Not a lot to say this week. New World of Warcraft stuff is coming next week, which I'm hyped for, so I figured I'd try to finish Final Fantasy VII Remake this week in time for it. Turns out I got kinda busy and didn't have time to finish it, and also for some reason starting playing Slay the Spire as well.

Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade

I didn't get too much further than last week in Final Fantasy VII. I'm on chapter 11 or 12 now, and I've been keeping a kind of slow pace with this game. I've found I can't really play for too long before my interest wanes, which is a weird feeling since I'm enjoying it a lot. I think the over-the-top dialogue and delivery might be a little too much for me. This is especially obvious since the last game I played was Uncharted 4, which has some of the most natural sounding dialogue I've ever heard in a game. The contrast is certainly stark, but that's not to say there aren't parts of the writing that are fun, like the running gag involving a "will they/won't they high five" between Aerith and Cloud.

There are 3 areas so far that have contained side quests, and I've done every single one of them when I probably shouldn't have. I don't feel like they add that much world-building, and are most definitely of the MMO variety. Go to that place you've already been and kill some more monsters. Go around the town in search of these kids. Track down my father's inspiration. Et cetera. I don't know that I could actually skip these though, 'cause I'm definitely the type of player that tries to do as much as you can in a game, and if a platinum trophy isn't too obnoxious to get I'll probably try to get it. I usually draw the line at having to replay the game multiple times though, so getting the platinum for this particular game might be a wash since it requires you to beat it again on a higher difficulty that you can't pick from the start. Anyway, the side quests usually end with you having the option to instantly teleport back to the quest giver which is always appreciated.

Another thing I've noticed is the abundance of mini-games. It seems like each chapter so far has had some kind of mini-game breaks up the pace of the usual "walk down this mostly linear map and fight some monsters along the way" approach this game mostly takes. Sometimes, they feel fun and like they add something to the place you're exploring. Other times, they feel like a chore. And when a mini-game is less fun than walking down a linear corridor, you know something's wrong.

When reading what I've written down, it seems like I'm kind of down on the game as a whole, but I'm really not. I'm liking the combat a LOT, even if it took a little while to get used to. That and the visual spectacle alone would've probably been enough to carry me through the rest of the game, but the characters are growing on me (unrealistic and over-the-top as they may be) and the stakes are slowly but surely being risen, so there's some semblance of forward momentum in the plot - even if it does move at a snail's pace (expectedly so, given the nature of this remake).

Slay the Spire

These past few weeks, I've been hearing a LOT about roguelike deckbuilders. From Trials of Fire to Roguebook, to Griftlands (which I played about an hour of before deciding it was way too informationally dense for me at the time), everytyhing I've heard sounds like it would be up my alley given how much time I spent with Hearthstone back in the day (before they added all the extra modes). So I decided to go back to what I recall as being the source of this new wave of deckbuilders. Slay the Spire has been sitting in my Steam backlog for years, so I decided it was time to fire it up and maybe try setting a pace of "1 run per day" and see where it goes.

Unlike Griftlands, I was immediately getting out combos and feeling competent at the game. I was getting cards that I could see having synergy with my other cards and started thinking about deck archetypes. Of course, I have then also proceeded to not get past the 3rd world at all so I'm obviously not as good as the game at times makes me feel, but I'm enjoying the learning process and just how snappy it is. If I look at my hand and see the way I want my turn to play out, I want it to be super quick in regards to actually playing the cards.

I have unlocked the second character, but haven't tried it at all. My current line of thinking is that I wanna unlock everything on the first character, maybe beating the game on that character before moving on to the second, and third, and so on. We'll see if I stick with that, I feel like that gives me a lot of time to actually learn all of the cards that are connected to that specific character.

Like I mentioned though, this is probably gonna be a slow burn of a game for me, with me only playing 1 run (or as it has been a few times, a partial run because they can sometimes run quite long) per day. I am looking forward to playing a lot more of it though, but I want to balance it with actually finishing Final Fantasy VII and also since the WoW patch is coming out, I'm gonna be putting a lot of time into that.