#similarly the limit cut year gap is never going to be filled out!!! its for FANS!!!

[avale-reves]

if this "no news/trailers/whatever at all until the year leading up to release" is the new normal for KH i think fandom is going to like, have to massively restructure the way it works, the things it celebrates and engages with, the stuff it values and considers 'high worth', because otherwise it's just going to be years and years and years of the same discussions repeated over and over with nothing new for us to even chew on in the meantime.

i find that the kh fandom massively undervalues fanworks. maybe as a side effect of how important 'word of god' and 'canon' are to understanding the series, idk, but like i think there needs to be a real shift in fandom perspective to champion them more, and making them far more central to what "being active in kh fandom" means. And I think this both because of just the practicality of keeping fandom alive in an era where the devs are more tight-lipped than ever, but also I think it's something that KH specifically needs to do.

Kingdom Hearts is always going to be a series of "missed/unfulfilled potential". There is no way it cannot be. The concept is just too expansive, the cast so wide, and there are endless ways to spin off of what they've given us, or endless ways to imagine where it could go. Even something as simple as a Disney world has all of this "potential" in how it could be explored, how it could be utilized, how it could play or look or feel, what themes it could have, what character development it could give certain characters etc. And the games will always have to take that infinite possibility and whittle it down to a single thing. KH itself will always have to contend with right/legal issues, Disney oversight and rules, the realities of game development and budgets, etc and so in that sense, it will never be able to reach the potential. But like... we can? We as fans can take all of the potential and use it as an endless playground for us to enjoy and engage with.

Idk, I just think back to, for example, Kairi and Lea training. A concept that has a ton of potential! Very interesting fertile ground for character dynamics, fighting scenes, mentor scenes, etc etc. Obviously, in KH3 this amounted to only a couple of core scenes where the devs put the focus on just their character relationships. Many were disappointed by this, by how little we see, but like, it was always set up as a "thing that is going to be happening off-screen", that's the whole point of 'merlin made a special place where time doesnt matter and they can just focus on training'. And when we think of KH3 with its endless things it has to juggle, its huge cast, etc. it makes sense that Kairi and Lea training can only be a tiny part of it. They have a budget. They have resource constraints. They even have disc space constraints to worry about (it's why their scenes are CG even! They literally did not have any room on the disc to actual make in-game environments for them!).

Like we can look at that and be very disappointed. We didn't get to see any of that stuff. But like, idk, at the same time, the fact that we didn't see a lot of it means that almost any fanwork about that time can "fit with canon" and be "something that might've happened". Like, we can look at it as a disappointment it wasn't more defined by KH3, but we could also look at it as a fandom gift. To borrow a phrase from iconic kh fan translator goldpanner: It is a crack in the concrete sidewalk of KH canon where fanworks can grow and thrive.

Idk. I know for some, fanworks will just never count the same as canon. But, I do feel like if people in general grew to appreciate them more, and have fun with them and engage with them, and share them and make them themselves, then it could do so much to smooth out the feelings of 'missed potential' that is inherent with this series and always will be through no fault of the devs themselves. And perhaps we would find, if, for example, we had spent the 4-6 years between MelMem and KHIV having a blast as a fandom exploring 'Kairi and Aqua training' through fics, art, comics, vids, fangames, music, graphic design, etc etc. We'd probably feel that by the time it was 'defined' by canon into a single thing it has to be for the story they're telling, even if that thing is nothing that we thought or wished for, we might end up feeling the 'potential' of the idea wasn't wasted, because we explored it.

[ask-spider-man-61610]

The Infiltration: Part Two of Three

In the ten years he had been a vigilante, Peter Parker had become very good at sneaking into places he shouldn't have been.

Air vents were useless. The vast majority of them were far too narrow for anybody to slip through without becoming amorphous, and even when the ducts were large enough it was impossible to move inside one without making enough noise to alert the entire block. The subceiling--the space above the ceiling tiles, but below the actual architectural structure--was a far better bet, but that was similarly cramped--and besides, only some buildings had gaps in the walls to allow for movement like that.

Using a disguise to sneak in was better all around, but it required a lot of skill and care. You couldn't disguise yourself as a scientist unless you were genuinely an expert in the field you were pretending to study. Nor, in this particular case, could you just dress up as any old agent--they had security levels. Executives were out, reporters were only viable if the people you were trying to fool had reason to believe a reporter was going to be there, and the less said about solicitors the better. The key was to attract as little scrutiny as possible, to not raise any questions you'd have trouble answering; because the second someone grew suspicious of you, your cover was all but blown.

