#i think this series balances heavy stuff and silly fun stuff pretty well

[theonescreencap]

i thought this was so cute LOL they're friends :] i love how he goes all out on her weapon even despite the fact that she doesn't pay him for his work LMAO

[ahgasegotarmy116]

Semantic Error | A Jeon Jungkook Series | Chapter 3

Based off of Semantic Error (bl) by J Soori Summary: y/n meets Jimin and makes Jungkook jealous Pairing: Techie inexperienced fem!reader x Artist fuck boy Jungkook Word count: 2.7k~ Warnings: Explicit language, Idk that's pretty much it for this chapter. A/N: This is heavily based off of the original bl (boy love) Semantic Error and it covers chapters (episodes) 4,5 and 29. I've switched around the timeline quite a bit and got rid of some scenes here and there to make the story progress a bit faster so they're not exactly alike but I would like to stick close to the original story so let me know what you think! P.s. If you don't mind spoilers I would highly suggest reading the original story. I read it on the app Manta with the english adaptation being done by Angy and you can also find the Kdrama on Viki :) Read from the beginning

The next day as I'm walking to the cafeteria I see a guy fall dropping some books and papers all over the floor. I decide to walk past because honestly it's not my problem but unfortunately once I'm in his line of sight he decides to call out to me. "Hey sorry do you think you could help me pick this stuff up? I shouldn't have tried to balance all of it on top of each other" he says clearly regretting his actions. I start picking things up quietly, not making an effort to make conversation and once we're finished I decide to turn and go. 

"Wait! What's your name?" he asks preventing me from leaving. "y/n" I state and wait for him to continue on with whatever he had planned to say. "Well y/n would you mind helping me carry this stuff over to the music building? I'm just worried I might drop it all again" he says taking all of the heavy books and hoping that I'll pick up the folders full of sheet music. I stand there for a second trying to calculate the time it would take me to help him out and if I can fit it into my schedule. 

"If you help me, I'll buy you lunch" he says with a bright almost perfect smile aside from his cooked front tooth. Thinking about it now with that incentive clearly tips the scale, providing him with a favorable result. I wordlessly pick up the things he couldn't manage to carry and wait for him to lead the way. "You don't talk much do you?" he chuckles giving me a sideways glance. "Not unless it's necessary" I say and continue to follow hoping I'll get this over with so I can get back on schedule.

"So...what's your major?" he says obviously trying to maintain a conversation with me. "Computer Engineering" I answer giving his as short of answers as possible. I'm not one for casual conversation, let alone conversation at all. Like I said, only when necessary. "I'm Jimin by the way, and if you couldn't guess already my major is music. Well, music and dance but my course load this semester is very music centric" I nod my head and he decides to keep rambling which seems to be something he's used to doing.

From the casual glances we're getting it seems like he's pretty well known in this department. "Hey Jimin you down to go grab some lunch in a sec?" a guy in a big group of people yells out. "Nah that's okay, I promised to buy y/n lunch for helping me out" he says motioning to me as best as he can with his hands full. "Oh...okay well have fun" the guy says and goes back to one of the many conversations going on over there. 

I turn my head and look back up at Jimin confused, "You could've just given me enough for the cafeteria and have gone with them" I say hoping to brush him off and go back to my solitude. "I'm not gonna buy you food from the cafeteria silly, let's go somewhere! There's a cool pizza place right outside of campus that I've been wanting to check out. You wanna go?" he asks asks and nods towards the classroom that we're meant to leave these things at. "I guess" I shrug not really caring at this point. Since my class doesn't start for another two hours I guess I could afford to go off campus to eat for a change, especially since it's free. 

As we make our way into the pizza place (creatively named Pizza Planet) we're greeted by a pretty big crowd but luckily we're able to find a table near the entrance right away. "Welcome in" someone yells letting us know they saw us come in and they'll be with us in a moment. "This place is pretty cool huh? He says referring to the theme that seems to be trendy these days. "Spaceships, nice" I say barely looking up while scanning the QR code to get the menu.

"Have you never watched the movie Toy Story?" he says, surprised that I don't have a better reaction to it. "No I'm not big on American movies or whatever. My family really only showed us media that was Korean or Japanese" I say hoping to show that I'm not interested on elaborating on the topic any further and luckily before he can say anything again our server comes to our table. 

"Welcome to Pizza Planet guys, what can I get you?" he says with a bright smile until his glance falls on me. For some reason his expression changes to that of annoyance and I'm slightly confused but not enough to comment on it. "Do you know what you want y/n?" Jimin asks me and I take a quick glance over the menu and settle on the most expensive item. It's a free meal so might as well milk it for all it's worth.

Jimin places his order and the server looks back down at me and asks if we wanted anything else to which Jimin denies. "You guys do student discounts though right?" he asks holding out his card and the server takes his eyes off of me to inspect his student ID and confirms his suspicions. 

Once he hands him back his student ID the server's gaze for some reason falls back on me. "Do you need to see my ID too?" I question suddenly weirded out by his glaring. "No" he says full of spite, pushing up the bridge of his glasses. "Okay well then you can go now, don't you have other people to serve?" I say shooing him off, to which he looks down at me with utter confusion and opts to just turn away to go put in our order instead of making an further discussion. 

"Are you okay?" Jimin asks, clearly aware of the weird tension between the server and I. "Yeah I'm fine, he was just acting really weird" I say and shake it off for the time being. "Do you know him?" he asks tilting his head at me. "Why would I know a random guy in a pizza place?" I say confused as to how this all connects in his head. "Well because he goes to school with us, I believe his name is Jungkook, I had a class with him last semester and he seemed like a cool guy or so I thought. Are you guys okay?" he asks clearly concerned, seeing my face contort into an uncomfortable realization when I finally put the pieces together. 

I guess I didn't recognize him because he was dressed so differently while sporting a hat and glasses. Looks like he clearly recognized me though, and he definitely wasn't happy to see me. I watch as Jungkook makes his way out of the shop as another server comes to relieve him. "Would you mind it if I went outside to go talk to him for a second?" I ask already standing up not really caring to wait for his permission. "Oh um yeah okay, I guess I'll just stay here" he says awkwardly while watching me walk out before I'm finally out of his view. 

Looking around I notice that there's a small alleyway between this pizza place and the next building over and I can see a puff of smoke coming out of it as well as hear someone's voice sounding like some sort of argument. I walk over and thankfully it's the exact person I've been looking for. "Hey can you get off the phone?" I say and he looks up glaring at me and he stops leaves a pause in the conversation happening before he tells the person on the phone that he has to go. "What do you want?" he says before taking a drag off of his cigarette. 

"We need to talk" I say seeing if he's open to it. "So talk" he says and purposefully blows smoke in my direction which leaves me having to wave away the smoke and clear my throat before I'm able to start. "I owe you an apology" I start off, "No shit you do" he mumbles under his breath. "Are you gonna let me talk or should I just go back inside?" I say getting short with him. "Yeah go back to your boyfriend, see if I care" he spits out and throws his cigarette on the floor to stomp it out before pushing himself up off the wall and making moves to walk off.

"He's not my boyfriend, in fact not that it's any of your business but we just met today and the only reason I'm here is because he offered me a free meal for helping him carry some stuff across campus" I say in one breath and open my mouth to continue "That doesn't sound like you" he interrupts laughing bitterly at my story. "Well it's the truth and you can ask him yourself if you really don't believe me" I say crossing my arm, becoming aware that this has now become my defensive stance of choice against him.

"No that's fine I believe you, I just find it adorable that you could be so food motivated. Helping out a perfectly good stranger and then making a trip with him off campus. That wasn't very smart of you y/n" he says taunting me. "Just because you're older than me doesn't mean that you get to talk down to me" I say getting even more irritated at this situation. "That's funny that you say that" he says getting closer until he's sure to tower over me, "because it looks like I have to love" he says trying to get some sort of reaction out of me. 

I'm not sure exactly what it could be I decide to take a step back but as I do I find myself slipping on something and I mentally brace for impact but it never comes, now seeming to notice a firm grasp on my waist instead of my back on the cold hard street. "Be careful there y/n, we wouldn't want to have an accident on our hands" he says amused at our forced proximity and my facial expressions because of it. I get back up on my feet and push him away after I've sure I regained my balance. "I apologized okay? Now stop being so hostile, it's annoying" I say while straightening out my clothes. "But I like seeing the faces you make when I'm annoying you" he says with a smirk. 

"What faces? I don't make any faces" I deny. "Why don't you go look in the mirror pretty, I'm sure you'll see why I like it so much" he says before walking past me. "Hey where are you going? Aren't you going to apologize too?" I call after him before he gets too far. "Sorry love, I've gotta go back to work, why don't we pick this up later?" he says sending me a wink before opening the door and walking inside. "But I don't want there to be a later" I say under my breath kicking the rocks that I had no doubt slipped on just moments ago. I shake myself out of whatever headspace he had me in and take a deep breath trying to calm myself down. 

I've never had a rush of so many emotions running through me before, and the only other times it has gotten close to this it seems like Jungkook has been the one to triggered them. I groan and make my way back inside as well and I sit back down at the table not making an effort to say a word to Jimin. "So how did it go? It seemed like he was pretty happy when he walked in" he says intrigued by our polar opposite returns with me being the one who looks upset now. "He's happy because he was able to irritate me and get a reaction out of me. Ugh I should've never went out there" I groan and take a drink of my water.

"Why did you end up going out there?" he questions, clearly interested in the story behind our weird behaviors. "I said some things that were probably interpreted as being mean, I'm not the kind of person who cares much about others but I'm adult enough to admit that what I said was out of line" I say rolling my eye irritated that I let him get the best of me time and time again, but for some reason I end up being the bad guy.

"I swear this man is going to put me in an early grave" I say and then speak of the devil Jungkook shows up with our order. "That's not very nice, are you already trying to be mean to me again" he pouts jokingly. "No but you are being rather rude listening in on people's conversations" I roll my eyes and go back to taking a drink of water. "It's not my fault that you're talking about me right in front of me. Anyways is there anything else I can get you guys?" he asks looking between the two of us.

"No I think we're all set" Jimin responds sending me a smile which I return with a nod. "What about you pretty? Do you need anything else from me?" Jungkook says leaning towards me and tucking my hair behind my ear to see my face better. To which I respond to by choking on my water while also spilling some on the table. "Shit y/n are you okay?" Jimin asks clearly concerned for my welfare. I cough a few times and send him a thumbs up trying to calm my coughs down. "I'll go get you guys some napkins" Jungkook chuckles walking off. 

"Man I swear guys like him think they can get away with anything just because they're more attractive than the average male" he says rolling his eyes at him and handing his napkins over to me. "Thanks" I say and clean up as best as I could while we wait for the rest of the napkins. "It's fine I'm over it" I say clearing my throat hopefully for the last time right as Jungkook returns with more napkins.

"Sorry guys I was just teasing, your meal's on me this time okay?" he says giving us both a charming smile. "You sure?" Jimin asks looking surprised as ever. "Yeah it's the least I could do for interrupting you guys and making y/n upset" he says but I can tell he's still teasing me even though he's behaving in front of Jimin. 

"Thank you so much" Jimin says giving him a thankful shallow bow. "It's fine don't mention it, also you can call me Hyung if you want to, I don't mind" Jungkook offers, clearly trying to get on Jimin's good side. This whole act he's putting on is ridiculous, I haven't known him for long but I can sure as hell tell when people are lying. "Okay, thank you Jungkook hyung" he says and smiles back at me. "You can call me Oppa if you want to y/n" he says offering it to me as well, waiting for me to take the bait. 

"Jungkook is just fine for me, I'll call you JK if you want me to, but that's it" I say not bothering to show any sort of respect and grace to the person who just bought my meal which is probably cold by now. "Aw come on just once?" he says mercilessly taunting me still. "Don't you ever get tired of being a pain in the ass?" I say finally fed up with all of his antics "Nope" he says popping the P at the end before leaning down to whisper in my ear "You look cute when you're feisty" he says making sure to blow on my neck again making me shiver slightly. 

I stand up abruptly and he straightens his posture and takes a step back giving me the tiniest bit of room to pass by. "Jimin I'm leaving if you want I'll wait for you outside so we can take the food back to campus" I say and make moves to leave as quickly as I can, not missing the way Jungkook chuckles at me on the way out. "Um yeah I'll be out in a second. Hyung do you think you could box this up for us?" he asks using the new term he had been encouraged to use. "Sure, see you around y/n" he says making sure I hear it before the door closes behind me.  

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[sjofn-lofnsdottr]

While there's a lot of stuff I wish had been handled differently MSQ-wise, there's a lot I liked anyway, be it because I appreciated the thought or because it just hit the way it was supposed to or whatever.

I enjoy that Estinien seems to be having the vacation we were supposed to have. I sincerely love that for him. I loved him being barely in Stormblood, I loved him barely being in Shadowbringers, I can certainly love him barely being in Dawntrail.

I really enjoyed the first arc a lot! My quibbles with the first half feel pretty minor in the grand scheme, mostly wishing I had more moments where it felt like I was actively mentoring Wuk Lamat, but there was a lot to like and it's hard for me to hold a grudge about it. Most importantly to me, I think it struck the balance between 'important this happen' and 'relatively low stakes' really well, which was heartening to see. I'm one of those people who would like the WoL and the Scions to get breaks from Big Existential Threats from time to time, and I think the first arc did a decent job at showing that's entirely possible to do without it feeling artificially held back.

I LOVED that they did not use the Azem stone except the one time. Sure, some of the trials were set up a little silly with Just the Right Number wandering in off the street to help, but that's fine. I want it to feel special when the stone gets used, and this expansion seemed to get that.

I think they did a really good job tossing potential plot seeds everywhere without being extra obvious about it. Like sure, some of it was more in your face than other things, but I never felt like the writer was pointing frantically at anything and yelling REMEMBER THAT FOR LATER. There's a lot to speculate about, one of my favorite things!

The way the Alexandrians wound up perverting 'memories are how the dead live on' to such a degree was honestly great horror for me, specifically. I might want to edit a bunch of the second arc, but that particular thing? Mmm, made me feel horrible in the best way, and I loved that.

Also just ... Sphene as a character might not have done a ton for me, but Sphene as a concept? Horrifying. Amazing. Loved it.

I appreciate the stones it took to leave the last zone a ruin by the end of the MSQ.

Really, the last area in general, just vibe-wise. It felt Wrong in spite of being superficially pleasant, which was great, but it also still felt a bit sad to shut things down zone by zone. And I liked how it was basically a countdown, and even if I wish the Erenville stuff was handled a bit differently, that sense of marching towards the inevitable as you got closer to what you knew was coming but didn't really want to ever get to was still very, very heavy and I liked that a lot. I know people compared that zone to Amaurot and Ultima Thule, and they should, but I feel it combined what they learned from what worked with both of those into a terribly depressing baby in a really effective way.

