Work-Life Balance

I must confess that outside of my 24-hour Extra Life stream from last Saturday — which you can see a summary of here, including unedited video archives — I haven't had a whole lot of time to actually play games recently! There's been a lot to do, both in "life" generally and on the site, and I've been ill, too. Twice. Tonsillitis sucks.

Now that what are probably the most challenging of the Rance articles to write are out of the way, I can concentrate on ploughing through the rest of Rance VI ahead of writing about it towards the end of the month; a Rance 5D writeup is coming next week, meanwhile. I've already written that one — I actually composed it immediately after beating the game as I wanted to get some thoughts on paper while they were fresh in my mind.

It's not an exaggeration to say that as a result of Rance 5D, what I've played of Rance VI so far (just under half of the main story, I believe) and what I learned while assembling the lore article, Rance has become one of my favourite series. I was ready for this possibility — I recall a former podcasting buddy enthusing about the fan translation of Sengoku Rance a few years back and his tastes have typically aligned rather nicely with mine — but I seriously wasn't expecting the setting of The Continent to have quite so much depth to it. I should know better by now that a game or series being "eroge" most certainly does not preclude it from having good writing or source material crafted with care, attention and love.

Aside from Rance, I've been continuing to pick up PSP games, as I mentioned in the last update, and got my hands on the original PSP version of Half-Minute Hero — produced and directed by Senran Kagura's Kenichiro Takaki, fact fans. I really enjoyed the Xbox 360 and PC versions of this game and its sequel, but there's something rather lovely about the PSP version. There's a bunch of additional content that was chopped out of the later ports, too, so it's nice to play the game as originally intended.

I'm pondering what to cover once Rance is over and done with. I have a heap of brand new stuff that is all worth talking about; presently I'm leaning towards Cyberdimension Neptunia: 4 Goddesses Online because I started it during the Extra Life stream and had a good time with the four hours I played. Plus it's been a long while since I covered something Neptunia-related!

Thank you all once again for your continued support of MoeGamer here on Patreon; it is massively appreciated. Every day I see clickbait nonsense from commercial sites trying desperately to squeeze some ad revenue out of their audience — sometimes even trying to shame them out of using adblockers — and I'm reminded that I always wanted to do something different.

Creators — and I'm not just talking about me here — deserve to get paid for their work, but the ad revenue-based model just isn't conducive to the production of thoughtful, well-crafted content. I'm glad there are people out there — like you! — willing to show their appreciation for and compensate those of us who want to produce something a bit different. You are the people who can help make a difference in the mess that is online media, so thank you, and please keep supporting those whose work you enjoy. <3