#I screencapped these and completely forgot to post

[chalamet-chalamet]

New/old from Venice (September 1, 2022) ✨

IG credit to yourboychalamet

[superfamiblog]

Final Fantasy 6 (Square, 1994)

[pagesofkenna]

(Love Bullet Chapter 0)

[butteriish]

lil fairground / circus for pietro! 🎪🎠🤹

[jayplayscozygames]

♥️ Valentine’s Day 💌

(a bit late… lol)

[narwhalsarefalling]

rats, huh?

All the way back in 158, we have Chisaki give a monologue that I had completely fucking forgot about because it was cut from the anime

And it reminded me of a lot more recent chapter that we had gotten.

With this evidence put together, we really can make an effort to discover where exactly quirks came from.

The mother of all quirks isn't the mother of the glowing baby, as is thought by the characters in-universe. no, it was actually someone else.

The mother of all quirks is AFO and OFA's mother, and when the twins were born and she passed away, the rats that ate her corpse spread the disease to humans.

But not just any humans. Children. Mostly babies that were born at that time and children on the onset of puberty.

We don't hear of meta-abilities/quirks manifesting at puberty now, because almost everyone in this world is infected with this disease that alters their dna. this is the true source of quirks. I bet the remaining 20% of people are either people who were born before that time, or people who have resistance/immunity to the original disease so the side effects of quirks never manifested.

In the end, I don't know what type of solution will best fit for the world of BNHA. things won't go back to normal, as deku said. society has been at a tipping point for a long time, and something has to give. I really wonder what will happen next.

I don't know if Eri will be the solution for solving all of society's problems with quirks. I don't know if getting rid of everyone's quirks will even be a good solution, seeing as how much technology has advanced because of it. Destroying the symptoms of the problem at hand rarely makes the problem itself go away. Quirks just magnified every single known flaw with society and dragged them into the light.

(i had discovered this while gathering screencaps for this post, go check that out too if you dont mind)

[pinkgy]

So, I finally completed Attacker Mammon’s Unholy board, and I have so much to say.

SPOILERS BELOW

1. These expressions have me W E A K

They got me dooown bad for him.

2. Hear me out, we all knew he was huge, but this card made me realize how huge he really is.

What do you mean by BASEBALL BAT a WEAPON??!!

And please let's not ignore that a bed made of GOLD squeaked because of his weight, how much must this monument of a man weigh so that this could've happened?

3. Istg when this action appeared in his adoring mode I thought it was squirt or something like that. THE LAST THING I WOULD'VE IMAGINED IT TO BE WAS HIS CUM SPURTING OUT OF THE MC.

And that's hot ngl.

4. (I forgot to take screencaps of the examples)

This card also made me realize how whipped he is for the MC, at one moment Mammon was literally confessing his undying love for them and MC was like "Sir we're fucking".

I don't know if the other kings get this "romantic" in their attacker cards or if it's just Mammon that is that way, but it would be really cute :D

I also loved the way this card showed Mammon's greed, in the main story they show his sin mostly in the way he claims that everything is his, but in this card, it was much more personal, and I liked that a lot, this Attacker card raised my expectations, and now I can't wait to read the others, unfortunately, I'm missing the artifacts and Attacker Satan that refuses to come home :'(

5. He created a palace in the middle of the battlefield just because he wanted to fuck, and I love him for that.

I've unlocked pretty much every story of the cards that are right now available at the gacha (Excluding Attacker Satan) and I'm stuck halfway with Attacker Beelzebub and Leviathan because I'm missing their artifacts, and from what I've read, this Mammon card has to be my favorite so far.

I'm inspired, I'm probably posting a little something for mammon tomorrow

[teaveetamer]

Take I just read on Twitter with over 200 likes: “I think the thing about edelgard discourse is most of it isn’t started by edelgard fans. it’s started by people who can’t read going “edelgard is a fascist who is evil and wants to genocide rhea” and then those people going “ugh fucking discourse” when a dozen people go “wtf””

Thoughts?

I’m sure they honest to god believe that lmfao. I’ll be real anon, I don’t really expect much from the group of people who can quite literally read someone saying “using genocide rhetoric is bad” and somehow turn that into “you think Edelgard fans deserve to be genocided!” even after numerous ELI5 level clarifications. Like we have achieved a level of disconnection from reality that I did not think was humanly possible.

I’m certain that any of the numerous people like myself who have received death threats, gotten their (sometimes completely unrelated to Edelgard) posts screencapped and reposted, and had pro-genocide rhetoric left in their notes unprompted from the Edelgard stannies can attest to the fact that the Edelgard stannies fucking love starting shit. I have never met a group of people more violently opposed to the idea of “don’t like, don’t read” and leaving people who disagree with them alone.

They can do all the impression management they want. 95% of the fandom is sick of their shit and hates their guts. The only reason they don’t get even more pushback for it is because they have demonstrated that they are the type of people who are willing to stalk you, go through your social media account to try and find personal info they can use, brigade you, sexually harass you, engage in sexist, ableist, racist, etc. rhetoric to insult and demean you, deny you your identity, appropriate your struggles and throw them back in your face, lie about you being a real life groomer, pedophile, or rapist and spread those rumors across multiple platforms, engage in pro-genocide rhetoric, and like I probably forgot something because they’ve done so much shit I can’t even keep track, and who wants to deal with that? I think most of the fandom is just quietly hoping they’ll burn themselves out and move the fuck on from from the series so they can finally leave us all the fuck alone.

