#review of sorts

[cybernaght]

Baldur's Gate 3

Well hello, strangers on the internet, I am here with another wall of text that has nothing to do with the actual topic of this blog. And before you ask why on Earth do I not make a free-for-all blog: last thing I need is encouragement to write more walls of texts. 

The topic of today’s Wall of Text is - shock, surprise - Baldur’s Gate 3, because it came out, and half of the internet and I have lost our collective goddamn minds. 

So, today I’ll talk about why for me, as something who thinks she is a non-gamer, but who is also an aficionado of interactive storytelling - both collaborative and not - this game is a kind of a marvel that I have not seen since I was a child.

I’m doing so in three parts. The player introduces my personal perspective and relationship with video games. The interlude talks about what on earth is interactive storytelling exactly, and where RPGs fit into that term. The game mostly sings praises to Larian’s masterpiece. 

As ever, this is a think piece with the main source being “my brain.”

The player. 

The thing is, I’m not a gamer. 

I do love video games. I play plenty of video games. It’s one of my favourite pastimes, and one of my favourite types of media. That said, I don’t believe myself to be a gamer for two reasons:

One, there is a subculture around it, and I have never been part of it, nor have I ever strived to be. It’s not that I don’t like it - it’s more that I don’t think we have the same, or even similar, values when it comes to what we seek in our gaming experience. For one, I play solo. Even in server games, I play blissfully alone, always. More importantly, I don’t pride myself on my gaming skills, because I effectively have none of those, and I’m not overly interested in developing them. When I play anything, I seek something else entirely; we’ll talk about that momentarily. For now, suffice it to say, I’m not a gamer because I say I’m not.

Two, I didn’t grow up as one. I have played a lot of old nineties/early naughties games - RPGs predominantly, but also point and clicks, and dungeon crawlers — a kind of stuff that honestly, looking in hindsight, formed a core of my interests. By the time mid-two-thousands rolled around I stopped. There are several reasons for that, but the biggest one is simply that the games outgrew the hardware I had access to. Growing up, I have never had - was never allowed to have - a console; and I have not actually had one until only five or six years ago when I was ageing out of my twenties. This massive break between gaming will be relevant later.

And, because I’m merely a person who likes video games, I have two functions for them.

Function one: a digital fidget toy. My brain frequently refuses to shush, and my hands need to do something for it to do so. This is where my deck builders are handy (Slay the Spire is my time sink of choice, but Monster Train does just as well); as are my Diablos and all their infinite clones. Those are my “in the zone” games. I am pretty okay at those through exposure by now, but being good at them is not part of the appeal because the less they need my actual mental engagement, the better. Being challenging - or me perceiving them as challenging - goes directly against what they are for me.

Function two: a vehicle for a story. The genre is immaterial. Do I like RPGs still? Doubtlessly, provided those are narrative-focused (which not all of them are). But well-written adventure games do just as well, as do indie dialogue-tree ones. And, well, this year, was absolutely wild for those, across the board. 

Star Wars Jedi Survivor learnt every mistake from its predecessor and made me excited about Star Wars for the first time in literal years with the way it put you into that world and the story it’s telling. The world-building there is fantastic, and it made me want to slow down my race for the endgame payoff and savour the atmosphere much more than the first title did. I also really appreciate a game which is effectively a Dark Souls-alike allowing you to nope out of that particular style of play from the get-go.

Failbetter Games' Mask of the Rose is an absolutely sublime dialogue-tree game, incredibly well-written, intuitive, and so narratively rich that it warranted no less than a dozen play-throughs. It has its limitations - mostly through the sin/virtue of being very indie - but the core of it is absolutely breathtaking. If you like macabre horror-comedic Eldritch Victoriana, mystery solving and date-simming, I’d recommend giving this one a go. 

And then Baldur’s Gate 3 had its console release - finally - and the world tilted on its axis.

The Interlude: three steps to interactivity (and then one step further than that)

Let’s envision a path to interactivity in games as a ladder. 

Ground zero, absence of narrative focus.

I think it is useful to distinguish between narratives that support the act of playing and the act of playing that supports the narratives. Most games come with a story; Candy Crush Saga has a story if you squint. But, quite often, the story exists around the mechanics of playing: it’s present but not really what the title is about. Diablo games have narratives, but, let’s face it, none of us were buying Diablo IV to find out what happened in Sanctuary after the titular villain was finally properly vanquished. (If any of us are buying Diablo IV these days; although that’s a whole other can of worms.)

I see Bethesda games in this category. They have narratives, but they are not about those. They are about simulation of living in a type of reality, be it high fantasy, post-apocalypse, or space exploration.

Step one, linear narrative. 

