#i may have watched a bit of a playthrough of a certain time loop game and got inspired

[rizardofether]

I got an idea for one of those talk about your characters prompts:

How would your Commander/other GW2 characters react to being stuck in a time loop?

[ga-yuu]

I hope you don't mind me asking you this but have you ever thought of playing otome games from switch? games like Amnesia, Piofiore, Olympia Soiree, Café Enchante, Cupid Parasite, Birushana, etc. ?? they have beautiful and thoughtful MCs!

Thought? I WANT to play these games but too bad I don't own switch. But yeah, I can play it on a PC using an emulator. I downloaded Piofiore and played like 1 chapter of the prologue and didn't continue because I didn't have time(not that it was boring, it was very interesting). I've played the mobile version of Amnesia (only the prologue because you have to pay for playing the routes) and I've seen the anime (was quite boring!).

Cafe Enchante and Birushana are on my MUST PLAY LIST, but I haven't officially played them myself because...again, I have no time. But let me tell you, I sometimes watch playthroughs of these games on youtube. There is a youtube called dirili , who narrates the stories. I may not sit through the whole route but I listen to certain chapters of each game in the background when I'm doing something else. If you can count that as playing a game, then I've played:

Code realize - Lupin's route.

Collar x Malice - Little bit of Enamoto and Sasazuka

Period cube - Zain

Birushana - Tomomori (this asshole!), Noritsune (only that one scene where Tomomori and Shigehira dress Shana as a girl! I played that on loop!)

Reine des fleurs (one of the most visually pretty otome games I've ever seen! and there is also a blonde hair blue eyes guy!)

Now the ones I've actually played include:

Diabolik lovers (first two games)

Ozmafia

Sweet fuse

Love spell written in the stars.

Cinderella Phenomenon

Locked heart

Hakuouki 1st game(only a little bit of the prologue)

Most of the Ikemen series

Court of darkness (Mostly prince's path)

Then some very mediocre other games on mobile (these are those when I first started getting into otome games)

And yeah, I do think the MCs in these games are extremely beautiful. Even if some of them have long brown hair, at least they have a unique-looking hairstyle (for example Ichika from Collar x Malice) they wear beautiful-looking dresses (for example Cardia from Code realize and Shana from Birushana). They all still look very beautiful and actually looks like a main character of a game.

[prokopetz]

I haven't played a game through since Witness, but the specificity of your recs made me feel interested and safe enough to try again, and I'm really enjoying Refunct and the Pedestrian! I was wondering if you had some recs for my 11 year old. He's REALLY into games where reality/physics work oddly - Recursed (which we got because of your rec!) and Portal. Monument Valley, Eva Explores, and some phone merge games. He also loves Minecraft and Witness, though the 'it's fake' ending makes him MAD.

I can see from your follow-up message that you already found a previous post of mine on the subject, so I'm going to focus on titles mentioned neither in that post nor in your request.

The first recent game that springs to mind for that particular set of criteria is 2019's Outer Wilds. (Not to be confused with the similarly named The Outer Worlds – the two were published less than six months apart, which sometimes leads to mixups!) It's a time-loop walking sim, similar to TIMEframe (recced in the linked post), in which a solar system is caught in a 22-minute loop where each each planet undergoes its own unique form of apocalyptic destruction, followed by the star itself going supernova. Because each planet's terrain changes over time due to its ongoing apocalypse, what you can access on that planet depends on what point in the loop you visit it.

The game’s ultimate goal is to figure out what’s causing the time loop, so expect to do a lot of reading ancient alien inscriptions and such. There's some orbital physics involved in travelling from planet to planet, but don't let that intimidate you – it's a lot more forgiving than it looks, unless you're keen to try out some speedrunning tech; as the game's 100% world record holder at the time of this posting aptly put it, gameplay in a casual playthrough consists principally of picking things up and putting them down.

I’m also going to plug The Talos Principle, which was mentioned but not discussed in the linked post. With respect to your son’s criteria, the operating principles of the game’s reality are fairly straightforward, but the nature of that reality is a delved into a fair bit. It’s sort of an inversion of The Witness’ big twist in that it’s made obvious right off the bat – at least to the player – that the reality you’re presented with is in some way artificial, and the mystery is more about who set things up this way and why, with a particular emphasis on how to reason and draw conclusions about such a world when you’re looking at it from the inside. I’m not sure if eleven is too young to be engaged by long-winded philosophical maundering about the Simulation Hypothesis and related topics, so I’ll let you be the judge there!