As for more general stuff, the new classes are both a lot of fun. The graphical update has done wonderful things for a world I already thought was beautiful AND made my elezen in particular look fantastic. The new zones in particular are a gorgeous flex in what they can do now, and I'm excited to see literally anywhere they decide to go in the future as a result. I enjoyed a lot of the music, the raid series has been super fun, I really liked learning the extremes so far. And I appreciate that they made the dungeons more engaging, even if I want to drop the first boss of the spooky boardwalk dungeon off a cliff.

Look don't I don't really care about whether or not you think Dawntrail as a whole is good or bad.

That's not interesting.

Instead talk abt what makes you go ABSOLUTELY FERAL from it (or ffxiv in general).

What is it that hits your brain in just the right way to make you fall into a never ending rabbit hole of madness and obsession. A rabbit hole from which you emerge from with endless and absolute knowledge about super niche subjects that may come up in conversations once or twice.

a character? Plot beat? Theme? Job rotations??? A dungeon with absolutely unhinged lore? A random ass sidequest that is somehow relevant still today and lives rent free in your brain???

Go wild w those plz, I need more of those.

[shihalyfie]

I’m a diehard 02 fan who does not want a reboot and never wanted a reboot, and here’s why

This is one of my few editorial-esque pieces, but this is something some friends and I have been discussing for a while, and given what’s going on right now, I feel like this needs to be said at some point.

Sometimes I feel like there’s a really massive gap between what 02 fans want (especially diehard ones) and what people think 02 fans want. I'm not saying that media should only be catering to hardcore fans, and if more casual fans of 02 or people who simply just happen to have a stake in the full franchise have their own opinions on what they wanted to see out of 02-related media, that’s perfectly fine, and they have a right to have those expectations. What I’m mainly writing this about is sentiments that talk about how Toei is apparently doing 02 a disservice or sweeping it under the bus by not rebooting it (which basically comes with an implication that giving it respect would mandate it being rebooted just because Adventure was), or talking about how doing a reboot would please 02 fans just by giving their favorite characters more rep. (Although, I suppose the simultaneous reveal of an actual 02-related movie kind of killed any grounds for claiming that the lack of a 02 reboot meant sidelining 02. You can’t really claim that they’re sidelining 02 when they’re making a whole movie, after all...)

Of course, I don’t claim to speak for every single 02 fan out there (so if you’re a 02 fan who doesn’t agree with anything I’m about to say, I apologize and hope I don’t sound presumptuous), and I highly doubt I represent the mainstream, but I felt I should input my perspective as a 02 fan who’s friends with a handful of other 02 fans, who have discussed this extensively and all have the same feelings on the topic, and why it’s kind of frustrating to keep hearing this kind of thing from people who assume that all fans of something should want to see more things that resemble them by default without any more nuance to it.

It won’t actually improve much that’s worth it

I’m going to be blunt about it: I think more people who supposedly want this 02 reboot are people who hate or dislike 02 than people who actually are fans of the series, because they’re doing this under the sentiment that “this was a bad series, so a redo would improve it.” You can especially tell because a lot of people acting like a reboot is in 02′s best interest are the same people being scathingly critical of the current Adventure: reboot right now, so you can see that this kind of mentality comes from people who clearly understand that a reboot won’t necessarily be something everyone likes all that much, and thus believe 02 is so unsalvageably bad that you couldn’t possibly make it worse. So you can probably understand why I’m not exactly patient with this kind of take.

If we are to be charitable, though -- if this sentiment comes out of a genuine feeling that 02 had missed potential that could be addressed by the reboot -- I want to ask everyone if they really believe that this theoretical reboot would be a net improvement, especially one that’s worth all the time and effort involved, and even more especially given the writing style that the current Adventure: reboot is employing. You don’t have to claim it’s a perfect series or anything to understand the sentiment that it held up enough by itself to not necessitate a whole anime series being made to do another take on it.

Something I would like to remind people who love to claim that 02 is such a despised series is that it made around 89% of Adventure’s revenue at the time it aired, and despite those who despise 02 being very vocal on the Internet, the actual mainstream tends to be very positive about it, especially in terms of anything to do with Ken (whom most reasonable people will agree had a character arc that deserves acclaim). So in other words, if you want to do a reboot, most likely you would want to do it without offending the base that likes the series already, right? (Especially since, you know, recent events have proven that upsetting the real-life 02 fanbase is actually a pretty inadvisable idea...)

Here’s the thing: Once you filter out most of the “scapegoat” reasons people tend to criticize 02, the one that’s generally the most agreed upon is how disorganized the plot gets in the second half. So this so-called ideal situation reboot would supposedly iron out all of the messy plot writing and make use of the “wasted potential” the series had -- but 02 was way more than just a narrative storyline with characters walking around in it, and when it comes to the reasons people were so drawn to it, they’re tied to the series themes about regrets and making up for the past, and about the unreasonable pressures that society places on children. That, and also the most important one, the central theme of human relationships, and the charismatic and well-developed (yes, really) characters. The so-called “messier” second half of 02 was full of payoff for a lot of what was set up in the first half in regards to its themes, and a lot of its subplots or character flairs are packed in really small nuances that are easy to miss on the first watch.

What this means is that 02 is a series that works off of a lot of delicate balances. Adventure could be “rebooted” because everything was very clear-cut and straightforward, which meant that you could change almost everything about the plot and still relatively adhere to the primary points of “kids gain self-awareness through a journey in another world”. (Like, I really hate to break it to those who put Adventure on a pedestal, but this is mainly possible because Adventure doesn’t really have much of a plot besides “defeat enemy” followed by “defeat bigger enemy”...) In the case of 02, everything regarding the story is, for better or for worse, much more deeply tied to the plot, the narrative behind the Kaiser and the traces of psychological horror laced into everything, and the second-half evolution mechanic, Jogress, has a lot to do with the developments related to the human relationships narrative. Moreover, a lot of the reasons that people call it “bad” for are deeply tied to the exact same reasons a lot of people like it -- that its takes on certain topics were heavily nuanced and unconventional, meaning it could cover ground that most media wouldn’t go anywhere near -- and so the series loses too much of its identity if those aspects are removed, even if it ostensibly seems like “streamlining” it.

So if you mess with one thing, a lot of it falls apart -- and in fact, considering the writing style that the Adventure: reboot is using right now, it’s hard to imagine that applying it to 02 would make it any better. Actually, it seems like it wouldn’t address any of the grievances anyone has with it to any substantial degree, and it’d be more likely to axe all of the stuff that were integral to 02′s identity, like the social commentary, or the heavy focus on human relationships, or the unusual sort of character nuance it employed, and...basically, we go back to the same question: is this actually worth it?

02 itself was about not having this kind of sentiment

The main reason most 02 fans get upset about the 02 characters not being included in Adventure canon-related things that should rightfully include them is that, quite simply, they’re part of the canon! In fact, most 02 fans like Adventure too, so they like the way 02 built on Adventure’s worldbuilding, and moreover they’re attached to the web of relationships between the Adventure and 02 groups -- 02′s additions to Adventure’s worldbuilding and the nature of what it established around the neighborhoods of Odaiba and Tamachi were not only added on but also deeply entangled with what was established before, so you can’t just act like none of it exists!

So this also means that once we’re talking about a completely different universe, absolutely none of this applies and there’s no expectations to adhere to any of this. The 02 quartet doesn’t exist in this universe? Cool.

Funny thing about 02: one of the biggest themes the story revolved around was “not getting caught up in the past, and moving forward with what you have instead,” so it’s probably pretty understandable that a lot of people who like 02 would be the type who wouldn’t be fond of rehashing stuff too much (and even more so it involves 02 itself), especially since being okay with 02 as a sequel likely means being okay with change in general. To make something really new out of it, you might as well...actually make something new out of it, or cover some truly new territory, instead of bothering with this whole reboot business, you know?

One thing you might notice about a lot of 02 fans is that they’re not actually all that fond of the idea of canon putting the group through more massive suffering or emotional ordeals after 02 compared to most. I mean, I think it’s pretty normal to enjoy your favorite characters going through emotional trouble, but the aversion to it often tends to be much stronger than usual, regardless of what country’s fanbase we’re talking, and even the official staff for Kizuna seems to have somewhat recognized that the 02 group is most in its element when in the context of fun and silliness. All things considered, this probably isn’t particularly surprising when you take into account the fact that “just being able to hang out with each other as casual friends at all” was considered such a blessing, and such a difficult goal to reach, that there’s a natural aversion to seeing them go through more emotional suffering again. The new trailer for the upcoming movie seems to have Daisuke in a relatively good mood (and even then, “please don’t make it too emotionally vicious for them” is a pretty common plea).

So if you want to talk about rehashing all of their old problems, seeing it all over again is just not very fun. It’s like holding Ken’s sins over his head again, even if it’s in a different universe; it just doesn’t feel right when the series itself endorsed the best possible outcome for these kids to be “to live happily and at peace with themselves, no matter what happened beforehand”. They worked so hard to get out of it, so to decide we have to do this entire rodeo again for the sake of doing it again, instead of trying something new is...well, it’s not that appealing of an idea, I have to say.

The real-life impact would be intolerable

It’s no secret that the 02 hatedom is a bit uncomfortably vocal about it, but what tends to be really frustrating about it is how many of them love to dunk on the series based on misremembering it. It’s fair that, if you don’t like a series, you probably wouldn’t want to watch it again, but as someone who’s spent a lot of years unpacking all the little details in the series and noticing that it’s much deeper than it initially seems on the surface, it’s honestly annoying to see “criticism” of the series that’s actually just dunking on it based on details that are genuinely factually incorrect (it’d be one thing if it were a question of subjectivity, but no, so many of the insults 02 often gets are based on things that legitimately did not happen in the series).

In the end, I admit that 02′s penchant for ridiculous subtlety probably worked against it a bit too much, and I’ve already covered its impact on how the series gets misread a lot. Thing is, this kind of subtlety was a thing in Adventure too, and it all leads to the unfortunate effect that a lot of people tend to forget what actually happened in Adventure if they haven’t seen it for more than a few years. With the current reboot right now, you’ll see people saying that certain characters are the same as they were in the original series, even though in most respects they’re actually the opposite -- because a lot of said people only remember them by the surface characteristics that seem to be similar.

So when you look at 02, and consider the fact that even official media -- including the official American English dub and V-Tamer -- has been a bit too prone to not handling Daisuke’s character tastefully and reducing him to traits that make him easy to dislike, you might realize that handling these characters improperly runs an extremely high risk of actually turning them into the flat, unlikeable characters that people tend to accuse them of being -- imagine Daisuke where his entire character is about fixating over Hikari and being impulsive, or Miyako being nothing but self-centered and selfish, or Iori being genuinely stoic and missing the nuances of constantly holding his emotions back. And making it worse is that this would basically solidify these negative perceptions of the characters even further -- because people, especially those inclined to hate the series, would take it as further evidence that the characters have always been like this, reflect it back on the original, and everything would really just become a miserable experience. (Those who are particularly inclined to be malicious against 02 would probably even claim a reboot to be “better than the original” no matter whatever it is, because of the belief that 02 is so incredibly terrible that literally anything would be better than it.)

It’s not my business to dictate other people’s opinions, but it’s already been a frustrating twenty years of dealing with this kind of thing, so of course I’m not going to be enthusiastic about the idea of putting up with more of it...

[shinygoku]

Percy for the Character thing?

Wait! Oh yes, wait a minute Mister ...Milk! Man~

First impression

Honestly I think the first time I actually saw Percy was in the outro of some CGI Thomas that was on telly at the time ...several years ago. I have absolutely no memory of the episodes themselves, but somehow it seems I got the ED more than once? So I couldn't possibly say what eps they were or even if they were HiT or Mattel seasons, but it was the Engine Roll Call thing. "Percy pulls the mail on time," it would say. And that's how I knew his name, colour and his job, lol

Impression now

Percy, a precious, peril-prone pea!

We are all love Percy. He's cute and cheeky and pretty darn sweet! And sometimes he's as daft as a brush, which leads to many Funny Moments. The producers of the show also had a pretty obvious bias toward him, as it feels like every season 6 episode has him crash into something or otherwise a heavy amount of spotlight.

Sadly, this made me start to feel a bit annoyed as him being used so much doesn't mean he was used well! But that's passed now, because s7 [for all it's blandness] did different things and the Golden Era of s1 - s5 actually has variety and balance and a better eye for how to use the characters... Like Percy! Cause he was heavily featured in 2 and 5 but so much better it didn't feel like he was being pushed, haha

It's also kinda funny to think how in and out of universe, he was originally a Replacement Thomas before diverging and becoming his own engine, (even if s6 did have him as the Main Character) but when you again consider some of his defining traits being Small, Cheeky, the Station Pilot who was mentored by Edward, and even pulling Annie and Clarabel early on.

I do prefer the version of Percy who has the hidden roughness (contrast with Thomas who's more upfront about it lol) and his own things to do, being more Goods-based and Harbour located, and later being the de-facto Post Train puller, while still having Ffarquhar as his main home. And he's a bouncy, playful sort'a fella, which contrasts nicely with how Thomas holds his work so importantly.

Favourite moment

First that comes to mind is his Wheeshing at Henry, which is so unexpectedly big and loud that Henry scoots tf outta there in panic. Legend hours only!

For a somewhat longer moment is Percy's Promise, cause while his heroics that day would later engorge his head and make him do something stupid later, he was legit impressive at the time lol

Also Promise shows how dang unlucky he is, cause Thomas lets him pull the Sunday School train as a favour, to be a nice break! [Trombone WUP WAH sound as the camera cuts to the flooded line]

Idea for a story

I don't have fresh ideas at present, the WIP I do have features him fairly heavily, but the most I'll say here is that grew out of my musing on Duck's post lol

I would be curious about his pre-Sodor times, though! He's meant to have had a long and chequered past, predating most of the cast members and having been all over the country, but even if it was limited to the warehouse FC1 eventually buys him in, who are the other engines? Are they friends or foe? What was Percy called, seeing that Sir Hatt names him on the spot?

Unpopular opinion

Percy + Crashing ≠ Instant Classic Ep, Season bloomin' Six!

I also feel his naïve nature and general ignorance is leaned on too hard. It's very transparently to have a convo between him and Thomas for the benefit of the Kiddie Audience but it doesn't feel authentic to either character when they stop and are like:

Percy: What is "Money"?

Thomas: [looks at the audience with generic smile mask on] Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Percy: Oooh, I wish I had money! Then I could buy a lovely bow tie! [Imagine spot of him wearing one]

That's the sort of template that became weirdly common, and it's one of the early signs that the series was sliding to be more Children Friendly at the cost of it's actual broad appeal. Man...

Favourite relationship:

Done right, done well? Then yes, I really am fond of the Best Bud dynamic he and Thomas have. They have enough in common and enough different to bounce off each other well!

