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xxcrystalinerose · 6 months ago

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In celebration of me officially reaching 100 HOURS of fucking around in Hades 2, here's a couple of general gameplay tips from yours truly!

Preface

I am not the best Hades gamer out there, but I'd like to think I'm doing pretty good considering my still-standing 25+ win streak in the Underworld and 16 Fear clear on all weapon types, so this tip is meant for you guys who find Hades 2 weirdly difficult compared to the first game (I've been there!), or those who still haven't figured out good build and aspect combos. However, I will not be doing a deep dive of all the bosses except for the final bosses!

Obviously, spoilers abound under the cut, so tread with caution!!

Part 1: General Questions, Comments, Complaints, etc.

Q: Playing Melinoë is so difficult compared to Zagreus!

A: First of all, you are playing Melinoë, not Zagreus. Second of all, you are playing Lv. 1 Mel after being so used to Lv. 100 Zag (if you've spent an unreasonable amount of time playing Hades 1 like I did). These two have different playstyles! I myself am guilty of this mindset in my first 20 hours of gameplay.

Mel is all about using everything in your disposal to dispatch enemies. Additionally, the devs have designed the kit in such a way that none of your moves are an afterthought that you occasionally use every other room. The biggest example of this is Cast, which remains useful as a crowd control (CC) move even without a Boon attached to it. Use your Cast all the time!

Additionally, in case you haven't realized it, you can still move while charging your Omega Cast; however, the AoE will not follow you unless you have Local Climate (Demeter).

Don't forget that you can hold down Dash to Sprint. Lock enemies in place with Cast then sprint away if you need breathing room. However, do remember that you do not have i-frames while sprinting, only when dashing.

I have to concede that as of the current EA patch, dashing to dodge attacks still feels janky without the Swift Runner card, mostly because of the dash start-up animation being slightly but noticeably slower than Zag's dashes. However, after several runs with the Judgment card (where I can't activate Swift Runner, and that it might not activate further in the run), the rhythm of dashing with and without it is just muscle memory now. Keep practicing!

Q: Melinoë feels so squishy/slow/weak/etc.!

A: Hades 2 does feel much more Early Game Hellish™ than Hades 1, which imo is mostly because of the Arcana system's complexities.

You need various resources to unlock an Arcana, then you need sufficient Grasp to actually use the Arcana, THEN some Arcana have prerequisites for activation so you can't just use anything and everything you want. Very unlike H1, where you can just dump exactly one resource type into levelling the Mirror upgrades and the only true constraint is choosing one side of the Mirror over the other.

To mitigate the squishiness, Frinos with a fully upgraded Life Bond gives you a free 40 base HP. I prefer him over Toula because I fucking suck at bullet hells and Frinos eats up all those projectiles without flinching too much, and some enemies are really fucking annoying with their projectile attacks. Looking at you, hourglass thingies in Tartarus.

Another thing to note is that The Wayward Son card is a buffed version of Zag's health regen on room exit. At max level it heals 4 HP (8 if you're low), which also makes Chaos gate health drains trivial in Erebus and Oceanus, so go grab those Chaos boons.

If you think surviving against Chronos/Eris is difficult, try having at least 200-220 HP (adjust depending on Fear settings) before entering the fight. The Centaur and Titan cards are useful to achieve this. If you run a Hephaestus build, the Boon that adds HP based on Magick is also great!

Q: The Bosses in Hades 2 are more difficult... please help!

A: I see this observation often, but in my experience, the H2 bosses bar Chronos and Eris are actually significantly easier than the H1 bosses. Your experience gap between dealing with H1 and H2 bosses could also contribute. But anyways, here's some tips for each boss:

Hecate

The transformation Hex counts as a projectile and can be blocked by Frinos. If you haven't unlocked Frinos, simply dash back and forth into the hex (essentially abusing your dash i-frame) and it will eventually dissipate. Don't try to outrun it.

(Frinos ate the hex before I could fully demonstrate the dodging lol)

If you DO get transformed, dash and attack repeatedly to prevent Hecate's attacks from hitting you, because your attack in sheep form is a charge forward that helps add extra distance while waiting for the dash cooldown to end.

Scylla and the Sirens

They killed me an unreasonable amount of times early game because there's so damn much going on the screen, so my tip for that is kill the drummer first. The guitarist's arsenal is much less dangerous and her dash attack is heavily telegraphed. Even if the guitarist is the featured artist, I would still kill the drummer first. Additionally, the Night Bloom Hex* works in this fight. Have fun!

Infernal Beast

Mostly immobile boss that can't really turn around with heavily telegraphed attacks, so the easiest trick is to just stand behind it for free backstab damage and don't get hit. Paired with the massive hitbox, the boss becomes very vulnerable against Apollo/Zeus cast and Omega specials with Pan aspect on the Sister Blades.

Polyphemus

Sometimes he has sheep in the fight; if he eats them he gets healed. Gold sheep will block Omega moves in the radius indicated around them, while black sheep will charge at you. I find his most difficult attack is the boulder slam if he spots you. When he leaps, sprint away first for some distance, then dash into the shockwaves because they move FAST and staying near will guarantee you get hit.

Eris

All of her attacks count as projectiles, so Hestia's Soot Sprint turns the fight into a total joke. She also turns relatively slowly when firing; when she does the spread shots, stay directly behind her. The forward charge is also telegraphed by an animation where she rises a bit before charging, so dash towards Eris to avoid getting hit (because it also stuns you).

Chronos, in general

God I hate that bitch ass scythe throw attack SO MUCH. I find the most reliable way to dodge it is to dodge towards Chronos but in a counterclockwise direction because it always travels clockwise. DO NOT DODGE AWAY FROM HIM.

The thrown scythe counts as a projectile, so projectile slowing effects like Demeter's Cyclone debuff or Hard Target (Hermes) affect its move speed.

Additionally, Chronos himself is immune to any time-slowing effect, including from the Sorceress card, the Phase Shift Hex, and Hermes' legendary Boon. He can still damage you during the time stop in the Hex casting animation.

Lastly, the ring explosions that come after his slashing attacks are unblockable by any "Block" move e.g. Axe special.

Chronos, 2nd phase

He always begins the phase with a full screen attack that does 999 damage unless you stand in the highlighted safe spots... or if you have Coarse Grit (Demeter Infusion) that lets you take no more than 15 damage per hit (lol). The clock hands will also kill you this way, so stand well clear of its radius. When he does this attack he will stand in place, which if you're lucky lets you get a guaranteed Omega Cast or Total Eclipse strike, and even one or two fully charged Pan aspect specials if the "safe spot" is near him.

(* Night Bloom has an unintended interaction with the Judgment arcana that causes its effects to be triggered multiple times in the Scylla fight. I've reported this as a bug, but I guess you could abuse it until the next patch lol)

Q: What is your Arcana setup?

A: This! I find this to be the easiest setup for activating the Divinity card and also the "safest" build, with the drawback of being unable to change room rewards/Boon and Well of Charon offerings.

If I wanted more challenge, I would activate everything in the third row, and use the remaining 3 Grasp for either The Huntress or Death, depending on weapon:

When I do a Judgment arcana run, I only activate The Wayward Son, Eternity, and Excellence; the bonus with Judgment is that it also automatically activates The Queen, and keeps it active no matter how many more cards it activates later.

If you have yet to max out your Grasp and want to play it safe, the cards I recommend to prioritize are Eternity > Excellence > Origination > The Swift Runner/The Sorceress > The Titan > The Furies/The Moon/The Huntress/ > Night/The Unseen.

Extra tip: The Moon synergizes very well with pure damage Omega Casts e.g. Apollo, Zeus, Poseidon because it adds to the base damage. Naturally, this makes Apollo cast busted as hell.

Q: What are your recommended Keepsakes? How do I use them?

A: The ones from Hecate, Odysseus, Nemesis, Moros, and Narcissus. If you're good at not getting hit, Arachne's because it continuously stacks Armor per location as long as you stay above 1 Armor. Recently I've also been messing around with Chaos', which has been fun.

To elaborate:

Silver Wheel (Hecate) lets you regen Magick automatically, which was great for me in very early game until I got the hang of every Gain boon and evaluated which are the best ones. Essentially, it's a good crutch for learning how the game works. However, do note that the Keepsake regen is prioritized over any other Magick regeneration effects.

Knuckle Bones (Odysseus) is also a similarly useful early game crutch if you have difficulty against bosses or need to take a run to analyze their moves (very appropriate). It also gives you all-damage reduction against bosses. And fun fact: bring it to the Polyphemus fight multiple times for some unique interactions!

Evil Eye (Nemesis) is just a straightforward free ~30% universal damage bonus against the last enemy that killed you. Since mine was Chronos... well, let's just say I almost never spend a single DD in his fights ever since.

Engraved Pin (Moros) is functionally a better Stubborn Defiance. Triggering its effect will be prioritized over consuming a Death Defiance, and it works ONCE PER ROOM which is fucking amazing as a learning crutch and in high Fear runs. One of my favorite strategies if 1) my HP falls below the Pin's healing threshold, 2) its effect has not been triggered yet, and 3) I am 100% sure the encounter is about to end, I just die on purpose, kill everything that's left, and get a free heal.

Aromatic Phial (Narcissus) rarifies a random Common boon when you drink from a Fountain, which helps massively in no-Arcana runs or runs without Excellence/Divinity. It could also help if you grabbed Hera's Uncommon Grace but are unable to activate it because you have a Common boon. Lastly, the extra Fountain heal helps with survivability.

On the topic of Keepsakes, I encourage you to use the Olympian Keepsakes, because they now have the ability to increase the rarity of non-Infusion/Duo/Legendary Boons up to a certain rarity threshold and not just help you aim where your current build is going.

Rarification works especially well with Demeter's Rare Crop; one time Heroic Rare Crop managed to rarify my Attack, Special, and Cast somehow and I ended up blazing through Tartarus and Chronos like it was nothing.

End Notes (For Now)

I have some more tips prepared, but I'd like to know before I compile the next one:

Aand that's it for now. If I got something wrong or you know anything relevant to what I've shared above, do tell me in the replies so I can edit!

TL;DR: Don't forget to use Cast, get used to dodging with and without Swift Runner card, grab Chaos boons in early regions, be patient with grinding for upgrades, keep practicing, and have fun :)

#ksaplays #ksa: hades 2 #hades 2 #hades 2 spoilers #hades 2 tips

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adelaidedrubman · 1 year ago

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some scattered thoughts on plagiarism and sharing creative space in good faith before i turn my phone off and walk into the swamp

so, this is a post i have avoided making for well over a year now. because i have spent well over a year minimizing, excusing, and trying to convince myself that i’m crazy and just imagining things. even more so, convincing myself that it’s worthless to talk about, because even if i talked about it, no one would particularly care, and i would only cause myself more heartbreak by officially confirming that.

but the past few days in fandom have dredged up a lot of things for me and made me reevaluate. i’ve found immense reassurance from seeing how ready and willing everyone is to band together to keep the community safe from those entering with the intent to copy the work of others rather than creating their own. i won’t lie, seeing that unity and mobilization on my dash was at times bittersweet when it was interspersed by reblogs from someone who’d plagiarized me.

but i also took the opportunity to move past the hurt and remember this is a community — seeing others have the courage to come forward and talk about the plagiarism they’d experienced inspired me to open up to more and more friends in private about my own experiences, and i cannot describe to you how relieving it has been to find myself validated and supported. sincerely, to everyone who has lent me an ear over the past few days, i appreciate it more than you know. i’ve been brought to tears several times, and feel like i now have the strength to talk about this.

this is also a post i have backspaced on several time, because. well. frankly it’s difficult to even allude to the vague category of most obvious thing that was stolen from me without this amounting to a de facto callout post, which isn’t my intention so much as getting out my feelings and hopefully opening a dialogue about the lasting harm plagiarism does.

so. i’ll just start by saying one of the most hurtful things about plagiarism is that it destroys the implicit trust that everyone is entering a creative space in good faith. most of us don’t come into fandom and oc communities preemptively guarded and ready to go looking for instances of plagiarism, and are far more likely to perceive things as incidental overlap than malicious theft even under circumstances where the latter is more likely. personally, it didn’t even initially set off alarm bells for me when i saw an oc with jestiny’s exact design plus color contacts and terf bangs also sharing prominent symbolism utilized in her story.

