#IF I IMAGINE IT HARD ENOUGH... IT'S ALMOST LIKE SHE'S PLAYABLE...

[rontra]

Control Edits...TWO!!!!

wowie zowie lone trail november 7th incoming fast & reminded me of Her... so i re-made this post and this post from scratch (no template for the operator screen this time...💀) and then some more. just for fun and autism playtime. the UI changed i have to update my Control edit to match....!!!!

SHE HAS SKILL ICONS THIS TIME YAYYY obvs everything here is based on my AU comic which diverges from canon before dorothy's vision can even happen. SPEAKING OF DOROTHY... AdAstra kirsten's made-up files used "resonator" first 😔 /j but i'm too lazy to change it. let's forget her...

the numbers and stats are completely arbitrary don't pay them any mind. i miss my dog i hope she blows up

+ bonus

[munchbuddi]

Spent most of my day making a roster for a hypothetical Marvel vs. Capcom game where none of the playable characters from any of the other games in the series are allowed on the roster. So like, no returning characters at ALL. A fun lil exercise.

25 characters from each Marvel and Capcom, and honestly isn't as awful as I would have expected (but would still be the worst MvC roster, lol)

(The cast isn't imbalanced, I just have Reed and Sue as a single character, where Reed does the main attacks, and Sue comes out for Blocks/Grabs and some other animations. I played too much Mortal Kombat as a youth to let an invisible character exist on the roster. PLUS, combining Reed and Sue let's you make a 3v3 team with the whole Fantastic Four, which is cool)

my main takeaways are that:

MvC has already used most of the good villains from both companies. (and the remaining villains are either very passive trickster types, or too massive and cosmic to exist as a fighting game character outside of a boss fight)

It's fucked up trying to make a roster for an MvC game when basically all the Avengers and Street Fighters are off the table. I ALSO did not want LUKE as the main SF protagonist representation, but he's definitely the closest to a "main Street Fighter character" that hasn't already been used in MvC.

A lot of the popular Marvel heroes that are not already a part of MvC are fucking LAMEEEEEEEEE. I don't care how obscure we have to get, I'm not putting fucking Namor and Ant-Man on my fucking fighting game roster.

It was really hard to narrow down the Street Fighter cast, but I feel pretty good with Hugo as our big body grappler and 3rd Strike rep, and then having Juri from 4 and Rashid from 5. I like these Street Fighters a lot.

The fact that MvC hasn't had Punisher, Fury, Luke Cage, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, Nightcrawler or honestly just a LOT of these characters on their rosters yet is a lil mind blowing. I like these characters, I think they rule. ALSO FUCKING BLADEEEEEE. I think Capcom hates money.

Capcom has a lotta good fighting game rosters that have never popped up in an MvC game as well. The designs for the Red Earth cast, as well as the casts for Rival Schools and Power Stone are fun as hell. Also, Picking Darkstalkers representatives is hard as hell, because despite MvC already using like, half the DS characters in other MvC titles, the remaining half of the DS roster ALSO kicks ass.

It was really hard to find enough Marvel characters I liked to keep up with how many Capcom characters I wanted to add, forcing a few heart breaking cuts on the Capcom side. I would've really wanted another Rival Schools/PJ character, Victor (or honestly any other remaining DS character), Saki (using her TvC moves), as well as one of several SF characters. Ultimately I couldn't really add more to the Capcom side without having to start adding some real duds to the Marvel side (like fucking Namor)

No Dead Rising characters because all their characters outside of Frank suck ASSSSSS. I do not like Chuck. I almost cut Ace Attorney as a series as well because I had a hard time imagining a character who would work as well as Phoenix and Maya. Ultimately I thought having Ryunosuke and Herlock (who would unintentionally attack people while showboating) felt like the best option. (Although Franziska would have been fun too, or an Apollo & friends character)

Mr. X, Birkin, Lady D, Saddler, and Salazar are nowhere as cool as Nemesis and Wesker (I kinda like Berkin mutation #2, but 🤷🤷). Ultimately I could not think of another RE character that fit the roster as well. I thought about having Leon as a gun mcshooty like Chris, and then having Rebecca or Claire with a missiles/zombie summoning moveset like Jill in MvC2, but that felt like a copout to just have MvC2 Jill again. +Although I kinda still like the idea of Rebecca with a healing support assist type thing, since she's a medic.) Ultimately I just went with Leon as the lone rep (with Regina acting as a second survival horror representative character, summoning Dinos the way MvC2 Jill does with Zombies)

Gene Godhand is finally on the roster (as he always should have been) as the sole representative for all the Clover Games, since Amatarasu and Viewtiful Joe were already used. If you haven't played God Hand, please do, it is very good.

I could not imagine good enough movesets for JJ Jameson and Edgeworth to justify adding them, despite thinking they are both very funny. I also cut Moon Girl because I didn't wanna imagine any of these characters beating the shit outta a lil girl, no matter how smart she is or how kick ass her dinosaur is. Also couldn't think of how Xavier would fight, since even whenever he does take a rare combat role, it's all telepathic tricks and such. Same with Mystique.

Also, no Red Skull because his ass is just a nazi, and I didn't want to imagine any of these characters collaborating with his nasty ass. Which is a shame because he would definitely be a much needed additional villain, and I think he could have a funny moveset of constantly summoning goons like his fellow fighting game nazi Parasol who summons her egrets.

Black Cat, JJ, Kingpin, Kraven, Spider Gwen, and honestly every member of the Sinister Six because I did not want the whole Marvel cast to be "Oops, All Spiderman". Spiderman really has a monopoly on all the great marvel villains who aren't either cosmic level deities or X-Men villains.

Some characters just don't feel right without their counterparts. Like, I feel like adding Red Hulk without Hulk would be a bit fucked up. Or Hercules without Thor. JJ without Peter Parker. Killmonger without Black Panther. Franziska or Edgeworth without Phoenix. Ya know?

I thought about adding The Arisen and a Pawn from Dragon's Dogma, but I don't know how interesting the moveset could be. Also, the main feature I always think about from the DD games is climbing like a jackass on all the enemies, and I cannot think of a way to add that to a fighting game that wouldn't be miserable.

lastly, some characters were totally chill to add, but went against the SPIRIT of the exercise. Stuff like Evil Ryu, Violent Ken, Captain Carter, Red Hulk and Carnage (who are both way too close to the secret characters Orange Hulk and Red Venom), Zero (from the Mega Man Zero series, as opposed to Zero from the Mega Man X series, even though I really think Zero from MMZero is very cool in SvC Chaos), the very cool and mysterious Paper Bag Man, and the 10000 cases of "character takes up a mantle that used to belong to a other person". Obviously I ended up making exceptions to this thought process for Miles, Gwenpool, and MegaMan Volnutt, but I honestly think these characters would end up having different enough movesets to differentiate themselves from Spidey, Deadpool, and Rock or X. (and also I just really like them so boo hoo)

Ultimately, I think this would be a pretty terrible roster when compared to the other MvC titles, but it was a fun thing to think about. Thank you for reading all this if ya did read it, lol.

[lonelygamedev]

Pulverizer 12th devlog: A catch up

It was late December 2023, I've noticed hints of trouble before with slow down and frequent 100% hard drive usage, but soon small moments became common and I couldn't work or do much of anything for days. When programming halted, I spent my days watching youtube and anime while occasionally reading. This continued for awhile till February, when I finally replaced my hard drive with a SSD. With a back up of almost everything, I can finally get back to work. I know from experience, that it's quite hard to get back into something you left for quite awhile. So I thought I could do a RPG in one week again as a warm up, but I just got annoyed and just wanted to work on the zombie project again. When I got back, one of the first thing's I did was burn all the code that used the new Input system. Because it felt unresponsive and I hated the days when it would just not work. Along the way I also begin work on the idea of items spawning in levels, power ups, guns, etc. After those were done, I realized I also hated the store system. the code was massive and the design didn't work well with co-op. So I went with a simple option and just added healing, ammo and weapon stations around the map Afterwards I decided it was finally time to add graphics, I felt like the game was fun enough and the design was proven. Plus fitting the animations and sfx's in is gonna require alot of code rework, so it was probably best to do it now then later. First thing I decided to model was the shotgun enemy, sense I already had a idea of a design for him

As I begin to animated him, thing's didn't quite work out. Sense when exporting, I notice animations kept disappearing. So I got frustrated and put him aside for a few days After that little adventure, I decided to also experiment with a editor tool. To make the level layout, sense Unity's default tools where a pain. The process of creating it became quite addicting. And I got it done in about a week

After I finished the tool, I begin start on the first tutorial area. When I finished the layout, battles and item stations, I decided to add graphics for the only playable character in the game. I imagined her with a katana and being something of a samurai/assassin, I was also playing RE4 recently so femme fatale was also a possibility. I first started to design a universal rig with IK and FK, with the purpose of reusing it for other characters. Soon I begin modeling the character. before long it soon appeared I didn't thought enough about her design as I should've, sense I wasn't happy with how she came out, especially the colors. But I pushed on and begin adding weapons. Creating a list of everything I needed to make. And start the process of modeling and animating. Along the way I also found out why I had issues earlier with stuff disappearing, basically I thought blender saving button didn't work because the deleting function is so unknown and weird I likely did it on accident. When I got everything finished, I also realized that getting them in game was a different issue. Sense the code for weapons was a mess and never was designed for graphics. So I also had to tear it out and redesign it, from scratch. Creating a function's for shooting, akimbo and melee(which still hasn't been implemented yet) Soon I decided to spend a day adding graphics to the venting machines, health and weapon store(which is fairly basic and needs to be redone later) With the new gun models, I was also able to make them Hang and spin them for drops

After I got those done, I decided to work on the first enemy you see. The zombies, or zombie sense there's only one for now

First design was fairly basic, but later on I redesigned it to fit more with the story of them being stitched together from other parts

When I got the animations in and worked on the part where bits and pieces come off. I realized I also need to work on blood splatters. My plan was to have them be part of the texture of level. so I had to do uv maps and lots of complicated shit for about a week

After I got the blood for the walls and created a fairly simple but good blood SFX and shader, I had to redesign the game health class. Sense it was long and didn't account for the type of death's enemies will have, and many...many other issues. I gutted the hole thing and begin organizing again. Separating each Enemy state into their own class, while also spacing out and categorizing the variables. I also work several new thing's into the enemy health, such as different graphic states for the zombie when it takes damage to the body. After I got the zombie working, I moved on to the other enemy which also appears in the tutorial. The shotgun enemy, so I Recreated the animations and added the Gun guy back in. And making it so you can knock him to the ground with his shield. There are still issues but for the most part it's workable

In here I use a shotgun weapon to blow a big hole in zombie stomach. I'm writing this on the 4th of july, I just finished coding this in. I can hear the fireworks and the smell of gunpowder is in the air. As I lay on the grass and watch the light's with a coke in hand, I feel a great sense of accomplishment. Have a good day people

[marshmalleaux-queen]

I haven't played Awakening in a few years, so forgive me if I misremember something, but I still have the strong (unpopular? I don't actually know) opinion that Emmeryn should have stayed dead.

I like Emmeryn. I love altruistic, kind, but strong characters. I like how connected she is with her siblings, and I still think she's a good unit to use in terms of combat. But I hate the implications that come with her paralogue.

Emmeryn being alive after all makes the events of chapter 9 really lose their impact. Her sacrifice was supposed to be a statement to show the consequences of war and senseless violence. She did it to protect Chrom from having to choose between the lives of thousands and the life of his sister. Her death was supposed to mean something. Having her turn out to be alive later just makes the whole thing seem pointless. She could have just as easily faked her own death and gone into hiding or something, and the result would have been the same…probably.

The part that bothers me the most is the state you find her in. She's alive, but barely remembers a thing and clearly struggles to function, even the village elder says that she speaks with the words of a child… but she's somehow fully capable of fighting? Bits of her personality still remain - she's still kind and tries to console people - but she doesn't really get enough dialogue in this state to show any sort of real recovery, so at this point it just feels like Chrom and Lissa are just taking care of an adult child. How hard must that be for them? Watching their sister kill herself would be traumatizing enough, imagine then finding her alive only to constantly see her in this terribly regressive state. She looks like their sister and sounds like their sister, and small pieces of her still show, but it's not really her anymore. It's this broken shell of their sister who unfortunately doesn't seem to get any better after she comes home. Even Chrom himself says in her recruitment paralogue that "it's not enough for her to be alive like...this." So if anything, it would likely be easier on Chrom and Lissa emotionally and mentally if Emmeryn was just…gone entirely. Which, sure, I guess that makes for some interesting drama and all, but it's just so unsatisfying and sad. It almost feels wrong to use her in battles.

Again, I really like Emmeryn. I just think this was a really bad way to justify having her be playable. I'd love to see fan works where she ends up recovering, or at least something that addresses the problems with this.

[genshinarchives]

Ayaka and Xingqiu's older brother's is not even out yet and now im already simping for them, also I raise you these: Imagine getting courted by 2 hot oniisan in tevyat 😳

Ion think Xingqiu's gēgē will be playable, that's how much hope I have (does he even have a Vision-) 😭 Buuut since Mihoyo will be releasing more male characters to make the men to women ratio almost equal from now on, maybe he will eventually be playable? IN ANY CASE THERE WILL BE MORE HOT MEN, SO LET US REJOICE FELLOW HUSBANDO COLLECTORS 🏃‍♀️💨💨

Being courted by two hot onii-san, with one being the head of his clan and the other being the heir of his family 😏

-

(Y/n) had the misfortune of being stranded in Inazuma because of the Sakoku Decree while she was travelling, and was forced to make a living there as a result. She’s not one to give up easily though and was able to land a job at a popular teahouse that Ayato would frequent during his free time. He must have been attracted to (y/n)’s refreshing personality and smile that shines brighter than the sun, and he would make an effort to visit the teahouse she works in whenever he had the time to. (Y/n) was always the one who served his table since the other waitresses were far too intimidated to approach him.

The two developed a close relationship over time, and after the Vision Hunt Decree was abolished, he helped arrange a ship bound for Liyue so she could go home, even though he really wanted her to stay with him in Inazuma. But since she admitted to feeling extremely homesick, he thought that he should do something to prevent her smile from being extinguished.

It was so hard for him to watch her leave. She filled his mundane life with colours, and it felt as if his world was turning monochrome once again as she bid him farewell. At least (y/n) would be bringing a part of him back home with her to Liyue. The blue kimono she wore was splashed with his colours, and the patterns even included the Kamisato family crest. Before she could walk away from him, Ayato caught the end of her sleeve between his fingers and kissed the fabric, causing a faint blush to flit across her cheeks.

“Please consider returning to Inazuma,” he implored, his bright eyes staring straight into hers, “I’d like to see you wearing a white kimono next time.”

When (y/n) finally returned to Liyue, Xingqiu’s brother (let’s call him Xingchen for now) would be the first person to welcome her home. He had been worried sick when he received news of her being stranded in Inazuma, and not a single day would end without him thinking about her. But wait a moment - he noticed that she's wearing a beautiful kimono that seemed to be tailored for noble women. He doesn’t have a problem with her wearing fancy clothes, but he does have a problem when the person who gifted his childhood friend the kimono had clear intentions of courting her. He’s not dumb, he can see the family crest that was sneakily added to the patterns.

Xingchen had intended to make (y/n) his betrothed since he’s going to become the Head of the Feiyun Commerce Guild in the future, and it seems like another man from Inazuma was bold enough to make the first move on her. Well, he’s not about to let her go easily now that he knows someone else of a higher position than him had taken an interest in her. You bet that Xingqiu’s brother will make (y/n) wear new dresses that have his colours instead, so let's forget about the kimono that Ayato gave her, yeah?

[kaibacorpintern]

hi i forgot the ship name but would u write something thats seto and ryou? (platonic or romantic) where they play a ttrpg together or somethin idk

“or somethin idk” give me an inch, i have run a mile. a mile of 4.7k words.

platonic euroshipping. post-canon. ryou applies for a game writer position at kaibacorp and makes it to the final stage. contains: dragons, swords, some very sexy things about solidvision and the virtual world, kaiba covered in blood and having a great time, me the writer having a great time, hopefully you the reader having a great time, and ryou, not covered in blood, having a very, very, very anxious time

tw for some fantasy violence

++++++

Ryou inhaled, taking a deep breath of: the fresh, sweet smell of grass, the coolness of river water, something dry and grey in the wind, slightly rotten - smoke? And sulfur. The grasses were filled with the restless susurrus of the wind, each blade quivering with anticipation. Above him, a hawk tilted in lazy, wide circles, tracking the hidden paths of its prey. He stood on a dusty path halfway up the long slope of a steep hillside, the farmlands of the valley behind him peeled back to reveal the burned, blackened devastation beneath. The village from this distance looked like the charcoal remains of a bonfire, the air still shimmering with heat. 

The sun itself was hot, making him sweat in the thick, coarse silk of his mage’s robe, every purple thread saturated with light and heat. Mopping sweat from his brow, Ryou opened his options menu, the holographic display falling open, in the guise of an illuminated manuscript, and hovering at waist-height in thin air, perfectly tilted for reading. The parchment was old and yellowed, almost velvet to the touch, the edges frayed with age, and he couldn’t resist the urge to smell it, leaning in cautiously to take an experimental whiff. Strong notes of dust, old ink, age; an undertone of knowledge, of the forbidden kind. 

He selected Player Appearance and the page turned, with weight and heft, to reveal another. Kaiba didn’t miss a beat. Ryou had no doubt if he knelt down to drink from the stream that flowed down the slope, folding in clear ribbons past the rocks, the water would run cold over his fingers until they pruned. And the magic effects?

He swallowed. It was not just the sun that was making him sweat.

He’d just changed into something more practical - a short-sleeved green tunic, a pair of white breeches, leather boots that had just a bit of bite to the fit, like the player had to wear them in - when a chime pealed out from six feet away, as though someone had rung an invisible bell. The air tore apart, in odd, geometric anguish, like a broken mirror twisting into itself - 

and there was Kaiba, standing in the knee-high grass in his customary black turtleneck and tight pants, frowning with his arms crossed.

“Hello,” Ryou said. “It’s so nice to see you again. Your technology is... this is amazing. The attention to detail is incredible. The player screen, with the parchment - it even smells like - ”

“What is this? Medieval?” Kaiba said, glancing around at his clothes, the distant village, taking no notice of his praise; Ryou bit his tongue in self-rebuke. As if buttering him up with compliments was going to help. 

“Western Europe. From the mid-11th century to the 12th. The age of knights and chivalry,” he said, deciding that maybe his best strategy was to simply be straightforward.

“I’m familiar with basic history, thank you. How... classic,” Kaiba said, in a tone that screamed disinterest, and Ryou’s heart began to plummet - already starting from behind? No, no, no, he reminded himself, straightening the slouch out of his shoulders. Yuugi had warned him about this. Kaiba was fantastically tough to impress, in general, and the Virtual World was his world, a realm he'd built with sweat and tears, and stolen back with blood. So he hand-picked every writer that wrote for Virtual World games, refusing to squander a single pixel on conventional nonsense and uninspired cliché. 

The last step - before he brought the axe down - was a short, playable demo, as proof of concept, written by the applicant and executed by the Virtual World team.

Ryou had come this far in the application process. Trust that, Yuugi said. And trust yourself.

Kaiba was looking at him, eyebrows arched with expectant curiosity.

“Er,” Ryou said. “Let’s get started, then. You’ll need to change.”

