The duality of man... being able to feel really good and terrible about my life.

I've still been working on commissions. Having a physially demanding job has made it much harder to get artwork done, and when I'm drawing I'm literally only working on commissions. I can't help but resent it. I want to get back to my creative projects. I even sometimes feel like working on Nocti again! But doing any perrsonal art means commissions are not getting done, and people have paid for that...

Work has been a little rough lately as well. It's still a fantastic job, don't get me wrong! But there's the possibility of an upcoming event that I'm dreading. I don't want to talk about it in any detail for privacy reasons. I've already been consoled by my boyfriend, and I know no matter what the outcome is I will survive. But it still sucks. It sucks so bad.

Getting paid is nice. I like having money. Not that I've ever not had money, I just have enough now to actually buy fun things. I got myself a nice backpack and a birthday gift for my brother. I've also got a new keyboard coming to replace my old semi-broken one. I've also gotten a lot of little gifts for my boyfriend because I love spoiling them hehe. I can also finally support more people on patreon and make monthly payments to charities. It feels good. But I also can't help but feel guilty.

I'm very good at feeling guilty for every good thing that happens in my life.

Oh, also: DQM The Dark Prince? Holy fuck is this game the stupidest thing I have ever played. The gameplay? Fine. Interesting evolution of the old games. The fucking everything else??? Holy shit it's so cheap and terrible. This game feels like it was made on no budget. The story is absolute ass, the characters have no personality (yes I know it's supposed to be a side story to DQ4, why did they do that and not make it its own thing???) and I don't care about their troubles, and the fucking cutscenes.

Oh.

My.

God.

It literally feels like I'm playing a bargain bin ps2 game... but even bargain bin ps2 games had better directed cutscenes than this. There's one scene where the main character goes to fight in a human tournament. You don't get to see any of the fights. Afterwards a character comes over and tells you that a town of humans might be thinking of doing something bad to monsters, so you have to stop them. Hard cut to another main character looking out the window and saying, "I can't believe [player character] imprisoned all those people..." Like HUH??? I DID WHAT?? CAN YOU AT LEAST SHOW ME DOING IT? As a person who likes monster taming games and has never played DQ4, I have no fucking context for what's going on. Can I please have a normal-ass story about needing a magic plug to stop my tree island from sinking into the ocean??

Also while I like some of the corny-ness of the translation, it's a little much, especially when the story is trying to be serious and all the monster characters are thrown puns left and right.

I'm still going to try to beat it. Despite it's presentation, the gameplay is... pretty good. There's a large variety of monster designs even with all the recolors. And there's auto battle/speed up battle functions. If anything this will make Digimon Time Stranger will feel extra refreshing to play afterwards.

This is a really long blog post, so I'm signing off now. It's late and I'm going to a festival tomorrow.

Current Mood: Burdened with Thoughts