#but that's a *lot* of game to replay to find that out

[carlyraejepsans]

would you be okay pitching ghost trick to someone who doesn’t rly know anything about it? i’ve heard of it before and that it’s good but idk why, and i don’t really get a lot out of advertisements or game descriptions

you know the toby-typical campiness in how he writes his characters in UTDR? over the top, extremely iconic, clearly working from preestablished tropes but doing his own special spin on them? put toby fox on acid and you've got shu takumi's writing style.

ghost trick isn't "just" good. ghost trick is the type of good that invents a whole new categorization for itself. ghost trick invented a situation to put little fictional bitches in that is so good, the most popular works in the tag are people from other fandoms being like "oh shit, let me put MY fictional bitches through in this situation as well"

it is one of the most hooking, satisfyingly delivered mysteries I've ever seen in a videogame. there is not a single second of the game that feels unutilised, everything pushes you forward in the mystery, and still it never feels choking. the way it handles tension and delivers its information is phenomenal. if this were a normal recommendation i would start talking about the gameplay and how fun and good it feels to play and how genuinely clever it is but you're not here for that, are you, so let me tell you the real selling point: every single character in this game is fucking insane. not a single one of them is normal. it's a noir. it's a parody. it's an animator's wet dream. my friend is playing the game on stream and they said his fiancée can tell when we're streaming because she can hear him doing his pathetic man voice on call.

listen to me. you will fall in love with sissel. i played One Shot earlier this year. i thought i was never going to find a game with a protagonist that crawled into my heart as much as niko. i was wrong. jesus christ i was wrong. you need to understand, this is a puzzle game. once you know the answers that's it for the gameplay. the replay value is extremely low. I have replayed it 5 times in three weeks just to make the wrong choices and watch what sissel says and quips about it. he's my guy. i need to hold his face in my hands. you will see his fuckass red suit, you will see his fuckass banana hair, you willl see his goofy little smile and his dirk strider ass sunglasses and you will whimper like a DOG because you miss him so much. i am missing him right now as we speak. fuck.

play ghost trick.

[toasthaste]

ok here are some In Stars and Time thoughts: (wow! that's a lot of thoughts actually! long post warning! also warning for like every possible spoiler, don't read this if you haven't engaged with the game to your satisfaction)

I'm obsessed with the fact that the loop that ends up being the final one is the one where EVERYTHING goes wrong. I spent the whole game subconsciously building up my Perfect Final Loop in my mind, how I'd get every item to make sure I didn't miss an opportunity to use em, do all the friendquests and such... I didn't even realize I'd been building up that ideal scenario until after credits rolled! Really really cool. The timeline where Siffrin does the worst stuff he does in any loop is the one that stays. And it's still a happy ending! it's a better ending because of that! His friends saw him at his worst and still loved him! He didn't have to do everything perfect to keep them around actually! Something about that feels so right, to me.

I keep using "ludonarrative resonance" to describe this game and yeah ok I'm huffing my own farts here whipping that out but whatever, it's REAL. The player and Siffrin are on the EXACT same emotional journey as each other, we're getting tired of seeing the exact same lines over and over again right alongside them, we're taking shortcuts because we've seen it all before and just want to grab key open door grab crest etc etc make the progress go. We're starting to find these previously-charming characters grating because we've just seem them repeat the SAME lines over and over and over and OVER again until they start feeling like caricatures of themselves who we can barely feel any real compassion for any more.... It's just so.... clean, it's so perfect, to me. It helps that Siffrin is also one of the more relatable characters I've encountered in, like, media. I don't usually relate to fictional characters much, but, man, the emotional constipation, the building scorn, the depression, the Being Weird About Touch... I mentioned in another post that it's really just Siffrin and Murderbot who I've ever found viscerally relatable, of all the characters ever in media. So like, it's a pretty rare position. (I do not relate to the pun-love though. I'm funny I'm good at goofs but bad puns are extremely tedious to me. Which perhaps goes to show how well-realized Siffrin is, given that I'm able to look the other way....)