[beesmygod]

im just going through discord to see caps i had showed my friends when i was trying to figure out if i was insane or not when things happened but i forgot xel completely freaking out on me bc i expressed disbelief at that loser who was making tiktoks teaching people to use clipstudio auto-trace tools on screencaps of houses you make in "the sims". except they didnt notice this event happened until like literal hours later and re-started it publicly for no reason.

this conversation is insane actually. this was how i was talked to regularly

im being way too nice here i should have ripped their head off when they told me to "eat a pizza" because they saw an angry post 6 hours after it occurred

[p-redux]

Surprised you haven't mention the discovery of the new Tait house.

Hi, Anon. I heard about it last week in a Twitter DM, but got busy with Sam stuff and forgot to post about it. I asked around and indeed Cait and Tony bought a new place in Glasgow. We know they sold their old one. And we know they have a place in London and another in the English countryside. But we hadn't heard yet if they bought again in Glasgow since Cait will still be filming the last season of Outlander. Plus, Tony is originally from Glasgow. For the inevitable, "no he's Irish." Nope, that's misinformation that was spread. He is 100% from Scotland. I know this via my original Tony family source whose brother went to school with Tony in Glasgow. And via the infamous Tony video where he is interviewed about the music industry and his Glasgow accent is unmistakable. Anyhoo, I was told in another DM that there is PROOF of Cait and Tony having bought a new place in Glasgow and BOTH their names are on the title. I'm waiting to see if I can get a screencap of it and post it, blacking out the address and other identifying info, of course. The people who told me about this I trust completely and have known for a long time, so I know it's the truth. I'll post if I get more info.

[kudamono94]

So after getting back into Mortal Kombat not too long ago due to getting Ghostface for Christmas, I forgot this guy exists and by 'this guy' I mean Homelander - that said, I also recently found out this dude got put into COD, and although I haven't seen The Boys (and therefore know next to NOTHING about it lol), listening to his voice I got to thinking: huh, you know this guy's VA* wouldn't be half bad as Kizami!

That brings us to here, naturally lol - this took me a day to complete, and while it definitely shows/could use some work, I mostly just wanted to smash together some crappy memes and test out a new video editor I got for myself (this is like the 4th one I've tried and so far it's worked a LOT better than my previous ones, so hopefully I can try making more stuff in the future whenever I get the chance?)

My main inspo for this was based off of those short text meme based videos I used to watch all the time growing up (think something like this, for example), and again, while this video isn't close to being perfect, I had a lot of fun putting it together and testing out the features in the editor, so there's that I guess ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Anywho, to anyone that sees this, please enjoy and here's looking forward to whenever I can crawl out from the rock that is work to post something original again orz -I'm still actively working on clearing out my likes and ask box, so making this video was really just a treat for myself ngl. After I get my blog sorted out, I'm planning on updating some stuff on my AO3 so whenever I get around to that eventually, I will do what I can ¯_(ツ)_/¯~

(Credits to both the original audio and links to the artists whose fan art is used in the video are under the cut -anything else is edited screencaps from the manga BUT pretty much the theme for the whole video really was just me taking random/weird pictures of Kizami I had on my phone but set to different voice lines of Homelander from his operator skin in COD)

*From what I understand, Homelander's actual actor portrayed him in the animated spin - off of The Boys as well as in COD, but didn't in Mortal Kombat, which is unfortunate bc imo Antony Starr is actually a decent VA! That said, whenever The Boys ends, I think if he did more animated work that would be pretty cool, but after hearing how Homelander is supposed to ACTUALLY sound outside MK made me immediately think of Kizami lol, so while I doubt Starr would ever do anime works, with Corpse Party getting a new game sometime this year (at least according to some listings I've seen online), I think I've definitely found a good headcanon voice for him that rivals the previous one I had (up until now, seeing their similarities with each other, I've always headcanoned Kizami sounding like Zapp Brannigan ngl, but again Homelander isn't a bad voice claim either). Also sorry for the walls of text, but if you've read everything up until now, thank you~

Original Audio Used Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGKFUSRrDwU

Link to the Original Fan Artists' Works Used:

https://x.com/canaan_000

https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/764377

https://www.deviantart.com/katkat-tan/gallery/46699718/fanart

https://www.tumblr.com/kizashige

https://x.com/hazime_purasu

https://www.tumblr.com/yama-gotchi

https://www.pixiv.net/en/users/207524

[trainncy]

OLD HOBIE ART ill try to post here more sorry i completely forgot i had tumblr 💀💀 also this a study of a screencap

[lovelylovelyartist]

LovelyLocke Leaf Green Part 5

We start off the gym with an evolution! congratulations, Beans! :D

Misty battle, Lets Go!

Had a good fright, i forgot poison is weak to psychic and that Starmie is psychic type as well as water

But we overcome! Badge two, in the BANK!

Penny the Sandshrew

Level 8 - Level 9

Soooo, remember in the last post how Penny's Intro Screencap said "FNT"?

She met her end against aNOTHER GODDAMN SPEAROW I fuckin hate spearows right now, GOD. I was so looking forward to having a sandslash :(

OK, well, with that disappointment, let's meet a new friend. Welcome, Chuck! Ill be honest, I dont think you'll see the outside of the box, but you are definitely a friend :)

New Route, New Friend! :)

Ah weird, I wonder why all of the encounters are mons I already have?

(Resident Alien Alan Tudyk Voice) SON OF A BITCH

FINALLY FINALLY FINALLY WELCOME TO YOUR AWESOME NEW HIGH ATTACK POWER LIFE SASHIMI

Now I don't have to do the "start out/switch out" training method for Sashimi, because magikarp are so... Bad. and because I don't think it'll be possible for me to get the EXP share. Since, it's locked behind one of Oak's Aides/ requires 50 pokedex entries. I don't think I'll be able to get it at all, or not at least til late game.

Arrived in Vermillion! now time to prepare for Lt. Surge in earnest.

So, since we no longer have Penny, I'm concerned about a ground type. Luckily, the Diglett Cave is right there, so I popped in, and we welcome Zero to the team! Welcome, Zero!

