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theskyexists · 5 years ago

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she-ra 4

the reason i stopped watching she-ra is the same reason i stopped watching the dragon prince.

the narrative doesn’t take the situation seriously. instead of leaning into the anguish of war and violence (atla, teen titans) - they make light of it. EVEN when the characters’ guardians are KILLED!!

when Angella died and they spent 2 seconds on Glimmer’s grief at the end of season 3 i was like......actually fuck this. HOW can i take any of these stakes seriously when they insist on brushing them off???

anyway just had to complain about that - especially because the start of the first ep of 4 is them joking AGAIN about something as grim as Glimmer now carrying all the responsibilities of her mother - who may i remind you IS DEAD

but catradora became canon apparently so now i have to struggle through

her aunt, her mother’s sister, is fuckin, joking about cakes, her friends are laughing at the joke. COME ON! how goddamn unrealistic and insensitive. EVEN if they wanna make a point of it - it’s silly! because the narrative PARTICIPATES in making light of the situation. if it was just the characters it would be less jarring

‘we’ll make sure this day is perfect’ WHAT? how could it EVER BE IF HER MOTHER IS FUCKING DEAD????????? AND THAT”S THE ONLY REASON SHE’S QUEEN????? ‘must be hard’ YEAH IT’S HARD - IN FACT IMPOSSIBLE. instead of pretending to be happy maybe you can show some genuine sensitivity. these people are so crazily emotionally underdeveloped my god. what age are they supposed to be? 16? 17? The problem that She-ra has (just like the dragon prince) is that there are no relevant adults. Oh sure there’s a Queen, and some Soldiers, and a Sorceress. But there isn’t a single relevant competent adult around who is concerned with running a bureaucracy or the emotional stability of children

I do like how Catra has overcome her fear of Hordak. but i think i remember being fuckin furious at her for almost destroying the whole world and hurting Scorpia and betraying Entrapta just to spite Adora. vaguely.

the rebellions problem is that they’re all extremely stupid himbos. like literally, in the whole story, only catra and shadowweaver have any smarts, while glimmer gains the ability to think during full moons on wednesdays. meanwhile everybodys is a slave to their emotions - which destroys any brain cells that shadowweaver or catra (or angella or anyone) might have managed. they could literally have killed hordak the entire time but just let him order them around because they’re so hot for acknowledgement

I’m glad Glimmer reflects my frustrations now hahahahaah

‘everyone is already acting like she doesn’t matter’ - yeah dudes, you fucking insensitive bastards

‘im supposed to take care of you glimmer’ - but unfortunately i have the emotional intelligence of a crab! FUCK!

this is another thing about this show that makes me groan. sappy quick resolutions of emotional turmoil through re-affirming the fuckin power of friendship in the first episode of the season.

also couldn’t Adora have done this she-ra stuff from the very beginning

that was badass.....miss glimmer’s other hair though. ok the emotions at that hologram and statue though...

the coolest part of she-ra for me is finding out more how the ancient systems all fit into Etheria and the She-Ras and Hordak Prime etc.

THIS IS A GOOD SPEECH. love this badass.

love Hordak getting put in his place. Love Catra realising she has power - love Hordak reaping what he sows. its unfortunate that she’s a shitty brat who JUST can’t get over her inferiority complex

if i could endlessly teleport i would do what glimmer does

also, glimmer was willing to fuckin murder catra before and she DEFINITELY will be now lol. love that for her.

why did they only introduce adora learning to transform her sword NOW ahahaha, theyve had SO MANY SCENES in which she doesnt have it and then suddenly does - and then its gone again

scorpia is the funniest and most likeable person in the whole show

they really suddenly can’t take five people on with she ra and fuckin huntara on their side??

i remember that little sadistic righteous twist in my stomach when Adora finally was like: FUCK!!!!!! YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!! Catra!!!!!!! and the stupid idiot got it

FINALLY A GLANCE AT THE PEOPLE OF ETHERIA AGAIN! i love the party sequences in this!!! the people of etheria are so beautiful! nobody ever comments on the main characters all looking plain human in contrast....

‘and i fell for it!’ yeah cos you DUMB AS BRICKS ADORA

so first they quietly take out the guards....and then literally break open the door hahaahahahahaaha

‘we forgot the bots regenerate’ - yeah cos you DUMB AS BRICKS ADORA

i just dont understand why they insist on making the main characters so DUMB ahahahahaah

Adora and Catra are great at hitting where it hurts. the difference between them is that Catra KNOWS that she’s hurting Adora - she does it deliberately.

wow that could be some pretty angsty stuff constantly leaving her to struggle on the floor while painfully electrocuted. Catra has also moved to kill Adora straight up so many times. im sure she really wants to (but it would destroy her later). But now, Adora swept something at Catra that might have actually killed her. I get Catra though, I would’t want to get beaten by some blonde, blue-eyed, glowing golden kid who always gets to win and do better. this is truly the first time Adora has moved to kill Catra......

does flatterina not have parents who’d be like: uhhhhh maybe leave the soldiering for a couple more years?

catra truly burning all her bridges. hahaha. it’s so satisfying to see her use her anger and power to truly destroy herself - because of guilt!

no other villagers were like - HMMMMMMM this random new kid is here? weird..... i didnt see that coming either.

