#FUCK THIS GAME AND ITS CREATORS

[positivelyamazonian]

What do you think about Tomb Raider Anniversary? I actually like it surprisingly, of course the originals are better but from what I've gathered they seem to have made it somewhat similar to the original but I would have loved to see Core's remake of it. Also, it seemed like they were trying to make Lara and Larson a thing?! Idk. Also, the Atlantean creatures had an awesome design in that game!

They lost me in the moment Natla mentioned Lara's bloody father AGAIN, who was never important in the original timeline in the first place, if anything, he would've stopped his daughter from pursuing her talents, didn't he disown her for that? Legend was about mommy, Anniversary was about daddy, and the reboot rebooted it again, can't Lara do shit without walking in the shoes of a parental figure?

Also the way she seemed disturbed or repentant to kill Larson when actually she was defending herself from a potential murderer. Classic Lara would've cleaned her teeth with his bones.

The worst part, though, is that its demo was built in record time by Crystal only to rival with Core's almost totally developed TR 10th Anniversary Edition. It wasn't planned before, it was only done so they could push Core out of the map and have their work canned and definitely expelled from a potential release, so their Anniversary ended replacing the Anniversary Core had prepared and Core Design definitely vanished as studio.

Girl, I spit on Crystal's Anniversary. I spit on it a thousand times, only for this.

In the end, NOPE. I remember playing it once just for out of curiosity and then bye bye. You know, graphics and designs were never enough for me to do the trick. It's what happens in general with LAU trilogy. They look cool because modern, but it's like an empty nice chocolate box: no matter how pretty, it's still empty on the inside.

For that, I still prefer to play the originals. Now that they're remastered, I don't see why anyone would care to touch Anniversary.

[isdisorigionalenoughforyou]

yknow sometimes i think about how mr seawatt gaming parkourcivilization only got to where he was by leveraging his knowledge of obscure rules and mechanics and keeping all his cards close to his heart. how he clearly only got to where he originally was in the 1st movie by making himself useful with amethyst blocks and brewing stand jumps. and how it all crumbled because evbo 360-ed all over his carefully laid plans but really, his undoing was his own hubris.

and he's shit at parkour

[limonjarritos]

no im still so unwell over this??? vince scribbled out the criticism of rody in the review of the bistro. help

Nooooo but literally. How he immediately discredits any bad word against Rody! It defo made me more convinced that the reason the party ended was because Rody's ex classmate made fun of Rody (and it is mentioned by one of the guests that Vincent can hear Rody very clearly from over there, there's no way he didn't notice that whole scene). I do wonder exactly what was said, since he's not afraid to be brutal to anyone that's not Rody.

If a customer ever treated Rody like shit in the typical way customers act towards service workers I don't think Vince would be too happy lmao. POV: you treated your waiter like shit and now some white french man who smells like an ash tray starts glaring daggers at you.

Come look at my smiling deranged blorbo!

[feelboss]

me when I've never played a game with a character creator before

[trainingdummyrabbit]

ayin. i'm curious

one question in and im already having to pull up the cutscene dialogue. god. ok listen this is the most bullyable man in the whole entire world and he makes it so easy, but also I Do Fucking Love This Guy. i need to study him so bad its unreal.

im always a sucker for characters introduced as a "yeah theyre totally a player stand-in dont worry about it ^_^" and then they kick you in the fucking shins halfway through. and he is no exception. i am Notoriously endeared by characters with any amount of weird identity fuckery going on and Jesus Fucking Christ Dude.

the way that he is so solidly rooted in the core of everything that goes down in lobcorp, and yet how certain bits of his attitude and Personality are Wholly lost. how most of what we know of him is through secondhand accounts and recollections, and yet he refuses to let on anything about himself in his own memory of things. his perception revolves entirely around the people around him to a very, Very stark degree. im not sure if its just a side effect of the genre and execution of this story in particular or if im just making shit up, but.

hes not a loud character. something about that in tangent with how he completely splinters himself over and over in conjunction with the things that happened to them, its all very compelling. the way he tackles problems with this sort of analytical distance, unaware of or perhaps intentionally separating his own mess from what he feels he has to do-- while at the same time having it be so inextricably intertwined with Everything. he feels like the type of character to desperately want to simply point a direction and shoot, yet he gets in his own way time and time again, simultaneously on accident And on purpose. avoidant of And conscious of.

