#at first this was just going to be yi kuafu and jiequan but then i decided to be FAIR TO EVERYONE (for some reason)

[velveteen-vampire]

what the fuck? felis catus?

[doodledrawsthings]

Opinions on the Sols from Nine Sols immediately. Please. Your au is delish.

Keep in mind these are my very off-the-top-of-my-head, surface level impressions of them after having recently beaten the game on story mode once, while streaming. I won’t be giving any deep analysis or anything lol so the tone will be pretty jokey and unserious.

MAJOR major Nine Sols spoilers under the cut. Please do not read if you haven’t finished the game.

Kuafu: second favorite character. I love him so much. He’s such a pal, everybody likes him. Hou Yi left him as the final sun standing after shooting down the other nine cuz he’s just a stand up guy. The fact that he’s the one who pled keep Abacus around and set his settings to High Sympathy and kept coming in to talk to him out of guilt over what happened to Yi kills me. Smart, silly, handsome, the last remaining Solarian in existence and he can never go home for the remainder of his life. He’s my ride or die bestie, he’s one of my several husbands who babysit my little brother while I go off on a revenge murder spree and I’m kissing him on the mouth.

Goumang: I like her design and concepts and think she’s a fun character. She was the first boss I fought and i thought she was pretty fun, though I didn’t find the fight as memorable as others. I wish she had more presence throughout the game, I heard from a friend she had some more stuff that was cut apparently? Curious about her rivalry with Yi and relationship with Eigong. And since Yi technically never killled her I’ve considered including her in the Dont Worry About It AU.

Yanlao: Grampa!! I think he and Yi’s back and forth throughout the warehouse area was pretty funny. I was so ready to kick his ass the entire time, especially after the segment where he’s shooting at you as you navigate a maze. Loved his bossfight, first fight of the first three i started with where I really felt the parry/dodge/attack rhythm for the first time. Rip gramps.

Jiequan: BASTARD!! (Half-affectionate but only half) he’s giving Fruity Disney Villain Who Flirts With You As He Stabs You In The Chest. He sucks <3 but he’s such a FUN character, what a great antagonist. His fake out fight is so intense, the prison scene is so intense, his boss fight kicked my ass and his theme goes hard. He’s a war criminal, he’s a freak, he looks like All Might MHA and he regularly irradiates himself as part of his body building routine. “Heroes are forged in agony!” 10/10 Disney villain, very stylish. Defeating him was so satisfying especially after the Kanghui fight in the prison and learning what happened with THAT horror show.

Lady Ethereal: I LOVE HER!! SO MUCH!!! UGH!!! she makes me so sad! But everything about her is SO cool! Her fate! Her backstory!! Her design! Her boss fight! Her entire platforming area!!! Just!!! Aah! I won’t say too much but it’s just so good she had my favorite fight in the game, the dance for that one is so much fun. I was streaming the game on discord for my partner and another friend and when we first went into the cortex, she was like “oh you should keep going left and see what’s over there ;)” and then I did and just!!! So cool that Red Candle started off making horror games, it’s really great. Love it. Awesome character, awesome boss, awesome theme.

Fuxi and Nuwa: Rich asshole twins!! These two suck lol but I do think they’re fun characters. The entire empyrean district is experiencing a resident evil style zombie infection and Nuwa is throwing a rager at the club for the rich cryosleepers only. It’s really eerie over there though, I love the vibe of the east side and the discovery of the mutants and destruction of the west half is spooky as hell. And then I got to the area where you get Fuxi’s sol seal and didn’t even notice he was sitting there until my partner pointed him out. I thought he was furniture lol. She’s really puppeting around her brother’s pustule-riddled zombie corpse Weekend at Bernie’s style cuz she’s that much in denial. Also absolutely horrifying that the district supposedly once held 100,000 sleeping solarians that is whittled down to 300 after the mutated virus wreaks havoc through the area. Personally, I’m mixed on their bossfight, the first half with just Fuxi was fun once I got the rhythm but the 2nd half when Nuwa comes in with her attacks gets a bit too chaotic for me. Their boss theme, however, is probably my favorite in the game. I love the opera samples, it’s so cool.

Ji: I think about them a lot. Like, wow what a guy. I think a lot about his immortality, and that if he had not left Penglai with the council he would have been stuck there, alone for eternity. I think about the fact that because they will never get Tianhuo, there would be no need for them to be in cryosleep, which probably means that in the 502 years that Yi was recovering, he was probably up and about the entire time, probably wandering around new Kunlun mostly alone. I wonder if they ever hung out with the dusk guardians, or if they just stayed in the grotto for the most part. Their boss fight felt the most like a dance to me, or like friends sparring. Do you think they thought of Lear as you attacked them with the moves he taught you in the spiritual realm? He makes me sad, but he is very stylish!

