#FULL spoilers for all games listed ahead so be warned

[drainbangle]

do you ever think about the overlap between ot2 and the pmd series? do you like guessing? well if you do i made a uquiz dedicated to guessing which lines are from which series. good luck!

[hard-core-super-star]

During an interview with Hailee, someone asks reader to marry them, and Hailee isn't too happy about it.

it it cool that i said all that? [H.Steinfeld]

pairing: hailee steinfeld x actress!reader

summary: doing interviews with your girlfriend is all fun and games until someone gets too comfortable with their questions.

warnings: none, just fluff; a speck of possessive hailee; two dashes of (not-so) secret relationship vibes; awkward interview moments that gave me second-hand embarrassment while writing

wordcount: 1.1k

a/n: does anyone else remember when comic-con was a big deal? yeah, me neither. so, instead of a convention-type vibe, i went the talk show route. [specifically stephen colbert because he's the only host i can honestly say i like] slowly but surely getting through all of my requests but the urge to write alpha!kate pt. 2 is starting to take over my life so...don't be surprised if i disappear for a few days and then post it out of the blue.

* * * * * * *

There are only a few things more nerve-wracking than having to sit in front of a room full of people and answer questions you’re definitely not prepared for despite all the time you’ve spent overthinking. The only thing that could possibly make that situation more anxiety-inducing is having to do it next to someone you’re dating…in secret.

It’s not a well-kept secret by any means but the lack of confirmation from both parties is more than enough to have fans from both sides analyzing every single comment that gets exchanged. You don’t really mind it, even though sometimes you feel like there’s a target on your face. 

A target in the form of looks you can’t hide and smiles you don’t share with anyone but Hailee.

Okay, so maybe you’re incredibly obvious about your feelings for her but it still took her until after you finished filming Hawkeye to realize the truth hiding beneath all your stupid jokes. It would be easy to make fun of her for being so oblivious if you weren’t exactly the same way.

It took more than a few tries but the two of you eventually gathered enough courage to be honest with each other leading to the start of quite possibly the most chaotic but most rewarding relationship you’ve ever had. Just because most people in your life haven’t caught up yet doesn’t make it any less amazing.

The thing no one prepared you for, though, is having to do talk show interviews while avoiding the topic of said relationship. It’s not like either of you is genuinely trying to hide the truth, it’s just easier to explore your developing feelings when there aren’t a ridiculous amount of eyes trained on the pair of you.

Eyes that sometimes don’t quite know how to read the room.

Which brings you back to your current situation.  You and Hailee are sitting slightly too close together while doing another interview where you have to dance around spoilers while trying to get people excited for Hawkeye.

It turns out, you don’t actually have to do much since seeing the two of you together seems to be more than enough to get people talking about the show.

“So, y/n, I know this is your first time doing an interview like this and I don’t want to scare you away so how about we get some questions from the audience?”

The crowd erupts into cheers and you can’t help but let out a nervous laugh even though you already knew this was going to happen. Being notified ahead of time still isn’t enough to stop you from worrying about what this segment will bring.

“What’s the worst that could happen right?” You joke, sharing a look with Hailee who merely shakes her head at you.

Of course, the list of “worst things that could happen” is quite long when it comes to people asking you whatever they want.

And right now, the way the brunette hasn’t let go of your hand since you sat down is definitely at the top of everyone’s list of questions. You’re sure no one is surprised by how affectionate she can be sometimes but it’s unusual to see her happily holding onto someone in a room like this one.

You swallow down your nervousness in order to focus on the questions that get thrown your way. Most of them are, in all honesty, softballs. Things like,”What was your favorite part about shooting Hawkeye?” and “Who’s the strongest Avenger?” 

You’re thankful for the easy questions until the humor your responses carry inspires some…bolder comments. Stephen lets everyone know the next question will be the last and the lucky fan who’s chosen takes her chance.

“Marry me?”

The easy atmosphere of the room leaves you completely unprepared for the question and the only real response you can offer at first is a laugh. A laugh that earns you a grin from the bold fan and a glare from your unamused girlfriend.

“Yeah, sure,” you reply with a shrug. “My manager will email you my schedule.”

Your response is just as unexpected as the question which just makes the audience laugh harder.

There’s a slightly smug look on your face that disappears the second you turn to look at Hailee.

She’s an actress, and a fantastic one at that, so she hides her emotions well. Unfortunately, you’re an expert at reading her and the lack of a smile on her face tells you all you need to know.

“Too bad you have a very busy schedule,” she says through a chuckle that sounds more forced than anything you’ve ever heard out of her.

“True, true. I’m a very responsible dogsitter and I don’t think Martini would be fine with me leaving her for so long.”

“Does she get jealous easily?” Stephen clearly picks up on you trying to change the topic but Hailee’s not done voicing her displeasure.

“Her owner does.” The words are a mere mumble but the microphone picks her up loud and clear.

Your eyes widen and her comment renders you utterly speechless. It’s not that the words are a complete surprise, you just can’t believe she actually said that in the middle of an interview.

She realizes what she said a few seconds later and her soft eyes meet yours. There’s a layer of nervousness in them that she can’t quite hide and the sight makes your heart clench. You can’t do much to reassure her though so you merely squeeze her hand three times and let the interview continue.

The minutes feel like hours but you eventually wrap up and are allowed to go back into your shared dressing room. Hailee all but drags you inside and you close the door behind you once you're in the safety and privacy of those four walls.

“I shouldn't have said that,” she blurts out, her hands emphasizing her words and the anxiety they carry. “I just, I don't know what came over me. It was stupid and I’m-”

“Lee.” You quickly cross the small space between you and grab onto her slightly shaky hands. “You don't have to apologize, everything’s fine.”

She blinks a few times but the action doesn't get rid of the genuine surprise that's etched onto her features. “You…You're serious?”

“Incredibly. I thought it was cute that you got jealous like that.”

Her usual playful energy comes back the instant she realizes you're not upset. And it very quickly becomes clear she's not actually upset either.

“Excuse me, I wasn't jealous. I just thought it was a lame question.”

“Mhmm, right.” You let go of her hands in order to wrap your arms around her waist and pull her close. “I'll make sure to remind you of that if I ever propose.”

She leans in to kiss you until her brain catches up to your joke. There's a hint of a pout on her lips that makes you chuckle.

“What do you mean if?”

You don't bother with replying and instead kiss her again, knowing your actions will be more than enough to soothe her worries.

[pico-digital-studios]

KinitoPET console port ideas

In the wake of KinitoPET's growing success, I thought about how a console port of the game would work if troy_en ever decides to do something like that.

WARNING!: Spoilers are prominent for the game ahead, so don't read on unless you've played or watched all of KinitoPET, including the game's secret ending.

To start, let's talk about the...

Interface

Since the game takes place on a simulated PC, changes will obviously have to be made for the game to function there.

To begin with, the control scheme. The general idea I had was for the mouse cursor to be moved with the left analogue stick, and for interactions to be made with one of the different buttons on the controller. Pressing the console's respective start/pause button will quickly bring up the pause menu for you to change settings or return to a regular desktop.

As most of the consoles lack their own wallpaper settings built in (Nintendo Switch, I'm especially looking at you for your lack of themes), the My Pictures folder instead links to some pre-prepared images that you can set as the in-game desktop background. For 3D Pinball's controls, it works similarly to games like Pinball FX, using the trigger buttons to move the flippers, and one of the normal buttons to control the plunger.

Now, about the game's achievements/trophies. Steam was the main way of unlocking KinitoPET's various achievements, so I felt the system could also be applied for the Xbox and PlayStation systems. However, a new workaround is needed for Switch, since that lacks an achievement system outright. As such, like with the Portal and Stanley Parable ports, I thought about a separate Achievements menu/application where the unlocked and yet-to-be-unlocked achievements can be viewed from.

KinitoPET in general

Since the game needs keyboard input at various points, the ports would have ways to overcome this, using the console's respective on-screen keyboard for these inputs. If it supports touch-screen, then all the better, too. Kinito's instructions are also tweaked to make up for the consoles not actually having keyboards by default.

As the game also reads from your Steam friend list and what Steam games you have in your library, I thought about the game also having its own way of reading this; namely, pulling the options from your console's friend list, and if your highlighted favourite game is in the respective console's store, along with various others you have save data for.

For the 3D sections in the game, the left analogue stick helps with movement, while the right analogue stick (for controllers that support it; otherwise, the D-Pad works) moves the camera view.

Fourth-wall scares

Now, this is something that definitely needs tweaking due to it being on consoles.

First off, a lot of fans will know that when Kinito is told that he's NOT your best friend, he turns up your system volume to reiterate that question. Obviously, this isn't going to work for consoles that have their audio come from a TV, but if the console has built-in volume controls on its own (like Switch), Kinito will raise the console's volume from there.

Next, the Paint jumpscare. This one opens up your PC's actual MS Paint briefly to facilitate the scare, but in this case, a fullscreen in-game Paint window would appear to create the "ARE YOU REALLY (NAME)?" taunt.

Now, next up is the infamous Camera scare Kinito pulls on you. Now, we all know that unless your TV or console actually HAS camera support, it's outright ineffective, so I thought of another workaround. Kinito, instead, asks to "see your avatar", pulling a direct model of your Avatar/Mii on full show. If you don't have one, he'll instead nab one of the generic defaults.

Also, about the recording secret, another twist is thrown in; if you have captured screenshots or recorded snippets of gameplay, Kinito questions this, actually pulling said screenshots/recordings from your console's gallery to question you with.

Now, onto the darker questions of the Analysis Hub. Remember what I said above about the friends toggle? Well, two of the questions, those being "Can you trust everything that (NAME) says?" and "Who would you rather kill?" actually read that friend list data for you to look through.

For the address-hunting/doxxing scare, the dialogue obviously changes unless your console has a proper built-in web browser:

"Hey. It seems like you made a mistake when filling out your address. I would find out your address for you, but your system doesn't have the capacity to let me do so. But just so you know, I could."

And last, and most importantly, the Command Prompt sequence. Kinito will instead point your attention to the My Computer icon, which is toggled in the console ports to house other sub-applications, a built-in console included, for you to type either Kinito's system access command, or the commands and codes needed to outright get rid of him.

Oh, right! Let's not forget about the game-closing sequences. At the end of each act of the game, pop-up windows appear to inform you that that part of the game is over, though for the consoles, this isn't possible, so on-screen text would appear before the game crashes deliberately, necessitating you to actually restart the game.

Your World

When Kinito is preparing to show off your house, since he can't exactly turn off your monitor, he simply resorts to asking you to close your eyes. In the house itself, he recycles the data he found in your console to utilise here. For instance, in the special office, the cover art of your favourite game on that console is on the computer, with other games that have save data on the shelves. Your console friends are each gathered around the dining table and sofas, and the TV, which originally showed nothing, plays random recordings from your console gallery to give you something to watch.

I personally also had the thought about Your World being accessible without an off-screen timer if you wished to explore either the funfair or your island/forest/field's house without any pressure on your shoulders. In the idea, the rollercoaster would instead park up by the entrance to another chute, and taking this one will let you go back to your funfair if you wish.

Secret Ending tweaks

As the Secret Ending requires even more interaction on your part, new tweaks are needed to help this fully work.

The "Lense.exe" program creates a magnifying glass that you can use to gather the files and email logs. Since they likely can't be stored on your console's system memory, they are instead stored in a bar accessible once you get inside the Dark Land. The respective passwords are saved by the game for you, and will be entered for you in order for each one you find before opening the console in Act 3.

If you don't have all of the passwords, the game will stop entering them should a crucial one be missing, and deny you that access. If you have all of them, though, and get to the confirmatory code, the game will ask you to confirm this final decision, and if you go through with it, you've achieved the secret ending!

Well, that's all I can really think about for a potential future console port for KinitoPET. I do know it's going to be a lot harder work to work with, though I'm sure it can work out, since the Godot engine (which KinitoPET runs on) is cross-platform.

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Doctor Who: The Giggle Review- A Whole Glorious Hour of Literally Perfect Television

Warning: Spoilers Ahead

In my previous two Who reviews, I argued that- regardless of the increasing quality of the show- cancellation would still, ultimately, be a kindness. I said this as a fan, because I was aware that the world Doctor Who was built for and the world we presently have are so wildly different that, ultimately, the off-kilter, quintessentially British spirit of the show would have to be traded away to maintain long-term viability. In the wake of The Giggle, I find myself forced to reevaluate this opinion. You see, The Giggle isn’t just a really, really good piece of television- it’s also a blueprint for the series going forward. In this story, showrunner and script-writer Russel T. Davies seems to have hit on a new-but-familiar identity for Doctor Who that can continue to work in the modern world without sacrificing the elements that made it good to begin with.

It would be hard to overstate how fucking great this episode is. Let me see if I can put it into words. I was fourteen years old when Doctor Who came back from its decades-long hiatus and reappeared on the BBC, fronted by the inimitable Christopher Ecclestone. I used to watch those early episodes perched, very literally, on the edge of my seat, my legs trembling involuntarily, ready to run- as though if I sprinted fast enough, I could catch up to the Doctor and enter that world of wild, uncontrolled imagination; that infinity of time and space. That feeling continued throughout David Tennant’s first run as the Doctor, but eventually began to decay. I chalked this down to getting older. After all, nobody watches anything at 20 or 30 the way they watched it when they were 14. I just had to accept that the ageing process had robbed me of my ability to uncritically enjoy something that had meant so much to me in my formative years. And then The Giggle happened, and suddenly I’m 14 again, glued to my chair and grinning like an idiot.

It’s not that The Giggle turned off my critical and analytical faculties by appealing to the nostalgia centres of my brain. It’s too fresh and inventive to pull that cheap trick. Rather, it’s that it’s so joyous and energising that it taps directly into the same part of my psyche that the early episodes did in 2005 while also being so well thought-through and meticulously realised that my capacity for analysis and critique enhanced rather than marred my enjoyment. In my review for Wild Blue Yonder, I commented that it’s harder for TV episodes with a lot of superfluous ideas, characters and concepts to juggle them all successfully- almost like there’s only so much quality to go around and it gets spread too thin. This makes The Giggle particularly impressive. There’s a ton of stuff going on here, but it’s all handled with equal panache and genuine verve. The Giggle makes the juggling of elements feel completely effortless. Spoilers ahead, but I think it’s important to list, out of context, some of the things that happen in The Giggle that left me bewildered, gobsmacked and delighted all at once. And yes, I laughed out loud at many of these, braying like a complete fucking cretin from the sheer, infectious joie de vive of it.

Rhyming murder puppets.

A shop folds itself into a toy-box just to mess with the Doctor and Donna.

The Celestial Toymaker interrupts the plot to deliver a full-on, showstopping musical number.

“It’s alright. I’ve given the moles a force-field.”

A sexy black alien with no trousers whacks a time machine with a croquet mallet so hard that gives birth to another time machine in a slightly different shade of blue.

Grandma’s Footsteps with a motherfucking death-laser.

The fate of the world is resolved with a game of catch.

“I love you. Get out.”

Two chill dudes set fire to a dummy in order to invent television. All the more hilarious because this isn’t a ‘Doctor Who Thing’- this actually happened.

Neil Patrick Harris’ cardistry is on fleek, and- as a magician- I appreciate that.

Oh Sweet Baby Cthulhu the accents! The accents!

Donna Noble has the balls.

You know, I could probably go on, but I won’t. I think that’s honestly enough to be getting on with, and this review does kinda need to end eventually. The point I’m trying to make is that there’s a tremendous amount of silliness and cleverness and inventiveness on display here and it all feels very Doctor Who-y.

Now, if I were a proper reviewer, I’d deal with the meat and potatoes of making a TV show. But honestly, what can I say that isn’t blindingly obvious? Of course David Tennant and Catherine Tate’s acting is spectacular- they’re good actors. Of course the rest of their cast pull their weight- most of them are old hands. Of course the script is well-crafted- I’ve already praised it. Of course the special effects are excellent- this isn’t the bloody Star Beast (hey! I think I just worked out where all that Disney money went!). Basically, everything is well-assembled and you could have figured that out for yourself because I wouldn’t be praising the episode at all otherwise. I will say that Neil Patrick Harris’ Celestial Toymaker is one of the most amazing performances I’ve ever seen. The dude’s having so much fun it’s infectious. I don’t mean to suggest he’s the best actor in the world or anything quite so grand- I just mean that he’s ideally fitted for the role and it’s a treat to see. Other than that, I think we can forgo the painfully obvious gushing over the acting.

