Month Review: August 2026
✦ 4 more months of 2026 ✦
I can't exactly say that this year has been "great" to me so far, what with everything burning around us (quite literally because of the heat), and most of my plans kinda not coming to fruition re: my career & education.
Good things still did happen for me. I published a Visual Novel demo that I got to work on with my friend! I'm still working on art & code for it, but I'm having fun. My health issues I was having with my stomach have mostly cleared up. I'm still jobhunting but I have friends and family helping me so I don't feel totally alone. I'm trying to stay positive & hope for the best. There's still 4 months lol.
✦ Fire Emblem!!!! ✦
There is approximately 17 days left until Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave releases!!!!!
I'm extremely excited, I haven't looked this forward to a Fire Emblem game since Three Houses. Everything I've seen of the game so far looks to be a genuine attempt at improving on both Three Houses & Engage's flaws, but regardless I'm sure I'm gonna have a really fun time.
The biggest thing I am grateful for is that you can do all four (five?) routes in one playthrough rather than having to restart the entire game to play the other routes. I initially didn't mind it with Fire Emblem Fates because those were two (actually three) seperate games similar to what Pokemon does, but it was kinda crummy to have to pay 80 dollars for both Conquest & Birthright just for Intsys to come along and go "actually, you need to buy this DLC which is actually the third secret route that explains the whole story." It was kinda silly.
With Three Houses though, White Clouds, the prologue of the game, takes up so much time that by the fourth run I was so tired of having to repeat the same activities and dialogue just to get to the actual route differences. It didn't help that Silver Snow, one of the four routes you get if you pick the Black Eagles but don't side with Edelgard, felt like it was tacked on to pad the length of an already lengthy game.
All this to say, Three Houses is kind of a slog to replay, therefore I am very grateful it seems that Intelligent Systems have learned their lesson and made it easier to go through each route in Fortune's Weave. I'm likely going to do Dietrich's first, then Leda, Cai, and Theodora in that order. According to the trailers there's a fifth "Path" where the protag Eshmel can fight the enemy army alone, but not gonna lie I'm not that good at Fire Emblem's hard modes which I'm assuming this will be, so I'm not sure if I'll play it anytime soon.
As you can tell by the multiple paragraphs, I am super excited. I took the weekend off to play it, and also made a page on my Games Log➚ to liveblog my thoughts!
✦ Other Things ✦
Canto 10 is also releasing on the same day funnily enough. I reread "The Stranger" last month in July, I still really love it, especially how Meursault's trial was depicted. Regardless I'm hoping I'll have a lot of fun! I adore Canto 9 despite it's flaws, but to be honest I don't know if Canto 10 will top my ranking. But it'd be unfair for me to preemptively judge it before its out, so I'll wait and see. There is definitely loads of potential for fun character dynamics.
Before I go, I again want to promote my friends➚ who participated in the Toxic Yuri VN Jam➚. I met so many amazing people, and there are so many wonderful entries that I'm still trying to get through my massive backlog lol. I'm looking forward to the award ceremony whenever that happens!
I think that's it for what I've planning on doing next month outside of my visual novel work. I love video games❤️