Final Fantasy IV: Interlude + The After Years

Total Time to Complete: 44.5 hours

So… it’s been almost three years since the last review in this Final Fantasy Challenge. Obviously my grand plans of 12 games in 12 months did not come to fruition. But! I am not going to give up on at least getting through the whole series. And since I’m not limited by time constraints at this point, I’ve decided to include some more games in the series beyond the main numbered titles, namely direct sequels like Final Fantasy IV: Interlude and Final Fantasy IV: The After Years.

Why exactly has it been so long since the last review? Two main reasons. One, right after the Final Fantasy IV review, I had to move houses which took up a lot of my free time. Two, and more importantly, I just couldn’t get into Final Fantasy V, which I started right after finishing the last one. Spoilers for that review, which is still forthcoming, but my opinion on it hasn’t changed much since I dropped it to work on these games instead.

That being said, it also took me a really long time to finish The After Years. The Interlude chapter was quite quick, it was about 3 hours and didn’t really do much, but once I got to The After Years, it just kept going, and going, and going. It would be safe to say that I’m not a fan of these sequels, so let’s dive into exactly why.

As a quick note, this review is pretty much entirely about The After Years since it is actually worth talking about. The Interlude is too short and too similar to the original to have anything to say other than, it was a thing that happened. So let’s dig in.

Exploration

Looks pretty familiar

It is difficult to decide where to go with this section because, for the most part, the game world is identical to the one we already played in the original FF4. So for this section, and all the other sections as well, I will be focusing on the key differences.

The first key difference is that, since the game is played out in short episodes featuring different characters, the world in Interlude and The After Years never fully opens up. Each episode is isolated to a small section that the main characters need to navigate, and in some cases they will go through this same area multiple times. You also go back to the same areas in multiple episodes where nothing is different about it. Even near the end of the game where you are given a little more freedom, you are not rewarded for it, the world has nothing interesting to find. They essentially took a decently large world and shrunk it down into a bunch of repetition with nothing fun to do.

The second key difference is that there are a few new areas, namely the craters and the second moon. The craters add very little as they are short and, like everything else, are visited multiple times with no variation. The second moon serves as the new final dungeon like the moon did for the original game, and it plays out similarly, albeit even longer and more frustrating. I already didn’t like the final dungeon in FF4, and this final dungeon is just twice that, so it really was just a grind to get to the end.

I don’t know if there’s anything the game really could have done to make the exploration more interesting. Going back through old familiar areas is not inherently bad, but there is way too much of it, and they didn’t even bother to change up the enemies or items you get in those areas. I suspect it is a symptom of a larger problem, which I will get to shortly, but even just a little more effort into putting some variation in the old areas would’ve done a lot to make it better.

Battle System and Leveling

What is irks me with the battle system is that they could’ve just left it alone and it would still be one of the best the series has to offer. It is still snappy, crisp, and requires a lot of experimentation to figure out the best way to tackle enemies and bosses. The wrinkle they decided to add with this game (specifically The After Years, Interlude has no changes) is that there are moon phases that impact how powerful abilities are.

There are four types of abilities that are affected by the moon phases: basic attacks, black magic, white magic, and special abilities (which can be magic depending on the character). During every phase, one type will be enhanced while another is hindered. So for example, during a phase physical attacks will be 25% higher but special abilities will be 25% lower. The phase also affects which enemies spawn during random encounters.

The idea of phases is a decent one in theory. It encourages you to have a well balanced team that can handle any phase, and also pushes you to use more magic or special abilities when you otherwise wouldn’t. But in practice, you rarely have the option to create a balanced team, and once you do have the option to choose your team, you’re going to choose the characters you want to have and manipulate the phases to take advantage of your party. So in the end, the phases end up being more of an annoyance and you just blow tents at save points to cycle the phases to what you want.

The other major addition to the game are bands. A band is a combo move that can be performed by two or three characters that deals massive damage to enemies. Essentially the same idea as combo techniques in Chrono Trigger. The problem with bands though are that, unlike Chrono Trigger where you automatically get them based on the party and their levels, with bands you have to figure out which attacks/spells combine together by guessing. With this added hassle, I spent zero time trying to figure out what the bands, though some of them you get through story cutscenes. Another problem they have is that I generally found them to be less effective than just having the characters do their own thing. So yeah, the bands are pretty useless and I honestly forgot they were even in the game until I saw it while looking up other info. I have no doubt that when given the right attention, the bands are fun and break the game in various ways, but it was just never convenient to use. If you’re going to rip off Chrono Trigger like this, you might as well make it just as easy to use too.

Characters and Abilities

THOSE GRAPHICS!!!!

Speaking of characters, there are too damn many in this game. I think above all else, this is where The After Years really fails for me. When you have up to 21 characters that you can choose from by the end of the game, you don’t have time to invest in them all, so what is the point? You just end up in a situation where you are forced to use underleveled characters because the game says you have to, and when you get to the end game you choose the 5 or so you care about and the rest are thrown to the side. And by the time you get to the end of the game, the difficulty ramps up a lot so you have to stick with whoever you have at the highest levels anyway. So of course when I played through the game I just chose the characters I liked from the original game and threw the new characters away because they are garbage and pointless.

The main problem with the new characters is that in any other game they would be NPCs because that is how much effort was put into making them interesting characters. The only new character with any depth at all is Ceodore, and even then his only arc is that he feels he needs to prove himself to his dad, Cecil (who himself goes through a far more interesting arc of getting possessed, becoming the bad guy, and fighting to restore himself and fixing what he broke). And when you think about it, literally every other new character is going through the same arc, they are all trying to prove that they are worthy to one or more of the original characters. That’s it, they have no other purpose, they have no other goals or stances on what is going on in the game. The only difference with Ceodore is that he’s simply there for more of it, so you see a little more growth for him in that area. Most of the other characters already seem competent enough at the beginning so they have nowhere to go from there, they just suffer from low self-esteem.

Honestly, it’s fine that they wanted to introduce these new characters because they show that the original characters have grown since the original game and have other people involved with their lives now. But there was no reason to make them all playable too. What would’ve made the game way more interesting would’ve been if none of the old characters were playable, or maybe just temporarily, so that the new characters were forced to become the new heroes. You already have history with the old characters, so why would you want to play as someone else?

Difficulty Curve

Yeah, this sums up how useless the others are

Much like the original FF4, the difficulty curve of these games was very good. This makes sense since almost all of the enemies are from the original, with some new ones for flavor. The only real complaint I have about it is that, again because of the episodic nature of the game, you go through the initial curve so many times. Since each episode starts with a fresh character, you have to grind from nothing up to the low-mid tier over and over again. Only when you get to the last chapter and everyone is available do you see the curve go up from there.

And again like the original game, I never felt that the game was being cheap until the final dungeon when the regular enemies can take so much out of you. You get to a point where every fight is pretty easy to get through, but you have to fully heal every time in order to not get blown up randomly. It becomes just resource management of white magic through the whole dungeon, popping up to the surface if you happen to run out of tents/cottages. This is a totally valid way of doing things, the dungeon itself is the boss, I just got tired of it by the end because I was checked out from the game in every other way too.

Story Integration

They could’ve at least tried to make the menu more interesting

Since the integration of story is identical to that of FF4 from a gameplay perspective, let’s talk about the thing that’s been talked about this whole time, the idea of having episodic content in a game like this. When the game originally came out on the Wii, the episodes did come out as episodes, so you would get the new one, play through it, and wait a little while for the next one and play it. Neat idea in theory, but I think what really hampered them was the choice to have so many different characters that are given their own focus, so each episode is overly isolated. You have a bunch of characters doing things in parallel and you don’t get a sense for what is actually happening until you’ve played for 20 hours or so. Fewer, longer episodes with multiple characters in focus would’ve worked better.

