#nobody cares but im posting anyway!

[carrionbeast]

Carrion Top 10 Game of the Year list

10 -Star Ocean The Second Story R - Full Disclosure, I'm still in the first couple of hours of this but it's really, really good. Just beautiful to look at too. If I could spend more time with it, it would have been higher than 10. 9 - Dave the Diver - Fun and chill but gets a little rinse and repeat after a while. 8 - Theatrhythm: Final Bar Line - Nostalgia Generating Machine. I miss the touch controls of the 3DS versions though. Not enough FFXIV music. 7 - Fire Emblem: Engage - Stupendously fun combat, but I missed the social aspects of Three Houses. Still got Lesbian Married though. 6 - Disgaea 7 - Classic, refined Disgaea. Way better than 6 by miles but not as good as 5. Super cute story though. 5 - Baldur's Gate 3 - LOOK I REALLY LIKE IT BUT MY COMPUTER COULDN'T REALLY RUN IT AND THEN I GOT A NEW ONE BUT WORK WAS BUSY. I'll play it. I know it's good. 4 - The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom - I started playing it and emerged from a fugue state about 200 hours later with no idea what happened. Wonderful. 3 - Slay the Princess - So weirdly comforting and distressing at once. 10/10 would be a big bird again. 2 - Dredge - Once they introduced the thing to turn off monster damage, it became way more chill for me and thus way more fun. I get to just sit back, fish and go mad from the revelation of what I've done. 1 - Octopath Traveller 2 - I put 100 hours into this game and I still wasn't ready for it to be over.

(Honorable mentions to FFXIV's Endwalker patch cycle, during which I openly wept a lot and Monster Hunter World which I was finally able to play thanks to a mod that let me have a Monster buddy to hang out with ala the Stories series)

[medicalunprofessional]

never change, man !

[julijbee]

girlbossing too close to the sun.

[valtsv]

as much as it's fun to joke about not wanting new people to join tumblr from twitter after everyone else thought this site was dead or too cringe to make an account on for years, if you're actually an asshole to people who are just trying to use social media to have fun and/or share their content like the rest of us and are adapting to a new platform they're not familiar with then i don't want anything to do with you personally, because it's obvious you're just using this situation as an excuse to be mean spirited dickhead and i don't tolerate that kind of behavior

[loveipromiseimnotinsane]

Just to throw this out there

[lost-in-fandoms]

au in which max has one of those off road recovery services and daniel and his friends were being stupid on a hill

they got stuck in a very narrow bend of the road between some rocks unable to reverse or go forward and with a high drop on the other side so they call max's garage

max shows up with his team in two jeeps and calls them all idiots for attempting this climb on an unsuitable vehicle until daniel shows him that it was actually on google maps so max calls google an idiot too

then max gives daniel and his friends an heart attack by moving their car further up the ledge to give himself a sliver of road to pass them and be able to hook their car and drag them out of the hole they're stuck in and then drives with two of four wheels fully off the edge while rico guides him on the radio

daniel and scotty are clutching at each other's arms until they realise and let go because that's embarrassing

when max is on the other side he gets off the car like nothing happened and hooks their car and then tells one of them to get in and just steer to follow

daniel goes and max does some more crazy driving to get them unstuck and off the dangerous part of the road and by the time he's telling daniel he can turn off the car daniel is so high on adrenaline he's shaking

scotty is whooping and cheering but daniel stumbles off the car and max catches him by the arm telling him he did a good job and wow maybe daniel is in love

max then tells daniel and his friends to get in because he'll drive them down while his team takes care of their jeeps and now that he's not working or calling them stupid he's actually nice and soft spoken and laughs at their jokes in a way that makes his eyes crinkle and shine and daniel is 100% in love

when they're off the hill and they're thanking max and his team daniel gives him his number. for a moment max seems confused, but then daniel smiles at him and tells him just in case you're feeling a little stupid too and max smiles back

[oceanwithouthermoon]

imo everyone who insists that saikis life was perfect and he was a spoiled brat complaining about nothing are just purposefully ignoring and misinterpreting the whole manga simply because they like other characters better and want to make up scenarios to make their fav seem like a precious little victim in every situation

its hard to explain but i see it happen a lot with specifically people who have dedicated accounts for other characters and constantly misattribute every issue to "saikis such a baby, my character has it way worse!" "saiki hurt my babys feelings once so i hate him!" "saikis such a spoiled brat, my baby has a way shittier life and never complains about it!" "saiki hurt my poor precious fav once so hes an abusive monster!"

and said "shittier life" that they "never complain" about is either the persons headcanons (literally made up) or... the character DOES complain about it and the person takes those words at FACE VALUE but ignores everything else, including things that actually HAPPEN right in front of our eyes

