#i swear it's good but OOOOH BOY is there a lot of poorly made and/or questionable stuff

[fayesdiary]

actually now that you've finished AM and re: Paired Endings, did you get the paired endings you wanted? I remember when I went in blind and didn't know how the hidden support points system worked in regards to paired endings, I ended up with exactly no paired endings I was expecting or hoping to get, and a few people I knew playing the game at the same time as me ran into the same "wait, how does this work" conundrum bc we all went and got everyone to A or A+ supports with everyone else and therefore had a roulette wheel of paired endings.

also just in general, how did you enjoy AM?

I barely knew paired endings were a thing so I wasn't aiming for any one in particular (although I'm upset by the Felix/Ingrid one. I'm sorry Ingrid, you deserved better).

That said, having paired endings almost hidden from the player if you don't know (I'm guessing it's a selection of the A/A+ support pairs, but if you have multiple it selects one based on which has the highest support points) is... really weird. Why not just have S supports at that point and give the player the active choice of which paired ending they want?

As for Azure Moon itself, I quite enjoyed it! Dimitri's journey is the good shit, his relationship with Edelgard is just tragic and overall it's a really nice personal narrative.

But for the larger narrative, well... I have questions. And they are not the good kind.

Let's start with the smaller things first - Sothis.

Why is she even in the game?

I'm saying this as a huge fan of her- I adore her, I think she's so much fun. That said, if she's barely going to have screentime in White Clouds and is completely absent in Part 2, why even pretend she's going to be a primary character if she barely features in it?

I enjoyed Ch9 and 10 with her because she finally had her time to shine, taking initiative, coaxing Byleth into investigating a bit more and being a little gremlin when she convinces them to eavesdrop on Rhea. She finally has the presence she should have always had, but then she merges with Byleth and... that's it.

Poor Rhea is in an even worse situation in Azure Moon, being completely absent in Part 2. They tell you she has been secretly been imprisoned in Enbarr all this time but they never tell you why (my guess is it has something to do with Edelgard's monster form?), and then when you beat the game... Nothing.

Just a small line telling you she has retired and moved to Zanado.

The poor woman feels like a complete afterthought in this route.

Speaking of things feeling like an afterthought in Azure Moon, the Dark Snakes (the personal name I'm going with for Those who slither in the dark because I hate that name so goddamn much).

In White Clouds? Hyped up as a major antagonist.

In Azure Moon Part 2? Nowhere to be seen properly.

You only get Cornelia and Volkhard who have been very blatantly replaced with members of the cult, and yet no one seems to notice.

Dimitri will say straight to your face Cordelia's whole demeanor changed around a decade prior but never think "hmm, this sounds familiar", despite him mentioning Kronya a few chapters prior.

They appear in the final chapter but only as an extra boss you can stomp to get rid of a bunch of soldiers, and again - barely acknowledged. The rest of them flee when you kill their leader so the Snakes are still around scheming, but this is never addressed in Azure Moon, not even in the endings.

And I am not accepting "it will be explained in the other routes" as an excuse, because if you're going to treat every route as its own game, then the narrative of every single route has to stand on its own.

As it stands, the Snakes in AM only exist to make Edelgard look better by comparison in White Clouds and are almost completely ignored in Part 2.

And speaking of Edelgard - we need to talk about the whole deal with Fòdlan's unification.

This game is... weirdly fascinated with the idea. I can understand why Edelgard views it as an ideal - of course the future Emperor of an Empire would have an imperialist mindset.

The problem is that several other characters and the narrative itself portrays it a good thing, when if you think of it for a few minutes... It's not. The mere existence of the Kingdom and Alliance as well as two of the major wars in Fòdlan being for their indipendence proves that.

And look - Fòdlan has many, many problems. Rampant racism and xenophobia, class inequality exacerbated by Crests, you name it. But it being united under a single banner, especially if by force, does nothing to solve any of the issues and arguably makes them worse.

Hell, as fucked as the status quo at the start of the game is, at least there was a clear harmony between the four powers, and Fòdlan had been at a state of relative peace for almost a millennia until Edie did her, um, thing.

Shamir has a line where she mentions Fòdlan will probably split again eventually, and she's right - it's increasingly clear that Fòdlan being governed by a single power does not work.

Also I know I barely know Claude at this point especially because he's deliberately written as hard to read but I'm sorry- him just giving the Alliance to Dimitri is bullshit. Both because of what it represents, both because I don't buy it at all he would just do this (especially with Verdant Wind existing), and especially because you really want me to believe every single noble would be ok with rejoining under the Kingdom they declared indipendence from two centuries ago?

So the narrative ends up saying "oh it's not that Edie's ideals of a unified Fòdlan are fundamentally wrong- no, it's her methods and the fact that she wants to destroy the Church". And the cynical side me is thinking that in the large scale of things, the main difference between the routes is choosing which war criminal gets to govern the whole continent.

So while overall I enjoyed Azure Moon, I can't help but notice so many warning signs for things to come.

[joryho]

Hi! I'm back with a new post! So, I made a Mamagen with some custom textures for my best friend! Her name is Agmine, and she's based off of Rain World's Train Lizard... which means good luck stopping her from rolling over you!

ooooh boy. OOOOOH BOY YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW THE AMOUNT OF PAIN I HAD TO SUFFER AND ENDURE IN ORDER TO MAKE THIS SASSY GAL RIGHT HERE. It was INCREDIBLY rough, took me about two hours with about 50% of it being learning features I didn't know before (pose mode on Blender, changing black masks in Substance Painter for new bits and pieces, etc) No joke, getting this CUSTOM TEXT to work was the hardest part. Substance Painter broke MANY times while I was trying to put it on, for basically no good reason. I'd choose the text-ure (badum tssh) and try to apply it... and out of NOWHERE, I can suddenly not change the text! Or the Alpha being used! Maybe I can't change the black/white for the mask of the texture! WHY NOT ALL AT ONCE???

I think the part that I could have done way better on, though, was the custom Emission icon. I used an Eel Lizard icon from Rain World to make it look nice, and it's on the hip/visor sides. Making this as an Alpha brush was a lot harder than it needed to be. Importing it was fine, but it was making the Alpha not look unbelievably blurry that was the big problem. For the life of me, I could NOT get rid of the blurry edges, no matter what I did. So, fun fact: The lizard icons are about 25x25 PIXELS. It is absolutely miniscule. I'd be completely fine with this, if it weren't for the fact that I can't cleanly upscale the texture, and make it... y'know, actually look good. It goes from charming little pixel art to a blurry-edged mess. This can be seen surprisingly easily in the visor image, as the icon looks like it has a thicker outline. Oh yeah, also, for SOME REASON, Substance Painter doesn't have the ability to mirror Alpha brushes.

HAHA. WHAT.

YEAH. YOU HEARD ME. MIRRORING BRUSHES DOESN'T EXIST. I don't know if this is because I'm using an old version of Substance Painter, or if it's just something Adobe opted to entirely ignore, but you gotta have TWO separate brushes to have a mirror image. If I didn't do this, Agmine's emissive icons would have been looking completely opposite directions, and one would have been flipped.

But, in the end, I managed to conquer it. It was horribly unintuitive, but god damn, if I didn't persevere. The blender side of things was fine, except for trying to find where Pose Mode was on the model, and frankly, I prefer having to spend ten minutes looking around in Blender rather than two hours.

So, yeah! Thanks for listening to me ramble about how poorly made some of the "professional" software is. I swear, there really needs to be a better new-user experience for this software. I'd rather sit through five hours of understandable tutorials that are built-in rather than have to go and find tutorials on Youtube for the one specific thing I need to do.