#i'm not even talking about gameplay or graphics

[beatrizamante]

It's no secret that Bioware has been cut 'til their bone. A lot of people were laid off. Besides, the project got cancelled what? 3 times? It was supposed to be a multiplayer like Anthem but scratched, then fucking EA put DA:I's team in Anthem and still flopped anyway. Then they had good ideas, re-hired old people that left again. Cancelled good story lines and tried again to put some kind of multiplayer because triple A industries are trash and will only ever care about money and revenue (Yes, I'm talking about DA:O, since the whole Darkspawn plot never ended and the plot they knoted this all together in DA:I was subpar at best. I loved playing DA:I, but the story of Origins is and will always be miles better).

I wanna see the game be a success, but I have literally no more faith in any Dragon Age and Mass Effect games, since I watched through the years how these games lost their soul. How the plot became shallow and even romances became so fucking... bad.

I loved literally all characters from DA:O and the Mass Effect series, but Andromeda and the next installations of DA had me having to make mental gymnastics to find reasons to play them. And while I want to see and play the game, while people buy on pre order to love or hate it, these fucking companies will continue doing a poor job at managing resources, time and good talents.

Larian proved that it IS possible to make good RPGs. Triple A companies don't care about quality. I'm happy that the devs on Bioware managed to make something nice with so little time, but feeding thia narrative will only make them continue putting insane pressure on their employees and paying BADLY, since they have a guillotine over their heads.

Like Microsoft laying off of Arkane, Tango and all the others. GREAT studios. But they only care about profit.

Assholes.

there's a line between encouraging people to keep an open mind about DAV and pretending the layoffs don't matter & the grim internal reports regarding DAI's production didn't happen and I need 'True Fans' to find it quickly

[xx-j4nu5-c4t5-xx]

"An ideal Sims game would have Sims 2's gameplay mechanics, Sims 3's open world, and Sims 4's graphics!"

I absolutely despise this take, and I want to explain why. This is a very long rant and it is full of piss and vinegar directed at everything in the Sims 4. I'm gonna try to keep everything kinda professional as much as I can but I can't guarantee an unbiased opinion.

If you'll let me talk your ears off for a moment, I'd like to explain, from my own experience as an artist and a casual player, my issues with the art style and direction of The Sims 4 compared to The Sims 2. (I'm not really going to comment on 3 because I've never played it.)

I want to start off by explaining the difference between better graphics and higher resolution. The Sims 4 absolutely blows Sims 2 out of the water when it comes to textures and polygon counts on sims, no contest. But I'd argue that the graphics themselves... aren't better. They're worse, even, so much fucking worse. The biggest problems come from the stylization and the animations, in my opinion, so I'll explain what I mean.

Have you ever felt like the Sims in 4 just look... weird? Not quirky, not kinda strange, but off. Distressing. Uncanny. Whatever the fuck the kids call it nowadays. When you strip away the packs and the CC and the shaders, the sims in the base game look bad. They're very close to being human; they walk like us, talk like us, have families like us, but they don't look like us, not exactly. There's always something off about them, no matter how close you try to get. Proportions will be a bit off, or your eyelashes will be like three polygons for some fucking reason, and the jig is up. The illusion is gone.

This is one of the instances where a higher resolution and more detailed models and meshes work against you. You aren't making believe. You are beyond the point of pretending that the pixelated shapes are real clothes and bodies and faces, because at this point, they're close enough that you don't need to. There's no gap to bridge. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're lifelike, at least, not enough to be completely human. In some ways, they're still tethered to being cartoony and plasticky and fake. Just enough to frighten you. Enough to put you off. They're not using it to their advantage anymore, and instead, it's holding them back.

When the Sims 2 came out in 2004, the developers knew that they weren't going to make a perfectly accurate life simulator. They physically couldn't render every wrinkle in the face or fold in the clothing. In some animations, things clip strangely or the facial expressions are sort of janky or there's just some form of roughness around the edges. But that's okay; your brain doesn't need a perfectly accurate representation this time. That's not what you're here for, anyway.

The Sims 4 is basically Icarus-ing itself into disaster. The entire game sacrifices style for complete realism, a goal that was unachievable ten years ago, and is unachievable now.

The Sims 2 never thought of itself as a completely realistic life sim, though. It has cartoony, low poly meshes and exaggerated proportions and wild, raunchy storylines that would never occur in real life. BECAUSE IT ISN'T REAL LIFE. And it isn't like real life, not because it's failing to be, but because it doesn't want to be!

The Sims 4 is not ever going to completely replicate human looks or interactions or dynamics. And if it's trying to, it's doing a shit job of it. That shouldn't be the goal in the first place. If I wanted to watch a lonely college student talk to himself in the mirror to try and get better at interacting with people, I'd close the computer and go look at myself. It somehow highlights the most mundane parts of life without any of the whimsy and goofiness that the earlier installments had. It takes itself too fucking seriously for its own good, and it's killing both the gameplay and the art style.

The other point I'd like to bring up is the animation. The Sims 4 allows for much more customization of both sim and environments, but at the cost of dynamic animations. How many times is that grab animation reused? How many times is the same set of animations used for sims with wildly different personalities? Your sims barely feel alive with how little they express themselves.

Now, look, I'm a digital artist. I've dabbled in animation, but only briefly, and only in 2D. I've got no clue how 3D animation works, much less how it worked 20 years ago, but I can see the passion in every single animation in the Sims 2. The more niche interactions allowed for more expressive animations than in 4. They could afford to have a distinct animation for mean sims throwing the football extra hard to be assholes, rather than every sim using the same generic football-throwing animation to save time and money. I get where they're coming from. I get the idea. But in one move, you've both made the art style stiffer and less expressive, and you've made the personalities of the sims seem meaningless. Everyone acts the same, regardless of what their moodlets or their traits say. It's hollow. It's stifled. It's a waste of potential.

But for what Sims 2 lacks in polygons, it makes up for in smaller animated details. Quality over quantity. The sims have hair physics, they open the door before they get in the car, they take utensils out of the counters when they cook, they jump on the couch and the cushions smush under their weight. When they dance, the weight is realistic, and when they smile, it tugs at every one of the few dozen shapes that make up their faces. The sims are lively. They dance and sing and love and hate just like humans, and rather than being some strange attempt at mimicry, it's almost a tribute. They were made with love. You can tell that they were drawn up and rigged and animated by a bunch of people working together, studying each other and making faces in the mirror for reference and watching their kids and neighbors and dogs and hands for reference. The sims are not human, and not trying to be, but they're taking the most human parts of us and making them their own.

You could never have a game with the Sims 4's graphics and the Sims 2's gameplay. The gameplay and graphics are inexorably connected, and the Sims 2 just has so much glorious detail baked into it, that you could never really make it work underneath the limitations of the later games. The developers of 2 knew what their limits were, and they worked tirelessly to make the game as full and complex as they could within those limits. The developers for the Sims 4 just did not have those guidelines, and thus, the drive to bend the rules was no longer there. They didn't go wild in rebellion because they were never told they couldn't in the first place. They spent the entire time chasing a goal they couldn't meet, and lost sight of what made the series fun to begin with.

It wasn't the realism you came for; you had realism already surrounding you. It was the caricature of it that made it interesting.

[cheianimatez]

Please Don't Cry, Little One

Warnings: Child abuse, violence

You have horrible parents. They treated both you and your older sibling horribly. But your sibling loves you. They swore they will never leave your side and maybe soon, when you two are old enough, you can finally escape this hellhole.

One day, they saw you crying, covered in bruises, so they decided to let you play on their phone. While your parents went out to get drunk, your sibling cooks you dinner. Meanwhile, while you're using their phone, you found a game called "Genshin Impact". You asked your sibling about this and asked for their permission if they can play it. Your sibling said yes.

You played the game and you're amazed from the graphics and the world. It looks like a fairy tale. Your sibling told you some basic knowledge on how to play the game and about the story.

You saw a character named Venti in the team, and when you tried his gameplay, you loved it.

When your sibling saw you happy and when they looked at their phone, they were surprised you used their main.

Everyday, when you have a chance, you played Genshin on your sibling's phone just to play as Venti. The bard is very fun to play with, your sibling can see that.

Until one day, tragedy struck.

Your sibling got beaten to death. Your father is now trying to find you, holding a bloody bat on his hand, while you're hiding in a closet somewhere in your room. You held your sibling's phone, the game still on but the sound volume is low so that the horrid man won't hear it.

[Meanwhile]

Venti is wondering why is his guide no longer responded. He then looked through the screen; on the sky, there is a barrier between two dimensions: His world, and his Traveler's world. He gained sentience the moment he met the main character. He realized the Traveler he usually talked to is not the real one. And he's probably the only one who can see the translucent barrier.

And oh boy, when he looked through, his eyes widened in horror.

A child crying.

He could here their mumbles "My sibling's dead. I'm so sorry, Venti"

Wait, his Traveler is now dead?! The child is their sibling?

