#i think one of those dialogues is actually reused in two different locations so it might even be Four

[cozylittleartblog]

wh what do you mean roulx is hottest in the kingdom(referencing the anon ask that's 'i loaf your deltarune art. it is very shape.')

anon im sorry to tell you this but at least three characters in ch1 call him hot or hunky, etc etc. which means his claim that he has "many admirers" is Not Bullshit. and i am so glad that after toby's last deltarune dev update, i now have TWO ridiculous images to think of when i have to be reminded that rouxls is. is canonically a hunk

This.

[senotsuri]

Way back when, I posted an image of an OC, who fairly recently got a full name (she only had a surname back then.) So, with Eliza’s name finally figured out, I realised I hadn’t actually given my overview of the game that spawned her; Champions of Vestroia.

Time to lose my mind, I guess.

Some fore-knowledge before we get into this.

I am, by all means, a legacy bakugan fan, not a reboot fan. I’ve only seen one double episode (the become-smaller-child episode, which was cute, and Outer Demons, which has a super good premise, but the execution is. something.) By all accounts, CoV is essentially my introduction to the world of the reboot, and I’ll come to this later.

I played both the first game (Bakugan Battle Brawlers, specifically the Wii edition), and the... third game (Defenders of the Core, shortened to DOTC, also for the Wii. The second game, for anyone curious, is Battle Trainer, a DS exclusive.) This will come up later, of course, but I want to point out these two as they’re basically my control group for the quality here (not for the battles though; different battle system and all.)

I am incredibly stay-at-home. A lot of people I know irl I don’t have contact with, and most of them don’t live in my city. This is only important when it comes to the protagonist and literally no one else in the game, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

So the game begins with the character creator. This is pretty standard stuff, honestly. My one issue with it is just-- this is probably my fashion sense speaking, but the fashion in the game is very... for lack of a better term, naff. There aren’t many options that look good, personally speaking. This is ignoring the issues where the protagonist loses their name, mid conversation, or is referred to as if I chose the male option instead of the female option. These issues are likely just oversights, by all accounts, but talk about jarring.

The first time you see your character is where 3. comes in. The protagonist, no matter what you chose (I have two save files, in case there was a difference. There isn’t), will always be a football/soccer player. Are you one of many, many people who isn’t sporty, who is trying to play as themselves? Sorry, your character is sporty, and you can’t do anything about it.

In the legacy games, this was never really a problem; your character was never seen doing anything other than brawling and interacting with other characters. Whether they played sports, or stayed indoors and wrote fanfic, the game let you decide on that for your character, by not having them do either of those things: your character only battled, or snuck around in DOTC’s case.

Once you stop playing football, you get to run to your best friends, and I guarantee you, you won’t immediately guess who they are unless you somehow already knew.

I mentioned BBB and DOTC being my control group on quality. Bringing the character creator back into this, the NPCs are laughable in quality. Any character who has the same model as you (older child. There are only two other model types: adult, and younger child) will look like a remixed version of your character. Had it not been for some characters having special eye shapes, you could practically cosplay any character in the game, because they were made the same way you made your character.

This includes your two best friends.

You could easily make the same character (minus clothes) as one of your best friend characters, without knowing it until you saw them.

While, yes, BBB and DOTC had the characters from the legacy anime in them, the fact that your best friends are nigh indistinguishable from any other character in the area, because you could easily make any of them in the character creator, isn’t... great.

Speaking of that. Characterisation is questionable, to say the least. Whatever bakugan you have in your first slot will answer to you the same as any other bakugan you have in your first slot. If you started off with Howlkor in the front of your party, and you replaced him with, say, Barbetra, Barbetra will act the exact same as Howlkor did, and it’s really something.

There’s only (?) Armoured Alliance bakugan in the game, other than Dragonoid, Pegatrix, Trox, Hydorous, Nillious, and the afforementioned Howlkor. That’s a small roster, by all accounts, so having varied dialogue depending on the bakugan would make sense.

The characterisation of the other characters is also a little funky in places. Your best friends don’t brawl, and I honestly forgot about them for a portion of the game. The tournament brawlers are practically as faceless as the villain minions, and the villains- oh the villains...

Preston. I don’t like Preston, at all. He’s a villain from the moment you see him, and the whole “try to find Preston” section in Helena Heights makes me want to punch someone. When you fight him in the Parasol HQ, his dad being the CEO, it’s fairly clear that Preston is little more than a tool for him. Sometime later, you fight Preston again, this time as the final tournament’s final battle, and he’s laughably weak compared to the other challengers. Remember, this kid fights you with Leonidas.

You’d think Leo would be good, but I’ll get into the butchering that happened to my death dragon later.

Anyhow, he fights you, assuming his dad will enjoy him defeating you. With the power of you’re the player character, you beat him, he hands all of his bakugan to you, and gives up on brawling for good. Kinda.

The next time you see him... hoo boy. In Old Town, on the way to defeat dear detestable dad, you come across Preston. He offers you help, and when player character is understandably suspicious, Preston complains that... one of his toys was taken away because you beat him, and now he wants Revenge On Dad.

I wish I was joking. His revenge, by helping you defeat his dad, isn’t because he’s obviously neglected by his dad (company taking priority over him, the CEO’s son), and then is used as a minion to try and get rid of you. It’s not out of bitter feelings because his dad doesn’t care about him, no, it’s because his dad took his ball away.

What’s worse is how player character reacts: “Oh! :) You’ve learned that bakugan aren’t just tools! :) Yes you can help me, despite the fact that you learning this sounds less than genuine and definitely not last minute! :)”

This is a level of stupidity I’ve only seen in DOTC Mira when Spectra tricks her into giving him Drago. He’s literally sulking and moping about over his ball, and then he sees the player character, immediately being manipulative so that player character can take down his dad for him. 

Leonidas also forgives him, and has the same reaction as the player character.

Speaking of Leonidas! I think everyone’s been excited for Leonidas in general - we all love a shark headed death dragon, and we wanted one in the reboot for ages.

I refuse to call reboot Leonidas Leonidas. This is like the Shun Kazami debacle, but one I’m substantially more angry about.

Leonidas, in BBB, was untrusting of everything, wanted to throw down with everything in sight, had no fear of anything because “I don’t fear weak [humans]”, and literally came from hell. He eventually grew to trust you and others, to calm down and enjoy himself at his own pace, and was willing to have help from others, showing anyone around him that his origins aren’t the be all and end all about him.

Leonidas, in CoV, is immediately trusting of the first human who showed a hint of kindness, has a weakness to all attacks in the game, comes from Vestroia (not the Doom Dimension), and forgives the human who threw him away when he didn’t win the battle against you for him.

Ignoring the fact that Leonidas just doesn’t look good in CoV, I’d say he got bastardised. That’s not Leonidas, it’s just a dragon with the same name.

The main villain is the CEO of Parasol, an energy company that, assumedly, used to use solar power. Upon finding out that bakugan battles give off incredible levels of power, they turned to using bakugan, forced to battle, to generate power. These guys literally dug into someone’s house to try and get Leonidas. They’re evil.

On the topic of the battling for power generation; this has a decay effect on Vestroia, as it happens, as battling energy would usually go back into Vestroia, which would be recycled and reused.

The CEO doesn’t bend the knee to you until you break him, which is undoubtedly nice for a villain; I was honestly expecting him to give up, but he doesn’t. You beat him into a corner.

But as my introduction to the world of BP, through CoV, is lackluster at best. Obviously the game is meant for those who have seen the reboot, and don’t mind being completely disconnected from the story, because CoV is self contained, and Dan only shows up to be the tutorial giver (as a jpg, no less).

From what the game tells me about the setting; bakugan are often exploited by adults, bakugan do not like adults because of this, but can’t tell when a human child is manipulating them, unless another child removes them from that situation (the lack of agency here is somehow worse than in the legacy series, who knew).

Despite bakugan being around for 18 years in the setting, no one seems to be aware that they’re living beings, other than the main charcter, as if BP humans are equivalent to Legacy’s Vestals. I was already aware of Vestroia and Earth sharing a location in space, but the fact that drilling deep enough causes bakugan to appear on Earth seems... really weird? Schrödinger’s Bakugan Summoning Pit, but they exist on every digging site possible. Bonus points to all bakugan being able to speak, and they do speak a lot, but only to the player and whoever is around the player in a cutscene.

I’m missing a lot of things, such as battle items being the worst sometimes, I’m aware, but at this point I’m tired of rambling, so let me end off in a comparison.

CoV has, in my opinion, the same replayability levels as Pokemon Shield; I couldn’t replay either game to the end, and I wouldn’t recommend either to anyone unless they were desperate for a new game to play, and had nothing else to chose.

[laufire]

In depth fandom ask: the last fandom you joined bc I can't remember it now

Well, I guess the last fandom I’ve properly joined --making a few edits, starting yet-another-WIP etc.-- is Black Sails, so. Plus I want to talk about it a little, spoiler-free, in case you decide to watch it ^-^ (I’ll leave that to the s3 post I need to finish...).

Top 5 favourite characters: Max is my number one, without a doubt, and of the rest of my faves Silver has an edge... but the remaining positions are a tough fight between Flint, Jack, Madi and Miranda, and I honestly can’t choose DD:

Other characters you like: Mr. Scott, Anne, Idelle, the Maroon Queen, Billy, Eme, Abigail... This show has a lot of great characters tbh.

Least favourite characters: I still loathe Peter Ashe with every fiber of my being. Alfred Hamilton is obviously The Worst(TM). And though it hasn’t grown into hate (yet), I don’t like Woodes Rogers one bit ¬¬

Otps: Flint/Miranda, and the combos in Flint/Madi/Silver and Anne/Jack/Max (in no particular order at the moment because I just HAVE TONS OF FEELS ABOUT THEM ALL).

Notps: I don’t have strong NOPE feelings towards anything, but I’m not into Eleanor/Max (which is a dynamic I actually really like BUT that I’m glad it doesn’t return to shippiness LOL); Eleanor/Rogers (I might be indifferent towards Eleanor most of the time but I haaaaaate Rogers for her. RUN GIRL), Flint/Vane (booooooooring).

Favourite friendships: Max & Silver (THE duo I swear), Jack & Max, Flint & Silver, Idelle & Max (I might not have said so before but I guess I like a little conflict LMFAO), Billy & Flint (NOT a friendship, but their relationship absolutely cracks me up I swear. “Who’s Billy?” XDDD).

Favourite family: Madi’s family, which is all I can say without getting spoilery. I just. *lies down on the floor overcome with emotions* xDD

Favourite episodes: the problem with binge-watching (okay, I’ve taken s3 more slowly but) is that they all kinda blur together LOL. Hmm. The season finales are all *chefs kiss* so far (sometimes in a very painful way... I’m looking at you s2. Though the ominous Flint/Silver moments in the s3 were A LOT too); any in which I get to see Max & Silver scheming together ofc. And the first handful of eps in s3 were particularly enjoyable to me because I was drowning in PURE ANGST and Flint & Silver feels xDD (I can’t NOT believe the fandom seems to call one of those “the shark date” asñldfjasdfñl).

Favourite season/book/movie: oof. I honestly can’t pick; s1 is probably the “least” because the others include better moments for some of my secondary faves, and because there’s a plot that’s really hard to watch... BUT it has things on it I adore to pieces too. s1-2 doesn’t have Madi (major drawback xD), and s3 is after one of my faves’ death... but frankly they’re all neck and neck so far.

