#just a neat idea i had when looking back at the cutscenes a second time

[picklesplitz]

Hi cr fandom... I'll post this here instead of my Instagram.... Do you like my au idea ... (Basically the agency is corrupt and jjajang thinks about how immoral her work is (with the whole mind whipping n such), to where she loses it. Girly having a crisis n the higher ups intervene by. Fighting her and dragging her back to hq, wiping the rookies memory of everything that went down and letting him go back to living a normal life while they deal with her...

She'd be a great asset to the corporation if she just followed orders, right? So they took what remained of her crumbled corpse, and rebuilt her to their liking.

[strawberrydracos]

Playing Ace Combat 7

Started playing the game today! I'll go little by little and updating this post through reblogs sksksksks

@technoblade-apologist-and-proud this is for you buddy, since you asked :] Starting with Mission 1 and 2 today

(Putting stuff on read more bc I get a little self concious of long posts)

First impressions of the game upon opening it: Menu music is beautiful "Wow this is so. Graphic design. Wow." upon seeing the actual menus "Why do we have cowboy music on the cutscene?" Girl talking about loving the color of the sky instantly made me remember the damn "Don't you love the color of the sky? / Which one?" classic tumblr post. "That plane looks like a tesla" upon seeing the drone in the cutscene Started laughing for a whole minute when rave music started playing in the plane selection screen before the mission.

Right out of the bat we start Mission 1 with DEATH from controller. I didn't know what to press and the screen only told me about R2 to accelerate so I killed myself by crashing on the end of the take off thingie. This was a warning to what was about to come.

I need to publicly apologize to every Ace Combat fan that has ever lived because inverted controls make me feel insane so I had to "invert" them back to normal. I am very sorry. I have failed you all. Don't look at me.

Anyways, first mission went TERRIBLY. WHO have me a license. I was DRUNK driving in the skies. Absolutely dogshit piloting skills. I didn't know it did a neat little replay of the mission at the end + the replay with the tiny lowpoly planes. Humiliating. Everyone was flying to neatly and I looked like I was using my plane for a ribbon dance.

As someone that played Drakengard on the ps2 and Armored Core on the ps4: Piloting a plane is much more similar to riding a dragon than piloting a mech.

There's a lot going on in the cutscenes, the story seems cool and I have an idea of it already but by god they just feel so goofy sometimes, very silly, I am very lost.

Second mission started terribly as well, I still fly like I'm drunk, I died at least 5 times because I turned a little too much and crashed on the ground. At some point when I was managing to stay alive I thought I was gonna fail from the time running out because I just couldn't hit the targets.

Also. Did you know? In Armored Core you press X, Square and O for boosting and movement, and L1/L2 R1/R2 for your weapons. Ace Combat is the opposite. I've been playing Armored Core for a month already. My brain is having a hard time trying to grasp the controllers, somebody help me.

Second half of this mission went better than the first half bc I *am* learning but by god. I died once because I hit the ground again, I keep doing it, my pilot craves the safety of the ground. It was a nightmare trying to get to the targets to properly hit them but I did manage to do it.

All and all? Game is pretty fun! It will be a challenge to actually learn how to play, specially with expert controls, but that's the fun of every game, learning and mastering!

Had to stop for today but I'll reblog this once I play more :]

[desultory-novice]

since you are still doing character asks... i'd love to hear your thoughts on dedede :)

003 Dedede

How I Feel About This Character:

King Dedede holds a permanent position in my top 5 favorite Kirby characters and I want everyone to know that my top 5 in a series this great and with so many amazing characters...well, getting a spot there is a really big deal.

For one, his character design is nearly perfect. Like, Kirby obviously has the perfect character design. Just beautifully simple and flawless. I'd probably rate Magolor second for excellent use of simple shapes, colors, patterns, and silhouette, but Dedede is third. He rocks the RBY color scheme and is a delightful combination of circles and rounded triangles. If you've never drawn him before, I recommend it. He's a character that is actually FUN to draw. Just like Kirby!

(But I also love people experimenting with him. Feathery Dedede++)

We're obviously all big Kirby fans here on Kirby-Tumblr, but I want to give a shoutout to "The Subspace Emissary" from Smash Bros Brawl, which really should have been everyone's wake up call to what King Dedede was -really- like. The way he feigns being on the villains side when he ends up being the damn hero of the story who literally saves all the fighters from being wiped out forever by Tabuu, hello?!?

Also his sliding hug tackle when he sees Kirby again! Cutest thing ever. I could watch it 100 times. I probably have...!

Any/All the People I Ship Romantically With This Character:

Already mentioned I have Dederanza feels in the Taranza ask. Let's see, I mentioned in my Kirby general series ask that I also ship MetaDede so might as well talk about that?

MetaDede is something I hadn't actually seen in the games -I'd- played that much (I only picked the ship up after being alerted to some of the stuff in the later games.) I thought it came from the anime, tbh! I'm fairly low-key about it, but I think it's neat. I really enjoy monarch x vassal and they are in no way your average king and knight, and actually end up bonding over their shared experiences with KIRBY of all things, which is pretty hilarious! Anyway, there's so much MetaDede in the fandom that I rarely feel the need to talk about it, but having them fight at each other's side/back-to-back to defend Dream Land is the A++ quality I look for in this particular ship.

...That said, I do want them to play chess together sometime. (Man, you cannot believe how I screamed when I saw in the Planet Robobot opening cutscene that chess playing Dedede was real. Chess-playing Dedede! Ahhhh!!)

My Favorite Non-Romantic Relationship For This Character:

Dedede and Adeleine. The protective pseudo-sibling (?) relationship they have is one of those low-key amazingly heartwarming things going on in the background of Kirby.

I have a scrap of a comic idea written down where time passes VERY strangely on Dream Land, and so, in this particular story idea, Ado is actually Adeleine's grandmother, and she tells young Adeleine that should she -ever- get in trouble or need anything, go to the king. "He'll take care of you, just like he's taken care of our entire family till now." That is, in a nutshell, how I see them and why I adore them.

But also King Dedede and the Waddle Dees and Doos all the residents of Dream Land. Even in the chaotic and brain-breaking Kirby manga by Hikawa-sensei, Dedede still has a good rapport with his sovereign subjects.

My Unpopular Opinion About This Character:

I think everyone being tired of "mean ol' King Dedede!" is a popular opinion, at least, it should be, so... Hmm, I don't know where this falls, but one of the reasons I love King Dedede so much is that he ISN'T perfect? Like, I recall hearing once upon a time that the stories say the Arthurian knight Lancelot had the healing touch not because he was a perfect human being, but because he accepted his flaws?

King Dedede LIKES being in charge! He's got a huuuge appetite, and he likes being pampered. (Heck, who doesn't?!) He wants to win against Kirby when the two are competing. (Not enough to set up him, but in an actual fair competition.) He can have all these traits and still be a hero. I don't want a flawless Dedede who is free from snark and never loses his temper or accidentally (oops) misjudges people and other character flaws. I want a Dedede who can do these things and then come around!

Oh...and also I don't headcanon him as being particularly older than the rest of the gang?? ("Kirby is in his 10s, Dedede is in his 40s" stuff is just not for me, thx.) Maybe it's because my older sibling always picks Dedede in Smash (while I always pick Kirby) but I'm not super into "Dedede Dad" either? (...Well, "Dedede Dad" with the Waddle Dees is okay. I just have a limit I hit with that stuff.) I can see where people get the idea of an age gap from, and there's a size difference to boot, but I just see them as closer in age than most? It makes their "destined (friendly) rivals" thing better if they're not 20+ years apart, y'know. Dedede is not the team's "grizzled old man veteran" to Kirby's "idealistic young hero" (that role goes to Meta Knight if anything!) he's right there with Kirby on the field.

Annnd last unpopular (?) opinion: I don't necessarily mind Dedede being damsel'd. WITH the corollary that he gets to have his hero moment after. (Or that they, you know, switch it up RtDL style and let him be a hero from the beginning.) That is to say, I don't think it never needs to happen again. This is a highly personal thing, but as bigendered peep who grew up with so.much. female-in-distress in media, as long as we're going to get "save person in danger!" fiction (and it's a good trope in a bottle, so we will) I am totally okay with the big tough guy being the "person in danger." Cliches are gonna cliche, so give a peep some role-reversal so I stop feeling crazy inside, thx!

One Thing I Wish Would Happen / Had Happened With This Character in Canon:

I have never seen KRBAY. I don't really want to. But, as I mentioned in my Taranza ask and again here, I am big on loyalty dynamics. And I guess in the anime, Meta Knight was -literally- a knight of the kingdom? Whereas in game canon, he seems to be more of a mercenary/leader of a para-military force? (I mean, Dedede was said to have give fragments of the broken Dream Rod to his most loyal allies so obviously he has a long standing relationship with Meta Knight) but anyway, what I am getting at is that I would have a LOT of fun with a Meta Knight who is officially sworn to Dedede's service. At least for a little bit!

Oops. That turned into more of a "what do I wish happened to Meta Knight in canon."

Speaking of Meta Knight, I wouldn't have minded if we got just a little bit more insight into Shadow Dedede? Like, we know Shadow Kirby is a trickster and a coward, and DMK is ruthless and pragmatic instead of noble. And we get some implications that Shadow Dedede was...maybe never -rescued- from one of his earlier possessions (?!?) but very little on what makes him a reflection of Dedede.(*)

...Oh yeah. MORE MERCH PLEASE! I want to have more Dedede in my home but his majesty just gets real bottom of the barrel stuff and it's so sad. Like, okay, no one is as cute as Kirby and Waddle Dee. I get it. But they make Kirby seasonal collabs with Waddle Doos and Gordos and Scarfies and yet no Dedede? Puh-lease.

Favorite Friendship For This Character:

Kirby. Honestly, a big part of my "unpopular opinion on Kirby character ages" is because I really, really, really, really REALLY like Kirby and Dedede's friendly rivalry/ "two heroes working the scene from different sides" dynamic and I massively prefer that to pretty much any other relationship they could possibly have.

I was playing Forbidden Land with the fam and my sibling commented that Dedede's mid-boss fight roar in the Ice Castle stage felt almost like he was shouting to Kirby, "Where HAVE YOU BEEN?!" and ugh, I got so many feels from that idea.

...Forgotten Land is really good for the Dedede+Kirby dynamic...

FREE SPACE/Recs:

Rinyo's next video is actually going to be Dedede focused, I hear? :excitement:

There's also this Dedede x "King" with 7 different artists collaborating to draw his majesty in all his glory. That was a little fun!

I want to burn his Kirby Cafe outfit/hat in a fire.

Dedede's Drum Dash was silly fun, but it will be weird if it stays the only Dedede focused spinoff in the history of the franchise. ...HAL?

(*) Oh, and lastly, I just went to the wiki to look up Shadow Dedede in Japanese only to find out he's got the, uh, ill-advised name of "Black Dedede" there but, it's noted further down that this gets shortened right in his pause screen to "Bla-De" - which is a parody of Dark Pit's nickname "Bla-Pi" (which got localized to "Pittoo") but anyway, my twisted brain accidentally read "Bla-De" as "Bloody" and suddenly "Bloody King Dedede" popped into my head, which is maybe a really cool take on Mirror-verse Dedede???

[thebuttsmcgee]

Alright!!! I'm gunna be saying some spoilers so beware that lol

Okay so if u don't wanna see em then you shoulda scrolled for you life by now so here I go!

Alrighty, so Frontiers is AMAZING!!! Nearly everything about it felt so wonderful. Sonic himself just feels so good to control again. He has good weight while in the air and his running speed, even at level 1, feels controllable yet so wildly fun! They really nailed it with his movement, not to mention Air Tricks™️✌️ are back and are still rad as hell!

The story was also really fun to watch!!! Now Ian Flynn has a...questionable reputation on here but def not as negative to the previous writers and most, if not ALL scenes were an absolute joy to see, I had a goofy ass grin during nearly every part, the Eggmemos were perfect. Just perfect. Some parts kinda paled but the overall story was incredible to play through! Not to mention, just the character interactions were 👌.

My only real gripes with the story are that we reaaaaally needed some more of Eggsy being a pops to Sage, not that what we have already is bad, but c'mon it woulda been perfect to see more! Also...ngl. The scene of Sage feeling sad when seeing Sonic and Tails that cuts to her memories 100% woulda benefitted if they were unique new cutscenes created for the sole purpose of this particular scene instead of just reusing the previous ones. Still great tho.

As for the game itself, my gripes aren't entirely huge. Cyberspace Overall, isn't terrible, but the changed control/movement felt so stiff and restraining at times compared to the fluid and fun overworld controls, not to mention some of the time limits were a bit much but that's more of my own skill issue lol. It makes sense for the context of this game but I'm not sure if I'd like to see it return. Another gripe would be that post-game, not a whole lot to do other than battle some guys and fishing aka the best part. Also....no unlockable cosmetics....✊️😔...

The music is just fucking flawless. As I'm writing all this down I've been listening to Undefeatable this past hour. I'm Here is my personal favorite and owd is my least fav of all of the songs but good god every song is a banger. I can't say much else cause they're all fucking bangers lmao

Fishing stomps every other aspect of the game 100/10

Okay....so the boss fights are FANTASTIC!!!! And yes while Supreme™️ isn't as unique compared to the previous ones and its basically just a slightly fancier version of Giganto, it still managed to be fun. Plus. C'mon. I'm Here alone managed to give it a good rep to me. This was all marvelous.....eeeexcept The End. Look the rail shooter minigame was neat on its own but This being the "reward" for playing on Hard Mode is an incredibly disappointing part of the game. The dialogue was cool ig but still. It feels nothing like a reward and just like a last second addition. Nonetheless that failure doesn't take away the pure enjoyment from every other boss!!! Super Sonic feels sublime that no matter which one, they're all an absolute treat!

So entirely, while no game shall ever be perfection (and this goes for every single game in existence let's be honest), this wasn't just a solid experience, not just an okay time, This was an Amazing game! A well deserved 9.5 outta 10!!! This is all my opinion of course but hey feel free to throw tomatoes at me if ya agree or disagree. Every aspect just felt fantastic, especially the cool combat system that just controls wonderful and innovative.

As for where the series heads from now on, no idea. Hopefully they do unlockable cosmetics next time. And confirm Sonic as bi. That's most of what I got to say this time!!! Have a great rest of the week and a good day everyone! ✌️!

