#well anyway. in context of loop's identity... this is kinda even more fucked up

[electrozeistyking]

this has been locked in my brain me since I first made this au, so I finally drew it. how are we feeling tonight chat

[jeweledstone]

Recent Trayte Dream I Keep Forgetting to Fucking Post

DATE: 2/4/2024

OKAY. SO.

This dream post is basically context for a doodle from that drawpile I made involving one of the newest characters in my dream lore, Trayte. Specifically this one.

For those not in the loop so to speak, Trayte was a character from a recent dream I’ve had who apparently knew me since my early childhood and had a tendency to have rather severe, sometimes violent, mental breakdowns. In the dream he was introduced in, he ends up being unwillingly transformed into Pizzelle from Sugary Spire, which caused his mental state to become even worse. He ended up blaming me for the whole incident and swore he would one day take revenge on me for it, thus becoming a re-occurring villain in later dreams.

This post is regarding one of those revenge attempts.

So basically his thought process behind this “revenge” was that since “I” turned him into the character he was now permanently stuck as, he might as well try turning me into some other SS character as a sorta ironic karma thingy. Originally he was gonna have me turned into Rosette because apparently he used to have an unreciprocated crush on me, but I guess the hate/spite became stronger than the crush cause he eventually changed his mind and decided to tf me into Pizzano.

This (technically) makes the 4th character from a media I like to invade my dreams and try to turn me into a different character from their source material.

My brain has recycled the same plot element. Four (maybe five) fucking times.

Which is what we in the industry like to call

FUCKING BULLSHIT

Anyway, back to the plot summary. Since Trayte didn’t have access to any sorta reality warping abilities like “Dream” and Elias or weird black magic like Pizzahead, he ended up taking a more science-y approach to his little revenge scenario by sneaking into my house while I’m asleep and injecting this weird serum into me that would not only turn me into Pizzano physically, but also eventually take me over mentally as well. (The mental part was so I could feel the same pain Trayte felt over his own mental struggle between keeping his old identity and slowly being taken over by Pizzelle that he’s had since his own transformation)

So that happens, and at first the serum seems to work as intended and of course, that’s got me freaking the fuck out. And it only got worse when one of the serum’s unintentional “side-effects” began to show.

You see, turns out the whole transformation thing Trayte designed…

Was contagious…

So yeah, fuck me, it’s the Spamton Virus all over again, and my family ended up being the first one to have it “spread” to them despite me trying to isolate myself from them in hopes they wouldn’t get hurt by me once I finally lost control. It was around this point I kinda-sorta blacked out as Pizzano took full control only to miraculously regain lucidity several in-dream months later.

By then the infection had spread rather exponentially and there were very few uninfected humans left. I remember at first trying to “blend in” with the other Pizzanos hoping they wouldn’t find out I wasn’t “one of them” anymore.

They… actually found out pretty quickly and I ended up being outcasted by them. The normal humans wouldn’t accept me either since even though I was lucid, I was most likely still contagious. So I ended up spending a good portion of the rest of the dream as a loner, trying to survive in this post-apocalyptic world of sorts. At one point, I was looting an abandoned grocery store looking for food and such when the plot started up again.

Turns out, some members of the government were still alive and trying desperately to find a cure or something for the infection, and they just so happened to be bunkering in a building right next to the store I was in. (No idea why they chose GROUND FUCKING ZERO outta all places to hide out at while the rest of society suffered but since when has a politician ever made an actually smart choice in their life, y’know?) I ended up encountering them while exiting the store and their first instinct was to basically take out their guns and unload a shitton of lead into me.

Now, if you know anything about JeweledStone dream journal lore, you’d know that one of my abilities as a reality bender is that I’m basically fucking invincible (or at least, I can take a lot more damage than a normal person could, there HAVE been some recent dreams where I have died from being injured and stuff) (bruh I can’t believe my own subconscious fucking nerfed me lmao) so the bullets basically did nothing but slightly annoy me a little. For some reason, they ended up becoming less hostile towards me after that. (Could just be cause I wasn’t actively being aggressive towards/trying to infect them tho tbh)

The dream ended with one of the politicians revealing that they were also invincible and trying to order for a fucking nuke to be dropped on us to prove it.

And yeah, that was it, kinda disappointed it ended on a cliffhanger like that, but whatever.

[legionofpotatoes]

my thonks on the new game I played this weekend, under the cut for length and spoilers

I softly clicked the Sable icon when first booting it up yesterday, expecting a visually pleasing indie game about nothing with Mechanics LiteTM loosely screwed on; and I am sitting here now on a platinum trophy, with messed up hair and wide open eyes, wondering what the fuck has just happened.

