Year in Review: 2023

[freshfeeling]

I started this Dreamwidth blog on March 20th of this year after spending a fair bit of time reading things like System Error's Video Game Variants, Sullla's Website, The CRPG Addict and even a few things on the Let's Play Archive. GameFAQs boards have been one of my longest-running gaming communities, but it has seemed to be dying a slow death. And then there's Twitter. I really liked Twitter for a while, but I was winding down my use of it and then deleted all of my accounts outright in mid-2023.

I had also been accumulating a pretty large list of gaming challenges I had done, and for most of them I either had existing write-ups or huge YouTube playlists. I had been thinking about taking my lengthy plays of these games and editing them into nice, digestible videos but I didn't know who the audience would be. After all... I'd much rather read about a weird variant play than watch a video about it. So I reasoned... with the content already largely done and my creative outlets shrinking, why not make a blog-styled site like the ones I actually enjoyed? And here we are.

Playthroughs Done in 2023

• Final Fantasy Legend II (GB Hack) Classic Jobs:
  This was actually finishing up a playthrough that I had started in March 2022 and abandoned shortly after. I had played five sessions and needed four more in 2023 to win. The rules started to feel pretty arbitrary on this one, but I like the game and I'm still glad I did it. There weren't any real standout moments in it although it was fun to abuse the trashcan bug.
• Shining Force (Wii) Minimum Party:
  It was really quite random to pick up and complete a run that I had originally played and documented in a GameFAQs forum roughly seven years earlier, but I don't really want to leave incomplete playthroughs in my backlog. It was fun! I liked being able to stream this and it went well. My favourite part was the little chunk where one of my children joined in.
• Final Fantasy II (GBA) Classic Jobs:
  I had been talking about this script for literally years. I was glad to finally do it. And the script was pretty good! I liked seeing how this game handled with stricter job roles. What was funniest, of course, was how badly it broke down during the Soul of Rebirth. I may still need to complete that "normally".
• Final Fantasy IV (SNES Hack) Classic Jobs:
  This wasn't what I originally envisioned but it was actually really cool, too. It was a delight to play a game that has so many options available and yet typically has relatively linear gameplay; it felt like there were aspects of a game I always knew that I was getting to explore for the first time. It was so fun playing the one really long session, especially the battles with the Eblans and Rubicante.
• Chrono Trigger (SNES) Holiday Challenge:
  I may have been emboldened by my Final Fantasy II script - and this one may have emboldened me further! After the first session, this script worked spectacularly and it was so fun to play this game, which I love but hadn't played in most of a decade. Playing this game without Crono is quite an experience, and one I would frankly recommend for the same reasons as what I said about FF4: it's so cool to see what else can be done with a game one knows so well.

Other Achievements in 2023

In addition to the playthroughs I did this year, I also spent kind of a gross amount of time retroactively documenting some of my own playthroughs. As of now, at the very end of 2023, they're all done! Roughly 20 playthroughs mostly very thoroughly written-up with video embeds and screenshots where available. I am glad I won't have to do that again... and still mostly glad that I did it.

Even more recently, I added my old Top 10 Lists onto this site. Very exciting.

I didn't play a lot of new releases this year; the only big one I played at all was The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, which I did play a lot in May and June. Much more recently, like in November, after a weekend away with friends, we all became a bit obsessed with Vampire Survivors. I may have 100%ed that including DLC like 1.5 times (Switch and mobile plus kids' profiles) in a few weeks.

Backing me up a bit, according to Nintendo my year looked like this:

Yeah. That's a lot of Tears of the Kingdom. I kind of forgot that I spent so much time on Age of Calamity early this year, but I really wanted to complete it before Tears of the Kingdom came out and I had a periods of illness when I couldn't work and really sunk some hours into it. I liked Age of Calamity, actually; it's the first Warriors-style game that has interested me.

As for Super Mario Maker 2, I haven't written about it here yet, but in September my kids and I collaborated on a 40-course super world entirely based around remixes of 2-3 from the original Super Mario Bros. I am actually very proud of it. The content ID is 9RD-GP7-VGG where I can only assume "VGG" stands for "very good game". I think I'll elaborate on this in another post.

Steam has a very different opinion of me:

Besides WorldBox taking up 80% of my playtime because my kids and I kept leaving it on for days at a time, there were only a couple Steam games I put any time into at all. Zero new releases. It was not a hot year for PC gaming for me.

I just got Sea of Stars as a Christmas present but I probably won't stream that, nor am I planning a novelty playthrough.

Plans for 2024

So what am I planning? I actually have a ton of ideas. My list has well over 30 of 'em, which is more than I could reasonably expect to complete within a couple of years. Some of them will require some hacking and/or scripting.

Realistically, I've got a few ideas for more Classic Jobs runs where for some reason the ones that are calling out to me most are Breath of Fire (the first) and Lufia (the first). I also have somewhat freaky ideas to do it for Star Ocean 2 (PSX) and Valkyrie Profile.

There are some older challenges I'd kind of love to revisit. I'd love to re-do the Phantasy Star IV Gratitude Challenge but with modified rules (if that community is still able) and generally I want to give that game some more love.

However... given all my recent success with scripting I've got two FF1 things I'd love to do that would require some external programs. One is FF1 but with blue mages (and yes, I am aware of Final Fantasy Renaissance), and the other is finally getting the Final Fantasy Monster Party fully working and making use of that.

Besides any new playthrough, I might editorialize just a little bit. I have some ideas for that too.

This site ain't the height of interactivity; I really have no idea who is reading this. Although this blog partly arose from the sad state of social media, I very recently got an invite to Bluesky and might be using that a bit to connect with people I've missed since Twitter, like The Well-Red Mage. For now, at least, I'm at bsky.app/profile/freshfeeling.bsky.social as FreshFeeling. You can also find me on GameFAQs and Discord. You can say hi if you like, or not. Either way, I'm happy you're here, and I wish you a wonderful 2024.