ill be real im just kind of spitballing the vague Idea of him in hopes of reaching something concrete. he's so intent on the straightforward "any means necessary," yet he sabotages himself every step of the way. its fascinating. such a strange form of self-destruction.

i wonder how he really feels about everything. how he felt, and then, what exactly it is that changed in him after the SoL project "completion". what exactly did he come to terms with through the course of ruina? was it something new he hadn't the room to process until then, or was it simply an understanding that he'd had for longer than that, that he'd simply never had the mind to voice it?

and then! the way he feels about the rest of the team-- how little he seems to speak of any particular bond between himself and them, and yet (iirc) he has photos of them all up in his office. how much of him is means to an end, and how much is compartmentalization of what he might actually feel? which does he want to be true?

does that cohere? he's such a messy tangle of things that never get spoken-- on purpose and otherwise-- that it makes him so difficult to Actually Read, and yet... and yet! what im saying is that benjamin saw something in him, and that is something worth studying-- not because of doubt, but because of a desire to truly Understand. something about the metaphor between Sun and Shadow, seeing things in the gaps burned between photos. fascinating specimen. i need to put him into a blender.

also hes one of the few characters capable of making me lose it just by seeing his basic png which has to count for something i guess

[number-1-kuaidul-fanboy]

The Creator: Rush duels, rush duels, rush duels, rush duels Kuaidul: Dad, I don't know what the fuck that is. Can you please just be normal.

[shittymihodaily]

its kind of crazy miho is in the dungeon dice monsters game but not any of the capsule monsters video games

The Miho in s0 is a different one than the Miho ddm but like, you're still right. They're not allowed to pretend they don't know who she is in s0, they had to have brought her up in the writing room at least once

[4th-d-slipped]

memes that cater to no one but me

[Image ID: A meme with a blank white background. On the left is concept art of Jowee from Drawn to Life with text above him that reads "im transmasc". On the right is concept art of Pastel from Graffiti Kingdom in her boxdog form with text above her that reads "and im transfem". Below both of them is flaming text that reads "THE ART GAME BROTHERS". End ID]

[milkman-zahhak]

I wanna share more erm.. belly stuff about my favorite characters and media on here but I'm already REALLY pushing it with this blog being named after e/q/u/i\u\s since I'm, like, one of maybe 5 of his total fans, and make it very obvious on all my main accounts.

If anyone finds the art or fics it's like. There's maybe a handful of people that even care about that character or fandom enough to make something for it and it doesn't take a lot of searching to see who they are and narrow it down lol.

I'll try to hint at what some of them are in the tags if anyone is curious, and wants to request anything with the characters from those medias so I have an excuse to post about em lol.

[sebek-zigbolt]

fucking around in code vein

[vault81]

dragon age twitter anytime anything is announced about the game

[seafoam-taide]

THE GAME... IS A CURRENTLY IN PROGRESS GAME ... IVE ALREADY SEEN ALL THEREIS TO SEE FOR NOW... FUCK !!!!!!!!! FUCK !!!

[shellseaisms]

casual reminder to cc creators: your terms of use actually mean nothing. you don't own the cc you're sharing; ea does. 🤠

[presiding]

What is your favourite thing about Billie Lurk?

(Answers are obvious possibly but i love when people talk about her👍)

thanks for the ask!! YEAH ME TOO I love when people talk about Billie! I can't say I have a favourite thing specifically, but I can explain why she's my fav. apologies for not taking this qn literally, but -

short answer: she’s really cool

& you can stop reading there, or, for the maybe 2 mutuals who might have time to read this my thoughts on her as a character, her meta, and her character as raw potential...

long answer:

i considered making this entire thing a gush so you could read a gush about Billie. but, part of what draws me to her is that she’s not always well written, and in fandom she’s underrated for a literal protagonist.

since you ask...

billie is a cool character

when I played Dh2 (hadn't played Dh1), I was excited to see a black woman with disabilities who was captaining a massive ship by herself. wow.

then I discovered Billie’s backstory with Deirdre, the way she responded to that, then having to survive while living on the run, and her bisexuality. as well as her history with daud & delilah. fascinating!

she’s an outsider who has so much to lose, and knows what it's like to lose everything - having lost everything not once but three times - but nevertheless speaks truth to power. she's so brave! she went and helped Emily & Corvo and she must have known they might kill her! plus, she’s smart, she’s funny, she gets shit done, she’s gorgeous.

