#best phantasy star girl

[dark-falz]

【Ｃｈｅｌｓｅａ　Ｅｎｃｈａｎｔｅ】

[fallroute]

Senna joined the Guardians to make sure that she could provide a better life for her mother and brother. But, who knew that the first steps would be so daunting?

[linkspooky]

what are your favorite scary movies?

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT

This is the most predictable response for top found footage movies list, but some things are popular because they're good. Blair Witch shows wat is good about found footage as a medium because you get to follow these college students who just act like regular people deteriorate in real-time. There's no narrative behind it like a normal story. You just see them wander around trapped in the woods with no end in sight.

The scare doesn't just come from the monster that may or may not be there lingering just out of sight, but your concern for the characters that you have spent long enough time to grow attached to. It's distressing to see their distress. There are some horror movies that scare because they make you dread the inevitable fate of the characters, you wish for their survival but you know it's not happening so you just watch hope get slowly peeled away from the characters. The scariest quote of the movie is just one girl giving into her despair as she's lost in the woods.

Heather Donahue : Everything had to be my way. And this is where we've ended up and it's all because of me that we're here now - hungry, cold, and hunted. I love you mom, dad. I am so sorry. What is that? I'm scared to close my eyes, I'm scared to open them! We're gonna die out here!

"I'm scared to close my eyes, I'm scared to open them" is just such an emotional statement to make.

PSYCHO

The shower scene in Psycho literally changed cinema permanently, and is probably one of the most scary thoughts that a film maker has preyed upon that someone can just bust in when you are traditionally naked and vulnerable like that

Psycho is far scarier however for the reasons underneath the surface of the film. This video analysis does a good job of eplaining what made me love Psycho.

Psycho is famous for doing the protagonist switch, the movie starts out as a typical thriller about a woman who stole money to elope with the man she's having an affair with until she stops in a strange motel on the side of the road. What makes the shower scene so shocking itself is because Janet Leigh who played Marion was a big name star at the time. No one was expecting her to get killed halfway through the movie, and no one was expecting the movie to turn into a horror in the first place.

The way the protagonist changes, from Marion to Norma, just goes to show the foiling between the two of them as illustrated by the above picture. Marion smiles like this at the beginning of the movie when she believes she has gotten away with her crime. Marion begins the film as an ordinary, slightly put-down woman who succesfully bamboozles all the men in her life and makes her escape because practically none of the men expected such deceptfulness in such a tame woman.

Norman at the end of the film smiles like that while the "mother" personality speaks in his head, informing the audience of her plan to play innocent to try to deceive the detectives that have arrested Norman.

At that moment the two of them display the term uncanny in its true Freudian sense.

"For Freud, fear comes from a natural progression of phantasy, so that the uncanny is not just the familiar turned unfamiliar but also the childish wish turned monstrous. It is Marion's quest for fantasy and respectability by running away and marrying her lover, that leads her to the Bates MOtel, where she encounters Norman a manifestation of respectability turned pathological."

The uncanny is the connection between Marion and Norman that manifests here, the same way an unseeming woman can flip around and turn money, the unseeming man she meets in the hotel can turn out to be her killer.

CARRIE

The single best Stephen King Novel, Carrie simply tells the story of a girl who snaps, but it tells it so well. There are a lot of ideas in play in Carrie, including the inhuman actions of bullying itself and how it's perpetrated by everyone in Carrie's life just making the collective decision just not to treat her as a person basically no reason.

The pointless cruelty of what happens to Carrie. The logic of Carrie having to be bullied, because she's ugly, because she's socially awkward, because in the book she's fat and pimply. Also, the hidden underlying reason for all of Carrie's strange behavior at high school being that she's relentlessly abused at home, and that not a single person in school cares or shows empathy for her. They've all just made the collective decision to either ignore what's happening to her, or take part in that cruelty.

This is what makes the pig's blood falling on her at the prom such an effective scene, because o the pointlessness of that cruelty. Carrie was finally having a moment of feeling like a normal girl, and several bullies had to go out of their way to kill a pig and set up that prank just to humiliate her further. They also thought there'd be no real consequence afterwards, they just get to keep beating down on their bullying victim for the satisfaction fo it.

Carrie is also a character that blurs the line between victim and perpetrator. She is both the monster of the story and the main character. It's like if the creature of the black lagoon was a teenage girl. The moment where she snaps the audience feels far more for her than they do the innocent children she's massacring, which is kind of the whole point of the story to blur the line between how much of Carrie's rampage was her own fault and her own fault, and how much of it was caused by the way people around her treated her.

TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE

There's so much themes and meaning in a movie that basically got famous for a guy wearing a leather mask who chases a woman around with a chainsaw.

The whole movie takes place in what's basically a post-apocalyptic landscape, even though it's just the declining rural America.

"Hooper's apocalyptic landscape is ... a desert wasteland of dissolution where once vibrant myth is desiccated. The ideas and iconography of Cooper, Bret Harte and Francis Parkman are now transmogrified into yards of dying cattle, abandoned gasoline stations, defiled graveyards, crumbling mansions, and a ramshackle farmhouse of psychotic killers. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [is] ... recognizable as a statement about the dead end of American experience." Charon Charett."

This is what American Gothic looks like. It's a man chasing you around with a chainsaw.

Leatherface and his family are victims of capitalism, and the dry, dusty desert and the ruins of an old farmhouse the main characters spend most of the movie journeying through are the wreckage left behind by American capitalism. The movie is basically about the cannibalism of capitalism, using slaughterhouses as a metaphor and treating human lives as callously as the way the animals marched into slaughterhouses to be killed and made into meat is treated. Their house parodies a typical wholesome farm home, but everyone inside of it are murderous monster.

The themes of the exploitation of women in this movie are so strong too, especially the ways their bodies are both sexualized in brutalized not only in horror movies but in society at large are also right on point. There's the reason that the ending scene to Texas Chainsaw Massacre is so legendary and it's because despite representing the "final girl trope" Sally Hardesty, chased, terrorized, tortured over the course of the movie does escape but her experience has completely mentally broken her.

[demonfox38]

Completed - Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete

Never sleep in the nude. Especially not when an emergency might happen. Like, say, a home invasion.

Have you been keeping up with the latest hot debate in video games?

Recently, video game publisher Naoki Yoshida revealed a perspective that surprised American audiences regarding the term J-RPG. While seen in the west as a classification of a certain flavor of role-playing games produced in Japan, it is seen as derogatory and reductive to Japanese developers, particularly in how many people use the term to mock design choices in both the game rules and story structure. Which, man, it sucks to hear that it causes pain and sour feelings. Like, a lot of the best video games I've played fall under that categorization. Hell, I grew up in the era where Japanese companies were the most trusted and revered in game development. I'm not saying that the likes of Nintendo, Konami, and Capcom are perfect little angels, particularly when it comes to overworking staff members. But, even today, I still have a positive bias towards Japanese games and developers. Hell, that was my first major link to a culture outside my own. To think anyone would consider them inferior when they both saved the goddamn industry and continue to make major contributions to it is infuriating.

It was definitely a weird time to play "Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete," all things considered. Because man, is "Lunar 2" ever the most game of that game type.

"Lunar 2" takes place about 1,000 years after its predecessor. A silent threat is building behind a false front of benevolence, triggering a strange woman to come blasting to Lunar to stop it. She subsequently gets nerfed so hard that even a paper weight could take her out. Lucky for her, a hero named Hiro (lucky that!) comes to her aid. Through various tribulations, Hiro, the strange woman from the Blue Star, and their friends manage to quell the rising threat without using the same destructive power that once killed an entire celestial body. And then, when the strange lady ditches the planet to return home, Hiro re-discovers space travel to reunite with her.

Like, buddy. She says she loves you, then ditches you hard enough that you have to create NASA? Maybe think twice about this.

Are you old enough to remember "The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés" website? Like, pre-TVTropes TVTropes? This game could literally be that list codified. Like, there are several rules on that page that are named after both "Lunar: Silver Star Story" and "Lunar 2" characters and situations. It's not to say "Lunar 2" is derivative, necessarily. A lot of the party members are creative in the same way that a teenager's fantasies are brashly unique. It's just what you'd expect out of an RPG story. Church bad; dragons good; Satan's a thot; only your girl is pure enough to fight them.

"Lunar 2: Eternal Blue Complete" gets strange when put into the context of time. Like, this remastering was released in 2000. This poor game was released in the same year as "The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask" and "Final Fantasy IX." Like, holy shit, right? It's wild how much technology varied between 1999-2001. Absolute cowboy years of gaming. I can't find sales numbers for this particular variant, but if it were sentient, I'd have to imagine it took to drinking with "Wild Arms 2." What a rough time to roll out. Hell, depending on how you look across international markets, even the original game would have had spicy competition from "Shin Megami Tensei" 1 and 2, "Final Fantasy 6", and "Phantasy Star IV." Aspects from those RPGs might make this one look sweet and baby-faced by comparison.

There is one major structural difference between "Lunar 2" and most games. This is the inclusion of its post-game epilogue, where Hiro strives to reunite himself with his lost love. Honestly, this may have been one of the earliest games to try this narrative structure out. Like, it's so unique that I thought this was added to the Playstation version to quell angry players of the Sega CD version. (It's not, but more on the Sega CD version at the end.) It's probably most comparable to "Tales of Graces F" or more recent "Pokémon" games, in terms of content addition. Despite some hang-ups I have about Hiro's relationship, I do think it is critical to play through. It's an additional 15-20 hours on top of the 24 it took you to get to it, but honestly, it feels wrong to let this plot thread hang. Might as well do all you can!

Like its predecessor, "Lunar 2" has a generally likable cast. Most of them are flawed, but still endearing (particularly, alcoholic gambling addict/ex-priest Ronfar, assassin-turned-dancer Jean, and money-hungry, driven mage Lemina.) Even some of the villains are surprisingly kind, once you kick their ass. (Although, Lunn and Borgan probably should have had some subsequent ass beatings for what the hell they pulled. Fucking karma escape artists.)