I suspect that Square Enix figured this out too since the last two episodes are drastically different. While the first 8 episodes are very short, around 2-4 hours each depending on how quick you are, the ninth episode took me around 6 hours and the last episode clocked out to almost 15 hours. This implies to me that they realized the episodic thing wasn’t really working and they just dumped the rest of the game into one last episode to get it over with. I don’t know if that is actually the case or not, but it would answer why there was such a change in episode length.

In this case, I do not think that the episodic nature of the content helped the game. Again, I think it forced too much focus on too many characters without giving a strong sense as to what was actually happening until much later. The reason why so many other FF games get the story right is that they are focused on one character and the other characters get their time to shine as well as they support the main focus. The original story of Cecil works because he spends the whole game trying to make up for the terrible things he’s done, and the other characters both support and work against him at different times based on their needs. This game shows that splitting your attention between so many characters leaves all of them feeling hollow with little to no growth.

What could be done to make it better? One option, as I said, would be to just throw the old characters aside and just be NPCs to a new set of characters focused around Ceodore, who basically represents the next generation. Another option, fewer episodes with much longer arcs, and have them be a little more sequential instead of purely in parallel. That way, even with a mix of new and old characters, you can build up a full party in each episode and get somewhere satisfying with them.

Conclusion

Let’s face it, these sequels to FF4 are terrible, and I’m not going to pretend that they are worth anyone’s time. Among the rankings I have for the first four games in the series, this is down at the bottom. Yes, I would rather go back and play FF2 again before touching this again. When it comes right down to it, The After Years is just a boring game. FF2, for all of its flaws, has enough merit to keep it interesting and engaging, even when it’s frustrating like few games are. The After Years takes what is already an excellent game and ruins pretty much everything about it in order to create something insufferably mediocre. It’s a shame really. But on the plus side, the original FF4 is still there and still excellent.

Current Ranking

1. Final Fantasy IV

2. Final Fantasy I

3. Final Fantasy III

4. Final Fantasy II

5. Final Fantasy IV: The After Years

Year in Review: 2018

This review is going to be fully, internally focused because it needs to be. On a personal level, this year was incredibly disappointing. I am more frustrated with myself than I have been in a long time. Granted, it was a tumultuous year with a lot of unexpected events, but that is true of every year. No, what has truly frustrated me is that, as I write this, I am looking back on last year’s review and literally nothing I wanted to improve on has gotten better. In fact, they all just got worse.

2018 in Summary

There’s going to be a lot of negative in this review, so let’s start with some of the more positive things and just go through all the things that happened.

The biggest change for me this year was in my career as I left Amazon after almost 5 years working there. There were multiple reasons for this, but the main one is that the team I was on a year ago was dissolved, everyone scattered to other teams within the organization. That was really de-motivating given that the organization as a whole is barely-contained chaos and our team was a tiny beacon of sanity and good practices. By the time this happened I was also getting frustrated with other bureaucracy in the company that was hurting my ability to advance my career the way I wanted to. So, as everyone else on that team moved on to other opportunities, I decided to as well.

This change was followed by a month or so of enjoying the freedom of funemployment, then three months of job seeking. The end result is that I do have a new job lined up for 2019, and it’s in New York City. So I can already say that this new year is going to be a game-changer as my wife and I move across the country for new opportunities and experiences. I’m also going to be getting into a completely new industry for me, finance, so that will be exciting.

As an aside, I specifically pointed out in my review last year that I loved visiting NYC and could see myself living there for a few years, but doubted that it would happen. Way to show myself!

On the home front, we managed to stay in the same place for another year without moving, but that is obviously going to change very soon. If I’m honest, I’m not going to miss much about our current home aside from the space, and even then I could do with a little less of it so I don’t have so much to clean.

As far as trips went, there were a ton of them, but most of them were small, so no big vacation trips like we’ve done. The year started off strong with another fun trip to San Antonio for PAX South, can’t wait to go down again in a couple weeks. Shortly after that was an unexpected trip to Mexico City for a recruiting event that was a lot of fun despite the long days, and my wife took the opportunity to go to Vegas while I was gone.

From there, a short trip down to California for a family visit in March, then April came with another couple work trips so that our team could transition our work off before we split up. I got to visit Austin for the first time (liked it a lot, would enjoy visiting again) and Vancouver, BC for the first time in over a decade. It made me sad that it took so long to visit Vancouver again after so long because I barely remembered my first trip, and turns out it’s a fun city to visit. April rounded off with another yearly tradition, the spring wine barrel opening in Zillah. Always one of my favorite weekends of the year enjoying good wine and many of my closest friends. This is going to be one of the things I miss most about moving away, unless we find a way to make it work.

There were no other trips until August, where I went to Minnesota for the first time with a few friends to visit their family. Not normally something I would do, but I had just left Amazon and wanted to take a trip somewhere where my wife wouldn’t be upset if I went without her, so this fit the bill. It was a good trip overall, got kinda bored after a few days, but that’s just me having difficulty backing away from the need to be productive. After that, once the job seeking process got underway I was traveling around quite a bit. In the span of two weeks in November I: went down to Santa Barbara for an interview (didn’t get nor want that job); went to Disneyland two days later for a long weekend with my wife (this was planned before the interviews); went to New York City for some interviews (didn’t get those jobs either); and finished off with another trip to Vancouver, BC with my wife (also planned before, she was jealous of my trip earlier in the year so I had to take her). Other than that, the typical holiday trips to visit nearby family. Overall a lot of new places to see, and they were all great in their own ways.

Before we move away from the positives, there is one more event worth mentioning that is the highlight of my year. After 7 years of writing and false starts, my band finally got into the studio to record our second album. It was a night and day difference from our first recording. We knew better what to expect going in, having learned our lessons the first time around. We had a recording engineer with decades of experience with many well-known bands who helped in so many ways we didn’t anticipate. And with the time we put into making the songs, we executed better on every level, and we had the time to decide which songs we truly loved. The second album sounds amazing, I’ve listened to it dozens of times since we got the mixes and I expect to continue having it on heavy rotation. The mastering is happening next week from when I’m writing this, so the final product will hopefully be out this month. It is hard to express how proud I am of what we did together. It’s not the perfection you get from a professional band, but it embodies who we are, and I cannot think of a better way for the band to say goodbye (we knew going in that we were breaking up, so my moving had nothing to do with it).

Looking at the great things I just listed, the list of negatives from this year is short in comparison, but it’s really the pervasiveness that made it insidious. Trips are a lot of fun for me and recording an album is one of the most rewarding things I’ve ever done. But those are just blips when compared to the whole of the year.

On the work side of things, the only time I was really satisfied was in the first quarter when our team was still together. The transition was frustrating and the work the new team was doing just wasn’t fulfilling in the same way. And then I wasn’t even working for almost half of the year. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from this year it’s that I legitimately hate being away from work that long. I tried to get myself motivated to do some stuff on my own, but that didn’t work very well. I’ve come to accept the fact that I am 95% eternally motivated to do non-recreational activities.

