#anti square enix

[dalekofchaos]

Because of my complete disdain for Square Enix's greed to milk the LIS brand.

Here is my own canon for what happens after the Bay/Bae endings.

Post-Bay. Max and Warren are successful Photojournalist and Science Professor, married and living their best lives while keeping in touch with their friends from Arcadia and visiting Chloe's grave on her birthday and the anniversary of her death.

Post-Bae. Time shenanigans happen which results in Max saving Rachel and because of saving Rachel she saves Chloe and Arcadia Bay. Max, Chloe and Rachel ride off in the rainbow and get their happy ending.

It's evidently clear that DE is made with complete contempt towards Chloe fans, Pricefield fans, fans of the original game, fans of the LIS1's art style, fans of Warren/Grahamfield, Kate and everyone else from Arcadia Bay. Acts like it's a love letter to Max, while alienating the core audience.

Square Enix's soulless corporate capitalism and hyperrealism made a small developer's passion project unrecognizable. To the point where we can't even recognize Max.

[ultraericthered]

A little while back, a Dark Road fan/Xehanort simp came upon my post about my Divergence KH3 Xehanort. They did not seem to like it much. But I deleted their comment and just to set the message straight, I will address this to Tetsuya Nomura himself, Tomoco Kanemaki and the folks who made Dark Road, and the game's fans:

Let me make up stuff about my evil boi and enjoy him in peace.

[grimlocksword]

Square Enix CENSORS Toriyamas Female Warrior Design For Modern Audiences...

[exposingtheidiocy]

I couldn't have said it any better myself! Amazing responses! These perfectly explain why the arguments from Square-Enix shills do not hold up at all.

[xyrishi00]

anti-aqua

[birues]

A slap to every single artist in the gaming community, not even mentioning the artists who work for SE. Absolutely disgusting behavior. This needs to be known. Do not buy this game. Boycott it at all costs.

[asterdiz]

ANTI-FORM

WIP lineart and some shading currently. Loving how the pose turned out!

[walks-the-ages]

Reminder: You can't claim to support artists, writers, voice actors, and more against AI and then still uncritically share AI-generated Art because it's "funny" and "just a joke".

Reblogging AI generated content uncritically "because it's funny" is how AI generated content is going to be normalized.

If you support artists and writers and actors and voice actors not losing their livelihoods to AI, that means you need to reject AI-generated art *everywhere*.

Square Enix is literally already using AI art generators in their latest game by their own admission to try to test the waters and "boil the frog" as the expression goes -- starting out using AI for small, "inconsequential" things, then slowly increasing what they use AI for until in just a year or two, entire games will be voice acted by AI, using designs generated by AI, and more.

[themattress]

So basically three things just got confirmed:

1.) The "Lost Masters Saga" starting with KH4 is a soft reboot for the franchise.

2.) However, the "Lost Masters Saga" is also the last saga of the KH series for Nomura.

3.) Nomura will be retiring some time within the next decade.

Conclusion?

Call me when the "Lost Masters Saga" is over and Nomura is retired. If the KH franchise still continues past then under new management, then I might - might - just give it a look.

[mlon-x]

All that's left in my heart is misery and despair...and now, you can share it!

[caehum]

mickey, you're too late.

[elleastic5]

“𝓐𝓵𝓵 𝓽𝓱𝓪𝓽’𝓼 𝓵𝓮𝓯𝓽 𝓲𝓷 𝓶𝔂 𝓱𝓮𝓪𝓻𝓽 𝓲𝓼 𝓶𝓲𝓼𝓮𝓻𝔂 𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓭𝓮𝓼𝓹𝓪𝓲𝓻…𝓪𝓷𝓭 𝓷𝓸𝔀, 𝔂𝓸𝓾 𝓬𝓪𝓷 𝓼𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓮 𝓲𝓽!”