Favourite quotes: “I am ruined over you” always comes to mind DD: “Liked is just as good as feared”; Max combo with Eleanor about sand (typing that down made me think of Anidala LMFAO. The scene itself is very different though! xD) in the s1 finale; “in another time, in another place, they would call me a queen”; “this ends when I grant them my forgiveness, not the other way around”, Mr. Scott’s “No. Only YOU.”... honestly, this show’s dialogue is just too good(TM), I could just quote it all back xD. And of course, I HAVE to mention “WHO’S BILLY”. It’s the law.

Best musical moment: the score is perfection all around, but given that I never skip the intro just to listen and watch it... yeah, the intro xD

Moment that made you fangirl/boy the hardest: well, I *might* have lost it the moment CAPTAIN FLINT COMES OUT TO LONG JOHN SILVER OVER A BONFIRE, IDK XDD

When it really disappointed you: the fact that I won’t get to see a fully fleshed out Mr. Scott-Silver dynamic is MAJORLY disappointing, let me tell you. That Flint’s actor didn’t somehow get his mother (aka Maggie Smith aka Professor McGonagall aka Lady Violet) on the show too ¬¬. LOL.

Saddest moment: character’s deaths of two of the characters listed on “top 5”/“others you like” xD.

Most well done character death: the hanging in 3x09 was well done and served its purpose.

Favourite guest star: for a value of “guest star”... I’m going with Idelle.

Favourite cast member: Jessica Parker Kennedy is the one that I know and love for other projects she’s done.

Character you wish was still alive: THE ONE WE TRAGICALLY LOST IN 2x09.

One thing you hope really happens: I’m cheating because I know there’s some of that in s4, but I want to watch more Flint/Madi interactions pls.

Most shocking twist: well, I wasn’t spoiled for Mr. Scott’s plot in s3 so I was (pleasantly) surprised by that xD

When did you start watching/reading?: a little over two weeks ago; I watched (devoured) s1-s2 and 3x01-3x04 in a few days because I wanted to meet Madi, and then I tragically had to slow down :(((

Best animal/creature: I will always love Treasure Islands’  parrot that Silver named after Flint LMFAO.

Favourite location: Nassau aka Max’s ~domain xD. And Miranda’s house.

Trope you wish they would stop using: noooooone. I love the tropes this show reuses LMFAO. Romantic Betrayals(TM), triumvirates, “good things happen in the dark/away from civilization”, the power of narratives, social climbing and revolt... bring them oooooon.

One thing this show/book/film does better than others: quite a few xD. But one that really stands out to me is the dialogue; both the ~deep and sorrowful type (there were so many quotes where I had to take a break to freak out properly lol), and the humorous ones.

Funniest moments: I know I’m repeating myself, but I recently rewatched the pilot to edit some scenes and I keep remember the WHO’S BILLY one xDD (which I maintain it was Flint trolling him. He could give Abigail a rundown of Billy’s whole life story AND he shamelessly checked him out that one time. Flint knows who Billy is, he’s just an asshole xD). Really, all the scenes between Billy and Flint in that episode are comedic gold lmfao. Billy’s “oh dear I fucked up” expression when he tells Flint the crew has started to think him weak and Flint looks half a second away from murdering him right there, his WTF face at Flint’s antics with the stolen page... Gold, seriously.

Couple you would like to see: I meannnnnn. I would’ve been very happy if the show had decided to go with Flint/Madi/Silver, for one. Bonus if Miranda could’ve been included. Or just explicit Flint/Silver in poly arrangements (THEY ARE IN LOVE, IT’S JUST ~COMPLICATED XD).

Actor/Actress you want to join the cast: MAGGIE SMITH DAMMIT.

Favourite outfit: literally everything Max wears in s3. Eleanor’s s1-s2 outfits were things I’d love to wear too. Flint’s ~dramatic coat. Miranda’s collection of supposedly-puritan-but-showing-the-goods dresses xDD (and ofc her London clothes), Jack’s clothes (he’s Nassau’s fashion icon lbr).

Favourite item: the books!! Especially when Flint gave Miranda “La Galatea” as a gift (given that sometimes he reminds me of my OC Latoya, you might understand the freakout I had when he gave the other member of my OTP a book titled like that xDD).

Do you own anything related to this show/book/film?: no, but I kinda want to. I did have a Treasure Planet computer game I tragically can’t find... it was about collecting money in increasingly difficult scenarios LOL. And I probably have more pirate-y/Treasure Island theme stuff. I had a long pirate phase xD

What house/team/group/friendship group/family/race etc would you be in?: Max’s because I like being on the winning team, thanks xD (though I do ~align more with Flint and Madi’s lbr...).

Most boring plotline: Eleanor and Vane’s ~romance is not at all badly written... but the fact that I find both of them boring kinda ruins the whole thing because I always wish that time went to someone else xD. Also, Blackbeard. Meh.

Most laughably bad moment: n/a.

Best flashback/flashfoward if any: the London flashback where Miranda goes to Flint’s house unannounced to take him to an art gallery, she finds him half-naked and he gets all awkward about it lmao. And then they hook up in the carriage :DDD

Most layered character: we get to explore Flint and Silver the most. Silver’s development in particular is something that never ceases to impress me ngl.

Most one dimensional character: except the one-note characters I wouldn’t really call anyone completely one-dimensional, tbh. Though I do think the fandom attributes more complexity to Thomas than it’s seen in canon? Like, I like what I see; I think he’s functional, he works well, and he adds wonderfully to Flint’s (and Miranda’s) story, but I don’t see him as a full character in his own right. Which is perfectly fine for the narrative so far, but I fear it might fall apart for me at the very end.

Scariest moment: I never know what to say in this... I mean, I guess Flint killing a man with his bare hands in the pilot Like That was scary xD. I understand why Silver freaked out LOL.

Grossest moment: any of Max’s interactions with Vane tbh. Stay away from her ¬¬

Best looking male: Flint has that ruggedly handsome thing going on for him, if you’re into that (and sometimes I do appreciate his ~aesthetics... very sad he shaved his head in s3 though. Like, I get you did it for the Angst, honey, and trust me, I Feel U, but still). I feel like I might be forgetting someone, but seriously, none of the dudes in this show so far do anything for me LOL. I can honestly say I love them for their personalities xDD

Best looking female: I have a weakness for Max, but Miranda, Madi, Anne, the Maroon Queen, Idelle, Eme... all of them are gorgeous in their own way. This show is good for sapphic women’s enjoyment in that sense xDD.

Who you’re crushing on (if any): I could crush on any of the women mentioned above tbh.

Favourite cast moment: I have literally only seen this post about an interview where Flint’s actor says he’s too old to party with The Youth of the cast and just wants to chill on the weekend... with bonus Max and Eleanor’s actress talking about how Vane’s once climbed the side of a building up AND back down. I’m with you, Toby Stephens, you don’t need those shenanigans xDD

Favourite transportation: the Walrus, for sentimental reasons LOL. I liked stolen Spanish warship too.

Most beautiful scene (scenery/shot wise): lots of good ones, though I think my fave might be the one of Miranda sitting by the window in London. Or the one of Charles Town burning down, I liked that :))) (I remember thinking “Flint better go full Daenerys on them”. And he did! It was nice xD).

Unanswered question/continuity issue/plot error that bugs you: n/a, so far.

Best promo: n/a.

At what point did you fall in love with this show/book: I liked it from the word go, but the moment that TRULY cemented it for me was in 1x03, with Max making a decision that I... frankly didn’t expect. It made things worse for her in the short-term, the storyline itself was difficult and disturbing to watch and I still have some mixed feelings about it. But what it said about her as a character and how her journey goes after that... I was in awe of her, and of the show.

[tainbocuailnge]

ive played all the story chapters and a bunch of side missions and tried out a handful of characters so now it’s time for The Official Lance Tainbocuailnge Review Of Fate/Extella Link if you’re like me and were kinda on the fence about buying it after extella massively let you down

tldr; gameplay is actually fun and varied with loads of different objectives and the same servant can be played in different ways so it doesn’t get boring. main story is a bit disjointed and most servants only have a quick cameo but it gets charlemagne’s plot beats down well enough and the silly everyone-knows-everyone banter is delightful. everything looks better, the world actually feels populated, and there’s a lot of care put into special interactions. link will not disappoint you like extella did

the gameplay has much more variation than just press button use moon drive repeat. you’ve got a mix of regular attacks that lead into various combos and active skills with cooldowns. each servant has like 7 of them, generally some combination of damage skills buffs and debuffs, and you can set 4 at once so there’s a degree of customisability to how you play each servant even within the fighting style they’re inherently geared towards. servants with similar regular movesets (like cu and scathach) still have decidedly different active skills so they don’t feel interchangeable. certain moves from servants that were already in extella are generally reused either at the end of some combo or as an active skill which for me goes a long way in still making it feel like the same game, just better

attacking builds moon drive meter, and fighting enemies while moon drive is active earns you np meter. this means you can use your np as often as you can charge it instead of the pathetic One time it was in extella and you can just blow up a whole sector without remorse. you can also end moon drive early with a weaker version of your noble phantasm. some active skills are labelled as class skills and if you use those in a combo against a servant you get the button mash attack that extella had. altogether it really gives the sense of an all-out servant battle

allied servants are much much much more proactive. they’ll actively go out and conquer sectors for you and will try to join you wherever you’re fighting the boss servant. if your allies are nearby more of your active skills will get the class skill property and they’ll join you in the button mash attack. before the battle you also set two support troops, who will randomly join in on your combos or defend you when you’re in a pinch. hakuno is also out on the field, so combat is much more a team effort than before

stage objectives are varied too, there’s field effects, map jamming, hunting down messengers before they can call for reinforcements, escorting allies to specific locations, waves of shadow servants, lancelot disguising himself, robin or lishu going invisible, iskandar or darius with endless armies, drake or gilles bombarding from afar, all often used in various combinations too. on top of that the extra stages will provide random additional challenges so even replaying the same stage will be different every time. 

there are four difficulties (that I’ve unlocked) but I haven’t tried any of the higher ones yet so I don’t know what they change to make it more difficult other than enemy level. there are like. i think at least 50 maybe even 100 extra stages to play after you’ve cleared the ~30 main story battles that continue until servant level 200 or something so there’s a lot to do even after you’ve gone through the story. servants unlock by clearing story battles and I didn’t realize this until very late and was very pissed off that the game wouldn’t let me use cu but that’s on me. the money is power system is still in place so you don’t have to manually train any new servant you want to try out you can just powerlevel them. install skills are also still in place and you do need to level servant bond if you want to use any decent number of those

there’s a pvp mode too but I haven’t tried it yet so no comment on that beyond i bet skilled lancelot players are The most annoying motherfuckers to fight against

graphics are a huge step up from extella. reused areas got a complete visual makeover while retaining the same feel. everyone’s models got spruced up and now they don’t look plastic anymore. there is an unreal amount of care put into sculpting karna’s asscrack. the ost actually slaps beyond the main theme this time as well as featuring some ol reliable CCC tracks. everything looks much more polished

the story is somewhat disjointed because of both the large cast and the splitting routes. the story splits up at various points to create an excuse to make different battles but it means a lot of things happen at approximately the same time in slightly different ways and it can be confusing to keep up with what happens in which order. for that reason I suggest looking closely at what path leads to which ending and playing all the quests of each converging branch before moving to the next day. the story seems to go out of its way to be ambiguous in when what happens exactly and how it’s even supposed to follow the events of extella so I think it’s best to look for the themes and the fun lore details over the linear coherence

overall the atmosphere is pretty silly and servants constantly banter back and forth even during tense situations, but it lands the occasional serious moment well enough imo. charlemagne and karl are the only ones who have any significant story focus but since they’re the only newcomers it’s not like the other guys particularly need the screentime. charlemagne himself is a pretty silly and lighthearted guy so he goes along well with the general feeling and it actually works in favour of his heavier plot beats because of the contrast. I grew attached to him incredibly quickly, not in the last place because he gets hyped about every single person he meets and it’s hard not to get excited too

the servants who weren’t already in extella generally get to show up more in the main story than the already familiar faces but most of them don’t have much more than a cameo. having a lot of people just randomly roam around with no idea what’s going on goes a really long way in making the moon cell feel populated beyond the people directly involved in the story so I actually like it a lot. they came up with like 3 different convenient plot devices to give you servants to fight without worrying about what that means for the alliances and it gives room for a lot of cool character moments

a good chunk of the extra stages come with their own mini stories told through the combat dialogue which adds to the liveliness of the setting. my favourite so far is the one where liz and nero try to hold a concert and hakuno frantically tries to explain to charlemagne in the middle of combat why it’s absolutely vital to keep them from doing that

everyone seems to know everyone so a lot of story dialogue is banter in varying degrees of playful versus vicious between both likely and unlikely combinations of servants and there’s a lot and i mean a LOT of care put into specific interactions. if two servants even remotely have an opinion on each other there’s special dialogue for it, and I even picked up unique dialogue for when archer acts as support troop for cu which no doubt means it exists for other combinations too (altho that’s not subtitled so i dont know what they’re saying there i could just tell it was the usual bickering because of the tone lol). some servants have unique win quotes from hakuno, she calls gilgamesh by his nickname ‘gorgeous’ for example. servants will sit around your home base and have a default line to say but sometimes they have lines that refer to each other instead. compared to how barren extella was, link is overflowing with the sense that these people have lives outside the current conflict and se.ra.ph is a thriving and vibrant world for them to live in

there’s a scene where karna and arjuna use their noble phantasms against each other in mutual destruction and it fucking RULES