I think they could have stood to make Loop's Whole Deal a bit more obvious. I had no clue what their fucking deal was at any point. I totally missed the interaction that lets you learn about The Incident and thus get more Loop info at the end, and... it's valid to have different endings in a game of course, but... I felt like I really missed out tbh! And I had no way of knowing I had to keep interacting with the silver coin.... idk. It felt a bit like a gotcha I suppose. And Loop's deal is really cool! Holy hell! I'm doing a quick replay of the game to see more convos with them with this context, and to get the ending with them, and like--!!! There's so much here! Loop tellins Sif to use the royal We, they even tell Siffrin, like-- Loop asks Siffrin why he doesn't just tell his friends about the loops, maybe they can help, why keep it a secret? Meanwhile... Loop!Siffrin is stuck in their own helpless timefuckery world and refusing to let Siffrin know about it! The Siffrin from the Start Again timeline never learned those lessons, they're still trying to help someone else while refusing to ask for help themselves, refusing to even let on that there's a problem! And getting more and more emotionally fucked up about it! Man it's good. I guess it does make a replay more rewarding, not knowing this until the end, the first time, but so much of the game is already a replay that, idk, it does feel weird to replay it. I've already done so many repetitions y'all.... But I guess that's pretty meta, also...

Oh I'm under the impression this is not terribly uncommon but I absolutely did get got by the ?diary? that had the story of the person making a duplicate of themselves so they had someone to talk to. Like I fully thought that was describing the King and Siffrin, I spent a long time under the mistaken impression that Siffrin was a copy of the King in some capacity. Oops.... I might try to gently lead Beloved Roomie away from this interpretation when she plays it. Planning on being pretty hands-off overall but this is one area where I feel it might be justified to violate the prime directive.... But we'll see!

I wish I liked the music more..... This is a game that I think really begs for some real heartwrenching tunes to enhance all of the everything but instead none of it does it for me at all. I think that's a real shame, it's by far my biggest complaint. I'm not asking for Undertale-tier, but, at least something I'd want to put on my playlist for the emotional resonance, y'know?

THEY ACTUALLY KILLED THE KID !!!! LIKE!!!! I guess I have some biases I might should think about but I was not expecting a game that begins with so many explicit pronouns introductions (rather than just giving us context clues) and that has no real cursing to be willing to kill the kid, even impermanently? Let alone so gruesomely? I think I was expecting a much greater level of.... idk, tweeness, fanglessness, than we actually got. In spite of being a fan of insertdisc5's comics for YEARS and years! And like! Damn! Props to them!

God. God. So, like. All the ending fakeouts were fucking great. I genuinely thought the All Friendship Quests ending might be the Real One, I was prepared to be disappointed because it felt too soon and just not.... quite.... right? But I did think that was probably where it was heading! But it wasn't! I got got and it's so heartwrenching and also so satisfying, the mood whiplash from loop to loop is fucking sublime.

And-- AND! The real ending! So like. Some of the stuff I missed was just me not pursuing specific content correctly. But some of it is genuinely just, like, stuff that has no actual purpose besides flavor. Flavor, and.... The locked passphrase door in Dormont. The four-pointed leaf you can get (but not in the final loop!), the bell chime, etc etc. You can't actually really do anything with any of this stuff. But you don't know that! It feels like there's still all these loose ends! And!!! Those loose ends do their job SO WELL! The dev knows Gamer Instincts, knows people are gonna have that mental tally of boxes-yet-to-be-checked. Left some forever unchecked on purpose, which-- At the end, the real end, when Siffrin is about to talk to the Head Housemaiden and find out, for real, if this is the final loop or if it's all going to happen again, again, again. He's scared. He's traumatized! He's thought he Had It so many times! SO many times!!! Hope is terrifying! Hope is a poison! And the game has left these loose threads, and at least for me I really was not sure it was going to work. Like it seemed likely but the same metaknowledge of story structure that made me think it was likely also told me "but wait, there's all these loose threads, and the only way for them to trick us again WOULD BE to make the ending SO elaborate and epilogue-y....." I was nervous right along with Siffrin! I was uncertain! Fucking fantastic work, using my own gamer's instincts against me. Thrilled about it.

