Listen to the Rain

You'd think I would have written more about this game considering how much I've played it.

Back during the Plague Years, not long after sashagee and I met, she got into a game called Genshin Impact, then still relatively obscure. Her father and brother had started playing it months before, not long after it first came out, and they had gotten her into it in order to play with them. But, as she tells me is often the case, they played much more than she did, rocketed ahead of her in progression, and by the time she caught up with them, they had gotten bored of the game and moved on to another one. She was having a fun time--she's an old gacha hand, having played a ton of the Shining Nikki phone games in the years before she met me until she had to cut herself off from spending too much--but she had gotten herself into a horrible bind. Somehow she had increased her World Level (the difficulty of monsters, basically) up to level 6, but her characters were all severely underleveled and underpowered to the point where she simply could not beat any of the fights necessary to increase your characters' power, which meant she couldn't advance the story either. So she came to me and was like "dorchadas, you're my boyfriend, so I need you to help me."

And that's how I started to play a gacha game.


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I usually don't review the same game twice, but MMOs are different. With most games, I play them once, I do all the content, and I'm done. Even with games that receive extensive post-release updates like Wasteland II or Divinity: Original Sin that had enough post-game changes to warrant doing another review, I avoided it by not playing them at all until years after they came out, long after all the additional changes had been made. But I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV for years at this point, through every patch and with all the changes that come out, so I've seen the game as it developed. And my original Endwalker review only covered the story and none of the mechanical changes and was written over two years ago before the patch content. A lot has happened in the game since then!

As before, this review will contain spoilers for Endwalker's story.


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This is the game that made JRPGs.

Not sure that Horii Yūji knew when he decided to adapt the Wizardry and Ultima games that he loved on computer into a console RPG that he would change Japanese culture permanently. Words like クエスト ("quest"), 勇者 (yūsha, "hero"), 魔王 (maō, lit: "Demon King" but more often just "main bad guy") that are all over the place in Japanese culture now can point here as the source of their popularity. The series that rapidly grew so popular that Enix only released new games on weekends so that schoolkids wouldn't skip school--and so salarymen wouldn't skip work. It never really made it big in America, though, because Final Fantasy came out first and so when Dragon Quest came in America in 1989--a year later than Final Fantasy here, and three years after its initial release in Japan--it looked extremely dated, because it was. By then they were already onto Dragon Quest IV in Japan. Even Nintendo Power giving away free copies didn't help.

I didn't get one of those free copies because I didn't know RPGs existed. I didn't encounter Dragon Quest until I got to university, discovered how many people had uploaded things on the internet, and tried some of the games I had missed either because I had no way to play them (I never owned an SNES) or because my interests were different and I played through "Dragon Warrior." And it was fun! So when I was looking for short game, I thought about how there's supposed to be an HD2D remake of Dragon Quest III coming at some point and I wanted to play through this game and Dragon Quest II before it comes out, and I thought about how I need more Japanese practice.

Descendant of ErdrickLoto, defeat the Dragon King!


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This was not my first introduction to the Battletech setting--that was Mechwarrior 1, a game I never beat because it had timed missions and I really didn't feel comfortable starting the story until I had a full lance of Battlemasters--but it was the game I played the most. Even as a callow youth, I was already super into RPGs so the combination of tactical combat and RPG statistic development immediately drew me in. Unlike the Fellowship of the Ring DOS game, all the story was contained within the game rather than forcing me to constantly consult a manual, and also I didn't have to suffer through a terribly underpowered phase in order to climb up to RPG greatness. I remember spending hours roaming around the fields of Pacifica, fighting other mechs, going to buildings, looking for secrets.

One of the advantages of the internet is the quick ability to take games apart and find out any hidden content so that everyone can experience it, but it's a disadvantage too. As a child, the world of Crescent Hawks' Inception seemed so large, with the people roaming around towns and entering and leaving buildings, the forests and grasslands and rock fields of Pacifica, the hidden team members that you can find, but looking online I learn that it was never as big as I imagined. There is no fourth mechwarrior party member you can find. The vast majority of the people you can talk to in those towns having nothing to say other than some variation of "Get outta my face!" But Crescent Hawks' Inception has such a big space in my imagination because of those mysterious spaces. If I had known the game's limitations then, I wouldn't have any fond memories and would never have bothered to replay it now.


