#most heavy handed set up of Protagonist Skill That Will Help Us Later

[aperture-of-bullshit]

Bumblebee 2018 MAY just be iron giant with a cool can of transformers paint slathered over it but well. What can I say. A deeply enjoyable movie. They babygirlified Bumblebee. Hailee Steinfeld has a weird tension with her car. Memo’s only reason for existence is to create a plausible deniability that Hailee Steinfeld does not have a weird tension with a car. It does not work. She has weird tension with a car. But it’s fine. Fun even! (John Cena voice) “They call themselves Decepticons, does that not raise any red flags?”

[mordysworld]

Film Induction Assignment

This is where my film essay writing skills began, these were my answers for my film studies introduction assignment. The first question was asking for an analysis of the importance of cinematography using an opening scene from a film of my choice and the second question asked for an example of a director who could be considered an auteur.

The importance of opening of Shrek (2001)

The movie opening of Shrek is an iconic scene that is still remembered and referred to when thinking of the movie shrek 20 years later but what exactly makes this scene so memorable? The opening establishes our protagonist Shrek and walks us through his morning routine starting with him exiting his toilet.

When we first meet Shrek he’s shot from a low angle which then transitions into a wide shot of his home, the swamp. The low angle used establishes that in this environment, shrek has a level of power, authority and status and then the wide angle makes his home look bigger so makes the audience think shrek is a character with a lot of authority as he owns his own land which is typically an indicator of power and status. We see Shrek smile before the camera pans to the swamp where a spotlight appears overhead. This kind of lighting  has heavenly or angelic connotations which makes the viewer think that shrek highly values the swamp and sees it as a gift from the heavens above. The swamps lighting and deep depth of field make the viewer focus solely on Shrek's home which could also emphasise the importance of the home to him as we see the swamp from shreks point of view.

None of the shots are filmed in a hand held camera style, this could be to show the steady, never changing routine that the character has already established. Shrek has a steady set, day to day schedule and this could work as foreshadowing that the stable, pre-established monotony of his life would soon change and chaos would ensue. The same could also be said for the heavy focus on his attachment to his home and that his power and authority over his home and land would be threatened by someone even bigger (metaphorically of course) later on in the film. Another important element of the scene is the music. The song ‘All star’ by Smash Mouth is the music that accompanies the scene. The establishing shots of shrek are important but the memorability of his character also comes from the association with this song as well as the first introduction we have to shrek, the cinematography and music go hand in hand.

The Cinematography in the scene is incredibly important; It establishes Shrek's character and the dominance of his character at the beginning of the film and foreshadows a waiver in that status to come. It also establishes the deep attachment he has to his home and why it's so important. The close up and more personal shots show us how comfortable, happy and at ease the character feels in his natural environment which helps to illustrate the deep attachment he has to the setting. The cinematography also helps set the more light-hearted and jovial tone for the movie as well as the pace. This is an example of how pivotal the cinematography is for creating a powerful response in the viewer.

Question 2

Fantastic Mr Fox: The Work Of An Auteur?

Many different components go into creating a film. Editors, actors, set designers and the directors among other things. Arguably one of the most important people that are crucial to the creation of a film is the director. A film director's job is to  manage the creative aspects of the production. They direct the making of a film by visualizing the script while guiding the actors and technical crew to capture the vision for the screen. They control the film's dramatic and artistic aspects.

Wes Anderson is the director of many films including Fantastic Mr fox, the grand Budapest Hotel and Isle of dogs. 

Anderson has a distinct directive style. His films have symmetry and meticulously chosen colour paler in common. Anderson directing could be described as 'direct directing' and he has a hand in producing idiosyncratic and immensely detailed films. Something important is to note a film could have the same cast, crew and script but be directed by a different person and turn out very different. It's all about the creative direction and execution. 

The aesthetic of Fantastic Mr Fox is deliberate and at a glance the scenes could look simplistic but the closer you look the more intricately detailed it seems. An example of this could be character design. The characters already have a base design thanks to the book the film was based off but a decision that Anderson made as director was, having the characters be made from real animal fur rather than synthetic fur as a stylistic choice. 

Another popular shot in Anderson films are profile shots. In Fantastic Mr Fox in our introduction to Mr Fox and his wife we see multiple profile shots when characters speak which gets us to focus our attention solely on the characters and their dialogue. In this scene there is also the visual gag of me fox saying "you're practically glowing, maybe it's the lighting" and then it cuts to a wider shot of both the foxes and she's literally 'glowing'. Anderson movies share a similar sort of dry/visual gag element of humour which isn't exclusive to Anderson movies but is consistent throughout his light-hearted or comedic films

[arashikitten]

Why has no one made a Yu Yu Hakusho x Danny Phantom crossover yet?

?I mean, honestly, look at these two shows! Look at them! How is it that no one (that I know of) has made a crossover with them yet? There’s so much potential!  I mean honestly! Both are about a 14-year-old who died in or before the first episode, came back to life through some sort of shenanigans, and ended up with supernatural abilities as a result. Both Danny and Yusuke have a very close knit friend group comprised of people who know about said supernatural abilities and help them fight all form of malicious supernatural entities (Danny fights ghosts, Yusuke fights demons). Both Yusuke and Danny have a rival/arch-nemesis who, at the start of the series, is leagues above the protagonists in terms of power, but ends up being surpassed by the main protagonist sometime during the second season of their respective show. Both Vlad and Toguro serve as foils to Danny and Yusuke respectively, and while they may feel some sort of kinship with them for some reason or other, they tend to see the young protagonist as someone who is below them in terms of power, intelligence, and skills (even after that is no longer the case). Both Danny and Yusuke are snarky and seem like delinquents to all but their closest friends, but secretly they have a heart of absolute gold. Both would (and have) died for any one of their friends, and they likely have a metric fuck ton of trauma from the many, many, many times they almost watched their friends and family die right in front of them. And of course, both Danny and Yusuke are likely to become kings of their own supernatural realm (if you disregard DP’s canon in favor of the fanon like I do).

So then the question becomes this: how would a crossover between the two shows go?

Here’s how I see it playing out:

Sometime after the last episode of Yu Yu Hakusho, and right after the events of Reign Storm, Yusuke (who I would say is about 18-19 years old now) gets a call from Koenma for the first time in almost 4 years. Koenma tells Yusuke that he needs him to come back for one final case: investigate a small town in Northeastern America for recent spikes in spiritual and demonic activity. 

When Yusuke asks why Koenma wants him to look into what is seemingly a tourist trap town, Koenma tells him that the town was recently encased under a dome of spirit energy, disappeared for almost 24 hours, and then suddenly reappeared again, and Koenma suspects that someone- or something- from spirit world might be responsible.

Three calls and four plane tickets later, Yusuke and the gang land in Illinois and make their way to Amity Park. Kuwabara takes one (1) step into the town and immediately freezes. He’s always been the most spirit-sensitive of the group, and this town is setting off all of his proverbial alarms. Kurama, Hiei, and Yusuke also notice something off about the town, like everyone here has way higher spirit energy than normal. 

The four make their way through town, noticing more and more as they continue. They notice the massive craters that litter the streets. They notice the constant smell of spirit and demon energy that drenches the town like a fog, covering everything and everyone. They notice the small, silvery-grey and green devices that almost everyone seems to have on their wrist, and Yusuke can’t help but think about how similar they look to the spirit-detecting gadgets he used to have back during the beginning of his detective career. They notice the metal panels that every store seems to have hanging above their windows, waiting to come down and defend from some unknown beast.

They notice how, whenever they appear in an area, everyone in the vicinity goes silent. Tense. Wary of them. Like they know three demons just appeared, even if all of them look human.

Yusuke and his team split up to search through the town and cover more ground, agreeing to meet by the local highschool in two hours. Things just get even weirder from there. 

 Kurama finds a patch of wild blood blossoms growing near the forest, despite the fact that they were declared extinct more than 200 years ago. Hiei sees a pair of burly men wearing all white suits and dark sunglasses dragging a young man with white hair and sunglasses away for questioning. Kuwabara is surprised when a small, glowing green puppy appears in front of him, only to vanish when he leans down to pet it.

Yusuke finds a massive stone brick building with what almost looks like a UFO perched on top, and huge neon sign with the words FentonWorks on it. Here, the spirit energy is almost suffocating, and it feels like molasses, thick and heavy and dense on Yusuke’s senses. He feels something else though, something that just barely manages to break through the thick ambient spirit energy that swamps this entire block: a ghost. And a powerful one at that.

By the time the group reconvenes at the high school, everyone is tense. They’re sure that there’s something sketchy in this town, but none of them have gotten any concrete leads on what caused the town’s sudden disappearance and reappearance. Almost none of the townsfolk give them any answers, and the few that do are vague and confusing, or outright lies. Kuwabara firmly believes that this town is haunted by ghosts, and that they’re what caused the sudden disappearance, but Yusuke, having been a ghost himself at one point, is less inclined to believe that. Yusuke is convinced that the house with the weird UFO thing and abnormal spirit energy has something to do with it, and the gang agrees that would be the best place to start.

Before they can do that though, they all suddenly sense a MASSIVE spike in spirit energy, coming from the center of town. Yusuke and the gang book it to where the spike is, hoping to get some sort of lead.

Meanwhile, Danny is having a fight with Skulker, made slightly more difficult than normal due to the fact that he’s still recovering from the whole Pariah Dark fiasco. He’s been on edge all day, ever since he sensed that weird ectosignature near his house. He’d felt the typical chill of his ghost sense, but the typical puff of blueish smoke wasn’t present like it usually was. On top of that, he’d felt a small jolt of electricity, too big to be chalked up to static electricity and carrying with it a hint of... something. Something not entirely human. 

But when Danny had tried to investigate, he’d come up empty handed. Which as you can guess, made Danny My-friends-and-family-have-all-almost-been-killed-by-a-ghost-disguised-as-a-human-at-least-once Fenton more than a little nervous.

So Danny’s fighting Skulker when he feels that not-quite ghost sense again, except this time it’s even stronger than before and waaaay the hell closer. And now Danny goes from nervous to flat out terrified, because whoever or whatever is triggering his not-quite ghost sense is really fucking strong, and oh fuck are there four of them?! Are they getting closer?!?! Whatever it is is really strong, like almost stronger than Pariah Dark and Danny was barely able to take him down at 100% strength with the enhanced suit, and he no longer has the suit and he still has not fully recovered since then, so how in the fresh hell is he gonna fight four beings who are at least on par with Pariah? 

Skulker notices the sudden power spike as well and immediately bounces, leaving Danny to panic over these four insanely powerful entities. 

Yusuke and the gang make it just in time to see Skulker leave while Danny hovers in the air, looking like he’s about to blow a gasket. Kurama takes one look at the panicking ghost kid floating above him, notices the weird spirit energy around the kid, and immediately puts two and two together and realizes the kid is a ghost, and a really powerful one. Yusuke, who if you remember spent about a week as a ghost at the age of 14, is confused because I thought ghosts couldn’t be seen by living people? But these bystanders are clearly seeing this kid? 

And then Yusuke senses that strange spirit energy he felt when he went by FentonWorks, and he’s like “You were the reason for the weird spirit signature!” at Danny, who panics and flies off because now he thinks these super powerful guys are working for the GiW, and he’d rather not spend the rest of his afterlife on an examination table.

So Danny flies off, hoping to lose Yusuke and his gang, but Yusuke I-used-to-fight-demons-who-could-move-at-the-speed-of-sound-for-fun Urameshi and Hiei have absolutely no problem keeping up with the panicking halfa, and they end up fighting. Yusuke and Hiei want answers, Danny is terrified of being caught by what are possibly government agents, and finally Kurama manages to trap the halfa with ghostly vines.

Unfortunately for Danny, these vines are phase-proof, meaning he can’t escape, and he’s already hurt and exhausted and he doesn’t know how much longer he can hold his ghost form.

Yusuke picks up on the ghost’s nervousness immediately, and again assumes that this ghost is the culprit for Amity’s sudden disappearance, demanding to know why he abducted an entire town.

Danny is confused, because what the hell are these people talking about? He never abducted the town? He’s not nearly that powerful?? Before he realizes that oh, these people are trying to figure out why the town disappeared for 24 hours because literally no one outside of Amity Park has any idea why.

So Danny starts to explain what really happened, when his time finally runs out and he detransforms. 

Right in front of what he believes to be four government officials.

There are five different reactions.

Hiei goes still. He’s completely silent. This shouldn’t be possible. He wants to believe that this is all a trick, but he can hear that fifth heartbeat that wasn’t there ten seconds ago and he smells that fear scent that only humans have and glamour can only do so much.

Kurama has the calmest reaction. He leans back a little, eyes wide, and lets out a soft “oh”. Yes, this is a surprise to him, but then again, Kurama himself is a demon hiding as a human, with a human family, so he immediately sympathizes with Danny a bit.

Danny is panicking. He’s just revealed his biggest secret to four complete strangers, all of whom are absolutely powerful enough to take him out on their own, and he is terrified that they’ll turn him in to the government. He’s about five seconds from a full-blown panic attack.

Kuwabara freaks out. He’s trying to wrap his mind around this whole thing, because he is 100% sure this kid was a ghost, that he was dead, but now he’s not sensing much of anything and how the hell is this possible???? How can someone be a ghost and a human at the same time???? WHAT????? He’s pulling at his hair as he tries to put the logistics of it together, pacing back and forth.

Yusuke freezes. Suddenly he’s 14 again, floating as he watches his body get carted off as he tries to come to terms with the fact that he’s dead. Then he’s in the temple of the four saint beasts, fighting with everything he has as he watches the love of his life get attacked by monstrous zombies. Then kneeling next to Genkai’s broken and bleeding body, begging her not to go even as she draws her last breath because he couldn’t bear to lose the woman that he’s come to see as family, as the closest thing he’d ever have to a grandmother. Then he’s watching Toguro plunge his hand into Kuwabara’s heart, watching as his best freind gasps for breath because Yusuke wasn’t good enough, he wasn’t strong enough, and he just lost Genkai he can’t loose Kuwabara too-.

And when he looks down at this small, skinny teenager with deep shadows under his eyes and knuckles covered in scars from god-knows haw many fights, he sees himself as he was in the beginning: Just a kid who was thrust into the world of the supernatural without any warning, desperately trying to stay alive and protect the human world despite the fact that he’s only a teenager, and he shouldn’t have to be fighting for his life against these ancient and powerful demons because he’s a kid, dammit!

Yusuke kneels down to get to eye level with the kid. He can’t help the painful twinge in his chest when the kid looks up at him with wide, icy blue eyes, and quietly begs him not to tell anyone, because this kid can’t be much older than he was when he started out as a spirit detective and he sounds absolutely terrified, and Yusuke can’t help but wonder why he sounds so scared of people learning about the whole ghost thing. 

“Listen, kid. We’re not going to hurt you. We were sent here to investigate something, and we were hoping you might know something. Can you tell us your name?”

“Danny. D-Danny Fenton.”

“Ok, cool. Don’t worry, none of here are going to tell anyone about... about whatever this is. We just want to know about something that happened here a week ago, and we were hoping you could give us some answers.”

Danny agrees, and Kurama frees him from the vines. After a couple of moments, Danny calms down as he realizes that no, these guys won’t rat him out to the government, and he agrees to answer some of their questions.

The group make their way to the outskirts of the forest, and Danny tells them about his status as a half-ghost: he tells them about his parents, how they were building a portal to the ghost zone (Everyone is more than a little freaked out at that, because now there’s a permanent portal to spirit world that Koenma doesn’t know about), how he’d gone inside to see if he could figure out why it wasn’t working, how it’d turned on while he was inside (Yusuke clenches his fists hard enough to draw blood. Both of the times he’d died had been excruciatingly painful, but at least they’d been quick. Getting electrocuted to death would be beyond agonizing, and getting caught in a portal like that...). He tells them about how his parents despise ghosts, believing them to be cruel, malicious, and emotionless, incapable of feeling pain. He tells them about how he’s TERRIFIED of telling his parents the truth, of telling them that he’s Danny Phantom because that seems to be the ghost they want to capture the most, and he’s seen what they do to the ghosts they capture (Kurama and Yusuke feel sick at that. No wonder the kid was so adamant about keeping this a secret.). 

“Does anyone else know? Anyone at all?”

Yusuke breathes a small sigh of relief when Danny tells them that his sister and his two best friends know. That sigh of relief is rescinded when the kid tells them that oh yeah, all the ghosts that are constantly attacking the town? Yeah, they know my secret identity too.

Yusuke has to force himself to move on from that last tidbit because he’s about five seconds from adopting this kid despite being only five years older.

“Ok, neat. That’s... that’s ok. Moving on to why we’re here. We were hoping that you would have some information regarding the sudden disappearance and reappearance of Amity Park a week ago? Do you know why or how it happened?”

Danny talks about how, one week ago, ghosts started pouring out of the portal in unprecedented numbers. How they were terrified, running from something in the ghost zone. How Fright Knight had appeared, declaring the reign of Pariah Dark (Kurama and Hiei suck in a breath. Had... had this kid seriously fought against the fabled ghost king?), and the massive green dome had appeared over the town. How he’d tried to fight Fright Knight off, how another ghost by the name of Vlad Plasmius had shown up and admitted that he was the reason for Pariah Dark’s temporary freedom, how Plasmius had decided to have a temporary truce with Danny in order to defeat Pariah, how Danny had pulled Fright Knight’s sword from the ground and accidentally teleported Amity Park into the Ghost zone, how the entire town had gone under lock down. How he’d stolen the power suit from his parent’s lab to go and face Pariah on his own, and bring Amity back to Earth. How he’d just barely been able to shove Pariah back in the sarcophagus of Forever Sleep, how the power suit had almost completely drained his life energy, how the town had been back on earth when he’d woken up (Again, Yusuke has a flashback to the Temple of the Four Saint Beasts. What is it with the powers that be and sending kids to do life-threatening missions like that?).

Kurama records the entire thing before sending it to Koenma. 

When Danny is finally done, he notices that everyone is staring at him. Yusuke is the first one to speak.

“Damn kid, you really fought the king of the Ghost Zone, huh?” Danny stutters for a moment, because this guy is saying it like Danny fought a god or something. Like yeah, it was difficult, but it can’t be that big a deal right?

Then Kurama speaks up. “Danny, I don’t think you understand. There are two ways to crown a king of the Ghost Zone: either the ghost zone itself must choose someone, or the current ghost king must be defeated in battle. You defeated Pariah Dark in battle. Meaning....”

Everyone goes silent for a moment, processing.

Then several things happen at once. Danny, who at this point still hasn’t fully processed that oh yeah, I defeated one of the most powerful ghosts in existence, freaks the hell out because I barely have time to protect one (1) town, how am I going to rule an entire dimension? Kuwabara is flipping his shit again, Hiei is contemplating, and Yusuke.... Yusuke decides screw it, I’m having an apprentice now, and after calming Danny down, he offers to help train him up a bit (Somewhere in spirit world, Genkai starts quietly laughing).

Danny agrees after a moment of deliberation. Yusuke hangs out in Amity for a bit to help Danny. His first interaction with Sam and Tucker is.... interesting. Yusuke snuck up on Sam and Tucker, and Sam promptly punched him in the face and almost broke his nose. But after a bit they start to warm up to him, and eventually Yusuke starts teaching Sam some hand to hand along with Danny.

Vlad makes one appearance while Yusuke is there. He sensed some sort of foreign presence in Amity and wanted to see if he could exploit it, only for Yusuke I-haven’t-slept-in-a-week-and-I-refuse-to-start-now Urameshi to wipe the floor with him. When he asks Danny who the new ghost is, he is surprised to learn that no, Danny is not the only half-ghost in existence, and also that guy is a famous millionaire and also knows my secret identity so maybe let’s not break into his mansion to fight him please? (Yusuke agrees not to after a very lengthy argument. Still, the whole situation reminds him a little too much of Toguro and the Dark tournament, and he quietly asks Koenma to open an investigation into this Vlad Plasmius guy.)

Yusuke’s introduction to Danny’s parents goes... surprisingly well, actually. Aside from one small incident where one of the Fenton ghost detectors lock on to Yusuke’s signature, everything goes fairly well. Jack and Maddie take a shine to him almost immediately, when they see him curb stomp Skulker with a practiced ease that only a professional should have, and within the week Yusuke is an honorary member of the Fenton family.  

There’s a lot more, but this post is waaaay too long as it is. Feel free to add on!

[entracteofevil]

Character Introductions

Entr’acte of Evil, page 14-36

“Come, kneel to me!”

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Riliane Lucifen d’Autriche

(Kagamine Rin)

The princess who rules the Kingdom of Lucifenia. For her arrogant behavior and proud personality, she is despised by her people, called the “Daughter of Evil”. She and her servant Allen are twins, but as she’s lost her memories of when she was young she doesn’t remember him. Her life was endangered in the civil war with the revolutionary army, but with Allen’s help she escaped from the palace, and later came to live in a monastery.

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AkunoP’s comment

Her character isn’t very complicated in construction, following the template of the ‘willful girl’. I guess she’s developed a bit more than her portrayal in the song. Though I did want to write more on how she grows after joining the monastery (haha). I do regret not being able to do that. It’d be nice if I could write about that somewhere.

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID 2 Character Vocal Series 02 Kagamine Rin of “Kagamine Rin/Len” published by Crypton Future Media.

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-Her monastery outfit is cinched together by a strap tied at the left side on her waist. Her back is the same design as her front.

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-These are the accessories that Riliane wears on her person (rough depiction). There’s a lot of simple items that just have a gem in the middle, but they are still quite expensive.

