#its not just a lovely game gameplay wise of course the story and characters are SO SO good

[todayisafridaynight]

i think the only person who could REALLY confront kiryu was haruka and no one else, because, again, he cant dismiss her or fistfight with her about it. it could be so tasty to see how he tries to make a decision for again and she goes 'ummm chotto matte i actually have a kid now too, so how about I decide for MYSELF'. because one thing about me? i love generational conflicts. man it's just so sad because this game had all the potential to be great and yet

and speaking of other games, i'm planning on playing everything that has been ported to pc and localised. gonna go through completion lists in the games i've already finished :) looking forward to ishin and judgement and not really looking forward to y7 because the fighting looks nightmarish. until last week i was sure it was a beat em up... but if i learned how to play mahjong, i'll handle a turn based combat system too lmao

I don't think Kiryu would default to violence or an argument if someone were to call him out on his instability as a parent- he'd probably agree with them honestly as even as early as Y2 and later Y5, Kiryu had doubts of being able to raise just Haruka. Ergo, hearing it from Haruka herself probably would be the most effective and most impactful.

I'm sure you'll love Ishin! It's a really fun game with pretty colorful gameplay and opportunities and play around with the combat, and- maybe it's because I'm an enjoyer for history- the story's great to follow and become involved in.

[lesbiansforboromir]

I am sorry, but LOTRO is...like a LOTR game? The plot is good? It has which characters?

HAH you know that's such a good question, didn't even think to explain it properly.

LOTRO is an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game), think World of Warcraft-esque. It's about 15 years old so it's a little on the dated side graphics wise and it's gameplay is essentially landscape exploration and combat, with group content that goes from three-person dungeons to full 12-person raids.

BEING a 15 year old game the plot is... enormous. Like its hard to even talk about a 'plot' at this point, since there are about 30 different individual storylines for each zone strewn throughout a multitude of quests that see you talking to every character imaginable. Like 'which characters does it have'? all of them, LOTRO has all characters from lotr in it. LOTRO has characters you don't even remember in it. In LOTRO you get major questlines from Denethor's two unnamed elder sisters. In LOTRO they make you care about the men named amongst the dead in the song of lament after the pelennor fields, people you never speak too in the books.

You create a character and choose your race and begin to journey from the furthest west (Ered Luin, the Shire, Bree or Cardolan depending on choices) to the furthest east and act as a side character to the main plot of lotr. You cross paths with the fellowship at various points and develop relationships with all of them, up to and past the death of sauron (currently the game has expanded into Umbar, months after Sauron's defeat in game canon.) All of the game's story is told through quest dialogue, which you have to read, it's a hell of a lot of reading, whether thats reading what people are saying to you when you accept a quest or reading what NPC's are saying to you within quest instances and 'cutscenes'.

So there is an overarching plot, called 'epic book quests', which will take you on this journey, but it is dwarfed by the sheer number of surrounding tales going within each area you visit. Dunland is an excellent example, you have to travel through it to get to Rohan but what you're doing whilst you're there is investing yourself in the struggles, politics, dangers and cultures of the people who live in Dunland. And that is true for every area you visit, which inevitably makes LOTRO a massive worldbuilding and expanding project for middle earth. Like it's really hard to put into words quite how much 'plot' there is in this game. Some of it is good, some of it is not so good, some of it is so good it makes me want to bite the game, some of it is so bad it makes me want to bite the game, you will find 30 favourite plots and 30 hated plots and 100+ more in the middle.

Of course, this means LOTRO also creates it's own characters to fit into the world and get attached too, many of whom I now love and care for just as much as original canon characters. Like fucking Ayorzen. Oh my god. I love Ayorzen. You only meet him at level 110 in mordor and it takes you real life months of questing to reach that point. Not anything repetetive either, you do not grind exp in this game unless you actually want too, there are just that many quests and storylines between you and mordor that it takes you months to finish them all. Are some of the epic book quests kinda superfluous and make you run around way too much? Yes. I don't care about them, the point of lotro is in the smaller stories you find along the way. The game is about being able to walk, by yourself, no loading screens, from the Shire to Mordor and beyond and experience the minutae of middle-earth living whilst you do it. Hope that somehow answers your questions!

Oh it's also a dress up game, forgot to mention that, the lotro devs will disagree but this is a dress up game except you're dressing up TO journey through middle earth and you can unlock multiple outfit slots to customise that you can change your character into whenever you like, no restrictions on what you can put on your outfits regardless of levels or classes so long as you have wardrobe space. Unfortunately the game's armours are ugly as sin until level 50, though happily that's a shorter trip than it sounds, early game goes by much faster than the post-50 stuff.

[brazenautomaton]

Princess: The Hopeful, Crystal Edition

Princess: the Hopeful is a fanmade game line about magical girls in the Chronicles of Darkness, struggling against the overwhelming evil with the light of Hope. A lot of people loved the premise but found the rules clunky and the execution profoundly unfocused. I was one of them.

Princess: The Hopeful, Crystal Edition

It's not DONE -- it's in beta, which means it's feature-complete. A few options need to be filled in (a couple stat blocks, some Signets only have one option at a given level, Embassies don't have all their benefits, and not all the interstitial fictions are in), but all of the systems are in and you can play it perfectly fine. I mean, it's probably imbalanced as all hell, but that's what a beta is for. It's also probably formatted badly, and there's places I didn't catch where I use the wrong term for something because I changed it later. That's why it's only 0.8.

Crystal Edition is not a page-one rewrite of P:tH, but it's at least a page 2 or 3 rewrite. The structure and Queens are still there but everything has been revamped and refocused to give it clear through-lines both emotionally and physically. And the magic system is totally new and, though I do say so myself, it's really cool.

There's no more specific spells to buy one at a time. Each Charm has a basic action to it, and a bunch of Upgrades that expand its capabilities multiplicatively, so you stack together your Upgrades to get a spell that can do something neither Upgrade alone could do, and in doing so make an anime word salad spell name! Do you want to hit a ghost with a truck? Give it a Redline Phantom Step! Fling someone's bullets back at them? Rewinding Restoration, Stat! You wanna do sick air combos with multiple weapons? Weapon Master into Aerial Rave! Play three-card monte with your own presence? Blunt Tricky Cunning Illusion! How about a devastating magical finisher? BOTTOMLESS INFINITY PETADRIVE ANNIHILATION HYPER-EXPLOSIVE BUSTER!

Story and theme wise, The All-Consuming Darkness is not some new and distinct entity that inflicts supernatural taint on people to make them Darkened when they spend too long near a tainted place; the taint of the Darkness is fear. The supernatural corruptive force that drives others to spread misery in its name is literally the emotion of fear. The game's central thesis is about how much of the suffering we inflict on others has fear at its heart. The world is drenched in fear down to its bones, and Princesses believe that all of the weird-ass inexplicable nonsensical horrors of the CofD are all manifestations of the Darkness, though of course whether or not they are correct about that is another matter.

The basic "okay so what do I do" problem is solved by presenting a basic ground-level threat: Nightscapes, which are like Madoka labyrinths or Persona dungeons created by someone breaking under the weight of fear, and send out monsters to re-enact it. You don't just need to blow up the monsters, you need to figure out the source of the pain and overcome the psychodrama the prisoner has created in order to solve it, so there's multiple types of gameplay involved.

Instead of having a focus on virtue and public service that got frankly weird in the old versions, a magical girl character is someone who has a vividly defined personality and ideals, such that when they overcome obstacles, it's validation of their ideals. Princesses now have a Drive and Dread instead of Virtue and Vice; a guiding principle that they're About and something whose fear most motivates their behavior. Wisps are regained from spending Willpower, your human spirit purifying and refining. You can emotionally invest yourself into whatever you do by Flaring your power, granting you a free dot of your power stat, Inner Light, and you can do it multiple times... but if you emotionally commit like that, and you still fail, or you still have to compromise your Belief, the consequences will be devastating. The stakes are high and the tension is overwhelming and you will need to devote everything you are to succeeding and that might still not be enough.

[emblemxeno]

I think another reason why I'm of the opinion that 3H's writing falls flat due to superfluous exposition, is that... it actually does what I think is great gameplay-story integration.

And that's the character paralogues!

Every character has a paralogue which ties their personalities and backstories into that mission's plot, without exception. Certain gameplay elements are also introduced to suit why the characters are doing what they're doing in those missions.

They're not flawless of course (map reusal is a bitch), but they are nonetheless stellar ways to tie in the characters to their world.

So what's the issue? The problem then becomes, why the hell is there so much else then?

I'm not advocating for everything else to be cut or for character backstory/development centered supports to be shelved, of course. But when you have paralogues-missions that are very well crafted to engage the player in the game flow and the writing simultaneously-why do the characters reveal the same things and go through similar developments in other places, like supports, the monastery, sometimes even in story as well?

Because you can miss out on paralogues? Well this game makes it so you can skip the monastery, supports can get locked if you don't do them in time, and those sparse story moments don't exist if the side character dies. There's no functional reason why you need multiple avenues to dive into the same few character plotlines, especially when one method does it consistently better and more involved than the others.

And logically or writing wise, there's even less of a reason other than they really wanna make sure you know these characters really well. Which is in no way bad of course, it's great to make a cast that you're proud of and want people to fall in love with every aspect of each of them. But there's nudging your audience to a position, and then there's outright making the line between player control/influence/preference and authorial intent too blurry.

Inevitably yeah, people did love this cast. That's why 3H is so popular and why their characters rank so highly in polls. But I reiterate from previous posts: 3H doesn't do anything special that previous FE games didn't as well. The cast isn't particularly deeper than most FE casts on average, nor is its world/story writing any more impressive. There's just more of it being delivered and put in your face than normal. And because many finer details unique to 3H's plot construction end up irrelevant (or outright contradictory to the main plot when thought about for too long), most of what's pushed is the character writing and backstories and Fodlan's primary backdrop... over and over and over again.

To me, that becomes tedious and ironically makes me care less for the world as I find incessant need to reiterate major aspects of the story near verbatim to be artificial and suffocating. But I'm not most people, and I can't fault others for finding great joy in it. I just thoroughly hope that the gameplay-story interaction is taken as priority like it was with Engage for future FE games, because these are still video games at the end of the day. When your game is being talked/argued about more than it's actually being played (for reasons that don't specifically have to do with archaic design elements as a result of its age)... shouldn't that be seen as a bad sign in the eyes of a video game designer?

[the-bar-sinister]

Have you played the AA Investigations games? If yes, what did you think of them? Sadly I was only able to play for myself the first one (I couldn't make the translation patch for the second one work :( ), and let's just say that the novelty of playing as Edgeworth wore off quickly lol. The second one was much more ambitious with some stellar character arcs and a memorable final villain, but of course it's still stuck in "only in Japan" limbo...

Yes! We played both Investigations, and Investigations 2 (fan patch) about 10 years ago. Currently, we're in the middle of watching a letsplay/fandub of the games because uh, yeah. We're not going to play through them again. They're the worst 'games'-- NOT the worst stories– in the AA series.

