#c:tod

[nmtltlz]

A rearranging of one of the final scenes in ACiT, suited to fit my own personal future needs. Unfinished!! But its all i got done tonight :)! Like the top of the comic says, planning to write out a short little au that 10 year old me /really/ wanted.

Ive had this game since? Forever? One of my first games (my /first/ first being R&C:ToD) & its the first game i finished. I was 4-7! When i first played! And when i got a little older & knew how the game ended I always ended up…pitifully wandering around Torren IV wondering if there was a way to change the ending of the game. Like if I maybe found something out about alister, Ratchet could do something different & he wouldnt have to die, Clank wouldnt have to witness this, & Alister wouldnt have had to die. 10 yr old me thought she could save these characters from pain like it was Undertale or smth because she did not! Know! How games worked!!! She was always crushed when she couldnt find anything.

So here I am, half a decade later, planning smth to help her out. And maybe anyone else whod like a read :)

(This is also an excuse for me to draw dumb shitty drawings of alister with the usual R&C crew as though he doesnt die lmao!!! And if someone asks why or whats up i can point them at this!!!)

[myhyperfixationisback]

Playing Tools of Destruction for the first time since middle school is interesting because the story hits very different now.

(I would put a read more here but I’m on mobile :\)

I used to think this was the honest to god pinnacle of storytelling LOL and I mean it’s still good, but even for a video game there’s pacing problems. Things go by so quickly and the story jumps into a few things that should have been introduced more steadily. For example, Tachyon is played up as this huge emperor but Ratchet easily ditches him and all of his minions in the first level and even steals his ship (idk why he did that either was he trying to go find out if Quark was on another planet? Was he just trying to escape?) and the it’s almost like the story is assuming the one or two times Ratchet is mentioned to be the “last of his kind” are impactful enough to invest us in the Lombaxes. The thing is, alien races and species were never really made to be a big deal before this point in the series. There were casual mentions of Ratchet being a Lombax previously, but none of them carried the connotations that mentions of the species do from R&C:TOD and onward. And Ratchet was never really shown to be sensitive about that either. Even when Tachyon taunts him in the beginning, Ratchet is just bantering back at him, and he seems more like he’s moderately curious instead of genuinely affected by any of Tachyon’s acute hate towards Lombaxes. With Clank and the Zoni I can give a little bit of a pass, because it’s meant to seem out there and a little concerning, but the fact that Clank doesn’t question the sudden appearance of these creatures that only he can see, or even act a little confused, is a bit of an odd exception on Clank’s part. I know Clank can be a bit too trusting sometimes (it must run in the family) but it still feels odd for him to react to something like this by just accepting it immediately. It may have something to do with the Zoni hive mind, but that wasn’t explained until ACIT I don’t think? I haven’t finished playing the game so the story may provide more to work with further in. For Ratchet, though, there’s no amount of later explanation that can take away how rushed his mood change on his first trip to Fastoon is. First of all, I don’t understand why either of them expected to see Lombaxes when Tachyon had mentioned him being the last in the universe and everyone else that mentions them speaks in past tense, but sure maybe that was denial. But when they find an old plane left behind, Ratchet all of the sudden gets SUPER invested. He’s begging to fix this old plane left on a planet in ruins instead of continuing to evade Emperor Tachyon who’s trying to have him killed. I don’t get the transition there. Even Clank is confused, but gives in because Ratchet is begging like a girl in a horse movie. Don’t get me wrong, I feel for Ratchet learning about something he never had and is wishing he could have been a part of it, but I think it could have been built up more before Ratchet got to that level. There’s been a whole era of PS2 games where Ratchet never once indicated he wanted to know where he came from, so either he’s have an extremely early midlife crisis, or they rushed his development into wanting to know about the Lombaxes in favor of getting it over with early so they could play with the angst of it throughout the game. But that seems cheap to me. Part of what makes angst in a story effective is the buildup, so if you jump the gun the impact is lessened according to how early you started the angst. Also, I get this is a video game, and story elements are a bit secondary to gameplay, but if you market your game as a “Pixar-like experience”, you better make sure your story reflects that, and not just your animation. And the build up doesn’t even have to take half the game! I mean, one of the saddest twists in Up came at the beginning, and the story used that angst all the way through to the end— the difference is how it was done. I’m running out of room, but I may make more of these as I go! It’s interesting and fun to look at this game with a fresh perspective!!

[wontsetfiremoved-blog]

             "Okay. But instead of pretending you're a serious student               you could head with me to the bar and not ruin the fun."