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really happened to me yesterday

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wrote a fanfic for the first time in a few months. This one's me working out my brainworms regarding two fire emblem characters that basically nobody gives a fuck about except me

plus they pork!

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And it's got a really nuanced take on the nature of "finding one's calling" that I have basically never seen anywhere else: that if you try to force someone to find their calling, it'll always come out half-hearted because they're not doing it for their own fulfillment, they're doing it to fulfil your request. That's such a strong message for the pre-teens and teens who are the game's target audience, since they're told almost constantly that they need to find a calling and make a plan for the rest of their lives (and if I'd actually gotten that message when I played for the first time, I might have made some different life choices lol).

Plus, its broader theme of "your parents don't automatically know what's best for you just because they're older, and your own wants and needs are real no matter what they say" (Laura being stifled by Erik, Olivia's years-long game with Ahab and Elise, Daemon being forced into a militaristic role at Demona's pressure, Divinus's desire to just let Reveria die despite both his daughters wanting to save it) is definitely something that a lot of people in the game's target audience (and older!) need to hear.

The problem, of course, is that if a person is playing with the intent of ignoring the story because they've already decided it sucks (cough cough griffin mcelroy for polygon in 2014 cough cough) then they of course won't see any of this, they'll just see the word "wish" and their brain will shut down until the cutscene ends.

My fear is that the more generic story of FLi will psych people into thinking that the first game's story was always like that, and they'll never bother to play it again (or for the first time, because I know there are a lot of newcomers to the series starting with FLi). Hopefully that's not the case...

My favourite thing in Fantasy Life 3DS was that there was no villain. There was no evil. Nobody was actually The Bad Guy.

Everyone had actually been working together for the same goal and trying to help each other in their own ways the whole time and the only time someone seemed evil was due to misunderstanding.

The closest to evil we got were two guys who just had no direction in life but were ultimately not monsters and just needed some help finding a calling and a purpose.

Everyone was useful and important in their own ways, and everyone turned out to be a hero in their own little story, all part of the larger narrative as a whole.

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THIS!!!!!!! THIS EXACTLY!!!!!! Such a good take and hands down one of my favorite things about the first game. A big grandiose save-the-world story with absolutely no villains at all!! It's such a hard backflip to land and the game makes it look easy

My favourite thing in Fantasy Life 3DS was that there was no villain. There was no evil. Nobody was actually The Bad Guy.

Everyone had actually been working together for the same goal and trying to help each other in their own ways the whole time and the only time someone seemed evil was due to misunderstanding.

The closest to evil we got were two guys who just had no direction in life but were ultimately not monsters and just needed some help finding a calling and a purpose.

Everyone was useful and important in their own ways, and everyone turned out to be a hero in their own little story, all part of the larger narrative as a whole.

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seriously though the original had like... themes. and it wanted you to care about its characters. and it doesn't leave a bunch of random loose threads hanging even after attempting to hastily explain them at the last minute.

i replayed the first game in preparation to play FLi and was shocked by how well it held up and how internally consistent it was. like, given its own internal logic, it basically doesn't have ANY plot holes at all? which is incredibly rare for any video game story with that many characters and concepts tied together.

in contrast, FLi feels kinda... hurried? and the removal of Bliss and the post-chapter wrap-ups makes all the main story chapters feel incredibly short? and none of the main story characters can become followers or even appear for you to go talk to until after credits roll? it's really weird.

it's totally not expecting too much from this series to want the story to keep you invested. the first game did a great job at that, and it gave you enough downtime between main story events to let you actually do the slow-life stuff. for some reason, the end of every FLi story quest hurriedly pushes you to do the next objective immediately, so like... it has this weird sense of urgency that kinda kills the slow-life vibe?

idk. I like the expansion on the gameplay that FLi did, but I feel like the map design and story is just a huge downgrade.

i like the story i think its fine enough, its not as good as the original but it's fine

i think i said this in a previous post but nothing really feels like it lasts long, you never spend enough time with anything

perhaps funny since its a "slow life sim" but while you're encouraged to take your time (or not) and put things off to craft or explore or whatever.....there's nothing slow about the story

i feel like i have more questions than anything

about anne, the final boss, we get one flashback about trip....

