Trysdyn Black

I streamed a blind playthrough of Ōkami last week. I'd been wanting to play it for years, but I knew it'd be an extremely special and perhaps even emotional affair, so I waited until I felt I was in a good place to commit to it. This was one of the few games I'd dread starting and then getting bored of it and leaving it unfinished. With some of the games I managed to finish on stream over the past six months, I figured now was a good time-- even if I was worried about chat spoiling things.

I'd been warned it was a long game, and I think I kind of rushed it. It weighed in at 33 hours over 7 sessions. Honestly I usually only stream 2-3 hours at a time, but this was so engaging and addictive I was doing 4, then 5, and finally 6 hour streams before the end. I'd originally bought the HD remaster on PC to play, but ran into rather severe issues with it, so I ended up emulating the PS2 version-- this was not an ideal solution but it served well enough.

I'd gone in knowing two things: 1.) That the game was strongly linked to Japanese folklore and even a bit of spirituality (a thing I have close ties to myself) and 2.) The existence of The Sun Rises, which was a song I came across years prior and felt a strong attachment to, though I didn't know anything about the context in which it was presented in the game.

( Spoilers and a LOT of rambling )

I've been busy I suppose. I last rambled here in mid-March, when I finished my playthrough of the Deep Dungeon series. I thought then I was done with RPGs on my stream, but then I got bitten by both the Pokemon and the Etrian Odyssey bug, as well as tangoing with a little game called The Dark Spire.

I may do a write-up on those at some point but not tonight. Maybe tonight I just wanted to braindump, to catch up with the 0 people who I suspect read this. To put my thoughts in order.

Shortly after my last post, my job went rather unstable. I'd been given a temporary contract pursuant to my company being purchased by a larger entity and was rather unhappy with the culture in the new organization, so I put feelers out for other employment. I took a job closer to home, doing more engineering-related work than my old operations gig.

The job change has been a trade-off. I gave up a rather easy, boring job in a corporate culture I liked for a far more difficult, far more engaging position but within a corporate culture I dislike. It's not often I go a workday without missing the old place and my old team, but the problems I'm solving here are interesting and challenging. I can't say for sure I'm happier or not; I at least feel like I'm getting more done?

Unfortunately the new job comes with the rather steep price of my free time. At the old job I was essentially working from home almost every day, on my own schedule. That's not quite acceptable now, and I've had some difficulty transitioning back to the 9-5 world. I used to be the person available to do events, marathons, etc at any hour of the day but now I'm experiencing a time crunch trying to fit in all I used to do in fewer hours, and more constrained ones at that.

With what time I have, I've signed up to run in the Handheld Heroes marathon this coming weekend; Hachiemon is finally getting its debut in a marathon. After that, I've done the unwise thing of submitting five runs to Big Bad Game-a-thon 2018. I wrote, at length, about how awesome BBG was last year; I'm hoping it's just as great this year. Unfortunately I'm unsure if I'll be able to be present 24/7 for it this year like I was last. It's over the weekend, so maybe.

Finally, after SGDQ, I'm rather confident I want to go to AGDQ 2019. I'm so confident in this I've already started making plans-- but we'll see if I chicken out AGAIN before signup time.

Between Handheld Heroes and BBG, I want to find another obscure gem to delve into casually. I miss the experience of Deep Dungeon. Even though it was arguably quite bad, it was new and fresh to me, and was a joy to explore. Dark Spire was a joy too, and I deeply regret I can't go back and play it again from the beginning.

[Whole lot of CWs here. Slurs, trans hate, queer hate, furry hate...]

If you hang around on Twitter long enough it'll probably happen eventually: you say a thing that takes wings and the next thing you know you have to silence your phone because it's beeping every 3 seconds with RTs and replies. I guess in my case I can't be too disappointed in what did it for me. Out of all the random bad puns and random banter, what blew up for me was a rather charged tweet I made about gender identity and gamers:

Just saying: If you can memorize

- The moves of 200+ pokemon
- The moveset of every fighter in DBFZ
- The routes for speedruns
- The roles of 100+ heroes in a MOBA
- The spray patterns of guns in CS:GO
- The names and records of eSports teams

You can remember people's pronouns.

Shamefully this came from a place of anger. I've gone thus far without calling out the person in question because I believe, if they saw how big this blew up, maybe they'll give some thought to it. Suffice to say though, I was just a wee bit grumpy at a speedrunner misgendering a trans individual. This runner prides them self on being varied in the pool of games the run and routes they remember, but they claim remembering the probably ~10 people in their normal stream circles that aren't he/him is too much work.

