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astralartefact · 3 months ago

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Placeholder Name for Atarase's Media Diary

Entry 009 - Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition <<Prev: Pentiment

Synopsis

We're stuck on a different planet. A lot more than we can manage. But we gotta keep on standing (standing) (standing)

How much did I know before playing?

The original game is in my top 3 favorite games of all time.

I have not played any other Xeno Game, neither -Blade nor -Saga, I only kinda peripherally know what happens in some of them.

Did I like it more than I expected?

Honestly, I don't know.

Let's just say this entry would have looked a lot different before I reached Chapter 13 and before Chapter 13 I was ecstatic. I was going to make this post about the entire game just so I can praise what I love about it, but I don't think I can do that anymore...

not because the game isn't good anymore, just for the sake of formatting

Since I guess I liked it, here's what makes me second guess myself about this version specifically

Liesel and Neilnail join the party too soon and both manage to make other quest lines feel weird because of it. (The Hraesvelg can clearly already fly so Linly struggling with the Flight Module is kind of ???; Neilnail should first come after meeting Celica)

Liesel feels too Alexa-adjacent, she's another Skell girl with an engineer partner. I think they could have been more creative with her.

Also, Liesel being "Good Friends" with her "Business Partner" (who she brings up any chance she gets, even when the world is ending all she thinks about is that she has to get back to her "Good Friend") in 2025 is very... something.

I'm not too fond of Elma's new face (and the fact they bleached her) - and honestly, the fact they kept her [spoiler] pretty much the exact same makes it even weirder?

The new armors they added are... so weird. Ignoring that I find a lot of them tacky there are only like 6 of them, they did the base game thing of having really bad sexual dimorphism - some are even fully gender locked - but also why are they all one piece???

I don't get Al's catch phrase thing. At all. I guess they are vaguely connected sentences, but I think something got lost in translation, I literally do not understand why you would bring it up constantly as if it's the height of comedy. His first real scene introducing him is him doing it thrice back to back and I'm just oh god he won't stop saying this won't he (he doesn't) also is he supposed to be X's Alvis, the way his face looks so different from all the others makes me feel like he's supposed to resemble someone and Alvis already has 5 different forms from what I remember

Did they take out the explanation for the Prog Ares because of the Ares Prime? It felt a little bit unaddressed, but maybe I'm just misremembering

They changed it so you can't button mash the research prompts ._. My disappointment is immeasurable, this is probably the worst item on this entire list. I also really don't know why they removed the Research Levels? Every time (after reminiscing that just holding A feels empty. i want to mash) I just think "What reason was even there to remove this?"

I don't really get why they removed the division points that were part of the old online system (it wasn't really balanced but imo they could have just made it part of the leaderboards without the rewards?); Then again the fact that the online stuff that used to be free costs 4€ a month now feels criminal, especially since it makes grinding that much easier

They added my personal pet peeve of reverting the world state to before the Final Boss after you're done :((( I always hate when Open World RPGs do that, always feels lazy to me and kills any motivation for me to do post-game stuff... then again I of course do know that in this case they literally can't do that so I'll give them a pass, but it still hurts a bit being put back :/

Why was returning to the ship after the Final Final Boss not Interactive. Stuff the Map with Mobs 5 Levels too high for me, set off a Timer, disable quick travel. Easy. This didn't need to be a cutscene.

The original stinger just turning out to be Lao in the afterlife is so mid, they should have brought him back. also, I do like Al but that should have been lao in the ares prime, right.

Volitaris is nice, very pretty but a little bit small. Then again I would have much preferred a 'real' sixth continent with new mobs, drops, nodes, etc. that was just floating somewhere on the map and could have been freely explored during the main story after you unlock flying.

Chapter 13 Act 2 is mild, as in the opposite of wild. So mild it broke me. The world is ending and you're forcing me to do Chapter 2 level fetch quests. As in the Tutorial. But during the endgame. Level 55. I have to sit here and watch 15 minutes uninterrupted pleasant small talk with a Nopon Grandma who tells me she won't move away from the apocalypse that will kill her and there's nothing I can do about it only for her to IMMEDIATELY change her mind off screen while I fast travel back to the quest giver and I can't even skip it in case they randomly decide to say something important (they didn't). I can imagine what you were trying to do dear writers, but I fell asleep at the wheel. I drove off a cliff with the Ares 90 I grinded before this chapter. I'm not happy, my skell's insurance isn't happy, were you happy writing this? This was mindbogglingly boring while I needed to be engaged. If you desperately want to force us into one last downtime before it all goes down this could at the very least have been an NPC I already met and cared about but you made a new one just for this so why should I care. actually I did meet this Nopon Lady on the map by chance and did care about her and yet. All of this should have been side quests. You know. The green ones. That are optional. So I can do them on my own time. And then you can add a little scene of the Nopon thanking me in Act 3 if I did it. You know you can do that right, just add things from the game to the game you added things to. Also, about the Genetic Material thing right after, you know we have the Collectopedia for that, right. You could have made a quest helping you to fill it out or something, since it's such a pain (=pure chance without and honestly even with a guide) to find out which item pool that one thing you need is in. It would have (further) rewarded people for actually interacting with your systems!! But you do know you could just have added optional side quests for this chapter right. This is your video game.

Which brings me to my biggest point:

Chapter 13 is clearly from or for a different game.

I wonder which 1 to 3 games it could have been!

I know it's called Xenoblade Chronicles X, but X has never been a Xenoblade Chronicles game in the same way as the other ones. I'm fine with them connecting the games the way they did, that's not the problem I have, I actually found them actually making it more of a "true" Xenoblade Chronicles game sweet even as someone who never played any of them - and as a guy who plays NieR for Drakengard trust me, I get it - What I mean is that X was never a story game in the way the others were, which is very apparent by the fact that entering Chapter 13 - which mind you has absolutely no barrier from Chapter 12 aside from the credits; if you didn't know that that was where the original game ended and the credits didn't tell you you wouldn't know, so it's honestly kind of weird they didn't move them, but since you don't have to complete anything first, since they don't tell you "Hey, take it easy for a minute and do side quests!", since you can just keep going and nothing in the game stops you - once you do enter Chapter 13 then all of a sudden

Nobody stops fucking talking.

All of a sudden we have back-to-back cutscenes, superfluous talking, people not getting to the point so they can purposefully be interrupted so we can stall the reveal a little, people repeating themselves and each other, more superfluous talking, a full flashback of stuff that happened at most a singular chapter ago, lore drop in excruciating detail, even more superfluous talking, every party member you unlock as part of the main story takes a turn to give a mandatory comment on the last sentiment uttered, none of them add anything to the conversation (this happens every other sequence), oh hey you get to walk somewhere you've already been at in the main story! gameplay! maybe even fight a monster or two! back to people describing what you just did during gameplay. surface level empathetic epiphany. cutscene, people describing what happened in the cutscene, flashback to a scene from the cutscene we just watched in case you didn't pay attention. And remember to take a half-second pause between every single line because this game works like that since it isn't used to this much dialogue at once.

Compare that to the rest of the game where story scenes are: "Elma, we have data on what could be the lifehold check it out", You leave immediately, but not before Elma has murmured a leading thought that leaves you pondering while you explore your way there, gameplay as you make your way to said location, a local you didn't have to be at yet (and if you have explored there on your own already you're rewarded for it now because you can just fast travel), Story scene, the last two continue until you reach the boss of the chapter, Elma's thought turns out to be substantiated because as your boss she knows more than you, Boss Fight, rinse and repeat. Each dialogue is always kept light and succinct and after a short bunch of talking you may or may not care about you can quickly go back to exploring Mira.