[solmelo]

Another Paul is dead post from me

(idk why I love PID lore sm)

My entry for @zankie21's dtiys on Instagram. I'm more likely gonna lose or get unnoticed anyway so I'll just post my art here before I sleep 🥱

[jasperandhenryslovechild]

urges to post about my genloss oc and do a completely impulsive rebrand of this blog just to yap about genloss

[triglycercule]

i viscerally want the murder time trio to fucking HATE each other. and not in the type of hate like "ugh i hate that guy he's annoying" NO. i want them to at the mention of each others' names get pissed off. i don't CARE if it's ooc or something i don't CARE i DON'T CARE i want them to beat the other up until they quite literally can't on all ends. i want the three of them to get into verbal screaming matches with each other fueled by hatred and fire spit from the deepest pits of hell. they say it's because of backgrounds and personalities that they can't get along but really they just love to hate each other. i want dust to on a day to day basis turn killer and horror into ashes. i want killer to turn dust and horror into a pincushion for knives. i want dust and killer to have giant scars on their bones from horror trying to mutilate them and chop their heads off I DON'T CARE IF THIS IS DARK!!!! I NEED THEM TO HATE HATE HATE EACH OTHER!!!!! I NEEEEDD IT I NEED IT I WANT IT I WANT IT

they have souls filled with hatred and resentment and who better to take it out on than another version of yourself but subjectively worse

[skateisawesome]

at what point is an intro post necessary?

OH WELL HERE IT IS!

my name on here is skate, im a minor, im a girl, i use she/her pronouns and i have no idea what im doing!!

im in highschool so im a busy girl and i will complain about school

some fun facts about me are: i play 6 instruments and sing, i like reading, my favourite season is winter, i speak a fair amount of french and italian and i can crochet.

im also mentally ill so just prepare yourself for that!

most of my posts are about osemanverse but i love taylor swift and will not shut up about her. i am in a pitch perfect and dead poets society phase at the moment so expect some of that too and mostly i post whatever else pops into my head at the time.

my asks are open and i love answering literally anything and if you ask a question ill probably fall in love with you or smth

my tags are 'skate has words' for my writing 'skate answers' for answering asks and 'skate rants!' for rants obviouslyyyy

also my messages are open and, yes, i am extremely awkward, i would LOVE to be friends !! i need to add that i am very unwell sometimes for long periods of time and will sometimes just not respond to messages. i am sorry but ill get there eventually.

im very infrequent on here and will sometimes forget tumblr exists for weeks so im never ignoring you im just stupid and i have memory issues

if youre gonna be mean to pretty much anyone i dont really want you here. just dont be an asshole guys.

anyway have a good day !! :)

[sasaranurude]

I'm a loser who both spends too much time playing gacha games and loves to hear myself talk, so here's another game review style post, this time covering my first day playing Break My Case. This time I'm not even being a little hater! I'm a lover! I'm cringe! I'm free! I love you Coly! I love you ikemen gacha games!!!!!!!

Break My Case is a new puzzle-music-adventure mobile game from Coly, the developers behind Mahoutsukai no Yakusoku and On Air. More relevant to BMC/BreMai is their game Stand My Heroes, with which it shares a writer, some gameplay elements, and of course a naming convention. Coly has developed a bit of a cult following for their unique status in the Japanese mobile gaming world: they're a company that was founded by women and hires women to make games for women. They put a lot of soul into their games. From the start, BMC is no different!

"Could you have pulled a clean version of this image from the internet so it didn't have all the game junk" no. it's my tumblr and you get my screenshots.

I (with help from friends) overviewed the initial Break My Case announcement back when it dropped. You can read that here! I said in that post that I thought a "dark rhythm game" would be a really cool direction for the game… and that's more or less what we got! GO ME!!!!!

First: the game's presentation is fantastic. Super slick graphical design and just amazing atmosphere. The sound design of this game is incredible. Genuinely. Really, really, good. All the music is amazing—I'm not knowledgeable enough to say anything other than "IT SLAPS!", but it totally does slap. The illustrations for the cards are all wonderfully atmospheric in and of themselves, and are just a delight to look at on the homescreen with its chill background music. Even just navigating menus is a sleek, seamless experience. The live2d is well-done, although it clashes a tad with the art style for a bit of an uncanny look at times. 

The atmosphere! The atmospheeeeeeere!!!