A few other, possibly somewhat less suitable candidates off the top of my head:

Antichamber – I don’t have much to say about this one; the trailer is self-explanatory, and anyone who enjoyed Disoriented and Portal will probably love this, too. Just watch out for motion sickness; if Manifold Garden didn’t make you queasy, you’ll have nothing to worry about here.  

The Gardens Between – A short point-and-click puzzler where you have very little direct control over the player characters, instead playing and rewinding a fixed sequence of events while making small changes to each iteration and watching how things play out differently in response – sort of like coming at a puzzle platformer from the opposite direction. No content warnings to speak of, though I find that younger players often find the story a lot sadder than I think the writers intended.  

GRIS – If side-scrolling platformers aren’t a dealbreaker, this may be one to check out. Beautiful artwork paired with a textless narrative that might best be described as “gently surreal”; in spite of the threatening appearance of certain creatures you encounter, it isn’t actually possible to die (though you can get roughed up a bit, so it’s not entirely non-violent). What the story is aiming for may be somewhat obscure to anyone who’s never experienced a death in the family, so I’d recommend it for younger gamers with that qualifier in mind.  

OneShot – Sort of like an old-school JRPG with no combat, this one’s premise is that the player character is the Messiah, which means they can talk to God, who is of course the player themselves. The puzzles take that fourth wall break as far as they possibly can, with solutions that variously involve restarting your save file, manipulating the size and position of the game window, reading and editing text files the game drops in different places on your hard drive, and at one point even running two copies of the game simultaneously.  

Perfect Vermin – A short, free-to-play first person title that initially appears to be about hunting down alien creatures that mimic office furniture and killing them with a sledgehammer. I probably don’t need to tell you that Shit Gets Weird. The subject matter may not be terribly relatable to an eleven-year-old, but a. it’s free, and b. a complete playthrough only takes about 20 minutes unless you’re achievement-hunting, so it’s no big loss if it misses the mark – maybe play it yourself first before passing on the rec. Content warning for heavy (albeit stylised) gore.  

Please Don’t Touch Anything – The player character is left alone with a mysterious control panel and sternly admonished not to touch anything; shenanigans immediately ensue. This one is focused almost entirely on achievement-hunting, with no overarching story to speak of (unless you count the 100% ending where it’s jokingly revealed that the panel is actually just a fancy coffee machine, anyway). It’s a great one if you just want to click stuff and see what happens. Content warnings for jump scares, the repeated extinction of all human life, and mild gore.  

The Swapper – A side-scrolling puzzle platformer from the same writer as The Talos Principle. This one’s a bit like a 2D Portal, except instead of a portal gun you have a cloning gun that can produce copies of yourself and (apparently) swap your consciousness among the clones. Another one that leavens relatively conventional gameplay with heavy philosophy, this time with a focus on the continuity of identity. Notable for having an ending that manages to be a total brainfuck in spite of carrying the story’s premise to its obvious and rigorously logical conclusion.

(Also, based on your described preferences this one’s more of a rec for you personally than for your son, so I’m not including it on the main list, but if you got a kick out of Refunct you definitely need to check out EQI, Self-described as “synthwave parkour”, with just enough of a physics-warping puzzle element to keep things interesting!)

[iaintyourbro]

The Unknown Journey Continues

Part 1

I know it's been a while... but I've been going down a rabbit hole with @starlight-samurai regarding time loops, Jenova, Minerva, and more fun. So I figured I'd try to put it into one post to get the insanity out of my head. Everything in here is based on things we've found by either going through more obscure Ultimanias, learning more about Dirge of Cerberus and trying to decipher what the hell Jenova is by putting together various sources - including other Square Enix games - and how they handled freakishly similar scenarios.

Did you know there is a companion mobile game for it that was out on the good old flip phones? Did you know there was an online mode in Dirge of Cerberus only available in Japan, but had story elements that were not in the main game?

The sad part is, there's still so much to go through...

(I've also had various discussions with @ourfinalheaven, Manu, who doesn't have Tumblr, so here is her Twitter. and Somebody's Nightmare (here is her Twitter). So I wanted to tag them here, as it's much more fun to discuss these ideas as a group, since it'll only help you build on and strengthen your own ideas.)

Please be aware, there will be Spoilers for FFVII - Almost all Compilation titles, Xenogears, and NieR Automata throughout this.

