mastery, randomness, friends, and nourishment

there’s no clean way to start this discussion, so let us get our hands dirty right out of the gate:

I loathe “friendslop” as a term significantly more than I do the thing that is being gestured at with that term.

fully managed austerity space fascism, or: friendly fire isn't

habitual overthinker that I am, I often end up wondering what makes some games interesting/tolerable where similar ones fall flat. I recently got into helldivers 2 thanks to being gifted a copy of the game by a metamour, and it’s a lot of fun to play with my gf + her other partners, but I’m also like... not living under a rock. I’ve been paying attention to the state of the world.

a brief and rambling history of my writing

greetings. I'm Val, and I've written a lot of nonsense, mostly about games, over the years. you might have stumbled across my work. big maybe. if you're reading this, you're probably familiar with me in passing, or by reputation from whoever's linked you to this post. I did a JRPG podcast for three years, I did a couple anime podcasts with a friend, and now I do an anime podcast with my fiancee. 

warning: most of these links are going to lead to content which deadnames me so be chill about that.

games are too fucking much

sometimes I think about a hypothetical scenario, where I’m made immortal and immune to entropy, and ask to be given every bit of media that I would personally enjoy from the entire history of humanity, past to future. if I stretched the time it would take to enjoy all of these things, even half-heartedly in a rush, back from the heat death of the universe, I wonder if I would be able to fit it all in between the big bang and the dissolution of matter that would hold such media. I don’t know! 

what a year will do to you(r oshis)

the first half of this post was written on august 18, 2023, and posted on cohost. the second half was written when the next holocure update landed on november 15, 2024.

holocure - save the fans got put on steam with its latest update and like. yep that game still goes hard.

the beauty of crystal [old writing]

this is an archive of an abandoned draft about the final fantasy xiii trilogy, originally planned to be in a zine for dead genre chronicles' blog. it was archived on cohost but now it's on here because cohost is dead. long live the internet. :\

why futa fix (a mid porn game) is a 5/5 game in my book

 [mirroring this post from cohost since it's dying. original post date: june 24, 2024]

one of my partners (who also came up with the star-based rating system I use for rating games (most games are a 2/5)) wanted to know why I gave futa fix: dick dine and dash a 5/5 rating.

the stars are:

• not actively regressive/bigoted
• not a complete waste of my time
• I recommend someone else ever play this
• gave me something to think about afterward
• personal arbitrary point

we're focusing on that 4th one. here goes.

Val's Visual Novel Nonsense #03 - Word by Word, Line by Line, Darkness Retreats

    Daitoshokan no Hitsujikai (a good librarian like a good shepherd, stylized as such in the jp logo) is, in short, a fairly strong character-driven VN dragged down by a structural decision about the routes that unnecessarily dilutes the focus on the true end. Taking place at a school that is closer to a city in population, the story follows Kyotaro Kakei, a member of the Library Club, who coasts by on his ability to test well while spending every second he can get away with immersed in books. 

Val's Visual Novel Nonsense #02 - In Love and War, No Plan Survives First Contact With The Enemy

    Muv-Luv is a game that embodies the value of planning and foreshadowing, the power of contemporary consumption of media, and the degradation of both of those strengths under the flow of time and ensuing discussion.

Val's Visual Novel Nonsense #01 - Beyond the Sky, Above the Firmament

I have a lot of visual novels that I’m going to be playing, and for once I want to have some kind of archive of my thoughts on them. For whatever reason, most of my history with VNs has slipped my mind. I feel like I can only confirm that I’ve played certain games with the assistance of screenshots that are still buried in my documents, but even then, I have the sneaking suspicion that I’ve played some more than are listed there.