#THIS WAS ONE OF THE ONLY NPCS WHOSE DIALOGUE I EVER READ IN THE GAME

[dawnleaf37]

also theres this npc in world // zero in the first area that says "im gonna grow up to be a summoner just like my dad" and in the new 10th area you can actually find him with a summon next to him and he says like "i became a summoner, just like my dad! he was the very best..." and i kid you not i nearly cried

[first-impressions-gaming]

Redfall

Developed by Arkane Austin and Roundhouse

Published by Bethesda

Release Date 2023

Tested on Xbox Series X

MSRP 59,99 USD

Which game made you ask ‘why would I play this game when I can play X or Y?’, this is a question I ask myself rarely when I am ‘playing’ a game but not ‘enjoying’ myself. I do play it, I press buttons, I follow the path to the mission location, complete the tasks, and I cannot stop myself comparing the one I’m currently playing to similar games. Here is the gist of this: when you create a game, or think of a game you have certain mechanics, plot, progression and story in mind, and on paper it might look cool, the execution not so though. Redfall falls into the same pit for me, when you browse what it offers, it sounds like a decent game to play, the way it plays out isn’t what I expected.

What is this vampire game about? You are in fictional town Redfall in United States. When a scientific experiment went south, some sort of plague or virus spread across the town and it got overrun with vampires. You play as one of four survivors, your mission is to exterminate vampires and their human worshippers, who are named Cultists. Each survivor class has its own unique abilities, and when you read descriptions of skills, you clearly see the intended direction of gameplay, this is designed as a co-op game in mind, if you are basically playing it solo like me, you’d lean towards two characters and disregard the other two (these two being more like ‘support’ classes which rely upon the other two ‘aggressive’ and ‘damage-heavy’ classes.)

The starting plot does not go deep in story. Apart from the opening sequence I did not find the story progression that appealing, at first it felt we had a solid foundation where the cutscene shows a ship leaving Redfall and getting attacked by unnatural forces, we waking up shipwrecked on coast of Redfall in this surreal sea waves which are frozen around us. We are tasked to go to a fire station, kill all the Cultists and power on generator, and release the citizens from a barred room. From that point onwards, the fire station becomes our base, you can buy medkits, weapons, ammo etc, and interact with NPCs in the most uninteresting way, these interactions are so void of meaning and substance that I wish there had been no option to interact at all.

One NPC bugged and I couldn’t even interact with him because it did not work when I pressed the interaction button. It is even funnier to see the button says “Talk”, this is not talking, this is only some NPC repeating same set of lines in loop. If there had been an actual dialogue and NPCs telling us about their lives before all these happened to set some groundwork as a backstory, I would have accepted that. NPCs at base are two dimensional, they don’t have any distinct personality, I wish there was more to them, I guarantee you will forget their names in a minute and won’t care about them ever.

There is an NPC woman in base whose only action is to lean towards the vending machine, press the button on it, and kick the machine. This is all what she does over and over again! And it is even worse to see that her fingers do not touch the buttons on the machine, there is a big gap between the machine and her hand. Another NPC woman sits on a chair, and when you press ‘Talk’ button, she sighs or groans. Well, that is one way to ‘talk’, am I right? NPCs in this game are such a joke, I cannot take them seriously one bit, sorry.

In addition to fire station as your main base, there are safezones around the map that you can unlock by powering on the generator nearby, and you can fast travel to these zones, replenish your ammo and accept safezone-specific side missions. Both in safezones and fire station there are billboard that have the town map on them and there are tables next to them, when you wish to check out available missions you are to interact with the table, and it pops up a simple window with mission descriptions in it, there you can accept your next mission. Why didn’t developers use these already-created billboard as the table/window for missions? Ideally,  you would display available missions on relevant locations, enabling the player to be familiar with locations and Redfall, but no, instead of this, you have this bland window with zero appeal. This is a missed opportunity. When you accept a mission, the game does not tell or show you the location for it, you need to open your Map menu, find the location, and ping it to track it down. The developers did not make use of billboards as a mission window and you put extra steps for the player to track down the current mission. 

Here are the clips for mission windows:

I cannot wrap my head around the difficulty in this game, even though I set the difficulty for the easiest option, there are levels and missions I cannot pass at all. This is not a ‘skill’ issue per se, this is about vampires being overpowered and having fast movement and me having underpowered weapons for the task. 

As you can see in this clip, I am overwhelmed by six or seven vampires and my most powerful shotgun barely hurts them. This is a vampire nest I am in, a main mission, therefore I naturally think that ‘the game  should provide a powerful enough weapon for me to succeed in this mission’. My guns are no use here, I cannot get through these vampires, I already failed couple of times in this mission. This is a point that is defined as ‘quitting-moment’ when a player is frustrated by the game’s approach or when s/he thinks the game works against her/him and blocking the progression.

Let’s get to vampires. Setting and promise of the game don’t make the best use of vampires in fact. You will see them around the map and special mission locations. Vampires and Cultists are too superficial, they hang around buildings, strolling in streets. As a player, I feel the need to be threatened by them, scared ıf them to some point, however you will encounter them perching on rooftops or standing in the middle of a street as a group, when you make noise around them, they say things like “we gonna get you” or “you will regret this” as such, these lines are so cheesy and lack originality. Since you come across and fight Cultists and vampires almost exactly in the same way, the game butchers itself by stripping away vampires of any distinguishable attributes. Shouldn’t the focus on the vampires? Why do cultists and vampires act alike and why isn’t there a separation in terms of places for cultists and vampires? I wanted the game to narrate the origin story for vampires, how they invaded the town and why or how some people started worshipping them. Unfortunately, all these questions remain unanswered and the game leaves so much on the table.

I got closer to a group of Cultists and waited for them to see if they interact with one another, they say a few stereotypical lines but their lines don’t correspond to what the other person just said, they are so random, in short, they don’t hold a conversation:

You will see places which have this red mist floating, apparently this damages you and slows you down a little bit by disorienting the character, the game does not explain what this is or whether you can get rid of this by achieving something particular, besides this, I want to touch upon how low-quality it looks. For real, it looks like pixelated red paint up close, it looks solid instead of being ‘foggy’.

I also encountered four civilians in total in two occasions, in the first one a group of Cultists seemed to having kidnapped them and I killed them, and released the civilians. In the second time, there were no Cultists around, civilians were out in open street with their hands tied with ropes, as the player you push the button and release them, the question has to be asked, who are these civilians, under what conditions were they kidnapped, and where do they go when I release them? There is zero information given by the game as if this has been put into the game as an afterthought, this is so shallow and amateurish. Implementing a low-effort mechanic or feature is worse than not applying it at all, because every non-enjoyable mechanic wears down the player’s experience. You cannot just throw everything in there and say “okay, you have every subpar mechanic here, try to enjoy it”.

As I briefly mentioned, there are four classes/characters to choose from, and I picked Layla, who is an african-american college student in Redfall, you know how important the voice acting, the tone of the artist and lines s/he speaks in a game, this is one of the core pillars of world-building, if the player is to establish attachment with the character, this is the first step to do so. Honestly, if this game is intended to be an arcade-vampire shooter game, the voice acting suits it, but if this game targets a more mature serious tone with thriller elements, this is not the case here. First, the character Layla is a citizen of this town, and it gets raided by vampires and you cannot escape the town, you’re trapped here, this sounds like a pretty serious situation here, but Layla makes B-movie jokes, does not take so much seriously and acts like as if she is in a teenager zombie movie. This is one of her lines: “So which one of us do you think is going to die first? I mean we’re basically in a horror movie, right? You know what happens to brown people.” Is this the best writing a game can offer set in a vampire apocalypse? 

Lastly, I’d like to show you the menus and the rest of what the game presents, in a nutshell you have your inventory, character skins, map, missions, skill tree, codex entries. This is first-person game and you don’t see your character in-game ever, not even in cutscenes, therefore character skins are pretty much redundant if you ask me, unless you play the game co-op and you’d like to show off your skins. I wish codex entries enriched the experience and backstory a little bit, but they don’t hold that much of a value, they are basic, simple without deeper attention-to-detail. 

Redfall didn’t meet my expectations in any category. The combat/gunplay, the story, traversal, world-building and mission-progression all are disappointments, it is sad to see a game fail this miserably.

[feralphoenix]

SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THIS: The Mechanics of the Infection

welcome back to feral’s essay tag where the hot takes don’t stop from keep being hot!

this particular meta has a Lot of citations from canon, and my plan is to have them as actual footnotes in the dreamwidth mirror when that goes up (as i always crosspost my meta there in case my layout text is too small for any folks accessing these from computer and not mobile).

CONTENT WARNING FOR TONIGHT’S PROGRAM: This essay contains discussion of body horror, cancer, and many of the darker aspects of Hallownest’s society.

ALSO, AS USUAL: I read Hollow Knight as anti-colonialist fiction and all of my meta approaches the text from that angle. This essay is strongly critical of the Pale King and Hallownest, and affords sympathy to pre-Hallownest societies & native characters, including Radiance. If you come from a Christian cultural background (regardless of whether you currently practice the religion or not), some of the concepts I am going to discuss may be challenging for you. Please be responsible in your choice whether to engage with this content, and also, be respectful here or wherever else you’re discussing this essay. Thanks.

SWEET DREAMS ARE MADE OF THIS: The Mechanics of the Infection

If you’ve ever looked through my Hollow Knight tags, you have probably seen me joke about the Infection like a lot, usually along the lines of Radiance casting Level 9 Inflict Tang on Hallownest, or “(radi voice) the End of EVA will continue until you Let My People Go” or some such. In addition to being some of the most beautiful body horror I’ve yet seen in fiction, its appearance also makes it a veritable meme factory.

It is also something that inspires a lot of very wild theorizing amongst fans, because canon tells us WHY the Infection exists but doesn’t ever directly explain WHAT it is. To name just a few of the guesses I’ve seen, people have posited that it could be some sort of pupa juice, or maybe some type of parasitic fungus.

I have my own guess, though, and it’s based on hints we can find in-game. I would like to share it with the class today, so let’s take a quick look through the sauce, starting with what we already know!

WHY

We learn why the Infection happened from Seer and Moss Prophet, and this is also summed up more directly in Team Cherry’s dev notes attached to Seer.

The Pale King wanted to be the only god of light in the crater,* so he tried to kill Radiance by thralling her children - attracting the moths with his light and making them forget about her,** assimilating them into Hallownest. Radiance survived because some moths still remembered and tried to preserve what they could of their original culture,*** and eventually she attempted to reassert her existence and communicate with the bugs of the crater by speaking to them through their dreams. However, the Pale King realized what was happening and ordered his worshippers to shut her out.****

Radiance did not give up, and continued to broadcast her message through dreams. This unstoppable force VS immovable object conflict could not last forever - something eventually had to give, and what gave was the mortals.***** The Infection was an accident that Radiance did not initially intend, but presumably chose to weaponize after the fact as a way to attempt to pressure TPK into releasing the moths and leaving her alone (or, barring that, a way to thoroughly destroy his kingdom at the very least).

SOURCES:

* “No blazing kin. Only one light shall shine against the dark.” - Lore tablet hidden beside the Pale King’s throne in the White Palace.

** “None of us can live forever, and so we ask those who survive to remember us. Hold something in your mind and it lives on with you, but forget it and you seal it away forever. That is the only death that matters.” - Seer’s 1200 Essence dialogue.

*** “But the memories of that ancient light still lingered, hush whispers of faith... Until all of Hallownest began to dream of that forgotten light.” - Seer’s 2400 Essence dialogue.

**** “The King and the bugs of hallownest resisted this memory/power and it started to manifest as the infection.” - from Team Cherry’s dev notes attached to Seer.

***** “Light is life, beaming, pure, brilliant. To stifle that light is to suppress nature. Nature suppressed distorts, plagues us.” - Moss Prophet's dialogue.

HOW

Now that we’ve recapped why the Infection exists, let’s examine the process of how the Infection works. We see some examples of this with various characters in-game, and the Hunter also shares his observations of the Infection’s mechanics in his commentary on the Infected Crossroads entries.

Since we’ll be bringing up the Hunter's Journal here, I want to first examine three entries to establish its dual authorship and how trustworthy it is: The Shade’s entry, the Lightseed’s, and Radiance’s.

We know that the bottom section of the Hunter’s Journal is the Hunter’s personal notes on each creature because the game itself tells us so. So who writes the notes on top that give a brief explanation of what each creature is? It’s a common fan theory that Ghost writes these, which I believe is indeed the case.

First let’s look at the Shade, which is automatically unlocked when we receive the Hunter's Journal in-game regardless of whether we have died and fought the Shade or not. Mechanically this is important because if the Shade weren’t unlocked by default it would be impossible to attain the Hunter achievements without dying at least once - this would REALLY suck for anybody who likes to suffer enough to try to complete the journal in Steel Soul mode.

The Shade’s entry reads:

Echo of a previous life. Defeat it to retake its power and become whole.

-

Each of us leaves an imprint of something when we die. A stain on the world. I don’t know how much longer this kingdom can bear the weight of so many past lives...

Notice that the top text knows exactly what the Shade is and how it works. In story terms, this would imply that Ghost has died and come back enough pre-game to understand the mechanics of how their revivals work.

The Lightseed’s entry reads:

A single-celled organism, completely infected. Scurries about simple-mindedly.

-

Strange air has been seeping down from above for years. Some of the air became liquid, and some of that liquid became flesh, and some of that flesh came to life. I don’t know what to make of it.

In this entry, the top text assumes that Lightseeds are a Lifeseed-like creature that has been infected, and the Hunter’s notes reveal that this is incorrect and the Lightseeds were actually born from the Infection itself. From this we learn that the top text isn’t omniscient and can be mistaken: It’s written from a limited perspective.

And here’s Radi’s entry:

The light,* forgotten.

-

The plague, the infection, the madness that haunts the corpses of Hallownest... the light that screams out from the eyes of this dead Kingdom. What is the source? I suppose mere mortals like myself will never understand.

Here, the top text has information that the Hunter doesn’t, and which only a handful of bugs are privy to anymore.

From these three examples, I believe it is safe to say that Ghost is in fact the author of the journal entries’ top segments.

It’s important to remember that the observations these characters make can be not wholly correct, and I’ll bring that up when I believe it to be relevant, but for now let’s build a picture of how a case of the Infection generally progresses by looking at the Hunter’s commentary on Infected Crossroads enemies, and at a handful of characters whose Infection we directly observe: Bretta, Sly, Myla, and Moss Prophet.

