#i spent 100 hours on my first ever playthrough just to try and make him happy

[margonite-seer]

I surely can't be the only one in this

[bylightofdawn]

I finished ME3 and whelp that end game was a fucking SLOG. OH MY GOD. It never ended. I ended up going with Control because I am a weak-willed paragon player at the end of the day. I will probably reload my save if I can and experiment with Destroy tomorrow though. Even though I did a shit ton of side-missions I guess my military assets still weren’t enough. I blame the fact I didn’t know the Reapors would breed like fucking lice and I prolly should have spent the first day just scanning for as much materials as I could because I did 95% of the side-missions that didn’t require scanning and I was only like 6000+

Fuck. My. Life.

Okay so my hot takes are as follows: I still love Shepard/Garrus. I was very heartbroken to break Kaidan’s heart by picking the sexy velociraptor over him.

Also, Garrus never gave me shit for picking up with Cerberus and I get why people dislike Kaidan. I still think his pluses outweigh the minuses and I am thinking of doing a m!Shep only trilogy playthrough where I romance him cause fuck I love war buddies falling in love and watching a friendship shift into something more trope. -cough cough- I’m looking at you Cortez and Vega. -cough cough-

Garrus also kinda reads as ver young and emotionally immature in a lot of ways. Like Shepard was definitely the first serious relationship he ever had. Fucks sake, this man’s idea of a date was to go and shoot things on top of the Citadel. And he cannot be smooth to save his poor Turian life. 

But that’s part of his charm, if I’m being honest. However compare that to the heartbreaking and emotionally vulnerable moments Shepard and Kaidan have, you can definitely tell the developers were more invested in that romance.

I ABJECTLY REFUSE to acknowledge they did my bae Kal’Reegar like they did and fucking offed him in a fucking email. N O P E. Sorry, rumors of his death are greatly exaggerated and he will drag his wounded ass home and surprise Tali by being alive. I will accept no other canon.

I fucking ship the hell out of Liara and Javik even though Javik is a super not-cool colonizer/ at times outright misogynist and I don’t know how I feel about this. It makes me uncomfortable but I guess that’s why you have problematic faves. So long as you are willing to acknowledge and accept that the shit they pull isn’t kosher and don’t try and defend it then it’s up for you to find that balance of on your morality scale.

But yeah even Citadel DLC hinted at that being a thing and yeah I ship it.

I don’t mind Garrus/Tali as much as I thought I was when going into ME3 and I know I kinda rudely labeled it as pair the spares but the more I think about it, the more I can see it. I mean, they have been with Shepard for years and I can totally see them building a bond. I would also be completely down for a Garrus/Tali slow-burn where Shepard/Garrus was a thing and now Garrus needs to find a way to conduct his life in a world without her being the pendulum on which his orbit revolves.

And I feel like Tali and Kaidan/Liara to a lesser extent are the people who would understand what it’s like trying to live in a world without her larger-than-life presence. I am also 1000% open to the idea of Garrus/Kaidan finding second chance love with one another with them grieving together over the loss of Shepard and HAVE in fact read some really awesome fanfics with that theme.

I’ve been reading SO MANY FANFICS during this playthrough and I have a shit ton of pairings, both crack and otherwise. I’m compiling a list of ME fanfic recs right now that I will gush about in ad nauseam later.

I got boned because I didn’t import from ME1 onwards so it felt like a personal attack and failing that Eve and Miranda died. I also didn’t have access to Kasumi or Zaheed which made me sad.

I just don’t think I’m up for sinking another 100+ hours into this series right this moment. I am debating buying Andromedea but the amount of bitching and whinging I’ve heard about it, I don’t know if it’s just fandom being a whiny titty baby because they ‘broke it’ or if it’s legitimate criticism.

I’m darkly amused that I am 2/2 in the talking at people long enough they would rather shoot themselves than listen to me pontificate any longer. First Saren and now the Illusive Man, Shepard really do be talking people quite literally to death with her care bear stares Paragon energy. 🤣 And yes I am dating myself horrifically with that reference.

I’m also debating picking up Dragon Age. I bought it on disk for PS3 I think but I’m not breaking that shit out to play a horrifically grainy near 20 year old title. Hopefully it has a remastered edition.

I’m glad I finally finished this series. I’ve legit been picking it up and putting it down for like 10 years at this point. Do I think it’s worth the hype everyone has given it? Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhh no? It’s serviceable and definitely a fun ride. I am super both confused and impressed with BioWare rehauling the gaming mechanics THREE DIFFERENT TIMES. Like, I respect the grind but why? I know everyone hated the Mako and none of use were sad to see it go but jeeze. I’m assuming there was a gaming engine difference between the three of them but still it’s not usual to have the gaming mechanics changed three different times and it gives it a bit of a haphazard vibe because of it.

I actually REALLY MISSED the hacking games in ME3. I suspect I’m prolly in the minority there but I would much rather have that fun code matching/icon matching memory style game over mashing buttons in ME1 or just having to sit there watching Shepard wave her hand around for 10 seconds while bypassing doors in ME3.

I hated only having access to three/eventually four weapons in ME2 but I liked it’s leveling up system the most. Class restricted weapons just didn’t do it for me. Being able to build your paragon/renegade level in ME1 is just weird and I’m glad they got away from that. I do feel like ME1 and ME3 were more similar in how they did their level scaling and I really liked being able to earn a special ability from one of your teammates if you invested enough time and effort into building a rapport with them. Whereas you could just buy it in ME2.

NGL I got Flare and didn’t look back at all. LMAO. What a stupidly OP ability. Banshee and Brutes? Eh toss some grenades and Flare at them and it ain’t a problem anymore.

There are other things but I think I’ve spazzed out long enough over this stupid video game trilogy.

[antivan-beau]

51-54, give me your headcanons

Aww thanks, Auby!! I decided to lean in and had a lot of fun with these.

51. Favorite Warden/Hawke/Inquisitor headcanons (any or all)?

GOSH, this is so broad! I’ll go with some HCs for my characters that are a little unusual and/or contradict things established in canon.

Beatrice Cousland - Morrigan performs the dark ritual with Alistair without Beatrice’s knowledge or consent. For those unfamiliar with Beatrice’s story, she and Morrigan get a slowburn romance throughout the events of Origins that has a pretty different trajectory from Morrigan’s canon romance. On the eve of the final battle, Morrigan proposes the ritual, and Beatrice flatly refuses to ask Alistair to go through with it. She is perfectly content to sacrifice herself, do her duty as a Grey Warden, etc, plus she argues that this ritual is just a final way for Flemeth to exert control over Morrigan’s life. But Morrigan can’t bear to lose Beatrice, and she feels she has very legitimate reasons for wanting an Old God Baby that her lawful good gf doesn’t understand. So after Beatrice falls asleep, Morrigan sneaks out and convinces Alistair herself. Beatrice is shocked and upset when she makes the final blow and lives through it. Her time during Awakening is spent with Big Angst trying to figure out why Morrigan would go behind her back, why she would leave afterword, and how the heck is Beatrice gonna find her swamp witch gf again.

Edric Surana - By the end of Origins, my boy’s personality is 50% mage rights, 30% wanderlust, and 20% spite. He has no desire to stick around and be Warden-Commander. He can’t bear to be told what to do or to give other people orders anymore. He also shirks his duty because he and his BFF, unhardened King Alistair, end the game on tense terms, since Alistair doesn’t want to be king and Edric thinks he needs to suck it up. After Edric survives killing the archdemon (in this worldstate, Morrigan’s ritual is very much an awkward act of wlw/mlm solidarity), Edric and Zevran leave for Antiva together. Edric is an active participant in Zevran’s quest to hunt down and kill Crow masters, which pleases them both immensely. I’ve got a vague idea that Edric actually shows up in Kirkwall with Zev during the events of DA2.

Anias Hawke - like many Hawkes, she is a disaster, but I think in her own special ways. She goes from “bright-eyed refugee trying to do the right thing” to “overtired bureaucrat/public figure, constantly thwarted at doing the right thing” to “washed-up celebrity who spends too much time drinking with Isabela on weeknights and Aveline on weekends.” Probably my most unusual headcanon about her is that I simply rewrote the whole end of Act 2 / beginning of Act 3 because I was so mad she didn’t immediately get to have a follow-up conversation with Isabela about stealing and returning the Tome of Koslun. Anias is doggedly persistent and simply would chase Isabela to the city gates if she had to. This short, kind of mediocre fix-it dialogue was my earliest foray into DA fanfic, before I even knew there was an active fandom :’)

Bastien Adaar - Only 15 hours into my first playthrough of this game, so everything about Bastien is subject to change! I’ve been toying with the idea of roleplaying her as a faithful Andrastean who genuinely thinks she might be the chosen one? I don’t see that much with Inquisitors, especially with an Adaar, so I’m trying it out and seeing where it gets me. 

52. Favorite non-Player Character headcanons?

Kirkwall feels so lived-in! My brain is full of specific ideas for the ways the DA2 companions spend their time away from Hawke’s missions. Merrill spending time with Alienage kids and telling them Dalish stories about elven heroes :’) Anders’ clinic is always busy, but every day is a different adventure - delivering babies, curing food poisoning, unexpected veterinarian queries that he’s 100% unqualified to answer but he’s so beloved by Darktown residents that people go to him, anyway. Fenris devotes serious time to learning to read, but I also like to think (after a particular Sebastian party banter) that he decides to teach Alienage elves how to fight. Aveline on the slow, tragic slide from ‘daily city patrols’ to ‘daily office paperwork.’

53. That One Headcanon that hurts to think about?

I love thinking about Taliesen and Zevran re-meeting in Denerim. I HC that Taliesen still has “yeah, we’re best friends! also, would definitely still sleep with you if you asked” feelings for Zevran. But since Zev’s actually experienced some personal freedom + healthy relationships by this point, his feelings about Taliesen are complicated at best. You know when you’ve grown and changed a lot, but somebody from your past shows up, and they haven’t changed at all? And they still have all their old flaws and lame ambitions? Must be an incredibly bittersweet moment for Zev - confronting his changed circumstances and how much he’s grown, but also confronting the realization that he doesn’t have any choice about killing his other lover, too.

54. Fluffiest headcanon ever?

Gosh… everything about Beatrice and Morrigan after the events of Origins’ DLCs. When they finally meet up again, perhaps a year or two after Witchunt, they are finally able to admit the depth and complexity of their feelings, and begin to reconcile their very different worldviews. They settle down in Orlais together, they’re very good moms to Kieran, Beatrice hangs out around the Orlesian court being a chill knight, probably stealing kisses with Morrigan in alcoves that aren’t as private as they think. I commissioned art of them at this point in their lives just to indulge my desire for fluff.

[malarkiness]

Finished Nier Automata, and I have many.... many thoughts.

I just want to start by saying that this game is aggressively bleak once you hit Routes C/D. Endings A/B are really the last bright spots in the story, and then it's just tragedy after tragedy from that point forward, and the worst part of it is that none of these tragedies result in anything good or even decent or even narratively satisfying. They just happen, and you're left thinking "wow, that fucking sucks" before you shake it off and proceed with the game.

Despite that, I kept playing because I thought all these tragedies would eventually result in something that would've made the characters' suffering worth it because that's just how a good story works, right? But that never really happens (at least, not within the context of the story itself), so when I finally got to Endings C/D, I honestly felt like I'd spent ~27 hours playing a game just to watch the leads die terrible deaths. It just felt really hollow and pointless.

But then I got Ending E, and that kind of changed my entire way of looking at this game.

So this ending shows the PODs deciding to try salvaging the androids' data rather than deleting it all as ordered. The game warns you that saving the data is risky and unlikely to work, then says "Knowing that, do you still wish for them to survive?" Choosing yes turns the credits scroll into a hacking minigame that is UNFORGIVABLY!!!!! difficult, but each game over screen reels you back in with something like "IS IT ALL POINTLESS?"/"DO YOU WANT TO GIVE UP?"/etc.

Now if you're connected to PSN, you'll also get little encouraging messages from players all over the world on each game over screen, but I wasn't connected for my first playthrough lmfao, so I just suffered through it for like 20 minutes and was starting to think the whole thing was deliberately impossible just to give the player one last kick in the teeth and show that yes, it really was pointless and that they're wasting their time trying to fix something that can't be changed. With the way this game's storyline played out, that really wouldn't have surprised me.

But then I restarted the segment and connected to """The Network""" when prompted, then died a few more times before getting a screen asking me if I'd like help. And I really wish I'd screencapped that prompt because that was when I started noticing all the little messages that other players left. There was one from someone in China that really got to me for some reason, and I can't even remember what it was lol, but it made me tear up. Once you restart after that, a bunch of other players' cursors will join in the fight to help you and the solo singer turns into a chorus, and I just.

😭

Every time you lose a player, though, you're told that "[name]'s data has been lost," which I thought was kind of sad, but it wasn't until I finally beat that segment that I realized what they all had actually done. After the credits wrap up, you learn that all the players who helped you finish the game gave up their save data to do it, and then you're asked if you'd like to do the same to help someone else. And while I've since learned that all this actually does is let you leave an encouraging message for other players and have your username show up during the ending sequence for someone else (sort of like an arcade game's scoreboard), the game presents it as an opportunity to really help other players finish the story, so of course I said yes. It wasn't a hard decision at all, and making that choice after playing through the credits was easily the most rewarding part of the entire game, or really any game I've ever played.

And I know I've spent like... 75% of this post talking about a credits sequence lmfao, but that really did change how I look at this game. When you finish the storyline with Endings C/D, the answer to this game's whole thematic question of "What's the point of living?" seems to be "There ain't one, chief." But finishing with Ending E, the answer leans more toward "The point is hoping for and working toward something better because you believe it's there." Add in the fact that you're given the option to "sacrifice" yourself to help someone else continue, and that the game makes this such a painless decision despite what an actual pain in the ass it is for you as a Gamer™, and it actually makes for a more satisfying ending than the in-story ending.

SE could've just had that one sequel-hook scene play at the end of the credits without the minigame at all, or just gone the typical RPG route and made that scene unlockable if you got 100% or whatever. But instead, they took this really creative meta approach that not only pushes you to do a task that's seemingly impossible, but also asks you to sacrifice something you've worked hard for just to help someone else get through that same task. And the fact that so many other players made that choice is just really sweet and honestly kind of touching. Like I'm sure plenty of people just got around it by saving their data on a usb lmao, but still. It's a nice thought. And for the record, my username is Larkey, and my message was "I bet you're having a tough time right now. But we've got this!"

Anyway! Other things about this game:

2B's history of killing 9S over and over or A2's backstory with Anemone and the YoRHa troops definitely should've been given actual screentime, and not just stated in the last 2 minutes of the story or shoved into some optional text. Watching 9S's grief-turned-madness was fascinating, sure, but 2B and A2 deserved just as much focus on their grief (which would've been way more interesting, just for the record. 2B purposefully distancing herself emotionally from someone she has to repeatedly kill, and A2 feeling betrayed by her own creators after watching her friends die needlessly, are storylines that would likely have a lot more emotional weight than "angry teenage boy goes on murder spree before finally getting his revenge only to fall on his opponent's sword and die like a dumbass." I know the Nier franchise has approximately 93 trillion pieces of supplemental material that fill in the gaps from the games, so it's possible that some of those cover 2B and A2 more, but come on. These characters are just as important to the story as 9S; They should've gotten actual in-game screentime devoted to contemplating their existences/grief/etc.