[bluerosesburnblue]

What are your thoughts on the Neo demo, then, if you feel like sharing?:)

I was actively messaging a friend while I was watching the demo so I have an itemized list of things that caught my attention

First off, I was really happy to see the adjustable difficulty levels and character levels make a return. That was always one of the better aspects of TWEWY as a JRPG. Game's too easy? Bump up the difficulty or lower your level! Game's too hard? No worries, you can get through on easy for any battle you need. And you can change it up whenever you want

Also as a small quality of life thing: being able to decline pin evolution if you want. I have no idea if pin collection is the same in NTWEWY as it was in TWEWY, but when I went to 100% complete TWEWY, the pins were the worst because they all had to be maxed, and that included base form pins that could still evolve further. So you were forced to figure out which kind of EXP it didn't evolve with and do your best to make sure that non-evolve EXP was the highest. Just seeing that they streamlined the whole pin EXP system made me sigh with relief

I am so, SO happy that the NPCs' thoughts are still so wacky and full of so much flavor. And the little social media usernames are a cute touch, too! The two that I thought were funny enough to screenshot that I saw were the lady who was very concerned that she'd see her old crush at her school reunion and would feel the need to dump her current boyfriend for him, and the guy whose wife bought him really nice underwear and now he wants everyone to know about them

I STILL can't get over the fact that one of Fret's battle quotes is "Galaxy brain, activate!" What an absolute legend

Not sure if this happens on every run of the game, but for the one I saw the battle music during the first battle with Minamimoto as a party member was Transformation, which was his boss music in TWEWY. I just thought that was neat, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was intentional because the entire demo was very detail-focused

The Final Fantasy messenger stickers are SO cute. I went and screenshotted all of the ones that I saw. Ohhhhh, I want them to be real!

The character expressions are so good. I adore Rindo and Fret's suspicious side-eyes. And now that they're not bound by the tiny DS screen, the body language has gotten so much more expressive! I'm so grateful that they went with the hand-drawn, comic-style cutscenes instead of animating the whole thing in 3D because it's got so much more character

I'd theorize as to who gave Rindo his pin back and who Swallow really is, but both of their actual identities were in the datamine. Not gonna give any spoilers, but both of the names I saw made total sense to me

This has been on my mind since the earlier trailers, but I love the slight glow effect on the tattooed parts of the Noise. They brought back a lot of old classics, it looks like. I just hope there's a decent amount of new, non-boss Noise in there, too! (But we only saw up to Day 2 so there's still plenty of time)

I love Shoka. She is such a grouch. Big "they don't pay me enough for this shit" vibes always, every second she's on screen

Overall, though, I'm really happy with what I'm seeing. A New Day made me so worried for the future of the franchise, but it really looks like they're averting everything that I was worried about. The focus is on a new cast of characters with the old ones taking a mentorship role, the Game is using different rules to keep it interesting but isn't SO different that it feels alien, and the gameplay (from what I've seen, I haven't touched it) feels like it's trying to do something different while still making creative use of the console that it's on. The whole thing looks solid all around

[dungeonecologist]

oh man i totally forgot there was a passing time mechanic in this... the second dungeon is a different forest, also newly teleported in from another world, where we have to go track down a doppleganger of one of our party members. on our way out of the village a little exposition blurb mentions that Giant Butterflies show up in the northern forests in spring time*, so if we take too long to complete the mission, the monster line up might change on us. I really like this idea but I have no clue if it'll persist meaningfully throughout the game, or be a feature that just kinda gets forgotten about, or under utilized.(like if the monster rotation isn't actually unique and just shuffles around things we'll have already seen)

Really loving these little dungeon illustrations that show up with their title cards. So far they're a little same-y but I can't wait for us to get to some of the weirder or more exotic locales.

Anyway, we are technically in a different section of the same forest as before, so no surprise that Spider Hoppers, Thorny Mushrooms, and Googly Seeds are back. But we've also got Googly Tree Buds now alongside their seeds!

There are Fanged Baboons, although they're weird armless baboons.... i guess we just aren't going to question that... The Geldi Monkey, which seems to hang out with the anatomically questionable baboons, which... i guess makes sense? Im not sure what the word "Geldi" here is referring to, possibly the German geld, meaning "gold" referring to the color? A mistransliteration of Goeldi/Goeldii, which is a type of marmoset? an even more off base attempt at gelada, which is a type of baboon? Dunno...

Venus flytraps and the like are subtropic swamp plants, baboons are African savanna and light woodlands, and the geldi are in fact just very angry marmosets then those would be native to South American rainforest... not that the world here is directly analogous to Earth, but the general habitats aren't really similar.

We also get Saw Kingfisher, a neat tropical looking bird with a saw-like beak, hence the name. Despite the name not all Kingfishers actually do hunt fish, although that's obviously what they're known for. Plenty species also live away from major water sources and prey on insects. Real life Kingfishers are actually really pretty birds, but these things in game are kind of an ugly mess of a design. :/

It's also the first "black beast" enemy we fight, although the term seems a little erroneously translated; I assume it was meant to read as "dark beast." The color palette is a real bad darker version of the basic monster, not "black" at all really, and frankly it's not even a good recolor, as it looks like they just through a dark multiply layer over the original texture. Although the little anime cutscene actually does depict it as a shadowy blob with a purple aura, rather than just a miscolored bird.

I hadnt mentioned but this ds game had little anime cutscenes and BOY O BOY did they not age well. actually i remember them looking bad even when this first came out. the file compression is a mess and every frame is a artifact ridden disaster. Which is a shame because it's all really fun looking otherwise.

Anyway the Black Beasts/Black Monsters/"Renegades" are monsters from other worlds who can apparently only be defeated by people from their own world, or our heroes who've been initiated by magical means. This isn't actually at all important, because our entire playable cast will qualify, which is a shame because it might have been interesting to occasionally run into enemies that we just can't beat and have to run from, or that everyone can damage but only certain party members can finish off.

Going into this i thought this dungeon might be longer, but it was pretty short and the "boss" was just the dark Saw Kingfisher. If these early dungeons stay kinda plain I might skip blogging any of them until stuff gets interesting... We'll see...

*I forgot about this but I went back to futz around on the world map until the season changed. For one it took WAY longer than I realized. There was no way on earth to have accidentally let enough time pass for this to be an issue, and there appear to be no such giant butterflies at all actually.

[retphienix]

I Have A Lot To Say So I'll Read More This.

The short of it?

I'm glad I played Joker- I played it because I wanted to know how DQM evolved when it reached the DS and I got my answer.

It's mediocre. Not bad exactly, I enjoyed playing it, it adds some REALLY appreciated features to the DQM series and if you were playing it at release it had online play which plays well with the post game content which I haven't touched by the time I wrote this:

-but there are some engine/console specific things that made it a drag and there are some parts of the game that are just weaker than the previous games which is amusing since the previous games were simple GBC titles.

And finally, I don't really recommend playing through Joker 1. Can't speak on the sequels, but Joker 1 was a pretty middling experience for me so I'm the wrong person to get a positive recommendation from.

And since the opportunity presents itself: If you like monster RPGs and haven't tried it- go emulate Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 for the GBC, it's really good and also if you emulate you can fast forward the GBC era grind if that's your taste- really a win all around.

On to my rambling:

I debated on writing, rewriting, rewriting, and better presenting my thoughts on this game and the series as a whole but nah, Joker ain't getting that, I'm ramblin'- lol

I will split it slightly between "The ending" and "The game as a whole" though.

Ending:

1:07 - This is slightly a 'game a a whole' thing but honestly it's funny to me that you unlock a permanent repel in this game by doing the main quest. I entered this dungeon feeling strong enough to beat the game, so I just avoided 90% of encounters entirely.

5:00 - I genuinely got a laugh out of Sparkpug's whole deal in this finale. Not story wise, that's fine, no complaints- I mean that Sparkpug is clearly built to be a monster that can carry an ineffective team. He's clearly meant to be bred a few times and a god tier member of a potentially inexperienced player's team- but I literally never used him after the intro.

So during this scene it's supposed to be like "I'm a demi-god monster, you can't possibly beat me" and I'm thinking "Dude, you're like level 10 and shit tier, you can't win, this is hilarious."

Obviously it's a real boss fight and not 'face the monster you once had' but I was having fun roasting him behind the scenes of this recording.

45:00 - What an entirely unexpected change of pace.

Like, I had it spoiled for me by a screenshot that Dr. Snap becomes a monster or something- but I thought maybe he was always a monster or something, and also I got a bad look at him.

HE TURNS INTO A BODY HORROR BEAST, THAT'S NUTS.

Genuinely a highlight of the game.

52:00 - I fucking laughed what a meaningless exchange where the payoff is saying "He was stupid!", it's honestly just silly and dumb but not necessarily bad just dumb lol

55:00 - Not a great 'you won' victory lap. Like at all. Kinda feels like they should have just made this all a cutscene where I appear back at town and see that Solitaire is the leader now etc etc.

I kinda don't understand why it's a victory lap at all? Because all anyone says is "They picked a weird successor to Snap >:(" or "Snap went to the island? I bet he was stopping the calamity :)"

If you have 2 lines of dialogue prepared, maybe don't make a victory lap???

1:00:00 - What a fucking stupid payoff lol

Like sincerely, Solitaire does NOTHING the entire game! She's meaningless from start to finish! And the 'surprise' is that she's the new commish??? And she got the position because she's a rich spoiled brat??? Like LITERALLY that's why????????

What a stupid fucking ending lol

Now her proposed evolution of the contest is fair enough, I mean it's childish as hell, but to be fair- more contests is a fine idea especially since prior games and this game demonstrated the public's interest in watching monster fights. And the goal being to fight her as the final fight is fucking egotistical and stupid- BUT- it does play into the fact that the player didn't get to fight her the whole game so it's whatever?

1:03:00 - This is both the best and worst lol.

This game has no story, like at all, it's fucking empty front to back, and only explodes with like- 1 event at the very end.

This moment is a montage of memorable moments with your 'best friend' Sparkpug. It's cinematically very nice to be honest! Even includes a moment I don't remember at the arena which probably didn't happen lol.

So visually it's cool- I dig seeing the camera zoom out as we run across the beach, and the flashback moments intersplice over us making our way to the scout memorial- that's very well done.

The content is empty lol

As I said there's no story, these moments are nothing lol

And that's that.

All said the ending was a very nice challenge to face with my team- I had to abuse items like mad but I MADE IT! It was a GOOD fight.

The rest I've already said.

On to the game as a whole:

I have issues with this game, but there's good too. It's really like 4 steps forward 6-7 steps back it's weird, it's really weird.

Positives are neat!

> First and foremost- TRAITS!

Monsters in Dragon Quest Monsters have always had a problem with keeping their identity for long. The way I'd explain it to an outsider to the series is that Monsters DO have special stat variance and intended movesets and all that jazz- but the breeding system completely and entirely destroys that relatively early into the game.

While a monster might normally have really high defense and low other stats while knowing buffing magic- breeding, EVEN UNINTENTIONALLY, will have that same monster come out with 9 billion attack and all ice magic.

Monsters in DQM have a habit of becoming canvases for the breeding effects rather than their own mons- and this is undeniably a downside. It makes the game feel unique, it doesn't 'hurt' it, but when by mid-game monsters are more easily identified as sprites rather than strengths and weaknesses or even types (family) it's a slight downer on the series.

Traits fix this a lot by making every specific monster have unchangeable traits which offer things like "immunity to x type of damage" or "higher crit chance"- it's small, but it gives each monster more identity.

> Second and secondmost- SKILLS!

The older games didn't use trees, it used each individual spell as a potential pass on during breeding.

Each monster could have 8 spells, and when you breed two monsters you pass on all 16 spells to the offspring (they don't learn them all at once, they learn them as they level up) as well as the natural spells the monster would learn by level up.

So in the older games it is really easy to end up with a refined and overpowered list of 8 spells on each of your monsters.

Now spells are tied to Skill trees and your monsters can have 3 skill trees total (which are passed on as OPTIONS when breeding).

All to say skills do a lot for removing the "Master of all, weakness of none" spell lists that the older games made trivial to make, now you have to limit your builds and be more specialized- also they added skills like "Attack up" to add more variance to a build- instead of having spells you might just have high stat buffs as skill trees.

Overall I think Skills are an improvement because coupled with Traits it makes each monster feel much more specialized and unique and less like a sprite with no identity.

> Breeding is improved.

This is very much because of skills and traits- again- but also the system is just improved in general. Instead of being told "That's a monster you haven't had before!" and judging your decisions based on the name of the offspring breed, now you get to see a small sprite of the resulting monster to help you decide- ALSO instead of getting 1 result for every combo (to the point where you have to back out and choose Monster A + Monster B and Monster B + Monster A as separate options), you now get up to 3 results to pick between for every breeding opportunity.

It's just better.

> The engine is impressive.

At least to me. This is a DS title using (from what I read) a rework of the DQ8 PS2 game's engine- it certainly looks like it.

Combat models are nice, using moves looks nice, overworld exploration looks nice- it looks nice.

Now for some negative and general nonsense- all of which is more often than not 'weird'.

> I gotta be unfair and say "The Story" first and foremost.

DQM 1 and 2 are not intense story games. They aren't.

But they both knew how to handle their story well for what they wanted to tell, I can and will praise both for their narratives because they know what they are and do it well.

DQM:J does not. It's fucking bad.

Basically: The overall story doesn't exist- you're told to be a spy, but that comes up 1 time towards the end of the game and LITERALLY doesn't matter at any other moment INCLUDING the one time it comes up.

You have NO meaningful objective from the start up until near the end of the game. You show up and have no goal- so you get told to get some crystals with no meaning behind it (not even a lie because they are clearly evil- not even a lie to motivate you! NO MEANING IS PRESENTED! JUST DO IT! TO DO THE CONTEST I GUESS! WHY? SHUT UP!)

So 90% of the game time you're not doing anything meaningful. So what about the islands? Any small narratives to keep things moving?

NO!

NOT AT ALL!

So you go 90% of the game having no real objective, just kinda wandering forward mindlessly- and then the game suddenly goes "Oh! Guy who seemed sus! He's evil! He's gonna unleash the calamity that you were 'kinda but not directly' working towards with your dog! You know, that plot point that's kept vague and paid 0% attention to the entire game? Yeah it's happening! Aaaaand you're done! GG!"

Basically there's just nothing going on in this game, it's all background noise until the last 10% of the game. And that's lame.

DQM1 had a light story- but from the very intro cutscene you have a clear objective which makes every action you do seem relevant as you are working towards that goal.

From the start of the game you know "My sister is gone! The king says a magic wish can get her back! I'll go do that!" and then you do!

DQM2 has a much better story!

You have a goal from the start (The kingdom is physically dying and you have to save it by getting a new plug!) AND it has stories for each world you visit!

THAT'S MILES BETTER! THIS GAME COULD HAVE DONE THAT FOR THE ISLANDS!

