#destiny sucks

[ollyrewind]

The Hanged Man is the card that suggests ultimate surrender, sacrifice, or being suspended in time. Also known as traitor.

[ganondoodle]

its still rough but as far as im gonna get for now, cant decide on the tentacle colors still nkfdnvkdfn

possible name for lad is Pan or Paktolos (just bc .. reference to midas legend even if this midas got nothing to do with it; oh yeah, a bonus midas sketch .. he needs a proper redesign too)

tentacle lad may look mean here (i genuinely dont know why i drew him like that) but hes a big sappy softie, even carries a picture of midas in a locket around- next to the demon teeth hes collected he doesnt leave the island much anymore and mostly manages everything on it, his people call him by royal titles sometimes bc hes been a very competent leadership figure but he doesnt put value in any titles-

he rescued midas from the demon hunters that kidnapped him years ago to bring one of the biggest and most influencial empires to collapse after his older sister, who was the empress, was unexpectedly dying- midas being the next in line the empire doesnt really exist anymore at this point, midas now leading missions around the island instead, or going around keeping up to date with politics and tensions since his husband (tentacle lad) and his people are of a kind that is largely being kept a secret and would be a target for demon hunters as well, despite them not being demons (they look monstrous but are more based on animals, are native to earth, cannot change form, age only somewhat slower than humans and have no control over any elemental magic more than a very skilled human can have- which is basically not even noticable and usually gets passed off as 'talent' in the way a skilled sailor can feel the approaching weather in the wind)

[systemhead]

describing Warframe’s story without spoilers will make you type shit like this

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

i've convinced myself that Sunny is a serial gossiper, except the only other dragon that knows is Clay bc they're best buddies <3

[warriorofthesky]

interesting tidbits from the trailer and my probably wrong interpretation of them

zavala is shown (?) the traveler leaving the percussor planet here i think.

see a bit later:

comparing to the season of the deep cutscene:

maybe the witness is showing zavala how the traveler left it (playing on zavala's fears, like when he began questioning the traveler for supposedly giving the hive the light back in witch queen)??? not sure

then it seems like he is in the same place where he meets veiled lady:

with cayde saying "you said it spoke to you?" as in the witness, right? the witness showed him the traveler leaving, then showed him... this?

so the million dollar question is: who is this?

idk but

veiled lady holding a shard of glass (???? im not sure what that is) right after the traveler leaves the precursor planet? smells like first knife to me!

no really. kind of.

especially because we get this later:

aka tons of veiled ladies dying/going puff. which makes it seem like veiled lady might be a representation of the precursors? like, they are all melting into smoke bc they united to become the witness. and the witness is asking zavala to join them/it. it also sounds like one of the veiled ladies is the one who whispers "suffering" to zavala, sooooo

i do feel like the first knife bit might be a stretch buuuut back in season of the deep (cutscene) we were told the precursors desired a "winnower to shape the garden". veiled lady with shard of glass might just be indicating that the precursors wanted to influence the traveler, which caused it to nope the fuck out and eventually led to the witness forming itself. idk.

it might be the ffxiv fan in me, but veiled lady representing the precursors sounds reasonable bc the precursors stripped themselves of individuality (literally!), as in, without faces, recognizable characteristics, etc, with the precursor faction (penitent, i think?) that led the idea of "cutting off" unwanted aspects of the precursor race, everyone becoming one aka the witness, with one single objective and motivation, blah blah blah. it is implied (both in the vidoc and in game, imo) that they didn't succeed in cutting off said unwanted aspects, tho (which is one of the reasons veiled lady whispering stuff to zavala sounds so fucking angry i guess). not all of the veiled ladies/precursors who are contained within the witness are happy about it, is the thing

(also the witness seems to be in front of the veil at this point, which imo just makes it more likely that veiled lady = precursors + quite literally the power of the veil, AS IN VEILED PRECURSORS)

but who knows!!! certainly not me

[siveine]

it started as a prank. my roommate got me 3 copies of destiny (2014) for my birthday, one of which was riddled with bullet holes. it had costed them $3, and honestly? it was kind of funny.

a few days later, the two of us happened to catch the manager of our local game store going on a monologue about how much he hated destiny. so i bought another copy off his hands, quote "so you dont have to look at it anymore."

this became routine.

id show up weekly and buy up every copy of destiny he had in stock. then, when the number of pawned off copies dwindled to nearly zero, i expanded my search to nearby gamestops and chain game stores.

i singlehandedly raised the secondhand price of destiny (2014) from less than a dollar to OVER $5 in every game store in a 30 mile radius.

anyway. heres the last images i had of the destiny (2014) collection, before it all got lost in a tragic boating accident:

i only stopped collecting when i could find no more; i owned almost every copy in the city, save for a single confirmed copy from a friend of mine, who heard of my crusade and vowed never to let me collect them all, lest i become corrupted by the sheer magnitude of power of possessing Every Copy of Destiny (2014) in the Las Vegas Metropolitan Area

i dont believe that was the full amount, my room had stacks of destiny. i dont remember what actually ended up happening to them. i think i hid a few dozen around the city? perhaps some were buried or destroyed, never to see the light (ha) again. surely, this outcome is for the best; some say the destiny collection may once more be drawn together, and four of the mojaves purest souls will journey forth to put down such an evil for good.