The Hunter describes the broad arc of Infection progression in the Violent Husk's entry: “First [the bugs of Hallownest] fell into deep slumber, then they awoke with broken minds, and then their bodies started to deform...”

The two NPCs who we can save from becoming Infected, Bretta and Sly, are initially found emitting orange fog and mumbling to themselves. In Bretta’s case, when listened to, she initially talks about being left behind and forgotten** as she assumes that all people will treat her this way even though she craves affection and attention; Dream Nailed either before or after being listened to, she mentions a “shining figure”.***

Meanwhile, Sly speaks about his pupil Oro and someone named Esmy, and when his symptoms subside he identifies that he was led to the Crossroads village ruins by a dream.****

Listening to Bretta and Sly completely brings them back to reality, after which they leave the underground area entirely to return to Dirtmouth. However, when the player encounters Myla after defeating Soul Master and obtaining Descending Dive, listening to her does not cause any change in her condition despite that she is not yet hostile.

During these encounters, Bretta is surrounded by orange fog, Sly is surrounded by orange fog and his eyes have also begun to turn orange, and Myla's eyes are glowing but there is no fog around her. So, we can deduce that for as long as the orange fog is present, a bug may still be awoken and cured (Bretta and Sly both show no signs of relapse over the course of the game), but once the fog disappears the bug can no longer be saved by external means.

The "deformation" that the Hunter mentions in the Violent Husk entry refers to the large blobs of Infection that develop on the bodies of creatures that have been infected for a long period of time. We observe these upon the Infected Crossroads enemies, as well as on Hollow and the Moss Prophet. We also see that these Infection tumors can eventually kill bugs once they grow too large and impede bodily functions, just like real cancer: The Moss Prophet and Mossy Vagabonds are all discovered in this state after the Crossroads become infected, as are the Husk Guards in the Crossroads.

So, the progression we can see here is that bugs become infected through their dreams, and while they can initially be woken, if left alone they will fall into too deep a sleep to wake up. Some time after this they will start to move around again but will be hostile to any creatures that are not infected. And, if left in this state for a very long period of time, they will develop tumorous growths which are potentially fatal.

Potentially fatal. This is an interesting contradiction to a basic assumption that most players - and even Ghost and the Hunter - seem to hold about the Infection: That is, that the Infection functions like a pop-culture zombie plague, and infected creatures are all undead (reanimated dead things that can't be killed); thus that the enemies that respawn after resting or going offscreen are the same ones that Ghost just murdered, and have simply been reanimated by the Infection once again.

But infected creatures can die of the Infection. What’s more, bosses and unique instances of generic enemies (such as Myla and the Moss Knight at the pier of Unn’s lake) do not respawn once killed. And it’s definitely not that Ghost killed them that counts: Traitor Lord dies whether Ghost fights him solo or whether Cloth is brought along, in which case she always gets the final blow. This creates the argument that the respawning generics are NOT in fact the same individuals reanimated over and over, but different individuals of the same enemy class, and that their different respawn rates speak to how plentiful those creatures are - small animals respawning faster because a new one will arrive in the recently killed one’s territory sooner, for instance.

Ghost and the Hunter both seem to assume that infected enemies are all undead - many creatures are identified as “husks” or “the remains of [whatever specific bug]” in the Hunter's Journal. But we’ve already established that sometimes Ghost and the Hunter are wrong.

So, if infected creatures aren’t undead, then what are they?

SOURCES:

* I find it a very interesting tidbit of characterization for Ghost that they refer to Radiance as the Light, as native bugs do, rather than calling her the Old Light, as Hallownest bugs did. This has some fascinating implications for where Ghost feels their allegiances to be, but that's neither here nor there right now lol.

** “Ohhh... please... don’t leave me behind! You... forgot about me...? I knew you would... everyone always forgets about me...” - Bretta’s dialogue, Fungal Wastes encounter

*** “...Shining figure...So bright...” - Bretta’s Dream Nail dialogue, Fungal Wastes encounter

**** “...ugghh, Oro you oaf.... You wield your nail... like a club... ...Esmy... how much deeper do we have to go... Oh! What?! Who are you?! ...I see. This old village. What a strange dream, to have led me down here! If you hadn’t found me, I don’t think I would’ve ever woken.” - Sly’s dialogue, Crossroads village encounter

WHAT

In a move very on-brand for Hollow Knight, there’s actually a line from Seer that gives the whole game away - and I mean this incredibly literally, she declares her loyalty to Radiance and says Fuck Hallownest and also hints at what she hopes for from Ghost all in two breaths!! - except that most players are never going to see this line because Seer only says this if you screw up platforming in the Forgotten Dream and yeet yourself off a platform before picking up the Dream Nail.

I do not doubt that I could wring a whole essay out of this one line by itself (and Seer deserves an essay from me so maybe I will), but today the part we’re concerned with is the third line of this dialogue, i.e. how she describes the Dream Nail to Ghost: “The power to wake this world from its slumber[.]”

Its slumber.

The Infection doesn’t only spread through dreams. It is a dream.

To put it in a more meta/video game mechanics sort of way, the Infection is a status ailment. Sleep exists as a common status ailment in RPGs, strategy games, and even some adventure games and platformers. Usually the status ailment of sleep is a mild nuisance that wears off after time, when a character is struck, or if the requisite curative is used; in comparison the Infection is Sleep But Bass Boosted. Appropriate, for a glorified status ailment that’s inflicted by the literal actual god of dreams.

The Infection can only be cured in the very early stages. Once an infected creature has fallen into a coma, there’s no longer any hope of a third party breaking the curse... and also, infected creatures sleepwalk. Violently.

This may also provide an explanation for why mummified bugs in the catacombs have been infected, too: If they were freshly dead and their lingering spirit was still attached enough to their corpses, and that lingering spirit retained enough of a mind to dream...

Aside from those mummified bugs, though, I believe it likely that most if not all of the infected enemies in-game are very, very much alive.

Beyond all the dialogue and lore crumbs pointing to the Infection simply being a cursed sleep, this explanation makes the most sense when thinking about Radiance as a character. She is the literal embodiment of dreams as well as the sun, so inflicting eternal slumber with bonus malignant sleepwalking is a natural extension of her power and a way to use it offensively without being directly violent.

(I've written about this at length elsewhere, but signs point to Radiance having been a pacifist prior to the Pale King’s invasion. Short version: The Moth Tribe were pacifists and Radiance was the center of their culture so it would be odd if she were an exception; she is incapable of inflicting any physical harm whatsoever in a game where lack of contact damage from an active enemy indicates helplessness and such enemies always flee from Ghost unless they have a tool they can use to fight with; her behavior in her boss battles indicates a lack of combat experience, and her nail-generating spells seem to be based on Hollow’s abilities. Real-life adult moths cannot fight - they defend themselves with flight, camouflage, mimicry, and I’m Poisonous So Fuck Off coloring.)

Now, I don’t want to downplay the harm the Infection causes - it doesn’t have to turn bugs into literal undead zombies to be devastating. What we can glean of Hallownest’s ruins suggests that as a state it was heavily dependent on labor to run its industry, so incapacitating the laborers would have turned the whole country on its head, especially because those laborers cannot be woken. The Infection also created an intense atmosphere of terror throughout Hallownest as bugs tried to discover ways to cure it or at least protect themselves. And as the Hunter observes,* because of how the Infection is caused, the harder you try to block Radiance out, the worse the Infection will get.

(A sidebar: Interestingly, the Infection's progress seems to be very slow when a creature willingly accepts it; Moss Prophet has Infection tumors when met but doesn’t die of them until the Crossroads is infected, though many Crossroads bugs are found dead of tumors immediately. Traitor Lord and his followers opted in to the Infection long ago, but Traitor Lord is still at the “orange fog” stage and could theoretically be cured, if he wanted to be. Both Traitor Lord and Moss Prophet are still completely lucid, too.)

Radiance may not have committed any direct violence against Hallownest, but the Infection does incite violence: infected creatures become hostile to and will attack the uninfected. And as we’ve discussed, the Infection itself can become fatal once it’s progressed far enough for tumorous growths to form.

A god smiting the shit out of her people’s oppressors by nonviolently but thoroughly disrupting their kingdom, Especially if that kingdom is a genocidal colonialist slave state,** as a Let My People Go And Leave Me Alone :) ultimatum is not unreasonable. (And Moss Prophet tells us point-blank that literally just listening to Radiance in the first place would have prevented the Infection before it began!) But despite that Hallownest as an institution is unambiguously awful, Hallownest bugs victimized by their own state (such as the maggot slaves and other menial workers) probably saw much less benefit from Hallownest’s genocides than the rich and nobility, and likely deserved the smiting way less than said rich and nobility.

Meanwhile Hallownest’s neighbors - all native nations who are just as much victims of TPK’s bullshit as the Moth Tribe - did not deserve to get caught up in the smiting at all.

Lateral harm in Hollow Knight is another topic that deserves its own essay - and more than that, lots of in-depth conversation! - but, again, that’s not the topic we want to focus on today. I do want to make it clear, though, that infected creatures being alive and theoretically wakeable if the curse should end doesn’t suddenly mean the Infection was actually no big deal. If you want your jimmies rustled, try Dream Nailing enemies that pull from the generic Dream Nail dialogue pool: They are on some level aware that they’re dreaming and can’t wake.***

Clues that the Infection is literally a dream are littered all over the game, from Elderbug’s initial dialogue**** to the name of ending 3, Dream No More - not only named that because that’s the ending where Ghost sacrifices Radiance’s life as well as their own to end Hollow’s suffering rather than only sacrificing their freedom.

Some of what Bardoon and Moss Prophet have to say about the Infection is suggestive of the nature of this dream, though. Moss Prophet appeals to their audience to find unity through the Infection,***** and Bardoon also remarks on this, though he cautions that this comes at the cost of being reduced to instinct.****** Dreaming does tend to come hand in hand with lack of inhibition and suggestibility, but I’m more interested in what Moss Prophet and Bardoon mean by unity, since infected creatures’ thoughts are different depending on what they are and what they were already doing while awake.

There's less specific hard evidence for this aside from how we can observe that Infection blobs are connected to Radiance, transmitting her heartbeat and birthing the Lightseeds, her unintended creations. But given that those blobs do originate from Infection fluid according to the Hunter... Radiance is not just the embodiment of dreams but the heart of THE Dream. So could the Infection be a forcible pseudo-immersion into that capital-D Dream, the Dream Realm itself?

Whether my hunch here is right or not, I can’t in good faith end this essay without bringing all y’all’s attention to absolutely my favorite bit of The Infection Is A Dream foreshadowing: The way multiple parties mention the fact that the Infection smells and tastes sweet.*******

You know... it’s sweet... it’s a sweet dream... get it.........

And now that you can no longer unsee that brilliantly awful pun, I think I'll see myself out!

SOURCES:

* “The infection that swept through Hallownest so long ago... they say that the harder you struggled against it, the more it consumed you.” - Hunter’s commentary, Slobbering Husk Hunter’s Journal entry.

** I’m referring, of course, to the maggots. See: “Weakest members of the kingdom of Hallownest. Generally looked down upon and forced to do menial labour.” (Ghost’s commentary) and “If they try to bargain for their life, just ignore them. They have nothing to offer.” (Hunter’s commentary) from the Maggot Hunter's Journal entry as well as False Knight/Failed Champion’s backstory. Remember also that maggots are the larval form of flies like Sly (you’ll see the resemblance if you compare Sly’s features to the maggot siblings’), meaning Hallownest employs child slavery. In more cheerful news Sly’s backstory must be absolutely goddamn wild.

*** “I’m not...Dead..” “Am I...Sleeping?” “I can’t....Wake up...” - Dream Nail dialogue from generic Hallownest bugs (Wandering Husk, Leaping Husk, Horned Husk, Husk Bully, Husk Warrior) and from God Tamer for some reason

**** “Perhaps dreams aren't such great things after all...” - Elderbug’s initial dialogue

***** “Embrace light! Achieve union!” - Moss Prophet’s dialogue

****** “Theirs is a different kind of unity. Rejection of the Wyrm’s attempt at order. I resist the light’s allure. Union it may offer, but also a mind bereft of thought... To instinct alone a bug is reduced...Hrrm...” - Bardoon’s dialogue (Listen four times, not counting other dialogue flags)

******* “A thick orange mist fills these walking corpses. It has a sweet, sickly taste to it. I find it foul. After you kill these creatures, I suggest you do not eat them.” - Hunter’s commentary, Husk Bully Hunter’s Journal entry, just for one example.

[bluerosesonata]

A Window to the Soul: Game Mechanics and Characters in Ai: the Somnium Files

Spoiler-free!

Ai: The Somnium Files is an adventure game/visual novel for PC, PS4, and the Nintendo Switch by Spike Chunsoft in September 2019. Written and directed by Kotaro Uchikoshi, known for his Zero Escape Trilogy (999: Nine Persons, Nine Hours, Nine Doors (DS), Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward (DS), and Zero Time Dilemma (DS, PS Vita, PC), also available as the Zero Escape Trilogy on Steam and PS4), this game once again displays Uchikoshi’s signature combination of suspense, humor, and ludonarrative harmony that fans of his previous games are familiar with, alongside a cast of complex, compelling characters you’ll absolutely fall in love with.

For all my fellow Zero Escape fans, you probably remember the issues the series faced with financing, which ultimately lead to Uchikoshi helping to establish Spike Chunsoft and the eventual release of Zero Time Dilemma. In AitSF, more than ever, the fruits of that partnership are apparent. It feels we finally get to see a complete picture of Uchikoshi’s vision; Featuring fully animated 3d models, fully voiced dialogue, and some incredibly goofy and self-indulgent dance sequences, this murder mystery (and yes, it is a murder mystery) is absolutely worth it’s full price and your time.

The game has multiple endings (About 5, without checking), all leading up to and feeding into the true ending. One notable feature is that the timeline allows you to jump into previous played sections at any point of the chapter, and even provides summaries of the events that happened in each “node,” so unlike in the original 999,  you don’t need to replay through every scene of dialogue to get to each ending.

Rather than spend time analyzing the story itself- something that can’t be done to a satisfying level without spoiling the whole thing- I’ll just say that the way Uchikoshi literally has us get inside the heads of characters by “syncing” with them is a great story device, and is realized extremely well in the gameplay. For me, the Sync was used in all the right places to push me into genuinely caring about some characters, that, without the sync, I would be sympathetic to, but not feel a real sense of attachment towards.

