#tactics blogging

[autopotion]

Notes from our fanfic

[slothmonth]

I agree that "in Germany your boss legally has to provide you with work while you're at your job" is a bit funny considering the German stereotype. But I am really annoyed at people who act like this is some horrible hypercapitalist thing on that post about pushing people out of their jobs by just not giving them anything to do. When really it's very basic worker protection (within the context of German emplyment law.) Because under most circumstances you can't just be fired from your job. Your employer has to provide a reason for firing you if they want to get rid of you. You also have a right to specifially the work you were hired to do.

So your boss having to give you appropriate work makes illegal any of the following:

a) Making you clean toilets instead of (or in addition to) the clearly defined office job you agreed to do

b) Not giving you work and then firing you for not doing your work

c) Waiting for you to crack under the intense boredom of having to stay on one place with absolutely nothing to do for eight hours a day while your coworkers are roped into it to shun you (or hate you because for some reason you're the only one who doesn't have to do any work) until you quit "voluntarily"

or d) waiting for you to crack under the aformentioned pressure until you do what the people in the notes said they'd do, like watching movies or doing a second job instead which is something you then can be reprimanded and fired for

[novelistparty]

ok

[decoy-sammy]

Dadwave

[silver-gm]

The Jen Kellen experience

[anghraine]

I know that Boromir is explicitly compared to King Eärnur and I know why, but my baseless personal headcanon is that he's not that much of a fan of a king who got himself killed in tactically asinine circumstances rather than prioritizing his people, particularly when the end result of Eärnur's life choices is Boromir himself carrying the weight of protecting Gondor. Boromir's true icon is Tar-Telperiën, the proud unmarried queen who firmly maintained Númenórean autonomy and priorities, but who was the actual ruler when Númenórean forces first showed up on the coast of Lindon to save the Elves and kick Sauron back to Mordor.

The line about Boromir only being interested in lore when it came to military things—well, kicking Sauron's ass out of all of Eriador and forcing him to desperately flee counts as military lore! I imagine that Boromir knows and loves that story down to the most granular tactical details recorded. Whenever some hidebound loremaster goes on about Tar-Telperiën's reign being a period of total disengagement from Middle-earth's problems while Númenor only interceded under Tar-Minastir, Boromir goes from zzzzzz to "well AKSHUALLY" in about a quarter second.

(This is also aro-ace leadership solidarity in my mind, but mostly because Boromir thinks Telperiën's successful navigation of bullshit politics without marrying, while finding time to orchestrate the defeat of Sauron's armies, is awesome.)

[gentlemanmotorslifestyle]

[adam-trademark]

Cats of the Monastery

(March 9, 2021)

[would-they-listen-to-that]

Hi! Since you’re doing kin playlists, I’d like to request a playlist for an Oliver Fog (Reverse 1999)! I associate him a lot with classic rock and British political music so things along that line please! Thank you, I understand how you must be swamped right now with requests <3.

‧₊˚🖇️✩ ₊˚🎧⊹♡ hi there! it's no worries at all! i'm incredibly thankful for so many asks! thank you for being so patient while i answer them! - mod Cupid

People are Strange - The Doors

Brass Goggles - Steam Powered Giraffe

Chim Chim Cher-ee - Mary Poppins OST

Drunken Sailor - The Longest Johns

There's No Place Like London - Sweeney Todd OBC

An Unhealthy Obsession - The Blake Robinson Synthetic Orchestra

Puttin' on the Ritz - Taco

Stalker's Tango - Autoheart

The Dismemberment Song - Blue Kid

The Masochism Tango - Tom Lehrer

thanks for dialing in!

[spiribia]

baru gay asf for falling asleep

[cleveradjacent]

i lived bitch

hey! i finally annoyed tumblr into resurrecting my blog. in the meantime, i set up a backup: @clever-adjacent. follow it if you don't wanna lose me should this happen again!

[bigdumbbambieyes]

abusers looooove to ask their victims to ‘just move on’ instead of taking accountability 🙃 the plain disrespect and the self-victimization is CRAZY i can’t imagine the mental gymnastics going on

that being said i hope therapy works 🫶

[sheepytina]

So people are talking about the artwork in Metal Slug games again

There's been a few posts going around talking about how weird the Metal Slug characters look in the mobile games, particularly female characters like Eri and especially fan favourite Fio.

