#also not putting this in the main post but every boss is a priority don't ignore any of them

[spoopy-soup]

Extra tips from me and people in the notes:

slosher can two-shots fish stick easily, aim two consecutive shots towards the top right side (where the fish are going towards you), its easier not to be right below it

slosher can take stingers down in one shot if you shoot towards the top at max-ish range

if you have a line of enemies, lessers or not, its very satisfying to send a few shots in there because of slosh's piercing

dualies can also get flyfish down if you can get above them

dualies can also take down fish stick in one roll at the top

dualies get a boost in range if you shoot after a dodge roll if you need to ink the side of a fishstick or reach a steelhead

dualies is very good at clearing lessers, that being said, careful for scrappers and steel eels that can instantly splat you

stringer also has a few spots where the shots line up closer together on the sides, you don't have to aim it straight

if you can get really close with the stringer, it can instant kill most bosses, and even kill a shielded flipper flopper before it cycles

splatana can kill maws during its attack if you have a full charge, you don't have to leave the circle if you just aim down and slice when it comes up (which with splatana's slow speed while charging is very nice)

I usually only use the lunge for steelheads as when they are taken down the resulting explosion makes it pretty safe with the endlag

as long as you're swinging youre pretty safe from lessers, do not fear being close range because you are close range

the roller's vertical is high risk high reward, it does a lot of damage (600!), though take care to think about if rolling into it will do the job.

you can kill maws by rolling into the side of them when they surface!

If you want to take down a steelhead with the roller, you have to do the vertical RIGHT when you see the charge up animation, or before it if you can

A lot of weapons are ink hungry so you DO NOT want to be stuck in enemy ink, if you have a weapon that inks turf easily, like the stringer or brella or even the charger, do so! It also helps everyone with retrieving eggs. This includes killing fishsticks!

Oh yeah and because this is a good chance to say so a pet peeve of mine, DO NOT OVERLURE, it is tempting to bring everything to the basket, but this leads to it being easily overwhelmed. Always be doing something, and if its the beginning of a round get the first few bosses down and bring the eggs back while spawns happen (unless its like. 3 maws 2 scrappers of course) If you get overwhelmed even a little bit, it will snowball and you will spend more time surviving than fighting/splatting or grabbing eggs, so I say; a clean workstation is a happy workstation!

a tired octoling's advice for gold ???? salmon run rotations

so i'm in evp950-999 bracket right now and seeing people clearly not use their weapons correctly and it's kind of driving me bananas. i don't know why this is happening. but it makes me want to make a cheatsheet for Grizzco weapons and what they should be doing to make the shift smoother.

note that anyone can deal with maws because of how you dispose of them, same with flippers. "grounded bosses" refers to eels + big shots + scrappers (not steelheads bc you need range or piercing to get them).

so here's some weapon-based tips for anyone who may need them during the last few hours of big run + for later gold rotations:

grizzco slosher: like the explosher, a flyfish killer. hitting the cockpit of a flyfish with a gslosh projectile is an instant splat. aim well and move fast. prioritize flyfish. also armored bosses (drizzlers, steelheads, sometimes scrappers + lids) because you two-hit all of them regardless where you hit them. mind your ink, you have 4 shots on a full tank.

unless you have 3+ gsloshers in team comp, please don't waste your shots on fish sticks i beg you

grizzco brella & blaster: as rapid-fire, you need to help handle fish sticks and stingers the most; deal with them as they show up. but outside of that, you are the flexible team slot(s) and can generally handle a lot of threats.

grizzco roller: your speed and contact damage helps you destroy hordes of lessers as well as grounded bosses. use your speed to run eggs and revive teammates, too. your flick is slow and can easily get you splatted; use it to fell steelheads, ink fish sticks, etc in a pinch. you can also use your speed to set off slammin lids very safely.

also please note the knockback from running into scrappers, it can and will get you into trouble. ALSO this weapon completely trivializes Glowflies/Rush. move slowly at the swarm.

grizzco dualies: like the rapid-fire weapons, you destroy stingers; unlike them you can't climb fish sticks easily without help. work on thinning hordes of lessers, reviving teammates, running eggs and dealing with grounded bosses. your dodge roll is a very safe bet to get slammin lids to go off. PLEASE be mindful of where you end up after you're done dodge rolling or you will get splatted.

if you don't have anything better to do, just run eggs or throw bombs at flyfish.... but this is advice for most generalist and low-range weapons.

grizzco charger: first get used to spamming it at max charge. good? okay, you handle steelheads, slammin lids, stingers, and sometimes drizzlers. you can also spam shots at steel eels and scrappers pretty effectively. in a sense you are a generalist with a lot of range.

