esperderek - Tumblr blog

[esperderek]

I'm pretty good at avoiding having my Paladins Oaths not get broken in BG3, but a momentary lapse had my Paladin Lae'zel falling because she threw an explosive barrel at Dror Ragzlin out of combat, so I met the Oathbreaker Knight for the first time. And started to laugh.

See, I play Final Fantasy 14. If you're unfamiliar with the MMO, one of the classes is the Dark Knight. And how Baldur's Gate 3 presents the Oathbreaker is basically lifted wholesale from the lore of the Dark Knight from FF14, and the Oathbreaker Knight is basically just Fray. A person clad in dark armor, obscuring helmet, and glowing eyes, who acts as a guide for the new knight to their newfound powers and only speaks to them?

And, I mean, there's already a Heavensward reference in BG3 (One of Folk Hero/Wyll's Inspirations is titled A Smile Better Suits...) so you can't tell me there's at least some people in Larian that plays FF14.

[esperderek]

Shadowheart's Act 1 distrust of Lae'zel because she knows the Artifact is Gith and Lae'zel might have some objections to her having it gets very funny when your Tav is also a Githyanki.

[esperderek]

Doing my first Durge playthrough now after a couple of Tavs.

It's kind of amusing to me that Alfira apparently isn't inspired enough by a Tav helping her to want to join and fight, but a Dark Urge she's all aboard and ready to sign on with.

Lady has bad taste in role models, makes you wonder what her former teacher got up to. Maybe she secretly WAS a gnoll.

Also I guess no Warlocks this runthrough I guess lol.

[esperderek]

Okay, if you go the route of staking Astarion during the event where he first tries to bite you, the morning conversation the party afterwards is very funny. It's just so matter of fact. Just a general attitude of "Oh shucks, he was a vampire. Oh well. Anyways, who wants breakfast?"

[esperderek]

Approval is Silly

I've been paying attention to Approval for my second playthrough, after barely caring in my 1st, and I can't help but feel the Approval system is a little silly.

It's actually very hard to actually go into the negatives, even if you're being consistently dinged, because doing your companions quests usually give you fuckton of Approval. It's much easier to get them to fuck off through plot events than Approval.

Admittedly it being hard to get someone to fuck off through sheer "Just don't like you!" makes a certain amount of sense after knowing the artifact is protecting everyone from being brain-jacked.

Conversely, it also leads to silly situations like Shadowheart saying something like "I've never met anyone like you before, and perhaps never will again." in an absolutely reverent tone even when she's at like, Medium approval, or going through Astarion's entire plotline, saving him from the hunter, helping him reclaim his autonomy, ultimately killing his slaver followed by talking him out of becoming just like him, and him ending the game on 'High', which is the middlepoint of positive approval thanks to all the -1s through the game.

Sure you liberated him from 200 years of slavery and torture, but on the other hand you felt a little bad about that goblin losing their parents and, uh, expressed your disgust about slavery a couple of times.

Others are absolutely trivial. Gale in particular has so many very early game boosts if you're at all playing nice (like I do) that it's hard not to have him at Very Good or Exceptional by the midpoint of Act 1 unless you're intentionally leaving him in camp or choosing things specifically to piss him off. Karlach and Wyll aren't far behind him. I think I finished my first playthrough with everyone but Astarion at 'Exceptional' and it wasn't very hard.

It also has the weird thing that some party members protest....taking quests. Sorry you don't want me helping these refugees, Lae'zel, Astarion, but I would like to do the content that the game provides.

Honestly, if I was makin' the game, I don't think I woulda bothered. At this point 'companion approval' just feels like the appendix of western style RPGs since BG1/Fallout. It's put in because it's always been put in, even though it's not actually adding anything.

[esperderek]

Ah. I see we're in THIS era of a fandom's evolution. Think I'll stop checking the feeds for a few weeks.

[esperderek]

I wonder how many people will play Baldur's Gate 3, get interested in DnD5e, and then get disappointed because 5e doesn't have many of the changes Larian did to combat and classes.

Like, for instance, I'm current playing a Circle of Spores Druid. Ice Knife, one of my level 1 spells, doesn't lay out a patch of Icy terrain for CC in 5E, it's just the damage aspects of the spell. I can also turn into an Owlbear or a Dilophosarus.