I talked about how bleak this game's storyline is, but the real kicker for me was the scene where all the children in Pascal's village commit suicide. That just seemed so needlessly cruel, and the fact that it happens (depending on how you play) maybe an hour after A2's shown to have warmed up a bit towards the machines is just... cheap? It really did feel like emotional string-pulling just for the sake of it, like the kind of silly edgelord shit I wrote when I was 14. It's so over-the-top that I almost couldn't take it seriously. And if all that wasn't 3edgy5me enough, Pascal then asks you to either wipe his memory or kill him because he can't live with the heartbreak. Fuck's sake. I think what really annoys me about this whole scene is that... This game introduces us to A2 by having her kill a defenseless baby machine, right? So you'd think there'd be some kind of reflection from her after Pascal loses all the children in his village. She fought an insane battle to protect them, too, and she's clearly horrified when she finds out what happens to them, but... that's kind of it. This incident is never brought up again, despite the huge impact it should have on her character. The only thing this scene really does for the narrative, I think, is set up a parallel between Pascal and YoRHa troops like 2B and 9S. And in that way, it does fit into game's overall theme of finding meaning for your life, especially after you've lost what you were living for in the first place (so Pascal's community, and YoRHa's "god worth dying for"). But like I said, the game never really seems to resolve that thematic question within the context of the story itself. And even if that parallel was the point, you could've accomplished it by just having everyone in the village die during the cannibal machine attack and Pascal + A2 failing to save them, no baby suicide needed. I dunno, I've gone back and forth on how I feel about this scene, but honestly, more than anything, it just comes off as a try-hard, eyeroll-worthy way for this game to earn its M-rating. And the fact that A2 gets 0 character development out of it just makes it seem lazy.

Characterwise, I'd definitely say A2 is my favorite. Her ending on the C/D routes was probably the most satisfying just because she essentially gets the only thing she's really wanted ever since she lost her friends, and I thought her unusual relationship with 2B was interesting (and again, deserved more screentime). 2B's also great, especially on the second playthrough when you know why she purposefully tries to get 9S to shut up anytime he innocently wonders something out loud. And I like 9S too just because he's so endearing in Routes A/B, making his stark personality shift in C/D that much more jarring. I'm a little annoyed that he never finds out why A2 killed 2B, though by the end of C/D, he's probably too far gone to actually take that in. I liked most of the NPCs, too. Anemone and Jackass are my favs, but 6O and 21O have some good moments, too. And while a lot of the female YoRHa designs are just... embarrassingly male, there are some really creative character/boss designs here and there. Simone's corpse dress is probably something I'll never forget.

The soundtrack is incredible. "Weight of the World/End of YoRHa" is a standout track not just because of the ending it plays through, but also just because of how cleanly it blends together the 8-bit sound from the hacking minigames and the English and Japanese versions of the song, and how it ends with the game's fictional "Chaos" language (which is apparently meant to be a futuristic blend of English, Japanese, Gaelic, and a few others). I definitely want to check out more of Keiichi Okabe's work, and that of the singers for all three languages. Some other favs are "Vague Hope," "Wretched Weaponry," "Alien Manifestation," and "The Tower."

I enjoyed most of the gameplay. The hacking minigames could be a little tedious sometimes, but overall, I found myself enjoying 9S's gameplay more than the other leads' because of it. I also actually liked most of the sidequests, too, and I normally don't like those all that much in other games (well, okay, I mainly just hate them in FF7R). I think I liked the machine quests the most because so many of them were just silly and low stakes, which was a nice change of pace compared to the main story. I remember the Father Servo one making me laugh a few times. And as for the androids, I liked 11B's memento quest and the Amnesia one (partly because 2B and 9S bicker so much through it, and partly because it's the first we hear about execution models).

I loved the voicework in this game, especially A2 and Anemone's. And whoever voiced 9S did his job perfectly.

I was crying through that whole Ending E sequence, but the part where the POD asks you something like "You put all that work into unlocking Chapter Select. Are you SURE you want to delete all your save data?" made me crack up. I'm doing a replay now, and Chapter Select is probably what I miss most from my original save data lmfao.

So... yeah? Overall, I liked it. I really do think that credits sequence was what sold me on this game as a whole, as weird as that sounds. I'd say the game's biggest faults are the unbalanced focus on the leads and its tendency to throw in pointless angst here and there, and I really wish those two things could've been smoothed out to make a good story even better, but eh. I'm enjoying my replay now, and I'm taking my time doing more quests and exploring areas. I'm going to try to get more of the joke endings, too.

[cosmiciaria]

In defense of Final Fantasy XIII-2 (long post - mild spoilers ahead!)

Disclaimer: Sorry for the pics bad quality. I don't own a ps3, my friend lent me one, and I don't really know how to take screenshots, so I did my best to make my photos look visible.  Just don't mind them much.

SO, I'll start by saying that this game IS BAD and it's part of a badly executed and hated trilogy. To be honest, I don't appreciate Final Fantasy XIII much: the first time I played it I was blinded by (light – sorry pun) the visuals and the crystals and everything was shining and whatever. But then I replayed it, and started seeing all the things people were complaining about. As I skipped some scenes to make my second playthrough smoother and faster, I noticed one thing: I was bored. I wasn't enjoying the gameplay, I didn't understand the story in its entirety even if it was my second time playing it. It was one of the first videogames I played in English (hello from Argentina) so I thought that maybe my limitations with the language were dampening my experience, but I asked a friend about the plot and she told me she didn't understand it either.

At any rate, I only played FFXIII because I wanted to play FFXIII-2. I didn't know why, or what, but something in the sequel (cof cof Noel cof) gave me the urge to try and see it for myself. Like I mentioned before, I don't own a ps3, so I had to wait until in 2015 they released the PC ports. I was so happy with this, that I decided to complete the game 100% and see everything it had to offer.

And it has so much to offer! Yes, I won't deny it, the plot is all over the place, and this is where the trilogy goes to hell with its story. But, let's just say we are all aboard the suspension of disbelief train – if we do it, we'll find there's a great story behind all the time gates.

What I enjoyed the most about this sequel was the characters. In XIII I spent HOURS complaining about how annoying everyone was (except for Fang, she's perfect). I couldn't relate to or stand anyone: Lightning became obnoxious with her monotone, Hope was a crybaby with a pretentious revenge plot that didn't work out well, Sahz is just kinda there not contributing anything to the plot, Vanille just has that oh-please-kill-me squeaky voice and Snow is… I hate Snow. I just hate him. The little fondness I have for him stems from my love for Troy Baker's performances, but oh my Etro, Snow is just like a shonen hero in the body of a 21-year-old man. It's just not right, it defies the laws of anime and videogames. Please eradicate him. I hate Square Enix for creating a character like him and forcing me to play as him and use him as a Sentinel because he's just that good in that role, damn him!

But in FFXIII-2? Suddenly, I found myself rooting for Noel and Serah. We get to learn about Noel's backstory, his sad present, his depressing lifestyle. The inexorability of his tale, the imminence of his decaying world. And he becomes such an endearing partner! He's always there to catch Serah if she falls, he's always asking her if she's feeling well. He's proficient, he's efficient, and he's not complaining about stupid stuff. He even doesn't want to talk about his past because he doesn't want to bother Serah – PLEASE Hope just learn something from this man!

And what about Serah? She's not the best character, I give it to you, but she goes from damsel in distress to a badass time traveler in a blink of an eye, and I can certainly get behind that! She's selfless, she faces everything head on, even though she's scared. Her journey began with the search of her sister, but slowly she found herself surrounded by things she couldn't quite comprehend, only to learn that she was more entangled with the fate of the world than she'd anticipated.

And if you do some optional stuff, you can learn things about Mog as well – not only his features are useful (and funny), but he's also the comic relief, adding extra spice to some of the conversations. His exaggerated expressions and his cute voice make up for a good companion.

And I cannot NOT mention Caius (Liam O'Brien I stan). Say whatever about him, but I love his characterization. He's well made. Yes, he wants the same as countless others villains from the FF franchise, but this time I can understand his motives. I feel pity for him. I want to help him. He's cursed beyond redemption. And he's got the best theme song ever.

I can understand these characters. The game spends enough time on everyone so we can learn to care for them, they show us how their relationship nurtures, their dynamics. And I care! This is something XIII-2 made right and XIII did not: I don't care about Lightning, or Hope, or Snow, but I do care that Noel and Serah succeed in their task. I don't care about Barthandelus or the Pulse Fal'Cie, but I do care about Caius getting what he wants. XIII had so many characters but spent too little time in developing (properly, at least) their strengths and weaknesses, but most of all, their relationships. The only real relationship that feels genuine is the one between Fang and Vanille, but that's because they know each other from before the events of the game; whereas the rest of the team feels like… badly placed pieces of puzzle trying to fit.

I know you're gonna say, hey, other FF put together characters that had nothing to do and it worked (yeah, I can mention FFXII and to a certain extent, because Penelo and Vaan were just there for the lulz I guess). In XIII it just didn't work for me: I couldn't root for any of them, and when the game was finished, I was kinda relieved.

That doesn't happen in XIII-2. Maybe they got it, maybe it was out of luck, I don't know, but characters here are better fleshed out, and we can learn to care and root for them, so we want to see it through to the end by their side.

That's just one thing that XIII-2 did better.

Gameplay was enhanced: now it's faster, more strategic, it doesn't bullshit you like when the leader died in XIII. I'm not going to delve deeper into the Pokémon thing, but yes, you can catch them all, and it adds a lot to the stakes because there's one more thing to gain besides the battle: the monster you're fighting. The game added so many features, it blows me away: the time travelling, opening new paths, closing some; the fragments, which give you experience points and insights in some of the lore; the fragment skills, additional things you can earn or do if certain requirements are met; the f*cking casino that has chocobo races, something that was lacking in the previous game; you can add ADORNMENTS to the monsters you tame to get the ultimate fashion experience. I don't know, there's so much to do, too many timelines to visit. There are too many sidequests, but all of them are linked to the main plot, so you feel like you're still learning things from the main story. Yes, I know, they reuse the same map over and over (Yaschas Massif and Oerba, I'm looking at you), but they compensate with some brand new maps, like Academia 4XX AF which must be my favorite location, so full of life and futuristic style, and the Archylte Steppe, with its weather changing feature.

Sometimes the lack of gameplay slaps you in the face but in the good sense, for instance in Academia 400 AF, where you have a forced battle every two seconds. The sense of urgency and danger is well conveyed through the use of random encounters with enemies. Or when you visit the Void Beyond with Serah, that you're alone, and you have a ghastly Mog following you around, with some of his features blocked. They used everything they had at their disposal, and they used it well. Gone are the days with the endless hallway that we complained so much about in XIII (as if FFX wasn't linear as hell too, but we don't complain about that one – don't dare because it's my favorite FF I warn you): now you can choose how to play, when to play, face that monster or go for an alternative ending. They listened to our whining and gave us this sequel, yes, that nobody asked for, but yet, they did.

There's a huge world-building surrounding all the time travelling thing: in the future, time travel becomes something of an everyday topic, so when you walk around in Academia 4XX you can hear kids playing "let's go and destroy those evil paradox monsters". They built a world around the idea that you can time travel, and that's how Hope gets to live and see every era, monitoring his work that will take centuries to be fulfilled. This is how we should take the time travel in this game, not as doomsday-serious as in Terminator or Back to the Future, but with a more light-hearted approach. I think that's what they tried to do, and it works well that way.

However light-hearted this game tries to be, it has some sad and depressing bits, mostly around Noel and his way of life. Whenever his theme song kicks-in, you can understand all his character without a word. And that takes me to another thing this game excels at: soundtrack. Now, I won't say it's better than XIII, because the first game has some awesome music as well, but I'll be damned if I don't give enough credit to this game's songs. Yeul's Theme, Noel's Theme, Wishes – you learn everything of these characters by just listening to these beautiful vocals. And I also love that the music took risks, like the Crazy Chocobo theme – I swear that thing is both the best and worst thing out of this game.

Confession time: I can't stop shipping Serah and Noel. I'm just so angry that Snow exists because it forbids this ship in the canon. I have one major complain about it, though: I can't help but notice that both Caius and Noel are infatuated by a fifteen-year-old. I can't discern how much of it is "loyalty beyond boundaries" or "I love her, I truly love her, like I'm in love with her" kind of love, but still, it bugs me a bit. Caius and Yeul's relationship feels more natural, given that he's her guardian, and he acts upon this role the whole game, until the end, where Noel clearly states that Yeul always came back because she wanted to stay by Caius's side. So it leaves me wondering. And Lightning Returns pretty much confirmed to us that Noel was in love with Yeul, which of COURSE I don't LIKE at ALL but I'll roll with it. I'm just glad that we got XIII-2 ending where Jason Marsden's voice breaks when he yells Serah's name. They gave me enough content for a thousand fics. Let's pretend that Noel's attitude in LR doesn't happen, ok?

You can hate this game. I can't blame you for it. Nobody wanted it, it doesn't connect well to its predecessor unless you read two novellas, and it forcefully leads us to Lightning Returns where, I can safely say, the plot goes to hell, almost literally. But this game exists, and it doesn't deserve half the hate it receives. If you play it it's because you enjoyed XIII (I highly doubt that you'll make yourself go through this suffering if you didn't like the first one – if you do, I just don't know why you hate yourself so much), and if you did, there's no way you're not going to see all the good things they added in this one. Enjoy it for what it is, and not for what it's not, or for what it could've been.

I sometimes wonder what could've happened if this game didn't have "Final Fantasy" on its cover. Because the time travel is intelligent and fun to play, the world-building around the Farseers and this bleak future is interesting and well made – the problem with this game is that it's a Final Fantasy and that it's a sequel to an already quite finished story. It feels like they forced a sequel, and maybe they did. But I, for once, am glad they did.

[thegeminisage]

What other characters (of DBH) you think people should appreciate more and why? I love read your opinions❤

omg anon pls thats so sweet

(if anybody wasn’t here for the last ask the first character was north & there’s a follow-up here)

alright just a “””quick””” (lol as if) little thing for each one bc it’s getting late & you’ve already been waiting on this for like an hour at the time i started typing. it’s probably gonna be long as fuck but the tl;dr is at the bottom

LUTHER:

they did luther so dirty…it was like david cage was playing “racist trope bingo” for his entire debut chapter…and then on top of that all he cares about is kara & alice, these two near-strangers, and it’s real easy to get him killed for them. in fact, in an ending where kara sacrifices herself at the border, she tells alice that luther will get her across the border, and after that, rose will take care of her. UM WHAT? don’t call ur PSN trophy “happy family” and then try to erase luther like that!! what does luther want? what are his hopes and dreams, his fears? nobody ever bothers to ask bc they’re too busy making ralph alice’s dad. and it’s not that i don’t like ralph - i do! but he threatened alice with a knife TWICE. after her previous dad’s bullshit, that’s the last thing she needs!!

here’s my take on luther: he says that what his life was before kara & alice doesn’t matter, and that’s because david cage doesn’t care about him. but imagine instead that luther remembers what he did (was forced to do) before he broke his programming. our luther is sweet and gentle and good, but zlatko forced him to use his strength as a weapon for LITERALLY tearing people apart. don’t you think luther regrets that? don’t you think he wishes he could take it back? perhaps his even temper and loving heart is a RESULT of those early memories: he’s seen the worst sides of anger and callousness, he’s had to be complicit in it. my feeling is that he never ever wants to be complicit in something like that again…it feels weird when he picks up a gun in the game because i think he would be even more of a staunch pacifist than josh?? i feel like even when luther does get annoyed or angry he’s so afraid of the harm he’s capable of doing he doesn’t even really let himself feel it And That’s Sad. he should be able to get annoyed at like a broken coffee maker or some shit without illogically worrying it will result in someone’s maiming or death?? maybe he is So Ready to throw himself on a grenade for kara and alice because yes, he does love them, but also he feels he has to redeem himself somehow, yk? he has to be willing to do absolutely WHATEVER it takes to be Good

they didn’t give luther any depth…he never got to speak to zlatko’s captives and apologize, he never got to express a feeling about kara potentially burning down the whole fucking nightmare house (with living androids inside, i might add) - would he have wished to save those androids? would he be glad their suffering was over? would he have motherfucking hearts in his eyes for kara single-handedly destroying his own personal hell? he deviated for alice, it was alice that made him say “ok, doing this to kids is where i literally can’t take it anymore” - don’t you think he’d be so retroactively terrified of all the terrible things that could have happened to her? 

like i truly don’t get why people make ralph alice’s dad when luther loves her so fucking much he’d bring her the moon if she asked - he’s the only person who loves her just as selflessly and unconditionally as kara does. she accepted him and wanted him to say goodnight their very first night together…as soon as he resisted his programming, she stopped being afraid of him, and it must be so amazing for him to finally have people around who don’t either fear him or try to control him…whether u ship him with kara or not (i do, everyone should - it’s one thing to HC kara as gay but i side-eye people who don’t wanna ship luther with anybody) you know he’s gotta cherish them so much

AMANDA:

ok look i know amanda is the antag to connor’s story but honestly she’s metal as FUCK. i was so fucking floored to not only learn the garden isn’t a garden but that amanda isn’t amanda…my first playthrough i was letting connor be just a lil bit deviant but whenever amanda would ask about it i would panic and lie…now i know it doesnt matter what you can say and you can be blatantly deviant right in front of her and she’s like ok Whatever BUT i was deeply shook to realize all my lying to her all along hadn’t meant a thing…she did in fact KNOW i was lying because she wasn’t real, she was living in connor’s brain and she could see all that shit he was doing

and also?? like, imagine you were made out of a dead person’s face and voice. we don’t know if amanda has a body, we don’t know if kamski actually liked what he created or thought it was creepy (like imagine if he and amanda were close and then she died…it’d be weird to see her like that), we don’t know if amanda CAN deviate like the androids…she’s living this half life potentially stuck in some garden and just doing what her program says like everybody else. but even though machines get all the sympathy in this game i very rarely ever see people stop and go “dude, is she ok…is someone controlling her can we help her” - amanda’s a lot like connor, she’s hunting down deviants but she’s not a human and she’s not alive yet so who’s pulling her strings?? can they be cut??? 

