#and then. AND THEN. you add loop in there. and their unique convoluted feelings towards each of them
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i love that isafrin can be the most straightforwardly romancey, wholesome pairing on a surface level and then you go one (1) level deeper and run into siffrin’s seething guilt and convoluted feelings around touch and intimacy and the extent to which they want or don’t want those things in a specifically romantic way or if he was trying to seek connection and love in any way he could once he knew that Isabeau wanted those things from him in that context, and the combined power trip/self disgust at “manipulating” Isabeau’s desires without his knowledge to make themself feel wanted and in control. and then you keep going and there’s also Isabeau’s own warped self image (still, in spite of all his changes, fearing that he’s someone that would be shameful to know), his “emotionally stable pillar” role and self-taught therapy talk masking his deep fears of real confrontation (struggling loop after loop to confess, not wanting Odile to confront Siffrin about their weird behavior in the sus quest bathroom talk) and how Siffrin’s fear of vulnerability and Isabeau’s fear of Pushing Too Hard allow both of their issues to fester unspoken long after it’s clear that the problems exist.
all this to say. duality of isafrin. makes my heart full and warm and happy to see the sweet, fluffy, silly love and connection between them (mutually romantic or otherwise). and then also. the delicious, delicious complications. gnawing on them like a dog with a beloved bone
#isat#isat spoilers#mypost#isafrin#loopsafrin#sloopis#<- for what i’m about to say because#and then. AND THEN. you add loop in there. and their unique convoluted feelings towards each of them#the pendulum swing between visceral hatred & jealousy & bitterness and overwhelming love & understanding & tenderness.#the guilt of loving a ‘replacement’ and forgetting the original. trapped in wondering what could have been in another life#if they hadn’t given it up.#AND their feelings towards isafrin as a pairing#[leans forward] it’s about the Yearning. and also about how knowing the yearning is mutual doesn’t actually resolve anything#because do you Deserve it. do you deserve to be here and part of this after everything you’ve done and failed to do.#is Having it any less painful than Not having it? or is just a different kind of agony#<- questions all 3 of them get to ponder.#bc isabeau is not immune to the guilt of knowing some version of him failed these people he claims to love over and over and over#until it broke one entirely and was almost too late for the other#BUT ALSO. falling in love with the same person twice. not just because of the similarities but because of the differences#<- true for both isabeau and loop#how can they not? but also how can they bear to?#siffrin and loop in a guilt contest about who Deserves happiness and acceptance more without recognizing that it can be possible for both#(not just in a romantic context but in an Everything context)#isabeau’s dissonance and isolation when faced with how well siffrin and loop Know and Understand one another#both because of their shared origins and bc they’re the only ones who know what the timeloop was Actually like#while everyone else is left piecing together scattered clues from the most tight-lipped people in existence#did you think this was an otp post. [rips off disguise] it was an ot3 post all along!!! mwahahaha!!!#to be clear every time i talk about a ship it will never just mean ‘this relationship But Romantic’#i mean every facet of what makes them compelling. the love and complications are both there in every interpretation#and that’s what i’m chewing on
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Lateview: Absolver
If you've heard the expression, “Biting off more than you can chew”, then you'll understand how I feel about Absolver. Fans of third-person fighter games like “Dark Souls”, “Devil May Cry” and “God of War” know that these types of games require high levels of love and polish to do well. Despite the starved market, there’s a lot of room for mediocrity. Surprisingly, Absolver doesn't pull any punches and goes toe to toe with the best... until it runs out of steam.
Absolver is a third-person fighter game trying to set itself apart from the crowd using two unique mechanics: stances and the combo builder. The “build your own combo” system has been done before, most notably in “Remember Me” and “God Hand” but the way they combine it with the stances really sets it apart. Each move has a speed and damage rating as well as some of the moves having unique properties like breaking guard and interrupting attacks. There are 4 combat stances, visually corresponding to the direction your torso is facing. Changing stances will result in you turning your torso to face to the left or the right of your opponent while others will leave you with your back facing towards the enemy! Each stance can be assigned an escalating number of light attacks and a heavier “alternate attack”. Most attacks transition you from one stance to another; then, since you’re in another stance, you can immediately use that stances attacks. If you build your combos correctly, you can create loops where one attack will lead into one stance before an attack in that stance returns you to the same stance you started in. The end-result is a custom-built train of attacks that you've personally engineered to confuse opponents as you flow from stance to stance. Since you’re changes stances so often, your alternate attack changes over time. Predicting what move your opponent is currently planning on doing is daunting since there is so much they can do. Oh, and did I tell you that you can pull out a sword or gloves and doing so swaps you over to a brand new page of attacks that you need to customise and memorize?