I definitely can't blame you for saying the novelty wore off quickly. Investigations has some serious flaws as a game and in structure. Which is an absolute shame, because the characters and stories are some of my favorites.

I absolutely adore Detective Badd, Agent Lang, Shih-Nah, and Kay Faraday from the first game, and Sebastian Debeste and Justine Courtney from the second game are some of my favorite characters in the whole series.

It's also absolutely fantastic to get to see more of Miles and Gumshoe together. I just love them as a mystery solving pair. They have such delightful energy. It probably helps that I'm a gumworth shipper from way back of course XD

But frankly, the fantastic characters, interesting worldbuilding and good stories absolutely can't save the Investigations series from its faults.

Problems with Ace Attorney Investigations

the need for the narrative to telegraph to the player how to solve problems, and forcing the player to painstakingly go through each of Miles' thought processes as a game mechanic has the opposite of the intended effect. Instead of making the player feel clever it makes Miles Edgeworth seem, very, very stupid and slow.

logic chess (from the second game) is agonizing. It's a great character bit for Egdeworth, having him conceive every logical problem as a chess problem, but its a fucking agonizing game mechanic.

circular reasoning. Every case is way too long, and it goes around in circles. I feel like this is a result of the "trial" phases being outside the court and thus having no real mediator. It's very true to life because people are going to "nu-uh" for as long as they can, but, realistic or not, t's agonizing to explain the same things to characters over and over and over.

connected to the above, all of the cases are too long, and also some of the logical leaps that the games expect you to make are some of the worst in the series. From Apollo Justice onward the games got a lot better about having a clear line of logic for where you're supposed to present evidence. Investigations and investigations 2 are just fucking guesswork.

So yeah while I definitely think these games are fantastic lore and character wise and worth experiencing, they are absolutely aggravating to play. My personal suggestion for anyone who wants to experience them is to pick a lets play/walkthrough video of their favorite variety (commentary, dub, no commentary) and enjoy them without having to worry about the terrible fucking gameplay.

[sammyloomis]

2023 completions

welcome to the 2023 edition of my ramblings about video games i completed this year!! including even more unwanted opinions and even less coherency

total games: 37

09/01 - Sam & Max Save the World - 8/10

sam and max, freelance police, begin a long string of investigations involving hypnotised celebrities, sentient computers, and conspiracies that go all the way to the TOP, baby

startin the year off good game wise then!! tbh i started this one in 2022 but it didnt make that list cause i just.. wasnt in a game playin mood towards the end i guess fghj but anyway!! really liked this one, ive seen a few mutuals who like this series so i was excited to play it and it was a lot of fun :] defo an old school point and click game and i rly liked the main characters themselves and the supporting cast!! glad theres another remaster i can jump into right after this one

11/01 - Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil In Me - 8/10

the crew of lonnit entertainment are invited to a recreation of the infamous murder house, the stomping grounds of americans first serial killer, h h holmes. they are hoping the location will help save their documentary, but will you be able to save... THEIR LIVES??

i feel like every dark pictures game becomes my fave dark pictures game as they come out, but this one really was Very Good. i can confidently say this is probably the most scared ive been while playing a supermassive game Ever. the characters, while dysfunctional, grew on me a lot over the course of the game which made keeping them alive even more nailbiting :’] speaking of, the deaths in this one were Particularly gruesome imo, just from a concept standpoint, so big kudos for that too!! my only gripe is that i think the new “features” such as puzzle solving and traversal mechanics just artificially prolonged the runtime without actually adding anything to the experience

15/01 - Sam and Max Beyond Time and Space - 7/10

even more weird shit is afoot in the second sam and max game, this time our duo facing off against T-H-E-M, the bermuda triangle, and satan himself!! ... or was it santa??

2 sam and max games in one month, this may have detrimental effects on my brain :’] but really, i liked this one too!! not as much as the first, but i still liked the characters and overall story, i liked how it all connected to both the previous game and the events through this one. i found some of the puzzles a bit more difficult and obtuse, but they were still fun. another fun point and click game (tho somewhat dated in some cases fghjk)

18/01 - Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments - 5/10

the game preceeding sherlock holmes: the devils daughter, which i completed last year, follows the titular character once more, solving 6 of his cases along with his partner dr john watson

eh, not much to say about this one. i certainly prefered the devils daughter, but that one was also kinda meh fghjk. with this one being an older game, the graphics and gameplay were a bit more janky, and i guess theyd changed voice actors for sherlock since this game cause i didnt like his voice in this one tbh. that being said, mystery wise id say its abt on par with the devils daughter. yeah, again, not much to say really :’]

24/01 - Psychonauts 2 - 10/10

a mole in headquarters, an evil from the past is rising again, and even MORE figments hidden in really obscure places... another day at the psychonauts office :V raz once again must delve into various brains to figure out what the Fuck is goin on

okay this game was literally so fkn good in every aspect. visually stunning, amazing story, brilliant characters both new and returning... GOD!!! what the first game did well, this one blew it CLEAN out of the water, i loved it a lot!! like idk what else to even say, it was just such a solid game i cant think of much to critisise :’]

04/02 - AI: The Somnium Files - 3/10

kaname date works for the police force for a department unknown to the general public, using groundbreaking technology, he delves into the minds of suspects and uncovers clues using their own memories. when a body shows up resembling a victim of a serial killer from a cold case, he begins his investigation

... man... spike chunsoft rly just know how to make characters that grate on me fghjk for starters ill praise the original concept and interesting story (when it finally got around to being revealed), but i disliked/was uninterested in most of the characters and thought the tropes they kept using were annoying and just plain weird. im not fully sure Why this game was a branching path type game since it never really plays into the plot and the main story could have easily been told with a single storyline. overall, didnt rly enjoy this one, but what can ya do they cant all be winners :’]

13/02 - Sly Cooper and the Thievious Raccoonus - 5/10

sly cooper, youngest descendent of the illustrious cooper thief clan, had his familys secrets stolen when he was just a lad. now he sets out to retrive what was taken from him and beat up some bad guys as he does

i gotta commend this game for the humour and the creativity with it, and im defo lookin forward to playing the rest of these games based off this one, but i think this first entry suffers from a lot of Jank that made it quite frustrating to play :’] also, there wasnt any way to mute anything except the music or adjust the volume so it would routinely blow the FUCK out of my eardrums. that bein said tho, still fun, very quick game, but im keepin it a low rating cause im expecting to like the later ones better :’]

26/02 - Hidden Agenda - 2/10

the infamous “trapper” killer makes a final confession while counting down the days on death row, claims he never killed anyone and he can help lead the police to exactly who did. detective becky marney must investige this case one more time and decide if hes lying, or if the killer is still afoot

im so so SO sorry to my friends who like this game but besties.... why fghj for starters i was locked out of playing it for almost 2 years when the app you are REQUIRED to use in order to play this thing just stopped working, and when i finally did start playing the jank didnt stop with just the app. the whole game seems to be a broken mess with textures flickering in and out, characters walking thru solid objects, its MADNESS. the story and characters are so.... not interesting :[ it takes only 2 hours to do a full runthru of the story so i never rly grew to care abt them and theyre so flat anyway that i didnt Want to. if it wasnt so clearly rushed i think itd be good, and some of the acting is actually rly stellar, but overall...... its a no from me

04/03 - Minecraft - minecraft/10

its minecraft

technically i already got the plat ages ago but this year i finally got the coveted 100% so.... yeah ;w; i mean we all know what minecraft is so like...... idk what to say abt it guys, u already know how good it is (tho the console version is Vasty inferior to pc)

05/03 - Death Stranding - 8/10

after a world ending catastrophe dubbed the death stranding wiped out modern life as we know it, humanity is scattered across america. its up to sam porter bridges, post apocalyptic delivery man, to travel across the country and unite those that remain

depsite how confusing this game was, and how slow it was paced, and how fkn damn weird it was half the time, i still had a lot of fun playing it :’] i enjoyed the characters, tho wish certain ones had more limelight, i enjoyed the actual gameplay, tho by the end game i was finding it a bit Too repetetive, and i found the story rly interesting, when i could understand what was going on fghj so basically for every good thing i liked, it was countered by something, tho they are fairly small things. also the ending cutscene is an hour n a half long and i was fkn 3 am when i was finally allowed to exit the damn game so, u know, beware of that

10/03 - Ratchet & Clank - 7/10

young mechanic ratchet, with his new buddy clank, join the galactic rangers in stopping the blargs from destroying countless planets in order to build their own

another game thats been on my backlog for ages, im glad to have this one done and dusted :’] i certainly had fun playing it, but i feel like it was a bit Too kiddy in some places for my personal taste (dialogue and humour wise that is, but since this was also made by insomniac of spiderman fame, it makes sense) and after a certain point the game becomes piss easy with all the upgrades u get, but i still enjoyed it

03/04 - Sly Cooper 2: Band of Thieves - 5/10

sly and his pals return to their thieving ways after learning that the infamous klaw gang have begun reassembling parts for slys arch nemesis; clockwork. they travel across the globe to stop them

man my descriptions are getting worse fghj but anyway, as with the first game, i rly enjoyed the characters!! and the music, and... thats pretty much it. i really dont know what it is about these sly games that i just cant seem to enjoy the gameplay but i Really Really dont have fun while playing them :[ which is a shame cause, like i say, great characters that id like to spend more time with. if this was supposed to be the best in the series, i think im gonna give the 3rd and 4th games a miss for now, but maybe ill come back to them in the future

29/04 - Last Day of June - 7/10

a short game depicting a young couple named carl and june, and the tragedy surrounding their relationship

this game doesnt actually have a plat, which is something im trying not to be too picky about going forward in terms of playing games, but even tho this game was super short i really liked it!! the story is rly simple but incredibly sad, and even though theres a lack of “voice acting” in the traditional sense, there was still a lot of great emotive acting in this. that being said, the fact some of the voices sounded so odd detracted from the seriousness of the plot sometimes, and the actual gameplay was kinda boring, but still a solid short game :]

29/04 - Predator Hunting Grounds - 1/10

DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME

OH THE AGONY OH THE PAIN OH THE HOURS OH THE WASTED YEARS THE WASTED YOUTH THE PRETTY LIES THE UGLY TRUTH

and i dont like it >:[

03/05 - Linger in Shadows - 1/10

this... isnt even a game apparently

i had it on my list of things to check out while i had the ps plus premium thinking it Was a game, but its not. its a strange kind of “art” thing according to the guide i used. i didnt rly know what was going on fghj. certainly a unique experience i suppose but nothing id recommend u go out of ur way to do, even if it takes literally 10 minutes to get all the trophies (no plat either)

08/05 - Kurushi - 2/10

ps1 puzzle game, another one from the ps plus catalogue

not much to say abt this one again fghj seems like these last few games have been kinda duds huh :’] ah well, theres certainly better games on the horizon i suppose. as said, this is just some puzzle game from the ps1, janky controls and all. the music is surprisingly good, sounds almost like disney instrumentals :’] not that fun without assisstance tbh