Adora doesn’t think about what Catra might have even been doing there - cos she’s DUMB AS BRICKS

the interesting thing about this show is that they’re setting up a dichotomy. they’re treating war like a high-stakes game because they have the good side adhere to an aesthetic of ....magic. they will not make the two sides equivalent in any way - which makes questions of morality moot. the show is purely an emotional drama. the horde is an army of brainwashed kids in an industrial wasteland - they fight with tech and guns. but the good guys cannot fight with an army or tech, they fight with cleverness and magic. they’re called the ‘rebellion’ - they HAVE to be underdogs because they have to follow the script of good - even though what’s really going on is war, not a rebellion. That’s why they have a single strike team that do ‘missions’. They are presented as FUNDAMENTALLY different - on the level of identity which they cannot change lest they destroy themselves - and in that way the good guys can never become the bad guys. it is ALMOST meta. think they’re gonna do something with that at one point. i hope

also Netossa has such a super cool design.

‘everyone knows you’re needed in bright moon’ - uh. really? i dont know. some random person i’ve never seen before demands you go to meetings. so? is that important? why?

spinerella can literally FLY???????? why has she been in the background this whole time??? hahahaha military inefficiency.

there was an explosion that ripped trees apart - but bo’s alive!! honesty why didn’t they try explosive suicide bots before. they’re very lucky he was still alive to heal

‘could they be tracking she-ra?’ WHAT? isn’t the obvious suggestion - A SPY???? they just assume that the general is right hahahahaa.

i love how double trouble is so meta.

actually, why wasn’t glimmer trained as a sorcerer anyway?

glimmer is upset about her growing magic plants but not her having magic ingredients

why do they present good strategic thinking (for once) as evil influence from shadowweaver

what a fuckin badass. honestly - glad that this show finally utilised glimmer’s extremely op powers like they should be. honestly, she’s much more powerful than She-Ra.

that bit with spinerella was so contrived jfc.

‘by using me as a decoy’ adora says, pissed off. uhhhh YOU went off on your own to get smushed by fuckin bots adora. Glimmer didn’t do that to you. she just used your stupidity.

glimmer really left catra to die. hahahahaa

i like adora best when she’s on her own and being a dork

they definitely managed to foreshadow that Light Hope was evil but im glad they picked up the thread now

am i seeing this wrong or did scorpia have two mums??? but also. where the fuck are they

lolololololol because everybodys dumb as bricks and emotionally volatile they’re incredibly easy to manipulate

‘i cant risk hitting flatterina’ pffft - ALL YOUR ARROWS ARE NON-LETHAL BO. ugh i cant deal with these contrived stakes

I LOVE THIS BADASS EFFICIENT HARDCORE GLIMMER

they’re really gonna spin it like this is a bad development? fuck off. finally some grit.

‘you took things way too far’ - but she got results! dumb as bricks adora

(this may seem harsh but adora is DUMB shes so fucking DUMB!!!! and she has many good qualities (such as an almost innate sense of morality) but goddamn. i guess its good to sometimes have a show about all around dumb characters. i mean, it’s not unrealistic per se, it’s just.....weird.)

the interesting thing about these characters is that you can SEE every single one of them struggling with cognitive dissonance. thats the big story of this show. they see the world a certain way - and then when something challenges that, they fight to the death to destroy or deny or ignore that new information - to everybody’s detriment. and they can’t back down because every step they’ve taken - would turn to sins they can’t live with. it’s interesting and its also a kind of conflict that‘s frustrating if not resolved at SOME point. thats why i love this season for its characters going off the rails. adora aiming to kill catra, catra destroying her last relationships, glimmer growing more and more militant.

they’re all acting like teens - that is - highly volatile - unable to keep from provoking others or be provoked - but they ARE teens.

‘catra doesn’t care. she’ll hurt people to get her way (implied: EVEN people on her side)’ - we must remember that Scorpia was entirely fine with KILLING the trio (it was Catra that wasn’t at the time).

‘you’re a bad friend’ OH OUCH. Catra - who’s always been treated as a whipping girl by those in power - does the same to those she is in power over. But on some level she doesn’t WANT to be that. she’s just always always been rejected and take advantage of and lashed out at and abandoned by the people she considered important (shadowweaver ---- doing the same to catra that was done to her is so goddamn....it’s the story of this show. the simplicity and banality of damaging and hurting others and that carrying over to harm even more people - is the story of this show and it’s immeasurably frustrating and REALISTIC)

she still flinches at Hordak’s lashing out. but she imprints on him the exact lesson she’s trying to school herself in. If you don’t need anybody - you don’t want anyone - if nobody matters but the mission and winning - then you can’t be hurt. she wants to prove her worth - but she doesn’t realise that inherently means that she’s putting somebody in power over her - again and again and again.

mermista coming in clutch with the braincells: there’s a spy! I love how this is played as completely implausible and just Mermista nonsense (who i love learning about) - while it’s so obviously true/

i actually love Adora when she’s being serious and heroic, or a huge dork. and she has the wit to RECOGNISE good ideas. but i just don’t understand why Adora is being big b about being used as a distraction. like....why?