He could here faint shouts of another voice.

And it sounded angry.

"Come out, you little sh(#)!"

No!

He won't linger here and watch helplessly!

He must do something!

Then he did what he shouldn't do in Teyvat, let alone in his nation...

He turned to his god form and flew fast towards the barrier.

Your father found you and is now holding you tight by the neck.

"Your sibling won't help you now, helpless creature!"

He's about to throw you to a wall when he suddenly got thrown away by a strong gust of wind, letting his grip on you go.

"Mortal fool, you think you're powerful by hurting a child?"

The man immediately scrambled backwards as his eyes widened to the god. The costume is not even a costume, it's legit.

"You should have taken care of your young. Instead, you and your wife abandoned them. Now, your punishment will be death!"

"The God of Freedom ensures everyone has freedom. But you, it seems you take it for granted..."

.

"So I have no choice but to take away your freedom. Your freedom to live"

Venti, or should I say, Barbatos, summoned his bow, and aimed the arrow infused with Anemo energy, and released it, hitting at the man's heart. You were behind Barbatos's wings, so you can't see what happened to your cruel father, all you heard are his screams of agony.

When the screams are no longer heard, Barbatos turned around, still not letting you see what happened to your father, but all you know is that you're finally safe. When you looked up, he looked familiar to your sibling's main

"Venti?"

"Yes, little one?" -Venti, feeling glad the child, his Traveler's sibling, remembering his human form.

You then hugged him as you let out your quiet sobs, making Venti sad.

"Hush... It's alright, you're safe now" -Venti, hugging you back

"Please don't cry, Little One..."

[yamisnuffles]

DATV Spoiler Free Review

I beat Veilguard a couple days ago and have had some time to let it settle in my brain. So, without getting into the nitty gritty and more spoilery things, here are my overall feelings on the game.

The Great:

The world itself. The scenery. It was really gorgeous and felt fully alive in a way that none of the previous games have quite managed. Since it wasn't as open world as DAI nor as narrow in scope as DA2 (nor as old as DAO lol), it felt more vital. Definitely a place where the advances in graphics helped, I'm sure.

The Good:

The companions. I wouldn't say any of them blew me away but they all at least ranged from enjoyable to very good. I definitely had my quibbles here and there but I think they were all pretty solid. As such, though I've only done one romance, I'll suppose they're all good. A bit... sparse in my experience and from what I've been hearing, but nice enough.

Overall, I also think the story was pretty good. Like much in this game, nothing that blew me away, but solidly compelling.

Also, mechanically, the gameplay and the glamour system. It still doesn't feel like DA to me but it was enjoyable once I got used to it. It works well with how I play games. And it was nice to just set looks for myself and my companions and not worry about stats vs appearance.

Rook. I have some definite Complaints, and so this point is probably closer to the good to mid range, but they did a pretty good job with letting you pull in your faction stuff. I'm prevented from saying great because it feels like, even with what are supposed to be rougher dialogue choices, you're limited to being mildly pleasant.

The Mid:

The music. This is tragic to me because every previous game had some really standout songs and DAI especially was such a solid soundtrack. I love soundtrack music. Also because Hans Zimmer! I love Hans Zimmer. But the entire thing felt very generic epic fantasy to me. It wasn't bad but it didn't feel good. The only times I ended up moved by the music was when they lifted DAI songs.

The lack of imports. It wasn't the end of the world but did make some cameos feel really off. And for all the talk of making what few things were imported matter, that really didn't feel like the case at all (unless you were in a specific subset of players). I didn't care too much, but it was just enough to make things feel weird, especially with characters like Harding who are so attached to previous stuff.

The Bad:

The world felt so sanitized. I have no issue getting rid of real life bigotry that makes so sense in the context of the world. For example, the sexism in DAO especially made no sense. That said, there was a lot of in world nastiness that is just... gone. The game does a lot of telling us the elves have it bad but doesn't show it. No one bats an eye at a Tevinter mage running about outside of Tevinter. No one cares about a Qunari in occupied Treviso. I suppose it's not the worst thing in the world but it feels weird, especially when it's so central to Solas' motivations.

This sanitization carried on through pretty much everything. All of the factions are presented as good and heroic, even the ones that are historically pretty shady. Your companions are all pleasant and palatable. They have the occasional minor squabble but even when they almost have actual beef, it's solved super easily. You might get some disapproval for decisions but companions never seem to much care or hold it against you, even on really big things. I don't need DA2 levels of interparty drama but, boy did I want a bit more tooth sometimes.

The Awful:

I can't get into it without spoilers but it did a Thing that Bioware sometimes likes to do that I absolutely loathe. This is definitely personal but it ruined some of my desire to replay.

Overall:

I'd give the game a 7/10 or maybe 6/10, depending on how I'm feeling. It was enjoyable for the most part but it had so many things that felt like splinters. Lots of little things that stuck under my skin and bothered me. Would I recommend it? Genuinely depends on the person.

[genopaint]

Tomorrow

Wish Granted

I know I've talked about it at length at this point but Super Mario RPG is, without a question, my favorite video game of all time. It's meant a lot to me since I first played it back in 2011 or 2012 or so and since then I've absolutely adored it.

I know I don't talk about Mario much nowadays but even still after all this time I would still consider SMRPG to be my favorite video game of all time. The characters, the story, the music, the graphics, the gameplay all are seriously the best of the best to me and I adore it all.

The remake is very exciting and while I'm not sure what I'm feeling right now about the Mario series it is very exciting to see Mario RPGs in a form that truly and genuinely has brought me so much joy and helped me through so much return. And I hope everyone will consider playing the remake when it launches, I hope it gets introduced to a whole new audience, and I hope people fall in love with this game and go out to play the other Mario RPGs and fall in love when them all and fall in love with this amazing genre as much as I have.

[nicole-the-hololynx]

how many changes can you make to a game before it stops being the same game?

what if I do it gradually instead? slowly change the artstyle, the plot, the gameplay, just a tiny bit at a time. is it still the same game if it's broadly the same? if I can still kinda give the same blurb to describe it?

I'm mostly thinking about this because of Final Fantasy I (I'm always thinking of this game it seems), and how every successive port of the game changes things little by little. I find it hard to believe that "Final Fantasy" on the PSP and "Final Fantasy" on NES are in any meaningful way the same game.

like, say you took all the map data from Super Mario Bros and copied it over to Super Mario Maker. is it still Super Mario Bros? why or why not? what if I copied it over a different game, like Super Mario Bros 3 or Super Mario World or Zelda II: The Adventure of Link. is it still the same game then? when did it stop being the same game?

what if I remade the game from scratch based on what I can see playing it? everything looks largely the same, but if you're experienced enough with the original you can clearly tell things are off. certain movement constants or enemy behaviors don't quite match. some secrets are missing because I didn't find them. to an average player it might seem identical but anyone that's played the game for long enough can tell its not the same. so is it the same game? what if I managed to convince Nintendo to sell it, is your answer the same? this one's not a hypothetical. I'm talking about a real game here

following back to Final Fantasy I, can any of the later versions of the game be said to be "the same game" if they don't share the artstyle? if the combat system has been fully redone? if the gameplay loop no longer resembles the original? the story is broadly the same, but characters are there now who didn't exists. characters have different motivations behind their actions as before. is it really the same game still?

and if not, when did it stop being the same game? when the graphics got changed? when the battle system got redone? that happened twice, do you feel the same about both of them? when the story stated drifting? what even makes the game "the game"? I'm unsure myself

Final Fantasy I is a weird game. Final Fantasy I is a weird series of games. No game is truly Final Fantasy I, unless they are. Final Fantasy I is like if the Ship of Theseus was a game.

you ever play Dawn of Souls? it's a really fun game. can't recommend it enough

[yamsgarden]

looong Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Vesperia rambling incoming:

I was chatting with my buddy about Tales of Vesperia and Tales of Symphonia and idk by what miracle this could ever happen, but I truly wish someday Bandai Namco could make a TRUE remake of Tales of Symphonia but with Tales of Vesperia's cel shade graphics

Because so far, all "remakes" are just more or less good ports from what I read/ saw? And TOV still holds up to this day, even 20+ years after even if the animation is a liiiittle stiff it' still works, but yeah TOS could really have a fantstic revamp

I want her so bad to experiement this journey too, but I totally get it that the graphics are a turn off... Which is also so sad because to me they still feel cute and I grew up with them OTL

idk... I understand TOS isn't necessarily the most insane RPG out there, same with Baten Kaitos but they have their own identity and amazing writting and complex stories and charming characters aaa even 20+ years later and I still hold these games in my heart and still listen to their OST, it really feels like magic

It's not like today where you have to constantly play daily for grinding or worry about being tempted to buy micro items in the shop with real money, it was a one time payment and one shot story and had an end... And that's what made it great too imo... if that makes sense, idk what I'm saying anymore, I guess I just miss so much how things used to be haha

Where games had more soul and personnality and passion behind it and ofc you still have that today but i feel it's... Rarer and back then I feel it was still experimental but that's what made it so great, now there are so many copy cats and it feels like a race to which one can be the next lottery... and I know they're all companies BUT LIKE at least I could feel my money was well spent you know?!