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I saw this post on reddit yesterday, Morrowind is the only TES game that understands empire, and it really gets to the heart of my Morrowind is, and will always be, the best Elder Scrolls game.

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A year and a half ago, I wrote about how my Free Company in FFXIV managed to acquire a house for themselves, in what's often called Housing (Savage). Well, this time we completed Housing (Ultimate)


We're moving from a small to a large, so while our old house was a sushi bar up top and a speakeasy on the bottom floor, now we have three floors, every one of which is bigger than our whole entire house was before. We also only have 400 item slots to fill the whole house--smalls get 200 items, mediums get 300 items while being over twice as big as a small, and larges get 400 while being twice as big as a medium--so we're really going to need to think about how we want to do the decorating. sashagee wants to make it a museum to all the different Final Fantasies, with mannequins of their heroes. Right now, all we've done is the yard.

We got extra lucky, though, because we actually won. The FFXIV housing system is famously bad because there are only a limited number of houses--it's not instanced, they are real locations in the game world--and previously the winner was the first person who bought it, which meant that people woke up at 4 a.m. and sprinted to their house to buy it any time new houses were added. Any houses that went up for resale went up at a random time up to twenty-four hours after the original owner relinquished it, so people would spend hours clicking on the house in the hope that they would be the one to find the exact second it went on sale. That's how we got our previous house, after like twelve hours of hunting and clicking on housing placards, and we swore we would never do it again. But we did not have to, since this time the devs introduced a lottery! sashagee, aaron.hosek and I all put in our 50 million gil and ignored the house until the lottery results came due, where we found out that #3 had been drawn and aaron.hosek won!

Most people had a much different experience, however--when the lottery results concluded, they went to the house with hope in their hearts and found that somehow #0 had won, and when they checked the results it said that there were zero participants. This was true even for houses with only a single bid. Each ward contains thirty houses, and in our ward maybe five people actually won. The medium-sized house down the stairs from us (we're on the highest point in the district) had several members from the same Free Company standing forlornly around it as I ran back and forth to the market board, and I chatted with them a bit to discover that #0 was the winner at their plot too.

News just came today that the FFXIV team identified the bug and has the original data for who the winners were supposed to be, since it was apparently a communication error rather than an error with the actual lottery. So hopefully all the winners get their houses as intended! As for us, we have a lot of decorating to do.

Shadowbringers is the second big piece of FFXIV news I remember paying attention to after the news that Kefka was being added as a raid boss in Stormblood. Once again, it was an article on Rock Paper Shotgun and reading the tweets of nova_crystalis as they covered the Live Letter reveal of the title and basic plot. Travel between worlds. The Warrior of Darkness. Unyielding light devouring all in its path. I remember being interested mostly because World of Warcraft had done something similar with 2014's Warlords of Draenor that, by 2018, was widely acknoweldged to be a complete disaster. Could FFXIV really pull off a story of alternate worlds and time travel?

Well, Warlords of Draenor has a 4.8 user score on Metacritic and Shadowbringers has a 9.1. So.

I will say at the outset that I do not have unmitigated praise for Shadowbringers the way that most of the internet seems to, but that may be because it's hard for me to compare it to anything else since I only started playing when ShB was half-over already. The only systems and skills I've ever known have been ShB ones, even when I'm doing lower-level content, so it's possible I'm not giving ShB its clear due because I've never experienced an FFXIV where Tactical Points exist or where crafters are a gruelling nightmare grind to level. My view is ultimately skewed by being a latecomer.

But you're reading this because you want to know what I think, so here we go.