On the health side of things, I feel like crap all the time these days. My exercise sputtered the whole year and it’s effectively dropped to zero by now. My diet has also gone to hell as sugar addiction got to me and my overall dissatisfaction led to making bad choices more often than not. It’s one of those things where the scale doesn’t show that much had changed, but I can feel it. Constant inflammation and fatigue plague me, and being unemployed has only exasperated it. I feel that I shouldn’t complain about it since my wife was diagnosed with arthritis this year, so she’s in a worse situation than me. But at least in my case, I know what causing it and I know how to fix it. I just don’t.

On the free time side of things, I again failed to improve in any way based on the goals I had. They were pretty simple goals: reduce distractions (my social media and Youtube use went up this year, not down) and focus fire (I’ve played a dozen or so different games in the last month, only finished one). I think the most telling statistic here is that this year I read less than one-third of the books I did last year (15 books this year, 47 in 2017) and less than half of any other year in the past 6 years (since I’ve been keeping track). That’s just plain awful and points to how much of my time is being stolen away by useless crap and how bad I’ve been at prioritizing.

After all that, I’m not sure if disappointment in myself is enough of a motivating factor to really make things change. If that were the case, I’d be on the rebound by now. I really hope that a new city and a new job will help me refocus, but I need to have a plan and make conscious effort to follow through. Some changes to my environment and a few key habits should help, and I’ll go into those a bit later in the goals area. Overall, I am getting to a point where I’m starting to worry about myself, so something definitely needs to change.

Favorite Games

(Incidentally, this is the only area where I actually did better this year than any year previous, so that’s good, but improvement here shouldn’t come at the cost of everything else)

God of War - Best game I played this year, no real surprise here. It deserves every accolade and award it’s gotten this year. I feel like I have to play the game again before I can put it in my all-time favorites, but I have never been more impressed by a game. It is stunning to look at, the combat is a blast, it has just the right amount of difficulty throughout the whole thing, and I haven’t enjoyed exploring a world and doing the side stuff this much in years (probably not since Assassin’s Creed 2).

Cuphead - I don’t have an Xbox One so I missed this game when it first came out and didn’t think about it for a while until I saw the speedrun of it at AGDQ this year, and I knew I had to give it a shot. I’m really glad I did because I enjoyed the hell out of it. I never found the difficulty to be that bad, but there are definitely some bosses I struggled to get through. Still managed to get the full 200% completion on it though. I eagerly await the DLC coming this year and will jump back in when that happens.

Diablo 3 - Late to the party much? I’ve had this game for years but only this year did I finally decide to give it a spin (driven largely by an upsurge in my Heroes of the Storm playing). I never played the first two, so I didn’t really know what to expect going in, especially on console. But I had a blast right from the start. I’m pretty sure that’s largely because I picked the right class (demon hunter) first, if I’d chosen a different one I probably wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much. I’ve largely fallen off after going through it with a couple characters, but I still jump in from time to time to do the adventure mode stuff while I catch up on podcasts.

Marvel’s Spider-Man - I’m honestly a little surprised that this made my favorites of the year. I had heard plenty of good buzz about the game, but I’ve never really been a fan of Spider-Man, so I didn’t feel the need to rush to it. Eventually the buzz got to me and I decided to try it out. Oh man I got hooked quick, probably more so than any other game on this list. I think I got to 100% completion in about a week. I’ve also been jumping on each DLC pack and completing them in one sitting. It’s not the best game I’ve played this year, I have some big quibbles with some of the side missions and the controls, but when it clicks, it clicks. The swinging mechanics in particular, I never got tired of flying through the streets of NYC. Incidentally, this game was a big motivator for me to look for jobs there. It just reminded me of how much I enjoyed being there, so if a game can capture that feeling, it’s doing something right.

Favorite Movies/TV Shows

Thor: Ragnarok / Captain America: Winter Soldier / Captain America: Civil War - About half of the movies I saw this year was my wife and I catching up on everything in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that we had missed over the years so that we could go into Avengers: Infinity War with full understanding. Of all those movies, these three stood out on top, particularly Thor: Ragnarok. It is just a fun time from beginning to end. I think of all the MCU movies, Winter Soldier and Civil War stand out as the best in both narrative and action. While I don’t think I would go out of my way to watch them again like I would Ragnarok or the Guardians movies, I would never say no if the option came up.

Mission Impossible: Fallout - I’ve never been a M:I fan, I’ve only seen half of them and I can only recall what happens in one of those, Rogue Nation. I can’t fully put my finger on what it is about Fallout that appeals to me so much, but I had a blast watching it the first time and enjoyed it just as much on the second viewing. While it no longer had the element of surprise the second time, I was able to appreciate the craft of it a lot more, and it’s an impressive movie in so many ways.

Favorite Books

To be honest, I didn’t enjoy any books I read this year. That is probably a big factor for why I didn’t read much, I couldn’t find anything to get sucked into. Of course I am a completionist by nature, so putting down a book unfinished is extremely difficult for me to do. This meant that several books sat on the table for weeks or months while I pursued more engaging activities. I should probably try to be a little more selective in the coming months so that I get back into the habit of daily reading with books I know I should like to some degree.

Goals

Alright, finally to the part that I’ve spent several days thinking about. Looking back at last year’s review, I mentioned that it’s difficult to have a goal stick when you don’t make it specific. The goal for 2016 was simply “consume less, produce more”. That didn’t work. The goals for 2017 were basically the same idea but a few more specifics. That also didn’t work because they still weren’t specific enough.

So this year I’m getting a lot more specific, and I’m also going to lay out some actions I’m going to do to make positive habits around them. I did this to some degree last year with my goals of getting below 200 pounds, reducing distractions, and focus firing, but after a while I stopped caring about how often I missed my targets because I didn’t set up any habits around it (I especially stopped caring once I was sitting at home all day).

For the most part each of these goals is a response to something that I feel is bad or lacking in my life, so I will frame each goal as such.

Run a Half-Marathon in Under 2 Hours

Hi, 2015 called and it wants its goal back! Yes, this is dipping back into that well again. I was doing really well at running a few years ago when I was exercising more regularly, and doing races really helped motivate me to stick with it. This goal is a direct response to how awful my health has gotten in the last couple years. The reason I stopped running was because of injury, but I have long since healed up. During the last couple years I have tried to get back into running shorter distances on a regular basis, but it just hasn’t stuck because of that lack of an external motivator.

I figure, if I’m going to set a goal like this, let’s really push the envelope. My previous goal was simply to finish a full marathon. Based on that experience and where I’m at age-wise, I don’t feel that doing a full marathon is ever going to be a good idea. It’s a cool feat, but not one I’m interested in doing any more due to the stress it puts on your body. I have done three half-marathons, so I know how it goes, and I think it’s a lot more reasonable. And where this pushes me is that my current record is 2:13:30, so I not only need to get back into shape where I can run it, I need to do it a lot better too.

So how do I get there?

• Get the diet back under control. Easier said than done, but if there’s one thing I know about myself, it’s that I’m a lazy cook. So it’s going to be back to basics and get used to boring food. The hardest part is that I’m effectively going to have to go my own way here since I doubt my wife will want to share. Another thing I’m going to do that I’ve toyed with but haven’t committed to yet is cut out meat more often, have more vegetarian meals. Good for the environment and good for me. The trick here is that vegetarian often means more carbs to replace the protein, but I think that with a big a place as NYC is, I can find the right places.

• More tea, more wine. These are specifically to try to curb some of my bad cravings. When I say tea, I mean herbal tea because I don’t like black tea at all and I don’t need the caffeine. The tea is just a way to have something other than water so that I don’t get sugar cravings in my mouth. The wine, similarly, is a better alternative to beer and mixed drinks. Granted I’ve already cut back on those quite a bit this year, so this is just more in the right direction.

