#i hated the new building stuff mechanic

[a-bee-wizard]

now that the dust has settled: can we all admit that totk just. wasn't really anything. it was just botw again. and i played botw in 2017.

[liauditore]

he is so so tired please get off his lawn

[spaciebabie]

Remember when you said "I dont go here and probably never will" about cotl? That's hilarious to think back on now

BWAHAHHAHA YEAH i dont think it'll be a hyperfixation type deal but i am quite enjoying playing the game :3

gotta thank the people on my dash and friends for being coocoo crazy about that game otherwise i never would have gotten it lol

[neverendingford]

.

[level2janitor]

Introduction to the OSR

what's an OSR? it's a game that's kinda like old-school D&D. or is old-school D&D. or is compatible with old-school D&D. an OSR game generally has some or all of the following principles:

low character power with highly lethal combat. in old-school D&D a 1st-level fighter has d8 hit points and a longsword does d8 damage, and you die at 0HP. this is not to ensure characters die all the time but to emphasize the next bullet point:

emphasis on creative problem solving. most situations cannot be solved by straightforward use of your abilities (such as charging into every situation with swords drawn, if a fighter), so the game tests lateral, outside-the-box thinking.

emphasis on diegetic progression. spells are found, not obtained automatically on level-up. you get XP by finding gold more than killing monsters. most of your cool abilities come from magic items. making alliances & hiring followers is encouraged.

focus on managing inventory, resources, risk, and time. the players are constantly faced with meaningful decisions; this is the heart of the game.

very sandbox-oriented. the focus on creative problem solving means the game must be accommodating to players taking a course of action the GM didn't plan for. use lots of random tables to generate emergent story. some elements of new simulationism.

high tactical transparency, i.e., the optimal course of action is rarely system-specific, and ideally very possible for a new player to intuit.

usually semi-compatible with old D&D, but not always. usually rules-lite, but not always.

what does the OSR mostly NOT do?

focus on character builds. these change the focus too much to be on the rules than the fiction, can create situations where stuff everyone should be able to do is an ability locked to one class, and impede tactical transparency.

resolve everything with a die roll. combat uses dice to be scary, unpredictable and most importantly not your default course of action. everything else should bring up dice rarely - dice are your plan B when your plan A fails. the best plans need no dice.

use linear storytelling or put players into a writer/GM role. linear storytelling gets in the way of the decision-making so core to the playstyle; letting players write details into the setting is mutually exclusive with them discovering it.

rules for everything. 400 pages of crunch is worse at simulating a believable world than the GM and players' shared understanding. OSR games rely constantly on GM ruling.

mostly still applies to all the above. making your system a "pure" OSR game comes second to doing what's best for your game.

System recommendations

old D&D or a retroclone

old-school D&D - or old school essentials or basic fantasy or swords & wizardry, which are old D&D's mechanics repackaged with quality-of-life tweaks (and the upside of not giving WOTC your money) - are usually the go-to when recommending someone's first OSR game. they're actually not my first pick, though!

PROS:

very complete, with more robust rules than a lot of the lighter games on this list.

100% compatibility: most OSR adventures are statted for old school essentials. converting them to other OSR systems is usually simple, but not 1-for-1.

easier to find games for. anyone interested in the OSR space knows what old school essentials is.

CONS:

jank. these games largely still have weird saves, level limits for non-humans, some still have descending AC, etc etc. it's not that bad but it is there

i hate thief skills. lots of essential dungeoneering actions are locked to the thief class as abilities, with abysmally low success chances. this is stuff i prefer being handled without a roll. thieves in this system suck and make everyone else worse at dungeon crawling by existing.

there's just lots of really cool shit in other systems i'm about to go into that you just don't get here

Knave 1e and its various hacks

this is a 7-page super-lightweight system that boils everything down to just the essentials.

rolling a character takes like 5 minutes. roll stats, roll gear, roll traits, go. done. it's great.

characters are defined entirely by stats and gear, no classes. wanna be a fighter, have high strength and carry a big sword and armor. wanna be a wizard, have high intelligence and fill your inventory with spells. item slots are elegant and pretty limited.

initiative is instant: roll d6. 1-3, monsters go first. 4-6, PCs go first. swingy, but god it is so smooth and shaves like the most boring 5 minutes off of every combat

monsters are so very elegant. old D&D gives monsters a "hit dice" rating to determine their HP, e.g. a 3HD monster rolls 3d8 for hit points. knave takes this number (HD) and uses it for attack rolls and saves (aside from exceptionally bad/good saves), so a knave statblock looks something like this.

spells are all one or two sentences long & extremely easy to remember.

7 pages is so light. i have the system basically memorized.

DOWNSIDES: there's no dungeon crawling rules (standard for meatier OSR games & something i consider essential) and no real bestiary, though the second point isn't a huge deal cause they're so easy to make. it also kinda assumes you already know how to run OSR games, so there's very little real advice or guidance.

KNAVE HACKS

knave 1e is in creative commons & comes with an editable word doc for you to publish with modifications, so there's a ton of variants (there was a spreadsheet of them somewhere, but i can't find it).

Grave is a favorite - i'm two years into a grave campaign and it's fantastic. it's a dark-souls-y version of knave with some really elegant innovations.

you have a set number of deaths before you for-reals die, as every character plays an undead as is dark souls tradition. makes it good for OSR beginners! being able to tell when you're close to your final death is really good - it lets you emotionally prepare for losing your character & raises the stakes more the more you die. (though honestly you should probably cut the number of extra deaths in half, it's super generous)

XP and gold are combined into one resource, souls. legendary creatures drop big souls you can make into magic items. this has ended up being the coolest thing in my current campaign. my players love finding powerful souls to make into magic items it's so fun

uses preset packages of stats/gear instead of knave's rolled ones, filling the role of more traditional character classes. has the wonderful side effect of not making you get stuck with low stats cause you rolled bad one time.

you have stamina equal to your empty item slots. you spend stamina on spells if you're a caster, or free maneuvers (on top of your attack at no action cost) if you're not. it's super elegant.

there's 3 classes of spells: wizardry for intelligence, holy magic for wisdom, and witch stuff for charisma. nice and intuitive.

there's a page of 50 magic items each a couple sentences long. this PDF is worth it just for the magic items.

DOWNSIDE: see the downsides for knave 1e. all still apply.

i enjoyed grave so much i made a variant of it with the dark souls bits removed (and some dungeon crawl rules added!) to use for my standard fantasy campaigns.

Knave 2e

sadly knave 2e is not purchasable yet (i backed it on kickstarter so i have access, though). but when it comes out i highly recommend it.

much larger and denser than knave 1e. it finally has dungeon crawling rules, it has GM and player guidance, everything is refined and the layout is so so nice and readable.

combat is a bit more interesting than 1e. you can break your weapon against an enemy to deal max damage. you get a free maneuver on high attack rolls.

there's rules for stuff like alchemy, warfare, building a base. it all kicks ass.

there are so many goddamn tables. i rifle through it anytime i need inspiration.

DOWNSIDES: some of the new rules are a little untested & wonky. introducing randomness into how often your rations spoil or your lights go out can cause issues.

Mausritter

you play tiny little mice! in a world full of big dangerous things that want to eat mice. cat = dragon. you get it. what more could you want

the mouse thing is just super intuitive. you get the dynamic between you and the big scary lethal world. fantastic OSR game to introduce kids

nice and robust ruleset; nothing feels missing

tons of super nice GM stuff! faction rules, tools for rolling up hexcrawls and dungeons, plenty of tables

super clean readable layout. font isn't too small to avoid being intimidating. guidance is really nice and clear.

combat is autohit. super fast & lethal.

100% free

look mausritter is just. good. i wanna run it so bad someday

Worlds Without Number

sort of a middle ground between OSR stuff and 5e. paid version here free version here

lots of classes, at least in the paid version. the free version comes with just the warrior, expert and mage. there's feats and more of a focus on builds than most OSR games. if you like more mechanical build variety than a typical OSR game, this is a great game for you!

extremely good multiclassing. y'know how in most games if you just mash together two classes you think are cool you'll end up with a total mess? not here! every combo is viable and works fine! easily the best multiclassing of any game i've touched

an absurd amount of GM stuff and tables. easily more than any of the other stuff i've praised for also having them. but personally i haven't dug into them as much, so i can't really comment on them

skills the way modern D&D has them. you roll dice and try to beat a target number. i don't tend to like rolled skills, but most people do, so if that's your thing WWN has them

DOWNSIDES

the layout is terrible. everything is a huge wall of text with very little use of bold text or bullet points to draw attention to the important bits. the table of contents has like 15 things in it for a 400-page book! i couldn't find any of the paid-version-exclusive classes for like a month after i bought it! looking up rules is a nightmare.

the way the default setting handles "evil races" is like an exaggerated parody of all the problematic aspects of how D&D handles it. like, it wants so bad for you to have an excuse to genocide sentient free-willed people. but at least the default setting is easy to chuck in the trash

Dungeon Crawl Classics

the goal of this system is to take all of the crazy gonzo moments people remember playing old-school D&D in their childhood and turn all of that up to 11 while cutting the stuff that doesn't add to that. i think a lot of its innovations have ended up kind of standard in newer OSR stuff (like fighters getting maneuvers with their attacks), but it still has more to offer.

the funnel: you start the game with four randomly rolled dipshit peasants that you then throw into a meatgrinder to get horribly killed. you pick one of the survivors to be your 1st-level character.

maneuvers: fighters roll an extra die with each attack that gets bigger as you level. if it's a 3 or higher, you get to do a cool thing on top of your attack. pretty standard for OSR games, but this game popularized it!

