#making me not knowing jack about the setting during my first playthrough into a character trait ✌️

[leyartser]

My first Tav! Beryl Greenscale, a dwarven sorceress who grew up very sheltered and is more than a little naive.

[adventuresofclever]

CleverMax: SDCC 2021 Masquerade Entry

Comic-Con@Home Masquerade Entry: Adventures of Clever Costume Title: CleverMax - Mr. Clever as a Borderlands boss Costume Description: Recreation of Mr. Clever from the Doctor Who episode Nightmare in Silver, written by Neil Gaiman, done in the style of the video game, Borderlands. Bio: They/He pronouns

Greetings all!

I realized that I never wrote about how I made my CleverMax mashup cosplay, so when SDCC posted about their At Home masquerade, I figured this was the perfect time to do so! Most of you know that I cosplay exclusively as Mr. Clever from Doctor Who, with the random mash up thrown in here and there. I’ve always wanted to be a Borderlands cosplayer, and the following is how I managed to combine the two together.

As always, enjoy the blog and if there are any questions, please feel free to contact me. 

Let’s step into the TARDIS and jump back to October 20, 2009, when the first Borderlands game was released. It was my first foray into FPS (First person shooters) and I was hooked from day one. In 2012 they released Borderlands 2 which is, in my not so humble opinion, the best video game ever created. We got some of the most iconic charcters and storylines in that game. Including the best DLC ever, Bunkers and Badasses. And my second favorite villain of all time – Handsome Jack.

Jack’s sass, sarcasm and charm fits well with Mr. Clever’s personality. And in the pre sequel you get to play a version of him called the Dopplegnager.  I mean, this pretty much wrote itself.

Handsome Jack from Borderlands 2 and Mr. Clever from Doctor Who

Borderlands cosplayers have aIways left me in a state of awe and admiration. The style of the game is so unique and seeing it recreated in person is nothing short of incredible. I’ve always wanted to figure out a way to be a Borderlands cosplayer. For the past eight years I have only ever cosplayed as Mr. Clever from Doctor Who. In the summer of 2019 I decided that was the perfect time to try to make this happen before NYCC.

When I initially decided to do this, it was going to be more of a mash up between Handsome Jack and Mr. Clever. I had planned on wearing Jack’s basic outfit, but in Clever’s colors with the a few add ons. Namely the bow tie and the cybernetics.

After much research and drafting, I decided against that. I ended up just turning Mr. Clever into a Borderlands boss. Same basic outfit as Mr. Clever/11th Doctor, but cel shaded and with weapons, cause Borderlands.

I made the accessories, chess set, and obviously the working cyberplanner piece itself for my Nightmare in Silver version of Clever, but I have never tackled anything this ambitious. An entire costume from scratch? Not something I thought I could do. Not knowing how to sew and being visually impaired were both challenges that I had to work around.

I started with looking around my house for various items that I thought I could use. I figured if I messed up, might as well mess up on something I hadn’t spent money on yet! I was going to toss a pair of my old paddock boots as they had some rips in the leather. Ripped leather? How very Pandora. They were the first thing I tackled.

Old paddock boots that I refurbished for the cosplay

This was my first time using leather paint and I have to say I am very pleased with the Angelus brand of leather paint. I have worn these in the rain and through puddles, and they have held up 100%.

After the boots were done, I started on the vest. I had an old black vest lying around the house that was sort of the shape and size I wanted. I don’t have a dress form, so I put it on myself, inside out, and used safety pins to make it the size I needed, then hand sewed around the safety pins. Not ideal, but it works.

I had a spare pair of black jeans, button down light blue shirt and a plain bow tie that I just ended up cel shading.

The only item that I really couldn’t figure out was the purple frock coat. Try as I might, I couldn’t find one to modify. So the coat was actually made by my friend Heather Long. I did alter the length after NYCC. 

With the clothes themselves all set, for the most part anyay, it was time to paint. This was my first time trying to recreate the art style of Borderlands, often referred to as cel shading. I have a few “art of Borderlands” style books that I poured over before I sat down to attempt this.

Other than the accessories and anything leather, I used the same materials and techniques for each article of clothing. Instead of describing each seprate piece, I’ll just explain what I did to achieve the overall look.

When you look at a Borderlands character on screen, it can be a bit overwhelming. So many colors, and so many nuances of each color. I did my best to visually sift through all that, and try to establish what I thought was the base color.

Once the base color was determined, I just added blotches, blobs, shading, low lights, highlights and other variations of the base color itself throughout each piece. I recommend keeping your fabric wrinkled and using those wrinkle as guidlenes for where the lines and shading would fall naturally.

Once all of that dried, I then went over different sections of the fabric with white and black lines. To get that crisp, almost comic book looking outline of each piece I used black sharpie, and white fabric pens as well as white fabric paint.

When I sat down to do the coat, I wanted something a little different than just cel shading. During a second playthrough of Tales from the Borderlands, I noticed Rhys and other characters had interesting logos and designs on the back of their jackets. I ended up putting a chessboard pattern on the back as a homage to the chess game between the 11th Doctor and Mr. Clever in the episode.

Great shot of the chess board and my Judd Nelson pose

The materials that I used for all of the clothing items were craft paints that I had around the house. Any brand works, but I prefer Americana paints. I then added an additive that you use to make the paint water proof and used various sized brushes. Dry brushes are also very useful if you have them.

Black sharpies of different sizes and any fabric markers are also very helpful. Heat setting is required to make the paint waterpfoof, so if you mess up before you add sharpies, you can wash the clothes and start over.

A few tips if you decide to undertake cel shading clothing: Until now I hadn’t noticed that there aren’t many thing in Borderlands that are true black. Due to the art style most things that appear black are in reality shades of grey, with a grey base colr. This makes it easier to add the lines, shading, and what not.  Looking back, I should have bought GREY clothes. It was a ton of work to make the pants look like they were a mixture of greys. And as a result of so many laers of paint, they are stiff, lost their stretch and feel an entire size smaller! So I would recommend grey fabric as a base for black clothing and buy a size larger.

The pants are so stiff that I think they will stand up on their own

This entire process was way more fun than I thought it would be and I’ve since become addicted to cel shading anything I can. I may or may not have started cel shading my guest room. 

After the clothing was finished, I started on some accessories and props. The first being the easiet – a wee little cybermite that I cel shaded. My cosplay of Mr. Clever always has a cybermite on my lapel, so I took one of my older ones and repainted it.

You can’t have a Borderlands character without some sort of weapon, so I painted a nerf gun that looks similar to the one that Clara Oswald holds in the episode.

I have never had to carry a gun for my Mr. Clever cosplay before so weapon checks are sort of new to me. I didn’t want to go through that at NYCC so I came up with a clever, no pun intended, way around it.

I took a photo of each side of the gun. Went to Staples and had them printed on heavy cardstock. Then I cut around the guns, glued them together between a piece of cardboard then added some black electical tape around the edges.  Viola. Instant weapons check approved gun that is lightweight, and also acts a fan when it gets hot. It was a huge hit at the con. A few security guards were like “ we have to check your…wait..is that flat?” And they proceeded to play with it. I highly recommend doing this!

Gun and its flat counterpart

I am holding the flat gun in this picture from NYCC

In the actual game, you can equip your characters with mods that give them certain abilities and bonuses. In the Pre-Sequel, you can play as a Dopplganger of Handsome Jack so I searched for some of his mods and found one in purple which seemed perfect. I made the mod with cardboard, covered it in craft foam, modge podge to set, and installed led lights. The first time I wore it I put it on my belt which didn’t work. It kept falling off. I eventually put it on my lapel and wore it like Jack does. Unfortunately, someone glomped on me at a con and broke it, so I recently had to remake it all over again.

No Borderlands costume would be complete without cel shading on yourself. This was a huge challenge for me for a few reasons. One, I’m visually impaired so doing line work like this was challenging. Two, I am highly allergic to so many materials and ingrediants that finding a make up brand that I could wear was a trial and error process that ended up with many break outs and rashes before I found the perfect combination.

I used mostly eye liner pencils and liquid eye liner to achieve the look. The Wet n Wild liquid eye liner lasts forever, and is actually difficult to remove, but that is not a bad thing as it stood up to the heat of a very crowded venue.

As for the cel shading itself, I relied on many refernce photos of various characters in the game. I started with the eyebrows first as that seemed to frame the face nicely and give me a nice mischvieous look. I then just outlined the bones of my face, adding some random lines here and there. It never looks the same way twice, but that’s ok. Playing with different angles, lines, shading etc is half the fun!

The only real challenge were my hands. The make up didn’t last that long on my hands so I had to touch it up throughout the con. I also eventually started to use band aids that I cel sahded to cover up a tattoo on my inner wrist.

Figuring what to do with my hair is an on going process that I still haven’t 100% mastered. I opted to not use a foam wig as I have over heating issues on a cool day let alone trying to wear one if it gets warmer. I have had adverse reactions to craft foam in the past, so I don’t want it touching my skin, and lastly, I think a wig AND a facial prosthetic would be too much for me. So I decided to just cel shade my hair.

This takes forever to do, and I’m still figuring out better techniques every time I wear it.

I have a really great brand of colored gel, called Mofajang which I apply with a baster brush that you would find in the kitchen gadgets aisle. I also use a clean mascara brush to add some finer lines here and there. Set with way more hair spray than I ever used in the 80’s and it becomes fairly waterproof.

I have learned that due to how hard the make up and hair color is to remove, I really need to wear this on the LAST day of a con. I made the mistake of wearing it on day one of Long Island Who one year, and spent hours scrubbing my skin and hair for the next day. Far better to just leave the con with a tad bit of left over cel shading. Which makes it very interesting when you stop at a roadside bathroom on the trip home.

With the entire costume done it was time to work on the actual cyberplanner appliance. 

Next time I make a variation of Clever, I will make this FIRST. Making these pieces is the bane of my existence – I love wearing them, hate making them.  It’s a long process.

I am allergic to latex, silocone, scuply, most clays, and so many other things that seem to be every cosplayers go-to. When I made my first cyber piece back in late 2013, I spent weeks trying to find a substance that would keep attached to my face all day without causing a rash. Like an alchemist in a fantasy novel, I submerged myself into creating the perfect concoction. It took 22 days to finish the final product.

I admit that I rushed a bit on the Borderlands one.  As a result, it doesn’t quite fit as well as my others, and is a bit heavier than I expected. I only added two working lights, instead of the usual four, to hopefully balance the piece out. It lasted through two full days of a con, despite the heat of a crowded venue, but I did end up tweaking it a bit after. Even with the tweaks, it still doesn’t fit as well as I would like. It is too heavy and brings down the entire left side of my face, making it difficult to keep my eye open at times. I really need to sit down and force myself to make a new one.

There are a few more things that I would like to add to this costume eventually. Like a belt of grenades, and maybe another gun. But aside from that, I am incredibly pleased with how this costume turned out. It is by far, my favorite Clever variation that I have done.

I hope this post gives you the inspiration to go off and cel shade something, and possibly even play some Borderlands!

[f0x-gl0ves]

i said i would rant incoherently about enderal and fable a while ago so here we go

This is for the 2.5 people who are interested in both fable and enderal like i am xx (sorry this is written so badly)

Okay there are ridiculous amounts of thematic links between the fable series and enderal and I'm sure it's pretty much just a huge coincidence but I just can't stop thinking about It. The lore of fable (history before the events of the first game) follows enderals cycle almost exactly it's insane. After defeating the knight jack and queen of blades who had a dictatorship over Albion  William black (the first hero to posses powers) rules over Albion and he and his family become god like figures called the 'archon' and for a while Albion is prospering. However a few generations down wills family tree the archons become twisted and cruel, causing will and the good archons to disappear leaving Albion to descend into chaos. The wiki mentions famine, disease, and the appearance of horrifying creatures and the dead walking. The evil archons then construct the 'spire' a tower used to gather and concentrate 'willpower' (magic).  The contruction of the spire allows a creature called the crawler (from the same universe as the blades family) to escape into Albion. Three heros who's names I can't remember right now step up to fight the crawler, and end up blowing up the spire to destroy it. This explosion ends up wiping out the whole of Albion and the new kingdom grows and takes its place (this is the cycle where the three fable games are set)

In fable 1 your sister Theresa is mutilated by the villain of the story the returned jack of blades. It's believed by a lot of the fandom that Theresa is actually possessed by the queen of blades, now an immortal character due to the mixture of the queen's soul and Theresa's hero blood.  (There are many conspiracy theories about this if you want to read up!) It appears this game is set during the peak of enderals cycle, where the kingdom is at its best with heros running around saving the day and most people are havin a chill time. In fable 2 you are led by Theresa who appears as an immortal space hopping veiled woman on the path to defeat someone who would destroy Albion again. Whilst your choices at the end of the game don't affect the state of the kingdom that much, when you defeat Lucian and take the spire (yes the aforementioned world destroying super weapon) Theresa very ominously states that you can fuck off and do what you want but the spire is hers. This and fable three seem to be set during the declining end of the cycle, where things start going to shit, there's poverty everywhere and barely any heros left. In fable three Theresa's actions seem a lot more incidious. She leads you in battle against your older brother the tyrannical king of Albion, forcing you to enlist the help of the kingdoms people by making promises to treat them fairly once you take the throne. Only for you to find out once you've decemated bowerstone with your war that your brother was draining the kingdom of its money to fight the real threat - that's right the crawler is back baby and you have a year to raise 6mil to fight off the apocalypse whilst also paying to keep your promises to your friends and Better Albion.   Now I think a lot of people don't like fable 3 because of the random sudden paywall at the end and I get it, I was confused and annoyed too (I still love the game tho ️) and the path I took was the path I think they expected all the first blind playthroughs to go down - broke a few promises to pay to keep a few promises ect, ended up mostly wiping out Albion save for myself, Theresa and a few friends This is the 'pride was my fall' route as I like to call it, because I can totally see fable 3s main character being enderal's aged man. There are some more random parralels: -theresa is theorized to be in control of the shadow court in fable 2 meaning she takes sacrifices like the veiled woman from enderal. -in the first destroction of Albion, the three heros who blew up the spire are said to have transformed Into 'magic stones' - according to the fable lore after the events of the third game Theresa journeys to collect these stones - could it be that powerful heros become these black stones if they are present during the 'cleasing'? (Enderal's word for the end of the world) - in the old kingdom it is said that William black was the first person to get powerful magic, it is suggested from his time spent in the blades' family universe - the void, when he is kidnapped by jack of blades. He returns with magic, a sick sword full of souls and a 'corruption' disease that slowly gets worse and spreads through the archon and the kingdom - - He was likely infected by 'the corruption' the ruler of the void who canonically wishes to destroy and colonise Albion: corruption is a HUGE theme in enderal, the high ones are essentially personified corruption. - - I'd say the spire and the beacon are pretty obvious comparisons - both can cause the cleansing if used wrong - - in fable 2 Theresa leads lthe main character sparrow to their death and then possibly ressurected them and in enderal the veiled woman leads you to your death is able to ressurect characters like jespar and calia. - Ben/page and jespar/calia are like exactly the same: himbo and intelligent hottie (only difference is in fable 3 u can't marry Ben/page ) - reaver could also be the aged man considering he's immortal ? If you disagree or have even more parralels let me know !! I literally don't know anyone who will talk to me about this

[love-fireflysong]

Until Dawn’s Fifth Birthday

Welp, congrats Until Dawn, you’re officially old enough to start kindergarten. You’re off to learn to read, tie your shoes, recite yous ABC’s, and learn to count to 100. Your such a big kid now, and I’m proud of you for making it this far.

I know I have done literal jack shit for the entire month, but I have been immensely enjoying the things that everyone’s been putting out for this month. So I’m gonna make this text post, not just because of it’s the five year anniversary, but because it’s actually a post I’ve been wanting to make for a while.

So here it goes:

I first learned of Until Dawn when it first came out hilariously enough. My roommate at the time had boughten it for her ps4 and I had been seeing it all over my dashboard on tumblr at the time. I didn’t play it myself though until close to a year later, when I finally had my own ps4 and I bought the game used for like $20 or something from my local game rental store. And I was hooked.

