ET  ·  NIHIL  ·  MANET

                            anχother

      Ansem · Xemnas · Apprentice Xehanort

   independent · literate · mature · established  

words smooshed together by Ang

One thing that I suspected and am even more sure of now is that this game was made with a daily two way commute in mind, preferably on public transport where you can pay attention to your phone. The placing of all interactable points along roads/railways, their spacing, the presence/function of the "hands free" mode, and the way several types of interaction point are not fixed but move and respawn make it so that I think the main use of the game's gps play is expected to be this:

Fire it up on your commute in the morning (bus/train to work, school bus, drive or cycle with it on in hands free mode) and grab what you can along the way, then by the time it's time for the commute back things will have reset and you can get new things on the way back. What you find will be different each trip. You'll slowly rack up AP to use to teleport and access world map content out of your way. Short local walks are also an option, and fighting Heartless spawns seems to be better optimised for that.

A lot of things clicked for me when I realised that the game seems to be designed around the assumption that going places on public transport (or as a passenger) is something you do regularly and without thinking too much about barriers like cost. I can't do an analysis of this because there are no purchases in the beta, but going by how gacha premium currency is usually priced I suspect that for me it would be a close call between spending the cash on premium currency and spending it on a daily bus trip for fewer, lower grade rewards.

It looks very much like they're trying to make it possible for you to play passively if you want, just have the game on and walk around to auto-encounter and auto-battle, and that's great both for convenience and for anyone who has much more on their minds setting outdoors than checking their phone every few seconds, however one technical aspect of this part is not working for me so far.

So far, Vanitas has yet to discover anything that remotely satisfies him.

Today, Vanitas is accompanying him outside of the castle, amber eyes burning into the back of his head just like they always do. He hasn’t said much the whole time they’ve been out there, his moodiness is thick enough to almost be physical. It can be physical, should Vanitas’ emotions writhe out of his control and form Unversed.

Vanitas’ concentration is only broken by the sight of a food stall. The pleasant aroma was a far cry from the bland MRE-like meals he’d subsisted off of for four years while living in the Badlands.

“Hey,” Vanitas speaks up. “You smell that?”

Being out in the town markets was not his first choice of pastime, and Vanitas was certainly not his first choice of company, but Braig had ambushed him near the main doors, said he needed to get out more, and all but dumped a shopping list into his hand and pushed him out. Vanitas had followed in a similar manner moments later.

Xehanort strongly suspected that Braig had simply not wanted to do the task himself.

Vanitas seemed equally unenthused about accompanying him. Or he had until this point, the words catching Xehanort by surprise. He stopped, turning first to Vanitas then in the direction the young guard-apprentice was looking.

It was the first thing Vanitas had said to him that was not a clear attempt to dig under his skin.

He could smell it. Something rich and savoury. Scents could be a powerful trigger to recall long-dormant memories, both Master Ansem and Braig had told him. He tried to match it to any of the fragments shattered like stained glass across his mind, but... nothing. Whatever they were selling, it was unfamiliar to him.

So very much was unfamiliar to him.

"We do not have time for distractions," he replied, and something flashed behind his eyes. Was there... there was something he had to do... he could not afford these delays...

I'm still in my no-activity-because-kh-rp-is-dead-and-there's-no-KH-news phase.

But if you happen to like my writing, and my lore dissections, and general commentary, and the Final Fantasy franchise, and have a high tolerance for spoilers and me saying fuck a lot...

I am liveblogging FFXVI. I'm an hour in and it's already over 2500 words. There's 19 more hours to go to liveblog, and though my actual playthrough is far ahead of that I've still not finished. This is going to take a while. It's probably going to be the biggest piece of writing I've done in years. And it's 90% shitpost level comments, sprinkled with some serious addressing of why the writing team need to be a lot better about hiding where they copied their homework from.

I know I am making exactly one friend lose thier shit over this and that's enough for me, but if you want to take a look it's here:

Filthy NSFW questions why do I do this to myself

Filthy NSFW questions why do I do this to myself

"There is a thought experiment. It goes like this: a brilliant scientist has spent her entire life studying colour. The mechanics of spectra, light's interaction with the eye, the precise brainwaves elicited by such interaction at differing frequencies, both alone and in combination. She knows all that there is to be learned. And yet, she has spent her entire life in a closed room, entirely in shades of grey. The question is, once she steps outside, and sees colour herself for the first time, does she learn anything new from this experience?"