#scrolling-my-life-away

[joznii]

walk of shame (they decided to go to bleak falls barrow by themselves to impress camilla,, it went,, poorly.)

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[only-the-shippers-can-bully-nrmt]

(Original Japanese on the left with translations under the break, Fan Translation in the middle, and Official Translation on the right.)

Saw some things flying around that have (unintentionally or otherwise) been giving people the wrong idea, so here are the comparisons to show that, yes, Miles was referring to Phoenix near the end of the second Miles Edgeworth Investigations game. Miles does bring up Gregory too, but Gregory being "that man" during the famous "shines brilliantly" scene was actually a change in the official English release that does not line up with the original Japanese version (even MTLs will get across the Wright meaning).

Also, "shining brilliantly in one's eyes" can be both how a son might look up to his father but also how a ruffly prosecutor might strongly/romantically see his courtroom partner; the line is simply intense enough to not easily carry the label of an "average" relationship. We don't need to elaborate when we tell family members/friends/significant others "I love you" (even if it's at the same time) for similar reasons, and I don't see anyone arguing that this means that Miles must see Phoenix like a father because he grouped them together in some form.

TL;DR: The official translation mucked up some context and stuff happened because of it. Keep shipping and feel free to use this as a reference post because the shippers did not misinterpret anything. We can have a conversation about how the change affected the moment, but the original context is still important and Phoenix was part of it.

Besides the translations, there are other points under the break as well, including a bonus of one of the nice and harmless additions the official translation changed/added with the "saved me from myself" line:

Translations (provided by a friend of mine who knows Japanese; edited at times to sound more natural in English or help get across the intended meaning)

........以前、 ある男が言っていました。

……..In the past, a certain man once said:

被告人の唯一の味方になって あげられるのが弁護士だと。

the only one willing to be the defendant's ally is their lawyer.

依頼人を信じることで、《真実》に近づいていく････

By believing in the defendant, the truth draws closer....

その男の姿は、私の目にも まぶしく映りました。

The image of that man was so bright in my eyes, it was engraved into my mind.

There's a bit more added here for clarification's sake and people like me who have a habit of taking metaphors too literally; essentially, the first part that's in the game is saying that the sight of "that man" was so blinding that it stuck in Miles's mind/memory eternally, so the translation in the fan version is correct in a direct translation and what it means is closer to the official.

(fun fact that if you go for an MTL, a translator may translate what in English was "image"/"sight" as "appearance" or "figure" which is technically accurate but obviously not the intent when translated, just as "so bright"/"shining brilliantly" may become "dazzling"; doesn't mean I won't mention it for people to imagine/have fun with though :3c "That man's figure was so dazzling in my eyes." my god)

法廷で戦う父と、同じように････

In the same way my father fighting in court does….

(without the clarification it's more like "In the same way my father fought in court...." but as above, message is clearer this way)

しかし、それはあくまで その男や父の生き方です。

However, that's just the way that man and my father lived their lives.

This is the big one since it makes a clear and blatantly obvious separation between "that man" and Gregory himself.

Here's another translation in a reblog of the post I linked, which follows even closer to the fan translation and is more straightforward.

My asks are open for any further translation clarifications people may want to make (don't want to bog down reblogs when edits can simply be made) but this was a long-winded way of saying that the fan translation was super on point with accuracy and the only thing of note is the "burning into memory" that the official one has to help get the point across (though I think more was definitely lost the way it was done).

Other Points

1 - Staying on the official translation, its use of "that man" is rather... bizarre, even if one hasn't seen the original. Such a use is typically for:

someone the game wants the audience for figure out on their own (so the character knows it but the player needs to go talk to the person themself once they figure it out)

someone who the character speaking isn't really familiar with (like, "oh yeah, that guy, I kind of remember now")

someone the game tries to keep secret a little longer for the sake of mystery (example being the fan translation where Ray refers to Gregory without a name drop for the build up that Ray worked for him)

Miles using the phrase and then saying "my father" in the very next sentence made me do a double take because I was totally caught off guard by how it was done.

The shot of Miles sepia toned in the courtroom (the fourth shot) doesn't even make sense anymore if he's only talking about Gregory since obviously he's never seen Gregory from across the courtroom while Miles has been behind the prosecutor's bench (nor do they do a camera slide as if Miles is only imagining himself across the courtroom from him; it flashes to white instead). It only makes sense if he's taking about Phoenix.

2 - Looking at it from a fan's perspective, it makes 150% sense why "that man" would immediately be associated with Phoenix in the context of the moment. Not only did the last case of the first game have that exact thing too ("In a situation like this… what would that man do…? What would he who can turn any desperate situation around do…?"), thus making it a near-perfect continuation of that, but "a defendant's only ally being their attorney" was a huge part of the original trilogy.

In fact, the official translation actually actively makes it weirder to leave Phoenix out of that bit because of the change "a friend to the friendless" it did, which catapulted me back so violently to Turnabout Sisters - the first serious case in the entire series - that it could've put me in a coma.

This is even disregarding how important the whole "trusting clients" and "finding the truth" stuff was in cases, especially 2-4.