JOSH:

i’ll be honest i haven’t figured out what Angle i like best for josh the way i’ve got one for luther and north but he has such strong convictions i feel like they would have to stem from some past experience. everybody’s always arguing about simon vs north that nobody stops to give josh the attention he deserves…he’s part of the fantastic 4 too!! who is josh? what does he want? what is he afraid of? does he refuse to be violent for reasons like luther - did he hurt someone, deliberately or accidentally? (to a lesser extent, a pacifist markus who shoved leo can also follow this pattern - he gave into violence and thought he’d killed carl’s son, so he swore to do no more violence after that.) or: did he see someone else get hurt/get hurt himself? i know the backstory they give him in the gallery but tbh it’s very similar and not stand-out from most of the rest of the stuff we hear…

like, what made josh deviate? we literally never find out. i think it would be interesting tho if instead of just being the victim of violence, he was ordered to DO violence, and refused - maybe that’s why he got hurt. but i think his relationship WITH violence could be a complex thing for anyone who wanted to tackle it. we know why north prefers violence, why does josh detest it? (similarly, why does simon prefer safety over either approach? - but fandom gives him a lot of love and attention and tries to explain this, and nobody tries to explain it for josh.)

KARA & ALICE:

like…to a small extent…i know they’re main characters but i could write an essay just on why they didn’t get a fair shake either - constant victims of assault, little depth, kara got to choose what happened to her but not what kind of person she was gonna be like markus & connor, significantly less playtime than markus & connor, had NO influence on the big macro plot like markus & connor, i could go on…but definitely the worst for me is that everything about kara that made us love her (from the short), was ERASED - david took her memories and never made the slightest move towards kara wanting them back, or her being able to get them back. she’s six years old and he took all of her history from her, all of her agency!! i feel like translated into fic they can both become very flat - all kara cares about is protecting alice, and alice is constantly scared or hurt or needing to be taken care of, like a baby doll. granted that’s not actually far from the game’s canon, but it could have been MORE. kara had six entire years of experiences before she met alice - what makes alice special? who is kara without alice? 

i really wish we had been able to take a personality route with kara - her main superpower seems to be empathy and getting people on her side (ralph, jerrys, zlatko’s creatures), but she can also wave around a gun at anybody who gets near her baby. it would have been really interesting to explore two sides of that - to have a kara who is 1000% Done and ready for wholesale murder if it means surviving vs having a kara who can bring out the best in anyone, even if they seem like bad people at first. (imagine the influence you could have over alice - she would learn to be wary of strangers or be warm to them.) but instead the narrative is wishy-washy; you can’t teach alice anything, and in fact she serves as kara’s moral compass instead of the other way around - you wind up doing things like comforting the guy who broke kara multiple times and waving a gun at ralph (who like, shouldn’t have done that, but also isn’t 100% in control of his own facualities all the time). it would have been really interesting to see kara be able to influence her own fate more as well - the camp sections are shitty and should not exist but like maybe a kara who had spent the whole game yelling at everyone with a gun would have the ability unlocked to then rally the people inside, and who cared what connor and markus were doing, you know? 

but david doesn’t know how to write women so that’s not what we got - kara carried that entire franchise into reality and he totally screwed her over!!

TL;DR

luther was forced to do terrible things and that could explain a lot of his behavior if anybody cared, nobody ever wonders if amanda is being forced to obey programming like the rest of the machines or if she’s ok, josh’s relationship with violence could be very complex and we don’t know his motivation for refusing to participate in it the way we know north’s for preferring it, and david can’t write women so he shafted kara so fucking bad and it is an honest to god shame

(dbh meta tag)

[gaming-grandma]

Skyrim and Breath of the Wild: My Two Favorite Open World Games

While botw doesn’t really qualify as an RPG, it still has many elements similar to one that I feel like this comparison is fair. Even though a large gap of time, graphical style, aesthetics, music, and story splits the two in feel and theme, I still feel like both games plucked the same heartstrings for myself, albeit in different ways. This is a long, long essay type post with no pictures. I wrote this instead of doing a reading assignment, so enjoy.

Both of these games came to me at opportune times in my life. Skyrim came to me right in the middle of my ‘golden-days’ of highschool, where I had the absolute most amount of free time and no responsibilities. I delved into the game and devoured it whole, and when my brother would take it to uni with him I would spend hours into the night until 2, 3 AM pouring over the guidebook and analyzing tactics and build ideas and roleplay elements I could incorporate into it the second I got my hands on it again. I almost convinced my dad to buy me the game so I could play it while my brother was away, but for my own good and those of my grades I failed. I would play Skyrim until sunrise, and then until sunset again, and I would go on to make probably actually hundreds of characters, each with different back stories and approaches and methods of play and skills. They would all feel unique and I would treat each one like an experience and go new places, or even go to places I knew well on purpose to see if I could put new spins on it. The world was so open and ready to manipulate and bend to your will that I, the moldable teenager I was, was utterly bent on feeling every square inch of this game hundreds of times, like a baby given a new toy they have to shove in their mouth for hours. I’m not proud of the amount of time I spent on Skyrim, but I am glad I got to, and I’m proud of some of my accomplishments. I invented this method of infinite Magicka regeneration as long as you were in a circle of a certain spell by making myself a vampire Breton with 100% magicka absorb (which involved using a glitch allowing you to use the same constellation stone twice) and casting a banishment spell on myself with the perk that makes restoration affect vampires. I spent days perfecting this until the final product: I could walk into a dungeon and cast a circle of light on the floor, walk into it, and unleash untamed power and destruction and anything I wanted anywhere until the circle wore off, and I’d cast it again. When my brother walked in on my working on this his jaw kinda dropped.

 Similarly, I would go on to invent all sorts of my own clever elements to the game as I mold it to my will, like one of those shake lights you have to break in a bunch of places to get it to light up. I would play the game dry over and over. Graduation came, and I slowed down. Other things came into my life and I had other games to play, new experiences to mull over. New worlds to bend. I would always go back to Skyrim for a few days, trying to pick it up again and feel the same awe and excitement and pure wonder I did when it first came upon me, but I would eventually realize “I’ve done this exact same thing too many times now” whether it be the character, route, skills, or style, I’d done it already. To this day, it’s the only game I’ll actually pull out and play sometimes when I’m truly lost or have nothing to do or feel depressed or broken. It’ll always remind me of my youth and make me have something to look forward to again. I’ve still already done it all, but that doesn’t really matter sometimes does it? Sometimes it’s just about remembering and being a totally different and older person sitting in front of the screen that gives you the same experience and joy no matter what you’ve been through.

I don’t trust Bethesda with TES6 anymore. I don’t think it’ll work for me, and I don’t think it’ll be a great game. I’m excited for it, as I’m naturally inclined to be and I won’t shut myself up over it, but it won’t be the next Skyrim for me. It won’t make me a wide-eyed 14 year old again, nothing can do that. That doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it, I’m sure I will. But I don’t trust Bethesda’s methods as a company, and I don’t know if they’ll ever achieve what they did in my eyes when I was a kid. I’ll sit and listen to the music sometimes, and it’ll hit me in waves; the world, the awe, the excitement. The memories of coming home from big life events like finals or job interviews or trips and being able to relax and play it again. It almost sounds like an addiction at this point, and my brother would joke that I was, but it didn’t harm my social/professional life in any way, so I don’t think it was a true addiction.

Then I realize they don’t even have the same guy on music for TES6 as they did for morrowind/skyrim again and I remind myself it won’t be the one.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have a gullible hope that TES6 will do all those things to me again, though. But when it comes down to it, Skyrim was the biggest and most influential game on my life as a teenager. It was just a great game. I loved it, everything about it. That’s all there is to it. It’s one of those games I wish I could erase my memory of and do all over again.

And you’re wondering why the hell this essay is titled with BOTW, and here’s the connection; the only other game I truly would like to erase my memory for and experience again is Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. But this is for a totally different reason.

BOTW came into my life at a similarly critical point of my life in young adulthood; I was at the end of my community college career, having only 2 classes for the entire semester. I had a job, but I hated it and was depressed over it. I felt like I was going nowhere fast, and BOTW came out with the switch and I decided to buy into the hype and see what it was like. BOTW is an untamed love letter to everything that made Skyrim amazing to me, and yet it was totally new and unseen and alien. It was huge in scope, the awe and wonder it hit me with was the same as when I first realized how huge the province of Skyrim truly was; this was even bigger. The immersion and aesthetics were beautiful and appealed to me in ways skyrim never did, but I still fell in love with it and played this game up and down and inside out. I just checked and it’s still my #1 most played game on the switch nearly 2 years later at 120 hours. That’s not even 1/10th of how long I played Skyrim, and yet it managed to have that insane appeal to it that drove my young eyes wide in pure thrilling excitement. The minimalist music accompanied by beautiful sounds of nature reminded me of the frozen tundra of the mountain sides watching sunrises in the Throat of the World, or exploring the sun glazed Rift. None of this was actively in my mind as I played it, but I knew that the same heartstrings that Skyrim tugged on were being tangled with by this amazing game. As a Zelda game it blew me out of the water, and if I devoured Skyrim whole, then Breath of the Wild ate ME whole, because I was not in control of this world; I was merely a spectator trying to survive and watch it for as long as I could.

My biggest gripe once I finished the game to pieces that fall was that there was “nothing to do”. “There’s nothing to do!” I whine as I sit on my 120 shrine, 600 korok seed save file that had a full inventory of every best weapon and nearly every side quest completed save file. The DLC would then come out but I never felt compelled to play it or finish it. I’m tempted to today and that’s why I’m writing this. I did everything the game had to offer, or at least I thought, as I would late learn of lots of different activities I never got to finish, but I enjoyed it and I wouldn’t trade that time for any skyrim experience.

BOTW struggles to stand up to Skyrim’s depth, but its scope is ambitious and accomplishes its own voice without relying on anything ever created besides the actual Zelda franchise characters and lore. Skyrim, on the other hand, is an achievement of a long struggle as a gaming studio, the ultimate pinnacle of what Bethesda has learned in creating open world games. BOTW is most certainly an easily accessible game, and is not nearly as dated as the launch graphics of Skyrim, but I still have to give Skyrim the title of my favorite open world game, not purely because of the nostalgia, but because of the depth and variety you could get out of multiple playthroughs. BOTW only has 1 link, and link only has so many skills. You can use them to screw with the environment and do some crazy cool stuff, but nothing will top the pure blank canvas that was a new Skyrim file in my eyes. BOTW doubtlessly takes a hard 2nd place.

[whatsthecraicwithvideogames]

My Definitive Ranking Of All 21 Confidants in Persona 5 (yep it’s a list you just gotta deal)

Persona 5 has some of the best characters in any game I've ever played. Over the 100 hours spent in the game, a lot of these characters are significantly fleshed out and you feel a genuine bond with them. Some not so much. So, because the world needed it so much, here is my official 100% accurate ranking of all those characters. No debate needed. This is the only ranking you will ever need. Enjoy.

21 Yuuki Mishima

Mishima seems to think that just because he figured out that you were a Phantom Thief that he is entitled a spot in your friend group.No. GET YOUR OWN FRIENDS MISHIMA. There are plenty of characters less interesting than Mishima, but none that annoyed me more. It may be completely unjustified, but I just need him out of my life. More specifically, I need him out of my hotel room in Hawaii. Go home, Mishima. No one wants you here.

20 Toranosuke Yoshida

The main issue that afflicts the majority of the people at the bottom of the list is dullness and being underdeveloped. Yoshida happens to be the former. Maybe it's just because I'm young and ignorant, but when I'm trying to save the world from its inevitable ruin, I'm not really all that interested in a disgraced politician. Call me simple minded.

19 Chihaya Mifune

Now we come to the underdeveloped. Although it must be said that Chihaya could have had an amazing storyline that I just didn't see, as her character was so one note and uninteresting that I became equally uninterested in what was going on with her and I didn't pay a whole lot of attention. So I apologize if I've missed an amazing character, but she should have made a better impression sooner.

18 Shinya Oda

I have little feelings towards Shinya. He's a little higher on the list due to his storyline being a bit sympathetic but there isn't really much to his character other than the fact that he's a kid who's good at a video game. I was invested in making sure that he got fed, but that's about as far as it goes.

17 Munehisa Iwai

I am currently holding a bit of a grudge against Iwai at the minute, as he was the only confidant I didn't manage to max out on my new game plus run, basically meaning I wasted about an extra 70 hours BUT HEY. That's not his fault. He also suffers from side character dullness, but he gets bumped up the list a bit because we had a lot of weird dates together that I'll never forget. What other game allows you to go to the planetarium and an all you can eat buffet with a yakuza member? In Persona 5, even the boring characters have something to offer. Some more than others.

16 Igor

There isn't really much to say about Igor to be honest. Of all the people on this list, he’s the one you have the least opportunity to get to know, but there's just something about him. Maybe it's his nose? Or perhaps the eyebrows? Either way, I like his style and he managed to crawl up a few spaces.

15 Haru Okumura

We arrive at another character who took a little while to grow on me. Originally I thought she was just as boring as Makoto, but at least Haru has some semblance of a personality. She's awfully sweet and her storyline is very sympathetic. She struggles under the weight of her responsibility to run a company, and is conflicted by her arranged marriage to a man she has no interest in. I felt genuinely invested in making sure she was okay and safe, even if her metaverse outfit is a bit dumb. Nobody's perfect.

14 Ichiko Ohya

If you're not familiar with Ohya, just imagine a really incompetent Jessica Jones and you're pretty much there. Meaning, she's drunk all the time. She drinks away the guilt she harbours from losing her best friend on the job, but she still remains a fierce journalist who doesn't crack under pressure and is determined to find out the truth. She just happens to smell like gin while she's doing it.

13 Sae Niijima

Sae is cool in the most normal way that you'll find in Persona 5. She's a prosecutor, working against against all odds to become the top in her field. She may have been working slightly against us in the beginning, but she was a formidable foe; working with an open mind and a level head, she eventually began to believe our stories about our time with the Phantom Thieves. Sae is rad without needing a cool outfit (@Makoto) and we should all be more like her.

