New week, new thread! What are you playing?
Continuing Heaven Burns Red on steam. Chapter 3 and chapter 4 prologue done. Steam tells me that I have clocked in 75 hours so far. Geez, what a ride!
As stated before, the main story is full of high highs, and low lows. Thanks to spoiler reasons, I can't talk about the highs too much, but those scenes are really emotional (albeit sometimes overstay the welcome by talking too much). Unfortunately, apart from climax or big reveals, I needed to resist the urge to press the skip button during more than a few story sessions. These lows continue to be the military action scenes. I have difficulty grasping what the teammates are going to act and why they act such ways to counter their enemies. I have read some lightnovels where the actions are really well-written: just through words, I can feel the speed, the actions and reactions, and maybe most importantly the spatial relationships between the characters and enemies. Obviously, the writers here (likely Jun Maeda) are simply not good at writing action scenes and failed to deliver satisfying combat. Which is totally ok, IF they didn't put so many military action scenes into the main story...
Another thing I would love to see less would be the use of (huge spoiler) characters' sacrifice as plot device to advance the main story.
I believe that the game is going to have a long run in the future so variations in story-telling should be expected in the upcoming chapters.
Meanwhile, my rant regarding the scope being too limited was destroyed by the beginning of chapter 4. I am excited to see what the characters are going to act in face of the big unknown. The side story events are also full of surprises. I have gone through four events so far and all of them have high-quality, concise and impactful writing. There are still so many of them left to do (2 years of content!) so I will go through them steadily. Very excited to put another 75 hours, or more, into the game!
On the other hand, I have also restarted Poison Control again on PS4 Pro. NIS makes niche but interesting games and this is definitely one of them. I have talked about the game before so you can read it here and here. I played it on Switch in 2022 but switched to PS4 in 2023 because of the atrocious performance of the Switch version. You can also tell my experience towards the game changed a bit between the two versions, likely due to the performance and my mood. Giving it another chance in 2024 so hopefully I can finish it this time.
Continuing Heaven Burns Red on steam. Chapter 3 and chapter 4 prologue done. Steam tells me that I have clocked in 75 hours so far. Geez, what a ride!
As stated before, the main story is full of high highs, and low lows. Thanks to spoiler reasons, I can't talk about the highs too much, but those scenes are really emotional (albeit sometimes overstay the welcome by talking too much). Unfortunately, apart from climax or big reveals, I needed to resist the urge to press the skip button during more than a few story sessions. These lows continue to be the military action scenes. I have difficulty grasping what the teammates are going to act and why they act such ways to counter their enemies. I have read some lightnovels where the actions are really well-written: just through words, I can feel the speed, the actions and reactions, and maybe most importantly the spatial relationships between the characters and enemies. Obviously, the writers here (likely Jun Maeda) are simply not good at writing action scenes and failed to deliver satisfying combat. Which is totally ok, IF they didn't put so many military action scenes into the main story...
Another thing I would love to see less would be the use of (huge spoiler) characters' sacrifice as plot device to advance the main story.
Yes, it is a story about survival, love and sacrifice, but using the same plot device twice (sacrifice themselves to save friends) cheapen their deaths. In addition, there are obvious death flags (that can easily spotted by seasoned anime enjoyers) before the tragic endings which made their sacrifice predicable.
Meanwhile, my rant regarding the scope being too limited was destroyed by the beginning of chapter 4. I am excited to see what the characters are going to act in face of the big unknown. The side story events are also full of surprises. I have gone through four events so far and all of them have high-quality, concise and impactful writing. There are still so many of them left to do (2 years of content!) so I will go through them steadily. Very excited to put another 75 hours, or more, into the game!
On the other hand, I have also restarted Poison Control again on PS4 Pro. NIS makes niche but interesting games and this is definitely one of them. I have talked about the game before so you can read it here and here. I played it on Switch in 2022 but switched to PS4 in 2023 because of the atrocious performance of the Switch version. You can also tell my experience towards the game changed a bit between the two versions, likely due to the performance and my mood. Giving it another chance in 2024 so hopefully I can finish it this time.
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