It’s probably more relevant to discuss whether The Giggle does the job it sets out to do. And, frankly, it sets out to do a lot of jobs. Its a send-off for David Tennant’s take on the Doctor, an introduction to Ncuti Gatwa’s take, a long-overdue attempt to mend the bridges fucking Chibnall burned during his time as showrunner, a showcase for everything that’s good about Doctor Who, an attempt to expand the Whoniverse in lasting, meaningful ways and an attempt to establish a new identity for the programme that cleaves to the original without depending on it. I mean, that’s a fuck-load of stuff, so it would kind of be unfair to demand that it pulls it all off. Well, the good news is that I don’t have to demand shit, because it just does. Like, completely fucking unprompted. I didn’t have to yell or whack its knuckles with a ruler or anything.

As a send-off for Tenant, it works by… well, by not being a send-off. Russel T. Davies is a gay man whose formative years were the eighties, with the AIDs crisis running rampant and disproportionately effecting his community and demographic. In the early 2000s, when he had to write and manage Tenant’s first run, he still hadn’t entirely come to terms with that (or so the speculation goes), which is why the Doctor’s regeneration from Tenant to Matt Smith was so traumatic- to paraphrase a fellow fan on the issue, Russ just didn’t believe in happy endings. Tenant’s 10th Doctor ‘dies’ (for want of a better term) sad and desperate, clinging to an identity that’s about to be washed away. This time around, we get something called ‘Bi-Generation’, which allows the Doctor to split himself in two, so that his current and next identity can co-exist simultaneously. He gets to hand over the mantle and task of being the Doctor, without giving up who he is. In fact, he gets to go and live with Donna and her family and basically become everyone’s favourite uncle while Gatwa’s Doctor flies off to continue being the main character. And it’s perfect. It’s not a painful, wrenching goodbye, but a fond farewell- a reward for services rendered that doesn’t just keep a fan-favourite on hand for future shenanigans but allows the show to evolve without symbolically erasing a beloved part of its history. It’s made all the more lovely by the fact that it clearly signifies Russel T. Davies going through some kind of internal resolution and coming to terms with something we humble viewers can only guess at. He’s made room in his life for the possibility of happiness- or so it seems- and it’s reflected in his work. It’s nice when real people have arcs.

As an introduction to Gatwa’s 15th Doctor, The Giggle doesn’t do a bad job either. Instead of a few pitiful seconds of screen-time at the end of the episode (which is traditional for hot new Regenerations), Gatwa gets to act properly alongside his predecessor for a little bit and feel out the role. His delivery of the lines is mostly solid, barring a few moments of awkwardness, but- in fairness- he’s being asked to act against a fuckload of green-screen FX in no trousers for one of the most iconic programmes and roles on British telly. The fact he does as well as he does first time out is impressive. You can tell he has the talent to carry off the role (this isn’t another Whitaker situation, thank fuck)- it’s just going to take him a full episode or two to hit his stride, which is fine. But that’s the actor. The character of the 15th Doctor… well, let’s just say I feel like the TARDIS is in safe hands. Fifteen is over the top, bombastic, a tiny bit queer-coded (in a fun way, not a virtue-signalling way), refreshingly silly and absolutely full of heart. Yeah. I could get used to this guy. The fact that he’s the first black Doctor is also handled way, way better than Whitaker being the first female Doctor. With Whitaker, we got a fucking awful, unearned straight-to-camera speech about how change can be scary but how it’s also inevitable and important (or something- after a certain point, I couldn’t hear it over the sound of my own groaning). With Gatwa we get “Do you come in a range of colours?” “Yes.” and that’s it. The show doesn’t want to start a blasted controversy over it or have it be a big deal… so it accomplishes that by not making it a big deal. This kind of light touch, trust-the-audience-to-keep-up approach is refreshing to say the least. And yeah- it does help mend some of those Chibfail/Pisstaker-burned bridges I alluded to earlier.

Speaking of mending burned bridges, I think one of the most important things The Giggle does is low-key kick the shit out of Chibnall’s idiotic changes to canon. It’s accomplished with exactly one line of dialogue, and it’s open to interpretation, but it’s still an olive branch to fans who were flabbergasted by the flagrant disrespect of The Timeless Children and the whole ‘Division’ plot arc in Flux. See, aside from pushing against established canon in a way that insulted those invested therein, those storylines symbolically overrode William Hartnell’s definitive performance as the First Doctor from way back in the 60s, turning his character into just another link in the chain and erasing the in-universe legacy of much-cherished figure (a real person whose importance to the show cannot be overstated), just because he didn’t fit Chibfail’s personal, self-serving vision of who and what the Doctor should be. But, in The Giggle, we learn that the Toymaker “made a jigsaw puzzle” out of the Doctor’s history, low-key implying that, actually, none of this bullshit is canon- it was just a mad bastard with reality-bending powers messing with the Doc for shits and, er, giggles. No pun intended. Fine by me. I also quite liked the way The Giggle used the Toymaker to take aim at the Culture War and cancel culture- on both sides of the divide- because it seemed like a bit of an acknowledgement that the fans hadn’t really come first where creative decision on Who were concerned lately; that it was more about seeming to be on the right ‘side’. The implication here, of course, is that if the bloody Toymaker knows this is bullshit, so does the show and we’ll get episodes that appeal to all the fanbase as a whole rather than episodes that seek to draw battle-lines and divide them. I mean, the bridges Chibnall and Whitaker burned were big, huge, fucking massive bridges and they burned them very, very thoroughly. Doctor Who has a lot of work to do if it wants to bring them back up to code and win fan trust back, but it’s made enormous strides just with The Giggle.

As for serving as a showcase for everything good about Who- yeah: fucking nails it. We’ve got cosmic stakes, quintessentially British snark, loveable daftness, a great fucking bad guy, problems being solved with smarts and charisma rather than guns and violence, high concept sci-fi nonsense by the bucket load and even some creepy as fuck monsters to play with. Plus, with the single line “My legions are coming,” we know that we’re going to get more mileage out of the plot-line. What’s not to love?

So yes: The Giggle is worth every tiny scrap of hype that surrounds it. It really is the episode to revitalise Doctor Who. Yes, RTD and friends still have to stick the landing- they still have to keep up a consistent quality with upcoming episodes and not backslide to fucking Star Beast level- but, if they can do all that, the show should be good for awhile. Yes, it will still have to stop eventually, but that moment is no longer imminent. With the right management and succession of showrunners, we could get another decade out of this. Doctor Who could actually outlast the Culture Wars that make it so hard to do good sci-fi, regardless of which side of the political spectrum your story falls on. Wouldn’t that be nice? To know that, in the end, the winner of that tawdry fucking bum-fight wasn’t one side or the other, but a genuinely lovely and well-meaning little British sci-fi show. And all that, because one episode- one fucking episode- was able to undo years of crap. Not bad for a single hour of Saturday evening telly.

[floatingcatacombs]

once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds.

12 Days of Aniblogging 2022, Day 9

This is your usual anime blogger’s girlfriend speaking. We watched a lot of the same anime together this year, so in the interests of not stepping on her toes, I’ve decided that instead of screaming about how Togame’s scheming lost the importance placed on it in the original LNs, Prospera grabbing Miorine’s face, or how much I fucking hate Minmay (so much) I’m going to be talking at you about the visual novels I read this year.

THE BIG LIST OF VISUAL NOVELS I READ THIS YEAR:

Umineko No Naku Koro Ni

Full Metal Daemon Muramasa

Coquette Dragoon: Love is a Parasite

AI: The Somnium Files

VA-11 Hall-A (Reread)

Heaven Will Be Mine (Reread)

Can you guess what all these stories have in common? That’s right. Today’s article is all about

VISUAL NOVELS I READ THIS YEAR WITH MAIN CHARACTERS WHO ARE PERVERTS WHERE THAT’S ACTUALLY A REALLY IMPORTANT PART OF THEIR CHARACTERIZATION IN MULTIPLE WAYS AND NOT JUST AN EXCUSE TO HAVE THEM PUT IN SITUATIONS WITH SCANTILY-CLAD GIRLS AND YOU ONLY FIND THAT OUT AFTER HOURS OF PLAY TIME BUT ITS WORTH IT NO TRUST ME WHERE ARE YOU GOING PLEASE COME BACK (or; But once you recognize the secret reason for her exposure, you will feel ashamed of your words & deeds.)

Presented mostly in increasing order of desperation to convince you that no, you have to believe me, it’s actually really relevant ok???

Heavy spoilers ahead, as well as content warnings for discussion of rape, incest, and a whole bunch of other objectionable stuff that I apparently found it worth wading through.

HEAVEN WILL BE MINE

Protagonists: Bratty Saturn, Old Tired Horse Luna-Terra, MILF-Coded Pluto

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: Saturn gets off on having her mech crushed, stabbed, and shot in the neck; Pluto balances love and the desire to cause pain; Luna-Terra is a leatherwoman and has an absolutely wild relationship with her boss. That said, if you gave this to somebody who wasn’t queer and couldn’t read between the lines, it would just be a story about mech war in space (certain CGs aside).

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: Heaven Will Be Mine is a game about how mecha combat and gay sex are the same thing, and also how great both those things are as mediums for intimate connection.

Test Pilot Saturn dares psychic prodigy Pluto, who’s always holding back, to unleash her full power and fight her as hard as she can. Sometimes a girl just wants to get hit!

Just because we never see penetration on screen doesn’t mean that certain things aren’t obvious to anybody who can read the subtext: Saturn keeps getting her mech, which is wired into her senses, hit/shot/crushed and always gets really happy whenever it happens; Pluto really wants to wreck her ex but won’t do it unless she asks for it; Luna-Terra, shackled to Earth by her chain of command, wears Memorial Foundation-mandated bondage gear. I could talk about that last one and her deal forever but instead you can just read and comment and leave kudos on and bookmark my manifesto about how incredibly sexually compelling it is here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37263772/chapters/92975275

Heaven Will Be Mine is also an examination of stances on queer assimilationism and the contexts that shape them (if you paid enough attention to the game, that’s enough to tell you which faction has my heart). The victory condition is whatever happens when all three of the pilots stick together: sex/combat/communication are ways to move forward to whatever future they decide on.

But sexuality/connection/opening a rival’s cockpit up isn’t a good thing in and of itself. The Directors and Halimede, 2.5 of whom were sexually involved with one of the main three pilots, make the failure states clear: opening yourself up for people more powerful than you who only care about your body, or who care about their dream more than they care about you, or who you voluntarily ablate yourself for, or even just who want what they think is best for you if what they want is unhealthy enough, can get you remolded into something you don’t have input over.

VA-11 Hall-A

Protagonist: Jill Stingray, bartender at a tender bar

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: woman noticing other women’s bodies, thinks about sex a lot, has a pink shirt with SLUT on it hanging in her apartment. Jill is bisexual but prefers women. Male gaze filtered through a woman’s eyes;

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: Otheredness. VA-11 Hall-A has roots in imageboard culture (just look at Danger/u/) – and back in the day, a huge part of that culture was being really into girls and shipping them together like BL fans shipping guys. Jill looks at the girls she bartends for as special in the same way as the game’s presumed player, as othered from them and longing for them, sexually and/or otherwise. It’s not a coincidence that both jaded jackass Ingram and Jill spend nights with Dorothy where she’s specifically providing non-sexual emotional companionship; they both need a kind of intimacy that neither would be able to accept from a guy.

Jill’s perspective can be titillating, sure, but the tangible love VA-11 Hall-A was written with makes it clear that its missteps come from naivety, not ill intent. One of the money-based thresholds she needs to meet is for a porn subscription; fail and Jill will spend the next day idly thinking about actors’ bodies instead of focusing on her job – but that’s a natural consequence, not a moral judgement. Sex doesn’t make her, or anyone else, impure, and fantasizing about your clients and co-workers is fine as long as you aren’t being a Donovan D Dawson and sexually harassing people.

Attraction between women in VA-11 Hall-A is weird, yeah, but not in a hateful way. It's not an accident that so many people with non-standard relationships to womanhood (trans, non-binary, various flavors of woman-identifying with various flavors of attraction to women) have been associated with the particular cultures around anime, with their specific pedestalizations of women. N1RV Ann-A can simmer for as long as it needs while Fer figures things out. Whatever self-understanding they arrive at will make their next game the better for it.

COQUETTE DRAGOON

Protagonist: Xiomara Rosales, pilot of the titular Coquette Dragoon

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: Xio gets off on being treated like a child, and also on peeing herself.

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: Coquette Dragoon is a game about agency and feeling like filth and dehumanization by the vast grinding cogs of bureaucracy and war. It’s not hard to understand why being given a girlhood without agency would appeal to a trans character; incontinence is deeply tied to loss of control/agency. By signing up with the Lilac military, Xio trades her morals and independence for an escape from poverty and a mech. The really interesting thing here is her own interactions with the shame she feels, and not just for killing people for money: not knowing which non-vacuum-sealed food to order is humiliating, and having a room to herself for the first time in her life just leaves her ashamed of not decorating it. She’s not ashamed of her mech, though, just how much she likes it – the power to kill is a heady drug.

Compare Xio and her shame complexes to those of the other character into wetting herself: unabashed little pervert creature Lady Bell-Chime Katzbalger, bastard daughter of a weapons manufacturer on the other side of the war, who carries her stuffed animal everywhere, writes incest rpf about her best friend’s boss and her daughter, and publishes purin pudding tf doujinshi (dear reader, I know you know what those words mean) – but who never talks about her home life, the fact that a genetic disorder has left her incapable of eating solid food, or the nobility loudly whispering about her behind her back.

And here, after Coquette Dragoon, we get to the games with male protagonists. There’s nothing inherently objectifying about having a male point of view character but boy does “it’s ok when girls do it” make for more recommendable fiction.

UMINEKO NO NAKU KORO NI

Protagonist: Battler Ushiromiya, The Guy Who On Seeing His Cousin For The First Time In Six Years Immediately Asks If He Can Grope Her, Who Remarks That His Aunt Has A Woman’s Charms, And Tells His Ten Year Old Cousin To Promise That He’ll Be Able To Feel Her Up Once She Hits Puberty

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: You read that last phrase, right? If that wasn’t enough for you, there’re sexually-charged torture sequences.

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: Once you finish this two Les Miserables long behemoth and then read the Confession Of The Golden Witch chapters in the manga you will feel ashamed of your words and deeds.

Okay so the story goes to pains to point out that Battler is being awful from the beginning; after he tries to pull his shit on Jessica she tells him that his dick hasn’t grown at all, elderly housekeeper Kumasawa harasses him and everybody laughs, and then, when he tries to grope Kinzo’s servant Shannon, he’s legitimately shocked and upset when she doesn’t stop him, implying she’s been a victim of sexual assault by Kinzo.

Wow! You might think. The author sure wants to portray this guy as a horny idiot. That’s not really enough of a reason to make him so sex-obsessed though. And it isn’t!

Shortly thereafter Umineko reveals what it’s actually about: Japanese family norms enabling horrific intergenerational trauma as victims take all their pain and hatred out on those weaker than them.

(and then the murders start.)

(and then the magic meta-world reveals itself.)

Battler then goes on to be tortured and humiliated by the “blonde and bouncy is best” witch Beatrice, her servants, a set of seven penetration-loving sisters in identical slutty little outfits, leashed with a chain, stripped naked and treated as furniture, etc etc.

Wow! You might think. The author sure does love femdom!

And then we get magic battles and mystery-solving and intergenerational cycles of abuse and “wow! What the fuck is wrong with Battler” falls by the wayside.

