#is dark souls like this too???

[hacknet]

which dev at fromsoft was responsible for making the catacombs falling puzzle in subterranean shunning grounds. someone should strangle them.

[neanmoins-que]

recently had a dream lothric was my roommate and i was destroying him in chess and since it fits my hcs for him i had to draw it

[braisedhoney]

Can we get some Dark Dan and Jazz?

oh you absolutely can. these siblings are not alright.

[thedeadedhooman]

get me on the call with eric kripke because I need to know his version of the supernatural finale. I just know it would've been a banger. it would've been the darkest of shit and horrifyingly gory and too tragic to even rewatch but it would give you a fetish so bad you'd find yourself going back and watching it while you gag and jack off at the same time. it would've been wacky enough to even have him cancelled by a section of the fandom.

[the-punforgiven]

Soulsborne co-op is such a weirdly melancholic experience sometimes

Like, sometimes you find some rando you just vibe with, or who's rocking a build that compliments yours, is fun and goofy, maybe their character's got a Character Creator Abomination face that makes you laugh, or is just really fun to play with, but like, the second they die or you accidentally jostle your ethernet cable and DC, you just never know if you'll see them again

Like, sometimes hope's restored after they die and they summon you again and then it's like "Holy shit! They liked me enough to summon me twice!" and that's even better! You found the Cool Guy and they liked you and still wanna keep playing the game with you! And you're a socially maladjusted pack animal so that floods your brain with serotonin and that's rad! The two of you struggle, fight, overcome, and eventually build up to a climactic victory fighting the boss of the area, and that's so much fun! Like a little self-contained adventure story, just the two of you

But then after that you just like

You realize you may actually literally never see this person again, this person who's been your companion on this mini-adventure, who's had your back, who you've laughed with and fought beside. Brief as they were, they were good times had between the two of you, and you have to take a second to realize that may have been the only time the two of you will ever meet, like ships passing in the night

wherever you are, random guy who summoned me at every bonfire and for every bossfight in the Ringed City like three years ago, I still think of you sometimes. I hope you're doing well

[mtonette]

colored a few snips of the manga for icons. smile

[desultory-novice]

"Darkened Skies"

Dark Matter is a very lonely person... When he saw Dream Land, a place where everyone is friends, he became jealous. He's unable to say 'be my friend.'

...But you don't always need to say it to be heard...

Kirby of the Stars is rather new to the whole hero business, but he has saved the day twice now at least. Kirby knows that when you do bad, you have to be stopped. But he also knows that sometimes, you can do the wrong thing while still being a good person inside...

Villainy and friendship are not mutually exclusive to Kirby.

And he can always sense when you're hurting...

[Bonus First Draft]

Noir's "bad deal" imprisonment to Dark Matter during their talk was initially gonna be more of a metaphohrical one. I'd wanted to draw it as if he were literally shackled TO the Dark Matter Blade (:metaphor:) or as if the blade was what was trapping him there.

However, my snarky brain coulnd't stop asking, "Why doesn't Kirby just, like, break the chains and free him then? XD" thus I settled on the idea above of Noir only briefly emerging partway from the darkness before he is swallowed up by it once more.

.

[Prev] “Matter Over Mind”

[Apologies AU Masterpost]

[Next] “Last Will”

[minecraft]

instead of making the nether taller they should just put the existing nether upwards and then fill the underneath section with a new Deeper Dark biome that links to the overworld via ancient city portals.

[vasira96]

can't stop daydreaming about a soulslike zelda game yall i'm so normal about this

[cannibal-nightmares]

let's make trouble in the dream world, we'll hijack heaven with another memory now; i make the most of the turning tide, it just split what's left of the burning silence

[oneluckydragon]

I know it's a story, oh I know it's just a story. But why does it feel like my worst nightmare?

My Explorers of Sky Hero, Echo!

Lately I've been writing a study on her and this paragraph is taken from my rough rough draft. It's a more in-depth exploration of her character/origin/experiences and since I am a huge fan of the darkrai reincarnation theory, this is my personal take on the concept.

