Mister Jack

I just love seeing the crazy builds people come up with.

Ah, tons of people do that. I did it for Bloodborne.

This is why we need an expansion.

Between this and the Cowabunga Collection, we turtle fans are eating good this year.

Fuck the Dragon God.

Oh no, the new patch added a really bad bug.

The Batman This one is even more grounded than the Nolan trilogy, but I thought that made it more interesting. Batman isn't a flawless fighter and takes a few hits and several bullets from common thugs. The Batmobile is basically just an armored muscle car. Batman himself never does anything crazy like blocking a gun barrel with a batarang and he has to go out of his way to prepare for taking on a room full of guys with guns. I thought it was neat to see how they make him work around these more realistic restrictions, not to say it never has its "comic booky" moments. But boy oh boy. Pattinson is also a pretty good Batman and they really play up the fact that you'd have to be mentally disturbed to put on a bat suit and go out at night to kick the shit out of criminals. Pattinson's Wayne is visibly unhinged for the whole movie and it made for an interesting take on the character. My main complaint is that it's too long. It's almost three hours and I really feel like they could have cut down fifteen to twenty minutes and not really lost much.

Forced stealth sections need to die. They're always the worst part of otherwise great games.

I do wish they had somehow nerfed that boss or at least changed its AI a bit. It's a pain how it's always running away from you in such a huge arena.

Well now you get bragging rights for beating it before your build got buffed.

Huge list of changes in the latest patch. Colossal weapons have been buffed across the board, which was desperately needed. A few OP spells have been nerfed. No balance changes to you-know-who.

Mortal Shell It was on my PS+ list and I was hunting for a different Soulslike to try but this one is just so drab and dull and I couldn't get into it at all.

It's easier just to hunt down the bell bearings for them, really. They patched the twin husks merchant so that you buy crafting materials for like 80% less than what it used to cost.

You're pretty close to the end. Might as well just finish it.

Got the Final Fantasy Origin platinum. Not too much grinding for this one aside from getting one of your jobs to level 99, which will take a while on your own but if you're willing to help out other players on chaos difficulty it gives you a lot of exp crystals as a reward so I managed it in a few hours. I'm probably done with this game for a while. Maybe if the DLC is good I'll jump back in but I'm ready to move on for the time being.

Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin Man, Nomura can just never pick a normal name for these games, can he? Anyway, this is branded as a soulslike but I wouldn't really call it one. It pretends to be one, sure. It has the respawning enemies and the high difficulty like you'd expect, but I don't think of it as one for two reasons. One, there's a difficulty selection option which goes all the way down to casual. Two, you don't lose exp when you die. In fact, you don't lose anything when you die except for MP, which is easy enough to get back. You don't really level up in the traditional sense either. SoP uses a job system like FFV or FFXIV where you can switch between them freely and each one has its own levels up to 30 (at least until NG+). The job system is easily the best part of this game. Jack can equip two jobs at a time and swap between them freely during battle. Figuring out the best ways to synergize your jobs for encounters is pretty appealing and there is rarely a "best job" for any particular boss, only what works best for YOU. Strategy guides online told me to use the black mage against Tiamat and I was really struggling with it until I decided to try switching to the lancer and throwing spears at her until she died. It made me feel pretty clever to come up with my own way, and the combat in general is very customizable and full of combos. Team Ninja excels at action combat systems better than anyone else except maybe Capcom. Of course, it's everything else that's kind of lackluster. The story is hilariously cringe and Jack is the edgiest video game character since Shadow the Hedgehog. At one point his response to a character saying something he doesn't like is to say "bullshit" and then walk away while blasting rap metal on his phone. This is what Nomura thinks is cool? What is he, 14? I can't say it didn't make me laugh, though. It's just so absurd. The plot in general is also really convoluted, but what else do you expect from a Nomura game? He has a complexity addiction that hurts every project he's in charge of. But I didn't buy the game for the story anyway. Unfortunately, the level design is also...well, bad. It's not frustrating or confusing or ugly. It's just dull. Lots of corridors and hallways like it was put together in a map maker program. No real sprawling vistas or anything like that to speak of, which is disappointing for a Final Fantasy game. There are a few interesting gimmicks sometimes but by and large the levels are basically just vehicles to get you from one combat encounter to the next. This is a game I might recommend after a price drop or if it gets a big sale on steam or CDkeys or something. The combat is quite fun like I hoped it would be, it's just surrounded by fairly mediocre trappings. If they ever made a second FF game like this and improved it the way they improved between Nioh and Nioh 2 I could see a hypothetical sequel becoming one of my favorite games, but right now it's just not there. The foundation is solid, but everything around it needs work.

