Xenoblade Chronicles X - This time with 100% lowered expectations

Way back when the Wii-U was a thing, I bought one because a new Xenoblade game was announced for it.  I thought the console was a little weird and clunky, and Xenoblade seemed to be the only game coming out for it that I cared for, but it was new, and there would probably be more games, right?  RIGHT?  Well, the Wii-U kind of flopped, and the only other games I ended up getting for it were remasters of a couple of Zelda Games.  It is fully backwards compatible with Wii games, though, and all of my virtual console stuff transferred over to the new system.  It also isn't region locked like the Wii was, so you can play EU games on it, both Wii and Wii-U.  So it wasn't a complete waste, buying the system.  I basically just replaced my Wii with it, and gave the Wii to my brother.  I don't regret buying it for one single game that I never actually finished, because it did offer that backwards compatibility.

The Xenoblade series, is BY FAR my favorite current series being made today.  They offer very deep and expansive stories, in huge and immersive worlds, with excellent characters.  So when I heard that there was a new game coming out, I didn't hesitate to preorder it, and buy myself the console it would be coming out for.  When it finally arrived, I was somewhat disappointed with it.  I enjoyed the gameplay.  The graphics were pretty stellar considering the Wii-U hardware limitations.  The music was pretty hit and miss.  For me, the music is always part of the experience in a video game.  That's why I always mention it.  There are some really good tracks, but the majority of it is either awful, or extremely irritating.  And the characters were kind of flat and shallow.  The character you control is an avatar that you create, never has his or her name spoken in any dialog, and never speaks in any of the story scenes.  I have ALWAYS hated silent protagonists in video games.  It's supposed to bring you more into the story by allowing you to choose a character's every response and action, but in my opinion it does nothing but take you OUT of the story when you're constantly being prompted for dialog responses that are never spoken aloud by your character.  You go from Shulk, a very deep and emotional character in Xenoblade Chronicles to Cross, a completely silent automaton in Xenoblade Chronicles X.  It kind of stung more than a little for me, with how much expectation I had coming into this game.  The original Xenoblade game set a VERY high bar, and X just didn't quite clear it.   The story was pretty weak, the characters were pretty weak, and though the world is beautiful and fun to explore, it's just so empty.  There's like, nothing in it.  You have all these places to go and nothing to do in them.  I got to a point in the game where, in order to progress to the next part of the story, I had to go out and do mandatory exploration, something I very much dislike, and several side quests, which I also very much dislike, and level up, which I find boring and tedious, and I also had to go level up affinity for characters I never use, and then gear up and use those characters for affinity missions.  I looked at all of that mountain of crap I had to do in order to continue the story and said NOPE!!!

Well, anyway, since I finished Xenoblade Chronicles 2, and it's expansion Torna: The Golden Country (definitely worth the expansion pass pricetag, if you're wondering.  I got a good 30 hrs of gameplay out of it, and didn't even come close to 100%ing it.) I've been having this nagging feeling of wanting to go back and finish Xenoblade Chronicle's X.  I spent all that money on the game and the system to play it on, and I never even finished the game.  So, I tried to pick up where I left off.  Yeah, no, that game is WAY to complicated to play to just pick up in the middle and go back to what you were doing.  So, I started over from the beginning.  This time, with 100% lowered expectations.  I knew it was going to be a slogging grindfest of lvling up, forced exploration, and forced sidequests.  I knew the story and characters were going to be lackluster.  And I knew I didn't have a very good time the first time around. 

So, I sucked it up and plowed through.  I'm not a fan of games that say, look, and open world, go have fun.  I don't really play games for that.  I like having a strong story with strong characters.  Exploring huge worlds is okay, but just so long as there's characters I like, and exploring it is part of the story.  Xenoblade X doesn't really have that.  It's just exploration for the sake of explorations.  There's a pretty weak story reason for it, but mostly it's just exploration for exploration's sake.  But I was determined to finish this game, so I could say that I have played all of the games in the Xeno series to the end.  With such low expectations, I kind of had fun with it.  Like I said, the game is fun to play.  It has pretty cool controls and combat.  The story and characters are weak, especially when you compare it to the other two Xenoblade games, but this time around I knew what to expect, and I found myself enjoying them.  I never got far enough to get to control giant robots the first time around, so I didn't know this at the time I started over, but as soon as you have access to them, the game goes into overdrive on the grindyness.  I finished with just over 120 hrs of gameplay, I would say that at least 100 hours of that was spent grinding out money for giant robots and giant robot weaponry.  This game is literally 80% grinding out money to pay for the things you cannot finish the game without due to a pretty steep difficulty curve at the end.