For me, a vessel for narrative is a game in which narrative is the main event, and the reason the game exists, with the engine and/or series of mechanics facilitating the consumption of said narrative. The narrative can be absolutely linear. Jedi Fallen Order and its predecessors in the platformer genre are as linear as they go: you travel from area to area, helping the story play out by engaging in predetermined events, and no one is pretending otherwise. 

Step two, false-choice narrative. 

Then, there are false-choice narratives: think of it as getting from one point to the next and then to the next, where the journey has some cosmetic or flavour variation. You can get from point A to point B via two or three different routes (physical, or conversational), but none of them actually change what happens at point B.

For an obvious example, some (but not all) of the TellTale Games’ titles exist within this step. 

Step three, true-choice narrative.

Congratulations, we have reached interactivity! So, let’s look at that in slightly broader terms.

According to Wikipedia, interactive storytelling is “a form of digital entertainment in which the storyline is not predetermined”, which essentially means an element of choice and consumer agency. 

Personally, I don’t think there is a need to limit this to digital entertainment. There is plenty of literature that I believe falls under this category, starting from Mark Z. Danielewski’s work and travelling through time and space to our friends at the indie British online magazine Voidspace.

Another obvious place for non-digital interactivity is theatre: immersive theatre specifically. If you’re not in the UK, here’s a quick run-down of things one can find under that umbrella term on our little island. Secret Cinema’s work is, strictly speaking, linear, but the variety and tangibility there can be enough to conceal that fact, and the routes you get to the outcome can be rocky enough to still have an element of choice. Punchdrunk’s promenade productions present a technically linear selection of narratives, but with a choice of which of those to follow, and so for you, the audience, the events differ from night to night. Then, there is a whole subset of game-theatre, crisis management theatre, and interactive work, which, in most general terms, gives the audience agency of playing and deciding, often with multiple possible endings at play.

If we loop back to digital media forms, however, playable films (Bandersnatch being an obvious one) exist in this realm. Quantic Dream’s interactive adventure games live here. Decent RPGs feel comfortable here too: Dragon Age series, Mass Effect, Greedfall, and Outer Worlds, just to name a few. And those are all good, don’t get me wrong. 

And yet, we can still go one step further, and shoot for the sky. 

Step four, collaborative (or generative) narrative  

The sky, to me, is a well-run table-top RPG, which does not just engage players in a story by giving them a set of specific choices, but invites players to effectively write that story together. This process is not just interactive - it’s collaborative, with mechanics and rules existing to facilitate it. It’s not just about giving players agency in the story but taking on their active input and feeding it back to them.

What I find particularly interesting in the context of video games is that technically this was the starting point for the RPG genre: taking tabletop mechanics and digitizing them. Fallout is MSPE, but make it post-apocalyptic and computerized. Baldur’s Gate is ADnD - but make it computerized. Bloodlines is quite literally Vampire: the Masquerade. Computerized, of course. 

For me, the epitome of RPGs up until, oh, let’s say just over a month ago, was Troika Games’ Arcanum: of Steamworks and Magic Obscura. This was a game that defined the genre for me; it’s a game that defined interactivity in general for me. It’s a game in which you could do just about anything, but more than that, the world around you was defined by your actions. Some companions would just leave - or never join you at all - if your actions and place in the world didn’t align with their values. Some decisions you made paid off dozens of hours later by, say, making entire areas hostile to you because you broke a law there in big ways early in your play-through. And yes, you did affect the fate of the world, but the paths there felt unique to you and you alone.

Naturally, whatever is programmed on a computer cannot have the limitless creativity that fleshy humans have when they (we) play games. And yet, the illusion of boundlessness was there, in those early days.

I think you see where this is heading. 

The game

There are many things indeed that Baldur’s Gate 3 has going for itself. The fact that it’s been openly tested for close to three years (I was there, in the early days) meant that the final product, when it was released, was as immaculate as a game could be at this point: it is, in fact, complete. This sounds like a bare minimum requirement, but we all know this is rarely cleared. Delaying it slightly for the console was also an excellent move: I love the way it runs on PS5, and I genuinely prefer the controls here than I did on my (arguably, rickety) laptop. Again, you’d think optimising the controls for the console would be a bare minimum requirement, but I, too, played Cyberpunk upon release, so…

Larian already having a very decent top-down engine with turn-based combat also works in favour of this game. It’s certainly sleeker here, but it’s recognisable as the Divinity engine, and it’s clear to me that the resources went into fine-tuning it, which means that in the last three years, this became more and more intuitive to play. And this engine is stable, which surprised me in combat that spawned 20+ hostiles. I suppose my one qualm is that they haven’t fixed the path-making AI. While companions forgetting that they can jump is only mildly inconveniencing, NPC’s complete lack of special awareness and self-preservation can be downright infuriating. I have both re-loaded encounters because the character I tried to keep alive chose to run into an opportunity attack, and just condemned people to death deciding, at some point, that if they really truly want to Misty Step right into an explosion, so be it. 

