#YOUR DAYBREAKER SUN IS REALLY COOL BTW

[itsahotminuteinbetween]

How's that daybreaker sun analysis goin?:p

Hello! Going well, I'm nearly finished! (I actually finished a little while ago but forgot to add the final touches [the final touches being our dear friend's {*cough* sue *cough*} sona, the coloring completely escaped me]) Should hopefully be posting those soon, but schoolwork threw off my posting schedule and I don't know when I'll push it out, sorry!

[jcmorrigan]

So... Did you hear about the new TWEWY game coming out yet?

Oooohhhh boy. Neo. I have heard about Neo, and I’m not happy.

Let me start by saying that Sho Minamimoto is my favorite character. I love him SO much. And every single reason for this lies in his villainy (no matter what a younger, more morality-obsessed me would try to tell you). This is a young rebel who decides he wants to fight God and rule over all dead people in this city. He asserts his dominance by chucking Dadaist trash piles all over the place and going “This is MINE because I put my TRASH here!” He’s an utter slimeball and that’s why he’s ENJOYABLE to me.

 I do not see any of this magic being recaptured so long as he has to play nice with the hero team.

 Maybe he won’t be redeemed. He could be the Token Evil Teammate – though that still wouldn’t allow him as much freedom and fun as his days of roping angels and the FORBIDDEN type of evil encounter monster into a grand conspiracy. Or he could be a Twist Villain, but let’s be real – modern media is never that obvious about who the twist bad guy is.

 (Except No Straight Roads, which understood that a predictable Twist Villain is an effective one. ILSYM NSR. But that studio is considerably smaller than Squenix and can do what it wants, like allowing its voice actors to say a queer ship the fans made is good. Oh, I long for the day when a Squenix developer will actually validate even ONE of our gay ships in FF or KH.)

 The other thing is that I only very recently just checked out A New Day’s scenes. Like, a week ago. Remember when I put up that edit of Coco Atarashi x Symonne from Tales of Zestiria? That’s the timeframe to mark. Listen. I grew up on old-school TWEWY on the DS. I never played any of the Remixes. So after seeing enough content of Coco on my dash, I was like “I should actually watch the epilogue that has this cool Reaper who pretends to be cute but isn’t” (an archetype I like a lot these days).

 The thing about A New Day is that we live in a post-KHIII world, which kinda affects how I view all of Squenix. A New Day felt like KHIII levels of complication. Not like the “KH is complicated” jokes of old in which it was just long and had lots of continuity so people were like “This is too much to keep track of” (which it wouldn’t have been if they’d packaged the Remix games on the same console from the start, but I digress). As in how in III and the prequel/Daybreak era, Nomura and his crew have started throwing in alternate realities and time travel because they keep getting bored with the plot they’re doing now and want to make it something else. You know what else KHIII did a lot of? Villain redemptions. Vexen, who is even dearer to me than Sho, became not only a hero, but a hero who lost all of his personality. Most fanfics I’ve seen that deal with his redemption at least keep him in character to who Vexen used to be. But canon decided he doesn’t even have a personality anymore, and so you wonder why I’m worried about Sho?

 Also to consider: the fact that KHIII insists on tying itself to TWEWY lore. I just want to forget the worst parts of that game, but canon won’t let me, the fandom won’t let me, and I’m SURE Neo won’t let me. Neo is going to remind me that Sora yeeted himself into the sun because one (1) of his friends was important than the entire collective of the other people who love him and it’s probably going to have to do with him running around somewhere.

 Or it won’t. After all, there’s no hint of that. There’s also no hint it’s going to resolve the cliffhanger from A New Day. Neku is nowhere to be found, even though Sho was supposed to be his partner. Coco is nowhere to be seen. Sho’s existence and the naming of Hype-Chan are the only proof I have that AND is going to be followed up on at all (BTW, “Tsugumi”? Nothing objectively wrong with it; I’m just so deep in the DanganRonpa hole that I will constantly say “Tsumugi” by accident). And maybe the other stuff’s hidden because the crew is guarding spoilers, but those are all plot threads we very clearly expected as of AND, so there’s nothing to spoil if you cut your footage right. It seems so backward to me that we have to design a whole new crew of characters to take over the story to finish a plot that involves Neku somehow. (Though Nomura is designing them and again, he gets bored with what he’s doing so quickly and wants to move onto the next thing, which means he should really just start making different series or oneshots instead of trying to pack it all into one. TWEWY was best when it was a standalone thing with no worry of series rot.)

 It also just feels unfair to me that it has this whole 3D battle system and OG TWEWY just got its 2D system in high-def. Maybe this is because a couple months ago, I was having a chat with a friend about “If you were a game developer, what would you do” and I came up with this whole way to translate the TWEWY UI into the stuff of a fully voice-acted and animated 3D game, and now Neo is halfway there, and obviously the OG could have been translated to this, but it hasn’t been, and you need to understand OG TWEWY in order to get Neo’s plot, so why can’t we streamline them both? REALLY remake OG TWEWY into something that matches its successor? I just love the story and characters of classic TWEWY, and I’d sooner see that all polished up on a new platform and made accessible to a new audience of gamers than just blowing on to a new cast and a plot that I’m really not sure will be good.

 But in the end, if Sho Minamimoto is fun, I’ll be happy, and I’m afraid he won’t be. I’m afraid he’ll either go full antihero or be diluted into “evil, but only in his words” by the ball-and-chain of the party around him. Oh, and did I mention I’m gonna be real mad when we eventually have to deal with how Sora fits into this?

 I do really, really love Sho’s new coat, though. Like…an insane amount. I might actually reblog fanart of him in that coat if people are drawing it because as much as I am not excited for this game, the costume design is already gorgeous.