#Literally a post said 'game freak is working their devs to death LITERALLY'

[mlarayoukai]

That post reminded me of another which started as a pretty good critique of idol culture… and then the OP went on a really fucking weird ‘oh those poor primitive backwards people’ lamentation on a whole continent

Nah dude I see it all the time. Like when a new pokemon game comes out people always say shit like "oh those poor Japanese people they keep dying on the job(?)" like western companies don't over work their employees or same thing with western singers. They always mention they're Asian. Idk I can't explain it too well like yes Asian communities do have an over work culture but people on the internet love to mention they keep dropping dead. Like when that hogwarts game I didn't personality see anyone say "oh those poor overworked devs" like they did with pokemon even though those games had similar problems. Like I wholeheartedly agree overwork culture sucks but can we stop only mentioning it when it's an Asian company? People stop treating Asians like zoo animals that can't protect themselves please

My point being whenever there's a game that's buggy on release you can tell when the devs are Japanese or western based on if people bring up if the devs are over worked and on crunch. Because western devs are never on crunch

[goattypegirl]

Hokay so I have reached the final boss of the dlc, I think. I say reached because I have not yet beaten it; I got to phase 2 once. This is going to be a doozy I can already tell. Super spoilers below.

First, the fight technically. First phase is like a schmixed Radahn; muscle memory is kind of helping but it might be placebo. It's probably placebo. Phase 2 reminds me of the twin princes, I can't say more than that because I got got approximately 2.3 seconds into phase 2. I think some people are going to be mad about the twin princes similarities, but I like how Fromsoft tends to iterate on ideas from previous games. I don't mean like overt stuff like patches or the moonlight greatsword, but like the guardian ape and the bloodletting beast, the lamenter and pinwheel, or leda and crew and gideon. Assuming I get to phase two sometime this calendar year, it'll be cool to see how they've built on the twin princes concept.

Story and lore wise, like I said in my other post, I knew the dlc was going to fill gaps but boy howdy I was not expecting them to be filled this way. So grain of salt, I'm not actually done with the damn game yet. My initial reaction was confusion, and I'll need to sit on it more, but I like it.

From what Ive gathered, ascending to godhood apparently requires a consort, a Warrior to the Thinker, the Red King to the White Queen, and so Miquella did something to Mohg's body to make it a suitable vessel for Radhan. (Maybe it's cause I'm a freak but I think it would have been cool to see that process. Who knows, maybe there's a cutscene into phase 3 where the body deteriorates back into Mohg.) Radahn 2 has a move where he casts bloodflame, and you can see horns peaking out of his cuffs and boots. Actually, whenever I've died he's spun around to face away from the camera. I wonder if that's intentional? In universe it's Radhan hiding his face because he knows something's wrong, out of universe the devs wanted you to notice the horns.

I know people are wondering why it isn't Malenia or Godwyn, and I think I can come up with some in and out of universe reasons why.

For in universe reasons why Godwyn isn't the final boss, maybe the night of the black knives killed his soul so badly it was unable to be retrieved, or because his body couldn't be killed. Maybe that's what castle sol and the eclipse thing was for, if it worked and Godwyn died a true death, he could be used as Miquella's consort. Honestly I didn't expect the dlc to feature Godwyn at all, the whole 'oh the scadutree is being choked by deathblight' thing felt like a reach, but there's something going on with Godwyn here. Don't think I didn't notice the two death knight fights have the Stormveil face in the back of the arena, or that their weapons reference a "surrogate corpse."

Out of universe Godwyn, the only thing I can think of is that Godwyns simultaneously an obscure character but also relevant to two game-spanning, ending-determining questlines, fia's and ranni's. Radhan meanwhile is a shardbearer in an area right next to the starting area. If you asked the average player who didnt really talk to NPCs or read item descriptions, they'll probably recognize Radhan and not Godwyn.

For in universe reasons why Malenia wasn't the final boss, it depends on how you view Miquella's character, but I think it's because he knew making a consort would require killing his sister, and he didn't want to do that. That's just my hunch right now working on incomplete information, and you could probably come up with a lot more uncharitable reasons why he didn't pick Malenia. (Side note. If Radhan was chosen as his consort early on, and therefore needed to die, thats yet another potential reason why Malenia battled Radhan.)

Out of universe, the devs probably didn't want to lock the dlc behind the base game's super boss, and they were probably wary of making Miquella's consort his literal twin sister.