Like, I'm not even saying that the original approach was necessarily "better", clearly it was very Elma-heavy in a way Chapter 13 has some reason to be self-conscious about which is why they force the entire mandatory party into every single dialogue - and hey, maybe you're into this - but this new writing style is clearly very very different to the old stuff and by comparison the new stuff is simply too much talking. Why does L have to comment on every single expressed thought with his idiom shtick. Just let him shut up for a second, we have more than enough lines already, I'm pretty sure Chapter 13 alone has a bigger script than most of the main story combined.

Also, up until Chapter 12 I was pleasantly surprised at how nuanced the dialogue options for the MC were. They were generally concrete choices of what to do and not necessarily opportunities for you to role-play like in other games that have them - which in turn meant that these options are actually better opportunities to role-play a more nuanced character. I didn't really remember that all that much but they were always also things to actually consider choosing between (especially since a noticeable lot actually matter in some way, even setting you on different quest paths for example). I of course say up until Chapter 12 because in Chapter 13 they suddenly let you choose between the nuanced options of "You quip the funniest joke and everyone laughs because you're a really cool and confident alpha" and "You cry like a pathetic little whiny baby that you want to go home and cry some more." Like, I'm not kidding. They waste your second option on whining that you would rather go home several times.

I will say I liked the story well enough though, it's not "perfect" but I never wanted it to be so I'm perfectly happy with it. I'm a little bit sad they wrapped up Mira in this epilogue, I was always wondering if Mira would have been the connective tissue of a XYZ trilogy of otherwise unconnected games, especially since the original definitely intended for Mira to be what kept the Mimeosomes alive. Seeing it and NLA die hurt quite a lot - but I think they managed to still make all of our exploring feel worth it. There is something very beautiful to me about all the intelligent species that came together in NLA working side by side to escape and survive and that feels very in line with the original game.

Let's put it like this: There would have been a way to make this feel like they blew Mira up so people finally stop asking about X2 - but I don't think they did that here.

What did this game make me think about?

This game has 1 (one) type of men. You'll need to stick around until the ramble section at the end to find out why Phog doesn't count!

Specific Impressions that will stick with me

Seeing Sylvalum at Night for the first time

Al letting you drive the Ares Prime in the Final Phase, I hate that they made me do his catchphrase thing but it was worth it, I'm still getting emotional thinking about it (do his bond quest just for this scene you guys i beg you)

Okay, this is a weird self-report because no healthy person would ever choose this outcome, but: There's this quest about this Ultra-Racist Guy who wants to purge the Xenos from NLA (not Boze, but he's almost as bad ngl) and at the end of his first quest there's this scene where you have to choose between doing something or standing by while he point blank shoots and kills the Ma-non you gathered during the quest. If you keep standing by you can skip his fight at the cost of the Ma-non's lives... but it ends with the final of the three dead Ma-non standing up again, telling you that she knows she shouldn't have blindly trusted all humans to be kind and nice (like you, she says, the guy who just stood there letting them die!!!) but that her experience in playing dead (who has experience in that!!!!) means she can go back to NLA and there she's still going to continue trust humans, just a perfect angel that got dragged into this and even she can't make the racist guy reconsider anything. It's such a weird and eerie scene I of course had to do it again this time. Do I feel bad about it? Absolutely - but wow, what the fuck

Outstanding Audio

Hiroyuki Sawano will always be special to me because he's the first composer that I recognized without knowing it's him.

I really like the Volitaris Battle Theme. The Youtube upload I found of it has most comments fully miss the point that it's clearly supposed to sound more like the other Xenoblade's soundtracks. Since I assume Sawano did it, I think he nailed it! I'm glad X has its own Xenoblade-esque theme now.

The Sylvalum Night theme is just magical. It is a major contributing factor to making that continent feel so special. It's one thing for it to be really pretty once the trees start glowing at night, especially if you don't know it's going to happen, but once the theme suddenly swells and grows louder than the Day theme it just elevates the entire experience so much.

The new female voice in Chapter 13's Key We've Lost hit the right spot. I really like both versions equally but man. I've always loved Sawano's Soundtrack for this game. You could never make me hate him. People that hate this OST are weak. Like how can you hate Black Tar, if the text is too cringe for you that's just weak. Even if it's not your type of music - and it's not mine either! - you have to admit he took a swing putting this stuff into a Japanese Open World RPG and he made something one of a kind that clearly people remember.

Favorite Character

Elma. I love her.

Also Linly was for a long time part of the nickname I used online.

I also remember that, for whatever reason, I didn't particularly care for Celica and Rock when I first played and I would like to issue an apology and say that I disavow the actions and opinions of my past self.

Favorite Arc/Story Line

I mean, if we count continents as arcs I do like Sylvalum the most...

But Story Line-wise I love the Green Quest Lines about the optional species joining NLA, I always thought that was the coolest thing ever, that random green quests had that much impact on the game world...

Favorite Set Piece

Both Final Boss Fights (New and Old) are pretty good. The arenas are so pretty.

/// /// Exploration Spoilers /// ///

Entering the hole in the big glowing tree and just seeing the Queen Beast hanging in there. I always wondered if that implies that all the trees in Sylvalum are actually eggs... Maybe it's good Mira died...

/// /// Spoiler ends here /// ///

The Divine Roost is so pretty too, especially with its soundtrack and the Telethia flying above. This game really knows how to present a Superboss to you. I'm pretty sure I never actually went out of my way to beat them though...

Favorite Scene

Al seating us in the Ares Prime q_q I don't know why it made me emotional, but it just. works.

German Localization Notes

Good enough. I played with Japanese VA this time around and it's pretty obvious that the German version is more based on the English lines and not the Japanese - which makes sense since there is no German VA so they have to act as subtitles too and more people are going to play with the English voices.

Aside from that I don't really have anything to say about it, aside from the fact that I do not get Al's catch phrase and it might be their fault for translating it weird.

--- ENTERING THE PRETENTIOUS SECTION OF THIS ENTRY ---

What about this game gives me Hope for the future of gaming?

If Monolith Soft made this game run on the Switch imagine what they can do on the Switch 2. I'm actually really interested to see what's coming next for them because... well, they're pretty good at what they're doing.

What about this game makes me scared for the future of gaming?

That being said I would be surprised if they made a game that hits the same itch as this again. Judging from Chapter 13 I don't think it's possible for Monolith Soft to shut off the Story-monger Lore Brain anymore. Even if we somehow do get a Xenoblade Y it will be much more in line with the other games/Chapter 13 and have grand multitudes of story telling even if gameplay-wise it's exploration focused again.

Part of why I loved X all these years is that it didn't explain shit. It made Mira so tremendously magical. What is the Telethia's deal? Why is Pharsis just hanging there? What are the big Rings in Oblivia? All questions I don't actually want answers to because... well, judging by the fact that we got an answer to the third one, I simply don't care because "knowing for a fact" doesn't change anything, now it's a done deal I can't do anything about. And maybe it's still cool and interesting, but imagining what it might be and theorizing about it is so much more interesting to me than knowing turned out to be. The original X did a really good job with that.

I don't know. I just don't see them not pivoting and focusing a potential Y to be a grand story game that needs to explain everything and its place in the world after they've gotten known for their story telling with 1 to 3. And again, that's fine for those games! I don't hate them in any way for that - but X wasn't that kind of game and I don't know if I want them to turn it into one.

The Ramble Section where I get to actually talk about what I thought about

So, I've watched a JDrama on Netflix called "Look at me, Mukai-kun." I watched it because the actor on the poster looked really cute. He doesn't look like that in the show and I honestly didn't think he's that good of an actor. I was kind of disappointed. Why am I bringing this up...

Unbeknownst to me "Look at me, Mukai-kun" has a premise if I've ever heard one, one that I did not expect coming from a random Japanese Drama I decided to watch on a whim: Mukai-kun is a guy who got dumped by his girlfriend because he couldn't explain to her what he meant when he told her "He wants to protect her."

