#the coolest level start in the game don't @ me ^^

[descendant-of-truth]

Okay I waited to get this out there because I didn't want to be a bummer the second it released, but. The story in Shadow Generations was... kind of nothing. Which sucks, because it had literally everything going for it.

Shadow gets plunged into a white space where people and places from different points in time are unceremoniously dropped in due to the power of the Time Eater, and that means Black Doom is here to try to manipulate Shadow again. Shadow starts developing alien mutations that mess with his sense of identity and only make Black Doom stronger, but he's determined to use them to take him out for good.

At the same time, Maria and Gerald Robotnik are here, and of course the first thought on Shadow's mind when he discovers them is how he can find a way to save them from their original fates. So he's got two goals: defeat Black Doom, and save his family.

This setup is really good. It's immediately engaging for all sorts of reasons, from the surface-level "whoa cool alien powers!!" to the heartbreaking implications of Shadow being forced to say goodbye to Maria and Gerald again. (Because naturally, we've seen where the games go from here and we know the timeline isn't changed that drastically.)

And it's clear to see that the people involved in working on this game were passionate about it, too. The animation and cinematography is quite good, and while I have my critiques (I still don't think the character models are that great), so much effort was put into making Shadow the coolest guy ever, and I think it paid off. He's both very cool and shows a wider range of emotions than we've seen from him in a while, which is always a plus for me.

I mean, goodness knows that Shadow needed his character to be revisited and given respect after, what, over ten years? The step up that this is can't be overstated.

And yet.

The story itself is so empty.

Let's go in order:

The game opens with a narrated recap of Shadow's basic history in order to catch people up. I can't say it doesn't technically serve its purpose, but given the fact that the premise of the game is exploring Shadow's past, it's a little weird to spell it out at the start like this. If you're a newcomer to the series and don't know much about Shadow, wouldn't it be cooler to find this stuff out by progressing in the game?

It also leaves out crucial details that, while they could arguably bloat the scene, provide a lot of relevant context that a first-time viewer isn't privy to.

"At the last moment, Shadow remembered Maria's final wish... to protect her beloved planet and all who lived there."

The last moment of... what, exactly? What made him remember, what made him forget in the first place?

In order, these are the answers the scene doesn't give you:

The last moments before the ARK crashed into the Earth, which would've caused catastrophic damage.

Amy was the one who pleaded with Shadow to give everyone a chance, which echoed what Maria told him, triggering the full memory.

It's actually unclear if Shadow forgot what Maria said as a natural trauma response or because Gerald messed with his memories on purpose, but this would have been a great opportunity to clarify.

It also leaves out the fact that Shadow teamed up with Sonic to save the world after he tried to destroy it, so that's two connections with other characters he has that are completely left out in the recap. I know we're finally getting back to showcasing Rouge and Omega as his best friends, but he does hold respect for Sonic and Amy, too. Plus, his interactions with them in SA2 were so iconic, why leave them out?

Then again, I suppose Rouge and Omega aren't in this recap either... which is really weird, the more I think about it.

But even as it's describing the moment he chooses to be a hero, they don't show him in his super form alongside Sonic, he's just... what, on fire?? I don't know what that's supposed to be depicting, it just looks cool.

"Shadow didn't understand why Black Doom expected him to be the vanguard for his invasion of Earth."

A fine start, but shouldn't we have gotten a passing mention of Shadow's amnesia somewhere in here? He spent two whole games trying to remember who he was, and Black Doom's whole tactic was to exploit his desire for answers. That's important characterization for both Shadow and Black Doom that we're missing out on, here.

"Shadow the Hedgehog. The lone, dark warrior who judges the world by his own code."

This is maybe best addressed in a separate post, but. does anyone else find this description of Shadow kinda odd? "Lone warrior" I get, even with his friends he's not big on groups, but it's everything else.

Yeah, he judges the world by his own code, I guess, but his actions are all in service of following Maria's code. It's Sonic that lives solely by what he wants without much influence from others, not Shadow.

And what exactly makes Shadow a "dark" warrior? He's been explicitly characterized as someone who doesn't kill as recently as the prologue animation to this very game, where he goes out of his way to save a pilot when he doesn't need to. His entire life's purpose is protecting the world, and this doesn't involve killing or torturing people, so... what exactly is the dark part of his morality. Nothing about this recap has given me reason to believe he's anything but a heroic person with a traumatic past, and the subsequent game will only reinforce that.

I guess he did kill all the Black Arms, but that's not something the game ever treated as an immoral action. Shadow blows up Black Doom and the comet his people live on and all of our heroes cheer as he does it. It happens in the True Ending and everything, where Shadow's supposed to be proving himself as a hero for real, so that can't be the example of him being a Dark Warrior.

Is it because of how he treated Infinite, a character that this game doesn't acknowledge despite featuring a level from Forces? We'll never know. They just want you to accept the idea that he's Darker and Edgier than Sonic based on his surface-level demeanor alone, which... given that the objective of this game is to showcase Shadow's nuance, this is really out of place. Overall, not a great scene.

That said, the first real cutscene is pretty good, and it immediately showcases how unnecessary that recap was by showing how excited Maria was to meet Shadow for the first time. From that scene, we learn that Shadow was artificially made, that he's "the Ultimate Lifeform," that Maria was likely close to him, that this happened on some place called "the ARK" which is in space, etc. Why did we have a narrator tell us all of this a minute ago when we were just about to see it for ourselves?

I do have one nitpick, though - Shadow claims that he arrived at the ARK "an hour ago," and Rouge on the other end of the comm is already at Sonic's birthday party. Rouge only agreed to help Shadow get to the ARK if he would go to Sonic's birthday party afterwards, but how was Shadow supposed to have time to do anything up there if Sonic's party was that soon? I was under the impression from watching the prologue that Sonic's birthday was at least a week away, because how else would Rouge expect him to conduct a full investigation and potentially fight some huge battle before then?

Oh and the Time Eater shows up in two places at once (at Sonic's party and on the ARK), I feel like it would've made more sense to have it grab Shadow after it was done with everyone else. Now I'm gonna be forced to ask "why doesn't the Time Eater multiply" for the rest of the game. Whatever

Moving on, our first real sign of things to come is the fact that Omega does not have a proper speaking role despite showing up in the first cutscene. He's right there, conveniently next to Shadow, but as soon as you think they're going to talk to each other... you're dropped into the hub world. Speaking to Omega results in text bubble dialogue, wherein Shadow is mysteriously hit with Silent Protagonist Disease and we don't get to hear anything he says. Effectively, Omega just. talks at Shadow three times, saying nothing of interest. and it's completely optional.

I repeat: all of the dialogue from one of Shadow's best friends is OPTIONAL, and Shadow himself says nothing to him. Yeah, we're off to a great start.

(Omega even says that he's going to assist Shadow, and I just. I have to laugh. I'm so sorry Omega but in terms of physical actions, you're genuinely going to do less here than in Forces)

Shadow: "No. She's gone. I'm seeing things."

Pardon?? Seeing things??? I'm sorry but there is no way that Shadow can see and recognize Maria from that distance but not from ten feet away with her back turned. He's also never been implied to have super-vision, so the whole scene just doesn't make sense, and frankly adds nothing to the story.

Even if he doesn't mean literal sight, then 1) why did he phrase it like that, and 2) I kinda don't care. He doesn't need to be able to sense Maria's presence or whatever's going on here, because he's just as shocked when he actually sees Maria properly later. It builds suspense I suppose, but I feel like it would've been more impactful to discover that Maria was really here the same way Shadow does; in the cutscene where he saves her.

But before they can reunite, we've got the first proper cutscene with Black Doom:

Black Doom: "You defeated us, but the Black Arms live on. And this temporal anomaly has accelerated my plans to revive my forces and consume the world."

I'm gonna be real with you guys. I have no idea what he's talking about here.

The game makes zero attempt to really explain how the Black Arms "live on" despite Shadow blowing up their entire comet along with Black Doom himself, and going into the game, I kinda thought it was just... time displacement. Maria and Gerald are brought in from a time they were alive, so I thought it would be the same with Black Doom, but no - he revived himself before the Time Eater even got involved.

Which I'd be willing to accept if they gave me an explanation for it, but they didn't, and the whole foundation of the plot suffers for it.

Plus, what the heck does he mean that the temporal anomaly has "accelerated his plans to revive his forces"?? The Time Eater's powers don't... accelerate anything. At all. They pluck things out of time and freeze them in a void. How does that help Black Doom's plans whatsoever?

If the idea is that he's going to pluck his own forces out of time and bring them back that way, why not just say that? Why are they withholding such basic information from us? It doesn't create intrigue, and the story doesn't even treat it like there's a gap in our knowledge to begin with. I think it's genuinely supposed to be the whole explanation, and that's a problem because it explains very little.

Then you've got the Black Moon, and this thing annoys me to no end because guess what?? Despite gradually opening more eyes and cracking open every time you complete a level, it's never once explained what it is or what it's for. All it does is turn the white void into a red void and open a portal to Even More Radical Highway. Maybe I'm forgetting something from an optional piece of dialogue, but that only creates a different problem, which is that you should never lock basic understanding of the story behind optional dialogue.

Why does it have eyes? Is it a living creature or some weird bioweapon? It's oddly mechanical for a creation of the Black Arms; even their weaponry is organic, as this very game tells us through Omega, so what's its deal??

You'd think it would have something to do with time, considering the framing of this scene:

Shadow says "perhaps I can change their fate" and then looks to the Black Moon as though it may hold some relevance to this new plot thread, but. nope. it just takes you back to Radical Highway.

And hey, look at that, I was so busy complaining about the moon that I seamlessly transitioned into one of my biggest issues with the game: Shadow says this. and never follows up on it. EVER.

I'm not kidding, there's literally NO point in the game where we're shown Shadow trying to do ANYTHING to change Maria and Gerald's fates. There's no scene where he attempts to understand the void better, he never investigates anything, he makes exactly zero attempts to accomplish one of his main goals. of BRINGING HIS FAMILY BACK TO LIFE.

What is the point of them being here, then.

No, I'm serious, literally why are they here if we don't get to see Shadow try to save them?? By the time the final cutscene rolls around, they start fading away back to their own time, and suddenly Shadow's like

(WHY ARE YOU SURPRISED, YOU DID NOTHING TO PREVENT THIS OUTCOME)

But I'll talk more about Maria and Gerald later - for now, since we're on the topic of Shadow having odd reactions to things, how about those stages and bosses, huh?

Well guys, I'm pleased to announce that despite there being dialogue in some of the stages, absolutely none of it provides context to the locations Shadow visits or his thoughts on them! If you didn't play Heroes and have no idea that Bullet Station is where Shadow found a destroyed Shadow Android, kickstarting a new layer to his identity crisis, then congratulations, this choice of level will mean nothing to you.

And before anyone tries to be like "the Sonic Generations levels don't get commentary from Sonic on their significance to him, either," it's a problem there, too. But it's an even bigger problem here, because they went out of their way to choose levels that have real emotional significance to Shadow and then proceeded to do nothing with it.

Isn't this the game where we revisit Shadow's story up until this point? Would it have been so hard to drop a line of dialogue indicating that Shadow's not thrilled about returning to Bullet Station? Maybe add a brief cutscene where he finds the same broken android from before, and says something like "hmph, I can't believe I let that thing make me doubt myself for so long," thus demonstrating his growth?

Here's a fun fact: Shadow has zero cutscenes that happen inside of levels. This is something Sonic beats him at, by having one cutscene that takes place in a level (Chemical Plant). This should not have been a high bar to clear, but they fell short somehow, anyway.

(Space Colony ARK doesn't even use the Final Chase music. The Shadow game starts out with a song exclusive to Sonic rather than him. He actually has more ARK-related music than Sonic does and they still didn't use any of them. How did they mess that up)

This problem only gets worse when they start pulling in levels from Forces and Frontiers - games that this Shadow hasn't experienced yet and wasn't there for, respectively. Once again, on principle, this is a cool idea! Shadow getting a peek into what his and Sonic's futures have in store? The confusion over when these events take place, if they're even connected to him like the others have been? Great stuff

And hey, if he's going to Chaos Island, and we saw from the trailers that the volcano is exploding in Act 1, then maybe we could even see Super Sonic fighting Knight in the background in Act 2! The debris from their fight could even act as platforming challenges, can you imagine how cool that would be? What will Shadow think of the advanced tech on the island, or of seeing Sonic fight something so massive? Surely this is a great opportunity to elevate Frontiers even further--yeah of course they don't do that.

No Knight fight in the background, which is... fair enough, I guess, but then why bother with the volcano exploding? It only does that moments away from when Sonic is about to fight Knight. Yeah, it looks cool, but we didn't need it. The more egregious problem is still the fact that Shadow has no observable thoughts or opinions on being sent to unfamiliar terrain in the future, though.

The bosses all have dialogue, though, which is a step up on a technicality and little else. Most of the dialogue from Shadow is just him being a self-aggrandizing badass who doesn't see any of the bosses as threats - even Neo Metal Sonic, who he should really not be so confident in beating all by himself, considering that he. didn't do that before. It actually took eleven other people to defeat Neo Metal, including Super Sonic, but I guess he just doesn't care at this point.

