#''yosuke is not in this game'' may account for like half of that though

[syrupmancer]

Honestly so far (at the last vanilla dungeon) the main story of persona 5 has a lot less weird distasteful moments than p4, surprising to me with the way ppltalk about it like it's so infamous

[spicynbachili1]

A trip to Final Fantasy fan fest 2018

“Should you discover,” says the catfish, “everyone seems to be smiling round me.”

It’s true. This enormous fish individual has been waddling by means of crowds of people that grin whilst they duck beneath the beast’s large barbels. A number of individuals are taking pictures. I peer into the gaping mouth of the fish. Two human fingers immediately lurch out, gripping onto the creature’s lips from the within.

“I’m a namazu,” says Missy Allan, the 32-year-old girl within the costume. “It’s an enormous catfish… they usually’re usually actually dumb-looking, and I really like them… I assumed it could convey numerous happiness.”

Once I counsel that additionally it is barely terrifying, Missy is unfazed.

“That’s part of their pleasure.”

She stretches her hand out of the mouth to supply a parting handshake, her human limb showing from the maw of this googly-eyed creature, like a tongue.

That is the sort of unsettling marvel chances are you’ll witness on the Closing Fantasy XIV fan competition, a conference for the monster killers of the eight-year-old MMO, Closing Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. A get-together internet hosting 1000’s of gamers (though the passes round their necks insist they be known as “adventurers”).

The web universe that unites these followers is like many others. You discover enormous maps, go on world-saving quests, and band collectively to raid dungeons for loot. You dance round cones and circles projected on the ground to keep away from injury, a display screen busier than an Amazon warehouse staffed by bees. The story is drenched within the cheery anime tropes followers have come to anticipate from the sequence.

However this instalment additionally acts as a vortex for Closing Fantasy paraphernalia. Bits and items of the opposite worlds bleed into it. Kefka (the scary clown from Closing Fantasy VI) exhibits up for a struggle. You may play Triple Triad, the cardboard recreation loved by Squall and buddies in Closing Fantasy VIII. You may gamble within the Gold Saucer, a theme park from Closing Fantasy VII. This final crossover is thematically applicable, as a result of this 12 months’s fan fest is going on in Las Vegas.

Other than having an an overwhelmingly alliterative identify, the Closing Fantasy Fourteen Fan Pageant is equal components cute nerdery and fetishistic cat ears, a conference of moogles and magic. Cosplayers strut round like foam peacocks: a spiky dragoon, a vampiric elf, a moon goddess.

The primary corridor is a pit of noise and color. There’s an enormous cactuar. There’s an artwork exhibition. There’s a stage for internet hosting shows from the sport’s creators. And, in fact, there’s a chocobo racing recreation.

(Click on to play GIFs)

Within the very center of the corridor, surrounded by followers, there’s additionally a protracted wall the place gamers scribble their names.

Right here, for 2 days, a monk and a samurai who struggle side-by-side in a Free Firm (a participant group like a clan or guild) would possibly see one another for the primary time. However the massive deal of the weekend is the announcement of a brand new growth known as Shadowbringers. The primary corridor fills for the displaying of a brand new trailer. Afterwards, director and producer Naoki Yoshida arrives on stage, quickly joined by localisation chief, Michael-Christopher ‘Koji’ Fox, appearing as translator.

Yoshida is a smiling stage presence with a straightened fringe and fingers coated in metallic rings. The followers know him as “Yoshi P” and there’s applause between each small declaration he makes. At one level, the gang begins chanting: “Yo-shi P! Yo-shi P! Yo-shi P!” Till he redirects the reward to the dev workforce, and the chanting mutates. “Dev-team! Dev-team! Dev-team!” It’s the sort of viewers so charged with unbridled fanaticism that it’ll erupt into cacophonous applause at some good field artwork.

Yoshida goes by means of the upcoming options of the growth. There will likely be user-controlled farms. There will likely be dwarves and pixies and thrilling server redistribution (at this an unsettled murmur grips the gang). There will likely be dungeons and forests and cities and homes.

“And yet one more factor,” says Yoshida, in one in all his many crowd-taunting prospers.

“Blitzball!” shouts a person within the crowd, to in-joke laughter.

