#{ what a TERRIBLE game based on a really neat premise }

[1-800-scaryphone]

i feel like d.ialtown is one of those fandoms i can squeeze into absolutely everything. me playing m.ichigan report from h.ell w/ my qpp today like "teehee i could make all this a funney au..."

[lucky-clover-gazette]

okay i have THOUGHTS about this line

he didn’t have to say that to make his plan work. i mean yeah, being nice to the player definitely earns their favor and future assistance, but he could have just as easily gone the route of gaslighting them into feeling bad and like they caused the problem, eliciting a more shame-based and desperate and less uplifting and righteous kind of reliance. like if volo really hated the player, and was truly cruel, that’s what he would have done. the player would have still gotten the chain and felt indebted to him for the plate hunt, but they also would be miserable and feel lonely and hurt and confused. but volo doesn’t do that, he grounds the player and validates their feelings, which were hurt by the cruel townspeople more than the event volo caused to prompt that cruelty. like truly, it’s only volo’s fault that the player gets banished through the most like simple calculated logic—yes, if he hadn’t caused the rift, they wouldn’t have been banished, or brought here at all. but kamado CHOSE to banish them based on his own paranoia and disdain for outsiders, and the others enabled it by choice. volo didn’t make that happen, just how he didn’t make or even want arceus to get the player involved in the first place.

i don’t think volo hates the player, personally, at all. or at least, i think that he hates them and cares for them just as much as he hates and cares for himself. i know this isn’t groundbreaking volo theorizing material, but he’s absolutely projecting his disdain for society based on his vague past experiences here. he dislikes the outsider because his plan demands it, but he dislikes everyone else because he personally thinks they’re terrible. it’s kinda neat how he “fake” compliments the player’s loyalty to him as a merchant so often, bc i think loyalty is something he actually takes very seriously. and he probably saw how loyal the player was to the galaxy team, and then the way they kicked them out, and was genuinely pissed and hurt on the player’s behalf.

the things he says at the end of the game are said in extreme distress and defeat, and while they are not NOT reflective of his character and motives, i’m shocked by how many pokemon fans regard volo like he’s a nihilistic and amoral sociopath. passion and compassion are behind nearly everything volo does, for better or for worse. they’re behind moments like this, and moments like his ranting at spear pillar. he is a person who constantly grapples to align his personal moral code and lofty ideals, which live in this weird space between the manmade and divine, with the flawed reality of existence. his entire mentality is full of contradictions, because he is a man who thinks he should be god, but in reality could never be a good god, because he is still very much a man. it’s the emotion, idealism, and intellectual curiosity of humanity that drive him, not the impartiality, absolutism, and complacency of an omnipotent all-knowing deity.

so like, with this line. he specifically mentions that the galaxy team has treated the player poorly. not that the galaxy team’s choice was illogical, not that the player just needs to try harder to get them to accept him. he is emphatically rejecting the premise that the player did anything to deserve blame, even though he has no intention to actually explain why this really happened or volunteer himself to take the blame. because ultimately, volo is not the person to blame for the galaxy team’s cruelty, and he knows it. and he also knows that it’s the cruelty that has hurt the player, more than the sky problem itself, because he has been treated like an outsider too. and he can’t DO anything about that. even if he told the truth, the damage has already been done. the player knows how their supposed allies would react in this situation, regardless of the logic or truth. and volo can’t fix that. he does not believe he can make people kinder or the world a better place, which is exactly why he wants so badly to remake it. for himself, bc clearly he’s been through some shit too, for people like the outsider, and for anyone else whose loyalty and dedication have been met with rejection and apathy. which is so deeply tragic and ironic, because by being the only person to care for the player in this moment, he is making the world a better place for them.

volo is, at his core, a hypocrite. he’s like if you put the ingredients for a hero into a blender, but accidentally used the “tragic hypocrite” setting so he came out a janky villain instead. to volo, concepts like loyalty and self-righteousness are driving forces, much moreso than simple black and white morality or consequentialism. this makes him a hypocrite because he believes a perfect world is possible as long as his moral code is strictly followed, and his evil plan is to prove it. but in his efforts to do so, he proves over and over again that a perfect world isn’t possible, and certainly would not be possible under his control.

like, okay—if someone suggested that the means of pain and suffering in the world justified the ends (the world), volo would disagree and claim that arceus is responsible for the pain and suffering, and therefore does not deserve the power to create/rule worlds. but then, following that very same logic, if volo needed to get a random person banished and betrayed in order to create his better world, then those means wouldn’t justify his ends either. which is WHY we see him subconsciously draw a line here, between the things he’s not responsible for (other people being cruel, arceus transporting the player) and the things he is directly responsible for (the way he treats the player in these circumstances, either with derision or support). and wouldn’t you know, in this instance where it truly is up to him what the means are to his ends, he chooses kindness where he could have been cruel. because while arceus sending the hero and the town banishing them weren’t really Volo’s means to Volo’s ends, this conversation sure as hell could be. And he doesn’t want his better world built on a foundation of suffering and pain.

by saying this one line and treating the player as he does here, i think volo accidentally exposes something deeply true and good about himself. this man could say “i’m a villain and i don’t care about the player” and fully believe it, but at the same time demonstrably possess the morals and compassion of a hero, which he uses to actively care for the player. he is a delusional hypocrite, but he’s definitely not heartless. and i just think that’s neat.

alternatively, volo is completely heartless, knows that people are endeared to people who want to protect them, and methodically uses that knowledge here for his convenience. that very well could have been the intention, and it makes sense too—but i personally enjoy entertaining the notion of depth where i see potential for it. so yeah.

[moralesmilesanhour]

Ooo hi, can you write something with gamer/streamer Miles G? Maybe he and the reader just chill and play games talking about life or whatever.

streamer miles!

Ok this went in a sliiightly different direction but the general premise is the same i hope that's ok lmao (also lowkey trying a new writing style/approach)

A/N: comment which animal crossing villager you think miles would like if u want 🫶🏾

You only really see a fraction of a person online. 

The messy, disagreeable thoughts that don’t fit into a neat little post, every time you’ve ever tripped over something and ate shit, all of your worst outfits - none of it exists if you don’t make it known. If you decide you’ve never stumbled over your own feet a day in your life, then it’s so. No one’s gonna claw their way through your screen and check.

For example, you had never seen Miles Morales smile with his teeth before until you clicked on his livestream, and none of his viewers would ever be able to guess.

He was laughing at some joke being made in the chat. 

“Y’all are terrible,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye.

Miles’ stream had been recommended to you by the ever-mysterious, totally-not-creepy algorithm ‘based on your location’, and the thumbnail with his dimples on full display piqued your curiosity.

He’d been passing by once when you accidentally dropped your books and folders while rushing to class. He knelt down and picked them up without a word, dropping them into your hands in a much neater stack than they had originally been in, from largest to smallest. 

Your eyes met for less than two seconds, but you could’ve sworn that there was a softness to them that couldn’t be caught from a distance. 

“Thanks!” you called out as the late bell rang. He only nodded before turning away, not bothering to walk any faster.

You never spoke to him again, having no idea what you’d even say. He rarely spoke outside of class, but you had assumed that based on the way he skulked down the hallway and the permanent ‘I’m bored’ look on his face, that he’d be playing something a little more…serious? ‘God of War’ maybe, or ‘Last of Us’. Or some sports-related game that you couldn’t understand.

Certainly not ‘Animal Crossing’.

Tentatively, your fingers hovered over the keyboard as the stream of comments began to slow, and you wondered if he’d be more likely to see it if you commented this instant.

–Who’s ur favorite villager?

There, nice and simple. Inoffensive.

Miles squinted his eyes at what was presumably a second monitor.

“Who’s my favorite villager?” His brows furrowed in confusion for a moment before he put two and two together. “Oh! You mean the li’l animals and shit. Um, the blue penguin? Ace? I like him.”

You sat back and watched him play for another fifteen minutes, most of which were spent figuring out what direction a couch sitting inside his virtual home should face. His voice was low and almost raspy, but…muted. As if someone had turned the volume down on it like you would the radio. He was fortunate to own a decent microphone.

–You got your own PC? 

It seems you got lucky a second time, and Miles paused to read your comment aloud once again.

“Yyup,” he answered proudly. “Put it together myself. I’ll do a tour one day. My setup is wavy, you’ll see!”

He continued going back and forth with the comments in chat, occasionally thanking some for making small donations. The fact of him making anything at all just from playing a video game was impressive. 

Miles remarked on the ‘classical style’ of one of the buildings on his island, and you snorted. Nerd.

–bro thinks he’s an architect

This made him giggle. A light, breathy sound that you would hardly expect to come out of him.

“You’re a hater, man. Watch me get hired as soon as I’m outta college and build yo’ next apartment building.”

You looked down at your phone and realized it was nearly one in the morning. With a yawn, you said your goodbyes in the comments and left the stream.

-

The cafeteria was full by the time you got downstairs, leaving not a single space on the white benches save for two completely empty ones near the back. 

Well, not completely empty.

As you weaved in between students carrying trays of slop with milk cartons, a familiar pair of cornrows came into view.

It’s now or never.

Timidly, you slid onto the bench right beside Miles. Focused on his meal and the tattered sketchbook he carried around, he looked up at you with just his eyes.

“Hey,” you tried to greet him casually with an awkward smile. “I saw you ye–I mean, I…I saw you. In general.”

His blinked slowly. “We all go to the same school.”

You cleared your throat.

“...Right. We-uh, met in the hallway.”

“You dropped all your books on the floor.”

“Yeah!” you replied a little too loudly. “I just, um, wanted to say hi.”

“...hi.”

There was a stretch of silence as you sifted through a list of topics to rescue the conversation, and a lightbulb went off.

“Do you have any hobbies? Other than drawing, I mean.”

Miles gave up on sketching and answered, “Video games.”

“Which ones you been playing recently?”

“Uh, Mortal Kombat, 2K,” he counted on his fingers, “and Animal Crossing, just to see what it was about–”

“Oh, you’re really good at that one!”

You both froze. Uh-oh.

“And how exactly do you know that?”

“I-I mean, you just…look…like the type?” 

You started frantically chipping away at the remaining nail polish on your fingers. Not even you could believe that one.

A tiny grin played on his lips. 

“Sure, let’s go with that.”

Soon the bell rang, saving you from making any further incriminating comments.

“See you in class?”

“Yeah, see you in class,” Miles replied, before tilting his head. “Or wherever I see you.”

[wirewitchviolet]

Consider cloning one of these games...

So the other day someone was showing me the trailer to some neat new indie game they were getting into, and my immediate thought was "that does look pretty nice but FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING! INDIE DEVS, PLAY A SECOND GAME ALREADY!"

Presumably you've already guessed this, but it was a nice little handcrafted thing that was very plainly inspired primarily by Super Metroid. Even had those bubble-looking platforms. I'd say what it was specifically, but I already forgot the name, because, you know, I've kinda seen a few games do this before.

It's not like Super Metroid isn't one of my favorite games of all time, obviously. I'm one of the shockingly few people who played it when it was new and totally fell in love then. And it's also not like there aren't several games made in its image that I also love. It's just that there's way too damn many of them out there for anyone to play, and while I'd never be one to tell someone not to make the thing they want to make due to market saturation or whatever, I kinda feel like we're doing a huge disservice to our collective creativity and appreciation of classic games to all be so hyper-focused on putting our own spins on this one particular game, especially when it kinda knocked things out of the park back when this wasn't a genre it was just this one super cool game with, among other things, a compelling structure to it.

Like, I do love that Super Metroid became A game that's served as a focal point for indie devs to try and recreate. Back when it was first released it actually sold kinda terribly by Nintendo's standards, and didn't really have anything else out there trying to iterate on the concept until we eventually got the Castlevania series going that route, and Cave Story. But at this point, yeah, Super Metroid has been all canonized and studied to death and if you're the sort of person who cares about this sort of thing in the slightest you know all about how it ticks and the appeal and what other ways the basic premise can be pulled in. So it's well past time for people to take another game that's super great and fairly unique and use that as a jumping off point to make some new things. So I'm just going to ramble here a little about some real gems that nobody's ever really gotten around to trying to replicate.

Punch-Out!!

I want to say we're all familiar with Punch-Out!! but... are we? It's a famously difficult game, so odds are good you've seen speedruns or other challenge runs, but you really have to play it for yourself to see what's so interesting about it. A big part of the initial appeal of course was having these really expressive screen-filling characters, which isn't something we're lacking now. It's also real twitchy, basically unplayable towards the end if you're dealing with any sort of input lag at all, which isn't super unique these days, but structurally, the way it's coded, there's all this weird artificial drama to it.

Like, on the surface, it's a pretty straightforward thing. Enemies have tells for their attacks, you dodge those, you hit them in the resulting openings. But there's also the round based structure, knock-downs, and one-off gimmick mechanics in the mix. Officially, we're playing by the rules of boxing where the outcome of a match is decided by either knocking someone down and them not getting back up, knocking them down three times in a round, or running out of time and having to go to some judge's decision. But that's not REALLY how it works.

There's no random chance of someone going down and staying down. You've got HP meters, you take one down, your opponent falls over, waits until late in the count and gets up, forcing you to drain that HP down three times before the round ends, and if yours bottoms out, you get to mash buttons to stand up and have your other two chances. But then there's times you CAN take someone down, not only keeping them down for a KO win, but even getting there without your opponent bottoming out on HP first. The most famous example, I believe of both of these, being Bald Bull's charge. The big dramatic make or break where he just keeps using this special move which isn't terribly hard to dodge, but deadly if it connects, and dodging doesn't really help as he won't stop until the round ends, and then might spend the whole second round doing nothing but. You need to take that risk, and get that frame perfect stomach strike just before he connects to dramatically KO him and snatch victory from the jaws of defeat... or you can do this:

I was actually looking for an example of the all or nothing strike when I found this. If you don't face the charge in round 1, he gets into it sooner in round 2 to force the matter, but if you're still not confident enough to go for it there, turns out you can just drop him early into round 3 and have him stay down... and the only real consistent rule any of this follows is drama. Heck looking at the opening screen here, this person knows tricks for getting a KO on at least the first 10 opponents. Most of them I've always just taken the TKOs on myself. Point is though, the mechanics really run on drama. AI scripts change up if you move onto new rounds. Knock-downs turn into knock outs if and only if it fits a certain narrative. This sort of thing is super fascinating to me. Makes me want to look through the game's code line by line. And the only thing I can think of in any other game that even comes close is, of all things, the Ace Attorney series, with those scenery chewing meltdowns, and scattered scenes that "break the rules" with instant failure penalties or no-win situations where you're then suddenly saved by a friendly NPC's dramatic appearance.

I wouldn't suggest anyone literally try to make a Punch-Out!! clone. There's no real reason to stick to the boxing framework. I'd definitely advise against copying all the broad stereotypes. But there's a real unique soul to the drama-driven mechanics breaking stated rules I'd love to see people really digging into to gain a deep understanding of it and apply that to original games.

Yume Kojo: Doki Doki Panic

I'm not just being pretentious and refusing to say Super Mario Bros. 2. When it was Mario-ized, there were two huge changes- A run button the original FDS game didn't have, and the fundamental structural change of just having you finish levels with whatever character you like (or use warp zones to skip them entirely). In the original game, in order to see the proper ending, you had to play each and every level with each and every character with no run button. And that's neat, actually.

See, just as an example, there's a bit of a skip early on in both versons of the game, where you can avoid taking a door through some whole area by just leaping across a big waterfall. In Super Mario Bros. 2 anyone can do this, just needing a running start, but in the original release, there are no running starts. Either you can jump that gap by way of good airtime, or you can't. Depends which character you play as. Everyone has different stats, so being forced through the same full set of levels, there's a few little things like this where you have to alter your strategy to reflect the character you're running with at the time. That's cool. The whole mechanic of lifting things and throwing them, or riding on enemies' heads, or stacking blocks to reach higher areas or block fireballs, this is also just cool (and another thing SMB2 tweaked actually, play both and see for yourself).

I have seen literally one indie game that riffed on this idea, Curse of the Crescent Isle.

Umihara Kawase

If you've played it, you know. If you haven't, please just watch this speedrun:

Nothing has physics quite like this game. Nothing really has the same weird mildly distressing dream sort of tone to it either, or weird as hell branching level structure, or the weird system where the game has a time limit, but rather than giving a game over just makes it end after your current level. Other games have played with grappling hooks, but nothing I've ever seen has made me feel like this here is what they were going for.

Altered Beast

You know, I don't even particularly LIKE Altered Beast. I always thought it was a bit too short, a bit too simple, and still somehow it felt like you were just killing time until getting the power-ups that kinda make you invincible for the rest of the level.

There's... something here though. Somewhere with these bodies getting so bulky and beefy with no change to their heads and the voice samples and the sense of spectacle to it all, and yeah the dramatic gameplay shifts with the power-ups. I don't quite know what the secret sauce is, but if you find it, bottle it up, and slather it over something less shallow, you might really have something there.