09/05 - The Gardens Between - 6/10

a very short puzzle game following 2 friends exploring a strange series of islands that tell the story of their friendship

when i say short i Mean short. like even without a guide i got this completely done in 2 1/2 hours, and that included me leaving the game on while i went to get something to eat from the kitchen. that being said, its a very cute game!! i enjoyed the puzzles, the style is nice and Capital-I-Indie, the musics nice and relaxing. the story was also nice, if sad, (can i say nice a few more times??? nice nice nice nice) but i just think this game is Wayyyy too short dfghj i think a lot more could have been done with it :’] glad i didnt pay the full £15 for this as it would have been a bit of a rip off

09/05 - Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent - 8/10

fbi agent tethers is sent out to the minnesotan town of scoggins to investigate the local eraser factory shutting down

damn we’re just flying thru em now huh! ive actually played and 100%’d this game before on steam, as well as its sequel so i suppose im a little biased :’] but i rly like this game!! another short one, and another puzzle one, but i rly love the art style and story, as well as the puzzles being fairly simple but still fun!! its a shame the second game never made it to ps or id complete that one too but yeah, fun and simple puzzle game, defo recommend :] like most games like this tho, i wish it were longer

11/05 - ABZU - 6/10

you are a diver on a journey through the ocean, discovering the creatures that inhabit the waters

short n sweet indie game (anotha one) and this one was pleasant!! i rly liked the style and music, the story was simple but told fairly well, and just overall a nice game :] beyond that, not much to say tho fghj defo a very pretty game, and id recommend if you have an interest in marine life n such, but beyond that its pretty bog standard indie game

11/05 - The Pedestrian - 5/10

a short puzzle game where you traverse various signs as the tiny person within them

pretty straight forward puzzle game with a Weird ending that i dont quite understand fghj but overall it was enjoyable :’] most of these quicker games ive been playing lately have been super quick puzzle games so i might be getting burnt out on them, but even then i can appreciate the creativity of this one. its also another game with no plat which, considering it came out not 3 years ago, is kind of annoying

14/05 - Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons - 4/10

two brothers venture on a quest to find medicine for their sick father

another short puzzle game, with a pretty interesting feature!! you control each brother with an analogue stick each, which can make coordination in some parts quite tricky if ur me fghj overall a pretty decent game, the story was kinda meh for me but i thought the gameplay was interesting, not much else tho

20/05 - Bloodborne - 6/10

the town of yharnam is crawling with beasts and hunters alike. fight through the corrupted streets and discover the fetid depths of this city and all the inhabitants trying super duper hard to kill you

im editing this from when i first wrote it after immediately finishing the game because i was cranky and frustrated because i cant in good faith give this game a score lower than 5 (mainly because i know the fromsoft fans would dox and kill me). this game is visually very nice, in the sense that it looks Horrible, which fits the vibe. the gothic style along with the monsters are really unique and detailed to the point where some of them are hard to look at. that being said, i personally didnt like this game. at all. i know on a “technical” level its very good, but i struggled for a Long Time to “git gud” as it were and surprisingly, dying a million times because you cant dodge within a 1/2 second window before being stun locked to death GREATLY decreased my enjoyment of this game. and thats all im gonna say about it :V

21/05 - Black Mirror - 4/10

following the suicide of his father, david gordon returns to scotland from india to inherit his familys estate. however, there are strange mysteries surrounding this house and the family who occupy it

pretty short horror/puzzle game that was pretty light on both the horror and puzzles fghj tho this game had a surprising amount of animation that looks fairly good which was a nice surprise. the characters were fine, and the story started out quite interesting but just felt a bit... weird. especially the ending, the final climax is basically just a bunch of qtes that ends really abruptly with little push back from the villain :’] for a free game i guess i cant complain too much

23/05 - Vampyr - 8/10

dr johnathan reid, recently turned vampire, has just returned home to london after serving as a field medic during the war. the streets are crawling with rogue vampires, and an epidemic is spreading quickly through the city, all while johnathan is searching for his maker

FINALLY A GAME I ENJOYED. GOD. okay so this was surprising because ive heard a lot of people call this game p mid, and maybe id think the same if it wasnt preceded by a whole bunch of Crap ive recently played, but here we are!! i really loved the chracters, i thought they were all fun and interesting, even the ones we dont meet for too long, and i also found the story super compelling!! the game Does have a bit of jank to it, with weirdly long loading times (even on the ps5) and the occassional graphical error, but otherwise i rly enjoyed this one :]

31/05 - Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart - 9/10

seperated after dr nefarious begins ripping holes into other dimensions, ratchet and clank must team up with another lombax named rivet and stop the universes from collapsing altogether

man this game was so fun!! i got the whole thing done and dusted over the course of 2 days :’] the writing was still a bit cheesy for me, and as implied the play time is Outrageously low for the steep price (which i thankfully avoided cause ps plus), but the gameplay itselt was Incredibly fun and engaging!! defo a huge step up from the first game in this reboot series. i also rly loved rivet so that certainly helped :’]

02/06 - Lake - 5/10

meredith weiss, a successful programmer, moves back to her childhood town of providence oaks to fill in her her dad at his post office job. deliver mail to the residents of this lakeside town and decide how meredith wants to end her 2 week stint

pretty cute indie game i got through ps plus, i kinda wish the whole thing Was just a post delivery simulator :’] the characters are okay, the storys okay if a little eh.... i wanna say Loose?? like the plot beats (if u can call them that) feel kinda boring n half arsed. theres also a random romance option in this which feels?? out of place and doesnt actully impact anything that much. overall its an okay game, like i say the thing i found the most fun was driving around delivering post but maybe thats just my autism showing :V

13/06 - PowerWash Simulator - 10/10

i mean... kinda does what it says on the tin guys

is a 10 a bit generous?? maybe. do i particularly care?? absolutely not. this game is a 10 if ever there was one. i truly dont know how else to sell this if the idea of cleaning stuff with a powerwasher isnt immeditely appealing to you like, maybe You’re the problem :V this game also has a weird amount of lore?? which is also v fun fghj so do with that info what you will

19/06 - LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean - 7/10

a lego retelling of all 4 pirate movies, with all the usual lego bells and whistles

pretty typical lego game, so the gameplay and stuff is p fun!! ive actually never seen these movies so i didnt rly know what was goin on half the time, especially because this is an Older lego game so theres zero voice acting in this. i also had quite a few crashes and bugs while playing where i had to restart either the level or the whole game, which got annoying during the cleanup grind. overall tho, cant go wrong with a lego game tbh

17/08 - Chicory: A Colorful Tale - 9/10

after all the colour in the world disappears out of nowhere, you must go on a quest across the picnic province to restore it using a magic paintbrush

you may notice the significant time gap between the last game and this one and uhhhh ngl folks i was Not Gamin dfghj i was Tired n a lil Sad but eh what can ya do, but this was a great game to come back with!! absolutely loved this one, super adorable art style and gameplay that reminded me a LOT of toem, very similar vibes but this game is much longer imo. id give it a perfect 10 if the collectibles weren’t so horrid to find fghjk but other than that cant recommend this one enough!!

29/08 - Observation - 7/10

dr emma fisher wakes up after the space station on which she resides undergos a catastrophic failure. take control ships ai, S.A.M., and attempt to reboot the systems and find the crew, who have all mysteriously disappeared...

rly quite liked this one!! the fact u control the ships ai is a pretty interesting feature and made the interface really cool and sci-fi lookin, defo alien inspired on that front. i liked the story, even if it Did get a bit confusing, and the voice acting was also pretty stellar!! gotta dock points for some classic indie game Jank, and the fact that there isnt a whole lot goin on gameplay wise (p much entirely minigames that arent that well explained to you that u only end up doing once) but the story and overall eerie atmosphere rly saved it for me

31/08 - OMNO - 5/10

short indie game where u travel through a mystical world, solve puzzles, and meet extraordinary animals

theres indie games and then theres Indie Games, u know?? this is the latter. and thats not a bad thing!! it just means its kinda... predictable. usual fare of no voice acting, gorgeous music, simple but stylised graphics etc etc. it was pretty cute and the puzzles were fun, but some of the controls felt a bit clunky and like i say, a little boring story wise imo (but maybe ive just played too many of these types of games). perfectly middle of the road :’]

03/09 - Tacoma - 7/10

you have been sent on a mission to retrieve the ai from a ship where all the crew have seemingly vanished (sounds a bit familiar huh?? all sci fi is the same (affectionately)). explore the ship and piece together what happened to everyone

anotha one, anotha sci fi indie game :’] rly liked the story of this one!! and it was an interesting mechanic to be able to view scenes of the crew via an AR system, and then also view their files and such. despite their limited appearances, all the crew members were interesting and unique, and no spoilers but it made the ending and its lead up a lot more exciting and intense. gotta dock points for how Glitchy this game was, it crashed at one point and started stuttering so bad i had to restart it manually, and also for how short it is. still, good story, good characters

06/09 - Chicken Police: Paint it RED! - 8/10

a gritty noir point and click detective game where u play as the infamous sonny featherland, one half of the crime fighting duo, chicken police. after a nervous dame shows up on his doorstep about her mistress recieving vague threats, he realises hes gotta take just one last case

anthropamorphic detective chickens..... played TOTALLY straight, mind you. like i was actually totally blown away by this game fghjk its Completely voice acted for one, and its Pretty Fuckin Good voice acting too, the story and mystery is Really interesting, the world its set in is super gritty and deep despite how little its kinda touched on through the story, i was very surprised!! i think the ending and reveal were a bit uhh.... abelist, not to get too into spoilers, but for a noir story i guess its par for the course. still, enjoyed this one!!

