I finally bought Tears of the Kingdom a few weeks ago, still working my way through it. I love just wandering around finding secrets, shrines and Koroks, although I just made it to the Wind Temple. I expect to spend a lot of time just in this game!

Dave the diver. Very much enjoying so far.

And as someone whose pandemic hobby involved a deep dive into the history of the sea peoples, I’ve been enjoying a secondary layer to the game as well.

Playing Lunaria: Virtualized Moonchild!

Almost exactly an year ago I finished Planetarian, a classic visual novel that was also the first game from the “Kinectic Novel” series - a Visual Arts brand for VNs without any choices or branches in the storyline, more akin to a visual book than a game.

So I thought it was appropriate to celebrate this anniversary by playing Lunaria, another Kinetic Novel from the same studio (Key, of Clannad fame) that I had just received in the mail.

One of the things that drew me to both these games is that I’m a huge sci-fi fan, and both deal with interactions between AIs and humans. However, they take very different approaches to this theme - Planetarian is bittersweet story focused on the contrast between the post-apocalyptic present and the small glimpse of a better past the MC encounters, while Lunaria is a much brigher slice-of-life story with focus on VR and e-sports.

The plot so far is the typical “boy meets cute (AI) girl, romance starts to develop between them”, but this being a Key game I’m already expecting something tragic to happen in the latter parts of the story - there’s already some hints of a bigger plot around the AI girl’s origins and circumstances.

I promise to continue Sparks of Hope tomorrow. It’s been two weeks now and I just haven’t had time. And it doesn’t help that Arkham Knight is in that post-game challenge phase were you can just play short bursts, but end up getting trapped by “Just one more” Syndrome. I’m done with all Batman challenges, now it’s Robin’s turn. And it’s immediately obvious how much Batman’s “Disarm & Destroy” move turns all combat challenges into easy mode. Some Predator Maps get really big, too. I just spent 10 minutes clearing out more than a dozen enemies out of a four-story map without being allowed to use Detective Mode or Floor Grates, with barely any useful perches to hide on.

I usually don’t talk about what I do on YouTube, but I have to shine a spotlight on a game I’ve been playing for five months now. It’s a Japan-exclusive Super Nintendo game called Genjuu Ryodan and it’s basically Advance Wars in a fantasy setting. The only fan translation that exists only translates the two main menus you interact with, but there’s no characters or dialogue to worry about and the game is very good at slowly introducing new units. You don’t have to understand it to figure it out, and the variety in maps and units is tremendous! My only complaint is that there’s no way to get newly built units to the front quickly. The summoning circles around your starting area are all you’re going to get, so the late game usually becomes quite the slog on bigger maps. But if you like Advance Wars and don’t mind having to experiment a bit to climb over the knee-high language-barrier, this game is worth looking into!