Now it's feels like, "we have your money AND you have shitty rushed half-baked product, you're welcome"

If only Llyod could have made it into Super Smash Bros Melee at the time, I feel it could have helped the Tales of popularity even more OTL I remember reading somewhere he was considered to be added to the roaster but maybe it was rumors too... But the thought of it is so cool. I rly don't think it's for nothing TOV and TOS keep getting so high in popularity polls when it comes to general Tales Of games, those two are really memroable and beautiful.

TOS almost feels like the blueprint for TOV to me, so they are very similar but different enough as well. I must have played TOS on my gamecube at least 10 times in my whole life and everytime my gameplay reaches 60h-80h+hours, it's just so much fun everytime

aaa but yeah.. all that to say I just wish it could get the remake of a lifetime so more poeple could experiment it too OTL I don't think it'll ever happen but yeah.... If only if only if only...

and lowkey so i would have more poeple to talk and gush about it.

[zylphiacrowley]

Okay so now I'm thinking about rack focus and gpose and I just want to talk about it in regards to vanilla gposing. I've never been trained in filmmaking or anything so this is not expert advice but I enjoy absorbing cinematography tips and tricks as a very passive hobby so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, rack focus is explained in this video:

or if you don't have the time/attention span to watch the video it's when you shift focus from one subject to another usually to draw attention to or emphasize a connection between the subjects your focusing between. It's used all the time in film and is an effective way to "show, not tell".

I've used it in some of my own gpose sets before like between these two shots:

These shots were used to illustrate how this character had just stepped outside to see the night sky for the first time in their lives. Could I have just used the single shot of them looking at the sky? Sure I could've and it would've been fine, but to shift focus is to allow the viewer to dwell on it just a bit longer to absorb the information and emotional intent behind the shots.

But of course, that wasn't done using vanilla gpose tools but you can achieve a similar effect with vanilla gpose tools! It's available right here:

I took these shots using vanilla gpose tools (with the exception of my gameplay shader which doesn't have any DoF settings on):

In the first one you of course see the chocobo in the foreground before switching to focusing on my character in the background. These might be good shots to set a scene. Catboy at the chocobo farm, what he gonna do next?

the settings I used for each shot:

Of course these were just really quick snaps I grabbed to try to illustrate how you can apply rack focus in gpose, so I'm sure with actual time and some messing about in your settings with various sliders and such, you could come up with something much more polished and nice than what I managed in 5 minutes. OTL

And even if you don't use it for rack focus specifically, I encourage people to play around with the Depth of Field sliders! Go nuts! You can easily take some really dynamic single shots with combinations of gpose settings and actions.

Edit to add this bit of important information from @candycryptids: If DOF is not doing anything in GPose for you, check your graphics settings under system. There’s a box at the veeeery bottom that will disable DoF for EVERYTHING. Make sure it’s ticked.

[fillingthescrapbook]

Let's Talk About: Fantasy High Junior Year and Stress Tested

Brennan Lee Mulligan is an evil son of a genius.

I have been waiting for this episode forever--like, a whole week--and it did not disappoint. Starting with a return to assembly. Confirming the conspiracy that the Rat Grinders were setting them up.

Side note: I really do think the Rat Grinders are working for something or someone who is (or who are) also meddling with Interim Emergency Back-Up Principal Grix.

The mandatory drug testing at school that IMMEDIATELY netted the kid who called out Aguefort Academy becoming a police state in freshman year was a deliberate choice that I feel like Brennan, knowing how easily distracted his Intrepid Heroes can be, planted for the viewers to pick up on. And unleashing this after a "speech" from Agent Clark that ended with an extra distracting "until doppelgangers burn your nest!"? Yeah, I smell Brennanigans.

Quick break: I just want to say that Murph plays Riz's paranoia so well. Ally's quick moves to shenanigans is on another level. And Zac immediately taking a stress token for Gorgug feels extremely correct. That said, I feel like there should be a mechanic where Gorgug gets stressed so much that he channels the tokens into a rage that impresses Porter.

Also: the rolling graphics on the left side of the screen, for the tracks that our intrepid heroes are rolling for, look so cool. The stress levels on the right look great too, but they are stressing me out.

Now; I am really liking Yolanda Badgood, the cleric professor. I am not liking, however, the fact that Brennan is making her so likeable. And so friendly. And so helpful. Because I am now fearing for her life.

Emily's bits about Fig not knowing where to go rings differently for me, having seen the pre-season interview where she admitted that she wanted to play a new character. That she wanted to keep the happy ending Fig already got in Sophomore Year. I have to confess: I also actually really like this new aimless track for Fig, and it's showing in Emily's gameplay how she is also realizing new things about her character as Brennan showers her with more choices to make.

The one bad thing about the downtime episode, in my opinion, is that the time we spend with each character feels so little. Especially with how much time is passing in game time. I wanted to see more of Adaine's relationship with her sister, and maybe see a friendship blossom with Oishyn. But Siobhan is, rightfully, concerned about Adaine's finances so she has to prioritize her job and her academics. I needed Gorgug and Riz to get more updates about Frosty Fair before it happened--but, obviously, the had personal stuff they needed to deal with first…and Frosty Fair is already happening next episode--

Honestly: Brennan did a wonderful job with the down times for everyone. And every member of the Intrepid Heroes utilized their down time well.

I just wanted more because I'm very greedy and I love these characters to bits.

Speaking of bits:

With two Nat20s in a row, I would say that Gorgug really is the greatest wizard of our time.

"Get your best pair of Badidas and we'll see what that body does" is an s-tier Brennan-liner.

Riz using the celestial spy stuff he got from his dad is AMAZING.

And Brennan is enjoying handing out the stress tokens too much. Zacky even points it out.

Can't wait for next week!

[kd89-3dstudios]

InZoi's - The sad truth (Fail)

You've also heard about the "hype" around InZOI and I have to give my honest opinion on it. First of all, I'm shocked to see that people are stil Graphic "Bitches". As soon as you say that something was made in Unreal Engine 5, people think that it MUST be a good Game. Sorry there is so much Unreal Engine 5 shit out there, called (Games)

I'm not comparing Sims 4 with InZoi, that wouldn't do the Game justice, but what it can be compared to is Dragon's Dogma 2 (Re-Engine)

Namely the Character Creation version. DD2 had that too

InZoi Studios? Character Creation? Mhh 5/10

InZoi where it's mainly about Character Creation? comes with only half the functionality and selection, I couldn't even begin to create my Character. Because the Character Creation from INZOI only uses the Unreal Engine 5 base function. But everyone celebrates it because it looks good? Even DD2 had all the features in the pre-release that the Game should have in the end. Why can Capcom do this but KRAFTON can't? that makes no sense.

Dragons Dogma 2 Character Creation? 10/10

Anyone who has Created a Character in Dragons Dogma 2 knows what I'm talking about. And it was also a pre-release befor the main Game. All functions and selection options were already included. Just saying. And the Re-Engine looks just as good as UE5.

The Inzoi Character studio hasn't convinced me yet. I can't really get on with the realistic style either, I like Anime and Manga but K-Pop isn't my thing, but InZOI just seems like a "K-Pop Drama Game". And I can't get on with that, it's not Art for me.

So far it is just a sweetly presented base game with a Fluffy Cat.

And don't forget that the finished Game will have high hardware requirements, even if the developers want to improve a few things, it's Unreal Engine 5 and, even today there are still People who have problems with Sims 4 and CC together, which means that many of you won't even be able to play it when it comes out. In developer mode - What do you think it will do when the first mods and custom content comes for InZOI? Your PCs will burn.

That's a sad fact

Btw, did you know that we can put a comic filter over our (Photorealistic 3D character - Gameplay)? That changes EVERYTHING! Of course! Seriously, it's still Photorealistic, another UE5 product, almost everything that comes out.

I'm sorry but I'm not a fan of it.

[three--rings]

So it's time for my "alt-right dudebro gamer" Dragon Age opinions.

(Note: I'm a 45 year old womanesque queer person who mostly plays indie and Japanese games.)

(To further my cred I was super excited to meet and hear Karen and Patrick Weekes talk about this game in development at Havencon a couple years ago...it's a small queer con in Austin.)

Dragon Age is my all-time favorite game series. I adored Inquisition, though DA2 has my favorite characters overall.

My opinions about the gameplay reveal are:

The environments and background graphics and effects look awesome.

The character design still bugs me quite a bit. The faces, ESPECIALLY the female faces look Disney/anime/Overwatchy in structure. The textures looks a lot better in game than in that trailer. I miss my Not Particularly Pretty Female Characters. They have sameface now.

There's something off in the lip syncing. Mouth animations looks weird. I can't define it more than that but I noticed it with multiple characters and it through me out.