New Route, new mon. The Missle is very tired. He is Eepy. (might be re named if I can actually catch a Snorlax, but Im not optimistic at that given my Pokeballs Only rule)

OK, readjusting team for Surge, since Beans is still good he should be pretty good backup for Zero, so we just kinda need to focus on training up Zero. which will be very easy, since hes already pretty close to on par with the rest of the team, and we still get to go on the SS Anne :)

..... I completely forgot about this in the original pokemon. Red and Blue- and then their successors- really did just. make some strange decisions as far as the ecology of the pokemon world. I dont think I remember anything actually being addressed about the implication of real world animals and pokemon, either. Theres a lot to unpack but lets just throw out the whole suitcase tbh

Bienvenue, Power Bottoms. Luckily we happened to be on level par, I got worried for a second that I was underleveled.

(On a side note, I forgot how weird the Cut Master thing is, why the whole hell does the pc have to rub his back while hes hurling up in a trashcan. no pics cause I was so stunned i forgot to screencap lmao)

YES! MULTIPLY, MY LITTLE HOTDOG FRIEND!

Tune in next update for Lt. Surge!

[andoqin]

List of dramas that I am watching or want to watch, just for personal record reasons:

Cdramas:

The ingenious one (36/36): this drama has blown me away so far with its incredibly nuanced and sharp writing, its love stories between all the major couples and the absolutely magnificent cinematography. FINISHED verdict: HIGHLIGHT drama of the year for me so far. Smart, engaging, complicated, peak romance of all sorts, just what the doctor ordered tbh (overly long review can be found in my tags). 9.5

Chang Feng Du (40/40): I did not realise how close to the end I was. This drama is very pleasant and I adore our mains, but sadly except for a few highlights (the early beating gjs put on himself, the destruction of the gu family and the aftermath, the battle for wangdu) the writing hasn’t been able to keep the narrative tension up which is sad. FINSHED verdict: Very pretty and engaging in the beginning kinda loses me in the second half and then fizzles out emotionally, doesn't crash and burn but doesn't exactly stick the landing either 6.5

Gone with the rain (10/30): adore the gremlin4gremlin couple and from the spoilers I’ve seen not gonna adore much else

An ancient love song (1/16): incredible first episode and with only 30 min per ep and 16 eps in total this is gonna be a short fun ride I hope ( with lots of angst and tears naturally).

Here we meet again (18/32): started this for Wu Qian playing to type and Zhang BinBin being pretty but oh boy I’m struggling I just don’t care about the conflicts and in s surprising twist, I like the flashbacks to high school much much more, which is very funny if you think about the fact that the reason I started liking wu qian in the first place was because of her show stealing performance in the flashbacks of My Sunshine. I’ve been promised kisses in the near future so I’m gonna hold out till then but this might end up another drop.

Hidden Love (5/25): this one promises to be v sweet and kinda short but oh my god I have so many dramas on my plate rn so this might end up the first drop.

Till the end of the moon (22/40): I think I watched ep 1 when it started but then I got busy and now I am just staring at gifsets and crying, it’s definitely on the list to watch tho.

Heroes (6?/38): I started this a while ago, was really into it and then got busy… dammit. I might just rewatch the beginning so I can remember most of the set up for sure but man the visuals on this were so good, aaaa liu yuning.

Blood of youth (0/40): the last 12 months really have spoiled us with interesting looking wuxia dramas and this one is definitely on the list, I have been gifbaited once again.

Ray of light (0/30): usually hs dramas are something I avoid, but because I will not be watching the longest promise, for reasons, and bc @storge is a gifmaking temptress, this has made it on the list.

The legend of anle (0/39): Lmao trust YOUKU to screw up the release with bad subs only 1 ep even for vips and no released schedule… but at least I can put this on the backburner for now. Lmao should have known not to trust a youku dilreba drama, the tl has soundingly spoken and I'm gonna avoid this.

Ancient Detective (0/24): I was recced this by a friend when I mentioned my love for wuxia dramas, and since it’s almost shockingly short for a cdrama it’s on the list. EDIT: this got @purplehanfus seal of approval so it is def going up the list and since it's complete I'll probably at least watch it before the ongoing ones.

Butterflied love (0/22): see I barely made this post and already forgot about the screencap that got me started on writing it, the screencapa look great, but the drama is on mango, so who knows when I’ll truly be able to watch this

When I fly towards you (0/24): Well, I wasn't interested bc modern youth drama, but then I heard it described as "updated It Started with a Kiss" and... I'm weak? ISWAK was pretty much my crack gateway into asian dramas and while IDK if i could rewatch it today, something in me will always love this kind of story. Maybe it's like a quick palate cleanser in between since apparently eps are only about 30 mins.

Mysterious Lotus Casebook(0/40): CHENG YIIIII, in a possibly bromantic role? Or maybe het romance, I'll take it all. Plus I've already seen he's bleeding copious amounts as per his contract, so that's most of the checklist done.

Lost You Forever (0/??): because nature abhors a vacuum I apparently must have?? A minimum to watch pile and this actually and genuinely looks good??? A Yang Zi drama in 2023??? The mind boggles. Anyway I've been reading the recaps with delight, and am def going to watch this when part two airs in a couple of months but until then I have a thankful reprieve...

Kdramas:

See you in my 19th life (4/12): since kdramas release so slowly this is on the backburner but it does have some great gifsets that keep enticing meee

King the land (2/16): I am watching this for junho but it is kinda hard bc I have so much else on my plate and while I don’t mind a classic romcom type story I feel I need a bit more of an emotional hook

Story of the nine-tailed 1938 (0/16): so so many gorgeous and hilarious gifsets so little time. I loved season one so so much and the fact that this focuses on the brotherly relationship?? Extremely smart writing decisions were made!