There was one major character hang-up I had, and that was with the main heroine herself. Like, I get that Lucia is a weird space girl from thousands of years ago, so she might not have the best sense of social cues. But, there are several times where she tries to ditch the party to continue her mission alone, only to end up putting either herself or the party in danger. She initially bails on helping a sick baby because it might take too much time. She gets weirdly prudish as she starts falling in love with Hiro, which seems backwards. Then, there's the whole ditching humanity to go back into a freezer to wait for the Blue Star to recover. Like, hello? Girl? What the hell? Did you learn nothing this entire time about working with humans to accomplish your goals? Could you not have learned about agriculture or the fine points of sustainable space travel? Did you think any less of your goddess for going mortal and abandoning both the Blue Star and Lunar? Do you think any new life on the Blue Star would automatically revere and listen to you like in the past? How are you a princess of a dead planet? What's the governance on that? Is this mike on? Hello? 

Oh, well. At least she didn't nuke anybody.

The gameplay of "Lunar 2" is pretty much the same as it was in the first game. It's mostly mazy dungeon exploration + turn-based combat + inventory management on lean funds. I didn't have to stat boost Hiro as much to get through bosses this time, but there's definitely an item in the epilogue that makes stat boosting totally spammable. Absolutely worth it. While Lucia is in your party, you have no control over her actions. It's weird (and honestly irritating in some circumstances), but comparable to the Sega CD variant of Luna from the first "Lunar" game. I don't think you'll find anything too surprising here. It's just mostly about stacking your dominoes in the right order.

The engine for this game is so similar to the first game that I literally encountered the same audio-loading hard lock bug. This time, it hit with a vengeance. Like, if I did not own a disc repair machine, there's a good chance I would not have been able to beat this game. The discs were just in that rough of shape. I guess I can't blame a game for failing if its physical media is melting into sludge. It did make for some frightening moments, though.

Seriously—don't get into physical media collecting if you're not going to put the work into keeping your collection functioning. A lot of the games I like are running on consoles that are between 20-40 years old. It's only a matter of time until a clock battery runs dry or an electrolytic capacitor blows or even a disc reader fails. You've got to be ready for when that happens. Otherwise, you're just making an elaborate garbage pile.

Media degradation isn't the only way this game is rough. A lot of the translation is very of-the-times. Which, for the late 90s/early 200s, means that there is a significant amount of crude language. Like, I gave "Final Fantasy VII"'s translation shit for Tifa's single R-bomb. Ronfar is handing them out like party favors. I'm assuming if you're reading this on Tumblr, you're also well aware of the international discussion of terms used to describe those of the Roma ethnicity. And, okay. I want to be a good international citizen. So, I try to be mindful about the wrong term in the same way one has to be careful about using Eskimo, Indian, or Oriental. And then, Jean literally shouts "Gypsy magic!", and I end up snorting pop up my nose. Like, goddamn. Times really change, don't they? And that's not even getting into one character being solely dragged for his weight! Shit, man.

Oh my God. Anybody remember that bit with the woman in Zulan having amnesia and forgetting she was a mom? That was pretty fucked, too. Like, imagine how horrific being in that position would be for all parties considered. Although, I guess that’s also the plot to "Overboard", in a way. 🙃 Jeepers. Times change, indeed.

This is a minor nitpick, but Hiro's run option was driving me nuts in game. I'm used to using it like you would in an old "Pokémon" game to blast through everything as fast as possible. Hiro's run is very limited. Like, maybe 4-6 tiles out limited. Also, don't expect to gain any invincibility frames from it. The damn thing is really near useless, especially when trying to evade enemies. But, I guess it's there, so…thanks?

If you are interested in playing this game, definitely play "Lunar: Silver Star Story" first. It does add a lot of meaning to the game, although you could probably follow along without that experience. The Playstation version of this game is a must, particularly for those in the NTSC region. I mean, those of us in the U.S. are used to companies dicking around with international releases. There's beefing up enemy stats and increasing item costs, and then there's consuming the experience points used to beef up spells so that you can save your game. Like, okay, Satan. As if 40 hours of grinding weren't enough already!

Whatever you decide to do, I hope you come away from this introspection with at least one important thing to remember. Keep your games clean. And I don't mean linguistically. Although, it can be thoughtful to do that, too.

There's no reason to shit up the world before Space Satan does it.

[fstbmp-a]

Just refound Save This World (and it's many iterations) from Phantasy Star and it reminded me about how Amy just. Never wanted to be a fighter. At best she wanted to protect what was important to her, things she loved, and now she's a commander in wars, even.

This girl that just left her home in search of love and now is constantly in the crosshairs of world-ending events. She Did Not Ask For This.

[saitamabilingualgamer]

Games I Played Recently 最近プレーしたゲーム

CrossCode -Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One/Series

This is one of the best new retro style games I have played in a while. The game takes place in a fictional MMORPG where you play a girl named Lea, who finds herself trapped in its vibrant, action-packed world. The sprites, smooth gameplay, and story are all excellent. This game is unapologetically influenced by 16-bit era games such like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to The Past, Yoshi’s Island, and Phantasy Star. It even takes some modern influences from games like Stardew Valley and has moments where it feels like you’re playing a bullet hell shooter game. My only complaint is that this game has some very difficult puzzles that almost seem impossible to play without a guide.

最近プレイした中で最高のレトロス風のゲームのです。このゲームは架空の MMORPG で行われ、その世界に閉じ込められたレアという主人公の少女をプレイします。スプライト、スムーズなゲームプレイ、ストーリーはすべて優れています。ゼルダの伝説 、ヨッシーアイランド、ファンタシースターなどの 16 ビット時代のゲームに大きな影響を受けています。スターデュー バレーなどのゲームからの現代的な影響もあり、シューティング ゲームをプレイしているように感じる瞬間もあります。私の唯一の不満は、ガイドなしではプレイするのがほぼ不可能に思える非常に難しいパズルがいくつかあることです。

Biohazard: Village – PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, PC, Xbox One/Series

So I finally got around to playing though this game even though it has been out now for quite some time. I found the the return to the creepy atmosphere set in Europe, similar to Biohazard 4 to be fantastic. I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the Biohazard 2 remake but maybe I am just being biased because I grew up playing the original on the PlayStation. I am hoping the next main installment in the Biohazard series will return to the gameplay style in the recent remakes of 2, 3, and 4.

発売されてからかなり時間が経ちましたが、ようやくこのゲームをプレイしました。バイオハザード 4 に似た、ヨーロッパを舞台とした不気味な雰囲気への回帰は本当に楽しかったです。バイオハザード 2 のリメイクほど面白くなかったが、もしかしたら私がPSのオリジナル版をプレイして育ったので偏見を持っているだけなのかもしれません。バイオハザード シリーズの次回作では、最近リメイクされた 2、3、4 のゲームプレイ スタイルに戻ることを期待しています。

Ion Fury – PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4

This game was a blast to play. There is a new term called “boomer shooter” going around and this game is the epitome of that. The meaning of boomer shooter is a newly developed game for modern systems, but harkens back to the 90’s first shooter games such as Doom, Duke Nukem, and Quake. Ion Fury was actually developed by team members who worked on the Duke Nukem series. It has a cyberpunk setting with lots of tongue-in-cheek humor.

このゲームは本当に楽しくプレイできました。最近「boomer shooter」という言葉が流行っていますが、このゲームはまさにその典型です。ブーマー シューターの意味は、現代のシステム向けに新たに開発されたゲームですが, 90 年代の最初のFPSを思い出させます。実際、Ion Fury は デューク・ニューケム シリーズに取り組んだチーム メンバーによって開発されました。サイバーパンク的な設定で、冗談めいたユーモアがたっぷりと盛り込まれています。

[maguro13-2]

Shattered Hero ~ Origins of the Ink Demon Episode Maka Pt.3 ~

[Carnival - Fumie Kumatani]

Sonic : Ah, man. 2006, this is possibly going to be the worst year ever, and my co-creator that made Phantasy Star and Nights left out to prevent him being blamed by the public. Producer that created the hardest Shinobi game on Playstation 2. I knew that he was gonna do that to me after dealing with that catgirl at the first ds game, which was released on the same days as the Black Arms Invasion.

Tails : Relax, sonic. It's not that bad. Although the Dreamcast era did ended after the Black Arms Invasion therefore the new Sonic game would be the very start of the modern era. Plus, Sega required that the boost system from Heroes has decided to give you to boost freely!

Sonic : Yeah, that's really cool, Tails! I can boost freely! Watch this! *BOOST!*

Tails : Woah!

Knuckles : Hey! My hot dog!

Sonic : *BOOST* Oh, sorry about that. The vendor decided to give you another one.

Knuckles : And I asked for extra mustard, when does boosting became a thing since Heroes and now that the Black Arms Invasion has ended, who's gonna look after the Space Colony ARK after the invasion? Did something happened to Amy's Place that was located in Central City? You know, where the Amy's Room stage is at.

Sonic Oh, that? It got destroyed during the Invasion. Two years, man. Two freakin' years.

Sonic : Now that we finally dealt with eggman and Eggman Ne... (attempts to say "Nega", but stutters to change the subject and determines to say something instead) Eggman Negative in Rush. Yeah! Eggman Negative! That's what I really said about him after dealing with a cat! I'm sure the 06 will be great without--Dodge! (the trio avoids) Hey, who was that just by now!?

[Sonic Speed Riders - Tomonori Sawada, Runblebee]

Jet : So, you must be Sonic the Hedgehog! So surprise that you wouldn't see your face after the Black Arms a year ago. I heard that alien leader has got some daddy issue with Shadow.

Tails : Woah, who is that guy?

Sonic : That's Jet the Hawk. The leader of a group of thieves called the Babylon Rogues. They steal things that are treasures and are bandits capable of theirselves as Pirates. Luckily, this all changed for theirselves and became Extreme Gear specialist! You know Sonic Riders just came out to be part of the 15th anniversary. He maybe have speed, but I have the power to boost! *BOOST!*

Jet : Oh yeah!? Two can play at this game! Storm, Wave! Let's show him who's the fastest thing alive!

Storm : Yes sir!

Wave : With pleasure!

Jet : Onward!

(WHOOSH!)

Tails : Knuckles! We gotta go after them!

(cuts to Sonic running through the streets while racing against Jet)

Jet : So did you heard the news? The Grim Reaper of Mobius has released a girl who had been framed for a crime that she didn't commit.

Sonic : Who's the girl that was mysteriously released?

Jet : Hero of Soul World, Maka Albarn. 14 year old human girl born on the planet Jupiter.

Sonic : Born on Jupiter. What else?

