Expedition 33 Review

Greetings Friends, rare game review post. I guess just to get this out of the way this is the best game since the Witcher 3 which was the best game since RE4 so it's the once in a decade experience more or less; it's only 50 bucks too so you should probably go play it. I actually bought a physical PS5 copy of it as like a symbol; it is the only PS5 physical game that I own (I played the Game Pass version mostly) which is pretty emblematic of the current generations issues. I do get almost every game for free from developers including this one but I thought it would be nice to own one physical PS5 game to go with my Two (2) PS5s and 5 PS5 controllers (2 are broken one is halfway broken); apparently said PS5s are appreciating assets which is highly amusing. Was able to make it through the entire game on a beefy 3090 PC; top of the line from 3-4 years ago but no longer so necessarily; I think it varies a lot on optimization though; the 3090 isn't drastically less powerful than 40 series cards and the 50 series is generally trash so far; Indiana Jones for instance ran very well on high settings with no crashes.................................................................................................................................................................................................................... So what makes this game special and how does it tick. Well for starters Lune is probably the best character design for any female character in any game, visually and the cohesion of the character in the plot; she's not KOS-MOS levels of awesome or anything and not actually the central figure but pretty damn masterful for a supporting character; plus she has feet (and even laughs nervously when she mentions feet in a conversation). This game's inspirations are many and multi faceted but as a baseline it's Final Fantasy X mixed with Legend of Dragoon; then you add a sprinkling of Dark Souls and Sekiro's Mikiri counters (quite randomly in the middle of the game); very reductive dipshits will say "its just Mario" but there's so much more to it than that. It also has very complicated build construction systems though admittedly after a certain point the game is a little too easy to break, but before that point it's fantastic in a balancing sense. I think only Valkyrie Profile 2 has a similar level of customization through gear as far as how busted you can get characters to be; coincidentally before this game VP2 was my 6th best game of all time and now this is my 6th best game of all time..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................As far as the plot is concerned its some mixture of Mother (the Aronofsky movie), Greek Tragedy/Olympic Diaspora of Greek Gods, and otherwise generally pretty unique, the setting is almost entirely unique for any non walking simulator and it's fucking gorgeous the entire time. There's even like some artistry if you're running on lower settings compared to high, the way the game shows that is also sort of artistic. There's an exceptional deconstruction of the JRPG protagonist like "what would actually happen to a JRPG protag in a more realistic setting" and that's wonderful, Andy Serkis is in the game which is pretty wild, plays like a top 10 villain in any game in it probably the most intimidating villain ever in a game but not like a life changing experience to watch like Albedo in Xenosaga or anything (or Delita who still transcends the medium). I do think the Witcher 3 is just better in terms of plot and also has Gaunter O'dim in it who's hard to beat, but if you ignore the Witcher 3 there's not really any other RPG that has voice acting and competes evenly with this game on a presentation level......................................................................................................................................................................................................................So how would this game have been better than The Witcher 3 to broach the Top 5 games ever; well it would have to be mechanically perfect and that's not quite the case. For starters there are awful minigames in it a la Rebirth (they are worse than Rebirth's though not as numerous); my advice is either don't do them (sadly losing out on swimsuits) or mod the game to do them for you basically; no need to stain the masterpiece with the minigames. The gameplay is top 3 in any JRPG for sure but that's still not quite as good as Vagrant Story's gameplay which also has defensive and offensive timing; so from an RPG standpoint it can't quite make it over the hump. So tragically the game is only a 10/10 and better than fucking everything in ages.

