#wouldn't be ys without those

[veebs-hates-video-games]

I think once I do Ys 8 I'm basically caught up, but first Dragon Quest 11 for a bit.

I played the demo on my computer a couple years ago and was really impressed. I spent at least a dozen hours on just the demo and still didn't run out of stuff to do, and I was enjoying the retro vibe in a more modern and polished package.

Then I decided to wait for it to go on sale at an arbitrary price I decided I was ok with. And then I kept waiting for multiple years because it just keeps never hitting that point on Steam.

I ended up actually paying slightly more than that for a used physical copy for the Switch instead, so good job Squenix, you got $0 out of that instead of like 10% less than what you would've if you'd dropped the price slightly more over time.

The problem with that is that now I have to redo all the stuff I did in the demo, and the beginning of the game is slooow. Painfully so. And on top of that the game is just painfully slow in general. It would be instantly improved by speeding up literally everything by 20%, even without redoing anything to fit the slightly faster pace.

The default camera speed takes a full five seconds to do a 360, and even at the max speed it takes at least like three. This is a recurring problem for me in a lot of Japanese games, and less often in games from other places (who tend to screw up their cameras in different ways). If the maximum speed isn't too fast for me to comfortably use your range of speed settings is too narrow.

Unsurprisingly to go along with that the walking speed is also really slow compared to what I'm used to. It has separate speeds for indoors and outdoors, and really the outdoor speed is how fast the indoor one should be while the indoor one should be reserved for stealth/sneaking sections (and those should stay in games I don't play because they're just not fun for me). It's especially painful coming directly from Ys 8, where the slowest walking speed is faster than the fastest one in DQ11, plus it has a run button to go faster, plus you can equip an accessory to turn it into a run even faster button.

There's a setting to change the combat speed, but really that wouldn't address most of my problems, and also it makes the animations look weird, which is a shame because there's a lot of excellent animation work in the game, like every different enemy has their own set of animations, and they're all extremely expressive and charming.

Unfortunately it tends to make you wait through the entire animation every time, including the full transition to their idle animation, when normally most games would move the camera or start accepting input again somewhere in the middle of that process. Also if there's a musical jingle that plays for any reason (e.g. winning a battle, leveling up, a new party member joining, saving your game) you have to let the whole thing finish playing before you can do anything (and anything includes mashing buttons to skip through stuff you've already seen dozens of times), which is also an extremely long delay compared to what most games do.

I swear if the camera and run speed were more reasonable and all the little things that make you wait around extra time doing nothing were tweaked a bit the game would instantly go from 100 hours to 60-70 and feel much better too.

Also while we're at it can we get some menus that suck less, especially the terrible inventory? I know a lot of the weird quirks in the game are things that were inherited from the older ones, but sometimes you just need to change them to make them actually functional, and you can reference the old ones with visual design or something.

It's a great game in a lot of ways, but it sure does manage to suck in others at the same time. I wish I'd just paid the extra five bucks and finished the game in 2021, because redoing all this stuff at the beginning is painful.

[comicaurora]

Had a thought about how to prevent power creep, but it's a trick I've only seen used in video game series and I don't know how well it would apply to a TV show or book series.

In the Ys Chronicles (which apparently has nine games? Their numbering system is confusing), the protagonist goes through a new set of weapons every game from a rusty sword to some form of Ultimate Weapon - a different one every game - and then he gives up/loses that fancy weapon when the threat is abolished, allowing him to start the next game with beginner-level weapons. The most recent game actually called out that this kept happening, so whatever you think is happening to his best weapons, there's canon support (if I remember right, most of the games had him just leaving the weapons in the care of the people he'd just saved; two of the games had the Ultimate Weapons linked in some way to the threat he had to defeat, so upon defeating it the weapon vanished). This works for the protagonist because of how his character is designed - he's not a warrior, he's an adventurer, and he doesn't really have need for those extraordinary weapons except under similarly extraordinary circumstances (at which point the circumstances are usually handing him a weapon anyway).

