Some games I like to play!

 22/01/2026 -

 Today i thought about writing something a bit more light-hearted than my previous posts: some of the games I like!

 Recently I've been reminiscing about playing the Kingdom Hearts games again. I played through most of them on my Playstation 4 a few years ago, and I've been watching a lot of lore videos again. The thing with those games is, the story really interconnects with the gameplay in a way, like the way each character reacts and moves is explained through their behaviours and stories. I love the combat system, especially Birth By Sleep's. I think that a cooldown based system is much better than a meter than runs out, because some attacks do require more MP points than others, but even if you only have 1 MP, you can cast any of the magic in the game, which doesn't really make sense. With cooldowns, you don't have that consistency problem, you have to really gauge what attacks you do in what order, because if you spam all of your attacks, specifically in the end-game, you will find yourself having to wait that some attacks recover so you can use them again. I find it more strategic that way.  

 I love the Kingdom Hearts franchise, but to be honest, I've only finished Birth By Sleep, Kingdom Hearts 1, and the rest I played until at least half I would say. But way before playing them, like probably 10 years ago, I watched Let's Plays of all of the games, so that's why I don't have much of a need to complete them. But one of my goals is to finish all of them, or almost all of them, because Re:Chain of Memories doesn't fascinate me as much as the other ones, but I can consider playing it someday.

 I do miss not knowing certain games, and experiencing them for the first time. One example of that is Alice Madness Returns. The first time I even knew of it's existence was when I was 8 years old, I loved watching a French gaming youtuber, and he played that. I remember I coudn't watch most of it because it's kind of a "horror"/platformer/action game, so it had a lot of horror-esque elements, like dolls, monsters, and stuff an 8 year old kid would be afraid of. Still, I absolutely loved the concept of Alice from Alice in Wonderland being in a mental hospital, a complete mess, having visions about the horrifying Mad Hatter and all of the other characters depicted in such a... I would say a Burton-esque way. 

The story of that game is also very poignant, at least for me when I was 8: 
Alice went through a fire when she was little that happened in her home, killing her entire family. After the fire, she was placed in a mental hospital because she had gone completely mad, saying she was the culprit of the fire. While playing the game, you discover "memories", small audio-clips, or sometimes cutscenes, of events that happened before the fire. At the end of the game, Alice discovers that the person who started the fire, was none other than her doctor, Bumby. 

I'm sorry if I ruined the story for you, I'd still recommend playing or even watching someone play it, because I left out details and I couldn't even begin with the whole atmosphere of the game.

 I haven't been playing a lot lately, I've been mainly working so I don't have the same time I had before. Although, I recently downloaded a game called "City Of Heroes" which is an old MMORPG about creating your own superhero or villain, you can customize their appearance and their attacks aswell, so I thought about giving it a try. Turns out, it has been discontinued a long time ago, but fans have created fan-servers where people can still play the game, with their custom rules or mods. So I've been playing a little bit on the Europe server "Unity", and it's quite fun! I was looking for an MMO where I didn't have to sink my whole life into it to be able to compete or have fun. I can just log in, play for about half an hour or even less really, and then log out and I'm completely satisfied. What I particularly love about it, is the customization of the characters. I think I spent more time doing new characters than actually playing the game. I can recreate literally anyone. 
Well, almost anyone. I convinced my friend to play with me, and we tried doing Shane (him) and Ilya (me), and it worked out except for the hair and helmet. Surprisingly, there is no hair like Ilya's. I wish I had a picture of it, but I deleted that character because he didn't look great. The graphics are very 2000. We can see the polygons, and the menus are super dated, but I love that. I love retro graphics.

 A franchise that will always have a place in my heart is The Legend of Zelda. I love Nintendo games, and Zelda will never cease to amaze me. I have a Switch 2 and I bought Tears of the Kingdom for it. I know I'm going to contradict what I just said, but bare with me: I don't really like Tears of the Kingdom. I played Breath of the Wild on the OG Switch, and I loved it! I felt like it was a breath (pun intended) of fresh air for the series. But after that, I felt like that was a good run and we could go back to the older, more traditional formula. Well, we certainly didn't get that. What we got is the same game, with just more area to go to. That's pretty much it to be honest. I'm being a bit overly critical, but that's because I really love this franchise, and it pains me that this game had so much potential, yet under-delivered in almost every aspect of it. When Breath of the Wild came out, everything was new, the mechanics, the map, the characters... With Tears of the Kingdom, it's really more of the same with a slightly different flavour. Except, there's more of it. And someone would think that's great, we got more of a good thing, except we got more quantity, and less quality. Everything in this game, I assume because of the performance of the Switch 1, is very surface level. There's no content to do in the Depths, they replicated the shrines and made them less fun and they literally reused the exact same map from the previous game. Nintendo's not known to be lazy, and this game isn't that, bit if feels like they didn't want to think of a new idea so they just grabbed the other game and rolled it over with a rolling pin so there would be more of it, but thinner. That's the most comparable metaphor I could come up with.

 I guess I could talk about literally every other game I played or like to play, but this is pretty much it for now. If someone's reading this and want to share their favourite games, feel free to comment or send me a message! 

 

 See you later!