I really haven't posted anything here in so long that I can legitimately say "I haven't posted anything since last year" and it isn't a silly New Years joke damn.
Anyways, hey! Welcome to the H1 VS Blog retrospective, such an original blog name that I didn't actually notice it got taken by someone else and I had to add a bit on the end. This blog started out around August, smack in the middle of Death Battle's fun adventures in nearly dying due to the RT closure. It was mostly done as an excuse for me to get around to consuming a bunch of media that I was meaning to get around to, and staving off the type of insanity you'd see at r/batmanarkham. Three whole ass blogs later and some future ones that are still on the queue I haven't forgotten yet later, and I feel now is a good time to steal what every other blog owner is doing recently and look back at what I dropped in the year.
Do stick around, I will have some future plans to share after this
I somehow missed the fact that 2 blogs covering this already existed beforehand
Alright, the one that started this whole venture. This was one of my top most wanted matches at the time and has since moved up to probably #1 in general, and it was a comparatively easy match to research without a whole mountain of media to go off of so it was a pretty natural choice. Research was pretty smooth overall, didn't really have any major hiccups. I was pretty knowledgeable on both going in and both are pretty well researched already. There was a few things I hadn't actually seen talked about, like the flight speed feat from DS3 that became the swing feat due to being pretty comically above just about everything you can do for Gordon speed wise. It's otherwise a pretty close match, I've seen one calc somewhere that may put Gordon at more of an AP advantage off of Strider beams disintegrating people since this came out, but otherwise I think it holds up. Not like either get new media all that often (
unless we're in the middle of the Valve actually makes stuff again arc, anyways)
Fun fact: I don't think I said this publicly anywhere, but I very nearly locked the fuck in and did a whole written fight script for the project. The plot of it was going to be something like G-Man teleports Gordon to the Titan Station during the events of Dead Space 2, testing him as an "employee review" or something along those lines. Isaac would be running from a horde of Necromorphs and shoot at Gordon in a panic and the two would start the fight. I had the idea that there would be a part like in Leon vs Frank were they'd just start fighting Necromorphs midway through, Gordon would struggle with killing them with bullets before he'd switch to fighting them with the gravity gun Ravenholm style and Isaac would just be another day at the office. Honestly typing this whole thing out I really regret not writing this lol. I didn't end up doing it mostly cause I hit the "screw it I wanna work on something else" stage of the project and I think there was an old Deviant Art fan battle that had a really similar premise that I found most of the way through blog writing and I didn't really want to just copy it wholesale.
Overall, pretty fun to make and probably the favorite one I've released so far, even if it may be simple first one bias
I play telephone with a blog involving a franchise rivalry that died like 7 years ago
(Link)
Oh look it's my most viewed blog, cool (1.1k vs 879 combined views for the other two at the time of writing). Can't say I'm super surprised, it's a pretty popular franchise pairing overall and I swear it's blog owner rite of passage to do a blog with both franchises at some point so may as well get it out of the way early lol. It's also one blog that I think I probably should've done a lot differently writing wise.
What I mean is that even though I think the overall verdict is pretty sound and I don't think there's much I'd change, I really do think this is the one blog that I feel I could've written a whole lot better. Team Fortress blogs particularly in recent months have become dominated by the Sub-Atomic destruction meta. I'm not sure how much I contributed to this whole discussion, but I feel I may have put out some misinformation on the arguments. Basically just go to the actual blog and swap some things around, namely the Grordbort weapon statements of being subatomic as the primary evidence and use the quantum disentanglement thing as some supporting evidence that it can work on that scale and I think that makes the whole argument make more sense. A lot of people I see seem to get it confused and I feel I may have confused some people on the matter.
...who am I kidding give it until next TF2 blog and there'll be a different interpretation and explanation of all this shit lmfao
Torbjorn's side I think was done not up to snuff personally. I wouldn't go so far as to say the whole blog is "Engineer is epic ft. Torbjorn" and this may just be my harshest critic, myself, speaking, but I feel his half was a bit phoned in. Particularly the feat section was kind of just copying a lot of the existing OW blogs at the time for feats and not putting a whole ton of effort into seeing how much everything checked out for scaling and what not. OW blogs have since come out since then that do a better job than I of discussing a lot of the existing feats (Reaper vs US Agent is a particularly good example).
