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softcoregamer · 4 years ago

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DRAGON QUEST XI S: ECHOES OF AN ELUSIVE AGE - DEFINITIVE EDITION

I've never played a Dragon Quest game before, so all I had to go on with this game was the pretty looking graphics and charming character art by the Dragonball guy, which- combined with having a hankering for a JRPG, a genre I haven't played since probably the Digital Devil Saga games (minus an abandoned most-of-the-way-done playthrough of SMT3 and a partial of one of the Megadimension Neptunias) was enough to sell me on it. I'm having a tough time determining if it was worth it.

(spoilers)

The story starts off very weak. Your glowing hand marks you as the chosen one, you have to collect glowing orbs to defeat the dark lord. It's like the story of a generic videogame you'd see in the background of a movie. They do throw in a little novelty to keep you on your toes- you present yourself to the king and he throws you in the dungeon, you go back to your hometown and travel back in time for some reason- but I really never warmed to the setting. It's just a collection of cliches and cute gimmicks, like the town of people who speak in haikus, the town of people who speak in rhyming couplets (you're stuck with these people for the bulk of the exposition at the start of act 2, which is a nightmare) and the town of- ugh- Italians. There's no sense of these places being places. It's just a nice pleasant fairytale kingdom of the kind that's normally mentioned in Snow White or whatever as the place the handsome prince comes from, except here you spend dozens of hours trudging through it looking for glowing tree roots and orbs. The big problem in Gallopolis is that the sultan's son isn't brave enough for god's sake. Acts 2 and 3 pick things up, and there's some neat reveals- I like that the lil red star you've been seeing in the sky right from the start was the stain of the original hero's failure to slay the villain, literally hanging over the entire setting all this time. Also the annoying act 1 scene where you get handed the name of the villain and an orb quest in an exposition dump is retroactively improved by the fact that the exposition isn't quite correct. Act 3 reintroducing time travel and actually being thoughtful about it was welcome as well, but sadly that has the effect of making you redo story points you already did since, logically, you're back in time to where you haven't done them yet. Sometimes this comes across as getting a do-over to get a more positive outcome for something that previously ended more tragically, in keeping with the way time travel is explained in-universe as essentially reloading an earlier save (and, as revealed in the end, continuing in a separate save slot). The 8th party member's act 3 quest is a standout here. In reading discussion of the game I've seen people insist on referring to this character as 8, presumably to preserve the plot twist of his existence, so I guess I'll do it too. But more often than not, act 3 quests consist of just doing the same stuff as act 2 again, in a somewhat more curt manner. This sticks in the craw after so much of act 2 already consisted of just doing the same stuff as act 1 again. The party members aren't much better, for the most part. The first three people you meet all say "ah, you're the Luminary, I was sent to help you" and there isn't much to them beyond that for a long time. Sylvando has a lot of personality, which is probably partly why he's become the game's big meme character, but it gets grating and he is insanely trite. The Dark Lord takes over the world and purges the unclean, and Sylvando's overriding concern is that he wants people to laugh and smile more. It's like he takes advantage of the fact that I need him for his boat to get my goat by acting like a fucking teletubby. Things pick way up when you meet Rab, and the 8th party member is genuinely really good. Even the early-game party members end up having their moments (Erik's backstory was pretty fun) but the game really doesn't put its best foot forward with these characters. Not that it needs to; for the first few I was just glad to be getting some help in combat. The combat is excellent in this game, when it gets going. I played with the "draconian quest" tougher enemies mode on, and I turned it off right at the act 2 end boss. The difficulty curve flowed really well this way, with act 3 enemies not feeling noticeably less tough than "draconian" act 2 enemies. The abilities and spells you get are carefully balanced so that it's very difficult to put together a perfect 4-person party, you're always missing something. This means the fact that you can change your line-up midfight isn't just a nice quality of life feature, it's a potentially vital mechanic. They tread a fine line where sometimes needing to swap people out during the battle doesn't mean the characters themselves feel useless; everyone is capable of some extremely tough stuff. And on the other end of the scale, enemy damage is heavy enough that buffing your attack and using big-damage abilities vs healing or defending can be a properly difficult choice; a heavy hit or a big heal at the right time can turn the tide of an entire battle, as can your big hitter suddenly getting put to sleep or your healer getting knocked out. Again, this is all with the caveat that I had "draconian quest" on for the first 2/3 of the game, from what I've heard combat without it is insanely easy. My big gripe with the combat is that there's very little in the way of tooltips. What's this enemy's magic resistance? Does my Sap have a better chance of landing if I up my Magical Might, or does that just increase spell damage? Does Oomphle affect Quadraslash? If I increase my agility will it go up by enough that I can take my turn ahead of these enemies? Does agility even do that? Does using abilities and spells mean I go later in the turn order vs generic attacks and defending? You just have to guess at all this; the wiki has some info on enemy stats but I don't know where they're getting it from other than datamining. There's an entire bestiary with almost no useful information which is functionally just a model viewer for all 700+ enemies. The only way to know anything is to experiment, which I guess at least adds some purpose to combat when you've filled out the bestiary for an area but still have to grid encounters- which will be required at some point, because fighting is the only way you get xp and money. There is also too much RNG. Critical hits being rare and certain attacks having a chance to cause Confusion or whatever is fine (although I'd prefer for attacks which are labelled as having a chance to inflict status effects to actually inflict the status effect way more often than they do) but why the fuck does the resurrection spell have a 50% success rate? Under what possible circumstances would I be using that spell other than needing my dead teammate back right now? Same for all the abilities on the skill tree that say "doesn't connect very often, but when it does it can cause a critical hit" OK that "CAN" is telling me that this ability which doesn't often connect won't even necessarily crit if it does. Why would I choose this ability? To handicap myself? How is this going to help me defeat the Timewyrm? All that said, when the combat is good it's really good, and whenever I lose a fight I'm thinking "I can win that next time if I do XYZ". The 2D battles are much less fun because the pace is much slower and there are no cute animations to liven it up, but it's always satisfying when the "flash" of an enemy taking damage becomes the "flash" of them disappearing, and you know you have slayed yet another blob. Non-combat gameplay is a mixed bag. The early-game fun of running around looking for new enemies to fight and fill out the bestiary wears off hard once act 2 begins and everything is either a reskin or a glowing-eyes "vicious" version of something you've already fought, and many maps are fairly sparse with just the odd treasure chest and locked door to liven up your path to the next area. That said, there are also several areas and dungeons which make a minigame out of traversing them; the Eerie Eyrie and the Battleground were standouts for me. Especially the remixed version of Eerie Eyrie you go to later on, where you get a flying mount to ride around. Crafting is surprisingly involved, with a whole minigame around it and hundreds of recipes to find all over the place. In most cases you can just use money in lieu of ingredients, which means minimal farming is required to get a lot out of the system, and the recipes with ingredients that can't be bought feel special instead of bullshit. In terms of items and recipes there really is a deluge of content- there are recipe books all over the place, with new ones available even in the last couple of maps that open up in the entire game, and there's an undeniable cookie-clicker rush you get from getting better at crafting and taking something you could barely get to +1 all the way to +3. I play games like this as a magpie, accumulating items with nice pictures and effects that make me do a 😲 face, and DQ11 certainly delivers. This even extends to character advancement, with Hidden Goodies incentivizing picking skills you might not want otherwise, and entire new skill trees opening up as quest rewards.

Overall, DQ11 is a good combat system with loot and progression systems that are well-executed enough to feel rewarding after 100 hours, all wrapped up in a style and tone that is not up my alley at all. A good litmus test for how much you'd like the game is probably: watch this scene and if you think it's the most epic thing you've ever seen then Dragon Quest 11 is for you.

#game review #dragon quest

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modmamono · 4 years ago

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Why Space Channel 5 is one of SEGA’s best dumbest games ever, no questions asked. (Report 1 & 1/2.)

Space Channel 5 on the Dreamcast is one of my favorite things ever, let alone favorite video games. Though I more often watch it on YouTube then actually play it.

For those not in the know, Space Channel 5 is a game series developed by United Game Artists and published by parent company SEGA. And that’s the most Wikipedia quoting I’m gonna do in this gush piece.

There aren’t many games quite like this rhythmic, Simon says game. At least in style because this game has that in spades, the gameplay anyone can do. And I am not at all qualified to explain its style because I wouldn’t how to describe it as besides maybe very 70s?

Point is there’s something charming about this game, and I think SEGA agrees with me on that. The lead character, Ulala (seen above), appear in these games to name a few years after new Space Channel 5 games stopped being made after 2002:

2004: Sega Superstars

2006: Sonic Riders

2008: Sega Superstars Tennis and Samba de Amigo

2010: Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing

2012: Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and Project X Zone

2015: Project X Zone 2

And not to mention the invading aliens have been skins of the titular Puyo Puyo in that series for a while I can’t determine. Possibly since at most 2007 up until current day with Puyo Puyo Champions in 2018/2019.

ALSO not to mention the VR game that came out recently! (How could I forget that? That’s the main reason I’m doing this.)

So it is clear SEGA loves this game and it’s sequel a lot. I don’t think their most beloved cult classic NiGHTS: Into Dreams gets that much love from the company though it certainly does get a lot itself, most games wish their parents still loved them that much long after they had a game. Anyway...

Now the part where I actually talk about the game.

I wanna say, first and foremost. This is not a review of the game. This is just gushing about why this game makes me happy.

And everything I’m gushing about is just what you get from the from one playthrough of the game. Save for one exception, I will not be talking about supplementary material, nor Space Channel 5′s lore.

And yes, this colorful dancing/rhythm/simon says game has lore. Basically any non-repeated character model has their own biograph. So I will not go into that.

You’re not missing too much, there are interesting tidbits, sometimes they fill you in on background details of the story.

Speaking of the story. I’ll start in a second. But if this is new to you, you can watch it here first (The first playthrough is only half the video):

youtube

Prologue:

We start off with a bunch of alien sitting on a space couch watching space TV. These aliens are known as the Morolians and they’ll be the main antagonists for the evening.

This cutscene has no dialogue, so this is all open to interpretation for a first time viewer. Though I do enjoy this split second foreshadowing:

And that’s when the title screen appears. Blasting you with the series’ main theme Mexican Flyer. Look it up if you must. You’ll be hearing it a lot, it’s the game and Ulala’s leitmotif.

Report 1: This is terrorism attack on an airport... I’m gonna ignore that.

This is the only piece of supplemental material I’ll talk about, as it’s present in the game itself, but not elaborated on, and it is important to two of the character.

The game starts in a flashback. In the year AD 2489 a spaceship exploded. Everybody on board died safe for a little girl.

She was rescued by a man working for Space Channel 5. A news organization that with a specific focus on dancing. That last bit is nothing special though, as everything in this galaxy revolves around dancing.

After the little girl is saved by this kindly Channel 5 Gent (Age 25) she knew what she wanted to be after she grew up. She wanted to be a sexy dancing reporter for Space Channel 5 just like him (presumably). And to meet him so she can thank him in person.

10 years later......

It is AD 2499! And the Morolians attack a space airport and their ray beams hypnotize people to dance silly.

THE HORROR!

And that’s when Space Channel 5 sends in Ulala to report on the progress.

But what they’re actually doing is for Ulala to solve the problem instead of the Space authorities.

One character I do wanna mention now is that Ulala’s producer, Fuse, is an unseen character yet is important later. He’s the one briefing Ulala in the screenshot above. And oversees Ulala’s every move.

Also Ulala never got to meet her rescuer. He either left shortly after Ulala got rescued, or shortly before Ulala joined. Given what we learn later, likely the former.

Anyway onto the show:

BAM!

BAM!!

BAM!!!

I will always love that. Ulala got down on the ground in the panicking space air port to coolly report on the panic.

As quick aside, I wanna mention that Ulala doesn’t run in this game, she slowly struts and all of her struts are simply majestic. And those amazing struts lead her to the first gameplay section of this game.

Some Morolians hold a few hypnotized people hostage. This is is a dance battle. Meaning you got repeat exactly what the aliens do in the exact rhythm they did it in order to save the hostages. And I love this gameplay. It’s simple yet fun (provided you got minimal lag, you should look into that if you wanna play this game).

The controls are:

Up: Up

Down: Down

Left: Left

Right: Right/Light

Button 1: Chu (Aliens)

Button 2: Chu (Humans)

And this is how normal people settle things in this world apparently:

Party 1 (usually the Aliens) make up a tough but fair pattern for Ulala to copy in the hopes of psyching her out.

Party 2 (Ulala & Co.) gets as many chances ad she got. And the better she does more people tune into her news report. If she wins she gets what she wants. Saving the hostage and getting Party 1 out of her hair.

Every single one lives by this code of honor and I honestly have no clue if there’s an in-universe reason. But I love it regardless. I love it when people say: Up Down Chu Chu Chu. And the Ulala repeating it.

Though frankly, I don’t like it when the Morolians issue the commands. I like it when others do the exact same commands in this same game, so it’s a little bit of a bummer the Morolians do it.

Anyways. You save the hostages and they join in on Ulala’s unstoppable strut as will always happen if you rescue people. And they strut to the second gameplay type: The Shoot-out.

The controls are the same as the above but now you gotta watch out for humans in the mix.

In general these are trickier. And I might go into that later. But they do work on the same rules.

Don’t worry I won’t go over every dance or shoot-out unless there’s something special about it.

Also I’m pretty sure you kill people if you push the wrong Chu. Don’t do that, it’s bad for the ratings!

Skipping over three battles.Something new happens, rival space news station: Space(?) Channel 42 has a reporter of their own out on the field. And that reporter is planning to steal Channel 5′s viewership. And this is HER!

You do a dance battle and she dies.

Though seriously, I like this game does this. It’s not only aliens you fight, but other factions of the Space News Media. And it’s always a nice shake up when someone besides her shows up.

You see, for the most part any reoccurring enemy has recognizable mannerisms you gotta batlle, and her is no different. It’s hard to describe for me. You kinda gotta play or watch the game for yourself to see what I mean, but I think it’s best exemplified in Report 2. And the following games.

Though one thing’s for sure, each non-normal Morolians or rival reported does bring their own genre switch with them. Heck sometimes even normal battles have unique genres. I’m am not musically inclined so I wouldn’t know hers or most others.

Any way, before she dies she give an emotional speech and gracefully suggests to take her Channel 42 guitarist with her and Ulala accepts that’s the least she could do for a lousy reporter like her.

And then it’s boss time!

Yeah, actual bosses with actual boss characters. And not like the recently deceased as shown above. She’s practically for all intents and purposes another Morolian dance battle.

And it’s down to funky jazz music, not unlike what you’d see in Sonic Adventure! Even Ulala comments on it, confirming it’s dietetic Where does it come from? Not sure, there might be an explanation somewhere. But do keep that in mind. That the music we hear is also the music the characters hear as well.

Anyways:

Not Pictured: Super Stretchy Arms.

I think it’s a bit of a misnomer. Invader is correct, that’s what it’s here for. But is it really a robot? It moves like an organics and is a bit rubbery. This basically goes for all Morolian robots.

I can suspend my disbelief. You shouldn’t nitpick too much about Space Channel 5, it doesn’t want you to think too hard about it’s world even if there’s a lot to it. I’d be concerned if Space Channel 5 did wanna put its story and world building first and foremost.

But “Hypnotized Robot Invader”?

What?

Spoiler.

Robots and hypnotism... I’m pretty sure a sign that we made perfect human-like Artificial Intelligence if they can fall susceptible to Hypnosis. Even then I doubt it.

Sorry, that’s always bothered me, I get what they mean by it. It’s just the word choice... Did they mean Hypnotizing Robot Invader? This boss is great.

It starts off with a normal dance battle, but you get to watch a new Morolian enemy’s moves. It’s also quicker on the draw along with a few softballs to throw your timing off. Pretty good stuff.

And that applies to the next phase as well, where the the shooting starts.

I don’t have much to say.

Unlike the robot’s final phase where it’s the first phase again, but with guns and the robot goes to berserking speeds with the input commands.

And after you beat it, it joins you in a strut.

As does everyone you saved, No matter the gender, nor age, nobody is embarrassed imitating Ulala no matter what she does. We’ll be half as lucky to get a cool future as cool as 2499.

And with that the first report is over.

Report 2: (Age 35)

At the Morolian HQ (Presumably), their boss doesn’t like failure.

But like a good boss he doesn’t dwell on failure and moves on to the next plan. One of his lackeys has this plan: Another boss battle dance robot who operates on:

The everyone at the table is impressed. So I guess Ulala is screwed, game over.

This level is more of the same as the last one more or less, it’s possibly the most boring level in the series in that regard. It’s not bad, this is just the game bulding enough a status quo before they change things up in Report 3.

But that doesn’t make this level any less interesting to talk about, so I won’t go over it much.

The short story until something new happens is: Space Ship (think of it as a fancy yacht but in space) is being attack by Morolians, Ulala is send to report on it, and being the professional she is saves hostages as well.

She saves the captain, crew members, stewardesses, waitresses, the Space Diva (OH NO! NOT THE SPACE DIVA!), passages and the like.

UNTIL!

He voice says “I’m gonna steal you show, Space Channel 5”. And you see this ship flying by:

Another rival reporter, this one a pirate broadcasting station.

Side note: That’s sounds like the most important kind of pirate ever. Alternative news/non-mainstream with no money/rating motive blinding everything with journalistic integrity? Yes, by all means. If they’re pirates then so are Secular Talk & The Humanist Report.

Back to the silly dance game. The Pirates either jam or hack Channel 5′s signal and the Ulala is stuck with them for a while.

And then we meet that where we meet the gent above.

“[His] name is:“

“JAGUAAAAARRRR!!!” “JAGUAAAAARRRR!!!“

(Age 35)

LET’S DANCE!

Dude, I love Jaguar (Age 35) he’s gotta be my second favorite character in the series on account he’s just cool and incapable of embarrassment.

Remember the deceased of the last report? The Channel 42 reporter in the blue dress? He’s her counterpart for this chapter.

But whereas the deceased’s gimmick sounded air headed for a lack of a better term. Maybe, girly? Point is, battling her didn’t feel too dissimilar to battling Morolians despite her rhytmic mannerisms.