It completely blindsided me with the Entire Rest Of The Experience after I was done oohing and aahing at the cel shaded packaging. I was expecting a Journey-esque barebones rumination on esoteric concepts at the very best, but here I was seeing a charming story that was one hundred percent steeped in metaphors but decidedly about something. or maybe two things in my mind, identity and purpose, and it goes about articulating them through character writing which is. So good?? Sable is an actual character. with interiority and desires, and her world is peppered with NPCs that are eager to chat back and reveal that they very much possess their own, too. The story is fury-road-simple, yet her growth is palpable and almost entirely gameplay-driven through player lens and agency. You get to literally decide what your purpose is and what purpose even means by the end. And the more you engage with and give to the world, the more it gives back to inform and enrich the context around that decision. It is such a deliciously simple parable that it is impossible not to click with it on some level.

And yeah, the game design is fucking rock-solid, another surprise. Not that I short-change indies because of their scope necessarily, but they do generally tend to be on the single-idea-test-drive side of the industry equation, rarely excelling at all internal pillars at once. Not the case here. There are smart choices made in borrowing mechanics from other titles and throwing them in an elegant mix that works in the internal math of this specific world; and it is all from-the-top efficiency. Sable looks for purpose through exploration and wears her currently preferred identity on her sleeve, so the entire macro loop is dialed in on those two elements. exploration and expression, with all extra fat trimmed off. your stamina meter feeds the first, various cosmetics feed the second. deft RPG-like quest structure and varied mission chains award you with boosts to both.

It is difficult to articulate, but the symbiosis between story and gameplay is really-really tight here, the very opposite of ludonarrative dissonance, to an almost indistinguishable degree. And it is never best exemplified than during the ending of the game, wherein the ending is a choice you make, you choose to end the game when you decide that Sable has found her purpose (it is all a neat dance of mask metaphors and communal occupations); and if you decide that she hasn't, or that her purpose is the search, the text automatically supports and encourages it. You can end it with 75% of the content untouched, or glide endlessly on, wearing any mask you start liking at any point. It is the ultimate celebration of autonomy in destiny and identity, and its fluidity, and its ownership. The game makes that distinction with a gentle firmness; the gliding rituals are solitary, personal. You make that final choice for yourself, you acknowledge the consequences but it is yours to make or not make.

The game is the search, and it ends if you decide that Sable has found herself.

The word "gentle" is so evergreen when thinking about this game, too. It is incredibly chill and introspective, yet manages to achieve triple-A level forward momentum without using a lick of combat gameplay, competitive beatdowns, fail states even, just entirely disregarding violence as a form of interaction between the player and the world, both lanes. And I know I'm biased to home in on and love this sort of thing because empathy-building gameplay is something I preach about like an annoying doomsday prophet but really, it really works here, despite me and despite itself. There is genuine good game design underneath the naivete of the idea, driving engagement and keeping your attention glued to the process without using combat mechanics. In an open-world RPG-like arena. It can be done.

And it looks and sounds fucking great and there's pretty decent customization of Sable and even of your weird kinda-alive bike that has terrible pathfinding when summoned. The selective absence of depth tones can be disorienting at first, but the aesthetic sorta makes its case with time, and the charming animations (is Sable animated on twos when she runs?) lock in the spell. The game is definitely finicky in some technical areas; I encountered one fairly major bug that randomly sorted itself out after minutes of me doing nothing (the button activating the watch sundial wouldn't trigger), and fairly common pains of open-world streaming would sometimes fire off like random audio cues and NPCs spawning on top of one another and real bad frame drops in geometry-heavy areas. But I definitely heard much worse than I experienced with my run. I managed to 100% the whole thing without a hitch and even wore my princess chum dress to the final gliding ceremony.

Anyway. I want to talk about a thousand different things Sable does well but this post was mainly about how good it is with telling a story about purpose that you get to both literally and metaphorically search for before deciding to end or not end it. It is just very very good at being story-first. Please buy it! Instead of fighting giant beetles you kinda try and make them poop for science, it's amazing.

[murasaki-murasame]

Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 11 [Chapter 3 - Trial]

I probably should have left this for tomorrow but oh well, here we are.

Thoughts under the cut.