[cosmosnout]

Thinking about the end of khdr and how our keykid is implied to be Xehanorts caretaker, in which case I fully blame my keykid for every bad thing that Xehanort has ever done.

[plifpliff]

"A new tale told through frankly unconventional and doubtful means" - Ikora

"Be sure to suspend your disbelief, guardian" -Eris

"AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-" -Immaru

For the Fotl event hosted by @d2artevents !

[mayasaura]

I've finally finished the six games in the main Ace Attorney series! That's right!! It's time for my review!

I think it's fairly common knowledge that Ace Attorney is a political commentary on the Japanese legal system as it existed in 2001. I know I knew that going in.

What I didn't know was just how topical the games were. I didn't figure that out until I started looking into what the fuck was going on in Apollo Justice, and what I discovered makes Apollo Justice my favourite game in the series.

At the time the Phoenix Wright trilogy was first being released, Japan did not have any form of trial by jury, and boasted a conviction rate to make Edgeworth and Von Karma's records look almost credible. Four months after the release of the third game, the Japanese National Diet passed a piece of legislation implementing judicial reform with the explicit intention of “the promotion of the public’s understanding of the judicial system and … their confidence in it.”

The next installment of the series—Apollo Justice, released in April of 2007—builds the themes of legal corruption explored by the first trilogy into a passionate argument for reform by restoring judicial power to the citizens.

Phoenix Wright, seen through the eyes of the new protagonist, appears to be a jaded shell of his former self: retired from the legal profession, beaten down by trying to champion truth and justice from within a broken system. The circumstances leading to his forced retirement come to light in the game's climactic final case, hand in hand with the revelation that Phoenix never really gave up on his ideals. He just gave up on the system. Speaking directly to the player, he casts the player as one of a panel of six civilian judges in a new reformed system of trial he and Edgeworth developed together. At the end of the trial, the player directly casts the final vote to decide the verdict.

In May of 2009, two years after Phoenix Wright handed the player direct power over the outcome of a trial, the real Japanese legal system conducted its first trial utilising civilian lay judges under the newly reformed judicial system.

I don't know nearly enough about how the current Japanese system works to judge the accuracy of Apollo Justice's vision to the final real result of real Japanese lawyers and judges' efforts, but from my casual perspective, it's pretty close. Close enough for it to be clear the game developers were following the progress of the real reform. Perhaps the game was meant as a celebration, or maybe they hoped it could work as an educational tool to introduce the concept to the public. Either way, these games were made by someone or someones who cared deeply about criminal justice, and I love them for it.

I also love them for their fun and immersive mysteries, of course, and their ludicrously charming cast of characters. It's no wonder the series has withstood the test of time, thriving on their own solid merit as games even far removed by both time and distance from the context of their social commentary.

[vivifrage]

I think with Lightfall like. It's fun. I had a good time. A blast, even! Especially with the gameplay, even when I got frustrated because I was playing Legendary and I'm not a good gamer.

It's action movie fun. Which is what it intended to be, really, from all the tropes and the pacing of it. But it got bodied with sudden roadmap changes and Witch Queen as video game Oscar bait.

Yeah, I think it could have used a breather to bond more with Rohan especially, but there was in-game justification for going fast and I'm sure the format A Destiny Expansion(tm) limited the team. We saw it bad in Witch Queen's seasons, and Bungie acknowledged that yeah the seasons structure was limiting them. As someone who works in software dev, nobody likes having to make things worse. But it happens a lot. Sometimes in really bullshit ways that the software folks wouldn't expect to be that level of bullshit, let alone anyone who isn't working with the software day in and day out. And by bullshit I mean "massive overhaul of the entire system just to make one tiny change" kinds of bullshit. Again, nobody likes it. I promise you.

Back to Lightfall. It's a fun action movie. It's also the plot point we'd been hurtling towards since Witch Queen, and probably even well before that: The Darkest Hour. We're struggling to use this new power in time, the mysteries around us have unraveled but in the end it's too late for us to get the upper hand, and it nearly costs us everything. In the year beforehand, we'd been losing in one way or another at the end of the seasons: Crow kills the Psion, our rituals fail to stop Calus, Eramis gets away, Rasputin dies. The Witness accesses the Traveler.

What it also does is it sets up the rest of the year for our Triumphant Finale. We get a thread to follow - how to get into the Traveler - and chase it through the year, alongside other threads like what the Veil is and how we're gonna deal with Xivu Arath. As of the end(ish) of Wish, we've got our answer and are primed for The Final Shape as our finale.