my first instinct was to be welcoming and supportive in the spirit of celebrating that creative minds can find inspiration from the same sources. even as the symbolism began less and less to in any way resemble the context of said source material and more and more to resemble the version of the story i told, increasingly picking up elements that weren’t in the original but were sure as hell in my fic. in fact, i went as far as to offer resources on the source material in hopes that it would motivate the person to dig into it and find a way to make it their own, still hoping this was a case of overstepping taking inspiration at worst.

it was after pushing my goodwill that far and giving an out only to then see another of my most well-known scenes copied down to my exact wording and pacing that i got the nerve to block.

and i was naïve enough to think that would actually end it — hurt as i was by what had already happened, at least it was over.

nope.

even after blocking, i went on to see the scraps of another of my most well known scenes lazily repackaged. (i can forgive ripping off jestiny, but i draw the line at sullying poor daniel’s memory. he’s been through enough.) in fact, it continued incessantly enough that i have had multiple people independently send me screenshots of the same passage from within the past month commenting on how blatant it is.

it should go without saying what a violation this was of my boundaries and my creative labor. every single aspect of jestiny’s story is deeply personal to me, both because of the extensive effort i have put into researching and crafting it and because of the pieces of my own experiences and emotions its founded in.

but more than that, what sticks with me is the violation of the implicit trust and vulnerability that comes with choosing to share a creative work. i stretched my benefit of the doubt to its limits at the expense of my own mental health, i assumed good faith and tried to make space, and when i could no longer endure i quietly isolated myself rather than risk sowing discord or simply being a bummer in a fun time space. it made me no longer feel safe sharing works that were especially personal. the pain of the experience was one of the primary reason i put wildfire on indefinite publishing hiatus despite still loving the story and greatly enjoying continuing to write it in private.

still, after the past few days and my own slow process of opening up, i am beginning to develop a renewed hope that we can act as a community and look out for each other. i still genuinely want to think we can by and large share creative space in good faith, and that people coming forward will leave us more ready to identify and deal with bad actors when they do pop up.

and i have hope that i can heal and find ways to be open and vulnerable with my work again. that might mean soon thinking critically about how to curate my fandom experience in a way that will minimize having plagiarism thrown in my face, but for now that’s still a problem for future liz.

for today, i just want to thank anyone who has read this far (y’all know i’m bad at shutting up). i’m still not ready to be super detailed in public, but if anyone wants to know more about the 5 ws and 1 h, you’re welcome to dm me — although i might be slow to respond right now, because i wasn’t being hyperbolic with the title. i am going to be on a camping trip in the swamp the next few days, and might not be online much.

i am excited to have the time to unplug and reflect, and look forward to coming back recharged. until then, please know i am so thankful for all of you, from the bottom of my heart.

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wilanserulia · 8 months ago

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For a while now I've been trying to design an "alternate design" for my new OC Julian Rowley. While I feel the design I've come up with is perfectly adequate for a dashing sky pirate, Julian is also the captain of his own airship and I wanted him to have a more official-looking ensemble. Something that'd alter his silhouette slightly enough to give him an air of importance without making him come across as too pompous, something he could easily put on and off as the situation needed, and ideally something that would swirl in the wind for dramatic effect.

I've been experimenting with different kinds of coats, but nothing seems to work. Today, I think I've found my solution: shoulder armour pieces that attach to his harness, and a shoulder cape.

And that seems to do the trick! It's a very small addition to his design but I feel like it does a lot to change the way he comes across at a glance.

Alright now, let's see, what do I have left on my to-do list?

Design for his gun

Design for his violin

Design for his airship

... boy, am I glad I don't have a deadline for this.

#Julian Rowley #art #concept art #OC #new OC #work in progress #sky pirate #Fabula Ultima #TTRPG #TTRPG OC #sketch #steampunk #prosthetic arm #mechanical arm

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miloscat · 1 year ago

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[Review] Star Trek Prodigy: Supernova (PS5)

I love to see budget licenced games still being made.

Prodigy is one of my favourites of the (many) new Star Trek shows. It’s got some Star Wars vibes, not just from the The Clone Wars-esque art style, but also the story of a band of misfits coming together to survive in a crapsack galaxy. Now that I’ve caught up with part 2 of season 1 (which was split in half for some reason) I thought I’d check out this companion game.

Like the show, the game could be classified as “for kids”. It’s not dissimilar to the Lego games which I always enjoy: a semi-isometric perspective, puzzles and simple combat, objects to bash and collectibles to find. The two main gameplay modes of puzzle-solving (via block-pushing and logic gates) and robot-battling (via bashing and pew-pewing variations on the show’s Watcher drone) are fairly well-developed if lacking in variety, while the rest of the experience is rough around the edges. These two modes are also very discrete, with rooms basically alternating between the two.

The game is wired for co-op but is technically playable solo by swapping between the two characters. Dal has more ranged options with different kinds of phasers, and for puzzles can lift heavy boxes and “camouflage” past security cameras. Gwyn is more melee with her “fretwork” heirloom morphing between sword, fists, and spear, and can also use it as a bridge or shield against certain lasers. Rescuing the rest of the crew is the main initial objective and once found, they can open certain themed doors and periodically activate a combat effect.

While the game is set in the mid-season gap, there’s a few plot details that are more impactful coming from the show’s second part as opposed to their insertion here. For example, the antagonist is a third Drednok from the Vau N’Akat Order who has enslaved the three-world system that is Supernova’s setting. It works well as an interquel adventure, and the show’s actors all reprise their roles nicely (although the two leads only having two oft-repeated attack and dash grunts gets grating).

The lead game designer and co-creative director Pere Suau Massanet of the upstart Spanish dev studio Tessera is credited with the original story, while actual writing fell to freelance Brit Martin Korda, many of whose most recent credits centre around the Fifa games’ story modes. Some questionable tendencies seem to have snuck their way into the game script, such as Janeway at one point cloaking the ship (something the Protostar is not supposed to be able to do!) using “Bajoran magic” (???), or out of nowhere giving Dal the character trait “constantly making shallow and nonsensical references to Star Trek stuff”, along the lines of “it’s hotter than a Cardassian fire pit” or “it’s colder than a Betazoid freezer”. On the other hand, there is some fun to be had such as with the collectibles, one being a toy version of Voyager’s Salamander Janeway, and I enjoyed the running gag of the crew picking up the expression “check it” from Dal as a part of their official communications.

After rolling credits, I considered replaying levels to find more relics for the captain’s quarters or to unlock more concept art, but having to redo the busywork of puzzles I’d solved before and undertake yet more repetitive combat was a prospect that lacked appeal. But I had a decent time playing through it once. I just wish there were more than two of those attractive, stylised motion comic-style cutscenes that bookend the game. Not that the in-game graphics don’t look good and match the show (except for Dal who looks a bit weird).

Two final notes. I called this a “budget” game because it has a budget feel on the development side, but on the consumer side it’s actually quite expensive at the A$70 mark. Try to get it on sale. And I loved seeing some casual nonbinary rep in this game from Lorn’ess, one of the two oppressed natives you meet. This is in addition to the main cast’s Zero of course, who joined the ranks in new Trek alongside Discovery’s Adira and Strange New Worlds’ Captain Angel. Pride!

#star trek #star trek prodigy supernova #star trek prodigy #tessera studios #review #ps5

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pocketbelt · 1 year ago

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okay here we go fuck it, FFXVI criticism/complaint/whinge post

spoilers are a given, play XVI or decide you don't care, but they will at least be in the plot section at the end. There will also be mild spoilers for FFXIV: Heavensward and light mention of later parts of XIV as well (Stormblood and Shadowbringers, no Endwalker).

this isn't about being fair or even-handed it's just knives in its back the whole way down; the game is at best okay but I grow more annoyed and angry about it the more I think about it, and I personally think it is just shit now

this post is giant, you have been warned, I could not bring myself to condense it more as I felt I would be losing relevant points

Combat

XVI's marketing made a big deal of the combat director being Ryota Suzuki, 20-year Capcom vet whose last jobs at Capcom were game designer of Devil May Cry V and programmer on Monster Hunter World. His joining the team was championed, interviews focused a lot on the action game aspect, he's said it's his "personal masterpiece" in interviews and XVI's official sites in all languages call it Final Fantasy's "first fully-fledged action RPG" to step around XV's corpse.

The game emulates DMC heavily in style and gameplay, the comparison is desired by the devs.

And this was the stupidest thing they could have done.

Clive's core moveset is extremely lacking. He has a single 1-2-3-4 Square button combo that does not change from hour 1 to hour 45, no alternate combo routes, no ways to link seamlessly into and out of other moves, not a goddamn thing. Outside of this Clive has projectiles that are extremely weak and functionally useless (its charge upgrade does not change this), a chargeable sword attack that just leads to the same 2-3-4 hit string, a DMC Stinger-esque lunge that's obsoleted frame 1 by your default Eikon and an aerial drop attack. That's it, that's his entire basic non-cooldown moveset for the entire fucking game.

The projectile is worth honing in on: ranged attacks in Devil May Cry serve to keep your Style ranking ticking over for a few seconds while you keep your distance, and even then have extra utility and damage capability besides. Dante, for instance, in V has his dual pistols, dual shotguns and dual rocket launchers which all serve obviously different purposes and behave differently. On top of this he has his Gunslinger Stance, which changes their default attacks and gives each a special move, while also providing access to stance-exclusive gun attacks like Rainstorm, a useful midair attack with a very precise form of movement that makes it useful for sticking on bosses evasively while still attacking. In Final Fantasy XVI Clive has fucking nothing but a single piss-weak shot that does almost no damage or stagger, ever, and can be charged to do tiny damage or stagger. It has no further utilities, ever, even as it changes from its default fireball to match the element of your equipped Eikon (ice, lightning, etc). It isn't useful for anything, as flying enemies are better dealt with by using Phoenix's dash to teleport to them or Garuda's grab to yank them to you.

That's XVI in a nutshell: an extremely constrained Devil May Cry whose devs missed the most crucial and critical parts of what makes Devil May Cry work: it's not just that you have lots of moves with interlocking traits and mechanics to make a complex combat system, it's that you have so many options you can do whatever the fuck you like with. DMC's core strength is player expression: if you want to use one weapon then by god you can and can still get SSS ranks, you just have to not use the same one move in succession over and over (and don't get hit), it's just easier the more of the kit you use. XVI has no interest in player expression, you are very limited in tools and by design you are locked down.

The big stuff comes in with Clive's Eikons, of which he can equip a max of 3 who have 2 slots to put moves into. You have just 6 special moves that do the big damage and special effects and also they're all on cooldowns. The idea is to use your cooldowns carefully so they pop back up when the enemy enters stagger: in practice you can just open every fight with them and then just go back to beating on the enemy until they come back up, and if stagger happens it happens, the cooldowns will largely line up anyway. The spectacle wears away as the hours pile on and the standard enemies never get engaging. Your ability to play with moves, link them up and create mad chains is harshly limited by the 6 move cap and the fact that they all just go away for 20-50 seconds. Few of the Eikon attacks can link into each other very well, either.

Eikonic Feats clearly align with Dante's Stance special moves, as they're mapped to Circle and some are clearly just Dante's own (Phoenix is Trickster's dash and Titan is Royal Guard). The problem is you only have 3 at once and some feel like they should just be core mechanics on tap, such as Phoenix's dash or Garuda's grab, which has special animations when used to floor bosses at the 50% "mini-stagger" threshold. A combination of that, the length of time between Eikons (they're plot-tied) and the order they come in means many players will be extremely hard-pressed to even consider leaving the Phoenix/Garuda/Titan combo in particular, given how instrumental, useful and powerful their moves are. Phoenix is further a problem because it also has Ifrit's attacks without needing to "master" them to let them be equipped to other Eikons, and Ifrit's attacks are batshit good. It's not even that later Eikonic feats are bad (Megaflare is cool and has uses, Shiva's works on bosses which is delightful and Odin's just makes your standard moveset cooler so it's a flat upgrade), it's that the game's pacing and the implementation of these as limited capacity hot-swappable powers and not always-on core features discourage swapping out what works to explore and experiment, even with easy free respeccing. If you weren't locked to so few Eikons and so few move slots, getting new ones would be a delight instead of going "oh, okay" and then not bothering with their moves because most of them don't stack to Titan's anyway. I myself fucking loved Odin's and was delighted Shiva's worked on bosses, as it was a rare instance of bosses reacting to something you could do outside of the pre-ordained 50% stagger Garuda grab.

