#plus the artstyle fit so greatly

[just-sp-in-inginthevoid]

Finished Back when you called used devils/Your evil past

[satellite-blossom]

tell me the story of your greatest creation!

Oh boy, "greatest creation"...? It's gonna be hard to pick one since I've relearned to love what I create.

I've worked on a lot of things : art, animations, custom game content, written stories, OCs, edits, ... I'm not sure what to pick !

At risk of sounding cheesy, I must admit that I feel like my greatest creation has yet to come ; not that what I've done so far isn't good already, I just feel like I keep improving ! My greatest creation of yesterday may not be my greatest creation of tomorrow, and that's to say nothing about the months, the years, the decades that await me !

Every time I put together a new fairy kei outfit (IRL ; yes I do actually wear pastel alt fashion !), I feel like it's my best coord so far.

Every time I tweak something in my artstyle, I feel like it's the greatest my art has ever been.

When I make a new bead bracelet I think "wow this one is even cuter than the others !".

Every time I come up with a cute outfit for a piece I think it's the cutest fit I've ever drawn...

It's something of an exaggeration/hyperbole of course, but I do feel like I'm constantly improving lately. I've stopped hating on every word I write, every piece I draw, every mistake I make, ... ; I enjoy creating things and looking back on them now ! It wasn't a magical switch, getting new meds and a better environnement greatly helped. Also I must say that switching to better art programs helped too ; of course you feel more frustrated with your art when it took over ten hours to make, drawing with your fingers till they hurt, using a barebone app running on an overheating phone just for your art to seem lesser than other artists'.

I guess I could make a short list of some of my favorite things from over the years ?

1) Some of my earliest drawings made with Sony Sketch, the drawing app I've used the longest :

This app made my hands hurt (literally, that's not a joke) but I've managed to make some cute things with it. I look back on this era fondly ; I used to draw a lot and be very positive about my art back then.

2) Some small animations I've made with Flipnote Studio 3D :

I used to make silly animations with the original Flipnote Studio for the DSi, so when the 3D version arrived I've tried to make a few things. It was super hard but I've managed to make some gifs a few years ago ! The smoothie one was for a fan-made Splatfest on Amino ! The dog is the mascot of a French YouTuber called Mister Flech ; the colors came out a little wonky when I've exported the animation as a gif... The red girl is Google Plus-chan, and lastly we have Finalfest Pearl doing... A thing. I was team chaos, by the way !

3) Some of my 3DS games shenanigans :

Here you have screenshots from two of my favorite 3DS game : The New Style Boutique 3 & Animal Crossing : Happy Home Designer ! As you may be able to tell, I love the 3DS to bits and I adore games that are easy to customize !

4) New Horizons shenanigans :

Here you can see my island : Saly ! It's the first ever island/town I got to five stars, and it's not even done yet ! Still, it has many corners I love, like the orange county side, the camping area, the museum area or even my pink fair ! All of the custom designs there were made by me ! I've improved a lot since 2020 already !

5) My more recent art :

Here you have a piece from 2020, one from 2021 and the two last ones are from this year !

I've kept trying new things and improving I think ! But I still love those four pieces, and they're just some of my favorite drawings of mine.

And lastly...

6) My main OC : Léa Acorn !

They've come a looooong way since their first appearance ! And they've remained my flagship OC ever since !

Dimensional Hoper, Magical Enby, and Tortured Soul it's them ! The blorbo from my brain that I love but keep putting in the worst situations. But hey at least I know how their story ends now, and they get a revenge & peace at last !

I used to be very self-conscious about Léa ; I was afraid of people calling them a "Mary Sue" or mocking the fact I was using them to depict a fantasy of mine, so I used to talk somewhat derogatorily of them to say "hey I know it's a Sonic OC (how cringe !) but don't worry I'm aware of the cringe and Mary Sue stuff, see I'm mocking myself first so you don't have to !", and I think it was pretty sad. Even though Léa's "Mary Sue" attributes are justified in the narrative now (loved by most people, super powerful, ... for reasons that would spoil everything), I think it would be fine if I hadn't tried so hard to rework them. I'm proud of the progress I've made, but sometimes you just have to be self-indulgent and have daydreams about someone kinda like you going on adventures and beating their abusers up, y'know ?

