come on man

i just passed the level 100 mark in gear drops and thought i must be making a lot of progress. then i see in the auto-dismantle settings menu the option to automatically salvage any gear below level 500. well i guess i just go from one Final Fantasy forevergame to the next. though i think there's a good amount of post-game DLC, and this is probably a game they expect people to play up to like, new game+5

something i've learned! those non-way-way bonus-ways also hide critical story information in them. so it's like FF13's story making no sense unless you read the lore menu entries between chapters but worse. i'm approaching the end so i don't care enough to go back and keep getting lost looking for them (unless i pay attention), i'll just let the fact that this is probably a new game+5-type keep things incomprehensible up until the very end so that it makes sense on a second playthrough

there was a story mission that made me control Jack on his own and now i kinda wish the whole game was like this. this style of game is a little hectic with three party members, and it feels a little cheap being able to use an "ok now fight better" command on the other characters, letting me chill out without confronting the boss for a second. "soulslike" didn't feel like an apt term for this game until this point. it's still a stupid term, but it's a more apt stupid term than before

now there's been a much-needed expositionbomb, but it was not explosive enough for me to understand why at the end of this mission i had to kill the other party members??! they were all saying stuff during the fight that may have made it make sense but dude it's a 5-on-1 i'm not readin any of that right now!!! my only solace is Jack still being as consistently confused as i am

alt text: Jack (lower left) is reaching out to fist bump the corpses of his friends he just killed

oh my god i forgot about this. first the fact that Jack is Garland. second, that after the game was announced, everyone figured out that Jack is Garland even though it was supposed to be a twist, and so after that they shifted the marketing from "who is this Jack guy?" to "fine screw it then How did Jack become Garland??" yet in the game itself it's still a reveal saved for the end. oh my god

i finished the game last night. when i first played FF1 and it started going into the time loop stuff at the end, my brain immediately recognized it as nonsense and didn't even bother trying to follow it. this game's ending was a much more elongated version of that feeling; i thought to myself maybe this could be cool? if i cared to understand what was happening, but i don't. ultimately i get what happens, i don't get or care about how it happened

i really liked this game!! i kind of want to play Nioh now, or FF1 again until i remember how unfun random encounters are and start playing Nioh instead. i'm in an action game and/or FF mood. when is XVI coming to PC, because i know it's not whenever the exclusivity is up - i think FF7R didn't come to PC until like a year after its exclusivity. and Rebirth is another "timed" exclusive. man i don't wanna buy a play station cinco

finishing the game unlocked Chaos difficulty which allows me to scale the difficulty for bigger rewards. so it's not a new game+ with a fresh story perspective like i thought, but i'll probably have to replay the whole thing anyway becaaaause

it turned out the FitGirl repack i downloaded did not include the DLC unless i ran it with certain arguments, and my original save is not compatible with that en-DLC-ened version. trust me i spent hours downloading all kindsa converter programs and hexdigging and whatnot

one method involved [making a fart noise between each word] signing up for and downloading the Epic Games Store, and "faking" the game on my account through some Hello Neighbor modding thing?? which, i don't know how or why, it was all online and i was earning achievements and stuff so. that account's probably definitely gonna get banned. but yeah same problem my save would not gel with sweeney's gameworld

there's apparently a way to convert an EGS save (which mine technically was so i don't know why i couldn't get it to work on the actual EGS) to a Steam save. so the only way i'm gonna be able to play the DLC, which i really want to, is if i replay the whole thing using one of those other methods, or i buy it on Steam and my alienhexed save is able to be converted properly. leaning towards just rushing through it again, understanding combat better and saving side missions for higher levels. i'll give it 2000 years before that though. that's a final fantasy joke