I remember jumping the first time the UD logo pulls that jump scare on the title screen. And laughing because I’m normally pretty good with jump scares, but that one managed to get me because I hadn’t been expecting one before I even started the game. (The one thing in the game that manages to make me jump every time is the mine cart you stop as Mike. For whatever reason it doesn’t matter how dark my room is when I play the game or how many times I’ve played it, I can never see the mine cart until its literally on top of Mike and the QTE is almost up and I squeak in surprise every fucking time.)  

Of course I didn’t manage to save everyone during my first playthrough, I definitely lost Matt to the hook and Ash to the trapdoor (RIP darlings), and for the life of me I can’t recall how the lodge scene at the end went. I’m one of those players though that try to make choices that the characters I’m playing as would, I throw my feelings by the wayside. For example, being in the shed when the game’s making me choose Ash or Josh, and I was debating on whether or not Chris would save the girl he’s had a major crush on for a while at least, or his best friend for the last ten years. I distinctly remember wincing and sucking in air through my teeth and going “Sorry Ash, bros before hoes” and choosing Josh. And then being confused and convinced that I misunderstood the instructions? I mean I wasn’t complaining, just really, really confused. I definitely choose Ash to live at the gun one though, like there was no hesitation. I watched the whole ‘only thing I’ve ever wanted to do with my time’ scene and talk and the moment control was given back to me, the gun was under Chris’s jaw and I fired.

I’m also one of the players that didn’t know that Josh had been behind everything until the reveal either. I had gotten Sam captured so I never got any of those clues and I managed to miss the other clues that hinted at it being a set up (like the bundle of newspapers). So until the reveal I was still convinced that someone was out there killing all of them. Listen, I like mystery games but I’m not very good at connecting the dots okay.

I think I stuck around for a couple of months, gorging myself of fanfiction (all ff.net stuff by the way, I can’t remember if I knew about ao3 at that point or not) but like all interests do with me, the obsession eventually faded (helped in a large part by the rampant Ashley hate going around at the time) and I moved on.

Until February of this year. I was trying to kill time till the end of March when Persona 5: Royal released and I decided to try and see how many games I could platinum until that point. I had made it through the ps3 tomb raider games, Prince of Persia 2008, and decided on replaying the Uncharted games because the ps4 collection didn’t have multiplayer trophies. I hadn’t even thought of replaying Until Dawn. I mean, I had looked at the case and I remembered the game fondly, but that was it. There was no urge or want. 

I was halfway through Among Thieves when I was bored and chilling time on Youtube. And because I had been watching a couple of videos for the treasure locations in Uncharted, one of the recommended videos for me was a game sins for the series. I decided sure why not, and watched it. And watched a few of his other ones as well, Until Dawn included.

That’s right, what got me back into the series wasn’t fond nostalgia for the characters or story. It was a fucking Game Sins video. I’m so sorry.

I was devouring UD content again. I spent like 2 or 3 weeks reading everything Chrashley (with the hyper-fixation for the game back came the ship, what can I say) based on ao3 that I could get my hands on. I was back into the tag on tumblr, going through art I remembered seeing way back when and looking at usernames that didn’t mean a thing then, but mean the world to me now. And then near the end of February, when the obsession was once again starting to flag, I decided to hell with it, and clicked on the The (Almost)s.

I’m not going to expunge all my praises for the story, everyone else has done that better then I ever could. But guys, it was so good. So so good. I was hooked back into the series once again, just as I was starting to flag. And when I saw that @queenofbaws had mentioned that she was tumblr... I didn’t do anything right away. Too scared really, figured she might find it creepy, so I didn’t do anything for like a week. And then I decided fuck it, sent a message about Chris giving Ash his sweater, and following her.

And that was it. I figured I would stick around to see the story completed and just dip. Not even make a splash, just enjoy the content from the sidelines and no one would know that I was here in the first place. Same old, same old. But that was also when I started turning around the kernel in my mind that Baby It’s Cold Outside (so hold me tight in your arms and don’t let go). I didn’t even intend to write it, it was just going to be the fanfic that lived in my mind for me to stew on before bed every night. But I couldn’t sleep one night, my brain was too on and the words just weren’t stopping, so I pulled out my computer and wrote the first part from Chris standing in the snow outside to him reaching the lodge at like 3 in the morning. 

I started becoming more involved in the fandom when queenie started her wip wednesdays and asked to be tagged. Hilariously enough, those days are what started me cross-stitching again too, I hadn’t touched the pattern in months at that point. So I started posting snippets of my writing, and that one day a week was the only thing pushing me to continue writing. By that point, I had stopped hanging around the edges, now trying to push myself closer into this little fandom circle. 

The day I posted the story, I was fucking terrified. It wasn’t my first story, not by a long shot, but I had always considered my writing to be shit. I thought I had good ideas, but I never felt that I was able to truly bring them to life. English and grammar had never been my best subject, I was always more of a math and physics person growing up. But then that first comment from @elliepollie came in and I almost burst into tears. I couldn’t believe that someone out there liked it so much, that they were willing to leave me a review in the first place. I’m still so blown away that she was willing to recommend it as a Chrashley story for other people to read. I think that was the point I stopped hesitantly pushing my way through, and I just kicked down the doors and just yelled ‘Hey fuckers! I’m here now and you are going to fucking deal with it!’.

That was the event that opened the floodgates for me. Suddenly I was talking to people, I had friends online with the same interests as me. I’ve written more in the last six months then I’ve done in the last ten years! I’m feeling inspired to create again. I actually went out to do the first commission I’ve ever requested (speaking of which, please please please go commisson @fudgeroach. I cannot wait until he can post and show you guys the stuff he drew for me. It was worth every fucking penny let me tell you.)

I’m going to be honest, Until Dawn isn’t my favourite game. Sure it has some of my fav lines (it had been years since I played the game, and the moment Jess started her rant outside the guest cabin I was screaming it along with her) and great characters, as horrible people as they all are, but it’s never been my favourite game and likely never will be. But Until Dawn has the best fandom I’ve ever been in and I’m so, so happy to have met and known every single person here. I seriously love every single person here so, so much. You all make my life better and I’m so happy to have all of you in it. Just to quote Chris because I can: “Every second I spend with you is all I ever wanted to do with my time.” This is how I feel. This is how I feel every goddamn day now.

So yeah, I got back into this fandom from a stupid Game Sins video. But by god if it wasn’t the best choice I’ve ever made.

(PS: for those wondering, I never did finish Uncharted 2. Maybe one day...) 

[rubyredsundae]

Mass Effect Trilogy Tag!

I was not tagged by anyone, I just really wanted to join in. If you see this and want to as well, please do! I've been loving reading through everyone's :)

I am a fan since… 2011ish? Definitely at least a year before ME3 came out. I remember watching my brother play ME2 and thinking it was so cool. While he was away it was a huge comfort for me to play it in his room, kind of like a bonding or cathartic experience for someone who wasn't there at the time.

When ME3 came out, me and him went to the midnight release at a gamestop like 40 minutes away or something, wearing clothes we threw together to kind of fit the N7 color scheme. Even though we don't talk anymore, those memories are still really precious to me. Also, the nostalgia of playing ME1 after-school or on the weekend, running to get my easy mac from the microwave during a cutscene, stuffing too hot mouthfuls while speeding the Mako towards the conduit on Ilos.

Favorite game of the series: It's a tough call between ME1 and ME2, but I'd say ME2. It's the game I get the urge to replay the most.

MaleShep or FemShep? Femshep all the way. I only play MShep when I want to do his exclusive romances. No offense to BroShep, but ME was the first game I ever played that let me not just be a girl, but customizable. Not just to be the already generated token girl character in a pack of boys. And not only can you play Femshep, but every game you are surrounded by smart, funny, tough women as squadmates. It was such a huge deal to me, and still is. Femshep represents so much. As Jennifer Hale put it, FemShep was a military grade boot to the video game industry glass ceiling.

Earthborn, Colonist or Spacer? I personally tend to lean spacer in-game, but I tend to use Earthborn when I'm writing fics.

Paragon or Renegade? Usually Paragon, but Renegade playthroughs can be really interesting, especially if I have a detailed background about why Shep is the way they are. My first Renegade, Krystle, is pretty bigoted and anti-alien until she meets Liara. Krystle is naturally guarded and quick to anger, so meeting someone who seemed to accept her and listen to her without judgment really opens her mind.

By the 2nd game, she wakes up in the cerberus lab with new biotic powers, having previously been a regular foot soldier. This makes her seeth, having someone completely take her agency, agreeing with the illusive man on the surface but plotting against him the entire time. She starts to lean more Paragon, if only to piss him off. She has the biggest smirk on her face when she blows up the collector base.

Biotics or Tech? Oooh, this is hard. Maybe biotics just the tiniest smidge because of Jack/Samara biotic bubble throw during the suicide mission. I don't know if we'll ever get a screen adaptation but THAT is a moment I would pay to see done with a big SFX budget behind it.

Favorite class: Sentinel! I don't know how much this reflects on my class preference in gaming in general, but I love the 'jack of all trades'ness of it. By the time I get an assault rifle, I don't really feel the need for anyone else to make up for something I lack. Also, tech armor in ME2? Where your shields regenerate automatically when it breaks, and the cool down is when you initially active it, instead of when you detonate it? Chef's kiss. I understand why it was nerfed in 3 but I'm still mad.

Favorite companion: Ho boy. This is obviously very difficult to choose but I'm gonna say Miranda. I've always loved and identified with her character, I love the accent, and she's always useful on missions. I was so happy when I learned she could be a squadmate in the armax arena.

Honorable mention to Ashley in ME1. Her character is rarely used to exposition lore, so she just gets to have her personality fleshed out. I don't always agree with her but she does seem genuinely willing to listen. ME3 tosses her out the airlock though; partially because her content was bugged and never restored, leaving her inclusion feel half-baked, and partly because Ash and Kaidan have to be able to serve the same plot function as each other and it negatively affects her character more than his. This could also be intentional on bioware's part, to try to flesh out kaidan's personality and tone down Ashley's as a response to criticisms of them from ME1.

Least favorite companion: Also difficult, because I don't really hate anyone as much as I am just less interested in some. I didn't like Zaeed for a long time, but I think he's much better and really funny in ME3. James was pushed on me too much at the beginning and it made me really dislike him, but I think he's greatly improved and also pretty funny in Citadel DLC. I'm also pretty indifferent to Jacob; I don't think he's a bad character, just disappointing because there was a lot of potential.

Not that every character has to go on and do some grand quest to be interesting, but I don't feel like Jacob every really got a big hero moment like everyone else. He is a very calm and introverted person (imo) who doesn't really share his feelings, so it's always been hard for to to connect with him on anything.

My squad selection: Depends on the game, but it usually involves Garrus lol. Typically it's Liara/Garrus in ME1, Miranda/Garrus for ME2, and Liara/Garrus again in ME3. I am very boring and predictable! If you have any suggestions for me to try out and mix things up, let me know!

Favorite in-game romance: Also depends on the game. ME1 it's Liara, hands down. It was the first game, really the first piece of media, where I was told two women could fall in love and be happy and that was okay. The amount of enlightenment and comfort in figuring out that I was bi these games brought me is kind of wild to look back on.

ME2 is a toss-up between Garrus and Thane. They are both wonderful but in completely different ways. I tend to now romance Thane on characters I don't plan on importing to ME3, or if I do, to just have a really depressed fucking Shepard lol. I hate how much Thane was brushed off, especially if you romanced him.

Other pairings I like: l love Miranda so much, but I'm a gay girl so I ship her and Femshep. Same goes for Tali, Jack, Ashley... damn I'm just really gay for straight girls huh :/

I don't really have any other ships for non-Shep related pairings.

Favorite NPC: Shiala is really cool to me, I wish we got to see her in 3. Emily Wong is also cool, also wish we saw her in 3. There's probably a lot more that when I come across them next I'll be like, "you! I love you! You're my favorite."

Oh also Joker! And EDI! But not together. Idk I feel like ME3 threw a curveball at me with "do you support organic/non-organic relationships?" Like m'am please don't ask me, I accidentally drank turian liquor last year, I'm not qualified to be an expert on this.

Favorite antagonist: Tbh I really dig Saren. I think his reasoning is super fascinating, both to set up how someone who's indoctrinated can rationalize to themselves that they are still in control; and as a foil to Shepard, to show what can happen when you become too isolated and the ends justify the means. I think his VA does a great job of walking the line between desperate survivor and madman. He's also the only antagonist in the trilogy that we ever fight 1 on 1 (ignoring squadmates) and it feels more personal. I think he's such a fantastic foe for the first entry in a trilogy and I don't think he gets enough credit.

Favorite mission: Is it cliche to say the suicide mission? It's honestly close to perfect. The stakes, the sequencing, the cinematics, the score. Everything works so well.

Favorite loyalty mission: Kasumi's and Tali's are really cool, as we all know. Samara's is also cool because it is entirely non-combat based. Shepard has to prove they can accomplish what seems impossible without a gun or biotics.

The confrontation at the end with Morinth always haunts me a little, because they are both right in their own way. Morinth's final line, "and they say I'm the monster", as you let Samara kill her, watch her scrambling backwards in fear... I know that she's a remorseless killer, but it gets me every time.

Favorite DLC: It's Citadel, obviously. Turns out what I really wanted was quality time and a party with all my friends. I love mass effect for many reasons, but simulating friends and affection when I had none has always made me bond to this series like other games don't. Is it sad? Sure! But I don't think love and affection for fictional characters should ever be shameful until it makes you hurt other people.

Control, Synthesis or Destroy? I'd say destroy. If the other options were presented earlier and we had time to stew with it, maybe I'd be more split. But all of this in 5 minutes? It's not like the collector base where the implications are obvious and the choice is just down to what Shepard believes. The 3 choices all seem like space magic out of nowhere, and none of them seem to really offer any insight on what Shepard should believe. So I say destroy, just because it's what Shep has intended and is most consistent with their character and their admiration of Anderson.

Favorite weapon: The spectre level assault rifle in ME1. Never have I felt more powerful.

Favorite place: Idk why but I just thought of the creepy lab with all the scientists during the leviathan DLC. I really love when Mass Effect leans into the Lovecraftian horror aspect of things. Talking to Sovereign and Vigil in ME1 gave me goosebumps my first few playthroughs.

A quote I like: I have hundreds, but the one off the top of my head is, "After time adrift among open stars, along tides of light and through shoals of dust, I will return to where I began." I have a poster of it up on my wall right now!

[kolbisneat]

MONTHLY MEDIA: December 2019

Oof what a year! It’s been a rollercoaster and I realize I haven’t been posting much art this month. I’m heads down working on my Neverland role playing setting (out next fall, I think!) and thus it’s been quiet. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t still taken time to read and watch things and such! Here’s how I spent the month of December!

……….FILM……….

Knives Out (2019) Just incredible. It’s beautiful and subversive while still delivering on the expectations of a murder mystery. It’s one of those films that just feels like everyone was having a great time making it and I think we need more of these in the theatres. Absolutely worth checking out.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) You know, I just don’t think this film was for me. I saw it with a quartet and felt like the varying opinions was a  good breakdown of what worked and what didn’t. The person who grew up with Star Wars and thoroughly knows the universe loved every minute of it. Totally satisfied. The person who has maybe seen half of the 9 movies had nooooooo idea who half the original cast was and never really got a sense of what the point of the movie was. Like what was the driving thrust? Control over...the galaxy? I guess. Anyway, I don’t know if I would’ve enjoyed it more if I didn’t know all the drama outside of the actual films, but I can’t avoid that now. At its core, I think the movie tried to do too much and in doing so, didn’t do enough. It spent so much unnecessary time with old characters and it diluted the time we spent with the new cast. The action felt empty and I just don’t think I was the target audience for this movie. And that’s fine.

