#thats basic game design

[justinegreenpie]

does anybody else feel like a lot of sso's features aren't fully implemented lately? for example the championship season pass thing, I think that was so hidden. for no reason. i've had multiple people tell me they didn't even know it existed until somebody told them about it. and that seems like such a big flaw for a timed event and brand new feature?? i also felt very thrown into the deep end with the collections lately. both gm bee's bees and erissa's dolls didn't tell you anything about what you had to do! i loved the stars, i adored the spiders, this would be right up my alley. but all the confusion ruins it for me! why doesnt sso tell us how many things we have to collect? what's the diary even for if they don't add the new collection quests to it? i loved it as a way to keep track of your progress and get hints of the areas of the collectables you're still missing. the way it is right now it just incentivizes looking up guides instead of trying :(

[deltarunebt]

Meeting (Befriending?) Jevil

So much for an easy first fight.

[starrysharks]

got some chara designs for a little death game oc project that i kinda want to develop further so why not post some chara designs from it ?!?!!?!?

[wardinespurrit]

little wardin e spurrit doodle for perplexplore. yay

[moeblob]

it is almost midnight why am I still drawing art ...

[puhpandas]

what are u guys' dream game after sotm? since itll be the last game centered around the mimics backstory and integration and stuff (hopefully) theres basically a whole world of possibilities for currently neglected storylines lol

[scopophobia-polaris]

first female loz director and the gerudo seem to be written fine enough? wow... there ain't no way I thought we were in the worst timeline after totk

Yeah got through the main quest with the gerudo, it wasn't painful! It wasn't even bad! Still got them outfits but for the most part it was like oh cool!

I would say a lot of that oh cool is from the fact they didn't do a lot to even fuck it up to begin with, I'm gonna be real with yall this game is NOT worth $60USD

Edit: lemme say one thing, you know when people were being like damn totk story wasn't dark or mature at all why was this compared to Majora's mask again? And then all the zeldatwt people came out and said zelda is just a kid series domt expect good writing uH

This one feels like a kid's game. That ain't to say it's terrible I would say, hell I'm not far in it if I get something crazy that's like OH FUCK I'll reblog this post and say something but uh.....game for babies I'm gonna be shocked if anyone struggles with any puzzles cuz you CAN CHEESE THEM EASY ITS 🫢🤭

EDIT EDIT: I SWEAR IM NOT EVEN TRYING TO BE A DOWNER..... @ezlo-x HAS BEEN THERE THE WHOLE TIME IVE BEEN PLAYING....THEY KNOW I HAVENT BEEN A PARTY POOPER.....

[supersecretnerd]

Ok so these designs are cute as hell, the Internet is just mean

I have too many thoughts about a game I still need to watch

[monarchamos]

I know nothing about ur pokemon au tell me about Chuuyas team pls- i wanna know the poke-parallels between his team and Dazais

Ah!!! i'm glad you asked!!! :D

In this AU, Dazai is the strongest of Yokohama's Gym Leaders. He specializes in Ghost types! His team consists of a Dragapult, a houndstone, a spiritomb, a froslass, a mimikyu, and a lampent! here's so fun(debatable) facts about his team!

he used to be an admin for the Port Mafia, so he still has like. a big fat kill count. So that's where the Spiritomb comes from. yeah.

Dragapult is usually the one dragging dazai out of his attempts. It's been with him since even before Dazai joined the mafia, so it's his signature pokemon

His mimikyu likes playing with children. Dazai often leaves it with Kyouka and Kenji to play with whenever the gym leaders get together

Dazai found Lampent when he visited Lupin after Oda's death. It was hanging around the alleyway, and he decided to catch it.

froslass is always freezing him. yk like james in the pokemon anime with all of his pokemon. bc he's pathetic like that. Dazai caught froslass on a mission with Kunikida, shortly after becoming a Gym Leader. (yes this froslass is the nightmare of all of his challengers).

Chuuya tried so hard to convince Dazai to catch a Greavard. Dazai eventually relented, but only because he could name it chibi. eventually he got actually attached to it and evolved it to Houndstone

Chuuya, on the other hand, is still an admin for the Port Mafia

His team consists of flying types. This is because, as his brother Verlaine is French from Kalos, got Chuuya super into sky battles. he prefers sky battles, but he's obviously just as formidable in normal battles. In Chuuya's team he has a corviknight, a skarmory, a honchkrow, a mismagius, a talonflame, and an oricorio (sensu style)

Honchkrow is his signature pokemon! it's been with him since he was in the Sheep

the oricorio, believe it or not, is actually from Kouyou and not Dazai, despite the ghost typing. its usually the pokemon to drag chuuya away when he's overworking himself.

the talonflame was gift from Verlaine! yk. as an apology. for killing the flags. Chuuya raised it from an egg. Verlaine battles with it every once in a while to see how it's doing. the battle's just an excuse to spend time with his little brother though

Corviknight was a gift from Adam as well.

