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okay-victoria · 3 years

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Love of My Second Life: Tanya & Romance

This is both my take on why, despite seeming like the easiest and healthiest relationship to write, TanyaxVisha is up there with TanyaxMary in difficulty level for pulling off successfully, what I’ve seen go wrong in fanfic so far, and what needs to make it/any romance go right.

Where to start, where to start...um, a warning, for obvious reasons I’m going to have to talk about sex.

The Age Difference

This has the joy of being a bit creepy on both ends of the spectrum! Yay.

Visha Being Creepy

Visha is probably 5 - 6 years older than Tanya. While as more mature adults that age difference is relatively negligible, Tanya being 17/18 and Visha being in her early 20s doesn’t make it suddenly a non-issue. If you and a coworker, both in your first job out of college, went to happy hour and you met his/her significant other and they were a senior in high school, would you feel good about that?

The age-of-consent laws in bygone eras may help your case for why in-story characters give a pass to such things, but it doesn’t really help explain it to your readers. Unless I’m missing something, no one is reading this story from 1920s/30s Germany, and so it needs to have the relationship explained in a way that tries to work for modern standards. Additionally, I think people tend to mix up age-of-consent with “people found this generally appropriate”. A 19 year old dating a 59 year old violates no laws in the United States, but that doesn’t mean that most people are going to consider it a loving and healthy relationship without any proof. Even your in-story characters are probably going to have some thoughts.

The final issue, from Visha’s end of the spectrum, is that even when Tanya is aged up to 18+ and has gained some secondary sexual characteristics, she is sometimes still presented as being an “eternal loli” who can be easily be mistaken for someone around 14/15, an age at which girls normally have some secondary sex characteristics, but distinctly immature ones. I imagine this problem stems from two places:

1) Scenes when Tanya’s lolidom is brought up are not the same scenes as the romantic ones, so the problem is not as obvious to the author and

2) Author forgets that “short+small boobs+doesn’t have wrinkles yet” does not actually result in people looking like they are mid-puberty. Without being really creepy, as women age, their breast tissue drops down and to the side, waist/hip/leg ratios change, and the face loses its baby fat, among other things. Writing that references Tanya as looking like a teen comes along with the unfortunate implication that she actually looks like she is still mid-puberty, and Visha...is into that, instead of being someone who is attracted to petite POST pubescent women.

These are all extremely fixable problems. Really, all an author has to do is make Visha acknowledge that it’s weird, and probably try to talk to Tanya about her reservations before she starts trying to seduce her. It’s the handwave that is the issue. For the last/puberty problem, unless there is some reason I probably don’t want to know about that the author only wants to write the relationship if Tanya looks 14, simply describe her as a petite but adult woman, and if you need to use her looking young as a plot point, have her make an effort to adapt her adult characteristics to suit or hope that nobody looks hard enough to tell the difference.

Tanya Being Creepy

While Tanya is physically the junior member of the relationship, mentally, she is the senior, and by a lot. Tanya knows this. While I don’t necessarily think Salaryman is the Earth’s most morally-pure man, I have a high enough opinion of him to think that he was not pursuing college girls when he was like 35. Tanya should also have a moment of thought over this, or the relationship needs to wait until Visha is closer to her late 20s, when she is approaching a similar level of life maturity that Salaryman would have felt was close to his own.

Even if you think that Salaryman’s logical side would have been eroded by his “but I’m a guy, I can’t help it, college girls are hot” side [I’m side-eyeing you], I think it’s very unlikely that living as Tanya, and being on the receiving end of that kind of stuff, wouldn’t make her reconsider her stance on it, at least a little.

I know, I know, Visha’s been to war! She’s not the same as some random college girl in 2020! While this is allowable as a partial justification, because it is true, it ignores a whole lot.

First off, maturity is not a straightforward drive. All parts of you do not mentally mature at the same time. If you want to write early 20s Visha as a mature-enough partner for Tanya, a bit of time needs to be spent on what Visha loses because of it - she never has, and never will, get to be that happy-go-lucky girl. While making fun of young women for being dramatic gossips, obsessing about non-serious things, etc remains a popular sport, thinking that you are doing Visha a favor by taking that time of her life away from her says pretty terrible things about how society values women’s relationships with each other. If you don’t mean for your fanfic to accidentally imply that, it’s something that needs some love & care.

Alternatively, you could write a story in which Visha, while being a competent adult, still gets space to explore her “girly” side. If doing so, you are going to have to make a really strong case for why Tanya is willing to put up with this, as Salaryman does not come off as someone who would judge it a good use of time & effort to be constantly letting his girlfriend rattle off about things he thinks are silly and immature - there’s a lot of other fish in the sea, why not find one that is a competent adult *and* isn’t often talking about things you don’t care about.

The Canonical Setup of Visha & Tanya’s relationship

Opposite Goals

In a nutshell, Tanya is presented as a person that wants to live a safe, boring, and non-notable life, is doing her best to get there, and is constantly failing and being stressed about it because she needs to figure out a new plan. Visha is presented as someone who has major qualms about Tanya as a human being, but has a nigh-worshipful respect for her heroic officer side.

This is a massive, and I mean MASSIVE problem. You absolutely cannot ignore that what makes the characters happy is diametrically opposed to each other. Can you overcome it? Yes, by slowly developing the characters towards a compromise, but you can’t just not acknowledge it and expect me to think this relationship has any hope of leaving both partners happy. Either Tanya never escapes her never-ending stress cycle, or she does, and the entire basis of Visha’s attachment to Tanya disappears.

This can be fixed by: 1) Tanya coming to terms with a new side of herself, one that wants to be that hero. This cannot just be a one-paragraph epiphany. Tanya is shown to hate when she thinks her internal self is being changed by her new experiences and she needs a lot of work to get to a point where she is willing to acknowledge this in herself.

2) Visha has to go through a rocky part where she second-guesses herself - she thought she wanted Tanya, but turns out, Tanya isn’t the person she thought she is? How and why does she decide that she likes the person Tanya has become? This is probably the easier route, but I think runs the risk of having an author have Visha *say* Tanya does all these other good things for her, but never really show it happening.

3) The happiest medium is probably one where Visha *mostly* adapts towards Tanya, so Tanya gets to live a quiet but not too quiet life, and Visha learns to love another side. As Visha is compromising more in this sense, a healthy relationship is going to include Tanya realizing what is happening and deciding to make an effort to appeal to Visha and not just be like “Take me as I am. Or don’t.” and Visha unilaterally decides to accept that.

Why Does Tanya want to be in a relationship with Visha?

Tanya betrays no actual emotional attachment to Visha in the light novels. While you can read in rationalization to the reasons Tanya gives to her actions, she herself does not believe that it is because of an emotional connection.

Canonically, Tanya is portrayed as liking Visha because of how well Visha passes the “usefulness” test. This brings up another MASSIVE problem - does Tanya, in any way, shape, or form, actually like Visha as an individual, or just her ability to conform to the role Tanya wants her to play?

Look, I don’t need Tanya to be in LOVE with Visha in the way we usually talk about people being in love to believe that Tanya can be in a relationship successfully. I’m fully on board with a portrayal in which Tanya can’t quite summon that level of emotion. However, she needs to like and respect Visha as an individual person, and summon a level of emotion beyond friend with benefits.

IMO, it is really hard to do that without showing Tanya and Visha disagreeing on a major piece of Tanya’s philosophy and Tanya actually listening and responding positively to it, not simply agreeing to disagree because it isn’t worth upsetting her useful sidekick, or whatever. There needs to be character development of both characters - Visha finding it in herself to be comfortable rocking the boat, and Tanya having a compelling enough reason to change something that she has clung to for two lives.

Everyone wants to be a lesbian

While I get it, the Empire is not the exact same as Germany, and yes, I know that Weimar Germany was relatively sexually progressive, it’s really not something that a well-written romance should handwave.

“Weimar Culture” in many ways developed as a result of how WW1 went for Germany. If you have a story where WW1 doesn’t go that way for Germany, gay culture is unlikely to flourish to the same degree.

All that aside, Tanya isn’t someone that is going to easily shrug her shoulders and say “you know, sometimes you need to jeopardize your career for the sake of hot sex/love”. She’s pretty clear on which she prioritizes. A lesbian relationship is not going to help her here, and she’s going to be aware of it. She needs to struggle with that choice.

Visha not struggling to accept herself as a lesbian is also somewhat of an oversight. It’s pretty unlikely that a woman born in her time period would come to terms with that easily. Visha is also never shown being attracted to other women besides Tanya, which carries a weird “I’m only a lesbian for you” vibe that is like a gross parallel of a straight guy wanting a lesbian to be so attracted to him she can’t help it, she wants the D.

And now, we enter the realm of Tanya’s relationship with her identity and sexuality.

Tanya is shown to have mental qualms both about entering a straight or lesbian relationship in her new life. The reasons behind those qualms are not explored at all in the LN, but they should be in a story in which Tanya goes into a relationship.

No matter which path puberty takes her down, there is the issue of Tanya being comfortable having sex as a woman. Even if it is with another woman, it is not going to be particular similar to the way she had sex with women as a man. That type of thing is pretty tied up with our identity. Tanya hates having her internal, I haven’t changed identity threatened, and not being able to give sexual pleasure/needing to receive it differently is the type of thing that is probably going to come along with some emotional reservations on her part.

Again, sexual identity being a part of our overall identity, while Tanya may remain attracted to women, that means her identity is now as a gay person, not a straight person. Given her biases from both growing up in Japan and the state of gay rights in her new life, it would seem atypical that she would consider this a non-issue and it wouldn’t make her question her priorities or the type of person she thought she was.

But...The Sex?

Look, I get it, sometimes you wanna see certain characters bang. We’ve all been there.

While yes, I recognize that many humans make terrible decisions solely in pursuit of sex, and so it’s perfectly realistic to have Tanya and Visha do the same and say that’s why you’re handwaving everything else, it is an extremely lazy storytelling technique, especially since neither character seems likely to go to extremes for it.

Because people focus so much on sex appeal, unfortunately, they use it as a substitute for making a good case for the relationship. Visha/Tanya is so attracted to Tanya/Visha, that now they are willing to undergo character development, because the pulsing loins urge them to. Really?

Do at least some of it first, lay the groundwork for romantic attraction before you slam them with physical attraction. While it often works the opposite direction in real life, that undercuts the romantic side in fictional story-telling.

I also think that because of the focus on their attraction to each other, what ends up missing in all TanyaxVisha fanfics I’ve seen so far is the tension. That makes it boring, I don’t care about it, and the entire reason I don’t care about it is because the choice to handwave the inconvenient facts means there is nothing in the way besides Tanya being a dumbass, which you can only do for so long without it becoming boring.

They are both attracted to each other, and admit it to themselves. Neither sees any real problem with the relationship other than not knowing if the other person likes them, but they aren’t even hung up on it and mostly work on straightforwardly winning the other person.

When in doubt, blame it on The Patriarchy

As far as we know, Tanya isn’t pining for relationship, and never thinks about a romantic relationship from her old life. Combined with other things Tanya says, it is hard to imagine Salaryman ever had a “considering marriage” relationship - more like, he may have felt partnership had some desirable aspects, but probably never was able to compromise on his kind of extreme worldview enough to try to make it work with someone, just figuring he’d find “the one” one day that wasn’t going to make him compromise.

While of course, you should not need to change everything about who you are for a romantic partner to like you, saying “you should like me for me” and then putting in exactly zero effort to do things because you know they are important to your partner, even if they aren’t for you, is not one of the keys to a successful relationship.

While it is not a problem inherent to Tanya & Visha’s relationship like the above sections, it is a problem in all forms of how I’ve seen the relationship written. It fails to answer a fundamental question: WHAT CHANGED?

Why did Tanya want love/a relationship/a wife in this life, and not in her last? If she did want it in her last life, why did she successfully find love/a relationship/a wife in this life, and not in her last?

Unfortunately, skipping the answer to this question implies that nothing changed. The success is then entirely reliant and Visha, and that brings along with it a really ugly answer.

Visha’s professional I’ll-do-anything-for-you is equated to a personal I’ll-do-anything-for-you, and she very much accepts Tanya for who she is, through all the flaws that are definitely there and that presumably no woman in Salaryman’s life was willing to put up with. Tanya doesn’t have to undergo any character development to be capable of making the relationship work.

This has some really, really unfortunate undertones. It is the very reason why even legal-but-large age difference relationships often aren’t healthy, because the older partner, instead of trying to be someone capable of contributing to the life of someone their own age, decides it’s easier to find someone younger who doesn’t know better and is more willing to put up with their bullshit. That, then, turns into a creepy grooming undertone - you make the less experienced partner think this is normal.

It really isn’t normal or good that Visha should have to put up with a relationship in which she never discovers who she wants to be because she’s so caught up Tanya’s idea of how to live your life. That is borderline emotional abuse, I am sure no one intends it to be there, but without giving some serious treatment to character development, unfortunately, it is.

To me, this has some of the worst overtones of the worst types of male fantasy - My Manic Pixie Dream Girl is completely devoted to me, and instead of emotionally adding to her life and/or our relationship, she is completely fine with me substituting being a Strong Heroic Man who occasionally buys her Nice Things. She demands I change nothing of myself and completely agrees with my Logical Man worldview, no matter what she needs to change about herself to get there. She’s hot, and I get to simultaneously be a straight man and have hot lesbian sex. Even better, because she’s a “strong” woman who is capable in her own right, not only am I physically satisfied, but I get the ego boost of “earning” the submission and subordination of a woman who is better than most people, because she knows I’m better than her.

Honestly, the more I think about it, the grosser it gets, so as far as fanfic goes I just try to ignore it and understand that the authors intention wasn’t to bring along all this baggage. However, to truly write a good Tanya x Visha story that gets away from all these unfortunate implications is a big undertaking, and it’s really impossible for it to make for a compelling side-plot that doesn’t get much screentime.

I’m generally fine with handwaving issues for sideplots, but if Tanya is making decisions because of her relationship with Visha that are now affecting the main plot, it really isn’t something that *should* be handwaved.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

#OpEd

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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15 Worst NES Games of All-Time

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The worst NES games of all time are a truly special breed of bad video games. Say what you will about the downsides of the modern video game industry (and there is certainly a lot to say), but there is, in most cases, a baseline standard of quality ensured by better, cheaper technology, experience, and more controlled distribution channels. You may get the occasional indie game that is basically a scam, but when it comes to major releases…well, even Cyberpunk 2077 was pretty good in a lot of ways.

That wasn’t the case during the NES era. At a time when console gaming was basically the digital wild west, it was incredibly difficult to tell good games from bad ones, and developers often exploited that fact to get us to buy titles that refuse to leave the deepest, darkest parts of our nostalgia all these years later.

That’s the thing about these games. Are they among the worst NES titles ever? Absolutely, but years later, there’s something about remembering the pain of playing them and sharing those memories with others that is strangely enjoyable.

15. Tag Team Wrestling

Even with all of the other bad wrestling games for the NES (and there were many), Tag Team Wrestling manages to stand apart largely by virtue of being fundamentally unplayable in nearly every way you can imagine.

In a dream world where you manage to overcome this game’s all-time bad animations and unresponsive controls, you still have to deal with the fact that there are times when the opponent A.I. difficulty is raised to such a degree that it becomes quite literally impossible to win. If it weren’t for the fact that this game eventually inspired Homestar Runner’s Strong Bad character, it would be entirely worthless.

14. Friday the 13th

There are some who will credit Friday the 13th for being unique and ambitious. We shall not speak their name in this house of truth where we recognize that the Friday the 13th franchise was never scarier than the moment you tried to play this game as a child.

This game’s bewildering map and unforgivable controls were practically designed to eliminate the possibility of fun. It’s easy to love Jason’s weirdly stylish purple jumpsuit in this 8-bit nightmare, but much like Patrick Bateman, no amount of style can hide the monster beneath.

13. Super Pitfall

There’s no shortage of NES games that are difficult to the point of being fundamentally unenjoyable, but Super Pitfall may just be the king of that particular trash heap.

Super Pitfall‘s developers seemed to believe that the reason people love video games is that they offer the chance to listen to repetitive music while dying all the time to obstacles you have little to no chance to avoid. Just in case that level of abuse wasn’t enough to make you love their project, the developers decided to just go ahead and fill their game with essentially invisible items that no sane person would ever find organically despite the fact that they’re required to progress. To it’s credit, this game does recreate the sensation of being trapped in a dank underground cave.

12. Operation Secret Storm

While it almost feels too easy to pick on developer Color Dreams (the studio responsible for many terrible unlicensed NES games, many of which were based on the Bible), Operation Secret Storm is really on another level in terms of all-time bad games.