When they showed that moment, I gasped a little. Because they're right: Men are always saying this. They want to protect their family, that's what a real man does, If you wouldn't protect your family you're not a real man, they say.

But what the fuck does any of that mean. What does it mean to "be a real man", especially in a society where women aren't all that different anymore. What does it mean to "protect" your family and why is it considered so important in a society where the only protection you really need is from freak accidents that rarely if ever happen. Why is it "pathetic" for a man not to provide everything they have for their family, especially when their partner is perfectly capable of providing themselves.

The show itself ranges from very good to a little bit lackluster as it takes a relatively nuanced look at contemporary relationships and the role of men in our society. It both went more nuanced than I expected it to go and not far enough; there are several moments where men are pretty easily let off the hook for "not getting it" and it's just framed as the women's problem to now find a better way to explain what they mean so their tiny brains can understand. I would have loved if the show grilled them a little that they just kind of give up immediately on trying to figure it out themselves, because I guess men just can't simply be expected to think about this a little more deeply.

What I learned most from it though is that there's an easy reply for when Men say that media doesn't focus on men's problems enough: You're wrong, they do. Just watch media made for women. A lot of those do exactly that, because a lot of them do actually care about you guys.

Anyways, Xenoblade X only has men in it that "protect."

Yes, even Phog. The thing that gets Phog and Frye to bond again is that Frye thought Phog doesn't want to "protect", but actually he does so actually he is a "real man" that deserves his care - and Phog explicitly wants to be that kind of guy, too.

The closest I would actually consider to be different is Rock of all people - but even with him they made him say out loud "Yes, I would fight to protect Celica" before they gave him the option to just build things inside of the city.

But for some reason a certain subset of men have a lot of black-or-white conditionality for themselves and each other. I will only care for you if. You are only worthy of my attention and consideration if. There are hard rules that need to be upheld - and nobody cares about asking why we should do that and where that even came from.

and for some reason it mostly ends up leading to hypothetically asking if you would consent to being horrifically murdered in place of your loved ones, a very relatable thing that definitely happens a lot and should be part of our concept of manliness.

I wonder if that's why most of the men in X are so boring to me. Maybe some of them are cute enough to push them over the line for me to like them - but all of them are "Men's men." Men that judge others for violating arbitrary codes of conduct they never agreed to, Men that would throw around words as if they know what they mean while clearly never once having thought all that deeply about them beyond their intuition - and that's just accepted, everyone else has to deal with that and respect their ignorance. And I hate that. I hate that Lao gets to talk about how he wants to die as if his family would be happy if he wasn't alive anymore just because they themselves are dead. I hate that Doug gets to halt the (original) ending so he can spew some "valid concerns" about whether the DNA Printer counts as natural as if he has any idea what he's talking about and isn't just voicing a gut reaction. I hate that Boze gets to berate people as this enlightened authority figure as if he isn't a straight up idiot that knows absolutely, canonically nothing about the religion he uses to berate people with. I hate that men - and especially older men - get to do stuff like that. And I hate that they get to do that to me. And I hate that I'm expected to be like them just because I look like I should.

Anyways, I'm not really mad at X for this, it is a game from 2015 after all, it's - and say it with me - a product of it's time. I guess it's just something that got me rambling.

#xenoblade x #xenoblade chronicles x #xcx #xcxde #atarasemediadiary

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astralartefact · 3 months ago

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It fully went over my head that the stream was app only so I missed pretty much everything but at least I managed to see their final good-bye live.

I will miss you my queens q_q I know we will meet again!!!

btw in this precious time before we know the 105 crew i want to predict that the new mirapa member will be a little shit who's usurping megu's place as driving force

#hasunosora #hasunosora spoilers #link like love live

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astralartefact · 4 months ago

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i am finally free ...to sell vouchers for money

#ffxiv #ff14 #the gemstone grind will never end #i only bought like 70 to 80 at most bc im broke af #its not the worst grind i ever did diadem was much worse

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astralartefact · 4 months ago

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Hasunosora, you will always be famous.

#i love you love live hasunosora #like legit i'm so proud of these producers #i respect the shit out of them for actually going through with this #this is exactly what muse wanted to be but couldn't #this is _the_ love live school idol experience #liella could __never__#also i need some of you to chill about this #yeah it's sad it's perfectly fine to be sad im sad #but it's almost as if everyone involved in this knew this was going to happen. they werent fired #also don't underestimate the strength of a 2 year contract #i promise you ui kotoko and konachi are going to be fine #and if not then it's their managements fault #if they don't book off of this then two more years of sitting around gathering fans wouldn't have changed much either #i mean look at whatever suwawa is doing #then again sitting around bankrolled by your fanclub must be nice...#good for her

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astralartefact · 4 months ago

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2nd Player

#crym!!!!!#the art she deserves

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astralartefact · 5 months ago

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If I got a penny every time they drew 10H walking through the Final Chapter, a chapter she isn't in, I would have two pennies, which...

also the reincarnation version of song of the ancients is called homesick

Don't mind me, I'm just over here back on my bullshit <3

like, since there was clearly (cope) a chapter cut that would have had 10H and Pod!Mama walk through a white block copy of the cage and also the room that became the birdhouse interior - all I'm saying is...

that would have been a y:da reference, right. they would have walked through the copied cage/the pseudo-seed from y:da, right. this would have been my moment. capitalism took my moment from me...

#nier reincarnation #nier #yoko taro

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astralartefact · 5 months ago

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FFXIV Live Letter 85 / 7.2 Part 1 Thoughts Your wholesome queen needs your support to root out the dissidents

As Dawntrail's only player without a problem I will continue to have fun while everyone else is miserable <3

I didn't watch the beginning part where he talked about the Player ID thing, I was on the go. I assume everybody hates his response? Great.

Main Story & Trial

Are they giving us Populist Idol Evil!Sphene?!?!? Please, for the sake of Menphina's love give us Populist Idol Evil!Sphene. I need her to be an active character, I beg of you. This is what Idol Jihen should have been, the ripe to abuse power of an idol's sway on her community set in the overly literal context of the government... one of these days someone will do it

I am wondering what we're going to search for in the Underkeep, something that's so notable that it's kept safe by what we're fighting in the Trial... I wonder if it's Sphene's soul. If she really is our shard from the 12th 9th (yes i'm still bitter) I guess it would make sense to wrap her whole thing up by doing an Ardbert with her in 7.3. even though i hate that as a plot point, please don't kill all of our shards off i don't need a thicc soul you can just keep the nice people i like alive thanks

Anyways, I'm kind of ://// about the fact that Trials are MSQ again, I generally prefer a dedicated Trial Quest Line... That being said I do like the idea of a Beatrice fight, as someone who hasn't played 9 that seems right from what I've heard about that character, it seemed weird she never showed up until now so it's fun to honor her role in this way.

I do have to say that I hate what they showed of Zelenia's design... I don't know, her armor stuff looks really messy to me. Not my kind of art design at all - but hey, maybe we're getting a second phase.

*looks over to Ruby Weapon's phase transition* ...maybe we're getting a fucked up second phase...

But speaking of Trial Series, I had kind of pictured that they'd go for more mythical Tural Vidraal on the scale of Valigarmanda? I mean we have a bunch of them as dungeon bosses, but... those are so small. Having a Trial Series would have been a kind of low stakes way to just have more really big ones exist. Make it Four Lords 2.0; Tataru does sightseeing in Tural and she keeps managing to run into the worst beasts we've ever seen. tbh i was still holding out hope for a flooded salt flats sky mirror lake area and the last place i could have imagined it happening was as a trial arena... should i give up yet? we'll see...