12 Makoto Niijima

I'm not even going to apologise. Makoto just barely made it above her much more impressive sister, and the only reason she did is because her whole deal in the metaverse is pretty badass. However, and let me say this loud for you Makoto, just because your persona is a motorcycle, DOES. NOT. MAKE. YOU. THE BOSS. Once she joins your team, every plan comes from her, even though I am the leader of the Phantom Thieves. I have tried really quite hard to understand why everybody loves Makoto so much. I even romanced her on my second playthrough so I could get a different perspective on her. It helped nothing. I really tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, but anywhere outside of the metaverse, she is dull and boring. Number 1 Waifu she is not, I'm afraid.

11 Hifumi Togo

Before Futaba came along, I was all set to romance Hifumi. To be fair I felt she was the best of a bad bunch, but let that not detract from her good qualities. She's a shogi master (or at least she thinks she is), and yet she still struggles with something that a lot of us can identify with: she is desperately trying to live up to her mother's unachievable high expectations. All Hifumi wants is to play shogi, and when she plays shogi, she plays shogi. She's a bit crazy but we love her anyway, and there's no one else I’d rather play shogi in a church with. Now just to figure out what shogi actually is…

10 Morgana

What would a JRPG be without a resident weird humanoid animal thing? Mediocre, that's what. Morgana is an integral part to the whole structure of the game, in more ways than one. Without him, our character would have no idea about how anything works in the Metaverse. Yes, he can be literally the most irritating presence on the planet whenever I'm trying to go out and Morgana is telling me to go to bed (YOU’RE NOT THE BOSS OF ME MORGANA), but deep down I know he's doing it out of love. Sometimes I wish Morgana loved me a little less but hey, you can't pick your family.

9 Goro Akechi

Okay, look. I know what you're thinking. Akechi is a little bit problematic. I know this. But he's just so adorable before all that! That's pretty much that only reason I have for having him so far up the list. His little face in his character profile is just so cute that you can't help but love him. Also the way he yells ‘PERSONAAAAAAGHHHH’ is badass and I can't hear it enough times. I forgive the Ace Detective of all crimes he has committed.

8 Futaba Sakura

A couple of months ago, Futaba would most likely have topped my list. She was the first girl I romanced in Persona 5. I had spent the whole game waiting for someone to come along and sweep me off my (digital) feet. It was beginning to look like I was going to have to settle with Hifumi- and then Futaba came along. She was a hacker and a gamer: my perfect waifu. Her romancing scenes are very sweet and I remained enamoured with her throughout my whole playthrough. After playing new game plus that changed. I went in with the intention of romancing someone different, and boy is Futaba different without those rose tinted glasses on. Her inability to do anything on her own is, while understandable, it's frustrating at best. She's still pretty high on the list though, as I'll never forget our time together, and also she's saved me countless times during combat that she will forever be elevated to God tier in the Metaverse. I owe her a debt I can never repay.

7 Tae Takemi

I won't lie to you. A lot of Takemi’s charm and appeal lies in her character design. The idea of a cool, punk rock doctor who supplies us with our own extreme healing products is great. Even better is that she's got the attitude to match. Confident in her skills but still dating enough to go rogue and have you be her guinea pig for new medicines she's developing, Takemi is a doctor you would want as a friend, but DEFINITELY not treating you. Unless you enjoy drinking mysterious liquids and passing out for hours on end. In which case be my guest.

6 Sadayo Kawakami

Ah, Kawakami. She sure does have it rough. Teacher by day, maid by night, she's a very sympathetic character, although she may not start out that way. At first glance she just seems like your typical extremely incompetent teacher- which she is. However the deeper into her storyline you go, the more you start to understand why she is the way she is. She ends up being quite a sweet person, not to mention her skills enable you to have more of the most important resource in Persona 5: time. Coincidentally, that's the one thing it takes for her to grow on you. Just give her a couple of days, and you'll learn to love her for who she is. A hot mess.

5 Sojiro Sakura

I don't think it’s an overstatement to say that the entire plot of the game would not have happened if not for Sojiro. For some unexplained reason, he agrees take in our main character who has just been put on parole, and it's that act that eventually brings our whole crew together. Even when he discovers that he has a phantom thief right under his roof, he sticks by you and even lets you hold meetings right there in his café. He goes from standoffish jerk to ‘dad we never had’ in a beautiful transformation that is one of the best progressions of a relationship in the game. If it wasn’t for his curious combination of coffee and curry for breakfast every morning, there's no way we could have completed our rehabilitation and saved the world from ruin. Sojiro literally saved the entire world (don't question it he totally did).

4 Ann Takamaki

Of all the characters on this list, Ann is the one that surprised me the most. She's pretty, blonde and a model. In video games, TV, movies; these things tend to be a placeholder for a personality, so really I expected nothing more from Ann: and boy did she prove me wrong. She is kind, loyal and is extremely strong willed. She suffered through sexual harassment at the hands of her teacher, her best friend's attempted suicide, and the her career as a model being sabotaged by a spiteful competitor. Through it all, however, she remains a positive force on the team and one of your characters closest friends from beginning to end. We all deserve someone like Ann in our lives.

3 Yusuke Kitagawa

Yusuke is another character that I love purely because every conversation with him is golden, particularly when leveling up your relationship with him. Throughout his journey to find himself as an artist, I joined him at an art exhibit, a romantic boat ride on a lake, and I posed as our Lord and Savior himself Jesus Christ on the crucifix as a way to inspire the creativity within Yusuke. Some may say that Yusuke’s best quality is his voice, but those people simply can't appreciate what he brings to the table and I simply have no time for them. He is a rare flower and I will defend him at every given opportunity.

2 Caroline and Justine (The Wardens)

Before starting my new game plus playthrough, these girls wouldn't have even been on this list, because I had no idea that they were even confidants until my second time around. The way you level up your confidant ranking with them is by fusing personas with a certain ability, per their request. The only thing I dislike about that is that you don't get to spend as much time with them as I'd like. They are both as entertaining as they are enigmatic, and though it may seem strange to have them so high up, everytime I brought them a new persona, they stole a little bit more of my heart. By force. They demanded I give it to them. But it still counts all the same.

1 Ryuji Sakamoto

I don't care what anyone says, this game would not be half as interesting or funny without Ryuji in it. There are a lot of people who would probably put Ryuji last on this list, due to his loud nature and penchant for yelling in public about how you and all your friends are the Phantom Thieves. But that's all part of his charm! Ryuji owes a lot of his likeability to his voice actor, Max Mittelman, as he somehow manages to be comically over the top while still remaining believable for his character. There are multiple times during the game where you'll have to pick who to hang out with at certain story moments, with the intention really being that you hang out with the girl you're romancing, but every single time I chose Ryuji. Every situation with him is comedy gold. Ryuji will forever be my number 1, and nobody will ever change my mind on that.

[afreakingdork]

Review: Resident Evil Village

So, just to set the stage here. I’m obsessed with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. I first played it when I was home sick and beat it within two days. I then immediately replayed it to go through the Zoe ending which, in retrospect, might not have been worth it. I then followed through my partner’s playthrough which I tangentially refer to as me playing through it and, finally, I replayed it in preparation for Village. I just love everything about it. I love the enclosed space of the Baker estate, I love the characters, and I even love the story despite the many silly plot holes. Keeping that in mind, I found Village to be alright. I was not immune to the big lady hype. I was really excited to be back as Ethan. If we’re talking about my playthrough specifically, I found starting the game to be a treasure. It really sets a great tone for the story and I loved seeing how everything had changed in three years with Mia and Ethan. My joy and curiosity were cut short when I got totally bodied by the lycans in the village. For whatever reason, I could not figure out that I was just supposed to run away from them and kept dying. It was so stressful I actually put the game down for a day after dying a few times because my nerves were shot. I moved through the game what I considered to be an average pace. I made sure to ‘turn’ all the rooms blue and my total run time ended up being just over 15 hours. Of that time, I probably spent at least 7 hours in Castle Dimitrescu, a little over an hour on each House Beneviento, Moreau’s Reservoir, and the Stronghold, and finally finishing pretty much a majority of the rest of the game at Heisenberg’s factory. 

Now that all the details of my gameplay are out of the way, my thoughts on the experience are below! 

Which brings me to my two biggest problems with the game; the first being pacing. The amount of time spent on Castle Dimitrescu vs. House Beneviento is staggering. I love House Beneviento. It’s the exact kind of enclosed space puzzles that I adored about Resi7. The baby is objectively one of the scariest things I’ve ever encountered in a video game and I was truly, heart racing, terrified playing it, but jumping into that after Castle Dimitrescu is a wild difference. Honestly, all four dominions don’t feel like they share the same game. There’s a wild tonality shift between each area that felt really disjointed. There’s also a ton of little nit-pick things I have, like why are pots breakable, but only at Castle Dimitrescu. I’m not talking about the item vases; I’m talking about regular pottery that can be broken in pretty much every room along with the windows. It’s so strange because every other area has the identical item crates so why is Castle Dimitrescu an exception? The assets for pottery from Castle Dimitrescu are used in other areas, but they are no longer breakable. It’s a weird consistency problem that just goes in line with the inconstant tone. 

I don’t know if this is common, but my other issue with the game is I genuinely believe that the game is out of order. I truly believe that they meant for Castle Dimitrescu to be the second to the last level, but after the Lady Dimitrescu hype, they moved her up in the game so everyone could experience her as soon as possible. Think about it; you spend hours wandering about Castle Dimitrescu and defeating the Lady all before you even get the dialogue from the Duke about who the four lords are and what they do. On your way out of Castle Dimitrescu you pick-up your first meat items before you’ve even unlocked Duke’s Kitchen. Resource-wise, House Beneviento and Moreau’s Resevoir have very few items to pick up in contrast with Castle Dimitrescu, which I posit is because they were meant to sequentially go first. The amount of ammo you pick up in Castle Dimitrescu is insane. It was so much, in fact, that a majority of the ammo I picked up in Castle Dimitrescu ended up not getting used until the Stronghold. From a visual standpoint, the Castle is such a visual focal point in the game, it seems wild to just knock it out and lock it up in the very beginning. Also, when you take into account the Castle’s logs about their Cadou experiments, they are the only location to not mention the Cadou. It’s almost as if they specifically had to take that phrase out, because you hadn’t learned what it was yet. You also don’t hear about Cadous in House Beneviento, but that makes more sense story-wise. As opposed to the other lords, Donna isn’t really experimenting on individuals with Cadous because she is instead experimenting with her hallucinatory power that was caused by the Cadou. The other lords are actively serving Mother Miranda by trying to create more viable subjects, while Donna is just mostly keeping to herself outside of the occasional overwhelming loneliness that pushes her to ‘call for playmates.’ My ideal order of the lords starts with Moreau because the Reservoir is the most linear of all the domains (and because I think blowing the House Beneviento load immediately would skew perception of what the game would be). You then tackle Beneviento next as a way to show the player how far this game’s reach can go. Then you enter the ever-looming Castle Dimitrescu and pick up all the details and ammo you need to then hit the Stronghold and then Heisenberg’s factory. Think about how well the game would have flowed, were you to just alter the order some. 

Outside of that, there are a ton of little gameplay aspects that are sloppy. When you switch between weapons, there is a roll animation that means 1. Ethan can have two right hands up at any given moment, or 2. Ethan can have 3 hands total if you switch from a one-handed weapon to a two-handed one. When you try to dock after using the boat, you have to wait for the sliding animation of the boat getting back to exactly the right position before you disembark. When you’re talking to Chris in Heisenberg’s factory the game has to cut to black to get Ethan to sit in a chair, when it didn’t have to do that when we were talking to Heisenberg when we first get to the factory. The button combination to block and then push back an enemy was extremely finicky if the enemy wasn’t in the 100% perfect position. There were so many times when I would block and then have the prompt pop-up to push back and I would execute and Ethan would just stand there because the enemy was, usually, too close to him, which is wild because you would think that’s exactly what you need to push them back. The sound effects are omnidirectional. What this means is that when Lady Dimitrescu is walking around it sounds like she is everywhere because no one programmed the sound to not go through the walls. This is something that is taken care of in Resi7 which makes it all the more baffling that it is not in 8. When I heard the growl of a lycan or the flapping of a samca I would spin around wildly because the sound was coming from all angles. It made especially the Stronghold super annoying to play.

This is a personal thing, but it really drove me crazy how many times Ethan just sat there and took attacks in cut scenes. So many times he was still holding a firearm in his right hand and doesn’t even try to aim while enemies (particularly Lady Dimitrescu) maim him. Another personal thing is what is up with Lady  Dimitrescu‘s daughters? There are detailed notes on how the Cadou and Mutamycete work differently on different individuals, but there are like no details on why the Daughters are bugs? It’s never specifically stated how Dimitrescu went about her experiments. We know it was an injectable, but was it Cadou? We know for a fact that the Cadou is large. Moreau was separately, surgically putting the Cadou into people’s bodies and then maybe injecting them with wolf blood. Donna split up her one Cadou between her dolls to puppet them and Heisenberg was using a Cadou-powered reactor which was quite large to power his Soldats. Also, as opposed to all other areas, Castle Dimitrescu is the only one with what can only be described as zombies (they’re actually called Moroaica which is like when was that established?) as the rejects of the injection, where everywhere else it’s lycans. Then, the three viable candidates of the injections turned into what looked like house flies and then reformed in a human-esque body, but is really a mass of flies for the Daughters?! At least they gave Alcina a blood disorder to explain her height and vampire tendencies, but the Daughters don’t get this treatment at all. It’s just bizarre. 

Something minor I haven’t stopped thinking about is just how enormous baby Rose is. There’s even throw-away dialogue at the Winters’ home about how she is outgrowing diapers that are meant for her age at an alarming rate. Even the maternity photos of Mia show her stomach is way bigger than the average person pregnant with a single child. It’s wild because nothing about this ever comes back in any way, shape, or form. Rose is just a big baby and it’s not a big deal.

Also, WHY IS CHRIS ON THE COVER AS A LYCAN?! 1. That never even happens and 2. Chris isn’t even in the game that much!! I get that we can’t put faceless Ethan on the cover, but why not a picture of... I don’t know... THE VILLAGE! IT’S ONLY IN THE TITLE FOR FUCK’S SAKE AND IT WORKED FINE ENOUGH FOR 7!

[lunargrrrl]

Life is Perfect - Life is Strange/Pitch Perfect AU

So, seeing as I’m currently waiting to register for both FanFic.net and AO3, I thought I’d post a quick preview of my first chapter (still some more to do) of the fic here. First fic I’ve written in MANY years so I am welcoming feedback with open arms!

Set in Acadia Bay (Aca-dia, get it?!), Beca Mitchell attends Barden Academy and longs for something more in life.

