Unexpected Game Revival
A while back, there was this mobile game, Final Fantasy Brave Exvius. It had a pretty decent story and the central conceit of the play mechanic was also pretty nice. The art and music was good for a mobile game. They had a gacha system that was reasonably generous, though as time went on and they continued to need to release new characters, the power creep became super real. It shut down back in 2024 (the Japanese servers went until 2025, but did eventually also close). Kind of a shame, it was pretty fun for what it was.
Well, it’s back, as Final Fantasy Resonance. They took the story and art and music and cleaned it all up, got rid of the gacha system (while adapting the “vision” system the game had introduced to explain the gacha system, since it’s kind of central to the story), and fleshed out the world map and dungeons, and so now it’s a full fledged standalone 2D-HD Final Fantasy title. I played through the demo (which is the entire first chapter of the game, so the save carries over when the full title comes out), and it was a really pleasant JRPG experience. So, y’know, kudos to the development team for seeing the bones were good and not throwing them out, just because the online service had to close. Good work, and I hope you’re rewarded for it.
The Block System Sucks
We recently migrated Simone’s site, and it was the first opportunity I had to really dig into WordPress’s block editor system. I can certainly see why they bothered creating it – you can do a fair bit of customization with just their built in site editor, without having to touch a line of HTML, PHP, CSS, or Javascript. If you want to make creating your own site more accessible, it makes a ton of sense. I also kind of hate it.
I realize some of this may be me being a curmudgeon and having gotten used to the old system, but it all ends up feeling disjointed to me, where it’s not very clear where you make a distinction between a template, a part, a pattern, or a page. And what’s worse, is it’s super non-obvious where any of those customizations live on your server (answer: in your database, and all the stuff like font and color changes are tied to that specific theme). If you started customizing a default theme and have now decided to turn it into either a child theme or its own theme, good luck getting those settings migrated (even though it’s super easy to start messing with stuff without realizing you run the risk of screwing things up if the theme gets an update).
So let’s say you want to export all those customizations you’ve made. Where do you do it? It’s not in the export settings, it’s not an easy link on the main page of the site editor. Answer: it’s on some editor pages if you go to a menu and look for an “export site” link, which downloads a zip that you can then modify and manually upload. It’s fucking stupid. Like, you’re all too happy to add a link for resetting any style customizations you’ve done on the style page, but not an “export/import styles” link? Did you even stop to think about the user experience, or that people might want to back things up, or that by making it easy to import, export, and share styles, people would be more willing to experiment?
I’d been debating making a new theme for this site using the new block editor, but nah. I’ll stick with what I have for now.
Falling into Fall
September went by really fast. I was hoping to get out and about more, but that’s just not how it panned out. We’re starting to see some color, which is always a delight.
We’ve been planning some trips for later in the fall and winter, so there’s some things to look forward to (important, since the winters here can be a little brutal). If we’re going to be here for another winter (and it certainly looks like that’s the case), we’re also thinking we should double down on the hygge, do our best to live the cozy life while preparing to try and sell the house and move *hand waves* somewhere in the spring. If you’ve got thoughts on how to encourage the cozy hibernation vibe, let me know.