...I just feel like it more often isn’t done to actually be in character for one or both of them. Like I just said with the ‘Percy is Dumb so Thomas explains basic life fixture to him’ example, Thomas tends to get stripped down to a bland slightly wiser role who’s there because he’s the title character, while Percy is treated as the most important character who has to be in every episode but also Learn things and oof the Sixth Season did do a number on me lol

(Literally the best ‘Thomas Explains Something To Percy’ moment was in Percy takes the plunge, as Thomas was using his own experience with the mine but Percy takes the story too literally and doesn’t get the point lol)

I like it when they’re competent, hard workers who are mostly in sync but also have silly rows over things and get into prank wars. They cooperate on the Post Trains and Percy is one of a very small number of engines Thomas trusts with Annie and Clarabel. They also bicker and stew over comments the other made, which is indeed a Sibling type behaviour and doesn’t contradict the affection they still have for each other.

The alternative brotp is Percy and Duck, which again I touched on in Duck’s ask and Jobey went into more depth on! Combined they are a well oiled machine and don’t seem to suffer the same OOC bouts, so it’s a lot of fun seeing them doing stuff~

Favourite headcanon

Percy is absolutely older and wiser than he comes across. Some of his baby faced, wide eyed curious nature is a careful construct, all the better to take the meaner types by surprise when Percy does his stuff very effectively. Also he can’t carry a tune in a bucket, haha

[sazorak]

Every Game I Played in 2020, Ranked

2020. Boy, what a garbo year huh? Didn't actually play that many games this year all-in-all. Happens! My backlog is getting pretty big, but I just find it hard to focus on games when I could be working on something. Or put off working on something, as it may happen to be at times.

My arbitrary decision from years ago to only attach a numbered ranking to same-year releases is getting increasingly silly, especially given my propensity to wait on playing games until I’m in the right mood, but whatever. That order matters than the dumb numerical numbering anyway.

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019

Later Alligator – 2019 – Steam – ★★

The style of this game is very cute, and the jokes are funny enough. But… ok, look, I’m not one to be precious about what is or isn’t a game. But this really isn’t a game. It’s a series of disconnected, unrelated challenges clipped from Atari Free Mini Game Collection 100, wrapped in a very non-interactive adventure-game. It’s cute, it’s kind of sweet, but it’s dull. Dull dull dull. There’s a pointless, mandatory sliding block puzzle early on that infuriated me by its mere existence. Them giving the ability to skip it because “wow you’re bad at this huh”, which, while accurate, also just sold the whole point meaningless of the “““interactive experience”””.

Also: when a huge part of your game is WOW WE ANIMATED EVERYONE REALLY GOOD, text boxes that reveal word-by-word, far away from the animations that occur when said characters talk? Kind of stinks!

8. Carrion – 2020 – Steam – ★★

What Carrion does well— the whole “You’re controlling The Thing and just rippin’ people apart!” shtick— is really neat. They made that bootleg The Thing animate real-ass good.

The actual game as a whole though? Kind of garbage. Imagine a Metroidvania with zero actual exploration, where every opportunity you have to venture off the path instead results in immediate railroading with constant, utterly inexplicable one-way pipes. It’s not that it’s linear, it’s that it actively slaps you when you attempt to explore. It’s very frustrating! Add the fact that the tentacle-monster-shtick makes challenging to actually, y’know, move around and control all your bits…  the only reason I finished the game was due to foreknowledge of its extreme brevity.

I think if the game were more open and less obsessed with constantly handing out upgrades, as well as having less of a focus on pure combat, I think I’d have enjoyed it more.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays – 2019 – Steam – ★★

It is well documented at this point that I am both an active Gundam fan, and as well as an on-again-off-again tactical RPG aficionado. A SD Gundam game appearing on Steam with a good English translation and localization is… exciting, to say the least. That said, I have never had much context for this game series beyond the basic facts that the combat tended to be pretty well animated CG, and that it’s vaguely similar to Super Robot Wars. Turns out… it’s really different from SRW? I dunno how the rest of the series fairs, but Cross Rays is weird as hell.

For one, there’s zero tutorialization at all. None. Almost all of what I’m going to explain here is me figuring stuff out by trial and error, or by reading junk online. Gundam is insanely popular, you’d think they’d be interested in explaining how it all works, but… nope. Even Super Robot Wars has multi-level introductory bits for new folks to show them the rope these days.

So: Cross Rays is a tactical RPG where you can playthrough the storyline of various Gundam AUs. You can play through them in any order. These playthroughs are fairly literal translations of the stories. You take control of the lead mecha from those series, fight enemy mobile suits that show up in SRW-like tactical RPG combat, until all reinforcements cease. Pretty straight forward. There are occasionally mission variants like “prevent enemies from reaching X” or “prevent enemies from destroying Y”, but even those can be just reduced to “kill everything very quickly please.”

But here’s the thing: while there is a story progression, the characters in the story itself actually have no character progression. These characters and mecha are actually considered guests, despite it being ostensibly their story. Instead, you are able to field “permanent” mecha and pilots of your own choosing, which do have progressions. There is no plot justification for this or anything like it. The game does not recognize that it’s weird that during Iron-Blooded Orphans intro where nobody knows what a Gundam even is, you can have 25 Gundams show up at once and just fire lasers at everything. That’s because this game is actually about repeatedly grinding the same set of missions over and over.

Pilots are recruited by completing certain in-mission requirements. Mecha are acquired by either by getting enough kills with the progression-less “guest” mecha, combining mecha you already have gashopon-style, completing certain quests, or by leveling up mecha and then “evolving them”. This is the actual core of the game.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays is basically Disgaea, it turns out? You’re grinding story missions at various difficulty levels in order to complete missions, try to recruit specific pilots, equip them with stats and levels to make them stronger, and then hitting mecha together in a sort of quasi-SMT fusion system until you get all the powerful mobile suits you desire.

The combat itself is kind of… bland? There’s a lot of systems, but they mostly seem in service of making an already easy game easier, or burning through tedium. There are four different difficulty modes, because there’s not actually that many different missions you can play through. The expectation is you’ll just work your way through every story beat while ramping the difficulty up over time to where the “guest” mecha would not be able to handle on their own. In fact, letting the story mecha act out the story beats is actually bad after a point, unless you’re still trying to get those lead mobile suits, or if you’re trying to complete some mission requirement in order to recruit Named Wing Grunt Pilot #246.

There is something to the notion of “I want to get N and N and N and N on a team, piloting weird but powerful mobile suits, and just solo every Gundam AU in a row,” but the whole premise seems kind of against purpose. Why bother recreating story beats at all, then? It’s not like the game even acknowledges any of that going on.

If the point is that I’m supposed to be, like in other grind-heavy tactical RPGs, breaking the systems to my own end in order to proceed… why not make the missions you play challenges focused towards that? The story progression literally only exists to facilitate the mission-based unlock conditions, which makes all the energy put into making them JUST LIKE THE ANIME really damn pointless.  

I like tactical RPGs, I like breaking RPG systems so as to beat hard challenges (I beat all the insanely hard extra bosses in FFXII for crying out loud), I looooove Gundam. I should like this. But I don’t really have the “god, I NEED TO FILL THIS LIST” gene that some folks have… except as an excuse to continue to engage in gameplay I enjoy. The gameplay here seems in service of the collection, rather than the way around.

7. Pokemon Sword: The Isle of Armor – 2020 – ★★★

Pokemon’s first foray into actually doing DLC is… a mixed bag. As a positive, they’ve improved the Wild Area concept I liked from the main game, and even brought back buddy Pokemon walking behind you. That’s neat. On the other hand: the actual progression in it is completable in like an hour, it doesn’t scale with you, so you’re bound to be over leveled for it, and all the raid stuff, while still conceptually neat, is just as flawed as in the base game. And so, you’re just left with even more new Pokemon to RNG grind on to continue to catch-them-all. Nah, I’m good.

Astral Chain – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

Platinum knows how to make good character action games. They’ve made a bunch of them. Bayonetta, Nier: Automata, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. They also know how to make some kind of mediocre character action games. Transformers: Devastation, Wonderful 101, their various shovelware character action games like Korra. Astral Chain falls somewhere in the middle, I guess?

Astral Chain has all the production of their good games. It has some stylish, cool action. It has a neat core mechanical idea, in that it’s essentially a two-character action game where you control both characters at once. It has a lot of the old mechanics from some of their best games brought in; witch-time last second dodging from Bayonetta, Nier’s shooting-and-slashing combination, the Zandatsu mechanic from Metal Gear Rising, even Wonderful 101’s multi-unit shenanigans. The setting is different, and there’s some neat world flavor all in all.

But, of all games I’ve played over the past few years, Astral Chain made me more vividly angry than any other. It’s not that it’s too hard— far from it, really, I found its combat incredibly mashy. No, the problem is that it has so many shitty mechanics slathered on that it become a chore to get to the “good bits”.

Why would you put forced stealth sequences in your character action game, especially when your movement controls are not suited for it?

Why the HELL would you put platforming sections in your character action game, constantly, especially when your stupid ghost buddy can accidentally yank you off the edge, your auto-combos can just throw you off the edge, or literally anything can knock you off the edge and make you lose life?

Why would you put so many constant excuses into the world to force me use the digital sensor in the game, that also makes it miserable to walk around while using it?

WHO THE LIVING FUCK THINKS THESE SHITTY BOX BALANCING MINI-GAMES ARE FUN???

These games are supposed to encourage me to perfect everything, right? Why keep putting fucking fights you need to complete in order to get an S rank behind backtracking, or Legions I don’t have yet? That isn’t adding replayability, that’s just wasting my time. There are even in-level missions that have fail conditions that you never even know about. Surprise!!! A lot of them involve chasing after guys and catching them with your chain, which is really obnoxious to do!!!! SURPRISE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The story is just Bad Evangelion, straight up. Every story beat from Evangelion is here, executed worse. They also make your character have a twin just so they can have a character who can talk and feel emotions, because your boring-ass protagonist is stuck being an emotionless audience cipher. Cool!!!

Tetris Effect – 2018 – Origin – ★★★

It’s drugs Tetris. I personally don’t use, or have synesthesia for that matter. I imagine this game is better if you do. It’s an enjoyable enough experience but it feels incredibly slight for what I was expecting from it, or even compared to something like Lumines, which has tons of replayability by way of its difficulty. Tetris just isn’t that hard, unless you’re forcing yourself to do weird shit to get points. I WILL NEVER LEARN HOW TO T-SPIN. Never.

Castlevania Anniversary Collection – 2019 – Steam – ★★★

Kind of an unremarkable Castlevania collection. Neat that it has an official translation of Kid Dracula in there, but also… look, I prefer Metroidvania Castlevanias, OK?

6. Spelunky 2 – 2020 – Steam – ★★★

I’m not entirely sure why this doesn’t click for me where Spelunky 1 did. More annoying intro levels? Too many fiddly requirements for different ending-progression? Gameplay additions that just make things more annoying? Spelunky 1 was hard, but there was a kind straight-forwardness to it, even with its weird secrets, that made it much easier to grok and continue banging your head against. I’m just not having as much fun with this. Difficulty should be challenging, not a hassle.

5. Stellaris: Federations – 2020 – Steam – ★★★

This is the year that Stellaris just broke for me.

Federations itself is a good DLC; it adds some really interesting mechanics tied to various types of multi-national unions (the titular federations, as well as the Space UN), as well as the addition of unique “origins” that allow you to further specialize your gameplay. The origins in particular are a great addition that allows more specialization and roleplay.

I’m just tired of the sheer amount of busywork Stellaris forces you to do. Every DLC adds more junk you need to keep an eye on, and the fact that the AI doesn’t even bother with it (compensating with copious economy boosts in order to keep up) makes the whole thing frustrating. It’s like playing fetch with yourself; you just get tired of chasing after your own ball after a point.

I have to wonder if they’re pivoting towards a notional Stellaris 2 at this point? Might not be a bad idea for them, though it is weird with all they talked up adding more origins when Federations came out.  

4. GranBlue Fantasy Versus – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★

This is probably the fighting game I got most into over the past few years. There’s just this nice, almost Street Fighter-esque ease of execution to the controls, and that Arc Systems Works 3D-as-2D style continues to just do work. I don’t give a single shit about GranBlue Fantasy (frankly, I think I’d enjoy this game more if it wasn’t attached to a property) but the characters are fun enough to play and look at.

The big problem here is two things: no crossplay, and no rollback netcode. In the span of a month, this game became a total ghost town on PC, and it doesn’t sound like PS4 faired that much better. 

Ring Fit Adventure – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

I’ve fallen on-and-off this game all year. At its heart: it works, it’s a fun exercise game. I don’t think it really feels like a “game” (in the sense that I’m not really coming to it for riveting gameplay or anything) as much as just a guided exercise experience, but… that’s fine? The in-game story is kind of flat, but funny in the fact of it existing at all. Buff Nicol Bolas and all.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen – 2017 – Steam – ★★★★

XCOM2: War of the Chosen is a great answer to what XCOM2 struggled with. As I discussed back in 2016 (Jesus Christ), XCOM2 tried to push against player’s worst instincts by incentivizing them to keep being aggressive through a whole bunch of timers— which, kind of just weren’t fun given how much accidentally walking into an ambush could “ruin” dozens of hours of play. War of the Chosen dials that back in some intelligent ways, by instead making the encounter designs themselves, as well as much more grab-and-bail mission types, encourage players to push ahead instead. Smart!

The addition of the Chosen makes the game feel more alive, and they really do make missions harder— particularly early on. But they’ve somehow accidentally fell into the hole, where XCOM just… isn’t that hard? Early on it’s challenging, particularly with the resource restrictions and all. But they keep giving you more and more options (that aren’t especially meaningful choices) that make your team more and more powerful, without increasing the strength of the enemy as time goes on. By the five-hour mark, you basically know if you’re going to steam roll the game or not.

The amount of additional character and variety in the gameplay is great, I just wish it had a more challenging difficulty curve. Maybe make the meta-layer of when enemies show up more targeted to where players are at. If a player is doing well, ramp up the difficulty, if they’re struggling, pull it back a bit. I should always feel like I’m just barely keeping ahead with XCOM, not like I’m bored. And by the end of War of the Chosen, I was kind of getting bored, really. Oh well.

3. Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 2020 – Switch – ★★★★

This is probably the video game that I spent the most time with hours-wise this year. I’m not entirely sure why? It’s a nice evolution of New Leaf, in that the crafting, environment shaping, and general quality-of-life improvements made are quite nice. There’s clearly been some thought on how people play these games, and ways to make the experience less frustrating.

… and yet, they kept so much tedium in the game. Like yes, the schedule stretching is the point, I get it. As someone who for some reason decided not to play with the clock, I only just recently finished the fish, fossils, and insects for the museum. But there’s just so many weird, little things that just make it hard to keep coming back to it. It’s like… to what end? When I’ve unlocked everything, and basically seen the entirety of the item list at this point, and the holiday events all being the game meaningless collectathons…. Why? I’m not going to try completing the collection; the museum stuff is about my limit, really (and even the paintings I can probably pass on).

I guess even an idealized, digital representation of a quasi-domestic life has the spiritual emptiness of consumerism-for-consumerism sake. Thanks???