Anywho. Story is lacking and empty and lame especially when DQM2 has a similar format but does every part better- you have a clear objective you're working towards AND side stories to keep the light narrative moving!

WTH!

The spy plotline doesn't matter! It could have been used to build suspicion on who's the good guy!

The islands are so empty of story!

DQM2 has a fun mix on how a rival character works which makes every world interesting to see how they get involved!

This game has a rival that does NOTHING!!!!!!!!!

It's just such a step back from the previous games, it's weird to see DQM 1 land a solid simple story and DQM 2 build a great format to expand the story going forward- and then DQM:J just slams its head into the dirt and wipes out.

> Game's slow.

The engine switch is a good thing overall, but it makes combat slower (a lot), adds loading screens to combat (primarily), and they didn't bother speeding up the grind from previous games.

Because of the grind still existing which isn't a problem in and of itself- the game becomes SLOW AS HELL because the engine makes that grind take longer.

Also world exploration is slow which is to be expected when moving from 2d to 3d, but this is countered by adding things to the world to find or do- and Joker tries but it's still noticeable. The world exploration isn't a problem, it just stands out alongside the combat being slow as hell.

The engine change was a great thing- but it feels like they should have put more work into speeding up combat to counter the slowdown of load times and flashy animations.

A GOOD WAY TO FIX THAT MIGHT BE XP!

> Music ain't great in my opinion.

DQ has amazing music. This game has some weak renditions in my opinion. The CELL HQ theme song is a pretty good poster child for the worst there is, but just in general even the better music is lacking compared to the chiptunes of the GBC or the better mixes of the main series.

Maybe it's unfair, it's a DS game, I don't know, I just know I ended up just muting most of the game because it didn't sound great. I played the GBC games OSTs instead for a large portion of my playthrough. I listened to videos instead for the bulk of the game.

It's just not pleasant to me, sorry to say.

> XP!!!!!!!

I'm being a spoiled ass on this but yeah!

XP SUCKS IN THIS!

There aren't good placed to grind until you beat the game! (apparently)

The first level blatantly has too low xp which makes you grind before you can tackle the boss of the island- and the late game has you mindlessly grinding low xp rewards in order to be ready to face the final boss.

It's WEIRD!

Why is it so low!

> Tech is weird!

I could ramble on this alone but here's the short version:

DQ has a unique fantasy world aesthetic that each game has explored in its own way. It's basically "swords, magic, monsters, and charm- things feel light but aren't afraid to get scary sometimes :)"

This game... doesn't.

This game has fuckin' tech watches, jet skis, TOWER PCS????

This ISN'T dragon quest on a world building level.

It's like, contemporary modern world but with slimes.

And that could be good I guess, but it feels so fucking weird to see PCs right alongside swords and axes and a dracky.

Like... why?

It's a poor aesthetic according to my tastes. Maybe I'm an ass for that. The tech is weird.

All to say, in a poor rambling "I gotta get this out of me" kinda way, is Joker was fine.

I enjoyed breeding. I enjoyed seeing the engine. I enjoyed the unique additions like a 'hero monster'.

But I also had to grind mindlessly on a slower game.

I had to endure a story that forgot to show up until the very end.

I sat there thinking about replaying the older ones the whole time.

It was fine.

It's mediocre.

I'm glad I played it.

I'm done now :)

[silverselfshippingchaos]

[dorky-self-shipper] 🎫 here’s a gush pass :3 feel free to gush about whichever f/o you want, however much you want, then send this ask to 3 other selfshippers

Oh, my friend!!! Ahhh thank you so much for sending this in!! I have been a bit iffy because some things in my life have been piling up, but!!! I am so excited to dig into this!!! I really need a good gushing session haha!

Today's target for gushing hours with your girl Ash is none other than Yaag Rosch!

This ended up being pretty long, and is a mix of lore, screaming, keyboard smashes, his gorgeous design, and more screaming.

Saying that this man lives in my head rent free is an understatement. He is all I think about it. Honestly, I think it's funny considering Yaag's role in FF13. He's only around in the first game, and shows up in like five cutscenes.

Also. We get crumbs of him in the novels. More on that later. Back to the game.

All he does is "hey yall suck" "your lives don't matter" "uhh i need to kill you guys" "oh wait no i'm not evil" "*dies*"

But!!! He's very cool!! His character is so interesting to me. He's so driven to do whatever it takes, but beneath his actions, there's always an edge of hesitation. He seems like he comes off as so sure of himself, but... I'm not sure about that. Now, I can't say anything for sure because the writers hate him, I really liked those few moments where we get to see his actual thoughts.

For example, "Do you think we want to Purge our own people?!" And things like that where you see him question his orders. I feel like there's a lot of underlying hatred, distrust, and overall fear of the system.

Also, his development from "They aren't people, they're targets." to "I'll trust in your humanity." Gets me every single time.

Also don't get me started on his "if this is my punishment... i accept it." when he's bleeding line.

I am here to gush, not analyze. But both are happening anyway.

I feel as though he puts a lot of thought into what he says and how he acts, and I really do admire that.

For context, Lieutenant Colonel Yaag Rosch is this military higher-up guy. I remember seeing him for the first time and my jaw simply dropping. I know that these games have a history with hot villains. After all, I am an FF7 fan. I have seen the SOLDIERS, I have seen the Turks, I've seen Rufus. They're all hot.

There. I said it.

This intro scene gave us some damn good food. Like??? The silver hair??? The ponytail??? The scar on his forehead??? The overly dramatic speech about how the protagonists need to be eliminated??AJKLFNAWKJFNAWKLJFNWILEN.

(Also, I'm beginning to see the resemblance he has to Felix. I am a very predictable woman, aren't I?)

I am actually going to scream. He’s so handsome!!! His jaw!! His eyes are such a pretty color too!!! I wanna give him a kiss ahhh!! Especially on his forehead scar!!! He's so... woah.

Also, he has a really, really nice voice. Like??? WOW. I want this man to like. narrate my life. Here, lemme find some clips of him talking.

Here. Enjoy.

This one is a fan favorite as well.

It's not a Rick roll. I promise.

..... Unless?

Anyways, as time went on, I realized that he's actually such a deep and interesting character?? He gets done dirty by the writers and the game, but the potential he has makes me so excited!! There's so much material to work off of!!! Truly one of the more interesting villains the trilogy has to offer. Honestly, it's kind of difficult going through the second game knowing that he isn't there.

However, it's also difficult going through the second game because I??? Can't beat?? The goddamn boss fight??? I'm also playing on easy mode. I didn't struggle this much during the first game either. What the hell, Ash.

Back to the actual topic.

I'm gonna start off with his design before we delve into s/i lore and fun tidbits.

(His coat is so cool... Do you think he'd let me wear it? I'd probably waddle around in it because he's pretty tall and I. I am not.

He's around 6'2 (around almost 188 cm..? I think?), but take into account his boots too. Which means that normally he's slightly taller. That means that he's about a foot taller than me. That means that I'm pretty much the perfect height to bury my face in his chest. *screams*)

Talk about a kickass design. He's really cool to look at. Not only, uhm, *blushes*, but because of how cool his outfit is too! It does a really good job of portraying that "heyyy i'm super importtanntttt" energy that he has. He carries himself like he's the shit. And you know what? He is.

He's pretty professional. Minus the times he gets kinda pissed. The novels say, and I quote,

"They said he was the most straitlaced man in PSICOM - if you put serious and stubborn in a military uniform, you'd get Colonel Rosch."

And yeah. That basically sums it up.

Also, there's this scene where he gets all pissed and pulls out his sword and I'm over here like *insert debby ryan hair thing here*. I'm telling you, it's always the sword boys that get me. I'm sure you've noticed that by now. I don't know what it is but. It's a thing.

Oh!!! Oh!!! Speaking of the *tucks hair behind ear*, there's this one scene where he's chasing the protagonists. And he goes, "Clever, aren't you?"

*SCREAMS*

That scene is truly a masterpiece. Thank you for the good food, Squeenix. I remember having to take a moment to just pause and regather myself. Actually, I had to do that the first time I saw him too-

I wasn't alone at the time when he was introduced so I was just silently like "ohmygodhellosir ajrfnaklwenjklwenjklrn" but oh my GOODNESS.

My s/i works with him! She's pretty much his right hand woman. She always has reports and intel on all their missions ready to go! I find it cute how well they work together, be it for mission-related matters, or just when they're relaxing together.

Just like pretty much all of my other s/is, she's a raging academic and total nerd. In the first game, they basically live on this human paradise called Cocoon. It ends up not being so great because the gods want to murder humanity but anyways! Education is pretty much free and you can study whatever you're passionate about. That's why she has studied just so many things.

She's not exactly the type who aspired to join the military, but alas! Things happened. I like to think of it as a "heyyyy y'all needed my help once and then once turned to twice and twice to thrice and then i never left" type thing.

Oh, and then she fell in love with Yaag while she was there.

Her cheery attitude is a direct opposite to his, but they're also able to have some very serious conversations with each other. I love their dynamic so much! Also, he can get a bit softer when he's opening up to her and,,, Soft Yaag??? Hoo boy.

Her motives and beliefs tend to align a bit more with the Cavalry branch, but i feel as though she fits in better with PSICOM. Also, the book describes the soldiers to be a bunch of dumbass dorks and just the thought of her smiling and cracking jokes with all of Yaag's men make me super happy.

Oh and she gets a cool uniform too! Because I said so.

Now, they've known each other for years by the time the end of the first game rolls around. They're happy together, maybe even engaged! It can go one of two ways here. He either dies or he doesn't.

I like adhering really closely to canon with my ships (*laughs in genesis angst*) but I also think it would be a blast if he were to survive.

In the novels after his death, some recordings of his are found. It's basically him talking about how the government sucks from the inside. A character finds these and reveals them to the public to get rid of the old government and an invite a newer one that actually cares about the people. However, it's never quite stated how he got those recordings. And that's where Ash steps in.

She brings them to his attention and helps him out, but then returns to live with the rest of the remaining soldiers in that camp they set up in the second novel. They all look up to her as a leader-type, which I find is really funny because she doesn't exactly have the qualifications? She worked with PSICOM, but was never exactly a soldier. But hey, it's right after the world (quite literally) fell apart, I don't think that anybody cares about that.

Also, there's another chapter where Snow ends up visiting, and she has a friendly chat with him!!! She helped out the protagonists a little bit near the end of the first game, so they have a slight idea of who each other are, but that doesn't exactly change the fact that she fell under the category of villain for a lot of it, despite not actually being a bad person. I also think that their dynamic would be fun. Snow also just makes me really happy LMAO.

I think that this version of Ash is really fun just because of how much the experience hardens her? She spends a lot of time grieving. Also!!! Whether or not she makes a cameo in 13-2 (maybe near the ruins early game?) is totallllyyyy up to you hehe! I think it would be neat for her to talk to the protagonists of that game, especially since Yaag was the one who orchestrated the Purge and at the ruins, there's a huge monument of the names of people who were killed there.

Also, whether or not she has a son here is up to you. I like to think of all my ideas all happening in alternate timelines so everything I want can happen without stepping on other events? I imagine their child to have Yaag's pretty silver hair with Ash's brown eyes.

Also, 13-2 is about time travel so like. The protagonists meeting their child in the future when he's all grown up? Good stuff.

But hey, in the main timeline she's alone after Yaag's death. She helps the other characters. I also think that in time, she does work for the Academy? I mentioned that she's pretty nerdy earlier, so that definitely helps out. She's super cool!!! Such a badass!!!

Now, on the flipside of things, what if he survived? Then what happens? shameless self promo

Yaag still has those recordings, and they do still reach Captain Rygdea. They both live in the small village that the remnants of PSICOM created. It's a sweet life. Are fankids a thing in their future? Yeah, probably.

I feel like Yaag would be a really good dad. I headcanon that he has a very strong relationship with his own father as well. He's caring and stern, but also knows when to turn down the serious scale. The novels also say that he likes kids!?!?!? I know I've screamed about this point like 24892 times on my blog. But.

It's so cute??? Who would expect this super serious and mean man who quite literally says that the protagonists aren't people, they're targets to like children of all things???? It really is my favorite thing ever just because of how cute it is. I also have a few tiny cousins in my family, so him playing with them makes me very soft too.

("Would you please stop tugging on my hair- Ash, this is not a laughing matter!" "Oh, but it so is.")

I think that detail really helps hint at him having a more gentle side? And I adore that.

Also, I mentioned how Snow pays a visit to the PSICOM camp after the events of the first game? I think that would be very interesting with Yaag there because before Yaag dies in canon, Snow says, "Stay alive. We'll see you when it's over."

And now he finally gets to see him. The conversation would get surprisingly deep and definitely dive into Yaag's motives and real thoughts about his actions in the game. I really enjoy the few interactions those two have in the game.

Anyways, now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's dig into the meat and potatoes of this ship.

In 13-2, they get a separate dlc side story just to themselves. Because I said so. I'm not sure how the plot of this works, but it's basically them exploring Gran Pulse together. Maybe to map things out? Maybe to get better acquainted with the world they thought was a hell their whole lives? Maybe there's some sort of big mission they have to do? We'll figure it out.

Basically, it's a whole side story of them exploring and kicking monster ass together. The combat is regular 13 combat.

Yaag has his sword along with some explosives (we see him carry some grenades at the end when he blew himself up). And Ash also has a sword because I like swords.

In the game, usually only l'Cie, or magic god slaves, can use magic. However, after the fal'Cie (magic gods) go poof at the end of the end of the first game, some normal humans can use magic? It makes no sense and exists only for plot convenience, but I'm not complaining because it makes my plot easier too.

My point is, Ash can use magic! Because A) she's quirky mage material B) we need a balanced team C) Every single version of Ash so far has been a mage. D) I like magic a lot. Would be my go-to as well.

Also, if you're interested in how they work in battle, roles divide up very nicely between them.

Yaag has: -Commando (physical attacks) -Sentinel (beefy tanks) -Sabuteur (debuffing enemies)

Ash has: -Ravager (magic goes brrr) -Medic (i think you know) -Synergist (buffing allies) -Commando (physical attacks)

Maybe Yaag could get medic too to balance off the load in battle? They're a blast in combat because they really do compliment each other.

Anyways, back to the adventure.

It's the two of them traveling around. The main focus of it is their conversations as they travel. There's a lot of fun banter. Ya know how like when you're walking around in Naughty Dog games and your characters are just chatting? Yeah. That.

Their conversations are super random and they cover pretty much every single topic ever. They go from really serious to them just being stupid. I love their friendly banter.

Also, when they set up camp and are about to sleep, we get to see sleepy Yaag in action. And do you know what that means?