Ecco the Dolphin

There is such a weird mix in the whole series of new age hippie save the whales vibes and genuinely disquieting horror just kinda seamlessly blended together. So much of it is the sound design, but the claustrophobia, the weird sense of speed, the constant pressure of drowning or suddenly being in the face of some huge nasty thing that'll basically one-shot you. The... unspoken but pronounced notion that this is set in a world where all of humanity died and are totally unremembered. There's a hell of a lot you could do with any of this, and the only game I can think of that comes close to hitting the same notes is Subnautica. Actually for that matter...

Subnautica

I don't want to get into what's so great about Subnautica here, because the most common sentiment I hear from people who have played it is they wish there was some way they could play Subnautica for the first time, again. Just... yeah. If you haven't already, play through it all completely blind, and if you can think of how to recapture all of that, do it, and put it in my hands without a word.

X-Com Apocalypse

So... X-Com is a truly amazing game that to this day feels like a unique enough beast it also wouldn't be bad to try and learn from, but there's actually a good number of attempts at clones already, none quite seem willing to get into the same levels of complexity, and there's the whole remade Firaxis series with a simpler take that a lot of games are using as a template. But Apocalypse? The original third game? That tried to do a lot of new and different stuff. I don't know how much of it didn't work vs. how much is secretly amazing if you internalize how it works vs. what's sort of half-baked per se, but there's some real ambition with mixing the original's tactical intricacies and destructible terrain and such (which somehow works even better with the realtime mode this one has), with this living breathing city. You aren't intercepting UFOs on a featureless world map. You've got a whole separate combat engine on a persistent map where stray shots can damage roads and cause long-term problems because the supplies you order get shipped via trucks that travel on those roads. Tons of factions you ideally want support from but can go attack and rob if they feel like lost causes. A tech tree with really dramatic progress and early discoveries that are either double-edges swords or genuinely just terrible things to try to use.

And then the endgame is really neat because instead of just one big final mission, you flip the whole script, and suddenly you're invading an alien city, picking targets to wreak havoc on and ultimately destroy, one by one. Incidentally this also did headcrabs before Half-Life so... I feel like it should be better known just for historical context.

Shadow of the Colossus

I know this is kind of a big technical ask, but why the hell were we not FLOODED with a whole generation of grandiose setpiece-y boss rush games after this first dropped? Perhaps more than anything else on here, someone really needs to get onto scratching this specific itch again, immediately.

I could totally keep going, but more importantly I'm sure you had some game that really left a mark on you that's been largely forgotten since, which I don't even know about, and you should really, if you're up to it, try and teach the world about it and how great it was by blending the old with something new of your own.

Just... draw from wider pools of inspiration, people.

[kitsunabi]

Played some more of cp77.

damn their AI for npcs is terrible lol it’s less sophisticated than GTA. I mean I’ll see this train wreck to the end but I’m also pointedly not playing the main campaign. Just side gigs and peppering it with a main quests but I’m really not liking the how this world was built up. Some people are saying that it’s the dystopian corporate future and the game is criticizing it but.... all that stuff is presented without commentary. Crunch making the game a half baked glitchy mess (which I’m meh about, tbh, it’s understandable) it’s the premise of stuff and how the narratives of the main characters you meet develop that just rub me the wrong way. Or rather they don’t...develop them??? Just kill them all??? Apparently a solid writing technique it seems. Like, ya coulda picked anything any major theme to base your game off of and that’s kinda what you’re going with?

The only word that I can use to describe this game on all accounts is that: It should have been better.

The last time I got this mad at a game I played was TR3 and I abSOLUTELY raged my way to the end of that trainwreck lol

The VA work seems to be one of the better aspects of the game and for an RPG it’s got a neat combat system and an interesting chat system. Cars are terrible to drive (pls just use a MaiMai). The unique skill mechanics are hella finicky and not explained well, if at all. Can’t easily adjust brightness settings so I’m staring at a black screen most of the times when I enter a slightly darkened room.

Time to go back home to Destiny 2 in time for the Dawning event.

[commandercoriandersalamander]

deservingporcupine said:                                                                                                                            Nooooooo what’s your favorite book?                             

OH BOY IS IT TIME TO TALK ABOUT ARCHIVIST WASP AGAIN YES IT IS

(you’ve unleashed a demon here my friend)

Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace is probably one of my top five favorite books ever, maybe even top three (and the top three isn’t ranked it’s just Really Good Books). It is constantly slept on. No one has read it. No one has even heard of it! Even though every element is fantastic and likens to a very popular series (in a “oh, you liked that bit? try this book!” way not in a derivative way). It is my life’s work to get people to read this book.

 I should put in a Read More because I am going to talk A LOT about it. But- if you like The Abhorsen Trilogy, His Dark Materials, the Hunger Games, Never Let Me Go, Station Eleven, Graceling, any mythology ever, ghosts, supersoldiers, post-apocalypse religion, or the struggle of to what extent you can define yourself versus others define you and the trauma of being both a monster and a savior, you’ll love this book.

-the premise. it’s post-apocalyptic fantasy which is a niche I absolutely love. basically, the world ended generations ago, and no one really knows why or how. but humanity lives in little isolated town-states around the edge of this giant irradiated wasteland. and since the end of the world, ghosts exist.

-after the collapse (and I’m going to talk a lot about the collapse BUT it’s worth noting that the story of the end of the world isn’t a major-major part, like the book is concerned both with looking back and looking forwards, but the story is much more intimate and focused on Wasp and her world rather than The World At Large) this new constellation-based religion popped up. it’s completely unique and AMAZING and integrates so well into the world that you forget you’re still learning about it.

-Wasp was raised by the Catchkeep (what we call Ursa Major) priest. he’s this skeevy old man who raises young girls and every year they fight to the death for the honor of being the Archivist. Wasp is the current Archivist! which is absolutely terrible for her, but the only way out is to die, and the only way to survive is to kill the upstarts.

-the Archivist’s job is to protect the town from ghosts. ghosts can get really angry and mean! and then, to record the ghosts, and watch them and categorize them, in hopes that one of them will reveal how the world ended

-(lemme talk about ghosts for a hot sec. ghosts in this world are basically repeating memories- they’re not really “people”. when you die, your ghost might return, to constantly play out its last moments, but you aren’t aware of the world, you’re not really sentient. ghosts who died violently can become violent, hence the Archivist’s banishing rituals. there has never been a ghost that can talk, so no one has been able to ask the ghosts how the world ended. the theme of repetition, identity, and relation to the world that is inherent in the concept of ghosts is SUPER CENTRAL to the plot and woven so well in.)

-Wasp’s job is really sucky, because she’s incredibly valued by the people of Sweetwater, but she’s also feared and hated. she is kept apart from them, and is basically only ever allowed to interact with the Catchkeep Priest, but she survives on the offerings the people leave outside her door being they are grateful to her for keeping the ghosts away and also terrified of her for being so close to them. this theme- valued monster, monster created and maintained by a society, is central to the book, and I know you’re like “okay, yeah, that’s a theme of a lot of books do, whatever” but the nuance and depth here is incredible.

-Wasp, naturally, wants to escape the Catchkeep Priest, but again, irradiated wasteland, everyone is afraid of her, she has nowhere to go. Wasp is very explicitly a trauma and abuse victim/survivor, and she has guts and bravery without overlooking that or pretending that one cancels out the other.

-Wasp’s entire life is turned upside down when she finds a ghost that can TALK. like, recognize its surroundings, recognize her, and talk to her. like I said, that’s NEVER HAPPENED. completely unprecedented.

-the ghost (who doesn’t have a name) explains that in his old life, he was a soldier. and that he had a comrade, Kit Foster, who died as well, and that he’s trying to find her ghost, so that they can survive the underworld together. he wants Wasp’s help. in return, he will get her away from the Catchkeep Priest.

-lemme talk about the ghost because he is a completely tragic figure in such a compelling way. ghosts get weaker and weaker the longer they’re dead, and he’s been dead a long time. he doesn’t remember most of his life. he doesn’t remember his own name. he remembers that he is a monster, in a way that directly parallels Wasp, because they’re both created soldiers people are afraid of but also need, but while Wasp has the chance to go forwards and grow, he’s dead, he can’t. ghosts are incredibly stagnant.

-he wants to find Kit because he’s forgetting who he is. he hopes that if he finds her, they can remind each other of who they are. when the underworld decays them, they can pull back and remember each other. remember the theme I said about defining yourself versus others defining you, and how it plays into the idea of an important monster? yeah here it is again!

-let me say really explicitly though: I know what you’re thinking. Wasp and the ghost are going to hook up. Mild spoiler but worth knowing: THEY DO NOT. yeah you heard me. Kit and the ghost aren’t romantic either. this is a book about trusting other people enough to know and define you when you can’t and IT DOESN”T HAVE ROMANCE. platonic, important, deep and trusting relationships, boyos! I care so much about this.

-so the trip through the underworld. the underworld is such an amazing setting here. the closest thing I’ve read is His Dark Materials underworld, full of ghosts and emptiness. it’s an expanse of old flotsam of memories and it’s always trying to destroy you. Wasp and the ghost have to wade through this place, trying to figure out what does and doesn’t belong to them.

-Wasp, as the Archivist and wielding a special ghost sword, is able to enter the memories of the ghost. specifically, the memories that he has forgotten. doing this is killing her, but she’s already in the underworld, so... the book switches between Wasp and the ghost’s journey through Hades and flashbacks to the ghost’s childhood with Kit Foster, as medical experiments and supersoldiers in a world-ending war. you start to realize that the ghost thinks he betrayed Kit, but can’t remember how.

-look, it’s just incredibly. the themes are woven into everything, the parallels between Wasp and the ghost are superb, the symbolism is constant without being heavy-handed. you’re reading a really engaging story, not an essay about identity with some story trappings, it doesn’t get preachy, it’s just really well done. Wasp and the ghosts are both realistic, flawed, hurting characters trying to imagine some kind of ending for themselves. this book sneaks up on you with how painful (in the good book way!) it is to read. and then the ending! I’m not gonna say anything! I won’t! But the ending!

-the sequel (which is the book I lost, RIP) does the Really Great Sequel Thing where it continues the themes and struggles without invalidating the progress the characters made in the last book. it also confirms what was hinted at in the first book, which is that Wasp is a woman of color, and so that’s neat. she’s also a realistic example of someone with PTSD and chronic pain. plus: still no romance, still incredibly important and complete platonic relationships. and you learn more about other towns and the gods!

-I will say, on first reading, the writing style took me a sec to adjust to. Wasp’s POV (it’s third person, but completely centered on her viewpoint) has the blind spots and anger that you’d expect from first person, and it can be weird to adjust. it’s also very jerkily written, which sounds like an insult, but it’s not, it absolutely works with Wasp’s voice and the setting, but it takes a few chapters to click with your brain.

-have I dressed up like the Archivist for Halloween? oh you fuckin bet I have.

[glenngaylord]

TATTOOED LOVE BOY - My Review of THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND (4 Stars)

By now, we all know Judd Apatow makes long movies. With the right script, premise and actors, however, you may find yourself having a great time basking in his universe.  He takes his time, allows for breathing room, and essentially makes mumblecore movies on a larger scale. Call it Jumbocore.  With his latest, The King Of Staten Island, co-written by Pete Davidson and former SNL writer, Dave Sirus, Apatow has combined the classic hangout movie with elements of romcom, family drama, and a lot of heart.  

Davidson stars as Scott, an unemployed young man who lives with his mother Margie (Marisa Tomei),and younger sister Claire (Maude Apatow) in a modest Staten Island house, and spends most of his time in the basement playing video games and getting high with his friends.  His father, a firefighter, died tragically when he was younger, and this contributes greatly to Scott’s suicidal ideation, which we see in the opening scene.  On a good day, Scott seems quick to outbursts or worse, tuning out the world.  Even the most casual fans of Davidson will recognize the autobiographical elements at play here.  

Scott has vague dreams of opening a tattoo parlor/restaurant, which I’m sure sounded like a terrible idea when they wrote the script, but in light of our current situation, worsens exponentially.  One fateful day, he attempts to ink a minor, which draws the ire of the kid’s father Ray (Bill Burr) to Scott’s door.  Enraged and spitting bile at Margie, Ray, a local fireman, initiates undoubtedly what we’ll call a meet-not-so-cute.  What little story this shaggy film possesses lies in the machinations which bring Scott to Ray’s firehouse to ostensibly learn to adopt a healthy work ethic and confront the demons from his past.  

Of course, this being a Judd Apatow film, the story goes off on many tangents, including a visit to his resentful sister who has just left home for college.  Scott also has been having a quiet fling with his lifelong friend Kelsey (the gifted Bel Powley from The Diary Of A Teenage Girl) and also gets involved in a pharmaceutical caper with his pals.  Under normal circumstances, I would call it all a bit too much, but thanks to a screenplay which doesn’t try too hard to deliver constant zingers and an alive, honest, soulful performance by Davidson, I loved hanging out with these characters.  Unlike Apatow’s previous work, this film, while often very funny, benefits from staying grounded in Scott’s mental health issues instead of insisting on a gag-a-minute pace.  Davidson proves himself as an engaging, thoughtful, unpredictable actor who keeps you guessing his every move or reaction.  It’s impossible not to love this “loser” because when he tries, he connects so beautifully with others.  I especially loved his sweetness with Ray’s kids, holding their hands as he walks them to school and shows genuine interest in their lives.  

National treasure, Tomei, also brings so much warmth and vitality to what could easily have turned into the stock Mom character.  Smart, observant and nobody’s fool, Tomei milks one great scene after another for all they’re worth, especially when she dresses down Ray and Scott for fighting or when she hilariously refuses to take Scott back into her house.  In my fan fiction version of the production, I imagined Powley approached Tomei to tell her she was basing her character on Tomei’s Oscar-winning My Cousin Vinny role.  While not as broad, Powley’s Kelsey has that extra New Yawwwk oomph and spunk to ring similarly delightful bells.  Burr, best known for his standup comedy, also makes a strong, vibrant showing as an angry guy who needs to be nicer to Scott if he wants to stand a chance with Margie.  Steve Buscemi, in a small but effective role as the chief at Ray’s fire station, seems to exist to make us like Scott more, but that doesn’t take anything away from Buscemi, a former firefighter himself, from giving a relaxed, generous appearance.  

What I love about Apatow’s work is his ability to mine the pain buried beneath the surface of comic actors.  Steve Carell, Seth Rogen and Amy Schumer have all benefited from surrendering themselves to Apatow’s aesthetic.  It also helps that Apatow has hired cinematographer Robert Elswit to give the film an unfussy but living, breathing look.  Same goes for Kevin Thompson’s production design, which displays a keen awareness of what those Staten Island homes really look like.  

While nothing earth-shattering, The King Of Staten Island moved me to tears, because it works so hard to welcome the Scotts of the world into the fold and to gently nudge them into finding their purpose.  Scott bobs and weaves a lot, simultaneously sincere and diabolical at times.  Witness the tattoo reveal on the back of one of our main characters for a specific example.  Apatow doesn’t tie things up into a neat little bow at the end, preferring to end things abruptly but perfectly in tune with the rhythms of his sweet, slightly lost, yet ultimately beautiful main character.  

[metalandmagi]

March Media Madness!

Hello and welcome to the post where I talk about all the movies, books, and TV I consumed this month in my seemingly never ending quest to shout my feelings into the void. And oh boy all the winter anime is ending so I feel dead inside.

*puts on sunglasses* Let’s do this.

Movies!

