#and it just so happen that i have this way of functionning for a lot of things so i'm learning to think... outside the cage teehee

[merakiui]

So how would red riding hood Vil go about training wolf reader into being a good puppy

Someone totally not into pet play ur crazy

>:) so many thoughts for training!!!

Firstly, he’ll have you wear a collar. It’s a pretty thing, study and well-made, aesthetically pleasing craftsmanship. Perhaps it also functions as a shock collar as well or, if Vil is determined to use methods that are not so painful or risk ruining any part of you in some cosmetic way, then maybe the collar just emits a noise that sounds like a shock. You’ve no idea what to expect and maybe you’re already so tense with the threat of that hunter that you don’t even realize you haven’t been shocked. You still flinch all the same, your hands flying to your neck, but Vil clicks his tongue at you. You’ll be tricked into thinking so the more times you hear that crackle as it fools your brain with nonexistent shocks.

He dresses you in very nice clothes. He’s quite selective when it comes to fashion, and he has a very good eye for choosing based on what suits you best. Therefore, you’ll wear things that flatter your body type, that match your preferences and style (while also incorporating some of his as well), and that show off certain assets. You’ll wear lots of things with a low neckline so that your beautiful collar can be seen.

As for training, I think he starts with the house first. Teaching you proper etiquette and whatnot. You must never eat so sloppily. He’ll teach you what each utensil is for and where to arrange them on your plate once you’ve finished. These lessons are so tedious, but they’re simple enough to follow. If you’re smart enough to simply abide by his teachings, you’ll breeze through any and all of his house training. There’s just two things you loathe: the fact that Vil insists he be the one to dress you and the fact that Rook is always the one to help you bathe. Apparently, Vil has yet to see any indication from you that you’re trustworthy, so until he can trust you you’ll be supervised by either him or Rook. Or both if you’re unlucky.

You’re not sure which is worse: this demanding Red Riding Hood or that creepy hunter. >_<

If you happen to fail or refuse to comply, Vil is very simple with his punishments. You’re cut into with harsh criticisms, and they’re all the truth. Vil does not go out of his way to lie or sugarcoat when he offers his criticism. This is all meant to help you for the better. Also, he’s no fool. He’s tailored his lessons to help work on your weaknesses. He knows you’re very intelligent, perhaps too much for your own good when you try and fail to outwit and charm him or Rook into letting you go. You’re very clever. He’s merely assisting you where his assistance is needed most.

Usually, you’re given x-amount of spankings for however many minutes you refuse to cooperate. So if you remain locked in your room for fifteen minutes, to the point where Rook needs to break in to get you, you’ll be bent over the knee and spanked fifteen times. One for every minute of disobedience.

Sometimes Vil will take you outside his house in the woods and allow you to roam, but not beyond the boundaries he’s set. It’s all a test. You fell for it the first time and took off running, and Rook captured you within minutes. When it’s Rook, he’s not exactly one for punishments like Vil. He recognizes the abstract beauty in that, but he prefers to praise you for your efforts, failed though they were, instead. Scrubbing you clean from the tussle he had with you in the woods, calloused hands running down your soft skin, fingertips pressing into your shoulders to massage you, reaching to pet your ears or admire your tail. All while he rambles about how beautiful the chase you gave him was. It’s not your intention to cry out when he brushes over a bruise, nor do you mean to sound so erotic. What happens in that bath remains an easily uncovered secret, but Rook will come out of it with scratches and bites littering his forearms and throat and you’ll have a hole stuffed full of cum. >_< your every bite is like a addictive, disastrous kiss, he tells you, so it really doesn’t faze him. ;;;;

The only reason you’re not muzzled and treated more like a mutt than a person (wolf) is because Rook insists upon otherwise. And Vil agrees because, troublesome you may be, you are full of potential that he couldn’t dare stifle by demeaning you anymore than he already has.

[weaselle]

my dear madam-or-sir-or-what-you-prefer, i would never!

I wouldn't dream of depriving the sims social workers' union a busy day with lots to do! Tho sadly, the social bunny, like the humble burglar, has gone extinct.

But in the above neighborhood pics, this part of the city over here? it's like an abandoned construction site, and features a homeless encampment of easily three to four people and some piles of trash and a 55 gallon drum fire/grill and an abandoned couch and stuff.

A couple generators i stuck into a busted up front half of a car wreck like they had rigged the old engine as a motor to generate power. And a sell-stuff table the way you sometimes see things for sale in a row on the ground or on a folding table around homeless areas. It's kinda hard to see in the above pics, but i'm talking about this part of town

i hid a real room with a bed in the little debug trailer, and another one in the shipping container

and then across the street there's a brick warehouse that's abandoned but someone probably camps out illegally there. Right next to the warehouse is this little area where somebody started kind of a hobo bar in a broken down old bus.

But then that attracted a food truck and then a couple people started busking there and now it's a happening little spot people go for a bite and a drink and some light entertainment, but the poorer folks started it up and it's in their own territory kind of, so it's a place they can be no matter who else is there; it's right by a bus stop, so sometimes some foodies and college kids and people show up. On the back side of the warehouse is a chain link basketball court

and then over on this end of town (really just a block away from the homeless encampment) there's a corner store and a laundromat under a photography studio and a small clothing boutique, and they make a little alleyway, and in the alley and on the back of those businesses there's a bunch of graffiti and stuff. And a tiny bit on the front.

and the apartment building has two apartments that are small, but nice and fully furnished and have two bedrooms each; they are currently set up as office/hobby rooms, but somebody is probably going to have a kid they aren't ready to take care of!

Plus i set the lot to cat hangout and dog hangout, so plenty on the horizon for the social workers of the sims universe.

Probably could replace the rollerskating rink with a pool tho ;)

(i'll just leave these two pics here to check out again on your way down - in addition to the above there's a gym and spa, a studio apartment above a cafe/bookstore, a two bedroom house above a two car garage, and where there's a de-bug building with a weird growth on top in these, in the current version of this build i fit my tiniest functioning restaurant there instead, comfortably seats 25 and includes an actual dish pit and walk-in fridge like you'd find in a real restaurant. Oh and the park! which has a community theater with a karaoke machine and a microphone on it so sims will use the stage)

me playing sims 4 when it came out: I think I’ll make a business lady, what traits will she have? oh, there are careers? neat, I can’t believe I never played any of the sims games before.

me playing sims 4 now: *opens testingcheats comand prompt, unlocks build anywhere mode, enables bbshowhiddenobjects, enables bbmoveobjects, enables bbshowliveeditobjects, cracks knuckles* okay, today we’re gonna use the debug menu and a build function full of modern suburban design pieces to build a pirate fortress that would make Jack Sparrow clutch his effects and swoon – I wonder if I can use spandrels to fake supports for a platform around a sized up palm tree by hiding a column inside the trunk…

[a-bottle-of-tyelenol]

I love reading Eurylochus analysis but I don’t see people mentioning the beginning of Puppeteer all that often.

