#i feel like smt is missing so i might add more to this. yeah.

[marurumai]

the working of a revived person's body ; inspired by the moot @watermelonfrog2 !!

when someone dies, their body goes through a natural process of decomposition. the body doesnt serve any purpose, as it has seaced function, so with it no longer being self sustaining, it starts to rot.

this is a know fact, but what if the body was sprung to life after this prolongated pause?

tommys body didnt deteriorate much post-mortis. other than the... "mishandling" from dream, his body would only partially rot, nothing that big. well, thats if we dont count the multiple bruises from his rather violent death.

however, wilbur, who was dead for a long time, didnt have much luck in that regard. by nine months, the human body will be swollen and in an advanced state of decomposition, alongside a foul stench natural of the rot.

the revival book will fix you up just enough to stay alive, but that doesnt mean it will completely heal you.

tommys wounds had long since closed, even if the bruises were still there. the revival book stopped his internal bleeding, and fixed some part of his broken skull just so the pieces wouldnt stab his brain and provoke an instant death.

wilburs only wound would have been the gaping hole in his stomach, caused by the sword he had handed his father that day... however, even when that closed, the decaying state of his body would have killed him instantly.

being fixed up by the books power isnt nice nor soothing. its actually rather painful, as your body is forced to work all if the sudden and heal itself so quickly it will drain you of any other energy you might have.

wilburs body is still rotting, and the stench of the death follows him because he was dead for a long time.

i imagine that tommy would help patch him up and evem replace some bits of skin.

regen and healing potions are a basic necesity for the revived. their body doesnt work properly, and the natural healing process doesnt either. if left untreated, a small wound could be the cause of their next death, because the wound will never close by itself.

tommy had to taku up sewing once again to apth himself up, just like the old war times, except this time no one wouls hold his hand to aliviate the pain.

they run really cold, too, because the blood rushes slowly through their veins. revived ones tend to avoid cold places because of this. they miss the warmth they had once experienced. tommy wants to seek out tubbo, but snowchester is too cold, no matter how many layers of clothing puts on. wilbur wanted to stay with phil, but the coldness of the commune just served to remind him of those long years stuck in the train station.

they are sickly pale, no matter what. their skin a greyish color. no matter how much time they spend under the sun, it will never gain a lively color again. sometimes wilbur will use makeup to add redish tone to him skin, but he knows its fake.

[p5x-theories]

Hey do you think you have any guesses on what arcana each character might be? I’d really love to see what your guesses are in one of our favorite topics for the characters and the game itself. 😁

Oh, it has been a while since I've talked about my own theories on that, hasn't it? Yeah, why not! This got long, so I'll put it under a cut.

Right off the bat, I'm still on board with the theory that the story teammates, at least, will reflect the arcana of the P5 characters they seem to parallel. I also don't think any arcana will be repeated, at least for the main Confidants (if they add more later, that could change). So for me, that means I think Wonder will be the Fool, Ruferu will be the Magician, Motoha will either be Lovers or Chariot, Shun will be the Emperor, and Riko will be the Priestess.

From there, I lean towards Motoha being the Chariot- it feels like the athletic aspects of her are treated as more important/significant in the story than the sort of popularity usually associated with a Lovers- and I think Tomoko might actually be the Lovers, given her indecision about what she wants to do now that she can't play baseball, and her crush on the protagonist (not that that's required for a Lovers arcana, but still). An additional bit of my reasoning for that is that Tomoko, who seems to parallel Shiho, is kind of an "extra" Confidant (since Shiho wasn't a Confidant at all), and then we're also "missing" a teammate (since Motoha seems to fulfill both Ann and Ryuji's roles to some extent), so it makes sense the "missing" arcana might go to an "extra" Confidant.