Janitors, then, were perfect.

Nobody pays attention to a janitor. It's practically one of the perks of the job. Beneath notice means beneath scrutiny, and people only give custodians the slightest thought when a place needs cleaned. Even then it's just an assertion that a custodian needs to be there. Nobody questions what a janitor is doing in a room, even in the dead of night. Nobody questions why a janitor is wearing gloves, or where they got their ring of keys. There's no better disguise for going somewhere that people generally can't go.

Peter had been pretending to be a janitor in the main headquarters of the Cape Code Authority for several days now. He had listened intently as he'd mopped the floors, mapped out the layout in his head, figured out where the labs were and who had access to what while keeping his head down. He'd owned this coverall for years now, for infiltrations exactly like this, and now with the security cameras disabled he hooked his cart on the handle of his mop and dragged it towards the door the three agents had just left.

The door had locked automatically. Of course it had, all laboratory doors locked automatically around here, and even the custodians needed special permissions to get them unlocked. But as the door had swung closed, Peter had pressed the trigger in his palm under the guise of adjusting his grip on his mop, and now the door's latch was glued down beneath a small splatter of webbing. Pulling on a latex glove, Peter tugged the door open a crack and slipped into the lab.

He adjusted his hat as he glanced around the lab, the hat that had blond curls sewn to the inside to disguise his brown hair, and scratched at his false nose. The hologram table sat in the center of the room, still softly glowing even after its deactivation--an enormous waste of energy, but apparently nobody cared. Ignoring it entirely, Peter headed straight for the computer monitors against the far wall, grabbing a chair without breaking stride and only stopping to climb on top of it and crouch on the seat like a gargoyle on a rooftop.

Like everything Reed Richards ever touched, the computers were encrypted. But Peter had dated Johnny Storm for five months once, and he didn't spend so much time nearby his fellow supergenius without taking some time to figure out how to bypass their usual security. It took him just over five minutes to get through the firewalls, and then he stuck a translucent plastic sticky note to the screen and began to browse.

The sticky note was, of course, a data drive. Peter had learned about these only recently, but he was fast growing to like them; they were easy to conceal on his person and, unlike a USB stick, didn't require a specific size of port. As he opened up the computer's files, the drive pinged off of the computer's software and integrated itself into the system without leaving a trace. Cracking his knuckles, Peter typed a few cursory searches into the file browser and tapped Enter.

Perpetual Holographic Avatar/Nano-Tech Offensive Monsters had been a thorn in his side for over two years now. They didn't move like humans; their range of motion didn't have the limits that their skeletal shape implied; their systems adapted and learned and coordinated in ways that he'd never seen before in artificial intelligence. Even Octavius, permanently on the cutting edge of AI and biorobotics development, wasn't sure what the hell was going on with them. Last year, in the middle of beating the multi-armed megalomaniac's face in, Spider-Man had asked for Otto's thoughts on the Phantoms; the technology, both of them suspected, wasn't exactly beyond Otto's work so much as to the side of it. The systems were hyperspecialized: they had no connection to neural networks of old, and were practically useless for advancing them in the future. They were, in a word, alien.

Peter suspected Chitauri tech. The War of the Worlds had left countless remnants of the Chitauri on Earth; some of them still remained, like the Leviathan rotting in Maine, but far too many of them had seemed to simply vanish. Anyone who gave it more than ten seconds of thought could realize that governments of the world had squirreled the stuff away to study and reverse-engineer. Now, as Peter's eyes darted back and forth across the screen, he skimmed through the blueprints and models that he found in the folder and tried to see if any of it matched the distinctive look of the Chitauri.

Some of it did, he found as he kept searching, but not a huge amount. Reed had done some work with Chitauri tech in the past; traces of its influence were obvious in the composition of the Phantoms' gun barrels, and in the way their hard-light armor projected itself over the skeleton. Kid stuff, nothing that explained the problems he'd had with them. Peter's brow furrowed as he copied the files he found to his data drive and peered over his shoulder at the hologram table behind him.

What had Reed been saying to Flint in here only a few minutes ago? Peter had a spiderlike hypersensitivity to vibration; he could feel footsteps on the other side of the building rumbling through the floor, and the variations in air pressure caused by the fly drifting around the ceiling. But it didn't work like hearing did, nor was it interpreted by the same part of the brain. Though he had felt Reed talking in here, it just felt like a continuous drone of vibration against his skin--he hadn't heard him, and so couldn't interpret the words. And, like an idiot, he hadn't thought to bug the room beforehand.

