#nobody needs to re-enter the church based off of their own experiences and for many they may not find comfort in it even if they did

[prozach27]

If the metaphors in the bible were useful at helping people be good, there would be good catholics. Instead, there arent. If you join a group that is outright destructively hostile to queer people, you dont get to complain when people are wary of you. You've chosen to identify with a political structure that wants to do harm to them - you DO identify as a threat.

Saying something broadly like “there are no good Catholics in the world” immediately shows me that this isn’t meant to be a rational discussion but one that’s likely stemming from past pain, and for that I’m really sorry. I would’ve agreed with you once. Reality, like any topic, is more complicated.

Like I’ve mentioned before, organized religion can and should be critiqued - especially Catholicism. Blind faith or dogmatic worship raises a million red flags for me. I was treated horribly by the church as a young queer kid growing up in catholic school due to religious zealotry, and it led to a long period of atheism and lashing out at religion. In my specific case though, I slowly realized this was because of how religion as a whole made me feel about myself and my community rather than it being because I didn’t believe in God, and so I was reacting in anger. While in an LGBTQ organization, I ended up working with a Lutheran pastor on several events she was hosting - specifically one called the shower of stoles, showing the stoles (those fancy-looking and colorful shoulder wrappings priests have) of LGBTQ people in faith who’ve been silenced or removed from the church in order to highlight the enormity of the issue and to “bear witness to the huge loss of leadership that the church has brought upon itself because of its own unjust policies.” Things like this made me slowly start to realize I’d been treating Christianity as a one-sided villain, and with time and repeated programming from this Lutheran pastor that was embracing LGBTQ life, I began to feel as though there were some religious people I could let my guard down with (warily).

Once I felt comfortable with who I am and around religion, I ended up switching to the best university in my town, which was a private catholic one. I expected hatred and repeated bigotry. Instead, what I found was a community genuinely eager for my presence and excited for what I had to say. Younger millennials and gen z in the Catholic Church, in my experience, overwhelmingly abhor homophobia (and often transphobia) and are vocal against it in the church. Within a year in that environment, it became crystal clear that everyone just… didn’t have a problem. There was still the administration though, right? Well, the administration went out of their way to spend hundreds of thousands on building an LGBTQ center while I was there, and leading priests on campus actively sought out queer voices and uplifted them. I eventually became president of the LGBTQ group on campus, and priests would once in a blue moon come to meetings just so they could stay informed on what issues need their support - and our faculty advisor was a lesbian faith leader in the community. For my senior event, I even got this catholic university to use its money to put on a raging drag show in the center of campus, and had the pleasure of seeing the Vice President of student affairs along with a priest slip drag queens some dollars during business hours lol. My commencement speaker, Fr. James Martin, has written EXTENSIVELY on how unfairly the LGBTQ community is treated by the church, and meets with bishops (and even the pope) about how the church needs to modernize and embrace queer and trans members of the congregation. He went from being an influential catholic in the church to dedicating his entire career solely to embracing the LGBTQ community, and is repeatedly attending speaking gigs throughout the country to spread this message.

I used to earnestly believe all Catholics - and all Christians generally - were horrible people because of how I was initially treated by the church. As I was re-exposed to religion as an adult, however, it became clear to me that like any organization, judging the people for the leadership lacks nuance. Ever since warily re-entering Catholicism, I’ve been radically embraced by my churches and congregations, and have been exposed to countless fellow members and leaders who are just as concerned about homophobia and transphobia in the church as I am and are actively working to try and change it. Rather than maintain distance and write off Catholicism outright, I feel glad to have a chance to use my experiences to make the world a little brighter for kids growing up queer - by being a part of the church once more, I can serve as a representation that being queer doesn’t contradict believing God loves you, and I can also lend my support to any events or issues I come across that seek to further counter harmful stances the church takes since hurtful messaging no longer hits me the same. By all means, there will always be sects of Christianity and Catholicism that are focused more on hatred and causing pain, but there are so many more that really do take the metaphors in the Bible to heart and genuinely try to do their best to achieve it, and by painting in such a broad stroke, you run the risk of not getting to see that little touch of beauty in the world.