[kierongillen]

Writer Notes: The Wicked + the Divine 39

Spoilers, obv.

And we collapse forward on the keyboard and twitch a while. This has been nightmarishly hard. I suspect the last arc will be hard (as nothing in WicDiv is easy) but the things we were juggling here were something else.

Before we dive in, some top-level thinking. The advantage of the way WicDiv is constructed is that we know what we're doing. A friend was just rereading the first arc, and noted how certain elements and approaches simply changed as the tone of the book solidified – while also noting that every direction we did take was there from the off. We knew the What We Were Doing but not always the specific How.

(Not least, as I was a hot mess in 2014. I'm amazed the WicDiv scripts weren't just bahsjasjfaglagsfk.)

But the problem with knowing the direction of the book is you're tied to ideas you may wish you hadn't put in play. Because a five year book is enough time to change significantly in what you consider a good idea or not – and even if you still think it's a good idea in the abstract, it doesn't mean it's an idea you would necessarily want to do any more.

At this point, there's various things flying around. Firstly, Laura has rejected her godhood. That's great. That's clearly the arc of the book. Secondly, Ananke is running her own eternal scheme with its eternal rules. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Ananke (and I'm using “Ananke” for “Ananke and Minerva” here) is significantly deceiving people on some key matters, and using the holes in their knowledge to her advantage. At this point in the story the same thing happens to her. We see that her own perception is also incomplete.

So – what's the thing she's missing?

I fell upon Maiden/Mother/Crone as a structure to create a relationship between Ananke/Persephone/Minerva. What action would Ananke buy?

It has to be archetypal and mythic. Cheaty postmodernism doesn't work. Myth is brutal and basic and ugly and wrong.

So – if the Mother archetype has a child, Ananke's doomed forever. It breaks the little eternal circle and Ananke thinks herself trapped in that sensory void forever.

There's nothing in the above specifically and individually which worries me too much. It's how they intersect with the rest of the plot, and how we can chart a line between them all without saying anything we don't want to say, or without causing undue emotional distress in a way we're uncomfortable with.

We end up with our solution, which is merely our best solution, which means it's far from perfect. We do as much as we can, and try and touch on stuff as gently as we can to avoid any fair misreading of the story. Even so, there's resonances in there I dislike.

There's a sentence that is said all the time in writing room situations: “This is the bad version.” It's said when people are brainstorming, and asking the audience to know this isn't good, but they are good enough writers to make it better – it's just a structure of the sort of things that the narrative could delineate.

It's easy to imagine The Bad Version of this plot. Laura finding out she has to have a kid to save the world! Baal and Baphomet fighting over who's the father! An issue cliffhanger where you think Laura's own choice has doomed the world! I shudder. Like, someone with a different aesthetic to me would have done all of the above.

Instead, what we try to do is what we have to do to make the story work, and do it in the safest way possible. It's the guiding aesthetic of most of this issue, in terms of separating the two key threads – namely not confusing Laura's choice to have an abortion and Laura's choice to reject godhood.

But still – I spent four years trying to think of something that Ananke would buy, based on our implicit story, which wasn't this, and failed. I'd rather not have gone this way. I'm happy with the issue, but it was a heartbreaking amount of work as I take all of this intensely seriously.

So, to return to the opening, the problem with being as structured as WicDiv is means that you are tied to decisions you made years ago, without which the story simply breaks.

DIE (aka Project Spangly New Thing) rejects this kind of plotting. It's just as messy emotionally as WicDiv (hell, even more so) but leaves the characters a lot more narrative freedom. I'd have done it anyway (because I hate to repeat myself) but the experience on arcs like this certainly feeds into it.

Anyway – I'll be talking some specifics in this as we go through, as I suspect it may be useful for people thinking about the impact of choices.

Jamie's Cover: Ananke in her cavewoman chic. That means 2 “persephone”, 2 “minerva” and 2 “Ananke” covers for this arc. The symmetry seems fun.

Phil Jimenez's Cover: I first saw Phil's work in his pop-thrill issues of The Invisibles, an obviously influential work on yours truly. We worked together on Angela: Asgard's Assassin together, which was a thrill, and this glam-metal take on her. He's also very lovely. As such, Minerva in full-on catwalk mode is a great take. I love these kind of maximalist high-thrill ones. And LIZ's ‘When I rule the world’ has just come on my WicDiv shuffle at this point, which seems appropriate for Minerva stomping down a lightning-catwalk. Also, Dee Cunniffe (who has flatted nearly all of WicDiv) provides colours. Nice work, Dee.

Page 1-2

Black spaces. Like the opening of the arc – C's idea, I believe. Also, ensuring we get our page turns right. We dropped the recap for once. Normally we'd drop it in the mid-point of the issue instead of the first interstitial, but it would have broken the space.

Obviously mirroring the start of this arc.

The first obvious bit of delineation: this is ten days after the end of last issue. Laura stopped being Persephone 10 days ago. As such, anything that happens now is not connected to that.

The biggest reading we wanted to avoid: “Laura's abortion is the ritual by which she rejects and escapes the Persephone-Mother archetype”. Especially if people, either pro or anti choice, could make an argument we're saying we're saying the act is human sacrifice – a reading which seems especially possible in a story that already has human sacrifice in it.

Page 3-4-5-6

Reestablishing what folks have been up to in the gap – in short, bits and pieces, bits of information the characters should exchange, etc.

The Cass/Woden dialogue is stuff I'd have liked to get into issue 33, but was cut due to space and focus. It was Mimir's scene, and as he's been silent for the whole book, he gets to speak. The “He stole my life/I stole his” was all that was required. This is detail. Interesting detail, but detail. And, yes, loaded.

There's a lot of “starting other stuff” in this sequence – clearly the “ritual” is going to be important next arc.

I love what Jamie is doing quietly with Mimir and the boxes at the back of the room on page 4. Like, I wonder what's in each of those boxes, right? There's some horrible pure objectification here. Like, Pokémon. Got to catch them all.

You can tell that Woden is more chill with Minerva, right?

It was originally written with Minerva noting that mind-controlled-sex-is-rape at the end of page 4. That felt frankly aggressive, as if we were using it as a punchline. Instead, we soften it, and move it mid-panel, which changes the feeling around it, hopefully.

On page 6, I really like the “Hmm. You're learning.” It still makes me laugh.

Making the gun's controls REALLY VISUALLY OBVIOUS is not exactly subtle, but 100% needed to make sure the scene make sense.

Page 7-8-9

With a month gap between issues, it's possible that the reader may not have noticed that we've changed the issue structure from the rest of this arc. It's not “past stuff then present stuff” like the others. It's at least one reason why we didn't give a preview – that and that the first pages of the issue are entirely non-characteristic in terms of where the issue goes.

Anyway – first page is a pure repeat from issue 34, so a free page. This issue is a little longer than normal, due to normal cheats. It's actually 20 new pages long... plus one new panel.

Page 8 is very peak Jamie, plus Matt, for a certain mode. I never get bored of seeing what they do with blood together. Ananke's expression in panel 4 is just particularly well chosen. This isn't how Minerva feels last issue – that's after thousands of years of dwelling on it. This is first exposure. You don't go straight to AGRGRHRHRHRHH.

And back to the still angle on the third panel. Like, the static nature of these seems important in terms of mood.

I really hope Ananke isn't licking that knife.

Page 10

I spent the best part of a day trying to work out what to name this interstitial, after naming it a few things previously. That we end up with a very limited Bowie nod says everything. Anything else seemed to create resonances we were trying to avoid. Once more, the aim is to separate the two decisions from Laura as much as possible.

Page 11

I know drawing London kills Jamie, but I'll miss seeing stuff like this monthly when it's gone.

We don't know Laura's walked out of a clinic for a few pages, but it was important to just give her space here.

Researching locations in London, in terms of placing the events, the timing, what would be available, and Laura's condition after an abortion and trying to find a way to be sensitive to all of that as a writer. Ideally, I was looking for an option around Highbury & Islington, as I always prefer to reuse settings. In practise, this was best.

Page 12

I basically described Beth's crew as Valkyrie-plusses. As in, the mini-bosses in a videogame. Elite models for a basic troop type.

Toni pushes to the front, as he's always been the most talkative of the Other Two. Writing this I realised who he is here – he's basically “Imagine Marvel Boy, if Marvel Boy was a total idiotic dipshit.”

(Instead of the “mostly idiotic dipshit” he was in YA. Love you, Noh-Varr! KISSY FACE.)

I believe Jamie laughed at this a fair bit.

Page 13-14

I considered various captions for Laura here, but no matter what they did, they blurred the line between her abortion and her abandoned godhood. As such, the relative silence was considered more effective.

13-14-15-16

A lot is packed into this space. In an ideal world, I'd like another page for it, to extend Beth's choice to shoot or not, but it's all there.

Key delineations here: obvious restatement of the 10 days since she's been a god, to ensure it's clear. “Panel 3”; Beth never knowing (nor caring) where Laura has just been; Robin actually being human; Laura's privacy being respected; the “I've got more imminent problems” to separate her being shot from this; most importantly, Laura never knowing that this decision was important to Minerva, and never letting Minerva's mistaken beliefs impact her decision. Laura' abortion is her choice and doesn't need a bunch of mythic stuff attached to it for her.

The “shame” line resonates with another, more optimistic, line on the first page of Young Avengers. This speaks to the books, and the choices and the attached psychology.

Page 17

Oddly, the “no cameras in the bathroom” information we've set up allows this scene. Minerva isn't someone who would vocalise much if someone could have hear. You can imagine her looking in each booth to see if someone's around. I did consider moving to captions for a page, but Minerva getting captions for this one event seemed aesthetically off.

Page 18

Self-evident interstitial, and so long a bit of text I can hear designers wincing.

Page 19-20

Earliest scene so far in WicDiv. I did consider having it set after the murder, with the grandson coming back to hear her last words, but the “alive-dead-alive-dead-alive-dead” was getting a bit silly. A quietly magical breakfast conversation seemed the way to go.