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When I first started playing Final Fantasy XIV, Stormblood was the final frontier. Oh sure, Shadowbringers had been out for over a year by that time, but I started playing because sashagee got me into it and she had last played in 2018, when Patch 4.3 was current. As I watched her play while she tried to convince me to join her, I saw the quest text "Use the Duty Finder to confront Tsukuyomi in Castrum Fluminis" or "The airship has arrived above the remains of Dalmasca's capital city. Set off into the Estersands and locate the missing Jenomis" on the side of her screen as she roamed around the broad plains of Yanxia while Drowning in the Horizon played. And when I started playing A Realm Reborn, she waited for me to catch up for six months, so I'd be doing low-level quests in the starting zones and she'd be galavanting around the far east, talking to mysterious beings and performing tasks whose purpose I simply couldn't fathom.

Consider it all fathomed.

Stormblood took me longer than any other expansion to date--three months instead of two--because I had to wait on sashagee to get through the story too! Previously I could just forge ahead at my own pace whenever I wanted, but now that we were playing the game together, I couldn't outpace her too quickly or she'd get annoyed at me. So I spent some time doing other things and we played together when she was feeling well, and in the end we both charged through the fire and smoke of the Ghimlyt Dark together and moved on into Shadowbringers. It's the ending she always hoped for when she got me into the game, even though I took me months and months to get there.


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How do you review the perfect game?

Chrono Trigger is the game I've beaten the most times, starting back in uriany's basement in high school. He introduced me to the game and showed me how it worked, and then watched me play as I went through the game once, tried out New Game+, and eventually found all of the secret endings. The slow way, too--every time we'd play through the game, get to a secret ending, and then do another New Game+ and start from the beginning. We played through over a dozen times to get all the endings, and I've played through it more since then, making Chrono Trigger the game I've beaten the most in my life. The most recent time was over a decade ago when the DS port came out, and now that it's the 25th anniversary and I speak Japanese, it was time to go back to the original and experience it all over again.

Well, almost the original. I played the Steam game in 4x3 mode, in a small window to avoid any distortion or bad scaling. The port was based on mobile phones and was legendarily bad when it was released, but a series of patches since then made it look pretty close to the original. I usually play old games in an emulator with as accurate graphics as possible and then edit the resulting 240p images up for posting here, but all these images are direct screenshots. As you can see, it still looks amazing.

It's all still amazing. I make no pretense of being objective here.


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Well, my "play over New Year's" schedule for these games certainly got thrown off. I was looking forward to playing Shadows of Darkness for literally months, because it's been my favorite of the Quest for Glory games since the first time I played it. It has a creepy horror-themed setting with riffs on Eastern European myths, it has vampires, it has the Fair Folk, it has a Lovecraftian monstrosity that sleeps outside reality whose awakening the hero is trying to prevent...what's not to like? But then I got more social, and then I got distracted by Stellaris, and Shadows of Darkness faded into the background, to rise occasionally as I was sitting in front of my computer and thinking, "You know...I have this game I was playing..." But now that, much like the rains isolated the country of Mordavia, we're all isolated in our homes due to the Illinois shelter-in-place order, I realized that I no longer had any excuse to avoid finishing it.

Okay, that was a stretch. Maybe I need a hero to get me my own Good Humor Bar.


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The Games Awards dropped another Final Fantasy VII Remake trailer, so just I like I did with the last trailer from back in May, I'm going to compare the Japanese and English dilaogue.

First, here's the trailer:

Watch on YouTube

I haven't been able to find one with Japanese audio, but this was posted by Square Enix Japan, so I assume that the subtitles here are from the Japanese script. Which is interesting, because sometimes the dialogue is, uh, very different:

( Table within )

There are more differences here than there were in the first trailer! The first exchange between Aerith and Cloud is completely different in Japanese, Cloud explicitly mentions what he promised Tifa rather than just alluding to its existence, and in the English Tifa is more expressive in being glad to see Cloud. A lot of the other stuff is just stylistic--"Okay, that...was pretty cool" isn't really a bad translation of さっすが, which is kind of an interjection when someone does something good or cool that's exactly the kind of good or cool you would have expected them to do--but there are some major changes that swap the meaning around!