for the love of fax machine kamisama, DO NOT WASTE YOUR SHOTS ON FISH STICKS. DO NOT. even a groller will do it better and faster than you. ink the side of a fish stick for a teammate and go do something better. please

grizzco splatana: all power, no range. focus on armored foes like drizzlers + steelheads, grounded bosses and hordes of lessers. you can kill flyfish in a pinch but you risk being hit by their exhaust and they need to be on land.

grizzco stringer: another generalist/flex team slot. you have the reach for steelheads and slammin lids but you need to align your shots well to oneshot them. i suggest helping with grounded bosses + fish sticks + stingers and then doing general duties like bombing maws/flyfish, running eggs, reviving allies.

a lot of this does rely on your whole team having common sense and knowing what each weapon is best at. and that's not always reasonable in random queue! but if you know what you're doing, then you're already doing a great job. if you're doing your best and your team still fails, it's not really your fault. it happens.

be willing to be flexible based on team composition. sometimes you get 3 stringer 1 splatana and you just have to deal with it. i've had multiple 2 roller 2 dualies compositions this weekend... and had times where the only bosses that spawn in the first 20 seconds are flyfish, with no slosher present. you gotta do stupid things to survive and hit quota and that is okay!

but being informed about what each weapon can do is very helpful too. i hope i could help. :3 please feel free to add since this is just for normal wave!

[whypolar]

Gundam Unicorn OVA 2: The Second Coming of Char

It's time.

Here comes a special boy!

If you don't cheer and clap for him I'll blow this whole building up.

(You can read my previous post here, if you want.)

I was grinning every time Frontal was on screen. I'm so easy. He's perfect.

The music continues to be excellent.

The percussion in Frontal's theme is fucking crazy. I don't even have the vocabulary to describe what is happening here musically, but I like the aggressive synth and that there's a xylophone. Maybe multiple xylophones. Imagine.

I also particularly liked this one track with the chanting vocals before the hostage negotiation-- apparently it's the Sinanju's theme.

The main theme associated with the Unicorn itself keeps getting caught in my head.

The robots remain very cool.

Combat plays out almost beat-for-beat as described in Novel 3, right down to the automatic cockpit functions and Banagher throwing up in his helmet. Gross.

Environments: effectively conveying information.

The backgrounds in this one didn't wow me as consistently as the first one, but that's fine. They're in space. They're on closed ships. They have other, more important things they want you to look at. Sterile corridors communicate information about the setting, even if they're not necessarily exciting.

They do some cool stuff with the lighting on the bridge. I also like that they have an inexplicable vaporwave room to put the civilians in.

I'm pretty sure I have this exact room in my house in Animal Crossing.

After Banagher gets captured we start seeing more variety again, since there are more different places for us to visit.

Those are my big surface-level impressions.

From this point on, there will be novel spoilers up to the equivalent point where this OVA ends (which will include some things that I assume will show up in OVA 3).

One of my favourite background nobodies, Lieutenant Commander Liam. I love that the main thing we know about her is that she's big and constantly side-eyeing her blustering boss.

In terms of novel comparisons, there's a lot more I can potentially talk about in this one than the first.

Judging by these first two, it seems like each OVA covers about 1.5 novels worth of material, which sounds about right to cover all ten in seven episodes.

They swapped a number of scenes around. They've been skipping over a lot of little Vist family stuff that will have to come up later. I don't think that will be a problem. I assume they had two priorities:

Establish key details of Frontal's character, such as his self-identity as a vessel and his ambiguous relationship to Char, in the same OVA where he's introduced

Set up the hook of Banagher getting rescued for OVA 3

They've held off on introducing Martha for now, which is fair. She hasn't really done much by this point, she just exists as a vaguely menacing figure. I assume she'll be in the next one. Please?

They also skipped over Cardeas' memories of Syam arranging to have Cardeas' father killed. If they intend to tell us that later, it will probably be through another character, such as Martha or Syam himself.

Alberto hasn't figured out Banagher is his half-brother yet. Martha is the one who tells him this, so that makes sense. I could see them making that scene Martha's introduction.

Have I mentioned I love Alberto? I really do. I like him even better without a judgmental narrator describing his fatness, so there's an unambiguous point in the anime's favour, lmao.

Banagher

I'm glad they kept the flashback of Banagher's childhood 'training', but disappointed that they cut off the nightmare at the end. I wanted to see how they'd do it.

Caught my not-husband zapping our son so he'll be good at killing people in the psychic death machine when he's older. He does it in the piano tapestry room, to make sure the repressed traumatic memories are as poetic as possible.