Of course, the draw to this game is the characters and story, so let's jump into that. I'll admit right now that I read the story through a machine translation—I have aaaalmost enough Japanese knowledge to fill in the gaps, especially since the story is fully voiced, but I'm definitely not getting the full nuance of the story that someone fluent in Japanese is going to get. THAT SAID, after completing the prologue, I was definitely intrigued enough that I want to continue slogging through the MTL just to read more! There's a great setup, centered around the bar Aporia and its three modes—a daytime cafe, a nighttime members-only bar, and, secretly, a "fixer" service who'll help anyone with any problem. Our main character, a woman who was just forced to quit her job at a corrupt company, gets hired to replace Aporia's eccentric owner while he goes on a who-knows-how-long vacation. The owner also has the role of "tail"—as in, the tail a lizard sheds to avoid being eaten. If anything in the fixer service goes wrong, it's the owner who takes the fall and the blame. This hasn't come to mean much in practice yet in the (quite short) prologue, but it's a fascinating setup. The story promises to touch on themes of the threads that weave our lives together, how small meetings can lead to massive life changes, and whether any human being is truly replaceable, even in our modern corporate world where people are treated like cogs in a machine. According to a staff interview, there are a handful of references to Stand My Heroes in BreMai, but the games' settings aren't otherwise closely linked.

Rough translation in alt text. The Aporia manager Ai may be the most mysterious, intimidating character, but he also beefs with a parrot the first time you meet him, so...

All the characters are staff at Aporia with various unique roles and background. The prologue just gives you a little bit of each of them, but everyone does show up, and they all have interesting dynamics with each other already. Ai, the stern manager, has some history with the MC that he refuses to divulge, and goes so far as to force psychologist Riku to agree to not look into it. The range of relationships among the staff run the gamut from the calm and mature friendship between fortune teller Kiho and art teacher Kyoya, to the unfaltering dedication of Yu to his ex-mafioso savior Tomose, to the ridiculous Takeru and Soyogu who spend their first appearance waking up after having gotten black-out drunk together the night before. My favorite dynamic of all so far is that of Kou and Mao—Kou is a playboy who insists he's not a playboy, and is introduced evading a woman by… asking the icy Mao to pretend to be his boyfriend so that she thinks he's taken and gay and leaves him alone. Which Mao exasperatedly agrees to, telling Kou that he's used up his allotment for this month which ohmygod how often does Kou do this. Kou if you're asking this guy to pretend to be your gay lover so often he gives you a monthly limit I think you might just have to admit you want him to actually be your gay lover, Kou, oh my god— 

Rough TL in alt text. Kou is letting the implication do all the heavy lifting here. He technically never said he was dating Mao. Technically. 

On to the gameplay. There's gameplay! Unique gameplay! Good unique gameplay! Oh my god, uncharted joseimuke territory! The main gameplay mode is a match-3 puzzle game with rhythm elements. As in other rhythm games, each song in the game is its own level, more or less. (Each character has two unique songs, and three songs shared with the other members of their unit.) You set up a team with cards you've collected from the gacha, which determine your power level and special skills. The "leader" of the team has to be the character whose level you've selected. The puzzle gameplay is a tile-swapping match 3—think bejeweled or candy crush—but the tiles you've matched are only cleared once a bar sliding across the screen hits them, clearing them in tune with the song. Everything cleared in a single swipe of the bar ups the combo counter. There's also a life system, where if the bar slides across the screen without clearing a single match, you lose a life… But the bar moves pretty slow. You're not likely to game over or even lose a single life any time soon. There are more difficult versions of the levels I've yet to unlock, so I'm sure the life meter becomes relevant then. There's also "auto" and "loop" features if you want to grind a level over and over for exp and items, but, of course, the computer can't score as high as you playing it yourself.

And, really, it's fun to play, so why would you want to!? The sound of matches clearing with the music is so satisfying and really makes you want to combo as high as possible. Once you've matched some tiles, you can't move them again, nor use them in a second match (eg, in a cross shape), so if you want to maximize your combo and make as many matches as possible with what's on the board, you have to think ahead about which matches you're going to make. The bar slowly crossing the screen adds a visual timed element that gives some urgency to putting all the matches together. It definitely feels like a game you can pick up an instinct for over time, which is super fun. 

All in all, a really solid, enjoyable little puzzle game. It would be fun to play even without the promise of anime boys. Stand My Heroes is also a match-3, for the record, which is what really cements the two games as being part of the same series.

Admittedly, the anime boy staring at you while you play musical candy crush is a little disconcerting.

The second gameplay mode is "Snap'n Spin", a… gameplay-lite mode that just puts chibi characters in random strange situations and lets you take pictures of them. The mode is explained to be a video game within the world of BreMai, so it's not even trying to be realistic or relevant to anything else in the game. Once you take your pokemon snaps of the boys, they get a fun little caption. You can save up to 40 pictures in your album. Other than being cute, the main way this mode interfaces with the rest of the game is that it's the primary way to unlock card stories for the cards you pulled in gacha. 

