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Man actually that Lloyd Act I Ending is so frankly bizarre that I gotta theorycraft about it, even though it would probably be easier to just, you know, play the game.

Maybe this is too high-concept, but it feels like the point of everything that happened in Lloyd's story so far is kind of a generic, unplanned, and kind of poorly written sequel. I wasn't thinking about that so much with the prologue, although it does do that fake credits roll like "THE SPECIAL SUPPORT SECTION SAVED THE DAY AND CROSSBELL IS FREE! :)" only for the first act to go "OH NO, ALL THE BADDEST DUDES HAVE BROKEN OUT OF PRISON AND ARE DOING THE PLOT FROM THE LAST GAME AGAIN! :("

I feel like if Trails was going to start doing extensive high-concept stuff, this would be the game to do it in, especially since Azure and Cold Steel introduce the idea that A.) causality can be predicted thousands of years in advance and even account for manipulation of causality (KeA using her powers as the Sept-Terrion of Zero to prevent the SSS from dying) B.) the world beyond Zemuria (whether that means other dimensions, realms, universes, whatever) is home to some fuckin' superfreaks like McBurn and knowledge of that world is extremely limited (Ouroboros, the Gralsritter, the Hexen Clan, Professor Epstein and maybe his disciples, and even in the aforementioned organizations, it's not necessarily everyone). Taking that into consideration, and the fact that Reverie has this fragmented style of narrative with the "Trails to Walk" system, I think it's possible that the events of this game are being manipulated by something. Maybe even that causality engine that was mentioned in Black Records 13, AZOTH, which feels like a familiar name, but I'm terrified of trying to look it up.

Maybe this post will be sad once I get further into the game, or maybe they'll actually be able to make Rufus's coup interesting, but I just wanted to get it down on paper before proceeding.

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What do you mean this dude's name is Marco Rodrigues?

They just randomly changed his fucking name to "Butt Khushnood"?

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Garcia Rossi, Dieter Crois, and Rufus Albarea announcing their plans to unite Zemuria under Crossbell's banner.

Falcom has more than enough goodwill that Itrust that they'll go in a more interesting direction than what's currently been presented, but "The Shittister Six Break Out Of Prison To Do 'Crossbell Supremacy 2: The Great Twilight Boogaloo'" is not an inspiring start.

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Falcom has more than enough goodwill that Itrust that they'll go in a more interesting direction than what's currently been presented, but "The Shittister Six Break Out Of Prison To Do 'Crossbell Supremacy 2: The Great Twilight Boogaloo'" is not an inspiring start.

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YOU GUYS WERE STREAMING THE FUCKING CEREMONY WHAT THE HELL TOOK YOU SO LONG???

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Dunno who decided to change Noel’s victory pose from the little salute to her posing like FFX-2 Yuna but I appreciate the desire to focus on her military-grade daisy dukes.

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Oh thank God, I’ve been playing this game for three whole hours and was beginning to have Rean withdrawals.

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ZIN STOCKS ARE UP, BABY!!!

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MY MAN!

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This is raw as hell, but I dearly wish women in the Gralsritter got to have the cunty coats that the men wear instead of uniformly wearing the habit.

Also cannot get over Wald’s glasses, he just reminds me of Dave Bautista now.

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Mommy needs to be honest kitten. You're not a kitten, you're a puppy, I know. Actually, that's exactly what I wanted to talk to you about. You've let this whole puppygirl thing completely take over our sex life and to be honest it's not really clear to me that you really enjoy it anymore. You really seem stuck in a short-term hedonic spiral from posting about it on tumblr and getting likes. And I know it's hard to get out of that kind of thing but it's really been getting out of control. You said "we're trying for puppies" to my best friend of 15 years. Seriously? How the fuck am I supposed to live that down? No one was laughing. The room was dead silent and I wanted to sink into the floor. And this was days after I was crying my eyes out over the infertility stuff. So you came across as kind of an asshole on top of it. Yeah, I know you didn't mean it like that but you can only point to "bourgeois morality" so many times before it starts to feel like you're just saying "I'm sorry you got offended" you know? Like every time I try to express that some basic social decorum is necessary to preserve relationships I care about you start misquoting Bakunin. And like look you have a lot of positive qualities but I don't think this is working anymore. We both know it hasn't been good for a long time.

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The beach that makes you old

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person who has only watched one anime: what i really love about dungeon meshi is how it subverts our expectations of a typical anime by not sexualising women and having a good plot!

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Realizing that I've been- and will continue to- be posting about Trails games as I play them, but I never thought to provide a tag so people can opt out.

Going forward, if you don't want to see my Trails liveblog posts for whatever reason but don't want to just blacklist the entire series tag, I'll be tagging everything with "Trails with Tom"

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This is, objectively, not especially impressive or dynamic mocap, and the lip flaps very obviously don’t match the dub, but this cutscene looks insane after two games and ~200 hours of canned animations and extremely static camera angles.

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More detailed thoughts on the conclusion of Trails of Cold Steel IV because man does that stick a number of landings that I was not confident about them landing:

From the bottom of my heart, I adore the fucked up reveal about Zemuria. It's such a unique reveal that plays on things you take for granted- the scope of most of these games is a single continent with a lotta shit going on, and "The East" is vaguely alluded to, so there's no reason to assume "people cannot conceive of a world beyond this landmass". I found myself wondering what Reverie or Daybreak or the upcoming Kai could possibly do up the stakes from the Great Twilight, and it turns out, the answer is "basically anything".

Ouroboros has also firmly re-established itself as a credible threat, which is fantastic because I also found myself wondering how they could do that following the death/abandonment of two Anguis and a rapidly depleting supply of Enforcers. The reveal that the Grandmaster is playing 5D Chess and can seemingly manipulate the gameboard (whatever McBurn's realization was) pretty neatly addresses that.

The one thing I worry about, though, is that this 12 game series will conclude exactly the same as Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, which I think would lead to me and every other fan of Trails committing ritual suicide.

Osborne's great to the bitter end. I was a little leery about the "he knows he's a reincarnation of Dreichels" stuff but I think it came together, and I think the line he has right at the end where he jokes about having the same penchant for self-sacrifice as Rean kinda ties the whole package together.

I also really appreciate dropping a line about how the encounter with the SSS in the Azure Tree (specifically Rixia) had a lasting impression on Shirley.

I've been thinking about trying to convey the feelings I have about Trails having lost its teeth as time goes on- less willing to have even incidental characters die, less willing to have villains do actually fucked up things despite being acknowledged as being fucked up (Mariabell doesn't do anything nearly as fucked up as she did in Azure while everyone is constantly saying MAN, YOU'RE MESSED UP), fucked up things that did happen kinda get flanderized into sideshow attractions (Hamel), and I still do wish they'd go back into that stuff to some extent, but I'm pretty sated with a overly happy ending considering its meant to be a finale to all the games that came before it.