First of all, I basically failed this trial at least three times because I kept running out of health, but APPARENTLY the ‘retry’ option just takes you back to the start of the section you were stuck on and gives you most of your health back. That sure would have been nice to know back in chapter two. I could have avoided replaying half of that case’s trial if I knew that. I thought that the retry option reset the entire trial, especially since I’m pretty sure the ‘prepare and retry’ option takes you back to the start of it. At least, it takes you back to the screen you’re at right before the trial starts. Maybe I was wrong, since in chapter two I just backed out and reloaded my save instead of making sure whether or not I really was being reset to the start of the trial, but still. Oh well. It’s not a major complaint.

Anyway, that aside, this sure was a trial. I don’t know if it’s because I decided to do it at 1am again instead of just waiting until tomorrow, but in terms of logic difficult, this was probably the hardest trial thus far. I’m not kidding when I said that I ran out of health several times, even with the skill that gives me the max amount of health.

The weird part about it is that I was more or less spoiled on this chapter in advance. Or, well . . . it’s not that I knew Kiyo was this chapter’s culprit, but I knew that he was going to be a culprit at some point, since before I even played the game, youtube decided to recommend me one of those ‘all murders and execution’ videos that had his face on the thumbnail. Well, I guess it was his sister’s face, but you get what I mean. Same difference. So I knew that he was going to be a killer eventually, I just didn’t know when. I had to awkwardly keep it a secret this whole time just in case anyone was reading these posts without having played the entire game.

Just to get it out in the open, there’s one other character who I know dies at some point [not sure if they’re a victim or a killer for sure, though], and I think I may have gotten more or less spoiled by what was labeled as a ‘spoiler-free review’ of the game, but I’ll keep quiet about that one until it comes up. I’ll continue to dance around those two spoilers I’m aware of in these posts, but I’m pretty sure that those are the only two spoilers I’ve read in reference to deaths in this game. Every other death should hopefully be a surprise to me.

But back onto my main point, I knew that Kiyo was going to be a culprit eventually, and it was a major reason why I suspected him immediately [though he was pretty suspicious anyway], but somehow this entire trial was still genuinely difficult for me to get through. I ran into so many points where I was completely unsure what the answer was, or what the game expected from me. And since I didn’t know which exact chapter Kiyo was a culprit in, I had the lingering doubt in my mind that maybe he wasn’t the killer yet. This is why I also got thrown off by the possibility of there being two killers involved, since it kinda partially invalidated by spoiler, or at least it seemed to at the time. I guess in the end there wasn’t a second killer, and my initial instincts were right, but this trial really put me through the motions of doubting those instincts to the very end.

It may have been because I held back on thinking too hard about the mechanics of the case since I didn’t want to work it all out in advance, especially since I probably knew who the killer was, but basically every aspect of the actual mechanics of how these murders happened was a real surprise to me.

I guess my main issue was that since Kiyo was so immediately obvious in every way, with the katana being from his room and the seance being his idea, and him being one of the first suspects pointed at, I just kinda assumed that he was being set up as an innocent scapegoat. So basically I got stuck in a loop of metagame-y logic, yet again, and it made me spend the entire time agonizing over whether or not my instincts were right. The game sure picked the perfect time to deviate from the pattern of the true culprit only being suspected in the second half of the trial. I got so used to that set-up that I started immediately ignoring any character who gets suspected early in the trial. But it makes sense that at least one chapter would involve a killer who’s obvious enough to be guessed at the start.

It also lead to me inaccurately doubting Kaito for a second time, but at least this time I was never super confident in suspecting him, since absolutely nothing in this entire case directly pointed at him, aside from him being kinda shady and reclusive lately. So I don’t feel TOO bad about suspecting him a bit.

Even though it’s always sad to feel like this sort of thing got spoiled in advance, I’m happy that Kiyo was the culprit. Now I don’t have that spoiler hanging over my head for the rest of the game. I would have been horrible if he ended up, say, being the chapter five killer, in which case there would have been no doubt about him being the killer then, since chances are there won’t be any murder mystery cases after chapter five. So it’s better that it happened when there was still a chance of my instincts being incorrect. Which worked out for the best, since in spite of me being sort of spoiled about it, this chapter ended up being incredibly difficult for me because of that possibility of being wrong.

Of course there’s still that one aforementioned spoiler that may or may not be pretty directly spelling out one of the final killers, buuuut let’s not talk about that one for now.