Noelle (2019) Very much ABC/TGIF Christmas movie vibes. The sets were fun and there were some wonderfully touching moments in there. It felt a little long and maybe that’s where editing it into a 2 hour block with commercial breaks would’ve helped.

……….TELEVISION……….

The Mandalorian (Episode 1.01 to 1.01) This is Star Wars that worked for me and hopefully future movies will follow this template aka be inspired by the iconography of the world but expand and tell light/smaller stories. It’s fun when Star Wars is fun. 

You (Episode 2.01 to 2.10) This season doesn’t ask for any more suspension of disbelief as the first season and I think that’s incredible. It’s still a little kooky, but continues to be relevant and unsettling. Great performances and a fascinating exploration of the old and new characters.

Swamp Thing (Episode 1.01 to 1.02) The casting is a little jarring (I recognize that there are real life scientists that are Hollywood handsome and beautiful, but it just feels a little boring) and I haven’t quite gotten past it. With that said, the pacing has been brisk and the effects are stellar.

……….READING……….

Dracula vs Hitler by Patrick Shean Duncan (Page 240/500) Perhaps the title and premise presents a slightly pulpier story but I’m still a big fan of what I’ve read so far. It mostly feels like a story set during the second world war with a light dose of the fantastic, and it’s great! The structure of the book follows various points of view and it really allows for a deep dive into each character’s perspective. It also does something the first Pirates of the Caribbean did well: only lightly explores the coolest character. Like Jack Sparrow (and again, only in the first movie), Dracula is a compliment to the main characters and the fact he isn’t where we spend all our time means his presence is made all the cooler. So far, so good. 

Emperor Mollusk Versus The Sinister Brain by A. Lee Martinez (Complete) Writing a hyper-intelligent conqueror as the main character is tricky in that most of the book is a breeze. The plot presents a mystery wrapped in pulpy fun, but it’s not nearly as enjoyable when the lead already solved all the problems outside of the current events. To its credit, the end gets far more interesting and sees the titular mollusk up against dire circumstances, but I’m not sure it made up for the rest of the book for me. Recommended if you want a casual adventure with giant robots and sentient plants and alien worlds, but just know that the plotting and characters stray dangerously close to Ready Player One territory.

Silver Surfer Omnibus by Dan Slott, Michael Allred, Laura Allred, and many many more (Complete) Ugh I loved this so so so much and I think Silver Surfer may be one of my new favourite characters. This run is so optimistic and big yet also deeply personal and driven by love that I just...I really felt so much when it was over. It’s sci-fi used to highlight human stories and I’m just so glad it exists.

……….AUDIO……….

Bat Out of Hell by Meatloaf (1977) Maybe it’s because my dad had this album, or maybe it’s just something about Meatloaf’s voice, but the whole thing feels like it captures what it was like being a teenage white boy in the seventies. It also feels like it captures the spirit of live as an AV or drama kid in highschool and that I can’t explain quite as well. It just tells stories of relationships in the biggest and most dramatic fashion possible and it’s fantastic.

Faster Than the Speed of Night by Bonnie Tyler (1983) Researching Meatloaf lead me to Bat out of Hell’s producer, Jim Steinman, and to this album by Bonnie Tyler. It has the big, fill-your-chest, sound and I love a song that features a children’s choir. Right from the first track you know you’re in for something bombastic and it really delivers.

……….GAMING……….

Pandemic (Zman Games) We were gifted this for Christmas and while I’ve seen it on a bunch of “Best Board Games” lists, I really wasn’t prepared for what an adventure it was! The cooperative element is a nice touch and it really does feel like you’re trying to stop an outbreak of infectious diseases. Great for small groups and also I’ve yet to “win” this game.

The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening (Nintendo) This new style on the Switch is so freaking cute! I’m also loving the rather concise game in comparison to Breath of the Wild. Definitely going to try to get 100% but I’m doing the hard mode for my first playthrough so maybe I’m overconfident. Anyway. So cute!!!

Maze of the Blue Medusa (Satyr Press) The group continues to explore but I can see the cracks. Maybe I’m not the best Dungeon Master for a megadungeon or perhaps this group wants more of a narrative-based game; it’s just not quite clicking. I think we’ll be trying something new in 2020.

And that’s it! As always, I’d love to get your recommendos and see you in 2020!

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: Tell Me Where To Find Shelter -- Weird And Complicated Video Game Crossover AUs Strike Again

Okay, so last week I offered you all an updated rewrite on my old Fallout 4 Sole Survivor!Victor AU, Tell Me Where To Find Shelter. And at the very end of said update, I let you know that I had an idea for fitting Alice into the AU --

Specifically, my Malkavian Alice from Vampire: the Masquerade -- Bloodlines.

Look, the fact of the matter is, Fallout 4 and Bloodlines have been rather closely connected in my head from day one of my purchasing them -- hell, I got them during the same Steam sale! (Along with the BioShock series entire, which is why I had a couple of posts about Tell Me Where to Find Shelter back in 2016, then it dropped off the face of the earth -- I played Bloodlines first, and followed up with that series.) And my “Londerland Bloodlines” playthrough of Bloodlines was done concurrently with my starting up Fallout 4, so -- yeah. Me wanting to figure out how to cross the two over was probably inevitable.

I know what you’re all thinking, of course -- “how the hell do you make this sort of crossover work?” Well, I have had a few ideas:

-->This version of Malkavian Alice and her adventures in 2004 Los Angeles would be much more like the standard fledgling’s, given that the Corpse Bride characters are now born in the future. So the person she saves in the hospital is Heather (who she does manage to send away in time to save her life), and the Giovanni party goes down without dragging an undead version of Lizzie into the mix. Obviously the story and setting would have to be tweaked to fit better into Fallout’s alternate history (though given what the computers in the original game are like, maybe that’s easier than expected). She still goes Independent, and escapes from Los Angeles in the wake of LaCroix’s explosive death, making her way slowly but surely to the East Coast because she has had enough of California and everyone there.

-->She manages to get on with her unlife, watching the growing tensions with China and the Resource Wars with unease, but keeping to herself and doing her best not to let her humanity slip as she gets older. When the bombs fall, she’s sleeping the day away in a basement bunker she set up in Boston -- but the destruction from the explosion ends up collapsing part of the ceiling, burying her in rubble -- with a chunk of timber piercing her heart. She ends up in a staked torpor. . .

-->Until Victor shows up at her location at night to clear out a few raiders who are taking over the place as a base. One of the raiders yanks out the stake to use as a weapon, has three seconds to wonder why it’s got fresh blood on it -- then Alice explodes from her centuries-long hiding place and drinks him dry. Victor is too stunned at first to actually shoot her, and once Alice’s blood thirst has been quest, she immediately puts her hands up and does her best to show she means him no harm. They talk, Alice explains what happened (and goes ahead and admits she’s a vampire when Victor explains about the nuclear apocalypse -- who gives a shit about the Masquerade when the world has ended?), she offers to help with the remaining raiders to prove her good intentions, Victor accepts, and they take down the assholes together.

-->Obviously, Alice isn’t immediately “unlockable” as a companion -- she’s still got her sunlight thing, after all! She and Victor chat about it, and Victor, feeling bad, offers his assistance. Alice accepts -- she misses the sun -- and says that she’ll stay where she is for the moment (after finding a non-partially-collapsed basement to stay in) and keep raiders and monsters out while he searches for information. And so the “Here Comes The Sun” quest begins, with Victor searching for a way to counteract the sunlight curse! I’m thinking this would end up interacting with the Cabot family stuff, because I don’t think it would be hard at all to change the source of their immortality, and the artifact upon Lorenzo’s head, from something alien to something vampiric. Maybe Lorenzo’s partially possessed by the spirit of an Antediluvian, and it’s turned his blood into something close enough to vitae it can make ghouls? At any rate, Jack manages to whip something up after examining some of Alice’s blood (which, naturally, she’s kind of nervous about, but what choice does she have?), and it successfully stops her from burning up in sunlight (though she is weaker in it). A grateful Alice thanks Victor (and Jack) and agrees to travel with him to experience the Commonwealth.

-->As they go on together, they end up getting closer -- Alice likes that Victor is generally a good guy and sympathizes with the story of his lost family; Victor likes Alice’s snarky wit and strong sense of justice. As they share more details of their lives, help out the settlements, and battle monsters together, they realize they’re growing feelings for each other, and eventually get together, facing off against the Institute as a couple and parenting Synth Shaun/Chester together afterwards. (Alice jokes a lot that it took both her dying and the end of the world in general to finally get a domestic happy ending.)

-->Alice’s starting clothes would be a simple blue dress and apron with black buckled boots (the dress would naturally have a big bloody hole right over her heart when she first wakes up; she patches this after you leave her to her own devices for a bit), and she’d have the Tal’Mahe’Ra Blade (her prize from her storming of the Hallowbrook Hotel, taken from Andrei’s lair) as her standard weapon. She has a unique bite attack, being a vampire, and can still use Obfuscate (turning invisible to sneak past/sneak attack enemies) and Dementation (inflict debuffs on enemies so they’re confused and can’t shoot straight, or kill a single enemy from fear alone), though both have a cooldown so Victor can’t rely on her just spamming that to take care of every raider for him! XD Her perk would allow you to drain blood from enemy corpses (which other companions would find less disturbing than outright cannibalism, but still fairly creepy) and/or increase the healing capabilities of blood packs. I’m thinking, once romanced, she’d also have a unique variation of the “Lover’s Embrace” temporary perk, “Love Bite” -- Victor wakes up with HP not fully restored, but the XP boost is greater than “Lover’s Embrace” (+20% vs +15%).

-->Other vampiric elements of the Commonwealth would include:

A) That blood bank you can find? Those bags of blood are warm and fresh because there’s a Tremere there who has built up their power and knows some rituals for preserving the stuff. Unfortunately, they’re also very low humanity by this point, so they end up being a nasty surprise fight.

B) There’s a secret settlement of vampires that is made up of all the various fledglings you could pick from in Bloodlines, having learned to live together after the destruction of vampire society along with human when the bombs fell. The local Tremeres managed some blood sorcery that infused a mutfruit tree with human blood, so plasma fruit, a la The Sims 4, is a thing for them, and allows them to live in relative peace with their human neighbors (though they’ll happily drain anyone who attacks them). They’d probably have a quest revolving around either talking down or killing some vampire hunters who have been eying their base, and they could be persuaded to allow Jack Cabot and family to study them in exchange for vitae to help them stay in their immortal states. Also, the Malkavians openly call Victor the “Sole Survivor” and offer roundabout tips on his quests -- if he can decipher them. XD

C) This is just one that amuses me -- this universe’s Mysterious Stranger is none other than good old Caine! He’s trying to be a little more helpful to mortal and Kindred alike in the post-apocalypse, and has decided this means “showing up randomly to help people out of tight spots before vanishing again.” Alice, upon seeing him, jokes that the cabdriver thing didn’t work out, huh?

D) I’d kind of like to make stimpacks developed from vampire or ghoul blood to explain just how it is they can heal crippled limbs so fast -- the wiki didn’t provide much of an answer there! Which means anyone who uses them is at least slightly a ghoul. . .which might explain a few things about carry weight and why some enemies are so tough. (Legendaries have more vitae in their system, prompting the power-up, maybe?)

So yeah -- that’s how I’d get Bloodlines and Fallout to work together, and thus have my Malkavian!Alice and Sole Survivor!Victor be a couple in the wasteland. Because why make a crossover simple when I could make it way more complicated than it needs to be? XD Look, I just like the mental images I have of them together -- and of Alice taking out a whole army of baddies by hitting them with Voice of Bedlam to throw them into absolute chaos.

[roloko-karlstein]

S+: 

Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy IV: The After Years - my favorite games in the FF franchise it had a pretty damn good story and the characters were really memorable to me. Also its home to two of the few best OST that has Uematsu has composed Red Wings and The Four Fiends. On top of that I really loved how the sequel adds another layer of strategy with its lunar system. I know people hate the sequel cause of how it was spit into multiple episodes you had to buy, but as a person playing the PSP version where the all the stories were all bundled into one price it was actually pretty fun to see how and what the characters has been up to all this time and some fresh faces in forms of either children or comrades of the old IV cast.

S:

Final Fantasy VI: I love this game its my second favorite FF title. I think my favorite thing about it was at different times you controlled different party members it wasn’t just Terra the whole time. Also the fact anybody can learn magic so in a pinch you could use your offensive characters to heal. Who can forget the opera scene and the Dancing Mad song? Instant classic songs

Final Fantasy Type 0: My third favorite game in the franchise. I know that is an unpopular opinion, but I just love the setting and how you can control any character cause its their story and not like a specific character (Ace). Every character has their own weapons and way of fighting I really love using Cinque,Jack, and Trey. I know people hate using her cause she is slow, but I feel like its all about timing she is super strong honestly. I never finished it nor a new game plus where I think it ends differently than the first playthrough. I love the battle system overworld battles play more like Tales of while the missions play out like XV’s battle system, but I think better honestly.

A: 

Final Fantasy X: My fourth favorite FF title and if I remember my very first. Touching story and I love the characters. The only real flack I have is unskippable cutscenes even in the remaster. It really makes it annoying when facing two certain bosses.

Final Fantasy IX: My fifth favorite FF title. It had quite a few memorable characters and fun games on the side. I really liked its story too. The final boss really came out of no where I still think it should’ve ended at Kuja, but whatevs.

Final Fantasy VII: This one is a classic which is why it made A rank. I’m fairly certain the remake will be S or S+ tier with how they are expanding on characters and the story (I will cry over Biggs,Wedge, and Jessie I can feel it you know its coming, but I bet Square will pull out all the stops to get us to like them)

Final Fantasy Rhythm games: My other favorite genre after JRPGs which is rhythm games. I love the little chibi characters!

B:

Crisis Core: Its a nice prequel and the ending was really good I remember first playing it I cried even though I knew it was coming. I really like the song “Why” that plays during the credits

Final Fantasy V: Only reason it is below A rank is cause I never really got far in it. And both times I played it I only made it to the part where we find out about Faris and Lenna’s relationship. Job system was pretty cool and was an upgrade from III.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper: For a mobile game its pretty good and the gatcha was I think for weapons and not for characters.

Final Fantasy VIII: I actually like the junction and drawing system it was new. The final boss fight would leave me on the edge of my seat cause the final boss I think draws all of a certain type of magic from you every other turn so it was basically a battle against time. This series had more of a modern day/futuristic vibe to it. The only reason its a B cause I didn’t really care too much for the story.

Final Fantasy II: Its an easy game after hitting yourself for two hours straight. No really. After I got past the first part of the game I find that ya know it isn’t THAT bad of a game kinda tedious at the start to get your stats up there, but after that it really is smooth sailing the rest of the game.

Final Fantasy: It is only at B rank cause this is where everything began even if the game play is simple and the characters have no name and there really isn’t much of a story

C:

Final Fantasy X-2: I think its nice that we get to see a more light hearted story for the most part, but I don’t think this was really necessary. Has one of the best battle systems in the franchise though I have fun playing it and it does have some really challenging fights. 

Final Fantasy XIII: I don’t think its bad as what people make it out to be its honestly an average game and the story is alright. 

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: I used to play this game and the event stories that would come out were really good, but if you do not have 6 Star characters with super strong equipment you would never able to finish the story. Also from what I’ve heard its not even harder to obtain lapis to draw for characters. Gatcha has been going downhill and the events harder which is why I eventually quit.

Final Fantasy III: I haven’t gotten far, but I don’t really care too much for how you can only have so many spells for each level. I think I like V and X-2 more since you can actually learn all the magics by using that class in battle.

World of Final Fantasy: Meh...thats all I gotta say I want to kill that animal thing “THE this” “THE that” if I want to hear shit like that I would go watch Teen Titans Go

D:

Final Fantasy All The Bravest: Again not as bad as the fandom says it is and I breezed through it in a week. I guess I can see why people are ticked though. $1 for a character and it might not even show up in your party. 

Final Fantasy XII: I’m thinking about giving this another chance honestly. I wasn’t a fan of the gameplay or license board.