We don’t get to hear Banagher's mother confront his father about putting him in the newtype pilot torture simulator, so we miss out on Cardeas' incredible defence of "don’t worry, I'm not using drugs on him in the tests." Father of the year.

In the novel: we hear the fight, it moves on to memories of Banagher leaving home with his mother, and then it eventually degenerates into the horrible withered body of Banagher's dead father grabbing his ankle and trying to make him go to the Gundam. The Gundam is described as a giant bleeding demon that wants to eat him.

It's important to me that a Gundam should always be at least a little monstrous. They should let the Unicorn be evil. As a treat.

At this point, I think anime Banagher comes across as mostly in line with his novel counterpart's characterization. The change in situation means a change in behaviour. Events have forced him to start openly expressing his doubts and fears-- which means the audience can actually know what they are.

There is still one difference that stuck out to me, because they chose to cut a particular scene:

OVA Banagher feels less genuinely attached to his friends.

I don't think this is a worse characterization. It's interesting in its own way. It's just like... a notably different one, imo.

There's a very sweet scene in the novel of him reuniting with Micott and Takuya. They're all overjoyed to see each other again alive. They hug, floating through the air in low gravity. Banagher feels warmth and a sense of belonging, and seriously considers never getting back in the Gundam again. They get so caught up that they end up hitting a wall and getting grabbed by gravity again, so they all collapse and start laughing. Then Audrey comes in, and the moment ends, as Banagher is compelled to go to her instead.

In the anime, they're all at his hospital bedside when he wakes up. Micott directly calls out to him in concern. He totally ignores her and addresses Audrey instead. Bro???

Given that he mostly ignored the other students and stared into space for a lot of the previous OVA, because they cut a lot of their casual school interactions from that one, too, well... Audrey doesn't just feel like Banagher's most powerful connection, but possibly his only real connection.

They also cut Micott being the one who approaches Mackle about Audrey, which makes him decide to look her up. Instead, he recognizes her face on his own. I was surprised by this one, since it felt like they were setting it up, but I guess not.

Audrey / Mineva

Mineva translates flawlessly to the screen. It helps that she's central both to the plot and to our protagonist's motivation. An element of mystery is also already important to her portrayal, so not getting direct glimpses into her thoughts doesn't feel like losing something. Much like last time, we basically know what the protagonist knows, and it works.

This is the best case scenario, but it also gives me less of an excuse to talk about her. Now I have to talk about Riddhe instead. I can't even believe how much I feel the need to talk about Riddhe. I did not think I cared about Riddhe.

And yet.

Riddhe

We find out who he is by the end of this one. Kinda. Depending on how much attention the viewer pays to character surnames, they may have figured it out earlier, or might even still not have grasped exactly what was being implied.

Again: I don't especially care about Riddhe, so I'm hesitant to say I want them spending time on him that could be used elsewhere, but the thing about reading the novels first is that I know his significance to the plot going forward. I'm worried things might end up more frustrating in the long run if they don't do enough with him early on.

When I think about scenes centred on Riddhe from the first 4 novels that I found particularly memorable… a lot of them were removed!

That good luck charm he has? In the novel, he doesn't have that. He has model biplanes, like actual hand-sized toys. In his introductory scene, he's sitting in a cockpit with one and basically zoning out, pretending to make it fly around. He thinks about wanting to be a pilot growing up, and it really gives the distinct impression that he's a bit mad that planes are mostly obsolete and he has to fly in a mobile suit instead. People roast him for being a rich kid playing with his toys.

That's the kind of idiosyncratic and slightly cringe enthusiasm that makes a character feel real to me. I don't even know if it would have been better to keep that in, I just know that I personally would like it.

The little things are what let me engage with him as a specific character, as opposed to an archetype I'm not personally invested in. I'd rather have a more detailed character than a guy who feels like nothing, whether I personally like him or not.

This is how the novel version of Riddhe meeting Banagher played out:

After the battle, Riddhe is feeling survivor's guilt, since they lost a lot of pilots during the battle. He goes to check on his machine. The mechanic inside is one of the older crew members, and he's crying.

When Riddhe tries to speak to him, he turns around and screams at him. He found the airplane model in the cockpit, where Riddhe accidentally left it. He's furious that Riddhe brought a toy onto the battlefield. He tells him to his face that he wasn't taking things seriously, and that's why they got massacred in the battle.

He throws the plane out of the cockpit, Riddhe chases it down as it glides through low gravity, and Banagher ultimately catches it, which is how they meet for the first time.

It's just much meatier than what we got.