Jet : And some say that she is responsible for wiping out 80 percent of the country's population after a tremendous power she unleashed has created an explosive shockwave of amount of that power called Shattered Resonance, luckily, the masked boy named Makoto Asagiri of the Phantoms of Society have saved her life by calming her down to lower Shattered Resonance.

Sonic : And after that, a second explosive shockwave was occured in it's capital, Tokyo, where a girl named Kimial Diel was teased by people that were killed by her and including her best friend, and then another phantom saves the day. Too bad Death City was so out of character. Or should I say, a city that was the home village of the hero of the ohkuboverse himself, Shinra Kusakabe, aka Mr. Devil. Responsible for creation his son and Soul World, and as well for spreading the "Influence" of his.

Jet : Yeah, right. And it's not like that they dealt with the forces of evil that is exactly a diversion, they weren't created to protect peace, they were created to get the attention of heartless to act like they're the forces of evil. But the true forces of evil is the Shadow Realm.

Sonic : What!? Shadow Realm? That lame concept made up by 4Kids? Tou know, I changed my voice from Ryan Drummond to Jason Griffith voice after Heroes in 2004 and in 2005 during the Black Arms invasion.

Jet : Correction. Shadow Realm maybe a concept, but it's also a world where the Ohkuboverse has became a facade to it's kind, all thanks to this Demon Vibe fella. So the author did falsely led his characters to be the instrument of his son and was an arrogant dickhead. So we don't know what's gonna happen to the Real World is that might be covered in Darkness!

Sonic : You bet!

Jet : Think fast! You should really catch up!

Sonic : You're on!

Tails : Sonic Wait up!

Knuckles : Hey don't leave us hanging!

(on top of the building is Silver watching Sonic and Jet race through his binoculars)

Silver : So we finally know who you are. I finally found him, the Iblis Trigger.

"Meanwhile at the Halberd..."

Medusa Gorgon : I can't go back now. I have to get away from the influence of Shinra Kusakabe. Perhaps that Crona would be pleasing me that our heartless is working perfectly syringing the heartless of original Asura Kusakabe. With our emotions in plan, we can kiss Real World AU goodbye to the Kusakabe Legacy and then our jealously would be over. Shaula, Arachne, come. We have to make our escape into Soul Eater's moon, we will overthrow the Kusakabe Legacy once and for all.

Shaula and Arachne : Yes, sis.

Inky Albarn : What do you think you're planning to do, Gorgon Sisters? Or should I say the hated enemeis of Soul World that goes against the Kusakabe Legacy. Where do you think you're trying to do on destroying the planet just to get away with murder?

Medusa Gorgon!? : (Gasping in shock) Y...You! You're not Maka Albarn! Who are you and what are you doing here!?

Shaula Gorgon : We were just minding our business that's all!

Arachne Gorgon : Yeah! N...Nothing much at least! (sweats nervously) We wouldn't hurt a fly on destroying the Kusakabe Legacy.

Inky Albarn : And what were you attempting on Destroying the Kusakabe Legacy for what?

Medusa Gorgon : Umm...I...I believe that we are planning to coup d'e tat the Kusakabe and the Kasugatani Legacy so that we can end our jealousy once and for all!

Inky Albarn : In an attempt on genocide by creating heartless doppelgangers from yourselves? Nice try, fakers. But it shall be me that will end your jealously, you and your so-called sister did that to witchkind and for taking the royal bloodline which you stole from, you cowards! (walks up to them as the Gorgons back up and cowers in fear)

Medusa Gorgon : Please! Why us! Why me!? All we just wanted was to end our jealousy over the Kusakabe and the Kasugatani! But what kind of family of sorcery is this supposed to happened, cowering in fear by the ones that Gave Crona to life!? You gotta understand us! We just want the Jealously ended! That's all we ever wanted, so we may have created our heartless doppelgangers as decoys so the Kusakabe and filthy teenagers would never suspect our real intentions! You got it all mixed up!

Inky Albarn : Shut your mouth, Heartless Genocider! You and your sisters have did naughty things to Humankind and witchkind, and even of course Demonkind. This is why villains like you are always such a pain in my ass! You creating a sadistic heartless of yourself to attack me so that you would get away of ending your jealously. But I believe that I will be the one that is going to teach you a lesson. You three witches deserve punishment in the slammers. I got a date with a 14-year old girl that looks alike me, and you three got a date with justice!

Medusa Gorgon : Wait! Don't come any closer! I was born to end our jealousy to overthrow the Kusakabe Legacy and of course the Kasugatani! I just want the jealously to end! I have the knowledge for this!

Inky Albarn : Too late! The only knowledge you'll ever find something to love is get you punished and heartless born from within the darkness, shall be perished!

Medusa Gorgon : No! Don't! Please! I beg of you for this! Nooo! We don't deserve this! (yelling) NOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

"Ah, Justice! The Sweet taste of victory!"

~ Act 2 : Justice Against Heartless ~

[eggoverlord]

April Albums

I kind of went crazy this month

Who Do You Think You Aren't - Robby Moncrieff and Zach Hill - Math Rock on the weirder side

Team Sleep - Team Sleep - Experimental Rock

Atmospheric DnB (Good Looking Times) - It's a compilation, so, a whole bunch of artists - Well. The name kind of explains it but I'd say it's a fair bit of jungle too

Mantra Hiroshima - Omar Rodriguez Lopez - Math Rock on the WEIRDER side

Spiderland (Remastered) - Slint - I've listened to the original before and loved it, so this isn't truly a fully new album, but this is my first time hearing the remaster. Oh yeah, the genre is post rock, and it's one of the founding albums of the genre

Merriweather Post Pavilion- Animal Collective - Experimental Rock

Hard Normal Daddy - Squarepusher - IDM

Today's Active Lifestyles - Polvo - Math Rock

Royal Astronomy - μ-Ziq - IDM

good kid, m.A.A.d city - Kendrick Lamar - Conscious Hip Hop

Ants From Up There - Black Country, New Road - Post Punk Post Rock Stuff

Three of a Perfect Pair - King Crimson - Prog Rock

Flower Boy - Tyler, The Creator - Hip Hop of some kind

Leaves Turn Inside You - Unwound - Post Rock

Rites of Spring - Rites of Spring - Original Emo Band basically

Let Us Pray - Electric Wizard - Stoner Doom Metal

Yank Crime - Drive Like Jehu - Original Emo Scene post hardcore with hints of math rock

Amber - Autechre - IDM

Nostril - Igorrr - Breakcore and Metal at once

Spirituality - Igorrr - Metal and Breakcore at once

The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste - Ministry - Industrial Metal

RePorpoised Phantasies - Machine Girl - Breakcore

Talk To Your Kids About Gangs - Holy Smokes - Math Rock Starring Zach Hill

Machine Girl / Five Star Hotel - Machine Girl and Five Star Hotel - Breakcore

NONE OF THIS IS REAL - DJ Rozwell - Wizard type beats

Post Self - Godflesh - Industrial Metal

Scream Bloody Gore - Death - Death Metal

Mingus Ah Um - Charles Mingus - Post Bop (Jazz)

Hiss - Wormrot - Grindcore

9-5 and Odd Jobs - Dolly Parton - Country of some sort

72 Minutes of Fame - C418 - Experimental House

The Shape Of A Burning Credit Card - KFC Murder Chicks - Noise Grind is the genre name that showed up when I googled it 👍

Time'S Up - Living Colour - Funk Rock Classic Rock stuff

Now He Sings, Now He Sobs - Chick Corea - Latin Jazz Fusion or smthn

Cortex Rampage - KFC Murder Chicks - Noise Grind as well I guess

KFC Core - DJ Scotch Egg - Breakcore

Anxiety & Circumstance - Akintoye - Really good hip hop artist; do recommend

13 Songs - Fugazi - Punk

Zwei - Turing Machine - Math Rock with some Psych Rock Krautrock inspiration

In Rainbows - Radiohead - Experimental Rock with some IDM influence

Discovery - Daft Punk - House and Pop

Traveling Without Moving - Jamiroquai - Funk

GT Ultra - Guerilla Toss - Synth-y math rock

Rest Proof Clockwork - Plaid - IDM

Feedbacker - Boris - One of the best albums ever made, yes I've listened to it, yes I will listen to it again. Post Rock, noise, metal, slowcore, it's got it all

[neokad]

Phantasy Star II - The 1989 JRPG that could

(This post is dedicated to @kuukigajan, my best friend, whom motivated me to post here again, so... I hope you'll enjoy this!)

This game. This freaking game.

I'm gonna say it right now: this post will contain massive spoilers about pretty much everything in Phantasy Star 2's story, so if you do plan on experiencing this game fresh, I strongly advise you to not read this post at all beyond the first paragraph, but... here's the gist of it: Phantasy Star II is one of the most important and groundbreaking JRPGs of its time, and I just did not believe this game was from 1989, at ALL. For that and a few other reasons, it has become one of my new favourite games of all time <3 

In fact, I do want to start with the one big flaw of this adventure so that I can just gush about everything else that's brilliant about PSII. I have to be honest: the dungeon design in this game is horrible. Now to be fair, it does make the many places you visit more memorable, but well... there's a rumor floating around that an actual trainee made the layouts for the dungeons - and since this game was a bit rushed for the Genesis's launch, the devs just didn't have time to replace the... stuff he submitted. And let me tell you, this rumor makes sense: PSII's dungeons are too big, too maze-like, too confusing and also FILLED with strong enemies. And in a game where you don't get a way to save anywhere until the midway point, it can make your adventure very frustrating and potentially grindy because of that... Now I wouldn't say that PSII's nearly as bad in this area as say, the original version of Dragon Warrior or ironically the first Phantasy Star, but the dungeons can totally make you feel like the game's harder than it actually is, at least without a map.

Thankfully, you should never feel bad for using any maps or guides with this game! The execs at SEGA at the time made the very smart decision to include a walkthrough with each copy of the game, including maps, tips, secrets and more! Said guide does encourage youto not look at it as much as possible but... it's totally fair to just use this, without any shame!

And that is a great thing, because... with you armed with this piece of paper, Phantasy Star II can finally show you its actual brilliance.