PP’s Beca Mitchell is essentially Chloe Price

PP’s Chloe Beale is essentially Rachel Amber

PP’s Aubrey Posen is essentially Victoria Chase

PP’s Jesse Swanson is essentially Eliot etc

I wrote this because both AmberPrice and Bechloe make me emotional. Plenty of fluff/angst/all the good stuff. This particular part is essentially Episode 1 from Life is Strange: Before the Storm, with some different takes on things/Beca Mitchell’s personality mixed with Chloe Price’s from Life is Strange etc.  For PP fans not familiar with Life is Strange: Before the Storm, it is an incredible game and I cannot recommend it enough. 100% recommend for the gameplay, emotions, and all the gay feels. You can watch a playthrough of Episode 1 on YouTube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6uCVUC7XCE Hopefully/maybe you’ll see the Beca Mitchell in Chloe Price and the Chloe Beale in Rachel Amber etc just like I did. TW: Alcohol/violence

Chapter 1: “I once said I was better off just being dead/but I didn’t know you yet”

The cool evening air whipped its way through her hair as Beca Mitchell put her hands in her pockets and left her front yard. It was April in Acadia Bay, and the Oregon evenings still got pretty cold. She didn’t care though; all that she cared about right now was that she was finally going to get to see Firewalk live. The music, the crowd, the atmosphere; Beca lived for music; and live music was one of the best things in the world. Her mom had called after her from the kitchen as she left the house; something about curfew and not being back too late. Beca didn’t care about that either. She’d found out about this “secret” gig online last minute and there was no way in hell she was going to miss it. No good bands ever seemed to roll up to Acadia Bay; just one of the many reasons Beca was determined to get out of there as soon as she could. Acadia Bay didn’t have anything to offer, and she felt like she didn’t have anything else to give in return. She missed her best friend (who had left for greener, more northern pastures 2 years earlier) and most of all, she missed her dad. Beca Mitchell was done with this town. The people, the lack of anything to do, Barden Academy... The gig tonight was going to be a brief escape. Firewalk were playing at the Old Mill; an abandoned building a bit outside of town where the only real way to get there was to follow the train tracks. Twigs crunched beneath her scuffed boots as the sky grew darker and the buildings became fewer. Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she knew it was either one of two people; her mom asking her when she was going to be home or her friend/kind-of-ex Jesse who seemed to text her every hour of every day. Beca and Jesse both enjoyed the same music and that was around about where Beca’s interest in him came to an end. That, and he was probably one of the only guys in Acadia Bay that didn’t make her want to immediately projectile vomit. They had fooled around together in the past and there was no doubt that Jesse was definitely still into Beca. It had been fun at the time and it was a good way for Beca to “test the waters” as such. From now on though, she was determined to try to keep him out of her pants. The only problem was, he was the only one that ever seemed to talk to her or have time for her. She did enjoy talking to him at times, mostly jabbing fun at his nerdish ways or bonding over music. She longed for something more than that though. She longed for someone more. Beca spent lunchtimes at Barden alone with her music blasting through her headphones and she could easily go a whole day without speaking to another student. She made exceptions for calling people out on their bullshit though, and she had no trouble sticking up for herself when the popular students made her feel like a freak; namely, queen bee Aubrey Posen and her followers Jessica and Ashley who worshipped the ground she walked on. Beca tried not to think much of it though as she knew girls like Aubrey picked on other students for one reason only; everyone (including Aubrey) wanted to be Chloe Beale. Well, either be her or be with her. Chloe was beautiful, mysterious, and popular. She excelled in every class and above all, she was a genuinely nice human being who was kind to every single person. Not that she’d ever had a chance to be nice to Beca that is; Beca made sure to walk with her headphones in to avoid human interaction at any cost. Even if people were supposedly amazing and nice and friendly just like Chloe Beale, who’s to say that one day they won’t just abandon you? Or mistreat you? Or disappear without a reason? Just like her dad and her old best friend did.   Her feet began to ache as she walked along the train tracks and the sky above her was fully dark now, but she could finally see some lights and hear the low hum of a hard and fast punk bass line which made Beca’s heart beat faster. She jogged forward and jumped over an old fence that definitely had some kind of “no trespassing” warning sign on it. She was finally there. There was a bonfire outside along with cars, bikes, and some rusty machinery. Two guys were fighting next to an RV and she heard glass smashing in the distance. Sketchy dudes hung around smoking outside and she saw a young drunk guy almost fall down the steps to the mill. “Shit...” Beca’s heart sunk. There was a bouncer by the door who had already seen her walking towards the place. “Isn’t it past your bedtime girl?” The towering bouncer called out to her and rolled his eyes. “Bedtime? There’s no bedtime when Firewalk are playing in my town. You’ve got to let me in, dude.” Beca tried to play it as cool as she possibly could, but she had no idea how she was going to make this work since she wasn’t 21 yet and she kind of looked like a teenage boy with long hair (Aubrey’s words) at the best of times. “Stop being cute and just split.” The bouncer crossed his arms and sighed at her. “I don’t do cute.” Being called cute was the last thing Beca needed right now; it added to her annoyance of not being able to see Firewalk. “I’ve been following this band for ages and I can handle myself. You’re an idiot for wasting your time guarding this place instead of seeing the band.”

“Look kid, I can’t protect you in there. Anything happens to you? It’s on me. I’m surprised the cops haven’t turned up to shut this thing down already.” The bouncer took a drag from his cigarette. “I don’t need looking after,” Beca started to square up to him; the situation right now probably looking ridiculous as the huge bouncer towered over her tiny self. “The only one that will need looking after is YOU if you don’t let me in there...like... right now.” She cringed at herself. Hard. But to her surprise, the bouncer stopped for a moment before laughing. Hard. “For real? Oh man, that’s the best thing I’ve heard all night.” He stepped back. “You’re alright kid. Go in. Knock yourself out... before you knock me out” He laughed and shook his head. Beca couldn’t believe her luck, but she wasn’t about to question it any time soon. She sauntered past him, impressed with herself and more pumped than ever. The air inside was hazy from cigarette smoke and the smell of beer engulfed her nostrils. Taking a beer from the ice bucket in the corner, she eyed up the place and saw the entrance to where the band was playing. Just as she was about to walk through the door to the main room, she was knocked backwards by a drunk guy moshing and she fell into someone behind her holding a beer. It spilt all over him. “Fuck...” Beca stepped back in surprise.

At first, the guy looked angry, looking at his friend and then back at Beca. He was tall, skinny, and stank of alcohol. 

“Hey hey... looks like you bumped into me little lady.” The two guys sneered at her. “Yep. My bad dude.” “You don’t know who I am, do you?” The skeevy guy blew cigarette smoke in her face.

“Nope. Don’t care either.” Beca pushed past them and away from the moshing crowd. She had a feeling it was best to get away from these guys ASAP, and it wasn’t as if her short ass could see anything from the back of the crowd anyway. 

“Let me know how that works out for you!” The mad dude with the beer called after her. She ignored him. “Bitch!”

She shrugged them off; there were more important matters at stake. She had a much better idea. She turned to walk up the wooden stairs in the corner of the building which led to the roof and rafters of the Old Mill above the crowd; she was about to get the best seat in the house. The previous song finished and the drum roll began of her favourite Firewalk song ever. She ran forward to the edge of the rotting floorboards on the top floor and looked down below at the stage. Lights flashed and the amplifiers were set to full; Beca was in heaven. She hung her legs over the edge and nodded her head to the music; letting it fill her ears and her veins with everything she loved. Beca cracked open the beer and savoured the taste as the cold liquid ran down her throat. She leant back and lay down to take it in the music fully. She closed her eyes.

“You spilled my beer, bitch.”

Beca frowned, seeing the two guys from downstairs standing over her demonically. Was this dude for real? There was no way her Firewalk experience was going to be interrupted for this. He followed her up here to start on her AGAIN about his stupid beer?

“You should be more careful, it’s a rough place.” Beca got up and crossed her arms at him. There was no way she had time for assholes like this. Not tonight.

“I don’t like your attitude.” The gross guy squared up to Beca, looking down at her.

“You don’t like my attitude?” Beca questioned him. “Then why don’t I show you how much it pisses me off when assholes like you get butthurt over a spilled beer...”

His friend nudged him. “I think she’s calling you out, dude.”

“She’s going to regret this. Every. Word.” He squared up closer to Beca, waving a skinny finger in her face. “I’m going to teach this little punk some manners.”

Beca started to panic; realising that behind her was the edge of the old wooden floorboards from where the top floor had fallen in. If he kept going, she’d fall down from quite a height and she could really do with that like, NOT happening right now.  Her heart raced.

“I’m serious man.” Beca panicked. “I really don’t wanna get angry. It won’t be pretty either... it won’t...” She backed up further, glancing behind her; very aware of how quickly the ledge was approaching.

He lifted his beer bottle and smashed it on the pillar in front of her.

Her breath hitched.

He grabbed her arm.

He held the razor-sharp broken bottle in front of her.

“Hey! Dickhead!”

The guy looked behind at the unknown voice who had shouted at him. He was distracted and now was Beca’s chance. She remembered the beer she’d been drinking was still in her hand, and strengthened her grip around it. Taking a deep breath, she swung it hard enough to knock it to his head and for him to let go of her arm. He fell to the floor. Before she could run, his friend swung a punch at her and got her right in the eye. Pain seared to her face but she didn’t care. She ran for it, covering her eye and bumping into the voice which had caused the distraction in the first place.

Beca uncovered her eye to look at her saviour. Bright blue eyes were looking right back at her with concern; her eye make-up fierce and her red hair tied up into a quiff and high ponytail. She was wearing almost all black, except for a single bright blue feather earring in her left ear which matched her eyes uncannily. Her jacket was killer, with amazing boots to match. That’s when she realised.

“Chloe?!”

Chloe looked at Beca then back at the guys. The dude Beca had knocked to the floor had started to get up.

“Come on!” Chloe grabbed Beca’s hand and began leading her down the steps. Chloe blew a sarcastic kiss to the guys who started on Beca, pulling her away with a purpose. Beca also went to blow them a kiss; giving them the middle finger instead.

What was happening right now? Was this real? Had Beca actually been knocked out by the skeevy dude earlier? Did she have a concussion? Was Chloe Beale actually at a Firewalk concert? Was she really been saved and swept away by Chloe Beale right now?

Before she knew it, she was downstairs in the mill and being led through the crowd by Chloe; their hands entwined. Chloe manoeuvred in and out of people, finally stopping and pulling Beca forwards when she was right at the front of the crowd. The band were right there in front of them on stage; loud, heavy music filled her ears and the buzz was so intense that it was almost overwhelming. She looked at Chloe who was jumping up and down and shouting the lyrics.

She couldn’t take her eyes off her.

[st33d]

Sandman

I’ve tried a lot of sandbox games over the past year. Mostly driven by acquiring a PC and leaving my Mac to its scheduled obsolescence. Playing games on a Mac is like playing Doom on a calculator. You celebrate that it works, it actually works, but it usually fails to be more than a proof of concept. When I switched back to a PC I discovered an entirely new realm of stubborn design. At least it wasn’t getting slower with each update and it deigned to play all manner of toys. Being quite turgid for roleplaying games I set about catching up with every RPG the Mac had denied me and checked out some more for good measure.

A common feature I discovered in many of these games is what I call the Back Breaker. You lift the game up high, then crash it down over your knee, broken. You are now free to explore the game how you choose - all of its secrets are laid bare. A lot of people get very upset at the inclusion of Back Breakers in what they hope will be a game with an ever ascending skill requirement. The notion that the audience is primarily there to explore is an insult - where, they ask, is the game? Personally I like this feature, I like that the end game is to become a god. This is why a lot of you will disagree with my assessments.

Skyrim

The sticking point for many people with this one is the combat. It’s dour grey-brown landscape invites a comparison to Dark Souls (I’ll get to that one in a bit) so people like Matt Lees will remark that Skyrim is an inferior counterpart. If you’re looking for tight combat in Skyrim, then like a 1st edition iPhone 5, you’re holding it wrong.

It insists you take it seriously over an unskippable introduction to the most tired hook that any roleplaying game can throw - the prison break. After shaking your screen as hard as it can with an assault by a dragon you are thrown into a scant and confusing interface in a land of ugly robotic people who are super fussy about what time they’re willing to sell things. On my 1st playthrough it got dark, so dark I couldn’t loot the mages I was killing for their expensive robes. I quit and rerolled a khajiit, purely because the wiki told me they had nightvision. It wasn’t until much later I discovered that there were many means of creating light, some of them causing fantastic AI behaviour (I nicknamed the spell Magelight; aggro-ball). Some short way into the terrible main quest line I thought, “sod this”, and went in search of the mage college to learn how to blow things up like some of the monsters were doing. This haphazard adventure was some of the best gameplay I’d ever encountered. A scared lowly girl-cat, picking her way through a hostile landscape in hope of learning real magic. Typical that when I finally arrived at the college I encountered the first blatant design wall in the shape of an unclimbable pillar that the college sat on. I barely had the mana to cast the spell that would prove me worthy to train there. A few hours later I was the archmage of the college. It would take many more hours before I mastered glitch-riding: taking the cereal box collision space of my horse and rubbing it against the prettiest parts of the scenery until it yielded to let me ride vertical. Out of the many hours of play the only real low point was getting turned into a vampire, I had to look up a wiki on how to cure it and reload many times because the quest to stop vampirism is broken.

There are many Back Breakers in Skyrim - I chose twin dremora lords that I chain-summoned to lock up the AI. But truly it is Skyrim’s pretty mountains and their unresolvable collision meshes that are the best. Only after hours of play does one develop an art for sniffing out details that defy edge-case-programming. Skyrim is a perfect mess. I know why they keep re-releasing it, they got lucky. One need only play the Dragonborn DLC to see Skyrim at its worst. It is a hard game to recommend, for it is not really a game, it is a thing both ugly and beautiful.

% out of 10

The Witcher 3

“Stick with it”, they say. Few games deserve such an epithet as this one. The controls are fiddly. One’s inventory is so dense with options that I didn’t realise that my potions refilled themselves until I’d nearly finished the game. After which my character sported full-body-priapism as I quaffed every decoction available. The turning point from hating this game to loving it was a side quest where a character caught Geralt off guard when being subject to the witcher’s advice - the townsfolk declared him a freak not because he was like Geralt, but because they were intolerant of homosexuals. I then got drawn further into the man’s drama. Every single story this game presents is trying to be Not So Simple. It’s a manifesto that leaks into the game’s bestiary that tells you not only what a monster likes for dinner, but your best tactics for killing it. But then, it’s Not So Simple as killing a monster, there is always another layer to each story.

It took at least three score hours of gameplay before I started skipping some of the many cutscenes. One of them was the infamous sex-on-a-stuffed-unicorn. It was a fault of the main storyline being so lackluster. I never really cared for Ciri, I found her even more fiddly to control than her tutor. But the extra layers that surround it: the Bloody Baron, stupidly shagging Keira Metz, the numerous detective scenes - they all carry this game. It is a shame it takes a few hours for it to reveal itself.

I must commend the map design for being sensible enough to be broken into several parts. You first explore a tutorial village before moving into war torn Velen and its haunting soundtrack. Here you work until you can gain passage to the north, the islands, and your home. Many sandboxes simply give you one map to conquer and contort it to stop you wandering into the final challenge. It’s refreshing to move on to a clean map, full of new challenges and surprises.

I couldn’t be arsed to play Gwent.

Trophy out of Archgriffin

Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This game has three stages: Delight, Depression, and Exploration.

Delight

Oh wow, there’s so many things to do. And so many things interact with one another. The sense of discovery comes not only from reaching new locations, but also finding new ways for elements to interact. Of course wood burns. Of course burning creates an updraft. Of course metal conducts electricity. Even after many hours of play there are still new things to find. So strange that the game is as dense as it is... empty.

Depression

Ugh, I don’t have a horse and I’m in yet another blank area. Ugh, I lack just enough stamina to climb this mountain, I’ll have to start all over again. Ugh, I can’t stay in this area because I take damage and the food I eat to stop it only lasts ten minutes. Ugh, I complained about all of this online and everyone keeps saying, “I don’t have a problem, the game works fine for me, Git Gud.” As often as I meet people who have played this game in excess of 100 hours, I also meet people who have played it for less than 10. If you are unlucky, if you don’t make the right connections, if you don’t stumble upon the right thing, this game is truly depressing. Made more so by the amount of people who cannot fathom why anyone would have trouble with the game. And yet there are many that do. It is not really that they need to be better at games, it is merely because they have not found the Back Breakers. Or worse, they do not appreciate them.