Varric's hair annoys me SO MUCH. Someone pointed out he looks like Blackwall and now I CANNOT UNSEE.

The structure of the game/quests/whatever looks fine, this reminds me of all the moments running around Haven at the beginning of Inquisition. Some of my least favorite moments, but yanno.

The combat. I'm very worried about the combat.

I am 45 years old and I have arthritis in my hands from gaming and knitting. I gave up knitting to keep gaming. I cannot play some action games. Like Hades, I tried but simply couldn't continue more than an hour because of the pain. And that's with my hands in good shape these days.

Some action games I can play, but only on easy, and sometimes only if I limit my playtime. This is simply a reality I've had to get used to, but it does kill me sometimes.

Do you know how enjoyable it was to pick up Baldur's Gate 3 and be able to put it on a higher difficulty, to be able to actually struggle through combats and have to use tricks and my brain and try and fail and do it again, all without worrying about my hands? Makes me think I need to replay Origins again.

So I'm concerned. The combat in this game is focused on attack type, dodging, parrying, countering (according to bioware)....all stuff that requires quick and frequent button mashing, which is what I can't do. So I'm looking at a game that I can probably only play on easy and maybe even not then? In my favorite game series.

The question we don't really know is how different it will be from Inquisition, and I find it hard to tell from the footage since we can't see what buttons are being pressed. But I'll say that while I love it, Inquisition was the game that first hurt my hands. It made me aware of the problem and made me have to start limiting my activity.

IDK . I just hate the idea that devs have that turn based games can't do well and are inherently not exciting.

Fucking Solas motherfucking killed Bianca! That was the first time in these reveals I've been 100% reacting as a fan. NOT BIANCA!!!! HE MUST DIE!

Oh I did like the Rook in the gameplay and his face looked good. Again I feel like it's the character design and not the engine that is the problem.

As for the plot, it's interesting that Solas has gone from Main Antagonist to Opening Antagonist and I wonder if he's actually going to transition to an ally later in the game to undo whatever the fuck has gone wrong in this clip.

I do still have some worries about the writing. "She's greatest detective ever and she has a lead on Solas." So do you think that lead is the giant glowing thing in the middle of the city spitting out demons? Did you need a great detective?

And basically nothing I've seen so far has super MOVED me, as someone with serious connections to this world and the characters, other than the fucking Bianca moment. I'm hesitantly curious about some of the new companions. And if the griffon thing had come at a moment other than me going WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THIS? in the trailer I may have been a lot more excited.

So yeah, call me a hater or whatever. But that trailer reveal CRUSHED me emotionally. I was so depressed the rest of the day Sunday. These are my true reactions to the gameplay footage today. I don't have an agenda, other than I want the game to be good and I want it to do well and my confidence in EA and Bioware is at a very low point.

I've tried to keep a realistic mindset this whole time, but keeping in mind HOW MANY PEOPLE have left Bioware, how few OGs are left, the constant turnover in leads, the game being scrapped and redone like twice from scratch. And the game industry as a whole at this time, I have to be somewhat skeptical in general.

I'm not a skeptic overall, I was both a Cyperpunk 2077 enjoyer (but not apologist) and a Starfield defender and frankly there was a lot less reason to be skeptical of those games before release. So am I going to say "well I've been a Bioware fan since KOTOR 1 released, so I'm gonna hype it up and not point out flaws I see?" No. I'm going to be honest.

I'm not a casual Dragon Age enjoyer. I can't react casually to this stuff.

Will I play the game? Almost definitely, but am I going to wait till the release reviews? Probably.

[dr-spectre]

I've had some time to go over my initial thoughts about the switch 2 and I wanna discuss them.

I do like the bigger joy cons but I'm not sure how to feel about an all black look with coloured highlights on the connectors and control sticks. It reminds me of those RGB lights that some pc gaming handhelds have and I always found them kinda tacky. Also why is the red now orange? I don't like it, make it a nice hot red instead. It's common knowledge that red on black is one of the most pretty colour combos of all time. I hope the other colours that eventually come out do change the entire controller and not just change the highlights.

I am worried about the sticks due to well, you know, and i am praying to the gods that the joy cons have actually good control sticks that don't break down easily. How the hell does my Wii Nunchuck from 2007 have no stick drift, yet controllers made 10 years later break down so easily?

I love the chunkier look of the Switch 2 because I always thought that the Switch was a bit too flat and it didn't have enough grip to it. An 8 inch display sounds lovely even if it's gonna be an LCD panel.

Although there are these annoying bezels UGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY NINTENDO WHY!?!? YOU GOT A FAT ASS PANEL! USE ALL OF IT DUMMY!!!

Now about that backwards compatibility... I got a few questions.

1. Will the system transfer process be easy and will it transfer EVERYTHING?! I'm talking saves, miis, photos, games, etc. Everything. It better be easy and stress free as possible, i wanna be able to put my Switch 1 to rest and not have to pick it up ever again.

2. Will we be able to use Switch 1 joy cons with backwards compatible titles and have all of their features intact? There are some experiences like Ring Fit Adventure and Labo that will be unplayable on Switch 2 unless you can use Switch 1 joy cons. Nintendo, i swear to god, if you lock us out of those titles and not give us the option to play them i will be very VERY mad.

I am very relieved that backwards compatibility is a highlight of the console and that Nintendo is actually not gonna abandon their old hardware like they've done time and time again. They can be very stubborn and stuck in their ways, it's actually really frustrating that it took them until the Switch to realise that MAYBE HAVING A PROPER ACCOUNT SYSTEM THAT CARRIES OVER TO OTHER DEVICES INCLUDING PURCHASES IS A GOOD FUCKING IDEA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NEXT! Let's talk about the elephant in the room, new Mario Kart.

Firstly, oh my god the models are so lovely omg I'm so happy they changed up their looks.

Bowser and DK looking extra silly, we love to see it.

The animation and details look really good too. They got that nice squash and stretch.

I will say, i don't know if it's because of youtube's shit compression or how the gameplay is shown, but the graphics don't seem to have had a noticeable leap in quality, the game looks like it could run on the Switch 1 with ease. It seems like they are going for a different art style and i respect that. Then again i cannot make any major judgements on the footage shown because it only lasted for 10 seconds.

What really interests me about this new Mario Kart is that there isn't going to be just 12 racers, but potentially 24!!!!!!

If you're gonna evolve Mario Kart then this is not a bad way to do it, it's gonna increase the chaos and expand the track design. And it looks like the tracks may be actually expansive and larger in scope but we'll have to wait and see.

24 racers means that the character roaster has to be pretty damn big in order to reduce repetitiveness. However, i don't wanna see another Mario Kart 8 situation where a lot of the roaster could have easily been alt costumes, so i wanna see some changes...

MAKE THESE GUYS SKINS FOR BOWSER JR! I DONT CARE IF THEY HAVE DIFFERENT WEIGHTS! THESE FREAKS SHOULD NOT TAKE UP NEARLY A FULL ROW!!!

Make them costumes that don't fill up character slots... please... Nintendo don't be fucking stupid for once in your existence.

Leave these babies behind in Baby Park.

Don't get rid of her... Please. She's my goat, my MVP, my smingus chungus, my bingus smungus, don't get rid of one of the best non Mario characters from the series.

Add these creatures as optional costumes too.

Speaking of these fellas... Since i talk about Splatoon a lot, i can't help but bring up the fact that now we have a new console on the horizon and due to Splatoon's massive popularity, i wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo shadow drops a Splatoon 4 announcement this year or the next. Splatoon 2 did get shown during the Switch's reveal and released in the launch year so maybe by the end of the year, we could have something on our hands...

Then again, certain elements of Splatoon 2 such as the hero mode THAT I DESPISE WITH ALL OF MY HEART AND SOUL!!!!!.... and content did suffer due to Splatoon 2 being rushed. So maybe don't announce Splatoon 4 this year, please? We can wait, we'll be patient.

In terms of a first party launch lineup i wanna make some predictions and copium picks.

New 3D Mario game

Metroid representation, either a cross gen release of Prime 4 and or a bundle of Prime 2 and 3.

F-Zero representation, a new game FINALLY after the positive feedback from 99, or a GX re-release.

A Wii Sports/ 1 2 Switch like casual game

A new IP

A new Kirby, either 2D or a follow up to Forgotten Land

Something Fire Emblem related

The last thing i wanna talk about is the third party support, I'm not gonna say much but i guarantee a lot of third party companies are gonna be HUNGRY to port their PS5 and Xbox series games to a much more powerful handheld, so I'm gonna list off some games that i would absolutely love to see on the Switch 2.

If Nintendo wants to repeat the magic of seeing Skyrim on a portable tablet then i think one game in particular would fulfill that same shock or even surpass it.

And that game is....

If they can do it, if they can somehow find a way to make it run on Switch 2 and show gameplay of this thing... oh my god, it'll make peoples jaws drop. It's launching on the damn Xbox Series S, I'm sure with some programming magic it COULD run on Switch 2.

[strongest-soldier-jyl]

I really want a Murder Drones boomer shooter

ok so I've mentioned before that I play Doom, and it's my hope to one day make a boomer shooter similar to modern Doom set in the Murder Drones universe. I started learning SFML for this purpose recently, but being a university student takes a lot of time and graphics programming is hard to learn (even OpenGL, which is the "easier" of the graphics APIs :3).

However, in an effort to "ghost of done" this one, I'm going to post some various thoughts I had about what I'd like to see in a Murder Drones boomer shooter. This was inspired by a post I saw that was the Doom cover but redrawn completely with various worker drones and disassembly drones populating the area around Doomguy, who was replaced by Khan. The word "Doom" was humorously replaced with the word "Door" and was stylized in the same way as the Doom logo typically is. I believe the art was made by Animate-a-thing

So, okay, I had two ideas, one of which is exceedingly far from canon and probably deserves its own post because it falls firmly into the realm of "fanfiction" rather than being a natural/reasonable continuation to the story that Liam told. So I'll talk about the other one here, which stems from an idea on Reddit that I had seen (that doesn't seem to exist anymore? I couldn't find it, at the least).

The actual idea lol

Okay, so, picture this: Some time post ep8, the Solver is reawakening in Uzi and is beginning to take control again. Not only that, it's begun to spread (somehow) to other Worker Drones. Now, the Solver has an incredibly powerful Uzi and an army of Worker Drones on its side. Moreover, N is in denial. He believes that there must be some way to free Uzi from the Solver, so, of his own free will, he chooses to defend and support Uzi even though he is capable of singlehandedly solving this conflict.

The only Worker Drone who can put an end to this madness is Khan Doorman. His engineering prowess gave him the ability to construct a number of guns, including an improved railgun that can shoot more than once before needing to recharge. He also created some personal equipment that allow him to jump much higher into the air and dash at incredible speeds. It's up to him to fight through the hordes of corrupted Worker Drones (and maybe even some Disassembly Drones?) that the Solver has set up.

I like this because Khan being an engineer makes this idea make a lot of sense flavorwise. I also think it could be interesting mechanically. For example, if you have to fight some Disassembly Drones, since, in the show, they have the ability to heal themselves (unless they get too damaged, in which case they Solver), that could be represented in game mechanically as "If a Disassembly Drone goes too long without taking damage, it will begin to heal over time. So, keep attacking it and don't take your attention away from it to ensure it can't heal, or use a railgun shot to defeat it instantly." I think this setting allows the story to compliment the gameplay really nicely.

[richea]

Arise review

After buying the game at launch, I finally, finally finished my playthrough of Tales of Arise. Normally I would just write a few thoughts on Twitter and leave it at that, but I found I had a lot of things I wanted to touch upon with this game. With the prior two entries in the series, I kind of just rushed to finish them and then let them collect dust in my brain afterwards. However, back then I had other Tales games I wanted to try for the first time, so part of it was I was itching to get to ones I knew I would enjoy more. I got all caught up with the series before Arise was even announced, so there's no excuse this time!

With Arise, I took my time (well, maybe too much time), and let myself really process the game before I let myself finish it, in order to give myself a more solid basis for how I will feel about this game going forward. To that end, I wanted to really write down my feelings on the game in depth, touching upon all the various aspects of it and how everything made me feel.

Quick warning: if you don't accept criticism of Arise well, this isn't the review for you. I am approaching the game from the perspective of somebody who has played every other entry in the series and ruminated on all of them for years on end. I will be critical of the game in this piece. I'm not trying to tell people how to feel on the game, this is all purely my own thoughts and feelings, from the perspective of a long time Tales fan who deeply cares about the direction the series is going, and more importantly, its rich history.

I am also not looking for people to change my mind on the game, so please do not try to tell me my feelings are "wrong" or that I'm not appreciating certain things properly. I'm not looking for discourse.

That said, if you are someone who is interested in my perspective, then by all means enjoy the essay that is to come.

―――

In this post I want to dive into all the different aspects of the game and talk about each in depth, namely the story, characters and gameplay. I think it's more interesting to judge a game by balancing all these traits rather than just pinpointing one specific thing and basing my entire view of the game on that one thing (for instance, I tend to value interesting characters first and foremost when I indulge in media).

That said, for a quick TL;DR of my feelings on various things, when compared to other entries in the series:

Story: 2/10 Characters: 1/10 Character designs: 3/10 Other UI designs (such as monsters/menus/etc): 0/10 Battle gameplay: 4/10 Other gameplay: 4/10 Music: Undecided, which in its own right may not be a good indicator of how I feel about it Graphics: As a video game it's a 10, for Tales specifically it's a 9/10 for the graphics themselves and a 1/10 for the lack of anime portraits and the portraits we got just look awful (how does Ufotable only get worse with its Tales designs?)

Visual presentation

I want to start by acknowledging the graphics, as it's something that has zero relevance to how I feel on video games. Arise is a very pretty game! There is no denying this. I found myself stopping and just moving the camera around to admire all the pretty landscapes and views in the game. The character models are also very nice.

That said, like all modern Tales games, the battles are a bit overly stimulating on my eyes, because there's so much going on and lots of flashing lights. The actual effects were very pretty though.

The skits are absolutely horrible to watch. Even setting aside how I feel about the lack of skit portraits, the thin white text on top of the off-white backdrop was a horrible design choice. I think this is probably my least favorite aspect of the game. I get headaches very quickly from playing video games even just normally, and watching a ton of skits with intense eye strain did not help! There's also way too much movement with the skit... boxes? as well. Were they thinking about accessibility at all when coming up with them?

On the same topic, the subtitles for general cutscenes were also awful. The outline around the text needed to be much thicker. I could probably read 30% of the dialogue in the game. Thankfully I know a decent amount of Japanese, but still, I was interested in reading the actual translation of the text and I was having a really hard time. I feel bad for people who wanted to play with Japanese voices and don't know as much as me.

The menu UI was also very disappointing. It felt really barebones and had next to no personality to it. The big portraits drawn by Iwamoto were a nice touch (though if you're going to make such massive paintings, at least make the art itself more interesting to look at?), but it wasn't enough. They just felt like something to fill in the empty space which there was a lot of; the menu layout really did not utilize the space on the screen well, and it's double annoying when you consider how microscopic the font in the game is and how they could've used that space to make things more readable. Everything was hard to read, and again the lack of portraits was just utterly disappointing. Every time I opened the menu I just felt sad at how lifeless it felt.

Gameplay

My feelings on the gameplay are mixed. I'll start with the elephant in the room: the gald system in this game is not good. Only getting gald from chests and sub events is just a massively poor game design. Fishing helps but it's more time consuming than doing battles would be and there's really no other incentive to even doing it (at least battles would work towards EXP and getting battle proficiency things!).

The owl system was fun and was definitely a highlight of the game for me. It took me back to looking for attachments in Xillia, which is something I really enjoyed in that game as well and made the long traversing in the game more bearable. I just went from point A to point B in both Zestiria and Berseria, so this was the first game since Xillia 2 that I actually touched every corner of the map.

The battles are also a mixed bag for me. I will be completely transparent and state here that I mostly only played Shionne and Rinwell, so my feelings on the melee gameplay is very limited. My committed team was Shionne, Rinwell, Dohalim and Kisara. Between them you could hit every element weakness, on top of Kisara's high defense (and the fact that I just liked her more than Law and Alphen). From the perspective of a caster main, the battle gameplay was fine. Like other entries, you could do fun manipulation strategies to speed casting time. By the end game I was just spam casting Rinwell's highest tier spells instantly which was fun.

The healing is definitely... not great. There were a few times where I would run out of Orange Gels and then have to do a story progressing map action and it would eat the rest of my already gone CG bar. It was really infuriating. I only used First Aid the entire game, never anything else, because why would I use a better healing arte when it would just drain my gauge faster? It was a mess.

The monsters I did not enjoy. It felt really hard to stun them so it never felt satisfying fighting anything. Their movements felt WAY too grand. If every single boss is huge and epic and has moves that hit the whole map, the whole game starts to lose its impact. I also feel like they did way too much damage in a single hit, which made the healing issue even worse, and it felt more like I was trying to perfectly dodge every attack than it did managing my health in a natural way.

The skill system was just fine, no real commentary to make there. I wish there were more titles in the game however, and that they would display on the status screen (even Graces did this despite them both having the titles and skill systems merged).

Some quick other things

The campsite system was fine

I liked that the sub event indicators were really obvious, as someone who's really bad about doing sub events especially on my first playthrough (the actual sub events themselves are a different issue)

Like with fishing, I never really understood the point of the ranch

Did this game even have minigames?

I actually really liked the weapon skins system, that was super fun

Story

This is where I will start to nitpick things because I play Tales games for the story and characters first and foremost. And, having played every other game in full, my feelings on the story and writing in this game are... not very high.