So let's go on a journey where we explore what actually already exists in the compilation - including the idea of the whispers and timeloops - how Minerva may play into everything, and what exactly Jenova is capable of doing.

I asked Sesi if he'd ever played any of the NieR games, because he'd said something that made me wonder if they were going to take a similar approach. As a very, very quick high level summary: NieR Automata deals with a time loop type of idea. The androids will be rebooted and repeat the same things over and over again. This is broken when 2B is killed by A2 because she becomes infected with a virus. That being said, you have the option after Ending E to either erase all of your data and end the cycle OR you can try again. The Pods have a discussion, and one asks, "But won't they just do the same thing again?" and the other replies with "Maybe. But it could also be different this time."

Here's Sesi's message back to me when I asked him about this (cleaned up a bit since we were having a casual conversation over Discord):

Maybe I could just guess based comparatively on the Dirge storyline, because that was sort of SE's first flirtation with “robots and androids” since they’re all programmed and locked behind like task managers and shit that can shut them down. The story of the online mode for DoC that came out in Japan, we never got to see it, you’re basically an Android OC and you have to get to “the end of the level” and then essentially die, and a new one takes its place. This keeps happening until Weiss is essentially freed from being able to be task managed by the guys who are suppose to be able to control them and I know from tons of years with Square games that they’re verrrrry bad at differentiating their narratives they tend to just keep “ripping themselves off” so is it anything close to that?

Cuz if so I think I kinda know what you’re saying and yeah, I agree, I think with CC bringing in its poetic symbolism and LOVELESS, and DoC bringing back the cyclic nature of the lore, whispers, premonitions and future visions, proto-Materia and the perversion of this next cycle since the planet can no longer cleanse and protect itself and its will is weakening lesser and lesser to the point where it’s fate is “in a true sense of jeopardy This time essentially it’s all tied in together and sort of played as though it's a fated track; a cycle of events and something has hitched it, thus the whispers manifesting and Sephiroth's higher implied control over his destiny. Of course, even all that is just their new red herring game, but it’s definitely a part of the lore they want to play with, in order to go back and reMAKE the OG with the comp inserted from inception. Also gut punch a lot.

Time Loops

I was somewhat surprised to find out that this concept is NOT new to FFVII's universe. It's discussed in Dirge of Cerberus... probably one of the least played and least understood of the compilation. (Trying to sell a third person shooter with terrible controls to a market of mostly people used to turn-based combat wasn't going to go well.)

On top of it, we didn't even get all of it, since online mode was never released outside of Japan, and the Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode was on Amp'd Mobile and Verizon flip phones back in 2006. Were you around for the cell phones in 2006? I had the ones on the list, and how somebody could play a game on those blows my mind.

Square has a tendency to reuse themes from their other titles. Probably one of the most blatant is the similarities between Xenogears and Final Fantasy VII. They were both being developed at the same time and a lot of ideas that didn't make it into FFVII ended up in Xenogears.

NieR

So how does this work? In NieR (both Replicant and Automata), you play the same path multiple times. Each time, it's slightly different depending on what side quests you did your first and second playthrough, but there's also other subtle differences throughout the story. In Automata, you get to play as 2B your first playthrough and 9S for your second. They follow the same path, but you get it from his perspective the second time and it reveals a bit more of what is going on. However, even with some slight differences, the main plot points stay the same and the ending result it also the same.

Then on your third playthrough, you wake up in the Bunker, and you're getting ready to go on a new mission. This time, though, 2B is killed and shit hits the fan. Things get crazy, you play as a new character: A2. In the end, pretty much everyone "dies", but you can choose to "reboot" and try again. You also can say you are done and let them all rest and delete your save data (the game gives you the option for both Automata and Replicant, and with Replicant, it actually leads to a new ending).

The striking thing for me is... There are certain events that will always happen, no matter what.

Fixed Points in Time

It's been years since I've watched Doctor Who, but there was something that stuck with me, and that was the fixed points in time. You can read about all of them here, but here's the basics:

Now, of course Doctor Who goes into this with much more detail and it's a recurring theme. However, as you read through that page, you'll probably find many aspects that have been used in various JRPGs that you've played. And Doctor Who most likely pulled some of the idea from classic Science Fiction novels. Each story puts its own spin on it.

How does this relate to FFVII Remake? Well, when they say that the major plot points will stay the same, it reminds me of this. No matter what, Cloud must fall into the Sector 5 Church, the Sector 7 Plate must be dropped, Aerith and Zack both must die, and Meteor has to be summoned, to name a few. So, with a time loop, those things would still have to take place in order to prevent a complete collapse of reality (at least in how Doctor Who uses it).

