malymin

hello! i haven't posted a lot recently, sorry about that ~w~. i wish i could say it's because i'm Super Busy, but it's not; the more correct answer is that i'm Lowkey Depressed. however! i've figured out the secret to hating myself less. it's Doing Things and Going Outside.

i've been kind of nervous to Go Outside recently because of my physical proximity to my ex-friends. like, seriously- i had THREE run-ins with different groups of friends in ONE DAY on my first outing after the school year ended. it's a nightmare. T-T at least my current friends are willing to accommodate me about that, when we hang out we usually take drive thrus and then go a little out of town or just directly to their house. i'm very thankful to them for that.    orz

so i'm basically Going Outside around once a week; Going Outside is different from normal going outside, though. Going Outside is some kind of event where i need to leave my physical location and hang out with someone for a decent period of time. i could probably stand to increase my normal going outside, though. i might start taking walks around my house or using my scooter to get some fresh air. (but last time i used my scooter i very nearly broke my hand! such is the way of life.)

the other component is Doing Things, which tends to either be some kind of craft project or a way to spruce up my current living conditions. my room at home is incredibly messy, and it's been this way basically as long as i can remember. something something neglected as a kid etc. it's very difficult to make it Unmessy right now because i have a bunch of stuff from the dorm that i already have equivalents of at home, and my parents won't let me store the boxes holding those things in a different place temporarily until my room gets to a better condition. (variants of this problem have been happening since i was 12). so the room gets messier and messier...

i try to hack away at it as much as i can, but i find it difficult to retain the motivation to clean unless i have something to listen to. i've been struggling to actually Find something to listen to, so my progress has slowed... but i'd like to get my room livable again soon!

in the meantime, i still have much more motivation for craft projects, which i find much more satisfying to do. i try to have a short-term thing i work at over the course of a few days, and a longer-term thing on the backburner that i work on whenever i have the time/money. my current short-term is a perler sprite of the roaring knight from deltarune! i finished most of it today, and tomorrow i'll be ironing the smaller bits and assembling the whole thing. (the sprite is a bit too big for my current board size...) after i finish with the knight, i'm gonna take another stab at my tenna sprite! i tried doing that one last summer, but i was too busy with rehearsals to finish it (and the initial ironing of the first segment went poorly). i think tenna will probably be my next short-term project!

after tenna and the knight, i think i'm gonna work on styling and collecting things for my itabag! i preordered a deltarune one (I'M AWARE) from fangamer a few months ago, and it arrived 2 or 3 days ago! i'm still trying to figure out who or what will be at the center, but i'm leaning towards it being ralsei. i'll have to see, though!

my longer-term project is a cosplay of ralsei from deltarune. you may have noticed a pattern here. i bought the top half and the bottom half, but the colors were further apart than i had expected. my mom suggested a dyeover of the lighter piece with a darker color to try and get them to match better. i have no guarantees this will work, and i've never dyed anything before, but i figure it's worth a shot! i'm going to be doing that part this weekend. i'll try to update with how that goes!

another project i've been hacking away at slowly is more thorough system documentation. trying to categorize things like which headmates have fit what splitting patterns, what periods of time headmates have split and why, who's interacted with who, etc. it's something we've been meaning to do for a long time, but having a lot of free time means i actually get to do it now. so far the results have been fairly unremarkable, but i expect it to start bearing fruit soon.

that's about all for now!! :]

... i'm not a very big fan of this entry. there are PIECES of it i absolutely adore; beatspell is a super interesting twist on the usual rhythm toys in each game, and levels like crab snack 2, sneezy moon 2, and wiper bosses are excellent! but i worry that i only like these so much because everything around it kinda sucks. never has a game made me oscillate between "we're so back" and "it's so over" quite as rapidly as this one.

the first FORTY LEVELS are a slog, and then you're only halfway done. so many levels in this game could have been cut with no consequences (or maybe even IMPROVEMENT) to the quality of the game. why did they aim for a benchmark of 80??? barring megamix, every other game has done far better with 50 or fewer, and megamix's minigame number is inflated by ports from other games. and even though every game has a few stinkers, the VAST MAJORITY of each level is decently enjoyable, if not an outright blast to play. this is not the case with rhythm heaven groove. many levels have music unmemorable, and they keep reusing the same synth for so many songs in the first half of the game. it genuinely irritates me so much.

this game needed more time in the oven and less time making sequels to minigames. fever had TWELVE sequels, and each one was better utilized than the vast majority of them have been in groove. as for the sequels that stand out, they stand out because their prequel was obnoxious to play and the new sequel made it actually enjoyable. also, can i just say? there is ZERO good reason to make 20 entire remixes in this game, especially when most of them are middling-poor quality. the majority of the remixes don't offer any of the reskins that have been a consistent tradition since DS/gold (and a thing In General since the first game!). this game did not need to be this big, and now it's bloated.

this game suffers a lot from the biggest problem with megamix; it's assuming most of its players are more incompetent than they are, so the levels slant very easy for the first like 6 stages. this results in a sort of reverse power creep where earlier entries in the series have more difficult entry levels than later ones. 

also, oh my GOD the handholding is so annoying. it's like they forgot to code a setting for normal levels to disable the tutorial. there is a tutorial in front of EVERY sequel, even if the sequel doesn't add any new cues or inputs! you are WASTING MY TIME!! not to mention, the levels that do have cues will teach them both before AND after the review sections. if you take a gamble and skip a tutorial for a sequel you haven't played yet, you might skip out on information crucial to the success of the level! it's like this game is designed to waste all of my time.

the "first" levels are ridiculously easy. there is no point to the vast majority of them existing. once i fully finish the game, i'll make a list of every single level i think could have been cut (or maybe i'll just aim for a benchmark of 50 like the other games.)

i'm a veteran of the series, and i've played every game on its original hardware except for tengoku (but i have an original DS that accepts GBA cartridges; it's just a matter of finding a replacement battery and charger for the damn thing. i've emulated it with no problems!). i think it's fair to ask if my complaints are unique to having known the series as well as i do. i honestly have no idea how someone new to the series would respond to these issues, but my best guess is that it would drive them to quit! 

an issue that i know for sure is plaguing people new to the series is that many of the audio cues are too quiet, or there are cues that are visual-only without any audio component. this is incredibly embarrassing for the first entry in the series explicitly advertised to be blind-accessible. there are also no audio settings besides enabling the TTS (which is very grating for sighted people and likely at least a little annoying if you're blind), which means there is No fix for the too-quiet cues, and the visual-only cues are genuinely directly against the design ethos of rhythm heaven (which will have been around for 20 years in august). 

a LOT of this game goes against the design ethos of rhythm heaven in a Bad Way. i can respect megamix for pushing the envelope and trying new things, even if a lot of them didn't work out (having a main story, Prequel Levels, a map you have to flip through the pages of instead of every level on one screen). there were interesting new choices that were made (challenge train stuff, bonus levels unlockable through rewards for perfect levels) that had potential to carry onward into the series. but it seems like groove took all the wrong lessons from megamix; prequel levels now make up roughly half of the game's 80 (!!! RIDICULOUS NUMBER!!!) minigames, the levels take up multiple pages you need to flip through (due to the, again, stupidly inflated minigame amount), and it is SO handholdy.

oh well. if i'm really so dedicated to being a miserable wretch, i could play literally any other game in the series!