#the replay value on this game

[dyrewrites]

My husband asked if I'm going to play through Baldur's Gate again when the new classes are in...

And yes, yes I am. I haven't chosen the side of the scary drow lady yet. I need to know how that goes. Pretty sure she's going to hurt me, but in a sexy way. Could be fun.

[captainobis-stressball]

Playing One Piece Odyssey:

Sanji when Robin or Nami heal him: oooOOOOOOooohhh for me???😍😍🥰

Sanji when Chopper/Usopp/Luffy/Franky/Brook heals him: thanks, you’re a lifesaver!

Sanji, poisoned, paralyzed, clinging to life at 1HP & no one there but ZORO to heal him: I DONT NEED YOUR DAMN HELP YOU MOSS BASTARD!!!!

Zoro when Chopper heals him: You saved me, Chopper!🥺💚💚

Zoro when anyone else heals him: Thanks🗿

Zoro when Sanji heals him: WORRY ABOUT YOUR FCKIN SELF YOU TWIRLY-BROWED FOOL!!!!!

[randomluthoughts]

[bluhbleeblah]

save me cal i-was-a-teenage-exocolonist...... save me.............

[simpletailoring]

bashir: I like human mystery novels :/ The trouble with cardassian enigma tales is that they all end the same way, all the suspects are always guilty

garak: yes!! but the challenge is determining exactly who is guilty of what!

hey elim garak, I have amazing news for you about the hit game series “phoenix wright: ace attorney”

[folkdevilism]

I'll always have a soft spot for Dishonored 2, but I still occasionally wonder what kind of game we could have gotten if it had been allowed to focus solely on Emily instead of trying to accommodate two playable main characters.

[pnsge]

havent posted art on here in a while

[nerobearo]

i have been going insane with politics so instead i have been thinking about pokemon as a cope and how much i want to play a game but all the switch games that i care about i already filled the pokedex so it feels pointless to restart...

[impossible-rat-babies]

“limited replay value” is it not enough to experience a game for the first time and have that be it? does everything have to be a commodity, to be used over and over again?

[thesoupisburning]

there are seven genders

[wizardsix]

about 30 hours into veilguard and while I have an essay worth of my problems w the game and how this is absolutely not ten year's worth of developing I do want to say what I do like. the maps (visuals/progression/exploration), combat, and the companions (only five of them. neve and taash annoy me and I would absolutely not recruit them if this game didn't force you to)... overall it's all right on its own but it's no dragon age game.

[basilpaste]

I’ve seen you posting abt In stars and time and I’m intrigued! What’s your pitch on it for someone interested in playing?

OKAY. so. in stars and time is an indie rpg! its also a time loop story! you play as siffrin, who just so happens to be the fourth member to join a party on a quest to save the country from being frozen in time! in fact, you start on the parties final mission! its the day before they face the evil king.

and then you start the journey to the final battle! only for things to start from the top as quick as it began.

to stop talking with my 'pitch voice'. uh! isat is a fucking fantastic game. the story is great, the characters are so lively that you never for a second question how important they are to each other, and even the mechanics are great! the way the time loops work in game makes sense from both a story perspective and a quality of life one.

its also a BEAUTIFUL game. its entirely in black and white and most of the graphics are pixel art, but theres also a lot of cgs and talk sprites that really bring things to life! the music bangs, the actual rpg mechanics are CRAZY charming, and everything about it is super duper cohesive. it gets really easy to get in siffrins head, to feel what theyre feeling. both the writing and the gameplay do a GREAT job establishing this.

and!! its only 20 dollars??? and the game is like upwards of 12 hours of gameplay? like the speedrun record is 4 hours. you get a LOT of bang for your buck.

i will say! it gets really heavy near the end. there are content warnings when you open the game and you should head those warnings! it can be kind of a lot!! in a really good and well done way, but still kind of a lot!!

[valravn72]

I’ve been playing a lot of small indie games and god I wish the rest of the game industry understood that the whole point of farming and grinding is so that in some point of the journey the player can go HAHAHA I PLANNED FOR THIS and pull off crazy crap earlier than they should be able to. Like Teenage Exocolonist letting me just walk past all the checks when I’m outside the colony and go to the boss immediately because I farmed the fuck out of my perception skill should technically be game ruining but it’s not. I planned for this so I could get the ascension ending easily while simultaneously putting the rest of my effort into figuring out as much about engineering as possible at the same time so I can pull off a full shield run. Having advantages in certain contexts should allow me to interact with it in a way that opens an entirely new path for me to take. Poisoning the campfire survivors at the very beginning of my Inscryption run lets me take a route where I focus on building up the cards I already have instead of hunting down new ones. Advantages are good!! Grinding so you’re high enough level to beat one boss only for the rest of the game to balance itself by making everything else many levels higher than you once again is unrewarding. If your player cannot face your game from multiple angles then maybe it’s not that worth exploring. If your player over relies on an ability they spent a long time working up and they’ve made the game too easy make it so that steers them into a new situation where they have to innovate on their strategy to get things going again. Just hand me a game like Inscryption where I farm the whole game with fecundity decks and then get to Kaycee’s Mod and realize I have to relearn the whole game from a completely new perspective now that I can’t rely on that anymore. If it’s just a matter of “the numbers are too high we have to turn all the other numbers up too” then do the numbers really mean anything anymore or are you just keeping me stuck in a role where I’m saying to myself “once I have the advantage I’ll be able to explore so many new things” but then never letting me have any advantage until near the end when the world has lost its charm because everything is just a damn numbers game.

