Random Pride Month Post

So, events seem to be preventing me from watching episode 3 of The Untamed today.  (Which sucks, because that's the episode where Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji first meet and have their rooftop duel!  (If it even counts as a duel...))

But I wanted to do a random Pride Month post anyway, so...that's at least something?  (Something I should have gotten to much earlier in the month, more specifically.  😅)

I don't actually have anything to say, to speak of, though.

Mostly I wanted to share some game screenshots.

Because rainbow trail.

The pictures are from Fae Farm, which I've been playing lately (and am almost done with).  The game got an update recently and some of the new potions give your character an effect trailing behind them when they move.  (Spoiler:  the rainbow one is the only one worth bothering with.)

The game is kinda confused about its own name.  When it's written in text form in menus and such (like the album menu to copy the screenshots to computer) it's written as I wrote it above, Fae Farm.  But in the game's logo it's written Faefarm.  I feel like they should have gotten that straightened out long before the game was released. 😅

Anyway, you may have noticed my rainbow flower bed in those photos.  Well, I have a video I captured about that.  (I can only hope it works.  Don't think I've ever put a video on one of these posts before.  (If it doesn't, I'll try to remember to turn it into an animated .gif tomorrow on the computer and post that.))

Wow, I hope that runs.  Won't be able to tell until I've actually posted it, though. 😰

Anyway.

Yeah.

Didn't actually have anything to say.

Just wanted to share some rainbows.  'Cause Pride.

(Ah!  I should make some flower beds in the pattern of the Asexual Pride flag!  Wait.  Wait.  No, I can't.  No gray flowers.  😭  Dang.)

Plushie!!!!

 So, a while back I mentioned that I had just finished playing Sword and Fairy 7, and how much I wanted a plushie of this little cutie:

Well, guess what?

Not quite the same, since this is the friendly version rather than the peach-colored enemy type, but probably the closest I'll ever get.

And how did I obtain such a plushie?

Well, I happened to be in a Gamestop last night and noticed this on the shelf:

When I looked at the back, and saw that the contents included a plushie of the leaf fairy, how could I have resisted?

Unfortunately, not everything in the picture ended up being in the box.  😭  The "chipboard character standees" and the DLC download code card aren't there.  Well, actually, maybe the download card is inside the actual box of the game itself, but I kinda doubt the standees could be.  (Though I suppose it's possible? 🤔)  I already have the Nendoroid of Yue Qingshu and the doll of Bai Moqing anyway, so that's two out of four even without the standees. 🤣

Anyway, the important thing is that the plushie is safe and sound.  Also the four disc soundtrack!

Of course...I already had all the music as .mp3s I bought on Steam, but... 🤷🏻‍♀️  Having physical media is always a good thing.

....

There is, naturally, the slight hitch that I don't actually own a Playstation 5. 😅  But surely the price will come down on those things eventually, and then I can get one... 😅

Anyway, I just wanted to post about that.

Partially just because it's been a while since I posted anything. 😅

(Wow, am I over-using that emoji in this post...)

Looking back on 2023...

    So, 2023 is ending, and I thought I should post about that, because that seems like a thing to do.

    To be honest, the Year of the Rabbit has not been kind to me, it feels like.  Which is weird, because I was born in the Year of the Rabbit myself.  Then again, I recall reading somewhere (around January, I suspect) that each cycle is connected to one of the five elements, so I guess whichever one 2023's Year of the Rabbit is connected to is bad for whatever one 1975's Year of the Rabbit was connected to?  (Or, you know, I just had a bad year and everything else is unconnected to that fact. 😅)  

    It's kind of weird, though; I don't really remember any of the past Years of the Rabbit, or even if the fact that it was same even mattered to me in the slightest.  I mean, obviously I didn't care for the first one.  Uh, I mean, the first one after 1975, since I was obviously unable to care while I was a newborn infant.  But I don't really have any memories of being 12.  Or rather, I have no memories connected to being 12:  I'm sure I remember plenty of things from that year, I just don't think of those memories in terms of my age at the time. 1987...I wanna say that's the year I graduated grade school?  Except that sounds kinda late for it, doesn't it?  Wait, if one typically is six when one starts first grade, then...yeah, being twelve when you graduate sixth grade does track.  So, yeah, that would be the year I graduated grade school and started high school.  (My high school was a combination high and junior high, so it was one school from 7th to 12th grade.)  In which case it was actually a pretty decent year for me in some respects--I met my high school best friend, the only person from high school I still have any contact with--but in other respects it was awful, since my entire high school experience can be summed up with one word:  pain.  As to the year I turned 24...nope, no memories whatsoever connected to being 24.  That would have been 1999?  Ack.  Nevermind.  Waaaaaaay too many memories, almost all of them bad.  That's when I...actually, no, if I go into too many details then I will totally be doxxing myself if anyone who knows me happens to stumble across this.  (Which is unlikely, but I'd still rather not take that risk.)  But it was a bad year for me.  So...turning 36...that would have been...2011.  Hmm.  Yeah, I actually do have zero memories connected to that year.  I'm wanting to say I got my second BA in 2010, in which case I was not currently in school in 2011, but maybe it was the year I started volunteering at the museum where I used to work.  In which case 2011 was probably pretty good for me?

