Hey, Gamers! December, for most people, is the holiday season… although a season is meant to be 3(ish) months so uh, let’s ignore that. But for me, it was a month of sickness. A month of headaches, feeling sick every day, and stress. So, a little background: Christmas brings a ton of stress on me. For those who don’t already know, my parents split up when I was 8 and me and my mother moved to a different country. Before that, Christmas was perfect. I have to older sisters, and I just- all of my Christmas memories as a child were just this image of perfection. My parents’ marriage obviously wasn’t great (it never was) so having this one day when they wouldn’t argue or be mean to each other, and my sisters would act like kids again (they were ten/ eleven years older than me so it was just special). Finding out that Josh didn’t have that didn’t shock me, but it did upset me. So, I try my very best each year to make his Christmas as perfect as it was when I was a kid. It’s for completely selfish reasons and I’ve learnt to be okay with that. But my body can’t seem to keep up with that so I’m almost always sick in December. Wow that was a long explanation. My point is, I didn’t get a lot of gaming done. I don’t think we streamed at all in December because I was so sick. That means no Brilliant Diamond, no Persona 5 Royal AI Takeover and no, uh, whatever Josh does on his one allowed day (jokes, it’s usually Skyrim or SoulsBorne). So, let’s get into what we did get up to!
In Yakuza 3, I’ve had the chance to actually do a lot of side content that Josh usually rushes me to ignore (it’s his favourite series and he just wants me to play it all so he can talk to me about the plot, please know that he’s not doing it maliciously, he’s just excited). I love Okinawa, even though I’m not as familiar with it as I am with the Kamurocho map. I’ve noticed more in this game than the previous 2 (ignoring 0 due to the absence of this character) that Haruka is scary mature. She reminds me a lot of myself as a child who has gone through trauma. The thing that bugs me the most is the amount of responsibility that Kiryu puts on her. Like, I know she probably wants that but Kiryu has the responsibility as her guardian to make sure she has a childhood and she’s not really getting that. I feel like a lot of the adult responsibilities of the orphanage get placed on Haruka’s shoulders and that really isn’t fair. She’s still a kid. I’m trying to look at it from a not-traumatised-child perspective but it’s still the same. She’s still a kid. She shouldn’t be the one going to get groceries all the time, she shouldn’t be the one cooking for all the kids every day. Kiryu took on the role of guardian for these children, so he should be doing those things. I’m not saying that the kids shouldn’t help, but they shouldn’t have that much responsibility placed on them. They should help, not do. This should be obvious but I beat Majima. I went into the fight before buying healing items because I am a certified idiot, apparently. But I did it. Honestly, I was fully expecting to not get on with this game at all. I think it’s a common thing with autistic people to get frustrated easily (as shown later on), so I was expecting the blocking to be too much but I’m enjoying it. It doesn’t feel different enough from Yakuza Kiwami 2 for me to hate it.
Okay, moving on to the main thing for Josh- he got Lost Judgment on the PS5 for Christmas because I’m the best fiancée in the world. He’s played all of it. I think from what he’s told me, it’s his favourite game of the series. Okay, so now I’ve pulled up the list that we collectively wrote, I can say with certainty that Josh thinks that the combat is the best in the Yakuza series so far (I strongly disagree after trying it for a whole 30 seconds and deciding I hate it), but in comparison to Judgment, there seems to be less to do in terms of mini-games. He’s still sad that there’s no karaoke (for those who know Josh, you’ll know it’s his favourite thing. He woke me up at 3 am once because he got 100 in Judgement), but the dancing mini-game is “a satisfactory replacement”… but he would still rather have karaoke. I hate them both, naturally, because I’m terrible at both of them. The boxing mini-game is fun, and so is skateboarding… but he hates the robotics mini-game. With a passion. So much.
He’s played a lot of Days Gone in December. He actually started it again, because he stopped playing it when someone who worked on it was like all “if you want a sequel, pay full price” in a rude way. He’s had a lot of fun with it but it drags too much for him. He has at least 30 hours in this playthrough and doesn’t even feel close to being done. The gameplay got repetitive. He didn’t tell me to put this but he kept getting stuck in bear traps and that was hilarious. I think he rage quit one time because of that. It was funny.
Animal Crossing time! My DS ran out so this will only be New Horizons (remember the whole certified idiot thing?). We did a bunch of time travelling. We were trying to make everything perfect for Toy Day but we didn’t realise that Toy Day was on the 24th so we messed up. Ken also moved in. Without permission. We’re trying everything to get him to move out.
