#1000 year quest

[ace-of-fairytail]

sons of Igneel (Au)

-updated version. chat, we’re so back.

[rocketbirdie]

Laid to rest by ten thousand arrows — the fall of Lao-Shan Lung

HE'S FINALLY DEAD.

This oversized infant has been tormenting me ever since his fateful introduction as the Wall Of All Time in rank G2. It's difficult enough to just scare him off, but for months now, I've had my sights set on outright slaying him.

I tried everything. Aerial style great sword to the face for 30 minutes straight. Max dragon attack striker lance dash spam into his gut. Hell, I even tried the infamous weaponless strategy, frantically hauling cannonballs back and forth, calculating every single ballista shot, carefully counting flinches. But alas, Lao-Shan Lung was simply too powerful for one scrawny little hunter. I was faced with the horrible realization, that if I wanted to take him down alone... I was going to have to play a ranged weapon. (GASP!)

Anyway yeah those guides ain't joking lol dragon pierce bow is ridiculously overpowered against this guy. It took me 2 tries because I've literally never used a bow before, but once I got the hang of it, it was a super easy hunt. Here's the set that netted me a 20 minute Lao kill with both fortresses at 100%:

Magnastar Wil (Max upgraded Valstrax bow), Valor style

Neset Armor (Ahtal-Ka), full set

The luckiest fucking talisman of my entire life, Expert +9 and Crit Element +4, no slots

Armor skills: TrueShot, Pierce Up, Crit Element, Critical Eye 3, Tremor Res

Items: Power Coating Lv.2, Element Coatings Lv.1 and Lv.2, and an unholy amount of mega dash juice

A LOT of patience to obtain all of the materials for the armor and weapon. Phew!

Altheos Incanonis (the max Alatreon bow) is technically better, but there is no way in hell I was going to grind G RANK ALATREON solo, fuck that. I got stupid lucky with the Valstrax grind and got 2 mantles and an orb on a single hunt, so I just ran with it; Magnastar is more than capable of getting the job done, even in the hands of a clueless melee main.

THE DREAM IS REAL!!!! WOOOOOO

[chimerafeathers]

thinking about Frieren and Dungeon Meshi today and just remembered seeing a post/comment or two saying that people have no reason to compare the two stories since they have nothing in common except being non-isekai fantasy. different tones, different pacing, different themes, etc.

i don't know if whoever said that were dunmesh manga readers or not, but i kinda assume they were making judgments based purely on however much of the anime was released at the time, because i think about how similar these stories are a LOT, actually.

[spoilers for the dungeon meshi manga below, and a little bit of frieren manga]

i think that's a pretty fair assessment to make based JUST on the "prologue"/setup arc leading up to the red dragon. while some of the main themes are very in-your-face, others are still being woven into the characters and established much more subtly, and we don't get the full weight and payoff for that early work until later into the story.

Frieren establishes its identity within the first episodes and never drastically deviates from that first impression. on the other hand, dunmesh takes its time to build its foundation...but instead of using it as groundwork to build a house above, it then leads you into the depths of the dungeon below.

the stuff about conflicts between long-lived and short-lived races seem like just jokes/banter and a touch of political worldbuilding, in the beginning, but that tension is absolutely central to both Marcille and Kabru's arcs. both Frieren and dunmesh are about elves facing their (near) immortality in contrast with the brief mortality of their companions.

I think about the ways Frieren, with a thousand years of life behind her, carries the memories of those she's outlived along with her and all the ways she emulates them to preserve their lives and values. I think about the way Marcille, with a thousand years of life ahead of her, clings so tightly to the people she holds dear and fears the future she sees beyond their deaths.

