#tl;dr it's a totally different story and you can skip the first two games

[infinitevacancy]

yes, it is g i would argue even more so than dragon age bc there's a lot less of the game taking your previous playthrough's events into account, except for the broader sense

however! as someone who played baldur's gate 3 first and then went back to baldur's gate 1 and 2, i would strongly recommend you try rhem out as well. they're a bit dated, but both of them are worthwhile experiences and give a lot more context to the wider world

the player character of baldur's gate 3 (tav) is different to bg1/bg2 (charname) but aa lot of people (myself included) think that the baldur's gate 3 origin character called The Dark Urge is linked to the bg1/2 player character for story apoiler reasons, so make of that what you will

Is baldurs gate like a dragon age situation where I could technically play the third game without playing the first two or is it a mass effect situation where you've got the same player character through all three games so you really should play the first two games before the third?

[sanguine-tenshi]

I just finished Inazuma and I have words

TL;DR: Hate the story, mixed on characters, love the design and tired of being treated like a 4-year-old with a learning disability.

SPOILERS UNDER THE CUT

Let’s start with what I like.

Inazuma is absolutely beautiful. I’ll admit Inazuma hits a lot of aesthetic points for me. All the islands are different enough to feel unique but they still look like they are a part of the same land. There are a lot of secrets to discover through just exploring. Each island has a world quest to help it (make it less hostile towards you) so it very much feels like you are saving Inazuma from itself.

.

The puzzles are alright.

I like the cubes that rotate, I always put in the effort to figure them out properly.

Hate the ones that don’t rotate, they just aren’t engaging enough for me, so I just hit them at random and hope for the best.

The glowing floor tiles were fun, once you actually realized what they wanted you to do. A little bit too easy if I’m honest.

The electro compass isn’t really much of a puzzle, more of a fetch the nearest electrograna quest.

Those little pillars that require an electro connection are kinda boring to me, again not much of a puzzle, the hardest part is finding both pillars.

I love the new electro seelie, kinda hard to follow the jittery thing in certain parts but they make a nice contrast to the regular seelies.

.

I’m very much mixed on characters.

Yoimiya is adorable. She is so bright and bubbly. What little game play we had with her was fun and I love her over the top style of fighting. Kinda disappointed she’s another pyro archer but I do admit it fits her character well. It was also wonderful seeing her just settle down and be quiet, just be a part of that moment that obviously meant a lot to her. It’s always nice to see that bubbly, energetic character have that one quiet thing, ya know. Kinda funny it’s fireworks, of all things, for her.

Gorou I like, from what little we’ve seen of him. My man killed a dude with his thighs so I’m down. I do find it kinda ridiculous that a resistance general has his whole damn belly exposed. There is also something about his voice that just does not fit. I cannot for the life of me put my finger on what exactly it is. Could be the tone itself, could be just voice acting. It sort of feels like the VA is trying to sound deeper than he actually does.

Sangonomiya Kokomi, mixed. I like her design, she looks like some sort of mystical priestess. Again something about the voice is jarring. I expected her to sound sort of airy, like she isn’t 100% present, like she’s seeing something we can’t. TBH she reminds me of Luna from HP for some reason. 

Yae Miko, I was interested because of her design. She sounds very arrogant and up her own ass, which would have been fine...if she hadn’t given us that god-awful line. “...I have high hopes for you, child. Don’t disappoint me.” Dear lord I wanted to punt her off the mountain. Or fucking what! Also she’s some bigshot priestess of the Sacred Sakura and yet she can’t do her damn job properly. Why couldn’t her arrogant ass come down from her high perch and cleanse the stupid roots? Why did the traveler have to do that shit?

Baal looks dead inside. Booba sword is overrated, get a life. I want a remach! And no cutscene shenanigans this time!

Kujou Sara seems like one of those ‘honor above all else’ characters. Those are either hit or miss with me. You have my attention for now. Also what are those shoes woman?! I’d rather you wear those leg-killing, needle point stilettoes instead of those Wish gag shoes. How in the name of all that is holy can you run in those?!

Thoma, I like him. At first I thought we were gonna get another Childe incident, but Thoma is too much of a innocent puppy to pull anything that horrible. To me he fits a fox a lot better than Childe does. Childe is a dingo and I stand behind that.

Kamisato Ayaka...hate her. At first I was neutral on her. Nothing about her design really spoke to me, but I was willing to wait and see. But then miHoYo started to violently push her friendship at us. We are totally friends now, this is the first time you see my face, but we are so totally friends now. And during her story quest everyone was like “Ah, you are so good Ayaka. You are so nice Ayaka. You are so perfect Ayaka. We all love you so much Ayaka. And oh, how could a mere merchant like myself...” Ew, go away. This is the first time I’m actively not pulling on a character banner. Normally I pull even if I’m not particularly interested in a character, because you never know how good their gameplay is until you take them out in the map. But I think I’ll be skipping this one. No thanks.

.

And now, the worst part, the story.

We’ve been hearing about the situation in Inazuma for a long time. There has been also a lot of talk about how hard it is to get there. About the wall of thunderclouds that surround the islands. So to have it cut to black and then voila Inazuma, feel just so cheap.

I was expecting something. An animation. A struggle. A quest. A minigame. At least show us the horrible weather! Something! Anything!

Hell if they wanted to be assholes about it they could have made it so that if the player fails at this point the ship is damaged, you return to Liyue and have to wait until tomorrow for the ship to be repaired. No Inazuma for today. That sure as hell would have raised the stakes.

The next complaint I have is with Yurika, the 2 milion mora processing fee girl. Later on Thoma mentions that the agency people see the fees as easy money, so her attitude doesn’t make much sense. After all someone like her would want to extract as much money as she can, but you still want the people to be able to pay that.

So it would make more sense to me if she was overly friendly and asked way too many questions. She’d need to get a much information as she can and after all the previous hostility people would be very open with her. So she’d be able to quickly find out why someone is here, what they are selling and roughly how much money they’d be able to pay. A merchant selling expensive silk would have more many than a regular ore merchant. So she’d be able to extract as much money as she could.

“I know this is a lot of money, especially for something so simple, but there is nothing I can do about it. I’m so very sorry.” And people wouldn’t say anything bad to her because she’s the first friendly face they see in Inazuma.

The stealth mission was just god-awful and I hope we never have to do that nonsense again.

Getting off of Ritou was a bit janky at the end, Chisato should have had a better reason for coming along. But I’m honestly just glad we didn’t get out the usual way...getting stuffed in a crate and smuggled out.

As a side note, I’m getting really tired of characters overexplaining things to me, especially Paimon. Dear lord, not everything has to be said, you can leave me to come to my own conclusions and solutions. Just please, who cares if a few player struggle for a bit, you don’t have to hold my hand through the whole thing.

Ayaka’s three were...ugh. It was basic emotional manipulation. Oh no this guy forgot about the love of his life and he’s been waiting for decades. And oh how sad this guy was so good and he helped these people so much but now he can’t remember. And oh the tragedy this guy forgot his life goal and is now hunted by the demons of the past. Oh the humanity! 

And it did not work. Know why? Because I have no emotional investment in any of these people, in this land. What is happening to the vision bearers in Inazuma is tragic, true, but that doesn’t make me want to overthrow the government. I don’t live here. I just got here. I wanna ask a question or two and then move on. None of this concerns me.

I was so happy when the traveler just flat out refused to start a revolution. And then we had to go and meet some people and immediately I knew this was going to be some oh noes the tragedy moments and then we would agree to help them.

It’s so forced.

Wanna know what would have been better?

Just as we are leaving the Kamisato estate Thoma catches up with us. And he tells us he gets it. We are an outsider and this doesn’t concern us. He was hopeful but he expected the denial. We shouldn’t hold it against Ayaka.

He joins us as a guide because he knows of the people we have to meet.

And so as we help these three we also get to know Thoma. We find out he was an outsider too. He got in just before the worst of it started and then he was stuck in Inazuma. He lost someone to the Vision Hunt. They slowly lost their mind after loosing their vision, their ambition too closely tied to their personality to continue without it (what is happening to Domon hits a little too close to home and he has to walk away, this is where we hear the story of the one he lost). And the same would have happened to him if the Kamisatos hadn't taken him in. He owes them his vision, his sanity and his life.

So this rebellion is personal for him.

At the end of the three wishes the atmosphere is somber. We tell him we understand why Ayaka fights, why he fights. We know that this is all wrong, that it should be stopped...but not by us. We came here to get a lead on our brother. And rebellion isn’t an overnight affaire and we can’t loose so much time in Inazuma.

And yeah, he expected as much. He just asks that we let Ayaka down gently. It’d be a shame if someone as idealistic and hopeful as her lost their spark.

And so we are gentle but firm with Ayaka. She looks like she wants to argue with us but Thoma shakes his head at her. So she sighs and tells us that a promise is a promise. We should come to the Komore Teahouse in a few days and she’ll have a plan for us to meet with the Shogun.

Now we can still have a character story quest with Yoimiya and we can still somehow get involved with helping Master Masakatsu, but it’s through Yoimiya instead of Ayaka.

And instead of a character story quest with Ayaka we have one with Thoma. Hell, give him a whole damn hangout event even.

You can probably guess why I’m pushing the friendship with Thoma so much.

Because. He. Gets. Kidnapped. For. The. 100th. Vision. Ceremony. 

And that would have been the perfect emotional in to get us involved in the rebellion. After all we just saw what happens to people who have their visions taken away and we are not letting that happen to Thoma, someone we just got close to.

So Baal makes it personal for us as well.

.

I have a few more minor complaints.

Aoi is stupid for asking for compensation after she tells us everything we needed to know because, ya know, we could have just walked away. We should have.

The whole stupid misunderstanding about the value Kurosawa’s sword holds. Kinda obvious he meant emotional value instead of monetary.

The suspicious amount of visionless NPCs and by that I mean this is the first time we have NPCs with vision. This wouldn’t have been a problem if we’ve seen NPCs with visions in Mond and Liyue.

The whole rebellion camp bit feels incredibly rushed. We just sort of lollygag over there and then there is a fight (against Sara and her stupid shoes).

Don’t make us fight Baal just to force us to lose. It would have been better if we were forced to retreat, because Thoma was injured, because there are too many soldiers for us to handle on our own. Hell, you can have a funny scene where we straight up jump off a cliff with Thoma clinging onto us and screaming bloody murder until he realizes we are slowly gliding away and he’s not about to plummet to his death.

The Sakura cleansing quest should have been voice acted.

The Mirror Maiden and Pyro Agent are totally on a date, I will not be told otherwise.

[atroquinine-my-love]

I just finished Ace Attorney Investigations 2 and now that's everyone else's problem (post-game ramblings under the cut)

Investigations 2 is honestly one of the best AA games I’ve watched to date. I say “one of” because there’s of course the Original Ace Attorney, Trials and Tribulations, as well as Rise From the Ashes (which is 7 hours long, she counts as a full game). That being said, none of these had fully inter-connected cases like aai2 has. You can’t talk about a single case without it leading into another. Meanwhile, AA1 was just building up Edgeworth and Phoenix’s relationship, RFtA was a single case, and T&T had two totally unrelated cases to the main game. None of these had strong themes of family and the parallels of different cast members through that theme, either - while individual characters went through their own arcs, none of these games had every single character dealing with their own qualms of the same theme.