The game has RPG elements to it as well. Gear will drop from mobs as you down them and you'll also find stashes of gear hidden within piles of rocks. Most interestingly though is how you acquire new attacks. You start the game with a reasonable number of attacks but soon you’ll run into people using 'new' attacks against you and if you block that attack, you'll start learning the move. Use your right thumb-stick ability against it and you'll learn it even faster. Story wise, this is a cool concept. Get punched in a particular way a certain number of times and you should be able to know how your opponent punches like that. Unfortunately, in practice, this just results in you actively not killing your opponents. You end up standing around as they are wailing on you while try to block/dodge/parry all their moves; grinding out all the moves before you move along. There is a risk/reward system at play here wherein all the learning you've done during a fight won't be saved until you kill the opponent and exit combat, but there is a lot of moves to learn from random grunts in the world and these don’t really pose a threat once you’ve got a handle on the game. This system gets even worse when you're trying to discover sword specific moves because swords are rare, and by the time you find someone wielding one, they are normally a very strong opponent and you can't afford to grind out these moves because you won’t survive unless you actively damage them.
That's pretty much the entire game. Fight, learn moves, earn gear, equip said moves and gear, repeat. Thankfully that's not as bad as it sounds because hey, it's a fighting game. You came here to fight. So why am I so disappointed in it? Well before I get to the big one, let me just rattle off a few smaller impressions the game left on me: ● Falling off ledges is far too easy. Admittedly this is a designed mechanic; forcing someone up to a ledge and just pushing them off with attacks is a legitimate way to win a fight but it still felt like it was far too easy to just slip off. Even with nobody attacking you as you’re navigating the environment, one foot off the path might mean falling and most of the time falling is death, because when it's not instant, the insane fall damage will ensure you lose the fight that you just dropped into.
● The environment is not easy to find your way around. The “map” you're given is essentially 3 circles, and you don't know where you are unless you sit at a bonfire an energy shard thingy or kill a boss as these are the only 2 markers on the map. Many times, vital paths that you NEED to go down are not highlighted or made evident in any way and are sometimes, out-rightly obscured. As a result of this, I completely missed an entire area of the game for a long period of time simply because I couldn’t find the path AND I thought I had already entered that area of the map… There's a time and a place to do-away with the hand holding evident in modern game design but this is too far the other way.
● Maybe why the environment is so convoluted is to try to hammer in this sense of mystery that the game is so stubbornly trying to instil. The game makes a point of telling you NOTHING about where you are, who you are, what you're doing or why. Thankfully it does tell you what to do (fight people and open a door). It just comes across as entitled. There IS an interesting world here but by the end of the game, nothing is explained at all. Who am I? Why did I teleport when I put on this mask? Why do I need to kill these people? Did I travel through time? Who is this chick with a sword? Who were the people who were here before? The game makes a point in referring to the tesseract-looking particle effect that happens as you kill others, get killed yourself or even unsheathing your sword as “folding” which seems really cool! To sum up my feelings on the aesthetics and lore of the game, I have two words. Obnoxiously Mysterious
Finally, the big one. The game ends. It just ends. No big finish, no special reveal, no closure. Nothing. If you remember before, I mentioned the map being 3 circles? That's it. That's the whole game. I have FOUR HOURS in Absolver, and it's finished. The entire story-mode. That's a third of the I spent in DMC and less than a 10th of the time I spent in Sekiro. Now sure, those are AAA titles with massive budgets behind them, but I cannot help but feel starved of content, especially since the story does not wrap itself up. The game starts with you and a bunch of other initiates standing in an arctic wind before you are chosen, you don a mask and teleport to another world. You then traverse through 12 named areas (3 of which contain nothing) fighting 11 different bosses. There are probably below 50 enemies to fight in the entire game. And then you're done. After fighting the somehow important Risryn, you're teleported back to the place you started with, you graduate from being a “prospect” to become an “Absolver”, you get a neat cape and you get told, “Idk, wait around and grind a bit I guess?” before it teleports you back to the “hub”. To put this in perspective, if the game had 3 times as much content as it currently does, I would still probably call the game short. I have no idea why (besides development problems) the game ended when it felt like Act 2 should have begun.