This conversation comes up again every so often, but it's been reignited on Tumblr again this week with three new Metal Slug games coming onto the scene:

The recent re-reveal of the indie title Metal Slug Tactics from Dotemu, which was originally announced in 2021, during Summer Game Fest 2024,

The June 2024 Nintendo Direct shadow-drop of a revamped version of the former mobile game Metal Slug Attack as Metal Slug Attack Reloaded, and

The impending global launch of the Chinese mobile game Metal Slug: Awakening from Tencent Games next month (July 2024), which originally released in China and SEA in 2023.

Remember these three names, because this is what this post is going to primarily centre around.

However there's one version of this type of post going around that just posts artwork from Metal Slug 3 and MS: Awakening and doesn't adequately explain what the artwork actually comes from and why it looks the way it does, resulting in the confusion and bewilderment of many people who are less familiar with the Metal Slug series.

And so I decided I really need to throw my hat into the ring and see if I can dissect this and bring some actual facts to the conversation.

Look, it's not great. Basically, the stuff people are saying is indeed mostly true, but there's a lot of half-truths and even a few straight up lies being mixed into it. Such as how what the original Metal Slug games looked like is actually more complicated than people think, for starters.

Furthermore, one of the three games I mentioned actually looks really good, and oddly it seems to be the one with the least attention on it right now.

Now, because I'm me, this blog post ended up really long, long enough to have chapter markers, so please bear with me and stick around to the end if you can. — And if you don't care about the historical context, I'm happy for you just to look at the pictures too.

Part 1: The original NEOGEO Metal Slug games

So the main point of this conversation is that the classic Metal Slug games let the characters look weird and cartoony. That's a big part of Metal Slug's core identity, and this is lost in the recent mobile games.

(Of course I had to get a real CRT photo in here at some point.)

To define "classic Metal Slug" you can assume most people are referring Metal Slug 1 through to 3, i.e. the ones that SNK created before their bankruptcy in the year 2000. And most of all, that iconic character select screen from Metal Slug 2, X and 3.

As you can see, there's definitely a shift that took place here.

But hold on, Fio also looks pretty different on the arcade flyers, especially in her original debut in Metal Slug 2. So it's not exactly as clear cut at the cherrypicked images would suggest, but all the same there is still a distinct, extremely late '90s style to everything.

Metal Slug 4 and 5 also released for the NEOGEO system and are similarly loved by many, but were developed in the 2000s under the newly formed Playmore, aka SNK Playmore. I definitely agree with this sentiment that the "original identity" of Metal Slug was strongest in the early titles, and the artwork is the most noticeable reflection of that.

However, although it has little bearing on the conversation, I think it's important to clarify that this change to a contemporary anime style actually began in the early 2000s during the Playmore era of SNK. Like would happen with other SNK game series like The King of Fighters and Samurai Shodown, things got weird for Metal Slug once SNK was reborn as Playmore, eventually becoming SNK Playmore.

Still, all the mainline Metal Slug games through to Metal Slug 7 and Metal Slug XX are still considered classics by fans. The problem for a lot of fans would be SNK's push into new markets such as pachislot and mobile gaming.

Which brings us to…

Part 2: The Metal Slug smart device games, and the Chinese mobile game market

Mobile games would prove a highly lucrative market for SNK Playmore, with hundreds of titles published for Japanese phones during the '00s. A few of these also made their way to more conventional J2ME devices in China. Eventually the mobile gaming market would move to smartphones, with SNK bringing games such as Metal Slug Defense and Metal Slug Attack to market in the 2010s.

This is the first mention of China in this post and it won't be the last. SNK's arcade titles had traditionally been extremely popular in the Chinese market, and with the mobile game market rapidly growing and a hunger for bigger games from beloved SNK series, a lot of interest had grown for SNK titles in this market.

This would result in a huge investment from Chinese companies, with a new joint venture acquiring a 81% stake in the company in 2016, leading SNK Playmore to announce a new shift in their strategy, and with that came a rebrand, once again to simply SNK.

This new identity signified a new era for SNK. This newly reignited SNK would move away from non-videogame markets such as pachislot, and focus more on console games and character licensing. This is the SNK that gave us The King of Fighters XIV and a new Samurai Shodown game.

But this is also the SNK that really doubled down on the Chinese and South-east Asian mobile markets.