While all of the cases in aai2 fed into its inevitable conclusion, it felt like the first two cases were tedious and almost made me skip to AA5 without looking back. (Logic Chess also seemed like a ridiculous concept and throughout the entire first case I was cackling, but that’s neither here nor there.) As soon as we started our third case and started to lay down the themes of family, parents' love, and following in the footsteps of our fathers, though, I loved every second. Some of my issues with the earlier cases were Justine and Sebastian, but looking back on it their stubbornness (and stupidity, on Seb’s part) was necessary to have the last case work so well and hit so hard.

Courtney was weeding out corruption, but by trying to remain impartial to everything she was slightly blinded by it (similar to Franziska’s obsession with perfection, who didn’t have as big of a role in this game, but still had a few very powerful lines). Her compassion for her son was really heartwarming, accurate, and really took her character from “good” to “great”.

Sebastian, though! Who can get through this game without having a total 180 on Sebastian! The best arc behind (and a strong parallel to) Edgeworth’s in AA1, imo. A pretentious incompetent teenager trying to act like he owns the world, and then has every foundation he’s ever laid be taken out from under him within a matter of hours. While many call Sebastian an idiot, the only one who calls him that to his face is his own father. Many times! You feel for the kid. And then his father commits MANY a crime, and Sebastian tries to stick up for him anyway until his dad turns around and tells him that every single accomplishment he’d thought he’d earned was given to him. I won’t get into much more detail, but I will say that Edgeworth steps into a father-figure role for Sebastian in a really beautiful way. The Logic Chess after Sebastian has been kidnapped and the courtroom scene as Sebastian takes on Blaise are testaments to this amazing shift in their dynamic.

Simon Keyes was a great villain, his reveal was amazing, and the parallels to Edgeworth’s story were just as potent as Sebastian’s. The idea of an animal tamer being your big bad because he knows how to manipulate not only animals but humans? Fucking amazing concept. We didn’t see his redemption or his evolution into what he became so much as saw him as a conclusion to how everything could have gone wrong with Miles, and (if you wanted to really stretch) Sebastian. In the end, I’m glad he got to have a father figure, even if it was an imprisoned assassin ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anyway, I’m pissed we never got an official localization but at this point, I desperately hope we don’t. I don’t think the Capcom team is going to be able to pull this off as well as the fan translators did, and I’m actually very partial to the fan voice actors. Plus, how the hell are they going to beat the names Justine Courtney and Sebastian DeBeste? Just don’t even try, Capcom, keep to your little DGS localizations and cafe arts.

I have more thoughts on the plot and characters like Ray, John, Gregory and others but I feel like none of those are concrete enough to write down at the moment ‘cause I just got my second shot for COVID and I’m probably going to take a long nap after I post this. If you wanna talk abt this feel free to ask/message.

tl;dr: I fuckin love this game bro 🤘😔

[thegeminisage]

hey liz i've been thinking a lot about story structure lately and i wanted your take on how you decide what structure your stories will have? i know there's that "you have to do what your story needs and tells you to do" thing but these bitches dont ever tell me anything they just multiply so. thoughts? - bma

(as an aside, i don't know whether involving medium would change many things but it may be worth considering. mainly i think medium is just a matter of arrangement and that the story would be for most intents and purposes the same no matter how you choose to tell it. i guess you could argue that structure is arrangement in itself and intrinsically tied to medium but i sort of feel like it is secondary arrangement, if at all? like if you consider time as an element to outline -- the time IN the story (how things happen to your characters) is not necessarily the time you’re telling the story IN (how you are telling your reader that things are happening) aka internal chronology doesnt equal your work’s pacing? or should it??? does this make sense? i dont think so. i am sorry.) - bma :|

NOOO dont be sorry ur making total sense

i think there’s 3 thots to unpack here (medium, structure, & chronology) & i’m gonna start with medium bc it’s easier. im also putting it behind a cut bc it’s gonna get just stupidly long and rambly. i’m sorry in advance if it’s not helpful to you, i have a lot to say for someone who has never taken even one single class on writing and as a result doesn’t know jack shit (there’s a tl;dr at the end dont worry)

about MEDIUM: 

so like ok i’m just some goof-off with a HS degree who writes fanfiction but In My Very Super Qualified Personal Opinion, i don’t think that most of the time medium is intrinsically tied to STRUCTURE of the main storytelling arc...i think the art of storytelling itself is distinct from the medium you choose to tell the story IN. this post puts it better than i ever could but basically for me, i feel like the story itself is sort of the raw, malleable concept, and the medium you choose to tell it in is how you convey the information??

like in a book, you can say “she forgot her keys” and in a film you have to show her smacking her forehead, heading back into the house, and swiping her keeps off the counter. you can’t TELL in film, you have to show. similarly i regret every day i cannot perfectly describe a facial expression with words when i see it so clearly in my head. for audio-only podcasts that are dialogue heavy out of necessity you have different limitations than you would for, say, animated music videos with no dialogue at all. games allow for more interactivity and exploration while sacrificing accessibility, tv shows allow for more length while sacrificing, uh, a big hollywood budget...medium affects the kind of story you can reasonably tell which is why some stories are better suited to one medium than another. i think trying things in other mediums is a good way to stretch your storytelling muscles but with enough skill nearly any story could be told in any medium. i think when trying to decide on a medium you just gotta weigh the pros & cons and what you feel comfortable with/what you think would be most effective/what would evoke the strongest reaction

re: structure:

firstly “do what the story tells u to do” is a little silly like...the story isn’t sentient. come on. that’s like “i can only write when the writing gods inspire me” there are no writing gods! inspire yourself! it’s all in our weird messed up brains! ok anyway.

this is, again, just how i do things, and i am 700% self-taught so take it with a grain of salt, but when i sit down and start blocking out a story from scratch i don’t...actually consider the big structure at all! sorry if that’s not helpful to you. i like to make a list of everything i want to happen, and then put it together in a few different orders to see what looks best. and when i’m finished, whatever i have just like...IS the structure i go with, with perhaps minor tinkering to make it flow more smoothly. (i think this might be in the same spirit as “do what the story tells you” with less bullshit and more Agency Of The Writer.)

for long and more complex projects, i actually usually have several lists - one list of stuff that is, for example, the Action Plot (the kingdom has been cursed, i’m tracking down my serial killer sister to bring her to justice, i’m running from djinn who wanna kill my dad, i’m trying to bring my dead not-boyfriend back to life). then i have another list for Character A & Character B’s romance or whatever. and maybe a even another one for solo character development (magicphobic prince learns to love magic, former werewolf hunter figures out his family is a cult, half-demon learns to embrace his own nature). and as many lists as we need for however many Main Characters and or Plots/Sideplots

how i order the lists: individually first. don’t mix them together to start with. when deciding the order of an individual list i like to, for example in a romance arc, use escalating intimacy. “A and B have dinner together” is naturally gonna go way sooner than “A and B kiss” or “A and B talk about A’s angsty backstory” because that’s more satisfying. draw it out, good/important stuff last, dangle that carrot so we have a reason to keep reading! for singular character development, it’s basically a straightforward point A to point B...if i want my guy to start hating magic with everything he is and end up being very comfortable with it, i have to put “reluctantly uses magic to save his own life” WAYYY before “casually using magic to light torches and reheat his cold stew.” 

the tricky part for me is when i’m done with these lists and then i need to mix them together To Pace My Whole Story. (this is usually why i wind up with a rainbow colored spreadsheet.) i don’t like to put too many things too close together because then the pace feels uneven. even if my Action Plot is only a thinly veiled excuse for romance and character development, i still don’t want to focus on a romance for 30,000 words and then go “and oh yeah in case you forgot Serial Killing Sister is still coming for your asses.” the more sideplots and major character arcs you’re juggling the harder it is to get an even distribution, which is my main concern always

and like, generally, whatever i have when i’m finished...is my structure. (sorry.) 

i don’t know much about the classic 3-act or anything like that, but i usually can divide them up into 3-5 big arcs based on story turning points. sometimes i take a scene out of one arc and put it in another because it fits better and i like for my shit to be organized, but usually by the time i’m finished with all that, that’s what the final story is mostly gonna look like. (there have been a few exceptions when i realized i needed extra scenes/changes while i was MID-DRAFT and let me tell you that murders me EVERY time. it happened on the merlin fic i’m currently posting and that was like my own personal hell.)

this is also where thots about chronology come in:

i think time CAN be an element of this if you WANT it to be, but it doesn’t HAVE to be. if you want it to be, i would consider it just another “list” like character development or the romance arc. 

i usually plot without considering Time very much...to me, it’s all down to the events you want to show, and however much time it takes is the byproduct. if you want to show something from a character’s chilhood but then tell the bulk of it when they’re adults, that’s one thing. if you want to show a scene from their childhood, teenhood, young adulthood, etc, that’s a different kind of pacing?? i usually do it this way so i can regard time like wordcount: it takes as long as it takes. 3 days or 3 years, a 1.5k drabble or a 100k epic...overall, my LARGEST CONCERN is that even distribution. in the same way that i don’t want one chapter to be 30,000 words when the rest are 10,000 words, i personally am not a fan of huge timeskips offscreen

(because this where i think someone’s own internal chronology DOES matter...this is just a personal preference, as a reader i have a hard time really comprehending, say, a year timeskip or a 10yr timeskip when all i did was turn one page. like, a year is such a long time. i can’t even begin to describe how different i am now to how i was a year ago. it’s the same for character development. time IS development and as a writer i’m not really comfortable having that take place offscreen - for main characters, at least. it’s just too jarring. a little prologue with something happening 10 or 20 years ago is usually fine, but for the most part, i’m not a fan. ...i can do one chapter per year a lot easier than i can do two chapters in childhood and the other 8 in adulthood. of course you can play with this a LOT with nonlinear storytelling, which is a whole other very cool thing, and someone skilled in their work can keep me sucked in no matter what, but imo if you don’t want to risk throwing your reader out of your work it’s better to keep things steady)

HOWEVER sometimes time IS an element u wanna consider outside of just making sure your shit is evenly distributed...if your heart is moved to tell a story in a specific timeframe, over a year, or from solstice to solstice (this was almost the timeline for my merlin fic and then i changed it), for the first six months of a friendship, or even a huge journey in the span of a single day (toby fox had a lot of success with this one lol).

i think it can help to choose a start and end point for your chronology the same way you do for character development (prince goes from hating magic to being ok with it, story takes place from ages 8 to 25, or from new year’s eve 2038 to 2039, whatever) - that way you can keep your distribution even, if that’s a thing you want to do...even if you have a lot of skips you can still note what happens offscreen to make it work better in your head? like, if you just make it another List, another column on your spreadsheet, when you’re in the early stages of organizing you can be conscious of it and make sure it’s playing into the story the way you want it to

anyway these r my thots im SOOOO SORRY this is so long lmao. brain machine broke today which is why i had to ramble more to explain myself. the tl;dr in case ur brain is melting out of ur ears & u didn’t sign up for an essay:

imo medium is totally distinct from storytelling tho ofc some stories are better suited to some mediums

structure? i don’t know her. i plot w/o regard to structure and then if it looks funny i mush it into a more structurally sound shape

my main concern when structuring anything, including time, is an even distribution of Events and a steady rate of escalation

structure to me is just what i have when i’m finished plotting. i’m sorry one day i’m gonna take a writing class

internal chronology matters to me personally because i have a little bit of time blindness but maybe not to everyone, i know many very successful stories where they disregarded that entirely to no ill effect

writer’s block isn’t real! everyone just needs more rainbow spreadsheets

thank u for asking I HOPE i didn’t make you regret it too badly lmao and that at least a little of it was helpful!! 