Anyway I'm glad of where I've taken Léa, the flagship of my current paracosm. And I'll never get tired of rambling about them, haha.

Not sure if this really answers the ask, but I've enjoyed rambling here, so thank you for the ask !

[satoshi-mochida]

Some thoughts on my last Gamefly rental, Our World is Ended.

One way you pick choices is interesting. Sometimes it’s like a normal visual novel, but the game also has another way to do it, called ‘Selection of Soul’(SOS), that has the choices go across the screen like NicoNico comments do on videos. For the latter, the game will continue whether you pick any or not, and both kinds increase or decrease character affection with Reiji and the others. Also, not picking a choice for every SOS is required for the trophy that needs you to pick all choices in the game.

Some moments have them do clever things with the character portraits, like when attacking Velovelos, their’s are placed around or behind it to seem like they’re attacking from all sides. It’s not done too often, though.

At times, mainly the early chapters, I felt like I was forcing myself through it because of how annoyed the characters were making me, with the large amount of dumb sexual jokes making it a chore. When things actually starts happening and the dumb ecchi-comedy stuff takes a backseat, it gets better. Especially after a certain, rather intense, event. Chapter 13 brings it back to the forefront, annoyingly, but only for that one.

The story is fairly long, and more like a kinetic novel, and each character has their own ending, including someone not listed here(though their’s is more of a bad ending), but you can’t get them or the True Ending on your first run, since the Normal Ending stops you, making you start from the beginning again(though you can just skip read text at that point to go through faster). Here’s a guide for getting each of their endings.

The game’s artstyle is very good and nice to look at, and each character looks distinctive from each other. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it looks like theres...particles(?) around the character portraits, making anyone who wears black look like they have some kind of spacial effect on their clothes(it’s most noticeable on Deguchi).

Thoughts on the characters:

Reiji, the MC, is tolerable, but still has dumb, pervy thoughts often that hurt the mood, and ends up saying really stupid things, even unprompted. His mouth sometimes starts moving before his brain. He gets better and comes into his own as the game goes on.

Owari is an unashamed perv, though does have times when he acts responsible and respectable...and usually ruins that a few lines later. His ending may rub some people the wrong way.

Iruka can be a loud, annoying chunni, which made me usually skip his dialogue when he makes strange yells, but he means well, and is pretty likable.

Natsumi is just fairly hostile to everyone early on, but does gradually get nicer. Might be a tsundere. Became my favorite after a lot of nice moments with her and...well, read below.

Tatiana can be annoying, but she’s a kid, so it’s mostly tolerable, although she acts younger than a 13 year old. The game likes making annoying lolicon jokes with her, though they’re usually spread out. Her ending, on the other hand, goes all in on them, and is just awful to sit through. It would have been nice if they went for a brother/sister thing with more of their events together, and it would have fit pretty well with her character, but it feels like they had to shoehorn those kinds of jokes in, which ruins some possible good moments like that, but at least there’s a few that aren’t(also, all the male members of J7 are confirmed to not be into that...I think. Knowing Owari, he could just be screwing around).

Yuno is the most immediately likable of J7 and can be an airhead, but there’s more to her than just that that we see later on.

Asano is the butt of a lot of jokes in the game because, unlike her airhead sister and Natsumi, she’s flat, and the game won’t let you forget it. Also, she has a similar hairstyle to Yuno, but with the artstyle and the way it’s drawn, I thought she had a small ponytail until one CG showed that she didn’t.

There’s a bunch of small typos scattered around the game, but they aren’t too distracting.