…

HEAVY HEAVY SPOILERS AHEAD

Four and a half Mobys-Dick into the five-plus Moby Dick visual novel, the reader has been shown an awful lot of suffering Ushiromiya women: Eva, smartest of family head Kinzo’s children, whose father forbid her from attending college and whose excessively anime skill in martial arts stems from a deep-seated complex around the comparative weakness of her female body; Rosa, who endured years and years of horrific abuse from her father and siblings, and who now takes all that pain out on her ten-year-old daughter by hitting her just as she herself was hit, convinced that Maria is the reason men don’t want her; Natsuhi, who was forcibly married in to seal a business deal, whose inability to bear children (before Jessica’s conception) alone left her near-suicidal for years, and whose husband’s status as the heir has left her the target of vicious harassment by the other Ushiromiya women; Kyrie, for whom marriage into the Ushiromiyas was an escape from an even worse family, and who would kill with a smile on her face for love; 18 year old Jessica, who goes by Jessie at school and delivers a heartbreaking lecture about how having even one place where she can be herself means she can last through absolutely everything else at home; ten-year-old Maria, who turns to magic as a coping mechanism for her mother beating and screaming at her; and Ange, who was left at home because she was sickly and spends the next twelve years wishing for her older brother Battler to come home to her. Every single one has something to tell us about the culprit, and so, by the time we finally get the culprit’s backstory and motives, it doesn’t seem so outlandish or contrived.

It's a very Revolutionary Girl Utena style of character development via foiling: Tsuwabuki informs Miki informs Saionji informs Touga informs Akio.

Five or so Moby-Dicks in, critical clues to the culprit’s identity and backstory are finally revealed: Kinzo, the Ushiromiya family patriarch, raped the daughter he’d had with his secret mistress. When that daughter’s (male) child fell off a cliff, his servants rescued the child in secret, performed genital reconstructive surgery on the damaged portions of that child’s body and raised her in the image of her mother so that their master would have somebody to apologize to.

That child, raised among cruel servants years older than them on the Ushiromiya family island, dreaming of magic and reading mysteries, fell in love with Battler when he and his family attended yearly family meetings. (Maria: special interest as coping mechanism; Rosa: abused woman convinced a man will save her). He promised to take her away from the island and then forgot about it (they were both like twelve) – but she convinced herself that she’d get married and have his children and have the kind of family together that she so desperately wanted. (Ange: years of praying for Battler to come home; Kyrie: Love as escape and as something worth killing for, when you have nothing else.)

Upset at her body’s failure to develop into a woman’s, and feeling that that was why Battler hadn’t returned for her, that girl thought she’d be able to cut off her emotions and give up on him by starting to disguise herself as a boy. (Natsuhi: failure of her body to do the things she felt a woman’s body should do; Eva: a woman longing for the perceived strength and emotional deadness of masculinity; Jessica: compartmentalizing makes everything fine)

Pretending to be a boy doesn’t give her the emotional deadening she wants. She discovers that she’s bisexual when she falls in love with Battler’s cousin Jessica; Jessica herself develops a crush on the waifish and gloomy boy who she thinks has just been hired as a new servant. A third Ushiromiya cousin, George, falls in love with her as a girl, and she starts to return his affections, making it impossible for her to boymode fulltime without losing somebody else she cares about.

When the culprit solves the puzzle Kinzo has laid out for her (his original mistress loved mysteries) and learns her whole history, she has to contend with the fact that everything about her – her body, her love of mystery novels, her upbringing on the island – was deliberately controlled and seeded to make her into somebody Kinzo could believe was his daughter returned to him in his dying confusion. Worse,

[I was shuddering with disgust.]

All three people she’s hopelessly in love with, who could save her and take her away from her miserable life on the island, are her cousins.

And yet she can’t bring herself to stop being in love with them. She has nothing else good in her life! Moving forward would mean hiding this from them – and hiding her body from them – and, to her, replicating Kinzo’s incest-rape.

And this is why, when she writes the first two parts of Umineko, she portrays Battler as an incestuous horny creep. How could he be anything else for wanting something as disgusting as her? Of course Jessica and George are shown as ridiculously blithe; neither has noticed that they’ve fallen for her worksonas – but it’s Battler she loved first, and Battler who the witch Beatrice loves torturing most, and who she wants to unmask and kill her.

And once you know this, other pieces start falling into place. “Shannon”, the culprit’s work name while dressed as a maid, is so cartoonishly well-endowed because she’d been stuffing her shirt the whole time, insecure about her body not developing in the ways she’d wanted it to. Shannon is also oblivious as a parody of the perfect stereotypical girl that the culprit hates herself for not being able to embody. “Kanon”, her work name while disguised as a boy, is so bitter and depressed because he’s a way for her to act out her feelings of self-hatred. The Seven Stakes are dressed like that because she was deliriously horny and repressed and Battler gets penetrated by stakes repeatedly because that’s what he wants, isn’t it? Someone who should have had a dick. And so on and so forth.

…That cis Natsuhi’s years of depression and near-suicide over not being able to have a child are compared to the culprit’s despair over her inability to get pregnant and have the family she’d always wanted is an incredible act of compassion.

SOUKOU AKKI MURAMASA

Protagonist: Minato Kageaki, Guy Who Can’t Stop Apologizing Even (Especially) When He Kills You

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: This is a Nitroplus game, with the level of gross and awful that entails. Partway through the first act, a teen is forced to rape another teen at swordpoint. Every single sex scene that isn’t outright rape, Kageaki’s included, is about the defilement of purity. A monk rapes the daughter of his dead best friend on stage; a father watches his daughter get raped by a bunch of racing executives for funding; a woman is raped and beaten to death. This game is trying to make a point as hard as it possibly can, and because of that point it can be deeply unpleasant to read.

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: I’ll get there eventually, okay? Full Metal Daemon Muramasa has a very simple moral: Killing people is bad. No, it doesn’t matter how hopped up on honor, nationalism, or justice you are, how much you’re suffering, or how incredibly cool killing people is (Narahara Ittetsu believes the coolest thing in the world is when two people walk toward each other with their swords raised incredibly slowly while he explains in detail and with diagrams the histories of their respective schools of swordsmanship and the techniques they might both use, and he’s so fucking right. It is the coolest thing imaginable). Murder is a hideous and indefensible act; every life you take will fill you with life-ruining guilt and you should celebrate that, because if you ever stop feeling that guilt you will have become monstrous.

Muramasa is very very interested in the coolest possible things because the more of them it can dangle in front of you the easier it gets to justify murder – and at the end of the game, Kageaki is forced to admit that, despite all his apologizing and weeping, he really does just love killing people.

Minato Kageaki and his mech/giant spider/elf waifu Uemon-no-Jo Muramasa the Third are hunting down Minato’s sister Hikaru and her mech Ginseigo, who are committing seemingly random acts of terrorism throughout Japan. They are bound together by the Law of Balance, a principle forged to bring an end to war by an elf who had a revelation about subjectivity: peace can only come when people understand the true impact of death and value the lives of their enemies. The Law of Balance decrees that for every ‘evil’ person killed, they must also kill someone they deem ‘good’, ensuring in theory that they will never treat death lightly.

Each heroine, in Fate/stay night tradition, maps to a solution to the problem of violence.

Hero of Justice Ichijou Ayane’s response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is “Do you fucking know what evil is? When that monk raped that girl on stage, that was evil. Trying to obscure the pain he caused is cowardice. I’m going to kill him.” And then she kills him.

A few days later, she reads about his death in the newspaper and vomits as the magnitude of what she’s done sinks in. She has sex with Kageaki to wash the taste of death out of her mouth.

It’s not good sex. Kageaki is horrifically rough, and his internal monologue goes on and on about how he hates himself for how much he loves sullying her purity and using her to get off – but Ichijou herself feels she needs to be punished for killing that rapist, even though she doesn’t regret it.

And then afterward, in a visual novel full of gross awful graphic sex-as-defilement-of-purity… she’s fine. She’s not treated as disgusting or corrupted or a porn character, even if she needs to feel like one for a scene. She asks to have sex and doesn’t regret it, and she stays her unbreakable self.

Eventually that monk’s servant catches up with her and confronts her with the harm she’s caused; even killing ‘absolute evil’ causes harm. The universe is trying its hardest to force her to admit that killing people is bad: he forces the fetus his sister miscarried after they were thrown out onto the street and starved because their patron died into her mouth… and she chokes it down and accepts responsibility for the suffering she’s caused without ever regretting killing that monster. That servant is just another person she needs to save and protect.

And in keeping with this… Kageaki never really manages to prove her wrong, even when she kills him at the end of her route. True evil is something you know when you see it, and rapists and child-killers deserve to die.

Noblewoman Otori Kanae’s response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is “Of course. All those who kill are killed; that’s what justice is. That’s what the nobility’s endless blood feuds are for; to kill each other and protect the interests of the common people by killing the corrupt in the process. Also murder is fun.”

She just accepts the cycles of trauma and violence. It’s a scathing indictment of traditionalism in a story that loves traditional Japanese culture. But Kageaki begs her to kill him for his crimes, and that opens something in her twisted heart. Their sex scene is the only time anybody ever exerts any kind of control over Kageaki in bed, and he’s deeply uncomfortable until he manages to turn it into more standard Muramasa “oh I’m defiling her she was so pure and now she’s all fucked up I am so bad I am so evil”. One of the ‘good’ people Kageaki has had to kill was secretly one of her relatives, and she eventually kills him; one of the people she killed on her mission for the Western powers occupying Japan was his father, so she lets him eventually kill her. Neither regrets it, and so her solution is validated – it is the solution on the macro level in which the least number of lives are lost, although the story doesn’t shy away from declaring it morally repugnant.

General Ashikaga Chachamaru’s response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is “Violence for violence is the way of beasts and beasts is all we are. I am in pain and I make the choice to hold my trauma supreme.” An alien god is constantly screaming in her mind and she commits atrocity after atrocity trying to kill it.

But when she makes the choice to say “my pain is bad enough that I will do anything to stop it”, she’s also declaring that other people’s lives and agency mean nothing to her. She mind-controls Kageaki into helping her with her plan, and, it’s suggested, into dragging her aside after a meeting with the shogunate and borderline-raping her. Sex, for her, is both a way to block out the constant screams and a way to pity herself more. Playing along and serving as her weapon is a dead end.

Minato Hikaru’s response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is “the world is awful. Violence is the only way for me to break the world’s intolerable laws, and I will kill every single other human being on Earth without ever considering any of them evil to get what I want before I die.” This is the one unacceptable answer for Kageaki, both because her mech hits hard enough to rearrange coastlines and kills corresponding numbers of people and because what she wants is for him to have sex with her. When he does kill her after truly understanding her, he doesn’t need to satisfy the Law of Balance because years of tending to her through her chronic illness and caring for her as his sister, not a lover, mean he knows exactly how hideous and horrific it is to end her life. He’s killed somebody both ‘good’ and ‘evil’ with a single swing – which is incredibly cool, in yet another temptation to the viewer to decide that maybe violence might be good actually.

Mech Elf Muramasa gets treated like a tool by Kageaki, trying to erase her culpability in the deaths they’re both causing. Her response to “everyone thinks they are good and their enemies are evil and so war will continue forever” is the Law of Balance: peace can only come when people understand the true impact of death and value the lives of their enemies. Therefore, for every ‘evil’ person killed, you must also kill someone you deem ‘good’, ensuring in theory that you will never treat death lightly.

But when she does get treated like a person? When Kageaki erases himself and lets her control him, instead of being the one in charge of her, so they can attain true unity of mind and defeat his sister? Love breaks her resolve, and she’s willing to bend the Law of Balance and stand by a monster. Her second H scene is the closest thing to “nice” sex in the entire visual novel; Kageaki teases her instead of dragging out her insecurities – but this sex is ultimately what corrupts her, because she leaves her morals behind to follow the man she loves straight off the edge of the slippery slope.

There’s one other interesting use of sex in Soukou Akki Muramasa, and it has to do with Kageaki himself, traditionalism, and committing wrongs to stop other wrongs. It’s never stated directly, and needs to be inferred, but in order to maintain the bloodline in charge of guarding the forbidden sealed mechs, Kageaki’s mother, Subaru Minato, drugged her ten-year-old son and raped him. This is what kicks off the chain of events that lead Hikaru to try destroying the entire world, and why Kageaki is so brutal in bed – his fundamental ideas about what sex is were irreparably damaged by the woman who should have been keeping him safe. You can draw a line from Revolutionary Girl Utena through Tsukihime, Fate, and Umineko, where the fundamental wrong at the heart of the world is rape, often incestuous – and Kageaki is the first male entrant in that line I can think of.

He’s a guy for a very specific reason: because that makes it a lot harder to say “oh he’s not culpable”.

AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES

Protagonist: Date Kaname, Weird Pervert

Difficulty Of Recommendation Due To Sexual Deviation: Guy just cannot shut up about pussy (although, amusingly enough, he met his best friend, who was canonically in a sexual relationship with a man, in a gay bar. Why was he in there? Oh you know)

No It’s Really Thematically Important Trust Me: It’s not. He’s just like that.

Yeah this was fine in the moment (loved to see the culprit in Boss’s body) but the child abuse plot line and also almost everything else it’s trying are so much weaker than Umineko. Also I can’t fucking stand Tesa or her fucking patty cake song thing. Ugh.

[otome-mondays]

Piofiore: Fated Memories Review 🔫

(Ignore the fact that’s a water gun ty)

Another one I’m late to reviewing, but also another one I finished years ago. I first started this while in the middle of Collar x Malice and at the end of my senior year of high school. I finished this one shortly after graduating. Now this game is very rough so if you are triggered by violence, mafia, graphic descriptions of torture, drug abuse, human trafficking, suicide, and catholicism, please put yourself first and don’t play this game. I’d also recommend looking up a full list in case I have missed anything. Also, as with all of my reviews, these are my own opinions about the game. You may agree with me, you may not. I’m open to discussions but please be respectful! This review will contain general game spoilers, as well as spoilers for the secret route.

Piofiore takes place in 1925 Italy, in the small fictional town of Burlone. Burlone is run basically by the mafia, split up into 4 parts. There are 3 different mafia within the town, who each control a district, and then there’s a neutral fourth district. The Falce district is run by the older and more traditional Falzone mafia, the Creta district is run by the younger Italiant mafia the Visconti, and the Veleno district is run by a faction of the Chinese Lao-Shu mafia. We play as Liliana Adornato, an orphan raised in the Catholic Church by the nuns. Lili lives a very simple life and enjoys it, not really leaving the neutral district unless with members of the church. That is until all of the sudden she gets targeted by the mafias and now we start the game. This seems kind of early, and to be fair I did skip a lot of the prologue details for a few reasons. One, the prologue changes more as you complete more routes. It expands and gets longer and adds more choices. Two, the prologue is honestly a little long and boring to me. It’s only two chapters long if I’m remembering correctly, but it was ridiculously painful for me to get through after the first time. You are introduced to all the known love interests during the prologue though, and your answers to questions determine which route you are playing. Most routes are locked at the start and I had very minimal info on a definitive route order, so I decided to specifically follow the one on Otome Kitten’s review. Like my last review, I’m going to go in order I played.

Spoilers Ahead

Nicola Francesca ☕️

First up we have Nicola, the underboss of the Falzone mafia family. Underboss basically means second in command, and he definitely fits the roll. Nicola’s route honestly served as the perfect introductory route to this game. We get to learn about many different terms and explanations as to what the mafia are doing without giving an information overload. We also see how the mafias work within the city of Burlone and have some minimal exploration of the world of Piofiore. I have seen very mixed opinions on this route, but Nicola’s routes was one of my favorites in the game. Nicola is also one of the few consistently written characters and it makes me enjoy him as a character even more. So in Piofiore, every route has 3 big endings: best, good, and tragic. Unlike Collar x Malice, you’ll generally know what route your on because you can get completely different chapters and some are shorter than others. The best and good endings here are great and really give a nice wrap up to Nicola’s route! They’re more on the lighthearted sides which helps ease you into the game. Meanwhile the tragic ending…the writing it great but oh boy is this ending twisted. Bit of a spoiler but warning, this is a yandere end. Now, most the tragic endings are very jarring and twisted, so if you don’t like that don’t read them (but also you really shouldn’t be playing this game if that’s the case). This isn’t even anywhere close to being the worst tragic ending in terms of twisted-ness, so brace yourself for the next ones. This route gets an 8/10 for me!