He pulled up the menu, revelling in the hovering parchment once more, and changed Kaiba’s appearance, like - like magic, the lines of Kaiba’s silhouette rippling like a sine wave from the bottom up, his modern-day clothing becoming a knee-length tunic of chainmail under a belted dark blue surcoat. Kaiba held still throughout the entire transformation, in smug admiration of the effect, his arms held out in a ballet dancer’s pose as chainmail draped down his shoulders to his wrists. 

In his right hand appeared, with a sharp, diamond flash of light, a long arming sword, the edge nicked with age and bloodspill. The hilt was black, with a sapphire gleaming in the pommel. A plain shield dropped onto his left forearm. 

He gave the sword an experimental spin, testing the heft with practiced ease, and slid it back into the leather scabbard on his belt.

“A knight, the charred, smoking remains of a village… I’m assuming I’m on a quest to kill a dragon?” he said, pushing back the hood of the chainmail so that it draped off his shoulders, and nodding up the slope to where the grasses tattered into rocky shale. 

“Yes, you can assume that,” Ryou said politely.

On cue, a child no more than twelve years old staggered up the dusty path from the village, her small torso heaving with breath, sweat and tears running in clean streaks down her soot-stained face. 

“Sir Knight,” she choked out. Flashing a look at Ryou that said cheap blow, but unable to deny his own fraternal instinct, Kaiba dropped to one knee and caught her, his hands swallowing her thin, shuddering shoulders. Playing along, at least.

“Calm down,” he said, steadying her. Ryou imagined his anxiety as a small, hard rock, packing in the twist of every fraying nerve, and leaned all his weight onto one foot, grinding the rock into the dirt with his heel. "What is it?”

“They sent me to warn you, about the dragon,” she panted. “They said only the Chosen One can truly defeat the dragon, and bring peace back to the land. Many have tried. All suffered the same terrible fate - a fate worse than death.”

“I see,” Kaiba said. “And who is the Chosen One?”

The girl glanced at Ryou over Kaiba’s shoulder, her eyes glinting with fear. 

“No - no one knows,” she said. “But all the oracles say they’re coming… a knight with a pure and worthy heart. Sir Knight, don’t go. Come back to the village. It’s safe there. What do you gain from this? Our humble lands aren’t worth the danger!”

“I think they are,” Kaiba said, thumbing soot off her face, and frowning as her cheek pixelated, briefly, and resumed a skin-like texture. "Open master commands, user ID 000002510. Initiate master log. Begin recording: skin-to-skin contact glitch reappeared during writer play-test, candidate Bakura, R. Begin patch work immediately. End recording. Disperse to Virtual World team, flag Sawada, project manager. Close master commands. Did you know, one of the most compelling unsolved problems in physics is the lack of a theory that realizes both general relativity and quantum mechanics?”

The girl gave him a wary look, wide-eyed with faint alarm. Ryou sucked in a breath, grinding the anxiety rock down, down, down.

“You - you speak in tongues, Sir Knight," she said. "Are you also an oracle? Has your future-sight failed you? Don’t you see that only death lives on the mountain?”

Kaiba snorted and stood up, turning to Ryou. “A solid response to non-standard player input. Doesn’t ignore modern concepts, but re-contextualizes them in the setting of this world via a framework of prophecy, and redirects the player to the plot.” 

“Um... thank you?” Ryou said. “I wanted this world to feel like it has a future, too, not just a history. I wanted to place it on a timeline, like it - ”

Kaiba’s attention swung back to the girl, still standing there with her eyes darting between them, full of bafflement. 

“Return to the village, girl. Tell them my future-sight never fails me.”

The girl retreated backwards, warily, twisted on her heel, and fled down the path.

"If I go down to the village, what'll I find?" Kaiba said.

"More information about the Chosen One, and an outlaw who tries to recruit you to her band of thieves, with the option to join them for a stealth-based quest.”

"Hm. You have the imagination and the decency to offer me something other than blatant bait, which I don't always bite. The cliché of the Chosen One is boring as hell, it’s both over-done and deterministic, but I think... yes. Yes, I'll bite. Let's go see your dragon."

In the wake of this... compliment?, Ryou could only offer him a small, tentative smile, his heart clenching tight around Yuugi's advice. 

Kaiba started up the path. 

“Er, Kaiba - you might want to check your inventory before you encounter the dragon."

Kaiba’s hand padded around his waist until he found the small satchel that sat on his hip. Another parchment unfurled in the air before him, listing its contents:

Two full healing spells;

Two glamour spells, for changing the guise of a person or object;

Two transformation spells, for changing a person or an object into an animal;

Two scrying spells, for locating people or objects;

Two ignis spells, for commanding fire;

Two aqua spells, for commanding water; and

Two ventus spells, for commanding wind.

Ryou watched him as he read. He'd carved a small, thick groove into the dirt below his foot. Surely, that was enough for Kaiba to get creative?

Kaiba only closed the parchment with a brisk flick of his hand. Then he started up the mountain, Ryou following nervously behind.

***

The mountain path was rougher than Ryou expected, a tightly-coiled spring of switchbacks, leading to the curved lip of a high pass. After several minutes of trudging the dust in silence, he was panting for breath, his feet aching and blistering in their boots, and deeply regretting adding this little detail to the story. Next time, he was just going to put the dragon on a rolling, grassy plain, and he’d make it like an American autumn corn maze, because it still needed to be a challenge, and when the players got to the center they’d find the dragon’s decaying, rotting corpse and realize they’d been stuck inside the maze for five hundred years and everyone they loved was dead, and if they wanted to go back to their own time they’d have to find out how to resurrect the dragon, but only at a terrible cost, a sacrifice of some kind... Not his best off-the-cuff work, but there were usable concepts in there, somewhere. If there was a next time.

Despite being laden down with the chainmail, each tiny link flashing like fish scales in the airy slanting of the afternoon sun, Kaiba seemed unaffected by the demands of the hike, propelling himself forward with long, energetic strides. How?

Ryou thought about asking for a break. Or drinking water from the stream. Or changing his boots for something comfier, but he didn't have anything else in his outfit inventory except the mage robes, and the slippers might be even worse… he stopped, hands on his hips, gathering his breath.

From here the valley sprawled below them, a wide, velvety plain, its edges rising and scalloped by mountains. The village fit in the circle of his thumb and forefinger, a smoking black thumbprint. The team had done a fantastic job: the stream ran down the mountain, flattened into a river, and ran south, lazy and serpentine, a green-blue ribbon cutting through the yellow plains, just like he’d outlined in his initial description of the world….

Wait. 

This was all virtual. 

There was no such thing as air, here, or rivers or sunshine or grasses.

His real, physical body was half-asleep in a Virtual World testing pod on the 17th floor of the Kaiba Corp Tower, and his body here was just a series of algorithms, and if he didn’t want to sweat, he didn’t have to fucking sweat! Thank God!

Up ahead, Kaiba noted the absence of his footfalls and turned around, one hand resting easily on his sword hilt. From his position on the path, he looked down at Ryou from several feet up, which doubled the intimidation of his already formidable bearing.

“I’m fine,” Ryou said. “Just... admiring the view.”

“Are you having your Matrix moment? That’s what my programmers call it,” Kaiba said.

Ryou laughed. “I think so. I was tired but I don't feel it at all, anymore. Like all the fatigue's just melted away and I could run a marathon.”

“Is that something you enjoy?”

“Oh, no. I hate sports.”

Kaiba snorted.

“So, tell me. Why do you want this job?” he said. “At my company? Writing stories with my technology?”

“Er - ” Blindsided by the swerve in topics, Ryou tripped over his thoughts. Surely he must’ve read his application? Maybe he didn’t have the time. Stick to straightforward. “I’m sure you remember my performance in Battle City?”

“Yes, I remember,” Kaiba said, which was honestly more than Ryou expected of him.

“Well, I don’t play much Duel Monsters anymore,” he said, “but I still.. every once in a while, I turn my Duel Disk on and play a few cards, just to see my monsters come out, see them breathe… you know I run a Zombie deck, full of demons and dead things, but SolidVision makes them feel so - so alive. You took these fantasy monsters that exist only in our heads and put them in our world.”

“Virtual World game writers don’t work on SolidVision products,” Kaiba countered.

“Right, I know that. To me, Virtual World and SolidVision are the inverse of each other, or opposites that contain each other, like, like yin and yang - with SolidVision, the unreal enters the real, and becomes real. In the Virtual World, the real - ” Ryou motioned to himself - “enters the unreal, and becomes unreal. We like to put walls between imagination and reality, you know, taxes are real and unicorns aren’t, but with SolidVision and Virtual World, there is no wall. That’s the world I want to write stories for.”

“Hm,” Kaiba said, the corner of his mouth curving up in a smile. “Interesting take.”

And he waited, saying nothing more, until Ryou realized he was waiting for him; and trotted lightly up the path to join him.

*** 

By the time they reached the top of the mountain pass, the air had turned a clear, dusky gold. The mountains cast long, black shadows across the valley, like dark teeth, chewing up the farmlands. The mountain pass was saddle-shaped, one side sloping down into the valley they’d just come from, the other flattening into a smaller, higher bowl, cupping a pale blue-green lake between its rocky palms.

Kaiba scrambled onto the nearest large rock, his head swinging as he scanned the lake valley. Ryou wrapped one arm around his waist and bit his thumb. They had found a deep, penetrating quiet, the kind of wilderness quiet that was devoid of texture of any kind; no bugs or burbling streams or bird song. It was not even like holding your breath, waiting, because that implied a coming moment of exhale, a sigh of relief. This was a perfect stillness. 

And hidden somewhere inside it was a dragon. 

Ryou bit harder, until he remembered the pain was fake and did nothing, and he had to come up with something else to temper his anxiety, which was definitely, definitely real.

Kaiba's gonna flip his shit when he sees your dragon, Yuugi said, from the back of Ryou's mind, Ryou's demo manuscript in hand. In a good way or a bad way? Is it too derivative? What does it matter that he'll flip his shit for my dragon when he flips his shit for ANY dragon? He's a slut for dragons. Oh my god, you can't say that! Yuugi, please, help - nope. You got this. You know what you're doing.

Even the metallic shing of Kaiba’s sword coming out of its sheath seemed small, in an unnatural way, a pointless, petty defiance. 

A shadow fell across the lake valley. 

Both of them looked up -

and an enormous dragon hurtled out of the sky, landing with thundering force on all four clawed feet, flattening trees and boulders beneath its reptilian bulk. Ryou staggered backwards and fell, in an awkward, clumsy crab pose; Kaiba threw his shield over his face and dug in, undaunted.

"HAVE YOU COME TO KILL ME?" the dragon boomed. “MISERABLE WRETCH?”

Kaiba lowered his shield, just enough for his first full look at the dragon. From his spot, crumpled on the ground, Ryou saw, in the shadow below the shield, another slender smile. The dragon’s hide was a dark, luxurious blue-black, mottled like snakeskin but textured with the heavy crags and knobs of crocodiles. It lowered its head on its long, arching neck, gracefully bearing the weight of two massive, curving horns, and stared down at them with fathomless acid-green eyes.

Even Ryou, who had designed it, sat enthralled: every movement it made - the eager flick of its tail, the claws, curling into the dirt, glinting under a layer of blood and grime, the shuddering of its leathery wings as they folded into its long body - hinted at indomitable power. It was a true creature of legend, a titan from the youngest days of the world, demanding both reverence and terror.

“I have!” Kaiba replied blithely, despite announcing it in a ringing voice.

“ONLY THE CHOSEN ONE CAN DEFEAT ME,” the dragon said. “YOU ARE NOT WORTHY OF SUCH A FEAT. I SEE YOUR HEART, BLACKGUARD KNIGHT. I CAN TASTE THE BLOOD YOU’VE SPILLED WITH YOUR SWORD, BRIGHT AND PUNGENT. I CAN HEAR THE CRIES OF ALL THE LIVES YOU’VE LET EBB INTO THE DIRT AT YOUR FEET!”

“I’m here to avenge the village!” Kaiba shouted. 

“YOU COME UP HERE TO DEFEND SOME PATHETIC SCRAPS OF BRICK AND WOOD, THINKING YOU CAN KILL ME, AND CALL THAT HONOR? REDEMPTION? YOU CALL THAT COURAGE? ITS TRUE NAME IS VANITY! EMPTY AND FALSE! IT WILL STRIKE YOU DOWN BEFORE I DO!” the dragon boomed again. “LEAVE. I WAS ONCE NAIVE AND VAIN LIKE YOU. COME BACK WHEN YOU ARE MORE THAN A MERE WORM, OR ELSE SUFFER MY FATE!”

Ryou had clambered to his feet and bolted for the safety of a low ridge, which gave him a perfect view of Kaiba, head held high and proud as he gazed unflinching at the dragon, several hundred times his size. He’d written those words in his notebook on the metro, leaning his head against the cool midnight glass, pausing every other line to ferret out another piece of sour candy from his bag. Then he’d missed his stop. That trundling, light-washed world of a train car seemed impossibly distant now - a rapidly fading dream, to be remembered only in flashes and silence. To hear the words come out of the smoking jaws of this dragon, each syllable flowing in a delicious, indulgent baritone from its shining teeth, filled him with a breathless exhilaration, his heart hammering in his throat - this was real!

“Only one of us is suffering fate today!” Kaiba shouted back, a laugh in his voice, and then threw a glance at Ryou. “‘Suffer my fate?’ Is that a typo?”

“VERY WELL. COME KILL ME! THERE IS PEACE IN DEATH, AND ONLY ONE OF US CAN CLAIM IT!”

“I - watch out!” Ryou yelled, as the dragon lunged forward, its jaws snapping shut on the empty air where Kaiba had been standing half a second before. Kaiba threw himself out of the way, a nimble tuck and roll, and scrabbled across the shale towards higher ground. Behind him, the dragon swung its massive head, nostrils red and flaring, mouth curled up in a savage draconic grin, glinting with the promise of violence. 

No sooner had Kaiba flung himself behind a scattering of boulders, shield raised, than it unleashed a jet of fire so hot and scorching the boulders glowed red, their rough faces melting in sheets. Ryou felt the heat wash across his face, from several dozen yards away. 

The fire died out. The dragon snorted in satisfaction, horse-like, a loud, wet huff of smoke. The boulders sizzled as they cooled into their new, bizarrely dripping forms.

Kaiba emerged from behind a boulder, sweating and singed, his face streaked with ash and his eyes shining. He tossed the warped, melted wreckage of his shield aside, where it bounced and clattered against the rocks.

“SO YOU STILL LIVE? A MISTAKE. WHAT COMES NEXT WILL HURT WORSE!”

“For you!” Kaiba hurled back, and threw his hand into the air, a gesture Ryou had seen countless times on a duel field - a lightning rod, a summoning. “VENTUS!” 

The wind picked up, in a giddy, howling whirl, bringing with it a cloud of dust that descended gritty and blinding and pale across the valley. Kaiba and the dragon vanished from sight inside it. Mentally Ryou subtracted one spell from Kaiba’s satchel.

“THIS WON’T HELP Y - ” Cut off by a wet chop and an ear-splitting draconic scream, a raw, awful sound, torn out of an unwilling throat. Just below it, a glorious, cascading laugh. “WRETCH! WORM!”

The dust settled, revealing glistening, dark-green blood splattered across the rocks, and a single severed claw, its flesh still twitching. The dragon seethed, its wounded foot curled in agony. Kaiba was clear across the other side of the pass, by the dragon’s tail, grinning open-mouthed as he panted for breath. His chainmail and surcoat dripped with dragon blood; his hair was thick with it. 

“COME GET YOUR PEACE, DRAGON!” he bellowed, and the dragon slung its head around, tail coiling in an ominous whip. 

Again Kaiba lifted his hand, shouted “VENTUS - !”

And a second dust cloud barreled into the valley, as the dragon roared back, “THAT WON’T WORK AGAIN!”

It whipped its tail through the dust cloud, a scythe-like sweep - smacking something hard into the rocks with a thick, fleshy crunch of bone that made Ryou’s insides clench tight with terrified sympathy.

The dragon whirled around, clearing the dust with several storm-gathering wingbeats.

This was not real. This was just pixels, neatly arranged and running in rivers of algorithms - just a clever series of ones and zeroes - and yet Ryou gasped, the dragon laughing, at the sight of Kaiba lying in a crumpled, motionless heap in the rocks. He hadn’t considered Kaiba might actually fail to kill the dragon - all thoughts of jobs and game-writing abandoned - unreality aside, the mind had a way of making it real - what the fuck happened if Kaiba died?

“IS THAT ALL YOU HAVE, WORM?” the dragon said, nudging Kaiba’s limp body with its claws, rolling him over. His head lolled, his body twisted into a horrifying, broken-boned slouch. How on earth was Ryou going to explain this to Yuugi? Hell. “I TOLD YOU, YOU'RE NOT W - ”

Ryou almost didn’t see it - a hawk in a dive, arrow-straight, from the top of the sky, diving through a blinding flash of light several stories up - and out of the light came Kaiba, alive and whole, plummeting towards the dragon’s head, gripping his sword with both hands - plunging it straight through the top of the dragon’s skull. 

He left the sword hilt-deep in dragon flesh as he pitched forward with the force of impact, rolling over the dragon’s brow, flailing to catch himself - on the massive horn. Clinging, victorious, as the great dragon swayed, its green eyes filming, and finally slumped, in agonized slow motion, to the earth, body first, head last, with a thundering, bone-rattling crash. 

It released one last, rattling breath, the trees shuddering in the fetid breeze.

The valley descended into stillness once more. 

Ryou sat down on his low escarpment with a limp thump, burying his face in both hands. This was just a Virtual World, where at one point everything would power down and they’d wake up safe and sound in the squishy, air-conditioned comfort of a pod, and he had, after all, planned on Kaiba killing the dragon, but Kaiba’s sheer nerve seemed beyond that. Yuugi was right. The guy was, maybe, a little nuts. Completely off his rocker.

“Ryou,” Kaiba said, above him, and Ryou lifted his head. Kaiba rested the sword jauntily across his shoulder, the rest of him filthy with dragon blood and human blood and dirt. “I have to say, I enjoyed your dragon. A shame it had to die.”

“Your strategy... You used a glamour spell? On a... rock? To make it look like your dead body,” Ryou said. “And then a transformation spell.”

“Correct. Is that all for your demo?” Kaiba said, cocking an eyebrow, both bloody and disdainful, and Ryou swallowed. “I was hoping for more of a cha - ”

His words stopped hard in his throat, a harsh, hacking sound. His free hand flew to his neck, mouth dropping open in pain and confusion, eyes widening. He coughed - or tried to, achieving nothing more than a thin, ugly retching, his face going white - and Ryou watched, in fascinated horror, as his gamble began to play out. There was nothing he could do to help; he’d written it that way.

The sword clattered to the stones, green blood dripping off the shining edge, as Kaiba staggered sideways, gasping for breath, both hands on his neck - what was the algorithm doing to him? Ryou had only written ‘a suffocating, squirming pain, concentrated in the lungs,’ and resolved to think more carefully about what types of pain he might inflict on the player characters, if the gamble paid off... But how interesting to know even the creator of the Virtual World himself suspended his disbelief - his knowledge of the truth - sometimes, and indulged in pain...

He collapsed to his knees, stretching one hand out, fisting it around Ryou’s collar and dragging him closer - 

“What - ” he choked out, eyes glaring into Ryou’s, in baffled, furious agony - terrified - they rolled backwards, the blue sliding away to white, as he slumped over himself. 

His hand went slack and fell. What life remained slipped away in a low, shaking sigh.

Ryou took him by the shoulders and gently lay him down, passing a hand over his eyes to close them. Dead, but not really.

“Just hold on a moment,” he said. The body had been vacated. The soul - the player - was awakening elsewhere.