08/09 - The Testament of Sherlock Holmes - 5/10

a mutilated bishop, a deadly poison, and some other shady bullshit, its another sherlock holmes game

this is actually the oldest game in the series thats avilable on ps, ive kinda gone about playing these in the exact wrong order :’] that being said, i do think this is my Least favourite of the 3 ive played thus far. like crimes & punishment, this game also has plenty of jank, and the voice acting is a lil ehhh stiff for my taste. the puzzles were fine, the story was fine, overall just Fine. this game follows 1 case rather than multiple like its sequels do

10/09 - Garfield Kart: Furious Racing - 4/10

basically a mario kart clone but with garfield :]

now i am not one who loves racing games. in fact i suck quite badly at them. so u may wonder why i have a racing game in this list and well?? im ngl i bought this game as a meme and it ended up being so hard i had to put it down for a while dfghj BUT i came back to it and after hours of sweatin and gamer rage i DID IT!!! but at what cost. the game is fun, it looks nice, tho the only real garfield references it Has are its racers, the courses are kinda bland and generic. also the trophies...... my GOD the trophies..... not even a plat btw hhhh anyway if u like racing games check it out but if u Dont then DONT

17/09 - The Last of Us: Part 1 - 8/10

in the fungusy zombie apocalypse, smuggler joel is tasked with taking an immune girl, ellie, to a group of freedom fighters to create a cure. a remake of a remake :’]

obviously its good. i mean cmon. i remember watching a playthru of the OG og game wayyy back when so i kinda knew all the plot beats, but playing it myself in this beautiful 4k ps5 remake was Glorious (dont get me wrong, i think it was totally unnessesary to remake it AGAIN but it do look pretty). i can certaily see why this game has such a cult following and got the reception it did. maybe a Tad overhyped?? maybe a tad. but still good!! gameplay is solid, story is solid, characters are solid, whats not to like?? docking points for the frankly OBSCENE price point (luckily i got mine Mega cheap but go-LLY)

03/10 - The Last of Us: Part 2 - 10/10

after a devastating loss, ellie begins a gruelling quest for revenge and runs the risk of not only losing the ones she loves, but herself as well

i mean. fuck me guys. fuck ME. if the first game is good then this one is straight up glorious. the story is Vastly improved, so much tension and grey morality and Bone Deep Agony, emotionally and physically. its just such a hugely better game, both story and gameplay wise with a Bunch of new features and they arent afraid to take you to Extremely dark places with characters we already love and brand new ones too. this games going to be sitting with me for a long time i feel

and thats it for 2023!!

kinda fell off the gaming wagon in the final few months of this year due to a variety of reasons, but lets hope i can keep gettin games off the ol’ backlog in the new year :]

[zdbztumble]

Yet Another Kingdom Hearts Revisit, Part VII

I can't speak to what the Japanese version of Kingdom Hearts is like, but the English version has always done a brilliant job capturing Jack Skellington's voice. His dialogue reflects every facet of his character: elegant, theatrical, polite, delusional, and just a little pompous. Ooogie Boogie's always been on point too, speaking like the bullying but jazzy slob that he is. And this spot-on character writing is used in an original story! As far as adapting the flavor of a particular Disney movie in the writing - this Disney movie, at a time when the company still treated it like the ugly stepchild - Halloweentown is one of the best.

Visually, it's much less successful. I've never liked the look of Halloweentown in KH I, with its harsh reds and purples and copious amounts of ugly brown. On playing the game again, it might be my least favorite world aesthetically in the game, and the only reason it's not dead last for the entire series is because Port Royal in KH II looked even worse. Port Royal also doesn't have the saving grace that is Oogie's house, which I do think is well-designed. I wish it stuck around even after you defeat him, but I appreciate how that works out story-wise, and it's a fun area to climb and explore while it lasts. The gambling den is the highlight of the house, and the more fun and engaging stage of the fight with Oogie.

And you better believe that I fight him with Jack in my party. His movement and combat suit him just as well as his dialogue, and like Aladdin in KH I's Agrabah, Jack makes the Top 3 for my favorite party members in the series (Ariel's the other, for all the reasons I gave for appreciating Atlantica last time). Having Oogie fight you through gambling first, then a runaway possession by the powers of darkness, is a nice break from the more direct villains that precede him (Hades excepted).

Storywise, Halloweentown is the closest a non-Pooh world comes to being "filler." It's not - it's a world on the brink of destruction that needs saving just like the rest, and Oogie's in the League of Disney Villains - but none of the cutscenes build on the larger story or the lore the way every previous world does. It's the most self-contained adventure within the larger framework of "we must rescue Disney from darkness." I don't raise that as a complaint, though. It's rather nice to have a lighter world at this point in the game.

Neverland is much more embedded into the larger story, and it's an extremely well-written one. And yet I don't have too much to say about it; its virtues so far as driving Riku along the path to darkness, taking another step toward explaining what's up with Kairi, and giving Sora another step up in his hero's journey, are self-evident. And it's another world where the voice of a particular Disney character (Captain Hook in this case) is captured flawlessly. I don't think I fully appreciated how well he's handled before, but as far as lines and facial animation go, he may now be my favorite of the Disney villains used in this game.

Gameplay-wise, my biggest frustration with Neverland is that there's really one one combat area where you can really take off with flight. I'm sure the claustrophobia of the ship was by design, and I don't mind so much of the action taking place within the Jolly Roger, but it would be great to have a second open space where you can fly around unencumbered for regular combat.

Of course, you can fight Phantom in an open space, and I really love this boss. It was a nightmare fighting him the fist time I ever picked up this game, but as soon as you figure out his orb, it's easy (in principle, at least) to know what to do. It's not even that hard to beat him with a full party as long as you're willing to be generous with Stop magic. But he is still a challenge, and like with Kurt Zisa, I like that he demands a good mix of magic and physical attacks. I get why later games opted for more elaborate fights with main villains in lieu of these kinds of one-off Heartless fights, but I do miss them.

[sunnidaydreamer]

God, I need someone to talk with about Drakengard.

We need a full-scale AAA remake, to get more people to know about this series!

Yeah, people found out about it through Nier, but it's a product of its time engine and gameplay-wise.

I love the series more than I can say, truly love the series, but the controls are AWFUL.

The movie cutscenes are beautifully done, but the graphics are otherwise bland at best.

But the story it tells!

A deconstruction of fanservice and tropes like the Antihero, the Sister in Love with her Older Brother.

Things like gratuitous violence, with some weapon unlocks requiring INSANE amounts of kills.

The characters! You can tell some of them are or want to be genuinely good people, but they're still people.

Inuart loves Furiae dearly, he thinks of Caim as his brother, but he's consumed by envy. Envy because he can see that the woman he loves may care for him, but she's in love with her own brother. Envy because Caim is strong and respected and everything he feels he isn't.

The Empire, the Watchers, use this to twist him and make him your enemy, purposefully setting him up in a pact with the very dragon that killed Caim and Furiae's parents.

Even when Inuart is able to get free of the brainwashing things aren't just magically better. He's fundamentally changed as a person, driven to madness from grief, willing to fight and kill Caim if it means reviving Furiae.

Drakengard also has interspecies romance! Yes my friends, while it is not in your face explicitly, Caim and the Red Dragon, aka Angelus, do end up falling in love. What can I say, Caim knows what he wants in a woman.

And what he wants is a giant red dragon. Follow your dreams, my man!

Manah is the result of an abused child desperately searching for even a crumb of love, taken over and manipulated by the Watchers, but as long as they tell her they love her she clings to them.

This carries over into Drakengard 2. Even though 2 is famously the black sheep of the series as it was not written by Yoko Taro, and some fans of the series won't even acknowledge it, and it is bowdlerized to hell and back it does have its moments.

Manah before the main story of 2 suffered a head injury that left her basically a blank slate. We see that she has grown into a kind person, who wants to help those who are suffering. She genuinely believes that destroying the Seals is the right course of action.

And when it turns out that destroying them triggered the end of the world? That this is the second time that she has brought this about?

It breaks her.

For a chunk of the later half of the game, Manah is full-on insane out of guilt. She's so broken that the Watchers are able to easily slide back into her mind and soul and possess her again.

The way her trauma and insanity are... handled for lack of better phrasing is, to be blunt, kind of terrible though.

Nowe somehow teleports into her mind and kills the manifestations of her trauma/the Watchers. The power of love?

Once they're dead she's magically better! No more guilt or trauma!

In the third ending she's so healed from her trauma that the Watchers have nothing to hold on to when trying to possess her again and she... absorbs them?

Yeah, there's a good reason 2 is.... controversial to say the least.

I love Eris though, you go my pyromaniac daughter, set a woman on fire with a big ass grin. Are Nowe and Manah an example of interspecies romance? Nowe is some kind of dragon-human hybrid called the New Breed, and Manah is human so.... I guess?

This is only the games by the way. There are several novels relating to all three of the Drakengard games, as well as 2 manga relating to 1, but one of the manga was never finished for some reason. 3 also has a manga centered on the other 5 Intoners after they were accidentally created by Zero.

1 also has novels that are like an alternate universe take as well, but I've never been able to read them and I don't know if they're still ongoing or what is happening there.

[meeblo]

Top 5 fave Arknights events (be it story, gameplay, or both), GO!

Oh, this is a tough one. These won’t be in any particular order, and I might merge a few events I think of as related into one entry.

Il Siracusano is phenomenal. An interesting story executed very well, with good pacing, great character moments, and strong themes. The Azione Solos, map, and other bonus parts of the presentation complement and accentuate the already great elements of the main event story. No one who read Il Siracusano will ever forget Rubio's speech. Gameplay-wise, I don't think its mechanics are especially exceptional but they aren't bad either. They're fun, they make you approach stages in different ways from usual, but they aren't why I love the event. The music is a highlight as well, with an excellent battle theme, menu theme, and one of the most memorable boss tracks in the game, as well as great operator EPs.

Lone Trail, even accounting for recency bias, definitely makes my top five. It's an effective and evocative conclusion to multiple longrunning narrative threads, with numerous delicious thematic parallels drawn between members of the cast. Its presentation is wonderful, and like Il Siracusano the bonus text entries benefit the overall experience greatly. Unlike Il Siracusano, the event welfare character is usable, as well as being unlike many alters in that she's a well deserved alter; Silence the Paradigmatic great way of capping off Silence's arc, with a kit that reflects her character growth and some juicy file entries and voicelines. The event's mechanics are quite fun. Running enemies over with balls never gets old, and the enemies that are tanky but lose defense/res on hit open up strategies that allow fast attackers and multi hit characters to see use where most of the time they aren't as valuable next to characters who have big damage per hit. And of course, there's the mechanics that encourage shifting, which is always a blast. Once again phenomenal music that I find myself listening to frequently. I'd also like to shout out Mansfield Break. It is, imo, one of the most ambitious event stories. Not only is it told via frame story in a fascinating structure that no other event replicates, it begins largely in medias res. As the first Rhine Lab event, it pulls no punches with the preestablished character dynamics and complex landscape of the internal politics of Rhine Lab. Mansfield Break is a strong story on its own with a great cast of characters and well articulated themes, but it's even stronger when taken in full context of the Rhine Lab narrative that followed it and just how many things that Mansfield Break set up or alluded to in ways that trusted the reader's intelligence without outright spelling things out or leaving things unsaid entirely. Dorothy's Vision is great too of course but it lacks that special something to have me rank it as one of my top events, whereas Lone Trail and Mansfield Break absolutely have it. The Columbia events all have some of my favorite societal critiques Arknights does. As someone living in the U.S, they get so much right about the issues they bring up.

Darknights Memoir, A Walk in the Dust, and Vigilo I'm all lumping together. Honestly, I'm not sure if I should really include them at all given they tie so closely to the main story. All three provide fascinating looks into W, Kal'tsit, and the Doctor respectively, as well as being thematically rich and filled to the brim with important lore information. Vigilo has, in my opinion, the most interesting and well executed story of the three, with one of the only dialogue choices in the entire game that had me stop and think for a few minutes what I wanted to choose. All three are mandatory reading imo for someone who has finished main story act 1 before they move on to act 2, though Darknights Memoir can be read earlier than the other two. I also want to mention What the Firelight Casts as another main story adjacent event, but Reed's story doesn't have direct ties to W, Kal'tsit, or Doctor so it felt odd listing WtFC with the other events. For all intents and purposes you can consider it part of this entry as well, the "basically part of the main story" events. It's another great character focused story with a relatively smaller scope so it can focus in on its subject, while simultaneously having a number of notable connections to the main story regarding its themes of what a resistance/nationalist movement should prioritize and the setup for Eblana's entry into the Londinium Crisis.