Yang 🐼

Congratulations everybody, we’ve made it to the incredibly twisted route. Do you like trash characters who don’t pretend to be morally correct? Then Yang is gonna be your guy! So Yang here is in charge of the Lao-Shu, which are typically the antagonists of the routes. He’s the one that basically pushes the story into motion too, having the Lao-Shu abduct Lili at the start of every route. In this route, he’s successful and keeps Lili with him in the Lao-Shu. I don’t know why I keep feeling the need to bring this up, but if you are looking for any cute romance stories this is not the game and this is definitely not that route. Yang’s route honestly probably has the best writing for both characters and story, and it makes a very interesting playthrough. All of Yang’s endings are also very interesting and Lili behaves differently as a character throughout them too. It’s interesting to see all the sides of Yang and because of this he’s my favorite character based purely on writing. Now as an actual love interest, my god I hate him. But I would 1000% replay this route and enjoy it. 9.5/10

Dante Falzone ✝️

Welcome to the long route…buckle up this one takes a bit. Dante is the boss of the Falzone family, and unfortunately very boring to me at least. At this point in me playing the game, I genuinely don’t have any problems with him other than he’s just kinda bland to me. Dante is a very straightforward and straight-laced man, and is an extremely devout Catholic who follows his beliefs better than most people I know irl who fall into any Christian denominations. Other than besides, ya know, murdering people and doing criminal stuff with the mafia. Anyways, Dante’s route has a lot of lore! A lot of lote that basically becomes meaningless outside of this route. Unfortunately for Dante, his endings didn’t stand out as much compared to others in this game. His best ending is a pretty basic happy ending, his tragic ending is another basic sad ending. As for the good ending? I genuinely do not remember it and I’m not going back to re-read it. Now for most of the good endings I have had to go back to look at the CGs to try to remember what happened and even doing that for Dante didn’t jog my memory so idk what happened there. At the end of Dante’s route, he’s left still an ok basic character. Unfortunately for him it won’t stay that way by the end of the game. 7/10

Orlok 🗡️

Oh boy here it is, the saddest route in the game. Orlok easily was my favorite and I was so excited for his route. Orlok is a very mysterious character seeing as he isn’t in any mafia family, but rather working as an assassin for the church. And oh boy, he has so much religious trauma. The church tends to shove most of their dirty work onto him and any unlucky soul forced into this position. His route makes me so mad, because while there is great writing and even minimally talks about having to balance religious trauma with spirituality, lots of characters are just butchered for the sake of angst. And not in a good way. Dante and Gil specifically are like 2 entirely different characters who are both incredibly stupid and way more aggressive than before…which is saying something. The best and good endings give Orlok and Lili some peace, but the tragic endings is one of the most brutal endings. I hated reading it too because of how it just shouldn’t of happened if we kept the proper characterizations of the others. Nicola’s the only one who doesn’t get his character assassinated. 8/10

Gil Redford 🥃

Need something to cheer you up after Orlok? Well, it’s a good thing we’re on Gil’s route! This route is surprisingly more easy-going than most of the other routes. Gil here is the leader of the Visconti, but he’s very friendly with all the citizens of Burlone regardless of their district. He’s really easy-going too, and I felt like he was the only one to really see Lili as a person rather than a target of the mafia. After Orlok’s route, I thought I’d hate him like I hate Dante, but he proved to have an actually entertaining and good route that redeemed him. His route also is nearly perfect, but because of the supposed need of a Finale we get some more “this would never happen” crap. Unfortunately I don’t remember his good ending, but his best ending and tragic ending were great! 9/10

Spoilers Below!

Finale 💶

The secret final boss, the finale route! This one functions a bit differently than the others. This route is also longer than the rest like Dante’s, and it was even less necessary! Unlike the other routes, this one has 2 major endings: Finale end and Henri end. Let’s start with the good one. The finale ending is very unique because it’s not a romantic one! This one rather ties up loose ends and solves the biggest mystery about wants going on in Burlone and who is orchestrating everything. Genuinely a good ending and if anything, could be considered the true ending. 8/10. Now the bad. Henri on the other hand…oh boy. Sorry to any Henri fans, but I hate this guy. Henri is the biggest man-child I have ever seen in a romance based game that I’ve played. That is really bad. Instead of doing any work on his trauma, he just blames everybody else for anything and everything bad that happens to it. It’s never his fault. The dude actively does bad things and throws a whole fit when bad things happen because of that. Maybe I’d understand it more if he wasn’t in his 30s! Even Yang would be a healthier partner than Henri at this point and that’s saying something. Literally 1/10 I hate this so much.

Overall Thoughts 🔫

Believe it or not I did enjoy this game, but it is definitely not for everybody! I am still upset years later about how Orlok’s route was handled and the fact Henri is even a part of the game. There’s bonus post-route stories for both the best endings and tragic endings, and Henri gets his own as well. The good ending ones specifically set up Piofiore: Episodio 1926 (which when I was playing had yet to be localized). As for a route order, I do recommend Nicola -> Yang -> Dante -> Orlok -> Gil -> Finale. At minimum play Dante’s route before Orlok’s because I feel Orlok’s route ruins Dante. This also follows the least to greatest lore drops and developing lore as you go along. Even with its issues, I do recommend this game for anybody who can handle it. 8/10

EDIT: I decided to add in my rankings for LIs and routes to my reviews!

Route: Yang > Gil > Orlok > Nicola > Finale > Dante >Henri

LIs: Orlok > Nicola > Gil > Yang > Dante > Henri

Resources 📝

I went and took pictures of the CGs use above, but I also got my walkthroughs from Otome Kitten. I also interacted with the otomegames subreddit for thoughts on the game.

[kirsdoesstuff]

I might as well say how I learned about TWST and my journey through it so far with my thoughts. Slight spoilers ahead for the following a bit not much.

So to point it out, I learned about it before it’s release in eng on TikTok. I forget who’s video it was but it was like a year prior with the magical archives. I always loved some of the villains concepts as a kid, so this had me excited.

I followed the count down and the website, the pre order/downloads rewards were pretty good and they added more since the goals got hit so fast. Very interested in the fact that I was only taller than one of our main cast (Ortho).

When it came time to pick a hand, I picked Malleus. Maleficent was one of my favourite villains growing up. I don’t regret picking him to start, his CR (ceremonial robes) SR is still on my main team due to strength and Birthday Azul’s duo magic.

The free SSR I didn’t really have much preference, ended up going with Jack and he’s also a main on my team. He’s max on both spells, 2/3 friendships and close to his current max level 88/90. Currently still recovering the expenses in game, but I saved plenty beforehand.

I’ll be honest, I crush on Leona. I see the first years as kids and the second years. Most are taller than me, but I’m gonna be 20 in October so they kids. I totally first was into Malleus and Idia at first, but then book 6 in jp kinda changed things to me personally. Before it I totally would listen to the voice lines and the growl in Leona’s voice already had me. So it switched to being Malleus and Leona rather easily.

As sorta said earlier, I do look up translations for the main story mostly, haven’t looked up the full part 1 of 7 yet though. Most of my experience has been with the eng server, there are events I’m looking forward to for various reasons whether cute or Malleus in a mask (arms on show).

The eng translations in the official game have been, interesting to say the least. Cater got all those hashtags and social media language. Idia saying all his internet slang and the bunch. Epel is fine, he’s a country boy saying country things.

There’d be a lot I’d personally do if I were actually Yuu in there. Might be tempted to do what Ace did to the other Overblots. Not everyone, but a good punch on Jamil and Vil. Perhaps a slap to Leona and someone would need to hold me back from Idia in book 6. Kidnapping already traumatized ppl who were in therapy and starting to work. Plus you took the annoying but kinda lovable flame cat like monster and destroyed the dorm.

I like most of the fandom and try my best to interact. Of course I’ve seen a few accounts that were great on other platforms and then it started to have issues. I just hope most people remember this is an all boys high school.

When it’s ships, there’s plenty of cute ones and ones that make some sense. AppleJack and AppleJuice are pretty cute. ADeuce is a great team over time and plenty holding the other accountable when it counts. As long as it’s not illegal, uncomfy or I really don’t like it for whatever reason. I’m generally fine with the ships, that goes for most things tbh. Cuddles and kisses are typical safe things for all. NSFW is for 18+ characters.

Been a while since I made one, but on TikTok I have a little series of my honest opinions on characters from TWST with numbers to each one so a random number generator can pick who. I don’t have any RSA characters in it, but the staff and Grim are there. So 28 total there in that list and I’ve done 3 total (Deuce, Grim and silver).

I definitely recommend TWST when I’m talking to people about it, of course I warn that you have to pull for characters.

I do my best to use my Genshin pull luck, but I will admit I’ve spent money on this game and not the other. I spent like $40CAD trying to get Fairy Gala Leona. I’ve currently saved up some 10 pull keys for birthday Malleus. I only have Cater, Azul, Ruggie and Lilia for the birthday cards so far. I do the monthly card.

I think I’ll leave this here though, I’ll be sure to share what other item I preordered from AmiAmi in April.

Though enjoy the wallpaper edits, top for tablets and bottom for phones more. I post these on wit too.

Otherwise, what did you think about the game at first?

Edit: added a read more line

[thetrueshan-blog]

My long winded thoughts on TOTK, aka I just beat the game so let me write this up

Just a fair warning this will include full spoilers for TOTK. You have been warned. What lies below are some of my rambling (long winded) thoughts I collected after beating TOTK for the first time. Some would be stretched to call this a review. I personally would just prefer to call this as my own ramblings I can refer back to in a digital sense. I’m trying to in corporate a lot of my thoughts into this piece, but as I am writing it I am finding it harder and harder to talk about everything. So I will probably leave something out on accident and I apologize for that. Again: Warning if you want to avoid any spoilers don’t read past this point.

Also just gonna apologize right now for the length of this one. I had a lot to talk about, but had to cut some stuff out and even then this is an extremely long post.

Table of contents:

0. Intro: we gotta start somewhere 1. The Voice Acting Pre-ramble 2. The Tears of the kingdom (or in other words: the story) 3. The return of the rushed and unrewarding ending. 4. The Disconnect between BOTW and TOTK 5. List of complaints that were improved on (?). 6. Who knew Nuts and Bolts had good ideas? (Or the new powers in TOTK) 7. Rapid fire list of new things I liked 8. Conclusion

0. Intro: we gotta start somewhere

So, here we are. TOTK came out exactly 2 weeks ago from this post. And I just beat it. Took about 72 hours over 2 weeks. So, what do I think about TOTK? After all I was quite harsh on BOTW in my write up for BOTW on May 5th. And it has been three weeks since I posted that write up. So how did TOTK live up to my expectations?

Well, I’m not gonna beat around the bush. I loved TOTK. It’s not a perfect game, and shares a fair amount of flaws from BOTW. But I had an absolute blast playing through TOTK.

I mentioned in my last write up that I don’t like to give out numbered reviews. That’s mostly because I tend to flip flop my scores around. It’s kinda one of those things that the score I give for something really depends on how I feel that day. But if I could retroactively give BOTW a numbered score, it would be a 6/10. It’s not a bad time overall. But there’s a lot of room for improvement since it can be quite rough.

So what about TOTK? What score would I give that game? I’m thinking an 8/10 right now. It’s almost a perfect game for me. But there’s some parts that are really rough. Plus it still shares some flaws from BOTW, and biggest for me of all is there is no post-game content. That last point also makes me want to give this game a 7/10. It’s that disappointing to me that once again we are not given a chance to explore a peaceful world that we helped to create. It’s so baffling to me that Nintendo thought that was a good idea again. Give me some rewards for beating the game, besides the petty star sticker next to my save profile. But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. Let me try to describe this game in a similar format to how I described BOTW.

1. The Voice Acting Pre-ramble

Yeah, the voice acting returns with a vengeance in this game. But I knew from my recent play time with BOTW that I couldn’t stand the EN voice acting and that would probably hurt my time with the game. So the moment I got the chance to (as in the first five seconds of hitting play on the game) I switched over to the JP voices. And, thank Hylia for that, I am so glad I did that. It massively improved my opinion of the game and the story moving forward. I think there’s a disconnect from how the EN VAs are trying to convey the characters and how the JP VAs do it. EN Zelda sounds like a pompous upper class princess that wants to be treated with respect but still doesn’t under stand why the lower classes of Hyrule may distrust her. Meanwhile JP Zelda sounds like an innocent girl told to take on the weight of the world and doesn’t quite know how to deal with that heavy burden.

I don’t know, this might just be my hate for the EN Voice acting coming out but I really just don’t like Zelda’s characterization in the EN side. It might some kind of cultural language barrier when trying to translate the game into English.

But enough about voice acting. I played TOTK with JP voices on the whole time and I enjoyed all the voices and thought they fit their characters nicely.

2. The Tears of the kingdom (or in other words: the story)

So, one of my biggest gripes of BOTW was the disjointed and lack luster story. The story focused on how Zelda failed to live up to the expectations thrown at her. Which is a tragic tale, yes. However it got very stale and eventually annoying when every single piece of the story linked back to this point. The main issue I had was that there was no major wrap up point for that tragic tale. Well until the end of the game that was. But then we see the conclusion for like a minute or so and then BOTW ends and tells you to play TOTK if you want more. So going into TOTK I had some very low expectations. And honestly that might have helped. Because TOTK’s story compared to BOTW is actually one I care about.

Alright warning again about story spoilers. Skip to next section if you don’t want to read this.

The first thing that happens in TOTK is that Ganondorf wakes up. Yes that Ganondorf. But a new version. His hatred and malice was spilling out creating the “great calamity” from BOTW. But in this game he wakes up and immediately attacks Link and Zelda. Shenanigans ensue: Link looses all hearts and stamina; Zelda falls down a pit (but time warps herself); Link looses his right arm; and the master sword is shattered. Basically starting from scratch all over again. I won’t do a full summary since I think that would take up like 2,000 words. And I kinda wanna spare my hands for doing that. But needless to say I already like this premise way better. There’s a definitive goal: Find Zelda. There’s a definitive villain: Defeat Ganon. And a decent explanation to why Link looses all upgrades from the first game. All in all a pretty great start to a game. But wait it gets better. Turns out this game has the seven sages. Yup, the seven sages from OOT. When I saw this I was so excited. It’s not exactly the same sages from OOT. But it’s the idea of seven sages helping Link to stop the great evil that is Ganondorf.

TOTK also starts by explaining who the Zonai are. Which were barely hinted at in BOTW. I don’t think I even mentioned the Zonai in my BOTW write up. But not only does TOTK explain stuff about the Zonai, it turns out the Zonai play a huge part of the story. Since the Zonai’s Secret Stones are the MacGuffin that gives who ever holds them great power, turning them into sages. But the stones only amplifies power already there. It’s not gonna awaken a new power in you all of a sudden. But there’s also one more note, don’t eat them. If you do you will become an immortal dragon and loose all sense of self. Which is a neat extra side note for lore purposes on explaining how the giant dragons like Farosh exist in hyrule.

So yeah, I massively enjoyed this setting way more than BOTW’s story. I don’t know if it’s because I already knew so much from BOTW that hearing new things in this story really ended up helping. But it certainly didn’t hurt.

3. The return of the rushed and unrewarding ending.

I kinda spoiled this earlier, but yeah the ending to TOTK is similar to BOTW’s. It ends, rolls credits, quick cutscene, and then reload back to the title screen where you can then reload your save file right before the final boss with a new star sticker icon next to it. I know this is a trend with Zelda games. Once the evil is vanished the story is no more. But with huge open world games like this, especially since I enjoyed the setting of TOTK more than BOTW, I think it’s a huge wasted potential to not reward the player by seeing the world in a peaceful state. Or to see how people react. What the next things would be like. Like imagine if the end of BOTW was to finish the shrines, koroks or whatever but along side that you start working with Zelda to establish a reconstruction of Hyrule. But that doesn’t happen in BOTW. Nor does it happen here in TOTK. There’s this kind of disconnect between the player and link about what happened in BOTW to TOTK.

Which speaking of...

4. The Disconnect between BOTW and TOTK

I know it’s a hard challenge to even build such huge games like BOTW and TOTK. But I am disappointed by some of the lack of continuity between these games. I wonder how much of the game actually depends on your save from BOTW and how much is a mirage. In BOTW you can help foster a new town called Tarrey Town. In TOTK, Tarrey Town exists and has expanded. But does this mean this action is because Link, being played by me, helped Tarrey Town? Or does this happen no matter what and Tarrey Town always exists? I think it’s the latter. And frankly I don’t blame Nintendo for not creating systems that check every little thing like that from BOTW to TOTK. But at the same time there are some other times that this “disconnect” irks me.