Even if we can put aside the often blatant racism and bizarre Gulf War storyline, we’re left with a game where control commands are more of a polite suggestion and hit detection is a bug, not a feature. From top-to-bottom, this may be the “best” example of just how bad those old-school unlicensed NES games could be.

11. Where’s Waldo?

You know, it’s pretty amazing that Where’s Waldo? the video game can’t offer an experience comparable to the Where’s Waldo? books considering that the books weren’t exactly the great American novels.

Beating this game will either take you five minutes or 50 years. It really all depends on your ability to determine which of the blurred on-screen figures the game is trying to pretend is supposed to be Waldo. It’s truly impressive that this game manages to botch a concept this simple, but that’s the magic of the NES era.

10. Back to the Future Part II and III

The first Back to the Future game for NES was bad, but at least it followed basic video game logic in terms of its level structure. Back to the Future Part II and III, meanwhile, somehow beats Primer for the title of “most confusing use of time travel in entertainment history.”

To be honest, I still don’t know what this game expects from me. It’s supposed to offer a time travel adventure that spans the scope of the last two Back to the Future films, but I dare you to play this for more than 20 minutes without feeling tears in your eyes and the words “What do you want me to do?!?!” escape your lungs. If it’s not the most unintuitive bit of 8-bit game design, it’s certainly one of the most unenjoyable.

9. The Adventures Of Gilligan’s Island

There are two things worth remembering about Gilligan’s Island: the theme song and how annoying Gilligan was. To its credit, this game nails both of those elements.

This game is basically the result of escort quests and bad comedy games forming an unholy union. Imagine being dropped into a hedge maze and being forced to endure the constant jeers of the dumbest man you’ve ever met while trying to figure out where to go. Also, your legs are tied together. That’s basically the Adventures of Gilligan’s Island experience.

8. Bad Street Brawler

It’s tempting to overlook the golden age of beat ‘em ups for their seeming simplicity, but as Bad Street Brawler shows, it’s very much possible for those kinds of games to go incredibly wrong.

Bad Street Brawler was designed to be used with the NES Power Glove, which should probably tell you everything that you really need to know about what it’s like to try to “play” this game. Manage to master its nearly unplayable controls, and you’re left with a beat ’em up with bewildering visuals and fundamentally unsatisfying gameplay that leave you wondering how the industry lasted this long.

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7. Mario is Missing

Look, there are a lot of bad video games on the NES, but there’s something especially insulting about a terrible Mario game on NES that passes itself off as an educational experience.

This game feels like it was made by a dentist who wanted to give young patients a way to pass the time in the waiting room while also making them less afraid of the impending pain. Nothing in this game makes sense, and the fact it fooled young gamers into thinking it was an actual Mario game makes it that much more infuriating.

6. Ghostbusters

You know, it really shouldn’t have been that difficult to make a respectable Ghostbusters game. Honestly, the only way to go wrong is to pass up the more obvious genre opportunities and try to do something weird and stupid that nobody ever asked for.

As you probably guessed, that’s exactly what we have here. Ghostbusters has the audacity to try to be this strange combination of various gameplay concepts when the fundamentals of controls, visuals, and logical progression so clearly elude it. It’s genuinely hard to believe someone had the chance to make a Ghostbusters video game and came up with this.

5. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

There are some who say that you really need to learn to play this game before you can judge it. The fundamental flaw of that premise is that it assumes that there’s a game here that’s worth playing in the first place.

I genuinely can’t imagine what Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’s developers were going for when they concocted this unintuitive blend of confusing mechanics, overwhelming (yet unimpressive) enemies, and controls that only seem to work seconds before you convince yourself to give up on the game entirely. You can read every guide about this game that’s ever been written to try to understand how its needlessly complicated mechanics work, and they still wouldn’t answer the one question everyone has about this title, “Why are you like this?”

4. Action 52

It almost feels bad to pick on Action 52 considering that it is an unlicensed collection of 52 small games that were clearly made by underfunded and inexperienced programmers working on a project that legally probably shouldn’t have been “released.” Then again, that’s perhaps all the more reason to make fun of it.

Against all odds, not one of Action 52’s 52 games manages to be even remotely playable. These games would have been embarrassing even if they were released for the Atari 2600, but in the age of the NES, they offered young gamers the chance to quickly realize that the world is full of scammers and they will try anything to part you with your money.

3. Deadly Towers

Every NES gamer has that one game they just couldn’t beat and never seemed to understand no matter how hard they tried. Well, Deadly Towers is all of those games of your respective childhoods rolled into one.

There is not a single aspect of this game that makes any kind of sense that I’m familiar with. Imagine you’re trapped in the maze from the movie Labyrinth, but instead of getting to meet sexy David Bowie at the end, you have to listen to Eric Clapton tell you what’s wrong with your generation. That’s about what’s it like to play Deadly Towers. Even if you bother to learn the game’s structure, you quickly find you don’t want anything to do with the “rewards” that follow.

2. Dragon’s Lair

How do you take a game like Dragon’s Lair (an innovative arcade experience that combined FMV visuals with QTE gameplay) and port it to the humble NES? Well, if this port is any indication, you…don’t.

I don’t know if there’s ever been another game that inflicts so much pain on its first screen. I’m willing to bet that 90% of Dragon’s Lair players never figured out how to cross that first bridge and actually enter the castle. That’s probably because the solution to that “puzzle”makes no sense and is fundamentally unenjoyable to execute. Those 90% will be happy to know that the game only gets worse from there.

1. The Uncanny X-Men

Imagine how easy it would have been to make a decent X-Men game for NES. Just take Batman, Mega Man, Castlevania, or any number of the other great NES games, throw some X-Men designs on the whole thing, and you have a game most of us would probably fondly remember to this day.

Infamous NES developer LJN decided to go a different route, though. They decided to make a top-down action game where hit detection is basically non-existent, the music constantly assaults your ears, half of the characters are essentially useless, the graphics are so bad that you quite literally can’t tell where you are or what you’re supposed to be doing, and the AI is useless to the point that I”m pretty sure the in-game characters have become aware of the game they’re forced to exist in and are doing everything in their power to get out.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

There’s no shortage of bad NES games (clearly), but when it comes to wasted potential, this is truly the worst of the worst.

The post 15 Worst NES Games of All-Time appeared first on Den of Geek.

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razberryyum · 5 years

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The Untamed/陈情令 Rewatch, Episode 4 (spoilers for everything)

(covers mainly MDZS chaps 13 and 14)

WangXian meter: 🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰🐰

(a 🐰 is earned every time there is a WangXian scene or even when they’re just thinking of each other…more than one 🐰 can be given based on the level of WangXian-ness in a scene)

I loved and enjoyed all of Wei Ying’s “Notice me Wangji-senpai" moments in this episode, but my favorite has to be the one above: the way he tried to play off Lan Zhan totally ignoring him by blaming the other man’s hearing makes me laugh out loud every time I watch this episode. It’s just too adorable. Even though Lan Zhan is clearly still annoyed with him, I like how it’s also obvious that Wei Ying is slowly but surely burrowing his way into his psyche and taking hold there by either not leaving him alone or just being himself which is ample to constantly draw Lan Zhan’s attention to him. It‘s as if Lan Zhan’s life was a calm pond and Wei Ying was a beautiful, lively carp that suddenly decided to just jump into his waters without permission, taking liberties by swimming and splashing around, basically causing ruckus in every corner of his pool. Naturally, Wei Ying’s actions perturbs Lan Zhan to no end at first, but at the same time, he is also leaving an undeniable impression, so that eventually, when this carp leaves Lan Zhan’s pond, he can’t help but constantly think of Wei Ying and even miss his disruptive presence, thus naturally paving the way for the escalation of his affections that follow later on.

Whereas with Wei Ying, I think he simply enjoyed irritating this fuddy-duddy at first, but eventually, his light-hearted teasing probably became just a little more meaningful and he started looking forward to getting a reaction out of Lan Zhan because it provided him with genuine joy and satisfaction, until those feelings grew into just joy from being around the other man and interacting with him.

Ultimately that’s a big reason why I love their relationship: the development and progression of their feelings for each other makes a lot of sense to me. The phrase “opposites attract” has never been more applicable in terms of Wei Ying and Lan Zhan, but at the same time, they still share enough things in common—such as their moral code and belief system—that makes them absolutely just perfect for each other. I can imagine a future for them right from the start, whereas with other couples in stories, regardless of their sex, I’ve had difficulty believing they should be together other than because the plot requires them to be. I think the drama really succeeded in showing us why it’s completely logical that these two people would be drawn to each other, that they almost can’t help but be drawn together, by actually showing us all these little precious moments between them as they occurred, which the novel for the most part only described in an after-the-fact manner. While subtlety has its merits too, I do appreciate the more clearly illustrated path The Untamed decided to take for WangXian.

Along those lines, I also appreciated how CQL chose to show us the first time Lan Xichen and Jin Guangyao met and their instant connection. Honestly, when I first saw this moment…

I immediately thought they were going to be a couple too, like Wei Ying and Lan Zhan, and I was totally on board, until I found out from reading comments here and there that I shouldn’t be because this ship was bad news. I was disappointed of course and even tried to withstand its alluring call for a while, especially after reading the book and finding out exactly why this wasn’t a ship I wanted to board since it was on a one-way ticket to hell and heartbreak basically. But the drama just made it so damn hard to resist, and before I knew it, I was lowkey hooked. Much like with WangXian, I was surprised at how much the show was getting away with in terms of XiYao:

I mean, big bro Xichen totally stroked Meng Yao’s finger there, right? First time I saw that, I remember rewinding a few times just to check and and make sure and if it’s just an optical illusion, that’s a damn convincing trick. Amusingly enough I thought at first Wei Ying was seeing the same thing and was reacting in disbelief to that moment, until I realized from his angle, there’s no way he could have seen that small gesture and he was just responding to that (ugly) incense pot.

After finishing the series, I have to admit I’m pretty much a full-on XiYao-shipper now, which is really out of character for me because I usually prefer ships with happy endings. I have to blame, or rather, give credit to the two actors portraying LXC and JGY (Liu Haikuan and Zhu Zanjin, respectively) for conjuring up these feelings in me because they had so much chemistry together, which honestly at times rivaled that of Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo’s chemistry. I just love how LXC’s expression softens every time he interacts with JGY and even from their first meeting, it’s obvious there were genuine feelings of respect and gratitude behind Meng Yao’s reaction to LXC.

Take the moment above as an example: the extreme admiration emanating from JGY after seeing LXC exhibit his fluting powers had to be for real since there was no reason to react just for Nie Huaisang’s sake. I can totally imagine hearts fluttering all around him as he looked upon XiChen with those wide, innocent-seeming puppy eyes of his. And when he bade his farewell to big bro later on in the episode, I loved how the camera lingered on LXC’s hands as Meng Yao moved away after saluting him, just to reiterate the intimacy of their brief physical contact.

I also appreciated the small, seemingly trivial moments before and after he meets up with LXC in that scene, where Meng Yao is first ignored by the two male sect disciples walking by him and then later on by two female disciples. Contrast that with how LXC immediately praises Meng Yao and recognizes him as his peer from the get go, going so far as to refer to himself by his own name (“Xichen”) just to reinforce their equality, it’s no wonder JGY was instantly drawn to him. I would go so far as to say he probably fell for LXC right from the start; doesn’t even matter if it might be only in the platonic sense, man was smitten no matter how anyone chooses to categorize his feelings.

XianQing? No thank you

When I first watched this episode, I still had the stormy cloud of fear that Wen Qing would eventually be the love interest that comes in between Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji hanging over me due to some rumors I came across prior to even watching the show. As a result, every time Wen Qing and WWX would have a scene together, I would view it with trepidation as I was certain it was yet another building block to something undesirable, with the ultimate goal of mutating the relationship at the core of MDZS. If I’m going to be honest, I don’t think I was even able to rest easy until after Wen Qing’s passing and knowing for certain that the “danger period” was finally over, even though I had already grown to like her character. I still have complaints about how they altered her personality for the live action, but at least now, when I watch the scenes she shares with Wei Ying, instead of being filled with anxiety, I am actually more fascinated. I can still see the ghost of what Team CQL had initially intended with Wen Qing and WWX in a lot of their scenes together, before the fans’ uproar thankfully forced the producers to change their minds and stick with the source material. This scene wasn’t one of those moments, but with revisiting each episode, I actually look forward to picking out which scenes were feeding into their ship because of the way they were shot and how the two actors were directed to perform during the scene, especially Meng Ziyi. I’m glad I can actually sit back and have fun with all of this now.

XianNing? I can’t

I can see why some folks support this ship, and upon first viewing I thought this was a cute moment as well, but of course, I simply can’t go there since my heart already belongs to WangXian. And now, after having read the novel, all I could think about is how much I wish we got the archery contest at the Cultivation Conference. I’m glad we got to see it depicted in the donghua; it was as amazing as I hope it would be, but it’s a shame we didn’t get to see it in the drama. Since the producers had mentioned releasing specials of extra scenes that they couldn’t fit into the flow of the show, I hope the archery contest will be one of them. I don’t know where it would fit in in the timeline though…I guess it could happen while they were all held hostage at Nightless City, so the reason for the archery contest will have to be changed, but then maybe that’s the impetus for Wen Chao’s decision to force everyone on that dangerous quest to the Xuanwu cave: he’s so pissed off at losing at archery on his own turf that he decides to try to get all the sect kids killed. Either way, I hope we get to see the contest in live action form one day.

Wei Wuxian is so smart

I loved this scene. I love how WWX schooled everyone with his inventive fourth reason. He’s so awesome. That’s really all I wanted to say about it.

Random Bits of Randomness

I don’t think there’s anything wrong the color function on my tv, so please explain to me how that can be considered “purple” in any universe??

All I could think about in this scene is how disgusting that fish must have tasted cuz it looked awful, and I think Xiao Zhan even mentioned in an interview that it was gross. What probably made it taste worse was the fact that he kept on eating it from the stomach side, which can be really bitter. I think Wang Zhuocheng (Jiang Cheng) was eating it from the same side as well and I just can’t help grimacing every time I see this moment.

Odds and Ends:

I don’t really have any questions from this episode, but I did wonder if Wen Qing ever actually attended classes while she was at Cloud Recesses or did she just spend all of the time wandering the back hills, throwing her needles at barriers, cuz that’s not suspicious AT ALL. Unless I just happened to have missed her every single time in class, even though you would think it’s easy to spot her red in a sea of white…if that’s the case then I probably need to get my eyes checked.

Also, I wish we got to see Shijie draw her sword. She carried it around in the beginning, but I’m kinda bummed that we never saw her actually use it. I’m sure she is completely capable and would’ve looked just as badass as the boys.

And bless Uncle Lan for his brilliant idea of making Lan Zhan enforce the disciplinary action on Wei Ying, thereby allowing the boys to have valuable alone time in the library pavilion to further nurture their bond. In retrospect he probably regrets that decision, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s one of his best one he’s ever made.

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doshmanziari · 5 years

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Castlevania: Curse of Darkness ~ It’s Just Like Symphony of the Night, Except Not At All! [Part IV]

When asked recently if Curse of Darkness is good, I answered: no; but, I’ve played through it about ten times. So, on a subjective level that can’t really be transmitted to other people by telling them what to focus on (although I’ll try to enumerate what I focus on), there is something here that, well, I just like. I’m not the sort of person to make the claim that, “[X] is a fine videogame, but a bad [series-name] videogame.” That’s not my conclusion -- to suggest that there is an inherent goodness to the series I like just because it generally excites my palate, and that anything below one’s standard is a “betrayal” of that inherence.

Even though difficulty isn’t what I go to videogames looking for, I think what makes Curse of Darkness work best for me is its hard mode, accessed by finishing the game once and then inputting “@CRAZY” for your file name on a new file (the same goes for Lament of Innocence). The norm for the Castlevania series and iterative challenge has been “loops” -- clearing the game once and then having it roll over automatically to a new game, whereupon enemies deal more damage and are perhaps more numerous and/or newly appearing. Although these adjustments have provided an extra challenge, the presence of new material, of differing enemies or enemy placements, has tended to be relatively minimal. The first Castlevania, for example, halts its modifications on stage four on subsequent loops. CoD’s hard mode is remarkable in that pretty much every area has been edited for enemy type and occurrence. It is also, at least on some hypothetical level, the toughest of any Castlevania hard mode. Hours in, you will still be easily slain in just a few hits, your curative capacity is strict, and money is tight. What all of this means, for me, anyway, is that Curse of Darkness becomes a sort of brutal dungeon crawler: the endurance which the level design, by default, asks of the player better matches what you need to do in order to survive until the next save point.