Therefore, the Whispers are ensuring that the Will of the Planet is followed.

One of the major themes in FFVII is that of loss. People die and they do not come back. Yes, other FF games do allow this to happen (FFX, FFXIII, FFXV), but VII is not those games. It was written with that idea in mind, that once a person dies, they, just like in real life, are dead and cannot be brought back.

I've previously written that I think they'll make us believe we are able to change fate, but we will eventually be slammed with the reality that we can't. That is because the planet has determined that certain events are fixed points.

Xenogears

Xenogears takes a bit of a different approach to the loop idea. Instead of repeating the same time period over and over, it has the characters reincarnated, and the same outcome happens each time: Elly dies. However, each time it's different. After all, they're in various time periods, in some cases thousands of years apart.

In all of the lives of Fei (who will have a different name in each time period) and Elly (who is always Elly/Elhaym), Elly will end up dying trying to protect Fei and the others. In one life, she is a religious figure at a totally not Catholic church, in another she's the wife of a scientist who was working to create children from nanomachines due to mass infertility issues. But she is ALWAYS with Fei, even if his name changes.

In her Mother Elhaym time, this is when Lacan (Fei) finally snaps. Though he's not fully aware of his past lives, he becomes aware, the anger consumes him, and he becomes Grahf. Fei is then reborn into the time period you play the game in.

There's a lot to unpack with this, so I won't go into it. Grahf wants to destroy God (Deus) because he thinks if he does, then it'll stop the suffering (his suffering).

If you do want to read more about Grahf, you can do so here, but it probably won't make much sense unless you've played Xenogears up to that point... Since it's much later in the game that this is all explained.

Lacan's desire was to stop the cycle of Elly always sacrificing herself for his sake. Though Grahf is not a perfect existence - he's not fully "The Contact", he sacrifices himself in order to let Fei move forward, and hopefully stop the cycle, by destroying the Deus system. (Elly also tries to sacrifice herself here, but Fei goes after her and stops her.)

Now, some people may think I'm saying that Cloud or somebody is going to do this in order to save Aerith or Zack (or his village or mom), but in FFVII if they do the loop method, I don't think Cloud, Tifa, Barret, and the others are aware of it. Most likely, it's only 'Sephiroth' and Aerith who are aware of it.

How this Could Be used for Final Fantasy VII

I'm stressing could because there's so many different possibilities on how they use this (if they are using this), so please, don't take this as fact. This is based on speculation based on what we know.

A time loop is a great way to explain away the differences in the story that we've seen: Biggs being alive, Wedge living for longer than he should have, etc. Since these are not major plot changes, they can simply say that this time it'll be slightly different... but your fixed points (major plot points) will remain the same.

It's a way to pull in some of the more obscure themes from Dirge of Cerberus and also play with the LOVELESS lore.

It could all simply be a big red herring and it's really just a remake of OG, but with the compilation tied together nicely... since it works much better when it's combined and not in 50 different games, books, movies, etc.

I don't think it's a "sequel" per say, not in the way I generally perceive a sequel. It's more of a loop of the same thing. The question is, when is the loop started and what will cause it to end? When will the planet (if it even is the planet) determine that it's good enough to begin moving forward?

JENOVA, Sephiroth, Genesis, and Minerva - Oh My!

Let's be real... Genesis isn't exactly the most popular character in the FFVII Compilation... but what if they make him one of the most important to the story? //Ducks as various fruits and vegetable are thrown in my direction//

I think what Genesis is probably most known for is his love of LOVELESS. He has the entire thing memorized and randomly says lines from it throughout Crisis Core. LOVELESS lore is still something I'm trying to grasp, so I am not going to comment much on it. Once I understand it more, I'll update this.

...And then this happens. The secret ending for Dirge of Cerberus, where Genesis picks up Weiss. Weiss, who has now been introduced along with Nero in FFVII INTERmission and is an optional ridiculously hard boss in the Shinra battle simulator in chapter 17 of the main story. There is some lore associated with the battle sim - so if you don't plan on beating it or you just can't, you can look up the pre-battle and post-battle cut scenes on YouTube. They're very short, but interesting. (I beat this asshole last night - it's a hell of a fight.)

....To Be Continued because apparently Tumblr won't allow more than 10 images per post now.... Next will be more on JENOVA and Sephiroth along with Minerva.