Eurylochus starts that song by immediately trying to tell Odysseus about what he did. Immediately. I know we like to characterize Eurylochus as cowardly (mostly because that’s how Jorge describes him and how he’s described in the Odyssey), but I think it says a lot that Eurylochus didn’t try to hide or pretend as if this hadn’t been his fault. He didn’t wait for Odysseus to confront him about it or try to avoid taking responsibility. It’s rather brave imo that he tried to say something and only didn’t because his captain ordered him not to.

I think a lot about the timeline of EPIC and how entering the lair of Scylla likely wasn’t that long after Puppeteer. Odysseus says they’ve been away from home for “about twelve years or so” and then there’s the obvious discrepancy of Odysseus telling Circe the same thing— explained away by it being a simple mistake on Jorge’s end. If we go by the likelihood that it hadn’t yet been twelve years when they met Circe and that Ody was lying, there’s a rough two-ish year period before Eurylochus actually tells the truth.

To some, this might be indicative of his cowardice, a show that he wouldn’t actually tell the truth and would prefer to hide away his greatest mistake for as long as he can manage.

I disagree. I think this could indicate a couple other things, though; namely that this is proof Eurylochus changed his perspective and decided to listen to Odysseus. Mutiny could only happen because Eurylochus realized his mistake in not believing Odysseus not just once, with the windbag, but twice when Odysseus went to save their men on Circe’s island. Three strikes, you’re out and Eurylochus is not that kind of man— side note: it isn’t hypocritical to change your viewpoint and then criticize someone for adopting your old one btw, it’s just how people function.

Different Beast does imply this a bit, but I think the fact that Eurylochus waited so long to tell Odysseus about the windbag is much more blatant. After all, Odysseus told him to wait, and he did. To me, it seems like Eurylochus read between the lines of Ody’s order (go make sure the island is secure, there’s only so much left we can endure) and took it to mean “wait to tell me when things have settled and we aren’t on the brink of dying”.

Which leads to the second implication, why did Eurylochus choose this moment? Obviously, he didn’t know the nature of Scylla or the danger that they were in, but what about this moment in particular left Eurylochus feeling secure enough to tell Odysseus? Well, the obvious answer is the ruthlessness Odysseus showed in Different Beast showing that they’ve reached that point of power and being able to defend themselves even from monsters that have slain so many sailors.

But another option could be the idea that Scylla was their “last stop” before going home. It’s a bit unclear if this remains true in EPIC, but in the Odyssey, Scylla and Charybdis are right next to each other and the trick is that you have to pick your poison— do you want to die to the whirlpool monster or the six-headed one? What is clear in EPIC is that Ithaca is just past Charybdis, meaning that Scylla, in theory, could’ve been their final stop before reaching Ithaca had Mutiny not happened. There is a very real possibility that they might not have gone to the first island they found if Odysseus hadn’t been knocked unconscious. They still might have just because they were hungry, but it can be difficult to tell which is fate and which is the result of man’s actions.

Either way, I think that a lot of people tend to gloss over the fact that it’s very apparent Eurylochus was going to tell Odysseus what happened as soon as he could and only didn’t because Odysseus told him to wait. It’s a very interesting aspect of his character to me and I think it reveals a lot in terms of his character motivations and how it contrasts to Odysseus’ perception of him throughout the show.

[carolperkinsexgirlfriend]

63 and Stobin please!

and when I crawl out in the morning (can I stay inside your head?)

Steve Harrington & Robin Buckley || ~2k || Implied/Reference Child Abuse || Minor Character Death || Good Friend Robin Buckley || Blood and Gore || Off-screen Violence

Robin’s sitting atop the kitchen counter, all the lights off aside from the one above the stove, just enough to cast ominous shadows against the cupboards. Her parents have been asleep for hours, but something’s keeping her up—a restlessness running through her, making her legs twitch, heels clacking against the cupboard doors noisily.

She’s antsy, toes flexing with the desire to run. She recognizes the feeling from being trapped beneath Starcourt, from flinging fireworks at a monster straight from a little kid’s nightmares.

There’d been something to do then, something to run toward, or flee from. She’s not sure what to do with that same urge at one in the morning alone in her kitchen.

The question is answered when the phone rings. Her hand moves immediately, reaching behind herself to snatch it off the wall without having to move from her perch atop the counter, so fast it doesn’t even finish its first ring.

“Hello?” she says down the open line.

Her blood courses through her veins as she listens to the steady, crackling breathing, phone pressed hard enough to the side of her face that it hurts.

She’s just about to say hello again, hoping the person on the other side of the line will finally say something back, but then Steve’s voice comes through, strangely flat as he asks, “can you come over?”

This happens a lot late at night, Steve calling her for one reason or another. Sometimes it’s nightmares, or he’s just bored, or he misses her too much to function. She comes over, always, but that’s not what he says, how he asks.

He should be saying, “can I pick you up?” with only his tone of voice giving away what he needs. But, that’s not what he asked, and he’s got no tone of voice at all.

“Be there in five,” she says, not waiting for a response before she hangs up the phone, barely pausing to shove her feet into the sneakers she’d left by the front door before bursting into the quiet of a night in the suburbs.

It’s an eight minute bike ride to Steve’s house from hers, but Robin’s got a heartbeat in her thighs, she’s pedaling so hard. There are no cars on the road, so she forgoes the bumpy sidewalk and rides in the middle of the street, her mom’s voice an easily ignored phantom chiding in the back of her head.

She never rides her bike at night, and as the shadows of branching trees creep across the pavement, illuminated by distant porch lights, she vows to never, ever do it again.

But she knows, deep down in her sternum where Steve lives that if he calls, she’ll always come.

The spokes of her bike click as she coasts it all the way up Steve’s driveway, not even bothering to hit the brakes as she jumps up and lets it drop carelessly right up against the house. It’s still clattering against the pavement as she flings open his front door without a knock.

“Steve?” she calls, voice ragged with exertion and all the fear crawling up her throat. “Where are you?”

In contrast to her pitchy tone, Steve’s is without inflection as he says, “in the kitchen,” quiet enough that if the house wasn’t silent, she might not have heard it at all.

Robin goes to take off her shoes to line them up neatly beside the rest, but there, right by Steve’s pristine white tennis shoes, are a pair of polished dress shoes, too big to ever belong to Steve.

She doesn’t bother taking her own off, that same instinct that had kept her awake and by the phone so late at night urging her to keep them on.

The light in the Harrington’s kitchen has always been fluorescent, bright enough to reflect off the pristine white tiles, casting the entire space in stark relief.

The first thing she sees is Steve’s back. He’s sitting at one of the tall bar stools pushed up against the island counter. He’s in his own seat, her usual spot sitting vacant at his side. That’s where they sit when they’re eating meals too messy for the couch, neither of them fond of the giant, stuffy table situated in the dining room.