crit tables: fighters also get more crits and nastier crits as they level. every crit, you roll on the crit table. maybe you chop off a dude's arm. maybe you just knock them over. maybe you shatter their shield. it's very cool

spell tables: i don't really like roll-to-cast mechanics, generally. but DCC goes so all-in on roll-to-cast that it still looks fun as hell to watch. you cast a fireball and maybe it goes how you want. or maybe you explode, or you nuke everything in a half-mile radius, or from now on you permanently ignite flammable materials you touch, or whatever. casters just have to put up with turning into a weird mutated mess across a campaign

there's no dungeon crawl rules, no encumbrance - this game is all about the big over-the-top wacky shit, and is not really interested in the more down-to-earth number crunching. it's more in the you-die-hilariously-all-the-time area of OSR than the you-avoid-death-through-clever-play area. not really my thing but the system knows exactly what it wants to be and i respect it

iron halberd

this one is mine! as the author i'm not qualified to tell you what isn't good about my system, so just assume it's worse than i make it sound, but here's a bunch of the selling points

semi-random character creation where you flip back and forth between rolling dice and getting your own input. roll stats, pick ancestry. pick starting gear kit, roll different dice based on which kit you picked. etc etc. stats are random but all equally viable (no rolling incredibly low or high stats). every time i run this game the character creation is a hit. seriously go roll up a character it'll sell you on the whole thing

you start out a lot stronger than a standard OSR character but grow way more slowly. i don't like 4th-level characters being 4 times as strong as 1st-level ones; HP never gets that high. emphasis is more on diegetic progression instead.

way too many subsystems for alchemy, crafting, strongholds, warfare, renown, rituals, likes 9 pages of magic items, a whole subsystem for becoming a cleric mid-campaign. i couldn't help myself i love this shit

in my current campaign we had a player permanently sacrifice some max HP to become a necromancer after deliberating on whether that's a good idea for like thirty seconds, which instantly made me think my necromancy system is a success

also free

Adventure recommendations

(in rough order of size)

Moonhill Garden (by Emiel Boven): look at this. look at it! this is like the best template for a little dungeon in an OSR game. all of the little factions are tied together. this would be a great oneshot to introduce people to an OSR system with.

A gathering of blades (by Ben Milton): a system-neutral, one-page sandbox. i ran this for an iron halberd game and it went super well. lasted like 7 sessions. highly recommend.

The Waking of Willowby Hall (by Ben Milton): a single dungeon with a million things going on. it's super chaotic with half a dozen different factions crashing into each other and a big angry goose. highly recommend, especially for kids

The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford (by Chance Dudinack): small sandbox with a fun fairytale vibe and a very fleshed-out little town. and a big nasty dragon.

Evils of Illmire (by Zack Wolf): this is a very dense, entire campaign's worth of hexcrawl in a very compact package for like $5. it doesn't do anything particularly new, but the value-for-money is absurd and it's a really good template for how to do a sandbox if you're used to 5e adventures

Ask me anything!

if anything here is unclear or intrigues you, send me asks! i love helping people get into OSR games. i'll link frequently asked questions here if i get any.

[physalian]

In Defense of Fanfiction (Or the perfect starting point for your original novel)

Fanfic gets a bad rap pretty much everywhere except Tumblr. It’s misunderstood and misrepresented by its average works, seen as juvenile and cringey, or a banal point of contention between a famous person or piece of media and its fans.

Outside of fanfic that writes about real people, especially smut fics of real people, I support the art wholeheartedly. Fictional characters are one thing, but personally, caricaturing a celebrity’s life for public consumption and writing or drawing them in compromising content without their consent is a little weird. You do you. Don’t like, don’t read, as they say.

Fanfic is the perfect starting point for a few reasons:

It places you in a creative box and forces you to work within those constraints

It does all the worldbuilding and character concepts for you

It lets you write way outside your comfort zone

When published and receiving feedback, it boosts your self-confidence

It's incredibly flexible

It’s practice. All practice is good practice

—

Behold your creative box

When I was little I had no idea the majority of fanfic was shipping fics. I always pictured and looked for canon-divergent alternate universes. Like, what if X happened in this episode instead of Y? What if this character never died?

Fanfic demands you work within someone else’s canon, whether it’s an OC in the canonical world, or the canonical characters in an AU. These are like little bowling bumpers saving you from the gutter, but also keeping you on a straight-ish path toward the pins.

The indecisiveness of too many choices can be too intimidating when you’re first starting out. You want to be a writer but you have no idea where to begin, what genre to pick, what characters you want to chronicle, what themes you want to explore.

Even if it sits on your computer never to see the light of day, you still got those creative juices flowing.

Pre-packaged worldbuilding

Sometimes all we want is to get to the good stuff. Maybe I want to write a story about elemental magicians but Last Airbender already exists and I just want to play in a pre-existing sandbox. So I write some OCs into that world and have a free-for-all.

I don’t have to come up with my own lore, world history, magic system rules and mechanics, politics, geography—any of it. I get to just focus on the characters.

Even if you’re writing an AU, like say a coffee shop AU, you don’t have to think about brand new characters, you can just think “What would M do?” and go from there. The trade-off is your readers will expect canonical characters to behave in-character, but I think it’s worth it.

Stretch beyond your comfort zone!

Do you hate writing action scenes? Go practice with a shonen anime fic. Need work on dialogue? Write some high-fantasy fic, or a courtroom drama. Practice a fistfight by watching fistfights and writing what you see, and do it over and over again until what you read makes you feel like you're watching what’s on screen.

But beyond that—practice genres that you aren’t super familiar with. If you’re new to fantasy, write fantasy fic. Or a mystery novel/show, thriller, comedy, satire, adventure, what have you. The nature of fanfic still gives you those “guardrails” and you can get some brutally honest feedback on how you’re doing.

And, of course, the realm of M-rated romance and smut fics. I haven’t because I think I would die of embarrassment if I tried and I never intend to include sex scenes in my works anyway, but if you do want to, use the internet as your test audience. Post it on a throwaway account if you’re nervous.

Build that self-confidence!

The fandoms I used to write for are super dead, so it’s insane how I still get email notifications that so-and-so liked my fic to this day. Comments are as elusive as ever, but random strangers on the internet telling me they liked my work is a magical reassurance that my writing isn’t actually awful.

Random strangers on the internet are, as we all know, beholden to no moral obligation to be kind to your little avatar face, or be kind to be polite. So a rando taking the time to like my work or even leave a positive comment can feel more honest than one of my friends telling me what they think I want to hear.

I tend to avoid the more present aspects of fandom like online communities, forums, social media, what have you, so I get a delayed and diluted aspect of any given fandom through completed works. Which means, in general, I get to avoid the worst and most toxic aspects of fandom and get to sift through positive feedback and critique.

Even if your fanfic isn’t written with stellar prose, it’s fanfic. We don’t expect Pulitzer-prize winning content. And if your work isn’t up to snuff, people are more likely to just ignore it than put you on blast (at least in my experience, I never got a bad comment or a “flame” in the old FFN days).

Fanfic doesn’t care about the rules of published literature

On the one hand, try not to practice bad habits, but with this point I mean that your layout, punctuation, formatting, paragraph styles, chapter length–all of it is beholden to no rules. I get as annoyed as the next reader with giant blocks of paragraphs, or the double-spacing between pages of single-sentence paragraphs, but if the story’s good enough I might ignore it.

There’s more than just straight narrative fics, though. People write “chat” fics, or long streams of text and group chat conversations. The scene breaks can come super rapidly–I’ve seen fics with a single sentence in between line breaks to show the passage of time. And without the polish of a traditionally published novel, I’ve never seen a purer distillation of author voice in any medium more than fanfic.

All practice is good practice

Even if it’s crack fiction, or a one-off one-shot, or something meant to be lighthearted and straightforward and free from complex worldbuilding and intricate plots. It really helps break writer’s block when you can shift gears and headspaces entirely and you can get relatively instant feedback to keep you motivated.

Beyond that, the “guardrails” help you stay consistent as far as character growth and personality if you struggle with designing rich characters.

The most recent fanfic I wrote was just a couple years ago, for a dead fandom I didn’t think would get any traffic whatsoever. It wasn’t my original works, but the feedback on that fic gave me the kick in the butt I needed to get back into writing more seriously.

—

In short, I support fanfic. I may not be proud of my earliest fics' prose now, but I am proud that they walked so I can now run.

[victoryarchive]

Ok. I’ll bite. Hermit! Tommy? Because that looks an awful lot like a really cool Watcher au something? Please share!

Omg if you insist lmao

Buckle up this is gonna be a lot.

This all started when I was thinking about Greek mythology (a common occurrence I fear) and I was thinking how even though Helios is the sun and the god of the sun many people these days assign that role to Apollo (the god of light). And that got me thinking more and more about how as time progresses stories change and gods become gods of things they never were before. New gods exist. Old ones are completely forgotten. Their names change. Look at Roman mythology for a great example of this.

And because I’m one hell of a nerd this immediately translated to ‘how can I use this in fan fiction’

Another thing you must know about me is I hate to fall back on Minecraft mechanics, it feels lazy for me to do it (it’s fine to read I just hate writing it) and must always find a way to make things like respawn and different worlds fit into the lore of the story.

Thus began the world building:

Every watcher is a god of something, Xelqua/Grian: the sun, Pearl: the moon, Kristin: The underworld, XD: [redacted], etc. Each watcher has the ability to create a world (or multiple depending on their power) for their people to live (Grian: hermitcraft, Pearl: Empires, Kristin: the Antarctic Empire, XD: the DSMP, etc) Within these worlds it is very common practice for the Watchers to choose a devoted follower to give a small portion of their power to oversee their world, to make rules and keep everyone safe, an Admin. (Grian: Xisuma, Pearl: fWhip, Kristin: Philza, XD: Dream, etc.)

Now none of these watchers just spawned as watchers, no they became watchers through people worshipping them and writing stories about them as gods. These stories held power so the person held power and became essentially immortal and can do pretty much anything with that power, at least until they are forgotten.

So far the story begins with Xelqua brining his players back from their silly death game and being intercepted by a very very old goddess, one who had almost been completely forgotten. This primordial goddess is peace, not just the goddess of peace, she is peace. She is called Prime. She asks Grian and Xisuma to take her last worshipper and devotee, Tommy, and protect him from another Watcher. And with a little bit of convincing Grian’s like ‘yeah fine ig I’ll take the kid. How difficult can one child be.’

Now that’s as far as I’ve written aside from the beginning backstory stuff, but I’ve got a lot of stuff planned, including an entire few chapters inspired by ‘god games’ from epic the musical, where Grian has to go fight for some mortals life. One of them. I know which one. Yall don’t :)

There’s also a lot of Grian and Pearl back story from when they were kids and still mortal like thousands and thousands of years ago and how they eventually became literal gods.

