At its core, Fantasy Life i (and yes, it's an "i", not an "I") is an "everything game". There is a part that is a bit like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley, another part that plays like a pale copy of Breath of the Wild, and some elements that remind me of Palworld, where I collect creatures to help me in my crafting. The general game design of Fantasy Life i is to be extremely wide, while being rather shallow. Nothing is really difficult, this is the one game where in spite of the action combat and the quick time event crafting I have no problems whatsoever with my slow reaction speed. That is mostly because all these systems only to a small part depend on you pressing the right button quickly, but depend a lot on your stats. If you want to craft an item with recommended stat of 150 while having only 100 stat, that would be challenging. But it is easier to just get your stats up to 200, at which point the same item is nearly trivial to craft.

On the one side I would say that Fantasy Life i has a lot of grinding. On the other side, even the grind is wide and shallow. You never have to grind one thing very long, the rewards come hard and fast. But you do have to grind a *lot* of different things. While you only need one combat "life" (aka profession), you need all of the 4 gathering and 6 crafting lives to advance, each of which goes to level 100, with 10 ranks to achieve. That is because of some sometimes curious design elements, where for example in a dungeon crawl a path is suddenly blocked by a tree, and if you haven't leveled your woodcutting skill far enough, you can't proceed. When the game at the start asks you to choose one life, that is extremely misleading. You choose 1 or more combat lives, and then end up doing all 10 non-combat ones.

Thus the title of my post, Fantasy Life i is a game that steals time. There is always something to do, and usually you have something to do in several different lives at once. While there is a main story to follow, you can also end up playing for a day or two while completely ignoring the main story. It is only after a lot of time that you then need to return to the main story, because that unlocks access to new places. You can somewhat play this as a kind of cozy game, and it keeps you occupied for a long time, without ever stressing you out. And sometimes a not so exciting game can be good.

What isn't good is that Fantasy Life i often feels as if it had bought a collection of other games from Temu and assembled them. The Ginormosia part is definitely a copy of Breath of the Wild, having towers to remove the fog of war, and shrines with puzzles. But where the shrines in Breath of the Wild are interesting, the puzzles in Ginormosia are far more mundane and repetitive. You can climb mountains and swim oceans in Ginormosia, but without a stamina system that is rather trivial, and without the glider the verticality doesn't add much to the gameplay. The crafting part of the game is marred by all 6 crafting lives working exactly identical, so you are playing the same mini game, regardless of whether you are tailoring, cooking, or smithing. The gathering lives also work nearly identical to each other, although fishing is a minor variation, and farming is a bit different. If you admired the brilliant game design of the various games that Fantasy Life i is copying, you won't find that same brilliance in here. Fantasy Life i is about quantity, not quality. It isn't downright bad, each system works okay, but it isn't something to write home about.

As a summer holiday game, Fantasy Life i works well enough. If you are looking for a game just to pass time, without having to get too involved or applying yourself too much, this is it. If you are looking for a new and great experience that moves and excites you, you'd better look elsewhere.

While it was interesting to play a Sci Fi game instead of Fantasy for a change, I generally prefer Fantasy as a genre. But apart from that, I also found ISS Vanguard to be a less good game than Agemonia. ISS Vanguard does have a rich story, with good voice acting in an app if you want to, and a good number of scenarios that can have exciting moments. But it felt a bit more scripted, with the challenge often being that there was just one way to solve a planet, and you just had to find it by trial and error. While the ship book was an innovative take on the administrative tasks needed to run a campaign game, the administration part could get a bit heavy sometimes. And character development stalled about half way through the game, with every player having a limited number of sleeves to put characters in, and once they are full, you don't really progress much anymore.

I wouldn't say that ISS Vanguard is a bad game, but Agemonia was an excellent one, and ISS Vanguard just paled a bit in comparison. Still, we played ISS Vanguard from start to finish, and didn't regret it.