The tweet itself was crafted to try to be more generic, hitting on something almost anyone that would self-identify as a gamer would at least understand, if not be immediately party to. My original intent was to empower people who deal with this with talking points rather than directly call anyone out. I guess you could say I was yelling into the echo chamber; something I am sometimes guilty of. What happened next though ended up educating me.

The tweet blew up. It started with a few friends Like/RTing it, then my phone was assaulted with a salvo of happy chimes indicating someone had interacted with my tweet. Within minutes I had to mute my device as friend-of-friend-of-friend-of-friends were RTing multiple times a second. It was around then I knew I probably screwed up.

The most interesting thing about this is the propagation of the tweet followed very specific phases...

Phase 1 - Echo Chamber RTing: This is pretty much what I expected if things went anywhere. Friends RTing the tweet, and friends of them RTing it. The last few times I had something go "viral", it bounced around within a rather closed social group of people who shared my opinions and thoughts, so at worst I got a few people voicing their agreement or questioning some of my verbage choice. I always enjoyed when this happened because the pool of people engaging was small enough to peek at profiles and possibly find new people to follow.

Phase 2 - General Break-Out: I muted my phone and went to bed. At some point in the morning, I'm not sure when or even if there is a specific "when", the tweet reached out beyond the bubble of like-minded people I expected. Now instead of getting quiet RTs of agreement, I was seeing Quote RTs where people were inserting their own commentary, and then soon after that replies. For the most part this fell into three groups: general statements such as "I don't remember any of these things, haha", polite disagreements about the nature of gender identity, and statements that I "care too much" or whatever.

Folded into what I would consider polite discussion were a few more charged challenges. An interesting thing about the challenges in this phase of things though was most of them jumped straight to neo-pronouns, ignoring both cis women being misgendered in communities, and trans people. I assume most of these were in bad faith, regurgitating hatred and trolling. In this phase, challenges fell into one of a few groups:

1. Okay my pronouns are (random noun) and (other random noun), remember it or you're a nazi
2. Haha who cares about pronouns on the internet you loser
3. Trans and gender non-confirming people are mentally ill and I won't engage their delusion
4. Yeah but I care about pokemon/DBFZ/etc, and I don't care about identities

I think the thing of most interest here is, despite receiving about 100 of such replies, they all sorted neatly into one of these groups, while a lot of the people speaking them thought they were unique and clever, or had some insight I and others had never seen before. Most of these I ignored; a rare one or two I replied to when I saw a particular opening for a hilarious "sick burn" or whatever the kids say now and days.

Also present were the usual tired arguments of "Science says!" and whatnot. These caused arguments within the thread and linking of biased scientific journals. The usual.

One thing I could not help but notice is the more "spicy" takes seemed to come largely from individuals with anime styled avatars. Maybe that's because there's a larger ratio of them on Twitter in general, or maybe there's a correlation? I called this out to one person and they found it ironic this was coming from a furry with a furry avatar. Meh, most of the furs were on my "side" though? Such as there were sides anyway.

Mixed into this is one more thing worthy of note: individuals who felt some degree of guilt over the entire thing. This manifested in about two dozen people replying that they're trying to remember but it's actually hard sometimes. My one regret in all of this is Twitter's message length constrained exactly what I wanted to say and I didn't get a chance to express that trying is far more than most people do and mistakes can happen, so guilt shouldn't be felt from people being sincere. Oh well.

I think the highlights were the person who got so mad at my tweet that they forgot pronouns existed at all and my reply to them later. Also an individual I won't link who came at me pretty hard, but later apologized and explained to me that they, like a bunch of others, took exception to the implication that I also supported full gender non-conformity/non-binary and they felt this took a platform away from trans people. I don't agree, but I can respect the viewpoint.

Phase 3 - The Shitstorm: This persisted for about 24 hours. Then at some point the nasty stuff started. I can only presume someone with some sway or a large reader base somehow found my tweet and talked about it, because this seemed to be a very sudden and specific event in which even these somewhat thought out troll responses just turned into vitriol. I woke up the next day with about two dozen DMs from various people saying everything from "There are two genders and you are a deluded (slur)" to "I'm going to find and kill you if you don't delete your tweet". I reported the more egregious ones, of course.