theres nothing to the lives outside of the tutorial and the select few who are chosen to be in the main story, and even then none of them get as much attention than chemmel (and i guess the new lives have a bit more to them since theyre ooo new!)

speaking of i STILL have questions about him and mira!

like come on TELL ME things!

maybe i need to play through the original longer since i've only finished it once, i know people have said the original story isnt important to the game either

but i still feel like we get to know the characters better than we do in this game

even with the final boss's flashbacks in the shrines i feel like it ends so suddenly and then you get the stuff at the castle....

sigh....maybe im expecting too much from this series

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fl:i’s a great game but the world feels very small and apart from rem (who i love), trip, growler, and green selch, pretty much every character is super underutilized lol. including the life masters. they had that crew get together at the end and I was like man I dontknow you people. kind of the downside of having your designed characters be like random gacha guy transplants

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Ginormosia: The Most Baffling Feature I've Seen In A Long Time

I recently played through the entire main story of the newly released Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time. I have some thoughts, many of them good, many of them bad, but few of my thoughts are as passionate as my feeling that the game's open world exploration mechanic, Ginormosia, is the single most baffling feature I've seen in any video game in years. I'll put a cut below for anyone who doesn't want negativity or spoilers about the game, but if anyone wants to see my insane ramblings, feel free to click through and see the mental breakdown I had attempting to wrap my head around why this feature exists.

A Starting Point

For the sake of full disclosure when talking about this, I want to state that my relationship with open-world designed gamed is rocky at best. While I do like Horizon: Zero Dawn, I don't like Horizon: Forbidden West. I like Middle Earth: Shadow of War, I dislike Breath of the Wild. I enjoyed Infinity Nikki while I played it, I was profoundly mixed on Genshin Impact. I wouldn't call myself a fan of open world games, but I don't hate them either, I'm trying to approach this from a balanced perspective.

I'm going to be breaking Ginormosia down mechanic by mechanic to fully detail why I find the mechanic not only to be bad or unfun, but truly bizarre in a way that makes me ask one massive question: Why the hell is this even here?

Exploration

The most fundamental aspect of any open-world experience is that of exploration. At the end of the day, everything else in these games folds in to exploration, the feeling of discovering something new, getting distracted while on the way to an objective, even the simple act of crossing the terrain is part of the experience. The appeal of Breath of the Wild is to run across Hyrule and serendipitously stumble across shrines, koroks and bokoblin camps while swimming, climbing walls, gliding, riding horses and shield-surfing. In all of these ways, Ginormosia flounders.

Let's start off with the basic fact that you literally cannot look up. Fantasy Life i is a slow-life game, or at least wants to be, and as such sticks to a top-down point of view camera angle not unlike Animal Crossing. For the main game, this works perfectly, but in an open-world environment, not being able to look toward the horizon is a massive hindrance.

Trying to spot the game's Googly Eyes, the staple "giant tower that gives you a map of the area you're in" is virtually impossible until you're right next to the building in most circumstances because you can't look toward the horizon to spot them standing above their surroundings. There are some regions mountainous enough that you can climb up and look downward to survey the landscape, but that's not a universally available solution by any means. This problem is even worse when it comes to the 'Shrines' which are intentionally put in places off the beaten path. They're large buildings that literally glow but you literally cannot see them in the distance you just have to wander until you stumble into them.

Luckily, finding resources and enemies isn't as much of a hassle, as once you've managed to bumble your way into a region's googly eye, they're all marked on the map and you can set waypoints at your leisure. There's also five tiny NPC villages out in the world, but they also get marked on your map so they're fine, too.

Of course, the fact that everything is immediately marked on your map means there's nothing to discover, either. Once you've found the region's googly eye, the only other thing there is the 1 or 2 shrines per region, and if you're really lucky you're in one of the three regions in the game that possesses a hidden "dungeon" somewhere, only one of which is particularly interesting.