If they wanted to, it would've been easy to make him overconfident on purpose due to his new Doom powers, make an arc out of it, but no. Shadow's just Like This now, apparently.

There's a similar power scaling issue in Sonic Generations too, where Sonic can somehow defeat Perfect Chaos without his super form, but the game had dropped location-specific cutscenes so long ago that it was hard to feel like it was even canon at a certain point. The game never cared about making sense or really being anything, but Shadow Generations doesn't get that excuse. The bosses having the most mid-gameplay dialogue tells us that they're Definitely Happening, and so I care more about them as a result.

Which takes us to the moment that I truly realized that this game had no interest in doing anything with its material: the Mephiles boss fight.

Shadow: "What's this? A seal of some sort?"

Okay real quick before I get into my big issues with this fight: I know it's a magic glowing artifact, but what about it actually looks like a seal, specifically? Does Shadow just have a sense for this kind of thing? I don't recall him ever demonstrating that ability before.

I feel like this line is just here to clarify what it is for people who don't know, but since Shadow also doesn't know, it's just kind of weird. I'm not even sure why he's in the Scepter to begin with, considering that Shadow's sealing attempt in this room was a failure, but whatever.

Of the three bosses in Shadow Generations that precede the final boss, Mephiles is the only one that can both speak and had a relevant dynamic with Shadow that would be interesting to revisit. The Biolizard is cool but doesn't have a personality, and Neo Metal had no real opinion on Shadow. (In Rivals 2, Shadow and Metal Sonic have a developing friendship, but this has unfortunately never been brought up again. If they did so here, it would only have been on Shadow's end, since Metal hadn't gotten to that point yet.)

But Mephiles? So much of his character revolves around Shadow. It was Shadow who sealed him away originally, and it was Shadow's form that he took when he broke free. He's the main antagonist of Shadow's story in 06, and even though his primary goal is rejoining with Iblis, he takes a vested interest in trying to manipulate Shadow over to his side by showing him the worst of what humans will do to him - not unlike Black Doom, honestly, though he was focused on Shadow's past instead.

Plus, it's been so long! We thought we would never get to see Mephiles again! What have you got for us, game?

Mephiles: "I will defeat you, then restore myself to the timeline." Shadow: "I don't know what you're talking about, but I will crush you all the same." Mephiles: "What? Did you forget about me AGAIN?"

*deep sigh*

Contradictory dialogue back-to-back. I see. Cool.

Mephiles should not be surprised that Shadow doesn't remember who he is, because he literally JUST SAID that his goal is to restore himself to the timeline. He KNOWS that he never existed, and therefore SHOULD KNOW that nobody he encounters will remember him. I'm convinced that he only reacted this way because the writers thought it would be funny, and that's it.

Even if it made sense, though, Mephiles isn't supposed to be funny. He's supposed to be ominous and threatening. For as much care that went into recreating this environment and his powers/body language from 06 (and I gotta say, this whole section looks extremely nice), none of that same care really seemed to go into his personality. He's just as drab as Neo Metal, occasionally repeating lines from 06 so that you know they played it and not much else.

The end of the fight features some absolutely unhinged dialogue from Shadow for no reason, though.

Mephiles: "No... I want... to exist...! Shadow: "There is no future for you. Ever."

Look, I get it, they've done nothing but fight this whole time . But Shadow has no personal beef with this guy. Even if they're going with the idea that Shadow wouldn't care to learn what Mephiles is rambling on about (kind of boring, and why wouldn't he be curious about why someone like this has it out for him), there's no reason to go so far as to say he'll never have a future. Is this the "dark" part of that "dark warrior" thing they were talking about in the beginning?? Kind of a random place for it to jump out of him, if so.

The kind of intensity coming from Shadow here would be justified if he remembered who Mephiles was, but he doesn't. As it stands, it gives off the impression that he didn't actually process a single thing Mephiles said about wanting to exist and restore himself to the timeline, and just said the first cool, edgy retort that came to mind. Which makes the sentence both less cool and even more out of character.

After this boss finished playing out, all I could feel was disappointment and a creeping sense of emptiness. If this was how the game was handling Mephiles, of all characters, if this was the extent of what they were willing to do with an idea... the rest of the game suddenly seemed much less exciting. I got to this point, realized how comparatively little of the game was left, and thought oh no.

Now, uh... where was I in the story, again?

Oh right, Shadow was about to go save Maria. I actually have no notes on that scene, it's pretty good and I liked that Maria was immediately thrown off by his aggressive fighting style and whatnot. It implies a lot about what Shadow used to be like without really showing or telling us, and that's pretty neat.

The following cutscene where Gerald explains how Shadow's growing powers only make Black Doom stronger in the process is also fine, there's nothing super specific for me to gripe about it in isolation.

And this good streak it has going is immediately interrupted by the worst, most nonsensical scene in the entire game.

Sonic: "I found you, Shadow!" Shadow: "The blue hedgehog... of all places..." Sonic: "You have something I need." Shadow: "You can wait until my business is finished." Sonic: "Yea sorry, but that Chaos Emerald and I have a date with a monster!" Shadow: "Well then, it'll be a date to die for."

This is. a really stilted conversation, no matter what way you look at it. On one hand, it's repurposed dialogue from two different scenes haphazardly mashed together, neither of which should represent their current dynamic anymore since they were both antagonistic at the time. And on the other, it just... completely lacks character from both of them. They're so unbelievably dry despite their attempts to sound quirky, it's actually impressive.

I have to ask - have the script writers not heard the incessant complaints from fans about there being too many references in modern Sonic dialogue?? Because this scene plays out like an actual parody of that trend, the kind I would expect to see on twitter or something. I initially saw the animation for this cutscene without audio due to leaks, and I thought it looked pretty cool because the animation was nicely done.

Boy, when I tell you I was stunned to discover that THIS was the actual, official dialogue. What happened here?? Why is this what Sonic cutscenes are turning into?? In a game that costs $50-$60??And people are saying it's the best Sonic game???

Somehow, the god-awful dialogue isn't even the only thing that's wrong with this scene, but I'll compile the rest in bullet points to speed it up a little.

Shadow suddenly shows up in Sonic's section of White Space, despite it not being visible from a distance and therefore giving no reason for Shadow to venture out that far

Sonic says he "found" Shadow as if he was looking for him, even though the only people Sonic has seen here other than his and Tails' past selves are people who were at his birthday party

Classic Sonic is neither seen nor mentioned despite the extremely fun potential of having him interact with Shadow

A purple portal conveniently shows up in front of Sonic and Shadow while they're talking for no reason

The boss fight with Sonic is just a cutscene (lame), and Shadow gets taken out completely by one solid bonk from Sonic (even lamer)

The fake Chaos Emerald switcheroo, while clever, is presented as if it was done deliberately when it was clearly a coincidence that it got knocked out of Shadow instead of the real one

(I guess this technically happens before the Mephiles fight so my faith in this game was already plummeting, but I was willing to tolerate this scene being bad because I could understand them not wanting to add too much to Sonic's side of things. They had completely free reign with Mephiles and still delivered nothing, which is why it really cemented itself in my head)

The one thing I really liked here was seeing Shadow almost use his Doom powers to defeat Sonic, deciding against it, and his hesitation being what lost him the match. Shadow refusing to fight Sonic on unequal terms is some really good characterization that I was happy to see.

Black Doom: "The promised time is nigh upon us, Shadow. Soon, you will be mine."

So did we ever learn what the "promised time" was, exactly? I've played every route of Shadow the Hedgehog (some more than once) and still can't remember. If he's referring to the time when Shadow awakens his full power then I guess it makes sense, but otherwise it's kind of an oxymoron considering that time doesn't exist in White Space.

Gerald: "He has grown a new body, and used the nebulous nature of time in White Space to accelerate his plans for revenge."

Shadow, buddy, your animation is positively kickin' right now but Gerald, I'm gonna need you to do literally anything other than just repeat the same lackluster explanation we got earlier as if that's going to make it any less confusing. What ABOUT the nebulous nature of time? Is time not largely just frozen here?? We're somehow around 3/4s into this story and I still have NO idea how anything works

Maria calms Shadow down from his frankly justified anger by holding his hand and talking about how she doesn't want him to be driven by darkness. They find a way to throw in the fact that apparently Maria named him "Shadow" because the presence of a shadow can show you where to find the light, and it's... nice? Very wholesome, but it feels awkwardly placed and I'm not sure anyone was seriously asking why he was named that. Like, of all the questions to spend this game's limited screentime answering, "why is he named Shadow" was probably not at the top of most people's lists.

And before you have a chance to think about it, we're already at the endgame.

Shadow: "I'm letting go of that destructive anger."

Wow, and in the very next scene after it was brought to your attention, too! You sure do grow fast, Shadow!

Okay, all jokes aside, there's not much I can say about the pacing in this game other than It's Rushed and Bad, but I think it's finally time to talk about Gerald and Maria.

Gerald first: He's mostly just here to give out exposition. His relationship with Shadow is much less focused on than Maria's, which I find to be really frustrating because I always had a lot of questions about how those two interacted. In SA2, we only know him as a grieving, hate-filled man who was heavily implied to have scientifically messed with Shadow's mind - not long after they had both just lost Maria - in order to make him inclined towards Gerald's revenge plan.

In Shadow's first game, we see a side to him from before then, when he really seemed to care for Shadow and we got some clarity on the purpose of the Eclipse Cannon and whatnot. But what were their average interactions like? Who was in charge of Shadow's training? If it was Gerald, did that ever create a sense of distance between them? Shadow never has warm, nostalgic flashbacks of him, so I assumed their relationship either wasn't as close or he has too many conflicting feelings now for those memories to be very comforting.

This game decides to lean into Gerald being a kind, supportive man, but regardless, Shadow's feelings should be a lot more complicated, no?

I'd imagine that, in a way, it's a relief to have this Gerald around again. It would make it easier to pretend that the man who used him in an attempt to destroy the world and go against everything Maria stood for was just... a fluke, or something.

But still, Shadow knows that he would do bad things to him if Maria died. It's already happened.

Dark Beginnings also suggested that either Shadow was there when he shot down by the firing squad (unlikely given the context), or he watched the recording that played at the end of SA2 enough to be able to see it in his dreams. Neither of those are good for his psyche, and would only add to the number of emotions he has to suppress whenever they interact. There is, of course, none of this nuance within the game itself, despite it being right there and ready to be worked with.

Then you've got Maria, and. hoo boy.

I take no real issue with any of Maria's traits that are on display. Her being a nice girl with boundless energy and goodwill does not make her boring, and I've always been fascinated by her character. So, I need you guys to understand that it's with a heavy heart that I must say that Maria is... barely a character in this game.

And like, she doesn't exactly have a history of being deep or complex. But we've also only ever seen her in Shadow's memories up until this point, and that means this game was a unique opportunity to flesh her out more.

When a character is as idealized by another as Maria is by Shadow, and we only see them through that lens, it's natural to assume that the depiction isn't completely accurate. I was never in doubt that Maria was kind and gentle, or that she was always there to help Shadow when she knew he was struggling, but I always wanted to know what she was like outside of that. What makes her angry? What was she like on a bad day, when she inevitably got frustrated at her lot in life? How did Shadow comfort her? What was her sense of humor like?

While we technically learn more things about Maria in this game, there's never a point where she acts differently from Shadow's vision of her. She's not really shown to have flaws, and she's only really there to be saved and offer emotional support. It's like... a textbook example of what you shouldn't be doing when writing a female character, having her be defined entirely by her relationship with the male lead and never speaking up or complaining about her own problems or feelings. They don't even make a point out of it, that Maria tempers herself to be "perfect" for other people or anything like that.

Why don't we get to see how she and Shadow would handle an argument or something like that? Especially this Shadow, who's all shaken up by everything? Wouldn't it be beneficial for both of their characters for Maria to be seen as herself, the way she was in life, rather than just the nicest moments she and Shadow had together?

I'm gonna make a comparison here that people aren't gonna like, but... I think Elise is honestly shown to be a more nuanced character than Maria is. And this is coming from someone who thinks that she was also mishandled in her game.

Similar to Maria, Elise is genuinely a deeply caring person, and lives mostly isolated with a condition of sorts that makes her life difficult. Her most important relationship is also with the male lead of her respective game, but she doesn't exist solely for his benefit. (Amusingly, Sonic actually seems to be there primarily to further her arc, so it's a bit of a role swap there.)

But we see more from Elise than just Being Nice all the time. We see her being resolute and bold in the face of danger, or disappointed when she has to go back to the castle. We watch her try her hardest not to cry and retain her strong, regal exterior when faced with overwhelming emotion.

We get to see her open up and laugh and become more confident, we watch as someone who's been forced to put her feelings aside for the convenience (and safety) of others her whole life finally break down and shout something selfish for once. And then we watch her ultimately choose to do the right thing, anyway. Her strength of character is shown to us by putting her in situations that challenge her, and the narrative never once shames her for being imperfect; it's actually encouraging her to be her real, flawed self.