Jaguar (Age 35)’s gimmick is that he just adds. He starts with a simple Up. And then he adds a Chu, and another Chu. Eventually it becomes a really long chain of commands, it has to be some of the longest in the series. And you have to do them all from start to finish because he does them all sequentially. Can you repeat?:

Up. Chu. ChuChu. Right. Left. Down. DownDown. Down. Chu. Chu. Chu.

He is easing you into it, but it is by no means an easy fight. Because after the chain is at its longest, he just spamming ChuChuChu in quick succession. And then a simple Chu.

After defeat Jaguar & Co, escape by jet-pack, saying they will meet later.

This battle is a highlight for me. Coco Tapioco and the big bosses to come are better if you ask me (with exceptions). But Jaguar (Age 35) is some of the best the normal gameplay goes.

And you could argue what normal means in the context of Space Channel 5. But effectively, like Channel 42′s deceased, functionally he might as well be another Morolian if he wasn’t there to be set up for later. Because you do get person that just joins your Strut Club like everywhere else.

You gain his Jazz Man and you get a great sax solo as a reward beating him. Like how you got Channel 42′s guitarist for beating them. I like the think the Jazz Man can work for Jaguar (Age 35) again while the Channel 42 Guitarist is blacklisted.

And before we move on from Jaguar (Age 35) check out his Chu pose:

BOSS TIME!

Jaguar (Age 35): The alien mothership is retreating. Don’t you have to follow them, Channel 5? Fuse: Blast you, Jaguar [Age 35].

With the pirates giving chase, Ulala is left with the cowardly alien robot to elegant music.

Ignoring the robot’s title, while silly, its cowardice is its greatest asset. For it has kidnapped some space schoolkids, making their space teacher worry. Their space teacher can actually be seen at the start of the report.

Space fashion, am I right?

I’ve exceeded Tumblr’s invisible limit of what to put in a blog post. I’ll have to rewrite this boss what I have to say for this boss. So full, can’t spell check! We’ll be back!

#space channel 5 #sc5 #ulala #dreamcast #chu #gushing #jaguar #fuse #pudding #coco tapioca #morolina #morolians

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shidoukanae · 5 years ago

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Pokemon SwSh Theory: Sonia suffers from (or was supposed to suffer from) PTSD

Having played through the Pokemon Sword and Shield games, I noticed something very interesting about Sonia’s character. If you talk to her outside of the game’s forced story parameters (and listen to her during a few of them), you’ll find that she seems to have a character arc revolving significantly around one thing: her trip into the Slumbering Weald when she was younger.

I don’t know how many other people have picked up on this because, through watching YouTuber’s playthroughs to refind scenes where Sonia says things, I’ve realized I’m probably one of the few people who keeps talking to her after story scenes are done just to glean more about her character through the hopes of changed-up dialogue.

And, wow. There’s A LOT about Sonia that either goes unsaid or is swept under the rug entirely during the development of her canon character arc.

To start this off, let me posit an idea that I hope will make sense by the end of this: Sonia suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.

I will also note I hold no true credentials to properly identify PTSD or claim that I’m an expert on PTSD. I have only done background research on PTSD and its symptoms so my guesses are noobish at best. However, I will try to represent the disorder as accurately as possible but if anyone has the credentials to stop and correct me please do because I realize I’m out of my element here.

This said, let me give a rough timeline of the lore tidbits given to us as players about Sonia and then corroborate them all together at the end to make sense of why I think Sonia has PTSD.

First off: let’s start with what Hop says to you at the very beginning of the game after the Wooloo ramming the gates enters into the Slumbering Weald.

As stated above, Sonia once went into the Slumbering Weald and came out of it in a “real state”. It’s unclear what Hop means by this but, considering the context of the conversation (in which Hop is saying the forest is dangerous and it’s off-limits) it can be assumed Sonia was badly messed up by her trip in the woods in some way (and, given further context, I would prefer to imagine she’s been messed up in a mental way).

The next piece of information on this event comes from when Hop and you are about to receive your Dynamax Bands as well as after the occasion. Magnolia and Sonia are gathered in the living room and, as you enter a conversation about what you and Hop saw in the woods, Sonia asks:

This is worth noting because it shows Sonia holds an interest in the Pokemon they met in the woods. This is also further backed by what she says if you talk to her directly after this scene where she goes:

As seen, Sonia seems to recollect something about the Slumbering Weald (most likely seeing/meeting the legendary Pokemon) but is unable to consciously explain why she feels uneasy. This suggests that not only did Sonia come out of the woods in a bad state - she likely came out of the woods with no memory of what happened.

This is further emphasized when you talk to her in the Slumbering Weald after the post-game occurs. She meets the both of you in the Slumbering Weald. An obligatory cutscene occurs and, right before the cutscene where you put back the Rusted Sword and Shield occurs, you have a chance to talk to her. Here she says:

This gives the suggestion that, while not consciously able to recollect what happened to her in the Slumbering Weald, she remembers enough to still experience anxiety at being within the forest.

All these factors combined lead to a single conclusion: Sonia once went into the Slumbering Weald, came out of it badly shaken, and because of her experiences there she suffers from selective amnesia. She unconsciously shows signs of having met something freaky (as hinted by the fact she has probably met the legendary before) and she also seems to have no recollection of what happened during her time in the Slumbering Weald despite expressing anxiety and unease at being in the woods/being reminded of them.

Moving on to things that show even further that Sonia suffers from PTSD, here’s a list of notable things Sonia has said/has shown that I will relate back to the disorder:

-Sonia has lost her purpose in life and feels like she’s going nowhere, showcasing insecurities in her position in life. This is most notable in her introduction if you talk to her after forced dialogue is done with:

and later on when her grandmother calls her out on doing nothing meaningful with her life:

It is also further lamented on by Sonia in two different conversations - each of which has her reassuring you that it’s just “adult stuff” and that you don’t need to worry about her problems (showcasing the potential for her avoiding her problems or, at the very least, not wanting to talk with others about them for support).

(^^^ I would like to note that it is Very Interesting that you, who is obviously much younger than Sonia, has been given the chance to tell Sonia “are you alright?” or “You’ll be alright!” to her at two different points in time. This, combined with the fact that Sonia tells the player they have a sharp insight later on, seems to suggest that the player can tell that something is, indeed, not right with Sonia and this obligatory offering of reassurance by the game is meant to hint something is off with her. Keep in mind that Sonia always deflects your concern for her with “I will make it through, don’t worry about me” which suggests she doesn’t want to open up to anyone else about her problems or acts like they’re trivial when they’re really not for her.)

From this alone, it is very likely Sonia suffers from some form of depression. It is strongly hinted at throughout the narrative that Sonia is disappointed with her lack of purpose in life and that it is impacting her negatively.

I would also like to add as an interesting side-note that there is a tendency for Sonia to sigh a lot in the beginning of the game. This is more a fun fact than general proof of her being depressed but I find it interesting to see that she is sighing a lot - especially since I would suspect sighing is usually associated with sadness, tiredness, or an overall feeling of exhaustion.

-Furthermore, adding more on to the above, it seems like Sonia is estranged from the people she’s supposed to care about. This is most noticeable with Leon who she’s childhood friends with and once rivals with. Despite supposedly having a close relationship with him (as the game offhandedly suggests the potential for), I couldn’t help but notice how...hostile?...Sonia is towards Leon.

She snaps at him for being unable to remember their status together as rivals (granted, she had the full rights to as he was pretty much ignoring her), she shows insecurities in her life when she compares herself to him, the big strong Champion of the region (as shown above), notes with annoyance at how he has his “head in the clouds”, and even in her introduction she outright treats him with frustration, telling him off if he’s come to ask her about “some superstrong Pokemon again”.

For someone who’s supposed to be friends with Leon, these bouts of irritation seem a little offputting and overly aggressive. And while I do think some of what she says is meant to be comedic (because it certainly did amuse me to watch her introduction scene so the humor aspect worked if so) I also think it’s very telling of how she puts herself at a distance from Leon and even keeps him at an arm’s length with her childish behavior.

-One thing to notice is that Sonia has supposedly (and I say supposedly because this was never been pitched until Sonia outright states it in the post-game) lost her interest in Pokemon and her passion for it. This is reinforced by two different things in game: the lore provided by the inside of Opal’s gym as well as what she tells the player and Hop in the opening scene of the post-game.

In Opal’s gym, there is a section where you can find Opal’s notes on Sonia. There it is specifically noted that she “gives up too easy” and that this problem of hers is due to the pressure of being the granddaughter of the Pokemon professor. This further ties in to Sonia’s insecurities of her inability to go anywhere compared to her grandmother but it also showcases that she doesn’t have the passion to truly put her heart into the gym challenge she set out to conquer.

Furthermore, Sonia’s loss of passion about Pokemon can be noted in the post-game when she outright tells Hop and the player:

Sonia straight up admits a loss of love for Pokemon that she has now regained by involving herself in the lore of her region. This truly emphasizes the point that Sonia had, at one point, lost the passion she once had for Pokemon but now has regained it after performing the character arc she develops in the games.

...Now, with all these points said, I think it’s about time I relate these pieces of proof back to the idea at hand: Sonia suffers from PTSD and these circumstances and bits of dialogue prove it.

(Above from here)

To explain, PSTD is a disorder that occurs after witnessing a traumatic event. It develops in a person in different ways, but some of the more major symptoms include: a loss of passion in activities you once enjoyed, an estrangement from people who remind you of the event (or just estrangement in general), depression, and those with PTSD may suffer from dissociative amnesia (which is the forgetting of an important event related to a certain trauma).

You see where I’m going with this, right?

Sonia displays all of these symptoms. She has lost her interest in activities she once enjoyed (such as her love for Pokemon), has an estrangement from people she’s supposed to be close with (noticed by the way she keeps Leon at an arm’s length), suffers from depression (as can be seen by Sonia’s insecurities, her inability to open up to others about her problems, as well as her constant feelings of having no purpose in life), and especially suffers from dissociative amnesia (as she has no recollection of what occurred in the Slumbering Weald despite showcasing feelings of unease and anxiety about it).

All these factors combined, I think it’s hard not to believe that, at some point in time, Sonia was meant to not only tackle her problem of not having a purpose in life but, also, not getting closure for what happened to her in the Slumbering Weald.

The game makes a significant point of showing that Sonia’s involvement with the legendaries when she was younger has impacted her character growth up until now. And, I find it absolutely crazy to believe that these ideas were brought up only to be dropped (and completely forgotten to be erased in canon) when nothing much came from them.

Sonia could have had a really good character arc on getting over her PTSD, learning what happened to her as a youth and coming to terms with it through her journey to discover the legendaries (which would, of course, have forced her to come back to the Slumbering Weald to find closure for the trauma she experienced before the plot began). Instead, she gets half the closure she needed - finding her purpose in life - and leaves it open-ended as to whether or not she truly got what she needed (figuring out what happened to her in the Slumbering Weald and realizing she can move on now that she knows about the strange pokemon that traumatized her once before).

#putting this under a cut because whoo boi this is huge #Sonia #Professor Magnolia #Leon #pokemon Swsh #PTSD #also godammit youtubers why do you keep skipping over the optional NPC dialogue after forced dialogue is done and over with #i had to replay the game just to find these quotes again for proof jfghhfgj #Can you tell I paid waaaaay too much attention to Sonia during my playthrough of the story?#Because I totally did and I think me doing that paid off with this post fhgjfgj #also obviously there are some holes and stuff here because the game never fully fleshes out the critical Slumbering Weald event for Sonia #but from what I've gathered it seems like there was at once a moment in time where Sonia was meant to have history with Zacian and Zamazenta #and her journey of becoming a Pokemon Professor was not only supposed to help her get closure for her life that has gone nowhere #but also closure for the event that scarred her when she was younger and came out of the weald badly messed up bc of the legendaries

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tsukihimeyfan · 5 years ago

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To Undertale

In honor of its 4 year anniversary, I would like to talk a bit about Undertale (I know I’m a bit late, but bear with me). Apologies ahead of time for the long post, and to anyone who reads it in its entirety; thank you. Also thank you very much to Toby Fox for giving birth to this masterpiece that has touched all of us so much :) I will be discussing several important details in the story, so SPOILER ALERT (just in case)

I came upon Undertale very late. It had already been out for about a year when I first heard about it, but everyone said such wonderful things and I was curious, so I decided to watch a playthrough on youtube, just to sate my curiosity. But Oh Man, I was not prepared for what I found: a gorgeous soundtrack, dozens of memorable characters, an amazing story, an incredible journey, and a veritable fountain of feelings sprouting in my heart. I fell in love.

For at least several weeks afterwards, the words “stay determined”, “everyone can be better if they just try” and “despite everything, it’s still you” bounced around in my head. Also, the idea that “even if its painful, even if you are going through a hard time, you can always choose to be kind, and happiness can always be found there, for others as well as yourself” became embedded in my soul. Even now, thinking about the True Pacifist ending fills me with joy. It was only fairly recently that I finally completed my own playthrough of the game, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that there were still many little secrets to uncover (for example, did you know that the “gauntlet of deadly terror” bridge is just a rock formation that Papyrus painted over to make it more dramatic? He also added the rope for safety LOL😂)

The best part of the game, in my opinion, are the main characters. They are all more complex than they appear, they all have their struggles, and I would like to talk a bit about my opinions and theories about all of them.

Let us start from the beginning and talk about everyone’s favorite goatmom, Toriel. Of course, we all know her sadness at the death of her children, new and old, but if we really think about it there are signs that the situation may have been even worse than it seems... Namely, the shoe box in the room Toriel prepares for Frisk. If you check it, it says there are several shoes “in a disparity of sizes”. Presumably, these are the shoes left behind by the human children before they left the ruins, but they surely didn’t leave the ruins barefoot, right? And if they only stayed with Toriel for a day or so like Frisk does then she wouldn’t have had the opportunity or the need to go out and get some for them. This implies that each human child that fell probably stayed with Toriel for a while, long enough for her to need to buy them new shoes, maybe even because they outgrew their original pair. This, in turn, means that she had a chance to really get to know them, take care of them, and love them, unlike Frisk, who she only took care of for a little while before we leave. This might explain why she is so angry at Asgore, why it is unlikely that she will ever forgive him. If this is true, he not only killed random innocent human children that she didn’t really know, which is bad enough on its own, he might have killed her children, children she treasured. This also explains why she is so obsessive about protecting Frisk from everything and keeping them in the ruins no matter the cost. And yet, despite her pain, her “loneliness and her fear”, she still is one of the most gentle, kind and caring characters you meet, even willing to try to prevent Asgore’s death as well as Frisk’s. Toriel is best goatmom <3

Then we meet the star of the True Pacifist run (especially if you call him often); the Great Papyrus! He is my second favorite character for good reason. He is so much fun from the very beginning. Although he might appear to be a bit narcissistic at first, you quickly realize that in truth he is just lonely and desperate to impress in a misguided attempt to make more friends. Even so, he is always attentive to the feelings of his friends and tries his best to make them feel better. His relationship with Undyne is also quite adorable, and there are signs that he knows more than he lets on about everything (he is at the very least great at gauging the emotional state of people and manipulating them a little to push them towards self improvement, as Frisk’s date with Undyne and his warning about Alphys can demonstrate). Also, the way he always tries to believe the best of people, even in the worst circumstances or when he is scared, is truly admirable. I really love that precious cinnamon roll

Then there is Sans. Oh my god, Sans. He steals the show in the genocide route, truly. He is my favorite character of all, and there are so many things about him you don’t find out if you don’t dig deeper and talk to several people. First of all, he is a wonderful brother. Although he always teases Papyrus, he does his best to cheer him up all the time (for example, in the Genocide route he says that Junior Jumble is the hardest, even though in other routes he says its the crossword, just to make Papyrus feel a bit better when the human refuses to play along with his puzzles), he pays the bills for the house, he probably gave Papyrus his action figures (Papyrus tells you santa gave them to him, but there is a thank you letter to santa in Sans’ room), he made sure Papyrus’ room was super cool and comfortable when he doesn’t even have a bed frame himself, he was probably the one who bought Papyrus his car on the surface (one of the guys at Grillby’s tells you that he spends most of his time checking out car magazines), he helped him build his sentry station and battle body, and he reads him bed time stories every night. Second of all, although he seems to be a comic relief character at first, he is struggling with major depression (you can find out that he is eating less, he doesn’t sleep much at all at night, he feels hopeless all the time, he seems fatigued all day, and he doesn’t see a point in doing anything at all) and is probably using humor to cope. Finally, there is Sans’ heroism as well as his tragedy: he is one of the only characters who is aware of the resets. First he had to live through Flowey’s endless resets, when he first befriended everyone and then proceeded to kill them all in a variety of ways, presumably being the one to stop him from getting the human souls several times (Flowey tells you that Sans has caused him “more than his fair share of resets”). Then there is YOU, who manage to free the monsters, begrudgingly earn his trust/friendship, and then rip it all away (even worse, he is completely aware of your betrayal; if you reset after a True Pacifist ending, you can find a picture of Frisk smiling happily with all of your friends together, and the only time such a picture is taken is when you all make it to the surface, so he certainly knows that you freed everyone and then returned them to the darkness for your curiosity). And yet despite all of that, despite knowing that fighting you is pointless (especially since he can tell every time he kills you and you load your save file), despite not having hope anymore that he will one day see the sun and remain under its light, he still fights you fiercely on the genocide route, again and again, employing all of his considerable power, but not for himself (he doesn’t hope for anything anymore after all); its because he still wants his brother and his friends to have a better future, because he knows that if you win the world will end and no one will ever return, because he still wants you to reset so that everyone will come back and have another chance at happiness, no matter how brief. Jesus christ, this character gives me all of the feels. I love him so much

As for Undyne, I love how she seems so rough but is actually very sweet to her friends and loved ones, and she cares so much for her fellow monsters, always trying her best for their sake. Also, her crush on Alphys is the cutest thing ever, particularly if you take the time to call her often (you’d be surprised how often she talks about Alphys. Papyrus also tries to encourage her several times to be honest with her feelings, and their dynamic is frankly the best mentor-student relationship I’ve ever seen)

In the case of Flowey, I really like how he is a sort of reflection of the player ingame, especially for those who chose to go through the genocide route (“‘I don’t like this’, I told myself, ‘I’m just doing this because I have to see what happens’ Hahaha, what an excuse!”). And the Asriel twist was truly masterfully executed.