I think it's a bit poetic that Echo, in the aftermath of everything, winds up as a dark-type again (and one connected to the moon no less, the irony) as well. I mean, her timeline of lives has literally been this:

Darkrai (New Moon/Pitch Black) -> Human -> Eevee (Evolution) -> Umbreon (Moonlight)

A lot of her evolution into umbreon has to do with her personal trauma/amnesia and also significant influence from dusknoir (who she trusted and cared about), but deep down I feel like her evolution was also partially determined by the fragmented remnants of her original self. She even tried to evolve into leafeon, which obviously, did not work out as planned. Perhaps this is her past lives way of manifesting in her current self, though she is no longer the same pokemon anymore. Maybe it has something to do with self-forgiveness or acceptance? She still has a lot of healing to do, though.

Once evolving into a dark type, Echo slowly starts to regain some of her memories from her time as Darkrai. And Team Wish's new friendship with Cresselia, who is more perceptive than she has any right to be, gives Echo a lot of insight into exactly who she is. This spirals into Echo battling the reality of her past actions alone for a long time because how is she supposed to admit the truth to Sora? That she was the direct cause of their shared suffering? That she and darkrai are one and the same? That all of the pokemon of the future lived in an eternity of hell because she desired it? Of course, she keeps quiet for a long time out of pure fear-- because if Sora rejected her, she'd fall apart. It's a lot to keep secret but what else can she do?

And bonus!! Does Echo's shadow change during each night of the new moon? Hmm. Sure does seem like it.

[rcmclachlan]

what if i put my life in your hands? what if i took your life in mine?

[tempestmothstorm]

Ok since Monika still has her admin powers in the side stories you think she could just discover them accidentally or use them without realizing

Anyways au where Monika and friends discover her admin powers but dont know about the wider context of what it means. So they just go around thinking Monika has magic and try practicing with a bunch of silly fun shenanigans because they figure it’s some chosen one bloodline stuff and not like. A product of their reality being a constricted digital science experiment.

This au will not end well

[imashittalkingmushroom]

Rich Boarding School Au doodles, ft Bruce, Harvey, Lex and Ollie

headcannons under cut lol

Yes, Bruce and Lex are roommates. They stuck the Weird Rich Kids together

Ollie is there solely because I think its hilarious that well into their 40s Bruce does something that makes Ollie realize that he KNOWS WHO BATMAN IS. and that batman is the little weirdo he went to high school with

Ollie was scared of bruce and never talked to him. was 100% convinced that that kid did human sacrifice at some point or smthing.

Bruce and Harvey def picked on Lex. Were they his only friends? yes. Were they also really toxic and mean? Yes. Not that lex was nice either but ya know.

Lex has walked in on bruce and harvey kissing many times. poor boy just wants to chill in his room. He never tells anyone (who tf is he gonna tell anyway?) but he still thinks about it. in a 'he remembers it at the wirdest times, leans back, and goes huh' way.

Harvey doesnt realize he's bi until after his redemption arc in the far future. Because, obviously, making out with bruce over the years doesnt count. It's Bruce.

[transfem-kirito-truther]

i know in my heart that asuna and rika take the time to show kaz how to do cute little winged eyeliner and then the next time they see her she’s got 2009 scene queen panda eyes and she’s so excited about being the goth girl of her dreams 😭😭

Showing her how to do a very simple, graceful like that accents the shape of her eye only for her to come out the next day guns blazing eyelids fully blacked out and the biggest smile on her face. Lizbeth questions why they even bothered trying to show her the normal way while Asuna is looking lovingly at her over the top edgy girlfriend. Honestly Lizbeth wonders why she even tries with either of them.

[klysanderelias]

It's always funny to me when a big-name youtuber argues vociferously that souls-like games DO have a difficulty setting, it's Playing The Game Right (leveling, build, using summons, etc), and then later on in the same video will have a fifteen minute long section complaining about how certain boss fights completely invalidate certain builds or require you to drastically alter your style of play, and i'm like... I thought you were in FAVOR of this.

And of course they're not, they just don't understand what a difficulty setting IS anymore, and that's completely fair because I think that most DEVELOPERS don't either, but it means that the criticism they make is always couched in a fundamental misunderstanding of the thing they're trying to criticise (and also usually a complete misunderstanding of where the criticism comes from).