Why does Maria not get this same treatment? Why don't we get cutscenes of her being excited about the new environment she's in, or frustrated that her symptoms are making it difficult to do anything here? When does she get to be selfish? Why can't she get upset at people treating her like she's frail, even if it technically "makes sense" for them to do so?

We're told, in Gerald's journal, that some of the people aboard the ARK doubted that Maria was really sick due to her symptoms not being clearly visible. Because it's his journal, we only get to hear his feelings on the matter, but in the full game, we never once get to know how it makes Maria feel, the person this is all about to begin with. They absolutely could have incorporated this into a cutscene somewhere, but they didn't.

Once again, I have to ask: what is the point of Maria and Gerald being in this game if this was how they were going to be written? Not only does Shadow fail to even attempt to save their lives, he doesn't even walk away from the experience with renewed understanding of who they were as people.

So what even happens in this story, then?? Every single aspect of it is dragged down constantly by the game's refusal to do anything with what it has:

Shadow revisits places from his past, but has nothing to say about them

Shadow visits places from the future, but has nothing to say about them

He has nothing relevant or interesting to say about any of the bosses

Mephiles trying to restore himself to the timeline is a plot point that exists solely within his boss fight and nowhere else

He doesn't struggle with any of the bosses, emotionally or physically, turning them into a boring power trip

He barely struggles with his Doom powers, the things that are supposed to be giving him an identity crisis

Sonic is not a playable boss fight and he also says nothing relevant or interesting

Classic Sonic doesn't even get a passing mention

The Team Dark friendship is supposed to be a highlight but Shadow never speaks to Omega, who also never shows up in cutscenes, and Rouge is just kinda there

Maria and Gerald never meet Rouge and Omega, or anybody else on-screen, despite it being extremely easy for them to run into each other

Shadow's relationships with Maria and Gerald are barely explored past their surface

Most importantly, Shadow is never shown making any sort of effort to save Maria and Gerald from their fates, despite it being one of his primary goals

...Oh yeah, I forgot to complain about how Shadow barely struggles with his Doom powers. I was gonna go on a whole spiel about how it would've been super easy to make into an arc and how it was wildly underutilized despite being a major selling point of the game, and the only real consistent conflict whenever Black Doom isn't on screen.

Well. Anyway. Once the White Space becomes Red Space (something that once again makes me question how far away Sonic's area is, to not be able to see this happening), Shadow magically gets over his "destructive anger" and goes to Radical Highway one last time for the epic final boss.

And it certainly is epic, I can't deny that. A massive technical improvement over the first fight against Devil Doom, and I'm not about to sit here and act like the wings aren't cool. But I can't say it feels very rewarding, since I never really understood what was going on and Shadow didn't really struggle that much to get to this point. Not to mention, he's still acting all high and mighty during boss fights, which makes it feel stale really quickly. Black Doom isn't really that interesting by himself, so Shadow kinda needed to carry that fight, but no, it's just more of the same.

One last point before I wrap this up:

Where was Emerl???

Correct me if I'm wrong, but a promo animation for a game should, in theory, provide you some idea as to what kind of things to expect in the game itself. While a lot of them take their share of creative liberties, I don't think they're in the habit of putting spotlight on entire characters who never appear in the game at all.

This is THE GAME where we bring back the people from Shadow's past that he's lost, and Emerl most certainly qualifies. He's from the more recent past, yes, but Shadow still cared about him and absolutely would have been affected by his death. There's no way that, had he been in the story, Shadow wouldn't have been determined to save him as well. But no, he's just there to be a cool lore detail in Gerald's journal.

Which means this is yet another depiction of Emerl where we refuse to acknowledge his personality. Do they seriously think Emerl is more interesting as an emotionless killing machine that Gerald researched in his spare time? Where's the fun-loving kid who mimicked everyone around him, splicing things he heard them say together to communicate and creating funny tonal whiplash? Where's the robot with the soul that Gerald gave him, that was nurtured by Sonic and his friends?

Not in this game, apparently! They went out of their way to canonize Battle and still managed to treat it with zero respect. Kind of impressive, really, and just another footnote in the trend of this game not actually caring to do anything with Shadow's past.

There are definitely moments in this game that I like, but that's kind of all they are: moments. The game's total cutscene runtime is around 30 minutes, and that means there's not enough time in any of them to get anything done. A scene that's good in isolation is tainted by the fact that it's all there is.

And it's just... so baffling to me. There are so, so many points in this game where you could have fit additional cutscenes in. We could have had one after each act, or at least after each level. Give us more cutscenes after activating things in the hub world or something. I mean, a game that claims to be this story-driven doesn't usually need an excuse to throw cutscenes at you, and they certainly didn't need to force each scene to be so unbelievably short.

If they really needed to downsize on cutscene length for some reason, then maybe they should have just made a less ambitious story. The game wants to do so many things at once, but it doesn't have the time to do any of those things justice. We could have gotten a short, sweet, well-done little story, but instead we get a story that easily needed at least two hours to tell crunched into a measly 30 minutes.

I mean, Dark Beginnings in its entirety is half the length of the full game. Think about that for a second.

This game's story was supposed to be something, man. It's getting so much praise for what feels to me like the bare bones structure of a story, and it's frustrating because I know this series can do better. The writer of this game can do better, and I know that because I've read his other Sonic material and it feels much more complete than this does.

I was genuinely looking forward to this game, is the thing. I really didn't think it would be this lackluster, because like I said at the beginning of this post, it had everything in the world going for it. But no matter how nice it feels to have a Shadow who isn't wildly out of character for once, that alone can't carry an entire story.

Shadow Generations is a mess of good ideas executed in the least interesting, most nothing way possible. Its only real saving grace is its animation, and the fact that Shadow generally feels like himself.

Except for when he's talking to Sonic. What the heck happened when he was talking to Sonic

[octakiseron]

LEAVE THIS BODY

[luciluck2046]

WHOOOOHOOOO

It's my bday :3

Not a big deal...

Me and my friends actually contributed to this drawing. Respect to them.

They're some of the best friends I have. But I don't have that many friends. Tho literally every one of my friends is a good friend :3

But I don't only have friends around me.

I have some in other countries.

Far away.

But that doesn't make them any less of friends :3

So I will say a good thing about EVERY friend of mine.

Starting with my friend group.

Then the online friends.

I RL LOVE YOU GUYS <3

MY GIRLFRIEND, MY BELOVED GIRL TO MY SOUL AND HEART. You've been the light of my life, glowing when things became hard, and supporting me when I couldn't speak. I owe you my life, and I hope you have a LOVELY day <3

MY BESTIE, MY FRIEND AND SILLY RABBIT. You're the friendliest, yet most violent, one of the friend group. You're a cool motherfucker and I wish you the best. Now go fuck yourself.

MY FRIEND, MY SILLY AND YAP LISTENER. You're a cool, interesting girl and yapping to each other about out current hyperfixations is something I absolutely love.

MY FRIEND, MY UNRELATED OLDER SISTER. You like Undertale too! And Stardew, and other games and fandoms. And you're a very good artist, and are very silly.

MY FRIEND, MY FELLOW SILLY AND FOOD GIVER. Thanks for all the food I swear, I can't only survive by my food. BUT you're cool, and sing very well! hope the pans are safe

MY FRIEND, MY FELLOW SOUL TWIN. How tf do I relate to most of you? Anyway have a duck 🦆🦆🦆🦆

MY FRIEND, AND VERY COOL YAP LISTENER. You're tall. Also you listen to my yap sometimes. And you're so chill how do you do that?

AND NOW, THE ONLINE COOL PPL <3

@a-mess-of-a-crow. You're a very good writer, and a very good artist. I love your art and I like talking with you about different themes :3 Also thanks for being a cool mutual.

@akanemnon. You're the reason I even installed Tumblr. You inspire me and you make so much cool art, I hope you realize that we're so thankful for your comic. Also thanks for being a cool content creator.

@theomniplayer. Cool au, cool art, cool player, cool in general. Also thanks for being a cool mutual.

@ultrabean. ONE OF THE COOLEST COMICS. I rl wonder how y'all can do that. Also thanks for being a cool mutual.

@okamiz36. HOW DO YOU DRAW SO WELL, MY FRIEND, YOU'RE GOD BLESSED WTF. Also thanks for being a cool mutual.

@purpleeggyboi. Your silly levels are OFF THE CHARTS. Man you're a star. Also thanks for being a cool mutual.

@th3-r4t-48. Man we both go insane at times, or have our breakdowns. I hope you are doing a bit better, but I'll silly with you if you want :3 Also thanks for being a cool mutual.

@slasher-jax. Your ocs are WOW. Just WOW. You're a great person. Also thanks for being a cool mutual.

But the most important thing. THANK YOU ALL, MY FALLOWERS, MY FRIENDS, FAMILY, LOVED ONES, EVEN STRANGERS! THANKS FOR EXISTING AND BEING A COOL PERSON!!!

Now have some cake :3

(sorry the drawing isn't finished)

[bluelocksource]

Itoshi Sae’s trivia (source: twt & Egoist Bible 1 & 2).

"I'll see with my own eyes what kind of FW (idiot) will be born in Japan." (EB1)

"I'll show the next view only to the fools who can keep up." (EB2)

☆ Weapons: Kick accuracy, skills, tactical awareness, and physical ability—all at world-class level. (EB2)

☆ Character's colour: Adzuki bean color (reddish-brown).

☆ Nickname: ‘Japan’s Treasure’.

☆ Birthday: 10th October.

☆ Current age: 18 (3rd year of high school)

☆ Zodiac: Libra.

☆ Birthplace: Kamakura City, Kanagawa Prefecture.

☆ Family: Mother. Father. Himself. Younger brother.

☆ Current height: 180 cm.

☆ Foot size: 26.5 cm

☆ Dominant foot: Left foot.

☆ Blood type: A.

☆ Starts playing football: At age 1. “Before I knew it, I was playing soccer.”

☆ Team before returning to Japan: RE・ALE (レ・アール) Youth FC.

☆ Favorite food/drink: Salted kelp tea (shio-kombucha). “Because I can go back to 0.” (meaning he feels refreshed after drinking it)

☆ Disliked food: French fries. “It’s deadly delicious but it’s deadly to my health.”

☆ Favorite animal: Seagulls. “I like migratory birds that doesn’t stay in one place.”

☆ Favorite season: At the end of summer. "It seems that the world is starting to get lonesome."

☆ Favorite football player: Álvaro Recoba. “The left footer that casts a rainbow (perfect curve) on the pitch.” (Sae was referring to Alvaro quotes: “If today's game is on a rainy pitch, I'll draw a rainbow with my left foot.”. Álvaro is known for his curling-free-kick.)

☆ Favorite music: ‘Mercury’ by tofubeats ft. Seira Kariya. “I listen to this to cool down.”

☆ Favorite manga: Gegege no Kitaro.

☆ Favorite movie: Taxi Driver. “This De Niro is the coolest.”

☆ Favorite TV show: Chibi Maruko-chan. “It reminds me of home.”

☆ Favorite brand: “All of my sponsors. They know they're not crazy for betting on me, they have good eyes.”

☆ Hobby: Analysing data of football players and teams. “It’s easier to see the numbers in visualized data.”

☆ Mushroom shoots vs Bamboo shoots: “Depends on the mood.”

☆ What goes best with rice : Salted kelp (shio-kombu). “They don’t have it in Brazil, so I asked my parents back home to send some here.”

☆ What makes him happy: “A play beyond my imagination.”

☆ What makes him upset: Being forced to carry Japanese soccer on his back. “I’m talking about you guys.”

☆ What he thinks his strength is: He has flat ways looking at things. (meaning he look at things objectively) "People often calls me dry**, but who cares?"

☆ What he thinks his weakness is: The fact that he doesn’t know anything else other than soccer. “You guys shouldn’t live this way.”

☆ Favorite/Best subject: “I don’t know since I’ve only focus on soccer and didn’t pay attention in classes.”

☆ What made him cry recently: “Like I'd tell you, idiot.”

☆ Usual sleeping time: 8 hours (7 hours sleeping + 1 hour nap)

☆ Place he washes first when taking a bath: His bangs’ hairline.

☆ Fixation: Buttocks. “You’ll know an athlete's ability by the shape of their buttocks.”

☆ Number of chocolates received from previous Valentine: Around 2000. “That’s what my manager told me.”

☆ The first time he got confessed to: “I don’t remember which one was the first, octopus.” (here, octopus is just an insult like 'idiot' or 'fool', etc.)

☆ What will he do if received 100 million yen: “I’m not interested in such small amount of money.” “I don't care. It's just pocket change.”

☆ At what age he stops receiving presents from Santa: At age 10.

☆ What was his last wish from Santa: “My own talent that I have yet to discover.”

☆ How he spent his holiday: Gazing at the sea.

☆ What will he do during his last day on Earth: Give the world's best striker the world's best pass.

☆ Favorite historical figure: "Nicolaus Copernicus. A person who overturned the world's common sense."

☆ If he hadn't encountered soccer, what will he be doing: "Probably living a normal, happy life. My personality might not have been like this."

☆ If he could only take one thing to a deserted island, what would it be:  "Nothing. I’ll live freely without rules."

☆ If he had a time machine, would he go to the past or the future: "I’m not interested in either. I won’t have any unnecessary expectations or disappointments about my past or future. Live in the now. You guys are annoying."

Last updated: 31/10/2024

*Not sure about the exact pronounciation but the most of the translation says 'Les Halles'. Updated! (25/7/2024)

Spelling of Sae's team, レ・アール : Left image: RE・ALE. This was from months ago (twt).

Right image: RE・EARL. The left image is from the recent twt :

** In Japan, there are terms called ‘dry person’ & ‘wet person’. ‘Dry person’ is someone who can think rationally without being overwhelmed by emotions and because of their calm demeanor, they are thought to be cold and unapproachable. ‘Wet person’ is the opposite of ‘dry person’.

note: i want to apologize in advance for any mistake made in the translation!

[weltato]

The Ramble About Klavier (AA4 spoilers)

Going off this post I made a while ago, here's a ramble about everyone's favourite rockstar prosecutor :)

This is gonna be a long post, so I'mma put it under a cut, but the TL;DR is that Klavier's damage sprite hurts me physically and I absolutely think that Kristoph is the cause of it :)) Also, using Franziska as a bit of a comparison at points because I could go on about her as well honestly, but that's for a different post.

(obligatory headcanon disclaimer here)

*Warning for mentions of verbal abuse, if that's uncomfortable then please scroll on and stay safe!*

You still here? Grand.

This sprite hurts man.

(I couldn't find a gif file for young Klav, had to use the icky webp file from the wiki- I fucking hate webp it's such a stupid file type)

You see how it's the same? You see how both sprites are the same? They move exactly the same! Now, you could say that it's something related to the chord that plays every time we see the sprite crop up, but he's gonna be smart enough to know about ear protection when doing rockstar stuff. Could be a sensitive ears thing, or a cringe thing at the sound of the chord (bc it does sound bad, I'll grant that), but it's never said if Klavier has sensitive hearing or smth (afaik, bc I haven't seen SoJ yet). We know Athena does, but nothing about Klav.

So! Remember Kristoph? Remember how shitty of a person he is? Welp, in the same vein as Franziska's damage sprite making everyone go "ooh, MvK did bad things" I put forward that Kristoph also did bad things.

But not physically. Kristoph is a man who uses his words as his weapons until he just casually has to poison people and then stalk everyone for seven years bc a fangirl screwed up his plan.

The sprite when Klav's 17 is labelled as "Disbelief (Unused).

Sure, it's unused in-game, but they still made it and they made it exactly the same as present Klav!

But when he's older, it's simply listed as "Damage".

Damage is a word used for quite a few sprites tbh, since it's when they...well, take damage, from their opponent, either through scripted event or from player decision.

However! Going back to a point I made in the original post: Franziska has a different distinction. Her older sprite is listed as "Shocked" but her younger sprite is given the "Damage" title.

Look! Her sprites are different! It doesn't give any good vibes tbh, she's sort of holding herself higher up and more with both arms than with the one arm her younger self uses, but that's for a different ramble about Franzy. This is about Klavier.

Franzy goes from "Damage" to "Shocked", potentially meaning that whatever is being thrown at her doesn't hurt anymore, merely catches her off guard and this is a reflexive response.

Klav goes from "Disbelief" to "Damage", which tells me that his younger self refused to hear and his older self is now realising that things are SO much worse than he feared and that HURTS.

With Franziska, it's pretty obvious that MvK was a pretty distant parent in parenting terms. I mean, he was always there, sure, but he didn't really show much love and affection. Franzy realises this and carries on because that's how she was brought up. She can handle that. (Don't get me started on the cry sprite omg-)

Kristoph was the same.

All my homies hate MvK and those same homies should also hate Kristoph. His nickname was literally "The Coolest Defense in the West" - this man was known for being level-headed! He was known for being a cool, calm and collected person! You never know what's going on under that.

Klavier was absolutely verbally and emotionally abused. I don't think it was physical abuse in any way, and if anything happened then at most it might've been a slap in the face, but Kristoph doesn't strike me as someone who gets off on holding power over his brother by beating him. After all, Klav is in the public eye 90% of the time as a rockstar, he doesn't want to risk make-up being applied wrong and the paparazzi picking things up. Kristoph strives for perfection in everything (again, the wiki literally says this, although I'm aware that the wiki can be edited by anyone) and he sees it in his brother too: he wants Klavier to be perfect.

But then he went to be a prosecutor and a rockstar and that's...well that's not good, it might ruin the name he's made for himself if his little brother goes off gallivanting with people like that (poor Daryan). Kristoph sets impossibly high standards that Klavier just can't match because he's not the same as his brother, he's not like that, he cares about people and his decision to go study in Europe is met with more disapproval from Kristoph, but Klavier takes it all as brotherly encouragement because the boy is SEVENTEEN and there's an eight year age gap, surely Kristoph knows best...

Then we get to the final section of Turnabout Succession.

When presenting the nail polish, Klavier recognises it immediately because that's the brand his brother uses. When Apollo asks about his hesitation, he says it's nothing.

They never checked Vera's nails either and Klavier is unable to say anything because Apollo is on a roll and Klavier really hopes he's wrong, so he asks if the bottle belongs to Vera and Apollo asks back if he knows someone else with one of those...

"No." he says, "Just checking."

YES. HE. DOES! He knows immediately as soon as that nail polish is brought up, everything clicks and he's so distressed by it that he refuses to believe Kristoph could've done this. He's in prison right now, how could he poison someone??

And when the Judge isn't convinced by this, Apollo deals him the final blow.

"Prosecutor Gavin doesn't seem to think this is inconceivable."

No response. His face is unreadable, or maybe it's anguished, and when it's suggested to bring Kristoph up as a special witness, Klav says this: "I've known for some time that an impenetrable darkness lurked at the bottom of this. ...A darkness that has swallowed even myself."

He knows and it's time to face The Devil that orchestrated all of this.

Maybe he's known for a long time and only just removed the rose-tinted glasses he was seeing Kristoph through - and he's crushed by it.

When Kristoph is in the room, Klavier's words are especially defeated here. Kristoph even asks Klavier to explain what's going on.

"You're being accused again. By him. Again."

And when Kristoph asks if Klav agrees with this, he says nothing. What can he say? That yes, his brother is a dark man? That yes, he's manipulative enough to do this kind of thing? That, if given the chance, he do it again to get rid of everyone who's in his way?

Trucy even says in one of the pressed statements that Klavier "must be nervous with big brother watching!"

Kristoph even takes over from Klavier's Objection when Kristoph's pressed by Apollo about the likelihood of Vera wanting to poison herself. That bitch! He's so obsessed with control that he takes control over his own trial from his own brother who's trying to 'defend' him. When Trucy says the two together is a force to be reckoned with, Apollo notes that they could do with more teamwork.

In that pivotal last statement, Klavier acts more like his brother than he ever has in the whole game and Apollo picks up on that. Kristoph is the reason Klavier is acting different, the reason he's trying so hard to get Apollo to notice the difference - Kristoph is clearly the threat in the room.

Kristoph is cruel in public too, but only now that Apollo is cornering him. See, the abuse towards Klavier was only ever subtle in public and far more pronounced in the home, but in this trial there's nowhere for him to go and Apollo would pick up every detail. So, when Apollo brings up the stamp and Klav's taken aback by this, Kristoph takes that moment to pounce: "You've upset my poor brother to the point of uselessness. Allow me to clarify this matter[...]"

We all hate him, right? He's such a dick.

Klavier is quiet, just watching everything unfold since he has no way to confront Apollo when he himself believes that Kristoph is guilty, and when Kristoph worms his way out of things he belittles Klav: "Really, Klavier. You should be seeing through these weak-spined bluffs by now."

What can he say? It's the same kind of thing he was always told - that he should be better, always pushed further than he could go.

But then he doubles down. He's sick of this, sick of Kristoph always being the perfect brother. So he fights back and calls Kristoph the bluffer. Kristoph is shocked; never once has Klavier outright pushed back on him. So when Klavier starts to side with Apollo, Kristoph plays the game.

Now, I'm not going through the whole case beat for beat, but there's another point later on when Apollo goes "oh btw Phoenix didn't do this and lol here's evidence" and Kristoph tries to deny this by saying "oh but defense attorneys are only assigned the day before anyway" but Klavier objects and turns to Apollo, pleading with him because he needs to know the whole truth on this.

Even Kristoph is caught off guard because he thought he'd kept Klavier on his side but NO! NO HE DIDN'T! HAVE YOU SEEN HIS DAMAGE SPRITE HE'S HURTINNGGGG T^T

ahem-

Anyway, Kristoph tried to dismiss this and Klavier objects in his face and keeps his focus solely on Apollo - he even calls him by his actual name instead of Herr Forehead (which I think is kinda sweet actually but anyway-) and fuck man, this hurts me.

And as it closes in towards the end, when Phoenix's recording is mentioned and Kristoph says that his "brother is incapable of making rational judgments at the moment" (angy Wel grumbling) we soon get this:

I LOVE KLAV HAVE I SAID THIS YET!?

AND HERE'S THE KICKER:

KRISTOPH IS WORRIEDDDDD

AND KLAV DOESN'T GIVE A SHIT ANYMORE YES!

CAN YOU IMAGINE HOW GOOD THAT FEELS? HOW CATHARTIC THAT IS? THIS MAN WHO'S DONE NOTHING BUT CONTROL HIM AND USE HIM FOR HIS OWN BENEFIT AND BELITTLE HIM WHENEVER HE DOES ANYTHING EVEN OUT OF LINE IS FINALLY GETTING HIS COMEUPPANCE AT KLAVIER'S HANDS!!

OH it's great to watch, we love to see it.

Better still is the very end, after the breakdown, after Kristoph loses his cool:

The sass is strong in this line. To me, it's a final 'fuck you and everything you ever did to me' from Klavier.

We end on this line after the Judge says that nurturing is the task for all human beings: "Except for you, Kristoph. You aren't changing. You've stopped. You're not needed anymore."

And it's true. Klavier doesn't need Kristoph anymore. He's 24, he can live his own life and he doesn't need a cynical and condescending brother like Kristoph breathing down his neck every two seconds. He's broken free from Kristoph's control completely and he's relishing that.

So this is why his damage sprite hurts me to see. It's a point of pain and discontent, it's Kristoph lingering in Klav's head, it's the want to have a normal brother that loves him as he is and sees him as an equal. He got his first trial against him taken away, and we never know if there was another opportunity for the two Gavins to go up against each other again, but by the sounds of it there probably wasn't - and that's a good thing! If Kristoph had faced off against Klavier, it would have probably broken Klav's spirit to be a good prosecutor like we see in AA4 and to some extent in AA5 when he crops up in the Themis case.

On the whole, the damage sprite is a look into how Klavier hid from his brother's verbal abuse - by covering his ears and not listening to it. He didn't want it to be true, but it came at him anyway and he hated that. But it's also a parallel to how he feels about Kristoph: that is his brother and he can't bear the thought of Kristoph being not just a murderer, but also a scheming manipulator that's been skirting around the law he so desperately hides behind for seven years. Once again, he didn't want it to be true but it came at him anyway and he hated that he couldn't get away from it.

It's a good sprite, I won't lie. Great storytelling at the conflict between the two and that Klavier loves Kristoph probably more than Kristoph love him, but it still hurts me to see it because all I can think about is what kind of manipulation has Kristoph done to keep his power over Klavier. Kristoph is manipulative even to his own brother and there is nothing Klavier could have done about it. Throughout their interactions in the case there's this underlying current of "if I get out of this you're so dead" and that feels like it's been a thing forever between them.

I hope this makes sense because I should be writing my assignment rn and I just couldn't bc this has been taking up all the space in my head lol. I'm tirrrrrred, uni wears me out man >.>

[eggbert9000-blog]

My Thoughts on Persona 2: Eternal Punishment (PSP)

In my last post I talked about how I got into the Persona series starting with Innocent Sin on PSX, I also talked about how much I thought Innocent Sin was one of the best JRPG's I have played in recent memory, so I only figured that I would talk about what I thought about the next game! For my playthrough I actually chose the PSP fan translation over the PSX version. I did that because I heard that the PSP version of EP is basically completely faithful to the PSX version in terms of difficulty and menus, so I figured it would just be the definitive version to play, and I heard that the translation is fairly close to the original PSX version anyways. I played this literally the day after I completed Innocent Sin because, without going into spoilers, there's no way I could not see what happens next.

So what did I think?

I'm going to be fully transparent and say that Persona 2: Eternal Punishment has become, not only one of my favourite JRPG's, but one of my favourite games of all time. There's so much I want to talk about but just like with the Innocent Sin post, ill start with some things I disliked about the game.

The Grinding

My understanding is that this game has gained a reputation of being one of the harder, or even hardest Persona game in the series, and I sort of agree. Not that I dislike grinding, but there were some times where I had to step away from the plot and grind levels or tarot cards to get new personas for the party, and then grind the persona levels to unlock the skills. But again like in Innocent Sin, you can farm free tarot in the Air Raid Shelter to basically unlock whatever persona you want, and I spent a decent amount of time there levelling personas as well. Although honestly I was having such a good time experimenting with personas that I didn't even notice or even really care about grinding (I do that in most RPG's anyways).

Demon Negotiation (Again)

Credit where it's due, Demon negotiation is a whole lot better than in the previous two Persona games. Each character now has one specific action and most of the rest come from combining them instead of having 4 options for each character. I like this system a lot more, but I did wish it didn't matter what order you selected the characters in to determine the contact (for example, Katsuya + Ulala is different from Ulala + Katsuya). And sometimes it still felt like just guesswork without a guide. The interactions are still as fun as ever though!

Silent Maya

I'm not quite sure what the consensus of this is, if this is like a popular opinion or "hot take" but I really wish Maya wasn't a silent protagonist, or even just like had more reaction to the events around her. She was one of the coolest characters in Innocent Sin and I remember being kinda bummed out realizing she wasn't gonna speak. Although the more days I sit on it, the more I become fine with it. It's easy to believe a lot of Maya's kindness and actions because we saw it first-hand in Innocent Sin. And we still get to see her personality through her responses and contacts, so not all was lost.

(OH YEAH, I should mention that in the PSP translation I used the one that restores the original PSX english voice cast, I know they are made fun of a lot but I find that the voice acting has a lot of charm to it.)

Alright, Time for what I loved about it.

The Story

DON'T WORRY IM NOT GONNA SPOIL ANYTHING, IM JUST GOING TO GIVE MY THOUGHTS ON IT!

This games story is really good, it serves as a fantastic capstone to the original Persona trilogy, It has a huge sense of finality to it, It reminds me a lot of how Dark Souls 3 could be considered a capstone for the Trilogy, bringing in elements from all the past games to wrap it up in a nice bow. There were so many times where I was so invested I would just play for hours until I lost track of time.

Rumors are back baybee and they are as cool of a concept as ever, and they are still used in such a creative way.

And of course just seeing what happened after Innocent Sin and seeing why the world is the way it is and what happened to the characters got me hooked immediately.

I can't exactly talk about this story without going into mega spoilers for not only EP but also IS so just trust me in saying that this story is something that is worth playing two whole games for, ESPECIALLY THE ENDING. Im just going to say that this story and the ending are my favorite in the Persona series and leave it at that. Go and experience it yourself! It's good!

The ATMOSPHERE MAN

This games atmosphere is completely unmatched in my eyes. The world has a constant vibe of "theres something wrong" that I can't explain. Again it takes place in that modern setting with grounded dungeons that I found so great about Innocent Sin, but the whole world just feels different and "darker" in a way that I can't exactly describe. I think its the difference in the story telling, whilst IS was more goofy with serious undertones, It feels like EP really hones in on the dark side of Sumaru City. There's a lot more death and undergound corruption this time around, It really feels like EP is trying to tell a more adult story this time around, and I really dig it.

(If you kinda want to get the vibes, watch the original PSX intro, it's literally one of the greatest intros to a game ive ever seen and it perfectly captures the sort of vibe EP is going for).

Another thing that I think contributes to the atmosphere is that incredible soundtrack. Just like with Innocent Sin, I was excited to go to the next dungeon every single time to see what kind of music would play, and some of those Eternal Punishment versions of the Innocent Sin songs are really good as well. Some of the standout tracks are Aoba Park, Smile Hirasaka, The Round Sun, and ESPECIALLY Monado Mondala, one of the best tracks in the series. The battle theme and boss theme too are incredible.

The Characters

This party has got to be one of my favourite parties i've ever seen in a JRPG. I know everyone already talks about how this game has an all adult cast as opposed to the other Persona games, but I don't think that's the only reason why they are great.

They all have such good chemistry with each other and as a person who was turning into an adult playing this game, I feel like I related to a lot of the characters internal struggles. Their stories felt real and I ended up seeing myself in a lot of these characters, especially Katsuya, as I am an older brother myself, I relate to him trying to build a good relation with his brother. I Related to Ulala's inferiority complex more than id like to admit, Baofu's story and motivations are really interesting as well and his dynamic with Katsuya, an officer of the law working with a wiretapper for the greater good, and his cynicism feels realistic given his experiences.

However the character I related to and like the most was Tatsuya himself. Tatsuya's struggle to find out how to be a responsible adult and how to make amends for things he has done wrong is something I feel is done realistically, Tatsuya tries to do things that he thinks an adult would do, and it's this kind of coming of age story that I think is relatable to me specifically. And unfortunately I can't say all the reasons why I like Tatsuya without going into spoilers, but all I will conclude on is that Tatsuya is my favourite Persona character of all time and he, and the rest of the cast gave me hope that going into adult life wouldn't be as scary as I initially thought it would be.

I Love this cast so much, I don't even think I said everything I wanted to but I think the main takeaway should be that this is my favorite party in all of Persona and their stories still stick in my head to this day.

(You might notice I left out two characters, because spoilers sorta, but to let it be known, I picked the man).

The Gameplay

Okay, I have been rambling on for a while now so Ill try not to make this a full university length essay. The gameplay is about the same as Innocent Sin, which I praised for being fast and fluid in battles and having really great customization options that I really appreciated such as being able to switch personas on the fly. its just my love for it has intensified because I was more used to the mechanics this time around and I was excited to go into this game thinking how I was going to build each character. It was a fun time, if you want a more in-depth explination of what I thought of the gameplay you can check the post I made about Innocent Sin on my blog (no pressure though).

One thing a really appreciated in the PSP remake is how they ditched the Innocent Sin PSP menu and recreated the PSX menus for Eternal Punishment PSP. So that fluid and nice menu from IS PSX is back and makes its so that I think EP PSP is the definitive version of the game.

Conclusions

Even though I feel like I've written so much about why I like Eternal Punishment, I feel like I haven't given a definitive reason why it's my favourite Persona game. And I think if I had to sum it up quickly, its that the world of the original Persona Trilogy is so well developed and well written that I couldn't help but get sucked into it. And Eternal Punishment was the one that that gave me an experience that I wish I could have over and over again, the world, the music, the characters, the story, even the charming sprite graphics, it all worked together to give me an unforgettable experience. I haven't even mentioned everything I love, I purposely left out things I already said in my Innocent Sin post like how much I love fusion spells or the whole customization thing. And I didn't even talk about Tatsuya's Scenario either. which is also incredibly good.

Persona 2: Eternal Punishment is great. It's a shame that the earlier Persona games aren't widely available on modern platforms because I believe that Eternal Punishment is something really special.

My final thoughts are for whoever is reading this and somehow hasn't played through the duology yet to at least give it a shot. I kept my thoughts on the game as spoiler free as possible so please give it some love. And like I said in my Innocent Sin thoughts, you might find a new JRPG that you will love and will stick with you for a long time, just like I have.

[theminecraftbee]

Hi, here with a vault hunters question — what's the best way to start with the big tech mods if i never played with any of them before (or, haven't played with three of them and lowkey hated Botania)? I'm not *quite* at that point yet, but i want to try them and don't want to get too overwhelmed to play.

it depends on what you’re looking for! first, let me say that none of the big tech mods will become required at any point; production mods probably define your farm-building capabilities way more than your big mods in most cases, and unless you’re playing in skyblock or with grindy crystals you can normally last well into the late levels without needing absurd farms for much (although most people identify a specific pain point they want modded farm for eventually, and this can be a good reason to go into a specific mod). choose a specific thing you want to be the First Task you do with a big tech mod, and focus on getting the steps done to do That Specific Task; that often gives you the path to learn everything you need!

from there, if you’re a beginner with no preferences, my advice is that you will probably want to watch or read tutorials! all four big mods have wikis/guides of varying qualities; botania also has the botania lexicon in-game, and create has the “ponder” feature. these will help you figure out how to play one of the big tech mods, once you’ve decided which interest you!

as for how each mod plays: thermal expansion is less powerful than its cousins, but is far, far simpler. almost everything thermal expansion does is a one-block solution, and I’ve never had to chain more than maybe two machines together to do any given task. you will craft a machine using all components you can craft at a crafting table, provide that machine power, and you’re off to the races! so if you like simple solutions, this is probably the mod, especially since it doesn’t require any mod-specific crafting.

mekanism is all about chaining machines together. it can do a lot of things thermal expansion can do much more powerfully thanks to the ability to upgrade many of those basic blocks into factories, but boy do some processes in mekanism require a LOT of pipe spaghetti, machinery, and steps to get things done. luckily, determining what these steps ARE tends to be fairly simple, as you can just follow backwards in JEI from your intended endpoint to the eventual one or many starting points you need, and there are a lot of video guides, plus a wiki. if you LIKE some of the most powerful ore processing and tech and eventually power production in the game this is for you, but it can be complicated or intimidating at first glance.

botania also, from what I’ve seen, requires chaining multiple machines together, this time in order to send mana from place to place. the hard part of botania, at least for me, is wrapping my head around how to move mana around; once you understand that, I suspect it’s a bit simpler than late-game mekanism, but its logic can feel VERY different from the other three mods due to that mana abstraction. it and create also make the coolest decorative blocks in my opinion, with botania having a lot of cool “natural” blocks.

create is the mod that requires the most “thinking” in my experience to get things to work, but is often the most capable of being cheaply powerful. you will need to use spatial reasoning to figure out how to connect gears together in order to make anything work, and you’ll likely need to use create’s conveyor belts to move items around. this can make doing anything in create feel very complicated if you don’t like it, but extremely satisfying if you do like it, since in create you will often feel like you can use your own, special solution for things, instead of a set chain of machines set up the way anyone else would. a lot of players who otherwise dislike tech mods also tend to really like create, despite it being that deep down! it also has by far the best in-game documentation, with the ponder system on every single mechanical part letting you see what they do in-game, with animations to demonstrate, and it’s probably the most useful all-in-one package of the big mods for the most things, even if not necessarily the best at each of those jack of all trades things it does.

so yes! hopefully this helps you out! all of the big mods have sort of their own playstyle, and maybe this helps you figure out where to start!

[bettsfic]

bg3 build: beast priest (shadowheart respec)

i'm playing around with some new builds! after scrounging the internet for good build guides, i didn't find any that i thought were interesting. in my current playthrough, i'm trying to respec all the companions to be the classes they would have chosen without their various traumas.

the beast priest is my respec for shadowheart. if you haven't noticed, shadowheart's basic build isn't great. when you find her, she's already level 1, which means the game chooses her subclass for you: trickery domain. and that doesn't make sense at all, narratively or for the stats she's been assigned. so to make her a good trickery domain cleric, you would want to respec her anyway just to fix level 1.

but i don't want her to be a trickery domain cleric. i don't even want her to be a healer. i want her to be an emo bird girl. the Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way of bg3, emphasis on raven. by endgame, we learn that shadowheart loves animals and nature, and she's a bit of a rebel (my graffiti queen). without having been kidnapped by the mother superior, i can see her either noping off into the woods or staying in the city to be the type of person who accidentally acquires really a lot of cats. so my goal is for her to have lots of animals, do a fuckton of damage, and fight off the darkness with lots and lots of light.

you can find the full build on eip. more detail and a level by level breakdown under the cut.

the beast priest build involves taking 6-7 levels of beast master ranger and 5-6 levels of war priest cleric. you start off as a ranger, because rangers have great early game damage and are also imo the easiest class for beginners. you stand in one spot and you shoot stuff. you can also get Harold (crossbow) pretty early on and it can be your main weapon through most of the game. it does insane damage and casts Bane.

i'm not familiar enough with armor and weapons to include recommendations in this guide (beyond Harold. get Harold). that is too much for me to keep track of, and i swap things out a lot. use whatever you find most helpful and/or looks the coolest. you probably can't use this build for lone wolf tactician or anything, but i do think it's very fun for an explorer or balanced playthrough, and it fixes a lot of the problems in shadowheart's base build.

this build does a few things:

uses war priest weapon buffs to increase ranged damage

minimizes concentration spells to prioritize ensnared strike and hunter's mark

backup heals (unfortunately this means either respeccing another companion to take on main healing duties or building a main heals tav. i'm working on a bardadin build for this very purpose. there is also always halsin, but he takes a while to acquire)

it's very beneficial to astarion that the bird can blind enemies near him so he can gain advantage to sneak attack (i'll share my build for him too eventually; he is also part ranger)

toolkit against undead (guardian spirits is a must)

important team utilities like guidance

what this build can't do:

be the "face" of your team, by which i mean initiate dialogue. we have no charisma or proficiency in anything related to talking to people. we are a gloomy emo girl sequestered to the back of the group and we shoot stuff and hang out with our bird

steal shit, disarm traps, lockpick. i mean, you can, but you'll probably have another character better equipped for it. we'll be wearing medium armor or heavy armor (optional), so we'll have a disadvantage on stealth anyway

here's how i've broken down each level:

initial build

if you're respeccing shadowheart, you won't be able to change her race or background, which means she'll remain an acolyte and have proficiency in insight and religion.

if you're making your tav a beast priest, you should choose whatever background and race makes sense for your character's narrative. the caveat being, as stated above, stealth and sleight of hand are kind of useless here, as well as dialogue proficiencies like persuasion, intimidation, deception, performance, etc.

what *is* helpful is having proficiency in the things you walk up to and go "oh shit, what's that?" so survival and perception are pretty important. folk hero and outlander are therefore both good background choices, but again, what's important to me in a build is that the story makes sense.

note you will not need investigation because we'll be taking bounty hunter as a favored enemy.

level 1: ranger (1)

proficiencies: survival, nature, animal handling (see above for more explanation; really just take whatever you think will be useful)

favored enemy: bounty hunter

bounty hunter gives disadvantage to enemies hit by ensnaring strike. very helpful for astarion and your companion. however, it's sometimes difficult to choose when to use hunter's mark versus ensnaring strike.

natural explorer: beast tamer

all of these are kind of useless, tbh. but i chose this one because early game, your companion dies very easily and this way you'll be able to bring it back without using a spell slot.

from my understanding, in EA you could either have your summon pet OR your companion out, not both, but in full release you can now have both summons out at once.

level 2: ranger (2)

fighting style: archery

we are going to be very far away from our enemies and Harold is going to be very dear to us.

spells: hunter's mark, ensnaring strike (ranged)

both spells require concentration so you can only pick one. ensnaring strike gives disadvantage to an enemy but hunter's mark does more damage, and your companion does more advantage to it as well. for cc situations, i'd choose ensnaring strike; for taking down one big dude at a time, hunter's mark. hunter's mark can be recast as long as you maintain concentration.

level 3: cleric (1)

deity: any (if you're respeccing shadowheart, your deity will remain shar)

domain: war domain

cantrips: guidance, sacred flame, light

the only one that's important here is guidance. the other two can be whatever your party needs most. the reason we're taking one level of cleric early and the others later is because guidance is a must. if someone else on your team has it, or if you have a bard, you can stay as a ranger until 5.

level 4: ranger (3)

subclass: beast master

spell: cure wounds OR speak with animals

for shadowheart's respec, i would say cure wounds so that she can start subhealing. however, if you don't have anyone in your party who can speak to animals yet, that's pretty important. the strange ox you meet in the grove provides a lot of endgame help, and it's fun talking to the owlbear and scratch.

level 5: ranger (4)

feat: resilient (wisdom)

taking resilience in wisdom gives us a proficiency in wisdom saving throws, which we'll need for both cleric and ranger spells.

level 6: ranger (5)

spells: anything that would be most helpful to your team.

you probably already have somebody who can cast longstrider as a ritual spell. enhance leap is helpful although this is pretty late in the game to be getting that. i try to avoid concentration spells because of hunter's mark and aoe spells because astarion and karlach are always in the thick of it and i don't want to hurt them.

what's important this level is that your companion's AC and damage increases, and it gets an extra attack.

level 7: cleric (2)

you get turn undead and guided strike this level. both are very useful, particularly guided strike. nothing to choose though.

level 8: cleric (3)

new spells! these can be prepared based on what you think you'll need for a given scenario. lesser restoration is a must if you're letting astarion bite you every night. but if that's the case you probably already have it.

level 9: cleric (4)

cantrip: whatever's most helpful at this point

feat: ability improvement (1 in wisdom, 1 in dexterity)

if you have auntie ethel's hair, then you might want 2 in one or the other.

level 10: cleric (5)

here's where you get guardian spirits, which is the single most important mid-game spell you can have (although in this build you get it pretty late). make sure when you cast it, you have as many movement speed spells and potions you can get. you're going to cast it and run around like mad killing everything.

level 11 & 12: ranger OR cleric (6 & 7)

here's where you have a difficult choice to make. your last two levels can be ranger 6 and 7, which will give your companion a huge buff. or you can choose cleric 6 and 7, which will give you war god's blessing, which gives you a +10 attack roll to give to someone else on your team.

you an also do cleric 6 and ranger 6, which will grant you war god's blessing AND allow you to take ranger knight as a favored enemy, which gives you the ability to wear heavy armor (if you want that). you can also gain resistance to cold, fire, or poison, but since you encounter all of those things in pretty equal measure, i never know which to choose.

i think it'll depend on what sounds more fun to you. personally, i think seeing my animal companion destroy everything is very fun. but if you enjoy reactions and buffing your teammates, i can also see wanting to stick with cleric through the end.

unlock to level 20

you might be thinking it's not worth it to only take two half classes instead of one whole one and lose out on late game spells and abilities. and i agree with you completely. my favorite part of beast master is when your companion gets two special abilities at 11. if you're playing completely vanilla, this is the major sacrifice of multiclassing. you're prioritizing creativity and cool combos over fancy spells and abilities.

but if you install a mod that lets you level to 20 (no class can go beyond 12, but you can multiclass to 20), you can take 11 levels of ranger and 9 levels of cleric. level 11 of ranger maxes out your animal; level 8 of cleric gives you divine strike, and level 9 gives you flame strike.

i didn't find anything from 10-12 in cleric very helpful. there's divine intervention which you can only use once in the game, ever, and i used it at a very integral time and it didn't do enough. heroes' feast is helpful but halsin has that too. heal, which should be the best healing spell in the game, is currently bugged and i don't know when they'll fix it.

you could also do level 12 of ranger for the extra feat if you don't have both wisdom and dexterity to 20, and stay at 8 for cleric.

if you do unlock to level 20, i would download the double xp mod (although i haven't gotten mine to work yet) so you can get to 20 at about the same pace you get to 12 in vanilla. this obvs is extremely unbalanced and makes you very very OP but that makes the game more fun for me. and anyway, if it gets too easy you can always play tactician or honor mode.

i hope you found this helpful! i'll probably be tweaking and updating it as i go. i'm working on respecs for astarion, karlach, halsin, jaheira, and wyll right now. gale, lae'zel, and minsc i'll be able to look at once i play around with them more. i haven't used them much yet in my teams.

if you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to send me an ask!

[asherlockstudy]

um im just scrolling through the streamys tag and i saw your posts and i thought "oh they seem cool i wonder what the blog is like"... then i went scrolling and you mentioned link coming out??? huh??? (i haven't watched gmm in like years year years) you seem like a level headed person to ask.... link is... gay? did this happen recently??? i am so confused but i know that if i google im gonna get garbage results. so yeah

Hello! Sorry for the late reply, hope you get to see this.

The answer is... yes and no. While there isn't anything explicit / certain / definite over all this time, it seems there is some restlessness on their side, with several projects such as their recent scripted videos, but also as far back as Hazel, the GMEs and Ear Biscuits that point towards the possibility of them taking a very slow, long way towards this direction, especially Link. In fact it seems like Link can't stand being in the closet anymore but Rhett dreads leaving it. That's my general impression.

While I might be considered the most stark supporter of this theory around here (or at least the one who verbalizes it the most), a few days ago more people started considering it thanks to a moment during GME where Link did something very close to a coming-out.

In case you haven't watched any of the GMEs, GME (Good Mythical Evening) is a paid live show they do once a year, which is like the strictly adult version of GMM. There, strong references to sex are allowed and they also drink enough to get inebriated and foul language is also allowed to some degree.

All that on its own would be already a lot to consider, but GME has also strong homoerotic traits since Rhett and Link play a lot with their ship there. Last year, they re-enacted rhink fics where they were having sex (basically handjobs?), I don't remember exactly. And they acted LIKE they were doing it. This year, they took it up a notch and Rhett actually sucked Link's nipple, among other things. And I mean, he really did it. For a few seconds. But he did it...properly. Don't ask me why they do this stuff. I don't know. I think nobody knows. I am just presenting you the facts so I can give you an idea about what is going on.

So, during a game in this latest GME, this dialogue took place regarding what the act of "docking" is:

Rhett: I was right! It is a gay thing! Stevie: Whaaat? I mean, well, Link also agreed with your answer so... Rhett: We both get points! Hold on, though... one guy needs to be circumcised. Link: Yeah you only need one circumcision for docking. Stevie: Oh you're asking ME? Rhett: I think..... I don't know a lot about this but I think only one guy needs to be uncircumcised. Link: Do you think docking actually happens? Because I don't think docking increases pleasure. Rhett: I don't know, man. I can't do it, man. My parents didn't give me a choice. They just circumcised me, man. Link: I know, but even after you're circumcised, you can try. Rhett: With someone who's not circumcised...... And also, I am not gay. Link: Hey, that's okay. It's okay. Rhett: Yeah, I mean, it's cool to not be gay! Link: No, it's not "cool"- Rhett: No, it's "okay" to not be gay! By "cool" I meant it is "okay" to not be gay! Link: But just go ahead and explain yourself completely. Rhett: But I might do it for scientific purposes! Link: This is what I wish you would do when I say something stupid. Rhett: If they needed to figure it out, if two scientists wanted to figure out whether two guys need to be uncircumcised, I'd be like "okay", I mean, I'd check with my wife first. Link: Yeah, but just say it is equally cool to be gay. Rhett: It is cool to be whatever you wanna be. Link: Yeah. Exactly. It's cool to be whatever you need, you want to be, you are. It's cool to be who you are. That's what I am deriving. Rhett: Yeah, that's the coolest you can be, to just be who you are. Right, Stevie? Link: I, you know what, I feel like, Stevie, I feel like I have been on a journey. Stevie: Okay. Rhett: Yeah. Link: To know- to figure out who I am. Rhett (mutters): Yeah, yeah, right. Link: And it's extremely rewarding, challenging and- Rhett: But we won't be docking later... Link: And..... rewarding. And we wanna- Yeah... can you... I was saying something important. Rhett: Because we're both circumcised. Link: Yes, but we are not gonna be docking later. Rhett: Right, because we're both circumcised. Link: But you can be circumcised and still have enough of a skin left after the circumcision to dock... In Good Mythical More we are gonna answer questions from the crew and we 're gonna have conversations about - (meanwhile Rhett talks simultaneously and almost over him about unimportant docking musings) Link: ...Right, so if you are not gonna come to Good Mythical More, please you can still get a ticket, join us for Good Mythical More, but for now we're gonna move on. Rhett (sarcastically): Don't you want more of this? Link: In the More. Stevie moves on with the game.

So, what happens next, Link also had two-three more moments when he seemed to consider talking about something and Rhett explicitly told him "Whatever it is you want to say, just keep it to yourself" and also in another moment "You can tell your Uber driver on your way home but not here".

During the More, at which Link hinted, there was a red box with nosy questions asked from the crew. Rhett was the one taking the questions and reading them. He chose to not read loudly and thus answer at least two questions, even though he pulled them out of the box.

Link eventually did not make any more similar statements.

You should also know that a couple of weeks ago, during the GME promo, Link had said that one reason we should watch the GME show was that he might even make an emotional speech before its end.

Another thing, the last months Link has also expressed in interviews and even in a college graduation that it is important to find who you are and explore your identity, addressing this especially to young adults. He always seems emotionally charged when he does it.

That's it. To me it just seems like there's one explanation only, but I will leave you to your own conclusions.

And one last detail. Rhett did everything in his power to not let Link finish what he started - almost bullied him out of it. Despite all that, notice what he said. While Link was trying to say whatever he was trying to say, Rhett said:

But we're not gonna be docking later.................. because we're both circumcised.

And he repeated the explanation once more.

+++

[trashcatsnark]

*Makes tea* Omg, can we please get your thoughts on the dlc and THAT ending?

ABSOLUTELY

Suffice to say, spoilers and a very long post, I am a verbose whore Ngl this is coming fresh off finishing it all last night, so my opinions may still be settling in a little bit and I also had to play it in more spread out sessions than I usually do with games.

Firstly, on a just a technical level, for me personally as someone who started playing at launch, finished all the endings, and had like 700+ hours in the game before Phantom Liberty was even announced- to me it felt a little out of place, granted might be because I jumped into on the tail end of an almost finished save. So, maybe for folks who started new runs it flows a bit better.

Like getting a dedicated credits listing as if the game is over after the decision at the orbital station just to cut back to Johnny going Wait, V, you're still dying!

It's a little strange, I understand you wanna give full credit to the Phantom Liberty specific team but also, was that really the only way to transition V out of the space station?

Songbird, I'm mixed on, I don't hate her but I don't love her like I think the game wanted me too. She feels a little... pushed on V for my liking. Like early on, it really felt like CDPR rattling a barbie doll at me and screaming at me to think she's the coolest thing in the universe and she's alright. I get why she does the things she does, I get that she is a narrative reflection of V, that her and Solomon honestly are meant to mirror the V and Johnny relationship.

The ideas of betrayal, the idea that the person who's trying to save you, and wants to save you the most is the very one who's gonna be your end.

I like that component for sure, like honestly, to the surprise of no one- the biggest things I got out of it was related to SilverV I also really do love Songbird's connection to the Blackwall and the way it's eating at her, I love those touches and when at the Orbital station you link with her to like- release Blackwall pulses. Very cool, still feel like there's more there to sink our teeth into, but very much liked the Blackwall in particular coming back.

My first impulse and choice was to side with Songbird, because even if I didn't love her like CDPR wanted me to, I did feel some connection to her through her being in similar situation to V and just being desperate to survive and live.

That said, it is disappointing that Songbird is... another person who was just lying to V in hopes of getting what she wanted. I get the desperation for survival, but it did feel like Hey, what if we did it again?

Like- that's what the game is, just over and over. I love it, but the game is V gets a lead, goes full steam ahead in trying to save themselves, and oop- someone was lying and V gets kicked right in the fucking teeth. Again. Again. Again. Again.

And I understood we weren't gonna get a magical fix it ending, but it is frustrating to be like- hey, wasn't it fun when the VDB betrayed V? Or when you found out Evelyn lied? Or when you finally found Hellman and all he gave was a hospice recommendation? Or when Hanako finally hears you out but only if you kill her brother and even then lol not really you're still gonna die? Or when Alt says oh btw you're still gonna die?

What if- we did it again?!

And in a similar vein, I really loved a lot of aspects of the Tower Ending (I believe it is?) where you side with the FIA.

The conversation with Johnny in the AV is fucking beautiful. That alone was worth all my money. Him saying that he feels more at peace than he ever has before, I still fuck- I love the way they play up that even in endings where Johnny doesn't necessarily agree with V's actions, he's just happy they're gonna survive. He's at peace with dying again, he's at peace knowing this time it means something to him. He died before his ideals, so convinced when he stormed Arasaka Tower that when he died in the flames it'd mean something, it'd fix something. Only to come back and find that despite everything having changed, nothing really did. He died and the world just moved on. But this time, him going means V gets to live, he gets to go out knowing (at least believing, hoping) that by doing so they'll get to live on, they'll get to fight another day, and can go away content knowing that he'll be leaving the world just little bit better of a place- because V will still be in it.

Got emotional there, my bad.

That said, beyond that component.... more of the same?

Like, it's the Devil Ending. Reskinned, revamped- but it's Devil Ending. V sided with the shadowy secretive shady corporation/agency, underwent extensive medical treatment, and oop- turns out none of your friends were worth a fuck, now deal with the consequences!

And like, I don't know, I do find the idea interesting of V no longer being able to have like combat implants and physically just not being the same, the idea of them being forced into trying to carve out a normal life after everything is actually pretty neat.

But it still feels like a reskin to me.

I also really just don't like the way CDPR tries to illustrate bad ends by making V's friends/love interests worse people? Like don't get me wrong, I can completely vibe with the idea that A) they'd have some grievances with V siding with FIA or Arasaka and B) that after two years of not knowing what happened to V, they would've moved on in some capacity.

But do they have to be like, mean?

Like Panam going full scale, don't answer the call, have Mitch tell you to fuck off. I was in a coma???? Like, I know she doesn't know that, but also maybe listen??? Like that feels like yeah, her character hasn't developed at all, she's still incredibly stubborn and won't even hear you out.

And River selling police secrets for Randy's rehab, so he's in a guilt spiral, so he just... can't meet up??? Like legit, CDPR, honey- what the fuck is your fascination with ruining this man's life? Literally, one of if not the only LI who can canonically die??? Or go to jail???? Like, what did River do to you????

Judy moving across the country and being married, I don't have inherent beef with, I think that does make sense for her character- that said, convo still feels weird, like the whole "please don't ruin this for me" like I'm sorry??? V literally nearly died for you several times and murdered for you several times and has been so nice to you- but you just assume they're gonna show up at your door and try to ruin your life? Wow, great to know what you think of me....

And of course Kerry is just busy with his career, that said I did find it kind of funny/in character that V calls and the first thing Kerry wants to do is talk about himself. Like, yeah, that's Kerry. But also, like again, the dialogue heavily implies that when he makes the bare minimum offer of hey... maybe we can hang out in four months, that no- you probably won't, it's bullshit.

Like, it just sucks because I really love all of these characters and feel like they do genuinely have love and affection for V, but this constant- oh nope they're all abandoning you, oof, pull on any ending that isn't Star or Sun is just.... frustrating and really undermines it and honestly reinforces that V's best friend and the one person who cares for them most is fucking Johnny.

Vik selling out to Zetatech also sucked ass, don't do that to my ripper- but hey, at least he made five fucking minutes for V. Even if he spent trying to convince them he's happy and eventually they will be too.

Misty I loved seeing again in the ending- though I don't know why, maybe it's just me- is her VA suddenly doing a harley quinn impression??? Like that kind of Boston(?) accent she suddenly has in the DLC for .... no fucking reason? That said, even if I'm sad to see her go, I am happy she's finding her peace, though kind of wish there was a "can I go with you?" option, because- V literally doesn't have a home anymore??? Maybe someone should help them.... not be homeless, that'd be cool. Maybe my V wants to go to the old forest in Poland too???

Also, also- Delamain, more of a true friend than any of the love interests in that ending. Picked V up, got them booze for them and Vik, helped them catch up on news, said they missed them, and were happy to see them again. Fuck yeah, Delamain.

But uhhh, overall, I think my opinions are there are some interesting and fun things within the DLC, some fun concepts that I definitely wanna play with in my fanfic. Some solid fucking SIlverV content. But like narratively and story wise- it's just alright. It's nothing ground breaking, I don't feel like the game needed it, I don't feel like it "fixed" the game. I think people who got into Cyberpunk 2077 through Phantom Liberty and praise it as what "saved" the game- just like Cyberpunk 2077. Like, cause the DLC is more of the same, like it's fun, it's a good time but it's the same narrative structure we've had times 3 within the main game. It's like if I eat a sandwich, and CDPR said "Hey, I know what will go well with that-" and handed me a third of the same exact kind of sandwich. I don't dislike it, I liked the sandwich, a lot- but also it doesn't complement or add to it like a side dish or a dessert might to a meal. It's a just a bit of the same- maybe it has a slightly new condiment on it, but its overall the same.

Like I said, this might change if/when I do a full replay of the game and can handle doing it as like a full run rather than kind of tacking it onto the end of another save. I think that might help with making it feel a bit more a part of the story.

But I think I'd still land in the same overall space of, it's was alright- some parts I loved more than others, and if this had been in the base game, I'd probably feel very different because Reed and Songbird probably wouldn't feel as sprung on V to me.

All that said, I also do feel a bit more confident and secure in how I'm gonna implement it into my fic- which is gonna mean heavy rewrites which should be fun. So, I definitely got a little something to sink my teeth into.

[marina-the-witch]

My Souls Hot Takes

Decided to write up a couple of my less popular opinions for souls games. Please don't get upset over any of these, if you disagree that's totally valid

Dark Souls 1:

Bell Gargoyles is my favorite base game boss

I don't like Ornstein and Smough that much

Gwyn's theme is nowhere near as sad or dramatic as its made out to be in my opinion

Painted World isnt fun to me at all

Tomb of the Giants isnt that bad

I miss the whimiscal 80s fantasy aesthetic the series lost in the following entries even if i understand it narratively

Dark Souls 2:

I'm not just a hater or fail to appreciate an underrated gem, I simply dont enjoy this game

I think Darklurker is mid and the runback gimmick is stupid

The world and lore arent that much better to me than any other souls games and dont save the game

Life Gems are actually pretty okay

Old Dragonslayer is really not that big of a deal

Royal Rat Vanguard is the single worst boss in souls to me

Fume Knight is just kinda alright to me, I enjoy Sir Alonne much more

The health cap loss fucking sucks i hate it

Its perfectly fine to both love and hate this game please calm tf down

Dark Souls 3:

Soul of Cinder isnt that exciting, I might just be biased though bc i started the DS games with 3

Jailers arent that bad, Thralls are way worse

Ancient Wyvern kinda funny tbh

I really really dislike Sister Friede

The random wolf guy in ariandel is the wost boss in 3

Corvian Knights are the coolest enemy in the trilogy

The game isnt actually as ugly and monotone as people say

Pontiff Sulyvahn is sooooo mid to me I could not care less for his parry bait jojo stand ass goofy fight

Yhorm is such a nothing boss without the siegward narrative to me

Demon Prince solos literally any other duo boss and its not even close

R1 and O spam is a dark souls staple to me, not DS3 exclusive at all

Dragonslayer Armor and Oceiros are insanely underrated

Sekiro:

Demon of Hatred actually slaps

Corrupted Monk actually slaps

Great Shinobi Owl is really mid to me, too gimmicky

Guardian Ape has the same issues as DoH just to a lesser extend

The 2 giant beast (serpent and carp) area hazards are so good

Souls should give underwater another shot imo

Most of the minibosses are kinda bad to me

Bloodborne:

Laurence is actually peak

Not really a fan of Maria's fight, gonna replay the game soon to see if it'll finally click

Winter Lanters are pretty cool

Micolash fans are weird why are there so many

Yharnam Sunrise is the most boring ending of any souls game

As much as i would love it, I cant feasibly see a logical contuination of the Bloodborne universe

Saw Spear mid idc

Chalice Dungeons are both infinitely better and worse than people say I really dont know how to feel about them

Simon's Bowblade is one of the coolest weapons in fiction

Elden Ring:

Morgott is underrated

Dragons are underrated

Placidusax's theme is kinda eh to me

Radahn and Malenia are equal, both fandoms can stfu, it said fought to a standstill for a reason

Rykard is genuinely a good fight even with the gimmick in mind

I don't care for vyke, frenzy, shabriri or any other madness hoobla

I hate using great spears so much

Summons are VALID. If they were cheating they wouldnt be in the game. Get over yourself

Idc how much you can counter it I dont like malenia's waterfowl dance and health regain

Godskin Duo isn't that bad, the REAL enemy is valiant gargoyles

Royal Revenants, Birds and Runebears at least have the decency to be rare... Imps and Lobsters though

Volcano Manor is underrated as fuck, such a unique level for a souls game with so much cool lore and visual flare

[blazehedgehog]

How is progress on your Ghostbusters RPG?

Almost dead, unfortunately. I think about it from time to time but I haven't done any meaningful code work since my Mom died. At some point in the last year I decided I'd write out the entire game script, since I was coalescing around a story idea.

With making an RPG in Clickteam Fusion, planning ahead is your best friend, so knowing every story beat ahead of time would give me a clearer picture of what needed to be coded on the back end.

But naturally, the opening to the game is going to be the most text heavy, outside of the ending. I wrote about three chapters, encapsulating a teaser and a recap of how the original Ghostbusters ended, and have been too distracted with other things to write more.

The general gameplay flow I was gravitating towards was something like Metal Max. Not long after starting this GB fangame, I watched somebody stream all of Metal Max NES and the bounty system in that was really interesting. Basically, over the course of the story, you'll hear rumors about special creatures and bandits roaming around the overworld, and if you can kill them, you earn a big reward by turning in the bounty.

If you ignore bounties, it cuts the gameplay length in half and you lose out a lot of level ups and gear. Taking/ignoring bounties almost ends up being kind of a difficult selector. Like doing a three heart run in Zelda.

For a Ghostbusters RPG, all of this just made sense, and it'd make it easy to reuse areas. You get calls about ghosts to catch, and you can either go catch the ghost (your bounty) or you can follow the story. Maybe the bounty is along the way to the next story event, maybe it's in a previous dungeon. It's up to you where you go.

I dunno if the game will ever get finished, but I'll let you peek on what I'd decided story-wise:

So it bothers me that a lot of recent Ghostbusters movies are kind of hero worship. Ghostbusters Afterlife is all about how these four guys were total legends that saved the world, and what a tragedy it is that they've been forgotten. "omg you kids don't know who the ghostbusters were? let me, paul rudd, educate you on the coolest, strongest and most epic titans to ever dress like sweaty service industry workers."

That's dumb. The Ghostbusters are working joes. They stumbled into this job, and saved the world kind of by accident. They are barely heroes and could have ended all life on earth as we know it just as easily. They just wanted a paycheck and were looking for a niche to fill.

And in the wider view of producing the first Ghostbusters movie itself, that too was kind of an accident. The movie got rammed through production, the script was an unfinished mess so they adlibbed a lot of it, and basically nobody expected it to do as well as it did. It is the very definition of lightning in a bottle, and it hasn't really been replicated.

So I wanted to push in on that. These guys aren't looking to save the world. They aren't actually that strong or cool. They don't have a sense of duty. They're just regular people, and they can (and do) make mistakes.

When Egon says crossing the streams is like "all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light", I imagine that means it's more than just a really big explosion. Ray calls it "total protonic reversal", which makes it sound more like the creation of a black hole, or something.

When the Ghostbusters crossed the streams and directed that into the doorway to Gozer's world, in my story, they effectively collapsed an entire dimension. Erased it, and whatever it inhabited.

I wanted there to be consequences for that. It was an impulsive action they made out of desperation to save themselves, and though it worked in the short term (sealing the door, almost certainly killing Gozer) I wanted there to be much worse long term consequences. They more or less punched a hole in reality, and there's really only two things that happen with holes:

They get bigger and deeper

They get filled in with debris

Ultimately I wanted to say that when the Ghostbusters crossed the streams, it was a mistake. They didn't know any better. They were messing with forces vastly beyond their comprehension. And the thrust of the game would be them figuring out what they did wrong and trying to come up with a plan to do a better job at fixing it.

But they don't know if they can do it. What happened with Gozer was a happy accident (that turned out to be not so happy). The scale of this problem literally dwarfs them. They are so small that they are barely even specks of dust. This is a supernaturally cosmic issue.

To me, The Ghostbusters are screw-ups that were in the right place at the right time and did the wrong thing. But not maliciously, just ignorantly. And the decision to take responsibility for that mistake is the grease that turns the gears of the narrative.

[chronotsr]

No. 7.5 - 1978 Reflections, and the Halls of Mystery

Welcome back to the end-of-the-year recaps! This is technically the first TSR iteration of it!

1. Coolest ideas

It's a lot of stuff from D2. The big ticket item is "neutral-ground hostile shrine" -- any time you can muck about with otherwise hostile people without drawing swords immediately is a big win. I know that the reaction table is supposed to mitigate that some but, cmon. Sometimes you just can't think of a good reason that the 9th goblin pack tonight is not immediately hostile. This is a way more natural way to handle it. And it lets you talk and such and experience their culture from their perspective!

2. Coolest Module You Haven't Heard Of

This is honestly a hard one because all of these modules are intensely well known. Gun to my head, I would probably vote for G1. The D-series is cool but frankly there have been more better and more interesting iterations of subterranean hexcrawls -- Veins of the Earth being the currently famous one. But the thing about G1 is, G1 is a surprisingly natural and fun location. Unlike the others in the GDQ series, G1 is genuinely an adventure you could slot anywhere with no context. It is simply a fun raid on a fortress, which I never get tired of. The twists of "they're piss drunk" and "there's a slave revolt in the basement" are really good (albeit in 2024 a little stale) twists on the classic raid-on-fortress formula.

3. The Growth of Module Design

Honestly 1978 represents a rather stagnant year for module design. The most innovative design feature I see is how D1-D3 feeds into one another in a much more naturalistic way than its predecessors, and all through that deeply useful combination of hexmap and random tables with a handful of pre-programmed setpieces. I am eager to see hexmap technology get much better going forward.

…

Surprisingly, 1978 wasn't too much to talk about? I don't generally think of Gary as an "innovator" in module design space. His main contribution is taking things that already exist and making them feel more natural. Which is not to say that I now buy into Gygaxian Naturalism as this great feat, more than a lot of his competition at the time was seemingly intentionally anti-Naturalism. Their work feels like the reaction to me, Gary is just staying the course of "this should make an amount of sense". Although, his random dungeon monsters mishmash still feels as nonsensical as all hell.

The Halls of Mystery (From Dragon 21, December 1978)

And as threatened, we're going to have a very brief section on The Halls of Mystery, which holds the dubious honor of 1st Dragon Magazine dungeon. I would throw the full header at you, but everything is by Don Turnbull. You may recognize his name, at publication time he works for Games Workshop and he will be heading up TSR, Inc.'s UK branch starting in 1980, leading to the much-beloved Fiend Folio.

So. Not much to say about this, actually, It's a very large room with some branches. The main schtick of the Halls is that the main chamber contains several mirrors, some of which are magical. There's a big riddle on the desk on the south side, the riddle solution is actually quite obvious (say Excalibur three times -- and hey, Don told us the answer and rationale of the puzzle! Thanks Don!). When you move the central cylinder, it teleports you to the corresponding position in the dungeon. The rest is a lightweight stocking of the dungeon with monsters, treasure, et c. If you're keeping score, this is a Zelda puzzle. It's very cute and lightweight and honestly it's so neutrally written (no statistics are given and it would be trivially easy to restock it at any level) that you could genuinely use it in 2024 with very little effort. It's adorable! It is also wonderfully lean, clocking in at two total pages and frankly it's super refreshing to have such a light read of a module here.

Happily, next time we will be covering B1 - In Search of the Unknown, which is the second Basic D&D adventure we will be reviewing in this series (The adventure printed in the Basic rulebook, Tower of Zenopus, was first. This is our first lettered Basic adventure.) And, funnily, the first TSR module in this lineup I've never read before. See you then!

[itsmearia]

New to Arknights: Beehunter

Why did nobody tell me about Beehunter?

Character design wise let's start with the fact that this bear is code named Beehunter. Excellent.

Her color palette is black/yellow. Perfect.

A cute little bear charm hanging from her chain. Love it.

Her nail game is pristine. I'm envious.

She doesn't want elaborate weapons. She's just here to punch things in the face. I respect it.

This DPS guard is a total bad ass boxer. Want her to float like a butterfly? Throw on that s1 and have her dodge incoming attacks with her passive. 40% of them at rank 7! Need her to sting like a bee? S2 rapidly improves her attack speed. Which is nice because her passive bonus is that consecutive attacks on enemies increases her attack! Faster attacks that hit harder and harder sounds excellent.

To top it off, she has some very relatable dialogue: “Boss, let's go grab a bite. On you this time. What? You bought last time? Doesn't sound right to me.”

I have no idea if she's actually good to use compared to other operators but I don't care. This is one of the coolest designs I've seen in this game when you look at the whole package – both conceptually and with gameplay – that I've got to level her up and try her out. She's only a 4 star so it shouldn't cost too much.

[catnatch]

okay so with all this au talk, the DnD college au is actually occupying most of my brain space. here's how it starts (LOTS more info under the cut):

Yosuke is a college first year and has had terrible luck doing the whole fresh start, make lots of friends (and get tons of babes) so far.... so while he doesn't like his suitemate Kubo too much, when Kubo wheedles him to join him for some dorm board game thing (so he doesn't look like too much like a creep going alone; and "it's not like YOU've got any plans on a Friday night, Hanamura") to get close to Yuki-chan- "and there are other hotties there!!" Yosuke doesn't protest TOO much. plus there's free food!

board game thing was actually a DnD session a couple of other first years are trying to put together. also in attendance are: Souji (the dm), Yukiko and Chie (they're already friends but don't know the rest of the group), Kanji, Naoto (Rise is there briefly (she's Naoto's girlfriend); she won't be joining but she wanted to steal Souji's cooking and catch up a little as she, Naoto and Souji are already friends- Naoto is the one to help convince Souji to put together this DnD recruitment, actually. Rise's very busy but she'll appear on occasion throughout the campaign when Souji begs her to play a dramatic bit parts for NPCs) and Ai just cos I feel like other people than the IT should join for a lil bit (she will make an excuse 20 minutes in "ohhhh something came up I'll be right back." she doesn't.) Mitsuo will not be returning after the first session after Yukiko flatly turns him down. Teddie is back home with Yosuke's parents since he's not college age yet and won't be a part of this at all, probably

first session is a little messy (the enthusiasm levels vary wildly among the players) but what hooks Yosuke and gets him to come back again is one of his off the wall ideas in combat actually worked and won them the battle and the dopamine he got from that is unmatched

what's the campaign look like: UHHHHHH i don't know but I have the vague idea it would somewhat mirror the events of p4- so instead of some world ending adventuring maybe the gang uncovers a serial murder plot? but more fantasy. and maybe the murderer's story is somehow tied to the NPC that Yosuke eventually falls in love with idk

the gang's characters!

Naoto already had their character planned out beforehand: an elf ranger ♂ (Souji had to talk them down from going into some super specific off-book combo to not scare off the newbies that hopefully would join). Yukiko, Chie, and Kanji had all actually read the recruitment flyer for this event so had a vague idea of their characters but haven't played a ttrpg before so just went with what appealed to them rather then how they play. Yukiko: tiefling warlock (and after she learned Naoto is x-gender she thought that sounded fun and made her character x-gender as well; Naoto thinks maybe they're being mocked but it's genuine on Yukiko's part). Chie: human monk ♀. Kanji: halfling cleric ♀. Yosuke had no idea what he was getting into so he's just going for what's Coolest. he considered being a super yolked warrior but nah... not even in make believe. But he could be an awesome stealthy ninja!! So he chooses rogue. as for race, he's not going to be an elf that's basically like being a fairy, right, and he's not... but he thinks they get cool bonus powers or something so he'll go with half-elf.

(Ai tried to be an elf princess but Souji gently maneuvered her to elf druid. Kubo went with the first things that caught his eye: dragonborn barbarian)

as for names, only Naoto came up with one already (Erawin <deeply into western high fantasy>); the rest of the gang workshops names at the table:

Yosuke: Jira (i'm not creative what do u want from me .)

Chie<sweating, desperately trying not to say her literal first thought > : her name is……uhhh… <gives up> Lee…

Yukiko just tries vague grunts to turn into a name (“Grgk!” “no” “Aaaht!” “no” “ERP!” “sounds like a belch” <yukiko laugh > “is that a name?? er- no” “Hrk!” “OKAY YES HRK YOU CAN BE HRK”)

Kanji: Usagi (it is for the reason you're thinking)

anyway the main meat of the au is an NPC appearing and then reoccurring throughout the campaign that Yosuke's character forms a natural rapport with... Souji picks up on this and fleshes out the NPC beyond what was a throw away background character. the gang try to do their DnD sessions every week for at least a couple hours, but it still takes them weeks and weeks to get through what Souji planned. since it's so gradual, Yosuke doesn't notice when their characters' banter turned from playful to outright flirtatious...

and he swears he's not like THAT but he can't help getting so genuinely upset when he dies* in Jira's arms and Yosuke can't separate character from person when he hears Souji's voice tells him before he dies that he- he loves--

*temporarily; I'm not a monster

[liauditore]

Cub and Pearl would both be competitive trainers 100%

Gem and Stress would be contest coordinators and have the cutest sparkliest pokemon in the world. (Your stress line up is on point)

False would be champion of the elite four but I’m not sure what type. False fans would need to help me out on that one-feels lazy to say fighting or steel type.

Etho would be the trainer for the first gym and have ghost type/dark type mons that look the coolest and most “ninja-like” (kill him) plus one really silly looking one. He’d get the shedinja after the post game level up.

Iskall would have a really fucking irritating set of normal type mons to battle and be the trainer for the eighth gym. His higher level team would be all slakoths fuck you man

Keralis would have like three of the Pokémon that evolve into sexy furrybait

Xb would just have three magikarps

(also your skizz lineup is so real. The lillipup made me chuckle)

LOVE THESE.

For my AU I purposefully made it so that none of them are "serious" trainers (because pokemon in day to day living was more in line with what I wanted to explore) but yeah in a context where that was an option, Pearl and Cub would absolutely reach for the sky. I think Jevin would too but eventually chill and settle down into being a gym leader instead.

Gem as a coordinator is so real but I also do think she would start vibrating violently on the spot if she was bested in a battle. Her uber-competitive nature won't let her rest!! I can see her having contests as her main thing but don't be fooled those pokemon have tighter training regimes than navy seals and she will DESTROY YOU no matter what you're challenging her in.

Since Gem and Pearl have been on my mind and I have a tendency to main characterify Pearl in a lot of these I love the idea of like. Pearl being mainly a trainer and Gem being mainly a coordinator but because Pearl really likes to learn new things and Gem is the world's sweatiest sweat they end up rubbing off on eachother and Pearl learns to be a coordinator on the side cus of Gem and Gem's passion for battle only becoming stronger from the fact that she can never seem to defeat Pearl.

Anyway Stress as a coordinator is so true I can see her being someone very well-respected as a veteran in the contest scene, probably gets invited as a judge just as much as she competes.

For False I can see her either being flying for her aviator theme or dragon because of my personal cynthia-inspired design bias. Alternatively the thought of False in Lusamine's outfit just crossed my mind and I would love to see her with a Bewear.

THE ETHO AND TEAM CANADA THING IS SO CUTE I LOVE THAT SO MUCH. My personal headcanon for my Etho in this AU is that he's an ex gym leader/e4/champion and has now gone into retirement so the thought of Beef and Pause witnessing essentially his entire career is so. augh I might steal that idea.

I love the Iskall section LMAO that one I might yoink as well or just some other really annoying team. I also like the idea of him having gulpin idk why it just makes sense to me and I think it'd be his little buddy and he'd take it on adventures and talk to it like his kid. Also like the idea of him having mons adjacent to Stress, like she has a smoochum and he has an elekid/magby or something (or alternatively, a wailord for the skitty)

The Keralis team is so funny cus I have him down as just having like. a pack of whismur that follow him around everything. and now I'm just imagining a mass of whismur + one lopunny like when farmers get an alpaca to look after sheep.

Xb being that one trainer in every game with 6 magikarp 😭😭 I'd like to think one of them has evolved and he either somehow hasn't noticed or just doesn't care that much and still treats it like a little guy. and everyone who comes over is terrified because holyyy fuckwhen did that thing get big.and he's just like what that's just fish 3