Bohemian Rhapsody: The one about Queen Freddie Mercury. And it’s pretty good. It’s a little weird seeing a biopic of a band with literally no struggles getting into the industry, and I wouldn’t say it does wonders for the negative stereotypes about bisexuals...but who cares because if you’re watching this movie, it’s because you just want to sing along to some Queen songs and see some big hair! 8/10

How to Train Your Dragon- The Hidden World: The third and final installment in the How to Train Your Dragon trilogy, in which Dreamworks pulls a Butterfree on us, but at least we get a happy ending. This franchise holds a special place in my heart for so many reasons, and I’m glad that this one stuck the landing. Each movie has its own specific feeling and message, and they all advance the story in unique ways. Apart from being beautifully animated and hilarious, it also packs the big emotional punch we all were expecting and ends on a satisfying note overall. But it’s still not perfect. The other riders are at their most useless by far, and this is coming from someone who never really minded them before. They’re a lot more irritating if you’ve watched the tv series and can see how they can be useful. And Astrid really only provides emotional support instead of her usual ass-kicking. The villain was...fine...but he didn’t really pack much of a punch. And I really wished they had kept some sort of continuity and embraced the television series (I NEED A DAGUR CAMEO)! But these are mostly small things. If you haven’t given this franchise a try yet, please give it a chance! 9/10

Ralph Breaks the Internet: The poorly named sequel to Wreck It Ralph, in which Ralph and Venelope must travel to the internet to save Sugar Rush and keep the game characters from becoming homeless. It’s a fine follow up, but it definitely doesn’t have the same impact the first one did. There’s a heck of a lot going on in this movie, and it feels like it tried to do too much in terms of plot and character arcs in favor of sacrificing the humor from the first movie. And I really miss Felix and Calhoun. But there are a lot of good things about it too. Everything the Disney princesses do is pure gold, Shank is amazing, and there is a ton of effort put into building the world of the internet. I’m sure it will be pretty dated in a couple years, but it’s not just a quick cash grab full of name dropping and references (even though Disney seems like it wants it to be). It’s still worth checking out. 7.5/10

A Quiet Place: A family must survive in a world where deadly alien monsters that are attracted to sound have invaded the planet. I am the world’s biggest wimp when it comes to scary movies, and even I was interested enough in the premise to want to see this movie. And yes it’s amazing! The performances are all incredibly moving and believable, we get good representation of a Deaf character, the sound design is so creative it should be used in film classes, and it tells a thrilling and heart wrenching family story in only an hour and a half. I think I liked it because the focus wasn’t on the monsters just going around killing people. It’s about a family and what parents will do for their children. People like to say there’s a ton of plot holes, but if you actually think about them for more than five seconds, you’ll see there’s really nothing to pick apart because their decisions all make sense in the end.

My only question is about the cochlear device the daughter (Regan) uses. Was the dad (Lee) trying to make a new cochlear implant? Did Regan already have the internal component implanted in her cochlea? Had she been using one since before the monsters came? Did it break earlier because of the monsters’ connection with electromagnetic waves? Because if not...CIs don’t really work like that. I’m just confused about that situation. But that’s kind of nitpicky when this movie is still amazing. Even if you hate horror movies, I’d highly suggest it simply because of how creative its production is. 9/10

Mary Poppins Returns: It’s exactly what it sounds like...Mary Poppins returns to help the now adult children of the Banks family with the help of Lin Manuel Miranda. It’s fun, but it definitely goes on too long. Though I appreciate Emily Blunt putting her own spin on the character. Odds are if you like the original, you’ll probably like this too. 8/10

Fantastic Beasts- The Crimes of Grindelwald: The second movie in the Harry Potter prequel-verse, where Grindelwald basically becomes wizard Hitler and Newt is more concerned with winning Tina back then saving the world. Okay...this movie is not great. Structurally it’s a mess, the fun is being sucked out of the wizarding world, the characters make decisions that don’t align with previous behavior and make no logical sense, and there really is just the bare bones of a plot. There are also several characters that don’t need to be there and are just thrown in for fanservice (for now anyway). I found myself constantly saying how things don’t work like that and asking why things are happening. But even so, there are still good things about it. Visually it’s...fantastic. Jude Law makes a good young Dumbledore, and even Johnny Depp embodies what I always imagined Grindelwald at the height of his power would be like...I just wish it wasn’t Johnny Depp. I also wish it had more humor, because what was there was funny. It’s really just a transition film, which proves this franchise should never have been five movies, and Rowling should have focused on a Marauders era series or on young Dumbledore and Grindelwald. You just have to form your own opinion. 6.5/10

Maquia- When the Promised Flower Blooms: An immortal girl becomes a teen mom to an orphaned baby after her clan is killed. It’s basically a high fantasy version of Wolf Children. I honestly don’t know what to think about this movie. It does the family relationships so well and really drives home what it means to be a parent. However, its setting really throws me out of the movie because it tries to focus so much on the politics and background of this world without really succeeding. And because it is about a baby growing up, the pacing is so fast it will give you whiplash. But it is beautifully filmed and animated, and I would have bawled my eyes out at the ending if I wasn’t so distracted by how much I didn’t like the other characters and things that were happening at the castle. So...yeah, it’s a well animated, hard hitting movie that will probably mean more to parents overall. I just wish it was a TV series or a trilogy or something other than a two hour film. 7.5/10

Free Solo: A National Geographic documentary covering Alex Honnold, a man who is attempting to climb up the 900 meter side of El Capitan at Yosemite national park...without ropes or safety equipment. Yes, this is an incredible feat and the actual climbing portions are gripping and super intense. But personally, I found who Alex is as a person much more fascinating...and not necessarily in a positive way. Honestly, he can be a jerk. This sounds horrible to say considering he’s a real person and he’s doing something amazing, but seriously watch this movie and tell me this man is not one step away from being a sociopath. It’s completely understandable why he thinks the way he thinks, but it’s not exactly healthy for the other people in his life. I would be just as interested to see a two hour therapy session with him as I was with his climbing. Anyway, if you love gorgeous scenery and butt-clenching thrills with a side of psychologically interesting perspectives, watch this on the biggest screen possible. 8/10

The Matrix: REALITY IS AN ILLUSION, THE UNIVERSE IS A HOLOGRAM, BUY GOLD BYE

Yeah I’d never seen The Matrix, but I really didn’t expect it to be EXACTLY like the Oto arc in Tsubasa Chronicles. It’s too long, Neo’s an incredibly flat protagonist (but I feel like that’s on purpose to serve some sort of self-insert fantasy), and it seems like a YA dystopian fantasy series from 2013...but in an endearing sort of way. And hey it’s got a lot of cool slow motion fighting and neat body horror if you’re into that sort of thing. 7/10

Books!

Dry by Neal and Jarrod Shusterman: What happens when California literally just runs out of water one day? A group of teens go on an apocalyptic field trip to find some of course! I’ve only read one other Neal Shusterman series before, but I’m sensing a pattern of how well Shusterman can propose a theoretical question and then build an entire world around it. And this duo knows how to cover as many bases as possible because every time I ask a question about how something world work, the authors answer it almost immediately. This is a great story with very well written characters, and it even has a small hilarious twist in the end that makes you completely rethink everything about one of the characters. Most importantly it doesn’t follow the Scythe series’ formula of terribly written romance. However...it’s definitely a major bummer. It’s very interesting to think about, and it’s a roller coaster of a story...but the roller coaster only goes down and makes you want to scream all the time. If you like books that make you question human behavior and society, definitely check it out, but get ready to start hoarding all the water you own. 8/10

Jackass!: Okay this one’s a manga, but I’m still counting it. Honestly I don’t even know how to describe the plot...there’s two boys...there’s pantyhose...there’s a fun side character who is openly gay and doesn’t take shit from anyone...there’s introspection about how to deal with developing feelings and realizing you care about someone. It has the most awkward premise ever, but it’s unfairly good I promise. The less you know going in the better. 8.5/10

TV Shows!

The Umbrella Academy: A family of seven children with super powers who were “adopted” by an eccentric billionaire become child superheroes. So naturally, they all grow into jaded adults who are now tasked with saving the world from the inevitable apocalypse. And it’s...amazing. Like, this should be the new Stranger Things amazing. It’s a Netflix original based off the Dark Horse comic series, and it has one of the most binge worthy plots I’ve ever seen. It is capable of pulling off some very weird things because it just leans into it. The setting and aesthetic is very similar to A Series of Unfortunate Events where different time periods seem to collide, and it works pretty well. It has (mostly) likable characters, interesting and/or empathetic villains, great use of music and editing, and Emmy worthy performances. The only thing I don’t like (aside from them killing off a perfectly interesting character for no reason at the beginning of the show) is the romantic relationship between two of the siblings. Because naturally they had to put a romance in it, and it just sort of conforms to the idea of “adopted siblings aren’t related so it’s not weird.” But even they have some great scenes together so I can’t be too annoyed. It’s amazing. Please watch it. 10/10

Ducktales (2017): The reboot of Ducktales, in which the three nephews of Donald Duck go on mysterious adventures with their obscenely wealthy uncle. I’m pretty sure we all know this as the cartoon where Scrooge McDuck swims in his giant pool of money. It took me a long time to get to, but I like it! Webby is an amazing character, and even though the boys can be annoying, at least they all have their own personalities. I just wish Launchpad was a little less...stereotypically clueless. I’ve never seen the original series, so I can’t compare them, but I’d recommend it for everyone who likes Gravity Falls style mysteries and satisfying story arcs. 8.5/10

Carmen Sandiego (2019): The Netflix original animated series that focuses on a master thief who travels the world stealing important artifacts before an evil organization can get to them first...AND HOLY CRAP WHY IS NO ONE TALKING ABOUT THIS!? I don’t know anything about the original Carmen Sandiego franchise, but dang this revamp is awesome. Carmen is a great character who banters enough to be a Marvel protagonist, there’s unique animation, some mystery, and its own twists. The side characters may not be for everyone, but I like them...well, most of them. Apparently the purpose of the original franchise was to be educational, so they do sound like they’re reading the Wikipedia page for every new place they visit in the beginning of each episode, but at least the cultural things they mention always come back into play later. If you liked the new She-Ra or shows with great heroines, PLEASE WATCH IT! 9/10

Queer Eye (season 3): The third season of the ridiculous makeover show where five fabulous gay men rocket into people’s lives to boost their self confidence and keep them from living in filth. I hate that I love this show so much. I don’t like things that try to be overly emotional, but dang it, this show will just make you feel happy...and then sad...and then happy again. 10/10

Honorable Mentions

THE LAST SEASON OF STAR VS THE FORCES OF EVIL IS AIRING! Stop sleeping on this gem people!

Netflix finally released the rest of Arrested Development season 5

I started watching Yu Yu Hakusho because it’s a classic and the dub is hilarious.

I also started watching The Librarians. It’s...something that’s for sure.

And I’m currently reading Reign the Earth which is basically Avatar the Last Airbender set all in the desert.

[cynthiaandsamus]

Game Blondes Crystal Clear Nuzlocke Part 1!

“Hey I’m blonde!”

“…I’m also blonde.”

“AND WE’RE THE GAME BLONDES!!”

(Game Blondes Logo by @game-overture)

“…okay so what the heck is this?” Samus stared at the screen with a grumble.”

“Okay so remember when we played that Wonderlocke for Pokemon Y? We’ll be doing something similar here, well YOU’LL be doing something similar here, a Champion playing a pokemon game might be a bit overkill. But essentially this is a romhack of the original Johto games.”

“A romhack? Like AM2R? I love that game!”

“Loved, it’s gone now, but yeah, essentially. So the premise is you can freely roam both the Kanto and Johto regions without any roadblocks or plot to get in the way of getting your badges. Battles scale for your number of badges so you can do everything in any order you want. It’s designed to give the maximum freedom possible with playing the Generation 2 games, we’ll get into some of the specifics later.”

“Hmmm, well I’m already a Champion of the Kalos region from playing Y, so this should be easy now.” Samus cracked her knuckles.

“Yeah well keep in mind the later games are a bit easier, Generations 1 and 2 are where the big boys play. No Mega Evolutions, no Affection bonuses, most gym leaders have more than three pokemon, we’ll see how you do.”

“…way to fill me with confidence…” Samus sighed.

“As far as the rules, same Nuzlocke rules as the Wonderlocke, you can only catch the first pokemon per new area, and anything that faints is dead to you. Only difference between this and the Wonderlocke is there is no Wonder Trade so you get what you get. Might as well start the game though, there’s a tutorial I believe.”

“Alright so you can start with either Kanto or Johto regions, everyone starts with Kanto so I’ll go against the grain and pick Johto. Next is gender… huh, so you can pick whatever sprite regardless of gender, that’s nice. Think I’ll go with the girl and make her blue, sounds good for me.”

“Wow! Look at all these starters!”

(Mun Note: Shuckle is also an option, this pic may be outdated)

“How do I even start to pick?” Samus grumbled.

“Well since you said you want to go against the grain I’d suggest starting with a pokemon that’s not already a starter in any normal game, so that cuts out Bulbasaur, Charmander, Squirtle, Pikachu, Eevee, Cyndaquil, Totodile and Chikarita.”

“Well Magmar and Electabuzz are pretty cool…”

“True, but they’re also babies. You can’t get their third stage in this game and they’re stuck as babies until they evolve at level 30, until then their stats are pretty trash which isn’t great for a nuzlocke…”

“Hmmm true, so I can probably cut out the babies too…”

“Magikarp, Ditto, Shuckle, Unown and Smeargle are mostly for challenge runs so I wouldn’t advise it…”

“So that leaves Psyduck, Slowpoke, Seel, Growlithe, Houndour, Ponyta, Voltorb and Porygon…”

“Narrowing it down to eight’s not bad.” Cynthia smirked and put her hand on Samus’s shoulder.

“Fuck it, Porygon needs more love after the whole seizure thing. It’s a good balanced pokemon to start off with and should be pretty solid.”

“It does have a good movepool, feel free. Plus it comes with the Amulet Coin to get you more money right off the bat.”

“Porygon it is! My god is this whole episode just going to be us picking our characters? What is this a Dark Souls stream?”

“Not yet anyway.”

“…please don’t scare me like that.” Samus shivered. “Anyway, picking blue for the pokegear and item pack, looks like we finally got to the tutorial… oh god who let this guy be a pokemon professor?”

“What, you’ve never heard of Professor Shockslayer? Shut up, he’s trying to explain the game.”

“So basically what you said about free roaming and stuff scaling with badges, and I can rechallenge gyms if I want too, that’s pretty neat. Some stuff about music settings and shiny rates, that’s all good but not something I need. There’s non-canon secrets tucked away so I’ll have to be on the lookout for those.”

“Some pokemon areas have been shuffled around too so you can obtain all 251 pokemon in some way.”

“Isn’t there like over 1000 pokemon though?”

“This is generation 2, simpler times.”

“Many regular encounters are resettable by beating the Elite Four, good to know but again not something I’ll probably need. And every TM is purchaseable in the TM mart once I get enough badges.”

“Oh yeah, unlike Y TMs aren’t reusable, so you can buy them but they’re one use, sounds like a fair compromise.”

“That doesn’t sound fair to my wallet!” Samus huffed. “Oh! I can have pokemon follow me too, that’s pretty cool! And now we can finally start the game!”

“It’s okay, we’ll make this episode a little longer since we’re just starting out.” Cynthia chuckled, watching Samus dive in.

“Okay so Porygon needs a nickname, I’m thinking… Polly.”

“Polly? You know Porygon are genderless right?”

“Well she identifies as a female okay?”

“Porygon said Trans Rights!”

Samus laughed as she put in the name, shaking her head. “Alright let’s get going~

“So if you have a Porygon named Polly that’s a pokemon, a pocket monster….”

“…don’t say it.”

“Does that make her Polly Pocket?”

“FUCK! Your bad puns are going to get us sued! Lemme just run into this tall grass and shit. Awww look, Polly’s following me, how cute!”

“Anyway the Professor says I need at least one badge before he’ll give me shit, so I’ll just go find some pokemon and start building. …great a Rattata.”

“Hey at least you start with some pokeballs to catch it with.”

“Why do I want a rat!?” Samus growled. “WHAT!? He broke out of the ball twice!? That motherfucking rat get in my balls you little shit!!I only have five pokeballs and I wasted three of them catching a fucking rat!”

“Two pokemon’s always better than one.” Cynthia shrugged.

“I guess… let’s just keep going, what should I name it. It’s purple, so I’ll name it Verde.”

“Verde means green…”

“I’M NAMING IT VERDE!!!” Samus huffed. “Fuck, the very next encounter was a Hoothoot, that would’ve been so much better…”

“Oh hey there’s a route up there, you can try again.”

“Hmmm shit there’s a battle, Polly got two levels from freezing that Ponyta solid, let’s try Verde versus this Pikachu of the same level.”

“…well Verde’s dead.”

RIP Verde:  Lv. 3 – Lv. 3, Route 29- Route 46

“Well that’s great, first battle and I already have a casualty… at least Polly finished it up handily.”

“And this is why we didn’t pick a Baby starter.”

“Oh hey, a Geodude though, that’s a much more useful Pokemon. Alright, a critical hit and a quick capture. It’s a female so what to name it… it’s a female Geodude so “Dudette”.”

“How creative…”

“Are you here to help or make snarky comments?”

“Snarky comments, to much help from a Champion would be cheating.” Cynthia chuckled.

“Well with one dead rat, one living N64 sprite and a boulder, I’ve made it to the next town. I can go anywhere from here huh? I could go back up to Route 46 and see what’s up there or continue from Cherrygrove here along the normal path… let’s keep it safe for now and take the north path, get some more pokemon. I already have one dead pokemon so no time to take risks…”

“Oh wow it’s a Poliwag! That’s really cool for this early on!”

“I love Poliwag! Let’s catch it!” Samus grinned. “Oh fuck thank god, I forgot to buy more balls and Poliwag got in my last one… but that just makes me even more mad that I wasted three balls on a rat that died five minutes later!!”

“Can’t win them all, especially in a Nuzlocke.” Cynthia shook her head.

“Well at least I have a couple good pokemon now, got a good water-type to cover some of my bases. I really need a Town Map though, where’s Gary’s hot-ass sister?”