[mayiotome]

XOXO Droplets [Free to Play/ ext. ver:$19.99]

My Rating: 💗💗💗💗 ▪️

itch.io game page

Producer: GBPatch 

Release Date: Aug 31, 2017  (Updated: Mar 20, 2020)

Languages: English

Genre(s): Stat Management, Romance, Slice of Life,  

Download size: 279 MB (W/L) 261 MB (M)

Content Warnings: Swearing but it’s censored anyways.

Advertised length: not listed in hours but the completed game is 320,00 words while the free version is 130,00+

My Play Length: a few (3-4) hours to complete all routes (using cheats after the first one and skipping all seen lines). 

Steam Key: YES

Achievements: YES

Demo Available: Technically there’s a free version that’s about half the game.

(There is also a horror version of this game I’ll be reviewing in the future.)

Description/Features from game page:

“The story begins when our nameable protagonist finally transfers into the boarding school of her dreams at the start of her junior year in high school. It would be perfect if it wasn't for that little catch attached to her enrollment: her parents will only let her keep attending the school for her remaining two years if she doesn't make everyone  there hate her by shunning them, like she always does.

Do your best to show just enough interest in the other losers around to appease the folks while still having time to chase after all the attractive guys in the MC's afterschool group, which just so happens to be a group for chronically unfriendable people.

★★★★★★★

No, seriously folks. When we say the protagonist and main love interests are a big ol' jerk squad it's not a mistake and it's not an understatement.”

Default Game

3 distinct jerky main boyfriend options: Everett Gray, Nate Lawson, and Shiloh Fields

6 side characters who'll be your buddies and 6 minor clique boyfriend options, each with a bonus effect that makes the game easier

Partial Voice acting for every significant character by a talented cast

The option to break up with your bf and start dating someone else, if you feel like it

A variety of methods to manage your Reputation with the unimportant students

Part-time jobs, stores to visit, useful items, optional mini-games, an in-game phone to call a guy up and arrange a date at one of several different locations

Over 130,00 words. Hundreds of different events, including a collage-style ending system where you get events for every goal you achieved during the game

Cheat codes for those who don't give a f*ck about gameplay and just wanna see the events

Paid Extended Addition

3 more main jerk boyfriend options: Bae Pyoun, Jeremy King, and Pran Taylor

2 sweet but not-terribly-bright side boyfriend options: Kam Sung and Adrian Wulu

Yet 1 more boyfriend option in the flirtations party boy Lucas Kaiser (New Addition!)

4 Extra Date Events for Everett, Nate, and Shiloh

The ability to unlock all 4 CGs and 12 outfits for Everett, Nate, and Shiloh, rather than just 3 and 10

The ability to unlock all 4 CGs and 12 outfits for Everett, Nate, and Shiloh, rather than just 3 and 10

50 more Random Events, 45 more Text Chats, 24 more Part-Time Work Events

320,000 words in total

An accessory system that lets you decorate the main character with a variety of pieces, plus small events where characters comment on the accessories you wear

The option to change the background of your cellphone to one of 12 different options

Even better cheat codes

My Review:

This game is half stat manager, you have to “work” to get money, choose where you sit at lunch to raise your popularity with different cliques, etc. 

The story isn’t all that long if you use cheats but if you do use cheats you can’t get certain achievements.

The free version only lets you date 3 out of the main 6 guys (The paid extra version gives you those 3 + 3 others that are more side characters but they have their own scenes too, though not many).

It’s not too long or that story rich compared to other games I’ve played. The gameplay isn’t too hard or difficult to figure out.

You can pick the first and last name of the protag but not her looks.

Story/Writing

The story isn’t that long or complex, you have an ultimate end date. Extra scenes take place at the jobs you do every few times you do them. Each job is connected to a character (and school clique) with a few scenes. There are 1-3 date scenes per date location per guy. On certain (calendar) dates certain events happen, depending on who you’re dating certain dialogue will change but it’s not too big of a change (maybe like 3-5 extra or changed lines). 

Most of the game is just slight dialogue changes depending on who you want to romance/who you’re dating and a few original scenes per character.

Characters

So yeah, they’re not lying when they say that the characters are jerks. Kinda loveable jerks after a while but yeah, none of the guys actually want to date the protag but she kinda just says “Hey we’re dating now” or “Hey we’re going on a date tomorrow” and they just go with it albeit reluctantly but she grows on them for the most part.

There are 3 side characters you can date too, for achievements and I think 6 others for smaller perks for the game but no actual game-play involving them and it takes a long time to be able to actually date them as you need to meet certain requirements.

The 3 side characters are only with the paid version but they don’t go to the school the protag goes to so there’s less scenes of them really.

Visuals

The style of the stat raising menu/Weekend Planner is cute, the CGs are drawn in a cute drawing style and the rest are classic looking backgrounds that match the character styles.

The protag has a little portrait in the bottom corner where her facial expression change. With the paid version you can buy her accessories and they show up on her in game (some also trigger random events for each guy, 2 per guy as there are 2 versions for each of those items).

Sound

It is semi-voiced meaning there’s sigh sounds, growls of annoyance, a few lines here and there are voiced, they each have a set of “catchphrases” like the protag will go “Boo” when she is unhappy or a little laugh sound, Nate saying “this is absurd” when he’s annoyed or “You can’t be serious!” Sometimes they say the first or first few words of a sentence.

Stat Raising (Gameplay)

It’s not too hard to keep the stats (clique popularity) even/balanced so you don’t fail the game. It’s easy to earn money via the jobs, if you have a set guy you want then keep doing the job associated with him (where he also works) to raise his stat with you, get scenes at that location and earn more money the more you progress that job. (There’s no mini game for the jobs just occasional scenes.)

Using cheats the stat gameplay goes by fairly quickly and with no possibility of failing. You can get through each route quicker this way but there’s no way to skip the actual weekend planner part (which is good because you can go on dates or the store still.)

My strategy is to use a cheat to raise clique levels to the max, to get money, and buy a bunch of taffy (which skips the weekday choice pages and lets you quickly get to new story events.) that way I can just skip over the mostly tedious parts of the gameplay.

Worth the Price?: In my opinion, yes. You get a lot more content, unlock the other 3 guys, outfits, cheats more, date options, etc. (See above) and clearly time and effort went into this game. There’s no bugs, the VA is decent however limited. I’m sure some people might thing it’s a bit expensive but you have to remember you’re supporting a creator and not some big game cooperation.

Conclusion aka TL;DR

It’s not your traditional guys quickly fall for the protag story as none of the guys actually want to date her when they start dating. All the characters are jerks (So much so that they’re all in a club cause no one else wants them in theirs) but they do grow on you after a while. There’s no way to really skip the stat raising part of the game but it’s also not that hard to keep everything balanced and there’s always cheat codes.

I ended up getting the extra version (meaning paying for the rest of the game) because I wanted to romance Jeremy and Pran (Green and white haired ones).

My Rating:

Story: 7/10 (would score higher if the routes were more different.)

Characters: 9/10 (They’re jerks but they’re meant to be. This isn’t really a game where the characters will compliment yours and make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside but they’re well done.

Visuals: 10/10

Sound: 10/10

Gameplay: 9/10 (sometimes you just wanna skip all the stat stuff and just read the story. there are cheats in that case but you still need to actually click through the weekend stuff and keep skipping days until you get to the next event day). You can’t simply roll back on the mouse wheel to change a choice or rehear a line, it’ll bring up the log page where you can click any line that has sound to hear it or read what was said.)

Overall - 💗💗💗💗 ▪️

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh S1 Ep 40 PART 1/2: So Much Random Stuff Happens That It Requires Two Parts

Most of the time, Yugioh’s plot is delivered in nice, bizarre, bite-sized segments, offset by duels that I skip. But then, in this episode they decided “Hey, we should drop some plot. Like a lot of REALLY WACKY plot.”

And thus we have an episode with over 80 caps. So, this’ll be a two-parter! The other part will show up later. Like...when we finish it.

Also, despite the fact that this is probably one of the more important episodes of the season, it has quite some damage on the recording on Netflix. You’ll see that it isn’t really cropped right on the sides, and in some parts it’s got motion blur I couldn’t avoid. One day, Yugioh will get it’s Sailor Moon remaster, but this is not the day. Also, if they redubbed Yugioh, it would be an absolute tragedy, but that’s a different story.

TL;DR Forgive the massive amount of text in the upcoming recaps. There’s just so much they did and I uh...didn’t want this to end up being over 100 caps this episode alone.

So, lets get into it: The Yugi crew is looking for Pegasus.

For some reason, Tea suddenly remembers what went down the night before and decides “I bet Pegasus is hiding in that spooky tower we don’t actually know how to get into because we climbed it with a grappling hook.”

(Sometimes I get used to Yugi’s eyeliner and then they throw a shot like this at me and it’s like DAMN, Yugi, when did you have time to apply that stiletto heel to your face? Like most of the time I’m just put off by the awful hair and then the rest of the time I’m just really jealous of this emo boy’s wings.)

With that they suddenly remembered...the other stuff.

(read more under the cut)

I like how Joey is just so incredibly fed up with magic at this point. Out of all of them, he seems to hate magic the very most although his best friend is a walking dark magic portal. Joey is just completely done, but unfortunately for Joey it turns out all the magic up to this point hasn’t even remotely been the amount of magic that this show is going to throw at us, because this entire episode is a bunch of wizards just screwing with each other.

I’ve mentioned before that it feels like the power players of Yugioh are kinda like Greek Gods where they just really can’t be bothered about 95% of the time--but when they are FINALLY bothered enough to move their own ass, they just kinda sweep the floor clean and leave me utterly baffled.

Anyways, Pegasus actually is in the spooky tower, to my disbelief, at this non-euclidean desk that doesn’t seem to exist in time and space.

And then Kaiba wakes up in a cabbage-patch lookin jail cell. I would love to see more of his reaction to that but alas, this episode is not about Seto Kaiba.

Pegasus decided to make good on his word, mostly because Yugi is a cursed Pharaoh and he doesn’t want to see what happens if he doesn’t make his end of the bargain. To be quite honest, getting your mind scrambled would have probably been better than what did eventually happen to him in this episode.

Seriously, did this guy ever sell a painting that wasn’t a card? His portfolio would just be one person. And they do say that you shouldn’t make your portfolio too many styles but, damn, you can’t just do one person, unless your going to work for one specific type of video game, in which case sure just draw that one space punk chick over and over it seems to work for you.

Bakura decides to show up, and he’s very Bakura about it, introducing a new Bakura mechanic that I didn’t at all predict would ever be a thing.

Bless this storyboarder.

After showing off his weird tarot ability for no other good reason than to mess with Pegasus for a little bit, he decides to make me regret ever saying this necklace looked like it has five dicks.

I am so sorry, I had no idea! I had no idea it would be shooting lasers! What the hell, show?? What genre am I even watching anymore??

Also this whole concept that at any point these items can just shoot anime lasers and start a...whatever this trope is called, is so bizarre to me. They CAN do this...but they prefer to use cards.

They CAN do this, at any point, but they prefer to trap the souls of you and your friends in a card so you must play even more cards.

Or they can shoot you with a laser and solve their problems that way.

But why would they? They can like...play cards and do tarot and read minds and make card monsters real so who would ever want to shoot freakin lasers!

I do appreciate that Pegasus’ laser is pink like the salmon I chose for his font.

My bro argues that Pegasus probably sees just fine with the golden eyeball, but I feel like it can’t be the same, like a Spike Spiegal situation. It’s not like they ever tell us, anyway.

Him being alive for centuries is just never brought up for the rest of the episode. It comes up here and then Bakura’s like “Woopsie! Change the subject!”

Kid’s show!