All the characters are so well realized. They all have specific relationships with each other, not just with Siffrin (Important!!!!! Huge complaint I had with BG3, they didn't put their whole pussies into this!!!!). And, and, I love how they all have different feelings about the time loops. I love that Mirabelle doesn't want "spoilers," and meanwhile Bonnie doesn't mind them and thinks of their alt-selves as like... them-but-not-them in a very cool way.

There's something about-- the way the game starts as a regular degular videogame and then graaaadually becomes, essentially, a visual novel as the actual gameplay becomes trivialized. Which itself is like, really really cool with the themes! And also, just.... I never would have picked up a straight up visual novel, I just, don't get into them, I'd rather read a book, but! I was already invested! It got its hooks into me when there was gameplay mixing things up and those hooks weren't about to let go just because the gameplay didn't super matter any more!

Straight up when we first see Red I didn't at all process that it was a Color in a game with No Colors, Canonically. They had to spell it out for me. It didn't occur to me to be surprised. I'm just too used to colors existing I guess idk. I think I wish the colors thing had gone somewhere a bit more...? I'm GUESSING it mostly originated as just a cute little explanation for why the game is all grayscale and then fit in with enough stuff to be given elevated importance (?) But it felt... hm. Underdeveloped, maybe. I think I really want more stories in this.... "Setting" and "Universe" and "Series" are not quite the right words but hopefully you get the idea. I want more so there can be one that develops that more. Not that leaving stones unturned is, like, illegal ofc. I just find the idea very compelling....

What is it with time loop stories and themes of loss that cannot be outsmarted. Man. I wondered, for so long, if Siffrin's country was going to be restored in people's minds, if that was one of the main big Plot Things we'd see. And it just didn't! Their memory is going to keep being bad, they're going to keep having all these huge tragic gaps and it's just. What can you do. At some point you have to either be permanently paralyzed by the horrific injustice you've suffered-- or you have to try to live a life. And. Man. I don't think I've actually ever encountered a story that was so much about that exact specific form of loss, the loss of one's culture, history, language! All of it. Gone from everywhere. It made me think of the obvious things and just. Man. What a howling void. The contrast with Odile's deal made it a lot more effective too I think. More of an expanded meditation upon these themes than just one toe dipping in, I guess? Hm.

Odile's battle profile pic when she's at low health is so fucking hot this cartoon character is so hot goddammit.

Game good. You're only reading this if you've already played it, I hope, so I can't use this space to recommend it in a meaningful way but. Heck. Game good.

[kemendin]

Kem's non-spoilery/non-plot-related impressions on Veilguard:

Now that I finished a first run, I want to just put some thoughts out there - basically likes/dislikes sort of thing. So here we go! In no particular order:

Likes:

This is very subjective of course, but to me it just FEELS like Dragon Age. It's nostalgic in the vibes and mechanics while also being fresh.

Hair physics!! Me gleefully watching my boy's ponytail flipping around like 'yessss gooood'. Every game needs this imo xD

Companions: While I'm personally not going feral over any of them, I do LIKE them all, which is unusual for me. I love the shouted encouragement in combat, and how they move around the Lighthouse and have little snippets of conversations with each other (wish we got MORE of this).

I adore the environments and maps. I love exploring new places in Thedas, they're all so gorgeously detailed, and I love the LAYERS of them. The exploration feels very Assassin's Creed, which is fun for me. Docktown is my favourite I think, but Arlathan and the Crossroads are also stunning.

I'm a sucker for the elven relic puzzles, they make me happy!

Combat: It took a while for me to adjust, particularly coming from BG3 where I had time to deliberate my decisions. But once I got into the rhythm of it, I now find Veilguard combat quite fun. (I played as a sword and shield warrior this first run, I'm excited to see what a mage feels like next time around)

PHOTOMODE!!! At least a third of my playtime has definitely been spent taking screenshots. It has almost everything I want - camera angles, depth of field, field of view. SO MANY SCREENSHOTS! (1800 at last count)

Dislikes:

Save system. Generous auto-saves are great, but I hate how you get bumped to the nearest beacon when you load in, rather than where you actually left off. Also I'm a save scummer so 100 manual saves is not enough lol.

Main menu being the only functional 'pause' button is irritating, especially when trying to get into photomode.

Armour/outfit stuff. I'm sorry but most of the designs are terrible. TERRIBLE. Also there's no dye/tint system, at least Inquisition had SOMETHING to that effect.

Pacing. I feel like the stories in the game had so many good notes, but it felt.... disjointed, like it was just hitting the main beats rather than creating a cohesive narrative flow. Across the board, it felt rushed and shallow in that respect. Also (and maybe this is just a me thing) it felt really difficult to get a handle on the passage of time throughout the game.

Ambivalent: The character creator. Lots of great sliders and options, but also I kinda hate the 'mash three heads together' thing, and I don't know why we need 50 styles of eyelashes instead of, I dunno, more hair options? (also - body hair. Needs body hair)

I may add to this as more thoughts occur, but for now that's what I've got. Overall impression - positive! I had a great time and I'll be replaying for sure.

[killjoy-prince]

This has been my experience with my replay so far

[galaxygermdraws]

I don't usually post sona related art, but I just beat the SMRPG remake and it made me just. start crying. Like i was just sobbing my way through the end of the game, and my hope for the future of Mario RPGs has never been brighter. So it made me just. Feel a lot of emotions and I didn't really know how else to capture them.

I'm very happy I got to live during a time when this wonderful game got a remake that will be more readily available for people to play. And I am so happy this game was just as good as I have been told it was. Definitely looking forward to replaying it again.

Uh. Yea. Jus kind of a personal piece I 'spose. Bonus little doodle I drew the day before the remake dropped under the cut

[kakusu-shipping]

The hardest part of Pokemon Self Inserting is Team Building.

[elegyofthemoon]

listen i also think 2b is hot but also i am very very tired of walking into the tags every now and then only to see sexy art of her this is not what im here for im here for the existential crisis

[limielle]

idk i feel like so much discourse could be easily minimized if people learned to say "i think" instead of "it is"

[gamebunny-advance]

Weird Pikmin 4 Thing/Speculation

I don't really count this as a spoiler, so read at your own risk, but it looks like certain castaways have different hair/suit colors on different playthroughs. Of immediate memory, Molly, Alpin and his brother, Grace, and Chewy all had different hair colors in my game from other LPs I saw.

I'm not quite sure what's causing it though. At first, I suspected that maybe it changes depending on your suit color, but literally every person I've watched play this game has used a different suit color, so I can't confirm that theory.

(Light spoilers ahead)

My alternate theory depends on whether all the castaways that can have random colors are also all leaflings. It could be that leaflings are cured in a set-order, but their colors are dependent on the order you rescue them in. For example, if you don't do the first dandori challenge in the Sun-Speckled Terrace, which is hosted by a pink leafling, will Dash, seemingly always the first leafling cured, still have pink hair?

Edit:

It seems I'm partially correct, but I still need to do more testing.

First correction is that Dash is not always the first leafling rescued, and besides that I confused him with a different castaway, and he wasn't even pink in my main game. In my game he was purple, but in my test file he was blue. Furthermore, other leaflings that I rescued in the test file always shared their hair color with the leafling cured, so there's at least some correlation there.

Second, Corgwin and Jin, two other leaflings and hosts of the Dandori Challenge/Battle practice, were purple and pink respectively in both save files. I'll need to test if they still appear if I don't rescue any pink or purple leaflings. Similarly, will it be impossible to save Bernard if you don't get any purple leaflings, or will his hair change color too?

Edit 2:

Corgwin and Jin can be any color, as I found an LP where their Jin was blue.

I did a test of rescuing and curing every possible leafling except a single purple leafling to see if the game would give me Bernard, but it seems like you do need at least 1 purple leafling for him to be rescued and unlock Hero's Hideaway.

So I'm gonna put a stamp on it: Every single leafling castaway has the possibility of being different colors and are rescued in a set order, except Bernard, who must be revived from a purple leafling. I haven't yet determined if the order you rescue the leaflings in as any effect on what color they'll be, or if the castaways have a preferred color and will be revived from those color leaflings if they're available.

Edit 3:

Okay, here's my latest observation about this.

Typically, all castaways will wear suits that match their hair color. For example, the purple haired Schnauz also wears a purple suit. This is true unless the player's suit color would have matched the castaway. For example, the green haired Dalmo will wear a red suit if the player character's suit is green. This changes even if the player changes their suit color through Puddle mid-game. It appears that whenever there is a suit color conflict, then the suit will default to red.

There are a handful of exceptions to this rule, notably characters with red hair will not wear red suits unless forced to if the player's suit color matches their default.

For example, the red heads Vonda, Kaia, and Osa by default wear pink, purple, and orange suits respectively, even if the player's suit is not red. This was likely done to set them apart from Olimar/the Red Leafling, whose suit has red accents and/or were chosen around the idea that the "canon" Rescue Corps color is red, and thus can't be shared with any castaway. However, these exceptions will still follow the first rule if their default color is being used by the player. For example, Vonda will wear red if the player wears pink.

With that in mind, it's probably safe to say that in most cases, the leafling castaways' "canon" hair color would be the same color as their suit, as this is always consistent.

I've still yet to test if the castaways will use up their "canon" color leaflings if they're available, although I believe this may be false as I recall that someone had once rescued Chowder and Alpin together, whose suits are blue and pink respectively, but interestingly their hair colors were swapped as pink and blue.

Edit 4:

I can now confirm that leaflings will not use their "canon" color, even if that color leafling is available.

I rescued almost all leaflings in the first 3 areas. By the time I started curing leaflings, I had a single green leafling and several pink and purple ones, but Dash, who has a green suit, still got rescued as a purple leafling. Unfortunately, I can't remember if said purple leafling is the first one I rescued on this file (though I'm positive that it was the leafling taken by Olimar in the Sun-Speckled Terrace, so there's a high likelihood that it was), so I still can't determine if the order you rescue leaflings in changes the castaways' hair color, or if their default colors just don't match their suits the same way the regular castaways' do.

Edit 5:

Alright, I think I can more or less confirm that leafling castaway hair colors correspond to the order you rescue them in except the early game where if a purple leafling is available before you rescue Bernard, then the game will use them all up until Bernard is rescued, after which all other castaway colors should be in rescue order.

[teiasviago]

you could even say that greek mythology is my achilles heel

[ruairy]

.

[loregoddess]

back on my nonsense (I'm replaying Three Hopes)

[edgepunk]

I love how you can play as a dumbass bisexual in FNV truly the game of all time

[uncanny-fellow]

started playing FF15 on a whim the other day and ngl the combat is pretty much exactly how I wish combat in Xenoblade was like

[quenthel]

will you be trying out the veilguard? i personally don't believe i will like it/doubt i will finish it, but i'm curious about like... the creature/demons/griffon/that giant skeleton/tentacle stuff aspect, even though da never focused on its bestiary all that much. what about you?

im not following the news abt it like at all tbh... like i didnt even know there were new creatures and shit lmao like to me dragon age creature design was never super good or exciting but maybe this time around they will add some cool looking ones?? i honestly dont know. i dont think ill be playing veilguard maybe once i can torrent it ill try it out but im not spending money on it for sure ... sadly dragon age is just not a franchise that can get me excited anymore 🤷‍♂️ also i dont like the art direction a whole lot from what little i did see im gonna be honest

[skrunksthatwunk]

ok i just beat lucia's campaign. it's like 5 missions shorter has an actual story and is like. wayyyy less painful