Ashtear

Quite adorable. I audibly gasped when I saw the newspaper recipe visually showing how to make puni drink in Atelier Meruru 😂

Celine's super cute, though.

For Trails, it's gotta be Mishy.

Worth it just to get your socks blown off by the opening theme, if nothing else.

It's not the best Civ has ever been, but RomanHoliday's AI rework seemed to mostly resolve the biggest problem I had with it, which was the AI falling apart by the Renaissance.

Glad you liked VI! I do think it's aged pretty well. It and X are my favorites in the series.

I struggled with VIII and IX because the combat was a lot slower, but you might enjoy them. A lot about VIII is quite different from the jump.

I do think the story and the characters pick up more later. If you liked traveling the overworld in the previous games, FF7 will also feel like it's moving along on that front more after Kalm.

That said, not enjoying the combat by now is a problem, I think it's kind of the highlight of the Midgar section. If gameplay's important to you in your JRPGs, it might be time to give this one a pass.

No nookie with blue-skinned feminine people, no.

Everyone seems to be more interested in the latest techbro feud so I wanted to highlight what he said about Unknown Worlds staff not being given specifics on what their compensation will be. The statement was quite nebulous on that.

Gods, I hate this culture. Make concrete, public promises to your staff to follow through on your acquisition deal? Nah, can't have that. Open yourself up to liability by throwing the former execs under the bus, in detail? No problem!

It's really interesting that one of the reasons Diablo 3 was a step down was the increase in handcrafted story elements that kept interrupting the procgen flow. Some games just do really well with it.

Fire Emblem Engage, having more fun with it than I thought I would. After Three Houses, I'd kinda written off Fire Emblem as not for me but only a couple hours in I'm already having fun messing around with character builds.

Given SQEX's restructuring and what Kitase's said about how they feel about remakes after FF7, I'm getting the sense this became a "spare time" project like FFT turned out to be. Could be a long while for this one, if it ever does see the light of day.

Two things helped me with this: allergen control (in my case this was moving to a different region and getting better about cleaning) and a septoplasty. I used to get sinus infections three times a year, and now I don't even really think about it. I might even get a humidifier this winter, which is wild to me considering I had chronic congestion practically all my life.