Eigong: FUCK HER! SHES SO COOL, BUT FUCK HER!!! EVIL GRANDMA! this games story is like peeling back an onion of horrors where each layer you peel back brings new, mortifying understanding of the situation at large until it ALL. COMES BACK. TO HER! AND HER FRUITLESS PURSUIT OF IMMORTALITY! Her boss fight KICKED MY ASS. I was streaming my first playthrough, so I was already prone to doing worse than I probably would without an audience (emphasis on probably) but in my first attempt I was fighting her for like 6 HOURS STRAIGHT. And for the true ending too, which meant three boss phases. I just could not get her pattern down and my hands were cramping but i really wanted to finish the game that weekend so I could finally talk about it so I ended up turning up the accessibility options to one punch man her. I did eventually go back and do her fight by myself with the story mode settings and MAN what a fun boss battle once you get the dance down (I’m still so bad at unbound counter), and it is SO satisfying to beat. Incredible character, we love fictional old women who commit atrocities in the name of science.

Yi: and finally we have the man, the myth, the legend. I could probably write a whole separate post about him and Heng and his relationships with the other characters but to keep it short- I LOVE HIM SO MUCH! BUT IM ALSO BITING HIM AND PUTTING HIM IN A BLENDER AND RUNNING HIM THROUGH THE DISHWASHER AND HANGING HIM UP TO DRY. Just UGH! It’s not common for the main character of a thing to be my favorite character but Yi is my favorite character. It’s the fact that he is his own character, and we, the player, must gradually find out things that HE already knows. And his budding and flowering relationships with the other characters, especially those who set up shop in the pavillion which leads into his character development is just AUGH. AND THE ENDINGS. YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW I FEEL ABOUT GHE ENDINGS. THEYRE GOOD BUT AUGH. I love him, I’m rotating him in my mind on a skewer, he’s my little manlet, my poor little “I’m not a good person” shadow the hedgehog energy meow meow cat boy. I love him so much, I’m so distraught over his terrible life choices. Incredible character.

Ok hope that was entertaining to read, bye.

[sharkangelic]

Something I like about the boss fights in Nine Sols is that (most of them) feel fitting for the boss. A lot of other games just have you fight someone who technically has lore and personality but their boss fight is just Another Tough Fight, even if the person you're fighting objectively should not be good at it. But not Nine Sols.

We don't fight Kuafu, both because he's not a fighter and he turns out to be our friend. Instead we fight his robot. Goumang is a farmer. Similar to Kuafu, she is not a fighter and never pretends to be. There is no way she should be fighting Yi - and she doesn't. Her minions do it for her.

We don't fight Yanlao, because he's so old and sick that he can't walk on his own. Another fight where we face a tool instead. Kanghui is Kanghui. Next.

Jiequan IS a fighter, like that is his whole shtick, so we do go hardcore when fighting him.

Lady Ethereal is not really a fighter. We fight her in her soulscape, where of course she has control and can do whatever she wants. She attacks Yi in an attempt to provoke him into killing her.

Ji just wants to die spectacularly. He's not malicious, he's just so completely ambivalent about almost everything except his desire to die, because he is an immortal who is bored of life. He is as extra about this fight as he can muster. The Fengs don't want to fight Yi, and they have no intention of doing so as long as he leaves them alone. They want to continue their partying in peace. Nuwa gives him her Sol Seal freely, but Fuxi is basically already dead and cannot, so they have to fight. Eigong is absolutely a fighter and she WILL wreck your shit. The fact that she uses talismans implies she's the one who taught Yi to do that in the first place. Love having the tables turned on me - reminds me of Okami Ninetails. She is SO like Yi - a master scientist AND martial arts master. Everything about this fight is just so fitting.

I love the boss fights in this game. I don't normally say that about games, ever.

[a-goumang-ripoff]

The Use of Death in Nine Sols

I know it's been a while but I'M MAKING ANOTHER POST FINALLY!!!! Alright so, I was rambling to a friend and something clicked in my head. If you can't tell by the title, it's about the unique way death seems to be used in Nine Sols.

To summarize it, death is used in unique ways with each sol in a way that gives each one exactly what they deserve, even if what they nearly all get is the same exact thing: death. While I'll do my best to not explain every single case individually and make a super massive post, I will go over as many as I think is needed to make my point. My autistic ass has categorized almost every character into 2 categories I want to cover: the sols who are good, and the sols who are bad. I will also be talking about Kuafu, Goumang, and Jiequan separately as they are very unique cases for mostly obvious reasons.