Similarly, Legend of Zelda has the Master Sword only being used at the end of the games that have it, and then Link puts it back after the battle is over. Theory there is that the Master Sword is too powerful a weapon to just use willy-nilly against common enemies, so it's exclusively a Final Boss weapon (even the part where Link has to keep earning the right to use it over and over makes sense, because technically it's a different Link every game).

First thought for why more writers don't do this is that it also requires them to figure out a logical reason why the protagonist would keep giving up his best weapons - and if they go the Ys Chronicles route of a different Best Weapon every arc, why the protagonist can't just go get the old Best Weapon from the previous arc without retroactively nerfing it. But wouldn't the extra work be worth it to avoid the problems of power creep?

The funny thing is, a variant of this trope is actually quite common for exactly that reason. Purposefully putting the weapon on the shelf or locking it away is the rarer version because it can be harder to justify, but breaking the weapon or having it get weakened or cursed somehow is a very popular solution. Some stories will have powerful weapons with serious drawbacks that mean our heroes only pull them out as a last resort - like how they handled the Helm of Fate on Young Justice, a powerful artifact that had a nasty habit of permanently possessing the wearer. Other stories will wait til the very end to introduce the weapon that does significant damage - the zelda games typically use the Bow of Light this way.

Breaking or nerfing weapons is a lot more popular, mostly because an iconic weapon getting wrecked is (a) fixable and (b) a serious "oh fuck" moment. It immediately kicks off a "fixing the weapon" sidequest, and while it's being fixed your heroes are conveniently depowered and vulnerable. You can even stretch this out after the weapon is repaired, if there's some sort of learning curve to it or the weapon's been weakened or reset to factory defaults by the reforging process. They did this a couple times in Inuyasha - the sword gets busted and reforged a couple seasons in, and for a few episodes after it gets fixed it's ridiculously heavy for plot-based but still vaguely contrived reasons. It doesn't break again, but it does start accumulating a big pile of powerups, some of which make it very difficult to use until our hero gets the hang of them, like an energy-absorbing move that makes the sword get really hot.

The problem with giving your heroes really massive threats to face is you need a way for the heroes to actually deal with that threat, and giving them a weapon or upgrade that lets them handle it is a popular solution because it's much less complicated than figuring out a plan to solve it with the meager tools they already have, and it's less contrived than just letting them win even if they're logically way too underpowered. The problem is after the big scary final battle they needed the upgrade or weapon for, if you want to continue the story, you need to account for the season-ending upgrade. The solutions are simple:

Take the toy away. It can't be a problem if the heroes don't have it. This is the category that covers your example - the heroes sealing the weapon away or returning it to the care of the gods or whatever basically means they don't have it. This category also includes the option of breaking the weapon, having the villain do some villain magic on it to seal it away or make it unusable, or otherwise put it on a high shelf where the heroes can't get to it. This works and avoids power creep, but can feel like cheating. Especially if the heroes just hide the weapon somewhere, why can't they just go get it back when things get hairy again? And if it's confiscated by Higher Powers, that can feel barely a step removed from the hand of the author saying "you can't have this because it'd make things way too easy for you."

Give the toy a drawback. The heroes get to keep the toy, but using it has a new challenge. The simplest way to handle this is to make it exhaust the wielder - if it's powered by life force or just vague "energy" you can have your protagonist dramatically tip over whenever you want to make it clear they can't rely on this one trick too much. Using the fancy season-ending weapon often comes with a cost. Superpowered evil sides and sentient malevolent weaponry fall into this category for self-evident reasons. If it's a special technique the hero figured out rather than a new physical weapon, maybe the hero doesn't know how to do it perfectly yet and just got it right the first time out of dumb luck or heroic willpower - overusing it now hits them with all the nasty side effects and they need to build up to mastering it through a good old-fashioned training arc. Or maybe using the new toy exacerbates some kind of weakness. There are a million ways to do this, and it has some serious advantages over the first option - for one thing, it doesn't feel like cheating. The heroes don't lose the toy, they just need to decide if it's worth the cost - meaning the heroes retain their agency. You can get a lot of mileage out of making a character desperate enough to pull out the nuclear option, and if it doesn't immediately solve the problem you can get more drama out of the character facing the consequences of overusing the toy while still dealing with the unsolved crisis. Very inconvenient when your ultimate hero keels over mid-fight from trying and failing to oneshot the villain of the week.