What it also means is that you might be compelled to more intentionally curate your familiars, here called Innocent Devils. Normally, these critters are absolutely peripheral, excepting a handful of spots where one’s ability is required for progress. On hard mode, having the right familiar in the right situation, using the right abilities, is an enormous help -- sometimes, the difference between your life and death. If I could retroactively magically redirect all of the labor poured into the Innocent Devils to the level design, of course I’d do it in a heartbeat; but the variety that effort produced -- the physical differences between a Devil’s evolutionary forms, their skills, and the descriptions for each (two of my favorites: “A star motif graces the rod of this mage. Its owner dreams of one day becoming one with the stars”, and “Pure rage in corporal form, it is chaos with wings. Many find its anguished form hard to look at”) -- has its place among the rest of the game’s marginalia. Without them, too, Curse of Darkness would perhaps be an overly lonely experience.

Curse of Darkness has something in common with KCET’s post-Game Boy Advance Castlevanias (most of all Order of Ecclesia), which is that its bosses are excellent -- fun to look at and fun to fight, especially on hard mode, where precise mechanical execution is mandatory. The downside is that they are, in fact, so good that returning to the game as usual after each can be especially deflating. Just as fun are the narrative interludes featuring some wonderfully on-point voice acting by, best of all, Liam O’Brien (as Isaac) and Adam D. Clark (as St. Germain), and, somehow, some of the subtlest facial expressions found on the console. To be sure, the characterizations are limited -- caricatures more than characters -- but what they lack in humanistic texture (something perhaps not to be sought in this series) they make up for in flair. People might pick on the Lords of Shadow titles for resembling “high fantasy” ersatz with doses of Castlevania jabbed in wherever, and while that is a fair criticism, just as awful was the games’ relentlessly grieving tone, as if a suffocating sense of self-seriousness were what the material needed for effect. Curse of Darkness’ tonal strain -- reverential, obscurantist, and funny -- could not be unlikelier. There is the rendering of Trevor Belmont, after we first fight him to no avail, as a near-saintly figure; the inscrutable, fanfiction-like logic guiding the major plot beats; the way Hector, as protagonist, slams between ridiculous shrieks of vengeance and introspective “Indeed”s. It is, all in all, maybe the best-relayed storyline Castlevania has ever gotten, and maybe will ever get.

If there’s one mechanical idea, separate from the Innocent Devils, to applaud, it’s the stealing mechanic, whereby Hector can snag various items from ghouls and ghosts if done at the proper time. This is indicated by the lock-on reticule momentarily switching from orange to purple, and often requires waiting for certain animations to begin or finish. It’s a neat micro-challenge to engage if you’re so inclined (bosses are where it shines; the Wyvern, for example, has an optional aerial sequence that’s tied to the steal-window), and a nice alternative to item drops being determined by randomized success/failure rates. To be clear, randomized drops do still exist -- they’re there in the bestiary as a delineated datum -- but they’re no longer the sole possibility. For some, this mechanic might also serve as an invitation to observe Dracula’s army with a heightened degree of purposefulness, to better appreciate the effort that went into giving its members life. However viewed, it’s kind of a shame that the idea remains unique to Curse of Darkness. I suppose pure statistical randomness pumps up the playtime for anyone who enjoys grinding; but the intentionality underpinning the stealing mechanic, the terms of its execution and our means of utilizing it, is a tantalizing window into an alternative, less number-crunchy shape for the action-RPG mold of Castlevania.

And, really, for as often as Curse of Darkness’ visuals compare unfavorably to Lament of Innocence’s, I couldn’t’ve taken as many photos of it as I did for another lo-fi-/CRT-dedicated project last year (a fraction of the results can be seen here and here) if the game’s world didn’t have an ambient luminescence of its own, albeit one thinned out by the aforementioned issues with the scope and camera, and several stale settings. In a fashion seemingly particular to PlayStation 2 releases, scores of exterior and interior spots are clothed with polychromatic, sourceless “lighting”, such that a wall’s surface might go from a deep blue to a brown-green to a purplish red. Taken as a sum, Curse of Darkness’ Wallachia is dim and gray-faced; taken constitutionally, it’s in fact abounding with colorful dispersions. Especially delightful for its brazenness is the pause menu/status screen, centralized by a pillar of neon-green stamps, headlined by a teal and an orange ochre banner, and itemized on the right by a stack of iconographic boxes. As coloration and organization go, compared to Lament of Innocence’s screen, it’s sloppy. But as a chunk of graphic design to linger in, it’s delicious, and happily recalls Harmony of Dissonance’s palettes (also directed by Takashi Takeda).

Well! That’s nearly all I have to say about Curse of Darkness right now. I’m curious if the animated Castlevania series’ second season, featuring Hector and Isaac (Isaac is physically recast and no longer queer-coded in the way media tends to do that coding; a gain and a loss, in my opinion), got some people to try this game out for the first time. If it did, I’m also curious if the show’s characterizations transferred over, maybe allowing those people to enjoy Curse of Darkness in a way foreign to myself (no, I still haven’t watched the show) and others. Could the imaginatively supplementary reach of fanfiction sustain such a playthrough? Surely it’s possible.

You can read the prior three essays on CoD here, here, and here.

#curse of darkness #Castlevania #brick by brick #akumajo dracula

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morshtalon · 4 years

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Dragon Quest II

Well, it's been a while since I wrote a review on something. I've played a number of games in the meantime, but none of them really gave me anything I felt was worth talking about or that hasn't been talked about before, so I just keep them in the backburner of my mind for possible future reference.

However, I feel like current circumstances make for a good time to dig up one of the games I wanted to share my thoughts on for a long time, and that I had beaten before even writing the first review I've ever "published". That game is Dragon Quest II.

Part of the reason why I held off on it for so long is that I don't think my review of the first game is all that great, and another part is that, again, I don't feel like I've bunched up enough good stuff to say, even though I really wanted to talk about it ever since I played it.

But hey, by far and wide my post popular post is technically related to Dragon Quest II, so why not cut to the chase and do it, right?

Anyway, to say that the first game took off in popularity is an understatement, it being the seminal harbinger of an entire genre of gaming that would soon take the world by storm. You would think that means this would be the time-old tale of "runaway success game making company executives pressure developers into slaving away at a sequel with suffocating deadlines". However, planning for DQII apparently began before DQI was released. 1986 was a different time, I guess. A time when the industry was fledgling enough that it wasn't that much more than a group of dudes banding together to bring an idea to life, and then - not a moment of hesitation after that idea comes to fruition - immediately start brainstorming ways in which they can build on it to give birth to new, more complex explorations of the concepts they had just tackled.

I believe this is why it's good to go back and play these games in their original versions, in chronological release order. Nowadays, it's virtually impossible to innovate. Back then, almost every big-time franchise was always finding ways to breathe fresh air into the structure of their games. Though Dragon Quest isn't the most innovative when compared to the likes of Final Fantasy, they were still making great strides into the codification of the type of game they had pioneered. With that knowledge in mind, one can really appreciate the evolution by going back and exploring these things as they grew with the times. And hey, Final Fantasy still wasn't around by the time DQII came out, so once again, they had to rely on ideas from western RPGs they liked.

In my opinion, II is the first jRPG that actually feels good to play, if you can put yourself into the mindset of an 80's gamer. The designers felt the 1v1 battles of the first title were boring - a sentiment which I share - and put in different groups of enemies as well as extra party members for you to find. One thing that some of these old RPGs that only let you target a group of enemies does is drawing only one enemy sprite on-screen to represent the entire group. Surprisingly, this game does not do that, even though it predates all the ones that do. It draws every enemy on-screen, which doesn't seem like much nowadays, but it's very appreciated nonetheless. Sure, it came at the cost of battle backgrounds (all fights in this game are set against pure blackness), but they did the right thing. The party itself follows what would become a typical archetype of 3-person groups: One character who is a jack-of-all-stats, balanced between physical prowess and magic, one who is focused on physical combat (in this game, this character actually has no magic capabilities whatsoever), and one who is a pure mage. Perhaps surprisingly, because these structures hadn't become tropes yet, the main character is the physical one, and he's also pretty much the most reliable party member by a reasonable margin, even though all he can do is attack normally. Balance issues aside (we'll talk about that later), I honestly sort of dig this arrangement. It's a little bit of a breath of fresh air to see the main character in an RPG rely completely on his weapons, and in the future, in any DQ title that has a reasonable degree of character customization, I always try to make the protagonist a physical powerhouse, to match the one from this game. It hardly ever works, but hey, it just goes for show that I enjoyed it while playing. Given that the other party members join you as you progress through the game at specific points, that also means the complexity of magic spells is added to your arsenal slowly, getting you used to it without feeling overwhelming. Sure, the game is simple enough that it wouldn't be overwhelming regardless of how they had set up the pacing, but I never felt like any of the times I struggled were because of insufficient knowledge of the game mechanics. So, the battles are fun enough, and they feel just right in terms of complexity vs. focus. The strategies to win are simple - really, the whole game is very simple - but it does its job well, and it allowed the developers to have near-perfect control of the game's difficulty curve. As a result, it is also - almost up to the end of the game - pretty nice, even if the whole thing is on the challenging end of things. At the end, it gets... A little special. We'll get to that later.

Let's take a step back and look at the gameplay outside battles. First of all, the story is... sparse, to say the least. Not as much as the one in the first game, and supplemented in the international version by a frankly kick-ass introduction that gives the experience a certain tone and atmosphere I appreciate a lot, but still, it's 1987. jRPGs were... not so much about the story back then, if you can believe that. In fact, they were more like an extension of a point-and-click adventure game. DQII is, essentially, a big fetch quest. In a different story, one that has enough plot points that you can sense a type of underlying narrative progression, I would not enjoy having the game interrupted by a blatant collectathon. However, the fetch quest aspect is basically the soul of this entire game. The extremely loose story paves the way for an experience that boils down to pure exploration and combat, with light elements of puzzle-solving woven in, using the fetch quest premise simply as a background to leave the developers with fertile soil to plant their little tricks and enigmas without worrying too much about how it would all connect rationally. And here, we witness an aspect of old games that could only spring about as a byproduct of limited graphics, ill-defined representations of the setting's reality, and a healthy disregard for common sense, things that were the style at the time. The puzzles, and sometimes just the exploration, violate logic quite heavily. Traversing through a monster-infested castle to get to a point that is technically outside the castle, but you can't just walk around it because most of the outside grass tiles are exit tiles that warp you back to the world map? Sure, why not? Having dedicated "teleport-room" maps that only serve the explicit purpose of housing a teleporter to another part of the world, except for one which also houses a chest with an essential item if you walk along the right border of the map, but not the identical-looking left one? Mario 2 hid a goal post inside a secret too, so yeah! Throw that in! Stairs down in a brick islet surrounded by water which brings you to a room that's... Also at water level? We hardly have enough tiles to go around, let alone a set to represent underwater or underground rooms, so whatever! Nobody cares! And, honestly, I truly don't care, either. If a game is up to, let's say, willfully forgo a bit of logic in order to formulate a creative puzzle to play around with your expectations, then all the more power to it. I honestly feel like puzzles nowadays are too sectioned-off, contained within a single room in a single dungeon, ready for the player to walk in, solve it, move on to the next point in the flowchart and never think about it twice. When puzzles are woven in so closely with the world, requiring the player to think outside the box at all times, as they're out there exploring, it makes the whole game feel like it's working together to make a point, and helps reduce that feeling one gets when playing RPGs where there are very separate elements of gameplay that... Don't really connect to each other very well. Sure, you're blatantly aware you're playing a videogame at all times, and it's not super great for immersion, but this was a time when there just... wasn't enough memory for immersion. It was a constraint that naturally gave way to challenges that capitalized on its own limitations, and therefore, created a type of immersion of its own, where the player is completely sucked into their own thoughts, holding a notebook with a rough sketch of the world map in their hand (yeah, I might have done that), taking notes and thinking where in the world could that last crest possibly be?! I think DQII hit that sweet spot of looseness vs. clarity in the narrative that helped these wild, nonsensical elements flourish. I really don't know how other people react to this sort of thing, but I don't care. I had a good time with it, and soon after this game, everything RPG started to become more focused on story. That's definitely not a bad thing, but I felt a kind of clear, developer-to-player kind of communication from these small bits of wrongness that made me more aware of the time, effort and creativity put into it by the people who were making it. I realized that, were I in the shoes of the dude who was making all this crazy stuff, I'd be stoked to see my friends trying to solve them. I'm not trying to be sentimental, that's how I honestly felt while playing that part with the teleporter and the chest. In any case, I appreciated it.

Then you get to the road to Rhone.

Though, apparently, the game was not pressured into deadlines by higher-ups, I did read something about one of the guys in the team offhandedly setting a deadline that turned out to be just that little bit too tight, requiring it to be delayed from November 1986 to January 1987. This, along with the fact that, at the time, the second title in a franchise had the habit of being designed for people who were hardcore fans of the first game in that series, might go a little ways into explaining why everything starting from the road to Rhone is absolutely fucking brutal. Every element of the game that, previously, was a tad questionable, leaving that little itch of worry in the back of your head, returns here with the express intent to make your life miserable. I have a high tolerance for difficulty, one that is even higher for RPGs where, for the most part, there are always ways to slightly circumvent it and make your life easier. The simplicity of design in DQII means that this is not the case here, and from this point on you're expected to not only have the skill and familiarity you've accrued while playing, but also a very healthy amount of luck to go with you, otherwise you will die. And rest assured, you WILL die. In fact, due to the specific way in which the player's mortality rate skyrockets in Rhone, it's almost not even a matter of the game being "hard" in the traditional sense, because it doesn't exactly require you to be strong enough or smart enough anymore, it just requires you to be patient enough to slowly trudge through the mountain of corpses of your former attempts until you figure out how to minimize your risks to the lowest degree they possibly can be minimized, then hitting that sweet spot of luck and control that finally allows you to reach the end of the game. This particular way of handling things means that, after you hit about level 30 with the main character, further leveling will only render you negligibly less likely to die, and the effects are not strong enough from level to level to even be clearly noticed. But what exactly makes it so hard? The answer is primarily RNG. When you reach the end, you will begin to notice just how much RNG there is through the whole game. Starting off, the turn order is entirely random. There is an agility stat, but I never found any evidence of it actually factoring into who goes first in battle (instead, it's a carryover from DQI that calculates your base defense). If there are more than three enemies, you're at a disadvantage, but even if there aren't, a stray run of bad luck - which is guaranteed to happen given the density of random encounters - means you're gonna have to scramble with enemy attacks, and they are perfectly capable of leaving you in such a state that it would take a miracle to put yourself back in shape, if they don't just wipe you out instantly. Now, remember, two of your three characters have magic. However, at this point in the game, enemies have a large amount of magic resistance to all kinds of different spells, and magic resistance in this game means that there is a chance the spell simply won't work. If it does, it deals full damage. If it doesn't, it deals none at all. I don't know about you, but I almost never take my chances with low-accuracy, gimmicky stuff in other games. This one renders all spells like that given enough time. If you decide to rely on physical strength, the main character is the only one who will bring you any significant results. The pure mage at this point in the game is far more efficient at support casting than direct damage, and the balanced character is - memetically, at this point - incompetent at both, and also sucks as a physical fighter, so once again, you're boned on that front. All of a sudden, running away becomes an alluring strategy. However, once again, there is an ever-prevalent random factor to it, so the pressure is on in all fronts. The game becomes a challenge of carefully planning out how to simply survive each encounter. Do you take the chance and run? If you fail, you'll be wailed on by the full force of the enemy party, and will likely be too weak to attempt mounting a resistance. Do you take the bait and unleash the full force of your attacks? What if they all target different enemies in the group? You won't deal enough damage to kill one of them, so you'll suffer heavy retaliation and waste precious MP that could be spent on healing spells. Did you win or escape successfully? You've only lost about 20% of your health, but some encounters can relieve you of the remaining 80% before you can even act, so do you spend MP healing or do you trudge on because you already don't have that many to go around? If you make the wrong decision at any of these break points - and rest assured, there won't be a shortage of them - you'll either die or get so close to death it will be almost irrelevant to keep going. And then, it's back to the last save point. Rinse and repeat many times until you clear the road and get to Rhone proper, for one final save point and one last, grueling stretch of game before the final boss. Here, the game introduces enemies that have, no joke, a move that kills your entire party and has 100% accuracy. Typing it out, it sounds like hyperbole, like i'm salty that I died so much and am exaggerating the things the game does in order to trick myself into believing that it was super impossible times infinity, but no, it's true. To be fair, there isn't a high chance the enemy will perform this move, but when they do, there's absolutely nothing you can do to save yourself. Just reset the game when the screen turns red. Other than that, the rest of the lovely cast of enemies rounding up the final waves are more than capable of just killing you the regular way, so keep your wits about you like you did back in the cave and grind yourself up until the stat bonuses start getting negligible, because now, you need to face five bosses in a row. Right, okay, technically you can go back and heal yourself right before the last one, but I didn't know that, so if you're an idiot like me, try to get ahold of a Wizard Ring, as well. It's the only way to heal MP, and can be used multiple times until - you guessed it - it randomly decides to break. After that, you just have to contend with two bosses that use a move that heals all their HP when it gets low, so you also have to roughly keep track of their state in your mind so you can unleash a full round of attack before they can get in that heal. Unless your spell doesn't hit them, of course. Or they happen to go first. Or you just barely miss the threshold of HP that will actually kill them. Oh, and be careful! One of the other bosses also knows the instant death move. He won't use it often, but 30 or so attempts in, you're likely to see it once or twice.