I really empathize with Alphys in a lot of ways, since I struggle with social anxiety myself. Her journey to overcome her self hatred and be honest about her mistakes is really touching. I love how her friends understand that she only had the best of intentions at heart and continue to stand by her when she comes clean about what she did. Friendship can really make all the difference in the world for those of us who are struggling like her in one way or another. Her apparent suicide if you kill Mettaton or Undyne, her pillars of support, is one of the saddest things in the game I think. I also really admire how during genocide she presumably opens up the true lab for the evacuating monsters despite her fears, and if you abandon the genocide route in Hotland she takes charge in order to protect all monsters in Undyne’s stead

When we first meet him, my opinion of Mettaton is the same as Undyne’s; “I don’t really like that guy, but I admire his lifestyle”. However, I really enjoyed his growth as a character after Frisk beats him and his fans remind him of what is truly important. He becomes so much more supportive of his friends, and I really like how he always stays true to who he is, even going so far as to find the body/look that perfectly represented how he felt inside, and later encouraged others to do the same (like giving that one lion his dress)

Finally, we come to one of the most interesting characters, even though they are rarely mentioned and not really seen except in the ending of the genocide route: Chara. Truthfully, I think they are often misunderstood because the biggest impression they make is in said ending, when they take control of Frisk and destroy the world. However, I do not believe Chara was inherently evil. After all there are clear indications that Chara is the narrator of the game (the most obvious being the mirrors in Genocide). They tell you that your determination awakened them from death, and I believe that their spirit becomes attached to yours at the beginning of your adventure, which would explain how you, a human new to the underground, can understand the monsters that can’t speak normally like the Froggits and the snails (notice that their text starts with a noise they make, like “ribbit”, and what they actually mean is in parenthesis) as well as the ancient writing on the walls. After all, Chara lived in the underground long enough to become a sibling to Asriel and become known by all the monsters, it would make sense for them to have learned their language, and then they translate for you. This would also mean that all the funny commentary whenever you check an object or a monster comes from Chara. Also Chara being the narrator would explain why they go silent at one point or another during the battles with Asgore and Toriel (when the description says only “...”). Many people argue that their plan to cross the barrier with Asriel and kill humans means they were evil, but I do not think so, even if they did hate humanity. After all, if they only wanted the power to kill humans they could have killed one of the Dreemurs in their sleep, taken their soul and crossed the barrier with it. Instead, they killed themselves, gave Asriel their soul in order to break the barrier and made a plan to free all of their monster friends and family. Death from buttercup poisoning is not an easy one either (it includes bloody diarrhea, abdominal pain and blistering of the intestines); they had to suffer in terrible agony for days in order to achieve their goal, all for their monster family. People also argue that the fact that they laughed after accidentally poisoning Asgore means they did it on purpose or enjoyed causing him pain, but Undertale shows us many times that sometimes you laugh when the only thing you want to do is cry. There is also this during the fight with the Snowy amalgamate which proves my point: (look below) . Finally, during the battle with Asriel in True Pacifist, you use your memories with your friends in order to save them, but you don’t know Asriel at all, so how do you save him? The answer is simple: Chara shares their memories of him with you, and since they are the narrator, they are also the one who encourages you to use the last of your power to save your friends. In conclusion, I think in the beginning Chara is just a slightly bitter, slightly misguided, sometimes unnecessarily violent child who tried to do their best to protect those they loved, even though in hindsight it might not have been with a good method. In many ways, they remind me of Undyne (specially after MK says that maybe she is mean, not cool, in the True Pacifist ending. That really breaks my heart, when I think about all she has done for monsters in general and MK in particular in other routes. It would also explain why Chara seems to admire her so much, calling her a heroine in every route and seeming horrified by the state of her body when she is killed in neutral routes). This means that what they become in the Genocide route is because of you, and they even tell you so at the end (you are the one who makes them think the only meaning of their reincarnation is acquiring power). It makes sense that seeing everyone they know and love being killed systematically right in front of them would twist them, turn them into something they were never meant to be in order to cope with what is happening. Also, Sans does say that gaining LV causes you to feel less and hurt others more easily. Your actions take that well-intentioned but misguided child and turn them into a demon.

I am so in love with these characters that I cannot do a Genocide route myself. I only know about it from watching playthroughs but I don’t have the heart to destroy their happiness. I only ever did a single run, without resetting once, all the way up to True Pacifist. I like to think that in some universe where they are real, they are living happily on the surface, Sans has had the chance to restore his lost hopes, and resets are no more.

I would also like to thank the Undertale fandom for giving me a home, and so many wonderful ideas to explore. Since Deltarune practically confirms that the Multiverse exists in canon, the possibilities are endless, and the amount of detail and dedication you guys have devoted to building those other realities is truly outstanding. I specially love Underfell, Aftertale (and its close relative Errortale), Underswap, Handplates, Endertale, and Underverse/Xtale. To their creators, thank you for the ideas, the art, and the possibilities. And most of all, thank you Toby Fox for starting us all on this wonderful journey.

And to all my fellow fans: Remember, Always Stay Determined ♥️

#undertale #stay determined #happy anniversary #despite everything it's still you #toby fox #thyf rambles

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commentaryvorg · 5 years ago

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Danganronpa V3 Commentary: Part 5.18

Be aware that this is not a blind playthrough! This will contain spoilers for the entire game, regardless of the part of the game I’m commenting on. A major focus of this commentary is to talk about all of the hints and foreshadowing of events that are going to happen and facts that are going to be revealed in the future of the story. It is emphatically not intended for someone experiencing the game for their first time.

Last time in trial 5 (trial 5!!!!!!) as we spent a lot of time discussing the logistics of the plan, Kaito’s cause of death was thrown into question, leading to a clever bit of misdirection which was probably written by Kokichi just before he died about how an unknowable culprit was totally the point of the plan, Kaito basically told everyone that Monokuma doesn’t know who did it, which had equal chances of being Kokichi being stupid and full of himself or Kaito being clever and gunning for the next-best outcome since the best one is almost certainly out of reach, Shuichi figured out Kokichi wasn’t the mastermind (rendering Miu and Gonta’s deaths now completely pointless), then Kokichi ruined his own plan by posthumously gloating about how evil he is, causing everyone to make the mistake of thinking their real enemy was Kokichi and not Monokuma, and so Monokuma joined the party.

Monokuma: “Now, where should we start? We’ve already established what Kokichi is after…”

Note how Monokuma has still not explicitly admitted that he doesn’t know who the culprit is. He’s only vaguely alluding to it here without outright saying it. I really do think that he’s literally not allowed to admit it.

Shuichi realises that now that we know Kokichi’s objective was to fool Monokuma, it might explain why he would bizarrely show a video that apparently proves he crushed Kaito.

Monokuma: “Then what kinda mistake was Kokichi tryin’ to get me to make?”

They made a big deal about how Monokuma is supposedly participating now like just another student, but he’s still kind of not. He could just tell Shuichi, “so, hey, I’m not even sure if Kaito is the victim, I don’t trust that video but I don’t know how it could be faked, figure it out for me”. But it seems he’s still not allowed to participate so directly and is instead just asking vague questions to point Shuichi in the right direction.

Shuichi: “There must be a reason you went out of your way to show us the body being crushed.”

Exisal Kokichi: “No reason, really. That’s just my twisted personality.”

Shuichi: (You’re lying again, Kokichi. There’s a method to your madness.)

Shuichi is still sure that the person he’s talking to here is Kokichi. That will change very soon.

(It might kind of partially be “Kokichi” he’s talking to anyway in the sense that this is probably scripted. But then again, maybe not – again, he’s using Kokichi’s nature as an excuse for a lie, which is not really something Kokichi ever did?)

Shuichi: (Taking the video of the murder but keeping the victim’s identity hidden… What does it show? What doesn’t it show?) “…The victim.”

Maki: “Huh?”

Oh man I never properly noticed until now how Maki is the first one to react to this, aaaa, of course she is.

Shuichi: (Is it even possible?)

This single line, on my first time through, absolutely fucking broke me.

I’d been convinced for a while that Kaito definitely was dead after all, this was the absolute truth, it’s sad but we’ll just have to deal with it and keep going. And then suddenly, for the first time in over an hour, this line was the narrative acknowledging the possibility that Kaito could be alive after all. This wasn’t a relief. This was utterly terrifying, because it was still only a possibility, and there was every chance that this hope would be crushed and snuffed out yet again, which would hurt even more than it had the first time, make me feel stupid and foolish for daring to hope again in the first place. And yet, even the tiniest most fragile possibility of Kaito being alive was infinitely better than the alternative. I couldn’t not hope, despite how terrifying it was.

For me, this case was the absolute best hands-on experience of hope fighting against despair (the real meanings of those words), more than anything else in Danganronpa has ever been. I am so, so glad I managed to be unspoiled for this game so that I could have that, and so sad that I am never going to be able to feel that way while watching this case ever again. Rewatches are great for a lot of things, but some experiences of fiction are literally once-in-a-lifetime.

I admit that I read this line as a desperately hopeful “is it even possible (that Kaito could be alive after all)?” when it might actually just be meant as a more logistical question of “is it even possible (that the video could have been faked)?”. But even if it’s the latter, that still suddenly reopens the possibility that Kaito is alive, so Shuichi has to be thinking that here, one way or another.

Shuichi: (No, that’s a question for later. For now, we know that…)

Regardless, Shuichi is amazingly good at pushing his emotions aside and just focusing on taking the logic one step at a time. While there’s got to be a part of his mind that’s desperately jumping up and down going Kaito might be alive!!! (first-time-me knew exactly that feel and that’s why I can confirm that Shuichi is showing incredible self-control right now), he’s refusing to let it have a say because it’ll cause him to think irrationally and maybe come to the wrong conclusions. The Ultimate Detective can’t let himself be biased by what he wants to be true.

Tsumugi: “Then it was some other dead body that got crushed by the hydraulic press?”

Maki: “What?”

Maki Roll! She sounds hopeful!

Himiko: “Where would he even get another body?”

Keebo: “There should be plenty to choose from if you reuse the body of a former victim—”

Perhaps because they know the story of DR1 now, they’re jumping to this conclusion instead of considering the other possibility that there was one other living person there who could have been crushed instead. I personally immediately assumed that if Kaito was alive then that must have meant somehow Kokichi was dead and Kaito was in the Exisal, but that might be thanks to the narrative argument that that’d make the most interesting story, which these guys of course don’t have.

Exisal Kokichi has a whole scripted speech here about how switching the victims was definitely impossible because the footage wasn’t edited. I think it was around this point that first-time-me finally realised that the camera has a pause button!!!! and that actually totally made it possible for the footage to be faked and Kaito to be alive. This helped a lot in making me somewhat less terrified, because I’d gone from hope that was completely baseless into hope with an actual basis behind it, some way that I could see to reach the outcome I wanted. Even then, it was still only a possibility and there was still always the chance the game could pull the rug out from under me again – but it was a much firmer possibility than a few moments ago, and that was good.

Exisal Kokichi: “Also, if the victim was switched, then that would mean Kaito is still alive. We already discussed this sooo many times. The chance of that happening is imposs—”

…Says Kaito. Heh. Imagine how amused he must be to talk about how impossible it is for him to be alive.

This is definitely scripted, though. The only reason there’s ever been to be sure that Kaito is dead is the footage, but he’s talking about this like it’s a completely separate argument from what he was just saying about that. Like Kaito is obviously just this reckless idiot who’s inevitably going to fail pathetically and get himself killed, and the idea that he could have escaped death and succeeded at something is ridiculous. Like that in itself is proof Kaito must be dead. This is a narrative that Kaito would never choose on his own to promote – but Kokichi had been known to join in with said narrative occasionally, and so it seems he did in the script as well.

Maki: “…It might be possible.”

Exisal Kokichi: “Huh?”

Maki Roll!! He says it’s impossible, but the impossible could be possible if it’s Kaito! She’s finally trying to claw and fight her way into a better reality rather than just accepting the awful one she’s stuck in! And Kaito must quietly be so proud to see Maki latching onto this possibility, to have stopped feeling that unshakeable despair and be looking for a better outcome.

Maki: “There could be a trick to make the switch possible. We just haven’t noticed it yet…”

Exisal Kokichi: “Ooohh, and what trick is that?”

Maki: “…”

Exisal Kokichi: “See, you don’t know, do you? I already said it’s imposs—”

It seems like right now Maki’s hope is still completely baseless. But even though it’s baseless, she’s desperately holding onto it anyway! That’s such a big deal coming from Maki!

Shuichi: “Maki’s not wrong. There is a way it could be done… So we can’t just give up here!”

Shuichi sounds here like he’s already figured out the trick. But I kind of doubt he has, because you’d think this would be the one time where he wouldn’t hesitate to voice his deductions and would immediately explain the whole thing. So in fact, Shuichi’s hope is probably also still baseless, and he’s just doing a better job than Maki of making it sound like it isn’t, to try and keep her hopes up. How very Kaito of him!

Maki: “Hey, Shuichi… I’ll think harder about this as well… So… can you confirm whether or not the victim switched places? If Kaito is… alive or not?”

Maki’s voice sounds so full of emotion here! She’s not holding anything back and is finally letting herself desperately reach for this possibility, now that it seems possible after all!

Maki: “I don’t like the thought that I killed Kaito… I don’t… want that.”

This is the first time Maki has mentioned that she didn’t want to kill him! She’s talking about what she wants! She’s talking about how she felt about killing someone! She’s not just a heartless killer! Her feelings and desires matter!

It’s also in this moment that Maki starts crying, which is the first time we’ve ever seen her do so. She is having emotions and being a person! Kaito must be so proud of her, and so relieved that she’s finally letting herself feel this instead of locking it all away.

Himiko: “Okay then, let’s talk about the possibility that Maki Roll mentioned.”

Tsumugi: “Himiko, if you call her that again—”

Maki: “…Yes, please.”

Maki Roll!!! I absolutely love that this is the moment she accepts that nickname from Himiko. It’s not just that she’s tolerating it; she actively wants Himiko to call her that! She’s desperate for anything that’ll remind her of Kaito and help her feel the way she did back before she thought she’d killed him, just so that she can hold onto that hope!

Tsumugi: “Then let’s all talk it over together!”

Shuichi: (Together…)

…

Kaito: “And don’t forget… you’re not alone! Don’t try to do everything yourself. It’s only gonna wear you out. When times are hard, you gotta rely on your friends.”

…

Shuichi: “Yeah… I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”

FRIENDS!!! It’s probably thinking that Kaito might be alive that spurs Shuichi to remember what Kaito said to him, and it’s so lovely and appropriate that the feeling that his best friend might still be here is also accompanied by the reminder that he’s not alone and he’s got other friends he can rely on too. Did you know that this game is about friends.

Exisal Kokichi: “Geez, you guys are a stubborn bunch. There’s no trick.”

And yet you’re still the most stubborn person here, Kaito! He has to have been so thrilled to see the change in Maki just now, and to see everyone working together, and Shuichi letting his friends support him (even if he has no idea that Shuichi was specifically thinking of his own words about that). But no matter how much this might make Kaito feel like he wants them to succeed, he still has to oppose them, and he’s still going to give that everything he’s got until the very end.

Maki: “The person in that video… Was it really Kaito?”

Everyone else in this debate is making fairly logical suggestions for what could be off about the video. But Maki’s voice just sounds full of desperate hope, and this doesn’t even read like a logical argument and doesn’t have an agree spot like the others (surely she can’t really be arguing that it’s not actually Kaito that we see there; it is very unmistakably him). This is her still being so stuck on the is Kaito really alive after all??? that she can’t even think logically like she usually does.

Shuichi: (If we put our heads together, we can find the smallest hope… We won’t fall into despair!)

Finally the narrative is using these words correctly! Yes, damn right thinking that Kaito might be alive is hope! Damn right that him turning out to be dead after all would make them despair! Shuichi’s still having wishful thinking to be saying that they definitely won’t fall into despair, since Kaito’s survival isn’t confirmed yet, but that’s precisely what hope is!

Keebo: “There’d be no way to stop the hydraulic press unless someone used the ‘Force Stop’ button.”

Maki: “When you say someone… you mean Kokichi, right? He was the only one there.”

Exisal Kokichi: “… Hm, actually… maybe I pressed it by accident? I don’t really remember…”

You would imagine that this response would be scripted, but it seems oddly vague for one of Kokichi’s calculated lies to hide the truth of his plan, so I’m not actually sure about this one. Maybe it’s just the vagueness in his tone of voice which strikes me as off? If Kokichi were really here delivering this line he’d probably sound a lot more gleefully sure about his unsureness.

Monokuma: “There’s also the question of how the bodies got switched while the camera was rolling. That would have clearly been caught on camera.”

It almost kind of sounds like Monokuma has already figured this out and is just leading Shuichi into saying it. But then again, if he’d already figured this part out here then he’d probably have been capable of figuring out the whole trick by himself and wouldn’t have needed Shuichi’s help at all.

Shuichi: “Ah, I see. It wasn’t just the press that stopped…”

Monokuma: “…Eh? Huh? Whaddaya mean?”

…Yeah, maybe not. He seems genuinely confused here.

By the way, can we talk about the fact that after the press stopped and the switch happened, the press then descends for the killing blow faster than it did before? I saw a fic once which surmised that during the switch, Kaito fiddled with the settings of the press as best he could to make it go faster, in order to make Kokichi’s death as quick and painless as possible. Not my idea, but hell yes, headcanon absolutely accepted.

Tsumugi helps explain why the video’s odd camera angle was necessary for the trick.

Tsumugi: “If they were recording it like normal, they would have used a better angle.”

Maki: “And if it was recorded at such an odd angle, then that proves a trick was used.”

It technically doesn’t prove it. It could just be that Kokichi had no idea how to frame a decent shot, or that he just wanted us to think a trick was used. But Maki’s latching onto anything that makes it more likely that Kaito is alive and trying to insist that it’s proof, because of course she is. I love how desperately she wants this.

Himiko: “Camera angles, huh? Looks like your cosplayer experience is finally useful.”

Tsumugi: “Well, cosplay doesn’t really come up all that much in class trials…”

Yeah, and maybe it should stay that way, hm?

Shuichi: “When the press was stopped, you couldn’t really see who was inside it, correct?”

Except for his VERY VISIBLE ARM which isn’t actually visible there in canon and we just have to pretend we can’t see, araghrghrghr.

