I am uncertain what it is about Christmas Vacation that makes me extra antisocial. Maybe it is the crowds and dealing with Christmas shopping, but whatever the case I tend to go through a turtle phase at the end of the year and beginning of the next. This is specifically heralded by me significantly increasing the number of single player types of games that I am engaged with. Last year at this time it was Cyberpunk 2077 and Jedi Fallen Order then a foray into Knights of the Old Republic 2 in January. The year before that I was heavily engaged Witcher 2 and 3 and this pattern keeps going back as you look at what I am playing at the end/beginning of the year. Winter break seems to have been the time I actually re-engaged with Final Fantasy VII Remake and finally finished it.
I have to say I really liked what they did with this. Not only did they spend a lot of time fleshing out areas of the game that buzzed by extremely quickly in the original game, but also taking the opportunity to change the story a bit. This is going into mild spoiler territory but if you have not caught on… Final Fantasy VII Remake is not a faithful recreation of the original and more a re-imagining of the game and with that comes an interesting plot device to explain those differences. I think it works well and I greatly appreciate the more action oriented style of gameplay… which again is a non-starter for some fans of the original. I greatly enjoyed the ride and look forward to the next “disc” worth of game when it releases.
I’ve moved on to Intergrade, which is the Yuffie adventure. So far this is extremely enjoyable and it has a completely different feel to the base “Remake”. While it weaves in an out of the story, it has an almost Cowboy Bebop vibe to it… which I think is largely influenced by the deep jazz cuts for the soundtrack. I am not very far into this side adventure but I think it will be an enjoyable way to finish out this week… if it lasts that long. After watching Witcher on netflix… I am having a deep desire to replay Witcher 3 which may end up happening. I also really want to try Red Dead Redemption 2 again to see if it can grab me this time around. I bounced pretty hard the first time but I have a good friend who absolutely loved it… so I might give it another shot. I don’t love the Rockstar style of open world games, but now that I better understand what the expectations are… maybe I can account for that in my expectations.
Lastly I am still poking my head into New World each day for long enough to collect 3 packages, make a gypsum orb, and make a sword cast to get expertise gains. I have to say the merger has had the opposite impact for me… in actually killing my desire to play the game. Firstly there is the challenge that there are exactly 3 covenant territories… and all three of them are the places where I have a home. Second there is the problem that on Minda Brightwood was one of the best late game crafting hubs… and on Frislandia it has been maintained by a bunch of slumlords who have done little to nothing to keep the crafting machines maintained. All of my crafting resources were centered around my tier 4 house in Brightwood… which sorta wrecks any desire to actually try and craft anything since there isn’t the resources I actually need there.
So I am concerned that as people continue to leave the game… we might end up going through another round of mergers meaning that once again the structure of the towns and the machines in them could change. This really harms my enjoyment when I do not care at all about the PVP mini-game. My personal preference would be that crafting resources never downgrade, and once a town is tier 5 in everything… that it just stays that way because this nonsense of mergers downgrading towns has been a significant hardship. I am sure that once the Christmas event is over and I no longer get free upgrades and gold every day… that New World is going to fall by the wayside for me.