He waited a few moments, absorbing the stillness, the detail on the leaves of the pine trees; the way the lake water shimmered in golden flecks with late afternoon light. It was maybe his last few seconds to enjoy the world he’d written, rendered in full splendor by the magic of technology, and he’d banished his anxiety from both his mind and body, to live out its exile in the real world. It didn’t belong here.

The great dragon body began to stir, drowsily, waking up from a deep, deep sleep. The deepest sleep.

Ryou stood up and slid down the escarpment to the dragon, pebbles and dust avalanching around his feet. The stab wound in its skull was knitting back together; the severed claw was crawling back to its slow-bleeding joint. There was an agonized hiss, forced through the dragon’s tightly-clenched teeth, and a vibrating groan, deep in its chest, as it gathered itself out of death.

Its eyes opened, in wary slits - not the bright, acid green, but a stunning, oceanic blue.

“OW. FUCK,” it growled, in Kaiba’s voice, magnified and twice as resonant. “OPEN MASTER COMMANDS, USER ID 000002510. SUSPEND ALL PAIN ALGORITHMS. CLOSE MASTER COMMANDS.”

He rolled upright, flexing his wings with experimental care. He arched his neck, looking down at Ryou.

“YOU TURNED ME INTO A DRAGON.”

“Yes,” Ryou said cautiously.

“NO ONE HAS EVER TURNED ME INTO A DRAGON BEFORE,” Kaiba said. ”SO I WASN’T WORTHY? IS THIS WHAT IT MEANS TO SUFFER THE DRAGON’S FATE? EVERYONE WHO KILLS THE DRAGON BECOMES THE DRAGON, AND ONLY THE CHOSEN ONE BREAKS THE CYCLE. IS THAT HOW IT GOES?”

“That’s how it goes.”

“HOW DO I FIND THE CHOSEN ONE?”

“You choose them,” Ryou said. “You decide what makes them worthy.”

"SO ANYONE CAN BE THE CHOSEN ONE? ANYONE CAN BREAK MY CURSE?"

"That's right."

Kaiba pondered that for a moment, flexing his claws idly in the dirt, the massive slabs of muscle in his shoulders shifting as he tested the strength and fit of his new draconic body. His gaze drifted out over the lower valley, eyes clouding briefly with memories of another story, another game, another man; one who had always seemed real and unreal, all at once, no matter what world he lived in. Ryou had heard it all from Yuugi.

Then Kaiba looked at him and started to laugh, a sound that echoed and rebounded across the small lake valley, the water shivering as each delighted peal of laughter rolled across. Ryou blushed as it buffeted him from all sides.

“IS THAT SO,” Kaiba said, with dry relish. “YOU’RE HIRED.”

[wygolvillage]

been thinking about how i would make a remake/reimagining of simons quest. long post ahead. might be a little stupid since im no game designer or writer or anything lol

random gameplay stuff

it would be metroidvania style, but not all in the castle. imagine it like ooe but the map is interconnected.

i would keep the day/night cycle but it would be less obnoxious of course... probably there would be a little clock on the HUD showing what time it is and how close you are to nightfall. villagers would go inside during the night, but you can still enter churches. churches are your most reliable healing method since save rooms would be pretty sparse in the rest of the world map, and saving at the churches also allows you to skip straight to morning or nightfall if you so desire. being stuck in the middle of the woods during night can be disastrous if the player is ill-prepared since monsters grow stronger then.

there would still be puzzles to figure out and complete, and it would still be a bit cryptic (not to the degree of the original of course), but there is a supporting character i would put in who you can ask for hints at any time, and hers are a lot more straightforward (more on her later). important items are gained through quests rather than bought with hearts, but drop rates would be VERY forgiving since it’s required. like, a villager promises to give you the red crystal if you can get him some fish meat from a merman, which would have about a 40% drop rate... i kind of wanted to preserve the sense of fighting monsters to forage for materials the original has without making the game a total grindfest :P

additionally, materials dropped from monsters can be used to craft food items after simon teams up with the aforementioned supporting character. like i said before, save rooms wouldn’t be super common so it would be implemented as a way to heal yourself when you’re away from town.

the bosses would be decently difficult to compensate with there being very few of them- a true challenge, but they can be beaten with both playable characters if the player is skilled enough

the plot would be expanded upon as well so lemme give a little summary

it begins in simons house where he wakes up having trouble breathing. he’s been struggling with some physical illness ever since battling dracula years prior, especially a nasty bite on his arm he sustained during the fight, and that arm has been turning a pretty nasty shade of grey, like its wasting away. he goes outside to a graveyard near a local church to try and get some fresh air, but it is largely unhelpful. suddenly, he spots an old woman standing at one of the graves. he looks over at him and says mysteriously “ah... must be a horrible night for a curse.” simon is like “what do you mean?!” the old woman tells him to “resurrect him and destroy what remains, or nothing will remain of you”. she then disappears into thin air, implying she’s a ghost or something equally spooky. simon is like “destroy what remains... dracula’s remains?!”

the game starts properly in the graveyard and surrounding forest as simon heads in a fairly straight path towards the town of jova, where he meets a woman a few years younger than him named agnes. agnes’ parents were killed by dracula’s forces when he was resurrected back then, and she admires simon greatly for defeating the dark lord (shes also implied to be a descendant of grant danasty!). she decides to accompany him on his quest after hearing about his curse. he asks the head priest of the town if he knows about dracula’s remains, and the priest tells him that he heard of some of dracula’s followers placing some of dracula’s body parts in their strongholds to worship, and points him to the direction of the first stronghold and hands him a stake. he also warns them that bringing all of his remains together can resurrect the dark lord and it holds a remarkable corrupting power.

simon and agnes then become a character swapping duo (just like portrait of ruin hehehe). agnes is low on defense but can deal plenty of damage at a close range, and her signature weapon is the golden knife. she’s fast as well, whereas simon is more of a slow, defensive character who is best at keeping distance between himself and the enemy. agnes is smart, but impulsive and stubborn, and doesn’t like being told that she’s wrong. simon is a stoic but kind individual who tends to keep to himself. their personalities occasionally cause conflict between them during the adventure, but they eventually grow to become really good friends.

eventually they reach berkeley mansion, the first of the strongholds, and its aesthetic is very much “dark evil church”. there are the usual skeletons and bats and stuff, but some of the dracula followers are regular enemies as well. the first boss is a human who has dedicated his life to following dracula (specifically to contrast against the priest dude who gave simon the stake and directions) who uses magic attacks and stuff. beating him earns simon dracula’s rib, which functions suprisingly well as a shield (which becomes important later).

the adventure continues on like this, going from town to mansion to town, with simons curse becoming more and more hindering to him (from a story perspective not a gameplay one. simon wont become worse to play as because that would be lame as hell). they go to the other mansions, with the bosses being carmilla (guarding the nail of vlad, in a mansion thats very much a vampires lair), olrox (guarding the eyeball, in a massive dining hall themed mansion) death (guarding vlads ring in a Spooky Clockwork Skeleton Mansion with slogras and gaibons and all the usual death stuff), and in the final mansion... there is no boss. just as simon is about to grab the heart, agnes stops him.

Agnes: You told me you were going to destroy the remains, weren’t you?

Simon: Of... Of course, Agnes. Why do you ask?

Agnes: Why haven’t you?

Simon: ...

Agnes: We have almost all of them. You remember what the priest said, right? That bringing them together can resurrect Dracula.

Simon: Well... I haven’t exactly been truthful, Agnes. The old woman who sent me on this quest didn’t tell me just to destroy his remains...

Agnes: So you’ve been intending to resurrect the Dark Lord this whole time? For your own selfish gain?

Simon: This curse will kill me if I don’t.

Agnes: ...So it’s true, then. You’re willing to risk the lives of thousands just to save your own skin. Lives like my parents’... Lives like mine.

Simon: I...

Agnes: There’s no need to explain yourself, oh great hero, Simon Belmont. (Scoffs) If you care more for yourself than anyone else, strike me down now!

surprise! simon has to fight against his best friend! tbh i would be pissed at him too lmao. and it’s a tough fight, as agnes can deal a ton of damage and is hard to dodge. killing her like any other boss will give you the bad ending, where simon realizes she was right and lets himself succumb to the curse out of guilt for her death. the way to the good ending is to use dracula’s rib as a shield (i told you it would be important!) or dodge/survive her attacks until she tires out (the shield is the best method though), and realizes simon doesn’t want to hurt her. they have a touching emotional moment and simon assures her that he beat dracula before and can do it again, but he will need her help. agnes nods, and they head to the ruins of dracula’s old castle, which is totally empty. there’s no music, while the rest of the game has been filled with catchy tunes, here there’s only ambient noise.

they reach the throne room and place drac’s remains on a pedestal, where they begin to glow with dark energy. blood is dripping down the walls and stuff, and the count is returning to the mortal plane as thunder booms in the background. simon begins to doubt himself. if he loses now, the world will be plunged into darkness, and it will all be his fault. but... agnes has his back, despite everything. they fight dracula together, and though it’s tough with simon’s weakened body, they eventually prevail, as simon drives the stake into his heart, the curse finally lifted.

the game ends with agnes and simon returning to jova. agnes admits that she’s still upset with simon for lying to her, but she would be even more upset if he died slowly because of her. simon sighs, stating that there was no easy solution to the situation they were in, and asks for forgiveness for breaking her trust and risking so much for his own desires. agnes says maybe one day she will forgive him completely, and she still considers him a friend, but she needs some time to herself. simon nods, and they go their separate ways.

SO YEAH idk if this is even good but i hope u at least enjoyed reading it. maybe ill make designs for this version of simon, and for agnes too ofc :D

...yeah, not exactly the happiest ending, but i always found it kind of weird that simon was so willing to resurrect the count to save himself from the curse, so that’s the main conflict i decided to add to the story. its not the sort of conflict that can be easily resolved. theres no easy answer... agnes was right about simon risking other peoples lives being wrong, but she was also wrong to insist that he just give up and let the curse kill him instead. its Complicated idk... Castlevania II: Simon’s Trolley Problem

edit: actually i decided there would be two "true endings" after using the shield in the agnes fight. the one i described, and a second one where they decide against resurrecting dracula and simon lives out the short rest of his days with agnes until he dies of the curse. both endings are considered equally canon and valid

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Hol Horse

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

So last year I thought it was a good idea to try and review all of the enemy Stand users in Stardust Crusaders in a totally random order. The results were… mixed. Some of them I think came out okay, but others? Not so much. One of them was just an entire backhanded attack against some guy who decided to say “No one likes your analyses” because I think ProJared was a creep. It was, quite frankly, a mess, and I never bothered to revisit it and never thought I would, even though I still hadn’t covered the glorious, wonderful human being who is Hol Horse.

Well, now, after playing Heritage for the Future and All-Star Battle as well as just becoming a bit more knowledgeable on JJBA, I’ve decided to not only give Hol Horse his dues, but also at least briefly go back over or cover the other Stand users and give them a rating or an updated rating, as the case may be. So buckle in, this is gonna be a long one, and it’s all gonna start with everyone’s favorite incompetent henchman.

Hol Horse is probably one of the most amazing characters Araki has ever created. Hol Horse is in possession of a powerful Stand, The Emperor, which is literally a magical gun that fires bullets he can control the trajectory of. By all accounts, Hol Horse should be the single most dangerous foe that the Crusaders face, more than even Vanilla Ice. This guy should be able to shoot them all dead without a second thought! There’s just one tiny little caveat:

Hol Horse is a fucking moron.

This man is cowardly, incompetent, and just the punching bag of cruel misfortune as all his plans constantly go awry and he is constantly knocked on his ass. And yet, Hol Horse is still the most beloved enemy Stand User of Stardust Crusaders, and it’s not hard to see why. Because despite all of his bumbling, Hol Horse just oozes a sort of cool you just don’t see every day.

(For best results, listen to this the whole time while reading the following).

Motivation/Goals: Hol Horse is one of the few henchmen of DIO who is motivated purely by his own greed… at least, at first. Eventually he has his ass handed to him one too many times, and he decides to try and assassinate DIO. This goes about as well as you’d expect, and Hol Horse – not just part of it, the ENTIRE Horse – is so scared out of his mind that he decides, yep, loyalty to DIO is the way to go! It doesn’t work out, but hey, he tried, right?

Performance: Imami Williams gives Hol Horse that raspy, American charm he needs in the anime adaptation. With his voice and the animation combined, we get to see our favorite smarmy sharpshooter who can’t shoot for shit shoot his shot and miss every time, and it is simply glorious.

Final Fate: Hol Horse kidnaps Boingo and forces him to work with him to finally get his revenge! With the prophetic skills of Thoth and the raw damage that can be done with Emperor, there’s no way they could lose! And yet, as is always the case with Thoth, things go horrendously awry and Hol Horse, despite having the ability to control the trajectory of his bullets, ends up shooting himself and knocking him out of part 3 for good.

Best Scene: Really, just the entirety of the episodes where he teams up with Boingo, especially when he tries holding up Polnareff. Considering what comes after and what came before it, it’s just the dose of lighthearted fun needed before you watch all of your favorite characters get brutally murdered by DIO and Vanilla Ice,. 

Best Quote: There is only one line it could be, and it’s Hol Horse’s response to Thoth’s suggestion he kick a woman in the neck: “Listen, Boingo... I am the nicest man in the world. I have girlfriends everywhere. I might lie to a woman, but I'll never hit them! It doesn't matter how ugly they are! Because I respect women!”

That’s right, everyone. Hol Horse drinks Respect Women Juice.

Final Thoughts & Score: Hol Horse is simply astounding. The character is such a colossal screwup that he shouldn’t be as good as he is… yet he is. The dude is gifted with the most incredible power imaginable, and yet somehow he is never able to do a goddamn thing with that power! You control where the bullets go, dude! How can you not hit anything?! It’s interesting how his cowardice and lack of motivation makes him a perfect representation of the inverted Emperor tarot card, but hey, tarot motifs are par for the course with the Stand users.

But there’s something charming to how pathetic Hol Horse is. He’s always plying second banana, he’s a dirty coward who turns tail and runs when things aren’t looking good for him, he never wins a single battle, he didn’t even kill the one guy it seemed like he killed… but throughout it all he still has this sort of smarmy charisma to him that makes him impossible to hate. It’s no wonder this guy has girls all over the world, because he is a world-class charmer. There’s also how Hol Horse is just a character who really, really lives by his own personal philosophy – that is to say, he always likes to be #2, never going into a fight without backup. It’s kind of refreshing to see him always stick by this, even to his own detriment; it’s hard to hate a man who’s principled to that degree. And, of course, this man respects women. Good on him.

It helps that Hol Horse’s inexplicable popularity has led to him getting his time to shine in outside media. Heritage for the Future has two versions of him, his regular form and one that partners him with Boingo, and in skilled hands his Emperor finally gets to live up to its deadly potential. And he’s no slouch in his return appearance in All-Star Battle, and what’s more impressive is in that game he is part of the base roster while Joseph and Iggy, two of the main heroes, are relegated to DLC! You heard me right: the bumbling cowboy who did not win a single fight or even come close to it and spent a lot of time shooting himself managed to beat out out two iconic heroes from the same part onto the roster! Horsey Man must be doing something right.

As this video shows, Hol Horse is one of the most influential characters in the JJBA franchise, having helped to shape the franchise going forward and helped to inspire the traits that made beloved characters like Guido Mista, Gyro Zeppeli, and Yoshikage Kira as legendary as they are. Hell, Hol Horse is just so awesome he almost got to be a protagonist, but Araki decided that Horsey was too similar to my favorite big-titty Frenchman, Polnareff. This means Hol Horse never got his time to shine as a hero, and so stayed a villain til the end… but hey, can he really be that sad if he gets a 10/10 on Psycho Analysis?

Actually, maybe he wouldn’t like that. He likes to play second fiddle to others, after all. But I guess that’s just the curse with these JoJo villains who want to not stand out; they always end up being the best and most memorable characters.

Anyway, now that we’ve got the best of the best out of the way, it’s time for...

Psycho Analysis: DIO’s Other Henchmen

I’m just gonna give my brief thoughts on these guys. Most of them are pretty one-note oneshots, but there are a few who rise above that and manage to be something else entirely. These guys were a learning experience for Araki, and his enemy Stand users of the week definitely improved with later parts, with Vento Aureo really cranking it up to 11. 

But for now, we’re stuck with these guys.

Gray Fly: I actually stand by my opinion from my original review of him; he’s nothing incredibly memorable, but he’s a solid start to the adventure and he is directly responsible for diverting the journey onto the course it ended up going on. Without him, things would have likely played out far differently. A 5/10 is still a good score for him.

Fake Captain Tenille: He actually gets bumped down to a 2/10, due to my changes in how things are scored. He’s not amusing enough to be in the “So bad it’s good” category of the other 3s, he’s just really lame and forgettable, and he still somehow manages to lose when he has the advantage. What a dweeb.

Forever: If you think the monkey boat fight is dropping in score, you’re mistaken. Forever remains at an 8/10 for being such a delightfully weird curveball that helps set the tone for the franchise to follow.

Devo: One of the weirder playable character choices from Heritage for the Future, and certainly not one I like too much; he’s also a random event that is pretty useful in All-Star Battle’s online campaign, so that’s a good mark for him. If nothing else, he gave a good showing of Polnareff’s skills when under pressure, so… yeah. I think a 5/10 is good enough.

Rubber Soul: This review I regret because I was backhandedly responding to that guy who weirdly decided to bring up my distaste for ProJared in a review of Arabia Fats and Kenny G. I do mostly stand by what I said; Rubber Soul is one of the more amusing minor foes, if only because of his ridiculous performance as Kakyoin. Still, it really sucks he was just a clone character in Heritage for the Future… put he gets points for  having the iconic cherry-licking as a taunt. 6/10 is where he remains.

J. Geil: Again, my opinion hasn’t changed: J. Geil is a mountain of wasted potential, but at the very least he makes for a good antagonist for his brief appearance and hey, he’s the one who helped bring us the beautiful hunk of man that is Hol Horse, so I’d feel bad giving him less than a 7/10.

Nena: I honestly think Nena is one of the most boring Stand users of the part, which is sad because her episode gives Joseph the spotlight. She’s just really gross and uninteresting, and you’ll likely forget her after her episode is over. 2/10.

ZZ: ZZ is not particularly great, and his design is just there to be a joke, but it’s hard to totally hate a guy who manages to roll references to Christine, Duel, and the album cover for Eliminator by his namesake into one. I think he’s more of a 4/10, but probably on the higher end there. He’s not great, but he has enough going for him to keep me from hating him.

Enya: So if I thought that J. Geil was a waste of potential, I feel this even more so for his mother Enya. Despite being hyped up as this big, intimidating right-hand woman to DIO early on, she gets one appearance where her Stand is defeated by Star Platinum pulling a power out his ass and then is unceremoniously killed by Steely Dan of all people. I will give her this: her interactions with Polnareff are absolutely hilarious. But when all you have going for is some jokes, don’t be surprised when you end up with a 6/10, which you’re pretty much only getting because even despite the mountains of wasted potential you’re really not that bad.

She do be looking hot in the OVA tho.

Steely Dan: My opinion is unchanged; he’s a solid 7/10 oneshot douchebag. Nothing more, nothing less. His level in the PS1 game seriously blows, though.

Arabia Fats: I was too hard on this guy. While I meant everything I said, and his episode is boring filler, does it really make him a bottom of the barrel all-time worst villain? No. It just makes him a crappy joke character. 2/10.