The nail in the coffin is enemy design: standard enemies such as regular knights, normal orcs, wolves and things around that size are fairly passive fodder to be blasted into paste in a single Eikon move from around the 1/3rd point of the game. Small enemies that fly die in single 1-2-3-4 strings from around the same point as long as you keep up on your equipped sword. Large enemies armour through anything and everything you do, can't be launched, their only "special" state outside stagger is the Garuda grab window, they're just big sandbags to pile Eikon moves into and dodge around. They use the FFXIV boss design philosophy most of the time, where they plainly ignore what you do and just broadcast AOEs or heavily telegraphed strikes, only occasionally moving to a new spot to do a new mechanic (which is always an AOE). They are just completely un-engaging. I think often of how Kingdom Hearts' bosses often can be made to flinch, or put into a state that's vulnerable to being launched or just hitstunned into the dirt. XVI needed that kind of thing so badly.

Un-engaging is the term for the whole thing; on Action-Focused (the higher of the two default difficulties), standard enemies don't have the HP for you to try and do things like super-long aerial combos. They turn to dust if breathed on so you can't style on shit, and the focus on cooldowns means you can only style on bosses for very brief moments before going back to dodging and mashing Square. The higher difficulties unlocked after the end of the (45 hour) game would alleviate that somewhat but they wouldn't fix any of the other problems here. I want to stress it's not that it's easy (though it is easy), it's that it's dull. It doesn't engage you. It doesn't present anything to push you to explore its limited systems, and the limits it imposes seem extremely arbitrary (if not simply existing because of performance concerns, as performance hangs by a thread as is). Plenty of easy games rank among the greats of every generation, and they do so because they're still very engaging to play and interact with. XVI isn't, at all.

And this game is at minimum twice as long as a Devil May Cry. I can't fathom the logic behind massively reducing the options and tools DMC has and then going for a much longer game. None of it really works well together, at all.

RPG Mechanics

In a slide at some convention or other presentation, YoshiP included questions from users, including some slightly more aggressively worded ones for humour. One of these was something along the lines of "Why aren't there RPG mechanics? Isn't this just an action game now?", to which they said they existed and to keep an eye out.

As it turns out, the question was more on point than expected.

XVI's RPG mechanics barely exist. Stats go up in tiny uniform amounts each level-up, and the difference is not perceptible. Enemies are already made of wet paper at level parity; that they pre-emptively crumble to dust at a slight level lead doesn't mean anything. It at least takes a significant level lead for bosses or large enemies to start melting. The bulk of your stats come from equipment, then, however...

...equipment is clearly an afterthought by the devs. For the first few hours, you have a tiny array of options of different swords, belts and bracers to craft and reinforce, and then after some hours you get Clive's dad's gear and it outclasses everything before it by leagues, and will outclass everything for the next 10 hours or so, whereupon superior alternatives are found in the odd chest in dungeon levels, to do you for the next pile of hours. By that point, the Blacksmith's Blues quests start appearing, which by the second quest unlock the recipes for the best belt and bracer in the game, and they are readily achievable around that time. Do that, and now for the entire second half of the game you never need to change equipment, ever. Weapons are worse off; the storyline gives you Eikon-related materials after each Eikon fight, which upgrade a specific sword that starts outclassing everything by the time you get Ramuh. It is topped maybe once and only very shortly, and then the Blacksmith's Blues quests come into things; they hand you the Ragnarok for free, which is only topped by the endgame Eikon sword and the best sword in the game...whose recipe comes with the Ragnarok. Outside of these, you can just ignore the swords for basically the entire game; there are only like 7 alternatives throughout the game and they get topped by the Eikon sword most of the time because this entire thing is an afterthought.

No weapons or armour have special traits or unique attributes that make them more suitable for a given area or sequence, or for dealing with specific kinds of foe. You don't ever need anything other than the thing with the highest number, like this is an ancient NES/SNES/PC-98 RPG, and there are no factors that might outweigh pure damage.

What secures this as an afterthought and not just a super simple system is that the game is constantly, constantly shitting buckets of crafting materials at you. There's only like 6 kinds of non-unique or "elite" crafting material, which are dispensed as rewards from quests, fights, chests and items lying around. By the end of the game I had around 2000 each, because you need only small handfuls for the very rare times you do craft something that needs them, and the game is always shitting them out. They have no other purpose in a normal playthrough; I've heard you can reinforce your gear to higher levels on NG+ using the materials, but that just means they're completely fucking pointless if you aren't compelled to replay the game. And they're used as the main reward for basically everything, and have no other fucking use.

Similarly, the economy's fucked: potions and other restoratives are piss-cheap and the game buries you in money and items that are sold for big amounts of money. I never sold one of those, crafted all the best gear and still had 250,000+ gil in my pocket by the ending. There's nothing to use it on other than unlocking songs to play in the home base, which are all mega-expensive (20k-50k+) to justify it, but that's clearly a sloppy "fix" for gil numbers that weren't considered. Like the crafting material, there is no other use for it; this shit cries out for investing money into the home base and other side activities, but the game has none of those.

This may as well go in this section too: the game is packed with sidequests and very few of these are worthwhile. The ones that give meaningful upgrades are marked with +s like in XIV; outside of them, some give good AP (for moves), good gil and very, very rarely give something like orichalcum for the best equipment. The majority give you fuck all, and thus are dependent on being engaging to do or telling an engaging little tale...and the majority fail at this too. The sidequests are generally MMO-tier stuff, unsurprisingly given the devs' pedigree as, well, MMO developers; you just go from point A to B to C hitting X at things until it ends, sometimes you go to B and fight stuff, etc. I've seen people say that XVI's sidequests have compelling character moments, and this is true for a handful, mostly the ones kept to the very end of the game at the end of a variety of sidequest chains. The majority tell you things you already know, things that aren't interesting and also don't matter, all three of these or not even these. Here's the thing: world lore only matters if your world is interesting, and XVI's world is not. It's a bargain bin Ivalice (the setting of FFXII and Tactics) with none of the truly fantastical designs or truly stunning world design, filtered through the Game of Thrones TV show. I hope you like hearing that slaves have it horrifically and are treated terribly because that's what most of the sidequests will be about for the first half of the game, and it's also what the plot is about for nearly the first half of the game (and is otherwise a running theme of the game), and oh my god the XVI writers want to be sure you absolutely know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Similarly, character moments only matter for, well, characters, and the game just isn't able to sell everyone in your home base as a fun or compelling character. The moment with Otto when you find a note from Cid is genuinely heartwrenching and well done, and it's pretty much the only one that genuinely lands...and it should've been in the main story, not an incidental sidequest. Especially with how dry the main story is most of the time you're in the home base.

Also, Final Fantasy traditionally was never big on sidequests so much as side stories, optional areas and side activities. Pretty much starting with XI is when it began really dabbling in them more and more, starting with XII having some, XIII-2 having a lot (XIII-1 had nothing because it was stripped to the bone to finish it), XIII-3 being almost completely sidequests by design, XIV being an MMO and XV having a lot. The thing is, some of these still had actual minigames and side activities; XIII-2 had its casino games and chocobo racing, same for XIV, XV had a very fun fishing minigame with attached sidequests, etc. Going further back, the PS1 FFs had card games and multiple minigames throughout, chocobo breeding and racing and treasure hunting, etc. XVI has none of this, absolutely zero, and it's a shame. Sure, XII also purely had sidequests and hunts, but XII's hunts and elite hunts were way more interesting and involved than 99% of XVI's; they often had special spawn conditions, special gimmicks and mechanics, could often be brutal and even had fucking surprise twists. There's no fun surprises in XVI's hunts, even the familiar recurring faces are at their most boring and incidental here. XVI's Carrot and Red Chocobo don't even begin to stack to XII's.

Put shortly, XVI's RPG aspect is so fucking thin it's more an action game with a very faint RPG layer strapped on. With how simplified and restrained the action side is, you'd hope it was to work with the RPG side in tandem, but no, there's basically nothing here.

Presentation

The game's really pretty and really high fidelity until it moves. Outside of combat, in Performance Mode, the world will often just swim and devolve into a blurry mess of over-aggressive motion blur and really bad temporal anti-aliasing if you or the camera move too fast or too suddenly. It struggles to hold 30FPS when just walking around environments, and I suspect performance is why Clive's auto-sprint is turned off when in towns (and your Chocobo is forbidden from entering towns) which also makes time spent running around towns for main or sidequests absolutely agonising after a little while. The game is so pretty, but I find myself wondering if it's actually worth it; is this fidelity worth the game melting and the console revving when I try to actually move in it? No, obviously.

I will go all RETVRN here but like, the fixed camera-angles and 3D models on pre-rendered backgrounds of the PS1 FFs allowed to be visual powerhouses in their day, and VIII and especially IX still hold the fuck up now. We seem to be slowly realising the strengths of these perspectives and designs again, as Nintendo rolls out a surprisingly immaculate looking Super Mario RPG remake and Square keeps rolling out incredible remasters and remakes of their older titles. Can you imagine what a big budget FFXVII could do with the strengths of that style, where you only need to render what can face the camera and nothing else? We need to go back.

In combat on Performance Mode the game mostly holds 60 pretty cleanly, sometimes staggering a little when shit gets busy, especially in the Eikon fights where the designs are complicated and particles heavy. It blatantly jumps between 30 and 60 for cutscenes and special animated sequences a lot in these fights, and I again wonder if we wouldn't be better off with lower fidelity for smoother shows.

Still, it is pretty and they at least knew to focus on making combat perform slickly, so hey.

While I'm here, the OST is a massive downer. It's mostly generic orchestral shite and very little stands out. This is especially saddening because the composer of at least most of it is Masayoshi Soken, who is a fucking eclectic powerhouse of range and skill in his work on XIV. YoshiP's drive for a grounded dark fantasy styled like Game of Thrones strangles so much of what this game could be; the Titan Eikon battle is the one time Soken's let off the leash and it's the highlight track of the game. This is also a baffling choice when you consider the gameplay is inspired by Devil May Cry, a series rife with tracks in the same flavour as shit like this! You had the perfect team for a DMC style OST and you wasted it!

Plot/Writing

okay here we fucking go

To establish, the game's core theme is that an unequal societies built upon the exploitation of some of their people will not stand, and that if we aren't united and equal we are damned to die, likely to a problem of mankind's own making such as the gradual destruction of the environment (which is what the Blight in game is, it's the world rotting from overuse of magic). This is what all the focus on slavery early on is done for, it's about how deranged these societies are for the subjugation and exploitation of others and the myriad ways both explicit and subtle they created justifications in their cultures for it (the slaves, called Bearers, are designated slaves by religious doctrine in the Sanbrequois Empire, for example). The main counterpoint to this is Cid's anarchist commune, which is your home base and eventually what Clive comes to lead...and does very little with, truthfully. Like Clive is never very concerned with the running of the place, a lot of it explicitly is handled by Otto for you (and he did the same for Cid, apparently).

The problem is this theme isn't really backed by gameplay at all, and it's here that I have to start slagging off the writers; the main scenario writer was also main scenario writer on FFXIV's Heavensward expansion, which also really, really struggled with this, but it is a failing of the gameplay end of the team as well. Namely, in this game about how united we stand and divided we fall, Clive does everything by himself successfully and unerringly. He beats every Eikon he fights 1v1 with one sole exception, and when the final boss reveals an Eikon form it wins a 3v1 matchup (where 1 of the 3 is the Eikon Ifrit couldn't beat alone!) only to lose to a solo but empowered Clive right after. From a gameplay perspective it's a fault that your party members just never matter ever, sure, even when they are present, but from the story perspective I have no idea why you'd deliberately do things like set up the 3v1 as a loss that leads to a Clive solo victory when your entire fucking theme is people working together for the betterment of all. Like, that's the moment where all the prayers of the people at the home base explicitly fly into Clive or your remaining Eikon allies descend from on high to skewer the boss for Clive to get the winning counterhit in.

The main way the game tries to show "people uniting together" is people giving up their Eikon powers willingly to Clive so he personally gets stronger, but like, that's a shit way of doing it. When Jill gives Shiva to Clive, she falls out of the plot immediately afterward; Clive has to tag-team with Joshua to defeat Bahamut, but at the final fight, Joshua surrenders Phoenix to Clive so Clive can beat the final boss alone instead of just doing the goddamn fucking tag-team again.