Mismagius used to be Dazai's, but he left Chuuya its pokeball when he left the mafia so its his now :P

Chuuya had to add skarmory to his team during the DHC but ended up bonding with it and now its a staple in his team

Back when they were in the mafia, soukoku were often paired up for double battles on missions.

[regigigaz]

hiii

HI RAY!

[icewindandboringhorror]

Recent game related things .. hrmm...

[inkedmyths]

Some sketches to get into the swing of things as I get ready for this work, and decide what level of effort and detail I want to do

[kaweeella]

I have a very important question

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

what some of the undertale fandom did with grillby fucking fascinates me like my god

[undefeatablesin]

So I want to talk about the Bloodborne Comics today, more specifically I want to talk about the hunter from Death of Sleep, mainly because they served as my gateway to the franchise and I think about them a lot even to this day-but nobody else ever seems to mention them or the comics for that matter? But I don’t control my brainrots, they control me, so here we are. This is long as hell, so buckle up lmao.

In any case, I’m going to preface this by saying I definitely understand why the comics aren’t talked about a great deal in the fandom as far as I can tell, since we only get one issue that actually centres around the more familiar and expected story of the hunt, and even then the story’s trajectory veers off in a wildly different direction than you might anticipate-and then the rest of the issues by and large all revolve around characters that are only canon to the comics except for Eileen. I appreciate them for what they are, even though I think a lot of opportunity to explore more pertinent characters was definitely missed, but I’m not here to talk about that in particular today when The Death of Sleep has only become of increasing interest to me since I finally played the game for myself. There will be spoilers for this issue mentioned throughout, so if you haven’t read it and still want to, please keep that in mind.

For those who haven’t read it or just as a refresher for those that have, Death of Sleep follows a nameless hunter on their journey to uncover the meaning of paleblood in order to transcend the hunt they are trapped in the cycle of. This story presumably takes place a little earlier than our hunter’s story in the game, something we can safely assume based on two key details in particular:

Djura is present with all of his powder kegs in Old Yharnam as opposed to being by himself with only one accomplice, and furthermore does not yet seem to be driving other hunters out of the city. He even refers to the nameless hunter as his “friend” and the powder kegs are all taking refuge in the cathedral which, by the time of the game, has obviously been overrun with beast patients praying to the strung up corpse of a blood-starved beast. There are also dogs and huntsmen present in Old Yharnam in the comic, which there definitively is not during the events of the game. Could just be an oversight, but I like to believe this is just a relatively earlier point in time.

Iosefka has not been turned into a celestial emissary and replaced by her imposter yet in the comic; the real Iosefka is still very much alive and present, as we can define by her strict dedication to keeping contaminants out of her clinic and away from her patients while the hunt is in process. As we know, the fake Iosefka is not interested in protecting the patients so much as she is in acquiring even more of them to experiment on.

The hunter of this story is delivered to us as a blank slate in many ways; they have no name, no memory of their past, their family or why they came to Yharnam (if they indeed came from the outside at all), nor how long they have even been a paleblood hunter, asking Gehrman at one point how long they have been bound to the dream (which Gehrman does not actually answer.) The only fragments of their past we are privy to is that a) they have some blurry memories of a child they can’t fully remember, whether that is a child of their own, a different family member or someone else entirely that they have forgotten throughout the hunt. And b) they have some sort of history with Iosefka, which I will expound on further later.

The basic story in DoS revolves around The hunter being entrusted with a strange child by Djura, the both of them believing that the child is the fabled Paleblood that the hunter seeks, due to the fact that, as one might guess, the child quite literally bleeds pale blood. The hunter takes the child with them out of Old Yharnam (after dying once attempting to do so in a confrontation with the Blood Starved Beast), intending for the both of them to escape the hunt with the child’s help.

