#[[ well tbf he wasn't expecting a present at all ]]

[countlessrealities]

{ @thcpresidcnt || To your Evil Morty from my Evil Morty ! }

Just as the president's second-in-command would do tomorrow, Morty decided to send his gift off without being in person. Though, a day earlier. To save the trouble of being rejected. In case if it were to happen.

Hours prior, he managed to sneak in and leave the gift on his counterpart’s desk. It wasn't wrapped, leaving it there to be easily spotted. And how could anyone not spot it?

A singular rose laid there, crystalized in its entirety, down to the stem and leaf. The formation of it was rare. Not a typical type of crystal. It looked unusual, but beautiful all of the same.

Underneath it was a handwritten note. ‘Sorry I couldn’t deliver this in person, I had other matters to attend to. Enjoy the gift. For some odd reason, it reminded me of you. -- The President.’

Relations between him and his counterpart had been...proceeding. It was hard to tell just how much and how well, because they were both cryptic and vague about how they truly felt, but all considered it could have been worse. They were in friendly terms, despite the disagreements and the veiled threats that passed between them during their meetings.

Morty was inclined not to underestimate his other self’s seriously, because he knew himself too well not to do it, but he could also tell that, while real and concrete, the subtle warnings and intimidations also had an almost playful side to them.

It wasn’t that surprising. After all, what they had engaged with each other was a game. Dangerous, complicated, ambitious. But still a game nonetheless.

Yet, finding a package from his counterpart waiting for him when he came back into his office after a meeting that had kept him busy all night still managed to surprise him. And it wasn’t just any package. It was a gift. He had been planning to deliver a present for the holidays to the other president too, a symbol of approval for the progresses they seemed to have made so far, but he hadn’t expected to see his intentions reciprocated.

Especially not so thoroughly.

Careful fingers picked up the crystallised rose, turning it around to allow sharp amber eyes to study it. The petals caught the dim light of the office beautifully, reflecting colourful glimpses all over the smooth surface of the desk. It was indeed beautiful, in a way that was both elegant and ominous. After all, the petals were strong despite their thinness and the thorns were point enough to piece the skin.

Morty moved his attention to the note, reading each words carefully, lingering on the last sentence in particular. For some odd reason, it reminded me of you. So pregnant with meanings, flattering even, and yet also somewhat obscure.

“You certainly know how to keep me intrigued, other me...and that’s not something easy to achieve,” he mumbled to himself, lifting the rose just a little higher, close to his face. “I wonder where this might lead. And if you’ll be able to handle the consequences of your choices.”

[am-i-the-asshole-official]

AITA for agreeing to be a bridesmaid in my cousin's wedding even though I think she's making a huge mistake?

(Emojis so I recognize it 👰‍♀️💍🤵)

So my (24F) cousin Anna (21F) got engaged at the start of December. This was really surprising to me because the last time I saw her at Thanksgiving she was just starting to get back into dating via tinder after a couple bad breakups, and she wasn't actively seeing anyone yet. When I got home for Christmas break, my mother told me that Anna had gotten engaged to and moved in with her new boyfriend, Evan (~22/23M), an army guy she'd met three weeks before and that no one but her immediate family had even met yet.

Our family has always been pretty close, and this was concerning for a lot of reasons. 1) she literally just had a nasty breakup with her rebound boyfriend after a nasty breakup with her last long-term relationship, making this guy her 4th serious boyfriend this year, 2) she historically has very bad taste in men, every boyfriend she has ever had had treated her horribly and she ties her entire self-worth up into how her boyfriend sees her so she's literally never been single for more than a couple weeks since high school, 3) her older sister (28F) literally just left a 13 year abusive relationship with the guy who started grooming her when she was 15 and he was 28, 4) the groom is about to ship out for a 9 month deployment a month after their March wedding and military men are notorious for cheating or divorcing on long deployments, 5) she wants her dream wedding in March (giving us only 2 months to plan and fundraise), despite her parents already being in tight financial straits bc they started building a house right before unexpectedly needing to take in and help provide for their eldest daughter and her two kids and both my grandparents (who live with them) having sudden drops in their health to the point where my grandfather probably will pass in the next couple months and my grandmother could pass at any time (though tbf, were pretty sure no one has told Anna this since my grandparents don't want to scare her and her mom's in denial).

I also just really don't like the groom bc the one time I met him he made a ton of racist and homophobic jokes despite there being multiple black and queer family members present, but if that were the only thing I could probably bite my tongue since I don't think that's something that bothers her or anyone else in the family. I'm just really worried about her, since it seems like she's been going through something for a while and I know how hard this is on my whole family, especially my grandparents, since we all are really scared about what's going to happen to her if things go wrong and considering the circumstances, that's a good chance this will go wrong.