but... the meta

mild critique of fandom & arkane incoming.

skip this bit if you want - you've been warned twice now - jump to tired Hayao Miyazaki and read from there if you'd like my thoughts on writing her.

i thought Death of the Outsider was going to be amazing and then... well. *sad trombone* i've written about that before so i won't keep banging on. i figured others must be disappointed too, so I joined a few fandom spaces in hopes of finding camaraderie.

most people with complaints about DotO didn’t like how the Outsider and Daud were handled. which is valid & I agree. but it seemed like most paid no attention to Billie; when people talk about her it’s with respect to Daud, as opposed to in her own right. you could argue for fandom misogyny because people don’t talk about adult Emily Kaldwin that much either, but in Billie's case, it’s misogynoir (compare & contrast with the popularity of thomas, particularly the popularity of thomas portrayed as a white man for no particular reason that i've been able to discern - i keep asking around, is it in the books???).

i think this is a LOT better now than it used to be, which is fantastic. or perhaps i have found the correct echo-chamber? ha.

ultimately, The Fandom is a fraction of the entire picture, and not even the important bit since The Fandom is not who these games are made for. you can't make money relying on only your hardcore fans even if all of them spent a fortune on merch, this is true for any AAA game.

while it's true that Billie is underrated from a fandom perspective - but Billie as an underwritten protagonist is squarely Arkane’s fault.

it was reasonable when she was a side character - the lack of info in Dh2 makes perfect sense (if anything there was more lore in Dh2 which is kind of wild)-

- but as a protagonist in Death of the Outsider?

.... there’s lousy writing, and there’s whatever is going on with Billie Lurk, a black woman who mostly exists as a foil or saviour for light-skinned characters. In her own game there’s barely any of her own lore except where it's relevant to saving two dudes.

lore hints at, but barely touches on what race means in the Dh universe (xenophobia is stronger in Dh1; separate essay i guess), but Arkane has patted themselves on the back for portraying non-white characters, which feels like the same thing as the aesthetic of diversity we're seeing in advertising currently because it’s in marketing trend guides. it's self-congratulatory and it's a missed opportunity for deeper storytelling.

you can see an example of diversity at its most shallow in the way that Billie’s written: there’s little engagement with her as an entire person with history & wants & preferences, and the world she walks through in that game feels like it has nothing to do with her. you could make a case for alienation as a theme, but then, how do you handle the titular premise of 'Dishonored' without ever letting Billie make changes in an environment without a chaos system? it's disappointing from that angle too.

in my opinion, whatever it's worth, it was an accident Arkane created such an awesome character - they needed someone to betray daud. congrats billie.

all this said, it makes her an underdog as far as characters to enjoy & create art & stories for. it's nice to find so many like-minded, switched on people! <3

billie's character potential

she’s got a wealth of unexplored lore, being deeply intertwined with both Karnaca & Dunwall’s fates & criminal underbellies, as well as her connections to the witches & whalers, and three Empresses.

she’s lived a few distinct lifetimes and in the games we get to meet her at two peaks (KoD & DotO) & a low (Dh2 as Meagan).

her voice is very distinct, her dry & often dark humour is entertaining & fun to write. her perspective is really interesting - she’s had the widest variety of void-powers of anyone canonically, and she’s also lived through the highest highs and lowest lows.

she's got everything going for her :) i couldn't really pick a fav thing!

[longelk]

i think about how log 11 is kaycee being sad she will never get to show off her mod and having daydreams about being praised and recognized for her work, but in the end her one and only witness to her pride and joy was leshy, and the memory of what she has done and contributed to the game died with him

[valgeristik]

She will not come,

She was torn apart by dogs,

Her hands were not ready for a fight,

And she did not desire to win

I will now be

Instead of her

------------------------------------------------------

Hi, meet Noel (she/he), whom i decided would fit perfectly for my dark urge bg3 playtrough 🤭

The way I see it... the him before the nautiloid is dead, and the him after the nautiloid will make sure it Stays That Way.

She is here now, she won, she was the one to claw her way to the surface of the body they share, and she will maim anyone who threatens her newfound existence.

Resisting the urges not out of fear, but out of Spite💁‍♀️

and as always..............this was drawn with a song in mind: