You like Mischief Makers! People who like Mischief Makers can't be all that bad

You have a nice collection!

Gravity Rush is pretty neat. It’s definitely a one trick pony but that pony is entertaining enough. I was making good progress on it for a while but then Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater showed up in the mail and I have been dedicating most of my time to that. If Gravity Rush is a one trick pony, Tony Hawk’s like a prize-winning pig. It might be my favorite game of the generation on a technicality I call “contrarian’s bonus.”

After playing Xenogears I realized that those games probably all have the same weird difficulty peaks and valleys and knowing that I think I’m prepared to check it out again on Switch. I heard the remake sped the game up a decent amount. On the Yakuza front, 0 felt like a perfect synthesis of what I liked about the other games. From what I’ve seen of Yakuza 7, it looks really good. I feel like it’ll be kicked around as an influential game for the next decade, if no other reason than I think metanarrative dad games will continue to be big.

Yeah when/if this quarantine ever lifts I want to do some traveling across the country, or whatever is still legally designated the United States in the coming years. I was actually looking at OSU for grad school because they have a paid master’s program but then all this stuff started going down and I never even bothered applying or taking the GRE. I would like to head out to the Northwest at some point in the future.

Glad to hear that you're doing alright. Quarantine was definitely a good time to knock some of those big games out of my backlog but it's always an avalanche over here, I'll never run out of retro JRPGs to play (read: download and never play) lol. I knocked out Death Stranding and Xenogears, both games that I thought would be about twenty hours shorter than they ended up being, but both were quite good. I bought the Xenoblade remake and have thought about starting it up, I liked Xenoblade but Lorithia ended my campaign so I never finished it.

I also sunk 65 hours into Yakuza 0 with the post-game and everything and I barely even touched Majima's post-game. Excellent Yakuza game, probably the best one, but it had also been a while since I had played any of them so maybe I was just thirsty for a new Yakuza. Since I got my PS4 in August, I've been compulsively buying games for it and when I counted how many Yakuza and Yakuza-adjacent games that the system had, my wallet practically wept. I just bought 13 Sentinels and Tony Hawk HD during Gamestop's Black Friday sale like a chump and I am going to try and make those the last games I buy for a little while - so like a week based on my current buying patterns I keep seeing deals on Yakuza 7 and I just have to push those to back of my mind, but I'm glad you're enjoying it.

Philadelphia hasn't been too bad imo all things considered. Things got a little hot in June, I live in the city so I saw some action downtown but outside of protesters being kettled onto the highway and tear gassed (which I narrowly avoided the worst of) and the roaming National Guardsman equipped with mace, Philadelphia's nowhere near as bad as national media would like people to think. It's really not a scary town! I imagine the situation here isn't dissimilar from Portland although Philly's left used the winds of change to highlight the city's homelessness problems which while not solved, saw some amelioration so that's good. My job was across the street from one of the larger homeless camps and my bosses would get scared shitless whenever the police threatened to break up the camp.

The original Deadly Premonition also definitely benefited from its five year development cycle. I think it really gave the team time to figure out what in the story worked, what didn't, make cuts and changes to better smooth out certain parts, and it allowed the team to add weird bullshit to flesh out the town (like new businesses, mini-games, and probably townsfolk.) Deadly Premonition 2 just straight up feels like it was developed in a year and pushed out the door. The blueprint for a successful sequel is there but everything feels like a first draft. Capturing that lightning twice would have been difficult but I don't think it would have been impossible with a more robust team and more development time. I am still a little eager to see how The Good Life turns out because it looks to me like that game has had more dev time and larger team working on it. Part of me almost suspects that DP2 was a ploy to do last minute fundraising for The Good Life's development and/or to keep the lights on at White Owls.

Anyway, I would kill for a super in-depth, blow-by-blow of the original Deadly Premonition's development because whatever they did with that game in between its unveiling as Rainy Woods, subsequent cancellation, and eventual revival and release was a good move. I know you can parse some of the narrative changes they made based on the changes in audio quality in the story (since certain lines were added in two years later post revival) but I'd love to know what stores, sidequests, and others things had been added in too. Nevertheless, Deadly Premonition 2 was a major disappointment, so now I'm playing Yakuza 0 which is a safe bet. Always bet on Kiryu.

How's your 2020 going though? You still in Portland? As I understand it, the city's not doing so hot right now to put it lightly

So what do you think of DQXI so far?

I feel like KH2 got better with time.

I know what you mean about replaying the KH games. Playing them with my brother and we still have like half the series to cover in a month.

Anyhow, DQXI was pretty awesome, provided you enjoy the Dragon Quest formula.