Ranking of Final Fantasies 2025 Edition

Greetings Friends, somewhat rare game post. This is mostly just a mental exercise and a self review of past opinions; blog format is so borked I don't think I can actually formulate it as a list so I'll just copy paste the notepad section here momentarily: Tactics, 6, 4, 10, 12, 5, 8, 7 Remake, 1, 7, 2, 9, 13, 3, 15, 7 Rebirth, 16; don't care about the mmos. Tactics has the best non voiced (though it is voiced now) story in any game and the best character in any game in Delita though you could take Gaunter O'dim and I would be fine with that choice as well. It's also the best game mechanically in the tactics genre aside from Front Mission 5 and arguably XCOM 2; great game; sort of killed its own genre by being so good I guess with everything being compared to it and Tactics Ogre afterward...................................................................................................................................................................................................................For a long time 4 was my best final fantasy, I'd say 10 or 15 years straight; I've played 6 and 4 like 25 times each under various conditions and it comes down to how much do I still enjoy it at this point; most recently I've played both on a Super Famicom with actual cartridges and what not; actually both games have really cool and weird bugs/glitches that work on actual hardware so that part is a wash even though the 4 one is more useful I think the Opera House glitch is also fascinating. Sketch glitch doesn't work very well on the JP cartridge so didn't screw with that much (also probably wouldn't since it could be unhealthy to the cart). I think FF6 pre world of ruin is the best game of all time pretty much but World of Ruin botches that even though it's decent enough; it's just not utterly flawless like the rest of the game. That said the WoR grind is strangely appealing the last 4 or 5 times I've played, dunno if its just the habit of doing it or the music when you get the Falcon; who knows. The biggest thing is being able to beat the final boss with any party at any level; I used Umaro and Relm this time who I've never used before and it was a blast. Just coming up with a party to farm Brachosaurs is fun in and of itself and as Celes and Terra become more and more comically broken the game becomes increasingly silly and enjoyable; even in Pixel Remaster (where MBlock is fixed) those characters are basically invincible; just a good time all around. I think conceptually I'd still say 4 is better because Whale, Golbez, Kain, Rubicante etc. but this time out 6 is the victor.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................10 is basically a flawless masterpiece all around, best turn based combat system in any game period; and then the protagonist is unbelievably fucking terrible and thats what shoots the game in the foot. No Tidus and 10 is also maybe the best game ever, but Tidus is there and straight garbage so that's it for that argument, it's still like a 9.5/10 though albeit it tends to elude my top 20 games of all time lists. 12 is awesome and 12 zodiac with 4x speed is even more awesome. 5 is the third most replayable, 8 with speed up options is also quite so plus Triple Triad. 8's story is a mixed bag but aside from Tactics 4 and 6 (and 10 if you exclude Tidus) the series hasn't really had many good stories so it doesn't really bother me much; the strength of Final Fantasy has always been the gameplay, if the story happens to be good that's a bonus on top........................................................................................................................................................................................................................7 Remake has one of the best soundtracks of all time and fantastic gameplay; great usage of the characters and set the stage for Rebirth being good (it wasn't, at least not particularly); great stuff all around. 1 still holds up and is the main NES one I would want to replay though I've more recently played 2 and 3 on Famicom; the Tower of Mystics music in 2 is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsMQnlL8qw0 Considering how ancient the game is the fact that 1 still works at all and is fun is remarkable; most NES games are terrible. Original 7 (and 8) are big parts of my childhood and hard to parse entirely but aside from particular affection for the characters it's just generally a pretty good game with a cool level up system and good characters; lots of better JRPGs. I like 2's leveling system and did get a second Excalibur to drop from an Iron Giant (1/64 + 3/64 I believe) for my run of Pandemonium on actual hardware (Famicom) so that's cool.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................9 is good for 1.5-2 discs and Chocobo Hot and Cold then it sucks. 13 has issues but a fantastic and super difficult combat system and the hardest boss in the series (Bart Part 2 if you don't grind); I don't have that much desire to replay it or Lightning Returns though; XIII-2 I kind of did everything already. 3 is just worse 5 it's a neat game for a Famicom game though. 15 is pretty damn good considering how much hate it got, love Adamantoise and the platforming dungeon; I'll play the DLCs at some point. 7 Rebirth would be a good game if it was 60 hours long and the ending didn't suck ass but it's like 150 hours long and the ending is terrible and sets up the next game to also be terrible (gameplay/outfits for Tifa aside); of course I'm going to wind up playing that too. It does have the quality of Remake's soundtrack but again there's too much of it so you need to trim the fat and make it more polished; fat chance with Nomura in charge. 16 I've played both DLCs and around 10 hours of the beginning at this point; I will play through the entire thing when it goes on PS Plus; it has very good core gameplay and a pretty solid story (if slow moving); very bland art design except for a handful of characters and very poor exploration systems; 13 had that problem too but the story was compelling enough for me at the time so it didn't bother me much. It's cool as a character action game because not many of those exist; still like an 8/10.

