i like fishing in video games. fake plastic fishing, if you will. i have a long-running document about different types of fishing minigames that i would love to talk about here. i rank all of them on five criteria, but one of them is really subjective and only gets weight on my personal list. the rest, i've tried to make as objective as possible. scale of one to five.
- variability (v) - the ways the game influences what you're catching (high = call a fake plastic meteorologist)
- control (c) - the ways you influence what fish you're catching (high = juggle your inventory, bait boy)
- effort (e) - how much you'll have to work to understand how to fish in this game (high = get an encyclopedia)
- necessity (n) - how necessary fishing is in this game to progress (high = mandatory)
- do i like it? (l) - well, do i? (high = yeah)
the list, in no order
V C E N L
4 4 4 1 4
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FINAL FANTASY XIV (NORMAL FISHING)
fisher is still one of the most rewarding experiences i've had in a video game. picked it up at the beginning of the pandemic and now i'm waiting with baited breath for the fishcord to figure out what's hitting every patch and i have, like, two or three big fish titles. maybe four. let's see what happens. yes, i very very much like this. i love how catching each fish feels like a little puzzle. i love the community that's built itself up around fishing and how many outside-of-game resources exist for people who want to get real deep into fishing or who just want to dip their toes in. i won't have as many nautical puns going forward probably.
fish uptime tracker | fruity snacks on youtube
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V C E N L
4 4 3 1 4
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FINAL FANTASY XIV (SPEARFISHING)
good news, fishing in xiv is so complex that it gets three separate entries. spearfishing is a little different (introduced in stormblood, for one) with a totally different interface and a separate set of skills. there's fewer holes to explore but there's mechanics where some are totally hidden until you catch enough fish, which adds to the puzzle-solving nature that i love so much. spearfishing is pretty underutilized, unfortunately, and you won't find anything too special in it, but sometimes i like chilling out and playing a little claw machine game.
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V C E N L
5 2 4 1 3
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FINAL FANTASY XIV (OCEAN FISHING)
ocean fishing is like fish raid. every two hours you get on a boat with a bunch of other fishers and you try to affect the local trout population. there's special blue fish you can catch to trigger spectral currents, which are big point-based events that let you catch a different kind of blue fish that are super-rare and more or less just trophies. it's a lot more random than normal fishing which tanks its control score pretty significantly. i like ocean fishing, but once i catch all the blue fish i'm not really going to go back to it. fortunately that day seems like a long way off.
lulu's tools for ocean fishing
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