Then, the final boss can randomly spawn with a number of hit points between 75% and 100% of his assigned value (every enemy does that), and you're gonna deal an average of about 15% damage per turn to it. Sounds easy at first, but he will take you out in either one or two moves, and...

...Here's the motherload...

...He has a 1 in 16 chance of casting the full heal move at any point in the battle. And he WILL do that the first 2 or 3 times you get to him, sucking you dry of resources and smashing your face all the way back to the save point to try the 5 bosses again, so it's back to grinding attempts until you have another mostly hopeless shot at him.

But when you get him, man...

When you do it...

*sigh*

Anyway, this was a long, rambling, focus-shifting tangent just to correctly capture the degree of luck and randomness that constitutes the final stretch of Dragon Quest II. How does it impact the rest of the game? Well, I still appreciate it for what it did right, and there's a small, strange part of me that actually thinks the insane difficulty perfectly fits the stakes that the game set up, but it is, nevertheless, very hard. And once again, it's the kind of hard that is virtually impossible to circumvent. For any average, non-god-tier player, there is no alternate way of tackling the simple-looking, but highly controlled challenges in this game that trivializes it. You can't change your party, you can't buy extra spells, you can't really use stat-up items to change stat configurations in any significant way. You just have to keep trying and hope it works, and for the first few dozen times, it won't, so you'll just have to deal with it.

Still, it shows, even up to the end, that the DQ team has a certain grasp of consistency in design that will slowly grow and adapt as the series embraces new complexities through the years. DQII stands as somewhat of a black sheep in the series (as the second titles of old franchises often do), but I think it has its place, and it's surely a wild ride. Also, if you can get yourself into the mindset of late 80's design, I can assure you it won't ever be boring. Maddening, sure, but not boring. It's more fun in the midgame, in my opinion, as for someone who is very used to RPGs, it can be exceesingly simplistic at the start and too hopelessly uncontrollable at the end, but I feel it deserves a score of 7 out of 10. It's pure gameplay, and, for what it's worth, you WILL get an intense experience. Just be ready to shake, a lot. And pad your walls.

#rpg #video games #review #dragon quest

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paintingraves · 6 years

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Crimes of Grindelwald info dump

CAREFUL : SPOILERS ! There’s no structure to this I’m sorry

the humor is still very present. from newt’s awkward flirting skills to Jacob’s tell-tale high-pitched screams, it’s all here and guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

seeing Hogwarts again was a great plus as well. Dumbledore as a teacher is a great thing.

Speaking of which Jude Law makes a perfect young Dumbledore. His performance is great, and I wish he’d had more screentime. I’m looking forward to seeing his role grow in further movies.

Credence is GROWING and that’s GREAT even if he MAKES MISTAKES

the baby nifflers - and as a matter of fact, all creatures - are delightful. the CGI is very well-done, and the creativity behind each of them is palatable. I love those guys so much.

Newt and Tina are actually adorable as fuck

Dan Fogler is great. Scratch that, he steals the show. He’s brilliant.

The cinematography, costumes, etc - all that is great as well. it’s believable.

in terms of acting… none of the actors get much screentime. Queenie & Jacob do get some emotional scenes. Credence is very busy making angry murder faces at the camera. I liked Tina as well, but again - not enough screentime.

there’s a lot of new characters being introduced, some who get no more than perhaps ten minutes of screentime as a whole (looking at you Nagini.) We get this whole building plot about Credence being Leta’s long-lost brother, thought dead, only to have it crumble in the last minutes - the same as it was with Credence’s sister Modesty in the first movie who we thought was the Obscurus. Now that worked actually well in FB1 but here it feels… kind of anticlimactic? Leaving you to wonder the whys and the hows because nothing led up to it.

I’d like to know how Credence came to know Nagini and how he found himself working in a circus, as well as how he survived. How?!

Nagini and Credence seem to be close friends, nothing more. Which is good - he could use some good friends, especially given the direction he’s taking. Just wish Nagini had more screentime to really show up the mechanics of their relationship and how close they are, because it really isn’t clear. We’re just supposed to take at face value that they know each other and that’s it.

How did Credence even find his adoption papers? Isn’t he being wanted by every government in the world? How does his status work?

They’re literally sending assassins after him because he’s supposedly Grindelwald’s greatest weapon, which like… chill a bit guys maybe. Rethink this through???

Oh, Grindelwald. Grindelwald is grooming Credence like hell, calling him “my boy” again and again and hugging him and touching him and making promises and Credence is falling for it hook, line and sinker. Someone help him holy shit.

One of the characters that actually does make sense is actually Abernathy. His role is minimal but he does help Grindelwald escape and seems to be given tasks of importance - which seems to be a great deal for a man who, like him, appeared to be no one before. It’s easy to see how he could have been seduced to Grindelwald’s side.

We don’t know much about Rosier yet. She’s just here. Looking pretty and threatening and hinting at her ‘close relationship’ with Grindelwald, whatever that means (I don’t want to think about it.) She seems to be his second-in-command.

I liked the fact that at the end Grindelwald and Queenie are like bros. Bitch bros. That’s wonderful and terrifying.

I didn’t say it enough, but the grooming

There were so many times. So many times where they could have mentioned Percival Graves and what happened to him in passing but not only once. NoT OnLy oNcE

but that’s a whole other headache SO. moving on

Hmmm Leta. What to say about Leta? She’s great. She seems like a good person, and Zoé did a great job portraying her. She’s the one who gets the most emotional scenes, next to Jacob and Queenie. There’s a whole family drama unfolding here (which oooh boi is it complicated) and it’s kind of easy to see how she became the woman she is?

She and Theseus seem to love each other very much. I’m wishing they had had more screentime, the two of them.

Nicolas Flamel is here for comic value.

I loved the relationship between Theseus and Newt. There’s some real brotherly love and character growth in there, and it felt good to see it depicted well.

I’m wondering how powerful that assassin sent by the british minister needed to be to resist the full-blown assault of a grown obscurus. even Grindelwald had trouble doing that. where’s the logic ???

also how did they obliviate the entire city of Paris following that little trick with the dark cloaks inviting people to Grindelwald’s little rendez-vous? Unless it was visible only to wizards, but since they show us an old intrigued man looking out the window I don’t think it was the case. So?

Same thing with the blue fires and red fires in the cemetery - how’re they gonna explain that to the muggle police and fire brigade should they come running?

Bunty is here for comic value.

Newt literally isn’t aware of his own appeal. I’m afraid oblivious!Newt from the fics is sorta canon now.

TINA DOESN’T GET ENOUGH SCREENTIME. She’s one of the characters who, along with Jacob, seems to have her shit together and seems eager to get shit done but we don’t see her progress. The movie prefers to focus on her relationship with Newt - which, don’t get me wrong, they’re adorable as fuck - instead of the much more interesting investigation plot line she has got going on. She’s an Auror; let her be an Auror ! Show us that side of her !

Queenie was certainly… something in this movie. I get the feeling she’s suffering a lot and Grindelwald is the only one, unfortunately, who listens.

Jacob the poor guy goes through a lot in this one too. I don’t know how he’s expected to survive in a world he really shouldn’t be in, and I think he’s starting to realize that. At the end of the movie he looks to be on the verge of a breakdown.

Leta dies sacrificing herself so the others can escape. Which is very noble but… I don’t know how I feel about that one just yet.

Grindelwald and Dumbledore… Hmm. Dumbledore shows us his suffering intimately. It’s a short but intense scene that goes one with him in front of that mirror and it’s a great piece of acting. Seeing Johnny Depp in front of him stiiiiill doesn’t cut it but oH WELL

Seeing Jamie morph into JD was about as bad as seeing Colin Farrell morph into him tbh. It’s unbelievable.

Now Grindelwald… Grindelwald is… He is Grindelwald. He is busy being Grindelwald. He’s not particularly striking but he gets the job done. That’s it.

Sometimes he looks terrifying and sometimes he looks ridiculous. The character design is still a hard pill to swallow.

I got the feeling at some points that Grindelwald worked well when he was doing some Johnny Depp. Like when he asks Queenie if Credence trusts him or when he says “I hate Paris” after killing a dozen people at the end of his rally - that was funny. Unexpected. And it worked well.

For someone who claims they are the non-violent ones he does seems very prone to like, drowning people, killing children and burning people with fire lol - but all that away from the public eye, which is clever. I’d say in Grindelwald’s and his followers’ opinion that rally worked very well. It did what it was meant to - give them an insight into his hopes and beliefs and then scare them into joining his side.

They introduced World War II which, oh boi. Wonder how they’re gonna weave the muggle history and wizarding world plotline together.

Credence joining him also makes sense for his character. He wants to know who he is and Grindelwald offers him that. But Grindelwald plays him so well it’s also very sad to watch it unfold.

Credence is gonna be so powerful growing under his tutelage though.

The actors playing young Newt and Leta were awesome! Very good casting, very believable. Young Newt’s got Eddie Redmayne’s trademark Newt mannerisms down to a point - congrats to them both!

Newt the adult… well he is busy being Newt. He’s quite cute and clumsy, but he still has some growth to do as a protagonist. I like him being the main character though. He’s caring.

Yusuf Kama doesn’t get much screentime either. He’s part of the whole Lestrange family drama plotline. We don’t have time to get attached to the character.

We don’t relate much to any character, actually. Not to Credence, not to Dumbledore, not to any minor new character either. We might relate slightly to Newt’s rivalry with his brother or his difficulties in approaching the woman he likes as well as the difficulties Jacob and Queenie are facing as a couple buuuut that’s pretty much it.

There’s a scene at the beginning when we’re in the carriage and Grindelwald gets illuminated by lightning - he looks properly terrifying. My heart skipped a beat.

Newt and Leta’s relationship is really touching. It’s easy to see how they could have become close friends.

The Ministry trying to recruit Newt into the auror department like you seriously thought that was gonna work ? lmao

Jacob being charmed by Queenie is problematic…. but it’s interesting to see how Queenie evolves, how she could be driven to such desperations. In my opinion Jacob is a bit too quick to forgive something like this lol but yK

Newt just wants to get to Tina and that’s cute

God these two are just terribly awkward

I genuinely thought they were gonna kiss at one point though.

I felt bad for Credence seeing the servant who was a link to his family (or maybe not ahaa SPOILER) die like minutes after he met her. the poor dude.

So Credence is a Dumbledore uh. Wonder how that one skipped past Rita Skeeter’s sharp quill.

Credence blasting that hole in the mountain like YEAH BABY THERE YOU GO !!!!!

The niffler steals the blood pact Grindelwald keeps on him at all times and im like YES BABY THERE YOU GO TOO !!! GOOD BOY !

and idk there’s probably more to say but here you go

Now I’m saying all this but personally I have a really hard time caring about anything I’m saying or any of the characters. But that’s personal.

#crimes of grindelwald spoilers #tcog spoilers #fb spoilers #fb2 spoilers #fbtcog spoilers #juTS SPOILERS IN GENERAL OKAY #thanks bye #i kinda really want to try to do an articulated review like a movie critic though #but i dont care #slljdksfhsjfjsdf

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entropy-game-dev · 6 years

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Hey, nice job keep it up! However i have a question as a game enthusiast;is it really hard to program a rpg, is it heavily math oriented and is it does really uses algorithms and logic because i can say i really suck in everything above so if i wanted to make a video game how can i achieve it. Thanks for your opinion and good luck with everything you are doing.

Thanks for the great question and kind words! So, you’ve touched on a few things here, and I’ve both thought about it quite a bit and talked to my friends regarding my answer. So I’ll answer this is three separate parts:

Are RPGs math-heavy?

Are RPGs logic-heavy?

How could I go about making an RPG?

Keep in mind that I’m discussing this as if you will be setting out to make a game in gamemaker, don’t forget there are tons of engines out there (RPG maker and so on) that will do a LOT of the heavy lifting for you, but will be limited in customisability. There’s absolutely no shame in using an RPG engine to begin with, but it 100% helps to have the fundamentals of programming down anyway, both for working within an engine and eventually progressing to a programming language. Anyway, onward!

RPGs and math

So the beauty about designing your own game (as an independent developer) is that you are the one that decides everything about it. Everything from the overall message and themes right down to the nitty gritty of your systems and subsystems. So in that sense, it can be as math heavy or not as you like! I always say you should play to your strengths (but also take the time to understand and work on your weaknesses). My weakness is art and sound, whereas I (like to think) my strength is dealing with data and numbers, and I think that’s reflected in my game design.

As an example of an RPG battle system that’s not math-heavy, take Paper Mario: 100xp to a level, damage dealt is attack minus defense, level-ups are a choice between incrementing HP, FP or BP by a set number, and so on. Extremely rudimentary math involved, nothing like complex level curves, damage variance, and so on. So in terms of game systems the math here is simple. However there is always going to be some level of math involved in your game, because programming is fundamentally about manipulating numbers.

Beyond game systems, you’ll need to know some kind of math for the game itself - I’m talking about stuff like knowing formulae for circles/squares/etc to trace paths for effects, probabilities for item drops, percentages or flat rates for certain skills and items, that sort of thing. It’s relatively simple math but this sort of stuff is fundamental to building a game.

RPGs and Logic

Having a watertight understanding of logic is absolutely fundamental to creating any game, and there’s no way around this! Luckily, learning logic rules is pretty easy and this is not as difficult as you might think. At the end of the day, programming is a bunch of statements that say “IF this happens THEN do that”. Over and over. The difficulty is in writing the exact conditions that need to occur for an event to happen. Here’s a common (paraphrased) programming joke:

A wife says to her husband, “Buy a gallon of milk, and if there are eggs, buy a dozen.”

The programmer comes back with 13 gallons of milk because he saw eggs at the shop.

Now, you don’t have to be an expert in logic to understand the joke here. The thing is, while the husband may be acting humorously, a computer needs to be told, step by step, exactly what has to happen. If I was writing this for a robot, I would write,

“Go to store X. If there is at least 1 gallon of milk, buy 1 gallon of milk from store X. If there are at least 1 dozen eggs, buy 1 dozen eggs from store X. Come home.”

The above is something that’s written time and time again in programming. Every time something happens, a logic statement causing it. Pressing a button to make Mario jump is a statement that checks user input. Mario dying because the timer hit 0 is a statement that checks the stage timer. These checks are simple, but interact to form a complex network of behaviours that are the essence of every video game you play.

So yes, video games are logic-heavy. But they do not need complex checks. Once you understand IF statements, and can define your game’s behaviour using these sort of statements, you will be able to slowly define exactly what you want your game to do.

Making an RPG: First steps

The number one rule I see everyone fall down on when making games, time and time again, is they fail to define a scope that is appropriate for their skill level (check out my postmortems and you’ll see I’m not above trying to make a game I have no business making). For a novice programmer, first steps are generally always a “hello world” sort of program which prints some text to a screen. But even that can be pretty daunting because you’ll need to choose a language to program in!

I would recommend Khan Academy’s introduction to programming as a first step. I haven’t personally done this course but these guys do some good courses. It’s interactive, so they give you pre-written code for you to change, and you can see the results of it instantly! Then, when you’re happy you grasp the very basics of programming, my suggestion is to write an extremely short text adventure:

“You are in a locked room. What should you use to open the door?”

>Key

“You open the door and escape, you win!”

And if you type in anything else,

>Crowbar

“You don’t have that. Try again!”

A working program like that will give you a TON of experience. It will teach you about text entry, if statements, and loops. Shoot me an ask again after being confident in basic programming and I’ll find a nice text adventure tutorial you can work through. Then you can move on to a basic platformer tutorial, or something else equally simple.

Remember - programming is literally learning another language, similar to learning German, or French or Japanese. You won’t get proficient overnight, but you will be able to speak very simple sentences that the computer will be able to understand! From there it’s just practice and more practice! Good luck! (and if you want any more clarifications or guidance, send me another ask!)

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discovering-ellie · 3 years

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August 21, 2021 - Post Two

Midday Mindfulness Check-In, Day Eight! Let's goooooo!