What follows is a breakdown and analysis of how well the gameplay is designed, and some non-spoilery discussion of characterization and character design:

Mechanics:

The core gameplay loop can be broken into two parts: dialogue and investigation, and “syncing.”

The investigation portion of the game is similar to most adventure visual novels- investigating crime scenes, talking to NPCs to advance the story, examining your surroundings, and in my case, clicking on scenery over and over again to get funny flavor dialogue.

The flavor dialogue does not disappoint- and for me, the best minor feature included in the game ties to this. When you click on an object, you get an initial string of dialogue- but the indicator with the name of the object will only get grayed out once you’ve seen all the text related to that object. For some people, this might ruin the “fun” of clicking over and over again- like in 999, where some bits of dialogue would only display on the 9th time examining an object- but for me, it was a godsend, because I didn’t spend any time wondering if I missed anything funny.

The Sync gameplay loop is also mechanically brilliant. Part of the in-universe rules, which are emphasized over and over, is that the main character, Date, can only spend 6 minutes within the subject’s “Somnium”- the internal dreamscape of their mind- and that staying any longer could result in disastrous consequences. As such, each Somnium loop attempt can (hypothetically) be experienced in chunks of about 8-10 minutes. This set time frame makes it a breeze to play the game in small sections at a time and let your mind breathe a bit. The time limitation is challenging, but never infuriating; even when I messed up horribly and knew I had to restart a sync from the beginning, I would just use the time I had remaining to try out the goofier actions available to try out as puzzle solutions.

Somnium Files’ adaptability to being played in long sittings or in short bursts, while still maintaining an engaging, tense narrative is an incredible strength that not all games can boast of. Not a single part of the game felt like a slog or a chore to me, unlike a few puzzles in Zero Time Dilemma, where I ran into the perennial adventure game issue of  “okay, so I have this item, but where do I use it?”, “how the hell do I even solve this puzzle without a guide” (I didn’t), and “what do I need to do to unlock the next sequence?”

Characters

So let’s talk about these good characters. Some of you probably recognized the art style for the game’s key visual as the work of Yusuke Kozaki, best known by many as the head artist and character designer for Fire Emblem: Awakening and Fire Emblem: Fates. Even in his work for the Fire Emblem franchise, you can tell he doesn’t care much for drawing armor- which puts him in the same club as literally every artist I know who draws Fire Emblem fan art. His designs really shine in a contemporary setting, with modern clothing, and really give the cast a unified, unique aesthetic. Moreover, the designs are beautifully translated into 3D as well.

For a game that was most likely well underway in development several years prior to the boom of the subgenre, the design for A-set, (AKA Iris), an in-game internet idol and streamer, is incredibly in line with those of many successful “Virtual Youtubers”- for that alone it deserves some accolades. Fittingly, as part of online promotion for the game, Chunsoft posted a series of video blogs starring  A-set, as if she were posting to her own channel. (I missed all of these, and that’s a real shame, because I think they would have gotten me excited for the game if I had been paying attention.)

Despite Iris’ obvious and engineered marketability, I think my favorite design of the game is Aiba, the AI partner of the main character, whose human form only appears in Somnium and in the realm world as an AR projection imposed in Date’s cybernetic eye. The way her arms fade into glowing, electronic “nerves” at her arms is a subtle reminder of her artificiality, but her design also doesn’t make her more playful and goofy behaviors jarring in the least.

As far as personalities go, I would say that Date, our protagonist, manages to hit the perfect median- maybe even fusion- between the past male protagonists in the Zero Escape trilogy. Junpei, Sigma, and Carlos were all likable in their own ways, as the narrative character, but all had a level of blandness to them. To me, they served more as vehicles for us to participate in the Nonary Games.

In contrast, Date feels very much like his own, established person, and that’s not only a huge strength, but central to the overall narrative. (For all non-ZE fans reading this review- I apologize for the heavy use of ZE comparisons here.) Like Sigma, Date is a bit of a perv, but unlike Sigma in Virtue’s Last Reward, I didn’t feel squicked out by his behavior; Like Carlos, he cares immensely for the people important to him, and puts their wellbeing first; Like Junpei, he’s, also, a loveable moron.

There are other characters- Mizuki in particular- whom I can’t speak too much about without spoiling some of the enjoyment of their character arcs, but all of them have incredibly good and complicated interpersonal relationships both with and outside of Date.

Lastly, there’s Aiba. A good companion character is worth their weight in gold. After all, most of the time, they’re who you spend most of your time with, and for that reason, the more “annoying” ones always catch more flac for being so. For me, Aiba easily slides into my top 10 favorite companion characters of all time, along such members as Maya Fey in the original Ace Attorney trilogy and Midna from Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Most of the goofiest sequences in the game are instigated by her, and every time she’s on screen there’s bound to be something fun to do, not to mention the fact she’s our avatar used within Somnium. Combine that and her telepathic banter with Date, and you got a recipe for a dynamic duo.

In closing, every aspect of AitSF is absolutely delightful; It has tightly woven narrative gameplay, wonderful and complex characters, a storyline that, despite my best efforts, I couldn’t unravel the details of before they were revealed- and I didn’t even get into how great the voice acting is. If you’re looking for an enjoyable, self-contained game that you can beat in under 35 hours, Ai: The Somnium Files can’t be beat.

[benisasoftboi]

Unorganised thoughts on Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter:

Unorganised thoughts on the first game are here

No longer spoiler-free, sorry

So tl;dr I loved this game and I love these characters and this world and I’m so excited to play through the whole rest of the series. What an underrated gem

I liked that everyone’s status portraits were updated, FC’s were a little rough. Except Olivier’s - his original art is miles better, good lord. The updated one is so generic :(

Speaking of updates, here’s some on how I feel about the major characters:

Estelle: Estelle deserves the world. I love her and her development, she’s just so great. What I especially love is that I cannot think of any other JRPG hero I’ve seen who reacts to the villain’s grand monologue like she does. Most of the time it’s like, huge declarations of justice, and how evil will never win, but Estelle’s reaction to Weissmann ranting about the inherent evil of man was just, like, ‘nah, actually that’s stupid, I love my friends and we’re all nice people. You just suck dude’. And that works so well, and it was really refreshing, honestly. I just...  love her. I really love her.

Joshua: This poor traumatised boy who also deserves the world, my god. His backstory was so much darker than I was expecting (if I understood right, there were some implications that sexual assaults occurred in the Hamel massacre!? And that it nearly happened to his sister!? Which made me have to sit back for a moment because I did not think this game was gonna go there and it threw me for a loop). I like how his whole arc is about learning to not define himself by his trauma, I haven’t really seen that in a game before. I also love him.

I think Estelle and Joshua cute together and I support their romance, but if the game could stop reminding me post-get together that they used to be pseudo-siblings that would be great thank you

Agate: I did the Agate route mostly because I prefer using him in combat, and goddamn if I thought I liked him before. I think his arc is one of the best in the game, and I love him, and are you seeing a pattern? His friendship with Tita is also so sweet. I want to be friends with Agate

Schera: Might have had more to say if I’d done her route. I appreciated getting her backstory, and I thought her relationship with Luciola was well done, if not incredibly fascinating. As it stands, I like her just fine, even if I’m not as passionate about her as I am some of the others

Olivier: I still love this guy. I had his twist spoiled, but let’s face, it wasn’t the hardest to guess anyway. His rivalry with Bleublanc was funny, as are most of his interactions with other characters. He’s good comic relief in general, and I love using him in combat - on that note, though, I’m very angry with him for leaving in chapter 8, because he was the character I had invested the most into arts-wise, so I had to go fix up Schera just for that chapter (and then swapped to Zin as we lost ZFGs, for obvious reasons). I will say that he seems to have become a little more... creepy feels like a strong word, but I don’t think he was so forwardly suggestive in FC. It felt to me like he sort of went from Yusuke Kitagawa to Yosuke Hanamura, in a sense. But all the same, I still like him

He should have stayed in his prince look at the end though, it suits him better

Side note, I really love Mueller, and I love his and Olivier’s interactions, and I want more Mueller, why does he have to be a minor character :(

Kloe: So I wasn’t super into Kloe in FC, but I actually really loved her this time around - I thought her arc about deciding whether or not to accept the crown was well done, and the little conversation she and Estelle can have on the stage at the academy is one of my favourite scenes in both games. Also GOOD LORD do I love her outfit change at the end, she’s so pretty I want to cry

Tita: Most of what I like about Tita is her friendship with Agate, and also how smart she is. I’d probably have more to say about her if I ever used her beyond when the plot forces me to (I don’t like using glass cannon characters in games), as the unfortunate nature of SC is that you don’t get much dialogue if you’re benched. But yeah, I still like her as a character

Zin: I don’t dislike Zin, but I still find him kind of dull compared to the others. He’s fine, he’s there, he’s got a backstory with Walter and Kilika and that’s neat. Honestly the main thing I remember about all that is Zin revealing that their master had terminal cancer because I kind of just... didn’t think cancer existed in this universe, I guess. It threw me

Kevin: Firstly, I find it really, really funny that such an important and mysterious character who looks the way he does is named ‘Kevin’. But yeah, I like Kevin, I’m excited to learn more about him in 3rd. I liked his relationship with Estelle (It’s nice to see a guy who’s capable of backing off without being an ass about it. Shame there’s such a low bar). I am, though, honestly very creeped out by the mere concept of the Gralsritters, ngl  

Bleublanc and Campanella were easily my favourite Enforcers. Bleublanc especially gets points for keeping himself relevant for the entire game

Renne is a character who I think I’m probably meant to feel more  sympathy for than I actually do, to be honest. You can’t make me like someone just by making them a cute little girl, Falcom, I’m sorry. Maybe I’ll feel differently after playing 3rd, I know she’s in it

I thought Loewe was well handled and I love that scene where he and Joshua hug at the end

I love the Ravens. I love that they got actual art. They’re amazing. I would play an entire spin-off game about the Ravens

And the Capuas! Can they all team up? Please?

Especially Josette, I came to really like her

A thing I’ve kind of realised about this game and its characters is that it’s a really good example of how tropes and cliches are not inherently bad - everyone in this game is based on some kind of mostly-unsubverted cliche, but they are incredibly well-executed cliches. You can have the most original characters in the world, but if they’re not written well, then what’s the point? I think a lot of writers conflate ‘unique’ and ‘surprising’ and (ugh) ‘subverting expectations’ with ‘good’. This game doesn’t make that mistake, and I appreciate that

Don’t get me wrong, unique and surprising and expectation subverting is also not inherently bad - just that it’s all in the execution

I like that Richard came back! And reformed! To be honest, though, (maybe this is controversial? idk), I thought he was a better antagonist than anyone in Ouroboros. His motivations made a lot more sense than those of most of the Enforcers 

Honestly (excluding Renne and Campanella because those haven’t been fully revealed to me yet) Bleublanc was really the only one with a motivation I liked - I can respect a villain who does crimes just for the sake of being an asshole

Oh yeah, there’s also Anelace and her team - they’re all great. I would like to know more about Grant, he doesn’t get to do much

The side quest in chapter 8 at the academy where we get Kurt and Anelace is one of the best quests in the game

Oh, and that reminds me, Gilbert! I love Gilbert, he’s so lame. Fighting him is hilarious

I was very happy to see minor NPC Clive on the Arseille at the end. It’s what he deserves

I love that this game got me invested in the lives of the random NPCs 

Screw that Abyss Worm bounty hunt, and also that fight with Renne on Ambryl Tower

I don’t know whose idea it was to fill this game, in this setting, with GIANT ROBOTS but it grew on me and I kind of love it now

I’ve decided Ruan is my favourite region, but Rolent is my favourite city

The Liber Ark is such a cool setting, I’m sad we only saw a tiny part of it for one chapter

I knew they weren’t going to kill off Joshua and Estelle, but I still cannot describe the rush of relief I felt when the dragon saved them at the end. I care about these kids, damnit!

There’s that one section in Grancel where everyone’s talking about Crossbell and then it never comes up again - set up the next arc of games a little less subtly, why don’t you?

(And then Cassius being like ‘the adventures will continue! But with other people!”) 

I read all of The Doll Knight and I genuinely enjoyed it

This game has maybe the best end credits I’ve ever seen

...think that’s all my thoughts expunged! Now to play 3rd :D

[secret-engima]

Bast? who is Bast, what story/fic are they from, who's character are they?

Ohhhhh right, I’ve never talked about him on here have I?

Okay so- Bast is .... “technically” a canon character from the game Horizon Zero Dawn? Technically? With big glowing air quotes? See, I have a WIP that started when a buddy of mine and I were chatting about our respective fav game (Horizon Zero Dawn for him and FFXV for me) and we had this- galaxy brain moment and realized that there are actually a LOT of storyline similarities between the two despite their very different worlds/plot specifics. Since I was the only one had the time who had played both games in their entirety, I was the one volunteered to write a giant crossover between those two games to explore the Galaxy Brain Moment. And for that- I needed a character to go from FFXV to HZD. I then Galaxy Brained again and came to the conclusion that the focus character had to be from the HZD-verse, who somehow went to FFXV-verse and lived through FFXV’s plot there, then woke up back on HZD in time to experience the plot there too.

But I didn’t want to make a 100% random OC and try to make people believe he’d hopped from HZD to FFXV and back, I wanted an ... anchor. A semi-familiar face that I could point at to go “see? He is from HZD!” and roll from there. So I looked around at the sprawling cast of background nobodies who had at least 3 lines of dialogue and were roughly in the age group I wanted for my victim character and ended up picking Bast, because he only had like- 2 short conversation/cutscenes in the game but was one that had a better chance of being recognized than a quest-giver NPC (plus he knew the HZD MC as a kid and I wanted to work with that). Thing is that Bast was like- a bully character. He bullies the MC of HZD because the “totally mature” adults in his life made him think that was okay to do to her and the only way we know he isn’t a complete jerk is that he dies trying to save someone else early in the game. So when you take this kid character who was meant to be a bully solely because of the culture/place he was raised in and then yeet him into another world from a young age so he’s raised in a totally DIFFERENT culture/setting/etc-.

Totally different character personality wise. There was no avoiding it and I 100% didn’t care.