The game tries to justify this by placing a big emphasis on PVP. There is a system to look up other players and have a tussle and the game is always online so you might find people in the world and decide to start smacking one another but if the game is dead (like it was when I got to it) then all the PVP is non-existent. That's not even mentioning the players who don't WANT to fight other people. As far as I can tell the “latest” addition to the game included the “downfall” mode. This mode (only available after you have graduated to be an absolver) is randomly generated rooms of goons to fight endlessly. The lore explanation for this area only adds questions to the already tall pile of unanswered ones. The game allows you to fight bosses again at a harder difficulty, but this is locked behind PVP progress…meaning that if you weren’t able to find a game like myself, then you just can’t
I hate having to be so negative. Other indie games cater themselves to a casual market and can have all the depth of a puddle and still receive high ratings but because the devs took on such a loved genre, all the depth they have added only makes people want more. I mean really, if my biggest complaint about the game is that I wanted more, there's got to be something good about it. In shooting for the stars, the devs came up short, but the time, skill and effort they put into trying to get there far exceeds a lot of other developers. I can say that the game was bug free and (until it ended) felt close to a AAA title and the sad thing is that it starts to get judged by those harsh standards. For a AAA title, this would be an insult; But for a fighting game? This is a worthwhile experiment; for an indie game? This is one heck of an accomplishment and for your time? This is worth it.
Overall, I'd look to pay $15 to $25 for Absolver, despite its $42 default price tag. It depends on how much you love the third person fighter genre; how much you enjoy PVP (and if you're lucky enough to be in a locale with players online) and how much you want to support the studio. If you can make a trio of yourselves, maybe you can get some mileage out of the co-op enabled Downfall mode, but I wouldn't want to pay much more for that.
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New Horizons Review — On An Island In the Sun
April 3, 2020 4:00 PM EST
By bringing players into their own island, Animal Crossing: New Horizons works the series’ charming, wholesome magic like never before.
Whether Nintendo intended for it to happen or not, Animal Crossing: New Horizons arrived at precisely the best or worst possible time, depending on how you look at things. There’s simply no way to account for the fact that New Horizons would arrive in the midst of a global pandemic that has fundamentally changed the way we live our lives (even if temporarily). But despite the fear, anxiety, and turmoil that this situation has brought, in another sense, New Horizons is exactly the game we need at this moment; a source of comfort, warmth, and a light through an uncertain world.
Even outside of those unusual circumstances, Animal Crossing: New Horizons–which comes eight years after the last mainline installment, Animal Crossing: New Leaf on 3DS–is a huge leap forward for the series and perhaps its best entry yet. The familiar and cozy loop of building your home, interacting with your other animal Villagers, and collecting items and resources is still as strong as it ever has been in Animal Crossing, making it easy to sink dozens (if not hundreds) of hours towards perfecting your island getaway into a home to call your own. But what really adds to the experience, aside from getting to settle in on a cozy island in the middle of the ocean, are a number of quality-of-life improvements and new features that make this Animal Crossing feel more personalized and tailored to the player than ever before.
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The beginning of Animal Crossing: New Horizons has players venturing off on a flight to a deserted island, courtesy of the Nook Inc. Getaway Package. Upon your arrival, players are then introduced to Tom Nook and his assistants, Timmy and Tommy, who get you set up with your initial amenities; a lay of the land, a tent to call your own, a NookPhone, and two other Villagers to settle the island with. After Tom gets you set up with these items (and a massive debt of Bells to pay) and an introduction to some of the game’s core mechanics, from there players are set off to do pretty much anything they please. Whether you want to start working towards paying off your first loan, upgrading your tent to a house, collecting bugs, fish, and fossils, or develop your pyramid scheme for mass Bell production (tarantula farm or otherwise), the decisions are left for you to make at that point.
