Merry Christmas!

Normally I schedule my blog posts to go on up Mondays, and since this Monday is Christmas it seems a bit weird not to acknowledge it. So, I hope you and yours have a Merry Christmas if you celebrate, or a good day if you don't.

Look back on this year there's a lot I didn't get done that I hoped I would have. For instance, I've embarrassingly have not finished any books this year. That isn't to say I haven't read any, but I haven't finished, which is a bit annoying. So when my Top 5 lists go up starting next week, there won't be one for books I've read, since even if I manage to squeeze one in this year, it doesn't see right to showcase just the one. I'll try for a fresh start in 2024.

Similarly, I want to get back into writing regularly again in 2024. To be honest I haven't been able to set a regular schedule for myself since the Covid pandemic, and I don't know if it's an artifact of the fact I'm still working at home or that I just haven't found my groove again after my stomach cancer. But again, that's something I hope to remedy.

I see how this post is starting to turn into a New Year's resolution post, so enough with that!

I'm currently enjoying even if Tempest for the Switch, which feels like an otome tailor made for me between the detective work, the romance, and the dark fantasy setting. I actually forgot I was playing an otome at one point because I was so engrossed in the witch trial portion of the game. It'll be fun trying to fit everything I want to say in the VN Talk for it, but I have a little time since I have other game posts scheduled go up after my Top 5 lists go through.

See you in the next year and have a good one!

Catching Up on an Online Story as a New or Lapsed Player

I used to play World of Warcraft like a lot of fantasy fans, and while I gradually became disenchanted with it over the years, what finally killed it for me was the one-two punch of my stomach cancer surgery, which prevented me from playing for months, and the sexual harassment scandal at Blizzard. The news broke literally the month I thought it was time to resubscribe.

This was during the Shadowlands expansion and I'd long since tired of raiding and grinding. I was mostly there for the ongoing story, and my favorite activity when I ran out of story on my main was making an alt of a different class and leveling through the story all over again.

After enough expansions, Blizzard understandably did not want everyone to play through an increasingly long leveling experience all over again with every character, nor did they want new players to spend too much time trying to catch up with their friends at end game.

So they introduced things like experience boosting heirloom gear to help people level up faster, or outright level skips that could come with the purchase of an expansion. I never used either because the point of my leveling a new character was to see all the stops along the way.

Eventually the leveling process went through so many expansions that they just overhauled the entire process, relegating all content older than Battle for Azeroth to being just "old content" and starting all new players off immediately with BfA as a new "Year 0." Older players could choose to timewalk and level in a different expansion of their choosing, but gone was the whole leveling through the entire story to understand the context of what happened before. I think that was about the time my interest in leveling alts really started to flag.

I actually came back for a few months of the latest expansion Dragonflight because a friend surprise gifted it to me along with a subscription so I could play with her. It was my first time coming back in the middle of an expansion, and I lacked any idea of what happened between the end of Shadowlands and the beginning of Dragonflight.

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 5: Vilio

Vilio was the character whose route I most wanted to play. I don't always like the poster boys, but Vilio is such an unabashed ray of sunshine that he's actually billed in-universe as your friendly neighborhood dragon. (And his color scheme of red hair with red outfit gives me a bit of an Ys nostalgia vibe, if Adol Christin ever turned into an overenthusiastic dragon.) On other routes, if characters are feeling down or the odds look far too long, Vilio is often the one to give them an optimistic push, to remind them that they're CIRCUS and they'll find a way!

In many ways, I feel Vilio embodies the spirit of Radiant Tale the most. Why shouldn't a cheerful dragon be the poster boy of a game where we solve the world's problems by putting a smile on people's faces?

He can be a bit much, with his extroverted nature and the joy of seeing the world beyond his village combining into a person who is ready to go just about anywhere and do anything, but there's never a sense of abrasiveness about it. The common route and the routes of other love interests tend to play him fairly one note as an over the top curiosity seeker with the occasional shift to seriousness when the situation calls for it, which made me wonder why such an outwardly earnest guy would be the gated love interest. Looking back, it's really Zafora's route that gives the best inkling of what Vilio's actual route will be like.

Radiant Tale was only released a few months ago, so be warned there will be spoilers after the break!

VN Talk: Radiant Tale - Part 4: Radie

Sometimes to get a jump on the blog writing I'll start a post before I'm done with a route. It's usually to get some initial thoughts down or to make sure I don't forget something important. It might also contain why a particular character ended up in the play order they did. Occasionally this results in some tweaking as I finish the route and new facts come to light, but Radie had given me a number of false starts and it's because the character I loved was not the one I romanced.

My impression of Radie kept changing from the common route to the first half of his route, to the second half, all the way up until the end. He occupies an unusual space in Tifalia's life since he's not human and has been with her since childhood. He's close enough to be considered family, but because he looks like a cute and cuddly fey beast most of the time (and Tifalia doesn't know any better until midway through Chapter 1 of the story) it's hard to say exactly what family role he occupies. He looks after her like a guardian, but his size and cuddliness suggests more of a pet.

And before I go much further, please realize that Radie's route, though available at the start, contains a fair amount of backstory that isn't covered on other routes and I'll be spoiling that here. While his route doesn't spoil other routes, since they all operate fairly independently of each other, you might be unable to keep that backstory knowledge out of the back of your mind while playing, and for me personally I might have ended up annoyed with Radie for the bulk of the game.