Steve’s not eating right now.

As she takes slow, measured steps toward him, she catches sight of his hands. They’re clasped together, grip tight enough that she can see the loose skin against his knuckles wrinkling up, cracking the drying blood coating them. She takes a few more steps, and his side profile comes into view, and there’s blood on his face, too, splattered against it like someone had scooped it up and flicked it at him.

Even his hair isn’t clean—red running through it, streaked like he’d run his bloody fingers through the strands. Or gotten a botched dye job at the salon.

She’s frozen, neither flight or fight taking over when there’s nothing to punch, nothing to run from, just Steve Harrington covered in enough blood that whatever wound he’s sustained must be fatal.

She should call someone; Robin never bothered to learn first aid.

But as she turns her gaze away from Steve, ready to rush to the phone, she catches sight of a socked foot, just barely poking out from behind the island. She stares at it, transfixed, waiting for it to move, even a twitch. It shows no signs of life.

It’s only as she starts walking again, circling the island to catch sight of whatever’s hidden behind it, that Steve comes back to life. “Robin?” Steve asks, and when she turns back toward him, his eyes are big in his skull, the blood flecked across his face drawing out the red of the vessels in his eyes. He looks small, suddenly, like a little boy caught doing something he shouldn’t.

“It’ll be okay,” she says, staring into his bloodshot eyes.

She waits as he swallows, Adam’s apple bobbing with the nervous moment. Only once he nods does Robin turn back around and take the final few steps to round the counter and stare down at the body the foot belongs to.

That’s what it is now, a body. It’s slack, collapsed on the floor, pose peaceful enough that Robin might think it was sleeping, if not for all the chunks missing. It’s only as she looks at the vestiges of a suit the body’s wearing that she remembers the shoes aligned neatly beside Steve’s own at the front door.

They’d match perfectly with the dressed down suit she sees in front of her, if it wasn’t for the blood all over the button-up, still perfectly tucked into wrinkle-free pants, despite what must have been quite a struggle based on the way the white fabric’s shredded, hints of mincemeat poking through.

She’s never met the man, but this must be Mr. Harrington. He’d been alive last she’d heard, and now she can barely tell he’s a person at all. His face is almost gone, skull visible past the pulp that’s been made of him. He looks like the ground beef she sometimes picks up from the grocery store for her mom—not a man, just meat.

And as she stares down at the dead body, she’s terrified, suddenly, of what could have left those marks. Steve had told her about the Demogorgon that had burst through the Byers’ ceiling, the Demo-dogs that had circled him and the kids like they were the pack’s newest kill. He’d described claws, and teeth, and creatures designed to rend flesh from bone.

If a Demo-What’s-It had been the thing to kill Mr. Harrington, then they need to call the calvary, or it won’t just be Steve’s shitty dad laying dead and almost unrecognizable on the kitchen floor.

Her heart’s beating fast again, a frantic ba-thump, ba-thump, ba-thump beneath her ribcage as she tries to figure out who to call, what to do.

“I’m not sorry.” Steve’s deadened voice comes suddenly enough that Robin startles.

It’s as she’s turning around to face him that she sees it: there, dropped haphazardly in front of the sink is a baseball bat full of nails. There are bits of flesh stuck to the ends of the nails, blood coating the wood, new enough to still be dripping red.

The last time she’d seen it, it was beneath Steve’s bed.

She stares at it, and finally, things start to click into the place. There’s no Demo- anything, nothing to fight, no one to call, just a dead body, a murder weapon, and a mess to clean up.

“Okay,” she says, gaze still trained on the bat, but she’s barely looking at it anymore, eyes sightless as her mind ticks away, faster than she can keep up with. “Okay, okay, is your mom home?”

When she turns back toward Steve, the entire mess that is the Harrington’s kitchen now out of sight, Steve’s staring up at her with that same dead-eyed look. Robin doesn’t care, can’t when he’s alive in front of her, no monsters coming to kill him. That’s all that matters right now, him alive, and free, and by her side. They can deal with everything else later.

So, when he shakes his head—no witness, no second body—she’s hit with a relief so bone-deep, she almost collapses with it.

But there’s too much to do, so she shores up her legs and turns back around, sidestepping the spilled blood, and the body to get to the sink. Her shoe hits the bat and clatters noisily against the Harrington’s fancy tile. She ignores it to turn on the tap, wetting the dishrag until it’s dripping between her hands.

“Take off your clothes,” she says, walking around the whole mess again to get back to Steve’s side. He stays seated on the barstool, looking up at her with blank eyes she’d normally make fun of him for. “Good job doing this whole thing in the kitchen, dingus, but we’ve gotta get you clean.”

Steve stands up, still moving like a puppet, but it’s okay—Robin’s got all of his strings. He gets undressed without hesitation, movements mechanical as he strips off his t-shirt, pants, and underwear, letting each item drop to the tile until he’s standing in front of her, entirely naked.

She starts at the top of his head and works down, perfunctorily scrubbing at the blood caked into the hair on his head and chest alike. It flakes off to join the rest of the mess on the kitchen floor. It’s okay; she’ll clean it up.

Robin goes back to the sink to wet the rag twice, thorough enough to leave him pink but clean. He stays silent through the whole thing, barely twitching even when she scrubs hard enough that it must hurt. He’s quiet as she kneels between his legs, the only protest coming when she swipes at the bottom of his foot.

He twitches, entire body shaking as he yanks his foot free and puts it back down, keeping it hidden from her seeking fingers. She didn’t know he was ticklish.

“Can’t have you tracking any of this through the house,” Robin says, as she pries his foot back up off the ground. She’s relieved when he lets her. “I don’t know how to get blood out of white carpet.”

“I do,” Steve says, but he stays still as best he can while she wipes between his toes.

Once done, she stands up and stares at her best friend, pink and clean in all his naked glory.

“Go shower,” she says, dropping the rag onto the tile. It splats, full of water and all the blood she’d just rubbed off of his skin. “Wash your entire body three times, with a soap and rag. Hair, too.”

He still looks so far away, like even as he’s standing in front of her, she can’t quite reach him. She wants to touch so badly that it aches. She wants to wrap her arms around him, feel his heart beating against her own sternum, a constant thrum. Proof of life.

But there’s blood on her hands now, too, so she lets them drop to her sides, hanging uselessly as she asks, “can you do that for me?”

Steve nods, ready, always, to follow her directions. “What are you going to do?”

Robin turns away from him, the snapping of their locked gazes almost a physical sensation as she looks back toward the scene of the crime. She surveys the mess in the kitchen—the blood, the weapon, the body, and realizes there’s only one answer to his question.

“I’m going to fix it.”

And as Steve showers off the evidence of his crime, that’s exactly what she does.