As for the others, the ones I have thoughts on off the top of my head:

I've talked about this one quite a bit, but I think Kiyoshi's probably the Moon

I forget who first suggested this, but I like the idea of Mont as the Strength. The tarot card itself is associated with courage and self-confidence, and reversed with self-doubt, weakness, and inadequacy, which feel like they could be themes in Mont's potential Confidant, given it'll likely center around how she used to be an ice skater but had to give up on it due to injury

Yukimi feels very much like an Empress character, if we don't end up having a Haru parallel in the main team. Mainly in her demeanor, but also her struggles with her mother and the Empress tarot card's connection to motherhood

Kayo feels like a good Hierophant candidate, as an older character looking after the protagonist (at least more than his parents currently seem to be), though I could also maybe see her Confidant going in an Empress direction if Yukimi isn't the Empress

Leon as the Star seems like sort of a given; it's possible they've changed it, but it does seem to fit his demeanor so far

Yui as the Hermit or maybe the Temperance? Hermit is an obvious speculation, given the Hermit in P3 is also one you connect with through an online video game, but I feel like this might get snapped up by a theoretical Futaba parallel in the story teammates. In that case, perhaps Temperance instead? I know this one's also a teacher's arcana (in P5), and I don't necessarily think Yui's really a teacher, but the arcana is associated with the merging of opposites, which could perhaps relate to Yui and whatever her real-world life is like (compared to her video game life). In the Persona series, the SMT wiki even points out that "these characters try to escape their normal lives by engaging in their hobbies", which really sounds like it could apply to Yui as well

The reasoning on this one is pretty loose, but as mentioned before, the Tower is my best guess for Riddle right now, mostly going on the fact that P5's Tower is also the only elementary schooler of the group (and, I suppose, P4's as well). We know so little about her theoretical Confidant right now, though, that it's really hard to say

Right now, given how they're introduced, I think Ikenami and Polter will both be story teammates, and I think between the two of them, Ikenami is more who I'd expect to be the Justice (has a reputation of some kind, like how Akechi was famous), and Polter seems more like a Hermit (she's kind of quiet, and doodles in her sketchbook, which are often associated with the "introverted art student" type character). It'd be super fun if they were the other way around (Ikenami as the Hermit and Polter as the Justice), though!

As for the others, for the sake of not leaving anyone out, here's my thoughts just purely on vibes + which arcana the above assignments would leave left over (Fortune, Hanged Man, Death, Devil, Sun, Judgement):

Seiji has Emperor vibes, but I don't expect them to repeat arcana, so I don't actually think he'll be the Emperor. Seiji also has Judgement vibes to me, relative to Eriko in P1 + P2, so if that arcana isn't reserved for a story role (like Sae Niijima having it in P5, or the changed group goals in P3 and P4), I could see him having it? Maybe Fortune or Hanged Man, if not

Yaoling feels Fortune-y to me, I dunno. I could also see Sun?

Sepia... maybe Hanged Man? Or... he's not goth enough, but maybe Death? Having any idea of what his Confidant's premise is (besides maybe something with fishing) would probably help me narrow down a vibe here haha

Puppet has Sun vibes to me, both in that she's a politician's daughter and Yoshida's a politician, but also something about her running away from home and trying to make it on her own and the Sun's association in this series with being in kind of a hopeless situation, but trying to make the most of it and achieve your goals anyway

If Liben, Wuhexi, and Jitianzhudai are all also teammates (story or Idol), then we sort of run out of Arcana, haha. Wuhexi seems the look the most like he could be a Death arcana, though who really knows, and I could kind of see Liben or Jitianzhudai maybe being the Devil, but I'm really going out on a limb there, and I'm not sure what that would leave the other one to be (probably one of the extra arcana- Aeon, Jester, Hunger, Faith, Councilor, Hope, or Apostle?)

[nulla-senzanome]

About SMT Nocturne’s Italian localization

(This post was initially meant to be a submission for @eirikrjs, then I realized that making my own post would give me less of an headache with the added pictures, so here it is. This might very well just be my first and last post on Tumblr)

Yesterday some SMT III previews dropped, and since the only thing I care about regarding that game is its localization, mostly the Italian one, I immediately looked at that. There's some interesting stuff, I swear.

First of all, about MegaTen and Italian: if we aren't counting Catherine, Persona 5 Royal was the first game in the series that got translated. French and Germans got "Lucifer's Call" (which afaik didn't have a great translation either), but we weren't so lucky, so the only translations we got are P5R and P5S'. Both of them are definitely based on the English script, even if I wouldn't rule out the chance they actually checked the Japanese script for some minor stuff.