Hypnospace Outlaw – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

I grew up on the internet of the early 00s. I had an AngelFire website, mostly consisting of shitty sprite webcomics and hosted Gundam pics. I remember when Google wasn’t really a thing and you would heavily rely on website compilation sites like the Anime Web Turnpike in order to find anything of value online. It was weird, it was wild. It was exciting!

The internet seemed so different back then. There was a ton of garbage online, but also, like… there was a sense of optimism to it. Folks were shitty, there was plenty of bad stuff online, but it felt so disconnected from the fabric of the physicality of real-life that it was at the same time a perfect escape.

I was young when I first got “online”, something like 12. I remember having this notion that the internet was going to be this great equalizer, that it had infinite potential to change how people behave and interact. Boy, huh.

Hypnospace Outlaw is essentially a splendid alternate universe GeoCities recreation, where you’re a volunteer moderator of a grouping of websites on HypnOS, an internet-analog you access while you are sleep. At the surface level, it’s mostly about poking around the weird alternate-historical version of the internet they created, full of kids feuding, bizarre historical divergences, and plenty of amazing bespoke weirdness. All of this is great; there’s an incredible amount of content that’s just great to poke at, listen to, and explore.

Below the surface, there’s also a rolling plotline about the ethics of this industry-owned platform, those who run it, and the way corporations handle new technology, new platforms, and emerging digital societies. There’s a late game turn that’s pretty damn affecting. And as someone who has moderator his share of internet forums in his time, trying to balance ‘do it for the community’ and what your ostensible ‘bosses’ require of you, it was kind of a weird throwback in more ways than one.

Minecraft – 2011 – PC – ★★★★★

Turns out, Minecraft is really as good still who knew??? Started playing a bunch more of it this year due to Giant Bomb deciding to do so, and yeah: still good!

2. Hades – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★★

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again— Supergiant makes damn good games. I’d been holding off on checking out Hades until its full release due to my tendency to burn out on games easily, and I’m glad I waited. Hades is a fantastic rogue-lite experience. The way it makes narrative progression part of the reiterative, randomized rogue-lite structure is just perfect.

It’s got all the usual Supergiant bullet points. Great characters, voice acting, narration, and music. In terms of gameplay, it’s probably their least ambitious game— playing something like a cousin to their original game, Bastion— but it’s also been polished to a mirror sheen. It just feels really damn good to play, over and over and over.

That being said, the second (final?) ending feels kind of…. Tacked on? It’s fine as a goal to go for while continuing to do the game’s relationship mechanics for additional story bits, but it ends up feeling kind of unfulfilling compared to the payoff of the first one.

1. Crusader Kings III – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★★

I never could get into Crusader Kings II. Despite my interest, the sheer mechanical heft and unintuitive interface made the game a wall that I just couldn’t get over. I’m sure if I’d dedicated myself I probably could have learned it, but… ehhhhhh.

Crusader Kings III, on the other hand, has a good tutorial, a cleaned-up UI, and a very helpful highlight and tooltip system that make it much easier to understand how to actually play the game through resources inside the game itself. And, as it turns out: I rather love this game.

I mean, conceptually it’s an easy sell, isn’t it? Historical politics is something I enjoy broadly. I liked Stellaris but wish it had more narrative, roleplaying elements. They outright say that “winning” isn’t really the point of the game. Instead, it’s more about emergent storytelling and playing with the different systems and seeing what you can do with it.

My current game has had me taking the Haesteinn dynasty from its Viking origins into England, forming a London-seated Northern Sea Empire that encompasses all of Britannia, Iceland, Holland, Norway, and Denmark. I am currently working on hegemonizing Norse religious control over enough Asatru holy sites to finally reform the religion, such that more unified feudalization can occur. To that end, my current ruler’s predecessor invaded West Francia and conquered the whole of its territory, substantially reducing the foothold of Catholicism in mainland Europe… which seems to have kicked the hornet’s nest, given the Crusade I’m going to need to contend with next time I boot up the game.

Of course, a complicating matter is that my current ruler— the Emperor of the North Sea, King of Ireland and the Danelaw, liege of the King of Denmark, was elected from the extended Haesteinn family via Thing, the Scandinavian council of his erstwhile vassals. Where the previous emperor, the one who manufactured the invasion of Francia, was quite religious and beloved for his adherence to the old ways, I discovered as I took over as his successor that he really, really is into just boning down across Europe. We’re talking constantly attempting to seduce neighboring Queens and Princesses. His vassals are not thrilled with this. They also don’t care for his propensity for torturing people to death, constantly.

I had no real say in this; attempting to stay on top of a dynasty is kind of like riding a bucking-bronco, so many things are only tenuously under your control that some weird shit can happen. This is especially true when you use the systems that make it easier to maintain the coherency of your domain. The Norse religion encouraging concubinage results in you having a lot of kids, which means there’s a lot of domain partition going on (someday, primogeniture, someday). Naturally, using Thing election reduces that, but also makes you sometimes end up having to play Emperor Stabbo-Fucko because they thought he was the best candidate at the time. Hell, I thought he was the best candidate at the time until I discovered just how many people he’d be laying with on the low. But you just have to roll with it.

The way the game forces you to play ball with character traits is great. Doing things that match with the character’s traits makes them lose stress. Doing things against their character increases stress. Too much stress can force you to make the character take up vices (which can make them suffer health or opinion maluses, as well as altering their aptitudes), or even die outright. And sometimes those vices and attitudes can be boons, given they open up opportunities for different character interactions.

Emperor Stab-and-Fuck-Kingdom is perhaps the most relaxed person alive, it turns out, because his sadism makes him really enjoy sacrificing infidels, which makes the gods happy. It also freaks the fuck out of all of his vassals, so they’re a good supplicant mix of both appreciative of my religious sentiments and also utterly terrified of my skull piles. Some especially brave vassals occasionally try to assassinate me, but my lovers keep jumping in front of the knife and saving my life mid-coitus. Iiiiiit happens! :D  

The game can be incredibly fun to just watch, as it becomes emergently weird. Georgia right now is incredibly Jewish in game. I’m not sure how that happened; I guess someone made a random Jewish guy into a vassal, who somehow moved up enough in the world to make it a movement? The Byzantine princes elected a Coptic as Emperor, which over the course of the decade resulted in very accelerated balkanization as Byzantium just lost its shit. The Middle East and notional HRE haven’t really unified in a meaningful way, so I’m curious how things are going to go if/when the Mongols unify and roll-on in.

It’s one of those “Just one more thing” games that can completely devour time. I have more than a few times checked the clock mid-game to see that it’s 4AM and that I’ve totally ruined my sleep schedule in the process of play. Oooooops.

I highly recommend checking it out if you’re curious; the introductory, pre-release video series Paradox put out showing off the game does a pretty good job of showing the core gameplay loop and also how weird it can get.

[aahhlliiss-writes]

On My Own or Not At All - Chapter Four

Ugh guess who finally managed to finish Chapter Four? So sorry about the wait, and I hope you enjoy!

I would absolutely love to know what you think, and if you have any questions/ideas/feedback about this then please let me know. You can find my ask box HERE.

You can find all other chapters HERE.

WARNING: This series deals with sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and mental health. While I’m going to keep these themes pretty mild, if any of these things upset you, this may not be the series for you.

2860 words.

Six months. Genesis was six months pregnant, and now officially in her third and final trimester of her pregnancy. Her bump felt huge now, and she could hardly believe that she had another three whole months of growing to do before she finally gave birth. The closer she got to her due date, the more nervous she became. She was excited to meet her baby, but the prospect of giving birth continued to terrify her.

Pregnancy was hard. She was constantly sore, tired, and hungry, and she had a particularly bad case of recurring heart burn. She was sexually frustrated and emotional, and living alone was getting increasingly more difficult. Her and Harry had seen each other three times a week every week ever since she had told him she was pregnant, and they were getting along surprisingly well. Genesis was beginning to enjoy having someone more constant in her life, and while she had herself convinced that she didn’t have any real feelings for him, she cared deeply about him and his involvement.

The pair had been unable to go out in public together due to Harry’s slightly unconventional career choices, so they mostly hung out at Harry’s apartment. They’d been to Genesis’ once or twice, but it was cramped, cold and dark, and they both agreed it was nicer to be at Harry’s. They watched films, cooked together, and chatted endlessly. They talked in great depth about the pregnancy and their birth plan, and they had pretty much everything arranged down to the last little detail.

Genesis had begun to buy baby clothes and supplies here and there, keeping everything gender neutral. They had both decided they wanted to wait until the baby was born to find out the gender, a decision that Genesis was struggling to stick to as time went on. They had names picked out for both a boy and a girl however, and Genesis knew she would be thrilled whatever she had.

Genesis busted through the door of her flat, dropping her shopping bags and heading to the couch, sitting down heavily and letting out a relieved groan as the pressure on her aching feet, hips and legs was finally removed. She swung her feet up onto the sofa with a little difficultly, hands finding her swollen bump as she relaxed back, her eyes closing a little.

Her phone rang, pulling her from thoughts as she scrambled in her handbag for the source of the sound. She smiled seeing Harry’s name lit up on the screen, answering the call.

“Hey Harry.”

“Hey love. How are you? How’s bub?”

Genesis shrugged her shoulders involuntarily, a little shiver running down her spine as Harry’s slow drawl washed over her. His voice alone comforted her, and Genesis couldn’t deny her own reaction.

“Good, and good. Bit sore. Bit tired. Nothing new.”

“Tha’s good to hear. And how’s the heart burn?”

“Eh. Not great. Same old same old. How about you, how was that interview this morning?”

Harry chuckled before answering. “Yeah, it was fine. Hard to resist the urge to talk about you and bub though.”

“Harry-“

“I know, I know. Secret for as long as possible. It’s hard not to talk about though. Best thing in my life and all…”

Genesis blushed at his words. She knew he was just talking about their baby, but even the vague notion that Harry cared for her the way she was beginning to care for him made her feel all flushed and breathless.

“So…” Harry started, breaking the slightly tense pause in conversation. “Are you coming round t’night? Think it’s time you watched The Notebook!”

Genesis giggled, shaking her head fondly. “Yeah, I’m coming. Is seven still okay?”

“Seven is perfect. Looking forward to it.”

“So am I. See you then, Harry.”

“See you,” he echoed, before hanging up.

Genesis looked fondly down at her phone for a moment after the call ended, before sighing and pulling herself up slowly, steadying herself as she found her balance. She gasped softly as a searing pain ripped through her abdomen, her hand finding the arm of the sofa as she gripped it tightly for support. The pain was gone reasonably quickly, and Genesis took a second to recover, rubbing her hands over her bump in an attempt to soothe herself.

Casting her worries aside, she dismissed the sudden pain as a fluke, walking cautiously to her closet to change. She felt a few more residual pangs of pain over the next hour or so, but nothing close to the initial pain she had felt upon standing up. Before long it was time to head to Harry’s, and she made her way out to the car slowly, grimacing slightly as heavy rain droplets began to fall.

##

By the team you reached Harry’s apartment, the pain was back, ripping through your stomach making it difficult to stand up, let alone walk. You knocked a couple of times lightly, gripping onto the door frame as you struggled to stand up. Harry was quick to answer, his familiar grin falling from his face as he saw the look of hers.

“Love, what’s going on? Are you in pain?” His arm wrapped around her waist quickly, supporting her as he guided her to the sofa, setting her down carefully. Genesis grimaced as she sat, letting out a relieved sigh as she relaxed back.

“Sorry, sorry… Just had a little pain after we talked. Not sure what’s wrong… I think I’m okay. A little pain is normal,” she explained, her eyes meeting Harry’s. Worry filled his green orbs as his gaze burned back at her, an absent-minded hand resting on her knee.

“I dunno, I think we should go to the hospital…”

“Don’t be silly, I’m fine. Just need to rest, I think.”

“But don’t you think-“

“Harry, at least give it an hour or so. If the pain is still bad then, we can go,” she reasoned, offering him a weak smile. Harry hesitated before giving her a reluctant nod, his shoulders dropping a little as he relaxed slightly.

“At least let me make you comfy. What do you need?”

“Umm… Well, if you could help my get my fat ankles up onto the sofa…” she trailed off, giggled breathlessly as she tried to pull her legs up. Harry’s hands immediately found her limbs, helping them up onto the sofa carefully, her feet resting on his lap.

“Not fat… Just a little swollen,” he smiled fondly, carefully tugging off her shoes and setting them on the floor. His hands found one of her feet, taking it gently and beginning to massage his fingers against her sore skin. She moaned, heading dropping back against the arm of the sofa and eyes flickering shut.

Harry chuckled, watching her face fondly. “I take it this is alright?” he murmured.

“So good…” she whispered, her hands automatically moving to her bump.

There was a moment of comfortable quiet as Harry continued to work her tense muscles, and then-

“I worry about you all alone in that flat of yours.”

Genesis’ eyes opened slowly, blinking a little blearily at him. “Don’t be silly.”

“M’not being silly, m’being realistic. You’re big now, love. This pregnancy hasn’t been easy and it’s only getting harder. I just worry you aren’t getting enough rest. Or enough love,” he added, his voice a little stern.

Genesis sighed, nodding a little. “Yeah. No, I know. It’s not much fun, I won’t lie. But I’m alright. Don’t really have any other option, do I,” she reasoned, offering him a smile.

“You could move in with me,” Harry blurted, a slightly flush appearing on his cheeks. Genesis’ mouth popped open in disbelief, blinking rapidly as she tried to process his words.

“I-“

“Look, I know what you’re going to say but think about it! It would mean I could be there for you, help you when you need help, look after you and baby. And I would be able to be there for… y’know. For all the pregnancy stuff. And I know it’s a little weird, but I have all this space, and your apartment is… Well, you’d be more comfortable here. And I wouldn’t have to worry about you all the time…”

“Harry-“

“Just think about. Please love?” he pleaded, his eyes meeting hers.

She nodded slowly, offering him a weak smile in return. “I’ll think about it.”

“Good,” he said happily, slumping back, satisfied for now by her promise to consider his offer.

##

The rest of the evening went by as they all did. They ate some dinner, chatted, and then started to watch a movie. Harry had somehow convinced Genesis that The Notebook was a good idea, despite her protests against any form of rom-com. She hated movies like that, but Harry was infuriatingly impossible to say no to. So there she was, cuddled up under blanket, her head resting against the arm of the sofa. She was finding it harder and harder to keep her eyes open, and it wasn’t long before she was fast asleep.

Harry smiled fondly over at the sleeping woman opposite him, transfixed by her peaceful features as she slept. There was no denying how he felt about her. He’d been attracted to her since the day he met her. There was something so incredibly intriguing about her, and Harry savored the time they spent together. The fact that she was carrying his child only made his feelings more intense. Genesis was a mystery, and Harry couldn’t get enough.

He switched the movie off, chuckling slightly as he realized she’d once again found a way out of watching one of his movie suggestions. He stood, careful not to disturb her as he tucked her up even cozier with the blanket, pausing a moment before pressing a chaste kiss to her forehead. A slow grin spread across her lips, her eyes flickering open sleepily.