I think about the way Serie talks about training Flamme on a whim, casually dismissive of short human lifespans. I think of the way Kabru resents the way elves treat short-lived species like children and fights so desperately for their agency and right to speak on the same level as the rest, fully informed of the dangers that threaten them all instead of being left in the dark.

beyond that, too--you can really feel that these series come from a place of love for the genres that inspired them. dunmeshi's speculative biology for the monsters and the ecosystem they're a part of, the exploration of how and why different races get different "stat" bonuses (dwarven constitution, half-foot perception, tall-man versatility, elven/gnomish magical affinity), the side comic about "Grease" as a starter spell--all obviously come from deep knowledge and affection for D&D and/or similar rpgs.

meanwhile, Himmel gives thoughtful weight to doing "side quests" for paltry rewards--they help because they're heroes, but they accept scraps and useless items for rewards because no one wants to feel pitied or indebted to anyone. he says they "went the wrong way" if they find the stairs to the next floor in a dungeon, because the "right" way is to explore every nook and cranny first before you progress. it would be very easy to mock how annoying fetch quests are, or make the dungeon bit a pure joke--but this is a story that relishes the process and the journey of it all, down to the smallest detail and silliest quest.

flashbacks to Falin being achingly kind and gentle, and also strange and awkward. flashbacks to Himmel being blindingly heroic and noble, and also vain and goofy.

these are both stories about the weight of death and loss and the things we'll do to see our loved ones one last time, when we are destined and doomed to outlive them. they're about the joy of the journey even when it's painful, thriving on silliness even when things are "serious," and loving the people in your life knowing you will lose them, and how you carry them with you when they're gone. dunmeshi is heavier on the comedy side of things, but both have their fair share of emotional gutpunches, and their themes and values mirror each other.

all this to say, these stories are holding hands.

[snezus-christ-risen]

In a surprising turn of events, I’m finding it 1000x easier to come up with stifle sounds and spellings for my fic but unstifled sneezes? Nothing sounds right. 😖

[mitzirockerextendeduniverse]

[Game 2 on my massive JRPG Spreadsheet! Previous entries - well, the previous entry - can be found in my #tales from the retro jrpg Spreadsheet tag.]

What it is: Bokosuka Wars (ボコスカウォーズ) for Famicom, released on the 14th of December, 1985, developed and published by ASCII. Based on the home computer game of the same name from March 1984, also published by ASCII and developed by one Kōji Sumī, currently an avant-garde artiste working under the name Rasho but then a lucky bedroom coder who happened to win a programming contest. Got a sequel/reimagining thirty-five years after the fact, making this technically the first in a series of unique vaguely board-game-y strategy games about the heroic kingdom of Suren's fight against the tyrannical Basam Empire's oppression.

What's it about: Pretty much what I just said, yeah! Even by the standards of early 80s quasi-RPGs, Bokosuka Wars' plot is thin. The Famicom version adds a few extra details to account for some gameplay changes - Ogereth, Emperor of the Basam Empire, has turned the Suren Kingdom's soldiers into rocks and trees, but King Suren (or possibly just the King of Suren, the Japanese is a little unclear) has learned how to undo that spell and rebuild his army - but the various home computer versions keep it short and sweet. You don't have the manpower to fight off the invading army the traditional way, so you're spearheading a lightning-quick assault on Basam Castle to take out Ogreth, and that's all the setup you need.

How it plays: Bokosuka Wars' box calls it 'a very different type of RPG!' but by modern standards it's more of an abstract chess-ish strategy game. King Suren starts at the right side of the map, 600 metres/tiles away from Ogreth. To win the game, all you have to do is get from there to him and defeat him in single combat. Of course, it's not as simple as it sounds; the forces surrounding Basam Castle outnumber your largest possible force four to one, and there's no way the King can fight his way through them on his own, and if he dies, you lose the game.

Fortunately, he doesn't have to do it alone. While in the home computer versions the King starts with a small force of his own, due to hardware limitations on Famicom he must free his troops by pushing against trees and rocks and other obstacles to turn them into soldiers. There are two types: pawns, who are fairly weak but fairly numerous, and knights, who are relatively strong but relatively rare. The player can move either the army as a whole, just the king, just the knights, or just the pawns, making manoeuvring around scenery and enemies alike trickier than in most strategy games.