He pushed his tongue against his upper lip in thought. Had it had something to do with why Flint had registered with the CCA in the first place?

Kicking a foot against the bottom of the desk, Peter rolled his chair over to the hologram table and set to work getting past the security there too. This took even less time than it had with the computer, now that Peter knew how Reed had updated his security measures over the last few years. Within three minutes of typing so fast an observer would have seen his fingers as blurs he was browsing through the most recently accessed files.

The image lifted out of the table and filled the room with its soft light, and Peter frowned at the image of the Phantom he saw. How on earth was this related to Flint's desire to Be A Real Boy? He typed a few commands into the table and watched the Phantom's white shell disappear to reveal the mechanical skeleton beneath. A few notes by Reed appeared to highlight key points, and Peter read through each with steadily rising concern.

Very little of the Sandman's mass was actually Flint Marko. When he had been disintegrated all those years ago, most of his body had become just plain old sand--only his nervous system had become anything different. Over the years, he had gained entire truckloads worth of sand and lost enough to fill beaches, but the gallon or so of milky white silica that had once been his brain and nerve cells had remained, scattered evenly through every shape and sculpture he made himself into. They assimilated granules of a similar composition through static cling, arranging them with an intricate electric charge that neither Flint nor Peter had ever fully understood, and now it looked like Reed wanted to apply that same static charge to the Phantom project.

Looking through the notes, Peter could already see that Reed wasn't putting much effort into following through on his promise. The conjectures and theories put forth in them were ludicrous--ideas that Peter had discarded years ago in his various scrambles to stop one of Marko's rampages. But he read between the lines, read ideas that Reed had intended for his own eyes only, and his blood grew steadily colder in his veins.

It wouldn't take much modification to turn a Phantom into a suitable chassis for Flint's nerve granules, so went Reed's idea. The skeleton already contained organic elements, and they already received commands from a biological source rather than a computer. This flew in the face of Peter's assumptions about the Phantoms.

They were only partially robots. They were like Octobots; their processing units were very much alive.

Peter waved a shaky hand over the table. The hologram deactivated, which wasn't his intent at all, but he was too taken aback to care.

Deep in the bowels of the building, ignored by Peter until now but always scratching at the back of his mind, the vibrations of mechanical footsteps rumbled through the walls and floor. The central hub of manufacturing and deploying Phantoms was located fifty feet under the foundation--a fact he'd known all along, but which he had to investigate now. Now, when he knew that within those robotic skeletons were living and thinking beings. Now, when he knew that the drills whirring and 3D printing that he felt even from here were working tirelessly to imprison and enslave something. Jumping off the chair, he retrieved his data drive from the computer and took barely a minute to wipe all evidence of his presence from the room. Then, readjusting his disguise and checking for the presence of witnesses, he slipped out of the room and finally allowed the door to lock.

The route to the underground hub was a circuitous one. As the operations were almost entirely automated, not even the janitors were given clearance to enter that level; maybe four people had access, and Peter wasn't one of them. No matter. There were more ways to sneak around than just throwing on a coverall and mopping a floor. If Peter's disguise only took him this far and no farther, it was time to drop it. Some places you could only reach as the wall-crawler.

Had the security cameras not mysteriously lost power earlier that afternoon, they would've seen a janitor shedding his hat, kicking off his shoes, and beginning to unbutton his coverall. Without breaking stride, he snatched a small bag from where he'd hidden it in his cart before and pulled on a mask; whatever features, real or fake, a witness might have noticed, they were now hidden by dark red fabric and two gleaming grey bug eyes. In short order the coverall and hat were gone--wrapped up into a web-knapsack that he slung onto his back even as he swapped his shoes out for red spandex boots. Pulling on his gloves right as he reached the elevator, Spider-Man stopped to politely tap the call button beside the sliding metal doors.

With a ding, the elevator doors slid open, and Spider-Man immediately smashed straight through the emergency hatch at the top of the lift.

Elevator shafts were always a bit more complicated than one expected. Even Peter, who could feel the constant motion of the metal boxes through the building and their cables sliding against pullies, always needed a moment to figure out how to squeeze through the systems that controlled its rise and fall. He paused as he examined the mechanism of this particular elevator before he sucked in his stomach and crawled around the box with a few inches to spare. Then, once he was beneath it, he released his grip on the elevator shaft and let himself fall.