As a kid an episode of the Rugrats freaked me the hell out--you know the one where Reptar becomes alive? I couldn’t take that one, it was terrifying. So maybe I’m not one to judge, because I was not a normal kid when it came to anxiety (in fact a legit phobia of dogs gave me pretty severe panic attacks on a weekly basis) but, it seems like Yugioh is a lot like brother’s Grimm because they are SO READY to cut off body parts, revive corpses, and overall gross me out, just to make a point.

Is it necessary? Eh.

But is it bizarre body horror we can stuff in this kid’s story? YES LETS DO IT.

With the way they set this up it looked as if they were just going to have them show up in the nick of time or something, but instead the show was like “lol, these kids? You’re kidding, right?”

He’s literally missing an eye and Croquet’s exact line was something like “he’s fallen ill.”

Also, I’m glad we got a cameo from Double-Spike Mohawk Mullet Man in this episode, giving Pegasus a fireman carry like a trooper.

So, because they can’t not, and because Pegasus’ security is only effective at random times of the day (they must have a lot of smoke breaks or something) the four decide to raid Pegasus’ bedroom. Why would you ever want to do this to the guy who was ritually sacrificing people the night before!?

Joey’s weird crushes on blondes that are...not in High School. Joey. Stop this. You are a child.

Anyways, Tea goes straight for the juicy stuff, because if there’s anything in this world that I would never ever want to read is a grown man’s journal filled with all his unfiltered thoughts.

Then we’re welcomed into a Pegasus Flashback, because why not make a tragic past even more tragic? Anyways, it’s OK because anime food lives here.

Bro called them gravity melons. I want to point out the party cups drawn from the side sitting on the round table we see from the top. Love it. Also realllllly love that guy with the mustache and glasses in the bottom right corner. There’s some good stuff here in this vaguely 80′s flashback.

Anyway, she totally dies. The flashback goes through things we’ve been over before--they get married, she gets sick, she turns into a rose and then becomes a grave in a really poorly kept graveyard.

And so Pegasus turns to religion. Yes, you read that right, He decides, he wants to find a religion that will explain afterlife to him, and he’s like I might as well start with the oldest and work up, so he goes to Egypt.

Uh...OK. I mean if you’re just looking for a religion with an afterlife you could have chosen...almost any of them. You could have stayed in America and like gone to...anywhere but, the guy was like “Mummies, youknow?” and went to Egypt although Cecelia is already dead and buried so it’s not like he can do the mummy trick to her now. It’s a little LATE?

My brother and I were so entranced by this bizarre hat, that we wanted to see if it’s ever been made real. AND IT HAS.

MARVEL AT IT:

IT IS VERY EXPENSIVE.

LOOK AT THAT DUMB HAT!

We checked Amazon for cheaper listings, but only found trucker hats with the Square Mason symbol on it, and Illuminati trucker hats like this one.

My brother wrote this note to them. I hope they read it and take it to heart.

Anyways, our newly found joy, held aloft by the discovery of perfect square brimmed hats was quickly sullied.

His hat is a transformer. But a round to square kind.

So in walks this guy. His name is Shadi. I’m telling you that right now because I want you to pay attention to how long it takes before we find out his name is Shadi. He is going to tell us his name at some point, and it’s very weird when it happens.

Pegasus doesn’t seem to realize it is not at all normal for a guy in modern Egypt to be walking around with this massive ankh on his chest (eh...you can’t see it in these pictures, but there’s a HUGE ankh just hanging around his neck) with earrings and pharaoh makeup. Pegasus is just that type of sheltered American. He’s like...well you look like someone from a movie so it must be legit. And that is how Pegasus decides to follow a guy who is clearly an ancient spooky wizard into an ancient death dungeon crypt.

I feel like Pegasus could have easily avoided this whole situation he got himself into.

Shadi has a whole speech about how the eyeball has a lot of power, and that he’s got to protect it all yada yada--but at the same time Shadi is like “BUT I gotta make sure some people use it so a lot of terrible things happen. You’d think I’d just...leave this stuff in this crypt so it’ll never be a problem and the world will never be cursed with terrible dark magic that was sealed away for thousands of years, but...I’m gonna make it happen anyway...and it’s not my fault...”

How many times has Shadi done this? It’s suggested that Pegasus is not the first.

It’s pretty gross, and while it’s done in shadow (which was a nice visual allusion to Shadow Magic), it’s still pretty gruesome for a kids show. To happen twice in one episode of this kid’s show, haha.

She calls him by his full name “Maxamillion” which made me realize he’s probably never shortened his name to “Max” in his entire life.

I’m glad Pegasus making out with a ghost happened on screen. This is now the most romance we’ve seen in all of Yugioh. Good.

So did Pegasus actually write the part where he made out with a vision, though?

I’m curious about how that process works. But, I don’t think we’ll ever find out.

Anyways, next time, on this very same episode of Yugioh:

Will Bakura stick this eyeball in he own eye or will he back out last minute and just hang it from his necklace and pretend it was there the whole time? Will Tea next read Pegasus’ food diary only to discover, in horror, that he drank upwards 60 liters of grape juice and far exceeded his daily calorie intake? Will security even realize these children have been snooping in all of Pegasus’ personal stuff for the past 30 minutes?

[gayspock]

wth is TAZ and how do i get into it bc it sounds cool as hell??

DGDFGDDGOSHDSGI WELL!!!!!! IM PUTTIN THIS UNDER A READ MORE BC ITS LONG AND IVE WENT ON THIS SPIEL BEFORE BUT LEMME SIT YOU DOWN AND TELL U ABOUT TAZ, MY BUDDY

TAZ (the adventure zone) is basically?? a dnd (although, theyve branched out into other games, with different mechanics now) podcast, done by the mcelroy brothers & their dad (you might know them from other things: they have another podcast/tv show called my brother my brother and me, and justin&griffin do a popular series called monster factory on youtube). 

 there’s currently one BIG campaign (balance, the first one they did, which has 69 episodes discounting liveshows) and then three mini-campaigns that come after it (commitment, amnesty and dust which is literally just starting) which are all independent of one another (i,e: you can totally listen to one and not the other, because theyre totally different universes, with totally different characters)

balance is the longest arc and its the one you’ll see the most fanart and stuff of. it’s a fantasy setting (theyre playing DND) and it starts off?? pretty slow. the whole thing was initially a one-off episode, that soon turned into something a lot bigger: that means the first campaign in the beginning can sometimes turn people off? seeing as it was early days, and not something they’d thought through that much (instead, they learnt along the way - which, i found really Charming tbh, because you can literally see them grow as story tellers and it KILLS me) so a lot of people?? can find the first chunk of Balance kinda hard to chew, especially if you’re new to podcasts (bc they are hard to focus on, lbr) but if you can get through it, TRUST me it’s so, so fucking worth it. like it’s literally... like i cried really hard at the end of it (partyl bc im a baby) and it hass some of my favourite characters of all time and the story is just... so, so fucking juicy. my god. like everyone ive turned onto taz, whos managed to make it that far is pretty ??? fucking in love with it. LIKE I DONT SAY THAT LIGHTLY!!!! I REALLY DONT !!!! BUT TRUST ME IT’S VERY GOOD 

however if you think you’re going to struggle taking on something that long, that starts off that slow i’d suggest trying out the second mini-campaign, amnesty. basically after balance finished they started doing experimental, shorter campaigns to see what they wanna do for the next big one . amnesty is DM’d by griffin, who also DM’d Balance - as such, it’s like!! of the same quality level as Balance was by the end, but right off the bat. it’s about 5 episodes long, discounting the setup episode (which isnt necessary to listen to, but it tells you about the characters, game mechanics and settings) and it’s basically a story about a small town called Kepler and features cryptids and monsters and cool shit like that (also: gggay goth girlfriends)

the other two mini-campaigns are commitment and dust. 

commitment was DM’d by Clint!! seeing as he hasnt DM’d before, it’s sometimes (imo!! you might like it!!!) not as engaging, but if you like superheroes you might want to give it a try!!! similarly, dust has just started, and is DM’d by Travis - the first episode isn’t until next week, so i dont know the verdict on that, but it’s Also about supernatural creatures & magic (vampires, werewolves, ghosts - that kinda business!) but it’s going to be more of a murder mystery, whereas amnesty was kinda centred about?? OH BIG SCARY MONSTERS IN THE WOODS!!!!

BUT YEAH IM SORRY IF THIS IS SUPER LONG IM JUST A MESS SOIHFOSDHSDOG

TL;DR: TAZ IS GOOD. THE BALANCE ARC IS AMAZING. BUT IF YOU STRUGGLE TRY SKIPPING TO AMNESTY. 

[logical-illogicalperson]

REGARDING JOSEPH’S SECRET ENDING!!!! (MASSIVE SPOILERS)

THIS MESSAGE WILL CONTAIN TONS OF SPOILERS SO PLEASE AVERT YOUR EYES NOW IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BE SPOILED!!!!!!!

So I’m sure all of us are lost and confused right now, wanting our husband Joseph to get his shit together and dump Mary and have a happy ending with us. This post will cover: why Joseph DOES INDEED HAVE A HAPPY ENDING, and what we can do to get it, now, if not later.

1. Why Joseph has a happy ending: One of the achievements on Steam blatantly state “Escape From Margarita Zone, which refers to: the second date’s “Margarita Zone”, and the bad end, which we all know as the dreaded pinup of doom. Not only that, certain gaps in the story are unfulfilled – for example, the Walk Mary Home scene….doesn’t actually involve walking Mary home? And Joe’s confession comes out of NOWHERE. That, as well as the writer’s allusion implies that Joseph DEFINITELY HAS A BETTER ENDING (DO NOT FRET FELLOW JOE LOVERS!!!!).

2. Next, on “Walking Mary Home” which happened after Joe’s second date: The scene with Mary is confusing, right? Why does it say “Walk Mary Home”  if all you do is yell at her…and make her burst into tears regardless of what your choices are, and she ends up going home by herself? DID THE CREATORS DELIBERATELY MISNAME SOMETHING? The answer, my friends…is that the Walking Mary Home is a totally different scene.

“But what, logical-illogicalperson? You just said that the Walking Mary Home scene happens after Joe’s second date! Surely it’s not a totally different scene?”

This is where the author’s allusion comes into play. YOU WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO SEE THAT SCENE AFTER JOE’S SECOND DATE!!!!!! Instead, what you’re supposed to do is to….do SOMEONE ELSE’S TWO DATES BEFORE JOE’S FIRST TWO DATES. Who is Joseph closest to though? ROBERT.

“Alright, so get to the point, how do I get the ending?”

Okay, so what you need to do is go back to your file, and either start a new game or load your save before the Joseph dates, and then do the two Robert dates first! I dunno if an S ranking is a requirement because I got S ranks on both of mine, but either way, presumably, after the first two scenes, you trigger ANOTHER SCENE where you actually Walk Mary Home (and please, for the love of everything, DON’T CALL A CAB FOR MARY!!!!). Afterwards, I presume you either have to do Damien dates #1 and #2 (if rumor is correct), or you can skip on to Joe and his first two dates.

This actually unlocks another scene pre-date 3, where you are confronted by Robert, who says…some interesting things, which I won’t spoil for you at this time ;)

3. HOWEVER, THERE IS A CATCH. Playthrough of the first two Joe dates seems to always trigger the bad scene (as per Steam and personal playthrough), so the answer to why the Joe ending ends up bad even after this? IT’S A BUG!!!!!! That’s right, ladies, gentleman, and non-binary folks – the reality is – the fact that the bad scene triggers itself regardless of whether you do the two good things or not indicates that it’s a glitch which needs to be fixed ASAP, which is why the fact that Joe’s thing lights up after the bad ending, and the postcard’s…strangeness has me to believe that this whole thing is a glitch. Normally, the Walk Mary Home Scene should disable the second scene, and Joseph would get a better ending, so I guess all we can do now is wait….for our shining, secretly-bad Youth Minister husband to get his bug fixed so we can be happy. So don’t give up on Joseph yet!!