Exploration

After needless hours of collecting (grinding) you find yourself in possession of armour. You upgrade the armour again and again and suddenly the cloud of depression is lifted (if it was ever there). You are free to explore any edge of the island, you simply need to wear the right threads. At this stage of the game you have found many secrets but still keep finding more. Korok seeds, the OCD baiting puzzles, become a delight to find. It’s hard to remember the game ever being frustrating, but it remains in the back of my mind. Zelda BotW has a hump, a hump that some people will feel very aggrieved to surmount. Do not be surprised when you hear of someone bouncing off this game - it really is torture for people with precious little play time or patience.

Perhaps I should say something about the shrine dungeons or the 4 beast dungeons. They exist. There, I said it.

96 out of 120

Path of Exile

I tried this many years ago on my Mac using some sort of Windows executable wrapper. It did not work. I tried again when I got my new PC, I was underwhelmed. I tried yet again two weeks ago - holy shit this is the best action RPG I’ve ever played. The fact that it’s also free is sort of a weird blessing. You can only buy cosmetics and extra slots, so it even has a total lack of pay-to-win going for it. At least they get to keep expanding and updating it, which is probably why my recent play through was so smooth.

Diablo 2 is one of my all time favourites. It’s a concise loop of murder, loot, sell. But not without flaws. It has cruft, tedium, and imbalance in spades.

Path of Exile shuffles the formula and bets the whole thing on loot. Skills are loot. Money is loot (you pay with scrolls and item modifying tools, no gold). Equipment is loot. Yet playing it like Diablo is quite a silly thing to do - you get almost nothing from items you try to sell to vendors, so you no longer make trips back and forth with junk items. Leveling up is spent on a massive passive skill tree shared by all the classes, so the game sees no need to forestall leveling because it’s not the gatekeeper of mechanics. The items are. This occurs by way of gems that you socket into items, a bit like Diablo 2 and 3, but instead of boring damage bonuses you get entirely new mechanics. If you play with several characters in the same league they can share these items as well (providing they are strong enough to wield them). A mere ten levels into the game I had a full on rave of undead surrounding my witch character like she was the hottest new DJ at a halloween party.

I refrained from playing on hardcore because the game is online only and my internet sucks, but the game does boast a challenge that is mandatory hardcore. A multi-part dungeon that rewards you with a new section for your skill tree. Complete it without dying and you get to specialise. This is further complicated by deadly treasure rooms you must salvage keys from in order to unlock the many chests at the end. This was quite an exciting challenge with real stakes and real swearing when I let my greed get the better of me.

So what of its flaws? It takes a few goes to shake off the Diablo conditioning, so it’s not until you hit act 2 and try again from scratch that you figure out a strategy for building a character. The passive skill tree has a handy search feature and after I typed “minion” into it I was determined to carve a path through the best parts. If you don’t plan your route, you miss out on your mana rocketing back to full, your health restoring, or in my case: zombie disco. It’s online only and if you insist on playing over the weekend it can be a very choppy experience. The chat is a sewage pipe, a stream of edgelord douchebaggery. Go into the options and turn it off. I’ve yet to meet anyone that wants to form a party and every time I look at it I’m certain I don’t want to. There’s little to say of the story, it’s not bad though. I appreciate that it doesn’t try to get in the way like Diablo 3′s did. Perhaps if they had taken their loot thesis a step further they could have buried it in the game’s items. Then all this hoarding would have expanded into something like an archaeology dig. A missed opportunity.

O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O-O out of Shiny Armour

Shadow of Mordor

It’s quite cool and exciting to begin with. We’re in Mordor with lots of grim orcs and cool cutscenes, and... is that a bush? Oh okay, it just popped into existence. Nevermind. Well at least sneaking around is fun... my finger hurts a lot though because they want me to hold down the trigger button for ages. Yeah, ganking orcs is cool, it’s real fun shooting them in the head... oh, I have to do these crappy sword fights where I only press two buttons throughout the whole thing.

This game is like someone who seems fascinating and pretty from afar, but soon as you talk to them at length you begin to realise that they’re quite boring. They just say the same thing over and over. It’s a sausage party that gets slowly more off putting as I play. The developers don’t even seem to know that women exist outside of being trophies or reasons to be angry about stuff. The main draw in this game is apparently the battles with the orc leaders, which I found to be the most boring part of the game. I hated the sword combat and it kept dragging me back to it. After doing every arrow and dagger challenge I could find on the map I left the game and never played it again.

Gollum out of Mordor

Dark Souls

in my game Ending I structured the second level so that the player would step forward and get a slap to the face in the shape of an unfair death. This was my opening salvo, death is your education. So after persisting with Dark Souls I’m somewhat nonplussed. I get it. By repeatedly killing the player they form a mental map of the area. By repeatedly killing the player they encourage experimentation.

Except that this doesn’t always work. There has to be some investment on the behalf of the player or this magic completely fails. If the player feels like they can walk away, they will. And they do. It’s why I believe Dark Souls is such a hit with game reviewers, they are beholden to persist, and in doing so the game makes a believer of them.

I on the other hand couldn’t care less. A tedious march through the same janky fights to get to the same boss I still don’t understand is nothing more than that. I tried a variety of combat techniques, from trying to interrupt attacks, to blocking, to evading, all of it very unsatisfying. What little progress I made illuminated the premise, to internalise the map and hone my skills, but I was not impressed. I enjoyed not one second of it, I only endured. I experimented and I explored, but never was I delighted.

The very worst thing that Dark Souls has given us is complacency towards killing the player. I have heard designers remark that it didn’t matter that the player died in that spot in their game because Dark Souls kills the player all the time. It makes me want to shake them. Dark Souls does not kill you all the time, it kills you for a specific reason. See, I get it, I get Dark Souls, I just don’t enjoy the combat.

Soul out of Estus

Divinity Original Sin 2

I had the worst time with Divinity Original Sin. My two characters insisted on bickering and ruining every conversation - no matter how many times I reloaded a scene they would find a way to trash it. I eventually found myself locked out of every quest in the game and unable to fight my way past monsters higher than my level. I was playing the game to forget about a failed relationship where my ex would find excuses to start arguments. It was about as bad an experience playing a game I could ever hope for.

To say the sequel is an improvement is true. To a point. Somehow I’ve done it again and gotten trapped in an area with no quests to advance and monsters too powerful to fight past. I’ve muddled my way past some really irritating quests with obtuse requirements that I’m told can be solved in many ways. Except that when you fail to chase a particular lead it’s really frustrating to have to try a dozen different tactics to shake out a solution. It feels like I’ve picked up my PC and I’m rattling it over my head until the game agrees to let me move on. People keep telling me I can solve situations in dozens of ways, but all of them seem very specific and very intent on being a dick about it.

The combat is as amazing as it is chaotic. Environmental effects are at the fore, making it feel very D&D-like as you slow people down with oil and then ignite the oil and so on. The story I felt was okay, but the tone is all over the place, making it impossible to give a shit. Some nice touches with elves gaining visions from eating flesh and anyone can choose perks for talking to animals - but I found it more infuriating than cute after searching an entire island to solve a riddle, only to have a rat explain to me that I had to talk to some NPC again in order to shake, shake, shake out the solution. For every ounce of fun I got two ounces of frustration and misery.

1 out of 2

Dungeon World

Out of all the table top roleplaying games I’ve tried, this one was the most robust for casual play. Especially seeing as roleplayers are the most unreliable people on the planet. The resolution system it employs forces a plot twist every time you use it, so it’s impossible to plan anything. It’s not for everyone, you end up with a very gonzo story without the fiddly depth that other roleplaying games manage. On the other hand it’s a dream to be the Games Master and watch a story unfold instead of meticulously planning it and seeing a conclusion land that tears apart your ideas instead of adding to them. I wrote a full guide of how I run this game over here. The campaign is effectively a sandbox, I let people explore and fill in the map as we go - which is why I mention it. I’d like a computer game that approached it this way, not like Dwarf Fortress where a randomly generated overworld is dumped on you. Instead I’d like a piecemeal discovery of the world, one that reacts to the tensions you’ve created. Perhaps I’ll have to do it myself.

Story out of Players

[oumakokichi]

what's your opinion on the "ouma is komaeda 2.0" debate? or, more aptly put: why is ouma NOT komaeda 2.0

I’ve written various pointsabout why Ouma and Komaeda are extremely different as characters in previousmeta, but all of them were a long time ago, and I don’t think I’ve everactually written an entire post that was only dedicated to talking about thetwo of them. So this is actually a really, really good question, and one that I’vebeen meaning to respond to for a while.

In order to go into depth aboutwhy the two of them are so different as characters (and most importantly, whyOuma isn’t just “Komaeda 2.0” or a “purple Komaeda clone” or anything of thesort), I’ll have to talk about spoilers for all of ndrv3. So please only readif you’re comfortable with that!

I suppose the most importantpoint to start with is the fact that Ouma is a deliberate subversion of Komaeda’scharacter (and Junko’s too, for that matter). The reason why they seem similar on a surface level islargely because that’s what you’re supposed to think, especially at first.

Komaeda is not exactly theantagonist of sdr2, but he is a force of conflict, someone who deliberatelyhinders the plot and stirs up chaos whenever possible. Ouma crafts this kind ofpersona for himself and steps into the role, but he is ultimately acting thepart. By constantly telling the group at large that he’s a liar, warning themnot to trust him, refusing to participate in their efforts to cooperate, hesucceeds in making himself seem much more antagonistic and hostile than heactually is.

The most important note ofdifference, however, is that whereas Komaeda poses a very real threat to hisclassmates because he really, genuinely looks down on them, Ouma is only everacting. His bluff is never anything more than a bluff, and his primary goal isto put an end to the killing game and all the chaos, death, and sufferingassociated with it. From start to finish, every single action that he takesproves this; even when he acts seemingly hostile or chaotic by “refusing tocooperate,” he also emphasizes that he does what he does “for everyone’s sake,”such as his plan to try and make the group watch their motive videos in Chapter2.

Because Ouma is a liar, it’simportant to note that many of the things he does or says change drastically inperspective on a rewatch. Things which seemed incomprehensible or downrightmean or aggressive on a first playthrough shift quite a lot when going throughthe game again. Every single line he has can be scrutinized and analyzed—and it’smuch easier on a second playthrough to see that even when he sets himself up asthough he’s a Komaeda-like figure early on, his actions truly are aimed towardstrying to maintain the group’s safety or breaking out of the influence Monokumahas over them.

To put their differences evenfurther into perspective, Komaeda is legitimately a threat to the group’ssafety as early as Chapter 1 of sdr2. Despite setting himself up to seem like arelatively laid-back, easygoing person who was agreeable despite maybe being atad too self-deprecating, he completely crushes this impression of himself inthe Chapter 1 trial, revealing his true colors as well as the fact that he canand will put everyone’s lives at risk if it’s for the sake of “hope.”

He’s a dangerous idealist, asubversion of everything Naegi was in dr1 as well as the beginning of thefranchise’s point that “hope” and “despair” are two sides of the same coin, andthat both can be lethal when taken to extremes. His adherence to the ideal ofhope is just as fanatical as Junko’s adherence to despair, and that’s preciselywhy Komaeda is such a threat. His persistence and loyalty to that ideal and hisdesperate need to see hope “triumphover” despair make him a threat right off the bat, because he is honestly, 100%willing to sacrifice other people’s lives in order to obtain that ideal.

Not only that, but he’sincredibly smart. Not to the point of having SHSL Analysis the way Junko,Kamukura, and arguably Ouma himself are, but Komaeda is still extremely cunningand intelligent. Whatever his own plans don’t account for, he knows hisinexplicable luck will fill in the gaps for him, and that serves to make himeven more dangerous than he would be otherwise. He’s effective, because he cancreate plans and take incredible risks and gambles in order to put them inaction, knowing that the outcome will work out the way he wants when it wouldn’tfor any normal person.

Ouma is not an idealist of anysort. He doesn’t embody “hope” or “despair,” but instead represents ndrv3’scentral theme: “lies.” As a result, he rejects the “hope vs. despair” themes ofthe previous games right from the start. Even when he’s literally set up by theHope’s Peak remember light in Chapter 5 to be a “Junko 2.0” figure, the “leaderof the Remnants of Despair,” it’s clear that he had no interest whatsoever in aconcept or ideal like “despair.” A large part of ndrv3 Chapter 6 is actuallyspent clearing up the false accusations of Ouma being “Junko’s successor,”objectively proving that he had no such interests.

Unlike Komaeda, who trulybelieves that “hope” is equivalent with “talent” and that people without suchtalents are disposable, just “stepping stones” along the way to his goals, Oumahas no such biases against people, regardless of their talents or lack thereof.He’s a realist, rather than an idealist, someone who grasps the necessities ofparanoia and suspicion in the killing game right away but who also values humanlives more than abstract concepts like “hope,” “despair,” or “talent.”

Ouma’s motive video, found inhis room in Chapter 6, shows that he and DICE were nothing more than a band ofpranksters who enjoyed “laughable crimes,” and that their most important mottowas a taboo against killing others. While he will retaliate and have peoplekilled if push comes to shove, as Chapter 4 shows when Miu tried to kill him,it’s not a course of action he wants to take, and he’s never one to make thefirst move. The fact that he calls himself a pacifist in his FTEs with Saiharafurther supports this, as does the fact that he refrains from punching Momotauntil Momota takes a second swing athim in Chapter 4.

There’s no denying that Ouma isdefinitely not harmless or weak;clearly, he can and will fight back when his back is up against the wall. He’sa master strategist and not someone anyone should take lightly as an enemy. Buthe’s not someone who instigates violence for no reason, nor does he enjoy it.Even though it was arguably in self-defense, manipulating Miu and Gonta intogetting killed in Chapter 4 still took a toll on him. Violating his own mottowith DICE and getting people killed, regardless of the fact that it wasindirectly, was still something he hated, and the fact that he refused to takethe same course of action in Chapter 5 is proof of that.

It’s important to note toothat, as I mentioned earlier, Ouma very likely has some variation of SHSLAnalysis. Like Junko and Kamukura, he displays an uncanny knack for predictingthe behavior and outcome of his classmates and the situations around them, aswell as a distaste for boredom and stagnation. “Boredom” has been associatedwith “knowing everything before it happens” for some time now in the DRfranchise, ever since dr0, and many lines in Ouma’s dialogue seem to indicatethat he is, in fact, bored by how much he’s able to predict everything aroundhim.

The fact that he writes roughly300-or-so page script in Chapter 5 in the span of only two hours also backs upthis theory. His script was able to predict nearly every single one of hisclassmates’ lines and responses in the entire trial, and according to Momota,it featured “multi-branching routes.” Clearly, this sort of script would beoutside the realm of possibility for a normal person, so it follows that histalent must be related to it.

My main point is this: whereKomaeda leaves everything to the whims of chance and luck, knowing that it willpull through in the end for him, Ouma leaves nothing to luck. He analyzes, strategizes, and plans everythingout, and when one plan falls through, he immediately comes up with another oneon the spot in order to try and lessen the damages. He’s not a gambling man andunlikely to take any risks unless he’s 100% sure he can win—though he willcertainly bluff and claim that he’s “betting it all on the line.”

Even his FTEs with Saihara areproof of this: despite seeming like he’s playing games entirely based on chanceor luck, Ouma manipulates the outcome every step of the way, and eventuallyloses on purpose in order to let Saihara win. His ultimate advice is to “win agame without playing it,” which turns out to be exactly what Saihara and the othersurvivors do in order to put an end to the killing game once and for all inChapter 6. Where Komaeda would undoubtedly take any bet because he would knowfrom the start that he’d be the most likely to win it, Ouma refuses to play bythe rules of anyone else’s games but his own, and tries to find any loopholesor workarounds possible, even to the point of snatching the game away from thereal ringleader and trying to grind it to a halt in Chapter 5.