I also feel like we've seen less conflict with others and emotions from Riddhe about his family so far. We don't know what his relationship to them is like at all, really. We miss the scene of him biting the bullet and asking his father for help, even though he really doesn't want to, because he believes it might save lives.

Maybe that will feel more present going forward, now that Mineva knows who he is?

Still, it's not like we didn't get any character moments for him. We get a bit of banter between him and other members of the crew. He reacts to stuff. I thought the scene where he confronts Mineva about Zeon and recalls Garma's funeral was very good.

Just... I want him to be interesting enough for me to get something from his arc.

Imagine me pacing around my room and gesticulating wildly for this next part, because I finally get to talk about Full Frontal

This scene. This specific scene is the one I most want to talk about.

First of all, it has Frontal in it. Second, there's a lot of information conveyed in the novel scene that does not make it to the screen at all. Third, the anime makes its own strong visual choices that are entirely original and not drawn from any kind of novel description.

This shot of Frontal's mask is downright fascinating to me. The outside of the mask is pristine and smooth, but the inside has all these gnarled ridges. The lines around the eyes remind me of wrinkles on an old man's face. In-universe, someone decided it was important to make it look like that, where nobody but Frontal himself will see it. Was it designed this way at his request?

This scene in the novel is written from Banagher's perspective. There is no camera, it's just Banagher pointing out whatever he thinks is important to comment on. When they decided how to frame it in the anime, they pulled the camera way back, for all these extreme distance shots in this huge room. Everyone looks so tiny. This is, obviously, an unusual framing for an intimate conversation between three people.

There were so many cool and very deliberate shots in this scene; I'm kind of obsessed with it. The separation of spaces in this massive room and how they kept showing Frontal moving back and forth between them... I wish I could include them all, but tumblr has a 30 image limit per post.

When Frontal is wearing the mask and sitting next to Angelo, he is visually separated from Banagher. When he moves to speak to Banagher, he is then separated from Angelo. This is a sentiment that Angelo expresses in the novel-- that when Banagher was around, Frontal suddenly 'left him out of focus'. This is one of the things that drives Angelo to fixate on Banagher out of jealousy going forward.

Aside from depicting emotional distance between characters and showing off the absurdity of how big the room is, it's possible that the camera choices are meant to evoke another detail from the novels.

There is something very important we learn about Frontal that is conveyed solely through narration, and which has not come up at all yet in the OVA: the way characters describe his appearance, and the emotional response they have to it.

Specifically: Full Frontal looks exactly like Char Aznable, but he doesn't look like a convincing human being.

How does Banagher describe Full Frontal in this scene?

Well:

Is he a human? This was the first impression Banagher had. He could not detect any sense of life from that man, not just from the mask covering his eyes, but also the vibe that he was artificially created. He stared at the masked man who sat on the Mahogany made office table, and seriously thought that it might really be part of the decorations in the room.

The hand under the glove felt rather hard, causing Banagher to remember the first impression of a puppet ...

Perhaps I might not have seen the true appearance of this man? Banagher recalled the beautiful blue eyes, and felt that he was following an illusion ...

He also describes his stare as "machine-like" at one point.

After removing the mask, he describes Frontal's face as handsome and without identifiable flaws. "His cheekbones did not reflect his age" -- he looked younger than expected based on the age of Char Aznable, I think is the implication.

Anyway. The point is, he's good-looking and there's nothing specific anyone can pinpoint that's obviously wrong with him, and yet this is a consistent reaction characters have to meeting him. He doesn't feel real.

Honestly, this is one of my favourite things about Frontal, and it makes me a bit sad that it doesn't translate at all. I'm sure it would be difficult to visually convey-- any attempt runs the risk of looking like an error, or just 'bad'. It could also be they were worried about going too hard with it and making him read like a monster, rather than someone who could plausibly be a charismatic leader.

I get it. I just miss it, man. It's such a good little detail. He'll always be a beautiful creepy puppet to ME.

I love that Angelo's always two seconds from going on the attack. He's like a beautiful fluffy dog that's human-aggressive and keeps biting people. He's Frontal's feral rescue persian cat.

Angelo doesn't go for Banagher a third time in the novel. In that version, these lines are delivered (less violently) by Frontal himself.

The change makes sense. It's in character for Angelo, and it still implies something about Frontal-- he speaks about Banagher sympathetically, but he pretty much just lets Angelo do this, not even chastising him or telling him to stop like the previous two times.

Banagher still falls over in the novel, despite not being physically assaulted. He almost passes out from the horror of realizing he killed someone, and then he spends the entire rest of the scene dissociating and feeling physically ill. Marida and Zinnerman pretty much have to drag him out of there.