SO ANYWAY that’s the very short version of how I ended up OC-inserting character as Bast, who was a minor HZD canon character, but without ever having to do the reincarnation trope or anything like that. I just- yote him into FFXV and had him grow up there and then had him wake up post-FFXV plot as a kid again in HZD to start all over so I could fully explore the similarities of the overall plots through the eyes of a character who has already lived one of those plots. He is now an ex-Kingsglaive and former ward of Queen Sylva Nox Fleuret, was a good friend of Crowe, Nyx, and Libertus, and spends much of the FFXV game escorting Luna around helping her avoid Nifs while waking up the Astrals. He makes it all the way through the long night and to the rising of the new dawn and then-

Wakes up as a kid in a world whose language he BARELY remembers, with people who think he’s crazy for talking King’s Speech, and who are a lot more primitive technology-wise than what he’s used to (also there are no daemons here??? no Garula?? No coeurls??? The ecosystem is totally different someone pls explain he’s so confused?????). Ends up getting raised alongside local orphan outcast Aloy because nobody else will tolerate his “crazy” and so gets sucked right into the HZD plot alongside her. Immediately recognizes some of the similarities that started this whole disaster and is currently alternating between wanting to go hyperventilate in a corner because It’s Happening Again or go out and murder something Because Not This Time Sucker.

I really enjoy writing him and his story arc, because I get to bounce between worlds to show the connections. One chapter is always in HZD and the next chapter after that is always in FFXV so I alternate between Bast’s past and his present to better point and go “SEE? SEE???”. But I will fully acknowledge he is more than a wee bit traumatized by what I’ve put him through so that’s why the poem I reblogged gave me such Bast vibes.

If anyone wants to read it, it’s up here on Ao3 and here on FanFiction. I only have the first two chaps up so far, but I’ve got several more pre-written and just waiting for me to sit down and edit. Which I intend to do. Eventually. When my brain will actually sit in Edit Mode for more than three seconds before screaming at the latest FFXV plunny that comes my way. *shrugs*

Feel free to drop an ask if you want any specifics about Bast!

[the-passenger-if]

because you’re the first (and my favorite) cog blog i follow, i was wondering if you had any tips on how to get into the coding and writing for my own story? any direction would be greatly appreciated! and of course sorry to bother you if you get a lot of these asks!

No problem at all :) This one will be a long answer, so I'll break it into two. Also, this is sort of a short break for me, I'll answer the other asks later.

Alright, I'll assume you have no idea about choicescript so sorry if I sound condescending or anything.

What you need:

- Notepad++

First the easy (ha!) part: coding.

Go to this page and read everything, DON'T download anything yet. That's the introduction to choicescript and it's pretty easy to follow (I mean, I could follow it and I have zero coding experience and half of my neurons might as well be mashed potatoes).

This page contains explanations to what each command does (it's shorter than it looks, I promise).

Once you have some idea of what does what it's time to talk about the pain in the butt that's been mozilla firefox latest update. You see, mozilla was the only browser that played nice with choicescript, any other will show you an error page if you try to run your game outside of dashingdon.com (the page that hosts the forum WIPs) and you need to test your game in private before uploading it for everyone to see. Then update 68 happened and it screwed us all (they could've waited until update 69, opportunity lost there, mozilla guys) so Dan (one of the creators of choicescript) found a workaround and I'm sure it's awesome for people whose brain cells aren't half brain cells, half mashed potatoes but for me it's like fifth grade math: impossible.

So here's the branching part of my explanation (how very interactive-fictiony of me) you can either go with Dan's way (best way) or you can go with mine ("easy" way). If you choose Dan's, you can read his posts, try to make sense of everything, then go back to the tutorial page and download node.js, and the choicescript source from github.

If you want to try it my way download an older version of mozilla, install it somewhere where it can't auto upgrade like some freaking skynet creep—I have mine in a USB stick. [NOTE: never ever use this downgraded version to browse the web unless you want an orgy of trojans all over your PC] Go here and download the file. It's a RAR of my own choicescript folder (hopefully I'm not doing something I shouldn't, but it's for educational purposes and I'm not getting anything out of this so idk). Extract it, go to your neutered mozilla and drag index.HTML (it's inside the 'web' foder) into it. The test "game" should run without problems.

There are 2 other HTML files that will be your best friends—if pretty dense sometimes; quicktest and randomtest. Just drag them in the same way you do with index. Here is where Notepad++ comes in handy since quicktest says stuff like: QUICKTEST FAILED LINE 1408 SHOULD BE A REPTILE BUT IT'S A TURTLE (quicktest you dumb dramatic bitch). Then you open the troubling scene in Notepad++ and look for the specific line that's making quicktest cry.

And that's all for the basics, then there's stuff like multireplace (awesome when your npcs can be either non-binary or binary and it looks something like this "Roach blows you a kiss" vs. "${r_they} @{r_plural wink|winks} at you") but all that is extra stuff that you learn as you realize you need some specific piece of coding for your game.

Now go out there and practice practice practice. Go to the forum and try different WIPs and every time one does something that has you like "how did they do this?" take a look at the code, try to figure it out, learn from what other people do. [To see a game's code you need to add /scenes after mygame/ so, for example, The Passenger's would look something like this https://dashingdon.com/play/pime/the-passenger/mygame/scenes/]

Also, always ask the author if you can use their code before adding it into your game (imho the way Malin coded Ortega's and Mortum's genders is the best way to go, so I sent him a pm asking if he was ok with me stealing his code and he said there was no problem, and now you can pick between three options for Roach and Horizon thanks to Malin. Malin deserves all the love).

Part dos. The fun/stressing/i'll-kill-everyone-and-myself part: writing.

Read, read a lot, find whatever you fancy and suck the marrow out of it. Read books, comic books, manga, whatever. Watch movies, watch documentaries about those movies. Find what you like about them—a scene, a style, a tone, a piece of dialogue—and think about why it resonates with you. Listen to sad music, listen to upbeat music, feel things. Talk to your friends, see people interact. Think about why you love them. The awesome thing about being an artist is we are lucky to be always learning, improving our craft, even when we're at the cinema or getting drunk with friends; everything can be used in a story later on. A mathematician only improves when they are doing stuff with numbers (also known as magic), a fisher only improves when they are fishing; we improve just by living and going through experiences (there's also a lot of work involved in writing, but you get my drift).

Write, write, write, and when you aren't writing think about writing [here's a bunch of cool people that know what they're talking about]

Don't stop if your first attempt ends up in nothing; I started two different stories on this format before The Passenger. The first one was about a hacker and I wrote 10k words before realizing I knew nothing about hackers; the second was a story about a soldier getting killed off in the first chapter, then coming back from the dead thanks to some otherwordly being and looking to get revenge on the ones that killed them—so creative very original. This time around I managed to finish one chapter (20k words). Then The Passenger happened and it was love at first keystroke. Writing MC's inner monologue always brought a smile to my face and so I thought, Hey if this makes me happy, then maybe there's someone out there that will enjoy it too. And now here we are, who would've thunk it?

Once you're happy with your story, upload it to dashingdon.com, then create a new topic on the forum. The cog forum is super chill and 99% of people there are super chill too.

I think that's it, good luck and happy coding/writing :3

[cultofthedrownedman]

My Experience Playing Pathologic 2: Day 1

I decided to pick up Pathologic 2 a few weeks ago because I wanted to play a game about surviving a plauge due to circumstances, it’s a similar genre to other games I’ve played, and it’s gotten interesting positive reviews. This was my experience with (most of) day 1 of the game (some spoilers for day 1, try not to get into anything completely experience ruining but in case you want to play blind I’ve put up a read more anyway)

The game has difficulty options but if you try to pick anything other than the ‘Intended’ difficulty it practically begs you to change your mind. I picked it the game wanted me too but since I know enough about the game to know that the Indented difficulty is piss hard I fully expect to lose. Badly. Multiple times. And then be forced to a lower difficulty anyway to actually see the rest of the plot. We’ll see.

Pathologic 2 is portrayed as a stage play of the events of Pathologic (the game this is a remake/sequel of) and I think that’s very cool. They go all-out with the play aesthetic too, with a director that bitches at you for not playing the role right, creepy looking stage hands that explain the game mechanics to you, and stage lights that swing by when you walk past certain places. Adds another layer to what seems to be an already complex game and I really like that.

The one thing that I can’t figure out game-play wise is the combat. Part of the problem is that my computer is a hunk of junk so the frame rate drops significantly when combat starts and part of it is that I seem to have shitty depth perception so I keep swinging at people when I’m nowhere close to their face and get hit when I think I’m at a safe distance, but at this point I really hope that combat isn’t required to win the game because if it is everyone’s gonna die of plague :(

I did however get fairly decent at stealth, which is good because everyone hates you most of day 1 for plot related reasons and NPCs patrol the streets looking for you, so a lot of traveling around to the different plot areas was sneaking behind a tree and waiting for them to go away.

The absolute relief I felt when I was successfully able to run to one of the few areas that didn’t have everyone trying to kill me.

Throughout the dialogues with other characters I was conflicted between wanting to ask questions about the lore that I didn’t know and trying to RP like the guy whose dad is the village healer and has lived in this village for god knows how long and surely must know this stuff already. A lot of conversations were me trying to sound like I know what I’m talking about while being at least three levels of confused.

That moment when this guy comes up to you and straight up goes “I sell organs on the black market, but it’s illegal for you to get organs so you can’t help me.... unless?”

I ended up being uncharacteristically antagonistic to half the characters I talked to (I usually pick the ‘nice’ option in video games) but maybe it was because I had little idea what was going on and half the characters seem like they’re lying to me.

In the middle of my play session a child character asked me if killing someone was ever acceptable and I straight up didn’t know how to answer. I tried to reconcile my personal feelings, what I thought the opinion of the character I’m trying to play might be, what I thought it would be a good idea to teach children, and what would really make me seem like a hypocrite for plot reasons, and in the end I stared at my screen thinking for a solid ten minutes. There was a lot of interesting dialogue with world-building and foreshadowing and all that cool stuff but that one question from a child that appeared to see me as an authority figure was was stuck with me most during the entire play session.

I had to look up a walkthrough once was when the game said there was someone to talk to near some rocks but I couldn’t find them anywhere so looked to see if there was something I was missing (they were there, they just blended in really well with the rocks).

The part that made me really sad was when I saw three guys trying to lynch someone they thought was me and I tried to tell them I was Spartucus to be heroic, but ended up in a fight with all of them at once and got caught in a loop where I would get pummeled and wake up somewhere near by, only to have them come right back and pound me again because I continue to suck at the combat. I had to reload to a earlier save and not try to save that person not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t :(.

All in all, very interesting game so far. I rarely come across a game where I can’t stop thinking about it (the last one was Fallen London). I’ve been putting off playing it more mostly because I haven’t had the energy for games the last few days but I can’t wait to see how this goes.

[fancyfade]

001: dc, 002: tank/jorgan, 003: hawkgirl >:3 (kendra saunders) oo4: dc/ swtor

from this ask list (link)

001

Favorite character: All time favorite is Jaime Reyes, but lately I’ve been reading mostly Damian Wayne and Cass Cain stuff

Least Favorite character:. I guess Guy Gardner, in that he’s one of the characters who, whenever he shows up, makes me think “Oh my god, not this fucker again”. Or the joker. I have similar opinions on the joker.

5 Favorite ships (canon or non-canon):

 DickBabs (OTP)

 Anissa/Grace (OTP)

 Jaime/Traci (they’re just cute together),

honorable mention to John Stewart/Hawkgirl from DCAU since that was my OTP as a kid.

 And I can actually only think of 4, unless I count any couple I have any positive feelings towards even if they’re very minute. I’m not a huge shipper in DC verse I guess.

Character I find most attractive: Probably Grace Choi, Barbara Gordon, or Talia Al Ghul

Character I would marry: I can’t marry any of the people on my attractive list, they’re already involved in my OTPs or working with the league of assassins!

Character I would be best friends with: Jaime Reyes or Cass Cain. They would both be great friends.

a random thought: Blue Beetle is one of the power houses of DC universe fight me

An unpopular opinion: I was wondering if this opinion was too unpopular but then realized that meant it probably belonged here if so: I just find Tim Drake really uninteresting.

my canon OTP: DickBabs or Anissa/Grace I cannot pick just 1

Non-canon OTP: I actually don’t think I have one… yet

most badass character: Cass Cain or Jaime Reyes.

pairing I am not a fan of: Spitfire god its just awful.

character I feel the writers screwed up (in one way or another): there are too many to list. Cass (retconning her out of being batgirl, dark cass  saga), Barbara (magicuring her), Damian (that weird prison thing, that ian and whitewashing thing that looks awful ), Talia (whiplash between morally grey and villain ball depending on whose writing her)

favourite friendship: Jaime/Brenda/Paco they are the best.

character I want to adopt or be adopted by: I’d adopt Damian or be adopted by Jaime’s parents (Berto and Bianca), since they are some of the most well-adjusted, reasonable good parents I’ve seen in DC

002 (tank and jorgan - jorgan being a SWTOR NPC and Tank being my SWTOR republic trooper OC)

when of if I started shipping it: Some time after Tank gets the dialogue option to gently rib Jorgan.

my thoughts: They are both obviously autistic. I mean Tank is my OC so I can make her as autistic as I want. But Jorgan is too.

What makes me happy about them: that they’re both autistic :P that you can have a dynamic where the female character is more teasing of the male character (where usually it is the opposite). That there’s a dynamic where the male character isn’t super overprotective of the female character. That they like sparring 2gether and its super charming. Many things.

What makes me sad about them: 5 years they spend apart between Rise of the Emperor and Kotfe

things done in fanfic that annoys me: I havne’t read many in a very long time so I can’t remember.

things I look for in fanfic: ditto

My kinks: I never know how to answer this part.

Who I’d be comfortable them ending up with, if not each other: IDK tbh. Tank can end up with ltos of people because she has great rapport and tension with a lot of people. I know when I ran an alternate universe bounty hunter Tank, she was in a relationship with Torian and Theron (not like… canonically at the same time none of this is canonical it was just who she was a) allowed to flirt with according to the video game and b) hit it off with) Jorgan’s harder to read. I put him as BFFs w/ Dorne, but not like… romantically involved. 

My happily ever after for them: they retire and spend rest of their days just chilling or training people but not getting shot at any more or having the responsibility of the galaxy on their heads anymore. Kids: Optional but not required

003 kendra saunders

How I feel about this character: I like her. I think she’s pretty cool but not one of the characters I go out of my way to read a ton.

