Seal your fireplace to stop this year’s annual December 25th home invasion. I can’t afford a home with a chimney, so I’m not vulnerable. Maybe you can’t, either. Let’s hope for more chimneys next holiday season. I’ve been a bit busy these past few days, so I hope you don’t mind a relatively straightforward post to close out the year.

Site Updates

I think I might switch these blog posts to a bi-weekly format again. One week isn’t enough of a turnaround for projects, so I find myself lacking interesting topics to share. We can call this first two-week interim my Christmas Break. If it’s good enough for the US government, it’s good enough for Noah’s Barks. Granted, I won’t be on break. I’ll probably be working on the site Christmas day, and I’d have it no other way.

Site-wise, I haven’t been able to find out what’s causing the intermittently slow backend speeds. I’m suspecting it’s my SEO plugin, which would be the worst-case scenario considering how tied to my site’s infrastructure it is. I still need to confirm what it’s conflicting with and hope it’s a simple fix.

I spent a few days experimenting with not having a caching plugin, but have switched back to one after becoming confident that it’s at least not increasing the number of slowdown incidents. Caching is supposed to speed up sites, but considering my low speeds and no one’s advice helping, you can imagine my skepticism at “conventional wisdom.”

Subscriptions Are Live Again

I have my subscriptions set up again. I have a popup that appears for everyone once a week, as well as subscription forms at the bottom of every page. Subbing is free and has an automatic email sent out at 8 AM containing articles added since your last notification. I haven’t necessarily finalized the appearance of my subscription forms, but they should be entirely functional. Please sign up or ask your friends who might be into my content!

Articles

Imports

There’s several new video game reviews up, most from around 2014. I did some basic editing, as usual. In particular, you’ll notice many Shin Megami Tensei additions. To a lesser extent, I’m adding music reviews as well.

In-Progress

My drafts are continuing to pile up, so I returned to my Shaman King: Master of Spirits review. It might encourage me to finish playing Master of Spirits 2, as well. I’m frustrated with myself, because I’m worried about forgetting things I wanted to talk about. Part of the reason I write reviews is to only need to experience a game once.

Debuts

I have a new article out, and it’s more of an editorial than a review. A new intro I was writing for an old Super Metroid review turned into a longer treatise on perfection in video games. I’m interested in seeing how it goes over with people. It gives some insight into my critical philosophy, in any case.

Video Games

Super Robot Wars X

I finished Super Robot Wars X… again. Both routes with Amari are done, and I even checked out the DLC and both Masaki/Cybuster stages. I’ve started Iori’s route, and I’m just holding down R+A and stopping to read Iori and Spero’s dialogue, assuming it’s the only thing that’s changed. I remember a few moments in Amari’s scenes where her gender is relevant, but I can’t recall where they were specifically placed. No way in hell am I scrutinizing the entire script not to miss those, particularly when characters other than Iori and Spero are discussing Iori/Amari.

Of course, for stages “unique” to Iori, I read all text. I put unique in quotes because, so far, the game categorizing these stages as distinct is laughable. They’re identical to everything I remember from Amari’s route. I don’t know why VXT is so desperate to pretend it has real character and ending differences in its story. The final five stages are basically the same on both routes; the standard route just has slightly less content than the other.

They obviously feel obligated to include these because they’re franchise standards, but didn’t have the resources to make them worthwhile. But by keeping them, they’re only delaying the audience’s disappointment on top of wasting their time.

The General Disappointment of the VXT Trilogy

I was prepared to say I liked X more than T going into it if only because of their series lists, but man, I might have to echo the consensus: X is probably the worst one. The botched fantasy premise and Wataru focus are bad already, but they underscore the plot’s extreme reliance on contrived, unexpected warps to move the cast around. There’s so little care in trying to make anything organically fit with in the storyline. It’s held together with scotch tape, and it’s like they thought no one would notice.

That said, I don’t think my appreciation for V and T have gone up; they’re still super lame games. I think this trilogy is the low-point of the entire Super Robot Wars franchise—from what I’ve played. They’re aggressively inoffensive and uninteresting. I hate describing things as “soulless,” because it’s such a cheap, commonly used phrase, but it best captures what I mean. I don’t think the developers actually didn’t care about the product, but they at the very least chose a ridiculous development process that disrupted their ability to demonstrate that care.

Looking to prepare for a possible Saizo run of T, I resumed my current file and was shocked while looking at units’ weapons. God Gundam, for instance, has its Vulcans and Machine Cannon classified as melee weapons. While this is beneficial for Domon, it comes across as incredible disinterest from the designers. Domon’s RNG stat, often functionally useless to Domon is made literally useless—a downgrade in complexity all the same, and at the very least, illogical. Why even have separate combat stats if a mech’s weapons don’t reflect them?

That’s just one example of the countless ways this trilogy’s cut corners add up to making the games feel almost shameful. Another is how terrain effects barely do anything, and no tiles are given HP/EN restoring properties despite the fact there’s still a designation for them in the UI. These feel like they’re just products pushed out as quickly as possible. SRWs are frequently absurdly easy, but at least discussing optimization in J and W is still fun because its mechanics have some relevance. VXT is just… meaningless. It’s plastic. The UI, how things sound, etc. Everything feels lightweight and passionless.

I know 30 gets a lot of shit too, but it’s hard for me to imagine liking it less than VXT simply for it trying a novel structure and changing up the goddamn visual style. Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. I sure hope not. I’m still looking forward to checking Y out once the rest of the DLC drops. I’ve heard pretty much nothing but positive things about it relative to other recent games. Let’s hope the developers have found their creative spark again and are receiving the time they need to achieve it.

Rayman 2: The Great Escape

Rayman 2 was recently added to the Nintendo Switch Online service’s emulator. I started playing it on my own, then restarted with a friend, then restarted with a third friend, and I’ve now experienced the first few levels multiple times in the span of a week. Worth it, though.

As a kid, I owned Rayman 2 on PC and loved the hell out of it. Never beat the final boss though, so that’s the main goal of revisit. Gotta close the book on another childhood game. That said, I’m morbidly curious about some of the game’s other versions, such as the PlayStation 2 port, so I’m sure this won’t be my last tryst with Rayman 2. I’m hoping to get 100%, so we’ll see how it all shapes out. I’ve begun drafting a review, as well.

Outro

I hope you have a great holiday season and, if nothing else, enjoy some deserved time away from work. By my next blog post, it will have been one year since I began Noah’s Barks, and I have every intention of making the site better all throughout the next year. Thank you to everyone who’s stuck by me as I get my feet off the ground!