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Early Early

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Bless Sea of Stars for having NPCs in the final dungeon look me straight in the eye and tell me "Okay, in the next room is THE FINAL BOSS OF THE GAME, so here's a save point, a campfire, and a two-way teleporter that connects this room with the exit. You can LEAVE AT ANY TIME BACK TO THE WORLD MAP TO DO SIDE-CONTENT BEFORE THE FINAL BOSS."

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The best crew ever

Last one of 2023!! Not going with a banger, but I think I salvaged this one :)

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Before I even got halfway through Sea of Stars I promised people a post about Garl when I finished the game. Well, it's been a week since I got everything I could in a single playthrough and I finally have time to write that post. (Original Post Link)

I'll start off with non-spoilery talk, and then put the part where I reach spoilers under a Read More, as is the norm in this fandom.

I absolutely positively love Garl. That never changed. He is such a good character. When I played the demo for Sea of Stars I pretty much just came from Live A Live. The remake specifically. And in it was a pretty typical fat character, he loves food, and his motivation is eating. When I saw Garl I remembered this LAL character and so many other fat characters and honestly sighed. Because I expected him to be the same way. Then I bought Sea of Stars the day it came out and even in the first cutscene we see Garl in it's clear that there's so much more to his love of food than it just being a love of eating. And I am really happy about that.

Garl loves food. And his love of food goes so far beyond him just liking to eat. He loves food because good food makes people happy. And this wonderful man just wants people to be happy and enjoy life. He wants his friends to be happy so he makes them their favourite foods, when he was a kid he made jam using the sap from a sacred tree and his two best friends absolutely loved that jam. So what did he do? He used some of that jam in a batch of cookies he baked for them. He couldn't see his friends until they were done their training so he left the jar of cookies behind.

Garl has a huge heart. The fat guy being the heart of the team is another trope, less common than him loving eating and refuses to even share a roll, but still, a trope. Garl was thrilled to be going on an adventure with his childhood friends. All his life he was told that he couldn't go on this journey. That only the two Solstice Warriors could. But Garl made that happen, he met up with them and reasoned with them by saying, "Yeah, I'll get out of the way when you do these big dangerous fights only you can do. But there's no reason we can't still travel together." So Valere and Zale let him come along, this was obviously a case of Garl twisting their rubber arms, but still. And when it came time to help the Molekin Garl was thrilled to have helped do some good for a whole town. And he even took the time to hear out little Malkomud and had a great talk to him about how everybody should have been treating him better, and how his powers are special. It was very sweet. And this sweetness and warmth from Garl continued through the game. It was really well done in my opinion.

But Garl also has a backbone and can be a leader.

Spoiler Talk Starts Here

Brisk got destroyed and a lot of citizens very understandably wanted to move and get a fresh start. Garl made sure everybody building the new town was well taken care of. He fed them, kept up their strength, and eventually stepped into a leadership role. He organized town meetings and kept them going. He made sure everybody's voices were heard. And the citizens repaid Garl by having him name the time. It was a very cute scene where Garl keeps pulling his name out of the hat for town name suggestions. He goes, "Haha guys, very funny. Garl's a bad name for the town." And once Garl was clued into why his name was in the hat he gave the town a perfect name. Mirth.

The acolytes pissed Garl off, it was one of the few times we saw him get angry. And The Fleshmancer was also the target of his rarely seen anger. Garl is not a pushover. And unfortunately this did cost him his life. Living off of borrowed time Garl helped his friends make it to the Sea of Stars. He came up with a bargaining chip, he'd wake up The Sleeper and soothe his savage soul. How? Freshly baked bread of course. Because as Garl said, nobody can be angry when they wake up to the smell of freshly baked bread.

This goes back to what I said earlier about Garl loving food because good food makes people happy. This was his logic, it's only natural that a delicious breakfast would make The Sleeper not want to destroy the world. And he's so right.

After Garl's death there is a hole in the party, I missed him, and his input. I'm glad the game had that funeral and gave the characters and the player time to start to miss Garl.

Now for the true ending. We get Garl back! :D He was brought back to life through time shenanigans. Garl was given one wish because of how good of a person he is. What was this wish?

To share a meal with all his friends at the Golden Pelican and celebrate his coming back to life. Garl could have had anything in the world, and he chose to share his wish with the people who meant the most to him.

And I think that does a fantastic job of showing what kind of a guy Garl is. A man with a huge heart who loves his friends.

In short: I loved Garl from the start of the game, and I still love Garl at the end of the game.

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Ooh, the good old times~ Oh and BTW that last image is from the ARG Sabotage Studio makes on their Discord server where we can interact with characters in from the games and do fun stuff. Before Sea of Stars was even announced, Resh'an (we knew him only as The Archivist back then) entered and showered us with lore about SoS and The Messenger. AND HE INCLUDED THAT. IN 2019. AND EVERYTHING HE SAYS CAN BE TRUSTERED AND CONSIDERED CANON (words of the writer, Thierry Boulanger). RESH'AN EXPLAIN TO ME-

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Limitless potential

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Everyone go play sea of stars right now please🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏

Do it for pretty assassin lady

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Garl, protector of lesbians

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the ideal friend group:

history nerd

autistic dude with a pet salamander

jesus figure warrior-cook

cyborg pirate assassin

immortal alchemist who still has a thing for his shitty ex-boyfriend

solar deity

lunar deity

bardcore band

shapeshifting sentient glass container

and last but not least, the souls of five child geniuses piloting a mecha

[hermionemonica]

Sea of Stars by Sabotage Studio; Coming August 29, 2023!

[hermionemonica]

Bless Sea of Stars for having NPCs in the final dungeon look me straight in the eye and tell me "Okay, in the next room is THE FINAL BOSS OF THE GAME, so here's a save point, a campfire, and a two-way teleporter that connects this room with the exit. You can LEAVE AT ANY TIME BACK TO THE WORLD MAP TO DO SIDE-CONTENT BEFORE THE FINAL BOSS."

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And once again the day is saved, thanks to the Powerpuff Girls

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Sometimes i feel bad for not really making original posts on tumblr anymore.

But then I think about making this post talking about that and get this whole "you're just looking for attention" vibe.

Cause part of me still thinks attention is a bad thing I guess?

Idk im just vibin now.

Have a doodle i did at work.

No im not going to bother to rotate it. Look at it like a confused dog

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you will live and you will say the wrong things and make mistakes and people will love you anyways.

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adrien: if i so much as touch marinette with one inch of my body i will surely lose every one of my scooter ride privileges and never again be considered a gentleman look she's already so nervous it must be scary driving i must sit as properly as possible it's fine it's not so bad my arms are almost long enough to hang onto the sides of my seat like this

marinette: if we hit one bump in the road i'm going to faceplant into the basket and adrien is going to fly into the sun seriously he isn't even holding onto anything why isn't he holding onto anything does he have that much faith in my driving or does he not want to hold onto me oh god was that a bump in the road just now i'm focusing i'm focusing i'm focusi

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we should globally ban the introduction of more powerful computer hardware for 10-20 years, not as an AI safety thing (though we could frame it as that), but to force programmers to optimize their shit better