Again it's worthy of note here that the people most upset about my tweet seem to have dog-whistled on the inference that I was talking about neo-pronouns (xe, ze, peh, etc, and to some degree them/they). While I certainly include that under the umbrella of "If you want to respect someone you should support their identity". this whole thing started with a woman being misgendered as a man. So a lot of the angry replies were attacking a straw man I didn't bring to the table.

In this phase, the activities from phases 1 and 2 were still present but were now taking a back seat to people bandwagoning on just insulting people in the thread. Several fights broke out between people posting low-effort insults against my furry/kin identity, against my validity as a person due to what I care about, against trans people, against GNC people, against women... and the people who wanted to defend any of the above. I mostly went silent at this point, half out of scientific curiosity for how this would play out and half due to the fact that life took my attention away from Twitter for a day or three.

Noteworthy "challenges" here...

1. lul sjw fur-fag
2. something something autism
3. You're such a loser if you care about people using pronouns in games
4. (Animated GIF of a 3D model of the number 2, presumably to argue the 'two genders' thing, but I actually don't know for sure)
5. Who can't keep he and she straight?? LUL
6. You must have no life if this is what you waste your time on (that one coming from a Twitch streamer "trying to go full time" for over a year with 4 average viewers so I'm sure they're a lovely person with many redeeming characteristics)

Highlight here? The twitter account that exists only to try to RT-and-win Funko Pops chiming into the discussion with "There are only two genders, fur-fag". I feel like I won some kind of Twitter achievement for getting called out by someone who uses their entire account trying to win 99 cent pieces of plastic, and for bonus points I'm not sure they actually read my tweet. Needless to say, upon careful consideration of their platform I found it wanting.

I made the mistake of reading those DMs yesterday as the first thing I did upon rolling out of bed. That had a momentary impact on my mood. On the plus side, I have some pretty awesome friends that reminded me how sad it is to go looking for people to insult on Twitter.

Ultimately I consider most of the "counterpoints" presented in this phase to not just be trolling, but brigading from some source. Most were not worthy of any consideration and I got to work out my pointer finger clicking "Report" quite often.

Phase 4 - Much the same as phase 1: That ended late last night. Since then I've actually been able to turn notifications back on on Twitter. The tweet, despite being almost a week old now, is getting RTs every now and then but no one's actually engaging in discussion (can you even call most of it discussion?).

Just as quickly as it arrived, my 5 or 6 days of fame/infamy vanished. The final "Score" as it were is about a quarter of a million people saw my tweet. Definitely not a massive viral explosion but hundreds of times more than I expected. Plus, it's always shocking me to how nasty some people are willing to be to absolute strangers online. However I know for a fact I changed one person's view on the gender binary, at least somewhat, so maybe that was worth it all.

I also re-learned that if you care about anything, a non-insignificant chunk of Twitter will accuse you of having autism.

I'd like to go awhile before having something blow up like that again 8)

I'm an odd type of speedrunner. Three to four times a year I go hunting for strange offbeat games no one has run (or usually even heard of) before, to route and showcase for major marathons.

With SNES Superstars 2018 set to be announced soon after New Year, I went looking early for my offbeat offering for next year. I found it (or one of them anyway) in Neugier: Umi to Kaze no Kodō. This game is Wolf Team all the way through: beautifully thought out and executed with the requisite amount of Wolf Team jank present in the mechanics and gameplay.

Of particular interest here is the ranking system. At the end of the game you're assigned a rank from 1 to 20, with an appropriate title attached. My first playthru got me the rank of "Normal gamer" at 14. As I began to develop a speedrun route I passed through "Masterful Player" at rank 8, then "Beyond Champion" at 4, "Over the Top" at 3, and finally "King of Kings" at 2. Quite the superlative! However rank 1 eluded me. At this point I was completing the game in 20 minutes, down from 2 hours for the rank 14 play.

I did some research and found from game's one FAQ and its translation patch notes that rank seems to be based purely on in-game time and that rank 1 was translated in the English patch to be "Couch Potato". I was now playing on the Japanese version though (as I was doing proper speedruns), so I wanted to see what the title for rank 1 was in the Japanese version. I set out on a stream with the explicit purpose of getting Rank 1, calling it "The quest to become the potato".