The scene with Angelo and Frontal on their own discussing the possibility of an attack on Palau is gayer in the novel. Being inside Angelo's head is always gayer. We might get the full version of this scene in the next one, since they started talking about certain exposition-related things before getting abruptly cut off.

Concluding scenes

I really like this scene with the family. The designs of these characters and how they interact with each other is very endearing. Marida casually holding the little girl upside-down and handing her over to the mother is unbearably cute.

They don't fully explain the logistics of where and how Banagher is being held prisoner, leaving it to you to intuit what the arrangement is. This works just fine for me, but I did wonder if it might throw some people off. Maybe not-- I feel like most UC Gundam stuff I've watched occasionally leaves gaps like this and trusts you to connect the dots on your own.

It's just very different from reading the novel, where it leads you through the whole process of him being kept on the ship, brought to Palau, being taken to see Frontal, etc. It gives a history of Palau as a mining colony, including how and why it was built, why the guy who bought it most recently renamed it Palau, the population size, the dimensions in kilometers... you get the idea. Completely different approach.

Marida.... the next one should have a lot more of Marida, I think. I'm glad. I want more Marida. She's one of my favourites.

Her big scene in this one is a good one with a lot of thematic and emotional weight, but the reordering of scenes did skip over a lot of smaller moments between her and Banagher that I really love-- big fan of her grabbing his face to check his eyes and then telling him about the effects of g-force on the human eyeball.

I'm hoping at least some of those casual interactions make it into the next one. They can be shifted around pretty easily, so long as it's before the attack on Palau begins.

I think that's everything I wanted to go over... either way, I'm done. This post took me a lot longer to edit than the first one.

I can't believe they made me write fifteen paragraphs about Riddhe.

[starlit-mansion]

I was just reading your post about them "whiffing" the story and while I agree somewhat? Tbh at least hopefully it's an actual decisive direction they've picked this time. FNAF lore is mostly a mess afaik because Scott scrapped the original 'it was all a dream' ending after fnaf3 bc it was so disliked (reasonably so, imo). so maybe this new era/soft reboot of FNAF will be more coherent long term? Anyone who can stomach the change might have a nice (and eventually, a less confusing) time with it down the line.

LOL i talk so much mess about fnaf that i can't even remember which post that could be.

To be honest... i'm not the person to complain to about the second trilogy of fnaf ruining the franchise because sister location and pizza sim are my favorite games in the series.

Also, i know this is verboten in the fnaf fandom, but i don't actually want a "coherent" story or timeline. I want a SATISFYING one. I think it's the fact that when scott was at the helm, he prioritized rule of cool over being painted into a corner by his own story and had the stones to be like "you know what? The murderous security guard was actually a mad scientist with a secret lab because i want to model bitchin' sci-fi clown androids" that kept me hanging on to the franchise.

There's a lot of, let's be honest, derivatives of the fnaf trends that do coherent lore and consistent stories that just don't have the sauce of fnaf, and they don't really spark fandom brain in me. The fact that the first six fnaf games have an absolute gut punch last call/final act (from phone guy's brittle denial all the way to connection terminated) WORKS. They function as roller coasters, dark rides. When you walk backwards through them, you can see the places where things are propped up with plywood and 2x4s, and i tend to fixate on little flaws and details as much as anyone else, but every time i ride through, i still FEEL it. I still remember why i was captivated.

Security breach sucks because the story had huge bites taken out of it. I can tell you in detail why it's bad but part of it is that the villains are NOT put over within the story. Gregory's main enemy is Vanny, and there's no bossfight with her, no big reveal that the stabby bunbun WAS the security guard (and also the security guard is brusque and mean, not the ally she was clearly intended to be based on promotional material). There IS a boss fight with Burntrap, and Gregory does not know that man from adam. That is the game staring the audience in the eye being like "you like springtrap? We gave you a springtrap!" It does not hit. As bad as i think robogreg is, i understand that it partially comes from a ham-handed desire to fix this dangling thread.

I recognize that steel wool did some serious triage, and i even understand their priorities in making the glamrocks so likable (warming up new/casual fans of the series while, possibly, trusting that lore heads and villain enjoyers would fight over scraps and mostly remain dedicated to the franchise). I think that's why the wider reception of the game is... fine. It's memey and candy coated and came out during a particularly dry season in all the genres it pertained to, had a hot minute of trending fandom, and left a lot of people primed to pop back in to check out the next installment (with a little free dlc to keep the buy-in going). I can't say it isn't smart.

But they put out a broken game that doesn't pay off a single setup in a non-infuriating way, and so i maintain that the story whiffed lol