No posts in a while, sorry about that.

I hit the point in WoW where I was just logging on for the chance to make my numbers slightly bigger, then I resubscribed to FFXIV to prevent my house from being demolished and so I could get caught up on the story before the big digital event they had the other day.  Neither of those seem particularly noteworthy, though I did very much enjoy the way they wrapped up the Shadowbringers storyline.

I did have a Memorable Tank Moment in FFXIV where I queued for one of the 8-man trials, intending to slack off and leave tanking duties to the OTHER tank, and it turned out we were both doing the trial for the first time and that he was even less confident than I was.

We cleared it, anyway, though it wasn’t EXACTLY smooth.

But let’s not talk about that.  Let’s talk about this:

About two weeks ago, I had a nasty health scare.  Fortunately, I managed to get a doctor’s appointment on very short notice and it turned out that it wasn’t actually anything to worry about, but there were a few days where I was, to use the vernacular, freaking out.

When I’m stressed, one of the ways I deal with it is to sit down with one of the Souls games, because the mindset you have to be in for them is one that I find extremely calming.  I’d originally played Dark Souls II back in 2016, then replayed it in the “Scholar of the First Sin” edition on the PS4 in 2017, so it felt like a good one to pull off the figurative shelf and put through its paces again.

Also, I had deliberately chosen NOT to start an NG+ run back in 2017, just in case I ever felt like going back for the remaining trophies, and that’s what I decided to do.

In hindsight, this wasn’t my best plan.  Getting the majority of the remaining trophies was simple enough and just running around and talking to a few NPCs was enough to get me to about the 90% trophy completion rate.

Then came the final four trophies.  The “collect all of the spells in the game” trophies.  The “how hard could they be?” trophies that you don’t realize include needing to kill two of the hardest optional bosses and do a ridiculous amount of grinding for rare drops.

Oh, and you have to play through the game in NG+ mode, 70% harder than the base game which is already plenty nasty, and then play through about half the game again in NG++ which bumps up the difficulty even more.   There’s a workaround for that, I’ll get to it.

It took me just over 39 hours to get these last four trophies.

I would not recommend doing this, except…

See, I don’t really collect platinum trophies except for games I really enjoy.  I figure this is pretty normal.  So, when I look at someone’s PSN profile, I tend to see their platinum collection as being a fairly personal reflection of their likes.

Sometimes these are very confusing.  I have a former boss whose sole platinum trophy is for Assassin’s Creed: Unity.  This is not a particularly quick or easy platinum to collect, so this is someone who decided to put a lot of time into – arguably – the worst modern AC.

As far as I can tell, he is in all other respects a perfectly sane individual.

So, in the extremely unlikely event that anyone cares enough to look at MY profile, I want them to see the Bloodborne, and Nioh, and Dark Souls platinums, and also the Senran Kagura and Love Live platinums, and I want them to go away convinced that two people are sharing the same PSN ID and that both should probably be on a watchlist if they’re not yet.

Anyway.

In addition to the general sense of elation that came with taking out those nasty optional bosses, I had a truly Peak Dark Souls Moment that I wanted to share.  This is where I get to the workaround to playing through half of the game on NG++ that I mentioned before.

There is a door in Dark Souls II that only opens once you have killed four, basically, demigods.  You need to go through this door because it is the only way around an obstacle consisting of a fallen pillar in the middle of a path.

Yes, you need to commit multiple counts of deicide because you can’t step over a rock.  I’m just going to move on without further comment.

If you don’t want to kill all four of these demigods, which involves clearing through all of the stuff BETWEEN you and the demigods, you can simply farm souls until the door decides that you can open it.  This takes three million souls, which is quite a lot if you try to do it by killing random monsters that give anywhere between 500 and 3000 souls per kill.

Alternately, you can clear the path to any one of the four demigods and just fight it over and over again, because THAT nets you at least 300000 souls per win.

Upside: This is much faster.

Downside: Every time you kill a given demigod, it gets harder the next time.  Hits harder, has more health, that sort of thing.  Technically there is a cap, but that cap is quite high – and once you’ve hit that cap, there is very little room for error.

Here is that Peak Dark Souls Moment I mentioned earlier, as a study in four pictures.  Note that my health bar is in the upper-left corner and that the boss health bar is the practially-empty health bar at the bottom of the screen.

Boss is nearly dead.  I’ve even managed to sever its right arm, so most of its attacks at this point consist of it flailing the useless stump vaguely in my direction.

It may be quite difficult to make out as this is a largely-brown boss fought in a largely-brown room and the lighting is rather poor, but you may be able to tell that the nearly-dead boss has raised his LEFT arm threateningly.

I did not notice this in time.

This WOULD have been the final time needing to kill this boss.  I am not ashamed to admit that this did test my calm just a little bit.

So. Between my initial clear of the game and then going back for trophies, I spent nearly a hundred hours at this.  I’m not entirely sure that this was a good use of time, and I have instructed my wife to not let me play any other Souls games until, at the earliest, April.