#and of course they're extremely emotional and dont know how to handle it!

[morphogenetic]

i recognize this might be a bat to a hornets nest but curious about more in-depth ndvr3 opinions

hi anon im sorry this took one million years to answer properly (bc i never got an answer back about how long you wanted this to be) but im answering it now. spoilers for v3 and very concentrated dislike of dr as a series (and especially v3 lol) below the cut

as a whole, dr does a very poor job at making its characters feel fleshed out. this is, i know, kind of the point - they're all supposed to essentially be very exaggerated versions of some specific tropes common in jp media, i.e gundham being an extreme chuuni. after the first game though, which feels like more of a proof of concept than an actually well-designed game, the extreme flatness (ironically shown very well by the pop-up-book art style lol) just gets worse and worse and the characters in v3 in particular are even less fleshed out than before. i realize that for v3 this is somewhat a consequence of them trying to drive home the 'these are characters written by someone else' point, but like.......even if you're trying to make the point that someone wrote the characters to be like that, you can still write the characters well if you're trying to pull off genuinely emotional moments w them. e.g. every time they tried to make kaito's illness sad i could not give LESS of a shit about it because he just has the one-note personality.

dr has always had the problem where characters - outside of komaeda and hinata in sdr2, who are IMO the best developed characters in the whole series, especially komaeda - are only as well developed as the amount of time you spend doing their social links (or occasionally the particular trial that focuses on them, if that applies). of course, it's literally impossible to complete everyone's social events during the main mode of the game - unlike, for example, p4 or p5, where you can at least get close if you dont finish the whole social link. as such, it is extremely difficult to form an attachment to more than 1 or 2 characters before they kill/are killed. this is especially true when it's immediately obvious who has less of a personality than everyone else - or has more of a trope of a personality - and it's intensely predictable who is going to die early. for example, in v3, it was almost immediately obvious to me that tennis guy, maid girl, and angie and tenko were not going to make it to the end of the game, and were all early deaths, because of how paper-thin their personalities are. of course, this meant that i didn't bother doing their social events at all, so i had no attachment to them when they did inevitably die. this is a problem w every single dr game but its especially bad with this one.

(don't even get me started on how ive been able to figure out the majority of the solution to each case before the trial even starts or gets farther than like 30 minutes in. or how the issues that the students raise are often incredibly stupid and take WAY too much time and energy to shoot down when its so obvious that they're completely wrong. it's just. filler for in so many of the trials and it is incredibly annoying. the amount of filler before seesaw effect made me insane.)

now for my main v3 specific complaint: the fucking ending.

i actually like meta endings, you must understand that about me before reading the rest of this. meta in video games in general is something i love as long as it's well executed. i adore how uchikoshi handles it in [GAME REDACTED TO AVOID SPOILERS], for example, even though a lot of people seemed to have missed the point with it entirely.

the key word there is "well-exectued." v3 is not.

first of all: if you're trying to make this a meta case where v3 is part of the ongoing DR series....why are you trying to say that the video game you're playing is part of a TV show???? it feels as natural to say that a TV show you're watching is secretly a book someone else is reading. it's not a natural jump between mediums in the slightest, and what makes it even more annoying is that dr as a series is a primarily-video-game series!!!!!!!!! what on EARTH are you doing trying to be meta about your video game secretly being a TV show. it makes no fucking sense. if they tried to say that it was a mixed-medium franchise, that I would accept, because DR IS a mixed-media franchise. but it feels incredibly stupid to retroactively say that 'these two video games we wrote in the past are actually tv shows.' what? no. that's not how mediums work.

secondly: the meta does not work effectively in a series like dr to begin with when it already is constantly breaking the 4th wall for comedy - which i don't actually have any significant problems with. i personally think it's a lazy way of trying to be funny when it's the primary way you try to make your game funny, but i can accept that it works with the general character trope adherence of the series as a whole. however, because of how meta is often used as a joke in the series, when they suddenly try to make the meta serious, while also still keeping elements of the meta comedy at the same exact time that you're revealing that the meta Is Dead Serious Stuff, the complete tonal dissonance really works against you.

lastly: it does not really feel like the writers wrote v3 as a whole to be meta, if that makes sense. [redacted uchi game] feels like it was always meant to be that way, and so it feels completely natural that it leans into fourth-wall breaking all the time. however, the way that the meta ending comes across in v3 is just that they didn't have any other better ideas on how to end the game/were running against a time deadline and just threw in the 'ehhhhhhhhh we're already meta all the time for comedy let's do that for the ending but serious this time' towel. as i said earlier, i like meta in games when it's well-exectued, but poorly executed/written metanarrative always sticks out, and in the case of v3 it is especially bad because it doesn't even seem like they wrote the first case AFTER the last case....which you need to do in order to successfully pull off the meta in a case like v3. and is also wild considering the very beginning of the game makes it clear that they did actually go back and try to drop foreshadowing earlier without editing much of the rest of the game to accommodate for that.