[postgamecontent]

Sword of Vermilion: SEGA Genesis RPG Spotlight #4

Original Release Date: December 16, 1989

Original Hardware: SEGA Mega Drive

Developer/Publisher: SEGA-AM2/SEGA

There are a lot of interesting things to say about Sword of Vermilion. It was the first home game produced by the legendary Yu Suzuki and his team at SEGA-AM2. It was an RPG, which was decidedly outside of the developer's usual wheelhouse of thrilling arcade experiences. SEGA chose it as one of the handful of games to spotlight in its famous but ultimately unsuccessful "Genesis Does What Nintendon't" campaign. It uses four different viewpoints, which must have been an awful lot of work. In North America, it shipped with a 100+ page hintbook that basically walked you through the game. Some of the important names who worked on the game left SEGA after its release to found Genki, where they largely worked on racing games and only returned to the RPG genre once more with 1998's Jade Cocoon.

Yet for all the fascinating and unusual things happening around the game, Sword of Vermilion isn't anything particularly special. It's neither an amazing game nor a terrible one, the sort of experience that fills the belly but is forgotten by the next meal. It feels like even SEGA forgets about it now and then. The game was re-released on the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console, was part of the PlayStation 2 and PSP SEGA Genesis Collection, and is also available through the nearly-exhaustive Steam SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics, but somehow was left out of Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. As first-party Genesis games with no rights issues go, Sword of Vermilion is a relative rarity among SEGA's many re-packagings of their 16-bit output.

As near as I can tell, nobody who worked on Sword of Vermilion had made an RPG before. The team was clearly familiar with the genre, though. I'd venture to say that they obviously knew of such hits as Wizardry, Dragon Quest, Xanadu, and Ys. The trouble is that they apparently couldn't decide which one they wanted to ape, and ended up doing a little bit of all of them. I don't mean that in a chocolate-meets-peanut butter kind of way, either. This isn't like Dragon Quest's smooth fusion of Wizardry's first-person turn-based combat and Ultima's bird's-eye overworld exploration. Instead, it's four dramatically different gameplay styles haphazardly stitched together into a bizarre Frankenstein's monster with little apparent thought or care put into making them consistent with each other.

The game starts with a somewhat lengthy cut-scene that sets up the story. Basically, some bad guys overthrew the good king. Before they arrived, he sent his infant son away with his top knight so that he could grow up safely in secret. Years pass, and the knight is on his deathbed. He summons the boy he raised, now a man, to finally reveal the truth of his origins. This is where you get control for the first time, and the game for all the world looks like a standard JRPG at this point. You can explore the town from an overhead view, talking to people, visiting homes, and going to shops. Once you reach the side of the man you believed was your father, he tells you of your royal lineage and instructs you to gather an assortment of rings that will help you take back your birthright. The first was entrusted to him, and he hid it in a cave many years before. Having told you all of that, he hands you some starting cash and then promptly kicks the bucket.

You might be tempted to just buy some gear and leave the town at this point, but that's not a good idea. Someone in the town will give you a map if you speak to them, and you'll really want to have that in hand before you step out of the town boundaries. As soon as you do head out, you'll run into the next gameplay style: first-person exploration. Both the overworld and the dungeons use this viewpoint, and while it's not quite as smooth as it was in Phantasy Star, it's convincing enough. In this mode, the main viewing area only takes up a portion of the screen. The remaining parts of the screen are dedicated to status windows and a bird's-eye map of the area you're in. If you haven't gotten your hands on a map, you'll only be able to see the square your character is occupying. You can technically map this yourself on paper if you really want to, but the NPCs are pretty good about giving you what you need when you need it.

This isn't too strange so far, though. The first few games from Richard Garriot of Ultima fame basically used a similar combination of overhead and first-person exploration. Even SEGA had already done this, in the Master System classic Phantasy Star. You start heading towards the cave that holds the ring you're looking for and suddenly a slime appears in your view. Time to battle! And also time for our third gameplay style. Yes, the game switches to another screen where you have a sort of angled overhead view of your character and a number of enemies. You have to move your guy around and swing his tiny sword at the monsters to take them out. If they touch you or hit you with an attack, you take some damage. Should you run out of HP, you'll be kicked back to the last church you saved at with half your money gone. You'll often start fights in the middle of a crowd, and the enemies are surprisingly aggressive. Once you get the hang of things it's not so bad, though, and you can always beat a hasty retreat by walking off the edge of the screen.

It takes a little while before you'll encounter the fourth and final gameplay style. After recovering the ring from the cave, the townspeople will direct you to the next town and even give you a map. Upon arriving there, you'll enter into what turns out to be the pattern for the rest of the game. The townspeople have some kind of problem. Maybe it's a wicked king. Maybe they've been transformed by evil magic. Whatever the problem is, you'll be given a map to a nearby cave and directed to retrieve something from it. You'll probably have to spend some time grinding experience and money to power up your character first, and there are some chests scattered around the overworld that give you something to do for at least part of that work. Anyway, you'll go into the cave, do the thing you're supposed to do, and that usually leads to the final gameplay style: a boss battle against a huge creature of some kind.