The red sleeve (0/16): I blame @dangermousie for this she keeps reblogging angsts junho on my dash and I am but god’s weakest warrior.

Love tractor (0/8): gay himbo farmboy falls in love?? You bet this is on the list

Lady durian (0/?): ok this is only on the list for crack reasons but, daughter in law is in love with mother in law and both women are like 40+ truly kdramas have entered a new era and I kinda wanna be here for that

EDIT: Revenant (0/12): Kim Tae Ri in a spooky drama? POSSIBLY POSSESSED KIM TAE RI??? how could i forget to put her on this list, plus it was written by the Kingdom writer and I adore that drama plus it's only 12 eps which is smart in this case so... let's hope i get to it at some point D:

My dearest (2/20): I checked this out because it's got pretty much everything going for it from a production standpoint and boy did the first two eps deliver. This has got 2 seasons though so I'll probably wait until the second season is airing, since it won't be too long till season 2 or so the internet tells me.

My lovely liar (0/16): minhyun learned to act and I wanna see it happen!!

Jdramas:

Our dining table (2/10): ok this category is gonna be a bit shorter bc I haven’t watched too much drama recently but omg the gifs for this I am just crying thinking about it they look so cute??

Jack o‘frost (0/6): people have recced it and it’s short so here it is.

Utsukushii kare s2 (0/4): Season 1 was an unexpected delight so I hope s2 works just as well.

She loves to cook and she loves to eat (0/10): the manga for this is amazing (and hungry making) so I hope this adaptation holds up.

Ok this list is in no way exhaustive (well except for me being exhausted just trying toward this down) and probably subject to change ( I haven’t even looked at thaidramas or twdramas I gotta stop for now) but hopefully this will keep me on the ball and maybe I can add to it whenever a new tempting gifset crosses my dash…

[pocketbelt]

Steam Next Fest, June 2025

I can never get these done as fast as I want to, but at least it's still within the fest this time.

Covering the list of demos I played this SNF, though I forgot to screencap the full list this time. Going to start with the top highlights, then ones that are good or at least have something I want to talk about, and then a quick list of any others that I feel are worth mentioning but just didn't have much to say about. And maybe some other tidbits if I can be bothered.

I'm not going to include all the little data bits like release window and all, I've got shit to do and don't want to spend like three hours or more on this. Tumblr is constantly shitting "there is an error autosaving this post" at me as is and I've had a cursed time as it is - the power cut out last night when I was hoping to finish the demos.

Begin.

Brutal John 2

In a good and just world, this is the path Duke Nukem would have gone down, instead of what we got.

The devs are a 3-man team formerly of 3D Realms, that is, through from what I've read, the Denmark-based resurrected 3D Realms that is now functionally disconnected from the American original. However, where the American original spiralled down the drain of Duke Nukem Forever, the Danish successor has had a pretty good publishing track record and even some development stuff, so hey, credit where it's due.

It's a boomer shooter with comedy leanings and adorably bad voice-acting. In a world where aliens used cryptocurrency mining to somehow conquer Earth, you are Brutal John, a man out to stop them by destroying all crypto-mining equipment and kill all aliens while he's at it. It feels a few years behind time in that sense, as while that shit still goes on, it is greatly diminished in the wake of other tech grifts like Ai.

Despite the Steam library page asserting it completely lacks controller support, it fully supports controllers and has pretty much the best gamepad controls of any FPS I've touched over the years of Next Fests. It has good movement, very satisfying and good shooting with very pleasing guns, a well-done weapon wheel and the buttons for different things like grenades and slow-mo are finely placed. It feels remarkably complete already, which makes it curious it's launching into Early Access in a month or so with a goal of finishing this December (which means it'll actually be done in 2027, by how these go).

Incidentally, this graphical style is what I would say "looks like a PS2 game". It's in the font choices, the model style, the general aesthetic, the gun styles; resolution and framerate aside, this would fit right in and would probably be the best on the system. They even have the multi-barrel gun from Duke and all, it's a trip. Excellent stuff.

Gecko Gods

This is an absolutely serene little explorative puzzle-platformer where you are a little gecko, who can walk on any surface and must slither, airdash and wander to switches, gongs and other mechanisms you operate by grabbing them in your mouth. The immaculate name isn't just for shits, as the whole goal is to awaken The Gecko Gods.

You just clamber over whatever, there are occasional enemies to avoid but for the most part it's just nice and breezy clambering around solving puzzles. The definition of being relaxed, being moistened, being in your lane and in the zone. The music really helps make it, too, all very ethereal but present.

If there is a trend in recent years that needs to fuck off it's not having music when exploring; I adore the Souls games but they more or less started that and bastards like Breath of the Wild perpetuated it ("oh but it does have music" it's so nothing it basically doesn't). The gecko's animations for walking is also just intrinsically satisfying to watch, too.

Gecko Gods.

Gecko gods

Hark, the Ghoul

King's Field is really getting its time in the sun among indie developers, be that genuine appreciation or just a desire to distinguish yourself from the horde while also chasing the thing you like by reaching back for its primordial ancestor. This is King's Field by way of Bloodborne's setting and aesthetics, but with a lot more kicking boxes into place to use as platforms for crossing rivers, climbing over fences and grabbing things.

It's nifty in that it truly hearkens to its origins in more than PS1 style aesthetic; you have no formal dodge or block or other defensive manoeuvres, you just have to do the move-back-and-forward dance to bait attacks and move around enemies to hit from safety. This makes the speed and damage trade-offs for weapons very important, and accordingly makes the whip (more Castlevania style than Bloodborne's cane-sword-whip) very good, which is just Correct.

