First Impression | Fire Emblem: Awakening

This last Friday I had to stop by my university bookstore to pick up my textbooks for this quarter. It's impossible for me to go into a bookstore and not stay for at least half an hour to peruse, so I wandered upstairs to where the store also happens to have an electronics section. With a shelf that has "GAMING" in nice, prominent letters over it. I've been pretty starved for video games lately, so I went in just to see what they had.

What they had was a game I'd been wanting for a long time: Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon. And Fire Emblem: Awakening. I'd never played a Fire Emblem game before, but since Lucina and Robin are going to be playable characters in the upcoming Smash Bros., I'd been thinking of giving it a try. And so before I knew it, I left the store with both Luigi's Mansion and Awakening.

I played both of them when I got home that night, and a first impressions post on Dark Moon will be coming soon. First, I'll talk about my first impressions of Awakening.

So far, I like it. It's a very different type of game from others I've played in the past; I've never played a strategy RPG like this, nor have I played any other Fire Emblem games before. I was worried that it would be too complicated to learn, but the in game tutorials are easy to follow so far.

I have no idea how the stats or different weapons in this game work, but I'm hoping I'll learn as I progress. The way the characters move and battle reminds me of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games, since you can only move a certain amount of spaces per turn, and attack in turns.

What's really drawing me into this game is the story. I absolutely love the animation used for intro cutscenes, and I wish all the cutscenes could look like that. The scenes using the chubby sprites just don't covey the scene that well, although using character art over the dialogue helps. The voice acting is also great, which is a relief, because fully-voice acted video games are not always stellar. (I'm looking at you, Xenoblade Chronicles and Super Mario Sunshine). The characters are also interesting, if a bit stereotyped right now, and wow, Chrom is really attractive. There's a lot of characters though, so I wonder how much development is going to happen.

First Impression: Chrom is really hot.

I've already been spoiled on one of the major plot twists of this game but it doesn't really matter since I know next to nothing about the rest of the plot, so hopefully I'll be able to enjoy the rest of the story as it unfolds.

So far I'm really enjoying this game and I can't wait to explore more into the world of Ylisse. Sorry I don't have much to say, I've only played an hour into the game so far and everything is so new to me that I don't have much of an opinion yet. Maybe I'll post an update when I'm a bit further in. Looking forward to it!

Goodbye, Quizilla

The end of an era

Today I learned of a heartbreaking fact: Quizilla is shutting down for good. I'm actually quite sad about this. Writing my silly little fanfictions and taking quizzes was my life for a good part of 2007, and although I now look back and cringe, I still have a lot of fondness for the site and how it introduced me to the world of fanfiction and fandom communities.

After learning of this, I logged into my old account and salvaged my stories. I copied and pasted them into word documents so I could save them, because again, I have a lot of fondness for them, and rereading them gives me a good nostalgic laugh. A quick tumblr search revealed I am not alone in feeling this way, as dozens of posts lament the end of Quizilla, a site, which gave many of users (me included) their writing start. It's just funny, how a site that hosted so many of our old shames and cringe-worthy writings can still stir up these feelings. 

I actually wonder what demographic was using Quizilla recently. I would say that 2006-2009 was the peak of Quizilla's popularity, and the majority of the users then seemed to be in middle school, and are now in the end of high school/college. However, back in 2007 when I was using Quizilla, there wasn't much in the way of other sites for fandoms to gather. Today we have Youtube, tumblr, deviantART, all of which are infinitely more popular than Quizlla when it comes to fandom communities. So who was using Quizilla for these last five years? Still middle schoolers?

Anyways, Quizilla, you were my first step into the crazy world of fandoms. Even if my writing was the worst, most terrible drivel to come out of my brain, I still have a crazy sense of love for you. I'll always remember the hours spent updating my Naruto OC fanfiction and taking Seven Minutes in Heaven quizzes (girls only, of course). 

It's been real, Quizilla. Godspeed.

If you want to read my post about revisiting Quizilla for the first time in years, check out this post.

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I'm back!

After a sustained absence over the summer, I have finally returned to my blog. I didn't expect to leave it for so long, but between a vacation, work, and research, I didn't have much time to write. Now school is right around the corner so I don't expect I'll be having much more time in the future either, but I'm serious about my desire to write and blog more, so I'll try to make it a point to blog regularly even during the school year.

As for the blog itself, there are a lot of changes coming up. I'm planning a complete overhaul with a new theme, new title, and new URL, which has already changed. I'm hoping I can figure out a way to structure the scheduling of my posts to fit everything I want to blog about; this is a personal blog with no particular topic, but I might try to post about certain topics on certain days, just to give the blog a more structured feel than it had when I just posted whatever came to mind. (Of course, there will still probably be plenty of that).

I'm so excited about starting to blog more seriously, and I hope you enjoy reading! Thanks as always!