I’m reading 100 Kanojo

“I agreed to date you because I love you, Karane. Headstrong, but still very gentle. Pretty shy, and not entirely honest, but even that was so very, very cute. On that day, right here, the person I fell in love with was the tsundere Karane.

“If the way that you are right now is the Karane that you really want to be, then I’ll do everything I can to support you in that. I’ll do my utmost to love you just as much as I loved the Karane you used to be. But if you want to effect this change because you hate the Karane you used to be, then I can’t accept that. I’ll never let you disown that Karane, because nobody in the entire world loves her more than I do.”

This goes pretty damn hard for a harem comedy.

(no subject)

There’s this thing that happens to a lot of game series, where the first game in the series has overcomplicated, kinda user-hostile mechanics. Sometimes it’s too much number-crunching, other times it’s an excessive focus on “realism.” It’s interesting and not like a lot of other games, but it’s also difficult and sometimes unfun.

Then the sequel comes around, and they throw most of that out the window to “appeal to a wider audience.” Stats and skill trees are drastically simplified, tactical options are reduced, points of failure are more forgiving, and you spend a lot more time killing people in ways that look stylish and awesome. And it’s fun to play, but I feel like it was a bit too much of a course-correction. Some of the original stuff made the game unique, and I think it could have been fixed rather than abandoned.

(You might think of Mass Effect, but what happened to Mass Effect was mild compared to Brothers in Arms. I’ve been told Splinter Cell got it even worse.)

(no subject)

In retrospect, the reason Spec Ops: The Line failed to have any meaningful impact for me was because I have a terminal case of “so, what action should I take now?” I’m not really concerned with whether the actions I already took were terrible, except to the extent I can learn from them to take better actions in the future. The game kept trying to rub my nose in “This action you took was terrible! You’re a terrible person!” and I kept going “Okay, fine, I’m a terrible person. Whatever. I don’t care. What action can I take now in order to make this situation right, or as close to right as I can possibly get it?”