It's like, "ah yes, Mr. Fender, that was yours and my father's life, not mine and also no one else's; honestly, not a single other important person in my life who I could have mentioned comes to mind" lol)

3 - From my own personal perspective, I'm not stirring up a fuss over shipping, it's not about that (though shippers getting thrown under the bus absolutely sucks). I'm far more baffled that it takes the already-not-around Phoenix and chucks his mention away for later.

4 - Anyone lamenting the loss of "shining brilliantly" for something else without the context has every right to be confused and should not be criticized for it. Shipper or otherwise, most wouldn't imagine for a second that the end of Miles's arc/self-reflection would have a significant change that takes 50% of the original meaning out.

This taken into account with my comment about the visual aid of Miles behind the prosecutor's bench in sepia during that very line furthers this. Obviously people will (still) think it's about Phoenix.

5 - I only linked to one of the comments/posts I saw in case I was accused of making things up. I don't actually recommend approaching/confronting anyone because I don't think it's worth the time/effort, so this is more for anyone who felt gaslit/like they'd gotten it wrong or wanted the actual evidence. I did check the blog of the person who I linked and they made a long answer to a person who was complaining about the people complaining about said post, but hadn't made an edit to their original post telling people that there were misinterpretations being made.

That's not actually me being aggressive in any way (it's their business and their blog), but pointing out that it's not something important to people like that. I'll also grant that some might simply not know enough about the fan translation/original meaning to get it, so don't stress about it is all I'll say. :)

6 - Here's the "saved me from myself" line as promised, congrats on listening to me babble and making it all the way down here~

[suddencolds]

.~

[la-galaxie-langblr]

what is going on w my brain

[sasquach-scratches]

Remembered the "modern" AU I did like one thing for then never thought about and this image of Alois in the AU would NOT leave my mind so I had to scribble it out real quick

I kinda wanted to play up the loser angle he has in Skyrim (which is moot in a land that thinks vagabond dudes that go around killing things are the coolest thing ever) so AU Alois lives in a trailer in the woods, usually unemployed but when the cost of living shows up he'll take some temp jobs or do some foraging out in the wilderness (which is still pretty dangerous in spite of urbanization pushing out monsters not integrated into greater society)

Like in Skyrim, he's actually pretty good at magic and could have gone to med school if he applied himself but dropped out of college because he hated the environment. What magic he does know is mostly practical stuff that can be done with technology here

He is currently dating a handsome laborer that may or may not push him to be more responsible.

[the-void-to-scream-in]

if i see one more leak without any tags or spoiler warnings on ANY social media platform im going to lose my FUCKING marbles

[mochinon-yah]

STOP ITTTTTT BDNSJWKSJS WHY JUST WHY — no i'm not angry or anything of the like, but it's just so wth and also funny at the same time — LIKE WHY IS THERE SO MANY FILIPINOS HERE AND THERE????

[totheidiot]

i hate that the solar eclipse just now serves as a reminder that nobody loves me.

[millionsknives]

genuinely these panels are going to make me ugly cry

[tiger-balm]

some people are soooo negative all the time like girl shut up !

[joznii]

her shenanigans take 10 years off his life

[cultivating-wildflowers]

📕

[michdoodles]

Today’s work doodle brought to you by Shadow the hedgehog meme images

[bijoumikhawal]

"Oh but if so and so gets elected then-" read 1-45 Have Lied, 46-100 Will Be No Different (I Don’t Want a Dyke for President) by Mwende Katwiwa before you spit out representational platitudes. I am SIIIIIIICK OF IT. Be brave. Imagine bigger things. Imagine a better future. If you don't, it will never come! You deserve better! The world deserves better! This is not a good world! You could elect the Messiah and it would still not be good! The system itself is rotted! Nothing can grow within it! Do people not nod along when people explain that "systemic racism" describes a state of affairs where it is possible that no individual in the system is racist, but the system itself reproduces racism? If you can understand that, never open your mouth about this nonsense again! Fight for a better world!

[dewitty1]

Saturday Six (Stuff)

So, apparently without my noticing, another of my annoying (drug dealing) neighbors moved out! I guess I'm really unobservant lol...Σ(-᷅_-᷄๑)

My vegetable plants are finally getting fruits! I've got cucumbers coming on and some yellow pear tomatoes.“ψ(｀∇´)ψ

I've been posting recipes on my Instagram. Not sure I have what it takes to be a great/popular food blogger, because I don't cook restaurant quality. I just cook "normal" homestyle food.(。-ω-)ﾉ

I'm trying to talk @astutesnow's gf into applying for an IT Tech job over here so they can both take care of me since I'm old now lol. But really, I just want their help to get a house so we can get out of this shite apartment.ヾ(◍’౪`◍)ﾉﾞ♡

One of my favorite fruits is ripe rn, nectarines, but holy hell they're expensive. I bought 4 and they were over 7$. I the local farm had them I'd definitely get them there instead.(๑•॒̀ ູ॒•́๑)

How is it July this week already? (;*´Д`)ﾉ