I also played a lot of A Plague Tale: Innocence this month since Josh was trying to ‘catch em all’ in Pokemon Brilliant Diamond (yes, that’s your BD update), so I got from trying to get into the library to the fight with the leader of the Inquisition. I got through quite a bit. I am really enjoying the story but I am struggling so, so much with the gameplay. I don’t want to be like “iT’s iNAcceSsiBlE” or anything, and I’ve been struggling with how to word this and if this is the case or am I just bad at the game… but I think something has to be said when I’m not “learning”. I’ve probably tried this boss fight over 10 times. Now, I’ve played a good chunk of Dark Souls. I know hard games, I’m decent at it. I learn. I am able to learn from my mistakes with gaming. What I’m not able to do is change my reaction time. It makes me emotional a little bit because it’s moments like these where I think I just can’t do it, and it is because of my disabilities. It’s not something I can learn this time. I can’t just get good at it, and that sucks. I’m playing it over and over again because I still hope that I’m wrong. And I know there are a million other games for me to play that I can play, but I’ve played this one so far that it would feel like a loss if I just gave up now. The gameplay has always been challenging to me. I’m not the best at sneaking or timing etc. But I did it. So the fact that there might be just this huge block just… sucks. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do it. Heck, there’s been times where I’ve thought to just ask Josh to do it because although he’s autistic like me, he’s not dyslexic or dyscalculic so maybe he could do it. But that just feels wrong to me. The only time Josh has ever ‘done’ a fight for me is the car chase in Yakuza Kiwami because I was crying and I was late to stream and I just wanted it to be over with. Everything about that just feels wrong. So, I might do it. I still have some kind of hope left. If I don’t do it by next month, I think I’ll just have to admit that it’s not for me and move on.
Something that I did manage to advance in is Shin Megami Tensei V. I finally got to Tokyo Tower! I feel like I’m understanding the whole fusion system more, as well as demon negotiations. I am needing to grind a lot more than I expected, but that’s okay. I like taking it slow, but at the same time, my memory isn’t great. I think I might do another playthrough after completing my first one, just to do it better and understand the plot better. I remember sharing a screenshot to Twitter and it said something like “I have no idea what I just saw” and I was like ‘yeah, same, bro’. It was like the game was breaking the fourth wall a little (not really but thinking about it like that is funny).
So, Josh got me an anime poster for my birthday in November. I can scratch off an anime when I’ve watched it, it’s super fun. But because of that, we’ve been watching Pokemon. And now I’m obsessed with Pokemon (specifically Squirtle). So for Christmas, Josh got me Let’s Go, Eevee. Eevee is a special Pokemon to me because I have DID and I feel like that’s a good representation. I named my Eevee Geralt because I’ve been reading the Witcher books (I usually write about that but honestly, I don’t want to right now… I’ll do a story on Instagram or something) and I love my Geralt, he’s so cute. I loved being able to stroke him and *flappy hands*. The whole game just made me very happy. Yes, you read that right. The whole game. I got this game on the 25th and I completed it on either the 30th or the 31st. I am officially the champion of the Kanto region, and Josh can’t fight me because he hasn’t finished Let’s Go, Pikachu that I bought him like three years ago. Through this, I’ve come to the realisation that I think I prefer water type starters… that’s crazy because I was so aggressively fire starter sure because of Josh. When I started BD, I picked the fire starter. I’ve been thinking of starting over but at the end of the day, there are only 2 fire types in the game so uh I’m fine with that. If we get SP though, I’ll probably pick Piplup. So yeah, my first completed Pokemon game was Let’s Go, Eevee and I’m okay with that (I think). For extra content, when I was a kid, I had a neighbour called David. He would threaten to put me in the bin a lot. So you guys can maybe understand the absolute pleasure I had taking the title of champion away from my rival, David. Like, it was pure joy. Like, chef’s kiss. Also, like, they said it was the boy who lived next door to me so what else was I supposed to put? Another reason I was thinking of restarting BD is because I named my rival Josh and I feel kinda bad and… off whenever I beat him. Like, my Josh doesn’t take losing that easily so it rarely happens. It feels unrealistic.
Lastly, after me hogging the Switch since Christmas, after I beat David, I finally let Josh play Pokemon Sword that he got off of his lovely mum for Christmas. I did feel a little bad but he was pretty occupied with Lost Judgment so it’s not too bad. According to the list, he only had like 2 days in December to play it and he hadn’t reached the first gym. He was on his way to a place called “Motosoke”. He picked the fire starter, as always. He’s actually giving nicknames to his pokemon which is weird for him but also cute (he’s named a lot after alters of mine, and then he has some punny names too). He seems to be enjoying it so far!
And that’s it for this post, Gamers! I hope you all had a wonderful “holiday season” and I hope 2022 is even better for you! What did you get up to in December? Let me know in the comments! Don’t forget to give this post a ‘like’, hit follow for more chill gaming content and check out 2nerds_1game on Twitch to eventually watch Josh and I stream again! See you next post, Gamers!
Eleanor Rees Gaming 