Shuichi: “That was intentional. The body is mostly hidden by the press, making the swap easier.”

In reality, it’s not “mostly” – he’s completely hidden by the press at this point. “Mostly” is what we see in the flawed localisation version, and that would not be enough to convincingly pull off the switch. (I checked the Japanese, and he does indeed still say “mostly” there, even though it really isn’t.)

I suppose one could argue that it was teeeeechnically possible to co-ordinate Kaito’s and Kokichi’s arms to be in similar enough positions to each other that the switch might not be noticeable to the human eye in the split second before the press descended again. But the fact that Shuichi never talks about how that could have been possible – which would be a very important point to cover – basically makes it canon that the arm isn’t actually visible, despite what we localisation-players see in the video.

Tsumugi: “I wonder if they used that tripod in the hangar to adjust the camera’s height.”

What tripod in the hangar? She’s talking like there was one there that we found during the investigation, but… there wasn’t? (If there wasn’t, it doesn’t have to be a plot-hole; Kaito could have taken it with him into the Exisal to hide it.)

Maki: “Then… that logic is correct, right? Kokichi used that video angle trick, and switched the victim in the hydraulic press. In that case, Kaito is—”

Maki is the first one to summarise this discussion and get to the point that this means Kaito’s alive, right? and it’s adorable.

Shuichi: “Himiko, the different body you mentioned… What are you talking about?”

Himiko: “The bodies from the other cases. Kokichi’s the mastermind, so he’d— Nyeh…? Wait… The mastermind…?”

Shuichi: “Yeah. Kokichi isn’t the mastermind, so… I don’t think he’d be able to produce a body to switch out.”

Maki: “…What?”

It seems that most of them, Maki included, were still casually assuming that Kokichi pulled a case 5 from the first Danganronpa and swapped in an older dead body. Which makes sense for them to think, since their heads are full of Hope’s Peak right now, and they also still haven’t shaken off the impression in their minds that Kokichi is the mastermind even though it’s been disproven.

But that would be a rather boring story if it were true. That’d mean that Kokichi is the one in the Exisal after all, and sure, Kaito’s alive, but he’s just hidden somewhere in the school, completely oblivious to the trial going on, still just an unwitting pawn in Kokichi’s plan with no agency of his own. That’s no fun at all. Kaito deserves better than that, narratively speaking. Kaito would have wanted better than that, to be more of a hero than that in his last day alive, no matter what it meant he had to do.

Keebo: “Well, Monokuma? Do the rules allow for a body to be reused?”

Monokuma: “Very well. I’ll answer that.”

Exisal Kokichi: “…You’re giving in pretty easily.”

Monokuma: “Well, it’s crucial information to make the trial fair. This discussion is pointless if it’s not clear what the culprit was allowed to do, right?”

Exisal Kokichi: “Ah-haha, you’ve a convenient mastermind. But I guess that makes defeating you worth my time.”

Not sure this last line of Exisal Kokichi’s is actually scripted. “Worth my time” seems like one hell of an understatement for how Kokichi really felt about defeating Monokuma and the mastermind, given the desperate, twisted lengths he was willing to go to for it and how much more passionately he was gloating about it in the script earlier. This might just be Kaito trying to ad-lib an approximation of how Kokichi feels about this, based on said earlier scripted speech, and not quite getting into it enough.

Monokuma confirms that it was impossible to re-use a dead body.

Shuichi: “…” (Kokichi and Kaito were the only ones in the hangar at the time. If they were the only ones present during the body-swapping trick… Then the real victim was…)

Shuichi looks intensely worried here as he realises this. His narration makes it seem like he’s being shaken at the realisation of who the victim was, but that doesn’t really make sense. He’d already accepted at the beginning of this case that one of the two of them has to be dead, and he was quite happy for Kokichi to be dead if it meant Kaito was alive.

What Shuichi’s really got to be horrified about here is the realisation of who the culprit is. He’s just approaching that topic in the most indirect way possible in his mind because he still doesn’t enjoy facing painful truths like this.

If you get this question wrong and say the victim was a third party, Maki has an extra line to fill Shuichi’s silence as he explains to himself why that’s not possible.

Maki: “If there were no other bodies… then how the hell?”

She is so confused. Kokichi being the victim would mean that Kaito has to be the killer, but obviously it’s completely impossible that Kaito would ever do that, so this is clearly an unsolvable conundrum.

Maki: “…What’s wrong, Shuichi? Who did Kaito switch places with?”

And back to the canon voiced lines from getting it right, Maki sounds somewhat frantic. Either she’s worried that Shuichi’s silence means he’s realised something that proves Kaito didn’t switch with anyone and is dead after all… or perhaps, somewhere deep down she’s also realised the truth and is even more afraid of admitting it than Shuichi.

Shuichi: “Maki… I think I missed something very important here…”

I enjoy the sense given here that Shuichi and Maki’s excited hope of a few minutes ago has come screeching to an awkward halt. They were all so focused on the idea that Kaito was still alive and figuring out how to prove it was possible that nobody took a step back to look at the bigger picture and realise the full implications of what it would mean if Kaito really was alive. In some ways, this is actually worse than Kaito being the victim.

(It’s not, of course; it is immeasurably better. But they’re not looking at this as a narrative. They don’t mind if Kaito doesn’t get to be a hero and just want their friend to survive and preferably not be a murderer.)

Shuichi goes on to deduce that Kaito and Kokichi were working together. Which really kind of makes more sense being deduced after figuring out that Kaito was the culprit, in order to then establish the how and a tiny bit of the why. But nope, Shuichi’s leaving that conclusion until the last possible moment.

Shuichi: “I can’t believe I overlooked this!”

Overlooking them working together until now isn’t something to be kicking himself about. The notion that Kaito and Kokichi would ever co-operate is inconceivable enough that of course it wouldn’t ever come to mind until you have basically conclusive proof that it must have happened, and he only just figured out that proof. Which means that really Shuichi is kicking himself about not having considered during all of his hopeful deductions earlier that if Kaito is alive then he almost certainly killed Kokichi. Shuichi still isn’t willing to think about that directly.

Shuichi: “If they switched places while the press and the camera were stopped… then the person who turned the camera and the press back on was the original victim.”

Even as he’s explaining the switch, he’s using these vague placeholder terms despite knowing full well who he’s talking about. He does not want to say it.

Monokuma: “Geez, this culprit’s a real jerk.”

Heh. Only to you, Monokuma.

I love the way he says this at the point where it is 100% clear that he’s talking about Kaito. It’s some delightful irony, knowing that really this culprit one of the least jerkish people around, and yet also he has been acting like a jerk for most of this trial, all for the purpose of pissing off Monokuma and saving his friends.

Monokuma: “…So, have you realised whodunnit yet?”

Maki: “…”

Maki’s distant, worried expression here makes it clear that she very much has.

Shuichi: (The culprit of the case… If my detective work hasn’t failed me, the culprit is inside that Exisal…)

Exisal: “…”

I love that it no longer displays it as “Exisal Kokichi” here. This is the first time Shuichi has looked at that Exisal without making the assumption that it’s Kokichi in there.

Actually, that’s also an interesting point. Despite how much Shuichi was desperately insisting Kaito could be alive at the beginning of the trial, he never properly extended that to figure that if Kaito really was alive, then he must be the one in the Exisal. He never even acknowledged the possibility of that until now. Partly that’s because he never truly believed Kaito was alive back then, of course. But perhaps it was also that thinking Kaito was in the Exisal was almost as bad as thinking he was dead – because that’d mean Kaito was actively deceiving them for some inconceivable reason.

The question the game asks you here in this accusation screen is “Who is in the Exisal?”. Not “Who is the culprit?”, even though Shuichi knows full well that that’s what he’s proving here. He still does not want to think about that and would rather think of it as proving that Kaito is alive after all.

(First-time-me, meanwhile, was elated to have reached this near-confirmation that Kaito was not only alive but had been inside that Exisal the whole time. It’s not just that his friends are going to get to see him again, but also that he’s been playing an active, integral role in this whole trial, fighting as hard as he can to defeat Monokuma and save everyone. This is exactly the narrative Kaito deserved.)

Shuichi: “If the two of them switched while the press was stopped… then the culprit who started the hydraulic press again and crushed Kokichi… must be Kaito!”

Instead of just straight-up saying “Kaito is the culprit” after you make the choice, Shuichi goes on to re-explain the victim switch, except using actual names this time, in order to end on the conclusion here that the culprit is Kaito. It’s like he still can’t bring himself to admit it unless he justifies to himself that this has to be what happened.

Shuichi: “I don’t want to believe it either… but it’s the only way any of this makes sense. My detective work has led me to the conclusion that Kaito is the culprit.”

I like how Shuichi stresses it being from his detective work. The Ultimate Detective may have figured this out, but Shuichi Saihara alone would never have been able to conceive of the idea that his best friend would kill anyone.

Exisal: “…”

Kaito’s being very quiet during this whole part. It is possible that Kokichi didn’t cover this eventuality in the script – more on that later.

(Kaito’s probably feeling incredibly proud of Shuichi for figuring it out, even as he’s also thinking, “well, shit, what do I do now?”. He’s still not about to just give up and admit it, of course!)

Tsumugi: “Hey, answer us! If you really are Kaito, then—”

Maki: “I’m the culprit.”

Shuichi: (Huh?)

Maki: “There’s no way that Kaito can still be alive… Because I’m the culprit.”

It is so heartbreaking that Maki would rather have a narrative where Kaito is dead and she killed him than one in which he’s alive but he killed anyone at all. She said just before the investigation began that Kaito being the culprit is even more impossible than him being dead, and she still desperately wants that to be the case.

(And note how she’s not trying to get the best of both worlds by arguing that she killed Kokichi and so Kaito is both alive and spotless. Which means that even though she’s not admitting it, she knows that if Kaito were alive then he’d definitely have killed Kokichi before the poison could in order to protect her. The only way for him to conceivably not be the culprit is if he’s dead, therefore that has to be the truth.)

Maki: “I saw it with my own eyes. Kokichi drank the antidote that he stole from Kaito… There’s no doubt Kaito died.”

She makes this argument, but it no longer holds any water. Now that we’ve established that Kokichi’s plan was to die while making everyone think he was still alive by having Kaito pretend to be him inside the Exisal, obviously Kokichi needed Kaito to live and not himself, so obviously he would have wanted to give Kaito the antidote. As soon as you realise that, it’s clear that him drinking the antidote was a lie.

Maki is smart enough that she’s got to have realised this. She’s only making this argument because it’s basically the only argument left to make, even though she knows it’s wrong.

Maki: “And he died because of my poison arrow.”

She’s also insisting that, given Kokichi totally drank the antidote, Kaito definitely died because of her, never mind the possibility presented earlier that Kaito was crushed to death by Kokichi. (Which is actually fair, because that’d mean Maki would still bear the responsibility for Kaito’s death since he would have died thanks to her either way. Look who’s not trying to run away from her responsibility in killing someone.)

Himiko: “But you told us you didn’t want to kill Kaito and—”

Maki: “Yes, I never wanted to. I wanted to believe that I didn’t kill him. But… the truth speaks differently. In the end, I was just running away from the facts.”

She’s still willing to acknowledge at this point that she didn’t want to kill him – and yet even then, she’d still rather have killed Kaito despite that than think that he could have killed anyone.

Shuichi: (Maki, are you…? Trying to protect Kaito? If he’s the culprit, you’re trying to help him get away?)

That doesn’t make any sense, Shuichi. There’s nowhere to escape to, as far as both you and Maki know. If Kaito is the culprit, then there is absolutely no way he’d want to get away with it, because it’d get everyone else killed. The only circumstances in which he’d ever be trying to do that is if he’s (inconceivably) not actually the person we believed in, in which case he wouldn’t deserve anyone trying to protect him. Maki is smart enough to realise all this, too.

What Maki is doing here is running away from the truth that Kaito did it. She knows he must be the killer, but she just can’t bear to accept it. Just like Kaito was with Gonta last trial. It’s ironic how during the investigation she accused Shuichi of being the same way about the “truth” of Kaito’s death, but in the end, she’s the one who’s ended up acting most strongly that way.

(Kaito’s got to have realised that this is what Maki is doing, especially since he was guilty of it himself once before. On the one hand he must be happy that she wants to believe in him this much, but on the other hand he massively regretted doing this kind of thing to Shuichi last trial and it has to hurt to see Maki doing essentially the same. And of course, he still can’t say anything to make this situation any better.)

Maki: “There was only one antidote, so it’s more likely he died from my poison arrow. This is the truth…”

Exisal Kokichi: “It’s not decided yet. I could’ve still killed him with the hydraulic press.”

This is the first thing Kaito’s said since a while before Shuichi accused him. He was probably intending to just stay quiet entirely, but not when Maki is happy to make herself into the murderer in order to run away from the truth. He must really just want to tell her that she didn’t kill anyone because he killed Kokichi, but he’s still being stubborn and refusing to give up on the plan even though it’s almost completely hopeless now. Nonetheless, he can still try and help Maki just a little by reminding everyone that even in his version of events in which he is totally Kokichi and Kaito is totally dead, it’s possible that Maki technically didn’t kill anyone at all.

And again, this is not even remotely what the real Kokichi would say here – he’d be jumping on the idea that the horrible murderous Maki seems to want to think she killed Kaito and cruelly taunting her about it. Yet again, Kaito’s making it pretty damn clear that he’s not Kokichi. Nobody picks up on this even now that they’re aware it really probably is Kaito in there, but still.

(Kokichi would also have loved to gleefully rub in the idea that Kaito killed someone despite how much they all trusted him… but him hypothetically doing that here gets a bit paradoxical.)

Exisal Kokichi: “Either way, those are the two options. Monokuma knows the answer, riiight?”

Monokuma: “…Huh? Are those the only options?”

Yup, definitely just those two options, not any options that involve Kaito being alive and having done it. Kaito is blatantly ignoring the entire conversation they just had deducing that he did it and is taking the opportunity from Maki’s desperate deflecting confession to keep trying to push his narrative onto Monokuma even though it’s near hopeless. He is so damn stubborn.

Also note him again implying that Monokuma actually doesn’t know the answer, since proving that is really what Kaito’s been trying to achieve this whole time given that he knew the main goal would fail. This is probably not scripted, after all – I highly doubt Kokichi predicted that Maki would do this. Kokichi assuming that anyone would believe in someone else is difficult enough for him at the best of times, but even more so when it’s Maki the horrible backstabbing assassin.

Maki: “There’s no mistake… Kaito is dead… I… killed Kaito… There is absolutely… no doubt. That’s… the truth.”

You very clearly don’t really believe that, Maki.

(It’s okay, though. Kaito is still the person you believe in! And him being still alive means you’ll get to talk to him one last time!)

Shuichi: (Ah, I thought so. Maki is trying to protect Kaito.)

No, Shuichi, she’s not! If she were doing that, she’d be stupid!

Shuichi: (I understand how she feels, but if Kaito is the culprit… Why did he agree to Kokichi’s plan?)

Exisal Kokichi: “…”

Shuichi: (I can’t imagine that Kaito would do something so selfish…)

Because it’s not selfish, obviously! The reason why Kaito is doing this should be quite clear. We’ve already established that the point of Kokichi’s plan is to fool Monokuma and “defeat” him. That would be something Kaito would want to do too! Kaito is also trying to defeat Monokuma! Is that not enough, Shuichi?

Shuichi is an amazing detective in terms of piecing together the facts from the evidence, but it seems he’s not always that great at figuring out people and the motives behind their actions, even when those people are his closest friends. (Meanwhile, figuring out the people more than the facts is what Kaito is best at! He and Shuichi complement each other so well.)

I’m also a little disappointed he’s stopped viewing the Exisal as just “Exisal” when it’s not speaking and actively sounding like Kokichi. He knows it’s not Kokichi in there now!

Shuichi: (There must be a reason for it. I truly believe that…)

At least, even while Shuichi is taking way longer than he should to figure out this reason, he is still as certain as he ought to be that there is a reason and Kaito is still definitely on their side. Shuichi may be rather slow on the uptake here, but that never for a second makes him not believe in Kaito.

Shuichi: “You saw him drink it right in front of you, but you couldn’t confirm he actually did it. So maybe… there’s another possibility.”

Maki: “What… are you talking about? Impossible… That’s… impossible…”

Another possibility that means that Kaito killed someone? No, can’t be possible. Can’t be.

Maki: “There is no other possibility! I killed Kaito!”

Definitely no other possibility. She is definitely not already aware of exactly what this possibility is.

The point of Argument Armaments is always that the subject already knows the final bit of proof and just starts yelling furiously to try and stop Shuichi from actually getting to prove it. Usually this is because the subject is the culprit, so of course they know what the proof is. But I love that this even applies to the two times in this game that the subject isn’t the culprit and is just desperately defending someone else – both times, they already know they’re wrong and just can’t bear to face it.

“Don’t reveal the truth… anymore!”

This is one of Maki’s lines for the thing where she blocks your view. She knows full well that what Shuichi’s about to reveal is the truth and just doesn’t want him to force her to accept it. And she’s in a slightly less stubborn amount of denial than Kaito was last trial, since she’s at least vaguely acknowledging this in her words. That would be because Kaito was not only running away from the truth but also running away from the fact that that was what he was doing, whereas Maki here does not have quite as many layers of issues over this and so is willing to acknowledge on some level that she is running away from the truth.

…Yep, Maki’s Argument Armament definitely has button patterns that aren’t quite as difficult as Kaito’s. (I know this without having to go back and check Kaito’s, because I am quite familiar with how his goes.) I mentioned last trial that I found Kaito’s the hardest, and it seems that isn’t just me; that’s a thing the game developers did on purpose. They are both very similar situations, but Kaito definitely did have more issues and more denial going on than Maki does here, and I love that the writers got that across in the difficulty, too.

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zdbztumble · 5 years ago

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“Kingdom Hearts II” revisited, Part VII

Little things can have a big impact, and a Twilight Town emptied of any signs of life makes for a very effective and foreboding beginning to the final legs of KH II. The continuation of the mystery surrounding Riku - or, more specifically, what King Mickey knows about Riku and why he won’t reveal it - is continued in a satisfying manner as well. That makes for another good point of comparison with later entries in the series; something like the return of Repliku in KH III, for example. That was thrown into the series more than a decade after that character’s supposed death, is only referenced when absolutely demanded by the plot, ends abruptly, and doesn’t have any logical - or narratively satisfying - continuity with what became of Repliku in R/R. By contrast, Riku and Mickey’s history in KH II was begun in the game immediately preceding this one and, while very much in the background, is referred to in big and small ways throughout the play time.