A Light Spark in Darkness is one of the game's most interesting events structurally. The shifting PoVs make excellent use of dramatic irony, with events the reader knows are coming looming over the story as you see another character's view of what led up to them and what happened in the aftermath. The event is thematically focused and has a smaller scale and lower stakes relative to many other event stories that allows it to laser focus on how the stakes and events of the story are relevant to the characters in specific ways. In addition to being a wonderful self contained narrative, it also has additional depth when taken with the context of what happens in other events regarding Grani, what neo-Reunion's role in the main story as a whole is, and Cannot Goodenough's sparse narrative threads the game drops into a number of events. I would recommend it to everyone were it not for it having episode 8 spoilers by implication.

Lastly, I'll shout out Who is Real. It's definitely my favorite of the three Sui events I've read (I haven't read Where Vernal Winds will Never Blow yet). I love Kroos, Mr. Nothing, and Lava as a trio of characters, Nian is both fascinating and fun, and Dusk herself is very interesting. The star of the event for me, however, was Saga. I loved how Saga embodied so many of the event's themes, with her philosophical debates with Dusk on the nature of art and of life in general and her decisions within the painting to help its false inhabitants, refusing to stop treating them morally. I really want to know more about what happened with Kroos prior to the events of Who is Real and what caused the breakup of A1 Preparations Detachment. Dusk's presence through the event was very well done. Though she herself doesn't appear in person until relatively late in the event, everything about the painting and her actions through the storyteller inform the reader as to her characterization and disposition. Invitation to Wine feels like it tries a similar thing with Ling only appearing fairly late into the event, but it doesn't stick the landing like Who is Real because Who is Real had so much directly tying Dusk to the nature of the events unfolding and the direction of the conflict occurring while Invitation to Wine's central conflict was spurred by the second brother, the Sui Regulator, and others rather than being as tied to Ling as the setting and conflict of Who is Real's painted world were to Dusk.

There's plenty of other events I loved too but didn't list here. Twilight of Wolumonde is the strongest of the game's early events, Under Tides and Stultifera Navis have some great stuff in them, Near Light has tons of outstanding scenes but as I'm yet to read Maria Nearl or Pinus Sylvestris I couldn't properly appreciate it, ditto for An Obscure Wanderer, Break the Ice is great and I have a lot of respect for the story staying true to Silverash's characterization despite his popularity in the fanbase as it would have been all too easy for the writers to have caved and painted over his actions and make him Not That Bad Actually He Said Sorry, Guide Ahead is very solid but didn't resonate quite as much as I had expected it would from things I'd heard about it going in, Ancient Forge is a ton of fun and has very nice subtle characterization for Lava and Nian as you can see what parts of the script were Nian's choices and what of Lava's original script survived the rewrites, To be Continued has some great followups on other past events, and the Luo Xiaohei crossover It's Been a While was way way better than I had expected it to be going in. There's a few notable events I haven't read yet since they haven't been rerun or I haven't had the time, so don't worry Lingering Echoes fans, I'm not snubbing it I just haven't read it.

[elendsessor]

tbh i don’t know when or if i’ll get back to playing desu2–strategy games are particularly draining for me when i feel as if they’re pushing too long without justification and that’s a problem i’m facing with 2.

i do want to inevitably talk about a couple more things desu2 put out there i appreciate it for over other megatens since there’s so much potential here. it’s by no means a bad game!!! it’s just too much. it’s heavily flawed. and though i see why people love it, those flaws still need to be acknowledged.

yes the gameplay improvements are amazing. yes i do think more time and effort was put into 2 than the first game presentation-wise, some of the battle improvements are much better, there are concepts no megaten would ever dare to even try and tackle at least in the pre-established format mainline is famous for, and though the writing is generally messy and contradictory, it’s genuinely entertaining at points… until day 8. we do not need a day 8 unless it’s post-game content like what overclocked did.

the problem stems the most from an identity crisis affecting the way it plays. of course it mainly struggles from its nge inspiration, but the biggest part of the identity crisis is one based in a criticism no megaten fan likes. hate to do it but imma do it—devil survivor 2 is one of atlus’s first attempts at persona-ifying the rest of the franchise. it’s a problem i want to touch on in the future so imma keep this brief.

desu2 clearly wants to be modern persona the most, judging by the fate system and how it does the cast, however a strategy game can’t pull this off without jumping major hoops. fire emblem does the social aspect better because the process is streamlined and the characters you’re made to care about usually tend to be written well unless your name is fates. (anything that has the word “fate” in the title should be enough of a red flag for either garbage fandom or garbage product just saying lol.) however, with what success persona got beginning with 3, the dev team was tasked with replicating parts of modernsona to help it be some way to capture mainstream audiences. after all, most people’s introductions to megaten will be persona, and as we all know with how journalists were with smt 5 and likely applies to the rest of the franchise due to how different it is, anything megaten that isn’t persona has no heart. with shit like the fate system being forced in, the pacing further deteriorates.

both desu1 and 2 are easy for the most part but require an ungodly amount of grinding just to build your team because money is scarce and everything is overpriced, be it in the auction or the compendium. you need demons with a certain skill and resistances? get grinding. and with what little ways to actually play around with the fusing without grinding because of the stupid add ons and expensive fusion chains and how exp you can get for demons gets significantly harder to obtain, you’re already at a strategic disadvantage. you can’t fuse mitamas without unlocking it after fucking beating the game, and even if you can, fusing elements and mitamas has a fee. this already takes up most of the experience, as this forces most battles to be either free or dlc battles for the sake of resources which ends in being over leveled, and since the ai for enemies and bosses aren’t the best, you’re already at far too great an advantage, so the mandatory combat goes by fast. then the socializing comes in. desu1 is definitely better since it cuts out the bullshit and makes so most of what you’re hearing contributes to the plot, worldbuilding, or actual development for the characters. in 2, the fate ranks affect nothing save for unlocks and maybe the occasional story relevance. you can’t skip this, as most of the options are either free battles, waste 30 in game minutes viewing an event that doesn’t affect any other function, talk with teammates that you swore you’ve seen their archetype done better before, be given info about said character that may or may not actually mean shit based on when you talk to them, have a chance to up their fate rank, and that’s it. not like you have the threat of being unable to. you can prevent anyone in death videos from dying, and there’s no consequences for choosing a route since you can re-recruit everyone except a certain alignment rep if you oppose them, not counting daichi. all that changes is the ending and if an alignment rep dies again not counting daichi. this is all the game is, rinse and repeat.

i’ve never had something simultaneously be worse and better all due to anime tropes and inspiration. it fucking hurts me. 2’s a good game, just way too big and way too focused on capitalizing on persona, neither of which i can fault the team behind it for since it was clearly an issue of ideas and expectations being thrown onto them. maybe one day i’ll power through the final day, but right now, it completely lost me.

if you want to make your game’s main campaign long, justify why it’s that way. if it’s long because of padding without a way to grip the player, your product serves as a way to waste time and money that could’ve been spent on something else.

[pinchraccoon]

Pinch Reviews: Spark The Electric Jester (1,2 and 3)

In an unusual fashion for me, I'm choosing to review the entire Spark series in one fell swoop. Somewhat recently I decided to play the entire series with my friend and cohost Space Buffoon. They proposed playing the series with me on stream as we're both fans of the Sonic The Hedgehog series, and Spark has very clear shared inspiration and DNA.

Over the course of three weeks, Buffy and I played the three titles in the Spark series, opting to play them in order. I'm choosing to cover the three of them today because I feel that comparing and contrasting the games to one another can shed some light on their strengths and weaknesses.

Spoilers, of course, for the entire Spark series!

Spark the Electric Jester, the first one, is a 2D platformer focused on speed and using powerups to creatively remove enemies from the optimal path. Notably, Spark differs immediately from Sonic while maintaining the core gameplay loop in that, far different to 2D Sonic's shield powerups, the powerups in Spark act much more like they might in a game like Mario, or like the different weapons in Mega Man.

The multiple different powerups in this game serve to further diversify an already diverse gameplay loop, finding alternate paths, by granting the player significantly different abilities and movement tech with which to maneuver through levels and carve out the path the player would most like to take. Whether it's removing specific enemies from blocking a path, or something as simple as an extended jump, the powerups allow players to express themselves really effectively. The powerups are also complimented by the stage design itself, which gives all the powerups that they contain a time to shine within them, and occasionally rewarding creative exploration with different, rarer powerups as well.

Every level in Spark is really satisfying to complete, and despite being longer than the typical level within the genre, it's rare to become bored with the levels as their visual themes as well as the gameplay gimmicks and powerup swaps keep them interesting. The levels are also a phenomenal example of this game's lovely visual style. It's this charming pixel art that really grants a lot of character to the world, it's locales and it's people.

The story in Spark the Electric Jester is a fun, simple romp that calls upon a cute cast of side characters and recurring villains, although I would have liked if the Shadow the Hedgehog-esque "Fark" or "Fake Spark" were better executed in the main game. Otherwise though, Spark has some really clever and somewhat self-aware writing that knows what this game is and what it's trying to be. Spark wisely doesn't seek to do more than it's earned in this game, and I applaud it for knowing its limits. Also, I really like Spark as a character, particularly his grounded nature and apathy toward the situation at hand. He's a good person, but at the end of the day the guy really just want to pay rent more than anything else. His presence in the story makes for a really fun juxtaposition to some of the more serious elements that it tries to pull, and grounds the story through him.

Really the issues I had with the game were incredibly small, primarily that the final boss felt extremely underwhelming due to the unique "Super Spark" powerup that the player is given feels supremely underwhelming, and being able to die far easier in that fight kinda kills the tension of what could otherwise be a really cool moment. I wish to stress, though, that my issues with this game are minute, almost inconsequential, even, and I only feel a need to bring up my issues with what is otherwise an extremely solid and consistent title because I had a great time with the game and just wish it was *that* much more improved. It is very close to being a game I could call a modern classic, but something like the final boss and other, very minor quirks do stick out to me because I *want* this game to be excellent. As it stands though, it's a really great experience that I would absolutely recommend.

Spark The Electric Jester 2 brings the series in a bold, new direction compared to its predecessor, which is to say, Spark is fully Not in the game. Also it's in 3D now.

Spark The Electric Jester 2, or as I'm choosing to call it because I'm spiteful, Fark2, is a 3D platformer with some of the same combat elements as the first game, but with the notable change, of course, of being a 3D game.

