Semantic Nonsense: Final review time

The time has come to issue my final report on how well I performed on last year’s goals. I suppose this would have been a good warm-up exercise for doing my employee review at work had I done it a month earlier.

Progress is my middle name

Last year, as you may recall, was the catchup year for the Shin Megami Tensei: Persona series. And what a glorious ride it was, playing through or otherwise completing Persona 3: FES, The Answer, Persona 4 Golden, Persona 4 The Animation, Persona 4 Arena, Persona 4 Arena Ultimax and Persona 4: Dancing All Night. It was a glorious march to victory that started slow but accelerated to a pace I didn’t think was possible.

The theme of this year’s catchup is, as selected by Magnus, The Legend of Zelda. This lineup will consist of Windwaker, Twilight Princess, Skyward Sword and Breath of the Wild.

What will the future hold? Will next year see Yakuza get its turn? Fire Emblem? Mario? Dragon Quest? Or perhaps we could make a theme out of cleaning up the leftovers on older systems, like the PSX, PSP, GBA or SNES? The possibilities are (sadly) endless.

In general, the list of games I wanted to knock out of the backlog (plus several add ons) was completed with only one miss: Finishing off Digimon World: Next Order. Not a bad piece of work all around, but what appears to be the first Digimon World game worth playing must shamefully take its place in this year’s list. Joining it will be the first two Game of the Year winners, Bravely Default II and Pokemon Legends: Arceus. For Four in February, I hope to time the completion of a Zelda game for credit, knock out two short games on stream, and finish up Dredge. We’ll see how quickly I climb the Zelda mountain and whether I need an extra games for Four in February are before stretching the offline game list any further.

Speaking of games on stream, I’m again looking for games in the backlog that tick our usual boxes. Aggelos will be the Metroidvania. Typoman will be the quirky indie atmospheric platformer (because Angela can’t hog them all). Castlevania Chronicles will be the final edition of the annual October’s slog through a Castlevania game I never beat (Don’t worry, we can do Curse of the Moon 2 for next year). I’m not sure what the 2D Zelda ripoff will be this time around, but maybe that genre can take a break this year in favor of doing that second 4 Job Fiesta I promised you. I haven’t decided yet what sort of randomizer I’ll try this year, but you can bet one is coming. Finally, I felt the itch to replay Parasite Eve this past December, and nearly did offline.  But loading up the lost VoDs from DC Live!’s first year, I decided that the best course of action was to treat it like M.C. Kids (and, eventually, Pokemon Red) and bring the videos up to our current standards by restreaming it. Probably without getting the 300 junk weapon this time, though.

So to recap, on stream:

• Aggelos
• Typoman
• Final Fantasy V (Pixel Remaster) Four Job Fiesta 2
• Randmomizer TBD
• Castlevania Chronicles
• Parasite Eve

Offline:

• Windwaker 
• Twilight Princess
• Skyward Sword
• Breath of the Wild
• Dredge
• Digimon World: Next Order
• Bravely Default II
• Pokemon Legends: Arceus

Everything else

Jumping from games to movies (and by extension, Quarantine Control), I technically succeeded. I had one more QC entry last year than the previous 3 combined. It was certainly a success, but not to the degree I expected. Part of the issue is I made a rule for myself to not step on anyone else’s toes with what I covered. As things happened, there was extreme overlap between Geoff’s viewing habits and mine, and he was consistently faster to the punch. Though there was this one time in which Joseph did so in a hilarious manner, handing in a review of Tiny Toons Looniversity immediately after I speculated in the Discord whether I should leave that one to him because it had rabbits in it.  

My plans to go out to the theater more often also succeeded in a weird way. More than half of the movies I went out to this year were old movies thanks to the 40th anniversary screening of Return of the Jedi (which I had to go to; it was the only “episode X” Star Wars movie I hadn’t seen on the big screen yet) and investing big into this year’s Summer of Ghibli.

On the personal health side, while I did drop 15 pounds over the course of the year (got to take them off slowly or the skin will be flappy), the effort was apparently too late to prevent my glucose levels from going haywire. This means an end to “blue potions,” Jones Soda and the ever-popular Kit Kat redemptions. It probably also means an end to “Drew v. Food,” as Food is rather insistent on fighting dirty.