This is where this conversation stems from. Games such as the tower defence mobile game Metal Slug Attack and many other mobile games in series such as The King of Fighters would be massive money-makers for SNK. Even the new Samurai Shodown game on consoles/PC would centre Chinese audiences with its first DLC crossover characters pulling from Ubisoft's For Honor and Tencent's Honor of Kings.

But when it comes to centering the tastes of the mobile game market, the big one that bugs people is Metal Slug: Awakening, a mobile game developed and published under license by Tencent Games, which entered beta testing in 2021 and released in China and South-east Asia in 2023.

Now this game actually doesn't have all that much to do with SNK besides the license. However it would be disingenuous of me to say that means it's insignificant to the series. We didn't get to this point out of nowhere out of all. Plus this game is set for a global release in 2024, so this game is for all of us to enjoy.

Although, is it really for all of us? The game certainly seems to plays like a real Metal Slug game, retaining the series' famous run 'n gun gameplay, which is more than you can say for most Metal Slug mobile games. But it certainly doesn't look like a Metal Slug game. The in-game graphics are a strange 3D interpretation of the original pixel art, and all the game's promotional artwork and splash screens look like this. Fio in particular straight up looks like a different character in these pictures.

It's not great. I'm not about to try and defend this. It's just that I really need to stress that it's really not a game targeted towards us.

To make matters more confusing for a lot of people not super plugged-into Metal Slug is that it's not even the only Metal Slug game in the news recently. Metal Slug Tactics had been missing in action since 2021, and all of a sudden it gets re-revealed by Dotemu in June 2024 but overshadowed by many other announcements during the Summer Game Fest period.

But also, SNK themselves would, during the June 2024 Nintendo Direct, reveal and immediately shadow-drop a revamped offline version of the Metal Slug Attack game called Metal Slug Attack Reloaded.

I actually saw a lot of people confused by this. People who remembered the initial 2021 reveal of Metal Slug Tactics and thought this was the same game. It might seem obvious to some of us, but if this is you, then I assure you, it's not the same game.

Although SNK seems to be downplaying this for some reason, Metal Slug Attack is a pretty old mobile game that went defunct last year, and this is a revamped version of it for consoles and PC that can be played offline without microtransactions. (An increasing trend I want to see more of!) The game is still very much a mobile game to its core though and you can tell.

But, look, don't worry, there's hope for us yet, in the form of a new game that many western Metal Slug fans have been excited for for many years. I've already mentioned it, it's…

Part 3: Metal Slug Tactics, a new tactical Metal Slug game from Dotemu and French developer Leikir Studio

I'm going to preface this section with a clarification of my stance on this. As a strategy game this doesn't exactly scream classic Metal Slug. However, a few people have been lumping this in with the mobile games and I think that's pretty unfair.

For starters, this game is oozing with personality and really looks like it's developed by people who truly understand Metal Slug.

Second, the artwork in this game is clearly a very different beast from what can be seen in Metal Slug: Awakening.

Obviously this isn't the same as the funny looking characters you remember from the in-game graphics of the NEOGEO titles. I still however feel like this captures the spirit of these beloved characters better than any of the mobile games have. This is definitely along the lines of Sonic Mania or TMNT: Shredder's Revenge in terms of attention to detail, and that's especially reflected by how the actual game looks and moves in action.

This is really my true agenda if I'm perfectly honest. Please don't sleep on this game. Even if you don't like tactics games, this is the one you want to keep an eye on if you want a true return to form for Metal Slug.

[quackity1999]

If you could get rid of one of us, who would you kill?

Would it be the ones who trigger you? Who poke, and prod, and make now seem like then. Those who can't get enough of your suffering, taking your energy and joy and making it into their own, the ones who make you their feast.

Would it be the spam? Us who commercialize your mind, using you as clout, such is your purpose? Just a pretty face to put on a package, to advertise a glorious nation and a glamorous life.

Or maybe the poets- capturing your attention with their paragraph and metaphors, taking your time, taking you away from the world and deep into your own mind. Comparing you and your actions to all of what you hate, and what you hate to be. Reminding you of what you've become.

But maybe it's the ones who care. The soft ones, the ones who could so easily trick and manipulate you. It's so familiar, and yet not. Because you've done this before, long enough to be paranoid of it. But still new- the names they call you, their encouragement, it's not something you've heard all that often. They make you seem childish, soft. Not even just that, they make you feel things you haven't in a long time. You can handle abuse, ridicule, objectification- but this is new. Can you handle new?