Manoeuvring is an important part of Bokosuka Wars for another reason. Moving one of your units onto a spot occupied by an enemy will start a battle, and though units do have an attack stat that can be increased in almost every battle there's a decent chance the weaker combatant will win and the stronger destroyed. This applies equally to a freshly-recruited pawn and a fully-powered-up knight and the King, so winning the Bokosuka Wars is as much about avoiding battles as it is about winning them, carefully positioning your soldiers to keep enemies away from the King and only risking a fight when you have no other options. Even so, sometimes you just have to barrel your army forward into the enemy and pray to the random number gods your King makes it through.

What I thought: I... wanted to like Bokosuka Wars. I really did! It's got this experimental DIY bedroom-coder charm that really appeals to me (I think because I spent my childhood playing Flash games.) Its gameplay is unlike anything else I've ever seen, and I mean that in a good way - the fact that enemies can't attack you, but can block your way, puts a unique twist on the tactics you need to make your way through, and the game is very good at using that concept to challenge the player, from enemies that swarm the King unless you can block their path, to tight corridors you have to carefully move your army through while baiting enemies into dead ends. Sumī even wrote some lyrics to the background music and put them in the manual! How can you not love that?

But, as they say, the devil's in the details. A full playthrough of Bokosuka Wars can take easily over an hour, and since we're still before the standardisation of - even password saves, you're going to have to pull that off in one sitting. That wouldn't necessarily be the worst thing in the world, but coupled with how easily and suddenly a run can end it makes every attempt to reach Ogreth a long, grinding slog that's only ever one bad decision - or one bad dice roll! - away from a WOW, YOU LOSE! This time around I could at least break up the sessions with save states, but the first time I played this, on original hardware, I was sitting in front of my little CRT, mechanically going through the same steps of my ideal strategy, again and again, for days on end. And this is one of those games that restarts with a higher difficulty when you beat it! I can't even imagine having the patience.

I think a lot of the blame for this falls on the Famicom port. I've heard it said that the problem is it breaking up the army so you're collecting it as you go rather than starting with most of it already, but I don't think it's that much of a downgrade - it can even give you a chance to rebuild your forces after barely surviving a tough battle. No, what's really wrong with this port is its speed. I've only messed around with the computer versions of Bokosuka Wars, but in those everything is so much faster than on Famicom. Units zip across the map, battles take a fraction of the time to resolve, and everything's just a lot more responsive than on Famicom, where sometimes it feels like your soldiers will only move in the direction you're pressing half the time. The almost-random outcomes of battles could even work in this version - sudden, unpredictable death would be a much easier pill to swallow if getting back to where you were was a relatively quick dash rather than an endless death march. I can imagine a version of this game that's legitimately fun, but unfortunately, it's not the one I played.

[coral-nerd]

Good thing Morimiya loves farming cause uhhh... those merfolk sure need A Lot

Like that whole bottom square is just gonna be used for upgrading a sprinkler

[dufflebagwitch]

I KNOW shadowheart has so much content and so many cutscenes but it makes me insane that the two times Shar mind tortures her it happens during FAST TRAVELING and OFF SCREEN, I feel like those two events were IMPORTANT

[fabaceous]

my 2024 new years resolution is the same it’s been for the last 3 years: i WILL finish skyrim this year

[wizard-of-night]

The Nightmare Bun is dragginG ME BACK-

[ace-of-fairytail]

Erza inside Etherion (1,000 year quest AU)

[cecilia-stars]

this might be the prettiest thing i've ever seen. ily op

carmen dei chp 2 is real and it will happen to us (said as though a mantra)

[mondy-shop]

#Anyway it can be a new start#a fresh one#but my username#I don't like have _ at the end#Mmmm#oka talks

[misunderstandings-georg]

Might play fallout 4 again like some kind of fucking moron or perhaps an idiot

[acepalindrome]

I got emotional thinking about Chrono Trigger tonight, and the fact that the majority of the cast could have just given up on the whole ‘saving the world’ thing, gone home, and lived perfectly fine lives with no consequences for walking away.

If you’re unfamiliar with Chrono Trigger, the basic plot is that our plucky heroes accidentally get pulled back in time after a science experiment goes wrong. On their quest to get back to their own time, they accidentally end up in the distant future, and discover that the world is destroyed in the year 1999 (of course,) and the future they find is a desolate wasteland where the few surviving humans are on the brink of starvation. It’s terrible!