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Ichika’s comment

*Princess outfit: She has a kind of light and fluffy dress design with a lot of lace and ribbons to show her more adorable side. There’re a lot of rose motifs on her decorations. I wanted to have her hold onto some connection with her and Allen’s parent, so I drew her necklace to look like it was it was made out of something Queen Anne wore.

*Monastery outfit: She’s a novice nun, so her skirt length is a little short. It’s a simple outfit that’s just overall a bunch of sewn together cloth, but as she’s a former princess she has the kind of setup of wearing it well. Though she’s probably a bit bad at her work. Or maybe I should just say she’s not used to it.

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“How’s the flavor, Princess Riliane?”

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Allen Avadonia

(Kagamine Len)

A boy who works as a common servant in the Lucifenian royal palace, despite possessing substantial skill at swordplay and horseback riding. He has a very mature personality, but occasionally he’ll show a bit of boyishness in his expression. He is actually Riliane’s younger twin brother. He wishes for Riliane’s happiness more than anything. He helps Riliane escape during the civil war with the revolutionary army and takes her place, being executed as the princess.

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AkunoP’s comment

He was the hardest character to write (haha). Despite being a protagonist. Mostly in that I would worry that I was making him seem too young (though he is young), and that his youth in itself was a bit difficult to write. Fourteen-year-old boys are tricky. Even now I don’t think I’ve really got a handle on it (haha). There were a lot of parts where I felt like I messed up.

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID 2 Character Vocal Series 02 Kagamine Len of “Kagamine Rin/Len” published by Crypton Future Media.

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-The ribbon that ties his hair back looks to be a butterfly knot. His shoes are a simple loafer design.

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Ichika’s comment

*Servant outfit: He’s a servant, so he has clothes that are easy to move in. In order to show a bit of his boyishness I made the lower cuff of his outer jacket a bit too big for him. His pockets are decorative. I think he should take off his upper coat when doing more strenuous work.

*Traveling outfit: I made his coat a little bit loose, so that it could be worn as-is above his normal clothing. I was thinking about various things when I drew it—like making sure he has a relaxed formal air even when he’s attendant on the princess, that he’s alright even if it rains as he has a hood, that it’s one-size-fits-all, etc.

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“To me, you are a very wonderful person.”

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Michaela

(Hatsune Miku)

A servant who serves Lord Keel, and originally a spirit that lived under the great earth god, Held. She has an inquisitive personality, and her hobby is people-watching. She chose the appearance of the ‘original sinner’ as her human form when she reincarnated. She is beloved by everyone for her kind and sociable personality, as well as her beautiful looks and singing voice. She’s always worrying about her dear friend Clarith, and also this “love” that humans have.

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AkunoP’s comment

This one was also hard to work with (haha). On a fundamental level, she’s less the “of Evil” Miku and more just straight up “VOCALOID Miku”. Like the whole “Miku is an angel” thing from the early days. I think it was through her relationship with Clarith that she was finally able to set herself apart as the “of Evil” Miku. I’ve still got a few more developments for her yet (haha).

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID 2 Character Vocal Series 01 “Hatsune Miku” published by Crypton Future Media.

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-The sleeves of her town outfit are lined with lace. They are three-quarter length.

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Ichika’s comment

*Town outfit: Given that she’s meant to be adorable, her outfit was made with a kind of fluttering look in her sleeves and such. There are a lot of parts where two sleeve ends  overlap. I drew her to be more of a diva than a servant in appearance. Also, while her pendant is a scallop in shape, its size is close to that of the end of her thumb.

*Village outfit: As she’s sort of German in style, I drew her with the image of the German Fairy Tale Road in mind. As I have the personal idea that it’s a hand-me-down from Clarith’s mom, the skirt for her dress is a little too long. I didn’t get the idea that she was dressed all that fashionably in the village, so I made it so that this one had no ribbon.

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“I—I’m sorry! I’m really sorry!”

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Clarith

(Yowane Haku)

A servant who works at the Keel estate alongside Michaela. She’s a Netsuma girl with white hair and red eyes, and she has suffered persecution from the Elphe people due to being an ethnic minority. It’s because of this that she developed her catchphrase, “I’m sorry for being alive”, and her pessimistic personality. On a fundamental level she’s clumsy and not really good at anything, but she does have skill in cooking. She also likes plants and animals, and she takes very good care of saplings.

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AkunoP’s comment

She’s the character that’s the closest to my “real self”. “I’m sorry for being alive” is actually my real life catchphrase (haha). So she’s easy to empathize with. She has a few odd points but she’s really the most normal, “everyman” character in the story. Haku herself was originally conceived not as a VOCALOID but as a “master”(song producer), you know.

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*This character was based on “Yowane Haku”, a derivative of the VOCALOID 2 Character Vocal Series 01 Hatsune Miku published by Crypton Future Media.

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-The length of her hair goes down to slightly above her knees. She also tends to use the bangs on the side of her face to hide her ears.

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Ichika’s comment

*Town outfit: On the whole she’s like Michaela, but I made her design more simple to express a grown-up and “in the background” air. I didn’t see her as someone to wear particularly girly clothes, so her collar is a bit more masculine. I think four out of five times she’d have Michaela help out with the ties on her back.

*Monastery outfit: I designed her sleeves to be neat so that it would be easy for her to cook, which is her main strength. As they don’t have any ostentatious stuff like hair decorations at the monastery I tearfully cut down on her ribbon… It’s a useless detail but her waist sash is supposed to be in a granny knot.

*Village outfit: I put her in a simple, full dress that’s easy to put on. I had intended for her outfit to both show that she was an outsider and be something that Clarith herself picked out to not stand out in a village, which ultimately gave me this image of a slightly overdressed outfit. Hence her design coming out like this.

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“I ain’t broken the fountain yet, yannow!”

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Chartette Langley

(Kasane Teto)

A maid who serves in the palace, and Allen’s childhood friend. Due to her frightening strength she excels at heavy work, but struggles with more delicate tasks and is often breaking things inside the palace. The princess is fond of her for her outgoing personality, and they will sometimes take tea-time together. During the revolution she engages in a duel against Mariam, one of the Three Heroes, using a broadsword larger than her own height.

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AkunoP’s comment

I like this character (haha). She was easy to work with. I wish I could have had her do more. She didn’t get to do anything in the second book, so I’ve been thinking about maybe having her show up in the third book.

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*This character is based on “Kasane Teto”.

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-During the duel she took on the style of wielding a sword larger than her own body. For that reason her outfit was made to show ease of movement.

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-The broadsword is of a simple design, but that’s overpowered by its sheer size. It sort of has the image of a blunt weapon more than a slashing implement.

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Ichika’s comment

*Maid outfit: The ends of her sleeves are precisely folded back. The hem of her skirt is frilly and puffs out a bit, as the style of the maid outfit in the country of yellow. The hem is also slightly short, as she does a lot of running around. The ribbon at her collar had been red at first to match her hair, but I figured that it wouldn’t be red in the country of yellow so I changed it to yellow.

* Resistance outfit: She’s a peasant, so she has light armor on her casual wear. The coverings for her wrists were a bit more unrefined at first. I drew her leg armor in to serve as a sort of counterweight for when she swings her sword around. As such, they’re supposed to be much heavier than they look. She could probably mortally wound someone with one kick.

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“Please…keep what I’ve said a secret.”

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Ney Phatipe

(Akita Neru)

A maid who serves in the palace, and the adoptive daughter of the head maid and one of the Three Heroes, Mariam. She does all her work flawlessly, but it’s countered by her being a gossip and loose-lip, which results in some turmoil occurring. She’s favored by Riliane, and becomes a source of information for her. Her true identity is that of Marlon’s thirteenth princess, Ney Marlon.

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AkunoP’s comment

Like Clarith, Ney is a character that I had a concept of since the very beginning. She was originally a childhood friend of the twins who stood in a sort of “big sister” role, and wound up becoming “another servant”. She’s the character who’s changed the most from how she was in the beginning. I actually had plans to make her into a joke character (haha).

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*This character was based on “Akita Neru”, a derivative of the VOCALOID 2 Character Vocal Series 01 Hatsune Miku published by Crypton Future Media.

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-I considered several different ways of her tying her hair when she’s an assassin, but how she ends up being in that situation is a secret.

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Ichika’s comment

*Maid outfit: The basics are the same as Chartette’s maid uniform. Only the hem is longer, to show the difference in work and her personality. She feels like the kind of person to wear her maid uniform so well that she could do her work from start to finish all day without anything out of place. She was trained by her adoptive mother.

*Assassin outfit: She’s doing espionage activities, so it’s an entirely black uniform. The main focus was ease of movement. The boots are made of a soft fabric to make it harder to hear her footsteps. Her ponytail can be bundled up and pushed under her clothing depending on the situation. It probably just barely gets in. –Fits in.

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“…Stop mocking me.”

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Kyle Marlon

(KAITO)

The king of the island country of Marlon (the “Country of Blue”), and Riliane’s fiancé. Riliane adores him, calling him her “dear”, but he falls in love at first sight with Michaela when meeting her in the mansion of his friend, Keel, and so breaks off the engagement on his end. He is no match for his mother, Empress Dowager Prim, something he’s a bit ashamed of.

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AkunoP’s comment

I’m so sorry, but he’s the one I care about the least (haha). Frankly I seriously didn’t want to write him all that much. These novels aside, don’t expect me to make KAITO this cool overall. Though he’s a pretty toothsome character, with how many turns he gets.

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID Character “KAITO” published by Crypton Future Media.

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-The basis for his masked appearance is a certain sha[redacted]. It’s a simple outfit, but the decorations it has here and there are gaudy in a minor way.

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Ichika’s comment

*Main outfit: As he was designed with a theme of solemnity, his whole appearance is composed with a precise and stiff feel. The collar of his jacket is designed like a suit. His sleeves are meant to feel a bit stern. I drew his outfit with a sort of square image of the country of blue in my head, so he’s light on the curves. Since he’s a male character I put more emphasis on being chic than flashy.

*Disguise outfit: I drew this to feel like the sort of typical outfit of the country of blue. But the quality of the fabric is a grade above that of the average person. If I were to draw in any armor it would let slip what country he’s from, so he’s just got the one sword as equipment. It’s the same sword he wields in his king outfit, but he tries to hide it.

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“Let’s go, everyone.”

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Germaine Avadonia

(MEIKO)

Allen’s adopted sibling who lives in the town below Lucifenia castle, and the adopted daughter of Leonhart, one of the Three Heroes. She’s dependable and cares about her friends, but that comes with the snag of her being a little crude. In actuality she’s quite smart, becoming the leader of the Resistance and earning the people’s respect.

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AkunoP’s comment

At first, I had wanted to make her into a classic, genuinely heroic character…But I guess that got a bit warped. Like Miku, there’s a lot of influence taken from her character as a VOCALOID. I want to write about her past sometime. She’s an unexpectedly pitiable character, who winds up not having a lot of influence.

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Ichika’s comment

In addition to being based on Leonhart’s armor, the insignia above her chest is taken from the hilt of his sword, so in that sense it’s like her equipment has inherited her father’s will. It’s lighter armor, given that as she’s a woman there’s more emphasis on maneuverability. As it prioritizes heroism over sex appeal, her legs haven’t been left exposed.

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID Character “MEIKO” published by Crypton Future Media.

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“You working hard, kids?”

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Leonhart Avadonia

(LEON)

Allen and Germaine’s adoptive father, and one of the Three Heroes. He’s the captain of the guard of the royal family, but he clashes with the princess over their different opinions. An unparalleled drinker, he often drinks the night away with his daughter Germaine.

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AkunoP’s comment

Among the Three Heroes, he’s the one that came to mind first. He vanishes pretty quickly from the story for someone who was present in the plot of the Daughter of Evil since its original conception… Though I guess he does get to do more in the bonus story, so it’s all good. He’s a bit of an old fogey by the Daughter of Evil era. I did have some other more detailed ideas for him, but ultimately wound up not using them.

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Ichika’s comment

He has solidly built heavy armor. The main colors of his outfit are red and white, but there’s a single thread of yellow on his mantle alone to symbolize the people of the country of yellow.  The mantle is part of his uniform as captain of the guard; he didn’t have one during his hero days.

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*This character was independently made based on VOCALOID “LEON” published by ZERO-G.

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“Lucifenia will very soon be overthrown.”

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Elluka Clockworker

(Megurine Luka)

A court sorceress who served the previous monarch, and one of the Three Heroes. Her predictions are never wrong, and so there are many who trust in her in the palace. She has lived for a long time, and is carrying out the task of collecting the “Vessels of Deadly Sin” as a favor to the great land god Held.

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AkunoP’s comment

It’s the postscript character! (haha) Originally I planned for the sorceress role was going to be played by a different character, but then I swapped her out when Luka was published, resulting in her ultimately getting the best role. Personality-wise she’s similar to how I am when I’m drunk (haha). So, like Clarith, I’m quite fond of her, and she’s easy to write.

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Ichika’s comment

It’s a bit hard to tell with the robe on, but despite not looking like it she actually has some degree of exposure. Mostly her shoulders and legs. Her outfit was designed to look bewitching. The jewels at her hip are taken from her VOCALOID image character. After Riliane, she probably has the most accessories out of anyone else.

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID 2 Character Vocal Series 03 “Megurine Luka” published by Crypton Future Media.

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“Yes, the green onion, the Very Amazing, Green Onion.”

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Gumillia

(Megpoid)

A sorceress in training who serves in the palace, and Elluka’s apprentice. She is very close with Michaela, and was originally one of the spirits who served Held alongside her. She picked the form of Elphegort’s first female prime minister, Gumina Glassred, as her appearance when reincarnating as a human.

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AkunoP’s comment

She hardly got to do anything at all…Since she hasn’t had a lot of influence on the story at present, I think I’d really like to give her more to do in the third book (haha). I think she’s the character with the most potential. She was originally a spirit, and is a sorceress to boot. So, expect great things from her in the future!

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Ichika’s comment

As she’s Elluka’s apprentice her outfit design is made to resemble hers, though it also shows a more apprentice-esque childishness in it. But I also see her not changing her outfit even after her training his passed. Like Elluka, she has a single jewel around her hip.

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID 2 Artist Vocal character “Megpoid” published by Internet Co., Ltd.

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“I am one of the Three Heroes, Mariam Phatipe!”

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Mariam Phatipe

(MIRIAM)

She once engaged in espionage as one of the Three Heroes, but now she serves as the head maid in the palace. Her personality is extremely rigid, but she has her kind side as well, and there are many who admire her. She prides herself on covert work, like running secret intelligence.

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AkunoP’s comment

Her appearance is meant to feel like a gorgeous, cool beauty. In conception she’s this badass secret intelligence operative, but in the end she wound up being a dud spy (haha). She was completely useless, and failed to see what was happening with her own daughter. Her position is sort of that of everyone’s stern mother. Though the “Of Evil” series is full of stern women, and all of them are strong.

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Ichika’s comment

She does have a theme of being a rigid, cool beauty. With this sort of masculine air, too. Her outfit is a bit old-fashioned, bearing in mind the image of the previous queen’s reign. I pictured her being able to move a fair bit whatever her uniform, so I think it would always be prim and proper, without anything out of place.

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*This character was independently made based on VOCALOID “MIRIAM” published by ZERO-G.

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“We have a favor to ask of you.”

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Anne Lucifen D’autriche

(Sweet Ann)

The old queen of Lucifenia, and the mother of Riliane, who admired her. She often said she wanted to “build a country where children can live with a smile”, and devoted her energies into the strengthening and expansion of her country. Like her husband Arth I, she passed away from the incurable “Gula” disease.

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AkunoP’s comment

She’s sort of like what Riliane could have turned out like if she’d been raised properly. Strong, kind, and popular. Only, I’m sure she must have been more mischievous when she was younger. She probably had reckless adventures and passionate romantic stories, but I’ve got no plans to write any of them (haha).

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Ichika’s comment

I drew her with a theme of a queen’s strictness and a woman’s gentleness. Actually, her character design is the one I liked the most on first drawing it. She’s not too gaudy, but I’m really happy her outfit conveys a sense of stability in its place.

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*This character was independently made based on the VOCALOID 2 “SWEET ANN” published by PowerFX.

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“That’s just common practice among merchants.”

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Keel Freezis

(Hiyama Kiyoteru)

A famous merchant who conducts trade in Elphegort, while being an immigrant from Marlon. He serves as the head of the trade association, and is also proficient in handling information. He’s an old friend of Marlon’s King Kyle. He has three children.

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AkunoP’s comment

The no.2 super afterthought character (haha). At first I had no plans for him to do anything at all, but when I tried giving him a few more scenes he turned out to be a pretty fun character; I ended up shortening Kyle’s role to compensate (haha). It was a lot of fun to write a character so cheerful. And it was pretty amusing to have him be such a doting parent.

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Ichika’s comment

As he’s a merchant, he wears shoes and an outfit that are both easy to walk in. His uniform base is the country of blue. Fundamentally his robe is for use in business discussions, and is supposed to easy to remove when it gets hot or gets in the way. I would imagine he probably dresses down a bit outside of occasions where he’s conversing with royalty and nobles.

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID 2 Vocaloid teacher “Hiyama Kiyoteru” published by AH-Software Co. Ltd.

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“Tell me the story of the ‘Daughter of Evil’!”

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Yukina Freezis

(Kaai Yuki)

The eldest daughter of the wealth Elphegort merchant Keel Freezis. She’s very attached to her servant Clarith, and often has her wrapped around her little finger, being both naïve and mischievous. She has a hobby of writing stories, and excels at it despite her young age.

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AkunoP’s comment

She’s going to be more active in the third book. She’ll be a main character!! (haha) She becomes the author of the Freezis Fairytales, and the official teller of the story. Come to think of it I did buy the Yuki software the other day, so I might make a song for her after this.

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Ichika’s comment

Frankly she’s the most fun when drawing. While heavily basing her off of her original character image, I also gave her a more chic and mature air befitting a merchant’s daughter. I’m happy I was able to make her appearance show how doted on she is by Keel.

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID 2 Vocaloid student “Kaai Yuki” published by AH-Software Co. Ltd.

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“I was the same as you…Evil.”

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Gast Venom

(Gackpoid)

A skilled mercenary who heads a mercenary band, called “The Demon of Asmodean”. During the revolution he stays at the palace until the end under Allen’s request, and fought against the revolutionaries using a weapon called a katana, something unfamiliar to the Evillious region.

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AkunoP’s comment

He’s got a mystery for so few appearances (haha). I’ve given him a ton of backstory but I haven’t shared any of it. Like that he’s a descendant of Venomania, that he isn’t actually [redacted], none of it’s been shown in story. And he got killed by an amateur girl (haha). In that sense I guess he’s more pathetic than Kyle. I’d like to get some of it out someday though.

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Ichika’s comment.

I made him more Japanese in style to give him a foreign feel. I drew his outfit and his equipment to be like the protective armor of a swordsman. His outfit’s meant to have a slightly feminine component to it, like having a feminine sash at his waist. He’s got a decent amount of layering in his clothing. His physique is meant to feel pretty lean.

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*This character was based on the VOCALOID 2 Artist Vocal character “Gackpoid” published by Internet Co., Ltd.

directory

[terramythos]

I beat Prey yesterday! here are the general thoughts i scribbled down. 

i thought the opening was super strong. When you break the glass on the apartment window? *chef's kiss*

i’ve never played system shock 2 but understand this is heavily influenced by it. I've played Bioshock though so I did pick up on some of the similarities by proxy.

generally I liked combat. In the first half it's pretty tense and survival horror-y and there's certainly a difficulty curve. I liked using limited resources and thinking up creative solutions to problems. 

However, most stuff became trivial halfway through. The shotgun is just busted after a couple upgrades. Once you know a surefire way to deal with each enemy type, the game gets pretty easy. from what I understand the difficulty settings do not affect this much (I played on normal). You can make the game more tedious, but not necessarily harder.

i wish there were more horror elements in the mid to late game. There are some genuinely great jump scares early on but they're basically gone past a certain point.

main quest in general was a treadmill of “go to point a, do x thing, oh no something stopped you from doing x thing, you need to go to point y and do b thing so you can go back and do x thing”. kind of disappointing; it mostly served as a way to get around and find more interesting stuff (with a few exceptions). i liked the side quests more. 

the voice acting was great. In particular, Benedict Wong's performance as Alex stuck out to me.

the visual and world design was fantastic, too. I think its impressive that Talos I had a unifying design but each area still felt distinct.

visually the Looking Glass stuff was super cool. I think that Arkane developed this with the time travel Dishonored 2 mission and it was cool there too.

there's an impressive amount of extra flavor. All of the art, audio logs, emails, books, and even the ability to explore a bit in space. Just cool details that helped make it all feel real and believable. It adds a lot.

i wanted neuromods to be more like the plasmids in bioshock. While they are the same thing story-wise, in game they function as a talent tree. And some just don’t make sense. Like... how would jamming 4 neuromods in my eye make me physically better at lifting stuff? Why is it an incremental skill I have to invest in 3 times? This makes a little more sense with the Typhon powers since those are basically magic, but not the Human ones.

the ending and some of the mid story is clearly rushed, although I'm glad there's more stuff after the credits.

despite the underwhelming endings (pre credits) I do think the developers put an impressive amount of thought into the circumstances various playthroughs would have surrounding them. I looked it up and there's a boggling number of variations on what's basically two endings.

startlingly few bugs! Just some clipping stuff for me, mostly.

there were some cool small details. I like that if you go someplace before the main story officially tells you to, January will act surprised that you knew ahead of time to go there for the next step. This only happened to me once (on accident), but I imagine it's fun for replays.  