About P5R's translation... it's mostly fine. It's got some typos and whatnot, but for a game that massive it's nothing unusual. As for the "mythological department", it doesn't look like they did much research on their own. The two most interesting things are Alilat which got changed to Allat (and the translated description has an added "also known as Alilat", which is nice) and Thunderbird which got changed to Wakinyan, probably because "Uccello del tuono" didn't fit. One thing I will never get about P5R though is what happened to エル・ジハード, the Electricity skill. It was Narukami in Persona 4, then Jihad in Persona 4 Golden, then Wild Thunder in Persona 5 and Royal... but in Italian it's "Dio del tuono" (God of Thunder). Really, that's still a mystery to me. Plus, Izanagi-no-Okami’s Myriad Truths became Verità letali (Lethal Truths) and the “ARM PC” DLC accessory became DECK. Don’t ask me what that means.

There really isn't much to say about P5S. Since the game is smaller the translation got better, there's just some typos here and there and some minor slip-ups but nothing major. It didn't add much mythologically-wise, so, moving on.

Now, Nocturne is the first mainline SMT game that gets the treatment, so I was pretty interested in how they would change the demon races (or species, as they're called in Italian apparently). I was pretty sure they'd just get the English->Italian treatment and that's exactly what happened, but there's still interesting stuff that happened, such as...

Brute: Orco (Ogre). I'm not sure how I feel about this one yet. It sure is... interesting. It kinda fits, since the onis are "japanese ogres", but at the same time I don't feel like it's "generic" enough to be the name of a whole race of demons. It's basically the reason I'm making this post. Plus, "Orco" is also Orcus’ italian name.

Fiend: Diavolo (Devil). Just like the English term, it's used both for the Devil and, well, devils, mostly of the christian kind.

Night: Oscuro (Dark). This one just missed the point, since they're supposed to be "night demons". Oh well. I guess night is dark.

Yoma: Yoma (Yoma). Yeah.

Wilder: Selvaggio (Wild). Not much to say. I like it better than the English one.

Fallen: Caduto (Fallen). It's the same term we use for "fallen angel" (angelo caduto), so it was pretty much the obvious and obviously correct choice.

Fairy: Fata (Fairy). It's pretty much only used for female entities, personally I think Folletto would've been more fitting. It refers to (mostly) mischievious little creatures (mostly) from european folklore.

Haunt: Spettro (Specter). Works fine.

That's all the races I could find. Orco definitely steals the spotlight for how interesting it is, but there's some more food for thought in there. I didn’t even consider the original Japanese names since the translation is based on the English script and we all know (?) how different the English names for races are from their Japanese counterparts.

Here's some more stuff unrelated to races:

Reason: Visione (Vision). I know it's not kotowari, but it works better than a more literal translation like Ragione would have. It's meant to be Vision as "an idea for the future". If I had to choose a term, I think I'd go with Principio, which means "beginning" and is also used for "moral principles". I really like Visione though.

Will o' Wisp: Will o' Wisp (Will o' Wisp). Dunno why they didn't change its name to "Fuoco fatuo", which is literally "Ignis fatuus" and is commonly used. Pretty weird. Plus, Jack-o'-Lantern has dashes. Will o' Wisp does not. I am going mad.

Demi-fiend: Mezzo-diavolo (lit. Half-devil). Obviously, they thought that the "Fiend" in Demi-fiend is the same as the Fiend race, and who wouldn't, just by looking at the English script? As for the "Mezzo": the "demi" in Demi-fiend comes from demigod, demi+god, which in Italian is semidio, semi+dio. Our "semi", however, is much more commonly used than the English "demi", so Semi-diavolo, Semi-demone or whatever would be nowhere near as "special" as Demi-fiend is. Mezzo-diavolo, on the other hand, loses that mythological appeal, but that "zz" makes it sound kinda derogatory, which I think is pretty fitting. It reminds me of mezzosangue (half-blood). I've seen some Italian fans hating this term with burning passion, but most of them would've probably hated every other choice as well.

In conclusion, I'm really glad we're finally getting translations, and so far they've been pretty good imho. I'd like them better if they were translated from the Japanese script, but that wouldn't really be an issue if the English translations were closer to the source material. In a post like this I'm obviously focusing on the "bad stuff", but all things considered, even if I wish we got something better, I'm pretty satisfied with the end result.

