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media diary - november 2024

[09/11/2024] RIDGE RACER TYPE 4

one of november's recurring sentiments, for me at least, was the need to persevere. this feeling echoed throughout each passing day as fear for an uncertain future began to build itself up, but in times of uncertainty OPTIMISM is vital. i was reminded of this when playing RIDGE RACER TYPE 4, which i made a mini-video about exclusively for patreon.

i'd already started editing my WONDERSWAN video at this point, which i was working on all month, but took a moment to stop and make this side video about R4 because i had felt overwhelmingly that its messaging, a sense of uneasy hope for the new millennium ingrained and hard-coded into every asset of its aesthetic design, was an important reminder. for a racing game to elicit this feeling is really cool to me, because with every race comes the chance to race again, whether you come out on top or fall behind you always have another try and you can always improve. keep your eyes on the road. my interpretation probably came as a result of watching THE GIRL WHO CONQUERED TIME last month, a movie that smacked me in the face, a movie that told me there's so much to live for and there's always a tomorrow and that lingering on the past is futile.

this also singlehandedly got me into ridge racer in general -- i had no idea up until now that this series was so fun, and later in the month i gave the PSP's ridge racer game a try, which is also dummy amounts of good and i'd easily recommend as a starting point. nothing can match R4's soundtrack, though, which has persisted decades later as its own high-quality assortment of tunes. people who have never touched the game know of its hotness, its iconic status as a product of the Y2K era, and it maintains its quality today compared to modern equivalents purely thanks to the artistry involved. really, there's nothing else like it.

[13-30/11/2024] EVANGELION

there's a lot i could say about this, but it's truthfully so monumental that it's gonna just persist through how i make things in the future. there's no way i can put into words how watching this series made me feel, because even trying to do so feels antithetical to what it communicates. this wasn't even my first time, i watched the original series back in 2021 and i don't remember how it made me feel then but rewatching made me realise just how, in the sneakiest and most subtle of ways, it probably had a giant effect on my work. evangelion answered a lot of questions for me. evangelion put a lot of things into perspective for me. evangelion is a feeling.

i'll tell you that the urgent optimism established by RIDGE RACER TYPE 4 and especially the forwards-looking hopefulness from THE GIRL WHO CONQUERED TIME bleed through here. if there's anything i "got" from this series, it's the same line of thinking i was already led into prior. it pointed a mirror right at me, spiritually. everyone i've talked to has different takes and opinions on this, and i deeply respect that there's no one way to enjoy it -- it's like a test of artistic interpretation, in which there are no wrong answers. like all art you get out of it what you get out of it, which is why i refuse to go into detail about what i think of it.

funnily, i have the wonderswan project to thank for my rewatch, i decided to check evangelion out again on a whim because i talked about a wonderswan evangelion game in the video and needed appropriate footage to edit with. the wonderswan indirectly changed my life. lol.

as i write this i'm Still reeling from this watch through, i'm in my post-eva state, and i have to be really careful in not being obnoxious as hell about it. the blog for next month is gonna be full of stuff i watched basically just as a result of evangelion. my apologies in advance!

[14/11/2024-] DRAGON QUEST III

at last, i played a second game from this year! shin megami tensei V was just an updated rerelease, so surely this will be my actual "game of the year" game -- and it's -- it'-- i-- it's a remake...

i don't tend to have any interest in square enix's "HD-2D" range of RPGs, not necessarily because i vocally dislike the graphical style as many others do but just because they riff on existing RPG tropes from games i'm unfamiliar with. they cater to fans of square's beloved super nintendo RPGs, and one was even an outright remake of LIVE-A-LIVE, which is the only one i did kinda wanna check out and only didn't because buying games is expensive. basically, these just haven't really been for me, as someone whose RPG experience is heavily limited.

even despite that, this DRAGON QUEST III remake has been kind of intriguing to me ever since its reveal in 2021. it's a game i've wanted to play anyway, and so this remake, one that's fine-tuned for beginners, seemed like the perfect opportunity to really properly get into DRAGON QUEST and play III, the most important entry in the series. i got excited over the remake because i knew i'd be eating good, that this is destined to be a good time, and i was RIGHT.

DRAGON QUEST III is ultra-engaging, immediately some of the most fun i've had with an RPG. it changed my mind on the entire genre, and unveiled to me the Secret Sauce that makes so many RPGs work. there was a certain point, when i'd unlocked the world map and went exploring around, that i found a random cave in the northwest and checked it out. it had no relevance to the story, it was nowhere near my objective, and yet it was a fully-detailed cave with a completely unique look and feel. it was just there, waiting. the sense of adventure that this brought blew my MIND.

sure, this is a modern remake of a famicom RPG, so it's all fancy and new, but this is part of its original design -- everyone i've talked to about DQ3 has said that the remake really doesn't change much about the core game, so this liberating, adventurous feeling, one that's on-par with modern open world game design, was just always like that. these chunsoft guys were doing breath of the wild three decades before breath of the wild. it's singlehandedly altered my perspective on games, this is some real good quality videogaming, not to mention the sheer customizability of your party. DRAGON QUEST III has it all, and it always had it all. it's no wonder enix were good with releasing a remake that's just 1:1 the same game unchanged, because they had the balls to know it matches the depth of triple-A open worlds being released now. they get to get away with it.

[25/11/2024] MEGALOPOLIS

heheheheheeheh ok this is some freak shit

i watched this under the best possible circumstances: in a voice call where we were all shit talking it in the text chat and the movie was in 720p with a bunch of random broadband-induced stuttering. i wouldn't have it any other way. i think if i watched this normally, in a theater or on a bluray copy or whatever, i'd lose my mind. i have no idea what i watched, it was a nightmare and i basked in every second.