I won't beat around the bush here, I don't think this game is very good whatsoever. There is genuinely nothing notable that I liked about my time with this game. Because I will surely go off on tangents about every minute instance of failure on which this game underperforms, I have opted to segment this part of the review, so as to maintain concision, and make my point as clearly as possible. I am going to discuss Fark2's gameplay, story, and presentation separately from one another.

Gameplay

Fark2 controls about how you would expect it to, you have a fast character who has a homing attack now, attacks that can help deal with enemies that cannot be dealt with by the homing attack, as well as a parry. Similarly to the previous game, Fark also has access to his own powerups, but not even close to the same amount as Spark had. Additionally, Fark has access to a few "special" moves that can be performed by holding a button and then pressing an alternate input.

With this core kit in mind, the tools given to the player would imply that the usage of all of the items within Fark's arsenal would be used, much like how Spark 1 heavily encouraged and featured the varied use of abilities and powerups to reach the end of a varied and interesting level. This implication, however, is wrong. In reality, very little of the kit given to you actually does end up being used, as the most effective tactics available could not possibly be simpler. I mean it without a shred of irony that every challenge that this game poses to you, outside of a boss fight, can be trivialized by simply running and jumping. This is because Fark is genuinely too fast for the levels, and the amount of space that he covers means that enemies, many jumps, and in some cases major portions of levels can just be ignored. By just running and jumping with the occasional homing attack, players can ignore 90% of Fark's auxiliary kit, including the special moves, the parry, and perhaps most damning, the powerups.

Levels in this game are often very open, and enemies do not populate enough of the space within the levels to actually be able to pose a threat to a player who is, literally, just running and jumping. Normally, I don't have an issue with level design that allows and encourages the player to speed through the level and even in some cases ignore mechanics for the sake of that speed, but I want to emphasize that this is The Entire Game that is like this. It almost feels as though, combined with the extremely generous health system, Fark2 makes genuinely no effort to actually try to kill the player, or worse, makes no effort to make the player adapt. The player creativity that was present in the first game is completely gone in this game, thanks in large part to the fact that the most effective tactic available is also the easiest tactic available.

A quote from Soren Johnson and Sid Meier, creators of the Civilization series, comes to mind, and I feel that this quote and the information that it presents can aptly highlight the issues present within this game's gameplay loop.

"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game; One of the responsibilities of designers is to protect the player from themselves."

I find this quote to be particularly important in discussion of this because, well, the devs are blatantly not attempting to challenge the player enough to encourage them to engage with anything other than what works immediately, and the result it an uninteresting slog through a collection of straightaways with nothing of interest to break them up.

This game is not entirely a platformer, however. This game has a combat system and it would just *love it* if you were to engage with it, so it does throw you into several combat scenarios with bosses so as to not waste the effort made to animate punches and kicks. Unfortunately, while it is an instance in which the player has to do *something* other than run and jump, every boss encounter can also be trivialized, this time by spamming the attack button mercilessly until the opponent falls to the ground in about 45 seconds. Now, I played the game on normal difficulty, and I don't always think that games should be super super hard all the time, but I do think that a boss encounter of a kind shouldn't go down in 45 seconds in a third person action game-style combat system on the baseline difficulty of the game. Because of how absolutely spineless the bosses themselves are, they feel pointless and kinda pathetic, really.

To conclude the section on gameplay; Fark2 does not make enough of an effort to actually make the player use any of their advanced tools, regardless of how success within the game is defined. Because of this lack of interest in making a player engage with the game, the game is boring and feels meaningless to play.

2. Story

Fark2's story fails to captivate, or even begin to intrigue me for a multitude of reasons, not the least of which being that I find Fark, the middling "edgy version of the MC" from the last game not particularly interesting or compelling. Fark2 doesn't actually do much with any of its story beats, and creates countless plot hooks that are never resolved, such is the case with the majority of the game's bosses, Float, Flint and Double, all of whom the player learns next to nothing about except that they're working with a somehow edgier clone of Fark named E.J. and that makes them bad, because of course it does.

The story culminates in a predictable and uninteresting "I was created by the enemy" notion, the likes of which we've seen countless times, notably, in the series' influence. I am not kidding when I say it, Shadow the Hedgehog (2005) does Fark2's core story better than Fark2 does.

Of course, a lot of games have predictable, or otherwise simple larger plots that are saved by good or writing that has a lot of character, so does Fark2 have that?

Absolutely not, not even a little. Get a look at this line, to see what I'm talking about.

The overly edgy, completely ironic way that this game plays itself is not only annoying to try to make sense of, but also refuses to go all the way with it. Every character comes off as edgy, but not edgy enough to where I can even begin to see the cheesiness that they're going for. After a certain point you begin to just tune out as secondhand embarrassment begins to set in.

The writing style that was so endearing about the few instances in the first game where dialogue would happen, particularly the tongue-in-cheek tone, is completely missing from this game, and comparing the two's writing styles to one another feels like night and day. It's dissonant to play these games one after the other, as they feel completely unrecognizable from one another.

It's so obvious that the writers want you to like Fark really badly, but they don't give him anything to latch on to as a character to actually make him likable. Comparisons between Spark and Fark as protagonists are unavoidable, but the most notable point in which the two diverge where Spark succeeds and Fark doesn't is that Fark fails to provide almost any input into the story itself, getting pointed in countless different directions for one reason or another, or for no reason at all. Fark feels like an engine to move through a story that he both is and isn't the center of, whereas Spark feels intentionally disconnected to events at hand because he doesn't particularly care about them.

Speaking of Spark, where is he? They mention him once as "being off enjoying a blank check" but that begs the question, why didn't they name the game "Fark the Electric Jester?" It's just supremely weird to me that in a game named after a specific character, that character has actually NO on screen presence. In some way, it feels like false advertising. And, considering that the devs are billing it as the *same series* the writing inconsistencies seem even more dissonant. If this were a spin off I would get it but it's not! Why is it named after a character who isn't in the game? This is like if the next Shantae game was called Shantae: The Curse of Driftwood, and then the game has no appearance of Shantae herself, and you're locked into playing as Rottytops.

The story of Fark2 fails on so many fundamental levels that I can't say that it's worth it to watch any of the cutscenes. It suffers issues on several fronts, from unsatisfying conclusions, plot contrivances, pointless characters, an attempt at intrigue that fails spectacularly, and a protagonist who is extremely easy to dislike.

There's one thing I didn't hate about this game's story, and that's that it does do the super form better than the first game did, but only because it wore a sickening amount of Dragon Ball on its sleeves.

3. Presentation

First, to get this out of the way, this game has some fun butt rock songs to play in boss fights, despite how lame those fights themselves are. I appreciate the attempt there, but music choice in this game is really quite odd.

There's no way I can put it politely, this game is not satisfying to look at. The textures are passable at best, the area design is really quite same-y and the model work for many characters is butt ugly. The two former problems I can pass, they're still problems, but I feel that the issue of the models cannot be as easily forgotten.

The way that these characters are executed in 3D is, disappointing to say the least, exacerbated by the fact that are that you see *in game* has every one of these characters looking far better than they do here! I'm consistently left confused about what happened here to make all of these characters look like they have all of their features stickered onto their face, which is genuinely just a sphere.

I genuinely like all of these character designs! I think that everyone here looks cute or cool in some degree, but to have such an uncanny representation of them in-game does a legitimate disservice to these characters. I know 3D modelling is hard, I get it, but there should be a point, I feel, where a product isn't ready to be implemented into a build of the game, and none of the models of these characters were ready yet.

In Conclusion about Fark2:

Fark2 fails at just about everything it sets out to do, it's largely uncool, uninteresting, boring, and I don't feel that it is worth your time, and especially not your money. It's gameplay, story and presentation aren't anything special, and it isn't even "so bad it's good." This game is painfully mediocre, and I would believe it if this game were something of a demo for the following entry in the series. Clearly, someone felt that this game is as pointless as I feel it is, because every one of its levels were used as late game extra content in Spark the Electric Jester 3.

Spark The Electric Jester 3 is another 3D platformer, but makes significant improvements to everything that Fark2 tries to accomplish.

First and foremost, Spark the Electric Jester 3 manages to provide fast-paced, fun core gameplay that actually necessitates challenge to the player in both combat and platforming sections. Spark, as the rightful playable character in this game, has access to a large arsenal of combat and movement abilities, which are unlocked from an ingame shop, which serves to naturally encourage the player to learn each move as they can afford it. Spark can also double jump, as well as charge a dash forward that can be used in midair. Despite there not being much more than there was in Fark2 from a platforming perspective, the platforming of this game is far more satisfying as the levels themselves are actually made with Spark's movement and abilities in mind. Levels will frequently push back against you, and require that you at least manage a degree of skill to succeed.

On the combat of things, everything has been revamped to allow combat encounters to feel like anything more than a spam fest. In Spark3, players are encouraged to earn stunlocks against opponents in order to maximize the amount of damage that they can pull off off of one option. Additionally, use of the parry is more difficult, but no less required, making each combat encounter with lots of enemies into a test to see if the player can manage their combo strings while avoiding or parrying enemy attacks simultaneously. Again, compared to some of the action games that this gameplay loop is commonly accredited to, it's a bit more barebones still, however as it isn't the whole focus of the title, and the sections where the pure combat sections are used are somewhat far between, the combat doesn't get old and remains a welcome refresher when platforming could risk getting monotonous.

Spark3 sees the return of powerups, again, however the player doesn't actually get many of them at all in a normal intended playthrough, really only getting maybe one of them for certain. I got to play with the Reaper powerup during my playthrough as I managed to defeat a certain boss who was supposed to beat me on my first attempt on him, and I think that this is a really interesting way to handle the powerups. Each powerup has much of the same fundamental kit, so players are never left wondering how to input something compared to Spark's normal moveset. I found this powerup implementation to be rewarding, but I felt myself wanting more upgrades to unlock in more apparent ways throughout one playthrough.

Level design in Spark 3 is extremely varied, and consistently visually and mechanically engaging the whole way through! This game works on the basis of certain "worlds" that unlock as the player progresses, sorta like how more rooms of Peach's castle will open at certain amounts of stars in Super Mario 64. Each level within these "worlds" are themed around a specific concept, like a city in a state of riot, an airport/rocket launch facility, or a militarized jungle. The theming of these areas doesn't just account for visuals, however, as each of the areas themselves are also considered for what could be interesting gameplay-wise. For example, one level in the airport level sees a plane crashing and Spark having to escape, in a rare timed level with strong wind mechanics attempting to throw the player off. Or, in the rioting city level, players can jump off of crowds of protestors for a boost, and use a helicopter in brief, but consistently solid vehicle sections. Speaking of, I adore the car sections. Spark3 starts in a car section and I adored every second of it. It's a thunderous, no-nonsense beginning to the game that served to really effectively set a tone that had me down for anything as soon as it started.