(Revisiting Twilight Town also has a great gag, with Sora and his friends incredulous at the deductions made by Hayner and his friends. Just because they happen to be right doesn’t mean they make sense.)

Once we start in on the road to The World That Never Was, however...my feelings start to get mixed.

I’ve learned over the course of this playthrough that Axel was originally meant to die at Roxas’s hands during the prologue of the game. As much as I don’t like Axel - and let me reiterate that I really don’t like Axel - I can’t regret the decision to keep around past that point, for reasons I’ll get into shortly. And wrapping Axel’s story up by way of a noble sacrifice, if a bit cliche, isn’t a terrible idea. But it is a more rushed and arbitrary sequence than I remember, with Axel’s appearance - and his decision to kill himself - just happening, without a strong motive. While it pains me to say this, more cutscenes with Axel - particularly concerning Kairi’s escape from him - would have done this moment a favor. Despite all that, I think this is more successful than not as an ending for Axel...one that should have been permanent.

(And did no one on staff remember the line “he was the only one I liked” when they decided to start working toward an Axel/Saix bromance?)

The return of Roxas leaves me with similarly mixed feelings. I like how cold and predatory Roxas’s attitude is - it’s a strong contrast with Sora, and indeed with Roxas as he appears in the prologue. I’ll once again save more detailed thoughts about Roxas for another day, so let’s just say for now I think that attitude speaks to why Roxas being subsumed into Sora is appropriate. But there is a big problem with this sequence: it’s only a cutscene. That this wasn’t a playable battle right out of the gate, given how pivotal a moment it is, is ridiculous, and if Final Mix did nothing else right, it fixed this huge mistake.

(And if you have Oathkeeper equipped at the time - as I always do, in any game that offers it, from the time I receive it - that cutscene is a little strange to watch.)

Stepping into the castle unloads a lot of story, for how (relatively) quickly it goes by, so it’s inevitable that there will be highlights and low points. Namine and Kairi finally meeting, and teaming up to escape, manages to be both. That the moment happens at all is wonderful, and both girls being prepared to fight Saix, unarmed if they have to, is a good touch. But these scenes take the old adage of “leave them wanting more” to an extreme, because we’re given only the barest of bones for what Kairi and Namine’s interaction could have been. Add in the fact that Namine’s origins, and the closest thing to an explanation for why she starts to fade from existence, are relegated to Ansem’s reports, and it’s very hard not to feel that she was cheated in the writing. She and Kairi were certainly cheated by the animators; their run cycle looks ridiculous. On the other hand, Kairi pulling back Riku’s hood is touching, and makes for a good reveal of an identity that most players would have figured out by this point, but is no less satisfying for that.

Every scene with Ansem the Wise in this game just reminds me all over again how incredible Sir Christopher Lee was, and how ridiculous they were to recast while he was still alive. The reveal for Ansem (another identity that should have been obvious by now) is well-handled, and he makes for an unlikely but effective partner for Mickey Mouse to bounce off of. But too much of Ansem’s story - his key turning points as a character - is left for the reports, and for his monologues. And the backstory given in that scene, and those reports, seems to be at odds with both the beginning of KH II and the events of R/R. Ansem speaks of Riku as though the two of them were working together, with knowledge of the other’s identity, for a long time, and yet the dialogue in their scenes in the prologue suggests that DiZ, at least, isn’t sure exactly who his cloaked ally is. And Riku leaving King Mickey because “Xehanort’s Heartless was still inside his heart, troubling him” seems to negate the growth Riku had in R/R. Just having Riku and Mickey get separated involuntarily would’ve been fine, I think.

I didn’t remember KH II vanilla engaging in any sequel baiting outside of the secret ending, but there is at least one line of dialogue that does so: “you don’t look like half the hero the others were.” Compared to later entries in the series, it’s a minor and innocuous tease, and if this were the end of the series, one could always justify it by assuming Xigbar was referring to the unnamed and distant Keyblade wielders that Triton alluded to in KH I. The scenes surrounding the boss battle with Xigbar are largely solid, with a fantastic reintroduction for Maleficent, great material for Kairi, and a pretty fun fight in its own right. Sora and Kairi finally reuniting is a very sweet moment - not just in the scene itself, where they embrace, but in the little details following. Kairi’s dialogue box remarking on how Sora kept her charm comes to mind (and made me doubly happy that I stick with Oathkeepr.) Kairi being the one to bring Sora and Riku back together is a wonderful idea too, though I’m one of those people who finds Sora’s reaction a little forced. I wouldn’t say it’s any more overdone than, say, the fake-out with Goofy in Hollow Bastion, but it is a bit much.

Where this section of TWTNW starts to slip up a bit is in its determination to keep the player from ever having Sora, Riku, and Kairi together in a party. How and why various characters don’t fight alongside Sora in this game is often arbitrary, and I think it’s probably impossible to avoid a few forced choices in a game this long, but it really is absurd to never put that trio together for a battle. If you check in with Kairi whenever there’s a chance to pull up dialogue boxes, you’ll get lines that all say more or less the same thing: she wants to be involved in the action from now on and be at Sora’s side in danger. This is why she’s a character that I get upset for, rather than at, because the writers take the pains to establish her as someone with the desire and the will to be an active participant in the adventure (and, apparently, the ability - she gets the hang of that Keyblade pretty quickly), and then force these circumstances that deny her the opportunity.

Having said that, the two boss battles leading up to Xemnas are...what they are. I can’t say there’s anything wrong with them, but they aren’t my favorites. To the extent that I have memories of Luxord from the first time I played this game, I’m pretty sure I disliked him, just for how hard I found it to get the timing right on his games. Saix is a fair challenge, but a little tedious IMO. His fight also leads into one of the most ridiculous moments for Sora in the game - his not remembering that he became a Heartless. Y’know, that pivotal moment in the first game, the choice he made himself for the sake of others that he was then rescued from by Kairi, and discussed with her after the fact as solemnly as two young teenagers could. Anybody could forget that.

But those fights, and the Organization’s graveyard, do bring me back to why I’m glad Axel wasn’t killed off early. Because this is the point in the game where I realized, back in the day, that Organization XIII is kind of pathetic. And I don’t mean that as a point against them as villains, or against the game. What I mean is - if you ignore the bullshit pulled by DDD and just take KH II on its own terms, the Organizers are ultimately little more than glorified Dusks, devoid of real emotions or conscience, aware of everything they’ve lost along with their hearts but careless towards the suffering they cause in an effort to reclaim those hearts that is, in the end, futile. The members’ own self-serving and predatory natures damages the Organization almost as much as the efforts of the heroes, and by the time Sora appears to clean up the mess, the Organization is already on its last legs. Axel’s attempts to get Roxas back by baiting Sora with Kairi - a ridiculous and ill-thought plan - is the whole Organization writ small, and offers a good preview for their own fate. And it’s another reason why I never wanted or needed more information about any of the Organizers as individuals than what we got. Going just off of KH II (and CoM), there wasn’t much left to any of them, and that seemed part of the point.

That Organization XIII is such a hollow, empty, and doomed shell gives the villains some pathos - a more earned degree of pathos than DDD and KH III would attempt to provide them - but it also means that the heavy-handedness of Xemnas’s dialogue isn’t necessary. A fair amount of what he was saying is self-evident. I also find it bothersome that no one calls him out on exactly what the Organization’s plan was, and that the person who gets the closest is Riku - not Sora, the character who had a much less wordy but far more impactful verbal exchange with Ansem SoD in the last game that expressed the contrast between knowledge and wisdom beautifully. That can’t be said for KH II; as I said, that bit of dialogue before the first Xemnas fight, and Xemnas’s conversation with Ansem are over-written. But they aren’t terrible either.

The events leading up to that first fight with Xemnas have many great moments. The image of Nobodies dancing in a shower of hearts is genuinely creepy. Ansem’s farewell to King Mickey is touching, and offers yet another effective character sacrifice that should have been permanent. And the final scene for Maleficent and Pete is fantastic. But Riku seems to be treated by the game - certainly by Ansem the Wise - as the group leader once he gets his body back, and I’m not sure how I feel about that. He was a crucial figure “behind the scenes,” as it were, in reviving Sora and sounding alarm bells. But Sora is the one who’s at the point of action, rescuing worlds from Heartless and Nobodies, and taking out the majority of Organization members. He’s the one who’s been used by the Organization to do their dirty work, the one who fought his way to the castle to save the others and, not unimportantly, the one we play as throughout the entire game. He’s also arguably the person most owed an explanation for what happened over the past year. I can’t necessarily fault KH II for that - it isn’t as though they have time to sit down and regale him with details about the events of CoM. It’s more a failing of later games that he never gets appraised. But that he, and everyone else, just seem to fall in line, and that Riku’s the one who knows what to do (not that it isn’t obvious)...I just don’t know.

I left off right before stepping into the final door, so this playthrough’s not over yet. But next time, we won’t be looking at the finale of KH II, or finally getting into my assessment of Roxas. There’s a Final Mix out there for this game I’ve never gotten to play, and it’s about time I took a look at everything they added...

#z's crits #kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts 2 #critique #commentary

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oumakokichi · 8 years ago

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what's your opinion on the "ouma is komaeda 2.0" debate? or, more aptly put: why is ouma NOT komaeda 2.0

I’ve written various pointsabout why Ouma and Komaeda are extremely different as characters in previousmeta, but all of them were a long time ago, and I don’t think I’ve everactually written an entire post that was only dedicated to talking about thetwo of them. So this is actually a really, really good question, and one that I’vebeen meaning to respond to for a while.

In order to go into depth aboutwhy the two of them are so different as characters (and most importantly, whyOuma isn’t just “Komaeda 2.0” or a “purple Komaeda clone” or anything of thesort), I’ll have to talk about spoilers for all of ndrv3. So please only readif you’re comfortable with that!

I suppose the most importantpoint to start with is the fact that Ouma is a deliberate subversion of Komaeda’scharacter (and Junko’s too, for that matter). The reason why they seem similar on a surface level islargely because that’s what you’re supposed to think, especially at first.

Komaeda is not exactly theantagonist of sdr2, but he is a force of conflict, someone who deliberatelyhinders the plot and stirs up chaos whenever possible. Ouma crafts this kind ofpersona for himself and steps into the role, but he is ultimately acting thepart. By constantly telling the group at large that he’s a liar, warning themnot to trust him, refusing to participate in their efforts to cooperate, hesucceeds in making himself seem much more antagonistic and hostile than heactually is.

The most important note ofdifference, however, is that whereas Komaeda poses a very real threat to hisclassmates because he really, genuinely looks down on them, Ouma is only everacting. His bluff is never anything more than a bluff, and his primary goal isto put an end to the killing game and all the chaos, death, and sufferingassociated with it. From start to finish, every single action that he takesproves this; even when he acts seemingly hostile or chaotic by “refusing tocooperate,” he also emphasizes that he does what he does “for everyone’s sake,”such as his plan to try and make the group watch their motive videos in Chapter2.

Because Ouma is a liar, it’simportant to note that many of the things he does or says change drastically inperspective on a rewatch. Things which seemed incomprehensible or downrightmean or aggressive on a first playthrough shift quite a lot when going throughthe game again. Every single line he has can be scrutinized and analyzed—and it’smuch easier on a second playthrough to see that even when he sets himself up asthough he’s a Komaeda-like figure early on, his actions truly are aimed towardstrying to maintain the group’s safety or breaking out of the influence Monokumahas over them.

To put their differences evenfurther into perspective, Komaeda is legitimately a threat to the group’ssafety as early as Chapter 1 of sdr2. Despite setting himself up to seem like arelatively laid-back, easygoing person who was agreeable despite maybe being atad too self-deprecating, he completely crushes this impression of himself inthe Chapter 1 trial, revealing his true colors as well as the fact that he canand will put everyone’s lives at risk if it’s for the sake of “hope.”

He’s a dangerous idealist, asubversion of everything Naegi was in dr1 as well as the beginning of thefranchise’s point that “hope” and “despair” are two sides of the same coin, andthat both can be lethal when taken to extremes. His adherence to the ideal ofhope is just as fanatical as Junko’s adherence to despair, and that’s preciselywhy Komaeda is such a threat. His persistence and loyalty to that ideal and hisdesperate need to see hope “triumphover” despair make him a threat right off the bat, because he is honestly, 100%willing to sacrifice other people’s lives in order to obtain that ideal.

Not only that, but he’sincredibly smart. Not to the point of having SHSL Analysis the way Junko,Kamukura, and arguably Ouma himself are, but Komaeda is still extremely cunningand intelligent. Whatever his own plans don’t account for, he knows hisinexplicable luck will fill in the gaps for him, and that serves to make himeven more dangerous than he would be otherwise. He’s effective, because he cancreate plans and take incredible risks and gambles in order to put them inaction, knowing that the outcome will work out the way he wants when it wouldn’tfor any normal person.

Ouma is not an idealist of anysort. He doesn’t embody “hope” or “despair,” but instead represents ndrv3’scentral theme: “lies.” As a result, he rejects the “hope vs. despair” themes ofthe previous games right from the start. Even when he’s literally set up by theHope’s Peak remember light in Chapter 5 to be a “Junko 2.0” figure, the “leaderof the Remnants of Despair,” it’s clear that he had no interest whatsoever in aconcept or ideal like “despair.” A large part of ndrv3 Chapter 6 is actuallyspent clearing up the false accusations of Ouma being “Junko’s successor,”objectively proving that he had no such interests.

Unlike Komaeda, who trulybelieves that “hope” is equivalent with “talent” and that people without suchtalents are disposable, just “stepping stones” along the way to his goals, Oumahas no such biases against people, regardless of their talents or lack thereof.He’s a realist, rather than an idealist, someone who grasps the necessities ofparanoia and suspicion in the killing game right away but who also values humanlives more than abstract concepts like “hope,” “despair,” or “talent.”

Ouma’s motive video, found inhis room in Chapter 6, shows that he and DICE were nothing more than a band ofpranksters who enjoyed “laughable crimes,” and that their most important mottowas a taboo against killing others. While he will retaliate and have peoplekilled if push comes to shove, as Chapter 4 shows when Miu tried to kill him,it’s not a course of action he wants to take, and he’s never one to make thefirst move. The fact that he calls himself a pacifist in his FTEs with Saiharafurther supports this, as does the fact that he refrains from punching Momotauntil Momota takes a second swing athim in Chapter 4.

There’s no denying that Ouma isdefinitely not harmless or weak;clearly, he can and will fight back when his back is up against the wall. He’sa master strategist and not someone anyone should take lightly as an enemy. Buthe’s not someone who instigates violence for no reason, nor does he enjoy it.Even though it was arguably in self-defense, manipulating Miu and Gonta intogetting killed in Chapter 4 still took a toll on him. Violating his own mottowith DICE and getting people killed, regardless of the fact that it wasindirectly, was still something he hated, and the fact that he refused to takethe same course of action in Chapter 5 is proof of that.

It’s important to note toothat, as I mentioned earlier, Ouma very likely has some variation of SHSLAnalysis. Like Junko and Kamukura, he displays an uncanny knack for predictingthe behavior and outcome of his classmates and the situations around them, aswell as a distaste for boredom and stagnation. “Boredom” has been associatedwith “knowing everything before it happens” for some time now in the DRfranchise, ever since dr0, and many lines in Ouma’s dialogue seem to indicatethat he is, in fact, bored by how much he’s able to predict everything aroundhim.

The fact that he writes roughly300-or-so page script in Chapter 5 in the span of only two hours also backs upthis theory. His script was able to predict nearly every single one of hisclassmates’ lines and responses in the entire trial, and according to Momota,it featured “multi-branching routes.” Clearly, this sort of script would beoutside the realm of possibility for a normal person, so it follows that histalent must be related to it.

My main point is this: whereKomaeda leaves everything to the whims of chance and luck, knowing that it willpull through in the end for him, Ouma leaves nothing to luck. He analyzes, strategizes, and plans everythingout, and when one plan falls through, he immediately comes up with another oneon the spot in order to try and lessen the damages. He’s not a gambling man andunlikely to take any risks unless he’s 100% sure he can win—though he willcertainly bluff and claim that he’s “betting it all on the line.”

Even his FTEs with Saihara areproof of this: despite seeming like he’s playing games entirely based on chanceor luck, Ouma manipulates the outcome every step of the way, and eventuallyloses on purpose in order to let Saihara win. His ultimate advice is to “win agame without playing it,” which turns out to be exactly what Saihara and the othersurvivors do in order to put an end to the killing game once and for all inChapter 6. Where Komaeda would undoubtedly take any bet because he would knowfrom the start that he’d be the most likely to win it, Ouma refuses to play bythe rules of anyone else’s games but his own, and tries to find any loopholesor workarounds possible, even to the point of snatching the game away from thereal ringleader and trying to grind it to a halt in Chapter 5.

Ouma wants to seem like Komaedaon the surface: dangerous, chaotic, and willing to sacrifice the lives ofothers for his own needs. Not only does this make him seem like a bigger andbadder threat than he really is, which keeps his classmates on their toes andprevents them from getting complacent, but it also plays up the role that boththe ringleader and the audience very likely expected him to play. By actinglike such a huge, chaotic presence in the group, Ouma was able to disguise thefact that his real aim was to end the killing game itself until very late intoChapter 5.

I have no doubt the audience probablyloved the façade he put on, especiallyat first. The audience, the ringleader, and Monokuma himself all prioritizeanything at all that will make the killing game more exciting—and from theirperspective, a character who seems dedicated to showing up, playing thevillain, and ruining everyone’s efforts to get along and be friends andcooperate would be extremely entertaining. Such characters prevent the gamefrom getting “too boring,” just as Komaeda prevented the rest of the sdr2characters from fully cooperating with one another by constantly interferingwith them in order to “try and witness their hope” for himself.