The main disconnect is a question that remained in my head the entire game. “Where are the guardians and divine beasts?” Like no seriously. Where are they? They’re just gone in TOTK. Did they get repurposed and destroyed? What happened to the sheikah towers? The only evidence I can even spot of the old sheikah stuff from BOTW in TOTK is the guardian that sits up on the Hateno Research lab. But that’s it. Maybe I missed some important diary log where this is explained. But I just couldn’t find a reason for this. Link probably knows what happened. But since he’s mute we don’t get to hear that side of things. Though I am definitely not trying to say that Link should have had voiced lines or anything. If anything I am really glad he doesn’t speak. But he just doesn’t communicate to us the players in any way.

And honestly that is something that is bugging me. With so many characters having so much dialogue and even some having voiced lines, it’s baffling to me that we know so little about Link himself. Link acts as an avatar for the player, until he doesn’t and does stuff on his own. Like we, the player(s), don’t know exactly what happened between BOTW and TOTK. But Link sure does. So there’s a weird disconnect there where you could draw a ven-diagram that showcases the difference in what Link knows and what we the Players know.

Like a good example of this is how Purah’s first appearance is treated in TOTK. To us the player it is a shock that the once child looking researcher now looks like a mid 20 something grad student. So the cut scene plays out to be a surprise to that fact. However the cut scene really just showcases how surprised Purah is to see Link is alive and well. Link isn’t shocked about her appearance and there’s no mention of it. But we as the player are vastly confused on why Purah looks like she aged very rapidly. And in my case I was trying to judge how big of a gap between BOTW and TOTK was* so when I saw Purah for the first time I was wondering if it had been like 15 years or so. But I found out later in a diary she hid that she aged herself up to 100 and then back down to 20 because she was sick and tired of being treated like a child. (*Side note: I think it’s somewhere between 5-10 years of a gap. Probably around 6 though. The only indication is the child of Hudson and Rhondson, Mattison being taken away to Geurdo town as she has reached the age of maturity. However Mattison didn’t exist in BOTW so it depends on when Rhondson got pregnant for the time gap. End of Side note)

Which wouldn’t be a problem if the info Link knew was also shared with us the player. I don’t know, maybe something like Link having a journal or something that we the player can read through as we journey along so we can keep up to date? Or maybe a journal left by Zelda as she’s trying to keep track of history for new history books? Something like that would have helped a lot with this issue. Especially when there’s something like Link’s house in BOTW in now Zelda’s house in TOTK. What happened there? Are they living together? Did Link give the house to Zelda? Did Link not buy the house but Zelda bought it? I don’t know, because the game won’t tell me anything except for the fact that this house is now Zelda’s.

But enough of this, let’s talk more game mechanics now.

5. List of complaints that were improved on (?).

Alright so for this next section I am going to refer to this list of complaints I had for BOTW in my previous write up:

   1. Durability system is wack. I get what they were going for, but it does seem weird that weapons can break so easily and fast.    2. Rain stops all exploring if you need to climb. It’s just not fun.    3. Combat feels slow and clunky. Never really got a hang of it.    4. No passive upgrades to anything except to health and stamina.    5. Dungeons are neat. But way too small and I wish the guardians didn’t speak during them. Just let me bask in a cool place nintendo. Stop talking my ear off.    6. Shrines all feel the same. Also randomly the walls aren’t climbable in shrines? Just put barriers to stop link from climbing on them.    7. No themes in shrines or dungeons. They all look the same. At least the music is different in the dungeons at least.    8. There is no way to see the durability of weapons until it is about to break.    9. You cannot get a full set of hearts and stamina. You will always be missing one. (this might have been fixed in the DLC?)    10. If an enemy can guard your attack then you can’t damage it until you break their stance. Even if they are facing away from you.    11. Koroks... so many koroks... but eh kind of a pro/con situation. Don’t need to worry about getting them all, but at the same time feels so boring getting them.    12. Blood moons. Freaking blood moons. They appear at the worst times.    13. Thunder blight fight. I have no idea why this one fight is so hard compared to the rest. Each blight and including the final boss I beat all on the first try. With thunder blight I died like 15-20 times on. It’s just tough as nails. You need to dodge instantly otherwise you get hit so badly. Like here’s a link to me beating it: click here. It’s by far the hardest boss in the game for me.    14. If something needs to re-charge (master sword, or guardian powers) it needs to fully deplete before re-charging. Which is a bit annoying.

So let’s see what I think about these in TOTK since TOTK is very similar to BOTW.

Immediately numbers 1-4 are basically the exact same. They are issues in both games. But number 5 is interesting. When I played TOTK there are 5 dungeons*. Which is 1 more than BOTW. But the difference is that while BOTW’s dungeons felt like big shrine puzzles. I would say TOTK dungeons feels like proper Zelda dungeons. Heck these are called “temples” in this game too. They might not be the greatest dungeons mind you, since they’re still pretty open and easy to complete. But there are some tougher puzzles and they feel much more Zelda like to me. (*Side note: though I don’t know if there’s another sixth dungeon since I didn’t complete the depths. If there was another one I would think it would be the “shadow temple. But I didn’t find any “shadow temple”, which might be in the depths(?) but honestly that’s a pure shot in the dark, hehe. End of side note)

Number 6 is also still true.

Number 7 is half no longer true. Shrines have the same music and look but are different from BOTW. Meanwhile the dungeons or Temples are very different in themes both visually and musically. They all incorporate some level of “Find X number of things to unlock the boss door”. But they at least look and sound different this time around. They also incorporate different music and you complete different parts of the temple.

Number 8 is still true.

Number 9 is something I can’t tell. The beginning of the game showed Link with a full set of hearts and stamina but that’s not something I know if you can also get in this game. I would assume so. But I have not done that yet so I can’t say for sure.

Number 10-12 are all still true.

Number 13. I had an easy time with all the bosses in BOTW except for thunderblight ganon. But in TOTK I can’t really say I faced the same hardships. Well except for the 2nd Master Kohga fight. But for main bosses I really didn’t have that much issue. That was until the final boss. Ganondorf third phase kicked my ass. But in a good way. It was still frustrating since it forced me to dodge perfectly and then parry to even damage him (which actually makes it a bit worse than thunderblight). But it was the final boss. So it was a nice challenge. (Side note: I found some cheese starts for Ganondorf. If he does a big two-handed attack that you avoid with the paraglider. Use bullet time and arrows on him. Does a decent amount of damage. In his second phase ignore the phantom Ganons. Just go for the big guy himself. In the third phase, try to pinch him near against a wall. When he backflips he doesn’t make a much a distance from you and him and you can get some easy hits in. It was the only way I was going to beat that third phase. End of side note)

And Number 14 is also still true.

So TOTK improved a few areas but it still has a lot of the issues of BOTW.

6. Who knew Nuts and Bolts had good ideas? (Or the new powers in TOTK)

Alright let’s get this one out of the way. Link has new powers in TOTK. I was thinking he would retain the old powers and get some new ones. But nope. He got a whole new bag of tricks of his sleeve this time. Which honestly is a bit shocking to me because I was thinking he was going to at least keep the bomb ability. But even that’s gone. What’s in it’s place is a new plant called a Bomb Flower you can pick up and store in your inventory to later fuse with. Which is really nice to see the bomb flower return in another Zelda game like this. But let’s talk abilities:

   1. Ultrahand: Basically the new magnesis of this game. This one is a bit weaker and can’t push stuff around as much, though it can rotate objects. However that’s not all it can do, because it can also attach objects together. This combined with the new Zonai devices creates the possibilities to create vehicles, automated battle bots, and basically anything you can come up with. It’s really the main crux of new exploration and puzzle solving for this game. And I really like it. Though it does raise the bar for how complex some of the puzzles can definitely be.

   2. Fuse: So this ability allows you to fuse basically any object to your sword or shield that you have equipped. Because of story reasons involved with Ganondorf’s Gloom, all weapons are now weaker. But you can fuse objects on top of other weapons to make them stronger. At first I didn’t use this ability that often. But as time went on I really saw the benefit to using something like this. At the end I was able to make really strong weapons out of boss materials to make weapons in the 30-60 damage range.

   3. Ascend: This ability allows you to ascend throw any solid surface above you that also has a solid surface above it. This allows for a lot of vertical movement.

   4. Recall: This ability allows you to rewind an object’s path up to a certain point. Think of this as TOTK’s version of stasis. But it move’s stuff backwards.

   5. Auto-build: This ability you don’t get in the tutorial area but have to go deep into the depths to obtain it. Basically it’s a recent history of your latest builds using “Ultrahand” or some schematics you have unlocked that you can build using either parts on the ground or by consuming a new resource called zonaite.

So yeah that’s the end of the new abilities. And I really like them. I was expecting the old power and some new ones but I didn’t expect only new ones.

7. Rapid fire list of new things I liked

Alright my stamina for finishing this rambling list of things I want to mention is dwindling so I’ll just rapid fire a numerical list of things I enjoyed.

   1. New sages abilities and they join you in fights after each temple. With the exception of maybe the last sage and Sidon’s abilities. I really enjoyed having the sages by my side as I jouneyed around Hyrule. Even if they got in my way.

   2. Lady Yona. Thank you Nintendo for bringing some new fish love. Honestly I love Lady Yona’s design. It’s so great. Her face is so wide yet so lovable. The fact that she’s also married to Sidon as well is great too. Though I will mention when I first saw Zora’s Domain I went back and forth so much about whether or not I liked where the story was going that I might have caused a small tornado in my apartment.

   3. Purah’s new design. I love it. And so does the internet.

   4. Zelda and Link seem to share way more of a bond in this game than they did in BOTW. So that definitely helps sell me on their romance. Since I definitely didn’t buy it in BOTW.

   5. Ganondorf’s design. Just a great evil tyrant that you want to stop and face against. Such a good villain.

   6. New house building was neat. You can now buy rooms and build a house yourself in anyway you want.

   7. Geoglyph memories. Honestly the memories in this game were so much better for me. Maybe because they all weren’t about how a girl is worried she is going to fail and you already know it. Honestly the big reveal from the memories was pretty shocking to me. I won’t say what it is here, but know I was pleasantly surprised by it. The Geoglyphes were also way easier to find in TOTK since you are given a map early on, if you go looking for it.

   8. Caves are neat and cool to explore through.

   9. The Depths are both a challenge (almost too much) and a sight to behold at times.

   10. The new sky layer of the map is giant as well, though sparse.

   11. TOTK is much more “Zelda Like”. It has bomb flowers. Like likes. Gibdos. It’s little things like  these that were missing from BOTW but make this game feel much more like a “Zelda” game to me.

8. Conclusion

So yeah. Lots of long ramblings. I know I complained a lot in this. But hopefully I still got the point across that I really enjoyed TOTK. It definitely isn’t my favorite Zelda of all time. But it’s definitely up there now. BOTW feels so much more like a prelude or tech demo to this game now. It still has charm to it, and playing it will definitely help you feel more attached in TOTK.

[codecicle]

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Hey, I'm Ashton B Codecicle Swagaythor! | he/they/it with no preference between them | audhd | minor | plural | normal about slimecicle | just some guy, please come talk to me ✌️ | more info under cut!

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[multiplayingorg]

Dead Space 2: NOPE NOPE NOPE NOPE

| Repost: Originally posted by Steve "Slurms" Lichtsinn on January 17, 2012

OH SHIT, OH SHIT, OH SHIT.... WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT THING? THE SHIT IS THAT!? BURN IT WITH FIRE!

If you know me at all, you know I buy a lot of games. You might also know that I almost never pay full price. Dark Souls and Star Wars: The Old Republic were the only games in 2011 that I did shell out top dollar for, everything else was picked up at some sort of a discount. Towards the end of the year, some of the games I bought on sale from Amazon came with promotional codes to get 5 bucks off certain games in January of this year. I didn’t really plan on using the codes seeing as they were only to be used one at a time and only on the top selling downloadable games from 2011. The list is comprised mainly of The Sims expansions and games I’ve already owned in one way or another. Oh well.

Then EA started dropping prices on a few titles on the list. Grand Theft Auto IV was the first. I’ve owned the game before, but never on the PC. The price dropped all the way to 5 dollars. After my promotional code was applied…it was free. I may never play the game, but it was free.

The same thing happened a week later, but with Dead Space 2. A game that had been getting a lot of talk on podcasts I listen to in regards to “great games from 2011.” I’m not much of a horror game type person, just as I’m not big on horror films, but again… it was free. Unlike GTA though, I figured I’d give Dead Space a shot.

I downloaded and installed the game, then attempted to play it. I immediately had an issue with the menu. For some reason if you have a device such as a flight stick or a keypad (like the Logitech G13 as was my case) it screws up the camera and makes the game unplayable. I unhooked the G13 and reinstalled the game (tried fixing it via the txt file, but it didn’t work) and then once that was done everything was hunky dory.

Since I hadn’t played the first Dead Space, I took the few minutes to watch the “Previously on Dead Space” video that was provided in the menu. I really dug that they put that in rather than trying to get you up to speed within the game. I’m sure people who DID play the first title were quite appreciative of it as well. After the video ended, I went in.

Warning: Very light spoilers about the first handful of minutes into the game ahead.

I went in expecting things to pop out at me as if I were walking through a haunted house. Scary, sure, but also somewhat lame and annoying in a way that makes me want to hurt someone. Instead I was greeted by a man interrogating me, slowly unraveling the idea that I had some important information in my brain but was being treated like a psych patient, straight-jacket and all. Then shit went south. I wake up to a man who is visibly panicked trying to wake my character up in order to get moving.

Still in a straight-jacket because my panicked friend didn’t last long after waking me up, I proceed to run down the hall as FUCKING CHAOS ensues all around me. Necromorphs (big, nasty, half human, half goddamn gross creatures) are tearing apart people and crawling out of the woodwork. Although it’s in space… so there’s really not any wood. Metalwork? Yeah, crawling out of the metalwork. I have nothing but the ability to run, so that’s what I do.

I eventually make it to a sealed office where I run into the doctor who I met in the beginning of the game. Dude. Went. Nuts. I won’t spoil what happens; apart from he gets you out of your straight-jacket and gives you a flashlight. FORESHADOWING!

I soon walk into a room that has no lights. GOOD THING I GOT THIS FLASHLIGHT! It’s then that the game starts to scare me. Say what you will about me, but I will repeat: I am not a fan of the horror genre. So I begin to make my way through this room, dead bodies laying on the ground and sitting in chairs, and I just know something is going to pop out at my defenseless ass. NOT GONNA HAPPEN. So I hit escape and quit.

Look, the graphics are really great, the controls feel awesome, and if you like horror games I suggest you give it a whirl. It’s not for me though. This isn’t to say I’ll never play it again, but never again right before bed.

Maybe on a bright spring morning or something…

with extra lights in my cloffice…

and my iPod playing KC and the Sunshine Band.

[thesoulspulse]

Ghost In The Machine (Daniel’s Unique Powers)

I’m using @kennymayovo​ wonderful rendition of my final version of Daniel Masters for this post since I’m very much looking forward to him reaching this stage in his story! I will never stop gushing over it! As for the rest, I’m mainly just sharing an updated version of his list of powers from when I still had my roleplay discord server for Danny Phantom oc’s.

It’s really a shame Daniel never got a real chance to shine once I fixed some major characters flaws which I’ll admit were pretty crippling at first. But I’m glad I’ve gotten the chance to fix them in a full story setting at least!

Anyways, potential spoilers for “Ghost In The Machine” ahead so you’ve been warned! Read the rest down below if you dare! lolz! Note that some of these ideas might change in the future since I don’t want Daniel to become too overpowered, I just want him to eventually become capable enough to stand on equal footing with Danny and Vlad eventually.

Daniel’s Unique Powers

Name: Technopathy/Cyberkinesis (aka the ability to connect to and perceive the technology around him both physically and mentally)

Ability: Basically Daniel has all the same powers Technus has with some variations to his powers and exceptions since Daniel's different. So no giant robot bodies for him sadly, although he can create weapons and such.

Setback: His ghost powers are still weak so he has to rely on the boosts Vlad has given him until he gets a stable form of his own.

~

Name: Telekinesis

Ability: Since we actually see canon Danny use this ability once in “Boxed Up Fury” that’s why I decided to give the same ability to Daniel. Plus it makes a lot of sense given how much control he has over the digital world he inhabits which will eventually translate into reality with some of his powers.