SPOILER THOUGHTS BELOW THE CUT 

LOVE the meta commentary on identity and autonomy in video games. Morgan is a little different between each reset in the early simulation, even though theoretically that shouldn't be possible. Characters constantly compare you to the Morgan they knew, whatever that means to them. Morgan the player character is a silent protagonist. Morgan the narrative character has several audio and video logs from their past and multiple robots with their voice. More broadly, each player will play a video game differently, even if they make similar choices. So is any playable character the same person between playthroughs? Is the player character narratively that person, or are they simply a vehicle that reflects what the player wants? It's no "would you kindly" but it's still interesting. 

in theory i like the Nightmare. kind of a pyramid head type thing but more random. however there’s little incentive to defeat it and it’s easy to avoid, so it turned into a “wait for a 3 min timer to count down” simulator. also, if you accidentally spawn it in certain areas it can WRECK your ending (though it’s easy to reload). 

so the Big Twist hints were pretty heavy handed. I figured it out early. It occurred to me after the first level that if the tutorial was a simulation, anything could be, and that was basically the big twisterino. Stuff like January saying "well good thing you're not an alien" in a super ironic tone of voice made me laugh out loud. Also, I did the Obvious Bad Ending for shits and giggles and it spoiled the whole thing. Really wish it had just cut to black since you can access it early. This potentially ruins any shock value for a lot of people.

on some level I like that the ending explains away certain "plot holes". Probably the most obvious is Morgan not remembering any of their past, which is... not how the neuromod memory loss works. But of course they wouldn't remember it, because the player is a Typhon going through a simulation, not the real Morgan.

you can also view the ending from the perspective of humans desperately trying to convince an alien they're worth saving, despite some "bad actors" (read: war crimes in space). Hence the sometimes on-the-nose moral choices and optional side quests. Even the fact that Morgan and Alex are characterized as total assholes in the past-- yet Alex in game and post credits is gentle and compassionate. Perhaps Alex in real life is trying to atone for his mistakes?

i kept expecting mirrors to be relevant? The Phantoms whisper about "what you see in the mirror", promo material shows Morgan looking at themself in the mirror, the Looking Glass tech, and the fact that mirrors are all over the place and DO NOT actually reflect Morgan. Which isn't a technical limitation since the Looking Glass is a whole thing. There's the whole mirror neuron thing but that's such a tiny line of dialogue I'm not sure it matters. Have to wonder if this was a story concept that got cut. 

in a similar vein to "crap Phantoms say", there's a minor human character who just... says a bunch of Phantom lines in a row once you complete a quest. He’s seemingly unaware that he's echoing them. What was the purpose of this? Was this an abandoned plot thread? 

why wasn't Dahl a bigger part of the story? or Alex and Morgan's parents? I assume it's due to a time crunch, but it just feels like a missed opportunity.

small detail: I love that one of the main story quests has you fake someone's voice using audio logs, and someone MUCH later uses the same trick against you.

another small detail which I missed: flying out to the space billboard to get an early horror twist about the fucking escape pods. there are lots of little things like that all over the place. 

[mwolf0epsilon]

Norman finds out Joey abuses Sammy. How? And what does he do ?

Warning for Joey Drew being a verbally and physically abusive dickhead, Norman being a little voyeuristic, and canon typical violence.

Summary: Despite his imposing size and general weirdness, Norman Polk had a very soft heart...

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Growing up with a militaristic family had shaped Norman Polk into one of the most capable people to ever work at Joey Drew Studios. He had a variety of skill sets that could cover a lot of general tasks in the studio itself, from handyman to mechanic work, to a bit of plumbing and a lot of heavy lifting. On days he didn't have anything to record, Norman would either find himself organizing the projector storage area, or carrying boxes full of reels, as well as lugging around those damn soup vending machines Drew had splurged large sums of money on (what a waste, he'd seen Grant's notes, he felt for the poor accountant).

In the earlier days of the studio, when Henry was still around, he'd been akin to a godsend in Joey's eyes. Cheap labour and little to no care about the workload.

Now that he had a more set position he helped where he could when asked. Yet, for all his usefulness, everyone in the studio considered him to be a bit of a creep.

Granted, he had done that to himself. His dear ma had always told him he had a bad habit of sticking his nose where he shouldn't, and his older sister had flicked his ears whenever he'd snuck up on her to eevesdrop on her conversations with that boy from across the street she clearly fancied.

"Quiet as a hunting jaguar and twice as observant", his pop would say with pride. His sisters all used to scoff and say he was just a snoop trying to get them in trouble.

Of course he never told on any of them, because that wasn't his intention. No, he simply had an insatiable curiosity that lead to him creeping about in the dark places, where none could see him.

It was something that followed him into adulthood and into the studio.

Quiet as a mouse he got around and saw things. Things no one could even dream he knew about them. Like the contents of Grant's locked filing cabinets, the bottle of whiskey Lacie hid in her toolbox, Thomas Connor's favourite sandwich (peanut butter and jelly, cut in triangle shapes), the conversations Susie had with herself in different voices to warm up for recordings, the rather interesting discussions between Jack and Sammy, Wally's frustration with his memory issues, even the few times he'd caught sight of Bertrum Piedmont being less than appropriate in a workplace bathroom (for his age, Norman had to say the man had restraint and stamina to be able to fiddle with himself for so long unnoticed). Info he could easily use to humiliate or even bribe a few people. But he wouldn't of course... Despite his imposing size and general weirdness, Norman Polk had a very soft heart. One that could fit all these misfits.

Which is why it physically hurt him when he noticed things changing. And not for the better either.

The studio was a mess from day one due to Joey clearly having poor management skills. Things tended to go a little haywire at times, and throwing money at something until it worked didn't solve anything in the end. When the war propaganda started popping up, stuff got way worse. More than half the staff enlisted, leaving Joey to hire women to cover for his losses. And god did Joey Drew hate women.

Norman had been repulsed by all the things he caught his boss saying and doing in the presence of the female staff. The looks of discomfort and masked anger left a bitter taste in his mouth and he cursed his own sneakiness for leaving him without a reasonable way to tell him off for it. How could he know if he wasn't in the room to witness it? How could he just come out and say he was in the walls watching his peers like some creep?

The few who caught on to him observing them often looked at him in disgust. An entire studio of angry women turned against him wouldn't do his sanity no good.

Conflicted mind aside, the new hires weren't the only changes. The few who remained weren't doing any better. If anything there was a decline in behavioral patterns due to an influx of work.

Grant became quieter, more anxious. He saw less of the man on lunch breaks and found him chugging coffee in his office just mumbling numbers to himself like his life depended on it.

Wally's hostility towards Thomas was escalating to the point he'd dragged Shawn Flynn into the mess. A stolen tool belt, a match of the blame game, and an irate Irishman were not good things.

Susie had been replaced, and her subsequent upset at losing a spot she'd adored was affecting her side character voice work. She also acted outright hostile towards the replacement and to Sammy of all people.

Speaking of which, both Sammy and Jack looked tired and had constant migraines from working with the band all day. While he saw little of Jack, he noted that Sammy was behaving in a rather aggressive manner to anyone who so much as inconvenienced him (Buddy had only been trying to be nice and immediately he'd gotten Sammy's full fury on day one of knowing him).

Lacie was murmuring paranoid mambo jumbo about that one creepy bendy robot thing moving and watching her (he'd never seen it do such a thing, and he'd spent a good part of a morning staring at it).

Bertrum's mood had darkened after an argument with Joey, and even the damn dancer they'd hired a month or so ago was going about hiding stuff behind toilets. If that wasn't disgusting Norman didn't know what was... Some of these people lacked the decency to clean after themselves so there was no way he'd take a peek himself.

The studio was, for a lack of better words, becoming a bit of a circus act.

So really, it shouldn't have surprised him when he'd stumbled upon an alarming sight in Drew's office.

There was a particular vent that lead to a nice and big crawlspace between the ceiling of Joey's office and the floor of the room above. Norman liked to eat lunch there, nice and quiet and with a vantage point to look down at Joey's desk, where he'd be writing the most pitiful letters to his investors.

It was fun to watch the bastard degrade himself when he often degraded those around them instead. That day Norman had expected to find just that, not Joey holding Sammy by the neck and squeezing it tight while the poor music director squirmed uselessly in his grasp.

Naturally de'd frozen in shock, staring through the crack he used to observe his less than favourite protagonist, watching the scene unfolding like something out of them novels his wife liked to read. Murder mystery stuff.

Joey Drew was choking the life out of one of his first employees, while hissing the most cruel and deplorable things imaginable. Once in a while he'd release his grasp when Sammy's face would start turning a horrid shade of blue, then continue to choke him and verbally assault him once the guy reinflated his lungs. The process carried on for at least five minutes before Norman could take no more.

Food abandoned to the mice, he crawled all the way back out and made his way to Drew's office. He slammed his fist on the door before opening it, refusing to wait for an answer.

Joey had released Sammy in the time it took for Norman to get out and back. The blond just barely composing himself while Joey played the part of a saintly boss, sitting behind his desk with a calm and peacefully look on his face.

"Is everything alright, Mr. Polk?" The devil of a man asked, with that false sweet tone he used when addressing his more naive employees. Sammy refused to look at anyone, instead fixing the creases on his shirt and pinning his loosened hair into a messy ponytail.

Caught red-handed, Norman didn't know what to say. Thankfully Wally was a saving grace in that respect.

"FIRE IN THE BAND ROOM! THE DANG PROJECTOR EXPLODED!"

"The music sheets!" Sammy practically shoved past them both to run to the aid of the few pieces that had survived any encounters with the faulty ink pipes. Wally followed, leaving Norman to stare at Joey.

The look in Drew's eyes told him he knew perfectly well why Norman had come here.

"Best be less obvious about your hobbies Mr. Polk..."

"Why Mr. Drew, I haven't a faintest clue what yous is on about... Just comin' ta tell ya the projector was no good no more."

"Right... The projector. Hopefully the projectionist doesn't end up the same. There's only so much a soft heart can take, hm?" The implications of his words were a little unsettling, but thus far Drew was more bark than talk.

"Resortin' to threats now, are we? Can ya really afford ta lose anyone else?" Not to mention it'd be odd to just let him go after years of working at the studio. People would ask questions.

"If I could afford to lose the best damn artist this studio ever saw, I can definitely afford to lose a nosy projectionist." He meant those words. He really did. Norman could sense the malice behind them. So he hit back harder.

"Henry did the right thing leavin' your sorry ass behind."

He got out as soon as the paperweight flew his way. He'd definitely pay for that later, but it felt good to at least spare Sammy from Joey's wrath.

Soft heart and all that...

A soft heart that would inevitable have an axe buried in it, brandished by the very same person he'd been trying to help.

Life didn't much care for soft people, it seemed.

[scoutception]

Final Fantasy II review

One of the most interesting parts of the Final Fantasy series, and a big reason why I’m so fond of it, is that every main series game takes its own approach to the gameplay. From the job systems of III and V, the Materia system of VII, the Junctioning system of VIII, or the straight up action combat of XV, every game has a different focus that makes them stand out, and while the results can certainly fall short at times, it’s still something worth commending. For example, take the subject of today’s review, Final Fantasy II. For the second game in the series, and a game that came out in 1988, it’s a huge step up from the original game in a lot of ways. A much more detailed plot, containing several defined playable and supporting characters, a much more experimental battle system, the introduction of many elements, gameplay and otherwise, that would establish a true identity for the series, away from just being a ripoff of Dungeons & Dragons 1st edition, it’s an impressive and critical step forward for the series. Unfortunately for the game, it hasn’t been 1988 in over 30 years, and it’s now easily the weakest game in the series in my opinion. As for why that is, well, that’s what we’re taking a look at today. As with the first game, I’m reviewing the PSP version. Note I’ll be pretty lax with spoilers, so take caution, if you actually care to avoid spoilers.

Story: Final Fantasy II takes place in an entirely different world than Final Fantasy I, a tradition that every main series game would follow. The peace of this world is shattered after the rise of Emperor Mateus of Palamecia, who, bent on world domination, raises a fearsome army and unleashes the denizens of Hell upon the land, conquering a large portion of the world. The city of Fynn organizes a large resistance effort, only to be attacked by the Emperor’s army, forcing a small remnant to flee to the town of Altair, establishing the Wild Rose Rebellion, led by Princess Hilda. During the fall of Fynn, four youths, Firion, Maria, Guy, and Leon, attempted to escape as well, only to be attacked and left for dead by the Emperor’s soldiers, with Leon going missing as well. Rescued by the rebellion, and healed by the white wizard Minwu, Firion, Maria, and Guy, having nothing left to return to, and wishing to search for the missing Leon, join the rebellion to fight back against Palamecia. Meanwhile, the Emperor, his army having taken heavy losses taking Fynn, takes to devising much less conventional methods of establishing his rule, starting with a massive airship called the Dreadnought, meant to scare the populace into obedience, on threat of total destruction.

Compared to the very light plot of Final Fantasy I, the story here is much more involved. Instead of wandering between locations more or less aimlessly, there’s always an explicit plot reason to go to new locations, the party being given tasks like finding mythril to supply the rebellion with better equipment, or trying to recruit potential allies. Compared to the party in the first game just being completely blank slates, the party consists of the more distinctive Firion, Maria, and Guy, with the fourth slot being filled by various guest characters that come and go as the story goes on, such as Gordon, the prince of the fallen kingdom of Kashuan, and Ricard Highwind, the last of the dragoons, and there’s actually an established side cast, including characters like Hilda, the leader of the rebellion and princess of Fynn, Paul, a noble thief assisting the rebellion, and Cid, a former knight who maintains the world’s only airship, with this notably being Cid’s first appearance in the series.

Final Fantasy II is also very noticeably darker than the first game. While the plot circumstances of the first game weren’t exactly cheerful, with the world falling apart due to the influence of the Fiends, outside of a select few towns, this wasn’t very obvious, and the game overall carried a bright, adventurous feel. Not so with Final Fantasy II, where the Emperor is a much more prominent and ruthless villain who’s already conquered or ruined a majority of the world, always keeping another plan on standby, and staying one step ahead of the heroes. Many characters die over the story, from random NPCs to even temporary party members, and the game overall carries a prominent melancholic, empty feel to it, one that’s very impressive considering the time it was made.

To be honest, however, it actually goes a bit too far in this regard. Almost everything the protagonists accomplish comes at the cost of allies dying, or something preventing them from fully completing their mission. Many NPCs are pessimistic about the chances of humanity being able to win against the Emperor, and so much destruction is wrought upon the world by the end that it seems there’s not even much left to save. From the very beginning of the game, which starts with your party instantly being destroyed in an unwinnable battle, the game is nothing but a constant stream of death and hollow victories, with plenty of characters you can find mourning their losses, and there’s very, very few points in the story that offer any sort of relief from it. Combined with the Emperor barely seeming bothered by anything the party accomplishes, and running circles around them more than a few times, it’s very easy to simply lose any investment in the story.

The characters unfortunately only add to this lack of investment. It’s hard to hold it against the game, but the main party of Firion, Maria, and Guy is still easily the least developed cast in the series. They have little dialogue to themselves to begin with, and have very minimal personality traits, especially Firion, who pretty much only exists to be the hero by default. Additionally, whereas in most RPGs, the cast’s varying personalities and skills tend to gain importance, here, the only skill any of them have is Guy being able to talk to beavers, which only comes up once in a way that doesn’t even affect the story, and, again, they have nearly no personality otherwise, which totals out to each of them having, at best, 1 moment each throughout the story where they’re not completely interchangeable with each other, which barely elevates them above the completely blank slate party of FF1.

The guest party members and NPCs fair a bit better, but not by much. The guests tend to be at least mildly interesting, like the fatalistic Minwu, the cowardly Gordon, who learns to be courageous as the story goes on, to the pirate girl Leila, but they’re still nothing special, and there’s surprisingly few other NPCs, most of which aren’t too memorable either. Even the Emperor himself is about one of the most stereotypical evil emperor characters you could have, not helped by the very few scenes he gets. That’s not to say he’s a bad villain, though. His successfulness does create a presence that looms over the entire story, and he pulls off one of the coolest plot twists in the series; after being killed by the party in a very easy battle late in the game, he simply returns as a demon himself, having become far, far stronger than he had ever been in life, to the point of taking over Hell itself. It’s such a unique and unexpected twist on the seemingly weak political villain that it alone cements the Emperor as one of the more memorable villains in the series. Overall, while the writing of the game is quite impressive for the time, and laid a good deal of groundwork for the improved writing of future entries, it’s just passable at best nowadays.

Gameplay: Here’s where things really start falling apart. On the surface, not much the combat doesn’t seem terribly different from Final Fantasy I, with it still being a standard turn based system with basic commands like attacking, using magic, and defending. The big differences in Final Fantasy II’s combat lie in the character progression. The first game had you simply selecting a party of 4 classes at the start of the game, gradually making them stronger across the game by leveling them up and acquiring specific equipment and spells for each, like pretty much every normal JRPG. FF2, on the other hand, uses a much more complex system. Every party member is capable of using every weapon and learning every spell, in the process abandoning the D&D system of set spell charges and instead introducing the traditional MP system, and characters are not set in specialized classes and roles. Instead, FF2 discards the usual EXP based leveling system, and instead uses a stat leveling system, where the individual stats of each character level up separately depending on the course of battle, and while each character starts with predetermined stats that favor a particular role for them, with enough grinding, you can still reshape them however you wish. This stat growth system would later be used and refined for the SaGa series, and it’s a very ambitious attempt at improving upon the party building system the first game established.

In total, there are 12 main stats that can be increased through battle: HP, your health points, which is raised in regular intervals, or losing HP in battle, MP, magic points that allow you to use spells, which is raised by having MP reduced in battle, Strength, which determines your physical attack, and is raised by using the attack command, Magic, which determines how much MP you get when it is gained, and is raised by having MP reduced in battle, Spirit, which determines the strength of white magic spells, and is raised by casting white magic in battle, Intelligence, which determines the strength of black magic spells, and is raised casting black magic in battle, Stamina, which determines how much HP you get when it is gained, and is increased by losing HP in battle, Evasion, which determines how likely a character can dodge physical attacks, and is raised by being targeted by attacks in battle, Agility, which factors into evasion calculation, and is raised by having high evasion, and Magic Defense, which determines how resilient a character is to offensive magic, and is raised by being targeted by offensive magic in battle.

However, it doesn’t stop there, as individual weapon types and spells also have levels that can be raised, which is done so by gaining skill points in them by attacking or casting them during battle. Once enough skill points are gained, they advance to the next level, with the hard cap being 16. Gaining weapon levels allows that character to be more accurate and attack more times at once with that type of weapon, and raising spell levels increases their power and makes them more accurate. Each weapon type, consisting of swords, spears, axes, staves, knives, bows, shields, and unarmed, have different attributes, such as spears being a relatively balanced type, with lower individual power than swords and axes, but higher accuracy, while bows are allow characters to attack from the newly introduced back row, which makes them immune to physical attacks, but prevents them from attacking with any other weapon type. While focusing on one weapon type with each character would seem the most efficient, the game only tends to give you one or two weapons of each type at a time, many of which have good boosts in power or added effects, making focusing on a few different types a decent idea.

Shields are unique in that, while equipping them doesn’t raise your defense as might be expected, and actually lower your attack, they give large evasion bonuses that makes dodging attacks much easier, and have the chance of blocking a physical attack completely even if something does connect, all of which increases as you gain levels in it. As for other defensive equipment, you have heavy and light types of armor, with light armor giving less defense bonuses than their heavier counterparts, but not weighing nearly as much, and thus leaving you much more evade. As for spells, they start out very underpowered, and have awful accuracy in the case of buff and debuff spells, but become much more effective after a few levels, with the downside of them costing more MP to cast with each level gained. Characters can learn up to 16 spells, and are free to remove them at any time, at the cost of having to level them again from scratch if they ever relearn them. Instead of simply learn spells by buying them in towns, spells are instead learned from tomes, which can be bought from shops, found in treasure chests, or dropped from enemies. Using them on the field teaches a character that spell, while using the tomes in battle instead casts a high level version of the spell, at the cost of losing that tome.

Unfortunately, as creative as this all is, this system has some serious issues. The main one, which you have already guessed, is that the game is incredibly, incredibly grindy because of these mechanics, and in a much worse way than most other RPGs. While not every stat is going to be important for each character, depending on how you build them, there’s still a lot of things it forces you to keep track of. Even if you want to make a dedicated mage, sticking in the back row with a bow for the whole game will leave them with so little vitality and HP that they’ll just be uncomfortably fragile, and with the magic attacks enemies have by the endgame, you really want to keep them in the front row for a good part of the game. Most spells, including important ones like Life and Esuna, for reviving party members and removing status effects respectively, while extremely useful, have such horrible accuracy to start that they’re completely useless before you level them up, and the weapon distribution is quite unbalanced, with swords having easily the best selection even in the midgame, essentially leaving most other types as stopgaps.

While you might level your important stats a good bit just naturally going through areas, trying to deliberately level any of them is a commitment. While HP, strength, spirit, intelligence, and magic defense tend to come easily enough, increasing stamina often only happens through the loss of a large chunk of their maximum HP, which, obviously, preferably doesn’t happen on a regular basis. This goes likewise for MP and magic, which is rather irritating, as not only do you need more and more MP as your spells level up, but ways to restore MP are extremely limited and costly. The bizarre loop of agility factoring in to evasion increasing, while itself only leveling up based on your current evasion, means that the only reliable way of increasing either is to equip the lightest equipment you have. While leveling up weapon levels is easy enough, especially since you can dual wield different types at once, leveling up spells is a much slower process, with casting low level spells during random encounters, even those that won’t actually help at the moment, often being one of the only feasible ways to get them leveled quick. You may even be tempted to ignore magic beyond simple spells like Cure because of the individual effort needed, but the game will quickly hammer the importance of magic into you; from the randomly encountered flans and bombs that either have absurd physical defense or tend to explode if not fully defeated in one turn, with magic being the only reasonable way to take them out, to mandatory bosses that hit quite hard, and also have enough physical defense to make physical attacks nearly worthless without absurd grinding, you’re not getting through the early game without dedicating some time to magic. On the flip side, another early dungeon has a boss that outright absorbs magic, making physical attacks the only way to beat it.