But by playing into that roleand pretending to be a Komaeda-like character, it was the perfect way for Oumato downplay his real objectives. Acting like he was enjoying the killing gamewas, as he admits in Chapter 5 before his death, “a lie that he had to tellhimself in order to survive.” Without that lie in place, he wouldn’t have beenable to act the part, or to avoid attracting the ringleader’s attention muchearlier, as he points out as early as Chapter 2 that Monokuma always shows upto “torment” the group whenever they try to openly cooperate and rely on oneanother.

I understand why people assumethat their characters are similar, but Ouma and Komaeda are incredibly different once you scratchthe surface. Just as Komaeda was an intentional subversion of themes and motifsbrought up by Naegi in dr1, Ouma himself is a deliberate subversion of Komaeda’scharacter, as well as many of the themes found in the entire Hope’s Peak arc,such as the “hope vs. despair” dichotomy.

Trying to say that he’s “theexact same character” or “just a rehash” misses the point entirely, and ignoresthe fact that viewing Ouma through the same lens as Komaeda glosses over manyof the actions he takes in-game in the later chapters. As an example, let’stake the fact that they both choose to commit suicide in Chapter 5 of theirrespective games.

Komaeda engineers his own deaththrough a method entirely of his own choosing, in order to “expose the traitor”among their group and further his own goal of witnessing hope win out overdespair. Ouma manipulates the circumstances of his own death in Chapter 5 ofndrv3, but not by choice; he didn’t foresee being poisoned by Maki because hegenuinely believed that even she wouldn’t want to continue the killing gameanymore after seeing “the truth of the outside world,” and he didn’t know themeans by which the ringleader would manipulate her into it. Where Komaeda’sdeath was arguably aimed to punish his classmates for their involvement withSHSL Despair, Ouma died intentionally in order to try and strike back at thereal ringleader, and in order to let Maki live and let Momota have a chance tosay his farewells with the rest of their classmates.

Just an example like this helpsto highlight the differences between them because once again, proving that ifyou scratch the surface of their actions and dialogue, they’re very differentcharacters with very different mindsets and objectives. Although their behavioris somewhat similar at times, they do what they do for very different reasons.

I feel that it’s important tonote that DR has always been a franchise based on the subversion ofpreestablished tropes and expectations. Dr1 took a handful of clichés andtropes and played around with them, sdr2 took what dr1 had to offer and subvertedupon that, and ndrv3 took both games and went even further with the subversion.

Trying to act like a charactercan’t be interesting or unique in their own right just because they havesurface-level similarities seems a pity to me, because many characters in DRhave these surface-level similarities with one another, many of which areaddressed and then turned on their head in the main story. Komaeda and Ouma areboth interesting characters in their own right, and while they certainly doseem to have a lot in common initially, I would say their differences vastlyoutweigh their similarities by the end.

This has gotten fairly long, soI’ll leave it at this for now. This was a really excellent question, so I hopeI’ve managed to express my thoughts on the matter. Thank you for asking, anon!

#ndrv3 #new danganronpa v3 #sdr2 #kokichi ouma #nagito komaeda #ndrv3 spoilers //#my meta #okay to reblog #anonymous

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multievans · 6 years ago

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the ol’ switcheroo | self

VERSE: freaky friday – sam wakes up in someone else’s body.

SUMMARY: sam wakes up feeling odd and out of place. turns out he’s in blaine’s bedroom. and also blaine’s body.

SETTING: blaine’s room, sunday morning.

MENTIONS: blaine anderson, mary evans.

WARNINGS: none.

WORD COUNT: 1,772.

Sam didn’t like mornings.

He never had, really. Waking up early and attempting to start his day when he’d rather be curled up in his warm bed had always been extremely unappealing. But it wasn’t like he considered himself unique for it or whatever. Like, who wanted to get up in the morning, right? Aside from those really weird, chipper morning people who eat a handful of granola and run five miles before going to work.

He thought some of those people might be another species, though. Aliens, maybe.

It didn’t matter, anyway, because he wasn’t one of them. Getting out of bed was, for him, a whole process of rolling over, groaning, letting his eyes close just a little too long — rinse and repeat.

But most times were the same. He always had that same super groggy feeling dragging him down and it was, at the very least, familiar.

Except for when it wasn’t.

And that didn’t usually happen, so of course when Sam woke up and started to roll over and stretch and feel all sorts of wrong, he was immediately put off. Something wasn’t right, he just couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He chalked it up to not getting enough sleep (he couldn’t just not finish his late night Silent Hill playthrough) and went about his routine of waking himself up.

It wasn’t until he sat up and ran a hand through his hair that he realized just how not-right something was. He was met with curly hair rather than the usual texture that gave him barely any resistance. He paused, his eyebrows coming together as he lowered his hand, which he instantly noticed looked...different. Not by much, just not quite the ones he was used to seeing every day.

His eyes adjusted to the entire scene in front of him, and he realized he wasn’t in his room. No, he was in Blaine’s. He woke up in Blaine’s bed, with Blaine himself nowhere to be found.

Well...technically.

Sam, suddenly feeling much more awake, scrambled out of bed to head toward the bathroom. He tried to ignore the noticeably different (i.e. shorter) vantage point he suddenly had while standing up straight. He nearly tumbled into the bathroom, way more frantic than was probably necessary, and took a good look in the mirror.

Sure enough, Blaine stared back at him, with a wide-eyed expression that was very, well, Sam. He was seeing Blaine, but when Sam raised a hand, the reflection did too, and when he turned his head, he watched Blaine’s do the same.

What the hell?

Sam headed back to Blaine’s bedroom in search of his phone. It wasn’t placed haphazardly somewhere near his pillow like Sam’s usually was in the morning, but rather on the nightstand, plugged in. Sam swore he tried to get it together every night, but most times he just fell asleep with his phone next to his head before he got the chance to take care of it. He’d have to make a note to get better at that once...whatever this was got back under control.

Sam typed in Blaine’s phone password (because of course he knew it; how else was a bro supposed to change the playlist while Blaine was driving and couldn’t access his phone?) and went into his contacts. It took him a second to register why he wasn’t able to find “Nightbird” anywhere; he was Nightbird today, apparently. He scrolled to where he’d find “Blond Chameleon” — the contact names were Sam’s idea — and sure enough, there it was. His hands almost fumbled with how quickly he pressed call and put the phone to his ear.

“Sam.” Sam was put off by the sound of his own voice speaking to him, even through the slight distortion from the phone. “I was just about to call you.”

“Dude, what the hell is this?” He knew it was a stretch to assume Blaine might have a clear answer, but the fact was he often just knew things that Sam didn’t. Blaine was logical and reasonable and all the things Sam sometimes had to be reminded about.

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me,” Blaine replied, predictably. Sam heard a sigh and then rustling, and he wondered if Blaine was doing his own hand through the hair thing. “Was anything weird last night before you went to bed?”

Sam sat down on the edge of Blaine’s bed as he thought back to the night before. Nothing stood out, except that he’d had a little bit of a headache, but he was pretty sure that was from staring at a screen for so many hours straight. “Not really.”

It was quiet for a moment, because neither of them had any answers or explanations. Sam started cycling through the possibilities in his head. It couldn’t be a prank, unless someone Sam knew happened to be a really good magician or something. And he wasn’t just seeing things, because his surroundings weren’t morphing back into his own room no matter how many times he closed and reopened his eyes, and his own voice through the phone, separate from his body, was clear.

“Maybe this is a dream. Like a really weird, vivid dream,” Sam suggested. “That could happen, right? Like this is all just in my subconscious and when I go back to sleep I’ll wake up and be me.” He looked down at himself — Blaine’s self? — as if to confirm that that was not who he currently was.

“I guess. But that would mean I’m having the same dream.”

Sam hadn’t really considered that part.

“Dude, this is like that weird Daredevil comic.” Something sparked in Sam’s brain, and his (Blaine’s?) eyes widened slightly as he started to add, “You don’t think—”

“Somehow I don’t think Doctor Doom played a part in this.” Blaine’s voice of reason cut through Sam’s thoughts before he could even get the words out.

The dude knew how his brain worked a little too well sometimes. And Sam was thankful for that; truly, he was. He didn’t need someone to take care of him or anything like that and he was sure Blaine didn’t see it that way either, but they certainly balanced each other out. Having Blaine around was like that whole angel on his shoulder thing, the sensible voice to counteract Sam’s sometimes highly illogical thoughts and theories. Sam couldn’t really be blamed, though. He had a creative mind. Unfortunately that wasn’t enough to get him through most of his classes. Otherwise he’d be skating by, and he wouldn’t need Blaine to tell him that no, his teacher was likely not abducted by aliens who might have looked like Sam, and that that wasn’t the reason Sam was being directly targeted in class, despite the stack of evidence Sam had to prove it.

Anyway.

It was just weird to hear that sound logic coming from Sam’s own voice.

“Well, you got any better ideas?”

“I don’t think we need to come up with an explanation right now so much as we need to figure out how to proceed. I think our best bet at the moment is to just go with it. I think...you have to be me. And I have to be you.”

Sam didn’t exactly know how he was supposed to do that. Obviously he knew a lot about Blaine and the way he talked and stuff like that; the dude was his best friend. But like, he still wasn’t Blaine. How was he expected to live a life that wasn’t his own and not raise any suspicion? There was no way he could just...not be Sam all of a sudden. Not to mention the fact that Sam had no clue how long this was going to last. He couldn’t act like Blaine forever.

Sam shook his head, though he knew Blaine couldn’t see it over the phone. “I dunno about this, man.”

"You got any better ideas?”

Sam hated when he did that mimicking thing. It wasn’t mean or anything, just reminded Sam how he sounded when he said things like that. And it definitely got the point across, because no, Sam did not have any better ideas.

“Okay, okay. I guess you’re right.”

Just then, Sam heard four quick knocks on his bedroom door through the phone. His mom was coming to wake him. Or Blaine, technically. God, this was confusing.

“Uh, come in,” Blaine said with the slightest hesitancy that only Sam would notice, his voice a bit distant as he’d probably lowered the phone.

He could hear his mom’s voice but couldn’t quite make out what she was saying. He heard his own voice tell her that he would be down in a minute. The door closed, more rustling on the phone, then Blaine was back. “Guess I’m going to church.”

Sam smiled despite himself. “Oh yeah. Sunday. That oughta be fun.”

“Tons.”

“Hey, you might get lucky where my brother’ll throw a fit about putting on somethin’ nice and then you’ll be late.”

“Sounds like a good time.” Blaine sighed again. “Okay, well. I should probably start to get this show on the road. And you should do the same.” He paused. “Please, just...be reasonable.”

“What? What would I do that’s unreasonable?” Sam asked, his brow furrowing. He was almost offended by the implication.

“Just try to remember that regardless of whatever’s going on right now, we’re not in a superhero movie, so don’t go jumping off of buildings to see if you can fly or anything like that.”

“You have my word, Nightbird. Or, uh, Blond Chameleon, I guess.”

For the first time, Blaine laughed, and it was a weird mix of Blaine’s actual laugh and the sound of Sam’s and he was reminded of the gravity of the situation and just how strange it was. “Roger that.”

“Later, dude.”

“Bye, Sam.”

With that, they hung up, and Sam tossed the phone onto the bed. He didn’t know how on earth he was going to pull this off, but he knew he had a few big obstacles to tackle before anything else.

First, he had to get dressed without feeling like it was some huge invasion of Blaine’s privacy, which was gonna be pretty tough. But not as tough as task number two: getting Blaine’s hair to his normal everyday look. And Sam didn’t have the slightest clue where to even start. Was it brush then gel? Gel then brush? Both interchangeably?

He supposed he’d figure it out.

Sam probably would have preferred if Doctor Doom had been involved after all.

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rinabrunoblog · 6 years ago

Text

Resident Evil 2 Review – No Spoilers

Winter, 1998. 8:50 AM. A friend of mine and I were standing outside of video-arcade waiting for it to open. We’ve heard that a new, revolutionary game arrived and we wanted to see what it is. We were only 13 years old at a time, but back then, video games were something quite fascinating to us. That video-arcade was the only one in town with a PlayStation. And we didn’t mind the cold or the fact that we had to spend most of our allowance just to play for a few hours.

Once it opened, we were the first in line to play the PlayStation. The worker showed us the new game. It was titled “Resident Evil 2” and there was a terrifying picture on the cover of the disc. We decided to see what it is. We didn’t mind it being a single player game, we took turns playing it. And we were instantly hooked to it. I still remember several failed attempts to reach the police station until I learned how the game works. The next few hours we were simply drawn into the world of the survival horror. It was the feeling, unlike anything I’ve experienced at the time.

Now, more than 20 years later, Capcom has released Resident Evil 2 Remake. I was thrilled back in 2015 when I’ve heard the announcement that they are remaking it. Given their history with previous remakes, I was quite optimistic about this one. Once I saw the E3 trailer, I was overwhelmed with the excitement. It looked … perfect! I’ve pre-ordered it the moment it was available and ever since that day, I was counting down the days until it’s release.

Once the One-shot demo became available, I installed it and played until the 30 minutes limit was up. It left me with a bittersweet feeling because I only got to see a tiny bit of the game. But I didn’t mind. I was hopeful that the game will live up to its legacy. And boy I was right. I was counting down the minutes until the game was released. The moment I started playing, I was “hooked” again.

It was a similar feeling from 20 years ago when I first played it. The opening Cinematic was masterfully done. The amount of work put in it is simply amazing. There are so many small details that are easy to miss, but any true fan of the series will instantly notice them. Each character’s facial animation was done doing motion capture, and I can honestly say that they did a fantastic job. You can notice their feelings and expressions in every dialogue and situation and it really adds up to the overall experience of the game.

The game uses RE Engine, which was used to create Resident Evil 7, which enabled the developers to add so many new and fascinating things, never seen in the series before. The graphics of the game are breathtaking. Every room contains so many unique things that simply look amazing. Each character was designed with so many unique little details in mind. Capcom definitely showed us the real power of RE Engine with this game. It is safe to say that Resident Evil 2 is one of the best looking games of the current era.

Unlike the fixed cameras in the old game, this one features “over the shoulder” point of view, similar to Resident Evil 4, and to be honest, it was the right thing to do. It modernizes the gameplay, while still maintaining the horror aspect that the old game had. As for the gameplay, the controls are quite responsive and easy to learn. Also, unlike the previous games, whenever you kill an enemy, its corpse will remain on the ground right where you shot it. However, whenever you down a zombie, you can’t really tell if it’s dead or not unless you hit it once more and see if it reacts. There are no “blood pools” to indicate if a zombie is dead or not, and it only furthers up the horror element of the game. Also, whenever you hit an enemy, the blood will splatter around, which is so gory to watch. Depending on where you hit them, you can remove some of the limbs of the zombies, thus reducing the threat they pose.

Similar to the original game, this one also features a unique set of weapons for both Leon and Claire. But, unlike the original game, the ammunition for each of those is pretty scarce, so you’ll never get the feeling of comfort. Every time you encounter an enemy, you will be faced with the decision or shooting it or running away. The game features the adaptive difficulty that was present back in Resident Evil 4. What it means is that the better you play, the harder the enemies will become. If you skillfully land headshots one after another, the enemies will become more and more resistant to it and it will become much harder to take them down. When you factor in that the ammunition is fairly scarce, you’ll be left dreading each new room you have to explore. Also, the knife in this game can be used to slash enemies, like in the previous games, but it can also be used as a defensive item, like in Resident Evil 1 Remake. It has a durability bar, and with each slash, it will get lower and lower until it finally breaks. In addition, you can also use explosive and flash grenades as defensive items, which will allow you to escape grabs and stagger your attacker for a bit. Also, the game features the gunpowder system that was present in Resident Evil 3, which gives the player freedom of choosing which weapon to focus on. Capcom really took the best gameplay elements of each previous Resident Evil game and combined them in this remake.

Like the original game, this one also features Tyrant monster, also known as Mr. X by fans of the series. He will relentlessly pursue you throughout the Police Station. You’ll be able to hear his footsteps whenever he is close enough, which will increase the sense of dread and hopelessness. Add in the fact that he is impossible to kill, and you’ll be horrified every time you hear his footsteps while walking through the narrow corridor.

As for the game itself, similar to the original, it features A and B scenarios for both Leon and Claire. You can start the game by playing with either Leon’s or Claire’s first playthrough (A scenario). Completing it will unlock the 2nd playthrough for the other character (B scenario). This way, you have four different playthroughs, each with its own unique elements and story. While some may argue that you play each of those through similar areas and that most of the puzzles are similar, the placement of the key items is different for each scenario, which will force you to take a different route and thus make the experience unique for each of those. Also, the 2nd scenario for each of the characters features an additional handgun which is a lot stronger than the regular one, and it further differentiates the gameplay aspect of each playthrough.

The music in the game is also phenomenal. It creeps under your skin and adds an additional layer of horror to this already terrifying game. The music that plays while Tyrant is chasing you is just filling you with chills which leave you horrified with each step on the way. Unlike the original where the voice acting was considered cringy and poorly done, this game’s voice actors did a remarkable job. Combined with the facial expressions of the characters, it really shows you the trauma these characters are going through.

On top of that, once you complete both first and the second playthrough of the game, you will unlock the Fourth Survivor mode, in which you can play as Hunk. It is quite similar to the original Fourth Survivor. You start your way at the sewers and you have to battle your way to the police station where the extraction chopper is waiting for you. This mode is heavily action packed, which is a great addition to the game. However, you won’t be able to find any pickups, so you’ll need to choose when to run and when to fight. Once you complete it, you will unlock Tofu mode, with the iconic character returning from the original game. Also, once you complete this mode, you’ll unlock two other Tofu characters that you can use in this mode. And if this is not enough, Capcom has announced an additional mode called The Ghost Survivors. In this mode, you will be able to play as Robert Kendo, a firearms dealer you encounter in the game; Katherine Warren, a daughter of Raccoon City’s mayor or as an unnamed member of Umbrella Security Service. This DLC will come out completely free in March 2019, which is certainly nice to hear. Alongside this DLC, Capcom has announced that they will be releasing alternative models for both Leon and Claire. Those will be the PS1 models used in the original game, which is certainly going to warm the hearts of all long-time fans of the series.

Overall, I have to say that this remake is everything I’ve hoped for and more. Capcom has really gone a long way to please the fans of the series, and they have certainly succeeded in that. I heartily recommend this game, not just to fans of the series, but to all gamers who love the horror genre, as this is a game all the fans were crying out for. This is the game that gave me those same thrills I experienced 20 years ago, and I am glad that I had the chance to experience it again.