He caught himself fifty feet later, his fingertips sticking instantly to the concrete as he touched it. Just across the shaft from him was a set of elevator doors, which he hopped onto and began to pry apart. It was slow going. Like everything in the CCA headquarters, these doors were made with superhumans in mind, and they had a magnetic lock that Spider-Man found himself straining to overpower. He pulled on them for a few seconds, changed his mind, and crawled two feet to the left to begin messing with the wiring that controlled the lock. There was a moment of silence, a low, hollow ding, and the doors slid open.

With one hand still stuck to the wall Spider-Man lowered himself into the unlit chamber, dropping to the floor and landing there in a crouch. What little light had made it down with him reflected off his mask's glaring eyes. For a moment he was still, one hand pressed to the metal beneath him and his attention fully on the vibrations of the environment. Then, mentally sorting through the sea of threats that his spider-sense whispered and squirmed at, he rose to his feet and nonchalantly slapped the lightswitch on the wall behind him. Sparse florescent lights flickered on above him, and he blinked and furrowed his brow as he adjusted.

Now that he was down here the vibrations were sharper, like a the world coming into focus as you come up from underwater. They travelled through the air, through the concrete, and through a metal catwalk that served as a floor, branching into pathways and situated above buzzing, whirring machinery. No wonder it had been so difficult to discern what was going on up above, Spider-Man reflected as he glanced over the guardrail and watched robotic limbs carry a Phantom chassis through a gap in the wall and to another room. He turned his attention ahead of him, where similar chasses were held in racks upon racks that spanned nearly wall to wall across the room, black robotic skeletons awaiting deployment.

But there was a difference between these Phantoms and the ones he so often encountered on the battlefield. Frowning under the mask, Spider-Man stepped forward, leaned over the catwalk's railing, and set a finger against the nearest collection of servos and solid-light projectors. Yes. There it was, the constant, ambient tremor of air in motion; the chasses were hollow like the frame of a bicycle. Whenever he'd fought them, they hadn't displayed any such emptiness.

Right. Mechanical systems supported by biological processing. He took his attention away from the chasses, looking instead at that hole in the wall that one of them had vanished into as he'd come in here. He could feel the Phantom in the next room over being hooked up to--to something, metal vibrating on contact with metal and stabilizing with a little pop. His eyes narrowed. His fingers twitching nervously, his breath held, he began to pace down the catwalk towards the door to that room.

A window on one side greeted him as he stepped through, displaying the Phantom under maintenance. Screens embedded into the window offered diagnostics and schematics, all of which Spider-Man ignored. He turned instead to the far wall, where what looked like a large cabinet was anchored in place and had a hundred or so pipes no wider than test tubes leading into and out of it. A quick ripping of metal, and he tossed a mangled padlock over his shoulder as he threw the cabinet doors open. The interior was poorly organized, and called to mind a prototype rather than anything intended for widespread implementation: a screen with a series of codes flashing across it, a mess of piping and tubing, and in carefully arranged racks hundreds upon hundreds of test tubes, most full of some amorphous fluid.

Spider-Man's brow furrowed as he selected a vial at random. Working carefully, he unscrewed the valve that connected it to the mess of piping and slid it out of the vial's stopper--without it, the test tube's lid sealed airtight again. He held it above eye level and turned to see the light filter through from overhead. The fluid inside surrounded what looked almost like a pipe cleaner, thousands of copper wires branching out from a central silicon rod. As he tilted it one way, an air bubble slid up the glass wall, and out of the corner of his eye he thought he saw--

--a tendril, as black as the rest of the liquid, squirming in that air pocket in a bid for freedom.

Spider-Man's eyes widened behind the mask. Oh my god.

Dead Leviathans and alien technology hadn't been the only things the Chitauri had brought to Earth. It had taken the terrestrial armies, and the remnants of SHIELD that Spider-Man had fought alongside, far too long to realize that the shape-shifting battlesuits that their enemies had used were themselves a separate species. Earth hadn't been the only planet to face invasion under the Chitauri; centuries ago, those invaders had conquered and enslaved a species called Klyntar. Amorphous, shapeshifting, symbiotic creatures, the Klyntar had the distinction of being able to use every single cell as musculature, digestive system, armoring, and neurons. Nobody was sure how long the Chitauri had been selectively breeding and brainwashing their symbiote slaves into battle armor, and until now Spider-Man had assumed that practice had stopped with the aliens' defeat.