A Circle of Spores Druid is incapable of both, as an Owlbear is CR3 (only a Circle of Moon Druid can reach that high) but also a Monstrosity and you can only turn into beasts. And Dilophosaruses aren't statted out in 5e outside of homebrew!

There's a lot that Larian did to kind of flesh out 5e's kind of sparse combat, classes, and rules.

[esperderek]

I've just started Baldur's Gate 3, and bonus points to the game for supporting my realization that the giant demon in the final tutorial fight being armed, Shadowheart has a spell called Command on her list that, amongst others available effects can disarm opponents, and rewarding my Paladin for putting two and two together with a cool fire greatsword.

[esperderek]

As an afterthought to my previous thought, there's something, I don't know. Hypocritical? Ironic? One of those words about Somerton actively stealing Vito Russo's material while at the same time lamenting that the only gay people left after the peak of the AIDS crisis were the non-artist "boring" ones who weren't artists and were more interested in "marriage and military" than anything else.

My man, not only is that a gross oversimplification of the many fights for rights that 90s activists did, those fights, including marriage, were the after results of lessons learned and trauma earned due to the AIDS crisis.

Why were they fighting for marriage rights? Because too many of them didn't get to see their loved ones in their final moments, or have control over what happened to them after they died. Because they didn't have the rights Western cultures afford married couples.

They were the decimated survivors of a plague and social indifference to that plague (when society wasn't outright cheering the plague on) fighting to make sure what happened to them wouldn't happen to queer people in the future. Many had seen their loved ones die, or had AIDS themselves. Not like THAT went away.

You're just a fucking thief who stole from someone you claimed to respect, while diminishing the fights of people who were inspired by him and people like him. You're a plagiarist, and you certainly aren't an artist like Vito Russo.

Tell me, who is more boring?

[esperderek]

Hbomberguy did a pretty good job pointing out how Somerton has tried to take up the air of modern queer creators, stealing the works they made to little or no money or exposure, and using them to bolster his own fame. It's a truly reprehensible act.

But I feel like it's also important to briefly touch on what he stole from the past.

The Celluloid Closet is a backbone text on queerness and cinema. Like, if you're at all interested in the subject, please read the book, and watch the doc. Yes, the language will be outdated. It was written in 1981 and the doc published in 1995. Language evolves. I was fortunate enough to both read the book and see the documentary in the early 2000s, when I attended university.

It was written by Vito Russo, who held a Masters in film and a desire to fight for queer rights after witnessing the Stonewell riots. The Celluloid Closet was first a live lecture presentation, then a book. He would try to get the book made into a documentary in the early years, and after he died, others picked up that torch to carry on his work and to pay respect to the man.

Vito Russo was also one of the co-founders of GLAAD. He was a co-founder of ACT UP. You may have, if you've watched documentaries or seen news stories about the AIDS crisis, seen parts of his speech, Why We Fight. He protested, advocated, and educated even as people he knew and loved died, and he himself was dying.

As Hbomberguy notes in his doc, he would go on to pass in 1990. This was a man who fought his ass off, even while dying, for a better tomorrow and better representation.

The fact that Somerton stole his work is beyond insulting to the queer history, and queer film history, that he purports to give a shit about.

[esperderek]

Just finished off In Stars and Time, which is an excellent indie RPG that tries to do a timeloop plot without annoying the player TOO much with the fact that you'll have to backtrack a lot, and does a pretty okay job at it. The characters are fun, the emotional beats hit well, and it builds a fairly intriguing universe. Combat is tolerable enough. Good stuff all around, a hearty recommendation.

That being said, I will give bonus points to any Earthbound-inspired indie RPGs that come out that do not have one of the following as the ultimate antagonist/threat:

The main character and/or some aspect of the main character's personality, perhaps based off of their trauma or something bad they did in the past.

The player and/or some entity based off of the way someone playing an RPG might act. Completionism, following the presented plot, save/load, replaying a game, or going for a 'true ending' being major ones.

The well is kind of getting a little dry here.

[esperderek]

I feel like an expansion that involves people receiving visions and hearing a woman's voice extorting them to "hear" them that seems to be coming from the center of the earth, and battling servants of Shadow, where the main cinematic features a young but world-weary and begrizzled man wearing silver and gold paladin's armor and a ratty cloak who is told that they will be in need of his Light is perhaps cutting it a bit fine there, Blizzard. 😆

[esperderek]

I'll give it this: being queerbaited *after* the series has ended with a textual married gay couple is definitely impressive in it's awfulness.