[scoutception]

A look at: Moon.

Writing reviews is always a learning experience for me, and one of the important things I’ve learned is that, sometimes, it’s pretty hard to write about certain individual games, visual novels, or such considering the kind of detail I like to go into. Therefore, this will be the first in a new series of mini reviews, or as mini as they get with me. Maybe there’s just not enough to a game to really give me details to dig into, or maybe it’s difficult to talk about without giving away more than I wish, or maybe there’s just something related to it that I’m more interested in talking about than the actual product; whatever the reason, these will hopefully be less rambly and excessive than my usual reviews, while still giving enough of an overview that they stand as proper reviews on their own. Either way, the subject of this post is an old, obscure visual novel from 1997 with a bit of history to it, called Moon.

Moon was developed by Tactics, a humble developer of adult visual novels, and was the second one developed by them, with the first, Dōsei, seemingly just being, well, a plain H-game, and the third, One ~To the Radiant Season~, while still obscure, is actually fairly notable for being a prototype to Kanon in a lot of ways, as many key staff at Tactics would later break off to form Key afterwards, with them having also worked on Moon beforehand. Thus, Moon is in a very interesting spot when it comes to the progression of the developers that would change VNs as a genre with the release of Kanon, and that’s really the only reason I checked it out.

Moon follows Ikumi Amasawa, a girl who joins a mysterious organization called Fargo, which recruits others with the promise of acquiring an alleged “invisible strength” that can put one far ahead of ordinary humans, in order to investigate their possible connections to the murder of her mother, and if possible, take revenge on the ones responsible. Upon arriving at the Fargo facility, Ikumi quickly befriends two other initiates with ulterior motives of their own for joining: Haruka Mima, a determined girl with a cool attitude who keeps her goal to herself, and Yui Nakura, a cheerful, but naive girl who’s seeking to bring home her older sister, who joined Fargo several months prior. Though the three agree to become allies and help each other achieve their goals, they are quickly separated in different “classes” housed in different buildings, with Ikumi being assigned to Class A, the most prestigious of them all. Settling into her new life as a Fargo initiate, which mostly consists of “training” with the Minmes and Elpod, machines that confront her with various parts of her very troubled past for the purpose of “mental reinforcement” in the form of a vengeful doppelganger of herself, Ikumi gradually discovers many strange things about her situation, such as there only being one other member of Class A, that being Youko Kanuma, a quiet, cold woman who has been part of Fargo for many years. Additionally, Ikumi is forced to share her room with a strange boy who doesn’t volunteer his name, who, though part of Fargo itself, is quite low ranking, and more than a bit dim witted at times. Worst of all, upon finding a passage that allows her to access the buildings where her allies are kept, Ikumi finds that the other classes are subjected to horrific abuses by Fargo’s personnel in order to further their mental reinforcement. As Ikumi struggles to aid her allies however she can, the confrontations with her past begin to put a heavy strain on her mind, and the existence of the invisible strength Fargo claims to have starts to become more and more plausible.

Needless to say, Moon isn’t exactly Clannad. I did not know much about this VN before I got into it, and finding it to be a psychological horror VN was a bit of a shock. Even more of a shock was just what form the majority of the horror came in. You see, even though One ~To the Radiant Season~, Kanon, and Air were all released as adult games, the h-scenes are very disconnected from the plot, most of the time, to the point of losing nothing from skipping them or even removing them from the game, and were pretty much just obligatory inclusions to help them sell better. From Clannad onward, most Key VNs have been clean to start. With Moon, on the other hand, you can’t go 5 minutes without running into some explicit scene, the main source being the Elpod sequences and the abuses the Fargo personnel inflict, and it wastes no time getting to them, at that. This is the biggest thing that drives off many of the few who go out of their way to experience Moon, and even with me having just watched an understandably censored playthrough of this on Youtube due to its shorter length, I almost quit very early into it, and definitely would have if I had actually played it. The Elpod is one thing, as the sequences are used for the purpose of developing Ikumi, but even then, most of them are just excessively disgusting more than disturbing, and that goes doubly for the sequences outside of it. Instead of really changing things up, they’re just content to get gradually more and more depraved, and outside of disgusting, the main thing I can even call them is repetitive. This is one of my biggest problems with Moon, and it was pretty hard for me to get into it because of it.