Setback: Moving/stopping larger takes lots of concentration

P.S. Sorry the image quality is so bad, this happens so fast I had to split images from a gif to find the exact moment we see Danny use this power.

~

Name: Machine Summoning/Creation

Ability: This is for summoning things like turrets like what Valerie can do with her battle suit upgrade or other types of shields around himself. It’s very Tron-like visually although when Daniel does this it’s more like stars aligning.

Setback: His powers are more based on what he can do on his own thanks to his programming so Daniel powers are mainly related to him physically somehow so he can't summon anything he hasn't already taken control of through hacking or using his powers like Technus can. At least not at first. It’s more in his nature to fix things, not control or break them. He’d rather create something new anyway but this takes more time so Daniel doesn’t use this power for combat.

~

Name: Tech Overshadowing

Ability: This is pretty much the same thing Danny does in the game Doomed only for Daniel he can overshadow any electrical device like Technus too.

Setback: He can get kicked out of a device if it has some sort of anti-ghost firewall which is usually only a problem with GIW secret files or something or files Vlad doesn't want him accessing. It’s kind of strange the Fenton's don't really have anything like that.

~

Name: Electrokinesis

Ability: He can use electrical attacks and self-generate electricity which can really come in handy, Daniel can even use his own energy to recharge electric devices through a transfer.

Setback: This can be hard to control if he gets too emotional since lighting is hard to predict anyway.

~

Name: Touch Screen/Tablet Summoning

Ability: Daniel can create touch screen tablets out of his ecto-energy to make it easier to either share info or play back videos or his memories in a similar format. He can also summon holographic projections of those events or of himself to serve as a distraction similar to a duplicate only this is purely visual and can’t be touched or interacted with.

Setback: The tablets and screens have a limited range and will vanish after a while unless he creates an actual tangible device to carry around.

~

Name: Superhuman Intelligence

Ability: Daniel can access information from anywhere in the world through the internet as a whole as long as its not fire-walled against ghosts in which case he'd have to hack into it. He also learns a lot more quickly as a result and can recall any memory of information he has stored in his data banks.

Setback: Sometimes he repeats back too much information when Daniel gets "in the zone" so to speak as a side effect of originally being a program before a ghost. This can be a bit unsettling at times for Vlad especially since he’s afraid of Daniel losing his sense of self entirely when this happens, but in most cases it’s more like Daniel is focused on relaying the data back and not stumbling over his words.

~

Name: Data Manipulation

Ability: Aka he can hack into and change any files, documents, or codes he wants to almost instantly.

Setback: Just like the real Danny he hates cheating and only does this as a last resort or if there's an important reason to change information. This can also be very mentally taxing if the files or code are super complex or heavily encrypted.

~

Name: Tracking/Ghost GPS

Ability: He can track any electrical device provided it's still on and he can track ghost signatures too.

Setback: Daniel doesn't have a traditional ghost sense since he’s not a halfa like Vlad and Danny to start off with, so instead he uses his powers to scan for "possible threats" based on the energy readings of the ghost signals in the area which he can match to a profile if Vlad has one in his data banks. And when his programming alerts him to the presence of another ghost, Daniel can send a distress signal to Vlad. However, if there are too many ghosts around him at once it can be very confusing for him, like hearing nothing but white noise.

~

Name: Reverse Engineer

Ability: Daniel can recreate anything from memory as long as he has a digital blueprint.

Setback: This power is extremely time consuming and has limits.

~

Name: Datascape Creation

Ability: He can create his own digital world inside any computer as long as he has the right software to work with or create one inside his own mind once Daniel ends up with a physical body with nanobot technology and other cybernetic tech to stabilize and contain his code, aka his ghost core.

Setback: The dangers inside these virtual spaces can be lethal to anyone else who is brought inside, especially if something or someone is controlling Daniel via hacking which is always a risk.

~

Name: Nanobots

Ability: Daniel's unique DNA as self-aware AI turned ghost requires him to have some sort of technology fused to his "body" to integrate his program and one way this is done is through special nanobots in his ectoplasm which allows him to transform parts of his body into weapons as a trade off of not being a halfa like Danny but a hybrid between a program and a ghost, so like an actual ghost cyborg.

This also works as a healing factor to repair his body which depending on the point in his story is either a pure ghostly body or a clone body his consciousness was transferred into like an empty avatar since his ghost form is pretty weak on its own and still requires a lot of energy to maintain. And again, in either case Daniel needs some kind of technology fused into him to protect and regulate his cybernetic ghost core.

Setback: Having a low nanobot count is just like having low blood sugar and can make him especially weak. So Vlad has to make sure to increase the nanobot count in Daniel’s blood occasionally.

~

Name: Electromagnetic Manipulation

Ability: He can pull the classic ghost move of communicating to others through various electronic devices like the static on a TV or through a telephone.

Setback: This is a tricky method to use and not an easy one if he's not directly connected to or overshadowing said device, so this method is mainly used a last resort to try and reach out for help if he's unable to communicate with anyone otherwise.

~

Name: System Upgrade/Fix

Ability: He can upgrade/fix any device like Technus can

Setback: This ability is very draining and must be used sparingly depending on how advanced the tech is.

~

Name: Ecto-Energy Constructs

Ability: He can make more advanced ghost shields and such around himself or others using his electric based ghost energy.

Setback: Breaking the shields physically hurts him too since their an extension of his core energy crystallizing in the material world.

[preemshots]

the definitive post of WHERE IN THE WORLD IS JOHNNY SILVERHAND’S BODY?

AKA the post of HERE’S WHY I WANT TO BELIEVE WE ARE GONNA GET JOHNNY’S BODY BACK IN DLC. 

buckle up, gamers. it's time for some lore. this is a very long post. 

warning: this will contain a million spoilers. both for details of multiple game endings, a wee bit of the “where’s johnny” comic, and the cyberpunk RED book. if you want a sparknotes version this is the post for you. my main source here is the cyberpunk RED book as well as as some references to the cyberpunk 2077 world book to cross examine the lore. 

i have no idea if someone has made this post before or what anybody else has been finding in their own lore diving. this is just me documenting my own findings from the sources i’ve been using.

it would be disingenuous not to preface this with the ways in which cyberpunk 2077's telling of the arasaka assault differ from the version told in the TTRPG books. the books =/= the game. pondsmith acknowledges in the intro of RED that this is a bridge between the old cyberpunk world and the new world of cyberpunk 2077. 

we also know that johnny's an unreliable narrator and his memories presented to V are often different than real events. but on top of that we don't know if the reason why many elements are changed is simply CDPR editing/adjusting/condensing the storyline for their own canon, or if it's due to johnny's construct being manipulated by outside influences such as arasaka.

some of the main differences you need to know from cyberpunk RED canon:

in 2023 johnny doesn't bring the nukes to arasaka tower. he's solely there to free alt.

johnny and rogue and their team from the atlantis/the aldecaldos are actually hired by morgan blackhand. 

morgan blackhand is the one who plants the nuke, unbeknownst to many members of the team. 

morgan blackhand promptly disappears after this event and no one knows if he's alive or dead. (claire confirms this fact to jackie and v before the heist in 2077 canon)

johnny's silver cybernetic arm is its own character, separate from himself. it seems to have a mind of its own and johnny interacts with it and/or is influenced by it.

when he, spider murphy, rogue, thompson, shaitan, and a team of los lobos from the aldecaldos (who are there in place of santiago, as he’s busy as the leader of the aldecaldos at this point) are attacked by adam smasher, johnny and his arm actively choose to draw smasher's fire in a deliberately suicidal move. smasher downs him instantly, but the distraction is enough to also save his friends.

spider murphy shoves a mysterious chip in johnny's dying head as they escape that alt had downloaded to her a long time ago.

johnny's body is later "rumoured" to have been retrieved from the rubble by a full-body borg groupie that was a first responder to the ground zero of AHQ and then hidden away in a nearby garage.

here comes the political lore that makes my eyes cross, so hopefully this accurately summarizes it: the 4th corporate war begins to end. arasaka is ultimately blamed by the NUSA government to have nuked themselves in a political move to protect their secrets and promptly banished from the USA. arasaka denies this all the way back to japan, then eventually returns to “liberate” night city in the unification wars.

but what the public doesn't know is that kei, saburo's oldest son, had actually hidden an EVEN BIGGER MORE DEVASTATING NUKE at the bottom of the tower to, well, do exactly what they were being accused of doing, even though blackhand was the one who actually dropped the smaller nuke on them. and luckily the bigger one didn’t go off.

arasaka tries to find their nuke in the rubble so they don't get in even bigger trouble, only to discover that it was moved and hidden away to... surprise! a nearby garage.

to compare with 2077:

in RED: we have no johnny loading the nukes into the elevator. no johnny being carried off the premises. no meeting saburo. no johnny getting soulkilled.

in 2077: there's a parallel moment to RED's version of events right after johnny uploads "liberator" from alt's old cyberdeck with spider's help into the arasaka mainframe in saburo's office. adam smasher comes for him as he's trying to escape, knocking him off the second floor of the atrium into the rock garden below.

visually this is the same atrium we always meet alt in in cyberspace and also where V meets johnny for the first time. hmmm. meaningful, perhaps.

not unlike what happens in RED, johnny unloads a clip into smasher at that point, but from there the scene instantly cuts to him running to the roof attempting to board the AV with rogue, where smasher shoots him down again. it’s possible johnny actually died to smasher in the atrium and we have some fabricated memories going on. 

either way, in 2077, we lose the character beat of johnny dying for his friends, and the current-day general consensus from rogue and others is that he’s perpetually a selfish asshole with ulterior motives. 

and, just to wrap up the politics of it all: morgan blackhand is rumoured to have been secretly hired by the militech-backed NUSA government to help end the 4th corporate war by... you guessed it! nuking arasaka.

HERE'S WHERE JOHNNY'S BODY ENDS UP IN CYBERPUNK RED (SPARKNOTES VERSION):

RED ends with a story called "black dog" set in 2045. black dog is the last song johnny recorded right before the assault on arasaka tower, but the final copy is a bootleg copy of the song and only a fraction.

we're introduced to a fun group of cybernetic-enhanced characters that represent the classes in the TTRPG and based on/designed by real people in collaboration with CDPR.

this group includes trace santiago, santiago's son, who is a media that is curious about the mystery surrounding the circumstances around his father and the arasaka bombing. 

just connecting lore here: if you talk to saul at the aldecaldo camp in 2077, he confirms that santiago was killed for his involvement with johnny and the bombing, something that rogue and johnny reference when they talk about their now-dead crew from the afterlife, and in chippin in, santiago is a friend that johnny lists as someone he had disappointed.

the group sets off to find any info about black dog, and meet up with a full conversion chrome woman named samantha in a garage who is blatantly a johnny silverhand fangirl. trace discovers she has a history with johnny, having rescued him from a studio fire at some point in 2015 and speculates she could have been a groupie also.

she mysteriously has a more complete recording of black dog, though not perfect, and offers to trade it for a service: she wants the group to transport a large crate to a facility in new mexico, asking them not to open it.

shit goes down. evidently everyone in night city wants to kill them for this package once it starts moving. eventually they open it. it's the arasaka nuke that had been hidden and never went off, emblazoned with warnings.

trace inquires about the circumstances surrounding the arasaka assault with an older member of the lobos who had been present with rogue and johnny. the man mentions that it was weird, because morgan blackhand organized the whole thing and then ran off immediately with a mysterious bag that we now know contained the nuke. 

michiko arasaka intercepts the gang, explaining the situation around the bigger nuke, that other factions in arasaka want to utilize it for their own goals (presumably hanako and yorinobu) and her father's legacy, that she feels responsible for. she escorts them to new mexico so that the nuke can be dismantled once and for all.

they meet up with a woman named angel in new mexico that takes the crate from them, at a facility that specializes in nuclear material. she gives the group the full recording of "black dog". the group leaves successful.

this woman is also a johnny silverhand stan. once alone, she calls up samantha, who says, "i promised i would get him to you in the end" and reveals that she had already gutted/dismantled the original nuke and discarded the material into the bay.

angel opens the "nuke" to reveal a hidden cryochamber, and greets the face of the person inside with, "hello, my love."

i mean, holy shit. okay! so that’s DEFINITELY johnny’s body. cool!

now let’s go into all the references to this story in the actual game of cyberpunk 2077 that SUGGEST we are going to pursue this story AND johnny's body since it’s such a HOT FUCKING TOPIC. 

and i know many of the following can just be considered easter eggs. but my personal interpretation of this game is that it has a really delightful way of intentionally glossing over important story details—and not by ONLY putting them in shards (which people tend to dislike because lol reading) but by also hiding them in plain sight, constantly deferring to V's own ignorance, distracting us with shallower, shinier things, encouraging us to actually play as the fool hero of this story. 

so here's the fun list of “””evidence”””:

this one’s a reach, but fun. in the initial arasaka assault flashback in 2023: we can interact with the groupies at kerry's show as johnny. samantha doesn't appear to be present, but the first person and groupie you can encounter in the flashback has a passing resemblance to angel in that she has a cybernetic arm.

in chippin' in, where we go to johnny's "grave" in the oil fields: if we are to take the 2077 retelling of events as truth, the story could instead be pretty easily be changed that samantha procured his body from there.

mike pondsmith, who wrote these stories and created the TTRPG can be heard on the radio narrating various conspiracy theories. and sure, these can just be easter eggs, intended to reference the differences between the TTRPG lore and the game, so take it with a grain of salt:

johnny. bro. tell him it was morgan blackhand

to top it all off, mike also directly references the actual WORSE nuke arasaka had hid in another arasaka conspiracy: 

SPOILERS FOR GAME ENDINGS AHEAD.

in the rogue ending of the game we discover rogue has a son. it's possible her son is trace (edit: nvm NOT LIKELY, since in RED’s black dog story rogue is listed separately from santiago’s mom in conversation) OR possibly one of the other characters. she tells her son to "pull over and look at the stars" or something along those lines. maybe just details, so that screams nomad to me.

rogue also has a photo of herself and johnny with mike pondsmith in her apartment/office in the afterlife. i initially read this as a delightful cameo but it also can mean mike the CHARACTER knew johnny and rogue, and rogue therefore has some kind of relationship to him and these conspiracies on the radio. and why the fuck not make him a full on character? we have a smattering of streamers and personalities already integrated into quests in the game. the creator of all this should be no exception. fuck it! 

rogue and johnny constantly dance around this accusation of her “selling out”. it’s repeated over and over that she and adam smasher worked for "the same people". i'm beginning to wonder if this wasn't meant to imply only arasaka since smasher mysteriously disappeared after the AHQ assault in 2023 and returned to SOMETIMES take jobs from arasaka... but possibly morgan blackhand and/or by extension, the NUSA or any other greater influences. (like nightcorp? we still don’t know where all this shit with nightcorp/the peralezes/sandra dorsett’s discovery about their research into mind control is gonna go) this also doesn’t account for the multiple factions inside arasaka with VERY different motives. 

morgan blackhand and adam smasher are rivals in the TTRPG, a role that appears to be at least partially filled by johnny instead in 2077. in relation to the arasaka factions, it’s worth nothing that smasher specifically works for yorinobu as his bodyguard at the beginning of the game, in part i assume because yorinobu is avoiding working with arasaka security details as he stole the relic and is plotting against his father. he is then promoted to head of security by yorinobu when yorinobu assumes power. 

in the ending as you work your way through arasaka tower with rogue and shaitan and johnny, rogue remarks:

michiko at this point in 2077 is the leader of the more “liberal” faction within arasaka, so it’s possible we’re seeing that while rogue and smasher work for the same people/family, they couldn’t be more different. 

you can also encounter rogue more than once on the phone fighting with wakako, who has apparently crossed her. wakako also seems to have her own ulterior motives and works mainly with the arasaka-backed tyger claws. she notably gives v/takemura the parade security info for “play it safe” without asking for anything in return, enabling hanako’s kidnapping. my theory is that yorinobu intentionally leaked the parade info to her to give away to put hanako in danger or at least continue to destabilize arasaka. 

in the takemura/devil ending of the game, there is a point where violence breaks out at the arasaka board room meeting when yorinobu-allied security open fire on them. one of the only people that survives along with hanako is michiko arasaka, who was at odds with hanako’s decisions, but  very involved in the preceding discussion.

and now for is my favorite detail! in the afterlife AT ALL POINTS IN THE GAME (but it can only really be inspected in the rogue ending when we are allowed behind the bar), we can find a photo of the squad that transported johnny's body from samantha to angel on the shelf below johnny's tequila, of them hanging out in front of the afterlife sign:  

this implies rogue has some relationship with them, and sentimentality, if we're to judge by the placement. she maybe even took the picture. i don't know, it's charming, it could be all easter eggs. who fucking knows.

either way, rogue and these kids both have in common that they worked with or at least interacted with michiko arasaka. 

and you know what my final evidence is? more wishful thinking! black dog plays on the radio in game. we got a full recorded version of it by refused. if not an oversight, i go ahead and take it to mean the final version was finally released to the public by those kids that were looking for it. 

i haven’t the slightest idea how this is gonna wrap up in future DLC. who has johnny’s body now in 2077, decades after it was dropped off in mexico? what is the truth?? where the fuck is morgan blackhand?? from the devil ending, we know that arasaka stole jackie’s body and put his soul into mikoshi, so the idea that they would just toss johnny’s corpse has always been laughable. the “where’s johnny?” promotional comic was even about thompson unsuccessfully trying to find johnny’s body. i know i am biased here but i cannot fathom all this talk about johnny’s body ending off with us NOT finding it, whether it’s just to bury it, shove johnny’s engram back in it, make out with it, or WHATEVER.

if you made it through this slog, congrats. thanks for reading! 