TL;DR: The Mary argument is a glitch which should be disabled if you do the first two dates, but unfortunately still exists, which is why the argument is unwinnable and why we need to wait for a hotfix for Joseph’s true ending!

[rosesnlavender]

Obsession: Mystic Messenger V Route

So this recently came out after Mystic Messenger got a whole new layout. The old layout was cute but the new layout has more of a space/ tech advance feel to it. If you’re interested in taking a peek at the old layout (there’s been 2 layout changes so far), take a look back at my 2016 Christmas Mystic Messenger Special post (it’s been almost a year and I haven’t even finished the post; I haven’t even finished all the routes for the special...).

Moving on, I have approx. 2 weeks until school starts so I have just the right amount of time to play through one round of the new route. Now if you’ve read my first Mystic Messenger post, you’ll know about my rant on V. I really wanted an Unknown route so I hope they’ll come out with that as well.

As I’ve started writing this post, I have not yet opened up V’s route. However, my mindset as I’m going through this THIS ROUTE WILL NOT CHANGE THE STORYLINE OR DIFFER IN STORYLINE. I SINCERELY HOPE that the story will continue as it was and that my baby Seven will also have a happy ending.

Here’s the promo vid if you’re interested.

I would not recommend reading this unless you already know what happens in this game and/or played this game up to both the secret ends. 

I WILL NOT STRIKE-THROUGH ANY SPOILERS FROM THE CASUAL AND DEEP STORIES ON THIS POST BECAUSE I’M ASSUMING YOU ALREADY KNOW WHAT’S UP.

Straight to the bottom is the TL;DR like usual but it’ll only appear after I’ve finished the post which is when I’ll finish the route.

This will be a long ass post with the usual format (if you’ve read these before):

Unlocking V’s Route

Beginning V’s Route

Finishing V’s Route

Endings Completed

Final Notes

TL;DR

Time Table

Unlocking V’s route

Alright, since I downloaded the new update at around noon, I’ll be opening up the sequence and going throughout the day and I’ll restart at midnight. 

So first things first. Look at this new start screen.

I don’t know how the route is going to work but I personally don’t really like the idea of the MC being a second love.

The head and quote goes through a cycle of all the characters and their difference sayings.

That “Another Story” wording really scares me. I PRAY TO GOD IT DOESN’T STRAY FROM THE ORIGINAL STORY.

On the side note, HOLY HELL 300 HG! Thank god I have barely enough saved up.

I KNEW IT. “This story unfolds 2 years prior to the original story.” It’s going to be a different story. Though surprisingly, I’m not too mad about it. Two years prior means everyone is blissfully unaware and my baby Seven hasn’t been hurt. Hmm. How long was it since Rika “died” before the original story? Kind of looking forward to this. That “Other surprising content” though.

80 CGs?! GETTING MY MIND READY. I really hope the artwork is the same as the original story and not like the weird occasional change in style like in some of the specials. It’s also cute how V’s album now has special photo squares unlike the usual ? logo.

Umm jumping ahead cause I’m really excited about this, 

GUYS. GUYS. GUYS. 

THERE’S AN UNKNOWN ALBUM.

CAN I HAVE HOPE FOR AN UNKNOWN ROUTE.

Beginning V’s Route

Anyways, moving back, I will now official start the route (before I restart it at midnight later tonight).

Look at this new layout. Green backgrounds means that there’s a new status.

There’s a shit ton more CGs which I really hope are in the original artwork style. There’s also a shit ton more guests. Like literally doubled the amount that was there before. If it took 5 routes to unlock all those guests, I wonder how big this party will be this time around.

I’m also really liking the MC profile.

So my hunch was correct, the story is set around half a year after Rika’s “death”.

OH MY FUCKING GOD.THE PROLOGUE SOMEWHAT BROKE THROUGH THE FOURTH WALL. PLUS WE FINALLY GOT UNKNOWN’S NAME! I mean not his REAL name but like an alias like most of the other characters have.

So the premise of this route goes like this: You are technically kidnapped by Ray (Unknown) and taken to what probably is Mint Eye HQ. You’re essentially locked in another room to “test” out this messenger game that Ray supposedly developed. The messenger game concept is literally like inception. Ray even gives you the promo poster picture of all 5 main targets. He tells you they’re AIs and that you’ll have to plan a party. The same game concept. Except in the dialogues, you can somewhat flirt with Ray. But while I say flirt, there’s a hint of a ummm manipulative atmosphere where Ray will sometimes flirt back but it’s basically just to play with your feelings and keep you there to use you. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is how it turns out later.

On a side note, Ray’s emojis are so cute. But I’m not sure if I’m liking his whole fuchsia/magenta Victorian aristocrat outfit. It’s a different look then what we’re used to in the original story 2 years down the road. I wonder what happened. Or is it just because he needs to manipulate the MC that he’s wearing this? His hearts are also in that fuchsia/magenta color.

Back to the game, although the format is the same as the casual and deep stories, there will be more appearances from Ray hacking in. You really interact more with V and Ray in this route.  I know it’s suppose to be V’s route but I’m all about flirting with Ray right now. Even though I know it’s probably not gonna end well.

On another side note, they weren’t kidding when they said HG for 24 skips vary.

A whole 165 HG to skip 24 hours ON THE FIRST DAY. I’m quite curious as to what to expect next.

On a whole new other side note

The phone calls now come with a whole new contacts section WITH 2 EMPTY BUBBLES. OMG WHO ARE THEY FOR?

Finishing V’s Route So I went through the bad ending for common route 3 (or so it’s labeled in the history chat, which is just missing all the chats before the branch after day 4) and restarted it. I didn’t exactly read them yet since I was kind of salty going through it. I’ll probably read them after I’ve finish the normal/good ends.

The first actual game play I’m going through is just choosing the choices that I want. I don’t care if this ends badly or not. I’m still kind of salty about V. I’m really all about flirty with Ray right now. I think that since this is fairly “early” in the time period, I don’t think Ray has been drugged and brainwashed and as mentally unstable as he was in the original game. So I really feel for ray and I’ve been all about flirting with him. And honestly, while I don’t like how occasionally you’ll see his unstable ultra possessive state, I actually totally agree with him on this:

You can still see his deep rooted misguided hate for Seven through the fact that he doesn’t even mention his name but Ray actually does have a clear understanding of the RFA members. It makes you wonder how he found out about this or was he smart and clear headed enough to infer this from reading the chat logs when he hacked in.

Side note: The following is a rambling of a storyline for Ray inspired by the chat above and one of the prologue bad ends. 

For a Ray route, I’m kind of thinking it could also be set 2 years ago from the original story line and the MC could still be kidnapped by Ray on the streets but it could be that the MC is actually an undercover agent tasked with bringing down Mint Eye. As they slowly interact with each other, the MC would see that Ray is just brainwashed and they would slowly fall in love but the MC can’t stay very long. 

After uncovering the truth and bringing down Mint Eye, the MC would deliver Ray back to Seven (hopefully all the RFA members had their eyes opened, including V) for Ray to get the help he needs. But even though Ray gets help and recovers quickly because it hasn’t been that long that he’s been drugged and brainwashed, Ray is still very dependent and loves the MC that he uses his hacking resources to track her down. The RFA members sees this and decided to help him. MC is found to be president of a security company by day and underworld boss by night. 

Since MC can’t leave, Ray decides to join her and Seven decides to follow. Seeing this the rest of the members follow (with Vanderwood because Vanderwood follows Seven and Seven’s original agency is afraid of MC’s company so there’s no problems). The members still hosts party with Ray as the party coordinator now. The only thing that’s changed is the RFA name. 

This is pretty much my little imagination on a Ray route. It would be fun to see the MC actually have more of a background. It’s pretty weird how the MC is just roped into the storyline with no regards to her previous life. Does no one care that she just disappears? 

Back to the first play, all I can say is Ray is too precious and my saltiness for V is starting to fade. It’s still there, but it’s fading. AHHH. Flirting with Ray gave me a bad end after Day 4 branch. I choose answers that flirted with him but at the same time I didn’t want to fucking join Mint Eye. Ahh. Time to restart. The second game play I finally got into V’s route. BUT I’M OFFICIALLY SALTY AGAIN. THE SALT DILUTED WHEN I WAS FLIRTING WITH RAY BUT IT CAME BACK STRONG WHEN I DECIDED TO GET THE GOOD END IN V’S ROUTE. His stupid pathetic ass is STILL hiding things from the members. He asks Seven for help but makes him go the round about. V wants to make everyone hate him and feels pathetic but he doesn’t deserves everyone’s hatred. He’s not seeing how he’s hurting them and only thinking about himself. The choices in the game is so annoying I want to smash his face. I seriously do not want to play this route. I just can’t with him. I’m only in it for Ray. If V wants to put a pity party for himself then go ahead but leave everyone else out of it. THEY’RE ALREADY INVOLVED. Keeping them out isn’t helping anyone! I especially hate how he uses Seven’s trust for when he knows Seven will feel betrayed when Mint Eye is exposed. In the original story, Mint Eye progressed by 2 years. TWO FUCKING YEARS he tried to do something on his own. AND WHAT DID HE FUCKING ACCOMPLISH? NOTHING. Honestly, I don’t know if I should continue for the good route or just do what i want to fucking do.

WHAT THE FUCK. I AVOIDED RIKA LIKE THE PLAGUE AND STILL GOT HER ENDING. WTF.  Endings Completed

Bad Ends

Prologue 1 ‎✔

Prologue 2 ‎✔

Common Route 3  ✔

...

...

Normal End

Good End

Final Notes

The CGs are smoother than in the original story and honestly love them more than the ones in the original story.

TL;DR Time Table

[otoroll]

While A3! and Kakupuri are on event downtime (or more like I don’t care about Kakupuri’s current event), I’ve been focusing on Stand My Heroes and LoS!, though it might be a little harder to tell because I’ve been flooding this place with LoS!.

So let’s have a quick chat about Sutamai, shall we? It’s not half bad as a match-3 game, but I feel like with the otome element it tries to juggle a bunch of things at once and ends up falling a little flat. And that’s unfortunate, because just looking at that Elysian field of shiny that is this game’s title screen gave me such high hopes.

(By the way, this jump cut below should tell you this is not going to be quick chat, because I’m not on Twitter now so I don’t have to limit my characters~~)

Stand My Heroes is based off the world of coly’s first entry into the otome world, Drug Prince & Narcotic Girl. Have an English summary of that game’s premise here for a quick catch-up, and then you’ll know as much about that game as I do because I totally didn’t play it. tl;dr: You have a special resistance to drugs so you get recruited into a police Narcotics department with your choice of 6 handsome men to be paired up with.

In this one, you join a special team called STAND - that is, STand Alone National Department - and basically act as a scout to help them recruit other people. So this opens up the game to a whole host of more pretty boys.

And that’s where we get to problem: the game doesn’t do too much to get you invested in these additional pretty boys. While it takes the time to make sure you know who the 6 men of Narcotics are with a quick reintroduction in the first story segment, soon after you just get whole teams of people thrown at you with the assumption that you already know who they are - though I can’t seem to find any details of their existence in the first game - or that you’re going to read all the supplemental stuff for whoever catches your eye.