It turned out to be a five hour stream as I honed my route and shaved off seconds. About ten attempts in I cut the 20:00 mark, which I thought for sure would give me the desired result. To my dismay I was once again assigned the rank of "Rank 02: King of Kings". Okay fine! At that point I knew ranks 2, 3, and 4 were on one minute increments: sub 21, sub 22, and sub 23 respectively but apparently the illustrious Potato title requires yet more. Back to the grind!

Finally while practicing the Stage 4 boss, I discovered a strategy that cut an entire cycle off the fight. I cut 27 seconds off my personal best and sat with bated breath as the credits scrolled. My chat intoned "Time for potato?!" as the azure cloud-textured text scrolled by and then, there it was...

  PLAY TIME
  00:18:50

   YOU ARE
GOKUTSUBUSHI
   RANK 01

Chat exploded. One of the viewers volunteered the translation: layabout, good-for-nothing, deadbeat... Yeah okay, Couch Potato is a good translation for this. A bit kinder maybe. In the afterglow as I tore down stream and cut the video of the run a thought occurred. While I don't consider this to be an optimized play at all, it seems to me they calibrated the ranking system to align almost perfectly with a good speedrun of the game.

I direly want to know the story behind this. Did someone at Wolf Team speedrun the game? Did they sit around on lunch break trying to finish an alpha of it the fastest and then calibrated rank 1 for whoever did so? More importantly, has anyone gotten rank 1 in this before? I peeked around and couldn't find much, but I also acknowledge that I really can't search, for example, Nicovideo well because of language barriers.

In any case, sub-18 in-game time is possible, and I'm curious if it's going to wrap back around to the special rank of Rank 21: Cheater if I do it.

Most people who would read this follow me on Twitter so they probably know how things went with the job. I haven't really had the time or inclination to write anything; it's been a stressful month. Let's see...

On the the job front, I was shockingly retained. I'm on a temporary contract to migrate our environment to the buying company's servers, then it's "expected" I find a role within the company to migrate into. I haven't decided how seriously I'll pursue that; first thing's first anyway. The last business day I'm an employee of the old company is probably Monday. We lost our tier 1 guys and our manager. So now there's no one insulating the system engineers from users and veeps, we're having trouble prioritizing or sticking to one task because no one's triaging for us or setting priorities. It's going to be fun when migration work begins.

On the home front, the partner-thing had a major medical issue mid-August and was put on a medication that made him ill for three months. So about once a week for three months we were going to the walk-in clinic or, in some cases, the ER. That seems to be settling now but I'm still in this hyper vigilant state where I feel like I can't fully relax because he may have another issue resulting in an urgent trip to a doctor. I'm sure I'll unwind in time but for now it's a rather intrusive thought constantly on my mind. He's off the meds now and improved almost immediately so... yeah hopefully it's over. Achievement unlocked: hit your yearly out of pocket maximum on your insurance? Blorf.

Furthermore our other roommate, who moved out in March to live with her wife, experienced a run of bad luck and the two of them may or may not be moving back in in trade for maid work. Don't know yet. Not looking forward to four people in this small house but it would be nice to have another presence here again. The house is oddly quiet with only the two of us here. I'm thankful to be in a position where I can actually help people in such a way. It wouldn't have been the case if the two of us had lost our jobs suddenly with all the medical issues hovering around.

Then I found out yesterday one of the big names in the retro speedrunning scene may have some kind of major health issue leading them to believe they'll be passing on soon. Details are sketchy but there's enough there to piece together a story that he's not expecting to survive out the year. That was a punch in the gut seeing as how much I like the guy. Death and I don't get along... Understatement of the century, yeah?

SPEAKING OF... it's my birthday in less than a week. I've largely not been a fan of celebrating it because it's also the anniversary of the death of one of my SOs. It's been 8 years now but it still twinges the back of my mind when the day rolls around. Especially when so much illness is surrounding me like this year. Still, I'd like to do something. For the past 8 years it's just been "just another day". Sadly on my birthday itself I'll be in meetings planning the migration of work's systems to the new overlords. I don't even get to take the day off as I've traditionally done every year.

Then you have all the political stuff going on, and whatnot. Yeah... it's been a really rough late half of 2017 for me.

I dunno, I just wanted to hash all this out for people asking what's been eating at me lately. The answer is a whole hell of a lot.

Yesterday I was stirred awake at 4:30am by a noise or something. While I was settling back into bed I decided to peek at my phone. I had a message from my CEO explaining in very curt and sterile form letter terms that my company has been bought out and there was a mandatory attendance all hands meeting at start of business. Not the best way to wake up after ~4 hours of sleep.