Tommy learns how friends are supposed to work and gets mentored by none other than Mumbo Jumbo, or Impulse i haven’t decided yet. The only thing I know about Minecraft is redstone so he’s learning redstone.

Also it would be a damn shame for me to not include False and Tommy flying together a bunch bc they’re the only to avians that can match each others speed.

There’s some stuff going on with techno being an admin on an anarchy server. He comes in later in an absolute rage.

Also Joel is a demigod… it makes sense I swear.

I’m having a lot of fun playing around with the world building and each individual characters back story so I will expand on anything if people ask about it :))))

Thank you for asking this has been fun

[ganondoodle]

been trying to do some pixel art bc after putting another 60+ hours into stardew valley the want to make a stardew like game but *my* way is strong again ... but i keep getting hung up on thinking about game mechanics (screenshot at the bottom .. sorry for makign this so long again ..)

at some point i thought the whole minecraft aspect is probably impossible to add into a 2d pixel game and im better off to cut that idea out of my head and instead make a dedicated area in which you can build stuff more costumizable and make the rest a more static thing id built so the worlds have more character and theres less problems with NPC pathing (since i dont want you to be able to escape Eadryas wrath if you overstay your welcome by building yourself into a circle or collision boxes .... though they would destroy anything in their path to you either way.. still)

but then i still want you to be able to change the ground in your little area (or maybe multiple ... idk im still conflicted bc i like the idea of finding a place and building your lil hut there ... unless i make it so you can build a hut anywhere but change the ground tiles only in certain areas ... ) and build little ponds and stuff ... so im back to the minecraft in 2d problem

i keep getting into these thinking spirals bc i dont want to draw all those sprites if im gonna scrap it all again anyway

the main point with this little ...... well, lets call it fantasy bc im not confident this 'project' will fare any better than any of my other projects (im a never finished a single project and keeps being haunted by it kind of guy and i hate it)

- is that i want a 2d game somewhat similar to stardew but set in my original story world and focused on the environment and nature, not on earning money, an intricate weather system and no time limit on your day, the twist being you are an ex-demon hunter and are on probation to prove you really abandoned the cause, given shelter and a place to stay in the demon world within the protective bubbles around gates into the human realm (bc humans cannot live in the normal environment of the demon world- this is an already long established thing but works extremely well to limit the space you are able to go in a game without making the world feel tiny plus allows me to give you several different environment designs bc those are gates and bubbles in different parts of the demon world) your task being to help clean up the poisoned land the celestials had caused and repopulating these parts with plants etc. ... there is a tracker that lets you know how well or bad it is doing and if you only destroy instead of restore (like chopping down all trees without planting new ones) you will be given warnings until Eadrya shows up and kills you since you are clearly still working to destroy their lands after all

i still really like this idea but im really doubtful it will go anywhere since i am so slow, need to learn at least two complicated new things (coding, music making) and already have so many things i want to do but never really .. do, the task is just too daunting and it keeps me from just having fun drawing pixel art bc i cant stop (over)thinking about mechanics

(see this is what i mean my brain just cant stop, it just keeps going and it keeps making me spiral into these thinking loops that prevent me from actually doing anything )

this is the same file i have been randomly doodling sprites on since april (by far not the only one, but the current one of multiple sprite tests i keep updating or changing)

(i appreciate feedback or thoughts on this alot, its a little fantasy that i keep comign back to, all my attempts to throw it out of my head in hopes of clearing up some space have failed no matter how little hope i have of making it a reality ..)

[thankssteveditko]

Sony's PlayStation 5 Presents Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man 2 (the third game in the series)

I beat the main story and have enjoyed my time with the game overall! I want to talk about spoilers and things that I liked and disliked in the story, so here's a post with some scattered thoughts.

(Hello! I haven't forgotten that this blog exists! Like I said, no update schedule, I will read more of the Lee/Ditko comics whenever I make time for it. I've actually been sitting on a mostly-complete version of this post since I beat the game in October, thinking that I'd finish the rest of the side quests so I could throw in thoughts on those. But... eh, I'll do that whenever the inevitable DLC rolls around. I just wanna get these thoughts posted.)

Spider-Cop No More

First off: they downplayed the cop shit!!! This was the first thing that really struck me about the game, and I'm stunned that they actually listened to criticism on this. I thought we'd just be stuck with it forever.

It'll never be completely gone, of course. Spider-Man is always going to leave criminals webbed up for the police to take to prison, hoping that they'll do their time and come out the other side as Productive Members of Society. That's just a thing I begrudgingly accept as part of the genre that will probably never go away. But Spider-Man is no longer repairing police surveillance networks. You're no longer beating the shit out of random drug dealers. Gangs of escaped convicts still wearing their orange jumpsuits are no longer terrorizing the streets of New York.

Instead, Peter and Miles are played more as firefighters. Sometimes very literally! They work with firefighters, they rescue people from collapsing buildings, they rush injured people to the hospital. In general there's a huge increase in the number of random onlookers present during the big action setpieces, and the Spider-Men frequently have to save them from harm. One of the major side quest lines is even literally about a cult of arsonists, and you'll routinely find burning fuel tanker trucks you have to extinguish with your webs. It's great! Love this for them.

I also generally liked the side missions in this. There's a lot of good stuff with the Spider-Men being neighborhood heroes willing to help out anyone in need, no matter the problem. Some of them can get corny, sure, but that street level stuff has always been the real heart of Spider-Man to me.

Gameplay

The gameplay's as fun as ever. That probably goes without saying. I will not be spending a thousand words explaining that swinging is fun.

In particular, I really liked the changes to the Focus mechanic. I never loved the way Miles' game made you choose between healing and doing your special attacks, but here your four specials have their own cooldowns, and the Focus meter is spent on either healing or finishers. It still offers that risk/reward element, but those vicious cycles where you can't do any real damage because you keep needing to heal aren't nearly as bad as they were before.

Personally I didn't turn off the swing assist or turn on fall damage, because the streamlined swinging never bothered me in these games, but I'm glad the options are there for people who want them.

Kraven

I liked Kraven in this! I liked the way they leaned into his Hunters being this weird death cult, and him wanting to go down in a blaze of glory against a worthy foe, to the point that he's actually disappointed anytime a foe can't kill him. It riffs on things people liked in Kraven's Last Hunt without being the exact same story. I like that Kraven's gang is renting out this manor or whatever and just being a complete terror to the wait staff. I liked the way Kraven hunting Peter's rogues' gallery clashed with Peter's belief in giving his villains second chances. I liked that they were willing to have Kraven kill off a couple of the minor villains from the first game to sell how dangerous he is. (I know some people hated this, but like, come on. We already fought the Sinister Six. They don't need to do that again.) I like the way Kraven pushed Peter to the absolute brink, turning him more and more aggressive with the Black Suit. Good stuff all around, even if the Hunter enemy types did wear out their welcome a little bit by the end.

The Black Suit arc

I think I liked the way Insomniac handled Peter's Black Suit arc overall, but there's a tradeoff here.

They REALLY lean into the body horror tentacle stuff, with Black Suit Peter basically just being a skinny Venom by the end. The sequence where you play as Mary Jane while the symbiote puppets an unconscious Peter's body around and goes on a rampage against the Hunters was REALLY great at selling how scary Peter is becoming, and it made me completely change my tune on the inclusion of the MJ stealth missions in the sequel. Having to beat an out-of-control Peter as Miles immediately after Peter beats Kraven was also really good. This is all cool!

BUT, the thing is... with the symbiote powers being so freaky from the start, it really pushes my suspension of disbelief when Peter and co. take so long to become wary of it. I guess when you've been bitten by a radioactive spider and given superpowers, and when you live in the same universe as the Avengers and the X-Men, your perception of what's "normal" is going to be pretty warped. But they buy the whole "organic exosuit created to treat Harry's illness" story WAY too easily lmao. How do the self-aware slime tentacles help with his illness, exactly?

And I'm not sure how I feel about giving Peter Anti-Venom powers in the last act. It feels like it's primarily a concession so that they can give players that branch of their skill tree back, but honestly, the designer in me thinks it would be really cool (if risky) to just permanently lock players out of Peter's most powerful skills past a certain point. Yeah, it'd definitely piss people off, but it drives home the idea that Peter's given up greater power because it's the right thing to do. It'd put you in his shoes! Instead he just gets the symbiote powers back, but it's fine because the Venom voice in his head is gone and also the slime tendrils that explode out of his body are white now, which means they're good.

I have to say it. I'm sorry. The glistening white goo... they turned Peter into the Amazing Cum-Man. I changed back to the Classic Suit after rolling the credits and forgot I still had the Anti-Venom skills equipped, so I just saw regular old Spider-Man exploding his white goo everywhere. Terrible.

Assuming Peter is just stepping into more of a supporting role to Miles and not fully retiring after the events of this game, I really hope the Anti-Venom stuff is gone. I get that he needed it to counter Venom, but that's not what I want for Peter Parker.

Miles

Miles is good in this, and I really like his arc where he struggles with whether or not he should avenge his dad by killing Martin Li. I like how all that plays out. Unfortunately, they don't quite stick the landing when it comes to making him and Peter feel like equals in terms of narrative focus. His arc is definitely the B-plot to Peter's for the middle chunk of the story, which I guess was kind of inevitable since they decided to do the Black Suit arc. But Miles does at least get a lot of moments to shine, and by the end he's very much taking the lead as the main Spider-Man.

Becoming the main Spider-Man also gets Miles a new, wholly original suit that ended up being super controversial, and honestly... I kinda like it? Or at least I like what it's going for, even if the actual design could still use some work. It's something totally unique for Miles, and I like spandex/streetwear combo suits like what the Spider-Verse movies have popularized. But showing his hair is really pushing the limits of his secret identity. He hangs around Brooklyn Visions WAY too much for his classmates to not recognize his voice and haircut. And I understand why people would be wary about it becoming his "canon" look moving forward. But I think it's got potential.

On the subject of Miles, though, I will say that while I liked Miles' side missions, it feels like he's often saddled with the game's broad, kinda touristy, kinda token attempts at Showcasing The Diversity Of New York, in a way that Peter isn't.