The game story follows a super linear path - you’re going to get story snippets before and after every puzzle segment and there are no choices to be made in these. Levels are grouped in sets of 10, with every 10 focusing on a different character and your attempt to recruit them into STAND. So it’s a little confusing why they wouldn’t just introduce the characters in the eventual order instead of going “Hey, here’s 15 more boys you can choose from if you’re lucky enough to get their cards in the gacha! Isn’t it great that we give you so many options?” in the very beginning.

Which leads me to say that this probably shouldn’t be called an otome game. And technically, coly themselves call this a “Puzzle x Scenario Game,” but the amount of choice with little-to-no background information is just a little overwhelming, and it’s easy to feel like you’re missing out on enjoying parts. The game makes it easy to disregard the Scenario part altogether, actually - you can skip the story snippets with that little fast-forward button in the bottom left corner, and the scenarios are kept separately in their own little “Story” section. The Puzzle part is clearly the main bulk of the game.

And there’s so much about the puzzle part that does work. This is your basic match-3 game, with special pieces that you can create when matching 4 or more pieces, obstacle bits, and objectives. You’ve seen and played this stuff before. If the puzzle has a gimmick, the game helpfully explains the gimmick.

Your choice of males are all disseminated into cards, where each card has its own skill, and you build teams of four cards that you can bring into each puzzle mission. If the card’s skill isn’t going to be helpful for that puzzle, then the game helpfully lets you know about it before you start the puzzle and gives it a chance to switch it out. Skills can be improved through improving the card’s affection level, which is usually ranked up by including the card in your lineup for puzzle levels.

Like with any F2P game, there’s an energy system. You max out at 10 hearts, though if you get bonus hearts from a daily gift or something you can go past that limit a little. Here’s where we get a little odd, though: Each level takes 2 hearts to play. If you complete a level for the first time, then you get 1 heart as a reward. So unlike most F2P match-3 games, where you get to keep playing on a heart until you lose a level, here you’re going to lose the heart no matter what.

Since you earn evidence every time you complete a level, which in turn can be used for the free gacha and to unlock stories, it makes sense that the game’s developers don’t want you to cheese evidence on an early level that you’re guaranteed to beat. But it’s still weird to suddenly be told “you’re out of energy” when you’ve been cruising through levels without screwing up any of them.

So let’s talk Scenario. As said, you can use evidence to unlock stories, which play out like a regular otome game with text boxes instead of speech bubbles. You can also unlock stories by ranking up card affection.

But this brings us back to the core issue this game has an otome offering: short of looks, this game doesn’t do too much to try and involve you in its story. If you want to read an affection story, you’re going to need the card first to be able to unlock it. And because you get cards randomly from gacha, there’s no guarantee that you’re going to get someone you’re interested in. In fact, I’ve done 10-pulls of both premium (with crystals) and regular (with evidence) gacha at least four times each by this point and I still haven’t gotten a single card with the white-haired green-eyed Arakida Sosei yet, but I have gotten six different versions of his favorite celebrity siblings, the Tsudzuki brothers. At least a plus for it on the gacha side of things is that there are no worries about duplicates taking up your inventory/card space: any duplicate cards are automatically fed into your existing copy to raise its affection.

There’s also no incentive to actually read any story short of “X is pretty” - you don’t get crystals (the premium gacha currency) for doing anything except meeting a puzzle level score checkpoint, and because you have to use up evidence (the free gacha currency) to unlock stories, you end up losing out on the gacha. As for the stories themselves, what I did read before I gave up trying to feign interest felt shallow and generic. It tries to alternate between serious drama (because of its premise) in the puzzle part and the cutesy lighthearted romance antics in the side story section, and I had trouble buying into either one. To be fair, though, I’ve always been terrible at that.

That’s not to say the game doesn’t try its best to be appealing as an otome game. It’s got some clearly high production values going on, between the Live 2D with some beautiful character designs by Koto Fudzuki (you’ve probably seen their work in Voltage games), and a voice cast to match.

It also offers an individiual character affection mechanic where you can pet your pretty of choice and give them presents to raise their affection levels, and this can give you more gacha currency or unlock stories. But just like game energy, there’s a countdown timer for how many times you can touch your chosen partner, and the character’s individual affection has no effect on any other part of the game. Its relative unimportance makes it quickly forgettable unless you like rubbing your finger on your screen.

Ultimately, I’m not going to say Stand My Heroes doesn’t have its merits. It’s free, for one thing. For another, if you don’t want to deal with the otome game part, you can basically ignore it and treat it as a puzzle game, and it does just fine there. If you want to try it as an otome game, there a lot of elements to enjoy, whether it’s the visuals, the story bits, or that one screen where you stroke a picture. But when there’s so many F2P match-3 games and F2P otome games, it feels like a shame that something with potential and the budget to match ends up feeling like two separate games haphazardly glued together.

But it has gacha so I’m still gonna keep it in my rotation. …for now. (I want to see how many rolls it takes to get to a Sosei.)

Pros: Beautiful design, works perfectly fine as a standalone match-3 game. Cons: There’s no real incentive to play the otome part, so for a gacha-obsessive doing anything other than the puzzle can feel like a waste of time. The seiyuu are mostly used for one-off grunts during the story bit and to voice cycled lines on the main game and puzzle screens.

Gacha Info: A premium Crystal Gacha (Rarity R & up) and two kinds of Evidence Gacha: Normal & Ultra. Ultra gets you Rarity R & Up cards at 50x cost. There’s a Roll 10, Get 1 Free discounted roll option for all banners.

[dngrs-untld-hrshps-unnmbrd]

Before the Fall (Pt 1)

Destiny fic. A Dead Orbit scavenger is resurrected as a Guardian hundreds of cycles after her death but can remember everything from her old life. While she struggles to understand why another new Guardian brings back memories of a time Zavala wishes he could forget.

Set in two time periods: during the events of Destiny pre-Red Legion and just before the Battle of Six Fronts. 

Drama/romance | slow burn | sexytimes at some point | Andara probably swears a lot | if you’re just meeting me hi this story will have a lot of Zavala | Shaxx, Ikora, Saladin and Osiris and Lyssa the Lighthearted feature too

Author’s Note

Bear with me, I know this first chapter and author’s note are long. Future installments will be pithier. 

This is a companion story to After the Fall but can be read as a standalone. It features my OCs Andara, an Awoken Voidwalker Warlock, and Piax, a human Sunbreaker Titan. It’s primarily Andara’s story but will feature chapters in Piax’s POV (point of view) exploring her early days of being a Guardian and why she’s so devoted to Zavala. It will also explore a lot of Zavala’s back story through his POV, including his romantic history. Because I’m allergic to stories without kissing.

OK, so, the lore. This is probably the longest Author’s Note I’ve ever written! Thanks Destiny for your confusing, vague lore XD For those interested, I’ll set out what we know that’s relevant to this story as well as the assumptions I’ve made.

You can totally skip this and start the story if you prefer. I’ll explain things in the story as I go along.

This fic is set during what I’ll call the Early City Age, just before the Battle of Six Fronts, and the Late City Age, just before the Red Legion Attack in D2. Six Fronts was the first big battle to defend the Last City and marked a turning point in the way the City was run. (In Zavala’s Origins trailer it’s the battle he, Shaxx and Saladin are street-fighting in.)

At the time of the Battle of Six Fronts, the Last City was at the mercy of the Faction Wars, there was no Consensus and it seems the Vanguard didn’t exist as it did today. The Wall had been built by the Titans. The Iron Lords were probably already dead so there was a power vacuum in the Last City.

One assumption I’m making is that the Exo Titan Saint-14 and Lord Saladin worked with the Speaker to govern the Last City, but in some sort of unofficial capacity. Saint-14 must have been in an important leadership role because after Six Fronts he vouches for the Warlock Osiris’s elevation to Vanguard Leader.

Another assumption is that because Saladin mentored Zavala and Shaxx and the early days of the Last City were kind of YAY TITANS, Saladin brought his boys into important discussions and decisions. This is long before the rift between Saladin and Shaxx, which happened after Twilight Gap.

The Crucible was founded after Twilight Gap but as Guardians love to fight each other I’ve made up a thing called Skirmishes. Shaxx runs these and they function in a similar but scaled down way to the Crucible.

Thank you to @littleshebear for letting me use her Zavala/Lyssa the Lighthearted relationship headcanons, and for all our endless discussions about lore and the Vanguard and Guardians. Lyssa is a real character in the grimoire, a Sunsinger Warlock like Osiris.

Tl;dr?

Early City Age = the City has a Wall and the Guardians are just starting to venture out beyond it

Late City Age = the setting of Destiny the game

Chapter One

Master Rahool, Late City Age

The little silver Ghost lay silently on the table where the Cryptarch had left it. A Hunter had brought it in a few hours earlier along with a stack of engrams that she’d found on Mercury. 

Couldn’t revive it. Looked like it had been there for years, almost buried by a broken Vex gateway. Think you can fix it?

Now he had a few minutes to spare Rahool picked up the Ghost and examined it. Could he? Sometimes he performed maintenance on Ghosts that had received knocks on the battlefield, but they were more cosmetic adjustments. This Ghost could be beyond help, drained of Light and unable to seek out the Guardian it had once belonged to. He or she could be long dead, or perhaps the Ghost had never even found them.

There was a lot of gunk in its seams and Rahool worked at them with a thin silver tool. The Ghost was starting to look clean, but still very dead, when suddenly it lit up and made a whirring noise.

‘Ah, so you’re not dead. How long have you been sleeping?’

The Ghost began spinning urgently and a moment later shot out of his hands. Rahool watched it zoom across the courtyard and then over the Tower railings and out of sight.

He laid down his silver tool and smiled to himself. ‘Goodbye, Little Light. Looks like you’ve got someplace to be.’

Zavala, Early City Age

Twilight was descending and the gates were being readied for closure. The Wall cast its long shadow over the Last City, a sprawling thing of low stone buildings and wooden huts. The Traveler hung in the sky, bright white and silent.

Zavala remembered when the Last City was merely a motley collection of tents and had no Wall to protect it. That they’d managed to cling on in those early days was a miracle. With the Wall to protect them and new Guardians arriving in the City almost every day they could only grow stronger. There was hard work ahead of them and there was hope, and he found himself welcoming both equally.

A pulse rifle in his hands and a stack of other weapons on a trestle table before him, Zavala watched the thin stream of Guardians returning from the Cosmodrome. Two Titans, laughing loudly with their helmets under their arms, greeted Zavala before heading for the Guardians’ Hall behind him.

He’d be out there himself tomorrow but today he had duties for Saint-14, attending to the stockpile of new weapons that the Faction scavengers had traded with them. In the last few years they’d begun venturing outside the Wall, the Guardians clearing out enclaves of Fallen while the Factions looked for supplies.

A slight figure in black armour streaked past Zavala, pulled one of the Titans round and punched him in the face. He reeled, and blood began pouring down his chin. The scavenger started screaming at both of them.

‘How could you? Do you even understand what you’ve done? We’ll never be able to replace the tech that you –’

The bigger Titan, the one who hadn’t been punched, narrowed his eyes and reached for his gun.

Zavala threw down the pulse rifle he was holding and lunged for the Guardian’s arm. He didn’t recognise this woman but she wore a Dead Orbit insignia on her chest plate. If they shot her she would stay fatally, permanently dead. There were already enough tensions between the Factions and the Guardians and the last thing the Speaker needed was a murdered scavenger.

‘Hey. Hey. That’s enough,’ he called, trying to be heard over her screaming. But she wasn’t listening to him and a crowd was gathering.

