Level 81 and second tech boost achieved. It's the final stretch.

Level 65. In another 16 levels I'll get a second tech boost which will speed things up by 50%. This one should be done by mid February.

Re:CoM postgame grind complete. Last time I did the Riku grind I used the strong initiative method used by speedrunners, but this time I used the Lexaeus card method and cleared rooms instead of running away, and it was not bad. The grind is so much less tedious when you're allowed to actually play the game, I even had fun. Sora's grind was actually the more painful one, even though I slashed the length of the mega flare spam by going for enemy cards organically rather than RNG manips. 500 deck edits is still a silly achievement.

My backlog includes not just games, but audio books, and I like to occupy myself with something mindless while I listen. Usually that's a replay of a game I've played many times before, but this time I opted for something even more mindless. I noticed that the subset existed, laughed it off, looked again, considered it, and for whatever reason, started it. I'm not sure why. Maybe I want to prove to myself that I'm not so brain rotted that I can't do something uninteresting for long stretches of time. Maybe I want to climb the mountain simply because it is there. I'm already past the point that most people quit, and I can see why. Getting from level 1 to 40 in one day was easy. Getting to 55 took another four days, and it will take another five to get to 65. While the finish line is still far off, the exp curve is about as steep as it ever gets, which means most people quit just as progress starts to come slow. There are lots of comments on the page about revising the subset to include achievements at every 5 levels instead of every 10, for more regular dopamine hits, because apparently, the level up notification ingame just isn't enough anymore. Maybe I'll make 2026 the year of the grind, and do more things most people don't finish.

Kingdom Hearts 1 Completed, Re: Chain of Memories Beaten. I've already done these two before so I decided to go a bit harder this time and do the Unchanging Armor achievement alongside Undefeated on Proud Mode. I'll never look at equipment in this game the same way again after that. The numbers in this game are deceptively small, and you wouldn't think they'd matter so much, but they do. You'll be doing chip damage and dying in two hits the entire game even if you picked the shield, which I did. Not getting MP Rage until level 90 is suffering. Dying at the very end of Hades Cup, Final Rest and World of Chaos/Ansem 3 is suffering. Everything is a slog, even more of a slog than Re: Chain of Memories. I'm proud of the achievement but man did it just… take a long time.

Given that it feels like one out of every three games on Steam is a roguelike deckbuilder now, I wanna ask if people who enjoy those games think Re:CoM is any good. It's by no means the worst game I've ever played but I'm pretty sure I'd still rather play Devil May Cry 2. Riku is pretty fun to play, duels clicked with me, but with Sora (whose entire story you have to play first to unlock Riku) it feels like the entire premise of the game is learning how to cheese bosses for free. If you try to actually play Kingdom Hearts, and let the bosses do things, you're not going to be allowed to have any fun because your cards will get broken randomly and you'll take damage instantly. If you solve that problem, you're hitting a sandbag until you win because only one attacking card or sleight can be "in play" at once. I never found a style with Sora where winning actually felt deserved. I did it, in the end, but it still feels like I'm missing something, because playing without sleights almost feels like playing Kingdom Hearts, but if revenge values randomized every second just to troll you, and playing with sleights makes the boss fights free unless they get lucky, draw a lot of zeros in a row and deck you out. Maybe people who like card games enjoy luck being a primary factor, but I generally don't. Level 99 with two characters is going to be a huge grind, too.

Got the bad ending for Portrait of Ruin, then promptly distracted by more Silksong.

Completed Dawn of Sorrow and started Portrait of Ruin. I remembered Dawn of Sorrow being more enjoyable than it was this time around. If you don't go out of your way to grind for souls, bosses become ridiculous damage sponges. Since the collection doesn't have achievements for anything besides just killing bosses and beating the game on Julius mode, I tried to quickly steamroll through, but it's just not fun to play like that. They also had a perfect opportunity to remove the stupid magic seal minigame with the stylus pen, but they decided to just give you the option to do a quick time event instead of using the mouse pointer, which is admittedly not as bad but still annoying. Julius mode continues to save this game. Portrait has been much more enjoyable so far. I've never played the other two games, so I'll have to wait for a final vertdict on the collection as a whole.