It means we get to see Yaag with his hair done a bit looser, maybe even down!!! Yaag with his hair down is all I want to see. It's what we deserve. It's what we need. The day that I see Yaag with his hair down is the day i achieve true happiness LMAO.

It's what we need.

Ash playing with his hair??? Yes, I most definitely think so.

Oh and there is totally a "Yaag, I'm cold." "Allow me to help remedy that. *pulls her closer*" type moment because they're cute like that.

All in all, their travels are really fun. Maybe somewhere around there they run into the protagonists? Either from the first game or the second game. I think that would be a fun mess.

I feel like Yaag can show a softer side of him around her and that makes me really happy. He deserves to be happy and I love him very much.

I think about him all the time, and just the thought of him holding me makes me so happy. He really is just adorable.

Before I wrap this up, I have a few more things I want to speak about! Firstly, allow me to share one of my favorite pictures of him because oh. my. god.

*screams*

The urge to backhug him!!! Ahh!!! He's so cute!!!! I just wanna hold him aelajflanef.

One of my favorite pre-relationship moments from them is this one time where Yaag is pretty down in the dumps, and Ash is talking to him about it and offering her advice. And as she talks, she gently places a hand over his (they're seated side by side btw). He looks up at her in shock, and she takes back her hand is like, "O-oh! I'm so sorry, I should've asked first, I just thought tha-"

And then he just snatches her hand back and gently holds it. You can see the tips of his ears burning red haha! I think that they're pretty cute ajfwnjklef

She always tries her best to take care of him, too! He needs a hug, and she is more than happy to provide. She always tries to remind him to eat his meals on time and such, even if she can be questionable at following her own advice at times. She can also be a bit of a tease sometimes, so he can get pretty annoyed (not really, he thinks it's cute) sometimes.

However, he also does his best to take care of her. Would he pull the "that's an order." card after she refuses to rest, pulling several late-nighters for work? Yeah. Probably. He's very caring, even if he can come off as very serious and scary sometimes.

To wrap things up, I love Yaag Rosch.

Thank you for your time.

[mysterious-prophetess]

so, I just finished watching the Snyder Cut of Justice League

And since I did watch the Theatrical Cut or Josstice League (and own that on Blu-Ray) I thought I’d compare and contrast.

From here on out the Theatrical version is Josstice League and Snyder Cut is Snyder Cut

First, the things they have in common: A lot of the plot beats and characters appear in both with the exceptions that are probably obvious.

But the story still is

“Space Invader from beyond the stars is on earth searching for magic macguffins to end life on Earth as we know it forces Bruce and Diana to recruit a team of other metas to stop this and they end up reenacting Re-Animator with Superman/Clark who died in Batman v Superman with the MAcGuffin and the MacGuffin Ship from Man of Steel and in the end, though shit gets weird in Russia, they save the world and resume their lives in slightly better shape than before.”

Now onto the contrasts

I’ll hit the low hanging fruit and go with Tones first.

Josstice League’s tone could flip-flop wildly. Which, since they were trying to mimic the MCU’s tonal flip-flopping (by even hiring the same guy who set it up with Avengers) makes some sense.

Snyder Cut isn’t without levity but it doesn’t do the drastic veers that Josstice League did.

There are some things I liked better about Josstice League, believe it or not.

While the tone shifting like it did was very MCU copy-paste at times, there were character moments of the Flash from Josstice League I enjoyed.

I even liked Diana’s little heart-to-heart with Bruce from Josstice League.

I also liked Bruce being behind bringing Lois into the fray post their attempts at science based necromancy calling her “the big guns” even if that sounded way more like Tony Stark than Bruce Wayne.

One final compliment I can give Josstice League was the soundtrack. I like the music I like and I liked the music they chose.

The scenes that the Snyder cut extended were a 70/30 split of me liking the extensions with a 30% split of them thinking “You know, I get why they cut this” and this being the character set up scenes. Flash’s sequence is ok, and so is Cyborg’s, but the Aquaman one with Bruce and Diana’s foiling of a bank heist felt too drawn out. Aquaman interacting with Atlanteans sequences are mostly needed to establish the other characters and how he got the trident and costume change.

It’s neat to see how things got into place for each scene but.....if this was a book I was editing, those would be the darlings I’d have told Snyder to kill.

The extra characters were folded in seamlessly. It was nice to see Willem DaFoe’s Aquaman character get an appearance since he’s a big player though the change in hair style was jarring.

I was stoked to see Martian Manhunter. So stoked.

I was also pleased by the revised Steppenwolf design. Before, he just seemed like....I can’t quite put it into words eloquently but Josstice Steppenwolf looked liked an early 2000′s CGI cutscene character crossed with a few of the Orcs from Lord of the Rings and an orc from Warcraft the failed movie. Just off and not much of a villain.

This one is a major improvement and it’s pretty clear he’s a grunt the whole time.

Was very excited to see Darkseid in a major movie.

Now all they need to do to make me happy is use Brainiac in a live action movie. Yeah, I know he’s been live action a couple of times but not in a major movie.

For the most part, the action of Snyder Cut just felt better.

The quiet scenes also felt better.

Problem is, the length makes watching this in one go not really a practical thing. I know there are chapter marks, so kudos for that, but this film isn’t perfect.

The Length thing is a nitpick. Since this is a special home-release, I don’t care as much as usual about length but I really have opinions on movie lengths for theatrical stuff partly from being a movie goer back when that was a possible thing to be AND from working in a movie theater. (I’m of the opinion that keep theatrical releases to 150 minutes or you’re just being an over indulgent jerk of a studio)

Now onto actual problems.

First is that I both love and hate Snyder’s Snyder-verse.

So, I hate the Grittier Superman Snyder came up with in Man of Steel wherein Superman is less Paragon and more like a Punisher type. Same goes for Batman in Snyder-verse (since he’s not a fan of guns and the whole doesn’t KILL people rule)

If any come at me with “but that’s because he’s too simple a character otherwise” I’ll direct you to Overly Sarcastic Productions’s better worded video essay about paragons not being boring/simple.

But Snyder does have good ideas for a general shape of his universe, and he also is pulling in more comic book source material into the films, which I love.

but his universe is always darker and grimmer than necessary and sometimes his aesthetics are weird.

Speaking of that-that weird destroyed future timeline wherein Supes is working for Darkseid.

Can’t say I like the aesthetics of it. Can’t say I like how Batman is portrayed in it either and no, not a fan of Mera or Joker’s presence. I’m able to admit that this is due to both of the actors portraying them. Though, I also really don’t like the Suicide Squad Joker.

Superman going evil isn’t unheard of in story arcs. See animated Justice League story arc wherein the Flash was killed by Lex Luthor.

Making Lois the key to his heart also isn’t a bad idea. 

It’s just the moment the movie threw that in just before the end, I rolled my eyes at it. I also thought the Lex Luthor bits were a bit superfluous, at first, but hey, it explained Deathstroke the Terminator (and gave a name for the face of his terrible future counterpart).

So, yes, I enjoyed the Snyder Cut for the most part. Should it come to physical media, I’ll probably purchase it.

Comparing the two films isn’t quite fair, but Snyder Cut just looks better over all.

I’ll give the Josstice league credit for being shorter-easier movie to sit through, with some dumb moments enough for fun and maybe even a scmaltzier ending at times but it just looks like the second draft of something next to a final draft with the Snyder Cut.

Snyer’s Cut’s polish is nice, but the length does undermine it.

So, actually both versions are fine but one clearly looks like it had been smashed and glued back together while the other is smooth and seamless with more consistency over all.

Like what  you will.

I like both but Snyder Cut is, to my eyes, the better put-together film.

[sage-nebula]

Game Review — Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town

In the past, I was never really one for farming sims. In fact, I used to pass on every single Harvest Moon game because the idea of farming just didn’t seem fun to me. Then I heard you could have same-sex romance options in Stardew Valley, so I played that, fell in love, and thus got very excited for the newest Story of Seasons game, since I knew that Story of Seasons was Harvest Moon previously, and Harvest Moon inspired Stardew Valley.

And all I have to say is . . .

Overall Score: 5.5/10

. . . oh boy.

Well, I actually have a lot more to say than just that, but that should give you a general idea of what the rest of this review is going to be like. I do want to say up front that I have played through the entire first in-game year to give the game a fair shake, so please trust me when I say I did my due diligence to give this game a real chance before I reviewed it. If you’re ready, jump under the cut (best read on my blog for formatting reasons) and let’s get into it. 

The Pros: 

The character customization, while not perfect, is definitely several leaps in the right direction. None of the clothing or hairstyle options are gender locked, which is amazing. There is a variety of skin tones to choose from. You pick your pronouns independently of everything else, voice included, so you can 100% have a trans character if you want to (or a nonbinary character if you don’t mind using gendered pronouns for your nonbinary character). I do wish the clothing selection was better (especially at the start, when you only have two outfits to choose from) and having different body types would be cool as well, but the fact that you have so much freedom with regards to gender presentation is a definite plus.

Likewise, being able to have same-sex relationships is a huge plus as well. Honestly, it was what convinced me to pick up the game; I might not have gotten it if it didn’t have that option in there, but that pushed me over the edge. I mean, the fact that it’s 2021 means this sort of thing should be expected, but with Japanese games on Nintendo systems it’s really not always guaranteed, so the fact that it was included still does deserve to get a mention as a plus.

It’s easy to raise affection with the villagers by just talking to them, which is an improvement over Stardew where you pretty much had to give gifts to raise affection (because I don’t think talking did it, or if it did, it was abysmally slow). I was able to unlock heart events pretty quickly just by running around the town and talking quickly with the villagers each day, which is particularly nice since the preferred gifts can be pretty expensive at first.

I enjoy that not all of the heart events necessarily involve the farmer, especially for characters that aren’t romanceable. It’s nice to see the villagers interacting with each other more, to see that they have lives and relationships outside of the farmer’s sphere of influence. It also gives you unique insight into the characters, because how they act around or with each other isn’t always how they interact around or with the farmer.

Being able to sow seeds in multiple patches of dirt at once is nice, especially since otherwise it takes much longer than it does in, say, Stardew. I mean, in Stardew you can hold the A button and sow everything at once, whereas in Olive Town you have to do it one press at a time. So to be able to do a multi-plant is very nice.

The pet and mount selection is pretty great, too. I love how many different types of breeds of dog there are, how many different cats and different types of horses, and of course the unique mounts like the unicorn or the wolf. 

The farm has a lot of space once you unlock the different areas, and is divided into neat sections to make organizing easier. 

Having not played a Story of Seasons game before this one, and knowing that Stardew Valley’s developer was inspired by Harvest Moon, I can’t say entirely which features were unique to Stardew and borrowed and which ones Stardew borrowed first. However, I have seen others claim that the tool bar at the bottom of the screen (which is nearly identical to the one in Stardew) was unique to Stardew, so I can say that this is one area in which they copped something from Stardew and did it well. The fact that you can put your tools into a separate tool bag to make some emergency room in your bag is nice too.

The Neutrals:

While there are a lot of villagers and they all have their own heart events and interactions, the day-to-day dialogue can get very repetitive. I can’t tell you the amount of times Laura has told me about losing track of time during Laura Things, or how many times Jack has told me about how his mom told him about planting different crops and he thinks that’s just too much work. The dialogue only really seems to change around festivals / after plot changes, and it can really make characters that might otherwise feel fleshed out feel more like . . . well, NPCs. Which they are, but you don’t really want them to feel like that in a sim game. So while the characters are (mostly) unique, sometimes they can feel a bit repetitive.

The plot is a bit weird. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s weird that the plot focuses on wanting to turn the local town into a tourist hotspot. I get that the idea is that they want to bring commerce into the town (I guess), but that everyone is on board with it and the fact that it’s essentially gentrification just feels a bit . . . weird, for a game that’s supposed to focus more on nature. The tasks associated with it also get very repetitive, and that’s not even talking about how you literally have to improve the roads and lamps twice to make a difference.

The holiday festivals are also pretty average. It’s either a cutscene, or a tiny minigame (or sometimes not even a minigame, but I’ll get to that). The minigames are charming, but they’re not something that I’d want to do the following year. You’ve done it once, you’ve done it a million times. It’s also strange that there’s not a festival to celebrate your farm at all, whereas at least in Stardew we had the Stardew Valley Fair and I hear that in past Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games they had farm celebration festivals, too. It’s just a bit strange.

The music is hit or miss, and mostly miss if I’m being honest, but I’ll still put it here. The songs are too short; they loop far too fast, and often sound no better than you’d expect a game on the GBA to sound (especially that first cave theme, ugh). There are some nice melodies, but again, when I compare it to Stardew (which I know isn’t exactly fair, but also Stardew is made by a grand total of one person when this game had an entire team so I feel it’s at least a little fair), it’s a pretty big letdown in the music department.

The bachelorettes are not very unique. Like, they are different, you can tell them apart, but . . . the primary difference between Bridgette and Linh, for instance, is that Linh is Korean (and also looks like a child which I don’t like at all if we’re being honest) while Bridgette is white. Otherwise they’re both sweet and shy and have basically the same personality. Reina and Blaire are also pretty similar, in that they’re both outgoing party types. The main difference between them besides their hair color (brunette and blonde respectively) is the fact that one works at the museum while the other is a waitress. The only one who really stands out is Laura, and while Laura is great (and the one I chose to marry), it’s still disappointing when you see how varied the bachelors are. It feels like not a lot of effort was put into designing the bachelorettes, which is sad when you consider they’re kind of major characters since they’re part of the dating pool.

The Cons:

This game is AWFUL to play. How, you may ask? Well, let me count the ways:

To start with, the loading screens are atrocious. There are loading screens between everything that you do. You go to town? Loading screen. You leave town? Loading screen. Start your day? Loading screen. Go in and out of barns or coops? Loading screens. And they take ages, or at least in this day and age it feels like they take ages. Particularly when you go into town, immediately realize you forgot a resource you needed for an upgrade, and go back so you get back to back cutscenes, they’re fricking awful. I cannot believe that loading screens this annoying were necessary for this game. I refuse to accept that as truth. They absolutely could have cut out the time it takes to load had they spent more time on development instead of rushing this title out for the anniversary, and speaking of things they could have ironed out in development . . .

THE LAG. THE FREEZING. THE CRASHING. THE POP-IN DISTANCING. If I didn’t know that an entire development team worked on this game, I wouldn’t believe it. This game is, put simply, a mess. Even when my farm was brand new and had pretty much nothing on it, I was noticing framerate drops both in docked and handheld mode. I’m talking, I had maybe one coop and two planted areas for crops, and the framerate was noticeably dropping. And now that I do have more stuff on my farm? Not only is the lag atrocious, but the game can’t load everything on the screen at once and so things have to pop into view after a few seconds. You can see video footage of this here, which also features one of the delightful loading screens. And this doesn’t even get into how the game will randomly freeze, or how I’ve had it crash once already. And from what I hear, I’m not unique in this. The fact they had the nerve to release this game as finished when it performs like this just boggles the mind.

