sleep? no. not sleep.
I am swinging back and forth between epic productivity and epic fail right now, I think. I finished most of the cleaning on Sunday, and dug up half the yard to plant a bunch of bulbs. I won't know how successful that was until spring, since it's all hyacinths and tulips and lilies, but it is planted and there are giant lumpy sections of dirt where once there was grass. (In related news: JFC the soil under our lawn is TERRIBLE. thick nasty clay. I added a bunch of potting soil to the planted bits and I'm hoping that gives the bulbs enough to grow in.
Today I woke up with a migraine, so I emailed my boss (after arguing with myself about it for about half an hour, sigh, I am bad at self-care) and then passed back out for another five hours. I didn't get much else of use or value done today, which I am trying to tell myself is OK because it was a sick day and, you know, even once I get the migraine to stop hurting I'm usually pretty useless for half a day afterward or so. I did get some laundry done, I guess.
I also finished the last few classes of Fantasy Life, and I have a lot of feelings about that game. It's very adorable and in terms of graphics it reminds me a lot of Animal Crossing. The story is focused around gathering people's wishes and helping people out, and one of the things I really liked about it is that it's basically a positive game about making connections between people. There are several circumstances where people mean well but are going about it in the worst way possible, and a lot of the plot (such as it is; this is not a Deep Intricate Storyline here) is about untangling those things and making people understand that even good intentions can be hurtful to others.
The game gives you a choice of twelve Lives (four combat, three gathering, and five crafting) and you can swap between them at a guild as long as you aren't in the middle of a story mission (it's very clear when you're about to embark upon one of those.) I love that the game treats all the Lives as important; you're not automatically better when you're a Paladin than when you're a Miner, and the game specifically makes a point of talking up how important your contributions are in any Life. Each Life gives you certain stat boosts while you're in that Life, which increase as you gain ranks. All the Lives have little stories and a cluster of NPCs that go along with them, and those NPCs have different reactions to the PC and their ascent through the ranks.
One thing I really liked is that each Life gives you an adorable little song and dance number when you reach Master rank, and reaching Master is pretty easy for most Lives (you do it by performing certain requirements, which the game will tell you about. Combat classes generally have to fight certain enemies, while gatherers have to achieve certain milestones of fancy trees or whatever and crafters have to make certain kinds of items.) After Master, there are two more ranks to fulfill which are increasingly grindy, but I really love that the "reward" comes after enough work to feel like you earned it, without being buried under a mountain of minutiae.
One thing I really didn't like was mastering the crafting classes in particular; several require you to max out your skill, which means a lot of making the same item over and over and over and OVER again. There were also a few where I literally was just running around from one boss to another farming them for drops so I could make all the items, which was not interesting, especially when I was farming something that had a 20% drop rate and I was not succeeding on that RNG.
I'm given to understand that the DLC adds a massive amount to the game, almost enough to qualify as a whole new game, and I deliberately made the choice not to pick it up, because I know me and I will feel like I absolutely have to accomplish each and every new task for each of the twelve classes--and frankly, I already put 110 hours into this game doing it with a reasonable degree of efficiency. I'm not too interested in repeating that.
That being said, though, I really enjoyed the game and the variety of nifty things I could make. The NPCs were adorable, and the game just generally left me feeling upbeat about the world and the Power of Kindness, which I guess just goes to show that even though I pretend to be cynical and grumpy sometimes I really am just a ridiculous optimist. I like being kind to people, even when the people are actually pixels.
After I finished that I tried to go back to Persona Q, where I am on the fourth floor of the Evil Spirit Club, but I basically kept running in circles with the same damn FOEs so I turned that off and started Lord of Magna: Maiden Heaven. So far it's reasonably cute and I found the combat kind of interesting in the one battle I did (I promptly failed the second one by paying too much attention to the sub-objective and failing the main one.) It is also very, very male-gaze-focused, but at least the main character is not an irredeemable douchebag, so I'll stick with it for a bit and see how it goes. I am admittedly pretty enthused about the idea of a game where all the real fighting powerhouses are female characters and the MC is terrible at it, but it will all depend on the execution, as with most things.
One of the downsides of sleeping off today's migraine is that I have no interest whatsoever in going to bed (as evidenced by the fact that it's now a shade past midnight; I went to bed when paladin did but I was too wide-awake to stay there, so I got up and came downstairs to play on the internet, which at least is generally less frustrating to me than lying in bed flopping around, and probably less disruptive for him. Still. Sleep. Why do you not come when I call you? AUGH.) Meh. Meh, I say.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1129258.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.