The game has quite a reputation for being brutal, and it’s not inaccurate, with most dungeons being more than glad to beat you down without remorse, and there’s tons of troublesome enemies to be found throughout the game, doubly so if you try to go for all the treasure chests in the area, as many of them are guarded by encounters called monster-in-a-box, which are often much more powerful than other encounters around. Most bosses are more than happy to make your life miserable too, especially the infamous Lamia Queen and Behemoth. However, this difficulty is in no way fair or well designed. While the growth system can easily leave you unsure as to whether or not you’re prepared for a dungeon, since you have no easy guideline to go off of compared to standard leveling, that’s not even the worst of it. The design of the dungeons, and even the world map, are horrible. There’s tons of doors scattered throughout pretty much every dungeon, and 90% of them lead to dead end rooms with raised encounter rates. There is absolutely no way to tell which doors are dead ends and which are necessary to progress, so you’re reduced to trial and error, which is extremely exhausting when there’s so many doors per dungeon, and you’re almost guaranteed to get into an encounter before you can leave each one, and if you’re tempted to ignore any doors when they don’t seem mandatory to progress, in many of those cases, there’s treasure rooms hidden among them, once again with no way to figure out other than guessing.

The world map, on the other hand, is one of the best arguments against open ended world design there is. Compared to the first game, there are almost no physical obstacles barring where you can go, other than a few rivers that are only crossable by canoe, something you get almost immediately, and a few areas only accessible by boat. Instead, you’re kept out of where you’re not supposed to be through the Dragon Quest 1 method of having the random encounters kill you horribly. The problems with this method are twofold: not only are the borders between where you’re supposed to be and where you’re not very thin, to the point of running into late game enemies just outside of the first town if you go just a biiit too far to the left, compared to Dragon Quest 1 often using bridges as visible borders between areas, but it just doesn’t really fit with how the game is designed. Dragon Quest 1′s pacing is rather relaxed, as while you do have plot objectives, the game doesn’t rush you to fulfill them. You’re meant to just hang around the areas you can survive in, grinding your way up and getting whatever equipment you need until you feel confident to move onto whichever area seems to be designed for next.  In Final Fantasy II, you’re constantly being sent back and forth between areas to get new orders or do whatever the plot wants of you at that moment, but while the game loves telling where to go, it’s pretty bad at telling you how to get there, with its often vague directions being spread out between NPCs in multiple towns, to boot. While there is a map of the overworld you can access, it can still get pretty annoying having to meticulously check where you’re going, and you’re still liable to being decimated just because you wandered into a harmless seeming area. One nasty example comes after completing Kashuon Keep, not too far into the game. You’re expected to head back to Altair, which is on the other side of the world and is quite a bit of a walk, but heading south soon loops back to the Altair area, making for a much shorter walk. Trying to put this idea into practice, however, sends you across the large Palamecian desert, full of enemies more than eager to tell you that this area is still a few dungeons away from being accessed. It’s not completely unsurvivable, and can be safely traversed by finding the nearby hidden Chocobo, but it’s still a nasty situation after a very irritating dungeon.

The biggest, and most frustrating, source of difficulty, however, is that the game stubbornly refuses to tell you anything about what’s going on behind the scenes. There’s so many mechanics left unexplained that cause a lot of difficulty if you don’t understand them. For example, every enemy has a stat called rank, which determines how many skill points for your weapons and magic you’ll actually get by using them on said foes. Essentially, if your weapon or magic levels are higher than the enemy’s rank, you need to use that weapon or spell more times in that battle based on the difference between the numbers to actually get any skill points. Not an unreasonable system, and you can view every enemy’s rank in the bestiary, but the game never directly addresses this, and even the most powerful enemies only go up to rank 10, effectively softcapping your skills and spells at 10, which often leads into having your party attack each other to bypass the entire mechanic, a depressingly efficient solution most of the time. Other stats the game never cares to explain are evasion and magic defense, which both display both numbers and percentages. For evasion, the number represents the number of attacks that character is capable of dodging, as physical attacks strike multiple times per round, and the likeliness of evading each attack. With magic defense, the number represents the number of attempts at avoiding a status effect can be made, and the percentage represents the chance of successfully doing so. Despite the name, the stat does not reduce damage taken from magic attacks.

On the subject of magic, the spells available to you are also plagued with unneeded complexity and vagueness. First off, the descriptions for many spells tend to only give you the barest idea of what they actually do; Aura “Enhances effectiveness against various foes.” It never tells you what enemy types count, or that it only becomes effective against certain types as its level increases, you just have to hope that it’s working whenever you use it. Barrier “Raises a barrier to defend against special attacks.”, again giving you no indication as to what it’s actually protecting against. Shell and Wall both claim to raise magic defense, but give no obvious indication how they’re actually different from each other, and Dispel claims to remove protective magical barriers, which lowers the target’s magic defense, even though you may infer that it removes buffs, like in later games. Other spells tend to be redundant or very situational. Basuna removes temporary status effects, compared to Esuna removing permanent status effects, which is near worthless since not only do temporary effects wear off after a number of turns, but they go away after battle regardless, and are rarely effective enough to waste a turn removing. Fear increases the likelyhood of enemies fleeing battle, which is not only rare to actually work, but is worthless, since you don’t get any credit for defeating any enemies that do flee. Sap reduces the MP of the target, which is not only rarely likely to work, but counterintuitive if you have the infamous Osmose spell, which saps large amounts of MP while restoring the same amount for the user. Status effects also have different elements to them, namely body, mind, and matter, with most enemies having different resistances. Some spells, like Stop and Paralysis, have the same effect, but different elements, and keeping track is both difficult, both remembering which spell is which element, and what enemies are actually affected by each element, and nearly pointless, since the effects are rarely worth bothering with in favor of just attacking. Matter elemental spells, however, are rarely resisted by most enemies, even bosses, and mostly comprise of instant death spells like Mini, Break, Teleport, and most infamously, Toad. Not only does this game make instant death spells effective, it makes them downright overpowered, with almost every encounter being capable of being solved through judicious application of Toad.

But the peak of all this is a special property that some enemies, like ghosts and the final boss, have applied to their physical attacks: a draining effect that not only restores their HP by the amount of damage inflicted, but specifically inflicts 1/16th of the target’s maximum HP per hit, with them eventually attacking 8 times per turn by the final dungeon. To sum this up simply, this makes heavier equipment worse than worthless. Not only will the defensive power do nothing to protect from this damage, but it actively weighs you down and destroys your evasion, guaranteeing you’ll take all those possible hits unless your did some extreme evasion grinding. You’d be protected better by not wearing anything at all, because at least then you’ll make use of all your natural evasion. Unless you want to constantly heal your characters for half their health everytime you run into specific encounters, you have to dedicate a lot of your time, or most of your run through the game, to getting their evasion leveled enough that this isn’t a problem. Knowing this can be the difference between fruitlessly blowing all your resources and breezing through effortlessly, and there is a certain weapon, the Blood Sword, that has this same draining effect, which can singlehandedly annihilate the final boss once you’ve figured this out. While there’s a few other smaller issues, like several encounter formations that cannot be ran from for no apparent reason, other than possibly being formations used in certain monster-in-a-box encounters, those are the main issues, and being aware of them, and having the information to circumvent them, makes the game much, much easier. If anything, it makes the game extremely breakable. From physical attackers that dodge everything thrown at them, to spellcasters that can wipe out encounters with a single cast, it doesn’t take much to erase the difficulty once you know what you’re doing.

As for bonus content, there’s Soul of Rebirth, a bonus mode unlocked after completing the main game, first added in the GBA version, which focuses on several characters who die in the course of the story finding themselves in what they think is the Jade Passage, the path to Hell. While a cool concept that has a really neat final boss of its own, namely the light side of the Emperor, who split off from his dark half after death and instead took over Heaven, it still has issues of its own, namely that most of the party are guest characters in the main game, and carry over the stats, equipment, and spells they had when they left the party, meaning if you didn’t bother training them and stripped them of all equipment before they departed, you’re in an absurd time. The mode is also quite short, and only consists of two dungeons that are just mirrored versions of the final two dungeons of the main game and a town. A neat addition, but not much more than that. Other than that, the only optional content to find in the main game is the Arcane Labyrinth, a bonus dungeon added specifically for the PSP release. The game uses a keyword system where you can learn important terms from NPCs, and ask about those terms to get directions or a bit more plot. It’s sort of neat in concept, but in practice it doesn’t amount to much other than make it slightly more annoying to find out what to do, especially if you manage to miss a keyword. The Arcane Labyrinth, however, revolves around its use. In order to progress past the entrance, you must select a keyword at the portal to the next floor, which then takes you to a specific floor based around the keyword you chose. Almost every floor has a little sidequest to solve, like defeating specific enemies or giving items to NPCs, which give you new keywords exclusive to the labyrinth, or hints for some of the trickier floors. While they can be kinda annoying to do, you only ever have to complete them once for their reward, and can otherwise run straight to the exit on subsequent visits.

Every floor requires you to select keywords for the next, with 45 different floors being available in total, and the Arcane Labyrinth is actually split into 3 sections, with the northwest section requiring four floors to be visited, the northeast seven floors, and the south ten floors, though while you can’t visit the same floor twice in the same section, you can choose repeats in separate sections. There is much more strategy than simply randomly selecting floors, however. Each keyword belongs to a different category, which cause different reactions depending on your next choice. Picking keywords in the same category in a row cause better treasure to spawn and lower the encounter rate, while picking something in a category that opposes it, such as a matter and materials floor after going through a magic and spirits floor, has the opposite effect. Even more importantly, each playable character has a set of keywords that resonate with them, to varying degrees. This becomes important after finishing all three sections, which unlocks the Arcane Sanctuary. Within is Deumion, the master of the Labyrinth, who summons a superboss, Phrekyos, to test you, with its strength varying depending on how many keywords you’ve gotten through the story, making it beatable even in earlier parts of the game. Beating Phrekyos allows you to get a reward from Deumion; if you picked enough keywords that resonate with a certain party member, you will be able to get their ultimate weapon, which not only have tons of power, but confer massive stat boosts when equipped. If your keywords didn’t resonate enough, you only get an elixir, something that you can buy, albeit with absurd amounts of money. The optimal keywords for the main party are only unlocked in the endgame, but it can actually be worth visiting early for the party members that are used in Soul of Rebirth, as the weapons make it much more manageable, though visiting too early can end with you being much too powerful compared to how you should be. A special set of keywords also allow you to see Deumion’s past, leaving you able to either peacefully receive from him the Revive spell, or fight him as the ultimate superboss for the Destroy spell. Both are disgustingly impractical, but it’s a neat idea nonetheless. Overall, the Arcane Labyrinth, though still rife with its own set of frustrations, is actually one of the more enjoyable bonus dungeons I’ve come across, with a very creative concept that actually leaves you curious as to what the next floor could hold.

Overall, while the gameplay of Final Fantasy II has some interesting ideas, it’s held back by an irritating lack of explanation as to how it works, the overly grindy design, and just plain poor design and execution. It’s a miserable experience that makes even other early JRPGs seem appealing, just because their grinding is so much simpler to handle, and I need to note, this is the most polished version of the game. Between bugs, a horribly limited inventory, and even more absurd design decisions, like stats sometimes decreasing instead of increasing, or weapons massively decreasing magic accuracy, and increasing skills taking even longer, any version earlier than the GBA version is even more infuriating and even less playable.

Graphics: Final Fantasy II is actually a quite nice looking game, as with the rest of the Final Fantasy releases on PSP. Locations have a lot of detail to them, like ambient effects like rolling fog, and noticeable lighting effects, with a few areas like Pandemonium having pretty fascinating designs, and there’s some pretty good looking cutscenes for bigger story events. Spell animations are pretty neat, and attack spells have a nice detail where their animations become more elaborate as you level them up more. Characters even finally look accurate to their original art by Yoshitaka Amano, unlike earlier versions, though that’s not necessarily a positive: between Firion’s random mishmash of materials and colors, Maria and Guy’s awkward, half complete outfits, and the terrifyingly gaudy Emperor, this is possibly the tackiest looking cast in the series. The monster designs, on the other hand, are top notch. After Final Fantasy I’s bestiary was lifted almost entirely out of D&D, this game introduced a lot of original and iconic enemies, like the coeurls, the bombs, the malboros, the adamantoises, and the behemoths. It even introduced chocobos, though it’s easy to miss their existence, as their confined to one spot on the world map that’s decently hidden. While there are still a lot of oddities like vampires and giant mantises, it’s still one of the biggest advancements in the series in this regard. The enemy designs also excel in that they look much more threatening than in the first game. These enemies literally come from Hell, and look the part. I’d even go so far as to say that this is the best looking Final Fantasy game on the PSP, and has some of the coolest enemy designs in the series.

Sound: Final Fantasy II’s soundtrack was composed by Nobuo Uematsu, as usual, and remixed by Tsuyoshi Sekito for the remakes. All things considered, it’s my least favorite soundtrack in the main series. That’s not to say it’s bad at all, and there are some great tracks like the Rebel Army Theme, the somber main theme which plains on the overworld, Ancient Castle, the Tower of the Magi, Battle Theme A, typically used for major boss encounters, and Battle Theme 2, the final boss theme. However, as an overall, it’s just not quite as good as the soundtracks for the rest of the main series, to me. It also contains my least favorite version of the Prelude, being just a bit too high pitched for my liking, and my least favorite battle theme, sounding way too intense just for regular encounters, and quickly becoming grating not too far into the game. The soundtrack is good in its own right, and is worth a listen, it just doesn’t quite reach the heights that some of the others do.

Conclusion: Overall, I give Final Fantasy II a firm not recommended. Though very ambitious and important for its day, its story, design, and mechanics have aged like milk compared to the other Final Fantasy games on the NES. While technically still perfectly playable, especially with deeper knowledge as to how the mechanics work, it doesn’t make for much fun at all. You’re better off keeping your distance from this entry. Now, with this absurdly long review finally done, finishing this game, and the subject of my next review, hopefully to be soon, have convinced me I need a break from older RPGs for a while. Till next time. -Scout

[clumsydarknut]

Scripted Wishes

Chapter 4: Anima Extalia

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Lucy sighed, stretching and flopping back onto her bed. The dress rehearsal – if you could call it that – had only gone for maybe an hour and consisted mostly of the crew running a few of the more complicated dance scenes and rubbing out a couple bumps in the cues, none of which Loke seemed interested in helping her learn. The Loke she’d met that morning was nowhere to be found, instead replaced with a nervous, twitchy, hyper-focused stagehand who was determined to pretend she didn’t exist. He hadn’t said a word to her, even when she asked him things.

“Which one’s the left spot again?”

Point.

“So you play guitar?”

Nod.

“When do you think Natsu will be back?”

Shrug.

That hour had seemed like an eternity, dragged out second by second with anxious glances and awkward coughs. It wasn’t a total loss, though. She’d been able to see first-hand why Jellal got the praise that he did. Most of the cast of Anima Extalia were adult actors who seemed very experienced, and Jellal matched their skill note for note and step for step. They had done a battle scene featuring some crazy aerobatics – the choreographer had called it capoeira – where Jellal had pulled some off some incredible flips and twists. She was kind of bummed the show was sold out, and based on the way Loke behaved it wasn’t likely she could watch from the sound booth.

Guess I’ll just have to try out for something, she thought. Probably the next musical.

With nothing else to do, Lucy wiggled her phone out of her tight pockets and unlocked it with a few quick taps. She was used to most of the notifications – a few spam and school emails, a new video from a YouTuber she liked, and suggested pins for her astronomy board weren’t out of the ordinary. To her surprise and delight, however, all of those lined up beneath six new texts from Levy.

I saw Natsu drag you to the sound booth. Nothing kinky going on is there? ;)

omg i can’t believe i said that plz don’t show him

Lucy?

Oh right probs busy learning sound booth stuff k nevermind

We hope you’re here to stay, Lucy! Welcome to Fairy Tail!

The last text brought tears to her eyes. Beneath the welcome message was an awkwardly thrown together group selfie, with Levy holding the camera and doing her best mock-Instagram face. Jet and Droy crouched next to her, grinning, while Cana leaned on them, pointing a finger gun and winking. Erza stood over Levy with her soft smile, and Gray stood just next to her, arms crossed over his chest and giving the camera a smirk. In the corner, she could make out the boxy shape of the sound booth, a blur of pink and a blur of blonde just visible in the fuzzy background.

Lucy grinned and rubbed a tear from her cheek. She let her thumbs dance over her keyboard while she tried to think of a good response. They really like me, she sighed. I’m in Fairy Tail, and they like me!

Her phone gave a buzz and she squeaked as her hands jerked in surprise, making her lose her grip on the slender piece of technology; she juggled it awkwardly for a second before it landed flat on the pillow next to her. She scrambled onto her stomach and flipped the vibrating phone over, grinning at seeing Natsu’s profile picture humming on the screen. She slid her thumb across the icon and put it to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Heya Luce!”

Lucy winced at the sudden noise, moving it a little further from her head. “Hey! What’s up?”

“Are you coming to the show?” he sang. She could almost see his toothy grin in the tone of his voice.

“It’s sold out, isn’t it?”

“Well yeah,” Natsu replied, “but you’re in the company now! You can watch from the sound booth with me!”

Lucy bit her lip. “Is that okay? I wouldn’t want to get in your way – it’s already pretty cramped with just two people up there.”

“You won’t get in the way,” Natsu chuckled, “Right Loke?”

She felt her breath hitch. Though she heard a faint “uh, sure” wobble on the other end, she knew the red-head was most certainly not okay with that. She wasn’t particularly fond of the boy, and certainly not of his playboy kind, but… he seemed genuinely afraid of her, and for no reason that Lucy could deduce. She didn’t want to make things worse if she could avoid it.

“No, it’s okay, Natsu,” she replied, “I should probably rest up – I’m a little woozy from all the action yesterday and today.”

“Aww, c’mon Luce! Is it cuz you’re afraid Loke will make a move on ya?” She heard Loke splutter something frantically. “Don’t worry, I won’t let him use a single pick-up line!”

“No, no,” Lucy laughed uncomfortably, “I just really need some rest.”

“Oh, okay.” Natsu seemed disappointed, but only for a moment before perking right back up. “I found a great role for you, by the way! I’ll tell you about it tomorrow, yeah?”

She smiled. “Sounds good!”

“Yosh! Ja na!”

“Bye!”

The screen turned black and she sighed. I’ll just have to miss this show, I guess. She rolled onto her back and picked up her phone again, humming as she decided what to do. She opened Instagram on a whim and flicked down to a random spot in her feed. It was another video posted by the school, bearing a very familiar face and a very familiar tag. She grinned.

I’d prefer to hang with him in person, but I guess this Salamander will do.

---

Gajeel really wasn’t one for theatre.

It was cheesy, weird, and straight up uninteresting. People prancing around on stage in frilly costumes, pretending to be things they’re not? And set to music? No, not really his thing at all.

Well, maybe that was a lie. He was in the Cosplay Club, after all.

But there was no way he’d ever admit the two things had anything in common. Cosplay was an art – a dedication to replicating a character so perfectly that it seemed they had stepped out of the world of fiction and straight into reality. Cosplaying a character was the ultimate testament to how incredible that character and their world truly was, and thus, being a cosplayer came with the heavy responsibility of making sure that character was done justice. It wasn’t this… thing, that played out on the stage in front of him.

He couldn’t really complain, though. Not since he was here on a date.

A second date, at that.

He leaned back further into his seat, scrunching down into his gray hoodie and tilting his head to look at the girl next to him. Sue was cute. She was at least a head shorter than him, with darker, tanned skin and forest green hair cut off at her shoulders. Now she wore a beige blouse and a short black skirt, but Gajeel much preferred her usual attire – a blue shirt with ripped sleeves and green cargo pants, along with an oddly adorable purple jester’s hat. He’d asked her out casually last week and they’d gone four-wheeling; when she asked him in return, this had been her suggestion.

He almost said no, but he actually kind of liked her.

He sighed, settling in for the show. The overture had finished, as well as the opening number – a solo by a guy in some weird ninja gear. Gajeel was pretty sure he’d seen him around school hanging with the other Fairy Tail dorks, which was a little bit of a surprise. Then again, all Fairy Tail had to work with was Fairy Tail, so maybe giving the title role to a teenager was the best they could do. Either way, the number was somewhat foreboding and left Gajeel with prickly discomfort itching at the back of his neck.

Sue gasped as the scene changed in a flash of smoke and a sheen of light. The eerie set the ninja dude had occupied was replaced with a multi-tiered stage painted as floating isles on a backdrop of a beautiful blue sky. Gajeel gave a smirk as Sue turned back, smiling, to see if he was watching. As soon as she looked back to the show he scrunched further into his seat. Maybe I can pick up some cosplay design ideas at the very least.

The show was pretty strange, in Gajeel’s opinion. Half the characters seemed to be humans from some post-apocalyptic magic-science hybrid country, and the other half were… cats? Cat people? Cat angels? Whatever they were, at least they weren’t furries. He had to admit the half-cat costumes were very well done, blending prosthetics perfectly into skin and avoiding the whole mostly-naked-with-body-paint deal that so often killed good animal cosplays. The rigging they used for some of the aerobatics attached to very well disguised harnesses with pretty impressive angel wings that seemed to be high quality animatronics. They’d somehow managed to get realistic tails as well, which moved and swished about like real ones instead of dangling limply or sticking out at awkward angles. Pretty cool, that. He made a mental note to scare the technique out of one of the stagehands later.