I think the bleakest and darkly funniest thing in the issue is the “Eventually, we'll learn. It may take a thousand years, but someone will figure it out.” Oh, you total optimist, you.

I do like the mood of the colouring for this.

Okay – the key structural bit for safety-proofing this plot? The absolute minimisation of the gap between discovering the fourth rule, discovering Laura has had an abortion and then discovering that the fourth rule is just a lie. The longer it hangs, the more it is letting people live with an idea we find reprehensible. The thing I knew when starting this arc is all of this had to happen inside the same issue – the problem there being, that it also had to be foreshadowed enough to not come out of nowhere. And if you foreshadow too heavily, it's as same as saying “this is where it's going”.

Anyway – that wrapped up, we move towards the end...

Page 21-22-23-24-25

The continuation of last issue's end. Laura and her captions.

Some perfect McKelvie expressions, and some key beats. Like, this also adds shade to last issue – I forget if I mentioned that one of the key beats of the series (Laura rejecting her godhood) being dramatised by her swapping a SIM card seems absolutely key to where we are.

Two key expressions – the glance to camera with “I'm not a god” and “So what? So do you.” I could marry Jamie for these.

Matt working the blacks and the ochres here is fascinating.

Thought experiment: originally the layout on page 21 had two captions in panel 3 and two in panel 4. I moved the first from panel 4 to panel 3. Why? A single caption always has more weight in a given space. Having two in each was effectively giving no extra weight to any individual caption. Instead, three in one makes that the conversational beat and the one over the spiral-staircase means the latter just hangs there.

(In short: less dialogue/caption in any space makes the line more important. SPACE=MEANING is what I've been saying all along, usually with panel size. As in, “bigger panels read as more important.” But the same sort of thinking applies to lettering in terms of the space it is allowed to “control.”)

End of page 21 – a final restating of the two events being separate. Laura choosing to have an abortion is something she decided when starting to put her life back together. It's not a cause of her stopping being a god – if anything, it's something that's resulted from her new state of mind.

Lots in terms of mode in 22, but I love how Jamie has handled the nudity in the second panel. As in, she's a girl changing for bed, but she's never presented as something to be objectified, to looked at. Laura is always someone we're meant to be. We are meant to inhabit her, and her us.

The panel at the start of 23 is the extra panel we squeezed in. One panel for this amount of extra material, leading to the better reveal seemed a good choice.

Did I mention I lost a line I really liked last issue? The “At long last, I know what I'm not” was originally “I know what I am/and I know what I'm not.” Which is pretty and elegant, but also confusing with this ending – the “what I am” is “not a god” and what I'm not” is “a god”. Prettiness only goes so far, especially as it's not as if Laura's going to stop and explain that.

Lots of key bits of dialogue in these pages, obviously. “I distrust anyone who tells me who I am. Especially if I agree” and all that.

Obviously in storytelling choices, this is reprising, in an inverted way, the end of The Faust Act. Instead of a flash of light, fading into darkness, darkness emerging from light. Also, really strong choice of expression in that final panel.

26

Referencing ‘Dancing In the Dark’. Springsteen's is obviously great, but I'm thinking of the Downtown Boys' cover which is much closer to where WicDiv is coming from.

I choke up at all this scene. Been a long way to get here, Laura. Onwards.

The trade collection for Mothering Invention is out in October. We have two Specials before next arc, WicDiv: 1373 (out at the end of September) and WicDiv: The Funnies (out in November.)

We're then back in December, where we begin our final arc.

It's called – “Okay”. Including the quotation marks. Yes, we're going out on another Bowie reference.

Thanks for reading.

[greyias]

So, occasionally I’ll be doing something else and go down a rabbit hole in regards to content over on torcommunity. This weekend, somehow I wound up taking a journey through some of the cut content for the first expansion.

And man... did I find some interesting could-have-beens.

Like, I’m still kind of poking around and nosing through some of the dialogue trees, so this is by no means a complete and accurate reading of what-could-have-been (not to mention that the mined dialogue is very incomplete, there’s only Bothawui and some other snatches here and there for various classes—but still!)

So, I already knew that the Knight storyline introduced a bi-romance option for both male and female Knights, a Doctor Audra Kantos who is like... the exact opposite of Doc and kind of a babe if her 3D model is anything to go by. From what I’ve gleaned from the dialogue, she seemed like she would have been a fun addition to the universe. I hope they find a way to reuse some of her story content or bring her into the game proper.

What I didn’t realize the first time around was that Audra was a Knight exclusive romance, meaning... there were other romance options planned for the other classes.

I found two of those other options this weekend, and man, I feel both robbed and a little giddy that there’s at least some content that showed that some of the character and dialogue paths in Vanilla weren’t pure tease. 

You see, before they had to change course on this expansion, it looks like originally we were going to get a romance option of Master Sumalee for (male) smugglers and Jonas Balkar for (female) Troopers.

Jonas Romance: https://torcommunity.com/database/mission/BdZCIC4/hidden_speak_to_jonas_and_chall/

Sumalee Romance: https://torcommunity.com/database/conversation/Bn3RGeF/cnvexp01bothawuiclasssmugglermaster_sumalee/

Sadly, the Sumalee romance getting resurrected is probably a no go, since she was one of the Shroedinger’s Cultists during Nathema Conspiracy. Although since a certain SIS Agent is going to be making his reappearance soon... maybe if we all ask the devs nicely enough they’ll let us kiss a Jonas?

I also find it amusing that Theron literally stole lines from Jonas’s seduction technique, and now I’m imagining Jonas trying to give him dating advice, Theron pretending to ignore it and then using those pick up lines when no one’s watching.

Okay, more likely the writers repurposed some of those lines, as poking around some of the Knight’s dialogue I found out that the (light side) Hero of Tython’s promotion fo Battlemaster was originally intended to happen somewhere within the cut class-continuation. (There’s also some hints I found this weekend that Master Orgus’s ghost was going to show up again, although there’s no dialogue I found to see if it was what eventually became the Rishi sidequest).

Also interesting to note of content that was originally written one way, but it seems like they used the concept for something else it this one: link (although I will point out that I think the only thing that was reused for the upcoming 5.10 drop is the planet location and the character).

Aside from the cut romance content, I found these bits of dialogue most interesting (although I am guessing this is one of those pieces of world building that got lost in the shuffle and cuts, and probably won’t make it’s way into canon proper):

And I’m like... just laughing here at the thought that one of Satele’s big acts of defiance against everyone who kept calling her Revan 2.0 when they wanted to shut her up is public going “Look! You guys can go have sex! Just... don’t like get married or something”. Almost like she was preparing for the inevitable moment some hypothetical impetuous and hotheaded offspring started making a habit of breaking into her living quarters any time he wanted to have a conversation. Or something.

Sadly, I don’t think we’ll ever get confirmation on whether or not that really happened in-universe (unless they decide to promote Satele back to Grand Master). And that’s a shame, because it really ties in nicely with Obi-Wan’s dialogue in the Clone Wars series where they actually clarify the difference between “romance” and “attachment”.

Ah well. I guess we’ll see what happens in 6.0.

[alwayswritewithcoffee]

OK, now I'm intrigued. What makes Still one of the best clip episodes to ever air in network television? I think the banter is great, and I find many of the segues very clever. But is there more to it than that? It's my favorite clip episode too, bit it's nice to hear it from someone who knows a thing or two about TV production.

Well, just because I know some stuff about tv production doesn’t mean that my opinion on what episodes are better than others is any more valid than anyone else.

I think one of the reasons Still stands out is because it’s not that common for an hour-long drama to go all in on weaving a clip show into the actual script. It’s been far more common for hour-long television to have a recap episode that airs separately, usually before a season or series finale. Sitcoms are usually the format where the clips are edited into the show, such as the Friends episode where Monica and Chandler tell Rachel, Ross, Phoebe, and Joey that they are planning to move out of the city and they all reminisce about what has happened in their years living together in NYC. (Friends actually did a bunch of clip shows, but that’s the one that always sticks in my head.)

Clip shows are inherently difficult to do, even if they’re meant to be easier on the production budget and the filming schedule. For one, it’s hard to make a compelling story if half your airtime is made up of previous clips. You’ve got to figure out a story that will make sense, find clips that will support that story, and still manage to make it entertaining. For me, most clip shows just come off as cheesy and kind of boring because it almost always revolves around some life-changing event in the course of the show. In the case of Friends, Monica and Chandler deciding to move out of the city was the first step in setting up the fact that show would be ending. Others have used clip shows to send characters off to college or to new jobs that effectively remove them from the weekly narrative.

Then you have to consider why clip shows are often needed in the first place. The practice started with movie studios reusing old footage in new movies to try and save some money, or to recap ongoing short films in the early 1900s in case the audience might have missed the previous installment. Sometimes when clip shows are used, it’s to create what is termed a bottle episode.

If you’ve been in the Castle fandom long enough, you’ve probably heard the term tossed around. What it essentially means is that the production team figured out a way to make an episode on the cheap. Usually, that will mean shooting on stages that they already have, or minimizing/forgoing location shoots and the number of sets that have to be constructed for a specific episode. It also would include avoiding hiring numerous actors to fill out parts called for in the script, and it’s a bonus if you can avoid a bunch of special effects that would also cost money.

In the case of Still, ABC ordered an extra episode very late into the production of season five. And by late I mean that the writer’s room had already plotted out the end of the season and begun work on breaking the story down. Since it was near the end of the season, the budget was also pretty tight, and that meant that the production team had to create an episode by spending minimal money.

I think for me part of the greatness of that episode is that the premise fits seamlessly into the Castle universe. Sometimes clip shows just feel monotonous, and a bit stunted because you are watching an entire episode to get maybe five minutes of character development and an actual plot. With Still, you are dumped into a sweet moment between two people who are very much in love and a moment which fans had long been waiting for but had yet to see on screen. It’s also one of the most intimate interactions between Castle and Beckett in season five, and one of the few in the series that doesn’t take place with an investigation looming over their heads which requires immediate action.

Yes, the banter is great, it never fails to make me laugh to watch Castle needling Beckett about their relationship in an effort to keep her mind off the fact she’s standing on a bomb. The clips interspersed with their dialogue do a great job of backing up the concept of just how far they’ve come and just how head over heels they are for one another. But the thing that always draws me back to the episode is how dedicated Castle is in waiting for Beckett and, as time starts to run out, how quietly desperate he becomes.

In general, Richard Castle isn’t the sort of person that buries his emotion when it comes to Kate Beckett; especially in season five. Even though he spends most of the season downplaying just how far gone he is over her, he also doesn’t ever actively hide that he loves her and worries about her except in this episode. He spends the whole thing being a cheerleader and a distractor, but from the time they are told that they can’t just transfer weight from the pressure plate so that Beckett can step off the bomb, there’s a very quiet level of panic that slowly rises.

And then you’ve got the contrast of Beckett who, while worried at first, isn’t concerned that she might die until she learns about the timer. It scares her, you can see the way her eyes flicker, and her jaw tightens when she finds out, but she downplays it because she knows Castle and she can see that he’s trying to keep his panic on the inside. So, to soothe him (and probably herself), she maintains that stoic nature that she’s developed over her years as a cop. But she also knows that she’s going to die. She knows it from the point that she asks Castle to do something for her and then puts him off until the timer has almost hit zero.

The fact that she calls her dad and leaves him the most matter-of-fact voicemail while standing on a bomb will never fail to mess me up, and then, of course, you have her telling Castle that she loves him. While it’s the first time that she says it on screen for all of us to hear, it’s definitely not the first time she’s told Castle, but when she says it, they both know it might be the last time, and neither of them wants to admit it.