Arkadion Part 2

Can I be vulnerable and admit something. FFXIV seems to have one guy in the art department who hates pretty colors, probably the same guy who to this day insists on having undyeable dungeon armor sets...!! that decision doesn't come from the art department But they struck again and this time they came for Disco. how do you make Disco look drab.

Anyways, I hope the cat boy isn't fight 4 because if he isn't that means Crazy Chocobo Chocolina Savage isn't dead yet... I mean, I would be fine with something on the level of Red Chocobo, they just haven't really taken advantage of the Monster theme in a way I particularly care about, the monsters up until now just seemed kind of random, even the Kitsch Horse. As it stands Arkadion still lacks a "Why should I care about this after Dawntrail" for me and I hope they don't leave that just for the last wing. i mean they have to do raubahn savage right

Woo (Cosmic Explorer)

They made this for me. They just took Eureka, made it gathering and took out all of the group content. They even named it after one of my favorite Perfume songs. I'm so glad it (probably) won't have ranking because I don't think I would survive that again - but I would have to do it because I would have time for it and this looks fire. The zone looks so big. I hope that wasn't just deceptive framing from the screenshots, I really hope the zones are Eureka-sized and not as small as Island Paradise.

no but really i kind of did diadem on accident and i hated it i had nightmares of it. i did get second place but for what, i don't even use the title

But I really hope it's more Eureka and less Diadem/Island Paradise then I assume it is going to be. Have special nodes whose window can open randomly whenever someone logs a certain hidden item on the other side of the map, instance tracker style. Have some kind of Crafting Fate where people need to craft a certain Fate-only item that can only be crafted during that Fate, but it only spawns randomly whenever someone submits a specific item to the delivery npc. Stuff like that. I know you can do it...!

Mamook Tribal Quests

And it really makes sense to catch up on how the village is doing since we upended their cultural practices so abruptly... And to have a quest line about it that forces you to take your time with it...

I didn't expect them to put one of them here but I'm in love.

I really liked what they did with Mamook in the MSQ and I really like the blue forest area (did you know the forest is very similar to one in FF11. I didn't know. Like. So much stuff in Dawntrail is pretty directly from FF11. The Giants from Urqopacha are from FF11!! Nobody talks about it :( )

Hmm.

(silently shaking in anticipation whether they do another YoRHa:Dark Apocalypse Moment in Mamook. It wouldn't be their first.)

But this certainly could be a way to tie up the one 'issue' I had with the place... Please be good. Or at the very least don't be bad.

"Triangle of Death, Kreszentia" (the german localization stays winning)

My favorite thing about Live Letters is to look up if they mentioned how they localized the names on the official DE twitter account... Most of the time they're pretty much the same, but if they aren't I always feel so... exclusive. Only me and the 21 other people that liked this post know about this. i'm such a big fan of the de localization, if i ever do manage to go to european fanfest i don't want yoshi-p's signature i want those guys

Occult Crescent, who? I'm over here in Kreszentia, an Island in the Triangle of Death. (I did check; the triangle is also called something like that in French. The Island is called Isle de Lunule) (which I wouldn't google) (it's a carbuncle situation) (okay it's just healthy fingers with red circles around them but it looks like it's a carbuncle situation okay) (no but that one for real, don't google carbuncle)

Anyways I'm such a big fan of the sky bubbles, really giving me vibes of the second FF16 DLC. if they don't have a special weather for this zone where the sky goes dark and the bubbles begin glowing what are we even doing here. But even just looking at these few screenshots, they already deliver on the aesthetic scale that Eureka did so well, I'm so excited to see the other zones and I hope unlike Bozja they do more than two.

And that was an Wanderer's Palace asset in the background, right? I hope they don't make it literally Eureka and have it teleported there or something, the implication that the 6th calamity washed it all the way half across the globe really puts the size of that flood in perspective... Add to that that there's also a lot of Voidsent stuff in the few 48-man raid screenshots they showed I guess we're getting more War of the Magi lore...? (Also, that bridge-like platform made me think we're getting a large-scale Demon Wall...)

FF11 Discount Campaign

I've been waiting for something like this ever since someone "leaked" that FF14 would change the more expensive sub to include an FF11 sub... Didn't turn out real and this has nothing to do with it, but...! I guess it was worth waiting...!

It's kind of sad it's just for one month but I definitely have gotten the 11 itch the past few months and this really makes me finally want to commit and check it out.

btw 11 had a german localization and they shut it off? like, they just stopped doing it at some point probably for budget reason and instead of leaving it partially translated the entire game just stopped having other european languages at some point relatively late... like at least until adoulin. anyways. weird.

Concluding Thoughts

Would you guys say people's feelings towards Dawntrail are above or below Stormblood? Like, I want to say "No, they can't possibly think it's worse than that!" since people really hated Stormblood but I really can't tell, if you listen to how people complain about this game right now - even those with positive commentary - general consensus seems to be somewhere around "The game isn't what it used to be" and they don't seem to mean Shadowbringers with that. Meanwhile I'm just kind of over here like... okay...?

To me Dawntrail directly and noticeably addressed a lot of the big problems people had with Endwalker and it seems silly that as thanks... people just fucking hate it. Like, really hate it. I don't get it, I guess we don't actually want a dialogue with developers, healthy community communication means they need to address our problems before we have them or something and if they don't we'll throw a bitch fit and make any fan space unbearable for anyone who doesn't want to constantly complain about the game they like.

Anyways could not be me. You won't like me for it, but I've found myself as FF14's ideal customer. Regardless of if it gets better or not, in this specific instance I'm always winning, because I'm always happy :)))

#ffxiv #ff14 #dawntrail #ffxiv spoilers

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astralartefact · 5 months ago

Text

Placeholder Name for Atarase's Media Diary

Extra Entry 00b - KamiErabi S1&2 <<content warning: pet death, child murder, abortion>>

Synopsis

Will the blandest anime main character you'll ever meet prove to you that what the world really needs right now is a white boy? also apparently this is a death game (allegedly)

(this post is really stupid, yes, even more so than usual. read it for a long time, not a fun time)

How much did I know before watching?

Let's be real I only watched this because of Yoko Taro.

Okay, I only watched S1 because of Yoko Taro. I watched S2 because I needed to know what they where thinking

Did I like it more than I expected?

At this point I don't even know what I expected going into it, but what I didn't expect was that they bring abortion into this for absolutely no good reason while the story is about how children's entire lives are at the whim of their parents and how children can't do anything against that.

Because I know, you're already thinking: "But isn't the reason kind of right there, isn't that kind of the ultimate 'whim' though, the biggest decision a parent can have on the life of a child and there is literally nothing a child can do about it because it doesn't even exist yet?" - and to that I say: That's exactly the problem, because now you've already thought more about abortion than KamiErabi ever has.

In short: This shit sucked ass.

Since I hated it, here's what I liked about it nah this time i'm just ranting about this

Let's be clear, you can tell Yoko Taro worked on this. There are pieces in here that are clear parallels to stuff he already talked about at length - which weirdly enough means despite it being kind of dog shit it still pairs really well with his other contemporary work because he's clearly been thinking a lot about this topic (the agency of children in the face of their parents) and those thoughts have clearly influenced KamiErabi.

The problem is that KamiErabi posits a lot of those intelligent thoughts about the place of children in a society that mainly sees them as property both in its characters and the story setup - but not only does it not follow up on any of that, it either forgets or actively ignores it as if that stuff never happened to instead tell us a story about how Ono Goro, the whitest boy a Japanese child can possibly be - aside from the fact his single mom hates him, something we're by the way never really given a reason for aside from "mom kinda evil" - is in fact causality's greatest gift to humanity. The thing KamiErabi is most about is that out of our entire cast this one guy is special - he's the only one that deserves to become god. Why is he so special? Well, according to the text he is the only one who "listens to other people's wishes", that's the phrasing Lall uses at the end of S1.