• Get back to accountable workouts. The main reason why Orange Theory worked so well for me was that there was some sense of accountability. We were already paying for the gym, but we had to pay a penalty if we missed a workout. With the CrossFit gym I joined, there was none of that, it was very loose. Despite the high monthly cost, it was just too easy to never go because there was no schedule to follow. So once I get to NYC, I’m going to need to find that accountability again.

• Monthly races. This worked really well before, so let’s go ahead and do it again. I’m sure there will be plenty of opportunities in a city as big as NYC. If nothing else, doing a lap of Central Park once in a while will pay big dividends.

As far as finishing the goal itself, it could come through the form of a defined race near the end of the year. Another option I think would be cool (and there may be a race that does this), is simply do a run from one end of Manhattan to the other. It just so happens that the distance from Inwood Hill Park at the northern tip to Battery Park at the southern tip is about 13 miles. Not sure how feasible it is because running on streets means having to stop often, so I will need to do some research on possible routes. Even if I can’t use it for the goal purposes, I think it would still be cool to do.

Publish a Post Every Week

This is something I’ve also toyed with in the past, I have had several years where a goal was to write more. But again, “write more” is not specific, so those years inevitably led to little, if any, actual work. There was a period of time in 2014 where I was making a post each week (which you can still find on this site), but I ran out of steam because I ran out of ideas around the theme I was going with. There was another period of time in 2016/17 where I was doing mini-reviews and posting them once I had a few saved up. I took those off the site because they didn’t provide the kind of value I wanted them to.

So what is going to be different this time around? Not a lot on the surface. I already know that I can do it, as I’ve done it before. The average time to write a post is 3 hours, which is perfectly doable in any given week. The only real difference is that I’m not going to stick to one theme or topic (like the lessons series I did or the FF Challenge I failed a couple years ago), I will let each post come from whatever I happen to be able to speak on that week. I suspect that most of the content will come as reviews of things I’ve been playing or reading, but I will try to branch out into more lessons, observations, or other creative work. The only area I will not do is politics, not because I don’t have opinions, but because it’s just a lot of work to do research and stuff. I will leave that to the experts.

So how do I get there?

• Schedule out blocks of time. This is pretty obvious, so I won’t dwell on it. Not knowing what my new job schedule and commute is going to look like, I can’t say when the blocks will work. Most likely it will be blocking out one night a week to write up the post, then do a quick proofread the next morning before work and then putting it up. The key here is going to be making the time and not letting other things get in the way.

• Plan things out in advance. Also obvious, ideally I should have a month’s worth of ideas at any given time.

• Have more to write about. This comes back around to the focus fire idea from last year. The goal below will go more into this, but suffice to say that having more experiences will allow for more things to write about.

This will be an easy enough goal to measure. Come back in a year and see if I made 52 posts or not (this counts as number 1).

Listen to 200 New Albums

This goal may seem a little odd compared to the other ones, but it has a very specific purpose. The biggest problem I had during my last year at Amazon was self-imposed distractions, mostly in the form of streaming video and podcasts. Listening to podcasts at work isn’t new to me, I’ve been doing it my entire career, but I know from that experience that while it seems like good multi-tasking, it really wasn’t. The mind can only focus on one thing at a time, so it either distracted from work or become background noise and I’d miss things. Once I started streaming videos at work, the problem worsened exponentially as video is much better at distracting me than pretty much anything else. I have to be really disinterested in a video in the background for me to ignore it.

So the real goal of this is to remove my biggest distractions at work. It seems to me that simply saying no to those things will be tough, since, again, if it was easy I wouldn’t have had the problem in the first place. In order to keep podcasts and videos out of my head, I need to replace them with something else, like music. And in order to keep music at the top of my priority list of things to listen to, I need to make a goal such that I want to keep it there.

Thus, set a goal of listening to a bunch of new stuff. My natural inclination was to just say 100 new albums, but given there are 365 days in a year, around 250 of which involve going to work, I think 200 is stretching without getting too crazy. And realistically, I’m going to want to listen to a lot of music I already love. I also really like this goal because there are a ton of albums from artists I like that I haven’t gotten around to for one reason or another, so this gives me a chance to finally get to them.

So how do I get there?

• Remove the options to consume the bad stuff. Not knowing what my work environment is going to be, I can’t say what that will look like. But ideally I can set it up such that I cannot access things like Youtube or Twitch from my work computer. Similarly, I am going to remove all video apps from my phone and block non-music apps from being accessible during work hours. The latest version of iOS has most of this capability, though it’s a little clunky, so I might find another solution for that. But the general idea is that the only thing I can access during work hours is Spotify/iTunes.

• Make a list of music to listen to. This is another obvious thing, but not something I have done for music in the past. I do this all the time for games, movies, TV, and books, so adding music should be an easy enough thing. The list will also be easy to seed with all those albums from artists I like that I’ve missed, including the ones I already have in my library (soundtracks and such).

The nice thing about doing this goal is that next year’s review I’ll be able to talk about which ones I liked the most.

Make a Focusing/Quitting Habit

The previous goal is very much this year’s version of focus fire/reduce distractions for the workplace.This goal is the same thing but at home. I really want this goal to be more specific than “create a habit” but it really is more of a process change than accomplishing any one thing. I can say things like, “write one completed story” or “read 30 books” and those would be fine, but there’s something deeper that makes those things easier. The ability to focus is key to getting more done, so this goal is around making it into a driving habit rather than an occasional thing I can do when needed.

So why is quitting also mentioned? I’ve noticed it for years, but it was especially prominent this year. My inability to quit things that I don’t enjoy doing is a key factor in my inability to keep focused on one thing at a time. Since reviewing and analyzing media isn’t my job, I don’t have any real incentive to actually finish things I don’t like other than the completionist side of me needing it to be done. At some point I need to break that side’s stranglehold over my habits so that I can get my time back, so why not this year?

What does this mean in practice? The focusing aspect isn’t any different from what I talked about last year. It involves removing distractions in order to block out time, removing decision paralysis via (selective) randomization, and having one thing in each category to focus on. Where the quitting aspect comes in is that if I find that I don’t want to focus on what I’ve already chosen, then maybe it’s just not for me, and it’s okay to abandon it and choose something new. For the things I loved this year, it was never a struggle to devote my time to them, so if it ever is a struggle, I need to do the right thing and just move on.

So how do I get there?

• Remove the options to consume non-focus stuff. Just like with the goal above, I need to remove the temptations of other things so that I’m necessarily funneled into the right thing. With my computer at home I can easily block distracting content, and my phone is going to be pretty barren in terms of things it can distract me with. And even with the things I intend to keep around, like Twitter, setting time limits will keep me from overdoing it.

• Keep a daily tracker of my progress. I already do this to some degree through a productivity app I use, but it’s really just a binary thing of “yes, I focused on one thing” or “no, I didn’t focus on it”. Having a tracker will give me a better idea on a weekly and monthly basis of how well I’m doing. Being able to see that I focused on my one thing 25 days this month is a better metric than what I do now. Keeping track of the number of things I’ve abandoned will also be interesting to see at the end of the year.

• Make the habit rewarding. One way I’m doing this, and I’ve already gotten it set up, is using more granular checklists. Completing checklists is super satisfying for me, and up until now my backlog lists have been just big buckets that never really finish. By breaking these up into lists that can be completed, I think that will drive me to finish more. Having a more tangible reward, especially for successfully quitting something, would be great too, so I will give that more thought and see what I can come up with.