tldr the writing around the metanarrative ending is just so intensely bad that it's kind of unbelievable to me that people think it's a good ending.

sorry if you like dr but tldr its a mediocre series and its baffling to me how it got popular, but also people saying v3 is better at being meta than [redacted uchikoshi game] is an opinion ive seen more than once that just makes me fucking laugh.

[helmarok]

i like james' childish behavior and not cuz it makes them a "cute baby" but cuz of that connection to their past... like they lost their childhood to trauma and abuse you know what im sayin

[senkrechter]

you dont have to answer this but i think i may have bpd, npd, and szpd. but im really unsure, is it even possible to have the 3 together??

like, i want to spend time with people, i have friends, i like the IDEA of spending time with people, but as soon as i call someone im just... bored? if i feel anything it goes away in a flash, and the feeling is usually pretty strong, especially when it's closer to the time where my meds start wearing off. i hate spending time with people irl because it adds an extra layer of exhaustion since i have to express my emotion on my face more. i wanna be well-known because then i could get loads of attention and admiration for my art but i absolutely don't want it either because i value my privacy wayyy too much. and like, i'm (almost) always on call with my partner and i really miss them when they're away and i constantly fear abandonment from them but they're the only person who really makes me feel that to an extreme? and when i'm alone i want to be with other people but when i'm with other people all i want is to be alone. idk that's not everything but this is getting long enough ahah. my mind is simply always at odds with itself and it frustrates me not to know why it's happening. i'm not diagnosed with any of these but i am diagnosed with adhd? but i've done as much research as i can on bpd, npd, and szpd.

sorry for troubling you, you don't have to answer this if you don't want. have a good day!

I don’t mind answering asks at all, you are not troubling me in the slightest, sorry it took me about three days to reply to this, I haven’t had the energy to log in the tumblr in a while. I will be honest with you and outright say that I don’t know enough about BPD or NPD enough to tell you whether you can have both at the same time, or whether you have them at all. And of course I can’t accurate say whether you have SZPD either, since the only thing I know about you is just a paragraph. I don’t know all of the things you feel, and I am not a professional, so just take these as my personal opinion and thoughts based on just the things you’ve told me here. Not gospel or fact! From my point of view, the things you describe aren’t very related to SZPD. Just as any personality disorder is, SZPD is severe, with a variety of symptoms, and I’d say the feeling of wanting to be around people, but then feeling tired when you are, wanting to be popular but not wanting to sacrifice your privacy etc. are very common introverted traits, rather than a relation to a specific personality disorder. Not to say these traits don’t make things hard for you at times, but you must be careful before assigning an entire personality disorder to them, since there’s so much more to SZPD than just these things. I am not the best at talking about my experiences, and feelings, so I will try to be more pragmatic and talk about the professional diagnostic criteria for SZPD more than that. Both the DSM-5 and ICD-10 share these criteria: 1. Taking little if any pleasure from activities. 2. Always, or almost always choosing and prefering solitary activities. 3. Indifference to criticisms or praise. 4. Little if any interest in sexual activity. 5. Emotional coldness, and detachment. The slight differences in the criteria are, ICD-10 has a couple extra, being, 1. Limited capacity in expressing emotions and feelings towards people, even anger. 2. Excessive fantasizing, and introspection. 3. This one similar to one of the DSM-5 criteria, except it includes not desiring, as well as not having close and personal relationships, or having just only one. (These are mostly out of memory, so if I forgot something or left it out, I’ll edit it if it comes to my head, or otherwise if someone sees this they can reblog with any correction.) Using only my common sense, to me it would not make a lot of sense for someone to have two cluster B PDs, known primarily (generalizing of course for ease of wording) for emotional volatility, common sensitivity to rejection and criticism, and among other things, as well as a cluster A PD that is commonly emotionally stagnant and apathetic most of the time. But then again, I am not a professional. Only real advice I can give you is to not overthink these things! Focus on the things you are feeling, the things you are thinking, try to recognize patterns in your behavior and do your best at figuring out how to handle the things that cause you the most grief. I know it may feel relieving to be able to assign a term or a label or a diagnosis to the things you feel and struggle with, but in this case, I personally don’t think SZPD is the right one.