I like that Miles has a deaf graffiti artist girlfriend that he and Ganke sign with, and I like that there's a series of side missions that explore some local jazz history, and I like that there's a mission where Miles helps a gay classmate ask his crush to prom. I like all these things! I like Spider-Man being involved with his community, and that said community includes such a wide variety of people! I like that this game slows down to savor these types of moments instead of just being all action all the time! But when I step back, I notice some patterns.

Hailey doesn't have a big role in the main plot, especially when compared to MJ, but Miles gets a side mission where you briefly play as her with muffled audio to teach you what being deaf is like. There are no major queer characters in the story - unless you count Felicia showing up for exactly one mission to mention she has an unseen, unnamed girlfriend in Paris now - but you get a side mission where Miles helps out a gay couple at his school, who then never come up again. To put it very uncharitably, they can feel like Very Special Episode missions. It's like the devs going: we're going to give Miles a Gay Mission, and an Impaired Hearing Mission, and a Cultural History Mission, so that we can say we touched on these things, but we're gonna make them all optional and keep them far away from the full-blown Superhero Stuff like fighting costumed villains. Those flavors cannot mix. Meanwhile, Peter gets to have a whole elaborate subplot about teaming up with Wraith to track down fucking Cletus Kasady. There's an imbalance here, and I think it's part of the reason why Peter still feels like the "main" Spider-Man for so much of the story.

I think this was all written with admirable intentions, but as others have pointed out, you can kinda tell that this game was mainly written by some white guys based in California. These attempts at depicting various marginalized groups can feel kind of detached in the same way that Insomniac's map of New York doesn't quite line up with the real thing. But I dunno. I'm not really the one to dig deep into some of this stuff as a white woman from Florida. I would be curious to read others' takes on this.

Maybe I'm just being overly cynical about the writers' well-meaning but corny and kinda out of touch liberal politics because of the podcasts.

The podcasters

I wish Jameson was in this more! They psyched us out by giving him a full character model for, like, two scenes. I like him being MJ's boss, but I wish we saw inside the Daily Bugle offices to get more Jameson.

At least his podcasts are better than the ones in the Miles game, though. Him completely trusting in Roxxon was just too much for me. Here he condemns Oscorp for the symbiote shit, and he also gets some moments where he takes the ongoing crises seriously and isn't just ranting about the Spider-Men. He isn't just a conspiracy theorist crackpot here. Shit like his "fuck Spider-Man, we have a justice system for a reason" speech makes him feel more like a human being with a point of view, rather than just a caricature. Definitely an improvement.

Unfortunately, I still find The Danikast grating. I'm sorry, Ashly Burch. It's not your fault. The quirky heckin' wholesome millennial podcaster lady who catches you up on current events and then reminds you to drink 64 ounces of water a day in the same breath is just too much for me. At least she doesn't have any lines as bad as her throwing in a "damn" and then going (direct quote here) "That's right - no censoring! That's how REAL I'm being right now!" like in Miles' game. Instead they give her this, like, almost psychic insight into the main plot to try and make her the angel on Peter's shoulder. The second Peter gets the symbiote she's like "Wow, y'all. Have you seen Spider-Man's new black suit? Something's different about him. He's been giving me such bad vibes lately. #NotMySpiderMan" Also she's supposed to be this, like, underdog independent podcaster who started her show on a whim and has become the voice of the people... but she's got billboards plastered all over the fucking city. Which makes her feel like an industry plant lmao

Again, there's a detachment with the writing. This is, like, some middle aged white liberal game dev guys' idea of what a modern leftist teenager would think is a Cool Activism Podcast. Unfortunately, because Insomniac thinks Danika's a hero, Mary Jane's triumphant ending is that she quits her job at the Bugle to become a podcaster, too, delivering a thinly veiled monologue about the pandemic to kick off her new podcast literally titled "The New Normal." She's going to save the world with podcasting, because that's the highest form of activism, I guess.

Venom

So! Venom! Venom was... okay.

Surprising no one, Harry Osborn is Venom. Harry's okay both as himself and as Venom, but I'm not sure his arc is a smooth one. He starts out as Peter's comically perfect best friend who returns to reminisce about the good ol' days and hand him his dream job on a silver platter, and then later he becomes a little ball of rage over the fact that Peter gets his symbiote and can't/won't give it back. I'm not sure that pivot is handled the most convincingly. You kind of have to write it off as the symbiote messing with their heads, I guess.

When he actually becomes Venom, I'm... mixed on the execution. On the one hand, the cool factor is absolutely there. He's a very cool big monster, and Tony Todd is great in the role. But he also wants to take over the world and make everyone a symbiote, and aside from any lingering resentment towards Peter, that's really all there is to him. It makes for a good video game to have a bunch of symbiote enemies and creepy symbiote nests and symbiote tentacles climbing up the sides of buildings in the last act... but is that really what I want out of Venom? Probably not. But he sure does look cool as a big monster guy to fight, and I was happy he was briefly playable.

Suits

Part of me feels like there's something lacking about the suit selection here, but almost every suit I liked in the previous games is back, and also I'm the type of person to give Peter the Classic Suit the second I unlock it and use that for most of the game. So does it really matter for me?

Peter's selection feels dominated by the various live action movie suits, but I get that those are going to be some of the suits people want to wear the most. I wish he had the Peter B. Parker skin to go with Miles' Spider-Verse alts, though. No idea why it's missing. Really I think I mainly just want more of the Spider-Verse designs.

Also I've complained about how most of the original suits designed for these games make Peter and Miles look like they were bitten by radioactive Alienware products, but I can just, you know. Wear other suits.

Misc thoughts

Everyone's already made this joke, but it's extremely funny that the Avengers didn't help with the symbiote invasion. Took one look at that and decided it wasn't their problem

On the subject of other superheroes, I do wish these games would acknowledge the Fantastic Four more. Peter's close relationship with that team feels woefully underutilized in his various adaptations

I like the trope of a boss fight that's a heightened version of a personal conflict between two people who are close, where throughout the fight the boss is airing out their grievances while the hero tries to get through to them emotionally. That especially works for Spider-Man! But WOW has Insomniac played that card a lot of times by the end of Spider-Man 2 lol

They're teasing the addition of Silk, I guess? I'm gonna be honest, I don't know shit about Silk, but I guess it was inevitable that they'd give us some form of Spider-Woman at some point. Gotta work all those costumes in somehow, and they're not brave enough to let one of the boys cosplay as Spider-Gwen.

They WERE, however, brave enough to let Harry say he loves Peter. I liked that little moment. They presumably meant it platonically, but clearly ol' Yaoi Lowenthal knows what's up

Post-leak addendum

So, obviously, by the time I got around to finishing this post the big Insomniac leak happened. I wish the game industry wasn't so secretive that it took a massive, dangerous data breach just to get our hands on some very basic info that would be public knowledge if Insomniac was a film studio, but here we are.

We now know that Insomniac spent somewhere around $315 million making Spider-Man 2 - triple what the first Spider-Man game cost to make. A quote about this from a leaked presentation has been stuck in my head ever since I first saw it on Twitter. “Is 3x the investment in [Spider-Man 2] evident to anyone who plays the game?”

To be honest, I'm not sure it is.

I liked Spider-Man 2, but I'd probably say that overall I liked it about as much as the first game. It's certainly a somewhat bigger game, with marginally more realistic looking graphics thanks to the power of the PS5. But I think I could do without ray tracing and more realistic hair rendering and whatnot if it meant that these games didn't take like five years and hundreds of millions of dollars to make. I could not give less of a shit if the swinging animations were recycled between games. I'd be fine with them being shorter, too.

I like these games, but as we look at that leaked project lineup and realize that Insomniac is turning into The Marvel Game Studio, I think about how many smaller, more original games that those resources could go towards if they scaled back the Marvel stuff just a bit. How many Ape Escapes or Patapons or Gravity Rushes could get made for the budget of just one of these massive AAA tentpole games of Sony's, which are apparently barely even breaking even? How many could be made for the budget of the "smaller, cheaper" Miles Morales game, which somehow cost $156 million to make despite using an updated version of the same Manhattan map from the first game? Hell, how many smaller games could have been made with the $39 million that went into remastering the first Spider-Man game for PS5 a mere two years after launch? How many people will lose their jobs if any one of Insomniac's upcoming Marvel games underperforms - which, in this case, could mean selling "only" 5 million copies? And would hardcore PlayStation fans even accept those smaller games at this point, now that they've been trained to only appreciate mega-budget Prestige Games with cutting edge graphics and treat everything else with disdain? How much worse will this get as the graphical arms race continues?

I think I just miss Japan Studio. Fuck Sony. Uhh but anyway the Spider-Man game this post was supposed to be about was good, some writing complaints aside. 8/10

[cinderblockgabbs]

Hi here’s a loooooooooonggg rant from the one that can’t go on without inserting Wilford into every egos life in any way possible…

For context: I see engineer mark as a separate person from actor mark, but he’s also like actors self insert, or how he interprets himself if he were an awesome engineer in the year 2080- something. This doesn’t mean that they’re the same person, at least not anymore, they just have a lot of the Same personality traits and the same name.

I also see a large portion of iswm in general as a really messed up retelling of wkm that’s been retold and reset so many times it’s become a completely new and different thing. This isn’t saying that every iswm character is supposed to symbolize every wkm character, but at one point, SOME were vaguely based off of marks interpretation of his wkm friends. It’s kinda like an answer to the ship of Theseus.

Anyways, One of the things we see as the captain is mark being stuck with the warp core where we watch him tweak out and slowly build the warp core up again which makes that chain reaction that sets off kinda everything that happens in iswm. I’m saying this cuz I like thinking it’s a parallel to actor mark creating his vengeance plan against William and stuff. I see it that way because both engineer marks and actor mark were stuck in isolation for forever, and they couldn’t die, so they were miserable. AND AND AND, both marks FIRMLY BELEIVED their closest friend (engie’s being the captain and mark’s being William) were ACTUALLY EVILLL AND THEY WANTED TO STOP THEM . The creation of the warp core and the poker night both came from this crazed and desperate guy who convinced himself that what he was doing, despite it being bound to hurt people, was the right thing to do.