Wow, okay, that sounded a little more excited about things than I intended but, whatever, we're keeping it. Today's random selection comes from the "Rest & Balance" section, and that brings us back to me randomly selecting whatever one I feel like tomorrow.

Front: "There is no control"

Back: "Much of the conflict we face in our day-to-day lives is related to our desire to always be in control. What would it be like to relax our need to be in charge of what happens to us and other people? The world continues doing what it does whether we get involved or not. Consider your own body; so much just happens without you doing anything at all: you heart pumps, your digestive system digests, and your mind remembers to come back to the present when it has become distracted."

My Interpretation: I like to think of myself as a very "go with the flow" type of person. Typically, I can be, however there are certain times and situations where I feel the need to have a greater sense of control and most of them are all work-related. I'm so regimented in my daily work routine that I have difficulties meshing with the routines of others, especially if I feel like their routines and ways of doing things are slowing me down from going through my day or adding work to what it is I have to do. Sometimes, I need to actively remind myself that, in the grand scheme of things, it's not all that serious and, like the Degrassi: the Next Generation theme song so eloquently states, "whatever it takes, I know I can make it through." Sometimes, I find myself taking deep breaths in an attempt to bring myself back down, while there are still times where I find myself trying even harder to rush through what I'm doing so I can try to get ahead of whatever might get brought my way.

Really, what I need to do is keep the words of the great Ellie Sattler in the forefront of my mind; "You never had control! That's the illusion!"

Plan of Action: This is difficult for me, but I know that I have to try harder to accept that not everything is going to play out in the ways that I think it should. As long as the end result is the same and things get done, that should be enough, right? I mean, maybe.

DBT Card Update: So, I'm still continuing on with my journey to establish intentions and set expectations with people. In terms of work, I'm still working on establishing my need to have my boundaries and workload respected. Today, we're finally starting to do some work on alleviating the laundry issue (kind of), and despite telling my boss yet again that I -need- my personal space respected, I'm starting to come to terms with the fact that she's probably not going to do anything about it and I'm going to have to try to fix this situation on my own. The problem is that I'm so stuck in trying to find a tactful, diplomatic way to state things that I end up getting in my own way with lots of overthinking and hyping up the situation to potentially be way worse than it logically will be. Right now, I'm leaning towards trying to explain to my co-worker that I feel claustrophobic in small/tight spaces because that seems like the nicest (???) way, but I still don't know how to even approach that outside of in the moment. I can, however, say that I said "I would much rather do that myself, please" at one point when he was trying to do something of mine that I'm fully capable of doing. So.... progress?

I am already everything I am trying to be. I will see that if I stop for a minute.

#mental health #mental health blog #mental health journey #mindfulness #mindfulness cards #dbt

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phoenixmarks · 6 years

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Typing form

It's been suggested by @mafiyaxiii that I fill out this typing form and post the results. Here you go:

Note: I'm on mobile, unable to go on desktop, and difficulties with mobile mean I can't complete the final scenario on the form.

Scenario 1

FOCUS ON YOUR FEELING PROCESS HERE

Your significant other just ended your 2 year relationship quite suddenly and with no apparent explanation. Up until this point you had both been talking about marriage and last week you even went to look at rings together. Now he/she won't even return your phone calls or texts. After talking with his/her family you find out that he/she has just been diagnosed with terminal stage 4 cancer.

Describe how this scenario would make you feel as well as what sort of influences and motivations lie behind those feelings. Why do you feel the way you do?

First I'd feel numb and would have difficulty understanding - I know she's probably trying to spare me pain, but I'm not sure if it's any better to just be cut off. Once I've processed, I'd feel awful imagining how it must be eating her up inside, and what a sacrifice it must have been for her to give up my support rather than let me see her suffer. I'd feel wounded. Not by her, but for her...for what she was cutting herself off of.

I'd have to try to find a way to get her to let me back in. Our future may not be what we hoped but the future is like that. I'd rather be there for her.

In this scenario what would you honestly say the primary focus of your feelings would be?

My partner. How she must be feeling, already knowing her life is coming to an end with everything she was expecting unlikely to ever happen, and now also feeling like she has to spare those she loves and needs support from the burden of sharing in her suffering.

Scenario 2

FOCUS ON YOUR FEELING PROCESS HERE

You are in college and this semester both you and your roommate end up in the same class together. You and your roommate get along fairly well and the living situation works but you aren't particularly close. You both typically do your own thing and are rather indifferent to each other. As the semester progresses you excel and become one of the top students in the class whereas your roommate is struggling significantly to grasp the material. The professor assigns a fairly challenging take home test that is a significant portion of your grade. He/she makes it clear that while it is open book, students are to work alone. Later your roommate comes to you begging for help after struggling with the test most of the weekend. You have already completed the assignment and he/she isn't asking to copy your answers, just to help tutor and mentor them as they struggle to complete the test, so there is no way your professor would ever know. However, this is the first time your room-mate has asked you for help this semester. He/she makes it clear that how they do on this test could mean the difference between passing and failing this class.

How do you respond to your roommate's request and why?

I help. I don't see that it would harm anyone, and anyone asking for help from a virtual stranger must be at their wit's end. Besides, if it weren't for the distance between us my roommate would likely have asked for help before - this is just doing what I'd have done anyway, only a bit late.

What sort of things in this scenario stand out to you as far as having a strong influence on your decision making and why?

My roommate and I get along. That means I respect them - they're probably rather sharp and not overly disruptive of others' lives.

My roommate tried on their own first, and doesn't make a habit of ot. They're not coming to me because I'm good and they're lazy, but because I'm in the best position to need help and they do need help.

I've completed the assignment. They're not disrupting me, and probably made a point of not doing so.

I'm in control of what information I pass on. I won't be disadvantaging anyone by helping my roommate.

Describe the flow of your decision making process.

First consider that they tend not to disadvantage others for their own benefit.

Then that I wouldn't have to disadvantage anyone.

Then that it's not like it's something I wouldn't have done if asked earlier.

So I've decided to help.

Scenario 3

FOCUS ON YOUR LOGIC AND THINKING PROCESS HERE

Your boss calls you into his/her office in order to assign you to a new project. He/she gives you a choice between two. Project 1 is a rather broad, expansive project covering multiple areas of company operations. It has the potential to have a very significant impact on company operations but it would require a collective effort and an extensive amount of group work where you would be logically thinking through the project together with the group of individuals your boss has also assigned to it.

Project 2 has a much more specific and narrow focus and would require a significant amount of in depth individual analysis to work through the problem. You would be working alone and the completion of the project may or may not have much impact on company operations. However, after complete the process and problem you were working on will be streamlined and fundamentally understood.

Which project appeals to you the most, as it relates to the way you prefer to logically process information? Why?

Project 2 no doubt. I hate group work, I love spending time analysing information and I don't care about the impact of what I do, but I love to learn, to understand.

What sort of things in this scenario, across either project, stood out to you as having a strong influence on your decision? Why?

Group work in project 1. I prefer working by myself, people exhaust and distract me, especially at work.

In project 2 I have the opportunity to use my knack for analysis and I'll be learning while doing so.

Scenario 4

FOCUS ON YOUR LOGIC AND THINKING PROCESS HERE

Your college professor has assigned you to a group project with 3 other individuals. All 3 of these individuals have a good strong work ethic and desire to contribute to the overall success of this project. You are at the first meeting of your group and the other members are tossing around valuable ideas as to the nature and direction of this project.

Describe your behavior in this situation as you process and think about the ideas they are presenting.

When an idea is suggested I'd try to think how it would work out, attempt to identify problem areas that are poorly thought out or likely to be unnecessarily difficult or may be counter productive. I'd try to expand on ideas or find alternatives that may achieve the same goals without those problem areas. After hearing all ideas, I'd try to consider them all in comparison to one another to consider which offers the best opportunities.

Describe what major influences drive this behavior.

I'm good at considering ideas, identifying their flaws and thinking in terms of "cause and effect" - I can see how things may pan out. I'm very good at building on concepts and coming up with related ideas. The best I could contribute to the project is to offer these abilities to help develop ideas.

Scenario 5

FOCUS ON THE SOURCES YOU DRAW NON-PHYSICAL ENERGY FROM HERE

It has been a very long week and you feel mentally and emotionally drained, but good news! It is Saturday and you have nothing significant that needs to be done. You FINALLY have some free time to yourself to recharge your batteries and do whatever you want.

Describe what sort of activities would help you to recharge. What would you enjoy doing after a long week and why?

Playing video games, specifically RPGs, allow me to escape life and use my mind in a manner that is not soul-crushingly boring.

Reading does the same, but heavier on the escape part.

Writing... likewise, but more focused on using my mind.

Spending time with a close friend or my girlfriend allows me to relax and enjoy life for what it is.

What sort of things do you feel you draw non-physical energy from doing?

Thinking. Using my imagination. Solving problems gives me a rush of energy. Mostly just being alone (or with select people) and able to do what I want will give me energy, though.

Hit the character limit, rest in reblog.