The game's plot starts off a thousand years after the events of the first Phantasy Star game. Since Alis and her party defeated Dark Force, the inhabitants of the Algol solar system - and its three planets of Palma, Motavia and Dezolis - have enjoyed relative peace. However, at a (to my knowledge) unknown point in time, a computer entity known as Mother Brain has started imposing itself onto mostly Motavia. This, over time, has actually given many benefits to the region: the once deserted wasteland was given rain, water and crops, so that it could finally host viable, comfortable civilizations. The citizens that lived here could finally ditch their (arguably) nomadic, harsh lives in favor of comfort, pleasant weather and more. And most importantly, Mother Brain allowed its citizens, save for a few, to ditch their current jobs and live a life of laziness, without any obligations or pressure to do anything other than well, existence. This is reflected many times during the game through NPC dialogue, too!

It is on such a setting that our protagonist, Rolf, wakes up from a strange nightmare. In it, we see Alis batting Dark Force and struggling in doing so, but as soon as he realizes this, Rolf wakes up in cold sweat. He then proceeds to calm his nerves, realizing that no such dramatic events could possible happen to him - after all, he and many others have been under the universal protection and care of Mother Brain, whom at this point, has provided all of their needs for centuries. He then gets out of bed and goes to the central tower, where we works as an agent in case some things do go wrong.

And gone wrong things have! His superior informs him that biological monsters, which had been created and bred in the Mota biosystems laboratory, have gone rogue and infected the regions of Motavia at a rapid rate. Because of this, Rolf is asked to investigate the cause of this phenomenon. Once he gets home to prepare for his journey, he is ambushed by best girl Nei, who has been rescued by him many months ago from the clutches of a serial killer. She does not want to be left alone anymore, and since she is also worried for Rolf's sefety, asks him to accompany him on the mission. Naturally, Rolf accepts.

Here, I do want to bring up Nei in more detail! She's in fact, the first of PSII's brilliant story-gameplay interactions, and here's why! Nei is in fact, a crossbreed experiment between a human and an unknown animal with cat-like features, but here's the thing: this said experiment was a failure. Because of this, Nei is only one years old, and yet her physical and mental age are progressing way more rapidly than they should. And you can feel this effect on the game itself: she needs way less EXP than any other party member in the game to level up, and because of this she will skyrocket in levels way beyond the rest of your crew... with a catch. Because of the nature of the experiment, the genetic code inside of her is slowly being messed up and corrupted, which not only causes her level ups to be less valuable than anyone else's, but it also becomes an important plot point later...  Unfortunately, despite her absolute cuteness, her status as a half-half made her a victim of bullying, racism and so much more, which is... pretty messed up to bring up at the time not gonna lie o_o

Starting up the journey, the party discovers that rogues have destroyed a neighboring city, and it just so happens that their base is situed at Shure, the first dungeon of the game . One assumption I like to make from this scene is that life has become so easy and careless on Motavia that people just went and did crime out of pure boredom, because life just wasn't thrilling enough anymore with Mother Brain doing everything it could for its inhabitants...

However, upon climbing said tower, Rolf and Nei find out multiple dead rogue bodies, whom have been presumably murdered by the many biomonsters roaming the place. They do, however, manage to find some dynamite and most importantly, a letter. This piece of paper informs our heroes that the daughter of a Darum, the very same person that tried to murder Nei months ago, is held captive in another tower, which explains why he turned to crime in the first place. They then decide to do the obvious, which is to rescue daughter Teim in her captivity location. Once they meet up with her, she explains her desire to talk to her father to set things straight and sway him from the life he's been getting into, as well as hide her from the surviving rogue members with the help of a veil. Our group manages to meet up with Darum, but... her daughter asks the party to stay put, as she does not want them to interfere with her as she explains things to her father. However, in the heat of the moment, she forgets to remove her veil, which causes Darum to not recognize her. In his confusion, he murders her own flesh and blood and sits there, stunned, as he watches the reason he caused many untold atrocities... wither away below him. Shocked and going insane by this situation, he sees no other way out... but to commit suicide with the help of a bomb.

It gets worse.

While this scene was tragic and brutal to say the least, it does allow Rolf to cross the previously guarded bridge where Darum was always located, which allows him to investigate his mission further.

I do want to make a sidenote here actually! Phantasy Star II does include eight playable characters, but unlike Rolf and Nei they do not join you at fixed intervals - instead, they will become available in your home town of Paseo once conditions are met. Sadly while they do have a recruitment quote, a few lines and a backstory, they do not have an impact on the main story in any way. This does blow as this means PSII does not have much in character development and interaction, but I did want to mention that there’s more to this game than just Rolf and Nei :P 

Upon exploring the regions of Motavia, the party manages to make its way to the Biosystems lab, and what they find here is horrifying to say the least. The lab is in horrible shape, with cracked floors everywhere. On top of that, there is no one inside the lab anymore, it being completely deserted, save for some horrible-looking creatures being kept insides tubes, decorating the now sinister looking building... Because of this, Rolf deems it safe to pick up the recorder inside the lab, to analyze it and try to find out just what exactly went wrong - if anything at all - to hopefully figure out why the world has been sacked by biomonsters. And sure enough, the gang make its way back to Paseo.  After handing over the recorder to the library located in Paseo’s Central Tower, it is now made clear: the biomonsters were caused by a large amount of energy used in a very short amount of time in those labs, causing them to mutate extremely rapidly. This had the predictable but unfortunate effect of ruining the natural order of the ecosystem, which is why these species are wrecking havoc without control. The librarian giving this information also makes the following connection: this outpour of energy must have come from Climatrol - another lab which regulates the weather of the terraformed planet so that it can sustain its new shape. Following this, Rolf and co. take a few steps to reach Climatrol - and I want to highlight a specific one!

The story somewhat pauses until then, but one of the dungeons you’ll go through is a garbage dump... and one of the treasures is a jet scooter you can use! Sounds cool, right? Well it is, but even such a cool object has been abandoned by the lazy society, since teleportation is much more convenient to them. I just thought it was a really neat detail, that’s all ^_^

Once making their way through the relatively normal Climatrol, something does wait for them at the top of the building... something... unsettling...

This is Neifirst. She was another failed experiment just like Nei, sharing the same biological data as her. However, unlike her sister, her creators tried to kill her on the spot due to her status. This made her enraged against the species that gave her life, and as an act of revenge, decided to unleash this bio catastrophy to slowly wipe us out. This is where another truth is revealed: Nei did not come with Rolf just to protect him, she actually wanted to put a stop to her sister, because while she did dislike being treated like a freak or a monster, she never wanted to hate her species as a whole... It remains that she still wants to stop her sister’s plans, and despite Rolf’s protests, the two engages in a fight. However, due to Neifirst being much stronger, Nei sustains heavy damage and is incapacitated. But, this is where the rest of the party comes in, and thus they finish the job and kill off Neifirst dead in her tracks, Rolf then quickly rushes in to his dear friend’s side, but as he does... it’s too late... Nei is dead.

This is yet another reason why Phantasy Star II is such an important game: it is, to my knowledge, the very first JRPG in which a major playable character dies permanently. Heck, Rolf even tries to bring her back through the local Clone Lab - because yes, citizens have access to eternal life by cloning their bodies until the end of time - but... since Nei’s genetic code was degenerating rapidly, they could not clone her body anymore. And, since Neifirst was also defeated, it is also impossible to get a fresh code back from anywhere in the world. Nei is dead. And you cannot do anything about it.

But don’t worry! It still gets worse!

But just as you’re about to find a way to fix this, it turns out that Climatrol has collapsed, which caused an immense flood all over the world. Since the government - and by extension, Mother Brain - isn’t happy about this, you are now considered a fugitive, a criminal. You are now the bad guy, and you are wanted for treason. 1989, anyone??

This is where the second brilliant story-gameplay integration of Phantasy Star II happens. Where until now you’ve only fought mutated monsters due to the outbreak, the government has now sent thousands of carious cyborgs and robots against you - and lo and behold, this is now the only thing you are fighting in both the overworld and dungeons, and the previous creatures are now nowhere to be seen. THAT’S REALLY SMART. Now sure, even if you are considered evil to many, you still task yourself with the task of unflooding the planet, and to do so you simply reactivate all four colored dams in the continent. However, upon reactivating the fourth one, your party is suddenly ambushed by a trio of robots sent by the cops, and this time? They succeed in capturing you. Your party is now sent in chains on a hovering satellite, as you are sentenced to slowly wither away and die in there without any trial of any sort, simply because you went against Mother Brain’s dear wishes...

But, something goes amiss. The sattelite starts to malfunction, and is now set to crash on one of the three planets of the Algol system. And despite you all trying to alter its course, it is too late. The satellite crashes onto Palma - the planet of the first Phantasy Star game - and it is gone.

That’s right! The planet in which many players took the time to save with Alis’s gang, to have a huge dungeon crawling adventure, the planet where you defeated Lassic in a glorious fashion. GONE. In only a few seconds. But... what about yourself? Well, you actually died! But a space pirate wandering close to the crash site pulled out your remains and cloned everyone’s body back to life... which makes you technically not yourself, and also dead, for the remainder of the game! ...May I remind you this game was developed in 1989?

Tyler the space pirate then escorts the zombie party back to Paseo, but not for long - you see, your commander, who hasn’t truly approved of Mother Brain’s actions against your group, allows you access to a spaceship. This is a big deal, because space travel as a whole has been banned ten years ago due to a major accident in which Rolf had lost his parents, and thus, the one stationed in Paseo is the last one remaining on the planet. But sure enough, Rolf takes the opportunity and travels to the ice planet of Dezolis, or Dezo.

And honestly? Even though this next part has nothing to do with the main story, it’s probably one of my favourites in the entire game. In this section, you simply must make your way through an abandoned space station, which has not seen use in years. At first, you’d think it was somewhat related to the spaceship incident, but as you explore this space station, you find a bunch of animals and newspapers lying around. You not only find some irrelevant ads about various products, but also news flash about a horrible gas spreading throughout the station, begging every inhabitant to evacuate immediately, which... definitively implies a very bleak fate to the place and its inhabitants o_o 

And on top of this unsettling setting, this is the first time you get to hear “Silent Zone”, my favourite track in the game. While the rest of the soundtrack is very upbeat, catchy and all around excellent, this track in particular is very... sad, desolate, lonely, in spite of it being just as catchy! It all combines for a brilliant example of “show, don’t tell” that really sets the mood perfectly to me <3

Either way, upon exploring more of Dezo - a frigid wasteland with few inhabitants - the party gets to meet up with Noah, a party member from Phantasy Star I! After reawakening from a cryogenic sleep, he then reveals that unlike Paseo and Motavia, Dezo basically never submitted with Mother Brain’s control and benefits simply because they did not want to live a life without any struggles. Unfortunately, this is also where you learn that Paseo came to terms with this *after* being to MB’s whims and as such, you can connect the dots and realize that the satellite crash was no accident after all... it was all planned.