“Go back to sleep, love,” he whispered, stroking back a stray strand of her hair. Genesis sighed, nudging into his touch for a moment before pulling herself up slightly.

“Need to get home.”

“Stay? There’s a guest room,” he encouraged. Genesis nibbled her lip anxiously as she considered his offer.

“You aren’t safe to drive when you’re this sleepy…” he pressed. Genesis smiled, clearly endeared by Harry’s persistence.

“Alright. I’ll stay,” she finally agreed, giggling softly as Harry broke into a big grin.

Harry helped her up from the sofa along the corridor to the spare room, helping her sink down onto the edge of the bed.

“Wait here,” he instructed, kissing her forehead again before hurrying from the room.

Genesis blushed at the kiss, her hands finding her bump as she waited for him to return. Her heart was pounding as she took in her surroundings. The guest room was almost as big as her entire apartment. It felt weird to be here, in Harry’s space, getting ready to go to sleep. She was letting her guard quicker than she ever had before, and it was scary. The more time she spent with Harry, the more she wanted to let him in, and it terrified her. There was something about him that made her completely abandon all her suspicions and forget all her previous hurt. She trusted him, even though she knew she shouldn’t yet.

Harry came bustling back in, handing her a baggy t-shirt and a pair of clean boxers.

“For jammies. Sorry I don’t have anything else… Will this work?”

“This is perfect, thank you,” Genesis smiled, taking the clothing.

“Okay, good. Um… There’s a bathroom just through that door, and there’s more blankets in the cupboard if you get cold… I think that’s everything. Do you need anything else?” he asked, his eyes wide as he looked down at her.

“No, you’ve got me so sorted,” Genesis giggled. Harry chuckled, leaning in to press a gentle kiss on her cheek before turning to leave.

“Sweet dreams,” he smiled.

“You too.”

And then she was alone. She smiled to herself, burying her face in Harry’s t-shirt and breathing deeply. They smelled just like him. Clean washing, coffee, cologne, toothpaste, and something else that she couldn’t quite put her finger on. It was a wonderful smell, and it made little butterflies erupt in her stomach, giggling a little as she felt a sharp kick from her bump.

“Hey little one… Can you smell your Daddy too?” she murmured, beginning to change out of her clothes into Harry’s. The t-shirt was a little tight over her bump, but it was soft and comfortable, and once she had washed her face and brushed her teeth, she tucked herself up in the large bed feeling the happiest she’d felt in a long time.

Her mind wandered to thoughts of Harry’s proposition to move in here with him. While her brain was screaming at her all the reasons why it was such a terrible idea, she couldn’t help but want to consider it. It would be nice to get to share the burden of her pregnancy with Harry, and she knew it would be rewarding for him to be more involved. But it would mean a new level of vulnerability, one that she had never shared with anyone before, and the thought terrified her.

She reached for her phone, pausing a moment before typing a quick text.

“Thanks for getting me all set up. I’m so comfy. Bump says good night.”

There was a pause, and then-

“Of course, love. Give bump a kiss from me.”

“I will. Night Harry.”

Genesis placed the phone back on the bedside table, sinking back against the multitude of pillows, trying to relax. She was comfy, but she was restless. She tried for half an hour or so to fall asleep, but sleep just never came. She reached for her phone once more, her heart pounding in her chest as she began to type another text.

“You still up?”

“Yeah, you alright?”

“Yeah. Just can’t sleep.”

Genesis watched as the little typing bubbled flickered on her screen, her breath held as she waited for his response. She wasn’t really sure what she was expecting, but she had an idea what he might say.

“Baby keeping you up? I could come keep you company? If you wanted?”

Genesis smiled, breathing out as she replied.

“That’d be nice.”

Almost instantly, Harry was knocking softly on the door before entering quietly, shutting the door behind him.

“Hey you.”

“Hey,” she smiled back, smoothing her hands over the duvet.

“Do you-“

“C’mere,” she interrupted, patting the space beside her. Harry’s eyebrows raised slightly but he wasted no time joining her, slipping under the covers a little cautiously. Genesis rolled onto her side, taking in his profile. He was beautiful.

“Harry?”

“Mm?” he hummed, rolling as well so that he was facing her. She shuffled a little closer.

“I’m scared. Of giving birth,” she admitted, her voice meek.

“Oh, love…” he cooed softly, his hand moving to stroke her hair. “I know. I know it’s so scary. But… We’ve got a plan, and we’ll be in the hospital with all the medical staff. They know what they’re doing. And… and I’ll be there, so you’ll have a hand to squeeze. If you want, of course-“

“I want,” she breathed, their faces inching closer and closer together. She could feel her breath hitching in her throat as his hand slowed, cupping the back of her head. And then, just like that, her lips found his.

It was the most intense kiss Genesis had ever had. Much unlike their drunken night together, or their moment of passion on his sofa when she had first told him about her pregnancy, this kiss was slow, and sweet. She could taste him on her tongue, his own lapping slowly against her mouth as their hands roamed over each other, discovering one another properly. It was mind-blowing and intense and scary and safe all at the same time, and Genesis felt incredibly overwhelmed.

They finally broke apart, breathless and flushed as they gazed at each other. Harry swiped the pad of his thumb over her cheeks, catching a few stray tears that must’ve escaped in the moment.

“Y’alright?” he breathed.

“Mhm,” she nodded quickly. “Just… never been kissed like that before. It’s a lot,” she whispered.

Harry nodded in understanding, his thumb continuing to stroke her cheek. She sighed happily, pecking a little kiss to the corner of his mouth before nuzzling her face in against his neck, her bump pressed against his stomach.

“Feels nice,” he murmured, his hand moving to gently rub over the side of her bump. She hummed in response, eyes closing as she relaxed into their embrace. Harry’s hand pushed gently under the fabric of her t-shirt, fingers splaying against the bare skin of her stomach.

“I can feel bub moving,” he whispered.

“So can I,” Genesis groaned, chuckling softly.

“Try get some sleep, love.”

Genesis snuggled even closer, warm and safe in Harry’s arms as her eyes began to close. As new and scary and unknown as this was, it felt right, and she couldn’t deny it.

[fridge246]

@bookhobbit​

...So here’s a bunch of fic recs for Lord of the Rings fic in response to your post requesting some... I wrote some notes about whether or not there was romance and how much worldbuilding there was... i have no idea what you have read already so i just kind of put down everything i could remember off the top of my head!

...I haven’t read some of these fics for years so I may have forgotten some problematic elements (or not noticed them... i was a different person at 15/16 :\) ...or i may not have accurately remembered the writing quality... I have no idea if your tastes even match mine... actually i’m kind of nervous you won’t like any of them ha  but here we go anyway:

Lindelea: LOTS of Hobbits, and detailed worldbuilding on Hobbit society. Not all of her writing is romance-free but theres SO MUCH of it that the non-romance content is still a considerable amount. Does a good job of treating Hobbits as a real society instead of innocent children or silly and oblivious. (though she’s also good at comedy... there’s just an enormous range of fic)

 Going, Going, Gone is a pretty good and fairly short fic with an interesting premise even if it’s not one of her more worldbuilding-heavy ones (also it has rosie and frodo being friends) and she also wrote a good one about the history of how the Shire began which has LOTS of worldbuilding ...but also is 90% OCs

Canafinwe: Low on the Hobbits but really REALLY good at making Middle Earth feel REAL and filling in worldbuilding gaps (especially the interpersonal and political dynamics- everything is fully fleshed out and complex it’s GREAT). and she writes Gilraen really well! The only romance i can recall is a little bit of Aragorn/Arwen but that’s done... well literally the best I’ve ever seen it done EVER, and it’s very understated. Just. all around character dynamics are realistic and A+ aaaaand i could go on for a week so i’ll stop.

...the fic A Long and Weary Way is really good but can get kind of grim/painful... if you want to skip right to the part that has more interpersonal interaction it’d probably work to start at chapter 55 or 56 instead of the begining. Everything else is ....less continuously harsh? so maybe start with one of her other fics. I’m not up to date with her newest fic since it’s still in progress, but it seems to be of a consistent level of excellent with the others!

...i guess start with one of the short stories or this one *shrugs*

Soledad: does some good versions of Hobbits and Dwarves! (pre-hobbit-movie dwarves no less! a rare treasure) I remember really liking Elf-root and a couple of other ones.

Nothing of Note by Primsong lots of hobbits, and Bilbo goes on a trip around the Shire+the land just outside so we get to see some worldbuilding up close! excellent Bilbo and Frodo friendship/family relationship and a nice balance of funny and serious. It’s long though. The author wrote some fic with dwarves, but I haven’t read it *shrugs*

Less Worldbuilding, More Hobbits?

...er also i got a little bit carried away so some of these might not have a total worldbuilding focus ...of course people still have to build most of hobbit society from scratch so there’s at least some? it’s always nice to see which names off the Hobbit family trees get turned into actual characters

Dreamflower: lots of Hobbits...! and she does a little bit of Shire history too! 

on the non-worldbuild-y side of things her Eucatastrophe series is an AU where Frodo only needs to sail West for a short time and then returns the shire... i remember it being pretty good, if blatantly a AU for Happy Ending Purposes 

Thundera Tiger: i don’t really remember much about her fic?... i think she writes good gapfillers...? also Fey is just a good mystery story all on it’s own- and it adds in a bit of worldbuilding which is a plus?

Gamgeefest: pretty good Hobbits but i think sometimes their writing strays into movie-verse territory? movie-verse appearances anyway i think? but I don’t 100% remember. Anyway, just read this one shot if nothing else... and i remember this fic being kind of fun and also having some worldbuilding/cultural exchange?

Larner: can get a little... “character infodumps exposition” at times but pretty good at writing Hobbits and their society!

Budgielover: i remember really liking this author back in the day but i don’t 100% remember everything... ? might get a little bit ‘and then people prank each other’ but it’s been years so idk 

Cairistiona: is one of my personal top favorites so she goes on the list even though she only has a couple stories with Hobbits! Very good at OCs that feel natural and does some worldbuilding of the towns/culture in the areas her fic is usually set. 

there’s a LOT more i could try to track down... i spent like two YEARS obsessively reading every scrap of decent LotR fic i could get my hands on, and it’s all kind of a blur now ha... but yeah these were what came to mind. There was one more person who did excellent worldbuilding but i just can’t remember their name or any fic titles :\ i’ll figure it out eventually

random extra bonus fic rec

just this chapter of this fic it’s Frodo and Feanor having a chat due to a chance meeting in Valinor after the end of Lord of the Rings. 110% better than it sounds but it does have a bit of not-third-age stuff so i’m not officially putting it on the rec list. it’s one of the few ‘elves of legend meet hobbits’ that actually works and treats both characters with respect and dignity. There’s actually quite a bit of worldbuilding just because they’re both curious about the other’s culture/background. Also they talk about linguistics a lot and it’s fun?? idk it’s hard to explain. there’s footnotes!

[transboyurameshi-blog]

x @frogopera I didn’t wanna spam your inbox so here’s a list of recs, there’s anime in there as well bsjskqjdrjejqjr anyone is open to reblog this tho idc think of it as my official rec list pff tf t if you have any triggers I’d be happy to go through and let you know if they have them

Bojack Horseman: you’ve possibly already seen this but I would do a disservice if I didn’t include it. It’s genuinely the best animated series I have ever had the joy of watching and the pinnacle of adult animation. It’s inclusive, smart, very heavy and bojack is…he the kind of main character you don’t wanna relate to but you will • tw for drug and alcohol abuse, mentions of and implications of child abuse, and homophobia (gay character is fired and contracts prostate cancer ), and slight pedophilia ( bojack almost drunkenly sleeps with a teenager, technically legal in that state and she was sober but ewe no to the shows credit it’s painted as a BAD thing )

Home: the adventures of oh and tipp it’s a 2d animated series based around the dreamworks movie and it’s actually incredibly cute fun decompression stuff • tw for transphobia I think? they make some jokes about the alien races genders and like…..I can’t tell if it’s a transphobic joke or trying to teach kids pronoun usage tbfh

The batman idk how you feel about superhero stuff but the batman is a pretty stylish and interesting take in batman mythos and the art style is that kind of awkward but captivating and interesting. it really stands out if that makes sense

my little pony: equestria girls movies: okay hear me out, they’re actually pretty good ( so is the show in my frank opinion but the movies are a good jumping on point ) the movies take place in a more human world and rainbow rocks is legitimately fucking awesome with kick ass music and they’re all S U P E R gay with butch lesbian supreme sunset shimmer

the tinker bell movies: they’re centered around a whole world of fairies and like I’m psure they might not be 2d animation but they’re honestly worth a watch, just pure and fun.

lolirock:

cute french based cartoon about three magical pop star princesses and it was the show everyone was excited about because there’s a black magical girl. it’s just super beautiful and sweet and bubblegum but it’ll get you in the heart too

Glitter force:

it’s one of the few precure anime we dubbed and it just …. it’s silly and kinda dumb but if you just want pure cotton candy and sparkles this is the anime for you. the main girl has a deep love of fairy tails and happy ever after like 💕💕

Winx:

again a little shallow seeming and the art style takes some getting used to but it’s a big organic world of magic and wonder that will draw you in and genuinely surprise you in some places

Horseland:

it’s a pretty diverse show about a bunch of young girls and their magic talking horses they don’t know can talk. it’s again more feel good kid stuff but it tackled native cultural appropriation and litterly called out the white girl wearing native headdress so it gets bonus points from me

the last unicorn:

*clutches chest* it’s just beautiful and amazing okay

justice League / justice League unlimited:

both fairly awesome superhero series that helped start the dcau and are just fucking brilliantly written and still hold up today

batman beyond:

this show is dated af and is about future batman in the fuuuture man sjjzjqjejriejr it’s super great though and is just a nice take on a young batman still balancing school and life

the goofy movie

just a really nice hilarious movie that gets a lot more on the nose the older you get plus I’m still not over Roxanes character design it’s really aces

Balto;

again a lot of my love for this movie comes from its animation but it’s a pretty heartwarming story about what someone can achieve for those they love

I’m sneaking in Wendy wu homecoming warrior despite it being live action because it’s an actually fascinating Disney movie with a really cool mythos and ACTUALLY HAS A PREDOMINANTLY ASIAN CAST go figure sjsjsjdje

Atlantis:

I have a deep love for this movie and it doesn’t get near the recognition it deserves. it subverts the damsel in distress trope without being patronizing about it. we get a lovable scrawny nerd that’s actually respectful of the cultures he studies and his goddess of a future wife and like it was a movie written by mostly white people that managed to portray a tribal element without seeming racist

lucha Libre and really cute oft forgotten cartoon about latinx children in training to become luchadors like their parents

ao no exorcist:

is a really intense anime with catholic themes that really goes deep into the concept of nature vs nurture and has a pretty gay coded protagonist and focuses more on his familial relationship with his brother and the strain it’s gone under vs his possible romances

ruroni Kenshin and samurai champloo are good old classic anime if you’re looking for that old school feudal Japan feeling and adventure and rag tag looser building a family