    Anyway, as to why this year was not good, well, there's a lot on this blog about it already.  I was taking part in a game jam in my fledgling indie game dev hobby, and started getting heart palpitations, which became so bad that I dropped out of the jam and stopped writing altogether for about a week (maybe only a few days), and then decided I wouldn't do any more game dev until the heart palpitations were all cleared up.  (I did permit myself to write for non-game dev purposes...which in this case meant fan fiction.  So, so, so much fan fiction.)  They, uh, still aren't.  They're less frequent--a few spells per month--and pretty minor, but they still happen.  Meaning I haven't felt safe returning to game dev, despite that I was in the middle of rewriting an old series of my (many) unreleased novels and releasing them as interactive fiction.  So it's just sitting out there, the first two of seven, taunting the universe.  Admittedly, very few people have even interacted with the game pages, let alone actually read them, but that doesn't change how annoying it is not to be working on them.  But heart health is a scary thing and I don't want to tempt fate.  (And yes, I have seen doctors about this heart thing.  It's just that they can't find anything wrong with my heart.  I don't even have high blood pressure.)

    Looking back on the year, that's honestly been the major part of it.  Just more and more and more doing nothing because I'm scared to do anything.  Though also my favorite Chinese restaurant closed shortly after my birthday (my birthday was the last time I ate there, in fact) and although a new one has opened in the same space using the same name, my parents have eaten there since it reopened and they said the menu has changed and isn't as good.  😭  I also feel like my house has become even more of a roiling, uncleaned chaos, but I think part of that is the health thing; I'm afraid to do anything for fear of upsetting my heart.  Which is dumb, but somehow I got into that mindset and it's hard to push myself out of it again.

    But this is depressing, so let's change the subject!

    Please be amused by my very amateur attempts at photography instead:

    Since rabbits feature heavily in a few choice moments in Mo Dao Zu Shi, Goodsmile released special Year of the Rabbit Nendoroids of the two leads.  And somehow I didn't actually take them out of the boxes for some photographs until today. 😭  But they're super-adorable, right?  😁  I'm not sure how clear it is in this picture, but their eye highlights are little bunnies.  🐰  The bunny-ear headbands were the pre-order bonus for getting them directly from Goodsmile.  😁

    Anyway, looking ahead to next year...

    I don't do New Year's Resolutions.  Those seem like "promises I don't intend to keep," you know?  But I do have goals for next year.  Things I want to do, and hopefully will do.

    My goals (in no particular order) are:

• Polish up and release book three (it's already gotten a couple new drafts and I've already put it in the game engine, so it just needs polishing and some work on the glossary)
• Finish this @#$^#@$#ing fanfic that I've been working on since like April (it's at like 385k words now!)
• Post my dragon-based MDZS fanfic tomorrow (since it had gotten to nearly the end of the year, I figured may as well wait and post it in the Year of the Dragon, lol! (yes, I do know that technically that doesn't start until February, but humor me))
• Start exercising in some manner (if nothing else, there's supposed to be a Vocaloid version of Fitness Boxing coming out in a few months, that should help)
• Try to fix up my awful diet at least a little (I do plan to talk to my doctor about weight loss when I see her in January)
• Do at least a little cleaning around the house (hopefully enough that I can replace my dying refrigerator)
• Try and give away or sell some of the crap I don't need/want/use anymore
• Get my car fixed (it died on me again)

    Okay, admittedly, a lot of those sound like exactly what everyone says every year, but a lot of my health problems are coming to a point where I can't keep on going like this much longer, which has given me a lot more motivation to fix the problem, only I keep trying to diet too strictly and going off it and making things worse. 😭  (Hence why I plan to ask my doctor about it.  And hope she'll have something to say other than "let's cut you open and staple your stomach shut" because that is just cursed.)

    Hmm...what else did I want to say?

    I've made a few plans for the turning of the year.  I managed to finish the book I was reading today (volume 4 of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun) which is good, because I did not want that to be the first book I read in the new year, 'cause about half the volume is just the two leads being insanely horny for each other and refusing to do anything about it, until I just want to scream at them.  (It's a pity it's so insanely thirsty, because the actual plot of the novel is fairly interesting, but I'm not sure if I can put up with any more drowning in lust garbage.  It's agonizing to read.  Especially as someone who is both aromantic and asexual, because I can't even connect with it in the slightest.)  I'm going to read something short before the day ends so that it's not the last thing I read, either.  (The only short thing I haven't read before that's lying around is a sexually explicit fan comic for Promare, but I have a feeling it will actually contain far less horniness than that volume of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun.)  And then, at some point before midnight, I will start reading a book I got for Christmas, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines by Garret Ryan.  It was one of the few presents I wasn't expecting, but I'm really looking forward to it:  I read one of his earlier books, and it was a lot of fun, a combination of things I already knew some of and interesting tidbits about the ancient world that I didn't know.  (I seem to recall that there was one thing in the previous book that I didn't agree with, but I can't remember what it was, specifically...though I'm betting it had to do with same sex relationships.  That tends to be the spot where straight male scholars drop the ball most often.)  Anyway, I figure that of all the unread books on my shelf, that's the best one to be reading at the turn of the year.   Well, that and I promised I'd let my mom read it when I was done with it, so I don't want to wait too long to get to it. 😅