The problem is that whoever is to blame for this certainly intended for that phrase to be understood very literally because if we were to only take it as "they didn't just wish something for themselves" then we quickly find that actually literally everyone else is also doing that. Almost none of these characters are straightforwardly wishing for themselves; most of them do it for reasons that mainly involve others and specifically not themselves.

Sawa wants to resurrect her brother and kill her parents for starving him to death

Akitsu wants to know the future to protect his friends

Tetsuya/the Little Angel wants to end bullying even though he isn't really all that bullied anymore

Koki wants true equality even though he's one of the few people on earth that wouldn't directly benefit from that (because he's rich)

Iyo's fan exchanges his life to keep Iyo's dream alive when she's murdered for idol culture reasons

They forgot to tell us Chika's wish but what we do know is that she wished something for Ryo

Ryo wants to resurrect her brother who died because of her

Every single child that wished for something wished something for somebody else. Even the one guy that brainwashed his whole school wished that to get rid of all bullying - but I guess the text is trying to tell us that we can confidently ignore that guy's reasons for doing so because the way he did it was kind of fucked up.

No, Ono Goro is different from all of them. We're told Ono Goro is "truly selfless".

That particular difference is actually most notable through Sawa: Her only functional difference to Goro - and there's really only one, a fact someone behind the scenes clearly hasn't noticed - is that Sawa is a determined girl instead of being a complacent boy. They both wished to give life to their "not alive" sibling, they both have parents they hold responsible for said sibling being "not alive" - the only real difference is that Sawa actually grasps the opportunity she's given acts "selfish" to achieve that wish and since that's the only thing that's really different about the two of them it highlights that this specific thing is what makes her worse than our main character. Her own selfish actions are why she doesn't deserve to become god.

And I will point out that holding her accountable for that character trait kind of defeats the point when half of the story is trying to be about how children don't have agency about what their parents teach them and how that is a problem that causes parents to ruin their children's life. I guess we're having Lall berate her and everyone else at the end of S1 to make a very necessary distinction about that when it comes to whatever the "aptitude to become god" is supposed to stand for, because it's really necessary to point out that the "sanctity of Sawa's soul" or whatever is fucked and it's her fault.

No, if Sawa really wanted to matter to this world in a karmic way she should have just decided to be born to parents that, if they already had to neglect her, at least didn't also instill her with an "If I want something I have to do it myself"-attitude all while neglecting their other child to death - really, she should have seen that one coming, she should have done whatever Ono Goro did.

Thankfully whoever is responsible for it might have noticed that what they presented to us might have been a little bit under baked, so in S2 they felt the need to expand on Sawa's selfishness - and hey maybe that will help us understand why all of this is actually her fault after all! (it will not)

You see, not only is the selfishness that may or may not have been born of her parent's neglect already weighing enough as it is - even if she decided to try not to be this selfish, to actually grasp agency and do something about her situation that isn't just taking from others, to accept her brother's death the best she can and help others out of situations that she wasn't helped out of - Well, actually, that would be even worse, because that means now she isn't just selfish, now she's lying to herself about it.

Actually, Honoka Sawa, you're just lying to yourself trying to help others, you only do that to feel better about yourself. You will never not be selfish and any attempt to outrun your true nature is not only futile, it is also dishonest and disrespectful to everyone you ever shown your true colors to and I truly hope you'll be able to live with how unworthy you are behaving in the light of your dead brother. Your brother isn't helped by making the world a better place for others like him, your brother would have been helped if you had managed to resurrect him. But you gave up, you were fine with whatever you think you're achieving now instead of chasing a far-off dream that would actually help your brother and only your brother. Who cares about these other kids, from our one single interaction we've had during a particularly stressful time in your life I know perfectly well that you don't care about them, you selfish prick! Shame on you for giving up on such an achievable goal as Resurrection - but good luck with your non-profit! Hope it feels nice, but remember! Giving up like you did was a privilege your brother couldn't afford :)))

Keep in mind that she's lectured about her poor life decisions by S2's mouthpiece Lall, a child that wasn't even born (ever) and therefore has not lived to make a single life decision (ever).

(btw sry my conscience tells me to do this but there is actually some core "sure i guess" in this episode. sometimes these sorts of charity causes are just a way for people to run away from facing what has happened and/or even actively harmful to the cause because now particularly fervent people are working for a change for hell or high water bc they think it will help their own emotional well-being while ultimately not actually understanding what's the core issue, obstructing real progress in the process - but this is clearly not one of those situations. in-universe sawa is doing the best she can to create a semi-comfortable place for children like her brother in a society that at this point actively hates her. she has no family left, she has no real support network because nobody cares about her, she is hated by everyone for something she had no hand in and not even her government protects her from it because her particular kind of discrimination is legal - and even still her activism isn't about her or about getting revenge; it's trying to fix the problems that killed her brother even just a little bit bc that's what she considers worthwhile to do.

but your problem isn't even really that she isn't focusing on her own well-being, even if you maybe try to pretend that, it's that she isn't doing enough. the problem is that she should have still tried to win the god app game to save him and didn't. her not going after something that asinine, something that she already failed and had no reason to believe that she would suddenly win this time is criticized as a moral failing on her part because she didn't even try.

i'm sorry but what the fuck are you talking about. what else do you want someone like sawa to do about her brother having died. she is already doing more than anyone should ever expect her to and if she's not 'doing it wrong' - after all the problem in the episode seems to be that she's protesting at all - it's probably one of the healthiest things she could possibly do about her problems if it's already a fact that she's not looking after herself. even if she realizes months or years later that none of what she did 'fixes her' and that she lost touch with herself a little bit - i would assume she wouldn't regret spending a couple months petitioning for the better protection of children from abusive parents. and i really beg you to reconsider that her only way of overcoming this issue is to resurrect her brother bc if you haven't noticed, resurrection isn't real but situations like sawa's certainly are. please, tell me what you think people in real life that lost their entire family to abuse should do about it.

how dare you tell this girl that she should have tried harder about something that should have, at no point, ever been her responsibility. her parents killed her brother and there's absolutely nothing she could have done about that and you're here telling her that she mourns the wrong way, that she copes the wrong way, that she doesn't do enough, that she suddenly should be selfish because "that's who she is" even if that's literally the only thing that you ever show us to make her an 'unworthy' person unlike goro, and that she's pathetic and stupid for not figuring all of that out by herself. her "giving up" on something so far out of reach at that point - even if it was rationally achievable - is a perfectly understandable compromise for someone in her position, she's not settling for less while stepping on her brother's grave, she's trying to survive a world that actively took everything from her. HER PARENTS FUCKING KILLED HER BROTHER. there is nothing left for her to care for and yet she still tried.

whoever is to blame for this episode, go fuck yourself. whatever moral judgment you believe will take place at the end of your life - it will not show kindness for this.)

Really, she did it all wrong - and it's so easy, too! She should have just been born selfless like Ono Goro who, gifted in his wimpyness, waits for his wish to come be granted on its own - something he mainly just does because he needs several episodes to realize that his shrugging agreement to take part in a death game for his wish to come true might actually have had resulted in him taking part in a death game for his wish to come true. He's probably really glad that his parents' neglect hasn't made him selfish - Instead this guy's most pronounced character trait is the presence of mind of someone that mindlessly clicks on every single blinking pop-up he sees on a tabloid news website, especially if it offers him something that sounds 100% too good to be true. Not that he expects it to be real - he's smart enough to know it probably isn't - but he does click on every single one regardless because hey, it might be!