Noah, however, knows about how deeply MB has ruined everything for the inhabitants of Motavia and thus tasks Rolf with collecting eight legendary ancient weapons all throughout Dezo, located within some ruinous, empty, cold dungeons which make for stunning atmosphere and presence, believe me!

Once that’s done, he then entrusts Rolf with the ultimate Sword and, thanks to kinetic abilities, sends him and his troupe to the space station housing Mother Brain. And once there, for the first time in centuries, a human being has met with Mother Brain.

And of course, the computer scoffs at those rebelling against her. She laughs at how they think they’d want a life with struggles, wtihout comfort, without anyone providing their needs, when work and hardship seems so uninviting on a desert wasteland like Motavia, or a frigid hell like Dezo. And yet, after a (pretty difficult!) battle, you emerge victorious! Or do you?

After the victorious outcome, Noah senses some additional presences beyond Mother Brain’s spot, and urges the party to investigate. And then... I don’t think I’ll even explain it in words. Please watch what happens. It is disturbing.

Yeah. We, the humans, were destroying our planet, Earth. Thus, we escaped through this spaceship to avoid extinction, and found the Algo system. It then, to our species, only seemed logical with so few numbers, to instead slowly weaken the population of all three planets with Mother Brain, making it then easy (although a very long process) to get rid of the population and start anew, even if it meant genocide. What I love about this twist ending is not only how it’s presented: the creepy music, the way you did *not* expect it at all, the number of humans on the screen at once, and so on... but also, how you don’t even know for sure how it ends. You don’t know if Rolf, Rudo, Amy, Kain, Hugh, Shir, Anna... if any of them survived. But it looks grim. It looks like we lost. And it looks like everyone we fought and tried to save... will rot until the final days anyway... Phantasy Star II... is important. Sure, I could talk about how the game is challenging due to how both your party members AND the enemies are very capable in battle or the stellar, catchy, memorable soundtrack...   but its story... is stunning. In 1989, we were still used to princesses being saved by armored heroes from dark dragons. We were used to things going all well in the end. But in 1989, Phantasy Star II taught us many things that would become staples in the future of JRPGs:  Yes, your cherished ones may die with you not being able to do anything about it No, you may not be able to save everyone you’d like to. Yes, your actions might make things worse for yourself and everyone else. No, things aren’t quite as black or white as they seem. And no, you might not always win. Phantasy Star II is a masterpiece. It’s a bit hard to approach this game today, but with a guide, this game is a must play. It’s unique. It’s ambitious. It’s chilling. And I adore this game to pieces. Thank you for reading, somehow <3

[dark-falz]

Transparent of a happy Chelsea Enchante

[mille-marteaux]

[T-A-C] Marte: how delirious do we need to get you in order to write a maid tier list

@t-a-c​ never ask me for anything ever again (you may feel free to ask me for things in the future.)

I will be rating the maids that I know of on the following criteria, on a baseline scale of 1-10:

Are they actually a maid: A yes or no question. If they are not actually a maid then they are disqualified but will still get ratings anyway because it makes the list funnier.

Modesty: How reasonable their maid uniform is. The "sexier" the costume is, the lower the score.

Professionalism: How they behave while on the job. The more they flirt with/actively torment/etc their employer, the lower the score.

Competence: How good they actually are at performing domestic tasks, such as cooking and cleaning. The worse they are, the lower the score.

Combat proficiency: How effective they are in battle. The more of a liability they would be in a fight, the lower the score.

Devotion: How devoted they are to their employer. The more disinterested they are, the lower the score.

Extra input: A miscellaneous category that does not award points, but is more room for my own observations and extra opinions.

I will be going down the line from series that I know about. I do not actually actively seek out maid content - it mostly finds me. But I'm bored, so whatever. (Don't expect to see Rem on this list because I never watched Re:Zero.)

i am not inserting images as i’ve already spent two and a half hours on this fucking awful post like three people are going to read. find images yourself

PHANTASY STAR ONLINE 2 This game has at least one maid.

LUCOTTE IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 5/10 (despite being an android, she still expresses herself with a "sexy" maid-like design) PROFESSIONALISM: 8/10 (she is very serious about what she does but is a little eager to dote on others) COMPETENCE: 5/10 (seems decent enough at chores but will break brooms using them as weapons) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 (trainer NPC for the Etoile class; helps all Etoiles grow stronger) DEVOTION: 10/10 (loves her friends and all her peers and will protect them with her life) OTHER NOTES: checked my vibes when we were introduced to her and basically made me admit that i do, in fact, like maids to some extent

THE AVERAGE ARKS MEMBER WEARING A MAID COSTUME IS A MAID: No MODESTY: Anywhere from 3-10 PROFESSIONALISM: Anywhere from 0-10 COMPETENCE: Anywhere from 0-10 COMBAT PROFICIENCY: Anywhere from 1-10 DEVOTION: Anywhere from 0-10 OTHER NOTES: putting on a frilly dress does not automatically make you a maid. spend money on your gear instead of trying to seduce others

==================

PUELLA MAGI MADOKA MAGICA Fuck you. Fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you god damn it son of a fucking bitch fuck you

MELISSA IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 10/10 (very tasteful uniform and magical girl costume) PROFESSIONALISM: 10/10 (she does maid things and treats everyone with respect) COMPETENCE: i don't remember. like at least a 8/10. it's been a while since event ran and i don't feel like reading it for this list COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 0/10 normally, 9/10 if contracted and transformed. her personal memoria implies she got darc killed at least once due to being on the front lines and not as a magical girl DEVOTION: 10/10 (she will take an arrow for darc without hesitation if she has to but darc would take the arrow first) OTHER NOTES: the first magireco event character i uncapped and four-slotted

KANAGI IZUMI IS A MAID: No (she works part-time in a maid cafe; otherwise is not a domestic worker.) MODESTY: 6/10 (as her work uniform is a "sexy" maid costume it scores lower than usual, but it could be much less modest) PROFESSIONALISM: 5/10 (she treats all customers with respect but does not behave in the cutesy bubbly way you'd expect a maid cafe employee to behave) COMPETENCE: 9/10 (excellent worker; but accidentally messed up a ketchup drawing once) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 (is a veteran magical girl) DEVOTION: 0/10 (she does not put any love into anything she does and is only a part-time worker) OTHER NOTES: AABBC is a good disc loadout

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GRANBLUE FANTASY oh you know it has maids

DOROTHY IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 10/10 (wears an actual proper maid dress) PROFESSIONALISM: 8/10 (has a few... moments. professionalism drops to 2/10 when near MC) COMPETENCE: 10/10 (is very good at her job) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: (8/10; is only held back by game mechanics. 10/10 when paired with claudia) DEVOTION: 15/10 (she will kill a man for her employer) OTHER NOTES:

CLAUDIA IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 10/10 (also wears an actual proper maid dress similar to dorothy) PROFESSIONALISM: 7/10 (is fond of napping on the job. would be 8/10 but she loses one point for flashing her thigh during a combat tournament battle to distract and defeat her opponent.) COMPETENCE: 10/10 (is very good at her job) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: (7/10; is only held back by game mechanics. has a slightly worse kit than dorothy as her big damage skill can miss. 10/10 when paired with dorothy) DEVOTION: 10/10 (she will break a few legs for her employer if needed but is lacking in empathy for non-employers) OTHER NOTES: she scares me

==================

AZUR LANE whY ARE THERE SO MANY MAIDS IN THE ROYAL NAVY

BELFAST IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 5/10 (while her skirt is fine, her top is minuscule and requires copious amounts of fashion tape) PROFESSIONALISM: 2/10 (she sees the commander sleeping once and decides to move their head onto her lap so they awaken to a lap pillow, just to see how they react) COMPETENCE: 10/10 (despite everything, she is very good at her job) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 (goes to 14/10 if equipped with a HE gun) DEVOTION: 10/10 OTHER NOTES: she is not as lusty as the fandom would like to make her out to be but she would still jump the commander's bones in a heartbeat if given consent to do so

EDINBURGH IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 7.5/10 (her maid uniform is more akin to a maid cafe costume than a proper domestic worker uniform, but isn't offensively alluring like SOME OTHER PEOPLE in this section of the list) PROFESSIONALISM: 6/10 (she's doing her best) COMPETENCE: 0/10 (do not trust her with actual tasks) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 (goes to 13/10 if equipped with an AP gun) DEVOTION: 10/10 (she's doing her best) OTHER NOTES: she's doing her best

GLASGOW IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 8.5/10 (it's not perfectly modest but it's much more modest than SOME OTHER PEOPLE in this section) PROFESSIONALISM: 9/10 (she reads during active secretary work if she thinks nobody is around) COMPETENCE: 9/10 (seems good enough) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 9/10 (is held back by lower stats due to lower card rarity) DEVOTION: 10/10 (even if she hates the commander, she will continue to do work just fine) OTHER NOTES: i do not know anything about this character and only just read her lines about five minutes ago as of the time of writing this assessment

GLOUCESTER IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 7/10 (while the majority of her uniform is fine, she loses three points for the strange underbust window in her blouse that seems to be entirely there to distract perverts) PROFESSIONALISM: 10/10 (she will scold the commander for staring at maids instead of focusing on their work) COMPETENCE: 10/10 (as expected of one of these maids at this point, i imagine) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 (i am running out of witty comments. i will stop making them here unless i have something funny to say) DEVOTION: 10/10 (will continue to work even if she dislikes the commander but will refuse to speak to them) OTHER NOTES: did albert design her uniform or something

NEWCASTLE IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 6/10 (looks more akin to a maid cafe uniform than a domestic worker uniform) PROFESSIONALISM: 2/10 (very friendly and flirty. easy to get along with) COMPETENCE: 10/10 COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 8/10 (loses a point for rarity, another for having anti-air mode in her kit) DEVOTION: 10/10 OTHER NOTES: friend

SHEFFIELD IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 10/10 (finally a normal uniform) PROFESSIONALISM: 9/10 (while normally curt, she loses a point because of a distressingly weird scene in the anime where she nonchalantly flashes her peers during underwear discussion) COMPETENCE: 9/10 (loses one point due to being trigger happy) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 DEVOTION: 0/10 (rises to 2/10 when oathed) OTHER NOTES: wow i don't trust her at all actually

