「Ｂｅｈｅｍｏｔｈ」

I have to explain that there is no missing context here. This is the opening cutscene of this mission. After this you just start running around a forest killing giant worms and water elementals.

This game is a real gem. Everything about the cutscenes and plot is so bizarre. The protagonist is seemingly an isekai'd dude with amnesia (he has a smart phone for some reason???) who grumbles every single line in the exact same tone. In the mission before this, the other party members were talking like they know who he really is, and what's going on, but he didn't react at all, and it was never discussed.

It's one of those things that blows past "so bad it's good" into some unexplored territory of bizarre singular art.

Also, there's a feature where you can like... talk to random JRPG townsfolk. But they didn't want to bother rendering a whole town for you to walk around in... so you just get a menu with different people. It ends up with a situation where you're loading in this whole environment and high-res model just for a guy to spout the exact same meaningless single line of dialogue as a random NPC in an NES game. It's fantastic.

Ahhhhh, today was good day. Work was busy, went by super fast. It's funny, I feel more energized after a day where I'm actually doing things compared to a day where I'm just sitting around. I continue to be a bit frustrated by my boss not being available most of the day... but honestly I've gotten used to it.

He is like... simultaneously extremely busy in meetings for hours and hours every day, and also wants to have final approval on basically everything. And is trying to get two new hires up to speed, still.

I tried Soul Hackers 2 again, got bored pretty quickly. That game has the usual excellent aesthetics and stylish GUI, but the gameplay feels so... shoddy. The battles are weirdly paced, even with the new fast-forward feature. Getting into and out of locations on the world map is so slow and laborious at times. The characters are interesting, but they don't show that at all at the start. It doesn't have one big critical flaw or whatever, it's just... kinda crummy, in general.

So, instead, I went back to Stranger of Paradise! I'm having a much better time with it this go 'round. A big part of it is realizing that there was a second built-in control scheme that's based on the Nioh games, instead of the default which is more like the souls games. It is so hard to go back to having attack buttons on the triggers, I think that's part of why I bounced off of Elden Ring so hard.

The first time, beating Chaos in the first dungeon took me like... 20 tries, easily. This time? One. No probalo. Just got in there and mopped the floor with him. Countered his magic with magic, and then just punched him.

It's extremely funny that Square-Enix apparently mandated that Team Ninja include more plot and cutscenes, but seemingly did not offer any assistance with that portion of the game. So the story is still as bizarre and stilted as ever, there's just... more of it. Also, the character models look fucking bizarre, there's something very uncanny about them.

Man... I can't wait for that open world game set during the bakumatsu they're making... that's gonna be sick as hell....