Another major problem I have with Moon is how it handles its cast. Moon is pretty short for a VN, only around 10 or 11 hours if you go straight for the true ending, and even though there are 7 endings in total, they don’t add much more time onto that, with two being worse variants on the true ending, and the rest being bad endings gotten through making bad choices. Having as small a cast as it does should naturally work fine with that, but they really aren’t balanced well. While Ikumi gets developed across the whole game, and Yui gets a good arc pretty early on, Haruka only gets a short arc that ends as quickly as it starts and doesn’t do a lot for her, Youko barely has any screentime despite establishing a good dynamic with Ikumi, and the boy doesn’t have much presence or relevance until late in the story. The pacing is just bizarre and rushed feeling.

That’s not to say there aren’t a number of good points to Moon’s story. Ikumi is very well developed throughout the story, with the Minmes in particular leading to many melancholic scenes that make her quite sympathetic, and were definitely the high points of the normally rigid daily schedule much of the story takes place during for me. Despite the story’s flawed handling of some of them, the cast is still decent on a whole, with Youko’s gradually developing friendship with Ikumi and Yui’s development during her arc being some of the more memorable parts for me. The atmosphere is very well done, with the cramped, depressing corridors of the facility always feeling like they’re hiding something awful just around the corner, especially since you need to manually navigate the place using a map screen, and once the plot really kicks into high gear things become much more compelling, with the final days containing many high points in characterization and an infamous mindscrew of a sequence that, once looked back on with a more understanding eye, is actually quite fascinating in its own right.

Visually, Moon’s art was done by Itaru Hinoue, the same artist as the majority of Key’s VNs, and it’s a lot rougher than the art of, say, Kanon. It’s not outright bad, but it looks very dated, with the designs and sprites not really sticking out. The CGs vary in quality, as some look pretty ridiculous, but others are quite good. Most impressive, though, is two animated intro sequences included in the DVD version, which happens to be the only version with an English patch anyway. They’re fairly brief, but do a great job of setting up the atmosphere and premise despite that.

On the sound side, the soundtrack is great. It’s not a very big one, with only about 16 tracks, and the use of them can get a bit repetitive, but most of them are just a joy to listen to. From the electronic and tense Closed Space, to the wistful, yet peaceful The Place Where the Sun Shines, to Youko’s ethereal theme, to the credits theme, Sorrow, and especially the nostalgic music box theme, Memory, it’s worth looking up even if you hold no interest in the VN itself. There’s also voice acting, also added in the DVD version, and most of it is just average, with not many performances standing out, with the exception of Kahoru Sasajima as Ikumi, who delivers a very solid performance, especially during the more intense moments.

Overall, Moon can be a pretty hard sell. While I thought it was a decent experience by the end, its very offputting content, lack of similarity to any other Key works, and bleak atmosphere can make it pretty hard to go through even if you’re prepared for what’s to come. Even if you wanted a horror VN, there’s plenty others out there, like Chaos;Head and Chaos;Child, Higurashi: When They Cry, Wonderful Everyday, Raging Loop, or just about anything from nitro+. That said, if you can stick to the end, I definitely feel it becomes fairly satisfying, and when I got to thinking, I realized something that actually boosted my opinion quite a bit just by itself. As much as Moon is a story about cults and psychic powers with a somewhat unclear point to it all, it’s even more so just a story about a very troubled youth struggling with her grief, irrationally falling in with a bad crowd, and being forced to face her past and actions if she wishes to accomplish anything. Looking at the story that way, it’s actually quite well done, and going in with that in mind may even make it a bit more palatable. Still, I wouldn’t especially go out of my way to recommend it, and ultimately it’s still very far from being one of my favorite visual novels out there. Either way, that concludes my first mini review, which still turned out longer than I thought it would. My next post will be something unusual for me as well, but that’ll take a bit to come. Till next time. -Scout

[transguyedgeworth]

OH HEY YEAH i think the main difference that makes my opinions on certain aa things like. differ from like general consensuses or whatever is the fact that I HAVENT ACTUALLY BEEN PLAYING THE GAMESSSSS i own the first one and played it a long long time ago but other than that. sdfhdfjd i kinda feel bad abt it tbh but whats done is done honestly,, but yeah ive been watching those no commentary walkthroughs on yt since 2, basically i havent done aai2 yet bc i went to aai after 4 and after that i was like I MISS PHOENIXXX so ive been on dual destinies and im abt 2/3 through that.. so my plan is to then go to aai2 and then soj. and tbh i might actually try to emulate and like PLAY those but ive never emulated before so shits scary... whether or not i do that tho i do think i wanna get the turnabout collection for my switch and then i can play thru 2 and 3 eventually n all that shit i am not immune to consumerism smh