    I have some sparkling apple juice to drink at midnight (I don't drink alcohol), and a naughty-but-not-too-naughty snack to enjoy with it, too.  I'll probably either get lost in playing My Time at Sandrock and barely notice midnight or I'll start watching Dungeons & Dragons:  Honor Among Thieves around quarter past ten to be watching that when the year ends.  Not connected to New Year's in any way, but it's on my unwatched Christmas gift pile, so...hmm.  Then again, maybe I should dive into Doctor Who instead, to usher out the 60th anniversary year?  (I got the second season for Christmas.  And I do mean the actual second season, as in the 1964-1965 season.  There's some real gems in there.  Also the unbearably awful "The Web Planet" which my brother and I couldn't even finish when we tried to watch it before. 😅  But it starts with "Planet of the Giants," which is pretty good, then goes into "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" which is better, and...anyway, there's a lot of really good ones in there.)  Hmm.  I'll have to think about which to do....but I'll probably end up gaming anyway. 😅  Oh!  That's right, I could also watch some anime on Crunchyroll:  there should be a new episode of The Apothecary Diaries, and I wanted to start watching Frieren...  (I still haven't had the courage to check out season two of Heaven Official's Blessing, in case the subtitles are as bad as the ones on the blu-ray...and New Year's Eve seems like a very bad time to take that risk...)

    Oh, yes!  Gaming!  That was it!

    Someone on one of the Discord servers I'm part of posted a thing about the games they loved that they played for the first time this year.  I thought I should do that, too.  In chronological order...

    (That's order played, btw, not order released.)  Technically, Sword and Fairy 6 probably doesn't belong, as I didn't quite love it, but...because of the different sizes of Switch and Playstation covers, it was going to be even more lopsided if it was only eight, like the version the person on the Ooblet server posted.  (Said person being primarily a PC gamer, they didn't have the different image shape issue.)  I mean, I suppose I could have tried to balance it out by removing Oshirabu, but...that would have felt much more wrong.  I did play more games that I loved this year, but there were a lot of remakes and remasters in my year, including things I had played in their original versions:  Xenoblade Chronicles, Final Fantasy, Grandia II, and Sam and Max Beyond Time and Space.  (There may have been even more than that and I'm just blanking on the others.  Though technically I only played about half of Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii; I hit the point where one of the characters said something that pissed me off so badly I was like "yeah, I'm just going to put this aside for a while until I cool off..." and then I never ended up picking it up again. 😅)  I kinda shouldn't include My Time at Sandrock on this, since I only started it like two days ago, but...it's the type of game that's much more make-or-break on its mechanics than its story, so I already know.  😆  (Thankfully, there's a full character creation at the start, so you don't have to play as Mr. Generic from the cover there.  I'm playing as a woman with purple ponytails.  💜  Though if I'd known the town doctor was going to hit my character design sweet spot, I might have played as a guy after all in order to romance him.  (I do not do het romance in a game if I have any choice in the matter.  Just not how I roll.))  I still would have probably gone with purple hair, though.  I almost always choose purple hair when it's an option.)  Even more technically, Forager kind of doesn't belong, because I first started it when I bought that copy a year or so ago, only the TV I had at the time was not compatible with the Playstation 4 and I lost so much of the edges of the picture that the game was literally unplayable because so much of its UI was off-screen.  Therefore, I had only played like two, three minutes before I gave up in despair.  When I got a new TV this year, I started playing it again for real...ah, crap.  It and Sword and Fairy 6 are in the wrong places; I got the TV because I was already playing Sword and Fairy 6 and was losing too much of the edges of the screen, and I was determined to keep playing it, enough so that I actually went to buy a new TV.  (Thankfully, it was a cheap one...)

    Anyway, top three of those are....

    At number three:

    And at number two:

    

    (To the extent that I've bought the doll I found of the secondary female character, and the Nendoroid of the heroine.  😁)

    And--drumroll please--the number one favorite of the year...!

    I've even bought all three of the Ooblets plushies released through Fangamer!  (And will likely buy every other Ooblets plushie they make...)

    And on that note, I'll bring this post to a long and rambling close.

🎉  Happy New Year! 🎉

"Sword and Fairy: Together Forever" - my random, rambling thoughts on same

    So.  I mentioned before that I've been playing Sword and Fairy 7 (in its English release the 7 was dropped in favor of the subtitle "Together Forever" but it's faster and easier to use 7 instead, so...) and as of a few days ago, I have won the game. There's still a few things I need to do to feel "finished" with it (mostly the @&$!?&! card game) but I've beaten the final boss and witnessed the cutscene after the end credits, so...I feel I can now talk about it from a more knowledgeable position.

