#so instead of the character being a blank slate that the player gets to shape however they choose

[rocketbirdie]

lowkey funniest part of rebirth is when cloud dissociates BIG time while the costa del amor girls are making their pitch

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

In what ways would you change Yuu (or would you get rid of them entirely)? The writing feels inconsistent on their place/importance. If they were just a conduit for the player to watch the events unfold that's one thing but in another story they are an active player.

I'd personally play into the beastamer aspect more. They are supposedly the reason why Ace, Deuce, and Grim were able to work together thus I'd want them to have more agency in making plans, giving orders, etc. Rook calls them Trickster but in what way (lol). The vagueness of being a self insert pains me. I'd also want to give them some magically infused weapon (or has a magestone embedded) just so they aren't fodder or sideline material.

Mmm… As much as I dislike the blank slate self-insertiness of Yuu (I’d prefer to read about an actually realized character), I wouldn’t want to get rid of them altogether. I think they’re important for the role they serve in the narrative even if in execution is inconsistent and not done well.

The problem with “changing” Yuu is that there has to be a certain level of ambiguity due to the design of the game. You cannot give them too much personality or you risk alienating the audience that likes to project or self-insert. There’s also a limit to how much uniqueness a mobile game can lend its players characters; the format isn’t exactly known for having super in-depth player arcs, it’s known for their colorful casts of rollable characters. The devs have to toe that line carefully, not to mention juggle Yuu’s participation with letting the other characters shine. It is for this reason that I won’t be doing a total overhaul of Yuu or just deciding “give them a personality!” as what I’d change about them. Rather, I’ll be proposing alterations while thinking like a dev (ie preserving the current story and as much of the self-insertiness as I can while also trying to give Yuu more to do/say).

Now Yuu, being the outsider to this world, is perfectly poised to have others dump exposition on them. This serves the dual purpose of being able to diegetically explain things to the player. (We wouldn’t get this advantage if the player character was changed to be like… a Twisted Wonderland resident; you could explain some magic things to a layman, but a resident wouldn’t need more common knowledge like country names exposited to them. Were this the case, we’d need an additional excuse for Crowley to take in a native.) It’s also convenient to have them be the “eyes” for the player to experience the world through, since Yuu is able to conveniently be present for most major main story events. It essentially makes them a human-shaped video camera.

I’ve often heard people suggest that if we need a POV character, why not go with Grim since he basically serves the same purpose now anyway. My answer to that is: Grim is also an arrogant asshole who picks fights, just the same as any other NRC student. If Grim were the player character, he wouldn’t be contributing much or helping to guide the other students learn to get along. We need Yuu here to be that driving force for change because Grim simply isn’t capable of it when he’s instigating himself half of the time.

A smaller thing about Yuu that I love is the idea of them being the school photographer! (This is something that is shown in the second anniversary animated video too!) It gives us context for the cards we roll and it implies that Yuu is the one documenting these precious memories. I want Yuu to stay if only for this reason.

Personally, I wouldn’t make Yuu a combatant. This is antithetical to their role and I feel would instead work against them (or at least create a scenario where Yuu has to have some level of battle prowess; this impedes on the self-insert nature of them). Sticking a magic item in their hand makes little difference since they most likely wouldn’t know how to handle it in the moment. (Nor would a magicless human even be able to use some of them; for example, a magestone is completely useless to them.) A magicless human with no combat experience is just another liability to account for, not to mention it actively puts them in harm’s way. It might be cool in theory, but I think in practice it goes against the very concept of Yuu. They’re meant to be here to show that there is “another way” to the NRC students—that violence doesn’t solve all your problems, proof that you don’t need to be a powerful being to “change” others or the world around them. They’re supposed to be underestimated and not seen as much of a “real” fighter, and they’re supposed to prove those notions wrong by demonstrating their worth via other avenues. In this “the weak obey the strong” school, Yuu has to be the one to show them that strength comes in forms that are NOT magic power or battle prowess.

I feel that Yuu works best on the sidelines as a supporter and strategist. Strategy is, after all, half of the battle, and it’s a part that people tend to overlook in favor of the flashier fighters. But strategy is crucial and it can turn the tide against a formidable foe (as we see in the prologue)!! I think this is something the NRC students need to be made more aware of too, so Yuu should stay as the strategist; they just have to be given more opportunities to show off those skills!

With all of that being said, here is what I would change about Yuu:

Drop the beast tamer thing. It gets mentioned prominently like once in the prologue and then never becomes truly relevant. Maybe it’ll become important when it comes to taking down OB Grim, but that will be SO late in the main story that the payoff doesn’t seem worth it. There are no examples of Yuu’s beast taming skills ever being used in the main story, so the whole “oh you have the makings of a beast tamer” thing is so useless. If you really want to keep it, then let Yuu’s innate talent/skills for beast taming help them out at least once per main story book. This means I’d want to see instances of Yuu getting other creatures (ie not just Grim) to help them out.

Allow Yuu the agency to act on their own when it comes to finding a way back to their own world. Going home is so often relegated to a single line or a few sentences and then not addressed again until next book. Have Yuu take initiative instead of waiting around for updates from Crowley. They should go out and ask questions, investigate on their own, etc. Maybe have them get involved in each book’s conflict because they happen to get mixed up in it while conducting research instead of being TOLD to go and fix a problem. Book 6 marks the only real time I can think of Yuu making a drastic decision against Crowley’s advice. It puts them at great risk, and that’s something they’re willing to take for the sake of saving their friends. We need more moments like this throughout the rest of the story. However, Yuu won’t be allowed to do whatever they want unrestricted because 1) it falls out of the scope of a mobile game title and 2) we want to largely retain the capacity to self-insert. So when I say give Yuu more agency to act, I mean it ONLY in the sense of being more proactive in their efforts to get home.

Add a short comment or two from other characters depending on which dialogue options are picked for Yuu. It would be too ambitious to incorporate a full-on branching storyline or strong “choose your own adventure” elements, but at least have the other characters consistently comment on whatever brief dialogue option Yuu has rather than ignoring them 90% of the time. This wouldn’t alter the story in any way but it sure would be nice to have a little more flavor text and more of Yuu actually being acknowledged as present.

Yuu should fully commit to being a planner and strategist. We get to see this aspect of Yuu like once or twice in the prologue (when they tell Grim where to spit fire at the ghosts/planning how to beat the Phantom in the mines) and then are left to extrapolate this to the rest of the game. Maybe you can argue they figured out Azul’s scheme in book 3 too, but this isn’t good enough. If you’re going to set up the idea, then have consistent segments in each book that reinforces that idea. Have Yuu brainstorm ways to jailbreak in book 4, have Yuu be perceptive enough to notice that Malleus isn’t feeling great in book 7 (only for Malleus to brush them off/insist he has a solution), etc.

Have a short story segment that explains how or why Yuu earns their nickname “Trickster” from Rook. We got this with Floyd, so the other known nicknamer should reveal this, especially since the name “Trickster” implies intelligence and cunning. Yuu should have an opportunity to demonstrate this (in book 5 maybe?), which earns them Rook’s respect and the new title. This should also be informed by other parts where Yuu shows how smart they can be.

More time bonding with Grim. I say Grim specifically because I commonly see him as a hated character in part because of how he “steals lines/time” away from Yuu. (Adeuce and Malleus are fine as they are because the former already stick up for/help Yuu out and the latter is meant to stay mysterious until late in the main story.) This means that if you don’t already like Grim, the whole “Yuu chases them to Styx HQ to save Grim” plot point in book 6 rings hollow. To truly build a bond with Grim, please give us moments prior to book 6 that show how much they care for one another and are linked to each other as partners. Times when Grim causes inconveniences for Yuu don’t count. Give me instances of them cuddling at night or talking to each other about their hopes and dreams or whatever. This would establish the value that Grim sees in Yuu, as well as the value that Yuu sees in Grim. It makes it more believable that Grim would cry when he’s alone or realizes he hurt his partner, and that Yuu would defy the headmaster’s advice and put themselves at risk to save Grim.

Better incorporate the ghost camera and its usage in the main story. The ghost camera provides an in-universe explanation for gaming meta (ie the card illustrations); in the main story, it’s hardly ever mentioned save for its introduction in the prologue and when Yuu takes a picture of Mickey with it. What should happen instead is Yuu will take a picture of the characters involved in that chapter. This way, it’s a physical reminder of the time everyone spent together and the bonds they’ve developed. It further strengthens the idea of the students learning to get along and Yuu being there to facilitate that while also keeping the ghost camera relevant.

More time where Yuu actually bonds with/“changes” the other characters. One huge gripe I have with the main story is that we’re TOLD that Yuu’s presence changes and improves the boys for the better, that they teach them how to get along. Very little of the actual main story supports this (outside of the prologue). At best, Yuu has a very short chat with some of the OB boys at the end of their respective book. Yuu should have a little more time in this regard. I don’t know, maybe Idia is still struggling to socialize when he comes over to play video games at Ramshackle so Yuu has to gently encourage him to give it a try or says something to help include him in the conversation. Little things like that! Keep the strong interactions the other characters have in changing the OB boys (like Trey being the one to rush to Riddle’s side, the twins teasing Azul, etc.), but have Yuu help facilitate them opening up emotionally and being vulnerable with one another.

This last point is debatable (I keep changing my mind about it), but possibly make a point of showing how Yuu is adjusting to this new world. This honestly might mess with the self-insert aspect (which is why I debated to leave this out), but I also feel like it might be interesting to reinforce Yuu’s desire to go home h demonstrating homesickness or issues with settling into Twisted Wonderland.

To summarize, the changes I’d make largely involve making TWST commit to briefly mentioned details (that they largely don’t follow through on) and making Yuu actually do a little more to warrant crediting them with resolving issues + fostering friendships. A lot of the problems that exist now are due to promising a lot but then poorly executing on what was promised.

[callioclops]

I want to share a little bit about my time with Danganronpa V3, because I had what I would consider quite a unique experience with it. I think I owe my love of this game in part to how everything shaped out. There will be spoilers for the ending so be warned.

I played through the Danganronpa trilogy around 2020. I went in completely blind, so much so that on getting through the prologue of the first game I declared to my friends that I was going to go for a deathless run. It isn't that kind of series, I thought it was much more open ended rather than a concrete story. I'd enjoyed my time with 1 and 2, and was enjoying V3 even more. But then the game crashed. It was quite an unfortunate time for the crash, at the end of trial 4. I hadn't saved since the beginning of the trial, which would mean about 2 hours of gameplay solving a mystery I already knew to get back to where I was. Though I was willing, my computer saved me the trouble and for whatever reason could not load into the game anymore. I never finished V3.

What I did instead was watch a no commentary playthrough of chapters 5 and 6 on youtube. I missed out on the gameplay of the trials and I couldn't choose the free time events I invested in, but it was a solid alternative. There was a certain disconnect though. Even though Shuichi isn't by any means a blank slate protagonist, the fact that I wasn't making the active decision to engage with each conversation did take me out of the story enough to where I was just viewing it, not partaking in it. Those of you who know the ending may see where I'm going with this.

On first watch I was thoroughly disappointed with the ending of this game. The reveal of the entire game franchise being a series of games and anime in-universe felt strange, I didn't like how the characters handled this confrontation that they are a work of fiction. I didn't like the meta-ness of the whole thing. I wanted the characters to do something, anything.

I was the audience.

I was the audience that in game was chiming in with complaints about the state of the game. "This is getting way too meta", "Just kill each other already". My frustrations with the ending were being echoed back at me from the group that is, at the very least according to the game, in the wrong. And after I got through the final trial and the epilogue, I sat on how I felt about the ending for a couple of weeks.

I think being forced to separate myself from these characters made a huge impact on the way I viewed the ending and, with the ending in mind, the entire game as a whole. And I eventually came to the conclusion that the game wants you to hate it. As someone with a vested interest in the story, knowing that these characters aren't real, you want not what's best for them, but what's the most entertaining or thought-provoking for you. You aren't meant to find the ending satisfying. It isn't a satisfying ending, in fact it isn't really an ending at all. And that's the point. These are real people suffering under horrifyingly inhumane conditions, and you're more concerned with the story? You don't deserve a story from them. They don't owe you a story. They deserve to live.

Ironically I think part of that is lost as a player rather than a spectator. Which is why my game crashing is the best thing that could have happened to me while playing V3. I owe a lot of my love for this game to that one hardware error.

[basedonconjecture]

I hear what you're saying and I don't totally disagree on the point of wishing to see more consequences explored. Please know I'm not trying to fight with you or be aggressive or anything, I think your opinion is valid, so this is less directed at you and more at this general complaint as a whole. Because I just...don't think that's the kind of story they were trying to tell in Veilguard specifically.

It's telegraphed repeatedly that to successfully gather your allies against the larger threat, you have to help them sort out their personal affairs so they're free to help you. Consider, also, that from the beginning Rook is being told they're going to have to make hard choices with the implication being for the success of the mission. Rook is being tasked with being a leader by a man who refused to give up on his friend even when that friend's whole goal is, to their knowledge, to destroy the world as they know it. Varric's last real order to them is to take care of the team. The individuals working with you. The people. This is (imo) intended to be in juxtaposition with Solas who is willing to sacrifice whoever and whatever he has to for the larger goal. Rook isn't a completely blank slate of a protagonist that you, the player, get to wholesale create. They have a backstory. They have loyalties. And they serve a specific narrative purpose, the choices you do get to make determine what that purpose is. Keeping in mind that Rook's story is meant to parallel the Dread Wolf's, they can either become his mirror by trying to "fix" their mistake and focusing only on the Evanuris to the exclusion of everything else. Or they can become a mirror of Varric, someone who cares so much about people that they would not sacrifice them in pursuit of their own goals. There is no room for these horrible choices people are fond of bringing up nor is there time. Rook doesn't have armies. Rook has a group of experts in their field who help them gain assistance from their respective factions because the threat is larger than them. Even if they don't care about their companions as people, it is still impractical to encourage any decisions that would undermine their assistance. But through all of that, the question is still not "How does Rook shape these individual's lives?" because they shape their own lives, ultimately, and they trust Rook to give them advice as someone they look to to lead. Instead, the question is, more broadly, "Does Rook care about these people or are they a means to an end?"

If the answer to that question, for you, is the latter, then Rook would not care enough what Lucanis (or any of the companions) do to resolve their problems in order to give input, frankly. They're not even in the room because it's not their problem to deal with. Their problem is the Evanuris. That's why the quests are optional. And if it's the former, why would there be a choice to encourage something against not only their best interest but also their character? These big companion quests are all late game so presumably Rook knows them well enough by now to know what they'd be receptive to hearing. Even if you don't see them as friends, they are still co-workers who have to work together, any decision in opposition of that would be illogical. If you could purposefully make (or encourage your companions to make) awful decisions, they'd simply never make it to Tearstone. If they miraculously did, Rook would never get out of the Fade prison. Yes, I agree that I wish there'd been more weighty decisions to make with bigger consequences. However, I am not in the camp that those decisions have to be bad/evil to be impactful in relation to Veilguard specifically. Those kinds of decisions just don't work with the story they're trying to tell. This isn't a good vs. evil story at it's core. Elgar'nan and Ghilan'nain are the villains but they're secondary antagonists to Solas, a man so trapped by his regrets and mistakes that, while he meant to do good once, can now only see the forest and is ignoring the trees that will be razed if he's successful. You are not meant to want to follow that path. You are not meant to want to make horrible decisions. In fact, it is imperative that you fully consider your choices so you're making the best ones you can. All of them. Including whether or not you, the player, do specific side quests. This is a thing that is repeated to you and it's why there aren't these truly horrendous ones to make because you're actively supposed to be considering only the best ones. So that, when you face them all in the end, that's where your choices matter. That's where the impact of them is. Either you've centered your team around the people in it or around the goal and history repeats itself ad infinitum.

I kept writing a whole long rant on why there is no “Kill Illario” option but the mobile app keeps eating entire paragraphs so it’s probably a sign I should give up.

Anyway, in no universe, under any circumstances where he has a choice, would Lucanis kill his cousin and the suggestion itself ignores everything he’s said/done up to that point.

[came0dust]

finally took off the limiters (read: plugged in my tablet instead of just drawing on my phone) so i got to use layers and select tool and an actually workable canvas size so i started with hc/design stuff for the captain. chickenscratch transcriptions and elaboration under the cut. (this old agent 3/captain's name is typhoon and they use they/he!)

it is once again a late-night drawing/posting moment where im choosing to post immediately instead of potentially just not releasing anything bc i got cold feet after waking up the morning after. i'm making an effort to make sense but if anything is not comprehensible or you just want more details, the ask box is open. i'd love to talk about what ive got for any of my characters so far! moving along in about the order i drew/wrote things in, let's start here

left text: "10-year consecutive 'worst posture' award winner."

right text: "(its okay they don't have bones)"

i started off drawing them doing The Thing that is captain's idle pose for the majority of the game but i didnt like the first sketch so i was like "okay i want a Good line of action and then im gonna build around that" and this is what came of it. they just like extremely twisted around and would absolutely be destroying their spine if they had one bc that was just the flow of the sketch apparently. i was gonna also color this but i didnt really like how it was going and i started losing the details of the pose the longer i went (i dont really like how the look of the clothes came out and it probably shows) so i just kind of left it.

right text (it was written first) 1: "eyebrow tapers on the outside / [drawing of a default masculine inkling eyebrow from a front-facing angle, labeled:] in-game default / vs / [drawing of typhoon's eyebrow from the same angle, labeled:] typhoon"

right text 2: "wide eyeshape / [drawing of typhoon's eye from the front without the accompanying inkling mask] / curves higher up than down"

right text 3: "somewhat squared jaw"

right text 4: "(his) right eye (including mask) is damaged from The Goopening still, even five years later"

left text 1: "ears more 'elf ear'-ish / compare"

left text 2: "the kiddos [representing the overall player inkling design, roughly 14]" / "typhoon [who is 21, as they were 14 during the events of splatoon 1, which was 7 years ago now. i dont want to get super long-winded in the middle of transcription so hold these tidbits for a second]¹

left text 3: "squisters"

left text 4: "okay i do actually just wanna draw frye now"

bottom text: "vaguely hostile autistic gaze (there is nothing to point to for this one)"

ive been doing a lot of jumping around fleshing out my splatoon ocs (which currently consists primarily of my agents) and like essentially reentering my splatoon mind. to start with, each of my player agent ocs were on some level self-inserts of differing amounts (i mean theyre literally like. inkfish you to a certain extent. like in many respects theyre pretty much blank slates by design (or lack thereof as promo material just uses one of the default options which are by no means mandatory given the whole player settings screen existing and yknow. being acknowledged. you get it right)) but by now they're pretty separate. there are some more overarching themes to them though that im keeping in, like a sort of longing for identity in the transition from teenager to adult where others seem to be more realized. if that makes sense. finding and wrangling with one's senses of identity and purpose so far is a thing for all of these guys. gee i wonder where that came from. anyways the thought i had to like cut out for flow is actually not going to be that great to do that to bc i was thinking i'd segue into that but i didnt like this next part is more of a design thought

¹my current working hc which informs the designs of my splatoon ocs so far includes the idea that ear shape is something that can vary not just from person to person but also with age and that the thinner, pointed, more traditionally "elf-like" ear (seen in the squid sisters, grandpa cuttlefish, and frye, as examples) might be more common the older an inkling is, compared to the blunter, more equilateral triangle-ish shape from the younger player inklings and others. of importance, this isn't hard and fast, not even to typhoon's design, as i can also very easily come back to it later and be like "hm. yeah i dont actually feel like doing this for them", but i was thinking about the ear shape from that inkling development chart from however many years ago and was like .. okay actually i don't remember what i thought in detail im really about to conk out honestly. but for example, dallas (my agent 4), who's just 2 years younger doesn't have the elf-y ears either (well hes not supposed to, but i dont think it really showed last post 💀) because that's just not how his ears look or will look (likewise for a less fleshed out non-agent character who is also an inkling and of a similar age). not to mention, of course, the many band members who are inklings with the triangular ears, as the idea is again that the elf-ear look becomes More common with age, not that it Is common immediately. even still, though, typhoon's ears arent the exact same shape as callie and marie's either, but more sort of in between them and the player inklings. all this to say, my goal is in part to have some variety more particular to splatoon than just general humanoid frame things outside of the hairstyles bc thats something that i have struggled with and so as it stands im basically tossing things at the wall to see what sticks and either working from there or tearing it all down and starting over.

anyways i like to also draw typhoon's tentacles down. the shapes are fun. sometimes they want them away from their face but sometimes they don't care

long-ass tangent aside, here comes another one unless i immediately decide i would rather be asleep now that it's almost 3am

left 1, ripley (new agent 3): "Are they... okay?"

left 2, callie: "Oh, they're just like that!"

right: "Actually just kind of spacey, they give off a sometimes imposing energy. Bad at communicating otherwise, they tend to just kind of go with it. Overall naturally deadpan, surprisingly oblivious a lot of the time."

i dont know why i started going pokedex mode there but i do know it was before 1am when i wrote that. i have a Bunch of shit written down in various places (personally. i don't have very much more than the barest introductory stuff up yet bc of the fact that im still ironing out a bunch of these things) and it was at this point that i realized i cant really distill it into notes but i'll explain a little bit. splatoon 1 was huge for me as a budding artist and someone like. beginning to actually Think about things? it was the first thing i really found myself world-building with, it was a huge factor in me having realizations about myself, and even if retroactively so (after all, taunt parties were a thing in brawl and i played the shit out of that), got me thinking about video game communication and (likely not the right term) pseudo-languages and a whole bunch of other things. some of these don't directly relate to typhoon's development but what does relate to it is .. oh the train of thought literally disappeared actually. uh.

the text next to the signature: "back at it again with the clipped studio at fucking midnight" [it is 3am now]

oh yeah right shit. neurodivergence. as was bestowed unto me, i hath bestoweth It upon Mine Cephalopodes. that was the train of thought probably. i took the way i end up just kind of Not looking when i start thinking sometimes and exaggerated it to be possibly a little unnerving bc i just think it would be fun to have typhoon just end up looking accidentally a bit creepy bc shit man i be feeling like that sometimes. he just like me fr. i have more words but not the time im sleepy honk shoo

[ardeawritten]

Halo 4

The game-player in me is thrilled with the very pretty levels, new weapons, flashy enemies and more creative, less linear methods of level progression/interaction. Lovely soundtrack as always, though the random peppy upbeat music overlaid on a race-to-save earth battle is still hilarious. This game was fun and enjoyable to play, a great few evenings' worth of distraction and some nice catharsis for a little current-events-related attitude. The last quarter felt like a meat-grinder slog, but then, it's endgame of an FPS. What else is it going to be?

The writer in me is rolling their eyes.

(there’s an whole essay under the cut) ((I really hope these cuts work on all platforms, if not I am sincerely sorry; it’s like a thousand words long))

Ok, so the first three games were a fairly standard blank-slate FPS protagonist. Play as an armored super-soldier fighting to save Humanity from the Monsters, with a Sexy AI Sidekick and some Battle Buddies. Not what I'd call high art in gaming, but I can understand its popularity and the enduring appeal of a simple, straight-forward "if it moves shoot it" style of play. No escort missions, no puzzles, really no boss battles requiring tricks and analysis. Just "if that didn't kill it, keep shooting or use a bigger gun."

Writing-wise, there's not a lot of characterization but overall Indications that MC is well-recognized, well-liked, has a sense of humor and a camaraderie with his co-workers, is pals with his Sexy AI and is a generally level-headed person-shaped brick. It's an early 2000's Military FPS, it's not about the characters, it's about role-playing as an indestructible military hero who always saves the girl. It's the game equivalent of John Carter of Mars-genre action hero stories (books, not movie.) This does not absolve it of the crime of woman-as-sexy-or-dead, but it is par for the course.

So on to game #4. 

This game was released in late 2012, in a post-Mass Effect gaming market. #4 has a ME2/3 feel to it, which makes sense. They're both very popular flashy scifi action games with similar graphics/design feel (and with Sexy AIs but that's another conversation about the literally unreal 'idealization' of womanhood in a male-dominated creator/created space!)

It opens with the storyline revelation that MC is a brainwashed and conditioned child-soldier, alleges he's got some issues with performing basic human functions and clarifies that Cortana's existence is the "band-aid" applied to that problem. On the MC side, Cortana's expiration date has passed and she's fragging out, giving MC a personal reason to want to get home. This combines to give the player a sense of urgency- if Cortana dies, it's not just "sad," it's "MC will lose his band-aid and all his humanity will bleed out." This is also I think the first time the POV is, narratively-speaking, third-person (we know things MC doesn't or couldn't know) instead of solely first-person (I'm not counting Arbiter’s story as breaking first-person, as it's still limited to player character POV.)

As a Writer, here's my issues: 

- MC is given a traumatic backstory as a brainwashed child-soldier to what? Justify a damaged emotional state, as if emotional wounding and isolation isn't a very common, very human point to reach after having experienced and participated in war at any age? Justify being unable to function without Cortana’s hand-holding? And then the game never goes back and addresses that opening cut-scene. 

- Cortana's existence had a built-in, known expiration, but she was still (retconned?) created to provide MC his primary band-aid. Either this was extremely short-sighted of the Spartan R&D team, or MC likewise was expected to expire on the same timeline. There's no talk of planning ahead for this problem that would render an extremely expensive asset fundamentally useless. (ok there’s Cortana’s “they’ll pair you with someone else but it won’t be me” line, but that isn’t exactly smoothing the transition any.)

- We the audience/player now know Cortana's death will have personal, negative repercussions on the MC's health outside of grief and trauma over loss of a friend and partner. She exists solely for his benefit, and must continue existing for his benefit, and the plot's urgency driven forward by his need to continue benefiting. It's not about saving Cortana, it's about saving MC. This would be fine if her character existence was framed as "computer service program," but it isn't. Prior to this game, narrative and gameplay repeatedly tells the audience she's a character and not just MC's security blanket.

- The above, coupled with her "stock naked lady sexy" design, has Implications of how the writing team figured they could fit a female character into their narrative. So far we have A) woman who fails to complete a heroic sacrifice and is shot in the back and dies pointlessly, B) woman whose visual and intellectual existence is tailored solely to benefit the MC and has no autonomy outside of that existence and C) woman as 'fallen mother/evil crone' who perpetrated the brainwashing on the MC. (Female Spartan in the mammoth got a whole three lines; female scientist with a bag of nukes? She… died pointlessly.)

(I swear I did not intend this to be an analysis of female roles in the Halo main game franchise but hey, my first memorable introduction to the FPS genre was Mysteries of the Sith where, playing as female jedi Mara Jade, you save the guy by making him acknowledge the value of a non-romantic peer relationship! That game was made in 1997.)

For Cortana, in 1 I got the impression she was a shipboard AI like EDI in Mass Effect, not an AI specific to MC. Her characterization feels like it's been shifted each game from a warship AI capable of coordinating fleet-wide maneuvers and going toe-to-toe with Guilty Spark to a cowering captive of Gravemind needing physical rescue to a Pocket Pal for MC to cover for his emotional shortcomings and inability to interact with technology more complex than "a button."

Having an AI programmed to be essentially a therapy dog or social caretaker, and exploring the complexities of that role related to the invisible and unquantifiable damage violence visits on the human body and brain would be a very interesting story. An AI designed for coordinating war on a massive scale who despite "winning" each battle finds its platform systematically reduced until the only "ship and crew" left are just one person would also be an interesting story! Why are we left with "my girlfriend's dying and I'm going to starve because she's the only one who knows how to cook."

tl;dr: the opening cutscene was detrimental to the plot, characterization and world-building. The game would have been fine as a story about a soldier coming to terms with his best friend’s inevitable death while trying to save the planet, and would have preserved Cortana’s game 1 identity as an autonomous AI who lost her ship and partnered up with MC of her own free will. The ending of “we saved each other, if just for a little while, and will grieve but will continue on” would have been stronger IMO than “I’m going to save you-I’m going to save you-NOPE.”

[warsofasoiaf]

Hi again, just a friendly reminder for you about Disco Elysium. I played it myself 2 weeks ago and I thought it was a wonderful game, looking forward to hear your opinion.

Here’s the weekend reminder about disco elysium: at some point I’d like to hear your thoughts about Kim and the deserter, but I’m sure you have a lot of first thoughts about the game’s narrative and styles at large and the overall themes ?

Yep, I’ve got many thoughts on Disco Elysium. Overall, I found it an incredibly enjoyable throwback to the classic role-playing games of the old Infinity Engine in a good way. It’s dialogue-driven in the way Planescape: Torment was, but was confident enough to avoid the pitfalls of combat that punctuated the D&D games in favor of a mechanical challenge of skill checks. All conflict is done through dialogue, either through picking a dialogue choice or engaging in a skill check. The game also helpfully gives you feedback, not only in your skill totals, but in how your actions influence the choices you’ve made. Did you take the corrupt union boss’s check? He has you over a bit of a barrel so it’s harder to resist him. Did you impress Cuno with your marksmanship by shooting down the body? You have a bonus to impress him since you’ve already done it before. This sort of openness with the mechanics of the game helps smooth over understanding of the functions, as well as reinforce the themes. Since everything you do is in the dialogue trees, and all of these choices occur in dialogue, it stresses careful reading of the dialogue box as opposed to something you just blow through to get quest markers or goodies.

Alright, let’s talk about the plot. Since there will be spoilers and it’s a relatively recent game, I’m going to throw a cut in here.

One of the chief themes of the game is sadness and loss, it’s written all across the setting. Heck, it’s even written into the name. Disco is the archetypical music genre that is dead, despite its followers wishing that it could come back. Elysium, the afterlife of Greek mythology. It was a failed communist revolution followed by a failed monarchist rebellion followed by a capitalist invasion, and now exists as a pit of corruption, crime, and plenty of people within Martinase look back to the lost days by cleaving to the old political systems as a source of comfort. Communists and monarchists look back to the old communes that were established, capitalists look to the successful Coalition and the ability of capital to absorb its naysayers and failures into itself for success, and the moralists look at the other three and say “you extremists are absolutely insane!” and hold to their own centrist platform and the path of incremental caution. This is hardly unusual in our own history, with far too many historical examples to list here. There’s a longing there for something that is lost, the people you meet in the game are lost, even what seems to be simple comedic beats have their own secret wishes, like Cuno who ends up helping you in the final act if you lose Kim, and can even become a junior police officer once out of the thumb of Cunoeese. Harry can sing the saddest song about the littlest church, and it’s a perfect expression of his regret, as his reptile brain lets him know. The deserter is lost in regret, albeit an incredibly negative sort. He curses those who are not ‘committed’ like him, who aren’t willing to murder like him. He looks at the Rene, the old monarchist with his boule, and wishes only to pull the trigger and silence him. 

The main character you inhabit is a great twist on the blank slate character that dominates the ‘western RPG.’ The main character starts the game passed out in his own drug-fueled excess. Where most RPG’s either expect reading a large lore dump (this was the case with the Forgotten Realms Infinity Engine games, which expected people to know who Cyric or Auril was) or largely wave it off with bland exposition, this was a game that made what happened an integral part of your character. What drives such a man to try and destroy himself so completely? Going through the game reveals the answer: it’s Dora, your ex-wife. Before, your obsession with your job (your case load, as noted by Kim, is exceptionally high), seemed to be at odds with your character’s penchant for substance abuse and overall instability, but exploring the failed relationship with Dora sheds new light on Harry DuBois. Dora was a wealthy woman, and your character was clearly a member of the lower classes given his demeanor and salary. Your character tried to immerse themselves in the work perhaps to earn more money, or simply to earn prestige to help alleviate the mismatch. It didn’t work, Dora left six years ago, and the detective has been alone ever since. By calculating the ‘cop tracks’ that the character can be on, the game can populate dialogue with references to the behavior, allowing the character to fill out aspects of themselves in a character-driven way. Tyranny did this with its campaign character generation, and Disco Elysium does it here. Such things are always going to be niche in RPG’s, the driving trend these days is instead make a completely blank character and have them be built out from actions taking place in the game world, but this typically leads to characters who rationalize performing optimal paths and who do everything the game offers in the world, which translates either into a lot of time doing repetitive content (in order to built up other character builds to the same level of mastery to the original build) or leads to ludo-narrative dissonance at the ease of which the character plows through the content, like becoming the Arch-Mage in Skyrim without being able to cast a single adept-level spell.

However, that isn’t to say that Harry is alone. Instead, the detective is quite a crowd is his own head, with the 24 various skills that he has developed largely advising, suggesting, yelling, and talking over each other. This was almost certainly part of the reason the original name of the game was “No Truce with the Furies.” The Furies, in Greek mythology were embodiment of vengeance, primal feelings that sought out their goals. These 24 skills in your head almost cannot be compromised with, only accepted or rejected. They’ll yell inside your own head to listen to them. Electrochemistry wants its next fix, Volition is certain that Klaasje is trying to manipulate you and wants you to slap cuffs on her right now, Physical Instrument wants you to show everyone who’s boss with fists while Authority wants the same with words. This was almost overwhelming at first, 24 characters to figure out in addition to my own character as well as Kim, Cuno, Joyce, Everett, and the Hanged Man made me wonder what exactly I was going to do. What was the difference between Volition and Composure, or Shivers and Inland Empire? It helps on a replay once you figure out what the skills actually mean and can help shape your character into your preferred vehicle for exploring Revanchol West. Dealing with these characters can be fun, insightful, and incredibly heartwarming, as the player can understand when they finally find out that Reptile Brain and Limbic System are simply trying to help Harry out with the loss of his ex-wife by trying to get rid of the sad feelings as best they can. 

What helps with this though, is that failing skill checks is not a death sentence. One of the most annoying things in games comes when you depend upon success after success that is out of your control, it encourages save-scumming behavior. This isn’t to say that failure isn’t a valuable learning experience or that difficulty is something to be avoided; the enduring popularity of the Soulsborne genre suggests that difficulty is not itself a bad thing. But failure typically has to be fair. If instead a game drops you in a room with 25 gorgons, forcing you to roll 25 checks against petrification or die immediately, that’s not challenge, that’s just padding the length of the game by forcing repeat content. Disco Elysium instead makes failure, particularly of red skill checks, either entertaining or allowing alternate paths. I laughed with absolute glee when my character took off from Garte yelling at him about the trashed hotel room which ended up becoming a full sprint while flipping him the bird, causing me instead to run over the nice wheelchair-bound old lady, in true black comedy fashion, or that you can get into a nodding war with Kim that’s so intense that you actually break your neck. That the game offers so many different methods to the same path helps elevate the role-playing elements.

Similarly, one of the best moments of game design was when you looked at the billboard to find out where Ruby could have gone. It’s a difficult Shivers check, which might force people into an insurmountable wall if they haven’t upgraded their Shivers skill. However, doing stuff in the fishing village, from going on a date with the harpoon girl to tracking down what went on with the body on the boardwalk, gives you bonuses to the check, encouraging the character to perform the side quests and explore the bonus content. 

The game’s side content really does reward some more of the Dirk Gently type of character that sees connectivity in anything. The old lady reading outside the bookstore doesn’t have a missing husband only to later be the wife of the man who died on the boardwalk, or that a grounded character won’t walk out into the water to speak with the apparition of Dora as the mythical Dolores Dei (another great reference to what was lost, the lost wife seen as the lost mythic Moralist conqueror and crusader) means that the more grounded character does have the more grounded, less intense story. But the short length encourages replayability, and the idea that a grounded character has a more grounded story is in it’s own way a commitment to the game’s overall vision, even if it means you miss out on a key insight the first time around.

I’m incredibly impressed at how the developers stuck to their visions and the finished product that they developed. My hat is off to them.

Thanks for the question, Khef, the multiple Anon’s who reminded me, TBH, and everyone else who was looking forward to this essay.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[fantroll-purgatory]

Itcha gal back from like August with Trinel’s kismesis’s moirail

Name: Tabula Auctor- Both are Latin for something to do with writing, but I can’t remember exactly what.

Tabula usually means tablet/table, and is most Famously known in the phrase Tabula Rasa, or Blank Slate, which has some interesting implications. 

Auctor is latin for Author or Originator, but in science it’s also the term used to describe the genetic donator for a clone. 

Since you gave her Two-writing based names, and these very interesting and multi-meaning ones particularly, I might gently try to pull in that themeing in her personality/interests/backstory, etc. 

For the Auctor name most directly, something interesting could be… Maybe Tabula’s ancestor was as interested in Descendants as Auctor is interested in Ancestors, and maybe… Tabula is a slightly more direct clone of her ancestor than ectobiology would Usually do. A Weird and major glitch in the system, maybe not a Direct copy but something very, very close to it.  

Age: 7.5

Strife Specibus: Staffkind- Taller than she is and with a box-thing on the end for looping around necks and stalig-whatevers.

I’m kind of tempted to say pickax instead, the double-sided kind. It’s a tool that… common enough in archaeological circles, as long as you’re careful with it, and it’s double-headed. You could also use it to hook around someone like one might with a scythe, given the head of the ax is big enough. 

Fetch Modus: Dig modus- Basically, a jumble of cards she had to sift through.

Ooo, you could make it more explicit and make it one of those dig kits. 

But instead of shells it’s her items and if she digs too hastily, she might break them.

Blood color: Cusp- Between gold and bronze.

I know you probably already know this, but I’ve got to acknowledge anyways that this is noncanon. But I’m gonna let you keep it anyways because I imagine that’s what you’re Goin’ For and I think her being in a weird blood place makes the direct cloning even more fun. 

Symbol and meaning: A tall rectangle with a line through- I tried to make it a light mix of bronze and gold signs.

I’ll take another look at the sign when we get to design, so we’ll see!

Trolltag: guardedTraveler

I kinda wanna recommend ancestralSapience, if her interest in ancestors is such an important part of her theme it makes sense to make a reference to it in her trolltag. Sapience is the ability to self-reflect and act with self-wisdom, or in response to learned information. 

Quirk: tHe quick browN fox…

You don’t explain why this, but it is good. I think since she’s somewhat fixated on the past, you could also have her have a quirk of going back to previous messages or repeating previous messages and saying things like “as per my last message […]” a lot.

Special Abilities (if any): Used to have psionics, but lost them when voidrot knocked out her psionic eye

We definitely still haven’t seen for sure Exactly how voidrot works or if it can only infect void players, so keep in mind that going forward this could be revealed to be very noncanon. I think it’s interesting if it was happening to her because she really technically is a glitch in the system and the universe is struggling to cope with her, though. 

Lusus: Cyedog; small fox-thing with one eye and wings.

We don’t really see Traditionally Winged creatures until we get up to like teal (there’s only really buggy wings until that point), and her theme isn’t really Flighty enough for me to say wings would be a necessary addition anyways. 

What if we go instead with like… a two-headed sheep? As a Dolly The Sheep jokey, it references the dual themes of the golds And the farmy themes common in brownbloods, too. 

Personality: Big block of text I pulled off my mastodon and slightly edited;

she’s a huge ancestor fangirl and probably the only troll who actively hunts in caves for old scrolls and shit. she’s 4'11, 7.5 sweeps, and has a heavy faygo drinking problem- in fact, it’s gotten bad enough that the soda barely affects her at all, like the radioactiveness in a banana. her moirail, vittah, is a vriskablood that does ribbon dancing and, when she gets to visit, tries to crack on tabby’s habits but yknow. also- tabs hates the theater. vittah’s kismesis won’t shut the fuck up about it- he’s a famous playwrite. She does genuinely care for vittah, and is one of the only trolls that acts normally around her. (May or may not submit Vittah sometime, tbh.)

So I love this ancestor thing enough that I brought it in more in like, her theme conception. I like the idea of her feeling Really, like Weirdly connected to her ancestor, as much as though she really could be a reincarnation of her, and she could have like… a bit of identity struggle. She really doesn’t know who she is because she feels this weird displacement and is trying to build some sense of self By reading about the ancestors. And since you gave her a writer name, maybe she could write a lot about history. And maybe even some Guilty Pleasure Self Insert Historical Fanfiction. 

You could probably give her a fixation on the classics, too. She likes old stuff, original stuff. She doesn’t like rehashes. It could be part of why she doesn’t like theater (on top of her finding Trinel annoying)- it’s all just remixes of the Clearly Superior Old Stuff.

Interests: Archaeology and the ancestors, mostly.

And faygo it would seem LOL. 

Title: Seer of space..?

I honestly think maybe Heir of Space, if only because that makes her inverse Mage of Time and implies an understanding Of time, which comes with her natural interest in and fixation on history. Her trying to passively shape and change space to match up with that form she’s built from a defunct past can cause a lot of problems until she comes to understand the current time and comes into herself!

Land: Land of Ocean and Frogs- (She lives in a desert so no water normally, and frogs is obvious.)

How about the Land of Idols and Frogs instead, a land where there’s like idealistic idolized versions of the frogs and she has to Realize that they’re not the ideal form and she can’t blindly chase the past in order to succeed at her quest and breed the correct frog.

Dream Planet: Prospit.

My Ipad is mean, so here’s the link to an image. Its kinda old though

Design: 

Just as before I really don’t think there’s much for me to say about or change in your character design! I think something you should keep in mind if you ever design the ancestor is that she should try to look like her ancestor or at least mimic her ancestor’s silhouette. The symbol could also use a little editing to fit both the brown and gold sign language… 

I wanted to keep the cut square design you wanted, but I also wanted to incorporate Taurga and Gemge, plus the Symmetry of the usual brown and gold signs. 

Thank you for sharing and I hope this helps!

-CD

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY ARC ISN'T ESPECIALLY OBJECT-YEAR LANGUAGE DESIGN AND MONEY

The reason design counts so much in software is probably that there are fewer constraints than on physical things. We were all just pretending. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. Others seem more innocent; it depends how badly adults lie to maintain their power, and what it means.1 In the long term the most important thing was to stay on the premises. I doubt they realize it, but at least half the startups we fund not to worry about.2 They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies.3 They've applied for a lot of kids grow up feeling they fall hopelessly short.

So our rule is just to do whatever's best for your users. The main point of essay writing, when done right, is the new ideas you have while doing it. In business there are certain rules describing how companies may and may not compete with one another, they work like watertight compartments in an unsinkable ship.4 It's only temporary, and if you look, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one.5 Business is broken the same way as saying that something is technically impossible. But most kids would take that deal.6 Any online store that kept people's shipping addresses would have implemented this.7 Compared to IBM they were like Robin Hood.8 Most parents use words when talking to other adults that they wouldn't want their kids to a new school. We won't see solutions till adults realize that.

And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be: the reason you should avoid these things is that you don't know who needs to know something. Software is so subtle and unpredictable that qualified experts don't get you very far. Work still seemed to require discipline, because only hard problems yielded grand results, and hard problems couldn't literally be fun. His motive is partly that it would be stupid to try the experiment and find out. VCs are driven by consensus, not just for the nerds. Though lie has negative connotations, I don't mean to suggest by this comparison that types of work that depend more on talent are always more admirable. If that was what character and integrity because they had been so debased by adults.9 Like nuclear weapons, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around.10 In a typical American secondary school, being smart is likely to make your software compatible with some other piece of software—in fact, he was listed as an inventor on the patent Yahoo sued over—so perhaps there was something personal about it. Don't do it! It would cost something to run, the threshold of profitability, however low, your runway becomes infinite.

It's not enough to consider your mind a blank slate. One is that software is so complicated that patents by themselves are not worth very much. Adults lie constantly to kids. There are companies that will give $20k to a startup that avoided working on some problem because of patent trolls. Your target market has to be big yet, nor do you necessarily have to be able to argue with you, because everyone has base impulses, and if you look, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. Being good is a particularly useful strategy for making decisions in complex situations because it's stateless.

Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable. Like all investors, we spend a lot of data about how they work. When he was working on first. In fact, programming didn't get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. Companies often claim to be benevolent, but it isn't the real thing. Early stage startups are the exact opposite of this. For example, a father who has an affair generally conceals it from his children.

Now I know I don't. When you want something, you don't have them. They try to convince with their pitch. If you're sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will probably increase the number of employees at Craigslist looks like a Formula 1 racecar, not a sedan with giant rims and a fake spoiler bolted to the trunk. Founders think of startups as ideas, but investors think of them as markets. If founders decide VCs aren't worth the trouble vibe from several YC founders I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen. Octopart built the right way to lift heavy things is to let your legs do the work. They build Writely. But we all arrive at adulthood with heads full of lies. Obviously it worked for Google, but what you'd like to like. Someone who was strong-willed person, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Notes

You end up.

The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably no accident that the people working for large settlements earlier, but the churn is high, they said, and owns significant equity in it. It will also interest investors. What drives the most, it's cool with us he would presumably have got more of the accumulator generator in other Lisp features like lexical closures and rest parameters.

Or rather, where there were about the new top story. And in any case, because they are like sheep, but instead to explain it would annoy our competitor more if we couldn't decide between turning some investors away and selling more of a safe will be familiar to slip back into it.

Since we're not doing YC mainly for financial reasons, avoid casual conversations with potential earnings. In a series of numbers that are up there. Look at those goddamn fleas, jabbering about some disease they'll see once in their experiences came not with the sort of Gresham's Law of conversations. The history of the reasons angels like to invest more, and we don't have one clear inventor.

Distribution of potentially good startups that has little relation to other investors doing so. Incidentally, this idea is the desire to do it.

They're still deciding, which parents would still send their kids to say that it killed the best new startups. As a friend with small children, we're going to be told what to outsource and what not to.

Everyone's taught about it.

Delivered as if it means is No, but this could be overcome by changing the shape that matters, just the local startups also apply to types of studies, studies of returns from startup investing, which wouldn't even cover the extra cost.

It did not become romantically involved till afterward.

Make it clear when you ad lib you end up making something that conforms with their users. Statistical Spam Filter Works for Me. This is why they tend to get at it.

[starbright-cobweb]

I always feel like playing the Elder Scrolls at 11 ruined me for video games, because now I can't get through even 20 minutes of a Bioware game without being like "...oh wait, restrictions? restrictions which reveal character? What authoritarian dystopia is this?!" haha But yeah, I'm very much in the "no sexualities for NPCs" camp, because I like more of a sandbox mood: a sense of a story unfolding in my mind over time, just like when I play with my playmobil knights; they are my toys, and I participate in sculpting the narrative as a slower process. "Oh yeah and what if -!" might come up at any part of the participation; and it doesn't block off the possibility of NPCs having a sexuality (in my head), but it does give me more agency to participate in defining them. Games are participatory by nature: getting to participate in assigning a headcanon to a character is a freedom a game can offer which static media can't. I suppose like fandom, in a way: the fun of coupling up the protagonists in any old combination that appeals to you. And it gives the player more power in a media landscape where the gay characters are, realistically, going to be a mixed and stereotypical bag: what if the romance that interests you is with a character that no mainstream studio would ever permit for a person of your gender? Especially, I think, because "choose your gender and race and class" comes up as the first thing you do in a game, but it's often hours into the game when I feel attached enough to the world to really care about my character. Perhaps encountering a particular NPC I want to romance is the thing that gives my sense of belonging in a world a definite form? And that my character then shapes itself around. And because I tend to be a "play a game once" sort of person; so encountering content that's been locked by a decision I made 30 hours ago (and which was kinda arbitrary at the time) is an irritant. There are regular calls for the Sims to implement a clear, fixed sexuality system, instead of "everyone's theoretically bi" - but I like that, it means I can leave options open for characters until I'm ready to make some decisions. (as well as the game's ability to fly under censorship radars: "implementing sexuality is more hard work than just letting everyone date everyone so idgaf" game dev decisions have been the queer awakening of many a teen who suddenly discovers, right under their parents nose, that this is a thing that Exists) I'm OK with the idea of a NPC turning you down because of choices made throughout the narrative, so maybe there's also a queer resistance to the idea of "this first choice, and existing in a world with a rigid gender system, defines everything about you". Is this a game where my gender is regularly a barrier or advantage, where gender is constantly marked by the narrative? That makes it a key theme - and potentially, a very interesting game. or is the only NPC romances? Maybe I'm just bugged by the idea of thinking about the rigidity of gender in my leisure time. So yeah, the Elder Scrolls playstyle has kinda messed me up for other games. (It's also possible that I'm the kind of old gay who feels quite comfy with "none of these people have sexualities it's all a blank slate!" as a route to carving my own representation, and slightly more on-edge about the idea of there being a person like me? just canonically in the game??) I think the point is that if computer games are a medium you participate in, what is your role? & I think your preferred model is like, Player Character with a Dungeonmaster, whereas mine is like, Child with Toybox? Which parts are predetermined, and which parts are yours to play around with? I have a better time with as many choices as possible.

Just saw a post about how you should be able to romance every character and personally I think the correct approach would be to let you try to romance every character but also allow for those characters to have agency enough that it's not just a power fantasy where anyone and everyone will fall in love with you if you flirt with them. There should be aro characters who turn you down, people already in relationships who turn you down, people who aren't into your gender who turn you down, and imo also people who turn you down just simply because they don't like you.

I want these interactions to be rich, too, not just the succesful romances. I think one of the wonderful things about interactive storytelling is, or should be, the ability to have interactions with a wide variety of outcomes, including less "succesful" ones. Unrequited crushes aren't a lesser story if they're treated like a story rather than just implied by your inability to pursue it in the first place.

I don't want to have complete power over my companions in a game, I want them to act with their own will, their own mind, their own preferences. IMO while it wasn't super well implemented in Dragon Age 2, they were on to something with the friendship/rivalry idea. I don't want every character in a game to blindly like me and I don't want every character to be willing to date me and I don't want every character I can date to be the perfect boyfriend/girlfriend. I want them to be shitty sometimes and then I want to be able to roleplay a reaction to that. Hell, I want the option to break up with them and then get back together again, bc The Drama. I don't want every romance, particularly not in a roleplaying game, to be an escapist fantasy. And not because there's anything wrong with those, just because I want that variety. I think there is a place for games where every romance is an escapist fantasy (eg, lower difficulty dating sims) but I think for a lot of things, this would be far more interesting.

TL;DR I want the option to try to pursue a relationship with any character in a game, but I don't want that to always lead to a "succesful" romance.

[pudgy-puk]

i find it interesting and a bit alarming that we’re getting so much of “doing things with both alisaie AND alphinaud” in msq before SB. delicate narrative balance to strike there, one that didn’t fare quite so well in HW (this is that very long essay on the underappreciated difficulty of writing the supporting cast of a silent blank-slate protagonist video game i threatened y’all with earlier).

see

one of the really difficult things about writing a story with a silent protagonist who is a blank slate in terms of history, personality, and motivation that the player individually fills in, is justifying why they’re necessary--why other characters in the game world continue to rely on them and kinda invite them into their stuff, when so much important stuff about the character of this character is unknown because it’s been decided by the player as they play the game. why should the rulers of nations trust a catboy-in-a-bikini-wearing-a-giant-chocobo-head-shaped-cipher to solve their problems? it takes a lot of finagling of characters and settings to create a scenario where that can make even a little bit of sense.

the easiest way to do this, as a creator, is to hand to the silent blank-slate extreme power, sometimes uniquely extreme power: other characters seek them out because you’d be stupid not to want that level of power on your side. because this solution comes with its own set of problems in terms of narrative-writing (if victory is near-guaranteed, whence cometh drama and emotional investment?), a common modification is to make the power not IMMENSE, but unique--basically, a Chosen One dealie, which is the function that the echo serves in this setting. it’s worth noting that of Team Hero, as of 2.0 (idk wtf the writers were doing in 1.0) originally the player character is the ONLY one who is both very combat-capable and has the echo: all the rest of the scions are only elite scholars/warriors/etc, the only other person with the echo, minfilia, is a noncombatant, and krile’s own combat skills seem to be, eh... not BAD but nothing to write home about. but that setup is part of why the player character is necessary--a combat character who has the echo’s Immune To Gods ability can fight primals, er, ‘safely.’ none of the rest of the scions can.

this ties into the other way creators can make that blank-slate scenario work, which is to impose restrictions on other characters that wouldn’t apply to the protagonist. a very common one, and widely useful for other forms of protagonists, is to simply make the other characters be bound by the law/procedural rules/responsibilities/reputation/etc, and the protagonist isn’t, or at least isn’t bound quite so tightly. see: the warrior of light’s roadtrip with alphinaud, estinien, and ysayle during 3.0, which was authorized by aymeric but not something he could come along with, or indeed even be public about. so in addition to empowering the blank slate, other characters must be restrained, else the blank slate risks becoming redundant. and this is where heavensward npcs ran into a whole lot of problems. because that road trip, with estinien, ysayle, and alphinaud, came very close to prompting questions about the thing the writers need the players to not be questioning: “why does the military leader of a powerful sovereign nation need a manderville-dancing lalafell in a chocobo suit to solve his problems, instead of these reliable, powerful, intelligent people?” now, there is nothing wrong with these characters at all. but, in the context of a story centered around a blank slate protagonists, they run very close to being storybreakers.

let me explain what i mean by “storybreaker.” first, i do not mean a mary sue, nor do i mean a bad character (necessarily. i do believe one major storybreaker in ffxiv is also a bad character, but the two opinions are fairly separate of each other). a storybreaker is a character who spoils drama or the intended arc of a narrative, usually by being capable of solving other character’s problems quickly and easily. one of the best examples of a storybreaker in well-known fiction is gandalf in “the hobbit.” because gandalf, as a wizard, is so powerful, he’s capable of solving many of the problems and obstacles faced by bilbo and thorin’s company with ease--thus, he has to be forcibly removed from them for extended periods or the characters simply will not have the room to have agency in struggling with and solving their own problems, realizing their own goals, and thus developing as characters. gandalf isn’t a bad character, but his skills and “power level” are too perfectly matched to the problems and the stakes set in the plot of “the hobbit” for him to be able to be present and fully capable for most of it without turning it into “the wizard did it: a hobbit’s tale.” so that is what a storybreaker is, classically--you can find that type of storybreaker in narratives in all kinds of media, from books to tv to film to comics: a character who destroys drama because there’s no reason they’d ever lose and they have no reason not to fight. in a blank-slate-protagonist video game, though, it’s possible to break the story another way, which is by rendering the protagonist completely redundant and obsolete.

first, look at ysayle--the most seriously affected by this. ysayle has a lot of personal influence as lady iceheart, commanding heretics in very effective infiltration and sabotage missions through coerthas--but, as she is also an outlaw/criminal, she isn’t bound by the laws of ishgard, or any other nation. ysayle has incredible combat prowess, which is very relevant as this is a combat-based video game--she could be a match for the player character. and, finally, she has the exact same Special Power as the player. she too is Immune To Gods. this made her an effective and thrilling character in 2.x, where she was an antagonist to our silent protagonist. but then, one of the first things 3.0 did was make ysayle’s goals align with the players. she ceased to be an antagonist, became a protagonist, and immediately became a huge problem in terms of writing, because there was then no reason why she shouldn’t or couldn’t be the main protagonist. notice that once the story returns to ishgard from dravania, ysayle departs abruptly from it--she leaves ishgard as the player and our group face the crisis of imprisoned aymeric and thordan implementing the final stages of his Evil Plan. she never meets aymeric or lucia or the fortemps household or hilda or any of the people with institutional power ties who send the blank-slate player character on adventures to further particular goals. she could have filled the role the player character fills, and thus she was in grave danger of breaking the story.

note that this is only a story-breaking quality when dealing with, as i said at the beginning, a blank-slate silent-protagonist video game story. in a story with a defined protagonist, one with known history, personality, character relationships, and so forth, a character like ysayle doesn’t run the risk of replacing the protagonist because those other characteristics define that protagonist, rather than just a role to play and actions to perform. but in this story, ysayle could have broken it--because surely if aymeric trusted a giant lizardman in a metallic blue pig suit to solve ishgard’s problems, he could trust a former heretic who summons shiva incarnate to do so as well or instead. so, i suspect, this is why ysayle never met anyone inside ishgard, departed the narrative immediately after the story re-centered on ishgard, and only reappeared to die: it was the best or only solution that people thought of pre-deadlines to prevent a broken story.

and this problem applies to estinien as well. he holds great power institutionally and physically, martially; and while losing nidhogg’s eye might “depower” him some, the loss of the office of azure dragoon also frees him from most of his restraints in terms of where and how and when/for how long he can act. he too has the potential to upstage and fill the player character’s role, and that, i suspect, is why he was dragonized at the end of 3.0 and, immediately after being un-dragonized, stoically hiked offscreen for the foreseeable future. he’s too dangerous to handle carelessly.

the leveilleur twins, though, are the most interesting instance of this particular problem. essentially, the two of them are, in their personality, strengths and weaknesses, and backstory, a classic final fantasy protagonist, split into two people, and on their own are half-a-protagonist, a supporting main character. as final coil hinted, if those two were ever able to stop sniping at each other long enough to work together, they could indeed do anything. and that’s why the new plot developments interest and worry me, because now they HAVE learned to stop sniping at each other long enough to agree on goals, make plans, and carry them out (and don’t think i haven’t noticed, during the final patch stuff, that every time alisaie was left at rising stones and instructed to hold down the fort, something of the sort of horrible that alisaie is known to get cranky about and intervene in happened at the scene of the action where the main character was). i think, actually, that this may be why stormblood takes place not only in ala mhigo but in doma--one of the twins will be in one place, other twin in the other, so that there will be most of a continent between them to minimize their shared endeavors upstaging the player character. (and, if i were leveling bets on which twin goes where, based on this official art piece on weekly famitsu’s cover, it’d be alisaie in doma and alphinaud in ala mhigo).

but yes. long story short, the HW writing ran headfirst into one of the forms of storybreaking characters unique to silent-protagonist video game stories though completely normal in any other storytelling context, and it remains to be seen how they do or do not plan to deal with some of these thorny issues as stormblood rolls in.

[ooc-but-stylish]

iprinny

 “There’s a lot that gets me about the love story in FFXV and how it…”

Im super curious to know what your thoughts are on that absurdity with prompto’s “dramatic reveal” in chapter 13

Hoo boy. My opinion about the “dramatic reveal” is pretty much my opinion on the whole game, which is 

“Good plot, terrible execution”

Prompto was an MT? Neat. However,

it should have happened earlier

it should’ve been resolved earlier

it should have had a bit more foreshadowing if it was going to be dragged out to Chapter 13 of all things. 

With regards to the actual scene, my first impressions were “Damn, Prompto looks good for a guy that fell off a moving train and got tortured!” then “Oh, oh shit, this is the twist– Prompto’s gonna strangle the shit out of Noct, isn’t he? He’s right there–” and finally “…. Oh.”

The game has Prompto like “Oh, I’ve been tortured for a while in this dungeon, also I wanna tell you guys I’m a Nif/MT”(1) and the bros are like “Ok so? That doesn’t change anything. We still care about you.” which matches more the reaction parents should have when their kid comes out of the closet than anything else. One of their own revealed themselves to be part of the same army that, like, has been attacking them relentlessly on the World Map every 15 minutes ( and interrupting the important dialogue we’ll never hear again ). You know the reaction Wakka had about Rikku being Al Bhed? Yeah. I was expecting that, most likely from Gladio. But they’ve known each other since they were kids, more or less, and those of us who have played the game, regardless of whether we did or didn’t see Brotherhood or the extra media, have likely already seen proof of their unwavering friendship toward each other even in portions of the game where it wouldn’t even make much sense for them all to still be cool.(2) So this… is a waste. It reinforced what we already knew. It served no purpose except to reveal a plot-convenient serial code on his wrist to help them escape, and it raised more questions. 

MTs are made from daemons made from Starscourged humans, and Niflheim would need a lot of humans, so they started making clones and infecting them. Prompto is supposedly one of them, but escaped when he was super young and adopted into the Argentum family. Okay, so who got him out of that lab? Why did he still have “no parents” in Brotherhood? Who were his parents? Were they natives to Insomnia? How did he get a nice place to live in and not end up in the outskirts/slum parts of Lucis on account of his being a foreigner? If he got a serial code imprinted when he was a baby, wouldn’t it have deformed as he grew up? How did it maintain its shape? Was the barcode the same size throughout his life? Why isn’t he wearing light-resistant armor, like the other MTs? This is stuff we’d have to read the Wiki or the strategy guide about, except I’m still asking these questions, so the answers exist nowhere. Even to this day. And people still have theories on whether the Naga in the beginning of the game ( the one that kidnapped Prompto and cried about her baby ) was actually Prompto’s mother. That’s fucked up storytelling, not because they did it on purpose, but because they didn’t.

The reveal happens and is resolved so quickly, no one has the time to process anything. A lot of this game is pretty much “Here’s this earth-shattering detail! Let us never speak of it again”. 

Like, yeah, Noct is broken up he attacked Prompto and knocked him off the train, but did he process the part where he said everything was Prom’s fault and demanding that Prom stop following him around? Right to his face?

Did no one stop to think that Ardyn being able to make himself look like another person means that there’s 0 chance any of them would know for certain that their allies were their allies? Wouldn’t they be in an intensely paranoid state, questioning each other on stuff the “real” them would know about? How do any of them know Ardyn isn’t still right there, hiding in plain sight?

Details that would have worked as foreshadowing for Prompto’s reveal, instead of Ardyn dropping eleventh hour infodumps on Niflheim’s army allowing for post-hoc bullshit:

The constant Magitek encounters come specifically from the Nifs geotracking Prompto’s barcode. The party actually brings up the frequency of these attacks, but Prompto is hesitant to say anything.

None of the Magiteks attack Prompto, focusing on the other three in the party instead of “one of their own”. Possibly dumb luck, and saves every gamer the trouble of Prompto always dying first somehow.

Increased frequency of goofy Ardyn selfies and creepy Prompto pictures on any day Ardyn is with the party.

Instead of Ardyn’s “stitch in time” thing that is never explained again, and Ardyn’s immortality just being the Astrals going “Ew, cooties” and banning him from the Beyond to inflict him on the living, have this: the way 'Ardyn’ appears and disappears is by body-hopping from one Starscourge-afflicted/daemonified person to another. Some individuals are more receptive to him than others based on how far along they are in their daemonification or MT experiments. So why was he on that train, in the place of Prompto? Because something inside Prompto allowed him to be there ( enough to alter his looks but not his speech patterns ). He could drop that particular bomb in Ch 12 before telling Noctis that Prompto is in Gralea.

Ardyn’s immortality comes from the fact that when he ‘dies’, he just manifests in the next likely person to host him or maybe someone of his choosing if he wants. That adds the drama of Ardyn not really ever being dead for good, and the possibility that he could take over Prompto in his next life if he felt like it. That’s a better justification for “You have to kill this dude, then kill yourself, then kill him again” than “Because the gods said so”.

TLDR the Prompto reveal sucked ass.

(1) Let me get this out: Fuck This Game. The localization sucks in its consistency by language. Bahamut is either the Draconian or the Aetherian. Ardyn could have either vaguely “known” Gentiana died, or personally had a hand in killing her. Izunia is either a relative of Ardyn, and Noctis’s ancestor, or is a completely random name Ardyn made up that he forgot the origins of. The Japanese version of the game, rather than hinting that Prompto is an MT, has sections where Ardyn instead taunts Noctis about “Did you know he’s originally from this city?”, and when Prompto reveals it to the group he says “I’m a person of Niflheim”. Even the JP VA confirmed it. So whether or not Prompto is even a Magitek is dependent on language of the game. I can understand that they were trying to go for, but they should have been consistent. Must have been something to do with the constant rewrites of the plot.

(2) Fuck This Game Part Duh: No, seriously. It tried to eat its cake and still have it, and I’ll tell you why. The game doesn’t actually give a shit about your choices. It wants its narrative both ways, telling us that Noctis in particular has certain “fixed” character traits but giving us a choice to make him another way in his dialogue options typical of Western RPGs which have “blank slate” characters. Using both methods and no lasting plot divergences to support those choices beyond the immediate cutscene makes it so that the dialogue options have no impact on the story or make sense, suggesting you play it “Square’s way” or else the game ignores your choices, which is fundamentally not how open world western RPGs work.

A playthrough in which Noctis acts like a total jerk to Prompto and dismissing him every chance he gets will still result in Prom wanting to hear from Noct that he cared about his well being, as well as Prom expressing sadness that Noct will die. 

A playthrough where Noctis puts only platonic or indifferent notes into the book he sends to Luna will still result in the scenes in Chapter 9 where he sheds a tear at her speech, laments that he wanted to save her, and then is quiet rather than impassioned and vengeful, even though he summoned Ramuh and busted a base to rescue the Regalia and to get revenge for Jared of all people.

A playthrough where the Altissian woman interrogates Noctis and Noctis answers by straight-up fucking metagaming and showing more understanding of the lore of the story than he’s ever been told and treating her with respect should count as “gaining her implicit trust”, but we still see a scene where Luna is sitting in the chair across from the Altissian woman and Imperial forces come in and surround Luna anyway, meaning the Altissian lady sold them out.

A playthrough where Noctis only ever responds maturely to Gladio, and his conversations with others have the options for him to act like a leader and the King he’s meant to be, will still result in Gladio chewing him out unnecessarily while the game clunkily tells us Noctis “is a spoiled brat/selfish”, “is being immature” and was “moping for weeks” about Luna even though we just saw her death five minutes ago and Noctis is shown to be quiet but otherwise not stalling the quest in any way. We didn’t even see a funeral, or excessive crying or outbursts, or Noctis demanding that everyone focus on his pain and staying in Altissia locked in a hotel room. He’s just quiet on a train. 

Chapter 13 of the game is especially awful, when both it and Ardyn insist that Noct is supposed to be some scared, frightened puppy without his weapons when he’s wielding the most canonically powerful item in the game, casually ripping gashes in reality and insta-killing a fortress full of daemons with an anti-daemon ring, and the player is able to ignore most (if not all) stealth mechanics and blitz through that chapter with no penalty.

For those that did the side quests throughout the game, the only trait from gameplay that sticks in the narrative is that Noctis is a passive entity. He’s told to do something, he just does it. Otherwise, no matter what, even if you played the game and had Noctis act like a rude shit and played as if none of the Bros were his Bros, they’re still going to be Bros. They’re still going to care about him, including Prompto. Especially Prompto.

[jmsebastian]

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of Polygon Faces

Sometimes we just have to be honest with ourselves. There is an undeniable charm to many games from the early 3D era. While often unrefined, a style developed that now breeds nostalgia in the way blocky, squat pixel mascots did in a generation prior. Pushing polygons rather than sprites was a new art form, and not many had a clear vision as to how it should go. Many made the push toward photo realism, and in doing so, ended up drowning us in a new surreal, a limbo of concrete and abstract representation. I have a deep fondness for the 32/64 bit generation because it gave way to a new visual language for video games, but like I said before, we have to be honest with ourselves. Sometimes the language being spoken with those ground breaking graphics was unintelligible. Sometimes the results were downright unsettling.

Let’s start with this police officer from Parasite Eve II.

All things considered, this police officer really doesn’t look too bad. He’s got some nice shading and some real definition to his features. This being a 1999 release, it’s pretty clear that Squaresoft had made some real improvements over their earlier forays into 3D gaming:

(Ahem.)

The problem with the officer isn't so much in the level of detail, but really the content of those details, specifically his eyes. With Aya approaching him, his gaze seems to be aimed at nowhere in particular. Given that this game features no voice acting, it isn’t really odd that he would have a neutral expression, but neutral is not really an appropriate description. He looks eerily absent, as unresponsive as a mannequin. Compare that to the beautiful pre-rendered cutscenes that pepper the game and you have yourself quite the disconnect.

Obviously, no Playstation game is going to be rendering characters that look as good as that on the fly, but even compared to Aya’s in game face, the officer looks odd.

This closeup reveals a hint of determination, but also a sense of calm, similar to how she was characterized in the cutscene above. The officer, on the other hand, looks as though he’s never experienced stimulus of any kind.

(There’s just nothing going on in there.)

Parasite Eve II is one of the more technically impressive Playstation games, and as such, its crimes against humanity barely even register. There are modern games that can’t get characters to emote, and their faces can actually move. By that measurement, Officer No Soul is a crowning achievement. Let’s take a look at a game in the same genre and released the same year. Capcom’s Dino Crisis featured a female protagonist, Regina, with the same kind of gun totin’ sex appeal that Aya Brea brought to Squaresoft’s character lineup. For reference, when we thought about Regina, this is what Capcom would have preferred we have in mind:

The unnaturally red hair seems geared at portraying Regina as a fiery, adventurous type. Her look is pointedly alluring, which doesn’t complement the theme of the game in any way, shape or form, but was par for the course after the debut of Lara Croft. Let’s see how well this dinosaur murdering seductress translated into the actual game.

(Oh, god!)

The “come hither” look from the cover seems to have melted like a wax figure. Similar to the officer from Parasite Eve II, Regina lacks any meaningful expression on her face. The texture mapping is slightly misaligned as well, making it so her lips appear to be sliding off to the side of her mouth. What’s most disappointing has to be the way her hair is rendered. This was long before things like cloth physics or individually animated feather blowing in the breeze. I’m empathetic to the constraints of the platform, but I can’t help but feel discontent when I’m teased with distinguished hair strands and am instead given a rust colored crescent moon with some highlights capping her skull.

By 1999, the Playstation had been on the market in Japan for five years. Dino Crisis and Parasite Eve II were games developed and published by big players in the industry. While it’s all well and good to poke fun at their badness now, they were still among the most advanced graphics that could be achieved on the platform. While looking quite dated by the dawn of Sega’s Dreamcast, in the same year as these releases, they managed to hold their own. Results from games much earlier in the system’s library tell a very different tale.

This is from King’s Field, released in North America in 1995. You may have noticed that this man here has no face. There’s an extra polygon showing for his nose, but other than that, we are just staring into the void. Bad faces are unsettling, sure, but no faces is the stuff of nightmares. This game is technically the second in the King’s Field series. The first game, confusingly also just called King’s Field in Japan, released early on in the Playstation’s life, December of 1994.

While many of the established studios were busy mixing pre-rendered backgrounds with polygonal character models in order to maximize the amount of detail they could squeeze out of each scene, From Software decided to go all in on 3D right from the beginning. Nearly everything in this game is built using polygons. Even more impressive, the game continuously streams data from the disc, meaning load times are practically nonexistent once play begins. In order to accomplish that, corners had to be cut. A lot of those corners were in the details department. Most objects are made of simple shapes with little or no texturing. Edges are sharp in a way that feels unnatural. This extends to every face in the game, and is the biggest barrier to buying into the game’s world.

There is something inherently unpleasant about holding conversations with people sans mouth. It was bad enough when characters couldn’t move their lips, but to not have a visual reference for where the speech is supposed to be produced from puts the player in a tough spot. On the one hand, there is plenty of space for the player’s imagination to take over. They can create any character they want due to the faces being literal blank slates. On the other hand, of course, the inability to visually relay more detailed information about its characters through facial expressions means King’s Field has to work harder at the language that’s used when NPCs communicate directly with the player. Overall, the trade off of having a large, fully 3D world at the expense of detail was risky. Given what we know about texture mapping in the ‘90s, I’d say From Software made the right call, even though it meant talking to no faced monstrosities.

I wanted to point out a few bad examples of polygonal faces in order to demonstrate that some games took a completely different approach to the whole 3D thing: mainly, they tried to maximize their capacity to convey information visually by only including the most vital information. In Mega Man Legends, the characters are incredibly blocky. The basic shapes and sharp edges make it so that it looks as though everything was a paper cutout. When looking straight on at a character’s face, all you see is a flat surface with everything simply drawn on top of it. It may not be the most technically impressive, but it allows for a great deal more emotion. Mega Man expresses more with his face in one scene than any of the previously mentioned character do throughout their entire adventures.

Here, Mega Man shows some clear confusion. The simple frown and solid coloring gives him a great deal of personality.

In this shot, Mega Man’s sense of fulfillment is very clear, and all it took was a different mouth texture over the same facial structure. Sure, he doesn’t have the lips and his hair looks poised to pop any balloons that might be floating by, but the anime style art design allows for visual storytelling in a way that many early 3D games just couldn’t pull off.

Another great benefit to Mega Man Legend’s art style is that it has prevented the game from appearing as old as many of its contemporaries. Dino Crisis may have looked really good when it came out in 1999, but when magnified and displayed at resolutions above those that would have been possible on TVs of the time, it’s very obvious what era of video games it was made in. Games with pre-rendered backgrounds look especially bad at higher resolutions because character models and the environments don’t scale together. A character might upres quite well, but then clash horrifically against the blurry, pixelated mess of a backdrop. For anyone playing on the original hardware hooked up to a television of the era, these issues are lessened, or even non-existent thanks to the resolutions and adaptability of CRT technology. When played by more modern means, say on a Playstation 3 via the Playstation Store connected to a nice LCD screen, you can get some very unfortunate results.

Mega Man Legends’ visuals may not hold up perfectly in the modern era, but they can be blown up significantly and still maintain most of their quality. The techniques of simplifying visuals would pay off big for Nintendo just a few years later with The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for Gamecube. Basic shapes combined with newly developed cell shading techniques allowed the game’s visuals to be expressive in ways even modern games struggle to match. When played at modern resolutions, The Wind Waker hardly skips a beat.

(That is a look of some serious, and easily distinguishable distaste.)

The increased processing capabilities of the Gamecube meant that visuals for its games would automatically outpace the Playstation, but visual techniques pioneered on that platform gave 3D games a way to circumvent the inherent limitations of the era and technology available to them so that they would have lasting power. It’s important for games to push the boundaries when it comes to visuals, and a cartoonish style certainly isn’t appropriate for every title, but I can’t help but wonder how many times this cycle will repeat. Games developed for the Playstation 3 are already starting to show significant visual age when compared to the newest released on PC, so much so that I almost prefer the abstract horror of bad face texture mapping to settling in the uncanny valley. Graphical fidelity never felt as important as artistic design, a reality that feels more true now probably than ever before.

[noaokami]

"Actually good characters instead of just archetypes because Atlus doesn't know how to write"

That's an opinion, not a fact. Explain how the characters are badly written. Also--If you think a group of professionals who created an insanely popular franchise can't write, I would like to see you try and do better.

"Female characters not being used as fanservice/being sexualized and instead being kickass characters without having to have their entire bodies in latex suits for them to be seen as powerful"

Another opinion. Does the fact that many of them wear skintight outfits mean they aren't kickass and are just sexualized and useless? Far from it. These women are powerful regardless of whether they're wearing a tight suit or not. You can't deny that. An example would be Futaba. She's a talented hacker who was fully capable of busting the phantom thieves. Is she not powerful?

"A comic relief done right instead of one character getting all the blame for shit that isn't even their fault"

Another opinion. While it is true that they shit on Ryuji a bit much, he deserved a lot of it. He nearly outed them so many times due to bad judgement. That's not something he can't help.

"An actually good mascot character"

Baseless opinion.

"Morgana and Ryuji being teasing buddies who push the other to be better while taking light jabs at each other But will defend each other when it comes to that."

As far as I remember, they already are teasing buddies... they jab at each other all the time but they're still teammates. They'll still defend each other, because they're teammates...

"Ann not in her thief costume (Atlus you know what you were doing)"

You just don't like her costume. This isn't something we, the entire fan base, were all robbed of. What's wrong with Atlus' design other than "Its too sexual for my tastes"?

"Just... Ann not being sexualized when she's supposed to be a sexual abuse survivor."

A lot of Japanese games do have issues with oversexualizing their female characters, I will agree with you there. But I personally don't think they went too far with Ann. I somewhat agree with you here.

"Mishima, Hifumi, and Shiho being thieves"

I will agree that these characters had a lot of potential that went unexplored, but I do believe Atlus did a fine job making them as side characters.

"Akechi having more effort put into him"

How do you know they didn't do enough? What is he lacking? This is another baseless opinion because you're not really explaining why you think this way, and why we should agree with you.

"A main character that already has a story and personality to them and isn't just a blank slate for us to project onto"

...Akira does have a backstory. A simple one, obviously, but it's there. We play as the protagonist and shape his personality through his actions and dialogue. Also, why is it bad for a player character to be a blank slate?

"Later confidants getting more screen time and actually being able to max them out at a reasonable pace"

I'm indifferent.

"A LONGER BETTER WRITTEN GAME"

Dude, P5 is already a really long game. That's not even an opinion--its just LONG. Considering what the vast majority of reviews and fans say, I think the game is written perfectly fine. If you think the game is badly written, then how come so many people praise it and love it?

Don't put stuff like this in the character tags, please. You seem to just want to start drama.

Things we were robbed of from Persona 5

Actually good characters instead of just archetypes because Atlus doesn’t know how to write

Female characters not being used as fan service/being sexualized and instead being kickass characters without having to have their entire bodies in latex suits for them to be seen as powerful

A comic relief done right instead of one character getting all the blame for shit that isn’t even their fault

An actually good mascot character

Morgana and Ryuji being teasing buddies who push the other to be better while also taking light jabs at each other but will defend the other when it comes to that

Ann not in her thief costume (Atlus you knew what you were doing)

Just….Ann not being sexualized when she’s supposed to be a sexual abuse survivor

Mishima, Hifumi, and Shiho being thieves

Akechi having more effort put into him

A main character that already has a story and personality to them and isn’t just a blank slate for us to project onto to

Later confidants getting more screen time and actually being able to max them out at a reasonable pace ((loud cough Haru loud cough))

A LONGER BETTER WRITTEN GAME

[recentanimenews]

Sinking Our Fangs into Code Vein for Some Delicious Action

  When I saw the announcement trailer for Code Vein being unveiled, I thought: "Wow, this game might totally be my jam!" But what I mostly heard from others watching the same trailer was: "Wow, it's anime Dark Souls!" It seems overdone lately to compare games to Dark Souls, to the point that the comparison is starting to not mean anything anymore. If a game is difficult, it’s Dark Souls inspired. If a game is dark fantasy, it’s Dark Souls. Co-op or Antagonistic online interactions? Dark Souls. Suffice to say, the comparison to From Software’s popular Souls series is starting to become meaningless, so when I heard people say that “Code Vein is anime Dark Souls”, I wasn’t really sure what that meant before getting my hands on it. 

Code Vein’s first impression on players is an almost ridiculous amount of character customization. The amount of options available sound almost comical when put into some sort of list, so let’s just say you can choose from things like pupil shapes, sclera colors, hair lengths, tiny hats, how many individual tiny hats you want to wear, your gas mask, and other things. Though, the only real disappointment is that body size isn’t a slider; your character just goes from ‘unhealthily skinny’ to ‘approximation of normal human weight’. Also, ladies, you’re gonna have some big… assets. A player could spend literal hours in here, and the game seems to note that maybe you want to change things up after you start playing, as you’re able to change your appearance at will in the central hub of the game once you unlock it. There have been a lot of people posting recreations of anime characters and others in Code Vein, and honestly the creation aspect is perhaps one of the best parts of the experience, really letting you spend your time crafting a character that is uniquely yours. Unfortunately, the game… sort of forgets that this is who the protagonist is not too long after. 

Players take their newly awakened (and amnesiac) main character out into the destroyed world of Code Vein, a place where Revenants are constantly trying to secure their survival after a calamity, with Revenants that succumb to the parasites within them morphing into dangerous Fallen. The world of Code Vein is in shambles, and your character may hold the key to unlocking a way forward… If you can survive long enough to do so.

The first thing that struck me with Code Vein is that there is A LOT of talking. Like, a lot. Within the first 5 hours of the game, I felt like I had spent most of it listening to people talk, walking my way through memory fragments, and seeing things happen without taking a lot of agency in making those things happen. This, personally, was where I first started seeing the flaws of “It’s like Dark Souls” falling apart; Souls games have always operated on a very specific story aesthetic, where the character has arrived too late, things are already falling apart, and there’s really nothing left to save, just an attempt at piecing together what was happening before whatever calamity befell everything around you. Code Vein is different: There are a lot of characters still kicking and talking, and at times your silent protagonist fades into the background as the other NPCs talk to one another, as if you weren’t even there.

My first real disconnect with the game happened after the first major boss, which was followed by numerous cutscenes that made my character feel like an accessory to what was happening; if Code Vein were a directed action game where I was asked to play as Louis, an NPC you meet early on who becomes integral to the story, I think I would have been less disconnected to what was happening than how things were presented.

In fact, this might sum up my biggest complaint about Code Vein: you don’t ever really get to feel “alone”, unless you go out of your way to do so. The game works off of a sort of “buddy” system, where an NPC ally follows you around during the game’s action sequences, fighting enemies with you and tagging along. The problem is that they seem far better at doing things than you are, charging headfirst into waves of enemies and usually clearing out mobs far faster and with more style than your character is capable of. This changes a bit as the game goes on, where instead you end up babysitting your NPC companion into not dying because they can’t seem to read enemy patterns and behavior, but early on the game very much feels like you’re playing a supporting role to the NPC, a problem that presented itself to me in the first major boss fight. 

Without spoiling anything, the boss fight felt… hectic. The boss’s behavior was almost totally random, with no discernable patterns, because it would change wildly based on whether characters were near it or not, and would switch between targeting myself and my AI companion seemingly at will, leaving sometimes little room to react or block. Eventually, I had to adopt a more long range fighting style, simply so I could stay far enough away from the enemy to have it focus on my companion, then lure it towards me while they would recover. This system eventually worked out, but it felt far less satisfying than I had wanted it to be, essentially making me change my entire playstyle and weapon loadout to complete rather than going at it with whatever I had and figuring out a strategy from there. I even tried fighting the boss solo, but that proved to be an even worse nightmare, as the AI seems coded to work best (as in, most fair) against multiple targets, and became ridiculously oppressive against me by myself. Attempting a later boss using the online multiplayer had a different issue: bosses became far too easy, as they couldn’t seem to handle 3 attackers, 2 of which were human and less prescribed than the AI NPC. 

This was when I realized I had to make a decision that would affect how I would look at Code Vein: It was a more action-oriented version of God Eater, which happens to share numerous staff members with Code Vein. 

Areas are bland, and opening shortcuts really just allows you to avoid having to walk through them again, but almost every area is a straight line of sorts, meaning there really isn’t much reason to backtrack to begin with unless hunting particular enemies for crafting essences or grinding. There is no diverging path: you simply go in the direction the game points you in, and work from there. Map exploration feels less important to exploring the game, and more important to just figuring out where to go next, or what specific item or location you were attempting to reach might be. Unless you were totally reckless, your AI partner will ensure you stay alive (unless, as the end of the game starts to invert, you’re racing to keep THEM alive), meaning that brute forcing your way through Code Vein is also totally possible, making the game seem fairly easy. At times this is nice, as Code Vein is certainly an accessible action game; players can somewhat coast to victory on the support of their NPC partners, and can even adopt supportive playstyles by equipping Blood Codes that allow them to buff and heal party members, and the limited online functionality allows you to call for help from other players (if you can find any; in my time playing I was only able to get this to work twice) to add a second partner to the mix. 

This wouldn’t be so bad if the world of Code Vein was interesting to explore, but it never really feels like it is. It also adopts the “storytelling” method of Souls games in that many items fill in lore gaps and info dumps, but this feels superfluous at times because despite how much narrative the game throws at you, it never really tells you enough information to know what anything that’s happening means. While your character is an amnesiac, it takes that issue too literally, as characters will begin talking about events and important ideas without ever taking time to clue your character in on what any of that stuff means until perhaps hours later (or you discovered it on your own from some sort of item description). 

Code Vein gives you a huge amount of options and customization (25 Blood Codes, all with different stats, abilities, and specialities), allowing you to tailor your approach to enemies and areas in whatever way suits that particular challenge best. The story makes a big deal out of your character having the ability to be this blank slate, and the game seems to push you into taking advantage of this in terms of gameplay too, without outright punishing you for only using one approach. As you level up, the stat specializations and changes come from swapping Blood Codes. While you can change them on the fly in the pause menu, I will say that I wished it were possible to have hot keyed at least two of them, making it possible to change during battle more seamlessly than just mashing the Option button to get to my menu, change all my gear and set up, and then go back to the fight.

Early on, it’s hard to appreciate the Blood Code system, as you don’t have a lot of access to things that let you take advantage of the variety they offer. You start with very basic gear and start finding pieces along the way, and I found myself prioritizing fast attacks with wide arcs to damage or variety until about midway into the game, where it started to become obvious that my best approach wasn’t a “Jack of All Trades” method, but instead creating and maintaining gear that would suit particular circumstances best. While you could very likely brute force your way through Code Vein with only one or two Blood Codes, the game really seems to expect you to change your build constantly; the game encourages you to make a character that can change on the fly when a new problem rears its head. 

The game has you fighting hordes of enemies and occasional bosses, meaning the combat has to be faster paced and also a bit more hectic. Combat can be a bit slow to keep up, though, as you don’t really have a lot of combat variety in your combos, and while you can change to various weapons and styles, there are really only a few basic types of weapons in the game. The amount of buffs and abilities you can use are where the real customization comes in, but it combat can still feel a bit rote and clunky as you mash the same buttons over and over again to mow down mobs, and using abilities like Drain to increase your Ichor count, or special attack abilities, can become costly as Ichor tends to be a small resource, and your AI partner will occasionally steal your kills, meaning your flashy attack not only doesn’t work, but wasted resources. 

While it may not sound like it, I enjoyed Code Vein quite a bit! One of the best parts about it is that it is a far more accessible version of the “Souls” style games that everyone knows and loves, while also being a bit more like God Eater in the way it presents some of the gameplay in a far more accessible way. For example, while your healing is limited, you and your partner can use a skill that shares health between you, and you have some window of time to use this skill before a character dies completely. While exploring an area, I got attacked by a huge enemy, and their attack knocked me out; I assumed I was done for, but Luis actually revived me using his skill, allowing me to roll to safety, recuperate, and then team up with him to take down the enemy. During our fight with the boss, I was able to do the same, sacrificing my own health to heal him and keep him in the fight, allowing us to take the boss down on what was essentially our last ditch effort to do so. In these little moments, Code Vein really shines, letting you feel cool and do cool things with the character you spent so much time creating.

And while the action is a bit stale, the flow of combat can feel fun and cinematic, especially as you unlock more complicated abilities and Blood Codes. Code Vein operates on a Rule of Cool, sacrificing challenge at times in order to make sure that you feel like your character is a badass, doing cool, flashy attacks and decimating hordes of enemies. This doesn’t always work, but when it does, it feels fulfilling and enjoyable. The game rewards your investment into your character, allowing you multiple opportunities to take pictures of your character, posing them at various stations in your home base, and has flashy cinematic sequences during certain combat attacks, that let you look as cool as you hoped your character would after all that time in character creation. I appreciated this, but some may not, as it does tend to make the game feel easy and somewhat unchallenging; even though I butted heads against the first boss a few times, after that, the game was fairly smooth sailing, with the occasional death coming as a result of trial and error more than specific, unique challenge. The game has a LOT of bosses, so if you enjoy big, cinematic battles, you’ll find a lot of them here, although ironically I felt that the second boss in the game was one of the hardest, with many of the bosses having similar, repeated attack types: AOE, tracking magic, big 360 swings, and somewhat erratic patterns. This meant that while the bosses were quite different in aesthetics, they have somewhat similar movesets with some slight variation; the second boss, who uses poison, is something of an outlier because it hits you at a point in the game where you have limited resources and haven’t seen a status ailment yet; the rest of the bosses feel more “fair” in that regard. 

Code Vein feels a bit like an RPG in terms of story; characters talk a lot, and the story is the main motivator to continue the game, but there are sometimes a few speed bumps to this. While the game’s characters push a sense of narrative urgency, nothing ever feels overly urgent or dire, and the focus on reclaiming memories (both your own and of NPCs) makes the game feel like most of the bad, challenging, or dramatic events have all happened in the past, leaving many of the big character reveals to feel somewhat inconsequential. Even when I finally learned the big secret behind my own character and her companion Io, I couldn’t really say I was very surprised (the game kind of telegraphs everything), nor did I find the game treating these revelations as anything big; if the characters in the game weren’t very concerned about it, I didn’t see any reason I should be. I did, though, enjoy the various characters that I met and can’t say I didn’t like any of them, but it just felt like I wasn’t on the edge of my seat, worried that something bad will happen to anyone.   

The game forges a style of game that centers on the idea of reclamation and forward momentum. Your character’s amnesiac past isn’t that important, because what matters in Code Vein is moving forward. Even as characters regain their memories, they react to them in a way that centers on what that means to them now, rather than what it meant to them then. If you're itching for a fun action game with a colorful anime-styled world, Code Vein is the game for you! The game will never ask too much of you, and rewards short play sessions quite well, meaning that you can take your time and enjoy the story and world that Code Vein have to offer, even if the challenge isn’t particularly there. Personally, while I’m quite finished with the game, I do still find myself turning it back on to mess with the character creator, posing to take screenshots and occasionally doing some small adventuring with my partners for gear I didn’t complete, while trying to occasionally find multiplayer sessions to join and help others.

  REVIEW ROUNDUP

+ Aesthetics and visuals are great, with character creation being a big high point.

+ Action is fun and fast, and develops more as you get more Blood Codes.

+ While not groundbreaking, the story is very enjoyable.

+/- Difficulty is somewhat on the easy side; accessibility is nice, but self imposed challenges (like playing solo) become far too difficult due to game balance.

+/- NPC ally mechanic can be somewhat odd, as it shifts wildly between holding your hand and babysitting fragile CPU partners who can’t read patterns. 

- Online is a bit boring and hard to manage, and not many people seem to make use of it.

- Exploration is kind of dull; maps are generally straight lines with the occasional loop.

  Does the vampire curse of Code Vein call to you? Do you also spend hours in character customization like I do? Let us know what you think of the game in the comments! 

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Nicole is a features writer and editor for Crunchyroll. Known for punching dudes in Yakuza games on her Twitch channel while professing her love for Majima. She also has a blog, Figuratively Speaking. Follow her on Twitter: @ellyberries

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