Mannish Boy: I regret not getting to this guy last time, because aside from Forever he’s probably one of the most insane Stand user of the part, seeing as he is an infant. Like, he’s just an evil baby who can kill people in their dreams. And he gets defeated by being force fed his own crap. Much like Forever, it’s fun to speculate where exactly DIO found this guy; did he just go to a nursery and start jabbing babies with the Stand arrow? Did he meet this guy at a Cairo night club? What exactly is Mannish Boy’s origin? He’s just so utterly and hilariously inexplicable. He’s definitely a 7/10; he doesn’t quite have the shock factor that Forever did before him, but let’s not pretend an evil talking baby Stand user isn’t one hell of a weird twist.

Cameo: This guy really lives up to his name; his Stand is the one that gets the most screentime, with the actual Stand user being relegated to a – you guessed it – cameo appearance at the end of the fight. Thankfully, his Stand is an enjoyable take on jerkass genies and gives a pretty sad and disturbing episode that not only features my man Polnareff, but also marks the point where Avdol returns and brings “Hell 2 U!” I think he deserves at least a 7/10, even if this is mainly for Judgment. Still, a Stand is a representation of the user’s soul, so I think it works out.

Here’s the Stand:

And here’s the man behind it:

Midler: Midler is one of the single most interesting characters from the pre-Egypt half of Stardust Crusaders, and is the point where Stand users really started to get interesting. Her Stand, High Priestess, has a really funky and unique design, and her battle serves as the final roadblock before the Crusaders arrive in Egypt. Despite never appearing onscreen, with only her unconscious body being shown at the end of the fight in a way that obscures her, she got to appear in Heritage for the Future with an awesome sexy belly dancer design and a badass moveset that makes her a really fun character to play as. Taking everything into account, I think she just barely scrapes into the bottom of the 8/10 pool, though really this is mainly for her playable appearance.

N’Doul: My opinions really haven’t changed on him. He’s still an 8/10.

Oingo & Boingo: These guys are, in a word, hilarious. In between the grueling, brutal fight with N’Doul and the later fights in the part, these guys bring some much needed levity to the proceedings. Oingo gets an entire episode where he just completely bumbles about as he attempts to impersonate Jotaro to assassinate the Crusaders, failing at every turn and only managing to blow himself up in the end. Boingo fares a little better, eventually getting roped in to Hol Horse’s scheme to get some revenge, which leads to one of the funniest episodes of the entire series as Hol Horse and Oingo hold up Polnareff. I think they collectively get an 8/10 for being two of the funniest Stand users in the part. They even get their own unique end credits in the anime (with Hol Horse joining in on the fun when he teams up with Boingo)!

Anubis: Again, my opinion is unchanged, though I must say him having technically three playable appearances in Heritage for the Future does make me have at least a little more fondness for him. Black Polnareff, Chaka, and Khan are all amusing characters to play as and all have some awesome theme music. Introducing the concept of Stands being able to exist independently of their Original user is pretty neat, as well as the idea of a Stand that can switch users like it does. 7/10 is still what I’d give it, but I think that it’s pretty telling that this is probably the “weakest” character in the Egypt arcs in terms of being a villain, and yet he’s still pretty cool.

Mariah: Completely unchanged. She still deserves an 8/10, because her episode is hilarious, her playable appearance in Heritage for the Future is a blast, and she’s just really frikkin’ hot. I’m not gonna lie, she’s probably my second favorite enemy Stand user out of the Egyptian ones. I may or may not want her to step on me.

Alessi: I’m going to be honest here: Alessi is my favorite of the Egyptian Stand users. He’s an ax crazy coward with pedophile undertones who is just an utterly demented and sick individual with a seriously intriguing Stand that de-ages its victims. It’s a damn shame he never crossed paths with Joseph and de-aged him, but when he’s just such a hilarious and hateable lunatic with an incredibly fun playable appearance in Heritage for the Future (complete with awesomely creepy theme music!) it’s hard for me to give Alessi anything less than a 9/10. Attaboy!

Daniel J. D’Arby: My opinion is honestly unchanged, but I think I’d bump him down to an 8/10.

Pet Shop: Again, unchanged really. It’s hard to give a character as busted as he is in Heritage for the Future anything less than a 9/10 any way you slice it.

Telence T. D’Arby: Opinion unchanged, 8/10. I don’t have much else to say here, besides Xander Mobus rocks.

Kenny G: See Arabia Fats above. I got irrationally mad over a dumb joke character. He’s not going above a 2/10, but he’s not worth really getting mad about.

Vanilla Ice: I still think he’s the only enemy Stand user besides Hol Horse who deserves his 10/10. My opinion of him remains unchanged, but I would like to say he’s easily one of my favorite characters to play as in All-Star Battle.

Nukesaku: Ok, he’s not an enemy Stand user, he’s just some weird vampire… zombie… thing. Still, I feel he’s at least worth briefly mentioning, if only because he’s probably the only easily-defeated joke villain Araki did from the first three parts who is particularly memorable. Wired Beck and Doobie are really not all that memorable, but Nukesaku at least elicits a few chuckles – he even gets cameos in Heritage for the Future as well as getting to be a stage hazard in All-Star Battle. For what he is, I think he deserves a 5/10.

And with all these enemies taken care of, that just leaves one more Stand user to talk about.. one whose Psycho Analysis has been sitting in my drafts for a year now...

[amostheartman]

Be honest with me. (us? The TP/BotW community? idk.) What do you think of the BotW2 trailer, and do you think there's even a sliver of potential for the Twili to return? I've been dying to know your answer, Amos. By the way, thanks again for the Midlink art piece. Doing a smart here by being off anon for this ask lol.

My My, Quite the question 

*TP Link

First off I’m pretty sure Twilight Princess Link is done as far as canon in-game appearances go. Wolf Link was a pretty dope add-in for Breath of the wild and could be added in for BOW2, but that’s really all were gonna get I’m afraid. :/

well sorta at least.

I mean we got TONES of Amibo and in-game TP stuff like the Twilight tunic, TP Epona (the only Epona in this game mind you), TP Zelda’s Light bow, TP Ganondorf’s Sword, Midna and Zant’s helmet, mention of Prince Rails on the path to Zoras Domain, the somewhat homage to the Bridge of Eldon and of course the famous side quest “A Fragmented Monument” being an obvious nod to the Mirror of twilight.

but even with all this TP stuff It’s no indication that Nintendo has any plans to bring TP Link into the mix.

...

That said... Between you and me, Nintendo just won’t let go of Twilight princess Link.

TP Link got the hi-rez treatment a few years ago for promotional stuff, and as much as I love it and want posters of the full version there really isn’t a reason for Nintendo to be using him to promote things.

They could have use any other Link, but they picked him specifically.

 I mean, Skyward Sword Link was technically the latest in the usual green tunic design(although it was basically a simplified TP tunic), Ocarina of Time and Toon Link are the “fan favorites”, and Breath of the wild Link is the brand spanking new one that broke records.   

Yet, TP Link is still getting promoted.

Whats even more interesting is the the rest of the Nintendo Tokyo banner.

Breath of the Wild Link and Zelda are both there, but so is TP Link and Ganondorf!

 And get this, TP Link is the one in the smaller more common banner!

I love it, but I can’t explain it!

*This is from the 2019 Nintendo Tokyo game show btw*

So as much I have my doubts about TP Link showing up in BOTW2 or ever having a real return of any kind Nintendo sure isn’t making it easy for me to keep believing that.

 Almost like they're toying with me. :(

Is TP Link gonna show up in Breath of the wild 2? probably not. at most heel be a non-cannon amibo wolf companion like in the first one.

Is there gonna a new game with TP Link in it? doubt it.

Is there gonna be a port of the HD Version of Twilight princess to the switch? Could be... but highly unlikely.

Will they do a complete remake of Twilight Princess with these dope re-rendered models with a gameplay style like the Wii U tech Demo of the spider boss!!??? GOD I WISH BUT I KNOW IT WILL NEVER HAPPEN!!!!!  ( ͡ಥ ͜ʖ ͡ಥ)

But logically it’s probably that TP Link is the best looking and most Marketable out of the Link bunch.  :/

Anyway, you were asking about Breath of the wild 2 right. lol

*BOTW2

the trailer is interesting... like really REALLY interesting.

Its looks waaaaay darker and shaping up to be the Zelda story we never knew we wanted.

I mean com’on whats not to love about dark Zelda stories!? Zelda is always at it’s best when its pushing the edge a bit.

I even did my own break down of it.

  I think I posted it here already but I can’t remember so here it is anyway.

This is pretty much what I gathered from the trailer.

Dark, mysterious, somewhat hopeless and tragic, our heros are in over their heads, everything is on the line, I love it!

Sadly, I really don’t wanna think about it too much because I got my hopes up last time and Nintendo has a bad habit of playing it safe when they should go all out. :/

Straight Up though we’re gonna be seeing Zelda in a much more involved role so that much seems apparent. to what degree? I have no idea.

She might be playable as a character you switch off to for puzzle solving or Goddess powers since shes using the sheikah slate.

All I ask it that she not be an exclusive cutseen character. I wanna see my girl doing things in game.

that said, I know people want Zelda to be the the main playable character but she really isn’t suited to fill Links role as the adventurous warrior type. 

She’s really more of a sage type character on top of being a book worm and not really fit for direct combat.

Ironically enough playing as Zelda would change things so much it wouldn’t be a Zelda game. lol

Or heck, she just might be the playable character its hard to tell honestly.

but what about Link?

Link on the other hand (no pun intend) is still gonna be the player character I think.

I imagine the thing going on with his arm is going to replace the sheikah slate’s function with some added combat stuff.

Kinda like Nero’s arm from DMC or the Shinobi prosthetic from Sekiro.

It would be pretty cool to see Links combat and exploration open up because of a nifty arm. :)

or it could be killing him and we gotta find a way to cure him so he can defeat Ganondorf. (that would be rad!!!)

All-n-all that just depends on what the arm is doing and waht the game wants to be like.

I hope and pray for a combat system like in Twilight Princess and a return to the Temple / Dungeons puzzle and bosses system from the other 3D Zelda’s with a breath of the wild spin.

Golly, just picture exploring a Dungeon with Zelda doing logic puzzles and switching off to Link to handle the combat segments doing a back and forth between the 2 leading up to a boss fight they have to work together to defeat. 

THAT WOULD BE SO RAD!!!!!

Man this is getting long.

 I’ll just say that I have high hopes for BOW2, but going in with zero expositions is always the the way to go.

I trust Nintendo took the feed back from the first game and is adjusting t something that will hopefully satisfy the fans.

I apologize if this was all over the place, I had to do work in between.

I had others ask me slimier questions if you’re that curios and want a fresher take on my thought for BOTW2.

* thoughts about that BotW sequel trailer

* how much Hyrule has changed 

thanks for the question, hope I answered it properly! lol

-Amos :)

[fenrirlives]

So after getting some feedback here and from some gacha folks on discord, the overall picture I’m seeing here is that people had a much larger problem with the way Minase wrote a lot of the servants and their interactions than the concept of Agartha in general. I also see alot of people base their dislike on the JP version, which I can’t really comment on because I don’t speak the language and I’m not a fan of basing opinions on possibly biased translations for or against the subject matter

tl;dr, I liked it a good deal! Hated the repetitive dialogue, but the blended fictional worlds, Megalos, and a bunch of other things were really to my liking! I view it as a cool singularity with a sloppy ending and sloppier dialogue. Not as good as Shinjuku, but leagues better than Septem, London, or Orleans on my chart.

also as far as villain servants go, Columbus goes in my “What a douche, I love em!” shelf of fame right next to Mebd and Teach. I mean look at this dude!

Truly Rider is best servant class in all respects! (also his artist is great go follow!)

Addressing the elephant in the room first, I was really confused at the whole misogyny complaints. I saw a few people who found the tyrants to be sexist in concept, while others took more issue with Fergus’ interaction with Scheherazade, or how Fergus as a character was treated overall. 

I don’t imagine there are THAT many people who see the kingdoms as the problem, as they never came off as a commentary on gender to begin with, and context shows that they wouldn’t even work as commentary since all aspects of them are either A) fabricated in regards to the non servants, or B) altered by Scheherazade’s Noble Phantasm in regards to actual servants. If anyone saw them as the writer’s take on gender roles, I think it’s unintended.

People taking umbrage with Fergus and Sche, I can understand a little more, as alot of that is a symptom of the repetitive dialogue that plagues this whole singularity. Fergus’ message near the end is one that I agree with (living in constant fear of death isn’t living at all, and using your trauma as an excuse to generalize or hurt other people is unacceptable), and I was a big fan of how the end of his quest to become a good king is realizing he’s just not meant to be one.

 The thing is, character arcs are carried by their dialogue, and having Fergy either repeat the same crap about training/not hitting women or break the pace of a scene to internally monologue about the philosophy of a kingdom really did no favors. I also wished that his revelation about there being strong women was something someone else told him instead of something he just randomly remembers when the time is convenient, because that makes his whole “younger self” aspect kind of meaningless outside of not letting him be playable. Medea and Medusa lily were far better examples of how one goes about writing these younger servants and their relation to the knowledge of their future selves.

 I think it would’ve worked better to use Adult Fergus instead, and have him show new levels of discomfort both with the situation in Argartha, and with his own behavior when first interacting with Sche (thereby betraying her expectations and reason for summoning him by actually being more thoughtful and reserved than she initially expected) . Maybe have him focus more on male camaraderie with Columbus and the resistance than sleeping with women, as I don’t imagine he’d have much interest in cell dividing zombies with fabricated personalities, even if he doesn’t know that’s what they are yet!

Now, Scheherazade is actually my favorite character from this singularity besides Wu. I love stories that have trauma & behavior developed from trauma (rather than principle built upon trauma) as an antagonistic force. Having to perfect your craft of storytelling to survive for over 2 and a half years while also suffering abuse and captivity is nothing short of awful, and the fact that this attracts the Demon Pillar to her and allows them to work together is really interesting.

 I did dislike the fact that she seemed more affected by her infatuation with Fergus than his encouragement to find strength and pride in her storytelling, and see her nature as a heroic spirit as a boon to it, rather than something to fear. It feels like a big flaw of her character in FGO, which is that DW can’t decide if they want her to be a shivering leaf that hates fighting, or a sly beauty that subverts authority with her tales. Ideally these two aspects should be combined, but it comes across as inconsistent since there’s no solid in-between to give that transition more nuance. 

That being said, I think the folks that label Fergus’ speech as inherently sexist are kinda missing the forest for the trees. No amount of headcanon or fan interpretation changes that he’s a character highly motivated by carnal instinct, and the fact that it’s the lense through which he tries to argue against Scheherazade’s viewpoint is pretty consistent, though the afore mentioned issues with his dialogue makes his sudden shift back to being horny on main jarring and could be fixed by him always being adult Fergus. I can at least appreciate that the story brings up the clumsiness of his words and that even if they get the message across, the flaw in delivery means that Scheherazade will not indulge him on his terms, even if she’s grown just a tiny bit out of her old mindset (plus everyone calls him out so it’s not like his attitude is treated as being “good”, just that it’s not all there is to him). Bottom line I love both those characters, and Agartha left them both in a place where I’d love to see more about them and their relationship explored!

Drake/Dahut was unremarkable (though I was a huge fan of the character design, and I wish DW would make that a skin for Drake). The concept of Ys and her being a creepy rapist/murderer using Drake as her puppet was interesting, but she really didn’t get screen time needed to do anything with that. Wu Zetian on the other hand, I felt was really fun!

I would’ve liked to see her more before the confrontation while we were in the Nightless city, but her speech about working her way up from nothing to becoming a ruler through sheer tenacity, contrasted against the lady that tries SO hard not to let it show that she likes being doted on really clicked with me. All in all, she definitely swiped Gorgon’s spot as the 4 star servant I’m gonna use that ticket on later in the year!

Penthesilea and Megalos had the highlight of the singularity. Nothing was cooler than fighting a bunch of Amazons as those two clashed overhead, and despite almost losing that fight due to a string of Penthesilea’s intrusions hitting my team, I actually wish they did more damage at this point because I wouldn’t even be mad (fyi Colombus actually got killed by Penth during the Megalos fight and I couldn’t stop laughing).

Now if we’re talking about parts of Agartha I absolutely hated, that’s Phenex with a bullet! Besides his bossfight being the most drawn out and irritating thing ever, the fact that both him and the Pillar in Shinjuku don’t fight us in their more humanoid form feels like such a waste. These are supposed to be 4 (5 counting ccc) Pillars that had enough independence gained to run away from Goetia, so the fact that they still look like pillars and never become those human forms when we fight them seems like a real dropped ball here when it comes to visual storytelling and Story/gameplay integration.Also, after how radical Shinjuku’s final fight was, Agartha really didn’t do much to sell Caladbolg finally going off in the middle of the fight (the poison of Wu’s NP was a nice touch at least!)

so yeah, I had quite a few problems here, but I always regard the art and media I consume on a component basis, and for me, the lows here really couldn’t beat out the fact that Agartha was this really cool combination of fabricated settings with tyrannical rulers facing off against a villain masquerading as a revolutionary hero, with a Nightmare monster appearing anywhere at any time, and our heroes seeking to find out which of these figures was the one truly responsible. 

This was always the strength of the Remnants imo, taking looser concepts that normally don’t fly in Nasuverse fiction, and using it to twist the rules of servants through singularities in a way the original seven didn’t outside of Camelot and Babylonia. It wasn’t as great as those two by a long shot, but at the end of the day, It’s left me quite excited for Shimosa, which I’ve been told is the hypest Pseudo Singularity out of the bunch. 

It sucks that this singularity gets such a bad rap when it has so many cool and interesting things in it, but if people dislike something, then there’s nothing for it. As for me, I’d give it a B- on an F to S scale, with Camelot still sitting at the absolute top for me. Anyway, Happy 4th of July tomorrow if you celebrate it, and here’s to EoR 3 and Shirou eventually getting in the game (lmao nope)

[moistwithgender]

Media Roundup (February 2019)

I wanted to try and squeeze in one last finished show into the last day but I ended up having a really bad sleep schedule hiccup. Anyway, here’s what I finished this month:

Games:

This is actually the shortest list this month, on account of me mostly playing through a single game somewhat slowly. If you follow my posts, you might be able to guess what series it’s a part of.

Super Robot Wars EX (SNES): At the end of the previous post I warned that if you want to get into SRW, SRW2 is an extremely rough starting point, even though it’s canon to the four or five original SRW canon games mostly on the SNES. Thankfully, there is a youtube video that shows you all the dialogue and combat snippets from SRW2. That said... if I wanted to stick hard to canon, I would have either played SRW3 first, or waited for the incoming re-fan-translation that will drop probably at the end of March. BUT, I wanted to play SRW and not jump to a game so far ahead that the mechanics alienate me to the earlier games, so I started EX. EX is largely a contained side story that takes place in and revolving around the original properties of SRW canon. Said original properties involve La Gias, the world that exists inside of planet Earth, and a three-sided war involving mechs that run on magic. There’s a lot of politics and strategic talk and fantasy worldbuilding grounded in fantasy science and it’s actually really fucking cool. They take the time to explain how due to a (magical) scientific phenomena, prophecies are always accurate in La Gias (yet preventable with the right effort), which is exactly the kind of bullshit I love.