Early on, the game was very obnoxious with the pervy jokes and constant sexual remarks about the girls, which made going through the dialogue a chore, but once the story actually kicks in, that happens less(though doesn’t go away), and I started to really care about what was happening. If you think you can deal with that for a while to get to the good parts, it might be worth a try. ...I will also admit that, in retrospect, I may have been tired when starting the game, making me get annoyed at it easier. ^^;

I’ve been hinting at it, but before renting this, I had heard about it having a lot of dumb pervy humor, among other things, but where I had heard it from has a history of being...dubious(my phone has that “article recommendation” thing, and it gave me that one). I decided to rent it to see for myself, plus I was already a bit interested, anyway. And it was somewhat accurate, more or less(though I didn’t agree with everything they said, especially some parts that felt like it was intentionally trying to get a reaction from some people). I almost wrote it off and sent it back after seeing those annoying parts in the early chapters, but I’m glad I forced myself through them, since the rest of it was pretty good(aside from most of Chapter 13 and something with Asano, mentioned below). Wish it didn’t feel like a slog getting there, though.

...you’ve probably put 2 and 2 together that I think ecchi humor is annoying and dumb, hurts the mood, ruins potentially good moments, and is not for me by now. I know, I’ve been incredibly subtle about it. =P 

Before sending it back, I listened to the very nice sounding True Ending song, Eternal Days(Working Title) a few times. With the lyrics and context, the song is sad, too. Can’t find a transcript of the lyrics online in English, though.

Next game being sent is: 7′scarlet.

Some spoilers below when I talk about one of the characters, and something about them I really didn’t think worked. Might want to skip if you plan on playing it to form your own opinion on it:

Asano was one of the characters I liked the most for a while...until it gets revealed that she’s a shotacon, and that’s not hyperbole. The game tries to explain and downplay it after a section where she opens up a lot, saying it’s from not feeling safe around adult men because of a creeper relative and former boss, and her line of “it’s less that I like little boys, and more that I’m just not good with adult men”, but yeah...no. Her reactions with Nichol, the character that brings this out in her, are not portrayed that way, from how I saw it. There’s probably a way they could have written her similarly while dropping the shotacon thing, but nope, that’s what we got, greatly hurting her likability for me, though the game does somewhat salvage her for me by the end. It all feels like they just shoehorned in the shotacon parts as a joke(like the lolicon ones weren’t bad enough).

[metalempire]

Kingdom Hearts 3: A Review

This one is gonna be long as shit probably but since I finally finished the game on standard, proud and critical mode, and with DLC on the way I’m going to try and review the basegame for KH3 and see how it stacks up. Most of this under readmore for the sake of ur dashboards.

So I want to clarify a handful of details, KH2, its final mix especially, is my favourite game in the series. The gameplay is almost fucking perfect for an action game and is accessible to so many skill levels and did all of its difficulty modes quite well (though proud has not aged well compared to critical). Not only this but Sora’s moveset and animations, their speed and frames and iframes after actions and also interaction with abilities is almost perfect (I have eternal issues with how guard’s timing works compared to KH1′s guard it’s just slightly more delayed by enough to throw me off) and I have played KH1, CoM, BBS, DDD, Re:Coded and 0.2 so I have enough experience with the games overall.  Also as for story, KH1 was the only game that did it well, CoM is fine, and KH2 is a bit like that but still decent. After that point story has been going downhill thanks to Nomura’s writing dying a fiery death so KH3′s awful story pacing, fairly disappointing execution and dumping of things all at the end don’t bother me as much since it was doomed from the start considering it has to conclude stuff set up by BBS and DDD which were stories that don’t hold up well anyway. Plus at this point I just accept that the story of KH isn’t going to be good anymore. No I don’t play the gacha game, I keep up with the cutscenes time to time to stay in loop and that story is just long winded and cryptic. Gameplay is what I care about since that’s what makes a video game a game, funnily enough. (Though I think KH3 has a bad habit of making cutscenes either too long or stacking too many on top of each other) Also I want to state I am completely neutral on attraction flow. I neither like nor dislike them all that much. They serve a purpose and they can be ignored too. They’re more or less a matter of personal preference and I don’t feel strongly about them. Aside from the choo choo train no one can slander the train. 