i love that the underside of Mermista’s sneaker has a figure. but why the fuck is a common soldier with them (flatterina) and do they really think they can interrogate the whole castle filled with some shitty guards and...what - the guerilla troops they sometimes employ? where do they even live? ah in a tent city. ok

why is the GENERAL in front line combat WITHOUT SOLDIERS???? oh wait. glimmer did that too when she was general. lolololol

i understand why Adora doesn’t trust Shadowweaver and doesn’t want her around most of all - and Glimmer getting buddy buddy with her is hurtful. but...it’s not helpful to needle glimmer about it. but dismissing the guards around shadowweaver however? stupid of Glimmer. unnecessary. ‘what has she done but help us?’ - uhhhh she kidnapped you, corrupted your powers, almost wiped Adora’s mind. I wish Adora had summed up those things instead of leaving them implied.

so perfuma and mermista come across inconsistencies in the stories - but then. forget about it? i just...... UGGHGHGHGHGHGHGH. people really aren’t this dumb are they? they’re just NOT.

‘no more secrets and doing things without us’ - that was a good speech. but like, glimmer is right - she’s surrounded by INCOMPETENT IDIOTS lolololol. but good leadership is corralling idiots, Glimmer. not going off on your own. but she’s already planted the bait about the dining room.

‘we were the only ones who knew about the plan to take back dril’ ---- THEN WHY DID YOU INTERROGATE OTHER PEOPLE AHAHAHAHAAHAHAAHA

‘stop questioning my choices, stop whining about being a decoy’ YEAH FUCKIN HELL ADORA STOP BEING SUCH A FUCKING SHIT. IS THIS REALLY ‘TAKING CARE OF GLIMMER’????

‘all you do is question my authority, it’s exhausting.’ yeah god...it really is. adora needs to fucking BACK! OFF! but im loving these fights because it brings out the grievances. Adora is right to be worried about Glimmer no longer including her in her decisions. and she makes a good point that that’s bad. She makes a good point that Shadowweaver cannot be trusted. And Glimmer makes zero good points - except that it’s been hard for her and has garnered 0.1% understanding from the people around her. Oh they were working together. BUT those were definitely real grievances.

GLIMMER CAN ALREADY DO A CONTAINMENT SPELL LIKE THAT??? godDAMN. castapella completely flunked her responsibilities to Glimmer but shadowweaver did NOT.

hmmm so Solinius was....destroyed. but like, did the people die? like....the people? that’s the important bit isn’t it? i mean, they were under the sea right?

i suppose the problem i also have is that this show will NOT hurry up. normally i love filler stuff but ...the characters are too.....cheery. too flat. their quirks are fun and funny until they’re literally character flaws.

are the horde just literally attacking civilians? jezus. the war crimes. how did shadowweaver ever expect to trick Adora when she was released into the field?

‘you can’t just keep going off on your own!’ - SHE LITERALLY SAVED THE WHOLE FUCKING TOWN. SHE’S THE QUEEN! EVERYBODY SHOULD LISTEN TO HER! lolololol

the problem with Adora’s points is that everything about their dynamics are always so nebulous. why cant glimmer keep showing up to help out? WHY??? she’s the most capable fucking soldier in the field! she’s supposed to have full fucking authority! like, Adora isn’t in the right here. the problem is that her needling is only a symptom of her worries - which is that Glimmer doesn’t trust her any more. but the needling does NOTHING but make her seem like an idiot

i do love this trope reversal here - Seahawk deliberately damselling them to let the princesses save the boys? pffft

love catra getting the consequences for her actions regarding Scorpia. You can’t keep lashing out at people and expect them to stay my dear cat.....

oooohhh Glimmer.... you’re treading close to very hurtful territory. Blaming Adora for the Rebellion failing? for things she couldn’t do anything about? stupid.

really?? you’re really gonna fucking fight-resolution BLOCK ME? are you FUCKING kidding me? edging me for the whole GODDAMN SEASON??? and finally Adora cries at Glimmer going over the line???? fuckin I HATE the narrative decisions in this stupid show I FUCKING HATE THEM FUCK THESE WRITERS GOD FUKCING DAMMIT!!! this has been the whole GODDAMN SHOW!!!!!! ARGHGHGHGHGHGH

i’ve been waiting for a fucking resolution for Adora and Catra the whole! goddamn! SHOW! NOTHING! else matters! you do the exact same for glimmer and adora and now you let it fester again??? because of some no-stakes BULLSHIT? just give me the fucking godddamn PAYOFF for watching these kids be IDIOTS.

this fight on the boat is COOL and really wonderfully animated

really? Glimmer’s response to Adora being hurt and not wanting to be TOUCHED is to be angry herself? what a fucking IDIOT. god i can’t stand this. I CAN’T STAND IT

is this how people act? do they never take a moment to breathe and think and reflect and realise their priorities and take a step back and fucking apologise?

jezus FUCKING! CHRIST!

‘no matter what glimmer thinks of me’ oh that HURTED. oh damn. that’s so relatable. it’s a way to run, it’s a way to internalise the hurt and then prove the things that hurt wrong. the one that hurt you

I know Bo is supposed to be the emotionally intelligent one but he’s also too soft. He should go up to his friends individually and ask them the sharp questions. not - ‘communicate more positively’.