The general rule for retirees is the 4% rule, that is you can spend 4% of your savings per year, adjusted for inflation, and it is likely that the money will last for 30 years. The history of that rule is that it comes from a study of historic stock and bond returns. But historical averages are very different from the specific current situation. For example, right now bond returns are very bad, with 2022 having been the worst year ever for U.S. bonds. On the other side of the coin, global stock market indices, from the S&P 500 to MSCI World, are all at an historic high. Which is great if you have your money already invested, but not so great if you are looking to invest. One should "buy the dip", not buy the peak. The probability that a stock market which is already at an historic peak keeps on rising without a major correction for years is low.

If you look at financial news discussing global financial risks, this month of course there is a lot of talk about a possible U.S. debt crisis, due to the "big, beautiful bill" adding so much more U.S. national debt over the coming years. But that crisis might still be years away, it is very hard to say how much national debt is "too much", and it varies from country to country. The last big stock market correction was caused by Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs, but since then the market has come to the TACO conclusion, "Trump always chickens out", and doesn't believe in a real major trade war anymore. Still, Trump is obviously a factor of volatility to the global stock market and investment returns.

Personally I believe there might be a next financial crisis which would be somewhat similar to the dot com crash of the early 2000's, just replacing the dot com bubble with an AI bubble. Note that this is independent from whether you believe that AI has huge potential. History shows that the internet in the late 90's had huge potential, and companies like Amazon obviously made billions from that. The financial crash was that investors were made to believe that the gains would come a lot faster than they actually did, and from investment flowing to some companies for which the financial gains through the internet were actually a lot lower than promised. With AI, where we don't even fully understand how it works, it is extremely difficult to predict how fast this technology is going to make how much money and to which companies. And examples like Builder.AI show that just like in the dot com crash, a lot of investment has been going to the wrong companies. There is some evidence that the still high valuation of Tesla, based on AI being able to turn every single Tesla into a fully self-driving Robotaxi, is too optimistic. And DeepSeek this year has shown that not all AI development supports the very high valuation of Nvidia. It is relatively easy to see how a series of events might turn investor sentiment on AI sour, burst the bubble, and lead to a major global stock market correction, especially with stock market indices like the S&P 500 being over 40% tech these days.

A standard financial advice from a few years ago would have been to buy an ETF of the S&P 500, and just let it sit for decades, and you'd easily get those 4% return you need for your retirement savings to last. But if you add the potential weakness of the dollar due to debt, the potential of an AI bubble burst stock market correction, and section 899 of the big, beautiful bill adding retaliatory taxes on foreign investors, it is far from clear that this is still good advice for Europeans.

In Europa Universalis IV, you can't wage war and expand all the time. There are a number of game mechanics that will stop you: Unrest in the provinces you took, overextension, other countries counting your "aggressive expansion" score, war exhaustion, manpower depletion, etc. Thus a normal game of Europa Universalis IV is dominated by a cycle: Wage war when the opportunity is rife, take some provinces, and then spend some years to integrate the new provinces, and calm down your population and the neighbors, until you wage the next war. Playing as non-expansive Switzerland, I only had to wage war early to grow into the later historical borders, and the mission tree for Switzerland gives bonuses that avoids most of the expansion problems you'd otherwise have. And then, in "only" 40 hours, I could play at relatively high speed through nearly 4 centuries of history. I learned a lot about playing "tall", finished most of the mission tree of Switzerland, and had quite a successful game. It was fun. And it got me to the point where I am thinking that I won't be playing Europa Universalis IV again.

A decade ago or so, I made a tragic mistake: I considered Europa Universalis IV to be too complicated, and never played it until now. Instead I tried other Paradox grand strategy games, didn't like Hearts of Iron IV, but played a good amount of Victoria 3 and Crusader Kings III. In hindsight, I actually like Europa Universalis IV better than Vic3 or CK3. While EU4 certainly has problems with accessibility, it turns out that the stronger focus of the other games (economy in Vic3, characters in CK3) is actually less fun than the all-encompassing EU4. Europa Universalis IV is also a lot "easier", as in the player having a higher chance to succeed and grow into a large empire, even if he doesn't understand all the details. I had several games in Victoria 3 where my economy somewhat unexpectedly went south, or my kingdom in Crusader Kings 3 split up into several parts just because I had had too many children randomly. In Europa Universalis IV the details are often confusing, but I usually had a good grasp of what was going on, and what to do to succeed.

