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dynamite-derek · 10 months ago

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Final Fantasy II: Ambitious to a Fault

This is the latest in my ongoing series on the Final Fantasy franchise I started for the website vidyathoughts.com. For now I will crosspost content here, but please consider checking out the website! This post is slightly edited to conform to picture limits on tumblr.

A trying time for sequels

Final Fantasy II was unleashed into the world on December 17, 1988. The original Final Fantasy title turned out to be a hit, with 520,000 copies shipped in Japan. Hironobu Sakaguchi, the ‘father’ of Final Fantasy that I mentioned in the last article, pushed for a large number of carts to be developed so a sequel could potentially be on the table. Luckily for him, those copies did not rot on the shelf and SquareSoft elected to move on to make a sequel to what would become their flagship franchise.

Video game sequels were tough to figure out at the time, and quite frankly they still are. How do you even follow up on a major hit? Do you stay close to the original vision or do something completely different? Nintendo had a mega hit on their hands with Super Mario Brothers and released Super Mario Brothers 2 in 1986. The game looked and played basically the same but was exponentially harder than the original release. It was so infamously mediocre that Nintendo of America elected not to release the title in North America at all – instead they altered a game called Doki Doki Panic and released it as Mario 2 for the United States. You will not find many people who will claim either version of Mario 2 as their favorite game of all time.

On the other side of the Nintendo spectrum was Zelda 2, also released in 1988. That game took the top-down Zelda formula and turned it more into a side-scrolling adventure game. There were still puzzles to solve and secrets to find but it just looked and felt like something else entirely. Zelda 1 is a fairly universally beloved game, so much so that it often tops best games of all time lists even to this day. Zelda 2? Not so much. That said, while most normal people don’t think much of Zelda 2, notable developers like the people who made Hollow Knight cite it as one of their favorite games ever and note it as an inspiration for their games. Something to keep in mind when thinking of that game’s legacy.

And who could forget Castlevania 2: Simon’s Quest (1987)? It added RPG elements and was non-linear – a big departure from a game where the player generally just walks in a straight line to their destination. The clues they receive in order to progress are also quite vague and hard to figure out. As someone who has only played the game well after release, I picked it up, said “oh that’s why people hate this” and put put it back down. I also believe it has officially been labeled a shitty game that sucks ass.

The original Final Fantasy was released in 1990 in North America and found some success, so work had begun to go into Final Fantasy II – there are English prototype roms out there to prove it. However, note that release date: 1990. The Super Nintendo would release in North America in 1991. In Japan, Final Fantasy IV was set for release in that very year. So what makes more sense logically? Release Final Fantasy II in 1991 – at the earliest – on a rapidly aging system that nobody plays anymore or skip it and release Final Fantasy IV instead?

Final Fantasy II was skipped, relegating it to the same fate that Mario Lost Levels would have. Since the Internet was in its infancy, most people playing Final Fantasy II on the Super Nintendo weren’t aware that they were actually playing Final Fantasy IV. Square would not correct the Final Fantasy numbering internationally until Final Fantasy VII and by the time VII came out, respectfully, very few people cared about the three titles they were missing out on. Final Fantasy II would not receive an official release in North America until 2003. Ironically, on the Playstation 1, which was in itself a rapidly aging system that nobody played anymore. But hey. It was here!

So was it like Mario 2 in that it was skipped over for a reason in that it was kinda middling and samey? Was it like Zelda in that it was too different for most? Was it like Castlevania in that it was hard to figure out without some guidance?

All is not as it seems

On a surface level, Final Fantasy II looks very similar to the original game. In the NES version, most character sprites look like recolored versions of sprites that showed up in the original. The main character, Firion, looks just like the fighter with some extra work done. Another character, Guy, looks like the sprite edit of the Thief. It looks visually uninspired and some might even think it’s a touch up of the original release. The combat is also very similar feeling. It’s still a turn based system and it largely relies on using physical attacks or magic.

That’s on a surface level though. When actually playing the game, the player realizes that Final Fantasy II is actually a fair bit different than the original and that realization starts immediately. When the player creates their party, they are no longer making four blank slate characters with no personality traits or dialogue. Instead, they get four characters with canon names who have dialogue. The original game was definitely an adventure with story as set dressing whereas this game eyed offering more of a story to go along with that grinding.

The story isn’t going to win any awards – this was a Famicom/NES game after all – but things are more fleshed out. The player’s main party joins a resistance movement, highlighted by Princess Hilda of Fynn (currently on exile in Altair) and Prince Gordon of Kashuan, to fight against the evil Palamecian Empire that is using demons and technology in order to conquer the world. Every town the player goes to has unique NPCs with unique Empire-related problems. The character section in the last article was relatively short but in this game, it felt like every location had someone new and interesting thrown into the mix. Characters have more to say and they give the player more motivation to go from one location to the next.

Adding to this expanded story is something called the key terms system. You can learn specific terms from NPCs and then ask other NPCs about them, which can change their dialogue and give you more story or direction. This small little step makes the storytelling feel a lot more immersive than in the original game. The player’s conversations with these NPCs that spout like three lines of dialogue total feel more like actual conversations because they are answering questions for the player. It feels interactive! The player doesn’t get key items and have NPCs just psychically know that they have the item, the player has to present it to them specifically. This system would never come back but it does a really impressive job of making Final Fantasy II feel like it has some sort of grand narrative.

Having an actual cast of characters is really nice for those of us who started with later, story heavy Final Fantasy titles. Yes, you can role play as your thief in Final Fantasy I, but at the end of the day “GP or HP?” is a character that lives exclusively on your game cart or save file. When you talk to someone on the playground, they won’t know what the hell you’re talking about. With II, if you want to talk about the main character, everybody has the same one. Firion. Or maybe “Nathan” if you’re one of those weirdos who names RPG characters after your real friends.

I definitely named Aerith and Tifa after a crush or two in my day, no judgement here.

Oh! Aerith! That reminds me…on top of having more narrative, the game takes on a decisively darker tone than the original Final Fantasy. Yeah, chaos and Garland are no good assholes trying to take over the world. But do they actually kill anyone? Thinking as hard as I can, I can’t think of a single character or NPC that gets killed by the bad guys. In fact, every single death in the game can be attributed to the Warriors of Light. Murderous jerks. In 2? Well…

You thought Aerith was the first character to die in Final Fantasy history? No. If you meet anyone remotely important, there is a good chance they bite the bullet at some point. There are literal bombings on cities that take place in this game. Death is all over the place. It reminds me of when people are talking about what will happen at the end of a popular show – it always involves the question of ‘whether X character will die.’ I remember so much speculation about the potential death of Don Draper at the end of Mad Men. Death isn’t the only way to make something tragic! Still, Final Fantasy II kills off roughly a billion characters. I suppose it’s nice that the bad guys actually kill more people than the main party this time around.

The nitty gritty

For as different as this game feels from a narrative standpoint, it feels even more different when you’re actually grappling with the ‘core’ gameplay. I described the original Final Fantasy as a game designed with grinding in mind. Final Fantasy II takes this idea and supercharges it. There are no longer traditional levels. Instead, every single skill your character has needs to be leveled in some way. If your character wants to get better at evasion, you better make sure you have a shield. Got a fancy new sword? Better go out and do some random battles so your character can actually wield it properly. Have you ever played Morrowind? You know how when you start the game your character moves at like two miles per hour and if you want to get quicker you gotta, well, keep moving? This is a lot like that.

The goal of this is to create an immersive experience. If the player wants Maria to play like a white mage, simply teach her the proper skills, give her the right gear and her stats will progress in that way. If the player wants Firion to just be the warrior from FF1 simply jam on that attack button baby and they’re like halfway there.

I looked around to find if there were Western games released around this time frame that incorporated these mechanics. Leveling up every single thing is not terribly uncommon in CRPGs, for instance. But I could find nothing. So I’m not comfortable with saying that Final Fantasy II was the first video game to do something like this, but I will say it feels like Akitoshi Kawazu – the designer most people credit for Final Fantasy II being the way it is – got into a time machine and grabbed a bunch of mechanics from the 90s and tossed them into a blender for a console game released in 1988. Seriously, it feels nuts that an NES/Famicom game from the 80s would have this kind of stuff in it. I would love to ask someone like Todd Howard if they drew inspiration from Final Fantasy II of all things.

The way I approached the Pixel Remaster version of II was me just playing the game naturally. I had tried playing Final Fantasy II in the past and read about how cruel the leveling system is and just kind of fell off. The consensus best way to level stats for your characters was to wail on each other over and over again until you felt you were strong enough to continue. If you wanted to have your HP increase, you had to perpetually walk around with your HP very low. You needed to cast fire on yourself over and over and over again until it leveled up. Trying to play this way was an immediate turn off, so my suggestion to those playing FFII for the first time is to simply move forward. Don’t worry about over grinding spells and weapons until you HAVE to worry about it.

It’s still a bit of a cruel system because no matter what spell the player is casting, it needs to be worked on. For instance, this game has Esuna. In Final Fantasy X when Yuna casts Esuna, it cures all status ailments as soon as she learns it. In Final Fantasy II, when Firion learns Esuna, the only status ailments it can cure are Poison and Darkness. The player has to keep leveling it up to cure Amnesia, Toad and Stone. On top of that, you also have Basuna in this game. Esuna cures status ailments that persist after battle while Basuna cures status ailments that fade after battle. So if a character gets confused, the player needs to cast Basuna on him. Esuna does nothing. Of course, the player needs to level Basuna up to level 6 in order to cure confuse and the later FF mechanic of just smacking the shit out of a confused party member doesn’t work. So there is a need to grind both Esuna and Basuna if the player wants to effectively deal with status ailments. And you know what that entails? Casting Esuna and Basuna over and over again to no effect in battle. It gets tedious.

This game is grindy. It felt grindy even in the Pixel Remaster and as I noted in FF1, that version took a lot of the grind out of the original. My strategy when going from one dungeon to the next was to just cast spells on repeat in order to level them up. This did not cover all my skills though, at some point I had to pick and choose. So by the end of the game I was using Flare, Holy and Ultima pretty much exclusively as my damage dealing magic. The only buff skill I really bothered with was haste because it was really useful in the original but found it pretty lacking here. So my trips in dungeons consisted of me using the same spells over and over, running out of MP (the D&D-esque charge system is gone) and then attacking over and over. It felt dull and repetitive here, so I can only imagine how an NES player in 2024 would feel.

Jackassery

Speaking of dungeons, they are much more lengthy and involved here. I found that basically every one had multiple floors with lots of twists and turns. Even though I feel like my MP wasn’t lacking, I had to cut off my magic grinding less than halfway through most dungeons because I suddenly wouldn’t have the ability to heal myself. I feel like needing to grind every little aspect of your character is a poor combination with the resource management required of early Final Fantasy. This approach encourages the player to grind away from their main objective and as a result, the journey through dungeons feels unexciting because to conserve resources, they mostly running away or just jamming on the attack button. These dungeons are far lengthier than what showed up in FF1, you don’t want to run out of magic halfway through.

Also. This game is an asshole. Observe.

This exceptionally boring looking screenshot compilation is of four empty rooms. Your eyes do not deceive you, they are entirely empty. Nothing. What if I told you every single fucking dungeon is full of these empty rooms? They’re just there for seemingly no reason. If you’re like me, you try to get every single treasure chest that you can. You need those stinkin’ potions! So naturally you go from room to room trying to find all these chests and you get met over and over again with empty rooms. If there are five rooms on a floor, odds are that four of them will be empty. Sometimes more. But I’m gonna check every time because what if the fifth door has something? This actively punishes the player for exploration and encourages them to stick to the main path. If the player goes to every side room, they’re probably gonna get into more random battles, which will further drain their resources. It feels like you are being punished for trying to engage with the game.

Going back to Kawazu’s wacky time machine, I want to discuss another open world WRPG mechanic. Sometimes a game will gatekeep the player from certain areas by placing exceptionally hard enemies in their path. If someone were to run straight for New Vegas at the beginning of Fallout New Vegas, they are probably going to run into Cazadors and Deathclaws, the hardest enemies that game has to offer. It’s a subtle way of telling the player to fuck off. An unsubtle way of this is seen in basically any Pokemon game, where the roadblock can range from “some guy is thirsty” to “a bunch of people are hanging out here for some reason.”

At the beginning of Final Fantasy II, I was mashing monsters left and right. Nothing felt out of the ordinary. However, I went one pixel too far to the left and I encountered this.

I screencapped this because I was excited to see a bomb already. Hell yeah dude, a famous Final Fantasy enemy! What this screencap doesn’t show you is that these bombs self destructed for around 300 or so damage, well beyond what my characters have here. It should be noted that Bombs show up in the final dungeon too. Granted, by then they are pretty weak and easy to manage, but they are legitimately a final dungeon enemy. By going like a pixel off the main path I got destroyed. Some players find these early hard encounters useful for grinding spells since harder enemies equals better stat gains, but since I was trying to do a straight up playthrough without looking for too much guidance, this just served to annoy me. It ensured that I would basically not move a fraction off of the main path. Plus, in a game without autosaves, a random encounter that blows you out can make you lose hours of progress and it just isn’t fun.

There are also things the game doesn’t flat out tell you. Characters can wear any kind of equipment and equip any sort of weapon they want, which is good. But, unless I missed it, they don’t mention that wearing certain equipment has penalties. Heavy armors, shields and certain weapons cut your magic expertise by as much as 70%. The game doesn’t say that your mages actually need to dress like mages if they want to be successful (and if it does, I missed it), so you might just think your characters all suck ass at magic and never bother with it. And then, if you want to level up your defense or your evasion, you need those things, so if you’re aware of this mechanic you might feel the need to have grinding equipment and fighting equipment. Neat for MMOs. Extremely, extremely tedious for single player games.

Did you know that you basically go through the entire game with three characters? Now you might be looking at screenshots and notice that there are four characters in each one, but Final Fantasy II uses a rotating fourth cast member. This character changes all the time and after the first one, they kind of are all useless. Why? Because you haven’t grinded all of their abilities, stats and magic. You quickly get the impression that these characters leave you, so why would you waste time and effort making these characters as powerful as the main cast when they are just going to go away in an hour? You get a permanent fourth at the very end of the game and by then, do you really want to build this guy up so he can cast flare as well as the rest of your party can? As I said, this game is an asshole.

The trimmings

I want to briefly touch on music here. In my Final Fantasy I writeup, I wasn’t terribly kind to the music. I said the Pixel Remaster tracks felt like they came off of an assembly line. So using the magical power of 2024 technology, I modded in the original soundtrack into the Pixel Remaster and I gotta say it’s fantastic. The songs are all very catchy and they feel like they were composed with the NES’s sound chip and limitations in mind. I found myself humming tunes when not playing the game far, far more than I did with FF1’s remastered soundtrack. When playing these games, I think it is absolutely essential to put on Uematsu’s original soundtrack. It’s just fantastic. Sometimes just sticking with the original thing is the way to go and prettying it up for, well, whatever reason, is just unnecessary. I’m not a music guy so you’ll have to excuse me for the shallow analysis.

Final Fantasy II is an ambitious title. It sets out to do so much more than what Final Fantasy I accomplished. It takes the ideas of Final Fantasy I and expounds on them in many ways. I admire it for setting the series tradition of reinventing themselves for each new title. Without Final Fantasy II being a strange mess, you don’t have the weird game about a bunch of orphans with amnesia as the follow up to the game about a bunch of revolutionaries fighting against an evil corporation. I think it had a lot of interesting ideas, but ultimately feels too mean to truly recommend to anybody. I would say if you want to understand the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole, it’s important that you play and try to complete this game. The amount of things here that would go on to be staples in video games as a whole is really impressive, but if you’re looking for an actual solid game that you’re going to want to play over and over again? You should look elsewhere.

The cast

Unlike with Final Fantasy I, you have quite the collection of characters here. Just like with that game, I decided to compare character sprites between the Pixel Remaster and the original.

Firion

The main character of the game. As you will notice here, he borrows the Warrior sprite from the original Final Fantasy (NES). In the remaster, he gets altered to look more like the official artwork for the character. I was against drastic alterations to character sprites in the original Pixel Remaster, but I feel like since the original Final Fantasy II looks so similar to Final Fantasy I, changing things up is acceptable. These are actual characters now, so making Firion’s sprite just the generic fighter sprite feels unfair to him.

This is still an early JRPG, so Firion still doesn’t have a lot to his character. If I were to sum it up best, just think of generic main character dialogue and you have most of what he says. It’s nothing impressive, but it’s a start. They do have one thing with his character I really like though. There’s a scene where there is an imposter masquerading around as Princess Hilda. In this scene, she tries to seduce Firion – it gets so far that the rest of the party just leave the room because I guess they wanna let Firion get his freak on. And it even seems like it’s going to happen! This is like 30-something years before Clive and Jill laid naked on the beach in Final Fantasy XVI.

Of course, this is a fake. But it’s a neat little touch to his character. Yeah, he gets all horned up too! I just thought it was hilarious that the party, including Maria who I am pretty sure is supposed to be Firion’s love interest, are just cool with him randomly going to town on the princess during a pretty tense time in their world.

The way I used Firion here was pretty disjointed. At first I tried to make him a magic and sword wielder. I tried to make sure fire, blizzard and thunder were always fairly highly leveled but – since I wasn’t willing to take my armor off during big fights – I decided it was ultimately useless to focus so hard on that. In the end, he became a fairly dedicated warrior and when equipped with the blood sword, he made absolute short work of the final boss of the game. It was actually such an easy victory that I thought maybe I was playing something other than Final Fantasy II. I’ll take it!