The ambition is high, it has a counterpart to the requisite starting "classes" from the Souls games, but makes them tangible identities that characters will remark on and react to, to affect quests. Other touches are also fascinating; magic, for example, requires holding the cast button until a magic circle in front of you fully forms for the cast to go off, which is nifty and cool magic circles are always welcome.

The important thing is I got a whip and a gun and both are very satisfying.

He Who Watches

A first-person puzzle game where your movement is restrained to that of a classic dungeon crawler; you walk on a grid, can turn in place, and while you can freely look around with the camera, your bow aiming and shooting is also fixed to the grid as well. The bow fires a magic arrow that activates switches, mechanisms and so on; you only have one and must recall it after each shot, meaning you can only activate one thing at a time.

The other big trick is you can walk up walls, along them and on basically any surface except for specific types of tiles.

It's a real good brain teaser, its puzzles are very promising being based around exact, precise navigation along the grid while still accounting for fully 3D space thanks to the wall and ceiling walking. Gravity is also relative to your perspective, so you do things like walk a box along to the left wall of a room, walk it over a gap in there to "drop" it in. Exactly my thing.

Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound

Now that's some gooood shit.

Picking Game Kitchen, the developers of Blasphemous, for this is a level of smart I can scarcely fathom for a publisher as big as Koei-Tecmo, but then they have been killing it this year.

Ragebound is a straightforward action platformer, in contrast to the Metroidvanias that the Blasphemous pair are. It's remarkably good at what it does; movement and jumping feel fucking great, it has very satisfying mechanics like the Guillotine Boost (jump off enemies/projectiles/attacks, being able to stay in the air for as long as you have something to hit) and the Hypercharged hits, and enemies mostly die in one hit, which keeps a really good flow to the levels and platforming. Difficulty comes from enemy positioning and their ranged attacks, or combinations of enemies rushing you at once, which means if you're making an indie game and think every enemy needs to be hit 10+ times to die in order to make the game hard, please stop doing that.

The Blasphemous devs do fantastic, top-tier sprite art and animation and it's true here too, and the music is fucking incredible, having an 80s style instrumentation to it - fittingly, as based on the story scenes here, this is taking place at the same time as the original NES Ninja Gaidens. I hope Koei Tecmo just gets a few more of these out of them, even from here before the full thing is out I'm in that hard.

Also look, I'm just saying; if Konami were smart they would've hit Game Kitchen up for a Castlevania, of either style. Especially given the incredible designs for monsters and bosses drawn from Christian medieval artwork, mythology and iconography. Instead they threw it to the roguelike hogs because they're idiots.

Primland The Magus

I saw this before it had a trailer on its page, as I recall, and wishlisted it on a lark to keep an eye on it. As it turns out, one hell of a fucking lark.

This game fucks, it looks like an SNES platformer that never was, but with the sort-of edgier visuals you'd only get out of a Mega Drive, or a 2000s Japanese PC doujin game. Fleshbeats, blood sprays, some gore, suggestions of tits and ass, bones everywhere, the works. Movement feels quite nice and the basic attack combo feels immensely satisfying to do - noise and visual for hit impacts is nailed fantastically. You have a string of special abilities that tie together well, giving you invincibility frames and performing special jobs which simultaneously expand platforming and make boss fights quite rad.

The music rules, the sprites and animations are absolutely fantastic, and I'm absolutely taken with the designs on display, and the story and world details laid out here. It speaks to me; it's like something I'd find on a floppy in the big box of disks my cousins sent us along with the Wildcard ROM-player device for our SNES when I was a kid.

If there's one I'd champion, it'd be this, as it feels like the most likely to be stepped over.

Super 10 Pin

Ah, now we're onto some real shit. This styles itself like an N64 game - it has a "HYPERCART DETECTED" screen that's just showing a recoloured N64 Memory Expansion Pak, and its 3D models and textures take after N64 visual styles instead of PS1 - but for games of this sort, esoteric sports games that do mad minigolf courses for a variety of other sports, especially with a soundtrack rich with DnB and adjacent music genres, those were more the domain of the PS1 and PC in my experience.

Super 10 Pin is bowling with mad courses and special, magic bowling balls. The courses are all floating in voids with trippy skyboxes and curious models of odd things as decor, and some of the best music you'll hear in a videogame is coming at you with slight compression fuzz just to nail the aesthetic.

Your control over the ball is interesting; in addition to choosing where to launch from along the line, you can also shoot from an aerial starting point. You choose a launch power, and then the requisite timed press to hit a point on a meter is for the amount of spin you can apply to the ball. Spin is applied actively as the ball rolls by hitting left or right, attempting to curve and steer it as it goes to nail the pins. You do have to get a feel for the curving, which makes learning it for the variety of balls very satisfying.

It's a delight and easily one to achieve a zen state with. I eagerly look forward to it.

--------------------------

The next few are the "silver medals", ones I enjoyed quite a bit and would mostly recommend but didn't enjoy as much as the previous set, or they had some issue, or whatever.

Brave x Junction

Of course having said that, the first one is one I'm ambivalent on, mixed even in my own feelings about it.

Fun fact, this doesn't come up if you include the x while searching on Steam. Steam enforces silent X in game titles, it seems.

It's blackjack where your wins and losses feed into a very basic RPG layer sitting on top of that. The production values and especially the fonts of choice remind me immensely of the PS2 and PS3 days; this could easily be a game of that era on those or PC, made on a budget of 50p, probably developed by Idea Factory, Compile Heart or Imageepoch (rest in peace), published by NIS or some other general EU distributor/publisher of the time (most likely Koei Tecmo, e'er our stalwart in those dark days). There's something of that soul to it.