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typologycentral · 6 years

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Death by Thesis

I first encountered my trickster before I knew anything about Jung. I was studying comparative literature in graduate school, which meant studying languages and literatures, ancient and modern. Many of my peers were bilingual or trilingual from birth, so I felt disadvantaged from the start. All of us, however, were in awe of one Professor Ulrich K. Goldschmidt (anglicized to Goldsmith), a German émigré who had fled the Nazis and who spoke numerous languages, both living and dead—we could never figure out how many because he kept surprising us with new ones. I had the dubious distinction of being his guinea pig in my cadre of grad students, having foolishly volunteered to give the first oral report in his class. The reason that I volunteered was not a good one: I couldn’t stand the silence that greeted the professor’s question, “Who will go first?” This was the classic extravert’s mistake, and I paid for it. My topic was rhetoric, which the ancient Greeks raised to a high art so that eventually it became synonymous with verbal manipulation. I was a wordsmith. I had made my way through school with verbal manipulation. I thought I knew the topic well.I gave my report on Day Two of my grad school career. Goldsmith debated every word that came out of my mouth, accusing me of using terms imprecisely. I was from then on notorious as the example of How Not to Succeed in Grad School. This and my language handicap made me decide not to bother with a doctorate but to take a master’s degree and run. To leave with a master’s required writing a thesis. Goldsmith’s known areas of expertise were Germanic, Slavic, Nordic, and East European languages, so I decided it would be prudent to stick to western European topics for my thesis. I consulted a professor who had given a seminar on satire, asking her to suggest novels in, say, France, Spain, or Italy. She suggested looking at Rabelais and Cervantes. Only two authors, I thought. How hard can that be? I promptly submitted the proposal, assuming she would be my advisor. To my horror, I was told that Cervantes was one of Goldsmith’s areas of expertise, and “Wasn’t I lucky to have such an expert for a thesis advisor?” This was the early warning sign for me that something trickster was afoot. I was learning, like Oedipus, that you meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. Cervantes’ Don Quixote is 940 pages long—a book of tales forever unfinished and unfinishable. John Beebe (2009) has an essay on the hero and the post-heroic attitude in Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Early in the essay he describes how he was invited to give a talk at a Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology to be held in Spain, and how it seemed apt to give the talk on Quixote, Spain’s most famous contribution to literature. The trouble is, Beebe observes, then he had to read the thing. As he put it: “I discovered that if I was to have a paper to include in the advance proceedings of the Congress, I was going to have to start to write about the massive novel even before my reading of it was complete” (p. 4). Beebe observed in a footnote that, “Frustration might even be described as the archetypal field that emanates from the novel itself” (n. 29, p. 21). “Frustration” is an understatement. Once I got into La Mancha myself, I thought I would never get out. And this was only one of my focus texts. The other was equally gargantuan and is, in fact, the source of that word in our language: Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. This verbal monstrosity is actually a series of five novels. Don Quixote comprises two very long ones. I had to read all of them in the original languages, the sixteenth-century versions of Spanish and French. These two masterpieces spawned my own permanently-in-progress unfinishable work. Both of them, I now realize, epitomize trickster works of literature, seducing and abandoning the reader, and turning the world upside down. And my own trickster was clearly at work here: I had tried to take the easy way out of grad school and now I was faced with an avalanche of work. Here, I must admit, Dr. Goldsmith was inordinately helpful. I had to meet with him to officially launch my research, and at that meeting he suggested that I focus on the topic of judgment and pointed me to a critical chapter on this topic in each work. The topic did not interest me much, but I was so intimidated by him that I did not resist. That turned out to be fortunate, because he had handed me a bite-sized, digestible chunk out of a huge torrent of words. The Jungian connotations of Goldsmith’s name have not escaped my notice. Moreover, Goldsmith’s suggested topic held even more Jungian irony, though I did not realize it until years later: Judgment is one of the two categories of Jung’s mental processes, the other being perception. It is a central theme of Jung’s (1921/1971) Psychological Types that we must balance our use of perception with judgment, and vice versa. This plays out in our personality type in our dominant and auxiliary functions: one is a perceiving function, the other a judging function. When we over-rely on one or the other, trouble occurs. I was going to discover something that Goldsmith probably knew intuitively—that I had a dearth of judgment and an oversupply of perception. My dominant function was a perceiving function, and it was much more fun than my auxiliary judging function. As I was to discover, it would be a judging function that would send me into a tailspin with this project. I spent more than a year doing research on judgment, judging, and judges, without understanding the first thing about the topic. These were the pre-computer days, and I collected a huge stack of four-by-six note cards containing my research results covering 400 years of literary criticism and thousands of pages of source text. Some people are afraid of flying; others are afraid of heights. I have a paperwork phobia. My worst nightmares involve a visit from the IRS asking for receipts. So, creating and maintaining my archive of notes was an agonizing task. This is fairly typical of individuals of my personality type, ENFP, though I’m a bit extreme on the subject. It relates to the inferior function of ENFPs (see Fig. 1). The inferior function, the fourth function, is the site of our inferiority complex, so each personality type has a weakness around the fourth function. My inferior function, introverted sensation (Si), is the mental process we use to record, to recall, and to archive our recollections. When introverted sensation is in the inferior position, our recall is not good. Mark Twain described well how Si inferior manifests for my type, when he made the following comment in his old age: “When I was younger I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.” (Mark Twain is thought by some to have had ENTP preferences, a type that also has introverted sensing as an inferior function.) When introverted sensation is our fourth and most primitive conscious function, we don’t remember things well and we don’t even know we don’t remember them; we confabulate. If forced to remember things, we get bored. The psyche knows our points of resistance and will take us there unerringly. My psyche led me to blindly choose a subject guaranteed to trigger my paperwork phobia, my inferiority complex, my animus. To have to spend a year in one’s inferior function is like a yearlong time-out for a toddler. I got so bored and desperate with my inferior introverted sensing (Si) function, required to gather and document the data, that I spent many hours asleep in the library. I could have asked Dr. Goldsmith for help, or maybe a mercy killing, but I was too proud to admit difficulty. I had arrived in grad school in a state of unconscious incompetence, to use Noel Burch’s term from his “Conscious Competence Ladder.” According to Burch’s analysis, an individual in training must progress from the stage of unconscious incompetence to a stage of conscious incompetence if he is to learn anything. Those who resist becoming consciously incompetent get stuck on the first rung of the ladder forever. My grueling Day-Two experience in Dr. Goldsmith’s class was his effort to move me out of my state of unconscious incompetence to a state of conscious incompetence—to show me the limits of my knowledge so that I could actually learn something. This movement is always a humbling experience, and those who do not endure it humbly are ripe for trickster reversals. The thesis research in the library was tedious and laborious, but working in my inferior function was nothing compared to what came next—being plunged into an unconscious place: my trickster function. Our unconscious functions are not just uncomfortable; they sometimes seem not even to exist—until they rear their ugly heads in a neurosis. Being plunged into our less conscious functions resembles that old joke about high school: long periods of excruciating boredom punctuated by brief moments of abject terror. When I had dragged myself through every available research source, there was nothing left to do but write. The trouble was, I was drowning in theories. I normally began a paper by organizing the ideas into neat categories, then arranging them into a logical sequence. But now, whenever I tried to organize the stack of note cards, I could not decide on a sequence. The whole thing seemed so circular that I couldn’t find the beginning. I would decide on a starting point and spend an entire day trying to organize the cards appropriately, promising to write the next day. I kept redefining the thesis statement, continually reconsidering it from different angles. Sequencing is the operational forte of introverted sensation, my baby function. If I had slept a lot in the library during the research phase, I was now nearly comatose. I couldn’t maintain the required concentration long enough to sit, let alone write. Each morning, I would see that my previous day’s decision was wrong, and I would reconsider the thesis statement again and re-organize the whole thing once more. The hypothesis was a moving target that I never hit. Jung would have noted that Goldsmith’s critique of my first oral report—my imprecise use of terms—pointed to inadequate introverted thinking (Ti). Introverted thinking is the function we use when constructing theories to make sense of something, and so it must be engaged in academic research, which aims to create new knowledge. As Beebe put it, the Ti function “reflect[s] on whether a particular construction … accord[s] with the conviction of inner truth” (2017, p. 31). Introverted thinking seeks ever greater precision in expressing that truth. According to Beebe’s eight-function/eight-archetype model, introverted thinking falls in the seventh position for my type, the trickster position. Introverted thinking is a judging function, but if undeveloped it may fail to reach a judgment and simply circle the drain. I did not know then that this is often how trickster Ti manifests: continually redefining, refining, and going in circles to the point of total confusion. I spent about six weeks stuck in this “paralysis by over-analysis.” I couldn’t move forward and I couldn’t go back. I was stuck in a trickster’s double bind. I was trying to write about judgment, but I was completely unable to muster a judgment. Eventually, I reached the point of being unable to face those note cards. I put them out of mind for a while. And that’s when disaster struck: I lost them. All 300 cards. My inner trickster had helpfully rescued me from the odious research cards by rendering me unconscious while it threw them away, thus ridding me of a loathsome task. I spent several days searching the campus for that gigantic stack of note cards, wrapped with elastic bands. I looked in all my usual haunts: classrooms, library carrels, favorite café tables. I even asked the campus janitors to look for them. The cards were gone. A thousand references, quotations, and page numbers had succumbed to the second law of thermodynamics. I went into shock. The shock was followed by humiliation. The loss was a painful confirmation of my inferiority in the realm of record keeping, memory, and all the other details for which introverted sensation is known. It seemed to corroborate my bottom-of-the-class status. I told no one about the event, not even my closest friends, but endured it silently and alone. I suspected that my psyche had played some kind of grotesque trick on me, the kind that Pantagruel and Gargantua are known for. I had morphed into the buffoons Rabelais satirized. I had become Sancho Panza and Don Quixote in one, the butt of all of Cervantes’ jokes. A huge lesson seemed to loom nearby, though I could not see what it was. My mind seemed to have disappeared along with my research. For a while, I thought I had no choice but to drop out of grad school. Finally, after days of depression, I understood that I had one other option, though not a pleasant one: I could try to re-write from memory everything that had been on those cards. This meant going back into my inferior Si again! Though memory would never be my strong suit, the previous six to eight weeks of doing nothing other than shuffle the cards like Sisyphus in Vegas had had some effect. And so, in a big hurry to get everything out while I could still recall it, I threw the words onto the page as fast as I could, writing in longhand on lined paper. I wrote like a fiend. Of course, there were no references, no sources, and no footnotes. I couldn’t bother with anything as trivial as accuracy at this juncture. I was in a race against the growing black hole of forgetfulness in my mind. I didn’t care if the logic was circular, I didn’t care whether I was writing from the beginning point or not, and I didn’t care that Goldsmith would assassinate every word. Terrified of stopping lest I forget it all, I simply regurgitated everything I could recall. When I drew a blank on a topic, I didn’t brake to look it up; my dominant extraverted intuition (Ne) just made something up. And this is when something peculiar began to happen: These space-fillers were often jokes, puns, or other odd tidbits that seemed to come straight out of my unconscious because they were so unlike me. Maybe my Ne dominant took me into my 8th or demonic function, extraverted sensation (Se); extraverted sensation can be a great joker and storyteller. My conscious mind told me this would not qualify as “academic discourse.” Academe requires gravitas, my inner critic argued. These jokes will get you thrown out of the department. “Good!” I snapped back at myself. “Let them throw me out! That would be an improvement of my life!” In retrospect, I see that the new Ne ideas and the crazy Se jokes that popped out played an important role in the process: They kept me from getting bored with the Ti writing style and falling asleep again. I even grew curious to see what would come out of my pen next. Beebe (1981) has compared possession by the trickster archetype to bipolar disorder (pp. 24-37), a comparison I can understand after my brief episode of dealing with the trickster. I had gone from depression to mania during my trickster crisis, albeit these were not clinical or pathological states. Nonetheless, I feel sympathy for those who suffer bipolar episodes. In my trickster episode, I began to sound logical, cohesive, and authoritative to myself. I was writing fluently in an academic-sounding mode that resembled introverted thinking (if you squinted your eyes), although the trickster energy around my seventh function made it feel like a huge fraud of pretend research. Still, I was in love with my flights of fantasy, and I cackled like a hyena at them. I didn’t realize it, but those jokes were signs of an emerging trickster. The trickster is a prankster who doesn’t take anything too seriously. Thus, in sabotaging me, my trickster severed the grip of my paralysis. It liberated me. It was still tricking me (with delusions of grandeur), but I was at least enjoying the trick. I was now conscious of being a trickster. Eventually, to my surprise, I had a complete first draft. All I needed were references—no big thing when you’re in the manic phase. I airily breezed back to the library, re-researched the whole thing, and tried to retrofit the data to what I had written—the opposite of standard research procedure. Of course, the data did not fit. Remarkably, this did not alarm me. It seems that once I had jettisoned perfectionism, I was completely unfazed by the grossest imperfections. I had reached a stage of acceptance of my incompetence. Moreover, I was curious to see what I would find, rummaging in the black hole of my mind. I did not realize it, but I was starting to access the data-collecting mode of my Si inferior in a constructive way. Introverted sensation verifies accuracy in a fact-checking way, and my Si function began to lure me toward accuracy. I enjoyed the library work this time through. Far from falling asleep, I couldn’t stop working. I was salivating to discover what the evidence actually showed, as opposed to what I had confabulated. I corrected the first draft to accommodate the evidence I uncovered, reversing some hypotheses and modifying others if the data so directed. More importantly, as I revised the thesis, I could easily engage introverted thinking (Ti)—defining, refining, and analyzing—without becoming paralyzed. Finally, at the end of the academic year, it was done—under the deadline. I delivered it to Goldsmith’s office at about 5:00 p.m. one afternoon. He raised an eyebrow and said without a smile that he would get back to me. It suddenly occurred to me that I had probably committed a huge faux pas in the academic process: After our first meeting, I had not spoken a word to my advisor. It had been a full year since we had met the first time. I believe now that his restraint and withholding of unsolicited advice allowed me the space to discover my own thought process and to develop my own voice. This is what introverted thinking needs in order to find expression. It operates independently of the collective voice that guides extraverted thinking. I went to bed that night with peace of mind. I expected that Goldsmith would hate my thesis and would nitpick every line, and that I would have to spend months revising. I didn’t care. I had passed out of the stage of Good Student that had been my chief persona for many years and was now willing to be Mediocre Student if that was my fate. This is what Goldsmith had been trying to teach us smart-alecks in the first place: You can’t learn if you don’t know how ignorant you are. Goldsmith surprised me by calling at 9:00 a.m. the next morning—only hours after I’d dropped off the manuscript. This could not be good. I steeled myself to hear Mr. Punctual tell me of some major flaw in the manuscript that had prevented him from even reading it. Maybe I had used the wrong format and would have to re-type all 200 pages. To my shock, he told me that he had stayed up all night reading my thesis, unable to put it down. I was stunned to hear him say that he had “laughed and laughed” all the way through: He loved the jokes! Who knew Goldsmith had a sense of humor? Then he said in his punctilious, Germanic, back-handed-compliment way, “Even zough you completed your thesis in order to leave viss a master’s, I must insist zat you stay for a PhD. Viss just some additional vork, you can turn zis into a doctoral thesis.” It’s lucky he could not see my face over the phone. The last thing I could stomach was more Cervantes and Rabelais. But, surprisingly, I did want to stay in the program and write a doctoral thesis, and I knew the topic I wanted to write about: Twelfth-century chivalric romance, the source of Don Quixote’s mania. (This would require me to learn some new languages, medieval ones, but nothing looks impossible once you give up your ideals of perfection.) Like the hidalgo, I was infected by romantic notions, but unlike Quixote, I had grown aware of the hidden satire within those naïve romances—and within my own life. In writing my master’s thesis about two master satirists, I had stumbled onto enantiodromia in both literature and life. Jung defines this term as follows: “In the philosophy of Heraclitus it [enantiodromia] is used to designate the play of opposites in the course of events—the view that everything that exists turns into its opposite” (1921/1971, ¶ 708). I had transformed from being a prolific writer able to write about anything whether I understood it or not to being a blocked writer unable to form a single sentence. My doctoral thesis was a quest to understand whatever it was in my psyche that had emptied my mind and disappeared my master’s thesis research. Beebe (2014) offered a succinct solution to the problem of enantiodromia: “By letting go of our expectations, we will find that some of our expectations will be met.” He was pointing out that the American addiction to mastery is a poison. We have to relinquish our determination to develop competence in all things in order to have satisfaction in anything. Perfection is static. It imprisons the psyche. Growth and progress are imperfect, so when we aim for perfection, as we always do, the psyche must sometimes trick us into relinquishing it in order to grow. By forcing me to confront my imperfection, my psyche led me along a circuitous route that involved completing two theses in order to get a PhD. Dr. Goldsmith became my friend and staunch supporter. He even gave me private tutoring in German and art history. I think of him now as I think of Jung: a demanding but caring guide, one who, like Jung, never presumed to tell someone what to do but merely pointed out inconsistencies with reality. It was no accident that I had chosen rhetoric as my first topic in his class, and no accident that he saw the appeal it held for me, the ability to persuade others through word-weapons—a classic example of unconscious trickster introverted thinking. His detachment and relentless truthfulness broke me of my addiction to that most primitive definition of rhetoric and my insatiable need for approval. Pleasing others had motivated me for so long that I had nothing to replace it when it was pulled away. Losing that as a motivation, I had to develop my own internal motivation. If no one was going to applaud, then who was I performing for and why? That was my real crisis. The thesis was only the form it took. Beebe (2009) said of Quixote and his companion Sancho Panza, “As their own haplessness dawns on them, they see the realistic limits of a life lived to perpetuate the myth” (p. 17). I had tried to perpetuate my own heroic myth of child prodigy. My pseudo-self had to die in order for a more whole, more mature self to evolve. This death helped me escape the box I had inhabited for so long. I had to give up trying to be who I thought I should be in order to become more of who I really was. To state this in the terminology of the eight-function model, I had to give up the simplicity of my eternal child function (tertiary extraverted thinking), and be mature enough to access the complexity of my trickster function (introverted thinking in the seventh position). Beebe made a radical proposal when he suggested that the trickster and not the senex is oppositional toward the eternal child, an idea he first explored in his 1981 essay on the trickster. His eight-function model’s tenet that the seventh trickster function shadows the third eternal child function implies that we must surrender the innocence of the child in order to access our trickster defenses. The eternal child archetype and the trickster archetype are connected by a quality of youthfulness, but while the former is innocent and pure, the latter’s duplicity means it cannot be pure. The trickster is the dark embodiment of the creativity of the eternal child, and to access that creativity requires surrendering the halo of the divine child with its infantile omnipotence. It is the eternal child’s omnipotence that blocks anima integration, for the anima function is the site of our inferiority complex. According to Beebe, we have to make the descent into the underbelly of the psyche and get our hands dirty with the trickster before we can integrate the anima/animus. My extraverted thinking eternal child likes to play with ideas generated by my dominant extraverted intuition, putting them into piles and moving them around like chess pieces. I had gotten stuck in that game board of my mind, eternally reorganizing the note cards. Surrendering the puella aeterna Te function to access my trickster Ti function meant relinquishing the perfection of the illusory world of play that the eternal child believes is hers by right. Accepting the trickster within means acknowledging our own tendency to be deceitful about our incapacity. The eternal child would rather withdraw from the field than admit imperfection, let alone deal with it. The trickster lives in the nether world of the borderlands where purity cannot exist. We need to find a way to give expression to both archetypes, and we all tend to prefer the eternal child and the function it carries, as Lenore Thomson’s (1998) work on the tertiary has shown. If we do not voluntarily acknowledge our trickster, it may force us to surrender control. Grappling with the trickster is painful but rewarding; it enables us to accept our anima/animus, the seat of our inferiority, and to be re-animated by it. The trickster destroys us to save us. --- References: Beebe. J. (1981). The trickster in art. San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 2(2), 21-54. Beebe, J. (2004/2017). Understanding consciousness through the theory of psychological types. In Energies and patterns in psychological type: The reservoir of consciousness (pp. 19-50). London, UK: Routledge. (Reprinted from J. Cambray & L. Carter, Eds., Analytical psychology: Contemporary perspectives in Jungian analysis, 2004, pp. 83-115, Hove, UK: Brunner-Routledge). Beebe, J. (July 23, 2009). The memory of the Hero and the emergence of the post-Heroic attitude. Congress of the International Association for Analytical Psychology held in Barcelona, Spain, August 29-September 3, 2004, Barcelona. Reprinted on IAAP site, Spring, 78, Politics and the American Soul. Beebe, J. (August 7-8, 2014). Selected topics in psychological type [workshop]. Sponsored by Type Resources. Jung, C. G. (1921/1971). Psychological types (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). In H. Read et al. (Series Eds.), The collected works of C.G. Jung (Vol. 6, pp. 330-407). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Retrieved from http://www.proquest.com Thomson, L. (1998). Personality type: An owner’s manual. Boston, MA: Shambhala Publications. Images: Adrian-Nilsson, G. (1929). Shadows, twilight. Retrieved from wikiart.org Bortnyik, S. (1921). The lamplighter. Retrieved from wikiart.org Hartley, M. (1939). Sustained comedy. Retrieved from wikiart.org Hokusai, K. (date unknown). Carp leaping up a cascade. Retrieved from wikiart.org Kandinsky, W. (1941). Untitled. Retrieved from wikiart.org Lewis, B. (date unknown). Trickster. Retrieved from commons.wikimedia.org Masson, A. (1942). The sand crab. Retrieved from wikiart.org Picasso, P. (1904). Woman with raven. Retrieved from wikiart.org The post Death by Thesis appeared first on Personality Type in Depth. RSS Feed - Link To Personality Type In Depth Article https://www.typologycentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=95196&goto=newpost&utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

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skipygmod · 4 years

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Subjective, Objective and Relative have straightforward definitions, but they can be confusing and hard to apply in practice.

Subjective is the notion that something is true from the perspective of an individual. That connects with the feelings and personal taste.

"Objective" is the notion that something is true independent of human perspective. It's an absolute, undeniable and, unmovable truth.

Relativism is a bit of both; it's the notion about something's true depending on the context and circumstances. It means that it's true, but changing the factors or the perspective that truth stops existing.

It may be true that you're a tall person in a short people's country, but it's not longer true if you go to a tall people country.

Because defining what is genuinely tall is up to comparison. From there we get the semantics of relativism, it's what it has a relation. It is true regarding another thing.

Modern Relativism and Absolute Relativism are more radical doctrines of thought; it's about everything in life is relative, which it's a contradiction because it would be the same about saying that nothing is true and everything is untrue. No objective parameters nor comparison standards.

Relativism stops making sense when you say height is relative. Still, at the same time, you're stating that measure values and the concept of meters so are relative, that means by your mental speculations, you're sidetracking and bending the point, resulting in not sounding like an intellectual, but a person with schizophrenia.

Eather Objectivism, Relativism or Subjectivism, things must be functional. If I hate things such as Cultural Relativism is because those types of thinking are inefficient and incompetent at the time of evaluating results.

It needs an entirely selective thought and sophistry to deny a culture that made big progress in medicine and space discoveries is just like the culture which is alright to kill each other for no reason.

The only reason to see them as equals is trying to bend the concept of what is right and wrong or appeal to assumptions and ignore facts by convenience.

I'm bringing all this up is because all these doctrines of thought also have to do with toons.

When it's about judging animated works, we will bring up the words subjectivism, relativism and objectivism.

The notion about what is objective, subjective or relative at the moment of analysing is fuzzy, and many scoundrels take advantage of distinguishing and rejecting your standards, resorting to mental gymnastics.

It's easy to own a primitive thought and to say that my critiques have no validity because everything is subjective or relative or any nonsense like that. The truth is with these kinds of takes, they're not reasoning, and it's assuming an incoherent position like it's an objective judgement.

Ironically I'm not an objectivist, and I don't believe that relativism can't be applied, but I think that with trial and error, results speak more than semantics.

What I do believe is in the importance of debate and supremacy.

I believe in better life-forms, better lifestyles, better world views and better results.

The above applies in animation critiques and every kind of review in general. If there are superior societies in the world, it's because their members have had a larger ability of criticism and improvement.

At the moment a society declines or heads for suicide, it's when their members lost their ability to express themselves, to criticise what they got in front of them and; in few words when they have refused to think of difficulties, probably because of psychological manipulation.

