I am really working on my sleep, which has gone haywire since changing the time. THis is one of my pet rants, but can we please stop changing the time? I don’t care which we choose, but let’s just leave it the same all year round. My god. We have fake lighting. We don’t need to be beholden to the whims of the sun any longer. For fuck’s sake.
On the bright side, I’ve been getting a decent amount of sleep. On the not-so-bright side, it’s been at all hours of the day/night/morning. I am concerned. I am trying to drag my sleep schedule back to going to bed by 2 a.m. and getting up at 10. It’s not happening, though, and I’m just not happy with myself.
Let’s talk Taiji a bit. And Bagua. I’m focusing on those because they are my lifeline. Without them, I don’t know if I could .
Side note: There’s a new game out called The First Berserker: Khazan (Neople). It’s a soulslike, though the combat is likened more to Sekiro. I tried the demo for an hour, and I quit before even getting to the first boss. Hm. There’s an easy mode (someone mentioned it in the Discord), which I had not known. But I did play the demo, and I presume there was an easy mode in the demo? If so, wouldn’t I have chosen that? I don’t know.
Anyway. I am so sick and tired of soulslike relying on the parry and having bosses taht are brutal. It’s like they took the least-interesting thing from From games (to me) and made them the focus of the game. When I tried the demo, the scrubs could kill me in three hits or so. It took three hits to kill a scrub. This is actually something people mentioned about the game–that the enemy difficulty is badly calibrated. Andy Cortez from Kinda Funny said that he dumped all his points into Strength to get the max with as little health as he could get away with, but it still took him two or three hits to kill the scrubs.
I found the combat to be grueling and not satisfying. I think I went with the greatsword because the other options are dual-daggers and dex. As we all know by now, I don’t do either. So it’s greatsword by default. I don’t know if there is any kind of magic in the game, but my hunch is no.
Every fucking review talks about how brutal the bosses are, but how they came to love the drutality. Here’s one from IGN that typifies that sentiment. Meanwhile, I’m summoning humans for Shadow of the Erdtree because I do not want to struggle for hours with a boss. I did that with the final boss of the DLC the first time around. Five hours over two days after getting the boss down four or five hits on my second try. Did I feel exhilirated after beating the boss? Yes. But it was so fleeting and then exhaustion set in. I was so numb by that point, I was mostly just glad it was over.
I just did the final boss with my intelligent character. I called in humans, and we still fucked up several times. Well, three times. I think we got it on the fourth (or maybe fifth) try. One of my human summons had a bow and was doing poison arrows. That worked a treat! My strategy is to use scarlet rot, but with this character, I couldn’t get it to take in the second phase. That’s why the poisoned arrows was such a relief.
Here’s the thing, though. This boss was a nightmare when the DLC first came out. Not just beacuse of the endless combos, but because of the fucking light show. Every attack had a trailer of holy light after it, much like it was a 1990s Angelfire website with lights exploding everywhere following the cursor around the screen. It was really rough right after the game was released (which was when I beat it), and even after the taming of the light show, it’s annoying AF.
When I did it this time, I could not track the boss in part because it was too fast and my eyes couldn’t keep up, but also because of the lights following every attack. Yes, it’s cut down by a third or so, but it’s still a lot. And the combos go on for days. One time, it was seriously a five-or-six move combo.
It’s not fun. It’s very grim to wait out a string of attacks that can do your whole health bar of damage and then have your chance to get in one hit before waiting for the endless string of attacks again. I put up with it in a From game beacuse the rest of it is so good. I have never been in it for the boss fights, and now, more than ever, I don’t have patience for it.
Back to my life. I am feeling pretty down about life in general. It doesn’t help that my country is spontaneously combusting. I look around and see all the hatefulness that is surrounding me. Yes, I need to make changes in my life, but I don’t have the motivation. This is one of the issues with depression. It’s so vicious in that it makes you less likely to do the thing you need to do. And because you don’t do the thing you need to do, your self-esteem goes down even fruther.
It’s sad. My self-esteem has never been good. Except for the first two years after my medical crisis. You could not say shit to me then, and I was more than happy to strut my stuff. Then, bit by bit, my self-confidence started depleting. It’s the way of the world, really. The body returns to homeostasis, which for me, apparently, is depression. And self-loathing.
Or rather, not self-loathing, but just…self-defeat. I’m back to where I was before my medical crisis, which is pretty grim. That’s all for today. More tomorrow.