But then again, those are the only issues. In a game of this size. Upon launch. 

Speaking of the engine, I found some of the encounters hard on my first play-through, even on the easiest difficulty. As I mentioned, I’m not actually good at this. That said, I loved that on none of the occasions, did my finding it difficult have anything to do with what I did and did not have: it was not about optimising, or grinding, or shopping for gear - it was about observing the failure and developing a response to the strategy the game was using against me. While you can try to select a perfect party for every situation, equally, I found that the game didn’t force you to do that, and so, as a player, I can approach party selection as an in-world process, gravitating to the companions I wanted to have around for the kind of people they were and the relationships they have with my Tavs rather than for what kind of weaponry they carry. Is the act two boss fight punishing with a mostly melee team? Definitely. But, again, once you have figured out how to get around your limitations, it is doable. To me, that’s an excellent balance. It actually makes trying to figure strategy for any given tough encounter fun; and I’m saying it as someone who rage-quit Hades because she could not stand constant failure. 

The voice acting, mocap and animation are wonderful: you genuinely get full-bodied, nuanced performances, which… is just plain rare. The character writing, too, is spectacular, and the people you interact with feel real and unique, even if they only are here for a few scenes. Writing really shines when it comes to companions: they are humanly complex and multi-faceted, and all have a wonderful mix of love-able and hate-able in them. They are genuinely laugh-out-loud funny! They are also relatable, in that high fantasy way that takes commonplace anxiety and elevates it to proportions where it’s no longer real, and yet so very recognisable. 

Story writing made me actually scream, the first time around. I pride myself on being someone who is quite good at reading narrative clues, and yet, there were several subplots with twists that got me reeling. This only gets better on subsequent play-throughs, when you realise just how much of the meat surrounding the main “bones” of the story depends on your character, the paths you take and the options you select. The latter is particularly astounding in acts one and two, which have so much variety in them they feel limitless. 

The date-sim aspect of this game is… well, horny, in that hilarious way where every time you show a genuine interest in a character they immediately fall in love with you, provided your actions align with their worldview (which is not a given) — but role-playing always has an element of a wish-fulfilment, and I found something very joyous in thwarting (or leaning into) romantic and sexual advances of what felt like everyone in my path. Aside from that, the relationships I have seen have been well realised, each with a unique texture. 

And yet, none of the above is what makes this game such a unicorn.

Choices do. 

For me, true choices are defined not by the freedom to make them, but by the limitations they impose. When we open one door of possibility, other doors must close, and that is a risk we always take when we choose something. Taking an action - taking a leap of faith - should not feel safe. 

In this game, opening one door can lead to another one being permanently locked somewhere down the line. Chasing what you think is right might lead to death and devastation. Trying to satisfy someone with one point of view can alienate others who disagree. Quite often, it is not a game of picking the “optimal” choice, because, as in life, optimal choices are an illusion. 

This game allows you to make genuine decisions by asking yourself what difference you want to bring into the world and the lives of those fictional people you care about, and then it remembers those decisions, and pays them off. And fine, this does not happen all the time, I grant you that. I, too, feel somewhat let down by act 3 relative to early-game. The closer you get to the ending, the more you seem to be boxed into a few possible options where there would be multitude of those in act 1. But even then, the quality drop is from “so good it is actually unbelievable” to “incredibly decent”. To me, this is acceptable enough to not detract from the overall impression.

Having elements of randomness which dice-rolling introduces (and if you ask me, the very reason why dice exist in the first place in TTRPG) only enhanced this effect. Dice rolls can lock and unlock areas, they can make and unmake relationships, save and ruin scenarios. This creates a solid impression that at every step things can go awry - because they, effectively, can. Your choice here is how to approach this fate: whether to save every five minutes to try again or roll with the situation dice and your curiosity have created (pun fully intended). 

Baldur’s Gate 3 is incredible because it plucks you out of your world and does not just place you in another one - it populates that world with people for you to love and admire, and hate, and feel exasperated with, gives you situations that often don’t have a straightforward moral hardline, and then asks you “how would you like to do this?”

It does what tabletop games do. 

When I started DMing my first DnD campaign - which I decided, overachiever that I am, to home-brew from the ground up, - a friend of mine reminded me to fail upwards, always. In terms of storytelling, it’s a challenge. In terms of video games, it’s almost never done. You fail; or you succeed. Baldur’s Gate 3 lets you fail, and deal with the pieces you need to pick up.

And I know - of course I do - that it’s all programmed, so it cannot be truly generative, the way tabletop games can be. By virtue of having pathways, of course, a video game cannot do that. But it comes really damn close — it comes closer than anything I have seen since those early entries in the genre because those were made to directly emulate being in a campaign with live people. 

For a few years now I have been lamenting that they don’t do RP video games the way they used to any more. 

Well, my friends.

Turns out, Larian does.