So, in the end, was it a bad game?  No.   It really wasn't.  Did I treat it unfairly when it was released?  Yeah, I probably did.  Is it worth shelling out the cash for a Wii-U to be able to play today?  Probably not.  I mean, if you can find a really cheap console in good condition, yeah, go for it, but I wouldn't say it's really worth it if you have to shell out more than $50 for console+game combined.  If you enjoy the open world sort of games, you may enjoy it more than I did, but, again, the game is ONLY available on Wii-U.  Rumors of a Switch port have been debunked by Monolith Soft.  They said they thought about it, then realized that because of the Wii-U dual screen functionality, literally half of the game's code would have to be rewritten, and as they are a very small developer they just can't spare the manpower for it. 

This game deserved better, in my opinion.  It feels like what it is.  A game that reached for grand ideas, but fell short of them because Nintendo stripped away almost half of the dev team and put them to work on Zelda: Breath of the Wild.  It feels like an unfinished game, because it kind of is.  I've been reading up on what was planned for it and had to be cut because they just didn't have the manpower to get it done.  This game was gutted to give only the most bare bones of what it could and should have been, because Nintendo felt Breath of the Wild would be more lucrative.  You can really tell that there were a lot of people stripped out of the dev team.  Usually a game like this has end credits that go on over 10 mins.  The end credits for this game were less than 3.  That's how few people they had left to work on it, and because of that, the vision of what it was meant to be had to be trimmed away into what they could do with the people that they had.  Which is sad, but an unfortunate fact of the gaming industry of today.  I can see the game it might have been in the game that it is, and I can appreciate it for what it is, and what it aimed to be.  I'm glad I took the time to finish it.  And I hope that, with the overwhelming success Monolith has had with Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Nintendo will never do that to them again in the future.

Doctor Who Series 11

So, with this season of Doctor Who over and done with, I thought I'd write out what I thought of it.  First of all, I thought Jodie Whittaker did a pretty good job as the Doctor.  She played it a lot like David Tennant's 10th Doctor, just a little more scatter-brained.  David Tennant was my favorite of the new Doctors, and Jodie Whittaker is a close second for me.  I also like how they handled the Doctor being a woman.  She wasn't constantly commenting on it, she only really said anything when she was faced with something sexist that brought her up short.

The writing, for the most part, was a hell of a lot better than anything out of the Moffat years.  The worst of Chibnall's first season was better than the best Moffat ever achieved.  Mostly, because Chibnall knows how to structure a story, where Moffat doesn't know the first thing about it. 

Most of the episodes were a little mediocre.  They would start out good, and then they'd just get a little dumb once the villain was revealed, and kind of grating when it came time for the moral of the story.  There were some extremely good eiposdes in there,  The Demons of Punjab was probably my favorite, with Witchfinder being second.  But, overall the season was more mediocre than good.  But, again, Chibnall's mediocre is lightyears better than Moffat's best.

Previous show runners on the new series have limited historical episodes to one per season.  Which has been more than fine with me, because the historical episodes were some of the worst episodes of the season.  There were three in this season, and two of them were my two favorite episodes of the season.  The third was the aboslute worst of the season.  Not because it was really all that bad, but, more because it was extraordinarily lazy.  It was the laziest episode of the entire season.  That would be Rosa.  Look, Rosa Parks is an American hero.  She deserves a better tribute than a  terrible Doctor Who episode.  It was like the writers were all together, brainstorming ideas, and someone said, hey, let's do Rosa Parks.  Everyone said, yeah, that's great.  And that was all the thought an effort that went into it.  The thing is, though, that Chibnall was EXTREMELY proud of this episode.  In every interview he gave, this was the episode he brought up.  And it was just awful.  It was boring.  It was badly written.  It wasn't exactly all that historically accurate.  And, kind of worst of all, is that Rosa Parks only succeeded in taking her stand, because of the efforts of a white woman. 

Another problem that this season had, was that it wanted to have a message.  The problem was that the messages were usually extremely heavy handed, and they weren't very well incorporated into the stories.  What you basically got was a five minute or so stretch in almost every episode where the canst would pretty much look at the camera and say, and this is today's moral of the story... GET IT!?!?!?!  It's really kind of distracting, and it makes episodes that would, otherwise, have been decent, possibly good, kind of not all that great.  I have no problem whatsoever with social justice messages.  What I have a problem with is when the entire story grinds to a screeching halt so that we can address the moral of the story.  It should be integrated into the story in such a way that it's not popping out in your face.  The characters shouldn't take time out of the story to tell you , hey, look, this is the moral or the story.  It should be woven seamlessly into the story, and it just wasn't.

So, all in all, it was an okay season.  It's the best season since Russell T. Davies left by a very long shot, but it did have it's problems.  While a few of the episodes were excellent, most of them were just sort of mediocre and okay.  If I could give Chibnall one piece of advice for the next season, it would be to tone down the social justice a notch or two, and better integrate it into the story.  It's really jarring when all action and forward motion in the story comes to a halt so that we can discuss the moral of the story.  It needs to be better woven in than that.  I get that it was kind of his schtick when it took over, but there's for more compentent ways to do it than the way it was done here.  It was an okay season, with a great new Doctor, some very good new companions, but it really needed some work on the writing.

NaNo day 20

Woohooo!!!  I hit 50k.  Now the rest of this moth can be a stressful miserable horror without the added bonus of feeling like I have to spend every waking moment home from work writing.  I'm a little over 95k words on the first draft of Shadows of What Might Have Been.  I'm somewhere between 2/3 and 3/4 of the way done.   I'm expecting the full first draft to end up around 130k words at the moment, unless something drastic changes and I need to add more in.  BUT with my day job, and the Christmas season, it's probably going to have to wait until after the new year to get finished up.  We're more shorthanded than we ever have been in all the 15 years I've worked for the Post Office this Christmas, so it's looking like a heck of a lot of really, really long, gruelling hours and little time else to do anything but eat and sleep.  So yay for that.

NaNo day 13.

13 days in and I just hit 30k.  It's my day off, so I haven't seen the horrors which work has in store for me this Christmas season yet, but if past years are anything to go by, it's going to be ugly.  I think my supervisor tried to call me in to work today, but I wasn't about to answer.  The day after Veteran's Day is the absolute worst day for mail out of the whole year, and there's no way I'm giving up my day off to work it.  I like my job, but I don't like it that much.  Just 20k left to go, and 17 days left in the month.  I only need about 1100 words a day to finish.  Hopefully I'll be able to find the time between work and everything else to get at least that much done for the rest of the month.

NaNo day 9

9 days in and I just passed 21k.  I'm doing ok.  Work has been better these last few days since the election, but, unfortuantely, the Christmas season officially starts at Veteran's Day for the Post Office.  So I don't expect to have a whole lot of time to write after that.  That's why I usually try to power through the whole 50k before the day after Veteran's Day, but that's not looking like it's going to happen this year with my slow start.  We'll see if I'm able to pull through.  I'm ahead of schedule.  I only need about 1300 words a day to finish by the 30th, which seems doable, but Christmas seems like it gets worse every year as more and more people do their shopping online, so, we'll see.

NaNo Day 4

Uhg, I'm usually so much faster than this during NaNo, but work is just wearing me out this year with all of the extra election mail.  It's literally adding 2-3 hours to my every day of work.  It's freaking horrible.  I did still hit 10k today, which isn't bad for a 4 day total.  I'm still averaging about 2500 words a day so far, which is well above the 1667 NaNo daily goal.  So, yay, I guess.  Hopefully I'll be able to get a lot more done a lot faster once the election is over.

NaNo Day 2: The slightly further along than day 1ening

So NaNo is happening, and I'm working on Shadows of What Might Have Been, book 2 to Memories of What Never Was.  Thanks to next week's election I've been completely buried at work this week, and haven't been able to get home with much time to spend writing.  Hopefully that will change after Tuesday next week.  But I am still overachieving a bit by NaNo standards.  You're supposed to get at least 1667 words per day to hit the 50k by the end of the month, and I've gotten a little over 3000 these first two days.  Also, this story is a little more complex than the ones I usually write, which takes a bit more time to write, so not only do I have less time this year to write in (so far) I'm also writing slower because there's a lot more elements that have to go into the story.  It's all good though.  I'm still way ahead of the goal for day 2 with 6086 words.  To be honest, though, I doubt I can finish the first draft of this book in 50k words.  I already had 45k written, but I think this one is going to end up somewhere between 150k and 170k when it's done.  Anyway, expect more pointless posts this month about me saying how awesome I'm doing.