Playing Arknights in 2019 and now means having two completely different experiences. By now, threads and talkpoints are kind of taking their time being developed, in a never ending, as the cool kids say, yapping. They, them characters, do yap, in this game. If you're not willing to read, the game's main motif of interest is not for you.

Who knows what the future will hold, with gacha games being a commodity not in short supply and ending as soon as the interest wanes, but thematically we're kind of passing the baton to the new generation, thanks to events like The Rides to Lake Silberneherze but especially thanks to Lone Trail. Terra is a hellish place, but the writing does the place justice by offering different perspectives of what life means, what hope is, what different societies do with a never ending source of pain, Oripathy, which we, as a pharmaceutical company and defense contractor, do kind of offer solace from. 2024 might be an awkward moment to start playing this game, but its different events and a multitude of stories, characters and themes all intersecting and weaving their way towards the future have left a mark. Sometimes the writing's goofy, but when it hits, it hits, hard.

I have a hole School Idol Festival left; unwilling to let go, I was looking for other things to keep me busy, occupied, up at night when the sweet release of sleep from consciousness would not come, especially during hard times like the pandemic. Arknights is not a rhythm game, it's a tower defense game, awkward to play, not always clear in its intent and definitely not balanced. There are operators who are better than others and the odds are mostly stacked against newcomers.

I just hope this hole won't be left vacant, again. I wish I could be younger again and never instruct my neurons to hold information such as Texas mommy and Bagpipe lemmy, but here we are. It's my brainrot and I do, as I please, anything I want with it.

Also it's kinda fucked how Gummy, balanced and good in everything Defender operator, was replaced by Myrtle, a DP printing machine, in the beginners' case, this is a scenario where if anything is too broken, the designers have the moral obligation to break anything else to balance it out and cater content to a demographic, in this case redirecting the newcomers towards a certain frowned upon gameplay loop. Please just don't bother with the meta, there's a world of hurt there and the grind necessary to even glance the thing isn't worth it in my opinion.

I could turn out to hate this game down the line and it wouldn’t matter. Here and there readability issues don’t mean shit for this being the formative game my new girlfriend and I played right after confessing at the end of a convention, sharing solo progression progress back and forth to each other, progging duos and trios together until our heads bleed on Hard difficulty alone, finishing off with us posting the lyrics of that literal one song in the game sappily back and forth. Magical shit, love this FFXIV fan proxy

Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 is a life affirming work of art. I went into this one well aware of its structure, that it took place across the month of August, and during that time you could relax and enjoy the small town you were placed into in whatever way you wanted. Due to this structure and my on-going journey of practicing mindfulness with respect to video games, I only allowed myself to play a maximum of 3 in game days per 1 actual day, and with the extra stipulation that I had to concentrate solely on the game. This may sound a bit silly, though as someone who pretty much always watches YouTube on a second monitor, or listens to podcasts while playing video games, this represented a very intentional exercise for me in order to appreciate what I was engaging with, and maybe fix my fucked up attention span in some way. From everything I knew, this was a game particularly well suited to this task as well, because I really wanted to soak up every little drop of the atmosphere and dialog that I could.

In the end I think this approach to playing Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 was extremely successful for me. I hung out on each screen, taking it all in. I turned over the character interactions, both slight and large, in my head during the forced gap between play sessions, allowing myself to develop a real sense of knowing these people on an intimate level. What would Uncle Genta be doing tomorrow? Would he still be struggling with the loss of his old profession, or did he have a revelation that lead him down a different path? Due to the nature of my play sessions and the nature of the ongoing lives of the cast, I sometimes wouldn't see someone in game for several real life days at a time, causing myself to legitimately miss them and wonder what they're getting up to. These small somber moments of longing to see them again couldn't have prepared me for the great sadness and emptiness brought about by the sudden ending, which drilled home just how much I cared each and every one of them, and the fact that I'd likely never see them again.

That is to say, at least not without spinning up another save file, which just feels wrong to me. No one should ever get to know every facet of every person in their lives, there's a certain beauty in knowing that you can't possibly know everyone's experience holistically. People fade in and out of our lives, only appearing briefly to give an update on themselves from their own perception. This game represents a series of those brief encounters, wrapped up in an experience that is brief in and of itself, even when I intentionally stretch it out over a longer period of time, as though trying to get the most out of my own similarly brief windows in time. There is no going back to summer vacation, there is no going back to 1975, there is no going back to Boku no Natsuyasumi 2 for me, and I've made my peace with that.