    When I mentioned it before, it was mostly to complain that increasing the size of the subtitles does not increase the size of any of the UI's tiny text.  Sadly, there's no work-around for that except to get closer to the TV if you need to read the UI.  😰  But at least the subtitles are more legible than the ones in the previous game!  And they're better translated...though they put a lot more effort into getting the main dialog right than the other stuff.  'Cause while most of the dialog that's required for you to read is basically correct and logical, in talking to random NPCs you can get stuff like this:

    Which was so funny I had to whip out my phone and take a picture of it.  😅  (If there's a screenshot button on the PS4, I don't know where it is.  And actually even if I did, I wouldn't know how to get the pictures from the PS4 to the computer anyway.  For the best, really:  my system would have been glutted with screenshots of this game if it was on the Switch...)  Honestly, I have to wonder about the guy who spoke that line, and what his life must be like if we pretend that line is actually what he wanted to say:  did he used to get bad BO from eating steamed bread?  And if so, why did he still eat it? 🤣 (Or maybe he ate steamed buns to fight off BO? 🤔)

I don't even know what this one is trying to say...

    A more pertinent comment about the translation is that it's somewhat reductive about how characters address each other.  For example, the second female party member, Bai Moqing.  For the most part, the subtitles have characters calling her "Miss Bai" or "Moqing."  "Miss Bai" is an appropriate translation of Bai-guniang, but "Moqing" is far less illustrative of character relationships than "Qing-mei" ("Qing younger sister") and "xiao-Qing" ("little Qing") and "shimei" ("younger sect sister") or...huh, I don't quite recall what her brothers called her, might have been "xiao-mei" ("little(st) younger sister").  The subtitles also have her addressing her elder brothers by their given names (a huge no-no culturally!) instead of as "da-ge" ("big(gest) elder brother") and "er-ge" ("second elder brother").  For the most part, I do get why they were so reductive (people looking to play a video game are not necessarily looking for a lesson in another culture/language) but I do think it deprives the average player of some of the flavor and nuance of the setting and relationships.  So there's definitely an added benefit when playing this if you're already familiar with the wuxia/xianxia setting and the most basic linguistic aspects like how the more commonly used honorifics work.  (Which is certainly the only linguistic aspect I have even the least grasp on!)  I expect it's not a problem for those with no background info, though.  (The fact that they don't really explain about what cultivation sects are/do might be slightly confusing, but I'd expect most people would quickly come to a "rival magic schools" conclusion, which is, again, reductive but functional.)

    Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk about.  Mostly, I wanted to say how incredibly gorgeous it is!  It's not just that the graphics are really good (though they are) but the aesthetics of the visuals themselves.  Most fantasy video games--especially non-indies--have either a generic European-inspired setting or a Japanese-inspired one, so just getting one with this level of graphical detail in any other setting is already a breath of fresh air.  (Makes me especially sad that the demo for...I think it's called Raiji?...so quickly established that it would kick my hindquarters not just to the curb but right on through it and into someone's house.  Because that, too, had a gorgeous visual aesthetic, in that case an Indian one, with the game's story rooted in the Hindu mythic structure.  But there was no point trying to play the game if I couldn't even make it through the demo... 😭)  The locations in Sword and Fairy 6 were already quite lovely, but the ones in Sword and Fairy 7 are leaps and bounds better.  The details everywhere are just breathtaking!

The home of the sect that Yue Qingshu is heir to

The Tianshi sect.  These guys remind me of the Jin Clan (they even wear yellow!)

This one and the next two are the Xianxia sect, one of the most beautiful locations in the game

Who needs an airship when you can fly on the back of a magic bird? 😆

Being able to stand on trees like this is relatively unusual in this game, unlike in 6

Random guest room at an inn.

This vase gave me a huge "wait, what?!" moment because until you look close enough to see the figures it looks ancient Greek.

(*ahem*  Sorry about all the phone photos.  I was spending a long time hunting down bits of lore for the library and found myself snapping more pics to share even though they do it less than no justice.  Even a good screencap wouldn't really do it justice, because it's just less effective when it's not in motion, and then these are crappy cell-phone-photos-of-the-TV-screen, so they're pretty bad all around... 😅)

    As to gameplay, it's all around much more smooth.  The massive errors I kept encountering in 6 are absent, and I can't recall any particular bugs off the top of my head, in fact. (Though there was one boss fight that I hope was bugged and not that it was actually supposed to lift two of the party members into the air and hold them there where they can't reach the enemy and then disable the attack buttons for one of the remaining two party members, as that's sadistic.)  The combat is now a basic action RPG combat, instead of what was in the previous game, which was...weird?  (It was like you had this timer gauge that filled up and once it was full you could use it to launch your skills, but there was literally no way to just use an ordinary attack:  it was skills (and items) only.  And you only controlled one party member (though you could usually choose which one to control), with mere tactics to suggest the behavior of the others, which was not always effective. 😰)  The jumping mechanics have also been refined, which is good, since they put in a Breath of the Wild-inspired series of jumping puzzles you have to take part in to impress some fluffy little fairies (a variant on the one pictured below); in the previous game, you had little to no control over how far you jumped, and yet it had these glowing spots in hard to reach places that you got a reward for reaching, most of which seemed categorically impossible to get to with that jumping engine.  Thankfully, this time you have at least some control over distance when you're jumping.  (Not quite as much as I would have liked, considering the platforming sequences, but enough to make them not tear-out-your-hair frustrating.)

