Actually, by the time I'm writing this, I'm kind of getting burnt out on Monster Hunter in general. So, I'm taking a break from it to write this. I love Monster Hunter. I was playing Generations Ultimate before I was able to just barely start playing Wilds and switching between the two really messes with my muscle memory so I've just drifted towards only playing Wilds after playing GU for a while. They made a bunch of weird design choices when making Wilds, it genuinely just boggles my mind as to why certain systems are put in place. At some points it just feels like it goes a step backwards compared to World.

Probably my biggest gripe towards Wild is the way multiplayer is done. It’s so difficult to get into a lobby with your friends from the get go. There is basically zero use for the proprietary friends list within the game because there is no way to join your friends’ lobbies. You can’t create a lobby where only friends are allowed to join you. It only operates by creating a private lobby and using a lobby code to join said lobby. Squad lobbies are in the game but this just feels like a cheap work around for a system that was fine in World. It’s just sad that we don’t have guild cards anymore because of this either. I can’t even say Wilds went any step forward in this regard since World, it just went straight backwards.

Not only this, low rank story is such a slog, and the reason for that is probably because I've played Monster Hunter games before, but the trailing sections where you’re glued to your bird mount and can’t deviate from the path you are set on are so bad. You just can’t use the story as an opportunity to explore the open world that was being advertised so much. The bird basically autopiloting everything for you doesn’t help this either. Whatever exposition they wanted to do in the game, I could not care about it at all. So, these trailing sections did not help whatsoever. I hate these yap sessions.

Also, I'm not keen on covering the performance aspect of Wilds. The games launch was a mess. As of now it’s still a mess. Needing my GPU to gaslight fake frames to me is ridiculous.

At the end of the day, the game at its core is still fun. Which is probably the most frustrating thing about all this. I genuinely enjoy using the weapons and fighting the monsters. When I start playing again, I do want to try more weapons and give everything a shot. It’s just that playing the game is fun but various things that get in the way of playing the game are not.

On the other side of the coin though, playing GU is really fun. It really is just more of a game that I prefer because playing the game with friends doesn’t make a blood vessel want to burst. So many different playstyles and monsters. You can also play as a cat! An incredible idea that needs to be reintroduced. I guess the only downside is that it is stuck on the Nintendo Switch, so I'm glad that there are friends who already have a Switch, which makes this game easier to recommend. They honestly just had it all figured out and writing this now just makes me want to play GU even more. If you’re reading this, you should probably play GU. I love the visual style too. I love that GU is so vibrant, it’s a beautiful looking game.

March was a super busy month for me. For the first time ever, I was able to meet online friends that I've known for pretty much 5 years. I took a much-needed break from my studies and just gave all my attention to my friends who went out of their way to visit me in the city I'm staying in. Even though I knew my friends pretty well there I was still a bit worried because that’s just how I am. Although when I saw everyone, I was probably the happiest I have ever been. I loved hanging out with everyone for the whole week. And I was incredibly sad when everyone left. It was nice being taken care of, shopping with everyone and just being close to everyone you’ve been talking to for so long. Being able to hug your friends for the first time and just be held by them while squeezing them in response is something I will think about forever. I also just like burying my face in the chest of my tall friend. Anyway, I'm sure I’ll get to see them again soon, it’s just a matter of time, really.

Later that month I had my first ever orchestra experience. I went to a Distant Worlds orchestra in London with some friends of mine. It was my first time being in London too. Outside of the orchestra I went around a bunch to different areas of London. Went to at least one arcade before going down south to meet some an online friend of mine. The weather was very nice and I definitely got lucky with the timing of the orchestra. The orchestra itself was incredible! I love Final Fantasy and it just made a lot of sense that this would be the first orchestra experience I went to. They played some favorites of mine like “Battle with the Four Fiends” and “Clash on the Big Bridge”. “Swind De Chocobo” instantly became a favorite after hearing it during the concert. They played some really good XIV and XVI tracks as well which felt like gut punches. Even after all of that, there was a surprise final performance with “One Winged Agnel” where the composer taught us when to yell “Sephiroth” during the song. So, he would turn around to us every time and basically the entire audience was yelling “Sephiroth”. It was the coolest thing ever. I'm really glad I took the opportunity to attend this with my good friends. It also helped me feel better about traveling as I'm not really the greatest about traveling to unfamiliar places.

I tried out Archipelago yesterday with some friends and we managed to finish everything in one day. I picked The Legend of Zelda to play while Muse Dash, Dark Souls 3 and Risk of Rain 2 were picked by my friends. I also hadn’t beat TLoZ before picking it up for the Archipelago.

As it turns out it was a ton fun to participate. I’m not familiar with the user settings you can adjust for the game so I believe it was a pretty standard run of the game. Shops had items I could buy to send to others and all my Triforce pieces were in other people’s games. So, I would be soft locked out of the last dungeon before someone else found my shards. DS3 having over a thousand checks did slow down others progression a bit. A lot of my items were in DS3. This was pretty much a test run between all of us so we did open the spoiler log to help since my key items could have been missed very easily. My last Triforce piece was found on a corpse someplace somewhere in DS3 which could have been completely missed. But they could have finished DS3 which would have completed all the checks.

