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The Dream-ending, the Dream Unending

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the quality of Limbus Company's character writing is such that for every Canto, even if the subject Sinner isn't like an absolute fave of mine or anything, there's just such a strong feeling of mixed compassion, pity, and affection for each that more often than not I end up staying up till odd hours of the morning clearing Canto Dungeons as if I can't sleep until I know our guy is okay.

like the other day after I'd cleared Nocturnal Sweeping and was discussing and theorizing with my brother about Hong Lu I swear I was getting worried enough that I felt a physical reaction like my body tensing up as if I was about to be punched right in the chest. I remember one of the promo taglines for Limbus was "Are you prepared to share the pain?" but I hadn't expected it to get literal like this lol

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the #1 thing you should know about me is that you can give me a character with any sort of identity issues

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i hope that after this event all FGO players can understand why Nero isn't just one of the Fate Series's most popular waifus but one of it's best characters overall

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In my 100% playthrough of LobCorp I thought the last Abnormality I needed data on was WhiteNight, which would have made a very appropriate final boss, but then after that I found I still needed like, *2 bits of information* on the Tool Abnormality Yang. The Yin-Yang dragon ended up being my true final boss when it killed like 5 Agents just because I had to wear Yang for five more seconds

So I'm actually kind of delighted that this new Hong Lu EGO in the promos is definitely Yin-Yang yaaaay

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bad idea for a new Limbus ID: a gun-wielding Meursault with a skill 3 that's 4 unbreakable coins where he shoots the enemy four times in the chest, but he can only use it if his SP is in the negatives

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one of the fun things about Metaphor re:Fantazio is that while the protagonist party like many RPG parties is rather goody-two-shoes, frequently we're reminded that our main goal since the start of the game has always been to assassinate our main political opponent.

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one time at the restaurant I used to work at some customers started beef with a manager I liked so I felt I should be allowed to cut the customers down with a samurai sword on their behalf. we were a Korean restaurant though so actually using a hwando would be more appropriate

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everytime Outis makes that one sneering face with the shadow over her eyes I think of the epithets Odysseus is commonly called by. that's "the wily Odysseus", "the lying Odysseus", "Odysseus, the author of all schemes" all right

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Don Quixote and Hong Lu's chapters being successive, and they both have a motif of "dreams" - also a theme of "identity" too I think, especially with Hong Lu referencing the Parable of the Butterfly's Dream in Canto 7. What's also interesting is that Ryoshu, who is up after them, could also tie into this, since there's a key scene in Hell Screen where Yoshihide describes seeing hell in his dreams, and there's a butterfly symbol in Ryoshu's icon as well.

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okay last Utopiaposting I swear: - place and character names associated with FF14's Ancients that are not borrowed from Greek mythology come from the 1516 novel Utopia. - Utopia is famous for giving a name and shape to the genre of speculative fiction that imagines ideal societies. the opposite of utopian fiction is dsytopian fiction, featuring corrupt societies. - one of the most famous works of dystopian fiction is Brave New World, which takes it's name from a line from Shakespeare's The Tempest. - and the area in which FF14's Amaurot is located is called "The Tempest" and is chock-full of other little references, making a full circle of literary references!

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JRPGs like to throw around references to literature and mythology like confetti, sometimes it feel like they do it just to make themselves look smarter, but these two games have things to say about the concept of Utopia making them in dialogue with the original, and they borrow names from the book (Hythlodaeus, More, Amaurot, Anyder, etc) and other references to cement the connection and also presumably to make lit nerds excited.

I had actually forgotten about studying Utopia for a while until I was looking up some stuff after playing Shadowbringers, but I hope there's someone out there in the fandom who likes 16th century literature and had their mind blown upon reaching Amaurot and meeting Hythlodaeus.

its like a Utopia (Thomas More, 1516) in here

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its like a Utopia (Thomas More, 1516) in here

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sixty bucks being the standard for brand-new triple-a games for a while was already pushing it, but now...

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reunion

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>FGO: what we have here is our Arcade crossover event >looks inside event >it's actually full of Last Encore >cue wild cheering and applause

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in any case my hope for Canto 8 is that Hong Lu can have at least one good moment of strong genuine emotion other than his usual smile, whether that's crying or raging or what have you, because I think that would be really healing for him.

and my fear is that he fuckin dies (or leaves the party in some other way, like forced to stay behind to be family head or turns back into a stone or something) and Jia Zichun takes his spot on the bus.