Maria

I really like how close the Pixel Remaster keeps Maria’s character portrait to the original. It basically looks the same but less pale. To me, her NES sprite looks like a female warrior. I am pretty sure it’s also a reuse of an FF1 sprite since I think this is how Princess Sarah looks in the 8-bit Theater comics, but I don’t know for sure so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. Her new sprite matches her hair color instead of the weird red->purple thing the NES has going on so I like that.

Maria’s actual character is…uhm…I have no idea actually. I feel like she maybe says three words for most of the game. Then you meet her brother who has been acting as the dark knight for the empire the entire game and her character becomes ‘brother of the former bad guy.’ She’s there. But this is your first canon female party member – the white mage in FF1’s gender is ambiguous – so I guess take what you can get?

So when I play games like this, I like to have my lady characters be magic users. Like everyone else in the world. So Maria was pretty much doomed to be my magic flunky throughout the game. Until I got Ultima, her main usage in combat was to be the party healer. I made sure Cure, Esuna and Basuna were all as leveled as I could make them and generally speaking I never ran into too much trouble. I think I ran into two game overs the entire way? Not bad. As a result of this, I will name her MVP of my party.

Guy

Another case where I think the Pixel Remaster does a great job of capturing what the original portrait is going for. I am curious to see how the remasters handle IV-VI considering those are SNES games. Just like with Firion, his Remaster sprite is made to look more like his official artwork which I think is a good call because his original sprite is just a recolor OC Do not steal of the Thief.

Guy’s personality is very simplistic. Apparently his official backstory is that he was raised by wolves. I don’t remember this being brought up in the game, but the first couple of times I saw him speak I thought maybe the font pack I installed with my game altered and fucked up the translation. No…he just talks like a caveman because he’s something of a wild man. Think a more useful version of Gau from Final Fantasy VI, but with none of the bad guy copying skills.

In my playthrough, Guy was an axe wielding mad man who I tried to make proficient in magic but ultimately found it not worth the effort. I didn’t keep it up as long as I did with Firion, but I did at least try to make him a viable Holy and Flare user. I failed, mind you, because with my armor all equipped he was only doing like 100 damage with level IX holy but an effort was made. Perhaps I need to get good. During the endgame, Guy took on some healing duties since I had Maria focused on casting Ultima. But I can’t say he was too great at it. Kind of a jack of all trade and a master of none. Like the red mage!

Oh and he can talk to beavers. He’s the best character in the game.

Guy indeed speak beaver.

Leon

Another warrior edit for this guy, but I kinda like that decision because it gives him and Firion a bit of a Dante and Virgil from Devil May Cry thing. Speaking of Virgil, I feel like his NES portrait looks a bit like what an NES portrait of Virgil would look like. The remaster went with black hair because I guess that’s what his character art looks like. Okay. Probably the one character where I prefer the original.

Despite being the fourth main character on the character naming screen, you don’t actually get Leon until the very end of the game. This is because Leon spends almost the entirety of the game acting as the evil Emperor’s right hand man and generally being an evil asshole. Eventually Leon turns against the emperor and joins the good guys, but it’s not like he ever gets a true character arc. I’d say he’s like a really dumbed down version of Shadow the Hedgehog. No I will not elaborate.

Since Leon is the dreaded ‘fourth’ party member that I mentioned above, he didn’t do much for me at all. I think I just had him attack blindly during the final dungeon. I did teach him flare and a couple of other odd magics but he never really needed to use them because Firion with his blood sword and Maria with ultima were just dominating everything. He got to be part of the final party that saved the world but didn’t contribute very much. What a jerk!

Minwu

I love Minwu’s NES sprite so much. It looks like a character from Mario 2 (U.S.). I think they did a good job of recapturing the feel of it for the Pixel Remaster but damn. The original rules. I also don’t know why they decided to mask him up for the Pixel Remaster when he is maskless in the original. You’re a handsome dude Minwu, no need to hide that face away!

His character trait seems to be reliability. The Joe Kido of Final Fantasy II. He is Princess Hilda’s trusted white mage advisor person and is tasked with joining the crew to go get some mythril so the resistance forces can make some cool weapons to fight the emperor. He leaves the party so he can focus on healing up the King of Fynn. He comes back at some point to help the party acquire ultima and ultimately sacrifices himself to save the group. One of many deaths. But Minwu was an exceptionally useful party member so I was sad to see him go.

He is the first ‘fourth’ party member of the game and honestly he sets unrealistic expectations for the rest of the fourth members. He comes equipped with a bunch of leveled up white magic skills. I mean, just look at this shit

I think my other characters had like 20 MP and level 2 spells max at this point. I liken him to someone like Frederick from Fire Emblem Awakening. A character you get early to make things seem easier. Fredrick becomes useless later because other characters catch up and surpass him whereas Minwu becomes useless later because he leaves the party and fucking dies.

Josef

I love Josef’s sprites. The first one just looks like an old businessman LARPing as an elf. The Pixel Remaster one gives him a gigantic forehead because he does all of his exercising at the library.

Josef is a bit cold towards the party when you first meet him but he eventually becomes a big ol softie when Firion and crew save his daughter from slavers. His main purpose in the game is to give the party a snowcraft in order to transgress an impassable snowfield in order to obtain an item called the Goddess’s bell. He joins you briefly and is probably the most useless of the ‘fourth’ party members. He doesn’t come with any magic and while he fills the monk role you’d see a lot of later – he fights with his fists you see – I don’t think he ever did very much damage. Like Minwu, he dies saving the party. His death involves saving you from a giant boulder!

Leila

Looks just like a recolor of Maria, so automatically I prefer the remaster’s sprite. I think they did a really good job of making it match with her new portrait. I don’t think I like her having purple hair instead of red hair – especially since we already have one purple haired lady in the crew – but that’s a nitpick.

Leila is a pirate and hooks the party up with a boat, which allows them access to most of the world. There are really only a couple of places that you can’t reach by boat so it’s probably the most useful boat in the franchise? I guess we’ll see. She starts off mean, remember pirate, but joins the party as another relatively useless fourth party member. Unlike Minwu and Gordon she doesn’t die, though I was concerned when she got separated from the party in the Leviathan dungeon, and ends up being a big part of the resistance against the empire. She doesn’t have much of a personality but the pirate lingo makes her stand out so I always liked when she would show up. At the end of the game she suggests Firion becomes a pirate with her, which apparently upsets Maria. Firion is a lady’s man!

Gordon

Damn, I love Gordon’s NES sprite. The white hair looks cool on him. I don’t understand why the NES portrait looks like Marth but, you know, that was the style at the time.

Gordon is the prince of Kashuan and has probably the only thing resembling a character arc in this game. He starts the game being a depressed coward because he feels like he let his brother, Scott, die. Eventually he decides to prove himself and in doing so helps the party defeat a giant airship that had been bombing all of society. The king of Fynn even acknowledges him and gives him a prominent position in the rebellion’s forces. He later agrees to partner up with Hilda, the princess of Fynn, in order to build up their kingdoms from the depths the empire has plunged them to. It’s not exactly the most compelling character arc, but it’s something! Oh and he’s another useless fourth party member. I got nothin’ on his gameplay because I legitimately don’t remember it.

In some versions of Final Fantasy II, Scott is a playable character. I generally feel like the bonus dungeons added to some Final Fantasy ports really suck and are rarely worth doing, but hey, he’s there if you want him. Since this remaster is supposed to be relatively faithful he was not a playable character here. It’s okay Scott, you were engaged to Princess Hilda before the game started, you won in some small way right?

Ricard

God damn look how cool Ricard’s NES sprite is. And he’s a good guy! This guy would have been a mega hit over here if it hadn’t released 15 years later. Since he’s kind of a dark character, I definitely agree with the decision to make him look kinda edgy in the Pixel Remaster. I don’t like his portrait as much though. Hide that mouth fella.

Ricard plays the role of the last dragoon in the world. That’s right, the extremely popular and beloved dragoon class debuts here. Want a character to be a megahit? Give them a spear and make them friendly with wyverns, odds are they will be one of the most popular characters in your game. Your party meets Ricard in Leviathan’s guts and he basically just exists to save the party from the emperor. He sacrifices himself so your party can regroup and challenge the emperor another day. Three of the five ‘fourth’ characters die. Not good odds!

In combat, Ricard had a pretty damn solid attack stat because he was putting up numbers comparable to Firion while he was in my party. He is probably the most useful fourth since Minwu, but he isn’t around long enough to make much of an impact. He also has no magic but he was hitting so hard that I didn’t mind it for once.

Princess Hilda

Princess Hilda is the second princess in the Final Fantasy universe and immediately she is a lot more memorable than Princess Sarah. Why does Sarah get used so much more in other media? It’s not fair! Her deal is that her kingdom, Fynn, has been overtaken by the empire so she is working with rebellion forces to take it back through their hideout in Altair, the game’s first town. She ends up giving the crew a lot of their tasks, starting with FIND MYTHRIL and evolving to STORM FYN AND TAKE BACK THE CASTLE. She was engaged to Gordon’s brother Scott at some point, but he died and I believe the game suggests her and Gordon are going to pair off now in order to help recover the world. Neat.

I decided not to make a separate character entry for the King of Fynn because he spends the entirety of the game either sick in a bed or dead. He’s not much of a character, so I consider Hilda the true face of the kingdom.

Cid

I like how NES Cid looks like Dan Hibiki of Street Fighter fame.

This is the official debut of the eternal Cid character. For those of you that don’t know, every Final Fantasy title has a character named Cid in it. Their importance varies from title to title. In some Final Fantasy games he is an important NPC, in some he is a playable character and in others he is an old mechanic that lets you perv on his mechanic daughter. He is typically an engineer of some sort or has a fondness for airships.

In Final Fantasy II he falls into the NPC line of Cids. His main purpose is to provide air travel to the party – at first he has an attendant that will charge you to fly to various world map locations but eventually you get his airship because he dies. A net gain, dare I say?

Paul

Paul is a thief character that is part of the resistance. He owes the party a debt because they saved him from a bunch of slavers in the game’s first dungeon, Semitt Falls. To repay this debt, Paul busts the crew out of prison, gives information about how to open up a secret passage at Fynn castle and even gives you a blood sword – well the location to it anyway – if you talk to him at the right time. The blood sword makes the end of the game a complete cakewalk so I really like Paul! The NES version of him appears to play up on his status as a thief by making him a ninja while the remaster goes more with updated renditions of his appearance. I prefer ninja Paul, he doesn’t have a bowl cut.

My favorite sprite, Ogre Mage

Just like with Final Fantasy 1, I just wanted to highlight a random enemy sprite I really like. This time it’s a very early enemy called the Ogre Mage who…yeah, I bet you can guess everything about him by his name. I really like the shadows over his eyes, it makes him look really demented. He reminds me of Sloth from Full Metal Alchemist.

Forces of the Palamecian Empire

The main badguys of the game! The connection between all of the villains is made a lot more obvious here because they are all part of the same empire, there isn’t some 2000 year relationship going on! So let me break down these four screenshots real quick.

Upper Left: Borghen. He’s a sniveling coward who betrays the kingdom of Kasuan because he sees the tides turning and wants to join the winning team. He’s portrayed as incompetent, though he does manage to kidnap Josef’s daughter Nelly at some point. The party runs into him while trying to find an item called the Goddess’s Bell and the boss fight is great because it’s one of those times where the gameplay matches what the story tells you – this guy is a joke. But upon death he triggers a boulder that kills Josef because even this joke character has to get a confirmed kill. I like to think this guy laid the ground for characters like Solt and Peppor from Chrono Cross or Zorn and Thorn from Final Fantasy IX.

Upper Right: The Dreadnought. The first portion of the game involves the rebellion trying to destroy this thing. It is a warship of immense power and is probably the most devastating weapon that the empire has available to them. You destroy it by trekking through it like a dungeon and tossing some sunfire into the engine. I found this to be one of the game’s more intimidating dungeons because I ran out of MP about halfway through, I had no ethers and I couldn’t exit to go heal up. I was very grateful there wasn’t a big boss at the end of the dang thing. I was pretty surprised when an early game cutscene shows this giant ship just flat-out bombing cities. Impressively, it even changed the look of the city. I’m not sure if this happened in the NES version or not, so if this is a Pixel Remaster exclusive…nice touch!

Lower Left: Captain. The Captain is not a major character, but I thought he would be a good choice when talking about the grunts of the empire. When the party goes to Fynn, something strange happens that doesn’t happen in any other town in this game. Random battles! This is an excellent little bit of gameplay serving the story because Fynn is overrun by the empire so it makes sense that this town is swarming with baddies. The Captain comes in as an elite unit the party has no chance of beating the first time they arrive into town. You are told to stay away from them – they aren’t random battles, they are NPCs – because you don’t want to raise alarms that the resistance is moving around. It would be wise to listen to the warnings because the Captain one shot every member of my party with ease. When you actually liberate Fynn later in the game, it feels like some nice progression being able to explore the town without fear of a Captain wrecking you.

Lower right: The Dark Knight: Final Fantasy titles love their brooding dark knights. The Dark Knight here is the right hand man of the emperor for most of the game and later tries to ascend to the throne when he believe the emperor has been killed. It turns out that this character is Leon, the party’s fourth member that they were separated from at the beginning of the game. The game never says why Leon turns to evil but I appreciate that they never excuse away his actions by saying he was brain washed or he couldn’t help it. When he joins the party, he never acts overly friendly towards them either. He’s just there because a bigger threat arrives. I think he’s probably the most interesting villain in the game just because what drives him is mostly a mystery.

The Emperor

Apparently this guy is also known as Emperor Mateus, but I never saw that in the game so I’ll stick with just calling him “The Emperor.” If you close your eyes and think of the most generic evil dude ever, well, you got him. He wants to destroy the world and will use magic and technology to achieve those goals. In your initial battle with him, he is portrayed as something of a coward because he summons a bunch of guards to help him out. He’s a bit of a pushover here. The game goes to a lot of lengths to convince you that he’s dead and that the Dark Knight is now the true main enemy. They even celebrate his death with a fun dance at the castle in Fynn!\

He’s not done though. He comes back from the dead by conquering hell or something – the specifics of it are vague but he says that he gained powers in hell and will topple your forces and presumably the world. This is when the Dark Knight decides to become Leon again and help the party save the world from the obviously bigger threat. I think the Remaster does a good job with his overworld sprite because he looks far more intimidating and boss-like upon his return.

The Emperor serves as the final boss of the game and compared to Chaos he’s a bit of a joke. If you remember with Chaos, I had went beyond the level cap of the original Final Fantasy and was still struggling to defeat him – it was an absurdly challenging battle that represented a large step up in difficulty from the rest of the game. The Emperor on the other hand is stupidly easy, as long as you have the blood sword. Firion was causing like 7,000 damage per hit with his sword and Maria was causing over a thousand with Ultima. Maria also still had normal armor equipped so if I had died, I would have stripped her down and assumedly hit far harder. He’s probably a fair deal more difficult without the blood sword, but if the game is going to give me an easy way to deal with the final boss, why wouldn’t I do that?

It started here

Here is a look at some franchise staples that got their start with this game.

Cid, the word Highwind (Ricard’s last name), main character deaths, Final Fantasy ‘sequels’ having nothing to do with the previous entry

These are touched on above so I won’t go into much more detail about them. The Cid thing is fun because everybody knows about Cid and everyone has a favorite Cid. Me? I’m a basic bitch and my favorite Cid is Cid Highwind from Final Fantasy VII. The word Highwind also goes on to become a bit of a Final Fantasy staple. Fun fact, in the very first Kingdom Hearts game you have to run a race against Riku, the rival of the main character Sora, and the reward for winning is the ability to name your ship. In my first playthrough, I of course entered the name Highwind and was pleasantly surprised to see that Riku had also chosen that as the name for the ship. It felt extra good considering I don’t think I have ever won that race despite playing Kingdom Hearts 85,000,000 times in my life, so I never actually got to name the ship myself, but it still got the name I wanted. Why does Sora act so distressed over it? You got the name you wanted buddy!

The sequel thing is definitely the most important part here and is a key element of the franchise. I think III regresses things a little bit and is a bit more like the first game, but generally each new Final Fantasy reinvents itself in some way and feels a lot different than what came before it.

Chocobos

That’s right, we got our first mascot! The Chocobo Forest is south of Kashuan and is pretty well hidden, to the point that it almost feels like an easter egg for players familiar with the franchise. But no, it was always there and Final Fantasy II is just a mean game that doesn’t want to give you easy access to a ‘skip battle’ mechanic.

The chocobo functions much like it does in later games. You find one and ride it around the world map. You can’t enter towns with it, but while you are riding you move quicker and random encounters are disabled. In the console version of the remaster and modded PC versions you can just turn off random encounters if you want to, so the chocobo being here is even more of a ‘fun little easter egg’ for those players.

Sadly no chocobo inbreeding until Final Fantasy VII.

Unwinnable battles

A fine JRPG tradition like no other. Occasionally you will have fights that you can’t win no matter what you do and just exist to progress the story. The one I remember most vividly in my head is Beatrix from Final Fantasy IX. This game starts out with an unwinnable battle that separates Leon from your crew and gets your characters to join the resistance. I like these in the sense that it really helps show your party’s progression when you fight unbeatable enemies again and come out on top.

Familiar monsters

I feel like it’s a good thing to point out the first appearance of iconic enemies in the franchise. Here’s a little mashup of some familiar faces. The one that may not be as immediately obvious is the iron giant in the top right. He looks far more sinister than later incarnations of that baddie, I actually prefer this aesthetic. I think I like the NES version of the (King) Behemoth because it looks like it has a giant fin on its back. Ya gonna go swimming or something buddy?

