#the story gets worse bc it breaks your suspension of disbelief

[pandoratheprocrasticreator]

"okay but what ACTUALLY happened in that minor characters backstory" "what did that character SPECIFICALLY do to become like this" "how does the plot device ACTUALLY work" oh my god i don't care! i don't care about your cinemasinsing about every little detail! does knowing this technical detail improve the audience's emotional understanding of the story? no? then i don't want to fucking see it in canon!

anything you come up with in fanworks is going to be more fun for you than what the author can do in canon! any attempts by the author to explain something technical in the story takes away time and investment from the main plot! so if the technical explanation doesn't inform the main plot then it's just useless trivia for completionism's sake! this shit should be written about in fanworks! or spinoffs! or idk the writers can tweet about it or smth! i don't need it in the actual main story!

[chromonym]

hi

wanna write for a while about something you love? or just find interesting? it'd be fun to read

genuinely difficult to decide what to talk about bc i have so many things uhhhhhhhh let’s do OneShot. i’ll try to avoid spoilers for this first bit.

OneShot is one of, if not my absolute, favourite games of all time. the story can and will absolutely break you, and even though it’s been years since i’ve played it i still miss Niko (the main character).

the gameplay itself is… eh, let’s be real, it’s an rpgmaker game with no combat. at the very least there are some quite interesting puzzles - nothing overly difficult, but their main purpose isn’t that. they serve to immerse you (for want of a better word) in the game.

the immersion and the story are the absolute highlights, although again ‘immersion’ might be the wrong word to use. i’m trying to word this without spoilers in case you or anyone else reading this hasn’t played the game, but you’ll be able to tell within the first few minutes of gameplay what i’m talking about. for similar reasons, i’d recommend the steam version over the console version (‘world machine edition’) despite the latter having quite a few quality of life improvements.

the story, aided by the ‘immersion’, can and will make you cry. i played the game after watching a playthrough (something that i would strongly recommend against!), and i still cried over it. it’s pretty simple, your job is to guide Niko to the centre of the world of OneShot to replace its “sun”, a giant lightbulb. well, okay it’s not really that simple there’s some other things that become apparent right near the end. :)

also, the Solstice route (think of it as a new game plus) will ruin you emotionally in a completely different way! if you haven’t played it yet, say hi to Rue and TWM for me.

oh also the music is great and certain tracks (pretty, i’m here, thanks for everything, etc) still make me emotional

but i’m not done. only look under the cut if you’ve played the game, and if you haven’t, go play it!!!

so: SPOILERS FOR ONESHOT (not including Solstice).

the funniest thing about OneShot is that it’s just a glorified trolley problem. with the main difference, of course, being that the entire game has been setting you up to have Genuine Emotional Investment in it, and it. fucking. works.

i absolutely love the way that it does this, too. throughout the tutorial area, you kind of expect to be playing as Niko - that’s how it is in almost every other rpg, after all. but immediately after you’ve made this assumption, the game refers to you and Niko separately - and it says your name before you’ve even had a chance to input it. (this is also part of why i recommend steam over console, because this is a lot more unexpected there)

this is then expanded upon when you meet prophetbot, who gets Niko to talk to you directly! you then kind of get to know Niko through these chats (as well as Niko talking to other characters in the game), which makes the final decision so much worse. they’re just a kid.

the meta puzzles are quite fun (and again another reason that i recommend computer over console), but saying they immerse you in the game world isn’t exactly right - they immerse the game world in reality. they, along with things like Niko talking directly to you, utterly demolish the fourth wall while simultaneously bringing direct attention to it. obviously there’s still a necessary amount of suspension of disbelief, but you can almost imagine that the program OneShot is an actual simulation of a digital world undergoing corruption.

i also love the tower sequence, because of what you can’t do in it. you can’t talk to Niko. it’s a very simple limitation, but it’s absolutely fucking destroying given that you’ve been able to for the entire rest of the game. and even though you’re still in full control, it feels like you’re not.

and then! once you are finally able to speak to Niko again! you need to tell them that the entire journey has been for naught and you can’t save both them and the world at the same time! look, there’s a reason that the song Pretty (the one that plays in the final elevator ride) is in a playlist of songs that make me emotional.

god i fucking love this game so much

(i’ve decided that i’m not going to write anything about Solstice because. i don’t think i can do it justice. just play it. you’ll know.)

[madokasoratsugu]

im new to shokugeki and i dont care about spoilers, why is it bad?

a no joke answer bc u deserve this:

tl;dr Shokugeki sucks because it lost its direction halfway through the story, and when Tsukada (the author) realised that he’d bitten off more than he could chew with such a huge cast of characters.

long answer:

here’s the thing. Shokugeki started out good. 

it mostly played off the usual shounen tropes: a challenger would appear, but then they quickly joined the friendship circle, rinse and repeat. but with such a wide cast of characters with differing goals and personalities plus the high stakes of only the top 10% graduating, it made it easy to bank on the character interactions and friendships, which is what the first half of Shokugeki did, heavily so. and it worked ! 

it was a simple set up (protag aims to beat his dad in a cook off, goes to cooking school, meets friends and foes ! a tournament arc ! fun and shenanigans ! yay!), but Shokugeki did it good. it didn’t subvert any expectations, just did according to what it set out to do. nothing felt exaggerated beyond the typical manga stuff, and everything achieved was earned with hard work. with the occasional fluff and friends thrown in, it became a comfy mix for a good shounen manga.

if anything, id say that half the success came from the character’s relationships themselves - the plot wasn’t anything special, but the genuinity that the characters and their friendships and goals (shared or not) were treated with were wholesome and fun.

which is why it was so fucking jarring when it derailed by throwing aside half of its cast and completely stagnating all character development for the remaining half.