After finding out that small keys were distributed between the other games, I was lucky to receive a magic key so I wasn’t sitting around in dungeons behind locked doors constantly. It was funny receiving small keys after the fact though.

I found TLoZ to be a very cute game, I’m glad I played through it in this format. Even though I finished it in a day it still encouraged me to explore everywhere to send items to my friends. With everyone playing beside me, sharing their game capture on discord it was a great time. I’m looking forward to running more Archipelago with more friends hopefully!

There was an article floating around a bit ago called ‘The Gentrification of Video Game History’ that I read which gave me a good reminder about what my origins were in playing video games. When I was growing up in Thailand, games were often sold as illegitimate copies which were mostly what I was able to play while sometimes being able to come across a rare case of a legitimate copy of a game. The first ever Nintendo handheld I owned was a pink Gameboy Advance SP and my parents bought me a fake copy of Pokémon Ruby which I later realized was fake after having my save file deleted due to the battery dying. I still remember how heartbroken I felt when I desperately kept trying to keep my Gameboy on overnight while it was plugged in to prevent losing whatever progress I had. I decided against this because I didn’t want to ruin my Gameboy which I still have somewhere.

The first console that I was ever gifted was a Nintendo Wii. I have a lot of pleasant memories of playing on that console and having it be the families very first console. We were a family of 4 so we did play Wii Sports and I always went head-to-head with my brother in Mario Kart. There are memories of Smash Bros. Brawl on the worst control scheme ever! I also remember very clearly that 98% percent of the games that were bought for the Wii were burned discs with incredibly warped images printed on them. I'm pretty sure at some point the console had to be brought in to have homebrew installed on it just so that these discs could launch with Gecko OS. It became routine to launch every game this way because that’s the only way I could play games. Wii games were not being sold in Thailand officially as far as I knew and if they were, they certainly weren’t in my area. Not to mention it would’ve been expensive to acquire these games legitimately as well if they were sold.

I also remember my uncle’s internet café that attracted a lot of young adults who came to play various FPS games and MMO games that I never learned the names of. I vaguely remember my uncle being really into games, he had a PlayStation 2 and PSP and I visited so I could play PS2 games that were also just burned discs. His PSP also had homebrew installed on it all for the same reason of playing games that could not be acquired by legitimate means. Theres barely any memories of what I even played on that PlayStation 2. Off the top of my head, it was an Ultraman fighting game, Sonic Riders, and a Xiaolin Showdown game.

This was just a small ramble but it feels like I was lucky to encounter games in the way that I have. If it weren’t for these experiences, I don’t think I’d give nearly as much attention to retro games as I have been for the past couple of years. Or I wouldn’t have cared about games at all.

I didn’t do anything to celebrate the new year. There were fireworks going off right outside of my window that made it hard to sleep earlier than 2 am. So, I was kept up thinking about what was actually going to happen for the upcoming year.

I honestly can’t think of anything crazy different that I want to be doing different for the next year besides maybe the obvious goal of like, losing more weight. I'm really thankful for the friends and family that I have and in terms of streaming, I'm really happy that people have stuck around this much. So, I've pretty much boiled down my new year’s resolution to being “I’d like to be happier than I was last year.” If there are any specifics goals then those will come up as I go. Maybe “play Dragon Quest 3” is a good start.  

Thank you for reading and I hope the upcoming year treats you well. Happy New Year!

I started replaying this game towards the end of the year, and I realized that I could not remember anything about it from the first playthrough. I think I basically got stuck the same way I did when I first played it. I just remember being lost in the exact same way and having the moment of realization when I realized that the library was where I was supposed to go to progress, which is like, the place I was in the least by far.

I also watched Nosferatu on Christmas day, and the next time I was playing SotN, I ran into the Orlok boss fight, which was very cool. I have an urge to read Bram Stoker's Dracula now.

I was a bit sad that I couldn’t remember too much about this game and thought the second playthrough was going to be pretty fast. It still ended up taking over 9 hours according to the save file in the game. I tried getting over that sadness when I was playing, and it got better. I forgot just enough to enjoy the inverted castle except for the Galamoth fight. I got stuck there for an absurd amount of time because he has a lot of health and the reward for beating him wasn’t really worth it. I grabbed Alucard's sword earlier which has a quarter-circle forward input where he is invulnerable while attacking, and you can keep doing that input as long as you have the mana. I beat him that way and all I got was the ability to do damage when I turn into mist.

The Beelzebub and the Castlevania 3 trio fights were fun though. I don’t think I saw these fights the first time I played. The Castlevania 3 reference boss was very cute, and I noticed that the coffins were shaped like the ones from 3 before the fight started. Back when I first played, I wouldn’t have gotten the references, but I've played a lot more Castlevania since my first playthrough, which makes me glad that I ran into this fight the second time playing. Just thinking back on it, I'm so glad I started playing Castlevania games. They’re so good. I love Castlevania a lot.

