Tales of the Aggronaut

Netflix Castlevania

July 11, 2017 by Belghast

It would be a bit of an understatement to say I was excited about the new Netflix anime series based loosely on the events of Castlevania III. I have a deep relationship with this game series and while I have not played a lot of them, it was nonetheless extremely important during my formative video game playing years. The original was the very first game that I saved up money to purchase for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Back then at roughly age 11, it took a long time to scrounge up the money to buy a $50 video game… but that was really only half of the obstacle. To get the game itself required going someplace that had video games… or at least in the case of Castlevania a trip to Toys R Us… the closest of which was an hour and some change away from home. To say I devoured the game is a bit of an understatement as well… there are sequences in the original game that are burned into my brain just as indelibly as the Vampire Killer theme is. I have said this plenty of times… but I count Castlevania Symphony of the Night as my favorite game of all time and consider it pretty damned closed to perfect. When Koji Igarashi started the kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night… I threw money at my screen and backed it as soon as I could. Since then I have played through the demo version that backers got a few times… so to say I am the target audience is also probably a bit of an understatement.

The show released officially over the weekend on the 7th but I just finally was able to sit down for a period of time and watch through it last night. Prior to doing so I had been seeing a bit of confusing press floating around with folks generally being unsatisfied with the new netflix offering. Firstly this is probably the most bingeable Netflix “series” I have ever seen… with only 4 episodes weighing in around 100 minutes of total watching. This honestly felt more like a pilot and less like a complete series, but I won’t get hung up on those details. What the season is more than anything is setting the stage for the second season. Since this series is roughly based on the third Nintendo Entertainment System Castlevania game… we go into it knowing some of the major plot points and it seems like the show more or less is following them. During the four episodes we are introduced to a cast of characters that will play out over the series… but I found it curious that at least one major character was completely absent. I am hoping this was just a situation of not having met him yet through the course of the very short few episodes that we got, and will join the team as a later reveal. The show sets up the central conflict between the early science hating church and Dracula… and to a lesser extent the general forces of the enlightenment. For the Christian viewers… I could see some of the dialog being a little hard to swallow. For me personally… it did an excellent job of setting up the central conflict that made Castlevania III so different than some of the others in the series.

One of the complaints that I have seen online about the show is that Dracula is not set up to be a sympathetic character… and frankly I disagree. I found myself sympathizing with Dracula quite a bit honestly, and were I in his position I probably would have wanted to burn everything to the ground as well. As far as matching the tone of the games… you are supposed to hate Dracula because ultimately that is the core conflict. Castlevania more or less is about the central conflict between the Belmont family and Dracula. More or less every 100 years Castlevania materializes in our plane of existence, and the Belmont clan trains to be able to stop him each time. This series has a Belmont and a Dracula… so I feel like it met all of the necessary requirements for being able to call itself a Castlevania anything. I honestly thought all of the character introductions worked extremely well, especially Alucard… who isn’t 100% on our side and we get that impression. The real problem with the series as I see it is that I want more of it. Four episodes was just not enough because it essentially serves as the pregame cinematic setting everything up… and we haven’t really gotten to any of the meat of the game yet… or in this case the series. I mean they had to functionally tell an origin story given that they cannot really guarantee that anyone who is watching the show has ever actually consumed any of the source material. I feel like they did a great job of setting the stage… but I am not really looking forward to the likely two year wait until the next batch of episodes. This time I am hoping they give us way more than four in a single sitting. This won’t be the show for everyone… but I am not looking to nitpick something that I never thought I would actually see in my lifetime. I am more than happy just to sit back and enjoy it.

Leveling DPS is Butts

July 10, 2017 by Belghast

One of the best parts about Final Fantasy XIV is that you can literally be every possible class be it crafting or battlecraft on the same character. One of the worst parts of Final Fantasy XIV is that for the most part leveling alt jobs has been a pretty grindy proposal. When you first set down to level in Final Fantasy XIV, you have all of these side quests and main story quests to keep the game feeling fresh and keep the content moving forward at a decent clip. Unfortunately when you sit down to level any of your other Jobs you find out just how much of your original quest experience came from that unrepeatable main story. As always I leveled my Warrior first because well… like it or not I am a tank at heart and for three expansions now I have not deviated from that mission. There was some brief flirtation with potentially going Dark Knight, but in the end Warrior just suits me best. However now I have reached that point where I have functionally geared the warrior as far as I can without the aid of Omega drops, and as a result I have turned my attention to trying to run my first DPS up. You can tell by the above image that my DPS of choice this go round is the brand new Samurai job. The only problem there is… quite honestly leveling as a DPS without the aid of the Main Story Quest… is butts and highlights some of the problems that Final Fantasy XIV still has when it comes to a lack of reasonable alternate leveling paths.