“…in Kanto.”

“FUCK!”

“Well your map is built into your pokenav now so you’re fine.”

“Good, well anyway lemme name this Poliwag… it’s got a swirl on its tummy, like a spiral, spiral power… Shimon, yeah let’s go with that.”

“Who the hell do you think he is!?”

“Going back to the Mart and getting some more pokeballs and two antidotes, I’ve heard Nuzlocke horror stories about poisoned pokemon, not taking any chances. OH SHIT IT’S YOUNGSTER JOEY! He’s got the best Rattata in the world! I’ve seen the memes.”

“…he sure went down easy.”

“I guess the best Rattata in the world is no match for a lower-tier Geodude.” Samus chuckled nervously. “Alright, next route up, found a Gastly and caught it! Since it’s a Ghost I’ll call him Danny. And let’s see, going into the Dark Cave right now is possible, but going in there blind would be insane, so let’s not do that and just go to Violet City.”

“Well we’ve got a gym in Violet City, this is where Falkner and Sprout Tower are for you to explore.”

“Yeah, but you know what the fun part of this romhack is? FUCK IT! We’re going straight to Goldenrod! Let’s go! Road Trip! Let’s see, got the Rock Smash TM from this dude, onto Route 35, got a Drowzee, naming it Yume~”

“Yume huh? Doesn’t that mean Dream?”

“Yup! I know some of my languages and stuff!” The bounty hunter giggled. “Got a Spinarak on Route 36 and named it Peter. Man I am just burning through this routes, though feels like I’m running in circles. Oh hey, this dude gave me a Magnet cause it’s Sunday!”

“We’re recording this at like 11:45pm so you almost missed that by like 15 minutes…”

“Well got a Hoothoot on Route 37, named Hooters of course. I planned to go to Goldenrod but I’m in Ecruteak now, such is the nature of Road Trips.”

“You have no idea where you’re going and you have a fucking map, open world exploration was a terrible idea for someone like you…” Cynthia sighed.

“Well wherever I’m going I found the National park and caught a Psyduck named Headahce.”

“Watching you burn through this game with no regard to story and just catching things left and right is hurting my heart…”

“Hey who’s this guy feeding the ducks in the national park? DOOM? That doesn’t sound like a normal name… This must be one of those non-canon secrets the tutorial was talking about… does he have a super strong pokemon that’s gonna take my team out?”

“Only one way to find out…”

“Apparently if I lose I have to pay for his lunch. He says he only has Ponyta… HOLY SHIT HE HAS A SHINY PONYTA!!”

“I can’t catch that right?”

“That would be stealing.”

“FUCK! I want it! It’s a blue flaming horse! That shit’s so cool! It’s not very strong though… he says he’ll pay for my lunch instead now and there’s a place in Goldenrod he goes to for lunch… guess that’s where we’re going next! We’ll go to Goldenrod after all!”

“Better go stop off at Ecruteak again to heal up before you go, you’ve walked like halfway across Johto and you’ve only been playing an hour, this is fucking with my head.”

“Alright, gonna make a pit stop and then we’re heading to Goldenrod to check out this restaurant… NEXT TIME ON GAME BLONDES!”

Samus’s Journey So far:

Samus’s Current Team:

[deltaengineering]

Summer Anime 2018 Part 1: Nurupo

I feel bad for calling last season weak now, since that turned out okay, what with Megalobox, Hinamatsuri and Rokuhoudou (the best show you didn’t watch). Maybe this is a lesson to not be so negative, but all the positivity in the world can’t make this season look good. To balance it out, I’ll be bringing along some hot opinions from people getting paid to see the bright side this time.

P.S. Part 2 is here.

Island

What: A very Frontwing version of When They Cry, apparently. Awesome McCooldude wakes up on an island full of pliant girls and/or dark secrets.

✅  looks alright

❌ story is tryhard mystery nonsense based on convenient amnesia, very unlikely to deliver

❌❌ an absolutely terrible cast of generic VN characters, enjoy your common route hijinks with them

❌❌ Frontwing being Frontwing, please see picture.

ANN sez: “This episode accomplishes the two things that it absolutely must for the series to have a chance of succeeding: it makes the main trio of girls endearing enough and layers on some intriguing mysteries.”

Hanebad!

What: Some girls take badminton very seriously. Somewhere between genocide and extinction level event seriously.

✅  well animated and directed

✅  there appears to be more to the characters than nothing at all, so the overbearing presence of the drama llama might actually pay off

❌ has a tendency to wallow in ostentatious KyoAni-style presentational kitsch

❌ speaking of which, making the cast of Euphonium look like a bunch of carefree slackers by comparison is not a good thing

ANN sez: “From the lush colors of their school's flowers to the alienating saturation and long shots of their gym hallways, every mood HANEBADO strives for is captured perfectly through its visual storytelling, and solidified through fundamentally sturdy dialogue and plotting.”

Senjuushi

What: Touken Ranbu with firearms.

❌ This is a cute boys doing cute things anime set against a backdrop of global thermonuclear war and combining the ultra seriousness of ufotable TR with the slice of life tone of Doga Kobo TR makes for a very, let’s say, “uneven” experience. 

❌  Unsurprisingly, it has the production values of neither of the above and looks like crap instead.

❌❌ The localized title is “The Thousand Musketeers” and given the reckless pace in which it introduces pointless characters, it might actually hit that number in 12 episodes.

❌❌ Mobile game character designs must be stopped, for fuck’s sake

ANN sez: “The story itself has some promise, especially if you're a fan of antique guns.“

Shichisei no Subaru

What: VRMMO light novel garbage about MMO newtypes.

❌ High tier light novel tropes like “u die in the game u die 4 real”, grade schooler magical girlfriends and demigod abilities

❌ Yes, the characters start as grade schoolers and then there’s a timeskip where they become high schoolers. They don’t change at all, which is either cutting commentary on arrested development or an indication of how good this show’s writing is.

❌ Ideas like permadeath in an MMO and giving good players a stake in the game company are hilariously stupid even by this genre’s standards.

❌ You’ve seen this exact cast of characters before, likely in better shows.

❌❌ There’s really no single egregiously bad aspect, but the stank of mediocrity is so overwhelming as to deserve a double minus all of its own.

ANN sez: “This episode banks heavily on the appeal of its mysteries, but those mysteries actually are pretty appealing, and I ultimately respect this episode's choice to introduce so much of its world and characters before getting to the real conceit.”

Banana Fish

What: A well regarded classic manga about New York’s seedy gang underbelly of drugs and violence. And BL.

✅ ✅   Looks good. Like actually, legitimately good. Animation, character design, directing, this show is quality.

❌ Updating the setting to contemporary times seems like a not so great idea since everything about this is deeply steeped in the mid-80s gang violence and drugs panic, no matter how many smartphones get used.

♎ The pacing is ultra fast. While I will admit that I’ll take that over a snoozefest (especially in a seasonal rundown), if this wants to be a legitimate high tier anime it needs to let the atmosphere breathe more. 24 episodes isn’t much for a 19-volume manga.

❌ I’ve praised MAPPA for promising first episodes before, and then I got the likes of Yuri on Ice and Virgin Soul out of it. This is not an anime original so it will be harder to fuck up, but life finds a way - especially given the need for condensing the story as noted above.

❌ Ultimately, just being a classy production with proven writing isn’t the be-all-end-all; quality aside, I still have to like what it does, and I’m not sure what amounts to a homoerotic 80s crime B-thriller is exactly in my wheelhouse.

✅ What else are you gonna watch this season?

ANN sez: “The one negative I can foresee is that one character is portrayed as a fairly stereotypical gay sexual predator, and this story pitches itself consistently as a seedier exploration of its boys' love subject matter, so it's reasonable to expect these kinds of details going forward.”

Yume Oukoku to Nemureru 100-nin no Ouji-sama

What: Girls get their wish-fulfilment isekai nonsense too, it’s just a pretty pointless definition when you can just say “basic otome harem” instead. But sure, nondescript girl wakes up in fantasy dream universe where she has a magical trait that makes a large number of princes desire her. Call it what you like.

♎ Successfully avoids the most obnoxious otome harem and isekai tropes, but that just makes it even more bland

❌ lots of exposition about an universe that is hardly complicated and transparently an excuse anyway

❌ Main character is agreeable but exceptionally boring

❌ The princes are all generically princely and very little else

❌❌ combine that with sluggish pacing and this might be the most boring show so far, which is not an easy feat

ANN sez: “There were also some neat details here and there that I particularly appreciated, like the fact that our heroine is actually a working adult, as well as the idea that rather than being “trapped in a new world” she's in truth been returned to her home.”

Back Street Girls

What: A trio of yakuza thugs get a forced sex change because their boss wants to be an idol producer. It’s funny, laugh.

❌ This is not the warm, fuzzy trans acceptance anime you’ve been looking for, to put it mildly. I am not easily offended, but it would have to be pretty darn good to outrun this premise. Yeah, about that...

❌❌ runs its one joke (idols are not supposed to be thugs, like, at all!) into the ground before it exceeds a 3-minute short runtime; is actually 24 minutes long anyway. Hope you really like that joke.

❌❌ the execution of said joke is the pits of anime comedy, nothing but reaction faces and shouting

❌❌ production values are basically non-existent, at most you can say that they took the time to color in those manga panels

❌ learning that Chiaki Kon is directing this pile is just sad, put THAT in your auteur pipe and smoke it.

ANN sez: Nothing, since western licensors mysteriously chose to skip this one. Really a shame because I was looking forward to the outrage.

Isekai Maou to Shoukan Shoujo no Dorei Majutsu

What: It has “Isekai” and “Maou” in the title so what do you fucking think. What it doesn’t tell you is that it’s also about an MMO, for the full LN shitter nuclear triad.

❌❌ It’s about a loser otaku who gets trapped in his MMO wherein he has the mostest hax, complete with complementary slave pettan catgirl and slave oppai elf

❌❌ This is meant to be funny because he’s too much of a dweeb to put his penis where his mouth is.

❌ Technically better executed than Death March or Isekai Smartphone, so it gets one single minus for effort.

ANN sez: “The idea that Takuma is so insecure about talking to other people that he can only comfortably speak in the voice of his demon lord character is ingenious in a dramatic sense and endearing in a personal one, while Takuma's clear understanding of his personal failings makes him far more sympathetic than the genre's usual snarky protagonists.”

Satsuriku no Tenshi

What: Early teen girl checks herself into Silent Hill General Hospital for grief counselling.

✅  Atmosphere works reasonably well; it’s creepy where it needs to be, which is everywhere and all the time.

❌ The girl is a nonfactor blob and the tough guy she gets paired up with is an annoying chuuni edgelord (it is called 𝔄𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔩𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔥 after all), which is not promising for the long run

❌ So obviously based on a run-of-the-mill spoopy RPGmaker freeware game you can practically see the floor tiles.

❌❌ 24 solid minutes of Getting Cornered By A Rape Metaphor quickly goes from unsettling to incredibly tedious.

❌❌ There’s really nowhere for this to go, given how unoriginal everything is; at best it’s going to be “it was all a dream”, at worst “everyone was dead all along, please feel sad now”.

ANN sez: “The design of the facility is one of those fanciful every-level-is-a-different-setting worlds, but the artistic effort strongly pushes the creepiness factor with a design aesthetic that suggests age, decay, and neglect.“

Harukana Receive

What: Girls play beach volleyball in scenic Okinawa, some light sports drama seems to be on the horizon.

✅  Looks just good enough

✅  Girls are just cute and likeable enough

❌ the sports aspect is weak; maybe I’m just spoiled on Emiya-san’s incredible beach volleyball scene right now, but even when not compared to a top tier studio ostentatiously flaunting the budget of their fucking cooking short the match here isn’t very compelling.

♎ where Hanebad has a bad case of the cereals, this may have the opposite problem of being too cotton candy to be worth it

✅  “good enough” is not a ringing endorsement, but counts for something when being just okay will net you a third or possibly second place of the season.

ANN sez: “This is, of course, all just conjecture right now. ”

Chio-chan no Tsuugakuro

What: We took Nichijou and replaced the surrealism with video game references and the production values with donkey dung. Let’s see if delta notices!

❌❌ Production values are not optional when you want to be Nichijou; it being astoundingly over the top and imbued with impeccable timing is a (or even the) main part of Nichijou’s appeal. Without them you’re left with basic reactionface manzai over awkward situations, the king of comedy.

❌❌ Suffice it to say, this show is 100% trying to be funny, while also 100% not succeeding at being funny.

❌Asscreed is a more original tentpole to rotate your first episode around than the usual Dragon Quest, but not by much.

♎ neurotic nerd main character that is little more than a bundle of social anxieties will be #relatable to anime professionals, observe:

ANN sez: “Chio's overthinking in this situation is both hilarious and painfully true-to-life, with her furious strategizing coming across as both absurd and very familiar to anyone who's not comfortable in conversation.”

Planet With

Wat: Appears to be a tokusatsu/crypto-mecha show aimed at the younger set, with the gimmick being that our protagonist is (initially?) on the side of the villains(?).

✅  Pretty wacky, actually. It definitely doesn’t neatly fit in your square notions of what an anime is, man (unless you’ve watched FLCL).

❌ It seems very uncertain whether the wackiness is in service of anything. It might be To Be Heroine, or it might just be Heybot with fewer fart jokes.

♎ Furthermore, it wants to be intriguing and sort of is, but merely being intriguing is not that hard - you just make no sense and hope for the best. This has the not making sense part down, do you feel lucky?

❌ tries to build up characters by immediately going for the sad flashbacks, which I never like, especially if the rest of the show is eIDLIVE-level nonsense.

❌ Looks mostly fiiiiiine, but is also full of subpar CG

ANN sez: “So if the heroes are fighting against someone who just wants peace, then what does that make them? And more importantly, if they find out that the bears aren't evil, will they stop?”

Hataraku Saibou

What: A cutesy educational comedy about the workings of a human body.

✅  Well made, characters are cute, topic is interesting.

❌ Educational aspect can get in the way; I’m not suddenly giving heavy exposition a pass just because it’s trying to teach me something, especially if it’s things I basically already know.

♎ Will have to show if it can keep coming up with good scenarios. The lung infection in episode 1 was alright and so will probably be the skin cut in the preview, but beyond that I’m not sure what’s left for red and white blood cells to do. I’m not expecting a show with this tone to tackle things like retroviruses, if you know what I mean.

♎ An actual storyline seems like too much to expect, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but not a positive either.

✅  Doesn’t rock my socks off but is an easily watchable show with a fine idea and high production values, which again is hard to say no to right now.

ANN sez: “But since it culminates in one of my favorite scenes from the manga, visualizing sneezing as shooting a torpedo out your nose, I can forgive the random gendering of cells.”

Ongaku Shoujo

What: DEEN are getting in on the idol mobile game anime biz too.

✅  The main character’s gimmick is that apart from being A Honk, she can’t sing for shit; this is moderately funny.

❌ It might have counted for more if that hadn’t come out seconds before the episode ended. Even if it isn’t a momentous twist, it was more of a point of interest than the incredibly bland leadup to it had.

❌  Yeah, “Ongaku Shoujo” is an entirely indicative name of how generic this show is: Music + girls, indeed. I assume “Idols” was taken.

❌ I’m still not sure what the ideal cast size of a show like this is, but 12 idols is Idolmaster turf and as such too many. They have personalities? I think?

❌ a very small handful of cuts aside, woeful production quality; I know picking on DEEN is 2ez but this is not their finest work. Animation snobs can feel proud that there’s no CG dancing here, for the rest of us it’s an object lesson on why CG is the lesser of two evils.

✅  Tumbling SR cards in the ED (which is probably actually the OP) made me laugh; this show can’t even afford URs.

❌❌ Overall, just another idol show. Large cast plus presence of a P-san marks it as Im@s-type – but if you're in the market for an Idolmaster clone with bad looks, I would recommend Wake Up Girls instead because that’s at least pretty real at points.

ANN sez: They’re out for the weekend, ask again later. I suspect it’s nothing funny.

[corvincaws]

Spreading Their Wings: In Conversation With Foxes And Peppers

Foxes and Peppers is the musical alias for the duo of Fox Amoore and Pepper Coyote. Over the past few years, they’ve been taking the furry fandom by storm with their energetic live shows and albums full of original content.

In January, their first non-convention show in the UK was announced at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. I sat down with Fox and Pepper before their show and had a chat with them about their upcoming album, music in the fandom, and Nashville.

You’ve been performing together for four years. What sparked you two to start working together musically?

Fox Amoore: Roughly three to four years ago, we were doing a convention together. I originally had another singer I was going to work with, but he couldn’t make it due to unforeseen circumstances. I then learned that Pepper was going to be at the convention-

Pepper Coyote: I was not going to be at the convention. You asked me to.

FA: Were you not?

PC: You asked me to, remember?