On that note, talking about Shiva naturally brings us to Jill. Jill is Clive's childhood friend, she's the Dominant of Shiva and the game's female lead. And she is probably the worst-handled female character in any Final Fantasy. Combined with the handling of two of the villains and the trends among women in this game in general, XVI might actually be the fucking worst about women in the series - yes, XV barely had women in it but the ones it did have weren't treated anywhere near this bad.

Alright, so, Jill starts the game being freed from Ironblood control by Clive after he realises who she is (they've been separated for years and he was sent to assassinate her). After she's back on her feet, she tags along with Clive as he journeys to Phoenix Gate, where his life went to shit, to see if he can discover who the mysterious second Fire Dominant that killed Phoenix was. In essence, Jill goes along with Clive for his revenge/self-discovery arc, and later, the opportunity to lay siege to the western Mothercrystal owned by the Ironblood Kingdom reveals itself. Jill pushes for it to be done, saying she has her own revenge to seek similar to Clive's, and her own sins to atone for like Clive's (all the people she killed as Shiva for the Ironbloods, as they threatened to kill enslaved women and children whenever she refused). Clive agrees, and has her back the way she had his.

It's a little scuffed but the arc in general is nice. Clive legitimately does mostly take a back seat to Jill for it (though Jill isn't playable as that would cost money they spent elsewhere). It fucks up a little in places: Jill struggles to freeze a spout of lava in a way no other Dominant struggles to use their powers, and a fire beast summoned by the overarching villain right as they reach the Mothercrystal's heart manages to wall and fend off Shiva. The explanation, ostensibly, is that Shiva is struggling because she's ice-elemental in a volcano but to be frank, later evidence tells us that Shiva is just the weakest Eikon outside of perhaps Garuda (whose Dominant is the only other female Dominant. Good job, lads). Ramuh may also eat shit, but Cid is old when he loses to semi-prime Benedikta and he eats shit to a mysterious force none have perceived before; when he's on point he's the only Eikon to floor Ifrit and survived an encounter with Bahamut in the past.

Outside of that blemish, the arc works, Jill kills the Ironblood pope herself and takes her revenge in doing so. In breaking the Mothercrystal, they also break the back of the Ironbloods' religion and thus their entire society, fucking them all royally and thus both having revenge and atoning partially for the crimes she committed for them.

From that point on, Jill does mostly nothing in half the scenes she's in, and her trajectory in the plot goes thus: captured by Hugo and almost executed to antagonise Clive, rescued, sits out from going to fight Hugo, sits out from fighting Bahamut, gets one-shot by semi-prime Barnabas, is kidnapped, is rescued, watches Clive get wrecked, fucks Clive, surrenders Shiva to Clive, and then she falls out of the plot almost entirely. She is kept out of the party after that point, only appearing to menace enemies with her rapier while Dion does all the real fighting as they buy time for Clive and Joshua, and then sits out the final battle along with everyone who isn't Clive, Joshua or Dion.

At no point do Ifrit and Shiva tag-team another Eikon. Shiva is explicitly shown to be able to hold her own against Titan in the opening/after the prologue (she fights him to a draw!) but doesn't take part at all in fighting him for real! Whenever Shiva does show up after the prologue, it's to be ineffectual or get defeated, every single fucking time! She is all but explicitly stated to be the weakest Eikon by leagues!

Lads! What the fuck were you doing!? That was the most obvious fucking set-up and you wasted it!

To say that Jill is wasted is an understatement. But the fact that the writers largely see her as a damsel for Clive to save or a vector for people to antagonise Clive through is fucking baffling for a series that has, historically, done really well by its female casts. Funnily enough FFXIV also struggled with female characters until Shadowbringers, almost like there's a pattern here.

Fumbling the ball is debatably the game's real big theme because it's doing it constantly. None of the villains are a hit for a variety of reasons, and it becomes really obvious that the Heavensward leads and parts of the XIV team went onto this after that came out because the strides XIV made in villain quality afterward feel extremely telling (yes Stormblood fumbled Yotsuyu hard and Fordola is 100% awful no matter how you see her, but Zenos was gold; then Shadowbringers has the series' best villain after that). A lot of them can be done quickfire:

Benedikta is an insecure failwoman that had some actually good character foundations for an arc about becoming secure and succeeding! She's dead within the first five hours and nothing further is done with her as a character in any way, significant potential cast to the four winds for no good reason other than "Game of Thrones has killing so we should kill". Heavensward had a character somewhat like this in Ysayle and it wasted her in similar fashion (FUNNILY ENOUGH YSAYLE ALSO TRANSFORMS INTO SHIVA WHY IS THIS A FUCKING PATTERN). Also her last moments as a person are breaking down right as a group of bandits begins to attempt to rape her. Great work, lads.

Hugo is seduced by Benedikta early on and believes she genuinely loved him, and is driven by unyielding rage when someone makes him believe Cid killed her (when it was actually Clive, which like, same difference after that point anyway). He has a good speech in the Rosarian throne room but otherwise isn't up to much and all semblance of character vanishes going into his fight, with no moment afterward.

The Sanbrequois Emperor is a generic emperor man who initially wars for access to unBlighted lands and then for control of resources, which while bastardly is just standard operation for an empire. His sign of greater evil is feckless disregard for treaties, which is explicitly driven by his wife's ambitions, which, christ, we'll get to in a bit. By himself he isn't up to much of anything at all.

Barnabas Tharmr is king of Waloed, the eastern smaller chunk of Valisthea, and Dominant of Odin. He fights Bahamut in a very early CG cutscene, then isn't in the game for about 35 hours. When he shows up, he gets built up as a Vergil-esque impossibly strong opponent who truly could only have been matched by Dion, Dominant of Bahamut, who you needed to partner up to defeat as Ifrit. He wrecks Clive in a really unconvincing cutscene where he just kicks him out of a blind rush and then one-shots him, is implied to oneshot Shiva without needing to become Odin (which is not a feat as Shiva can't do fucking anything after the prologue), and shortly later has a more even fight that ends with Clive and Jill fleeing from him. Then you fight him for real at a tower in the middle of Waloed and he's Odin for all of 2 minutes before Ifrit ganks him and the rest of the fight is mostly just fighting him in his "semi-primed" Devil Trigger state. The entire time he's back in the plot, he's a calm, collected cold type who just repeats the real villain's very limited spiel over and over, until halfway through his real boss fight where he randomly begins cackling and goes psycho, revealing an actual character trait...and it's just bargain bin scam-brand Zenos from XIV Stormblood. It's never suggested at being a thing anywhere before this.

There are three villains I have not discussed above, who are noteworthy for being three different kinds of more elaborately bad.

First and simplest: the entire Ironblood Kingdom. The Ironblood Kingdom is a small island nation off the west coast of Valisthea, whose army are fighting Dhalmekia (Titan's nation) in the game's opening before the flashback sequence to Clive's childhood. They are an explicitly barbaric and unbelievably violent people who wield the Dominant Shiva for conquest, forcing her to fight for them by threatening to kill innocents. They are the only people in the game who speak their own foreign language, they have an evil religion based around human sacrifice to their Mothercrystal, they raid Clive's homeland Rosaria before the imperials take it and kill all the men, kidnap all the women to use as slaves and Jill's discussion of this leaves the implication of "worse" (rape) in the air but doesn't confirm it. The Ironbloods are just flavourless Vikings with unfortunate connotations (why are the evil human-sacrificing ultraviolent cultists who kill men and kidnap women the only ones who speak a foreign language?), and after Jill's revenge arc they vanish from the game completely and never matter ever again. They get one mention - that their society collapses after the loss of the Mothercrystal, the centre of their religion - and that's it. Clive and Jill, now heads of an anarchist commune looking to rescue and take in slaves wherever it can, never even mention considering going to the Ironblood home island to save the Rosarian slave women. They're just left to their fate out there in the collapsing society of ultraviolent Vikings.

The Rosarian slave women Jill grew up with, lived with, was protected by, and met with again during the incursion into the Mothercrystal.

Just never mentioned again, left to their fates.

10/10.

The second is the real villain and final boss, Ultima. Ultima has an interesting appearance: a snow-white gaunt fleshy being with dark pits for eyes. He endlessly repeats the same few lines about free will being evil and how mankind's will is super weak and how it is reinforced by consciousness and links with other people to survive and etc etc. This is genuinely over 80% of his lines, the remaining few being "You cannot win because I am God" and him descending into coping and seething as Clive beats his ass in the final fight, which is also the only time he develops an actual character.

Ultima is a boneless version of the Ascians from FFXIV, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that he is very clearly hacked together from Heavensward-era lore bible/character notes on the Ascians at that point. The Ascians in XIV: A Realm Reborn (the base game) and Heavensward are all one-note masked robe-wearing villains, largely interchangeable as they rant about making the Darkness happen again and resurrecting their fell god Zodiark to restore Balance, and so on. The only exceptions are Lahabrea (who fucking loves being evil and is cackling all the time) and Elidibius, the lone white-robed Ascian and their leader, who is just the smug "I Know What You Do Not and that means we will win" sort of preening villain who doesn't do that much. None of the rest matter or have much in the way of character in either part of the game, and the Ascians are entirely absent from Stormblood until the patches leading to Shadowbringers start.

If you still don't believe me, consider this: Ultima is a member of an unbelievably advanced and magically powerful race of god-like beings who ended up creating humanity, with the goal of exploiting humanity and laying waste to the world to remake it for their own ends and restart their own long-lost civilisation. That's the Ascians from XIV to a tee. It's the same exact shit, only Ultima doesn't have a character, he just spouts blandly mean evil shit so meaningless platitudes can be spit back at him before he gets punched in the face.

This was the worst possible road to take. It's a bad road to have taken at any point, but in a post-Shadowbringers world this was the worst possible road to take. With its shuffling in staff and promotion of Natsuko Ishikawa, previously a writer for optional side content and famously XIV's excellent Dark Knight job quests, to lead writer, Shadowbringers saw the Ascians greatly expanded. The remaining Ascians, Elidibius and technically-a-newcomer Emet-Selch, are fucking fantastic characters in Shadowbringers: Elidibius is rescued from being a boring forgettable generic smug man into a genuinely tragic figure, and Emet-Selch is Final Fantasy's single best villain. Ishikawa had the giga-brain idea to look at the Ascians' situation, of perpetuating apocalypses for millennia to try and reform their destroyed world and resurrect their dead god, and thought to ask "What kind of a person does that? What drives you to actually stick to that plan? And what does that do to you as a person? How do you hold together? How do you keep going?".

And it was beautiful.

And then XVI stumbles in with this fucking cumstain who just keeps burbling "free will bad, being my slave is based actually, please stop having the free will" and trying to climb into Clive's skin.

Ultima has no character and has fucking nothing going on. He is at least an embodiment of the game's main theme but that's all he is, he's the ultimate slave-driver and exists for a former slave to spout platitudes he himself doesn't embody at and then be punched so that a truly equal society can be made...except we don't see that truly equal society, we just see one that no longer has magic and thus no longer has Bearers, who were enslaved for their magic, and is thus saved from the Blight too. Except in the Ironblood Kingdom where women were generally enslaved to make food and be sacrificed. Those slaves we just forgot. Hm.

Fumbles the ball constantly.

Anabella gets her own section

The third and final villain to discuss isn't the main villain or even an ally of the main villain, she's just a singular black hole of fucking awful writing and concerning attitudes. Anabella Rosfield is Clive and Joshua's mother, and at the start of the game she quickly establishes a seething hatred and deep-seated bigotry for Bearers simply because they are slaves and poor, and similar contempt for everyone not born rich. Her husband, Clive's dad and duke of Rosaria, talks about making life better for the Bearers and thus possibly has intentions of abolishing slavery in Rosaria, so Anabella concocts a scheme with the Sanbrequois Empire to perform a decapitation strike that kills him and the duchy's top military unit and leaders while letting her walk away with Joshua, her favoured son because he got made the Dominant of Phoenix. The way it plays out, Anabella assumes Joshua died and walks off to marry the Emperor and have a new child.

Over the course of the game, Anabella makes it clear that her goal is to simply be the birth-mother of the ruler of the world. She desires no power for herself: she isn't concocting a scheme to make herself regent in a system that favours men and male heirs as rulers exclusively, she isn't working the system to get herself in charge. When she gets her weird child with the Emperor into the seat, she does so by talking the Emperor into letting an eight year old onto the throne in name while the Emperor stays on as regent and continues doing his work. This is her end goal. She simply wishes for her son (and it is always a son, too) to rule and for that son to be known as legitimately hers. Having and birthing a ruler is the sum total of her existence and all she strives for, except for one thing: killing slaves.