Despite the fact that the Switch has two control sticks, this game plays only with one. This means that you can’t, you know, aim your tools with anything but the main control stick. And when you’re both controlling your character and aiming with the same control stick, the latter gets pretty hard. This leads to me missing things with my axe or hammer even when they’re right in front of me, as well as taking a lot of damage from the cave enemies simply because I couldn’t get in the sweet spot to both hit them with the hammer and also not get hit myself, particularly before they escape. It adds a lot of unnecessary frustration because the controls are so flawed and imprecise.

Similarly, there is a sweet spot when it comes to harvesting or picking up items off the ground, and it’s impossible to determine what that sweet spot is because you don’t get a little aiming box for that. So you can be right on top of an item and unable to pick it up because you’re not in that sweet spot. 

Apart from the framerate drops, there is input lag as well. This is most noticeable when swinging axes or hammers, or trying to pet cows and other animals after milking them. And yes, I know it’s the game and not my Switch, because it’s not consistent (and also doesn’t happen with other games). Again, this is something polish and more time in the oven probably could have handled, but now it’s too late and just makes the game frustrating to play.

Technical, mechanical gameplay issues aside, though, there are still a ton of other issues. For instance: makers. Again, I can’t say if previous Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games had these, or if they were invented by Stardew and copped by this dev team, but what I can say is that while makers also exist in Stardew, they are handled way better there than the absolute nightmare they are here. Again, to count the ways:

In Stardew, the makers can sit flush against each other and buildings, as well as flush against paths, making everything nice and not taking up too much space. Here, not only are the makers gigantic, but they can’t be flush with anything. They can’t sit up against each other, against buildings, or against paths. This means that not only do they look ugly, but they also take up a tremendous amount of space that therefore can’t go toward anything else.

In Stardew there are a handful of makers that do things. You’ve got furnaces for making bars, mayonnaise makers, cheese makers, fabric spinners, etc. There’s a variety, but it’s not so much that your farm becomes nothing but makers. By contrast, Olive Town is drowning in makers. You have all the above, but also more that contribute to those because . . . okay, let’s take the fabric spinners for example. In Stardew, you can put any type of wool onto the fabric spinning wheel, which will make one kind of fabric. In Olive Town, you first have to have a thread maker to make thread out of grass, AS WELL AS a yarn maker to make yarn out of wool. THEN you have to have a thread fabric maker to make fabric out of thread (and the thread differs depending on the grass used, which means you can make many different types of fabrics, but only one at a time), AS WELL AS a yarn fabric maker to make fabric out of yarn. So whereas in Stardew you have one maker if you need cloth, in Olive Town you need at bare minimum two, at max four, and that’s not even getting into how slow the process will be if you only have one of each kind. Because each maker only makes one of an item, and then you usually need multiples of that one item to make the next item in the series. So for instance, your thread maker makes one spool of thread, but it takes THREE spools to make one piece of fabric. Then you might need TEN pieces of fabric for a recipe. And the makers all take literal in-game hours to make. When you consider that the costs for some things are very high (the house upgrade I’m on right now requires 80 ingots and 120 pieces of lumber), you pretty much have to have at least four of each type of maker to get things done at any kind of reasonable pace, hence the factory hell my farm is currently in as seen in the above linked video. It’s a fucking nightmare.  And yes, maybe it’s more realistic that you can’t go immediately from wool to fabric, but this is a farming sim where you interact with spirits, ride unicorns, and befriend wolves. This is not a game where you need to push realism.

The mining is also just . . . not fun. At all. Not only do you have the “it’s really hard to aim properly, especially when you’re trying not to take damage” issue mentioned above, but there’s also the fact that there’s just no variation. In the first mine there are no enemies at all, you’re just breaking rocks. The second mine introduces enemies, but only one type of enemy (basically little moles that you have to whack with the hammer). The third mine has the same enemies, but they’re stronger and appear in multiples. And that’s it. Unlike in Stardew, where there were tons of different monsters that did different things that made the mines exciting, here it’s pretty boring because the enemies are easy to avoid (and it’s best to avoid them because of how much of a pain in the ass to hit them without taking damage from running into them is) and the levels all pretty much look the same. Whereas I loved dungeon crawling in Stardew, here it’s something I purely do to get ore to make ingots in the stupid fucking makers because there’s literally no entertainment value to it otherwise, especially since the music is subpar at best.

Related to the mining, when you defeat enemies or drain lakes you can find bags of items that need to be identified at the museum. You can only have Reina identify these bags one at a time. So it’s a bunch of spamming the A button and hearing her go “oh!” over and over and over again because they, for some reason, couldn’t implement identifying items more than one at a time. And the best part? Identifying items comes with a LOADING SCREEN between you selecting the item to be identified and Reina identifying the item! How fun!!

You can really tell that they cut corners in this game, content-wise. For instance, the first festival in spring is an egg hunt. You would think that it would be a minigame where you look for eggs (again, like Stardew). You would think that, but you would be wrong. Instead, you get to watch an extended cutscene of your character finding eggs. That’s it. That’s the “egg hunt.” I skipped the mushroom hunt in fall because I assumed it would be the same, but apparently that one actually was a minigame, so joke’s on me, I guess. But either way, the fact that the egg hunt wasn’t an egg hunt at all speaks to cut corners and rushed dev time, just like the myriad of other problems that plague this game. It’s pretty bad when you can’t even include an egg hunting minigame for whatever reason (or at leas come up with unique events for spring and fall).

There is a ton of furniture with which to decorate your house, which is great! Or it would be, if you were actually given freedom to decorate, but you’re not. You can buy whatever furniture you want, but there are very specific places where you’re allowed to place it, and nowhere else. For instance, furniture and rugs can only go in the little space in front of your counter in your house in the first two house upgrades (Log Cabin and Small House). This space is very small. Despite there being a GIANT ASS FLOOR with which to cover a rug, I wasn’t able to use it until I got the third house upgrade. You have a huge empty table that you’re not allowed to put anything on. You can’t move any of the furniture around, nor can you rotate furniture that you buy when you place it. You also can’t place furniture on rugs either. Seeing so much furniture in the game is pretty exciting until you realize that you can do basically fuck all with it. Apparently they didn’t have enough time to implement real decoration into the game either. (Then again, imagine the lag in your house if they did.) As a final complaint, you can buy picture frames that claim to let you place framed memories in your house. You have a camera as an in-game tool, so you’d think that you could place pictures of your pets or your love interest in your house. You would think that, but you would be wrong. There’s no way to change the pictures in the picture frames, or at least none that I’ve been able to find just yet.

Just like Stardew, when you first arrive at the farm in Olive Town you find that it has been completely overrun with nature, and you have to spend time clearing away the debris so that you have a place to build your farm. Unlike in Stardew, the debris comes back at a ridiculously fast rate. Several in-game hours, if not more, of each day are spent cleaning up puddles (even if it didn’t rain), breaking rocks, clearing weeds, and chopping trees. Your farm can easily become overrun with nature again in just a few days’ time, meaning that a lot of your time that you would spend doing things like scavenging the mines or talking with villagers is instead spent doing basic, boring chores around the farm so that you still have livable land. And while farming sims like this one are games that are basically built around doing chores at least in part, the extent of the damage in this one (given that it happens all day every day, instead of just at the start of each season like in Stardew) really kills any fun or enjoyment you’d otherwise have as a player.

Farm upgrades come as entirely separate buildings, rather than expanding on the current building you have. So while in Stardew you could turn your existing Barns into Big Barns (and then Deluxe Barns), in Olive Town you have to buy an entirely separate building, and then painstakingly move all your animals to the new building one by one. Similarly, you can buy a silage to upgrade from your silo, but you’ll still have the silo on the farm. It doesn’t upgrade your existing development at all, despite being an upgraded form of that existing development.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Pioneers of Olive Town has some good ideas, but ultimately the terrible gameplay and lackluster execution of those ideas leaves so, so much to be desired. I will say that a patch was released recently which improved the loading screens a little, and for that I added the .5 to the score. (I took notes on things I liked / disliked / was neutral on as I played, so that I wouldn’t forget anything.) But a slight improvement to the loading screens doesn’t do much to help it when the lag is still terrible, the game still has freezes, and overall the gameplay itself just isn’t very fun. I probably will keep playing it for a bit longer to get to the marriage scenes at least, since I’ve almost maxed out Laura’s hearts. But honestly, there are so many better life sim games out there (the oft-mentioned in this review Stardew Valley being one of them) that if someone asked me if I recommended this game to them, I would have to say no. 

Let’s hope the dev team does better with the next game. Maybe not feeling the pressure of it being the series’ anniversary will take some pressure off of them while they make it.

[official-michael-afton]

Made a tier list of FNaF media!!! Not counting the activity book or the security survival log because those don’t really add anything, they’re just neat activities or summaries of game info

I explained the choices under the cut, equal parts personal bias and objective opinion, so if you think differently then hey, good on ya!

Going down to up XD

F

The Silver Eyes Graphic Novel: Do I even need to explain this one? Rushed art with countless mistakes, horrid coloring, samey designs, the important scenes come off as bland and even goofy instead of impactful. It’s clear Pinky wasn’t used to drawing humans, the colorist had no idea what they were doing, and no one on the team made a graphic novel before. It’s laughable how bad this was XD

E

The Fourth Closet: Does anyone really know what happened at the end? I... really don’t like what they did with Charlie in this one. I don’t like how William was able to get out of his Springtrap- it was SUPPOSED to trap him, and yet he just... is out of it... I think the whole thing with Baby being like this hot clown girl instead of what she is in Sister Location is very... ... it exists... Tbh I respect the bold direction it took, but I honestly felt it was too much of a stretch and just didn’t work.

D

FNaF AR, Special Delivery: Not bad! The character models and voice acting is where the game shines most. Other than that, there isn’t really much substantial to the game other than some lore with Vanny/Ness and Luis. The gameplay can get frustrating sometimes(I cant collect remnant, read my mail, or even work on my own animatronics without DING DONG SOMEONES HERE every 5 seconds), and all you do is spin in a circle until you get glitchy, look away if they get glitchy, or zap them when they run at you. Some people probably love this game and good on them for that, but I find myself not touching it for weeks at a time.

Freddy In Space 2: GREAT game for charity, great art, great music! ... That’s all it has going for it, though. It was clear that this was a quickly made game designed to be beaten in one sitting, and it did exactly what it needed to do! Other than being amazing how it was for charity, the game doesn’t have that much going for it(except introducing Lolzhax aka BEST ROBO), so overall not bad but also did almost nothing outside of being for the Charity Livestream XD

Fazbear Frights, Into The Pit: Again, not bad! A nice collection of short stories, almost like goofy campfire horror you’d tell to kids... like goosebumps! I felt each story was REALLY lacking in some areas, but I liked the general idea they were going for. That being said, they’re moreso neat scary stories with the name FNaF attached than anything else(except maybe the first of the three). It hints that they have an overarching plot that will be covered in future books, but as of right now, I feel no one’s missing out by not reading them.

C

FNaF 3: A satisfying end to the original trilogy story! Purple Guy gets justice, everything gets tied together with a neat bow, and the first arc in the series comes to an end. Also Springtrap, aka my favorite. This game is riddled with neat 8-bit minigames and bits of lore, but the gameplay itself is where I find it not as good as the S A and B tiers. The new setup with the system reboots are def really interesting, but other than that, each night is just... the same thing but harder. Most other games introduce different characters on different difficulties per night, but since Springtrap is the only deadly one, it’s just... him more aggressive each night and systems failing more often. Makes the gameplay pretty repetitive and frustrating after Night 3 or so.

FNaF 4: The beginning of what I like to call the Afton saga(4, SL, FFPS, UCN)! This is when the lore began to get REALLY good... and also really confusing. Props for it taking such a bold direction by taking place in a child’s bedroom instead of in an office with cameras, its a neat change of pace! That being said, the gameplay can get frustrating and there’s a high learning curve for needing to listen to each sound the anmatronics make. Also lore wise... there really isn’t much! Just mainly focuses on what happened to this poor kid. Also the box still being a loose end... yeah.

The Twisted Ones: I enjoyed this one! It had a very interesting direction that kinda kept me guessing on what was going on, and this is when Scott really started nailing in the foreshadowing for the reveal in TFC. The Twisted animatronics are SO cool, and the introduction of those little alteration chips provided new context to games like 4 and SL! That being said, I don’t remember it being... that memorable? I also didn’t like how Charlie’s and John’s relationship was... so awkward... It was neat, but honestly nothing to really go crazy over, in my opinion.

B

The Silver Eyes: Honestly, I adored this book when I read it back in 2016, before Sister Location happened. At the time I wasn’t trying to connect it to any lore, so it was really great just to see a sort of retelling of the FNaF story. A lot of people complained about how long it was... I might agree if I reread it but tbh it never bothered me before. It was delightfully creepy, yet had a simple plot and wasn’t NEARLY as out there as TTO and TFC. Especially TFC. I felt this book didnt need 2 sequels and would’ve been just fine on its own, but whatcha gonna do. Carlton is forever my fav, and it’s the first time we really learn about Henry AND it was the first time we got a name for our Purple Guy: William Afton!

Sister Location: I like this one for just how bold of a game it was. I’m also including SL’s Custom Night wrapped into this package. Jam packed with lore, our first (main) game with VOICE ACTING, and honestly the humor has no right being as good as it is. I love how this not only expanded on the crying child from 4′s story, but also gives us so much Elizabeth and Michael content. The gameplay has a lot of unbalanced features and feels a little too over the place at times, but I appreciate where it was going with it!

FNaF World: ... This one is pure personal bias. A lot of people don’t like it. I adore it. Honestly I love the cute overworld, I love beating up enemies as my favorite animatronics, I love the horror, nihilism, and lore shoved into this game alongside SO MUCH humor. Update 2 was nothing short of an absolute delight and... wait, no!!! FNaF World had our first voice acting!!! So many endings and nods to other games Scott’s made, a cool scene with Desk Man/Henry and Baby, just... muah. Good content. Also Scott 57 <3

A

Ultimate Custom Night: Name a better way to end the Afton Saga, I’ll wait. It’s so obvious how much time, thought, and care went into this one. I love how the game rewards you with funny cutscenes the higher scores you get, and I just! So much voice acting! I love how each preset- no, each character has their own moves so every time you do a certain mode, you need to learn to manage them all and get a good strategy. I like how it’s way more strategy and skill than the RNG that many previous games had. Also, Scott!!! You managed to put this into the LORE by making it William’s hell, MUAH, couldnt have done it better!!!