If you beat the dealer (monster)'s hand, your attack lands, and if not you get hit. Whoever busts gets hit. It works as you'd expect; you can and likely will just get shit on for turns at a time as it's almost pure RNG. Not entirely -sometimes you can see what a card is ahead of time in the displayed card queue, and you can stockpile a card to hold onto it, there are learnable skills and weapons have abilities to tip odds, change your max denominator, status effects to fuck with that or do damage-over-time, etc. But functionally, almost purely RNG, which can make it maddening. And yet, it's blackjack; you can just mash through stuff with a basic sembleance of thinking, enjoy the music and voice clips and off you go.

It's here because I'm kind of into it, but also it makes me ponder. I ponder the borders of what counts as a roguelike, because the production here is fundamentally so low it tips into it, and it's the nature of the underlying game. You may consider that insulting, but it's true - roguelikes by nature are cheaper and easier to make than full-fledged fully constructed purpose-built games with actually designed and tested levels where you have to balance mechanics and design decisions across whole games, and not a series of 40 minute playthroughs.

But then, this doesn't wipe your equipment after runs, I think it said? Demo's dungeon only but there is a town, swappable classes, other dungeons, etc. The random encounters are handled like any other RPG's random encounters, and there isn't actually a dungeon to procedurally generate - if the tile order doesn't change each time, I guess it doesn't hit that point to count as a roguelike.

But does the RPG layer turn blackjack into a roguelike? Your every attack and gain is purely random, treasure chest dumps are definitely random, enemies aren't fixed outside bosses, but is it lacking enough components to fit? I don't know that I entirely think so, but I don't know if I can convincingly argue as to why.

Especially as, to be frank, I believe roguelikes are only as massively popular as they are (and thus are so common as everyone goes for the gold rush) because gambling addictions are way more common than we realise and these are safe vectors to feed them from.

Depending on how you take that, Brave x Junction either isn't a roguelike or it's the most honest roguelike outside Balatro. Either way I can't be mad at it, and I do kind of like it. Blackjack is so simple and so RNG based it's like playing Pokémon with shit accuracy moves, you just start slapping the button after a point and let god sort it out.

Also, it does lack one key element of roguelikes: this is not an extremely promising concept for a normal game or a super cool, appealing, enticing aesthetic and artstyle being wasted on the contemptible framework of these things, it's some (nice, but plainly nice) anime girl PNGs in a blackjack sim. The low-rent PS2/3 vibes make me hope for Steam Deck support, I'd throw on a podcast and just slap my way through this in a post-workday haze.

Death and Faeology

An investigative puzzle game set in late 1920s-early 30s America where fairies were discovered to be real at the turn of the century, with the prologue focusing on a series of murders of high society women seemingly caused by or involving fairies.

It's a little loose in some ways; the structure flows from VN sequence > desk where you look at all evidence > VN sequence > NPC 'interview' about evidence > desk to check extra evidence and re-examine prior evidence with new knowledge > answer questions. I've only some idea of I did any of that sequence right; there's no tracker or indicator for if you found everything in the desk sequences...or if there is, I guess I didn't find everything, in which case they hid that shit unfathomably well.

The desk interface is a bit fiddly; you have evidence in one menu and tools (fae encyclopaedia, magnifying glass, blacklight) in another, and they're all actual objects you pull out and put on the desk and move around. To investigate anything you need to move the magnifying glass or blacklight over it, and it'll auto trigger dialogue when you find something - even the police case file books, which cannot be interacted with or read by any means except using the magnifier on them. The instructions do not convey this at all well, so I got stuck there for a bit trying to decode what I was being told.

You can end the desk scene when it presents the button to, but I think that only shows if you have a bare minimum of flags needed to advance; the lack of indicators about finding everything is exciting in that way, you have to be thorough and think things through, but it also leads to a lot of uncertainty in the answer sequence. While I think I know, from the evidence and context provided, what to answer, the dialogue around it left me wondering if I had answered wrong somewhere. The detective kept remarking that I did well but some things were missing - which I don't know if that's in-character proper hedging and not taking conjecture as truth, or if I answered wrong because I (ROT13) bcgrq abg gb fnl gur Jneevbe snvevrf nyfb znqr gur punatryvatf gurl gura bcrayl xvyyrq va fgenatr snfuvba? Gurer’f abguvat gb npghnyyl vzcyvpngr gur Jneevbef va znxvat gur noqhpgvbaf orlbaq gur fvzcyr zbenyvgl bs Fpevor = Zbfgyl Tbbq naq Jneevbe = Onq (naq Cnenfvgr = Tvgf), gubhtu gurl qrsvavgryl qvq gur xvyyvat.

Perhaps that's part of the actual mystery, but knowing I'm not fucking up as I go would be nice. I think the fairy culture and society outlined is overly simplistic and a bit limited from here, but the idea is fun. I'm keeping an eye on it.

Hololive Holo's Hanafuda

Do you know there's a relative dearth of hanafuda/koi-koi simulators on Steam or elsewhere, at least that I can find? I probably need to go digging through the libraries of old consoles for more. I learned how to play it in the Like A Dragon games, where in the most recent ones I got to cleaning the fuck out of the high-stakes dens to get money to leapfrog to endgame upgrades/equipment early, and I got a taste for it. It's still RNG like mahjong but you've got more escape routes and if your opponent gets cocky/is trying to circumvent your lead, and actually calls koi-koi like an idiot, you can rip them apart for their hubris. Mahjong needs to let you whiff-punish is what I'm saying.

This comes from Gemdrops, developers of the truly excellent Star Ocean 2 R, and the pleasant and comfy "VR" Yuru Camp games, and it's looking real good; the Live2D in-match sprites and animations are really nice and cute-looking, the UI is all super clean and very clear and it provides plenty of guidance to teach you how to play koi-koi. It has explicit month-indicators, which LAD didn't, which is useful because the cards use custom art of the Hololive members so if, like me, you're halfway to memorising the faces of the traditional cards you'd be hopelessly lost.