I really did get put through the motions of genuinely suspecting a wide variety of people, especially in the context of if there had been two separate killers. I suspected Keebo until they spelled out why his flashlight wouldn’t have worked, which was a concept that I hadn’t really considered, I even suspected Miu for a fair bit, I almost got caught up in the idea that Tenko killed herself, which made me wonder if maybe she’d killed Angie, and I even seriously wondered whether or not Himiko really was the one to kill Tenko, though I feel pretty bad about that one now. And obviously I always suspected Kaito in the back of my mind. Kiyo just felt way too obvious for most of the trial.

I’m not really sure how I didn’t guess the whole trick with the identical rooms, and the purpose of the missing support beam. I think that if I’d given myself more time to think about it, I maybe would have figured it out, but I didn’t.

I still feel a bit . . . iffy about the seesaw trick, since I find it hard to believe that Kiyo wouldn’t have, for example, tripped over and messed up the magic circle, or broken the floorboard. And unless my memory is wrong of how it was laid out, it’s surprising that having the entire floorboard move didn’t displace any of the salt. So that part of it still feels weird to me, but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief on that one. The crimes can’t all be perfect. And at least to balance it out, I’m totally on board with the logic behind everything surrounding Angie’s death. That was all surprisingly easy. I dunno how I didn’t figure out the really simple way Kiyo set up the sword to push the lock. Maybe it just seemed too . . . simple? I dunno.

So the actual mechanics of how the case worked were a bit of a surprise to me, and that lead to the logic part of the trial being really difficult. It’s hard to remember all of it, but a lot of the different sections gave me a lot of trouble. For example, both of the hangman’s gambit games were weirdly difficult [at least the seesaw effect one was], I fucked up twice on the psyche taxi part, the rebuttal showdown parts were all kinda difficult in general, and I lost once at the scrum debate part. Though really, from what I remember, the most difficult part was when you have to lie about Tenko’s final moments. The idea of lying in trials is still so . . . weird to me, I basically never even consider it. I tried literally every single possible usage of every truth bullet they gave me, and lost all my health once, before realizing that the game expected me to lie, after I’d done every other option available to me. I kinda thought I was going nuts. But it worked out in the end, I guess.

Also I still suck so much at the Argument Armament, even with two skills dedicated to making it easier. Rhythm games are my worst enemy. Oh, and on the subject of skills, I also managed to squeeze in the one about making truth bullets faster, since I managed to get enough levels right before heading into the trial. That was good.

Oh, and before I forget, Keebo’s image recording function felt a little bit asspull-y, but oh well, it’s not a huge deal. And also I’m not even gonna comment on the reason why Miu designed it for him.

Before I talk about Kiyo, I just wanna say that I’m happy Himiko’s getting some actual development out of this. That’s good. Hopefully she doesn’t get killed off immediately after this. I’m starting to like her.

Anyway, onto the whole elephant in the room known as Kiyo. I was definitely expecting to get a killer soon who would be unanimously ‘evil’ in motive, to balance out the more sympathetic first two killers, but man was I not expecting how nuts he ended up being. His whole motive reminds me a fair bit of Tsumiki’s from DR2. It also helps that they were both the chapter three killers of their respective games.

I still kinda dislike it when murderers in games like this are ‘just crazy’, but I guess I can’t expect all of them to be sympathetic.

It was still a surprise to hear that he had no real desire to leave, and mostly just wanted to kill. That certainly was disturbing.

And on that note, jesus christ I wasn’t expecting this game to get into incest territory, and Kiyo’s delusional murder spree. Wow. I did not see that one coming at all. I don’t even know what to say about it. They really did everything in their power to make him unsympathetic and evil, huh?

In terms of that little post-credits scene of sort, I really hope that isn’t blatant foreshadowing for Kaito becoming a killer in a desperate attempt to escape from the school before he dies from whatever illness he seems to have. I was suspicious of his illness this entire time, since it obviously wasn’t just him being spooked out by ghost stories. It’d be lame if they signaled the idea of him being a killer so far in advance though, and in such a blunt way. We’ll see, I guess. Maybe it’s intentional on the game’s part, that it’s so obvious. If he does end up being a killer, maybe it’s not meant to be a surprise. Who knows.

In general, I have no real idea what to expect from here. Technically we still have nearly half of the game to go, which is weird to consider. And then there’s bonus stuff. I think I’ll probably continue liveblogging through all of whatever bonus post-game stuff we get. Depending on how it goes, I’ll try and avoid using any spoiler-y post titles.

Overall, this was a really bizarre chapter. I kinda sorta knew who it was in advance, and their motive [plus a few details of the crimes] felt a little weak, but at the same time this was undeniably the most difficult trial in terms of how much I fucked it up. It’s a weird situation. I’m not sure how to feel about it.