The reason behind playing this game again was to take a break from Final Fantasy V. I kind of hit a little snag in my playthrough where the pace just slowed down a lot and I wasn’t really feeling motivated at the time either. It’s a good reminder that I can play what I want and if I feel like taking a break then it's best to do so.

Anyway, SotN is such a beautiful game, I love looking at and listening to this game. Amazing soundtrack that I listen to outside of the game as well. The sprite art is phenomenal and I realized how they keep reusing assets for the DS games which is great because the sprites look that good. Alucard is such a badass too, just the way he stands and walks in the game is so cool. I love his sprites and animations. Everything about this game is great, even if it’s not my preferred format of linear stages like the classicvanias. I enjoyed getting lost in this game again even if I got a bit frustrated.

Dragon Quest 2 is the coolest game ever after having only played the first Dragon Quest previously. I went through all the emotions of excitement about how much bigger this new map was, seeing how much the world had expanded. I was able to walk across Alefgard very easily because it was made smaller to make the world seem larger. Seeing some of the landmarks of the previous game was cool too. Visiting the Dragonlord’s castle and seeing the Dragonlord’s grandson was cute so I'm glad I took time to explore all the locations in DQ2.

There was just so much more after the first game. The way that the game was set up made it feel like the characters you were playing as really were just kids trying to save the world because they had to, and they were trying to figure everything out along the way. At least that’s how I interpreted it, because that was me playing the game mostly blind until the very last parts of the game. I was excited to have more than one party member now which also meant having more than one enemy to fight and having 8 metal slimes appear to potentially kill me in very few turns.

I had the coolest thing happen to me while I was playing, an item dropped from a liquid metal slime called a Rebirth Stone (or Dragon Potion) according to the wiki. This allowed me to save anywhere on the overworld without having to be in a town that allowed saving. When I reset the game, it would take me to the last town I was at though so I needed to be careful with how I used it. Although it really helped me with saving money and progress whenever I picked up a key item. I never got another one of these from a liquid metal slime afterward and I think this helped with my enjoyment of the game. It felt really special honestly.

Speaking of items, the crests were so hard to find. I didn’t get far with NPC clues, not that there are many to begin with. I'm not sure if it was my translation patch but I really needed to look some of these up in order for me to find them. Some of them were just on the floor somewhere.

The end game area was so rough. This part of the game was so frustrating and it felt clear what they were trying to do, it was just overboard. There's that huge cave with looping hallways that I needed help with getting through. This was the game that made me think ‘Hey I don’t need to play through games blind if it’s not going to be fun.’ I try to look up to people who have the patience and brain to figure everything out on their own but I just think I'm not one of those people. At least for this game at this specific moment. What is fun though is having your friend get into a call with you to tell you directions while you’re playing. That made it feel like someone came over to my house to show me how to play. That kind of communication with a friend while they help you with playing a game made it feel less like “cheating”, even though I know that it's logically not cheating.

After this long cave, at the other end was the last part of the game, an area that circled into a castle that was lined up with bosses to reach the end of the game. If anyone said anything bad about this game because of this area, I understand why they feel that way. These enemies can just instant kill you and I'm so glad there is a save point here because I would have not survived having to go through that cave again. When you’re in the castle you have to fight these bosses on the way to Hargon and they kicked my ass so badly that I just ended up grinding a ton in this last area. I looked up the weaknesses of these bosses but it was still hard to get them out of the way. At least they stayed dead after you killed them as long as you didn’t reset, which I didn’t realize until later. So, I stopped caring about saving money so that they could stay dead and I could beat the final boss. I popped off so hard after beating Malroth after going through so much hell in that final area that I just didn’t care to keep being mad at it because I still thought it was sick having all that at the end. It felt so good to beat the game, and hearing ‘My Road, My Journey’ during the credits made me tear up. Wonderful track.

During my playthrough of this game, I also talked to others who were playing the game at the same time and people who have played the game before. We talked to each other like we were on a playground, giving clues to each other or seeing what kind of suitable clues we could give to someone who might have been stuck. These interactions involving my friends, getting the rare item drop, and going through hell to finish the game made me love the game a whole lot.

There’ve been a bunch of small updates made to the site, mostly on the home page. I changed the background to allow the container to fit in the middle of the screen. It was kind of jarring having this container be to the right while every other page on the site was centered. I used a Skeb that I got back from tamaki_iro recently that uses the updated look. It’s really cute!

Everything has been made smaller on the home screen. I think this looks a lot better. I blew up the text size a bunch so I could see everything clearly at first, but I wanted to make the text smaller so I could fit more text in if I figure out what to write there. I find it hard to describe myself but I can put something else when I come up with it. Although it's probably better to keep it short and sweet.