Castle coming back is a whole different discussion that I find fascinating. On some level, he’s walking back into the room with the knowledge that if they are wrong, he’s gonna blow up with her and I think that plays beautifully into some of the nuances of what comes later with Erik Vaughn, the job offer with the Attorney General’s office, and Castle deciding to propose. (Though I freely admit that the entire arc needed another episode to really make it work.)

I love the episode for all of those reasons and then there’s a plot advancement/development when you learn that Gates has known about their relationship all along and just played dumb so they could keep working together. It’s just the icing on the cake of an episode that really could have been phoned in where Beckett stands on a bomb, Castle cracks some jokes until she’s off the bomb, and they go back to business as usual.

Instead, it’s got some layers to it and I just always really enjoy watching it. Even more so when you take into account that Rob Hanning wrote the majority of the episode in two days or so once Marlowe assigned the script to him.

[gascon-en-exil]

I Liked Fates Before It Was Cool!: Conquest Part 1

Prologue

Opening Chapters

Chapters 6-14, in which if you squint really hard there might be a plot in there somewhere.

Chapter 6

But let’s not be unfair right from the start. Conquest offers what I consider the best version of Chapter 6, both as a narrative introduction to the route and as a gameplay challenge fitting the difficulty of what’s to come. Birthright is basically just Ryoma soloing Xander and Revelation throws you against generics, but here you have to make use of all the Nohr royals to defeat all but one unit on the Hoshidan side - and being able to take care of Ryoma quickly enough nets you a prize of sorts in that you don’t have to beat up an unarmed Sakura. The chapter also sets up the tense undercurrent of Conquest that Corrin chose wrong, that the Hoshidans (except Takumi) think they’ve been brainwashed and that their love for their adopted siblings is meaningless. On the one hand it feels rather spineless that what is supposedly a villain campaign is hesitant to allow Corrin to own their choice and makes it sound like blatant railroading by the player, but on the other there’s something to be said for the contrast between how Xander and Ryoma deal with Corrin’s decision. After two refusals in Birthright Xander is happy to label Corrin a traitor and becomes determined to kill them for their choice, whereas Ryoma persists in his brainwashing theory and in so doing denies Corrin’s agency completely. That actually works fairly well as setup for an antagonist - if we allow that Ryoma is one, of course, and the game itself seems uncomfortable with the concept.

Chapter 7

...And all my goodwill toward this story dries up almost immediately. There’s flat villainy, there’s a bunch of self-doubt from Corrin over their choice, and there’s foreshadowing that only adds to the confusion if you already know what’s going on. It’s kind of a mess, and it’s pretty much all downhill from here.

I have little to say about this chapter as it stands, except that it’s appropriately difficult and that the conflict feels fitting in terms of tone and atmosphere...even though it only exists because of the aforementioned flat villainy. I instead want to zero in on the moment pictured above, in which Garon “prays” to Anankos to deliver unto him the plot of the next few chapters in front of Corrin and Iago and the Nohr royals. Bizarrely, it’s Iago who goes furthest in calling Garon out on how absurd this is, though not even he bothers to ask who or what Anankos is or if he’s the same entity as Nohr’s Dusk Dragon.

Ok, I know I might be the only person in the fandom who regularly complains about the absence of pseudo-Catholic elements in Fates when they’re present in every other game in the series, but on a fundamental level I do get it. The priest -> sage/war monk class line from Awakening was given to Hoshido, so it makes perfect sense that those classes would be shifted over to the blend of Shintoism and Buddhism that comprises Japanese spirituality. It’s also not unheard of for a nation or group of people in FE to worship a dark dragon/god in lieu of the main organized faith, ex. the Lopytrians from Jugdral, Rigel’s Duma Faithful, and Plegia’s Grimleal. As seen with Salem from FE5 and Tharja and Henry from 13 it’s even fairly common for playable dark magic users in the games to come from the ranks of those faiths. I therefore don’t have a problem with the theory that there’s a theological element to Nohr’s dark mages and that it ties into the Dusk Dragon - who may or may not also be Anankos - in some way. The problem is that we never see any definitive evidence that this is the case, not even enough to understand how unusual it is in this scene to see Garon praying to Anankos. When Iago sounds like the closest thing to a voice of a reason you know the plot’s got some problems. For all we’re told Nohr’s clergy are just bookworms moonlighting as strippers with a crow feather fetish.

Chapter 8

It’s strange how easy it is to forget this guy exists since he only appears in Conquest in this one chapter, but the Ice Tribe maids do indeed have a father. Where was he during Chapter 17 of Birthright?

This brings up an interesting - or as some would probably call it, lazy - quirk of Fates’s map design. The early and midgame sections of all three routes are full of maps that get reused across routes, or different maps of the same location like the previous one and Birthright Chapter 18. I’m feeling rather charitable about this decision personally, for two reasons:

1) In most cases the reused maps are approached from different angles and feature different, sometimes opposing gimmicks. The Ice Tribe village map, for example, sees you racing to visit as many villages as possible in Conquest but encourages you to avoid them in Birthright, and the function of the Dragon Veins in the middle of the route differs depending on the route.

2) Fates’s worldbuilding needs all the help it can get, and visiting the same locations in multiple routes adds a degree of continuity that the story on its own often struggles to display.

See, cost-cutting measures don’t have to be a bad thing if you use them creatively! 

This chapter also deserves some praise for having a more plausible point of conflict than its Wind Tribe counterpart in Birthright. Instead of Iago’s shenanigans Elise grabs the conflict ball because no one taught her basic diplomacy, and Corrin saves the day through their first of many acts of pacifism on this route. It is a bit strange to have the characters talking about how Corrin’s army spared everyone just after you’ve finished mowing down a bunch of generics, but not unlike Niles I can use my imagination.

Chapter 9

A wild loli appears! Ugh...Nyx is one of several characters in Fates who could have been interesting with better execution. As it is, her best use is as a punchline or somebody’s fap material of course.

This chapter has nothing to do with her though really. Instead it’s just a set of contrivances - how did a Hoshidan force make it so deeply into Nohr so quickly (for comparison, Corrin’s army reaches the same location in Birthright by Chapter 20), and why did they bring Azura all this way with them if their only plan was to kill her? I do appreciate the reminder that Nohr and Hoshido are actually at war now as the rest of the Conquest’s early plot is more concerned with putting down rebellions, but some kind of logical reason for Azura’s reappearance would have been nice.

Still, this chapter goes further than most at showing an explicit example of Hoshidan racism, even if Azura is quick to absolve the royals (except Takumi, I assume) of any wrongdoing. I genuinely have no idea if we’re meant to interpret this as Stockholm Syndrome, or if the writers couldn’t bear to vilify all of Hoshido even for one chapter.

Chapter 10

Like a number of other defense maps in the series, this is the most infamous chapter of its game, and depending on who you’re using and how it can indeed live up to its reputation. I don’t care for how this makes for an uneven bump in Conquest’s difficulty curve, but with such varied chapter goals and mechanics on this route that was likely inevitable at some point.

For all that it’s a memorable piece of gameplay though there’s not too much to talk about in terms of story. Takumi is established as a strong and motivated antagonist right from his first reappearance after the route split, and as I said back in Birthright it’s a good look for him. He and Oboro are among the few Hoshidans who really make more sense as antagonists than as allies, and even though it devolves into yet another round of possession in the end there’s something very real to Takumi’s feelings of betrayal and inadequacy, to say nothing of his grief over his mother which unlike in Birthright barely comes up otherwise.

Also, Camilla is here, but with only a bit of retainer banter to flesh her out she’s more or less the same as FE10 Haar in Chapter 2-E of that game: overleveled flying death, with only a few stray bits of effective damage to worry about.

Chapter 11

The Sevenfold Sanctuary appears again, this time with tricky skill combos to contend with like archers with Counter and ninjas with Lunge as well as more of the by now common enemy pair-ups and a boss with an unfair enemy-only weapon. Does anyone else find it strange just how many such weapons exist in Fates?

In this route it’s the Hoshidans who get to troll Corrin, dragging the Rainbow Sage up Mount Sagesse for no real reason and doing their best to not sound like they’re invading a sovereign territory and kidnapping its most venerable inhabitant who also happens to be an ancient dragon. Granted the Nohrians’ mission feels a bit confused as well, as dialogue vacillates between Garon wanting to conquer Notre Sagesse and everyone else wanting the Rainbow Sage’s power. The two sort of come together in the end with Iago ordering the Sage’s death, though if there’s a logical explanation for Garon/Anankos’s continued desire to see Corrin suffer but not die it’s beyond me. That Corrin gets an eventual sword power-up out of the deal feels almost accidental on this route.

Incidentally, while he doesn’t get the gravity of a potential death scene in this version I do like how Kaze joins up with the Nohrians. It conveys the subtext of his connection to Corrin while not coming across as a weird obsession like his approximate counterpart Silas does in Birthright. Speaking of which, I’ve noticed that Silas gets a decent amount of the protagonist chorus roles in Conquest even when some of the royals are available. Eh...they are supposed to be BFFs.

Chapter 12

Now that’s just not as funny as the version of this picture with Takumi.

Elise comes down with a case of the plot, and as a consequence we bear witness to Ryoma’s most infamous act of dickishly non-heroic behavior. I’ve seen it argued back and forth that Ryoma withholding medicine from Elise in an attempt to coerce Corrin into returning to Hoshido constitutes a war crime, but regardless of semantics it is a surprisingly underhanded tactic for someone like him. Now that I think about it Birthright shows off this side of him as well, when he disguises himself as a Nohrian soldier at Cheve to ambush Leo. Not exactly becoming a shining exemplar of heroism here awkwardly forced into the antagonist role...but then he goes off about how his retainers have a more righteous cause than Xander’s and suddenly I lose what little sympathy I had for him. Sure, one of the retainers he’s insulted is Peri, but on the whole that’s an eminently hateable level of self-righteous posturing.

This chapter is quite fun, if a bit chaotic with all the random effects from the pots. For some reason I always forget about the turn limit, which can become an unexpected source of stress when there are shrine maidens spamming status staves to slow you down and such. Fates (and Conquest specifically) is the one game other than Thracia that frequently turns enemy staff wielders into serious threats, and this chapter combined with Azama’s Hexing Rod in the previous one show that off thoroughly.

Chapter 13

Pictured: a subtle and nuanced depiction of villainy.

Aside from his sudden reappearance and this one still, Hans is actually...not that bad here though? Corrin points out how weird it is that they (and the player) are expected to forgive him after he attempted to kill Corrin at the Bottomless Canyon, and the worst atrocities of Hans’s army - particularly Scarlet’s death - are effectively gruesome because they’re left for the player to imagine. It’s comparable to how FE8 handles the ghastly presence of Orson’s wife. It is pretty silly how much is made over Hans clearly enjoying his work when Peri was recruited in the last chapter and Reina is also in this game (in this chapter, even), or that explicit bloodlust among the playable cast has shown up before in past FEs in characters like FE7 Karel. Player-centered morality, yay!

In any case, there’s also a good deal of genuine character complexity on display in this chapter too. Takumi is still consumed by grief and rage and lashes out specifically at the bond Corrin shares with the Nohrian sisters, calling attention to his increasing isolation from even his own siblings. Between taking an arrow in a cutscene and last chapter’s illness Elise just can’t catch a break, can she? Camilla too gets to show a rare bit of character for this route, encouraging Corrin to keep their head down and go along with Garon’s orders because self-centered pragmatism is how she’s learned to survive in situations where she can’t solve problems with violence and/or sex. 

Chapter 14

What an incredibly effective disguise. No one would ever recognize her. 

Ok, ok, the audience at the opera is seeing her from a distance and obscured by all the water effects, but it’s still pretty dumb that Corrin of all people can’t put two and two together here.

