Tag: bg3

Welcome, one and all to the celebration of our first full month of posting content! Woohoo! Mom, you said I couldn’t do it, called me a failure, lobbed several hundred dollars worth of rotten vegetables at me from your seat directly behind my office chair, but I sure showed you!

For real though, it has been really gratifying to make these little posts and to work on these writing projects. Getting some of my thoughts on games on to the page is really fun in a “it’s work but it’s therapeutic” kind of way. And now we’ve come to that time again, that end of the month tradition (this is the second time, so it’s officially a tradition now) where we wrap up all of the little odds and ends of media I’ve been enjoying but didn’t feel the urge to write a specific feature about.

Let’s cruise on down the list.

Spy x Family

You know that thing when you’re watching a show and you get so swept up that without realizing it you’ve stopped having thoughts like, “hmm what an interesting narrative choice” or “ah, this comments on the Japan’s anime industry because…” and you find yourself grinning, cheering, weeping, and feeling like you’re just having the best god damn time? Because that’s how this show makes me feel.

I wouldn’t consider anime a huge part of the entertainment I enjoy, though I have had my fair share of it. I’d say I have a slightly above average American level of interest in it, but I’m not like IN IT. That said, if this had been the first series I’d watched when I was a teenager just getting interested in anime, my god, what a different life path that would’ve set me on.

Spy x Family is one of those shows that just COOKS. Every choice made by the production team is the exact best decision, be it the way lines are delivered, the animation for a badass action sequence, or the clever ways the series plays with the dramatic irony of none of the characters fully realizing what’s actually happening in any given scene. It’s also a deeply heartwarming show, one that cares about its characters and has no trouble getting you to do the same. Adapted from the manga of the same name, Tatsuya Endo has mastered the comedy and romance of the romantic comedy, to the point that they should just retire the genre altogether.

The premise is simple: a spy has to form a fake family as part of his mission, so he adopts a child (secretly one with telepathy) and finds a desperate young woman (secretly an assassin who is just as much using him for cover as he is her). With these pieces set in place, what follows is a show that will stop at nothing to fulfill every possibly delightful circumstance you could dream up, my favorite episode being one where one character has taken a non-lethal (but highly painful) injury from their secret career, and has to endure a romantic evening while trying to cover up the fact they’ve literally just hours ago been shot in the ass.

Even if you have only a passing interest in anime, please check this show out. You won’t be disappointed.

Baldur’s Gate 3

So I’ve actually been playing this for over a year now and have completed two separate playthroughs already, but after a few months away from the game the siren call of the platinum trophy drifted from beyond the waves of the Sword Coast and pulled me back in for one, highly organized, efficiently designed, and carefully planned out final run through the game, on the highest difficulty no less!

And I’ve learned that I am much too ADHD-brained to get really good at this game. Thank god for the gifts of RNG, save-scumming, and brute forcing!

I’m a big opponent to the idea that these methods are somehow “less real” or “dishonorable” ways to beat a game. A game is, at its very base, a series of systems working in tandem to produce an experience, and if you can manipulate those systems to have a better time, you should do so! I summon for fights in Souls games. I also have the platinum trophy for Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and earned it through sheer grit and skill. Play games the way you want.

But what I mainly want to highlight in this section is just how truly dense this game is. You’d think after having beaten the game two times through and having gone out of my way to do nearly all of the side content I could find, there are still events and bends in certain scenarios that I have never come across before, and every time I find one I am left gobsmacked.

Act One is by far the best portion of the game. It certainly feels the most fleshed-out. But this is one of those RPGs that truly allow you to play a role that feels personal to your specific experience. Which is kind of the whole point of an RPG and yet so many games miss this mark but so wide a margin you wonder how things got to this point.

Look forward to my update next month where I complain about how brutal it was to keep all the tieflings alive through Act Two and rescue the prisoners of Moonrise Towers on Tactician Difficulty.

Stephen King’s The Dark Tower Series

I would say I am a fan, generally of Stephen King. Bold statement, I know, but I think he simply has the juice. Sure, his political ideology and mine are, let’s say, incompatible (by this I mean I am so far left that the center looks like the eastern horizon), and he has certain fixations that I find unpleasant to indulge in, but to purity test every writer is to find out that “good books” are virtually nonexistent. You truly can write anything (not that you should) and Stephen King must have heard that at some point in his early life because boy does he write ANYTHING.

And of the several dozen King works I’ve read and to greater or lesser extents enjoyed, there is simply no greater embodiment of this method than the The Dark Tower books. As of the writing of this piece I have just finished Wizard and Glass (probably my least favorite of the series so far but still rather good) and the way that these books just… go places? Light spoilers but the way that elements and characters from other King stories get woven into the threads of this series are at times baffling and at other times immensely entertaining. Early on in this particular entry, I was the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme for a good long while when I recognized the term, “Captain Trips”.

I’ve heard mixed things about the remaining books but I will likely be starting up Wolves of the Calla soon and intend to finish the series before the year is up.

Side note: I also read Doctor Sleep recently and is it just me or is the movie actually better than the book?

And that’s all for this month! I’m thrilled to be keeping up with this project. I’ve always said that even if no one sees it, I believe in the restorative effect this work has on my spirit and when even one person views something I’ve written it’s a bonus. And a genuine thrill! Look forward to more reviews, game design news, and other various pieces in the future!