I want to make it clear, I do really want this to work out for her. She's head over heels in love and he seems to care about her too. I just don't expect it to go well and I've said as much to anyone who asked how I feel about it.

Here's where I could be the asshole: Anna's really having a hard time with the entire family telling her this is a bad and impulsive idea, feeling like everyone who has a problem with it isn't supporting her. She called and asked me to be a bridesmaid, specifically because "you've always looked out for and supported me even when no one else did, so I really want you to be my bridesmaid." I told her I would love to be there and support her however she wanted me to, and I fully intend to be the best bridesmaid I can be because I want this to be a happy memory for her and to take as much stress off her and her parents as possible. But now she thinks I support this marriage when I definitely don't and have been open about that with both our moms as well as her sister (the maid of honor), my SIL (also a bridesmaid), and my brother (a groomsman), all of whom are in the same boat.

So, am I the asshole for agreeing to be my cousin's bridesmaid while thinking she's making a big mistake?

What are these acronyms?

[motherfuckermorgan]

bayonetta 3 thoughts

im late on this but that's okay. i think it was proper for me to play it after the initial hype and then initial killing of that hype once people finished the game. i have a decent amount of shit to say about this game so im gonna dump it under a read more. it'll be kind of rambley so don't expect any masterful analysis here.

when the game allows you to play the core bayonetta experience, the combat is as good as its ever been. at first i wasn't really down with having the big giant mens that you use to fight because while you're using them as bayonetta you're unable to dodge. but once i just started playing smarter this wasn't as big of a deal. arenas in this game tend to be bigger so it's not an impossible task to find a fairly safe place to stand around and do your goofy ass dance to have a giant character beat up guys for you.

i also found viola decently enjoyable. she clicked with me right away, her gameplay reminded me of devil may cry 1, which i suppose makes sense given kamiya's history. it is an adjustment getting used to her having a parry to activate witch time rather than having a much easier time with just spamming dodge with bayonetta. you only get chesire as your giant character, but also chesire is smart enough to not need to be controlled by viola so you can still dodge and parry while he does his thing.

jeanne's stages are... bad. i didn't enjoy a single one of them. they start out as weird fake stealth stages where you're supposed to be careful not to get caught by goons but also they can only really do so much to you and it's decently easy to get heals so i never game over'd on any of these EXCEPT the last one where it drops the stealth element (which jeanne's third stage also does tbf) and becomes a shitty motorcycle level. i would be over the moon to never play any of this shit again. when it's not boring it's intensely frustrating and you have so few tools to play around with during these sequences.

jeanne isn't the only weird gimmick in this game but she's the most egregious. they do make you play a fair bit of random gimmicks in this game such as a rhythm section towards the end where you snipe enemies out of the air with a siren. they're all not particularly interesting nor very challenging. this is the easiest bayonetta i've played thus far which isn't really a good or a bad thing, it just is. makes the random bits of ~variety content~ less annoying though. aside from the jeanne stages. there's just no saving those.

the soundtrack is pretty alright. honestly when it comes to bayonetta i really only notice the battle themes typically, and thankfully this game delivers on that front at least. i actually really, really love viola's battle theme. definitely gonna be something i'll have on loop for a while. bayo's main battle theme is pretty good as well, though i find it weaker than her battle themes in 1 and 2.

the presentation overall is a step up from the previous games. there's very few cutscenes in this game that pull the shit from 1 and 2 where it's like a fake cutscene where you view the characters standing still in a pile of gears or some shit. they're still present, but for the most part the game is all cutscenes all day. the game also looks fairly nice, i played this game in handheld mode and performance was good from what i can recall and it looks nice! it's a good looking switch game which sometimes feels hard to come by.

all of this is well and good but the thing that most people think about and criticize this game for is the story and well, yeah it's bad.

like, i'll admit, i was not invested in this story whatsoever. i enjoyed viola being kind of a fail woman but that was about it. i think this is a pretty boring take on a multiverse story. it's hard to get multiverse stories right in general because too many people who attempt it do so in the most boring way possible. can't really name smth aside from spiderverse that pulled it off in a way that interested me. bayonetta 3 is disinterested in making the multiverse feel impactful other than Look! Egyptian Bayonetta! Look! French Bayonetta! like none of the levels in the game really have any reason to be separate universes, they could just as easily be setpieces in the main universe.