FA: Okay, so I thought Pepper was going to be at the convention, but then I contacted him anyway and then he said “Yeah, I’m gonna go”.  So then all of a sudden we were looking at each other’s songs and wondering what we could scrape together in the next few minutes before we were to go on stage to perform. We somehow managed to pull together 10 songs that we had done individually and worked our way up from there. People liked it, and afterwards one of our friends came up with the name Foxes and Peppers, and that was where it started.

PC: At the time I had just moved to Phoenix and into my “temporary” apartment - and it was temporary because it was kind of terrible. It was the day I had finally gotten a mattress. It was my first time really moving away from home or university. It was about 5am, because Fox was emailing me in UK time, and I received a message saying “Hey, can you do a show? Here are the songs we think we want to do”, and it worked out and Fox thought I was consistent enough to do shows together. It worked out really organically, it was neat. There was no recruiting or anything, it just kind of happened.

How does it feel to be playing your first non-convention show in the UK at a venue like the Cavern Club?

FA: It’s pretty special. We’re very used to playing conventions. It’s really cool being able to play at a venue with such an amazing amount of history for the first time. But we wouldn’t be doing this without the support of the fandom anyway, because for this show it’s going to be predominantly furries coming to the show anyway to support us, so it’s kinda cool to be able to play a convention and then sort of move out from it and play regular venues like the Cavern Club or the Ivory Blacks in Glasgow.

PC: We’re extremely lucky to have the size of audience we have. Our problem is that our fan base is widely distributed. So furry conventions work out because people get concentrated into “Okay, we’re all going to go to this one event” so our fans are in the same place. When you do a show just in Liverpool, there aren’t just a thousand furs just hanging out already in the same place. It lends us a new set of challenges and I’m excited to see how it works out. I’m always the type who is very nervous and hesitant about success until it’s happened. I’ve already started getting the jitters about performing in the Cavern, I’ll be trying to ignore them for the rest of the day.

FA: Are you sure that’s not the coffee?

PC: [laughs] It started before the coffee.

Your new album, Spread Thy Wings, comes out on the 1st December. Did you have a similar thought process with this album as you did with Hashtag?

FA: We kind of went along a similar premise where I would write chords, Pepper would write lyrics, I would sometimes write lyrics, he would sometimes write chords, I would score an orchestra, he would score out choir parts, so we kind of get together and collab as much as we possibly can and then create the album. That’s basically what Hashtag was. With Spread Thy Wings it was kind of the same concept on a larger scale in a big professional studio.

PC: It’s extremely rewarding to be in a collaboration where we seem to genuinely do 50/50 of the composing and the creative work. It’s cool. Anybody reading this who has tried to do group work at school, you know what that’s like sometimes. I think we found something special here that we’re gonna hold on to as long as we can.

Do you have any big plans for this album next year? Where are you taking it?

PC: This is the big!

FA: This really is the biggest thing we have planned for it so far. Obviously next year we have a lot of convention bookings. We’re waiting to see how this show goes. If it turns out we can fill the Cavern Club then it looks like we could actually do this kind of thing more in the future. We can look into that and actually do a set that is mainly focused on Spread Thy Wings, but at the moment we’re kind of going with the flow. Once the Cavern’s done, once MFF [Midwest FurFest] has been and passed and we’ve released it then I guess we’ll see where it takes us.

PC: We’ll continue to have the big furcon shows. The exciting new part is the potential for big “noncon” shows. I’ll assume the plan is mostly to be in the States. I don’t want to say that everything depends on this show, but quite a bit depends on it and that adds to the nerves.

What encouraged you to choose Nashville as the location to record the album?

PC: If you think of music in the US, that’s the city that you think of. If you ask someone “Where does music happen?” they’ll say Nashville. We also realized that it was a good choice because the quality of studio musicians that are just around the area. Most people know it for country music, but currently Nashville has a ton of session musicians who just hang out and record all the soundtracks to the video games you play, so if you wanted to book an orchestra then they’ll come in and play your songs.

FA: I feel that as a musician, Nashville is the place you want to end up. For me, Nashville is a dream, but because of the level of support that people actually give us it was an attainable goal that we felt we could actually try and accomplish. So we contacted Ocean Way [the studio in Nashville the album was recorded at] and said “Hey, what are the stipulations? What do you need from us? What deposit do we need to get into this studio?”. We worked it out with them and worked it into the Kickstarter and told our fan base, “Look, if we can raise this amount of money we can record in a world class studio in Nashville.” And it was incredible. The atmosphere of the city is nothing like anything else I’ve ever experienced.

PC: It’s also really small! Like you hear “Nashville, the big city!”. It’s like a big little town. It’s cosy at the same time, it doesn’t have intimidating factor that even somewhere like Liverpool has, like the tallest building I think is like, 8 or 9 stories.

You recorded this album with quite a few musicians in the fandom. Would you say that music is sort of under-appreciated, or that it hasn’t reached a big audience?

PC: It’s kind of lacking people putting out records. I know tons of musicians in the fandom, there’s just very few that publish, if that makes sense. It’s as if you had a ton of friends who are like “I’ve been writing a book!” and they never quite put it out for you to read. There are plenty of musicians in the fandom. The collaboration that we do is kind of difficult because we live so far apart, and that adds a whole other layer to it. You have to be lucky enough to have enough people in the fandom who live near you to make your band, or go solo, or do a long-distance collaboration. All of which are inhibiting factors that I think leads to fewer live musicians in the end - which is also why I think there’s so much electronic music in the fandom, because you can do it solo. It’s kind of the norm, you can do it yourself.

FA: With the fandom growing I’ve definitely noticed more and more musicians are starting to get involved, and honestly, that’s really great to see.

PC: I’m excited to see Xephyr that weekend! At MFF we’re seeing a hard rock band called Xephyr, they’re Canadian, they’ve got a record going. I’m hoping they take off.

FA: There’s a jazz band, Swingin’ Tails, they’re playing.

PC: They’re great.

FA: There’s Divine Dragon Cannon, they’re playing. There’s actually a bunch of bands and musicians at MFF, so I guess when you look at the larger context you start to see that there are musicians in the fandom.

PC: But compare how many live bands there are to how many DJs. There are musicians, just the ratio is off. But I see it as a ‘rising tide raises all ships’ sort of thing. More live music is good for everyone - it seems to be going that way - and hopefully it continues.

FA: I also know some really talented musicians who are great solo singers and perform and release stuff online. For a lot of them they have anxiety issues being on stage. You come across a lot of that, not just in the fandom but I think in general too. You can get very talented musicians who are too scared to go and express themselves. If you’re reading this, don’t ever be scared to take your opportunity and go up on stage.

PC: It’s kind of why it’s nice to do the long-distance online collaboration. You can record a track and send it to someone without having to get in front of people necessarily. We actually have a few people that we’ve worked with who took a while to get on stage. We were like “It’ll be alright, you can do well and perform on stage and it won’t be terrible. You’re a fantastic performer, we have a recording to prove it”.

About the distance, how difficult is it for you to record stuff together?

PC: It’s remote so it’s actually super easy, we just email each other stuff.

FA: Yeah, we have similar setups in our houses so we send each other our scratch tracks, we send each other ideas, our chord sheets, and we’ll gradually add stuff to it. We quite often hire musicians like a guitarist or drummer to actually play on the tracks as well. Dropbox is our friend for this sort of thing.

PC: Yeah, Dropbox is great. [laughs] Shout out Dropbox, please sponsor us!

FA: Hah, the amount of times we’ve used it! We have large dropboxes that we share with band members and they listen to the parts. We play the synthetic drums and then we take those synthetic drums out. They then play the live drums over that, it’s then recorded into the track, they send it back to us, and we mix and master it.

PC: We essentially have assembled five or six “home recording” people and made a band out of that. We’re not the first ones to do that.

FA: It’s fun, though.

You fundraised the album through Kickstarter. How supportive would you say the furry fandom is when it comes to supporting its talent such as artists and musicians?

PC: I am shocked we get the level of support we get. I feel entirely undeserving of the amount of money that people seem willing to give to us. In the past two years we’ve done three total Kickstarters between the two of us. Fox had one, I had one, then we had one, and they were all successful. People are super generous. Before I got into the fandom I used to play regular bar shows. You’d sell maybe, an album if you we lucky. We’ll play a convention and we’ll sell 30 or 40 of them. The fact that people are willing to put down money for what they support is really cool, and it’s rare.

FA: I think generally as well that furries really do appreciate original content. It’s what you do as a furry, you create your own character, you create an original thing, and I guess when you’re doing creations like that maybe it speaks to them.

PC: Even the shirt I’m wearing right now is not from a store - some furry made it. Somebody that’s just decided “I want to make shirts” and they did it. If it’s good, people will buy it. Everybody in this fandom is clever enough on a computer to pirate our music if they wanted. They don’t support us because they necessarily need the music as a commodity. They just like us and choose to support us. I like that.

I’ve heard many people say that you are a staple of their convention experience. Did you ever see yourself getting as popular as you are?

PC: I started playing in stairwells at conventions. I was the guy with the guitar that security would say “Get out of here, you’re being too loud” to. [laughs]. So, no. I did not see that coming.

FA: I wasn’t expecting it either. I remember years and years ago when I put my first track on FurAffinity. I was not expecting it to roll the way it did. I wasn’t expecting to be on main stage at MFF. We’re on the MFF main stage like, next weekend.

PC: That did not happen instantly.

FA: No, it didn’t. It has been a great deal of effort going from, as you said, stairwells at conventions. From a panel room to a secondary stage.

PC: And then you get to main stage at like, 10am.

FA: [laughs] You gradually work your way up the ladder.

PC: Don’t give up on doing your paneling. If you’re reading this remember that success only comes after a whole lot of failure usually. Unless you get a mysterious benefactor who wants to fund you.

FA: So honestly, no, we weren’t expecting it because we don’t ever expect to get to where we are. We’re just having fun with it and wherever we get with it is just a bonus.

PC: It means a lot that somebody would say that we’re a staple of their experience.

FA: It does mean a lot. Thank you.

PC: If we improve someone’s con, awesome.

Spread Thy Wings by Foxes and Peppers is released on the 1st December. You can get it here.

[numberonerandomblogger]

Double review: Hunter X Hunter’s Greed Island arc vs. Sword Art Online’s Aincrad arc (no spoilers)

I’m comparing the worst arc of a show with the best arc of a show: what could possibly go wrong? Yes, but what do these two arcs have in common? They have the same premise of heroes going in a virtual world to clear the game before the antagonists do some bad things. Before I write anything else, I’m going to mention that this article is entirely opinion-based. Either way, let’s start this double review.

First, let’s tackle Sword Art Online’s Aincrad arc. The premise is simple: about 10000 people bought a VR game called Sword Art Online and end up getting stuck in the game. The only way to get out from their VR headsets without dying is to finish every floor of the game. That’s the basic story. So, is the Sword Art Online story any good? I’d personally say it’s decent at best. There are a few twists here and there, but they’re nothing too surprising and don’t detract too much from the main goal. There’s one big twist at the end of the arc, but I’m not mentioning that. Despite that, I could define some episodes as filler that doesn’t move the story forward. But hey, I’d rather have 3 pointless episodes than 55. There are also plenty of plot holes that really don’t really make sense in this universe and there are so many asspulls I can’t count them all, but that would be going into spoilers territory, which is something nobody wants. The game itself is pretty badly conceived and the rules established by the author are very vague. Did I still have fun seeing all of these characters interact with each other? I guess so. Kirito is boring, overpowered beyond all beliefs, and some of the ways he uses his powers are questionable. I found half of the cast to be rather bland while the other half is decent. I didn’t even mind Yui, to be honest. The character that stood out the most during this arc has to be Asuna, a powerful female character who can handle herself yet still has a sensitive side...untill Alfheim happens, but that doesn’t count in this review. The antagonists also get to face the consequences of their acts, despite most of them REALLY being forgettable or even one-dimensional. So yeah, this Sword Art Online arc is decent, while being FAR from perfect.

Second, let’s tackle Hunter X Hunter’s Greed Island arc. All you need to know is that Gon and Killua, our usual protagonists of this show, end up going in Greed Island (a videogame) in order to find Gon’s father. We get to learn during the first 20 minutes that he isn’t in this game (it’s not a spoiler, trust me), but the characters still decide to complete the game for fun. This twist feels like a giant asspull from the author who needed to tease us a bit. But hey, the game itself is really interesting despite being full of plot holes that I wasn’t surprised to see. Don’t worry, there are a few neat little twists concerning it that I didn’t expect and that kept me on the edge during the whole time. As for the rest of the story: it’s boring, it’s padded out for WAY too long and has MANY infuriating moments that made me want to watch something else/throw a brick at the TV screen. One of them is the comeback of a bunch of villains from the previous arc that didn’t really need to happen because it doesn’t affect the main plot. Another one is a hostage situation done wrong EVEN THOUGH IT WAS DONE RIGHT IN THE LAST ARC. Speaking of characters, Biskit is the only new character that is memorable in this story arc. Everyone else is a bunch of one-dimensional pathetic forgettable characters that are just annoying to watch. Even Razor who is supposed to be a likeable antagonist just acts like a massive asshole. However, both story arcs have the same problem: people dying for shock value. If I don’t care about the people dying on-screen, why kill them? Is it to show how evil your annoying bad guy is? Either way, Hunter X Hunter’s Greed Island arc is pretty terrible storywise and it’s easy to see why it’s called the worst part of the series.

While Sword Art Online has in my opinion a much better soundtrack (opening included), Hunter X Hunter has the better animation, the better character designs (even compared to the manga), the most expressive characters and the most fluid backgrounds. Meanwhile, Sword Art Online has the same-face syndrome making most characters’ faces look the same. There’s no doubt about it: Hunter X Hunter wins at having the best presentation.

Overall, I think Hunter X Hunter’s Greed Island arc is the superior anime due to its presentation, but I still would rather watch Sword Art Online’s Aincrad arc again because it was a much more pleasing and less infuriating experience, even though it’s far from anything special.

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The Forest, Subnautica, and Survival: The Wages of Building a Cool Tree Fort

Spoiler Warning for both games as the article goes on! Do exercise caution.

I love survival games. That's just kind of a part of how my taste in games has developed over the years. I adore Minecraft, Terraria, Starbound and any number of creatively inclined "build and explore" games. I could think of a couple of reasons for this, the most prominent being that this kind of game is extremely good at making incremental progress feel rewarding, and that I've always had a fascination with habitation in extreme environments like the deep sea, space, and Magical Block Land where the Cacti Explode. Lately, I've been playing an streaming both Subnautica and The Forest, two games that belong in a sort of subset of the genre: Survive and Escape.

Both games start out with a cataclysmic (space)plane crash that deposits you and a number of other doomed survivors in a hostile world that wants to eat you. With Subnautica, you crashland on planet 4546B, an ocean world in which something has gone terribly wrong with the ecosystem. The Forest instead pops you out on a vaguely Canadian peninsula out in the middle of nowhere and cannibals kidnapped your son. Subnautica, as it is in most respects, has the more solid premise of the two. The Forest can scratch a kind of The Hills Have Eyes itch if you have one, but the overall setup of the game is sssssslightly too racially charged for my tastes.

In deference to alphabetical order, let's discuss the Forest first. Of the two games, it has the more robust crafting system. While it has overall less moving parts than Subnautica, you can still build a cool houseboat and you have a great deal of freedom in the overall shape and function of your buildings. In fact, that's originally what sold me on the game - I found the idea of having to build a base not only capable of sustaining you but also withstanding attacks from monsters to be very appealing. Base building can take a long time on your own (2 player co-op is a definite point in favor of the Forest versus Subnautica if you're one of those people that has to quantify the better game) but there are some things that can speed it along and make you feel like a regular Swiss Family Robinson - with all of the cultural baggage that entails. Completing a fort and finally creating a safe haven from the mutant hordes is a rewarding feeling, but it is one that the game almost immediately undermines.

The Forest is a game working at cross purposes with itself. It gives you the tools to create elaborate custom buildings or entire complexes if you so choose to do so, but there is also The Narrative, and The Narrative is most insistent on Finding Timmy. Timmy, your son from the beginning of the game, is assumed to be the player's top priority, but in actuality it's really easy to just forget about him. The game gives you a checklist of things to do as a sort of compromise between total freedom and a more linear experience. Most of the items on this list are some variation of "explore this cave". Cave Exploration is kind of where The Forest fragments into two separate halves: the crafty buildy survivey game, and a different sort of first person metroid slash cannibal murder simulator. The minute you enter a cave you basically go completely blind and have to rely on a variety of deeply inadequate light sources just to fumble your way around. The gameplay loop is simple - go into a cave, kill all the mutants, find a point of interest, go as far as you can until you find an impassible barrier, then retreat back to the surface. The points of interest are often interesting, to their credit, vaguely telling a story about A Deep Secret Beneath the Peninsula as you find various photographs and torn magazine clippings to gawk at for a few seconds, but it is impossible to shake the feeling that these spelunking expeditions have nothing to actually do with any of the other things you've been doing. You can find a number of useful objects in the caves - a flashlight, a map, a compass, a fine piece of hanzo steel - that will make your life easier, but are primarily designed to let you go into the caves Better and Deadlier.