Honestly, as much as I enjoy the opera house setting and praised its appearance in Birthright this chapter all falls into that same generally silly vein. There’s again no logical explanation provided for Garon’s trip to Nestra, the enemy combatants on this map are a random squad of Hoshidans unrelated to the unfolding story, Keaton’s recruitment has even less buildup than Kaden’s did, and everything culminates in Leo teaching Corrin the obscure and arcane art of lying and in so doing bequeathing him with a sword upgrade because that’s what passes for (anti)heroism on this route. There’s not even much in the way of gameplay to discuss, which is disappointing when contrasted against the Birthright version. 

I would however like to close this post by reiterating the point I made at the start: so far, this route is severely lacking in an actual plot. All of Corrin’s movements since returning to Nohr have been directed by Garon (and Anankos by extension, though his motives remain vague even if you know the full story). In a way this helps to reinforce the feeling that the Nohrian royals are trapped in abusive situation, though that would be an unusually deep psychological reading of what is in reality an unfocused plot. The following chapter and what comes of it ought to be proof enough that any similarities between Conquest’s narrative structure and the familial issues of its main cast are purely coincidental. 

Next time: Conquest Chapter 15 - 20

[unifiedsocialblog]

5 Steps to Succeed with Social Selling on LinkedIn

Social selling has become a widely used term, but still very few know how to do it effectively. In fact, most people seem to believe that social selling on LinkedIn is about spamming your connections.

Those that see social selling that way will never be successful at it.

Social selling comes down to building relationships with prospects on platforms such as LinkedIn, which is the premier platform for B2B businesses.

The strategies outlined in this article are effective for sales professionals or any B2B professional that wants to attract more leads and clients. But before I dive into the “how” I want to make sure you understand the “why.”

If you are still wondering if learning and using social selling techniques is worth your time and resources, consider that 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media. (Source)

Statistics collected by LinkedIn, provide further compelling evidence as to the benefits of using social selling (Source):

98% of top salespeople report using sales technology on the job

More than half (62%) of top salespeople strongly attribute closing more deals to incorporating social networks into their sales strategy

94% of top salespeople agree that using social networks provides them with valuable insights into trigger points like job changes, promotions, and news mentions which create an organic way to connect with customers and prospects

A third (32%) of business decision-makers will respond to a cold call less than ten percent of the time but are more likely to respond to someone that was introduced through their professional network.

64% of B2B decision makers said they wouldn’t engage with a salesperson if the communication was not personalized.

77% of buyers say that they wouldn’t engage with a salesperson if they didn’t do the necessary homework that would give them insights or knowledge into their business.

A substantial majority of B2B decision makers (62%) say they look for an informative LinkedIn profile when deciding whether to work with salespeople.

85% of B2B decision makers surveyed consider it essential for salespeople to be connected to other people at their company.

And from a company standpoint, companies that are engaged on social media are 40% more likely to be perceived as competitive and 58% more likely to attract top talent compared to those who are not engaged on social media. (Source)

I realized that was a lot of stats and data I just shared with you, but before I explain how to succeed with social selling, I want you to understand why social selling on LinkedIn is so important. That’s because:

80% of B2B leads generated from social media come from LinkedIn. And that’s with most people doing it wrong! LinkedIn is a B2B goldmine because…

LinkedIn Allows You to Connect Directly with Decision Makers

LinkedIn is widely used by not only business owners and professionals but also C-Suite executives. This makes LinkedIn the best social network to connect directly with decision-makers of all kinds.

But just how many decision makers and C-level executives are actually using LinkedIn?

Currently, there are 8.2 million C-level executives on LinkedIn. (Source)

This certainly provides a lot of compelling evidence that your ideal clients – regardless of their position in a company, are likely using LinkedIn – and expect that you are as well.

So how do you best find, connect and build a relationship with these leads and prospects?

You must create a strategy that can help you identify your ideal clients, referral partners and even possible strategic alliances and then determine how you will connect with them, what steps you will take to build a relationship with them and what the ultimate goal of the relationship is.

This plan should include the steps you must take to move each prospect through your sales funnel and the approach you will take for each stage.

To help you create an effective strategy, I am going to share the five steps of my proprietary system, The LINK Method (detailed in my book LinkedIn Unlocked), to use LinkedIn for social selling.

Social Selling on LinkedIn with The LINK Method

1. Prospecting on LinkedIn

There are two ways to prospect on LinkedIn. The first is by doing a targeted search for prospects, and the second is by leveraging your network to gain warm introductions.

While most social selling is an active process, there are many things that you can do to help enhance your efforts. The first thing you MUST do is to optimize your profile to speak directly to your ideal clients and include the specific keywords a prospect might use when looking for someone with the products or services that you provide.

The very first thing I do when I am providing LinkedIn training for a sales team or B2B professional services providers is to ensure they have laid their foundation for success by having a client-focused LinkedIn profile. If you are going to be connecting with key decision makers, you must ensure that your profile looks professional and that you look credible.

REMEMBER: It is important to know that when you are searching for prospects, only people in your network (1st, 2nd, and 3rd level connections as well as members of the same group) will show up in your results.

If you have a small network, you will have limited results. The same applies to anyone searching for someone that offers the products or services you provide. If you are not a part of their network, you will not show up. Adding new connections is an essential part of an effective LinkedIn marketing campaign.

Thankfully LinkedIn makes this easy by offering the ability to find prospects through its Advanced Search function.

Depending upon the level of membership you have, the search filters will be different. For example, Sales Navigator offers the most robust set of filters to do highly targeted searches. You can still do searches with a free account or even a Premium account, but you will have fewer search filters available to you in the Advanced Search function.

Using LinkedIn’s Advanced Search for Prospecting

LinkedIn’s Advanced Search tool is excellent for finding leads and prospects you can connect with.

The Advanced Search also uses what is known as a Boolean search, and this gives you the ability to hyper-target your search by adding additional filters so that you can pull up highly targeted search results. You do this by adding or eliminating elements from the search parameters.

If you find that a particular search produces really targeted results, you may choose to save that search using the Save Search function. This will allow you to come back later and reuse that same saved search repeatedly, as well as see people that are new to your network that meet your search criteria, with just the click of a link.

Advanced Social Selling Tip

One area that most people fail to capitalize on when using LinkedIn is to connect with possible strategic alliances and referral partners. Having someone else refer their client or connection to you (particularly when they are trusted source), results in valuable third-party credibility and that dramatically shortens the sales cycle with a prospective client.

To benefit from this important strategy, be sure to connect with other professionals or authorities in different industries that serve a similar audience to you, and begin to build relationships with them. You can also look at the connections of your current clients for anyone that may be an ideal prospect and ask them for a warm introduction.

2. Make First Contact

After you have located prospects and referral partners, you need to make the first contact.

This process starts with your initial connection request.

Make it personalized; give people a reason they should accept your connection request. What you put in your connection request message will largely determine whether they click Accept or Ignore.

You should think about this first contact on LinkedIn the same way you would as the first time you meet someone face-to-face. You want to make an excellent first impression and leave them wanting to get to know you.

When reaching out to prospects, approach it like you’re at a networking event and meeting them in person for the first time. Always start by greeting them by name. A simple “Hi Jonathan” works great.

The body of the invite is crucial. Remember that you only have 300 characters to convey your message. If you have connections, interests or something else in common, leverage that commonality in your message. Be sure that your message provides a valid reason for them to click Accept.

When in doubt about what to include in your connection request message, refer to these conversation starters:

Find commonality

Comment on something in their profile

Comment on content they have shared

Comment on or compliment their company

Compliment them

It is critical that you personalize your connection request as you do not want them to click Ignore. If someone clicks Ignore, they will also have the option to select “I don’t know this person.”

WARNING: If you receive an excessive number of “I don’t know this person” responses, your account will be restricted, and this will destroy your ability to connect with prospects and expand your network going forward.

Personalizing your invites is not optional if you want to succeed at social selling on LinkedIn and to connect with new prospects. If you follow just this one tip, you will significantly increase your success on LinkedIn, as most people are not doing it, and your invite will stand out.

3. Engage in Dialogue

When you first meet a prospect face to face, I would imagine that you have a conversation and get to know them, and NOT dive into a sales pitch. The same should be true online. Sadly too often… it’s not.

After a person accepts your connection request, you must establish rapport and start a dialogue if you want to build a relationship with them successfully. You do this by following up with a personalized message. I call this the welcome message.

When writing your welcome message, remember the goal at this stage is merely to establish rapport, start a dialogue, and request nothing in return.

In this first message, in addition to thanking them for connecting, I suggest you personalize the message by commenting on something you’ve learned about them from their LinkedIn presence, or perhaps ask them a question if it is relevant.

You never, ever want to pitch anything. While the content of these messages will depend on your industry and objectives, it should NOT include anything that could be perceived as sales materials.

4. Build Relationships

The process of building relationships isn’t limited to just one message after you connect with a prospect. It is vital to send additional messages to get the dialogue going and find ways to provide value to them.

That is why I call the next message in the sequence the relationship-building message, as most people never get past the welcome message and fail to ever build a relationship with their new connections/prospects on LinkedIn.

When appropriate and relevant you can look at ways you could add value to your new connection, and effective way to do this (when done right) is to provide them with a resource they would find valuable or interesting.

Once again, the content of these messages will depend on your industry and goals, but should NOT include anything that could be perceived as sales materials or a sales pitch of any sort!

Do NOT make the mistake of trying to sell or pitch your product or services in a LinkedIn message. Doing so is the fastest way to kill a potential relationship.

The resource you offer must relate specifically to their business or industry and should either help them discover new insights or overcome a challenge they may be having. Your only goal is to build the relationship, positioning yourself as someone who provides value and is potentially an authority on your topic. Doing so builds rapport and trust. 

When deciding what content to share, consider these questions:

What are they interested in?

What is important to them?

What problems do they face?

5. Move it Offline

No relationship with your prospect should be kept solely on LinkedIn. The real magic happens when you move the relationship offline. It is offline that you get to know your prospect, understand their challenges, and, when appropriate, offer your solution.

If you have established rapport, built some trust, and provided value to your prospect (essentially earned the right), many of them will be willing to have an offline conversation with you.

It’s offline you can get the information you need about them, it’s offline you can talk about your solution, it’s offline where you convert a prospect to a client.

This means you should NEVER try and sell on LinkedIn, you should use it to get to the place where you can have an offline conversation. It’s here your typical sales process kicks in.

Too many people rush this process. In rushing it, they only succeed at turning their prospects off and damaging their credibility!

When You Get No Response

This process, however well executed, isn’t going to work with 100% of the people you connect with or even 50%. Just like all sales, it’s a numbers game. There are many factors contributing to why your messages might not generate interest from an individual prospect. Some of them include:

They are not the right target market

They don’t need what you are offering right now

They aren’t ready for the solution you provide

It’s not a current priority for them

Personal or professional problems are distracting them

Your messages are not capturing their attention and need to be re-written

Not all of your prospects will be ready or motivated by the solution you provide when you reach out to them.

That doesn’t mean that they won’t be in six or twelve months from now. The key is to remain top of mind with these people and not let engagement with them stop at the last message in The LINK Method.

Advanced Social Selling Tip

In addition to the messages that you send as part of your lead generation sequence, there will also be many other reasons when you may want to engage or message your connections. These reasons (also known as trigger events), will provide opportunities to very comfortably and naturally engage your connections, which will allow you to nurture your relationship.

In each instance, you want to ensure that your future engagement is still relevant for each person and/or circumstance. The goal is to stay on their radar, provide value, build trust, and be top of mind when they want or need the solution you offer.

