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.
I unceremoniously started writing games criticism in the middle of 2014, having stumbled into the idea of doing so after a few video essays crossed my line of sight while I was having an existential crisis that started in 2013 (and that I could argue has not stopped since). I felt like talking about video games and how they made me feel would be a good outlet for some creative urges and, briefly, the spaces I found myself in were amenable to the idea.
and then august 2014 happened, and, well, so much for gamers. I had to break things off with someone I considered my best friend at the time because of the run-up to that, and I lost myself in playing games and trying to write about them to distract myself from how much that hurt. the sort of games I'd be playing and chatting about with said friend, even. she was the person that really got me into Tales games proper. shame about that. back on topic, though:
a friend had tossed me $10 to buy Time & Eternity on Golden Week sale on PSN, after I'd seen it thanks to another friend posting about how terrible it was, and I got the itch to play it, bizarre as it was; as I played it, I got the sense I wouldn't see closure unless I wrote something about it, and thus, The Moebius Troupe came out of me. folks seemed to like it, so I didn't much slow down as I worked through Tales of Symphonia's sequel, Dawn of the New World, and wrote another piece with my thoughts on it, titled Dusk of the Monster King.
I also, briefly, worked at a website where I would be asked repeatedly to rewrite and republish gaming press outlet news articles to make our site appear more important than it was. my reward? a steam key of Trails in the Sky FC so I could review it. that site's been dead for a long time and good riddance. thanks for the steam key.
my birth month brought me a whole bunch of games I wanted to work through, and thus it wasn't until a couple months later I had the wherewithal to chat about the Drakengard series (mostly 3, though I did bring up 1/2) with Behold the Final Song. this led into a string of posts where I daisy-chained thoughts together, beginning with Completion & The Value of Your Time and its focus on subjectivity and personal standards, carrying on through Objective: Impossible where I mocked the idea of "objective game reviews" which were becoming a talking point due to august's bigoted gamer outbreak, and ending with Set Difficulty To..., a rambling post musing about the different aspects of difficulty and how we discuss them.
2015 started in a funny way though! the people I met while doing games crit led me to be invited to come hang out in someone's apartment for a 48-hour kingdom hearts stream marathon where we all made an effort to beat kingdom hearts 1 and 2 together and keep everyone entertained! on the very same twitch channel I would eventually meet the woman I'm now engaged to, actually!
at this time I was also trying to play more games and write about them in monthly roundups, which is how the Argent Omnibus started. for uh. two whole months (here's January, and here's February). I had a lot of aborted attempts to do longer-term stuff over the years but I never kept with it if I was running alone. but I wasn't entirely alone! I did an episode of Critical Switch (an audio games criticism series) in February 2015 and put the transcript up a few months later.
aside from that, I also made some standalone posts over the first half of 2015. one was a guide to Tales games to remedy the ignorance of how many entries were available in english that I was seeing with my new focus on JRPGs. after that, I worked on Dragon's Dogma, eventually musing on the nature of silent protagonists in This Silence is Not Mine, which has apparently been my fiancee's favorite piece of criticism from me from the time it was posted. she's cited it in her classes before! wild. I also wrote another piece reviewing Xenoblade Chronicles, and one with my thoughts on Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep, before largely, my written output dropped off a cliff, because, well...
somewhere in the mix, I made a post trying to find like-minded folks who wanted to focus on JRPGs and respected the form, and that led to me meeting the people I would then start a podcast with. Dead Genre Chronicles was three years of my life I really appreciate, but also, it's a lot. I ended up doing Myth & Kin, a travelogue podcast about the Witcher series with a friend as well, before finally coming out as trans because those books made me feel so uncomfortable about how they treated women.
after that, I didn't do a whole lot of writing; what came after can be found entirely on this blog and The Backbloggery, where I write posts after I clear games. a couple of them are even good, I promise! we're also doing a sequel to DGC called Live Genre Chronicles now, and I'm doing an anime podcast with my fiancee, with an attached monthly reading round-up via Patreon.
anyway, that's a rough overview of my writing over the years. enjoy? if you enjoy my work, tell me so via bluesky. I need to get better at accepting compliments. I also accept compliments in the form of tips via my Ko-Fi, if you're feeling really generous. thanks for your time.