I just like Adora so much better when she’s alone. Her friendships’ positive moments are always so sappy or so....like over-exaggerated, the negative moments always so fucking annoying. Alone, Adora is generally driven, tragic, and cool. the problem is perhaps that i don’t care for the constant fucking drama

god i LOVE Mara so much - she’s so beautiful. and i LOVE learning more about the Old Ones. So they were trying to study Ehteria’s magic.... but then Bright Moon and the princesses were already here. The Magic-Like systems of the Old Ones are pure tech.

wow! even Mara’s transformation is way cooler.

so why was the first one’s tech (she ra) responsive to the magic? why does Raz know about She-Ra? when she ra is first ones tech????

WAIT ONE SECOND. She-Ra is ‘magic’ ??? it’s the SWORD that’s the first one’s tech! She-Ra is Etheria’s magic ! but how if the First Ones chose Mara. Did they steal She-Ra from Etheria?

so what im getting is that. the Old Ones colonised Etheria. Etheria has magic, and when Mara was chosen they made that girl an elite soldier - giving her a first one’s tech sword so she could ‘control’ Etheria’s magic. Then Mara was told to study the magic of Etheria - the ship implying that she’d not been on the planet before. then they created a Heart of Etheria project - which will probably turn the magic into a weapon. this was going to be used against Hordak Prime, im sure. I mean, Mara saved Etheria, but she did doom the rest of the universe to...extinction.... like, judging from Hordak’s strategy, Hordak Prime just literally exterminates planets and repopulates them with his clones....

But why would the planet choose a girl from amongst the colonisers - twice?

OOOHHH that anguished scream. i love anguished screams

why dont they put fucking safety belts in these ships. it’s not like the ship didn’t survive. only Mara got splatted (i guess)

also i love Mara. but damn Adora just got some more shit on her plate. why the fuck was she pushed through a portal again? for a She-Ra chain reaction?

I love madame Raz.

So they didn’t explicitly use it against Hordak Prime. and it wouldn’t have destroyed Etheria back then but it will now...

guh this showmakes it so hard to enjoy catra’s pain.

well they did finally have a good talk about it. I have to say, Glimmer is making good strategic sense - it’s just that this show only rewards harebrained schemes

Catra having a crazy panic attack cos she can’t find Scorpia and she’s completely lost and she knows its her fault. kinda love that for her. my heart

my dear Glimmer, theres a difference between absence of trust and absence of agreement.

they’re bringing king micah back just when angella is dead? oh fuckin lol

the horde....exiled micah? they exiled Micah instead of killing him???

why do they ALWAYS interrupt important conversations? i hate that shit. it’s cheap. it’s unsatisfying.

now THIS is what im here for - that unstoppable WILL!! john gonzalez is right - we watch stories for characters overcomign obstacles. writing, is creating the obstacle course. .....what does that say about me and my life....hmmm.

‘light hope told me everything i need to know’ - uhhh no she didn’t. she didn’t tell you how to harness the energy at all. ugh

how the fuck did double trouble escape. seems to me that they didn’t actually. they were let go....

it’s always so stupid when people try to tell other people: oh no you’ve got no plan - this is too risky! when that’s NEVER a problem

Glimmer is going to activate the weapon just in time for Hordak Prime to use it. And naturally she misses the return of her dad. fuck this

they’re gonna have Hordak and Catra fight? hmm

Double Trouble is right - this IS good for her - and it IS Catra - except for Shadowweaver’s case - she was an abusive bitch

I love Scorpia’s new cool fight music and also glowy eyes

is glimmer going to throw herself into lava??

the unfortunate thing is that Hordak Prime is right on the doorstep and he took over the whole universe or whatever. so they could probably have used that weapon. i mean the Old Ones must have seen something coming. there must be a reason they’re all GONE maybe????

why did Adora assume that all those stars would be destroyed?

THE ANIMATION ON THAT FINAL STUFF WAS INCREDIBLE AND EPIC

how the fukc are they going to beat Horde Prime lolololol.

i guess Glimmer really shouldn’t have done that. but at least she was in time to bond with Catra.

#my stuff #vidi #she ra

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lunarmoonflowyr · 5 years ago

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Because I’m bored I’m going to write down a bunch of my passive thoughts on a new game I started playing and because once I start making streaming/youtube content related to viddy game I might make a video on this

Vambrace: Cold Soul Initial Impressions

Vambrace: Cold Soul is a game by Devespresso Games, an independent game developer based out of Seoul, South Korea who’s other notable titles seem to be a series of horror adventure games titled “The Coma”.

Vambrace however, is a game far more akin to something like Darkest Dungeon in visual style and gameplay design however the Steam store page description has it claiming to be inspired by “the gothic fantasy of Castlevania, the deep lore of a series like The Elder Scrolls, the replayability of roguelites like FTL: Faster Than Light, and the sweeping, character-driven epics of our favorite JRPGs.”

This is going to be a small writeup of my initial impressions after 2 hours of the game.

THE STORY SO FAR

We are a woman named Evelia Lyric, although she just goes by Lyric most of the time so that’s what I’ll be referring to her as throughout the rest of this writeup. Lyric immediately begins showing tell-tale signs of “JRPG Protagonist Syndrome”, as she:

1. Survives being passed out in a freezing arctic-like environment while wearing what could maybe be called clothing for a slightly harsh winter in New England, and comes out of it with barely any complications to speak of

2. Has an (allegedly) famous father who leaves her a Mysterious Book That No One Can Read, and the titular Vambrace, which is now apparently fused to her arm, that lets her pass through what the game refers to as the “Frostfell”, a massive magical ice barrier surrounding the city of “Icenaire” that apparently kills anyone who touches it. Apparently she can also one-shot evil ghosts with it, but only in the narrative. She did it in a cutscene once, and so far that hasn’t translated to gameplay.