Final Fantasy XV: Probably one of the biggest disappointments since me playing XII. I payed full price for both AND bought the strategy guides which was not cheap. While XV is better with its gameplay the story felt really rushed and had some of the worst romantic subplot I have ever seen compared to any previous Final Fantasy. Noct had more development with his fellow chocobruhs than he ever did with Luna.

The Dissidia games: I’m not a fan of fighting games I think what I liked most about these were different heroes/villains interacting with each other.

F:

Dirge of Cerberus: Terrible game play, Terrible story, I got motion sickness extremely easy, all around bad game.

Final Fantasy XV mobile game: I never played it, but I have seen ads for it and I’m like really? REALLY?

[dumbthinmint]

Log cabin, eyelashes, beard, ireland, drungs, cunt mug, memes, septicart, jackie's cape, pins from jse themed ask game :D

:D Thank you!!!

Cabin: What was the first video you saw on Jack’s channel?

Ohhhhhhh this is a good one. It was his Undertale genocide route series! I had beaten the pacifist route myself, but decided to google a playthrough for the rest of it. Jack’s first video was the first one google suggested, and here I am!

Eyelashes: What you like the most in yourself?

Probably how genuine I am.  I’m not afraid to take up space, express myself, share my experiences, and live genuinely (while being respectful towards others, of course), even when that will make me stand out as “different.” 

I was lucky enough to grow up in a classroom environment that didn’t bully me for my quirks. They were “just how Emily is,” and while I knew I was different, I never really saw that as a bad thing. 

Of course, I’ve gone through patches in other areas of my life where I felt very insecure and unworthy of value, but for the most part, that developmental period of my life really set the stage for the way I exist around others as an adult. 

Beard: What topic could you spend hours talking about?

Hahahaha I could measure my life in phases of special interests. Obviously, one thing that I will literally never shut up about is my AU blog, @thewatchau. But that’s a very recent special interest that I’ve developed in the last year or so.

If I had to pick one that has really defined multiple periods of my life and hasn’t faded away or become less significant to me as time goes by? It would be the Halo games. Oh Lord, I could talk about those games forever and ever. 

The worldbuilding is incredibly relevant and fascinating to study as a history nerd, the characters are intensely complex and dynamic, and the story is just something you can get lost in. 

It’s not just games; there are books, comics, podcasts, miniseries, and more, all with more lore to just bury yourself in. I’ve been in love with the series since around 2013, and I don’t expect that love to die anytime soon.

Ireland: Do you have a lucky charm?

Does my cell phone count? 

XD Just kidding. Tbh, not really. I have little keychains and stuff, but nothing that I give any supernatural significance to, jokingly or otherwise. 

That being said, as a Christian, I do have a few bible verses that help me feel at peace when making hard choices. They don’t give me good luck, but they’re a reminder that someone more powerful than superstition has got my back.

Jeremiah 29:11 is my personal favorite: “‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the Lord, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you; plans to give you a hope and a future.’”

Drums: What’s your favorite sound?

A lack thereof XD 

I’m very sound sensitive, so no noise is good noise in my book. That being said, I do have some music that I’m quite fond of. But nothing specific enough to mention here. 

Mug: How many mugs you own? Do you have a favorite one?

I have four mugs that I can safely call my own:

A christmas tree one I painted years and years ago, which my mom pulls out to make hot chocolate during the winter. 

A mug with Donald Duck’s face and nerd glasses saying “Mad Genius” that we got at Disney World. 

A mug with the Jeremiah 29:11 bible verse on it and a cracked handle (curse the endless cycle of moving in and out of college). 

And a mug that my sister painted for my with a stormtrooper on one side and the words “This is not the mug you are looking for” on the other. 

The last one is probably my favorite.

Memes: Do you have favorite tongue twister?

Hmmmmmmmm... not really, though the “Peter Picked a Peck of Pickled Peppers” is one that I have vague fond memories of. I think my dad used to say it to me when I was very small. I can’t quite remember.

Septicart: Who inspires you?

Oof, a lot of people. Let’s assume that family members don’t count, because otherwise we’d be here all day. Oh, and same for youtubers. I reblogged the ask game, didn’t I? 

The cheesy Christian answer is Jesus, of course, but it’s not wrong. The guy was an incredible person, contrary to how He’s represented in Conservative Christianity today. He stood up for the immigrants, the poor, the disabled, the ostracized, the guilty... everyone. Who wouldn’t want to live out that example of love and gentleness, especially in today’s hellscape of a world?

There’s a guy named Roland at my church, who helped me get involved in the bilingual ministry there and is a person I majorly look up to. They were the first adult I ever met who I could look at and say, “I could picture myself being an adult like them.” Definitely a big mentor figure for me.

And finally, J.R.R. Tolkien, because screw it, if he can make this insanely massive world, then I can too, just freaking watch me. XD

Cape: What are three nice things that happened to you today?

Ummmm... okay ngl it’s been a kinda crappy weekend. 

I got a paragraph of my essay done (it’s due this evening but still that’s one less paragraph to finish in a panic later...)

I managed to get six hours of sleep, despite waking up every two hours because apparently my body is determined to break in a different way every few weeks. Waking up and falling back asleep is better than waking up and staying awake.

Oh! And I don’t have anything at all to do today outside of writing this stupid essay, so I can panic about the approaching deadline in the relative comfort of my pajamas and write when the productivity strikes me. 

Pins: Are you collecting something?

The charity pins XD I’m not much of a collector, but the pins are something of an exception. 

Oh, and also I’d love to start a collection of big fancy video game companion guides, but so far I only have two, so that’s not much of a collection yet. They’re so expensive though!!!!!!!!!! :P

[pixelgrotto]

The horrific Resident Evil playthrough, interlude three

I just finished watching all of the Resident Evil movies I could get my hands on. When I told people I was doing this as the last part of my great year-long playthrough, they all let out groans and said something along the lines of, “Ugh, don’t you wanna end on a good note?” Undaunted by these words and fueled by my ability to tolerate crappy cinema, I moved forward, courageously making it through nine of these suckers...which, to be fair, ranged from surprisingly enjoyable to just as terrible as everyone warned me about. 

Before I begin, it’s important to note that we’re dealing with two separate film series here. There’s director Paul W.S. Anderson’s Resident Evil Hollywood films, which are the ones that most people know about. Then there are three Japanese-made CG movies that are canon and co-exist alongside the stories of the games. The Anderson movies are...mostly ass. The Japanese ones are okay. 

Let us start with the ass first. 

Resident Evil - The first RE film came out in 2002, which means that what little CG it has is laughably dated and it’s refreshingly small-scale when compared to its sequels. The movie’s a fan fiction remix of some themes from Resident Evil 1, except with none of the characters from the games present. Instead, we have Paul W.S. Anderson’s wife Milla Jovovich taking center stage as Alice, the former head of Umbrella security in a secret base called the Hive that goes to hell when some dude tries to steal viruses. The entirety of the action takes place in the Hive, and we get a surprisingly tiny number of monsters, with just your garden variety zombies, a few Cerberus and a single Licker showing up. Even though she does run up a wall and kick a Cerberus in the face, Alice is at her most realistic here (she turns into a dual wielding mutant with the ability to make the camera go into slow-motion whenever she wants in all the other films), there’s a nifty laser grid scene that all the sequels keep referencing when they want you to feel nostalgic, and the Hive’s sentient AI, the Red Queen, is compelling enough that Capcom eventually stuck her in Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles. Aside from this movie being full of British actors who do REALLY awful American accents, sounding like they all have mouths full of sausages, Paul W.S. Anderson’s first take on Resident Evil is probably the most watchable one he made. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse - Okay, this one is watchable too, but in more of a popcorn-munching “lol, this shit is dumb” way. It steals the general plot of Resident Evils 2 and 3, with Raccoon City getting infected, but ups the cheese by a hundred. Alice is now a thirteen-year-old boy’s version of a BADAZZ woman, with lots of guns and a bare midriff, and she teams up with Jill Valentine, who resembles her game self in looks but not exactly in personality. Together, they’ve gotta escape Raccoon City along with Carlos Oliveira, who is possibly the only character from the games who is done a great service in these Anderson movies, which make him much more likable even if they couldn’t find an actual Hispanic actor to portray him and had to settle for an Israeli instead. Oh, and Nemesis shows up, because one of the dudes from the first movie who accompanied Alice into the Hive gets experimented on and turned into what honestly looks like someone’s Halloween costume. The writers commit a cardinal sin at the end of the flick by humanizing him, having him suddenly remember his TRUE SELF and help the good guys, but aside from that screw-up I admit that I had a goofy grin on my face throughout several parts of this movie. After Nemesis blows up the Raccoon City station and murmurs his one line of dialogue- “STARRRRRSSSS” - I even kinda felt like clapping. So yeah, Apocalpyse is idiotic fun.

Resident Evil: Extinction - Here’s where the movies stop being mildly entertaining and become varying degrees of either “meh” or just plain bad. Extinction’s biggest problem is that it makes the weird decision of having the entire PLANET be wiped nearly completely clean by Umbrella’s virus, giving the franchise the most generic setting imaginable for a zombie flick - a post-apocalyptic world. And even though this film features Claire Redfield and actually has Alice fight a Tyrant that looks the part, I feel that by turning the environment into Mad Max the filmmakers missed the entire point of the franchise. Resident Evil isn’t really about a “what if” scenario with mankind dying and zombies taking over the world. Instead, it’s about how humanity manages to cope in a time where zombies are used by corporations for terrorism purposes - hence the franchise’s “bio-organic weapon” catch-phrase for its creatures. It’s about how brave people live on in an era that just happens to feature biopunk monsters as a deadly fact of life. It’s about the evil that resides within a world that is pretty shitty, but hasn’t completely gone to shit. By turning the whole planet into the same ol’ zombie playground that we see in most popular fiction starring these workman-like horror tropes, Extinction - which probably thought it was upping the stakes - instead just feels sorta dull, and anyone who views the film today is probably going to see it as a weaker version of The Walking Dead. Oh, and it ends with Alice discovering clones of herself, which will only serve to screw with the loose continuity of these movies as they go on. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife - This one starts with Alice’s clones raiding the Umbrella facility in Tokyo, and the whole sequence - which feels like it should be the finale - is reduced to a few minutes of special effects in the beginning. (This is foreshadowing for the next two films, which both end with hints of giant, climatic battles that mostly happen off-screen, if at all.) The first thing that I noticed when watching this was how slow-mo kicked in every five minutes and how the camera seemed to linger on bullets, and I eventually remembered that this film was released during Hollywood’s obsession with 3D during the early 2010s. This explains Afterlife’s IN-YOUR-FACE-IN-THREE-DIMENSIONS action scenes, which are initially pretty in a music video sort of way but become overdone and tiresome as the movie goes on, kinda like a Zack Snyder film. (I place Paul W.S. Anderson in the same “style over substance” category of director as both Zack Snyder and Michael Bay, by the way.) Anyway, Afterlife deals with Alice teaming up with more survivors to try to find a secret ship haven free of zombies. Along the way she runs into Chris Redfield, who looks more like a janitor than the jacked BSAA agent that he is in the games, and Chris and Claire Redfield have a quick sibling reunion and fight Wesker in a scene with choreography shamelessly stolen from Resident Evil 5. It’s pandering fan service and sort of diverting, but ultimately none of it matters. Chris disappears after this movie and is never seen again, and Afterlife is more interesting as a specimen of 2010 3D excess than it is as an actual narrative.

Resident Evil: Retribution - Retribution amps the pandering fan service that Afterlife dabbled in to new levels. Ada Wong is here, played by Li Bingbing but dubbed by her original voice actress, Sally Cahill, probably because Li’s English isn’t that great. Leon Kennedy and Barry frickin’ Burton show up, both looking pretty much like their in-game counterparts. Even Michelle Rodriguez and a few other faces from Paul W.S. Anderson’s first Resident Evil flick make an appearance, thanks to the fact that this movie has clones up the wazoo and uses them to handwave away any series inconsistencies you could think of. So you’re got fan service for the people who like the games and fan service for the folks who liked the first movie, and on top of it all the film has the extreme 3D that its predecessor possessed and a buttload of battles because it all takes place in a giant Umbrella simulation facility full of stuff that can easily be wrecked. By now the plot to these things has gotten more scrambled than my eggs in the morning, but I will say that thanks to its inclusion of classic characters, Retribution is more or less tolerable. There’s even a bit of characterization this time around, thanks to a little hearing-impaired clone girl who Alice takes under her wing and begins to care for, and the movie ends on an okay cliffhanger in a Washington DC under siege, promising epic things to come in the next movie. Unfortunately... Resident Evil: The Final Chapter - I really did not enjoy The Final Chapter for a myriad of reasons. First of all, the Washington battle promised at the end of Retribution never happens. Instead, we fast forward to several months later, when Alice is (big surprise) the only survivor, and EVERYONE she was with in the last flick - Ada, Leon, the little deaf girl - is gone and never mentioned ever again. Wesker, who Alice was working with in Retribution, is back to being a bad guy for poorly explained reasons. Another bad scientist dude that Alice killed in Extinction also returns for even worse reasons, because supposedly Alice only offed his clone three movies ago. But wait, this “real” bad scientist dude is also revealed to be a clone as the TRUE bad scientist dude shows up in the movie’s last act! AND THE ULTIMATE TWIST (look away now if you actually care about spoilers) is that Alice is HERSELF a clone of the original daughter of the Umbrella corporation’s founder who died of a degenerative disease and served as the basis for the Red Queen AI. The idiotic thing is that this daughter was said to be the progeny of Dr. Charles Ashford in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, but this movie retcons her to be the spawn of Dr. James Marcus. The Final Chapter, in fact, screws with continuity to a degree I have rarely seen before in a long-running film franchise. Yeah, the framework tying this series together got weird as soon as clones were introduced, but previously it seemed that Paul W.S. Anderson at least cared about his own messy fan fiction. Here? It’s like he forgot what he’d spent the last 15 years building up to and ended on one sloppy fart. If this weren’t bad enough, The Final Chapter is edited in that god awful “shaky cam, lots of fast cuts” way that I hate. In fact, I counted something like twenty cuts in a scene of a few seconds when Alice is attacked by a creature, which means that this film won’t just baffle you with its disregard for continuity - it’ll give you a headache too. 

Resident Evil: Degeneration - After watching an array of live-action flicks that took random Resident Evil threads and mashed them together with the elegance of a splattered turd, it did feel good to switch things up and move to the CG movies that were actually put out by Capcom. This 2008 offering takes place in between Resident Evils 4 and 5, stars Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy, and deals with a virus breakout in an airport and some of the pharmaceutical company backstabbing that occurred in the aftermath of Umbrella’s destruction. It’s all stuff that feels like it could have come from a lesser gaiden game - perhaps in the same vein as the first Revelations title - and it kinda gives off that “so-so anime movie” vibe, especially because the dubbing always sounds a tad off. Nevertheless, Degeneration’s still a breath of fresh air compared to the Anderson series, and there’s a nice gag where Claire’s searching for a weapon in the airport, someone hands her a physical umbrella, and she looks at it and is like, “Hm, didn’t see this coming.” (Lollerskates.) The main issue I have with Degeneration is how “plasticky” everyone looks - it’s hard to realize how far computer animation has advanced in the last decade until you look at Degeneration’s stiff visuals and compare them to the other CG films. Also, Leon’s characterization is terrible. He’s meant to be a super serious badass, I guess, but he mostly just looks like someone rammed a Samurai Edge up his sphincter. I prefer my Leon Kennedy to be the “Don’t worry Ashley, I’m comin’ for ya!” version from Resident Evil 4, or at least a dude with a little sass to him. The guy in Degeneration is about as interesting as a board.  Resident Evil: Damnation - Damnation is a noticeable step above Degeneration, both in computer animation, which really got better from 2008 to 2012, and in all-around presentation. The dubbing’s still somewhat wonky with that same anime movie vibe, but the characterization is on point, and Leon, who’s taking center stage once more, is just like his RE6 self. Speaking of RE6, this movie channels that game’s themes of international terrorism with a plot that involves rebels in a made-up Eastern European country using Lickers and Las Plagas in an effort to fight for their freedom, only to learn that lo and behold, the nefarious female president who’s seized control of their nation has her own B.O.W.s - in the form of Tyrants - at her disposal. Leon’s caught in the middle of this mess and ends up befriending some of the rebels, and Ada Wong’s also infiltrated the country to manipulate the president. Ada and Leon’s interactions are as insubstantial as they’ve been in pretty much every game that isn’t the recent RE2make, but we do get a cool fight between Ada and the president, who for some reason knows substantial knife fu. There’s an even better battle between Tyrants and Lickers in a city hall square, and Leon gets throw against pillars, regularly takes hits that would kill a normal person and pilots a tank alongside one of the rebels who looks a lot like Chris Redfield but isn’t Chris Redfield. This dude serves as the film’s sympathetic character - a guy torn from his peaceful existence thanks to political wrangling and is tricked into using B.O.W.s to try to achieve a brighter future. It ends with the fella severely injured but learning how to live and move forward in a world infected with nefarious bioweapons, which is the very theme that the Anderson flicks ditched around movie number three. So good work for side-stepping previous failures and recognizing what Resident Evil is all about, Damnation. 