Here's where we get to this stark divide: you don't actually have to make a base in the first place. All of the fantastic tools The Forest gives you to make your own log cabin city are, beyond Basic Fire and Temporary Shelter, utterly superfluous to actually progressing in the game. The weird thing about the caves is that they are actually borderline overflowing with supplies. The Forest has you spend your first couple of hours thinking that you're gonna really to have to grapple with the land in a titanic struggle for survival but actually you can just go into a cave and find like six respawning boxes of Fun Drink! soda and Snack brand snacks which work just as well if not better than like. Hunting for food and purifying your own water. Sleeping is entirely optional, too, something that becomes readily apparent down in the caves where it's always pitch black regardless of the day night cycle. You can easily manage just by building the occasional temporary shelter to save your game or just find one of the many tents already in the game world. There's a whole complex system of substats and sanity meters that you can basically just ignore as you go careening through the depths.

Progress in the caves is gated by two things: environmental obstacles, and enemy mutants. You will occasionally find a novel map feature like a climbable wall or an underwater pool too deep and dark to go swimming through without some help that will keep you from moving forward. You can blow up walls occasionally too, but not often or clearly indicated enough to make that feel like a genuinely well implemented system. To overcome these obstacles, all you have to do is find the right items - the climbing axe and the rebreather will let you go basically anywhere, once you get your hands on them. The world of The Forest is big, and it plays a dirty trick on you - most of the stuff aboveground is useless bullshit for idiots. Basically everything you want or need is down below, and if it takes you a while to realize that, I imagine that it would be pretty frustrating to feel like you had basically accomplished nothing for the last however many hours of exploring the lush but ultimately very empty forest floor.

Speaking of the game playing dirty tricks on you, there is one more instance of needing an item to get to where you need to go. But instead of some neat piece of exploration gear or a Really Big Stick of Dynamite, it's a keycard. The door that requires a keycard is at the bottom of an incredibly long and grueling run through several cave systems that empty out into the bigass sinkhole that dominates the landscape and taunts you with secrets and mysteries from basically day one. The keycard, regrettably, is not nearby. It's halfway across the world hidden in one of the many Super Fucked Up and Scary mass graves the mutants like to keep in their cave systems, requiring either foreknowledge or impressive pixel hunting tendencies to find beforehand. The game gives you a clue where to find it in the form of an old photo - located right before the door itself. It is a slog and a half, to put it bluntly, and since this is a survival game, you're working on a constantly ticking timer of hunger and thirst, and this particular cave system is quite stingy with soda and snacks where the other caves were giving them out like it was an afterschool baseball game. It might have actually been faster to simply reload a save file from before I even attempted the journey and just go get the keycard first, but I didn't think of that at the time. I'm harping on this because it's a huge departure from the fairly natural flow of cave exploration that came before and also a HUGE waste of time. Like, why. Fuck you, that's why.

The endgame sequence is kind of a mess, basically the devs realizing that the game had been in alpha for like literally 3 years and they needed to have some kind of conclusion in place for the full release. While I have no doubt that through the game's development history they had been most diligent about slowly developing and uncovering secrets about what's really going on in The Forest, the actual part where they have to put their money where their mouths are and provide some answers it's just. Kind of. Ehhhhhhhh. Basically you tumble headfirst into a SeCrEt PhArMaCeUtIcAl LaBoRaToRy where they were toying with ancient alien artifacts to create anti-aging cream or some bullshit which, somehow, ended up creating a race of weird mutants without private parts except in certain individuals who have like. ALL of the private parts and probably more besides. The Sahara Labs company even had this fucking supervillain Relic Laser System that shot down passing planes so they could abduct more test subjects away from prying eyes and honestly its like if you want to be that evil and kill people just jacking up the price of insulin is way more efficient and easier on the PR department.

Basically it boils down to you finding Timmy inside some alien bullshit device, dead as fuck, and pantomiming being very distraught about it. However, it comes to light that actually the machine he was hooked up to can bring people back from the dead in exchange for a sacrifice, so you continue deeper into the facility with even more murder than usual on your mind. You eventually find Megan Cross, the girl that Timmy's life force was used to bring back from the dead. Unfortunately, because ancient alien technology never works right, probably by design because ancient aliens are fuckers, Megan mutates into this fucking Resident Evil limbs monster and you have a fucking final boss fight. I aallllmost put the game down there because like. Seriously? Seriously seriously this is what we're doing? I have to use this game's janky ass combat systems to kill an angry little girl monster that can kill you in like 5 seconds if you get within 5 feet? I stuck it out because the devs were kind enough to just kick you back outside the Big Final Boss room with a health and energy penalty whenever you died (which was frequently). Eventually the thing dies and you go rushing back to Timmy with the corpse in hand. But, alas! The machine requires a living subject! After that you just kind of shuffle through some more cave systems with spooky skeletons in them until you find the control tower for the Airplane Killing Laser Beam and you are presented with... a choice.

You can either shoot down a passing airplane to kidnap a viable sample to resurrect Timmy, dooming every single passenger to a gruesome, cannibal related death... or you can just shut the damn thing off, which is really the only reasonable thing to do. Like, who the fuck even is Timmy? I don't know Timmy. Timmy can fuck off. Timmy wants to guilt me for building a gazebo? He can stay dead. It's the Fallout 4 problem all over again - you can't just take it for granted that the player is going to care about someone because you screamed "THIS IS YOUR SON" in the first five minutes of the game and then immediately deprived you of any meaningful interactions with them. It is the unfortunate tendency of parents to believe that their children are things owned by them, brought to the logical extreme. You have no reason to feel particularly compelled to rescue either of these kids aside from the simple fact that they're Yours, whatever that means. So when Shawn is actually the sleazy, amoral director of science fascists, fuck him. When bringing Timmy back to life means putting somebody else through what I just went through, keycard bullshit and all, fuck him! Enough! Time to move on! So I turned off the machine and escaped through some more caves and then I burned my picture of Timmy and got the crafting blueprints to a Timmy effigy made of cloth and sticks which was, admittedly, kind of hilarious. You also get one for your dead wife, which is just labeled "Wife". That was less hilarious and more of another look into the mindset of the people who make these games and why they are a problem. Also you can find another alien obelisk in a boat and open up a door to find a god mode sphere or something but I did not have the patience to go do that.

So I've been down on this game quite a bit, but I actually enjoyed my time with it a lot because what it gets right, it gets very right. Plumbing the dark depths of the cave systems with nothing but a shitty lighter for illumination and an airplane axe for protection, straining your ears for any noises that might break the deafening silence of the underground, constantly scanning the edge of your vision range for the signs of movement in the shifting shadows - it's a fantastic horror experience that a lot of games could learn from. Similarly, the crafting and survival elements, superfluous as they are, are also a lot of fun. You can hunt game for meat and skins, find berries and learn to tell the difference between the poisonous ones and the edible ones, make a bunch of improvised weapons like a fishing spear and a shitty bow and arrow set, build fires to cook food and boil water to make it safe to drink - all of these systems are well thought out and fun to engage with. Like I mentioned earlier, base building is fun and The Forest gives the experience a very down to earth feel by having you chop down trees and transport the timber by hand. You can also build a wide variety of traps and defensive structures, but that brings us to another major sticking point. The Forest wields silence and darkness like an assassin's blade, but falters completely when it comes to actually fighting things.

Combat. Do you ever wish a game didn't have it? I do. A lot. The Forest is one of those games. Fighting the mutants that inhabit the peninsula is as tedious as it is distasteful. It's mostly just a bunch of wild flailing about with an axe or other bladed instrument in the general direction of the enemy. If you're feeling frisky you can use molotovs or poison arrows or even TNT, tactics that become necessary when fighting the game's Creepy Mutants (name not mine i swear). The Creepy Mutants are large, monstrous enemies usually comprised of several individuals fused together. They're big and tough and they have soooo much fucking health god christ ass. You can skin them and use their mutated hides as armor which is pretty metal but fighting them is just not fun. Which is the same for all the other enemies honestly. You just kind of get the enemy into a stunlock and try to finish them off before another mutant puts two and two together and stops running around in circles and actually tries to hit you. Your enemies are hindered by very curious AI and stunlock vulnerability, but to even things out you have to deal with some of the same vulnerabilities, as well as certain lighter related limitations when it comes to explosives and incendiaries that really makes using them a chore.

It feels odd to say this, but The Forest doesn't need its mutants. It's better off without them, to be frank. The dangers inherent in spelunking and surviving in a cold wilderness are more than sufficient to create a sense of vulnerability. Like if you really had to you could just put more crocodiles in the game and make them more aggressive, those fuckers hurt. The story wouldn't even have to change that much - the real movers and shakers of the plot aren't mutants at all. They serve very little purpose except to be the architects of a number of grisly tableaus we've already seen in other games with aspirations of environmental storytelling. There are no toilets in The Forest but if there were, by god would they just be filled to the brim with skulls. There's a severed head in a water cooler at one point. That's in the same spirit. And, of course, there's the elephant in the room: the mutants, as a concept, are deeply racist. Facing down a horde of hooting and hollering brown and black miscreants clad in tribal body paint and loincloths while brandishing various sticks adorned with skulls at you cannot be separated from our bloody colonial past and demonization of native peoples. It's just not happening. This game is about the White Man versus the Savage, whether or not the devs meant it that way. They probably didn't, trying to offer assurances that these aren't actually natives, they're mutant hell cannibals with no dicks. But like. Nah. Not buying it. The mutants will occasionally marshal a big attack on your base or settlement, bringing a big creepy mutant or two with them to try and knock down your shit. What should be one of the game's selling points is marred both by really unfortunate historical imagery and the fact that it's really hard to actually defend anything from getting broken because none of your weapons can actually hit straight down a wall without either lighting them on fire or blowing them up. If they really needed to have an enemy faction in the game, there are five million other angles of mutant they could have gone with - lizard men, tentacle monsters, psychic fuckers, zombies, a Mitch McConnel clone race - but the fact that they went with "tribals" instead of something even moderately less racially charged says a lot.

So that's The Forest! Promising game, fun for the most part, but intrinsically flawed in some very inescapable ways. What about Subnautica? Well, I have good news: Subnautica is much better. It starts the same way, with the spaceship the player is riding on suffering a catastrophic crash landing in an inhospitable world, with most of the other crewmen missing or just dead outright. You start with a life pod fabricator and a sassy corporate issue PDA to point you in the right direction, but aside from that, your only real goal is to survive. Crafting is much more hands off in Subnautica - it's handled almost entirely by way of fabrication stations where you input raw materials and it spits out a finished product in a very scifi way. The way you progress in Subnautica is quite organic: you find a recipe in your databanks you want to build, you go searching for the materials, and in doing so you uncover more of the world. You build an enhanced air tank to stay underwater for longer so you can go deeper and farther. You build a seaglide vehicle to go faster, you build a little underwater seabase to hold your growing collection of rare materials and creature eggs, and so on and so on. Unlike The Forest, where the survival aspects can be basically ignored, learning how to maximize and streamline your food, water, and power production is quite pivotal to getting anywhere.

There are a number of ways that Subnautica arrests your progress, from hostile megafauna to severe radiation leaks to hiding important blueprint fragments behind laser cutter doors. The big one, however, is depth. Appropriate for a game about the sea, I think. At first, depth functions as a barrier of how deep you can go before running out of air - the seas are pretty deep, and after some changes from beta, you can only have so many air tanks equipped at once. Once you learn how to get around that by making some sweet submarines, depth becomes a matter of water pressure. Oxygen is no longer a problem, but crush depth certainly is - take your seamoth below 200 meters and you start to have problems real quick. This necessitates a search for ways to better withstand the pressure. Subnautica is a masterclass in making incremental progress feel rewarding. Instead of having your numbers go up slightly, you get extremely tangible benefits from the various gear upgrades you create or find in the world. The Seamoth is both extremely fast and convenient for getting around and your only practical way to bring an oxygen generator with you, and installing a depth module just increases your freedom and utility that much more. Finally putting a Cyclops together is actually just building an almost self-sufficient mobile base. Even something as mundane as learning how to make a planter represents a big boost to your food production and can expand your operational range by a great deal.

Subnautica is a game that delights in its own world. The vibrant underwater ecosystems you explore and uncover range from beautiful to the slightly terrifying, but there is a genuine love of nature - even scary nature - evident in Subnautica that's infectious. Subnautica does not really have combat, as such. You have a survival knife and a couple of space age tools like the Stasis Cannon which you can use to defend yourself in a pinch, but there is no mutant menace to contend with on 4546B. Hungry Reaper Leviathans and Crabsquids, maybe, but wild animals are wild animals. No moral judgment is cast upon the Stalker's tendency to try and take a bite out of your ass. In fact, you can learn to pacify and even play with them by bringing them fish to eat or scrap metal to sink their teeth into. There is only one entity on the planet that is actively and determinedly hostile to the player, and it's a real fucker, but there's a good reason for it.

The reason for your unexpected visit to the ocean planet is revealed to be the work of a planetary quarantine system installed by Ancient Aliens (again) a long time ago to prevent the spread of a particularly virulent and deadly variety of bacteria. You gradually find evidence of the Kharaa bacteria and the involvement of a precursor civilization as you explore: certain fauna will be covered in green pustules, the PDA will inform you of the presence of infectious agents in the water and how some biomes are curiously lacking in biodiversity, and you'll occasionally find vents and structures of an obviously alien design. A refreshing thing about Subnautica's Ancient Aliens is that they aren't depicted as magic space gods. They have advanced technology compared to that of Earth's, but ultimately they were just some dudes who got caught on the wrong side of a very nasty bacterial plague and didn't quite figure out how to cure it in time. At this point, you have two goals: get rid of the infection, and find some way to disable the giant quarantine laser gun and get off the planet. Finding a cure for the kharaa bacteria requires going deep into the depths with a heavily armored PRAWN suit designed to withstand crushing water pressure and even the most angry and enormous of predators, where you can find a number of alien facilities using the abundant geothermal energy of the planet's magma layer. Finding a way off world involves putting on a radiation suit and exploring the wreck of the Aurora to both fix the catastrophic radiation leak and to get in contact with the home office, who in between ordering ham and cheese sandwiches are gracious enough to send you the blueprints for your very own interplanetary rocket ship.

Throughout all of this, you'll get intermittent distress calls on your radio giving you the coordinates to various points of interest like other lifepods and bits of the Aurora that were unceremoniously scattered to the four winds upon impact. You can also find evidence of people who came to this planet before you and learn their story from PDA logs and the condition of the temporary shelters they left behind. I am not especially fond of the whole audio log method of storytelling, but in Subnautica it's framed less as "the entire population of earth compulsively records their thoughts on tape recorders" and more "corporate issue malware will obsessively observe and catalogue all interactions between you and your fellow employees." There is a definite undercurrent of anti-capitalist criticism in Subnautica, from the Alterra Corporation's insistence on framing interpersonal relationships as business transactions to your PDA's intermittent reminders that all of the things that you are building to survive and get off the planet with are steadily incurring a ridiculous amount of debt to your employers due to exploitative contracting. It can get a little on the nose, but more and more I am finding that even the most on the nose satire is leaps and bounds more subtle and nuanced than actual reality so I can't complain too much.

As the game goes on, a rescue attempt by the Sunbeam freighter ship goes terribly awry when the quarantine enforcement platform blows it the fuck up and your own level of infection steadily progresses. You start to receive periodic telepathic messages from a mysterious being, who claims that it wants to help you. When you finally make your way through the briny Lost River and into the dangerous Active Magma Zone, you find the alien's primary containment facility housing a remarkable organism: The Sea Emperor. The Sea Emperor is an enormous leviathan class entity, twice the size of the gigantic magma spitting Sea Dragons hanging out nearby. However, like the enormous cetaceans of Earth, the Sea Emperor is an intelligent, sapient being that feeds by filtering microorgansisms from the surrounding seawater. The story of the last remaining Sea Emperor is a sad one, contained by the precursor aliens for over a thousand years in order to study the mysterious Enzyme 42 that it produced. This enzyme was the only compound they had ever found with the ability to neutralize the Kharaa virus, but due to the Emperor's advanced age and their inability to communicate with it, they reached an impasse. The Emperor was no longer capable of producing large amounts of the enzyme, and its eggs were trapped in a sort of indefinite stasis due to the conditions of the holding tank not being optimal for their hatching. So its basically been waiting all alone for a good millenium or so for somebody to come and help hatch its eggs.