No matter your class, your race, your nation, health status or any cause thinking triumphs over brute force. That's why critique is one of the most powerful tools that the human race have available.

Because of this, Postmodernism is not about brute force nor reasoning; it's about one's self-destruction.

Phrases like "You won't change a thing with your critiques," "It's just my opinion, respect it," "That's your opinion, each with their tastes" and other bullshit like that are a reflection of a mediocre and mindless society.

The better the cultural status, the lesser you'll hear these phrases. At the moment of explaining that not everything is subjective or that an opinion only has the allowed weight of their reasons and arguments; I'm just explaining an obviousness for the civilised and advanced people.

We must point out that even the civilised and advanced people can fall into the traps and manipulations of the postmodernist thought by its sophisticated yet rude way of bending semantics and sidetracking vital points in a discussion.

Criticising something by its own merits, it's also mediocre thinking and something that doesn't have a fundamental logic.

Understandably, there are out-of-place and invalid comparisons or simple false analogies.

But it's in fact, that comparison is the most crucial method for criticism. It's precisely this method that will get you closer to the truth. It's just when you compare the good works with the bad ones you have a clear image of the whole outlook, and that is true for everything in life.

One can compare groups, societies, economies, territories, jobs, buildings and absolutely everything. And that will give us a bigger image of superiority and inferiority.

But the thing is that sensitivity has prevailed so much over reasoning in modern times that with just words "Superiority" and "Inferiority" have become synonyms of wickedness, into taboo, into vicious terms and speak in the worst ways of the person who uses them. Again a reflection of the inferior modern man's unstable world view.

My message, folks, is that if you can review silly cartoons and cinema movies; you can do it! And it's more beneficial than harmful; it's such a minor and innocent practice like that one, which it can slowly awake your ability of critique and comparison that will take you to consider and assess about more crucial things in life.

Using your brain even for an exercise like playing Chess is truly a habit you should acquire.

I'll admit that my scoring system is not perfect and it's relative and ignorable to a certain point. The most important thing is not giving a five or a ten to some work, but it is what I said to justify that number. Some of my points are more objective and subjective than others, and the number is just a minimal description. Ten means Perfect, nine means Excellent, eight means Very Good, seven means Just Good, six means Average, five means Mediocre, 4 means Just Bad, three means Very Bad, but that doesn't mean that there can be some exception or distinctive feature with a title. You can see some mediocre works for the historical value they have just like some other works are pretty good at a relative level. Still, since they don't have artistic aspirations, nor ambition, their score seemed depleted like any production for kids, and that won't be an impediment to be an excellent material for your children. I suppose that is the relative side of the issue, but you can't deny that you can find an objective truth between strict opinions and assessments. Trial and error can give better results in the long run, and that's why objectively speaking...

“Knowledge is Power”

I am the best reviewer on the community, you can disagree, but that's your subjective opinion.

#Judgement #commentary #Sloth Commentary #Objectivity #Subjectivity #Relativity #doomentio #Perezoso Doom

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lzimbu · 7 years

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Destiny 2's Infinite Forest Sucks

Forbes thinks it could be better

Destiny 2's Infinite Forest is such a minor problem, effectively a single branch on a tree in the forest of issues that affect player's looking for this game to have some entertainment value versus the amount of money we're paying for it, that I think most people will ignore that it could be the game’s saving feature in the short terms. But will probably not get updated and so will be disappointing and tedious for a long time. The issue as I see it is that there's problems with the format of Destiny 2's activities and rewards systems. This is both for returning veterans, who have experienced everything from the original game, through all of the new activities added to the game and which have since been removed, through deprecation. But for right now we're trying to figure out what it is like for all the new players who are trying to figure out what they paid for and where the game is going. Someone buying the base game because this didn't want to commit to the DLC packs having to decide on buying those apparently mandatory content updates based on the game as is.. I can't see any of them being convinced. It's just been controversy since it launched. Easy answer is none of us knows what's in store for the game and Bungie keeps fucking shit up by making stupid decisions for no apparent logical reason. Like removing all the useful materials and level gear up with things like Motes of light. Also.. what happened to the speaker after the campaign ends? Is there a reason why he's not at the new tower? etc I mean I understand that the solo stuff can be underwhelming and focused on learning the game.. but why can't it have value to players that just want to replay that content? There's a large number or people that would like to get their money's worth out of the game while playing solo, or at least without friends because it can be hard to play a game like destiny if you don't know anyone else that plays it, OR more likely because all of your friends have left the game already and aren't going to come back while Bungie keeps making idiotic decisions like dumping everything from the old game. Also there's the thing about having to use a mic for matchmaking activities, some people don't want to because of the negative behavior that they are subjected to when they do. The new raid happened to cause an outcry because it appeared that communication was mandatory for a couple of parts of the activity. Since then players have found ways to complete the activity without voice communication and even without any communication at all. That's the core of the Destiny experience.. that progression towards mastery. The activities might not come off as self evident due to sparse explanation of how they function, but after practicing them for a while it clicks and you can end up mastering the content. That isn't expected from the single player activities of course that tend to be heavy with help for the player to understand how to play.. but once you get into strikes and public events their mechanics aren't always obvious or well explained by the game. Other players will show you what to do. For Raids, you'll have to learn from other players because next to nothing will be explained. Some of the changes that have been made to the game affect those principals in that the single player activities aren't fun or rewarding, for example the Mercury public even which has 2 chests.. that give you nothing for completing it on its Heroic Mode. It feels like Heroic modes don't add much for increasing the rewards getting doled out versus the actual bump in difficulty. Why does that matter? Well as a player starting out you have certain activities open to you and what you're looking at is a couple of hours to a dozen of leveling up. During that process you can expect to collect some gear that is supposed to make those bigger activities easier and prepare you to confront the hard stuff. While that is the case, those harder activities ARE hard for some new players that don't benefit from an established knowledge of the general mechanics of the game. Worse is that the variety of game play in the assortment of activities available in Destiny 2 doesn't feel much different. At least if you're a veteran that has played everything the game has had to offer so far. Because of that difficulty curve and lack of players (because they keep quitting) it feels like new players are getting bored without trying everything. There's no reason for the game to be so poor with giving the player useful rewards. What's a useful reward? Perhaps those new Masterwork weapons that drop orbs? Maybe.. I wouldn't know.. haven't been able to do prestige Nightfall this week and otherwise it doesn't seem like any way to get any of them. It isn't even that the activity is impossible to complete but the time investment with strangers, after finding them, is demanding. Even the regular Heroic Strikes which are straightforward repeatedly caused wipes (not even due to lack of communication which is not expected) but because it is just too easy for all three players to get killed. Example.. one time one of the other players had randomly died.. no problem.. but just as we noticed it myself and the other remaining player got kicked off the platform by god only knows what. It becomes annoying when you're actually trying to complete something hard and then you get wiped for no apparent reason. That aggravation was pervasive in the original game because it was rife with significant bugs and garbage mechanics that Bungie didn't usually fix. Those issue for the most part don't affect Destiny 2 and so present one of the only critical advancements in the series so far.. that the game isn't laugh out loud buggy and you don't often here players saying they are getting Bungie'd. Yet stunningly.. there are those random moments when you just don't know what killed you, or wiped your team. Paradoxically it makes Destiny 2 even more tedious when it happens because it just isn't as common to lose progress for no reason. I say this after playing through the DLC on Xbox and PS4 with 5 characters and don't feel like I've yet seen all the rewards... and that's fine, but not because I haven't played enough.. or that the game is artificially limiting the rewards.. but that there are too many duplicates and some of the new stuff is locked inside loot boxes that take a shit ton of time to earn. The rewards system just feels broken. From the small things that Bungie has claimed to have fixed, like patrol chests that tend to be empty most of the time, and that otherwise offer next to nothing as rewards (just tokens most of the time).. it feels like there's no point in going out on patrols other than when the game forces you to in order to collect materials or complete x number of activities to complete a quest. I'm not really trying to get into the issue of how long it takes to actually earn then, because on 2 accounts with 5 of 6 active characters (one Titan is on vacation).. but that I HAVE seen shit loads of play earned loot boxes return nothing.. or duplicates. If money was actually a consideration in their decision making then there should be more stuff in the loot boxes and fewer garbage items. This has been an ongoing thing because these loot boxes are just for cosmetic things otherwise they'd tread into pay-to-win problems. Bungie could have imported things from the old games for the new players to purchase in the loot boxes like legendary weapons, had they not contorted the gun system so badly. That would give the boxes some value for returning players. As that isn't the case and as the available loot boxes are full of shit items no one wants.. I can't see why they would have designed the game around them and why people would even buy them unless you really are that pressed for play time that you'd buy the game, and DLC and pay extra to unlock vanity items. Buying any amount of them and getting nothing worthwhile would be far worse than spending the time in the game and earning them. And then fully ignore that the items that matter, the weapons and gear.. have been nerfed. There's even less play choice involved in how we set up our gear. Bungie has said that there's potential for Mods to evolve to replace the old min maxing system but they never said why the system was removed in the first place. It was time consuming and perhaps tedious for some players, but that system of complexity was rewarding and helped justify the loot system (dropping so many duplicates). We knew about these changes prior to the games launch because Bungie decided to let us in on, 1 resetting gear and level, 2 gear would no longer be unique, 3 we'd be losing an entire weapon class for no reason as two that have nothing to do with each other would be combined. So before releasing the game, and after the pre-orders were opened, Bungie DID tell us they'd be trying out so really dumb shit. The response was negative. The result is negative. Bungie don't give no fucks. But gear and levelling aside, there's the activities. Would there be activities that would make it worth loading up the game every day? 4v4 PvP isn't going over well. And oddly the most played activity seems to be public events. So popular are public events in patrol for rewards over time played, that Bungie nerfed them. They claim that the rewards are better but that's only because they swapped blue drops which are literally useless.. to purple drops, which tend to be duplicates. Thus the only recent changes they made was to give players more legendary shards. Which has no value. You can dump hundreds into whatever vendors take them and get nothing back.. compared to just playing the game. Some would argue that as you have them anyway.. you might as well just sit there in a tedious menu system mashing a button to empty your shards into a handful of engrams that will have nothing in them. Instead.. just play the game and get experience AND as good odds of hitting exotic drops. But those exotics will most likely be duplicates and can often be of a lower level than the one you already have. Its aggravating because Bungie claims that have systems in place to avoid duplicates. Bullshit. Losing access to several locations from the first game.. for no reason other than that they haven't yet been added to Destiny 2 means that players are forced to explore the new worlds. Had there been a story based reason to block off those locations from patrols at the very least would have been nice but there's no reason given. Bungie doesn't give reasons. They don't explain themselves. Yes the obvious reason is that it would have been too much for them to deal with to add all of those places in a game that would have to grow it's player base.. apparently because their retention from the first game was so poor. Perhaps another argument is that the reception for existing locations would have been lukewarm. We've been to these places already.. why are they still here. Because you're continuing the series not replacing it with something else? Idfk. Is there anything wrong with them? No. Not as such. Titan would be the main location to feel 'poor' because it is so small. I have spent the majority of my hundreds of hours on Titan.. and was delighted when one of the first ghost shells I got was to increase XP gains on Titan. I like Titan because the public events are close together and they used to occur frequently AND their Heroic variants are somewhat easy to complete solo. So as a loot farm, Titan is nirvana. But.. why aren't the public events inside the Arcology? No reason. Very disappointing as there are story locations within the campaign that suggest that Titan should be much large and there's room for other public events but more importantly different and bigger public events. The Curse of Osiris DLC highlights this because the much longer intervaled, more complicated, and much more rewarding public even (not really) public even seems to hint that Bungie wants to try adding much bigger public events. That actually matters now because they resolved and issue (if it was real) that was loading players into empty patrol zones making them have to master solo'ing the public events. Now that the world is getting more populated it makes more sense for bigger public events where there actually is an expectation that you'd have help. The result though is that while Mercury is populated at any given time, the public event takes a long time to cycle. And it's rewards are shit. There's no reason to do it as there are no rewards unique to it. I don't care about the other locations tbh. Io especially just annoys me. And I mean that's the main complaint.. there's no worthwhile rewards from anything. Once you have a set of gear that gets you through the majority of activities.. there's no reason to keep playing. By that time you'll have done everything ad nauseam. But the reason people tend to gravitate to Patrols and public events is that you can complete them almost all of the time so the flow of loot is constant. Trying to do that with Heroic Strikes and Prestige Nightfalls for example.. isn't a guarantee even if you're playing with friends unless you've mastered those activities. Year 1 nightfalls were a joke for a while for having joke rewards like horns and emotes if you got anything at all.. I actually thought those days were done until I started getting blue mods as rewards. Its aggravating to receive something that's worse than useless. These items are worse than useless because they clutter an already small inventory and force the player to spend significant amounts of time emptying bullshit from their inventory like blue mods and shaders. Those inventory spaces get smaller when you ad useless shit like ornaments that are permanent. They show that either Bungie doesn't learn or they intentionally keep designing their menus to be aggravating. There are too many duplicate items due to the gear system which gives the player exact copies of the same gear which requires them to dismantle or infuse virtually everything they receive as rewards for a given activity. This automatic response to the majority of rewards makes the entire rewards system feel very unrewarding. Adding to the tedium of inventory management. Gee I need x item but all I'm getting is 1000x of x. Like right now I have a Heart of Time on Xbox. It took a bit to try it because I hate pulse rifles. But holy shit it is great. https://db.destinytracker.com/d2/en/items/4145119417 I don't have one on PS4. So I'm looking for it but can't get it. In the meantime I'm trying the Nergal PR4. It isn't the same even though the rounds per minute are the same and it's full auto.. should be better. https://db.destinytracker.com/d2/en/items/339343290 And I then accidentally opened my Destiny 1 inventory and started seeing those old Prison of Elders guns... the primaries with elemental burns.. or that were energy weapons in the primary slot. There was no reason to remove them or split the primary slot. Could have just made low mag powerful weapons their own slot and put Kinetic secondaries. Leaving it as weapons determine the slow not what they shoot. A power weapon needs to do damage and have low ammo. Why is that complicated? I'm actually made about this now because Telesto is back and even when the ground is littered with power ammo.. in most encounters you don't have it where it matter. There's no heavy ammo synth for the times when it matters.. when you're in a boss encounter. Telesto should be useful in boss encounters but not when there's no ammo for it. But that in itself wouldn't be bad when you consider that the first games rewards had uniqueness, materials and ammo packs etc, AND encouraged the player to level up the gear they wanted AND some gear was better than others based on their perks. That's all gone and there's very little right now that makes the new systems worthwhile. You'd sometimes obtain GOD roll items which still didn't break the game, it just made it easier to play certain encounters. So.. No God rolls. Fewer perks. Locked perks and stats. Duplicates aplenty. Garbage rewards. No materials, no ammo packs.. and a buch of garbage like armor ornaments that takes up space in the mod inventory for something cosmetic. WHO IS DESIGNING THIS SHIT AND MAKING THESE DECISIONS?! So.. The Infinite Forest Why is the Infinite Forest the camel that breaks my back? I mean there's not much wrong with the design of the infinite forest area except that like the Acrology on Titan.. there's no reason why it isn't a public space with public events. The majority of time on Mercury patrols should be in the IF once you have access to it. That means you would have needed to play through the story to have access to it. FFS there's a god damned door. As long as you get through that door in the campaign then you should have access to that area. Had Bungie not made it so you didn't have a sparrow for the entire campaign (complete idiocy) then getting into the Arcology in patrols would have that same type of gate. Same could have been said for the Raid areas, once you have access to them becoming public areas with public events with rewards in the Plague Lands and Vault of Glass. To some extent even the Dreadnaught could have had a few more patrol zones inside the ascendant realm. Aren't there enough players that would have access to the infinite forest? Now here's the big issue. The old patrol zones don't have to be gone. They could be added into the IF. As well as the old Raids. This again blocks from somewhat from players that haven't yet completed that part of the campaign. But how would the current design of the IF integrate new simulations of those old areas without falling into the trap of too much work to redesign old activities so that they are familiar but still fresh. That's up to Bungie. Adding a forth simulation tower thing that contains all the old activities brought forward into Destiny 2 would help shoe horn it into the overall story. I mean as it stands Osiris is able to modify and build simulations. More importantly it allows Bungie to bring back content that they might not have thought appropriate to, such as the Skolas encounter, because he's dead. And what happens if you consider that any Vex exposure to SIVA would have meant simulations of SIVA.. A SIVA power Gatelord? sounds like another great public event for the Infinite Forest. All those old boss fights could be those bigger public events. So ultimately what we have is a convenient way for Bungie to add stuff back into the game if they wanted without yet opening back up the old patrol zones. It just doesn't answer the question of WHY those areas are gone or are inaccessible.