It shoots right for the sky. 

[t-hirstreview]

[theautistichalflinghole]

Does anyone else see the vision

[sanguine-fangs]

Yeah, sure, sex is great and all, but have y'all ever tried being lounged on by a guard dog who's stronger and meaner than you? Serving as a weighted blanket, casually pinning you down beneath them under the guise of cuddling whilst watching a show/video. Their hands roam wherever they please, just softly exploring your skin with their fingertips and nothing more. Their lips are even more explorative whenever they're not pressed firmly against your own: panting hot breaths into the crook of your neck, leaving bite marks and hickeys all over your throat and shoulders. They growl each time you shift, any attempt to move making them more handsy out of spite. Any whining only makes them chuckle at your helplessness and bite/claw at you harder. You're stuck there, helpless to move, and so deeply content to be dumb and teased and frot against another, bigger dog who loves to watch you squirm beneath them.

[raayllum]

Was originally gonna start this later and then thought more about timelines / my own schedule, so...

Welcome to Raayllum's Review Fic-Athon, which is not about reviewing fic, but leaving reviews for TDP on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB and getting ficlets in return! Most episodes and seasons don't actually have that many reviews and it's an easy way to boost engagement / get the show's rating up higher so Netflix will #GiveUsTheSaga. Both sites just need an email address and nothing else, and immediately allow you to start reviewing.

The review system for each site works a little different, so here's how the fic-athon will work in response:

For Rotten Tomatoes, you can only review seasons, not episodes. So reviewing all 6 seasons = 1 ficlet for a pairing/character/topic of your choice. Reviews on RT have to be least 20 words, so this is probably the easiest pathway. Seasons get a star ranking.

For IMBD, you can do individual episodes, so 1 season (a review for each ep) = 1 ficlet for a pairing/character/topic of your choice. IMBD reviews have to be 600 characters (not words), which is about 1-2 paragraphs, and each episode gets a star ranking.

This is an effective way to show support because if stuff is trending on IMDB or has high ratings on RT, people are more likely to see it, watch, and/or get caught up. It also means that even if there were some eps of S4 you hated, giving the season / all episodes 10 stars every time is important to help boost their ratings and get them higher up.

Proof of reviews can be submitted here through screencaps on posts / in asks or by ID'ing your reviews by username (i.e. I left reviews on s3 under name XYZ). All ships and characters are welcome and if you're at a loss of what to prompt for, taking inspiration from previous prompt lists may be helpful.

Happy reviewing, and if you've been needing a kick in the butt to leave reviews, hopefully this is a worthwhile motivation!

[muchcelebrated]

PSA: If you loved My Lady Jane you should watch The Artful Dodger! It has immaculate romance and banter and angst and the two leads (Thomas Brodie Sangster and Maia Mitchell) have great chemistry!

It’s got great writing and is a part period drama, part medical drama, part romance, and has heist elements! I also really can’t overstate how great the romance is!

[jasper-the-menace]

If I had a dollar for every horror book I read this year (that was also published this year) in which a conservative cult used powers beyond mortal ken to enforce their conservative agenda onto a bunch of queer and neurodivergent children who then turned that power around to decimate the cult at some point in their lives, I would have two dollars, which isn't a lot but it's great that it happened twice.

Anyway, read Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle and Mister Magic by Kiersten White.

[empire-of-the-words]

Just finished skimming Damian’s introduction (aka only reading the Damian parts so I could actually enjoy them instead of crying over what they did to Talia) and this kid. This kid.

He's so sassy, and while he's also very spoiled, it's extremely clear he just wants to prove himself to his dad. I just love him so much 🥰

Bruce is either a horrible parent (tbf this was just sprung on him and he has zero processing time but still) or has the absolute best dynamic with Damian. They're so cute when they're not clashing like BattleBots

Also, while I take absolute none of Talia’s stuff into consideration when characterizing her, the fact she gave Damian to Bruce literally because she couldn't handle him is absolutely hilarious. She literally went, "hey, you're a hardass. I bet you can calm this kid down". She was also entirely wrong

Plus this:

[catboy-a-day]

catboy 170.. me rn.

[cybernaght]

One and Only: a review of sorts

I bet you did not expect the actual topic of this blog to resurface, and yet, here we go.

The previous time I went to a cinema to watch one of those Chinese films was actually completely by accident. I had a long break/cancellation situation at work which meant a three-hour break with a cinema around the corner. I ducked into said cinema and found out that a screening of Born to Fly has just stared, so… what’s a girl to do. I then didn’t write anything about it because I didn’t have much to say about it.

This one, however, was planned.

One and Only/热烈 is a story of a working class boy with a passion for dance (Wang Yibo - obviously) being roped into being an understudy for a cocky obnoxious star of a dance team by that team’s coach (Huang Bo - obviously), learning a thing or two about himself, finding friendship and hoping to one day complete in the Nationals.