So there's not much to explore, but is it at least fun to traverse the environment? No, not really. Your movement abilities consist of: Walking, running, or riding a mount, the latter of which is the fastest and comes with no downsides so you're always riding a mount. There's also climbing, but it consists solely of walking up to a wall and just scaling it with zero effort, regardless of how tall the wall is. There's no gliding, all of the mounts are identical, there's no alternate methods of traversal, no boats, no trains, no nothing. Again, this works perfectly fine for a slow-life game where you're spending most of your time running around streets and visiting NPCs, but if you're trying to enjoy an open-world experience, this shit gets tedious FAST.

The World

So the exploration process is a dud, but is the world itself at least interesting? Well, to be absolutely fair to the game, it definitely has its strong points. For one, the entirety of the continent of Ginormosia is shaped as a big ol' dragon, and that's cool. It's not groundbreaking, mind, fantasy continent shaped like a dragon has been done before numerous times, but it's still fun, I'll give it that.

Additionally, the way the player is introduced to the continent is quite interesting. The player starts in Western Dryridge Desert, the tip of the dragon's tail, a locale unlike any other seen in the game with unique ore, trees, and even some unique monsters. Progress toward Eastern Dryridge Desert, the upper part of the tail, is mandatory, but is prevented by a region-specific mechanic of hot red sand that the player needs a mount to cross, so you set about getting a camel to cross the desert with in a brief sidequest.

And then... there's... well... virtually nothing. The rest of the continent is mostly composed of rolling grasslands and forests, one region comprising the dragon's lower jaw is a series of islands, and there's a couple rocky valleys that make up the rest of its head. The only other places of particular interest are the story-relevant castle in the center and the volcanic landscape, the Moltana Wastes.

After you leave Dryridge Desert and head north, none of the new areas possess unique resources of any kind, only the Moltana Wastes contains any enemies not found elsewhere in the main game. Hell, a massive portion of the world map is dedicated to giving you oak trees and copper ore, the basic starting resources you'll outgrow almost the moment you leave the tutorial area of the main game.

And that unique hot red sand you needed a mount for? There's two patches of it in the entire game and none of the other regions have any regional mechanics. That is, unless you count the fact that only one of the regions actually possesses vegetables you can harvest with the Farmer Life because of a context-less farm that exists in the middle of nowhere with some crop patches up for the taking.

The only landmark I found particularly interesting exploring the entire map was a skull-shaped lake I found up on a mountain and thought was cool. Then I found the same lake copy-pasted twice more elsewhere on the map and it lost its magic immediately.

Collectibles

I think I've made my case that Ginormosia is built on some pretty shaky foundations by now. It's an open world experienced glued onto slow-life gameplay with a largely empty and mostly uninteresting world, but I still haven't touched on the main thing that would drive a player to explore these locales and engage with these mechanics: the collectibles. All in all, there are four types of collectibles located within Ginormosia: Legendary tool recipes, Strangelings, Cashnuts, and Leafes.

Legendary tool recipes are pretty inconsequential, so much so that I nearly forgot to include them in this part. They're just these podiums you walk up to and collect the recipe for a piece of end-game level gear. They're not super relevant as you're almost certainly not getting the materials for them until pretty deep into the post-game and are pretty much entirely extraneous given that you're pretty much all-powerful as is by the time you can make these things.

Strangelings are by far the most important of collectibles in Ginormosia as they actually have bearing upon the main game. For those unfamiliar with the game, Strangelings are magical objects that are actually remarkable people who had their life-energy stolen from them, they act as NPCs and party members back in the base game once revived. There's a Strangeling in each of the Shrines I mentioned earlier and in each of the five NPC villages, plus an additional pool of Strangelings hidden in places around the content, some hidden well, some out in the open. I don't have much to say about them because they're kinda just okay. They serve their purpose as rewards for doing Shrines and visiting towns, and finding the hidden ones can be decently fun.

Cashnuts are the primary currency of Ginormosia. Unlike the base game which uses golden coins given the charming name of "Dosh," Ginormosia NPCs demand to be paid in acorn-shaped currency instead. Now, disregarding the fact that "Paycorns" was right there, Cashnuts are mostly inoffensive but also feel almost entirely irrelevant. Cashnuts are rather scarce, mostly obtained through Area Challenges (I'll get to it) and through selling vegetables at NPC villages, neither of which give more than 5-10 at a time. That said, the only thing really worth buying at any NPC shop are the crafting recipes as everything else is available for the very plentiful Dosh currency back in the main game. The price for these tends to be in the 50s and 60s but without much else to spend them on and the total number of recipes available this way being rather small, it really doesn't take too much grinding to get what you need.