[talestoenrage]

Persona 5

Last night, I finally finished Persona 5, and...it wasn’t as good as Persona 4. Now that I have all the available facts, I finally think I can fairly unpack my reasons why. Behind the cut, for anyone else who’s still working on it and doesn’t want spoilers.

The first thing to note is that I am a huge Persona 4 fan. It’s not a perfect game (but then, nothing is); it starts off very slowly, its once-lauded LGBT content is actually not good in the cold light of day when LGBT content is (however slowly) becoming more common in video games, and it has a long, LONG day that is just...awful. Misogynist and transphobic as hell. But overall, it’s a hell of a game that I recommend to almost anyone, even with those caveats. It’s also a game that’s almost 9 years old, so why do I think it’s better than the sequel that came out this year?

Certainly, Persona 5 has a lot of gameplay improvements. There’s more variety in combat, with new types of attacks and status effects you can inflict and have inflicted on you. Adding guns as another piece of equipment gives everyone in your party additional options. Most importantly, the social links the current Persona games rely on for their flavor have added gameplay benefits, as different ranks will grant you useful skills in and out of combat, at a pace that lets you naturally integrate the new options rather than being overwhelmed by them. And the negotiation system with the enemies (imported back from the base SMT series) means that what you fight can matter beyond “this is their weakness/XP gain/possible item drops.” In every measurable way, combat in 5 is better than 4. Even the dungeons are improved, because the set designs stand out better than 4′s randomized crawling. Plus if you do want random dungeon crawls, there’s a whole huge area that calls back to Persona 3′s Tartarus. The best of both worlds, right? The problem is that while combat in 5 is a great improvement, combat is not what I loved in Persona 4 anyway. It was the writing and the story.

If you haven’t played Persona 4, the main plot revolves around a series of murders in a rural Japanese town. After the first two, the main character and his recent friends discover another world, and that it’s connected to the murders so far. When a third person goes missing, they save them, and then decide to work on stopping any further murders and figure out who’s behind them. On its own, this is a workable plot that stands out among JRPGs for being decidedly small scale. You aren’t setting out to stop an evil empire or find your missing father, but it’s a worthy goal, and the fantastical elements explain why you can’t just go to the police about it.

What makes the game sing is the writing for the other members of your group, and for the social links you make to gain power. Your party is a bunch of teenagers, and sometimes they’re, well, shitty in the way teens so often are. They care for each other and stick their necks out, but they’ll also crack inappropriate jokes or be insensitive because they’re still learning how to act like adults. It occasionally goes too far (see Teddy), but mostly it felt believable, as did any of the romance scenes if you choose to date any of your classmates. On top of that, with the exception of the main character, you gain team members by saving them from their own Shadow, which stands for the parts of themselves they don’t want to admit are real. Sure, you beat them when they become the boss, but then the character in question has to accept the parts of themselves they don’t like to admit are there, something that all of us have.

Meanwhile, the social links do the heavy lifting of making the town feel like a real place. Sometimes you’re doing real work to improve someone’s life, sometimes you’re just there for them when they hit a snag and need to process it. But it’s a reminder that outside of the fantasy elements of going into the TV world and fighting weird creatures, you live in a town with “real” people that have real problems. That’s not quite what your team member’s social links are about, but instead it’s about someone who has admitted they have issues...and then you have to help them work through that. Admitting they have a problem is just the first step, not the solution.

If this sounds more like a review of Persona 4 than 5, I can understand that. But I needed to unpack what I love about 4 first, because if I’m going to say 5 isn’t as good, I think it’s only fair to explain what I love about 4 and why. And the main stumbling block for 5 is a combination of writing and, to a lesser degree, a mixed translation job.

The translation isn’t terrible-I don’t think it will spawn any memes online due to particular lines. But some subtlety is lost, and lines that should hit harder lose impact because the sentence structure doesn’t work as it should in English. It’s hard to say if it’s just a case of being too literal or being rushed for time, or some combination.