K is a pretty fascinating anime in that if I explained too much I’d ruin the fun of discovering it yourself tho hey more queer coding

detective conan is a fucking awesome mystery anime but at like eight billion episodes and counting I wouldn’t worry too much about it sjajhdejskkf

Karneval is a really cute and funny, pretty anime following a sweet amnesiac child as he joins the circus to find the one he loves, and yes more queer coding like haRD

yu yu hakusho:

literally my favorite anime ever in existence and I’ll just keep this short it follows a demon hunter as life continues to screw him over and he survives

assassination classroom:.

is actually a very weirdly heartwarming story about a bunch of kids tasked to assassinate their teacher ( I swear it’s weirder than it sounds ( but it’s definitely not a book to be judged by its cover

Majin tentai nogami neuro: is a very interesting and in depth murder mystery anime about a demon who literally eats mysteries and enlists the help of a human girl to open up a detective agency. warning tho shit gets DARK near the end

petshop of horrors:

this is an ova series so it’s just a couple episodes but it’s a hauntingly creepy and fun look and an eccentric pet shop owner that offers his clients … dubious pets that would be fine if these guys would just follow the rules of ownership he gives them

xxxholic:

again kind of a mystery anime but with far more magic and I’m pretty positive it’s canon one of the male characters is unrequitely in love with the main guy, and the art style is definitely an aquired taste but it’s worth it

death parade:

THIS SHIT GAVE ME A CRISIS OF SELF AFTER FINISHING IT, DO NOT LET TYE HAPPY INTRO FOOL YOU IT’S OUT FOR YOUR BLOOD AND TEARS YOU WILL FUCK CRY

[neverlearnedtoread]

Soul of the Sword

⭐⭐⭐⭐; yumeko ignores everyone as they try to make her do stuff for them and does what she wants anyway, which is real gucci of her

Oh?? 👌😉😏

japanese-inspired fantasy! while i would have preferred physical descriptions (that way, if you know japanese folklore, you can pick up on the cues, and if you don’t, you’ll still know what it looks like), i felt like the worldbuilding was a lot more manageable this time around

lgbt rep! though i personally found it heavy-handed, the lgbt side couple was cute, and im here for that

like any self-respecting weeaboo, ive read fullmetal alchemist, which means if you have any remotely greedling-esque character, im obligated to stan. it was fun to see hakaimono and yumeko go head to head! very ‘unstoppable force meets other unstoppable force’

the maturity of the main romance - yumeko decided tatsumi deserved to have someone in his corner, and held true to that. steadfast loyalty wins over witty banter with a hot guy for me any day

i flew through this plot so quickly, i probably left the pages smoking faintly. a lot of trilogies have their 2nd title as their weakest link, but for me, this book was the strongest out of the three

No.. ❌🤢🤮

yumeko’s innocence still gets used as a gag, which is annoying - it also drives a disconnect between her intuitiveness in tricking others with her lack of understanding regarding obvious social cues

the side romance can get pretty...over the top with the sweet. it made me cringe a little, especially because yumeko’s obliviousness made it all the more glaringly obvious. still, it was a side romance - the plot was moving fast enough that we didn’t have to spend too long being embarrassed during these scenes

Some spoilers under the cut - this is the second book in the series!

Summary: Yumeko, a half-kitsune tasked with safeguarding one of three pieces of a powerful dragon-summoning scroll, has an ever-growing list of things to do before Dragon Bullying Season starts in earnest - and random people keep on popping up out of nowhere to make more demands. One of these people is Lady Hanshou, the mysterious matriarch of the shady Kage clan, who requests Yumeko’s help in neutralizing the demon Hakaimono, currently running amok after possessing her personal demonslayer, Kage Tatsumi. Lady Hanshou’s perfectly happy killing her loyal servant to retain control of the cursed sword Kamigoroshi, but Yumeko can’t accept that outcome - Kage Tatsumi promised to protect her from harm, and she’s not going to turn her back on him now. Knowing that Hakaimono intends to come after the Dragon Scroll pieces in his quest to free himself from the mortal realm, Yumeko prepares to face him, and win back Tatsumi’s soul in the process.

Concept: 💭💭💭

I had my reservations about how this book was going to go! Part of what made the beginning of the first book tough for me to get through was how 2D the main characters were before they started travelling together - their dynamic smoothed out a lot of the grating aspects of their personalities, making them more enjoyable to read. So starting the book with the two of them split up from each other, travelling separately throughout the whole book and not likely to meet until the very end - I was expecting to be frustrated.

Execution: 💥💥💥💥

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised! The new character interactions that opened up once the main leads were split up created a new layer for me to appreciate, while still never overshadowing the relationship the two leads had built from the first book - they still thought about each other, and the author didn’t withhold them crossing paths again from the reader like stick with a carrot in front of a donkey. I kept thinking how respectful the author was to build her main leads up as individuals first, with their own character arcs to pursue, before she was going to bring them together again.

Personal Enjoyment: ❤❤❤❤❤

This trilogy has great consistency with its characters - a subtly difficult thing to do, balancing the character arc and development with a character that still feels the same. I had a lot of fun watching Yumeko consolidate her character - it never felt like she was changing, more like she was becoming who she was supposed to be. And of course our new star - Hakaimono, my man! I thoroughly enjoyed his chapters in this book, which I wasn’t expecting at all, because of the distinct perspective he offered. He’s probably one of the only characters we get to know that has been present for multiple wishes, and it shows in the way he interacts with all the other mysterious players that were only hinted at in the first book. It elevates the story from Yumeko and Tatsumi’s pawn-level perspective of the board, although you can tell that for all of Hakaimono’s immense power he’s still no higher than a knight or a bishop, and it chafes at him.

Favourite Moment: the scene at the steel feather temple when yumeko tricked hakaimono and managed to use her diversions and illusions well enough to actually lay her hands on him - the bde of it all was choice 👌👌 im really enjoying watching yumeko take her ‘silly illusions’ and apply real power to them - we love to see a main female character develop her powers and her range!!!

Favourite Character: Yumeko - what a lovely main character to have; there are so many things to like about her. i love "”bitchy”” female characters as much as the next person but its nice to see variety, since everyone seems to think there are only a few ways to write ‘wormenn’ realistically - i loved yumeko’s strength and steadfastness of belief that she can do the impossible because its the right thing to do, without her becoming harsher or more cruel in the process. she even asked permission from tatsumi first! that’s another thing i really liked about yumeko - she listened and valued everyone’s opinion, even though it didn’t necessarily sway her final choice. we stan a woman who said my pussy pops severely and at the end of the day, im making that everyone else’s problem

[game-refraction]

Game Review: Resident Evil 7 - Biohazard (PS VR)

  I opened the door to the cellar and descended down the stairs. Even before my first foot was placed firmly on the wooden plank below I could hear a heavy erratic breathing and creaking of stairs below me. Soon after hearing those disturbing noises, all while surrounded in pitch black darkness, small white arms appeared, attached to a small thin body that crawled up the stairs towards me. She lunged up at me and laughed as she picked me up and threw me back up through the door frame. I got to my feet to attempt to get away, but she charged at me, knife in hand, and starting slashing away at me, grinning the whole time.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard brings its survival horror via a first person perspective. While this isn’t the first time the franchise has had this viewpoint, it is a new concept to the main numbered series. This perspective brings with it a new way to explore a Resident Evil game while also allowing it to return to its roots and lean far more on fear than straight-out action. Resident Evil 7 is nearly a masterpiece and a solid return to form.

As different as one would think a first person Resident Evil game would play, there is so much here that echoes that of the original 1996 PlayStation release. You still have a protagonist armed with various forms of firepower, themed keys, complex puzzles, herb based medical supplies and a maze-like home that continues to give even when you think you’ve explored each and every corner.

The Resident Evil games have commercially and critically gone downhill since the 5th in the series, with its 6th entry being the worst received of the entire franchise. Resident Evil 4 had been one of the best-reviewed games in the series and a turning point for 3rd person shooters altogether. The balance of horror and action was sublime and many thought this was, in fact, a sign that the future of Resident Evil games were going to succeed, and boy were they wrong. The series then left a lot of its survival roots behind and focused more on the shooting aspects altogether thus turning the series into action horror than one of survival.

Back at E3 in 2015 there was a tech demo from Capcom called “Kitchen” and it was for the upcoming VR headset that would eventually be called PlayStation VR. This demo was then later on revealed to be a glimpse at what the future of what Resident Evil was going to be. It was clear then that Resident Evil was going to follow in the footsteps of several recent horror games and be presented as a first person game. Throughout my playthrough of RE7, I couldn’t help but see so many horror influences here, from movies and games like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Outlast, P.T. and even Alien: Isolation. It also should be noted that many horror games throughout the years have borrowed from the original Resident Evil released back in 1996, so maybe we have just come full circle in who inspired who.

The basic structure of the story here is equally reminiscent to that of mid-2000 horror movies, with a few of those references I can’t mention due to ruining the core story, let alone the whole reason for the freaky things that go on here. You play as Ethan, a man who learns his dead wife Mia isn’t quite so dead and goes to Louisiana to track her down. You end up at the homestead of the Baker’s, a family that seems lifted right out from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Almost the entirety of RE7 takes place at or around the Baker homestead, a location that has just as much creativity and mystery as the Spencer Estate did back in the original Resident Evil. There are themed keys and secret areas that unlock through your natural progression in the story, with a few locations that need some backtracking to locate or unlock once you’ve discovered a special key or lockpick. This location is the gift that just keeps on giving and it is these small intimate locations that trump the atmosphere you get in any open world game. The level design in RE7 is just superb and constantly had me paranoid around every corner, even when I knew the danger had passed.

Where the original Resident Evil had many things to kill, this is where RE7 sadly stumbles; enemy variety. You only have a small handful of enemy types and they can become more frustration than excitement. While I’ll get to my opinion on VR and non-VR later on, because there is a huge divide on quality there, the monsters tend to be more bullet sponges than anything else. You have what are called the “Molded” and these tar-like monsters come in upright on two legs or ones that tend to stay on all fours. These encounters on harder difficulty can be nightmarish and with the aiming system what it is, you’ll spend a ton of bullets taking them down or attempting to. There are also some large flying bugs later on that pretty much are limited to a few encounters and are not found in high numbers outside of those moments. Other than that, you have your boss encounters; Jack, Marguerite, Lucas and two more encounters I’ll not reveal. I’ve also seen a few encounters happen differently than that of my own, adding a bit of unpredictability to each playthrough, and creating a greater sense of paranoia when you don’t know what is going to happen.

Several encounters with the Baker family take place in VHS tapes that you’ll find and view during the roughly ten hour playthrough. These tapes are essentially playable scenes where you embody another character and see events that happened before you entered the Baker home. These tapes almost act as a time machine as you can effect things in the past to help Ethan in the present. One of those effects is unlocking a locked drawer early on by finding the lockpick at your feet at the start of the first VHS tape. Unlocking this drawer as Clancy will allow Ethan to benefit from what is in the drawer. There are a small handful of these tapes and each of them are vastly entertaining with one resembling something straight out of a saw movie.

The Baker family is easily the true highlight of the game as each member of this family is sick, twisted and just pure fun. The problem with a lot of the gaming industry is its lack of inclusion of genuine silliness in games. When the original Resident Evil came about, it featured awful voice acting, absurd situations and a campiness to it that garnered it a cult status. With lines like “That was too close. You were almost a Jill sandwich!” or “Jill, here’s a lockpick. It might come in handy if you, ‘the master of unlocking’, take it with you.” Both of which are famously remembered when discussing any cheesy dialogue from video games history and is right up there with “All your base are belong to us.”

Games like Outlast had you escape encounters instead of embracing them, putting the “survival” in survival horror. Resident Evil allows the use of powerful weaponry, so there is no need to stuff yourself into a locker and hope that whatever is chasing you didn’t notice you pop in there. While there are moments in RE7 that require you to hide, it is usually behind some sort of box, table or pile of debris. Bringing the heat to the Molded and said bosses, Ethan has access to various handguns, shotguns, a knife, grenade launcher, flamethrower, and more. Depending on the difficulty you’ve chosen you’ll find ammo littered around to use sparingly or just go Rambo on anything that moves.

There are some issues with regards to combat that can hurt the overall enjoyment. Some of the encounters when you are trying to escape can be a pain when you are boxed in, as there is no shove or dodge mechanic at all, forcing you to expend ammo when you really wanted to conserve it. Speaking of ammo, let’s discuss the best way to play Resident Evil 7; VR.

My first and full playthrough of RE7 was entirely in VR, from start to finish. After completing the game I booted it up in 4K on my PS4 Pro and started up a new game. Once I had to shoot down my first enemy, I suddenly realized that RE7 in non-VR just wasn’t nearly as good. Well, that’s not true, I realized that well before I had my first gun. The way the VR allows you to see your entire peripheral vision is unmatched as is the way it allows you to aim. In VR you only have to move your head small amounts to get that much-needed headshot and the cursor for doing so is far more apparent. Without VR I was struggling to get a solid shot and it was frustrating.

The way VR enhances Resident Evil 7 is incredible, and not once did I get sick or too dizzy to keep playing. Sure, I had a moment or two where I had to slow down and pause the game for a second, but eventually, I went three to four hours of straight play without becoming light-headed or nauseous. There are vast amounts of settings to enhance or assist in how VR works for you. RE7 does the same thing another VR game I’ve seen do, and that is fading in and out each time you move the right stick, this assists in turning so that the fluid movement doesn’t make you sick. It takes a while to get used to and turning it off resulted in getting dizzy real fast, so I recommend to stick with the default setting. There are several moments in the game that are not in VR and it pans out to a theater style view. These are moments when the camera must be directly focused on something and needs to prevent you from looking around. There are also several moments when you are knocked down or jump down to a lower location that results in a quick fade in and out.

Despite any issues with VR, I enjoyed the game far more with the added perspective and immersion that VR brings. Locations gave me a sense of claustrophobia that I didn’t feel when not wearing the headset. Locations and people felt far more real and made me truly appreciate this game for what they intended to do. When a character grabs your hand, you feel far more connected to them as opposed to just seeing it happen on screen. There are also several moments in the game where it gets right in your face, a design that is obviously crafted for VR in mind. About the only thing that VR doesn’t have that non-VR does is a full body given to Ethan, as well as shadows that accompany said body; VR has floating arms and no shadow given to Ethan.

Health is another issue that is problematic with VR and non-VR as it can be a visual nuisance on both, but a far bigger one in non-VR. Ethan has a pebble watch attached to his wrist, not joking, and it shows your health as you take hits and cuts from various foes. In VR this is a circle effect around you, growing more red the closer you are to death. in non-VR you have blood effects on the screen and should you even be at 90% health, there will be blood effects on the screen, annoying you. Ethan already has a watch to show his health, these effects could have been completely left out and had us rely on the watch until giving us some visual warning for extremely low health.