MP (Magic Points)

Mentioned exceptionally briefly above, but Final Fantasy I used magic charges while this game introduces the MP system to the Final Fantasy franchise. Most games in the franchise use it from here on out, with the most prominent exceptions leaping to mind being Final Fantasy VIII (which replaces it with the junction system) and Final Fantasy XVI (which is an action game and has different mechanics all together). I think the charge system worked great for what Final Fantasy I was going for, but MP suits the franchise better as a whole.

Ultimate weapons for real this time, I swear

The Excalibur comes back! Again! But this time it’s overshadowed by the blood sword, which I am far more comfortable in calling an ultimate weapon than the Masamune or Excalibur from the original. The blood sword doesn’t work against every enemy in the game, its actual stats are lower than several other weapons, but it does work against every big enemy in the final dungeon which I think goes a long way into cementing its status as an ultimate weapon. There are several hard enemies that pop out in chests in the final dungeon and the blood sword makes short work of them and I’ve already mentioned how the final boss gets obliterated by it.

Dual wielding weapons

What would later go on to become the calling card of the ninja job, dual wielding starts here. Every character can dual wield every type of weapon, except those that require two hands to wield (bows). You can also dual wield shields if you want to. This is handy for grinding up weapon levels since you can do two types if you so choose to. For me, in more cinematic titles, when a character reveals they dual wield they instantly become way cooler. To mention Kingdom Hearts again, one of the things I remember the most about the original’s secret ending is when the mysterious cloaked figure (who would go on to become Roxas) pulled out his second keyblade. At that very moment I became obsessed with what the next Kingdom Hearts game would look like. I would like to think I have Final Fantasy II to thank in some small way for that.

In conclusion

Final Fantasy II is an ambitious but flawed game that can feel like it’s actively punishing the player for trying to get the most out of it. It feels like a game created with knowledge of future mechanics but without the knowledge of what makes them work or fun to engage with. I admire the heck out of it and cannot bring myself to hate it, I legitimately don’t understand people who plop it on ‘worst game ever made’ lists because it absolutely doesn’t belong there.

Just like with the original Final Fantasy, it’s a good idea to at least try the NES version before jumping into the Pixel Remaster. It’s nice to gain some perspective on what it originally looked and felt like. Unlike with the original Final Fantasy, I feel like you don’t lose out on a whole lot by sticking with this version of the game. Even with some quality of life and balance tweaking, the Pixel Remaster still feels like an ancient grindy NES game.

For most players, you only need to play a little bit. There is no need to beat the whole thing just to claim you’ve beaten every Final Fantasy. It’s worth sticking through to see all the innovation as it can help you appreciate what the title is going for, but don’t feel bad if you get annoyed and bounce off of it.

#Final Fantasy Retrospectives #Final Fantasy II #retro #retro gaming #video games #opinion #ps5 #switch #pc #Final Fantasy

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iloveabunchofgames · 2 years ago

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Week In Review - 04/23/23

#JakeReviewsItch Week In Review Archives

This week's reviews:

🧡🧡🧡🧡🤍 Antecrypt⚡ 🧡🧡🤍🤍🤍 Antistatic 🧡🧡🤍🤍🤍 The Aquatic Adventure of the Last Human 🧡🧡🧡🤍🤍 Arachnopunk 🧡🧡🧡🤍🤍 Arcade Spirits 🧡🧡🧡🤍🤍 The Arcade Tower 🧡🤍🤍🤍🤍 The Archives of Evil Dr BA 🧡🧡🤍🤍🤍 ARGH-P-G 🧡🧡🧡🤍🤍 Arigatou, Ningen-san! 🧡🧡🤍🤍🤍 Arlo The Rabbit

Thanks to my unexpected hiatus, this is more like a Week-and-a-Half In Review. What does that mean for this column? It means there are 10 nominees for Game of the Week, but beyond that, it's going to be business as usual. Oh, actually there's one other difference today. Usually, I write both a Week In Review and a new review on Sundays. It's a lot of writing! I'm skipping the review today, just to see how that feels. Later in this post, I'll share my thoughts on former Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aimé's business memoir. A few weeks ago, I came across a 2021 presentation by Meghna Jayanth that raises fascinating questions about the default structures and values in game design.

Game of the Week

This crop of games contains so many that were almost onto something, but there's no question which one was best.

Antecrypt⚡ is a twin-stick shooter where movement stick works exactly the way you'd expect and the aiming stick does not. It drifts here and there, totally at random, landing in the right place about as often as a stopped clock. It's a weird, maddening hook, made all the more frustrating by a weapon that burns through its batteries quickly when fired, which can only be recharged by standing in the range of the aiming reticle. It's a skill-based game with the compellingly random highs and lows of a slot machine, all wrapped in a cool, confident package. Great visual design, great enemy design, great level design, great progression system—if you haven't already read the review or given Antecrypt⚡ a try for yourself, get on that. Special mention also goes to clever metroidvania Arachnopunk, which is an admirable effort, even if it's not so hot in execution. Arigatou, Ningen-san! is nothing revolutionary, but parents of toddlers should check out this interactive picture book.

Disrupting the Game by Reggie Fils-Aimè

The local library finally got a copy of my old boss' book.

Reggie leveraged key differentials to push messaging in new markets. This disruptive way of thinking, and his decisive execution, drove sales in categories that were not previously thought of as receptive to high-margin product. Disrupting the Game is not a tell-all from a video game insider. It's a book by a business executive, aimed at those who wish to follow a similar path. Reggie (he often insists on being addressed by his first name) is a man with an incredible breadth of experience, from hocking Crisco to nearly making Shigeru Miyamoto cry by insisting that Wii Sports be included at no additional cost with every Wii in North America. He's heavy on business buzzwords, which I generally find off-putting, yet there's no denying that the man is an efficient communicator. The major events of his professional life make for a breezy read. That's my biggest complaint, actually. The book is a bit too general and optimistic. I'm still not sure Reggie understands what Nintendo had with Wii U or what went wrong. He spells out the lessons aspiring business leaders should take away from each of his anecdotes, but even in the stories where he admits fault, he seems to come out ahead. I want the lessons that come from abject mistakes. I want details. But Reggie is a slick businessman, and big business keeps details close to the chest. Reading this book won't teach you anything about a typical day in the office for NOA's president. Instead, he focuses on events that have already been covered extensively, like E3 presentations, and console launches. That, and his relationship with the late Satoru Iwata. This is the stuff that makes Disrupting the Game worth reading, whether you care about business or not. It feels like the reason the book was written. While Reggie obviously cares very much about passing on his professional wisdom to the next generation, he needs to preserve memories of his late friend and colleague. I'm glad he has. If you just know the Regginator as the funny "my body is ready" meme guy, I'm not sure you'll get much out of his book. If, like me, you were closely following Nintendo news throughout Reggie's reign (and occasionally seeing him in the hallways at work), you already have a good sense of how he reshaped the company. And if you're really like me, you'll enjoy taking another condensed trip from the days of Bigfoot Pizza to the launch of Nintendo Switch. If you've already read the outstanding Ask Iwata and still miss that lovely man, Disrupting the Game is a must. I just hope the next book approaches all its subjects with the specificity and range of emotions afforded Iwata-san. There's a brief story in the epilogue about teetotaler Shigeru Miyamoto joining Reggie at a New York bar before losing his mind over the establishment's collection of pipes. It so wonderfully captures the magic of the man's curiosity that I now want Reggie to drop whatever he's doing and write Miyamoto's biography. I've always thought he was too shy to allow anyone to write such a book, but if there's anyone who could wear him down, it's Reggie.

Meghna Jayanth: White Protagonism and Imperial Pleasures in Game Design

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I'm going to skip the recap and just let Meghna Jayanth speak for herself, either through the above video or the written word. I am not opposed to "imperial pleasures" in games. I regularly commit atrocities in games, and I enjoy it. Conquering digital worlds and amassing absurd in-game wealth isn't hurting anyone, and it's not hard to understand why it feels rewarding. A good game designer, however, does not say, "Let's keep doing the same stuff we've liked in other games." A good game designer questions everything. What's been done before? Why was it done that way? What are the alternatives? Since listening to Jayanth's speech, I can't stop noticing imperialist measures of success in everything I play. It doesn't dampen my enjoyment. I'm just noticing. Noticing and questioning.

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Beyond Blue is one of this week's free Epic Games Store games. It's an Endless Ocean-style scuba game, produced as a tie-in with nature documentary series Planet Earth: Blue Planet II. I went for a few dives this weekend and immediately found it weird that my goal was to head beneath the waves and get everything. In fairness, you're not actually removing anything from the ocean. You're vaguely "scanning" animals, but the way it's presented is so aggressively targeting the need to tick every box and earn every unlockable that the splendor of our world and the save-the-whales message of the narrative are quickly lost to find everything, mark everything, own everything, and master the one place on our planet not yet 100% mastered by man. Um, in the name of understanding and conservation, of course.

#JakeReviewsItch is a series of daily game reviews. You can learn more here. You can also browse past reviews…

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huniebunny · 3 years ago

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hi, i would like to request a hetalia valentines day matchup please!

my name is angie, im 19 and i use they/them pronouns. i’m omnisexual and hypersexual. i’m also autistic.

i’m 5’6, my body type is pear, and i’m a *little* chubby but not overweight. i have pale skin with blue eyes, my face shape is diamond. my hair is dyed black and i have a short, shaggy wolf cut. i like to wear dark eye makeup. my biggest fashion inspirations are pete wentz in the 2000s and kurt cobain :)

i’m loyal to a fault and would do anything for my loved ones. i don’t have much of a filter and i tend to speak without thinking. i can be quite talkative and i go on tangents pretty often without realizing it. i like to make people laugh, and it’s really easy to make me laugh. in general i’m just impressed by things easily. i’m a very passionate person, i’m enthusiastic and excitable and sharing this part of me with my loved ones is very important to me, i need someone who’s a good listener and doesn’t mind me being this way around them.

my hobbies are dancing and playing instruments(ukulele and bass). i’ve been dancing since i was 5! i also like video games, nintendo games are my favorite (especially mario kart wii and the whole zelda series!) but i also like stardew valley and the sims 2. i really like math and history. i can listen to anything, but i like rock subgenres the most. i like kpop and vocaloid too. my favorite artists are fall out boy, pisse, my chemical romance, nirvana, dazey and the scouts, destructo disk, aespa, mamamoo, and block b. i keep a bullet journal, i write in it every day without fail. i really like animals too, i have two cats! :)

there’s not much stuff that i dislike, the first that come to mind are blues music, team sports, and intolerant, judgemental people.

if it matters at all my favorite character is prussia, that’ll give you a taste for what kind of characters i like but don’t let it sway your decision! :)

You’re Matched With…

America!!!

What's your relationship to them?

How did you meet?

He met you at your local game shop! He asked your opinions about games and it devolved into excitable chaos after that with him dragging you from game to game to talk about his favorites.

First impressions?

Alfred loves your choice of video games! He’s going to wreck you at Mario Kart, just you wait!

General Dynamic:

Alfred invites you over to play video games all the time. And, if you can’t, he’ll barge into wherever you might be just to sit and talk to you.

When he learns about your skill with the bass, he’ll take his guitar the next time you hang out so you two can jam together.

You both have impromptu karaoke nights at his place when he thinks it’s unsafe for you to head back home on your own.

And, one time, the two of you fell asleep together on the couch, his heart beating slow in your ear as you lay on top of his chest.

TMI:

One of his love languages is definitely touch. He’ll find any reason to touch you, whether to poke at your adorable chubbiness, or hold you close during a movie because you might get cold or scared.

And because he can’t read the room or understand his own romantic feelings, it takes him a comically long time to realize he has feelings for you.

He plays it off as him just enjoying himself with you, but on a night where you fell asleep on his shoulder, he looks at you and can’t help but think:

“I want to spend every night like this.”

And it further evolves into him trying to impress you in any way possible. Showing off his incredible strength or attempting to cook for you. He sees you being impressed and takes that as a good sign, forgetting that you were easily impressed.

It’s during one of his parties that he’s given an opportunity to kiss you and he avoids that situation by any means despite you wanting to take that chance.

It’s not until you drag him down by the collar and kiss him that he finally gets it.

And he melts.

He melts under your touch then solidifies again to pick you up in his arms and spin you around in his excitement.

#hunie speaks #matchups #hetalia matchups #hetalia america #america x reader

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fatesdeepdive · 4 years ago

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Entry 8: Rinkah’s Burning Loins

My Castle

After fully dedicating ourselves to Hoshido, the game finally really begins. We’re given access to a customizable castle in the Astral Plane where our army waits between battles. We can talk to our units, giving them minor stat boosts or new weapons. Right off the bat, we have a farm and spring to give us resources, rooms for Corrin and Lilith, and a Hall of Records.

In Lilith’s spring, we can feed her to make her level up. Different foods affect her stats in different ways. Note that, although Lilith now has stats, she isn’t usable in battle. Other players can invade our Castle through spotpass, which I’ll discuss in a later entry, and Lilith is only usable in those battles.

Lilith

Lilith is a weird squirrel dragon thing that floats around clutching a random ball. She used to be our stable girl and is now our pet. I think she has a crush on Corrin. Her design is unique and cute, I like it. Gameplay wise, she can only use a modified Physic staff. I don’t dislike her personality, but she feels like a throwaway character added at the last minute. She raises a ton of questions that I doubt will ever be answered.

In the Hall of Records, we can see descriptions of all the units we’ll ever recruit, rewatch cutscenes, read unreadable poems, and play around with a relationship tester. The relationship tester is randomized, by the way, which kinda makes it pointless. That said, it told me that Corrin expects betrayal from Rinkah, while Rinkah’s loins are set afire by Corrin. This is now canon, I have decided.

In Corrin’s room, we can change their hairstyle and invite an ally over to chill. I chose Kaze. He complimented Corrin’s piano skills, which she apparently has, then stared at us, blushing, while thanking us for saving him from Garon.

So, let’s talk about the elephant in the room. In the Japanese version you get to rub units while in close up mode. Like Pokemon Amie except...with people. This was removed in the English version. A lot of Fire Emblem fans were pissed, crying about censorship because Nintendo of America had the gall to remove the minigame where you rub Camila’s tiddies while she moans. And I’m going to say a hot take right now: they made the right call. That stuff was weird and indulgent. It was the living embodiment of the fanservice focussed design that plagues modern Fire Emblem games. Good riddance.

Inviting allies to Corrin’s cool sex treehouse boosts our support levels. I suppose it's time I mentioned that. In Fire Emblem games, units form bonds from fighting next to each other, unlocking short conversations that flesh them out as characters. Units also fight together better when they have high supports. Now, here’s the fun thing about supports:

There are more than 600 supports in this game. Not support conversations, support lines, each of which is made up of three or four conversations. And, because God has cursed me for my hubris and my work is never finished, I’m going to read all of them.

Admittedly, I’m not going to unlock all of them. S-Rank conversations result in marriages and each unit only gets one. It’d take a few dozen playthroughs to get all of Corrin’s S-Rank conversations and I don’t hate myself that much, so I’m reading the transcripts from the wiki. I think I’m going to do four supports per Entry; that’ll leave me with a few extra by the time we reach the end, but I’ll just do a support grab bag entry or something.

Before we do supports, let’s finish up improving the castle. I built a weapon shop and a statue of Corrin that boosts her max speed. We are limited on the number of buildings we can build, but that isn’t a big deal yet because the only other option was to build a stave shop.

Support: Corrin/Rinkah

C: Corrin attempts to discuss battle tactics with Rinkah, but Rinkah blows her off and tells her to stop trying to be friends. Rinkah does acknowledge that Corrin’s authority and that Corrin saved her life, but tells the princess leave her alone.

B: Corrin pesters Rinkah until she explains why she’s so aloof. Rinkah explains that, the Flame Tribe keeps a great flame burning in the center of the village to honor the God of Fire. In the past, outsiders have extinguished the fire. One such instance was followed by a volcanic eruption that decimated the tribe. As a rule, the people of the Flame Tribe are wary of outsiders. Rinkah also explains that she’s working for Hoshido because her father commanded her to, much to her chagrin.

A: Rinkah explains that she would have preferred to die an honorable warrior’s death than be captured and resents Corrin for sparing her. Corrin says that she’s glad Rinkah is still alive, because it means Rinkah and her can be friends. Corrin also says that, despite the chaos of war, she believes in fate and its ability to bring people together. Corrin encourages Rinkah to use this opportunity to learn more about the outside world and bring that knowledge home with her. Rinkah begrudgingly agrees.

This is how the conversation will end on my playthrough, but if Corrin has a penis, you can get an S-Rank proposal conversation. I’ll be listing all of these off along with the normal conversations.

S: Rinkah comes to Corrin, blushing, and tells him that he has been a constant reminder of her shame and regret over being captured. But, over time, these feelings were replaced with love. Love that she hated, because Corrin is an outsider. Corrin says that he’s loved Rinkah since the day they met and only told her to be friendly to other people as an excuse to spend time with her. Rinkah states that, from now on, she will remember her capture as the happiest day of her life and the two get married.

Review: I really like this support line. It expands Rinkah’s backstory and culture, ties it into Corrin’s own isolation and belief in fate, and deals with the tumultuous meeting they had in Chapter 2. The confession comes out of nowhere, admittedly, but I do like Rinkah grappling with her mixed feelings of hate and love. Solid support.

Support: Corrin/Jakob

C: Corrin comes to Jakob to ask for a favor. Jakob interrupts her by humorously listing off the things he would do for Corrin. Things like slay dragons for her, which is actually kinda offensive now that I think about it. Corrin begs Jakob to allow her to be independent and Jakob refuses. Corrin explains that she’s his boss and he tells her that servitude is his reason for living. Jakob explains that, when he started working for Corrin, he was incompetent, and her kindness towards him made him indebted to her. The two compromise on the agreement that Jakob will teach Corrin how to make tea. After Corrin leaves, Jakob mumbles to himself that things might get apocalyptic.