But even with better translation, the writing just falls flat. 5 raises a lot of questions with its central premise, where your group “steals” the hearts of bad people to make them change and be good, but it’s resolutely uninterested in answering half of them. It will tell you all about the mechanics of how you do it and what happens to the person, but it doesn’t want to deal with the ethics at all for half of the game, and then when it comes up, it’s a half hearted ‘were we doing the right thing?” when people start saying bad stuff about the Phantom Thieves. Are all the villains you take down engaging in truly reprehensible behavior? Yes. Are they largely insulated from official control? Yes, and for reasons beyond general “looking the other way,” since the final human villain is revealed to be covering for everyone you fought before. But there’s never a conversation where your group, the people actually altering people’s personalities, ever ask themselves if it’s okay to be making such radical changes, or asking if you are returning them to normal versus changing a “normal” person into a different version that didn’t exist before. And even the half hearted attempts to question it get shot down by your character’s mouth piece, the fame whore, whose very questionable motivations for wanting to continue are ALSO never questioned, except very briefly near the end. I didn’t need the game to tell me I was wrong for what I was doing, but I at least wanted a discussion, even if it ended with “this may be a bad thing, but we need to do it because no one else can touch them.”

Perhaps the social links would have saved it, but almost all of them outside of the main party ones end the same way. You get up to rank 7 or 8, find out there’s a road block of someone being bad, and then you get a request to change their hearts. Rinse and repeat. This throws the question of how ethical your behavior is into even sharper relief, and adds in the issue of making every resolution to the social links be “I did magic, and then they figured out I was a Phantom Thief, but it’s okay because they said they would keep my secret.” The first few times, I found it charming. The 10nth time, I felt like I might as well stop pretending and just tell anyone who asked “Yeah, I’m one of them. Want me to change some guy’s head? I got my magic gun I can use.”

Most of the party member social links don’t involve that, but most of them also fall flat. Ryuji’s is just there, Ann involves helping her realize other models can be mean and she’ll lose out if she doesn’t put more effort in, Yusuke is having art block, and Haru needs to learn how to manage a corporation she unexpectedly inherited. None of them are offensive, but they’re mostly boring. Only Futaba (trying to reacclimate to society after being a recluse for years) and Makoto (mostly forgettable but she slaps another girl and then challenges a would be pimp to a street fight, which was great) stand out, or seem like you actually do anything to help other than be there as they talk it out on their own.

Then there’s the framing device, where you’ve already been captured and are telling a prosecutor the story of how you came to be the Phantom Thieves. It intrudes every time you hit a certain point in the plot, and whenever you start a new social link. It didn’t take long at all for me to roll my eyes every time it intruded to remind me I wasn’t ACTUALLY in May, I was just RECOUNTING what I did in May. Plus its plot hook of “someone betrayed you to us” was blunted when the person who did it joined my group last and was literally blackmailing us to quit after pulling “one last job.” Gee, wonder who could have sold us out to the cops? The shitty teen detective who talks about people as vermin? I’M SHOCKED. 

Now, I will give 5 credit, it has two solid plot twists. The first is when the framing device resolves (assuming you don’t get the bad ending), and Akechi shoots you...only to be revealed that your team was actually paying attention, realized he was lying, and used what they knew about the Metaverse to trick him into shooting a dupe. It wasn’t worth the hassle, but it was nice to see the group not be idiots. The second, that Igor was actually a fake as well and behind all the trouble, was more genuinely surprising, but it did make the voice change that we’d assumed was a weird miscast into a clue that we’d missed. 

The final boss fight being about pulling out a giant spirit gun and shooting a god in the head was goofy as hell, but unintentionally so, which is unfortunate.

Would I recommend Persona 5? With reservations. Along with all the issues I’ve noted, the game feels too long for the plot it has; I was close to 150 hours when I finished, and even taking out the grinding I did at different points, I felt like I went through a lot of filler dialogue to get there. Plus the opening to 5 is, if anything, even LONGER than 4. You show up in town on the 9nth, and it’s not until the 18nth that you have full control over your actions, with multiple mandatory tutorial sections.

At least the music is still great.

[badlydrawndrawnings]

Of Character Analysis and Comparison For the Detective

Because someone put Bad Ending 1 on Youtube, creating early discourse on the Youtube comments, so I’m like ‘screw it, i’m posting this right now and it still has some parts unpolished since I used (and lost) multiple translations’!