No, not blitzball. It’s a brand new playable race. The director reveals this by turning and displaying the again of his t-shirt to the gang. It’s a non-chalant Bugs Bunny. Everybody within the room cheers, as a result of it could possibly solely imply one factor: the attractive rabbits of Closing Fantasy XII, the Viera, are coming to the sport.

They’re placing on a present as a lot as making an announcement. At one level, the president and CEO of Sq. Enix, Yosuke Matsuda, comes on stage (to gasps and cheers) wearing a blue cape, wielding a mage’s employees. A jolly sketch ensues between the Japanese builders, one in all them taking part in an interfering CEO, the opposite a tight-lipped supervisor. The entire thing is sort of a pantomime. Did Matsuda simply announce a brand new blue mage class? Oh no he didn’t. Oh sure he did.

It’s a grand present, designed to tickle the feelings of precisely the sort of one who is keen to fly to Las Vegas and gown up as a moon goddess. However the bards and conjurers of this digital land weren’t at all times so completely satisfied. A few of them keep in mind darker instances.

Closing Fantasy XIV had a poor launch. Eight years in the past, gamers arrived (a lot of them migrating from the earlier MMO, Closing Fantasy XI) anticipating a wondrous new world of monsters and journey. As an alternative, they received a glitchy world of bugs, efficiency issues and complicated interfaces.

The elders of Sq. Enix ordered a full retreat. Naoki Yoshida turned the brand new director. They needed to reboot the entire thing. Three years later, it relaunched, sporting the subtitle: “A Realm Reborn”. It seems to have slowly recovered. At present, there are wholesome participant numbers, say Sq. Enix. Though the latest boast of “14 million gamers” is as deceptive as any studio’s massive quantity, because it contains trial accounts and inactive ones (“Be a part of an indeterminate variety of individuals unfold throughout 66 servers!” in all probability doesn’t lower it with the promoting division).

However these numbers matter little to the die onerous longears and cat individuals of the fan competition. They’re too busy racing chocobos to care, or getting into the “cactpot” raffle, or smashing an enormous hammer in a “take a look at your energy” carnival recreation.

A few of them are reaching out to the touch an enormous reproduction of the sport’s quick journey crystals.

This crystal matches in effectively in Vegas, town of facsimile. If there could be a 1:1 reproduction of Michelangelo’s David in Caesar’s Palace, why not an enormous shard of Aetheryte?

On the principle stage, there’ll quickly be a panel about lore, through which a whole bunch of individuals will assist create the flavour textual content for a brand new beast, with microphones handed round to take recommendations. The ensuing monster is a gargantuan liopleurodon with bone armour who eats tiny kings and wears their crowns. The gang known as it “the Vegetarian”, and based mostly on the laughs this suggestion obtained, I can report with confidence that it was a very good joke.

All of the whereas, that wall of signatures is changing into crowded. At first, gamers wrote their names beneath their server. Nevertheless it’s quickly change into a chaotic slab of cursive, with the severs – Cactaur, Hyperion, Ultros – misplaced among the many names.

On the foot of the wall, there’s a portrait surrounded by flowers and trinkets and snacks. A shrine to a long-eared warrior.

That’s unhappy, I feel, this MMO will need to have its personal Vile Rat, a useless participant commemorated by others. So I ask a close-by fan: who was this?

“It’s Haurchefant,” she says.

I frown. Her-osh-o-fan?

“Haurchefant!” she says once more, as if I had not heard of Jesus Christ.

Haurchefant Greystone wasn’t a useless participant in any case, however an aristocratic NPC knight. And amongst gamers he actually has a Messianic popularity. Within the story quests that pepper the MMO, he dies taking a magical spear for the participant character. And since everybody on this corridor performs the identical story, they had been all personally saved by him. He died, in order that we could stay.

Two Sq. Enix employees come to examine the shrine and its trove of goodies. There are Doritos, Nature Valley bars, half a loaf of bread, a handwritten letter (“I do know you might be with me,” reads one line. “I can really feel it”). There are even some greenback payments. I ask a staffer what they’ll do with all of it.

“We’ll take it again to the workplace,” he says, “and recreate it.”

As a lot love and enjoyable that’s bouncing between the partitions of the Rio, there are grievances too. Occasionally, an MMO will take in the issues of the actual world. In Closing Fantasy XIV, there’s a “housing disaster”.