But here’s the thing: our heroes are from the year 1000. The apocalypse is 999 years away from their time. Once they find the way back to their own time, they could have just forgotten about the future. It wouldn’t have affected them! They would be long dead before any of that ever happened! The only character who would have been impacted was the robot they met in the future, but they could have brought him back to their time too and called it a day. There was no consequence for them to walk away.

But they don’t, of course. They make it their mission to figure out what caused the apocalypse and how to prevent it by jumping back and forth through time. They do all that, risking their lives, for a future that they wouldn’t live long enough to actually experience. They don’t do it for themselves. They do it for the world.

It’s just kind of a lovely thought. Planting trees in whose shade they would never sit.

[caffeinewitchcraft]

It's a brainstorm day! A day I spend only writing prompts for myself to be used (or not used) at a later date. This day looks like this in my notebook:

A search and rescue ranger for hire that always somehow ends up saving people from supernatural phenomena she has NO experience with. She has regular run ins with people who DO know what the supernatural phenomena are, but they never find anyone alive. They try to recruit her and she has a hard time believing they’re for real.

A kingdom that chooses its ruler by who can make the most interesting story about an artefact from the treasury, assigning a history to it after their library of records burned 1000 years ago. However,  the main character is reincarnated from that time and keeps winning the challenges by ACTUALLY knowing what they’re for. Or the main character makes up stories according to the kingdom’s morals and wins that way? Interesting world, don’t know what character would be the most interesting in it.

A ghost who is just being a Chill Guy when he’s dragged into a mad scientist’s experiment which gives him a body – HIS body made corporeal – again. Does he feel good about this? Bad about this? Is his new quest to die or to live a better life than he lived before?

A girl who is turned into a werewolf during a college rager and she treats it like an STD. “I am confident I can live a good life, it will just look a little different than others’. This condition can be managed (uwu).” And the pack who is now obligated to take her in is like…look we don’t want to tell you how to live your life since one of our pack members did this to you non-consensually, but you DO need to fall into pack dynamics asap. And she’s like, “Sparkle, sparkle, NO”

A mermaid who is confused and alarmed when her friends all suddenly want to give up their tails to go on land. Turns out there is a Land Siren out there and it’s literally just a character from Bay Watch.

[halalgirlmeg]

5 Campaigns for Palestinians that need our help

Do you feel like you see people campiagning for funds and aren't sure who to help? Don't worry I got 5 campaigns picked out for you. Pick one and give 5, then tell your friend to pick one of the other four and donate 5 (or maybe you can't do 5 but how about 10, or 3, anything helps please don't forget)

There's Shimaa, the 20 year old computer scientist. She and her family are trying to rebuild what they have lost as the ceasefire looms this upcoming Sunday on the 19th. Shimaa's university is also gone, it has been lost to bombings and she is trying to focus on school. I am collecting funds for her on my PayPal which you can send here as we are a little over our current goal at 225 and we need to reach 400. @im-smart-i-swear is also offering commissions in exchange for proof of your help.

There is Safaa, the 26 year old Lawyer Mom who is the absolute sweetest, and needs our help. Currently she is trying to help raise money for her sick mother, which is going to cost ber 200 dollars. She also has a husband and child that she needs to help take care of alongside taking care of her own needs. They are also hoping to cross the border to Egypt when possible and we know that is not cheap so give what you can.

https://chuffed.org/project/118983-support-safaas-quest-to-get-her-family-to-safety

There is also Moataz, he is eighteen trying to campaign for this entire family. His goal is almost done but he still needs a few hundred to finish and we can't let it stagnate when he is so close. I cannot imagine being so young and having all of this on his shoulders so I know we can help him reach his goal.

Maysara is campaigning in order to support his family which includes his parents who are both disabled and 9 brothers and sisters and his campaign is very very low (like 85 out of 30,000) and he needs all the help we are able to offer him.

And last but not least is Mahmoud, he was recently sick and is recovering and he like many others, like everyone else listed here needs money to pay for basic survival for food clothes and battling the harsh weather of winter. He's gotten like 1000 out of 10000 so while he has some he still has a ways to go.