[emblemxeno]

I think another reason why I'm of the opinion that 3H's writing falls flat due to superfluous exposition, is that... it actually does what I think is great gameplay-story integration.

And that's the character paralogues!

Every character has a paralogue which ties their personalities and backstories into that mission's plot, without exception. Certain gameplay elements are also introduced to suit why the characters are doing what they're doing in those missions.

They're not flawless of course (map reusal is a bitch), but they are nonetheless stellar ways to tie in the characters to their world.

So what's the issue? The problem then becomes, why the hell is there so much else then?

I'm not advocating for everything else to be cut or for character backstory/development centered supports to be shelved, of course. But when you have paralogues-missions that are very well crafted to engage the player in the game flow and the writing simultaneously-why do the characters reveal the same things and go through similar developments in other places, like supports, the monastery, sometimes even in story as well?

Because you can miss out on paralogues? Well this game makes it so you can skip the monastery, supports can get locked if you don't do them in time, and those sparse story moments don't exist if the side character dies. There's no functional reason why you need multiple avenues to dive into the same few character plotlines, especially when one method does it consistently better and more involved than the others.

And logically or writing wise, there's even less of a reason other than they really wanna make sure you know these characters really well. Which is in no way bad of course, it's great to make a cast that you're proud of and want people to fall in love with every aspect of each of them. But there's nudging your audience to a position, and then there's outright making the line between player control/influence/preference and authorial intent too blurry.

Inevitably yeah, people did love this cast. That's why 3H is so popular and why their characters rank so highly in polls. But I reiterate from previous posts: 3H doesn't do anything special that previous FE games didn't as well. The cast isn't particularly deeper than most FE casts on average, nor is its world/story writing any more impressive. There's just more of it being delivered and put in your face than normal. And because many finer details unique to 3H's plot construction end up irrelevant (or outright contradictory to the main plot when thought about for too long), most of what's pushed is the character writing and backstories and Fodlan's primary backdrop... over and over and over again.

To me, that becomes tedious and ironically makes me care less for the world as I find incessant need to reiterate major aspects of the story near verbatim to be artificial and suffocating. But I'm not most people, and I can't fault others for finding great joy in it. I just thoroughly hope that the gameplay-story interaction is taken as priority like it was with Engage for future FE games, because these are still video games at the end of the day. When your game is being talked/argued about more than it's actually being played (for reasons that don't specifically have to do with archaic design elements as a result of its age)... shouldn't that be seen as a bad sign in the eyes of a video game designer?

[shaykai]

I went through some of your older posts bc I'm obsessed w your art style and I noticed you referenced Gortash ripping out pages of books that Vatil reads once or twice. I'm so curious what's up with that? Does he do it for petty reasons lol?

(The picture isn't related to this, its just an interesting thing I stumbled upon a minute ago)

It is entirely possible that I'm making this up, but I swear in one of the previous patches, Gortash had a smutty book in his room that had most of the plot-related pages torn out (which in hindsight ties in nicely to the whole "babygurl doesn't have time" thing lololol)

Anyways, whether I made that up or not, it stuck with me sdasdsa- I don't think he does it intentionally to piss Vat'il off, but he also doesn't stop when Vat tells him to- and honestly wouldn't be surprised if he starts doing it on purpose specifically to make him upset

Also! Thank you sdhklasdjkas it's so lovely to hear that you like my art style!! <3

[passthroughtime]

well, aren’t you fucking stupid then

it amazes me how in LJ yagami is ready to save everyone and everything from the powers that be, UNLESS it’s kuwana. one might argue he’d learn something from okubo, but nooooo. granted, it’s not that simple of an equation (okubo’s “i didn't do anything” vs kuwana’s “i did it and feel no remorse”), but... yagami STILL struggles to see nuances of this particular situation.