SIRIUS IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 2/10 (this is just getting ridiculous) PROFESSIONALISM: 0/10 (it appears everything she knows about being a maid she learned from pornography) COMPETENCE: 7/10 (despite everything, she's still relatively good at her work) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 DEVOTION: 15/10 (a little too devoted) OTHER NOTES: you have likely seen fanart and pornography of her without even knowing who she is

DIDO IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 1.5/10 (imagine albert designed a maid cafe uniform and you have dido) PROFESSIONALISM: 3/10 (she has severe anxiety issues that get in the way of her behavior but is at least not actively trying to jump the commander's bones) COMPETENCE: 9/10 (is good enough at her job that her anxiety makes her think she's being ignored because she isn't being watched all the time) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 DEVOTION: 30/10 (this is fed into due to her anxiety and fear of being abandoned) OTHER NOTES: albert really should not be allowed to design outfits

CURACOA IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 8/10 (drops to 3/10 after retrofit) OTHER NOTES: it's incredible how little i seem to care about her and curlew

CURLEW IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 8/10 (drops to 2/10 after retrofit; lower score than curacoa as she is in a more seductive pose) OTHER NOTES: see curacoa and replace "curlew" with "curacoa"

HMS NEPTUNE (not to be mistaken with HDN NEPTUNE) IS A MAID: No (she is a waitress) MODESTY: 6.5/10 (her uniform is very flashy and alluring) PROFESSIONALISM: 0/10 (she will regularly ask the commander to get on their knees and beg to her for a good reward) COMPETENCE: ??/10 (she does not seem to actually do domestic tasks) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 12/10 (rises to 17/10 if equipped with an AP gun) DEVOTION: 10/10 (she will devote herself to the commander but may also attempt to monopolize them; use extreme caution) OTHER NOTES: i'm fucking stupid. make of this comment what you will

==================

FIRE EMBLEM fire emblem fates was a mistake

FELICIA IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 7/10 (the nohrian maid outfit is nice but still a little fetishy with its short skirt and stockings making it resemble a cafe maid outfit more than a domestic worker uniform) PROFESSIONALISM: 6/10 (she's trying) COMPETENCE: 0/10 (not very effectively) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 (while a bumbling fool in domestic chores, she's skilled martially) DEVOTION: 10/10 (she will follow you even if you decide to defect from nohr) OTHER NOTES: heroes introduced me to her and i bought conquest to have her hit things in a good game and also to marry her

FLORA IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 7/10 (see felicia) PROFESSIONALISM: 10/10 (much more curt) COMPETENCE: 10/10 (she tends to have to fix felicia's mistakes) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 9/10 (skilled in battle but not as skilled as felicia is) DEVOTION: 10/10 (she normally would lose a point because she'd kill you if cornered but that's entirely garon's fault so she is excused) OTHER NOTES: i reinstalled heroes to roll for her and got her so i still have it installed

THE GENERIC NPC NOHRIAN MAID IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 7/10 (see felicia and flora) PROFESSIONALISM: ??/10 COMPETENCE: ??/10 COMBAT PROFICIENCY: anywhere from 5/10 to 15/10 depending on difficulty DEVOTION: 3/10 (if captured and bribed, they will join your army) OTHER NOTES: i'm stupid

ANY CHARACTER RECLASSED INTO A MAID IS A MAID: No OTHER NOTES: putting on a frilly dress does not automatically make you a maid

==================

LOVE LIVE god fucKING damn it

KOTORI MINAMI IS A MAID: No (works part-time at a maid cafe) MODESTY: 10/10 (finally. some proper fucking maid uniforms after all this weird fetish stuff) PROFESSIONALISM: 10/10 (falls to 0/10 if her peers are present) COMPETENCE: 10/10 (earned a nickname with "legendary" in the title due to how well she serves her customers) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: ??/10 (MIERNO "IDOLA" - VOLPHORNO playing loudly in the distance) DEVOTION: 9/10 (her customers usually come first but she loses a point for trying to flee work when discovered by her peers) OTHER NOTES: use extreme caution

EVERY OTHER CHARACTER IN THE SERIES THAT HAS A MAID-THEMED CARD IN THE MOBILE GAME(S) IS A MAID: No OTHER NOTES: SHUT UP DERX LEAVE ME ALONE

==================

TOUHOU PROJECT

RUUKOTO IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 10/10 PROFESSIONALISM: ??/10 (has no spoken dialogue nor personality to go off of) COMPETENCE: 0/10 (is noted to be bad at performing domestic tasks) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: ??/10 (is nuclear powered; while she could be harboring massive latent powers she poses a huge risk if she were to detonate) DEVOTION: 10/10 (is a good noodle) OTHER NOTES: she is probably my blog mascot in another timeline

SAKUYA IZAYOI IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 8/10 (while mostly fine, she still has a rather short skirt in the fighting games) PROFESSIONALISM: 10/10 COMPETENCE: 8/10 (loses a point for every time she lost to the mc during the events of eosd; gains a point for running the mc off if playing on easy) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 DEVOTION: 10/10 OTHER NOTES: alice's quicksilver is more fun to use than marisa's thousand knives but is infinitely worse for speedrunning so you never see it

YUMEKO IS A MAID: Yes MODESTY: 10/10 PROFESSIONALISM: 10/10 COMPETENCE: 9/10 (loses a point for losing to the mc during the events of mystic square) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 (throws swords) DEVOTION: 10/10 OTHER NOTES: superior maid

==================

HYPERDIMENSION NEPTUNIA

FINANCIER IS A MAID: No MODESTY: 10/10 PROFESSIONALISM: 10/10 COMPETENCE: ??/10 (is not actually a maid) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: ??/10 (has not been playable DEVOTION: ??/10 (i think she was evil in the original neptunia and then was good in the re:birth series) OTHER NOTES: cute

==================

HONORABLE MENTION AS I TYPED THIS UP AND REALIZED ANGEL MORT IS A RESTAURANT, NOT A MAID CAFE, BUT DO NOT WISH TO REMOVE THE WORK I PUT INTO THE SECTION:

HIGURASHI NO NAKU KORO NI SHION SONOZAKI IS A MAID: No (works part time at a maid cafe) MODESTY: 3/10 (this isn't even a maid costume anymore) PROFESSIONALISM: 10/10 COMPETENCE: 10/10 (is almost indistinguishable from mion when she tries) COMBAT PROFICIENCY: 10/10 (is trained in handling firearms due to her family connections) DEVOTION: 10/10 (she is a good noodle in a bad situation) OTHER NOTES: higurashi was among the first anime i watched and was a powerful formative experience on me

[coolgreatwebsite]

Cool Games I Finished In 2019 (In No Real Order)

We’re here. The end of the decade. 2019 was a weird, turbulent year for me. Despite my cross-country move already being a year behind me somehow, nothing’s really settled yet. Living situation is still weird, still separated from most of my belongings, I left my full-time QA job for a contractor position at a mobile game advertising company that may or may not convert into a full-time position... everything about what’s going on with me still just feels like I’m completely winging it, and while that’s not a position I’m really comfortable being in for such an extended amount of time, everything seems to be working out okay enough despite it. All this is probably why I spent most of my time playing the shit out of a handful of games rather than playing a bunch of different games this year! Needed some sort of stability. Also when I did manage to pull myself away from the timesink games and play something else, a lot of them ranged from “okay” to “real bad”. But I still managed to play just enough stuff that I liked to where I can put out yet another one of these.  Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2019.

Phantasy Star Online: Blue Burst (PC, 2005)

I haven’t bothered to do two thirds of the story quests yet and have barely touched any Episode 4 content so this game technically doesn’t count for this list, but if I left it off I would be neglecting to mention an extremely large portion of my video game playing time this year. I fell back into PSO preeeettty hard this year after the surprise announcement of Phantasy Star Online 2 finally coming to the US. Guess what: game still rules. It feels stiff to play and it’s obviously far less expansive than it seemed back in 2000, but the core of Phantasy Star Online is still as fun as it ever was and the aesthetics are still entirely my shit. I love everything about the way this game looks and sounds, I love stumbling on a weird new weapon, I love participating in the custom seasonal events the server I’m on runs, and I love how oddly relaxing the experience of playing this game and taking it all in is. I will probably continue to play Phantasy Star Online into 2020. I will probably still dip back into it after PSO2 US servers finally launch. If I know you and you want to join my Discord server for PSO get at me. PSO forever.

Cookie’s Bustle (PC, 1999)

You ever play a game that just speaks to you? Even through a language barrier? A game so incredibly out there and bizarre in the exact way you love that you can’t help but adore it despite barely understanding it? Holy moly did I ever find that game. I learned about Cookie’s Bustle through a news story last year about some rare games leaking from a Japanese collector’s stash. Didn’t manage to get it to run back then, but my off and on attempts to get it working finally paid off in March of this year and I’m so glad I kept trying. I knew nothing of this game other than it had a weird name and was about a bear doing sports, and it turned out to be a fully voice-acted and mostly unsubtitled adventure game starring Cookie Blair, a 5 year old girl from New Jersey who sees herself as a teddy bear and has traveled to Bombo World, an island nation once visited by aliens and currently in the middle of a civil war, to participate in the Bombo Sports Tournament. Dead level, I probably shouldn’t have been able to genuinely love Cookie’s Bustle as much as I did. The only context I had for what was happening and what I was supposed to do was provided by a 20-year-old Google translated walkthrough with broken images, the game’s slightly higher than usual reliance on English loan words, and 30-ish years of video games and anime allowing me to halfway pick up on a handful of Japanese words. However, Cookie’s Bustle is dripping with an undeniable and off-beat charm that genuinely transcends language. Even if you can’t understand the words and specifics, you can understand the basic plot, characterizations, and emotions they’re going for. Cookie’s Bustle manages to both be completely off-the-wall bizarre and feel totally genuine and heartfelt at the same time, a balance very few games manage to successfully hit but many of my favorites do. One could say that’s why it seems to have resonated with a decent amount of other people this year, too. Games rarely make me feel sad that they’re over. but when they do that’s how I know they’re one of the good ones. Seriously, go look up a longplay or stream of Cookie’s Bustle if you (understandably) don’t want to go through the hassle of setting it up and figuring out how to play it, it’s impossible not to love.