• Check in on satisfaction often. In terms of determining when I should quit something, I think a good rule of thumb will be to do a gut check around 5 hours in. For any activity that’s about 3 days. It’s early enough that I should be able to avoid the completionist itch, but enough time that I should also get a feel for how the rest of it is going to go. If I am still interested after 5 hours, then regular checks every 10 hours will work too. It would be nice if I could find a way to automate this so that I can’t avoid answering the gut check, but I don’t know how to do that with the tools I have right now. I will probably just have to do it during my weekly upkeep.

As I pointed out at the start, this will be harder to assess because it’s a habit rather than a specific number or event. I think a reasonable goal, assuming I’m good at keeping a daily tracker, is to have 75% of days this year where I am able to focus on whatever my one thing is (this will likely be two things because I’ve always kept reading as exempt from this, it’s really one book to be reading every day and one other thing to focus on).

Here’s to 2019

Not that anyone else is counting, but this review is almost twice as long as any other I’ve written for this site, but I think it’s for good reason. I haven’t been this low on myself at the beginning of a year in longer than I can remember, so I have a lot to work on. I’ve laid out what I think needs to happen, so now it’s a matter of doing the work.

With a new city and new job ahead of me, this year has no choice but to be transformational. I want to be able to capitalize on that and finally kick some of my bad habits for good. Only once I do that can I really pursue my heart’s desires.

Here’s to 2019 and 51 more posts!

Year in Review: 2017

Let’s just get it out of the way, this year sucked. While I personally didn’t feel any of the negative impacts of our embarrassment of a federal government, I know plenty of people who did and it’s been one frustration after another. It was virtually impossible not to get absorbed in watching the flaming spectacle, so I’m not surprised at how little I actually got done this year. It’s hard to get motivated to advance yourself when you see so many people getting kicked down and there’s nothing you can really do about it.

On the plus side, the tide appears to be turning in the right direction. We won’t know until the end of this year if the country truly wants to see things change, but at least for now we have a year of fighting experience that will help in the months to come. We have endured a lot and I have hope that this year will be better. We have to be better. I have to be better as well.

2017 in Summary

So a year ago I said that 2017 was going to be my proving year, the year that determines if my life is going to keep advancing or get stuck in a rut for a long time to come. I don’t know how true that is going to be, it felt like I took some steps forward and some steps backward, so I ended up back where I started. This disappoints me to some degree, but it also means that I don’t have to play catch up in the coming year.

In terms of advancing, the biggest thing that happened to me was switching teams and my job role at work. I have moved out of testing and I could not be happier about it. I am also pleased to be on a team that is building things that people in the organization appreciate and are excited about. I know that I was excited about things on my old team a year ago, but, as is often the case, things changed drastically and I didn’t see a bright future ahead there. I am sad to be out of the game development side of Amazon, but my current work is significantly more rewarding, so I have no regrets.

At home, things have largely stayed the same. We didn’t have to move this year, so we could just focus on making our townhouse better, and we are still very happy with where we are at. We also spent a good amount of time helping make improvements to the house we will likely be moving into in the future.

This year we focused on visiting new cities within the US with our vacation time. We visited Chicago in the summer, which was a lot of fun, with the highlight of seeing Hamilton. Just as an aside, that musical was the experience of the year for me. Seeing it was much more powerful than I expected it to be, and not a day has gone by since that I haven’t thought about it. I’ve listened to the soundtrack dozens of times and it still causes me to choke up from time to time. We will be seeing it again when it comes to Seattle and I could not be more excited.

Our other trips were focused around attending more PAX conventions outside of Seattle. We went to PAX South in San Antonio in January and PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia in November. San Antonio is a cute little city, and PAX South was a great time, it felt so much like old PAX and we are stoked to go again next week. PAX Unplugged had a similar feel, though I didn’t get to do as much as I enforced for the first time. Working at PAX ended up being more rewarding than I thought it would be, and I’m eager to do it again in the future. Philadelphia itself wasn’t much to write home about though. It was hard to be impressed when we had just come from five days in New York City, which was incredible. NYC has immediately become my second favorite city in the US behind Seattle. After PAX Unplugged we just wanted to go back there instead of home. Though I doubt it will happen, I could see myself happily living there for a few years.

On the going backwards side of things, my health has gotten worse over the year. Again, it has been hard to be motivated to be good when you are worried and frustrated a lot. I have also had difficulty adjusting to some of the changes I made. First, I ended up quitting the gym I was going to (OrangeTheory) because it was a hassle to get to since moving away from downtown and I felt like I had hit a plateau with it. Between that and not running anymore since hurting myself in 2016, I lapsed pretty bad in my exercise. After a few months of inactivity, I signed up for a CrossFit gym close to home, which I like a lot, but finding the right time to go has also been a struggle since their schedule is not as convenient and the workouts are more intimidating with my lack of fitness. The end result is that I’ve gained weight since a year ago and I feel worse in general. This is going to be an area of focus for me this year.

The last trip I made this year was just for myself, I went to a week-long bootcamp for self-improvement down in Los Angeles. On the whole, it was an amazing experience and I learned a lot. It was really rewarding seeing how much I was able to do in just a week, particularly with getting out of my comfort zone. Plus I met an excellent group of guys who I am proud to know and call friends. However, it has not ended up changing my life in the ways I had hoped, and that is entirely on me for not continuing the momentum I came back with. It is something that I would love to get back to doing this year, but there are some other things I need to fix before I can do that.

And then there’s the whole consume less, produce more goal that I set for 2017. We will get to that in more depth later, but suffice it to say that I utterly failed.

In the end, I am not happy with how 2017 turned out. Yes, plenty of good things did happen, some of my best memories in fact. But at the end of the year, I know that I haven’t taken care of myself physically or mentally this year, and I’m disappointed in myself for that. Hopefully I can use this disappointment as motivation to do better this year. I have already started making some adjustments, so I just need to buckle down and push forward.

Favorite Games

Horizon: Zero Dawn - This is the best game I played this year, hands down. It is rare to have a game where I enjoyed every bit from start to finish, but Horizon managed to do just that with great mechanics, a consistent challenge, and a fascinating setting with engaging characters. I haven’t had time to get around to the DLC yet, but I eagerly await that, and I hope to see a sequel of some kind in the future.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy - Another year, another Uncharted game, and to no one’s surprise I enjoyed the heck out of it. It doesn’t come anywhere near the greatness of Uncharted 4 from last year, but it is a fun romp with good ideas that I hope get integrated into future Naughty Dog games. The only real negative I can say is that, unlike the other games in the series, I don’t see myself ever coming back to it again later. Being a smaller adventure, it just doesn’t have the meat I want in something I come back to again and again.

Rise of the Tomb Raider - Came to this one a bit late, but it is an excellent game. It took everything the last game did well and improved upon them, resulting in a compelling adventure that I was happy to spend a lot of time in. I do have some quibbles, mainly that there were too many side quests and the controls didn’t feel as tight as the last game, which led to some frustration. But on the whole I think they did an excellent job and this is one I would not mind coming back to again in the future.

Favorite Movies/TV Shows

Baby Driver - I honestly find it surprising that this ended up ranking as my favorite movie of the year. I really enjoyed this movie and want to see it again, but it didn’t give me things to think about like most of my favorite movies do. Still, I didn’t see any other movie this year that exhilarated me in the same way. It is a movie dripping with style, character, and tension, which are always welcome to me.