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theresidentevil2remakepcdow-blog · 5 years

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Resident Evil 2 Remake

Resident Evil two Shipments Pass 4 Million

A single of the Resident Evil two remake's much more in-depth collectible tasks is finding and destroying 15 various Mr. Raccoon toys. This is the second time Capcom has attempted an ambitious Resident Evil remake. The 1st, 2002's Resident Evil for the GameCube, was a visually astonishing reimagining of the very first Resident Evil 2 Remake Download game in the series. But for all its graphical artistry and gameplay tweaks, it played a lot more or less the identical as the original, with 3D characters superimposed on 2D backgrounds and a charmingly 1D script.

Kazunori Kadoi, who's been with Capcom for more than two decades, was provided the shot to co-direct the remake with Yasuhiro Ampo and he sort of by no means looked back. Kadoi explains that even though the group 'considered' like the original view scheme as an choice, they decided that because they enjoyed the tension of the modern more than-the-shoulder cam they decided to have "one defined camera" to avoid where i can download resident evil 2 "splitting their power," which would have resulted in a worse game overall (I can believe of a couple of developers that try to do as well a lot, so this is a excellent tip). Kadoi says that the obvious Resident Evil 7-primarily based RE Engine hyperlink influenced their process fairly a bit, freeing them up to devote far more time on the combat method.

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But you listed off the most iconic features of the Resident Evil series, then just beneath zombies, but mercifully above boulder punching, you'd discover bizarre door puzzles. These make a welcome return in Resident Evil 2. The playing card-themed keys, animal-engraved medallions, and chess piece-shaped spark plugs are as silly and satisfying to use as ever. Their puzzles are well How to Download Resident Evil 2-integrated (in terms of pacing if not in-world logic) and challenge you just enough to make you really feel wise, without straying into cryptic crossword levels of difficulty.

The Ghost Survivors' missions are tough, occasionally to a borderline unfair degree. The DLC likes to load on enemies in quantities and combinations that at times look almost insurmountable. Each and every mission can be played on Training” difficulty, but even then you need to maintain your wits about you - Instruction generally just reduces the difficulty to about the same level as the major How to Download Resident Evil 2 game. Action-heavy added modes like this worked effectively sufficient in games like Resident Evil four and 5, simply because, well, these were action games. Resident Evil 2 isn't genuinely, and trying to combat hordes of enemies when you can not move quicker than a light jog and lack decent melee abilities can be irritating.

Resident Evil 2 requires location in the zombie-infested Raccoon City. The story follows rookie cop Leon Kennedy and college student Claire Redfield, who is hunting for her brother, Resident Evil protagonist Chris Redfield. Leon is drawn into the path of a mysterious femme fatale. Claire takes resident evil 2 remake download charge and tries to safeguard a youngster. Their stories intersect'”players encounter a single story, then play the other character's perspective'”creating a tapestry of a single night's events in Raccoon City.

Inventory management plays a massive role in Resident Evil two. You begin off with extremely limited slots, and have to discover room for guns, keys, ammo, healing products, and other essential products to progress. When you open the inventory, at least on common, it does pause the game so you can sort your inventory without having getting stressed. Nevertheless, with restricted inventory slots, you will occasionally Resident Evil 2 Remake Download have to leave items behind. Thankfully, the map will tell you if you have cleared a space of things or not, so you will know when you miss some thing. The rooms changing color primarily based on if they have something left in them, which is an outstanding addition to this remake. Note that defensive items from the original Resident Evil Remake have also been incorporated, which is another excellent addition.

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So a lot's changed with the survival horror series in the 21 years because Capcom unleashed the original Resident Evil two on the PlayStation. From Jan. 25, PS4, Xbox One particular and Pc gamers can sink their teeth into the remake and we're pleased to report that it Resident Evil 2 Remake Download is a tasty meal - Raccoon City's 1998 descent into zombie apocalypse has never ever looked, sounded or felt this very good.

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winterdeepelegy · 7 years

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RP snippet - Hunting for evidence

((Brief piece of RP between Frost and Mother ( @onidephor ) after the former delivered some frozen blood and tissue samples to Frumentarium for examination.)) The report of the samples collected from the ice would reach Occidens with lukewarm news. Mother would call him in to discuss it in private. The recovered blood and any other tissues were well preserved and easily extracted for DNA analysis, and the report for what or who it belonged to was typed in a bold text: inconclusive. The Frumentarium did not give up there, for another sheet of differential analyses spelled out their methods. The samples given over were such a mix of so many bodies that identifying one or a few out of the soup would be possibly, but the time involve in doing so would make it highly improbable. Instead, they did a blanket analysis for racial specific DNA, and the well studied gene known to rob a Garlean of their affinity for aetheric conductivity was the perfect marker to search for when looking among this mix. Nearly every race was present on the map, including Garlean, which showed up in trace amounts compared to a majority Gridanian or beastkin sample. It would be enough to begin investigating further, why a subject unit would have Garlean tissues in its tracts. Additionally, a small document wrote of difficulties obtaining more samples to compare for the accusation of using falsely identified chemicals, and they reported that any attempt to procure more of the fluid resulted in impossible fights with local chimerae. No man perished in the attempt. They could not proceed further, however. They were forced to bring Theius in with the evidence they had, which they felt would be weakly damning at best. The worst he would get off with is a fine and audit for working with unknown chemicals. Leera, however, was the one looking at isolation time for having a faintly Garlean diet, and if proven to have done it of his own autonomy, execution.

Not the best news for Frost or Lillium to receive back, the last part would probably be especially upsetting to the woman, but Frost had very little to say about it. Unless 305 suddenly decided to turn tail on Theius, it might be an unlikely chance to exonerate himself if he copped to doing it on the old man's orders. But then it would come down to one's word against the other's. That, alone, wouldn't get them anywhere, and 305's life would still be at risk.

If they could catch him. If they could keep him contained.

Frost had his doubts.

The Survivalist wrestled with the thought of going back to Azys Lla again to get them more evidence. He almost felt it would be necessary to get anything truly damning, but he wasn't eager to deal with the chimerae, or 271 again, if he was even still there by now. That self same survival instinct was telling him he was better off not to return, not yet. But since when has he been the one to always listen to his better judgment?

"Godsdamnit..." Lillium lifted her gaze to the elezen's rasped mutterance. She set the paperwork down and felt the need to take a moment and digest it a bit herself. "It is progress", is all she said, but a simple phrase typically signaled a flood of thoughts passing through her in that moment. If she was in possession of all the disposal units capable of performing the execution, she wouldn't be so concerned. However, Father still had 271. "We will see to it that Theius is involved. I will recommend that the Frumentarium subpoena 305 to download his commands. Assuming Theius hasn't been running his mouth on orders every day, the order may still exist in the database for dealing with the previous investigators", she said with a slight trailing off at the end, a lingering hope. "That's assuming either of them cooperates,” Frost noted. “And we're talking something which happened moons ago... how far back does this database cache? What's to say Theius doesn't... I dunno, delete the command history once in a while?" He sat forward and scrubbed his palms over his face, "It's not enough. We need something else provable in case this subpoena turns up nothing. The old man might be meticulous, but there's -got- to be something, somewhere, that he's been careless with." He paused, wondering. "What about subpoenaing - if that's even a word - all of his records from Solus? He can't have committed everything to memory, can he?“ Lillium folded her hands in front of her in order to think in a more peaceful postion, despite the bubbling anger deep down. "Core #201 is capable of select storage, but enough space to store back some time so long as nothing extensive has been imput to its system. Perhaps the records will do, too. I'll send those recommendations forward and see what comes of it." "It's our best bet. I could just go back to Azys Lla and try again to get more of the chemicals, but that should, I hate to say it, be a last ditch act of desperation if we can't find anything else.” Frost shook his head in dismay, "It's not that I'm afraid to, that's not it, but it's just not practical. And you need me intact. He can't obstruct that subpoena, can he?" "No, he won't be able to, and you aren't going back", she stated firmly. "That would be a logical next step and the most obvious one from our end of things. 271 being stationed there is proof of that. Though, I may send 296 up there instead to see what is going on with him. At the very least he'll be immune to any molten splash." "Fighting fire with fire," he chuckled, though the sound was devoid of humor. He'd still end up worrying about 296 until he returned, if he managed to. If he wasn't destroyed or caught in the attempt. There were too many IFs to find that plan satisfying, but she was right that he would be the only one who could go toe to toe with 271 on even terms, as far as fire was concerned. He wouldn't be feeding that abomination any new elements to play with. Lillium dipped her head in a lone nod. "Then that'll be the plan until we can figure a way to tie the man up in his own lies. His veil of good and helping the Garlean citizens has protected him up until now. Even Garlemald has its standards for what is humane and what is not. This is unacceptable." "I hope so, Mother," though he sounded doubtful. "I do have to wonder how much the Empire actually cares about the treatment of conscripts. Especially us. We're barely considered auxiliary. The only thing we -might- have going for us now are a handful of Purebloods who were willing to take the risk of joining us, but they might not have if they weren't guaranteed to keep their status. Must be nice, having automatic privilege because of an additional sensory organ." Bitter? No. He's not bitter. Lillium stood herself up to walk over to the edge of her office, just to stretch her legs and think. "It will be interesting to see what they do, indeed. What then defines an object or a citizen? For now, I have a report to send off to the Frumentarium. You're free to do as you please, provided you aren't getting into any trouble." "Twenty years, or exemplary service... or birthright." The question, albeit rhetorical, got an answer anyway. As far as he was concerned, 'exemplary' was defined on who was trying, not what they did to earn it, but citizenship wasn't something he was actively pursuing as a goal anymore. He learned that lesson last time, when he unintentionally made it about himself, rather than about the lives of his siblings. He smirked, "You make it sound like I'm going to go out of my way to -get- into trouble. No... no, I'll just follow my routine. You know, brood sullenly, mingle with the others, and glare at the newbies." "Feel free to make those newcomers who came here just for the power of having an artificial body part know their place. Their rebirths are synthetic at best, compared to what you all endured years ago. They deserve to know the difference", she said with her nose in the air slightly. She didn't have a drop of Garlean blood in her either, and the pride they had for themselves in her brood made them have a slight bit more disdain along with her customary caring. And then a grin slowly crawled to life on the Duskwight's lips, both eyebrows lifting in pleasant surprise. "I get to play with them?" If he had a tail, it would have been wagging. They were all Tier 1's, devoid of aetheric capability, but that didn't mean -all- of them were fragile, and he usually relished opportunities to break someone's misplaced pride. Perhaps it would be a good day after all. Frost turned to leave, giving Lillium back the solitude in which she needed to work. Somewhere down the hall, the rough, beastly voice of the Survivalist could be heard echoing off the metal walls in a rasping sing-song. "Pure~bloods~! Come out and plaaaay~!"

#ffxiv #ff14 #IC happenings #Colossus Project #Glace Silencieuse #Lillium Pyr Sylvanius

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morshtalon · 5 years

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Megami Tensei Gaiden: Last Bible

A.K.A. Revelations: The Demon Slayer

(Part 4 on a series of posts covering as many games in the MegaTen franchise as I can actually play)

Having successfully established a new canon with Shin Megami Tensei, things were going along smoothly, and the soil for new MegaTen titles was as fertile as it had ever been. However, SMT's ending was, in many ways, terminal for a lot of what was established therein. The situation of things kept changing drastically through the entire game and, by the end, things were pretty catastrophic. It would be a little while before they though up of some good material to serve as a base for SMT II, and, in the meantime, to keep fresh products coming out (and probably to keep the money coming in), Atlus chose to develop a spin-off series.

Last Bible was released for the Game Boy the same year as SMT, and recontextualized the core distinctions of the series into something more like what you'd expect from a jRPG in 1992. Gone are the first person dungeons, and instead we have a normal tile-based top-down RPG with DQ-esque character sprites walking around. Gone is the moral axis and branching story, and now things are as linear as they could, with only one path leading to one conclusion. Features like the demon summoning and recruitment have been majorly simplified, and in general, the game plays a lot more traditionally than anything the series has outed so far. There's no guns and no phases of the moon. That's not to say it doesn't still have its own quirks, but it's interesting to observe the transition from SNES to GB and all the compression and simplification that entails.

Furthermore, the setting was also moved to a more traditional, medieval fantasy-ish place, and demons aren't really demons anymore, just nondescript monsters with an in-game origin. You can still summon them, but it's done through a vague "sort" menu instead of the COMP for obvious reasons. You can also still talk to them, but they don't have any particular race or alignment to dictate their rough personality, so the questions are more or less random (there seems to be a repeatable pattern, but the actual text makes no logical sense in terms of a conversation) and whether or not you'll recruit them at the end of the conversation is effectively a crapshoot.

All of this obviously makes Last Bible miss a lot of what makes the series unique, and if you didn't know it was part of the MegaTen brand, you'd probably just take it for a generic RPG adventure clogging up the GB's library and pick up Final Fantasy Legend 2 instead. Honestly, if you did, you probably wouldn't be missing much, anyway.

It's not that the game is bad, per se. It has a decent, harmless little plot; some of the recontextualizations (such as the series' iconic powerful demons having been reworked into what are essentially powerful mage dudes) are funny; the aesthetics have an odd classical age vibe to them which is kind of interesting, with a lot of greek and egyptian inspirations; the music is above average for an early GB game (and the final boss in my opinion has a really kickass theme with one of the finest basslines the system can throw at you); and series traditions regarding demon handling have been simplified, but still function in roughly the same way, allowing you to experience the insane level of customization MegaTen usually offers, just in a different kind of place.

But, for a series that evolved its experimentation with storytelling into the character-based, uniquely moral narrative offered by SMT, with so much room for growth and potential to extrapolate and expand on previously established themes, Last Bible feels like a big step down. You can tell, while playing, that it was a much easier game to make than SMT, not only in terms of technical stuff, but also as far as challenging the developers' creativity goes. Consequently, this is mirrored in the fact that the game doesn't really have any poignancy of its own. I understand that the fact it was made for the Game Boy, a system designed for kids to just pick up some more simplistic, breezy adventures and enjoy them on their way to school and etc. means that Last Bible does its job nicely and there's really no point in me trying to compare it to mainline SMT since it's not trying to be SMT, so it isn't like I get angry with the game or chastise the developers and think they're slacking sacks of crap or whatever. But hey, still, if I'm looking at the game analytically, it has to be said it doesn't bring much new to the table.

One thing it does have over SMT 1, technically, is that there can be two enemy groups per battle now. There WERE a few scripted encounters in SMT 1 against two groups of enemies, but now, they can happen in any run-of-the-mill random encounter (unless the enemy sprite is too big), so that's nice. Also, the protagonist can use magic, which is a bit surreal in MegaTen terms. Furthermore, anyone can talk to monsters, even other monsters, and that means you won't have to go through the tedious generic yes/no conversations, so that's a good option to expedite the process, though I believe you need to select the right monster for the job or something, I have no idea. It'd be cool to see demons interacting with each other in mainline SMT games...

I think this is where I start to realize I may be a bit of a subconscious contrarian in some aspects, but despite the rest of the internet saying otherwise, I found this game to be really hard. Enemies were constantly able to kick my ass with two or three hits, it never felt like I had built my characters correctly and it always felt like I was at risk. A little ways into the game, I discovered, through the fact a monster attacked one of my own monsters of the same kind as them, that enemies actually get a significant boost in the damage they deal to you, which is Last Bible's iteration of old game design bullshit. Luckily, dungeons are really short throughout the entirety of the game, and you can save anywhere you want (except in-battle), even in the dungeons themselves right in front of the boss's face (because you wouldn't want to lose your progress when the school bus arrives and you're forced to put the Game Boy away, you know), so I guess when it all comes down to it, it was "easy", but damn. I'm not sure if I get bothered by the fact the dungeons are so short and have nothing to separate themselves from each other or if I'm glad they are like that because it meant my sorry ass could actually clear them. Maybe the high damage and stuff was once again done like that to be congruent with the portable nature of the system, so even battles needed to go by quickly one way or the other, but I don't know.

Anyway, Last Bible is not a very interesting game, but it did manage to entertain me somewhat, and the difficulty meant that there was at least something stimulating happening most of the time. It had a very Dragon Quest 2 vibe to it, and I think that's not exactly a bad thing (I only wish there were more puzzles and interactions with rhe world to make overworld exploration as interesting as it was in DQ2). I believe it deserves a 5 out of 10, smack-dab in the middle of the scale just like any game where my main conclusion is that nothing was really gained from playing it, but nothing was lost either. And hey, now that they got that out of their system, the developers can jump right back on track and start work on another actually intellectually charged, passionate project, right?

#review #analysis #megami tensei #rpg

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