Getting into the 'bad' sols first, the sols I've categorized in here are Yanlao, Fuxi, Nuwa, and Eigong. The thing that ties this category together is that these sols suffer death as a punishment for their actions. Yanlao I think encapsulates this the best. He would go on to die terrified of death, attempting to cling onto life as hard as he could, but still being punished with death despite it. And I think it's well deserved the way he dies, as in his sol seal memories he is shown to be a hypocrite willing to do anything just for the sake of respect, only liking the old relics he has because they make him respected and they make him money. He was brought onto a project to eliminate the deadliest disease that penglai ever faced, that solarians ever faced, that threatened the survival of the species, not for what he can provide to the efforts in skills, but for the sake of his relics which are actively remarked by multiple characters to be unnecessary or worthless. He spends his time as a sol doing nothing but criticizing others, demanding respect, and being extremely petty. He did nothing, and thus, deserves nothing, not even a death at Yi or his own hands, simply death itself. The fates of the rest can be argued similarly, Fuxi deserves his existence as a monster for him actively taking advantage of literal disasters to make money, and dying only as a monster. Nuwa deserves hers for her similar stuck up personality and asshole behavior. Arguably, Eigong could be said to be rewarded for her death by practically creating her ultimate work that would immortalize her, but the fact that it is immediately obliterated in its entirety with no one left to truly remember her makes me argue that her death was only a punishment in the end.

For the 'good' sols, I've categorized Yi, Lady Ethereal, and Ji together, as they ultimately receive death as a reward, as opposed to a punishment. I think Lady Ethereal encapsulates this the best. One could say that she deserved death for what she did, causing the gruesome deaths of several people, including someone incredibly close to her, and remaining silent about it. However, aside from her having no clue that the soulscapes would have that effect, I believe she atones for her mistake in her own soulscape, suffering her own personal hell in it over the tragedy and her response. She suffers for I don't even know how long torturing herself over it all, even attempting suicide at one point, only to be forced to stay alive in this soulscape. It's only then, after being truly forced to torture herself, that Yi is able to interfere and allow her to finally process and come to terms with it, after making her own punishment she felt she deserved, and thus embrace a death that she earned and be able to truly rest. Yi ends up going through something extremely similar, obviously being the one to suggest harvesting humans for their brains and attempting to originally take the seals to take the cure into his own hands, but the game itself serves as his redemption and in the end, he is rewarded with death and the ability to see his sister again in the afterlife. Ji also is similar, though they don't really make this big awful disaster occur, only lacking courage to truly act despite their immortality, and actively express happiness in their death.

Alright, now to talk about the other three. I have made my point already about how each sol does deserve the fate they are given, being rewarded or punished with death in very unique ways. However, one that sticks out is Kuafu, the one sol who doesn't die within the events of the game. And, as you can probably guess, I think it's because he is the only one who doesn't deserve to die. He doesn't actively express a want to die, yet he definitely lies more in the 'good' side of the sols. Nothing he has done has warranted death as a punishment, the most punishment he needs and gets is being the last survivor, which can be seen as a steep punishment, but I think he's one of the few characters who could really take it in a much softer way, especially with his bonds with Shuanshuan and his changed view on humans.

Now something I've been itching to talk about: Goumang. I've singled her out because holy FUCK her ultimate fate is super fucked up. Way worse than any of the other sols. And as I've seen the community discuss, a lot of people think this was way too excessive, but, as fucked up as it is, I do think she deserves it to a degree as well. And, before I get into this, I do NOT think that this is something that should actually be done to anyone, even fictional characters, but the irony of her fate I think makes it something she does really deserve in a poetic way. While she does have a lot of good intentions and plans set in place to revive Penglai and save solarians, but I find her true awfulness in her ideologies and behavior. Starting with behavior, despite being in a grave situation in which solarian life is threatened, she does not decide to forget her differences with other sols and put her effort into helping the cause, she instead decides to remain petty and a full on asshole to Yi, in a way that surpasses other shitty sols because she is in a position to actually do something and work with other to help save solarians. Her ideology also heavily contrasts her genuinely good desires. To put it bluntly, she is a fascist, I've said it a thousand times and I'll say it again, she believes that every person needs to be micromanaged in the same way she micromanages her farms, that it would create a perfect society if this did happen. It doesn't help that "if everyone gave up a little freedom and submitted to higher authority..." is just straight up fascist rhetoric. She also is the ONLY sol to own human slaves to serve her, ones with collars that actively control their actions. I think all of this combines to really set in that she is the worst of the sols, that while you're meant to question Yi's true motives and intentions, his biases, because of this moment, Goumang still gets what she has coming to her.

As a final little sidenote, Jiequan is interesting not because of his alignment, he's quite clearly on the bad side of the sols, evil as fuck, the way his death is treated is interesting. It feels like a mix of death as a punishment and death as a reward, he does not want his death but in the end he still dies happy and proud, he believes he died a hero, and that is far from a punishment to the character, even though he well deserves to die. Maybe it's a mix of him being a horrible person and yet also surpassing his bullying he suffered as a child, the expectations put on him, etc. I love it as a point to show how unique the game is able to utilize death.