The main protagonist appeared to be a bluish cat called Shiawase, who, of course, was in love with a girl. Typical of musicals. The girl was a beautiful white cat called Charlotte who seemed to be a princess of sorts. From what Gajeel could tell, the two were just trying to elope while the humans warred with the cat people and it really wasn’t going well.

“Gajeel,” Sue whispered suddenly, pointing to Shiawase, “Isn’t that… Gray?”

Gajeel did the air equivalent of a spit take as he suddenly recognized the blue cat, sitting forward in his seat to study him with a squint.

“Sure is,” he chuckled. “Damn that’s a lot of makeup. Too bad he still looks like a twat.”

Sue gave him a pout. “C’mon, Gajeel, be nice. He helped you with the kanji on one of your katanas, didn’t he?”

“Tch.” Gray had been helpful that one time, being from Japan and all, but he was still a Fairy Tail dork.

As the show went on the story got more complicated. If Gajeel had cared, he would have found himself torn on which side of the war to get behind. The cat angels were some sort of tyrannical deities or the like, in which case he favored the humans, but the humans were merciless executioners who slaughtered their own kind as readily as they slaughtered the cats. As badass as that was, he couldn’t really get behind that either. Not that he was emotionally invested or anything. If he had to pick, he’d probably go with the humans – mainly because of the large, bulky black cat who had betrayed his kind to fight alongside them. Gajeel really didn’t care much, but that character was pretty neat.

The ninja guy from the beginning – Mist Can or something – was turning out to be kind of cool too. He was revealed to be the exiled prince of the human nation, swooping in to save the imprisoned cat protagonists right before intermission, and Sue bubbled over him through the entire break. Gajeel would have preferred to go get a snack, but… she was pretty adorable when she got all excited like that, so he didn’t mind too much. He’d lost track of most of the plot at this point, but he was actually sort of enjoying himself. Kind of. Maybe.

The entr’acte ended with a very mournful piccolo solo and the lights rose on the remains of a blackened forest. Charred branches scraped and clawed at the orange sky. Smoke effects drifted up in billows and the crackling of flames hummed in the silence. This was a totally different feel from when the show had begun. After another moment, the three main protagonists rushed onto the stage.

“W-wait,” Charlotte stammered, stumbling “I… I need to rest.”

“We cannot stop now,” the ninja man replied. “We have to get as far from the city as we can. It’s only a matter of time before my people use the Dragon Cannon.”

“There must be something we can do!” Shiawase cried. “We can’t just run away!”

“There is not,” he growled. He turned to continue the escape, cloak swishing behind him.

Shiawase rose to his full height, gesturing back the way they came. “You would just abandon your people? Your friends? You would turn your back as hundreds of innocents are murdered?!”

The man whirled around and ripped his veil from his face, storming up to the blue cat and leering over him. “I do not do so lightly, Exceed! May I remind you that it is your people who began this war?! That your kind have used us as slaves for centuries?!”

“That doesn’t change your cowardice! You’re running away, Mystogan! Running from your throne and your duty! It was not my people who made you this way!”

The two continued to argue as a harp plinked a note and the lighting around Charlotte changed tones. A tear ran down her face as she sang a pitiful, “Please, stop…”

“Stop?” Mystogan laughed as a bass tremolo hummed beneath him. In a darker tone he sang back.

“It is not I who slaughtered thousands.

Who killed children!

Who drove their slaves to madness!”

Shiawase picked up the melody, gesturing to the burning landscape.

“Do you think this is what we wanted?

Do you think this is the life we crave?

No, your Highness.

You’re wrong.

We may be at fault, but we tried to stop it!

It is you

who ran away.”

Mystogan stormed forward. “You speak of things you know nothing about,” he spat back.

Shiawase hissed. “And you run from people who need you!”

Mystogan’s voice took on a tone of fury.

“There’s naught I can do,

she’s doomed them all.

My people are dying, Exceed.

Our kingdoms have slaughtered each other!”

“We can end that,” Shiawase sang more insistently,

“We can end it all!

We can’t just save ourselves

we have to do something!”

Mystogan took a deep breath. “All you will do is die.”

Shiawase leapt at Mystogan, letting loose a vicious snarl. Gajeel raised an eyebrow in surprise. Damn, Gray, that was startlingly realistic.

“Please, stop…” Charlotte sang again.

Mystogan pushed Shiawase away and removed his staff from his back.

“We can’t fight like this…” she sobbed.

Shiawase took a fighting stance and the invisible rigging lifted him off the stage.

“I said STOP!”

The outburst from the white cat reverberated in the theatre. Her labored breath was the only sound heard in the room as she got to her feet. She stepped up to the unmasked ninja and looked him straight in the eye.

“I am sorry.” She intoned softly.

“I could have stopped this.

I could have tried harder.

Mother wouldn’t listen.

Couldn’t listen.

The blood of your people is on my hands.

We have both made grave mistakes

and cost innocents their lives.

Millions may yet die and it will be our faults.”

She paused and sighed before clenching her fists. When she began again, her voice was made of fire.

“But how dare you!

How dare you just give up?!”

Mystogan stumbled back a step, mouth dropping open slightly. Charlotte didn’t back down.

“This is your country, isn’t it?

Can’t you do anything without your throne?

Though it was all a lie

didn’t you try to live your best life,

protect your people where you could?!

Why are you giving up?!”

The air around Charlotte began to shimmer and slowly her feet rose off the ground. Mystogan stared up at her in awe.

“So what if you’re weak!

You’re not alone!

When weak things work together

Strength is born!”

As if by magic, Charlotte’s wings grew and turned iridescent. Gajeel’s jaw actually dropped – he could not fathom how they managed that.

“My country will not be destroyed!

It is my homeland!

It’s not going anywhere!

I will die before I abandon it!

And I will die before I let you abandon yours!”

In a burst of radiance and glitter her wings spread wide. The backdrop turned from burning orange to a smattering of stars as luminescent mist rose from the stage. She looked into the distance beyond the audience as she belted the last lines of the powerful refrain.

“I won’t give up!

I will stop this all,

or I will die trying!”

The rigging pulled her out over the audience at a startling speed, her wings and gown sweeping through the air in a dazzling blaze of light. The walls of the theatre suddenly became the night sky as she soared past, sweeping higher and higher until finally she was out of sight. In the near silence a single violin held a harmonic quietly as attention turned back to the stage.

Shiawase met Mystogan’s gaze with a stern resolve. Hesitance flitted in the man’s eyes, and the cat extended his hand.

“Are you coming?”

The violin dwindled to nothing. Gajeel suddenly realized he was holding his breath.

With purpose, Mystogan took the hand.

Shiawase smirked. Suddenly, the bass of EDM rumbled from beneath the seats, setting up a slow build. A chill shot down Gajeel’s spine and he exchanged amazed looks with Sue.

“Hold on!” Shiawase hooked his arm under Mystogan’s and gripped his wrist with both hands. The call of distant bagpipes echoed in the room on top of the building music. The two men took a few steps back. Shiawase flicked his wings out wide. The music grew as the bagpipes seemed to get closer. Mystogan nodded. Shiawase smiled. Then, they sprinted and leapt off the stage.

The scoring roared into a variation on the main theme at twice the speed it had been sung; Shiawase took off over the crowd, carrying Mystogan higher in a maelstrom of light and fire. Gajeel’s mouth hung open in awe as the audience let out whoops and whistles. Mystogan’s not wearing a harness. Is Gray… legitimately carrying him?

The two made a few more circles of the audience, the walls of the theatre – which Gajeel had figured out were screens – providing a continuous backdrop that gave the illusion of distance. As the music came to a close, they landed back on the stage, now a broken battleground of a city.

This was where Gajeel suddenly felt very, very strange.

“Cougairis!” Mystogan shouted. The scene was a blur of motion, cats and humans in combat in every conceivable space. Actors had spawned miraculously in the aisles near the stage and on one of the side balconies. That combined with the flash of explosions and the clang of swords made the battlefield come to life. He was surprised he could still easily focus on the main characters despite the chaos.

“Cougairis! I need your help!” Mystogan called again.

The man in question was forced onto the stage, locked in combat. This was the cat that he’d liked. The panther held back three other cats with his giant blade, fighting for control as they pushed their swords against his own. With a roar that Gajeel was sure just had to be recorded, the giant cat shoved his adversaries backwards, two falling off the front of the stage and out of sight. The last stumbled back, gripping his side painfully before crumpling to the floor in a heap.

The black cat turned to face Mystogan, and Gajeel froze.

Over Cougairis’ left eye was a slash; a deep, thick, raw slash that hadn’t been there in the first act.

Gajeel’s head throbbed and his heart pounded, chest tightening until all he could manage was a raspy pant. The edges of his vision grayed. Wha…? What’s happening?

“Gajeel?” He heard Sue whisper his name, but it sounded as though it were a thousand miles away. “Gajeel, are you okay?”

He lifted his hands and felt them tremble wildly as his eyesight shrunk to a pinpoint. He could hardly see, hardly feel. His long, wild hair fell over his shoulders as he tried to shake away whatever was doing this to him. He could no longer register Sue tugging at his arm in worry.

What…? Is this one of those… panic attack things? He couldn’t think of any reason he would have a panic attack – he’d never had one before and didn’t have any traumatic experiences that he could think of. It can’t be a panic attack. Why would a play give me a panic attack?

He looked back to the stage. His tunnel vision centered back on Cougairis. He tried to look away, to any other character, any other piece of set, but the cat’s scarred face seemed to fill his view. That scar. That black fur. That white muzzle. Something seemed to be stabbing his brain at every angle and yet he could not tear away from that face. Suddenly the cat looked out into the audience – looked right at him. As if being shot through the heart his breath stopped, and somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind, he heard his own voice.

I’m taking you back to my guild one way or the other! And then, I’m going to make you my cat!

---

Gray watched from the shadows as Elfman strode to the front of the stage, their one and only child actor, Violet, perched on his shoulder. The audience roared and whistled as the large black cat set her down and she gave a small curtsey. Incredible, for a third grader, Gray smirked. I hope she sticks around.

The curtain call had always been one of Gray’s favorite parts of a show. Especially the final curtain call, on closing night. Molding yourself into another character was a huge, exhausting effort, and sometimes it was difficult to let go and become oneself again after rehearsal. The final curtain call, Gray felt, was an effective way to bridge the gap between being the character and living his own life. The audience, just for that final scene, now acknowledged you as both the role and the actor. In a way, it was a moment where he could be both people at once.

The music changed from Cougairis’ theme to that of Shiawase and Charlotte. Gray straightened his moss green, one-sided shawl over his bare shoulders and strode out from behind the curtains. From the other side, Charlotte – or perhaps now he should say Laurissa – strode out to meet him, a spring in her step as she took his hand. Renewed whistles and shouts rose from the house as they approached the edge of the apron, and just as they had done for every curtain call, Gray pulled her in for a kiss before they took their last bow. It had been her idea, of course, and the audience ate it up like free salsa at a Mexican restaurant. He and Laurissa weren’t romantically involved, but the reaction from the crowd was something they could both get behind.

The two parted as the music changed again, gesturing extravagantly as the star of the show took the spotlight. Mystogan rushed forward, twirling his staff several times before planting it solidly and whipping off his veil. The crowd screamed, applauding wildly and jumping to their feet. Gray clapped just as fiercely – not just for the performance, but for the grin spreading slowly over the blue-haired boy’s face. He knew that grin. The sage-prince Mystogan was gone; Jellal was back.

The company linked their hands and took their final bows as the music finished, and for the last time on that show, the curtain dropped.

“Excellent work, everyone!” Director Dreyar joined the scene from backstage, a toothy grin peeking from behind his mustache. “Very good indeed! A show well worth the effort! Head on home and we’ll strike the set tomorrow evening!”

“And don’t forget, the cast party is on Friday!” Mirajane added. The group bubbled into an energetic hum, matching the chatter of the audience just beyond the curtain. Hugs and claps on the back passed around along with laughter and the repetition of various inside jokes. Gray was happy – sometimes the afterglow of a performance was just as good as the show itself.

“Gray!” He twisted around to find the source of the call. Jellal waved him over. He grinned.

“Good to have you back, Jellal,” Gray replied. They did an elaborate fist-bump.

“It’s good to be back,” Jellal sighed. “At least, for a bit. King Oberon’s not a very complex character, so I won’t have to get into him for another couple weeks.”

“I’m sure Erza’s happy about that,” Gray nudged playfully.

Jellal blushed. “You could say that.”

“MYSTOGAN!” Gray turned just in time to dodge Elfman barreling through the crowd. The burly teen clapped Jellal hard on the back, and Jellal looked like he might’ve had the wind knocked out of him. “Your performance! OTOKO DA!”

“Thanks,” the blue-haired boy coughed. “You can call me Jellal now, though.”

“Oh, right,” Elfman chuckled. He turned to Gray. “Gray! You coming to Angie’s with us?”

Gray was tempted to say yes. He really wanted to. But he wasn’t sure if he’d make it that long.

“No, I gotta head home,” he replied. He rubbed the back of his neck. “Homework, y’know?”

Elfman gave him a funny look. “Homework? How? Today was literally the first day of school.”

Gray gulped. “Japanese stuff, y’know? Have to prep for tutoring.”

“Mmmm zannen da ne…” Elfman hummed.

“Yeah, that’s too bad,” Jellal continued. He didn’t look as convinced as Elfman was.

“Yeah…” Gray trailed off. He glanced between the two nervously, but tried to continue as if nothing were strange. “I should probably head out, actually. It’s pretty late and I really gotta get started.”

Jellal nodded, though his eyes still flickered with doubt. Gray gave a slight wave and sauntered away as confidently as he could, despite the knot in his stomach.

He made a short stop by the dressing room to pick up his things and drop off his shawl, his wings, and a few of the smaller accessories. The majority of his costume had been body paint and various prosthetics, so there wasn’t much he had to return to the company – there wasn’t much he had to wear on his way home, either. Body paint wasn’t a fun stain to get out of clothes, and he certainly didn’t want to scrub it out of his favorite jacket.

He made his way out the back to the rear parking lot, the night air chilling his bare chest. The cold didn’t bother him much – he was a hockey player, after all – but he was glad he’d come extra early to school to snag the closest spot. He clicked his key fob and the lights of his Chrysler 300 flashed. No one else had left yet; traffic was clear.

The ride home passed in a haze, as it always did. A turn here, a traffic circle there, the wonky tree on the end of the block followed by the gas station. He pulled into the dark driveway of his small, blocky house. No lights were on; his roommates were likely asleep. Good.

He locked his car by hand so it wouldn’t make a sound, then slipped inside as quickly and quietly as he could manage. A fan was on in the entryway, blowing softly against his bare chest. He cursed silently. His roommates wouldn’t have known better – he’d never said anything, never even gave a hint. At least, he was pretty sure he hadn’t. He wasn’t really sure if that was actually a good thing.

Just get to the shower, he thought. Get the paint off. You’ll be fine. Only a few more minutes.

He left the lights off as he made his way through the house, familiar enough with his home not to bump into anything in the dark. He figured most normal people could do that, could walk through their own house in the dark. This wasn’t strange. He was normal, too. Completely normal. Other people had sudden adrenaline jumps, right? It was nothing. Normal people occasionally had their heart start beating out of control, too, right? He was fine. He would be fine. This was normal.

Gray wasn’t sure he was being so stealthy anymore – blood pounded in his ears and he could hardly breathe, let alone tell if anyone else was awake. It was fine though. He shut the bathroom door behind him and ripped off the last of his prosthetics. It stung; the glue was particularly strong on his face. It didn’t matter though. If he was bleeding, he’d find out later. He couldn’t tell if he had cuts without the lights on.

His hands fumbled with the shower handles, shaking more than he would’ve liked. The water spattered for a moment before coming in a steady stream. Good. Warm. Paint. Take the paint off. He kicked off the last of his clothes. Steam. Hot water, sliding over his skin. Peeling away the paint. Not fast enough.

The blue skin of his character fell away, and left behind was only Gray.

Gray, and her.

[eldritchrisingarchive]

ON THIS EPISODE OF THINGS NO ONE ASKED FOR : A CATEGORICAL SORTING OF ALLOF MY MUSES INTO THEIR POTENTIAL ROLES IN A GENERALIZED RPG SETTING PART ONE. aka what role would they play in a video game setting.

#1- 5  lex foster, col. amanda schaffer, charlotte mitchell, claudia york, deb murphy

no one asked for this but this but here we are. will i make this into a hatchetfield rpg type thing ? only time will tell. probably at least a timeline

storylines :  tgwdlm  *  post  canon  dlc  /  black  friday player type :  tank  /  dps  /  healer grey touched :  yes  /  no

ALEXANDRA  ‘ LEX ’  FOSTER

class :  shaman locations :  lakeside mall, lakeview trailer park, hatchetfield high first  encounter  (  black  friday  ) : an employee at toy zone, lex can be found lingering outside of toy zone prior to her shift. she cannot be recruited during the first encounter. she has a job to do. when the riots begin, lex can be saved from wiggly’s devotees and becomes a companion if the player agrees to search for hannah and ethan. if the player refuses after saving her, they will cross paths with her at later points in the game in which she is pursuing her own storyline where she is the protagonist, searching both for her sister and ethan, and a way to stop wiggly and his followers. the first of these remains her top priority. roles :  potential protagonist, companion  ( dps ) brief  description :  lex foster is primarily driven during the game by her drive to find her sister, she is a crucial piece of the puzzle when it comes to surviving the game, and if not recruited, the game becomes significantly harder but not impossible to win. as dps goes, she is not the most effective in the game, but is often one of the most perceptive members of the party, and upon accessing her connection to the black and white, becomes invaluable as a guiding force for the party. strengths : strong sense of survival instinct and loyalty, hand to hand combat experience, aware of a number of routes unknown to the player if she isn’t in the party. weaknesses :  driven almost entirely by her pursuit of finding hannah and ethan, is not an experienced killer and is at times hesitant to make the final blow, in the event of ethan’s death if the player chooses to tell her she will be temporarily incapacitated by the news. interesting  facts : if lex is rescued during the beginning of the riots, she retains the box cutter, meaning linda does not have it later on. this does not save frank’s life, but it does result in linda using different threats if hannah is eventually caught by wiggly’s followers. if ethan dies and the protagonist keeps this information from her and she finds out lex will immediately leave the party and will be openly antagonistic to the player, to the point of impeding their progress whenever it does not impede her own.

COL. AMANDA SCHAFFER

class : paladin (  oath of the watchers ) location :  downtown first  encounter  (  tgwdlm dlc  ) : amanda is the woman in charge of the clivesdale civilian base, and has been immunized to the apotheosis by the government. she is not available as a constant companion, only for specific side missions. she takes her position quite seriously and is the deciding factor on whether someone is admitted into the civilian base, requiring at least three clean blood tests during a 48 hour isolation period. first  encounter  (  black  friday  ) :  amanda is boots on the ground reinforcements against wiggly’s followers during the hatchetfield riots. rather than being in the mall, she is roaming the downtown district, destroying dolls whenever possible and taking down violent rioters with lethal force as necessary, and restraining those able to be restrained. the current makeshift prison is the local animal shelter. they have been disarmed and are incapacitated. amanda can be found in near the animal shelter or hardware store if not recruited as a companion. roles :  npc or companion (  primary dps / secondary tank  ) brief  description :  amanda is loyal first and foremost to peip and the well being of the united states of america, receiving her orders directly from general john mcnamara and acting under his authority as he pursues a separate but equally important task regarding the leader of the free world. she can be recruited by the player if amanda truly believes the player capable of helping to defeat wiggly at the source. proving this requires the collection of five destroyed wiggly dolls to show devotion to the cause. strengths :  impervious to wiggly  (  peip training ), dislikes musicals, extensive military training, emergency medical training, immunized to the apotheosis weaknesses :   prioritization of her assigned task over the player, can be demanding, will not stray from her training, used to being in charge interesting  facts :   amanda’s radio is one of the most useful tools for retaining up to date information in both tgwdlm and black friday’s storylines, following the death of general john mcnamara late in the black friday storyline amanda is forcibly removed from the party as she is the de facto leader of peip and must return to headquarters but will authorize the player to use her firearm the most powerful gun in the game.

CHARLOTTE MITCHELL

class :  feral druid location :  ccrp technical, lakeside mall, willow park apartments first  encounter  (  tgwdlm  ) :  charlotte can be found hiding not far from the ccrp technical building, having lost the group she was with, and speaking with her triggers an escort mission automatically. she knows where the other survivors were heading and will take the most direct path to get there, and while this escort mission leads to a safehouse with a number of supplies, it is a notoriously difficult mission as it runs directly through downtown. first  encounter  (  black friday  ) :  charlotte is one of the first wiggly followers to be encountered, but is not the most devout. her minor fight is able to be averted with the pre-fight conversation. if averted, charlotte will flee the mall and may be found by the entrance of the willow park apartments. if not averted, when defeated, all potential benefits of her escort missions and fetch quests are lost. role :  npc with escort missions and fetch quests, potential minor antagonist. brief  description : strengths :  provides solid bonuses upon completion of quests, can turn into a large feral cat during escort missions to assist in fighting. weaknesses :  not the most intelligent, will run headfirst into danger, easily distracted by cats and love interesting  facts : items can be found in charlotte and sam’s apartment during her tgwdlm fetch quests that can be beneficial in interactions with sam and ted later in the game. they are not necessary to complete the game. if you agree to collect charlotte’s cats but instead choose to let them loose, you will later have to face charlotte in her druid form. it’s not an exceptionally difficult boss fight but can be annoying as it tends to occur at inconvenient times.