Resident Evil: Vendetta - If Degeneration’s a so-so anime movie, and Damnation a good anime movie, then Vendetta is just a good movie in general, with no “anime” distinction needed. The dubbing’s finally pretty decent, for one, and the story takes place in between RE6 and RE7, teaming Leon and Chris Redfield up with - HOLY CRAP - Rebecca Chambers, who’s been AWOL since Resident Evil Zero. They’ve gotta stop an arms dealer from bio-nuking New York and doing nasty things to Rebecca, who resembles his dead wife, and along the way Leon pilots a motorcycle on the freeway with his feet while shooting at Cerebrus with his hands. Nearly all of the movie’s considerable action segments are punctuated with rapid fire John Wick-style gunplay, and it works. It’s like the folks who made this film realized that the coolest part of Resident Evil 6 was the point where Leon and Chris point their guns at each other for a few seconds before deciding that they need to put their differences aside and cooperate, and even though you could conceivably fault Vendetta for leaning heavily towards the “action” side of Resident Evil rather than the “horror” side, it’s a well-paced film that finally gives us a substantial interaction between two series mainstays beyond the one minute they shared with each other in RE6. Also, people are still posting GIFs from Vendetta’s action sequences all across Tumblr and forums whenever arguments break out over whether Chris or Leon is TEH COoLER Resident Evil protagonist, so Capcom obviously did something right. If we get another computer animated film, I imagine it’ll lean more heavily towards horror since that’s where the series has gone recently...but hopefully the path of improvement that we’ve seen from Degeneration to Damnation to Vendetta won’t be broken. 

And with that, whew, I’m done with RE movies, at least until the rumored Hollywood reboot that’s supposedly drawing inspiration from Resident Evil 7 comes out. (It can’t be worse than The Final Chapter, I suppose.) I can’t say that my friends were wrong when they warned me that half of these would be shite, but I also can’t say that I ended on a bad note, because Vendetta was pretty good.

After all this, my grand playthrough and consumption of all Resident Evil media is about to finish Next post I make will be a last look at the franchise as a whole...and what a year’s worth of zombie headshots taught me.  All screencaps taken by me. 

[violethowler]

My thoughts on Kingdom Hearts III

My initial reaction to the ending of Kingdom Hearts III was equal parts confusion, devastation, and just being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of how much time was spent on the final battle. I had a lot of conflicting opinions about how some things were handled, but unlike when that happened with the final season of Voltron, I feel a lot better about everything after a good night's sleep, because I was up late at night finishing the game. I'll get into the spoilers under the cut.

So, for starters, let me put my reactions on a scale of negative to positive:

Major disappointments that should absolutely be done better in the next saga:

After Kairi was hyped up for so long that she'd have a more important part to play in the story, her role in the final battle was a letdown. I can swallow her not being as amazing a fighter as the others because she's never been in combat before and she's been effectively thrown into the deep end on her first day, but I at least expected her to resist when Xemas grabbed her, instead of passively standing there like a helpless damsel in distress. The only in-universe explanation would be if after stress and panic of the previous fights, she froze up when Xemnas made a more for her. But after seven years of being built up as a Keyblade Wielder, and her relationship with Sora, she could have done so much more. I sincerely hope that Testuya Nomura learns from this and lets her shine in the next saga.

With trailers and interviews hyping up how big the worlds were this time around, having Twilight Town and 100 Acre wood be just one small area each was seriously disappointing. I was really looking forward to seeing more of the 100 Acre Wood. They could have fleshed out the whole "Sora disappearing from the cover mystery" for at least a little bit, maybe let us run around the other characters' houses instead of just Rabbit's. And for Twilight Town, I would have liked to have been able to see how the other districts looked.

Going straight to the endgame after San Fransokyo. I know that the creators decided to focus on quality over quantity when it came to the worlds in this game, but I was hoping for just one surprise Disney world that could give fans one last breather after rescuing Aqua and Ven. If not a Disney world, then I would have at least liked to have been able to explore more of Land of Departure or visit Radiant Garden outside of cut-scenes. I love RG's look from BBS and I would have loved to walk around and see the world restored to its former glory.

Vanitas was frustratingly underused in this game. For all the hype surrounding his return, I expected more from him. Especially because the Kingdom Hearts concerts kept including his theme music with the "heroes and heroines" meddley, tantalizing us with the possibility of him getting a redemption arc. And instead, he just dies all over again, only this time, he's calmly accepting his own demise instead of freaking out like after his final fight in BBS. As someone who loves the idea of him getting redeemed, that was a big disappointment. The only thing I'm hoping for is if he somehow comes back in the next saga, because it was kind of unclear whether he's really dead, if there's a way for him to come back, or if he's just faking it like Xigbar was.

Things I wish had been handled differently but I can ultimately live with and hope are handled better in the next saga:

The lack of focus on or explanation of the X era mysteries we've been pondering for years disappointed me on first playthrough, but now that I've had time to think about it, I realized that X/Unchained X/Back Cover/Union X/Whatever-They-Change-The-Name-To-Next isn't truly a part of the Xehanort Saga, but rather, the connective tissue that sets the stage for what comes after Xehanort. It was supposed to set just enough things up that we'd know who the Foretellers were and what Xigbar being Luxu meant. But because it was released before KH3, the fandom built up our expectations that the mysteries of what happened would ultimately be answered in III, so when they alluded to Marluxia and Larxene's past as Dandelions without following up on it, I was kind of disappointed. But now I realize that it was meant to open the door to them playing larger roles in the Lost Masters Saga.

Maleficent and Pete just lurking in the background despite trailers and previous games hyping up her interest in Luxu's box and the Book of Prophecy. This is something else that was clearly being set up for the sequel, but I wish Maleficent had at least had more to do. A boss fight with Pete followed by a conversation to establish that she's waiting for the dust to settle between the Guardians of Light and Seekers of Darkness before she makes her move would have been nice.

The sudden introduction of this mystery girl. At first, I thought when they kept mentioning this girl, they were talking about Kairi, and that we'd be starting to learn more about her past in Radiant Garden. I soon realized that the implications of Kairi's life pre-Destiny Islands were a red herring, but the more they kept bringing this girl up, the more I was expecting there to be some kind of explanation for who she was in the game itself. I can understand in retrospect why Isa and Ansem SoD would suddenly bring her back now, because both knew they were going to die (Isa at least had the promise of recompletion) and wanted closure on burning questions they hadn't thought about in years. Considering that the epilogue and secret reports imply she's amnesiac Ava, I think this is another case of planting seeds for future installments in a way that I wish had been done better.

After years of Aqua being celebrated as a badass Keyblade Master, her not really getting to do anything in this game is upsetting. Sure, things make sense from an in-universe perspective: she sent her Keyblade to Destiny Islands as a beacon for Sora, Riku, and/or Mickey to find her, which weakened her already worn down defenses when Xehanort’s heartless came for DiZ. With how much warping Terranort does, I figured he’d attacked Ven at speeds so close to superhuman that Aqua didn’t have time to react. And in Land of Departure, Nomura wanted to have Ven’s awakening be a dramatic moment where he swoops in to protect someone he cares about. But having Aqua kick Vanitas’ ass only for her to get taken down by a single Firaga spell feels like a poor way to achieve the desired result.

While having some Disney worlds follow the plots to their respective movies was expected, Sora, Donald, and Goofy's presence their felt a little insubstantial. I mean, I'm not saying they should have just copied the movie shot for shot with SDG there in the background, but it felt like they missed out on large chunks of the movies. It was forgivable in Kingdom of Corona because they were there for the important parts and Marluxia basically told them what they missed re: Rapunzel. With Arendelle it felt weird that they were really only involved with Elsa running away, the Marshmallow fight, and the ending. The rest was pretty much spent with Larxene coming up with elaborate ways to keep them away from the plot of the movie. With Pirates it was just ridiculous. They were really only there for the escape from Davy Jones locker and then just ran around with fake!Jack doing their own thing until it was time for the final fight of the movie. It's hard to not know the plots of Tangled and Frozen due to pop culture at this point, but if you're playing this game with no knowledge of the pirates of the Caribbean movies, you're going to be very confused on what's happening in the maelstrom fight.

Minor quibbles:

An explanation for what happened to Demyx would have been nice, but then, that could just be another mystery to be addressed later.

The whole "rewind time and replay everything before Sora's near-death until things change at the last moment" thing didn't really make a whole lot of sense, but it wasn't too big of a deal, and Xigbar's "we don't need you to make a second blunder" implies that he had something to do with it, which can hopefully be explained properly at a later date.

Little moments that weren’t necessarily big for the story, but I enjoyed anyway for personal reasons:

At first, I was crushed by Even’s return to the Organization because I loved the fanfic Why The Sun Sets Red where he becomes a surrogate parent figure to Xion, and wanted that relationship to be a reality in canon. Then when he saved Ansem, Hayner, Pence, and Olette from Fake Ansem, my head was saying “this is probably a trap”, but my heart screamed #ShittyScienceDadConfirmed. And I was so relieved when my heart turned out to be right. I will probably end up writing a post-III fanfic of Even bonding with his Science Daughter at some point.

I generally stay away from shipping in the KH fandom, but after years of having SoKai as my first OTP, I came to start shipping SoRiKai, and as upset as I am about Sora’s fate (I can’t really complain about that too badly since Nomura already promised that Sora would still be the main character in post-KH3 installments so having this kind of ending should have been expected, if not for 3 than for a future title), I at least take comfort in the fact that there’s enough wiggle room for SoRiKai headcanons set after Sora’s inevitable return.   

Everything else that I absolutely loved:

The visuals were absolutely freaking gorgeous. On every single world, they went out of their way to make the graphics as beautiful as possible.  The 2D fire effects on Olympus, the different shaders used each world to make Sora, Donald, and Goofy fit with the aesthetic...

The Skein of Severance. While I wish we'd gotten to explore more of the Keyblade Graveyard during the final battle, or that the maze was a little more elaborate, I loved having to fight multiple members of the new Organization simultaneously, and oh dear god the aftermath of every fight: Xion's return, Terra regaining control of his body, Saix's death.... I was sobbing after every boss fight.

Despite how complicated the lore has become, the story itself was actually pretty straightforward. It was pretty refreshing and reminded me of KH1 and BBS, where the heroes have a clear overarching goal and a reason for why they're traveling to other worlds.

As much as I wish that Unchained X had been held until after KH3, there's a stroke of genius to the epilogue: Because of Xehanort's whole "balance between dark and light" obsession and Riku's whole "dark is not necessarily evil" character arc, I've seen a consistent idea within the fandom that the main villain of the next saga after Xehanort should be one of those who fit into the "Light is not good" trope. And by implicitly setting up the "Lost Masters" for that role in the epilogue, they've both ensured a masterful conflict between the Keyblade Wielders of the past and the ones of the present, and ensured that the next saga will be as heartbreaking as possible by ensure that the fandom is already attached to these characters.

Honestly, despite the issues I've had with the game above, I absolutely enjoyed Kingdom Hearts 3. It was worth the wait in my opinion, and I can't wait to see what the future holds. My only hope, given the epilogue and secret ending, that we get an announcement of Kingdom Hearts IV within a year or so. Doesn't need to release next year, but it definitely needs to be announced for development.

[lizzybeth1986]

Really, Really Slow Thoughts on TRR Book 3, Chapter 3

• This QT took two days. Because my pace has been sluggish. Because my thoughts on this chapter have been sluggish.

• This chapter is the only time in the entire series that I was barely invested. That’s only ever happened to be at the beginning of Book 1, and only because I didn’t think it would amount to anything beyond a Cinderella story. I haven’t been in that space with a single chapter in this book since Book 1,Chapter 8. I’m just…bored.

• Title: Allies among Enemies. Sounds very Kenna and Luther, no? But I doubt Kenna ever had to sit and play marriage counselor to a squabbling couple.

•

Esther asking all the relevant questions.

I mean, sure, Bertrand, I get it: I need to make a tour and that involves visiting other duchies, Justin thinks Madeleine would make a bomb press secretary, and I have to play matchmaker for her parents –

Wait what. Why do I need to resolve a personal fight because Madeleine’s parents? I know it’s all about reaching out and getting allies and making connections but playing armchair therapist just sounds extremely silly.

• I like that they’re carrying over the “house colours” strategy from TCaTF. Kenna occasionally did this during alliances, especially when meeting with the Nevrakis family.

•

So I have a dress “as green as Madeleine’s envy towards me and black as her shrivelled heart” (bomb analogy, Maxwell!). Buuuut I’m taking part in a court event. A formal ball. Why is the dress style more like what I wore in the club for Madeleine’s bachelorette and Liam’s bachelor party???

• Also can you imagine how awkward waltzing would look in this dress? Ballroom dresses are long and flowy for a reason. Part of the beauty of your twirl comes from how your skirt flows when you’re turning, esp in a dance like the Cordonian Waltz where the twirl is the highlight.

• So I’m supposed to ensure Adeleide comes for the wedding. Loooogically the story should make this easier on me because I already did the hard work of winning her over the last book right? Wrong. Because the story doesn’t care. It doesn’t care which Liam I chose, whether I’ve ever worn pepto bismol in my life or not, whether I charmed the pants off Adeleide (not literally). Nope. I still have to start from scratch (wouldn’t be the first time tho. I won over Kiara and Penelope in Book 1 only for them to ditch me next book [even though Penelope knew it wasn’t my fault. You owe me big, sister]).

• Soooo Godfrey, Madeleine’s dad, is an English nobleman. His marriage to Adeleide was a political alliance and he doesn’t actually give a shit about Cordonia unless his daughter is the goddamn country’s queen.

• Hmm. So Madeleine is half Cordonian too. Jesus Christ for a country that doesn’t like foreigners very much, a lot of its major players seem to have at least one non-Cordonian parent: Liam (possibly), Madeleine, Drake, Hana…

• I was a little confused because Book 1 mentioned that Madeleine is “practically royalty” from her father’s side - but it’s possible that’s more a hint towards his English roots. I guess we can rule him out for who the enemy is rn because this dude genuinely doesn’t give a shit.

• So Liam, whose interactions with Godfrey have been few and far between and who admits he has never really met him in a social setting, is the one who provides us inputs on how to deal with the Duke. Turns out this advice is pretty helpful, coming from someone who barely knows the man.

•

Savour this moment, Liam stans. This - and the “we need to avoid this lack of crowd at our wedding” exchange, are the only times we will get to properly interact with him today.

• I know this decor looks like a piñata threw up over the ballroom but I love the purple and the soft lighting xD

• So the first event post Homecoming is super empty, which is quite dishearting. It’s enough to make even our resident bar-hopper Adeleide upset.

•

Is it just me or does “STOICISM RULEZ!!!” Regina sound like she gives zero fucks today? I mean sure it could just be her usual irritation around Adelaide but here even Constantine seems a little taken aback. And besides, it’s not the Krona duchy that needs anything from the Crown, it’s the Crown that needs something from them. Your arrogance doesn’t have any legs to stand on, Regina.

• Also idk but am I the only one getting a different vibe from Regina this book? In the debriefing meeting she wasn’t there at all, and this is someone who has been a part of every meeting we’ve seen in the books. Then she comes here, to an event where if anything SHE needs to be begging her cousin to come for her stepson’s/some random noblewoman’s wedding, and she’s busy making snappy comments about the appetizers (and let’s be honest, everyone else found their spread incredibly good. Even Drake. DRAKE)

• Madeleine’s dad is essentially Madeleine Sr.

• “Magic Friendship Dust” my ass.

• Madeleine’s reaction to this “be my press secretary” thing is “I told you so” followed by a resounding (implied) “fuck you”. What else were you expecting, Esther?

•

It’s great that they say this, but I would have preferred if they showed it. It really isn’t that hard. Show him talking independently to a noble or two (you don’t even have to show their faces) - winning some over and not managing to sway some others. The reason a lot of Liam fans are upset is that not only does the writing make weak excuses to keep him from working WITH the MC, we aren’t even given a proper glimpse of what he IS doing!

I’ll return to this point later, because I have a LOT to say 😠

• …cheeseburgers aren’t appetizers, Drake.

• I’d agree with you about the buffalo wings tho.

• Nomnom that pasta looks good.

• I’d betray me for a plate of truffled penne too, Esther.

•

Back in the essay I wrote on the Balcony Scene, I spoke of how Liam’s mother’s story seemed like a mirror to the MC’s (I mentioned that she might be a foreigner, though, and given that Neville and Drake make the comparison between the MC and her, and that her son is customizable by ethnicity, I still think there are chances that is true). Called it! xD

• Neville is still as big a creep as he ever was and this scene was extremely ugly, especially with regards to Drake. But it was also extremely powerful because the group gets to rally around and protect him, and show Neville that Drake has people who will support him no matter what. It was a scene I felt was needed because it gives you a much better idea of what Drake has had to deal with in court. (also I know he’s taking the tour coz he wants a wife [good luck getting one with THAT level of creepy, asshole!] but I’m suspicious about him following ppl he doesn’t even like around).

• This is also amazing buildup to the dancing scene. The version of the scene I got was automatically platonic, which I loved, and I got more comfortable with this scene than I have ever felt with any non-Liam-LI scene so far (you know how you keep stressing about accidental romance points? That).

• In my playthrough, Esther keeps it professional, gives him encouragement, teaches him how to glide using a mental image. Drake points out he needs to give Liam adequate support and he will need to actually prove himself to other nobles for that. As a romantic scene, it really shines (and indeed it should, given that the Cordonian waltz is primarily romantic) but it works very well on a platonic level too.

• I also really, really loved the comparison Drake made between his situation and hers: that the MC is proof that he can hold on to who he is even if he becomes a part of the nobility/has endured this much from them. Drake’s character arc is built heavily on his fear that being part of the nobility can change people, based on very valid experiences. We’ve seen in this chapter how desperately some nobles cling to their titles, almost using it to make up for their lack of personality (I’m looking at you, Neville and Godfrey). But he has proof all around him too, that you don’t need to lose who you are through a title. In a lot of ways this plays really well into his “letting go” arc as well.

• Okay so I went with Godfrey first. He’s talking to Liam, who again makes a disappearing act (I don’t mind, because the MC specifically stated she wanted to speak to the Duke alone). I’m not surprised Liam wasn’t making much headway. This is the second dude to dump Madeleine after all, and worse still he’s brother to the first dude to dump her. No wonder Liam’s sticking to safe subjects like choice of scotch!

• YIKES @ Godfrey’s constant harping of successes and defeats. Why don’t we talk about what a failure YOU are as a dad, Duke Karlington, since you’re only ever there for Madeleine to tell her what a failure she is!

• I like the exchange they show us between Adeleide and Regina before the MC steps in. Regina’s care and concern for Madeleine has pretty much been there from the beginning and for what it’s worth, it has been genuine.

• Oh man. I want to give Adeleide a hug and some champagne. I mean I don’t exactly envision her winning the “best mother” award anytime soon, but she’s trying. Perhaps a little too pushy and a little too focused on her own coping mechanisms, but still, she cares enough about Madeleine to want to be there for her no matter what. Which is more than I can say for Godfrey, who thinks being a father means paying an annual visit to his goddamn FAMILY and judges people for failing when he’s perhaps the biggest failure in the room.

• Waltz time!

• Though between Esther not having a twirly skirt and Drake having an injured shoulder I’m not sure they even looked that good.

• WTF ESTHER WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU DOES THAT LOOK LIKE A MAN WHO IS IN ANY CONDITION TO MANAGE A LIFT

•

HE’S NOT JOHNY CASTLE AND THIS ISN’T DIRTY DANCING. STOP PUTTING DRAKE IN A CORNER.

• AT LEAST BABY DIDN’T MAKE JOHNY LIFT HER ON AN INJURED ARM. AND AT LEAST THEY AGREED TO DO IT TOGETHER NOT SPRUNG IT ON HIM LIKE A FUCKING JACK-IN-THE-BOX.

• “He winces at the pressure on his arm, but smiles through it”. …damn I’m angry at my own MC now.

• Drinking game time!!

• I’m not going to comment much on the scene because it’s going to be part of my group scenes essay, but I *will* say I’m so happy Hana gets her due in this one. She really shines in terms of character development in this scene and she gets the best line this whole chapter xD xD xD

•

• I think Hana has had this burn simmering in her pressure cooker ever since the bell-pepper episode in Shanghai 😂😂

• “You all know there’s more to me than liking whiskey, right?”

This is unfair and inaccurate, people. Of course there’s more. He likes cheeseburgers and pasta and greasy junk food too, cmon.

• I recall speaking not too long ago about how Madeleine and Hana had very different approaches to similar issues (family pressure, feeling like they are failures, broken engagements with men they didn’t love), and that Madeleine very possibly faced a lot of family pressure (I was wrong about the source being Adeleide, though). To me this forms part of why Hana can see Madeleine the way no one else can, and why it’s essential to have her around when Madeleine opens up.

• This doesn’t really change my opinion of Madeleine, though. It makes sense of some things, but in my mind nothing can really justify the sick pleasure Madeleine gets out of breaking people. She makes excuses for herself by calling it “not tiptoeing on other people’s fragile feelings”, but that would imply she was just being honest and not actively working towards making people feel like shit. In both Hana and Penelope’s cases she was actively working on making them feel like they were beneath her, and enjoying doing that. To me what she did, especially to Hana, was emotional abuse. Speaking ecstatically about “breaking” a human being who has harmed you in no way, is abusive. No more, no less.

• Please don’t tell me a Madeleine and Hana ship will be a thing now. No. Eww. I’d rather not pair Hana with someone who was actively trying to break her. I don’t care how much of a “crush” Madeleine seems to have.

• No matter how misguided Adeleide’s attempts to parent Madeleine are, to me she clearly wins the parenting stakes hands down. She may have made Madeleine feel like she couldn’t mourn what happened to her, but at least she views her daughter as more of a human being than a prize horse.

•

Didn’t lie to get her way? Was saying “I’m allergic to chocolate and you could have killed me” just a figment of my imagination then???

•

• You have to be fucking kidding me. The MC is a duchess now. The Beaumonts are supposed to be helping her. These three should be at the top of their itinerary right now, not throwing things together at the last minute every chapter. Isn’t this Unity Tour supposed to be about knowing your allies and enemies, and preparing accordingly? Being unprepared (somehow, barely) made sense to some extent in the first two books, but things are different now.

• Penelope next week! That woman owes us big time.

General Thoughts on this Chapter:

• Things I feel might come up in Penelope’s estate:

1. Penelope’s anxiety and her parents’ fears about sending her back to court

2. Personal issues within the family maybe? Perhaps Penelope’s desire to take up pet couture designing and her mother’s disapproval of the same might feature.

3. At some point there may be some sort of redemption arc for her where she gets reminded of her involvement in what happened to the MC earlier. Penelope clearly owes the MC a great debt for letting her off the hook so easily.

4. I’ll be damned if I have to play therapist for these people too 😠

• This whole idea of “meddling” is stupid. These people are adults. Grown people, who should be expected to know how to handle their own lives and talk to each other. The royalty/the MC shouldn’t be expected to babysit them. That’s not what we came here for.

• It stings even more when you take into account that the common public is feeling pretty terrified at the moment, and having their own, and here we are busy resolving the family squabbles of rich people.

• It highlights even more strongly what’s wrong with the whole idea of a Unity Tour. I’m hoping this “resolving-aristocrat-issues” thing won’t become a pattern because it’s beginning to look ridiculous.

• @ladynevrakis mentions in her excellent write-up on this week’s chapter that this chapter is a lot better if you’re a non-Liam shipper, and extremely frustrating if you are.

Correct on both counts. As the MC you’re just starting out as a noblewoman, and you will need all the support you can get. If you’re with Drake (especially Drake), Hana or Maxwell, you get plenty opportunities for support from all of them. With Liam, you barely get a few lines here and there before he’s completely MIA. There is no opportunity for Liam or his fiancee to talk properly, or work together as a team. And this house is unquestionably the toughest one, so why does the writing not give Liam any chance to truly be there for her when she needs it???

• I can understand why he wasn’t there for the most part. In the Neville sequence he isn’t there precisely because the writers need to highlight how people treat Drake when Liam isn’t around (and to show what people say about Liam behind his back), and there is no way you could have Liam around in either the group scene or the final scene with the family without making things worse (daughter’s former fiancè, hello?). Plus if the MC is not engaged to him, it would look weird for him to be present at some of these conversations.

STILL, there were a whole range of ways you could write him without him actually being involved in the patch-up, and still do justice to his character:

1. Eat with the group: The group eating scene could have been a perfect time to have Liam come, speak about his progress with convincing ppl, bond with the group over the delicious spread, and leave before Neville enters.

2. Check in periodically: Liam is my MC’s fiancè. They are here together on their first tour as a couple. They’re doing this tour for his people and his country. She is a newcomer and it is essential he has her back. It wouldn’t have hurt to have him come in on occasion and ask her how she is holding up. It wouldn’t have taken more than a scene or two, really, and it could have worked perfectly both on a neutral and romantic level. If you’re going to make Drake such a huge presence in this chapter that you’d go the extra mile and write him two ways, you can very well do the same for Liam. It’s even more essential in his case because he is the King of Cordonia and pretty damn invested in making this tour work.

3. Have the MC notice what Liam was doing independent of her: The writing team is no stranger to writing conversations that don’t involve the MC’s presence at all. We know Liam was spending time speaking to the few nobles in attendance, but we’re never shown how he does this or whether he succeeds. I know he’s as hard at work as the MC is, but I don’t see what he’s doing. Could you really blame readers for thinking he is less involved, then?

4. The Little Things: A gentle touch here, a smile there if he’s your fiancè. Things you would do with your partner when you don’t have much time together but still want to show them they care.

It’s not like the writers don’t know how to involve Liam. They’ve done a really good job of this in the past. The entire social season saw Liam working behind the scenes to ensure the MC was protected and cared for, even when he couldn’t be involved. The engagement tour had him pitching in to help whenever it didn’t seem too suspicious to. In all these instances they kept in mind Liam’s role and limitations, and STILL managed to make him proactive.

The writers had plenty opportunity this chapter to have Liam be there for her in small ways, but hardly bothered to involve him. I appreciate wanting to make his interactions as neutral as possible but that doesn’t mean you don’t put any effort into writing him at all.

To add insult to serious injury, this chapter follows another one where the MC practically takes over Liam’s speech (post the video), leaving Liam with little space to do anything besides agreeing with her. It’s essential - now more than ever - to portray Liam as decisive and proactive, yet the writing has him take 10 steps backwards in terms of character development. The MC is his fiancèe/close friend now. She should be able to see him properly as a politician and a leader at this point. If that doesn’t get resolved soon, we’re in danger of screwing up an interesting character who has a lot of potential.

• I’m still holding out on this book, because it’s still early and I believe they can turn things around and ensure there is a fair balance between the LIs. They are taking what we say into consideration and they have worked hard to make our other LIs’ interactions with us as safe and platonic as possible. I think this is a matter of balance, and I still think they can manage to do a good job of it once they ensure there is a balance.

• But this chapter? I’m not going pretend I’m happy.

[missdreawrites]

Far Cry 5, and How I Feel a Week after Beating It

@weekend-writer, here we go. Hold on to your butts.

I just recently finished Far Cry 5, and mid-way through the playthrough, someone asked if I thought it was worth the 60$ USD and I had originally said yes. Now, having completed the game, I’m rethinking that stance. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not sorry I bought the game for full price, but I’m definitely a bit - sad over it. So I’m going to go through the game point by point, in a somewhat blistering, disappointed review.

Obviously, beyond the cut, there are SPOILERS ahead.

Let me start this out by saying I enjoyed seventy-five percent of this game. The graphics were amazing, the outposts were all unique, the characters were priceless (fucking Hurk Jr, man, I love him so much and dude, I ran around with a bear named Cheeseburger). The music was fantastic. I loved the theme, and the battle music, and even the scary uber-Christian hymns that played on Eden’s Gate Radio.

Now, for those of you who are looking for a bit of a rundown, the game is about a Rookie Deputy Sheriff - hereby known as Rook for the rest of this review. You play the Rook who goes to Eden’s Gate, an uber Christian cult in the middle of Hope County, Montana. You, Deputy Hudson, Deputy Pratt, and a US Marshall go to arrest the leader of this cult, Joseph Seed.

Like in Far Cry 4, you have a choice in the very beginning of the game. You can choose not to arrest Joseph - though you have to loiter for ten minutes or so as your partners and boss get increasingly angry with you, but eventually the Sheriff decides you’re right, this is not a battle we want to fight, let’s just go. Credits.

However, if you actually want to play the game, you have arrest Joseph and bring him to your chopper, wherein all hell breaks loose, and you crash because of course you do. Joseph Seed tells you that arresting him was breaking the first “seal” and anyone who has watched Supernatural within the last thirteen years knows what that means.

The rest of the events in the game are not all that important to this review, only that Joseph Seed has several siblings that you have to defeat to get to him after you escape and are set loose on the region.

There’s John Seed, a torturer who has Deputy Hudson. He’s obsessed with cleansing people of their sins. There’s Jacob Seed, a war veteran who has so many PTSD issues I can’t actually list them all, and he’s a manipulator who believes the weak should be culled from the herd. He brainwashes you a la Bioshock, only he uses a song to do it. Then there’s Faith Seed, and she’s not actually related to them. She was a junkie who came to Joseph for help, and ended up helping him create Bliss, this hallucinogenic drug that stretches the bounds of reality just a bit too much.

There. Now.

You have to liberate each region (John, Jacob, and Faith respectively) in order to unlock the final confrontation with Joseph. Each region has a bar that has little bubbles on it, once reach those bubbles, those are essentially check points of “pissing off a Seed sibling” and they send Hunters out after you.

1. Mechanic I hate number the first one: the Hunting Party

So you’ve pissed off a Seed sibling! They send a Hunting Party after you. The party arrives - even if you fast travelled to a different region, or even the other side of the map. Or like me, you’re a stealthy snipery jerkface and you kill the entire party undetected as they yell about finding me and “use the Bliss Bullets, John/Jacob/Faith wants ‘em alive!”

I kill all eight of the hunting party, and breathe a sigh of relief. There are no more red markers, Boomer says no one else is around. I venture out of cover.

Blam.

Screen goes wavery, then sparkly. Then Rook falls unconscious. Despite having killed the party, or left the party or hidden, these are scripted events, so I literally can do nothing to save myself. I have to get kidnapped by the Seed sibling, for Plot Reasons.

Annoying but manageable.

2. Mechanic I hate number the second one: The Rook

Unlike in the rest of the Far Cry series, you are not a person. By which I mean, you’re not like Jason Brody or Ajay Ghale, or even Jack. You’re still the Rook, of course but you’re not voiced, you have no personality. You can be male or female, and the only person in the entire game that mentioned my gender as female was freakin’ Hurk.

Your character makes noise - when you’re hurt or falling, you grunt and groan and cry out, but you don’t talk. You don’t emote. You are just a blank canvas. What’s worse, is they didn’t bother recording two sets of dialogue like Bethesda did in Fallout 4.

So all the cultists just call you by a gender neutral sound. “Get ‘em!”/”I saw ‘em over there!”/”I got eyes on the sinner!”

Y’all. Y’all come on.

This is especially hard to stomach when the characters are spewing just the most ridiculous nonsense at you. There’s a moment after you get kidnapped by Jacob, and Joseph is there. He goes on this - truly awful and ridiculous monologue about how he used to be a different person, he was married, a baby on the way. How happy he was. Then there was an accident. His wife died, and the doctors saved the baby but the baby was sick, probably premature, and they said he had to be strong for his baby daughter.

TW: he is not strong for his baby daughter.

The rook doesn’t say a damn thing to this horrible man who admits he killed his baby daughter instead of taking care of her. The rook just watches him, from behind bars. Yo, I was livid. I was like WHAT THE FUCK YOU MURDERER HOW DARE YOU PREACH PEACE but nope. My character was totally silent.

Y’ALL.

3. Mechanic that I hate number the third one: the Ending (collectively)

WARNING: Here be spoilers. If you don’t care about me spoiling the entire ending confrontation with Joseph, keep on reading. Otherwise, feel free to skip down to the conclusion, which I’ve helpfully put in bold.

SO THE ENDING.

After you liberate each region, gather all your Roster, finish your side quests and helping each person you find, Joseph Seed contacts you - he offers to open up his compound so you two can finally have it out. Now, I’ll take this moment to say that I put it off for a bit. I ignored Joseph so I could finish side quests, and my partner, who beat the game two days before I did told me no, go do it, you won’t want to keep playing after. Why waste that time?

I was thoroughly alarmed by that statement. So even though it was almost seven in the morning and I’d stayed up all night to play it, I drove my ass to Joseph’s compound and in a mirror of the very beginning, walked up to the church.

Immediately, I am placed in a cut scene. This has happened a few times throughout the game, Whenever John Seed implored you to say “yes” to whatever tortures he wanted bestow on you, to talking with your allies. However, the length of this cutscene dragged on, until Joseph is done preaching at you.

He says he’ll give you an offer. That despite all you’ve done, despite the fact that you’ve killed his flock and family, he’s going to offer you peace. He’s going to do the “right thing” and offer you peace. You hear something behind you - still in a cutscene - and turn around to see all your friends. The roster you helped out, minus the animals, all Blissed out of their minds (as noted by the glowing cloud around their faces) and leading tied up people into the compound. They aim their guns at Deputy Pratt, Deputy Hudson and the Sheriff, all of whom have been recaptured by the people you thought were your friends. Joseph tells you if you resist, if you don’t choose peace, then you can kiss your friends goodbye.

Then you’re given the ability to choose two options: Resist or Accept.

IF YOU CHOOSE RESIST:

He knocks over some Bliss barrels, and everything gets all kinds of fucked up, and your friends attack Pratt, Hudson and the Sheriff. After you fight off Joseph for a second or two, you’re able to revive them (not a new mechanic, you can revive anyone during the rest of the game) and all four of you start fighting Joseph. You have to fight your roster as well, but once they go down, you’re able to revive them as well - which puts them back on your side. However, Joseph will also try to revive them, which leaves them your enemy.

I guess “killing them” and reviving them is like cognitive recalibration? Either way, once all your roster-friends are revived an on your side, you turn your attention to Joseph and shoot the fuck out of him. It’s real cathartic… until you beat him and are immediately locked into another cutscene.

While Joseph monologues at you, the Sheriff (your boss, essentially) comes up behind him, declares him under arrest, and handcuffs him. Joseph proclaims that another seal has broken, and then the entire screen shakes with some kind of impact. The cutscene shows you, Hudson, Pratt, and the Sheriff a giant mushroom cloud, not too far away from where you are, across the lake.

There’s a moment of shock, and Joseph declares it the end of the world, just like he predicted. He was right, and the end is upon us, etc, etc yadda.

We all run toward a car, with Joseph in tow, and then you’re given control back just long enough to drive helter skelter away from the shockwave, as shit is getting set on fire, until you’re suddenly locked in another cutscene just in time to slam into a falling tree.

The screen goes black and red, as you come to, realizing that Pratt, Hudson and the Sheriff are dead. The car door opens and you fall out, blacking back out. When you wake up again, you’re in a bunker - the same bunker you woke up in before being set loose on the county after the prologue, and who should be with you?

Joseph. Seed.

He tells you that everyone in Hope County is dead, and it’s all your fault, why couldn’t you have just picked peace? But hey, it doesn’t matter - we’re family now and one day, we’ll walk through Eden’s Gate together.

“I am your Father,” Joseph Seed says, leaning back in his seat, and staring at you with those wide eyes. “And you are my Child.” He locks eyes with you, never blinking, as the screen fades to black.

Credits.

I was in fucking shock. According to my partner who was awake on the couch and watching me play through this, I kept clicking my mouse like I was trying to pull my guns to shoot him. Why couldn’t I just shoot him?

Now, I’m willing to admit that a lot that might have been a hallucination - the cutscenes make use of the Bliss (which is hallucinogenic) a lot - even though when you aren’t in a cutscene the drug only behaves that way in the most minorest of ways. I’ve been running through fields of Bliss for ages, and all you get is weird sparkling on the corners of your screen. Sometimes you hallucinate Faith Seed, or animals that aren’t there.

However, ultimately, whether or not it was a hallucination doesn’t matter. Because the credits roll and the game is over. Hope County is gone, your friends, your allies, they’re gone. Your only companion is the man you failed to kill, the man you failed to arrest, and you’ve lost.

You lost.

So, utterly livid, I reloaded my save just before choosing Resist, and instead chose the other option.

IF YOU CHOOSE TO ACCEPT PEACE:

Joseph lets you go. He monologues a bit more, but he lets you, Hudson and Pratt, the Sheriff, he lets everyone go. You retreat to the edge of the Compound, get into the same truck you’d get into if you chose to resist, and start driving away. The Sheriff talks to you a little and ultimately what he says isn’t important, because the radio turns on, as you drive away.

Remember how I said Jacob Seed brainwashed you.... With a song?

The screen goes red as your character starts screaming, and then the screen goes black.

Roll credits.

The game is over. The last time that song played, when you did Jacob’s Region, you killed one of your allies because he brainwashed you into doing it. The entire lead up to killing Jacob is one big brainwashing suckfest, and you do things you don’t think you’re doing until it’s over.

It’s very, very clear that you’ll kill everyone in that car with you.

You lose. Everyone in that car knows how bad Joseph Seed is, they’re your survivors, your witnesses. The people who could have helped you get more manpower to come back and get rid of Joseph with more than a song and a prayer.

But you kill them. You lose.

Both of these endings mean that the ninety hours I spent playing were useless. Nothing I did mattered. Either the world fucking ends, or you murder the people you spent the whole game trying to save. Nothing you did matter, you made no difference, and you lose.

I have nothing against games where you don’t win. I have nothing against games where the ending message is you lose. I have serious issues with being plot railroaded via cutscene into endings I don’t want. Why couldn’t I shoot Joseph? I shot Faith, and Jacob and John. Clearly due process wasn’t important THEN, so why are we arresting Joseph? He’s a dangerous man who knows how to use a dangerous drug to mind control people - but yeah sure, let’s arrest him.

CONCLUSION:

Am I disappointed I bought the game? No, not really. I’m glad I played.

However, I was left with this - bad taste in my mouth, a little. The endings were lackluster, I feel like a require closure to move on with my life - especially because I beat it a week ago, and I’m still stewing over the ending.

Like the original ending of Mass Effect 3, where I was left in shock, I hope that Ubisoft hears how disappointing those endings were and gives us a miniature DLC (to go along with the three weird ones they already have) that gives us a better option.

To the anon who asked me if it was worth the 60$ USD, I originally answered your ask saying yes, because I loved the game.

I hope you see this, and note that my answer has changed. If you’re a hardcore fan of the series, like me, sure - spend the 60. But if you’re not? If you’re a casual player who just liked the idea of the plot - give it a miss, until the next Steam Summer Sale or Xbox Gold Give Away.

This is a little disjointed, I started it while I was at work and then slept before finishing it but I am free and available for any questions via ask/message system. Anon hate about loving the endings will be added to the fire and will fuel the heating for my house. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

[renegade-skywalker]

Okay, it’s time for me to rant about The Last Jedi:

Let me start off by saying that I am all for pushing boundaries, exploring the limits and really delving into the philosophy of Star Wars. I loved The Force Awakens, but I was very much ready for The Last Jedi to take the new trilogy in a new direction and catapult us beyond the horizon of everything we thought we knew about the world of Star Wars and its mythos. I was fine with the idea of Luke defying expectations and being disappointed by him, I was ready for grumpy Luke, and hell, I was even anticipating that the Big Twist™  would be that Luke was the antagonist. I was all for Luke going Paul Atreides/Muad’Dib on the galaxy and becoming an antagonist in the sense that Batman does at the end of The Dark Knight. I was ready for the plot twists, I was ready for the Rey and Kylo arc, but I was not ready for this mess.

What’s sad is that this has been done before. I may be biased, but Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords explores Star Wars in ways no other SW-related media ever has, yet it manages to do so within the realms of Star Wars’ “rules”. It feels believable, it draws from the Original Trilogy and the Prequel Trilogy, it discusses the problems with the Force as well as the Jedi and Sith who both feel as if they are entitled to act on behalf of the Force. It deals with redemption, but it also has a message that “ultimately nothing matters” and Kreia’s ploy to destroy both the Jedi and the Sith, but more importantly, The Force Itself and it makes sense. You see her point, you understand her desires and motivations. Not only do you see the Jedi and the Sith fail and bring violence and turmoil to the galaxy within the game regardless of their motives and intentions, even turning Revan into a bit of a villain whether you were Light or Dark in your playthrough, but also makes you think of how you can say the same of the movies, how the Council utterly fails Anakin in the Prequels just as the Council fails the Exile and how redemption is always possible for all of your party members and even Kreia, just as it was for Vader. 

The Last Jedi has elements of this story, but has absolutely no depth. Luke is not only out of character, in fact in many parts I feel like he was in character but he was most of all inconsistent. His comments about the Force and the Jedi are interesting, how the Force is not a “right”, and for the Jedi to think they have a claim on controlling it is pure vanity. I LOVE THAT. But beyond that line... that’s it. We do not see this point explored. In fact, Luke goes back on this idea almost as soon as he says it. For someone who has cut themselves off from the Force (think: The Jedi Exile, which has a lot of potential) he still cares about the Light and the Dark and is biased against the Darkness. After giving a rather nihilistic speech about the Force, Luke still sounds like the Jedi Masters from the Prequel Trilogy, who he also just criticized for being righteous hypocrites. He berates Rey for being drawn to the Darkness, yet decides she’s the Last Jedi? Nowhere do we see Luke come to this conclusion. 

There is no reason for Rey to be a Jedi. She can certainly be an arbiter of justice, or at least someone with the power to confront Kylo in the next act, but there is no argument for her to uphold the Jedi name. Yoda even destroys the old texts, which also feels like a slap in the face because the events of the Prequels are all kind of Yoda’s fault? Not to mention that scene was cheestastic as all hell. Yoda stuck to the code, did not give Anakin the training/guidance he needed, and did not heed the Classic Star Wars Bad Feelings™ of people like Obi Wan (at least in Phantom Menace, by Attack of the Clones he cares for Anakin and has hope in him) and Mace Windu, who never seems to trust Anakin or his future. Again, it is not Anakin’s fault that Darkness surrounds him. He was born into slavery, his mother is still a slave (which, for peacekeepers and do-gooders, shouldn’t Qui Gon and Obi Wan have done something about that??? Isn’t that what Jedi do???) and yet they still blame Anakin for his life’s circumstances, for things completely outside of his control, and for feeling things. The boy needed therapy, he would have been fine. This problem is brought back up in Ben Solo’s origins as Kylo Ren. For Luke to call out the Old Jedi Order (with receipts) and then do THE VERY SAME THING to his nephew makes no sense, especially since Luke was able to reach Vader by believing in him, by seeing the Light in him, and trusting him. What made Luke so cool in Return of the Jedi was the fact that he told Yoda and Obi Wan “No, I will not kill my father” when they kept telling him that Vader must be destroyed. And Luke was ultimately right. Where did that compassion go? Ben was just like Anakin, kind of thrown around like a bomb to go off, and I’m sure that will give any kid anxiety, so when Snoke comes along and tells him he’s powerful and worthy, it makes sense that he would be swayed. This is just like Anakin. Anakin was openly distrusted by the Council, but was welcomed and “understood” by Palpatine. I don’t see why Luke would overlook this.

Speaking of Snoke, the Big Twist that he dies makes no sense. Who was he is a big question, sure, but ultimately why did it matter? It doesn’t. It also makes me realize that the First Order is completely motivationless, and Snoke’s desire to train Ben/Kylo is made completely pointless. And if he was so strong in the Force, enough to reach out and influence Ben across the galaxy without seemingly ever met him and create a Force bond between Rey and Kylo, how the hell did he not even simply hear the lightsaber next to him rattling on the armrest? In Return of the Jedi, the Emperor is taken by surprise by Vader in a seemingly silly way, considering they’re both Force users and Vader just throws him over the railing and into the battery of the Death Star, but it’s more believable. Palpatine is so busy revelling in torturing Luke and the physical act of electrocuting him, in showing him that he’s right, that he does not see Vader turn. He is so vain that he does not see Vader change right beside him. But there’s motivation there. Snoke isn’t doing much when Kylo kills him, he’s too busy giving his Villain Takes the Time to Explain How The Hero Is About to Die speech to notice that his vision is right but ultimately a misinterpreted prophecy. It’s not believable.

Also, Palpatine keeps Vader on a tight leash but he gives him power, he gives him the illusion of agency. Snoke literally calls Kylo a snivelling bitch every three seconds. He’s like the abusive dad who puts down his spouse/kid all day every day and goes on and on and on about how weak they are and how they’ll never fight back or amount to anything only to get decked in the face during the climax. It was the behavior of an abuser, yes, which we know Snoke was from The Force Awakens, but this makes him an unintelligent abuser. Palpatine was a master manipulator. After seeing The Last Jedi, I have no idea why Ben would follow Snoke, nor do understand why Hux would for that matter. He’s not a villain, he’s a bully. How boring...

There is so much more I could talk about, but when concerning the mythos and philosophy behind Star Wars, what makes Vader so interesting and the rest of the movies so good, and everything else that felt wrong with The Last Jedi. I’m convinced Rian Johnson didn’t even see The Force Awakens and maybe watched the other movies a couple times and was somehow convinced he could make a Star Wars movie. Gareth Edwards’ movie felt like a Star Wars movie. It felt like a story that had always been there, from the beginning, we just hadn’t heard it yet. It was new, yet it kept the feel of the Original Trilogy. The sets and designs looked like they came out of the late 70′s production of A New Hope, but the characters were completely different than any other Star Wars characters we’d seen, they showed how even the Rebellion could be bad and how grey morality could work in a Star Wars movie where there is so much emphasis on black and white Good and Evil, and they killed off every single character by the end which was a bold move. The Last Jedi didn’t just introduce new ideas and explore the philosophies of Star Wars, it completely disregarded them and failed to feel like it belonged in the series. Even though the Prequels have a different tone to them than the Original Trilogy, they still have a feel to them that makes it consistent. The story and the mythos are there, even if the sets and the technology did not add up with what we saw in A New Hope. But The Last Jedi has neither, so I’m failing to see how this is a Star Wars movie at all.

There were so many plot holes, the Resistance plot line was essentially just a ship running out of gas, the First Order is magically able to track them through hyperspace, Hux turned from Space Nazi to Gargamel, Phasma is brought back for three whole seconds only for her to get her ass kicked again, Luke decided to give his ass-tral projection a Rogaine makeover and a different lightsaber, Yoda somehow looks worse than both his puppet and CGI counterparts in the Prequels, the guards on Canto Bight look like they just walked off the set of Spaceballs, and why did the movie end with a Star Wars Duracell commercial, y’know the ones we get this time of year about kids imagining they’re in Star Wars and how it makes Christmas special? That Resistance ring looks like it came out of a Cracker Jack box.

Honestly... what the fuck.

[listoriented]

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

bAUderlands: straya

Where/When/Why: Borderlands: the Pre-Sequel is the first of the series that I didn’t run through with friends at launch. Instead, I got it during a steam sale in July last year for US$16.50 as part of a finish-your-Borderlands-collection package/bundle, with an eye to playing it when I got to it. Apparently I bought Rocket League at the same time? Momentous.

What/Who: It’s in the title, hey - a Borderlands game set between Borderlands 1 and 2. I’m struggling to think of other game and movie franchises that have done this, which perhaps why there isn’t a better descriptive term for it. The newish Baldur’s Gate expansion maybe? Rogue One? Anyway, instead of being set on Pandora - the fictional frontier planet where the previous two games were set - Pre-Sequel is set on Pandora’s moon, Elpis.

Elpis is a noticeably Australian place; it’s inhabited by Australian NPCs and full of parodies of Australian animals and stories (the main characters are all still American though - don’t worry). This is probably because the game was made by the 2k Australia branch [official site], based in Canberra, and so apparently it just kind of happened that way. The Pre-Sequel came out in October 2014. Sadly, 2k Australia shut their doors in 2015, which means there’s no AAA games development happening here for the time being.

Time Spent: 23 hours.

Completed: Yep, finally - we managed one. 19 of 63 achievements ticked. Oh that’s not a lot, hey. Oh well.

Notes: We had a pretty good time. That should probably be the main takeaway. The day after we finished it, Lauren said that she missed playing it. The mindless shooting, looting and questing loop of Borderlands 2 is well repped again here. The flow of it is quietly addictive.

We found the going a bit tough for a while, though, there at the beginning. We spent a lot of time hunting for mission waypoints through the larger moonscape areas of the game, which are not intuitive to travel around in vehicles (lots of dead ends, crevices, mountains, barriers), and awful to travel around on foot (too many things that want to kill you and/or distract you). A few times we went to bed mad at each other after having our patience stretched thin (**n.b. it should be added that while we did often end up playing this in the last hour or two before bed over the past few weeks, this game, like the other Borderlands games, is not something that actually benefits from being played while tired, despite this seeming like the natural state to play it in). One particular semi-optional mission for urchin NPC Pickle nearly drove us to the brink with its arduous navigational requirements.

The quaint fugue that Borderlands draws you into can be a hindrance too: if you don’t pay attention you can be tricked into fighting scores of creeps that could easily be avoided, and which don’t offer much in the way of endorphin release or in-game reward. The next time you come past they’ll all have respawned anyway, making the intervening grind feel particularly pernicious. Things improved immensely once we had more fast travel unlocked, and as we got better at paying attention to who we were meant to be fighting. 

Pre-Sequel also has a couple of particular gameplay gimmicks. At first we were like “???”, but we came around to them. The game is set, as mentioned, on Pandora’s moon, Elpis, which being a moon has low gravity. As such, you can jump higher and further. Because the moon surface lacks breathable atmosphere, you carry oxygen tanks, referred to forever as “Oz kits” because Australia lololololol. These deplete when you’re out in the open (which you are for maybe half the game), causing you to lose health, but we found after the first half hour it’s something you only have to be slightly mindful of, so far as annoying gameplay factors go. More importantly, you can use these “Oz kits” to boost mid-air to reach far-off platforms. It’s pretty good! Any excuse to be able to jump a long way is an acceptable one: thanks, videogames.

The Australiana accents/jokes/parodies that pervade the game are, like, pretty cool...I think? I enjoyed the ironic Australia-for-market shtick tempered by its necessarily cringeworthy over-the-topness. Cliches and stereotypes can be funny too, sometimes. I’m also aware how rare representations of anything Australian are in games, good or bad, particularly home-grown ones; a feeling which is enhanced by knowing this was made by a studio arm that no longer exists. O’, state of thy industry. It’s not that I’m at all patriotic, and the construction of this nation and its cultural identity is as problematic as any other post-colonial state, and there are issues which this game, with its frontier-Western representations of “Australianness”, attempts to avoid altogether, leaving the giant wombat very much in the room. On the other hand is the essence of the game and its uncritical light entertainment sheen, a series of good-enough jokes that beg not to be looked at directly in the eye, the fact that this is what it is, the last of its kind, no more big-budget gaming in Australia or about Australia (no Forza Horizon 3 I’m not talking to you), no Australia at all; and that’s upsetting too. Lauren and I both particularly enjoyed the foul-mouthed shotgun, Boganella, who somehow never stopped making us laugh, and who I kept equipped all the way to the end. I certainly didn’t expect to get that much mileage out of it. 

Lauren played as Athena the gladiator, while I played as Nisha the lawbringer. Neither of us particularly liked the special abilities of our characters. I found the auto-aim of Nisha’s “Showdown” a bit glitchy, with it sometimes locking on outside the enemy’s hitbox. We made do anyway without relying on them too much. Neither of us had played the DLC the Athena appears in, and I hadn’t remembered Nisha from Borderlands 2, so while playing we were unaware of these character’s other roles in the series. 

One thing I did find surprising was how ‘epic’ the Pre-Sequel became in the final act. It almost seemed like it was speaking out of turn, I mean…it’s called “The Pre-Sequel”. That’s a title that screams incidental and unimportant if there ever was one. “This game is just setting the scene for the more important game that was worthy of a real number in its title”, is what it suggests. And for the most part as you play it, it feels that way too. You’re playing on the moon, for instance (and everyone knows moons rate lower than planets on the astronomical bodies ladder). And you’re helping the bad guy! Surely, none of what you do here should be as big, important or ‘epic’ as in the numbered Borderlands titles.

But then, as you approach the finish line, you find yourself fighting multiple boss battles (“surely this is it” I said, erroneously, each time), delving into a massive cavernous space with funky, brilliant colours, into a galaxy-esque background, fighting the forerunner guardians, while the stakes seem to go up and up. The ending is basically prophesy-esque, all bigger picture feels. It’s an odd match.

This is mirrored by the length of the game. We played for 23 hours, which was longer than my playthrough of Borderlands 2. Again, I find this surprising, not least because it also feels smaller at first, with the player limited to the same few compact (if difficult to navigate) areas for quite a while. I’d initially figured it for a 15 hour romp, maybe. This isn’t a complaint necessarily - the game was enjoyable enough for the most part to justify the time spent in it - it just seems structurally unsound to me that a “pre-sequel” should be as big or bigger than the game it’s foregrounding. 

As for the story itself and how it goes about setting up the Borderlands 2 plot, it seems... well I guess it seems cohesive enough, not having recalled many details about Borderlands 1 & 2. You’re basically helping Jack, arch-villain of Borderlands 2, but he’s not evil yet - maybe. He just wants to stop the moon being destroyed by a group called The Lost Legion, while perhaps finding a vault and turning a profit for Hyperion in the process. You watch him do his Anakin Skywalker -> Darth Vader transformation as the game progresses, but because the protagonist vault hunters themselves are morally suspect, they/you don’t seem to mind too much. It's an unusual situation, to be playing the bad-guy, and it’s handled pretty effectively by the writers, if you take this game in a vacuum. That being said, it's also kind of...contradictory, if we do consider background events of Borderlands 2, where Jack’s evilness is established as being a more endemic, long-term thing. Whether the whole coheres depends on what you think/who you listen to, but I've enjoyed reading some forum-posted opinions on the matter anyway. 

And so: This brings us to the end of our Borderlands sojourn. We finally finished one - hooray! Promises well kept. Paradoxically, finishing the Pre-Sequel took less time than it took to pass on Borderlands 2. All up, to sift, avoid and play through these three games has taken nearly the entire winter, which is...sub-optimal. My wish is to be done with the B’s by the end of the year. The letter grows stale; I yearn for a fresh beginning. As of now we've got fifteen games to go. Four months. Hmm.   Addendum: My multi-talented friend Caro started a Tinyletter. It doesn’t have much to do with games but I’ve been enjoying it very much. Consider signing up! It will cost you nothing except your time. 

up next is Botanicula

[mageinabarrel]

[SPOILERS] NieR: Automata Thoughts

 SPOILERS AFTER THE READ MORE LINK - YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED

So, I think the best way to tackle this game is just to go by ending/route. So I’ll talk about those, in order as I experienced them.

Route A: 

Highlight: This cannot continue. I tweeted about this at the time, but wow, this moment was absolutely visceral for me when I first experienced it. I was still getting used to the game’s controls (having never owned a console in my life until now and generally only playing turn-based combat JRPGs, this game was a stretch for me, especially early on), tense because I’d already been surprised by things chasing the machine, and completely enveloped in the atmosphere of the collected android corpses, the tunnel, and everything else. Then it was an insane rush of creepy repeated words, a cascade of enemies I wasn’t sure I’d be able to defeat, and then the incredibly disturbing conclusion to it all with the birth of Adam and Eve (right, that was them right?). I was shaking by the time it was done.

Ending: Again to repeat my Twitter thoughts, I was left a slight bit unsatisfied by this ending. With the C/D reveal that 2B was an execution type all along, I like it a little better, and I think the overall idea of it (especially the strange beauty of the blinking green machine eyes as 9S revived) was neat—but I still thought it was less moving than it could of been. That being said, I guess in the end it’s possibly my favorite ending?

Other thoughts on A: I probably had the most fun exploring the world this route! Although I got frustrated with the lack of a log that showed where you could obtain crafting materials, overall it was a pleasure exploring the beautiful world Platinum Games created. 2B was my favorite character to actually play as, as well, and some retrospect invested stuff like the YoRHa Betrayers quest with extra meaning, which was cool.

Route B:

Highlight: Adam’s taunting of 9S. The accusatory tone and the use of “you” (you the player or 9S, eh?) makes it more intense. That being said, having it delivered by text is... well. Not necessarily ideal!

Ending: When you gain control over 2B in the middle of the credits rolling was possibly the most exhilarating moment of the entire game for me. I was super excited, and felt like, “Oh, shit, here we go—for real now.” It was good.

Other thoughts on B: Probably my least favorite route to play through. I didn’t care much for 9S’s mechanics (that freaking hacking minigame, although I didn’t know about the lock-on function until almost the end of my full playthrough lol) & if I’m being honest I didn’t feel like going through all the same events as the A route really added all that much in the way of new perspectives on it all. At some points I really resented it, actually. Which... is honestly probably more of a reflection of my natural dislike of the “route” system than anything else—I greatly wished that my actions in A had had a concrete impact on the way B played out, but, well, that’s not the game this was. Oh, also I think I basically know the whole plot of NieR now?

Route C: 

Highlight: Walking out the door, refusing to cut off Pascal’s memory or kill him. His final, “How could you do this to me,” coupled with the immediate fade to black and switch to controlling 9S again gave the whole moment a feeling of, “I’ve done something I cannot undo.” And I felt pretty terrible! Even though I personally didn’t want to do either option and didn’t think A2 would be up for them either. But still, actually having to walk yourself out that door and listening to Pascal’s agony behind you... much more powerful than just selecting a “Refuse to help Pascal” choice out of three options.

Ending: Maybe I missed something along the way, but ??? A2′s final words about the world being beautiful came out of nowhere?? She sacrifices herself to save 9S because?? Surely I understand not killing him, as she obvious doesn’t care to kill her fellow androids, but as far as satisfying resolutions to her purposeless wanderings on Earth go, this was far from it. I felt like she was owed more than she got.

Other thoughts on C: I felt like A2 killing 2B should have been more moving that it was, but honestly I was more upset at the game for removing the option to play as her. And, you know, I was most invested in 2B as a character, so having to readjust my levels of caring for the characters was not a super fun experience. Otherwise, as you might expect, I enjoyed C (considering the A2 bits C and the 9S bits D) more than D because I liked playing as A2 – although her material felt somewhat directionless? Like the story didn’t know exactly what it was doing with her—something I suppose is borne out in the ending.

Route D:

Highlight: Devola/Popola’s backstory. As with the 9S/Adam conversation, displaying it in text was a bit eh of a choice for me, but I liked the material quite a lot.

Ending: So the choice you make whether to go with the ark or not doesn’t matter, huh? Anyways, can’t say I’m a huge fan of ‘everyone dies’ endings! It’s good A2 gets resolution in C, cause she gets jack squat in this one! 9S falls to nihilism and insanity... well... that’s fine I guess, but I guess I feel like there needed to be more for me to really be moved by it, my basic unfondness for the ending type aside.

Other thoughts on D: What was up with the Soul Box giving all the items (plus that weapon, Faith), though? An earlier Nier reference that I didn’t get? Lots of other questions, too? Devola and Popola made the Tower? It didn’t come from 9S after all? Or it did, as implied by the C ending? Idk...

Ending E:

Well, all games have to end, I suppose, and as far as “true endings” go this was a nice one. I suppose overall a 2-minute or whatever cut scene isn’t everything I wanted, but leave life after memory restoration up to the fan fiction, I guess! Yes I’m disgruntled. I’m sorry. It’s not enough for me! Although asking me questions like “is it all meaningless” in between deaths on the credits bullet hell is definitely enough to get me to stubbornly move through. Sorry to all the people who lost their data on my behalf.

—Overall Thoughts—

Needed more 2B, and if you think about this all from certain angles you might be a bit miffed that 2B got offed to let 9S’s story continue. Being less than happy with that decision from certain personal places, I’m certainly more sympathetic to that angle that, admittedly, I might be otherwise.

The hacking minigame was more frustrating than it should have been. It almost killed my Route D run for a week (thanks Twitter for getting me through that).

On the whole I felt like the game’s story delivery pacing was... hmm... not quite right? Like if I went off and did a bunch of sidequests and then came back to the story, it seemed really odd to just have it pick up again. But by the same token, just going from story point to story point felt like rushing through. The balance there could have been better. I like it best when quests just seemed to pop up in the middle of the main story and I could go off and do them, then resume what I was doing before.

2B’s swords were basically the only weapons I used for her and A2 all game lol.

I reconfigured my buttons after about the first 5 hours at it was sooo helpful. Quick summary:

X=light attack

Square=heavy attack/hack

Triangle=jump (duhhhh)

L1=lock-on

L2=pod function

R1=dodge

R2=pod fire

I think this is a good way to do things. Good set-up for me.

Overall, I was less enamoured by the game that I expected to be. I see the seeds of why people loved it, but to me it was not all delivered as effectively as it could have been. I might even say that the fact it was a game hampered my enjoyment of the story aspects (the final save delete option aside). I would watch an anime of this game and possibly enjoy it/find it more compelling than I did of it in game form. Anime is better than video games after all. It’s by no means a bad game and overall I enjoyed it (particularly the combat, especially during the mid-portion of the game when I’d just sort of got the hang of it but wasn’t perfect), but, I mean, if you don’t stun me into silence like Shining Force: Resurrection of Dark Dragon did, what’s even the point? (that’s a joke, although that game’s big reveal really did have a huge impact on me as a kid lol)

I suppose my thoughts on the game might evolve over time and as I read people’s essays/thoughts on it. But that’s my initial impression/experience of it.

Another thought that occurs to me just now is that some of the game’s questions about meaning and existence perhaps struck me as shallow and/or juvenile because they are such fixed, obvious quantities to me. Being a religious person I specially am, I don’t much struggle with such questions on a macro level. So interrogating them in this fictional context seemed a bit silly to me perhaps? Like the game was asking the wrong questions.