(insert infamous Central Arc expulsion joke here)

if you’ve started/are intending to start, id say its the most obvious after the Moon Banquet Festival Arc/beginning of Central Arc. the writing started getting sloppy, as did the handling of the characters. ive mentioned this before, and ill stress this again: i honestly believe that Central Arc is when Tsukada realised what a big miss steak he did in creating such a huge cast, and in the face of Shokugeki’s then success, made some poor authorial choices to keep the hype going (both plot and character wise).

for characters: half the cast was rid of via expulsion, including very competent chefs (which had no proper in canon explanation on how the fuck that happened) who happened to be fan favourites. i mean, Hayama Akira ? fuck, Nakiri Alice, anyone ? plus any poor remaining characters got shafted in lieu of Souma, hard. this became more prominent as the Arcs slowly go on, the ones of which took the worst brunt of it being Takumi and Megumi.

(what do u think is worse. your fav never getting a cameo or your fav being part of the forefront team but constantly getting fucked over because Souma didn’t get the spotlight of the chapter yet. vote now in the replies.)

for plot: higher and higher stakes were introduced that again, just didn’t make sense !! in Central Arc, Souma was expected to win against Eishi, the best chef in his entire school. when two arcs prior he just lost a cooking contest to two of his peers (placed third), and one arc prior struggled to beat Kuga in ticket sales (even then he didn’t win because his cooking was better, so. wasnt even a win on the cooking front). there was no build up ! NOT EVEN A TRAINING ARC. he just went straight from the bottom rung of the ladder to the fucking ceiling. super different from the first half of the series when everything would be shown in careful detail (best example i can think of off the top of my head being the Shokugeki against Mimasaka in the Autumn Election Arc).

also: in the midst of introducing Erina’s character arc and backstory, Tsukada seemed to completely forget (or maybe just didnt know how to link back?) that he’d already established an overarching plotline: Souma’s quest to best Jouichirou. so when Souma began overthrowing these foes that are his seniors said to be leagues ahead of him, the suspension of disbelief was stretching waaay thin. but hey ! its a shounen manga ! we can forgive this much (sarcasm). 

then Tsukada introduces Asahi. mother fucking Asahi. who is basically introduced by beating Jouichirou without breaking a sweat, but oh boy did he break the suspension of disbelief right then and there and completely toss the plot into the fucking fire. because there’s no end goal anymore ! the one thing that our main character has been working so hard for ? non existent. pointless. this no name (at that time) character has done it, pack your bags boys, let’s go home.

(might i note that at this point, Shokugeki was also uuhh nothing like the slice of life comedy it originally was. it became an action-psychological mix that just…doesnt work. and i mean. of course it wouldn’t. there was no foreshadowing, the villians can’t be taken seriously because 1) theyre also teenagers for fuck’s sake 2) Azami’s just a creep, plain and simple. he has no depth. no one cares about an antagonist who’s bad at just being bad.

the themes it began with was completely set aside for really badly written character backstories and angsty edgey bs that i still don’t understand why Tsukada thought would work in retaining hype. especially when considering how pure the premise was.

i honestly also think that its the Blue Arc + Dark Chefs Arc when Tsukada actually realised that his plot had gone haywire, since volume sales were dropping hard and fans clearly hated the direction the series had gone in. but instead of trying to reign it back in, he decided to just let it run buckwild because he just didn’t know how to fix it.)

to rub salt into the wound: so many promised resolutions are shoved into the background, done offscreen, or worse yet, forgotten ! scenes that fans have literally been waiting for. Souma VS Erina Shokugeki. Souma VS Takumi Shokugeki. Nakiri Alice coming back to the series and actually fucking cooking again.

(im sure that there’s more that lead to its downfall but like. shrugs. this is mainly to me why it sucks: it had A Lot going for it (im not ashamed to admit that at one point i actually genuinely believed it could be one of the next Big 3 on Shounen Jump), and it just didnt live up to any of it for no other reason other than Tsukada mixing elements of a story that didn’t work well together, tried to force them to work, and did nothing to fix it when it didn’t.)

so our plot is gone. so are our lovable characters. so is the slice of life comedy that drew most people in in the first place. the potential that it had is now dust. what does Shokugeki have left that makes it unique, that makes people love it ? here’s the answer !

nothing. 

that fact kicks you in the teeth every fucking time you remember how good the first half of the series was. 

then that fact dropkicks you when you realise that Shokugeki no Soma literally started on a 90degree drop into a dumpster fire when the series was at the apex of its popularity and plot buildup.

that’s why it sucks.