CLAUDIA YORK

class : seer location :  varies first  encounter :  claudia is only found by those who read the graffiti and notes scattered through the game. interactions can be unlocked approximately one-third of the way into the game in both storylines. roles : npc with lore heavy quest line brief  description : claudia can be a significant wealth of cryptic information on events both past and present, and if approached at different points throughout the game will provide answers and clues as to the strengths and weaknesses of enemies as well as clues of where to go next to continue the story. strengths :  visionary abilities, directly in tune with the black and white weaknesses :  incredibly cryptic, susceptible to sneak attacks interesting  facts :  if amanda has been recruited in the black friday storyline and is in the player’s party when speaking with claudia she can be gifted a radio that allows for communication with the player until amanda’s departure from the party, similarly an escort mission opens in tgwdlm dlc in which if you speak to amanda at the civilian base she will offer to join your party to escort claudia to the civilian base. if this mission is completed then claudia will supply messages to the party over schaffer’s radio from the base.

DEBORAH  ‘ DEB ’  MURPHY

class : monk ( way of mercy ) location : hatchetfield high, lakeside mall, downtown, the bus station first  encounter  (  tgwdlm ) :  deb can be found on their way to the bus station, checking their phone regularly for texts from their girlfriend. they cannot be recruited as a companion until meeting them for the second time, but they can give interesting first-hand information about the destruction of the starlight theatre the night before. first  encounter  (  black friday ) :  deb is in the downtown area, attempting to help those injured in the riots. they’ve managed to stockpile a small amount of medical supplies, and can be recruited through a fetch quest for supplies to help someone with more extensive wounds. roles :  npc, potential minor antagonist, potential companion  ( healer  ) brief  description : an artist and passionate person, deb is a somewhat unlikely survivor of both wiggly and the apotheosis, but there is hope for them yet if they are restrained rather than executed following the infected!alice boss fight. an option that is always presented to the player, but at times has dire consequences. if restrained, and not executed by peip, deb will revert to her human self within 36 hours provided that infected!alice was also restrained and not killed. strengths :  skilled healer, creative thinking, first-hand knowledge of the apotheosis from the night before. witness to early infections. weaknesses :  susceptible to the apotheosis, wants to help as many as they can even when it’s impractical, sometimes a bit too creative with their solutions interesting  facts :  if recruited before infected, deb can be a useful ally in the fight against infected!alice, when paired with bill despite their bickering they can help the real alice break through the infection proving for the first time in the game that someone can survive infection, when paired with elaine further backstory about both deb and elaine can be discovered but productivity decreases immensely as they distract each other and others with their constant bickering.

[theelvenreader-blog]

Character Profiles

Today, and for the past few weeks, I have been working on my character profiles, world-building, and thought dumping my fantasy novel. Since I could write books about all three topics, I’ve decided to talk about them in different posts as a series. Today will be character profiles, Wednesday will be thought dumping, and Friday will be world-building. As you’ve noticed, Monday’s post is   late (that would be today’s). I was busy yesterday and didn’t get around to finishing the post so it’ll just be today.

When I first started writing I thought you had to know everything about your world and characters right off the bat. I thought you were somehow a “bad writer” if you had to sit and think at all about your character’s personalities or your world’s government. Over time, however, I’ve realized it’s totally normal to have to sit and think about characters or worlds. 

Now, one of my favorite parts of writing are world building and outlining. I love researching themes and the insertion of “easter eggs” for readers to find. In order to do this, I have to do tons of research and thinking. They don’t just come to me as I’m character or world building. 

More of my favorite parts of the outlining phase are building complex characters (mainly going through my character profile template) and building rich cultures and parts of it like religions, politics, and since my college degree is in history, histories. 

Today’s post is in character profiles. I’ve built myself a pretty good process for myself (it’s nothing special but it get’s the job done): 

First thing I do is make a list of all my characters in my cast so far. If as I’m outlining or brain dumping I realize another character that is necessary for the plot I add them in immediately and do a character profile of them. Since I write fantasy I tend to sort this list into races of beings such as elves, dwarves, merpeople, humans, etc. I have a template on my computer that I can just open a copy of any time I need. This makes the process a lot easier for me. 

The goal is to get to know your characters like they’re people you know in real life, so you want to ask yourself a variety of questions to help you in that process. Try to think of as many questions as you can that you might ask someone you were trying to get to know. You can also look at other blogs or just online and get some ideas from other writers’ character profiles. Keep in mind many can get pretty detailed and pretty long. Some questions I ask myself are:

o  “What was their childhood like?”

o  “What is their romantic history?”

o  “What is their sexual history?”

o  “What Is their sexual orientation?”

o  “What is their sex?” Meaning their biology, not their gender.

o  “What is their gender?” This means what do they identify as. For instance, one of my character’s biology is male, but they identify as female or feminine.

o  “What are their hobbies. This involves something they enjoy doing outside the main plot of the story. For instance, they could be a warrior, but really like to knit in their free time.

o  If the story involves magical or supernatural elements, I ask myself what these powers entail and what their limits are (power’s limits are very important, but we’ll talk about this in another post)

o  I also ask myself what they look like, and either try to draw them myself or find an image on google for reference. I also do a drawing of a few pieces of clothing they would wear and some of their favorite objects

It’s also important that you aren’t afraid to make your characters quirky or enjoy strange activities. You want your characters memorable and original to themselves so if a quirky or different hobby is what makes sense for the character, go for it. Brown eyes and hair are common, so you might want to include a bit in your story. Especially amongst fantasy writers, it’s really popular for many characters to have lavender eyes, blue eyes, green eyes, ANYTHING but brown eyes. Be realistic here. 

As an example, here is an example of one of my own character profiles. This is for my protagonist in my current WIP, which used to be called Freedom Bringer but is now unnamed because I didn’t think the name suit the fantasy genre or story the way I wanted it to. I’ve omitted/deleted some parts that are spoilers for the book.

You’ll notice that I based this character profile closely on Jenna Moreci’s on her blog. You should check both her and her blog and youtube channel out and definitely her character profile. Her writing is great and a great deal of what I know I learned from her.

Character Profile: Fäel (pronounced like fay-EL)

Based on the example given by Jenna Moreci on her blog: count blogula

CATEGORY #1: BASIC STATISTICS

Sex: Male

Gender: He identifies as masculine, but he’s not an alpha male. He’s actually quite small. If he was in public school in our world, he would probably be teased for being “puny”.

Age: 250 years old, but if I had to compare this to a human age it would be somewhere between 19 and 21 years old.

Race, Ethnicity, Culture: Feräan (a race of elves that usually has brown hair and the ability to control fire. The most common race of elves)

Height: 5’ 7”

Body Type: Thin build. Think adolescent boy. You would never guess that he is fully grown if you took a good look at him. Though this is probably mostly due to malnutrition.

Appearance: Short, Straight as a board Almond colored hair

He is fairly short for an elf. Around 5’7” in American human measurements. Slightly darker tan complexion. Elves do not normally get acne, so his skin is very clear. Narrow face with defined rounded jawline, cheekbones not high but not super low eitherSmall hands with narrow, feminine fingers, which have been hardened and callused from heavy slave labor. Though he is normally given very demanding labor, he still isn’t muscular. He can definitely lift a bit more than before, but elves don’t grow muscle or muscle mass very easily, so he stays relatively small in stature.Thin build, not much muscle mass but fairly strong as well.Lips a light coral color, nothing special. Shape of lips resemble a heart at the cupid’s bow.Fairly large round forehead.Full eyebrows with a few strands in the middle where a unibrow would be (not a full unibrow, just a couple of hairs)

Where are they from? Fael was born in the elven realm but since he was 50 years old (a toddler) he has been in the Kingdom of Türmé because of the elven slavery. Because of this, he doesn’t remember the elven realm at all.

Describe their Childhood: His parents, the king and queen of the elven people (and therefore all magical creatures) died in battle during the first Elven-Mankind war 235 years ago. Since then, his people have been enslaved by the humans. The human king has a way of making sure he is completely miserable. For example, he gives him the hardest labor and insists he stands in the front of every whipping and execution.

CATEGORY #2: RELATIONSHIPS

Family: Fäel’s biological family is dead. However, he has many elves he considers family, and therefore so do I. Baelym, for instance, is his caretaker. Fäel sees him as an older brother. Not quite a father, even though Baelym does tend to act like his father at times.

Friends: Mäikash is Fael’s best friend. You could say these two are so close they are like brothers, but the extent of their relationship is that of a friendship, not family. Fäel doesn’t have any other friends at the beginning of the book but gains more as he grows as an individual and gains knowledge of the outside world.

CATEGORY #3: THE SEXY STUFF

Sexual Orientation: Bisexual

What are they Attracted to? Fäel is attracted to both men and women who have their own sense of responsibility. They know what they must do and do it. Even if this means they give up what they want. Normally the physical aspects he is attracted to is strength. He also tends to be attracted to lighter colored hair and chiseled facial features. He likes the look of facial hair, but doesn’t like the feeling when he kisses someone with it. In terms of women, he’s attracted to women with medium sized breasts and strong shoulders.

Sexual Experience: Fael is a complete virgin. He hadn’t even thought of the idea of sex until he and Mäikash had their conversation about sexuality.  

Romantic Experience: Like his sexual experience, Fael hadn’t thought much about romance until later in the book. He had thought about having a wife and he in the beginning of the book has a dream about his future with a wife and son. He never really becomes completely in tune with the sexual side of him like Mäikash, but becomes much more comfortable. CATEGORY #4: SKILLS

Skills: Fäel is really good at working with his Magic. He can handle it with more stress than others can and it is more powerful than usual.  He’s also not bad at all in sword fighting (though not as good as his Magic). He takes this from his grandfather, Sälavel. Who died in battle thousands of years ago.

Occupation/Schooling: Elven Prince, Slave to the Royal Kingdom of the Türmé. Later King of Ferä. Elves are forbidden from learning the elven language, though they learn to speak it anyway, very few know how to write or read. Fael can write a little, but he definitely couldn’t write an academic paper or even full sentences.

Hobbies: Practicing sword fighting and magic is one of his favorite things to do. He hides himself in the forest from anyone else and will practice setting things on fire and hitting trees with a sword. Türmé will go out to the forest and wonder why everything looks burnt and slashed, but they have never been able to find out who it was. Even after many searches of elves and tents. If he had access to books or even literature he would be a very avid reader.

Magical/Supernatural Abilities: Like any other Ferä, he has the ability to manifest fire. This means he can do anything from lighting a fireplace to making fire appear in thin air (if it’s directly above his hand or protruding from it like a flamethrower). He cannot, however, do this if he feels pressured or over stressed, or if his magic is taken away from him 

CATEGORY #5: PERSONALITY & CHARACTER

Introvert or Extrovert? Though he is an introvert, he’s very good at hiding this when he is around other elves that don’t know him as anything other than a prince. He doesn’t have anxiety toward crowds or company, he just prefers to be alone or with a very small amount of people at once.

Right-Brained or Left-Brained? Fael is very, very left brained. He thinks about everything very logically and doesn’t cling to his emotions. He has been trained by his caretaker to follow his duties as a prince and he refuses to rebel from this, rather following his path and accepting anything that is given to him. He thinks through every problem as if it is a puzzle with one correct, logical solution he needs to follow.

Strengths: Fael can easily separate emotions from duties or actions. Even if he feels emotional or vulnerable he can completely hide that until it is completely safe to show it. He can hide his weaknesses very well to the point that everyone thinks he has no weaknesses. Because of this, he comes across as very charismatic, which isn’t completely wrong. He just prefers not to be around large groups. Weaknesses:Fael can, however, have problems finding when he needs help and asking when he needs it. He is in the mindset at first that he needs to do everything on his own, which he later learns isn’t necessarily the case. He also has quite a bit of physical weaknesses but these are more obvious because of his small stature. He’s still stronger than a human adult. But compared to an elven adult of his age he is fairly weak.

Goals/Dreams/Aspirations: As a child he would dream of becoming a king and freeing the elves. As he became older these dreams would fade and he would seek to accept the hard lifestyle he leads as an elven slave. By the inciting incident he starts to grow a new goal.

Beliefs/Affiliations: Most elven races follow a polytheistic religious belief that believes that there are 8 gods that control each element of the universe that establishes balance. These elements are Light, Fire, Earth (for instance dirt, trees, rocks), Water, Darkness, Beauty, Power, and Knowledge.

Fears: He has an extreme fear of death. He does learn to deal with this fear over time, but he initially does have panic attacks over the idea of dying and this drives his motivation to make the decision to run away with Mäikash and convince Baelym to come with. Fael also has some other fears, such as his obscure fear of chickens.  

Insecurities: He knows he is very small for his age and race, but this doesn’t bother him until someone says that they would be worried if he were the Ferä king because he wouldn’t be very powerful. After this he starts to pay attention to how small he is and this continues to be an insecurity of his throughout his adventure. What would he Die for? His best friend and caretaker. Eventually his wife and child.

[armeniaitn]

Artwork by Julia Couzens, Richard Hoblock, Farzad Kohan on Display at Tufenkian Fine Arts

New Post has been published on https://armenia.in-the.news/culture/artwork-by-julia-couzens-richard-hoblock-farzad-kohan-on-display-at-tufenkian-fine-arts-73672-18-05-2021/

Artwork by Julia Couzens, Richard Hoblock, Farzad Kohan on Display at Tufenkian Fine Arts

“A New Day” Exhibition at Tufenkian Fine Arts

LOS ANGELES—Tufenkian Fine Arts is honored to present “A New Day,” an exhibition featuring bright uplifting works by Julia Couzens, Richard Hoblock, and Farzad Kohan. The exhibition opening reception will take place on May 15, from 2 to 6 p.m. and will be on view through June 26.

It’s A New Day, with Thanks to Nina Simone BY CAROLE ANN KLONARIDES

Reconsideration, repurposing, recalibration, call it what you like, for artists Julia Couzens, Richard Hoblock, and Farzad Kohan, it is an ongoing process. Layering, marking, moving the paint (the eye never rests), weaving, wrapping, scraping (the hand keeps active), a cyclical loop of rediscovery. An inspiration, perhaps, is to reconstruct a new consciousness from the salvage of our yesterdays. Sometimes the old is reinvented yet the roots remain, and new growth appears, and as cliched as it sounds, a new day begins.

Birds flying high, you know how I feel Sun in the sky, you know how I feel Breeze driftin’ on by, you know how I feel

For Richard Hoblock, it began with writing screenplays commissioned as portraits; each portrait was an imagined cinematic scene, the patron as the protagonist with underpinnings of personal details they provided. As a skilled writer, he could have several subplots at variance with each other all happening at once. After a series of screenplay portraits, he began to make abstract drawings while looking at Baroque paintings, focusing on a gesture or detail. Referring obtusely to the act of writing, his leftover pencil stubs would be ground down using a Cuisinart into a fine carbon powder which was used as a ground and drawn into. When finished, they were photographed using an 8 x 10 camera, a digital file is created, and the original drawing was then destroyed (unintentionally so was the Cuisinart!) Each photographic print was unique as part of his “Baroque Series.” This practice of layering materials and procedures, several times removed from the original, began a cycle of deconstruction and improvement, a reauthoring with each transitional stage. Yet, it was not quite an appropriation as the original source of inspiration is not apparent. It is more a process of cite and re-citing.

Farzad Kohan’s “Blue Blossom,” Mixed media, 60×48

According to the artist, he started painting seriously after seeing the Willem deKooning painting “Excavation” at the Art Institute of Chicago. An obsession with the work inspired many revisits to view it. The painting has an intensive build-up of surface that has been scraped to reveal underlying layers of paint and gesture, hence the title of the work. Starting with a color or off-white ground of paint, Hoblock also would build up layers and then scrape the surface with a palette knife or kitchen utensils, leaving the residue of previous layers along the edges as a visage of the process. Not quite a revival of gestural abstract painting, Hoblock puts it, “I went from concrete as a language to abstract as a gesture.” With such a calligraphic gesture, perhaps a screenplay is hidden within. However, it is up to the viewer to project their own, as his is not revealed with the exception of an occasional hint hidden within the title.

The most recent incarnations are vertically oriented abstract paintings that have dramatic virtuoso paint strokes of discordant colors. These seemingly would not go together but with his deft precision are found to abide on the same canvas. Fleshy pinks, cranberry reds with lipstick orange, and dull browns. Acid Green! White cutout shapes are held in front of the canvas to help the artist’s eye create the blank space needed to find the relationships within and around the gestures and forms—there can be no signature image as there is always contingency in the shifting relationships. The trajectory of this thought process finds a way for intuition to play; the outcome is not set. The work “Champion” was painted listening to the Miles Davis’ recording “Bitches Brew,” which similarly gives dead air and timing to punctuate each note creating a jarring, yet magnificent composition of discordant sounds. Replace sound with color and form and the same can be said about these gnomic paintings–what shouldn’t work comes together in a harmonious celebration of defiance.

Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel It’s a new dawn It’s a new day It’s a new life for me

Farzad Kohan prides himself as a self-taught artist always in-flux. His signature process of building up bits of ripped paper collaged on board or canvas, then distressed by sanding the surface, exposes layers of the passage of time and history of application like the age rings of a fallen tree. Ghostly bits immerge; gestures of automatic drawing, cursive lines of Farsi or Persian, the edges of torn magazine pages come forward and recede, much like distant memories. Having left his family and country of Iran at the age of eighteen, escaping first to Pakistan, then migrating to Sweden and later, settling in California, he weaves all of his past into the layers that make up his paintings and drawings with gradual transformations that sometimes hide the stories or hint at untold truths. As an émigré, a desire to be part of something bigger than himself drew him to art making; his work is imbued with a desired sense of belonging and new beginnings. The use of repellent materials, such as oil and water, perhaps metaphorically reflect the difficulties of assimilation, and his labor intensive procedures, the process of migration.

An art instillation from the “A New Day” exhibition

Inspired by a homeless man who creatively repurposed found objects, Farzad found his own economy of artistic material by using everything in his studio and surroundings. He taught art to children and learned from them, made his own paper, repurposed regional maps, created drawings and then ripped them to shreds along with discarded magazines (most commonly the local Iranian magazine Javanan), and then adhered them with water and glue in layers. For an additional pièce de résistance, in which an occasional fragment of fabric would be woven.

Lately, a series of works has turned more recognizably figurative. In each, he has firmly rooted a blossoming tree in a pot, with branches appearing to reach out of the confines of the perimeter of the rectangle. The arrangement of the carefully orientated strips of paper and the use of color is driven by form and texture. Slowly, he stopped sanding the surface, letting the paper bits layer like the bark of a tree. Underneath is evidence of the artist’s personal history, tangled lines that appear like the roots of many years of drawing automatically from the subconscious. As we walked out of his studio, he pointed to a cypress tree so tall it looked like it touched the sky. “See that, it was here the whole time and I never noticed it until recently.” I immediately thought of Van Gogh’s painting of cypress trees reaching to the sun and moon, with signature swirls and whorls in the heavy impasto. Van Gogh painted many trees, and in retrospect, the trees influenced by Japanese woodcuts are the ones that Farzad’s trees most resemble, with their minimal canopy and heavy outlines, a mastery mix of many historical and cultural influences. Not rooted in the ground but in a vessel, they are ready for transport to a new home.

Dragonfly out in the sun, you know what I mean, don’t you know? Butterflies all havin’ fun, you know what I mean Sleep in peace when day is done, that’s what I mean And this old world is a new world And a bold world, for me

As she approached the Little Flower Café in Pasadena, Julia Couzens eyed and then scooped up a doggie toggle pull toy left behind, a tight bundle of many colored strings that actually resembled some of her own sculptures. “Oh, this is so perfect for what I am working on!”, she exclaimed to me as she quickly stuffed it into her bag, a catchall for similar urban detritus she finds as she walks about. Her sculptures, which she calls “bundles,” are obsessively wrapped asymmetrical masses of rope, wire, string, yarn, bungee cord, fabric, and plastic, that have a textural physicality that gives the expression “tightly wound” a whole new meaning. Gathering, twisting, weaving, sewing, tying, all make up the form. The resulting structure, in its solidity with an occasional sharp angle, seems architectural, but is actually derived from a long history of drawing from the model or nature. Each sculpture begins like a drawing, starting with a line and continues until the intuited end with an aim to visually and physically build up layer after layer of contained energy. Like the Japanese tsutsumi (“wrapping”), used as protection for precious temple objects, one wonders if something worth protecting is contained within the sculpture’s inner core, but the contents (if there are any) are safely secured and hidden.

In making the bundles, process and materiality is something Couzens privileges over the conceptual. Whether conscious or not, her work counters the historical patriarchy of monumental sculpture. Sculptors Eva Hesse and Jackie Winsor, process and materials artists a generation before, offered a more organic approach in comparison to the minimal and conceptual work of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, whereas Couzens’ work is closer aligned to the work of Michelle Segre and Shinique Smith. Replacing the chisel with a needle, and casting with weaving,  each work has a sculptural monumentality that comes out of craft traditions. They are light of weight, and if I were to wax poetic, I could see them strapped on the body as one’s total belongings carried on a nomadic sojourn. The use of color is as a force, one different from contemporary sculpture primarily made of wood, stone, and metal, with a simultaneity of color combinations that express the ineffable.

Given a rotation of 360 degrees, each side of the sculpture provides a new vantage point with a new face. There is no totality or instant read, they operate in the space like alien forms whose origins one can’t quite define and are so self-contained that they seem natural on the floor, hung from the ceiling, or protruding from a wall. It is the bringing together of these repurposed and disparate materials tightly bound in all their brilliant splendor that sends off a charge like a bundle of electrical circuitry ready to combust.