Anabella's hatred for Bearers goes beyond even the other cartoonish examples you see throughout the early game. She straight up creates an honest-to-god Nazi death squad to go around carrying out pogroms on slaves in Rosaria specifically, not to spite Clive specifically because he escaped enslavement under the imperial military, just to kill slaves in Rosaria because she really fucking hates slaves. The Nazi death squad pillage one village, sack a church, raze a second village to the ground and raze a third to the ground before Clive finally deals with allegedly all of them as they prepared to raze another. They kill slaves in massive numbers and kill anyone who might object as well, all explicitly in the empress' name, simply because she hates slaves so much. Slaves never did anything to her, there is no hack shite like "a slave killed her dad for being a slaver" or something like Fordola in XIV Stormblood, nor does she have XIV Stormblood's justification for Yotsuyu (victim of childhood abuse and sex trafficking that the state permitted to exist openly - and still did nothing about even when new king Hien was faced with the specific sex trafficker who took her what the fuck guys); she just hates slaves because they have magic and are slaves. They are a subset of the poor and non-nobles, who she also hates blindly.

She's a deranged eugenicist-fascist birth-obsessed gender essentialist who holds these beliefs and thoughts simply because. Literally every line of hers is self-assured smug preening about screwing people over, slaves being killed or enacting her plans to get her child onto the throne so she can claim to be an emperor's mum. There is an extensive scene where she openly shit-talks, insults and smugly preens at the emperor's first son with his deceased first wife, openly gloating about screwing him out of the throne simply to gloat. She is not in league with Ultima, she does not act to serve his plans, she isn't even unknowingly corrupted by or influenced by Ultima to stir up discord to further his ends, she's just a pit of blind hatred towards everyone and everything who sexed her way to a position to give birth to someone who would take actual power, because actual power doesn't matter, birthing someone to take it does.

I have to wonder if the person who wrote her was freshly divorced. It may be uncouth to suggest it but I genuinely believe they have problems with women. I think it's deranged this got past editing and made it into the game as is.

Like, let's be clear here: Anabella is the single biggest individual source of suffering and death outside of Ultima, the literal slaver god. She:

Disowns Clive for not being a Phoenix Dominant

Orchestrates the assassination of her own husband once she has a Phoenix Dominant child and he starts suggesting they abolish slavery

Has all her husband's top men and staff killed, to a man where possible, leaving Rosaria entirely without leadership

Has her own handmaidens killed after preening to imperial soldiers in front of them, having given them the impression they would be spared to join her as she went to the Emperor

As Empress, is explicitly said to corrupt the Emperor, making him more callous and cruel. The suggestion to break the peace treaty with Twinside is from her influence

As Empress, creates a Nazi death squad themed after her dead first husband's band of loyal men, only coloured black and now called "the Black Shields". In her name openly and explicitly, they go out into Rosaria specifically alone to kill slaves, razing villages to the ground for having too many slaves and not turning over slaves, simply for the joy of killing slaves. Two villages are razed, a church sacked and a village pillaged with hundreds of people killed, and plans are made to continue doing this before the squad is allegedly completely defeated by Clive

As Empress, goes to Dhalmekia behind the Emperor's back to discuss terms with Hugo, telling him to lay siege to Rosaria's capital to set a trap for "Cid the Outlaw". This siege destroys ever more of Rosaria, continuing the trend of aggressively and viciously shitting on and destroying her prior family's legacy and history, and also sees myriad imperial soldiers and Rosarian civilians killed in swathes by Hugo's men

As Empress, having corrupted the Emperor into sieging and taking Twinside as the new imperial capital, following the destruction of Dhalmekia's crystal, she suggests the Emperor take up Dhalmekia in making a treaty to end the war (as Dhalmekia now struggles without its Mothercrystal) and then rout them as they try to leave. She suggests this so Sanbreque can take Dhalmekia and the outlying Free Cities and thus hold all of Valisthea outside Waloed.

She then intends to have the Emperor siege and take Waloed to complete the conquest of Valisthea for her 8 year old son to nominally rule over. This is a plan she has dedicated decades of her life to: making everyone bow to her child. Not her, not her family or lineage or name, just her son. Any of her sons, just needs to be one of hers.

Directly gloats about corrupting Dion's father to Dion, and directly gloats about screwing him out of the throne. Calls his "blood" "unclean", further insults, and sneers that he should just obey her weird child emperor. Thinks this will work without repercussion. This causes Dion to carry out an uprising with the intent to kill her, leading to the slaughter of the royal guard, and Ultima (who hollowed out her weird child to wear as a skinsuit a while ago) to provoke Dion into losing control and become a raging Bahamut, which then lays waste to Twinside, killing untold tens of thousands at minimum. This sequence also gets the Emperor killed.

Ultima doesn't even do anywhere near as much as she does when it comes to sowing discord. Depending on the population count of Waloed (which is more or less entirely converted to magic zombies by Barnabas choosing to serve Ultima blindly) versus the slaughtered slaves and people in Rosaria and Twinside, she may actually have caused more deaths total by her actions than Ultima does before the aetherfloods and Waloed's zombie invasion arrive. More, if we count war dead as technically hers too by her seducing the Emperor into ordering it.

I need to make it clearer: none of Anabella's actions or motivations make any actual sense. Nothing scarred her into needing to be validated or legitimised by having a child of hers placed into the highest seat of power in the world. She has no tragic backstory. She simply comes into being an unfathomably hate-filled pit directed at the weakest and most oppressed people in society, and all of her actions directly or indirectly lead to unfathomable numbers of deaths simply because she wants them dead or because she wants to be called an emperor's mum. She does not want personal power, she does not want to shape the world according to an ideology, she is not in league with the ancient slaver god or his thrall or anything like that, she just really hates slaves for no reason and is obsessed with birthing.

And they clearly aren't intended to make sense, because she's obviously meant simply to be hated. She exists to be hated, she's a completely ridiculous, embarrassingly cartoonish mess that acts as deranged as possible to make you hate her. One of her longest scenes is that one I keep referencing where she openly gloats at and insults Dion and laughs that her child is now emperor and he isn't, and she legitimately completely thought she could just do that and nothing would come of it.

Because she's shocked when Dion rocks up the next night, declares rebellion and attempts to kill her weird child. She is reduced to hysteric screaming when the Emperor takes the blow and dies, completely shaken and left a quivering wreck found by Clive later in the ruins of the imperial palace, legitimately unable to believe this could have happened or that anything could go wrong.

She's so specifically engineered to be spited and hated, to try and make you seethe at her, to be a singular symbol of all evil, and for what? This isn't the first time this team has done this sort of shit, though never to this scale; FFXIV will randomly produce minor villains and NPCs who are evil to the point of blatant stupidity, doing acts and getting minutes-long scenes of cackling and sneering and gloating about it at agonising length, and it's always dumb and bad when it happens there. At least on one occasion the gloater gets bisected gloriously, half the time they weakly eat shit or are simply rolled away.

Anabella is the worst fucking instance of it by far; as a villain type it just fucking sucks because it's not interesting to see, it has nothing interesting to say, it isn't fun or actually shocking or actually capable of disgusting you to your core, it's just weird and annoying in how much time they take up. Combining the weird birthmother angle shit to it, the fact that they're always sons and that she's the only woman in the upper ranks of these governments makes it all very pointed in a very discomforting way.

One might say it's realistic, there are genuinely people out there who are bigoted beyond belief and beyond all rationality, who will be bigoted even when it will actively work against them. Yes, that's true, they are tragically common and often shitting themselves on social media at the revelation that no-one likes them, not even their fellows. But so what? So what if they're realistic? It's not interesting, they aren't interesting, they're just shitty people. Being realistic doesn't automatically make them a good fit for a story, and often it makes them a bad fit.

Moreover, if you want to bring realism into this, let's do it: let's bring realism into Anabella's shit. That scene with Dion, realistically, is so fucking unbelievably stupid that she could not have conceivably survived to that point in the first place, she would have gotten herself killed stupidly long before it. Dion is:

First son of the Emperor

Leader of the Sanbrequois Dragoons, dragon-taming super knights and strongest and most powerful military division of a heavily militaristic society. This also makes him the highest ranked military leader in the country

Dominant of Bahamut, divine dragon in a society that worships and utilises and integrates dragons into itself. Bahamut is also undebatably the strongest of all Eikons. Sanbreque is a deeply religious society, Bahamut's Dominant is nigh-on a living god to them.

Suspecting that Anabella is an agent of, or possessed by, Ultima, who he knows is a real thing thanks to Joshua. He knows his father has become more violent and cruel lately, and has been since the marriage with Anabella. This makes Anabella a threat to all humanity, not just his family or Sanbreque, and thus she needs to be killed.

Is seeing Anabella tear his family apart before his eyes and taking away his birthright while laughing about it

Alone with her in the room at that point.

Is willing to kill her.

Is armed.

Dion has every single conceivable form of social and institutional legitimacy available in a medieval/early modern society shielding his actions. He could kill Anabella in the street and simply declare "Heathen" and walk away unfettered. He is also an extraordinarily powerful warrior himself before you even factor in "can transform into the most powerful god" - when he comes to the throne room to declare rebellion, no knight or cardinal/bishop there speaks up when the Emperor commands Dion's arrest. They don't budge. They either agree with him, or take his legitimacy over even the emperor's, or they simply refuse to fuck with him lest he kill them instantly.

When Dion orders the Dragoons to rebel and seize the palace, they do so without question. Not a man disobeys or turns away, they immediately set about slaying the royal and city guards, while evacuating and protecting civilians flawlessly. They take his assertion that Anabella is a traitor and usurper and that she and her 8-year-old son need to die without question and set about carrying it out.

Dion's word is basically divine law.

And Anabella, living in this society for over a decade if not near two, near the highest seat of power, regularly around bishops/cardinals/high priests and commanders, somehow believed that actively antagonising Dion as much as is entirely possible could not result in anything other than Dion going "okay" and just kneeling before her child. She somehow figured that Dion was not, in fact, the single most powerful man in this society (literally so, in a physical sense, too) despite living in it and seeing its workings from the inside for years.

Anabella is so stupid it's criminal. She's such a bad character it's unfathomable. The entire plot is actively warped by her presence and her list of sins is so deranged it undermines the fucking story because is this societal system that employs slavery actually this bad, or is it just this singular individual lunatic at the top ruining everything? She's the single worst character in any Final Fantasy, any one, ever. There is a weird seething, boiling disgust behind this character and I don't think it's unfair to say that someone wasn't right when writing her. Someone was freshly divorced or freshly seething about a woman for something, because I don't see how you go to these lengths and not be.

In fact, take what was said about Jill before, consider what they do with Benedikta, consider that no other female character is as prominent as these three. And then contemplate these facts:

The creative director and screenplay writer was also main scenario writer for XIV: Heavensward, where the main female character in the core cast, who also transforms into Shiva as her power-up state incidentally, steps to another primal as Shiva and gets fucking wrecked, and later sacrifices herself when there wasn't any real need to, dying as Shiva to a big airship.

One scenario writer was a scenario writer for Persona 5, which should speak for itself

One scenario writer was a game designer for Yokai Watch 3, a game so uninterested in its own female lead that not only is half her story completely irrelevant to main story, but postgame content actively denies you entry if you try to play as her for no actual reason. No plot reason, no character reason, she just can't do some things like a battle challenge tower simply because.

Another scenario writer was a story writer for Yokai Watch 3, as well.

And tell me that the writing staff of Final Fantasy XVI doesn't have problems with women.

There's other straggler issues I had, but nothing will top that. Now at the end of the post, actually, I remembered something and have nowhere else to put it. It's petty but I want to get it down somewhere.

After a point, you get a historian/lecturer at your home base called Vivian who tells you about the state of the world and the ongoing conflicts at different points throughout the story, and she is entirely useless every time. She gives you a very basic rundown of character backgrounds, she gives you a very basic rundown of recent history, and 95% of the time you already know what she tells you from previous scenes and the remaining 5% isn't of any use or interest, when it's even there. It's annoying in that it's pointless minutes of fluff and padding to a game that could do with better pacing and thus doesn't need it.