As the film is in cinemas, I cannot provide visuals, so, instead, I’m gonna populate this with some of my many gifs from Street Dance of China season 3-5.

Plot-wise, it’s not really unpredictable in any way. The highs and the lows are placed roughly where you would expect them to be, all the lulls are appropriately proportioned for character development, and the final-act dance competition is as exhilarating as one might hope.

And yet… this one has a heart, it really does, and the writing really does a lot to elevate a cookie-cutter premise. The characters have a hell of a lot of inner life, including whole sets of circumstances that are merely implied - a real joy to see in any movie, I love the effect this has on the feeling of the characters’ realness. There are also fantastic decisions made pacing-wise in the final two acts, with one specific time-skip which I found very exciting indeed.

Themes of mutual respect and cooperation are not by all mean new to this kind of a movie, but I really appreciated how well developed they are, being set up in the opening scenes, and paying off in the eleventh hour; and it was lovely to see those themes explored organically. Again, writing elevates the premise here, too.

Wang Yibo’s acting keeps improving in a way which is pretty damn impressive. He seems to be a very hard-working young man, and that hard work seemingly pays off, too. Good for him. There are a few idiosyncrasies that are still very “his” (I swear I have never seen him have any screen chemistry with any woman ever), but there were also moments that read as character, and that read as truth. Honestly, he’s all grown up now, it’s very sweet to watch.

And if you are here through Street Dance of China route, whoooo boy do I have good news for you.

Ye Yin is here

Jr. Taco is here

B-Boy George is here — with plot! (Is this a spoiler? It might be. It might not be.)

Rochka is here, with the signature ankle spin

So are Klash and MT Pop, by the way.

Liao Bo is here AND he! is! actually! dancing!

Kevin is in it, although he is not, in fact, dancing

I am certain this list is not comprehensive. Suffice it to say, there is enough on the screen to make a Street Dance of China fan very happy.

(The only real crime was that Chick was not in it. Because he absolutely should have been.)

Speaking of dance — I really want to know who choreographed this, because some of the routines were fantastic. I only wish that we could see them uncut - but of course this is a movie, and it is edited as one. Besides, you have to have cuts to be able to cut-in Wang Yibo’s dance double*, the true unsung hero of this cinematographic show.

(*last year the boy could do like, one freeze. He is a fast learner so I am ready to believe that he can be pretty good, but he is definitely not “halo five times in a row” good.)

All in all, if you are feeling sad that SDC 6 seems to be nowhere in sight at the moment, and One and Only is in cinemas near you, this comes with a cybernaght stamp of approval.

Go see your favorites doing the thing that they do - and doing it well.

You made a promise. Please hurry up. It's late August already, and you've not even announced the captains yet.

[ducktracy]

🫵 i can smell you

[narriose]

Thoughts on Veilguard so far:

Preface: I’m ~50 hours in with a handful of endgame spoilers.

My general values are: Story > Characters > Gameplay > Romance > Rep > Visuals.

My rating of the previous games: DA2 > DAO > DAI

Spoilers under Cut:

What I expected: Having to deal with an unappealing art style and clunky gameplay with leftover multiplayer and live service era elements that they couldn’t get rid of for the sake of the story and characters.

What I got: Well…

Let’s Start with the negatives:

-Dialogue: I want to know what happened there. Ik for a fact they had veteran BioWare writers on the team and it feels like there was a decision to dumb everything down to the point of me immediately having a line in my head that would sound better in universe every time someone spoke. It proved especially grating once I heard Morrigan speak. And when people compare the writing to MCU I cannot really protest. “Dragon Age has always been unserious” yes but like. Not every other line was a joke or relatable™️ millennial awkwardness . When jokes did happen they became memorable moments for the fandom. It’s often very difficult to listen to. Especially when Rook talks. It is getting marginally better though.

-Tone: Dragon Age has been compelling to me because it wrote conflict and trauma and corruption in a way that felt developed enough to feel grounded and believably horrific. Even with all its faults. DATV mellowed out the horrors and seems to gloss over a lot of sociopolitical dynamics and lore. Stuff like portraying crows as vigilantes and not showing the evils of Tevinter slavery. The tone itself just feels like theyre trying to make an easily marketable sanitized IP out of it to cater to a wider audience.

-Character Writing: A lot of characterization has been “Tell not show” because I’m disappointed in Lucanis and Neve. The story says one is a serious killer and the other is a cynic but both have only been friendly soft and positive which is like??? I feel like a lot of their intro has been cut out or something where they establish those traits on screen. Another thing is: there don’t appear to be actually detestable and controversial traits in characters or even internal conflict they need to overcome. They’re just dealing with some kind of external thing thrust onto them and that is very shallow to me personally.