Make the new threat something the toy can't solve. This is difficult and varies from situation to situation. Some of these season-enders basically just have the special ability "hit it really hard," and in combat-oriented media it can be very difficult to come up with a bad guy that this doesn't work on. Elemental immunities can only get you so far, and the last thing you want is internal inconsistencies - your villain shouldn't be vulnerable to only this specific flavor of blunt force trauma, it'll make it impossible for the audience to gauge the actual threat level of the fight. But there are ways to make this work! For a very basic example, say your heroes are fighting some kind of evil demon in the first arc, and the season-ending weapon is a big shiny holy sword they smite it with. Then suppose in the second arc the threat is an evil angel. That holy sword won't do a whole lot! While this solution is workable, this is where power creep comes from. Obviously the heroes are going to need a way to beat this new threat, and if they're building up an arsenal of problem-solving tools, after a while to keep making new credible threats the writer is going to need to either get very contrived or ridiculously overpowered with them.

Making narrative threats a convincing challenge for your heroes is a complicated process, but in my experience it's good to give the heroes agency in whatever influences their power level, whether that's seeking out training, weighing the pros and cons of dangerous upgrades or actively choosing to seal a powerful weapon away for everyone's good.

[tanjaded]

yo! if it's posible, could you give us a gist of the life changing revelation knk gave you? I'm very curious! I've had those movies on my watchlist for years but I always forget to see them. but if it's something personal there's no problem! in my case, youjo senki left me with an economic existencial crisis, which drove me to truly learn about investing and finances (and they said anime wouldn't help me huh)

So, I can't go into incredible detail without spoiling, and it's so so difficult to properly put my feelings for KnK into words becuase it's just so... incredible. But I'll try to give a gist.

One of KnK's strongest recurring themes revolves around the question of, what exactly does it means to be human? The best example (and partial answer) comes during movie 4, Paradox Spiral, and the story of Tomoe Enjou.

KnK's look into humanity and human nature as a whole are perhaps my favorite part. It has issues (Azaka is a great character, except when she's talking about her brother), but none of them are related to the overall narrative and themes. It's also worth noting that some people consider the occasional complexity of the dialogue a negative. I'm not of this opinion, I think it works great and fits the style of KnK itself, but this might be different depending on the audience.

Overall, KnK handles darker topics and themes very well. It doesn't sugarcoat any of the horror going on, and it doesn't demean or belittle the characters that experience or are a direct product of these terrible circumstances. It's a brutally honest showcase of the best and worst aspects of humanity.

It's a deeply human work. Supernatural elements abound, sure, but these elements play atop an incredibly poignant and thought-provoking dive into the human psyche.

Ryougi Shiki, the main protagonist, is the perfect example here. Again, I cant say more. But keep in mind that KnK has Shiki, and SHIKI. Some of KnK's greatest narrative moments come from this point.

Honestly, it's incredible just how well Nasu managed to hit the nail on the head considering this is one of his earliest works. Phenomenal worldbuilding, interesting and deep characterization, a continually and consistently thought-provoking and nuanced story, and bunch more.

End note: KnK is my second favorite media series without question and is the closest any series has every come to tying for number one with my still favorite, Youjo Senki. I plan to read the LN's at some point and am currently writing a fic for it, so if there's ever any questions or discussions anyone wants to have regarding KnK, I am absolutely open to talk about it, just like I am with YS