Game Review: Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight

While using speed runs to help find games I might like playing is an excellent idea, I really need to stop also using those speed runs as tutorials... particularly when I'm still on my first run through the game. Trying to pull off advanced tricks when I'm still working on basic mechanics makes things a bit more difficult than they really need to be.

... Then again, I managed to reach the true ending of Momodora: Reverie under the Moonlight in something like 4 hours of gameplay, so I guess it wasn't quite as much of a problem as it could have been.

My experience doesn't quite feel normal - to the extent where I hesitate to even call this a review - since I already knew much of what I was going to be facing from the beginning. It was challenging enough to be satisfying, but really wasn't all that difficult in the end even with me spending time trying to kill each of the bosses without taking a hit. I suppose I did have the difficulty turned down fairly low, and I am certainly looking forward to trying it again on a higher setting eventually. The story was a bit predictable but still compelling enough to get by.

Also: You're playing as a priestess who uses a leaf and a bow as weapons and eventually gains the ability to turn into a cat in order to get through smaller spaces. The anime nerd in me says that's worth a lot of points right there.

Overall, I enjoyed it, and I definitely think it's worth playing, but it's a bit short and (at least at normal difficulty) not quite as challenging as I might have hoped for.

End of a Irrelevant Narrative

So I'm going to go ahead and join the debate about the special counsel's investigation and whether or not President Trump's campaign colluded with Russia. I've specifically avoided saying anything one way or the other up to this point, but now that the investigation's ended, I'm more willing to participate briefly.

To put it simply, I really don't care that the special counsel's investigation has ended with no evidence of collusion. It's not going to have all that much of an impact on who I support or vote for in the future.

I made a post on one of my social media accounts shortly after the election that pointed out the various policy disagreements I have with President Trump and the Republican party generally. None of that has changed; to the extent that I've discovered I was wrong about some of those concerns, it's largely a matter of overestimating the risks involved, not underestimating the benefits.

To put it another way, it's similar to the remarks former Senator Flake made when he was asked why he didn't do more to oppose President Trump. He pointed out that he was still a Republican, he still liked lower taxes and fewer regulations, and he wasn't going to oppose such things just because someone he disliked was supporting them. By the same token, I'm not going to stop supporting social justice, strong environmental regulations, and a government that's actually involved in public life to a useful degree simply because some of my compatriots were overly aggressive in assuming criminal behavior on the part of someone they disliked.

And I also feel compelled to point out that President Trump was the most unpopular presidential candidate in history well before the special counsel investigation was even being considered. Those of you who are assuming that this result means President Trump can now cruise to an easy re-election may want to reconsider that assumption. I don't know whether or not he will be re-elected, but I'm fairly confident it will be a rather close race.

Book Journal: Overlord series

One of my friends recommended the Overlord anime to me a while back, and while I still haven't had the time or the Internet reliability to actually watch that yet, it was enough reason to start picking up the English version of the light novel series when I saw it in a bookstore.

As is often the case when someone goes to the trouble to recommend something to me, I've ended up wishing I'd picked it up sooner, because I've enjoyed reading it quite a bit.

The series is about a former online MMO player who decides to stay logged in to his favorite game until he's forced out by its final shutdown, only to discover that instead of being forcibly logged out, he's been thrown into a fantasy alternate world instead. Of course, he soon discovers that his massively powerful character is significantly more powerful than almost anyone else he can find, and the massive dungeon and NPCs that his guild created ended up in this new world with him, so he's a little bit better off than the typical protagonist of these stories, to say the least.

If there is a problem, it's that the story is a bit one-dimensional so far. The main character and his minons are so much stronger than everyone else that most of the stories focus on revealing more of the world's back story or detailing the exact ways in which they manage to annihilate whoever is making trouble for them. Which isn't so bad, since I do enjoy reading these absurdly destructive fantasy-style fights, but it would be nice if there was an actual threat or challenge to the main characters at some point. (Of course, I'm only about halfway through what's currently been published right now, so there's time left for me to get my wish.)

New Schedule

First, as is fairly obvious, I'm back from my break and making blog posts again.

However, I am going to change the schedule a bit. I don't really have time to post something every single day anymore, unfortunately, so I'm going to make one post per week on Saturdays. There may be additional posts if something particularly interesting or easy to write about catches my attention, but those will be a bit more irregular.