#i hope that was a fluke in the level design

[samarecharm]

Glitched out trying to dash to a cover point and lost 45 minutes of progress 🧍‍♂️

[vaingloury]

Disparate Thoughts on Dungeon Meshi

I'm an anime-only watcher, so no spoilers beyond what's currently aired (eps 1-3) + mild map spoilers for a random 3.5e D&D module (Sunless Citadel).

- I'm not the first nor will I be the last to harp on the English localised title but Delicious in Dungeon sucks. I do, however, think going with the "DnD" naming scheme was a nugget of a good idea (let's face it, "Dungeon Food" sucks too). Maybe "Diners in Dungeon"/"Dungeons & Diners" instead (as in those who dine, not a place where one dines). Or "Dungeon Dine" (like "dungeon dive"). Regardless, I'll just be calling it Dungeon Meshi going forward.

- I don't know if this is coloured by me going into this series with the knowledge that Ryoko Kui loves Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 or a wider ripple effect of eastern dungeon-fantasy conventions being shaped by there not being an official Japanese translation of D&D between Basic and 5e, but the world-building's vibe is old-school D&D as hell. It feels like it was written by someone who maybe never got the chance to play the tabletop game much but spent hours poring over the 1e Monster Manual in hopes of getting a campaign off the ground (and ended up penning a manga instead, game scheduling be damned). There's the disarming of traps, feeling for secret doors, and even the iconic red dragon as seen on the covers of the Basic Dungeon Master's Handbook and 1e Monster Manual being the dungeon boss. Design-wise, the dungeon's layout it reminds me a bit of the map from Ruins of Castle Greyhawk or The Sunless Citadel (pictured below, right).

- The main cast is very tropey at the moment. Quite literally all the Basic classes are covered; the generic white man Fighter (Lv 1, no multi-attack yet :P) as the party face, the halfling/thief, the elf/wizard, the missing cleric, the dwarf... This works for this point in the narrative but doesn't make me particularly attached to any of them. They need another overarching obstacle.

- I generally don't like Studio Trigger's output (not the Imaishi-involved stuff anyway; Gridman fucks) but I respect how bouncy their animation usually is. So, I was excited to watch something animated by Trigger but not (originally) written by them. Dungeon Meshi, however, looks static and resorts too often to Dutch angles to maintain visual interest. There's a bit of an art shift in episode 3 where this improves; more fun "off-model" moments, the movements get a little bouncier, more color harmony. Hopefully, this stays and isn't just a guest director fluke. Form the snippets I've seen on the manga, Kui suffers a bit from "draw background killed my grandma", thus her ability to make her simple character designs emote well has to carry the page. The anime does the opposite; super detailed backgrounds but flat shading/lack of texture on the characters creates a need for them to over-emote with a "screen-shake" effect in order to stand out from their surroundings, which I could see getting old fast. The main event, the food, looks better in the anime than in the manga due to colour and animation bringing it to life.

- I don't usually laugh at Japanese comedies because they're either too slapstick for my tastes or too pun heavy for my JP comprehension level. Dungeon Meshi gets a point for making me "lol" more than once.

- Finally, a good panty shot:

- I watched episode 3 dubbed. EN Marcille > JP Marcille (I say this as a stickler for subs). The rest of the dub cast is fine but I'm probably sticking with JP because JP Laios' ability to scream > EN Laios (EN is a great generic white man, though). I'm not familiar with most of the JP voice cast. I think Chilchuck is my fave in JP.

Both languages have little breathing room between lines of dialog and I was hoping the EN dub would play around with the fact that the character speaking isn't necessarily the one on screen (thus less lip-flap matching, especially for Senshi, who has few indicators that he's actually speaking even when he's onscreen) but alas. I'll do another one of these if I have more to say later in the season 🥂

[realswolestrider]

Long expositional tirade.

Please.

[Text is bright orange and bolded, but has been Edited for accessibility.]

Sorry about that. Funny slash fucked up part of having progeny in any form - they take after you. Every day I think, surely at this point, Rose's gotta be outta ways to stealthily forcefeed me my own patented brand of nuclear orange medicine, and every day I am simultaneously pleasantly surprised and mildly horrified to be proven wrong.

Anyway. I got my fuckin' pantaloons back and we're done with the thinly veiled psychological warfare for the time being. So I got a couple minutes to give the people what they want.