-Intro: I know we’re not getting Origins style personalized intros again but it felt like too much is handwaived into people making their own OCs and forming headcanons when the game doesn’t let us RP much at all outside identity stuff anyway. Like how do we know Varric? Why should any of the pep talks he gives us mean anything when we haven’t experienced anything to warrant the complements he gives us?

-Villains: possibly the worst part of the story: they lit act like theyre in a preschool cartoon down to body language. No nuance no controversy no actual horror to them when in previous games the evil felt so much more pronounced because some of the villains felt human enough to be a shitty person irl.

-Rep: Sigh. Even as a transmasc I might be a little too internally transphobic for the rep in the game. It feels like so many steps ahead of what the story should be handling. Like fix the slavery problem in a meaningful way then start philosophical gender discussions about what a gender binary even is. And it’s very cringe to me when it’s spoken about in game. Like yeah I love that there’s no way to dispute what the characters are but it also feels so entirely uncreative using modern day terminology for this stuff. And I don’t mean “replace it with ambiguous sad baby talk” but something more. Like is it terrible to want that? Even if you were planning on using the word nonbinary, at least tell us what a binary even is and how it was instituted as an idea into this world. Like I do adore Taash, I just wish the gender stuff wasn’t so clumsy.

-Visuals: It’s hard man. As an artist who sees human bodies as proportion reference points, the bodies still look off to me. Like it was worse and I’m getting used to it but it’s still painful. And I’m all for trying to stylize but this particular heroforge direction was not something I would have picked.

-OST: At first I couldn’t tell Zimmer/Balfe’s stuff apart from Morris’s but yeah, the new stuff is more boring(Sans the Rivain part)

-The 3 choice thing: yeah not a fan of that. I feel like perhaps it was a part of the multiplayer era where they would not be able to import much if everyone had a massively different world state so they limited it to the tiny MC choices. Still sad that the romance thing only really matters if you romanced Solas because the Dorian cameo wasn’t anything to write home about. Kinda feels like they added him in last minute because someone pointed out how much Solas-skewed the choices were. Idk. I so expected Josie in Antiva but alas.

Now Onto the Positives:

-Codices: The very way-too modern simplified conversational dialogue style carries over to the codices. And while I despise that as a creative, I do find myself actually reading them as they come because they are so easy to absorb. I feel like a lot of people would benefit from not skipping them because there are some references and plot reveals worth checking out.

-Story: If you deafen the dialogue style, the story itself is top. Gets way better as you play and from the spoilers I’ve heard, yeah. It’s good. Can’t wait to find out more.

-Gameplay: Listen I have a massive preference for DA style combat even if most ppl call it a slog. The turn based element, the pause button, the hoarding skills I never use. It’s like coming home to me. I hated DAI combat for the amount of anxiety it induced and I usually hate fast-paced action combat in most other games. DATV made me eat my boots. Its combat is insanely fun and engaging and often times I’m looking forward to fights more than quests themselves. Very colorful, very flashy, and very effective. The pause button gives less freedom but it’s there. The combos are fun. It is like Mass Effect except I did not find commanding the companions in Mass Effect as intuitive. Tho I wish non mages had less magicey feeling attacks.

-The CC: Yeah it wowed me with the options. I like how much can be done with the facial sliders and how good the hair looks.

-Puzzles: Listen the puzzles are extremely stupid in this game. But I also am very stupid and lazy when it comes to solving them. I have looked up the vast majority of puzzle solutions for DA games. No more DA2 Fade Barrels and no more trying to circumnavigate the ad infested Fandom Wiki to get to the Kitty’s prison solution. Crafted specifically for me.

-Mechanical Things: The game is optimized insanely well. Both when It comes to your PC and the gameplay. I’m amazed how well it runs on my PC when games like BG3 and Cyberpunk make my CPU scream. Love that. As far as gameplay goes: everything is super streamlined and designed to be as un-annoying as possible. No carry weight, no collectibles as annoying and unrewarding as the shards and mosaics. The maps are easy to parse. The game does not bombard you with useless NPCs, banter can’t be interrupted and characters catch up on banter at the Lighthouse if you’ve been avoiding certain party comps by accident. The quest locator is actually helpful. Skill points can be refunded. Looting is easy and finding shit feels rewarding.

-Characters: Honestly they do have some interesting things going on and while most characters feel a little hollow so far, I was pleasantly surprised by Davrin and Bellara. Davrin is the one I’m romancing and while the actual romance isn’t groundbreaking I’m glad I chose him. Yes, his character has a lot to do with Assan and his arc, but he does have stuff going on of his own. He’s very refreshing because some of the things he says low key both makes you think and also worry about him. He’s also not your usual preppy jock type. He can be a little mean sometimes. He’s artistic and principled. He has some remnants of “opinions I don’t agree with” that I love early DA for. When it comes to Bellara, she absolutely breaks the sort of Manic Pixie/Quirky Awkward young coded girl mold. It is the fact that there is self awareness and hints of history of failure and isolation in her words. There is also masking and over-clarification that I can relate to personally. I hope there is stuff like that to other companions when I get to know them better.