Like, compare English Aerith here to Japanese Aerith. English Aerith has a devil-may-care attitude, and when Cloud tells her that the situation is dangerous, she brushes it off. She's not worried. In Japanese, it sounds more like Cloud is reassuring Aerith that he can protect her and she's telling him that she knows he can. In English she's sassy, in Japanese she's passive. I wonder how that's going to play out over the entire game.

I do love the "next five seconds line." English or Japanese, Cloud's like "Yeah, yeah, mystical Planet crap, whatever, can we focus on the giant scorpion deathbot here?"

I'm curious how those different lines will work in the different version. I'm guessing they'll have different lip syncing in English and Japanese, and maybe different cutscene timing too? Aerith's first line here is so much longer in Japanese but her lips are clearly synced to the English.

Now that we know this is probably coming to other places than just the PS4/5, I look forward to playing it in 2021.

Morrowind is my favorite game of all time (though Breath of the Wild is rapidly creeping up on it...), and just recently the Elder Scrolls series hit its 25th anniversary! Bethesda is giving away Morrowind for free through Sunday, if you're not one of the people who's bought it multiple times like me.

I still have the map from the collector's edition, framed and hanging on my office wall at home.

If you want to know my thoughts about the game, I finished a heavily-modded playthrough of it in 2014 and wrote a review of it here. I've considered replaying it again, because I really want to play through the Uvrith's Legacy mod as a member of House Telvanni, and do the vampire playthrough with the trio of Vampiric Hunger, Vampire Embrace and Vampire Realism. And scripted spells so I can turn into a bat, the best way to fast travel. And maybe a playthrough as something other than an elf. But that playthrough I wrote about took me from 2009 to 2014, on and off, and probably about 500 hours of game time. There are so many other things I could do with that time.

There's a giant oral history of Morrowind article at Polygon that I have saved to read when I have more time to sit down. It's over twenty thousand words, so it's not something I can read over my lunch break like a lot of the articles I read. But I can use the time I save by not replaying Morrowind to read it.

I don't know that we'll ever see a game with Morrowind's degree of both freedom and weirdness again. Morrowind is the other half of my love of fungal forests sparked by Crystalis, and the political machinations, the slow burn of figuring out what the plot is, and the main quest actively encouraging the PC to go off and do sidequests are still rare in gaming today. I love the care they put in crafting a strange and compelling setting. I think it took me years to realize that "foyada," the Ashlander word for a ravine carved out by lava that remains after the lava has gone, was made up for the game, and "What exactly happened at Red Mountain?" and "What were the Dwemer trying to accomplish?" and "Was Dagoth Ur right?" are still questions debated among the fandom. Xenophobic nativism vs. colonial oppression was a conflict so good that Bethesda reused it in Skyrim, except Dagoth Ur is much more compelling than Ulfric Stormcloak could ever be. I mean, look at this:

Nerevarine: "What is your plan for the Dunmer?"
Dagoth Ur: "I will free the Dunmer from the Imperial yoke, and cast down the false gods of the Temple. I will lead them out of their ancient superstitions, and gift them with intimate knowledge of the divine. Then, perhaps, when Morrowind is once again restored to its ancient glories, it will be time to consider whether the Dunmer should cultivate ambitions of empire."
Nerevarine: "How do you justify your crimes?"
Dagoth Ur: "If, by my crimes, you mean the inevitable suffering and destruction caused by war, then I accept the burden of leadership. The Sixth House cannot be restored without war. Enlightenment cannot grow back without the risk of upsetting the tradition-bound and complacent herd. And the Mongrel armies of the Empire cannot be expelled from Morrowind without bloodshed. As I have charity and compassion, I grieve. But our mission is just and noble."

"Come Nerevar, friend or traitor, come. Come and look upon the Heart and Akulakahn, and bring Wraithguard, I have need of it."

So good.

Breath of the Wild is more fun to play, but Morrowind's plot and setting will win out every time. I've wanted to run a tabletop RPG version of it for years. Maybe someday.