Visuals will vary depending on how you play Resident Evil 7. The Xbox One and PS4 versions are virtually identical, whereas the PS4 Pro’s 4K mode and PC versions are easily the best in terms of visuals. The VR approach on the PS4 is far less impressive due to the resolution restraints the headset has, but rest assured this is the best way to play this game – bar none. The locations are packed with detail, dirty and filthy and just impressive. Sinks are filled with dirty plates, cockroaches and various bits of food, equally detailed with hundreds of maggots. RE7 is an aesthetically pleasing game on all fronts.

After playing through the entire game in VR and a solid portion without, Resident Evil 7 is superb regardless of platform. I will state that my 4.5/5 rating of the game is for its VR offerings and my experience with RE7 not in VR rates a solid 3.5/5. The game is just vastly better in VR in terms of difficulty, immersion, and function. Playing Resident Evil 7 in VR was thrilling, terrifying, and made me paranoid with each step. There are so many settings to make sure that your VR experience is an enjoyable one, it makes me wish that games like Robinson Journey, a game made solely for VR, would offer as many settings there to allow me to enjoy it without feeling ill. While my experience with it not in VR may be the result of a ‘been there done that’ approach to a second playthrough, I didn’t feel nearly as scared or immersed in my surroundings, because well, these locations were not really around me and neither were the threats looking to soak up my bullets. If you have been on the fence about purchasing a Playstation VR, well, this is that killer app that makes the purchase, albeit an expensive one, worth it.

Resident Evil 7 is a solid return to form for the Resident Evil series, a horror game that while not terribly original has us all excited about taking another trip to this once wonderful franchise, and that, regardless of any platform, is a very good thing indeed.

To get a taste of what Resident Evil 7 offers, check out the following trailer. As is the case with all the launch trailers surrounding this game, it does contain a lot of scenes from later on in the game, so huge caution for spoilers and story elements I’ve kept quiet on in this review, you have been warned.

  Game Review: Resident Evil 7 – Biohazard (PS VR) was originally published on Game-Refraction

[sazorak]

Every Game I Played in 2019, Ranked

 2019 sure was a year that happened where I happened to play some video games. Here’s the ones I played enough to form opinions, in a rough ranked order of preference.

It’s kind of weird that I’ve done this for five years now, but hey. I like to talk about things that I like / dislike. Hopefully you’ll empathize with my complaints, and give ones I enjoyed a try.

As a bonus, I also tweeted about the anime I watched and enjoyed this year.

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018

Orm & Cheep: Narrow Squeaks – 1985 – ZX Spectrum – ★

How far would you go for a joke? For the sake of a joke, I spent an hour beating an incomprehensible, shitty ZX Spectrum Game about Orm & Cheep, an 80s British children show I only know about from a Trash Night video making fun of it.

Orm & Cheep: Birthday Party – 1985 – ZX Spectrum – ★

… and also this one, though Birthday Party is marginally better than Narrow Squeaks. Marginally. Extremely marginally. Congratulations to Orm & Cheap: Birthday Party.

16. River City Girls – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

The style of River City Girls is great. I like a lot of what it’s doing in terms of look and sound. It’s just that… well, River City Ransom’s gameplay was interesting something-like 30 years ago. Gameplay wise, this game hasn’t evolved that much from OG RC Ransom. The combat certainly feels better, but as far as it controls… I can’t tell if it’s not taking advantage of modern controllers and just sticking too close to the original’s control scheme, or if side-scrolling beat-em-ups are themselves just so staid and dated these days that there’s not much to be done. I just wasn’t having much fun, and the RC Ransom progression of new techniques and stat boosting didn’t exactly make me want to keep going.

It’s a real shame because in terms of pure aesthetics and concept, the game is amazing. I just don’t actually enjoy playing it. Oh well!

15. Baba is You – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

The core gameplay concept of Baba is You is fantastic. The way you manipulate nouns and verbs to construct phrases that operate as equations in a physical environment is super interesting. The early goings of the game were quite fun.

The problem I have with this game is that when you hit a wall in it, that wall can sometimes be impenetrable. I found that Baba is You is at times too subtle with its attempt to “teach” you tricks or onboard you into approaches to puzzles; it’s possible to come to solutions without taking away the lesson the designer intended, which can make later puzzles basically impossible.

The difficulty curve feels all over the place; I was extremely high on this game early on, but after getting completely blocked moving forward for hours on end, with the only real recourse being to either look stuff up or stare at past puzzles to try to figure out what apparently crucial lesson I missed despite coming to my own solutions, I ultimately decided to just do something else.

14. Cadence of Hyrule – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

Zelda has great music. Crypt of the Necrodancer has pretty good rhythm-game action. Combine them, and you get… well, it turns out you get a pretty OK procedurally generated Zelda-game with Necrodancer mechanics, I suppose. The appeal is easy to understand, though I’m personally not sure I care much for the final product.

I enjoyed the original Necrodancer well enough as a simple run-based, short-ish rhythm dungeon crawler. The brevity of each given “run” (stemming in part from my own inadequate skill, I suppose) worked well with the style of gameplay, in that it never really became much of a chore.

Meanwhile, I enjoy Zelda as an extended puzzle adventure game where there’s an innate unthinking flow to the actions. I’m not typically thinking much about the moment-to-moment about the actual mechanics of the action; the brain’s desires flow directly to the motion on the screen, as it were.

Combining the two results in a Necrodancer experience that’s way too long, and a Zelda experience that is way harder to control. Add the fact that the procedurally generated world isn’t that interesting and I’m just rather lukewarm on this. Meh!

13. Super Robot Wars T – 2019 – PS4 – ★★★

It’s fantastic that Super Robot Wars is finally getting proper, high-quality localizations again. It felt like a dream to finally be able to play this franchise again after being forced to stop after the DS era. Playing through the rather roughly translated, and somewhat monotonous SRW OG: Moon Dwellers was good because the OG games tended to have the highest production values and narrative quality (missing out on 2nd OG may have also helped). SRW V was my first foray into the more recent non-OG games, and so shined as something rather fresh to me.

Two years on, and two Super Robot Wars releases later, it’s plain to see that Super Robot Wars’ current annual release cadence is not great. It results in incredibly repetitive, monotonous games that rely heavily on asset reuse— both between games, and even within the same game. Part of the problem is that the derivativeness doesn’t feel additive. It’s not like SRW T is SRW V + SRW X + New Stuff; it’s more that SRW T is a reskinned SRW V, with some heavy series-asset reuse to boot. I think it’d be a bit more tolerable if it felt like these games were building on each other, but every single one feels exactly as slight and mechanically weak.

Super Robot Wars’ combat have not been particularly good from a tactical sense for a long time now. The original OG games were probably the last time the combat was particularly interesting for me, as it presented an actual challenge and difficulty curve. Nowadays, they are entirely fanservice cakewalks, even on the hardest modes. Hell, they’ve apparently decided that increasing the difficulty of the game means you don’t get to chase the special challenge goals, which actually can paradoxically make portions of the hard-mode actually easier than the normal. Bizarre!

 I guess the idea is “well, folks are playing this to see the bits, so if it’s hard they won’t!” Which… I disagree? If the gameplay is deeply unsatisfying, why wouldn’t I just watch the damn series? Crossover shenanigans don’t mean much whey you don’t do much with it. Fanservice talking heads ain’t enough!

The addition of Cowboy Bebop and the return of GaoGaiGar and Gunbuster should have had me onboard. The series list for this game is fantastic. But what they do with it is so flat that about 30 chapters in, I just… stopped. It wasn’t worth it. I’d plainly seen all that it had to offer. Easy, slow, and repetitive gameplay isn’t appealing to me, even if I do get to see Spike Spiegel doing sky donuts to take out a Zaku.

Additionally: stop putting Nadesico in these games. The units are boring, the plot is boring. Stop devoting so much time to it! It sucks!!

12. Ape Out – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

Ape Out is a game where you’re a big ol’ gorilla murdering guys with guns while dope ass percussive jazz drums play to the action. It’s cool, it’s short, it could honestly probably do with being somewhat shorter, but whatever. I enjoyed it.

BattleTech – 2018 – Steam – ★★★★

Despite being famously a “mecha guy”, BattleTech has never really been my thing. While I’m not opposed to mecha-as-tank-analog, it’s not my primary focus in the genre; I like my robots to be fast, really. I like mecha getting into melee and fucking shit up. Mecha for me is a power fantasy. That’s not really BattleTech / MechWarrior’s thing. That all being said, I quite enjoyed my time with BattleTech, the PC-game rendition of the tabletop thing. It’s a neat turn-based tactical robot combat RPG with an interesting overarching campaign structure… to a point.

The first issue I had is pacing. While the game is turn-based, the combat and movement plays out in real-time. And given how lumbering these robots are, this means that a single mission can take aaaages. Think 45 minutes to an hour for a single mission. It took me about 20-30 hours to get to the campaign’s halfway point, which is when the game really started to sour on me.

The second issue is one of variance. Let me run you through the fundamental loop of the game. You are a mercenary captain that has a ship of mechs and mech pilots, and you fly around from planet to planet taking on jobs. You need money to pay for your ship to keep going, as well as to pay your pilots. It’s expensive to outfit your mechs, and severe damage to them can both REALLY eat into your budget and also take weeks in-game to repair. Missions are rated based on difficulty, and you are expected generally to field a greater “tonnage” of mechs in excess to that difficulty. This all plays out pretty well.

The game starts with you possessing mostly lighter mechs, and as you progress, you’re presented more and more missions in the campaign that require increasingly beefier mechs with more armor and more guns. Whereas in the tabletop game there’s presumably a kind of “point” system by which players are given a limited amount of tonnage that they can field on any given mission (for purposes of balance), there’s no such limit in the game; as such, you’re encouraged to field the four-ish beefiest robots you have, as they’re the most likely to kill everything fast while coming out with the least damage.

How do you get these beefy mechs? Well, you don’t buy them; instead, you’re aiming to kill opposing pilots and leave their robots as much intact as possible so that you can salvage or steal them. It’s kind of amusing; your entire gameplan after a point becomes “how the fuck do I shake this robot around a bunch such that its pilot dies???” It makes sense in practice, but if you think about it for even a second it comes across rather silly. Given you need good mechs to progress, you don’t have much other choice other than just running tonnnsss of missions and hoping you eventually get enough mech fragments to reconstruct some of your own. But beefy-ness isn’t the whole story, as some of the robots you can get just plain suck, regardless of their tonnage. You’re basically rolling dice again and again hoping a robot worthy of stealing shows up so you can kill its friends, and try to kill its pilot as gently as possible. You go through this cycle four times, across the four different weight-classes, until you’ve got what you need in terms of a team of class-appropriate mechs.

The fundamental lack of variety in what you field combines with every single mission really being “how do I kneecap everyone” instead of the given mission objective to make the game quite samey. Mission types don’t vary much, and the environments don’t constrain you all that much, either; the only ones that are particularly interesting are moons and Mars-like planets where your mechs’ ability to regulate their heat become much more constrained, which can necessitate loadout changes.  

I enjoyed the story enough for what it was, but honestly? After 30 hours, I was pretty much good. I had a good time with BattleTech, but I’d had my fill.

Mortal Kombat X – 2015 – Steam – ★★★★

In my ongoing adventure of playing the Mortal Kombat games for their goofy plot / story modes and nothing else, I played Mortal Kombat X. I’m not sure there’s much to talk about these other than “Hey I enjoy their dumb ongoing narrative; I wonder where they’ll go from here!”

11. Mortal Kombat XI – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

Ditto. The plot for these games are getting sillier and sillier, and the ending of XI may be the most ridiculous yet. In a good way.

10. Devil May Cry V – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

Character action games are heavily predicated on the question of “How do we spice the game up over time so that it stays interesting… without overwhelming the player?” Devil May Cry V’s answer is “well, we’ll slowly give them more characters with their own expanding skill sets, that’ll be neat!”

It is neat, but I’m not sure it was actually a good idea. The three protagonists all have extremely different move sets, meaning that the forced switches between them on a chapter-to-chapter basis results in you never really mastering any one of them. Each character has a ton of depth, but… take, for example, Nero, the “main” protagonist. He has a sub-mechanic involved with revving his motorcycle sword to boost damage. I never actually figured out how to get to work. Never really had to, because he had so many other mechanics that were also effective, and I never had much time with him alone to dial in the weird motorcycle thing.

DMCV also does probably my least favorite gameplay gimmick of “introduce new mechanics in a boss battle!” Like great, you gave me a whole new move set here, and are now going to rate me on my performance when you’ve never given me a chance to learn these skills? Oh wait, you’re giving me new mechanics in the final boss battle!?! Fuck off. That sucks!

Also, I think I’m an outlier, but I actually preferred playing as V, the control-three-characters-at-once-while-reading-a-book guy. Just felt like I dialed his move set in easier. Weird.

9. Untitled Goose Game – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

I’m not going to pretend that this is a deep game, or an enduring game, or even necessarily a great game. But I had a lot of fun with it, I have a lot of good memories thinking about it, and I am glad that so many people out there are now wrestling with the fact that birds can be both terrible and also good. Untitled Goose Game carries a powerful message about avian kind. You would do well to learn from it.

8. Super Mario Maker 2 – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

Mario Maker 2 is such an incremental upgrade to Mario Maker that it hardly feels like it earns that “2”. That being said: Mario Maker 1 is pretty darn good so it’s not like that’s all that bad. The additional mechanics and story mode are good, granted, but like… I had been wanting more than just Mario Maker 1.5.

As is, it was pretty easy to get bored with Mario Maker pretty quickly, given it was mostly a game I’d already played quite a bit before. The addition of the campaign held my interest for a fair amount of time, but I’m not exactly coming back to this all that often. Hopefully the content updates they seem to be rolling into it keep up.

7. Kind Worlds: Lo-Fi Beats to Write To – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

This is less a video game and more a sort of vague pen-pal application masquerading as a game, but man… the existence of this thing is neat. It’s just a program where folks write letters about their problems, and people send them stuff back. That’s it.  It’s kind of a sweet thing to just exist.

I’m not a person with what would one term especially Heavy Problems, but just going through other folks letters and giving them an encouraging word is itself nice.

6. The Outer Worlds – 2019 – Epic Game Store – ★★★★

Having been deeply disappointed with the quality of Fallout 4, I was very happy to see Obsidian come back to do their own Fallout-a-like. The Outer Worlds isn’t perfect; I wish it had a bit more of a bite, the gunplay was… fine, the environment design was kind of dull, and the gameplay loop did not outlast the length of the game itself. But I had a fun enough time with it.

That said, I think the dearth of me having much to say here sort of speaks to how… rather unambitious the writing and design ended up being. There’s not a ton to say about it. It’s more responsive than a Fallout 4, to be sure, but even that caps out at a point. It doesn’t necessarily offer much in the way of RPG-style different “paths” to develop your character in terms of who they are or how they behave, beyond the sort-of four-way axis of “grouch to nice” and “corporatist to socialist.” The skill tree ends up being pretty flat, and you can basically become a master of everything by the end.