In 2014, a patch added neighbourhoods full of homes to the world. A dungeon diver may now change into a house owner, as long as they’d about three million gil (the in-game foreign money) of their pockets. However on crowded servers, there weren’t sufficient plots to go round. Shortages imply that the paladins and rogues of this land now collect in residential districts each time a patch is because of add new homes. As quickly because the contemporary suburbs pop into the sport, there’s a literal race to purchase land. Two gamers informed me they solely received a home for his or her clan by exploiting an elaborate loophole. They purchased one other clan and inherited that group’s home, one thing you’re “not likely purported to do”.

“It’s important to nickel and dime,” stated one of many householders.

New suburbs full of homes have since soothed demand, and there are different measures to assist hold the housing market wholesome. Should you don’t log in for 30 days, for instance, your property will likely be repossessed. Nevertheless, it stays an issue, say these gamers.

This isn’t the one smudge of actuality to mark the unbelievable realm. Gamers are additionally working brothels in-game, as Kotaku reported final 12 months. There are pubs and houses populated with scantily clad cat ladies promoting naughty phrases to johns, and making artistic use of emotes to get busy.

“Huuuhh!?” says director Naoki Yoshida after I ask about this throughout a press Q and A. He appears stunned, however it’s onerous to consider the creators of the sport aren’t conscious of this most MMO of participant behaviours. I simply need to know the studio’s place on cybersex for gil. Do they quietly discourage this sort of factor? Or are they completely satisfied to show a blind eye to this erotic function taking part in?

“Can I make a really common response to this?” says Yoshida, through a translator. “In the beginning, earlier than you even begin taking part in the sport there needs to be a consumer settlement that pops up and you should have needed to test it off…

“So inside that consumer settlement there’s a clause that states that something that… breaks the legislation, any exercise or any remarks which might be made that should break the legislation or infringe on any kind of legal guidelines, for these gamers… there will likely be punishment… both that being your account being banned or… some sort of penalty will likely be imposed upon them.”

It’s a strict invocation of the legal guidelines of Eorzea, relatively than actual life legal guidelines (though maybe he’s reminding us of that too). Is cybersex actually that regarding? Even when it’s a consensual encounter between two grownup gamers?

“Regardless,” says Yoshida, “that’s nonetheless eligible for an account being banned.”

It possible doesn’t matter to roleplaying matrons and intercourse staff whether or not their methods are bannable or not, since it could take one of many individuals concerned within the attractive dialogue to report it. However whether or not it’s in opposition to the foundations or not, soiled discuss is one purpose why numerous roleplayers hold logging in. Nonetheless, it’s a really sober and severe reply from a person who, lower than 24 hours from now, will appear on stage dressed in a flashy Kimono and singing an indignant rock track. Sure, the competition’s finale was considerably surreal.

This rock live performance featured The Primals, a band made up of assorted builders. The sound director is on lead guitar. The top of localisation is on vocals. Yoshida appeared as a particular singer, wearing a Kyoto-made Kimono with a white tiger emblazoned on it. There’s something surreal (and but very Closing Fantasy) about seeing the pinnacle of a studio performing what quantities to a really costly session of karaoke. However the crowd loves it. They’re one massive holler, signing alongside, glowing batons swinging in unison to tunes all of them know from repeated boss fights. The entire state of affairs could be cult-like, if it wasn’t so adorably geeky.

With the live performance completed, the fanfest is over and the cat ears have to be put away for one more 12 months. Closing Fantasy XIV might be not the MMO for me. However there’s extra taking place on the earth of Eorzea than I may have imagined. The worship of useless NPCs, the housing issues, the strangers cyber-rutting within the corners of fantasy taverns. But alongside all that intricacy and intimacy is a recreation that calls for the love of holy knights, barbarians and even catfish. Once I consider Closing Fantasy XIV any further, I’ll keep in mind the namazu. It’s massive, it’s barely unsettling, and I don’t actually perceive it. Nevertheless it makes lots of people smile.

Disclosure: Sq. Enix paid for this journey.

from SpicyNBAChili.com http://spicymoviechili.spicynbachili.com/a-trip-to-final-fantasy-fan-fest-2018/