Previously in A Realm Reborn era especially… I used to hop in a FATE grinding party and move on with life. There were fabled zones like South Shroud or Northern Thanalan that were largely devoted to groups of players running around and trying to kill the FATEs as fast as possible. Unfortunately with the transition to Heavensward, there was a massive nerf of FATE experience and with it the grind party devotees started to disappear. When Palace of the Dead was introduced it gave us a ladder to follow to slowly bring those alts up to speed through grinding sets of 10 floors at a time. Unfortunately however the PotD experience is pretty horrible with the bar barely moving at level 61. There is a bit of a FATE presence in The Fringes, but everyone is fairly disorganized with no groups available through the party finder. There was some talk over the weekend of maybe starting up a guild FATE party just to get all our various alts leveled in a reasonable manner. My current MO has been to queue for a dungeon or roulette and grind FATEs until it pops and in the grand scheme of things this has worked well enough. Over the weekend I went from 60 on my Samurai to 65 as of last night, which a huge chunk of that happening during recording the podcast and simply bouncing from FATE to FATE until we finished. I remember that is also how I leveled my gathering professions, since while I am podcasting I can seem to grind something without even noticing it. I would also try this with Palace of the Dead, but before long I would find myself running circles in Quarymill while we recorded… much the same as I used to run circles in Dalaran.

I honestly thought I was being clever in this expansion, and after the end of Raubahn Savage… I found myself up enough in experience that I started attempting to ignore every side quest and only push through with a laser focus on the main story. My thought was this would ultimately help out the first alt that I leveled, and over the weekend I returned to Ruby Sea where I had dozens and dozens of quests to complete. Unfortunately… these quests provide next to no experience and simply only add bits of story to help flesh out the world a bit. I spent about an hour and completed a dozen or so quests… when I realized that my experience bar had moved less than if I had gotten gold in a single FATE. Hell to be truthful just wandering the world grinding random mobs seemed to be better experience than the side quests were providing. In the past this would be the moment that I would start leaning heavily on Battlecraft Leves… but unfortunately much to my frustration it seems that they simply do not exist in Stormblood. There are crafting leves in Kugane but neither there nor Rhalgar’s Reach have anything for the battlecraft jobs. I mean leves were a horrible experience in Heavensward and the thought of having to keep popping back to the Foundation between rounds was maddening. However they were there if you got desperate and there were many times I got desperate enough to see some steady progress on the experience bar. There are hunts of course, and I have been doing my daily hunt logs but again… while they are an excellent source of seals… they are a pretty crappy source of experience.

If I am playing a tank or a healer… then this whole question of how to level becomes moot. You simply queue for dungeons and ride the constant string of instant queues until you hit 70. However there seems to be something missing to help the DPS get a leg up. Now the leveling roulette and 50/60 roulette seem to go significantly faster than queuing for a specific dungeon. Over the weekend leveling roulette seemed to be about a 10-15 minute queue for dps, and 50/60 somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes… with queuing for an individual level and gear appropriate dungeon taking somewhere in the neighborhood of 30-40 minutes. If I was able to run FATEs while waiting on the queue to tick down it did not feel too horrible, or at least it felt like I was making steady forward momentum. However if I happened in one of the patches where the folks were not touching the FATEs at all… it was noticeably dragging. Compare that to the experience of playing a healer or a tank… with their push button get dungeon mechanics and it just feels lousy. At least with Palace of the Dead providing reasonable experience, you could skirt a lot of the issues and get by just fine with four dps parties in there. I am not sure where it is on the roadmap, but I am really hoping we see the next iteration of Palace of the Dead launching with 4.1. Until then… I think once I finish leveling the Samurai I will probably focus on my other tanks and my healers before returning to the DPS queue hell again. This is also why I have been trying to offer my short tank queues whenever possible to the free company… because leveling DPS is butts.

Needed Break

July 6, 2017 by Belghast

This is a weird post and I am not exactly sure how to write it. I find myself contemplating a break from blogging, or at least greatly ratcheting down the amount that I spend writing. It feels like for awhile now I have been too little butter spread across way too much toast. There are so many times I sit down in front of the keyboard in the morning and I have no clue what I am going to talk about, and somewhere along the way a post comes out. The problem is… it isn’t usually a very good one. When I first started blogging I was full of ideas that I felt like I had to get out of my head to keep from bursting. However the rate at which those ideas regenerated was way slower than the time in which it took to drain the well dry. Partially it is that I don’t think what I am doing is all that interesting anymore. I am no longer playing any one game serious enough to be a reasonable source of information about it, and I am not playing enough games to really be any sort of interesting review source. I’ve fallen into this pattern of largely playing whatever I happen to be playing on a much more casual level than I used to, and as a result you see long strings of posts about my activity in Destiny, Diablo 3, Final Fantasy XIV and occasionally World of Warcraft. None of which is filled with that much useful information, nor do I really feel like I have enough personality to carry it off anymore.