as for reginas theme idk man its just me i dont like it u cant make me like it.. like tbh i actually think its like good as in its Effective i think.. but like my ears just hate it idk. i feel like its repetitive too and so it just gets like annoying to listen to for me.. anyway yeah i do agree basically w what you said abt 2-3 and if id played it im pretty sure id hate it too but i mean the shit i like Liked abt it was like. everything you didnt mention jdfghersdhf i love the shit that has nothing to do w the actual fuckin case ie That Part in the plaza w franziska GOD THAT PART.. and also i said this to a friend who id also been talking abt it with another time and like may as well share it with you, au where regina is 20 the ventriloquist is the one who died and everything is Fine.

k laters <3

OKAY OKAY NOT TO LIKE. PRESSURE YOU OR ANYTHING BUT. PLAYING THE GAMES YOURSELF IS A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT EXPERIENCE THAN WATCHING A PLAYTHROUGH. both my partner and i can attest to this, i tried to watch a playthrough of aa1 years ago and it was SO BORING but then when my current roommates wanted to play the series with me i immediately got sucked in. like. there’s some stuff you just... need to Experience for yourself i think but maybe that’s just me?? idk i don’t think i’d even be into the series at all if i hadn’t actually played it myself. 

my roommate and i ended up playing aai and aai2 after trials and tribulations because he was telling me that that’s the order the games take place in chronologically and also cuz he knows i kin really like edgeworth ghdfnd honestly i’m afraid i won’t be able to get through aa4 for like. a similar reason that you had for skipping aai2 because I Will Miss Edgeworth. 

also emulating is totally not that scary i promise the scariest part is finding the roms. emulating is totally safe and as long as you have decent antivirus software (like windows defender or just. common sense not to click on shady links) you can basically just google ‘[game title] rom’ and find stuff pretty easily. i think it took maybe 5 minutes total for me to find roms for both aai and aai2.

and bro it’s like. totally fine to have differing opinions on music i prommy. i can def understand the repetitive part but considering most of the songs are played on loop in the background anyway i start getting annoyed by any song in the games that loops more than like 3 times in a row (it’s the Sensory Issues). 

my main issue with turnabout big top (besides the ped*philia which according to my roommate didn’t even exist in the japanese version) definitely has a lot to do with having to play it. the investigation is long and tedious and the reveal of what actually happened is just so fucking Stupid and Ridiculous. when i played with my roommates i kept making guesses as to what happened with the ringmaster and how the culprit flew and shit and every time they were like “i wish that’s what actually happened, it would make more sense” ghfjfdnf and yeah i like the part in the plaza with franziska too and all the times they mention edgeworth and we get to hear more about what exactly Happened and shit but. that Cannot save the case for me. those bits do not cancel out the utter bullshit that case put me through it still fills me with rage just to think about it (other than regina my angel whom i adore).

and yeah literally just. keeping regina Of Legal Age would fix the ped*philia stuff but i probably still wouldn’t like the case just because of how stupid and rage-inducing the plot twists and reveal of the actual events were. 

[thelimitsofcontrol]

Hitman 2 - Recap of the expected by many games

The game's earliest Elusive Goal, the very first portion of IO's complimentary post-launch service programs, is now busy and features celebrity Sean Bean as a MI5 agent gone rogue called Mark Faba. Continue reading for our entire review, initially published on November 8.

Well, killing particular people and trying to not kill others if you don't really need to. However, it's also a game about researching big, real-world-inspired spaces, learning how they function, finding a number of solutions to issues, and using this understanding to improvise and control the environment to strike the people that you're searching for. The episodic nature of this Hitman refresh in 2016 watched IO Interactive launch one degree every month--a controversial move in the moment, but one which helped accentuate the potential in every mission. Hitman two ditches the episodic version and provides a couple of new small mechanisms, but the loop of always replaying one place, gradually uncovering the abundance of chances, and having the ability to efficiently draw upon this knowledge in fresh obstacles is where Hitman is most powerful.

Hitman 2 requires you to six brand new locales, and every poses unique scenarios to conquer as you try to assassinate your own objectives. A assignment in Miami, Florida occurs for an energetic raceway, a loud and lively stage that feels just like a theme park with its swaths of mates, different zones, along with a hidden backstage underbelly.

