In which here we go again

Luther M. Siler

Warning: video game nerd content higher than usual in this post. Please avoid if necessary.

So I’m playing through Nioh again. This game got months of dedicated play when it first came out, and improved my skills to the point that after I beat it I was able to go back and play through the entire Dark Souls/Bloodborne sequence and beat all four of them as well. Nioh is, to my estimation at least, easily the hardest of the five games. You may recall me devoting a post to the day I finally beat Yuki-Onna after literally respeccing my character twice and an unprecedented several months of attempts. And it turned out that the ninjutsu tree was absolutely necessary to get through the rest of the game– the bosses in this game are stupid hard, and I was only able to beat most of them by cheesing the shit out of them with shuriken and kunai. It’s not unfair to say that I didn’t beat a single boss after Yuki-Onna without at least a little bit of blatantly exploiting the game mechanics.

Well, this time ’round I’m using the goddamn odachi, because I’m a glutton for fucking punishment apparently, and I’m reaching the point in the game where I run into Yuki-Onna again and where I hit a wall. The kusarigama/ninjitsu combo I used to finally get past her is all fast burst damage and long-range stagger, and the odachi is … not either of those things. The complete opposite of those things in fact. I’ve managed to blow past three of the bosses in the early game– Hiro-Enma, Umi-Bozu and the Goddamned raven tengu— who gave me hell the first time through, so hopefully I can actually beat her for real this time.

We shall see. I’ve got shit to do this weekend, so I don’t have a lot of time for weeping and gnashing of teeth and throwing controllers. Somebody’s going down, dammit.

EDIT: Got ‘er. Took maybe 10 minutes, half a dozen attempts, and during that time she one-shotted me at least three times. This may be the greatest day of my life.

In which I get what I asked for

Luther M. Siler

85792b8c-ce6f-4e36-872e-f4ba2d8afdd8I realized after dropping the boy off at day care this morning that today was another “last time” sort of day– and that this time, having finally gotten my weekends back like I’ve wanted for two years, I was about to experience my last Day Off To Myself.  I am willing to embrace this small bit of hypocrisy; I want to both have my weekends off to spend them with my family and to have days off where I can do what I did today, which is laze about and play Dark Souls 3 all goddamn day, and by “all goddamn day” you need to understand that I mean all goddamn day.

I have been playing the hell out of the Dark Souls series lately– I own all three, or four, or five games in the family depending on where you slot Bloodborne and Nioh, and until beating Dark Souls Remastered several weeks ago the only one of them that I’d beaten was Nioh.  I took Bloodborne out last week sometime, beating it a full three years after buying it, and I’m replaying through DS3 right now.  I’m not at the point yet where I’m hitting bosses I couldn’t beat on my first playthrough, but I’m getting close.  After that I’ll play through Dark Souls 2 again and, hopefully, beat that as well, and then…

… well, hell, that’s where my Future Planning about Vidya Gaemz runs out, but given that I don’t have all day Thursday and Friday to play video games any longer this plan is probably gonna be good at least until Thanksgiving.  Surely I’ll have something else I want to play by that time.

My wife and I have all sorts of plans for the next couple of days, ranging from general housekeeping sorts of stuff to a birthday party to a trip to the zoo.  I’ve got two full days of family stuff, and then two days of meetings for school.  At some point in there, I’ll be working on fiction stuff and readying at least one cool thing for the blog that got an early look over on Patreon.  Which you can see right now, if you like, for just a dollar a month.

A stupid good thing

Luther M. Siler

maxresdefaultIt has been a miserable couple of weeks around here.  I just got over being sick and went straight into some major Clark Kent life drama, which combined with an apparent downturn in the local economy (the sales for the store in general have been shit for several weeks now) have not done well for my general state of mind lately.  Unfortunately, while I do like to use the blog as a braindump for said on-my-mind stuff, sometimes shit simply isn’t My Business to share– that would be the family issues– and the other major thing that happened recently and scared the everloving fuck out of me would make it way too easy to figure out certain important things that I’m not willing to share about my kid, even if I just nibbled around the edges on it.  So you all get VaguePosting and I consider opening another blog up and telling no one about it just so I can get the post in my head out and onto paper.  Or, uh, pixels.  Whatever.

It’s a thing, is what I’m saying.

But!  I was fucking unconscious at work yesterday– I literally either sold something to or quoted out every customer I spoke to except for one, and managed to transform a sales week that was utter shit walking into Saturday into a quite-welcome average week walking out.  I’m off today, because the boy turned six on Wednesday and his birthday party is today.  There are lots of sweaty six-year-olds in my future.  (I am tempted to say “and not in a good way,” here, which I think is probably just creepy innuendo for the sheer hell of innuendizing?  What the hell would the good way be?  I dunno.)

But back to that stupid good thing.  And it’s really stupid, so those of you who aren’t video game nerds may just want to go ahead and cut out now; the tl;dr version is I had an utterly minor life accomplishment that has improved my mood.

Anyway: I can’t find when the first mention of Nioh was on this blog, but needless to say the damn game came out in February and I haven’t really played anything else since I bought it.  I have been stuck on a particular boss– that evil ice bitch Yuki-Onna, pictured up there– for, literally, months, to the point where it has seriously affected the way I think about video games.  I want a fucking cheat mode on everything I play now, because paid $60 for this damn game and I want to see the whole thing, and nothing is worth getting stuck for as long as I was.  And it didn’t matter what the hell I did, I couldn’t get her past half her health, and I was still good for a two-second “Nope, not today” one-shot death about every third or fourth fight.  This weekend (which, remember, is Thursday and Friday for me,) being generally miserable and lacking in any brainspace whatsoever that might be useful for things other than video games, I decided I was in “beat this boss or die trying” mode.

To wit: I respecced my entire character, twice, and learned an entirely different weapon, switching my build from sword-spear to kusarigama-spear and adding a bunch of ninjutsu and onmyo mage skills, just so that I could get past Yuki-Onna.  And finally, Friday morning, I managed to take her out after months of trying.  I have been playing video games for a long, long time, guys, and I’m pretty certain I have never once in that time gotten stuck for this long at a specific boss in a game and then actually gotten past it.

I am several stages past her level now, and destroyed all the bosses in between on the first time I fought them, having had to massively overlevel Yuki-Onna’s stage in order to finally fucking beat her.  Which: way to difficulty spike, game.  She’s supposedly only the sixth hardest boss in the game, too, so I have that to look forward to, since I haven’t seen any of the top 5 yet.

But hey: it’s good news, even if it’s stupid good news.  The way shit’s been going lately, I’ll take it.

(Want to improve my mood?  I haven’t sold a book in a few days.  If you have a couple of bucks you don’t mind burning, you could order one.)