And I want to be clear, I've beaten basically every single Dark Souls game, I beat bloodborne, I played shitloads of elden ring and the reason I didn't beat it was because I got bored, and I've done speedruns and soul level 1 runs of dark souls 3. I'm pretty much the dark souls power player that everyone expects would argue AGAINST having difficulty options.

But.

I've been playing thousands of hours of battletech, and the battletech difficulty screen has been the singlehandedly biggest argument I've had change my mind.

In the game, Battletech modifies difficulty per mission by changing the total health of enemies, changing their skills and experience levels, the usual fare of difficulty curves (although damage is never affected, thank god). But having all these granular options can dramatically change the way the game is played without simply affecting health values or hit percentages.

Toggling mech destruction and lethality means that losing a mech in a mission or having a pilot be knocked unconscious removes them permanently. They're killed, destroyed, you need to go get a new one. That's a HUGE change from the base difficulty where having a mech be completely destroyed in combat just removes the weapon components and costs a ton to repair. Likewise, changing the number of parts required to buy or salvage in order to complete a mech DRAMATICALLY changes the game - the maximum amount of parts you can get from a single mech is 3, and usually you only get 1. Needing 3 parts means that if you're lucky, you could see a brand new mech in a mission, blow its head off, and get one for free. Moving that scale up both means that rare or expensive mechs take much much longer to earn, but also that replacing mechs takes much longer (meaning that losses are even more painful).

Like, every single one of these options can dramatically affect how you play the game or change the feel of it to something much more interesting to you as a player - do you want to play a rogue-like game where you have to save and scrounge to get new mechs, and each mech and pilot is a precious resource you have to protect? or do you want to powerscale fast and constantly get new mechs and rare weapons?

And like, having extremely granular options for gameplay isn't for everyone, but then again, there are the owlcat pathfinder CRPGs that do this same thing, but have a base 'easy-normal-hard' sort of slider that automatically selects certain options, and you can adjust them if you want. If you're not interested in going through each slider you can just say 'I'd like normal please' and the game automatically makes all the selections, but you can also stop and say 'hey actually let me turn on permadeath too' and you can do that.

And I think that when people think about difficulty, they think about the most basic 'health and damage adjustments' sliders, and not ANYTHING else that actually have much more of an impact. I will hit this point to my grave that dark souls would massively benefit from difficulty options like turning off instakill effects (like curse or petrification) or removing the harsh penalty of dying when you can't get back to your bloodstain because a) that's often what drive new players off the most, and b) it doesn't fuckin' matter anyway, all you're losing is souls, the only thing it does is make you have to go grind more to make up for it.

And of course, there are always EXTRA challenge runs people come up with - nuzlocke runs of pokemon, soul level 1 runs of dark souls, hell, when I do Battletech I often add additional challenges like 'no intentional destruction of civilian buildings' or 'each mech must be assigned to a pilot and if one of them is sidelined, so is the other'

But challenge runs aren't difficulty settings, and more importantly there's no way to unchallenge run a game. You can decide to make the game harder for yourself, but you can't make the game EASIER. And when people say that you can, they're lying to you. Like yeah, there builds that are very strong in dark souls, and leveling optimally will make the game easier, but if you don't know what optimal leveling looks like, it's pointless. If you have a deep and thorough understanding of the game, and you check the messageboards, and delve through the wiki, and use a couple of exploits, the game will be easy! And if it's still too hard for you after that? Well, go fuck yourself, you just spent hours of your life doing research only to give up on the game anyway.

And the truth is, most people who argue that dark souls shouldn't have a difficulty slider are doing it out of bad faith, because they have a certain amount of ego riding on 'being good at hard game' as a character trait, and making these games more accessible frightens them because what if being good at dark souls isn't actually getting them into heaven

but also because they're somehow afraid that having extra difficulty options in the game will tempt them into choosing them? And then they won't get the 'true experience'?

Gamers are some of the most fragile people in existence that the mere option of reducing difficulty sends them into hysterics.