However, due to summoning rituals, the setting is also flooded with “Surface Dwellers”, AKA people from different mecha anime who have been written into a melting pot setting that contains all their narratives (sometimes cleverly tweaked to allow and complement each other). This isn’t just a hand wave, but worked into big plot points. It is genuinely stunning how much the creators of these games actually tend to give a shit about making these narratives believable and interesting. I say “believable”, though it’s also worth noting that, as with manipulated inclusion of various IPs, canon is general is somewhat malleable in SRW. There are usually multiple plot options in the games, and EX features a unique system with three separate campaigns that, depending on the order you play them, and also depending on the choices you make and how well you play, change the sequence of events in other campaigns as they weave into each other. It’s not handled amazingly, and to see everything, you may play the campaigns some three times each. I don’t really have that kind of patience, because these early SRW games are also sufficiently challenging games. While not nearly as bullshit as SRW2, EX features a fair amount of incentive to save and reset for better RNG, and you might spend an hour or longer on later maps because situations get really tight. EX is also considered one of the easier early games (phew). Despite that, the maps are almost all really enjoyable, you just have to be willing to work for your victory at times.

The writing, with much credit going to the stellar fan translation imo, is also a compelling read, and dialogue is frequently hilarious despite how much it also focuses on political intrigue and fatal drama. The “hard” campaign (at times equally or less difficult than the “intermediate” campaign) has you playing one of the main series antagonists, whose right hand minions include an oujosama who openly talks about how horny she is, a princess with hardcore stockholm syndrome (or is it?), and a semi incompetent little blue bird as a psychic familiar. A running gag is them chastising each other for using rude words. These characters have apparently been popular enough to reappear even in the modern titles, which largely are self-contained timelines of their own, with their own canonical tweaks.

Last point I want to touch on (this single game just has so much to it) is that playing this game out of order is interesting in how canon is referenced. In most self-contained-stories-in-greater-narratives, you’ll get somewhat forced exposition drops when a character is (re-)introduced. Most of these games so far tend to treat pre-existing characters on the same ground as OCs, where a character doesn’t say, for example “yo I’m goku I come from earth and I’m a super saiyan”, but kind of just realistically reacts to the scenario as per their characterization. If you learn more about them, it’s mostly via seeing them interact with other heroes or villains from their own canon (though later games include library bios to catch you up if you want). While this creates an interesting experience where, if you don’t know a series, you get that curious feeling of walking in on the middle of something, but instead from the beginning. The most interesting aspect of this, and what I consider the defining aspect of the game’s storytelling, is that the same delivery is used with the original characters. From the get-go, the original characters in SRW EX talk about other elements the way real people do, without vaguely audience-oriented exposition. Some people won’t like this, but it makes it feel much more real to me, and complements my recent exploration of the breadth of mecha, where I know a ton of names and have very little context, and slowly accumulate context as I go along. It’s a lot of little micro-mysteries. EX didn’t start this, either. SRW2, which is both the first SRW with a plot or even dialogue, introduces the main OC of SRW, Masaki and his Cybuster, who has a lot of his own lore, and tells almost none of it. You are left for the entirety of SRW2 to only grasp the fringes of what Masaki’s story is, and when he says “hey I’m actually leaving now in the middle of the game because I have my own plot bye” you just deal with that. SRW establishes that the world is way bigger than you, even though the core concept of the series is rooted in fanservice. Now, part of this is that Banpresto and Winkysoft probably had a big MCU-style plan from the beginning (cough most ambitious crossover in history cough), because, well, look at this release timeline and associated narrative chronology:

-Super Robot Wars (Game Boy, April 1991) No plot, or dialogue, but establishes the Big Three (Gundam, Getter, Mazinger) as playable characters and has the kaiju villain from an old 70s Getter+Mazinger crossover movie as the final boss. The pilots don’t exist, the robots are all apparently sentient beings. -The 2nd Super Robot Wars (NES, December 1991) Beginning of plot, introduces a proper antagonist (Bian Zoldak), an antagonist force he leads (Divine Crusaders), light political intrigue, Masaki Andoh and his nemesis Shu Shirakawa are established vaguely while having a separate plot that is not explained. IMAGINE juking your audience with your own main character like that. He doesn’t serve as protagonist yet but is clearly, like, the most important OC? Bian and Shu even serve as the final bosses and you don’t even know who Shu really is. The kaiju villain from before comes back for a single map and evolves into a stronger form unique to the game. The heroes from SRW1 also all acknowledge that SRW1 happened and they know each other. This establishes that you cannot rely on canon. -The 3rd Super Robot Wars (SNES, July 1993) Haven’t played yet but I hear this is where they really started playing with canon. Mixes the Divine Crusaders plot with the plot of the original Gundam series. Multiple endings exist now, and plot regularly splits into dual branches. -Super Robot Wars EX (SNES, March 1994) Here’s where it starts to get complicated. This focuses on Masaki’s setting, while continuing off of SRW3′s plot. Elements introduced here will continue to be referenced in SRW4 (the ending screen even explicitly states that, which reinforces my idea they planned this all years in advance). Multiple campaigns with malleable canon means nothing is concrete ever again. -The 4th Super Robot Wars (SNES, March 1995) Campaign now splits into Super Robot (Getter, Mazinger) and Real Robot (Gundam) routes, which is easier to handle. This game finishes up the “Classic” SRW timeline, but would also canonically be replaced by two remakes on the PS1 (SRW F (1997) and F Final (1998). However... -Super Robot Wars Gaiden: Masoukishin - The Elemental Lords (SNES, March 1996) Masaki gets his own game five years later, beginning his narrative. This game has no mecha IPs, and is exclusively OCs. The most complicated aspect is that this game is split into two chapters: the first, at the start of Masaki’s story, and the second, which... if I have this correct, follows after EX and SRW4. The previous games have, supposedly, been referencing this game that has not existed until now, and this game references what has come before. Playing SRW feels like being lost in linear time. This game starts off its own timeline of games that, I hope, stay confined to the OC-centric games. 

So here’s the timeline:

First half of SRW Gaiden SRW2 (loosely referencing SRW1) SRW3 SRW EX SRW4 Second half of SRW Gaiden

As a result...I can never be comfortable writing a suggested order of play. In playing these games, you simply must accept that the world is bigger than you, and at all times you will be an outsider to some degree. You know, until you’ve played all of them. Which you can’t yet, because they aren’t all translated yet.

Phew! That’s a lot of words about Classic Timeline SRW, and I’ve only played through two games. Thanks for reading all of that, I hope it kept your interest. Despite how complicated that got, EX is a great game and easily in my top SNES RPGs now, up there with Live A Live and Dragon Quest V. Let’s move on for god sake!

Oh, right. Almost forgot: (SRW EX: Masaki’s Chapter: Beaten 2/9/19) (SRW EX: (One of the two versions of) Lune’s Chapter: Beaten 2/15/19) (SRW EX: Shu’s Chapter: Beaten 2/20/19)

Fun fact: In EX, if you use a cheat code on the title screen to play through Shu’s route with a suped-up absurd final boss-strength version of his mech, and run into one of the other protagonists, then when you later play as that other protagonist, you’ll have to fight the cheat version of that mech as a boss.

Orbital Paladin Melchior Y (PC): I had to play something else this month, and because I’m trapped in a fugue state, I made it something mecha related. Melchior Y is a small, hour-long visual novel/shoot em up made by John D. Moore, who I know mostly as a_new_duck from the selectbutton.net forums. I’m... not gonna have as many paragraphs to talk about this, or anything, as I did with SRW EX, so if he sees this I hope he doesn’t take that as a negative. Reportedly, this has multiple routes, though as of this writing I’ve only played one of those. I don’t know if that means multiple endings! I liked it for the small gamejam game it is, though. John is an academic and a mecha fan (and did his thesis on mecha, iirc) and so this is reasonably an introspective mecha story focused on children conscripted for space war purely for their utility, and adults who boss them around despite no longer being allowed to pilot once they hit the very beginnings of adulthood. It gets dark! A smaller positive about it is the matter-of-fact inclusion of queer identity, comfortably existing alongside religion without having to immediately make the plot about the conflict between those (at least in the route I played). I enjoyed it, and if you have the patience to explore artier games that aren’t polished AAA cash houses, you might gain something from it too. Here’s a link if you’re curious, it’s currently free.

Anime:

Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai: I already wrote about this last time, oops! Still, despite a couple stumbling points, this is fun character-driven supernatural lit, and if you’re mad at Persona games for bad political takes, then this... at least this doesn’t have those! The funniest thing about the series is that the bunny outfit is easily removable from the plot and barely relevant past the first couple episodes. (13 episodes, finished 2/5/19, Crunchyroll/Hulu)

Punch Line: I actually went in expecting something akin to the sort of wackiness I remember way back when FLCL was fresh. I didn’t get that, necessarily. What I did get was (as I would discover after I wiki’d it later) a fucking Kotaro Uchikoshi story. That’s not a bad thing, but if I had gone in knowing that, I would have been prepared. Uchikoshi writes light novels. Extremely convoluted, mysterious, non-linear light novels. As I was watching this show, I actually thought the whole time “is this a fucking light novel adaptation?” It wasn’t, but it was by the guy who wrote Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors (one of my favorite DS games), and Ever17: The Out of Infinity (probably one of the most miserable game experiences I’ve ever had), and I was easily identifying his particular brand of storytelling. There is a LOT that can be said about his style, but I’ll try to keep it short with a paraphrased example (don’t @ me if this doesn’t explicitly describe any one of his plots, it’s close enough). He likes to tell stories that start as quirky or high-concept, but somewhat mundane, skip a scene at one point, and then progress until you suddenly hit a big plot point that turns everything on its head and, in my experiences, causes things to immediately end tragically. Then you see the scene you missed. The scene held a plot point literally so important that it completely changes what the story was ever about. From then on you are fed a trickle of left-field plot twists until eventually the plot is unrecognizable from how it started. His work is as stupid as it is clever, and he’s got the strongest grasp of continuity I’ve ever seen a human being have. This is the polar opposite of SRW’s “fuck canon” philosophy, and that’s not for the worse on either account. Punch Line starts as a story about a boy who dies, becomes a ghost, and then has to figure out... something? (I should clarify I watched all of this overnight while not sleeping as as the story built more and more upon itself I had to fight to keep following it) BUT ALSO, if he sees panties twice, he’ll accidentally destroy the earth. Those details are, like, one percent of the secret plot that the show is built upon, and by the end when the wacky dorm sitcom has become a full blown world war with government conspiracies, I was like “wait why is that girl a superhero again?” Everybody deserves to experience an Uchikoshi story once, just for the wild novelty of it. I don’t think this is his best work (I think 999 is better), but it perfectly exemplifies his style.

Also, I spent the full binge watch (which I rarely do) thinking it was a visual novel adaptation. Absolutely convinced. But, it turns out that, no, he just writes like he’s making a VN game. The “panties = genocide” concept is so obviously a choose-your-own adventure mechanic that I thought it had to be. On the bright side, an actual VN adaptation later came out, and even came out in English on the PS4. And they added in apparently ten episodes’ worth of significant extra plot, so I might play that.

Also, it’s called Punch Line because in Japanese it sounds like “panty line.” That’s it. Also maybe it’s referencing plot twists, or mortality, idk. (12 eps, finished 2/6/19, Crunchyroll/Hulu/HIDIVE)

Mobile Suit Gundam II: Soldiers of Sorrow (Movie): A month later, I finally got around to the rest of Gundam 0079. I think I might like this movie best of the three, even if it does feature a lot of character death is kind of a downer at times (granted, that’s kind of most of Tomino’s work isn’t it). This movie is where most of Kai Shiden’s character development occurs, and it’s nice to see his go from a bastard to a sympathetic, uh, bastard. He’s terrible and my son. (Finished 2/9/19)

Mobile Suit Gundam III: Encounters in Space (Movie): You know I really like the original Gundam in concept, and even execution, but sometimes I’m chewing through it. Even when boiled down to the compilation episodes I’m just pushing through at times. I mean, I think part of that is my burnout and executive dysfunction issues preventing me from fully enjoying things, but it could also just be that I’m baby. This was the movie I liked the least, despite having some of the best moments in the series. The final showdown is genuinely incredible, and there’s probably a lot of essays out there discussing the recurring theme in Gundam of invoking the figure of Newtypes, while also regularly denying being one (even to oneself!) after engaging in a lot of telepathy. My problem with MSG3 is that they packed the most plot points into this one, and it gets to a point where it was hard for me to follow. Mirai goes through two separate love triangles, and a huge tactic (bordering on the severity of a war crime) happens and then is iterated on in such a small amount of time that I actually lost track of who had it and how I was supposed to feel about it. If I were to rewatch it, I might grasp it better. I spent this movie feeling like I should have just watched the 50 odd episodes instead, for the sake of comprehension. Idk! Hate to end this on a negative note, because this series has layered characterization, complex examinations of war, the things people do in war, and the ways that war changes people, and also cool robots. It’s probably something you can revisit multiple times and gain new value from each time. (2/15/19)

Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team: Guess who watched this on Adult Swim a long time ago and almost totally forgot! This series is amazing and probably going to stay my favorite Gundam series. The animation is consistently beautiful and consistently had me comparing it stylistically to Cowboy Bebop, from the body language to the lavish mechanical displays to the character writing to the excellent english dub. The US got it ater it was complete, but the original airing of it was spread out over three and a half years, and given how flawless it is, I can understand why. If you’ve have a spot in your heart specifically for watching the switch axe change shape in Monster Hunter, you’re gonna lose it watching them do maintenance in this show. Character-wise, while 0079 was about watching whiny teens complain and break protocol on a regular basis, 08th MS Team is as much about living army life as it is about going on missions. There’s soldier superstition, there’s writing to girlfriends back home, there’s complaining about staking out in the desert for five days. I haven’t watched MASH, but the things I have heard about it make me link the two. 08th MS Team is also about a super unfortunate star-crossed love between people on opposite sides of the war. This plot element is a recurring one even back in 0079, but here it feels the most heart-wrenching, and with the very weighty and believable mech combat (it’s so pretty, good god), I was constantly worried about the well-being of all the characters, Fed and Zeon (except for Ginias). If you have any interest in anything, you have to watch this. I’m not good at selling things.

I watched all of this when Hulu was threatening to remove it, but now it appears to still be up? Uh, so go watch it I guess. Oh fuck, right, I almost forgot. The last episode of this is so bad they didn’t even air it on TV in the US. It’s tangentially related to the plot, claims to be about the main characters but instead centers on two side characters and like six new ones, has zero character development, has comparatively/definitively awful animation, relies entirely on misdirection towards the viewer to keep the plot barely hanging together, and has no satisfying payoff. Thankfully, it’s sort of an omake episode, and you can completely skip it. (12 eps (minus 1), finished 2/20/19, Hulu)

I can’t find a decent HQ poster so have this you filthy animal.

A Place Further Than The Universe: It’s not about robots! Wait. Is it about robo--it’s not about robots! I had heard about this show for a while, it was almost universally agreed upon by everyone that follows seasonal anime to be easily the best show of all of 2018. And wow they were not kidding around about that. APFTTU (oh god that acronym) is about four high school girls who decide to go to Antarctica. It is a feelgood comedy with occasional ventures into very real drama, and is rooted very realistically. The show is semi(?)-educational with the attention it gives to showing how real life expeditions work, while also liberally flowing into the poetry of the concept and experience of such a thing. The four girls are all hilarious and innocent without being cloying and, and this is the most important part, without being written with voyeuristic appeal. It is not off-base to have concern for the ways in which a significant number of female cast anime are written with intent to appeal to lonely men who want to feel a safe ownership of something innocent and attractive. It’s not all of them, but it’s a significant amount. Male gaze exists even in the lesbian shows, it’s something you sometimes have to roll with. Here, however, these girls are fully realized and believable, it is obvious that they are developing people, and that is treated as its own value, not as something to covet. If you’re lookin’ at thighs in here, that is your problem, and I’m calling God. A subplot that comes up involves a guy who gets a crush on one of the older women, and he tries to make it about his narrative and is immediately shot down by the whole cast, because this isn’t a vehicle for his romantic conquest. This isn’t anyone’s romantic conquest, really. It is significant to me to say, “this is an anime I could show to my mom and not be worried about.” I know I just said 08th MS Team was required watching for everyone, but A Place Further Than The Universe is required watching. (13 eps, finished 2/26/19, Crunchyroll)

Giant Gorg: At some point I picked this out to watch on CR without any prompting. Wait, I had one prompt. I knew nothing about this show except I think for seeing it on a short list of tumblr user @lightningclone’s favorite anime. It kind of floors me that this came out a year before Zeta Gundam and has way way better animation. Granted, Zeta has twice the episodes, which might be a big factor. The defining trait of this show is probably way it unravels itself, focusing for multiple episodes on exploring what of the great mystery of Austral Island and Gorg has been established to the audience, before revealing something more an deliberately taking it’s time as it takes you to the next reveal. The reveals don’t feel like twists, because a twist comes out of nowhere and sidelines you. The reveals here feel organic, and expected, but all the same compelling. Another good trait of the show is the characterization. Everyone fits into a very different role both in terms of personality and function, they all have their own motivations, and they all complement each other in unique ways. Also, this show has an Usopp. Back before Usopp was a thing. He’s Dr. Wave, and he’s the best character. 

If I have any criticism for the show, it all comes at the end. Near the end a character does a heel turn that, while a little twisty, is hinted in the beginning of the show, and in his heel turn the writers go a bit overboard and have him commit some sexual violence that goes on for an intentionally uncomfortable amount of time, and features frontal nudity. I know we’re supposed to think “oh god he’s a horrible person actually,” but 1) the main character is a child, I kind of expected this to lean family friendly with the occasional dark element (ignoring all the hilarious New York graffiti at the start that says FUCK in several places because America), but... okay! And 2) the stakes rise to a point by the next episode that the characters, including the victim of that violence, all just shrug it off, like whatever! The character is even redeemed by the end, which I wouldn’t mind if the betrayal itself was less physical. It’s a bit much for me, and I wish they hadn’t done it. Aside from that, I feel like the ending itself is a bit anticlimactic, but everything up to these two points had been so solid that I still think it was worth the watch. Worth it if you like mystery, adventure, and big robots, but worth bearing in mind the trigger warning for near the end. (26 eps, finished 2/27/19, Crunchyroll)

Manga:

Shin Mazinger Zero Vols 1-3:

[Serious Content Warning For Everything]

Shin Mazinger Zero is reprehensible garbage and I hate it. While inspired by Go Nagai and intentionally over-the-top, the absurdity is juvenile, offensive, and often just empty. Now, it may seem hypocritical of me to complain about transgression in something based on Nagai’s works, but I genuinely don’t find this transgressive, just extremely self-indulgent of toxic masculine fantasies, both sexual and violent. It has interesting ideas, about how Mazinger is both a tool possible of great good or great evil (literally the mission statement in every Mazinger work), and it wants to explore alternate timelines to see how characters can be corrupted or overcome corruption. The visual of a demonic Mazinger is genuinely pretty rad.

...Okay maybe he’s not, he’s kind of overdesigned. I like the toothy grill, though.

The problem with that exploration of corruption is that sometimes a character is just a horrible monster for no reason, without much explanation (so far?) for how that comes to be. Maybe in volume 4 they’ll get more into that, since they are currently in flashback mode, so there’s no undoing the damage.

Anyway, female characters so far are hypersexualized and submissive or motherly, or hypersexualized and, like, totally unreasonable. The hot robot girl sat on my lap in her underwear and did sex moans, why are you mad, main love interest? Men are testosterone as FUCK. The hero is constantly yelling to the point of visual distortion, no matter how the drama of the scene is being portrayed. The old man villain Dr. Hell is, for some reason, jacked as hell, and in the backstory to the main timeline (it’s all post-apoc) he shows his superiority over everyone by crushing Not Obama’s balls in his grip. I know exactly the kind of dude that would find this appealing and that’s the kind of person I avoid.