My partner and I were both awake so we drove into the office and just had "our day" early, then sat down for this meeting. Here's where the details have to be hazy but the net of it is yes, my company is being acquired by a larger firm. They were very careful to give absolutely no useful information at this point, as one can expect. What I gleaned from it, though, is that in about 30 days I will probably be layed off.

Everyone involved is playing their cards close to their chest. Why let people know they'll be let go in a month? They'll lame duck it. However given that I tend to be the generalist on the team with not as much under my wing that's mission critical, I expect I'm one of the least important people in my group. So yeah, I'm working on the assumption that either mid-November, or end of year, I'll be axed.

One bright side to this: due to a combination of factors, I'll be "okay" financially if it happens. The down side? I like this job. I'm actually completely 100% out about who I am there, which is something I can't say for sure I'll ever be able to do again. It's kind of a scary thing that after years of not having to live a double life, I'll probably have to go back to that to get in somewhere else. I've been extremely lucky.

To double that "I like this job" thing, most people in speedrunning scenes know me as the person who has an amazingly flexible schedule and can be involved in events whenever. I do night shifts for marathons, can fill in runs at events in the middle of the night or dawn, I'm always around. This is entirely because of the flexibility of my job and I'm not certain I can go back to a standard 9-5 now; especially with my sleep disorder in play.

I mean yeah, that's all whining. Having to go back to "A normal job" is a pretty good problem to have. It's hitting me kind of hard right now though. Who knows though, maybe they'll keep the whole team. I don't have a ton of hope for this being a permanent arrangement as it's been for the past years though.

It's 3:15. I'm trying to get my brain to wind down enough to sleep so my schedule doesn't drift too far out of control by having my LEDs on their lowest red setting. These things cast a dim enough glow to just barely see by; I suppose it looks like an old photography lab in here like this.

On my mind is the coming Nanowrimo. I've had a novel ... mostly... outlined in my head for years now. Probably more like a trilogy, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. Will I do it this year? Who knows. I actually want to start sooner than November, and eschew the Nano concept entirely. I don't think I could hammer this whole thing out in one month anyway.

As far as the novel goes, it's actually a story world that's a fusion of five short stories I wrote since middle school. Some of them were pretty bad, and will need a total rehash, but I've developed as a wordsmith since those days, so I think the challenge is more fitting them together cleanly. Initially, those five stories weren't intended to be within the same universe; it was only many years later did I realize how well they could coexist.

The general plan is to get about a quarter of the story done, then begin publishing it chapter by chapter as a web serial. I already have the platform for that developed (both a journal here on Dreamwidth and a custom script I wrote to publish to my own website too). I have at least the first quarter of the story outlined in explicit detail. I guess I just need to start.

But hasn't that always been the barrier?

I just finished staffing a speedrun marathon all weekend. Big Bad Game-a-thon was a neat idea people in the Kusogrande bad game tournament had to put on a marathon exclusively of speedruns and challenge plays of bad games. It was far more successful than we could have possibly dreamed.

A lot of people submitted runs, even people outside the niche of "Bad game" fans that we expected. We ever had some people who knew so many arguably poor quality games that we had to limit the number of submissions we allowed from one person. We managed to fill a 60 hour schedule with runs and have several backup runs on the side; that alone was a shock. Still as we put the word out we expected maybe 50 viewers at peak, nothing huge. Who wanted to see a marathon that intentionally ran bad games after all?

I'd been saddled with graveyard shift for emceeing. My original workload was supposed to be two four hour shifts of being on mic at about 3am local time. I work my own hours and have sleep issues anyway, so I volunteered for the grunt shifts. As the marathon started, though, we realized this was going to be a bigger deal than we thought. We had 200 viewers right from the word go, with the number steadily increasing as the event went on. Whew!

I ended up doing a little of everything: emceeing, chat modding, supporting runner setup, cutting highlights. Then some technical problems arose and I ended up developing some scripts to circumvent them. On top of all of that, I had one scheduled run in the marathon, and when we got so far ahead of schedule we needed to go to bonus runs, I had a second I was unprepared for put in (but it went fine~). In the end I was emcee, chat mod, highlight cutter, coder, technical support, runner setup, and a little bit of administration as the only awake staff member at 3am.