    Like the previous game, Sword and Fairy 7 added some additional game mechanics to "spice things up" periodically.  In the early section of the game, this included some quicktime events (not my favorite), and then in several places later on there are stealth sequences (which I may hate even more than QTEs) and there are also more involved mandatory platforming sequences than the ones in the previous game (which at least is balanced out by the better jumping engine).  All these "spicier" game mechanics can be skipped if you fail them enough times.  (Though I'm glad to say that I never actually failed any of them enough times to be offered that choice.  Uh, except one puzzle late game where I thought you had to jump your way up this spindle of rock to get the proper angle to do a thing and kept falling into the bottomless pit beside it, only it turned out I just had to walk to the far end of the platform and look up (instead of down) to get the right angle, so...that was just me being a dumbass, but at least I figured it out eventually.)  You also move faster, which is a great relief, particularly because the two actual cities you visit are really huge; if you were still poking along at the speed of the characters in Sword and Fairy 6 it would take forever to comb those cities for the people you have to talk to in order to unlock extra entries in the library.  (I ended up talking to everyone in one of them like two or three times 'cause the guy I needed to talk to was sitting down behind a building at the edge of the section of the city with the fewest people in it. 😰)  As to that card game I mentioned earlier...it's really badly explained, and at this point (four opponents left to beat), I think I've mostly figured out how to do it right, but no matter how good you are at the game's strategy, there's still so much luck involved that it's just miserable to play.  Triple Triad from Final Fantasy VIII is probably always going to be the best invented card game in an RPG, but at least this one is better than Tetra Master or whatever the one in Final Fantasy IX was called.

    Another nice quality of life upgrade from the previous game was an improved game map (especially where sidequests are concerned!) and an accessory that made all the items hidden in an area show on the map.  (It's possible there was such an item in the previous game and I just never acquired it and/or couldn't read what it did because the text was so tiny.)  Given how much of the library was unlocked by picking up books in sects and towns, that accessory was vital!  (Also vital for collecting the materials needed to forge new equipment...)

    The story feels a little more straight forward than the previous game's story did:  the idea of trying to give a capsule summary of what Sword and Fairy 6 is about (or even who its villains are) gives me a headache, but I think it would be a much easier task for Sword and Fairy 7.  (Though I tend to like going in blind, myself, so...)  That's not to say that there are no plot twists, of course, but more of them are surprises to the characters than to the player. 😅  There was a little more focus on the game's two romances than I'd have preferred, but they did at least work as romances.  (It helped that one was pre-existing at the start of the game, though.  It's always easier to accept "these two young people have had unspoken but utterly obvious crushes on each other for years" than "these two people just met and now they're so deeply in love that it's the most beautiful thing ever for reals," you know?)

    The only caveat I'd want to offer regarding the story is that the ending might be a bit frustrating, depending on how one likes endings to work.  (If anyone is actually reading this, there are some detail-free spoilers in the middle of this paragraph (also some for the previous game just before that), so take due precautions if you're thinking of playing the game and want to be 100% spoiler-free.)  If you've played a lot of JRPGs, then you're probably familiar with the trend (which may have started with Final Fantasy VII, and has certainly been used ever since then in the Final Fantasy series) of having an ambiguous and/or unsatisfying ending before the credits, then putting the clarifying/happier ending in an additional scene after the credits.  As China's answer to Final Fantasy, the Sword and Fairy series seems to embrace this trend as well:  the previous game went from an implication that something 100% unacceptable was about to happen before the credits to a scene after the credits which revealed that thankfully the foresight of another character had been sufficient to prevent the tragedy that was threatened, and that everyone seemed to be doing pretty well a few years down the line (and even that the dead character had already been reincarnated).  So, in this game they carried the ambiguity a little too far:  when the credits start, the fate of one of the main characters is bleak, and two of the others' fates are unknown (but probably okay), and then the scene after the credits establishes that the other two are totally fine and happy, and then the scene ends with the implication that the bleak situation is about to rectify itself.  In other words, the post-credits scene kinda cuts off where you'd expect the pre-credits scene to cut off.  Honestly, it's sort of "to be expected" in a video game that terrible things that happened to the party members after the final battle will be auto-corrected at the end, but actually getting to see the confirmation of that is always appreciated, you know?  I, personally, found it very frustrating in the moment, but the more I look back on it the more okay I am with it, given how strong the implication was.