To start, I do at the very least think Arise had some interesting starting concepts going on. Namely, a protagonist trying to figure out his amnesia and a girl who zaps everything she touches are pretty cool concepts! However, even from the first promotion trailer I was concerned about Shionne's story hinging too much on Alphen. The "he can't feel anything, she hurts everything she touches" plotpoints felt really, really convenient to me from the first trailer, and was a setup for having all the impact on the game being reliant on Alphen being a decent character (as well as, well, almost forcing him to be Shionne's hero, rather than him gaining that honor through actual hard work and emotion), but I was more than willing to give the game the chance to prove me wrong on that aspect.

I have too many feelings on the character writing so I will be giving them their own section below.

Anyway, sadly, I think those are the only two interesting and unique things in Arise's narrative. Everything else the game has done has been done in a prior Tales game but better. Let me go down the list (non-comprehensive as I can't remember every single theme from every single game, but I will name games that at least have these as the major theme that I can recall):

Two worlds vying for power (I could name games that don't have two worlds faster than I could name ones that do), and one world is trying to suck power out of the other one (Symphonia, Hearts)

The plotpoint about "when humans lose all their power they turn to dust" is literally exactly what happens in Hearts, while the "making people feel strong bad emotion to provoke them into our gains" is what Zestiria and Berseria's entire lore was about as well as Rebirth

Racism, oppression, slavery and colonialism (Phantasia, Destiny, Symphonia, Rebirth, Legendia, Tempest, Hearts (R removed this but there's literally an NPC who flaunts about enslaving the "lesser beings"), Berseria)

First half of the game is fighting a series of specific enemies, second half is focused on lore, especially figuring out stuff with the second planet (Destiny, Eternia, Symphonia, Vesperia, Hearts)

Do I think Tales rehashing tropes is a bad thing? No, not at all. It's something they have been doing for a long, long time. But what made it work in other games is that each game had at least something completely unique to it to balance that feeling of repetitiveness out. For instance, Hearts shows up a lot on this bullet list, but it is the only Tales game to have lore based around entering people's hearts, and the whole story is based around a fairy tale. Even the fact that it has a robot as a playable character was a first for Tales. Legendia rehashed a lot of plotpoints from Rebirth, but it had its own unique spin on things and the worldbuilding in it is completely unique with the focus on marine themes and the story structure being unique from any other game. Symphonia even keeps the same worldbuilding from Phantasia but the feels of the games are completely unique from one another due to how different the themes the stories tackle are. The issue with Arise is that I cannot think of anything unique in the game, aside from Shionne's thorns, that wasn't done in another game. And even then, all of the writing regarding her thorns is a big rehash of heroine tropes and situations in the series' past. I will go over that when I discuss her though.

Another glaring issue with the game is the skits. Normally, Tales skits have roughly 4 purposes. In order of prevalence: fun skits to show off the character's personality that the story can't showcase, the characters discussing story events to showcase the full depth of their feelings on the events as they happen, skits going over worldbuilding to explain in better detail if you didn't catch it from the story scenes (or just giving more information!), and navigational skits. Skits were always meant to be lively and engaging, even if things felt dull in the story, skits existed as a pick-me-up, and as a way to show how the characters were having fun. Skits are one of the most famous parts of Tales storytelling, specifically for this reason.

What's wrong with Arise's skits? In a franchise where the fun:dull skit ratio was 6:4 give or take, Arise changed those numbers to 2:8. Most skits were dedicated to rehashing events. Even in those rehashes, the characters were near constantly bringing up plotpoints that happened 30+ hours ago in the story. Over and over! Alphen was still talking about the first 5 hours of the game when you're on Lenegis!

Watching the skits, it genuinely felt like I was having constant deja-vu. I think I actually was worried I was going crazy at some point, because of the sheer extent of times they would have the same conversations over and over and over again. It got to a point where I would joke about Alphen and Law being on the screen together and I would say "countdown to them bringing up Zephyr" and every single time I would say that, the convo would turn to him. This was 55 hours into the game!

It's not bad for characters to reflect on the past events, but when that makes up the vast majority of their conversations, and one singular event makes up the entire personality of the character, the game feels dull very, very quickly. Skits transformed from a thing that I would usually open to find fun shenanigans between the characters and silly banter into me sighing about having to hear about Zephyr's death for the 200th time in the past 5 hours. It was very exhausting. Can we talk about something else now? My rant about this could be endless, but I genuinely want somebody to do a study on just how many times Alphen and Law bring up Zephyr throughout the game, and how many lines in the skits were dedicated to things that weren't just recapping events.

(Even then, there were cooking skits! However, I can only hear so many conversations about preparing food before I start getting bored. I know that eating and food is a BIG cultural point in Japan, but did every single "fun" skit need to be about eating? No.)

Speaking of, let me go over my feelings on the actual story and its events.

While the game did have a slow start, it wasn't that bad. The game eases you into what's going on, with the slavery and meeting Shionne. Nothing really of note to mention here. Rinwell and Law's character introductions were nothing special, but that was fine, it was still early in the game. My first major issue with the game is Zephyr's death. As it may be obvious from my above rant, the game places way too much importance on him as a character. A game mourning a character is nothing new. For instance, fractured Milla's death was a big turning point in Xillia 2. However, the entire game, as well as two entire characters, did not revolve around her death. Arise's issue is that Zephyr is barely a character, and yet the game constantly reminds you of how great and wonderful he was. We barely saw the guy, and no number of skits dedicated to Alphen and Law talking about him changes the fact that he is no more memorable than any other random NPC in the game. His death is unceremonious and was one of the most predictable deaths in the series to date.

(As an unrelated note, I am someone who loves a lot of NPCs in Tales. I love a lot of characters who have very little screentime. Two of my favorite Tales characters are Stella and Marian, who actually have a lot of similarities with Zephyr in narrative importance! The difference, however, is that you are not constantly having it drilled in that they are the epitome of nuance and the stories are not dictated by either character's morals, of which we never got to even see. Arise has Alphen claim Zephyr has the best moral views in the world and his entire life is dictated by those morals he was taught, and he pushes them on everyone else. Including the player.)

Zephyr's death aside, the other non-party characters are barely characters. I don't even remember any of their names. Especially the lords. To sum up my feelings on this instead of subjecting you to a long tangent on the lords, let me just drop these posts I made while playing:

One of Arise's lowest points however is how it handles its themes of racism and colonialism. I have a distinct memory of Alphen telling Rinwell to shut up when she brings up Renan oppression to him, Law tells Rinwell she's not allowed to want revenge due to her oppression, and there's this not-so-great scene on Lenegis where the party reflects on how... one of the lords was "only human" for wanting to enslave the Dahnans and how they can "see" his point of view? NOT GOOD! One of the comments I made while playing the game was "Alphen would stop Cless on his quest of revenge and he would also tell Velvet she's over-exaggerating is kind of my feelings on him at this point" and I still stand by it.

In general, the story is just very predictable. At no point in the game was I surprised by what was going on. Well, no matter, there's other predictable things in Tales games! ...But the difference is that other games, I at least was compelled by the characters and their reactions to those predictable events. Or, their personalities alone would carry me through plotpoints I otherwise found boring. Arise never endeared me to its cast, yet it expected me to find shock value and importance in its very predictable storytelling. I remember when the party takes on the lord who kills Rinwell's family, they said "we'll spare her life" (which is its own long rant but I digress) and I went "oh well someone DEFINITELY won't kill her one second later" and then Vholran showed up as I was saying it! Then, Alphen JUST so happens to get his feeling back in his body after Shionne walks right into Vholran's arms! This was truly the point in the game where I completely gave up on enjoying it and I started to only push myself to beat it just so I could get it over with.

The story sadly saw no improvements after that point either to remedy my soured feelings. The only two things I enjoyed after that point were the little bit with Dohalim's past and him making the speech on Lenegis, and Rinwell touching Shionne's hand in the final scene in the game.

I could go on forever about the story, but I will leave it at that.

As for the sub events, you couldn't really call them "events" when they were just one or two lines about defeating monsters. I did every sub event in the game up until before the final dungeon. I was very unimpressed by them.

Characters

This is absolutely my least favorite part about the game. As I stressed at the beginning, what I go through media for is for the characters. Good characters can salvage just about anything for me. When I watch story scenes, I'm always thinking about how it makes the characters feel. I went into Arise thinking "even if the story doesn't cater to me, at least I can fall back on enjoying the characters and their banter".

As you can already tell, I was utterly disappointed with the cast in Arise.

Alphen

He is easily the contender for my least favorite Tales protagonist, hands down. The issue with Alphen is he never has any original ideas at any point in the game. He always attributes any of his morals to Zephyr. He would go on tangents, explaining how other characters should feel about things, but when asked he got all of his ideas from Zephyr. It seriously felt as if he never thought for himself.