It was a blast. My first emcee shift, I was tense because the bot we had been using to control the marathon was having technical problems and the only person able to reboot it was asleep, but we were able to isolate the cause of the issue and some Twitch API scripting on my part made sure it never happened again; I'm proud of myself for that one. I'm not going to say I "Saved the marathon" or anything, but I'll take some credit for making things run smoothly. The staff even took time to thank me in the finale for my work, so that felt nice.

Downside: I'm tired as hell. I slept maybe 6 hours all weekend, grabbing a few naps during longer runs I found less interesting. I'm going to sleep like a rock when I finally calm down enough to crash.

As part of my streaming project I played through Final Fantasy IV: The After Years. I'd been wanting to play this for awhile, despite hearing all sorts of warnings that it wasn't very good. I dove in blind and managed to play… most of the game without any sort of major assistance. Now that I'm on the other side (32 hours later, twice as long as every other FF I played for this event except for FF3), I can say that all the criticism is valid and warranted.

For those who don't know, FFIV:TAY is essentially FFIV-2. It takes place seventeen years after the events of FFIV and focuses on the son of Cecil and Rosa initially before branching out to the other FFIV characters and their families and friends. The initial release of TAY was episodic, and on mobile devices. It came out across most of 2008 in the form of a new "Tale" being released every few weeks as a separate purchase. The game was later released on the Wii and PSP. From what I hear, the PSP version is probably the best one if you're okay with the altered graphics.

So what's the problem with TAY? I suspect it's largely the original format. Episodic and mobile doesn't make for a solid RPG experience. Anyway let's break down what got my goat here.

First of all the game is extremely linear. In each Tale you are shepherded from place to place by the plot and conveniently placed guards and barriers. Once a Tale ends, you are kicked back to the main menu to begin a new Tale, and cannot access that content again unless you load a save inside that Tale and re-do it. For the first fifteen hours of play I can count two instances of having any real choice in where to go.

Due to the episodic format, most Tales end in a cliffhanger and nothing ever gets resolved until the very end. This would be vexing enough on its own, but most of the cliffhangers are produced in the form of a borderline fourth wall breaking insult to the cast and even the player. The end of most of the Tales involves a conversation that goes something like "What is your plan with the crystals?" "I don't have to tell you", fade to black. No, I'm not paraphrasing. "I don't have to tell you" and permutations thereof is the most common line uttered by the new mysterious antagonist. How much TAY teases you with the potential of new plot reveals only to have this antagonist and her block-of-wood personality slap it away while laughing at you is maddening. This is not how you create dramatic tension.

As an extension of the biffed attempts at dramatic tension, the writing is terrible. Most of the cast act completely inappropriate for their characters. Sure, it's been seventeen years since FFIV, but in that time I don't think Cecil would suddenly become susceptible to his dark side again, or Rosa would literally lose all personality. It just all felt wrong. Surprise twists are also telegraphed so hard I'm unsure their reveals were supposed to be surprises at all. It's all very hamfisted.

Also due to the episodic nature, you're forced to traverse the level 10 to 25 expanse a dozen times. Each time you get a character up to a level that they feel reasonably powerful, the Tale ends and you're forced to start a new Tale with a new cast of level 10s. It gets very grating to not ever get to feel powerful unless the plot dictates it.

Speaking of which, in each Tale you will be in at least two battles that are forced losses. Some of these are just mind numbing… Battles you could win that are forced losses by plot, enemies suddenly pulling out abilities they shouldn't have. Eventually the game just gives up and makes the "You lose now" attack KO the party without even doing damage. At least twice I ended up in fights I thought would be yet another forced loss, only to game over because it wasn't. You've messed up your writing when that happens.

Finally on the writing front, about half the Tales just feel completely pointless and irrelevant. Porom's Tale is all flashbacks to when Palom and Porom were kids. Edward's Tale is nothing but traversing the Underground Waterway three(!!!) times. Edge's Tale is 80% about four comedy relief ninjas you'll never in your right mind use again. Yang's Tale tells the amazingly coherent story of Yang and his daughter having to traverse a dungeon to find fuel for their sailing ship-- If you think you misread that, you didn't. It's that stupid.

So okay, the writing and the pacing are terrible. That's all, right? Nope. If that was all, I think I would have found it to be a semi-enjoyable one-time experience just out of my love for Final Fantasy IV. Once you reach "The Gathering", which imports all your progress in the Tales into a combined story line that runs to the end of the game, the game throws you up against a brick wall.