The dlc recontextualizes a lot of stuff especially about Miquella's character, and I'll need more time to think on it, but I think if Miquella could have ever been called a "good guy", it was long before the events of the story. He probably had good intentions going in, but the dlc as a whole is showing how power necessitates corruption and compromise. One literally cannot become a god until you discard more and more of yourself, your doubts, your fears, and your love. The Miquella at the end of the game wouldn't have had qualms over killing his sister.

Something worth examining is that Miquella's an Empyrean. We still don't really know what that means* besides that they're candidates chosen by the Greater Will to replace Marika. And like. Isn't that what Miquella is doing? Like was the transition from Marika to Miquella supposed to require such chaos and bloodshed? Is Miquella following along the Greater Will's plan? Mohg's body had to be modified into something unrecognizable in order to be a proper host, a proper puppet. Is Miquella doing the same? If so, what exactly makes him any different than Marika?

*the watchful spirit item description vexes me. I think about it every night. What the hell do you mean Empyrean grandam.

As a final, very petty note. The 'Miquella is pure evil, he's literally Griffith!' and heccin wholesome chungus gigachad Radhan bros are going to be fucking insufferable.

[gamearamamegathons]

Trauma Center: Second Opinion: Bombs Are Basically Organs, Right?

[Content warning for surgery stuff, and euthanasia, a topic which this game *also* handles poorly]

Circe here! So, now that Derek has learned to use dark magic and defeated evil lung monsters, he's caught the attention of Caduceus, a super research lab that's all about curing incurable diseases. GUILT, admittedly, seems pretty curable with basic surgical tools, you just have to be really good with them, but I guess wielding the healing power of dark magic is worth taking notice of. Derek decides it'd do the most good to roll with Caduceus, so our next surgery is going to be the last one at this hospital before we move on. Here, we've gotta fix a young girl's heart. Hopefully the music can free her whenever it starts. But her heart, unlike the music, is actually stopping quite a lot instead. I hope you remember how to use the defibrillator! I skimmed over it before, but basically you have to push the remote forward, then press B and Z with specific timing, and you get to try again until either you get it or the patient dies. Yay! Here, we need to replace her heart valve with a fake one, but her heart stops, like, every ten seconds, which makes things a bit tricky. I, um, I'm sure she won't suffer any long-term effects from her heart stopping like a dozen times in the space of five minutes, right? Definitely. She's fine. It's fine. She's fine. She's *fine*.

But okay, time for another aside with Dr. Weaver. This time, a shady guy needs her to remove some real bad tumors from some other guy. These tumors are...weird. Each one is surrounded by three veins that have to be severed with a scalpel before it can be removed. Things get pretty wild near the end, and we find that Dr. Weaver, unsurprisingly, also can use dark magic. So it's all good. It seems like Dr. Weaver is seriously indebted to this shady guy, which is why she takes whatever work he needs her to do. Apparently something went bad in Japan, so she had to change her name and leave -- she used to go by Dr. Kimishima, although I'll admit, that name doesn't mean anything to us right now.

Back to Derek! He's off to Caduceus. Unfortunately, Angie's going with us. We're also introduced to a pretty big cast of characters, but I'll just kinda touch on them as they become important. Our first surgery at Caduceus is basically just practicing on the same tiny disease monster as last time, which we now know is called Kyriaki. There's a ton of different strains of GUILT, and it's basically just a catchall for whatever made-up anime disease monster the devs wanted to stick in.

As promised, one of the characters is now important! Introducing Tyler Chase, Derek's friend from med school. Remember the shady whisperings about a 'death doctor'? Well, it turns out Tyler's our guy. Today, in a very special episode of Trauma Center...let's talk about euthanasia. After Derek finds out about this, Tyler talks about how he just wants to end unnecessary suffering, and that's why he euthanizes patients. He talks about Derek 'turning him in' for this, so with the full breadth of context, it seems very much like Tyler is euthanizing patients in secret, illegally, and without asking them. Which...I think is actually murder, not euthanasia.

This comes to a head when we see Tyler's kid sister Amy. She's infected with an incurable strain of GUILT, and all the surgery that has been done on her hasn't helped. Tyler thinks we should just stop, rather than prolong her suffering, but Derek cannot allow that, so he insists on operating. When we go to Amy's room, she says she wants the surgery, and this one moment of a patient objecting to being allowed to die abruptly changes Tyler's mind completely. Which, again, confirms that Tyler has really not been asking anyone if they want to be euthanized. I should hate Tyler more, but this plot point is so bizarre and artificial that I can't really work up the same kind of reaction as I did to Angie. At least there's a sort of driving logic behind Tyler's actions, even if they're, like, kind of awful. This exchange also tells us a lot about the core ethos of Trauma Center, but I think I'm going to save a discussion of that for the end of this game, after we've really had a good chance to just...take in this game's worldview in full.