Positives 

I think KH3 competes with KH1 for second most fun gameplay in the series. They took alot of things and rebalanced them and brought them all together in a way that I liked, shotlocks, flowmotion, counters, forms, magic, summons, grand magic and even a little bit of reaction commands and limits. Aside from the combos which are a given of course, as well as being able to cancel into magic and other actions being fairly competently done, though guard has some oddities to it where it doesn’t always work and it might be down to the game’s buffering system. More on that later. The keyblade transformations stand out as a real strength to the game, with a wide variety of movesets for each playstyle (my favourite is the Happy Gear and its’ transformations) and they make both horde and boss fights dynamic and fun, not to mention their interactions with guarding, dodging and magic and how they change it up as well as little bonus abilities forms give you. I do like that they brought back all sorts of enemies, Heartless, Nobodies and Unversed, with only Nightmares not returning. The variety is appreciated. On a mechanical note, I am very fond of being able to store a keyblade transformation by switching to another Keyblade, and I like being able to equip and shift between three of them. This is the first game where keyblades feel incredibly distinct from one another, and also the only game where Kingdom Key is viable from start to finish. This was something Re:Coded played with and I’m really glad to see the direction they took it in KH3. The addition of up to five party members is also appreciated, having everyone fighting at once in the larger battles KH3 has overall brings a nice sense of scale to it. Wallrunning and massive areas allow for some big levels to traverse and honestly thats’s mostly a strength since it adds greatly to immersion. There are boss fights in KH3, namely those in the Keyblade Graveyard that function perfectly for the game’s overall combat pacing, and they also amplify the strengths of the game on Critical mode.I like the little detail of magic now doing little status effects too now.The gummi ship is a nice blend of KH1 and KH2, and the open world flying around is a fun aspect that makes it feel like a real journey through the stars.The world’s are a usually of great quality, with Olympus being the best tutorial level/first level in the whole series, and the Caribbean providing a really enjoyable open ocean exploration style, Monstropolis getting the linear level style right properly, Kingdom of Corona building itself character wise very well to endear you to Rapunzel’s journey with its’ interactivity and Toy Box throwing a few decent challenges and very well put together mech combat. Also, graphically KH3 is one of the most impressive games I’ve ever seen, flexing on all the films, the older games, and real life itself, making the presentation fit the artstyle and rendering to a degree that’s frighteningly good. Game looks wonderful. The music is also good but that’s true of every game, Yoko just be like that, though 3 has some great compositions and remixes of its’ own to stand on. 

