First Yooka Laylee which I had a rather large accident with about a week ago. See, I just became a father recently and so in order to help with the child care I have moved my computer to the area of the house where the baby sleeps, it's not an ideal setup but it allows me to get a bunch of stuff done while not leaving the newborn unattended, for a temporary setup its not so bad. My computers power cable is plugged into one of those power strips that have the little on/off switches on them and then that power strip is next to me on the floor. As I was playing Yooka Laylee, pretty much the moment I picked up a Pagie (the game's main collectable, for those that haven't played) I accidently hit the off switch on the plug for my PC with my big fat arse and my computer abruptly shut down. When I resumed, probably because I lost power as the game was saving, my file had been corrupted and I could not load my game. I had to delete the file and start over again, but I can't be mad about this really because this is a case of me wasting my own time.
What I can be kind of mad about is just how stupidly Yooka Laylee is designed. One of the reasons I was hating it so much my first time round is that I would be exploring a level and be getting blocked every few minutes or so because I would start a level challenge only to find that I didn't have the right ability to actually clear it, a whole bunch of the pages across the first three levels are just completely inaccessible without skills gained from later stages. This is fine in a lot of other games, Metroidvanias do it all the time but in a well designed game it happens once every so often, a little goody to keep in the back of your mind to come back to when you fill out your move set but in Yooka Laylee its ALL the fucking time and it was pissing me the hell off.
In this second attempt though I said fuck ALL that and I'm basically blasting through each stage, getting the powers and the bare minimum pagies to unlock the levels and then once I have everything I'll come back and clean up to get the 100 I need to beat the game. I'm hating the game a lot less now that I know to play it that way but even though I have a bit more momentum going this time the game just generally still feels very bland and soulless.
Xenoblade on the other hand isn't particularly badly designed, I'd say generally speaking it's a good game when you're moving the plot along and having fights with monters your level but MY GOD does this game love to fuck you about with just the most boring area design and the dumbest side quests I have ever seen in an RPG, I am starting to remember why I gave up on it back when I played it on the Wii.
I got to a town called Aclamoth? Akalamoth? Alakazam? I can't remember but it's full of bird people and this place is fucking HUGE. It looks like the kind of place that would sit right at home in some massively popular MMO with other players running around shopping, handing in quests and looking for raid groups but Xenoblade isn't an MMO it's a single player game and therefore this area sucks shit. It's full to bursting with side quests from various NPCs and all of these guys are spread way the hell around so just running from one exclamation mark to the next took fucking ages and then once you've done that the quests you get aren't any fun either
One quest had me going back to an area called Tephra Cave, an area from the start of the game with level 5 monsters (I'm 40-ish) to collect NINE randomly spawning little blue balls. If that isn't the very definition of a time waste then I don't know what is. I don't mind quests to kill X number of Y if it's done in the current area and killing those monsters is a nice excuse to get some bonus EXP but half of the quests from this town are like that Tephra Cave shit and I can barely stay awake playing it.
You COULD argue, if you were a stupid twat, that these are optional side quests and if they suck so much I should just skip them but fuck you if you think that because I paid what? somewhere in the realm of 3-5000 yen for this shit. I didn't pay my hard earn money to NOT engage with its features and content, I'm not a shitty journo that plays only easy mode and then shelves the game for life, miss me with that shit.
Anyway I've finished most of those quests now so hopefully by the time I have another backlog update I'll have something nicer to say as the plot, which admittedly I am quite into, progrresses.
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