What'll it be?

. . i think you're all out to get me in some way or another. it's not about the killing— i've always been better at building something you can't take down easily.

i don't know, okay? fuck, man. quit acting as if any of you even fucking know me.

trust me, you don't.

[anghraine]

It's weird to describe any Tolkien thoughts as "coming out of nowhere" given who I am as a person, but I woke up thinking about Ghân-buri-ghân.

I wish the depiction of him were not deeply entrenched in noble savage tropes, because there's something kind of amazing in this idea of a people who have barely survived through the ages yet still persist; who saw the earliest warning signs and ditched Númenor before most people had the slightest idea of what was going to happen; who have gotten profoundly screwed over by basically everyone except (iirc) the Haladin; who have had their own powers since the First Age; who have always been implacable opponents of Morgoth's and Sauron's forces, even as these days they're hunted for sport by the Rohirrim; and at the same time who are facing down the threat of total obliteration by Sauron. And Ghân-buri-ghân manages to navigate all of this and get his people security and autonomy.

So like ... there's a seed of a really intriguing concept there, but I'm not sure Middle-earth has ever been in the right hands to actually do it right.

[autopotion]

Something I noticed about this scene during my current replay: The song playing here isn't Alma's theme (which played in the scene immediately prior to the fight with Zalmo), it's the first half of Ovelia's theme (the allegro section in F sharp). We don't learn that the Virgo stone arrived at Orbonne with Ovelia until a little bit later, so the song choice is a nice bit of foreshadowing for how Alma would even know this, i.e. through their friendship.

But now I also like to read this scene in parallel to the one where Ovelia laments her role as a princess.

Ovelia's theme plays in that one as well—specifically the andante second half in B flat. B flat major is an open and bright key, but also a contemplative one; that particular arrangement of Ovelia's theme, with its slower tempo and low woodwind carrying the melody, accentuates the latter trait. Ovelia misses the only friend she's ever had, and one of the rare few that she could be certain had pure intentions towards her. Her nostalgic reminiscence of Alma is tinged with longing for the past and anxiety for the future.

In this scene, on the other hand, where Alma reveals to Ramza that she's seen Virgo at Orbonne, Ovelia's theme in F sharp major is at its brightest and most optimistic. (In classical music, F sharp major is also considered a "triumphant" key.) The music selection is a good choice in general, because it characterizes Alma well—she's humorously teasing her much more solemn brother; she's manipulating the situation so she can stop feeling useless and actually do something, and her gambit works; the higher woodwind brings to mind Alma's chirping flute from her own theme—but when you consider to whom this theme belongs, it implies that Alma isn't just conveying a fact she knows. She's actively reminiscing about Ovelia.

The use of this half of the theme suggests to me that Alma's memories of their friendship are, on their surface, more straightforwardly affectionate. I think that's partially because Alma seems to take more things in stride than Ovelia does, but also, Ovelia isn't Alma's only friend. Tietra's friendship casts a much larger shadow over Alma. For obvious reasons, sure, but as to the framing, the immediate preceding scene had Alma inquire about Tietra by name, and express fresh dismay upon learning that she did not make the same miraculous recovery Delita did, and the music used in that scene was Alma's theme, placing Tietra much closer to Alma's heart (notably, the last scene Alma's theme was used was during Tietra's introduction, at Alma's side). Alma's friendship with Ovelia must seem so uncomplicated compared to what came after, it's almost a relief to get away from all this and revisit the monastery where she grew up.

You could also say, given the arrangement's faster tempo and the surrounding story context, that thoughts of Ovelia are what drive Alma into action. Ramza and Delita have both compared Ovelia to Tietra; it's not a stretch to consider that Alma might be doing the same.

However... as Ovelia is the loneliest character in the game, I don't think you can use her theme, even the lightest part of it, without invoking loneliness. At this point in the story, Alma has been dragged to Lesalia by her brothers, the ones she's not particularly close to, while they wage a war against her childhood friend. That would feel incredibly alienating, I think.

There are so few relationships between women in FFT, and while Alma is central to most of them, she never gets a moment to talk about a really important one. Alma's the invisible connective tissue between Ovelia and Ramza, and Ovelia and Tietra. It's nice to get these little musical hints to remind us of Alma and Ovelia's importance to each other—and also of Alma's thoughts and feelings, elaborations on which are frustratingly few.