Progress Report- April 2023

Hey, Gamers. April was a long month, but it went by so fast. I didn’t exactly accomplish everything I wanted, but it was still fairly successful. Josh had a mind-blowing month, and I think even he’s excited to read about it. Let’s get into it!

Spoilers for: The Walking Dead, Skyrim (early game), the glitches of Cyberpunk 2077, 12 Minutes, Undertale (early game), Yakuza 5, Stray, Finally Fantasy XV

The special game for this month was The Walking Dead: The Telltale Series. I wasn’t really excited to play this game, but that changed quickly. I haven’t watched The Walking Dead (aside from the first few episodes), mainly because a few people I used to know were obsessed over it and it brings back some bad memories. But wow did I love this game. I loved this game so much that I want the other 3 seasons so bad. I want to know what happens next. I know Clem is the main protagonist of the series, so I’m hyped for that. Here are the choices I made:

The only regrets I have are cutting Lee’s arm off and not agreeing with Lily about Ben. I thought it being Ben was too obvious (it was my first thought). I knew Lee died in the end, but I thought cutting his arm off would buy him a little more time. I was clearly wrong.
I loved so many of the characters. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know that I play a random game each month to broaden my horizons. I don’t usually finish the games. But I played this game almost constantly for days. I adored each second of it. I’m so excited about playing the other games and I will be playing them as soon as I get them. I got a platinum trophy so that’s great too. I love this game so much that at some point, I am going to write a post about it, but I need some time before I can articulate my thoughts. My favourite character was Katjaa, and my favourite twist was Duck getting bitten. I was expecting Lee to get bitten a lot sooner (I was expecting it early Episode 4 or late Episode 3) as I knew he got bitten from… it being an old game, I guess. It’s just common gamer knowledge, I feel.

Another game I finished this month was 12 Minutes. I got it on my phone via the Netflix games section (there’s some great games on there, go check it out if you haven’t already). It was alright, I guess. I ended up getting frustrated quite a bit and having to look up a guide. Then Josh’s brother spoiled the ending for me, but I had my suspicions anyway so it’s not too bad. It was nice to be able to ‘play a round’ of a game since a lot of the games I play don’t have that format. The ending was… fine. I think the best thing about it was the mystery of the brother (which obviously ended up being the player character). I also liked how cryptic the room that the father is in was. It was one of the only locations other than the apartment that the game takes place in, and I think it’s always really cool when a game gets you very familiar with a certain environment and then takes you out of that environment while giving you limited ability to do anything. It always creates the most interesting scenes.

I played a lot of Animal Crossing: New Horizons this month.  I got two villager photos which made me feel awesome. Ione (which is the only villager I have an amiibo card for, I needed her) and Teddy (my OG) both basically confessed their undying love to me by giving me their photos. That means I have the photos from Ione, Teddy, Tammy, Fang and Croque. If you read my Quote of the Week series this month, you will know that I spent a few hours getting Raymond on our island. One of our cats had to have an emergency operation (she’s healing really well and we’re just introducing her back to her sister and they have several glare-offs per day), so we had to wait around and Raymond was at the campsite, and it just felt right. Who did we get rid of? Erik. We loved Erik for the longest time, but I think right now lazy villagers aren’t our thing. He was also always sleeping when I went on, so he ended up being one of two villagers I was the least attached to. I really wanted it to be Kody that got the boot, but it was not. It took hours just to get Erik so I took it. Right now, I’m trying to get Bianca’s and Gayle’s photos. I’ve also been doing a little construction and if I find my Switch by the time this post is meant to go up, I’ll include some pictures. We’ve also been slowly working on Harv’s island. I think we have everyone apart from Kick and Sahara. We’re not in a rush to get them on the Co-Op, to be honest.

The day our cat went to the vet, we tried to keep things as peaceful as possible (she didn’t like that, though, and proceeded to inflict top tier chaos on our lives). We tried keeping her on the bed where she likes to sleep, but the best we could do was keeping her in the bedroom. She’s always been… uh, moody for lack of a better word, but I’ve noticed that she does like when I’m just talking calmly. So, I was going to stay in there with her and work on the Life Is Strange plats. Yeah, you noticed that there’s no spoiler for Life Is Strange, right? My save data was on the other PS4 and I didn’t want to disturb her. So, I installed Undertale. I thought I would be able to read the dialogue to her, all while practicing my reading as I’m dyslexic, and it might calm her (and me, because I was an anxious mess at this point). We’ve had two Undertale sessions and both of them ended badly. By ended badly, I mean the first one I lost my cat in a pile of stuff and I could hear her licking and the second one… I rage-quit. I decided to do a pacifist run because I wanted to be as calm as possible for my cat. It was not calm. The first thing I did was play on the wrong account. We were doomed from the start. I haven’t even met Sans yet. My checkpoint is the one where there’s cheese on the table and a little mouse hole. I keep dying to the stupid vegetable monsters. I know I need to catch the green vegetable after talking to them about dinner, but I also catch all of the white vegetables too because I am bad at this game. Three times I attempted the same thing and three times I ended up dying because of the stupid carrot.