For these battles, you're playing from a straight-on side view. You can duck, swing your sword, and move forwards and backwards. Carefully hack away at the giant monster in front of you and you'll soon emerge victorious. You'll get one of the rings, the townspeople will hand you another map, and you'll be directed to the next town where you'll repeat the process. Lather, rinse, and repeat for 14 towns and around 20 hours, and you're all done. The number of monsters is quite limited, the game makes heavy use of palette swaps to stretch them out, and just about every location looks the same as the last. There's very little strategy in either of the battle systems, making combat somewhat dull. You'll never have any reason or cause to go backwards, with the result being that this a very linear, repetitive marathon to the finish.  

Given when it was released, Sword of Vermilion looks the part of a next-generation RPG. Everything is quite detailed, and those side-view boss battles are pure spectacle. The music, composed by Yasuhiro "Yas" Takagi, is very good. Each town gets its own theme song, covering a wide range of moods. Yet beyond those surface elements, the game is decidedly 8-bit in its design. As an example, the simple act of emptying a chest sitting in front of you requires you to bring up the menu, choose 'open', read the text box telling you the contents, bring up the menu again, and choose 'take'. Dungeons are pitch-black unless you use a candle or a lantern, and candles only last for a short amount of time. Your inventory is limited to eight items, not including equipment, so you have to make very careful decisions about what healing and utility items you want to bring.

The maps for the dungeons are hidden in the dungeons themselves, so you might need to do some physical mapping until you come across them. You also need to check every direction of each square when you're exploring, as chests and other objects might show up when you face west but not when you face east, for example. You can only save at churches in towns, so if you're playing it as it was designed you need to make sure you have time to see your outings through before embarking. Oh, and don't expect to see the stats of gear found in shops or chests. You'll have to equip them to see their effect, and some of them are cursed. For a game from 1989, none of this is particularly shocking; few games of this era broke ranks when it came to interface decisions. But many soon would, and that made Vermilion feel like something from a by-gone era within a matter of a year or two.

The strange thing is, I kind of enjoy Sword of Vermilion. The game has a really nice rhythm to it, even if it is somewhat mindless. The initial parts of each dungeon where you're operating without a map are pretty fun, and I like the basic structure of having to solve a different problem in each town before moving on. I had fun exploring each of the maps to see if I could turn up any treasure chests or special encounters. The battle systems are easily the worst parts of the game, but they're not offensively bad. At the very least, the normal battle allow you to feel your character's growing strength. The boss battles are stupid but thankfully quite painless in most cases. I'll even give a tip of the hat to the localization. It's a bit clunky in places, but it's largely coherent and correct. That was a big ask in this period.

I've seen some positively savage reviews of this game, and I guess I can understand why a person wouldn't like Sword of Vermilion. It's repetitive, old-fashioned, clunky, and some of its bits really don't work well within the overall game. It also drags on a tad longer than it should. Even though I enjoy the game, I wouldn't have shed any tears if everything wrapped up five or so hours earlier than it did. At the same time, I've played far worse RPGs that weren't nearly as ambitious. Even among the Genesis's library, I don't think I'd put Sword of Vermilion on a top RPG list, but I'm not sure I'd discourage anyone from trying it, either. I will say that if you play through to the second town's boss and aren't really getting into it at all, you're safe to cut your losses and quit. It doesn't dramatically change from there.

Of course, the aftermath is quite clear by now. Vermilion is mostly forgotten, and the few who remember it don't usually speak well of it. Its creators only made one other RPG after it, and the studio that produced it would only dip their toes into the RPG waters (in a very tentative way) a couple more times in the future. Still, for early Genesis adopters who loved RPGs, Sword of Vermilion likely kept them busy between Phantasy Star installments. That's about the best someone could ask for at that time outside of Japan. I'm not sure this was the best choice for SEGA of America's big ad campaign, though.

If you want to try Sword of Vermilion yourself, it's currently available on Steam as part of the SEGA Mega Drive and Genesis Classics, on the Nintendo Wii Virtual Console, and on PSP and PlayStation Vita through the digital version of the SEGA Genesis Collection. You can also track down any of the physical versions; both the original Genesis cartridge and the PlayStation 2/PSP discs for the aforementioned Genesis Collection are relatively cheap even today.

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