From the start of Animal Crossing: New Horizons things are pretty sparse, as you start out with just these items and have to make your own path to move forward. Given the series’ relaxed pacing, there’s no real rush to get where you want to be in terms of developing your island, but the beginning sections of New Horizons might be a change of pace for longtime series’ fans that are used to getting their town bustling quickly. Going from a bustling town full of Villagers to meet and places to explore contrasts sharply with the relatively barren nature of how New Horizons begins. The result is that the first few days (or week or two) of playing New Horizons may feel a little slow, as you won’t be able to get to some of the more interesting locations and mechanics until much later. If you want to be able to shop at the Able Sisters’ store, turn in items to Blathers at the museum, or begin to terraform your island, you’re going to need to put in some work to begin to open up those elements of the game.
“A number of quality-of-life improvements and new features make this Animal Crossing feel more personalized and tailored to the player than ever before.”
While Animal Crossing: New Horizons takes a bit of time to get going, the onboarding of new players and bringing them into the game’s gentle rhythm is perhaps one of the best parts of New Horizons as a whole. In a way, starting out with so little adds a lot to giving players in New Horizons a better sense of ownership in making their island their own. This is especially when it comes to some of the most significant new additions to the game through crafting and a ton of customization options. However, the new Nook Miles system really helps to guide players towards learning the ropes of Animal Crossing, and is by far one of my favorite new additions to the series.
Nook Miles are essentially reward points that the player can earn and spend on unique items or upgrades by completing different tasks around their island, and are separate from the Bells that you’ll collect by selling items you gather. The majority of the tasks that you can complete for Nook Miles are relatively straightforward. In your first couple days or weeks with the game, you’ll likely earn a bunch of them without even knowing it, whether it’s simply collecting items, catching fish, or other tasks you would naturally do while playing. However, the Nook Miles system adds both an additional layer of reward for players that incentivizes coming back to the game each day, giving structure and objectives for those that may not necessarily be accustomed to how Animal Crossing plays. In this way, the Nook Miles in New Horizons are a great way of giving players itemized tasks and rewards to give some direction if you’re lost, but without getting in the way of the sense of discovery and exploration that the series encourages.
“The new Nook Miles system really helps to guide players towards learning the ropes of Animal Crossing.”
Alongside the Nook Miles system, crafting especially brings some of the most important changes to how Animal Crossing traditionally plays, and for the most part it’s all for the better. While I’m someone that can get a bit overwhelmed by crafting systems in a lot of other games, the way that crafting is implemented in New Horizons makes perfect sense considering that so much time for players is spent on collecting items and resources. Thankfully, crafting in New Horizons doesn’t get too complex or convoluted, and once you get the basics of what you can make and how it can help you, crafting opens up a world of possibilities for players and their island community.
With your NookPhone, all you have to do is access the dedicated crafting app to open up the recipes that are initially available to you. The tools and resources that you can craft grow over time once you craft basic items like axes, fishing rods, or bug-catching nets, which then gradually lets you craft more refined and durable versions of those items. Once you learn the ropes of crafting and how to use items effectively (as they can break over time), crafting opens up much more of what you can build and do inside the world of Animal Crossing, such as making furniture and new items. Granted, in the early stages of the game you’ll have to get used to constantly crafting items that you’ll use a lot like nets and fishing rods when they break, but overall, crafting is a welcome addition that feels natural in the scope of New Horizons.

“Once you get the basics of what you can make and how it can help you, crafting opens up a world of possibilities for players and their island community.”
In addition to crafting, what New Horizons really puts at the forefront compared to previous Animal Crossing games are a wealth of customization and styling options. Aspiring fashion designers, artists, and home decorators will have a blast playing with the amount of tools in New Horizons that you can use to fully customize everything from clothing, to furniture, even down to the case of your NookPhone. Home decorating especially has had a number of quality-of-life improvements to make the process easier than before by taking some cues from Animal Crossing: Happy Home Designer. You can now simply rearrange furniture and items through an app on the NookPhone even down to changing the camera angle of your room, giving a greater amount of flexibility and control to really make your home shine, especially when you want to show off what you’ve spent so much time creating to your friends.