All the people I ship romantically with this character: no one. Sorry carter (her canon ship at least in new earth). Haven’t really seen enough of her interactions to have the non canon ship yet

My non-romantic OTP for this character: I liked her interaction with John in Justice League so far

My unpopular opinion about this character: hopefully not unpopular but: The hawkman series 4 just is terrible writing to her. Treats her like shit. She has some strong characterization tied into one arc and then once it’s over they drop it ASAP and give her character traits that seem to be mostly just “the girlfriend”

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: they should have explored more her anger and the ND stuff They also should let her kick as much ass as hawkman.

my het ship: DNA

my fem/slash ship: DNA

my OTP: DNA

my OT3: DNA

my cross over ship: DNA

my kink: DNA

a head cannon fact: I actually headcanon hawkgirl as a slightly better fighter than hawkman - because he remembers most of the memory stuff in new earth, and she remembers the spaceship skills, I headcanon that she remembers all the skills better - including fighting

004 Oh man I have no clue. DC/SWTOR have any compatible characters?

I guess one I can see:

Elara Dorne/Cass Cain They were both raised by bad guys (Elara - the imps, Cass - Cain). They both left not because someone asked them to or because they were forced to but because they realized that what they were doing/being asked to do was wrong. They’re both obviously autistic. They both don’t socialize like everyone else - Elara is very formal and precise in most of her speech and adheres to rules and regulations because a) it helps her understand what is expected of people and b) they are used to enforce doing the right thing (remembering her saying that the sith discarded any rules any time they felt like it and killed whoever they wanted). Cass is obviously a little overprotective of her friends at time (remember when she knocked Steph out to keep her out of a dangerous fight?) and seems like some people read her as intimidating because of her past or difficulty with words (Tim said he was avoiding her because of her past at first).

Even if they weren’t romantically involved, they would get along great. I think they would both be able to appreciate chilling without pretenses or putting on social conditioning you don’t have. And they’d be able to share their hobbies w/ each other. And since Elara is a soldier, she could spar Cass! Obviously not w/ Cass’s talent in hand-2-hand but w/e

[ghostwise]

Dragon Age Questions

@dirthara-mama tagged me for this! Thank you!! <3 I’ll tag @mabarihounds @antivan-surana and @vlwv 

01) Favourite game of the series?

Origins! It’s the first one I played, and each time I pick it up I find something entirely new in the experience. The characters feel like old friends, and the dialogue is really charming. It also has a ridiculous high-fantasy vibe that I love, which seems to be lacking in later games. I know it’s silly, I know it’s absurd and dated... but you just can’t beat that possessed rhyming oak tree npc…

02) How did you discover Dragon Age?

When Inquisition was announced, I started seeing a lot of it on my dash, so a friend and I started playing the series! I was hooked pretty much right away.

03) How many times you’ve played the games?

I’ve finished Origins three times, DA2 twice, and I’m currently playing Inquisition for the first time!!  Exciting!

I also have a handful of unfinished playthroughs on Origins, which were attempts to create new Warden characters, but none of them got past the first quest. I just love my Mahariel too much… 

04) Favourite race to play as?

Elves! I love the worldbuilding behind them, the city elves, the Dalish, and the ancient elves. I hate pretty much everything about how these issues are handled in game, though.

05) Favourite class?

Mage!

06) Do you play through the games differently or do you make the same decisions each time?

Pretty much. I have tried to play as different characters so as to explore different outcomes and decisions, but again… I love my OCs too damn much.

07) Go-to adventuring group?

Origins: Hamal, Zevran, Morrigan, Sten. DA2: Renata, Varric, Anders, Isabela. Inquisition: Neluayo, Varric, Blackwall, Sera—so far!

08) Which of your characters did you put the most thought into?

Listen, I love creating OCs and putting ridiculous amounts of thought into them. It went from being a coping mechanism as a newly immigrated depressed and anxious child, to something I still love as an adult. I have a hard time picking one OC I put the most thought into…

But because I’ve played Origins the most, and played it first, Hamal has a lot more content in his tag than my other Dragon Age OCs. He’s my baby and I adore him.

09) Favourite romance?

Zevran’s, no question. I think he may be one of my favorite characters in the series, romance or no! I love his background and his personality and his character arc. My boy...

10) Have you read any of the comics/books?

Nope!

11) If you read them, which was your favourite book?

Didn’t read any of them but I do own World of Thedas v1 and v2, and it seems each time I open it I find something new and surprising about the world. I love it!

12) Favourite DLCs?

I really enjoyed Return to Ostagar for Origins, and Legacy for Dragon Age 2. I know Inquisition has some amazing DLC content so I’m looking forward to that!

13) Things that annoy you.

The constant retconning, and rewriting of issues to suit a certain agenda in game. Especially regarding treatment of the mages or the elves. Like, I know this is a fictional narrative, okay? But it’s annoying to watch the story go from ‘Templars are unequivocally abusing their power and oppressing this group of people’ to ‘well they have good reason for it, sometimes you have to massacre an entire population because of one incident, it’s Gray Morality™ sweetie!’

Nah, it’s just bad writing! And it’s okay to admit that lol

14) Orlais or Ferelden?

I have no strong feelings on the matter. Would love to hear more about Antiva or Seheron!

15) Templars or mages?

Mages!

16) If you have multiple characters, are they in different/parallel universes or in the same one?

Same universe. I don’t have an interest in having multiple Wardens or Hawkes tbh, I... I get too attached lol

17) What did you name your pets? (mabari, summoned animals, mounts, etc)

Hamal calls his mabari D’alen. He is the most spoiled mabari in all of Thedas, typically guarding the camp, never fighting or being placed in danger. Renata calls her mabari Nicolo, and she loves putting warpaint on him. The dog accompanied Carver at Ostagar and takes care of the family over their years in Kirkwall. I still need to name Neluayo’s hart!

18) Have you installed any mods?

A few for Origins (different robes for Morrigan and the realistic appearance mods for companions), and several for DA2 (dialogue tweaks and new hair/appearance options). But Inquisition seems kinda complicated to mod, and I don’t want to break the game hhhh

19) Did your Warden want to become a Grey Warden?

No, he wanted to find Tamlen and go back to his clan. He actually did take off after Ostagar, driven by anger and fear and homesickness. Alistair was devastated. Morrigan had to go and fetch him, convincing him to return.

20) Hawke’s personality?

A good mix of purple and blue, but let’s be real, Renata is pink. Whimsy, whimsy, whimsy.

21) Did you make matching armor for your companions in Inquisition?

I haven’t played around with armor creation yet… sounds fun though!

22) If your character(s) could go back in time to change one thing, what would they change?

Hamal would have gone after Tamlen. It’s his greatest regret. Even before encountering him as a ghoul, Hamal was never able to shake the feeling that Tamlen had survived. But Duncan shot down every hope, and there was so much going on after Ostagar… there came a point where Hamal accepted that Tamlen was gone. 

When he shows up again, too far beyond any help but a blade between his ribs? It’s not something he ever gets over.

23) Do you have any headcanons about your character(s) that go against canon?

Oh I love breaking canon.

Hamal never becomes Warden Commander. His political influence by the time of the Landsmeet is as perilous as you might expect of an angry and traumatized Dalish elf whose interest was more on surviving and defeating the Blight, than, say, being on any noble’s good side. The only reason he isn’t immediately executed is because he and his allies called in many favors and made many concessions. One being that he would leave the Wardens and not remain politically involved. Frankly, the crown and nobility hoped he would perish against the Archdemon. But here we are! 

Alistair becomes Warden Commander instead. Receiving the boon comes with challenges of its own. The Dalish receive all the land that was most tainted by the Blight. Reconstruction takes years and is still an issue during Inquisition era.

To that end, the political influence of the Dalish during Inquisition leads to a lot of changes for Neluayo’s canon too. Because the elves have a hold over much of the south, the Inquisition needs to ally with them to even gain access to those regions. Neluayo being Dalish herself smooths things over some, but she is really in a complex position, with the Dalish, with the Chantry, with the monarchy… being stationed in the Free Marches, Clan Lavellan is one of the clans that has yet to join the southern Dalish. It’s a huge stressor for her.

As for Hawke, I keep both her siblings alive. Renata needs her little sister ;; <3 They do all go their separate ways after events in Kirkwall though. Orsino is also alive. Varric was clearly covering for him!

And I know Hawke already has a VA buuuut I headcanon Renata’s voice to sound more like Brittany Howard’s! Because it’s adorable.

24) Are any of your character(s) based on someone?

Not really. I never create them with any one source of inspiration or influence in mind.

25) Who did you leave in the Fade?

I’m gonna leave Stroud in the Fade! Makes my life a lot easier lol

26) Favourite mount?

I’ll agree that the harts are amazing! And they’re just so TALL. Love those majestic Thedosian megafauna. The bog unicorns are cute too, they’ve grown on me, surprisingly. Ha!

[thorinkingoferebor]

Some thoughts on the horse accident simulator and sad outlaws :(

okay, so this is the big old game impressions post I promised. don’t know how organized it’ll be since I’m still in a state of grief but here we go. First part is spoiler free, whenever there’s a number after a comment you can scroll down to the end to find a more in-depth comment containing spoilers. There’s a clear separation between the spoiler-free part and the rest with a lot of empty lines so you can stop ready before it gets dangerous^^

General comments:

in case you somehow managed to miss this despite me screaming about this game for 3+ weeks: I loved it. So freaking much! I don’t want to rank it cause it’s all still fresh and it wouldn’t be a fair competition atm but it’s definitely in my top 3. there are so many things this games just gets right. Granted, others might disagree but to me, it was the perfect mix of main missions, side missions, RPG elements, perfect map size, dramatic dialogue without overdoing it, etc.

I actually wasn’t planning on buying this game, I was saving money for the new Fallout game (that was before that whole mess) and then more or less bought it on a whim because a) it looked amazing, b) I’d had a rough week and I wanted to shoot virtual things and c) my favourite online news website trashed it and whenever they trash an open world RPG I just know I’m gonna love it cause they have the absolute worst taste in games^^

I bought rdr1 a couple of years ago but never got around to actually playing it. I still know almost nothing about it apart from who the main character is and where it’s set. I’d like to keep it that way so I can enjoy that at some point as well :)

If you haven’t finished yet, I really recommend getting a good horse early on and sticking with it. The final scene with your horse will be even more emotional if you’ve had it for most of the game :))))))))))))))))))))

I suspected this game would wreck me and it did :)))))))) I think the only game that affected me more was ME3. But yeah, I cry easily when I watch stuff and I was gone from the moment Arthur put on his head in Chapter six to the end (which is quite a while and it involves fight scenes and everything! Try shooting people when you’re busy crying!) and then again through the credits after the epilogues.

This game is HUGE! Not because the map is big or because the plot takes so long, it’s just so full and alive. Very hard to describe but it’s just so big!

Stuff I liked:

THE HORSES! Absolutely amazing! That (and landscapes) are probably what people talked the most about when it was released and it’s understandable. The animations and the handling is just unbelievable. I can’t even imagine how much work went into this and that’s probably not even the most impressive thing about the game!

The landscape is stunning but honestly, HZD was just as stunning, had the same kind of diversity regarding climate zones and yet RDR2 does something I haven’t seen to that extent in any other game so far: It makes the land around you feel alive! That’s down to tiny things like being able to see the individual rain droplets in the fog when you hold up a lantern, the way a bush moves around you when you walk through it (the first time I saw that I literally gasped!), rockslides and avalanches, wheel tracks in the mud, localised dirt on Arthur or the horse when you fall down. And then, of course, there are the bigger, scripted additions like railroads being built, houses burning down or being erected as the game progresses, trees being taken down or burning after a thunderstorm, animals around you interacting with other animals, animal carcasses decaying if you leave them, predators hunting prey (like have you seen this stuff? It’s insane!). Then you have NPCs that remember you and make references to your last meeting, NPCs are repulsed when you still have some blood on you, people you beat up sporting a bandage the next time you see them, having to remember to cut your hair and beard and take a bath, someone you captures freaking out when you place them too close to water because they might drown, a farmer fixing their fence after you accidentally rode through it a couple of days ago, Arthur quietly singing when you ride for too long without doing anything, your fellow outlaws having interactions that don’t involve you at all! There is so much detail in this game and it’s not like other games haven’t done a similar thing but not to this extent. It generates an immersion that I think is currently unparalleled. Absolutely incredible and you can tell that (despite the frankly unacceptable working conditions that were reported) people put their heart and soul into it.

I loved the fact that there weren’t too many side quests as there often are in RPGs (and most of the times they are somewhat repetitive). I felt there were just the right amount of additional quest markers on my map at any given time and apart from like “Hey mister race me!” quests every single one of them was unique! And most of the time you met well-developed NPCs you could later meet again! (Mickey and Hamish and the widow whose name I can’t remember right now stand out here <3)

The lighting in this game is out of this world! I think there was only one scene in which it didn’t quite work but apart from that every in-game scene might as well have been a cutscene for its beauty

It’s utterly heartbreaking and since I apparently love being sad this is perfect for me ;)

I loved the fact that they took accidental dialogue interruptions into account with the whole “right, where were we” thing

The motion capture and voice acting is brilliant! And as far as I can tell many of the actors haven’t even really done anything big but everyone was so stellar and Arthur’s actor really delivered!

Love my outlaw gang so much :’) especially the relationships between Arthur and John, Dutch, Sadie, Hosea, and Charles

and I LOVE Arthur! What an incredible main character and what a fantastic character journey! [1]

(connected to the point above) probably my absolute favourite thing about the entire game: The game objective changes drastically 3/4 of the way through and suddenly things that used to be a disadvantage are the opposite and the other way around. It’s brilliant! [2]

The music is so stunning! Both the background ambient music during free play but most importantly the songs they recorded and worked in so seamlessly. I still get goosebumps thinking about “Might I (Stand unbroken)”

Stuff I didn’t like:

I don’t think I’ve had any bugs (which is really surprising for a game of this size) except two instances of the dialogue disappearing for like a minute or so. It didn’t bother me that much, just turned on the subtitles for a bit and it was fine but yep, I did find some bugs

I feel like a horse that is able to bolt if it sees a snake or a predator should be able to not hit a solitary tree that I obviously did not want to ride into ;) like I get the collisions in dense forest areas but in open planes I feel like the horse should be smart enough to take a step to the side without me prompting it ;) 

it’s really easy to accidentally murder someone :( and I feel like the bounty system needs an update. If I accidentally walk into someone who gets offended and then starts shooting at me even though I’m apologizing then I shouldn’t get a bounty for knocking him out so he won’t kill me :/

I really did not like the “supernatural” stuff... I know they were just easter eggs and not relevant in any way but they just threw me off completely

There was one character I think I was supposed to connect to and I just didn’t which was a bit of a shame [3]

I wish there was a mission to the west (think Arizona, Utah landscape) I would have loved to ride through there with Arthur

I’m sure I missed quite a bit and I haven’t done everything in the game by far (only like 80% completion). I didn’t hunt much apart from the first two chapters, I didn’t craft much, I didn’t explore as much as I wanted to and I waited until like Chapter five before spending money. So there’s lots of stuff I still want to do and even more, I want to do again and really take my time now that I don’t have to be worried about accidentally reading a spoiler^^

So yep, second playthrough (albeit a much slower one) is about to start :)

SPOILERS WILL START BELOW! STOP READING HERE IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED!