    EDIT:  Now that I've read the whole library (which took like 2-3 hours across two nights, because there's just so much of it!) I can say that my initial thoughts of "well, duh" about the bittersweet ending turning to a happy one may have been incorrect.  I mean, I still think we're meant to take it that everything is going to become a happy ending promptly after the cutscene ends, but having read about the characters and events of previous games, I'm getting the feeling that bittersweet and even tragic endings may actually be the norm in this series. 😰 I'm hoping I'm wrong, of course, but there were a lot of characters whose entries in the library mention them sacrificing themselves.  Also a lot of them are mentioned as disappearing after accomplishing whatever it is they've set out to do, but that might just mean the ending sets them up as going on a journey and then no later game ever has them show up or mentions where they went.  (It turns out that these games are actually much more interconnected than I had initially thought.  I mean, they're still stand-alone, but various places, people and organizations come up repeatedly.  For example, two of the incidental characters you meet in this one are actually former party members (since the library seems to only have entries for party members, I feel like I can say this with certainty), and both the Tianshi and Xianxia sects originated in previous games.

    Just wanted to include these two other phone photos I took of the game, just because I loved how adorable this enemy type is!  🥰  Thankfully, they're among the "they only fight you if you hit them first" types that live around the first town in the game.  (You still have to fight them once to add them to the enemies list in the library section of the menu, but that's the only time you have to fight them.)

    Yes, they look like giant peaches with faces, arms, and leafy bunny ears.  They are definitely among the cutest RPG enemies I've ever encountered, and I very much want a plushie of one.  😁  Dunno if there are any, though; I've encountered three pieces of official merch for this game (two Nendoroids and a doll) online but they're all of characters, not monsters.  (Weirdly, one of the Nendoroids is for a demon lord you only encounter a handful of times.  I wonder if he's actually in some of the other games as well?  The other Nendoroid is of the heroine, Yue Qingshu (seen above), and the doll is of Bai Moqing.  I've actually ordered the doll, but haven't made up my mind about the Nendos, though; they're much pricier than the doll, after all.)  EDIT:  yup, it turns out the demon lord was in a previous game, and it seems he was even a party member.  That's probably why the listing for his Nendoroid doesn't specify what game he's from, 'cause he's from more than one!  (Still haven't made up my mind about buying either Nendo, though.  Esp. since I'm more leaning towards the heroine's than the demon lord's (after all, I don't know him all that well as a character), and she's much more expensive, since I wouldn't be buying her direct from Good Smile.)

    Oh, I should probably talk about the characters!  The four party members are all likable, and the game did a good job of keeping the heroine focused on both the task in hand and on her duties to/the survival of her cultivation sect even after she becomes aware that she's falling in love.  (So much in the world of fiction has female characters forgetting anything else exists once they fall in love. 😫)  And I can confirm what I suspected when I discussed this game before:  Xiu Wu is absolutely a heterosexual Lan Wangji.  (Or maybe demisexual/demiromantic really.  He takes a while to figure out that such things even exist and apply to him.)  He's probably got more alcohol tolerance, though. 🤣

    Oh, but speaking of MDZS characters, I was looking through the library section in the game's menu where it gives brief entries on characters from previous games.  (I haven't read most of the library yet; waiting for it to be full, since the type is so tiny I'll have to sit/stand nearer to the TV to be able to read all the text, so I wanted to wait and do that all in one go.)  Anyway, one entry caught my eye--or rather gave me a double-take!

    I'm sure the name is spelled with different characters, but still!  What are the odds?   (Especially with him being connected to someone named Ouyang Ying:  'Ying' is the birth name of MZDS's hero, Wei Wuxian, and the Ouyang Clan in MZDS was based in Baling, very near Yunmeng where the Jiang Clan was located...and in the novel's present Jiang Cheng kind of verbally bullied the leader of the Ouyang Clan, because of how nearby the two clans are and how much weaker the Ouyang Clan is than the Jiang Clan.)  Of course, no matter which previous game he came from, he probably doesn't look like this:

The only way Jiang Cheng should look. 😊

    

    (Wow, Netflix is great for screencaps!  Though maybe I should have been pickier about the particular moment to screencap... 😅)

    Soooooo....yeah, tl;dr version is "I liked."  🤣

UI Matters

 So...lately, mostly due to MDZS/The Untamed, I have lately been quite into Ancient China as a setting.

Thus, when I was looking for an additional title to fill out a Play Asia order--

Wait.  Let me start further back.

The trend, at the moment, among the larger Asian game companies, is to release their games digitally worldwide, and to release them physically in Asia with multi-language support (and no region-locking), and only to release physical copies in the rest of the world if they feel guaranteed sufficient sales to justify the expense of the physical release.  (Thus, for example, there is a US physical release of Final Fantasy XVI, but not of Various Daylife.)

While there's certainly financial logic to this policy, it's definitely frustrating to older gamers like myself who like the old-fashioned comfort of owning a physical copy.  And that's where Play Asia comes in.  Their online storefront has a huge selection of these multi-language console games that they sell directly to the Western audiences who want them.  Some of these are so very intended for sale to the US market (like the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster collection) that their boxes are printed entirely in English.