These amounts are overpowering in the simplest way possible, and it is exciting to start peeling off the layers of those big, complicated areas--researching the distances, finding paths, locating tools and disguises, and figuring out the best regions to use them. If you are knowledgeable about Hitman, you understand that every stage and its own AI inhabitants operate on patterns such as clockwork, making Hitman a sport which rewards societal stealth and patience. Possessing the interest to discover how things function within amounts, stumbling upon small plotlines and funny flavor conversation across the way, is intriguing in its own right.

Hitman does create an upfront attempt to help focus your range and provide you a bit of momentum toward your aims, though thankfully your initiative remains crucial to fix some predicaments. Stumbling across a Mission Story (formerly called Opportunities) may lead one to a system it is possible to sabotage, as an instance, but you have to discover the instrument to do this and work out the best way of distracting or dispatching the folks around it.

Mission Stories are a fantastic first step, however Hitman becomes best when you begin to internalize the phases and discover the more vague ways things could unfold into subsequent playthroughs, make sure it through chasing different Mission Stories, Challenges that request that you execute certain activities, or your improvisation. There are several fail states aside from your death, and there are many approaches and resources at your disposal the path to success is often as creative and tasteful or as bumbling and cluttered as it has to be. Completing a point typically takes quite a while, and there'll be a lot of minutes when a guard grabs you doing something that you should not be doing and requires backup. Unhinged gunfights nevertheless feel as useless as ever, but if things escape control there is nearly always the chance to escape into a less hostile portion of the degree, swap your disguises, and think of a different"contend" strategy. In reality, Hitman is occasionally more exciting if your first strategies neglect.

By way of instance, even though you are able to stash bodies in dumpsters and cabinets, I was frustrated to find I could not stash them in among several empty mobile baths. Even though Agent 47 can jump tall structures and shimmy across daringly substantial ledges, he apparently can not muster the guts to fall down from specific first-floor balconies. Guard AI behaviour is stern but ample --in case you are located trespassing in a limited area they will provide you an opportunity to locate the exit before responding, but sometimes it is too generous. I was thrilled to observe that a target's personal bodyguard opt to go home for the afternoon following his employer"accidentally" dropped off a building, though I had been the only other man inside the room.

Hitman 2 has been adopt a trial-and-error playstyle in its own effort. The levels are very long, but autosaves are manual and generous saving is supported, which provides you the liberty to experiment with various methods of approaching an issue. Hitman 2's interstitial cinematics are as gloomy and striking as a British espionage play, and it is difficult not to let's purchase the clinical conspiracy. But from the area, the show' tongue-in-cheek absurdity thankfully remains with absurd costumes, improbable firearms, and Agent 47's self indulgent deadpan acting, which perfectly follows any bumbling improvisation. Both exist don't actually compliment or detract yet another, but remain enjoyable in their own right.

Hitman 2 boasts a couple of vital modes out its effort, such as Sniper Assassin, which contrasts the layout seen from the Hitman: Sniper smartphone sport and jobs you with carrying a collection of targets from one vantage point using just a scoped weapon. It is a simple however gratifying, low-stakes mode which permits a surprising number of creative freedom, and it may be performed at two-player online co-op. However, Hitman two most attractive bonus, at least if you have the previous Hitman, is your capacity to download the first stages into Hitman 2, that provides you feature-complete variations of these together with the accession of new mechanisms such as practical mirrors (which enemies may place you in) along with also the briefcase (which enables you to hide and transfer tools subtly ), along with other items. These heritage phases are all wonderful to reevaluate under a fresh light.

It should also be noted that among the most persuasive elements of this 2016 Hitman was that the constant, free live material updates that happened after the game's release. We clearly can not gauge the quality of the content at start, but it is definitely something to anticipate.

The accession of additional small mechanical modifications --such as concussive weapons, a picture-in-picture enemy action alert, and observable safety camera sightlines--aid improve Hitman 2 complete as a compact and reachable stealth assassination game. Nevertheless, the new places are the actual stars, creative and impressive sandboxes ripe for picking apart with fascinating experiments. Hitman is all about experiencing the expectation of seeing if or not a strategy will work when you attempt it for the very first time. It is about feeling the strain of briskly walking away from a bad position, trusting you are able to drop the guards that are questionable. It is the pride of understanding the machinations of a degree so well when a target moves to some specific location at a specific time, you've got the ideal method to intervene. Hitman 2 is a comfortable experience, but at the Hitman entire world, intimacy is an unbelievable strength.