But Europa Universalis V is on the horizon, so with the UI and quality-of-life features of EU4 being distinctly lacking, there not being any more patches or content additions, and EU4 requiring a subscription to use all DLCs, I will most probably play the sequel EU5, and never look back to EU4.

The only weird thing about the transition from EU4 to EU5 will probably be that much of what I have learned in EU4 isn't applicable in EU5. A lot of playing Europa Universalis IV is not about grand strategy considerations, but dealing with very detailed and very specific rules. When playing as Portugal I learned that for example the game handles a colony in South America very differently from a colony in Africa. There are fewer universal rules, and more local rules, than in other grand strategy games. With the engine of EU5 being much different, I suspect that all those specific rules will be different, and I'll have to learn them all over again.

At one point in my career I was working on a chemical process developed in the 1920's and bought the original antique book from a hundred years ago in which that chemical process was first described. My ability to do so didn't require the publishing company from a hundred years to still be around. Once a book is printed, under proper care it can last centuries; and if a sufficient number of copies have been printed at the time, availability of that book a hundred years later is still very possible. To some extent the same is true about movies, where old rolls of films are still being found and restored. Books and movies are then also often digitized, to preserve them even longer. I can see the interest in treating games a media, and preserving them in a similar fashion. But one has to admit that there are some fundamental differences.

Games very frequently have a very strong link to the hardware for which they were published. If I feel nostalgic for the Amiga games of my youth, a fundamental problem would be getting hold of a still working Amiga computer. There are emulators, which are a bit similar to the digitization of films and books in preserving games for a longer time. But it all gets a bit trickier when we talk about modern live service games, which require connecting to an online server to run. I don't think many game companies would shut down such servers as long as the revenue stream from people still playing exceeds the cost of running the servers. But any law requiring them to run the servers for longer would create a liability for the game companies. In the extreme case it is theoretically possible that the Stop Killing Games initiative would actually kill games, before they are even released, because game companies wouldn't want to take the risk of running servers at a loss for years to come. If the regulation doesn't require servers to keep running, but requires code to be made open source in order to enable private servers, that would also be a liability for game companies, because they might have wanted to keep that code proprietary for their next game. I do believe that meaningful regulation on the issue is possible, but my confidence in the European Union working out a sensible regulation is limited, as they have a strong history of over-regulation.

While it would certainly be possible to have a meaningful debate about the merits, advantages and disadvantages of the Stop Killing Games initiative, the sad news is that reality just showed that we can't have meaningful debates on the internet anymore. Instead of debating, people were just shouting at each other, insulting each other, threatening and harassing each other, and telling lies about each other. And a bunch of people pretty obviously just jumped on the bandwagon for one side or the other not because they believed in the importance of the issue being "discussed", but because a flame war drives clicks, which drive revenue. Social media with ad revenue have turned the internet into a much bigger version of the Jerry Springer Show, in which fake controversy is presented for commercial purposes.

That suggests to me that the majority of players of Europa Universalis IV isn't interested in achievements at all. Achievements are a game design element which is somewhat "meta", designed to "gamify" the rest of the game. But the numbers would suggest that at least for three quarters of the players, EU4 is more a simulation than a game. Traditional game elements like winning and achievements aren't important. Probably because they aren't even all that challenging. Although I am a complete noob with "only" 132 hours played, I can turn a small country into a huge blob long before the game ends. I don't think that all that many people play EU4 until 1820, because usually you feel as if you have won centuries before that.

Which means that quite often I don't start a new game of Europa Universalis IV with the plan to win it, but rather with some other goal. For example to explore the game concept of colonization: I played a game with Portugal as traditional colonizer, then another as Brunei to see what happens if a non-traditional nation builds up a colonial empire. I stopped the latter game when it turned out that if you get 5 core provinces in an American region as a European, you get nifty features to found a colony, while you don't get the same if you perform the same action as an Asian nation. EU4 is full of very specific game mechanics that only apply to certain nations in certain situations, and aren't universal. That definitely feels bad sometimes, but it avoids the opposite effect one can observe in Victoria 3, where sometimes it feels as if it doesn't matter what nation you play, as they all play the same.