B: Corrin repeatedly tries and fails to make a decent cup of tea. Both of them get some funny lines in, with Corrin telling Jakob that she can’t hear him because she’s ignoring him and Jakob saying that, saying that they’ll run out of leaves before Corrin makes decent tea. They meaning the nation in this case. Corrin eventually makes a passable cup, after Jakob secretly adds in sugar.

A: Jakob admits to Corrin that he messed with her tea and she laughs it off, admitting that she knew all along. She apologizes for being stubborn and accepts that she still needs Jakob’s help sometimes. Jakob says that he falls apart without Corrin. Corrin says that the two of them are alike in that way and Jakob literally faints from joy.

S: Jakob is acting more distant than normal. When Corrin asks him about this, he admits that he’s fallen for her and resigns from his duties as butler, because it is improper for him to have feelings for his mistress. Corrin begs him to say because she needs him and admits that she loves him too. The two of them get embarrassed and Corrin fires Jakob, giving him the new job of husband.

Review: This was a hilarious support that really made me appreciate Jakob’s snarky yet loyal personality. He is the perfect butler. The conflict of Corrin wanting to be independent and Jakob wanting to take care of her is a good dynamic that made me appreciate the relationship between these two characters. I do like them more as a platonic couple than a romantic one, but Jakob quitting his job because falling in love with Corrin is improper is a nice character moment.

Support: Corrin/Kaze

C: A villager gives Kaze a bunch of radishes because he’s super hot. And I mean, he is. Kaze apparently doesn’t realize that he’s hot until Corrin explains it to him. Kaze mentions that he dislikes the attention because he isn’t a good person before running off.

B: Corrin asks Kaze to follow her around so she can figure out what’s bothering him. Kaze says no, so Corrin annoys him until he agrees to hang out with him. Then he runs away again.

A: Kaze admits to Corrin that it was his fault that Garon kidnapped her, because when he was a child, he noticed the Nohrian soldiers that killed Sumeragi were in the city but said nothing about it. I don’t know how that makes Corrin’s kidnapping his fault, you’d expect there to be soldiers guarding a king. And the fact that Kaze was there means that there were also Hoshido soldiers, which means there was no reason to be suspicious of the Nohrians. Also, Kaze was a teenager at the oldest, so he should probably get some leeway. Whatever. Kaze apologizes to Corrin and Corrin, in turn, apologizes for making him live with guilt for fifteen years. Corrin also points out that Kaze led her home, meaning that they’re even now. Kaze compares Corrin to Mikoto because of her kindness and pledges to serve Corrin as her loyal retainer.

S: Corrin and Kaze joke around about Corrin’s kidnapping. It’s cute. Corrin mentions that, now that she’s spent so much time offscreen with Kaze, she likes him even more. Kaze blurts out that he loves Corrin, despite being her bodyguard, and the two propose.

Review: I found this chain a bit lacking, to be honest. The first two conversations were filler and the origin for Kaze’s guilt complex is kinda dumb. Kaze’s relationship with Corrin defines him as a character. He is so guilt ridden over her kidnapping that he would betray his country and his family to protect her. Later parts of the game hinge on this relationship. But, three of their four conversations are dull. I do like Kaze’s guilt complex as a concept, and think becoming Corrin’s retainer alongside Jakob and/or Felicia and a way to repent, but it isn’t enough to save this support line.

Support: Kaze/Rinkah

C: Kaze gets a bunch of candy for being hot and shares it with Rinkah, who secretly loves candy.

B: Kaze continues to give Rinkah candy.

A: Kaze continues to give Rinkah candy.

S: Kaze reveals that he’s been giving Rinkah candy because he’s in love with her.

Review: This one was a big let down. The fact that Kaze and Rinkah are introduced together made me think it would be about their capture, but no. It’s just Kaze giving Rinkah candy for four conversations straight. And it’s cute fluff, but it’s nothing more than that. There is something interesting below the surface with Rinkah hiding her love of candy to protect her image, but it’s never really explored.

So, off to a mixed start with the support conversations.

Birthright Chapter 7: A Vow Upheld

Team Corrin heads to a Hoshidan fort where Sakura is tending to wounded soldiers. We are introduced to Sakura’s retainers, Subaki and Hana. Suddenly, the fort is attacked by Nohrian forces. Corrin and Azura point out the ridiculousness of them attacking immediately after they arrived. Sakura freaks out because the fort is being used as a hospital and has no military value. So apparently Nohr is now being evil just to be evil.

Subaki and Hana agree to help Corrin defend the fort and argue over who’s more important to Sakura, much to her annoyance. Subaki and Hana give me a good opportunity to discuss a few interesting things about classes in this game. First off, unlike in most Fire Emblem games, classes are NOT gender-specific, as demonstrated by Subaki being the first male Pegasus Knight in the series. Secondly, the classic Fire Emblem classes were divided between the two nations. Nohr got Mercenaries, Hoshido got Myrmidons. Nohr got Wyvern Riders, Hoshido got Pegasus Knights. Etc. I really like this, it gives the two countries different feels in combat both aesthetically and mechanically. Finally, a lot of Hoshidan classes were renamed to be more Eastern, shown by Hana being a Samurai instead of a Myrmidon, or by Sakura being a Shrine Maiden instead of a Cleric.

Subaki

Subaki is a Sky Knight, this game’s equivalent of a Pegasus Knight. He can fly over terrain and has good speed and resistance, but is decimated by arrows. His personal skill buffs his hit and avoid when he has full health. Design wise, I like how ridiculously smug he looks. Personality wise, he seems over-competitive yet fiercely loyal to Sakura.

Hana

Hana is a Samurai with high speed and skill. Her personal skill damaged nearby enemies when she scores a kill. Her design is fine, if a little bland. Personality wise, she seems over-competitive yet fiercely loyal to Sakura.

Starting with this chapter, we have a prep menu, where we can choose which units to use and rearrange them on the map. We can bring our whole team in with us, so it’s a little pointless, but it's nice. Worth noting that you can have units start in pair up via this menu, unlike in Awakening where you had to pair them up after the battle started.

At the start of the battle, the chapter’s boss, a Cavalier named Silas, shouts out to Corrin that he’s her childhood best friend. She does not remember him even slightly. Okie dokie.

This map is decent. It’s a bit short, but it features a lot of good bottlenecks. The Dragon Veins can be used to open heal tiles, which is a bit pointless because you have two healers. When Silas and Corrin fight, he reiterates that they used to be friends. Corrin says that she can’t remember her past. And that confuses me, because I was under the impression that she got amnesia when she was taken to Nohr, which would have been before she met Silas. Unless he’s lying.

After the battle, Corrin refuses to kill Silas. She interrogates him about why he was so hesitant to attack them and he explains that, when they were children, he helped Corrin sneak out of the walls to have a picnic. The guards tried to execute Silas for this, but Corrin stopped them, because apparently guards listen to small children. Because of this, Silas feels he owes a debt to Corrin.

Question. Why was this random child allowed to play with the super secret hostage princess? Whatever.

Corrin eventually recovers a vague memory of Silas and asks him to join the gang. She explains that Garon is crazy and evil and that’s enough to make him swap sides. Silas is now officially the most sane character in the game. I mean, he should have probably realized this stuff before being sent to destroy a hospital for shits and giggles, but still.

Also, Silas mentions that Corrin’s favorite food is surf and turf. Perhaps this symbolizes how Corrin is stuck between both kingdoms? Or maybe it’s a random throwaway line. You be the judge!

At the end of the chapter, Saizo and a new character named Orochi show up, wounded, and report that Takumi and Ryoma have gone missing. Uh oh.

Team Corrin decide to help search for the missing princes. Sakura decides to come along, despite Corrin and Kaze’s objections. Silas also decides to come along and Saizo points out that he totally could be a spy or traitor. He’s a dick, but he is infinitely smarter than Kaze.

#fire emblem fates #fire emblem birthright #fe14 #fire emblem #hoshido #nohr #corrin fe #kaze fe #corrin x kaze #corrin x rinkah #rinkah fe #rinkah x kaze #silas fe #jakob fe #corrin x jakob #hana fe #subaki fe

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alarawriting · 4 years ago

Text

52 Project #36: Escape from Sonnebend

Trigger warnings: This is a story about Meg. (Supervillain protagonist of my WIP novel, and the main character of story #18, “Thirteen”.) It does not have as much triggering content as the last story about her did, but Meg herself is triggering content. Story contains mentions of rape and torture, bioengineered diseases and horrible deaths. Also, being a victim of awful things doesn’t stop Meg from being a terrible person.

Title is shit and I may change it later.

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It’s been three days since anyone has ordered her to go anywhere, a week since she overhead two of the scientists talking about the future. Apparently Bush lost the election, and they expect Sonnebend to be shut down. Probably, the entire black ops agency that allows Sonnebend to exist will be shut down before Bill Clinton comes into power. She’d be eager to see it, except that she knows they’ll never let her go free. If Sonnebend is shut down, either they’ll send her to a different prison, keep her around to heal elderly politicians and work on their bioweapons… or they’ll kill her.

Activity has been winding down since mid-November. Now it’s mid-December and things are almost dead. High-powered researchers and administrators are taking their Christmas vacations. Meg doesn’t know if she’ll be alive when they come back. Are they moving their project to another location, or is it shutting down entirely? She doesn’t know if they know yet. She knows for a fact they’re not telling her.

Do they need to keep it open? They’ve got what they want.

She lays on the bed in her cell, because hiding under the bed doesn’t help. If she’s laying on the bed when the guards want to rape her, they’ll do it, and if she’s hiding under the bed, they’ll drag her out, beat her, and then do it. There’s no point to it. No point to trying to protect herself. No point in trying to protect anyone else.

Christmas is coming, but Meg strongly suspects she won’t live long enough to see it. Not like it matters. She remembers her last Christmas with David, the two of them in the tiny apartment on the 11th floor, a living tree that was heavy as fuck to carry but she’d gotten it up there with its pot and its soil, and she’d put it in the window so it would get sunshine, which meant they didn’t get any in the small common room because the tree was blocking it. David had experimented with chemical lights, blues and reds and greens and whites that ran on oxygen, slowly, and they’d covered the entire apartment with them, lights around every window they could see and lights around every door and lights criss-crossing the ceiling. She’d taken the drugs he was cooking up in order to test them, and as soon as she’d determined that they wouldn’t poison anyone, she’d let herself experience the high, giggling like the teenager she’d been as she lay back on the floor and pretended the ceiling lights were stars, making up fake constellations like The Butthole and Zeus’ Balls. All that December, she’d made cookies, pizzelle and horn cookies and Christmas-shaped iced sugar cookies and traditional New York black and white cookies, and eaten most of them because David had had a chronic low appetite and not much taste for sugar anyway. And then on Christmas she’d given him a Nintendo and a couple of games, and he’d given her a dozen CDs and Stuffy, a stuffed white and gray cat.

In August of the following year, the Special Service killed David, in his bedroom, unarmed. His blood ended up all over Stuffy. Meg never washed it out. His DNA embedded in her plush fur would comfort Meg when she cuddled Stuffy at night; it was a memorial no ordinary human would respond to, except perhaps in the abstract, but Meg could feel David’s DNA in the splatters of his blood. Slowly decaying – there wasn’t a lot of DNA in blood in the first place, since red blood cells don’t have nuclei, and it doesn’t last forever. But it was still there, the last time she saw Stuffy. In the townhome she shared with Tara, in her bedroom.

Is Tara still there? Is any of her stuff still there? It’s December. She was kidnapped in April. The billing service would probably have continued to pay the rent, but if Tara had moved out, Meg’s checks wouldn’t be enough to keep the lease.

Does it matter? Does any of it matter? She’s never getting out of here alive, is she? She’ll never see Stuffy or any of her other things or Tara or the apartment again.

She wants to cry, but she can’t. There’s no safety here, nowhere they can’t see her.

Four diseases, two viruses and two deadly bacteria, tailored to strike only Proximas. They’ll breed in the presence of catalysine, or they’ll look for the Proxima gene and insert themselves into the DNA there, breaking it in a way that will slowly poison them. They gave her no choice, but that’s a lie, there are always choices. She could have found a way to kill herself. She could have forced them to trigger the bomb around her neck. She could have waited until they had her in the sealed room, with the collar off, tasked with healing some important old man… and she could have killed whichever man she was supposed to fix that day, and forced her captors to shoot her.

But Meg wants to live. She did something terrible because she wanted to live, and she didn’t want to be tortured. She made those diseases. They gave her no freedom to do anything but study, genetics and biology and chemistry, on top of her medical school training and the training David used to give her in neurobiochemistry, and she used that knowledge to do what they asked. Because she knew they would check.

She remembers the blue homeless man vomiting, over and over, until he had no electrolytes left in his body and he died. The prostitute who could make a light show dance over her body, shaking and seizing until she was dead. The old man whose power mitochondria went into impossibly high gear, burning up all the phosphate and magnesium in his body to make too much ATP, and then his telekinetic power going out of control and tearing him apart. The homeless teenager crying as the poisons built up in his body. All her fault, and there will be thousands more, maybe millions, if her captors release the diseases they made her make into the population.

She hates herself, but she wants desperately to live, because she knows how to undo them all. She can immunize her people. She can. If she can get out of here alive. But the collar that suppresses her powers has a bomb in it. If she were to leave this place with it still around her neck… it would be the last thing she ever did.

There’s a click in the lock. Meg doesn’t look. She has no power over what’s going to happen, and if she turns her head to look, if she sits or stands up, if she visibly braces herself… then they’ll know she cares. They’ll know they’re hurting her, they’re frightening her. And she won’t give them the satisfaction… not until she can’t help herself, anyway. Without access to her powers, she only has a normal human ability to control herself.

“Get up,” a harsh female voice says.

Well. Small mercies. This isn’t going to be a rape, most likely. And they don’t torture her much anymore, not since she started cooperating. Torture doesn’t really work to get information – she knows that well, having tried it several times when she was a teen thug working for drug lords – but it works very well to terrorize people into doing as they’re told. But she’s been doing as she’s told. So it probably won’t be that.

It could be the execution she’s been expecting, but even if it is, there’s nothing she can do about it.

Meg gets up. Slowly, but not so slowly that the guard will decide she’s being insolent and shock her. The collar suppresses her powers, and it keeps her from escaping because of the bomb, but it’s also got electroshock capabilities, that all the guards can trigger by remote any time they want to. Electroshock’s how they captured her the first time – they went after her with the Special Service, the cops in hardsuits that her powers can’t get through, and the Special Service shocked her over and over, until her powers couldn’t handle keeping her conscious, and then while she was unconscious they put the collar on her neck. Since then, they’ve been able to shock her any time they want to, and they use it, frequently. Especially when they think she’s not being deferential enough.

She’s a former street kid and assassin for gangsters. She was living on her own since the age of 17. She went to superhero school with people who hated her, who’d fought her – and lost—when she was a supervillain. And she’s from Brooklyn. None of this lends itself well to respecting anyone’s authority or being deferential; she gave that up when she was thirteen and traded in a life as a Catholic school girl for a life in the criminal underworld. So when she first got to Sonnebend, they shocked her a lot.

She’s learned, though. Meg keeps her hate and her rage and her desire to commit bloody murder out of her eyes, out of her body language. If she ever has the chance, everyone who works here will die… but she’ll never have the chance, and she knows it.

The guard’s a black woman, head shaved, muscular. What progress America has made, Meg thinks bitterly. Now you can be a government thug and torturer even if you’re female and black! The guard motions her out the door, where there’s a second guard, this one a generic bland-looking dark-haired white man like practically every other guard in this place. “Keep moving,” the black woman says.

“Where are you taking me?” Meg asks. “What’s going on?”

“Keep your mouth shut,” the black woman says, but doesn’t shock her.

They’re taking her to her execution. She’s sure of it. Two guards usually escort her when she is taken anywhere, but she doesn’t recognize either of these two, and they’re not walking her in the right direction to be going either to the labs or the chamber with the one-way glass where she heals powerful old men, collar off but guns trained on her outside the chamber where she can’t see.

For a moment, Meg considers the possibility of killing these two guards. Even without her powers, she can fight; the absurd things she can do when she has her powers, the power-jumps, extending her arms, making tentacles, all that kind of thing… those are icing on the cake. All she needed to do to learn martial arts at master level was to find a dojo where the sensei had advanced skills and the urethane on the wooden floor had worn away enough that she could reach into her sensei with her powers and copy what he was doing down to the level of specific nerves firing and muscles contracting, and now she’s an expert. She could, maybe, grab the white guy, use judo to throw him into the black woman, then kick both of them in the jaw hard enough to snap their necks.

But what good would it do? She sees no evidence that they’re carrying keys that could unlock the collar; usually only a couple of specific people carry those keys, which have a distinctive appearance and are too large to hide in a pocket, and they wait for her in the chamber rather than walking around the base with them. She can’t get out, and any one of the guards can trigger the electroshock remotely, without even being near her, so she can’t escape. And if escape isn’t possible, what’s the point to killing these guys? It might make her feel better, for a few moments, but their friends will blow up her head, so it won’t help.

So she walks, with the white guy in front and the black woman behind, down a corridor she’s never traveled before. And probably never will again.

There’s a checkpoint, right before a door outside. The guard at the checkpoint looks up. “Where’s she going?”

“Where you think?” the black woman says, and hands him a sheaf of paper.

The checkpoint guy – another generic white dude, with sandy blond hair instead of black – looks at the papers, and then chuckles. “So I guess Williams and Becker aren’t getting a piece tonight, huh,” he says, and confirms what Meg suspects. Those are her execution papers. The guards who rape her nearly every night aren’t going to have the chance to tonight, because she’ll be dead.