The little vial of Klyntar sample in his hand was far from his first experience with the species. He had, for six months during and after the war, worn a stolen symbiote as a battlesuit of his own, and even after he and Vee had separated he'd been up close and personal with the species many, many times. But he had believed that Vee's defection from the Chitauri had been a fluke; that they had been the only Klyntar to be recovered from the Chitarui alive.

But now Spider-Man stood in the basement of the Cape Code Authority, holding a vial that contained another member of that species, and right next to him were over a hundred identical vials. All at once, the control systems of the Phantoms became obvious to him.

Without hesitation he turned back to the cabinet and began yanking the tubes out of their holders. The brush-like machinery in each vial, he figured as he worked, must have been some kind of brainwashing system; the copper wires made contact with as many of the Klyntar's neurons as possible, with controlled electric shocks frying out whatever thoughts the aliens tried to form and replacing them with--with whatever programming was necessary to get the Phantoms working. As he pulled each tube out, he killed the electrical charge, but for now he didn't release the Klyntar within from their cells. Where would they go down here? Did they even remember what they were? At best they'd die, at worst the CCA would collect them again and make it even harder to get to them again. No, for now he stuck the vials together with webbing, bundling them together in a padded sack of sorts--he could keep them safe until he knew what else to do, but for now--

--for now, he could feel footsteps vibrating through the concrete fifty feet above. Could feel the elevator starting to move, and the frantic tingling in his head suddenly concentrated all its alarm on the man upstairs. He paused, but only for the smallest fraction of a second; then he worked even faster, his hands becoming blurs again. Grab, break, thwip, grab, break, thwip. The bundle of vials and webbing in his arms was becoming untenably large. He kept at it anyway, always careful not to smash the vials, always careful to separate them from their neighbors with a carefully padded layer of webbing. Even as he webbed up the last one, he wove backpack straps onto the sack and pulled them onto his shoulders. Then he turned on his heel and darted out the door, ready to make an escape.

But as the elevator began its slow descent towards him, he paced around the room and realized that there was no escape to be found. No windows or doors, because he was in a basement, and the air ducts were of course far too small to crawl through. If he didn't have the Klyntar vials, he would've been able to crawl past the elevator, but with that bundle on his back there was no room. If he wanted to save these Klyntar, he was trapped down here with them.

Well, decided Spider-Man as his pacing came to a stop directly in front of the elevator. If he was about to be discovered down here, he certainly wasn't going to let whoever was about to discover him get a dramatic moment about it. There would be no voice booming out from behind him as he frantically looked for a hiding place, there would be no cat and mouse as the person looked for him in this increasingly exposed room. He folded his arms and leaned against the guardrail right in front of the elevator, glaring at the doors. Waiting.

When the doors dinged open, Scrier momentarily hesitated, not having expected to see Spider-Man so out in the open. He blinked behind those blank white eyes, far more awkward than a supervillain wanted to be, before he lamely managed, "I thought that was you, Spider-Man."

[ccross520]

Magic is Bullshit, A Nexus Story

Science saved my life, not magic and not hopes and prayers. See I was killed by a man named Black Israel black, he used my membership in the crusaders as collateral for his reputation. I say I was dead because my body did die, I don’t remember all the details because he drugged me first. The worst part isn’t the dying part, it’s the not knowing, the feeling of uncertainty. I had to be told that I died when I woke up and no one knew the details and we never will. You may be asking why I said science brought me back, well it’s because my body died but I had my body cloned long ago and moved by memories and chemical makeup to that new body before the brain fully died. The whole process wiped so much of what was in my mind I stopped feeling like myself. So I had to rebuild my blanket slate and I was lucky enough to keep the genetic makeup of my brain that make me process information the way I do.

If you’ve never have had near brain failure you can lose parts of your memory and that is problematic to the human brain. They human brain hates holes, so whenever a gap of information exists the mind will fill in the blank with whatever it deems ‘most plausible’, trying to create a scenario that most likely happened, like ‘great value history’. So whenever I face things I don’t understand I go into Icospace. Icospace is a place I discovered years ago with Ethan Cutler and Era, it’s a space that can be reached mentally but I secretly created a way of moving your body there as well. This will allow you do physically. Imagine it, being able to create a space to freely explore your thoughts and make things that can be taken t the real world. This Iscospace is a place where time doesn’t work the same way it does on earth, time is closer to an illusion than a concrete fact. Based off my findings time works very similarly to REM sleep, but that can’t be measured since Dream time is disjointed on a faster time scale. The best way to describe it is how it feels not what it is, it feels like hours pass when in reality seconds pass. Ever had a full length dream within the five minutes you have after you hit the snooze button on your phone? That’s it. I’ve been in Icospace since the day I woke up and I’ve been working ever since. See here since time passes in a similar manner as it does in dreams I have spent years working in what I’ve called TALITIME. Healing the body takes time, true, but the mind, is far more complicated. I was gifted a new body but an old broken down mind. I’m a brand new Lexus with 300,000 miles on the engine and a shoty alternator.

