I have done a good job of avoiding both doomscrolling and hopescrolling, because both of them are dangerous to my mental health. I have my lesson plans ready for tomorrow; I am off Tuesday and Wednesday, because no one deserves me, and hopefully the world is still here on Thursday for me to return to work, but I make no Goddamned guarantees, and if I am still a lunatic, I will stay home for a third day in a row.
I have been working on Platinuming Black Myth Wukong all day today and once I am done with that I have a lot of housecleaning, a bunch of books and Dragon Age: Veilguard on deck. I have plenty to keep me from thinking until it’s time to inject cable news into my veins for 24 hours straight on Tuesday night.
I have two things I want to review, but I don’t have the patience to do a full-length review of either of them, so you should fully expect that the actual writing in this post will take up less space than the pictures. Short version: buy both of these things!
The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne, is the third and concluding volume of his Bloodsworn trilogy, and as luck would have it I finished the book I was reading the day it showed up so I was able to dive right into it. I have ten of Gwynne’s books, all read over the last couple of years, and Bloodsworn is definitely his best series, but I’d need to reread the whole trilogy to tell you for sure if Fury of the Gods is my favorite of his books or not. One way or another, this showcases everything Gwynne is best at: a deeply Norse-inflected world, with very cool magic and absolutely brutal action, that starts off with all of the gods dead and gone and ends with them very much neither of those two things. The last hundred and fifty pages of Fury is one long battle scene. It’s amazing. His character work remains exceptional and the way this series swaps POVs between both sides of the major conflict in the book is great; I think it’s fair to say that there’s a bad-guy side but everyone’s reasons for fighting the way they do make sense and damn near everyone was interesting.
Also, my God, the covers for these books are remarkable.
He’s also doing this thing in this series where men and women exist in a society of complete equality and yet he never bothers to draw attention to it. There’s a lot of stuff in The Bloodsworn that is drawn from Norse/Viking culture, including the alphabet, but he sets aside historical accuracy whenever he feels like it, and gender differences are one of those places. If you’re looking for woman warrior characters (and everyone in these books is a warrior), you need look no further.
I finished Black Myth Wukong yesterday, finally, and I’m playing at least partially through it again because this is one of those games where I feel like I need the Platinum trophy and there’s no way to do that in one play through. This game is Chinese the same way that The Bloodsworn is Norse; it’s more inspired by myth and legend than historical reality, and frankly if you’re not already a student of Chinese culture (and I’m very much not) there’s a lot in this story that’s going to leave you behind. It’s apparently a video game version of Journey to the West, one of the five Classical Chinese novels, and … uh, that’s all I know about the five Classical Chinese novels? All I know is the story in lots of places makes no sense at all to my American ass but that doesn’t matter even a tiny bit because monkey man hit monster with stick.
Seriously, outside of the Nioh series this may be my favorite non-Fromsoft Soulslike (and anyone who claims it’s not a Soulslike but an “action RPG” should be shunned; this is absolutely a Soulslike) and I think I might like it more than I liked Nioh 1 anyway. There are some technical issues; I’m still hoping for an optimization patch, and there’s a stuttering issue that gets worse the longer you go without either restarting your PS5 or actually closing the game out and reopening it, but beyond that? No gripes. You’d think that build variation would be a problem given that you’re limited to the staff as your weapon, but 1) it doesn’t matter because the staff is hugely fun and 2) there are enough different stances and other ways to set up your build that there are going to be a million ways to approach any situation anyway. I talked about the difficulty yesterday; I’d say this hits the sweet spot of being difficult but fair pretty precisely, but people who haven’t been mainlining Souls games for years like I have may want to gird their loins. I hear there’s a big DLC coming eventually and I’m going to buy it the second I hear about it.
So I just kind of randomly noticed that The 7th Guest has a 30th anniversary edition (!!) out for PS5, and then I also sort of randomly mentioned that to my wife, not expecting anything in particular to happen based on that disclosure … and I’ve been informed that as soon as she’s done eating dinner she and I are going to be spending the rest of the evening playing The 7th Guest.
Yeah, so I’ve bought Shadow of the Erdtree twice today. Shut up. My son asked for it, and there’s a whole rant on how fucking stupid buying digital items from Microsoft is, and I’m downloading the Goddamned thing right now for my PS5.