Visuals: the UI and Locations are stunning. The outfits the best the game has had so far(tho wish the overall look was less stylized) The blighted stuff(sans the ogres) and the Crossroads. Beautiful.

-Dwarf Lore: started out as fucking cheesy but I just finished meeting Valta and I’m seated.

-Solas Stuff: Hated the man for a while. Caved and made a solavellan to import to get more story stuff. NGL he is actually tolerable/interesting to me in this game.

Overall: A sickly sweet combo of Disappointed and Impressed. And I’m still gonna be playing. I am used to not liking something about every DA game. That’s part of the fun for me. But damn is this one testing me. Am I having a lot of fun playing it? Absolutely. Am I finding it difficult to get through a concerning amount of dialogue…yeah. It does still feel like a DA game but also like if someone made a pg-13 live action of Inquisition and then made a supplementary game based off that. If I forget that it’s supposed to be a sequel and just treat it like an action game with plot then it’s easier. And like I’m sure at least half of what I listed as a negative can be attributed to EA meddling or prev iterations of the game being inseparable. Anyway. Can’t wait to see the ending and I will add more thoughts when I’m done.

[ineffably-smote]

Macbeth, David Tennant - A very subjective, spoiler and emotion filled review

Just walking out of seing Macbeth at the Donmar and I have Feelings. Unsurprisingly, I primarily went to see it because David Tennant was in it. I love the play, big fan of Shakespeare but the trip to London was most certainly motivated by a very specific actor. Hence the highly subjective review. Fortunately, I also happen to quite like Macbeth. We studied it at school, and it holds a special place in my heart (back then, Hamlet was my favourite Shakespeare play but honestly, after tonight, I’m not so sure anymore. Anyway, I digress). It was my first time actually seeing an actor I’m a fan of in real life, so obviously the entire time my brain was just going oh my god that’s David Tennant oh my god that’s David Tennant like I actually could not comprehend it. The man I’ve spent hours staring at on a little screen is suddenly real, and right there. So yeah, that took me a hot second.

(Excuse the piss poor image quality, I took this with shaky hands without looking or bothering to focus the cam)

The Staging

Still starstruck and a bit dazed, one thing really really stood out to me: the staging. It was so, so good. I knew it was going to be minimal from the pictures I had seen, and it was, but it was also so insanely real. There were barely any decorations, and half the cast and the musicians were hidden behind a glass screen doing background noises and gestures. From where I was sitting I could not see them much, but could definitely hear them which added to the overall atmosphere. The stage was also really tiny, and the play benefitted incredibly from it. All the action was happening in one tight space that had been put to use incredibly well, particularly the banquet scene but I’ll come back to that because it deserves its own paragraph.

The way they chose to do the soliloquies was so fitting - all the actors start to move in slow motion - everyone else slowing down and just the characters speaking moving was so good, it made sense.

The Headphones

I’m a bit mixed about the headphones. They were amazing for the vibes, we could hear whispers and they really heightened some of the emotional speeches in the play - because when someone is struggling with guilt and trauma it makes sense for them to be mumbling rather than yelling. So that was really great. However, especially in the scenes where the actors where yelling/ loud I preferred to take them off a bit cause it felt more real that way. I’m so used to hearing actors voice on recordings, it does hit different when you can hear them for real. But, as I said, personal preference and that’s what’s nice, you can take them on and off as much as you want.

Famous Speeches

There were three speeches I was quite interested to see how they were going to be adapted - scorpions and dagger for Macbeth, and out damned spot for Lady Macbeth. These are classic, everyone knows the words, the plot but they managed to make it feel real in a new and touching way. I think here the headphones were quite helpful because they allowed the actors to actually whisper parts of those lines. They were so subtle, so embedded in the text they felt so natural which imbued them with all their power. I saw in a review Cush Jumbo’s out damned spot speech be described as “haunting”, and I wholeheartedly agree.

The Macbeths

I didn’t like Macbeth, the character, very much when I first learnt about him. His actions didn’t make sense to me, I couldn’t quite comprehend in my 21st century little brain how he went from I’m super loyal to the King to I will freely murder children for shits and giggles. But now, now I understand. It makes sense, it’s believable. And that’s a mix of the acting choices and teh overall setting. Like the opening scene, instead of presenting Macbeth as a glorious hero, he is presented to us as a traumatised hero. He spends the first few minutes washing the blood of his clothes, haunted by noises from the battlefield. And that sets the themes quite nicely, not ambition, as Tennant specified in an interview, but guilt and trauma. There are so many ways to interpret Shakespeare, that’s the beauty of it, and I think this version of Macbeth just resonated more with me (maybe because ambition I don’t quite understand but guilt I am intimately familiar with? Or maybe because it was David Tennant? I don’t know, probably a bit of both). Tennant delivers a convincing Macbeth. Yes, you can see his ambitions play out, but also his fears, his guilt, and that makes him into a complex three dimensional character that you want to understand.