See, I've mentioned TAY was initially episodic a few times now. Part of this is the inclusion of a "Challenge Dungeon" in each Tale. The intent was to provide the player with something to hold their interest between Tales, but in the combined release ten years after the episodic trickle of content, there's no point to explore them. Each CD provided no plot information or progress, and the loot you get would quickly be outclassed the next time you have access to those characters. To finish a CD, you usually need to be close to 40. It's a grindy time sink. I skipped them.

The Gathering and Finale seem to assume you've done them. The Gathering is just that: you're given a party of four people dictated by plot (Edge, Rydia, Luca, and Golbez if you're curious) and must go find the rest of the cast (and other stuff) to prepare for the Finale. If you begin this Tale with your party in the 20-25 range, you'll get pasted by practically every battle laid out in front of you. Also, every cast member you rescue has some plot reason for being unable to assist you; you never even fill your empty fifth slot. Everyone you pick up just sleeps on the airship until the end of The Gathering. So you're stuck with this party whether you leveled them, want to use them, or neither.

After The Gathering, you pass a point of no return and are given access to your whole cast. You can assemble any party of five you want, finally! Hooray! At this point I was sixteen hours (over many days) in and had forgotten the capabilities, equipment, and whatnot of most of my cast. Though I already had a party in mind I wanted to use. In any case, you're placed at the top of a fifty(!!!) floor dungeon for this. Elevators are spaced every five or so floors, allowing you to return to the ship and restock and rearrange your party. So really it's closer to ten five-floor dungeons.

This is where the difficulty curves really slap you in the face. Most of your cast, you left at the end of their Tale at level 20-25, probably didn't do their CD, and probably didn't use them in The Gathering unless you got lucky with your planned party versus plot requirements. Once you set foot in the final dungeon, the expectation is you're around level 40. I was 20-35 depending on character, so the very first boss in Floor 2 (of 50) just utterly wrecked me. It's here I got so tired of the game and progression that I stopped and grinded for three hours on floor 1 of the dungeon, reaching level 45 on my entire party. This would turn out to be exactly sufficient to finish the game.

The moral of this story? If you don't do the CDs, expect to need to grind several hours in the same one tiny room of the final dungeon to get your party viable. That's not all though. In three specific instances in the final dungeon you will need a specific party. One of these is a big side-plot climax, in which four of your party slots are decided for you. I had to grind a second time because two of these mandatory members were still level 20. That grind was only an hour, though.

So what is the final dungeon? What is in there that's so massive that it needs to be a fifty floor marathon? Probably the worst plot twist in all of Final Fantasy. See, it's revealed to you (spoilers coming) that the crystals in not just the FFIV world, but every classic FF, were placed there by the same singular progenitor who is now coming to reclaim them and destroy any world that has not evolved enough for his experiments. As a result, the final dungeon contains the canonical crystals from FFI through FFVI, and each crystal is guarded by a throwback boss. You fight the four fiends from FFI, the four dark crystal bosses from FFIII, bosses from FFIV you haven't encountered yet in the Tales, and bosses from FFV and VI including Gilgamesh and Doomtrain. It's…. really, really stupid and there's no good reason for it aside from "HEY REMEMBER THIS?!" They even had a chance to make Ultros and Gilgamesh hilarious, and their writers just dropped the ball. It was so disappointing.

Really I consider it a cardinal sin to try to link FFs together like this in fan fiction, let alone an official FF title…

So, thirty hour mark. I've suffered through completely pointless Tales, having my progress reset to level 10 each Tale transition, awful writing, five hours of forced grind because of difficulty curve whackery and forced party changes. I'm five floors from the finale. What's left? Two of the biggest, pointless DPS check bosses I've ever seen.

Once you reach the FFVI floor, you're in the home stretch. Here though lies the most sudden, sharp, jilting difficulty jump known to man. I was level 60 at this point, having started at floor 1 at 45 and just not really run from much as I progressed. I was gaining maybe one level per section; the experience curve had turned into a wall. I was clearly not intended to level much more than this. I expected most of the final fights would be easy, and they were until here. Enter Ultima Weapon.

Ultima Weapon is a mandatory, progress blocking boss that fights like a superboss. He has two abilities that can instantly kill any member of the party, Meteor, physicals that hit for 4,000 damage, and a Bahamut-like countdown mechanic that ends in a 5,000 damage to all megaflare. At this point, with my "endgame ready" party, my beefiest character had 4,700 HP. Megaflare is a wipe, and he can begin the charge to cast it at will. I was unable to knock him down before he cast it, and only by the good grace of Edward having Hide did I not totally wipe. It was a 20 minute battle on its own. I've killed Omega in FFV faster than that! For those curious, the boss prior to him is Doomtrain, whom I clowned in two minutes with Flares from Palom. What a difficulty spike!