Summing Up Social Selling on LinkedIn

The old way of selling isn’t as effective with today’s modern buyer. The new method of selling has evolved and requires you to connect digitally, educate buyers and build relationships.

You will find that you will succeed at social selling on LinkedIn when you make your primary goal to offer great value to prospects, establish yourself as a trusted authority, and provide messages that create interest in you and how you may be able to help them.

Are you currently having success with social selling on LinkedIn? If not, I have another incredible free resource you’ll want to take advantage of. Attend my new online masterclass called How to Turn Cold LinkedIn Connections into Clients where you’ll learn a predictable way to generate more leads and clients in under 30 minutes a day. Register here.

The post 5 Steps to Succeed with Social Selling on LinkedIn appeared first on Top Dog Social Media.

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[geekade]

Geekade Top Ten: Hopes for the Secret of Mana Remake

While I’ve never considered myself a “hardcore gamer,” the videogames that I’ve played throughout my life, I’ve played exhaustively, and Secret of Mana is one of those games. Over the past 24 years, I’ve spent hundreds of hours playing through this adventure-RPG, and although certainly not a flawless game, its visuals, music, combat system, enemies, and sheer fun make it one of my favorite videogames of all time.

A few weeks ago, I was ecstatic when I learned that a remake of Secret of Mana is scheduled for February 2018. While the trailer for this remake reveals, among a few other things, updated graphics and voiceovers, there are still many unanswered questions regarding what will be redone for the new version. I’m not expecting, nor do I want, a complete overhaul of the SNES game, but there are some things that I hope the re-designers have considered and improved upon. Bust out those tiger bikinis and fire up some fairy walnuts, because here are my top 10 hopes for the Secret of Mana remake!

10. Better A.I.

The reason why something so important is this low on the list is because it’s such an obvious problem that needs correction. Everyone who has played this game has likely encountered a situation where a quick escape was impossible because a party member was stuck around a corner. We’d hit that invisible wall, unable to advance out of harm’s way because of faulty A.I., and it was game over. Unnecessary backtracking on a screen in order to get a character “unstuck” or having to switch characters in the middle of intense action is an enormous annoyance. Hopefully the production team solves this seemingly simple problem, because I do not want to encounter the subpar A.I. that I’ve been dealing with for over two decades when I play solo.

9. Reduce the use of recycled sprites

While this is surely still a common practice, in the 90s, this trope was everywhere in videogames. The slightest color change between characters meant that they were completely different characters, even though they otherwise appeared identical. For example, while Tropicallo and Boreal Face are likely related, shouldn’t the latter look a bit more intimidating, considering it’s a stronger boss? This might seem like a small point, but increased size, meaner facial expressions, fangs, spikes, and other additional features, would cause enemies to appear more threatening as the game progresses. I don’t think the production team needs to create completely new characters, but since so many enemy and boss sprites are reused, I think more than a color change is necessary, feasible, and an opportunity to make enemies look more interesting. Modern games can display plenty of detail, so I hope the development team takes advantage and updates enemies’ physical traits.

8. Improved weapons

As weapons are upgraded, it becomes increasingly time consuming to charge them and execute powerful attacks. Why even bother doing this when a spell takes seconds to cast? Sure, magic points are limited and so are magic-replenishing items, but during later-game boss battles, weapons are nearly useless. Although the player can somewhat control the A.I.’s behavior with the “action grid,” if all three characters charge their weapons simultaneously, that may leave the party open to attacks, and definitely slow progress. By shortening the amount of time it takes to charge weapons, the game can move at a pace suitable for the battle system. If weapons were more effective against bosses, players could truly work in unison and avoid the effective but mundane spell-spamming system.

7. Improved Magic

I don’t believe that the original system to level up magic is a bad one, but near the end of the game, it takes an unreasonable amount of time to completely level up different elementals. Having to cast a spell nearly 100 times in order to fully power up a single elemental is a pain in the ass, but that has to be repeated multiple times for the two characters who wield magic. I would like this task to be even just slightly easier, instead of the tedious chore it becomes on the SNES version.

Furthermore, the spell animations and the types of spells themselves could be improved. “Evil Gate” sounds very sinister and scary, but the actual animation is just a weird portal that spins, makes a creepy sound, and then disappears. Perhaps a claw could reach out of it and grab an enemy. There are plenty of different possibilities for different spells, so I believe that creativity could be applied to much more magic in the remake. Also, instead of 3 spells per character’s elemental, why not 4 or 5? If enemies’ weaknesses are tweaked, this could add a lot more fun to an already cool and creative magic system.

6. Careful with the music

The remake will apparently contain “new musical arrangements.” Does this mean the original compositions will be replaced by completely new songs? Does this mean the same songs from the SNES version will simply be updated with fuller sound? Does this mean a bastardization of the original music? While the song in the new trailer is fantastic, at this point, fans can only speculate about the rest of the soundtrack’s quality. Secret of Mana certainly doesn’t have the enormous soundtrack of something like Earthbound, but this game has some of the most amazing music on the SNES. Each track, though varied in style and instrumentation, invigorates each scene and area with perfectly fitting music, and regardless of the variety of musical styles, the entire score still feels cohesive and complete. Each composition is a goddamn masterpiece, so I am very defensive and a little nervous about the remake’s music. I hope that each track remains largely the same, perhaps only complimented with more vibrancy.

5. Let Flammie fight

Don’t get me wrong, I love Flammie and he is very useful in the original game, but I think adding a few assists in battle would really make him a badass. Come on, he’s a dragon! Perhaps instead of directly entering a fight, he could simply help the party attack an airborne enemy. Even if it’s just once in the game, let Flammie destroy a castle or stomp on a boss. My point is that he has a lot more potential than just a convenient mode of transportation, and I think this remake is the perfect opportunity to prove that point.  

4. A bigger world/more exploration

While the world of Secret of Mana looks pretty big and some of its locations are beautifully detailed, there are only so many places to go, and some of those places are very small. On the SNES, areas may appear huge while the party flies over them, but up close, those areas are either inaccessible or simply consist of a few screens. I think that this can, and should, be expanded for the remake. It’s well documented that Secret of Mana was originally intended for the SNES CD add-on, but much of the game was scrapped when that peripheral was cancelled. Among other things, many areas and paths in the game were deleted to save space for an SNES cartridge. Nearly 25 years later, limited cartridge space is not a concern. I hope there are expanded towns and routes between them, and even new areas, castles, and dungeons.

3. Cutscenes for more story

The Mana Tree’s origin, Serin’s final battle, Popoi’s village, Primm and Dyluck’s history - there are so many chances to embellish the story of Secret of Mana with cutscenes and additional dialogue. As I’ve mentioned, a lot of content was removed from the original game, and Ted Woolsey allegedly had only 30 days to translate Secret of Mana. Since there are no longer such constraints, I think it would be amazing to see visual accounts of events that took place before the beginning of the game, and additional dialogue between characters as the game progresses would serve to enhance the experience. I don’t think movie-length cut scenes or a novel’s length of prose are necessary, but the developers of the remake have a chance to truly enrich the story that this game can definitely deliver, which ties in with my next point.

2. Make the Generals less general

Something that I’ve wished since I was a child is more focus on the villains of Secret of Mana. I’ve always loved interesting villains, and while this game has its share, none of them are characterized very well. Sheex, Geshtar, and Fanha stand around most of the time they are present and don’t feel like they are true threats until they transform into monsters. Was Sheex trained in Ninjitsu as a part of the Emperor’s army? Did Geshtar have to get a license to ride his flying motorcycle? As a primary antagonist in the game, Thanatos most definitely deserves an origin. Has he always liked eccentric headwear? I hope each of these villains is granted a spotlight and history, because interesting characters lead to better storytelling.

1. A better final fight

The evil empire and its generals have been defeated, but there is still one thing left to do in order to save the world: defeat the Mana Beast with the Mana Sword. The visuals and the music during this fight are amazing, but unfortunately, the combat is lacking, and the small platform on which your party can move hinders the climactic battle of the game. I hope that there is something larger to stand on than a handful of small squares, and more to do than cast Mana Magic on Randi, only for him to stand around and charge his weapon. Perhaps a large section of the Mana Fortress could be designated for the battle, or even the entirety of it. The battle could move around the Fortress as the Mana Beast tries to attack from different sides and angles. Allowing all three characters to get more involved offensively would certainly make this battle more fun, especially if it’s multiplayer.

In the original game, the Beast casts “Wall” in order to negate offensive magic, even when your party dispels it, so perhaps this can be changed. Allowing the other characters to consistently attack with both weapons and spells, albeit damaging to a much lesser degree than the Mana Sword, would make the battle a lot more engaging. Even Flammie could be utilized here. This is the end of the game! The final fight! Make it more unique and fun!

So there are my top ten hopes for the Secret of Mana remake. What do you want to see in the new version? Is there anything that I missed? Did I ask for too much, or too little? Leave a comment and let me know! In the meantime, I’ll be endlessly pacing back and forth in anticipation of February.

[propertyhold]

Designing Olivebridge Cottage 2.0: Part 2!

So, you may recall that last time we discussed Olivebridge Cottage, we had a plan to kinda-sorta rebuild the house and it looked more or less like this:

This period was the closest this job probably ever came to feeling manageable: we had the town and the engineers on our side, the homeowners were happy with the direction, and the tasks ahead were difficult but not that difficult. It’s a little one-story house—a few more months and we’d be out.

Then the homeowners threw a second floor master suite into the mix. Which they wanted me to design. In approximately 5 minutes. Two weeks before we were set to start construction on a plan that had remained unchanged for a few months.

At the time, the logic went like this: after spending so much time and so much money on this house, reselling the house at a price that bore any resemblance to the amount invested would be somewhat impossible if the finished product didn’t really differ materially from the original house. Adding a whole bedroom and bathroom would turn the house from a 2 bed/1 bath to a 3 bed/2 bath, essentially shifting it into a different bracket of real estate. Obviously the upfront building cost would be higher, but the homeowners felt that it was the right move.

And so, the second floor. Maybe it sounds easy to you. It did not sound easy to me. It didn’t even necessarily sound fun to me, because I think I’m more of a renovator at heart. I like working within the constraints of an existing structure. Pulling a design out of thin air…that’s a whole different thing.

And you can’t just plop a second floor onto a house and call it a day! You have to rethink everything. For starters, stairs! Stairs take up a lot of space. You also have to think about using that new space efficiently. You have to think about plumbing paths and electrical requirements and septic systems and all the codes. And you have to think about what that new house is going to actually look like! And, in my case, without really any experience to lean on, I had to do it in a really short amount of time and have it approved by two homeowners, a team of engineers, and the fine folks at the local building and zoning department. And then I had to be able to build it.

All that being said, it’s not like I could just propose/build whatever. Every design job has constraints, and often those constraints guide the design much more restrictively than your imagination does. As somebody with some educational background in architecture, and certainly a personal interest, my mind immediately went to all kinds of things I’ve seen or read about. The Eames Case Study House, constructed from factory components in a matter of days. The stark geometry of the Bauhaus. The undulating concrete forms of Saarinen and Niemeyer. Those incredible walls of glass and rich wood finishes and the indoor-outdoor dialogue they create that Neutra did so well. It’s easy to get caught up.

And then you come back down to reality, because these were my constraints:

Experience: at this stage, we didn’t even have a builder. Obviously I can’t literally, single-handedly construct a house, so I knew I’d be working in conjunction with a contractor, but we didn’t know which contractor. New construction is somewhat uncommon around these parts, so there really just wasn’t room to gamble on some complicated or experimental design. This house needed to be simple and straightforward to construct.