So … see you in a week, I guess. Who knows; I’m still stressing about the build I’m going to use. Christ, I pick the stupidest things to blow up my anxiety with.
I haven’t ordered the Shadow of the Erdtree DLC yet.
I … what?
I put something like 130 hours into Elden Ring. My Let’s Play series is a hundred and ten episodes long. I completed every mission I could find, got the Platinum trophy, all of the endings, everything. Played the absolute ever-loving shit out of that game and enjoyed Goddamn near every second of it.
And they’re releasing a lengthy DLC on the 21st, which by all indications is amazing. And I haven’t bought it, I don’t think I’m going to buy it, and I’m not excited about it. Right now I should be planning on staying up late on Thursday night so that I can get started immediately, just like I did with the actual game. I stayed up late to record the demo, for God’s sake.
What the hell is wrong with me?
There’s been a consistent theme in my life over the last several years of this creeping anhedonia, where I just … stop doing things I used to really love doing, or stop enjoying things I used to enjoy. I effectively don’twatch anything any longer. No movies, no TV, nothing streaming. There’s a new season of The Boys, which I’ve enjoyed. Not gonna watch it. The Acolyte? Not gonna watch it. I’m done with Star Wars. I’m done with Marvel. I’m only still buying comic books because my weekly trip to the comic shop is my only reliable in-person interaction with human beings I’m not related to or work with; I can’t stop shopping there unless I move or die. I could literally just come home and put them in a box and never read them and I wouldn’t miss a thing.
You’re never going to catch me complaining about reading, but it’s literally the only thing I do for fun. That’s weird, right? I read books and I write here. Dassit. Those are my hobbies. The honest truth is I think I could sell my PS5 and my Xbox and I wouldn’t miss them. And I’ve been a gamer my entire life.
I don’t fucking get it, and I don’t like it.
(And, to forestall this: Yes, I recognize that I’m basically describing a textbook case of clinical depression here. And while I’m on Effexor, that’s an anti-anxiety med, not an antidepressant, and I don’t think the two overlap much. But I have no other symptoms of depression, including the not exactly minor detail that I’m rarely actually feeling depressed. This is a mental health issue, don’t misunderstand me, but I feel like the most obvious answer is not the right one.)
My usual line on Beyoncé is that I’m a big fan of Beyoncé as an entertainer and maybe not such a big fan of her music. I buy everything pretty religiously as it comes out but what usually happens is that there are a few tracks from any given album that I like a lot and I can take or leave the rest of it. Her collaboration with her husband was an exception, and I liked her live album a lot, but Cowboy Carter is the first studio release from her where I genuinely feel like every single track is a banger. It is emphatically not a country album, despite the existence of maybe three country-ish songs (Protector, Jolene, and Texas Hold ‘Em) and Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton both doing short spoken cameos. I don’t know what the hell it is. She calls it “a Beyoncé album,” and that’s just gonna have to be good enough for us mere fucking mortals. There’s opera on this damn thing. She’s doing whatever the hell she wants, and it’s amazing, and sooner or later I’m going to have to reconsider that disclaimer because she’s starting to stack up exceptions.
Oh, and speaking of the Jolene cover: it slaps. It’s a great update to the song and I love it. I love the original too. I love other updated versions of it. Music is good.
Shōgungetting a new Hulu miniseries somehow led, not to me not actually watching the miniseries, which for the record I’ve not heard a single bad thing about, but ordering the books, which are currently only being printed in two volumes because the motherfucking thing is 1500 pages long. I’m not even sure why I did it, to be honest, because I broke my current “don’t buy new shit” reading rule to do it, and even once they got here I was convinced that I was going to read a hundred pages and quietly put them away because they were going to turn out to be super fucking racist.
So naturally I blew through the first (700-page) volume in about a day and a half. I have not picked up the second yet, but I’ll have it read by the end of Spring Break. And it’s interesting– I kind of want to compare it to Gone with the Wind, except Gone with the Wind is a really amazing story that was written by a racist who wanted to promote racist ideas and is chock-full of racist characters, but Shōgun is a really amazing story chock-full of racist characters (basically every person in the book thinks everyone of a different ethnicity or religion from them is a subhuman, and some of them don’t even extend humanity to all of “their” people depending on their economic status) but I don’t think the book itself is racist, nor does reading the book make me want to look askance at James Clavell. If anything, I think Clavell would land on the side of the Japanese if he had to, and while I’m only halfway through the book it’s not remotely as white-savior as I was expecting it to be. Like, this would be a fascinating book even if Blackthorne wasn’t in it at all; the book doesn’t really revolve around him at all.
