no August book post

[queenlua]

since last time, i started but did not finish:

* The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedua. it wasn't a bad book, but it was a bit dull/slow in the hundred or so pages i read, and then the library started nagging me to return it and i decided i didn't care about it enough to deal with the overdue fines

* Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Geiman. the bits with the angel and the demon were great, and The Tumblr Dot Com would lead you to believe that's the entirety of the book. unfortunately they are a bunch of other bits and i found them interminably dull and overly cute / impressed-with-itself

all the rest of the time i would've spent reading instead went to playing Final Fantasy XII, Elsinore, and Fire Emblem: Three Houses. (two of those are 60hr whoppers, you do the math)

oh also basically every weekend has been booked so

yeah!

expect more fun book posts soonish; my weekends are calming down soon & i'm in the middle of My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferante, which is very good so far

Comments

[lavendre]

omg you're playing FFXII -- i loved that title, such a fun one.:') i've heard a lot of good things about Three Houses thus far, too.

[queenlua]

!!! i did not know you were a fan!

yes, they ported FFXII to Switch, and i'd never played it before, and i was lying in bed wanting a new JRPG so i downloaded it (god the Switch is so DANGEROUSLY delightfully portable lol). i liveblogged it a bit; tldr balthier and al-cid are delightful, i really like Ashe but wish she were fleshed out a little more, and in general i really like what was there of the game's story and characters, it just felt a little underdeveloped and i wanted more. (which feels nuts to say for a game that takes like 40-60hrs to beat, but, them's the breaks :P) the combat system was bizarrely delightful, though, and i'd love to see another game revisit it at some point.

Three Houses has been wildly addictive, which honestly is good, since i have six cross-country plane flights this month and thus i can use the distraction :P it's uneven in a lot of areas, but the sum-of-its-parts is a rollicking good time; despite some annoyances i'm enjoying it far more than i expected, and just plain enjoying it period.

(also ahh!! i love your icon <3)

[kradeelav]

lol i hear you with switch games - i was thinking about selling it right after smash came out since it was just BOTW on there for a while but with what feels like the entire FF library on there+3H+Smash+BOTW sequel? hoooooo

you should liveblog your 3H playthrough fyi, which house are you doing? >:)

(uh books yes, uh THEY'RE WONDERFUL BUT GRINDING CALLS!)

[lavendre]

yaaaas i got into FFXII a number of years ago, but i was not particularly active here then :P

ahhh all your commentary is on point. Larsa is in fact best boy (those endless hi-potions!), yessss the gambit system was so fun to use (you've described a lot of what i liked about it), and yesssssss Balthier is just. such a fun character with a lot of hilarious / depressing things going on at once (he's kind of a punk). but yeah, i remember wishing that Ivalice and its characters had more development; there were a lot of fantastic components, but they didn't go very far past surface level and it would have been so interesting to get a fully crafted feeling with that title. but ugh yeah, i'm so glad you liked it!!

and that is too many flights, but i'm glad Three Houses is providing such excellent entertainment in the meanwhile :D

(hehe thank you. i haven't used this icon in so long, for shame on my part!!!)

[queenlua]

YES wrt liveblogging, i'm planning to throw some shit up on here/tumblr/dw/somewhere??? now that i'm off planes for a bit (got into seattle at like, 2am last night, fml), but here's some top-of-my-head tl;dr thoughts:

* i finished the Edelgard route first (the one where you fight the church because hell yeah), and i'm now halfway into the Blue Lions route

* i have mixed feelings about the gameplay—on the one hand, it's a little on the easy side, and it's definitely a bit Stardew Valley-esque / Menu Emblem-esque in that it somehow makes small repetitive stuff wildly addictive and fun, which is not bad per se but does make the game feel a bit longer than it needs to be, feels slightly exploitative, etc...

...on the other hand i had six cross-country plane flights so honest-to-god having some dumb addictive gameplay mixed in with the Fire Emblem-ness was absolutely golden

* the adjutant system is great. i'm a little shaky on battalions as i'm not wild about the extra board complexity they add—but once you get used to them, boy they are a blast. biggest boon of the classroom is "i can beef up my students' levels in shit they aren't good at yet", e.g. dump some energy into lances even though your student's already A-level in swords and you don't want them to stop using the best weapons, etc.

* it's so oddly satisfying to force students you recruit to murder their former allies (e.g. make Ashe kill his dad, make Felix kill Ingrid, etc)

* i'm wildly fond of Felix and Sylvain and fic will probably come from me eventually; i also like Ingrid, Petra, Ferdinand, Dimitri a fair bit. intrigued by Claude, but haven't done his route yet so don't know a ton about him. Edelgard and Rhea facing each other down is delicious; they're both absurdly intense and mildly batshit in such different ways. i had a blast with the BE route but think they suffer a bit from some "meh" characters; a lot of the people in Blue Lions have known each other since childhood and click together really well, whereas Caspar, Bernadetta, Linhardt, etc just don't do much.

* i have a friend who managed to recruit every single fucking recruitable unit to his house. on his first playthrough. he said it made the second mock battle against the other houses extremely silly :P

* there's a bunch of meta that's kind of oddly delivered (e.g. only get it piecemeal on certain routes) but that i'm super-curious to dig into, in time. on the Blue Lions route you here a lot more about tensions between various noble houses in the kingdoms; Black Eagles gave me insight into Edelgard's motivations, but apparently Claude's route is "alliance politics are every CRAZIER than all the other places" and the church route is where you get details on wtf rhea / seteth's deal is, etc

* tl;dr i wish the game were a little less bloated, but overall this is a super-fun entry and i'm really pleased to see FE pushing some of their older themes again, after Awakening/Conquest/etc, which felt like missteps to me