In my journey of playing all of the Yakuza games that has spanned years at this point, in Yakuza 5 I… am still on Saejima. I actually wanted to finish the game this month and move onto Yakuza 6, but this game is so big that it feels like I’m not even going to finish the game this year. Usually, I spend roughly 35 hours on each Yakuza game (give or take 3-5 hours), with the exception of Yakuza 0, which was my first Yakuza game. Being on Saejima, that’s the second part of the game and I’m on 42ish hours already. I love this game so much. I don’t tend to spend too much time on side content since I’m just trying to get through the story (although I do side content when I run into it as I know that a lot of the fun in Yakuza games is the side content and I do still want to enjoy it), but I’ve completed Saejima’s hunting storyline (it was so good). I’ve moved onto Tsukimino, and I spent some time as a Santa while trying to find the homeless man. Saejima jumped to kidnapping (which makes me feel like prison really had an impact on him), and we’ve been staking out the place. While I feel like we could handle things differently, and that something is bound to go wrong, I’m enjoying playing as Saejima. I think I really struggled with Saejima’s combat in Yakuza 4, but I’ve gotten okay at it. Hey, I even trained to get a fake Tiger Drop (called the Tiger Dragon Drop). I don’t tend to train in Yakuza games, so I’m pretty proud of that. I’m having so much fun with Yakuza 5. I was worried I’d get overwhelmed with this game because of how different everything is, but I’m adoring it. I am hoping to be moved on to the next character by next month, though.

I kind of want to lump Stray and Skyrim together because they both had a similar outcome: sickness. Josh got the Platinum Trophy for Stray a long time ago (around the time it came out), and I love cats now (we have two) so I wanted to play it. I noticed pretty early on that it was causing me to feel dizzy. I stopped when I accomplished my small goal of finding all the notebooks, and my sickness calmed down pretty quickly as soon as I stopped.
Now, Minecraft is the main game I’ve noticed my very specific sickness with as it’s the first one I encountered it with way back in 2013. After discussing this with Josh, we thought it might be first-person perspective that caused it. I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 just fine, though. That’s why I thought I’d be okay when Josh changed my Skyrim character to first-person (he was looking for something for me). I was not okay.
So, Skyrim. I went to Bleak Falls Barrow with my faithful friend, Faendal (who helped me train my archery skills). I think I handled the whole thing pretty well. I even killed the spider. I got the Golden Claw, and I got to the last room before looking around and Faendal was… nowhere. That’s when Josh took over, to look for him for me. Now, it’s important to point out that I did have a slight headache before this but I always have a headache so that’s nothing. Josh confirmed my darkest fears – my beloved Faendal’s death – and he tried to reload a previous save, but it didn’t work out. Then he gave me my controller back, forgetting to switch the camera back to third-person mode, and I’d say the sickness came about pretty fast. I don’t know why this sickness comes about with certain games, but it’s super intense and now I don’t want to play Skyrim again. I know I will play it again, but right now the thought of it causes a little bit of anxiety because of how awful it made me feel. I know it’s not the games’ fault or anything, I just wish I knew the exact reason.

Since I’ve just mentioned Cyberpunk 2077, let’s talk about that now. I broke Cyberpunk 2077 the first time I played it this month. I think I was doing a NCPD Scanner Hustle job, and my HUD completely disappeared. Even the prompt to loot didn’t come up. I tried to fix it for a while. It was fine when I went on my bike but as soon as I got off, it was back to the glitch. The next time I went on my game, it was fine. I got the number for River Ward, I had a meeting with Judy’s associates and I drove to meet Panam to help her with what she needs. I didn’t spend too much time on Cyberpunk this month, spending most of my time with Yakuza to be honest, but I feel like I did pretty good considering my game broke. I was a little worried about driving in a video game again, but I did really well considering I’ve not had to drive in a game for a while and according to Josh, Cyberpunk’s driving is “janky” anyway.

In Pokémon Emerald, I’ve been taking it fairly slow. I got a Ralts, and I wanted to train it up before moving on. It now knows Confusion, and I got to the next city. I tried to storm the gym, but Roxanne fainted my Mudbro with her Nosepass so I, uh, rage-quit. I haven’t been on it since. Sorry, guys.

Josh has had a frankly scary good month. I’m so proud of him, and he has shown how much he can accomplish when he puts his mind to things. Things like 3 Platinum trophies.

First, Josh actually completed a full Final Fantasy game. He finished the Final Fantasy VII Remake a few months ago, but that’s not the full Final Fantasy VII story so I say it doesn’t count (as a joke). He finally finished Final Fantasy XV this month, after owning it for 6 years. He also restarted it, so he literally played the entire game in one month. He also got the Platinum Trophy in it! I am super proud of him for that. I could tell just finishing it meant a lot to him, so to not only finish it, but to also get the Platinum trophy was amazing. He defeated the Adamantoise on his first attempt! It was a super long boss fight, and I could tell it was hard for him to not rush it, but his slow and steady pace proved worthy of the victory. He also finished the DLCs for each of the party members.

He then moved onto a game called Tails of Iron which felt like he played, finished and got the Platinum Trophy for in like 24 hours. He said the combat was hard, but the voice of Geralt pushed him through (Doug Cockle voices the narrator of the game). My reaction was not as proud as I was when he got the Final Fantasy XV Plat, but I was still proud nonetheless.

His third Platinum Trophy came from No Man’s Sky. This was a game that he’s loved previously, and he always seems to go back to every couple of months. The platinum was difficult in the sense that it seemed tedious but he stuck with it. I was actually super proud of him for getting this Platinum Trophy because this game honestly seems really special to him, but he never seems to stick with it for long enough to accomplish much. Although, by this point, my “I’m proud of you” did start sounding a bit bitter and repetitive.

Lastly, he started playing Uncharted 4 again. He gets so frustrated with the Uncharted games but, again, he always comes back to them every few months because he hasn’t finished the series yet. I think he’s ready to just be done with it at this point, so hopefully next month will be the end of something he seems to think of as a chore. Like, he does like the series, but he doesn’t seem to enjoy it anymore.

But that’s it for this month, Gamers! As I’m writing most of this post on the First of May, I am so excited to tell you what the special game of this month is (HINT: the series has been mentioned in this list… and I haven’t played it yet). I hope you guys have an amazing month. See you next post!

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