Major Ass Spoilers for Persona 5 (and Persona 1, Persona 2, Persona 3, Persona 4, and believe or not, Shin Megami Tensei If)

Recipe: Goro Akechi (Akechi Goro)

Ingredients: Reiji Kido from Persona 1, Jun Kurosu (Kashihara) from Persona 2 (Innocent Sin variation), expired sugar, expired maple syrup, whipped cream, cherries. Substitutes can be Ken Amada from Persona 3 and honey. *squints*  Oh, and Tohru Adachi from Persona 4 and Ideo Hazama from SMT ...if can be used as substitutes as well.

Steps:

1. Pre-heat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Turn it off soon afterwards.

2. Get about 2 cup of Reiji Kido, and put it in a large bowl. Specifically, 1 cup for containing Reiji’s backstory as a bastard child* to a rich man who ditched his lover because he can, and another cup for Reiji’s terrible lust for revenge via killing his father (or Takahisa Kandori in Reiji’s case, his half brother since their father is dead in P1 proper, so go after the next best thing). NOTE: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD THE LOVER (aka the mother) BE ALIVE FOR GORO. IN FACT, GORO’S MOTHER SHOULD RUINED HER HEALTH AND DIE DUE TO THE ABANDONMENT SHE GOT FROM HER LOVER (and general idea of being stuck with a child).

3. Get three tablespoons of being an orphan and pretty much suffering as a youngster because well, it’s not Little Orphan Annie.**

4. Stir the mixture together until it you can’t tell the two ingredients apart, and make sure he is alone for about 48 hours in the fridge so Goro can get a sense of resentment to others, desire to be love, and the will to do anything to get his ‘justice’ on his asshole father. You can leave it in the fridge a little longer than that (49 hours is best). He needs to be bitter and alone. Like, super bitter and alone. Like, so super bitter and alone he doesn’t think clearly and be like ‘hm, it seems I can’t find another way to deal with him because it’s not like I have friends or family to keep me on the straight path’.

5. Add one and half cup of sifted Jun Kurosu. It doesn’t have to be sifted, but Goro is supposed to look more fluffy due to his hairstyle. This cup should contain Jun’s status as a villain (or antagonist, whatever you think is the better term***), foil for the protagonist of the leading game (Joker/Akira in Goro’s case), terrible crimes they did (er, terrible actions for Jun as JOKER I guess since he didn’t kill anyone, only making them empty husks), and being helped (more like being unintentionally manipulated) by a god. NOTE: UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD JUN KASHIHARA FROM ETERNAL PUNISHMENT SHOULD BE ADDED SINCE THAT’S THE RESULT OF A RESET CREATED BY THE INNOCENT SIN CAST AND FRANKLY, GORO ISN’T ALLOW A RESET (as far as we know).

6. Stir the mixture again until it looks like pancake batter. When that happens, adds half cup expired sugar and three tablespoons of expired maple syrup to make sure the sweetness is the right amount of awkward (Goro has a soft spot underneath his issues and flaws and will show it to one person, but will not admit it because when confronted with it, well, he’s super bitter and alone). Stir again until mixture looks like a sweet sweet mess. If you don’t have maple syrup, honey is acceptable.

7. Pour mixture into cake pan. No, the cake pan shouldn’t have parchment paper inside it. Bang the pan onto the table (or counter, or where you’re making this at) to make sure there are no air bubbles.

8. Turn back on the oven until it reaches 300 degrees Fahrenheit again. Place the cake pan into the oven. Let it bake until it looks like it’s a fluffy burnt pancake because someone was supposed to check on it, and instead, managed to make him their personal yet expandable supernatural hitman (dad little’s villain is more like it...but isn’t that more of a female villain trait?).

9. After letting it cool for an hour, decorated with whipped cream and cherries. Take one slice from it, and eat it while trying to figure out your feelings. Once that is done, try to take another slice. You see that the cake has vanish.

If you don’t have Reiji Kido, you can use one cup Ken Amada (containing terrible lust of revenge via killing), but you got to put six tablespoons of being an orphan and pretty much suffering as a youngster. Also, make sure the mixture is in place into the fridge again for 52 hours so the mixture has more time to think about everything it can do dealing with his asshole father.