3. Has so-far-unmentioned heterochromia

4. Gets a high-ranking soldier to trust her almost immediately when only one brief conversation ago he had a suspicion that she was a spy for “The Green Flame”, apparently some rival faction that’s very, very Not Good.

Getting confused by all the random names yet? Trust me, it doesn’t really get much better. This game’s story shows a lot of the very painful signs of an over-written, over-developed fantasy world that someone very obviously put a lot of time and love into, but didn’t really know where to stop.

Names, places, and concepts are thrown at you non-stop with a new one being introduced almost every dialogue sequence if you spend time talking to the locals of Icenaire once you convince the guard captain to let you go wandering the streets. You can also find random lore pages strewn around the place that add even more lore on top of everything else.

It all gets to be so dense and confusing you almost completely lose track of what the actual, present-day story is. The game has no trouble throwing random scraps of lore at you, full of names that mean nothing, but when it comes to actually explaining what the hell is going on right now, it falls a bit short. Here’s my understanding so far.

Lyric’s father has either died or mysteriously disappeared, I can’t remember which, and she’s been left a letter, a book, and the titular Vambrace. The book is referred to in the game mechanics as “The Codex” and is referred to by NPCs as a “book that nobody can read”, because apparently foreign languages don’t exist in this world, yet so far I’ve counted 6 or 7 distinct fantasy races that apparently all speak the exact same language all the time.

The vambrace has fused itself to Lyrics arm, and her fathers letter tells her to go to Icenaire (I have no fucking clue what that name is supposed to mean by the way, and it sounds really fucking awkward to say so it has to mean -something-. The “ice” part is pretty self-explanatory if a little on the nose, the entire game takes place in what appears to be an apocalypse along the lines of if you took the events of “Frozen” and turned it up to 11, but the only insight I could get on the “naire” part is that it’s from the Irish Gaelic word “náire” which means something along the lines of “ashamed” or “to have shame”. So this city is basically named “ice-ashamed”, which I have no clue what that’s supposed to mean, and it’s bothering me enough that I’ve gone on an entire run-on paragraph to rant about it because it sounds stupid to say and exactly like a city name I would’ve come up with for my crappy fantasy stories that I wrote when I was fourteen.)

Where was I again?

Right, okay, so Lyrics father instructs her to go to Icenaire (blech) and find some dude named “Zaquard Ventrue”. That name also means nothing, except as far as I can tell, “Zaquard” is the pseudonym of one of the people at Devespresso, and the first thing that comes to mind for Ventrue is Vampire: The Masquerade, and I’m not sure it really means anything there either.

The naming system in this game seems really off, it has no consistency and a lot of it is really self-indulgent, because you find out that this Zaquard fellow (in the game) is the big head honcho of what apparently is some kind of resistance movement of the oppressive organization called “The Green Flame”.

So Lyric goes through the “Frostfell” (the magical ice barrier thing around the city that allegedly is the cause of this whole Frozenpocalypse deal) by using the power of the mysterious Vambrace, and...passes out because of it, only to be found by a scavenging party in a tutorial section where the game teaches you how to play it using said scavenging party.

More on that later.

Lyrics unconscious body is dragged back to the city, she somehow hasn’t contracted hypothermia, and the next scene we’re given is an interrogation from some guy who’s last name is Esquire.

I don’t think the writers of this game knew what the word “Esquire” meant, because despite traditionally appearing after a person’s name, it is not a surname, it is a title. So the strange and unconventional naming choices continue.

Anyway, Captain Generic Man, Esq., interrogates Lyric for all of five minutes before believing her at face value that she has a magical super-gauntlet that lets her pass through this extremely lethal magical barrier, when he has all the reason in the world to believe that she’s some kind of spy sent by the people his resistance faction is supposedly fighting against.

And instead of keeping her under close watch until she’s at least somewhat established some trust that she’s not a mole or a spy or an assassin, he just...lets her roam free, around the city. Completely by herself. With no supervision, whatsoever.

As you can probably tell, I already have several problems with this games pacing and general overall writing quality, and we’re not even past the prologue section yet.

Oh, yeah, and Captain Generic gives Lyric some free money for her troubles, because the player needs to know how the market system works and how to buy healing items, and we can’t be assed to have them come across money in a non-contrived manner.

And the currency is really weirdly specific? Its this stuff called “Hellion”, which in real-person-language is a word for a malicious troublemaker or nuisance. But in the same setting where a city is named “Ice Shame”, “Hellion” is apparently some kind of magical incense that the fox people burn to appease their gods.

Oh yeah there’s a race of fox people in this game. They run the markets. They’re less full on furries and more like regular humanoids, but with fox ears, a tail, and pointy teeth, so like that weird halfway “haha guys look I’m totally not a furry” deal thats basically just “catgirls but with a different animal”.

Anyway.

You’re given a fat stack of cash and told to go buy yourself some food from the market, because we need to give you a tutorial on how to buy shit.