In a way, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the type of game that’s difficult to review from only playing for a few weeks since its release. While so far I’ve experienced a good amount of what New Horizons has to offer from finally setting up shops and getting new Villagers, to finally getting a chance to start using the terraforming features of the Island Designer, there’s still plenty more to experience throughout the coming weeks (and likely, months) in the game, including its upcoming seasonal events. Animal Crossing has always been the type of game that is best enjoyed over a longer stretch of time, whether it’s checking in constantly and seeing what your Villagers are up to, collecting new bugs, fruit, and items, and trying to game the system when it comes to turnip prices. While there is still plenty more for me to do in the weeks ahead–and since you can only do so much in a given day in an Animal Crossing game–New Horizons makes it easy, appealing, and effortless to hop back in each day and find something new to do and to expand your island even more.

“New Horizons makes it easy, appealing, and effortless to hop back in each day and find something new to do and to expand your island even more.”
With its numerous quality-of-life improvements and additions, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is a big step forward for the series and found its perfect destination on the Switch. Especially given the current circumstances that we’re all facing right now in the world, it may have been unintentional that such a peaceful, idyllic game would arrive in the midst of so much fear, uncertainty, and stress. But thankfully, it’s nice to have a small, peaceful little place to escape to right now, and I can’t wait to keep coming back to it when I need it most.
April 3, 2020 4:00 PM EST
from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/04/new-horizons-review-on-an-island-in-the-sun/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=new-horizons-review-on-an-island-in-the-sun
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In the past, the solution to improving themed areas which were lacking in appeal came down to two options: re-skinning, or demolition. Tomorrowland 1994 re-skinned the offending area, isolating the problem in its aesthetics. New Fantasyland and Disney California Adventure demolished, preferring to start over in a more traditionally appealing aesthetic mode. At Disney Springs, the approach was, uniquely, to lean in to the mess of conflicting styles and agendas. Areas which already were aesthetically appealing, such as the Marketplace, only received minor facelifts and foot traffic improvements. Pleasure Island's industrial aesthetic could stay. The largest offenders at West Side could be covered up with industrial details or slated for later demolition. Tying the whole thing together is a new "Downtown" area and central water feature. In other words, by refusing to paper over or demolish the inconsistencies of Downtown Disney, Disney Springs embraces them as the whole darn point. By my count there's at least seven aesthetics at work in the area, and they have been used to signify, rather than try to remove, the pains and competing ideologies of the growth of its imagined community: Pre-Modern Cracker Houses and Ranches, Industrial Revolution tin sheds, Industrial Revolution "old brick", Early 20th century Spanish Revival, Mid-Century Craftsman/Chalet, Post-Mid Century Modern, and Post-Modern "Whimsical". And here's where the story begins to become almost perverseley convoluted. Lake Buena Vista represents an abandoned attempt at a "Planned Community". The downtown of this planned Community - the Village - was actually constructed. As a result, even before the notion was legitimized by this new expansion, Downtown Disney already represented the problems of real cities - namely, having a well planned downtown with a bunch of suburbs stuck onto it more or less randomly, causing no end of traffic problems and infrastructure strain. This new expansion seeks to resolve the problem by building a new, sleeker, more attractive downtown away from the original urban center. Wait, hold on -- where have we heard this before? Oh, that's right, we've heard it in real life - it's the story of every mall that has ever been built. "Inside" the story of Disney Springs, we are supposed to understand that the new Town Center represents the "original" downtown area and the original Village is now a later suburb, yet the mind spins. We've now got a mall built next to a downtown that is pretending to be an yet older downtown - inside a huge mall. Where Downtown Disney more or less tried to keep pace with whatever the current conception of "cool" is, Disney Springs instead aligns itself with the mode of representation traditionally most successful to Disney - the past. Instead of a murky Florida lake, the area is now centered around a "natural spring" - really a pretty, and pretty elaborate, swimming pool. Surrounding the Spring is brand new - but supposed to be old - Florida vernacular architecture. 35 years ago, this area was a swamp outside the Village. 