Honestly I knew this series was going to be a trashfire from square one and just kept reading out of morbid curiosity. The story starts in media res at the end of the world, with sexy girl robot disintegrating the hero so his soul can go back in time and try the timeline again. Okay, sure, I’m on board. Immediately next we’re shown what I would assume is The One Timeline To Get It Right, after establishing that there have been thousands of timelines where the hero is corrupted by evil. Pretty normal storytelling. And then, uh, the hero’s grandfather molests and murders the hero’s girlfriend, because the hero might become evil. My face is in my hands at this point. The incomprehensible shame. The hero is then corrupted and goes on a killing spree and humanity’s caught in the crossfire and the world ends. After *that* we get the One Timeline. Why? Why say things have always been bad (and I guess imply that bad things are the default) and then waste my time with the worst shock value trash that comes after for a full volume before actually starting the story? It’s edgy garbage! Why is this an official Mazinger work? Stuff like this is what makes me stop and think “wait are all Nagai’s works like this and I’ve been lying to myself when I like it?” Christ, this turned into a rant. Moving on.

[Content Warning Over]

Dumbbell Nan-Kilo Moteru? Vol 1: Idk if talking about horny manga after that mental breakdown is gonna make me look weird but hear me out.

Hot girls lifting weights.

You still here? Okay, good. I started this on a mutual’s recommendation and while it’s not regularly engaging with my own things (I’m more of a “watching fit woman deadlift and hoping she drops it on me and I disintegrate like so many dead leaves” person), and with the two main girls being high schoolers, I try to avoid engaging with that in that way. Luckily, there’s a teacher my age with a bob cut, so we’re good! More interesting, though, this is in the same genre as that Skullface Bookseller Honda-san anime (though less biographical), where the author just wants to explain their job or hobby while also using likable comedy characters as the vehicle. Anime made edutainment work.

I’m starting to get tired and I wanna wrap this up but unfortunately I have a bit to talk about regarding the last manga I read in Feb.

Tokyo Ghoul Vols 10-12: I’ve been reading this for the past, uh. I read it a lot last year, I don’t know when I started, though. Around 8 books in I started slowing down and taking long breaks because phew! I’d hit the end of the series’ big bad story arc and was having trouble picking up from there. I’m glad I did, though, because the story is still getting good. Here’s hoping I can handle the sequel series, because Tokyo Ghoul itself only has two books to go.

I’ve talked about TG a few times before, maybe just on Twitter. It’s very intelligent “vampire” lit that ramps up the stakes of transition by saying “you can’t just suck their blood and let them go! Human meat is your food and you’ll suffer without it.” At first, I was like “oh wow lol this is edgy” but the last twelve books have talked about trauma, alienation, and most importantly loss of innocence. It’s also about the importance of the bonds between people. The main character is perpetually at odds with himself, trying to be a good person in spite of the fact that being a ghoul is literally and figuratively being a monster. It could easily be an overwrought story of self-indulgence and angst but everything in it has been careful and effective. Ghoul culture is thoroughly built up and balances concepts of territory and posture along with careful deception for the purpose of staying a part of, and hiding from, human culture. It’s about predators who cannot remove themselves from their predatory nature, even if they want to be people with families and educations. There’s an organization that wears white and hunts ghouls with weapons crafted from ghoul bodies and functionally I can’t fully argue with them, sort of, but hey we’re starting to discover that corporations are corrupt (who knew?) and that’ll be fun.

But forget the poetry and human condition, the best thing this series does is that unashamedly works the Hot Topic aesthetic. The main character likes reading books and wears an eyepatch to hide his heterochromia and works as a barista. He wears a mask that evokes an S&M lifestyle. Ghouls can only eat people and all other food taste rotten. Except for black coffee. There’s also a number of ghouls with black nails and eyeshadow, and very heavily coded queer male characters (some more flatteringly portrayed than others but that’s a whole other thing). If Sui Ishida never listened to Three Cheers For Sweet Revenge, I’ll eat my fucking feet.

@sun-eater-official I think this might be up your alley. Or maybe not! But these aesthetics sound like you. Actually, you should probably watch 08th MS Team too, for the Bebop vibes.

So that’s everything! I thought I had a short list but apparently it was all things I had a lot to say about. Again, if you read all of this, thanks a lot, I hope I end up introducing you to a new favorite. In the future, I may have to split these into separate posts for each category. I have a lot of free time to write these lately. Writing two roundup posts back to back is a bit tiring, but I don’t have to do another until April starts.

[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2018 (In No Real Order)

Man! Wow! 2018! 2018 was a wild year for me. I managed to deliver those elbow drops I talked about last year and ended up doing a lot of of things. I left my job and moved cross-country in the span of like 2 and a half weeks! I took a new job in the video game industry (play Ninjin and Override)! I took a trip to Vegas a week after that! I got in a relationship! I got out of a relationship! It’s been a ride. A ride that hasn’t left me a ton of time to play video games or write about video games, but I’m like 1000 times happier now so it’s probably a fair trade. No matter what though, I will always be here at the end of the year to make a bunch of terrible MSPaint banners and provide you with another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2018.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (PlayStation 2, 2004)

Nocturne is a game that I haven’t been able to get out of my head since I beat it. It’s so damn cool. It starts with you witnessing a demonic apocalypse where only you, your two friends, your teacher, a reporter, and the man with the world’s wildest widow’s peak survive. These people are, with a couple of notable exceptions, the only real characters in the entire game. You barely see them, and when you do your meetings are usually pretty brief. Sure, you talk to and recruit a horde of demons to your side as party members, and you interact with a handful of demonic antagonists and various demonic NPCs, but for the most part the game is just you. You, alone, wandering the weird hellscape remnants of Tokyo. It’s one of the most solitary-feeling video games I’ve ever played, and it nails this atmosphere flawlessly. The music, the visuals, the writing, every element gels with every other element so smoothly to create a prevailing, almost overbearing feeling of loneliness. The combat and gameplay mechanics are what I understand this series to mostly be like (this being the only mainline SMT I’ve played), and are fun and engaging in a way that’s not too dissimilar from the Persona series. The only knock I have against Nocturne is that the dungeon design super sucks. I’m fine with endless corridors, my love of the PS2 Persona games can attest to that, but almost every dungeon in Nocturne has an annoying gimmick to it, and they all essentially boil down to different takes on a teleporter maze. I was kind of almost dreading navigating dungeons by the time I got to the last fourth of the game, but my intense love for literally everything else saw me through. For those of you who like JRPGs and haven’t played Nocturne, I’m sure you’ve heard this plenty of times, and I was like you once. I didn’t listen. But now I’m on the other side of the tunnel, so I get to say it. You should really, really play Nocturne. It’s good.

Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

Octo Expansion is what Splatoon 2′s single player mode should have been from the start. Don’t get me wrong, the packed in single player campaign is fine, but it’s basically a level pack for Splatoon 1′s. Octo Expansion, on the other hand, is 100% fresh. Structurally it’s much more diverse, with the campaign taking place over 80 mostly-bite-sized missions with varying objectives. There’s a couple of stinkers in there, but overall the quality of the missions is much higher than what was in the original single player campaign. They can actually be pretty tough sometimes too! It was fun to see some actual challenge in a Splatoon campaign. Everything wrapped around the core gameplay of Octo Expansion is kind of phenomenal. The setting and visual design is super weird, the music is way more mellow than anything else that’s come out of the series and creates a great sense of atmosphere, and the writing is actually genuinely pretty great. There’s a lot of funny dialogue and good character moments. They made me like Pearl! The weird gremlin that eats mayo! She’s my friend now! The last half an hour or so of Octo Expansion is also straight up my favorite sequence from a game I played this year too. Don’t sleep on this thing just because it’s DLC. It’s legitimately great.

Monster Hunter: World (PlayStation 4, 2018)

At the outset I was incredibly skeptical of Monster Hunter: World. This wasn’t entirely fair to the game, as a lot of this feeling was based on its initial E3 reveal trailer kinda sorta matching up to some mostly not true pre-E3 leaks, namely that it would be much more action heavy to cater to Western audiences and tie into the then unannounced Monster Hunter movie (which, as an aside, looks like a trainwreck that I desperately want to see). You can probably pretty easily find some tweets and posts from me around that time saying that the game looks like trash because of some misinterpreted new game mechanic. I am here to say that I am a big wrong dumbass and Monster Hunter: World is very good. You might be surprised to hear this, but it’s Monster Hunter! With a bunch of good and well-executed gameplay refinements! And graphics that aren’t repurposed from a PS2 game! It’s a ton of fun and I put a lot of time into it, but it’s not without its flaws. The number of monsters and weapons is comparatively way lower than in previous games, mostly due to that whole not repurposing PS2 models thing. It’s still kind of clunky in a lot of the places Monster Hunter has been historically clunky in, but also in some pretty big new ways, mainly around playing multiplayer. Also the story, while it’s as bland as it’s ever been, is exponentially more intrusive thanks to the addition of voiced cutscenes (which need to be triggered before the game lets you bring other players into story missions, causing a lot of that clunk I mentioned earlier). It’s all nothing game-ruining, of course. The game wouldn’t be on the list if it was! Monster Hunter: World exceeded my expectations, and I’m super looking forward to playing the recently announced G Rank expansion when it comes out next year.

Contra: Hard Corps (Sega Genesis, 1994)

I wish I could go back in time and kick my own stupid ass for not playing this sooner. I’d written off Contra: Hard Corps for the longest time based solely on some bullshit I read on the internet at an age where I just took other peoples’ opinions and made them my own. This and Castlevania Bloodlines were the bad ones, the ones some weird b-team crapped out for the Genesis while the SNES got the good stuff like Contra 3: Alien Wars. Well, it turns out... they were right about Bloodlines. But MAN were they wrong about Hard Corps. Hard Corps is the best Contra game. It fucking rules. I would have gone on with my life never giving the game a glance if not for this excellent Giant Bomb feature happening, and a couple of episodes in I knew I had to play it for myself. Contra: Hard Corps is fucking nuts. It’s balls to the wall 100% of the time. There’s so many unique enemies and wild bosses and they’re all never not exploding. The game has four characters with unique weapons and multiple different level paths that have totally different levels, bosses, and story beats. Oh, and the soundtrack fucking rips. Sometimes it’s a little too much, and there are definitely some sequences and boss attacks that are total gotchas that you can’t survive without prior knowledge of how they work. I’d also be remiss not to give a special shoutout to level 4′s awful, tedious, unskippable-on-any-route boss. But god damn if the rest of Hard Corps doesn’t outshine these flaws. It’s the high water mark for insane non-stop 16-bit action.

Deltarune (PC, 2018)

Does this count? It’s a demo for a full game that won’t be out for a real long time... I suppose it does, it’s self-contained enough. Deltarune, the free demo for the sort of but also sort of not sequel to Undertale, is unsurprisingly good as hell. Less surprising for sure, as Undertale is a known quantity these days, but I’m still way into it. The story is interesting and full of charming characters, and the battle system has been overhauled to include things like multiple party members with different abilities while still keeping all the things that made Undertale’s battles novel. The music is, of course, fantastic, and the visuals look much nicer while adhering to the same general style as the previous game. It’s fairly short, and some character development feels a little rushed because of it, but again, it’s a small chunk of the beginning of a much larger game. I can’t imagine any of this stuff wouldn’t be expanded upon. It’s hard to judge this thing story-wise due to the nature of it being a demo. I thoroughly enjoyed what is there, though, and look forward to playing the rest of the game in 50 years or whatever.

Super Smash Bros. Ultimate (Nintendo Switch, 2018)

This game is so much. Even though the first thing I learned about this game was “everyone is here”, I still wasn’t ready for how much it is. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is maybe too much. Of course, as previously stated, everyone (meaning every single previous playable Smash Bros. character) is here. Most of the previous stages are also present. This was all known. Where the game really, truly goes overboard though is in the single-player content. There’s the usual classic mode for every character, this time specifically structured around a theme for each character, but the vast majority of it is actually comprised of the all-new spirits system. Spirits are non-playable video game characters that you can collect and equip to your fighters for special abilities, sort of like a less terrible version of Smash Bros. Brawl’s stickers. You collect these spirits through spirit battles, which are fights themed around the character the spirit represents via extremely clever usage of already existing fighters and mechanics. These battles range from the obvious (Big the Cat’s battle tasks you with fighting a giant purple Incineroar), to the obscure (fight the main characters from Zangeki no Reginleiv as represented by Link and female Robin while you’re giant-sized), to the creative (Porygon’s spirit puts you in a fight against wireframe Little Mac and Akira from Virtua Fighter, normally an assist trophy), to the downright in-jokey (the spirit of Ness’s Father, displayed as the telephone spirte from Earthbound, makes you fight an invisible Solid Snake). There are like 1200 spirits. The vast majority of them have an associated battle. And you don’t just experience these battles through a menu, at least half of them are implemented into the 30 hour long adventure mode, World of Light, which has you fighting spirits, navigating dungeons, and facing bosses. It’s insane. They focused on spirits in lieu of collectible trophies this time around and they absolutely made the correct choice. The trophies in the last two Super Smash Bros. games were fine, but easier access to existing 3D models of most represented characters made them inherently less exciting than Melee’s tailor-made collection of high quality (considering the time period) renders, many of which would never receive a 3D model again. The spirits system manages to be exciting in the same way Melee's trophies were, fostering a genuine sense of anticipation to see what they cooked up next, but in the context of gameplay. They completely knocked it out of the park. Smash 4 made it on one of these lists long ago, and I essentially just said “it’s more Smash Bros. and that’s good”. Smash Ultimate is also more Smash Bros., but it’s SO much more Smash Bros. It’s so much more extremely good Smash Bros. The only things I can ding it for are some totally subjective stage preferences (where the hell is Poké Floats) and some slightly less than optimal music sorting decisions. Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is, ultimately, the ultimate Super Smash Bros.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon (Nintendo Switch, 2018): Remember Castlevania 3? Inti Creates sure did! This prequel to the still unreleased Koji Igarashi Kickstarter project Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is an unabashed love letter to Castlevania 3, and it’s pretty good. Mom Hid My Game! (Nintendo Switch, 2017): A charming little game in the style of those old escape the room Flash games. It even looks like one (in the literal sense, not the pejorative). It’s not tough or replayable really, but it is $5 and consistently absurd and surprising. Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (PlayStation 4, 2018): Yakuza 6 is kind of a weird juxtaposition. It’s the final chapter of Kazuma Kiryu’s story, but also the first game to use the Yakuza team’s new Dragon Engine. The story end of things is a good, solid sendoff for a bunch of characters I’m going to miss very dearly, but the gameplay feels very formative and limited in a way that sort of reminds me of Yakuza 1. I had a good time with it overall, but I hope they manage to dial it in like they did with the previous decade of Yakuza games and make something truly excellent again. Looking at you, Judge Eyes. Etrian Odyssey V: Beyond the Myth (Nintendo 3DS, 2017): Etrian Odyssey V is a return to basics for the series, ditching things like overworlds and sub-dungeons and just pitting your party against one big labyrinth. Honestly, gotta say, I miss the stuff they left behind! The core of Etrian Odyssey is still super strong so I had fun regardless, but the overall simplicity of the game and the changes to how classes work had me missing EOIV more often than not. Soundtrack’s great though, as expected. Sonic Mania Plus (Nintendo Switch, 2018): To be completely honest, most of the stuff they added to Sonic Mania in Plus really isn’t that fantastic. Mighty’s spike and projectile immunity is fun, but Ray’s flying is more interesting than effective. Encore mode is largely disappointing, with most of it feeling identical to the base game outside of its all-new (and too hard for their own good) special stages. HOWEVER, Sonic Mania Plus was an exceptional excuse to play through Sonic Mania another six or so times. Congratulations to Sonic Mania for being game of the year for two years in a row. WarioWare Gold (Nintendo 3DS, 2018): A good compilation game, executed much better than in the team’s previous Rhythm Heaven Megamix, but lacking in reasons to come back after you’ve played all the games. There’s the usual toy room stuff WarioWare has had since Touched!, but it’s bogged down by reliance on a currency system and the fact that sooooo many things you unlock are just parts that feed into a larger, not that interesting thing. The part where you play WarioWare is great though, and the new visuals make it all feel fresh even though it’s mostly older games. Mario Tennis Aces (Nintendo Switch, 2018): I had a brief, passionate love affair with Mario Tennis Aces. The core gameplay is rad as hell and more like a fighting game than a tennis game, with multiple different special shots and a focus on meter management. I played like 40+ hours of it between the full game and the demo and never even touched the single player (which makes it technically not count for this list, but, shut up). I got 2nd place at its very first tournament at CEO 2018. Then I... stopped playing. It had some weird balance issues, sure, but I think it was more a victim of circumstance rather than anything else. I moved basically right after CEO and just never went back to it. It’s still incredible though. I hope this game’s systems are the standard for Mario Tennis games going forward.

We made it! Bottom of the list! It was a shorter trip this time, but I’m still proud of you for making it here all the same. Thank you for reading the words I typed about video games. I’m looking to get this web page back into gear in 2019, so you can probably expect part 2 of The Best Babies sometime in January. Hopefully I’ll actually play some video games too so I can bring back Breviews on the first of February. Until then!

[deltastorm101]

Mirror’s Edge Catalyst - A (critical) love letter.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of “a review I thought I could never write because I’m way too emotionally attached to this game which I know insanely, almost creepily well”, mixed with a healthy dose of “I should do everything but write this review because I want to finish school at some point but I have to use the surge of inspiration while it lasts”!

Today we will be talking about Mirror’s Edge Catalyst, which was released 2016 as a prequel-ly reboot (saying it like this because for the longest time I’ve thought it to be a prequel but turns out it’s a lot more like a reboot... my bad) to the first Mirror’s Edge from 2008 (which, by the way, still looks fantastic today considering its release year). I will occasionally throw in references and aspects from the first game as well, but this will primarily be about Catalyst.

Time for game 👏 review 👏!

And as always - warning: spoilers. I’ll try to keep the really huge ones out of this or at least mark them well, but going off and playing for yourself first is recommended.

To start this off, I want to say that I initially loved the first Mirror’s Edge - however, only after playing Catalyst, I realized how bad the controls and bugs in it actually were, which is another way of saying Catalyst is a miracle when it comes to naturally flowing controls and crisp and polished looking environments. The city it takes place in, “Glass”, is breathtakingly gorgeous, period. Shiny, clean, it is just on point and one of the biggest reasons I consider it to be my favourite game from the day I first played it, hands down. Not even one of the new Tomb Raider games or one of my childhood-reminiscent games were able to top it and that means something.

The game takes place in an open world map complex under a totalitarian government, drawing parallels to George Orwell’s “1984” – big brother is watching you, all that. A dystopian world if I’ve ever seen one. The open world aspect is one of the best decisions the developers could have made; I have no words to describe how beautiful the different city districts are, and being able to run in freeroam through the city of Glass like parkour runners are meant to feels so much better than being trapped in closed-off levels like it was the case in the first game.

When I first wrote down some key aspects for this review while I was playing it once more, I noted that apparently, you only truly understand the game’s backstory and the protagonists’ origins if you’ve bought and read the comic, Mirror’s Edge Exordium, and that I think it’s not that important because you can well understand what’s going on at the beginning without it – the game starts with Faith, the main protagonist, getting out of jail/a sort of juvenile detention, making her way back into her old circle of friends and family and, of course, old unresolved and new unconsidered problems and conflicts. The comic basically explains what has been messed up by who to make her end up in juvie in the first place and, as I said, it’s not really necessary to know. But, after having bought it now after literal years of consideration, I can say that it’s definitely very nice to know, and totally worth it. There are a lot of elements from the game carefully and lovingly worked into the comic and vice versa (I don’t know what was written first, comic or game, but they fit together very nicely), and just having more reasons, more answers, a larger overview and even partly some explanations for the first game feels... right.