I frankly Had To when I saw what song this was So! I hope you guys enjoy, and as always, shoutout to my beta @queenie-ofthe-void who managed to edit this literally minutes after I finished writing it. <3

[craziestfangirl98]

I would first like to start with, I get why THK team decided to refrain from releasing the episode last week and having to take an extra week's break now because if they would have done that, I wouldn't be able to function.

This episode was insane. But so so meaningful. I am enjoying this show more and more the deeper it goes and I'm really excited to see where it goes from here.

Since the beginning of the series I've been hoping that we'd see more of Fadel and Bison's interactions and I finally got it now. Can't say how happy it made me. Even with how it hurt, it felt so fulfilling to see them as brothers.

The guilt and heart break in Bison's eyes while telling Fadel the truth about bringing them into his life and 'hiring' Style made me see the side of Bison that is still young and naive but cares for his brother whole heartedly. I also love that although Fadel didn't forgive Bison and told him he'd 'deal' with him later about his betrayal, he was still there with his brother for the most part. Scared and concerned and worried about the heart break that he would experience. Even on his birthday, Fadel made sure to take care of Bison and got him a cake and a candle, which would mean a lot considering they were both adopted into this business and became brothers.

I think I deserve points for thinking it is mother who ends up hurting Bison considering Keen did bring out a gun but was beaten to the punch because Bison's impulsive ass couldn't stop himself from intervening into the situation.

Throughout the entire episode I was waiting with bated breath for the ball to drop and when it finally did in the hospital room and the bathroom for KantBison and FadelStyle respectively I had to physically let go a shudder terrified of what is to come.

I like how most of the fandom read Fadel and Bison accurately in terms of Fadel at least giving Style another chance and allowing to hear him out while Bison just blew his gasket so to speak.

I love that Style's reaction to it all was just to take it in stride and make Fadel's life more chaotic not because he hates him but because he loves him and wants to prove that 'i might have been coerced into loving you but I know nothing but loving you now and will do so forever.' I find it equal times hilarious and adorable. Something about Style continuously choosing Fadel makes me believe that the ex might have left and deceived him.

I knew when I watched the trailers and we were revealed that there would be a Kant jumping off the boat scene while he has a phobia of the water, that it would hit me hard. I was not prepared for that to happen today. Especially not the way it did. I had no doubts about Kant loving Bison but to see his heartbreak and grief about the reality of their relationship, his palpable fear towards Bison and his guilt towards ratting them out to the cops is all so clear in his face but so is the resignation and determination that he has to do this in order to convince to Bison and First is such a phenomenal actor for it all.

I do believe, in the heart of my hearts, Bison jumped straight after Kant to rescue him. I don't think he thought Kant cared enough to jump and would jump straight after. Because I don't think they will ever get to establishing trust otherwise.

Next week both the couples are going to be surviving alone, FadelStyle trying to find KantBison while they are dealing with the aftermath and the consequences of today. I don't know how I'm going to be waiting and going back to work. Sigh... Let's see.

Anyway, let me know what you all are thinking about this episode. Week by week it feels like it is going to be a tragedy instead of a comedy all though I doubt it. The angst is angsting and it hurtssssss.

[last-sprout]

Last Sprout Dev Diary - Jan 10, 2025

Hello, and welcome to the new year! After the break, I'm here for another dev diary - this one being a bit more about something conceptual. If you want to read the last dev diary from December, you can do so here.

If this is the first one you're reading, I'm @oneominousvalbatross, and I'm the tech side of the sprout team! This week I mostly worked on status effects, but I want to take some time to talk about a broader, more conceptual topic, and save the full breakdown for next week.

My poor boy, who has every disease.

Something I don't think I've really specified before in these dev diaries is my background in game dev, or, rather, my lack of background. I started seriously learning how to code a bit over a year ago, and entered my first game jam in February of 2024.

(The game was barely functional, but it did exist so like, there's something.)

My academic background is in philosophy (simultaneously the best and worst thing tbh), and apart from being pretty good with computers in a broad sense I didn't really have much to go on for this project. I'm bringing this up because I'm going to be talking about something that I had to figure out for myself, but that might be like, compsci 105 or something if you went through school for it. That said though, if you have always kind of wanted to make games, you can absolutely make games! I didn't think I was a math person, or a coding person, until I started doing it.

Game Development is Hard

I'm going to assume that software development in general is hard, but I haven't really done that, so I'm talking about game dev. I spent around two weeks not touching the game, and when I came back, the first thing I noticed was just how hard it was to get my head back around something with this many systems! This was also something I ran headlong into when working on that game jam, I reached a point in like, a week where I couldn't touch any system without potentially breaking every other system.

The solution I use, and the reason why I could come back to this without completely losing my mind, is to reduce the number of access points into a system to the absolute bare minimum. For example, we can look at the animation system. It's really complicated! It needs to be able to swap the sprites out on a variety of different renderers, it needs to be able to adjust animation speeds, control shader parameters, and it needs to be able to queue up multiple animations in sequence, plus it needs to send out events on animation end so that I can use them to time up other game actions.

If I was to condense all of this into a few sentences: A system can be as complicated as it needs to be, but try to envision it in its own little box, with precisely one entrance/exit. If you need to spawn a projectile, you should really just be able to go, like, SpawnProjectile(projectile), with as little external work as possible. This means if you need to completely rewrite how spawning projectiles works, you can do that, and all the other classes that spawn projectiles can still just do their thing.

A helpful diagram

The way I would've done this originally would have been to have, like, a SpriteAnimator class with a 'speed' field. I'd set it to one by default, and then whenever I need that speed to be different, I'd have whatever object needs to change the speed go in and set the speed to whatever. If you've done a lot of programming, you probably immediately realized the tons of problems this could cause - problems into which I ran headlong.

What do you do when you want one animation to play at a certain speed, then go back to the previous speed when it's done? If you do, do you assume that the speed was set to 1 before, and just reset it, or do you have one of the two objects involved store the previous speed to go back to it? If you do, what happens if, halfway through an animation, another object butts in to adjust the speed again? Say you're playing an animation at half speed, and then a speed buff gets applied that's supposed to last for a minute. Your speed buff goes in, sets the faster speed, the animation suddenly starts playing faster, then when the animation is finished, the object that was waiting to reset the speed goes back in and sets the speed to 1, leaving the animation playing at the default speed when it's supposed to be faster.

These kinds of problems will always be a risk, but in my specific case I split the speed at which an animation plays out into three places. First of all, an animation has a frame rate, which is meant to never change. We do most of our animating at 12 fps (on twos, I think is what you call it in the traditional animation world? idk, not a 2d animator), and each animation object keeps track of its frame delta (1 / frame rate) so that the controller can progress through the frames at the right speed.

However, we don't submit the animation to the controller in its unaltered form. Instead, we have a data structure called a PlayableAnimation. This contains the animation itself, but it also has the speed at which the animation should be played, as well as some other useful info that might change between two instances of the same animation. A controller maintains a stack of playable animations and can look at the individual speed of each one as it progresses through.

On top of that, there's a final speed modifier that can be submitted along with the playable animation, without changing its values. This way, if I want to play an animation at double speed for whatever reason, I don't necessarily have to set the value for the entire controller, I can just say this animation should be faster, and nothing else. Some animations have different frame rates, or are re-used with different speeds for different purposes, and I can do all that configuration without having to put all that weight on one field.

All of this sounds wildly complicated, and it kind of is, but importantly, if you're playing an animation from any other system, all you do is type in "Controller.PlayAnimation(animation)". You can also go like, "Controller.PlayAnimation(animation, speed: 1.5)" if you want it to play faster, but all of that stuff is handled completely without additional input. This is what lets me come back to the game and keep working on it when it's been months since I've touched a part of it.

Why This is Relevant Right Now

Status effects seem simple, but they kind of need to touch every other system at least a little bit, which is why I spent all that time talking about making systems. A status effect needs to be able to do things like apply damage, but it also needs to be able to play animations or sounds, and it doesn't always want to play those things on the source of the effect.

Some demos for the animations different status effects will use.

Plus, this is a roguelite, so we need to be able to add and modify status effect stuff within the upgrade system, which might mean modifying the magnitude of the effect, changing colors on animations, or tying other things into the effect when it goes off! As long as each of those systems has the cleanest possible entry/exit points, this is doable, but it's been a long battle making sure the game can keep moving forward and not get mired in constant bugfixing and complexity management.

I have a lot of cool game design thoughts on the effects themselves, but I think I'll leave that for a later week. As per usual, thanks for reading, feel free to send any questions or thoughts here or to @oneominousvalbatross, and I'll see you next week!

[gamingblur103s]

my thoughts on neo the world ends with you

long but probably not very good to read. spoilers and allat

i have to admit that i have a knee-jerk resentment towards a lot of the twewy franchise outside of the original game. every port and remake and reimagining of the original is simply worse off because something fundamental about what made the original experience so fantastic is removed. granted, this is often out of necessity for it no longer being a DS game, and from a business perspective, something like the anime adaptation only makes sense when a sequel is coming out practically immediately after the anime ends. still, in regards to these rereleases, i can easily see them as things that only add to the franchise rather than remove from them. the mobile port, despite screwing with the art style and the gameplay, added new music that is on par with the original game's score. the anime adaptation, despite its truncation, occasional mischaracterization, and format the story was not made for, looks pretty great and is still fun enough to be an effective recap, which was its precise purpose. it is much harder to say the same for final remix.

final remix is a port of a port; it maintains the streamlined and exponentially less engaging gameplay of the mobile version. granted, it comes with new pins which work well enough with this new base, but that doesn't change the problems i have with these fundamentals. to make up for that (as well as bridge the gap between it and neo), final remix comes with "a new day": a continuation of the story that is necessary to experience in order to understand neo.

to be blunt, a new day is where my previously mentioned resentment began. the story it tries to tell is so emphatic on its mystery that it foregoes any actual depth. as something that is expressly being tacked onto the original story rather than its own entity, its poor quality leads to directly detracting from that story.

the reaper's game (for og twewy at least) was meant to act as a symbolic prison for neku that colored every bit of his progress. yes, his character development is fairly blatant, but if anything, it benefits from that. the framing of the reaper's game actually makes the arc more grounded in how arduous it is, in how it was so much longer than neku could have ever expected, in how it hurt in all the ways he was scared it would.

it's all perfectly embodied by the fact neku is still wearing his headphones when the original game ends on the sublime emotional note of him taking them off. it's careless storytelling, to such an extent that it colors everything that came before it as the last canonical events we get to see, made all the worse by how it (and consequently, the game) ends with Neku dying. again. the only thing that keeps me from being completely outraged at the comical disregard of his arc is that it at least doesn't take away his emotional development.

there's also the iffy characterization overall, once again to serve a mystery the plot cannot afford to answer the larger reaching implications of. mind you, there's nothing outright OFFENSIVE about its portrayals (i actually think fake joshua is the best example of characterization in the whole thing; it's fun to show what a character is by what they aren't), but it's all just so vapid. forgive me for being smarmy enough to use an antimetabole, but when you go through a whole-ass video game that has its plot function in service to its characters, playing such a blatant sequel-bait that has its characters serving the IDEA of a plot feels like a disservice to those characters. if there's a connection to be felt, it's not indicated or made stronger by what happens here; it's all for the sake of hype.

i'm rambling, but hopefully that embodies my emotions going into neo comprehensively enough. i couldn't help but see a new day as utterly counterintuitive, and as a result, i had my typical territorial nature for my favorite things cranked up to twelve. i couldn't even fully trust the original staff with this game. for a while, i couldn't shake the feeling that the franchise of twewy outside the original game tarnished my experience with it. i did everything i could to convince myself to go full "death of the author": everything that isn't the original game simply isn't canon. but that didn't feel right to me, so i still kept this deep curiosity in me. then, about two and a half years after its release, i started up neo and spent my winter break exclusively on playing it through to the end (college made it so if i didn't finish it then, i'd have to wait till the summer).

this FINALLY leads me to my thoughts on the game this post is supposed to be about.

in a word, neo feels derivative. mind you, that's by no means the full story. for certain aspects, that description is either deeply unfair or outright untrue; for others, it's frankly generous. holistically, however, it feels like a continuation of what twewy had to offer, when it could've been an evolution. this by itself would make it worse than the original, but then there are times where it can't even accomplish that much.

on that note: the presentation.

og twewy didn't just have a fantastic style, but phenomenal direction. it was a multi-pronged refutation of the idea of "style over substance". the pause menu alone is so informative, yet so digestible because of its adherence to the game's style, what with its inspired choice of music and cute lil thumbnails for all the menus you can navigate to from there. there's also accounting for what players will most often check the menu for and an effort to make such features particularly accessible. the shining examples of this are dedicating nearly all of the top screen to the map and the fact that all the combat options aside from the pins (your level, partner behavior, game difficulty) are available on that screen, rather than hidden in another menu. hell, credit where it's due, the rereleases' version of this menu are all just as good; the attempt to depixelize the visuals makes it look a little too much like a gacha game for my liking, but absolutely nothing about it was changed in such a way that it becomes harder to navigate

in general, i think ui/ux design is way more important in games than it's given credit for, though that's undoubtedly changed in recent times. it's always been listed as a separate career from other graphic design jobs, and rightfully so, but for games especially, it can't be stressed enough how much they make or break a game's flow and "vibe". fact of the matter is, a significant chunk of a player's time is going to be spent in menus no matter what. i'm sure there's exceptions to this, but all i can think of is very primitive examples like pong which obviously don't apply to what i mean. as a result, making those menus feel fun and/or natural to use elevates the entire experience in ways even the most diligent game developers might not realize. an article from gamesradar has a translated quote from persona 5 director katsura hashino which really emboldened my feelings on the topic

"In Japan, UI design is often handled by new employees. ... Top level designers are usually in charge of characters and background graphics, with the UI being secondary. I think that’s a mistake. That’s why Atlus' UI designers are paid so well."