Outside of that all that's left that makes him remarkably special is his outstandingly unique performance in selfless empathy (i would argue that thanks to his mom's treatment he really only cares so little about himself that he doesn't value his own happiness and therefore can sell it off with his powers to help others without hesitation - but that's certainly not how the show sees it. what he's doing is good! the best even!) - the pinnacle of which is symbolically represented by him being the only one to care, to "look up from his phone" so to speak, when a cat is hit by a truck right on the crosswalk in front of him - something that's later implied(?) to be a weird dream metaphor for his mom having had an abortion (of the child that would have turned out to be Lall).

And I'll say, in a certain way that metaphor does actually track, I guess, because it might feel like a car crash to him, you know, when something unpredictably impactful happens in your private life that you cannot ignore, something that shakes you to your core and yet nobody else's life budges the tiniest bit, they don't even know what fucked up thing just happened right in front of you. I guess I can see that feeling being put like this.

But that isn't really what they did with it. As I said, this metaphor is also presented as the pinnacle of his outstandingly unique performance in selfless empathy. Lall says out loud that him "listening to her wish" is why he's better than everyone else and why he deserves to become god and this was the main on-screen symbolism that he's special and not like others - and since the show never proves Lall wrong in any way, even subtextually, we kind of have to assume her argument is true. (granted, it never talks about any of this ever again)

Might I add, it's a phrase directly commending Goro's empathy for Lall - but because it isn't elaborated on, it also implies that Honoka Sawa's fundamental problem was that when she wished for her sibling to be resurrected, she didn't ask him if he wanted to be resurrected and therefore she didn't actually care about his wishes at all - or at least not as much as Ono Goro, the consent-considerate winner of this semantic argument.

But for whatever reason the show takes this cat metaphor weirdly non-literally (which isn't bad, it's just really confusing if you do it wrong, especially when it kinda makes sense literally). In-universe, he wasn't the only one to see the car crash that symbolized the abortion because he was the only one who knew about it (and then, independently, he also cared about it when he saw it) - He saw the car crash symbolizing the abortion because he is the only one who would care about it. Like, that should be two different things, right, there should be people who could see the truck/the abortion but still don't care and people that would care about the abortion but didn't see the truck - but here it isn't.

Instead this implies that regardless of if he was the only one to see this imaginary car crash - everyone else wouldn't have cared about it either way, because if they did, they would have seen it and if they would have seen it, they would have been as special as Ono Goro and therefore would have deserved to become god. And that might seem like a leap in logic, but we know he is in fact the only person who could care about it if he saw it, because that's why he's special. Him considering the wants of who he wishes for is stated to be supremely selfless - and it's only supremely selfless and/or special if he considers the wishes of others unlike everyone else. And not just "unlike everyone else in this group" - the end of S2 makes very sure to tell us that in this case it's "unlike every single other human being."

So with all of these semantic logistics out of the way: Even in the best interpretation I can come up with, using abortion as the plot thematic for why Ono Goro is so much more special than everyone else feels exasperatingly tone-deaf especially in the climax of S1's finale in what amounts to a gotcha reveal for Ono Goro's wish and for who Lall is.

As I've already mentioned, KamiErabi is - like all of Yoko Taro's other recent works - talking a lot about how the actions and decisions and even just arbitrary inheritances of adults have deep-seated, inevitable and yet semi-foreseeable consequences on their children/the next generation and that, clearly, adults as a whole do not think enough about that. That is a thought I agree with.

But according to this truck metaphor Ono Goro is the singular person on earth to care about this unborn fetus and what that possible child might would have wanted... and not to be (not) christian about it, but isn't there someone you forgot to ask about this? Does the Mom aborting her child not count when that's literally an instance of her thinking about what that child might want, because even if she does it for completely selfish reasons she still saves that child from a future where she's completely hated by her mother? You know, the mother that already outwardly hates her other child.

Like, even if she literally thought "Goddamn it, I really don't want another child only for the singular reason that then I don't have enough time for tax evasion, which we all agree is really evil for the purpose of this argument, but as a one-dimensional character I just love doing it" - I have a hard time believing that even to her there isn't also some fragment of the foundational implication that "A mother who would rather do tax evasion right now is a bad mother for this child", however small that fragment might be in the mother's mind. To me that is an instance of an adult considering the future of a child, who then decides she shouldn't have that child (at least while she would rather do tax evasion). She does the thing that from her estimation causes that child less harm even if that decision comes from a completely selfish place - a selfishness that, pointing at my girl Sawa here, you later say you can't run from anyways.

So what was she supposed to do? She can't change who she is and yet there's a ready option available for child harm-reduction purposes.

But this is the point where I'm sad to inform you that someone in this writing team likely considers Abortion mostly to completely unethical, because otherwise the logistics don't really make sense. The fundamental implication here is that if the mother can do it, Birth is always better than no Birth at all - which isn't necessarily "Abortion is murder" but it is "You shouldn't do an abortion if you can help it" ...which often enough stems from "because Abortion is murder."

The possibility that a woman has an abortion "for" the child doesn't really exist here as long as she could "comfortably" have it, does it. Any consideration that she might have though of that child in her decision is null and void because it's "selfish" behavior. If that mom doesn't want a child solely for the purposes of scheduling her tax evasion, "maybe it's better for the child not to live with a parent like that" is just simply not an option, that's just an excuse. The conclusion is already "Too bad, you're pregnant, be a loving mom to the child you will get soon or else you might as well rot in hell you [insert your favorite gendered insult here]."

And again, this is about another hypothetical mom I made up. All of this isn't taking into account that this child/Lall would be born as the result of an affair into a negligent family with a dad that barely shows up and that already mistreats the one child they have. Ono Mom has a very good reason to go "I shouldn't have another child for the child's sake." The text is just pretending that "she wouldn't think that" because she's evil, I guess. Don't you see? The decision to not have a child clearly serves her, that means she's selfish!

Abortion is just simply beyond the line where we have any empathy for Ono Goro's mom. Her doing that is textually considered as not considering the unborn child - or else Ono Goro wouldn't have been the only one "listening to Lall's wish". If she cared about the child at all she would have had it. Her own needs and wants are worthless the second she has unprotected sex with a man. (actually i think she says her getting pregnant was an "accident" so assuming she knows how contraception works this. is. getting... worse) She just shouldn't have had sex with a man to begin with if she didn't want to live with the consequences - and I guess living with an abortion is not enough of a consequence. A man has never once cared about an abortion after all, so how could that impact a woman?? "Women that sleep around" just simply don't care about something like that so that's not a consequence - and we can't have them go around having Abortions all day! Somebody please think of the children that might have wanted to be born, we'll ask them before we ask the mother what to do with her own body.

there was supposed to be a quick aside here about abortions being legal in japan until 22 weeks under "certain circumstances" but looking that up ono mom's specific circumstances actually seem to open a whole new avenue of "why did you bring any of this up" since i guess the abortion must have also been illegal on the mom's part bc the pregnancy came from an affair(!) and in japan she needs the consent of her husband(!) to have a legal abortion - which of course means that even without an affair in the picture he can just say no (!!!) --- but yeah, the issue they bring all of this up for is that women shouldn't have abortions for moral reasons towards the unborn child, not that men can just legally(!) tell their wives they can't get an abortion, even if they otherwise could get one legally

I'm not trying to defend Goro's Mom from being a bad mom - well, I will defend her for it because she's clearly written exemplary one-sided for a reason (yes, it's the legendary straw (wo)man in person) - but her getting an abortion is also treated very differently than Sawa's parents literally killing a non-hypothetical child by neglect - and debatably worse because one of the two is the S1 climax "fucked up back-story" reveal after all. Like, there is a noticable difference between "What Ono's Mom did was so evil and uncompassionate, look how good he is for caring!" and it's an abortion, meanwhile it's "Sure, What Sawa's parents did was bad, but... idk, if she was a better person she could have handled it better" and her parents literally locked her brother into the room next to hers until he starved to death.