Despite being "down for anything" Spark 3 does lose me in one area. I don't think that it's story is very good, really. My primary issues with the story are that, despite far better writing, this game fails to actually deliver on any of the hooks that it puts out, and seems far more interested, for some fuckin reason, on fleshing out characters from Fark2, specifically the main bosses from Fark2, at least two of which are presumed dead at the end of that game. While there is *a degree* of plot relevance that there could be, in that Float, one of the presumed dead bosses from the previous game, appears to have returned, and seems sad about having dead friends. I take issue with the notion of how this is done however, because Float doesn't actually tell Spark anything, and instead this information is exhibited through stylized 16 bit cutscenes, which while looking cool, take up significantly more runtime in the story than is necessary, especially considering how this story ends.

My BIGGEST issue with Spark3's story is its *egregious* ending, which I will warn prospective players about spoilers for if they're averse to that sort of thing, BUT the rest of this paragraph will concern these spoilers. Spark3 ends in a way that couldn't have been seen from three feet ahead of you. Spark3's ending is, no joke, comparable to NieR Automata and Neon Genesis Evangelion. There's nothing wrong with an ending like that art has, I quite like endings like that, but mostly because art like NieR or NGE EARN their endings, by laying consistent plot threads the whole runtime about something mysterious. Spark3 does *not* do this, and instead pulls it out as shockingly as possible. The entire game is predicated on "Spark has to go and remove Fark, who has become something of a dictator, from power, as he's militarized most of the world using the Fark Force." Now, this is a novel concept, cute even! I really hate Fark, so I'm down to bring him down a peg! But upon reaching the end of the game Spark reaches Fark, who doesn't want to fight him, and instead explains to Spark that both of them have been in a simulation for 3000 years, and Float, a character who's past we learned a lot about in this game, was actually a fake created by the simulation arbitrator, Clarity, in order to lure Spark toward it's own goals. Notably, there have been ABSOLUTELY NO notable clues that the world was a simulation. Additionally, in a near final boss moment, they make you play as Fark, which pissed me off personally, but that's not empirical it's just something I didn't like. The issue with Spark3's story is that it spends five hours of runtime satisfied in the status quo of it's normality, while it attempts to end with something that would have been far more effective, and far less jarring if there were ANY foreshadowing AT ALL. Because Spark3 doesn't have an interest in actually encouraging the player to think about how the game outside of the typical "big simple punch off" fare, it doesn't work to implement something as left field as the ending that is in the game. Additionally, the game ends on a discussion between Fark and Spark, who are dead, and have been dead, about the importance of keeping moving forward, really played pretty straight, no jokes, no irony, then immediately after the credits roll is a Friday Night Funkin reference. Tonal inconsistency is *so* rampant throughout this ending.

The ending, regardless of if you did or did not read the previous paragraph, left me so dissatisfied with the game that my opinion on this game soured significantly, to the point where on stream I actively did not recommend the game to viewers because of the ending.

To conclude, Spark3 is a game with a really excellent gameplay loop that doesn't leave a lot to be desired, and consistently seeks to challenge the player while also giving them opportunities to experiment with new and fun toys that consistently spice up the gameplay loop whenever present. Despite the quality of the gameplay, this game's story is not only unfulfilling, but also useless within the context of the game itself. There are two cutscenes that matter, and they're the ones before and after the final bosses. I would recommend Spark3 to someone looking for an exemplary gameplay experience, however I wouldn't begin to recommend the game to someone who wants a deep or interesting story.

Now that I've discussed each game at length, I'd like to conclude with a short review of the series as a whole. S

park, when the direction accounts for potential shortcomings, is extremely fun, however the series' writing is consistently passable at best, with some egregious exceptions that make it hard to not skip every cutscene after a while.

Spark 1 is a really fun and interesting romp through a variety of interesting levels in 2d, with an overall fun atmosphere that doesn't seek to take itself too seriously, much to it's benefit. Complete with a multitude of gameplay styles and extreme encouragement of player creativity, it's an excellent way to satisfy a 2D speed platformer itch.

Fark 2 is awful.

Spark 3 takes consistent points from Spark 1 regarding player creativity, visual diversity, wealth of content, and attention to fun and engaging experiences that makes it easy to recommend for it's gameplay and visuals. However, the game's story takes itself far more seriously than it earns, much like Fark2 did to no avail, and the story becomes worse because of it.

If you'd like to watch these playthroughs for yourself, they're all up on my YouTube channel linked below! Thanks so much for reading!

[flurrin]

RE6 Deep Lore Analysis: Prologue

Welcome to my series where I pick apart a 10+ years old game frame by frame to analyze the storytelling, cinematography, characters and of course additional Lore to fill in the gaps that either don't exist or are poorly conveyed. I'm doing this because the game is often dismissed for being convoluted and too far removed from the Resident Evil series in terms of mechanics. These things are true and it's very much an imperfect game! But the story has a lot of brilliance that goes unrecognized and I want to dive in how the whole thing works, both to new players and to those already enmeshed in the universe. To read the series in order, go here!

Great shot to open the story on, a regular chrysalis thriving in an abandoned car, transforming into something new. We don't get to see anything beautiful like a moth or butterfly unfurling its wings for the first time, we see the insect, and then we cut away as disaster strikes. This obviously foreshadows the use of cocoons as enemy mechanics, and for Leon's campaign in particular, the lack of signs of surviving human life (including over the preceding establishing shots of a fiery city block filmed through the windows of the car) really set the mood.

I don't know if this was the shot that spawned RE's love of 1st person intros later seen in RE3R (not counting 7 because the entire game is 1st person) but it's an impressive bit of camera work, paring down the controls of the game so the player doesn't even have a body per se to control yet, just eyes and interaction commands (the interaction commands + QTEs themselves are...a little bit of a mess gameplay-wise for sure). We don't know this is Ada or that she's actually shooting at the zombies around Leon and not at him and Helena, so there's an active threat without having to push the player into combat right away.

RE6 is excellent at transition shots, here the gun is highlighted by the helicopter and thrown into the foreground of the next shot so your brain has realigned to recognize this is the POV character seamlessly. This is like a really basic shot, I'm going to show you some CRAZY animated camera tricks later, but it's good to keep in mind that the director knows what he's doing and is doing it well. This shot, this sequence, is also a perfect encapsulation of Leon's character as described in the very first game file. Leon protects the innocent, no matter the risk. He frames Helena, big and square and determined.

Helena being injured in this sequence also aids the tutorial's method of paring down the controls into something simpler, carrying her encumbers Leon, multiplayer doesn't exist yet. It also gives the player immediate stakes to worry about--someone is relying on Leon, and he cares, so the player cares too. We also first learn Helena is self-sacrificial through these extra interactions that don't get a chance to show up in the final game.

The purpose of this kind of hair in character design is to make a character's eyes, and therefore emotions, harder to read (this will be significant again when we talk about Jake later btw). Leon has a lot of baggage from RC and he feels it a lot, but he plays things close to the chest and hides behind his hair. In this way, even though he's a familiar protagonist, he feels almost as mysterious as Helena at the start, giving them an instant reason to connect.

RE6's answer to fixed camera angles is to still frame things cinematically rather than just for the benefit of the player. It's not a great approach to gameplay but thankfully in this one, Leon course corrects on his own and you just have to hold the buttons.

The camera is alive and active through these shots as they fall onto the glass, Leon's body framing the zombies below until they're clear to see beyond the edge of the cracks, a moment of peace before they look up, and the eye follows the path that the ornate light fixture is about to follow and crush them. They're trapped in by the circle of glass and the edges of the lantern.

I will say I hate the last shot of this prologue because the one that opens the game proper is essentially the same exact shot and it always throws me off, the first time I played I was like "Wait, what happened to the giant spire thing we were just standing next to, how are we in a college now". But it was an intentional choice at least to make the transition into the first chapter a lot smoother, I get that.

That's all for the prologue, I didn't want to cover this entire post in "the cinematography is so good here", but as we go through the cutscenes, be sure to keep your eyes on how the lines of the scene (such as Leon's gun and the tiles in the background of that last screencap) line up with the character's eyes to bring your attention there. Everything in the prologue is meant to build up intrigue so there's very little story and I'll talk less about cinematography going forward, but if you want a really good breakdown on what makes a good shot, I can't recommend this case study on Brad Bird's Incredibles enough. See you next time!

[archer3-13]

Fire Emblem Engage: The Four Hounds, Execution and Intent

got past ch23 of engage, gameplay wise its a fun enough chapter using map environmental damage gimmicks in a way that generally works. as you can tell from the title though, thats not why im making this post. I'm making this post because spoiler warning:

this is where the four hounds and the plotlines tied to that whole group basically culminate. id be surprised anyways if anything more comes of them, but at this point i feel confident enough at their part in the story to comment on it.

under the cut

the tl:dr of it all is that the four hounds are a villain quartet idea i love in concept, but find lacking in execution in regards to their place in the story.

but what do i mean by that? well, we'll start by going over the concept of what engage wants the four hounds to be. at the bare minimum the four hounds are our evil quartet/mini group for the game, a timed honored tradition not just in fe but across media of all sorts. in terms of general archetypes we have

zephia: evil sexy female group leader and bosses right hand mauvier: the honorable obviously going to heel turn or die tragically guy griss: the crazy one in it ostensibly for the lols possibly for another reason marni: small bratty child who was duped into it with candy

and if they were just the bare minimum I probably wouldnt have much more to say on the matter, but the game does give them some extra narrative teeth and its something that kinda flew past my head for the majority of the game because it didnt feel that important. we will get to that.

but essentially, ya know how in ch10/11, the snippet of the scene marketing decided to use to tease the four hounds pre release? when zephia notes how the four hounds are 'like a family'? shes not just saying that she literally means that, its their 'unique selling point' so to speak as an evil group. aside from their evil archtypes you can also map them like this

zephia: mommy mauvier: daddy griss: son marni: daughter

and to give the game credit where its due, when that realization did finally hit i'll admit, i appreciated the four hounds and what was going on with them a lot more. the irrational attachment mauvier and marni display to zephia despite how awful of a person she is makes sense, why mauvier is being so weirdly passive about all the things the hounds are doing especially to veyle despite clearly taking issue with it makes sense, why marni wants to go back to the hounds and mauvier fuckin encourages her to go makes sense.

a lot of what im mentioning there is pretty clearly suppose to be irrational behavior taken for emotional reasons of course. the game presents it as such, but it was always the context of why the characters were acting irrationally that got lost. the deathbed clarification between griss and zephia does clear up a lot of that confusion, atleast for me, and brings some interesting weight to previous storybeats. the four hounds are a family, but a clearly dysfunctional one serving a dark god.

and it tracks with what in retrospect are the wider themes of engage, family and what defines the individual in relation to them. veyles struggle for recognition from her father sombron to the point of believing in his lies until forcibly confronted with the truth, veyles evil alter ego being the complete opposite of veyle in every way except in the desire to be sombrons daughter, ivy and hortensia having had a loving father in hyacinth until his obsession with the fell dragon saw him willing to abandon his own daughters for power, alcrysts and diamants father being described as a paradoxical fierce warrior and gentle family man, alears relation to lumera and how they decide to be family by choice instead of family by circumstance etc.