Making this worse is the fact that he would explain how everyone should feel. He would tell Rinwell to stop being mad about her oppression, he would tell Law to listen to his feelings on Zephyr and change his view on him based on his view of who Zephyr was, he would tell Kisara how to feel regarding her place as a woman.

Worst of all, however, was how he would talk to Shionne. Any time she would have an issue, he would make it about himself. In her most important scene in the game, where she's talking about how her thorns make her want to die, he made it about himself. She said what she wanted for herself and he said "whether you like it or not, I'm taking matters into my own hands". Yes, Tales has done this before, with the heroine wishing to die and the hero telling her he won't allow that, but it's infuriating in this case when he never lets her think or act or move or do anything without his input. There's countless scenes in the game where she would be upset and want time alone and he would force her to talk to him about her feelings. Shionne was not permitted to ever exist without Alphen forcing her to talk to him about it and expecting her to go along with what he wanted, and his feelings about her situation. Again, past Tales game have had this, but when it's so constant and so prevalent, and is the only thing the character has to them, it becomes exhausting and annoying.

Also, his only "unique, fun" trait was that he likes armor, but this dialogue only ever showed up... when you made armor?

I was really disappointed with Alphen. Which is really not good when he is the protagonist, and Shionne's entire character also hinges on him. Especially given the grand finale to the game was their wedding, when I saw no romantic tension between them, because all he ever did was explain how she should feel. He was such a mess. I have more I could rant about with him but I need to leave it at that.

Shionne

Shionne is a big bundle of wasted potential to me. That said, she is probably one of the only characters in this game who felt like a character.

Like I said above, her thorns are an interesting concept. However, the handling of it really was standard Tales heroine tied to a cursed fate. The damsel scene, the way she wants to die but the protag talks her out of it, etc. That said, I did think her trauma with never being touched in her life was interesting, and it did make me emotional at points, even if the execution was poor.

I just really, really wish she could've been a character separate from Alphen. Her writing truly was doomed from the start with him being the only person who could touch her. Again, it felt like she bonded with Alphen because he's the only person who can touch her, rather than them actually making a proper bond as people.

Rinwell

Rinwell is... fine? I honestly don't have a lot to say here. I think it was nice that she got importance as the spiritual person in the party, and her banter with Dohalim was nice. I really disliked her relationship with Law however, and again, I hated that Law and Alphen tried to talk her out of her revenge. She was in the position as a "spiteful" person who "needed to grow out of it" but... her family was massacred? Why is Law allowed to be furious about his dad dying, but she's not allowed to be mad about her family being killed? The hypocrisy in regards to Rinwell seriously infuriated me and I felt really bad for her.

Law

Hoo boy. I really do not like Law either, for many of the reasons I don't like Alphen. He does with Rinwell what Alphen does to Shionne. What is with Arise men and mansplaining everything to the girls and refusing to let them have any agency or thoughts without their input?

He was also supposed to be the "mood maker," except his only mood making scenes were Hootle pecking him in the face or him saying something dumb and Rinwell calling him an idiot. It really wasn't that funny and felt like borderline bullying.

Law falls under a Tales archtype I normally really really like (Tytree, Spada, Hisui, etc), so I was expecting to like him quite a bit, but sadly I just... do not. See my Zephyr rants above as well.

Kisara

Kisara is probably the most unfortunate character in the cast. In theory, I really like Kisara. I'm a big fan of knight ladies, and I always enjoy the older woman character in the party (even if only in her 20s). In practice however she just... completely misses the mark. All of her scenes are dedicated to one of three things: working (or not working) under Dohalim, her brother, or how she can be a proper woman. Yikes! It's not good when a female character's entire character revolves around what she can do for men! There's many skits where she asks "what can I even do if everyone cooks for themselves" and her conclusion is... to follow her brother's dream? Kisara, can't you find your OWN dream? And no, bringing up how she can help Dohalim also doesn't count here.

I don't hate Kisara for being who she is, but I really just want to have a stern talking to with whoever wrote her. A female character should not revolve around men and being in the kitchen. Seriously. This game came out in 2021, you should've known better.

Dohalim

While I didn't like his introduction scenes much, he grew on me a lot throughout the game, and he definitely felt the most like a Tales character to me. There was a lot of humanity and nuance to him, and he had the honor of actually having his backstory shown on screen. He had a lot of facets to him: the part of him that was a Renan leader, the part of him that supports the party, his own goals, his own motivations, interesting relationships with other characters, as well as (and maybe most importantly) fun things about his personality via his breaks from seriousness as well as his fondness for music and artifacts.

Overall he felt very fleshed out, and I really wish he had been put in another game. I came out of Arise quite content with the character that was Dohalim, which I cannot say for anyone else.

Closing thoughts

Overall, this is probably the most disappointed I have been with a Tales title. Of course, I don't think every game is perfect, and there are games that I will admit just don't click with me personally that others adore, and likewise there are games that I think fall flat in some regards but resonate with me for the characters.

For instance, I think Tempest is a perfectly fine and even charming game, despite it being more on the barebones side of things. I do not hold Tales games to unrealistic expectations when it's not necessary, and I always think of a lot of things when I base how I feel about the game: crunch time, what the creators had in mind when making it, what heart was put into the story, what fun I am able to find even in the game's flaws. Things to that effect.

Where Arise differs for me is that many of the decisions I dislike about the game were intentional. The lackluster, yet overbearing monsters were intentional, the lack of skit and status portraits were intentional, the story not being that compelling, but taking itself way too seriously and acting as if it's the pinnacle of Tales writing, is also what the producer of the game flaunts when he discusses it. All of these things negative attribute to the quality of the game. Arise scratches away the charm that Tales games have, yet it is flaunted as being something groundbreaking when the story never attempts a single new trope.

It's not one deviation from series staples, it's a whole cluster of them. Why was there any reason to remove post battle dialogue, when that is something everyone absolutely LOVED about the series? Why are skits, which are part of what brought Tales to fame, boiled down to recaps of story scenes and not fun moments, which is what everyone is excited for when they go to open a skit? Why are the cute and iconic monsters completely gone, when every single game used the same designs? Why does the producer for the series actively hate the things that the fans love about Tales?

Arise is essentially a long laundry list of bizarre decisions made by the producer with awful execution, and then sadly the writing does the game absolutely zero favors. I came out of playing it feeling hollow. I've been revisiting some older games after playing it, and I've been getting legitimately emotional at how the characters in these other games actually talk to each other like people, and don't just bounce recaps of events back and forth to each other. Other games know how to have fun, and they have compelling characters, which is really what has always been the thing bringing people back to this franchise.

Would I like Arise more if it wasn't labeled a Tales game? Honestly, no, given I only ever played it because it's under the Tales branding. And I shouldn't have to even ask myself that, given I play Tales to enjoy Tales, and its tropes, and all the fun little things these games provide that no other series can give me.

If and when the next Tales game comes out, I will still probably play it. But so long as it is under our current producer, I will go in incredibly cautious, given he seems adamant about hating all of the things I love most about Tales. At the very least, I hope the next game is more innovative with its writing and characters, and brings back some of the charm that even Zestiria and Berseria had.

[janetkwallace]

On the consequences of the Burmecian Genocide

You don't have to agree with what I'm about to say.

As a matter of fact, you can disagree as much as you want, I'm not saying that what I say is the right thing or that my view is better than yours. Everyone hold different views on the things they like and they don't, and today I'm writing about something I both like and dislike about one of my favorite games. The thing is, I don't like to do this sort of analysis where I comment on the negatives of my favorite stuff, even if I were to do it with a bit of humor.

Well, do not expect any humor.

I was kinda hesitant to write about it, but then I found myself writing it on a whim, so here we go... There is no turning back.

I've written about my thoughts on Final Fantasy IX before, its goods and its flaws. I've said what I had to say about the second visit to Alexandria during Disc 2, aka the point in the game where my enjoyment for the story has significantly decreased, it did not ran out as the game is still good after that point, but for me things were no longer the same as they did during the first hours of gameplay.

If you read the title, you know what I'll be commenting on today. So, genocide... It happens across most of the Final Fantasy games, it's shown to be very graphic when it happens, and IX was no different. Disc 1 ends with the party visiting Gizamaluke's Grotto, and later Burmecia, places filled with dead soldiers and NPCs lying down on the streets. The bleak atmosphere combined with haunting music adds a lot to these scenes. When the party fights against the Black Mages at Cleyra, each fight doesn't end with a victory pose... Because there's no victory when lots of innocents are annihilated by a powerful attack all at once. Later, when you revisit Lindblum, a giant monster is swallowing everything in its dark void, from knights to people to Black Mages themselves, it doesn't matter who gets sucked in or whose corpses fall in midair.

Pretty graphic, don't you think? The scenes do not include any blood or gore, it's just these little gruesome details that the player clearly sees with their eyes, this nightmarish stuff that happens and you can't do jack about it. One of my praises for Final Fantasy IX is for doing these sorts of things and not being afraid of doing it so. Sometimes it's whimsical fantasy, and other times a bleak, chaotic mess that belongs to dark fantasy, all of it happens in one game that most people – and I still can't believe it – think it's for children or that because it's geared towards children it has to dumb down a lot of themes they can’t grasp by themselves.