Devil May Cry 5 (PlayStation 4, 2019)

Here’s something crazy to think about: Devil May Cry 4 came out 11 years ago. Aside from being a potent reminder that time is moving too fast and we’re all going to die soon, that means that there hasn’t been a DMC for over a decade. Devil May Cry 5 does not bare this fact even a little bit. Not only did they pick up right where they left off and manage to make another Devil May Cry game without missing a beat, they made arguably the best Devil May Cry game. I mean I still like the story and single-character focus of DMC3 the best, but DMC5 is the best playing game in the series without a doubt. Nero finally feels like he has a complete and complex toolset, Dante is the most mechanically dense and fun to play he’s ever been, and they even added a new guy that’s... neat to play as, until you start trying to S-rank the harder difficulties. Then he’s kind of annoying to play as. But it’s still cool that they tried something totally different and mostly got it to work! They also did something very stupid that I love and used this game as an excuse to make literally every single piece of Devil May Cry media canon. Like, characters exclusively from the anime and the books show up and act like they’re someone you already know and love? And they go out of their way to explain the most esoteric lore shit possible?? And despite it all they still intentionally give DMC2 as short a shrift as they can??? It’s so dumb, it rules. It’s just one of the many things about the game that show that even with so long of a gap between entries, no love for the series was lost by the people that make it. I don’t think the suits at Capcom expected this game to hit as hard as it did though, because despite there being clear areas where the game could be expanded on with DLC there still hasn’t been anything announced. I hope they’re maybe saving it for some sort of DMC3-esque special edition, or maybe just already working on DMC6, because even after getting all S-ranks I still wanted to play more. The game’s just that damn good.

Hypnospace Outlaw (PC, 2019)

I expected very little from Hypnospace Outlaw. I backed the game on Kickstarter solely because it looked cool and I thought a game about fake GeoCities was neat, and then I immediately forgot about it until it released. Admittedly my lack of expectations stemmed mostly from the fact that it’s kind of hard to set expectations for a game you never really thought too hard about, but even in the brief period of time where I considered it enough to give it money, I never expected it to be much more than a pretty-looking 101 Great GeoCities Jokez delivery vehicle. Boy was I wrong. I mean, it is incredibly good at that, but Hypnospace Outlaw is so much more than a funny period piece. The basic premise is that you’re in alternate universe 1999 and have just become a community moderator for an Internet service provider that allows people to connect to the Internet while they sleep. You’re tasked with browsing the game’s weird fake Internet and issuing demerits to users who violate the five basic Hypnospace rules, but it quickly evolves into something way bigger. Hypnospace Outlaw’s greatest strength is its exceptional ability at weaving together subtle world building, small and engaging character arcs, esoteric microjokes, and a genuine sense of mystery and discovery into an incredibly cohesive and engaging package. It’s as much a game about the people that use and run its weird fake Internet as it is about that weird fake Internet itself. And a lot of the problems both face echo the problems we face with our real world Internet today. When I was mapping out writing this article like a month or two ago I was prepared to go on about how at its core, Hypnospace Outlaw is an incredibly poignant story about how uncaring tech corporations actively harm their users and always have, but then a couple of days ago I read Colin Spacetwinks’ game of the year list and his #1 entry put most everything I would have said about that topic down in a way more eloquent and well-written way than I ever could have. And then I remembered that Friend Of The Site Heidi Kemps covered some of the same angle but from the perspective of the early Internet in an article earlier this year, again way better than I could have. So I highly recommend you read those when you’re done here. What I wanna bring up instead is just how effortlessly surprising and interconnected a lot of stuff in Hypnospace feels, using a mildly spoiler-ish late game example. Two of the first “zones” you’re allowed to moderate when you start Hypnospace Outlaw are Teentopia and Goodtime Valley, which are essentially alternate universe Yahooligans and a little slice of Hypnospace just for Boomers respectively. On Teentopia you’ll see a bunch of kids that are wild for Squisherz, Hypnospace’s alternate universe version of Pokémon, and over in Goodtime Valley you’ll see (much like there was back in real world 1999) a few pages made by religious fundamentalists convinced that everything the kids like these days is the work of Satan. This of course includes Squisherz, and you can find a page by one organization full of crackpot conspiracy theories with flimsy evidence that TOTALLY DEFINITELY backs up their claim. Squisherz contains a wolf, which the Bible warns about many times! This giraffe monster CLEARLY has a pentagram in its design!! And the eye of this snake-like Squisherz is the eye of Horus, an Egyptian occult symbol and NEED I REMIND YOU that Lucifer took the form of a snake in the Garden of Eden!!! It is very clear what this page is goofing on and throughout the course of the game it doesn’t get updated at all, so it’s very easy to laugh at it and forget about it. Very late into the game, you get an optional sidequest. Adrian Merchant, one of the CEOs of Merchantsoft, the company that created Hypnospace, was found out to have logged traffic indicating he was a frequent visitor of a website called Children of HORUS, and a call is put out to investigate what that even is. You can easily find the website, but it asks you for a password if you click the Enter button. Adrian Merchant is consistently portrayed throughout the game as a complete idiot, and the solution to this puzzle has you capitalize on that. Another early game objective ended up with you finding a list of cracked passwords, and one of those passwords happens to be for the instant messenger account of Adrian Merchant. If you can remember that he was even in that text file from forever ago, and then put two and two together that of COURSE that dumbass would use the same password for everything, you just punch in his messenger password and you’re granted access to the Children of HORUS page. It turns out that HORUS is an acronym that stands for Hiding Occult References in Utmost Secrecy, and the page itself is a basic leaderboard with a list of names and two numbered columns reading “Hidden” and “Found”. In that list of names you’ll find A. Merchant, along with the names of various other CEOs and celebrities you might have read about elsewhere in Hypnospace. One of the other names on this list is F. Kazuma, the CEO of Monarch, creators of Squisherz. The funny conspiracy theory website from the beginning of the game that you most likely forgot about was, about this one specific thing, correct. There was an eye of Horus hidden on the snake from Squisherz. Not as any sort of Satanic plot, mind you, but only as part of some weird millionaire dickwaving contest. This dumb tiny revelation is not called out by the game at all and nothing comes of it, it’s just there for you to notice if you’ve been paying enough attention. Hypnospace Outlaw is LITTERED with stuff like this. Weird small interconnected things you wouldn’t expect to be interconnected. Little dumb things you wouldn’t expect to have any sort of payoff but somehow do. And it’s also just as chock full of big things. Having all the pieces fall into place at once to where I was able to access Hypnospace’s equivalent of the dark web was the best sequence in a game this year for me, even beating out the outlandish shit in DMC5. Getting and solving the final case was a rush. Hypnospace Outlaw is full of incredible moments big and small. It’s genuinely engaging and affecting, which is so much more than I was expecting from a game that was pitched to me as “Funny GeoCities Cop”. It almost has no right being so good. But it is. Hell, even the music rules! I didnt even get into that! I don't have enough time or space to get into that now! The music is so goddamn good! I know I started these lists because I had no interest in ranking games, but every year I sort of jokingly-but-not-jokingly say “haha this game sure would be my number one if I did that!” for at least one game. It’s time to fully lean into it. I don’t gotta rank ‘em all, but I can pick a favorite. Hypnospace Outlaw is my favorite game of 2019 with a goddamn bullet.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Etrian Odyssey (Nintendo DS, 2007): Man, this series just started out good, huh? I dabbled with the first two games in college when I got a DS flashcart but never really dug in until EO4, and the first game is enjoyable in just about every way the modern ones are. Definitely more barebones and punishing though. Kero Blaster (PlayStation 4, 2017): This is a game by the creator of Cave Story that does not aim to be Cave Story, and that’s fine! A fun little shooter in its own right, though I do think the shooting in Cave Story felt a little better than it does here. Space Invaders Extreme (Nintendo DS, 2008): I played the shit out of this game in college thanks to that flashcart I mentioned before, but I never finished a playthrough in full until this year for some reason. Still way stylish and way fun! I need to get a copy of the second one... CROSSNIQ+ (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Incredibly chill puzzle game that can be as hard or easy as you want it to be. Almost uncanny in how well it emulates the style of late PS1/Dreamcast games. Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo Switch, 2019): Mario Maker 2 is kind of weird for me. It’s a solid improvement in a lot of aspects, but a clear regression in a lot of others. Also the online multiplayer is the second least amount of fun I’ve had with a video game this year (Secret of Mana swooped in and stole the number one slot near the end). Still, I had a lot of fun with it and I’ll probably end up going back to it eventually. Katamari Damacy Reroll (Nintendo Switch, 2018): The original Katamari Damacy is still every bit as fun and charming as it was upon its original release. This port is weirdly based on the Japanese version with the English text inserted, which means no English voice acting and Wanda Wanda only plays in the multiplayer mode. The Joycon sticks also aren’t the greatest for doing charge rolls. But none of these faults detract too much from the game. Bring on We Love Katamari Reroll! Earth Defense Force 5 (PlayStation 4, 2018): Sandlot somehow keeps finding ways to make each new EDF bigger and explodier, and EDF5 is the biggest and explodiest yet. I think the mission design in 4.1 was more solid overall, but 5 feels the best to play and has the most fun tools. Also the dialogue is the most absurd its ever been, and the final boss goes for it way harder than the series ever has. Pokémon Shield (Nintendo Switch, 2019): This game is honestly just okay, but leaving it off would again be neglecting a game I put a ton of time into this year. Pokémon Sword is fun in the way most Pokémon games usually are, and extremely half-baked in basically every other aspect. I’m still having a good time putting together teams and finding shinies and doing The Pokémon Thing regardless.

And that’s 2019 (and this decade) in the bag! I don’t know where anything’s going from here, but I’m going to ride it out as best as I can! I hope you do too! As always, thank you so much for getting to the bottom of all these words. I’m hoping to be in a more stable place mid-2020, and then I want to get back to all the things I haven’t had time to do. I want to get back to streaming, I want to write more dumb articles like The Best Babies, I want to do it all! I hope I will be able to do it all. Until then!

[kidmachinate]

Female Avatar, Male Player

This will be put out in the open given I am far from the first one to do this. I'm also likely not the first to be given items because people think I'm actually a girl. It's been a long time since dial-up internet on the Sega Dreamcast to play the original Phantasy Star Online. Aside from Diablo II this has to be one of the games I spent the most time with years back. This was before MMOs were "cool" and there weren't a whole bunch of them to choose from either. The short closed beta period for Phantasy Star Online 2 takes place today. It's going to be a long day at work.