The only difference between engie and actor tho is that engineer mark felt actually so terrible after he realized that he was in the wrong, while actor mark genuinely CANT see that he even COULD be wrong.

MEANWHILEEE Wilford’s in iswm, it doesn’t matter why, he’s just kinda doing whatever. I like thinking that at one point Wilford would’ve seen engineer mark at his lowest. Wilford, being actually so sad and stupid as a character, would see actor mark in engineer mark. Like he sees a lot of iswm characters like if they were just wkm characters in silly costumes. This is a coping mechanism cuz deep down Wilford KNOWS he’s not talking to his old friends at all.

Just like in WMLW, I think Wilford would want to try to make amends with actor mark , but actor really REALLY hates Wilford, so this could never happen. Until Wilford meets engineer mark yayyyyyyy 😛😛

So then Wilford tries saying sorry for everything and I miss you and whatever to who he thinks is his ex best friend and little brother (I hc them as step brothers) but it’s just engineer mark being like “..ok��🤨”

BUT THEN ALSO LAST THING LAST THING, since Wilford caught engie at such a low point in his life he would feed into Wilford’s delusions because engineer mark (just like actor for a time) is completely alone and has nobody. And since engineer mark is like actor marks space self insert, and mark put a lot of his personality into engineer mark, engie feels a familiar resentment to Wilford but also a familiar longing to hear him out and he doesn’t know why and probably never will and when engineer mark realizes and accepts that he’s in the wrong which breaks the cycle of actor marks self destruction infliction of pain into everybody else, JUST WHEN EVERYTHING IS OVER AND ENGINEER MARK FINALLY GETS A BETTER LIFE OUT OF THAT DAMN SHIP, he might not even remember who told him whatever he had to hear at his lowest, but he’ll remember that whoever they were, they helped him a little. maybe. just a bit..

That’s all I have that’s the end of the rant if anybody has something ANYTHING AT ALL to add pleaseeeeeee do I’m desperate to talk about obscure Markiplier lore and headcanons to anybody

[itsbenedict]

Games I Played In 2024 And Whether Or Not I Thought They Were Good (Part 3/4)

[1] - [2] - 3 - [4]

More of them! I've been doing these roughly in chronological order so I'm going to have more to say about these ones probably.

Another Crab's Treasure

Haaaaaah. Mixed feelings on this one!

The idea is that it's a Dark Souls game, only, like, vibrant and colorful and ocean-themed. You're a hermit crab who's trying to get his shell back! Cute!

First off: if you get this game, do not get it on the Switch. It is broken on Switch. Like, crashes regularly, freezes up on simple object interactions, drops frames all the time... it's rough. I've seen LPs of people playing the PC version, where it looks and plays much better, so that's probably what you want to do instead. I'm shocked Nintendo let them release it on their store in this state.

And... that kind of colors my perception of the gameplay, too, because it turns out soulslike difficulty gets way more frustrating if you're usually dying to the game freezing up during an enemy attack, or the camera getting stuck where you couldn't see the tell animation, or some other technical issue that completely wasn't your fault. I was fighting the game every step of the way.

That said, I can easily see the version of the game that works, and the gameplay's pretty fun! The various shell powers, the rolling mechanics, and the smart enemy design make it really smooth to play when it's actually running at full FPS. The environment design is also really good, and overall it's very well-executed.

Hated the story, though. What a mess. It's... totally thoughtless doomer nonsense, whose primary message is "capitalism bad!" while completely failing to depict any capitalism and instead having the government be bad. It's all half-formed ideas from people with no model of how the world actually works- just a vague sense of anger at powerlessness and disenfranchisement, directed at incoherent strawmen. The speech where the evil corrupt mayor tells you that laws exist to make it legal for him to kill anyone who defies him is especially eye-rolling- as is the strawman of techno-optimism who shows up as the surprise final boss. Just idiotic stuff.

None of its metaphors even work on its own terms- like the thing where pollution is a nebulous force of corruption caused by greed in the hearts of the crabs who hoard trash, except that the greedy trash hoarders live in the clean colorful heights and the poors with no trash live in the polluted undercity with too much trash. Wait, what? Yeah.

Fun though.

Loop Hero

This one was really cool! It feels like there's some potential it had that it didn't realize, but I enjoyed it as a smaller experience anyway.

The idea is... the world's been destroyed, and you can sort of bring it back by remembering. As you walk along this desolate looped path autobattling enemies in search of a boss, you can put down tiles that change it- biomes that spawn different types of monsters, buildings that give you buffs, and terrain with global effects. As you progress, you unlock more types of tiles, and learn synergies between different types of tiles that create new effects.

There's a lot of these, and they're really cool. Like, put down nine mountains or hills in a square, and bam, you get a tall peak that spawns harpies to fight. Or put forests next to a lightning tower, and get burning forests that, uh, I think lower everyone's HP or something? Place a light source next to a field, and it blooms with flowers, doubling its XP bonus or whatever it is those do.

My problem I think is just that there's not enough of them. Each type of tile has between two and four different kinds of interactions with other tiles, and you don't really get too many elaborate combos. Most types of tiles ignore each other. I kind of wish there'd been a little more depth to these systems, with more surprising interactions with older terrain types as you unlocked new ones. Let me run a river past a spider nest and get diving bell spiders, or put a storm tower next to a vampire castle to spawn frankensteins! The surprise tile synergies were the most exciting part, and there was definitely room to include more of them.

The story had some kind of cool things to say about, like, the weight of creation, passing judgment on the world, deciding what has the right to exist. I don't know that it really explores it fully, but there's something there!

Hades II

Yep, this thing's in early access! And no surprise: it's good as hell. I've wasted far too much time in it.

Gameplay-wise, it's going to be pretty familiar if you've played Hades, but there's a few major changes. The most impactful, I've found, is that you only get one dash. No upgrading it with the mirror or getting more from Hermes- you get one, and then can hold down the button to run slightly faster if you gotta move fast. This makes Melinoe play very differently from Zagreus, who favored getting in close and overwhelming foes with a flurry of blows before zipping back out with dashes when things get hairy. Melinoe needs to stay safe a lot more than Zag does, and relies on her ranged options to do so.

(There's also a few other tweaks- every attack comes with a charged version that costs mana from a mana bar, olympian calls are replaced with "moon blessings", and of course all the weapons are new and take some getting used to- but the dash is the biggest thing.)

The story, this time, is fascinatingly weird. It concerns a war between the gods and the titan Chronos, and... it's not entirely clear if you're on the right side of it. They play up how callous and evil the gods are with respect to mortal life, and have multiple supporting characters who put this concern front and center where Hades 1 kind of sidelined it. But Melinoe is this weird, uptight honor student type of character with a strong sense of propriety and familial loyalty, and kind of doesn't care about that compared to her quest to rescue her family.

It keeps, like... dropping hints that you're not really on the right side, here? Chronos is personally unpleasant and loathsome, but you keep getting little hints that what he's actually doing is an improvement over how the gods were running things. Various character arcs seem to be headed in a "the gods suck and you should stick up for your non-god friends" direction, but...

...I mean, they can't actually do that, can they? Just, structurally! It's a roguelike, meant to be infinitely replayable! Hades 1 had a pretty elegant resolution to that problem, reframing the gameplay as something that can fit without the central conflict, but I can't imagine how Hades 2 could possibly do that. An entire section of the world takes place on a fleet of ghost ships sailing to join the war effort! Even Melinoe failing to grow and just winning seems incompatible with the game continuing. A good chunk of the game doesn't exist without the conflict! I don't see how they can possibly put a bow on all this, and I'm excited to see how they try.

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

My favorite game from my childhood has received an updated rerelease on Switch... and they did it right. You gotta check this out.

I've talked about why TTYD is great before- I think one of the first posts on this blog, waaaaaay back in the day when my posts were bad and you shouldn't go looking for them? But the upshot is: the battle system uses small numbers, and you can figure out exactly what kind of damage you can dish out and take in a given turn, and plan your risk-taking and resource management around it precisely- in a way you can't really do when you've got big damage numbers with RNG ranges of outcomes. All the risk is in the execution of your guards and special moves, which let you attempt harder inputs in exchange for more favorable outcomes, with a chance that you'll fail because you fucked up,

Going back to it after so long... honestly, with fresh eyes, the writing isn't quite as lively as I remember? Like, I remember a big reason I was disappointed by later PM games was that there were no partners, or that the partners didn't really talk or figure into the story. But... honestly, TTYD does have that same problem, outside of the chapters where those characters are introduced. Once someone's In Your Party, their relevance is kind of over, and they all deliver pretty similar filler lines while out. That's something they could maybe improve on in a proper sequel.

Still, the writing generally remains sharp and very funny, and the variety of scenarios it throws at you are great. And the remake adds a few things that really enhance the experience- like new remixes of the battle theme for every chapter, and extra animations for every character, even the random background nobodies. You can hit NPCs with your hammer and they'll play a little "hey, ow!" animation now! Different characters get different dialogue bleep sounds! And they added a warp hub for backtracking, so the General White quest isn't so tedious! And a warp pipe between Creepy Steeple and Twilight Town, to cut out like an hour of pointless backtracking! All the changes they made were really smart.

(Including: putting Vivian's trans stuff back in the script, after it was cut in the original localization. Good on you, Nintendo!)

Pokérogue

I was weak. I held out two months, and then gave in. And I regret everything.

This fucking thing ate multiple months of my life. It's... infuriatingly addictive. It boils the Pokémon experience down to this ultra-tuned flow state, with accelerated levelups and mechanics to streamline the game into a roguelike form factor, and it's so goddamn tight. Every moment of it is setting you up with a thing you can do next, so there's no stopping points- just new goal after new goal after new goal. It totally hijacked my brain until I beat the damn thing into submission, doing absolutely everything it's possible to do in it.

Except "ever voluntarily using Skwovet", because fuck that thing.

Don't play this. It's bad for you.

Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree

Technically not a new game, but the DLC is basically an entire new game, with a map about the size of the base game and its own progression system and story.

I don't have too much to say about the DLC itself! It's More Elden Ring. Miquella's story is cool and tragic, the final boss was a terrifying surprise, and the new environments and enemy designs were sick as hell. If you liked Elden Ring for those things, there's more of it here! 'Nuff said.