The most interesting games of EU4 are those where you put some house rules and restrictions on yourself, like not expanding beyond a historical area, or pursuing a very specific goal other than global conquest. I am toying with the idea to continue my series of games as Switzerland in Paradox grand strategy games, not expanding beyond the historical area you get a core claim on early in the game. I might even play that in ironman, and get some more achievements, just for giggles. But it is also true that like most games, EU4 becomes less interesting when you have seen a lot of it, and events start to become repetitive.

And ultimately, that is my main goal and achievement that I had when starting Europa Universalis IV: Become sufficiently familiar with EU4, in order to be able to appreciate EU5 when it comes out soon®.

But beyond that, it seems to me that these comments are mostly driven by complete ignorance. 14.4% of the US population is black, so on a photo of 30 people with a representative racial mix, you’d expect around 4 black people. But in Europe, less than 2% of the population is black. And half of the black population of Europe lives in France, while in many eastern European countries the percentage of black people is below 1%. It is completely possible to have a team of 30 Europeans that are fully inclusive and representative of the local population, and none of them is black.

Some European countries, like the UK, were heavily involved in the “triangle trade”, shipping black slaves from Africa to America, while not allowing black slaves in their home countries. Other European countries simply never dealt with slaves. No European country imported millions of black slaves from Africa. Accusing Europe of being “too white” is accusing them of not having committed that original sin of large scale slavery.

While Apple might have some self-interest in showing that AI isn’t that easy, the companies that push for AI have a much bigger interest in keeping the hype up, up to levels that might be described as a scam. Companies like Nvidia have their share-price directly depending on the belief that you just need to scale up LLM models far enough to reach artificial general intelligence. I consider it likely, that this premise isn’t true, which might at one point burst the AI bubble and destroy billions in investment.

At the same time, AI is growing closer to becoming smarter than humans by the clever trick of making humans less smart. The first studies of the effect of the introduction of ChatGPT on education are devastating: Students using AI to write their homework are less smart in performing similar tasks themselves to the point where a diminished number of connections was evident in their brain scans. As a large percentage of students use AI, we will need to fundamentally rethink our education systems, and fast. “Homework”, where teachers rely on their students to let’s say write an essay on their own, might become a thing of the past, replaced by more educational tools like supervised exams, where the students can’t use AI.

While the Legend of Zelda games previously had only one save game slot per user, I could in fact have as many save games as I wanted, by creating as many user profiles as I wanted. The Switch 2 upgraded Legend of Zelda games have 2 save slots now, but only one user profile can use Zelda Notes or other online features like game chat. If I want more than 2 save slots and create a user profile for that, I can only play offline, and without the very useful Zelda Notes added functionalities. Bummer!

In very many analog and digital role-playing games, your character progresses by gathering experience points, which give levels, and gaining levels makes you stronger. Then a higher level character can tackle higher level enemies. Depending on the game, the higher level enemies either just appear as you level up, or you have different zones of different levels, and gaining levels gives you access to these higher level zones. The Legend of Zelda games work completely different: If you kill a lot of monsters, especially bigger ones and boss monsters, a secret, hidden xp score goes up. That xp score levels up the monsters all over the world. But *not* your hero. Meanwhile many of the activities that would make your hero stronger, like doing shrines or gathering materials to make better weapons, are not directly linked to monster fights and the xp score.

As I don't enjoy action combat all that much, I am avoiding combat as much as possible. So the first thing I did in this Tears of the Kingdom run was to unlock all the sky towers. That not only reveals all of the surface level map, but also gives a convenient network of fast travel points. Use the sky towers to launch up into the sky, and you can both reach various sky islands, and fly very far on the surface level to reach shrines and other points you want to go. With very little walking comes very little combat. Which means that my hero is now rather strong, due to having gathered a lot of stamina and hearts from shrines, and having gathered good armor and weapons. But my hidden xp score is probably still extremely low, and the monsters haven't evolved much. So when I do get into a fight, it isn't much of a problem.

The only flaw in this strategy is that a bunch of features are locked behind doing at least one of the four regional boss fights. So sooner or later I'll have to go to Rito Village and do a part of the main quest there. Other than that I have effectively decoupled my progress from the monster scaling mechanic.