Once again she considers killing them all. It won’t save her life, but at least it’ll take down a few of them with her. Once again she lets it go. Maybe, if she has a chance while she’s outside, since it looks like they’re taking her outside to do it. But she wants to see the sun again. If they’re going to bring her outside to kill her… then at least she won’t die in this nightmare building, where she hasn’t seen so much as a window since she was captured.

Is there snow outside? She doesn’t even know where Sonnebend is; no one’s ever told her what state they’re in, and with no windows, she can’t look at the sun and plants and try to guess. It could be Texas. It could be Florida. It’s probably not either since there aren’t enough guards with Latino names, but maybe it’s North Dakota. Maybe it’s Indiana. She has no way to tell.

The white guy with her chuckles, just a second later than you’d expect, like he’s not a native speaker and took a moment to parse what was just said. The black woman doesn’t. Stone-faced, she takes back the sheaf of papers. “Get moving,” she says to Meg, motioning her toward the door.

Outside, they’re behind the building. There’s a dumpster, and a loading dock, a short distance away. The black woman makes Meg walk in the opposite direction, along a wall with no windows or doors in it, nothing but unbroken beige brick. It’s cold; Meg’s breath makes clouds in the air. But there’s no snow. In the distance there’s grass and trees, but where they’re walking, there’s nothing but concrete. Meg stares hungrily at the grass and trees, at the sun in the sky, at the clouds overhead and in front of her mouth, as if she can make up for eight months of never seeing them by looking at them really hard, right now.

“Kneel down,” the black woman orders, and the tears Meg hasn’t shed in months well up. Not for herself. She has this coming. She may have tried to reform – first by being a superhero, then by becoming a doctor – but she’s always been a terrible person. She murdered her father, and then she became a murderer for hire, and then she’d helped David design drugs, and then she’d been a murderer again. She’d been a vicious jealous bitch around her first boyfriend, and had seduced her second, a man three times her age, just so she could take him away from her mentor. And then she’d gone to medical school, she’d tried to be a better person, but they’d kidnapped her and made her make diseases and because she was too weak to stand up to torture, many, so many, people will die. She’ll never have a chance to undo what she had done, to protect the Proximas of the US, or the world, against the engineered plagues she was terrorized into creating.

“Oh, you gonna cry now?” the black woman said.

“Fuck you,” Meg snarled through the tears. “I know you’re gonna kill me, so just do it.”

The woman sighed like she was at the end of her patience. “Kneel down, girl.”

“No. Shoot me standing up. I’m not gonna kneel to any of you anymore.”

“Have it your way,” the woman says, and points her gun at Meg.

It goes off, a deafening sound, but nothing that happens after that makes any sense. Meg sees her own body topple backward behind her, turning in time to see it fall, but she hasn’t been hit. There’s no pain. Is she a ghost? There’s her own bloody, headless corpse on the ground, and the black woman and the white man dragging the body off, but the black woman is also still here, tapping her foot.

“What—”

“Figure it out yet?” the black woman asks, and turns blue. The azurin mutation. In a small percentage of Proximas, melanin converts to azurin instead, and the person ends up blue. White people turn pale blue, with blue or green or purple hair, and black people turn deep blue, with blue eyes and blue hair. The buzzcut vanishes, replaced by a bright blue Afro that in shape and fluffiness looks like it came straight out of Cleopatra Jones. The woman’s face also changes, subtly, small aspects of eye shape and cheekbone placement altering, so she looks similar to the woman she was before, but not the same. Like sisters, or cousins. Except that one of them’s blue. Which means Proxima.

“You’re a Proxima?” Meg asks. She can’t quite believe this is really happening. She can still see the brown woman with the buzzcut and the dark-haired white man dragging her own corpse toward the corner of the building. Is this like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge or something?

“Sure fucking am,” the blue woman says, and puts out her hand. “Shadow. Illusionist. And you’re Megamorph, the bio-controller.”

Meg has never heard her power referred to as bio-control, but it makes sense. Any organic tissue she’s touching, she can do nearly anything to, and any organic tissue she can reach through an organic channel, like a wooden floor or a shaggy wool carpet, it’s the same as if she’s touching it. She takes Shadow’s hand, tentatively. “Why… if you’re an illusionist, couldn’t you have told me what you were doing to begin with?” The tears are still in her eyes. Angrily, she wipes them away.

“Conserving power. I have to create the illusion of what they expect to be happening, and hide what we’re actually doing. The more you move around, the harder it is. Now kneel down. I was serious about that part.”

“Why?”

“Hard to rescue you if you’re missing a head,” Shadow says, and pulls off her belt something that looks almost, but not exactly, like the keys that unlock Meg’s collar.

“Those don’t look right. Are you sure they’ll work?” Meg hates that she sounds plaintive, almost whiny… but if Shadow’s here to rescue her, she really doesn’t want to get her head blown up on the verge of freedom.

“Tested them already. They’ve got some collared corpses in the pit around the corner.”

There’s a pit around the corner full of dead bodies. This doesn’t surprise Meg in any way – it makes perfect sense – but it horrifies her, hitting her in a nerve she’d have thought burnt out by all the horror she’s endured. Her knees go out from under her, which she manages to make look as if she’s kneeling like Shadow told her to, rather than that she’s half collapsing.

Shadow puts the key to the collar. There’s a clicking sound. Meg holds her breath despite herself.

And then the collar falls to the ground.

It works by magnetic induction, suppressing the part of her brain that controls her body’s production of catalysine, and suppressing the part that allows her to perceive and control her powers. Stopping the magnetic induction doesn’t instantly replenish her body’s catalysine, and without the catalysine, she doesn’t yet have any powers to perceive and control. So she doesn’t feel any different. “My powers will come back, right?” she asks, knowing it’s a stupid question – she knows how the collar works, she knows how Proxima powers work probably better than anyone. She knows they’ll come back. But at the moment, she feels painfully young, and not like an expert on anything. She wants Shadow to reassure her the way a mother might reassure a child.

Shadow nods, her expression gentle. “Of course they will,” she says. She reaches a hand down and helps Meg to her feet. “We need to get out of here.”

“Wait.” Meg takes a deep breath. She doesn’t want to admit to this, but she won’t let people die for her pride. “Do you know if… that pit, are there any of the victims there? The experimental subjects, of the bio-engineered diseases?”

“I figure that’s probably where they are, yeah,” Shadow says.

“I’m sorry, but… is there any way you can cover me to get in there? I… they made me make those diseases. I have to stop them, but I couldn’t keep samples. It’ll be a lot easier to inoculate people if I can get samples…”

Shadow grins. “Oh, yeah. We knew all about those diseases. That’s why the World Unity Collective decided to rescue you.”

World Unity Collective is Caesar Primus’ group, a supervillain gang dedicated to creating a world where the Proximas of the world unite and take over, which is supposed to bring about a utopia for everyone, Sapiens and Proxima alike. Meg thought it was a stupid idea when she first heard about it, training with Peace Force Tau, and she still thinks so. Proximas are different from Sapiens by exactly one gene, and there is absolutely no reason to think Proximas will treat the world any better than Sapiens have. But she doesn’t care anymore.

Over and over, in her prison, she called out in her mind, begging her mentor to hear her. Suri Chandrasekhar is the leader of the Peace Force, and an incredibly powerful telepath. Suri knew where Meg was going to medical school; if she was paying attention, if she cared, she would know Meg had been kidnapped, and with her powers she should have been able to find Meg… if she was looking. But she hadn’t. No rescue came from the Peace Force. And right now, Meg has reasons to hate Sapiens – reasons that are illogical, because there are billions of Sapiens and they cannot possibly all be responsible for the torments she’s suffered over the past eight months, but Meg’s reasons for hate are rarely all that logical anyway. If it’s Proxima supremacists who’ve rescued her, then yay for Proxima supremacy.

“I’ll ask you how you knew about the diseases later,” Meg says.

“Yeah. Let’s get this done quick.”

***

The pit’s covered with a tarp. As soon as she peels the tarp back, Meg has to shut off her sense of smell. She hasn’t eaten since the terrible cafeteria-grade scrambled eggs for breakfast, so there’s nothing in her stomach anymore – it’s all moved on to the intestines by now -- but if she had to smell this without her powers, she’d be puking up all of the nothing in her stomach over everything.

It’s not hard to find her diseases. There’s maybe twenty bodies in here, tangled together in a heap, most in a fairly advanced state of rot. All of them are infected. Or were, when they were alive. Apparently Sonnebend doesn’t kill lots and lots of people as a general rule. This isn’t a concentration camp; it’s a research facility, where part of the research is on how to kill people with diseases. And since the people had to be Proximas, that limited the supply; only one in ten thousand people has that one gene that differentiates Sapiens from Proximas. Can’t very well murder five thousand people in testing a disease if you have to screen fifty million to find them.

The viruses are easy. With the machinery of the cells stopped, they’re not replicating, but a lot of them are intact, easy to capture. The bacteria are harder. They’ve been dying since they killed their hosts. But there are a couple of subjects that still have live bacteria. Meg pulls them in and stores them in tiny nodules of fatty tissue in her breast, with no capillaries feeding them so they don’t have much chance to get out into her bloodstream. Not that it would matter; Meg’s powers automatically destroy any organic matter that would trigger an immune response. She can’t get sick. Even at Sonnebend, the fact that they removed her collar every few days so she could heal some politician or CEO or important donor meant that she couldn’t get sick; in the hour or so she had her powers, her body would destroy any potential source of infection. She’s going to have to be more careful to make sure her body doesn’t annihilate these infectious agents before she has a chance to engineer an inoculation or cure than she will to make sure they don’t actually infect her.

She climbs back out of the pit, with Shadow’s help. “I’m done. I’ve got everything I need.”

“Then let’s get the fuck out of here, okay?” Shadow says, and ten minutes later, they’re in a car parked outside the barbed wire fence, driving away.

“It’ll take them some time to figure out you’re not dead,” Shadow says, driving the car with a cigarette in her hand. “I took back the fake papers for your execution, so they’ll have a hard time figuring out who authorized it, or where I went, or who I even was. If they compare video feed of the outdoors to the indoors, they’ll see me and the fake guy I made walk back through the door but then never show up at the checkpoint right inside, and maybe that’ll give them a clue, but none of their video will have anything real.” She takes a deep drag from the cigarette. Meg wants to warn her about lung cancer and suggest she quit, but she looks up to Shadow too much to be her condescending prick doctor persona.

“What were you doing? Manipulating light?”

Shadow nods. “And sound, but fuck it’s hard. It’s so much easier for me if I just work on the brain. Altering myself and making another dude is almost the limit of what I can do with sound and light, whereas if I’m going in through the brain, I can make people see a full Hollywood spectacular. Aliens shooting laser guns all over the place. An army of Picts with bows and arrows. Whatever I want.”

“That’s really cool,” Meg says, somewhat awestruck. “Doesn’t that mean you really have two powers? Because a psionic illusion power and the ability to manipulate sound and light sounds like it’s two entirely different things.”

Shadow takes another drag on the cigarette. “Used to just be the psionic part. I got fixed up by a guy named Giovanni. Told him I wanted to be able to fool cameras. Closed-circuit cams were getting big around then. It was hard to pull a job when the security guys can see you on the cam, even if they can’t as soon as they get close enough to use their eyes.”

“Wait… this Giovanni guy can give people powers?”

“Yeah, though all he does is give Proximas new powers. He won’t give powers to a Sapien and he’s got some weird rule about what kind of powers he’ll give a Proxima, but what I wanted sounded to him like it’d work with what I already got. Gives me a motherfucking headache if I overuse it. I gonna need a whole fucking bottle of Tylenol tonight.” She laughs.

Meg puts her hand on Shadow’s shoulder. “No, you won’t,” she says. Her power can hurt when she invades people with it, unless she’s working to numb them or make them feel good, neither of which is safe to do while someone is driving… but it only takes a second, barely time for Shadow’s body to register that Meg’s power is inside it, to clear away the tension that’ll lead to a migraine.

Shadow turns her head. “What the fuck you doin’, girl?” she demands.

“I fixed it,” Meg says, beaming. “So you won’t get a migraine. I owe you a lot more than that, but that’s the least I can give back to you.”

For some reason Shadow does not look happy. She rolls her eyes and slumps slightly forward against the steering wheel, which is all right because they’re at a traffic light. “Listen, kid. I know you meant well, and I’m not mad. But you can’t just go doing things to people’s bodies without even telling them, let alone asking them. You gotta ask permission. If it’s a friend or an ally, anyway. I could give a shit, what you do to enemies and Sapiens, but with friends and allies you ask.”

“Oh.” Meg feels terrible. She’s overstepped a boundary she should have remembered, because in Peace Force Tau, Suri told her this, but she’s so excited to have her powers back and so grateful to Shadow and so desperate to show that gratitude, she forgot. “I’m sorry. I, I really should’ve known better, it’s just, I’ve been locked up so long… I’m really sorry…”

“Look, kiddo, forget it. S’alright. No harm done, and I do feel better. Just, remember next time. Ask.” She pronounces the word as “axe”. This makes Meg feel strangely nostalgic. One of her best friends from the days right after she got her powers, a teenage prostitute named Rhonda who was one of the most level-headed people Meg has ever known, used to talk that way. Most of the girls she’d known in those days had, actually. Whereas no one in the Peace Force or medical school would have used anything less than 100% proper English, like back in Catholic school.

***

It turns out Sonnebend is in Minnesota, near the Great Lakes. World Unity Collective headquarters is in Florida. They’re going to drive to Chicago to use something called a “transmat” to teleport to Florida, but lake-coast Minnesota to Chicago in Illinois is still what Shadow calls a “long-ass drive”. “We’d go faster if we had a boat,” Shadow jokes, and shows Meg the route on the map.

There are explanations. Shadow won’t tell her how she knew about the diseases – “you’re not cleared to know that, yet,” she says – but she explains eagerly why Meg was recruited. “We figured, since you created the bioweapons, you’d know how to stop them… and you might be able to stop others they come up with. Or create ones to threaten them with, if they keep pulling this kind of shit.”

“I don’t want to create bioweapons. Not against Proximas, not against Sapiens, not against anybody.”

“I hear you,” Shadow says. “You don’t have to. You do whatever you feel comfortable with, for the cause.”

Shadow talks a lot about the cause. Talks about being thrown out of her home for being a “devil child”, when she was 12 and turning from brown to blue. Talks about the Human Definition Amendment, a thing some conservative Senator has proposed that will define “human”, in the law, to mean “Sapien”, meaning Proximas will essentially legally be wild animals, with no legal protections whatsoever. Talks about Proximas being killed as “witches” in Africa, especially the ones with the azurin mutation, who couldn’t hide being Proximas, and being turned into weapons for the government in Russia and China and who knew where else.

Talks about the Special Service killing unarmed Proximas who are suspected of crimes, and that one hits hard, because that’s exactly what happened to David. His power was to see chemistry at the atomic level, completely useless for fighting, and he was a skinny twenty-something nerd and he wore coke-bottle glasses with a tint because he was photophobic, and he was unarmed, and they’d gunned him down in his apartment, and Meg had only lived because he’d sent her on an errand to find his lawyer. Because she’d assumed, when he said he’d need his lawyer after they arrested him, that of course, that was normal, that was how it worked. She was pretty sure he’d known they were coming to kill him, and had sent her on that errand because they’d have killed her too.

Caesar Primus – it means “Emperor First” and it’s pronounced the Latin way, like “Kaiser”, not like the salad – is, according to Shadow, the smartest and most experienced man on the planet. Meg assumes the experienced part is probably true, because apparently, he is somewhere around 2,000 years old, and was a gladiator in ancient Rome. She’s not so sure about smartest. The guy apparently still believes that Sapiens and Proximas are different species. A lot of people believe that, but mostly they are idiots, or at the very least, they know nothing of science.

He’s also bought into a lot of silly ideas about evolution, or claims he has and teaches them to his people. Shadow tells Meg that Proximas are the next evolution of humanity, superior because they are more evolved, destined to rule over humanity, and will survive instead of Sapiens because they are stronger. Meg can identify five errors in Shadow’s concepts of evolution off the top of her head, without any kind of deep dive, but she says nothing. If Shadow wants her to worship at the altar of Caesar Primus… Meg hasn’t done worship at an altar since she left Catholic school, not for anyone, but for Shadow’s sake, she’ll pretend.

And if it’s true, as Shadow implies, that Primus sent her to go rescue Meg, then she owes him as much for her freedom as she owes Shadow.

***

A transmat turns out to be a platform, where you put in some coordinates, step on the platform, and are instantly somewhere else, on a transmat platform elsewhere. It reminds Meg of Star Trek transporters, but makes more sense – she’d always wondered, how did the transporter beam know how to reassemble when it got where it was going?

The base is in a swamp, and the only ways out of the base are either to wade through alligator-infested waters, or take the transmat. Or fly, she supposes, for those that can do that. Wading would be annoying, but can’t hurt her; neither mosquitoes nor alligators, nor anything else in the water, can cause her any harm. But it’s obvious to her that that’s not going to be true for most people, and it bothers her a little. If the cause is so wonderful and important, why make it so hard to leave the base?

“It’s not to make it hard to leave,” Shadow explains. “It protects us from so-called superheroes, and it means that if you want to go anywhere, you have to take a risk. Keeps you strong.”

“But if you’re going by transmat that’s not a risk.”

“Yeah, but you can’t go anywhere by transmat unless Caesar agrees.”