No, Sawa is a selfish normie for using the wrong words to wish for her brother to live again (despite her factoring in that now she could support him without her parents unlike back in the day; she had planned this wish through before making it) and later when all hope is lost for her to win that wish she's even worse for reasonably "giving up hope" and trying to move past his death when she instead tries doing something about a society that lets stuff like this happen. Meanwhile Ono Goro is a saint uniquely worthy of becoming god for his singular deed of asking if his unborn sibling might have wanted to be born into his shitty family situation where his cheating mother already despises him just for existing - and then he does nothing to achieve that aside from gradually making his life worse and worse for arbitrary reasons while waiting for his wish to happen to fall into his lap on its own. Which it does. Good for him.

But no. In S2 we even learn he's "a being god couldn't create" - an unthinking, minorly empathetic child that assumes his experience is the experience of everyone else around him. He is fine with this shit life, why wouldn't anyone else be, if he wants to live clearly that child also would have wanted to live. And he didn't just assume like everyone else, he asked questions everyone else but him already had reasonable answers to - and look! This one child wanted to live so clearly that means all children would have wanted to live. All those people must feel really foolish for just assuming what that child would have wanted! That doesn't count as listening. Really, Ono Mom, why didn't you listen to your unborn child's wishes?

Essentially it seems to me like someone in the writing team thinks God couldn't create a white boy who just found out about racism.

And he doesn't even do anything. Everything in this show just happens at him. Even his karmic sacrifices feel passive. Even his wish didn't do anything by his decree, it was to "hear (and grant?) the unborn child's wish." Even with the one thing he did, the one thing they tell us he was so special for, he still was passive, he still let someone else do something (maybe). All he's doing is considering and "considering" is specifically not doing something (yet) - and yet he's still constantly praised for everything he "does."

I knew since the only S1 episode he wasn't in how much of a problem he is, but writing about it now it's once again hitting me just how much of a problem Ono Goro and Ono Goro alone is to KamiErabi. The show's unbridled faith in their white guy protagonist despite him doing nothing to inspire it is the fundamental problem of KamiErabi - and honestly it would be game changing if the show even just noticed that.

Like, this story is about a guy's self-sacrifical nature inspiring empathy in others, but the guy they do it with, the guy they say is so self-sacrificial, is somehow the only character in the entire main cast (!!!) with which it doesn't work in the slightest. It's crazy how you could make "Isn't it kind of sad all of these children don't wish for themselves" work with literally any other character but not him. None of them, not a single one, has a "fun" wish. They all sacrificed their one and only chance to wish for literally anything at all to change something society - and therefore the previous generations - fucked for somebody they loved. yes even iyo's body double, idol culture is still a culture created by a society.

Ono Goro does wish to "rectify a wrong" for somebody else - but certainly not in the same way Sawa wants to save her brother to make up for what her parents did to him or that the Little Angel was bullied before, knows what it's like and therefore wants to end bullying for everyone else or that Iyo's fan wants to keep Iyo's dream alive after another fan forced her to stop what she wants to do. Those are all people that watched someone succumb to the way their society and their culture works and now they grasp at straws to do something about it. All these people have a very good, non-selfish reason to make their wish for somebody else.

Meanwhile Ono Goro just doesn't want to feel bad about his unborn sibling. He wants to hear what she would have thought about it to soothe something inside of him that thinks this abortion was wrong - even if it's just a curiosity about whether she thinks the same. That is a selfish wish if I've ever heard one. That's the logic of someone who needs to apologize to someone they harmed - not to "make things right", but so the other person can finally forgive them so they don't have to feel bad about it anymore.

And at the beginning of S2 Lall even points out that her mom suddenly treating her nice isn't how that would have happened, that Ono Goro's wish fulfillment idea is some degree of out of line and "selfish" by forcing his mom to act against her character. It highlights to me even more that S1 ended on the perfect note to tell him "Hey, Ono Goro, actually..." about all of this. That he doesn't know anything better, that he isn't special at all just because the one person who had the most to gain from his wish praised him for his selflessness over it. It's also the main reason I didn't fully give up on this stupid series after S1 - because hey, maybe they're doing the thing where they turn around and let Lall learn that she was wrong by explaining in overwhelming detail just how much Ono Goro is actually not all that great of a guy.

Because Ryo literally tells him that her wish isn't his to grant at the end of S1 as if to tell us that he isn't a good person just for using his position to grant other people's wishes. That this is about more, that maybe fulfilling these wishes is at the very least also a way for him to feel better about his shit place in society in the way that they critizied the Little Angel for granting wishes earlier on. But him granting this wish means nothing to Ryo - he doesn't even know her. Him granting her wish cannot possibly be about her aside from some form of generalized pity.

Maybe all of this could work if S2 was about how Ono Goro is actually not just a white boy but a white savior whose dispassion for himself and his place in the world actually makes him a bad person to be the one granting wishes - because clearly he has his own idea of what granting a wish looks like since he rewrites his and Lall's mom to be nice. Honestly, even just the implication that his wish was really just to hear the unborn child's wish and Lall was just a manifestation of what he thinks that child would tell him and wasn't actually that child would turn this anime 180 degree into high art.

But instead S2 was just outright boring. Not only

is its narrative barely based on what was established in S1 (at least not context-wise and i sincerely don't care enough anymore to examine if this author shit lines up subtextually)

is everyone's character premise suddenly fully inconsequential to anything at all

the time skip fully wasted aside from some subtext points that aren't even used (like, "they can't grow up after their wish was granted" was clearly supposed to go somewhere in reference to the whole adults vs. children thing but they barely used it for anything at all except sudden societal xenophobia and not having to do new 3d models)

is Lall an absolutely insufferable protagonist

it also had the Sawa episode I already talked about (this was legitimately the most appalling episode of television i have seen in a while. if you ever do watch this show out of morbid curiosity stop with s1. i beg you with my life to not watch s2. like, it's not even the fun kind of bad, in the few minutes it's not really boring it's "only" wildly out of line trying to lecture you about something that i trust you to 100% know better than them)

the fact that every single character, even the weird evil guy from s1, ends up totally nice doesn't help any case they're making. you can't really have a "chosen one" narrative that's also "everyone has the power to be the chosen one"

well actually this show kind of has the blueprint of something that could make that work - they just certainly didn't do it

something about phone's bad - but also not? they can't make up their minds about whether they are bad or not and never make any conclusive statement about anything

i really don't care enough to think about what the god.app death game and its back story is supposed to be about (it's part of the phone good question mark thing; phone bad bc we don't think about whats inside this thing we take everywhere - but also we as humans have the power to make a thing that made god mad so actually it's good in a "isn't humanity cool" sort of way)

also why was this a death game at all you're years late to the trend and squid game was already years late to the trend but they at least do it for anti-capitalist reasons; here you're not even really doing anything with it

like both of the mainly credited writers were old enough to see all those death game animes 10 years ago, i know bc i remember them

also also why does the politician guy look like grown up Goro?? Are you trying to tell me Atsushi Ohkubo of all people could not come up with another hair- & image color combination??? was he supposed to be goro's absent dad?

but it also, somehow, ends on the lamest pseudo-wholesome ending ever, it made me feel so little I somehow lost the need to complain about the entire show. That need eventually came back but only because I forced myself to chronicle its atrocities even just a little bit.