There's an Adventure mode which has cutscenes and a loose story of a tournament and all, with cutscenes on par with the Puyo Tetris games, which is a treat to see. Presentation is a strength across the board. The demo is oddly restricted to a 20 minute timer so I didn't get to see much of the special abilities and rules they've added, but it sounds in the vein of things like Touhou Mahjong. A treat just for me.

Mina the Hollower

Gameboy Colour remains the true best 8-bit aesthetic, fight me.

Everyone loves Link's Awakening DX and the Zelda Oracle games, it seems, or at least they're becoming the new hot commodity of lesser-represented Nintendo staples like Metroid (Zelda was a multi-million seller at best, but not 10+ mil mainstream giga-dominators til BOTW, lest you forget). Mina the Hollower takes that and melds Bloodborne into it, the other hot commodity of the public mindshare, especially in this moment of Sony refusing to capitalise on it in favour of burning billions on things no-one wants.

It's pretty good all round, but some aspects of UI and information presentation leave bits to be desired. For example, if you aren't well-versed in the pseudo-grid design of old Zelda games, you'll probably not be used to the shuffle dance of positioning and backing up to strike enemies after avoiding attacks. Without the sweeping arc of Link's sword swing you might be at a loss, but you can, in fact, lock the direction you're facing by holding the attack button.

The game does tell you this...in the Manual, under Settings, which the game does not tell you exists. It's relying on you reading that manual for a lot of things, actually, and that suits the vibe they're going for but it really should tell you it's there. Some of the controls grate a litte, too; I just do the shuffle dance but if the direction-locking was on a different button, like the entirely unused shoulder buttons, I would probably make any use of it.

Similarly, the titular Hollower thing is that Mina can dig underground and tear about the screen at higher speed for a few seconds by holding the jump button after jumping, to simulate diving into the ground. But to be honest, it would be feel a lot better if it were on a different button from jump, or just disconnected from jumping entirely. Again, all four shoulder buttons go unused. maybe they get used later but if they don't, they're pricks.

I don't know how to feel about it borrowing Bloodborne's version of lose-money-on-death mechanic, where it can be absorbed into the enemy that killed you or a nearby enemy if the environment got you. I only died once, to the Hulk Trooper boss, who absorbed my cash, which is actually a step beyond Bloodborne; bosses never absorbed your cash there. I note that Elden Ring began dumping your cash outside the arenas, and genre fellow Nioh just auto-restored your cash on re-entry to the boss arena. The way Mina does it, if a boss is hard enough that you can't kill it second go, all your currency is functionally forfeit immediately on that first loss. It seems like it'll be real annoying, but there is also a mechanic for stockpiling level-ups as un-loseable gems that you can re-spend in the hub later...but it also means if you're near 350 bones and know a boss is next, you'd just have to fuck off and grind to the level-up point.

We'll see how it goes when it finally comes out, I suppose. Also I chose the whip because it's objectively correct and I beat both the kraken and Thorne's asses; they're both "supposed-to-lose" fights you can "win", curious to have two so early into the game.

---------------

This section is for games I liked, sometimes more than the previous two, but just didn't have anything to say, or it was simply okay, or had distinctive issues but may still be worth it. The "bronze medals", as it were. Quickfire:

Artis Impact: Meiji Spa Very striking art and animations, and there's lots of them too, all kinds of bits of art. The core appeal. Simple turn-based RPG otherwise, neat enough; weirdly, built out of a Chromium browser. Hit F12 for a screenshot and got the Chrome Devtools.

BYTE One of two games this SNF based on Bram Stoker's Dracula, re-imagining and re-interpreting its events in a new setting or version of the tale with a purported goal of exploring the LGBTQ themes in the original. If I had pennies, etc. Aesthetics are a vibe and there's humour in retaining some of the turn-of-the-century Victorian English voice for 1990s Oregon, but doesn't use its time well and its "battles" are very awkward and unapealing. Bit of a drag.

Escape Simulator 2 More Escape Sim. Puzzles here are reall good and more that, also has more Dracula. Curious alignment of Dracula lovers, I appreciate it. Looking forward to it quite a bit.

Everdeep Aurora Incredibly short demo mostly comprised of wandering around, not really any of the trailers' gameplay. Seems real neat from those trailers but this demo is very thin.

KuloNiku I kept forgetting to give utensils. Cute and simple restaurant-management/cooking minigame thing, but pretty sure this studio isn't Japanese so it's yet another Wholesome Direct pick about running Cute, Quaint Japanese Businesses from "wholesome" non-Japanese studios. makes me iffy. Like the art style and character designs but lacks the je ne sais quoi to get real enthusiasm.

One Turn Kill Deckbuilder of debatable roguelike nature. You have to kill the enemy with your deck of attacks "in one turn" as you die in one hit, so it's absout chaining cards smartly to keep drawing (card cost draws more cards to your hand, but you need them in the deck to pay the cost). Really fucking nice art style and aesthetics, great sprites and animation and character design. RNG threatens to be a rabid nuisance, as is the nature of the beast. Roguelikes are for gambling addicts, I must assert.

Outrider Mako This was announced like 5-6 years ago and vanished. Hope the devs were okay during the pandemic; Playism slacking by not putting this at last weekend's conferences. I remember following it because it seemed to be Pocky & Rocky core but beyond aesthetic it isn't. Interesting attack and movements - you have Sonic's homing attack, functionally, but gameplay loop has me iffy. You need to gather and mine shit for gods to progress, not bad but doesn't enthuse. May come around to it when the backlog clears down a bit.