Like a lot of CBU3's work, it's following in the footsteps of an Ivalice game, specifically this time Final Fantasy XII (which is also a regular source of names, scenes, characters, plot elements, ideas and more for XIV as well). There are a scant few scenes in XII where you get an excerpt of the memoirs from a relatively minor NPC, the Marquis Ondore, and the first one of these comes in the game's opening, after its lengthy and gorgeous CG cutscenes. It sets the stage of the world and puts in more context for the things you saw in the cutscene, and establishes what the prologue sequence you're about to play is.

Compare the two for yourself: XVI's first Vivian scene (0:31 to 2:14, there's little bits of dialogue before and after with Clive if you want) and XII's opening excerpt with Ondore (7:04 to 9:14).

It's not just the performance, though I would argue Ondore's is miles and miles better, it's the presentation and all, really. XII's lead-in, its use of images, its fucking great music, the way it cuts it silent at the end to deliver its tantalising sting, it's not just exposition but a solid part of the opening narrative itself. Note how much faster paced Ondore's performance is, and how much easier it is to follow as a result. That sort of pacing would help a lot of XVI's dialogue and delivery, XII's English dub is very lively and theatrical and it really elevates it.

But really, I am petty about it; Ondore's opening excerpt is one of those scenes fucking embedded in my head, his delivery and cadence of his lines stuck in there. I love that scene, it's so good at establishing tone, context, flavour and leading in to the prologue it's nuts. I was excited to see XVI try the same, and was deflated when it didn't match up, and continually annoyed every time we had to go back to this random lady to be told things I already knew or even had just inferred.

And if you think I'm harping on it, just look at this bit where when asked "how do we enter Ash/Waloed", Vivian gives a 3 minute lecture only to end on "the beach you already went to literally right before this return to the home base". Tell me these scenes aren't just fucking filler.

Final Fantasy XVI should've been right up my alley. "Final Fantasy but Devil May Cry" crosses my favourite series with one of my other favourites, I should have been the target audience for this one. But holy good fuck, they fucked it in basically every area and I grow more negative on it the more I think about it.

At least now I can shit this out and get it off my mind.

#pocket-media-tag

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jerrymiemila · 1 year ago

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HORI7ON: Their Remarkable Journey to Achieving Success

Getting a sneak peek into the world of the idol industry, achieving success often appears as a far-fetched dream. With the increasing number of pop musical groups in South Korea, leaving a distinctive image can be an uphill battle. Yet, HORI7ON managed to do just that. This group, composed of Jeromy, Marcus, Kyler, Vinci, Reyster, Kim, and Winston, stands out as the only all-Filipino group based in South Korea. Their remarkable journey is a testament to their unwavering passion, talent, and a unique blend of cultural influences. Now, let us delve into the epic saga of HORI7ON’s rise in the heart of the K-Pop scene, where dreams become reality.

A Look Back on Their Pre-Debut

Since the formation of the group on February 12, 2023, their journey as idols has been set. Prior to their official debut, they unveiled three pre-debut singles: ‘Dash’, ‘Salamat’, and ‘Lovey Dovey’. These tracks garnered widespread acclaim from both fans and the public, setting the stage for their upcoming success.

In addition to their music releases, the group made memorable appearances on popular variety shows like “It’s Showtime” and “ASAP Natin ‘To”, solidifying their presence in the entertainment scene. Their star shone even brighter as they embarked on a series of mall shows, spanning various provinces across the country, where they introduced themselves to an eager and growing fanbase.

Furthermore, before their departure to South Korea, the group hosted their first-ever fan meeting at the New Frontier Theater, which was a resounding success, with tickets selling out swiftly. This event marked a significant milestone in their journey, and it was during this time that they officially unveiled their fandom name, “ANCHOR.” At that time, it was also announced that the group would have their first reality show program titled “100 Days Miracle”, which was later announced to be shown on Mnet��s M2 YouTube channel, showcasing the group’s 100-day journey before debut and giving fans a glimpse into how they prepared for their debut.

Debut Highlights

Arriving in South Korea, the feeling of being an idol became even more profound with their tight schedules. Training for twelve hours a day showed just how hard they had to work to be prepared for their debut day, which was initially set for June but was later pushed to July. Apart from the rigorous training, homesickness also took a toll on their mental health, leaving them in tears at times. However, as they gradually adapted to their lives as idols, they learned that nothing worth having comes easy.

On July 4, 2023, MLD Entertainment announced that the group would be debuting with a full-length album titled “Friend-SHIP”. Debuting with a full-length album is a rare opportunity for any group. Perhaps no other group had ever debuted with a fully packed album consisting of 12 songs, making fans even more excited for the septet’s debut.

Following the announcement, they posted their schedule, detailing what fans could expect in the days leading up to the group’s debut, including concept photos, a track list, a debut trailer, album highlight medleys, and music video teasers. Additionally, the group released information about their expected debut album, detailing the album’s versions, designs, inclusions, and pre-order information, which added to the excitement. Moreover, they revealed ‘SIX7EEN’ as the group’s debut track when they released the album’s track list. In addition to the songs released in Dream Maker, the album also included sub-unit songs and solo songs featuring members of TFN, Lapillus, and New:ID.

On July 24, 2023, the group released the music video for their title track, ‘SIX7EEN’, alongside the album. Before the release of the music video and the album, the group held a press release in front of various media outlets from South Korea. Afterward, the group held their debut showcase at the Olympic Hall at the Seoul Olympic Park, where they performed what they had prepared for their fans, who had eagerly awaited this exciting moment in their journey as an idol group.

The group’s full album, “Friend-SHIP”, debuted in various countries on iTunes, including the Philippines, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Poland, Finland, Spain, Cayman Islands, New Zealand, Singapore, Belgium, Thailand, Canada, Italy, United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition, it debuted on the Worldwide iTunes Album Chart and the European iTunes Album Chart at #82 and #185 and peaked at #57 and #58, respectively. Their album also amassed nearly 60,000 sold copies, demonstrating their marketability. Furthermore, their title track, ‘SIX7EEN’, achieved over two million views within its first 24 hours of release, showing their growing popularity.

The group also performed on various popular music shows, such as Mnet’s “M Countdown”, KBS2’s “Music Bank”, SBS’ “Inkigayo”, SBS MTV’s “The Show”, MBC TV’s “Show! Music Core”, and Arirang TV’s “Simply K-pop” to commemorate their debut. To date, they are the very first Filipino group to have performed on these music shows, showing that nothing is impossible when it comes to reaching your dreams.

Post-Debut Adventures

Bringing themselves the title of Global Pop Group, expectations for the group were high. In addition to promoting in both the Philippines and South Korea, as seen in their pre-debut and debut activities, the group also aimed to go global.

On August 19, 2023, the group performed at Kamp Fest held in Mexico City, a music festival organized by Kamp Global. Their appearance at this festival had already been planned before their debut, hinting at their likely future global promotions. Prior to flying to Mexico for their first international performance, they also took part in music festivals in South Korea, including the Ulsan Music Festival and Cheonan K-Culture Expo 2023.

Following their successful debut, MLD Entertainment announced on August 2, 2023, that the group would hold their first concert titled “Voyage to Manila” on September 9, 2023, at the Smart Araneta Coliseum. This sudden announcement took fans by surprise, giving them little time to save up and prepare. Nevertheless, they managed to sell over 70% of the big dome’s capacity, a remarkable feat for a newcomer group that had only debuted two months earlier. In addition to the group’s concert, the septet also planned to stay in the Philippines for the whole month of September to do various promotions on both radio and television.

Moreover, on September 18, 2023, Star News, one of the organizers of the most anticipated annual Asia Artist Awards, announced the group as one of the performing artists, alongside big K-Pop groups such as BSS, ZEROBASEONE, ITZY, THE BOYZ, Stray Kids, and NewJeans, among others, signifying their gradual rise in the music industry.

Like many other groups, the septet’s journey was no walk in the park. However, their talent and unwavering dedication turned their achievements into a clear demonstration of the group’s enormous potential for success. With their increasing visibility and appeal to the public, with effective management and promotion, it is only a matter of time before they ascend to the pinnacle and establish a prominent reputation for themselves.

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davidvkimball · 1 year ago

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Charizard and Diddy Kong in Melee?!

The Akaneia Build - Version 0.8 Update Trailer

youtube

This trailer, lovingly created in the style of Melee Special Movie, showcases the three new-to-Melee characters, Wolf, Diddy Kong, and Charizard, while also sharing the new costumes and game modes.

You can also hear a unique Star Wolf theme that was created by @Sarveproduction on Twitter and it sounds OUTSTANDING! It feels right at home in Melee.

Altogether a wonderfully constructed trailer that feels like it could have been made by HAL Laboratory in 2001.

Two New Characters Join the Fight

Based on their Project M counterparts, Charizard and Diddy Kong join Wolf and the rest of the roster in the latest Akaneia build for Melee.

Of course they’ve been given the Melee design treatment to fit in with the rest of the cast.

Some liberties were taken with the special moves, like Charizard’s side B and up B, and giving him Rock Smash on down B. Diddy Kong’s side B is simplified to be more “Melee-like.” All-in-all, they fit in well.

Right now Charizard’s dash dance doesn’t rumble quite the way I’d expect it to - but UnclePunch and team are aware.

With that minor complaint aside, these additions are pretty cool.

New Costumes + New Game Modes

A slew of new costumes are available for the whole cast!

Tag, All Star Versus, and Turbo Melee modes have been added to Melee’s new options under the added “Games” menu option. Note, these will not appear if you’re using Slippi.

Volleyball, Peach’s Castle, and Wolf got some tweaks also.

Wolf and Diddy Kong’s design are based on Smash 2‘s models.

Shout out to KTH, ConnorRentz, MaZone, Super4ng, Pik, and duccW, for their work on this update!

See the video at the top of this post to see the trailer they released for this update. It’s very well done!

* Edit, Team Akaneia on Twitter clarified that Project M was not used as a reference for the new fighters, rather they used official releases and tweaked based on their own preferences.

#Youtube

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joshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh · 2 years ago

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I did literally just say I love Sonic now more than ever so gonna offset my last post about Prime being negative by mentioning a few things I really like about Prime.

One of the biggest ones is just how dope it looks! Really fun stylised 3D animation that looks smooth and has a good focus on like, keyframing and strong poses - combined with the really expressive mdoels it’s a style that really works for Sonic and I can’t wait for more even just to see how it looks.

And on visuals, I really like the character designs! Part of the reason I grind Sonic Dash so hard or why I bought the Tokyo 2020 Olympics is because getting any official opportunity to see the characters in alternate outfits is usually just super fun, especially because of how strict SEGA usually is with that stuff. Prime meanwhile comes around and has given us like 3 extra outfits for several of the core cast with still more to come! That’s just blanket really fun!

I also like that Sonic’s new looks tend to give him neat little abilities. Narratively it doesn’t amount to much but I don’t even feel like it has to - it’s a neat surprise factor/rule of cool thing that adds character to whichever universe we’re in and enhances Sonic’s reactions to those places as well. If anything it’d honestly be cool to have something like that in the games lol.

I like the voice acting a lot! I actually can’t meaningfully expand on that one lol, it just sounds really good, everyone feels well cast to me, it doesn’t feel like many awkward line reads made it through to the final thing. They are just nice. The only person I don’t adore is Eggman but even then, A) I so can’t imagine non-Mike Pollock Eggmen and B) actual Eggman is mostly absent in favour of Mister Doctor Eggman so I’m pretty much solid with it anyway.

I really enjoy New Yoke as a setting a lot. “What if the villain won?” is a classic setting for a reason, even being one that multiple pieces of Sonic media have explored, but I think New Yoke manages to feel particularly fresh even just on execution and aesthetic alone. It helps that it still feels very lived in - there’s a living, breathing population and a band of rebels that operate in secret and there’s Nine’s hideout and just like, cool shit going on lol.

For that matter I like Nine a lot. I literally put Tails as my 5th favourite Sonic character in that list I did a while back and he’s been in virtually every single Sonic game even during some of its most intense Solo Sonica eras - but he can feel very relegated to the background because of the nature of his character sometimes? So it’s really awesome to see Prime use Nine as an excuse to really let Tails play a major role with lots of actual development and stuff. This is helped doubly by the fact that, awkward pixel art aside, the flashback of his actual backstory (as canonised by Origins wow) alone helps him just feel like the real Tails we’re dealing with, just in a different setting. And yeah, the mechanical Tails are just really cool lol. Particularly a fan of the fact that it allows Tails to be up close and personal in combat again - he’s supposed to use his Tails to attack as well but lots of Sonic media has him holding back for support roles in combat, it’s nice that Prime is willing to acknowledge that, yo, Tails can throw hands. And also tails lmaoooooo

I’m not sure how best to word this part specifically also, but I personally was worried that Prime would sorta like, I guess just follow a rigid structure of x episodes in x shatterverse, grab the crystals, and then move onto the next one? The formula not really changing? But it does not do that and we kinda go back and forth between them and there’s things happening between the shatterverses and like, just in general there’s an actually good attempt to keep the structure fresh and interesting.