This gameplay mode is... cute? I guess? It being so disconnected from the style and aesthetics of the entire rest of the game felt weird. The chibis are adorable, so it has that going for it. And I do like some of the captions you get on the photos afterwards. My favorite were the scenes you catch of a character drinking, and then the caption reveals their current favorite drink. That's a delightful detail for a game set in a bar. Mostly, though, this mode left me wondering "why?" ...And I imagine the answer is something like "because merchandisable chibi characters are a requirement for joseimuke games." This mode could've been anything so long as these cute, starry little dudes were in it.

Urara here hated the drink and the caption revealed that, lately, his favorite thing is sparkling water. He's the youngest character in the cast, so I guess he hasn't grown into booze yet...

One last feature I want to mention is the jukebox. Like many games, BreMai has a music player that lets you listen to tracks from the game… But its music player is, genuinely, a fully-featured music player app with shuffle, repeat, lyric displays, and even background play that works when you're in another app or your phone is off. What! Wild! When I first learned a few days ago that BreMai had a built-in player for its BGM tracks, my first thought was "Well, what's stopping someone from downloading the game just to use the music player and never spending a cent on it? Wouldn't you rather have the songs on spotify so you at least get a pittance of ad revenue, in that case? It's more than nothing."

But having played the game now, I see what they did to prevent that, lol. You don't unlock the songs in the jukebox until you get an SS score on the song's level. Which, I mean, that's normal rhythm game stuff, of course. Can't fault that decision. But, as in other gacha rhythm games, your score in a level depends on the power of your team of cards, and the cards you get from the initial handful of pulls aren't gonna get you anywhere near an SS score without significant investment. So you're either buying in-game currency to buy upgrade items, more gacha pulls, or both. Of course, you can also put a bunch of time into grinding for upgrade items—they drop from levels. Gacha currency is harder to come by. So you're not getting songs in the player without actually playing the game lmfao. The character solo songs in particular (the ones with vocals rather than just instrumentals) also require you to build up rapport with that character—the game calls it "Nice". You build up Nice with them by playing their other songs and using their cards in levels. It takes 1000 Nice on a character to unlock their song. In my first day of playing, I was able to get one character to about 250 Nice, another to 200, and a handful more with a few points, so it builds at an okay pace. There's ways to pay to speed up the grinding for Nice and for upgrade items with things like level skip tickets. So, basically: you're not getting that music player to a useful state without investing either money or time, lmao. Is paying-or-grinding to get cool music you can listen to while not playing the game more "worth it" than the usual freemium game goals of better units, new in-game outfits, or prettier card illustrations? ...Honestly, maybe it is? It's novel, at least.

All gacha rhythm games have the same card select screen, don't they. These were my cards' levels after my first day of play, and you can see they didn't quite reach a suggested score of "A", much less the maximum "SS".

But I do want to stress, the monetization is, for the most part, pretty easy to ignore. Nothing in-your-face. The button to go to the shop screen is a different color, but it's not flashing with an eternal indicator, it's not popping up at every second, it's just sitting there alongside all the other menu buttons. The game isn't shoving timers in your face at all times—there's a stamina meter, which is mildly annoying, but you get ten plays when it's full, and if you're just playing casually you're probably not going to want to play the puzzle game over and over enough to fully deplete that. I know the bar is on the damn floor here but Tokyo Debunker seriously made me realize how bad it can be with mobile game monetization. BreMai is freemium, yeah, but as far as dark patterns go, it's not egregiously bad.

So, the verdict: if you're a joseimuke game fan and aren't afraid to play a game that probably won't get an English port and doesn't even have a fan translation yet (which I realize is already counting out 99.99% of people), definitely give this one a try. See if you like the gameplay—it really is worth trying—and do check out the story if you've got the ability. Or just look at the pretty anime boys. 

[thegreatyin]

the adventures of the neath's most annoying definitely-totally-a-bat-and-not-the-scoundrel-in-a-robe continue (cards. their name is mr cards. or so they insist.)

this time: coworker antics. tune in next week on dragon ball Z where we'll be killing all of them with hammers

[oblivioustoast]

god i wish i was hot and charismatic but instead i’m quiet and off putting

[b4kuch1n]

pre-holiday leave crumbs

[oceanwithouthermoon]

ive been unhealthily fixated on kubosai for the past few weeks, i just have no idea how to put it into words. kuboyasu aren and saiki kusuo are in love btw