Anyway, Play Asia offers free US shipping if your order comes to $100 (or more), so given the cost of international shipping these days, when I make an order there, I want to take advantage of that offer.  And that brings me back up to where I started this post:

So I had gone to Play Asia to get a physical copy of the Etrian Odyssey I-III HD Remaster collection (ridiculously, about $10 cheaper than the digital bundle!), and was looking for something else to fill out the order and reach that $100 for the free shipping.  There were the physical copies of some old Squaresoft titles that have recently received HD remasters, like Chrono Cross and Legend of Mana, but I admit that I'm still trying to find a decent justification for spending $40 on a game I pre-ordered when it was brand new back in the PS1 days, especially one that I then replayed so many times I practically have it memorized even all these years later. 😅  (I justify buying the Etrian Odyssey collection because evidently I skipped III when the 3DS remakes were coming out (which was my introduction to the franchise, having somehow missed the DS versions when they came out 🤷🏻‍♀️))  Anyway, so I'm browsing around to see what else is available, and come across Sword and Fairy: Together Forever, which is set in a fantasy version of Ancient China.

Now, I had heard of the Sword and Fairy series because of its merchandising:  several characters from various installments have had Nendoroids made, and given my interest in the setting, they had of course garnered my attention.

Anyway, since the game page looked interesting, and since I figured there was no chance it would get a physical release in the West, I went ahead and ordered it.  (Then about a week after it arrived, I went into a Gamestop and saw a domestic copy sitting on the shelf there.  😰  At least there wasn't a significant price difference between the domestic copy and the import I bought, but I still felt effin' dumb.  😭)

Now, while I was waiting for it to arrive, and knowing that what I had ordered was a later game in the series, I went looking in the PlayStation store (sadly, the originally PC-only series has only seen ports to PlayStation and not to Switch (except for a spin-off about restaurant management)) to see if there were any of the others available in English.  And, sure enough, Sword and Fairy 6 (the previous game in the series) was available in the PlayStation store, and when I happened to look up the series, it was even on a massive sale that reduced its cost so much that it was only a bit over $5!

Obviously, at that price, I felt no need to hesitate, and went for it.  🤣  Fortunately, the series is very much China's answer to Final Fantasy (to the extent of having very Amano-like game logos for both 6 and 7, with 6's logo being particularly reminiscent of Final Fantasy X's logo, appropriately enough, since the game itself had a lot of Final Fantasy X vibes to it) so not having played 1-5 is not problematic, except that it means I haven't met the character with the most epic Nendoroid, Zhao Ling'er.  (I really want to know what game she comes from so I can hope they bring it over, 'cause I'd rather not buy a Nendo of a character I don't know yet, but I'd love to get that one...)

And this is where the title of this post finally comes into it.

Because Sword and Fairy 6 has some serious UI issues.

I mean, really, it has a lot of technical issues, to be honest, most of which I suspect are programming things caused by the port.  (In-engine cut scenes crashing is a new one on me, though, I gotta say!)  And translation issues, of course, because they did not have a native speaker look over the English to make sure it was, you know, comprehensible.  Though mostly the problems with the translation were just awkward, not anything that would actually stop you from understanding what they were trying to say.  (Sadly, one of the worst was right in the opening movie, where--among other problems--they accidentally used "peach" when they meant "peace.")

[EDIT:  the bit about the in-engine cut scenes "crashing" is something I feel like I ought to explain.  They didn't crash in the sense of failing to run or causing a forced stop to the game.  It took me quite a while to figure out what was actually going on there:  basically, the only thing broken about the in-engine cut scenes actually seemed to be the commands given to the camera.  This was particularly jarring on one occasion, where you fast-travel to a location and see the spot where you land from fast-traveling there, and then you hear the cut scene playing, but all you can see is this empty stretch of cliff face.  Which I thought at the time was just the game crashing, so I quit out to the Playstation menu and tried again.  But then, much later in the game, it happened in a way that let me understand what was actually going on:  again, it happened after a fast-travel, and the camera simply stayed in the base arrival position for the location, while the models for the cut scene did their thing....which included appearing and disappearing, rapidly jumping from one side of the screen to another, etc.  Because it was an interior scene, the characters had to move around a lot to have them be in the right place for various close-ups where they were or were not supposed to be visible.  (I really wish I had been able to record that somehow, because wow was it wild to watch!)  But lately I've sort of been thinking about that for some reason, and I kind of wonder just how many of the earlier cut scenes had been ignoring the camera commands like that and I never noticed.  For example, there's this one minor character who was several times shown "walking" on screen when his model seems to have been rigged at all, so he's just sliding around unanimated.  I can only think of a handful of times that happened, and in all of them I seem to recall the camera being completely static.  So it may be that those were other cases of the camera commands being ignored because of whatever the heck was causing that, and so if I had been seeing the cutscenes as they were meant to be seen, it wouldn't have been apparent that that guy's model wasn't rigged, because if he was shown "walking" it was from a higher angle where you're only seeing his face and shoulders or whatever.  Now, this is all still a new one on me, keep in mind.  In fact, having the cut scene play properly while just the camera commands are ignored is probably even more unusual and weird.  I suspect it's an issue with porting the game to the PS4, but having pretty much zero knowledge of the workings of the kinds of engines high end 3D games are made in, I have no way of knowing if that's likely to be the case.  I am quite certain about it being only the camera commands that were being ignored as the cut scenes played out, though.  Whatever was causing it, I got around it by saving basically every time I thought a cut scene might start up (the map helpfully gave you a marker to show where you needed to go, so I just got in the habit of saving right before reaching said marker, whether it seemed likely there would be a cut scene or not), and if it was obviously broken, then I'd quit out and start the game up again, which usually fixed the problem.  So it must have had something to do with having too much in memory at once, or something? 🤷  Sometime I ought to look up a playthrough on Youtube (if there are any) and see if some of those cut scenes I remember as looking sort of weird with their static camera were actually bugging out.  Actually, just watching the game would kinda be a better experience anyway, in that I could go back and see what any subtitles I didn't manage to read had said...]