FNaF 2: This one might have bias for being the peak of the fandom, but it was one of the greatest times to be in that fandom. Freaking out over the trailers, theories galore, prequel vs sequel, and just... so good. 1 didn’t have much plot, 2 DID. 2 had more mechanics and strategy to it than 1, and gave us over twice as many characters! We finally got a “face” to our killer, Mr. Purple Man, and how could I ever complain about more Phone Guy~? This one also introduced the 8-bit minigames, which became a HUGE staple for the series! Perfect expansion of the first!

Freddy Fazbear’s Pizzeria Simulator: The PERFECT blend of old and new gameplay. The salvage scenes are intense, the nights had a great balancing mechanic of juggling doing tasks while also avoiding animatronics, multiple endings, and a neat tycoon segment to give the player a breather... but with LORE!!! Midnight Motorist is easily one of the best tracks in the series. Also has a GREAT canonical ending, when(with paired with UCN), ties the plots of 1-6 SO nicely with a neat bow. 

S

FNaF 1: Okay. From a personal and gameplay standpoint, I was going to put this much lower. Like B or C. That being said... this has to go in S. Yes, it has the least lore and arguably the worst gameplay(too much RNG for 4/20 mode), but this was the game. I can’t even exaggerate when I say just how much FNaF changed not only the gaming community, but especially the horror and indie communities. So many names got big from this: Markiplier, Dawko, Game Theory, The Living Tombstone, DA Games, SCOTT HIMSELF, just to name a few!!! And to think, this was originally going to be Scott’s last game! FNaF changed gaming HISTORY, and I think that alone makes this title deserving of S.

FNaF VR, Help Wanted: Okay, personal bias time, but I truly think VR deserves this S. Seeing Glitchtrap for the first time incited a panic in me that I hadn’t felt since FNaF 1 and 2. You get FNaF 1-4 in one, all in VR, WONDERFUL character models that you can WATCH MOVE!!! SO many minigames and fun challenges to play, so many neat knickknacks to collect, the Halloween update is FANTASTIC. The introduction of some great characters, such as: Glitchtrap, Vanny, Tape Girl, Dreadbear, Grim Foxy, etc!!! There’s also just- something so nice about being able to see every office and the pizzeria in 3D spaces where you can look around! Just from a gameplay and environment standpoint, this was an AMAZING addition and deserves the S.

... Thanks for listening to me ramble XD If you disagree... then good for you! I won’t fight anyone on this, I’m aware that this is a lot of personal bias. But if you made it this far... thanks for hearing me ramble!!!!

[theghostbeaters]

my timeline of thoughts during my tlou 2 play through (bad and good and maybe even some silly) just let me vent because i can’t stop thinking about it tbh

- i was away from the internet for months because i didn’t want to be spoiled for anything, so when i started to play i had only the deceitful trailers to go by

- the beginning felt pretty normal for the last of us. they started you in the town and then on patrol for your hour of tutorial basically. i also remember thinking the recap of the first game was so nice because i liked seeing their younger selves in the new graphics

- abby was introduced, and like i said i had no clue what was going on because i had not been spoiled so my mind was going a mile a minute on wtf abby and co. were up to. when they spotted jackson my initial thought was maybe they do want joel and they will be the main antagonists? joel and ellie will have to fight them??? but because of the trailers, death of any sort wasn’t on my mind.

- i also had a very odd and pure hatred for owen’s voice, lol. i don’t know what it was but omg from the moment he spoke till his last breath i would always be like “why is he speaking like that??” in the back of my head.

- that scene happened. i’m a crier i’ll admit, but this was something else. I felt shocked, nauseous, numb. I don’t think I actually even cried till I saw the tombstone i was so taken aback by the way they went about this. I don’t care if they are fictional characters. It has been 7 years since the first game came out and almost 5 years that they released the first trailer for part 2. I did not wait this long, excited to see two of the most important characters to me in such realistic graphics get their fucking head caved in. at the very very least a fade to black and then to the tombstone would have gotten the same reaction you wanted from me, but it would have been done in a way less cruel way.

- i took about a 3 hour break. i could not get that image out of my head and it was really starting to upset me more then any media should. i don’t care or want to hear about any walking dead or apocalypse setting trope. it will never be edgy, deep, or meaningful to kill a favorite character in that manner. I want to state that again. In that manner. If they had killed joel in a more tactful way I could have possibly liked the game more.

-i remember thinking it felt forced. like the creators wanted this narrative so badly they seemed to go through hoops and hurdles to get there. there was a random horde that seemed to disappear as quick as it came, abby just gets lucky and has joel and tommy save her and then they go straight to the lions den? would joel from the first game be so quick to do that? Wait was she 100% sure just from two peoples names this was the guy she wanted? Ellie gets there just in time to see the final blow and then the others only get there just in time to miss everything and not be able to help? Whats going on??? This feels too structured and not genuine?? 

- going into his house was just as painful. i’m sorry but i’m going to bring this back up a lot-  if they would had just killed him in a more tactful manner i would have praised the way these little scenes were done. grabbing his watch, ellie smelling his clothes, seeing the pictures of sara and ellie, looking at his workshop and seeing how well he can carve! I couldn’t appreciate it the way I wanted to because I couldn’t get that image out of my head. i was literally bawling the entire time. 

-REVENGE TIME BEGINS:

+so the first scene was set: ellie wanted to go to seattle for revenge, dina was going to go with her, and tommy had already left. I remember having two thoughts here

  +“please tell me its going to be more then ellie just going on a revenge spree and then at the end she doesn’t kill abby because morals / murder is bad / not everything is black and white kind of tropes.” 

  +and “i have a wild feeling tommys gonna be like the only person that makes it out alive. he did it in the first game somehow hes gonna weasel his way free in this one.”

-ELLIES SEGMENTS:

+the graphics are amazing the sceneries are some of the most beautiful i have seen in a game. and it didn’t stop there. every area was amazing. I think most can agree to this. 

+i was determined, no matter what else the game threw at me i was going to see it through to the end and try very hard to visualize it the way the creators wanted it to be visualized. even if i didn’t agree or didn’t like parts, i figured hey the first game was so good this has to revive itself.

+i really liked the gameplay, it was a finer tuned version of the first game. i also liked the idea of the map and how it actively showed you different locations and crossed them out when you were done. but in the back of my head i was thinking “wow this would have all been so neat in the first game”. I shouldn’t be thinking about the first game. I should be enjoying this one.

+i was getting concerned none of the new characters were getting as much character development and love as some of the characters in the first one. I liked dina a lot, and by the very end of the game she did feel pretty rounded out (i especially liked her in the farm segment)  but the beginning and middle seemed almost more focused on “this is ellies girlfriend” instead of “this is dina”. I felt the same with jesse. I liked him but nothing stood out as much as it could and should have. I got more from tess in the short amount of time she was in the first game.

+there were certain segments that felt way more horror like and scary then in the first game and I loved them a lot. The new enemy (shambler) was cool and the settings where they used red lighting looked amazing. I also really loved the new take on stalkers. They were way harder to find and I found myself on edge to get jumped by one during those sections. They funny enough reminded me of dead space stalkers and i thought they were an improvement from the first games.

+at this point i pretty much understood what the creators were going for plot wise, but i personally just didn’t think it was needed. 1) i’m confident the majority of hardcore last of us fans already understand the concept of how every character can be good and bad and that not everything is black and white. we didn’t need to see one beloved character die horribly and the other be in that much pain and lose herself to understand that. 2) did we not pretty much already cover this concept in the first game? but....better? you remember...the ending?

- ELLIES FLASHBACKS:

+ of course I enjoyed them. its what i needed from a sequel. its what the whole game should have been, at least for me personally. the birthday flashback was the highlight of the entire game. i needed it so badly after the mind numbing, emotionally exhausting, weird out of place plot was putting me through. I was glad to finally see how ellie felt about the ending of the first game. but trying to crunch all that in 4 cutscenes? I just don’t feel like it was enough. you basically gave me one scene per year of joel and ellies relationship and you felt like that was enough to let me digest almost 5 years they spent in jackson?

- ABBYS SECTIONS:

+call me an optimist or maybe just stupid i’m not sure but when it rolled over and said “hey take over and check out the life of joel’s killer” my first thought was okay so i was right they want a “”nothing is black and white”” narrative but maybe doing it this way will be new and fresh? I can get through this and enjoy it? .... Its just not a fully possible reality and how could it be? had it been the first game in the series maybe it would had worked, but of course no matter how hard I tried I just felt disassociated from abby because I was already close to joel and ellie. I understood her reasons. I understood the narrative you were going for. I understood the damn parallels. I’m not an evil person that would just laugh about what happened to her dad, but how can you not understand as writers that a huge majority might be able to understand it, but still won’t be able to enjoy it. It felt so pushed and shoved into my face that I couldn’t enjoy it if i wanted to because the game just kept screaming “LOOK AT THE PARALLELS THO!!!”

+abbys dad seemed forced and out of place too. when abby and co. first killed joel i didn’t even think fireflies tbh. I thought it was something he did before he met ellie, or something he did during the 5 years in jackson. like yeah i got it, its not the worse backstory in the world but when put in context to the first game it just doesn’t make sense to me to use as the narrative you want to portray in the second game. maybe i’m nitpicking here but from all the personal notes and all the tapes you can read and listen to about the fireflies in the first game it makes it hard to believe the majority of fans would care for the second games narrative at all. they already made their decisions. it at the very least just seems like bad salesmanship? but maybe they already knew that and thats why the trailers were all lies? (just my thoughts at the time remember) 

+and oh god was the character development even worse for abbys friends. at least they tried to give abby a rounded character development that mirrored ellies but if you think ellies friends barely got character development, abbys friends got almost zero. I didn’t care about a single one. they felt so flimsy and husk like. “this is the boy she likes” “this is a medic friend” “this guy likes sex alot” “this is dog, so of course you like dog”

+I mean its great everyone was able to be so different. abby is muscular, ellie is a lesbian, there were many poc, dina is jewish, they brought in a trans character....but how can i enjoy any of it when more than half of these characters felt put in just to be there instead of well rounded characters you can appreciate for good or bad?

+the sex scene with her and owen was the scene where i personally felt myself giving up. it felt so much like this game wanted to be an HBO classic instead of just a video game that i felt myself detaching even more. (also whats up with owens voice??? lol)

+GROUND ZERO was a very good chapter. That shit was spooky in all the good ways, it felt a lot like dead space with the plastic everywhere, THE BIG ASS MONSTER HAD ME ON MY KNEES. The chase scene up to the actual boss fight was A+. Here is the one catch though - I forgot I was playing as abby. It felt more like just playing first person. Not a character at all. I don’t think that is how you want your game to be played, and no it wasn’t my intention. 

+I wish yara and lev had gotten more screen time. the game was so focused on the abby vs ellie thing and shoving it down your throat that most the side characters got washed out, these two included. Their story was interesting and it would had been nice to see more of them instead of whatever the weird love triangle abby had going on with her two friends I couldn’t care less about. (i stg chances were given, but as i previously stated they felt more like husks of characters then fully rounded ones.)

+getting hunted by tommy was actually a pretty cool highlight of the game for me. and even for a narrative i didn’t personally like it was a good idea to do! it reminded me of the sniper section (but holy hell tommys a better shot lol) and david’s hide and seek section in the first game which i thought was very well done. 

+this is when i went “oh maybe i was wrong, tommys gonna die. i give him a 20% chance of survival now that abby saw his face

-THEATER TIME

+why in the all out hell would you ever think it would be a good idea to tell the player to go after ellie? no matter what narrative? lmao. I died here the most literally for the soul fact i was scared there might be some kind of choice so i wouldn’t mash QTEs as fast as i normally would. and when i found out no, you just gotta power through it i literally found myself going through this 10 minute segment going “but i don’t want to do this”, “i really dont want to do this”, “do i have to do this?” “why do i gotta do this?” and yes i still understood your narrative but it doesn’t matter. it was just awkward. 

+This is where personally I would have put the cali segment if I really wanted to go with a narrative I still say didn’t need to happen because we already went through it in the first game, and then the happy farm bit at the end. 

-FARM

+i felt the game was going on too long and i was literally screaming at my screen to just end my suffering when i realized there was more after seattle. adding the extra PTSD scene just felt like an added fuck you towards the fans. I said it once, I’ll say it 1000x that scene with joel was seared into my brain already. I didn’t need that literal jumpscare. I already knew what ellie was going through dammit I was going through it with her! Let the girl and me for that matter have a bit of happiness after what you put us through!

+holy hell tommy fucking lived. he fucking lived. that mother fucker. hes the new telltales kenny. 

-SANTA BARBARA

+I said previously this section should have some how been merged into the seattle ending. I couldn’t tell you how honestly, but keeping it dragging like they did was so emotionally draining. it didn’t give me any feeling but more sadness and torment for a favorite character that didn’t deserve this kind of treatment. ellie looked so skinny and sad here. and i feel like it was what the creators were going for? because abby ended up looking just as sad looking. The ending fight was so sad and pathetic. I felt bad for both of them and that is what the creators wanted right? but at what cost? most of your fans, if they even managed to play this far, so emotionally drained and tired that they end up hating the game or not wanting to play it again? 

-ENDING

+so how do i feel now that i finished it? overall there were more cons than pros for me. as i said numerous times before this narrative is not new, this narrative was not needed. this narrative definitely shouldn’t have been lied about through trailers. this narrative was basically done better in the first game anyways. the ending did not give me “sad but hopeful”. it just left me empty and depressed. I don’t see myself playing this game ever again. 

+If anyone was able to enjoy it I’m truly happy you were able to and these were all just my personal thoughts and opinions while playing the game. I don’t hate anyone that liked it, I don’t even hate abby. I just personally hate they wrote a narrative that felt so forced down your throat in all the wrong ways. I hate that I wasn’t ready for that joel scene because it still hurts to think about. I hate thinking about how sad ellie looked and how they were both treated. It just wasn’t healthy for me tbh is the best way I can put it. 

[trashy-croud]

Nevada: Nevada Desert

Okay this level starts us off smack-bang in the middle of nowhere. At least it make you feel that way as you only find a small source of water, cacti and bushes around in this sandy wasteland. We encounter vultures once more along with snakes - although these snakes are far more different compared to the previous area we were in. Instead they are much smaller, but nonetheless do some damage despite their size.  We do some exploring to find a cave and to encounter our first secret of the level. Luckily there is only three in this level and finding them wasn’t as tedious as I would’ve thought of them being.