[lairofsentinel]

How to avoid Gale romance bugs in Early Access:

[BG3 Early Access, Spoilers]

Things to keep in mind:

Every change of reputation implies a new scene in the camp. Go rest as soon as you see the approval changed. Sometimes petting the dog, which earns super little approval, helps to trigger the scene in case it feels stuck. But don’t do actions that make Gale approve a LOT. He is too eager to approve you a lot, lol.

There are four instances of approval: Neutral, Medium, High, Very High.

Neutral: Triggers the scenes of the first time in the camp “Go to hell”, and the mirror image scene.

Medium: Triggers the scene of “I like what I saw”, and the artefact consumption. (you need to have an artefact already)

High: Triggers the scene of the Weave

Very High: Triggers the scene of the loss.

From Very high to Exceptional you will be able to romance him during the party.

If you miss the scene of the Weave, because Gale's compulsory approval makes you jump from Medium to Very High, you lost it.

The scene of saving the Child in the Grove, and managing Nettie in a persuasive way will earn you a lot of approval that may cause this massive jump. Avoid those scenes until you get the one of the Weave.

The consumption of the artefact gives massive approval. If you are almost full in the Medium level, giving him an artifact will probably boost you to Very high. This is the reason why most of the time he gets bugged.

There is an extra bug in the quest list. Gale’s quest is the last one of the list, and tends to be “eaten”, not appearing even though you scroll down. I noticed that the Weave scene won’t trigger if the quest Wizard of Waterdeep is gone because of this bug. That bug seems to be hard to fix once it happens, so if it happened already,  return to a save where it’s ok. The way I found to avoid this trouble is to not recruit Lae’zel nor Astarion. The less companions you have, the less chances to bug the quest list. Once you got the Weave scene, you can recruit the rest of the companions, though, be careful... Lae’zel may be lost/killed if you let many days pass by. 

A simple quest-guide to manage his approval:

(this is just a suggestion path, you can change it all what you like, just keep in mind how the bug works according to the points above)

-Start the game. Meet him. Go to Jergal's temple. Convince the NPC in there. Gale approves moderately.

-Go to the Gnoll zone. Hardcore, I know, but possible. If you convince Rugan/Rolan (the guy who says you are a beautiful bastard (?)) of giving you the chest, open it (in any other place but the camp, otherwise it will corrupt your save) and keep the Iron Flask. It's the artefact to have just in case when Gale asks for it. Check his reputation. If it keeps neutral, go ahead with the following minor actions. Otherwise sleep in the camp as many times as possible, always moving a bit or using some fast travel in between. It will help to trigger the scene.

-Go to the grove. Encourage diplomacy between Zevlor and Aradin. Talk with the tiefling wizard, convince him to stay and fight, and later, to make an introduction to his teacher Lorroakan. Gale will approve quite a bit. Go to the prisoner goblin and step in front of the crossbow. By this time you are probably Medium if you weren't before. Go to camp and trigger that scene of “I like what I see”. Give him the artefact, but check if by giving the artefact you did not jump into Very High, otherwise you’ll need to undo some approvals. .

-Once you have high reputation, make some quests that does not give you much approval of Gale. And rest a lot in camp. Eventually it will be triggered. It doesn’t matter the cambion scene, all these scenes can happen before or after Raphael. Even before or after the Dreams. The scene of the weave gives another MASSIVE approval, but usually allows you to remain in Very high. Repeat the same procedure: do some stuff that earns no approval or little approval from Gale, going to camp frequently. The scene of the Loss will trigger.

-Once you have Very high reputation, you are ready to go on with the rest of the grove actions: saving the child, speaking with nettie, Zevlor,etc. You will earn Exceptional rank in a blink of an eye, and you have guaranteed the access to Gale romance in the party.

Warning: all this works for version 4.1.83 and 4.1.84

[instablamwriter]

Top 10 Mankai Actors

Disclaimer: My onion lol. I think everyone has their own charm but if we’re going with just ‘acting’, I do think some are better than others in-game. I don’t think versatility as an actor is everything btw, but it is impressive to see people do very different roles and to do them well each time.

Warning: Spoilers for at least until act 8 for everyone since I did include the rookies in this list.

We will go 10-->1 Feel free to agree/disagree as long as you’re nice about it xoxo

I didn’t put a read-more just so that it’d be easier to read, but let me know if it’s pretty readable (dashboard or otherwise) with a read-more (and dw I tagged it as a long post)

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Honorable mentions:

Muku!!!! Muku has gotten so much improvement + has one of the largest range of role types in the whole company. Also helps that he’s in the troupe that does the most adlibs so he’s quick to think of lines to sell to the audience (and they have to be funny!)

Juza is the most improved imo and he has the passion and the work ethic to back him up. He does his role type really well but hmm I’ll explain a bit more later why the others edge him out for me.

Chikage was originally higher but upon reflection, I think he doesn’t make it to my top 10. He’s good in the sense that he was trained to deceive people, but in terms of stage acting, putting his heart into it is a newer sort of thing. Also, between him and Taichi, he was the one who was more obviously up to no good. Then again, was he really hiding it? His default is being cagey and secretive in the first place while Taichi is very much the type of person to wear his heart at his sleeve, so Taichi definitely edges him out.

Side note: I wanted to say Citron bc I adore his Ennis but I’m also aware of /how/ biased I am towards Harugaoka in general. so.

Let’s go on!

10-8) Harugaoka Boys

I’m sorry for cheating but I can’t really rank them properly among the three of them.

Arguably, Masumi would be the weakest because even though he has the natural talent, he doesn’t have the same drive as the other two. HOWEVER, his drive in a way is Izumi and Izumi’s own love of theatre. He’s pretty determined whenever Izumi is involved and he has a pretty good range of roles, making him not only versatile, but just pretty good in general. SPOILERS!!! <I mean, he learned how to play a violin so quickly just for Izumi so he’s pretty efficient at learning in the first place.>

Next, Sakuya is a hard worker and has the passion to keep him going. I say he edges out Juza because while I think the formal training from college (+ all the workshops he goes too, either Yuzo or at school), Sakuya sort of breathes and lives everything theatre. Like not only the acting part, but all the behind the scenes things too. He watches and helps out different companies on the daily so I’d say he’s more exposed to a variety of performances than Juza would be. Let’s not go into Liber underutilizing Sakuya with the range of roles or even the number of lead roles (either main or co), but I’d say he’s just has overall more practice at play (pun unintended).

Banri, as we all know, is naturally good at this lol. He does say his weakness is that he can’t put his whole heart into is character unlike Juza (which is also a reason why I’d say that Sakuya and him are more or less the same level). He’s versatile and has a good repertoire + he does have the drive to keep getting better (he says to beat Juza but I think it’s also because he’s become motivated after seeing /everyone/’s portraits (but yes, Juza’s in particular was the hmm trigger I’d say). And since he’s newer to acting, I think everyone else on the list beats him due to experience.

7-5) Taichi, Hisoka, Misumi

I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t choose AGAIN. I think the next 3 have such different skill sets that put them up there. They originally did have a proper ranking but once I was writing it all out, I just couldn’t decide who was better overall. Not surprising since I’m more of a tierlist person than a straight up list person anyway. Hayz, anyway here we gooooo

Taichi Nanao

I guess I should be upfront with the fact that I’m a Taichi oshi so of course, I’m biased. HOWEVER, Taichi started acting as a child, way back in elementary. He works hard on his roles (as seen in plays where he’s been the lead/co-leads) kind of obsessively and SPOILERS!! <has trouble sleeping and overworks himself for them.>

He was also able to get into GodZa at a young age that even Tsumugi couldn’t get into right out of college (tho I have other theories on why there but anyway). Reni treated him like shit but the fact is, he was still able to pass the strict auditions. Anyway, he has the foundation, the training, and the drive (PLUS IF YOU’VE READ ACT 9, YOU GET IT), so I think he’s earned this spot xD

Hisoka Mikage

As mentioned with Chikage, they were sorta forced to learn how to act or it was do or die. Hisoka can pretty much get into roles quickly once he knows the information he needs about the character. I think it’s fair to speculate that Hisoka got a lot more of the dangerous undercover jobs? He seems more attuned to acting than Chikage plus there was the factor that he had to be good or else.

It’s hard to say if his overall life experience would put him ahead of the other two.

Misumi Ikaruga

Misumi grew up watching all of the plays that his grandfather showed him. You could say he’s one of the less subtle acting geeks in the company but he’s all focus and everything once he watches a performance. He has the talent and the foundation, albeit no formal training. He did have a scriptwriter grandfather though who could have more or less helped him hone his skill. Also another very varied actor.

Still as we see with Tenma in-game, where you act (TV vs movies vs stage vs just the general public) makes a big difference and he still has less experience with stage acting and acting in front of others than the other two).

4. Sakyo Furuichi

Sakyo didn’t really have a lot of formal training but he did have the drive and love for theatre since a young age. He watched Mankai rise and fall. I think he’s the most unique case out of everyone bc he has he experience but he couldn’t grow into his full potential because of all the other circumstances in his life. I think he rightfully belongs in the top 4 though. He’s also another case like Juza who does those certain roles very well.

3. Tenma Sumeragi

Gonna be upfront once again, Tenma is my 4th fave, just after Taichi. Still, you can’t deny he’s been acting since birth and has had the formal training to go with it. He has the drive and work ethic to get even better. What puts him behind the other two is just honestly more life experiences and stage acting experience in general.

2. Tsumugi Tsukioka

We know Tsumugi is very skilled. He’s great at the subtle movements and understanding the characters plus he’s just full-on in love with theatre. Also being less sheltered and older, I think he just has more to draw from life-experience wise. He is edged out by our #1 because of the years he took off acting.

1. Tasuku Takato

Tasuku was #1 in Godza, one of the most popular acting companies in their region. He was consistently #1 until he left and even though he had similar roles then, he greatly diversified when he got to Mankai. I mean, it’s Tasuku, the resident ultra theatre nerd. Of course, he had to be #1.

If you’ve made it this far, then wewz. I hope you at least had fun reading xD

[skzmp3]

so i had a stray kids as tower of god characters series planned...

and well i keep trying to find clips and plan it but it's going way slower than i wanted. considering tower of god is like. a year old at this point, i don't think i'll ever complete the series, but i really wanted to share my thoughts because i was so proud of (most) of the pairs i made!

so with further ado, check out stray kids as tower of god characters! you don't really need to know tower of god to understand, bc i'll explain the characters below!

(warning: spoilers for the series! nothing major about the plot, but more about the characters themselves! i'll put pictures of the characters as well!

just as an additional disclaimer: this is all based off the anime only. i haven't read the webtoon yet, only saw the anime because my brother was interested and i wanted to watch with him.)

bang chan as khun aguero agnes

bang chan as khun aguero agnes

this is best explained with this quote - “Imma protect Stray Kids, do it for the squad, do it for the team!” like chan, khun is a natural-born leader, and does everything in his power to protect his team. he's very outspoken and does things his way regardless of what the people in charge of the test does (much like how chan does what he wants regardless of jype lol). khun is very smart and analytical, thinking two steps ahead of what the smartest move is in the game, much like how I'm so sure chan has stray kids career moves planned out for like the next five years already. but like seriously, just watch tower of god and tell me khun isn't chan in anime form.

lee minho as endorsi jahad

she's highly ambitious and confident in herself, much like how minho is extrememly self-assured, not allowing others to sway his opinion. i related her story to how minho saw bts performing and wanted to someday be on the stage like them, and worked his way through all the hardships to get there. endorsi's story is the same, where she had a goal in mind and did everything she could to get to the end (tho... her ways were way more violent than minho's...) endorsi is definitely more manipulative and sinister, but i always admired her in the anime because of how she knew those traits about herself but still continued the way she was - much like how minho won't let anyone stop him from doing what he enjoys (snow filters, anyone?)

seo changbin as rak wraithraiser

listen rak throws a spear changbin is spearb i got nothing else. okay that's sort of a lie l o l. when i first made this list, i wasn't sure who changbin should be and was planning to make this as like a joke. but really, changbin in a way does portray a lot of what rak does. rak has a clear goal in mind and everything he does is towards that goal. likewise, while i don't doubt that the other 7 are dedicated to making good music and growing as artists, changbin really embodies the saying "music is my life" the most of them all, where he will give it all towards his music releases. (also - rak has it out for khun much like how changbin and chan are always playfully bickering, but at the end of the day, they respect each other and work together well.)

+ the picture is misleading on purpose l o l. look up other pictures of rak and you'll know what i mean :))

hwang hyunjin as hatz

honestly when i saw hatz first i only thought of how pretty he was. but watching the series, hatz is more than just a pretty anime boy - in the same way that hyunjin is more than his visual. they're both super dedicated to their craft (hatz with his swordsmanship and hyunjin with his dancing), and both worked hard to get where they are. in the anime, hatz is at first very wary and guarded around the others (they honestly all are by nature of the tests), but he grows to be one of the most loyal to the team as he gets more friendly with them, to the point of going up against a ranker alone to ensure his team advances. in a similar manner, I've always felt that besides chan, hyunjin is most protective of stray kids, and is the most loyal to the stray kids brand.

han jisung as phonsekai laure

sleepy bois™ l o l. but like, don't let that fool you. laure is sleeping for like half the series, but the other half he's blowing everyone away with his explosive talent. i would argue that laure is the most powerful of all these characters (at least in the anime!), because you wouldn't suspect it from his demeanor, but when he reveals his power it comes almost out of nowhere. likewise, jisung is called their ace for a reason - that even with how young he might be, he is so talented it's almost ridiculous to see. they're both the hidden powerhouse of their respective teams.

felix as shibisu

shibisu is so full of love for his team - like how felix is literally the biggest ot8 supporter out there. he's always hyping everyone up and confident in their skills even if they aren't. the thing about both shibisu and felix is that sometimes their own talents are written off. shibisu is almost seen as like a joke in the series, because the others don't see him as talented as they are, and that he got in because he got lucky and found the right teammates. but shibisu deserves to be in the tower test as much as everyone else is, much like how felix deserves to be in stray kids as much as the rest are. and they both do have so much talent, with more just being revealed as the series/time goes on.

kim seungmin as anaak jahad

i love anaak so much, because like. we don't know exactly how strong she really is. she may seem small and not as big a threat, but really, behind the stoic facade is so much power. for me, pre-levanter era seungmin was the same - not necessarily seen as a complete powerhouse but rather as someone who was a good support to the more core members of stray kids. but really, seungmin stepped into the primary vocal role so well from levanter on, and every single day we just see him surprising us with exactly how much talent he has hidden away. (also - endorsi and anaak hate each other but also they don't, so like basically. minho and seungmin.)

yang jeongin as baam

anyone who watches tower of god and stans stray kids probably saw this coming haha. baam is the main character of tower of god, and in the beginning, he's seen as this super weak and unassuming character, with an impression of being small and not as strong as the others, only getting through because of luck. but really, much like khun saw the great amount of potential in him, the rest of stray kids saw how much jeongin would grow with the right guidance, and gave it to him to turn him into the idol he is today.

