Titanfall 2: Standby

It’s not every decade I decide to play an FPS game.

But having mechs be front and center is probably one of the few ways to get me to do it.

Music of the Week #455

It was inevitable

So aside from being delayed with my game posts, I have to address the obvious thing right now. Cold Steel 2’s OST cover makes no attempt to hide the enormous spoiler to Cold Steel 1’s ending, a plot point that I consider one of the best things Cold Steel pulls off and makes sitting through it worth it. I tried to keep that under wraps but since 2’s OST cover is so up-front about it, I see little reason to hide it anymore. I won’t address it right this moment but I will when the relevant track come up in the following weeks. Oh boy, you’ll hear some actual complaints without Cold Steel 1 nostalgia barring me now.

Music of the Week #454

Change of plans

While the next game related write-up is finished, I decided that I’d reschedule it because I appreciate the game enough to provide better visual examples. While this would have been relatively simple to do, the game in question had me go to NG+ mode that reset my inventory and progress so I’d prefer to play the game some more again to get better shots since I enjoyed the game enough and want to convey all the good parts I go over. So until I make more progress, we’ll just get to some other games down the list.

This week’s theme will conlude Cold Steel 1’s OST spotlight with the last boss theme. I’ve talked about this last week about how the last hour of Cold Steel 1 is where the game is at its best when all the political implications and the likes come under scrutiny beyond the classroom antics of 9 non-characters. Both CS1 and CS3 run the problem of ending things off in an incredibly interesting cliffhanger before the next game dials down the circumstances incredibly to a point that it retroactively ruins the experience of the preceding game’s build-up. We’ll get into more when we move on to Cold Steel 2 proper next week.

Music of the Week #453

Still a bit late

The next post of the summer-game-a-thon has the bulk written up and now in its finishing touches. It hasn’t exactly been busy these past few days but it’s been oddly tough to find some good time to sit down and write.

Let’s talk about objective “good” of Cold Steel 1, the ending sequences. Much like Trails in the Sky FC, Cold Steel 1 ends in a very suspenseful cliffhanger after the school-festival concludes and a certain somebody decides to take things very personally against a very particular individual. It’s probably no spoiler at this point as to who does what to another, but the reveal here is probably the best thing about Cold Steel 1’s development so I won’t say here but a cursory glance at Cold Steel 2’s OST will make things really obvious.

Music of the Week #452

Finally

We got a couple more posts to go for my summer project but I’m not sure I can entirely promise that I can churn one each week since I’m on writer’s bloc after binge writing two of them. With that said, at least I got some stuff out now and don’t feel guilty only doing music posts.

Next to Atrocious Raid, this track plays during those climatic moments that make up for a chapter’s slower-paced events preceding it worthwhile. For all its faults, Trails manages to pull some context-specific climaxes for each chapter but since this is Cold Steel, you can only make students being involved with stopping domestic terrorism exciting since they don’t end up killing anyone. Nonetheless a pretty great theme that fits the amount of heroism kids can muster against uncertain odds.

Darksiders 3: Rise from the Ashes

Let’s get the ball rolling.

Finally getting through some of these write-ups I’ve been talking about for months and Darksiders 3 is first up on the list. Well, more than DS3, I also talk about 1 and 2 a bit as well since my enjoyment of it is derived off the series as a whole.