The voice acting is good overall – not strikingly awesome but definitely up there, especially during emotional cutscenes. Sometimes the controls are a bit wonky and Faith might not immediately do what your fingers tell her to but that could definitely be on me - in games where fast reaction is important, quick time events can go wrong occasionally, nothing new. There are some passages you could consider a QTE but they’re being displayed early enough for you to be able to mentally prepare for them as far as I see it. And in my book, that’s a massive improvement from the first game, where you were able to press a button perfectly in time even while having reaction time (= a temporary slow mode) activated, and still watch Faith gracefully fall down the side of the building while flailing her arms in fear because she didn’t grab onto that perfectly grabbable practical white ledge. Why, you ask? I don’t know, ask Faith. Oh, you can’t, obviously made clear by the nasty sound of her hitting the road and her neck being snapped apart. Seriously, I cringed to the moon and back when I first heard that ugly sound. Which is another thing they improved in Catalyst; now all you hear is her quick, raspy, fear-filled breaths and a blissful silence paired with a white death screen after you’ve hit a death barrier. Not the ground, a death barrier. There’s a shitload of them. Which is a pity regarding the fact that a whole lot more out-of-bounds areas would be reachable and playable if there weren’t. Honestly, I find it kind of disappointing that there’s this many invisible walls, fall-through grounds and death barriers. I can see why, conserving computing resources to avoid loading screens, blah blah, but still... let me go off the map, dammit. The game is about a group of people living “off the grid”, why can’t the player actually do that? Hm? Hmmm?

Another aspect tying into this is the social playing mechanic(s), which I found interesting but indeed totally unnecessary. We all know leaderboards of races and stuff, which were incorporated here as setting the best time in short, timed courses (“dashes”), which naturally have been hacked and cheated into ridiculousness. No, RunnerMaster69, I do not believe you ran that dash in three seconds and 420 nanoseconds, I just don’t. Upon completing a dash, you leave an ‘echo’, so basically a ghost other players can compare themselves to, and for you to see which route another player took. Nothing too groundbreaking on that front. There’s a way of tagging locations you’ve been to: so-called Beat Link Emitters (Beat L.E.s) are like little chips shining red in the world you can put down wherever you’re able to stand safely and have them appear in other people’s games to touch, which is a nice way of incorporating a way of saying “Hey, look where I was able to climb!” (And yes, I have abused this system; there’s a glitch making it possible for Faith to float down high buildings onto lower ones, which aren’t death-barriered but not reachable on a normal way. You bet I was a floating gurl putting down Beat L.E.s whereeeeever I could. So much fun. Sorry.)

The same goes for hackable billboards, which can also appear in your friends’ games, but they could have been designed a lot more interestingly. If you hack a billboard, your runner tag appears on it, which consists of a visual symbol, a frame around it, and a background. You can customize the tag in a companion app, which again I didn’t really find necessary. But it is pretty self-explanatory and a nice gimmick if you’re into that kinda stuff.

Maybe an irrelevant aspect: Faith is wearing the same outfit (almost) throughout the whole game. Only at the beginning while getting to the runners’ lair she’s wearing something different and I see missed potential there: let the player run in these clothes, or in the prison clothes, or in the clothes from Mirror’s Edge 1, or in some of the fancy clothes Glass’ high society is wearing, or generally different runner’s attire which still stays true to the style, or Black November garb... endless opportunities, missed. Not at all crucial, but in my opinion maybe better than some different-looking billboard...

Coming back to the (back-)story aspect once more; as with all of today’s big triple-A games, there’s a looooot of documents and recordings to find, to give the player a loooot of backstory, which I found terribly overdone. It always felt like there was too much to collect and too few actual story told; not to mention some story bits not being in either of the games or their collectables, but in a separately sold comic, well done EA, well done.

Additionally, a lot of the documents were about literal history of the state called Cascadia and the ‘conglomerate’ and Omnistat and the November Riots (don’t worry if you have no idea what these words mean, I don’t either...) and regarding the fact that I finished taking history in school with a D ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)... you can imagine I wasn’t that interested in the actual history elements. Give me story anytime, but get the hi- prefix outta here please.

Another thing that I just very recently discovered: Some of the performed parkour movements are inaccurate. Thanks to my new interest of binging parkour tutorial videos I’ve seen actual mistakes in movement (in both games), which I can understand sometimes because some of them have been implemented on purpose and for a reason. For example: A parkour safety roll is performed sideways, with one of your shoulders hitting the floor first and the impact being absorbed and reduced by your whole back rolling over the ground in a diagonal line, ending in one of your feet carrying over the fall’s momentum for you to be able to stand up and run right along, probably even faster than before the drop. In the first game, this was handled straight up terribly; not only did Faith not roll diagonally but straight on her spine, which fuckin hurts if you perform it after you took a fall and is dangerous as all hell, but all her momentum got lost as well - it didn’t make any difference if you took a hard fall, the screen flashed red and you had to build new momentum, or if it was a soft fall with a nice (hurting and dangerous) roll, her stopping dead in her tracks like “Oh wow, did you see that, I made a roll” and then continuing to build new momentum because it all got lost. BUT since this is about Catalyst: Faith is still performing a straight spine-hurting-dangerous-as-all-hell-roll, but at least she keeps her momentum when she does it. Regarding to what I said at the beginning of this semi-rant-paragraph because I’ve “studied” (emphasis on the quotation marks) parkour theory so much at this point, yet am not able to actually perform any moves because I don’t have the strength, stamina or willpower to- Uh, where was I...? Ah, yeah, the reason for the incorrectly performed roll. It’s obvious when you think about it: motion sickness, a gamer’s best friend when it comes to first-person perspective. If Faith was performing a correct roll, it would turn and shake the camera around too much, which could potentially make the player motion sick over time. Period. Look up some first-person safety roll footage on YouTube and you’ll see what I mean. So, there’s a reason, and we should be thankful the roll is a straight gymnastics roll. Sorry Faith, looks like your spine and neck have to suffer a little longer. However, I can and will not understand why they have Celeste, a character from the first game, climb up ledges with her knees and elbows. No. NO. Feet first. If you can’t do feet first, then do one foot first and then pull up the rest. If you can’t do that, train more and don’t call yourself a runner yet, doing this for a living on top of I-dunno-how-high-rooftops.

My feelings are kind of ambivalent on the no-guns mechanics - all you can defend yourself with is your fists (and legs and momentum, of course), while in the first game, you could snatch people’s guns and start some weaponized combat. I liked both of these strategies, not really caring when they announced Faith not being able to do shootieshootie-pewpew this time around.

One thing I liked a lot considering the open world aspect is that if you die, you respawn exactly where you last stood on safe ground before dying (except in missions, of course). It makes freeroaming very comfortable because you don’t have to worry about respawn- and checkpoints; you can just try again when you messed up a jump.

They also changed the beacon- and navigation system (“runner’s vision”) a bit too, which was also definitely necessary for the open world (which they’ve praised as a lot less linear, but honestly? It isn’t really. I knew my way around in Glass pretty well after a mere month of playing), but they did include options for how much you want the game to help you. There’s normal runner’s vision, with a red streak appearing every few seconds, showing you exactly where to run; there’s classic runner’s vision, made to be like in the first game, with environmental beacons and indicators being coloured in red when coming close to them and without the red streak; and of course, you can switch it off completely, which I occasionally like to do to test how well I really know my way around in Glass.

The soundtrack is outstanding. Straight up phenomenal. It can empower and hype you up, but can also be relaxing during a relaxing sightseeing trip through Glass. And it’s also great to leave on as background music while studying (I’m making use of that when preparing for graduation exams), or driving.

There is dynamic day- and night time - I liked that a lot, it’s a good way of showing off the lighting at all sorts of times. Only problem I had: a night sky is supposed to be black, not royal blue.

Note: almost all the “problems” I’ve listed here have been made mods for (e.g. more exciting looking billboards, more outfits, a changeable day-night cycle and a black night sky). If I had enough experience with (and patience for) modding, I’d definitely try it myself but the ‘flaws’ aren’t grave enough for me to feel a desire to manipulate and tweak some game files.

Okay, time for a spoiler. Not a bad one, but one that could give you ideas if you know how Mirror’s Edge rolls, or if you’ve played the first game... which is basically a spoiler in itself too. Ahem, anyway.

Towards the end of the game, when I was profoundly convinced of it being one of my all-time favourites, I was like “Yes, finally a game that improves and learns from past mistakes and listens to their players and what they want”... and then came Noah. I bawled my eyes out and I will be forever angry at the devs for doing this. That’s all I’m saying.

That ultimately didn’t stop me from loving the game though. From an objective standpoint I’d say it’s an overall good prequel/reboot/requel/preboot. Faith’s universe became a bit more mainstream but also a lot more polished and they definitely listened to their fans to some degree. From the very subjective standpoint I have written this review from, I’m saying that Mirror’s Edge Catalyst holds a very special place in my heart and I am truly glad it saw the light of day, after everyone waiting 8 years for it to be released after the first game. (I didn’t wait quite that long; I got Mirror’s Edge 1 in January 2016 and was completely and utterly hooked and hyped for Catalyst in May 2016.)

And that concludes it. If you’ve read this far – thank you. I’m aware that this is a bit different from my other reviews tone-wise - I have put every ounce of sass I possess into this because I... felt like it :D I hope it was fun to read!

[gascon-en-exil]

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Revelation Part 2

Prologue

Opening Chapters

Revelation Part 1

Chapters 13-19, in which everyone’s going to Valla even though half of them suck.

Chapter 13

Hey look, Hoshidan scum!

Ok, meme comedy done. This is in my opinion the first really strong chapter of Revelation, with satisfying gameplay, escalation of the threat posed by Valla, and some good character development. It’s an utter tragedy that it takes place against the literal backdrop of Cyrkensia’s ruined opera house, but I can (mostly) live with the destruction of my favorite setting in Fates when it’s so effective at getting results. Azura still gets to sing here after a fashion, and although there’s no cutscene to go with it the results of this particular show do a good job of subtly foreshadowing that Azura and Mikoto use similar pacifying magic from the same source.

After Kaden and Keaton are done lampshading why the party always runs into shapeshifters in Cyrkensia, it’s time for Corrin to step between Xander and Ryoma as they left them back in Chapter 6 - at each other’s throats in a conflict ultimately engineered by Anankos. It’s a good demonstration of what the war between the two nations would look like without Corrin’s intervention, and the crown princes’ characters logically follow from their behavior as antagonists in the other routes. Xander is resolved that Corrin is a traitor and merits only death, whereas Ryoma is more hesitant to accept Corrin’s choice and, unlike in Conquest, willing to listen to their stated motivations when he’s not on the verge of death. Ryoma’s mellower outlook may be attributed, oddly enough, to the strong intimation that he’s got something going on with Scarlet, something I completely forgot about until I replayed this chapter. I don’t blame myself for doing so; in an Avatar free-for-all dating game romances between the other playable characters are naturally going to get short shrift in the story, and it doesn’t help that Birthright doesn’t suggest this relationship at all even though it’s the one route where both characters to survive to the end. And...yeah, there’s that part, but that’s for a bit later. It’s interesting to imagine how the different circumstances of Revelation could have encouraged Ryoma and Scarlet to grow closer in Revelation than they do in Birthright, though realistically it probably just boils down to Corrin not being there for most of their time together.

In any case, Ryoma shares what he knows about the Rainbow Sage - odd how the fourth person to visit the Sage is still Xander on this route when in the others it’s unsurprisingly the opposing older brother - and Corrin and co. are off to follow the path of Conquest 10 and 11. At least there’s no sequence-breaking teleport books this time.

Chapter 14

This time I’m not focusing on the cutaway to Garon and co., because his obvious gloating has reached such alarmingly stupid levels that I have nothing more to say about it. The payoff, such as it is, to that plot thread is still a few chapters away anyway...as is the appearance of Iago and Hans, who have yet to do much of anything on this route and yet get to appear as bosses at a plot-critical moment. Boo.

Let’s talk about unit balancing instead. Elise shows up with her she’s-legal-we-swear panty shot, and one look at the stats of her and her retainers showcases another glaring problem with the gameplay of Revelation. From this point onward, there’s really no point in training any of the numerous unpromoted units the game throws at you, because there’s no time to raise them up to par unless you do a lot of grinding. This is one instance where Revelation’s similarities to FE10 are more superficial than they first appear, because 

1) when compared to just one route of Fates Radiant Dawn is a much longer game, and in fact at 43 chapters still holds the record for the longest individual story campaign in the series. Revelation’s pacing and design suffers terribly from the requirement that it cover the same number of chapters as the other routes.

2) Radiant Dawn also has a massive roster (second largest in the series behind New Mystery) with several units who come behind the level curve, but they’re spread across the course of the game rather than lumped into a span of a few chapters. Examples vary from earlygame recruits just a bit behind (Meg) to underwhelming midgame units (Kyza and Lyre) to a bonus run Est type in lategame (Pelleas). 

3) and most notably, units in FE10 are divided into separate armies with different resource pools until lategame. While the balancing between those is infamously unequal, this setup almost requires that you train more units than you’ll ultimately be sending into endgame, giving even the lesser ones a small chance to shine.

I imagine that the design philosophy behind Revelation is that the player would be expected to spend a lot of time grinding on this route to get its numerous unique supports and raise a much larger army. It seems intended for a slower pace, particularly as this also helps with building up the castle base when you’ve got duplicates of most buildings to upgrade. I still don’t care for it though, because I don’t feel like taking that extra time to raise an oversized army and because some of the recruitments continue to be unexplained in story. Why would two border guards join in the invasion of a foreign port? Revelation doesn’t know or care, but it’ll make you run your new underleveled healer to both sides of this large map to recruit them regardless. At least Elise is mounted....

Chapter 15

Seriously, look at this. These two join in the same chapter, what the hell. This isn’t even mentioning that these are also some pretty random recruitments. Shura is awfully nonchalant on hearing that Corrin got his revenge for him, and Nyx has no more reason to be here than she did in Conquest 9. With her it really feels like the writers had a great (if highly fetishistic) concept for a character and came up with a plausible backstory only to find that there was no way to fit her into the plot, so...here she is. On a related note, Nyx is the only first generation character other than Gunter to outright not appear in one route, and at least there’s an explanation for Gunter’s absence in Birthright. Her presence really is just that random.

Before doing the write-up for this chapter I read back over what I’d written for the Sevenfold Sanctuary in the other routes. The gameplay of the Revelation iteration offers nothing really to speak of, lacking either Conquest’s class and skill-themed rooms or Birthright’s power jump. The Rainbow Sage uses an alternate old man sprite initially to make it less obvious that he’s repeating the same trick he pulled in Birthright, but his exposition at the end is worth the trolling for finally confirming that he is indeed a dragon and giving us the obligatory Fire Emblem name drop. Fates’s cosmology reveals itself to borrow mostly from Jugdral of all places, though I’ve never yet seen anyone try to piece together the scattered hints of worldbuilding to link the twelve dragons of the two settings. I’m certainly not going to attempt it, because even with divine weapons and draconic-blooded families in the mix there’s remarkably little to conclude definitively that the First Dragons of Fates are/were the dragons that appeared to Jugdral’s Crusaders. My pet theory aligns it a bit more with Tellius because of certain other observations about Fates’s setting and because something is going to have to connect the dragon laguz to the rest of the series’s lore eventually.

Chapter 16 + 17

I’ve been pretty down on Revelation thus far, and at first I was fully prepared to rip into these two chapters in similar fashion...and then I finished playing through them and changed my mind. If I had to pick one moment from FE14 to represent in miniature the beautiful mess that is this game, with all its inventive concepts and missed potential, its stirring emotional moments and lazy copouts, I would choose these chapters. In spite of everything they nail the very best of what Fates offers on an emotional level, and as a midgame climax they land almost as well as the Branch of Fate lands as an establishing moment.

And yet there’s so much wrong with them! Hans and Iago have never been flatter or more inconsequential antagonists; note that before this point in Revelation they’ve done nothing aside from knock Gunter off a bridge and use an illusion to piss off the Wind Tribe. The Ryoma/Scarlet angle is abruptly dialed back to the friend zone, presumably to make it okay for the Avatar to bone them, while Hinoka abruptly joins in the action after having been forgotten about for eleven(!) chapters bar one throwaway mention in Chapter 13. Xander and Leo’s apparent betrayal of Nohr has little bite to it even from Iago as Garon might as well not exist by this point, and their retainers fail so hard as backup I almost always just send them to a corner to wait out the battle. Speaking of which, the trend of underleveled units reaches its zenith, here where maybe four of the eleven units obtained in these chapters can reasonably be used without grinding after this point. It’s even worse than the torrent of garbage units the Archanea games throw at you, because at least those sometimes come with nice stuff in their inventories (hence the “Free Silvers” tier jokingly used on some of the DS tier lists back when those were popular). And to cap it all off the ticking timer that’s been running from Chapter 7 up until this moment, of the skies over Hoshido and Nohr switching as the moment that the portal to Valla will close, makes no sense either (meteoro)logically or narratively except to add unneeded urgency and entice a few of the characters to the Canyon. For that matter, since Revelation appears to take place in the same time frame as the other two routes it’s baffling that this bizarre bit of worldbuilding goes unmentioned in them. Wouldn’t it be kind of a big deal for Nohr to get a normal sky every few decades, and for Hoshido to get a bad one?

But somehow despite all that when the Nohrian brothers show up in Chapter 17 and the music switches to “A Dark Fall” (quick aside, but one thing I love about Fates as a whole is its soundtrack) I fully got what the developers were going for, and to see all the royals finally interacting with each other - something sorely missing from Chapter 6, if you recall - and calling a truce to face whatever awaits them in Valla together just sealed that feeling. The Hoshidan and Nohrian contrast to these two chapters followed by a scene of Corrin’s families united for the first time really sells the main draw of Revelation, even if for some of them the buildup to that moment was rushed (Takumi, Camilla) or just not there at all (Hinoka). Yeah, it comes with the distinct aroma of Avatar-centered plotting like everything else on this route - as Ryoma actually points out in Chapter 16, funnily enough - but even though some of the particulars are undercooked and most of the circumstances are downright silly I can completely get on board with this group of people in this moment banding together to, uh, jump off a bridge before an interdimensional portal closes because the sky is changing color and...ugh, never mind.

Chapter 18

I will say this for Valla: I really enjoy its visual style, a sort of supernaturally-ruined pastoral idyll that resembles nothing like the world above. It also helps that it’s not tied directly to any real-world cultures like Hoshido and Nohr are, and its nods to Middle Eastern, Indian, and exclusively in localization (I think?) Greek cultures come across in the series’s more typically understated fashion. Of course that otherworldly quality lends itself to more frustrating map mechanics, so it’s not entirely a positive. This one isn’t so bad provided you’re fielding a bunch of royals to activate all the Dragon Veins - and really, it’s not as though the player needs another excuse to use them to the exclusion of almost everyone else.

But of course the big moment of this chapter is Scarlet’s death. The bit with the flower is a painfully obvious hint to recall when it comes time for the reveal of her killer, but nevertheless the sequence does well despite that and some awkward staging with battle models. What doesn’t work quite as well is the reintroduction of the Ryoma/Scarlet angle just to add more punch to her death...completely ignoring the possibility that Corrin might be married to either of them (and Scarlet just undergone what had to have been one of the most hyper-accelerated pregnancies in all of fiction, if you want to be really sadistic). Because of their earlier buildup this may be the most egregious example of Fates needing to ignore its own support mechanics for the sake of the main plot. In any case, if Corrin didn’t shack up with one of them the scene after the chapter is pretty solid. I consider it comparable to Lilith’s death scenes on the other routes, since she also dies taking a hit for Corrin, but as the circumstances are less random and Scarlet actually gets most of her characterization outside DLC it’s much more effective overall.