Turning to the bigger Titan he said, ‘Go and report in to Saint-14. Both of you. Now.’ The Titan with the bloodied lip needed some persuading but finally the two of them headed into the hall.

The woman tried to follow them, still shouting, but Zavala hooked an arm about her waist and pulled her back. ‘No you don’t. I want a word with you.’

She was like him, an Awoken, with knotted purple hair and dusty black armour. A bag was slung over her shoulders and inside he could see it was stuffed with Golden Age tech. Good tech. Things the City needed. There was an auto-rifle holstered on her back and a knife at her hip, though even in anger she hadn’t drawn them. She didn’t want to fight, she wanted to be heard.

‘Want to tell me what that was about?’ Over his shoulder he could sense onlookers, but ignored them.

The Awoken finally seemed to realise he was there and spoke in a tight voice, her fists clenching. ‘I spent two hours clearing all the Fallen off a Warsat and those … those knuckleheads jumped in and destroyed it. I want to fucking kill them.’

A Warsat. They were precious to Dead Orbit and their mission to get a fleet off the ground. The Guardians needed them too if they were ever to reconnect a communications network. At the moment they were living blind and that was dangerous.

‘It’s a terrible waste. But things happen in the field –’

‘They destroyed it on purpose.’

Zavala pressed his lips together. They wouldn’t have. Would they? ‘If that’s true then it’s unforgivable. I’m sorry.’

‘It is true.’

Then I’m going to need to talk to Saint-14 and Saladin about this. The chain of command between the Speaker and the Factions and Guardians was blurred with all groups feeling like they knew what was best for the City, but if Titans had screwed up then it was clear what needed to be done.

He reached for his datapad. ‘One of the Hunters came back to the City with a suspected Warsat sighting yesterday. I know it won’t make up for the time you spent on the other one, but it’s something.’ 

It was quite a lot, actually. They could have swapped this intel with the factions for more weapons or tech.

She examined the coordinates, her expression tight but mollified. ‘I know the place. Thank you.’

‘Be careful. That place is infested with Fallen.’

But the young woman was already striding away, her hand tight around her bag strap. ‘I can handle myself. You handle those numb-nuts.’

Zavala grimaced. Something to look forward to. If he had his way he’d send the two Titans who’d destroyed the Warsat with the scavenger to help her get the new one, but Saint-14 was wary of getting too involved with the Factions. They do their thing and we do ours, and keep our people strictly separate lest we start bleeding Guardians to their causes.

It was true that the Factions’ aims were vastly different theirs, and each others, but they had to think in terms of the next few hundred cycles. Pushing back the Fallen from the Cosmodrome, getting airborne again and protecting this City was going to take everyone’s efforts, no matter their loyalties.

He turned back to the pile of weapons and saw that the cluster of onlookers had dispersed except for an exceptionally large Titan and a Warlock in canary yellow robes. Shaxx and Lyssa the Lighthearted. Lyssa was looking at Zavala with the smallest of smiles on her lips.

Shaxx watched the scavenger disappear into a side street on the far side of the square. ‘That was a good punch she threw. Shame she’s fallen in with those scrounging bastards.’

Traveler’s light, he was getting sick of this sort of talk. ‘We need Dead Orbit. The supplies they bring in are helping the City get off the ground. We don’t have time to scavenge ourselves.’ And if the scavengers were willing to risk their one life in the Cosmodrome they deserved respect for that, at the very least.

‘Not far enough off the ground for them though, is it?’ Shaxx grunted. ‘You handled her well.’

‘I didn’t handle her. I just did what needed to be done.’ Zavala turned his attention back to the weapons. He’d finish up here and go and talk to Saint. No, he’d talk to Saladin first. His mentor always had something sensible to say. He wished the Iron Lord would lead the Titans instead of the Exo, but Saladin had said many times that he was an old wolf and didn’t have it in him. Not anymore.

‘I’m going to get something to eat if either of you need a break,’ Lyssa announced.

Zavala pushed the pile of weapons to one side, sorting through them. Only two auto rifles, and in terrible condition. Later tonight he’d strip them back and see whether he could fix them.

‘Zavala.’

There was an edge to Shaxx’s voice and he looked up. ‘What? Oh, goodbye Lyssa.’

The Sunsinger headed for the hall with a flick of her yellow robes, and Shaxx sighed. ‘You are an ass sometimes.’

Three pulse rifles. Five sidearms. ‘Am I?’

‘Lyssa. She wants to get to know you better.’

He’d heard that before. Guardians wanted to get to know him into order to grill him about his fighting techniques. Or at least that’s what it felt like. ‘She’s already bested me in the Skirmishes.’

The look of shock on the Titan’s face was comical. ‘She did? When?’

It had been about a year ago, and the Sunsinger had burned through him like he was nothing. When he finally felled her she’d leapt up again before he’d got his breath back and knocked his legs out from beneath him. Aiming an empty sidearm at his head she’d whispered ‘pew, pew,’ and he couldn’t help but grin up at her.

‘It didn’t show on the tally. She was out of bullets.’ But they knew, and ever since when she overheard him talking about the Skirmishes he thought he saw a secretive, pleased smile on her lips. But she hadn’t told anyone, so neither had he. ‘Shaxx, move. I want to get this finished.’

The larger Titan folded his arms and looked at his friend. ‘I wasn’t talking about the Skirmishes. Why is everything about fighting with you?’

‘That’s rich,’ Zavala murmured at his datapad.

Shaxx grinned. ‘I know how to have fun. And Lyssa wasn’t thinking about besting you. Not in the Skirmishes at least.’

Zavala finally looked up. ‘Then why did she …’ But the knowing grin on Shaxx’s face made him trail off. Oh, like that.

‘Bald, blue and apparently pretty thick. I don’t know why she’s interested either, but I’ve never wasted much energy trying to understand women.’ Shaxx clouted him on the shoulder and said as he walked away, ‘Go and talk to her.’

Finally distracted from the pile of weapons Zavala looked toward the hall. Was he hungry?

He could eat.

He was just putting down his datapad when Osiris appeared across the square, the Warlock’s long, thin figure upright and haughty. He walked past Zavala and entered the hall.

A cloud passed over Zavala’s good mood and he suddenly remembered why he didn’t see much of Lyssa. Everywhere she went her mentor seemed to be, crooning at her like she was a pet. Something about the man got Zavala’s hackles up and he turned back to the weapons with a frown, finding that he wasn’t hungry after all.

You made it to the end, thank you! I hope you’re enjoying it so far. Leave me a comments and let me know what you think. Huge thanks to @littleshebear for beta-ing and checking my lore.

[junker-town]

What we learned from No Mercy 2017: Vince McMahon’s big guy fetish faltered at the wrong time

Years of memes wasted on a goofy decision.

No Mercy was great! Mostly. The parts that were supposed to be great were not necessarily great, but the parts people weren’t enthused about were all on point, so it evened out. Well, not completely evened. Enzo Amore can fall down a well and bring the Cruiserweight Championship with him, but we’ll get to that in due time.

Miz retains the Intercontinental Championship against Jason Jordan

Miz had a little help retaining the Intercontinental strap against the up-and-coming Jason Jordan, but it should be pointed out that, in true Miz fashion, he isn’t actually responsible for the shenanigans that caused Jordan to lose in the end. Jordan attacked Bo Dallas outside of the ring, and later, Dallas tried to interfere in the match itself at a crucial moment. Jordan took care of Dallas instead of ignoring him, opening the door for Miz to attack Jordan from behind.

What we learned: Yes, Miz got an assist, but in a way where he can blame Jordan for creating an opportunity for Miz to capitalize on. He’ll be stretching the truth instead of lying, and while it might not seem all that different, that’s an important distinction when it comes to heeling. Miz will truly believe he’s in the right, and he has just enough video evidence to back up his case.

Meanwhile, someone teach Jason Jordan how to read a crowd, because they loved Miz and were not at all there for Jordan’s post-match promo saying Miz sucks. Maybe just skip that one next time the crowd is going wild for a Miz win, guys. Kudos to Corey Graves for trying to say the crowd’s “Who’s your daddy?” chants were about Miz’s unborn child, though, and not Jason Jordan’s soap opera story line with long-lost father, Kurt Angle.

Finn Balor, man, defeated Bray Wyatt, god

So I called out something in the preview, about how Bray was just expecting us to forget that he constantly says a god resides within him and boosts his powers so that he and Finn Balor could have a “man vs. man” match. Wouldn’t you know it, Bray attacked Balor from behind and was like “ha ha ha, you seem to have forgotten that I constantly say a god resides within me and boosts my powers and it allowed me to book this totally unfair match with you and this time you aren’t even wearing your body paint.” Finn won despite the sneak attack and unfair nature of the match, by the way, and without even stopping in the back for a few brush strokes first.

What we learned: As with every Bray Wyatt plan ever, in the end, he lost because whatever god is inhabiting him is one of those JRPG gods who just thinks they’re omnipotent but actually forgot a whole bunch of key details that could (and eventually do) lead to their demise. “Incompetent” and “omnipotent” have most of the same letters, you know.

Or, as Brandon Stroud so eloquently put it months ago in one of wrestling’s most evergreen tweets:

Every single Bray Wyatt angle http://pic.twitter.com/hTdJ5I2VZl

— Brandon Stroud (@MrBrandonStroud) May 30, 2017

Dean Ambrose and Seth Rollins retain the RAW Tag Team Championships against Sheamus and Cesaro

It’s a shame the feud between these two is likely at its end, because good lord do they work well together. And all the credit in the world goes to Cesaro, who had his teeth either knocked out of him or further into him, for continuing to wrestle a completely baller match after said teeth went askew.

Who is next up for Ambrose and Rollins? I don’t know, but at some point, we need The Revival healthy so they can come for these titles.

What we learned: Ambrose and Rollins are able to hide any flaws the two might have in their game by tagging together, and it’s art. Sheamus and Cesaro need to stay buddies even if they end up stopping chasing the tag titles and go after singles championships, because their friendship is too beautiful to break up. FRIENDSHIP-BASED TAG TEAM WRESTLING FOREVER, THE FANS ARE THE REAL WINNERS WHEN FRIENDSHIP IS INVOLVED.

Alexa Bliss pinned Bayley and defeated Emma, Sasha Banks, and Nia Jax to retain the RAW Women’s Championship

You might be upset that Alexa Bliss didn’t lose her title to Sasha or Bayley or Nia or even Emma, but it’s okay. The match was great, with tons of interaction among the five women, and logical storytelling with alliances forming and breaking and everyone realizing Nia Jax needed to be unconscious if anyone besides her was going to be productive for more than 10 seconds at a time. Plus, Alexa is going to end up facing Asuka for the RAW Women’s Championship, and her getting wrecked by the Empress of Tomorrow makes a lot more sense than having Nia suffer that fate.

What we learned: Well, I kind of already told you that above, but that’s fine because now I’ll share with you what I would have done with this match and subsequent followup.

Emma has experience with Asuka from their shared NXT days, and all of it is terrifying and likely still gives Emma nightmares. Emma winning would have been wonderful as then Asuka would have showed up to lay claim to the belt, which should have led to a month of Emma hiding backstage wherever she could, and Asuka just stalking Emma around the arena for entire shows like she’s Nemesis from the Resident Evil video games.

tl;dr

I mean if you don't want Asuka to burst through a wall to chase and attack Emma I'm not sure what we're doing here

— Marc Normandin (@Marc_Normandin) September 25, 2017

Roman Reigns defeated John Cena and is officially the biggest dog in the yard

This match was real good, and while it seems like the ending came out of nowhere, with Cena getting speared once in the ring and going down, it really did not. Reigns beat Cena’s ass for most of the match, and all Cena really got in on him was a few of his signature powered up spots: the second rope Attitude Adjustment and double AA didn’t take Reigns down, because Cena didn’t lay any groundwork. He was goofing and laughing and smiling throughout the match, but that was all Cena putting on a brave face and assuming he would win this thing in the end even as he struggled to put the same kind of hurting on Roman that Reigns was putting on Cena.