Today I woke up with a migraine, so I emailed my boss (after arguing with myself about it for about half an hour, sigh, I am bad at self-care) and then passed back out for another five hours. I didn't get much else of use or value done today, which I am trying to tell myself is OK because it was a sick day and, you know, even once I get the migraine to stop hurting I'm usually pretty useless for half a day afterward or so. I did get some laundry done, I guess.
I also finished the last few classes of Fantasy Life, and I have a lot of feelings about that game. It's very adorable and in terms of graphics it reminds me a lot of Animal Crossing. The story is focused around gathering people's wishes and helping people out, and one of the things I really liked about it is that it's basically a positive game about making connections between people. There are several circumstances where people mean well but are going about it in the worst way possible, and a lot of the plot (such as it is; this is not a Deep Intricate Storyline here) is about untangling those things and making people understand that even good intentions can be hurtful to others.
The game gives you a choice of twelve Lives (four combat, three gathering, and five crafting) and you can swap between them at a guild as long as you aren't in the middle of a story mission (it's very clear when you're about to embark upon one of those.) I love that the game treats all the Lives as important; you're not automatically better when you're a Paladin than when you're a Miner, and the game specifically makes a point of talking up how important your contributions are in any Life. Each Life gives you certain stat boosts while you're in that Life, which increase as you gain ranks. All the Lives have little stories and a cluster of NPCs that go along with them, and those NPCs have different reactions to the PC and their ascent through the ranks.
One thing I really liked is that each Life gives you an adorable little song and dance number when you reach Master rank, and reaching Master is pretty easy for most Lives (you do it by performing certain requirements, which the game will tell you about. Combat classes generally have to fight certain enemies, while gatherers have to achieve certain milestones of fancy trees or whatever and crafters have to make certain kinds of items.) After Master, there are two more ranks to fulfill which are increasingly grindy, but I really love that the "reward" comes after enough work to feel like you earned it, without being buried under a mountain of minutiae.
One thing I really didn't like was mastering the crafting classes in particular; several require you to max out your skill, which means a lot of making the same item over and over and over and OVER again. There were also a few where I literally was just running around from one boss to another farming them for drops so I could make all the items, which was not interesting, especially when I was farming something that had a 20% drop rate and I was not succeeding on that RNG.
I'm given to understand that the DLC adds a massive amount to the game, almost enough to qualify as a whole new game, and I deliberately made the choice not to pick it up, because I know me and I will feel like I absolutely have to accomplish each and every new task for each of the twelve classes--and frankly, I already put 110 hours into this game doing it with a reasonable degree of efficiency. I'm not too interested in repeating that.
That being said, though, I really enjoyed the game and the variety of nifty things I could make. The NPCs were adorable, and the game just generally left me feeling upbeat about the world and the Power of Kindness, which I guess just goes to show that even though I pretend to be cynical and grumpy sometimes I really am just a ridiculous optimist. I like being kind to people, even when the people are actually pixels.
After I finished that I tried to go back to Persona Q, where I am on the fourth floor of the Evil Spirit Club, but I basically kept running in circles with the same damn FOEs so I turned that off and started Lord of Magna: Maiden Heaven. So far it's reasonably cute and I found the combat kind of interesting in the one battle I did (I promptly failed the second one by paying too much attention to the sub-objective and failing the main one.) It is also very, very male-gaze-focused, but at least the main character is not an irredeemable douchebag, so I'll stick with it for a bit and see how it goes. I am admittedly pretty enthused about the idea of a game where all the real fighting powerhouses are female characters and the MC is terrible at it, but it will all depend on the execution, as with most things.
One of the downsides of sleeping off today's migraine is that I have no interest whatsoever in going to bed (as evidenced by the fact that it's now a shade past midnight; I went to bed when paladin did but I was too wide-awake to stay there, so I got up and came downstairs to play on the internet, which at least is generally less frustrating to me than lying in bed flopping around, and probably less disruptive for him. Still. Sleep. Why do you not come when I call you? AUGH.) Meh. Meh, I say.
I've posted this at http://lassarina.dreamwidth.org/1129258.html and you may comment there or here. On Dreamwidth, this entry has
comments.