The Trolley Solution Comedy game sending up the trolley problem memes from a few years ago. Comically mad scenarios and whole entire minigames built around the framework, like playing a shell game and picking trolley tracks to pick your cup. Humour is up and down - the best-friend-or-girlfriend scenario is real funny, but a side level is an egregiously long and insufferable "stereotypical shoujo manga" setup that's horribly long, badly written and just not funny. I need indies to get over this shit, I really do, it's the same shit as ironic VNs, you're not funny and you're bad at this.

Truxton Extreme A remake of an old shmup by some of the original devs, who also did Zero Wing and Batsugun. Incredible fucking music, hilarious max-power weapons (the lighting gun in particular), interesting design decisions: bigger ship than normal, level expands past screen boundaries slightly, ship has no grazing hitbox, reset to checkpoint on death. Curious how that shakes out but it does mean you can't face-tank bosses, which is interesting to stop players from doing.

-------

I don't often highlight the bad or failed demos I get but I hit some particular ones this time I want to highlight for reasons.

The first is Burning Sword: Death Sun. There's no screenshot for this as it doesn't work; I tried multiple times and every time, it crashed within a second of booting, flashing a window pop-up labelled "UE-BurningSwordDeathSun" with the message "Fatal error!". Sasuga Unreal Engine 5, you unfathomable dogshit engine. Look at the trailer, I was excited for this!

The second:

Changer Seven

This should not have been given to the public yet, but I'm torn on that thought, as their own update posts reveal a terrible fact: they thought special attacks should lock you in place for the entire animation and then didn't design enemy behaviour, hitboxes or your invuln around that. They had to be told to let you cancel out of it with dodging.

This is barely past the "we got our own models walking in Unreal" stage of dev, it's so early as to be debug, not playtest. Movement is really bad, characters don't have animations for turning-in-place so turning is real as it wasn't accounted for - walking in general feels bad! Attacking feels weightless and while there's some effort to impact and reactions, it's barely anything.

You have one combo, it's hitting X three or four times - a bad sign! You have a heavy attack, it's on a cooldown - you have immediately failed the test. You have specials accessed by holding RB and hitting a face button, they do negligible damage and are on longer cooldowns - return to study.

The character design and sensibility, the base concept of an action game around a sentai team themed after knights, it's all very cool, but the developers need to actually go and play actual real action games, not Mihoyo ones. Honkai Impact 3rd was a ground-breaker for mobile games and was working within constraints of its time and was ballsy for it; but we now live in the age where iOS and Android have integrated Playstation and Xbox controller drivers for years now, and also THIS ISN'T EVEN A MOBILE GAME ANYWAY COME ON MAN

It's so early on there's plenty of time to hack it into shape, but oof. Like reading books to get a sense for writing your own, you should play games and especially those in the genre you're targeting to get a sense for what you're doing. A lesson many, especially any Anglo dev looking to be "inspired" by old Japanese RPGs or visual novels, desperately need.

HOTEL BARCELONA

Swery65 has been in my shitbooks for Deadly Premonition 2 and that godawful game he did a Kickstarter for, as he absolutely blew his lower body off with the former and the latter finished him off. This is what's been taking up the years since, and well, he's still washed.

This is a side-scrolling action roguelike where gameplay feels bad, the upgrades are near worthless and the boss it sends you against needs an unholy amount of attacks to break its armour so it starts taking real damage, and no upgrades provided fix that. The boss also has a moveset that hopelessly eclipses yours, your only recourse is a block that is on a limited resource gauge. Everything here takes an absolutely miserable amount of time and there's not enough of the aesthetic kick you'd want to make up for it.

This is the big "Suda51 and Swery65 collab", but Suda only supplied the idea and the rest is Swery's purview. It's rather tragic to see this now in the wake of Romeo Is A Deadman's reveal. Swery remains washed.

-------------------

I close off with one treat: a list of the roguelikes/roguelites I encountered while looking for demos. I had around 30 ish demos when I called my search, and winnowed those down to what's here; in that time I was hit with 124 roguelikes. It's not a wholly new list, I think a few of these I've seen in past Fests, but I can't be fucked to cross-reference with the two other lists. I do earnestly mean it when I say this isn't a judgement on quality, purely on quantity, but also after being punked like four or five times this Summer of Gaming by enticing games that turned out to be roguelikes, some of them hiding it from their trailers, I do have to stress: please, make real games. Make levels, make actual hand-crafted stuff. Okay levels are hard and can suck to make, oh well! You'll learn by doing, and bypassing it with this shit is just depressing.

This Next Fest had some high highs and good surprises, but also some of the lowest lows. Roguelikes continue to be a plague, but everything else ticks along. While the higher echelons of the industry are burning down, the medium and rest of the industry will tick along unbothered, and the art will continue to come. You do just have to go looking, because what little remains of games journalism has not the bandwidth or interest to tell you about things like Super 10 Pin or Primland The Magus.

This did end up taking 3+ hours anyway.

[every-kikuta]

Housekeeping/FAQs

This pinned post will be updated as needed.

Where do you source your images?

Panels are all sourced from the official VIZ digital volume releases unless otherwise stated. Note that the final volume versions sometimes differ slightly from the original magazine versions. Images are screencapped and unedited except to remove any visible neighboring panels.

Where can I find other blogs like this?

Here are the other Golden Kamuy character panel blogs that I know of. Give them some love if you haven’t already, and if there are any I’m missing please let me know!

@every-ogata, the OG ❤️‍🩹

@every-koito

@every-vasily (completed)

@every-kadowus (Kadokura & Kirawus)

@every-shiraishi

@every-nikaidou (Kouhei and Youhei)

@every-inkarmat

@every-usami

@every-tsurumi

@every-sugimoto

@every-tanigaki

You forgot alt text/mislabeled a chapter/mistagged a character/[insert other mistake here].

I am happy to correct any oversights that are politely pointed out to me, thank you.