So you go to the market and are taught by a smooth-talking fox-man-person-thing how to buy things at a market, after which you are immediately spotted by the only guard in the city with an ounce of sense who instantly goes “Hey holy shit isn’t that the person that literally nobody recognizes in this city that’s been cut off from the outside world for presumably several years at this point and the only other known faction that has the resources to keep a human alive is one we’re actively at war with?” and throws your ass right back in jail.

By the way, the things you can choose to buy at the market are all pretty typical JRPG items that heal stat debuffs, or are basically different flavors of health potion that restore different amounts of health, and for any seasoned JRPG veteran it’s pretty easy to guess what items do what and how they function (sort of) but there’s plenty of unique-to-this-game stat conditions and the way the health mechanic works is kinda wonky, and the game asks you to buy your healing items before it even explains to you how the hell that part of the game actually works.

I’ll go more in-depth to the gameplay once I finish this story synopsis but I just felt like pointing out that at this point you’ve been walked through some of the basic mechanics of the game and some of the combat, but the part of the game that deals with debuffs and HP and how you deal with those things hasn’t been explained yet.

This game is very weird.

Anyway, during the attempt to throw your ass back in jail, some shit is going down in the room that has the elevator to the surface (yeah apparently this city is like, underground. They don’t actually explain why, or how, or if it was like that before the Frozenpocalypse or if the Frozenpocalypse buried it, and if it was buried, how the hell did it get excavated so cleanly like this and why are all the buildings intact? Whatever, apparently the game doesn’t consider this important, which is weird considering all the random lore tidbits it does deem important, so we’re moving on now.)

OH hold on let me backtrack a bit. While you’re being let out of your jail cell because Captain Generic just felt like it apparently, you walk up to this other jail cell with a goth chick inside it and you’re told she’s an Extremely Powerful Bad Guy, Do Not Fuck With Her.

So, as you arrive at the elevator to the surface, guess who just made an escape and caused a spooky ghost person to invade the city and injure two people! That’s right, Spooky Not-So-Jailed-Anymore Goth Chick! Who’s name is Isabel Salazar, and it’s really saying something that that’s the most normal name we’ve encountered so far in this god forsaken game.

So you’re now face-to-face with a spooky ghost. You think you’re about to get into a combat section, you’ve been taught how to do combat, but nope! Lyric just waltzes up to the fucker and smacks him in the face with her Vambrace hand and it...melts...him? Just, with absolutely zero fanfare?

Uh. Sure. Alright. Weird, do we get some kind of special attack that hurts ghosts? Guess we’ll find out.

So the guard who was trying to arrest you, a redhead with pointy ears who’s very obviously an elf but hasn’t directly been called an elf in-game yet so I’m not sure if we’re using that word but fuck it she’s an elf, who’s name is Celest. That’s all, I don’t remember if she’s given a last name.

Celest is reprimanded by Captain Generic, Esq. for trying to re-arrest the possible spy who was let go with literally no actual forethought put into it, and she’s understandably miffed, and Captain Generic tells you to come meet him in the war room because “someone is very interested in meeting you.”

This leads nicely into the scene where our protagonist meets the leader of this massive underground (literally) resistance movement, who, upon hearing our surname and being told we’re the daughter of Some Random Guy, immediately trusts us to go after Isabel and lead an expedition all on our lonesome with a party of random soldiers we get to pick from a “help wanted” board instead of, I dunno, maybe sending some actual soldiers with us.

This leader is the previously mentioned Zaquard Vampire Clan Man, who looks exactly how you’d expect a self-insert resistance leader to look, a young white-haired anime boy looking dude who’s bangs cover his eyes and we can’t see them. And he has earrings.

Farquaad here apparently knew about our dad, and our dad was apparently the lead researcher about Archons (?) and the Vambrace is an Archonian (???) artifact (also they spell it “artefact” in the game and I hate it, they also say “magick” and it makes me want to find whoever was in charge of writing this and punch them) so that’s why he trusts us now, apparently.

We are then tasked with a mission to go retrieve Evil Goth Chick, who apparently is going to go tell these Green Flame fellows the location of our massive underground city secret base, which is somehow super duper secret despite being huge.

Keep in mind that this entire game’s setting is allegedly one massive city, it’s not like Eragon where the big inside-the-mountain Dwarf city was kept secret from Galbatorix, because that at least had the justification of being halfway across the entire fucking continent from the Empire as well as being on the other side of a massive fucking desert.

This is all apparently one huge city! And the “secret underground base” is kinda big itself! It doesn’t make sense that its some big secret!

Ugh, whatever, if I keep harping on about every bit of the narrative that doesn’t make any fucking sense when you think about it for more than ten seconds I’m going to give myself a stroke so now that I’ve caught you up to where I am in the story, let’s move onto the gameplay.

THE GAMEPLAY

If you’re at all familiar with Darkest Dungeon (a much better game) the gameplay is most similar in style to that. You have a party of 4 adventurers, you walk through room after room of a connected “dungeon” except in this case its neighborhood streets and buildings, find treasure, manage the balance of treasure in your inventory vs healing and utility items, and you have combat.

Let’s talk about the combat first, because its the part I like most about this game and the reason I’m probably going to keep playing it.