(side note: as great as the menus in p3r mostly are, the change for the in-battle menu from the revolver chamber is criminal. i know they still kinda have it, but i still prefer what the original did)

with all that said: neo twewy has three pause menus.

the first menu, which i will call the main menu, is where most of the options that relate to gameplay are. your current objective, social network (no jesse eisenberg in sight), equipment, map, and collectible progress. each of those five things i mentioned are their own menu within this menu, except for equipment which is actually two menus in threads and pins (to be fair, just like twewy).

the second menu, which i’ll call the pause menu, has all the shit that give off system setting vibes. saving, loading, going to the title screen, volume control, subtitles (always yes), voice track (we’ll get to that), the works. worth noting that this menu has absolutely no style to it. it is laughably barebones. sauceless, if you will.

the third menu, which i’ll call the combat menu, has all the combat options twewy had at the bottom of its main menu. this menu is also pretty lacking in sauce, though i suppose there’s only so much that could be done without it feeling obtrusive.

an insane person would argue this is a good translation of the immediate access in twewy’s ui. this division means less navigation is needed for certain option and it makes clutter a non-issue (in theory). while i’m sure this is true for some, for me, it became a consistent headache which would often undermine what i think are its design goals. the main menu’s subdivisions are a good example, but i actually didn’t have too much of a problem with it since switching between the menus was fairly snappy. the pin menu, however, was COMICALLY clunky. it becomes far too difficult to navigate your list as soon as week 2 starts. neo is a home console game, so there is zero need for a single pin to take up THAT much space on the screen, especially when that same pin at a different level of progress is listed separately, effectively doubling the amount of shit you have to sift through. the attempts at giving me shortcuts and filters ended up only confusing me. by the end, i resorted to exclusively consulting the full list every time, because even if it was tedious as all hell, at least i understood it and could eventually memorize the positions of things.

granted, it’s not all bad. you can actually access the combat menu while you’re in the main menu, so you can experiment with your level and view the drop rates in the noisepedia simultaneously. this version of the map, while it takes extra steps to access, also has features twewy’s map did not, namely the ability to see the kinds of noises that spawn in an area. you can even zoom in and out! for some reason!

these undeniable improvements are not only things twewy did not have, but in some cases (i.e. the map's new features) couldn’t have. however, it’s still missing the forest for the trees; the fundamental flow is still so disjointed that these features feel like a bandage on a tumor. i fully concede this next complaint is at least partially on me, but i cannot tell you the number of times i pressed the button for the wrong menu. because each menu has important shit that i need frequent access to, my muscle memory for the “i need menu things” neurons are always confused. if i’m not wasting time by going to the wrong menu, i’m wasting time by hesitating on pressing any button in case i’m wrong.

i’m being cruel here to an extent, and i acknowledge that. in isolation, these problems aren’t even a fraction as damning as i make them out to be, but when it’s something repeatedly experienced throughout the entire game, i cannot ignore how i dread having to interact with these menus and how they color my experience. granted, you could argue these complaints refute my thesis statement on neo being derivative. it may have failed, but is this not neo trying something new? to that, i would make the distinction that this is not a case of neo evolving, but rather, simply adapting.

allow me to branch back out to the more general subject of the game’s presentation.

i am by absolutely no means going to be calling the presentation of neo bad. that might be shocking to hear after me going so hard on the ui of all things, but i'm not an idiot. the soundtrack is a delight ("the beginning of a happy life" is genuinely, no bullshit, honest to god one of my favorite vg songs i have ever heard), the visuals are never any worse than ok (fret's design is by FAR my favorite, but i also liked shoka, rindo (mainly just his mask continuing the theme of neku's "hear no evil" with "speak no evil"), and susukichi), and when the two combine, it consistently achieves a familiar vibe throughout.

VERY familiar.

again, the presentation of neo is not bad. i would go so far as to call it good overall. but i genuinely struggle to think of any way it substantially iterates on what twewy has to offer. from where i'm standing, it feels like a complete copy-paste (with one exception that i swear i will get to soon cuz this is now like my third time alluding to it).

it's a bit of a mainstream example, but when you look at something like final fantasy, there's a clear throughline in the presentation of pretty much the entire series. even at its most vibrant and cutesy, there's this particular breed of gothic or sci-fi or—and i truly do not mean this disparagingly—edgy you can feel in the foundation of a final fantasy game. conversely, even at its darkest, final fantasy has its own brand of whimsy and bombast in chocobos or summons or the bajillion leitmotifs throughout the franchise. through it all, final fantasy has maintained a strong fundamental identity, but has managed to express it in a myriad of ways that, rather than dilute said identity, only bolster and refine its spirit.

i use final fantasy specifically because of its similarities to twewy. granted, these similarities are largely surface-level, but that's also kinda my point. final fantasy as a franchise achieves the variety it does through acknowledging what is fundamental to it and innovating off of that. by contrast, twewy (the franchise, not the game) is afraid to change its spirit and seeks purely to preserve it. because of that, the only way you could really differentiate twewy (the game, not the franchise) and neo at a glance is because of the hardware they are on. acquiescing to the merciless march of time, rather than embracing it.

that's why i still think my complaints about the ui ultimately fall back on the critiques of neo being derivative. while the problems with the ui in isolation seem like the developers trying something new, when you look at neo holistically, it is so clearly just an attempt at merely adapting, and sometimes it feels like neo fails even on that level. it isn't even innovation by necessity; every change feels like a sacrifice more than anything.

and on that note: gameplay.

i would say i generally enjoyed playing neo. the overworld exploration is very bog-standard, but i still appreciate it. remind is cute (it and telewarp's mechanics are obviously scripted but successfully "feel" cool to use) and dive fights are cool. i didn't mind the lack of fast travel, and in fact ADORED beat's soundsurf. having it add to your groove makes so much sense it hurts, and i love what it does to the music. but all of this is kinda window dressing when compared to the combat.

i'm sure my utter obsession with rpg (especially traditional rpg) gameplay aids my love of neo's combat, but i think most people can appreciate the gameplay loop. assigning party members to specific buttons is an undeniably fun concept. the hyper-customization of the combat is also something to be admired (to an extent); i'm sure i'm not particularly special for this, but i adore any opportunity to play a game "my way". the pin list is a teensy bit bloated with repeated ideas but with a higher number and/or different and somewhat arbitrary "element", but i sincerely love it overall. with how diverse the ideas are, there's a shocking few that i would consider objectively worse than the others. for example, the strength of the game's combo system "groove" means that a pin having a lower power doesn't actually make it necessarily worse, since less damage per attack allows for longer combos, which allows for more liberal and consistent use of the special moves unlocked by reaching the 100%, 200%, and 300% thresholds. inversely, as a compulsive grinder, the game's progression felt fairly natural even when i was pretty blatantly overprepared. fights are incredibly busy, and the boss fights especially are designed so that a single mistake can become a slippery slope of punishment. i died fairly frequently, particularly from getting too big for my britches and taking on a reduction chain i just couldn't handle. thus, fights never felt thoughtless the whole way through, which i was frankly REALLY impressed by.