Lastly are Leafes, the collectibles which are somehow the most difficult to find and the least rewarding by far. There's a total of 75 Leafes hidden around the map, 5-6 per region. They're little plant guys and the act kinda like this game's equivalent of BOTW's koroks. Unlike koroks, though, you're not solving a tiny puzzle to find these guys, no, they're all buried in the ground with only the little sprout on the top of their heads poking of the ground and you've gotta pluck them out to rescue them. Now, in rocky areas like the Moltana Wastes or the sandy terrain of the Dryridge Desert, these guys stick out fine enough, but the majority of Ginormosia is positively lush. Verdant plains, abundant forests, sunny valleys, tropical isles, brimming with foliage and flowers. These features make the game pretty, but they also make finding the specific tiny sprouts that stem from a Leafe's head absolutely nightmarish. And your reward for finding these little guys? A scant few of them give unique crafting recipes, the majority of them give low-tier consumables or easily crafted furniture, and a large number have the audacity to give you a singular Cashnut for their release from their Earthy tombs. You do get an additional reward for freeing every Leafe in a given region, but they're only moderately better than the individual rewards. I freed all 6 Leafes in Petalwing Forest and my rewards was ten Cashnuts so I'm basically a billionaire at this point.

Shrines

With the broad stuff out of the way, I want to take a few more paragraphs to talk about the truly Ginormosia-exclusive mechanics before wrapping up this rant. I want to start with Shrines because they are in my opinion the strongest of these mechanics. Now if the name "Shrines" made you wonder if these are essentially just the Sheikah Shrines in Breath of the Wild you'd be dead on the money, that's exactly what they are, they don't even pretend to be anything different.

Shrines can be split into three categories: Puzzle shrines, gathering shrines, and combat shrines. Gathering Shrines are the rarest of the lot, as a single one exists for each of the Woodcutter, Angler, and Miner lives, and they consist entirely of a time-limited trial to fell/fish/mine a set of resources in a short time limit. Combat shrines are the same except you're dealing with waves of enemies on a time limit. Puzzle Shrines are by far the most common, and consist either of puzzles where you have to cross a path of coloured tiles without ever stepping on the same tile twice, or a three-round game of Simon Says.

That's really it. Besides the annoyance of finding the damn things because, again, you cannot look up, they're kinda bland, but they're a fine distraction and a break of pace. The Puzzle Shrines are the game's sole source of puzzles, anyhow, save for a couple bits which are literally just Legend of Zelda Lost Woods gimmicks. I don't have anything more to say other than these are a decently engaging source of Strangelings.

NPC Villages

Dotted across Ginormosia are the five NPC villages, tiny settlements of friendly monsters who you can talk to and do business with. That description, simple as it is, actually makes them sound more interesting than they really are.

Each village starts with you doing a "savior quest" for the town, the majority of which are just "beat up a group of angry monsters" but there's also "clear out this landfill of ore with your pickaxe," and "chop down these trees that sprouted out of nowhere." After that, you unlock the rest of the village which consists of three things: a pair of crafting stations, a tool shop with a completely unexceptional inventory save for a small handful of unique furniture crafting recipes, and a leader NPC with a trio of sidequests that ends in them handing over a Strangeling.

Before you get your hopes up that these sidequests might be interesting, two of the five towns just ask you to beat up a progressively escalating series of monsters while the other three just ask for small amounts of easily craftable items in small quantities. The sole difficulty I ran into was the questline in East Dryridge Desert, because that required an Alchemy recipe I had to go and buy from an NPC back in the main game. Riveting stuff.

Once you've completed the associated questline in a village and bought out the shop, the only purpose they release serve is as fast-travel points, as crafting in Ginormosia is one of the least convenient places you could possibly choose to craft given the lack of available merchants.