But the UI is the biggest problem, or rather, the accessibility of the whole program is.  Because everything is tiny.  The entire UI is minute.  Including the subtitles.  Which have no background behind them to make them easier to read.

And I have a really small TV.

I had to sit on the floor halfway between the sofa and the TV just to be able to read the subtitles.  And even then I often couldn't finish reading some of the lines between the poor contrast and the fact that Chinese is a more efficient language than English (at least sometimes) and so things that are said in just a dozen words or so in Chinese then need three lines of text in English, and there just wasn't time to read all of them before the words went away as the cutscene continued.  (And after about the halfway point of the story, the gameplay loop was like 80% cutscenes!)

Still, I did soldier through and finish the game.  I was able to catch enough of the dialog to know what was going on, thankfully.  (There is at least a story section in the menu that sums up the story as it goes along...though the text there is just as tiny as the subtitles.)  Never really grasped some of the finer points of the combat system, though, as the battle UI was just too small to be comprehensible.  😰  Maybe it's better on a computer, where the screen's supposed to be really close to your face, but since computer monitors are even smaller than my TV, I don't know how much that would actually help?

Anyway, on the whole, the game was a positive experience, in my opinion.

Xian Qing is best boi.

Luo Zhaoyan suffered a humiliating costume change in the late game that needed to be reverted as soon as possible and never was.  😖  (Even with the humiliating new costume, still second-best after Xianqing.)

The graphics were sorta late PS2/early PS3 level, but very pretty anyway.  😁

Anyway, I was super excited (after having dealt with the previous game's itty-bitty subtitles) to see that Sword and Fairy 7 had in its settings menu a "Subtitle Size" setting! 😁

I was much less pleased to see that it didn't increase the size of anything else in the UI.  So I can read the subtitles (usually; there's still nothing behind them, so the background can make reading the text difficult, and it still often vacates the screen before I can finish reading it) but I can't read the messages in the upper corner that are telling me what I'm supposed to be doing next. 😭

So, yeah, maybe I should have called this post "Accessibility Matters" or "Subtitles Need To Be Legible, Guys!"

Or something.

I dunno.

.

..

...

(Actually, maybe I just wanted to make a post that allowed me to say "Xianqing is best boi.")

(This is Xianqing:

I rest my case.)

Anyway, as to Sword and Fairy 7, I'm not really far enough in to have much to say about it yet, aside from the even more eyestrainy UI issue.  The translation still has problems, but they're not as bad.  At least they're trying to be more naturalistic with the honorifics; the previous one literally had people addressing each other as "Brother Yue" and "Brother Luo."  Which is, technically, accurate in translating the honorific -xiong, but it's not how people speak in English unless they're Pilgrims and it's the 18th century.  (If you have any familiarity with Japanese honorifics, the Chinese ones are at least twice as complicated.  Three or four times more if you start getting into the extended family stuff...though one of the guides on AO3 pointed out that some of that is so complicated that even native speakers have trouble with it!  I've barely scraped the surface of research on honorifics and other forms of address for my MDZS fanfics; I figure as long as I'm able to reproduce the level the official translation uses, I'm probably okay...)

I did have a couple of double-takes last night, though!  We had to get some rubbings of ancient musical scores for a side quest, right?  Only when I looked at the menu for more information on what we were looking for, it said they were "Xianle rubbings"!  I couldn't stop myself from laughing and saying "I didn't know this game had a crossover with Heaven Official's Blessing!"  And then not too much later, we met an innkeeper whose name was Wen Mao.  Probably spelled with different characters than the founder of the Wen Clan in MDZS, but still!  Given that at that inn we encountered poor unfortunates being worked to death like the Wen remnants, I can't help feeling that wasn't a coincidence.

Especially since the all-white-wearing Xiu Wu is really trying very hard to be a heterosexual Lan Wangji.  Uh, probably with less tendency to jealousy, though. 😅  And almost certainly without the secret massive horniness.  So, yeah, maybe I should say more that he's trying to be Lan Wangji's public image. 🤣  Only not as taciturn...though he does say "Mn." a lot!  🤣  (Which they always translate as "Sure." even if that's completely the wrong tone for the context.  😰 )

But there's almost a poetry to there being obvious references to MXTX's work in game 7 considering that something in game 6 seems to have influenced one of the changes made when MDZS was adapted into the live action drama The Untamed.  (Specifically the strange urukhai-like things the "puppets" could be turned into.)  Though that could be both things drawing influence from an older work/tradition, though; as I only discovered the genre last year, I'm obviously not very knowledgeable about it!