The surgery itself is more GUILT-based absurdity. This kind if called Deftera. It's made up of red and blue parts, which the game calls tumors, and claims that they only appear to move by replicating their DNA very rapidly. I can only figure that this is confirmation that their tiny monster appearances are kind of...visual metaphors for disease, I guess? But it's kind of sloppy and imprecise so I'm going to continue to treat them as totally literal. Anyway, when a blue and red one crash into each other, they start trying to consume each other, and they can be damaged in this moment. When they're damaged enough, they start freaking out and damaging the patient a lot, but then we can cut them out and remove them. It takes me a couple tries, because it gets kinda hectic once the game introduces two of each color. But eventually we manage it, and Tyler realizes that actually people don't want to die. Hoo-ray.

After this, Derek heads off to an international doctors' conference with another Caduceus doctor, Cybil Meyers. Apparently she used to be a cop before becoming a doctor, and remember that, it's going to be important later. Oh, we also meet Victor Niguel, who's one of Caduceus's R&D guys. Actually, I don't remember if he does anything important, so nevermind him. At the conference, an important-looking guy says that GUILT is being spread by a terrorist organization called Delphi, and we found one of their labs in Africa, where they were experimenting on people. So we should, like, go there and take a look. Everything's good until suddenly, the lights go out and the emergency doors lock everyone inside, and we find a bomb. Cybil makes the logical decision, which is that if we're going to blow up anyway, we should definitely try and just defuse the bomb. I said she's a former cop, right? Apparently she dated a member of a bomb squad, so she like, totally knows about bombs, and how to defuse them with surgical instruments.

Yes, that's right. It's time to operate on a bomb.

As you'd imagine, this patient is a bit unlike any of the others. We need to turn the screws to open the cover, and we need to figure out which way to turn the screws or else the bomb will blow up. After that's done, we need to mess with the voltage, which is just, like, messing with pins till a meter goes right. It's not that interesting. No, the *next* part is where it gets interesting. The bomb core is surrounded by white panels, and at any given time a small number of them will be flashing red. You need to zap the white ones with your laser and avoid the red ones, till they're all gone. I'll admit, it's kinda tense. God, I can't imagine doing this without direct mouse control. Once we get the last of these, we expose the bomb core, but it's surrounded with spinning patterns of red tiles, so we have to laser it without hitting them. It's easiest to use Derek's dark magic here, they go pretty fast. With that done, the bomb is defused, and all the doctors are saved.

Time to go to Africa!

Wait, hold on. First, on the plane over, one of the passengers gets sick, so we have to drain his bad stuff out. This is a pretty conventional surgery, except you're regularly interrupted by airplane turbulence. I also found it kinda boring. You spend way longer than necessary draining fluid from this guy.

OKAY NOW WE'RE IN AFRICA. We find this village abandoned, but after some searching we find this one kid, who conveniently leads us to Delphi's lab. There's not much there, it's been totally abandoned too. The trip turns out to be a wash, but worse yet, when we see the kid again, he's caught...TRIANGLES.

Okay, so let me break this down, because this is where the game starts getting mean. This kid's organ is getting covered with triangles, which basically will petrify it. This will kill him...obviously. This thing is made up of two parts: a regular pattern of triangles, and thorns that stick out of the points of the triangles. A triangle can only be removed when there are no thorns touching it, but the thorns grow back fairly quickly. Also, whenever you remove a triangle, they will attempt to go through a growth cycle. In a growth cycle, an empty space becomes a triangle if it's adjacent to a triangle and two thorns are touching it. There's also another condition, which I only learned about from the wiki, where a triangle with no other triangles next to it will generate three new ones, one on each edge, if it has any thorns touching it at all. Phew. You can see how this could get out of control quickly. I appreciate how this is sort of a puzzle, but it also feels like it doesn't take very many mistakes before you may as well just start over, because if there's a lot of triangles, beating back the growth of thorns is brutal. Also, some thorns will dissolve into mist, and if you don't vacuum the mist out, it'll spread even more triangles. This isn't very hard, but the biggest problem is that it distracts you from your flow of removing thorns as quick as possible, and can lead to falling behind very quickly. It's hectic and difficult, but with a bit of quick thinking and careful action, you'll get rid of every triangle.

At this point, we've actually just hit a chapter break, so I might see about breaking these posts into single chapters from now on. We'll see how that goes. So let's review: shocking a small child's chest a dozen times, tumors with vein shields, amazing fighting color-coded tumors, a fucking bomb defusal with a scalpel and a surgical laser, and of course the peril of triangles. That is all, see you next time!