The Queue: Coffee Talk is headed to Tokyo!

Yesterday’s Nintendo Indie and Partner Directs were full of a lot of cool announcements, but the one I’m most pumped for is Coffee Talk Tokyo. Coming out on Steam as well as on Switch, XBox and Playstation 5, the third entry in one of my favorite indie series is heading overseas to a café in Tokyo to make drinks, talk to the locals, and maybe change someone’s fate if you get an ingredient wrong. It’s a charming and wholesome series and it’ll be a day one purchase for me.

That said, I am concerned that this may be the second sequel in a row where Freya — my absolute favorite character — will be largely or completely absent. Hopefully she finds her way to Japan for this entry but I’m guessing we’ll need to cross our fingers that the new characters can match her presence.

While I try to remember the ingredients for the STMJ let’s answer some questions! I hear there may be exciting stuff happening in World of Warcraft this week? Let’s find out together!

It’s real! Here’s the direct link and there’s also a bundle with Belastrasza.

So far Muradin has been absent. I’m guessing that he’s holding down the home fort while Moira, Magni and Dagran visit Khaz Algar. Speaking of Moira and Dagran …

I don’t want to get into spoiler territory, but I will say he’s been a solid addition to the dwarf team — it’s actually nice to have a bookish dwarf NPC with a major role (Brann is a bit of a nerd, but he’s still your stereotypically bold/aggressive dwarf).

That said, the short story written by the inestimable Cat Valente should be required reading for the expansion as you get a real feel for both Dagran’s and Moira’s personality.

Speaking of Moira I love her role in The War Within so far. Again, I’m not going to go into details because of spoilers, but I was concerned she was going to be typecast as an overprotective mom for Dagran but instead she’s really coming into her own as a leader. We even get some humor from her, which is something we rarely see (I think the only other example is when she arrives before the Siegecrafter Blackfuse fight in the Siege of Orgrimmar).

This is a case where the boring answer (aka Occam’s Razor) is that the initial lore for the Blade of the Black Empire wasn’t thought out beyond “cool talking knife that has a history of messing things up” and only when she became popular that the decision was made to expand her role into future events. There will always be inconsistencies when this happens, and how she ended up in the knife in the first place is one that has caused more questions — like this one.

That aside, just because Xal’atath isn’t happy about her former knife state doesn’t mean that the source of her dissatisfaction is conflicting goals. The Old Gods may have simply thought that Xal was a perfect candidate to become a deep undercover agent of void and didn’t care what she thought about it. They may have even seen that many of the futures resulted in their demise and knew that the only way to keep their goals going was to slip an entity of her abilities through the net.

So the conflict isn’t one of goals, but one of methods.

Spending hours exploring the city to write up a guide really makes me appreciate it a lot more than Valdrakken. Not that Valdrakken was bad, mind you, but there’s a lot of buildings to navigate around to get one from area to another. Dornogal is a much more open plan and almost everything is conveniently located. Frankly the only way Dornogal could be better is if every NPC was outdoors so you didn’t have to dismount to talk to them. I love it and I’m already dreading leaving it in Midnight.

I wouldn’t play WoW if it’s just a walking simulator; I have enough other games I could play if my goal was simply mechanical tasks. Believe it or not I’m still invested in the story — probably even more so with all the Dwarf-y goodness in The War Within. Don’t get me wrong, the gameplay is still largely enjoyable (glares at Professions), but I need a story I can get behind if I’m going to invest time in a game.

I do admit that a large part of why I have not become jaded with WoW is that I’ve never been emotionally invested in the “elf story”. I have plenty of problems with the Burning of Teldrassil from a narrative standpoint but it never hit me in the emotions like it did for others.

I do have some problems with the recent incident that you mentioned in the rest of your question (but I removed for spoiler reasons), but the outcome makes sense to me in the context of the story being told so it didn’t bother me.

Good news! By the time you read this response it should be fixed. Hopefully! Maybe!

The moment they made a big deal of the Harronir in the “vibe” trailer last month I became convinced we’re getting them as an Allied Race. It doesn’t make sense to me to feature them so extensively if there weren’t plans to use them as a selling point in the future. While they do have a presence in The War Within it’s nowhere close to being as large as the Earthen or the Arathi or even the Nerubian Awakened (another frequent expansion-related Allied Race possibility mentioned). That could change of course in the future of course but I’d be surprised if we can’t make a Harronir by the end of the expansion.

As for playing them myself I can’t say I’m too interested. I’d roll and level a Hunter to unlock the inevitable Heritage armor, but I don’t foresee deliberately choosing to play one.

That’s all the time we have for questions today! Stay hydrated, be good to one another, enjoy Khaz Algar, and be sure to ask plenty of questions of Matt!