I do talk a good amount of shit about this, but I do think this was a fine blog overall. Definitely something I could improve upon though. Also this was the first match that I got help on for writing and wasn't strictly solo so thats kinda neat.
"Just ask who wins in a versus channel like a normal person" "Nah do a whole ass blog on it lmfao" - The entire thought process put into making this a thing
Kinda surprised this one got as much traction as it did, considering it's not really a popular match for either of them and I choose to do it mainly on a whim if the title didn't give it away. Both are pretty easy to research overall, both mangas are fairly short and they don't have a ton of side media anyways, and it's not like the Akira pinball game for the PS2 was gonna make Tetsuo some Outerversal verse soloer at any rate. Research was pretty fun to do, T0m helped and did pretty much all of Lucy's side since she didn't have a modern blog and Tetsuo already had pretty good research done. Really, the only big production hiccup was a bunch of irl shit that kept pushing it back and delayed it by like 3 weeks lol.
But yeah, pretty fun research period. Verdict was also pretty interesting, it's was nice having a match where abilities and such played a pretty big role, and stats, while important, weren't the single sole deciding verdict, which is unfortunately a rarity these days. Unsurprisingly nothing has changed since the blog came out so can't really say anything on a verdict change. Overall, yeah, pretty great overall experience.
Progress updates and future plans
Zelda vs Nina, AKA most of the reason there's been such a hiatus of this blog lmao, shotgunning a decently big JRPG series and one of the largest game franchises ever pretty much on your own isn't really good for a consistent upload schedule. Who would've thought.
Well, the good news is that it's getting very close to being done.
tl;dr
Zelda: Basically done
Nina: 4/5 games done, good progress on the last one
Both may be subject to last second finds, but blog is otherwise nearing completion
Of the five BoF games (technically like 10 but the other half are entirely inaccessible, the preamble for the blog says this as well but tl;dr dead games and Japanese only syndrome are to blame), 1 through 4 are fully searched through. Dragon Quarter is currently the only game that hasn't been researched as of now, but we're getting there. Zelda's side is basically done, the series has been pretty thoroughly researched overall and a lot of good respect threads are out there. The research process was a lot of looking through Zelda games and then just randomly stumbling down a huge rabbit hole of finding something, but barring that happening again she's done.
Research wise, it's the largest match done here, by some distance, in both word count and overall length. >20k words and 102 pages, and counting (Gordon vs Isaac, the runner up, is 9k words and 71 pages respectively), so hopefully that helps explain the whole hiatus. Verdict is down to a few factors at the moment, but sudden discoveries not withstanding, I have the general flow of who wins either way. It's been a fun ride and this is probably my best work, so while I don't like giving concrete release dates, I think early 2025 is likely when it'll come out.
-
Now, Marth vs Erdrick, the other blog I had announced. I intended it to be the finale of sorts this wave, but due to the Zelda vs Nina shaped elephant in the room, I think it's fair to call that the blog finale instead. Marth vs Erdrick is now going to be pushed back; sometime between now and the heat death of the universe.
Unfortunately, while there's a decent amount of work on done already, the actual doc for it hasn't been touched in months and I am not currently in the headspace to jump from a blog covering a super long running game franchise and a decently long JRPG series to covering another super long running game franchise and an even longer SRPG series, and also an ass load of side media as well, so that's gonna very much be my "we'll get there when we get there" matchup. I'm unsure if I'd go so far as to cancel it outright, but it's not going to come out in the foreseeable future. Don't do scope creep, kids.
So where does that leave us? Well, I am going to do a much shorter solo blog to get something out in the meantime while BoF research is finished. As well, I have a few blogs for the future charted out. One's actually already done, just waiting on the correct time to release it, and the others I'll announce around whenever Zelda vs Nina drops.
I'm terrible at ending things here's the solo blog k bye
I should make a logo of my own one of these days
Comments
Post a Comment