Negatives

One thing to preface this with is that a strength to KH2 is your options, how balanced they all are, what they all do, how they can interact with each other (such as how magic can be integrated into combos and do their own or using different buttons to change a combo altogether, or how certain moves fulfil different functions in a fight) is all very well structured and seamless. In KH3 your basic combo game doesn’t have as many modifiers to how it works outside of formchanges and even then it doesn’t quite feel as complete. Not only that but your options end up doing the same thing alot of the time, heavy damage that leads into strong AOE. The core design of the game is built around huge hordes of enemies, and that tends to mean its too easy to get hit out of nowhere or annoyed to death or sniped out of nowhere on critical, so you need to use magic and then grand magic to clear or links and attraction flow if you’re on critical to thin out hordes. While in boss fights this changes the game feels a bit too focused on large fights and has movesets less focused around smaller groups and suffers for it. Tying into this, animations are grander and longer, leaving you open to interruption. The camera in this game is also awful, and one of the worst, either not zooming in enough or too far out, or on more mobile enemies (or teleporting ones, looking at you Goatnort) it fails to keep best track of them and angle properly and you can get blindsided too easily or put in a vision style that makes depth perception for projectile blocking too iffy for my tastes.KH cameras are always a bit off but this one needs work. Base Sora’s animations tend to be very hard to work with compared to KH2′s, he’s alot slower, has more delays, less invincibility frames, attacks don’t follow together and follow up nearly as quickly, item usage is overall a slower process which can fuck you over on critical, guarding still has a delay to it, leaf bracer can be rendered useless due to cure having no iframes during the ending portion of the animation and on critical you can just wind up needing to heal again if you get hit trying to use leaf bracer to slip through an attack. There’s also a very odd way the game handles Sora’s hitstun, where he can’t do anything out of it unless he uses aerial recovery which has a rather narrow iframe window and a bit of lag on actions that can be performed out of it that means you cant do anything in some lategame boss fights once hit half the time since no button input does anything especially if you’re hit in the air. The game is far too unclear on when you can and can’t act out of a hit or a block. Also, while I like being able to retaliate once its’ unlocked after aerial recovery, the animation for the attack has a set direction and often ends up missing more mobile bosses and lacks control. The game’s overall balancing is a bit of a mess as well, with grand magic and magic being far too strong on all modes except critical, and links being too strong on critical since there is far too much of a reliance on AOE overall in the combat. As for difficulty, it has a strange Fire Emblem Awakening parallel, where standard is too easy, proud is the true normal mode but not a hard mode, and critical is a bit too hard at times though not all the time. I’d say critical eases up for a bit though it favours cheap shots and delivers its true delights right at the end, it’s weird and I’ll talk more about it later but it starts out unfairly hard with the tutorial boss two shotting you in seconds. There’s a real lack of postgame content overall, with the battlegates being alright but not grand, and only one superboss in Dark Inferno who is alright all things considered but isn’t a Sephiroth really. Speaking of which, no Final Fantasy characters in the series that’s supposed to be it crossing over with Disney. What the fuck. Also I will say that while the worlds are huge and long now, there’s still not that many of them, and while quality over quantity is a factor, quantity is nice too, and making Twilight Town that small and short feels like a kick in the dick to KH2 fans who love that place, me included. Ultima weapon is a pain to get, all the minigames in KH3 are either bad, terrible, awful, or dull and not worth playing, and you need to do some of the worst ones to get it though thankfully it’s not really all that necessary to have unless you want a trump card for critical mode which you’re better off using new game + to get from an easier save file anyway. The cooking minigames are also very odd with their timing and the controls are a bit unresponsive or too sensitive at times and discourages you from cooking. Look at what they did to 100 Acre Woods, it makes me sob salty tears at how small and gutted it is. In general enemies have difficulties telegraphing their attacks in both audio and visual style and you get cheap shotted alot. There is a particular Unversed enemy in Monstropolis I’m sure we’re all familiar with by now who is guilty of that sin the most. And finally, the game’s biggest sin of all: Armoured Xehanort (who I call Goatnort). This fight is a travesty. Teleporting, unclear telegraphs, unclear hitstun, random super armour, long combos that cannot be interrupted, wonky interactions with dodges, guards and reprisals that makes him get free hits on you sometimes even when successfully executing a block or dodge. He has a lack of clear telegraphs, acts at speeds that give KH2FM superbosses a run for their money despite you being slower than that game was, leading to things Sora’s animations aren’t equipped to deal with, as well as shifting the fight constantly to underwater combat and then forced aerial combat with very confusing controls interactions and pair that with AOE magic attacks with magnet powers, lock on wind magic with warping properties to ensure he lands his hit, alot of teleporting out of the camera’s range and warp strike sucker punches that really stretch the human reaction time when paired with the shit camera and you just get an unpleasant boss fight that while proud and standard can mitigate to just being annoying as all hell, on critical its a nightmare fight and you cant even observe the fight and learn it well either due to how much shit is going on, the camera being against you, unclear mechanical aspects, speed above what you can reliably output as base Sora who you are stuck as for most of the fight. It boils down to a spammy clusterfuck with too much going on, with so few openings to do anything, and bad interaction with Sora’s options and the animations tied to them with alot of damage that feels forced on you half the time. The Final Xehanort phase with the X-Blade is much better though.