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SPOILERS APPROACHING!

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THERE BE SPOILERS BELOW!

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[1] Arthur’s Character:

Arthur Morgan is definitely one of my all-time fictional characters now. It was an amazing journey from someone who clearly has a moral code but doesn’t (want to) use it for various reasons to someone who (probably for the first time in his life) takes charge of it and stands up to the people who want to make into something he’s just not. I’m an absolute sucker for character growth and rough characters becoming protective and selfless and trying to make the world a better place before they go. For me, that’s what separates a good movie/tv show/game from an excellent one and RDR2 delivered!

And then there’s the’s the huge TB bombshell in chapter 5 which changes everything and accelerates what’s been coming for a while. I’m such a big fan of this, honestly. Normally you get that kind of stuff at the beginning (e.g. Breaking Bad, Deadpool, etc.) to motivate some kind of change but in RDR2 you get all this time see Arthur not be who he clearly should be but getting closer and closer and then the dam just breaks. I mean I hate it with all my heart because up until then I thought he might get out alive but damn what a wonderful character arc!

[2] Game Objective:

So this is the big one, very subtle I think but again something I don’t think I’ve ever seen a video game do and I’m just stunned!

I started writing a list for this post when I was in Chapter 2 and I had “Honour system” on my “stuff I don’t like list”. The reason for that was, I thought it was pointless and not well thought through. Sure it’s a nice idea (and not a new one) to give the player the option of being a very nice or a very bad guy and then depending on that some interactions might change. That’s the whole nature of RPGs. But the thing is, it should be equally easy to play as totally good or totally bad. And it wasn’t! For most of the game, you were at a severe disadvantage if you were trying to get high honour. You can’t rob people to get some money, you can’t rob carriages or trains to train for the larger missions and gain experience, you can’t refuse to collect a debt instead you have to beat people! Sure, now and then you can help someone and they give you some money or some supplies but that doesn't compare to what you’d get by looting corpses. And even if you somehow do something really good and your honour improves, you will still have to take part in Dutch’s raid so you fall back down to some area in the middle. I thought that was frustrating and I thought I was missing out on a big part of the game experience because my objective to be nice got in the way.

But then Arthur got sick and from that moment the rewards for being nice were insane! And I realized that the game objective was directly tied to Arthur’s internal struggle. He wanted to be a good man but life made it seemingly impossible so he kept stealing, he kept killing, he kept turning back to bad habits. But once he broke free of that, once he started to see the good in the world it was suddenly so easy to get high honour because for once the game (aka Dutch’s influence on Arthur) didn’t force you into dishonourable situations anymore. It’s so neat! Turning something that used to be a disadvantage (wanting to be good) into an advantage more than halfway through the game. I’m honestly so impressed by the total gear change that achieved!

[3] Mary:

Here’s the thing: I really want to like her and it’s not even that I dislike her, I’m just really indifferent. It’s obvious Arthur loves her a lot and it’s obvious she loves Arthur quite a bit as well but all I saw in the game are two people who might like each other but who are clearly not compatible. And I was wondering if the game wants me to root for them, to hope that they’ll make it and basically have the life John and Abigail have at the end of the epilogue but I kept thinking: “That will never work”. I think it’s mainly because we see so little of her and like 40% of what she says is “Oh, Arthur” (which gets old real quick the same way “I have a plan, Arthur!” gets old after 20 times). I feel like if she’d been around for more missions I might feel very differently. Or some flashbacks might have been nice. But with about 60+ hours of gameplay and about 30 minutes of Mary I just couldn’t connect. It seemed like a relationship that was way past it’s prime just like their outlaw lifestyle and just like the outlaw lifestyle Arthur just didn’t want to believe it. 

That being said, I don’t think Mary shouldn’t be in the game! I think she has a purpose and I did her first mission very early one, so that was the first time that I saw Arthur display complex emotions which was great! But as the story went on I just cared so much more about the other outlaws and I honestly think Arthur would have been happier being Jack’s weird uncle who drops in from time to time than Mary’s proper, upstanding husband. So in the end, some outlaws standing next to Arthur’s grave would have made more sense to me than Mary :/

[genesisarclite]

First of all, I stumbled upon your Valentine fic when hunting for some Adam/Aria content and I gotta say, it was marvelous. Truly, one of the finest DE fics I've ever read. You perfectly captured how I imagined Aria's personality to be like, and your Adam is as gruffy AND romantic as in the games. Especially I dig the dynamics within TF29 because there's not enough of it in the MD. I joked that we should have a 'let's break into their houses' mission for every prominent NPC, not just Miller. 1/2

(2/2) ’… so we would get a chance to get to know them better (meaning TF29 NPCs). Hence, why i would love to ask you about your predictions and wishes concerning Adam & Co in the future sequel. Will Aria finally join the strike squad and will her crush (hopefully mutual) on Adam be explored? Will Miller canonically survive and help Jensen take down Manderley? Will Mac stop being a jerk? Will Delara turn good or will she get killed by Jensen or Illuminati? Will Smiley stop write self-inserting fics?

Aww, thank you so much for your kind words! I worked on that story for hours, and pretty much finished it in one sitting, so I’m glad you enjoyed it! And, yes, “gruffy and romantic” is basically how he comes off to me, too. Certainly less gruff than in HR, which is nice, because character development is good.

Regarding the rest, I’ve actually thought about it a lot, partly because I have an increasingly detailed plot in mind for a third and final Jensen game, which would close out his story, along with other arcs and characters. I won’t talk about it here, but I’m considering writing it at some point.

Anyway…

Since Aria is now on MacReady’s team (she mentions it during the final visit to TF29, right before the London op), I believe she was present there, though we unfortunately don’t see or get confirmation either way. Since she’s got an augmented arm and is an excellent marksman, no doubt she’s being sent on more missions with the rest of the team (and Adam). With MacReady, the other highly-trained members, and Adam himself, I think she would fit in just fine and show off some serious grit in the thick of things. Even Mac would probably be surprised. I really hope that, in a sequel, we get to work alongside that team more than once and put names and faces to all of them.

With how sometimes blatant their interactions are (seriously, go rewatch some of their scenes and dialogue), I do believe the intention was to set Aria up as some sort of confidante to Adam, though hopefully not a Replacement Goldfish to him for Megan, because… just no. While I wouldn’t get my hopes up, it’s kind of hard to ignore that she’s attracted to him, and he is definitely rather unusually kind to her compared to a lot of other characters. It’s refreshing, actually, to see him like that, and I hope we get to see more of it.

(also, I hope she gets a unique model, because as cute as she is, she does share her model with a bunch of other NPCs)

I’m wondering how they’ll handle the choices in MD. They were far more extensive than in HR, with a lot of variables, so unless they go the Mass Effect route (unlikely, and I really hope not, or they’d probably have to stretch their resources way too thin), I’m thinking there’s a Golden Ending they’ll treat as canonical. My personal Golden Ending is Miller surviving, Marchenko taken into custody, Brown and his delegates surviving, and the Human Restoration Act stalling, among other minor things (Radich losing power, etc.). That said, Eidos pulled an interesting stunt with HR’s ending, so who knows?

I should think a third game would include multiple endings, with only one Golden Ending leading directly into the original Deus Ex. Other endings could branch off into alternate continuities. That means that, canonically, Manderly has to survive, since he’s in the original game. The Illuminati has to ultimately fail, Orchid has to become the Grey Death, and so on.

Mac is full of snark, but I think his hostility will go down over time. He’s full of himself and a bit of a douchecanoe, but at least he’s willing to admit when he’s wrong, is in over his head, or when Adam actually is doing a good job. He gets compared to Pritchard from time to time, but Mac is less overtly malicious, plus he’s got a military background. I ended up liking Mac quite a lot, honestly. I really didn’t expect to, but he grew on me.

Delara is… tricky. On the one hand, she is a high-ranked Illuminati Council member. Her turning against them isn’t likely. On the other hand, though, she is playing double agent, and I honestly believe she was a psychologist before being recruited. She probably manipulated her way to the top using some of those skills. I mean, even Adam is openly suspicious of her. It’s possible she could slip due to her double-agent status, which is discussed with Vincent Black.

On that same note, Adam. It’s easy to forget he’s an agent for the Juggernaut Collective, too, but I’m not sure what the outcome will be. That said, it is run by an Illuminati Council member whose motives aren’t clear. Perhaps Adam will find this out - the lovely cherry on top of the everybody-uses-me-and-nobody-cares pie he keeps getting served. With TF29 on one side and the Collective on the other, with both run by the Illuminati, who exactly is he supposed to trust? Can he trust anyone?

Perhaps Aria will become his anchor, and Mac his Vitriolic Best Bud, which will then lead to all the old faces coming back (Sarif, Malik, Pritchard, even Walthers) and then we’ll get an epic final entry and… I can dream, right?!

And Smiley. Smiley, Smiley, Smiley. Please don’t ever stop writing your trashy self-insert fanfics, dude. Just… change the names and put them on Wattpad or something, okay? Buddy? Pal?

[beardycarrot]

I bought Final Fantasy XII for one reason and one reason alone. Because it was $24.99 and I had $25 in GameStop rewards points that was going to expire at the end of the year. Though that said, another good excuse for buying it is because I have very little experience with the series, and this particular game is set in Ivalice, the one Final Fantasy world that I know and love.

Check it out, Montblanc from the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance series is in this game! Not in any kind of major role, but still... neat! I’m also glad that it allows you to use the Japanese voices, because one of the characters, Balthier, is played Hiroaki Hirata (Sanji from One Piece). I’m sure the English vocal cast isn’t terrible... but with how dated a lot of things in this game are, I also wouldn’t be surprised if they actively detracted from the experience.

There’s just a certain level of... clunk, to how the game plays. It’s all very minor stuff, but if you’re used to how modern games play these things really stand out. Like, talking to characters and interacting with things is tied to the A button... but so is accessing your command menu for battle. When you get close to a chest or something else you can interact with, an exclamation point icon appears above your head, but you have to be close enough for the icon to change (I think it’s a double exclamation point in a spiky bubble?) to interact. So far, I’ve consistently not been in quite the right spot, and always open the battle menu the first time I try to open a chest. I don’t even know why this is a thing, it’s not like the game is hurting for inputs... The Y button also opens the battle menu, and outside of menus, the B button doesn’t even do anything.

A lot of the button choices are weird, actually... for some reason, you access the map screen by pressing the - button, while + pauses the game. Not really sure why a game released in 2006 has a dedicated pause button when you can stop whatever action is happening on-screen by accessing the menu, but whatever; the important part is that you have to take your thumb off of the control stick to view the map, which is something I’ve never seen a game do. Weirder still is that you can “zoom in” on the map, but it does so little. If showing the whole area is 0% zoom, and showing only the room you’re in is 100%, then the maximum amount you can zoom in is... probably not much more than 10%. Legitimately no idea what function this serves. You can also click in the left control stick to put the map on-screen as move around... which is SUPER confusing, considering there’s already a mini map in the corner that shows enemy and NPC locations. Why show two maps at once instead of just expanding the mini-map?

The worst examples of these issues are when talking to people and accessing menus. For some reason, while in a menu, you’re only able to navigate using the D-pad (or, in the case of a Switch Joycon, the directional buttons), with the control stick doing absolutely nothing. Why? Why, though? The most irritating thing in the game, however, has to be talking to NPCs... and this is probably also my most First World Problem complaint with the game. In any modern game, you press A (or whatever your Confirm button is) to talk to NPCs, while B (or cancel) will allow you to display their dialogue instantly, and skip to the next part of what they’re saying. This is particularly useful in that, if you’re choosing a response, you won’t accidentally select something before having a chance to read it, and if the conversation ends and you press the button at the wrong time, you won’t start talking to them again. Of course, the reason I’m talking about this is because Final Fantasy XII doesn’t do that. The text scrolls more slowly than the speed I read at without the option to change it or press B to display it instantly, at one point I accidentally bought a map I didn’t need because I was trying to mash A to get through dialogue and there wasn’t any kind of grace period or confirmation message when the option came up, and I’m constantly talking to characters again because I’m trying in vain to speed the text up.

Now, I know I’m complaining a lot, and it’s all about ridiculously minor stuff... but is there anything significant wrong with it? Well, the characters are ugly as hell.

All joking aside, it’s too early to tell what the game’s real high points and faults are. It might have a bit of a pacing problem, as it took five hours for the game to introduce its battle system. Basically, you create what they call Gambits, which for all you programmers out there, not reading this because nobody cares about my lengthy rants, are essentially IF statements. Each Gambit consists of a target, and an effect. So you can set a character to, for example, target the nearest enemy, and attack it. Or target an ally whose health is below half, and heal them. This is probably the best system I’ve ever seen for assigning CPU-controlled actions in this kind of game, and I have no idea why it wasn’t available from the start. For some reason, up to that point, whenever an enemy attacked your (ugly, hideous) character, they would just stand there taking damage until you opened the command menu to retaliate.

I’ll reserve judgment for the time being, but now that the game’s actually given me its real battle system, I’m a lot happier. I’m a little concerned with how original the game will be, since so far it’s been a lot of well-worn cliches, including a slum area that’s physically lower than the rest of the city, trudging through a sewer that inexplicably contains a door leading into the palace, and a prison escape sequence... buuut, Dragon Quest XI also had those same cliches in its first few hours and was a fantastic game, so I guess we’ll see.

Assuming I’m able to adjust to the clunky, dated-even-in-2006 controls without losing my mind, I’m optimistic.