The building’s far too much like Sonnebend. It’s made of concrete rather than bricks, a big brutalism box in the middle of a swamp, and there are windows all over the upper floors, but it goes down several floors underground. Sonnebend had linoleum tile and World Unity Collective headquarters has concrete flooring, like a warehouse, but either way there’s nothing alive, nothing for her powers to sense through her feet or the canvas shoes she makes herself from rubber and cotton. She’s not going to spend much time here, she can already tell.

“I need to go back to Baltimore,” she tells Shadow. “I don’t know what happened to anything I owned when I was kidnapped.”

Shadow is skeptical. “Do you really need any of that stuff, or do you just have a sentimental attachment to it?” she asks. “Revolutionaries have to be ready to break free of any material possessions, at any time. You can’t have sentiment. And here, your room and board are provided for, and I know with your powers you can make your own clothes whenever you want…”

“I want my medical textbooks,” Meg says. “I was trying to become a doctor when they kidnapped me.”

Now Shadow raises an eyebrow. “You think being a doctor is the best way to serve the cause?”

Meg smiles. That particular smile is the last thing some gangsters saw, once upon a time. “To heal, you need to know intimately how the body works and how everything fits together. That’s also what you need to know to be really creative about hurting people. You know, if it’s going to advance the cause to hurt someone in a particularly creative way.”

That makes Shadow laugh. “Oh yeah, I knew I was right about you. You’re gonna be a fantastic asset to the team, Meg.”

There’s no one else important in the base right now – Primus is apparently in DC, and his other top-ranked minions are away on various missions. No one here but Proximas with low power levels who work as grunts. Thugs, like she was once. The only person here to give permission for transmat use is Shadow, and she’s all in favor of Meg getting her medical textbooks once she understands what Meg can use them for.

Except that Meg’s read them all already. The term had been about to end when she was kidnapped. Her ability to directly sense bodies and how they worked had gotten her through med school in record time – she’d been there a year, and she’d learned two years’ worth in that time – and then Sonnebend had taught her more, because to create the diseases they wanted her to create, or heal the ailments of rich old men, she’d needed to know more. It’d been all she had to do that gave her any kind of pleasure in any way.

She’s not going back for medical textbooks. Shadow the true believer can give up material possessions and eliminate sentiment, if she wants. Meg believes in very little of this bullshit. She just worships Shadow for saving her.

World Unity Collective maintains a transmat in Grand Central Station, and Shadow’s able to advance Meg some cash, since of course she doesn’t currently have an ATM card, a credit card, or checks. Meg takes the subway from Grand Central to Penn Station, and from there the Amtrak to Baltimore, and then a cab to the Johns Hopkins medical school campus.

***

Meg walks down the street to the townhome she used to share with her roommate, breathing in the winter air. She can't stop looking at the buildings, the trees without their leaves, the sun behind the solid wall of white winter clouds. The people. There are so many people and they're so beautiful and they know nothing about the way the world really works, nothing at all. She wants to kill them, to save them, to tell them the truth. To take the men, at least, home and screw their brains out because she's free to choose not to, now. She doesn't do any of that.

She doesn't have the key to her old apartment any more, but the music inside tells her that her housemate Tara is there right now. Meg knocks, hard.

Tara opens the door. "Meg?" she asks, sounding shocked.

"Is my stuff still here?" Meg asks.

"Uh, yeah, yeah, of course. The landlady was just wondering where you were -- she says she's been getting your rent checks in the mail, but she sent us a note about the electric bill going up and you didn't increase the amount you were paying, and she was trying to get hold of you, but I had no idea where you were so I just paid it for you."

"I'll reimburse you." Meg walks into the apartment. She looks around the place. Everything is just as she left it. "Pack up my stuff for me and I'll have movers come get it. I'll pay the landlady for your share of the rent for the next two months."

"What happened to you, Meg? Where did you go?"

How does one explain that one was kidnapped by the government and has spent the past several months being raped, tortured and forced to work on biological weapons? One doesn't. "Something came up."

Stuffy is still sitting on her bed, David’s dried blood still all over her. Dried blood looks brown; she explained the stains on Stuffy as chocolate sauce to everyone in Peace Force Tau. Tara never went into Meg’s own bedroom, so she never had to make that explanation. Meg picks up Stuffy and puts her in her coat. She suddenly wants to cry, but badass supervillains don't cry, so she uses her powers to suppress the urge. She's going to have to figure out somewhere to put her. Obviously she can’t bring a stuffed animal back to a base full of supervillains.

"Meg, are you okay?"

She doesn't look at the Sapien who used to be her friend. "I'm fine," she says shortly, and thinks, No. Not even slightly.

Back on the street, it's cold and crisp and she can walk anywhere she wants. She can walk to a hot dog cart and get a hot dog. So she does. And ice cream. The whole time she was imprisoned she never had ice cream.

Tears sting her eyes again. Stupid that she has to keep using her powers for this. She should be tougher than this. She stopped crying after the first month in prison, never did it again until she thought Shadow was about to kill her. Why is she crying now?

When she was at Sonnebend, she never stopped wishing for her freedom, but she stopped believing or even hoping she would ever be able to walk around on a city street and buy a hot dog ever again. And then Shadow walked into Sonnebend and brought her out like Orpheus freeing Eurydice from Hades, except of course that Orpheus hadn't succeeded in the end. And Shadow did that because Caesar Primus had ordered her to. Most likely. She’d never specifically said, but Meg could read between the lines.

If Primus sent her to rescue Meg, Meg will do anything for him.

Meg knows his ideology is ridiculous. Right now she doesn't care. She'll burn the Sapiens' world down for what they did to her, and she'll enjoy herself doing it. Out of gratitude for the gift of her freedom, she will do anything for the people who saved her.

She’s got financial things to arrange – Meg has a lot of money. Being the most terrifying killer in New York City used to pay really well. She’ll reimburse Tara, get movers to take all her stuff to a storage unit. Buy some clothes – she doesn’t need new clothes, since her powers can reshape the ones she has, but she likes to shop for clothes. She likes to dress up in clothes that make every man around want to fuck her, and maybe she’ll pick some of them out and do it. She hasn’t had sex because she wanted to in eight months. Maybe she’ll fuck away some of the memories of Sonnebend before going back to Primus’ hideout.

And then she’s going to be the most vicious badass she can possibly be, with all the skills she acquired as a teenage assassin and all the knowledge she gained in Peace Force Tau, and Johns Hopkins medical school, and Sonnebend. She’s going to combine it all and she’s going to make Shadow proud of rescuing her, and Primus of telling her to do it. And she’s going to make humanity pay for what they did to her.

#52 project #proximas #cold light #holidays5 #superpowers

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lonelyghosts-stuff · 3 years ago

Text

Avengers Infinity War-First Time Watching Reaction Play-by-Play (Pt. 2)

Part 1

I wonder how many people Gamora has killed? What made her finally snap to not serve Thanos anymore?

How DID Gamora find it? Like, who told her?

How did Thanos capture nebula?

Poor nebula. She’s literally been through hell and back.

Ohhhh she snuck on board...

Thanos you suck so much. You favor one daughter over another.

Oh. Where was said map to the soul stone?

Gosh I feel so damn bad for nebula. She was raised as his daughter too but he tortured her and tore her apart. Nebula never had the chance to be her equal. She deserves so much.

Taught groot as an elective? What about all speak?

Buckle up rocket. It’s gonna get emotional.

Thor is literally all alone. He needs a time to sit alone and cry and break a whole building.

Rocket and Thor friends? Please

1500 years old? Jane, honey, you escaped.

Gotta give it up to Hemsworth’s acting chops here. Especially talking to nobody in reality. Just a bunch of cgi

Ew ew ew eye socket

Should have washed that yikes

Snuck it out by hiding it up your? Huh? You watch too many movies rocket.

Huge title card. Thank you. I wouldn’t have known where we were despite them saying their location many times.

How is that video game battery not dead?

Perceptive rabbit

I LOVE that they used a dwarf to play a giant character!!! This is brilliant! (And that dwarves are giant for some reason lol.)

Soooo again Thanos killed everyone EXCEPT Eitri despite his “morality” supposedly being balance

Poor hands

Poor nebula

Smart nebula

Maybe should have waited to be fixed fully first

Ah crap. SOMEONE PICK UP THE SPACE PHONE

MANTIS

Love how Stark asks for peters help in steering and not Stephen lmao

Nice parking job

Peter, stop popping pop culture refs

Lmao ITS ABOUT TO BE THE ICONIC SCENE

YES PLEASE

Blanket of Death. Capey has a new nickname.

Where’s Gamora

Who’s Gamora

Why is Gamora

What master do you serve?

Jesus?

I mean, yea I do. So does Pratt lmaoo.

LMAO PARKER’S FACE WHEN QUILL SAID THOR WASNT HANDSOME

Storm breaker time baby

“In theory it could summon the bifrost” who theorized this? How do you only theorize and not know?

Oh my gosh mantis is just bouncing around

Mr. Clean lmao

Kick names, take ass

Hey now, these guys saved the galaxy and universe from Ego so lmao

Oh no I know the scene coming up

Poor quill lmao

“I’m half human. So the 50% of me that’s stupid, that’s 100% of you.” “Your math is, blowing my mind.” What’s funny is that Quill’s math was actually completely accurate lol

Stephen having a stroke or a seizure? You good homie?

Soooo if Strange looked to the future and so possible outcomes, what does that mean for the TVA? According to them, there’s ONE sacred timeline, so all other branches are erased (which again messes up what smart hulk eventually says in end game. See kids, this is why you don’t mess with time travel in stories. There’s no way to go back in time without creating a time loop). Ehhhhh I’ll let it slide. Just ignore it... sigh... I can’t help it if I’ve studied paradoxes

Hmmmm not good odds I’ve gotta say...

Watch like, outside of the millions of realities that strange saw, there were like a million or billion more he missed where they won with no casualties lol

Hey Red Skull. Long time no see. How did he get here anyways and why?

Yea you’re prepared all right...

Gotta say, Lord Elrond has seen better days

I’m not ready to say good bye to this Gamora. Gamora and Loki and Nat go down as my favorite characters, gotta say. I know that Tony does and it’s sad, but his feels more satisfying because his sacrifice directly results in them winning. Loki is murdered. Gamora is murdered. Nat died just for a stepping stone for the avengers. She has no idea whether or not they will actually win in the end.

I’m hopeful they may bring Nat back like in the comics, red room clone style.

We got back vision, Loki (kinda), variant Gamora, a new captain America, why not Nat? Yea we have a prequel, but gosh I love her so much.

“You must lose that which you love.” Couldn’t that apply to like an object or something? Could I not throw my Nintendo switch over the cliff? Or my dog? (I would hate that just as much as a person, don’t get me wrong, I’m just curious about the rules)

Yea boohoo sad for Thanos... loses his favorite daughter. I don’t care about him. He deserves suffering.

Poor Gamora doesn’t think he’s willing to do it.. GIRL RUN!!!

Thanos deserves all the suffering.

He does love you Gamora... but that love... it’s selfish. It’s blind... Thanos seems to be a chaotic vigilante who is narrowminded, tunnel vision on his goal with no regards of the cost. But he is evil. If there is ever an alternate route to an end that doesn’t result in the loss of innocent lives, and you know that but you willingly choose the once that costs innocent lives, that is an evil decision. Maybe Thanos isn’t evil, but he’s not good. Far from it. He’s obsessed with this idyllic Utopia but he rushes to one method of getting there. Yes, people suffer. It sucks... it’s unfair... it’s horrible. But it is never the right of someone else to dictate whether or not said person would be better off dead. Who lives, who dies. If Thanos truly was neutral and not selfish, he would have thrown his own life into the mix of the potential 50/50 snap. Thanos is not good. He’s not misunderstood. He’s a murderer. A genocidal cult leader. I have no tears for him. Only for those who suffered more at his hands.

Rant over, time to try not to cry about Gamora...

Her face of realization

Gamora run please

Thanos, I hate you. (Great character her, but not a good person)

Poor Gamora

Oh my gosh the emotion here is great but I’ve heard this sound used as a meme on TikTok too many times aghhhh

Gamora!

What a way to die

I’m crying again. I miss her already...

Who the hell designed this place and put the stone here???? Who did this?

Cry Thanos. Suffer. My only comfort here is that you are sad. You deserve suffering. You really do...

The TVA is laughing here and I’m not okay..

Poor Peter Quill... he’s also lost a lot like Thor, but has had the “luck” of not knowing his family too close.

Wakanda babyyyy

No, you don’t want Starbucks, you want Dutch bros

Lmao I love rhodey. Poor Bruce.

BUCKY BUCKY BUCKY

HUG

NO CMON HAVE A LONG HUG

MALE FRIENDSHIPS ARE SO IMPORTANT.

Yea Shuri show em up.

Okay quick pause, I love love LOVE how Shuri is smarter. It’s a powerful moment for females BUT it’s not done in a way that’s condescending to males! It’s not saying women power because men bad, she’s just good! (And she has had access to technology they never could have but I digress). More of this please Hollywood. Don’t let being a female be the power. I don’t want strong female characters, I want strong characters who happen to be female. Ones who hold their own, have faults like anyone else, struggle, have weaknesses and strengths, but are strong without putting down others. Just a comment, just because a woman character may not be as strong as a man character, that is not saying she’s weak. If you’re the second strongest human in the world, you are NOT weak. You’re just not as strong as the strongest human ever, but that’s nothing against you. LET WOMEN STAND ON THEIR OWN MERITS WITHOUT SEX AFFECTING THEM!

Anyways

I love Shuri

I wish they had more time. She definitely could have done it. But stupid Thanos

Ughhhghhg

I know what many scenes are upcoming... with quill and peter and vision and everyone else

Let👏🏻Bucky👏🏻Have👏🏻Peace👏🏻

Thank you Nat!!! I love that Nat is so protective and selfless.

GET THIS MAN A SHIELD

Bucky needs love please. He’s my stand in, manipulated, greasy, long haired, dark and mysterious, stabby boy. (Also I need Bucky and Loki to meet. But let Loki finish his show (and come out of it alive because if he doesn’t I will sue) and be the antihero hero we need. Please. If he doesn’t get reintroduced into the mcu as a hero I will sue.

Thor, sweetie, are you a masochist?

Back to wakanda

Oh no, bad CGI, floating head Bruce banner. I’ll let it slide... sigh....

Can’t like, you just rain bombs on them forever?

JIBARI TRIBE YEA BOYYYYY

Sorry Proxima Midnight, you look like a frog and your name sounds like a middle schooler’s OC.

How nice. Diplomatic meeting.

“Thanos will have nothing but dust and blood.” Reeeeeeally wish you didn’t say that, T’Challa...

Yay big CGI battle commence! It’s like a really expensive animated cartoon at this point

WAKANDA FOREVER!

Poor Bucky. Forgot this dude doesn’t know much about the modern world.

Ahhhh Kamikazi aliens

I just wanna say that I love that Wakanda still has the artistic culture in their clothing and tradition all the while having badass, super advanced technology.

Why can’t they just rain bombs down the whole fight lol. Rhodey has those super nice bombs, like, do that they he whole time? Please? Why do you not have a barrier around the entire king.

No M’Baku, it’s not the end of wakanda. But half of all life, yea

WAKANDA FOREVER YEAAAAAAA

They should honesty all have nano tech suits like black panther lol. Or iron man suits. Fine maybe the most powerful one with the best quality material for the king, but besides that, yknow.

Wow Steve is hot with a beard.

So much happening at once. Thor, Wakanda, Vormir, Knowhere, am I missing anything?

Okay, but what IS the full force of a star? Like in Newton’s or something? Juls? Is it heat?

What’s this metal? How does it fare with vibranium?

Get off your wooden butt, groot.

“He needs the axe” are you Thor, the god of axes?

Soooo, I thought Thor didn’t NEED the hammer, it just helped him concentrate his powers or act as a conduit. Is that retconned already?

Cmon groot, put down your game. Soooo, is Groot worthy? He technically lifted it. Or is it a technicality because it wasn’t fully finished yet?

Cmon bucky, use that fancy arm of yours.

Wow they’re getting destroyed.

They need wanda to help.

BADASS ENTRANCE BABYYYY

How did Thor know to come to wakanda?

Floaty head Bruce

“BRING ME THANOS!”

Ahhhhhahahaha yeaaaaaa

Cry Thanos. Do it. I hate you.

Much more of a purple grape nutsack.

Oh gosh... I know what Peter Quill is going to do. I still don’t hate him.

“With all six stone I would simply snap my fingers. They would all cease to exist.” Orrrr, now hear me out, I know I sound like a broken record now but... MAYBE DOUBLE THE RESOURCES INSTEAD?? That’s not mercy. That’s not up to you to decide whether or not someone’s better off dead.

Smoosh

Yea quill has experience with the power stone

AIM FOR THE HEAD

Cmon it’s basic zombie tactics

I love peter quill lmao

Go capey!!!

Magic with a kick!

Poor Peter

CAPEY NOOOOOO

Wow he’s OP

Ouch quill just got majorly clotheslined

NEBULA

“Where’s Gamora?” 😭😭😭 SHE CARES AGHHHH

Restrain him! Work it mantis!!!

Why even remove the gauntlet, just slit his throat... kill him....

Quill no... stop being cocky...

Oh no

Quill please don’t

JUST SLIT THANOS’ THROAT

Quill please....

Poor quill. Just lost the person who really really loved him

Okay, I still love star lord. Idc what others think. He reacted realistically. If you hate peter quill for how he reacted, you better also hate Tony Stark for how he reacted to bucky when he learned bucky killed his parents despite knowing for a fact that bucky was brainwashed. Yes it was annoying... yes they were so close, but quill is so human here. I don’t hate him. He gets too much hate for acting like any normal person would have. Distraught, grief filled, he lost his love. Someone who helped him open up and finally move on from his mother’s death and fathers villainy.