Ouma wants to seem like Komaedaon the surface: dangerous, chaotic, and willing to sacrifice the lives ofothers for his own needs. Not only does this make him seem like a bigger andbadder threat than he really is, which keeps his classmates on their toes andprevents them from getting complacent, but it also plays up the role that boththe ringleader and the audience very likely expected him to play. By actinglike such a huge, chaotic presence in the group, Ouma was able to disguise thefact that his real aim was to end the killing game itself until very late intoChapter 5.

I have no doubt the audience probablyloved the façade he put on, especiallyat first. The audience, the ringleader, and Monokuma himself all prioritizeanything at all that will make the killing game more exciting—and from theirperspective, a character who seems dedicated to showing up, playing thevillain, and ruining everyone’s efforts to get along and be friends andcooperate would be extremely entertaining. Such characters prevent the gamefrom getting “too boring,” just as Komaeda prevented the rest of the sdr2characters from fully cooperating with one another by constantly interferingwith them in order to “try and witness their hope” for himself.

But by playing into that roleand pretending to be a Komaeda-like character, it was the perfect way for Oumato downplay his real objectives. Acting like he was enjoying the killing gamewas, as he admits in Chapter 5 before his death, “a lie that he had to tellhimself in order to survive.” Without that lie in place, he wouldn’t have beenable to act the part, or to avoid attracting the ringleader’s attention muchearlier, as he points out as early as Chapter 2 that Monokuma always shows upto “torment” the group whenever they try to openly cooperate and rely on oneanother.

I understand why people assumethat their characters are similar, but Ouma and Komaeda are incredibly different once you scratchthe surface. Just as Komaeda was an intentional subversion of themes and motifsbrought up by Naegi in dr1, Ouma himself is a deliberate subversion of Komaeda’scharacter, as well as many of the themes found in the entire Hope’s Peak arc,such as the “hope vs. despair” dichotomy.

Trying to say that he’s “theexact same character” or “just a rehash” misses the point entirely, and ignoresthe fact that viewing Ouma through the same lens as Komaeda glosses over manyof the actions he takes in-game in the later chapters. As an example, let’stake the fact that they both choose to commit suicide in Chapter 5 of theirrespective games.

Komaeda engineers his own deaththrough a method entirely of his own choosing, in order to “expose the traitor”among their group and further his own goal of witnessing hope win out overdespair. Ouma manipulates the circumstances of his own death in Chapter 5 ofndrv3, but not by choice; he didn’t foresee being poisoned by Maki because hegenuinely believed that even she wouldn’t want to continue the killing gameanymore after seeing “the truth of the outside world,” and he didn’t know themeans by which the ringleader would manipulate her into it. Where Komaeda’sdeath was arguably aimed to punish his classmates for their involvement withSHSL Despair, Ouma died intentionally in order to try and strike back at thereal ringleader, and in order to let Maki live and let Momota have a chance tosay his farewells with the rest of their classmates.

Just an example like this helpsto highlight the differences between them because once again, proving that ifyou scratch the surface of their actions and dialogue, they’re very differentcharacters with very different mindsets and objectives. Although their behavioris somewhat similar at times, they do what they do for very different reasons.

I feel that it’s important tonote that DR has always been a franchise based on the subversion ofpreestablished tropes and expectations. Dr1 took a handful of clichés andtropes and played around with them, sdr2 took what dr1 had to offer and subvertedupon that, and ndrv3 took both games and went even further with the subversion.

Trying to act like a charactercan’t be interesting or unique in their own right just because they havesurface-level similarities seems a pity to me, because many characters in DRhave these surface-level similarities with one another, many of which areaddressed and then turned on their head in the main story. Komaeda and Ouma areboth interesting characters in their own right, and while they certainly doseem to have a lot in common initially, I would say their differences vastlyoutweigh their similarities by the end.

This has gotten fairly long, soI’ll leave it at this for now. This was a really excellent question, so I hopeI’ve managed to express my thoughts on the matter. Thank you for asking, anon!

[shiredwarf]

alright, so mea impressions

there’s a lot of rambling behind the cut but have a quick tl;dr

is mea as good as the original mass effect series: nope did that in any way impact my enjoyment of or love for it: NOPE!

there might be very slight spoilers behind the cut, nothing major though (especially main plot wise), just general stuff and a few screenshots but i blurred the spoilery stuff!

gonna start off with

Stuff I didn’t like: - i think my main complaint is that it could have been so much better. i love it quite a lot already but i feel like there was so much potential that was wasted - ah the bugs. so i didn’t experience anything major apart from one side quest flag malfunctioning and suddenly people were shooting at me and i was like ‘BUT I HELPED YOU’ and they were like ‘i don’t know her’. and there are just a few tiny things that don’t really matter that much in gameplay but just started to annoy me quite a lot as time went on. Like broken *new* notifications in my inventory that wouldn’t go away. Or broken sound flags that made you hear those horrible animal growling noises even though you were inside a cave and the thing was on the other side of the mountain. oh and SAM’s constant “this area can be mined for resources” or “pathfinder the environmental conditions have changed” YES I KNOW YOU’VE TOLD ME EVRY SINGLE TIME I’VE MOVED AWAY FROM THE LAMPLIGHT WHICH HAS HAPPENED ABOUT 20 TIMES IN THE LAST MINUTE SO SHUT UP. now that’s not a bug but you would have thought someone testing the game would have told them to turn that off after the first few times because omg it is annoying - now this wasn’t really an issue it was more something that disappointed me: detail and lack of diversity on the planets. Don’t get me wrong, the individual planets with their own specific environments were great but like if you look at DAI and the scenery programming, MEA is lacking in that regard. the thing is though, i’m not sure if it was maybe done on purpose. now at the end of the game i can totally see why the same animal life was present on every planet  because it does make sense story wise. But it was never mentioned in-game so i don’t know if that’s just a happy coincidence and i’m reading too much into it or not^^

and moving on to the stuff i did like:

Storyline:

so listen i was hyped from the moment i heard we’d go explore a new galaxy! That’s exactly my thing! Exploring, science, curiosity, that human need to push beyond known boundaries and of course lots and lots of drama. In short: mass effect^^ It’s starts of really great as well and while it does take a while for more complex issues to reveal themselves I enjoyed the storyline a lot. I know there were a lot of concerns about the whole ‘colonization’ thing before the release and I can fully understand that. there were a few moments during the game when I was like ‘right… but…. Maybe ask the indigenous species first???’ turns out they DO ask them but you only know that if you read the codex/post-mission emails so maybe that should have been more carefully addressed. I like that not all questions are answered, that it’s pretty clear at the end of the game that this will continue but I’m glad they answered one of my burning “BUT WHERE ARE THE ***” questions in the epilogue. And without going too much into details I love the throwbacks and connections to the original series and I want mea2 rn to find out what was really going on! (that being said I’m still destroyed over the recording of *** talking about my two fave space dumbs from the original series after the last unlocked memory :3) additionally I loved how dark it got sometimes, darker than the original trilogy and I’m so so, so happy everyone got to swear as much as they wanted :’)  so storyline 8/10 cause some stuff was a bit rushed and I wish they’d given some races (like the turians) more spotlight (though I’m happy the krogan are so prominently featured, they deserve that!)

Gameplay mechanics:

I LOVED THE GAMEPLAY MECHANICS! LOVED THEM SO MUCH! You can run without gasping for breath after five steps, JETPACKS!, tactical cloaks, and building your own character specification without having to decide on a class at the very beginning! (now to be fair, unlike da I’m mostly going for the soldier specs in mass effect cause I love to snipe everything from far, far away. So for most of the game the only powers I used were one biotic close combat one for when enemies got too close, the tactical cloak and grenades against the big stuff^^) I also loved the new morality system! I can finally throw some sarcasm and “renegade” options into my mostly paragon gameplay without having to worry about impacting my ability to, at some point, convince someone not to make a horrible mistake like jumping off a cliff :)))))) surprisingly, I even started to like the nomad and driving around H-074c was so calming! So yeah, gameplay 10/10

Companions:

Loved the new team! Not as much as in the original series but I think it’s unfair to compare the crews seeing as I spent god knows how many hours with the original and only one playthrough with the new one. The loyalty missions were great and the journey from acquaintances to friends was very smooth and natural and I appreciate that most of them have relationships outside the Tempest crew too. Makes them seem much more alive and real. Before finishing this off just a few of my faves: Jaal: I think the reason I love him so much is because he’s got by far the most believable and profound emotional reactions to what’s going on. Also, he’s blue and sad and weird looking and we all know I apparently have a thing for weird, sad, blue aliens. Anyway, his character development is great, his personal journey too and it’s great to see a very non-stereotypical portrayal of the rough and though male resistance fighter. (I chose him as romance option during this playthrough and I’m not regretting it. Though I feel like my ryder will spend the rest of her life going “OMG JAAL YOU CAN’T JUST SAY STUFF LIKE THAT IN FRONT OF PEOPLE!” while blushing^^) Peebee: Defiantly my romance choice for my next playthrough! She’s just so lovely and deserves someone to stay with her and care about her. (I still regret not stopping the flirting soon enough so in the end she did the whole propositioning thing and I had to turn her down and that was horrible :(  ) Vetra: VETRA IS AWESOME! so awesome! Also my favourite away-team-member cause she’s like… invincible??? I think out of the crew she might have had one of the bigger personal character arcs in terms of personal growth and letting people in and her relationship with her ***. and surprisingly my absolute fave is: Drack:  So shepard got to adopt a dozen krogan babies with garrus, ryder gets adopted by a krogan grandad and is 100% fine with it. Apart from being tied for 2nd place (with jaal) in my away-team-member preference list he’s just such a sweetheart while still remaining a true krogan at heart. He also completely blindsided me with one of the most profound lines in any mass effect game and I’m still reeling. (He also kind of adopted Vetra but don’t tell her, she’ll get embaressed!). so yeah, love my krogan grandad :3 companions: 9/10 because there is no way cora is straight and I didn’t get to punch jill in the face and scott wasn’t around nearly enough^^ i goes without saying that i love my awkward ryder twin right?????

in conclusion:

I was a bit disappointed at first and I understand why others might be disappointed by mea as well especially since people were badmouthing it even before it got released latching onto every flaw. But honestly mass effect was so good and set the standard so high, there was very little chance mea would be able to live up to the enormous hype, the expectations and the excitement that has been developing over the past years. So I feel like it’s being judged unfairly by constantly being compared to the original instead of treating it as a standalone game which it really is. It is set in the mass effect universe and you’ve got all those familiar and well-loved elements and races but there are surprisingly little references to the original trilogy which should give you an idea about what they were trying to do with mea. This was not supposed to be a sequel. This is supposed to set off a new storyline in this universe and while the basics are the same it is different in many aspects. so instead of asking whether it was as good or better than mass effect (and the answer to that was always going to be no because mass effect is THE game for me. nothing will ever compare) what i should be asking is: is it an enjoyable game worth the time and money i spent on it. And personally, I’d say abso-fucking-lutely! It fun, it’s entertaining, it’s huge, it’s got a new array of lovable and diverse characters, it’s got some really profound stuff in there and most importantly it restores your faith in humanity a tiny bit and makes you dream of faraway stars and all those discoveries still waiting for us the way mass effect games tend to do :)

And just to round this off, have a few of my favourite bits:

[when you gotta clone yourself to properly express just how done you are]

[when your Krogan grandad is about to fuck someone up and the poor bloke doesn’t even know it yet!]

[Drack being Drack]

AND THE DA REFERENCES IN THE POST MAIN GAME THANK-YOU-MESSAGES!!!!

i identify a lot with the ryder plant. I too am not viable.

And finally this beautiful quote and shot:

“We turned our backs upon a dwindling star, to chase a dawn beyond our childhood’s end.”

[makoparkingonly]

MASS EFFECT ANDROMEDAAAAAAAA

This is gonna be a rambly mess of feelings because I played end game last night and have a lot of thoughts. I’m using a cut but if you’re reading on mobile just scroll really fast past this post.

Okay first of all, I played Sara Shepard, kept the default name (you get to hear it in dialogue!!!!) and default appearance (during the preview I was hesitant to waste even a second of play time on altering my appearance). I romanced Jaal because I really loved his emotional dialogue. I saved the salarian pathfinder instead of the krogan (I thought Drack was gonna kill me). I put colonies on every world, got everything up to 100% viability, and had a planet named after me. I saved Sloane but I couldn’t shoot Reyes in the back.

I got everyone but Peebee loyal because no where on the description box does it tell you how important getting remtech out of the vaults is. By the time I realized I needed it to trigger her mission, I had already cleared the vault and couldn’t go back in. So if you’re reading this and you haven’t cleared all the vaults yet, GET THE REMTECH. 

This is going to be so rambly and out of order but I just found the Jaal sex scene on youtube so let’s start with that. I try really hard not to judge other people’s player creations but this one is . . . not great. Please pay no attention to that. 

It’s like they tried to recreate Amy Schumer and could only work with what Bioware gave them. It’s uncanny valley for sure. 

I actually really like that the romances are so different??? That it’s not “and here you’ll get a romance scene and of course before endgame you’ll have the sex” and the formula from the first three games. I like that this was just a random date on Aya that ended up being, like, the ultimate romance moment of the game. It’s frickin great. 

I’ve since watched the Suvi romance just for some contrast and because she’s the one I’m least likely to want to romance on my own playthrough. Though Ryder has some HILARIOUSLY awkward dialogue (“I like you you’re pretty I like seeing you on the bridge.” Kallo: “kill. me. now.”) that romance doesn’t do nearly as much for me and lacks any semblance of the scorching alien sex scene you get with Jaal. No one takes their clothes off, for starters, and you definitely don’t get boobs and alien oral sex.  

So anyway: romance in this game is great. I’m pretty sure I could have romanced Vetra as a lady, because she was responsive and didn’t shut me down, and I really want to try that. Obviously Liam. Cora shot me down, and so did Lexi. Kallo and Drack weren’t even options, though I’d only romance Drack for the novelty of it. Gil’s only an option for dudes. 

Okay let’s talk about ENDGAME because I just played it and it’s still fresh in my mind. The endgame of Andromeda is what Mass Effect 3 should have been. YOUR WHOLE SQUAD SHOWS UP. ALL OF THEM ARE THERE IN THE FINAL BATTLE and since you can’t direct anyone it doesn’t matter that you can’t direct them either. As you’re charging through the forest in the Nomad all of the various fleets show up. I literally cried when Sloane showed up to make sure that everyone knew that Kadara had helped. 

SPEAKING OF KADARA let’s talk about open world. I’m really grateful that I spent the week before this playing Dragon Age because the maps in Andromeda are basically identical, only space age. It also employed the same method of highlighting loot (only they call it crates). So it’s nice that in the vaults where you need a path, you get the path of previous Mass Effect missions, but you still get open world exploring. 

THE VAULT PUZZLES lol so many videos on youtube of people bitterly complaining about the vault puzzles, I thought they were going to be murderously hard. One guy spent literally two hours trying to figure out a puzzle that you couldn’t use the vault key on. I finished it in under two minutes. It’s basically sudoku with shapes instead of numbers and oddly shaped boxes but it’s still sudoku. I got that. I did not have nearly as much luck with knowing which console to interact with at which time, but you know whaaaatever.

BACK TO FEELINGS also I had a lot of siblings feelings about Scott, and a ton of feelings about the fact that I, the sister, saved him, the brother. It was like Jill of the Jungle all over again. I want to play as male Ryder but I also don’t want to lose that feeling ever. 

I was playing on easy and the endgame was actually super easy. I mean yeah and architect showed up AND nullifiers AND observers AND whatever the ones that make other ones are called, but honestly with your whole squad there it barely mattered? By the time I figured out what Scott was doing and actually paid attention to the architect they’d already mostly taken it down themselves. 

It was just nice to feel like all of the work I’d put into the galaxy paid off. That all the other pathfinders showed up and had all their moments. That you fought beside salarians and turians and also the angara. 

WHICH ALSO OKAY so when you get to choose a representative to the Nexus you can choose the Moshae??? Love that that’s an option. 