What stuck out to me was... I started a new character and a whole fresh playthrough of the game, because I didn't know what the entry point to the DLC was. And while last time, I built a strength-focused warrior with tons of HP, this time I decided to try out a totally different build and play a squishy wizard with ranged attacks. And the game was so different like that! Still balanced, still fun, but completely a different game.

Instead of being about getting in close, staying in close, and sticking around for a long time while finding openings to attack, it became about staying at a safe distance, dodging projectiles, and retaliating with nuke spells to end fights before bosses could get much of a chance to hit me. Some areas that were a huge problem for me before were trivialized by my reusable ranged blasts, and some areas that were no trouble were suddenly a difficulty cliff because there was no way to be effective at range. I'm surprised at how much of a transformation it was! Impressive feat of design.

WEBFISHING

This is a cute little multiplayer fishing game based off Animal Crossing's fishing system. It's a relaxing little second-screen game without too much going on! Not too much to say about it- it does what it sets out to do. Kinda wish they'd tried a little harder for some of the fish "jokes", though- a lot of them are anti-humor about not having a joke for this one. I will retaliate by... not having much of a review for this one.

DEATHLOOP

This thing was fuckin' cool. You're an amnesiac trapped in a time loop- but not just any time loop. The people on this island came here specifically to trap themselves in a time loop, where they could kill each other and live out hedonistic fantasies with no consequences, but something fucked up and now only you and a crazy lady who's trying to kill you are actually experiencing the loop. For everyone else, it's their first day, and they don't take kindly to you trying to break the loop and ruin their fun.

In order to break the loop, you have to kill a bunch of important assholes (called "Visionaries") who've somehow anchored the loop to themselves. But you've got to do it in a single day, and they're scattered all over this huge island- so you've got to come up with a plan. Find ways to manipulate where they'll be at what times, when they'll be vulnerable, and line up that perfect killstreak.

It's fun stuff. Initially, it seems impossible- they're too spread out, too inaccessible, too heavily-defended. But as you work on figuring them out one at a time, you learn lots of little details about gaps in their defenses, ways to fuck with their routines, and traps you can set for them so they'll die without you needing to be present. It's like a mystery game, even though the minute-to-minute gameplay is a pretty standard stealth action shooter.

(Said gameplay's pretty fun on its own- though weirdly, the starting pistol pretty much kills everything in the game in one headshot and has perfect accuracy, so I'm not sure why they bother giving you other guns. I upgraded to Frank's SMG which is basically the same gun but it reloads instantly, and basically never needed to use anything else.)

The story's... a little weird. It tries to focus on the relationship between Colt and Julianna (your also-looping nemesis trying to stop you from breaking the loop), but like... she's not... there, except as an annoying random superboss encounter that sometimes spawns in the middle of you trying to do other shit. She's just a voice over the radio that snarks at you and doesn't have any relationships with any of the other characters.

So like, ultimately you learn a twist about who she was to you before you lost your memory, and she explicates her reasons for wanting to protect the loop, and there's like, some decent character work being done there?

Buuuuuut, in attempting to foreground this character dynamic and make it the main resolution to the game, they kind of forgot to give a satisfying resolution to anything else. Like, these seven people you spend the whole game obsessively stalking and learning everything about so you can efficiently murder them in one go... don't really get a resolution other than being anticlimactically murdered. And there's like no resolution to like, what is the loop and how does it work and why did it get fucked up and what are the stakes here. It's all so meticulously done that I get the impression some writer somewhere answered these questions while plotting it, but they just either didn't put any of it in the game, or I missed something huge.

One negative I will say is: this thing made my old computer overheat like instantly. I had to build a proper gaming PC before I could run this thing- and that was in fact my main motivation for building it, was because I wanted to play this game without my laptop melting. Not really playable on smaller machines, even on minimum settings.

-

One more coming down the line, for the games I played but didn't beat this year, and that should do it!

[1] - [2] - 3 - [4]

[phoebepheebsphibs]

Double-Mutated Mikey

Chapter 8: Recollections

Continued from the short story written by @boots-with-the-fur-club

Prev || Next

Raph sits down on his bed, grabbing a stuffed bear and rubbing his thumb over its worn-down stomach.

The room is dim, but not dark. The main light is off, but the hanging lanterns he has strung along the wall give a warm red glow to the room.

Ever since his krangification, Raph's eye has been a bit sensitive. It waters easily, stings on occasion, and bright lights irritate him. He's started wearing sunglasses outside more often, even on cloudy days. Donnie offered to make an artificial eye to help, but Raph said no. He'd rather keep the eye, even with its attitude and quirks.

"I'm not ready to be a cyborg just yet," he'd joked.

He thought that much of a change would be too big for him, after all the changes he and his family have already gone through.

Now a mechanical eye doesn't sound so crazy or scary.

Raph hugs his teddy bear. It squeaks in his arms. He thinks of how similar it felt to holding Mikey before he got mutated...

He grimaces, scrunching his face up tight and pressing his hands against his head, trying to force the thoughts away.

Mikey is still Mikey! Just with a few new... he won't call them upgrades. Changes. Nothing that can't be reversed, of course.

But... what if they can't be?

Raph presses his hands even tighter against his head.

Stop it. Shut up. Shut up!!

He doesn't want to think about this. He doesn't want to think about Mikey. Not in this way.

He feels like he's betraying him somehow, thinking of him as a monster or a wild animal rather than a brother. But then, he feels like he won't be able to help him if he keeps thinking of Mikey as he was before, and not accepting that he is changed now. But then, he won't stay changed. But then...

"SHUT UP!" Raph yells to himself, slamming his fists against the bed frame.

His ninpo activates, giant red fists breaking the bed slightly and causing the edge of it to slip under his weight and crash against the floor. Raph yipes in alarm, looking down at the mess he's made.

"...Nice going, Raph," he grumbles, grabbing some boxes of dumbells from the corner of his room to prop up the extension on his bed.

He sighs, sitting down on the edge of the mattress again, head in his hands.

He tries to stay strong. He tries not to break down. His family doesn’t need that right now, they don't need a basket case or a worry-wart or whatever else they might call him. They need Raph, strong and brave and ready to take on the world.

But he needs Mikey... he needs his baby brother back, safe, sound, whole. Not broken, not bloody, not feral and confused. He wants Mikey home again. Home in his own body.

Raph starts crying. Although he's disappointed in himself for it, he is glad that he can finally get the tears out. He presses his face into his stuffed animals, trying to get it all out all at once.

Raph hates himself so much right now...

Because...

Because it is all his fault...

.

.

.

"...But I don't see WHY we have to wait!" Raph gripes, Mikey sitting beside him, drawing random doodles on his arm wraps while he listens to the rant. "If we know that the place is doing villain stuff, shouldn't we go in to stop em?"

"I mean, Leo's decision does make a little sense," Mikey counters, taking a big yellow marker out and drawing a smiling sun on Raph's arm. "It's a pretty big building, dude."

"I'm not saying we storm the castle," he responds, waving his arms in exasperation.

Mikey scolds him and brings his arm back down to continue his work.

"I'm just saying that we could scope out the place instead of ignoring it completely!"

"We're not ignoring it," Mikey corrects. "Donnie is gonna run surveillance on it. Leo's gonna have Cass and the girl scouts check it out. Besides, when did you become the go-getter? I thought you and your Raph-chasm would have preferred taking it slow and safe!"

"Raph-chasm?!" he sputters. "Is Leo spreading that slander around?"

Mikey giggles.

"You do know we've been calling it that for years, right?"

Raph growls angrily.

"Dang it, Leo..."

Mikey giggles again.

"But for real, Raph... why are you so antsy?"

"I don't know... just a gut feeling. There's been reports of all kinds of crazy stuff since the invasion, and most of it has something to do with that new organization Donnie and April told us about..."

"What did they call it again? ESP?"

"EPF," Raphael corrects. "Earth Protection Force, or some junk. But the building they're occupying is labeled Techno Cosmic Research Institute, or some junk."

"Doesn't sound so bad," Mikey hums, taking out a blue marker and drawing a mini version of Leo on Raph. "Sounds like a radio shack from the 90's or something!"

"Maybe, but it bothers me that this new weird mystery organization is everywhere." Raph shudders. "It's unsettling. What if they find us?"

"Find us...?" Mikey turns his head up. "What do you think they'd do?"

"I don't know. But I don't trust em. Something about it all just... bugs me."

Mikey is quiet for a second. He places the cap on his marker. He's managed to draw everyone in the family but himself.

"Well, if it bugs you, then... let's go check em out!"

"Wait, huh?"

"You're gut says they're untrustworthy? Then that's enough for me!" he says, jumping up from his spot. "Let's go see how bad they are."

"But... Leo said..."

"Weren't you the one just complaining about how you didn't think we should stand still and do nothing?" Mikey challenges.

"I know. But Leo is the leader, and I want to show him that I trust him."

"We do!" Mikey exclaims. "We're not storming a castle, we're checking out the scene. Leo wants to wait until we can get some actual intel? Then let's help him along! Let's grab a few listening devices or something and place them along the windows."

"Well... that would help... but we leave at the first sign of trouble, okay?"

"Absolutely!" Mikey salutes. "Now, am I breaking into Donnie's labs to get the spy stuff or are you?"

Raph chuckles as he stands, cracking his knuckles.

"You get the spy equipment, I'll get the weapons. Meet you at the tank."

The two give quick nods before heading off in separate directions.

Raph rushes to the training room and grabs the weapons. It is only then that he sees Mikey's doodles.

Oh, he should change his wraps. He doesn't have time to clean them off, and besides, he knows Mikey prefers to take pictures of all his doodles before getting rid of them.

Raph quickly grabs his sai and Mikey's nunchucks before heading to his room, grabbing a spare roll of black bandages, and carefully but speedily removing the one on his right arm. He just needs to replace the one arm, Mikey hasn't gotten to decorating the left yet. Maybe when they get back he can finish it...

He races back to the tunnel, seeing Mikey leaning against the ginormous tire of the turtle tank as he waits.

"There you are! Ready to go?"

"Sure thing. Do you wanna try driving tonight?"

"Can I?" Mikey asks with excitement.

"Sure, why not? You need the practice."