I measured my time here in heartbeats or HBs. I’ve learned that heartbeats are the one constant here. I built a device that measures the frequencies and displays them on my watch instead of hours or minutes. I spent the first three HBs here studying the landscape, to see if it was more scientific or magic based, my conclusion shook me at my core, that magic isn’t real. Magic is based purely off perception and it is not a factual thing. At one point they used to say ‘Magic is in the air’ because at that time we didn’t know that atoms were in the air; electrons, protons, and isotopes populate creation. This shakes me because in my old life I was known as nexus, the master of magic and mystical energies, I thought I could see spells and incantations but in reality I was just watching isotopic exchange reactions, direct combustions and redox. I chased after what I thought was the truth but in reality was misdirection, shroud of misinformation. So now I chase the truth, the truth of science and hard facts. I brought 423 magical books down into this space after I relocated my office here; I broke down, reassembled and broke down again every ‘spell’ trying to understand its unique codex. I was successful on over 9,232 cases; only 130 were inconclusive so I needed to go beyond my checkered memory. I constructed devices to see the actual makeup of these aberrations; I can now see what makes magic itself tick with the flip of a switch. No more fairy tales, I’m going to drag the superstitious world out of the cold dark world into the future. I am Prometheus, I am Tesla, I am Scion. I choose the name Scion because I have built what I know based off the knowledge of greats long gone, I am their descendant. My ultimate goal is to crack the biggest mystery of my word, what are Relic humans.

See the human DNA strand splits three ways: Homo sapien with no discernible unique traits, Echo-sapiens who have the potential to have lateen superhuman abilities that activate during puberty onward and Relics, who are born with the ability to use ‘magical’ abilities with apparent cost as ‘magic’ usually does. My theory is that in reality these relics have an innate ability to bend but not break the universal laws of science while still adhering to them. They have to, without these rules there would be chaos and nothing stopping high level relics from doing whatever they want. When I was Nexus I spent hours a day studying the rules and confides of ‘spells’ meaning they did in fact have structure which would mean the users had limitations based off their understanding, like real science.

Reality is manageable like an app on your phone, you know the right code and you can hack it, relics are basically hacking programs with preset functions, cheat codes basically, it took me 5 HBs to come to this idea conclusively. I created a pair of glasses that can view the different types of wave length frequencies so I can better analyze the content of artifacts left behind by users. I’ll tell you a secret, something you’ve probably realized by now, the artifacts are radioactive and cause a reaction to things around it, pretending to be mystical but in reality are just simplistic science if you look hard enough you can pick it apart which I spent two more HBS doing and even mastering. Now I can pinpoint the specific radiation from over 100 meters away, my body is basically attuned to it.

I spent another 4 HBs learning surgery to operate on mystical beasts. I learned you need different kinds of devises to dissect these aberrations. I created a surgical knife that can cut any surface by slightly separating the atoms by weakening the electromagnetic force and strong force simultaneously now I admit its dangerous and I try not to use it because if don’t wrong it can end in death or worse. I hypostasize it’ll take 7 more HBs to perfect it. The three times I’ve used this knife I call ‘SHIVA’ was to work on a unicorn and an onyx rhino, it does work. I’ve cataloged every discovery and every invention in my book called the ‘Scion of Nexus’ when I finish it I may change the name. I’m thinking about….. “Magic is Bullshit”.

[buytabletsonline]

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As someone who primarily games on PC, my advice to anyone who’s looking to get into PC gaming is usually going to be to build their own. Up until recently, I would have written that my advice would be to always go the custom build route, but thanks to that thorn in the side of the gaming enthusiast known as cryptocurrency mining, that may not be entirely realistic for a while. In turn, this makes buying pre-built PCs a better proposition than it usually is, and there are plenty of manufacturers ready and waiting to fill the gaps. Lenovo is once such manufacturer, with its Y720 offering solid mid-to-high-range hardware in a mobile package.