And the biggest thing of all is that. Prime is actually just really fun lol. There’s a lot of other good things I haven’t mentioned, but it all comes together with what I have to make a show that’s actually just plain old entertaining to watch. I didn’t feel like I was watching the new Sonic show out of obligation, I was just watching it because I genuinely liked watching it. Even my problems with it don’t feel like a huge deal because it’s so good at the moment-to-moment that I wasn’t really thinking about them while watching. Like it’s literally just a good show, and that slaps.

So fuck yeah, Prime is dope.

#sonic #2.2.23

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talesfromasnarkylisa · 2 months ago

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Lacey: Chapter 5

James: August 1st, 2023

Two days until the deadline and I still hadn’t finished the application yet. The questions really are weird. I wondered to myself if Corianna was right.

What’s worse, though, is that I was completely stuck in writer’s block for everything. Articles, video scripts, even Tweets and Reddit posts. I had not updated in a few days on any of my socials besides retweets. While that wouldn’t be a problem if I wasn’t stuck in a sludge of no creativity, the last time I had writer’s block lasted for a month. I lost over a hundred followers from an initial two thousand then. Thank goodness I now have 30K on Medium and Vocal.

With seemingly no way out of my creative sterility and only a few days left, I contemplated giving up on applying.

Maybe it just isn’t worth the hassle, I thought.

Part of me didn’t want to give up yet, but I definitely needed a break. I went onto Discord. None of my online friends or mutuals were online. So I checked out the official Music Refined server.

For a publication known for being insanely exclusive, the chat was rather chaotic. There were anime GIFs being plastered all over in the general chat and writers arguing about Machine Gun Kelly.

I messaged a simple “Hello” to the server. For a brief moment, everyone seemed to calm down. A few greeted me back.

Orion (08/01/23, 7:59 PM): Hello there!

Animemc (08/01/23, 7:59 PM): Hey there

Lacey Hannah (08/01/23, 8:00 PM): Hiiiiiiii, what’s up dude?

The last message startled me. I hadn’t seen that phrase since last summer. I’ve only ever heard it from one person: Augusta.

Augusta used to be my other best friend. At times, we were even closer than Darian and I. We only ever knew each other online, but she felt like family to me. I’d half-jokingly call her a sister sometimes.

Those days are long gone.

She wrote articles like me and also posted on TikTok. Also past tense. Augusta doesn’t go onto public social media anymore - assuming she told the truth. And honestly, it’s for the better.

While trying to calm down, I noticed Lacey’s avatar. It was a sullen dark skinned blonde Picrew with medium length hair and brown eyes. Photoshopped onto it was a dreamy filter - almost the exact same one Augusta used to use.

This can’t be Augusta, I thought. She’d never be so blatant with an alt account.

Still, I spent several minutes combing through Lacey’s socials and messages.

I started with her Twitter. The bolded name was Lacey Hannah, with the handle being the simple laceyhannah. Her bio went like this: She/they, writer and rambler. I unwind here. Lacey’s Tweets fell into four main categories. Generic cute animal memes, promoting her content, small talk designed to be #relatable, and pop punk. Not even only respectable pop punk like Paramore, Avril Lavigne or Fall Out Boy. Nope. She just had to go with Olivia Rodrigo fangirling on top of those. At least she seemed to like me, though. She retweeted a few posts of mine and followed me.

Next, I checked her YouTube. She had been trying to make it big in music there. Unfortunately, for her, there were quite a few things going against her. One, a low subscriber count of 43. Two, too many original songs and not enough covers to gain a fanbase first. Three, a singing voice that while good was hardly consistent video to video.

Finally, Medium. Unlike me, that was the only place she wrote long form. She didn’t post often. Her articles tended to center around pop music and rap, with a dash of actual rock here and there. Turned out, she wrote for Music Refined before. I read her article on a Sex Pistols song where she rips and tears into every detail. I may not have been into the band all that bunch, but she clearly didn’t know what she was talking about. Most damning was an article from 3 years prior where she confesses to having never heard a hard punk song in her life.

Returning to the Discord server, I scrolled through Lacey’s latest messages. She had only been in the server for a few days, but everyone liked her as a texter. They participated in her playful banter and replied to her meme posting. I both felt déja vu and didn’t.

Stupid you, I thought to myself. If you can’t write, at least spend more time trying to eliminate your competition.

I checked the Music Refined server channel for editor questions. Sure enough, Lacey was also applying to the editing team.

Lacey Hannah (07/30/23, 5:00 PM): For the questions which aren’t asterisked on the editor application form, do we still have to answer them?

Micah Turner (07/30/23, 5:06 PM): You can if you want to! There’s no requirement, but it’s a great way to show off your personality.

Lacey Hannah (07/30/23, 5:07 PM): Alright, thanks.

The time was 9:00 PM. Even though it was late, I felt rejuvenated. The motivation to finish up that damn application was back in store for me. There was no way I’d let Lacey take an editor position. Not when she was a sleazy sellout with no idea what true punk was. Sure, I didn’t know an awful lot either. But at least I wasn’t into juvenile wannabes like Lacey was.

I wasn’t just doing it for me either. Lacey was the pinnacle of everything wrong with beginner publications. Her articles were light and fun, yes, but they were just that: light and fun. And being light and fun shouldn’t be what cuts it in this sphere. Lots of people - like me - worked their asses off to get the engagement they dreamed of. It wouldn't be fair for Lacey to win.

(Wattpad version: https://www.wattpad.com/1481611874-lacey-chapter-5)

#creative writing #story #storytelling #tumblr #tumblr stuff #writing #inspired by #loosely #folklore love triangle #folklore #lacy olivia rodrigo #lacy #original characters #wattpad

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brandongamesall · 5 months ago

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I'm officially going to rank the cuphead bosses right now. Like, oh my god, they are almost impossible to totally rank, but I'll give it a try. I'll start from last so you all don't have to be spoiled XD

31. Hopus Pocus - I hate the design for the pink coming down and the circle if you don't have invisible dash on. Worst dodge.

30. Pirouletta- the attack various in speed and sometimes she pauses towards the end of her attack. I don't even think invisible dash works on her. And if you miss one of the chip platforms to jump over her, YOURE DONE! I've died on her too many times to say I'm a good gamer 😂😭😢🪦⚰️🤚

29. Esther Winchester - tied with the dragon (IMO) on it being so hard getting an S rank. Not just this, but the birds that fly by and small little green dudes can actually ruin any run you're doing. RNG on this boss is barely impossible with all 3 stages. You HAVE to get lucky with it being empty or you're really fast. Stage 2 killed me more than stage 3 did too. So, there you go.

28. Mangosteen - even though easy as heck and I really love catching a break here when the extra life lands on it.... I will never forgive how boring it is to beat this mini boss. Just, too easy and whenever you do lose a life on there, you always just want to reset because it can really tik you off.

27. Rumor Honeybottoms - If you were a beginner like me and you just defeated the dragon on isle 2, then you'll remember fondly coming to this boss, regretting you ever reaching the third phase (after an actually easy going first and second phase), and said "screw that" whenever you realized you needed lobber or chaser. This was a boss I waited to beat until even after Maria. Also, so many deaths and rage quits because the RNG on the second phase can make you hate that stage too. Though, I really love how the intensity went up each phase, so did the platforms. Oh wait, YHE PLATFORMS SUCK! Not to mention when you jump off stage at the top, if she recently did a move that floated to the top, you can still get hit. Like what the...

26. Talking about dragons (deez nuts across a chin LOL), Grim Matchstick - I enjoyed the game to a tee until this boss. This is the boss that made me have to go onto easy mode just to find out that you literally have to beat it on normal. And he was one of two I skipped (genie was the other one). I honestly respect and love this boss now, but I hate playing it. The first and second phases trick you into thinking this would be a nice way end on a good note... THEN THE FIRE BUBBLES! I think we all realized after the pain and suffering after a few hours, you couldn't use a spread shot, chaser, or even pea shooters as a beginner. Lobber or ring shot were the only ways to go. After the pain and misery, I can say this is one boss ill never revisit if I don't have to.

25. Captain Britney beard - NO, I did not have any fond time enjoying him. As embarrassing as this is, I actually spend 5 minutes in a row jumping up and down shooting the boats face at the last phase, not realizing the uvila was what you wanted to hit. I am talking about this phase because you know how many times I died here ducking and just saying "oh, the chest again.." yes, nothing you can do on one life and the chest smashes you under the laser. It was 4 months ago I learned you can parry the laser... 4 MONTHS AGO! I truly don't think this parry is easy to see. Other than that, I think the balls and shark and chest all together is bad RNG at times. One good thing I love about this boss though is you can get at least 4 supers in lol. Take that buddy!

Sorry, I ranted about it. Maybe tomorrow I'll continue this ^^ sorry for the long story XD

#cuphead game #cuphead #captain brineybeard #maria #grim matchstick #hopus pocus #pirouletta #esther winchester #mangosteen #rumor honeybottoms #mugman #cuphead dlc

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disabletblrlivereminder · 1 year ago

Text

Tumblr Clients to Use Other Than This Shitty App (but honestly thoooo...)

This is a long list and it's mostly me rambling about features that stood out to me. Also, going through these, no client here is going to completely replace the desktop or the app for most people. All of these clients have something up with them that, at least for me, hasn't made me stop using official tumblr options. Even the option I actually recommend to use is still just the official tumblr app while on desktop it's best to just use dashboard unfucker and xkit rewritten.

Think of these as companion apps for the most part.

Desktop

Washboard.ws: Browser || Free

Idk if anyone still remembers washboard?? I remember it being the first tumblr client I've seen people talk about back in the day... and, boy, does it still feel like it's back in the day.

It's a bit old feeling since it still using the older tumblr dash layout and I think some features don't work correctly like search not working and trying to reblog or like a post gives you an error. Their blog hasn't been updated in 2 years and the site feels like it hasn't been updated in 7 so while it's up and running, it's not very functional anymore. I just had to mention it because I appreciate it so much.

My Pros • Dashboard Views - List (Blockquote/Old Tumblr) • Viewable Posts - Text Only, Text w/ media, Photos, Videos, Audio • Posting - Redirects to Tumblr • Reblogging - Queue, Draft, Private, Schedule • Side Blogs - View, Reblog • Search Support - Clickable Tags Only • Messaging Support - Ask (redirects to tumblr) • Save Tags • Filter/Blacklist My Cons • Feels like 2009 bc of old dash design • Reblogging is broken • Liking is broken • No search bar

Ouga: Windows Desktop app || Free/OTP - $4.99

One of the desktop apps I've used for quite a while. It's ok, it feels better than Tumblast and 6tum (which isn't on here bc it doesn't work right and I've already made an exception for washbaord) to use but I've also had more crashes than Tumblast. Still, to me, it's the better working and easy to understand client on the windows store.

My Pros • Dashboard Views - List • Viewable Posts - Text Only, Text w/ media, Photos, Videos, Audio • Interruptions - Banner/Footer Ads • Posting - Queue, Draft, Private, Schedule • Reblogging - Queue, Draft, Private, Schedule • Side Blogs - View, Reblog, Post • Search Support - Bar, Clickable Tags • Messaging Support - Ask, IM • Download Support - Images, Videos • Filter/Blacklist • Activity Feed • Multi Account • Add Tags to Posts My Cons • Interruptions - Dashboard Tumblr Ads, Banner/Footer Ads • Crashes sometimes

Tumblast: Windows Desktop app || Free

So/so about this one. It works enough to make a post, reblog things, like stuff, but I think it's a little bit more clunky than Ouga. I do like this one feature that let's you have multiple tabs open. It's not a well working feature that sometimes crashes the app and searching tags don't always show with this enabled, but you can do it.