Like, this could have turned out fine. Make the politician guy from S2 Ono Goro who "grew up" from granting these wishes only to not have understood anything from his experience at all, place him in the literal shoes of one of the grown adults who doesn't consider the future of the generations after him and now all the people that were once, somehow, inspired by him (even though none of them actually were, they say they were but all of them already fought for and sacrificed things for what they believed in before they ever met ono goro) have to fight against him to enact what they learned from him. (you know, like i will have to do if yoko taro somehow ended up an anti-abortionist)

But it wasn't. It was not fine. I'm defending the one dimensional evil mom character for being allowed to have an abortion and how that doesn't make her son all that special for caring. and you know that's a bad thing, because the one dimensional evil mom is one of the 3 main reasons for why I hate ff16's writing with a passion.

But hey, at least they evoked thought, I guess.

Also I will be the one person to defend Atsushi Ohkubo's character designs - not the ones we got in 3D but the somewhat techwear-y ones in the concept art. Sadly the dots and lines necessary for it to look good got lost because the animators couldn't be asked to create even one singular texture for their animation budget of 5 [shrugs in currency].

Specific Impressions that will stick with me

The episode in S1 in which Ono Goro is comatose, easily the best one of the whole series simply because Ono Goro's devoid of content mouth words aren't wasting screen time. Like. I can't stress how much screen time S1 wastes on him saying things, but nothing of value. The Iyo Episode wastes so much time that could be spent on good Idol Bullshit on him saying nothing. He truly is the most bland protagonist of all time.

Ryo Sematei stopping Ono Goro from granting her wish.

I like the idea of Eko/the Author in theory, but very much not in execution. Like, Eko showing up and talking to them as the author/god made me feel something for a second for some reason. Just for a second though, it quickly became really lame.

Outstanding Audio

I mean, it's Monaca on the budget of a favor. They didn't make a lot of songs for the BGM but the ones they made are good enough - by which I mean that I remember the magic scene music.

Favorite Character

I could easily make the case for most of the S1 main cast except for Ono Goro and Lall (and I even kind of liked her until the last S1 episodes). Sadly this story is about them.

Also, special mention for Futana Iyo's/Futana Iyo's body double's character premise. I am beyond mad that that never got investigated in any singular way, that's such a fire premise for an idol character with regards to parasocial relationships - and it was immediately dropped during the episode it was established in. also i still feel really smart for having known what her name references without looking it up

Favorite Arc/Story Line

The thing about KamiErabi is that if you read the setup of it all and imagine what might happen you would probably think of a better story, so I guess the introduction of each character and nothing more than that.

That being said, S1 is much better than S2, mainly for the fact that aside from the characters - well, honestly even with them - S2 feels fully unrelated to S1 and S1 at least felt like someone had a concept of where this is going. S2 didn't even feel internally consistent on its own, even the Eko/Author reveal felt unearned. (for at least a third of S2 i thought Eko was Sawa's brother and the god was just Ono Goro who Eko met when he granted Sawa's wish, I was so confused bc that would have made so much more sense than what they went for and they didn't really directly reference Eko's gender until later)

Favorite Set Piece

The final episodes of S1, I guess? The Drakengardian Blob that made blood rain at least made me feel something, even if Yoko Taro should probably work on making his unrelated works a little more visually distinct why does this always happen

Favorite Scene

Once again Ryo Sematei stopping Ono Goro from granting her wish. I had so high hopes for S2 off of this single scene alone.

--- ENTERING THE PRETENTIOUS SECTION OF THIS ENTRY ---

What about this series gives me Hope for the future?

I guess even if Yoko Taro writes bad stuff, at least it's interesting. Like, this guy just gets into my brain in a very specific way and he didn't even write half of this. Even if he somehow gets himself cancelled (honestly, i'm sure it will happen one of these days) I will be the one to take the aesthetic hit and still play his work. (well unless he does something really fucked up but i cant really imagine that; he's the kind of guy that stays at 'says something really weird that could be a misunderstanding and never elaborates' territory. we will never know if he's actually being evil under that mask...)

I think the only way he could make me not check out his stuff is to do a literal NieR Automata 2 with 9S and even then I would check it out because clearly he won't "just" do a NieR Automata 2, especially if it's called that or like a visual novel with only Natsuki Hanae's voice. I just don't like him. It's just... something about him.

also can I complain about the Automata Anime Ending down here, I still hate they had to show them being put together at the end, god forbid we even have the tiniest bit of implication. I guess we needed to spell it out because see the Anime is distinct!!! A-1 cares about the source material so much they wanted to see their happy ending play out uwu! Isn't that wholesome fun??? All to make 2B's last scene her acting 9S's pure and demure waifu blergh urgh ew ew ew

also i love her, she's beautiful, but the anime doesn't deserve accord, she should have been in reinkane q_q

What about this series makes me scared for the future?

See guys?? I'm not a safe space bubble blowing snowflake mindlessly consuming slop, I'm clearly a stable aesthete of distinguished taste with a box-cutter to match and I can change my mind on someone as quickly as a weather vane - and you're on thin ice, silly little mask man!!! this is how we want our media criticism, right???

btw please don't associate these posts with the word "criticism". these are, at best, me putting my personal aesthetic judgments to paper. if you read all this i tricked you, this is supposed to be worthless for anyone but me.

People are always so weird about "criticisms of their faves." I'm sure I complained about it before, but every time a fandom discovers their favorite series did something verifiably "wrong", everyone suddenly talks as if they're at a wine-tasting because clearly they know what they're talking about, they enjoyed the particular particularities of this narrative at some point, but now they were disappointed with the incomprehensible and frankly unacceptable development decisions that were made! - It's so weird, but it really happens every time.

This is not that though, at least I hope so. I think I always talk like this. I'm just german and school managed to teach me to overwork my sentences.

No, but as a "Yoko Taro guy" I just really wanted to write this so at least someone didn't let this thing slip by just because it's kind of ugly, even if I'm still kind of glad nobody watched KamiErabi. Really, it being ugly is probably a blessing in disguise for everyone involved because could you imagine the discourse? If I've learned anything the past years it's that a righteous shit storm always grows the most unbearable. More storm always means more shit and if you're reading this you are in range.

But I mean, the options we have here are a) one or more of the writers doesn't consider abortion in any way ethical (at least if it isn't an emergency) or b) someone really did not think about abortion while invoking it for a gotcha reveal - and i'll say even if it is a)? If this is their manifesto, it's a really bad manifesto. Like, who are they going to convince that maybe we should slut-shame women "that deserve it" more with this. The people that already kind of want to do that aren't watching this - too few waifus, too little tits and it's also really ugly - and anyone that thinks about it even a little bit more holistically will probably run into the fact that the rest of your story kind of argues against doing that.

And as bad as that Sawa episode is in the moment, what is that whole thing even supposed to tell us. "If you have bad parents you just already lost and you have to accept that, but as long as you try you can still achieve everything you want to achieve." Great, I guess. Like. Okay? Huh? World's weirdest spiritually loaded pep talk telling you if you're born evil, that just means now you might as well just be evil.

As it is I just think it's a badly written show that - for reasons deliberate or not - happens to really slut-shame a woman out of her agency in the name of children, even though I personally think that women shouldn't need the consent of their partner for an abortion, even if they had an affair.

Like yeah, someone should say something about this work for accountability's sake - and I did, am I not proud of doing my part - but... if nobody ever talks about KamiErabi ever again that's probably for the best. Let's just keep this one in our journal and then we'll bring it up when it's worth bringing up, how about that! Let's just hope, we'll never need it again... not just because hopefully these people aren't evil but also... (mostly) because I really don't want to think about KamiErabi ever again.

Also, there's no way around it, the school uniforms we got just do look exactly as cursed as everyone says they do. I legitimately don't get why nobody involved got the animators to do even just one single texture for the school uniform dots even if it means everyone shares the same ones. I can't see that taking more than 5 [shrugs in currency] amounts of effort and it probably would have helped at least a little bit.

#atarasemediadiary #kamierabi #yoko taro

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