[pengiesama]

every time we vore i get the feeling, every time we vore i touch the vore

that’s the new single from my studio album where i replace most of the words in songs with the word “vore”

anyway, it’s that time, before i go to a convention, to slack on packing and play some berseria

REALLY SEVERE SPOILER TERRITORY BELOW. i’d say i’m approaching game-end at this point

the real lord of calamity was the friends we made along the way

introducing medissa, because we really needed another female character whose design is solely based around her tits

literally two seconds after appearing on screen kamoana starts in with her fucking. shrieking. i want to meet whoever designed this walking pedo fap bait and donkey kick them into a coma

oh good, honkers mcgee and the repulsive goblin child like each other. maybe they'll now disappear from the story entirely and then all we'll have to worry about is finding a shark to feed bienfu to. we'll finally be free

the real grand poobah of calamity was the friends we made along the way

i like to imagine all this mother talk is going to work up to a reference to Muse and Mikleo but i never get what i want

"natural" malakhim are born from untainted mana from an earthpulse, and don't have blood family ties. eizen and edna were born from the same earthpulse on a mountain, and felt a sibling connection they didn't with other malakhim. they lived together for a while but eizen's curse kept putting edna in danger so he left (only coming back once, upon which edna was immediately attacked by a hoard of malevolence-induced humans). upon parting, they exchanged pendants; edna wears hers around her neck and the one she gave eizen has a self-portrait inside.

eizen was so cagey about even admitting he had a sister but now that the whole party knows he just corners them at every opportunity, silently unfurls a wallet full of pictures of her, and starts telling every story that comes to mind

when human malevolence reaches a certain peak, innominat awakens and ends the world. because we need an end of the world scenario to push the plot forward i guess. we can't run this train on velvet's throbbing revenge boner forever

i am pleased to learn that there is a Grimoirh fan club among malakhim; they find her composed, elegant, and love attending dinner shows where she reads literature. Grimoirh for best NPC, even though there's vanishingly little competition. a classy old scholar lady normin vs a constantly-screaming pedophile fantasy, what a race

the skit and NPC dialogue translation quality is just getting worse and worse. some exchanges are completely incomprehensible due to what i'm ASSUMING is someone trying to translate the original Japanese literally, without actually checking to make sure the result is like...not a word salad of gibberish. editors are important :')

hyland is currently underwater; it sank ages ago due to pissing off a dragon. so elysia used to be quite a bit more remote instead of being a day or two’s walk away from the kingdom capital lol

putting the Sorey accessory on Laphi's head creates the ultimate sweet baby and is the best decision i have ever made, barring making everyone else wear several hats clipping into each other

the obviously fake Aball subplot was pretty screwed up but i could appreciate shadow-niko's aggressive attempts to seduce velvet into submission

there are malakhim artes that read regrets and trap you in happy dreams, like the Black Mercy from the DC universe. good fanfic fuel i suppose

don't you fucking dare give away Laphi's compass. he is the sweet baby and the other one is just some prequel ripoff splenda child.

hi teresa and oscar, bye teresa and oscar, you're still religious fundie incestuous racists i see. nice killing you let's do this again sometime

good armatus lore tho. armatization was derived from the power of that stupid gun macguffin that i still think is way too vague with its actual powerset, and before it was perfected (or at least when they tried to let a bunch of losers try to do it with enslaved malakhim), it basically made the user melt lol. that's what you get when you try to make a bunch of scrubs armatize with wal-mart knockoffs of the holy artifacts

not everyone can rock the armatus battlefield in stiletto heels like sorey does

so bienfu is the traitor; how incredibly surprising. can we gut him now

oh fuck off laphicet 1.0; you're just fucking pissed that laphicet 2.0 is ten times cuter than your pretentious nihilistic ass will ever be. you don't deserve the name so i'm gonna call you Fuckface McGetsStabbed from now on. and your hair sucks, god i’m gonna love kicking your ass.

the real lord of calamity was the rush of murdering shitheads like the incest siblings, c'mon Velvet chin up your brother ain't shit

yeah whatever i don't need to see the earthpulse's recordings of artorius fucking velvet's sister thanks

was it supposed to be a shock that celica = seres? i thought it was meant to be obvious from the moment velvet ate her. not rly surprised that Better Laphicet was the unborn child either

can someone please give velvet like a stress doll or something i'm getting a little concerned

the zestiria/berseria universe hates children so much; i don't think i've seen a game with a higher child bodycount, barring Drakengard 1 and Nier (where you murder an entire platoon of forced child soldiers and a nursery of helpless infants, respectively). it's kinda impressive, even most "hardcore grimdark" games don't have the guts to kill kids on-screen. zestiria alone had baby mikleo get burned and stabbed to death, not to mention that whole sidequest with the bandit kids that ends with only one survivor.

the earthpulse and earthen historia is explained a little bit better in this game as well: the earthpulse flows through the whole planet, and any event that happens on the planet gets shadowed onto the earthpulse's flow. recordings of events can be called up by those with the power to manipulate the earthpulse (like Fuckface McGetsStabbed, who has currently hijacked it by using the earth as his vessel), or can be found piecemeal in iris gems, like in Zestiria.

the real lord of calamity was me going to a convention tomorrow and taking a break on this game before this upcoming very obvious bossfight arena

[ciathyzareposts]

Planet’s Ege: Won! (with Summary and Rating)

Executive: “See, the game is called Planet’s Edge, so many the box should have this guy standing on . . . you know . . . the edge of the planet.” Artist: “Aren’t we all by definition standing on the edge of the planet?” Executive: “That’s not what I meant!” Artist: “Okay, okay, I’ll figure it out.”

          Planet’s Edge

United States

New World Computing (developer and publisher)

Released 1991 for DOS, 1993 for FM Towns and PC-98

Date Started: 5 March 2020 Date Finished: 1 May 2020 Total Hours: 55 Difficulty: Hard (4/5) Final Rating: (to come later) Ranking at time of posting: (to come later)      

I did not like Planet’s Edge. I knew by the fifth hour that I didn’t like it, and yet for some reason I forced myself to finish it, blasting through the rest of the scenarios in 20 hours spread over four days. Several times during those 20 hours–usually after my ship had been blown up for the fifth time by the same orbital defense platform–I resolved to quit permanently, but in the end I kept trying again. I have to confess that I used the cluebook more than a few times in the last 10 hours, and I took a lot of shortcuts. If I landed on a planet and some local leader said, “I have a [Piece of the Centauri Device that I needed]! I’ll give it to you if you’ll just–,” I didn’t let him finish the sentence before I decorated the room with his innards and looted the item off his body. Even then, the game took forever.           

The device is almost together.

         I’m going to do my best to summarize the game below, but one of its major weaknesses is that having finished it, I still don’t really know what happened to Earth. The best I can piece together is that the Ominar were doing some kind of experiment and it was interrupted by their enemies, the Ipremi, causing it to go awry. That’s mostly from random NPCs who otherwise weren’t important to the plot. The game is mostly uninterested in its core mystery. Everything that happens is intensely local, and in the end I have no idea how many different races I encountered or really how they inter-relate. Because you never get portraits, only fuzzy icons, for the aliens you meet in the scenarios, I don’t know how to reconcile them with the aliens I kept meeting in space. For instance, I don’t know if the blue aliens who gave me so much trouble, or the orcish aliens, or the aliens whose portrait only shows one eye from behind a visor, ever show up on the various planets.          

Is this species any of the aliens I met on the worlds’ surfaces?

           In broad strokes, the game seems like Starflight or Star Control II, but it fails in not being much like those two titles. There’s no joy in exploration because there’s never anything to find that isn’t part of some interconnected plot. There are no meaningful dialogues with NPCs in which you figure out the character and motivations of the various races. There’s no mining, no trading (not in the sense of the other two games, anyway), no economy. And while it’s nice that there are several different paths through most of the scenarios, there are no ramifications to your choices. Kill the president of the Algieban Sector, you not only never hear about it again in other sectors, you don’t even hear about it in the next room. 

The core gameplay mechanic is to rush around the galaxy looking for various keys, passes, badges, and other artifacts, killing the aliens guarding them, and then using them in the right places on other planets. A ton of backtracking is required. If there’s a door on Rigel Three that requires a key to open, you can be sure that the key won’t helpfully be on Rigel Three but rather Sirius Seven. And it will be behind a door that requires a pass from Rigel Three. This means you have a lot of plot points to keep track of, particularly because it’s never clear where to start the interrelated episodes in each sector.             

Will someone please tell me who these guys were?

         You’ll recall that the game’s central plot involves the mysterious disappearance of the Earth. Since its gravity well doesn’t also disappear, it seems that the Earth hasn’t been so much destroyed as somehow occluded. At the same time, an alien ship crash-lands on the Moon, and scientists on the Moonbase determine that a device on the cash, which they name the “Centauri Device,” was responsible for the vanishing of the planet. They identify eight crucial pieces that they need to get it working and reverse the effects. Studies of the craft allow humanity’s remnants to make enormous technical leaps (including faster-than-light travel), and soon the player and his party of four are commissioned to head off into the galaxy and beg, steal, borrow, or barter for the eight parts, of which there is one in each of eight sectors. They also need to find six sets of ships’ plans and four sets of technical plans to improve their ship and personal items.        As I said, the game is less concerned with the overall plot than the individual troubles of each Sector. Each one has four or five inter-related stories. You largely find them by searching random systems until you find one, and then following clues from that one to the others. (Or, you could be a lunatic and visit every system and every planet and record where they occur before visiting them.) But the game really starts at Alpha Centauri, where you find an observation base set up by the aliens performing the Centauri Device experiment. It was later attacked by another species. A brief summary each sector:               

In Sector Algieba, the saurian President Ishtao has been re-elected and is hosting his second inauguration ceremony. The event has been infiltrated by a group of terrorists called the Geal A’nai who you can either work with or foil. (Or you can just kill everyone.) But to get into the palace, you first have to solve some problems on a couple of Ishtao’s constituency worlds until the leader of one of them passes you an invitation. The Geal A’nai are trying to influence events on those worlds, too. I thought they would ultimately become a presence throughout the game, but they’re only in that sector.

Sector Alhena is in the midst of a civil war between the Scroe and the Evian, while a third race called the Dhoven try to mediate. Most of the episodes take place on war-torn planets in which the party has to fight both Scroe (look like Bossk) and Evian parties while obtaining help from Dhoven NPCs (white, gangly things). However, if you know what you’re doing (because you read the cluebook), you can bypass three of the scenarios, go directly the peace conference on Hyades Prime, and kill everyone to get the needed device part, the Krupp Shields. This option is quite evil because you end up literally massacring a group of envoys sitting around a peace table. One wonders if that ends the peace process or causes the Scroe and Evian to unify in their hatred of Earth.

       “Good luck with that whole peace thing!”

        Sector Alnasl is home to the Ominar, a species that looks like it has a bulbous red head. They reproduce by cloning and the uploading “standardware” into the brains of their clones, but this standardware has lately been sabotaged by a race or faction called the Ipremi Secundus (they look pretty much just like the Ominar), leading to rampant insanity among Ominar citizens. You have to help (or just kill) the Ominar to get the various items needed to invade the Secundus Base (easily the hardest episode in the game) and find the needed Algo Cam.

              Fighting these enemy robot tanks on Secundus Base was the hardest melee part of the game. I must have reloaded 25 times.

             Sector Ankaq has a few species, but the most relevant is the antlike Ethnys, whose queen rules from Ankaq Prime. You have to find four spheres among the other planets and bring them back to Ankaq Prime to, I don’t know, bring the species back into harmony again and make it possible for the queen to continue laying eggs. These spheres are scattered about the other episodes, including one where the entire party dons wetsuits and visits a triton-like species called the Tschi Tai and another where they have to fight through an urban wasteland called Shadowside. The grateful queen gives you the Harmonic Resonator.

              Placing the orbs around the hive.

           Sector Caroli is the one with a plant-based species called the Eldarin. They hibernate for long periods, awaken ravenously hungry, and must eat immediately. But their food distribution system has lately been disrupted, so you’ve got to run around fixing tractors and stuff to save them from their own incompetence. The Ominar have been supplying the Eldarin with parts, and the scenarios end on an Ominar base, where you find the Gravitic Compressor.

Sector Izar is the most confusing. The way I understand it is that the natives are actually human. You visit one planet, Arcturas III, which feels like a fantasy RPG complete with archers, kings, princesses, and a castle. But the sector has been invaded by the Ipremi Secundus whose leader, known as The Concierge, has built a supercomputer called OMEGA to oversee the sector. OMEGA for some reason has ordered the kidnapping of the more primitive aliens from their planets, and one of those races, the Mizarans, are currently rebelling. You have to collect a bunch of Hataphas Gems from various worlds before finding your way through an invisible maze on Izar II to confront the Concierge and get the N.I.C.T.U. device from him.

               Talking with the Concierge. I’m pretty sure he’s just guessing about the “some helpful, some grievously harmful” part.

          Sector Kornephoros is an anarchic part of space with a motley group of settlers, scavengers, and pirates. All the planets are being threatened by a species called the Cin Sae, which look like the aliens from Aliens. The central episode is an auction on Kochab II, where the auctioneer has the Mass Converter. You can run around the entire sector solving issues for various people and accumulate the things the auctioneer wants for the part, or you can just walk up, shoot him, take it, and beam away.

              “Sure, but not in the way that you had in mind.”

         Sector Zaurak is another one that I barely explored. It is inhabited by a humanoid species known as Ranans. The sector has lately been threatened by the appearance of “white hole” (the opposite of a black hole, it spews matter outward instead of sucking it in). On Rana Prime, a leader called the Giate offers you the needed K-Beam if you’ll run around the sector placing “grav buoys” to counter-act the white hole.

          Unfortunately, the Giate made the mistake of telling me he had the K-Beam on his person.

            As far as the main plot goes, the best I can figure is that the Ominar were the ones operating the Centauri Device. It was supposed to give them “transuniversal travel” capabilities, but the Ipremi invaded their outpost on Alpha Centauri, interrupted the experiment, and caused it to go awry. How this ended up affecting the Earth is not technically explained.           

A random NPC imparts more information than anyone else in the game.

          There’s a lot of ground combat across these scenarios, and the annoying thing is that the team never really gets any better because there’s no character development. You can keep re-cloning team members, but even at skill scores of 100 with their respective weapons, characters seem to miss an awful lot. Part of the problem is that you’re always having to swap equipment in and out depending on the enemy. If you’re facing an enemy wearing ceramic armor, you don’t want to be shooting him with laser weapons because ceramic protects against those. So you switch to projectile weapons but have to remember to switch back if you meet someone wearing composite armor. Meanwhile, you’re constantly changing your own armor based on the weapons the enemy is using.

