aniki

I cracked on Prime Day and picked up a Backbone for my phone, which has led to a lot of my battery disappearing into Skies of Arcadia via Dreamcast emulator. It's f–kin' great.

There's a new Kishi Bashi album coming out later this year; three tracks have been released so far and every single one has surprised the hell out of me in the best possible way.

He's always had a bit of eccentricity, mixing genres and arrangements in ways that are often surprising, but after a relatively "normal" pop album - 2019's Omoiyari - I was expecting a return to the expansive orchestral stuff.

Instead, we've got a bright, bouncy, 70s disco and funk-themed thing coming down and I'm loving it.

Come back to Star Rail

I thought about it a while back, spent over an hour re-downloading the client, and then was immediately put off by how much I had to catch up on. At least with ZZZ I'm in on (kinda) the ground floor.

For my sins, I have started Zenless Zone Zero, or ZZZ, the new gacha nonsense from Hoyoverse (Genshin Impact, Honkai: Star Rail, etc.). I'm not sure how much I actually like it, though.

I think it wants quite badly to be a Persona game. It's got a social "real world" layer of gameplay where you walk around a cosy not-Tokyo-I-swear neghbourhood and talk to people, visit stores, or run errands. There's a video store that you can run in a sub-Yakuza minigame.

More obviously, it's got that P5 thing of every UI screen looking totally different, except where P5 just slapped a new lick of paint onto a consistent underlying structure, the number of different screens, resources, upgrade paths, to-do lists and storefronts in ZZZ means that they don't just look different, they all work differently, too. This is even more apparent playing on PC (or, I assume, PS5), where the button functions aren't even the same from screen to screen. I don't imagine there will ever be a day where I'm familiar enough with all the slight variations to be able to move smoothly through the UI. I'll be checking the prompts every single time.

Combat is goodish; it's pretty button-mashy but you can chain together combos between the three members of your squad in a few different ways. It really does benefit from buttons, though – I've mostly been playing with my phone touchscreen, but a couple of tougher missions did necessitate an Xbox pad because in the heat of battle I wasn't reliably hitting the dodge button.

As a whole package, it feels a bit overwhelming. Not just for the usual gacha-game nested dolls of upgrade paths and materials, but the way you've got to navigate the mundane environment with a camera thats a little too close, a little too low and a little too sluggish, and the number of different things you've got to keep track of. Maybe it'll slow down at some stage, but I don't recall Arknights or Star Rail throwing this much stuff at you, this aggressively, this early on in the game.

The music's great, though. The battle themes are all dubstep bangers.

I assume there's also no question about the impact all my terraforming has on the planets' native life. There's an implication that I'm actually returning them to their original state, but having to use all these big alien monoliths definitely feels like I'm just running roughshod over whatever was here before.