Design

The Y720 looks much like the array of gaming-centric PCs from Lenovo, sporting a black color scheme accented by red. If you’ve seen a Legion-branded machine before, you know what to expect: something a little more subtle than your average gaming notebook, but still decidedly a laptop made for gamers.

There isn’t much in the way of external lighting on the Legion Y720. The Legion logo on the reverse side of the display lights up, but other than that, you’re left with an all black machine (save for another patch of red on the underside of the device that no one is ever going to see). I like the look of it overall, but one thing that’s become an annoyance for me is that the smooth and glossy finish on the outside of the laptop seems to be particularly good at attracting fingerprints and oils from your skin.

Obviously, even though this is an endlessly frustrating thing for me, it’s not a deal breaker. If I judged a laptop’s value by such a small annoyance, no machine would ever get a passing grade. Still, this might be something worth keeping in mind if you share this particular irrationality with me.

In the end, the Legion Y720 has a fairly unremarkable design, but that’s honestly the way I prefer it. If I’m going to carry a gaming laptop with me, I don’t need it to act as some kind of shining beacon that lets everyone know I’m using the computer. The black and red color scheme looks nice, and the limited external lights give this laptop a fairly mainstream look that doesn’t overdo it. If I had my way, more gaming laptops would practice subtlety in the way Lenovo has here.

Like every other gaming notebook out there, the Legion Y720 weighs a fair bit more than your standard notebook. There’s good reason for this, of course, as it’s packing more serious hardware than your standard notebook as well. With a weight that starts as 7.05 pounds (and goes up depending on your configuration), this isn’t exactly a light machine. Nor is it small – its 15.6 inch display and full-sized keyboard see to that. You’ll need to make extra consideration for space if you’re going to lug the Y720 around with you, but such is the life of a PC gamer with a preference for laptops.

Performance

Obviously, if you’re buying the Legion Y720 for anything, it’s not for looks, but to play games (or do other graphics-intensive projects like 3D rendering). For this, hardware obviously counts more than anything, and a gaming notebook that is lacking in suitable hardware will quickly be left behind and forgotten as manufacturers move to cram their machines with better and better parts.

In terms of power, the Legion Y720 is no slouch. The model I was sent for review is Lenovo’s top-of-the-line Y720, with a Core i7 7700HQ CPU clocked at 2.80GHz and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. This model also boasts 16GB of RAM, a 1TB 5400RPM Hard Drive, and a 512GB SSD.

The result of all of this hardware is a speedy little machine that’s fast to boot up and manages to avoid lag when doing most tasks. While the GTX 1060 isn’t NVIDIA’s best 10-series card (far from it, in fact), it’s more than likely going to be capable enough for whatever modern games you want to play on a laptop.

Does this mean that you’ll be able to max out graphics settings in each and every game for years to come? No, but for now, the GTX 1060 is a solid card that should allow for some very pretty games. For instance, the GTX 1060 is enough to meet the recommended requirements for the upcoming Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition, and I imagine that’ll be the case for a lot of graphics-intensive PC games for another year or two. In short: While the GTX 1060 may not offer as much power as its big brothers within the 10-series, it’s probably going to be a while before you begin to feel that rift in capability.

Indeed, for the time being, the GTX 1060 is a solid graphics card. In Divinity: Original Sin 2 – a game with no lack of impressive (and intensive) graphics – I found that cranking everything up to Ultra settings gave me a framerate that topped out around 100 in indoor environments without much on screen and bottoming out in the mid 70s during times when the PC had to render a bunch of objects and characters or when Original Sin 2’s wonderful particle effects filled the screen. The Ultra profile in D:OS 2 includes the highest settings for textures, lighting, and shadow quality; settings like ambient occlusion, god rays, and bloom turned on; and finally, 16x anisotropic texture filtering and SMAA.

So, the GTX 1060 certainly isn’t a slouch, though it won’t melt your face to the degree that the GTX 1080 can. Obviously, you’re going to want to keep the Y720 plugged into a power source as you’re playing, as trying to run a game while the laptop is running on battery will cause a significant drop in frame rate.

You can, of course, drop your graphics settings to compensate for this, but even then it still isn’t the most efficient way to play games on the Y720, as I only made it about an hour and 40 minutes from a full charge to the point where I was getting 10% battery life warnings while playing They Are Billions. Don’t let that give you anxiety about a potentially short battery life, as I got about 4 hours of life on a full charge when I was streaming video with the display at half brightness.

As an aside, it’s a bit confusing that Lenovo chose not to offer a Legion Y720 variant with a GTX 1070, even just for those who don’t mind paying extra as a means of future-proofing their notebook a little more. Regardless of which configuration you go with, you only ever have the option of a GTX 1060 with this notebook.

The review unit’s Intel Core i7-7700HQ and 16GB of RAM both help keep things going smoothly. With a Core i7, you’re not really going to have to worry about your CPU acting a bottleneck to gaming performance at any point in the near future, and unless you’re going to be doing things like video processing on this laptop in addition to gaming, you can honestly go for the base model, which ships with a Core i5-7300HQ.

While the base model only comes with 8GB of RAM, the good news there is that it’s also customizable, meaning that you can upgrade to 16GB for $100 more. This, I think, is worth the extra money – there was a point not too long ago where 8GB of RAM was suitable for a gaming rig, but we’re quickly approaching the point where 16GB will be considered standard. With many new and upcoming games suggesting 16GB in their recommended specifications, it’ll be much easier to pay a little extra than it will be to deal with the frustrations of hitting that ceiling later on.

The 15.6-inch IPS display Lenovo has outfitted the Y720 with is fairly solid as well. Though it isn’t matte like I would prefer with a gaming laptop, glare is not nearly the problem it is with other glossy finishes. Lenovo has treated the display with an anti-glare coating, and while it doesn’t stop glare from being an issue entirely, it does still cut down on it significantly. If I can’t have a matte display (which I understand doesn’t look all that great on a gaming laptop that is otherwise supposed to look sleek), I’ll definitely take something like this instead.

The 1080p LED display probably won’t blow your mind like a 4K desktop monitor will, but it’s perfectly suitable for this machine. Colors look rich and visuals are sharp, which is all you can really ask for at the end of the day, isn’t it? Anything else is just icing on the cake and borders on unnecessary when we also have to make concessions for battery life.

The trackpad and the keyboard are similarly “good enough.” Lenovo managed to resist going all-in on the RGB craze, and while the chiclet-style keyboard does have RGB backlighting, it’s zoned so you can’t make each individual key a different color or set up these crazy lighting patterns. You backlight is managed through Lenovo Sense, and even though the keyboard is zoned you still have plenty of options when it comes to customization, so I honestly can’t really say I miss having a backlight for each individual key.

The two-button trackpad does fine when it comes to browsing, but if you’re using this laptop for gaming (as is its stated purpose), you’re almost never going to use it. Get yourself a decent Bluetooth mouse and use that instead, because trying to play games with a trackpad – especially ones that require quick reactions – is really just inviting frustration.

Finally, we come to the Y720’s JBL speakers. These are something of an anomaly within the word of laptops, gaming or otherwise. The speakers seem to provide somewhat fuller sound than most laptops can (though bass is still lacking, unsurprisingly), but one interesting thing to note is that these bad boys can get loud. I think you should still get a nice pair of headphones or a headset to use while you’re playing games, but if that’s not an option after dropping the cash required for the Y720, the included speakers at least do a serviceable job.

Wrap-Up

In the end, the Lenovo Legion Y720 is a fine laptop, though it doesn’t really have much that makes it stand out from the crowd. As I said earlier, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because hardware – not software or design – is most important when it comes to gaming, and the stuff that’s packed inside this laptop is enough to ensure most games run well.

So, while I’m not about to sing the Y720’s praises from the mountaintop, I don’t have a problem suggesting that you at least consider the Y720 if you’re looking for a gaming notebook. This, of course, would normally be the time where I recommend that you build your own gaming PC instead of buying a pre-built, but there are two problems with that.

This first is obvious in that if you’re specifically looking to buy a gaming laptop for the portability factor, suggesting that you build a desktop instead is silly. Even if I could convince you to build a desktop instead, though, the second problem is that PC hardware is ridiculously overpriced at the moment. This means that pre-builts have a rare moment in the spotlight among enthusiast PC gamers, and the Y720 benefits from that.

Even though laptops aren’t my preferred form factor when we’re talking about PC gaming, those seeking one out should consider the Y720. Assuming you start with Lenovo’s base model – which is currently $1099 on Lenovo’s store – and make some tweaks from there, you should walk away with a solid gaming machine without ever having given the absurd prices of PC parts a second thought. Personally, I think that’s worth a lot at the moment.

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