Finished Expedition 33, it's fine but imo extremely overrated. Stopped engaging with the skill system after I got a full roster with one capstone 10-point skill around 15 hours in and never really felt like I was underperforming (I lost to the second-last boss of Act 2 twice, but that was due to parry fuckups on instakill moves). Also just balanced everyone's stat points evenly, and ran the exact same luminas on everyone. Up until the end of Act 2 I did basically all the optional content except the stuff that obviously was going to take too long. Finished Act 2, did Frozen Heart, then went to go to two optional areas but was told I couldn't go there. I suddenly got bored, and ran through the final area to fight the final boss, skipping everything along the way. Imo the ending is actively bad because it ignores something extremely important:
Verso's ending would kill everyone and everything in the Canvas. As they are depicted as being fully self-aware (Renoir more-or-less acknowledges this), this means that the actual decision is between "make one (or two, depending on how one views Alicia's relationship with the canvas) suffer" and "make one person suffer and also commit genocide", which is so obviously the worse choice that I can't really care about Maelle dying from addiction or about Painting Verso being sad.
More Warframe, as per usual, nothing of note accomplished in the past week due to bad luck (though I did get the missing part I needed for one vaulted prime pistol, wowee). Am right below cap for void traces and have like 40 aya so all set for the new resurgence later this week.
Got a bunch more progress in Hades 2. Got 2 wins over the down boss and am now trying to get to the up boss. Made it as far as the boss of the third up area and got fucked by a hit for like 100 damage. I'm definitely going to keep playing more. The weapons don't seem close to balanced. Daggers seem better than everything else, staff is okay, wands suck, axe sucks (unless you spam the omega special by having unlimited mana?), gun is weirdly close-range considering it's a gun. Haven't tried out fists, only just unlocked them after my last run.
The threat of violence that will be carried out in retaliation by the other agents of the state, and the fact that cops (ICE included) are legally allowed to do whatever they want.
I'll believe it when countries start leaving NATO and sanctioning the US. Until then, this is all just meaningless talk from liberals who want 60-70% of the policy goals of Trump but view him as distasteful for being too mask off.
The response (or lack thereof) to COVID in the west has served as a great example of what will happen with climate change on a shorter timeline. If there are some immediate one-off events that can't be ignored (raging forest fires, flooding, hurricanes, etc) they will be responded to, but viewed as unavoidable. General reduced QoL will be accepted due to propaganda. No meaningful action will be taken by the powers that be, which will drive people to the political extremes. Due to the multi-billion dollar fascist propaganda complex and general background radiation of a century+ of the Red Scare, the majority of these people will become fascists.
Also the economy being increasingly built on obvious scams seems bad.
Coming here from 7 months in the future to agree entirely. The ending as written is clearly about the choice between overcoming grief/trauma and deluding oneself in fantasy, but it fumbles it to an almost comical degree. I chose Maelle's ending because, hot take, I think that genociding an entire world of sentient beings is bad, but oh don't you know that means that she's on copium? I'll be honest, I was expecting a lot better from such a universally praised game.
I don't see it on truth social and there's no timestamp so it's looking pretty fake.