John Wick - Yeah, we are really late to this one, but it is a great film and deserves mentioning here since we did see it this year. The only reason we haven’t also watched the sequel is because we are lazy and it wasn’t freely available at the time. It will likely be on this list next year if it’s of equal quality.

The Breadwinner - I was hoping to like this more than I did, since it is from the same people as Song of the Sea, which I loved. I did like the movie and I think it’s worth seeing for the message it provides, it was just missing something I can’t quite place my finger on. The main reason it is on this list is because of how it made me feel emotionally and how it stayed with me.

Your Name - This is actually very close to being my top movie of the year, but it falls just short. It is without a doubt my favorite Makoto Shinkai movie and probably the best anime film I’ve seen in years. I absolutely loved the first half of the movie, but it goes a bit long and astray in the second half, which keeps it from being my favorite movie of the year. I do intend to get it and watch it again to see how much more I’m able to get from it having seen it once.

Favorite Books

Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind - This is easily my book of the year. It is absolutely fascinating and left me with a lot to think about. This is one of those books that I feel should be a staple of education at the high school or college level. It has a lot to say about humanity from both a historical view and a philosophical view, so it would be nice to see it get discussed by more people.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind - The movie version of this story has always been my favorite of Miyazaki’s films, and the manga version may just be my favorite manga from any author (Akira still ranks higher in my mind at the moment, but it is subject to change). The artwork is stunning and rich with detail, the story is riveting, and I just adore Nausicaä as a character. The world and other characters get a lot more time to blossom here as well and I enjoy them a lot more as a result. It was a long time coming since I’d wanted to read it for at least 15 years, and it did not disappoint.

Goals

As it turns out, when you set a nebulous goal with no specific targets, you don’t tend to stick to it very well. As mentioned earlier, the only goal I had this year was simple: consume less, produce more. I cannot think of how I could have done this worse than did. Instead of consuming less, I consumed significantly more than I did the previous year and I didn’t produce much of anything outside of work.

So this year, let’s be smarter and do the proper targeting for my goals like I had in the past. This year my focus is going to be on fixing the problems I introduced for myself during 2016. Once those are handled, I figure the rest will come in time.

Get Below 200 Pounds - Yes, I understand that weight is not directly correlated to how healthy you are as a person, but I’m going to use it as an indicator. The fact is that this past year my weight has slowly crept up to a level I haven’t seen in several years and I feel awful a large part of the time because of it. Eating poorly messes with my body and brain so I’m not able to be as productive as I want, nor can I exercise the way I think I should. So the goal here is to fix the eating habits and set aside more time for exercise, with losing weight as the easiest way to confirm that I’m on the right track. I’ve been below 200 pounds in the last few years, so I know it’s possible and I know I can get there again.

Reduce Distractions - I think more than anything, this is what killed my productivity this year. Between things like checking Twitter constantly for updates on what fresh hell was brewing up that day and getting sucked into YouTube channels with dozens of two hour long videos, I lost a lot of time to reading and watching things that didn’t help me in any significant way. These were particularly problematic at work, which is already distracting enough without the assistance of external forces. I don’t really have a set goal in mind here since it’s not an easy thing to quantify, but I feel like I will know it when I see it. At the very least I am going to try banning these distractions from work and keep them limited to certain times while at home.

Focus Fire - This also doesn’t have a specific goal in mind, but it’s a continuation of something I’ve been working on for years. Historically one of my biggest problems with completing things is that I see something new and want to try it out. I do this constantly, so when something new grabs me, the thing I was working on gets put aside for months or years. Another aspect of this is that when given many choices, I can’t commit to anything so nothing really gets done. There are a few things that can help with these. First, reducing the distractions as mentioned above, that gives me more time to consume and work on the things I want to (games, books, movies, etc.). Second, I have recently implemented a randomizer system to determine what to consume next, so I don’t have the decision paralysis anymore, and it helps keep my mind on that thing the system selected for me. Third, having dedicated time to consume things seems weird to many people, but it’s something that’s helped me a lot in the past, so I will be bringing it back in limited amounts. Once the systems are in place, I just need to force myself to let it guide me.

I think that’s enough ambition for one year. Obviously the focus for this year isn’t so much advancement as it is get back to a way of living I’m happy with. I have no doubt that things will change here and there as the year goes on, but this is a good place to start. Last year I said that the consume less, produce more thing will be so simple that I won’t need to write it down and reference it, but that didn’t work that well. So this year I will be putting these goals in my face on a weekly and daily basis to make sure they are never far from my mind. This is really taking advantage of the habits I’ve already established and using them to keep myself on the right path.

I will be better this year.

Year in Review: 2016

Oh 2016. A year that will truly live in infamy. I don’t think I need to contribute anything more to what has already been said about it, but I’m going to speak a few words about it anyway.

First, the seemingly endless deaths of beloved celebrities. I will not tell other people that they should feel bad about mourning someone they have (likely) never met, that is not my place and I think having that kind of attachment to someone’s work is a wonderful thing. I personally didn’t get upset or sad at any death this year, I didn’t have those attachments. So while I didn’t put people down, it did get a little tiresome to me, especially when there were more important issues to worry about. I fear what the future holds in store for us when the number of celebrity deaths gets higher and higher each year. It is inevitable. The number of famous people increases every year as our world gets bigger and more connected. So no, 2016 is not the worst year, it is just the first blow.

Second, and more importantly, the election was literally the most disappointing thing I’ve ever experienced. And as I’m writing this, just a couple days after the inauguration, the dread we had in November has become horrible reality. It is really hard to look back at last year and remember anything good about it because of how it ended and how it continues to tear through our nation. Watching the Women’s March across the country did a lot to give me hope for what we can do to fight back, but I hate the fact that we have to keep fighting this fight. I hate that with all the technology and access to information we have now, people seem to only get more insular and protective of their failing ideologies. I like to think that they know in their hearts that they are fighting a losing battle and so they refuse to go down quietly. And make no mistake, there is no doubt in my mind that we will eventually win this fight. I just hate that we have to suffer potentially four years of setbacks and irreparable damage in order to start moving forward again. I feel like this is going to be my biggest challenge going forward, standing up for what I think is right. I’ve never been a courageous man, but I’m going to need to learn if I want to live with myself.

2016 in Summary

Looking back at last year’s review, I said that I felt that I had been preparing for something for two years with the hopes of fully unleashing onto 2016. I still don’t know if I would say that I got everything done in the last year that I wanted to. In fact, I didn’t manage to accomplish a single goal I set for myself, but we’ll get to that. On the other hand, I am pretty satisfied with the year as a whole (outside of the obvious above).

Things at work have been stable, which was a nice change compared to 2015. I got put onto a small strike team focused on some pretty lofty goals, and we did a great job getting those things done. It got a bit bad near the end of the year, but I rarely felt like I was wasting my time at work like I was during the previous year. I feel like being back on the main team with some cool projects coming down the line will make for an even more productive and rewarding 2017.

The big event that happened this year for us was moving, yet again. This time though, as long as we don’t get kicked out, we intend to stick around for a long time. We knew going into our last place in 2015 that it was going to be a temporary solution to get around a crappy situation, but now we are in a better place that we’re happy with. We do miss the area around downtown, but we are still close enough that going there is easy, so it’s a minor loss compared to the gains.

