Working through my backlog; I finally found time to finish Oblivion Remaster last week. It was pretty comical doing the entire main quest after having finished all the guilds’ quest chains, the arena, Shivering Isles, and so forth.

Now I’m back on Sea of Stars. I had stopped just before the Clockwork Castle to go around the map finding any chests or rainbow conchs that I might have missed along the way, not realizing that I’m really not that close to endgame and some of these (even in early-ish areas) require sidequests that I can’t even start yet. I had to briefly rage-quit last night because diving back into the middle of a save after 11 months while remembering fuck all about the specific timed hit gimmicks meant that I blundered my way into a situation where random encounters were dealing enough damage to cause a party wipe in one or two rounds of combat. I fired up Clair Obscur: E33 for a bit, realized after 40ish minutes of cutscenes that it has the exact same mechanics (“wot if Super Mario RPG but depressing, steampunk, and 1880s France”), and decided to power through Sea of Stars some more. Once I got the hang of Resh’an’s regular attack’s timing, Air Elemental Skyland was less of a slog. I wouldn’t quite say “a breeze” (), but not quite as ragequit-inducing. I don’t know if I just undergeared Zale or what, but it was brutal, especially while re-learning the game.