AND back to combat I really miss the power wheel, even though this made combat go a lot faster. I didn’t like that I couldn’t direct my squad powers, so combos largely happened by accident, or I made my own with my powers. I never could figure out the mechanics of the favorite profiles, let alone how to switch on the fly like they showed in the combat video. Nor could I find any guide online. 60 hours of game play and I couldn’t figure it out. So much for that being intuitive, Bioware. BUT, I like that there’s finally a reason that Shepard I mean Ryder has so many extra powers and abilities, and Sara teaching Sam how to be a real boy was really cute. ALSO CUTE: THE SPACE HAMSTER. 

And idk I just started thinking about the throwbacks to ME3, the fact that you meet ex-Cerberus scientists in the wilds of Kadara and Conrad Verner’s sister in the port. That Zaeed Massani’s son is in the desert of Eos. That fallout from the Overlord Project follows you to Andromeda. There are so many interesting easter eggs for those who played the original trilogy but this also was really accessible for anyone who’s never played the originals. 

Not related: I had some HILARIOUS bugs in later stages. My ship wouldn’t load sometimes and I found this out because I went up the stairs to the conference center and literally fell out of the spaceship into space because the floor hadn’t loaded. Related: I like that falling off shit doesn’t get you the dreaded death music, that you just pop back up right next to whatever you fell off. 

I like some of the social issues it touched on. The trans woman you meet in the colony on Eos who came to Andromeda to start her new life as a woman. Gil deciding to have a baby with his friend Jill. 

COLONIZATION BABIES. Y’all I want to read (or write) the fic where plural marriages are a thing, and Sara proposes to everyone (including Drack) on the Tempest to make sure they always get to stay together and also because they’re all pretty conveniently in love with each other in various ways because what they really love and want to keep doing is exploring and pathfinding. I want one of them thinking maybe I want to colonize and farming for a bit and being okay at it but ultimately finding it boring as shit so they come back and they’re given a bit of shit for it but it’s okay. I want Sara having Liam’s baby but sleeping in Jaal’s bed most nights while Liam hangs out in Peebee’s escape pod. I want Cora having Gil’s second baby and letting him name it whatever he wants, which is how she ends up with a child named after a drive coil. I want them having petty fights about who left crumbs on the counter in the galley that Lexi tries to mediate. I want them to go to port thinking they want nothing more than to not see each other for a few days and then to end up back in each others presence in an hour because they had a thought they couldn’t wait to share. This may or may not have been influenced by the latest book in the Expansion series, but that’s a different post. 

Because, finally, I LOVE THIS CREW. I started this game off just so unsure of Cora and her talking about what a poooowerful biotic she is and how she scared everyone in the Milky Way and blah blah blah but by the time I finished her loyalty mission I was literally crying about how much I loved her. Last night after endgame I finally finished all of the piddly requests and requirements to make movie night happen and it honestly was the best fucking thing to end a game on. Next play through I’m waiting to do that the very last thing, because it felt like the end of the party at the Citadel DLC, everyone sitting around on a couch and laughing and just being their perfect selves. 

In conclusion: 

Detractors: no power wheel, no squad powers, actually wonky facial animation, some game glitches (I could never complete a mission on the Nexus because I’d already scanned a thing and it kept telling me I hadn’t.) (previously mentioned falling through the floor of my ship)

Positive: heavy on feelings, so many feelings, all of the feelings, my crew, INTERESTING AS FUCK stories, choices that matter, endgame appearances by everyone, twin feelings, open world exploring

EDITED TO ADD: OMFG THE QUARIANS. WE GONNA GET QUARIANS IN ANDROMEDA 2. 

[carnelianwings]

In a scale of 1 to 100 how much do you love tales of series?

I’m not sure 100 is high enough to describe my love for Tales.  I’ve loved the series ever since Symphonia’s localization was released on GameCube back in 2004.  One of my fondest memories of this series was spending Labor Day Weekend 2004 marathoning most of the second half of Symphonia.  I remember trying to do Shadow’s dungeon at absurd-o-clock in the morning that weekend because our Genius wanted us to do the side quest so we could fight Maxwell and he could get Meteor Swarm (lol).

I also remember playing the Destiny PS2 remake, and all the fun times my friends teased me because I’d laid eyes on Leon and went “Dibs”, lol.  (I also remember tearing up watching him die.)  And also making my friends groan any time I mention Chelsea from that same game, because me spamming Hien was A Thing I did all game, so our combats typically sounded something like *Stahn screams something*  HIEN HIEN HIEN HIEN!  *Rutee casts a spell*

I remember playing Vesperia on the 360, and me and my 2 friends utterly breaking that game - we were doing dungeons at 1 damage and killing normal monsters with Fatal Strikes once that was available, and cheesing Alexei with Rita’s Fireball spam, and our Estelle taunting to boost our Overlimit Gauge because I (as Rita) and our Yuri had the entire encounter totally locked down.  And then playing the PS3 version and having a blast with Patty, while our Yuri swapped to Flynn, and our Estelle (now that I was helping with support via Patty’s Random Spell artes) was having fun stabbing things.  Vesperia would also mark the first time the 3 of us (having played together since Symphonia) would break 100 Grade for a Boss fight.  I want to say it was even one of the Zagi encounters, lol.

I remember playing Graces f, unfortunately solo (because we were all older by then and schedules weren’t quite working out), but really enjoying Hubert and his Rolling Thunderbolt, and, really how he had a little bit of everything (ranged, spells, melee, healing).  And having to do a few critical boss fights solo because the AI doesn’t know the meaning of “DOOOOOOOODGE!!!”  Like She-Who-Kyoto-Laughs-At-Your-Pain, also known as Emeraude.  I hated that fight so much.  But hey, I did it.  As Hubert.  On Hard.  First playthrough.  Oh, and getting my ass kicked repeatedly as Cheria in that stupid Parasite boss battle.  Honestly, Graces f is actually one of the games I want to revisit because . . .

And then there was Zestiria (seriously, just read this line the same way Sorey just says “And then there’s Mikleo”, because that’s literally about how I feel about this game), the game that literally shoved a whole lot of stuff down a place or two on my various favorites lists, and had me do a whole lot of New Things.  Like make this Tumblr.  And stream (once in a blue moon).  And record videos of myself playing on some absurd difficulty.  Given how closely this game plays (combat-wise) to Graces, I really would love to go back to Graces with all these skills I’ve taken the time to work at and learn (360 hours and counting for time spent on Zestiria . . .) and see how badly I can destroy the game.  Maybe even work my way up to Chaos on a first play through, lol.  Graces will let you.  XD

I mean, this is basically a highlights reel of my 13 years of playing Tales.  No, I was never really visible in the fandom until now, but man, I’ve spent hundreds of hours on this game series, and the series, as a whole, has been my favorite ever since I played Symphonia.  This is a game series I’ve laughed and cried with for over a decade, and it’s gotten me through some rough patches in life too, so I’m not sure if rating it as 100/100 or even 100000000/100 is sufficient to represent just how much I love this series.

[casualarsonist]

RDR2 Last Impressions

Click here for my formal review of the game:

https://casualarsonist.tumblr.com/post/179824865660/red-dead-redemption-2-review-ps4

Full disclosure, I haven’t finished RDR2 yet. I’ve put close to eighy hours into the thing, at a guess, and I still haven’t finished it. There was a time I was hoping to 100% it, and while that’s not an impossible task, it is exceedingly time consuming, and not something that I’m ever likely going to care enough to do. The last few hours of my time were spent just begging for it to end, and failing that, I simply reached the point where I finally stopped caring about finding everything, put down the control, and left. Late into my run, once everything in the game finally opened up, I did feel a gentle nudge that gave me the energy where there was none before to keep pursuing the side-activities and challenges. But everything in the game only opens up in the epilogue - the last eight of nearly one hundred hours, once the main story has been completed. It’s unprecedented, in my experience. And it’s impressive, if frustrating. But it’s also incredibly draining to waste so much time trying to figure out ways to do things that you don’t realise can’t be done until after the main part of the game is effectively finished. And by the time the game comes round to letting you have free-reign, it’s been going on far too long for you to care anymore. 

My final impressions of Red Dead Redemption 2 are...mixed. The main issue being that the problems I identified much earlier in my playthrough never resolved themselves, and only became more frustrating as I was exposed to them again and again. My horse never stopped veering into trees, or into rocks, or into people in towns and giving me a wanted level. I never really managed to completely master the temperamental, complicated, and unresponsive controls. The game never stopped feeling like it was a bloated copycat of its predecessor, enslaved by the tropes its towering forerunner established. One of the biggest issues I experienced was during one of the multi-stage side missions that exist in the world to be stumbled upon by unsuspecting travellers. These missions are one of the most valuable parts of the game’s design, filling the world with organic moments that advance themselves with the passing of time, but are unmarked for the player, meaning that your thirst for exploration is the only thing that can help you find and unlock these stories. One of these ambient side-missions involves helping a railway foreman with the construction of part of the line. You have to track down an employee stealing from him, and later chase off some aggressive competitors, and after a time the construction of the railway is supposed to progress along its intended route until it’s finished. Mine did not. Instead, after I had cleared the land for the company’s advance, my railway just up and disappeared. I first discovered this when I unwittingly rode into a sky-coloured chasm in the ground, tumbling for a good 30 seconds before reloading the game. Once, maybe twice, a blank, featureless ridge of flattened gravel would load in, but nine times out of ten, it would simply be a void - a massive hole in the ground that let you see through into other parts of the map. If your horse fell in, anything it was carrying would be lost, which caused me to nearly break my controller after I lost the first perfect raccoon skin I’d found in dozens of hours. This void cordoned off an enormous section of the eastern part of the world, meaning that if ever I wanted to travel from west to east I’d have to divert my journey by three or four minutes to skirt around it, and if ever I forgot that it was there, well, too bad. This enormous glitch was never fixed in the weeks I played this game, and was a thorn in my side for dozens of hours, and had the game not been quite so long, perhaps this issue wouldn’t have progressed into such frustrating territory, but with the amount of time I spent in its company it became a real burden, which is analagous to much of my experience with RDR2. 

After those eighty hours I felt that the game failed to rise above its flaws. It’s often a breathtaking experience, but it’s a tiresome and frustrating one too. Which isn’t to say that it’s not worth the price - I honestly don’t think I’ve ever gotten more of ‘my money’s worth’ out of a game than when playing RDR2; I mean, how can one complain when there’s so much to do? Make no mistake, it’s not that Red Dead lacks value in any kind of tangible sense, but my overall satisfaction in the experience was noticeably waning for something that was seven years in the making and with all that money thrown at it; for something that should have been a generation-defining experience. No, sadly, what RDR2 represents is a triumph of efforts and budgets beyond anything else. It’s a testament to what a massive team of developers and artists can do with infinite money, as much as it is a testament to the bloated product of such a lengthy and ambitious project. For all its virtues, RDR2 is not a particularly well-made game. In fact, all the apocryphal tales of its creation simply serve to render more starkly how lacking it is in terms of its core design. It is by far the most cumbersome of Rockstar’s games, easily the least fun to actually play, to control, and while I was initially happy to credit this as a commitment to recreating the slow, methodical pacing of life in the time in which it is set, at this point I’m far more certain that it’s actually just shitty design. Picking up God of War after putting RDR2 down was a breath of fresh air, and as Kratos smashed his fist through the lid of chests in order to wholly retrieve whatever spoils lay within, I came to realise that having to watch Arthur crouch down, creak open a lid, and one-by-one take out each individual item again and again and again had left me somewhat traumatised. God of War is an engaging experience, but rarely forces the player into inconvenience for the sake of immersion; it only ever asks you to do things that it plans on rewarding you for doing. Every chest has a useful item in it, every corner of the game has something worth seeing. Collectibles are hidden, but not obscured, and in following your instincts you can find treasures that are both practical enhancements to your character, and small emotional rewards that positively reinforce your behaviour. There is plenty of exploration to be done, but there are no true dead-ends. There is a point to everything. And while the hack-and-slash genre is, in my opinion, mechanically crude and difficult to innovate, God of War is a superbly refined product. RDR2 is not. 

I would compare it to assembling a ten-thousand piece puzzle. There’s a certain respect that such a mammoth undertaking earns, undoubtedly. Whether you enjoy that kind of thing or not, you can’t help but admire it. But it’s an activity of diminishing returns, and after a while you find yourself just looking at the box to see the finished product. In the same way, after a time I wanted to skip out on RDR2 and read the wiki. In lieu of that, I found myself just railroading the story missions towards the end, which isn’t difficult, given that the entire second half of the game is a series of dumb shooting galleries. There’s a very clear turning point, after which literally every single mission follows the same formula, and that formula always revolves around killing everything in sight, which feels even more out of place given that it runs parallel to your character more frequently voicing his doubts about the gang’s brutality. It’s no coincidence that during this latter half of the story is where it becomes abundantly clear that the game’s shooting mechanics are terrible. Lock on, fire, lock on, fire, for five to ten minutes straight. All depth falls out of the bottom of the gameplay, and it feels like the team either ran out of time or inspiration and just phoned in the final ten hours of the main story. When the game finally reaches its climax, the tension in the story is squandered as it forces you into a pointless, repetitive, and overlong fist-fight, and then things finish up with little sense of closure. For those that played RDR1, Marston’s death feels like a fitting, if crushing, end point for that character. But there is little of that sense of satisfying drama here. Instead, the game’s epilogue, rather than wrapping up loose ends, takes the place of the ending of the third act. Again, while I might have initially thought of it as a bold move, that feeling quickly wore away in favour of the opinion that it’s just shit writing. 

It’s not entirely mismanaged, though. The fact that the game forces the player to follow through with the debt collections for a long time before offering a choice, and then eventually forcing them to let the debtors go, is an example of the gameplay smartly imparting the definite shift in Morgan’s personality. It understands your discomfort at having to enforce them, and then slowly changes its own rules to reflect the changing mindset of the character. And the game is superb at retrofitting a backstory to the existing characters carried backwards from RDR1: Dutch’s final speech of RDR1 is repeated almost verbatim here as a ploy to get himself out of a bind, and in that moment completely redefines his end in the first game from a man musing on his own animal nature, to a shyster, full of empty words and devoid of real convictions and values; a pathetic human being. But for the largest part, the moments of genuine pathos are disrupted by the irreverence of the world, or by the repetition of ideas for the sake of drawing out the story, or by the disconnect between the narrative and the gameplay.

Red Dead Redemption 2 feels like two games serving separate, conflicting interests. On one hand it’s a third-person survival game that relishes the grind; a slow, methodical approach. It suffers from many of that genre’s flaws, such as unrefined controls, and a struggle to strike a balance between labour and frustration, but its dedication to the realism of its interactivity endears at times. On the other hand, it’s also a typical Rockstar narrative of crime, morality, and revenge - largely humourous, but retrofitted into a bloated body that doesn’t match it. It’s a teenager’s head sewed to an old man’s torso, with a brash intention that its creaking frame can’t properly execute. Rockstar’s writing style is a bad fit for the introspective themes the narrative aims for; the Housers cannot help themselves but plant their tongues firmly in their cheeks, and while the era in which the game is set is ripe for parody, that parody doesn’t mesh with the seriousness of the main character’s struggle. John Marston was a man whose nature was never legitimately contradicted by the gameplay. In RDR2, ‘Arthur Morgan the character’ can be in the middle of a crisis of conscience when the player decides it’s time for ‘Arthur Morgan the avatar’ to start the bandit challenges, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. It’s just too disjointed. And I don’t care what genre you’re talking about, or what kind of achievements the game itself has earned, a 3:100 story-to-content ratio is never going to offer a wholly satisfying experience. No matter the price, you’ll definitely get your money’s worth here, but whether that’s going to feel like a good thing or a bad thing at the end, well, that’s an outcome a little less certain.