Economic System Theory Thoughts, Marx, Elon, Lowest Common Denominator Information Dispersion, Marketplace Discoverability etc.

Greetings friends, I haven't really talked about this topic in quite a while so my viewpoint might have changed over time and so forth; a bit of background I was more or less a pseudo Marxist for around 10 years; not because I think Marx is without faults but moreso that I was more concerned with geopoltiical theories and so on and thinking of an economic theory superior to Marx would be difficult and not necessarily productive. But I've had some fairly cogent thoughts recently about both economics and the way information is disseminated on the internet......................................................................................................................................................................................................................I do think there are some overarching merits to capitalism or at least Burgher style market policies in the middle ages that we have inherited; most modern capitalist practices are extremely flawed but the general core concepts from hundreds of years ago do have some merit. The question is how do you harness this; I think nominally we need to reach the 1917 state which we are kind of barreling towards right now; once that happens which every billionaire seems to be anticipating with their bunker building frenzy then we can probably come up with a better system that is neither Marxism nor Capitalism. I think a sort of separation of economic powers and some amount decentralization will help enable this; there will almost certainly need to be a period of some sort of brutal dictatorship though; or at least that will happen and then whoever that person is can then enforce some economic system that isn't so terrible, all other methods of reaching this point are either utopian or apocalyptic; I'm not too opposed to the latter.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................More to the point of discoverability, if a random average person looks at a list of things then they will almost invariably pick from the top of the list due to laziness or general stupidity and being incapable of scrolling down past a point; this is just an inherent flaw with search engines from inception and also an educational flaw in how humans are currently raised; not necessarily a scholastic flaw but a methodology flaw. This isn't fixable under capitalism because every system is informed by it and thus you have a world where one game or one streamer or one politician or one tv show or one sport dominates the conversation and everything else falls to the wayside. I've mentioned Pokrovsk in twitch chats recently when people bring up like "yo Washington DC is the worst place ever" and things similar to that and no one even fucking knows what Pokrovsk is, they are incapable of knowing that; its just too foreign and too old news and doesn't pop up enough in their news feeds. Recently POE2 released and then had like 1.2 million viewers on twitch (now it has like 6k); Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 just came out and same thing but if you look at who's streaming it and doing well for POE2 it was Asmongold (who played the game for like 3 days maybe) with 250k views and for Kingdom Come various other people but if you look down the list at other streamers you would think would benefit from this generally speaking they don't. So I watch Elajjaz and Lobos for example who at some point in time were similarly sized streamers; if Lobos streams a souls game he gets 2k viewers let's say for example and Ela gets 12k now, if Lobos streams Kingdom Come he gets 400 viewers and Ela still gets 10k-12k; this is the discoverability problem in a nutshell as disseminated on twitch. But the same thing happens for anything that functions in a search engine or "algorithm" format, same on youtube, same on reddit, same on google. This entire concept is why both Trump and Elon have power right now because they were able to harness that even though a lot of that traffic is negative for both persons.................................................................................................................................................................................................................I am still somewhat optimistic about Trump or rather the people Trump has selected to put in power in that they're generally 30-40 something instead of 70-80 something and thus probably have more mental acuity or adaptability; Trump himself has sort of descended to lunacy of late but it's hard to tell if that's deliberate or he's just saying shit for the sake of generating more discoverability until invariably all conversations and all wealth and power in the western world are either focused on Trump or focused on Elon; I don't think this leads to any particular outcome persay other than comedy but that does seem to be the current trend. Elon has done some extremely abrasive shit just in the past few days but generally speaking him being such an imbecile is really good for everyone since more and more people will grow to hate billionaires which will probably lead to some sort of revolution eventually; hard to say how that will come to fruition precisely but I would assume some kind of coup attempt and the repercussions therein; maybe in 2028, maybe in 2032; maybe caused by external forces due to WW3. After that happens we need to create a new economic system, when Lenin was doing his theoretical construct stuff he was just a writer and a journalist so if someone else can do that right now or start to maybe that will lead to some kind of economic reform in a decade or two; I'm not suggesting that Marx should be the basis of this it's just a loose reference for comparison; any idea is better than the current system you just need to develop and improve upon it enough in that timespan.