Sonic the Hedgehog 2 You know what, I fucking loved this movie and I won't apologize. I enjoyed the first movie, but part of me still had to admit it was missing a lot of the things people love about Sonic. This one, however, is definitely a movie written by Sonic fans for Sonic fans. A lot of the jokes landed for me and there are also a ton of fun winks and references to the games and even the memes but they flow in a way that's natural and doesn't feel forced or in your face like the references in Ghostbusters: Afterlife often did. Tails and Knuckles are highly enjoyable and they feel true to their character, even when they took the no-nonsense proud warrior approach with Knuckles, which Idris Elba absolutely nails. Carrey is great as Robotnik, naturally, but aside from him the movie is probably 90% focused on Sonic and co. and the human characters, for the most part, take a back seat. I didn't even mind Tom and his wife in the first film but it made this one so much better to write them out for a while. There is one part during the second act that primarily focuses on the humans for a little longer than I think it should have, but it got back to Sonic right when it was starting to lose me so I can forgive that brief misstep. There are a few small plot contrivances here and there, but nothing egregious enough to take me out of it and frankly I was having so much fun that I didn't care. This has probably dethroned Detective Pikachu as my favorite video game movie ever made.

HRRRGRRR I MUST KILL CHAOS IT'S NOT A NEED OR WANT IT'S A HUNGER, A THIRST. WE HAVE TO KILL CHAOS DIE CHAOS DIE DIE DIE

Sure is a whole lot of not killing Chaos going on around here. Better fix that.

Got the Demon's Souls platinum. It wasn't as much of a grind as DS3 but it still confirmed to me that Demon's Souls is tied with DS2 as my least favorite From game. World tendency is such a frustrating, inconvenient mechanic to deal with and character tendency even more so. There are certain items you HAVE to get that are only available at white tendency and the ONLY way to get white tendency is by killing invaders, which means once again I had to rely on a Discord server. Thankfully there was a guy in there who was super helpful at getting my tendency where it needed to be in a matter of minutes when it probably would have taken many hours otherwise. What a bro. Even then, this platinum was painful to get because NG+ in Demon's Souls is waaaay harder than in any other From game. Usually even with powered up enemies you can curbstomp the first few sections of the game until they start to catch up to you a bit, but in this one the very first enemies in the game can kill you in one or two hits and it only gets worse from there. The difficulty spikes up so dramatically that I briefly considered just giving up on the platinum entirely, but I persevered. I did, however, resort to using cheap methods to kill the bosses because of this game's other major problem, that being a severe lack of shortcuts. I fucking hate running through an entire level again just to get another shot at the boss, and I really wish Bluepoint had added more shortcuts as a QoL update to the remake even if it wouldn't be completely faithful to the original. After having to replay the same level over and over I didn't feel bad at all about resorting to poisoning most of the bosses and letting them die on their own because I damn sure wasn't going to run through it all again. I'm willing to help out with anyone else who is going for the platinum but I don't know if I'm going to play this again just for the sake of it. Elden Ring may make Dark Souls look dated but it just completely shits all over Demon's Souls.

I'm willing to help out, quid pro quo, but first I need to get myself to a viable level to even do NG+. This is waaaay harder than the NG+ in any other Souls game and everything is killing me in one or two hits. Apparently I'm forty freaking levels behind what people recommend. On the plus side, at least my white tendencies are saved so I might be able to get that ally ring sooner rather than later.