My Pros • Dashboard Views - List, Blockquote • Viewable Posts - Text Only, Text w/ media, Photos, Videos, Audio • Posting - Queue, Draft, Private, Schedule • Reblogging - Queue, Draft, Private, Schedule • Side Blogs - View, Reblog, Post • Search Support - Bar, Clickable Tags • Messaging Support - Ask, IM • Download Support - Images, Videos • Filter/Blacklist • Activity Feed • Multi Tabs • Add Tags to Posts My Cons • Look/feels like it was made for windows 8 & 7 mobile.. it came out for windows 10 • Searching bugs out sometimes • Can feel clunky • Icons aren't showing right now

Tumblesocks (updated fork): Emacs app(?) || Free

.... i....... tried.

I know I put this off for most of the month bc I had a feeling it'll be a bitch in a half to do (and I was right) but I didn't know I'd spend 3 days trying to get this client to work. Emacs itself was difficult to work with even though I went the simple way and the gnu install.

I tried this out in Windows. Got frustrated. Actually fucked with Linux. Got more frustrated. I'm pretty sure Linux users are probably like "this is so easy" and that's fine but there's a reason I hate Linux and I'm not cut out to test out Emacs. I'm sorry.

If you're interested I still have the links above. Gargle's fork is probably the best to use since it's said to fix a lot of things. But I absolutely invite anybody to reblog this or send me an ask explaining how to get this shit running in the most hand holdy way.

As far I can find, there isn't a client app for macos. I closest I saw was an app called MenuTab Pro for Tumblr which everyone was saying doesn't work (anymore?). From the looks of it, it would've fallen under "viewer" for me so I most likely would've skipped it anyways.

Android

Tumblr (revanced): Android || Free

So this post was made awhile back before tumblr was supported by the revanced community. I'm excited to see that, while I was testing all these clients out, some people have made tumblr patches for revanced!

There are very little patches right now. Most importantly the tumblr live icon is now gone and ads are supposed to also be gone but that sims a bit more finicky. It only says that dashboard ads are disabled and sometimes it feels like they are but then they come back in full force so you'll have to force close the app in settings and then they're gone again for awhile. The same with blaze post as it feels like they've also been disabled until it doesn't.

Even though these are early patches, it's still the only option I would replace the original app with. It's not a client so you still have to deal with Official Tumblr App Bullshit™ but you also get all the expected or good features of the tumblr app that some of these clients don't have. I would like to see more patches like hiding the badges or fixing how the disable ads patch work but it's still better than nothing.

This bit is long, sorry, but I wanna add it's worth picking between 2 versions of the tumblr app depending on how you like the layout. v28.6.0.110 (the version I use) has the old layout and some problems that come will it like tiny images in text post, not being able to reply with side blogs, and sometimes some things just stop... working at times? While any version after that will have the new layout what comes with it: tumblrmart icon, changed activity feed, new video/photo view. I love the old layout over the new one so I stick with v28.

Both versions have their goods and bads and is why I have 3 versions of tumblr on my phone. Using app cloner (better options are behind an otp. don't get the sub, it's not worth it) you can install different versions and see what you want.

My Pros • It's still the Tumblr app so everything you like is all here • No ads! (sometimes) • Tumblr Live icon is gone <3 • Am able to test out newer features that are actually useful and interesting (like collections and interacting from side blogs) My Cons •Blaze posts are still present at times • It's still the Tumblr app so almost everything you hate is still here • Badges are still visible as well as version newer than v28.6.0.110 will have the "add badges" button on your blog • Annoying pop ups like going ad free or whatever are still a thing if you're using any version with the new layout • Breaks like "but wait! there is more" and "check out these x" are still here • TumblrMart icon is still at the top corner on the new layout

TeeHub: Android/iOS || Free/Sub - $1.99, $3.99, $5.99/OTP - $8.99

TeeHub is no longer on either app store. You can download the latest apk and modded apk here

While this has become my new favorite android tumblr client, the free version of this app feels so limiting and the paid version don't feel that better. I'm still happy that they added the one time payment option because I'm tried of subscriptions but stuff like not being able to see text only post at all, problems with posting, and no filter feature is so annoying to me.

Currently, TeeHub, on the tumblr side of things, feels lacking but also on the same level as Tumbletail for Android. There is an OTP of $8.99 and 3 sub options of $1.99, $3.99, and $5.99. If you like this and want to support it getting better I'd say just do the OTP because while the pro features aren't anything important, paying 9 bucks once feels more worth it than paying around 50 by the time the month is over.

TeeHub is only my favorite android client right now because it looks nice. If Tumbletail fucking updated their app so you can post in the paid version and it didn't look like shit it'd be a different story.

My Pros • Dashboard Views - List, Grid • Viewable Posts - Text w/ media, Photos, Videos • Posting - Queue, Draft, Private, Schedule • Reblogging - Instant • Side Blogs - View • Download support - Images, Videos (paid) • Multi Account (paid) My Cons • Interruptions - Popup Ads(? they said there's ads but i couldn't get them to popup even on a separate phone soooo) • Subscription • Can't view text post • Can't post/reblog to side blogs • Can't post/reblog to queue, draft, schedule, or privately • Can't add tags to post • No search function • No filter/blacklist support • Posting videos/photos aren't working right now

Tmdroid: Android || Free

This one I love what they're trying to do I just think it needs more time in the oven. Some of my problems with this that aren't in my cons list are some of the dashboard settings in carousel view aren't available in waterfall view (the view I use in the image) and text post specifically don't have a square around them to separate them from other post. It's not that bad when it's a text post sandwiched between images but when there's text posts in a row, like in the image, it all looks like 1 text post.

They do have a blog and this app does get updates so I've been keeping an eye on this. They seem to be very open and accepting to feedback unlike someone else on this list and that's really fucking cool.

My Pros • Dashboard Views - List (Waterfall), Grid (Columns), Carousel • Viewable Posts - Text Only, Text w/ media, Photos, Videos • Reblogging - Queue • Side Blogs - Reblog • Download support - Images My Cons • Weird UI • Unresponsive UI • Limited or clunky side blog support • Can't make posts • Can't reblog to draft, schedule, privately • No search function • No filter/blacklist support

Tumbletail (Lite): Android/iOS || Free/OTP - $1.99

*screaming and crying* I feel like... a disappointed parent. Except I'm not disappointed. I'm mad.

This was my favorite client all the way back in 2012 when I was forced to use an iphone 3gs. I loved the way it looked, the text post were easy to read, it was smooth to use, it had a tag history that made reblogging & making post easy for me who ran an acnl blog, had really good settings to mess around with.... Y'all... so much of this is just not on the android version.

And it fucking pisses me off lol. There's no reason for the android version to look so ugly, to be lacking in settings & features, to not give paid uses the ability to post when you can on ios?

While the android version of this app is usable, moving from the ios app to android and seeing how lacking it was comparably and seeing people give feedback to cathand (who did have a blog) but they went unanswered while the ios version still got updates... The ios versions aren't perfect but it's a much better experience than the android apps. And I'm a bit mad about that.

My Pros • Dashboard Views - Grid, List (change thumbnail size to huge) • Viewable Posts - Text Only, Text w/ media, Photos, Videos • Reblogging - Queue, Draft • Side Blogs - View, Reblog, Post • Search Support - Bar, Clickable Tags • Download Support - Images, Videos (via video player options) • Multi Account (paid) • Tag History • Add Tags to Posts My Cons • Interruptions - Banner/Footer Ads • Can only make post in the ios app??!?!?!?!??? • Polls are viable as text posts but are broken • Looks cleaner on ios • Non photo/video post could be better formatted • Text posts contents are too large and you can't zoom out to see everything • Photos/Videos made using the new text editor (Text w/ media) are seen as text posts • ios version have more features/settings • Only posts uploaded as photo/video (not text w/ media) will have clickable tags • No filter/blacklist support

Violet: Android/iOS || OTP - $0.99

Violet is a weird on. I want to see it get better but I also don't recommended it. It did get a price cut to $1 so, ya know, but I think as a client it's not good. As a viewer, it's usable. I don't like the carousel view I'd rather have a normal dash. Stuff like posting and searching aren't a thing and reblogging isn't as featureful as I wish.

This works best in the way we heart it and instgram do, not like tumblr does.

My Pros • Dashboard Views - Carousel • Viewable Posts - Text Only, Text w/ media, Photos, Videos, Polls • Reblogging - Instant • Side Blogs - Reblog • Download support - Images My Cons • Account login troubles • Polls redirects you to tumblr • Can't make post • Can't reblog to queue, draft, schedule, or privately • No search function (tags open tumblr) • No filter/blacklist feature

iOS (mostly the iphone bc i dont have a tablet)

Tumbletail (Lite): Android/iOS || Free/OTP - $1.99

yes we're back again bc ive been yelling about this for years but i"ll make it quick

Had this app since 2012 and I still recommended using it along side the tumblr app. Mostly because of how tumblr works today with their restrictions and inclusion of a filters list.

While text post in the dash view looks better than on android to me, open a text post the contents are so small but they fit the screen. I know the image shows that I have text size small but that's only because it doesn't change anything that I can tell so I left it alone.

My Pros • Dashboard Views - Grid, List (change thumbnail size to huge) • Viewable Posts - Text Only, Text w/ media, Photos, Videos, Audio • Posting - Queue, Draft • Reblogging - Queue, Draft • Side Blogs - View, Reblog, Post • Search Support - Bar, Clickable Tags • Download Support - Images • Multi Account (paid) • Tag History • Save Tags • Add Tags to Posts My Cons • Interruptions - Banner/Footer Ads • Polls soft crashes back to dash • Hard crashes a lot more than on android • Dash view only shows media and text post separately • Quote, Link, Chat, & Audio are sorted as Text Post since you can't view different types of posts like on android • Photos/Videos made using the new text editor (Text w/ media) are seen as text posts • Only posts uploaded as photo/video (not Text w/ media) will have clickable tags • Can't post videos • Can't download images and videos from Text w/ media post • Searching by clickable tags is broken • No filter/blacklist support

Tumbot: iOS || Free/OTP - $4.99

This is the most fine and normal client on ios so far and I honestly really love it for that. I found the only big problems I had was I couldn't post anything, you can't add tags when reblogging content, and that you couldn't reblog to queue. As a primarily queue user, that's annoying.

I think the best way to describe this app is "chill". If I was able to make post and use queue/draft this would be my replacement app.

My Pros • Dashboard Views - List • Viewable Posts - Text Only, Text w/ media, Photos, Videos, Polls • Reblogging - Instant • Search Support - Bar, Clickable Tags • Multi account support (paid) • Download support (paid) My Cons • Interruptions - Banner/Footer Ads • Dark mode paywalled • No side blog support • Can't make post • Can't reblog to queue, draft, schedule, or privately • Can't add tags to reblogs • Crashes sometimes • No filter/blacklist support

MultiTab T: iOS || Free/Sub - $2.49, $5.99

MultiTab have old pricing structure list that is still up on the apple store page but is not longer effective since the subscription model was added, sadly.

Another app I would actually buy if they didn't only have fucking subscription options.

Compared to Tumbot it kinda feels less clean to me. Idky but it looks a bit clutter or busy even if you only have one dashboard tabs open. I also think post not having a boarder or a different background from the background isn't helping either.

But the way this app handles reblogging is so good and the custom dashboards that I've been wanting on this damn site for years is here but pretty limited. I'm sad that even paid users have a pretty small limit for how many people you can add to a "feedset".

My Pros • Dashboard Views - Grid, List • Viewable Posts - Text Only, Text w/ media, Photos, Videos, Audio, Polls • Posting - Queue, Draft, Private, Schedule • Reblogging - Queue, Draft, Private, Schedule • Side Blogs - View, Reblog, Post • Search Support - Bar, Clickable Tags • Download Support - Images, Videos (paid) • The most features/settings I've seen so far • Best reblogging menu I've seen so far • Multi Account (paid) • Multi Tabs (Customizable - 5 - free | 20 - paid) • Tag History • Save Tags My Cons • Interruptions - Banner/Footer Ads, Popup Ads • Subscription • Polls are viable but can't vote • Doesn't show or explains everything a premium subs gives you • Holds to reblog doesn't show all side blogs • Dashboard Feeds are limited even if subbed • Adding blogs to custom feeds don't always work correctly • No filter/blacklist support

#tumblr #tumblr app #tumblr update #tumblr client #tumblr alternative #<- but not really bc it's still tumblr but ya know what i mean #washboard.ws #ouga #tumblast #tumblesocks #revanced #teehub #tmdroid #tumbletail #violet #tumbot #multitab t #fastfeed

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