But first we had to have The Darkest Hour. Which, in the short term, being what it is, is a bummer. No getting around it. It's also part of why comparisons to Witch Queen went awry, IMO.

Witch Queen is, as I said before, the Oscar bait, insofar as an MMO looter-shooter has Oscar bait. It puts the tangled web front and center instead of tracing one thread and then zooming out to show the whole thing. It's more philosophical in nature, sitting back and asking us whether we think we're special and what really separates us from one of the enemies we hadn't forged alliances with yet: the Hive. And, of course, if we'd noticed the puppetmaster behind it all. It ties up the question that's been going on since Forsaken: are we the bad guys? (No, not really, we're struggling to survive the way everyone else is. Which, nobody else we've been fighting is really "the bad guy" either.)

It's a really good storyline! I loved it, even if, honestly, I didn't like the gameplay as much as Lightfall. I think it's earned its good reviews and positive reception.

But it is the Oscar bait. And unlike Lightfall, its plot role didn't require the same downer ending. It could sprawl, and honestly? I don't think it would have worked as our Darkest Hour. Not without screwing up the story and making a jumbled mess. Seriously, I don't think Destiny's "everyone gets a second chance" philosophy would have carried well at all if The Darkest Hour was when the Hive got Ghosts. Instead it would have reinforced our misconception at the beginning of Lightfall - that we are the sole rightful Lightbearers and that the Hive getting the Light was a wrongdoing.

Destiny did need something between Witch Queen and The Final Shape. And they moved things - but announced it less than a year before Lightfall released. At their big press conference-y deal, but still. Limited time for folks to get the news.

And then it came out and it was an action movie, not Oscar bait. But it followed Oscar bait, so that's what the expectation was.

Personally, I'm fond of, say, Moonlight. Fantastic movie. Beautiful and heartfelt. I enjoyed it and I think it is worthy of its high praise. But if you ask me what my favorite movie is, I'll say it's a tossup between Pacific Rim and Mad Max: Fury Road. They fit different niches in the cultural ecosystem - Moonlight isn't a bad Pacific Rim and Pacific Rim isn't a bad Moonlight. Not unless you pit them against each other despite their vast differences.

Also I remember there was lots of complaining about how empty Neomuna was at first, but everything about the CloudArk and especially the lorebook is such early pandemic-era fiction.

Lightfall is a good action movie. Witch Queen is good Oscar bait. Both of them have their strong points and weak points. There are technical factors that limit things. There are other external factors that limit things (looking at you, upper management).

It's fair to critique a story but like, I dunno. Bungie's devs, writers, and artists aren't idiots or evil or out to get you specifically. Lightfall is fine but you can't - and shouldn't - expect it to be Witch Queen.

Please, for the love of everything holy, don't let us repeat the nasty bitchy maelstrom we got around Lightfall. Or I'll start shitting in ovens.

[screebyy]

posting these separately bc a lot of it got covered up in the whole comic and also im a miserable little sap

[endivinity]

Atropos ; Monarch

[desolyx]

Another exo duo post since my brain is in a brainrot mode

"I love this character!!" (affectionate) vs "I love this character!!" (derogatory)

I am so normal about this I promise.

[thewitchwannabe]

A very slight redesign of my New Destiny turtles, mainly consisting of the placement of their spots and varying their skin tones

[eosofspades]

okay i meant to make this post forever ago but my personal opinion on why so many people were so dissatisfied with lightfalll (disclaimer: i am not one of these people, i love lightfall SO much), is that lightfall was kind of subjected to a really aggressive marketing campaign.

like, stick with me here, i feel like almost all the lightfall release content (the trailers especially) were so focused on battling the witness, how this battle has been centuries in the making and this is the Second Collapse Finally Finding Us, only for there to be,,, no real resolution. the end was left on such a severe cliffhanger, but not only that, there was NO battle with the witness. the witness didn't even seem to be having a hard time at all with what we WERE throwing at it.

and for narrative reasons *i* am obsessed with this ending; in terms of storytelling i adore practically every creative decision that was made in lightfall, but i think the reason that so many people were so upset about it is because lightfall had such intense marketing and was rooted in the implication that this was the End of Days, only for us to get almost no closure, and instead so many more questions.

(there's also something to be said, i think, about the fact that the people who ARE most upset about this are like, the youtube gamer dudebros who's content is very very often rooted in the aggressive, violence-and-warfare, pvp-centric, no-interest-in-lore approach to destiny, and that the people i've seen primarily ENJOYING the narrative decisions (or at least being understanding about it) are the artists and writers and loremasters of the fandom, but i'm not quite sure,,, how to expand on that point.)

[destinysbounty]

......does anyone else remember Wu Cru? Like I didn't just hallucinate that right