Chapter 19

Enter the strange child with the oversized forehead. At least it’s not immediately obvious that’s he’s evil, I guess?

It’s interesting to note that the Valla chapters are structured almost as a route unto themselves, having to establish a new set of characters previously unseen in Revelation and not seen at all in the other routes. Although in terms of gameplay they function more like an extended endgame in the vein of Radiant Dawn’s Tower of Guidance, bizarre architecture and all. I’ll be talking more about Anthony and Arete and the others later on, but I wanted to note the setup for when I talk about it in the next post. 

The intro to this chapter also delves into a bit more of Fates’s cosmology, specifically its deified dragons. Xander asks what only Iago thought to question in Conquest, namely why Garon would worship Anankos and not the Dusk Dragon, only to get the obvious but still technically necessary reveal of Garon’s true nature. I do like that the First Dragons are vague enough in their presentation that I could believe either that the Dawn and Dusk Dragons are just different interpretations of Anankos or that they’re all separate entities. As I recall however this is somewhat muted by the knowledge that the emotional payoff re: Garon is going to be rather muted when it finally happens, so this really is just more vague worldbuilding. 

Oh, right, the chapter. It’s Conquest 15 with a bigger party and entirely too many items drops on the optional path. Why the developers think the player needed so many items thrown at them in a game with no durability and a route with no shortage of funds I’ll never know.

Next time: Revelation Chapter 20 - Endgame

[strangertoparadise]

The level design of the Keyblade Graveyard is the worst part

Seeing a lot of people complain about Kingdom Hearts 3 and the horrible writing of the endgame gets its fair share of criticism, but I haven’t seen anyone commenting how the level design of the Keyblade Graveyard is the most stupid decision ever and it incredibly hurt the pacing of the game. I think the beginning of the Keyblade Graveyard is fine for the most part, while some characters could have at least shown some reaction (Aqua, Ventus and of course, Kairi), at least the Final World segment and the Demon Tide battle are quite interesting and fun. The main problem for me comes after that. You see... Who was the idiot that thought we should have to play as Sora to fight the entire organization? It makes no sense that Sora has to be in all those battles, specially considering how draining those fights seem to be. This is a decision that makes everyone look bad. Characters who should have been in the spotlight are sidelined, plot threads that have been hanging over the years are not dealt with accordingly and are rushed through and Sora has to do almost everything himself. Its just terrible. Specially when you just fight this incredible fight and you realize that your choice to go to one side didn’t change anything on the other boss room, even though you could already see people fighting. And I don’t really think it would be hard to make this segment better. In the beginning, have Riku join with Aqua and Ventus to fight Dark Repliku, Xigbar and Ansem, in this battle, you control Riku. After the end of the fight, Riku goes after Ansem and gets separated from Aqua and Ventus who keep going ahead. In the room next to that, have Sora and Mickey fight Luxord, Larxene, Marluxia and Xemnas. After the fight, Mickey goes after Xemnas and Sora keeps going ahead. Aqua and Ventus then fight Terranort and Vanitas. Player controls Aqua during the fight and together, they manage to help Terra get his body back from Terranort. They rest a bit before going ahead. Sora gets to Kairi and Axel who are fighting the hooded Xion and Saix. Have Xemnas ambush them and almost finish Axel, Roxas awakens from inside Sora’s heart and defends his friends. Xemnas then turns the odds against them and manages to isolate Sora with a trap, Kairi hurries to Sora’s side to help him before it is too late. This part would be the most complicated, because they would have to make Roxas a playable character like Riku and Aqua, but at the same, they have the basis to do that, since he was a playable character in KH2. So player would control Roxas during a boss fight with Axel as a partner against hooded Xion and Saix. This time, Axel is the one to remember Xion’s name and call her to their side (as it was foreshadowed throughout the entire game and never happened) and then, they would finish the confrontation with Saix and finally the Days trio would have their emotional reunion. Meanwhile, Sora and Kairi are cornered, Xemnas was joined by Ansem and Young Xehanort. You control Sora with Kairi as a partner in a battle against the three. They fight bravely in this hard situation, but the odds are against them (considerably so, these are three last bosses from previous games after all) and when one of the enemies was almost able to deal the fatal blow to Sora, Kairi defends him, but ends up being defeated and taken by Young Xehanort to somewhere else. Riku and Mickey arrive in time to see this, but a little bit too late to act. Fights goes on against Xemnas and Ansem with Riku and Mickey as Sora’s partners. When one of the bosses is defeated, Young Xehanort comes back to fight them as well and to taunts them about Kairi’s fate and Sora’s demise. When the fight ends, Xehanort reveals himself and proceeds to kill Kairi, forcing the inevitable conflict between light and dark. Imagine they didn’t change anything but this part. Sure enough, the ending wouldn’t be perfect, but it would make things SO much better. Everyone would have their own time to shine and solve their issues and there would be much better interactions between the characters without the game forcing Sora around. Riku and Aqua would be the badasses they always were, Ventus wouldn’t be completely useless and would have his final confrontation against Vanitas, Axel would have a proper role in the awakening of Xion, Roxas would be a badass. Mickey would stil be the badass he is. And of course, Kairi would also have had a proper role, defending Sora as warrior and not simply being kidnapped and asking for help. She would have made an heroic sacrifice for Sora (which was also foreshadowed). PS: Not that I think Kairi’s role in the game was as superficial as some people think. The execution of her role during the fights is the main problem here and I think these changes would address that. Doesn’t change the fact that without fighting, Kairi basically saved Sora and everyone after they all died fighting the Demon Tide and that is incredible in and of itself. Her character might be the one who suffers the most because she doesn’t even react, but generally I think the Keyblade Graveyard makes everyone look bad. Aqua and Ventus practically don’t do anything. Sora jobs to Saix of all people. Roxas, Xion, Axel and Sora can’t keep up with Xemnas, even though he had to go through them to get to Kairi. Etc, etc. Just a lot of scenes badly executed that could have been much better and I think what made this happen was the level design and their decision to have Sora fight in every battle.

[outofoxygen]

An Critical Analysis of HOME

“I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.” -Space Funeral; derived from Network

HOME is an OFF fangame made by Felix, may his soul rest in peace. His work is one of the most well-known OFF fangames, and is generally one of the most well-loved. I don’t like it, at all. So I shall eviscerate it. (Oh, and I spelt CONFINIUM wrong.)

Part One: Characters

The first character I shall start with is the Judge. Now, the Judge is one of the most well-loved characters in OFF, for good reason. He is witty, intelligent, enigmatic, mysterious, and knowledgeable. He’s altogether one of the best characters in OFF. However, he makes for a poor protagonist. How?                   Well, the main the problem with having the Judge as a protagonist is that one of his main attractive features is his enigmatic and mysterious behaviors, which are enabled mainly by his knowledge and intelligence. Whilst you can write the Judge as a intelligent protagonist, the main problem with making him a protagonist or even mainly playable is this: You remove his mystery and enigma.                                                                                                                    A protagonist, by nature, reveals their thoughts and knowledge to the observer, and even more so in games. The Judge is a mystery because he has knowledge that you don’t, and a whole story to him you don’t know. He’s altogether mysterious because he’s opaque, whilst Felix made him transparent with HOME. This kills his allure as a character. At least he’s still somewhat verbose.

Another major point is that he’s not that good in combat. The Judge is lacking in competence power, with only physical and special (or magical) attacks; yes, you can argue this allows him to engage both physical and spiritual enemies, it limits his ability to the party damage-dealer, when there are some characters better at doing immense damage per turn.

I shall now go to Alain. Alain is probably one of the better-written characters in HOME, and he generally conveys the idea of an churlish, starved cat. He is practical and has the ability to keep himself rather calm, but he also lacks strong morals and clearly doesn’t concern himself too hard with his fellowship’s opinions or worries. However, his backstory is painfully edgy, and his meeting and dialogue seem to convey an general ‘grimdark’ feel for him, though he thankfully drops this motif later on.

I can sing the praises of Alain’s potency in combat any day. He is, luckily enough, one of the most powerful characters you can obtain, rivaled only by Valerie, The Batter, and Alpha. He possesses one of the greatest utility competences imaginable in the form of Leeching Palpate, which allows him to continue absorbing health from the opponent whilst his party dies around him, along with the only Neutral attack in the game, thus ensuring that Shredding Palpate (which reduces enemy resistance to Claw attacks) is effective against mostly any opponent, except those already resistant to Claw (which their resistance will get degraded anyways).Thus, he is possibly the most versatile fighter in the game.

Valerie. He is mostly notable as The Judge’s brother, who dies in-game due to Japhet. In HOME, you can save him... after Japhet gets to his 2nd phase. At least it’s not the phase where Valerie is completely gutted, but I’d like to know something. Can anyone explain how he’s supposed to be alive after having his throat and innards mangled by a bird? Also, Mortis Ghost stated that Valerie was shy and soft-spoken, whilst in HOME, he keeps talking. Talking and talking and talking.

Oh boy. Valerie’s combat prowess. Aside from a death rate rivaling Epsilon, he’s obviously a glass cannon. He has one of the best potentials for damage, practically converting him into a nuclear warhead just through spamming a Break, then using the correlating Aneurysm to lash at the opponent with immense power, rendering them lying bloody and brainless on the ground.

On to Jozlyn! Now then, let me immediately ruin all potential to beat around this bush: Jozlyn is an annoying idiotic mess that makes me want to strangle her and myself. She is basically what happens when you grab an funnel and force the whole ‘LOLrandom!’ archetype and a stock ‘girl’ personality into a cat. She is the token female character of the cast, which OFF didn’t require or use. Not only that, but her ‘quirk’ of constantly adding ‘:3′ to every single damn line that the world had the misfortune of existing is disgusting and disturbing, at the very least.

Jozlyn might be forgivable if she is at least usable in combat. Maybe she can one-shot something? Is she an massively useful quasi-enemy targeting character, like Epsilon? No. No to both of these hopeful dreams. I almost gag thinking of having to use her in combat. Her main skills makes it evident that Felix couldn’t even THINK of making her slightly strong. Whilst Epsilon had rather weak multi-target attacks, not only could he not run his mouth 24/7, but also he had the advantage of something called ‘buffs’. Jozlyn just stole Omega’s ability to use curing competences and ran off.

The Batter. I’d imagine everyone who has played OFF has a strong opinion of him. Is he a mass murderer? Is he just someone trying to end an broken world before it can get worse? Is he a child murderer? Well, ignoring these questions, you can say something: He’s a stoic, dedicated, pious man, who is short-sighted, doesn’t care about the means, and is too blinded by his goal of perfect purity to care about the harm he causes. Of course, his personality is wiped in HOME. How, you might ask. Well, consider the following:                                        Given that we’re playing from the Judge’s point of view, he’s the enemy. However, it seems that Felix ignored that he has a personality, he’s got goals, and he’s not just some thoughtless mass-murderer. He is at the very least morally ambiguous, yes, but just having him be the dedicated typical evil archetype dilutes the narrative of OFF heavily.

Now, you might wonder, how can you state the mechanics and ability of an enemy as I have with the playable characters? What, are you going to say he’s too easy or strong or something? Well, the Batter is playable in the later part of Zone 2 leading up to the boss fight, and OH YESSSSS. He’s immensely strong, tears down enemies quickly, and comes with Alpha, who has the ability to endlessly heal your party. The downside is they’re AI controlled, but still, he’s not awful, he’s a LIVING GOD. Now then, time to move on from characters.

Part Two: Themes and Genres

HOME has some pretty obvious themes and genres, like OFF. They’re both quirky, surrealist role-playing games that have dark themes, like death. OFF pulls this off (haha) well, and OFF is, in my opinion, able to prime itself off of dark humor. Whilst yes, you can disagree with me on this, in my eyes, it is consistent of dark humor: it subverts some of the darker parts with comedy, such as Enoch is an absolutely detestable, merciless, and evil potential-metaphor-for-capitalist-businessmen, but he has an hilariously small face and an very notable way of speaking that highlights some of the humorous prospects of him.

Dedan is able to abuse his Zone’s denizens/elsen, but he is not only rather hilarious to read the lines of, but his incessant swearing and vibrant expressions of speech give him an obvious personality, and adds some comedy to him. As such, I rest my case that OFF involves dark humor heavily.

Now then, I don’t think HOME is good at this at all. The first thing I don’t like is that most of both Dedan and Enoch’s lines are torn right out of OFF, and it’s very heavily notable. I didn’t like the fact that Dedan and Enoch just use butchered versions of their canon implementations, and it’s absolutely awful.

HOME is even worse at adding in black comedy, with its general tendency to seem pretentious (with the whole forcing-you-to-walk-through-purified-zones and having The Witness, or Edna, try to tearjerk you for things the Batter did, not you), and even worse, it takes itself too seriously. It’s annoyingly haughty, and it tries to leave an impact it can’t. What’s even worse in my eyes is the fact that it has to include an credit song that’s supposed to be sad, just because one was in OFF.

OFF made it so I can’t listen to Judy Garland without bursting into tears, but HOME didn’t have that impact. Another, more severe problem, is that in the true ending of the game, the world gets fixed again, and everything’s happy. That’s too sappy, it’s not the dark game I came for. OFF seems to be able to point out the fact that if we don’t stop a destructive force, then it will ruin everything to the point where we can’t repair it. HOME undermines this with the whole damn happy ending sludge that tosses away one of the most profound parts of OFF. 

Yes, it’s nice to have hope, it’s nice to have games that end with hopeful endings. I know that barely anyone can handle continual barrages of hopelessness, sadness, and misery, but it’s OFF! We’re talking about one of the more dark indie games you can find out there! We are not talking about some damned happy-go-lucky good funtime game. We’re talking about Unproductive FunTime’s greatest, most recognized work, not some damn stupid romp-in-the-fields-of-happiness-and-sunshine by an AAA developer!

Part Three: Plot

HOME has a simple plot: basically, it’s OFF but you’re the Judge. You’re not purifying anything, just wandering around casually and killing spectres, ghouls, and burnts. You fight the Guardians, then wander into the purified zones, before entering an semi-trippy area, before reaching towards the end. So... what’s wrong with HOME? Well, guess what! It tries too hard!

HOME added an Fourth Zone. Whilst this is no problem normally, (in fact, the fangame CONTINUUM does this rather well with 3 zones! And yes, I just gave a shout-out to CONTINUUM.) HOME makes Zone 4 (or Bordeaux) grimdark and edgy to the point it makes Alain’s semi-edgy appearance in the beginning look happy-go-lucky. It’s a GRIM SAD WORLD that has elsen committing suicide left-and-right, gun-elsen, and, worst of all, an wannabe guilt-tripper true guardian who is rather annoying, and lacks an personality. Or a reason to be, just like Bordeaux.

Then, afterwards, HOME basically takes a fat ol’ hit, and announces: “Dude, like, what if you had to wander about those purified zones? That’s, like, deep, man.” So that’s what it does. Yep, you have to stroll through those zones you didn’t purify, fighting transparent shades of guardians. Yay. Whilst grinding through actually good-looking plague doctors. Yay.

Finally, skipping to the end, HOME gives you the Judge either interrupting the Batter at the switch-point, or him about to slaughter Hugo. Of course, you get either to the bad end or the good end, respectively, so it depends whether you get the ‘hooray yay happy’ ending or the OFF-style ending. So, you don’t really get the choice of siding with the Judge or not.

Part 4: Supporting Cast, and Main Enemies

For any OFF fan, Zacharie is one of the most notable supporting characters, given his mercantilism and natural charisma. HOME adds a new merchant. Oh boy. They keep Zacharie, and the new merchant, Viola, isn’t purely awful.

Now then, on to my FAVORITE part. The notable bosses. Dedan is still an loudmouth that has a tendency to hit elsen, whilst Japhet is rather new. Japhet is now, instead of being an mainly tragic character, just an insane evil douche who wants to kill Valerie. Oh no. Enoch, my favorite OFF character, is luckily untainted by any filth, due to his small screentime.

The Queen still uses the monologue style that was interesting and new in OFF, but predictable in HOME. She still has original and new dialogue, but instead of fighting someone who destroyed her world, she’s just angsty about the fact that the Judge kinda softened in up for the Batter accidentally. At the very least, the Queen has interesting dialogue at the end, now. You even get a choice at the end of it, and that’s beautiful.

Sadly, I don’t think there’s really any opponents left, but there also isn’t really any supporting cast. So I’ve got to wonder: What else do I have to list for this short section? Nothing. So, on we go.

Part 5: HOME’s Basic Enemies, and Combat

HOME, for the most part, uses OFF’s combat system due to having the same engine. HOME, however, has different enemies and competences, obviously striking something new (just like how CONFINIUM has new competences, that are also good!) and original. The enemies are interesting to observe, and truly help to build a feel for the game. They have interesting-sounding and looking competences, and they have great designs, as mentioned.

HOME is not only superb at this, but even excels to a point it should be looked at for an idea of how to make competences for OFF fangames, and for looking at good designs for monsters that fit in with OFF’s aesthetic and feel. Given that I’ve spent quite a bit insulting HOME, I can still announce that it gets OFF’s enemy and competence feel right.

Part 6: Did Felix get OFF’s Feel Right?

Hell yeah. HOME does feel like an OFF fangame, and it does things that are unique and interesting, like any good OFF fangame. HOME conveys OFF’s feel with the ability Felix had to not only draw OFF’s style of art, but he sometimes even nails the quirky writing that OFF had. The music of HOME fits in remarkably with the game, and it sounds like Alias teamed up with someone else to produce music for the game.

HOME also has the good luck to have been made by someone so creative, as Felix was truly able to design new areas. The maps for Zone 4 fit in well with the areas Felix made, and so do the new book pictures. HOME just has an excellent feel, and I can see Mortis Ghost actually announcing it as the spiritual successor to OFF. There are, of course, other fangames that are also equally beautiful and appreciable, such as CONFINIUM, which I wholeheartedly recommend, and even plan on analyzing later; DOLL, which, despite its anime-style and strange characters, is appreciable; Continue Stop Rise is enjoyable, and is fun to play; and Play Ball is a humorous game intended as a joke game, but it isn’t finished, like CONFINIUM.

But, Felix had a good sense of feel and lore for OFF, and applied this to HOME. However, I do believe it’s time I head to the conclusion, no?

Part 7: The Conclusion.

HOME is an enjoyable fangame. The characters (especially Jozlyn) are not the best (except Alain), and the plot has an ending that tosses OFF’s main point out, but it’s playable, and Felix definitively knew how to write rather well. He was able to write excellent lore and establish an nearly perfect feel for his game. HOME has unique monster designs, and nice competences. You can enjoy the game, and you could potentially cry at some of the turns in the plot.

It’s a lovable fangame, and it seems to actually strike its way out well in the general nice lineup of fangames, especially given its general acclaim in the fandom. HOME could’ve done quite a lot better, and some of its characters and themes were poor, but it was never truly awful. I’ve seen worse games, you’ve probably seen worse games. It deserves its place among the lineup of good OFF fangames, and I must say that you should play it if you haven’t.

Either way, HOME is still good, and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to play an OFF fangame. CONFINIUM, in my eyes, is a good fangame for an OFF fan who loves the style of OFF’s storytelling a darker themes, but HOME is more suitable for a general audience.

All in all, my verdict on it is that HOME is good, and I’d recommend playing it. It’s beautiful with its general feel that truly rivals OFF, and it’s got select dialogue that’s excellent.