Just after you managed to scrape by Ultima Weapon, the game has one more middle finger for you: a battle with Bahamut and the mysterious antagonist. Rydia is required to be in your party for this; even at level 60 she won't survive what either of them dish out; so she's a dead party slot. You also almost have to do this fight on a moon with Black Magic down, so she's doubly useless.

So how's this fight go? The antagonist is invincible and immune to all status effects. Bahamut does what he does: a 5 count before casting Megaflare and wiping you. This is a DPS race. Reflect? Nope, in this reiteration of the fight, the antagonist will cast Black Hole just before Megaflare, the two coming out as a single move. Once the clock hits 0 you're dead. So you have to win this DPS race with four party members, while the invincible antagonist is throwing Tornado, Quake, Slow, Confuse, and Meteor at you. Good hecking luck.

This all happens five floors above the bottom. The next five floors are total filler, feeling like dummied or prototype content. You walk through winding halls of a new tileset, where there are no random encounters, no loot, nothing. This could have been a single straight hallway and been just fine. Though there is a purpose for this that comes later, I guess. In any case my point is this: after coming off the high of beating Bahamut, you're forced to cool down with five floors of nothing, not even music. It really ruins the hype for what's coming-- though the final boss would ruin the hype anyway.

The final boss is introduced as a sudden new foe much like Zemus in FFIV. He has no real backstory, he's only mentioned in side-discussions with who you thought was the main villain until now. He even has the same "use the crystal to begin the fight" gimmick Zeromus did. There's nothing to say. He's also weaker than Ultima Weapon in every way. It's really a disappointment after barely scraping by Bahamut and Ultima Weapon.

So it's over when you beat him, yeah? No. As the dungeon begins to collapse (because why not make him a load bearing boss) you're forced to flee back through the five floors of nothing you descended, with the boss chasing you. At the end of each "battle", plot happens to tie up some loose ends. The writing is terrible, the design is terrible. I think the apex of bad framing here is when one of the plot characters tries to help you by casting Protect on you just before you're forced by the game to flee the battle. Thanks? You can't lose these fights, they're just excuses to let the former antagonist "save" you by sacrificing itself.

The denouncement cutscene is twenty minutes of nothing. Most of it is framed around the four ninjas you don't care about. One funny point though is you're forced into a mock training battle between Cecil and his son and, if you're like me and unequipped everyone you weren't using, they're just punching each other until the game cuts the scene ten turns later. I'm pretty sure that's supposed to go faster than that! Even the closing cutscene has bad story/engine framing.

A long story short: there's a reason why people say TAY is miss-able, even for people who really love the FFIV canon. It's not worth playing even then because the game actively tries to ruin what you'd love about the original FFIV by forcing you to revisit dungeons, bosses, and then caps it off with a plot reveal that basically invalidated FFIV's entire story. I'm glad I played it, but I don't plan to ever touch it again or recommend anyone else do the same.

( Pointless Mastodon stuff )

That all out of the way, stream stuff I have coming down the pipe... I'm running in Handheld Heroes on Friday. I feel ready for my Rolan's Curse II run, but Dicing Knight is RNG incarnate and the game itself could just decide I will not finish my run. I'm trying to make peace with the fact that I may have my first ever mercy-kill in a speedrunning marathon, but really I'm also practicing backup strats as hard as I can. Nervous, just the same.

After that, I'm going to start a personal streaming project, to break up the monotony of speedruns and such. After all my Four Job Fiesta runs, of which I did four this year, I've had an itch to go back and play other Final Fantasy titles I have in the past, and visit ones I never finished. When I made a list of what I wanted to stream, it basically included every pre-Playstation title, with the exception of 2. So I decided to just stream all of them: 1-6, Mystic Quest, and why not throw in the extended IV gaidens and Tactics.

That's going to be a long project but I don't have to stick to it every stream. I can weave speedrun streams and other stuff between chipping away at it. Besides, it gives me an excuse to code yet another weird stream overlay widget: a custom timer for it. I mean, I won't really need a speedrun timer, but I do want to track how long the journey takes.