📸: https://www.instagram.com/alasdair_watson?igsh=ZzhwbDBwdmZ4bHN6

[ultraericthered]

Terranort Speculation

It is known by know that when Birth By Sleep entered its earliest stages of conception and development (in 2006), Terra's story was thought out first (because Revenge of the Sith), followed by Ven's second and Aqua's last, explaining the recommended playing order. It's also shown in how in KHII FM, released in 2007, every single hook for BBS concerned Terra and his story - those horrendously misplaced scenes with Xemnas, Aqua's armor, Vexen, Zexion and Xigbar, the secret boss fight against Terra's Lingering Will, and the secret ending video where the climax is a close-up of Terra's face as his eyes morph into the "dark" golden eyes, or "Nort eyes." Then in 2008, early on at Jump Festa and later in at the Tokyo Game Show, the beta trailer footage for the former was only of Terra and Ventus while the latter added Aqua to the mix. And this was also the same time we got the 358/2 Days trailer and wow, between these teases and Coded starting up late into the year, 2008 truly was a year spent preparing the KH series for the plunge it was going to end up taking!

But I want to touch on all that early footage because it makes me speculate and believe that there was a slightly different plan set for Terra's story being developed at first, and that Terra himself was conecieved as a far darker character than what we ended up getting. Prior to contributions from Daisuke Watanabe and Masaru Oka, Nomura had every inclination to push as hard as possible with the "Anakin Skywalker" route for Terra, essentially taking what he had at first likely envisioned as being Xehanort's forgotten origin story and rewriting it with Terra in place of a younger Xehanort, making enough modifications to service the end point of Terra losing his heart and body to Master Xehanort, who'd lose his memory soon afterwards.

The thing about the beta trailers is that scenes that ended up occurring in the final product are played out in backdrops that were not intended to be the locations those scenes would actually play in (like, why's Xehanort confronting Ven at Olympus Coliseum? Why's Terra protecting Ven from Eraqus at the Great Maw? Why's Ven asking to be killed on Destiny Islands?) So while Terra's meeting with Maleficent was never meant to take place with thorns all around, what's really notable about how it's depicted here is...well, this:

Maleficent clearly has a proposition for Terra, and Terra gives an evil Xemnas-y face in response. To me this suggests that in the initial plan, Terra at the start of the game was going to be like Riku was in the midsection of KH1: very easily allured by the power of Darkness and willing to dirty his hands while working with unsavory characters towards some goal he believed to be righteous and worth it for him.

Just as interesting, the second trailer has this next scene with Terra and Maleficent, as the latter exposits about the Princesses of Heart.

Literally nothing is different from the final scene except Terra's body language. In the final version, his head is titled towards Maleficent. But in this initial version, his head is tilted towards Aurora. Later in that same trailer, the last scene played sets up Aqua and Maleficent's later interaction different. Rather than ask "what did Master Xehanort tell you?", Aqua (with no Prince Philip there yet) asks "was what you said to Ven a lie?" And then Maleficent answers her straight up:

And yes, Terra's embrace of darkness during his confusion and rage over Eraqus' strict, abusive teachings of the supremacy of light over darkness does happen in the game, but it's framed as him getting tricked into it and extracting Aurora's heart by mistake, which is then later backtracked with Xehanort indicating he'd set up Aurora's heart to be extracted, making him the true culprit. I think in the original pitch, Terra was going to deliberately embrace the darkness and turn his Keyblade on Aurora's heart. He'd immediately regret what he did when he sees Maleficent claim the heart, but it would have been a far more willful mistake, which is why he'd be racked with such guilt over having done it. For a moment, he'd have crossed the line and done something evil, which someone who values heroism and protection of others like him would find completely antithetical to himself.

So then rather than further self-damnation like Riku in KH1, we'd see Terra walking back from the abyss in the next worlds he visits, giving us hope that he may yet avoid succumbing to the darkness within himself. .... And then the events at the Radiant Garden would occur, to set him down a different, even more insidious road to darkness.