Shruggo.

5. Pokémon Sword – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

Pokémon Sword/Shield is a bizarre thing— its design is constantly fighting against itself. There are tons of ease-of-use improvements– but it somehow has some of the worst online in the series. It gives you dozens of complex, half-explained systems— but also feels the need to hold your hand lest you get lost in its incredibly linear, dull story. It adds challenging Pokémon raid battles that you largely need to team up with other players to beat— but also has one of the most trivial progressions in the series. It has a huge and varied open “Wild Area” where you can catch hundreds of Pokémon before ever facing the first gym— but that wild area largely exists as a world unto its own separate from the traditional Pokémon “routes”. It doesn’t want to have a plot up until the very end when it decides that gee, I guess we have to, even if it makes no sense.

Let’s go into these in more detail.

Sword/Shield introduces a ton of gameplay improvements. Auto-saving, while problematic in places, is super useful. The ability to move Pokémon directly from the box to your party is great, and removes a lot of process headaches. Single hand controls are a godsend for both improved accessibility and general ease of use. Items are way easier to get, Pokemon are easier to raise, and this is probably the easiest game in the entire series to breed and raise “high tier” Pokemon for online battling.

On the other hand: despite your friend list being loaded into the game, you are forced to use a bizarre password system and request system that is super confusing and prone to issues. You cannot directly trade or battle or play with friends except through this, which occasionally results in headaches anytime someone uses the same four-digit password as you and your bud. The Max Raid battle system is super poorly explained in-game in terms of how you find and join others raids— I only divined it by a tweet someone made. They did away with the “GTS” trading system they had used for the past decade that allowed global Pokemon bartering, presumably in favor of encouraging more natural trades— but didn’t give any way to actually communicate with people in game what you want to trade for. It encourages more in-person interaction, but that’s once again playing into Game Freak’s obsession with the Japanese mode of gaming.

Sword/Shield perhaps has the most sheer amount of systems in any one of these games. It’s not necessarily all good, but in terms of “wow, you’re not babying us huh” it is at least interesting. There’s Pokemon that evolve based on absurd, never-explained conditions like “number of crits in a single battle”, “pass underneath this specific rock when they’re at low health”, “spin baby spin.” The wild area has tons of mechanical stuff that they let you explore without forcing your hand much, and they let you explore it freely without really railroading you. There’s a separate wild-area specific currency system based on raids / dens that you just stumble upon unprompted, really.

On the other hand, the core story progression of the game though… is perhaps the most infuriatingly patronizing thing I’ve experienced. Cutscenes happen every 15 seconds, often-times forcing your movement, and are almost of zero consequence beyond someone going HEY YOU SHOULD GO THAT WAY. The game is completely unwilling to let you get lost when going through the story. It’s constant, it’s unrelenting, it’s maddening. It literally made me mad.

Pokémon Raid battles are super interesting. The battles themselves aren’t necessarily hard, but the kinds of things they present— in terms of providing access to unique Pokémon, rare items, and the fact that they’re not as “rinse-and-repeat” as normal battles— gives the system and game increased longevity. It’s a pretty deep system, with meaningful rewards. A five-star battle is time consuming and you run the risk of failing, but if you pull it off you can get items like TRs, EXP candies, even bottle caps (super useful items that let you increase the baseline stat “DNA” of your Pokémon), and the captured Pokémon can have unique moves you’d normally have to breed and possess extremely high baseline stats. You can even get hidden secret abilities! Nice!

On the other hand: the core game progression is so piss easy and straight forward. The game’s leveling curve is all out of whack, in part because their introduction of a forced “always on” EXP share. In older games, you’d only get EXP from actively battling and beating a Pokemon in a fight, or having participated in a fight. Now, your whole team gets EXP just from being around, and you also get EXP from catching Pokemon, making curry, and all sorts of other small activities. All of this is fine or even good in the abstract as it makes raising stuff easier, but the game isn’t well balanced around it. Encounters don’t scale, which can result in you steamrolling the game if you engage with any of the game’s other systems prior to beating the game. I had to compensate by stretching my normal party of six into a party of 10, constantly swapping members out to keep the average level across the party down. Additionally, the only non-PVP reason to train and breed pokes, the Battle Tower, is so trivially easy this time that… why bother??

The wild area system is brilliant. A big criticism I’ve had with this series in the past is that the kinds of Pokemon any given player is bound to encounter and capture tend to be pretty similar. The limited amount of Pokemon that tend to be put on a traditional Pokemon route, and the limited means you have to encounter them (“hey I walk through the grass, we’ll see what pops up”) doesn’t trend towards players ending up with very different party compositions, just because there’s not a ton of options at any given point. The wild area completely tosses that out the window. As an open space, the types of things someone encounters will vary wildly— and it’s further varied by player-specific weather conditions that dynamically change the encounter tables. It completely opens up the kinds of Pokemon one can encounter early on, presenting hundreds of appropriately leveled options for players. It’s brilliant. The intermixing of both grass-only, overworld-visible, and raid-specific Pokemon also increases the range of encounters. It’s the accomplishment of the core Pokemon concept of “explore and find everything.” Finally.

On the other hand: the wild area is actually kind of boring to explore, visually speaking. It’s basically the Ocarina of Time field with sporadic patches of grass. There’s little actually diversity or mechanics to its exploration, especially when compared to the fact that… the game still has normal routes. They still behave as they always have, except that by the total remove of “Hidden Machine” mobility moves, the ability to explore geographically has been severely hampered. There’s no “gee, I can’t get there yet, guess I’ll have to come back later” except for a single mobility mechanic (the ability to go over the water, introduced very late in the game). It makes revisiting past areas mostly a box-checking exercise, and in general feels like an odd juxtaposition. They either should went all-in on the wild area or better merged the concepts together, because as is it feels… weird. Especially because the wild area could have done with being bigger and more diverse looking.

The game spends most of its time having no story at all, which is kind of boring. Juxtaposed with the railroading stuff where there’s still constant cutscenes with their mostly mediocre characters who don’t do all that much, it almost comes across as padding than anything. There are good characters (Piers and Marnie are the best, the gym leaders in general are good) but man do they try too hard to put Leon over.

But then at the end they introduce the story super quickly and it’s very dumb in a way that made me laugh out loud so congrats I guess.

All in all, I rather liked Sword/Shield. It’s no Sun/Moon— which innovated in tons of places and had an extremely charming story, cast, and progression— but the places that it innovates, and the ease-of-use improvements that they’ve put in the game, are great improvements to the baseline formula. While it’s caused a ton of drama online, the Pokédex and Pokémon Bank stuff are not huge impacts on my personal enjoyment of the game. It kind of stinks a bit, but the overall package is still quite good and fun. 

 The Legend of the Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Master Mode – 2017 – Switch – ★★★★★

Breath of the Wild was my favorite game the year it was released. The harder Master Mode is something that had interested me as something to check out for a replay, but I decided to wait until the shadow of my previous playthrough loomed somewhat less. Breath of the Wild is, after all, both a monumental game and also a monumentally large game. Going back to it for Master Mode would mean (by way of my own obsessive brain) 100%ing it all over again, which is extremely time consuming, even if I don’t go after the all the Koroks.

There was also this sort of reticence in my behind to confront the creeping suspicion I’ve had in my mind that some of the DLC additions have made the core game worse. Which, I would say… is probably somewhat the case. Certain DLC gear items extremely imbalance standard play and really fuck with the exploration of the game (specifically, Majora’s Mask basically making you not have to fight multiple enemy types). Still, I knew I could ignore those, and just focus down on the core experience of Master Mode: harder enemies, regenerating enemy health, and the introduction of floating platforms.

Turns out, BOTW is still fucking amazing, and while the additions Master Mode make aren’t essential, they do make for a fun second run of a fantastic game. The harder enemies make the early parts of that game WAY HARDER (making you really have to get good at using your bombs and stealth), and while that difficulty ramp doesn’t keep up throughout (which, honestly, the platforms are somewhat to blame as they make getting certain bits of higher-level loot earlier easier), it’s still just a great game to go back to.

Breath of the Wild remains my all-time favorite game. Hyped for BOTW2.

4. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★★

Sekiro is in a sense the purest expression of the Souls formula. Stripped away of the jolly co-op, the PVP, the stats, the equipment, and most customization to speak of, Sekiro asks the simple question: can you do this? Can you learn all the systems in this quite challenging game, and engage with it on its own terms?

In its mechanical simplicity, I found Sekiro to be my favorite game of that lineage, as it has allowed them to really polish the gameplay by its singular focus. It just feels amazing to stealth around and backstab dudes, parry everything, and triumph in nail-biting sword duels. While you do gain new skills and equipment (in the form of the ninja tools), they are just supplementing the fundamental systems of the game, rather than acting as diverging ones. So really, most of your time is spent not learning wholly new methods of combat, but instead improving your mastery of the core one.

And the feel of mastering that combat is incredible. By the end you feel unstoppable; normal enemies that would have been challenges early on are nothing. Even a lot of the bosses become trivial as-time goes on, bar the few ‘mastery test’ bosses interleaved throughout the progression. This isn’t some “hey I got more EXP and now over-level for everything!” thing, either; this is me, the human holding the controller getting skilled enough to become a Sekiro master. It’s an amazing feeling.

I beat every single boss in the game, including the hidden ones, and enjoyed the hell out of it.

3. Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★★

I’m very much on the record as being a huge IGAvania partisan. I fuckin’ love the core loop of that permutation of the Metroidvania formula. Koji Igarashi no longer being able to make Castlevanias hurt me. A lot. Over a decade of time spanned between the last IGAvania game, Order of Ecclesia, and the release of Bloodstained. I was a bit worried.

Thank god Bloodstained is really, really, really good.

Bloodstained is extremely “one of those.” You move about a 2D interconnected world, collect items and abilities until you find the stuff that let you move forward in a new area. It’s kind of an eclectic hybrid of IGA’s past titles. The castle design feels very Aria of Sorrow. The shard mechanics feel close to Aria/Dawn of Sorrow’s soul system. The weapons feel very Symphony of the Night meets Portrait of Ruin. The overall mechanics of movement feel most akin to Order of Ecclesia. All in all: a good mix.

The game is massive. There’s so many weird one-off mechanics (something I appreciate), bizarre callbacks, goofs. There’s an in-depth alchemy system (mostly used for cooking, which is funny). The shard system is a bit boring in places— some shards are extremely simple and forgettable mechanically— but the shard leveling system is kind of hilarious in how broken it can become. The familiar system from SOTN is back and has been essentially perfected by making it a dedicated slot so you can just hang with a fairy or sword pal.

I wish the game had more enemy diversity, and the story left something to be desired. Many shards just aren’t very interesting. But the game is just so dang fun. The core gameplay loop is just so compelling, and the game just feels so dang good. I’m glad they took all the time to polish the gameplay feel because hooooooooooo boy.

Looking forward to those DLC characters for some additional playthroughs.

2. Outer Wilds – 2019 – Epic Game Store – ★★★★★

“Space exploration”, “cosmology”, “archeology”, and “sociology.” While these are certainly not the only fields that dominate much of my attention, they are some big ones. The Outer Wilds is a space exploration game where you explore the structure of a strange but exquisitely constructed solar system, and dig through the remains of a mysterious vanished alien species. Also, you’re stuck in a Majora’s Mask-like apocalyptic time loop ‘cuz the sun keeps exploding. Should probably find out why that’s happening.

I went into this game completely blind, entirely based on the way Austin Walker was raving about it on twitter. Austin’s interests in heady space shit is pretty similar to my own, and turns out? Worked out quite well for me. I blindly explored this solar system for about twenty hours over the course of a couple weeks, and came away from the experience misty eyed at the ending. Outer Wilds is fantastic.

It’s a surprisingly touching and cozy for a game that mostly about you going off into space on your own, all alone. And that’s because you’re not, really. Outer Wilds is less about the science of exploration and archeology and the meaning of it, why it matters even in the darkest moments. Why do we explore? Why does science matter, divorced from the parasite of industry and markets? What value does it give to us, to future generations?

The game is built on the notion that even as we individually wander, explore, and discover, we’re all together collectively building on something that may outlive us, even outlive our species, the pursuit of a collective knowledge that transcends personal enrichment and individual accomplishments.

You are but one a few alien explorers, each on their own adventure. As you adventure, you catch their signals as you cruise across space. The things you learn and do are further built on the relics and messages left behind by the Nomai, the species that came before. This sense of a personal and emotional connection in the act of discovery is the heart of this game. We’re not standing on the shoulders of giants; we’re holding hands with those before us and those after us to build a bridge to a future that we may not live to see.

It’s a positive message of hope in the face of oblivion. 

1. Fire Emblem: Three Houses – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★★

I’ve been really on-and-off on Fire Emblem over the years. I first got in on the franchise with Awakening, which I rather liked for its anime-ass sensibilities— though not without criticism. I found the combat kind of obnoxious in its tendency to get muddied down in the Oops You Done Fucked Up, Time To Reset junk. It was too anime-ass in some places, not the least of which being its incredibly one-note characters who had little bearing on ongoing events so as to support the permadeath system without too much wasted effort on the developers’ part. Fates, the follow-up on Awakening, only amped up these criticisms, becoming convoluted, stupid, and kind of obnoxious to play.

I had hopes that Three Houses would be an improvement. Initial impressions made it seem way more serious, way more grounded, with a lot of improved systems. Turns out: it was better than I could have dared of expected or hoped. Three Houses isn’t improvement, or even innovation; it’s a revolution.

Three Houses is great. It’s long, it’s got so many different systems going on that I hardly know where to begin with describing it, but… it’s great. It’s the platonic ideal of what I’d like out of a Fire Emblem. Things feel like they matter. The setting feels weighty, the plot is actually good, and the characters are absolutely marvelous.  

No, it’s not perfect— its handling of representation could DEFINITELY be better. Some of the narrative is hokey as hell in places. Certain routes seem to have gotten more attention than others. The class-based specialization systems could do with more depth such that so many characters don’t end up mostly identically specialized to each other.

But… I found the combat extremely enjoyable.  The charge-based rewind mechanic removed the feel-bad gotchas of unanticipated troop appearances and bad rolls etc. The characters are fun, and they’re kept relevant all the whole way through via creative framing of events. The ability to roam an actual physical space via the monastery made the world feel more alive, and made everything feel more real.

The writing was actually interesting and nuanced, exploring things like faith, race, social classes, feudal politics, and romance. While the three routes are largely similar, it’s interesting just how different the underlying messages of each of them ends up being. I appreciate that in this game where you otherwise spend most of your time hanging around with nobles in a church ends just short of you rolling out the guillotines by the end.

This is a tactical RPG in 2019 that I have put something like 150+ hours into, having beaten only two of the four routes. I was, and still am, deeply invested in everything that is. I’ll probably go back to the other two routes when the final DLC is out next year.

SAKURAI, PUT EDELGARD IN SMASH