Vambrace takes a similar approach to Darkest Dungeon in that each character has a certain number of skills at their disposal, being limited in use by where the character is standing in the party order and what position slots in the opposing party they can target.

When you get into combat, the party orders will look like this, with your party on the left and the opposing party on the right.

4-3-2-1-1-2-3-4

The skills are divided into three range categories.

- Short or melee range skills can only be used in position 1 and 2 and can only target positions 1 and 2 on the opposing side unless those two positions are empty, in which case they can target 3 and 4.

- Medium range skills can be used from any position, but can only target positions 1 and 2.

- Long range skills can be used from any position and can target any position.

Some skills also take flourish points to use, and characters build up flourish points throughout encounters by using their basic skill.

Different characters have different classes, which determine different skills they’re able to use.

This is a basically solid combat system, as proven by Darkest Dungeon, however Vambrace falls short of DD in two ways:

The first is Darkest Dungeon’s position system, and its supplementary corpse system, work slightly differently. Position order is the same, however, there can be no empty spaces breaking the line. If the line would be broken, units that are furthest back move forward to close the line.

So say you encounter 4 enemies, so positions 1-2-3-4 are all fully occupied. If you kill the enemy in position 2, the enemies in positions 3 and 4 will move forward to fill in the blank space, so now only positions 1-2-3 are occupied.

This is mitigated in Darkest Dungeon by the corpse system, when you kill an enemy it leaves a corpse behind, which fills up the space and prevents the backline from moving forward. However there are several skills in DD that remove corpses as part of the effect.

This opens up different paths to take in terms of strategy. In both Vambrace and Darkest Dungeon, the 3 and 4 positions are usually filled by the more deadly foes, the enemies that take those positions usually cause debuffs to your party or have a higher damage output.

However, in Darkest Dungeon, you can either run a strong backline of your own and try to eliminate the opposing backline quickly, or you can run a strong frontline and a more supportive backline to try and take out the frontline, and then wipe out the corpses, pushing the backline units to the front and making all their skills basically useless, since most enemies that stick to the back in DD have maybe one attack that they can use in position 1 or 2, and it’s usually not a very good attack.

There are also attacks in DD that you can use to force the enemy to shuffle positions, bringing the backline to the front and crippling them without even touching the tanky frontline.

However, in Vambrace, positions are static on the enemy side. When you kill enemies in front, the backline enemies stay in the backline. This leads to a much more limited strategy, where you pretty much only want to focus the backline first, and the frontline afterwards.

There’s also the matter of turn order. Characters with a higher Awareness stat (more on stats in a second) get a bonus on their initiative and can go higher in the turn order, beyond that I’m not actually sure what factors are involved in determining this. However, the turn order itself is transparently displayed in the bottom center of the screen during combat, telling you very clearly which position on which side gets the next move, which helps out a lot with planning out your encounters.

Once you get the hang of it though, Vambrace’s combat is still enjoyable, and I’d say the aesthetic and environment around it makes it different enough from Darkest Dungeon that I can enjoy playing both for different reasons. Vambrace far more embraces certain JRPG aspects, for instance.

Speaking of which, lets talk stats.

Before I do though I want to talk about one of my biggest gripes with the game so far, and that’s the fact that its interface is terrible. This game doesn’t have a menu for keybinds, it doesn’t let you re-bind things, and its control scheme is a little awkward to say the least.

It also hides a lot of information to be only accessible in the tutorial pages, which you can access at any time in the pause menu, but it makes things tedious because this game has a lot of smaller things to keep track of.

Each character has 5 stats. Combat, Sleight, Merchantry, Awareness, and Overwatch, and each one has a different impact on the game.

Combat is fairly self explanatory, it determines how good your character is at fighting.

Sleight determines how good the character is at scavenging, and it affects the quality of loot you find in containers.

Merchantry affects buying and selling, the higher the merchantry, the cheaper stuff is to buy and the more people pay for your junk.

Awareness determines how well you can avoid traps

And Overwatch determines how good your character is at managing the party during camping.

Your stats can also affect the outcomes of certain random events that can trigger throughout the dungeons, although I’ve only encountered a handful of them so far.

Speaking of camping, one of the most under-explained mechanics in this game is the camping mechanic, and my first and only death so far has been because of a failure to properly explain said mechanic, causing me to fuck it up 3 times before I did it right, and because camping is actually extremely vital to success in this game, it caused me to die and fail the mission.

Any healing items in your inventory cannot be used on the fly, they are only usable during a camping session. You can initiate a camping session upon finding a suitable spot for one, which you can either randomly find in the generated rooms of a “dungeon”, or in between the “dungeons” on a mission in shelters where you get sort of a mini-camp session.

A full camping session involves you selecting the character with the highest Overwatch skill to manage said session. You need to do three specific things to maximize your sessions effectiveness, and these things are not properly tutorialized and are easy to misunderstand or miss out altogether. When the camping session starts, the character you’ve chosen to manage the whole thing starts out by standing in front of the campfire, with an “interact” icon hovering above it.

Do not interact with the campfire. It will end the camping session immediately and you cannot redo it, you will have to find a new campsite.

Instead, you need to find the interact icon for sleep and the icon for music. The first one will restore the HP of your whole party equal to your session leader’s Overwatch skill provided it goes without incident, and the second one will restore the Vigor of your whole party equal to the session leader’s Overwatch skill.

