A Rabbit's Media Musings

The new Final Fantasy XIV live letter dropped.

Lot of people glazing that a singer from Rage Against The Machine is doing a song, but nothing about the letter leads me to believe the content will be any better.

People praise the Arcadion raids, but I thought the story was stupid, and the bosses were just "random stuff go!" Not really reading much about new or innovative content, which is what the game desperately needs.

Variant Dungeon is just a simpler version of normal dungeons but designed to have multiple paths that vary slightly. There's more hard content of course, but I honestly tried EX-level content in this game and it's just not fun to play FFXIV without making any mistakes and forcing a restart.

You know, the little mobile game where you merge fruits?

The concept is really old, as I remember playing it a long time ago as Faery Alchemy, and games like Threes are similar. They are combining objects till a play field eventually fills up, whether dropping items or sliding them into each other. two items make another, which makes another when added to itself.

It's addictive, but it's annoying because generally you have to perfectly organize random drops, leading to grasping the concepts quickly but ending up with a lot of mediocre runs and maybe a rare high-scoring run. Roguelikes tend to have similar issues, where you progress through the game, hit the low skill cap of it, and then it's just randomness.

I really hate FFXIV's tendency to make any hard content simply one-shot you or your party if you mess up. I've been trying to engage with Pilgrim's Traverse this patch, and it's become not worth it because all it takes is one mistake levels 61+ to destroy you and sometimes end the run.

It feels like a lot of modern games in general have a hard time creating fun experiences over frustrating or addictive ones. Or they get dominated by a tiny minority of highly skilled players and design shifts to that. The games don't really give meaningful experiences over focusing on mechanical difficulty and thinking that is the core to video games.

Yeah, to a point it matters. These are games. But 14 takes it to a point where you are there to do every encounter correctly or often suffer a wipe at harder levels, and eventually its just "oh, these damn mechanics" over any form of power fantasy or coolness.

Hi. If you've come across here, you've stumbled across the blog of a media-addicted rabbit with a fondness for movie serials and 50's sci/fi and horror. This is a personal space for me to record my memories of what I nibble on, so expect a lot of hot and cold takes on movies, books, comics, video games, and more.

Unfortunately DNF it. It's visually incredible, but somehow Scorcese forgot to put a compelling plot into it. The start seems to hint it would be a dickensian story about an orphan in a train station gifted with skill in clockworking and secretly fixing an automaton behind the walls of the station, but it derails into didactic lecturing about silent film and recreating Georges Melies movies.

This isn't a bad thing, but when you completely forget the emotional aspect of the film, it's not worth the trade. It's not even like a stage play or artificial by intent, but instead is just a diversion. The film tries to recover the lost magic with the nightmare of Hugo becoming an automation, but it falls flat because otherwise it's prosaic behind all the whimsical exterior.

Sacha Baron Cohen grates in every scene he is in. He simply cannot be the character they want, a buffoonish silent comedic villain, and the character is mismatched to the film. For all the orphan-catching danger, Hugo can sneak into movies, walk around the train station easily, and has little to no danger in existing.

Of course, we are trying to evoke Paris but everyone speaks with British-accented English, which makes no sense. Somehow that accent has become "old times by default" despite it not really fitting the film nor its music. Visually it's absolutely lovely though a bit TOO picturesque at times, too much of an idealized Paris.