Click on water to feed fish

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Final Fantasy IV

Clockwise from bottom: Cecil, Yang, Cid, (Elder), Edward, Palom
and Porom in the centre 
Well, it has taken me a good 47 hours just to reach this point in the game when I can swap party members ... in Final Fantasy IV players are forced to go through the storyline with a rotation of setups (otherwise there will be no coherent narrative)... which is both good and bad. Good because that forces players to strategise -- though inevitably you always end up having a hitter, black mage, white mage/healer and a quirky character fighting along side the protagonist (Cecil). Bad because I like to stick with certain characters and it's a pain to have to keep switching them in and out...

Anyway, am now able to party-switch because the rest of this game is pretty much just taking different party setups to farm items and exclusive equipment, which I hope isn't gonnabe too tedious. So far my favourite characters are: Cecil (no choice here, but as a Paladin, at least he is interesting and has high stats); Rosa, cos she is Cecil's love interest and a fantastic white mage, with range attack capability; Rydia is fantastic, not only cos she is lovely looking and she is also a powerful summoner (Bahamut, come on down!). The other two favourites (to make up the team of five) will either be Edward (just cos he's different, having a harp for a weapon!) and maybe Edge (the ninja) or Yang (the fist fighting monk who has a wife!). Kain, though a main character, somehow is a bit lacking in this game (keeps dying on me), and neither Cid nor the Porom and Palom twins are that impressive (when compared with the others). 

So my next destination is Mount Ordeals ... think will take that on next week... 

Meanwhile, I can do drop-backs against the wall now, which is Brilliant!!! 

Sunday, February 8, 2015

A Sore Lower Back

So I was having teacher training withdrawal syndrome *LOL* and got up at 5am yesterday morning for a voluntary morning intensive practice, which wasn't too hard. Instructor Patrick took us through the universal principles of alignments (mostly muscular energy and organic energy) using the basic sequence, which I enjoyed since there is no pressure now that I'm a teacher :-) I have grown to really like doing parsvakonasana and trikonasana (so opening) but less so with virabhadrasana II ... but what really got me feeling sore was the series of 10 urdhva dhanurasana ... we kept going up and down into the wheel pose ... followed by drop back, which is super intense. I'll be taking hatha 2 this afternoon just to work on the sore ... definitely need to do quite a bit of stretching through out the week if I am to keep my body supple. 

I just LOVE this love theme for final fantasy IV

Meanwhile, as I type I'm farming "sirens" in Final Fantasy IV (the complete collection) on auto ... this item is supposed to be very useful later on in the game. The question is, do I really wanna continue with this game... It was first released back in 1991 and has remained a solid RPG game (the music is just brilliant) but without a walkthrough you wouldn't know what to do. And I'm getting a bit tired reading walkthrough ... I'd also unlocked the rarest item in Final Fantasy X-2 last week. The amount of grinding (on auto or not) can get kinda tedious. So, am contemplating what to do next with these games. I don't particularly have an urgent to finish X-2 or IV, so maybe I'll just leave those as is. I wanted to unlock a rare persona in Persona 4 the Golden but the amount of work involved I don't think I'm ready to tackle at the moment. There are at least four more games on my PS Vita but none of them I wanna play right now (maybe Dissidia 12, which I still play occasionally). So this calls for maybe another visit down the game store ... maybe there's something there that's worth getting (hopefully a game that doesn't rely too much on following a walkthrough!)

Tech-wise nothing much is happening on that front. The Blackberry Classic I bought is okay ... it's a necessary upgrade but I really miss the Bold 9900, which is smaller and more simple to use (and it was white!). Nevermind. I am (surprisingly perhaps) still using Sony Xperia Z, which is great for photos and social media (WeChat, Whatsapp, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, Facebook/ Messenger, Line etc). Battery remains a minor issue (it's on since around 6am and lasts until 8pm-ish if on heavy use) but other than that I still really like its colour and functionality.