We basically did a drop of faith into barbed wire - dodging it only just, and encountering more snakes. Doing this enabled us to claim the first secret and oh god, was I thankful for the save crystal we got. We also got some flares and a small medi-pack. I felt like I was making a little collection of these because unlike the previous instalment, I’ve decided to actually try and not waste flare of medi-packs constantly. We’ll see how long it lasts. 

After claiming this secret and progressing forward. We stumbled upon a black box structure... thing. I suppose it was a container of some kind. We did different types of jumps to get over there, moving around in the upper levels of where we were only minutes ago. We got a whole new view of it all, and it felt very similar to how they would reference back to previous levels in the previous instalment, such as the Ice Palace where you could look onto the previous level. But rather than that here, we looked back on where we began in this level and interacted with it all in a much more different way. It was really nice.

After getting on top of this structure, I noticed there was a hole. And holes, mean jumping in. Without hesitation. There was a crap ton of hesitation from my end. I dangled and then felt like not doing it. It wasn’t until my dad loomed over my shoulder and made me jump that Lara would finally fall into the hole. We landed in water, which is all good, but it wasn’t good for my poor heart. 

After the swimming, we encountered a section that I have gotten stuck on multiple times. I cannot do precision jumping for the life of me as we were at a canyon, water beneath us so there shouldn’t be too much to worry about, right? Wrong, you jump on platforms and a vulture comes to great you and knocks you into the murky depths below. But that ain’t all, because he proceeded to do this several times. Purely because I couldn’t shoot and stay on the platform long enough to shoot him. My own fault, sure, but, let’s just push the blame onto the vulture just this once.

We managed the reach a climbable wall in this canyon but the way it was laid out reminded me of the Temple of Xian - just over the lava pit where the ladder splits halfway across so you can’t climb up the way you came. Sneaky, I must say, but it also meant that after I got the second secret that hid itself in a cubby by this ladder, I couldn’t climb up and carry on. So we had to make our way back up again. Oh how I started to loathe this because it takes me several attempts to even get back to where I was in the first place due to me pressing the wrong buttons or not timing my jumps very well.

Once we got back to where we were, we climbed up the ladder and made a couple more jumps, only to encounter another snake and a rather tricky situation. There is a hole in the ledge next to you, what do you think is the best thing to do? Jump into the hole? Oh, no, don’t do that. That’s a slippery slope to your demise and having to do it all over again. So we hang off the edge and let go before holding on again super quick and swinging across to the side. With some monkey bars and a ladder, we made it up to where we needed to be. We spotted a little lever with a boulder facing it - oh god another boulder trap. I thought we left those in India?! But there we spotted a cable leading down into the cave from the lever and being the nosy sod I am, I just had to follow it. So down we went to spot a big old box of T.N.T. I swear I sung “T.N.T.” by AC/DC throughout the rest of my time playing this level. It got stuck in my head for so long. We went back up to go activate it but we didn’t have a detonator key. So off we went to go find one, and this meant trekking up into the mouth of the waterfall. Y’know, where I fell in. A lot.

Reaching the entrance way of the cave, I decided to sacrifice a save crystal and began my journey further in, oh boy was it tedious. Sometimes Lara didn’t jump, other time she jumped too soon and I was about ready to lose it. But we finally made it and there was an overhang which we got to crawl under and find a ladder. Sneaky, very sneaky. Then I heard a snake hiss and the secret chime. Man, I was so ready for this, there was back flipping, snake killing and the works before we managed to pick up our set of uzis. Actually what I said wasn’t a hundred percent right. More like I back flipped, failed to land on the ledge, tried again, landed on it, got poisoned by the snake, killed it, wasted a medi-pack and then picked up the beloved uzis. I was an absolute fool.

After claiming the last secret of this level, which all were surprisingly close to one another, we managed to progress further on with this level. We encountered another snake as we left the overhang, and then encountered our first person of the Nevada levels. Or just in general if we ain’t counting Tony the Loon. If we are, he was the first man in this level we encountered. I was easy to deal with him as we also searched around a bit, before climbing up, I went to go check out the little cavern to the side, only to find a rather large drop which I wasn’t willing to jump into any time soon. There was also a save crystal which I picked up. I was thinking about going down but I knew my own luck was I would let go and fall to my demise. So I scratched that idea and instead went out to climb up the waterwheel and to explore more. Now I died a couple times in the water in the area we got to next. This is because, I hate swimming levels. Anything involving swimming, I cannot do for the life of me. This was no exception to that.

So there’s also some hidden levers, one which is in the other pool to get some items - I believe they were grenades? But then one in the passageway to actually make some progress. I didn’t know where it was at all and it wasn’t until I had died several times that I’d manage to actually find the switch. Totally didn’t press action at random to see if I could find anything. You can’t accuse me of doing that. You have no proof.

Anyway, all these switches and swimming led us to being able to divert the water towards the waterwheel and also enabled us to activate the elevator as we see a small cutscene of it coming up. This is where that side cave was and where the big drop was. Turns out that’s an elevator shaft. Learn something new everyday.

Making our way back to this elevator shaft, we found the detonator key sitting inside, as well as another man who seemed to think it was cool to hitch a ride in the elevator. Won’t blame him, though curse him for taking the easy route in there. So now came the challenge of getting back to the spot where the T.N.T. laid dormant. Eventually I gave up with attempting some jumps and instead let the water take me over the cliff and to climb my way back up again. You know, like the weakling I am. (Or as my sister says.)

As we got back to the detonator, we plunged it and had to jump quickly out of the way. Don’t think I forgot that boulder trap so quickly! No way was I forgetting it and letting that death loom over me. As we went into the caves to see the damage we’d done, I was quickly reminded of the T.N.T. in Natla’s Mines, during the first instalment of this series. Perhaps this was a throw back to that as it changed the environment we once new and would have to climb our way up and out. This is when my Dad decided to get involved.

I saved once more and would up outside some wire gates/walls, and my dad told me it’d be funny if I walked into it or touched them. That’s never a good sign, and my dad has clearly played this level and remembers some things about it because it all leads to death. Wire metal fences = death. They are electric and although I was a bit annoyed he got me to go into them, I was interested in the effect they used to show that Lara has been electrocuted. It almost looked magical-esque. It was a strange appearance, not that I’m complaining. I just haven’t seen Lara electrocuted before in the previous games, I mean we could in the first game with Thor’s room in St. Francis Folly, but it wasn’t that sort of effect. It was just interesting to see this slight difference and how they told the death apart from others, rather than just having her fall, the also gave that effect. I thought it was pretty neat so just ignore me if you’d like.

Anyway, after discovering it was electric, we went on searching around and found a crawl space, not only that, we could jump up to find a small area filled with water with two switches. I’m not sure what one of the switches did but the other opened another door. Ah, the switch to open a door, to pull another switch. You gotta love Tomb Raider games. After pulling all of the switches, we made our way to a water tank, after finishing off two guys who came charging towards us. This water tank helped us to get higher ground and to be able to jump into the compound that’d electrocute us if we tried to go in by any other means. Did you know that if the fences are electric, that electric current an pass through the metal switch on it? Funny that, ain’t it? So yes, we had a couple of deaths by electrocution during this part of the level. I mean, even accidentally touching it, this level showed me no mercy whatsoever!

We powered through, taking care of more guys in this compound and would finally make sure the fences were no longer electric from flipping an entirely different switch, hidden behind a keycard-locked door. Fun times. After this, we took the bike out and would finish the level by jumping over another fence with it!

This all triggered a cutscene in which Lara has knocked herself out, she got where she wanted but got a little injured in the process. The comments by the two guards referred to her as a “crazy geek freak” whereas the other suggests she’s an “eco-terrorist” but the first guard completely dismisses that idea as they take her away to the compound. And that’s it for this level. A very interesting level which paid homage to some of the things that they did in the previous games, that’s what it looked like to me at least, with the revisiting of somewhere we’ve been before but from a different view, and the use of T.N.T. changing the area we knew once before. It was a difficult level but we powered through. Now onto the next level - “High Security Compound”. Why is my dad laughing so much? Oh God, what’s coming next?!

[senpai-no-lie]

So I Finally Finished A Route in Three Houses: A Review of Mechanics

I also finished the DLC, but I figured I’d split my thoughts of the DLC, the first route I played, and my general opinions on the mechanics into separate posts for length and coherency reasons 

Overall: I liked the idea of a lot of what they tried to do, but the execution was hit and miss. Additionally, some of the stuff that was interesting and new at first quickly became a chore. Purely on mechanics, I would say 3H was worse than both Fates and Awakening; Echoes is a toss-up. 

What I Think 3H Improved Upon: 

Combat Arts! I loathed how combat arts worked in Echoes. Attached to the weapon? So freaking dumb. I thought there was a good variety of different arts your unit could learn, and if they decided to keep weapon durability, I think having combat arts tie into that was a good idea

Forging. Ugh, do I hate weapons durability, but at least I could repair my weapons pretty easily (outside of the Relics, which I hardly used, as a consequence). Realizing I could craft Levin swords was also a big game changer for me. I also hated how limited and mysterious forging was in Echoes, so I’m glad 3H didn’t hide what the weapon could become behind ???. Still think Awakening had the best forging, as broken as it kinda was lol 

Paralogues...? I thought most of the paralogues were a fun challenge and were good opportunities to learn more about the characters who aren’t as vital to the main (meager) story. Sort of wished you could’ve recruited some other the other houses’ members via paralogues (akin to picking up your children from Time Travel/Deep Realm daycare) 

Demonic Beasts I liked them. They were a change of pace from regular enemies, which is a plus in my book.

Stat Gains and Level Design, at compared to Echoes. I feel like they borrowed a lot of ideas from Echoes, since that was the last game (excluding Warriors), but with some improvements. The stat gains in Echoes were notoriously awful, and as someone who is a bit...anal at times about evenly leveling all my characters, it was the Literal Worst to put all that work into chumps like Est and Atlas and Clive and they still sucked. Also, the maps in Echoes started to run together and just be like a slog, so good job, 3H, for not being as bad as your predecessor. (Though the general lack of gimmicks in the story chapters and reliance on fairly so-so maps with objectives like route the enemy/defeat the commander over and over could’ve been furthered improved upon)

What Was A Bit Meh: 

Timed Activities This is petty, but it just stressed me out when a game put a timer on something. I stopped doing the advice box and didn’t bother with tea parties pretty quickly because while I could suspend the software to have the extra time to look answers, it wasn’t fun or a good use of my time. 

So Many Activities During Exploration Too much, in my humble opinion. A good chunk of them were ways to gain support with units or minor increases in skills, so I think it would’ve been better to condense activities. Like, lost items??? I was able to A support every single available unit on my first playthrough without to much difficulty without that. I’d scrap the advice box and also combine seminar with the tutoring in some way. 

Classing System It was a neat idea, to have that much freedom with classing units, and tying reclassing to skill level instead of purely level, but it was also equally annoying to spend in game weeks trying over and over to get a character to pass an exam. And the concept of the exams make even less sense post-timeskip. I liked the flexibility, but I think they could’ve scaled it back a bit (especially to make the game less intimidating to new players) so it wasn’t so tedious. 

DLC I like the creativity of deciding to just do an entire side story DLC instead of typical bonus maps. However, having completed the DLC side story, outside the notion the chapters were a bit more challenging (which in itself is a balancing act between engaging and tedious), and perhaps giving us more info about Byleth’s mom... it was kind of meh. Story was fairly cookie-cutter and the lack of any animated cutscene was a bit disappointing, those some of the stills were nice. 

Things I Just Didn’t Like:

The General Aesthetic Is this a mechanic, not necessarily, but it’s more appropriate to talk about it here than another post. For one, I just never liked how plasticky all the characters look. I commend them, I suppose, for deciding to fully voice act the game like Echoes, but I wish they hadn’t if it meant I had to look at vacant-eyed characters talking in a half-circle before every fight and after every fight. You can’t unnotice that almost every cut scene if all the characters standing perfectly still, talking in a half-circle. Additionally, sometimes their mouths don’t even move when they talk!! The face portraits had maybe a quarter of the personality they’ve had in previous games, and I miss how crits were done in Fates. 

Non-Mission Activities Made the Actual Story Chapters Feel Secondary For my first playthrough, I just decided I was going to grind for as many supports as possible, since the first half (or more than half) of each route is exactly the same. However, I noticed that I often felt that having to stop and do the mission was getting in the way of my other aims, or I would more or less forget what was going on in the story by the time I had to do the mission. 

Reliance on Using the Monastery as Homebase I know a lot of people ripped on Fates’ My Castle, but I feel like that was a much less intrusive base of operations than the monastery, because none of the things in My Castle had to be acknowledged if you wanted to bulldoze through several chapters in a row or do paralogues or DLC or whatever. I understand they put a lot of work into the Monastery, but it was hell to navigate around (I just fast traveled rather than navigating lol), made a lot of story chapters feel awkward (we’re in the middle of a war, but after every battle we gotta go back to the Monastery and dick around for a month), and really bloated up the game.

Recruitment At first, I was pretty gun-ho about getting all the units I could, and it was exciting to get a bunch of new units based on my efforts to seduce recruit them (especially Ferdinand-- he was such a bastard to get despite being the second unit I tried to recruit), but then you have them all and suddenly Edelgard’s enemy forces feel like a joke (it’s just her and Hubie Dubie, p much) and you realize everyone feels like a flake if they’ll join pretty much any side no matter. Additionally, because of how recruitment works, outside of Byleth and the main lord, and to a lesser extent the retainer, a good chunk of the characters have very limited to no importance to the plot. The rest of your house has about average FE involvement in the plot, such as commentary or exposition dumping, but they don’t feel like they matter when you can feasibly never use them if you recruit enough from the other houses. 

[bearpillowmonster]

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag Review

I'm going to split this review up in a sandwich so we'll have some good then some bad then a overall but it will be a lot of list of thoughts and just things about the game. I only ever played Brotherhood other than this so you can have that to go off of for reference. I've had dreams about this game before I played it and while I knew that it would never meet the expectation of those dreams, it still surprised me at how good it did.

The good. There are parts where the wind will blow your ship hard enough to make you change course and you have to steer against it, that sounds like one of the easily finicky features but I had no problem at all, it was welcome. This really is a definitive pirate experience, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can sync watch towers to teleport from one part of the island to another or if you sync all of them in that island then you can just fast travel from anywhere there rather than traversing the entire map (whole diff island). There's a Mayan outfit that you can collect tokens for throughout the game, so I got it and it has some neat perks my only complaint is that it has no hood. You have a scope to check out ships and what level and cargo they have so you know whether to bother plundering them or not. The shipmates sing songs (which are called shanties) whenever you're sailing which really kind of brings it to life which and you can collect these shanties in the form of flying pages so they can sing new songs. You can rescue pirates and add them to your crew, whether they're castaways stuck at sea or need your helping fighting guards, I always liked recruiting in Brotherhood. Every time you get on the ship, the crew cheers, I love it!