Feel bad for the creators and VAs who clearly know how their fucking show ended. Remember this started with an edited interview from Suletta's VA. Okouchi, the director, spent weeks after the show RTing artwork of the two together. Now a lot of people are going to lump them in with the cowards in the executive class. It's not their fault.

The old men in suits can fuck off.

It really is amazing how bad Bandai is at expanding the Gundam franchise beyond it's core fanbase of middle-aged Japanese men. Fans my age might remember when Gundam Wing exploded in North America, and they responded by killing it with a double-whammy of insisting that a cartoon from the late 70s be aired next in an era when NO one would respect that, and overproducing fucking G Gundam figures. No, not the cool hero and villain ones like Shining and Master. It was all the one-episode joke Gundams. Nether Gundams and Matador Gundams as far as the eye can see.

[esperderek]

It's a minor thing, but I rather like that this is Suletta's last line in the series.

Through all of G Witch, one of the biggest things that Suletta has struggled is her inability to state her needs and desires. It even turns out her whole list of school life was given to her by her Mom rather than something that she generated and desired herself.

It kind of calls back to episode 12, the lunch scene, where Suletta is unable to speak up and rectify a mistake that left her without any food, something she just took and accepted thanks to her low self-worth.

It wasn't until Miorine did she start actually wanting something properly, for herself, and it took her a long, hard road to get to the "I'm a greedy person." Suletta of the final episode. (Seriously Suletta you're like in the running for the kindest person in Gundam.)

So for her to say "I'm feeling hungry", while so simple, shows how far she's come from how she was at the start of the series, and a fine last line for her to leave the series on.

[esperderek]

On thoughts of a continuation....

I'll be honest, they probably didn't have anything initially planned beyond the series.

The thing to remember is that Bandai-Namco have been very gunshy about non-Universal Century Gundams ever since the abject and miserable failure of Gundam AGE, the underperformance of Iron-Blooded Orphans (in Japan, it had more traction in the West) and the success of Gundam Unicorn in the early-to-mid '10s. Both AGE and IBO were not UC, while Unicorn was and helped bring back some older fans that had left when the Universal Century was left behind as the main Gundam continuity for television series in the early 1990s.

Since IBO, which ended six years ago, not only have there been no mainline television series, practically everything has ever been set in the safe comfort of the Universal Century, or have been a Gunpla-based animation. (As an aside, watch Gundam Build Divers ReRise. It's actually secretly a very good Gundam series.)

G-Witch was basically them dipping their toes in the water. It's why this weekend with the series ending, they immediately released a trailer for a long awaited movie set in the most popular AU, Gundam SEED, as well as a new UC project. They had planned those announcements ages ago to cover their base if G-Witch was a failure.

That being said, because I know that sounds discouraging, Witch from Mercury is not a failure. It's basically brought Gundam back to relevance outside it's normal fandom for the first time in a long time, pulling in new viewers and new people to a franchise that, to be honest, had grown very stagnant.

I have to think that some conversations are being had, and have been had about new possibilities, they'd basically be foolish not to. Whether that means we'll see a return to the Ad Stella universe, and whether we'll see Miorine and Suletta, and when that could be, I can't say or promise, but I do think the odds are better than it was, say, this time last year.

[esperderek]

It's kind of amusing to me how on the same day that we got the Witch From Mercury finale, they also showed the teaser trailer for the upcoming Gundam SEED movie, a movie that has been about two decades in the making, as well as a new UC property (This time, Zeon members are the protgani-zzzzzzzzzz) in what was clearly a decision made ages and ages ago to have an immediate fallback option in case G-Witch flopped hard, ala AGE.

And now, all these months later, ain't no one caring about either of those things, social media is ablaze with the G Witch finale, and far from being a failure, the biggest complaint I've heard for G Witch basically amounts to "Boy I sure wish there was more G Witch."

Funny how that works out.

[esperderek]

I'm kinda shocked that no one has really picked up on it, but I kind of absolutely adore the fact that, in this show that has heavily utilized witch imagery and constant allusions to the Tempest, which is absolutely full of magic, that the show's main conflict ends by Suletta casting basically a no-bullshit magic spell.

Such a magic spell that one of the results, Ericht's survival, is outright a complete mystery. Because it's magic.

Is it a little corny? Maybe, but you have to have that level of corny sometimes.