Resident Evil 2 Review – No Spoilers syndicated from https://lucystrickland.wordpress.com/

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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Last week, we took a journey back to the world of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion to stream a chat with lead designer Ken Rolston about his work on Bethesda's breakout role-playing game. Today, we've taken the time to transcribe our conversation with Rolston for your full perusal. Read on for some in-depth insights on his work on Oblivion and its predecessor Morrowind!

This interview has been lightly edited for clarification. Gamasutra's Alex Wawro and Bryant Francis both peppered Rolston with questions.

Alex Wawro: Hello and welcome to Gamasutra’s Thursday stream. Today we are playing Oblivion. I am Gamasutra editor, Alex Wawro and I am joined by Gamasutra contributing editor, Bryant Francis and most importantly, Oblivion lead designer Ken Rolston. Ken, how are you doing? Ken Rolston: I am perfect in every way.

Wawro: Ken, I was surprised. You know, when we first started corresponding about this you mentioned to me that you had sort of been idly considering doing some of your own livestreaming, some of your own YouTube video production. I kind of wanted to get, pick your brain of what you think the value is there and what makes you excited about returning to older games and sort of sharing your experiences working on them. Rolston: Well the larger concept is that I don’t believe that any work of literature or art, and this, I must admit is “Light Classics,” but this is a form of art, depends on the creator, the text, and the viewer or the reader. And I’m always very interested in the various different ways that people write criticism. And in terms of games they also do Let’s Plays. So I was interested for myself, I wanted to go see how other people played my game, because when you design a game you don’t really have a lot of feedback from your audience. So you don’t know what they’re going to appreciate and enjoy.

And then after the game is completed, you get to watch and find out how people really play your game. And from my point of view, I said, “Well, what would it be like if the designer of the game went and became the audience for his own game and started to play it. And then tried to do a let’s play, which then became kind of a story about my relationship with making the game.” So it’s just a dumb opportunity to try to blend the user and the creator in a way that an open game does accidentally and trying to be a little more purposeful about it. I was just doing experimental crap, that’s all.

Francis: Yeah, my question first, Alex, is did you just try to light this church on fire there? Wawro: Uh, look. Oblivion is part of our classic games series. It’s a little older. It’s been a while since I’ve played this game. It’s been a whole week in fact, and I kind of forgot which was the crouch key and which was the cast key. Turns out C is cast and Control is crouch. I won’t make that mistake again, I promise. Francis: Yeah, I guess I’ll jump off with a question that Mitchell Sabbagh, who joins us very regularly in the chat wanted to ask for you, Ken, how do you feel your design philosophy evolved between working on Morrowind and working on Oblivion? Rolston: Uh, I believe I did not have a design philosophy when I was doing Morrowind. By the way, you have now joined the Temple Climbing Club. This, by the way, for Morrowind, was the idea of open world means if you make your own fun then you decide on your own goals. And in Morrowind, we decided that one of the ways to play the game was to be the Temple Climbers Club. I’ve never seen anybody climb one of the religious buildings in Oblivion. So you accidentally joined a very important freeform gaming group. Wawro: And now I have a new purpose in life. Rolston: I’m sorry, I’m going to go back to your question, now. Francis: No, that was important. Rolston: How did my philosophy of development evolve? I think it did not exist at all before Morrowind, and then once I had a chance to see how people played with things in Morrowind, I began to try to have more explicit conversations between myself and the player in the non-quest dialogue. I didn’t work nearly so much on the detail level of Oblivion. They’re almost two completely different lead design concepts. In Morrowind, I essentially wrote the outline of all the quest lines. There were only three designers, so that was practical. And I made an awful lot of the content myself.

"I essentially wrote the outline of all the quest lines. There were only three designers, so that was practical. And I made an awful lot of the content myself. "

With Oblivion, I made hardly any of the content myself, just a few scraps in the main quest and a couple of different quests. So my design was changed from a highly centrally controlled, centrally authored content to something which had as many different voices as possible. All the different designers, I wanted them to take my rough outlines for the designs and then remove the content of the outlines and simply make sure they hit all the basic elements, but have completely different content. That result, for example Emil [Pagliarulo], did amazing work with the Dark Brotherhood, I could never have done anything like that. Emil’s skills are completely different, orthogonal to mine. And the thief system -- the thief guild quests by Bruce Nesmith were completely different than any of the other quest structures. So the way it evolved in that sense was in the way the development evolved.

The more designers you have, the more opportunities you have to have a larger game with many different voices, many different styles. I think one of the great things about the Elder Scrolls games, as they’ve evolved, is that they have many more voices and therefore they suit the ears of the players better. By example, when I used to teach high school, I used to hope that at least once in your life you found a teacher who was your soulmate. That was kind of what I wanted you to do in the games. I hope you find one designer that did some content that really was your soulmate as a player that was able to have his own particular personality and express it in the gameplay and the design.

Wawro: Hm, I wonder, you gave us the hot tip before we started that it would be wise to sort of expand the boundaries of a new Oblivion playthrough by opening up everything, looking at the game and opening up the Oblivion gates as well. Is there an area you would suggest that well shows off what you’re talking about here? Maybe it shows your hand directly or the hand of a designer you admire? Rolston: Uh, no, because the possibility of a lead designer knowing the content of any Elder Scrolls game is diminishingly small. Morrowind is the only one I can really talk about, but I don’t think I’d actually played more than 60% of the built content when we released the game. I had certainly played it in prototype or white box or things like that, but you just cannot play the whole content, it’s just too big to put the iterations into it. So the reason I suggested wandering to different places, just be a tourist. Francis: Yeah, I was going to real quick, invite our viewers to give Alex -- Alex you’re still playing that pilgrim from last week, right? Wawro: Yeah, and I’m level two and I unlocked Oblivion Gates early, so if you don’t give me somewhere to go, we’re going to go to a quick death pretty soon. Rolston: Oblivion! Yay!

"The very first Morrowind was essentially a novel, the main quest, plus three or four or five or six other novels which are the main guild things. And then millions of little short stories."

Francis: Let’s see what pilgrimage our players want you to go on. So Ken, do you think that makes Elder Scrolls games kind of the equivalent of a short story collection? Rolston: Let’s see, the role playing game, in general, is the novel of the computer game class. So in this sense, it’s more like a collection of multiple novels built with different perspectives and settings. It’s really hard to come up with a literary comparison for the way it works. But for example, the very first Morrowind, was essentially a novel, that is the main quest, plus three or four or five or six other novels which are the main guild things. And then millions of little short stories that were either formally organized by quests or simply you drop a magic item into the world and that is a quest on its own. Once you discover the existence of the different items and you find out about them on the boards, you say, “I really want to have that bow.” Then that’s your story. Wawro: Yeah, absolutely. Francis: Alex, [Twitch Viewer] is advising that you guide Salamantha to Shaden Hall, if I’m saying that area right. Wawro: Yeah, sure. Francis: So let’s begin our journey there and see what happens. Wawro: Alright, well I’m going to see if I can get away from this charming chap. Rolston: I’m not sure that you can teleport except when you don’t have enemies around you. So you have to have some kind of a solution there. See if it works. Francis: I guess my next question for you Ken, while Alex is trying to survive here...We’re talking about fast travelling, right now and I know whenever anyone is making a big fantasy game like this, you want players to experience the world and experience some kind of simulation. But why did you all decide to implement a fast travel system that worked the way it did? And how do you feel it affected that relationship players have with the world?

"The player can always choose to walk, but the ability to fast travel lets you use the game in the way you want to use it."

Rolston: I think I learned the most about that from Mark Nelson, who was really like a second in command at that point for Oblivion. He was also a designer on Morrowind. He hated the concept of fast travel and Todd Howard wanted to have fast travel. And I think I fought it in kind of a casual way, but Mark fought it in a principled and heartfelt way. And both Mark and I were dead wrong and Todd was right, that what it did is it served the needs of the user. The player can always choose to walk, if he wants to, but his ability to fast travel lets him use the game in the way he wants to use it. I think it was foolish of us to believe that our experience of Morrowind should be the determining way that the game should be read. And I’m really glad that Todd, in almost every case, whenever Todd and I disagreed, Todd was right and I was wrong.

Francis: I’m kind of curious how you and your fellow coworkers on this game handled disagreements like that. Creative stuff like that is kind of a weird place where you have to either have faith that you’re right or someone else is right. And when no one’s sure who’s right, you have to debate -- hopefully debate and not argue about it. But how do you as a team come to a consensus on those kinds of things. Rolston: I think there are many different roads to enlightenment in this department. And I characterize BethSoft in the most positive way as the “raised by wolves” school. All of us are very very independent and sure that we’re right. And we fight like cats and dogs, but I think conflict is very good in this particular sense that we all shared love for one another’s peculiar points of view.

And also we were so lucky, by the time we were working on Oblivion, is we knew we had done something that nobody else could do, and therefore we felt very good about it. But we none of us were really particularly sure we knew how we had done it or what kind of basic principles made it art. And we felt like they were always evolving, so that process of conflict was part of the fun of it.

And I’ll say particularly in the case of fast travel, Todd, and almost in all cases of the design things, Todd as the producer had the capacity to rule programmers to secretly or above board go ahead and stub in something as a prototype. And once you’ve got the prototype to use as an argument to beat your companions with, you’re almost certainly going to win. But at the same time, it’s so possible with the editor, for us, if we believe that what we’re doing is right, we could go and stub something in and prove the kind of experience to a certain extent using the editor.

"The Skyrim Engine is such a fabulous tool because it lets us all be designers individually in a brute force way, whether we’re specialists or not. "

I think the key thing that may be mysterious and not well understood by other role playing game developers, is that the tool that BethSoft used and evolved from Morrowind and through now the Fallout Gek and the Elder Scrolls development -- I don’t know what it’s called nowadays -- The Skyrim Engine. It is such a fabulous tool because it lets us all be designers individually in a brute force way, whether we’re specialists or not. Programmers, artists, can stub in things and we can make a cogent case that is experienceable in the alpha version of the game. Overnight! And then jam it down the throats of our learned disquisition and debate society. Wawro: [laughs] Yeah, I wonder where that philosophy and where that toolkit came from. Because I remember when I was younger, I remember the first big thing I got into modding was Morrowind. And it was because of the approachability of the Elder Scrolls construction set. And that has given these games an enduring life post-launch thanks to all the vibrant mod scene that sort of spawns up around every single one of them. I don’t remember, did that really come into its own with Morrowind, do you recall? Rolston: Yes.

Wawro: Do you remember, obviously, you might not have been involved in these conversations, but do you remember what the thinking was at the studio in making that kind of toolset available to the audience.

"The tools themselves are a language of development that makes it possible for everybody in the team to feel like they’re making something and that they understand how everything else is made."

Rolston: I was there at that time, we had made a false start on Morrowind earlier and then we put it aside and we worked on Redguard and -- I’m going to forget the name of other -- Wawro: Battlespire? Rolston: Battlespire. We were working on those with the tabled the work on Morrowind. But we had made a list of ten features that we wanted to be able to celebrate as objectives in our development. And also to use all the way through advertising and public relations when we got to trying to sell the product. And one of those ten things was an editor that you could create content with. That was a consumer facing decision relatively early on, but also whether we were conscious of it or not, it was a necessary condition of making a game this large. We needed to have a tool that made it possible to make the game quickly and then iterate it. There are some great games, I’m going to -- It’s probably an Ubisoft open world, modern world shooter. One of the first great shooters based on -- Set in Africa, does that ring a bell? Wawro: Far Cry 2. Rolston: Far Cry 2, one of the great designs of all time, but it was primarily scripted. And that meant that it was very brittle and very hard to revise on the fly. So once you had content, you couldn't learn from that content from playing it. Whereas with our editor, we were constantly able to evolve our idea of what was fun in play. Also being able to build a world that large meant that it needed to be easy to do it. And having a kind of user-faced design meant that those tools would work for just about anybody in the development team. Wawro: Right. I, am having a hard time stealing anything because I forgot how hard it is to be a brigand and a malcontent in this game. I also wanted to ask, in the last couple of years, Bethesda has sort of broke big on the back of Oblivion it launched Skyrim and did quite well there and did quite well with the Fallout games. Some game developers have come out and sort of publicly championed the studio and said that, “It makes very iconic, unique games. Games that in many ways, only Bethesda can make.” And they attribute it to sort of a looking in from the outside, they say a key part of that is the studio’s unique culture. It’s rare that we get to talk to somebody who worked there for quite a long period of time and also had meaningful experience elsewhere. I know you worked in tabletop role playing games at west end, you worked on Kindoms of Amalur: Reckoning, you’ve worked, I think, on Hinterlands recently. So I kind of wanted to get your sense, as someone with a lot of experience at different studios and different environments, is there anything interesting or unique about the way Bethesda Game Studios makes games?

"Bethesda has a long institutional memory. The personalities in it have fought with one another and worked together for a long time."

Rolston: I think the key part to making Bethesda is the longevity of the major players. It has a long institutional memory and the personalities in it have fought with one another and worked together for a long time. That’s probably the most important thing. But also the tools themselves are a language of development that makes it possible for everybody in the team to feel like they’re making something and that they understand how everything else is made. It might well be the only studio that has the ability to see all the way sausage are made in a sympathetic way. I think something like Ubisoft with its very very large teams who all do very specific tasks, that is a very high polished production model. That might be a Hollywood model for making great polish.

But I would also say that BethSoft is about not making polish. And I don’t mean that in any way negative. That there’s a level of jazz to what’s going on rather than a classical music coming from a script. If it isn’t clean, but it’s fun we can understand it. That comes partly from being able to make new stuff, but anybody can just go in and see how it’s done and say, “Oh, I understand that. Maybe we can do this instead.” And I think it creates a development environment where everybody feels they understand at a higher level of sharing what other people do and how what they do affects day-to-day development.

Wawro: Nice. I think we lost -- Rolston: And they have ownership! I should have said ownership. You can break things and fix things very quickly and then have somebody make them better. So when you own something that somebody can make a little bit better really quickly, you have that relationship with those people working with you. Wawro: Yeah, I think we lost Bryant there for a sec. Bryant are you still -- Francis: I’m back, I was yanked out of the room by dark-suited men and had to fight my way back. Rolston: He’s probably been impregnated. If there was an ovipositor involved, Bryant, you probably want to have that looked at. Francis: They’re just suits, they probably wanted money! [Ed. note: Bryant was not impregnated] Wawro: Bryant are there any hot suggestions from the chat on what we should do next? Because I tried to get into some thieving and it didn’t go so hot. Francis: I’ll give a shoutout to the chat again to invite them to give suggestions for Alex for what kind of adventure he should put himself on. I don’t even know, what do you do in this city? I didn’t make it this far in my brief adventure into Oblivion last time, so I don’t even know what the central story of this city is myself. Rolston: I think the important thing, for example, if Alex wants to have more fun is to stop doing the things that he’s struggling doing and just deciding he wants to do something else. For example, the lockpicking interface is probably not one of the finest moments of any immersive open world game. There were many mini games that were proposed for Oblivion. That was a period of time when minigames were really really cool. Like I can’t remember there was a pipes minigame in which you tried to figure something out by having water move from one place to another. That was a very hip -- Francis: BioShock had that one. Rolston: Precisely, so that was the flavor of the month at that point. And you are fortunate not to have had a armor repairing minigame and for example the speech craft minigame in this thing is certainly not one of our finest moments and I bless Bruce Nesmith for making as not horrible -- Oh, that’s a nice pose. Wawro: That’s a good statue.

Rolston: That is very nice. Now what you’re doing, actually you should just try to attract people to how beautiful you are, Alex. Pose in different places, look fetching. Wawro: I’m going to change into some snazzier duds, yeah. Francis: Yeah, now the question is getting clothes. Actually, jumping on lock picking real quick, Nat Kidno would like to know is there a specific reason why lock picking pauses the game as opposed to Morrowind where it’s real time.

"The virtue of having been a paper and pencil role playing game designer meant that I spent a period of time creating worlds and publishing them within say six months. So that meant you had to, out of nothing, create a world, make it coherent, and publish it immediately."

Rolston: There might be and guess what, I don’t remember. I believe that it is a more immersive simulation to have the real time passing, and I believe we could have felt that that was inviting the player to expect more from the experience than we had any intention to provide. Lock picking and for example another one of the great sad things is pickpocketing never has been the exciting immersive open world experience that it could be and that’s another great thing about BethSoft, we’re perfectly willing to give you a substandard quality of experience if it still gives you the choice and you can continue to have some fun with it. Wawro: Yeah, I kind of want to dig into that little deeper because as I alluded to earlier you spent some time working on tabletop role playing games. Specifically I remember from my own youth a game called Paranoia. Oh!

Rolston: Yes. Wawro: I’m in trouble, hang on. I’m just going to back away slowly. So as I extricate myself from this particular predicament, tell me a bit about, if you can, about how your experience writing and designing tabletop games influences the way you go about making video games. Rolston: The virtue of having been a paper and pencil role playing game designer meant that I spent a period of time creating worlds and publishing them within say six months. So that meant you had to, out of nothing, create a world, make it coherent, and publish it immediately. And then throw it away and go into the next one. So that high level of expectation of iteration is one of the virtues of working with paper and pencil. And particularly for Morrowind -- By the way, I celebrate you, Alex, for figuring out how to solve the problem. Running from it almost always is right approach. Wawro: That’s how I solve all my problems. Francis: Did you just totally steal a horse and bolt out -- Rolston: Absolutely, head for the horizon at this point and then you get to become a tourist. I may have lost my thread on that question. Bryant, do you remember any of what I was saying.

Horse armor!

Francis: You were just starting to explain how Morrowind related to your tabletop experience where you were building worlds out of scratch and getting them to work in a few weeks. Wawro: And iteration, I think was a key theme there. Rolston: Well that was the first key and the second key is that I probably have not been worth my pay in any game development environment as much as I was in the beginning of Morrowind, because no one had ever built a game this big and then tried to do the three to six months of preproduction for it. Because I had done paper games I could do, I could create a bible out of nothing quickly that had little elements of connection between characters in towns.

And knowing to do that, that everybody should know that every town has N number of people in it and each of those people in that town belong to one faction or another. And, for example, a guy living in one house belonging to the thieves guild and a guy in another house belonging to the thieves guild meant that they were friends in some way. What it was is it created a large number of intersection nodes in the setting that you could build a coherent story out of. And I knew to do that, because you need to do that for tabletop games.