You can technically see a beefy ship and watch it tussle with other ships until they chip it down, as long as you get a blow in then you can still plunder it but you still have to take out the crew, especially the captain. You have a blow dart so you can tranquilize people but it's only a limited time before they wake up unless another guard finds them then they can wake up faster. You can change the colors of your sails but I think it would have been more effective to have the sails act as an upgrade so certain ones will give you better speed or something, just something that would have been cool but you can upgrade the ship through other means so that's cool. You can skin animals and use their hides to create armor or upgrades to health or whatever but I rarely ever hunted anything so it's not necessary at all but I appreciate that you can skip the cutscene of actually skinning it. Which is another thing that's not all that bad but something to point out, you don't have instant health vials like you do in Brotherhood, you just kind of have to work through it, if you're good then it's not a problem though. One more thing...BLACKBEEEAAARRRRDDDD!

The bad. So I played this without subtitles...because I couldn't find how to turn them on, then I did find it in the main menu settings towards the end, I really hate that but it's my bad, just a disclaimer for how my experience went. However the story isn't all that great or big, it's kind of just whatever, half the time I'm not sure what relevance some characters have to the plot but it's not a big deal, this isn't really a game for story but that doesn't mean it doesn't have good scenes. There's a windmill that sounds pretty cool but climbing up it is a pain in the rear partially due to controls, it took me so long to figure out and do it properly. James Kidd is a douche, enough said. There's a certain person you have to kill when you get marooned which doesn't make much sense to me because I had a berserk dart (meant for the crocodiles but again I barely hunted so I saved it) so why couldn't I have had the option to use that? 

Glitches and stuff. When you open chests, it's a bit finicky and you have to be in a certain spot, same with when you knock someone out, it will say "loot ammo" but you have to be in the right spot even if it gives you a button prompt (towards the head). I was on a trailing mission and was in the final stage where they have a conversation before the cutscene, so I was hiding in a bush, didn't move because I was listening. They almost finished the convo when it said "target lost" which if you know AC games, there's a vicinity where you need to be in, I was well within that range and I was practically in the exact same spot when I succeeded the second time. In the last part of Havana, I was looking for the target, using eagle vision and such but he didn't show up. I went everywhere in the green area, I even ended up taking out every person in the area and nothing. I looked it up and sure enough the guy who was supposed to be there, didn't spawn! I had to exit the animus and go back in to restart the mission. (he was on the close side of the church). I infiltrated a naval base and in order to capture it, you need to go into the war room. I took out the officers then went  there, in the middle of the cutscene of me opening the door, some guy back-stabbed me, there was no way I could have defended from it. A similar instance happened (but without the cut-scene) in the jungle. I died to a jaguar I believe and respawned but when I respawned, the little summary of the island showed up where it gives stats for what collectibles you have and stuff, it take up a 1/3 of the screen so I couldn't block any attack from it in the quick time event because I had no idea what button to press. I mentioned the Mayan outfit, with collecting the tokens, Edward will say "One more to finish my collection" after collecting so many which gets your hopes up but chances are that you'll need more, he says it too early. I went after a courier and I was right behind him whenever the chase started and I guess the game didn't like that so he rubberbanded away at an unreasonable speed. A shipmate glitched out of the ship and just hung there in mid air while I sailed.

Major rant. Back in the day it was cool to collect stuff because you would usually get something cool out of it and it was mysterious but with the internet now, it's just not mysterious so it doesn't work as well, so why not tell people what doing something will reward you? Especially if it sounds boring like "Animus Fragments" which are nothing more than balls of light. I ended up looking it up when I was around 75% done with the game which means I could have collected at least half of them right? (there are 200!) I'm not a completionist but alas the reward is too good...a skeleton crew! I wanted to end it as decked out as I could because I'm not usually one for post game content either but I did a nice big roundup of these fragments, but not quite all of them...I looked more into it and apparently you need to do challenges and the fragments are just a piece of the bigger picture...so alright, a lot more work but I WOULD still do it in order to get the skeleton crew. It even involves online missions I believe and I'm not up for that. But then...I figured out all of this requires you to more or less 100% the game which means you don't get it UNTIL POST GAME. So you finish the game and you don't even have it for the end, it doesn't even show up in cut-scenes (which wouldn't be a big deal but given the circumstances-) It's just not worth it, you can't even save after the main missions are done apparently so you get to just roam around with it for a little bit. I would rather it not be in the the game at all than tease me like it did, what a let down, what a sham! I was going to say how GREAT this game was but this made me mad because of how promising it was. There aren't even mods or bypasses or anything because it's an AC game.

The overall. It outdoes Brotherhood in the gameplay but the story for BH was better. In the end, I had more fun with this one for sure but I'm going to dock it for the misinformed skeleton crew, save yourself the hours of trying to get it. I will however say that if you are into pirates then check this game out! Like even if you're only slightly into them or have some sort of soft spot, try it! I played KH3 in the Caribbean and while I liked the world, I never thought I would be so giddy over a bunch of pirates like I was with this game. However this apparently connects to AC3 in some way, so I didn’t understand it, I might or might not try that one, not sure yet, I hear it’s sort of weak but if you want to understand the ending to its fullest then you should probably plan on playing AC3 either before or after or just look it up and spoil it, whichever you prefer. If there’s anything I’m wrong about or you want to convince me to play AC3, everything’s welcome, be my guest.

[game-meak]

A Proper Postmortem

Maybe?!  Heck if I know how to actually format a good post but let’s try.  As game development went on for almost four years, this is probably gonna be long... and also give away basically the whole game oops!  Read on with caution.

Sometime around July 2014, a month after the initial release of my first game, my room was being remodeled and I was stuck with nothing for free time but a garbage laptop I could do anything on, an old flip phone, my sketchbook, and my 3DS.  So beyond playing an obscene amount of Animal Crossing and Tomodachi Life, I at some point went “hey, what if I made a second game starring the kids.”  So I started trying to plan it out!  And it went

absolutely nowhere that I intended it to go!!!

For instance, this is the very first page of sketches.  This squirrel was supposed to be really important.  It’s not.  I don’t even KNOW what’s up with that duck.

A thing I like to think about before I set off making any of the story, assets, or scripts for my games tend to be themes and motifs.  And I kept circling back to a very important, very personal “theme.”  Without using the internet at large as my therapy couch, I was emotionally abused and taken advantage of multiple times in my life and it greatly impacts how I interact with people to this very day, as you’d expect events of such a degree would.  Particularly, I kept thinking that the RPG Maker fan crowd tends to skew young and be in the teenage range and at ages 14-16, I could’ve used something to help.

Of course, my entire thought process isn’t necessarily one of charity and selflessness.  It was also a way of me expressing what I’d dealt with in ways I’ve only ever communicated with my friends who were also victims of the same circumstances, the closest I would let myself come to personal stories and retellings with a cover of plastic children and wild adventures.  It was also in some ways a way of me verifying to myself that something ongoing was, in fact, bananas and should not have been happening, but that might be another story for another time.

As you can probably guess, Haze and Seal came into the picture since I needed to make two characters who would have this struggle.  A lot of decisions came about because of my personal experience.  They’re 15/16 because I was at the time of the incidents that primarily inspired me to make this game.  They’re both nonbinary because I am.  They love anime because I did (and do...?!)  One of their friends is even directly modeled off how one of my friends looked in high school.  To that degree, I guess someone, somewhere can call them self inserts.  But they’re also not, since I didn’t want to just do a personal retelling with fictional characters.  I’d just write a memoir or something at that point.

Haze’s design came first, and then Seal’s was sort of made as a foil to them.  Haze’s “colors” are pink, black, grey, and red.  Seal’s are teal and light purple... and also black.  Haze had a rabbit motif (which got toned down as I went on), Seal had an owl motif (which is now just a single mention in their list of likes...), etc.

Though in the beginning, the story was entirely different.  Initially, everything took place in the neon-ish areas with black sky and reflective, celestial water (that I, very eloquently, call “spacewater”).  The idea was that Haze and Seal were beings from another dimension and that their “fighting” was causing a rip in the universe that the kids stumbled into and therefore got wrapped up in this mess.  I had an entire script written and started making assets and when I went to sum up the game’s plot in a neat paragraph, I realized... I hated it!!!

So I chucked all I had done by that point writing-wise and started again.

In fact, I rewrote a lot.  After the first it was mostly small tweaks and adjustments, but the biggest ones (and the ones that still present a challenge to me!) usually involved trying to make Seal feel like a believable character.  I had shown an early draft to someone who said that Seal felt too much like trying to get back at someone, so I scrapped a ton of their lines and tried again.  I still worry whether or not they come across too Strawman-y, but I’ve done the best I can and whatever criticism people have can apply to my next writing attempts.  It’s very hard to separate yourself from subject matter you feel really personally attached to.  I don’t want to write them in a way that you immediately hate them, or hate me for writing such a blatant “villain” character, but in a way that you can formulate your own thoughts.  That said, though, I am violently allergic to people who call Seal a “tsundere,” even in jest.  So I guess I want people to have their own thoughts as long as it’s not that specific one...! (;;;;)

You may be thinking “heck, this is a lot of paragraphs in and you haven’t even brought up gameplay thoughts” and yes... that’s very true.  Shamefully, for a game where I thought “I should definitely, absolutely focus more on making it a Fun Game than a walking visual novel” I might’ve actually dropped the ball in that area.  I’d like to think I was more adventurous than I had been with my first game.  Some parts do kind of fall into the “walk to the next cutscene, find a key to unlock the next cutscene” pit, but I did put effort into figuring out what I could do with RMXP.  My obligatory “please don’t use this engine here, people thinking of using RPG Maker” statements here.  In the final product, though they’re very simple, I’m most proud of the chalkboard puzzle and the paint sorting puzzle.

Even if, y’know... I somehow neglected to include the letter “k”

Speaking of, I’m not sure if this is a general RPG Maker thing, a “man I hate RMXP” thing, or a “meaka cannot gamemake” thing, but I had several event/puzzles just up and quit on me a few times.  Like they would work fine for months and months, but one day I’d go to them and just nope, suddenly they’re not working, sorry.  Copy+pasting the event to a new map wouldn’t work, so I’d have to manually redo the event.  One of them was the chalkboard puzzle.  The other was the sliding puzzle when Tony is by herself.  Which I’m also aware slows the game down a ton, but I have legitimately no idea how to fix that... I tried and I could never get to to not lag like crazy.

Like I said, I started in July 2014.  I’d shipped the game off to my beta testers in March 2018.  A vast majority of that time was spent creating the visual assets since everything you see in the game is custom.  All the sprites, all the tilesets, every little pixel of it.  All me!  Needless to say... it was very exhausting and very time consuming. I grossly underestimated how much time I thought it’d take.  I never accounted for the very real possibility of burnout, which is incredibly silly considering I was making something entirely by myself that was also an occasionally difficult subject matter...!  There were quite a few weeks where I touched nothing because I couldn’t bring myself to and even a few times where I just considered deleting everything and cancelling the project.  I knew I’d be mad at myself if I quit, especially as I got later into production, so I just tried my best to make sure I didn’t turn it into a huge chore.  Obviously, there were parts that were more tedious than others, but this game really is a very large labor of love that I put a lot of my heart into.

Part of that time is also a little bit of indecision.  Did you know I went through 3 possible title screens?  I sure did!  I’ve also publicly posted about redoing both Haze and Seal’s bust sprites before.  I almost redid all of the kids’, too, but I didn’t wanna get caught in the loop of remaking everything, so I opted to just leave them as they are.  Most of them don’t bug me as much.  M...most of them!

I’m hopping back on the Story train since obviously that was my main focus, but the decision to have Seal sort of “reveal” their true nature (or at least have a jealousy-related anger burst) to Octavio as an animated cutscene was one I’d decided pretty early.  Which is also why, unsurprisingly, I was debating getting voice actors for a hot minute.  But I wouldn’t have used it anywhere else in the game, so I opted not to.  I also wanted to keep the file size low, but that wound up not happening so much, h-haha...   For someone who uses the only engine without native support for videos, I sure do like making animated cutscenes, huh.

Anyway.  This scene originally bridged Octavio’s section of the game to Pablo’s, which would’ve been (for some reason) in an abandoned hospital.  But that didn’t pan out because it didn’t fit what I wanted the game to be and also by switching the order of the two, it builds up more tension(?) on the kind of character you expect Seal to be.  I hope their very first “fuck off, maybe” took someone out there by surprise!

This also was the point when I decided I wanted to commission an original soundtrack, since nothing quite got across what I wanted at the time.  Which is when I put out my silly ad post and somehow managed to get the amazing ProjectTrinity to compose for me...!  I’m still amazed by the sheer quality of music he made for my little RPGMaker game.

Having the teen characters curse was also something I waffled on for a bit.  Clearly, I dwell on the important things as a writer.  I wanted it to contrast the cutesy, kidlike way the siblings talk and also the sort of squeaky-clean image the witches (particularly Seal) present to the kids by contrasting how they talk to each other, most importantly how Seal talks to Haze and their other friends.  I did have the same issue with the Mother in my first game, but I opted to not have her curse at all either since she’s childish in her own way, too.  But that’s not for THIS game’s postmortem, get otta here!!!

I also very much was set on a “battle” with words being the final event of the game.  Though I had a hard time imagining what that would be initially, but eventually arrived at a sort of fake battle system that was introduced in the mine.  The setting for this battle changed with time (everywhere from the park to the academy and in between) was considered...!  The dirty secret is that while I did like the decision to make it take place in the voids between worlds, I also sort of did not want to draw the staircase in the witch academy.  Originally, the kids would’ve also helped Haze “reach” Seal (who was putting actual obstacles in the way), but I guess in my own way, I wanted to give Haze the ability to confront Seal on their own, one-on-one.  Or something like that...!  I also didn’t want to add too much needless backtracking.

I’m... unsure what other point I really want to make, so I guess I’ll end this here unless anyone has anything in particular that interests them they’d want me to answer!

All in all, this game means a lot to me and took a chunk of my life to make and I really hope it’s able to reach at least one person who might need it, even if it’s only a little. 

To all of you who gave it a try, thank you, truly, from the bottom of my heart.

A shameless link to the game:  [itch.io] & [RMN]