i would accredit each of these compliments (or a stronger version of them) to twewy (to the point where i'm strongly tempted to derail this whole thing into how much i fucking love twewy's gameplay), but to its credit, neo does take different ways to get there in a lot of cases. to be doubly fair, though, as i've previously stated, these different approaches feel like they needed to happen rather than resulting from a distinct and passionate vision. to be TRIPLY fair, though, what's here has so much polish and depth that there was clearly some kind of passion present. my mind made a strong connection to kingdom hearts; i am not a big kh fan, so that is either indicative of just how similar neo and kh are (that someone like me could point it out) or how ignorant i am to action rpgs (accusing neo of being similar when it's really not). i'm open to either option.

the hyper-customization also feels like a double-edged sword, in that there is virtually no difference in how each of the six party members play. making your party members distinct from a gameplay perspective is INCREDIBLY important, because it's such an effective tool of storytelling. for better or worse, how a character performs during gameplay will directly influence how a player will view that character holistically. if, either by pure luck or bad game design, a character underperforms, a player is inclined to view that character less fondly. while neo's method of little if any distinction seemingly circumvents this slight dice roll, it closes off a unique opportunity entirely and settles for something that feels a little bland. mind you, this doesn't change anything about what i liked about the game's customization and customization as a whole. i do believe, generally, that the more customization the better, but that can't be an excuse to homogenize the party members.

none of how the game handles levelling up and stats really helps this. yes, characters will have different tastes in terms of food (leading to potential bonuses on top of the stat increases that food already does), and some clothes will have secondary benefits exclusive to certain party members, but it's not nearly enough.

i'm tempted to say that the solution to this would be to find a better balance, and that is still true on a fundamental level, but i also don't think making party members distinct and customization are mutually exclusive, or even necessarily things that mitigate the capacity for the other. if you want to go as extreme as what neo attempts, then yes, a focus on customization will undermine uniqueness, but there's also ways to let them heighten the other. in twewy's case, the dynamism of neku's gameplay vs the static "gimmicks" of his partners spoke not only to the personalities of each character individually, but also of neku's relationship with those partners and with people as a whole. more contemporary and popular examples of this would be pokemon (especially nowadays with nature mints and streamlined ev training) and persona (especially 5 royal).

the latter of the examples i bring up is an interesting one to me: taking advantage of a protagonist who is a canonical blank-slate (not to say joker or any persona protag from 3 onward has no personality, just that they are wild cards) to let them fit whatever mold the player wants. it's a big indicator of what i mean when i say that customization and uniqueness can coexist, because in this case, they're two almost completely separate spheres that manage to function without overpowering the other. when they DO interact, such as with the intended evolution of the mc's personas or the customization allowed for non-mc party members, it only enhances what it touches.

i should stress, despite these critiques, that i think neo's gameplay is good. i had fun with it. there are aspects of it, such as its pin selection, that i found memorably impressive. but i want to stress why i stick so strongly by my thesis—that neo is derivative—even for its best aspects.

and on that note: the story.

let's get the big thing i've been alluding to out of the way: i ADORE neo's localization. i really, truly, sincerely think there wasn't a single time in the entire game where i felt some piece of dialogue was awkward, and that is not only a compliment for the localizers, but for the writers as well. don't get me wrong, i could sometimes notice that things were localized, but that realization never jarred me. rather, it made me that much more confident about what that piece of dialogue could tell me about the character saying it, the situation they're in, and/or their relationship(s) to whom they're talking to.

i won't act like it's absolutely perfect, of course. however, my complaints come from failures to achieve the goal of localization, rather than with the innate nature of the practice. for example, probably my biggest hang-up on it is that it undersells a lot of the sentiment when shiki and neku finally reunite, though the voice acting is partly responsible for that (likely moreso the voice direction rather than the actors themselves, but i can't say for sure).

back on the positives, i do find the english voice acting pretty good. miranda parkin as nagi is my personal highlight; her performance reminds me a LOT of erica lindbeck's futaba sakura, and you should absolutely look into her work on her youtube channel "ParkinArt" when you get the chance, because she is superbly talented. shoutouts also go to xander mobus as kubo (i struggle to think of a sleazier voice) and pretty much every returning va.

in general, i am pretty massively defensive of localization and localizers; whole lotta people who don't know shit spouting, well, shit. to be fair, i'm not much better, but at least i'm on the side of the people who do this shit for a living. and i'm also on the side which appreciates those people for the work they do, because i can't help but feel like it's really fuckin hard. you're not just translating the literal words, but finding ways to synthesize it to maintain the SPIRIT. This short video by "Jehtt" about the opening line of Sonic Adventure is an excellent example of what I'm talking about.

as for the content getting localized itself, final remix (and specifically a new day) made it clear that whatever sequel comes out, it's going to be some kind of direct continuation of what's been established, rather than a self-contained story in the same universe or something along those lines. personally, i would've preferred the latter if a twewy sequel HAD to exist, and to its credit, my favorite things about neo twewy's story tend to be the things which THEORETICALLY make it stand on its own. obviously, your enjoyment is enhanced if you play the first game, but there's enough in neo to make it possible for someone who doesn't to still understand it.

for example, new characters are fun, even if occasionally half-baked. i'll get the riff-raff out of the way: the shinjuku reapers felt like goofy personifications of gimmicks that served their purposes well enough, coco is a bit less annoying this time, tsumugi is hilariously half-baked after being hyped up as much as she was, hazuki... exists, and i struggled to see any of the other team leaders as more than an impetus for other characters (though i am DEEPLY grateful kanon isn't as bad as she could've been). speaking of which, how about those characters?

my favorites were nagi and fret; i see their concepts as a bit tropey, but executed well all the same. the ways their arcs intertwine were surprisingly compelling; nagi's dislike of fret wasn't just a weird gag, but an inevitability of fret's compulsion to put up a front and nagi's keen perception and hatred of "fake" people. once nagi learns why fret puts up this act as he makes an effort to move past that instinct, they start bonding almost immediately as she tells him more about her inner workings and that she'll take care not to be so judgmental thanks to his influence. the reveal that she got fret on elegant strategy after the events of the game made me smile way more than the game trying to get me to like rindo and shoka as a couple ever did.