If you don’t have Jun Kurosu, you can use one and half cup of sifted Ideo Hazama (status as villain, even more bitterness at others around him, the mother not being in life-granted, Hazama mother just ditched him and took his sister away-,and strange vagueness for their fate like did  you and your sister actually just vanish forever) and three TEASPOONS (not tablespoons, TEASPOONS) of Tohru Adachi (foil to protagonist/got powers by goddess, job occupation, and terrible actions). UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU ADD ANYMORE THAN THAT (they don’t really have the same motives, and well, Adachi isn’t MIA and has a solid conclusion).

If you don’t have Reiji Kido or Jun Kurosu... well, use the measurements for the substitutes, but put it in the microwave before baking.

So yeah, that’s Goro Akechi (Akechi Goro)! He has lots of issues (like jc you ought to have therapy and legit question, does Japan has good therapy because if they don’t is that why he fell through the crack?), and while a victim of unfortunate circumstances in society, you little shit you’re also a perpetrator as well by making things worse like were you thinking clearly (answer: no). If your dead body was shown on screen, then I say you earn your redemption equal death. Sadly, you’re MIA for potential spinoffs.

Man, maybe I should make a recipeh for something else, like prompto^.

  \(oWO)/

*People either forget or don’t realize that bastard children in Japan and other Asia countries are treated worse than the West since over there, family's image and prestige holds a lot of weight (hell, if you seen any J-Drama or K-Drama that has bastard kids or implied bastard kids, you know they get treated like dirt). Sure, bastard kids aren’t consider a good thing anywhere in the world, but in Japan and other countries, like it’s the end of the world cause it can metaphorically destroy lives, and in Goro case, made his own mother kill herself from the shame and abandonment (Goro’s ultimate plan was to help his father get to the top of his political career before spilling the beans to the world, forcing Shidou to kiss his career goodbye). Hell, Goro is like, the Anti-Reiji since Reiji got lucky his mother decided to bear the storm and raise him, because I swear, Reiji could have turn out like Goro (re: might have killed more than just Kandori) if she wasn’t alive (she does ask P1 Hero/Naoya to befriend Reiji, and frankly, if Goro had friends before/during his revenge plan, they could have been like ‘don’t do the thing’...then again Kandori does die due to the P1 cast so maybe they would have help him with the thing?).

**I had three other articles about this, but I didn’t bookmark them. I’m sorry. You can type ‘Japan foster system’, and you can see some of the problems it has. It’s somewhat of a ‘blink and miss’ conversation with Goro in the game as it’s brought up once in his Co-Op/Confidant, but knowing some context explain (not excuse) why Goro did his revenge plan and not do anything else

***Oh boy. Let’s admit it, Jun did wanted revenge at his friends due to ‘Maya’s death’ when they were kids, and pretty much was villain/antagonist for 2/3 of the game. Yes, he was manipulated and incorrectly remember, but he was still a villain/antagonist and didn’t realize the truth until they beat the crap out of him and became so horrified with what he done, becomes the atoner. Goro is like the anti-Jun in this regard since Goro was only close to Joker/Akira and at best ‘hello...you’ with the others, and well, not MIA/dead. If Cognitive!Goro didn’t interrupt, it was obvious Goro was going to take the PT offer of re-joining them to take Shidou along side them (before he goes to jail because there’s no way he going to get away scott free). Even before Goro’s death, they admit they know how he feels and tried to comforts (er, cheer up?) Goro after he admits his life is just a bunch of bad choices (re: being envious of them having friends and fame of being heroes while he was going to get the short end if his plan work) and pretty much craps on himself (re: couldn’t be special, tells the PT it’s better to kill him so he couldn’t get in their way and tells them they should had killed him when given the chance right before he dies on them anyway). Hell, even after Goro’s death, in a group chat, despite the mix feelings, mourn him and feel bad for him (Yusuke pointing out he could have been just like Goro if he didn’t have the others stands out the most imo as it drives home the point that despite everything, he was like them) and fully put Shidou as the culprit to everyone’s problems when they confronted him about everything, from his crimes to the treatment of his own kid (logic behind this: Goro was the killer, but Shidou was the murderer as he planned it all).

^release the forbidden robbie daymond interview atlus because i swear to f*cking god i’m going to make more shitty ffxv jokes, not just relating to goro