3 years ago, it was a pile of dirt, yet here now stands "The Oldest Building In Disney Springs." Yet it's just this sort of absurd, working backwards, built up layers of signification that gives Disneyland and Magic Kingdom their great sense of history. And while perhaps there's nothing deeper to the historical approach of Disney Springs than the generational shift towards all things "retro chic", the new style at least will have the benefit of aging gracefully instead of constantly trying to chase whatever is "cool" in this decade. In other words, Disney Springs is the only part of Disney property which has grown to become something of a real life example of the kind of urban space it was designed to evoke. Real life cities do have huge traffic problems, real life cities are putting up parking decks to service their downtowns, real life cities are trying to attract popular and prestigious companies to fill their new malls. At what point does Disney Springs cross a line into fiction? At what point do real life cities more and more resemble Disneyland? If people believe that the fiberglass castle is real, does it become real? In this sense, Disney Springs opens up a feedback loop akin to the ironic mutation of history seen on Buena Vista Street at California Adventure. There, shops and facilities named after old school Disney characters are said to have inspired a young Walt Disney to create... those same old school Disney characters. It's become an absurd IP game of musical chairs where history and fantasy have melded seamlessly into a mobius strip of influence. I can see an average visitor being genuinely bewildered by this. Disney has replaced real history with slightly different artificial history and left audiences to sort it out. They've messed with similar elisions before - in the original development cycle of the Haunted Mansion, the ride was said to be a real haunted house transplanted to Disneyland. But as far as I know Disney has never quite created an idea that requires this many layers of fiction piled up on each other, and if the result is aesthetically underwhelming, it's conceptually dizzying. It's like taking everything one step further and claiming the Walt Disney actually grew up on Main Street USA and built the rest of Disneyland around it. Both versions of the area are fiction, but there's a crucial distinction left unsaid. Then again it's only worth fussing over conceptual distinctions like that if people are actually legitimately fooled, and I have little concern about that happening. Still, the resulting product, with its intermeshed history, fantasy, fact and fiction is truly evocative and conceptually bizarre. For about ten years, seemingly everything Disney built was rooted in some kind of meta history of abandonment and reuse - to Pleasure Island we may add Blizzard Beach, Typhoon Lagoon, parts of Animal Kingdom, and much of California Adventure. Inside the parks, at least, much of this didn't jibe well with Disney's audience and so has been stripped out, especially at California Adventure. Disney Springs is one of the few places left where this sort of thematic games playing is still in evidence, and it has fakes upon fakes upon fakes all reflecting back at one another, like a hall of mirrors. What I do know is that there are things in Disney Springs, Lake Buena Vista, and Downtown Disney that are beautifully present simply for their own sake - in the end, the only reason that matters. There's the way the afternoon Florida light filters in through the artfully arranged clutter in Jock Lindsay's Hangar Bar, who for some reason knew Indiana Jones, but whose bar feels authentically old in that moment in a way you usually have to go to Key West to enjoy. There's the Empress Lilly, impressive for her own sake, who is shortly getting her smokestacks and paddle wheel back, a real bit of history being returned to us. There's even an honesty in D-Luxe Burger, that brand spanking new old ranch house, in that it quietly and casually reminds Disney guests that once upon a time a long time before a certain theme park was built there wasn't much to Central Florida besides cattle pasture. It may be fake, and not look very much like the real thing, but there's a honesty in the spring inside Disney Springs too. It's the first time in the 50 year history of Walt Disney World that Disney has seemed to say to its visitors: "Hey, you know, there's stuff in Florida, too, and it's good enough for us to build a fake version here for you.". It's the first time that Disney's home state has been warranting of the sort of representation extended to, say, Canada. And there's the catch, and why the theme seems to maddeningly fold in on itself, bigger on the inside than the outside. It isn't themed to some other place, but to right here. Disney's mess of a planned community in Florida has embraced its identity as... a mess of a planned community, in Florida. It's Floridian, and maybe part of being Floridian means being an an elaborate fake, like Charlie Kane's Xanadu deep in the tropical jungle of the imagination. Imagined, fantasized, pre-planned, corporate, artificial, deeply weird - that's Florida, and it's true inside Disney's bubble... and true outside it, too.
Passport To Dreams Old And New
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