xeneth.design

    A  common refrain you tend to hear from Final Fantasy VIII 's detractors, (a group I certainly belong to, despite my devil's advocacy) is that its reviled Junction System is "too complicated." That's a bit reductive, and putting stock in stories of forlorn players pushing deep into the game without ever engaging with the system is difficult, given how exhaustively they teach and over-explain it. You can tell your 18 y/o teacher is into you if she slow blinks Heck, given her age and status as a pump-fake love interest, I suspect the only narrative reason Quistis Trepe was written as an instructor and not just an upper-classmate boils down to naturalizing her unhinged level of tutorialization on the topic! Individual spell casts get sucked out of enemies and act like consumables, and Guardian Forces buff you by equipping stacks of spells to your stats; that's about it! Core player understanding of FFVIII 's Junction System wasn't really one of its ...

     After hearing murmurings from Super Eyepatch Wolf and others, I decided to jump into system_erasure 's latest game  Void Stranger completely blind... This is normally where spoiler warnings would be appropriate, but I'm not sure how much I could possibly spoil given I haven't really started the game yet. That's right; I'm stopping to write this in response to playing the game for all of 5 minutes! + + + Void Stranger appears to be a game about defying player expectations. Before even getting past the title screen, I am confronted with a dynamic representation of the simple controls; Up , Left , Down , Right , A , and Start , in black, white, and gray against a field of rising particles. The interface responds to inputs and makes it clear that my controller is indeed working, but pressing Start simply causes it to light up; it does not allow me to actually start the game... How strange. A bit of thrashing around on the buttons yields a minor discovery; did the...