if youkai faith works then youkai fear must also work. the faith of the tengu and kappa is sufficient to establish kanako as the kami of youkai mountain, which is a way bigger thing than the assumption that a general low-level fear from the youkai of the underground could sustain the komeijis
i would say it's more like that youkai simply can't be authentically afraid of most other youkai (it's not in their nature) but given their existence as beings that are essentially just the mind and spirit, it makes sense that a mind-reader would cause fear that others would not trigger
i definitely agree that the vengeful spirits probably help with the maintenance of former hell, since they're former humans and we already know from keiki's example that even dead humans can still have sufficient faith to conjure up an unhinged cyberpunk kami
huh! it's been nearly 10 years since I broke my laughbox.
a ways back, I suffered a mildly catastrophic spontaneous pneumothorax that hospitalized me for a week and required surgery to fix (by cutting out the gnarliest chunk of lung and stapling the rest back together)
Ever since, I've been unable to actually laugh. I can still perform an approximation of laughter, to a degree, but when I am actually tickled by a thing, it presents with me immediately doubled over, not breathing, face a rictus of pain.
and turns out that worries people who aren't expecting it!
finishing bomb rush a second time has me feeling the same sense of riding high off the climax of the story and then crashing into a brick wall when there's next to nothing to do once the campaign is over all over again. I say it almost every time I mention this game but god I really want like, a chapter select menu or something at least.
I also managed to avoid a lot of the things I found irritating on the first pass by just tagging everything I could see as soon as I entered a new part of an area, and then doing all the crew lackey challenges at once as late as possible. since cops only start spawning in an area after you've beaten a few lackeys, I only had to deal with them for a fraction of the time I did last time. kind of a whack gameplay loop but it made it significantly more fun.
I still wish there was more differentiating the characters and vehicles. it all feels very cosmetic in an unsatisfying way. but I imagine designing for bigger differences could have caused the scope to get out of hand. I think if you're going to include differentiated character types like that where the original game didn't, you kinda need to do something with it, though
overall I don't think playing it a second time made me like anything less, the music and the visual design and the story all still really hit for me, and the movement only gets more fun to play with as you get comfortable with it. it's a really cool game, I just wish it didn't end so abruptly
Like the people who like Vanitas (character) all think he's literally BBC Sherlock and untouchable and the ideal fuckable guy or he's entirely meow meow-ifiied and people act like he is a complete victim in every scenario and the whole idea of the character is you're supposed to hate him Then start thinking of him as a victim and if you don't go through that process you miss the whole thing
me: in the legend of zelda: ocarina of time version 1.0, you can quickly do your most powerful sword attack by doing a jump slash and then using your crouch stab repetitively. the game is coded in such a way that the crouch stab takes the amount of damage you did with your last move and makes the crouch stab as strong as that move. also the deku stick is as strong as the master sword