Mikey squeals with delight as he climbs in, Raph following suit.

The two drive away, making plans while Raph gives Mikey impromptu driving lessons. They joke, they laugh, Raph clings to his seat when Mikey's turns come in too sharply.

"Park over there," Raph says, pointing to an alley closeby to the targeted building.

Mikey nods with an "aye-aye, cap'n!" as he makes another sharp turn and hides the tank in the alley, activating a cloaking device Donnie came up with recently.

"Okay, got the listening doohickeys?"

"Right here!" Mikey says, reaching out and producing several small, round baubles with purple centers.

"Alright, so all we're gonna do is ninja up there, ninja a few of these around the perimeter, and then ninja out."

"That sounds just like the time future Leo saved a war camp!" Mikey giggles. "Or whatever Casey Jr. said."

"Uh, okay?" Raph offers. "I'll pretend like I understood that."

The two exit the vehicle and slink around the block, coming up on the building.

It looks like a normal building. No more than 13 stories, small windows with frosted glass, a rotating door that leads to a small lobby, a few security guards and an intern behind a desk. Above the door is the acronym TCRI, bright and silver surrounded by white LED lights. There's graffiti on the side of the wall, with what looks like an artist's rendition of the 'New York Heroes'. Mikey takes a quick selfie with it before getting back to the unsanctioned mission.

"You take the left side, I'll take the right," Raph whispers. "We don't have a lot of listening gadgets, so use 'em sparingly. Got it?"

"Got it!" Mikey whispers back.

He takes his chucks out and swings them up. A long glowing chain activates, and Mikey starts to scale the wall, swinging to the opposite side.

Raph starts pressing the small devices to the wall, doing two for each floor. Once the gadgets stick to the bricks, the purple centers start to blink.

After about five minutes, Raph's phone buzzes. He pulls it out to see that he's getting a call from Donnie.

Uh-oh.

He declines the call.

He presses two more devices to the wall before Donnie calls him again. Raph groans and pulls the phone out, answering it.

"Hello?"

"Oh, Raphala, where are you?" Donnie asks. His tone sounds cheerful and fake. He can tell he's seething.

"Um, nowhere..."

"Nowhere? Really? Then, would you care to explain to me why I am getting bombarded with notifications about my spy tech being activated? And why when I checked the garage, the tank was gone? And why I cannot find you, nor Mikey, nor your gear anywhere within the lair??"

"Um... bad connection?" Raph tries.

"What are you doing."

"Nuthin'," Raph says, his voice squeaking. He clears his throat and tries again. "Just, y'know... ninja stuff."

"I can clearly see your location, Raph."

"Shoot, I forgot about that," he hisses. "I mean, uh..."

"Is that Raph?" Leo's voice comes into the call.

"Oh no," he groans.

"Let me talk to him."

"You had your chance," Donnie speaks into the phone, before handing it over to Leo.

"Raph. Where are you. What are you and Mikey doing with the listening devices."

"Okay, well, we were thinking," he starts, moving away from the alley for a moment as he talks with Leo on the phone. "We were thinking that maaayyybeee it would be a good idea to get some surveillance on the TCRI place before our next big mission, and so --"

"And so you ignore the fact that I said to wait?!" Leo yells angrily. "Raph, we TALKED about this! I thought you said you were gonna let me be leader without pulling these kinds of stunts behind my back!"

"I'm not pulling any stunt! All we're doing is setting up the devices, then leaving! We just wanted to try and see if we could get any intel on them to help! We're not stupid enough to just go in and mess around, ya know!"

"Where's Mikey?" Leo asks exasperatedly. "He isn't answering his phone."

Raph turned back to look at the building he's walked away from. He looks up, and can see Mikey standing on the roof, looking around.

"He's on the roof," Raph sighs. "I'll go and get him."

Raph puts Leo on hold as he runs back to the building. Once in the alley, he starts jumping between walls, doing impressive parkour as he bounces back and forth and flips off of fire escapes until he's at the roof.

But Mikey isn't there.

Raph walks to the other side of the roof and looks over the edge.

Mikey isn't on the ground.

He notices a vent panel has been jimmied open.

"Oh no."

Raph grabs his phone.

"Um, Leo? I think he went in..."

"WHAT?!" Leo screams at him, causing Raph to pull his phone away from his ear.

"Why would he go in?!"

"I don't know!" Raph whimpers. "I told him we were only doing the exterior--"

"You shouldn't be there at all!"

"Should I go in after him?"

"No, don't -- wait for a minute, call him, maybe he'll answer you."

"Okay, yeah, I'll do that," he says, trying not to panic. "Call you back soon."

Raph hangs up and quickly dials Mikey.

It rings once before he answers.

"Shello?" he whispers.

"Mikey? Where are ya?!" Raph hisses at him. "I thought we said no inside stuff!"

"I saw a weird van pull up," he explains. "They took a krangified person in through the back."

"They what?"

"Yeah, I know. I wanted to see what they were gonna do with him."

"Mikey, I think you should get outta there," Raph whimpers.

"I will in just a sec, I think I found the room where... huh..."

Mikey's voice trails off.

"Mikey? Mikey, what is it?"

"I'm not sure... hold on a sec, 'kay?" Mikey whispers, his voice soft and secretive.

"Mikey, get out of there, now!" Raph scolds.

Mikey doesn’t respond.

Raph waits for him to say something. Anything. He hears Mikey gasp quietly.

"Ohmigosh," he whimpers. His voice is weak and his breathing fast. "Okay, that's enough for me, I'm coming out now!"

"Mikey?! What did you see, what's going on?"

He hears a clattering sound, a stifled gasp, muffled shouting.

"I dropped my phone," Mikey whimpers in fear. "I think they heard me."

"GET OUT NOW!" Raph yells. He dials Leo, adding him to the call.

"Raph? What's going --"

"Mikey's been made," Raph says in a panic.

"Get out of there, now!"

"Leo?" Mikey whispers nervously. "Is that you?"

"Mikey, we're on our way now, just get out as fast as you can! Don't worry about whether or not you're seen, just get out!"

"I'm trying!" Mikey cries nervously. "I'm stuck in the vents!!"

Raph hears a loud clang, followed by Mikey's screams and a thud.

"There he is!"

"Get him!"

"Come'ere, kid!"

Mikey yells in protest, terrified screams as he shouts at them to 'let me go, stop, leave me alone!'

Raph yells out into the phone. He's not sure what he yells, only that he wants Mikey back. He hears Leo yelling, too.

"Raph! Leo!" Mikey screams.

"MIKEY!!" the two yell back in unison.

The line goes dead.

A blue light ignites besides Raph, and Leo jumps through immediately, gasping for air as he stares down at Raph, who is on his hands and knees, holding the phone like it was Mikey's only lifeline.

"Where is he?" Leo pants. "Where is Mikey?"

Raph can't do anything but shake.

Mikey got captured... Because of him...

.

.

.

Raph lifts his face from the army of plushies he has been confiding in.

He takes in a deep breath.

He stands, going to a drawer and pulling out the wraps from that day. Almost a week ago.

The drawings are still there. The sketches and doodles are all intact. The image of a family is there, with each member colour-coded. Red, Blue, Purple... but it's missing their Orange brother. He never did get to finish that portrait.

Raphael leaves his train car and walks over to Mikey's. The door is wide open.

Inside, he sees Leo, slumped over on a beanbag chair and snoring softly, his mouth fallen open.

He hadn't said anything about sleeping in here.

He must've wanted to check on Mikey, too...

Raph grabs of one the extra blankets and pillows and adjusts his brother so that he can sleep more comfortably.

He takes residence in another beanbag chair opposite him.

Once settled, Raphael watches Mikey, who is sleeping peacefully and undisturbed, his tail swinging from side to side and his claws twitching on occasion.

Raph sighs.

Tears silently streak down his face as he cries himself to sleep.

Prev || Next

[dreamsy990]

so, re:chain of memories, huh?

warning! its been a little while since i played through recom, so the game isnt as fresh in my mind as some others. sorry for any innacuracies!

spoiler alert, this is my second favorite kingdom hearts game. at least of the ones i've played so far. i get that this isn't like. a POPULAR opinion but fuck you i have almost nothing but positives to say about it.

let's start with the easy stuff first. recom introduced a new card-based combat system. i cant compare it to the gba version, since i didn't play that, but i can say that for what its worth i DID enjoy the combat. recom is by far the hardest game so far (at least for me) and almost every boss took multiple days for me to beat, even with my hp maxed out. it took me a while to get the combat system, but id honestly love to replay the game now that i have a better understanding of how it works. the card system requires a lot of quick thinking and i get that it isnt everyones taste but its CERTAINLY mine. every fight is difficult and feels genuinely rewarding when you win. the movement, like kh1, can use a lot of work, but i wouldnt call it terrible. just kinda sluggish. i think my favorite boss fight was larxene. shes a pain in the ass but i love her.

i think riku's side dropping the deck building mechanic isnt terrible, but i wish i could reorder his deck at the very least. and the lack of healing cards is. not fun. basically any damage you take is permanent unless you HAPPEN to get mickey and its simply Not a fun time. im not very good at games okay.

i have a lot less to say about the worlds than the combat. they're definitely the worst aspect of the game, though. the idea of making worlds with cards is fine! it just leads to kind of repetitive world design. the stories are forgettable, so forgettable that i literally forgot them. and i could make a point about how thats the idea its a game all about forgetting things!! but honestly that just making excuses for it. the worlds couldve kept the idea of forgetting things without literally making them forgettable. i say this about every world, except for one. because DESTINY ISLANDS

destiny islands is just. so fucking good in recom. its the climax of both sora and rikus stories and i think theyre both amazing. id have to say i prefer rikus, soley because of the visual storytelling you get from his side of it, and thats not to say soras is bad at all. but something about zexion telling riku that its his fault his home was destroyed, as riku sees a version of himself turning into a literal monster? thats just good okay. its really good.

i ADORE the characters in this game too. everything we get from them is sooo good. it's the introduction to the organization and all of them (except lexaeus who did literally nothing) are a treat. axels my favorite ofc, but larxene is such a fun villain, you love to hate her. shes really the star of the org cast in this game. sure, axels may have said its his show now, but larxene stole the spotlight.

its namines introduction, too, and i love her. on one hand, shes just really kind. she wants a friend, she wants someone to talk to, she wants to meet sora. on the other, shes just a little bit fucked up actually. sure, shes honest with sora, but shes the tiniest little bit guilt trippy and i LOVE THAT. her response to sora saying he wants to get back his own memories and forget her is "oh okay. you want to remember your REAL friends, huh? theyre the ones who REALLY matter to you? yeah anyone would want that. no friends for namine i guess." like shes just a bit salty and we love that for her. i want slightly guilt tripping and salty namine back nomura.

but ofc one of my favorite new characters in this game HAS to be repliku. god i ADORE repliku. his hatred for riku is sooo fun and the way he fights with sora is great too. like in soras side i thought he was a neat villain but rikus side? hes amazing omfg. one of the only villains i liked in rikus story (sorry lexaeus, you werent good until days)

over all, this game certainly isnt everyones cup of tea, but its DEFINITELY mine. it's the game im most excited to replay at some point, mostly because of the amazing boss fights. 9/10. its got issues, but the story and characters are so good that i genuinely could not care less about like. most of them.