Fortunately, the survivor of the Aurora's crash is a determined and compassionate soul, and by working together with the Sea Emperor, manages to put together a vial of artificial hatching enzymes by gathering samples of flora from the outside ecosystem. The eggs hatch, giving both the Sea Emperor species and planet 4546B writ large a chance at a future. The adult Emperor dies of Being Over a Thousand Years Old shortly after. Most likely, it was only its determination to see its children grow and flourish and save the planet that kept it going this long, so once that purpose was fulfilled, it finally felt able to go to its final rest. The Emperor is a philosophical individual, with complex ideas about other minds and the potential of life after death and reincarnation, idly wondering as it dies if it might come back as an ocean current or a tiny being that fits between the grains of sand. It's an affecting sequence that taps into a lot of our hopes for maybe one day being able to truly communicate with and understand our own huge marine life. Once the young are released into the wild, you follow them and obtain a sample of Enzyme 42, which completely cures you of the Kharaa infection. All that's left after that is to disable the quarantine platform and build the neptune escape rocket.

After you complete the rocket - an impressively large construction, even bigger than the Cyclops submarine - you are prompted to create a time capsule before you take off. The time capsule includes space for a few items you can leave behind , a screenshot, and custom text note. The idea is that other players might discover it on their adventures and find what you left behind, another surprisingly emotional touch to the game. Admittedly it was slightly ruined for me because when I exited the cockpit to go and take a screenshot the entire launch platform was flung into the sky for no reason, me along with it. I did have the presence of mind to take a  blurry screenshot of the several tons of plasteel sailing through the air as if by magic. We both eventually landed and I managed to climb back up and (properly) launch the rocket. As you leave the atmosphere, the spirit of the Sea Emperor contacts you one last time to thank you once again for giving its family a future. As the credits roll and you reenter Alterra space, your PDA happily congratulates you on making it back and assures you that you will be cleared to dock just as soon as your outstanding debt of several trillion credits is settled. As the music fades and you return to the main menu, you can't help but think: man, maybe I should have stayed.

It is this sentiment, I think, that truly separates the quality of the two games as experiences and statements on the human condition. The Forest presents you with a superficially beautiful peninsula swarming with Evil Tribal Cannibals that must be overmastered in order to rescue your darling son object, that exists to be exploited and despoiled in your quest to build a Sick Fort that isn't even really necessary. You can even get an achievement called "climate change" for cutting down 100 trees and like. Fuck off. Not funny. You can legitimately deforest huge swathes of the game world if you find the chainsaw and some fuel. In the Forest, you are an invading conqueror masquerading as a victim of circumstance. In Subnautica, you are an observer and survivor. The primary building material is titanium, which you get mostly from salvage from the Aurora, occasionally supplemented with some more exotic ores and corals found naturally on the seabed. The ecosystem of 4546B, even though it is devastated by plague, is bigger than you could ever hope to be. It's beautiful and fascinating and glorious, and the attempts that your predecessors made to exploit and subjugate it ended in abject failure. Your seabases are compact and efficient affairs, equipped with machinery for survival and research. The game specifically forbids you from building most kinds of weapons, citing a historical massacre that necessitated all weapon blueprints deadlier than the survival knife to be scrubbed from the database. Combat is fruitless and difficult, even in the PRAWN suit - it's better to just evade hostile fauna and slip by undetected with silent running. The only way to survive and escape is to work in concert with the indigenous life, not thoughtlessly destroy it.

I didn't expect, going in, to feel so compelled to compare and contrast these games, but when presented with the reality of the situation and how similar they really were, I didn't have much of a choice. They're almost dark mirrors of one another, the Forest presenting a Bad Future where the nazi sound designer from Subnautica was in charge of the entire project. I enjoyed the Forest, but there is a deep moral emptiness within it that I have trouble compartmentalizing, especially when Subnautica offers an alternative outcome that doesn't make me feel vaguely monstrous for playing it. Subnautica is, at its core, a more beautiful, more engaging, more thoughtful and even more frightening work than The Forest. The Forest comes close to offering a genuinely scary experience during the cave sections, but undermines its own premise by filling the haunting void beneath the earth with giggling naked canninbal men. The dark, trackless depths of the ocean, however, remain a fundamentally terrifying environment, populated by the strange and terrible lifeforms adapted to living deep beneath the crush depth of even the hardiest submarines. The Ghost Leviathans that lurk in the endgame areas and in the tremendously unsettling open ocean beyond the crater's edge are frightening to behold and terribly dangerous, but their presence is almost comforting, a reminder that other beings still exist in the lightless void. The hooting and hollering of The Forest's mutants simply cannot compare to the otherwordly cries of Subnautica's megafauna, and indeed, The Forest is at its most tense when all is silent.

I would be awfully interested in a game that took The Forest's robust crafting, building, and survival mechanics and transplanted them somewhere far away from the wretched peninsula and its ravening caricatures, perhaps a kind of Subnautica that took place in an alien jungle, or an earth jungle, for that matter. Anywhere less relentlessly ugly and hateful would be fine. Subnautica makes good on most of its lofty promises (except when it crashes. Stability is an area where The Forest has an unquestionable advantage) and presents a strong, unified experience. The Forest is a jumble of compelling systems mashed together in an unconvincing way with set dressing straight from the production of Birth of a Nation. A missed opportunity at best, an extremely questionable exercise in tone-deaf xenophobia at worst. I would be interested to know how the developers of the game justified their design decisions as not-racist, or if they even bothered. Subnautica is reflecting and uplifting, while The Forest, in all of its cynical attempts to push boundaries and put blood and titties on the screen, ironically only ends up feeling safe and derivative, contradicting itself and wasting the genuinely strong mechanics it developed. With certain statements from E3 about how certain developers try to distance themselves as much as possible from political statements while simultaneously creating deeply political games fresh in our minds, I think we should be more insistent than ever that this kind of cowardice is both ridiculous and transparently self-serving. All culture is political, because all human experience is political, inextricably intertwined with the struggles and conflicts between nations and groups that serve as the backdrops of eras. Subnautica knows this. The Forest either does not, or does not care.

[baradorable]

My opinions on the current anime season. I’ll go over come popular shows and try to warm you up to some hidden gems.

Attack on Titan (Season 4)

I ended up liking this show a lot more than I thought I would. I ended up binging the first three seasons in like a week. Now I’m impatiently waiting for more episodes.

I will say that I’m kind of mixed on this one, though. Like I know they want to flesh out the country of Marley, make the war less one-sided and establish how villainous Eren is later, or whatever. I preferred it when the characters were fighting the enigmatic, monstrous force of titans. The political drama was like the least interesting parts of season 3. (That, and Eren being kidnapped for the millionth time.) Regardless, I’m still liking what we have so far, and there’s only one thing that makes me hesitate.

Gabi Braun. Fucking Gabi Braun. She’s so fucking obnoxious. She’s like Eren, except without the character traits that made him interesting. We have less reason to care about her, and her story is mostly just a retread of Eren’s. And I’d tolerate that if she wasn’t such an obnoxious cunt all the damn time. “But euuhughhg Gabi is a kid and she’s brainwashed! She’s actually really well-written!” Yeah, but she’s still an annoying little shit and less sympathetic than the other Marleyans we’re focusing on. She shouldn’t be the main focus character.

“Did you see it happen?” BITCH. There’s being brainwashed and there’s being a fucking moron. And don’t give me that “Well, in real life, brainwa-” Yeah, I don’t care. She’s not real. The only thing real about her is the headache she gives me.

So she’s this unlikable kid who came in and killed a fan-favorite character. I loved Sasha. Everyone did. But I’ll live. (Unlike her.) But she just HAD to be killed by fucking Garbage Braun of all people. Honestly, if Falco killed Sasha, I’d get over it. He’s a way better character than Gabi. I could go on and on about how he works better on a fundamental level, but none of you are even reading this post in the first place. So whatever.

8/10

Beastars (Season 2)

It’s good. I don’t like it as much as season 1, but I’m enjoying it a lot. It’s not a show I actively wait for, but it’s always pleasant to see.

7.5/10

Cells at Work!! Code Black

I never saw the original Cells at Work, but this show makes me not want to. Because I don’t think it would be as good as Code Black.

For those who haven’t seen it, Cells at Work is basically about humanized cells working in a body. You follow a red blood cell as they deliver oxygen, and you encounter all sorts of issues and quirks you see in a body. From sicknesses, to infections, to even cancer, you actually learn a lot. It’s genuine edutainment.

Black is set in a body that’s incredibly unhealthy. The characters are scrambling to survive and keep a failing body going. There’s this growing sense of dread each episode as the body grows worse and worse. You get frustrated because these characters don’t deserve the Hell they go through, and you just want to shout at the human to eat healthy, quit smoking and shape up. Because you care about the cells and want them to have a better work environment.

It’s really fun and makes me feel guilty for my unhealthy habits.  

7.5/10. Maybe 8/10 if these last few episodes keep up the momentum.

Dr. Stone

I really liked season 1, and I’m liking this season so far as well. I prefer the set-up and use of tech in season 1, season 2 is kind of moving too fast with tech while the story is a little slow. But despite all that, this show is still great and is on track to becoming a classic. If it weren’t for Attack on Titan, it would be Anime of the Season for me.

8/10

Jobless Reincarnation: 

A 40-year-old NEET gets isekai’d into the body of a baby. You watch this child with an adult mind grow up and learn about this magical fantasy world. It’s pretty good, I like it. It has good humor, nice characters, interesting lore, and a fun magic system. 

If you ever watched Isekai Cheat Magician? (Of course you didn’t. No one did.) This is what Isekai Cheat Magician wishes it could be.

I give this show a 7/10. It loses points because it made me think of Isekai Cheat Magician just now.

Ex-Arm

No words. Except four words: Go watch this show.

Oh boy. This show is. This show is a doozy. If I had to explain, I would say it’s like... shit. Because it is shit. But it’s very entertaining shit.

The story and characters are cool, but unimportant. You just can’t get into them because the animation is the highlight of the story. It just blows every other aspect of the show out of the water.

What kind of animation are we talking about? If I had to describe it, it would be the visual equivalent of that girl on Tik Tok who made a video series where she plays a Jewish girl during the Holocaust. It’s like a present you would give your eyes, if you hated them and wanted them to die.

Some characters are 2D, but the rest are 3D. And not even good 3D, because this shit is worse than those bootleg mobile games with stolen assets that don’t fit together. They had to censor kisses because they couldn’t animate lips moving, and pushing their faces together would just make their models clip. One of the characters has a wide-eyed smile all the time, no matter the situation, because there’s like no animation for her expressions. This show makes the 3D Pokemon games look like fine art.

Another thing I’d like to mention is the opening song, if only because I can’t tell if it’s good or terrible. I genuinely can’t tell if I like it ironically, or unironically. Either way, it’s perfect for this show.

So yeah, I love this show. It’s such a fucking mess in the best way. It always brings a smile to my face. I just wish the story was bad, so I can have another level of awfulness to enjoy. This show never fails to make me smile. Anime of the fucking decade right here.

HELLO, HELLO/10

Kemono Jihen

It’s kind of like Inuyasha, except without the humans, Naraku has big boobs, the Shikon Jewel/life stones aren’t that important yet, Bakugo from My Hero Academia is on the cast, everyone is a 12-year-old with bad fashion sense, and it’s a lot more generic in premise and execution.

So, nothing like Inuyasha. Honestly it’s more like My Hero Academia in terms of vibes. I still enjoy it though. My favorite character is probably the little fox girl because I like her design. But I also like the little fox boy because I’m not entirely sure what game he’s playing, but I’m into it. 

6.7/10

Redo of Healer

It’s basically just rape hentai with a budget. Honestly, I appreciate the boldness of the show, if anything. (Aside from the fact that they don’t show any dick or vag. How cowardly.) The sex scenes are decent and frequent, so no complaints there. I’m not really into rape (been there, getting raped isn’t fun), but a true hentai connoisseur can still appreciate it.

Plot-wise, it’s neat. Making the main character a revenge-seeking rapist fighting even worse rapists is an interesting take. And there’s a lot of fun creativity in how he uses his powers, though I wish they explained them more. Like I get how he’s doing everything, but breaking it down would make them feel more intriguing. He’s also a broken self-insert power fantasy, but it’s nice seeing one that’s smart, evil and methodical. 

In execution, it’s a pretty generic story with generic settings and plots. The lead’s carrying the whole thing, though I can’t help but like the villains for being so over-the-top evil. If nothing else, the audacity and sex scenes make this show worth watching. Pretty entertaining.

Re: The harem. Setsuna is too young and innocent for my tastes, but I like her. The white-haired girl is cool, she’s my favorite even though she hasn’t really done anything yet. Freia’s meh, but I like the idea of her being a major cunt despite the memory wipe. 

I give this one five rapes out of ten. And if you like this show, I recommend reading that one Megg, Mogg & Owl comic where the characters become obsessed with rape-based puns.

Re:Zero (Season 2, second half)

I love this show. The first season was pretty good. The second half of season 2 was also pretty good, and the plot was shaping up to be great. But now we’re in the second half of season 2, and it’s meh. Which is really disappointing for such a great show.

Like, I get what they’re trying to do: they’re shaping up alliances, digging into the characters’ pasts, moving everyone forward, yadda yadda. But this arc is so slow now. It feels like we’ve seen nothing but flashbacks, characters standing around and talking, flashbacks, more talking, flashbacks. There’s so little action to break things up. The mystery and exploration from earlier episodes is gone, since we pretty much understand the important things. We’re just left waiting for the things they’ve been building up to, to finally happen. 

“AEUUGHG You’re Just an action anime fanboyyy, this is serious plot and excellent story!!” It’s endless exposition, flashbacks that go on way too long, and characters standing around and repeating the same points over and over. Compare how the story was delivered in the previous season. 

6/10

The Promised Neverland (Season 2)

Boy, did this show go off the rails in only a few episodes. What the fuck is even going on in this show anymore?

I ranted about this show on Twitter, but it pisses me off. Season 1 was a well-crafted, suspenseful show about these kids using their brains to unravel the mysteries around them, plan a daring escape from their captors and try to survive in a world of monsters. It was easily one of the best anime of 2019.

Season 2 skips about 80 chapters and off-screens tons of development. Like Norman fucking shows up in season 2, all fine and dandy with his own personal army of freaks. Also he lead his own escape, learned a ton of info AND found a way to auto-kill all their enemies, and we didn’t even get a flashback of any of this. Now Emma’s bitching about saving demons, even though they’re all assholes who probably wouldn’t change their ways even if they could. But she’s an iDeAlIsSTTT!!!!! But she was an idealist last season and had to learn how to compromise when faced with the reality of the situation? And the whole William Minerva plot, which was a major driving force in the last season, was handwaved away and unceremoniously dropped?

So yeah, I dropped it after episode 4 or 5. It’s not even fun to hate-watch I’d give it a 3/10 on its own, but it gets a -2/10 for ruining a great legacy.

Sk8

Free!, except they’re skating instead of swimming. It’s a well-animated show with an interesting premise: undergound gay skateboarding. The battles are fun, the characters (while cliche) are appealing, and it’s fun. And yeah. 

But I dropped this one because Langa is boring as a lead. Canadians, they don’t deserve representation. He’s a fine character besides that, but he’s gotten way too much screentime over the other protag, Reki. Reki was just pushed aside and the show quickly became about Langa. Which is sad, because I feel like this show would have benefitted from making them both stars. Especially since the characters’ friendship is a key selling point.

Ended up dropping this show. I read through later comments that they’re making a plot point about Reki falling behind, but even the fans are having their doubts that he’ll have a satisfactory story. And even if they make him a real protag again, the show’s been so imbalanced that I don’t think it’ll matter. Especially since we only have like 4 episodes left.

6/10

Yashahime

The sequel to Inuyasha, staring Sesshomaru and Rin’s twins, and Inuyasha and Kagome’s daughter. Except 2/3rds of the main cast are dull, and most of the stories are blatant retreads of Inuyasha plots, starring retreads of Inuyasha characters.

Think I’m kidding? The first episode was about Mistress Three-Eyes (Mistress Centipede but with three eyes instead of two) coming to eat the character’s magic sacred jewels. Rainbow fucking pearls, what the hell is this shit plot. Fuck you.

“Euhrghhghgh but they’re just paying homage to the old show!” Nah, they’re fucking ripping it off every step of the way. 

The most frustrating thing about this show is how Moroha, Inuyasha and Kagome’s daughter, is such a great character. She has great dynamics with other characters because she’s so lively. She has the best traits of her parents, while still being unique on her own. Then you have Sesshomaru’s kids, who are just Kagome 2 and Tsundere. The latter has more depth than that, but she’s  not that great anyway.

Guess who’s the focal point of the series? The fucking Kagome knock-off, followed by the tsundere. Moroha is a minor character who is often forgotten by the plot, or reduced to a joke. The already-boring plots are exacerbated by them ignoring best girl to focus on 

And I’m not alone on this, too. Read all the anime forums, pirating websites, and pretty much anywhere talking about this show. Moroha is the most popular character, far and away. People like her way more than the twins. 