And I absolutely loved this version of Lady Macbeth. Not just a powerful woman who bullies her husband into become an evil murderer (because again, here we can see traces of that in Macbeth from the start), but an ambition woman in love, with her husband, with power, and not quite healed from the trauma of loosing her child. Again another review said she is more of an enabler than a manipulator and I quite liked that description.

My Favourite Scenes

God the banquet scene. The one with the ghost of Banquo. An absolute masterpiece. I did not expect that scene to hit that hard. It was raw, it was powerful and even if Tennant was facing away from where I was sitting, even without seeing his face I could feel the emotion, the whole audience could. In a video essay on Tennant, @davidtennantgenderenvy highlighted how in almost every role he played, there is it is the classic Tennant breakdown moment, and breakdown moment it was. Not with tears, not as expressive as he sometime is but just enough for a King trying to hold it together but fear and guilt breaking through. I was absolutely overwhelmed and it was beautiful. The set up for the scene was amazing too - there were ceilidh, celebrations, I adored the contrast between these fast pasted scenes and guilt ridden whispers of the couple. And the way everyone sat down around the stage and suddenly it looked like a banquet table ? Just perfect.

Another really cool moment, less on the emotional side but more on the visuals was when Macbeth goes to get the second prophecy from the witches. Almost the whole cast is there, running around, moving, almost dancing and it gives the whole thing a mystical atmosphere. There’s smoke, Macbeth falls, is carried up high Jesus style, cowers, rises, it’s so busy and insane all the while there are whispers and whispers in the headphones - it manages perfectly to feel like a mystical moment.

Descent Into Madness & other cool things

For Macbeth, having the kid running around scene after scene, haunting him, and then scene where he kills him - GOD it’s powerful. Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness was so well characterised, I also loved the glass on the background that locked away some of the cast. Just wild. The actor that played Malcom actor was also really cool, and Macduff and Ross, big fan of all of them.

Overall I am overwhelmed with emotions. Tennant is truly one of my favourite actors - from Good Omens to Staged, Jessica Jones, even Harry Potter but also Mad to be Normal, Nativty, There She Goes, Around the World in 80 days, Doctor Who (god I’ve started a list, never start lists cause you’ll forget people) and so, so many more, I was truly beside myself with excitement and expectations for tonight. And it did not disappoint. I do not want to leave the theatre and I pray they release a recording of this because I want it imprinted on my soul.

(Side note: I don’t know how to use tumblr very well, for some reason whenever I try to reply to ppl it posts from my other blog? Anyway @raquel-and-sergio is in fact me)

[abybweisse]

Ch212 (p3), It's hard to find good help

After our earl questions Sebastian's suggestion to ever hire Mey-Rin, Sebastian turns the tables and questions our earl's offers to Finny and Snake.

Finny is indeed the product of a research facility in Germany, though we still don't know much about him, but now we know he really could barely speak back then. It wasn't just a barrier between languages but a barrier of speaking at all. Those kids were kept down there with just some basic toys and were apparently not given any education other than being forced to fight each other. Our earl defends the decision because Finny was like a blank slate, and they could teach him to be loyal. Sebastian concedes that Finny has become fiercely loyal to our earl and would probably rush into a burning building if our earl told him to.

But the decision to hire Snake truly surprised Sebastian. Our earl sees it as a better alternative than setting him free to make another attempt to kill him. He's (intentionally, I think) leaving out the option to kill Snake instead of hiring him or setting him free.

"His ability to manipulate snakes *has", not "have".

I'm not sure why our earl says Snake hasn't always been dependable (since he's been hired), particularly since he also says Snake preforms basic chores better than the other three. Perhaps he just doesn't consider Snake to be as loyal as the others, and that's probably quite true.

Poor Snake has lost his life, but hopefully Finny will come through this alive and ultimately successful... though he'll need more help to finish the job.

A waiter comes by, and our earl accepts the offer of tea, then he orders some for Sebastian, too, later saying it'd look odd if Sebastian wasn't seen drinking (or eating) while our earl eats and drinks.

"I feared for heavy snowfall." 😂

But that's just silly for the kid to say he has no leg room in that first class compartment. I think he just likes the dining car... and appreciates all that Sebastian does (sometimes appreciates it, anyway) but can't admit to it.

Now I'm not sure whether ch213 will be arrival in Brighton or something that happens during the transfer in Redhill.

[canisalbus]

I am so sorry if this is inappropriate but machete's fluffy ass is the greatest thing ever

.

[mxtwister]

Merline DLC please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please