Playing a bit more Twilight Princess and the game had the bold vision of giving Zelda a fucking sword.

Sure she had to drop it for a surrender in a cutscene but at least she had it.

Rabbit and Steel comes to mind, its what I've been playing most recently. I'm a fan of arcadey¹ randomized run games like it, and I'm oddly good at bullet hell type games due flash games/spending a lot of time getting good at puzzle games², so I'm having a good time challenging myself with the harder difficulties rather than just being walled and getting discouraged.

Its got a relatively subdued version of the usual synergy building stuff IMO, most things dont get too crazy and the things that can get crazy tend to have some prerequisites for the choice to be good. And since you get 6 items at most in a run, just because things can get to be extremely good, its still rare enough and lasts short enough to appeal to me well.

I havent got too far in the plot (multiplayer is really fun in the game, even if I've only tried 2 players and solo so far), but it seems like it'll be a fun plot. Emerald Lakeside stands out strong to me there despite only seeing a couple of plot scenes on it, the song plays a big part of that. Oh, the music's good too, I should mention.

I think my main qualm with the game right now is just that story progress is slow even when I'm doing well at the game. Its honestly similar to my complaint with Hades, if you do well enough it starts to get tempting to just throw runs a little ways in just to make progress faster. It feels designed for people who take many attempts at a boss in order to clear, and like, that is true of me on harder difficulties, but my choices of destination on higher difficulties are limited until I get good emough to win a zone in it, so I can only progress the plot in the 2 starting zones and not all 5.

I've also been playing FFXIV a bit, but nothing too much, just enjoying a few dungeon roulettes every now and then, messing with fashion, doing various small things like that. Mostly just excited for Dawntrail really, I will admit to liking the story of the MMO. Rabbit and Steel draws probably intentional comparisons to FFXIV given the whole "raiding experience" thing its based on, especially with it taking like maybe more than half of FFXIV fight mechanics whole cloth (some stuff I think is unique, unless its relegate to an obscure hard fight in FFXIV). It is funny how much more willing I am to tackle multiplayer hard stuff in Rabbit and Steel than I am FFXIV though, guess being able to basically practice by doing solo runs helps with that.

1. most people would say roguelike I think but that doesnt feel quite right to me in this case for some reason.

2. relevant for "able to parse when 5 important things pop up on screen" reasons.

just lives in your head forever, sometimes as warning, sometimes as goal

Completely forgot but MultiVersus is back online today, gonna give it a little try and see if it feels better to play.

This game needs to be like, 1.5 faster, at least. They got rid of the weird mechanic that your attacks would do less damage if you spammed them, though that's a weird "fix" cuz the real reason that mechanic wasn't great is because there's very few attacks available in general and...that's still true.

Will try 2v2 later and see if it feels any faster paced, but so far its Just Okay™