When Reigns did kick out of everything Cena had to offer, John looked exasperated, the smiles vanished, and he stared at Reigns while making some pretty clear “I don’t understand how you’re doing this right now” faces. Reigns had hit Cena with everything except his major moves — aside from the first spear that put Cena through an announce table — but then rattled off a Superman Punch and a spear to get that 1-2-3 and Cena’s respect.

What we learned: Was it the greatest match either has ever been in? Not even close. But it was far more fitting of a showdown than what we got when Cena had the torch passed to him by the Rock at either once in a lifetime match. Plus, it’s fun to see Cena get Cena’d, even if he didn’t really get Cena’d. And on a night where the announce team was letting us know his next pay-per-view would tie him for the most all-time, too.

Enzo Amore won the Cruiserweight Championship from Neville and it was dumb

I try not to harp on booking decisions too much, as playing wait-and-see often solves many issues you can dream up at the moment a supposed mistake was made. However, Enzo Amore winning the Cruiserweight Championship was a bad idea that happened in a bad match and just makes the entire cruiserweight division look bad.

Enzo is not a good wrestler. He’s good at being thrown around and ragdolled, and it helps that people want to see him get thrown around, but he never should have beaten Neville, even with a distraction. There were other wrestlers they could have done this with, or they could have not done it at all and simply had Cedric Alexander feud with Neville, which is some take my money stuff. Instead, we get the thing we knew was going to happen happen, and no one is happy.

Maybe his reign will be brief and we can move on, but considering all of the talent WWE fails to utilize within their cruiserweight division, handing the championship to the worst wrestler of the bunch is just weird. It should say a lot that I would have been fine with Lana defeating Naomi via shenanigans to heel it up as SmackDown Women’s Champ but have zero interest or justification at the ready for Enzo.

Brock Lesnar retains the WWE Universal Championship against Braun Strowman

What the hell, guys? Vince McMahon has long been OBSESSED with size, pushing huge dudes even if they didn’t have any other discernible talent outside of said hugeness. Braun Strowman is massive: he’s 6-foot-8, 385 pounds, and more agile than either of those numbers would lead you to believe. He’s charismatic, the crowd loves him, and Paul Heyman, Brock Lesnar’s manager, has been putting him over as bigger and stronger than his client, and maybe even the second-coming of Lesnar that we never thought we’d see, for weeks.

The result in their showdown, which came after a SummerSlam in which Strowman singlehandedly took Lesnar out of the proceedings for most of the match and then made him look like a nerd on television for weeks before this match? Lesnar winning after exactly one finisher, and actually out of nowhere, not in the way people will say Reigns beat Cena out of nowhere.

Vince had a chance to propel a huge human being to the next level, one who could be the focal point of the company for years to come, who already has a major following and fans dying to cheer for him despite his being a heel for so much of his run on the main roster. And, inexplicably, McMahon decided to go with Lesnar, who shows up on television every now and again, is nearly 40 years old, and is as known for vanishing on WWE for months at a time as he is for being the company’s final boss.

Imagine if Vince had halted Stone Cold’s push back in the day by having him tap out to Bret Hart instead of passing out at WrestleMania? That’s not to say Strowman is going to grow up to be Austin, but man, if anyone in the company now has a shot at being the guy, it’s him, and the reliably-obsessed-with-size-over-all Vince McMahon somehow wasn’t so reliable on that note this time.

[overly dramatic lengthy sigh]

What we learned: Brock vs. Roman II is definitely happening at WrestleMania 34, and no one is going to beat either of them until then, will they?

[delcanprobably]

The Turing Test (2016) Review

The Turing Test is a first person puzzle adventure game where you play as Ava Turing (heh heh get it? Turing test?), an engineer who has been sent to a base on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moon, to discover the reason behind the sudden disappearance of the ground crew there. When you arrive, however, you find that the crew has converted a set of rooms into puzzles that only a human could solve, as to keep robots out (theoretically, I’ll get to that in a bit).

This review is going to avoid blatant spoilers of anything major.

Gameplay

As aformentioned, The Turing Test is a first person puzzle game. I probably will draw a lot of similarities to games like Portal and other games in the same genre. Anyway, the main way you interact with puzzles is with your ‘Energy Manipulation Tool’ (their quotes not mine), which is essentially just a gun that allows you to sudck up power core thingies which act as batteries to power elements of the environment. You can only hold three at once and you can’t change the order they’re stacked in, so in other words if you suck up a new core, you’ll need to stick that core somewhere before you can use the other cores you’ve previously sucked up. On paper, this sounds pretty well and good, and even in the game for the most part it’s a pretty intriguing concept. There are different types of cores that you can find, some of them alternate on and off, some are only on for a short while after they’ve been placed, and it works well. Usually the puzzles are a matter of getting what is effectively a door open so that you can get through to the next puzzle, with there being 70 puzzles in total and 7 extra optional puzzles. I have some issues with the puzzles. By the end of the game, puzzles start to end up feeling like a chore. The puzzles don’t become challenging to get through like near the end of the Portal games, instead they just have so many bits tacked on that you have to take a minute or two to actually figure out what the hell is going on. And the inability to change which orb you fire out quickly becomes obsolete as you can always expect there to be three power sources for you to sort things out with. The middle of the game is where the puzzles really peak, and even then they’re not super difficult, just kinda clever. There are a lot of times where I felt like I wasn’t supposed to solve the puzzle how I did. Like how Portal speed runners sometimes do little tricks where they shoot a portal at just the right angle at just the right time so it goes through a tiny little gap and hits a wall right at the end of a puzzle. Except that seemed like the main way to solve some puzzles near the end of the game. Nevertheless, the puzzles are worthwhile, and you’ll have fun with them. The puzzles are the game’s strong point, and honestly if you just want a first person puzzle game for the intent of doing nothing but playing through puzzles, you can basically stop reading now because you’ll probably like it. It only took about 5 hours to 100% it for me, but I don’t feel like I wasted any of those five hours.

Performance and visuals

This game is made on Unreal Engine 4. As you can imagine, it looks pretty excellent, albeit most of the game does take place in sterile test chambers. Except occasionally there’s a little section in some ice, or sometimes you’re in a laboratory with lots of props and the like, and visually it really shines in those areas. And it runs great too, although the graphics menu has some questionable choices. For instance, it has these lens flares that go over a chunk of your view sometimes which I’m absolutely fine with personally, but I know that there are people who would hate them. The issue is that you can’t just disable them. You’d need to lose them along with bloom and that brightness adjustment thing where everything gets darker if you’re looking at something bright all at once. It’s only a minor thing, but it’s not that hard to put some check boxes in your menus. Everything is on a slider from Low up to Ultra, and while there’s a lot you can modify, I’d still like to be able to manually choose specifically what I enable.

Overall it’s pretty well optimised for PC.

Story

This is where everything goes to shit. The story at the start stays intact, but as you go it tries to be more and more clever, then starts being pretentious, and then everything bursts open. At the start, you’re flown onto the moon base and you go inside and “Woah!” you say “It looks like they’ve transformed the base into a series of puzzles!”. Or at least you would if it weren’t that the base’s AI, T.O.M. hadn’t of already said it. Lots of puzzle games have a robot that tells you stuff, except generally they either start off knowing as little as you do (think Weatley from Portal 2), or they start off knowing everything except they don’t have a real relationship with the player character so they don’t tell you anything (think GLaDOS from the original Portal). T.O.M is a weird mix between the two, and it just doesn’t work as well. Anyway, so T.O.M explains that he thinks the puzzles are some sort of Turing Test type thing to keep any robots and AI out, and explains that they’re too lateral for an AI to handle. That’s hilarious, considering AI would be much quicker to solve that type of test if anything. Now you’ve got that little hole in the story which is questionable, but really they didn’t do too terrible of a job explaining why there are so many puzzles on a space base for some reason. The issue comes up later, when this whole robots-can’t-do-puzzles thing contradicts itself when the writers start trying to be more clever than they actually are.

But then you get to the optional puzzles. These simply aren’t likely to ever exist in a situation like this, but for some reason, the people who built the puzzles thought “Hey, why don’t we put some audio logs behind more difficult puzzles for no apparent reason?”. It seems fine on the surface, seeing as though they wanted to include some story bits that you need to work for. Except then you go back to Portal, and remember that there’s a whole subplot you could skip hidden around the puzzles. Granted, these are a slightly different concept; they’re less direct story telling moments, but my point stands that it makes more sense in Portal.

You can ignore that, but then you’ll find that every 10th room, the people who built the puzzles thought “Hey, why don’t we keep a small section of the base with all our stuff still in it, and always put it at exactly every 10th puzzle?”. It just makes no sense, if the base was actually still being used after they built the puzzles, you’d need to go through 60 puzzles every single time you wanted to cross the god damn base! But the last 20 you probably won’t be doing, because they literally make zero sense if you think about it. To put it spoiler free, you need to start taking advantage of robots and AI to get through a set of puzzles designed to keep robots and AI out.

And then the game starts asking that you show some emotion for the characters near the end, even though they’re all mentally retarded. They want you to think that the robot is mean and heartless and other bad things, but really he’s the only one thinking logically out of all of them. So when the inevitable moral choice comes around, it’s not at all warranted, and you don’t feel like you’re actually doing anything. It seems that every time this game throws another interesting concept into the mix, it breaks everything else and weakens the story.

Overall, the story tries some interesting things, but constantly fails to execute them all that well.

Music and Sound Design

Eh, it’s alright. Nothing amazing, but it’s alright. The music is pretty good, but it’s not the sort of music you’d listen to outside the context of the game. A majority of the music is classical style piano based stuff, usually with the same melody which changes slightly to reflect the mood of the story. The sound is alright, but sometimes it feels slightly off to what’s happening on screen. Voice acting isn’t bad either. Nothing is bad in this department, but nothing is really anything more than average. Not bad, just not amazing.

Steam Controller Support

For this review onward I’ll do a grade system for this bit, just so I don’t waste your time.

Grade: A

Simultaneous mouse and keyboard works fine, although there are as always some issues with changing button prompts. Overall though, basically flawless in this area. Works best with either a mouse and keyboard or Steam Controller, entirely up to you.

Tidbits

Price to length

As I mentioned earlier, this game took me about 5 hours to 100%. It costs $19.99 on Steam. That’s just too much, especially when you consider that there’s almost no replay value. They needed something like the challenge maps in Portal, or a time trial mode, or just anything to give it a bit more content and replay value. I’d pick it up for $10 or less, preferably around $5. There are some games, like The Witness, which deserve this price point, but The Witness actually has $20 worth of content.

The Verdict

Gameplay - 8/10 Visuals - 8/10 Performance - 7/10 Story - 2/10 Music & sound - 5/10 Tidbits (incl. SC support) - (-0.5)

Score out of 50 = 8 + 8 + 7 + 2 + 5 - 0.5= 30.5/50 Final score =

62%

(Above averaqe) (6/10)

A great puzzle game which has its head up its own ass when the story sections come around.

TL;DR: Definitely consider this game, but don’t expect a great story, and wait for a sale.