Spider man saving mantis gives me life

How did that power stone blast not kill them?

Clearly Thanos has played Majora’s Mask. At least he has good taste.

So close vision.... but I know... I know what happens.

YES BUCKY AND ROCKET GUN CIRCLE.

Lmao give rocket Bucky’s old arm.

“I am Groot.” “I am Steve Rogers.” Comedy gold

Cmon Thor, go after the big one first.

Cmon wanda, save them. We need some scarlet witch magic up here to stop these

Okay that was so cool. AND THEN SHE USED THE BLADES

Oh no but now Shuri is alone

So close yet so far.... Dangit... vision was almost good

Ouch. Bonk to the head

YEA BLACK WIDOW

BADASS TIME

AND OKOYE!!

LETS GOOOOOOO

BADASS WOMEN

Ouch poor vision

Cmon Thor back up vision

Please

Hulk is in his feels

Cmon hulk grow up

Ooooh smart move banner

Aaaaand he’s gone

Giant blade look oit

Corvus, screw off.

YEA STEVE

WHERE IS THOR WHEN YOU NEED HIM

CMON NAT

Oh dang. Nice one wanda. But also, sheesh. Helluva way to go. But no big.

Yea vision. Stabby time.

Now vision and Steve, kiss.

Spider man saving everyone’s lives.

YEA STRANGE

Where was this in New York???

MULTIPLYING

WHY DIDNT YOU DO THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE????

Oh no

Well then... ouch. Soooo where’s the real stone???

Hey look Tony, you have a fan.

Okay I’m just pissed odd they didn’t just kill Thanos when they had him subdued. Like, worry about the glove AFTER he’s not longer a threat

Oof

Tony is taking a beating

HE WAS STABBED

WHAT

I don’t want your respect Thanos. That’s an insult.

They will remember him. They will remember him Thanos. When he kills you.

DOCTOR STRANGE WHAT?

You really doing this??? I guess he knows what needs to unfold for them to win... dang. I wouldn’t trust him tho.

Peter Quill in berserker mode

Where’d he go?

Name dropping the second movie

Strange knows everything about to go down. Who dies, who lives, what Thanos is about to do... he’s accepting his soon dusted demise because Stark needs to live...

AIM FOR THE HEAD UGHHHHH

Stop teleporting. That’s Loki’s gimmick.

KILL THIS RAISIN LOOKING NUTSACK UGH

Homie way too OP

Poor wanda and Vis...

HER LIP TREMBLE

PHENOMENAL ACTING

SAY I LOVE YOU

I JUST FEEL YOU

AGGHHHH IM CRYING AGAIN

Poor wanda. To have to kill her love... this.. this is a sacrifice Thanos... not your murder....

Wow Steve is holding back Thanos with pure brute

WANDA IS SO STRONG

HOLDING BACK THANOS WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY BREAKING THE MIND STONE

I LOVE YOU

AGHHHHHHHHH

And I know what happens next...

Poor wanda

Piss off thanos you understand nothing

You lost more than she could know? Bull crap. You are causing everyone to lose...

Cruel reality. Wanda has to see him die twice. RIP Vision

RIP half of all life...

AIM FOR THE DAMN HEAD

IF THOR KILLED HIM THEY COULD HAVE USED THE GAUNTLET TO BRING EVERYONE BACK TO LIFE. USED THE TIME STONE TO REVIVE THEM ALL.

How did that not kill Thanos tho. It may not have been a head shot but still.

Lil Gamora

What is this place?

Is this the soul realm?

Thanos, I hope you suffer forever. You deserve all the pain...

Rest In Peace: Vision, Loki, Bucky, T’Challa, Groot, Wanda Maximoff, Sam Wilson, Mantis, Drax, Peter Quill, Dr. Strange, Peter Parker (I don’t feel so good), and everyone else...

Thank you Nebula.

Thanos, you do NOT deserve to retire peacefully—wipe that smile off of your face

Oop, Rest In Peace Maria Hill and Nick Fury too... Motherfu— (so close Sammy boy...)

Yea Thanos you didn’t really think that through. Much more than half will died since other people rely on other peoples lives

Good thing he hit that button last minute huh? I wonder how captain marvel would fare in the TVA? are her powers considered magic? I mean, she clearly doesn’t know everything since she only just learned about Thanos (which is funny because she was supposedly traversing the universe to protect people)

Welp... onto movie two!

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terrascookiejar-archive · 4 years ago

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What about other official discords? I know Minecraft and New horizons has one. How come they are better handling it than CR despite with possible more massive fan base?

Well I’m not 100% sure. But I have a feeling those discords being ran by official sources managed to have a plan and keep things organized from the start. They probably had a strict process for choosing moderators, or hired their own moderation team whose job it is to keep things in line. Multiple people combing multiple channels and being there to hear things out when things go wrong.

The thing is, Cookie Run Official Discord didn’t start like this.

It’s a well known fact that the Discord was started without anyone on the Devsis Team really fully understanding discord. Originally there were NO moderators at all, aside from these “test mods” that seemed to be floating around, and it was essentially like a wild west where Dev Sis kind of assumed they’d just, figure it out over time? There’s no clear cut rules, they’re constantly changing. There’s no consistent moderation. They are in and out. So that means there’s no communication, so when Moderators come in that DO promise and try to change things, they very quickly realize that they aren’t getting the help they need higher up the ladder and yet are somehow expected to just keep things in check with a vague and broken system that DevSis assumed could build itself. So often times those good mods leave in frustration, because like a bad job with poor communication you can only handle so much of that. In the end they bit off way more than they could ever hope to chew and... yet still kinda ignore/assume the issues will solve itself and they’ll just... figure it out later?

I know it’s not entirely Devsis and MicMac’s faults. But considering how MicMac responded kind of half-heartedly to CookieRunUpdate’s very blatant harassment by a past moderator... it gives off the impression that they don’t really care that their Discord is a shit show and would rather just ignore the issue until it “resolves itself”

Either because they don’t care/want money, or they don’t have the capacity to handle any of it.

That might not be their intent but that’s completely how they come off.

Edit: Additionally with Minecraft and New Horizons. THOSE companies, Mojang/Microsoft and Nintendo, is that they have a strong company base in the United States and Canada. And if something were to go wrong there they could very easily be sued there. So there’s a stronger pull for preventing things from happening to the best of their ability.

Litigation is always a threat when it comes to america as a continent, and even if it’s conjecture it’ll be a messy prospect to deal with any kind of lawsuit so they’d rather avoid it at all costs by properly staffing their forums with reliable moderators, having a system and rules clearly displayed, and taking proper courses of action legally to handle things as needed.

The thing with Cookie Run and DevSis? They’re based in South Korea. I don’t know Korean Laws! I’m assuming most of my english-speaking followers don’t either.

The only time Devsis really took action over anything was when there was an uproar caused by the publisher of the comics for adding a Cookie Hitler to the plot of Adventure Masterpiece. I’m assuming only because it would cause a significant uproar in Korea- (For those who don’t know, Korea used to be the victim of fascist and abusive dictatorship when Japan had control of the country years and years ago. Plus considering the current state of North Korea, they generally aren’t exactly ones who take too kindly to any depiction of fascism in any facet, even if they are the villain.)

Since MicMac had to give a public statement about how this was not something under his control since the Publisher writes and makes the comics and they only license the Cookie Run brand name out to them. Subsequently the Publisher had to pull the issue and stop running it, so even though it’s still listed in korean online storefronts it’s limited and not in print.

Yet that’s the thing. The Cookie Run Official Discord is run most mostly the Western Fanbase as far as I can tell, and if someone wanted to sue DevSisters for maybe putting their children in danger... well that would be harder than filing a lawsuit against Microsoft or Nintendo.

There’s no Devsisters of America. or Canada. They’re all based in Korea. So they probably have the safety net of knowing that if anyone outside the country could even have a chance of filing a lawsuit perhaps due to the Pedophilia issue, they’d have to be exceptionally powerful. Like Someone with a lot of power and legal prowess.

The fact of the matter is, DevSisters ignored the Burning Sun issue, DevSisters ignores the harassment their fans inflict on each other on a regular basis, DevSisters will ignore pedophilic behavior because they either don’t want to deal with it or don’t have to worry about facing consequences.

You need to remember DevSisters is not a small indie group making video games as a passion project, DevSisters is a CORPORATION. Corporations aren’t your friends. They aren’t here to protect you. They aren’t looking out for you. Their only job is to make money and at the end of the day unless something threatens that, they aren’t going to do anything about it.

#Mun Answers #ask #asks #Anonymous

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mitsususu · 4 years ago

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All work and no play? Kick back and read about Stucky playing videogames. Below are my Top 5 Favorite stories:

“How Buzzfeed Helped Bucky Barnes Get A Boyfriend” (M, 40k) by nickel710

In which Bucky Barnes, Iraq war veteran and bicycle enthusiast, streams Overwatch on the side for fun under the handle President15, and one day his friend-of-a-friend FalconKnight introduces a new player to the crew, THECapRogers. It would be totally absurd for the actual Captain America to hang out in his stream and argue about baseball, right? ...right?

+ Shrunkyclunks. Overwatch and retro Nintendo. Bucky gets to be the more famous one for a while and Steve loves it

-☆-

“Stonks” (E, 2k) by borkybuns

Based off this Reddit post:

I gave a BJ to my friend for 1 million bells in Animal Crossing yesterday.

It's been a bit awkward between us since, but I have no regrets. My island looks so fancy now.

+ Modern AU. Animal Crossing. Steve is loaded with game-currency and Bucky sees an opportunity for a mutually beneficial exchange

-☆-

“Matchmaking” (M, 34k) by Nori

“Look, that was not my fault,” says a deep voice, crackling over the mic. Bucky jumps and clutches at his chest, heart pounding.

“Holy shit, you’re using the in game chat?” Bucky croaks. No one uses Destiny’s in game chat.

+ Shrunkyclunks. Destiny. Bucky carries a stranger through the game and Steve gets inspired to draw again

-☆-

“Rainbow Road” (T, 1k) by A_M_Kelley

Clint overhears something he probably shouldn't.

+ Post WS, living in the tower. Mario Kart and misunderstandings

-☆-

“Sucker” (E, 1k) by orphan_account

"Contrary to popular belief, being born in the twenties doesn't make him bad with technology. (Although it does make him bad with the man who makes this particular kind of technology.) He has a Stark phone, and he can actually use it for more than calling a takeout place, and hanging up on them six times ('Jesus, Steve, just give me the phone already, wouldya?'), such as, playing the in vogue games. Which is how he found this stupid fucking game. It's easy, of course it's easy, until it isn't. It's fine, until he has levels where it takes concentrated levels of planning. Because then he starts thinking."

+ Post WS. Candy Crush. Bucky is jealous of Tony and plays Candy Crush to distract himself. Steve shows him there’s nothing to be jealous of

-☆-

-☆- And an extra game AU! -☆-

“It’s Been A Long Season Though” (E, 49k) by thiccbuckybarnes

Bucky Barnes is in desperate need of a change in scenery, which is why he makes the foolhardy decision to quit his job, leave his asshole of a fiance, pack up his life, and move to his grandfather’s old farm all within a single day.

He expects confusion, hardship, and maybe even failure. But love? He wasn’t expecting that.

+ Modern AU. Stardew Valley. Bucky inherits a farm and falls head over heels with the local carpenter.

-☆-

*More Videogame fics in the Crossover list

#stucky #stucky fic #nickel710 #Nori #A_M_Kelley #borkybuns #thiccbuckybarnes #fic rec #Top 5 Favs

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sage-nebula · 5 years ago

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Top 5 Pokémon games! (Spin-offs included)

I’m going with my gut on this one because otherwise I’ll be here all night waffling over the decision and I have mac’n’cheese to make, so—

1.) Pokémon Sword — This is probably going to draw a lot of gasps and confusion, and to be honest I can’t even fully explain it myself except to say that this game was just genuinely a joy and delight to play for me. There wasn’t much to the story (it was mostly just “be the very best like no one ever was while also maybe stopping a disaster on the side), but in honesty I think that contributed to my enjoyment of it. Aside from Game Freak’s storytelling being less than great (to put it mildly) for the past two generations, Sword made me feel the way I did way back in childhood when I was playing the original Red & Blue versions, and those games had . . . pretty much the same story, except replace “disaster” with “yakuza / mafia crimes.” To me, the most important thing in any game is that it be fun to play, so the fact that Sword didn’t have a stellar story didn’t matter very much to me. In fact, again, given Game Freak’s recent track record, it’s a bonus. Sword is just an absolute blast to play, I love the characters, I love a lot of the pokémon, Galar is beautiful and I’m hyped that the expansion is DLC rather than a whole new game that’s the same story plus a few added details. Despite its faults (e.g. lack of a National Dex, lack of Mega Evolution, etc), I’m really happy with the Gen VIII games and like them a lot.

2.) Pokémon SoulSilver — Despite starting with Gen I, the region that has always felt the most like home to me is Johto, and so to see it re-imagined with beautiful graphics and a host of amazing new features was like a dream come true. The following pokémon mechanic is one that NEEDS to be a regular main game mechanic, the Pokéthelon was a TON of fun, and while the story wasn’t expanded on very much, it was super cool to finally get to legitimately access the Celebi event, and to have the encounter with the legendaries feel so powerful as well. I’ve really wanted to replay SoulSilver over the past few years, but I don’t want to erase my save file since I foolishly never transferred my ‘mon up, so it’ll require getting an emulator and I’ve just been too lazy for that. Someday, though . . . someday.

3.) Pokémon Black — Easily the best story out of the games. Don’t get me wrong, it had its faults—what they did to Bianca was unforgivable, and considering other small things in the story (e.g. Juniper inheriting her professorship from her father, who showed up a bunch of times to interrupt scenes Juniper was in to help her since she was “less experienced” than him, and in a way that past (male) professors never needed) smacked of sexism—but I think most of us can agree that Black & White was where the series writing hit its peak. On top of loving the story and the characters, the region of Unova is fantastic (I especially LOVED the seasons mechanic and would love to see that come back), it again has a great regional Dex, the music is incredible, and it introduced some really cool battle mechanics as well (such as Triple Battles, RIP to those). The Unova games got so much flack back in the day and it was ridiculous. I’m glad they’re getting the respect they deserve now.

4.) Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs — MY FUCKING JAM!!! Okay, listen—there are aspects of the story / plot / characters that make me laugh. The fact that the main antagonists for most of the game are called the Pokémon Pinchers is one of them. The fact that the true Big Bads are a group of old people that call themselves Societea is another. (Fun fact: In Japan they’re called Tea Party and while I understand why Nintendo of America wanted to avoid controversy and thus changed it, I still think they should have said “fuck you” and kept it.) But the gameplay is INCREDIBLY fun, I love the concept of “conveying your feelings of friendship” to pokémon to get them to cooperate with you, the scene where Uku’s (what I call Ukulele Pichu) home island is obliterated by Societea is actually pretty intense, Guardian Signs had Soaring before OmegaRuby & AlphaSapphire were even a thought bubble in Game Freak’s minds, and the story that I made up for my character as I played is one I got myself invested in. So I really love Guardian Signs and the only reason I wish I still had my Wii U is so I could download it and play it from the eShop, since I won’t erase my file since I S-Ranked everything, including the DLC captures. (They weren’t called DLC back then but they were special event ones and I don’t remember what they were called beyond special event.) The fact that we can have a billion Mystery Dungeon games but Ranger is a discontinued series makes me endlessly bitter.

5.) Pokémon AlphaSapphire — And finally, the only good game(s) out of Gen VI. (Well, to be fair, X & Y had fantastic gameplay mechanics; it’s the story that was shit-tier.) Hoenn was gorgeous in the remade graphics, the changes they made to the characters were welcome (e.g. Brendan is no longer a douchebag fuckboy), Soaring is possibly the BEST mechanic ever introduced and I’m completely flabbergasted they won’t bring it back, the mystery islands were also incredible, everything added to the lore was great and the Delta Episode not only introduced the best games character (Zinnia<3), but also had an incredible story that referenced the best anime character (Alan<3). Although the lack of a Battle Frontier was disappointing, I can forgive it in light of everything else. The Gen III remakes saved Gen VI and that is a fact. It’s a shame Gen VII didn’t have anything similar.

#top 5 meme #pokemon #Anonymous #i will not be taking criticism at this time for there is nothing here to criticize

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agoddamn · 5 years ago

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I am curious since i am very on fence about this game, but what do you think caused the general antipathy? Switch accessibility problems? bad marketing campaign that basically ignored the game for months and then seemed to focus more on the western side? Spoiler embargo not allowing people to get information to get invested? For all Fates faults, one cutscene was enough to make me hooked and looking foward the game, while i have been watching a playthrough of 3h and i cant muster much

Yeah, Fates grabbed me by the hair from square one. The Gunther reveal made me import a Japanese 3DS so I could play the game because it was so wild and I still don’t regret that. Fun as hell, great music, characters I came to love, wild ride, actual kanji practice. Was great.

See, it’s interesting that you’re the second person I’ve seen say that they focused more on Western marketing, which is totally the opposite of what I saw. It was fans translating the character profiles on Twitter, no official support. Even in the days after launch, the sections on Deer and Lions were “coming soon” in English. The greatest extent of English advertising I’ve seen is, like, a poll on what house you’re picking from the official Twitter. And maybe the leak if my crazy tinfoil conspiracy theory is right. I can’t speak as to how much advertising the Japanese version got because I wasn’t following that, but it was definitely more than English. English marketing was a joke.