To paraphrase Couzens from a recent online response to our times, “Art’s nature is exploratory, peripheral to linear progress and predetermined order. I think its meaning sprouts from the cracks in life.”  A bundle titled, “Sweet,” has a long shoot of bright green yarn that escaped and at its end is hanging a smaller bundle as if to say from the entanglements we make, there is always the possibility of something new thriving from the mess.

It’s a new dawn It’s a new day It’s a new life for me And I’m feeling good

Read original article here.

[fnlrndcllctv]

REVIEW: Nitroplus Blasterz -Heroines Infinite Duel- (2015)

Going into this review, I wasn’t at all familiar with the world of Nitro+, which doesn’t come as much of a surprise as the vast majority of their work has never actually been released outside of Japan.

So, let’s start this off with a quick background on the company and what kind of stuff it has released in the past. Since 2000, Nitro+ has been steadily releasing Visual Novel games, with Steins;Gate arguably being their most well known game in the west.

Most of the themes in these games are pretty dark, ranging from the more fantasy-based stuff like necromancy to some incredibly questionable material such as murder and rape.

In the mid-2000s, the developer released Nitro+ Royale -Heroines Duel-, which brought together thirteen fighters from their back catalogue of games in a traditional 2D fighter, and seems to be a pretty unremarkable, by-the-numbers doujin fighting game.

Almost a decade later, Nitro+ once again stepped outside of the Visual Novel genre to make another attempt at a crossover fighting game that included a who’s who of their games making appearances, only this time taking advantage of the various advancements in the fighting game genre had seen.

The resulting release was today’s topic; Nitro+ Blasterz -Heroines Infinite Duel-.

The question remains, is it any good?

Gameplay

The game uses just five buttons; light attack, medium attack, heavy attack, escape action, and heavy action.

The escape action button can be used to perform evasive manoeuvres and guards while heavy actions can be used to push an opponent back when players are feeling pressured during a fight.

The game makes it incredibly easy to chain together combos, and implements a whole bunch of other common elements that help to make the game feel like it fits in with the subgenre, and makes it easy for new players to get the hang of things.

Air dashing? You got it!

Super gauge-fuelled super attacks? Hell yeah!

“Lethal Blaze” ultra attacks that feel unique to each fighter and often look stunning? Of course they’re here!

Nitro+ Blasterz -Heroines Infinite Duel- feels very comfortable to play, while still offering enough of a challenge to encourage players to improve.

Story

The game’s main story mode is a standard 8-match arcade ladder in which players must battle through with their chosen fighter. The plot revolves around an evil being (a copy of the character Al Azif made from fragments taken from multiple different timelines where the Demonbane failed) who attempts to take over the final remaining dimension.

Instead of cutscenes, we’re met with the visual novel approach, which doesn’t do a fantastic job of engaging players and making them muster up any motivation to finish the story.

Upon finishing the normal story mode for the first time, an extra story mode becomes available, comprised of ten individual chapters. The mode is a(yup, you guessed it) visual novel adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s story “The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward”, and follows the games cast as they assume the roles of the story rather than themselves. This mode has more variety visually, but only slightly, and the scenes that do pop up are very questionable (one particular scene is very “non-consensual” in nature).

I guess it was inevitable that the game’s story would be presented in a visual novel-like format, considering the origin games for the majority of the roster, but they’re so difficult to follow thanks to a tidal wave of complicated terminology instead of any likeable dialogue or character development.

Roster

Nitro+ Blasterz -Heroines Infinite Duel- features fourteen unique playable characters, two of which are DLC fighters.

Al Azif - From the Demonbane series, Al Azif is the spirit of the Necronomicon (that’s the “book of the dead, for all you non-Evil Dead fans out there!). Her primary goal is to hunt down and destroy all unholy powers that are in league with the evil gods.

Anna - From the Gekkō no Carnevale series, Anna is an automaton doll that was found in a trash dump. She has amnesia, and now works in a workshop, fixing machines.

Ethica - One of the protagonists from the Tokyo Necro series, Ethica is a young "Private Special Living Dead Stalker" who practices a special kind of fighting style known as "Close Quarter Armed Martial Arts".

Ein - From the Phantom Of Inferno series, Ein is an assassin with such skill she was given the codename "Phantom", has no memories of her past and is incredibly apathetic towards, well, mostly everything except killing.

Ignis - From the Jingai Makyō series, Ignis is a demon hunter and the sworn protector of humanity who makes up for her lack of supernatural powers by mastering martial arts and being deadly with a kitana.

Mora - From the Vampirdzhija Vjedogonia visual novel, Mora is a vampire hunter who is armed with a massive hammer to beat down her opponents with.

Satsurikuin Ouka - From the same modelling agency as Super Sonico, Ouka is a confident, extroverted young girl who is constantly looking for her spot in the limelight. She’s also attached to a robotic metal crucifix for some reason.

Ruili - From the Kikokugai: The Cyber Slayer visual novel, Ruili is essentially a reanimated corpse/”soul transfer experiment” that contains the soul of a young woman who yearns to be with her brother (in a “way more than friends” fashion… yeah).

Saber - From the Fate/stay night visual novel, Saber is the personification of Arturia Pendragon (or, as he is more commonly known, King Arthur) and was created to aid participants in a to-the-death tournament called the Fifth Holy Grail War.

Muramasa - From the Full Metal Daemon: Muramasa visual novel, Muramasa is the human form of a tsurugi (a living soul forged into a set of armour). Also a demon?

Super Sonico - Nitro+’s mascot and lead singer/guitarist of the fictional band First Astronomical Velocity. Originally appeared in the arcade version of this game, but was made into a fully playable fighter for the console releases.

Saya - From the Saya no Uta visual novel, Saya is a being from another dimension who materialized in this universe for the sole purpose of reproduction. While she looks like an innocent young girl, in actuality, she is some sort of amorphous fleshy abomination that emits a putrid stench and produces slime, and eatanything from cats to human beings.

Heart - From the Arcana Heart games, Heart is the first DLC fighter in the game.

Homura - From the Senran Kagura series, Homura is the last DLC character.

In addition to the game’s roster of playable fighters, there are twenty different “assist” characters to choose from.

With representatives ranging from games/anime/manga such as Psycho-Pass, Guilty Crown: Lost Christmas and Phenomeno to Expelled From Paradise, School-Live! and Gargantia On The Verdurous Planet, each of these characters act in the same way as the striker system in The King Of Fighters ‘99. A player can choose two assists, and during a match, can briefly tag one of these assists into battle to do extra damage or change up specific stats.

The game handily makes things easier for players in this decision making process by informing you which duo of assist characters have an effective synergy with your chosen main fighter. With how likely it is that players will not be very familiar with most of (if not all of) these extra support faces, this is incredibly helpful.

Therein lies one of the biggest issues of Nitro+ Blasterz -Heroines Infinite Duel-, and it’s a problem that it seemingly shares with a great deal of anime as a whole; it’s full of fanservice, but actively alienates and overwhelms anyone who might be newcomers.

All of the character descriptions above were the result of me having spend hours delving into the story of each individual game for the purposes of the review, as this game doesn’t give you any information whatsoever. Throughout the dialogue of the story, each character makes references to their respective game, which is fine if you’re a diehard fan of any of these titles, but is absolutely bewildering for anyone who is out of the loop, and makes it tough to connect with any of the fighters outside of a technical level.

Look, I’m really not asking for my hand to be held through this, I just don’t think that it is too much to ask to include some basic information to go along with each fighter.

At least put the original game titles for each fighter in somewhere!.

Graphics

Nitro+ Blasterz -Heroines Infinite Duel- follows the tradition of many 2D anime-style fighters such as Blazblue, Under Night In-Birth and Arcana Heart, showcasing some very stylish fighting action.

All of the character sprites in the game are nicely animated, especially during assist moments mid-match and whenever someone lands a particularly devastating finishing move.

The visual flairs that pop up on screen during some of the “Lethal Blaze” attacks are amazing to watch, especially characters such as Ein, who leaps offscreen only to reappear in the distance with a sniper rifle, allowing players to quickly aim the gun at a foe.

At no point do the visuals in Nitro+ Blasterz -Heroines Infinite Duel- set the bar for the genre, but it’s still a great game to look at.

Stages

The variety of stages in Nitro+ Blasterz -Heroines Infinite Duel- is quite a mixed bag quality-wise.

When the stages look good, they’re great. The skyscraper-laden view from the rooftop stage is a highlight, as is the viscera covered grounds of the city (which feels appropriately Lovecraftian, when you learn about why it’s happening in “Another Story”).

The problem is that every stage feels very boring, even the ones that look nice. Everything feels so empty and lifeless, and directly clashes with the fast-paced action of the fights.

Every stage feels like a training stage, and is one of the more disappointing aspects of the game.

Replayability

Outside of the game’s standard story modes and score attack, there’s not really that much to do in Nitro+ Blasterz -Heroines Infinite Duel-.

In a similar way to games like Blade Strangers (read our review of the game here!), there’s not much of an incentive to carry on playing the game once you’ve gained the character art from the end of each character playthrough in story mode.

Even then, the gallery is lacking somewhat, showcasing art you’ll have already seen by the time you’ve unlocked it.

Training mode is as barebones as you could possibly get, offering nothing other than the ability to reset your position onscreen and a command list.

Online play is tricky too, as (at the time of writing) there was next to nobody to fight against, so it renders the option rather useless.

Final thoughts & overall score

Nitroplus Blasterz: Heroines Infinite Duel- is a solid and interesting crossover fighting experience that effectively offers an impressive fighter roster, fun to watch assist characters and easy to learn gameplay mechanics.

It’s a shame that the game doesn’t have the same depth as its peers, with two borderline nonsensical storylines, a range of disappointingly boring stage designs and a total unwillingness to offer any character context to players that aren’t familiar with the source material.

Do you agree with our review of Nitro+ Blasterz -Heroines infinite duel-?

Let us know in the comments section below!

[noctisluciscaelumcxiv]

In Which Chiyo Wastes Your Time For A Joke

background: i like mystery diners alot. i watch it alot. i decided to tell a joke about it. here it is under cut. ENJOY!

In Which Chiyo Wastes Your Time For A Joke

*bre,,,,gaymie,,,,,olivia...im so sorry in advance that you had to read this.

“Hey it’s me, Charles Stiles, I’m with a company called Mystery Diners.”

Whether you asked or not, he will always greet you with this single phrase. Mystery Diners is a “reality TV show” that focuses on weeding out the bad seeds of a certain food service. Many episodes revolve around finding the culprit responsible for a host of problems that the food service is having. Usually, via a three act structure, the problem is solved within the 20 minute time frame. The show is Produced by the T Group Productions, makers of such classics as Swamp Hunters and I Catfished My Kid. Many have accused the show of being staged, though Charles Stiles of Mystery DIners denies these claims. Who is this Charles Stiles? Well, he is the owner of California-based Business Evaluation Services and Mystery Shopper Services. These services are for companies to secretly test that their customer service is up to par by hiring “Mystery SHoppeers” to evaluate them. From the website:

    “Mystery shopping is one of the most traditional and effective methods for gathering feedback on your guests’ experience. You can gain valuable insight into how your customers feel about doing business with your company.”

THe show is an extension of these services, televised and dramaticized for our viewing pleasure. There’s many things a bit...off about the show. It’s a bit hard to put your finger on it, but once you sit and watch a few minutes, it starts to become clear. It’s very obviously a put on. Many episodes have “conflicts” that are are so absurd, one wonders how anyone could actually take it seriously. The “Action Burger” episode is quite a good place to start for how ridiculous this show can be.

Before tackling this episode, you must first understand the structure of the show. This is VITAL. The sho is split into three separate sections: The Consultation, The Sting and The Confrontation. Sometimes an optional fourth chapter is added to the story, The Restaurant Update. OH. There’s one thing before the show can actually start! The One Minute Advertisement. This is where the food service owner has a short section to sell their product. It usually ends up being them talking about thier most popular dishes. The Consultation is next. This is where Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners sits down with the disgruntled owners and talks about the issue. Problems range from “I think someone is rigging my poetry night,” “There’s a Suspicious Christmas Elf outside my shop,” or “I think my mother is stealing my secret Krabby Patty Formula.” No matter the problem, 90% of them boil down to a petty money making scheme by one of the employees or a scam. During this section, we also see the Control Room Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners sets up. He goes over how many hidden cameras he has placed throughout the perimeter of the area. He also introduces his Mystery Diners here. These are the people who infiltrate the restaurant to uncover clues that will help solve the mystery. They pose as guests or workers to do so.

Next we have the Sting, which is the true meat and potatoes of each Episode. This is where the juicy stuff happens. Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners and the owner sit in the control room and survey the restaurant on a usual day of service. It becomes quickly obvious to the viewer just who the culprit is usually within the first few moments. Sometimes a red herring will be thrown in, like a skeevy worker who seems to be stealing or talking negatively about the restaurant. Almost always, this person is revealed to either an accomplice to the crimes, or a misunderstood worker. Surveillance work is a unpredictable job. Cameras or microphone can fail, and unforeseen situations may arise. In these cases, Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners may have a ace in the hole. Things like drones, roller skate robots or hacking devices are not uncommon in the later seasons. Even with all these gadgets, the unpredictable may still happen. In these cases the Sting is usually cut short with Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners proudly proclaiming, “I think we have enough evidence to close this case. Why don’t you go down there and stop *whatever is going on* and bring them back up here!” This is immediately followed by--

The Confrontation! This is the most EXPLOSIVE part of any episode. Tensions are running high as the owner confronts the inept, wrongdoers. Often, this can lead to hands flying and tears streaming. Sometimes other customers get involved, sometimes other scams are revealed. In all cases, the offenders are fired or quit and those who were wrapped into a world of debauchery by the offenders are let off with a mild talking to. This section usually ends with the owner offering his eternal gratitude to Charle Stiles of Mystery Diners. They may even throw in a meal, on the house of course! A few weeks later an update of the restaurant is given. All problems are solved and nothing is awry. All’s well that ends well.

With the basic structure of the show down, it is time to take a closer look at an episode, “Action Burger.” Well...the offical episode title is actually “Comic Book Caper.” This is episode 6 (133 overall) in season 11 released December 30, 2015.

After the intro, we meet Vlane Carter, our protagonist for today.

(Vlane Carter, our tragic Hero)

His restaurant is a combination of his passions in life, “sci-fi comics, and FOOD.” One mouth watering explanation of his menu later (it’s spit into “villain” dishes and “hero” dishes. From how he explains it, it seems that villain dishes are quite fattening and greasy while hero dishes are more on the healthy side.), we get yet ANOTHER explanation (though not as tasty) about Vlane’s comic, Bio-Sapien. Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners is in awe of our great protagonist’s skills. Through this Consultation, we learn that a few of Vlane’s valuable comics keep going missing.

(valued at $155)

(valued at $75)

(valued at $750)

He suspects, Gary the Manager, Keenan(?) the Cashier and John the Cook. He also wants to know about the more mundane issue of employees arguing with customers over comic books. Denis, our P.I., infers that maybe someone is stealing the comics….to re sell them! He’s gotta look more into that though, one can never be sure with crimes like these. Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners ensures Vlane that “...At the end of the day, you’ll have your answers, I can assure you of that!” and we are thrust into the STING.

(today’s Control Room. Vlane’s exclamations of “SO HIGH TECH” leave the viewer breathless at such an astonishing show of technology.)

We go over camera placements (not as detail heavy as earlier episodes, lasting only a few seconds) and once again go over our suspects. Gary is said to be our least likely suspect, thought Vlane doesn’t have many negative comments regarding any of the suspects. Denis returns with nothing bad to say about the employees either. He says that all the local pawn shops no nothing of the stolen artifacts and it seems like this case may be lost forever… Until he whips out his 1999 Padger to show that he did indeed find the comics being auctioned off online. It seems as though the

comics have already been *gasp* sold! Denis leaves his “pad” with Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners just in case any other comics pop up.

(Our Mystery Diner for today.)

We are introduced to our Mystery Diner Beatrice (who makes sure let the audience how tasty the food is and how knowledgeable the staff is about comics). THis mini commercial is cut show by Gary arguing who the better batman is with a customer. The tensions run high in this scene, and they soon burst as the custmer Omar storms out. Or rather, is basically thrown out by Gary.

(Even the customers tremble at such a heated debate.)

We are then introduced to the most bizarre thing in this restaurant, Bellona. This is a young woman hired by Vlane to cosplay as his comic book character and walk around the shop for a few hours a few times a week. While Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners believes they should keep a close eye on her, Vlane is adamant in defending his “heroine.” Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners solemnly reminds our hero that “Even superheroes have their weakness.” Faux Bellona, or Jessica, seems to be well liked by the staff and customers alike (probably because of her super costume….), though there is one issue. She gives away copies of Vlane’s comic for free and eats lunch there without paying (to which Vlane remarks that eating burgers is far out of character for Bellona, a devout vegetarian.). This seems to be the first seeds of doubt that have sprung into our protagonist’s heart.

(Our Second Mystery Diner)

After a sequence with more hijinks and misconduct with Jessica, we are introduced to our second Mystery DIner, whose job it is to tempt the employees into buying a very rare comic.

THe idea is that the crooked criminal will tell the clueless customer that his comic is worth very little, when in fact its worht $300. That, and Action Burger is NOT a collector. Keenan, our cashier, passes the test but one other unlikely--it’s Jessica. She tells the simple minded store goer that the comic is worthless (which CHareles Stiles of Mystery Diners assures us that he checked HIMSELF! ITS IN MINT CONDITION!) and to sell it her for a few bucks. Very….suspicious.,.......could she be….no….not the heroine! Maybe this isn’t the case.

Jessica goes into Vlane’s office (a huge no-no) and snaps a pic of the comic to post online. THrough the “pad,” Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners informs VLane that the comic has just appeared on the auction website for sale!!!!!!!! Having had enough Vlane storms done to the office, ready to confront the super hero gone bad. This is the explosive confrontation that everythinghas been leading up to! At the Control room is where all this tension...BURSTS! Jessica insists that she’s giving away comics to promote business and accuses Vlane of not feeding her on the clock. Vlane corrects her saying that Bellona doesn’t need food, what with being a biomechanical alien and all. Oh and uh, also that giving books away fro free isn’t cool. Or something. Jessica then proceeds to call the Mystery Diner a dumb ass and VLane once again has to correct her in saying that super heroes dont take advantage of people! Seems like Jessica was always rotten to the core. After telling her that she is undeserving of such a noble outfit, he fires her and she storms out. Oh and she steals the costume. Next he confronts Gary….It’s pretty boring. Gary just makes a few excuses and is put on probation for a few months. Vlane promises to name a burger after CHarles Stiles Mystery Diners, Jessica pays the money back, the staff is reprimanded, he hires a new actor and everything isfine. That guitar riff closes the door on this case.

And that was that, my god where to begin? First off one of the main issues with this episode, and this show in general, is the man himself: Charles Fucking Stiles. With any other show of this nature, the one thing that usually holds it together is a fun host. Say what you will about Guy Fieri, he is still entertaining to watch. He emotes and reacts is ways that are fun for the audience and can keep your attention for the full length of the show. Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners is none of these things. He cannot act. Which isn’t saying much considering no one in this how has any acting abilities (yes, even the hired actors suck.). But Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners is a special kind of bad acting: he’s bland as hell. There is little to no emotion in any line he says. It is always in the same tone of voice and the same inflection. This becomes really noticeable when you realize all of his dialogue is the same few lines with the name of the current restaurant stuck into them. It is quite similar to an rpg where every playthru the npc says the same thing; the only difference in thier dialogue would be that your name is changed. His facial expression is blank the entire show. One has to wonder why the camera even bothers cutting to him half of the time. It doesn’t matter if there is a brawl going on or  “hilarious” hijinks with the employees, his face will never change. Maybe a smile may peek through but it is pretty hard to tell.

As mentioned before, not only is our host about as engaging as a rock, the others in the show don’t do much better in the acting department. The restaraunt owners, employees, mystery diners and sometimes other players in the episode are all acting, that is obvious. The thing is, all of them either under act or over act. Take this episode, Action Burger, for example. It is obvious that Vlane was given lines to recite but his delivery is absolutely horrible, though that is not really his fault. He’s not an actor so of course he wouldn’t give a great performance. I think what makes it so bad is that it seems like none of the crew gave this man any direction. This is also an issue in many episodes. There are instances of Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners telling someone to look somewhere but both end up looking in two totally different places. At one point in the episode, Vlane says a line that I think is supposed to be for the audience to laugh at but Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners just looks at him, looks away, and then immediatly looks back at him as if he did a double take. In fact, i don’t think ANYONE is given much direction. Poor Vlane sometimes has no idea what reaction to give to some lines so he just stares blankly awaiting his cue for his turn to recite his memorized lines. Again, I believe this is mostly due to incompetence on the crew’s part. There is a scene where Gary argues with a customer about the best batman and the customer’s acting is so forced it’s unbelievable. The man seems like he’s sleepwalking through the scene. Some extras in the background have no idea what to do and where to go; alot of them either stand around or flail around. Though, I have read that most fo the people seen in the background aren’t actors but actual restaurant goers. I am not sure how true this information is, though. Either way, it’s bad. Jessica’s acting is...wow. It trully is something. At the end during the Confrontation, she tries to “tell off” everyone but it comes off as awkward and weird. She walks up to a customer who is ordering her food and talks over her to her son. It is the most awkward way to approach someone for a conversation not to mention just...confusing.