and of course, the endgame is one of the most bizarre and baffling things ever. luka suddenly decides to be a part of the story again, and also him and bayonetta are now an item i guess? now i liked bayojeanne before but im also not dumb. i don't really have faith that platinum games was gonna make them endgame. but luka has consistently been a guy who fumbles around and hits his head into walls and kind of sucks but in a funny way. his dynamic with bayonetta has always been that she is far, far too good to ever really ever acknowledge luka in a romantic context. but they just decide towards the end of this game that they need to be a couple. he doesn't exist for like the entire second half of the game until this happens.

this game made me go through like 5 phases of a final boss where bayonetta 1 and 2 just show up out of the blue halfway through and THAT also just doesn't really mean much of anything. and the ending is just bayonetta and luka descending into hell together. i could barely comprehend what was going on and felt like i was going insane. things just kind of happen in the finale. some guy that you rescue during the jeanne stages is evil now, and you kill him, but he also killed bayonetta. the credits rolled at this point and then surprise! you fight bayonetta as viola and then you get more credits. the post credits scene is almost something, enzo and viola are inherently entertaining characters to watch but it's not enough to have stopped all the energy from being sucked out of the room.

it's clear they wanted viola to be a sort of successor to bayonetta and have her continue as the series protagionist. but i also feel like they kind of wrote themselves into a wall? like viola barely has anything to do in the finale other than beat shadow bayonetta up, it seems like she's supposed to be dead right before endgame. also, by having this be a multiverse story... like, why am i supposed to be invested in THIS viola becoming bayonetta's successor when it's just gonna be another viola in the next one? there's also a good chance that they could just write out this game entirely BECAUSE it's a multiverse thing and having bayonetta 4 take place in its own universe with a new bayonetta and wipe their hands clean of this shit. this is the preferable scenario honestly but they'll probably double down on this game's story.

this game's ending is dumb. it's hard to even describe what it does so much worse than the rest of the game when i already didn't care for the story much. but just imagine all the things i've talked about stretched out over an agonizing two hours where the game pretends like it's hard strong themes of seeking out and creating your own truth.

that's about all the thoughts i can get out of this game. yeah, the ending is as bad as you've heard. i think the game was already kind of underwhelming compared to how much more i enjoyed bayonetta 2 but it really does sour an experience that otherwise is a pretty okay action game bogged down by weird gimmicks. at least i didn't pay much for it.

[silver-wield]

What I appreciate about Intergrade is that it's showing us what fighting the Arbiters of Fate actually did: Allow more elements, characters from the Compilation to show up in either new or existing story beats. Yuffie didn't show up in Midgar when playing OG, but here we are now with an expanded story of FF7 that is CERTAIN to give one of the optional characters much more importance in the story this time. And what else is there? Well, looks like we got some Dirge of Cerberus making its way to the game. I know it wasn't written by Kazushige Nojima, but I'm sure both he and SE are fine with considering it canon to the compilation and therefore FF7R.

In other words, we once again have the same story beats, but as mentioned before they're being more fleshed out. Fleshed out to the point that potentially components from other entries in the Compilation will be included in the original story beats, if they don't show up in new ones.

And what else will happen in the expanded story beats besides more content?

The same outcome necessary to the plot of FF7. So folks can stop getting their jimmies rustled and know that certain scenes will still have that important moment happen.

Tbf we don't know where Yuffie was before we recruit her, so she could've been in Midgar during that time anyway. I think that's the biggest thing we're getting from a game that takes the whole compilation and weaves it into one story. Yuffie was optional because she was a late addition to the party, but now she's there from the get go. She's a great character and I love her arc and the whole Wutai mission is gonna be so much fun! This preview of her combat style and how her story merges with the main narrative is great. The Wutai war angle feels like a more present part of the game compared to an afterthought in OG. There was Wutai, Shinra and Sephiroth, so things felt a bit jumbled and Wutai got lost in optional content. It's gonna be really interesting to see how Yuffie integrates into the team with how Wutai has been presented so far. Barret clearly has no love for anyone from there, so I expect resistance from him. Cloud dgaf as long as Yuffie doesn't get under his feet. I bet Red will be the same. Aerith will be all for Yuffie joining, while Tifa is a bit of a fence sitter, so wouldn't want to upset anybody by expressing a strong opinion lol

Yeah, DC is canon even though Nojima didn't write it. Kitase produced it and Nomura was the character designer, so two of the big three working on Remake had a hand in it, and so far, Nojima's taken the best bits of DC's lore to weave into Remake, so the story is in good hands 😁