lowkey day following a lowkey christmas - there was a heavy granblue update this morning, so I spent a lot of time in the information mines digging up all the funny numbers
even though I'm powerful enough in granblue that I basically play all the content I want to play automatically, it's always fun to think about what sort of numbers path I will chart in 2023, once I've reconfirmed all the information and are ready to invest all the resources in a full rebuild. measure a hundred times then just cut what someone else has cut
(except everyone else likes "heal 9000 HP a turn" less than I do)
after a marathon session, I'm in chapter six of sports story now, a game that continues to be an advertisement for the better game (golf story) that precedes it.
I think among the fishing town, the water temple, and the secret base, at least one of these was one of the first things made for this game, as they show more polish and charm than the fetch-quest heavy early chapters which feel rushed together for padding. there's a lot of legitimately funny moments in them and fishing, as always, is impossible to get wrong (unlike volleyball!!! I hope they never show me that again)
it'll be really interesting to look back at this game and try to unravel a lot of the baffling changes made between the original and this (particularly in how the UI regressed in a lot of ways) and understand which parts of these are because the team bit off more than they can chew and which parts are just due to poor decisions, so to speak
one particular callout is the Tennis Academy, which is a fully standalone section that needs to be finished "anytime in the game" but is like the second area you open up, which means you rush it early and find out that it's really Not That Great for a variety of reasons including the two game-breaking bugs in a 15 minute span that I dodged
going over old interviews for the game, it's clear that there was an intent to make a pseudo-open-worldy "choose your own path through the game" experience, and the Tennis Academy was explicitly called out later as a source for the game's delay, as a section that grew too big and was being expanded into its Own Thing, and it's kinda like... I see what you were doing but also like... a lot of these concepts didn't stick the landing lol
also for some reason sports story has a profoundly unhinged interview in its presskit which may or may not be fake and is definitely baffling given that Sidebar is supposed to be two or three people from Australia. I truly do not understand
anyway that's enough undirected words follow my let's play here