Normally I'd have concerns about giving away all my plans, let alone in such dramatic detail. Oh, you're a mastermind supervillain and you're just gonna give the hero all the information in a neatly packaged two minute monologue? You're makin' some big brain moves the rest of us couldn't even hope to understand.

I'm sure you're thinking the same thing. "Yes, Dirk." You hiss through your teeth while jacking it furiously to your own literary competence. "Fall prey to your own ego for the umpteenth time this week and hand me the key to your downfall on a silver platter." And I'm like. Okay. With an enigmatic level of placidity.

I'm doing stuff. Things. Anticipating your dissatisfaction with such a memey non-answer, I continue on. To be blunt, as of recently I've been doing jack shit of fuck all, except waiting around. I am an irrelevant number of Earth C's revolutions along its axis into this trip across the Virgo Supercluster to find a needle in a haystack - the perfect planet for my plans.

It's a lot like picking one particular grain of sand outta the Sahara, but with way more grains, and billions of miles between each one. So as you can imagine, it ain't exactly a mentally stimulating process.

You see, on the relevant scales of spacetime, life is a fluke. An anomaly. Calling it a rare occurrence is being generous. It's not just the size of the planet, or the presence of water. The incubation period for successful generations of the most widely accepted philosophical definition of life is longer than my dick, and twice as dangerous. For a species to develop a level of cognitive awareness enough to question its place in the universe, a lot of shit has to happen. A Rube Goldberg Fractal of an infinite amount of Rube Goldberg Machines.

Sometimes, life gets pretty damn far. Take a trip to Chicxulub in the Yucatán. Find a gift shop there, and buy a velociraptor plushie to the impact crater of the K-pg extinction.

You'll look like a fucking moron, because velociraptors went extinct long before then.

If the variants of life on Earth C are crabs in a bucket, humans and trolls just happened to be the crabs at the very top who got their claws around the rim and got the fuck outta Crab Dodge before everything went pear-shaped.

The mere fact any amount of us survived the Sburb extinction event boggles the mind. Natural generation is clumsy and random. Many times human and troll alike were held back due to biological or sociological flaws.

Intelligent design ain't fuckin' real.

But what if it was?

[inoxygen]

Played a few sessions of Pathfinder 2e and it’s still all so exciting to me. I hope it’s not just the novelty and the flaws are just less readily apparent. Some early thoughts:

Rounds are fast. Positioning is important. Weapons are interesting. No bullshit spells.

It’s a fluke that I’ve stumbled on one of the better designed classes — the Rogue. Tons of skills and feats to build around, though I’m probably fooling myself into thinking that I can do everything. I’d definitely play the class again, which is a good sign.

Thief is clearly the best racket, though. I’m playing a Ruffian, but that was before I realised that medium armor isn’t necessarily an improvement, and most useful weapons are agile anyway.

By comparison, a (bow-based) Ranger looks pretty boring, and spellcasters seem quite weak at these early levels.

Athletics and Medicine seem too generally applicable, but besides those, skill choices seem niche. Healing between combat with Medicine seems like an unwritten rule which I wish was more explicit (and didn’t feel like a feat tax). I can see all of my low-level characters looking similar.

I wish archetypes offered a little more – progression is a little slow and only the multiclass dedications seem like complete packages. We’re playing with Free Archetype. I’m ambivalent, but anything giving more feats should make character building interesting.

The game is great on Foundry, but it seems like it wouldn’t work so well at a table where not everyone knows the rules.

Random gripes (when the system is so granular, it’s easy to criticise):

I would definitely streamline ‘deadly’ and ‘fatal’ and a host of other things. Armor Class is a ‘special difficulty class’, immunity to bleed isn’t found in the stat blocks, creatures with immunity to critical hits still take critical effects.

Head Stomp and The Harder They Fall, two similarly situational feats, occupy the same slot. Gang Up, already an oppressively strong choice, gets even better in the remaster. Plant Evidence, which might be used once in a campaign (with middling odds of success), really ought to be a skill feat.

The remaster is annoying. I’m pretty turned off buying any of the material and just using online resources.