Critical Mode

Since it didn’t launch with the game was added later as a free update and everyone made a big deal out of it and it’s exclusion seeming odd I might as well talk about it. Firstly, KH2FM has the best critical mode and is the only game to do it right really. It halves your hp and reduces the amount of mp you gain during level ups and increases to it, so you have enough to work with but never too much, enemies do the same damage as proud mode, but you do more damage than even standard mode, and you start with 50AP and a lot lategame abilities so strengthen Sora’s kit. This results in the best hard mode for the game, since fights never drag on too much and deaths are usually quick. It encourages and rewards you to use all your options and play both smart and aggressive to win. KH3 takes a somewhat similar approach. You start out with 50 AP and wide variety of boosting abilities mostly from endgame territory as well as unique critical mode ones that modify reprisals to reward proper dodge timing which is wonderful and even one to disable Attraction flow for those who hate it to build up transformations quicker. However Critical mode nerfs alot of things. Magic can’t be used as much and successive casts one after another especially rapid shots get a huge damage nerf so you have to use it sparingly making grand magic harder to get and magic de-incentivised outside of enemy weaknesses. There’s also wonky issues with damage scaling in relation to battle level and your level and all situation commands take much longer to build up to, even with the aforementioned boost to formchange buildup speed it still takes awhile and since base Sora is very hit or miss in fights this can be a very awkward change to work with. Enemy damage is also scaled very high and this could be one of the hardest critical modes earlygame, though DDD still holds the crown for hardest if we’re being honest. KH3 critical starts you out by Darkside two shotting you and most of the earlygame even regular Heartless kill you in two or three hits. Unless you use cooking to buff yourself you will die in two or three hits most of the time and some bosses can one shot you. The Gigas enemies in Toy Box are hard to deal with since magic is so nerfed and the Supreme Smasher boss can and will outright one shot you with all of its’ attacks if you don’t use a Gigas yourself. Even KH2FM critical wasn’t this unforgiving at times. The Kh3 critical mode experience boils down to a few things; most heartless bosses being easy as usual for KH3, getting randomly sniped in horde fights, boss fights that take awhile and usually 2 shot you, the mode and its’ particular challenge coming together masterfully for the Keyblade Graveyard fights to create a proper tense challenge that’s still fun, the Armours Xehanort fight being so frustrating it makes you want to launch your PS4 at Nomura, and Final Xehanort being a good but brutal fight that exposes a bit of flaws of KH3 but also plays to its’ strengths as well, unlike Goatnort who exposes all the flaws and needs to calm down. Overall I didn’t enjoy it as much as KH2FM critical mode but it was better than DDD and BBSFM critical mode. Definitely felt like it was trying too hard to be hard at times, did get me to actually use cooking though. Rage Form is king. 

Summary

Overall, Kingdom Hearts 3 is a well put together package blending together alot of the features from across the series into a very coherent combat system that oozes variety at its’ core, but is let down a bit by functional application reducing that variety to the same overall function. It’s a game with a bit of balancing issues, and ideally needs some overall core enemy fight redesigning, maybe a few more worlds and boss fights, and alot of tweaking to base Sora’s playstyle, requiring snappier animations, quicker flow between them, changes to hitstun interaction and options and iframe changes to be more fair on the player in critical mode. There’s alot to the combat overall that needs a little tweaking, and while it isn’t KH2 levels of good, it has alot of potential and is very fun to play, bringing together alot of what makes these games fun in general and pulling it off decently well. There’s alot to enjoy here, and the craft is up scratch, even if it is a bit wonky and rough around the edges on the more finer and precise aspects, it’s still up there with some of the best Kingdom Hearts games. I’m looking forward to the DLC and any future updates, and I’m hoping some more balance tweaking and a few changes might be all this game needs to be its’ best. It’s a good game through and through, and while some may find it disappointing, I’ve accepted that the series more or less peaked with KH2FM and I’m glad to see Osaka team have finally found a groove that fits them that they’ve clearly put some work into making as high a quality as they were able, considering the no doubt rocky development the game went through with all the business of engine shifts and other things going on in the company at the time. I know giving a numerical rating can devalue the qualitative aspects of a review but the quantitative is also nice to have so overall, I’d say that Kingdom Hearts 3 is a solid 8/10. KH3 competes with KH1 as second favourite in the series and even with all its’ flaws it’s a game I really do enjoy playing and putting time into.Story is still a fuckin train wreck tho lol. Good job the stupidity of it makes me laugh more than anything. Xemnas is still a better waifu than Ansem tho. MickeyRiku best ship.