But I also knew how to produce it and then give people the opportunity reading my documentation to say, “Oh this character could fit into my story,” or, “This guy’s got a personality that will fit really nicely into the story I want to tell.” And all of that work it brute force spewing. It’s the kind of spewing that very few writers ever need to be able to do. So a paper and pencil guy does it normally and -- I won’t say throws it away. He ships it and moves on to his next one. So that put me in a position to be really useful for Morrowind. And after that, having that as the model, most of the documentation and development of the other Elder Scrolls games was able to build on that inter-coherence. Wawro: Nice. I’m going to extricate myself from this tomb now. Francis: Ken, I have a question based on. Ken my question is -- Oh, am I having rough times? Wawro: Yeah, but why don’t we just try to get your question out and we’ll see how it goes.

Francis: Okay, Ken, I last time made some comments saying even though I’ve enjoyed my time in the world of Elder Scrolls. Everytime I pop open the game, which ever one it’s been, I’ve always felt this very arm's reach between me and many of the motivating factors behind the world. The factions the quests, I’ll care about it if it relates to a character I can see in front of me or a location I can understand, but I always felt this distance behind the giant book of Morrowind lore or Elder Scrolls lore and what was in the game play. How did you sort of view all the work that had been done on the Elder Scrolls games at that point. All those story character relationships and how did it affect your approach to getting players to integrate with it. Rolston: I think every player needs to have his own attitude about the way he involves himself in the game. The great thing about the Elder Scrolls games is they support both a naval gazing indifference to everything in the world, that is just running around and stealing things is a thoroughly satisfying story to tell -- Oh, you had a bad day. Wawro: Yep. Rolston: And there is the degree to which the Elder Scrolls games now have a life online where people are interested in that setting in a very deep way. They’re immersed in the factions and the relationships of what they do, so my sense is, looking back at the Arena game and the Daggerfall game, they were important models that I could use. Just as an example, the creation of books in a game that you could read, they can be used in a lot of different ways, they can immerse you in the setting, they can simply give you flavor, or they can give you skills and therefore you don’t care about the contents of the books, you just want to collect every book. So the more junk you put into a game that nonetheless seems, at least at one moment or another during running around, to seem logically connected to another thing. Whether you actually give a shit about that or not is not what’s important. It’s the illusion that it all makes sense that makes it a more immersive game. Wawro: Yeah something I -- This is relatively unrelated, but I think Bryant and I were talking about it offline earlier this week. Some games do a really excellent job of giving the player just enough room to hang themselves narratively. Insofar as a game like Destiny from Bungie will give you lots of proper nouns. It will give you lots of like “The Traveler” “The Last City” “The Covenant” or “The Kabbal.” Those in a very meaningful way are sort of vague but evocative pieces of storytelling that give the player room to kind of fill in the gaps on their own. I think what’s interesting about these games is they do that in a very physical sense. There is just tons and tons of stuff in this game that you don’t have to see, and maybe isn’t fully explained, but gives the player fodder to sort of tell their own story. And that I think is a unique strength. Francis: I’ll springboard off of Alex’s observation to ask, Ken, you mentioned earlier when you were writing that bible for Morrowind, you were starting to write about all the places where all these intersections would happen, right? And all these elements, “This character is of this faction or is of this mindset, so they would be in conflict with this thing.” Once a game like this starts getting big or even just medium sized. Even a medium-sized RPG would have trouble with this. How do you keep track and organize and focus making all those intersections happen? I guess that’s maybe more of a Morrowind question since you said you weren’t that in the thick of it on Oblivion. But how do you make those intersections manageable? Rolston: I believe it’s a high tolerance for chaos and disorder that is first required. And then it means that as a development team, you’re playing each other’s games a lot and giving feedback on it. And I think on Oblivion, the degree to which the producers -- We didn’t really have producers on Morrowind in the same way. The producers giving regular feedback, Todd’s feedback on these things. But I would say that the virtue of BethSoft is not in the level of control exerted over its content, but in the generosity of the content and its brute force willingness to work through the problems. Wawro: Brute force is a very apt term to use. Rolston: Absolutely, again, that’s BethSoft, brute force.

Wawro: Alright, here we go. Francis: I’ll just throw out to the chat, if you have any questions for Ken, we’re in the second half of the hour, make sure you get it in before we go here. Wawro: Yeah, I’ll try to get us to an Oblivion Gate so we can look at some more architecture. Francis: Yeah, I’ll jump off of a discussion we were having earlier. You talked about minigames and there was a moment where minigames were popular. Why? What was it that made all the developers of the early 2000s, I guess, so gung-ho for minigames? Rolston: It was the discovery that it was a possible tool for immersion. And when you play Fable and chop wood and you are able to do these little arcade-y type things in it, it makes you feel like you have perhaps walked into a room where there are toys that you would like to play with. Then over time players will vote with their feet what they really want and it turns out that some ideas have more longevity than others. And again, I think the great thing about BethSoft stuff is that there are so many things going on and so many attempts to extend the reach of the game from game-to-game the way Fallout 4 is trying to make crafting ever more part of the game experience. It will never be part of the game for me, but it will affect other people in an important way. I think most designers talk about verbs, the more verbs you have the more you feel that you have agency in the game and that’s the BethSoft thing, the reason I think that the minigames seemed attractive to us is they were just cool. And we often can easily be attracted to the cool thing that’s being done in the world and not know exactly what the future is going to -- which things are really going to affect the user. Wawro: Hey, guys I’ve got some good news. Look what I found in a horrible abandoned tomb. Some new threads! Eh? Eh? Rolston: If you can dress up -- That’s the only important thing really, is dressing up, I like to run around naked as a jaybird too, Francis: In-game too, right? Rolston: Oh, yeah, that’s just the best thing.

Francis: Twitch user CommittmentIssues would like to ask, how would you, Ken, like to see Elder Scrolls change in the future iterations?

"The way I would like to see future Elder Scrolls games is that they get more passionate, undisciplined, strong-minded people to create as much trouble for the producers as possible in terms of resources and focus. And just barely get it back together again for when they ship it."

Rolston: Well that’s a mean question. Because I’m not a good person, when I was working on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, I really hoped that Elder Scrolls would not be as energetic in extending its horizons so that Reckoning could crush it like a crouton. That would be ideal for me. But unfortunately, Skyrim is just marvelously better than Oblivion. And in many ways my favorite version of Fallout is the New Vegas and all of that content and the way it’s put together entertains me.

So the way I would like to see future Elder Scrolls games is that they get more passionate, undisciplined, strong-minded people to run at the barriers at the four directions of compass and to create as much trouble for the producers as possible in terms of resources and focus. And just barely get it back together again for when they ship it. I want them to suffer like we suffered in Morrowind to create a revolutionary game. And I celebrate them every time they push themselves into a desperate corner to survive to just ship a game. That’s what I want them to do. Wawro: Was there one particular memorable thorn during production on Oblivion or Morrowind that really stood out to you as something that you put a lot of time and effort into or that you really wanted to change that didn't really come together the way you’d hoped? Rolston: Oh, God. Partly, what I’ll do, is I’ll try to tell stories of myself about what kind of an idiot I was. I had, among the top ten things for Morrowind, that I thought our game was going to do I thought it was going to be an interactive novel, sort of like a hypertext novel. Because we had hyperlinks to all the elements in the journal. What happened was I had that idea and never tried to make it any better. And it was terrible, in fact, it was a negative feature of the game. So would I in the future want to try to find a way to make hypertext novels out of the journals in a Elder Scrolls game? No because I’m way too lazy. I think it could be cool, but I’d rather be dead than try to do that kind of work. Another example of things that we just never had -- Francis: Ken have you checked out Tyranny yet? Rolston: What?

Wawro: There was a game released late last year by Obsidian called Tyranny. Rolston: Oh, I did take a look at Tyranny. It did not draw me in in the way that the other games had drawn me in and I’m still not clear in my head why. I had loved PIllars of Eternity and I set aside Tyranny for reasons I cannot clearly define, but I think it’s narrative and design scope and ambition was achieved without achieving a sense of meaningful choice for me that pleased me. And I really just do not know how to define that. Was there something special about the journal in there? Francis: Not the journal, but there was a hyperlink system in the dialogue that we talk a lot about with -- I forget the name of the developer from Obsidian who joined us, but we talked about there were a few memorable ways they used hyperlinking and hovering text to make the act of talking to characters in a computer RPG stand out a little bit more, than it did in Pillars. I was just celebrating that little feature. I haven’t finished Tyranny yet, so I couldn’t argue with you about whether it achieves anything or not, but I just wanted to give a shout out to them for successfully building something with hypertext. Wawro: I will see you gentlemen on the other side. Francis: Oh, boy. Rolston: That’s embarrassing, go find the interactive point there, it’s got to be there. You need to be able to see the highlighting of the location. Yeah you’re going. Francis: Twitch user Baraka is asking a question I’m not sure I understand. How do you not “be killed” by a lot of features while developing a big game like Oblivion. I’m sure they cut a lot of features, but how do you -- I guess when you get backed into that corner you talked about, how do you not just die of exhaustion. Rolston: Well I’ll try to give the philosophy of it and if I can I’ll try to come up with an illustrating example. My design philosophy is to design 400% of the game then throw away 350% and take the 50% that I kept and try to generate 50% of that kind of material to make up the whole 100% lately. In other words, I want to test during development a very large percent of the ideas of the features and experiences that you want to have and I want to throw most of them away, except the ones that are really working and then I want to take the rest of the content and I want to focus it on those things that I know that work. Now, in terms of specific examples, thank god we didn’t decide to make more mini games in Oblivion. There were many people who wanted to do it. I believe they were meaningful and intelligent design intentions, but with a limited amount of time, you just don’t know whether that time is well-spent trying to polish those bits and trying to keep them in. Wawro: Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I think scope is always a key factor when we talk to game developers. I don’t want to say always, but they often overscope and that’s certainly one of their biggest headaches. Rolston: Here’s an example, there's a term in Oblivion called being Kvatch’d. Kvatch is the city that was destroyed when the Oblivion gate attacked. And one of the things we discovered was that if we Kvatch’d a city, we didn’t have to build that content. Certainly wasn’t intended, but when you’re running out of the time to build all the things you suddenly want to Kvatch things. “Gee, I bet that was destroyed and all there are is parts left of it.” Finding opportunities when -- Oh, that is not a good look with the thighs. Wawro: You don’t think so? I’m really into it. This is the year for red, you know what I mean? Rolston: Yeah, good taste is timeless. I kind of like the way the staff looks like your head when you -- It’s really tasteful. This is really what the game is about. It is not about winning. It’s preening and showing your friends screenshots. Collecting them for yourself. It’s expressing yourself. Look at how my character looks, I’m a filmmaker. I’m just giving you the production shots from the real interior of my life. Wawro: That’s so interesting. It’s like design at remove. Because as game developers, the team behind this is itself building opportunities for players to build their own games --

Rolston: Yes. Wawro: In a sort of small but meaningful way. And I think as game development matures and gets ever more refined, we’re only going to see more and more well-executed examples of that. This is a strange and almost elemental way to go about in designing games. It draws me back to my time playing tabletop role playing games, you set up things for the player to make their own fun. Rolston: And also, don’t forget the paper and pencil game revolution, Dungeons and Dragons created a genre of narrative which, in the fantasy setting, almost anything goes and there are tons of different literary materials you can steal from to make a fantasy setting. So the people who come to these experiences and make them up for themselves as they run through the locations are working with a much broader notion of agency and storytelling because they come from paper and pencil role playing games. So it fits the zeitgeist in a lot of ways. You notice it doesn’t work quite so well in science fiction storytelling. It doesn’t work as well in real world settings. It has to be in a trashy fantasy setting. So we’re just really lucky that we can tell stories where a player can live in his dream world and having worlds that have very little to do with reality, that comes from Gary Gygax and Dungeons and Dragons. Wawro: Why do you suppose it is that fantasy games are so well suited to being effectively playgrounds for players’ imaginations. Rolston: Because the archetypes are so vividly drawn and exaggerated and they give you examples of ways you might make your own archetype more vividly drawn. They also have a moral compass that allows you to play around. Like the original Gygaxian notion is you were either good or evil or chaotic or ordered. And those are very powerful ways to imagine yourself in conflict with other things. So there are a lot of -- Let’s see, they’re probably Jungian tools to play around with storytelling and then you have so many different models of people, professionals, writing stories and telling them that way. So you have a lot of tools. Your culture gave you a lot of tools for fantasy to make up your own stories. Wawro: I tell you what, I had forgotten just how much the world of Oblivion looks kind of like a heavy metal album cover. Pretty interesting. Rolston: Not the whole world, just this one. Yeah, I happen to love the worlds of Oblivion, but I happen to think that from my point of view this is an opportunity missed. I would have loved it if we had had these worlds have intelligent people in them. For example the Dremora are models, just like role playing, all your player characters, we could have speech for them. They could have their own stories to tell. You could play a Dremora. And a different design of Oblivion would have been where you go to these places and you find their different factions here and sure they want to invade the Earth, but there are some guys you kind of like. They might be nice guys. Or at least they’re evil in a way you find compelling. I admit I didn’t play very much of the Sheogorath stuff because I retired immediately after making Oblivion so I was ready not to play games for a while.

Wawro: Fair. Rolston: I would have loved if these were all worlds where different kind of people who were devils or lunatics were compelling people who had different stories and you say, “Well I’ll ally myself with this bunch.” Like it’s all gangsters or militia people or something. Wawro: Yeah, that would be awesome. I’ve got to say, I’m having a blast, chatting with you. We are coming to the end of our hour, so I feel like I should let you go pretty soon. Before we do, there’s a question we like to ask all of our guests which is sort of broad, but please feel free to answer however you like. Is there any advice you would give to other game designers in a broad sense or a very specific sense? Rolston: I unfortunately have a very broad sense, which would be inexhaustible in the time here. Mostly it’s take notes and think of yourself as a game designer as a person who is archiving every idea you ever had about a game. And then part of your job is to mine that archive for your own design purposes, but even more than that it’s when you talk to other designers you have a coherent language and syntax of design. For example I think it is the obligation of every role playing game designer to list his ten favorite quests and then why he likes them and I am shocked to find out how many people have no idea what their favorite quests are, and couldn’t tell you. They’re people who want to design role playing games, but they have not collected their bible of examples of what, when they were playing, were wonderful. So that’s sort of like I want every designer to become a user, learn what’s good about a game, and then try to make his designs good in that way. And to be able to communicate with other players and other designers about that.

"Assume that there is somebody on your team who is more obsessive and more completist than you are and therefore knows everything about games, so that you can steal ideas from them."

Wawro: Yeah, that reminds me, real quick, there was a former colleague of yours who now works, or a couple years ago works on Elder Scrolls Online. And please forgive me, I have forgotten his name. I think it might be Alan? A few years back he submitted a short story to Gamasutra about some of the important lessons he learned about game design from working with you. Which I thought was a very kind thing to do. One thing he noted there, was that in his time working with you on Morrowind and Oblivion, he noted that you stayed very up on what other games were out. You played a lot of games and then you would come into work to talk about them and use them as sort of a common language to talk about design problems. And I thought that was really remarkable. I know it can be very difficult for game designers who spend twelve hour days working on their own game, to go home and play something new. Rolston: It’s true. I think also, another way to look at it is if you can’t do that personally, make sure you know which guy on your development team or part of your fandom, is the guy who does that kind of game playing and can serve as an informant for you. So partly, be your own informant, but assume that there is somebody who is more obsessive and more completist than you are and therefore knows everything about games so that you can steal ideas from him. Wawro: That sounds like great advice. Steal ideas from the best. Alright, I want to take us out here in a minute. Bryant, any last minute questions, thoughts? Concerns? Francis: I throw away my last minute questions so that I can get Akidno in from the chat, “Bethesda games, have for the most part had a balance between player action and controlling a character in the world and ‘traditional roleplaying.’ The question asked is, ‘What do I want to do?’ versus, ‘What makes sense for my character to do?’ What are your thoughts, Ken, on that particular balance?” Rolston: I think if you are constantly, ambivalent about what you should be doing, the design is perfect. I want you to constantly say, “I can’t do everything I want. I want to do what the game affords me to do.” So partly, it’s a matter of you keep playing the game until you learn what it will let you do. That’s a part of the exploration of the game. At the same time, insist, I want to do what I want to do. Do it as stupidly, in the same way that Alex decides, “I’d rather die here. This is going to be more fun.” Wawro: I definitely decided that. That was definitely on purpose. Rolston: Yes, right away. Wawro: Alright, I’m going to go ahead and take us out here, Actually, Bryant, you are much better at talking about social media, you want to take us out? Francis: Alright, thank you all for joining us for another wonderful hour on the Gamasutra Twitch channel. Thank you Ken for joining us today. Ken, if people wanted to read more of your thoughts or ask you questions about making games, where would you send them? Rolston: To krolston at gmail dot com. And I have no idea, I never really thought about it very much. But I’m trying to pay it forward now that I’m retired, I feel obligated to help other people get into the same kind of miserable shit that I got into in order to become an internationally celebrated game designer.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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This interview has been lightly edited for clarification. Gamasutra's Alex Wawro and Bryant Francis both peppered Rolston with questions.

"I essentially wrote the outline of all the quest lines. There were only three designers, so that was practical. And I made an awful lot of the content myself. "

"The very first Morrowind was essentially a novel, the main quest, plus three or four or five or six other novels which are the main guild things. And then millions of little short stories."

"The player can always choose to walk, but the ability to fast travel lets you use the game in the way you want to use it."

"The Skyrim Engine is such a fabulous tool because it lets us all be designers individually in a brute force way, whether we’re specialists or not. "

"The tools themselves are a language of development that makes it possible for everybody in the team to feel like they’re making something and that they understand how everything else is made."

"Bethesda has a long institutional memory. The personalities in it have fought with one another and worked together for a long time."

Horse armor!

Francis: Twitch user CommittmentIssues would like to ask, how would you, Ken, like to see Elder Scrolls change in the future iterations?

"Assume that there is somebody on your team who is more obsessive and more completist than you are and therefore knows everything about games, so that you can steal ideas from them."

#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes