#he's visually goofy and i like the whole patch-work stuff in his design

[skeletalheartattack]

Who was your favourite mario character as a kid, and who is it now?

honestly? that's a pretty tough question for me to answer, because i played a lot of mario games growing up, and i don't know if younger me would've been able to choose a favourite. in terms of established characters, i think a safe option would likely be bowser; he was always my pick in Mario Kart 64, Melee, and Brawl. though in terms of the entire series as a whole, i liked the luigis mansion ghost designs a lot.

a favourite nowadays? i'm not quite sure. if i had to pick an established character, it'd probably be wario or waluigi. in terms of the entire series, i like the Mario Sunshine boos design a lot... but that's narrowing it down too small because i like a whole lot of designs from the franchise, so it's really hard to pinpoint.

[wobster109]

Clouded Kokoro thoughts (spoilers)-

This whole case was just so persistently sweet and human. I mean, it was definitely uncomfortably filled with racism (by intentional, purposeful design), but still. I just want every character to be better off and have a good life. There’s newlyweds constable Roly Beate and Pat Beate, all scraggly and covered in patches. He works long hours and just wanted to take her out for their anniversary, and she loves the single rose pitifully wrapped in old newspaper that he presents her, and doesn’t complain about their sparse life.

Then there’s old married couple John and Joan Garrideb, and they’re just full of secrets… secrets that are gradually revealed throughout the case. But the last secret came when John took the stand. Despite having a fight where Joan slapped him and threw stuff and him and literally caught the apartment on fire, he voluntarily got on the stand with her… no small feat as he has a bad knee and is chair-bound! His apartment is two flights of stairs up, and he wasn’t even summoned, but he took the stand anyway so his wife wouldn’t have to be alone.

And standing there, for the first time, I could see him from the back, revealing the back of his robe stained and worn through at the seat, and it broke my heart! And that’s what he does through and through, doing his best to keep up appearances when his life is going to pieces. He wears a ruffled jabot and military medal over his tattered and stained bathrobe. He pretends to have a maid whom he can’t afford. The house is falling down around his ears. And his undergarments showing through his robe is just tragic. I- I just want him to be happy in his old age.

I’m falling a little in love with goofy old Herr Lock??? There’s some weird chemistry in their Great Deduction dance. And he called me partner. And he invited Susato and me to live with him! And oddly, every time I try to write him off as a ridiculous fool, he turns around and proves me wrong. Like when he revealed he hadn’t actually accused Natsume-san, and had only deduced his location. Or when he wrecked Natsume-san after the trial.

Will I end up shipping Herlock Sholmes x Ryuu? Maybe?? Idk??? Not fully over Kazuma yet but I’m feeling something for Sholmes here!

Ok, Ryuunosuke is pretty cute when he’s confident and making deductions. Way cuter than when he’s sweating and twitching in court lol!

One complaint though… why are the cases so easy? They are long but each step is fairly obvious. Especially “pursue” is super obvious… too obvious in my opinion. The visual thought bubble, the audio exclamation, and the ! sign on the circular slider.

But beyond that, what evidence to present also feels too obvious. Too often, we get evidence and then it’s used in the very next step. I remember in the original trilogy, I had to think (and honestly, guess) a lot of the time, and somehow that made it more satisfying.

Bruce really came through for me. I thought he was a sleaze ball last time, but I’ve misjudged. I’m sorry I tried to pin Milverton on him.

Prosecutor van Zieks came through for me too. I loled when he told Joan he “couldn’t recall”, hah! I’m not surprised - this is case 4 out of 5, and prosecutors tend to turn into my allies around then. Will I end up shipping Ryuu x Reaper? Shipping with the prosecutor tends to be a thing that happens in Ace Attorney games, so maybe?

I was all set to love Kazuma forever, but I have to say, Barok van Zieks is incredibly beautiful. I mean, lots of characters are cute or cool or even attractive, but not many are beautiful. Miles Edgeworth is beautiful. Barok van Zieks can give Miles Edgeworth a run for the title.

[baconpal]

so heres the long super paper mario post

strap in for why super paper mario is fucking bizarre and why that’s pretty much awesome

gonna be a good amounts of spoilers, so if you’re on desktop then hit that read more, and if your on mobile, then here’s your punishment for using this god awful app

super paper mario is a game that is incredibly difficult to put into words, but it leaves such a powerful, lasting impression on me and i can’t come to say anything first other than I love it so much, and if you havent played the game, please just go do it now, even if you have to pirate or emulate or something, just let yourself play this game. It’s one of those games that I really feel I can just recommend to anybody

it’s difficult to think of where to start with dissecting this thing so i’ll just start with the art since lookin at things is pretty easy

ART/WORLD DESIGN

every world in SPM is completely unique, not just in what type of environment, but it’s art style, and this is premised with the fact that none of these worlds are capable of existing together and are completely separate, and NOT part of a cohesive universe (LOOKIN AT YOU ODYSSEY I STILL THINK YOU LOOK STUPID)

The hub and the first 2 worlds are mostly just slight variants on the same general style of simplistic shapes and colors, with world 1 delving into more linework type aesthetics, and 2 focusing more on impressions and silhouettes, 

world 3 changes this completely with what is obviously an 8 bit kind of style, but instead of jarring over sized pixels, the world is composed of detailed tiles arranged to look like pixel art that imply a more real world, and not a gamey one, 

world 4 focuses on patterns and big patches of color to give the impression of the vast emptiness of both space and the surface of a barren planet, before giving you the “Whoa Zone”, with a striking mix of wire frame and futuristic UI style to it

world 5 takes the idea of nature being crude and simplistic and humanity being sharp, angular, and extreme and flips that on its head, with humanity and the space they occupy being these absolute memes with no sense of depth, and the plant life existing in a system of clean cut caves with futuristic technology and elegant historic values

world 6 simplifies a kind of colored Japanese painting aesthetic, down to the funny cylindrical cloud clusters and brushstroke trees

world 7 depicts what is essentially hell (yes there’s hell in this game keep your pants on) as a squarish blur of bright greens and warm reds and purples, and depicts heaven as fluffy land of clouds and Greek temples

and lastly, world 8 is inverted greyscale, where light is black and darkness is white, its simplistic and striking and i couldn’t think of a better style for the final area of a game so focused on the concept of light and dark

MUSIC

I’ll just try and keep it simple, the musics fucking cash money

The game makes great use of motifs when it needs to, where specific themes and instruments are used in other songs to suggest relationships and put battles and travels into perspective

And when it ISNT doing that, it’s just fucking funky stuff, with a weird trend of BOING and PLOP and SPLISH noises in the percussion because fuck you i guess

There’s a lot of good songs that do lots of interesting things, any of the like 5 final battle songs are great things to point to, but i’ll just go ahead and say the main theme of world 8 “Castle Bleck” is one of my favorites that isn’t super highly rated. It brings in the types of instruments that have been associated with the villain the entire game, but also throws in 2 very important things; a sudden triumphant burst of almost JRPG styled chiptune that pushes away the constantly building tension, which is then followed by the sound of a clock ticking, which is a musical motif only present in the songs “Memory” and “Promise” which is played whenever the memories of the player’s little guide thing and the main villain’s past lives together are alluded to. This one song holds a lot of weight, as well as simply being a fucking cool song.

GAMEPLAY

This is, sadly, the one place I’ll not mince any words and say the gameplay is not amazing by any standard, it’s pretty much a classic mario game if it had RPG stats, items, and random abilities granted through the character and partner systems. The 3D flipping mechanic is nothing astounding, though it is very interesting to see how worlds are constructed

One of the biggest flaws people will mark the game for in its gameplay is that it’s tedious, and while I have to agree, that’s because I’ve already played the game before, and the tedium only comes from not being completely invested in the experience anymore. I’ll get some specific examples in a bit, but there’s a few cases of “tedium” that i believe are 100% intentional and drive the story in an interesting way

STORY/WRITING/GAME DESIGN

Thats a fuckin broad section, but its pretty much everything else i have to say on the game, and where the most spoilers and random praise is gonna be

I’m not actually gonna talk about the whole story, more just the strong parts of it, under the assumption you’ve already played it or understand a story as simple as “villain wants to destroy world, hero wants that to not happen”

The writing and characters are just flawless, everyone is fun to be around, especially the bad guys, who you see more antics of than your own party. There’s goofy running plotlines about O’chunks and mimi essentially getting grounded and being forced to write essays about why they fucked up at beating mario, and big stinky brother dimentio teasting and bullying them and sneaking them out to do his bidding when The big Count Bleck is away

The game is full of referential humor to not just mario itself but all kinds of games, there’s skeletons in hell who are clearly just Marios from the mainline games who died in stupid ways, there’s an actual dragon quest turn based boss battle in hell too, and chapter 3 has an otaku villain who tried to get with peach in a simulated visual novel

but the humor exists not just in references, but in simple good scenarios, with things like “Having a game show in a bathroom when everyone's life is at stake” and “locating an ancient manuscript to use as toilet paper” or “flying through black holes to find a convenience store” and things of that nature

It also interacts with the players emotions in many interesting ways, one of the more lauded being chapter 2-3, where mario is forced into working off a massive debt of fictional money, and is required to do hard, boring labor. There isn’t anyway to avoid doing both the hitting a block 100 times and the running on a treadmill for a few minutes thing, but the constant feeling of “there has to be a faster way to do this” drives the player to prod around, find the secrets, and slowly discover how to break the system wide open and get to the end, and i love it for that

This entire game is some sort of bait and switch, to put it simply, while it’s already a bit of a departure from both mario itself and the paper series, the first 5 worlds are pretty fucking tame stuff, other than the void, which is a giant black and purple spot that sits in the sky, always, every single world has the void growing in its sky, and it does grow, every chapter it gets bigger and bigger and takes up the sky, but where this truly culminates into the “switch” part is chapter 6, which starts itself by presenting you with the most TEDIUS sounding chapter possible, fight 100 enemies in a row, and nothing else, and for 25 straight fights, that is all it is, so you’ve locked yourself into it at this point, you know whats up, but the void in the background begins to grow to the point of being the entire fucking background, and every enemy you face speaks as if they know they’re all going to die, and by the 30th fight, one of the villains comes to stall for time as the void completely swallows the world, and the party is sent back to the hub. When they decide to go back in to world 6, its empty, the entire world is a white void with a single black line making up the ground, and colorless destroyed structures occasionally peaking out of the ground.

and you walk on this white void for so long and you just feel nothing but regret and fear and no matter how fast you make yourself go you feel like you’ll never find anything, but you do eventually get your plot item and escape

then, Dimentio, one of the villains you’ve seen the least of, appears in the hub world, the safest place in the universe, and kills mario

he just fucking kills him

he puts mario in a box and fills the box with explosions and mario fucking dies and goes to hell because fuck you mario

then you go through all of chapter 7 just to escape hell (called the Underwhere cus how could we possibly be allowed to take hell seriously) and join up with your full party before confronting the final world, which i’ve already stated i just love the design off

the game just takes the comfortable ride you’re on and throws it into the fucking sun and burns you alive and i love it so much, even the very end of the game doesnt let up, where the main villain is overtaken by that absolute madman Dimentio (Whose name is a play on both Dimension and dementia), who clearly was powerful enough to have done the whole “ending of the world” himself, but did it this way for the theatrics of it

there’s a lot i could still say about the game, but this post is absolute rambling and its 2 in the morning but as usual, i just wanted to shit my thoughts onto the internet to people could maybe learn somethin about either the game or me and how i think and look at and respond to stuff, and as always, anybody who read this whole thing is cool and i love you a whole heck of a lot