We also managed to spend a fantastic week in Hawaii near the end of the year to get away for a little while. And this year is the first I’ve felt since I started working at Amazon where I am totally secure in where we’re going financially. Going into the third year of employment, I got some big stock drops and boy were they lucrative. Granted most of the money is going towards a future down payment on a house, but it’s nice to know that we have it if needed.

My health hasn’t been doing as hot as the rest of my life though. I felt amazing in 2015 with the half-marathons and such, gearing up to do a full marathon this year. But then I got (what I assume to be) plantar fasciitis in my left foot two months before the marathon, so there was no way I was going to be able to do that, and I still haven’t fully recovered from it. As a result, I’ve fallen pretty badly off the wagon and I’m struggling to get back into shape. At least I haven’t gotten worse, I weigh exactly the same starting 2017 as I did starting 2016. So that is an area to work on again.

On the whole, I feel like I did a lot better this year than I did in 2015. It is just really hard to see those positives after such a horrible end to the year. In a strange way, I think this coming year is going to be my proving year. It will be the year when I determine if my life is going to keep advancing or if I’m going to get stuck in a rut for years to come.

One last thing I want to bring up before moving on is that the end of the year did have one very positive impact. Ever since I got out of college I’ve put aside some money for charity every month, which I collect and donate during December, mostly to Child’s Play. This year was different as I was able to give an order of magnitude higher than previous years, and I felt wonderful doing so. I really hope that my contributions go towards great causes and I intend to keep up the pace going into 2017, when we probably need it the most.

Favorite Games

Uncharted 4 - This was undoubtedly my favorite game of the year, by a long ways. I wrote up an entire review on it expressing my thoughts, but it’s worth repeating that the game is fantastic, definitely the best made game in the series and one of the finest games I’ve ever played. I intend to play it many times in the future.

Final Fantasy IV - While I failed horribly at my FF 12 for 12 Challenge, I did at least come away with finally playing this fantastic RPG for the first time. It was by far the best of the FF games I played last year, and it was fun to see how this game kicked off what we know FF as today. I doubt I will play FF 1-3 again at this point (though kids may change that), but I definitely see myself playing this again in a couple years if I get the itch.

Ratchet and Clank (2016) - I think in terms of pure fun, this is the winner of the year for me. I never played the original game, so this felt completely new to me, and it has so much polish and engaging combat that it was hard to put down. I really need to get back to playing the games I’ve missed. I had completely forgotten just how fun these games are, but this has rekindled the fire.

Monument Valley - I don’t want to spend too much time on this because it wasn’t a long experience, just two play sessions in total, but I have to mention how much I liked this game. It really felt like a game that was made just for me, both in the puzzle aspect as well as the aesthetic. I didn’t expect to like it as much as I did, but it ended up blowing my mind for a couple days. Would love to see a sequel.

The Beginner’s Guide - I want to give this one an honorable mention because of the way it made me feel once it was over. I had never experienced a game quite like it before, and it opened my eyes to what games can do. I suppose I need to spend more time on indie games since they tend to do more weird, outside-the-box stuff like this.

Heroes of the Storm - Normally I only post games I’ve finished here, but I would be remiss to ignore this as it probably took up more of my time than any other game this year (outside of maybe Rocksmith 2014, but I covered that years ago). This is my first foray into MOBAs, and I’m rather happy I went with this one. It is a lot of fun, most of the time. I generally only play with AI, so I can get royally screwed by my team through no fault of my own, but I suppose that’s no different than playing with randos. But yeah, this is going to remain a huge part of my gaming time in the coming year as well, as well as digging more into WoW and playing Overwatch with friends.

Favorite Movies/TV Shows

The Hateful Eight - Despite watching this in the first week of the year, it holds up as the most impactful piece of media I saw this year. It is admittedly a combination of a lot of Tarantino’s other films, but it is executed so damn well that I have to hold it up as the best movie I saw this last year. Granted, I didn’t see a lot of other movies, but it is still a fantastic movie regardless of my viewing habits.

Zootopia - Man Disney is really knocking it out of the park lately. I heard so many good things about this and they were all right. I loved this movie, I had a smile on my face from beginning to end. This is definitely going to be in our comedy/feel-good rotation for many years to come.

Top Gear - Yeah, kind of weird to put this on here two years in a row, but it’s really the only good TV we watched this year. Just wasn’t a good year for TV for us I guess. Anyway, we finished this whole series off and it was excellent all the way up to the sad end. I am glad to see that their work on The Grand Tour has been good as well, though that show has more annoying parts to it that I hope they tone down in the second season.

Favorite Books

Game Engine Architecture - Looking back on the list of books I read this year, you would think that I would find something better than a 1000+ page textbook on making game engines, but, alas, here we are. While certainly not the most entertaining book, it was definitely the most fascinating for me, I learned so much it’s kind of ridiculous. And it’s all directly applicable to my job, so double win! Don’t really recommend unless that’s something you want to get into. And get into deep.

Mouse Guard - I’m including all three of the books I read this year since they were read close enough to each other that they blended together in my head. I didn’t read a lot of comics this year, but these stood out the most. They remind me a lot of my childhood and reading the Redwall books, but with stunning artwork to go with the great characters. I got the Legends boxset for Christmas and can’t wait to dig into them.

Hyperion - I only read/listened to 11 fiction books this year (non-comic), and the selection ended up being pretty mediocre overall. This one stands out the most just because it was a lot different from what I expected. It’s a slow-burn, sci-fi story, which I’m finding is more in line with what I like when it comes to sci-fi. It also gave me a lot of ideas for stories of my own, more than any other book this year. I don’t really need to recommend it though since it’s already a classic.

The Nightingale - While I didn’t enjoy this book as much as others, I feel I have to bring it up again because of how relevant it is right now. As I said in my review, there are plenty of books about how the Nazis rose to power, but I don’t think there are many fiction books that dig into what it was like to be part of Nazi-occupied France. What stood out to me more than anything else was how you see the Nazis get worse and worse as the war goes on. They didn’t start out as the Holocaust perpetrators we know them as today, it took a long time to get them there. We really need to make sure we are looking for the same signs in our own government going forward because I dread to see what happens if we ignore them.

Goals

Okay, let’s go back over the goals I had from last year and see how I did (spoilers, I failed).

Post things more often - If you compare this to 2015, you could say that I succeeded since I posted more than I did the previous year, but I don’t think I came up to the standard I wanted. I did a pretty good job overall with this blog between the FF challenge posts and the reviews, but social networking was the other component of the goal, and I totally failed there. This continues to be an issue for me with being uninterested in voicing my opinions, but I think if there is one year for me to break that mental block, this is the year for it.

Run a marathon - As I mentioned before, I sadly got hampered by injury and couldn’t get this done. Once that happened I also lost all momentum for running in general, so I’m kind of done with it. I still like running during workouts, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get back into the long distance stuff I was doing. Maybe 5Ks here and there if there’s a good reason for it, but I’m mostly over this phase now. I don’t think my body is that well suited for it. Not a bad thing, I’m saving more money this way.

Get back on the healthy food track - I still haven’t found a diet that I can maintain. As such, I still go up and down with this all the time. On the plus side, my body has adapted to a point where bad foods make me miserable and I don’t want them anymore, but that doesn’t actually stop me from eating them. I think for this year my focus is going to be on simply not overeating, which tends to be my biggest problem. Sure, eating good things is good, but eating too much is my real roadblock to being slim and healthy again.