[medicinemane]

Talking about Vampire Survivors and Holocure again, which means another mile long rant about how the former is a good game, but I prefer the latter in every way

Been playing more Vampire Survivors (I will say it's by far one of the best games you can get on your phone, and I've mostly been in bed the past few days, so a phone game is needed)

The more I play it, the more I prefer Holocure

This isn't meant as a dig at it, just there's so many design choices I prefer there, though of course they have the advantage of coming second. You hope the game that's iterating is better than the original in at least some ways

Anyway, two big things I can think of that I prefer

For one thing, a lot of the time Vampire Survivors doesn't feel like a game, it feels like a management simulator. You pick your upgrades (often feeling like you're fighting the game to just get it to give you what you're trying to get), and then... you win or you lose based on gear alone

Like at a certain point you will just be swamped when you're playing with high curse, and you stomp or you die. It's very binary

Holocure is much more of an action game where no matter how I'm doing, it always feels like there's an out somewhere. You may not win, but it always feels like there's something you can do. It feels a lot more skill based, and it feels a lot more intense and engaging to me

Second thing is there's just kind of annoying ass choices, like I was just playing, had a good run, but then oh awesome, this ghost I don't have anything that can damage comes and just kind of kills me and there's not a lot I could do about it. What a big barrel of fun

I assume it's to keep you on your toes, but it's rare enough to be meaningless, and it's just annoying

Holocure instead (on higher difficulties) has these red lines that appear, and once they fill in, something flies at you or a bomb goes off, or whatever

It's a much more engaging way of not letting me just stand still if I'm stomping too hard. The harder levels, when you get to the end usually have a sequence where you'll just be dodging and weaving for like the last minute all while also dealing with enemies

Holocure is a game where I pretty much always go either "that was my fault, I got greedy", or "well this level is just super hard in a really fun way"

Vampire Survivors I often die and I'm just like "this game is so stupid, it sucks", even though it really is actually a good game (in spite of everything I say I recommend it, it's free on your phone, I just recommend Holocure more)

Also there's so much to unlock in Vampire Survivors that adds new little bits... and it just feels like busy work. I'd rather get achievements in Holocure even though most of them do nothing, cause they're actually fun for me. Like I really liked doing the challenge of beating a level without moving, that was so much fun, where as getting lvl 80 with most characters to unlock a card just... isn't

Then there's also the fact that in Vampire Survivors... you unlock this one set of things... you just have to go for it every time cause it's how you beat death at the end. Like you just... either pick up the extra 36 levels you need and the two weapons you need or... you lose. Once I did it with just the offensive weapon, but it was a fluke. Also if you have that stuff, you just win

Like I said, it's very binary

Then, so I beat this boss. Not gonna say final boss, but they take away the items you need to be invincible, make you play the stage normally, and then you fight a much more advanced boss at the end

I was bored fighting them, like I really was. I had a good healing weapon, so I wasn't dying... so I just kind of mostly dodged their attacks and healed up when I didn't... and then eventual I won and was like... cool... another thing checked off the list

Playing the current last stage of Holocure is just a ride start to finish, and the boss had me focusing so hard. I mean even the boss of Hard Mode stage 1 tends to be a tough and fun fight for me if I've been greedy (I'm always greedy). Only reason the earlier bosses aren't as intense is... I'm too good for them. I mean the stage 1 boss is straight up demoted to a mini boss in hard mode. Still enjoy fighting them though, it's just it's fun and relaxing instead of taking all my focus

Just... Vampire Survivors is such a good game that has so many cool things about it, and it's so damn cheap on steam, it's DLC is super cheap, it's free on the phone. I recommend it and say it's well worth the money

But every time I'm like... damn... Holocure wouldn't do me dirty like this, I'd be having so much more fun playing Holocure (but it's not on my phone, that's a hands down win for Vampire Survivors)

It's a really good game, Holocure just made a lot of really good choices that make it better in almost every way in my opinion. Even the stuff Vampire Survivors clearly wins at like exploration and secrets... don't really add anything for me, even though I like that stuff. Hell you even get a power up that takes all the passives you can find on the ground all over the map, and moves them next to you... I assume cause they realized it's kind of just busy work going and picking them up

What a good game... that I just always use to praise how much better Holocure is

I always sound like I hate it cause I criticize it non stop, but it's actually that I like, and just like Holocure even more because I'm like "look at the brilliance of all these choices" again and again