Some time well afterwards, after he's come to blows with his friends and is in conflict with his master's agenda concerning him, after he's once again channeled his darkness and taken out Braig's eye, after he's been talked up by Master Xehanort, stirring within him the craving to seek more power, achieve more heroic exploits using that power, and wanting to protect his friends while also prove his master wrong and assert himself as the decider of how the trio should conduct themselves as Keyblade Wielders, and after he's far more willingly indulged his darker nature by working with more villains he'd always be dead-set on backstabbing whenever it's convenient for him and his "noble" goals to do so, we'd be treated to this moment:

This plays much differently than anything we actually got from the stupid "Terra on Destiny Island" scene in the finalized game. To me, this is more like the also stupid first scene of the game with Young Xehanort, standing on the shore in contemplation as the bright sun sets over the horizon. Terra stands in solitude, away from the light, and when he sees the kids play-fighting on the beach, the sun is shining down and bathing them in light. Symbolism is clear; these are innocent hearts who belong to the light. Terra is no longer one such heart. He stands away from that brightness, away from light. This could've been the moment of realization from Terra that he needed to turn back from his darkness entirely, to head towards that light.

But alas. thanks to fucking Xehanort, this would follow instead:

This encapulates everything that Terra's character could've been. In the actual scene, the line is translated as "You may be my master... but I will not...let you hurt my friend!", to the response of "Has the darkness taken you too, Terra?" from Eraqus. But in the beta version, the wording suggests that the unseen Eraqus asks that question of Terra first, and Terra says "I don't care if you are my master! This power... I use it for my friends!" Conveying a full-on disowning of Eraqus as his master and a rejection of all that he'd taught him about light versus darkness, and an embrace of the power his darkness grants him to use for the sake of his friends. As in the final game, I think Xehanort would be the one to come in and kill Eraqus (gotta do the Mace Windu thing, after all), but in this version it would've been more clear that Terra was absolutely willing to kill his master here.

Beta Terra was meant to embody the absolute twisting of every positive value the KH Trinity showed us into a negative for him. "My friends are my power!" "My strength to become a True Hero comes from my friends!", "Our hearts are always connected", "No matter how deep the darkness, there's always a light at the end: keep your gaze towards that light even as you endure and exploit the powers of darkness from your own heart!" - Terra would showcase how you take those in the wrong direction, a callow young man ready and willing to try any measure, no matter how dark, in his pursuit of the "strength to protect what matters", his desire for self-actualization beyond what his master's expectations of him, and his committment to his more altruistic, heroic resolve (woah, major Alain flashbacks here!) We even see a carryover of this idea in Blank Points, where within Terra-Xehanort, Terra's heart tells Master Xehanort's heart that he's willing to get cast down into the deepest darkness and have his heart fully possessed by Xehanort so long as he feels certain that Xehanort will end up being the one to fade away into the darkness while Terra ends up returning to the light, and he does feel certain that this will be so for as long as he keeps sight of the cause he fights for: to return to his friends and make right what he'd helped set wrong, his heroic willpower embodied by that sentient armor spirit he'd left behind. But the follow-through on that is barely existent.

And the result is a man torn between himself: the man with the unbreakable will that desires to do good for the worlds and people he cares for (pure Terra, the Lingering Will), and the man who recklessly and selfishly embraces the heart's darkness for self-empowerment (Terranort, who'd later become a Heartless and create his own Nobody in doing so). By picking Terra to become his vessel, Master Xehanort would've basically ended up getting swept up in Terra's wild ride, as by becoming Terranort, he too became a fractured person, split into Ansem and Xemnas. Terranort was to be the ultimate villain because the "Terra" mattered as critically as the "Xehanort".

Tl:dr: I really like Terra, but at some point in his story's development he could've and should've been far more than a big dumb-dumb!

[grimlocksword]

Square Enix DELETES Ethics Department Page In Massive Damage Control But...

[the-desolated-quill]

The Guardians Of The Galaxy video game really reveals just how badly planned the MCU was from the start. Why would you not include the Galactic War against Thanos and the Chitauri? Not only is that important context for nearly every single character in GOTG, it’s also what links them to the Avengers on Earth since they had to fight the Chitauri in their first movie. Not to mention it would have been a great way of setting up the upcoming threat of Thanos. But noooooo, James Gunn thought it was way more important to have dumb jokes about Kevin Bacon 🙄

[with-all-erased]

“All life bears death from birth. Life fears death, but lives only to die.”