It’s not hard to figure out what armor is the best because it has a hit point value, but it’s not always clear with weapons (until you look at the clue book, that is). And–oh, my god–looking at that table, I just realized that the “tac nuke rifle” is listed as a light weapon not a heavy one. That might explain why I had so much trouble, since I gave those rifles to my heavy weapon characters. Aaargh. Does that sound like a light weapon?! Anyway, the only good news is that weapons of the same type use a common ammo stock so you don’t have to carry 20 different types of ammo around.     Other aspects of melee combat annoyed me. Enemies around corners always seemed to be able to shoot the party even when I couldn’t hit them. They seemed to have a lot more success from farther away, often off-screen, than I did. And I was always getting into combats in the most uncomfortable physical environments, like narrow doorway openings where I had to have my lead characters advance under fire if I wanted my rear characters to be able to participate. I suppose there are other times and other games in which I would have regarded such scenarios as “tactical,” but I’ll tell you what: knowing that I’m not getting any skill or experience from combat really reduces my desire to fight it.            

Occasionally, it works out for you. Here, I can use my grenade launcher (which does damage to a 4 x 4 area) to damage the immobile robots, while they can’t even see me.

           Space combat also remained quite hard for me, particularly in the Alnasl and Izar sectors, where just about every planet had an orbiting defense platform and a few ships. I had to use the cluebook to tell me where to find ship’s plans so I could upgrade as quickly as possible, and even then I had problems. One thing that makes life a little easier is that your ship is fully repaired when you disengage from combat, so you can dive in, destroy one enemy, and escape, then repeat for the next one until all are dead. But even that’s pretty tough. Sometimes, you can’t escape because your enemies destroy your engines. And a lot of other times, two or three enemy ships is enough to destroy yours before you can even get their shields down.          

It’s never fun getting to a planet and seeing this.

          The game offers several weapon types for ships. The success of beam, bolts, and projectile weapons is based on character skill. You can also mount missiles which just home in on targets and don’t depend on skill. Either way, I assumed for a while that the key to success was a variety of weapon types. The last two class of ships allow you to max out your 10 weapons slots, so I’d do a couple of rack guns, a couple of megamissile mounts, a couple of quark lasers, and so forth. There are supposedly also a lot of tactics associated with whether you mount the weapons to face forward, left, right, or on a 360-degree turret, the latter taking four times the space as the former three.    When variety seemed to fail me, I spent a lot of time recloning my lead character to favor different weapons. In the end, I found that nothing served me better than loading up all 10 weapon mounts with quark lasers, putting as many on turrets as possible but facing the rest forward. That simple bit of advice early in the game would have saved me a lot of reloading.          

My final ship configuration.

         When you have all eight pieces of the Centauri Device assembled, the endgame commences. An animated series of screens shows Earth scientists re-activating the device, shooting some kind of electromagnetic wad towards the vanished Earth. It strikes, and the Earth dissolves back into view.          

A bunch of scientist guys prepare to use the device.

There it goes!

This is a very accurate globe.

          A ship heads from Moonbase to Earth, where there’s some kind of big award ceremony. As each crewmember walks up and salutes a man who is presumably the Earth president, a bit of text tells you his or her fate. William Dean ends up marrying Katya Mershova, who later dies on duty. Osai Tsakafuchi becomes the World Health Administrator, and Nelson Ngatadatu simply retires.                

Given that he’s a clone, that’s probably a euphemism.

           After the characters get their honors, key personnel in the development of the game also walk up and salute the president.            

Hyman’s resignation letter. He was at ORIGIN the following year.

             Finally, we get some scrolling text:              

And so the Earth was pulled back into this, its proper universe. The U.N.F.A. team that had wandered the far reaches of a galaxy new to mankind returned home as heroes. Knowledge was gained that will forever alter the course of the Earth’s destiny, and contact was made with a galaxy teeming with life. [“And much of that life was destroyed,” it should have said.] Mankind finally grasped the heavens.

                    But soon afterwards, the “The End” screen develops a question mark, the moon dissolves away, and a message appears on the screen indicating that “the exact time the Earth was released from its dimensional limbo, the Moon slipped through a rift in the time-dimensional barrier.” This is a pretty stupid development, first because if it happened at the “exact time,” the crew, who was still on Moonbase, never would have made it back to Earth. Second, if it’s setting up the sequel, it’s not only derivative but a little lame. Sequels should increase the ante, not lower it. The original game had 8 billion people on the Earth threatened, while the sequel deals with a few thousand on the moon? That’s like Liam Neeson rescuing his daughter only to discover, to his shock, that the kidnappers have now targeted his second cousin, once removed.           

Would the sequel have been called Moon’s Edge?

           A quick GIMLET:

5 points for the game world. The plot is original, and there’s some good world-building to balance out the stupid world-building. The game is definitely more in the vein of pulp sci-fi like Buck Rogers than the more grim, realistic sci-fi we’ve become accustomed to today. Nothing wrong with that; it’s just not my particular brand of vodka. I’d give a higher score if the episodes had a greater since of inter-relation, and the choices you made in one had consequences for others. Alas.

            To see them decay?

         1 point for character creation and development, if by “creation” you count “cloning.” After that, there’s no development and you can’t even choose their names. New World should have known better.

5 points for NPC interaction. There sure are plenty of them, and most of the have at least a half a paragraph of text. NPCs are vital for background information, main quests, and side quests. I just wish you could see them better.

4 points for encounters and foes. Enemies aren’t really any fun, more distinguished by the weapons they wield than anything to do with AI or special attacks and defenses. But the game is relatively strong in other encounters and puzzles, only most of which involved inventory items.

             My characters suss out a puzzle that involves pushing buttons to assemble elements into chemicals.

           4 points for magic and combat. I didn’t like the system for the reasons I gave above. It would have been vastly improved by actions other than simple shooting. But I do recognize some tactics in both ship and ground combat.

3 points for equipment. You sure do get a lot of it, although most of it is for puzzle-solving. Standard RPG fare consists primarily of weapons, armor, and medical kits. There are some interesting exceptions, though, such as a shroud that resurrects slain characters and a pair of boots that let you jump over some obstacles. I like the way that you can replicate any item that you find back at the Moonbase.

         Preparing to don a wetsuit.

          2 points for the economy. It doesn’t really have a monetary economy, but your ability to build ships and items is dependent on finding natural resources. These natural resources are traded by ships and used to pay admittance to some planets and extortion from pirates, so they functionally serve as an economy. It’s still not very good, or complex.

5 points for quests. I can’t complain that the main quest doesn’t provide alternate paths and role-playing options, and there are lots of side-quests that allow you to get better equipment or just information. My failure to follow all of these probably explains why I’m still confused about so many points in the game.

         The “episode” title cards are always fun, but there’s just too many of them.

       3 points for graphics, sound, and interface. This is going to prompt some arguments. It gets most of those points solely from the interface, which is very well done, offering redundant mouse and keyboard commands. However, it loses a point for the pathfinding of the characters on the ground. As for graphics, this is just the sort of 1990s title for which I would prefer black and white iconographic graphics to what we have. There’s simply too much detail for the actual screen resolution, making it hard to tell what the developers were intending to depict on the alien figures, making it nearly impossible to tell objects from furniture, wall tiles from floor tiles, and NPCs from plants (admittedly, my colorblindness may have been a factor). My complaints are only from planetary exploration, though, and the graphics for the Moonbase, animated scenes, and space travel are quite nice. As for the sound, a few good effects are outweighed by an unnecessary piercing beep every time you scroll through a menu. I played with the sound off most of the time.

4 points for gameplay. It gets some credit for quasi-nonlinearity (difficulty enforces a general order) and for some replayability given the different ways that you can approach scenarios. But it was too hard and too long. Five parts would have been better.

             That gives us a final score of 36, technically just above my “recommended” threshold, but I don’t know that I’d recommend it–not as an RPG. It just doesn’t have enough RPG mechanics to keep itself aloft.          

See, the “enjoy” part is where I had trouble.

           Everyone else seems to like it more than I do. Computer Gaming World nominated it for RPG of the year for 1992. (It was up against Eye of the Beholder 2, Might and Magic III, Ultima VII, and Ultima Underworld; Underworld won.) Contemporary reviewers liked the episodic approach as well as the specific content of the episodes. “A solid, charming game with a few lumps in the dough,” proclaimed an oddly anonymous Computer Gaming World writer in July 1992. Scott May, writing in the April 1993 Compute!, called it “a minor masterpiece of size, imagination, and diversity of play.” The June 1992 Dragon gave it four stars but had hardly anything negative to say about it except a few bugs I didn’t experience. No one seemed to be overly bothered by the lack of character development, although a couple of them groused about character creation.            I don’t know if New World really planned for a sequel or if it simply designed every game with a potential sequel in mind depending on sales. Either way, I’ve never seen mention that a sequel was even begun. Outside of publishing several instances of the strategy game Spaceward Ho!, New World stayed away from science-fiction (except for that inherent in Might and Magic) for the rest of its existence. Lead programmer Eric Hyman went to work for the acquired ORIGIN systems but only has credits on the company’s action games before he left for other technology jobs. Neal Hallford still has Betrayal at Krondor (1993), a train derailment (1995), Return to Krondor (1998), and Dungeon Siege (2002) in his future and has never entirely left game development.

It occurs to me that Planet’s Edge has a lot in common with Challenge of the Five Realms, released by MicroProse the same year. Both games are episodic, featuring a bunch of side-quests and multiple paths through them, both with minimal character development and similar approaches to combat. Challenge scored 5 points higher at 41, and I see that I gave it 7 points for the game world compared to Edge‘s 5. I’m prepared to acknowledge that I have a small inherent bias in favor of fantasy games.         Moving on, a random roll of the open 1982-1992 titles produces 1983’s Karkoth’s Keep for DOS, a game that I missed on my first pass but which appeared on MobyGames in 2017. At the far end of the list, I have just added Might and Magic IV (1992), which of course I will play consecutively with Might and Magic V (1993).

        source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/planets-ege-won-with-summary-and-rating/

[digitalpenstroke]

Storied Gaming: A Good Story

I think we can all agree that, no matter how advanced graphics have become over the years, what remains the same is a good story in a game.  Though back in the day it was more prevalent to see stories on an RPG, gaming in this current modern era have evolved so steadily that even puzzle oriented games have a large depth of story to them.  In essence, what was once a silly hobby or time killer has turned into a movie with gameplay sprinkled in every once in a while.  Like good movies, run times can vary drastically based on the subject of the story, the genre the story is built around, and the direction of the story – and in most extreme examples, if the game was developed by Hideo Kojima.  So, what constitutes a good story?

An Interesting World

When a person either reads a book, listens to a song, or in our case plays a video game, we wish to find that certain something that offers an escape from the troubles of our day.  When it comes to the story, an interesting world helps constitute the escapism we seek.  Many stories have used real-world settings, or just flat out said everything is taking place on Earth. However, the more fantastical the environment the more curious we are to that world, and the more engaged we are into it.  

The indie game, The Witness, I feel is a perfect example of this.  Here you are placed on an island where everything is connected through a similar puzzle.  Though there are points of philosophical discussion placed throughout the area, the player is still left to decipher the curiosity and secrets that the island holds.  Why are you there?  Who sent you there?  What was the purpose of this place?  Who were those people that are frozen at the top of the mountain?  While some or all of those questions remain elusive, the experience and intrigue of the island stay with the player, as they continue to explore and try to learn more about what they have.

Or better yet, we can look to Subnautica for another example.  Unlike The Witness, the player is given a great understanding of their mission in the game:  Finding a way home (to a bill of 1 Trillion Credits).  The player is still just as isolated as they are in the other game, except they must gather resources to build shelter, storage, and supplies while getting a signal out from this alien world.  Here, we are treated, not with a picturesque landscape, but a vast ocean.  As the player progresses through the game, they begin to find other interesting things, like alien architecture and creatures potentially larger than their own spaceship.  The exploration of the ocean seems endless, and for the explorer enthusiast, the experience would be well rewarding.

Believable and Engaging Characters

What is a world without a population? An ocean planet with sea creatures.  But if it isn't like an undersea game, then it would be a dreadfully boring planet.  When the player, or reader, is engaged with a story, they want to some way connect to the characters.  Some say the best characters are the ones the reader can relate to, however, when it comes to video games it's hard for someone who works at a fast food joint to relate with an individual whose fate of becoming the chosen one, where fame and fortune are just a random encounter away.  So what makes a character so good in the eyes of the player?

Some stories can opt for the character to be believable.  That one person, placed into a situation so beyond their control or knowledge that they seem to go with the flow for the most part until they seem to become proficient in the role they've been given.  Tidus from Final Fantasy 10 had this happen to him. While yes some of his scenes are a little strange at best (AH HA HA HA HA HA HA), the player does see him struggle to understand the world around him, and what he must do in this world.

As there are believable characters, there are also engaging or interesting ones.  These traits, mind you, do not limit themselves to protagonists and NPCs (Non-Playable Characters), but antagonists too.  While there are so many examples out there for a charming villain, I can't see the bill fit better than the most Handsomest man in Borderlands.  Love him, hate him, love to hate him or hate to love him, his presence is ever present with his constant taunting of the player.  His dialogue is over the top malicious at times, but there is an absurdity in what he says that keeps it from being menacing; rather, it's quite the opposite is true, as his threats seem more comedic, which fits the theme of the game so perfectly. Handsome Jack still provides motivation for the player to go after him, as he is the person responsible for your character getting attacked and meeting Claptrap.  Though, it is hard to kill a guy who can make you tear up in laughter.

The Right Amount of Drama

Drama is everywhere.  We try to avoid it in our day to day lives because, quite frankly, who actually ever wants to deal with it?  Drama in a story, however, is pure gold when it's done right.  It's the moments that grip at your heartstrings, the moments that pump you up to really want to lay waste to the big bad, the moments where you wipe away that thing in your eye that's making you tear up.  When it's done right, you FEEL it, that experience that makes the player want to carry on and see what happens next.  When done wrong... well you wonder what the heck is going on.

There's only one example all gamers have looked to.  It's been done numerous times in Top 5's and 10's out there, and it made quite a few adolescents shed real tears for an imaginary woman.  When Aeris (Aerith) died in that summoning chamber, there was a collective of gamers who held their breath.  Though death is no stranger to the Final Fantasy series, this certainly struck a chord with players and was the final straw to see Sephiroth meet his end.  Death or sacrifice is a great motivator for the hero, as it is touching for the player, and offers an emotional investment to the plot.  From there, the ending must deliver, or that investment would feel wasted and develop a bitter taste in the mouth of the player, rather than delivering a sweet ending to savour.

What do you think?  Is there something here you would change or add?  Or do you think the story matters at all in a game?  Let me know in at the bottom of this post.  Until next time!