what have i been up to. what were my plans for the future. this is my little epilogue check-in, that will continue for another 30+ pages. speaking of which i need to get to work on that site revamp cos i'm still manually adding links for each new page, and it has become laborious. i say this to myself, when i'm readying a new page and i have to go back and edit the 30+ pages prior, i say this has become Laborious

i've been unlocking things. new dungeons new tribes and deliveries etc. reminding myself that there is simply too much of game. i did one single 6.1 main story quest, just so that Tataru might reassure me that things are going to be okay. but it was as i feared, she just grilled me about "so what the hell are you going to do now" while i shrugged and drifted to sleep. game knows me frighteningly well; more and more often when seeing my character lately i've been thinking "that's me. this is what i look like and who i am because i'm J'khet". weather's been pretty nice lately i gotta get out more

as it turns out the vocal track that starts playing in Ultima Thule towards the End of Walker, actually just becomes the regular zone music. it pretty immediately wears thin and now instead of feeling melancholy i am feeling use '/bgm' to mute it. as well as that, i was worried how they were gonna handle explaining how i'm able to travel there at will, because as far as i'm aware Elpis is just whatever, it's a video game. but instead for Ultima Thule they establish some goofy joke reasoning for it, and now it's become the Funny Robot Café area. slight shame that all emotional impact of this area is diminished as a result but i guess it's for the best if i'm gonna be coming here every day. except for the music

i like robot humor. it's good it's fine and all. impossible to write robots believably and literally no piece of media has ever done it well so may as well be funny with it. i'm just weirdly stuffy about lore and the implications of it all, considering how seriously this game usually takes itself and its world. though i suppose we're not in its "world" anymore so why not have a magic planet that can manifest anything at all depending on how chill a time customers at a café are having

dreamed dynamis was real and i made a cool hat out of it, from the desire within my heart to own a cool hat

been checking out those """variant dungeons""", by which i mean just the first one because i gotta do it at least twelve times to fully complete it. these seem more like what dungeons in a game should be, but obviously this being a multiplayer game things have to be more streamlined. i can only imagine going in with a party would very quickly result in disagreements over which route to take, so i'm extremely glad these can be done solo

i don't know if it's a handicap because i'm doing it alone, or if this just the way it is. but i sure can just heal however much and whenever i want huh. makes it so that trash packs are even more a waste of time than usual, and the only real threat is failing boss mechanics and building vulnerability stacks. of course i still be dying though, even if a lot of the time it was because i hadn't fully internalized that yes, i can in fact heal as much as i like whenever i like. fights are so much more fun on my own when i can take my time and experiment, it really has me wishing every boss had additionally solo difficulty scaling

finally got this yesterday while doing my weekly Gold Saucer challenges. kinda wish i'd waited a bit, because next week is the +50% MGP event so there'll probably be a lot more people doing chocobo races. 9 times out of 10 i get a race full of NPCs and it's BORING and EASY i need some challenge even though at this level starting position more often than not determines the outcome. there's one more title for 3,000 total races and i plan to make a shameful amount of progress toward that over the course of the event

i have been going islandmode these past couple days. the reason i only mention it now is it being a slow burn i needed time to break it in, and NOT because i've been too busy playing the game to write about the game. i have to keep in mind that it's a slow burn, because the questionable decision of an exp/leveling system that gates progress has me thinking it's something i can grind out. the only way to actively grind for experience is gathering materials, and grinding that way sucks. even doing it for the sake of gathering materials sucks

i'm of the belief that every person on this earth requires, for their own wellbeing, a daily farming check-in type game like this, unless they are an actual farmer. you should be able to get a specific game medically prescribed to you that best suits your mental health needs. ideally none of the options should involve microtransactions, which narrows things down a huge amount. and on top of that Island Sanctuary should not be a consideration, and not just because of the hundreds of hours of time investment needed to unlock it

i'm only a couple days into this but i think i already get it, and honestly it just has me wanting to play Animal Crossing instead. getting an army of robots to do everything for me is totally antithetical to the relaxing island lifestyle i was hoping for. everything seems to revolve around managing sweatshops (or oilshops (because they're robots)), and so far the only part i've really enjoyed is getting to let my collected minions roam around, even if only because it gives me an actual reason to collect minions aside from the handful i'd actually ever want to have out with me

upon starting it up, more than anything i was excited to finally learn why this mode was gated behind hundreds of hours of story progress, so i wouldn't be so mad with this game for depriving me of my farmtown for so long for seemingly no reason. there isn't much of a reason! anything tangentially relating it to story events could've been backspaced out of dialogue and nothing about it would be any different. the new player experience is already boring enough with having to go through ARR alongside the culled level <50 combat, they could absolutely throw them a bone and give new players some island time on the side

well it's whatever. not that it's ever stopped me from taking long long long breaks to go catch fish and race birds, but this is the first time the world isn't in mortal peril, so maybe waiting till the iron's hottest to strike was for the best in that regard. any of these would-be relaxing side activities are now all the more relaxing for not having that underlying pressure i will admit, it's nice

goddd Damnn it