Here we see her talking right in front of the mother to the son. Why didn’t she just walk up to the son? And no, she was not right there and just struck up a conversation. SHe got up from across the restaurant and walked purposefully to that spot, and THEN started talking. And yes the mother is trying to order food while Jessica is talking to the son.

Here, she reaches over the mother to give the son a book. Who in the world shot this and thought it was fine, this is the most awkward thing to watch! First off she is FAR too close to the mother, who is a STRANGER that she doesn’t know. Second, she just reaches over her like that and the mother doesn’t react at all! She also continues talking while the mother is trying to order. I know this is meant to be “reality” but scenes like this show just how little direction these actors were given. It’s so clunky and awkward it becomes hard to watch. It’s embarrassing. This is not an isolated thing, many episodes have bad actor placements like this. People just don’t know where to stand or what to do with their bodies, giving scenes very boxed in feeling or a cramped feeling. It’s weird and awkward and thoroughly unpleasant to sit through at times!

While this episode wasn’t a big offender of it, the sound mixing in this show can be passable to laughable. At times it’s obvious that lines are added in or dubbed over in post. Sometimes, with his back turned, Charles Stiles of Mystery Diners’ disembodied voice is heard, even though it is very obvious that he didn’t actualy say anything. He comments on things often time with no reaction from anyone almost as if he wasn’t….in the room! Plus, whenever a line is added in there is a noticeable change in audio quality. Once you pick up on it, it’s impossible NOT to notice. The editing can get a lil weird too, cutting to angles of the same scene that just loook….weird. This one is a bit harder to explain in words but just watch a few episodes. The camera cuts to something else obviously trying to not focus on something, but the thing we aren’t supposed to be focusing on is still in the shot, maybe a little off to the side! Which makes you want to focus on it MORE. Again, watch an episode and you will know what i mean.

There is sometimes this uncomfortable image of employees that this show often shows. It makes it seem like if an employee doesn’t absolutely love their job and everything it stands for, then they are bad and probably a crook. Many times a boss will jump to wanting to straight up fire an employee for making one negative remark. And it’s often these “negative” employees that end up being the criminal masterminds in charge of some intricate scam to con custmers and the boss out of money. It all seems a bit mean spirited towards workers. It’s like this weird sort of fear mongering for employers, “BE CAUTIOUS OF ANY EMPLOYEE THAT DOESN'T BEND OVER BACKWARDS FOR YOUR COMPANY!” Maybe i’m over thinking it. I mean, i hve to be if i sat and wrote this, right?

[austinonymous]

Film Critique- Is Rey A Mary Sue? (Based on The Force Awakens)

A question that many have asked and have answered to various degrees of ‘yes’ and ‘no’- here’s my take on it. Please contain your desire to burn me until I finish giving my reasoning. Maybe?

Firstly, What is the definition of a Mary Sue?

While there’s no concrete definition, a fair way to define a Mary Sue is: “A Mary Sue is an idealized and seemingly perfect fictional character. Often, this character is recognized as an author insert or wish fulfillment. They can usually perform better at tasks than should be possible given the amount of training or experience.” 

Yes that was pulled from Wikipedia but I think its a fair way to describe the concept.

So really the question we are asking is whether or not Rey is better at being Rey than she should be based on her background and how the universe of Star Wars works.

Well, to start off, we need to know her training based on what the movie tells us and base what we can reasonably expect from her off that. So, what do we know about Rey before the events of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi?

1)      She’s lived on more or less on her own for most of her life.

2)      She’s a scavenger and has spent a long time picking through the wreckage of Jakku

3)      She has some mechanic skill and can drive a repulsorlift vehicle

4)      She has not been off planet and presumably never flown a starcraft before

5)      She has experience using a staff as a weapon

6)      She has no experience with the Force outside legends about the Original Trilogy

So, what does she do over the course of the Force Awakens?

Well, the first event that causes red flags is the fact that she single handedly pilots the Millennium Falcon after jumping into it for the first time ever- not only does she pilot it, she then engages in a dogfight with TIE fighters, piloted by trained pilots.

This is more than slightly problematic. The Millennium Falcon is an odd ship, jury rigged and modified in many ways. Indeed, the base ship shouldn’t be able to engage in dog fights at all given its sheer size in comparison to other fighters like the X-Wing or the TIE Fighter. Its just under three times the length of a X-Wing ; for comparision, America’s famous b-17 Bomber was only about twice the length of America’s most iconic fighter at the time (the p-51 Mustang), and one was obviously more suited to dogfights than the other. Its only through the Falcon’s heavy modification of its engines and adding beefed up weapons that give it fire power on par or better than larger ships. Its dual quad-turbolasers alone gave it more fire-power than the larger corvette used by Princess Leia in A New Hope, ignoring the torpedo tubes it also had.

Suffice to say, the Millennium Falcon is not something you can just walk onto and pilot. Maybe you can operate the guns (as Luke shows in A New Hope) but to pull off the advanced maneuvers we see Rey manage by herself with no training in the escape from Jakku? Like how she sent the Falcon into a free-fall, flipping it over to just the right angle for Finn to shoot the TIE fighter with his stuck-in-place turbolaser? And this is a girl who ahs never personally flown a starship before?

Luke was a great X-Wing Pilot, maybe not the best in the Star Wars continuity but still great. This is established as believable because the movie mentions details that explain his abilities. It mentions in A New Hope that he flew a Skyhopper growing up, a ship of similar size to the x-wing and made by the same company as the X-Wing, meaning the control schemes were similar and he didn't have to adjust to the cockpit or control setup. He also is mentioned to have used this ship to shoot womp rats, attesting to his skills at shooting and his connection to the Force- as we see later in A New Hope, his instincts, guided by the Force, are highly precise, honed over years of practice.

Rey has none of that. She’s poor and has never owned anything the size of a X-Wing, let alone the Millennium Falcon. Nowhere in the movie are we given even a single line about her learning to pilot ships through simulations (which yes, is the canon reason why she could pilot). In the context of the movie, without outside lore helping the movie out, she should have crashed the Millennium Falcon many, many times.

Now I’ll give her a pass on knowing the Millennium Falcon and how to repair it better than Han freaking Solo, if only because the movie does give the explanation in the way that she, as a scavenger, knew what parts were universally useful in a way that a smuggler/fighter like Han might not. So maybe she had some way to fix the Falcon he wouldn’t have thought about immediately.

Rey doesn’t have any really bad ‘what’ moments that I can remember until later in the film when she not only resists Kylo’s force mind torture, proceeds to turn it back on him and then mind tricks a stormtrooper immediately afterwards. This is probably the most prickly one to tackle as the Force is purposely set up by Lucas to be as vague as possible more or less- it brings you to places or helps you do things you wouldn’t normally be able to do because its what the universe needs.

Basically it can be used if needed as a giant excuse for convenience and the plot armor of its characters.

But its important to realize that while the Force does set up events or tries to guide the universe back to a state of balance (which is another whole subject to talk about), one’s usage of the Force is never portrayed like that in the films. The Force itself may be more or less an excuse for plot convenience, however the way the Jedi use it is fairly consistent.

The first rule is that the Light Side is the hard path, and the Dark Side is the easy path. The second rule you generally see followed throughout the films is that the force has different difficulties depending on its application. Using it on one’s self is the easiest (intuition or enhancing reflexes). Effecting material objects like rocks or pushing people is slightly harder, while effecting other people’s minds is the hardest to do. This is why some species’ are immune to the Mind Trick- its so complex that it just doesn't work sometimes, as opposed to shoving them, which almost always works.

Obi-Wan is shown to use the Mind Trick from the beginning (which makes sense, as he is a master) but it is not until the Return of the Jedi, a full year or so after his training with Yoda, that Luke is shown to use the jedi Mind Trick. This is despite being able to move objects or summon his lightsaber telekinetically as early as the Empire Strikes Back. In a New Hope, with essentially the same amount of exposure to the Force as Rey, Luke only manages to tap into the Force via his intuition, such as his training with the training droid on the Falcon in A New Hope and then his later success in blowing up the Death Star.

Rey on the other hand is able to survive a direct mental attack by a Dark Side user, and then mind trick a stormtrooper on only her second attempt. Remember, this is her first ever intentional use of the force and she can pull off one of the more tricky aspects of the Force. She’s so much more ridiculously “in tune” with the Force despite the previously mentioned zero real exposure to Force that its absurd. Even Anakin, who has such over-the-top power with the Force that he is able to pilot a podracer as a child with zero training in the Force solely based on his Force-guided intuition (and podracing is a sport that no non-force sensitive human can compete in due to not being able to react fast enough, remember), never shows the ability to even so much as move a rock with the Force prior to training.

Even though yes, you can give the in-universe explanation that Rey is just that much more powerful in the Force than any of her predecessors, or she managed to do a mind trick in a burst of desperation, that still does not excuse the fact that it is ultimately the writer’s decision for her to be able to pull this off. Instead of using any of the other ways they could have let Rey escape her imprisonment (friends save her, more defectors, chaos from the attack somehow lets her out, etc), the creators decided to let her have this incredible power in the force.

You may say that there is an explanation given to us, albeit indirectly- the Force. That would solve the whole issue with being a Mary Sue, which is having more competency than you should based on what we know about the character, right? We have an explanation, right?

But the problem is that, as said before, the Force is essentially a writing crutch- why did the characters all happen to end up here? The Force wills it. 

The reason why Lucas got away with it though is because he rarely used it in that sense. The Force was a supplement to Luke’s or, for instance, even Vader’s skills. The fought mostly with lightsabers or star-fighters. Their piloting/fighting was bolstered by the Force of course, but it was never the way Luke escaped from a bad situation. Half the time he relied on his friends (Han saved him at the end of A New Hope, Chewy and Leia saved him at the end of the Empire Strikes Back, and Lando, R2 and Chewy were all instrumental to saving Han in Return of the Jedi ).

This is the real issue with Rey- no matter how well portrayed she may be (honestly her and Kylo’s development in The Last Jedi was probably the best part of that movie in my opinion), she has skills so categorically superior to previous protagonists without clear in-movie explanations as to why.

Could she grow out of being a Mary Sue? Sure, of course (I’ll detail whether I think they managed that in the Last Jedi at a later date). But I think that we can pretty clearly say that in the Force Awakens, she fits the definition of a Mary Sue.

(Also to clarify I do like her character in concept and Daisy Ridley can be a pretty great actress for the role. I just have issues with the writing of her character.)

[illusionsofdreaming]

I was tagged by sweet @ahonoriag​ here (mentions of gore/suicide in their post!)! First time being tagged :O so let’s do this!

Warning: It may be GIF heavy! Yes, I’m that type of person.

Rule: Answer these questions and come up with 5 of your own.

1. What accent is your favorite? (like Irish accents, British accents, etc.)

Funny thing is, I’m terrible at differentiating accents. I can hear ‘accents’ per se but I won’t be able to go ‘oh yeah, that’s a Scottish accent’ or ‘yeah, that’s Australian’. All I can say is, ‘yeah, that’s a different way of saying tomato’. To be honest, if you’re speaking English, 80% of the time I won’t even notice accent differences. Unless it’s really pronounced. I use to find differentiating American and British accents hard too - but after what, four years in London now, I think I know what British accents sound like. I think. 

Fun fact: People use to say I speak with a Canadian American accent but I’m always so confused because I can’t hear it. What even is a Canadian American accent? Are you saying my English sounds different from yours? I don’t hear it.

tl;dr I suck at accents. Therefore. I dare not claim to like any one accent more than another. They all sound the same to me.

2. Who is your least favorite main character from a book you’ve read or a movie you watched, etc.?

Ooo. That’s. Cruel. Testing my memory skills like that. To be fair, if I don’t like the main character from a book/movie I wouldn’t read/watch it because it would be quite agonising to finish a novel with a character you can’t connect with. But I’m thinking of in terms of extreme dislike so maybe there are main protagonists/antagonists from books/movies that I disliked but still read/watch - however nothing really comes to mind at the moment, I feel like I have to go back to reread some of my favorites to jog my memory. But, if we’re talking about recent ones.. hmm...

I’ve recently started watching The Ancient Magus’ Bride and while I find the art and the world beautiful I find myself developing a complicated love-hate relationship for Chise, the main protagonist. (BEWARE SPOILERS AHEAD)

I have a thing against protagonists that are ‘loved by all’ and it doesn’t help that such protagonists are often these frail, meek, innocent like things. Chise does not actually fall into the innocent category perfectly, although the meek helplessness thing does get old quite quickly for me. I appreciate that they do address her lamblike attachment to her caregiver and the explanation does appease the cringe that’s developing in my chest. Still, maybe I’m just impatient but I am definitely not fond of watching characters that are 80% sickly and needs saving every time after every tiny casted spell.  Especially since she’s introduced as this supremely rare ‘WOOOOA MAGICAL CONDUIT HUMAN BEING THING’ (not to mention they keep bringing it up every episode, you know, just in case you forgot she’s a Sleigh Beggy within twenty minutes) it gets awkwardly disappointing that she’s laid flat for days after every magic show. Also, the fact that ALL the bad things that can possibly happen, happens to her gets a bit grating. One curse. Two curse. ALL THE CURSES. JUST SLAP IT ON HER. 

Her strong attachment to Elias was developed from Ep.1, literally her swearing her loyalty to a mage who bought her on a slave market. Later as the story progresses we understand why she’s so attached to Elias, the one only who has treated her like ‘family’ (debatable), but the point I’m getting to is while the writer tries to portray Chise as an apathetic teenager moulded by the events from her traumatic past, I find it strange that she would grow so fond of Elias so quickly, considering that she’s been passed around from relative to relative all her life and - arguably - should not trust others this easily. Nope, it just went from human marketing, to ‘oh he fed me and clothed me, must be nice, he’s my family’. 

That being said, her character backstory does reveal a lot about human nature and psychology, and it is especially rewarding to watch Chise grow and develop out of her suicidal thoughts and apathy. From her history, we see an ugly side of humanity. It explored the different ways humans can crack under constant fear and pressure and the result was definitely damaging and heartbreaking. I’ve always been a sucker for stories/reveals that explore the grey side of human nature unfortunately, I only get this kind of excitement from her backstory/family more than Chise, the actual character - which is why again, she’s not my favorite. As a character in general, I find her extremely bland and lacklustre and her character development is unfortunately stunted by her being saved and coddled by everyone around her.

That being said, The Ancient Magus’ Bride is still airing so who knows, maybe future episodes will change my mind on Chise as a character. It is definitely worth watching because of its unique setting and characters (ALSO MYTHOLOGICAL CAMEOS) and aside my iffiness against Chise, the other characters are better developed and have more complex personalities. Interesting characters include Elias Ainsworth and Lindel. I’ll also always have a soft spot for Ruth as well.

3. What’s your favorite sad song?

Fun fact: I don’t really listen to music often because I find myself getting distracted way too easily. I can’t write with music playing - the only time I can be productive with music playing is when I’m in my studios making art. 

But back to the question. Hmm.. Sad songs. I have hard times making decisions so I guess I’ll give a list of several favorite sad songs that I’ve been listening to ‘recently’ (AKA these few years LMAO).

If I Die Young - by The Band Perry 

I Know I’m a Wolf - by Young Heretics

Dancing on My Own (Cover) - by Calum Scott

What are Words - by Chris Medina

Echo - by Jason Walker

Unsteady - by X Ambassadors

Little Do You Know - by Alex & Sierra

... I have too many favorite sad songs (a whole playlist oops) but I’ll just leave it at these few for now lol

4. What superpower would you not want to have?

Undying immortality - the Deadpool type AKA nothing kills me. With all the struggles I have, immortality would be the most painful, mentally and physically. Mentally I probably wouldn’t survive past even one day if that happened. Give me Mindreading abilities that can’t be turned off, give me terrible Future-sight, give me X-ray vision that can’t be switched off or sensitive ears that hurt - ANYTHING but regenerative/cyclical/deathless immortality.

5.  What is your favorite holiday-related song? Does this double as a ‘what’s your favorite holiday’ question?  Hands down it’s Chinese New Year. Yep, call me proud. But nothing gets me more excited than Chinese New Year. The festive colors the dances, the food. Definitely the food. But perhaps the main reason why I enjoy CNY so much is because it’s the only time I get to see my extended family all gathered in one place and its like. WOA. I DIDN’T KNOW OUR FAMILY WAS THIS BIG. It’s nice to know how many uncles, aunties, twice or thrice removed you have. It’s so loud and festive but it’s fun. I also like all the red colors. song wise, I always feel so giddy when I hear this festive CNY song that you’ll hear being played everywhere - it’s basically a song that celebrates the arrival of the fortune God - it’s just so peppy I can’t help but hum alongside it and dance a little.

LETS NOT FORGET RED PACKETS

PHEW! That took long, now I think I’m supposed to tag someone? IF I HAD FRIENDS MAYBE. but uh yeah. I’ll just list my questions down here and whoever wants to answer them do it! Do tag me if you do them! 1. What kinds of non-fiction do you read? What’s your favorite?

2. If you can direct/reproduce a Disney live-action movie which fairytale would you recreate and why?

3. If you can only eat one dish and only that dish for the rest of your life starting today, which dish would it be?

4. Breakfast, lunch or dinner?

5. What’s your favorite game genre? (ex. rpg, mmo, fps)

[pathofhouserules]

Deep Blue Kingdom Session 4: Cold As Ice

With their course set, the protagonists flee towards the northern borders of the Danu Kingdom. Along the way Einar and Olwen have a chat, The ship gets more staff, and Eoghan tries his hand at psychotronics. And finally, in the frozen wonderland of the far north, a battle begins.

I don't have great logs for some of these side sessions. Olwen and Eoghan talk some stuff out in the ship's gym, which is hot and uncomfortable in the grand tradition of submarines gyms. I think the purpose was for Olwen to scope out how well she could trust her new mercenary companion? Either way it didn't end in them fighting, so probably a good sign.

The other short side session that happened is Eoghan getting flagged down by Reiho for some help. She's decided to organize the civilians on the ship to assist the understaffed crew. While she and Eoghan go over schedules and lists of skills and such, they get to chatting. Eoghan's kind of pissed the Princess isn't in the lists, and appears to be just dead (royal) weight. Reiho explains that she's trying to be considerate because Fionnoula's been depressed, what with the losing her country and some of her family being hurt and all. No real agreement is reached on how to deal with that; Eoghan is playing up his Intolerance (nobility) to the max and Reiho is not going along with it.

Eventually they finish the work and table their discussion for another day. Reiho gets to ask him some about his Gadgeteering project, and they split.

When the team approaches the northern border, there's a short briefing before everything gets underway. Vayr is back out of hiding in their computer-cave, and leads the first part. Comms traffic indicates the various mobile firebases up ahead are patrolling, as well as the existence of a pursuit force dogging their tail. Eventually it's decided to try for a full-speed breakthrough, with the protagonists deploying their mecha on the outside of the ship's pressure hull. They head north with a moutain range to their right, so they won't have to worry about attack from that direction. Reiho is handling the comms, under the callsign ‘Masthead’; the PCs are each assigned their own monikers after a short discussion. (Merlin, Joker, Hunter, and Lynx for Alastar, Eoghan, Einar, and Olwen, respectively). The ship’s now staffed enough to be a viable combatant.

Not too much later and at considerable range, they notice a weird haze of white close to the ground. Alastar spots it first, and decides to take a rather cautious approach, doing his best to scan it passively but the haze of kicked up snow is just not cooperating with him. Eventually he reasons that a flying submarine is about as conspicuous as you can get and uses his mecha's laser sensors to try to scan the thing, right as the haze stops moving and starts to thin out.

Within that haze is their main obstacle, one of the mobile firebases mentioned last time around. Its movement had kicked up the ice and snow around it, reducing visibility & sensor range - and without any scouts outside to report back, the Sima Yi was able to get much too close for comfort. Promotions are not in the enemy commander's future.

As the haze cut both ways and both sides have effectively surprised each other, combat quickly becomes a mess. The first exchange of ship-bound weapons blows apart one of the firebase's turrets and makes the Sima Yi start crashing. PCs either jump off or brace for impact, while the enemy starts deploying their tanks.  They're able to get two out before Eoghan blows up the departure ramp, leaving their further tanks stranded inside the base.

The ship-to-ship side of combat stalls almost immediately. The firebase is unwilling to bring its three remaining turrets to bear on the grounded Sima Yi for fear of hurting the princess. The Sima Yi keeps bombarding the firebase, but that anti-ballistic missile laser is more than capable of point-defencing the incoming shells to oblivion.

On the mecha side, things are going pretty well for the PCs. The first tank suffers heavy damage fast, with direct hits on its crew compartment killing most of the crew and an 'eyes' (-9) hit from Alastar effectively crippling it. The second tank is doing better, and opens fire on Eoghan (he dodges) while Olwen rushes towards it and the base.

That's about where the session wrapped up; Alastar was able to get a bucket of 11 (!!) tactics points for the team. Depending on when the pursuit force shows up/how fast Eoghan can fix the engine, there may be a lot of need for them.

GM THOUGHTS

I expected the tanks to fare a lot better against laser sniper rifles at range than they did. Maybe I need to up their armor?

Having Reiho not be a huge jerk about Fionnoula is important characterization for her, but might have put some pressure on Eoghan's player to take the contrary view. Perhaps I'll have him deal with some people who are such big jerks even he can't handle it.

Should either avoid vast flat, featureless plains in the future or reduce their vastness by letting faster movement modes have more effect.

Need to check for disadvantages before sessions more, until I can remember what the PCs have easily.

This time around I wrote the occupant hit threshold for each vehicle in their statblock. It helped so much.

(Image is of a ‘Fatboy’ unit from Supreme Commander, and a decent reference for what the PCs are fighting.)