As for where the Japanese antipathy comes from…

All my general bitchiness aside, I do think the game commits a major sin in holding back the timeskip designs until the final, what, third of the game? There’s no universe in which that’s a good idea. You should lead with the designs that are your strongest. You should lead with the designs you most want to be iconic. Look at Steam cheevo statistics; so many people start playing games and then drop them far before the halfway point. IIRC even the artbook only gives school phase designs for everyone but the lords? No matter how you slice it, it’s a Bad Fucking Move to put your best looks and most salient characterization way at the end of the game. This isn’t to say you can’t have twists–but you probably shouldn’t have major twists with someone you’re trying to sell as a main character more than halfway through the game. Edelgard doesn’t build up to making a horrible decision, she decided to fucking murder her classmates before you even get there. You just don’t find out about it til halfway(+?) through the game. That’s not a great structure decision when you take into account how people actually play games.

Structure in general. I’ve seen a few people who’ve completed more than one run wondering if the timeskip was a mistake. What does it do, ultimately? The game takes a sharp left turn, but what have you gained in terms of actually playing it as a game? The characters hardly acknowledge that five years have passed in supports. It’s an excuse for new designs–but ones you hardly see, see above. It’s almost like the timeskip is there just to age the characters by five years so Americans don’t feel weird about fucking students.

Related to the above. If the lion’s share of your game is the school phase…and the school phase is gonna be what most players experience, being that it’s the beginning of the game…why the hell would you add a different phase that’s such a big mood/gameplay shift for a significant part of the game? People who came here for school shenanigans are going to be put off and depressed by the war phase and people who came here for the war phase will find the school phase interminably tedious.

Needing to play all 4 routes to fully grasp the story (a lot of fucking hours) also isn’t a plus. People playing one route–which are the most common type of people, see above–often seem like they’re dissatisfied with the plot cutting off and leaving dangling ends. I wouldn’t say this is a horrible thing in a vacuum–replayability is nice in these days of ‘games as a service’–but “you won’t understand what’s going on until you’ve played the same map at least three times!” is just a shitty situation to put the player in. And it’s surely gonna put off reviewers.

Switch accessibility is a medium factor. It’s definitely true that more people have 3DSes than Switches (it would have been really clever of Nintendo if they’d worked to release the Switch Lite and 3H concurrently, ah well), but I also don’t consider it a huge factor. Something to consider, not a critical issue.

This is undoubtedly going to be the subject of conspiracy theory shitposting to the point where I’m wary of saying it, but I really feel like functions that are standard in JRPGs got chopped back solely to appeal to the Western audience. And…naturally the Japanese audience is less interested in that, because it’s a whole bunch of extra busywork solely so Americans can ‘feel better’ about pressing buttons on a controller. I fully expect the Western sales numbers for 3H to wreck face, but I have a feeling the Japanese numbers will be lukewarm. Most likely comparable to Echoes, where it sells through most of its stock but didn’t have a huge stock in the first place so all that really says is that it isn’t a loss.

Relatedly–some of the things western fans are praising as ‘huge improvements’ were never an issue to Japanese fans. Jfen don’t nickname canons by continent, they do so by game title. 3H already has the nickname of Kazahana. That’s it and that’s all it needs. Jfen were not wildly elated and praising the game out the door when they saw the continent was named ‘Fodlan’. It’s not that Jfen didn’t criticize Fates’s storytelling–of course they did–but they didn’t criticize the same things Americans did. So to a lot of Jfen, 3H is actually not a huge improvement in the areas they were most worried about.

At least as far as America goes–spoiler embargo doesn’t help, though again it’s hard to say that it was a massive issue. There’s FE fans I’ve talked to recently still going ‘oh, what? There’s a timeskip? I passed on it because it looked like dull Personashit’ [paraphrased]. It’s like it made the opposite mistake Fates’s marketing did; Fates’s marketing promised too much, 3H’s promised too little.

Again, limited to America–a lot of casual players honestly found the child units pretty fun and were genuinely disappointed to see them go. Their plot relevance didn’t matter; they were fun little living homages to your ships and your way of creating custom units in the game by manipulating circumstances. They were just this silly little thing people enjoyed. Fun things are fun. These people weren’t really looking to replace the custom unit part of their enjoyment with spending a literal hour in menus per chapter tutoring every individual motherfucker in dicksucking and underwater basket-weaving. They liked having a hand in the creation of a semi-custom unit without having to dive into the nitty-gritty of stat maxing and efficiency; so, this audience isn’t terribly interested in 3H’s form of customization because they’re not interested in the statistical nitty-gritty.

I can’t tell you whether or not to buy the game. I can tell you that I know a lot of people having a lot of fun playing the game. I can also tell you that the game really hasn’t scalped me like Fates did. Maybe you’re like me, maybe you’re not. It’s up to you, my man. You’re the one who knows what your finances are.

#3h blogging #done my best to be unbiased here #or at least less biased #Anonymous

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opinionatedpieces · 5 years ago

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Nintendo Direct September 4th, 2019. A bust or a gift?

Ever since the Switch came out, I've been eagerly waiting for every new game to release. I’m personally a massive fan of the games on the Switch in particular, as over the years I’ve noticed, and many others probably have as well; that the selection of games are now broadening, instead of exclusively having kid’s games on the Switch. We’re slowly getting more mature oriented games aimed for young adults or older teenagers, like Diablo 3, Skyrim, Bayonetta 2, and many more.

However, I'm not going to talk about the M rated games, I'm more interested in the ones that are made for a general audience, I’m not a massive fan of Smash Brothers, but it came as a surprise to me as to Terry Bogard being introduced as the newest fighter in Smash; I honestly believed that SNK was just forgotten to the rest of the world except South and Central America, including the Caribbean. I grew up playing those games and it was the one time I could enjoy my time with my distant cousins in an old-timey arcade place in some random technology store in DR, it’s like the closest to Street Fighter I’ve ever played. I’m getting a bit off-topic but it’s okay because we’re out here to have a good time and not stress out, you know.

Regarding Xenoblade, I was expecting a remastered version of Chronicles but I didn’t think it’d happen this quickly. And sure, it's my fault for not checking the Nintendo Website for upcoming games or games in development, but whatever man. Considering the Switch’s engine, I can only imagine how beautiful it’ll look graphic wise; as well as the amount of data that’ll probably take, oh boy. I’m particularly excited for the SNES ports coming to the Switch, Legend of Zelda: like A Link to the Past, Super Metroid, and hopefully many more. I lived and breathed Super Metroid, it’s probably the first SNES game I've ever played, it’s either that or EarthBound, which by the way, if you haven't played Earthbound or Mother 3, give them a try, I cant guarantee you’ll like them as they’re not for everyone and no game is. But they’re amazing games with really good jokes and extremely good writing. Especially Mother 3.

Now, this is where I delve into my obsession, Animal Crossing: New Horizon, I’ve been waiting since New Leaf for ths game and I’ve been so deprived of any new info or content for the development of the game, I became excited over having SLEEVES in Animal Crossing dude, you can have CURLY OR WAVY HAIR AHHH, YOU CAN ACTUALLY HAVE A SKIN COLOR THAT ISN’T THE RESULT OF A TAN. I’ll admit before anyone else does, having multiple skin colors in games isn’t important, but with a game that is meant for you to have your own personal experiences and virtual friendships in; I’d much rather pretty much insert myself into the game, dark skin and all. Regardless, the animals actually CHANGE THEIR CLOTHING DEPENDING ON THE SEASON like I know that sounds trivial but even as a kid, I'd wonder if they ever got cold, they’d always wear the same thing unless they were gifted new clothes, or copied one of your designs.

There’s also a new Harvest Moon game based on Doraemon, which is pretty rad since whenever I think of that show now, it’s usually chocolate or old Japanese commercials. It’s nice to know that even if it’s been a LONG time, it won’t be forgotten for a while, I mean look at Osomatsu-Kun, everyone almost forgot about that show till we got a fresh new pair of Octuplets in 2015, Osomatsu-San, 20 year old no good NEETS and it’s pretty funny. However, in regards to Harvest Moon, it’s best to inform people that the farming life game we’re all so used to is no longer published under the name “Harvest Moon”, it’s “Story of Seasons” now, so if you see any other games under the name Harvest Moon, that’s most likely, if not, exclusively why. Most people don’t like the direction they’re heading, but like, I’m noticing a decent amount of progress. The stories and backgrounds of certain characters are becoming more coherent, the gameplay is noticeably becoming easier for a newcoming generation, and the music is lowkey becoming more relaxing. I can critique it if I wanted to, but right now, I want to appreciate the new games, cause Jesus Christ I KNOW how much shit these games get on the daily.

I enjoyed this year’s Nintendo Direct like always, I’m very excited for New Horizon, as you can tell. I’m also excited for a possible Sequel to Breath of the Wild, as that game was gorgeous, well thought out, and well-executed. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it, and let’s hope to more content from me soon.

#Nintendo Direct 2019 #Opinion #High School Assignment #Journalism #Terry #SNK #xenoblade #snes #animal crosing new leaf #Animal Crossing New Horizon #Osomatsu-San #Osomatsu-Kun #Harvest Moon #Story of Seasons #Doraemon #VERY short BoTW Mention

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popwasabi · 5 years ago

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Remembering My Hero, Robin Williams, Five Years Later

Not terribly long ago I used to deride others for feeling sad in the wake of a famous celebrity’s death.

My argument would go something like in the grand scheme of things their deaths “didn’t matter” when compared to various other atrocities and terrible, tragic things going on in the world. I even wrote an entire opinion piece poo-pooing the general populace for being sad in the wake of Whitney Houston’s death waaay back in 2012 for my University paper back in the day all largely because since I didn’t feel anything no one else should essentially.

Then Robin Williams died.

Well, more accurately Robin Williams committed suicide then everything changed for me.

To this day, I can’t recall a single death that has affected or beat me down more than this famous, larger than life comedian’s all too early passing and it still eats me up every time I think about it even five years later. You see, Robin was something of a hero of mine, an uber talented and charismatic funny man who seemed to perform his comedy with the kinetic energy of a hurricane and his humor often brightened my darkest moments growing up.

For him to die the way he did was beyond devastating for me.

Every 90s kid grew up on his various memorable performances. Whether it was “Aladdin” as the Genie, Peter Pan in “Hook” or masquerading as a nannie to win his family back in “Mrs. Doubtfire” we all had one performance that made us all fans early on.

(For some reason I always remember “Flubber” first though haha)

I didn’t start to truly appreciate him though until high school when I discovered his comic stand-up routines from his earlier years.

Despite not growing up in 70s or 80s his humor was nonetheless electric, unlike any previous comic I had seen up until that point and his impressions of Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon are still among my favorites. Live at the Met is an all-time favorite comic stand-up performance and much later Live on Broadway still has one of the greatest closing jokes ever:

youtube

(”Harder than Chinese Algebra” is definitely a line I’ve used in my college years)

What I loved most about his performances was that he could be boisterous and sincere at the same time. Being both genuine and vulgar simultaneously and in the best way. Weave bizarre character references into personal tales of his own life. Tell a multitude of hilarious stories and references at 100 miles a minute like a comedic roller-coaster ride that lasted the duration of his performances and you never wanted to get off it. It’s true when Time Magazine referred to his comedy as something all comedians loved and respected but could never in a million years duplicate. Robin was a one of a kind talent, the penultimate original, and fans loved him for it.

Robin did his performances with such natural gusto and spontaneous hilarity that it might shock you to know he always wrote virtually every line of his stand-ups before his performances. To bring that humor to life with such infectious joy takes real talent and no one can ever deny Robin was one of the best if not the best at it.

The remarkable thing is on top of his stand-up the dude was an all-time great actor on top of that displaying ranges from as absurd as “Death to Smoochie” and “World’s Greatest Dad” to as sensitive and thought provoking as “Good Will Hunting” and “Dead Poet’s Society.” Robin wasn’t afraid to show a darker side either in famous roles such as “Insomnia” and “One Hour Photo.” His range was simply amazing.

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(Personally my favorite^)

Like many high-schoolers, I was angsty teenager prone to hormonal anger and twitches, depressed I couldn’t score girls and that I wasn’t popular but at the end of the day I always had Robin to cheer me up.

As I became more and more a fan I’d read more into his life learning I actually had quite a few things in common with the famous funny man from a love of all things sci-fi including even anime and Warhammer to a deep appreciation of video games as he famously named his daughter Zelda after the titular Nintendo princess of the same name.

He was not just a comedian to me; he was one of us. America’s favorite funny, semi-secretly nerdy uncle and I loved him for it.

youtube

(The sweetest Nintendo commercial ever. #uglycrying)

I would carry my love of this magnificent comedian into college where I would routinely re-listen to his greatest hits when I was at my lowest of lows and boy did I have plenty of them during this period of my life and many of them revolved around suicide.

For reasons that are too personal to expand on, I had a friend who I was close with early in college who had some deep mental health and abandonment issues. She would constantly fear the worst out of others’ intentions and whether I would stick around with her to help her through it all in life. This put a heavy drain on myself and eventually it broke me enough to just attempt to cut her out of my life.

So, she threatened to kill herself when that happened.

If you’ve never tried talking someone down out of suicide before it is by far the scariest thing I have ever had to do and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. To try to reason with someone who is convinced that their life is meaningless that no one cares about them that they are better off dead than alive is unlike any terror I’ve ever experienced. What scared me the most was what I would do with myself if I failed to talk her down. Could I live with myself if I couldn’t do enough to save this person? Is the blood on my hands too since it was my actions that drove her to this point?

Well, long story short, I did succeed in talking her down but it left a tremendous mark on my soul that I don’t think I’ll ever forget (it also would not be the last time this would happen). I did eventually move on from this person (for both our sakes) but the depression it left within in me still stings.

There are limits to emotional dependency that we should all understand and in my need to fix everything for those I cared about I started not to care about myself and it damn near killed me. You should always try to feel empathy and help those who are need but you can’t forget about yourself in this regard because it will destroy you too. Painfully and slowly.

That semester I listened to probably more Robin Williams than I ever had in the past. His humor keeping me from being an unfeeling zombie and my mind from breaking from the stress of that year (there were other events that compounded what was going on.) Robin kept me going, kept me laughing in a period I didn’t have a lot to feel joyful about and I’ll always be grateful to him for that.

Then a few years later, as well know now, on August 11, 2014 Robin took his own life.

Like most everyone else I was shocked, distraught, and in total disbelief. How could a man who had seemingly endless joy and lived by all measures a far more successful life than most people ever would feel the need to kill himself?

It was tragic beyond comprehension.

The aftermath of course was an outpouring of love and support to the Williams family particularly his children but there was also the detractors as well. People who denounced him as some sort of coward for taking his own life, Christian zealots who believed he was rotting in hell for his sin and all matter of bad takes regarding him being too privileged to be depressed. It was infuriating and broke my heart all at once. Here was a man who more than most probably deserved a happy ending, dead by his own hands and now subjected to dumb moronic statements by people who probably will never understand what depression does to someone.

You’d would only need to a modest amount of research to understand where Robin’s depression could come from though. Despite growing up in an affluent household his father and mother were rarely there with him, raised practically by the maids in his household and by himself most of his childhood. He had survivor’s guilt for being in the same room John Belushi died in many decades prior (which would become a wake-up call for his own drug addictions). Also, he was great friends with the late Christopher Reeves who went to school with him Julliard and that shouldn’t require too much explaining there.

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(Personal pain never stopped Robin from lampooning himself of course)

But the real death knell probably came at the end when months prior Robin’s suicide he was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia Association and early stages of Parkinson’s disease. Now anyone being diagnosed with these conditions would be devastating by itself but if you frame it in the mind of Robin Williams, a man who’s comedy and charm relies almost entirely on spontaneous-ness, extreme attention to detail and constant joy this is like losing the very thing that made you who are, what people love you for; your core identity.

Robin was no longer going to be Robin.

I’m not asking people to like suicide or accept every instance of it but people should try to understand why and not judge others for it. Sometimes the demons are just too strong and we can’t fault others especially a mind as crippled as Robin’s was at the end.

If there’s one positive that came out of Robin’s suicide, it’s that the conversation on depression and mental health has notably shifted since that time. In the years since, it’s more acceptable now to feel sad no matter what your background is; you didn’t need to be a coal miner with black lung or a soldier with PSTD to be acceptably depressed anymore (and no, before any of you start I’m not judging those people). Athletes and celebrities alike such as Demar Derozan, Ryan Reynolds, Serena Williams, and Chris Evans have all come out about their own personal struggles with their inner demons. It’s now okay more than ever to feel inadequate even if on paper you have ever reason not to feel that way.

Though society hasn’t become completely understanding of mental health issues yet society is still a lot more open about it than it was before at least. It’s not a silver lining, don’t make that mistake with what I’m saying, but it’s comforting in a strange way knowing that even in death Robin can inspire positivity.

It’s a shame and tragic that Robin didn’t get age gracefully into his twilight years and given the current state of the country and the world as a whole we could definitely use that trademark wit to lampoon our reality right now but I’m glad that Robin helped keep me going in my most formative years.

(I mean seriously though, could you imagine Robin getting a crack at this motherfucker today on stage?)

It’s not hyperbole to call Robin Williams one of the greatest entertainers of all-time and though his time in this world was cut short by his own hand he has still left an indelible mark on myself, his fans and the rest of the world. Depression and mental health is a fact of life, generally speaking all of us will struggle with it at some point but if we can get help early and not be afraid to ask for it or even cry for it then maybe the world won’t feel so dark for us all.

So please, let’s all remember to take care of ourselves whether that’s seeking friends or professional guidance. There is strength in sadness, power in grief and love when you are lonely. You owe it to yourself to seek help and trust me, there’ll be arms open to bring you in.

Because you matter.

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Thanks, Captain.

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