They journey through some familiar locations like the Forbidden Woods and Iosefka’s clinic and then further out to the Old Fishing Hamlet in search of a boat; though where the hunter thinks they are going to go with that boat or what they are going to do with the child is never disclosed. However, predictably and yet unfortunately for the hunter, the child is heavily implied to be an escaped experiment of the Healing Church as opposed to the answer to the hunter’s plight. The child bleeds the same murky colour as the kin enemies (and the children in the upper cathedral ward orphanage are supposedly the source of celestial emissaries created by the choir’s experiments). The child remarks that they have always “felt sick”, not unlike how imposter Iosefka describes nausea after the blood moon descends. The child likewise does not remember their name or their past and exhibits supernatural abilities, is able to see the amygdalas in the world, and all of this eventually culminates in them turning into a grotesque monster at the very end of the story-making it grimly apparent that they are not what the hunter was looking for at all. The two leave together regardless on a boat out of the fishing hamlet, going to who knows where.

It’s a rather short and simple story, and not one that cares to explain much or expand much on the context we already have, but yet it really fascinates me regardless simply because of how much it emphasizes the presumed hopelessness of Bloodborne’s world and the aching that the hunter feels for an escape from it. For such a relatively mysterious character, we gather a great deal about them purely through the implications of their internal dialogue and the actions they take throughout the pages. If you have no other knowledge of the comic whatsoever, you probably have at least seen this meme-

Which is the hunter’s reply to the doll asking what the hunter desires once they return to the dream after dying to BSB, and the first real instance we see of this particular hunter’s weariness with the hunt that is only compounded by the struggles they have to face throughout their journey. They want out, and they want it terribly, even if they don’t remember what, if anything, they have to return to. They often ideate about death, what it means to die, their inability to truly die, and yet how it is enough for them to die showing the prey that they are unafraid. They feel stranded and hopeless, yet cling to a single foolish hope of finding their way out. They are sick and tired of the hunt, but the hunt now is all they know and all that they are-its their centre, their core, their person. I don’t often see depictions of a paleblood hunter so downtrodden and world-weary that they want to just lay down and give up but simply cannot, or one that goes so far out of their way to avoid the path that the Dream (and thereby the Moon Presence) demands of them. The path which, ironically, is the actual path they need to take to ever truly escape the hunt, whether they know that or not-or whether they are just purely too tired to tread it.

They are a walking, tragic paradox, which in a lot of ways is well-suited to the tragic and bleak world of Bloodborne, and when you think about it, a perfect contrast to the role we end up taking in the game however long after. Our hunter is a relentless force that sees their duty through to the bitter end, whatever end that winds up being, a single shining beacon of hope in this hopeless world-the definition of creating your own destiny, while the nameless hunter in many a way sadly succumbs to the one thrust upon them-seen abandoning their saw cleaver on the shores of the hamlet before they sail away to an unknown fate, though one we know will grant them no peace. They are bound to the dream still, even if they now refuse to fight any longer (not so unlike Djura denouncing his status as a hunter in the face of his own grievances, a very interesting parallel to the nameless hunter and likely an intentional one, since he of all people was chosen to be featured in the comic alongside the nameless hunter.) Frankly, I find them wonderfully, tragically interesting as our own hunter’s predecessor in a narrative sense, and one that is just buried away in these comics and never really spoken of.

I’m also surprised that at the very least nobody talks about the fact the nameless hunter is canonically non-binary! Though the comic summary and Djura both refer to the hunter as “he”, the hunter themself does not apply any particular gender to their person when questioned about it by Iosefka.

And last of all, speaking of Iosefka once more, I am also surprised nobody talks about the implied relationship between the hunter and Iosefka. For as brief as their time in the comic together might be, there are some interesting implications in the dialogues between them. Iosefka claims that “not even her dear hunter” could change her mind about letting people enter the clinic during a hunt-but yet took the hunter in along with the child regardless when the hunter turned up wounded from their jaunt in the forbidden woods and collapsed outside her clinic, as well as treating them with the best blood in her possession (presumably even her own?) The hunter in particular though has some dialogue that just reeks with yearning after they depart from Iosefka’s clinic, having the following things to say:

“Iosefka, I remember the smell of your skin. Soft, subtle markings. Then overwhelm. Honey and bitter medicines. In another world, we could have seen each other again. In another world...not this cursed dream.”

A remarkably intimate statement, by all accounts, especially given this hunter’s rather impersonal comments about the other characters in the story, none of which the hunter has terribly much to say about-whether or not this dialogue was supposed to denote a romantic connection of some kind, I am not going to say definitively. I am going to say the implication definitely keeps me up at night though.

All this said and done: pls read Death of Sleep, you might find it surprisingly interesting lmao.

[perenlop]

I know it's because she's an attempt at a main series Sunset Shimmer and because they eventually have her be Twilight's student, but man I don't quite see the point in having Starlight Glimmer be a Twilight Sparkle parallel