Cost: I had to be able to build it inexpensively. New construction is never cheap, but there’s a big difference between a simple, traditional stick-frame structure and a complicated one that requires steel supports or tons of custom components or hard-to-source materials. Time is money when working with contractors, going back to the ease-of-building point. Cost is also part of what eliminated prefab as an option: everything I found was priced much higher than we hoped to be on a cost-per-square-foot basis, not to mention really tiny!

Footprint: partially because we were working with most of an existing structure, and largely due to zoning regulations and setback requirements, we essentially had to maintain the footprint of the existing house. More on that in a second!

Site: this site was somewhat challenging. You have the beautiful wooded areas in the back and off to the side with big mature trees and boulders and the wonders of nature, but then across the street and next door you have houses. Two of the three are currently in states of disrepair (and even fixed up, it’s not like you want to highlight neighboring houses when you have nature as an alternative!), so I had to try to maximize the appealing views and minimize exposure to the less desirable ones.

Practicality: even with the additional floor, the house still isn’t particularly large. You can dream all day about the architecture of a space, but ultimately you still have to have a functioning kitchen, three bedrooms, storage, wall space for art and small storage and display, two bathrooms that meet code, utility space, and laundry. The house has to work.

Codes: There are codes for almost everything. Heights, spans, clearances, distances between supports, the rise and run of each stair tread, the R-value of insulation, the placement of electrical receptacles, forms of egress, the type of glass required on a given window, fire safety, vapor barriers, grades of lumber for interior walls vs. exterior ones, the space around the toilet bowl. To say the learning curve for me was steep is an understatement.

Engineering: Regardless of what would have actually been possible, the engineers had some restrictions that my hands were somewhat tied to follow—the most consequential being the pitch of the roof. You hear a lot about snow loads being greater than they used to be, and our engineers said emphatically that our roofs had to be 6/12 at a minimum. This refers to the rise and run—for every 12″ of run, the roof must rise 6″, which is fairly steep. That’s kind of fine for a regular gabled roof, but wouldn’t allow us to build, say, a shed-style roof without the angles just looking insane.

Time: there just wasn’t enough of it! I had to design it quickly, primarily because all of this came about in mid-September, and we had to get a foundation in the ground before winter hit! And we had to build it quickly. Had is a strong word—the homeowners wanted it done quickly. They wanted it done yesterday. There was quite a bit of time spent on this project trying to explain why various things were so time-consuming, and why we probabbblllyyyy couldn’t build and finish (and furnish!) an entire house in 3-4 months.

Homeowners: as much as the homeowners and I really did get along and were on the same page about so many things, remember that I’m designing this house for them, not me! It’s easy to forget now, but during this period there was SO much anxiety and frustration that, for the homeowners, it started to feel essential that the house had mass appeal. OH DEAR. To me this house was always aspiring to be more modern, not less, but Adriana started showing me examples of these very traditional, kind of generic but well-executed new construction projects that just felt so at odds with the actual house, or what they even wanted to live in! I think it was really just panic about the future prospect of resale, which I understand. Not only did this feel really…uninspiring, it also seemed like an efficient way to increase construction costs: with modernism you can get away with simplicity and utilitarianism, but it’s hard to do that with more traditional styles without everything just looking cheap and flat. As a small example, we were aiming to reuse certain things like windows that were still in fine shape, but large single-lite vinyl casement windows were not going to look right on a house that’s supposed to have 6-over-6 divided lite double-hungs. Nonetheless, this period of not wanting to go “too daring” with the design was happening in the background of this and felt like a big complicating factor, even though they eventually got over it. Ha!

SO! The first thing was figuring out the space I had to work with. Our original footprint was this, with the top facing the street:

Since we asked real nice and applied for a zoning variance, the town allowed us to bump out the living room wall 6 feet, giving us an addition 120 square feet of space to play with. Like so–shaded section is new:

One of the challenges I see in designing a structure vs. renovating one is that with renovations, you tend to be thinking mostly about the interior or mostly about the exterior. Exterior work is often cosmetic—re-siding, re-painting, re-roofing, landscaping…ya know. But you have a structure: you have window locations, doorways, ceiling heights, the direction the roof pitches. But designing a building, you have to consider the how the interior looks and functions and how the exterior looks, and the two don’t always play well together! You might think a certain window would be nice inside the house, but then outside it just looks totally dumb. Or vice-versa! Or you want really high ceilings inside, but that makes the structure really tall and proportionately unappealing. There are so many things like this. In this case, it felt imperative to maximize light and views on the elevations of the house that face nature, but ALSO create a street-facing facade that looked welcoming and attractive, but didn’t highlight the undesirable views available to that side of the house from inside. Tricky!

In super simple terms: green is where we have good views, red is where we have bad views.

So, at THIS point, the back portion of the house (now the “guest wing,” since the master bedroom is moving upstairs!) was supposed to remain fairrrrly unchanged, although I wrote in the last post about some of the stuff we were required to do with it.

The kitchen and dining room plans were also more or less set, at least in their locations. That footprint wasn’t changing, and since we were hoping to keep some framing and the foundation under the kitchen/dining space, which would not allow us to put a second floor over that part of the house without redoing the foundation as well. Weight and stuff. So our second floor master suite is confined to the area where the whole foundation would be new—directly over the living room.

So basically we have this enlarged living room, which is also the only artery to get to the kitchen/dining spaces, the guest wing, up the stairs that don’t exist, and into the house at all unless you’re just going in the front door and into that long skinny guest room. It’s a ton of space, but once you add in all of those factors it gets a little tricky to create a room that doesn’t just feel like a massive pass-through.

It dawned on me that nobody was especially tied to the front door location, and that maybe it ought to be facing the street. Incidentally that’s where the front door was before the previous owners bought and wreckovated the house.

It also occurred to me that it’s not like you spend a lot of time in a stairwell, and you can get sort of creative with window placement in a stairwell, and that the stairwell should probably go against the street-facing wall, too. That way, we concentrate the views from the living room out into the woods, not onto the street and neighboring houses.

That’s how I got to some earlier version of this. You’ll notice that a couple of walls have shifted around in the guest wing with the elimination of the old entry, but those changes weren’t planned for until after we started building! A number of major things changed on the fly once construction got underway.

ANYWAY—if memory serves, all of this took place in a couple of days, and then it was time for another meeting with the engineers and Adriana the homeowner. In the background of all of this was the fact that I was no longer under contract at this point—we had to scrap and re-write my contract for the job completely, which was underway but not complete. This sounds inconsequential, but typically I wouldn’t be designing or sharing drawings and renderings (not to mention running around town to building departments and engineering firms) until after I have an executed contract and a deposit check in hand—a little freelancer safeguard against doing a bunch of work and never getting compensated for it if a client decides to be a jerk. Unfortunately it’s happened so I’m leery of it, even when I work for people that I know and trust!

The point is, we walked into this hour-long meeting with the engineer, and I didn’t really know what we were doing there. Adriana had called the meeting but without a design in place, it seemed premature and potentially like a waste of everyone’s time.

As it happened, Adriana had been corresponding with the engineer and had submitted a sketch of what she thought the second floor layout should be. I think she’ll be OK with me pointing out now that it was…a mess. Haha! Problem number one was that it wasn’t at all to scale and showed the staircase coming up in a location that made no sense for the first floor. The allocation of space was choppy and complicated and gave the toilet the best corner in the whole house! There was an enormous amount of space given over to closets, not enough room to actually use the washer and dryer in the plan…and I was just sitting there like…oh shit. 

Again. I am not hired. I am not being paid. I am watching the engineer set these plans in stone in CAD, and feeling like if the meeting continued on this way, we’d have a terrible plan that I could then be possibly tasked with executing, and a client who might not understand the need to start over with a different plan since why did we have that meeting in the first place where we designed the house in an hour?!

So, I stepped in. And drew up a little sketch of what had been tumbling around in my brain. Then we dropped it into CAD. And then we moved a couple things. Then we rotated the roof 90 degrees to have a street-facing gable. Then…the basic strokes of the design were all there. We had a shape. We had walls. We had rooms.

Then some more decisions. How tall are the first floor ceilings? I say 10 feet. Adriana wants 12. How tall are the second floor ceilings? I say 8. Adriana insists on 10. All of a sudden the house gets four feet taller. That doesn’t sound like a big deal, but things like that had a bigger impact on everything—costs and time, for instance—than any of us appreciated at the time. That’s longer lumber, more insulation, more of all the finishing materials…whoopsie!

With those plans and decisions in hand, and shortly thereafter my contract executed, it was time to take our basic shape and basic layout and flesh it out into something resembling a house!

Because budget was such a concern, it was always the plan to reuse as much of the original house as we could in the rebuild! That’s right up my alley, of course, but it’s tricky—you don’t want to be so tied to the idea of reuse that the end result suffers because you were just trying to make too much stuff work together. This started with the windows, so I made a simple visual of all the windows that could potentially be relocated and the rough openings required to install them:

Pretty exciting stuff.

Then I set about placing them, and quickly realized that we’d need more windows, and the sizes we had were mostly really strange and difficult to work elegantly into a design. I tried, though! In order to keep costs down, I recommended that new window purchases be readily-available stock sizes.

Here was the first proposed design—oof! I hated that entryway when I proposed it, and I hate it now. Haha! Since the front elevation is where we wanted to minimize views, I kind of liked the idea of doing it up really fortress-like with just a couple little windows on the front. Those windows come from the list of windows with potential for reuse, but the sizes felt arbitrary and not so great.

The clients thought it looked uninviting and scary. I get that. Moving on…

Idea #2! In both of the first two designs, I sort of liked the concept of doing a shed roof over the kitchen/dining spaces, but the required 6/12 pitch was kindaaaaaa too much. I also turned the entryway inside-out, thinking a little recessed covered exterior mudroom kind of thing might be totally cool? Especially clad in a cedar tongue-and-groove or something? Given that we already bumped the front of the house out closer to the road than the existing zoning allows, it seemed like an interesting way to avoid pushing our luck with the building department by also asking for some kind of porch/portico/something that would bring anything structural even closer to the road.

The clients did not like the outdoor mudroom concept. Still not feeling the facade. Next!

I liked this plan! I think I still kinda like this plan! The mismatched window sizes on the second floor window are an error on the rendering, so ignore that. Anyway.

This plan definitely felt the best so far to the clients, but something still wasn’t sitting quite right (with all of us, really) so we brought in another set of eyes! Trained, talented, and experienced eyes! Adriana is great friends with an NYC-based architect named Matt Bremer, so she brought my renderings to him for some input!

Matt drew the above doodle, Adriana sent the doodle to me, I made the alterations in SketchUp, and that got us to…

Boom, house!

And that’s…pretty much what we ended up building. With some minor changes, naturally.

All in all—is this the house I would have built if I could have built anything my heart desired? No. But it IS a house that I think takes into consideration the things that I talked about at the beginning of this post. Simple and relatively inexpensive to build fairly quickly, satisfied our technical requirements, had the happy approval of the homeowners, made effective use of the site, and allowed for an efficient but spacious-feeling interior layout. Check check check!

Now let’s build this thing! This is where it gets fun.

Psssst! Olivebridge Cottage is an ongoing series about a renovation that flew off the rails (and then found its way back on)! For lots of backstory and schadenfreude, check out these past posts!

 New Season, New Project!

Plans for Olivebridge Cottage!

Oh Dear, Here We Go…

Little House of Horrors

From Bad to Worse (And Worse and Worse and Worse)

Blogger is Hired to Renovate, Mistakenly Destroys Ulster County Art Piece “House”

Olivebridge Cottage: 2.0!

Designing Olivebridge Cottage 2.0: Part 1!

Designing Olivebridge Cottage 2.0: Part 2! syndicated from findqueenslandelectricians.wordpress.com