4/10

[marketingatlightspeedreadin-blog]

Games You Might Not Have Tried #11 – Find New Games – Extra Credits

I sure hope you folks enjoy watching these as much as I like making ’em, because… I don’t know, these are fun! These episodes always take us a couple of months to put together, so by the time each one comes out, James has already got a new batch of games to recommend. Anyway! You know the drill. We don’t promise that all these games are good, just that they’re different.

Their design is interesting in some way, even if the most interesting thing about them is how they failed to achieve what they’re setting out to do. Anyway, enough talk. Have at you! Zero Time Dilemma. Years ago, we recommended 999 in one of these episodes. It’s been quite the journey since then, but now the franchise (or at least this chapter of it) is coming to a close, and the story is perhaps one of the best yet in the series. The graphics… not so much, but don’t let that deter you. This game may handily demonstrate just how much better 2D graphics can look, and that switching to 3D isn’t always the best choice, but, if you’ve followed the series so far, you owe it to yourself to finish this one out. And if you haven’t checked these games out yet, well, maybe get on that. Inside. We would be remiss if we didn’t mention this one.

Brought to you by the creators of Limbo, this is a dark and mysterious run through a puzzle-filled testing facility. James didn’t find it quite as compelling as Limbo, but it’s still a solid title, and the atmosphere alone is worth your time if you want to learn how to build that sort of oppressive feeling into your own games. Reverse Crawl. James just tore through this one. It’s one of those, “just one more battle” type games that’ll have you so sucked in that you won’t realize the sun is rising and, oops, you didn’t sleep. The really interesting thing about this game is that it takes the “Heroes of Might and Magic” or “Kings Bounty” formula, and does away with the exploration.

Now, that might sound terrible – James felt that way too, at first. I mean, exploration kind of seems like the lifeblood of those games. But by doing away with the exploration, Reverse Crawl is able to make the combat much tighter, with specifically designed encounters and a progression system that really makes the player consider what they want to be able to play with. Add to that the fact that the player can’t just barge into battle with a ridiculously broken combination of units, but instead has to pick from a wide variety of pre-made unit groupings for each encounter, and you get a tightly designed experience.

You can even beat it in one night if you don’t sleep. I don’t recommend it, but, I’m just saying, you could. ([evil laugh]) (And this, my distinguished gentlebots,) (is the new SteamWorld!) SteamWorld Heist. Since we’re talking strategy games, let’s talk about this pleasantly surprising little gem. This is a game that takes all the conventions of our isometric or top-down tactics games, and puts them on a 2D plane. And it works! It works because the designers considered how 2D might change the formula, what they might be able to do with the design in 2D that’d be harder in one of those other formats. And the conclusion they came to was to make you aim manually.

Yep, this is a tactics game like any other, but sort of like Valkyria Chronicles, when it comes time to shoot, you’ve gotta eyeball it. With no reticle to guide you, this makes variables like cover become a much more interesting and interactive element of the game than we saw even in games like XCOM. So, if you’re looking for a quirky tactics game, or even just like thinking about how we can push the formula, you might want to check out SteamWorld Heist. (And of course it all went according to plan…) Now, a whole lot of you asked if we could talk about some tablet and mobile games on one of these lists, so let me just throw a slew of those at you before we get back to the weird PC games. Let’s start with Galactic Keep. Galactic Keep is exactly what I always wanted a storybook adventure to be when I was young. It takes some of the work done in Steve Jackson’s excellent Sorcery series to the next level and really makes you feel like you’re playing a solo tabletop role-playing module.

Seriously. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt more like I was at the Barrier Peaks without a GM screen on the table. Out There. This game has no combat, and yet, it is brutal. It’s a roguelike survival adventure where you are the last surviving member of humanity trying to make it home. Its vignettes are excellently written, but unlike most story driven games, you will not easily reach the end of this story. I think it’s the very fact that Out There presents a harsh universe where you will die time and again before ever being able to see one of its many endings that kept drawing James back. If you like sci-fi, if you like roguelikes, if you like narrative and are interested in a brutal challenge that never once involves firing a blaster, you better check this out.

Icebound Concordance. Speaking of writing, here is a game that is all about writing. Or rather, it’s all about rewriting. The game itself is a conversation with an AI built from the mind of a writer, and you are there to help it edit and rewrite its last book. That’s pretty interesting in its own right, but then you get to the real bit: the Icebound Compendium. If you’re willing to pony up $25 to pick up the companion book, you are in for something…

Novel. I can’t say much about the Compendium without spoiling things, but, suffice it to say that periodically throughout the game you will be prompted to search through the book for pages related to some of what’s going on on-screen. Then, the game will use your iPad camera to scan the pages and to make the book itself come to life. My only complaint here is that the book itself is poorly made. The cover fell off the binding of James’ copy before it even got through the mail. Of course, that’s a sample size of one James, so hopefully yours will be sturdier. (♪ This is the Guild of Dungeoneering,) (♪ On our quest, we’re never fearing…) The Guild of Dungeoneering.

This game is here simply as an example of what a difference platform can make. James found this to be a mediocre strategy title when he first played it on PC, but on a tablet, its lighter shorter sessions and more casual strategy experience really works. If you want a relaxing strategy game to play on the go, it’s worth trying. Really though, this game is worth buying for the songs alone. (♪ The Guild of Dungeoneering!) (♪ Curse and swear, but don’t despair,) (♪ The way out appears to be over there,) (♪ I think we’re lost, but what do we care?) (♪ The Guild of Dungeoneering!) Templar Battleforce.

I haven’t tried this game on PC, but the mobile version was exactly what James was looking for in a slightly more hardcore tactics game. If you want to play Space Hulk, but the actual modern Space Hulk video game didn’t cut it for you, get Templar Battleforce. It’s everything Space Hulk should be. It’s got an interesting class system, a varied advancement tree, multiple ways to customize units of the same class, and yet the levels are short enough to play on the go. Alright, that’s enough mobile games. Let’s return to the PC, and let’s get weird.

Cat Lady. We so rarely get to recommend adventure games, so I’m glad we get to talk about this piece of weirdness. There are a lot of counter-intuitive design decisions in this game: sometimes on purpose, sometimes as pitfalls of the old-school adventure game ethos, but if you’re looking for something surreal, creepy, and dark, Cat Lady has you covered. The art style perfectly fits the madness, feeling at times like Monty Python channeling Poe.

And the decision to do away with the mouse entirely in an old-school adventure game and streamline things by going with a keyboard interface alone? That’ll put you on a “Games You Might Not Have Tried” list. Fran Bow. We can’t talk about horror games without talking Fran Bow. If you want disturbing and strange, this game has it in spades, but it’s the ambiguity of this game that I love. I’ll try not to spoil anything, but let’s just say, the game leaves itself open for interpretation, and I think that’s great. Too often, horror stories try to explain all their nightmarish surreality, and in doing so, kill the horror. That’s not to say that horror stories shouldn’t make sense, but leaving your nightmare world as an ambiguous metaphor is often so much better than feeling like you have to tie up all the loose ends by saying something like, “See? It was a dream all along!” Fran Bow is an excellent example of this.

Killing Time at Lightspeed. I love the premise of this game. You’ve left Earth. You’re traveling away at light speed, but you can still see your Facebook feed. But here’s the catch: at relativistic speed, every time you hit refresh, a year has passed. You can touch base for one snapshot of everyone’s lives back home then it whirls past and time moves on – for them, if not for you. My only complaint is that most of the time, most of my friends back home simply talked about the news, and for me at least, that’s not how social networks work. That’s a big part of it to be sure, but it’s in the background of all the tiny day-to-day things that people post. I would have loved to have more emphasis on the personal, on the relationships of people and their daily lives, as that backdrop would have given the big events of the world that much more impact, seeing how they affected the people I loved even as I whipped away from them at the speed of light.

Anyway, neat game. Try it out. And finally, Quadrilateral Cowboy. What happens when you mix stealth capers with command line hacking and a PS1 visual aesthetic? Well, you get Quadrilateral Cowboy. Your mileage may vary with the art style, but there is something so cyberpunk about actually hooking up a computer to a jack and having to turn off a security laser with a series of semicolon delineated commands. Am I alone, though, in this making me long for a multiplayer game where one player plays the stealth action hero, and the other one plays their off-site hacker buddy? Like, unlocking the doors and shutting off security cameras in the nick of time with a command-line interface? That would be rad. Somebody, get on that. Anyway, I think that’ll do it for today. Thank you for watching; recommend some of your own weird favorites in the comments below, and we will see you next week..

For More Info : Visit Here : Light Speed Reading

[doneses]

Final Fantasy Influences in RWBY

So it’s no secret that Monty Oum was a huge fan of the Final Fantasy series. As someone who’s also a huge fan of the series I thought it’d be fun to explore a lot of the things I think RWBY drew inspiration from. There’s not really much of an order to this, just various things I’ve noticed. This is also just my opinion on things so don’t take it too seriously. (I won’t be including stuff from FF15 since that was not out yet at the time RWBY was started and the stuff similar to it are most likely coincidence.I’m also only counting the stuff from the core series as those are the ones I am the most familiar with.)

Gardens/Seed- Academy/Huntsmen & Huntresses

In both FF8, and in RWBY, the main characters start their journeys at an academy that specializes in the training of powerful mercenaries: SeeD and Hunters. They have a similar age range (15-19 in FF8. 17-21 in RWBY), and both schools have rigorous and dangerous exams that the main characters have to survive and pass in the beginning of the story. They both also have a dance in the relatively beginning of the story. They also both have a uniform that the characters wear on occasion.

Shinra Electric Power Company- Schnee Dust Company

Now I actually noticed something neat that I never noticed with Shinra, that they can be abbreviated to SEC, similar to how the Schnee Dust Company is commonly abbreviated to SDC.

In both RWBY and FF7, these two companies are powerful and villainous and have made their fortunes by mining a natural resource that is used for fuel, and to give people magical abilities. Both the SDC and SEC engage in military action (Turks and SOLDIER with the SEC and providing/developing mechs for the Atlesian military for the SDC), and experimenting on monsters (the Armored Gigas in the White trailer being a Geist Grimm experiment according to the manga).

Materia- Dust

It’s a naturally occurring resource in the world that is used to give the characters magical abilities and is crystalline in design. Materia is name dropped by Monty when explaining what Dust is.

AVALANCHE- White Fang

A terrorist group with a white and red banner that has a history of warfare with the evil megacompany of their worlds. Main characters from both series are members (or former) members of the group, and both had/have a large burly man as their leader. Only major difference is AVALANCHE is an eco-terrorist group and presented as heroes while the White Fang are a racial terrorist group and presented as villains.

Crystals- Relics

Four powerful macguffins that the protagonists and antagonists are both after that can give them a ton of power and can change the world.

Al Bhed/Viera- Faunus

Al Bhed are a minority group who face persecution and have a unique genetic trait. In FF10 and in RWBY one of the main characters is secretly of this ethnic group and has to deal with racist behavior from one of their team mates.

Viera are literally bunny girls. While the al bhed have more in common with the faunus in story, the viera are closer in appearance.

Summoning- Schnee Semblence

Now there are a lot of Summoners in FF but Monty was known for his love of FF10 and of Yuna and I think that’s who’s summoning ability Weiss’ abilities are based off of. Yuna is capable of summoning dead spirits that take the form of Aeons and uses them in battle. Weiss, and other Schnees, can summon enemies that they have killed and have them aid in combat. Yuna’s summoning and Weiss’ also seem a lot more of a closer bond then say, Rydia or Eiko’s  were or the ones were summoning is just a job class.

Aerith’s Death- Pyrrha’s Death

An extremely shocking and brutal death scene of a beloved female character that is used to spur the protagonists to action and kick start the larger segments of the story.

Sin-  Ancient Grimm

Not a lot of similarities, other then they ‘shed‘ smaller enemies and are huge and capable of decimating cities if they want to.

Uncomfortable Laughing Scene

Yeeeeeaaaah, those scenes are cringey. I took from it that Ruby was struggling to keep her composure at seeing something that reminded her of Pyrrha after watching her die and started to laugh obnoxiously to cover up her issues, similar to how Tidus had his uncomfortable laughing scene to cope with his own issues. Or maybe that Ruby scene was meant to be funny and bunny jackets are hilarious, who knows.

Auron- Qrow

Red and gray color scheme, drunks, and a father figure to the main character, alongside using a similar weapon as the character they watch over.

Tifa- Yang

A bare knuckle brawler who’s a childhood friend of the main protagonist, is the team mom, and objectively considered the ‘prettiest‘ character of the main cast. Both are also fans of butt capes, given Yang’s timeskip outfit and Tifa’s Advent Children outfit.

Kefka- Tyrian

Now this one’s a bit of stretch and I really hope they don’t pull a Kefka with Tyrian late on in the story but here we go.

They’re both the insane right hand of the (apparent) big bad of the story, both have a flair for the dramatics (Tyrian’s theatrical behavior during his fight scene and well, just look at Kefka). Both also have an insane laugh and boy do they like to laugh.

Quistis- Glynda

A blonde, glasses wearing combat instructor at a school for specialized mercenaries. Both wield a bdsm style weapon (whip/riding crop) and are proficient mages.

Zidane- Sun

A blonde monkey man who breaks the law a lot, has a sunny personality, and fights alongside a dark haired princess.

Ruby- Iris

Now I said I wasn’t going to bring up FF15 but this is a unique case. I think this is an instance of RWBY serving as inspiration for FF.

FF15 was in production between 2006-2016. Red Trailer came out in 2012, with Vol1 coming out in 2013. RWBY is very popular in Japan, and I don’t know if there is a way to learn when Iris was added to the game’s production.

Iris is the younger sister of the stronk fanservice character of the game, wears black and red, has a red hood, short black hair, is 15 years old, and grows up to be a famous Hunter; a daemon slayer after the time skip. She’s cheery and happy, and has an interest in mechanical things (her fascination with Lestallum and how it’s maintained). Iris is a hopeless romantic and fights with her fists.

Ruby is the younger sister of the stronk fanservice character of the show, wears black and red, has a red hood, short black hair, is 15 years old, and dreams of being a Huntress; a Grimm slayer. She’s happy and bubbly, and is mechanically inclined, alongside loving weaponry. Ruby doesn’t have an interest in romance and can’t fight without a weapon.

Weaponry

Weiss literally uses a gunblade, and Raven has an odachi. But other then that, most of the weapons in RWBY line up more with Lightning’s style of weaponry in FF13; a melee weapon that transforms and can take a gun form and also collapse for easier storage.

Costumes

Both FF and RWBY thrive on amazing looking costumes that are hella impractical and use way too many belts for a rl person to wear. But damn do they not look amazing.

Setting

Both RWBY and (most) FF have a science fantasy setting, with continents that look really silly.

Soundtrack

Both RWBY and FF love their hard rock and piano’s, and have amazing scores and soundtracks.

Fight Choreography

Saying Advent Children was a big influence on Monty would be an understatement. RWBY’s fight scenes are fast paced, hectic, and make gravity and the laws of physics its bitch. This is hard to explain in written format, so I’d recommend watching a fight scene from Advent Children and then compare it to one from RWBY to see what I mean.

Light v Dark Themes

Recurring theme in a lot of the older FF games, the forces of Light against the forces of Darkness. RWBY has the Light and Darkness Brother Gods myth, and they will most likely play a larger role in the future.

Party of Four

FF games traditionally have 4 (or 3) party members and oh hey would you look at that, RWBY has 4 members. Iirc Monty also said he based the team’s fighting styles off of his preferred rpg team line up. (If anyone has figured out what class Ruby is, let me know ^^)

Strong female characters

I think it’d be easier to name FF female characters who aren’t strong in their own ways. And the entire premise of RWBY is four strong women living their lives and stopping evil, alongside the slew of other notable female characters in the show.

Moon

The moon plays an important role in the stories of FF4 and FF8, and although the moon hasn’t done anything of plot importance, the fact it’s shown so frequently in scenes and is a prominent image in RWBY (alongside how its brought up space travel is still being developed in Remnant) I’m pretty sure it will play an important role in the future.

Parent Issues

A lot of the characters in FF have really bad parents, parent issues, or are orphans. A lot of the important characters in RWBY have really terrible parents, and their issues with their parents playing a role in each member of Team RWBY’s personal storylines. Jecht and Tidus’ relationship being the most famous example from FF of a strained child-parent relationship, and given Yang’s obsession and hatred of Raven, it seems the most likely place of inspiration (alongside Raven and Jecht being antagonists and being involved in the Deeper Lore of their respective universes, and of being members of a team with the parents of one of the other main characters).

So yeah, those are my thoughts about all the stuff I‘ve noticed in RWBY that could have been inspired by Final Fantasy. Hope you enjoyed reading this ^^.

RWBY FF style poster done by digitaleva- https://digitaleva.deviantart.com/