What’cha playing and please do comment about it as well, like an apology – why you playing, what’s so good, should others get into it, wherefore?
stares at the stuff above I talk weird when I’m drinking.
Anywho – here’s me:
Past. . .emm. . .weeks, not sure how many, call it 4 or 5. I’m playing Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen on PC – cause I sold my PS4 about a year ago or something. I love this game. The story is very Japanese, tho much of the aesthetics are supposed to be Western RPG in form, including dragons. The combat is very satisfying third person you and one NPC you can choose their class and skills and equips or – plus 2 made by either some random generator (if offline) or what other people’s NPC they control (online) – keep in mind they’re still just NPCs, not co-op. Plenty of large mini-boss enemy types, but open in the world, fight as often as you like (either use a dx cheat hook’s hotkey to advance the hours thru a couple days to respawn, or use the in-game inns to sleep a few days) plus one true boss in the game, a pretty bad-ass set piece with several stages, very satisfying. But back to that story – it’s a complex set-up of how the game’s world works. It’s. . .beautiful. If you have experience with Japanese stories, be it anime, games, novels, or even ancient tales — believe me, I have experience with all of them – especially that last one. . . Japan is very xenophobic, but the beauty of the preserved ancient literary forms is almost worth it. . . speaking as a history and literature expert and disowning my near obsession with human kindness for a bit . . . for those who don’t know what I’m getting at, for the initiate it boils down to once key feature: The soul of the individual in reference to the world is essential. That is, the world has just enough backstory to make it understandable, the plot is very, very loose and only really has a few key posts for guidance — and the spirit of the warrior, the purity and power of the individual soul in service of an ideal that’s the plot. I won’t spoil it – but you won’t get nearly what you might want as an American, but the point is (and I grant funding has a more than a bit to do with a lot of it, especially side-plots being so poorly fleshed out) that it is the taking of the story into the soul of the person engageing the plot that creates the true story. Take an example from Megaman – where the American ideal comes from the power of the gun, the Japanese ideal is that the hero’s power comes from within – this also applies to the story, the story comes from within.
I really love the game – the idea of it, which you do not fully grasp until very nearly the end, is more interesting than the game itself – and enough I’ve put a lot of time into this while listening to books, not just now, but over the years. Just think, without spoiling anything – what justifies your life? Your answer for this modern kind of life won’t match the story itself, but think about what your life is justified by as you play, and that’s the real story. Everything else is there to challenge that, there is no meaningful character plot, it’s the world itself that has character, not the people, and you have to find yourself in reference to that world.
Like I said, it’s beautiful. That said, climbing a cyclops an stabbing it in the eye is a helluva lot of fun. give it a shot if you’ve got like 30 USD, I think that’s the steam cost. . .I got it free on PS3 thru PS+ in like 2012 – and bought it the day it hit PC because, damn man, I love this game.Played about 100 hours in just the weeks I’ve been replaying, might’ve hit nearly 1000 by now, as many or more than Skryim – especially because It’s a great thing to use my hands while I read — audiobooks are the shit man, allows you to read and double-task. And trust me, read thousands of books physically, and about a thousand audiobooks since I started about 18 months ago with those — 350 this year, and we’ve just closed out 5 months. Very, very few people have a fraction of the experience comparing the act of reading vs. the act of listening to audiobooks. . .trust me, all the positives of books exist in audiobooks – they aren’t the same thing, but audiobooks are just as good – and for people who have read enough to have the imaginative muscle necessary, audiobooks are decidedly better. . .but again, only if you’ve read enough books. My specialties are Literature and History – the first just generally anything I can get in English, read tens of thousands of books in my life, tho I couldn’t name 95% of them. . .but as a brilliant man once said “Do you remember what you ate last year? I don’t remember what I read last year either – but it nourished me as much as any meal.” – and actually my memory is quite good, I remember quite a lot if you drag me back thru what I’ve read.
I’m drunk, the fuck was I speaking of? Dragon’s Dogma is great, and very in keeping with Japanese stories circa, well, before the Warring States Period, but not more than two or three centuries before, get’s too strictly poetic back then.
Edit: Still drunk re-reading this, but I am surprisingly coherent. Mwahaha – bow before my mastery of English! >.> Bugger. . …Bite me 
Editing all this is just too much effort, it’s good enough for a forum, just a conversation. Even trying to listen to a book at the same time. Doing all right, but I’m not a genius man – well, Besides, I wouldn’t be able to gush, or be confident in what I know, sober.