I've hit up two buddies of mine about this game and have mentioned it in passing to a few others. We're deciding on out gender, races, class, and subclasses. Genders actually do slightly affect stats and races have a bit of an impact on this as well. We try and plan these things somewhat in advance to try and synergize with one another. The game took seven years to release here in the USA, so for us, this is brand new.

With the little bit I know and my love for Phantasy Star before it became an MMO, the best way to play a character I want to play, and channel old memories, is to play a female Numan (Newman). Rika in particular I love. The closest to achieving a character like her in the original game is to pick a female hunter class known as the HUnewearl. This class was Melee focused but could also use some techs. Rika in Phantasy Star IV is good at buffing the party accordingly with Shifta (increased atk) and Deband (increased def) spells. I forget if those are named the same across both genres of the series but I think I have the names right for at least the MMO versions of the spells.

There is a class called a Techter in PSO2 and my subclass will be a Hunter. My character will be a hybrid class of sorts. One of the more powerful weapons in the series, if still the same as the first game, is a Lavis Cannon. It was a sword but now is apparently a wand. Techers can use wands. Ideally with my two buddies we will have pure Hunter and Ranger variants for our party. I think a party could have up to four people so a pure Force class would perhaps makes us pretty well prepared.

I don't really know what to expect with this title given how long it is been but I am super excited to dive into it. I'll see perhaps if I can stream it and/or make video content but if I can't figure that all out quick enough, I'll be just playing to try and get all the event rewards in the day and a half we have for this closed beta.

The real challenge in all of this? Not spending hours in the character creator coming up with a name/look for her.

[teefa85]

Having had the day to reflect (and read...I was reading shit instead of typing up essays), I figure I want to put a lot of my opinions on PSIII down.  Honestly...I liked it a lot!  Sure, it’s definitely not the best RPG out there, and I do find PSIV the better game (although I do wonder if the way you set and use the Auto Battle feature ended up evolving into the Macros in PSIV...one of the most unique parts of that game which also had many strategic uses).  However, it was a fun game to play all the same...you’re talking to someone who loves very frustrating games like Arcana, so of course this is child’s play to get through!

(keeping the rest under a cut for length)

I do believe that part of the game’s problem did come from being Phantasy Star III.  The game is clearly more of a Gaiden game, as it is the only of the numbered games not to take place in Algo.  If it had just been Phantasy Star:  Generations of Doom (Successors of Time in JP) and treated as a Gaiden from the start, I think it wouldn’t have been treated as harshly for not following onto what happened to the people of Algo after the destruction of Mother Brain.  Hell, or even a new IP instead of a Phantasy Star game.  It wouldn’t be considered the best RPG on the Genesis, but it would probably remove A LOT of fan salt (as not continuing the immediate story did upset a lot of people back in the day).

Also...taking a look at the development cycle.  9 people (plus a few more assisting them) made the game in A SINGLE YEAR!!  Considering the size of cartridges back in ‘91, the stuff they were able to come up with was amazing!

--

As for my opinions on the routes...

I did enjoy Ayn and his kin more than Nial and his.  I feel it’s more logical a progression, as you’d then be fighting Bio Monsters with Rhys, to Cyborgs with Ayn, and then to both with Sean or Crys.  Wheras Nial continues fighting Bio Monsters and then suddenly Adan and Aron are dealing with Cyborgs.  So...from a gameplay and narrative perspective, I really think marrying Maia ends up better in the long run.  Especially since you basically make your entire quest and the fallout of bringing Dahlia and Azura back worthless if Rhys didn’t marry the girl he set out to find!

Plus, seriously...half of Nial’s Campaign has to be done anyway by Sean or Crys!  His only unique stuff is talking to his parents, visiting the destroyed Satera (though I’m not even sure if that’s a required sequence trigger), fighting monsters in Divisia’s dungeon as they’re no longer there in Gen III, saving Alair, talking to Ryan, and fighting Lune!  Wheras traversing any of his dungeons (even Divisia...albeit without monsters) and recruiting Laya are all done anyway by Ayn’s kids!  That’s the tunnels between Landen and Elysium (and Aridia, although Ayn went through that anyway), Rebel Cave, Aridia to Frigidia tunnels, and Mystoke Castle!  Oh...and once you get into the under area of Dahlia, Nial’s trek to Lune is only going down a straight path and then up another with the majority of that dungeon being traveled in Gen III by ALL FOUR protags!  While Ayn has a full dungeon on Azura.

Honestly...I often wonder if this was a time crunch after they finished up Ayn’s Campaign and they just grabbed stuff from Gen III, changing it as needed, in order to pad Nial’s up!

I’d still put my favorite campaigns in the same order.  Aron at last due to the shortness and self-righteous people I’ve seen, then Adan because he’s kinda generic (honestly, he’d probably be last if I didn’t have the problems with Aron’s that I do since I like his personality in Toyo Ozaki’s manga a lot more), then Crys, and finally Sean.  Because Sean is the only protagonist who is motivated by something more than “Dad told me to do it!”  Since he’s running away from the destruction of his homeworld and could very well be fighting to avenge his family and/or find some meaning in his life after losing everything.  While Rhys orders Nial, Nial orders Adan or Aron, and Ayn orders Crys on their adventure.  Rhys ordering Ayn might or might not count...I’ve heard a theory that him being told to find a safe haven was just as much to keep Ayn safe from the conflict but things escalated.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll talk a bit about what I would to to actually fix other issues with the game, now that I’ve played it.

[cumbler-tumbler-blog]

Sonic Team Company Developers

Sonic Team, presently which is known as Sega CS Research and Development is a computer game advancement area of Sega situated in Japan. The group is best-known for the magnificent arrangement Sonic the Hedgehog. They turned out to be most prominent for that arrangement; in any case, they made other referred to amusements, for example, Phantasy Star Online and Nights into Dreams. Initially, the group was made in 1990 and was made out of diversion makers from Sega's Consumer Development area. Likewise, in the group was incorporated the developer Yuji Naka, level planner Hirokazu Yasuhara and the craftsman Naoto Ohshima. The amusement they made was such a triumph, that prompted a large number of offers. In addition, the following sonic recreations were made by Yuji and Hirokazu in the U.S at Sega Technical Institute. In a similar time, Naoto worked back in Japan on Sonic CD.

In 1983, Yuji was employed into Sega's Consumer Development segment. Yuji's first venture for the organization was Girl's Garden which was some sort of a preparation procedure from the organization. A long time later, amid the late 1980s and mid 1990s, a contention was made among Nintendo and Sega due to the arrival of their 16-bit computer game consoles. We are discussing the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis. On account of the contention, Sega were in a urgent requirement for a mascot character since Nintendo had their Mario.

The organization needed another and interesting application and furthermore a character that could engage a more established statistic and try to make business progress in North America. The organization gave a vocation to Naoto to structure another character. Naoto planned a blue hedgehog and named it Sonic. That equivalent character was embedded in a test diversion that was made by Yuji. After at some point, another visual planner was incorporated into the group, Hirokazu Yasuhara. The sonic group began their undertaking in 1990 and the amusement was formally discharged in 1991. Its a well known fact that the amusement made a gigantic achievement.

Since the primary amusement was such a triumph, they had no aim of backing off. They kept on making new recreations and those diversions wound up known as one of the sonic arrangement. Nowadays, the sonic group is called Sega CS Research and Development #2 or otherwise called CS2.

[messiahofslams]

VIDEO gamez

Since I've moved to part time work I've had way more free time to game and I am destroying my backlog.

Games I've Beaten In January

Etrian Odyssey 5 (9/10)

Such a good addition to the series literally added a ton of customization and went back to the classic 5 floors per dungeon style that wasn't in 4. I always name my guild after my friends so here was my endgame party line up! Nathan the Monk(binds/combo), Jim the Dragoon(shield), Bryan the Bunny Swordsman(4kat), Dylan the Necromancer (dance), and Carly the Shaman (healer/buffs)

It was great my only complaint is that I didn't really struggle with any bosses. Usually I get stuck somewhere but it was kinda easy and I was playing on the hardest difficulty.

Nier Automata (10/10)

I finally got a ps4 for Christmas(Jim is the best) and I borrowed some games from my friend. I LOVE the original Nier one of my top 5 games easy and this sequel is everything I wanted it to be. The combat isn't terrible like the first game and feels way more fluid but FUCK hacking with 9s I suck a bullet hell. Amazing game already on my B route playthrough and I can't wait for shit to get dark. Yoko Taro is a beautiful creature I hope he gets to make more games.

Until Dawn (7/10)

Not a game I would have normally played but my friend Carly owned it and I invited the gang over to do a playthrough. Basically a B horror movie meets heavy rain and it takes place in Canada which was kind of endearing. MIKE IS BEST BOY. I'm furious because I kept main girl alive till the VERY last check and somehow I moved the controller EVEN THOUGH I was statue still. Still we saved 4 of the kids but 2 of my favourites died. Each of my friends played 2 characters and each of us killed one of our people. Mike made it though so thankful for that. Very clunky gameplay though I wouldn't have enjoyed it without my friends screaming every time something happened.

Fire Emblem Fates (revelations 7/10 conquest 9/10 birthright 6/10)

I've had this game forever and beat conquest a long time ago but I decided to fully finish all 3 routes... what a mistake. Birthright was so easy and boring. Every map was the same and it was so easy to break the game in the first couple chapters with the free grinding. Rev at least had interesting maps but the unit selection until the second half was balls. It was also easy to grind and break neither of those routes felt like 'Fire emblem' yknow? Conquest was amazing though best FE in a long time. Hoshido Family sucksssss, Nohr family is best by far come at me bro.

Backlog

Devil Survivor Overclocked

Bravely Default 2

XCOM 2 war of the chosen

Darkest Dungeon

Bloodborne

Resonance of Fate

Devil survivor 2 record Breaker

Advanced Wars Days of ruin

Phantasy Star Online ep1&2

Persona Q

Pokemon Moon

Trauma Team

Neverwinter Nights 2

Bastard Bonds

The Void

Legend of Grimrock

Final Fantasy 12

What should I tackle next after I beat Devil Survivor Overclocked?