Have more fun at home - It’s a bit hard for me to say if I succeeded or failed at this. While I feel I spent spent more time on hobbies this year than the previous year, I actually got a lot less done. So I have to wonder if I actually spent that much time having fun or if that time all got sucked up by other stuff. It’s hard to remember. So, since I honestly can’t say if I succeeded at this, I’m going to say I failed by default.

12 for 12 FF Challenge - Hahahaha, yeah… that didn’t happen. Basically I was doing really well until I got to FF5 and I just hit a major block there. I know now that it was largely because I was playing the worst port I possibly could and it was a painful experience. I’ve restarted the game in the last week on PC and the experience has been significantly better. So I’m looking forward to getting back on this, I suspect that once FF5 is out of the way, the rest of the series will go more smoothly. All the way up to FF15 now, which I’m glad has gotten a good reception.

So yeah, not my best year in terms of goals. Normally I would say that my plan keep pushing on these until I am satisfied with where I’m at on them, but things have changed. The world has changed, and there are really only two goals that I can come up with. Though I wouldn’t call them goals, they don’t have an end game. They are more two parts of a manta that I’m going to try to uphold during the coming year and see where it takes me. And it is a rather simple mantra: produce more, consume less.

Produce more - I’ve toyed with this for many years, but as I said above, I feel like this year is going to be the inflection point that decides the rest of my life. I don’t know why I feel that, but it’s surprisingly strong. So the first part of my mantra is going to be produce more. Produce more quality work for my employer. Write more. Perform more. Create more inspiring works. Publish more opinions. Donate more to help others. Teach more to raise others up. Reach out more. Overall, just be a more positive force in the world.

Consume less - There is certainly a time and place for having fun, and I do not intend to completely forgo that. But I have noticed that my consumption level over the last year has gotten worse, so I need to focus on what is important and not get caught up in the minutia. There are only a couple significant problem areas, but it is a thought process that can provide gains in all areas. The real areas of focus are eating (as I said above) and social media. While I do think social media is important to keep informed, there is also a ton of garbage and duplicated work there, so I need to limit the time I spend on them. I need to work on breaking my phone-related habits, which tend to be my biggest time-sucks away from what’s important. Unfortunately this does also mean that I probably won’t get through as many books or games as I’d like, but at least I’ll know that the time I do devote is for worthwhile pursuits.

And that’s really it. As I said, no real tangible goals this year, but I feel like this is an easier thing to maintain. I’ll admit that a month after I posted my last review, I’d already forgotten what my goals were. But having this mantra is something I can repeat to myself all the time and use it to inform my decisions. At this point, just pointing the needle can be more effective than setting endpoints.

See you again at the end of 2017!

Uncharted 4

So outside of the Final Fantasy games, this is going to be the first piece of media I’m devoting an entire review to on its own. And this is for very good reason. Namely, Uncharted 4 is one of the best games I have ever played, and is worth getting the full review treatment.

Just as a bit of backstory, I love the Uncharted series. Uncharted 2, in particular, may be my favorite game of all time. It is certainly in the top 3 (for the record, when I consider what games/movies/etc. are my favorite, it comes down to asking “which one of these would I rather do than anything else right now?”). I love (most of) the characters and the way they interact with each other. The presentation is second-to-none and the narrative keeps me going for some very long play sessions. The platforming and combat is great fun, though excessive at times. There is very little for me to dislike about any of these games.

And Uncharted 4 is the best representation of the series. You can tell that they really took the time to not only craft new things that would be great to add to the series, but also re-evaluate the things that have not worked as well while still retaining the exquisite level of polish that the previous games are known for. There is also a ton of influence on this game from The Last of Us, which was my favorite game of that year, and it brings the emotional impact of the story to another level.

Let’s start with saying what a technical achievement this game is. It is not only one of the most beautiful games ever made, the fact that they are able to present the entire game without a single load screen outside of the initial one from the main menu is staggering. Knowing what I do about game development, my hats are off to them just for that alone. The smoothness and detail of the animation is also incredible, particularly during cinematics where you get full mo-cap. I find it amazing that there are games now where you can see what a character is thinking just from facial expressions and posture. The first three games had a lot of this as well, but this game is several leaps above even those.

Uncharted 4 retains most of the same solid mechanics from the first three games with a couple new additions. You now have access to a rope (often called the “magic” rope because of utter lack of realism), which ties into a lot of the platforming, but is surprisingly useful during combat as well for getting around enemies. There is also a lot of sliding down and across things. I don’t know if that one is actually new to the series, but it is presented as a standard mechanic in this one. The parts where you have to hook winches up to stuff is also a fun addition. Others have noted this as well, but it does feel like the combat went backwards after Uncharted 3. Thankfully this game doesn’t rely on it as much as that one did, so it’s a negligible drop.

The Uncharted games are best known for are their set pieces. Most famously the train sequence in Uncharted 2, but the ship and plane sequences from Uncharted 3 and the convoy chases in every game are also blood-pumping scenarios of controlled chaos. I don’t think Uncharted 4 quite matches the highs of previous games, but there are definitely some good action pieces here. The opening of the game fighting off a legion of boats in the sea. The jeep escape through the middle of a village followed immediately by a convoy chase right in the middle of the game. The prison escape (both of them really). There is plenty here to get excited about.

However, I don’t think the set pieces are the important parts of this game. Uncharted 4 is much more a reflection on the series and Naughty Dog, the developer, in general. This game is the last one in the series (though who knows if that will actually hold true, the ending certainly provides a full-stop conclusion, but this is games), so it is full of nostalgia bombs, reminding us of all the great things that have come before it. And I might just be a sucker for those kinds of things, but I loved those moments where it was referring back to the great adventures of the past, Uncharted or otherwise.

If I had to single out the thing I liked most about this game, it would be the relationship between Nate and Elena. Being recently married myself, even though we don’t have any of the same problems that they have had, those moments where they were opening up to each other just tugged at my heart. It’s the kind of relationship that you can only depict by having a lot of history, which the first three games provided. It’s the difference between drama in movies and drama in TV shows, the amount of time you spend with them really does matter, and this is probably the first game to ever pull this kind of relationship off. I hope that I’m not the only person who feels this way as I want to see more games invest in their characters this way. Sure, you can argue that Nate is a bit of a psychopath based on the number of people he kills and swindles in these games, but you would hard pressed to find a main character in a game who is as charming and complex as he is. You often get characters who are one or the other, but not both.

I feel like I need to add at least one criticism, so I will throw out the only thing that really made me go “ugh” while playing the game. Basically, every time a squad of enemies showed up. The pacing in this game is such that you spend most of it exploring and platforming. Because of this, when enemies did show up, it came with a sense of annoyance at being pulled out of the fun of exploring. It wasn’t quite so bad when you discovered some enemies who were already camped out since that would allow for more stealth action, it was much more annoying when you were already in an area and they appeared or ambushed you. It’s a small gripe, but it really did bring my mood down a bit each time it happened, so I feel it’s worth mentioning.

Ever since I finished this game, I have been weighing in my mind whether Uncharted 4 is the new king on my list or if Uncharted 2 will retain that spot. Up until this point, if I listed out my favorite games and then ranked them by how much I wanted to play them right then, Uncharted 2 was #1. I still feel like time will have to tell with this one as I feel that Uncharted 4 is the better game in almost every way, so I may find myself replaying it more in the future than 2. In any case, it is certainly on my short list of favorite games ever, so I can’t give it much more praise than that.

Play this game. Do it. And play the previous ones if you haven’t because they are also fantastic. And play The Last of Us while you’re at it. Naughty Dog is truly the king of cinematic gaming right now, and their works are well worth the effort.