It doesn't. From the beginning, it’s clear that people do die, and it doesn't matter if your party members are well-trained or skilled, people in the world still die. I believe this is one of the core themes present in the games Sakaguchi worked with, that death is inevitable and out of the player's control. The original Final Fantasy VII had a lot of scenes revolved around said theme, such as when Barret meets his old friend Dyne or the main antagonist revealed to be a walking corpse who and whose mother – also a corpse – refuses to die in contrast with a party member whose sacrifices gives everyone else a chance to live.

I'm not here to talk about VII, maybe someday, but returning to the main point... The Burmecian genocide that occurs in Final Fantasy IX is shocking due everything I've said before, but the consequences of it are not fully explored. It's something that not only happens in this game, but a problem with the Final Fantasy series as a whole where the act of genocide is shown to be a horrifying event that leads to many casualties, and yet, very little is told or shown in the aftermath. Sure, there is an attempt to show the Burmecians leading their lives after the invasion, a few NPCs in Lindblum and some Cleyrans who managed to flee their settlement that are spread across the entire world, but it's not enough.

Genocide not only kills people, but their culture. How does the Burmecian culture look like after the genocide? Do people want to go home or do they want to build a new home elsewhere? The destruction of symbols can be demoralizing, so do any of the Burmecians feel sad or guilty or depressed after witnessing the collapse of their birthplace? Do other NPCs consider Burmecians as victims or do they see the mass murder as a justified act, given the few times conflicts between Burmecia and Alexandria were mentioned? What about the Cleyrans, what do they have to say about the giant crater that lies where Cleyra used to be? Are there any attempts from the citizens of Burmecia to restore their homeland to its full glory or is that something impossible to be achieved?

We see Lindblum in ruins and during its reconstruction, but nothing happens in Burmecia, it's abandoned the way it is since Disc 1. You could say that's a result of disc limitation at the time, and yes, while the limits of what can fit inside a 700mb disc plays a factor, it isn't the sole reason why a lot of things about Final Fantasy IX and other games from the series feel rushed or underdeveloped.

I'd say it's not only a lack of digital space, or budget constraints , but I do see it as a lack of care too, which's weird to think about since a lot of effort was put on the game, its story, characters, graphics, the backgrounds that we see for just a second and then never again, all of that done with such intricate and pure detail, and then you have stuff that isn't very well executed or explored. Disc 4 is there to show this dissonance of "let's put lots of details in these background elements" combined with "the story goes crazy and we will offer cryptic explanations as to why this happens and the characters in the party barely react to the information".

In the end, nothing that I wish for will be true. This game is called "Final Fantasy IX", not "Burmecian Fantasy IX", after all. They were never meant to be given any focus, but that doesn't mean they're irrelevant or any less important than anything else that takes place in the game.

[elionwriter]

Sherlock Holmes the Awakened: a Review

(SPOILERS AHEAD)

Sorry, sorry, sorry, but I just NEED to talk about this game! I have been a Frogwares Holmes fan since the very beginning and 'The Awakened' was always among my favourite titles. Not to mention one of the games that had scared the wits out of me. So I have to speak about the Remake now.

First and foremost, I think it needs to be reiterated that this game was made DURING THE FU****G INVASION OF UKRAINE! During such dark times, the team kept working on this. I would have supported this game even just for this reason alone.

Now, let's be honest: Frogwares never had the most marvelous graphics nor the most polished of gameplays and this entry is not an exception. I still feel the map system is a bit difficult to navigate (I may be an idiot, but I had the same issue with Chapter 1) but I really appreciated the added help the game gives you when you're recreating a scene, letting you know which passage you got wrong. Last game I found myself changing everything trying to hit the right combination so I really liked this fix.

This needs to be said: the game doesn't feel under any shape or form a product for a new fan. Everything from dialogues to game mechanics sort of take for granted that you've at least played 'chapter one'. Honestly? I'm ok with this, I hate having to always go through nearly identical tutorial stages for games I know inside out (like Pokémon) and I believe that most of not all people who are going to get this game ARE old fans!

I wasn't originally a big fan of the new Holmes and Watson models when the last game came out but....I dunno, they have grown on me. I find myself liking them now for, I suppose, no other reason than 'they are very expressive' and 'I've gotten used to them'. I think it's gotten to the point that these might be my favourite models of the two to date. Please ignore how fickle I am! (In honesty, just to draw a similar parallel, when Roger Craig Smith was first announced as Sonic's voice I hated it and now he's my fav Sonic v. actor)

This game has something.....compared to its predecessor, that makes it less scary. I can't really put my finger on it, but I distinctly remember the feeling of claustrophobia building in me when I was in the Black Edelweiss. Or the sheer jumpscare I got when the sacrificed American detective on the altar had tentacles coming out of it and severing his head making it roll to the ground. I remember almost not wanting to paddle the rowboat under the tree of hanging men in the Bayou. I remember how viscerally sick I felt at the lighthouse by all the gore and blood depicted. This time round.....I just didn't. I'm honestly not sure why this didn't hit me nearly as hard as its 2006 predecessor did!

And talking about comparisons, one thing I'm a bit disappointed they didn't grab the chance to do in this remake was fix the loose ends that were left hanging in the 2006 version. I mean....they still abandoned completely the search for that one Maori servant, what happened to all the people they managed to rescue? Who hired the private American detective that was killed? Why give out the cheap pendants? I know I'm a bit dumb and need extra explaining than what is necessarily needed but...I can't be the only one right? Sometimes you want to be told just a bit more.

Now, getting into the really good bits, that make all of it worth it!

'Chapter One' acted as a 'de facto' reboot of the Frogwares Holmes series, and I honestly think that was for the best. I don't really see where they could have gone with things after 'Devil's Daughter' and their Holmes had changed too much to be the same guy from 'The Silver Earring'...let alone Watson. But like this? They have a fresh, clean slate to start off from and they can rebuild the two mains' relashionship and lore from the ground up in a more strictly consequential manner. And the way they are doing it? I think it's state of the art!

The fact that they poke fun at themselves on certain points like Watson stating: "What about when you used to roll up only one of your sleeves? Did you get bored halfway through?!" I think the Devs themselves realized this was a cringe design choice and I like that they said so out loud.

The meta-conversation they wrote in towards the end, 'because yes, this HAS Happened before and the story still has the same outcome', is brilliant. I don't think I've ever seen another remake that acknowledges that it is a remake, and in the general madness that is mounting in the narrative this makes perfect sense! It adds one more layer of horror and inexplicable to the tale. The villain's warning 'that the Final Problem is coming and Sherlock will fall in the abyss too' is such a powerful way to use Canon. The prophecy is only made more real and dreadful by the fact that this person is aware of what has already happen in a similar but different scenario!

Also, not them using that one quote from 'The Valley of Fear' novel which happens to be one of my all time favourites!

I say, Watson,’ he whispered, ‘would you be afraid to sleep in the same room as a lunatic, a man with softening of the brain, an idiot whose mind has lost its grip?’ ‘Not in the least,’ I answered in astonishment. 'Ah, that’s lucky,’ he said, and not another word would he utter.

I think the thing that has most benefited from the Remake is Watson's character. Compared to the 2006 version, this Watson is a truly compelling character in his own right and this time round he's not just along for the ride. In this version, you simply cannot imagine how Holmes would have done it on his own. Watson was in every way a key component to the solution of the problem and the reason why Holmes didn't drown in madness. That point is driven home by Rochester asking 'How did you defeat me?' and Holmes answering 'I made a friend!'

Much of the narrative in the game was focused on Holmes truly learning to accept Watson's friendship and him as a person when he was still clinging so much to his old imaginary friend. You can see how, at first, Holmes refuses to be honest with the Doctor about what he thinks and feels and it's only as they move forward in the adventure that they both open up to each other. You can see as the adventure progresses that Holmes shifts his desperate cries from 'Jon' to 'Watson' to 'John' and the Doctor goes more and more often from 'Holmes' to 'Sherlock'. Mycroft also points this out when he says that Sherlock 'went from one Jon to another'. But this one, John Watson, is real and there to stay. In the context of a story that happens mostly in the detective's mind, Watson's friendship is really what turns the situation around!

I could add of little tid bits which were so random and on the nose that somehow worked, like the possessed 'Heidi' doll or the fact that you had to actually 'Kill Holmes' with the booby traps instead of avoiding them.

Also, "The director Guygax was randomly killed.....by a doll?!????!?!?! Yeah, let's just walk out of here no questions asked. That's too deep a wormhole even for this f***d up Adventure to go down. I'm sure nobody is gonna ask us questions, suspect or stop us as we go out the main doors!" 😃 -Holmes, probably.

So, yeah, I loved this game despite it not being perfect and my love and support goes to Frogwares more that ever!