Oh. Right, Vigor.

Vambrace has 2 health bars essentially. There’s your Hit Points (HP), and then there’s Vigor. HP works how you think it does, you take damage in combat or from poison or traps and if you hit 0 you die.

Vigor is basically a worse version of the Stress mechanic from Darkest Dungeon, but instead of ticking up as your characters get more and more stressed out, their Vigor essentially goes down as you walk through the various dungeon rooms, and certain debuffs and traps can reduce it as well.

Once you’ve done both a sleep and a music session, you then need to open up your inventory and use the appropriate healing items to cover up whatever those two things didn’t get. If one character was particularly badly hurt and needs extra patching up after a nap, do it with healing items now. You cannot use healing items outside of a camping session, so do it now.

You can also only use status healing items here too, and status ailments don’t go away with a nap.

Only once you have done those three things should you interact with the campfire again, ending the camping session and continuing on with the dungeon.

The Other Stuff

The other reason besides the gameplay being interesting enough that I plan on continuing to play this game is that the art direction and the sound design are actually very, very well done, with a feeeeew small exceptions.

Let’s start with the art direction.

Visually, the game looks fantastic. It’s as if you took the visual style of Darkest Dungeon but made it more anime-esque and less horrifying, more pleasant to look at. It’s really pretty and well stylized, and is a style that will hold up visually even when graphical advancements outpace it.

The character designs are also all fairly unique, if a little over-designed sometimes. You can pick out all the named characters on sight alone, they’re all visually distinct from each other and are easily recognizable.

The sound design is also, for the most part, really really good. The ambient noise is a good quality, the audio is well balanced and none of it really grates on my ears, and some of it is actually pretty nice to listen to.

The music in the game so far is also good, and while I haven’t come across any tracks that made me want to just sit there and listen to it on loop for a few minutes, I also haven’t found any tracks that made me go “oh god oh god make it stop”

The only part of the audio I have a problem with is...the voice acting. It’s only shown up in a few very small cutscene bits so far, mostly the initial opening scene, but I can’t really put my finger on what’s wrong with it. The only character who’s spoken so far is Lyric, and I really am finding it hard to say exactly why her voice-acted dialogue bothers me, but it really grated on my ears and I was glad when the cutscene ended.

I think it was a mixture of the quality of the audio, it didn’t sound professionally recorded although I’ll grant it that it wasn’t “Skyrim mod voice acted by the modder” level of terrible, but it still left a lot to be desired. The other part that got to me was just the style with which the actress was talking, however I can’t really pinpoint if it was just the stilted dialogue she was stuck with, if the direction was bad, or if she just didn’t really have much of an idea what she was doing.

She had a very monotonous voice throughout, and while she wasn’t speaking flatly or like she was bored, it was moreso that kind of voice people give characters like Sasuke in fandubs, where they’re overly mopey and Serious™ which kinda takes the oomph out of lines that should have had the more somber tone.

Overall Thoughts and Opinions

Keep in mind this is all based on the first 2 hours of gameplay, and that I’ll probably post a more detailed version of this (or make a video) once I’m either a lot further into the game or I beat it.

I don’t hate the game. I think the writing is completely overdone and obnoxious, and has way, way too much lore and way too many things going on without focusing on the more narrow plotline, and I have a huge problem with the very very inconsistent naming scheme, but aside from those two specific criticisms, I’ve definitely seen worse writing.

And it’s not like the characters aren’t endearing in that “this character 1000% slots into a very specific JRPG trope but I’m here for it” sort of way. I did enjoy what I got to see of Lyric and the other named characters, even though they were completely stereotypical and Lyric comes off as a bit of a Mary Sue.

So far the writing is very flawed, but in a tolerable way. I’d much more rather play a game written with love and care and have the flaws come from human error rather than a game that was written by committee to be as bland and appealing to as wide an audience as possible without offending anyone.

The gameplay definitely isn’t as deep as it could be, but the out-of-combat mechanics actually do require a lot of forethought and planning once you actually understand them.

That’s probably my biggest criticism of the game outside of the writing, the game has a pretty decent tutorial that tries to explain everything, but the UI design and how the game presents its information outside of the tutorial works against that and forces you to memorize things and constantly refer back to the tutorial pages.

There’s a lot of quality-of-life things that are missing that shouldn’t be. The ability to rebind keys, the ability to even check a simple menu solely dedicated to the keybinds instead of sifting back through the tutorials trying to figure out what fucking key you need to press for things is.

There’s no hover-over information, on anything. The mouse does literally nothing, you could control the whole game with the keyboard. This is especially problematic when dealing with stat buffs and debuffs, because while you can open up your character stat menu in combat to check exactly what their debuffs do, you can’t open up an enemy stat page and are completely reliant on having memorized what icon corresponds to what debuff and what that debuff actually does.

But if you can look past the cripplingly bad UI and inability to rebind keys, along with the weird writing, the game is actually fairly charming and does have a lot to offer, so I’d definitely recommend checking it out! I bought it on sale for about $16 USD, and if the game keeps up the current quality for a decent chunk of playtime, I’d say it’s worth it around that price. Probably not at full price though.

#moonspeak #Alyss plays games #idk #i was bored

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