and that’s ridiculous, because in any other case he’s more than ready to give a person another chance (to be heard/understood/supported/idk)

taking the school stories into account isn’t fair, but giving up on itokura never crossed yagami’s mind, even though she hurt seven people just because she was petty. he hopes that this isn’t what she wants deep in her heart, but is ready to let go if it is really. he talks to her, gives her the chance to accept his help and get out. he happens to be right, she doesn’t want this life. good for her. thank you yagami.

when he suspects sawa may be involved in mikoshiba’s murder, he still gives her a benefit of the doubt (after all, the screenshot above shows how he feels about her being connected to both murders, he just doesn’t want to jump to this conclusion because he knows her). he still goes and confronts her ofc, begs to make things clear, and after runs to her apartment when something troubling has suddenly happened that keeps her away from him, without thinking it can be a trap.

funny little tidbit in the main story as well:

who they are? idk! why does yagami suggest they don’t deserve to be punished? idk again! he’s just being a good guy i guess! (though i honestly think the last words should’ve been directed to kuwana. they always felt out of place to me, why would yagami think public security even has a use for that random dude? but kuwana... yet he can’t say that to his face for some stupid reason.)

kusumoto is a tricky one, because yagami blames both her and kuwana, but here’s the thing. he tries to convince him before he tries to convince her. time and time again yagami has the exact same conversation with kuwana, and only once with kusumoto (that’s undestandable though, BUT he pressures kuwana more in intensity time and time again vs the only chance he has with kusumoto).

an interesting thing here is what they are about to lose if kawai’s murder comes to light. kusumoto herself says it best:

kuwana will be tortured (to death), kusumoto’s political actions will be controlled. fair. the exact same.

btw she’s not the first one to tell yagami that kuwana is in grave danger. hell, yagami himself says (repeats) that to others.

but when kuwana says it to him, yagami suddenly doesn’t want to listen and doesn’t care that kuwana most probably going to die if he is about to go to the police (most obvious example of this exchange is shown before dig in your heels fight). which is kind of ridicuous, and may be the writers’ oversight, but i prefer to think that it is to show us how stagnant yagami’s beliefs may sometimes be.

yeah. tell me more. he literally says “i can excuse ANYONE but i draw the line at kuwana”. that is also considering that he still can save kuwana’s life, as opposite to emi and sawa. getting the truth of sawa’s murder out is retribution.

so, yeah, i believe that for the most part, his approach to justice is closer to punitive aspect than restorative, hence those all “i get how you feel, i know so well that it scares me”. yagami’s main problem with kuwana is that the latter decides himself what’s the right thing to do. it blinds him so much that he doesn’t care about what happens to kuwana after he surrenders to the police.

...to be fair to him, this is true only until the last cutscenes of the game.

this includes kuwana. i don’t care if i’m being delusional. it just does. the point here is that kuwana’s life is worth more than the justice system which is tend to be broken and redefined in the state that it is now.

...that’s not the point of this post though, so i’ll just shut up.

the whole “coming clear with your crimes” thing would work if both kuwana and kusumoto do that, simultaneously, not just kuwana. and yeah, yagami talks to them both, though in the end, kusumoto's confession seems to be enough. because for public security, kuwana is valuable as long as kusumoto’s secret is, uh, a secret. as well as he can’t be used as a scapegoat for soma’s crimes anymore, thanks to mafuyu and takano’s efforts to uncover this whole PS mess.

yet, yagami pressures kuwana the most. as if he’s not just a tool in a large-scale political game lol, and if his whole role in it wasn’t obvious to yagami from the beginning.

or what, he thinks if he was able to put himself in danger while investigating AD-9, and survive through it all, then anybody else can do it? kuwana is much more defenseless than yagami was, there’s nothing that would’ve protected him, or at least avenged the memory of him in the worst case scenario,

it fascinates me how yagami just... ignores the very real threat to kuwana’s life and his obvious insignificance in the grand scheme of things. idk. maybe yagami used kuwana more as an outlet for his frustration, but wow, that was fucking cruel of him to keep repeating to kuwana to go kys (sorry.)

during the boat’s scene, we can see in real time how yagami’s belief clash with each other: he knows that kuwana is about to be silenced for the greater good (the fate unfair to anyone), but kuwana is also a serial killer and that very kind of scum (who brushes away the consequences of his crimes) which doesn’t deserve to be saved.

^ i love this moment, how yagami still can’t figure out how to feel about him.

and then kuwana proves that he’s not, in fact, the kind of a person yagami despises, and the scales tip in his favor. yay. but kuwana is still a serial killer with no remorse to which he seems “deserving” of his justice. nay (?).

although, the problem is solved when kuwana uncovers his crimes. maybe, he won’t kill again, because going public with the reasoning behind them is good enough of a lesson (hard maybe).

but i think it’s beautiful, you know, in the end how yagami ends up losing his judgment of people, and that’s all just because of kuwana.

yes, it is a shippy post after all.