Area Challenges

The last of the major Ginormosia mechanics is Area Challenges. At random intervals, a small portion of a region will light up with an Area Challenge, beckoning you on the map to come over and do a simple challenge for a small reward. Area challenges can be anything from fighting a small group of enemies, to harvesting a small group of resources, to fighting a small group of enemies and a boss, to even harvesting a small group of resources then fighting a small group of enemies and a boss.

The only challenge that breaks the mold is the "Watch the Race" challenge which, I swear I'm not kidding, entails you sitting down and watching a pair of monsters briefly reenact the fable of the tortoise and the hare, ending with the hare spontaneously dying of shock and granting you the challenge rewards.

There's also a second type of Area Challenge, the "Legendary Challenge" that pops up after you've completed a certain number of Area Challenges in a single session. Legendary Challenges cause a special legendary fish, tree, ore vein, or vegetable to will itself into existence somewhere on the map waiting to be harvested. These things are extremely tough, to the point that you can only really hope to succeed in these challenges if you're geared up in high-quality post-game gear.

The resources dropped by these challenges are the only way to make those legendary weapons/tools I mentioned earlier, but they're scaled so insanely high that once you can pull off a Legendary Challenge, you just don't need those pieces of equipment anymore. There's no point bothering with these unless you're deep into the post-game.

Conclusion

Finally, I think I've made my case. Ginormosia is a mess of poor decisions, bad mechanics, unfun gameplay, and bland ideas. It's my opinion that it was added purely in an effort to pander to a crowd of RPG fans that have grown to expect open-world gameplay as a default in a post-BOTW world.

In truth, there's plenty more I could've gone over, I skipped over some minor mechanics like mimics and how they're an entirely unnecessary pile of loot that exists solely to pretend that the Treasure Groves (a mechanic in the main game that I am also not very fond of) aren't just an infinite source of resources and EXP. I also didn't touch on how many mechanics are completely disallowed during multiplayer Ginormosia sessions. Ultimately I couldn't cover everything not because it's impossible but because I just don't care enough.

Ginormosia is exhausting to think about at this point, and I thankfully got everything I wanted to say about it out of my system with this post. I think it stands as testament to how bland and disappointing I find Fantasy Life i to be in general, but that's a topic for another time, really. I hope you, the person reading this, have a lovely rest of your day. I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts on Ginormosia, particularly ones opposed to mine as I'm genuinely quite curious what the actual appeal to this thing is to people who aren't just mega-fans of open-world grindfests. (And why you wouldn't just play Runescape at that point).

I'm putting this post to bed. Goodnight.

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just finished the main story of fantasy life i. spoilers (for FLi and the first game, which I highly recommend) below

Seriously, if you don't want literally everything spoiled don't click the read more

disappointed. feels very tiny and generic in a way the first game didn't.

The first game was very aware of the kind of fantasy story one expects in a game like it, and it makes an effort in two directions: one, towards making you care about the characters and plot points despite how generic they can be, and two, avoiding the most generic development as often as they can.

this game does neither, and so it's just a generic fantasy story.

The principal characters feel very flat and never really learn or grow. By splitting the role Yuelia played in the first game into two characters, Trip and Rem, it flattens both roles. Trip can only dispense directions and express surprise about what you encounter, and Rem can only be naïve about the world and get attached to the player character. Removing the interplay between those things makes them both really mediocre.

Rem's whole "reincarnation of a big dragon" thing is revealed very abruptly and simply isn't as interesting as the plot point from the first game it's aping, because what the fuck do we care about some big dragon, the game has spent no time impressing upon us that the Master Dragon is something that's particularly important. Compare to the plot point from the first game where Yuelia reveals her origin, you know why Lunares is important, you know why the Goddess is important. The game has spent its entire runtime impressing those things upon you.

Almost every single Strangeling is either from the first game or from the gacha game, so none of them have any particular connection to Mysteria, the world you are nominally meant to care about. The effect of this is that the two worlds feel completely separate.

Also can I talk about how this game kinda ruins the ending of the first game? So, you know, that game ends with Reveria being saved from the falling of the sky. This game would have you believe that a few years after those events, a universal timer rolled over and Xernes reset Reveria. So I guess everyone from the first game fucking died?