There’s an interesting article on Vox about how historically accurate the show is; the condensed version is “good enough,” and while I’m hardly an expert I certainly haven’t hit anything that had me looking twice. One way or another, I think I can probably recommend this pretty whole-heartedly, with a caveat that, again, I’m only halfway through right now and who knows what the next 800 pages will bring.
Fuck this game.
I finally deleted it today, after giving it way too many chances over the last, what, ten days? two weeks? since it was released; I was ready to fight Sony for a refund after twenty minutes, and while with a couple more hours of gameplay I’m willing to admit that the game does get better after a completely fucking inexcusably bad first half hour, the bug I ran into today where every NPC everywhere was constantly hostile for no reason at all and nothing I could do would fix it was the last straw. The game is just deeply fucking mediocre, riddled with bugs and a ton of absolutely bewildering gameplay decisions that I refuse to defend, and it’s not getting any more of my time, I give up. I’m not going to fight with anyone who enjoys it because there’s a kernel in there that could be fun under the right circumstances, and I think I was starting to get into it before the bug, but after a couple of hours of experimenting and looking at message boards and trying workarounds, I am not about to start over and I’m done.
I really feel like I ought to throw a movie review in here too, but I haven’t seen anything new in forever. Oh well. Let’s pretend Shōgun counts for both.
I haven’t reviewed a video game in forever, for a whole bunch of reasons, including but not limited to the fact that that for a long time I was saving that for the YouTube channel, and– perhaps more saliently– it’s been forever since I actually beat anything. My gaming backlog, assuming I’m going back to anything that I started and put down, is literally longer than it’s ever been before, and contains some genuinely good games that I just stopped playing for no good fucking reason and moved, ADHD-style, on to the next shiny thing. I quit playing Baldur’s Gate 3 because it depressed me, but Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown, Armored Core 4, and a couple of others are also out there, and I’ve also downloaded The Surge and Sifu for cheap-as-hell and free, respectively, and not touched them yet. It’s too damn much, I tell you! Too much!
I started playing Nobody Saves the World because I’d hit a section of Prince of Persia that my platform skills weren’t up to par with without a lot of practicing and I wasn’t in the mood to beat my head against a wall any longer. Also, I thought I had downloaded a demo, but apparently I bought the entire game, I assume on the cheap, and then … forgot? But I played an hour and a half or so before realizing that I’d accidentally started a whole-ass new game and wasn’t playing a demo, and by then I was stuck. And I don’t mind being stuck, because this is a hella fun game, with its only real drawback being that it’s impossible to stop playing and it took up more of my life than I wanted it to on more than one occasion.
See all those characters up there? With the exception of the wizard Nostramagus, who is the only one with eyes, they’re all you, including the egg. At the beginning of the game, Nobody– a pasty white humanoid who looks more or less like the Pillsbury Doughboy without his clothes, and who, entertainingly, doesn’t appear in the above image– gets a magic wand that lets him change shape. You start off being able to turn into a rat, and over the course of the game gain a ton of other shapes, including a bee, a dragon, a robot, and the aforementioned egg. Each form has its own abilities and powers, most of which can be readily swapped between shapes, so by the end of the game you might be using the Dinosaur but have added the Slug’s mucus trail (seriously) to his abilities and also be borrowing a passive ability from the Bodybuilder that lets you knock enemies back further than you might have before. Everything, and I mean everything, is upgradable, and one of the reasons the game is so hard to put down is that there’s always a reason to play another three minutes– you’re either right on the cusp of gaining a level or a new form or a new power for a form or there’s a dungeon over there that’s ripe for pillaging or you just figured out how to solve a puzzle halfway across the map that requires the power you just unlocked, or or or or or.
It’s kind of repetitive, and at 25 hours for a damn-near completist run I’d say maybe don’t shoot for a completist run, but there’s a world out there to be saved and you’re the doughboy to do it, one way or the other. The art style is lovely and the music is burned into my brain rather unpleasantly and the sense of humor throughout is really great.
My recommendation: Go wander through a big crowd until you get Covid and an excuse to stay home for a week (Screw you, CDC!) and then download this (it’s apparently inexpensive) and go to town.