[blackjack-15]

Death, Philosophy, and the Runs — Thoughts on: Legend of the Crystal Skull (CRY)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN, CRE, ICE

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it. Like with all of the Odd Games, there will be a section between The Intro and The Title called The Weird Stuff, where I go into what makes this game stand out as a little strange.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: CRY, mention of CUR, mention of ASH.

The Intro:

 It’s time for New Orleans, y’all.

Legend of the Crystal Skull is a game that’s often rated highly by the fandom, especially for its atmosphere (which is among the most well-done and pervasive of the whole series). Honestly speaking, were it not for the mental health/death/immortality storyline(s), CRY would simply be a Jetsetting game a bit out of order, given its fascination with its location (even if the amount of locations is slightly smaller).

One of the high points of this game is honestly its location and ambiance. CRY takes the idea of the “dark and stormy night” and plays it to perfection, cloaking everything in such thick atmosphere that the players, like Nancy, can’t always see the way ahead, and have to take leaps of faith every once in a while.

The characters contribute to the thick atmosphere; Bruno is a shadow, Henry’s hiding everything under a guise of nonchalance and a fishnet glove, Renée is all gardening grandma hospitality but never says anything about herself, Gilbert has Southern Manners while avoiding saying anything bad even when he means it, and Lamont refuses to get involved in anything outside his shop. They aren’t perfect suspects, but they’re good characters, and it elevates the game.

Bess’ hesitance to delve into this atmosphere makes her the perfect partner for Nancy who begins by investigating just who the Skeleton Man was who attacked her before spiraling deeper and deeper into the mysteries surrounding Bruno Bolet and his crystal skull.

But while the costumes, pageantry, puns, and secrets all contribute to the atmosphere, nothing quite reaches the same level of Sheer Aesthetic as Bruno’s last years being dedicated to finding a crystal skull. Glittery and gothic with power over life and death, it’s easy to see why the game is named after it (which, of course, I’ll get into below).

This isn’t to say that CRY is all sizzle and no substance — far from it. CRY doesn’t attempt to teach the player the entire history of New Orleans, the complex background and practices of voodoo (or any of its other sister practices), nor does it get into iguana physiology or the mechanics of how to make someone sneeze or get the runs.

While education is of course present in CRY, it’s more centered in philosophy than in hard, straight facts. Professor Hotchkiss – a returning character perfectly suited to the French-influenced New Orleans and her love of slightly sinister history – gives the mission statement of the game, summing up its central philosophical question – “Does this mean that there mysterious external forces at work in the universe of which we do not and cannot ever have full knowledge? Or does it all boil down to us? If the human heart desperately wants something to be true, does the human mind have the power to make it true?”

It’s a fascinating question, and touches on all sorts of real-life phenomenon – the power of suggestion, the placebo effect, intelligent design, among others – without ever seeming like HER is trying to Teach a Lesson. Out of all the edutainment elements in this series, CRY (and I would add ASH in here as well) features some of the most subtle work that HER ever accomplishes.

The Weird Stuff:

Of course, a discussion (one-sided as these metas mostly are) of CRY wouldn’t be complete without addressing the things that qualify it to be a truly Odd Game within the Nancy Drew franchise.

The first and most obvious is that we’re dealing with death – and a recent death at that — for the first time in a while. We’d have to go all the way back to CLK to see another death of a relative not long before the mystery starts, and Emily’s mom’s death and Josiah Crowley’s death don’t hang over CLK the way Bruno Bolet’s death hangs over CRY.

Bruno is given instead more weight – part of the mystery is figuring out who he was, what he liked, what he wanted, and what he did every day, especially leading up to his death. The house is almost a stand in character for Bruno; it reflects him perfectly, including all the things that were important to him, and just as determined to keep his secrets. A lot of Nancy Drew games have the house/location as a character, but only a few associate the location with a specific character, and CRY does it possibly the best.

The second thing that makes this game so odd is the showcasing of an abusive relationship. Sure, Summer doesn’t hit Henry or anything, but is just as abusive all the same, and the game doesn’t shy away from showing her horrible behavior and the effect that it has on Henry. He stays with her because, like a lot of abuse victims, he doesn’t think he can do ‘better’ – that somehow this is what he deserves – and the only slight problem with how it’s portrayed is that we don’t get to see Henry leave her and be happier.

Lastly, in an oddity for Nancy Drew games so far, mental illness is put at the front and center of the game (rather than being a one-off random thing not really mentioned like in CUR). Henry, separate from the abuse he receives from Summer, is obviously depressed, and the game doesn’t really shy away from showing it. Sure, they might not use the term “clinical depression”, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not acknowledged. Henry’s depression, his sadness, his feeling of being out of control and yet still tied down – that permeates every moment of the game, and especially his conversations with Nancy. The whole reason Nancy’s there at the Bolet mansion in the first place is because Ned was worried about his shy, depressed classmate.

Gosh, Ned is such a good guy. He deserves so much better than Nancy “Lacks Tact” Drew.

Unlike a lot of the “Odd” games, the odd things in CRY don’t detract from the game; they make the game what it is. It’s a bit more mature, a little more introspective, a touch less black and white than most of the Nancy Drew games have been up until this point. No characters are simply caricatures, there’s very little stereotyping (for a ND game), and it’s not pointlessly spooky or try-hard in any way. CRY is the rare game that simply is what it aspired to be; while what it aspired to be was odd (and it is Odd), it doesn’t make it bad. It makes it feel genuine and honest – and after ICE, I can’t think of anything better for a game to aspire to be.

The Title:

We’re getting to the portion of Nancy Drew games where, regardless of the quality of the actual games, their titles are smash hits every time. “Legend of the Crystal Skull” is an incredibly good title on multiple levels.

First, it tells us what the game is about – not the Crystal Skull itself, but the legend of it – the myths, mysteries, and effects of the Skull. Not only does it (correctly) indicate that this game is a little more about philosophy than it is about something concrete.

The second thing it does is establish a sense of mysticism that is reinforced the second the game begins. We’re in New Orleans, we’re learning about this Crystal Skull, it’s dark, rainy, and spooky, there’s death and specters and possibly more afoot…and this doesn’t start with the Skeleton Man cutscene, or the phone call, or even the warning on the screen to play with the lights off – it starts with the title.

The Mystery:

We begin with Nancy and Bess visiting New Orleans – the French Quarter, to be specific – for a fun little vacation, only to be met with a Dark and Stormy Night. Ned, knowing of his girlfriend’s plans to visit New Orleans, asks her if she can check up on a classmate of his who’s going through a hard time: Henry Bolet.

Determined to get the visit out of the way, Nancy leaves Bess back at the hotel and traipses over to the Bolet Mansion. When she walks in – I know, honestly, Nancy –  the open door, she’s greeted by a person in a skeleton costume in the front room, rather than a miserable college student.

She’s soon knocked out by the Skeleton Man, coming to when an elderly woman offers her an odd concoction and the Skeleton is long gone. Soon, Nancy discovers that Henry’s dead uncle was in possession of a Crystal Skull that was to protect its owner against any source of death other than murder, the plot starts to thicken quicker than a bubbling roux.

CRY is home to an incredibly solid mystery, full of atmosphere, colorful characters, and even a food minigame as if to draw me in specifically. While I don’t think it’s the best Nancy Drew game by a long shot, I would say that it’s definitely the best of the Odd games, and by far the most successful mystery + atmosphere combination that we’ll have until we reach SAW, quite a few games later.

Now, let’s move on to our colorful characters.

The Suspects:

We’ll start with Renee Amande, as I think she’s our first character who is properly introduced post-cutscene (with her concoction). Bruno’s elderly housekeeper, Renee is a practitioner of voodoo (kind of) and a believer in the crystal skulls – she wants to reunite all thirteen of them to move the world to a higher plane of understanding.

Our villain, yet not our killer – not directly at least – the only thing Renee is guilty of other than attempted murder of a plucky Illinois detective is falsifying a letter. The shock of the “false” crystal skull shocked Bruno so badly that he had a heart attack and died, but Renee didn’t actually kill him. She’s one of those villains in Nancy Drew stories who commit a minor crime, and jump immediately to murder when she’s discovered.

As the villain, Renee is actually the only suspect that could even work. The game plays with Dr. Buford and the mysterious Skeleton Man, but in reality Renee’s the only one with motive and opportunity. But, given that Nancy spends 3/4ths of the game trying to figure out what crime has actually been committed, rather than working with cold hard facts, that works out pretty well.

Henry Bolet, on the other hand, is apparently catnip to a good section of the Nancy Drew fandom, and is the closest thing to a living victim that we actually have in this game. When his parents died, he was shipped off to live with Bruno – and Bruno shipped him off to military school, so he should be a bit more muscular than he is – and he’s never gotten over their deaths.

Like, “Nancy finds him crying over his parents” kind of never got over their deaths.

I’ll be honest, while I know lots of people who did Love him with everything in them, I never really saw the appeal of Henry Bolet as a love interest for anyone, or even as a compelling character. His voice actor – Brian Neel – does a great job, with his voice definitely being the part of him with the most obvious appeal, but otherwise…maybe it comes from my distaste for underdog stories, maybe it’s that I’m no good with crying people, who knows.

As a suspect, Henry’s pretty much out from the moment that he confesses to Nancy that he sold a trunk for quick cash for his abusive girlfriend. HER isn’t bold enough to have that be a lie, nor are they dumb enough to make him the culprit after that. Henry’s out of the running for most of the game, but he never really becomes Nancy’s confidante, not like other early-clear suspects.

Henry’s an interesting puzzle as a character, but that more comes from his place as the central piece of CRY’s “Oddness”, rather than any interest in him as a possible suspect.

On the other end of fandom appeal lies Dr. Gilbert Buford, whose greatest sin as a character is declaring an obvious heart attack an obvious heart attack and using regular, polite Louisiana manners for a man of his age while interacting with a character who obviously has no problem with it at all.

Dr. Buford is hard at work giving the majority of Bruno’s characterization that doesn’t come from his house to him, as well as giving a truly excellent scare when finding Bess in the Secret Meeting scene. As a suspect, Buford is a moderately good one – cagey, a doctor, knows about the Skull – but ultimately falls short as he just has too many of his own secrets to carry.

I personally like Gilbert Buford as a character, and find him an entertaining source of exposition – but then, I grew up around Southern manners (and military manners, which aren’t too dissimilar), so that might be the reason why.

Rounding out our suspect list – though barely qualifying himself, honestly, is Lamont Warrick, owner of a curio shop and intensely vulnerable to hot sauce and sneezing powder.

One can only imagine the Horror that would occur if Nancy were to mix those two allergens. Well, one can also Giggle at the mental image, but still.

As a suspect…well, even HER knew that he was a non-entity; his biggest part to play is actually after the game concludes, where he closes his curio shop in order to search for Bernie, who has swallowed the crystal skull.

I guess someone had to search for it? I’d love a follow-up with him, maybe over Labor Day, or Memorial Day, where Bess goes back to see if he’s had any luck, only to find that he found a dead body along with the alligator, and in order to not get suspected for the murder, they have to bring the body with them and pretend that it’s alive, taking it to bingo games over the course of the 3 vacation days.

Yes, that was all to set up a bad “Weekend at Bernie’s” reference. Hush.

The Favorite:

As you might have guessed from…well, most of this meta, one of my favorite parts of CRY is the sheer atmosphere that the game embodies from its beginning through the closing puzzle.

The Bolet mansion is just the right amount of cluttered yet comfortable, shadowy yet detailed, and gloomy yet homey to be a nigh-perfect location. The graveyard isn’t hard to navigate, is filled with puns, and does a lot of the character work for Bruno and (to a slightly lesser extent) Henry while allowing both characters to be private and a bit mysterious. The greenhouse is simultaneously cozy and elegant and yet slightly cage-ish and slightly claustrophobic.

Even the locations that Nancy stays away from — the hotel balcony, Zeke’s, the food truck, the secret meeting — are thick with a different kind of atmosphere: less wet, less foggy, more brightly lit, more French Quarter than haunting mansion. Bess’ locations are welcoming yet secretive, perfect for the reluctant amateur-amateur detective who just wants her vacation to be fun and mystery-free.

Adding to the atmosphere is the sheer number of cutscenes/cinematic camera usages in CRY. The opening with the Skeleton Man, Bess getting caught at the meeting, opening the final crypt, Renee shutting the tomb…they’re all so perfect, and do a great job at making you feel really immersed in Nancy’s New Orleans experience.

My favorite puzzle is honestly finding the glass eyes. CRY isn’t really a game I remember for its puzzles; they fade a little bit into the background (with the exclusion of a couple I don’t like) because they’re well integrated into the story, and because the game doesn’t really grind to a halt to make Nancy complete minigames like in, for example, CUR.

My favorite moment is split between two very different moments. The first is, unsurprisingly, the conversation with Hotchkiss mentioned above where she lays out the theme of the game. It’s a shockingly nice moment in the game, coming in the start/middle of the mystery and being a familiar face – er, voice – for Nancy to get help from. It’s a moment that lets you stop and think about what Nancy’s actually dealing with, rather than effectively pausing the game through a rhymed puzzle about the skull or other such nonsense.

The other moment is a little more obvious and a little flashy – the moment when Bess is discovered at the Skeleton meeting. The tension right before, the sudden pop-up of the skeleton mask between the boxes, the conversation afterwards…it’s just as close as possible to a perfect scene. It’s long enough before Bess is discovered that the player can kind of get comfortable, but not so long that it drags on. The moment of discovery is startling, but not scream-worthy or too scary to replay over and over or in the dark. It’s just great.

The Un-Favorite:

There’s not a ton to complain about with CRY, but I do have a few small things that make replaying it somewhat of a chore.

The first is my least favorite puzzle: the loquat bug spraying. It takes a long time, it feels shoved in the game just to have an extra puzzle, and Nancy can only take one loquat at a time. I feel like the player should be able to take up to 3, and then come back and do it again if they need/want any more loquats. Honestly, it’s a puzzle in a place where a puzzle really just shouldn’t be.

My least favorite moment in the game would probably be the chest that Henry sells to Lamont. After selling it and building it up for quite a few minutes, it’s kind of a letdown that it only has a few things it in. This would have been a great place to have more character-building work done, but instead the focus is on “how do we find it/open it” and less on “what can this do for the story”.

Finally, I mentioned it above, but I’m not a fan of how Lamont pretty much is a non-entity in the game. I’m fine with one suspect being less suspicious or having less ‘dirt’ on them than the rest, but Lamont really doesn’t have anything on him. He’s never a suspect for the Skeleton Man, he doesn’t really do anything sketchy…he’s just underwhelming.

The Fix:

So how would I fix Legend of the Crystal Skull?

I think really the only fix that I would attempt is to give Lamont a little more plot significance. Sure, his curio shop is beautiful and wonderful and important to the plot, but Lamont himself really isn’t. In order to include him more in the plot, make Lamont a bona-fide treasure hunter that manages the curio shop for cash in between expeditions. He’s heard that Bruno has a treasure that people have killed for, but couldn’t figure out what it was before Bruno’s death. He buys the chest from Henry and searches it top-to-bottom trying to figure out if it’s hiding something since it’s obviously Bruno’s personal chest.

To add a bit more importance, I’d place him at the Bolet mansion on the night of Bruno’s death as well. Renee’s there, Dr. Buford is there, Henry we’ve already written off completely in the actual game as a suspect, so Lamont should be there as well, snooping around to try to figure out what treasure Bruno’s got and if he can persuade him to sell it (or at least let Lamont see it). Nancy can match footprints in the garden to his boots, or some other method of proving he was there. I’d just like for Lamont not to drop off the map early on. It also makes his canonical ending that much neater.

Honestly, that’s it.

Sure, I’d appreciate the loquat bug spraying minigame to be fixed as well, but CRY is honestly a pretty character-based game, thick with philosophy and legends, and it doesn’t need a ton of help in that area. Make all the suspects viable for most of the game, and I think an already entertaining and atmospheric game would be just a little bit better.