on that note, i could take or leave rindo as a protagonist, and in general, my interest in the shinjuku reapers (especially shoka) waned as they became more significant. that's not BECAUSE of their significance, mind you, simply that they ended up disappointing me in one way or the other (with the possible exception of kaie who was just kind of a silly little guy). it comes back, yet again, to my thesis on this game failing to meaningfully iterate. i understand and agree that there's a lot of value in establishing parallels between characters, even if the plots of their stories are disconnected. i would go so far as to say it's ideal to make a sequel expand on the subtext of what's been established like that, as long as it and what's new bolster each other. in the case of rindo, i struggle to appreciate things about him that aren’t some extension of neku when he was a protagonist. i found his arc about making his own decisions sudden and a bit inexplicable, especially with how blatantly it was stated. felt like a case of saying a character was having a specific arc without actually giving them that arc.

as for shoka, i do like her more than rindo. in fact, it’s her relationship with him that made me lose interest; it felt like all the things that endeared me to her, like her relationships with the other shinjuku reapers and her brand of snark, got pushed to the side in favor of said relationship. it dominated everything else about her character in a way it felt like it just didn’t with rindo. granted, this could just be because he’s the protagonist, and her “snark” is a surface level reason to like her. however, i don’t find that first concession to be an adequate excuse, and it was precisely her personality that got me interested in the character to begin with, only for it to feel discarded (albeit probably not completely, i’m sure there’s a cute lil moment or two i’m forgetting). considering shoka’s love of gatto nero and shiki’s presence in the game, i imagine the parallels between the two have to be somewhat intentional, including with their relationships to their respective mc. like with rindo, these parallels make it hard for me to appreciate the character, but unlike rindo, shoka’s parallels seem to actively oust the things unique to her, as opposed to rindo’s leaving little opportunity for appreciable distinction to begin with. again, i ultimately prefer shoka, as tis better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all.

that just leaves the three elephants in the room/party: all of them are returning characters. two of them are characters you played as in twewy.

i do want to make it clear that even at my most territorial, i don't think i was ever completely against the idea of there being returning characters; if anything, my ideal twewy sequel would actually feature characters like joshua or hanekoma more prevalently than they were here. rather, much like most things, it comes down to how you implement them, and neo does so in a way that pretty blatantly relies on them. even that isn’t a necessarily a bad thing, but remember what i said about this story attempting to stand on its own?

what shocks me about their sheer prevalence is that very little of it feels necessary. i don’t get the feeling that any of the og gang were needed to make this story work on a thematic level (as happy as a lot of their scenes together made me), and in fact, as i alluded to with rindo and shoka, it actually seems to impede or dampen a lot of what the game is trying to go for. i see it as perhaps the single most blatant example of my thesis statement. neo plays with the concept of a self-contained story, but is unable to let go of what's already there, innovate enough on the franchise and original game’s core, and pull through with something standalone, because it seems generally unwilling to embrace change, and consequently, key aspects of creativity and what makes a good sequel. i understand if others don’t share this opinion, but to me, it really feels like neo only changes when it has to, and that reflects in the changes it makes as well as the ones it doesn't.

and on that note: the conclusion.

sorry this feels so disparate. i definitely wouldn't call neo a bad game, and in fact, i think given some time, i can comfortably call it good. plus, i can, after some difficulty and deliberation, say it and even final remix's existence only add to og twewy. impulsive territorialism be damned, it makes me happy to see stories and characters i love be added on to like this. the aspects i consider bad, even if they might be fundamental, are not enough for me to avoid embracing and appreciating the good. my silly little headcanons are not “threatened” by things like final remix, even if it felt like they would be in the moment. it is still possible to imagine all my favorite characters living happily ever after with each other, even that cunt with the mop for hair joshua, and if anything, certain scenes in neo only add to those delusions. i may have complained about them, and i do stand by those complaints, but i cannot deny how much i love them in isolation. i think the only thing that could've made me hate them is mischaracterization, but the only instance of that which stuck out to me (neku and shiki reuniting) seems to be a translation issue, and the real sentiment of the scene aligns far more strongly with my views of the characters.

that said, i'm still definitely disappointed by it all. neo's derivative spirit felt very pervasive to me the whole way through, and by the end, i felt a strong urge to replay twewy. that's not a necessarily bad instinct to have after playing a sequel, because it's the idea of "wanting more". it is, however, bad in this case, because it was a mix of that and the idea of "wanting better". i wanted to play something where these good ideas were new, or better yet, something where the new ideas were good. as it stands, i'm left the slightest bit hollow; just enough to be noteworthy, but i still feel like a dick for bringing it up.

i'm happy i played this game. i may very well play it again in the future. there's aspects of it i like to the point of loving. and yet, i hesitate to say i like it.

my feelings on this game continue to be jumbled, even after all this. still, writing a lot of it out definitely helped, and it was really fun to make! thank you oh so very much for reading; i hope you enjoyed it!

oh, and i would rather rip my dick off than play scramble slam again-

[paradimeart]

prowl has 0 idea what goes on in protoform development these days

(V.S. = vector sigma)

[icewindandboringhorror]

finally finished all of one character's entire quests/optional dialogue/questions/etc.... 100,000 words... .... aughhh

[isa-ah]

for people who have anxiety but live alone anyway: how do u deal with the panic? I live with 2 other people and still have bubble burst moments of random fear that only gets soothed by putting myself in someone else's eyeline. what do you do when the catastrophising starts???

[honeyconez]

guys hear me out would painis cupcake pay taxes? Because he’s not like mega insane like ass pancakes I think he’d pay his taxes in my professional opinion.

[sysig]

VUXPet (Patreon)

[machidielontheway]

did some little steps into making an animatic yesterday, meaning i google "how to make an animatic beginner" and i stumbled back on a website i like that i discover last time i google "how to mak animations beginner". And they still say "begins with a short and easy project !" with the ball animation and i'm like eeeeh but this sounds so boring.

and then for once the solution came to me easy : well if i don't find it interesting i'll just have to change the subject ! or the color of the ball !

[iliveinprocrasti-nationn]

one thing abt being disabled/chronically ill that some people don’t get is that sometimes body maintenance that ensures you have the absolute minimum amount of function can also be something that takes away a lot of control and autonomy. you can argue till the cows come home that making those decisions to try and help yourself (or realistically to try to make sure things aren’t worse than they already are) is something that exhibits control and autonomy and stuff, but they can be so limiting in practice because they’re things that take up so much time but have to be done to do anything else

[acrobattack]

i think it’s fun that blossom and buttercup butt heads the most vs brick who targets boomer and more or less gets along swell with butch

[forcebookish]

as much as i'd like to see forcebook play their ages, i don't really mind them playing 18-22 year olds because i can easily forgive a lot of shitty behavior in that age group. it's a really rough time in your life, often your first time out on your own, when you might not quite grasp how dire the consequences of your actions can be because you won't "get in trouble." when you're graduating from Teenhood, there's sometimes a learning curve with "my parents ragged on me about X just because they're parents" to "oh they actually did know better i shouldn't do that shit" - sometimes you have to learn that on your own. add alcohol, the pressure of college, shifting identities, etc., it's a good recipe for some nice 'n' easy character development.