I am not really sure what this means, but it all feels like I am forcing the daily blog to be a thing right now. In truth my blog was never really known for the quality of content, but more the quantity and I guess on some level that is a little bit depressing. Talking a lot without saying anything meaningful is not exactly my favorite thing. I know that I don’t want to do anything like nuke the blog from orbit… I am more the sort to simply let something rot on a server forever rather than delete it. The problem that I am having is that I wish I could blog with regularity… but also only do it when I have something worth talking about. I am not entirely certain if I am capable of doing something… but doing it intermittently. My life tends to be a series of routines, and once one is abandoned it tends to be gone forever. I am hoping that I can figure out how to blog when I actually want to be blogging rather than out of some sense of obligation or devotion depending on which day it is. It is my hope that by backing off from forcing myself to do this every morning… that I might be able to get some of my creativity back. I have this weird problem with when something feels like a job… it ruins the fun for me. There was a period of time when I used to love development… and now it is largely something I do to get a paycheck. Similarly I used to love sitting down in the morning and baring my soul for you all… but over time that too has started to feel like a job.

Here is hoping I can figure out a way to keep doing this blog… but recapture some of the fun. Regardless from this post forward we are entering a new phase of my blogging. If I have something to say I will say it. If I don’t however I will just peacefully drink my coffee in the morning and do something else.

Goodbye Bella

July 5, 2017 by Belghast

Having the “Fourth” holiday happen in the middle of a week always throws me off. For example I got up yesterday and never once considered sitting down to blog… until about 10:30 my wife asked me something about it and if I was going to call it “the weekend”. In truth I have felt a little out of it for the last week or so, mostly because a whole bunch of things have happened. Firstly we had the whole “dog adopted us” thing, which caused us to completely screw up our sleep patterns. For months now our Eldest ferret has not been doing very good, so there has been a daily routine of cleaning up after her. Monday evening when I got home from work, I went to check on her and found that she had passed peacefully during the day. We sort of knew it would be soon because we had been feeding her this nutrient soup, and Sunday night she refused to eat any… and also refused to drink much in the way of water. In some ways finding she passed peacefully curled in a little ball in one of the warm beds is a relief… because its like she drifted off to sleep and just never woke up. Whatever relief I am feeling however is outmatched by the general sadness of knowing she is gone… so it is a truly mixed bag of emotions. At the same time we have been trying to double our attention on her cage mate who had been watching after her as the signs of aging got worse. The challenge with ferrets is that they are extremely wiggly creatures… and as a result I have tons of blurry photos of them scampering and playing… but not a whole lot that are nice and relatively still. The above image is of a much much younger Bella and I managed to snap a few shots where we can actually see her face. She was my girl, and would follow me around while I was doing whatever… until I would finally go pick her up from the play pen. Feeling more than a little broken at the moment.

You aren’t going to get much in the way of a traditional post out of me today. I just don’t feel like talking about gaming and such. So I will just leave you with another photo, this one shows Shiloh as well and is one of the few “scamper” shots that actually has Bella in focus. In my four decades of life I have had to say goodbye to a lot of animal friends… and it never really gets any easier. In fact finding these photos this morning meant scrolling through a bunch of shots of Little Shit and Chloe as well… and that sorta tore open its own old wounds. I guess that is the challenge of the digital age… you have a mountain of available photos available at a moments notice… even if those photos are sometimes hard to look through. Bella came to us with her name… and she was a rescue from someone who could no longer take care of her. The original owner said it was short for Bellatrix as in Bellatrix Lestrange from the Harry Potter novels… but I sort of think it was the worst possible name for her. Firstly she was a blondish/white ferret… which might have fit Narcissa but not Bellatrix. Secondly she was one of the most loving and cheerful ferrets… and not at all similar to her cruel namesake. We kept it because she seemed to respond to it, though I imagine she was responding more to our voices than a specific name. She was our little escape artist, and I am sure at some point during my blog I have written about the fact that she figured out how to leap out of a marshall farms play pen… leading us to zip tie plastic cardboard signs to the top to keep her from gaining traction and flopping over to the other side. She had not been much of an escape risk for awhile though, and mostly just wanted to snuggle at all possible times. She loved being carried around… and often helped me go fetch this or that around the house. I am trying really hard to pour extra attention on Shiloh because I am sure she misses Bella… but also because it helps me as well. Bye baby girl.