[beevean]

If I’m being honest, you are all getting way too hung up on fake diseases and attacking a writer as if he personally attacked your family. It’s a strange obsession you have and you guys always come at any small nitpick as if it’s the end of the world. It’s a weird obsession and you have all been doing it for years. Maybe you liked Sunset Heights getting a remix but you also play victim when people don’t like the 2010s games. You can see Sonic is more successful now and doing things much better but you just like to sit in your anger towards the series for years. I’ll add that you’re much more sane in your reactions than RandomtheFox, but this whole side of the fandom here is so pathetic. The endless loop of anything new coming out for Sonic, and your little posse hating on it because it isn’t the meta era or because Ian Flynn has his name on it makes me glad you guys are a small minority in the fandom.

Do you want to know why we're discussing this?

If you go back and read our discussions, see how much we brought up with this little detail!

I looked up the effects of low gravity on the human body: I learned something new about science. I tried to put into words why this detail is harder to accept than Sonic breathing in space: this is about stories and world building. I immediately found a replacement idea. We discussed about SA2, its gameplay mechanics, its cutscenes. Someone even brought up the idea of drawing parallels with AIDS and how it would affect Maria. Negativity can stem from a place of reasoning, "how would I do that?", and it makes me use my brain in a fun way. I'm aware it's a inconsequential detail, but I'm having fun!

As for the rest of the message, yeah, we are a minority. Which makes me wonder why you care so much about a group of, what, four people?

Why don't I get any engagement when I'm positive, but suddenly people are up my ass when I talk about something negative? I didn't even tag most of my posts. Bro half of the Sonic fandom blocked me already because I'm a dirty sinning IDW non-enjoyer. I am not bothering anyone.

By the way, my negativity about IDW once even resulted in me writing a fic about it. Again, creativity and genuine discussions about writing a story and its downfalls. It nourishes the brain.

I don't like this new direction for Sonic. There, happy? I don't feel catered to, as a 2000s fan, by all this "REMEMBER WHEN WE WERE COOL????" stuff, not to mention I'm just not a Shadow fan so seeing him with wings and shit does nothing for me. I am annoyed because this used to be a franchise dear to me, but the current environment, both games and fandom, alienates me. I am also aware that, precisely because I'm in the minority, I'll just have to wait until ST changes trend again.

If my writer side activates when I talk about a writing decision I don't like and I'm having fun dissecting it, let me, alright? You can find me cringe, if you want to, but I'm not doing anything different than other fans, just directed towards a less acceptable target and in the privacy of my blocked blog.

Also: to be perfectly honest, if it only takes me one day of mild bitching to get anons yelling at me that I'm a joyless bastard doomed to be sad because I refuse to be happy, it kind of makes me want to be saltier out of spite. I'm already a bad person, might as well, right?

[elemom]

What are your thoughts on Echo and Dr. Julien's relationship?

Hi anon. I sure hope you’re prepared for a yap sesh!

I have SO MUCH to say about them.

TL;DR: Echo is Julien’s son AND his deeply flawed creation. And that dynamic is Difficult.

We’ll start off with:

Dr. Julien’s Perspective

Ok so i think the most important thing to get outta the way is that i don’t think Julien is *evil,* but rather he occupies a “creator” dynamic with echo (and by extension, zane) i’ll explain more, hopefully

I personally think Julien created Echo out of desperation and loneliness. The first time he was lonely, back in the birchwood forest, he built zane, and that basically fixed his loneliness problem. After such a long time in the lighthouse, he was desperate for *anything* to help him in his isolation.

Thus, I don’t think he was in a clear mindset when he was creating echo. Fueled by grief and a little bit of hubris (*he created mechanical life for crying out loud, he should never have to be alone again when he can just infinitely create consciousness!*) he used zane’s blueprints to build a brand new nindroid.

As the process went on, i think he lost more of that clarity and ended up wanting this nindroid to be a new zane, something he would later be deeply ashamed of when he realized he basically just built a replacement son. Once echo is complete enough to be activated, I think he realizes just how bad of a hole he’d dug himself. He’s disappointed: not in Echo, in but himself. He tried to create a life in the image of someone else, and he couldn’t even do that right.

Which brings me to the “creator” dynamic. While Julien sees Echo as a son, he also sees him as his creation; he’s something to fix and perfect and fine tune. Echo is imperfect, and as a creator, Julien wants to fix those imperfections. He views Echo (and zane) as sons, but also as his creations, and that’s a *really* hard dynamic to balance.

(as an aside, I dont think echo or zane mind getting tune ups/upgrades/etc. I think a lot of the internal conflict julien has with echo is because he needs *so many* fixes that it’s hardly feasible to do, so he’s left dealing with echo’s imperfections and echo is left as kind of A Mess.)

Now all the stuff I mentioned above about the creator + creation dynamic is still there, but I don’t think it’s the MAIN thing going on. I really truly believe Julien was a good father to Echo despite their circumstances. Like, I think he made Gizmo as a buddy for Echo like he made the falcon for Zane, he made toys and stuff for him, played chess with him, etc. However, I think Julien’s disappointment with himself and his regret over creating a replacement for Zane occasionally comes through.

Which leads me to…

Echo’s Perspective

Echo is completely 100% trusting of Julien. That’s the big thing, I’d say. After all, it was Julien that gave him life, who cares for him and reassures him when he’s down. (And he’s also the only other person Echo knows.)

It’s this trust that leads to Echo’s…. Issues. See, Echo eventually comes to realize something’s up with how Julien sees him — or at least, how Julien seems to act when certain topics about his creation come up. Like I mentioned in his section, Julien can’t hide the disappointment/regret/etc he feels about creating echo — none of which are echo’s fault of course. But echo sees that he’s imperfect and that his father sometimes gets upset and he blames himself for that.

Echo knows Julien doesn’t hate him. He knows he’s trying his best and that he really does care. But he still wants to do everything in his power to make Julien happy. So he’s keenly aware of how he’s Not Zane and how he’s Not Perfect and how his father created him to Be Zane but didn’t do a great job at it. Julien always reassures him that he loves him, and it’s true! Julien *does* love him. But Echo feels like he could be doing better.

Depending on your interpretation and headcanons and AUs and all that, Echo can stay in this state of trust after s2 (waiting in the lighthouse for an eternity) or go in the complete opposite direction (Rejecting the idea of being Zane and becoming Mr E)

I might go into more detail about Mr Echo and how being found by the SoG impacted his view of Dr J. If you wanna see that, I’d be glad to infodump abt it on another post :3c

I also have some thoughts about Why echo got left behind in the lighthouse, but i dont think any of them were out of malice on Julien’s part. Some are worse than others, but I think he wanted to go back Eventually.

Maybe he died shortly after s2 and didn’t have the time to go back. Maybe Echo had shut down due to malfunctions and Julien didn’t know he was alive (Gizmo would have repaired him before the events of s6). Or maybe Julien was procrastinating, because he would have to admit to zane that he tried to replace him. Or maybe he just forgor 💀

ANYWAY thanks so much for asking!!! If you or anybody else ever wants to hear any more hcs feel free to send me asks about them. Because I have a LOT to say. I have put enough mental energy into thinking about the jfam that i could probably power Los Angeles for a month.

(disclaimer, many of these HCs come from melting together a bunch of ideas from fanart and fics and HC posts on tumblr, so a lot of these thoughts aren’t original.)

[fleur-a-whump]

Hey!

....I guess it's about time I got around to doing this, huh? I'm Alise. I'm an adult and I use she/her. I've been around a while, building up from lurking to interacting to posting in this community. I've been writing whump as a hobby since I was around ten years old, but I didn't discover the actual whump genre until I was in high school, and even then it was just on ao3. honestly, finding this community has done incredible things for me, because it allowed me the space to freely enjoy something I've long had a deeply guilty pleasure for. my relationship with whump hasn't always been healthy as I've used it a lot as a coping mechanism and I attached a lot of misplaced guilt and shame to that enjoyment. but learning about other people's relationships with it and exploring why I use it as a coping mechanism has helped me so much. like I've learned so much about myself through this community, and I've received nothing but kindness and encouragement from people in the community as I dipped my toes in. you are all incredible and I can say nothing but thank you for everything you've done for me so far.

ANYWAY now for the fun stuff

My Writing:

Overloaded - ex-villain whumpee, hero whumpers, hero caretakers, supervillain whumpers, multiple whumpers and caretakers, bad team dynamics, shock collar

Asks are totally open btw!!!

loves:

kidnapping/captivity

restraints/bondage/gags

hero and villain stuff, especially villain whumpee

pet whump

just about any supernatural whump, especially demon and vampire whumpees

team dynamics!

RANSOM/HOSTAGE SITUATIONS

I do enjoy nsfwhump so you will see that on my blog

carewhumpers and caretaker new whumper

intimate whump

comfort and recovery arcs (I swear I'm going soft, I'm now actively seeking out recovery series lmao)

dislikes:

I need at the very minimum the possibility of a happy ending

on the same wavelength, I kinda hate character death

medical/lab whump

I tag like a mad woman so stuff should be pretty well labeled I hope

I guess thats all. thanks for having me :)