The problem is that simultaneously, this game relies on you understanding concepts that only the first game bothers to introduce, and it feels only tenuously attached to the events and intent of that game.

The first game insists over and over that the people living in Lunares aren't "gods". They don't consider themselves that way. Celestia especially does not, since, you know, she started life as a human!

Yeah anyway fuck that. Xernes is half human and half god. (Weren't two major characters from the first game also half human and half Lunares inhabitant? Nah, ignore that.) The gods who live in Lunares hate him for being half human (hey, how'd that happen? Never explained, or if it is, it's in some post-game thing). Where the hell is Original Carla from? Whooooooo knows! Presumably from some other version of the cycle! The first game didn't leave dangling threads like this!

It also never really does anything with the time travel conceit, and a bunch of the plot's most important characters straight-up never cross over at all. Why do Rem and Ranoah never meet Edward, exactly? Having all the threads of the plot so compartmentalized between Past, Present, Ginormosia really serves to make them all feel tiny and unimportant.

Plus Ginormosia has basically no plot at all, apart from the flashbacks which basically just spell out the villain's backstory for you in a way that could've been done in like 8 lines of dialogue.

The first game had followers too, by the way — but they were the important plot characters. You know, the ones you're supposed to be attached to? Why on earth would they remove that and replace it with "your followers are a bunch of cameos with no connection to the story of this game"????

I can really tell that this game was in development hell for a while. And I guess it's fine that they focused on making the gameplay flow satisfying (which it is, I actually really enjoy the gameplay) at the expense of the story's cohesiveness, but it just kinda makes me sad.

okay that's it. said my piece

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I think we should normalise going "GRAAAAAAH!" when angry or frustrated, it seems to work for the anime boys we should try it out.

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strongest evidence at this point for shen being a trans woman is that a thousand people jump into the replies to every post to do a transmisogyny

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you need to stop using being from california as an excuse for calling trans women dude. it's fucking miserable and you're giving people even more entirely fair reason to hate californians. idgaf if you think it's gender neutral. if you say "you're a dude" to me i'm walking away. it truly is not that hard.

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oh yeah.

i made a visual novel for NaNoReNo (which is basically NaNoWriMo but for visual novels).

it's about being trans and gay and unemployed and directionless, and also about meeting several very pretty women you have some kind of history with

if you read it and have thoughts on it lmk, I like hearing people's thoughts on stuff I make

i promise the grammar in it is better than the grammar in this post

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my name is ali because of this thang

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i started ffxiv as a male lalafell fully intending to use the free fantasia that you get at the end of the base game to turn him into a miqo'te lady or an au ra lady or ya know something other than a lalafell

but then i ended up getting really attached to my tiny little guy and really disliking the idea of my character not having to crane their neck upwards to meet anyone's gaze and more importantly the idea of every other character who isn't lalafellin not needing to crane their neck down to look at my character

so in the end i'm just using the free fantasia to make my male lalafell a female lalafell, and even that i have some reservations about cause the male lalafell poses are so absurdly cute like oh my god fucking look at him

but i think this character is way improved by being a trans woman so

uhh i d k what point i was trying to make with this post. "love these little thangs" i guess is it

yeah so there you go. love these little thangs

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the garashir episode of lower decks was fine sure but the more important thing is that it ended a years-long argument between me and my mom about whether bashir's undershirt is a different color from the other science officers. I was fucking right it IS a different color!!!! IT'S TEAL NOT BLUE!!!!

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If Edelgard was a man the fandom would be completely obsessed with him to the exclusion of any other character because that's how strong her character writing and ties to the main themes of the game are. Honestly I think a lot of the spite towards her is just because she's kinda the main character of the game and a lot of people feel like it emasculates their poor blorboys to be placed beneath a woman

If Edelgard was a man then ngl I think like 90% of the Edelgard discourse would just never have happened. People would be just as willing to completely conclude "morally grey" or "I can fix him" as they are with Dimitri. I'm not saying Edelgard Did Nothing Wrong, mind you, but I'm just saying if you assigned her character traits to a vaguely twinkish boy with long hair the fandom at large would welcome her unquestioningly and probably be too busy shipping said boy with Dimitri and Hubert to do anything else.

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HBD Cherche