which is why i will ultimantly say that watching griss and zephias death scene chocked me ever so slightly [in that good emotional release way] with griss providing a gentle reprieve in their dying moments, with a genuinely kinda beautiful final shot of their corpses lying next to each other with griss holding on to zephias hand in the end.

how, fucking, ever.

you'll notice how when describing their death cutscene i pretty much exclusively focus on griss leaving zephia out of the descriptor entirely despite the cutscene being just as much about her as griss. and thats because well i can definitely understand and appreciate the concept intellectually

execution is another matter

were introduced to the four hounds fairly early on in engage, over ten chapters before their whole plotline culminates. and right off the bat i'll note that the screen time for these chucklefucks is kinda wasted in a lot of instances. when they do appear in story they usually could just be replaced with bit villains, and i mean that from both a gameplay and story perspective but for this post story is the more important aspect.

so! the distribution and utilization of their screen time is already wonky and uneven. that'd hurt things even if it was executed really well. but, as i said it isn't and i can point to two primary factors in that matter that i feel needed some serious tweaking to get this to work

the interaction of the hounds as a family unit

and zephia herself

so, starting with the easier problem [in my opinion], the hounds and the time they spend interacting. if the idea were suppose to be grasping is that the hounds are like a family unit, if a very fucked up one, then its important that when the hounds are on screen interacting with each other that their interactions always carry a very distinctive family dynamic to them. and this is the first hurdle engage trips over with the hounds because frankly they dont.

dont what? dont interact all that often as a group, dont interact like a family. as stated their screen time is already wonky, but even when the group is all together on screen is very heavily weighted either to zephia talking mad shit, or to evil veyle/veyle interactions. that leads us into the second part of this problem, and its that even when the four hounds are all together interacting they never really feel like a family, even an off brand one. they feel like evil coworkers in an organization brought together as colleagues to do missions as they try and impress their superior for individual merit.

and thats a problem, cause if we are suppose to feel sad for their 'family' when it starts fraying at the edges, when the ideological and moral weight and contradictions of their actions and individual perspectives start clashing and tear the family asunder, suppose to feel bad when mommy and daddy start fighting because mommys an evil bitch who stabbed their daughter, then they need to feel like a family right from the get go and in every interaction and appearance they make.

which brings us to what i would consider the bigger problem. zephia herself. why is she a problem? because shes the biggest impediment outside of screen time and dialogue distribution inn getting this group to work and feel like an actual family. and screen time and dialogue distribution? giving the four hounds room to interact and feel like a family? thats a writing issue sure but a fairly easily fixable one you just have to give and write them more lines of interacting like a family.

zephia however simply does not work character wise as a mother figure for the four hounds family unit. even if you tried to get them to interact more like a family unit youd run into the problem that shes written exclusively as sombrons evil sexy secretary. and yes secretaries can be mothers but thats not the point.

in order to get this idea of the four hounds as a family unit across, and not the facade of one but an actual pseudo sort of family unit that were suppose to feel for as a family unit, then you need to have characters capable of displaying affection and compassion for each other. and zephia just cant do that the way shes written, itd be like trying to write petrine [or aversa really, who zephia shares way more writing dna with] in a domestic family situation. they're both characters that are too outwardly cruel and cold to realistically manage that without feeling either disingenious, as zephia felt the entire time i was playing whenever she mentioned the four hounds as a family unit which is part of why it didnt stick with me at first, or just feeling out of character.

and unfortunately the only way you could practically fix that, is by rewriting zephias character to one that would fit what the story wants to convey. at which point she becomes a different character, just one sharing zephias face.

best solution i can think of is to shift zephia from a aversa type as it were to more of an eremyia type if that makes sense. cause eremyias big thing in the fe12 assassin sub plot is how she outwardly presents the facade of a kindly matron of a church orphanage well underneath shes a cruel and cold taskmaster of an assassin cult for gharnefs objectives. if zephia had at least been somewhat similar, presenting a wholesome motherly facade before letting the teeth out to achieve sombrons objectives, then i feel things would have hit a lot better in regards to the four hounds and their plotlines.

it would make more sense why the group stays together despite the horrific shit they do, it would hit harder when the cracks form, it would be more shocking when marni gets stabbed by zephia, more impactful when mauvier declares his intent to kill zephia, and more heartbreaking when zephia belatedly realizes she wasted her opportunity for a real family of sorts by taking the four hounds for granted and similarly more heartbreaking when griss lets the facade drop for a moment to comfort zephia before passing away himself.

but... they didnt. or atleast it doesnt come across that way in the english translation. and thats why i consider it a really good concept, with poor execution.

[iamthepulta]

Hey which media/story/franchise is your liztlie AU based on? I've been trying to figure it out based on context clues and I'm getting no where. Please insert long ass info dump rant below.

OH HELL YEAH. <3

The Liztlie AU is based on the Fallen London universe by Failbetter Game studio! Fallen London is a decade-old browser game that’s updated regularly. It’s excellent. There’s also a PC game called Sunless Seas, which was my introduction to the fandom and still some of my favorite content. After the success of Sunless Seas, they made another PC game called Sunless Skies, which I love lore-wise, but for some reason can’t get into playing. (And now they have Mask of the Rose! Which just came out on the 8th! Also set in Fallen London, but a prequel to all of the games.)

For some background, Fallen London and Sunless Seas are set in the same location and same timeline. London as a city, has been pulled down into the cave called the Neath. (Mask of the Rose is set just after the Fall happens.) There are several different London factions, but most importantly, on one end of the Neath, there is a Gate. Sunless Skies is, strictly speaking, a possible AU timeline, set after London discovers and opens that Gate to a realm called the Reach.  

Sunless Skies is its own beast; all the lore in Sunless Seas and Fallen London is dialed up to 11. The focus is on either allying or destroying the 'Great Chain of Being', which includes everything from the industrialist time-manipulating nightmare London has become, to talking rats, to the “Gods”, the Suns of each realm which feed off of the souls of their inhabitants. The game developers did a great job at expanding the world of Fallen London in Sunless Skies, and there are several maps you can play through, a few dozen storylines, and a lot of cool content. (10/10, recommend. Although as fellow rock-eater, you might prefer Sunless Seas. It’s always a tossup.)

So because PC gameplay isn’t enough, people enthusiastically made an RPG out of Sunless Skies! Enter Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor. The Skyfarer RPG system is one page long. I’m biased because I hate long, complicated, number-based RPG systems, but I think this RPG is awesome. It was meant for short campaigns, it’s a d10 system, and your character is designed around being one of the officers on a Skies locomotive. Easy, inventive, and flexible.

Enter two ADHD geologists and a pandemic:

@paleomancer hit up our friend group one day and asked if we wanted to play a oneshot RPG in Skyfarer. We were socially distancing and mentally traumatized nerds, so of course the answer was Yes. And the oneshot was great! We made our characters, played the game for a few hours, finished the oneshot plot, and successfully carried our passenger to Elutheria along with her illicit books. We liked it so much we agreed to keep playing every few weeks just to keep in touch during the pandemic.

This was all well and good until I lost my mind playing Westlie. My dipshit friends (affectionate) thought it was a great idea for me, the First Mate, to be promoted when our captain kicked the bucket. I hadn’t written fiction since college, but I started writing again as I fleshed out her backstory and the DM and I crafted her sister, Morgan. Then I just kind of kept… creating stories and toying with different ways for Westlie to develop until @justanormalseagull and I were playing around with the Found Family/Adoption trope. She'd played Lizzie’s character, and in a burst of inspiration, I realized the plot of our first few Skyfarer seasons would still work well if Westlie adopted Lizzie and never left London. So I casually wrote five chapters as a gift, fell down the rabbit hole again, and now the Liztlie AU is a 200k monster. xD

So to really answer your question, the Liztlie AU is an AU of our Skyfarer Game, which is a translation of Sunless Skies, which is an AU of Sunless Seas, which is an offshoot of the ancient, niche, Fallen London browser game. xD The context clues are piecemeal at best, haha.

But the nice thing! At this point, the Liztlie AU is its own standalone story; it starts at the 'beginning' of the Skyfarer campaign, so you don't need to know anything about the Pyrrhus. And it's set in Sunless Skies, but I explain 90% of the world as Westlie learns about it anyway. Both aspects are basically Easter eggs for readers to enjoy if they happen to know. Which makes the absurdity of what I'm writing even greater because the AU is kind of my own novel now? But also, most definitely not.

The best links if you want to browse are: My Archive -> “the crew of the Pyrrhus” (for memes of the main campaign), "fl", “dnd”, "liztlie au", “wm”, “mw”, or just “westlie”

THANKS FOR ASKING! THIS MADE MY EVENING. :D NOW YOU KNOW! :D

Brief character summaries (links lead to more):

Westlie Faire is/was my Skyfarer PC. She has a horrible father, Arthur Faire, and ran away from the title of Heir to Fairweather Shipping Co. to be the First Mate on the Pyrrhus.

Morgan Faire is her younger sister. Extremely lucky due to [redacted] reasons.

Lizzie Twaddle is/was @justanormalseagull ‘s PC. She was an orphan who snuck aboard the Pyrrhus and got adopted as mascot by the crew. In the AU, she’s adopted by Westlie while she’s trying to sneak onboard a train and Westlie takes her back to London. Just wants a family. T__T

[ot3]

so i see you tweet sometimes about gw2 and im just curious about your thoughts on it like, plot wise.

i think the story of early guild wars is pretty par for the course mmo storytelling where im paying mostly superficial attention to the plot and mainly enjoying how fun the game is. but around the time you get to heart of thorns they start introducing enough interesting concepts that you decide its worth paying slightly more attention to.

there was a huge problem in the way guild wars 2's narrative flowed because of the way they handled the living world stuff. i love the living world in concept when it was unreplayable because its just neat to me to be able to take such large story beats in an mmo. where you literally nuke your entire main city and change its appearance. but i appreciate the fact they decided to retroactively let you play that stuff in the end! however making it, in the case of living world season 2, optional to buy, but then not also doing lws1 in the same way? it just meant that you got the story non completely and non sequentially. if you just go straight to core from HoT you have to do soooo much Inferring Shit About This Plot from it. It's like your character blacked out and lost several years of their life. 'hello? commander? its us. the guys who are totally already your best friends'

anyway once i got through HoT then i found myself going back to lws2 specifically to unlock the luminescent armor and the respective ascended trinkets since back pre-lws3 the only stat selectable ascended trinkets were from raids, i believe. and then once again it was really interesting to get the map meta-events recontexualized to me from going through the story. and then after that i was invested enough in these characters to go watch the howeverlong supercut lws1 movie someone had on youtube for anyone who hadnt been there to play through it.

all this to say i think there was a lot of interesting story stuff here that would have helped hook more people earlier on if it had been freely available to play in its intended order. anyway

hot: i feel like it benefitted a TON from playing through this on a sylvari pc the first time because the custom dialogue they give that taints it like all of the npcs are suspicious you are going to fucking turn evil. like the sort of 'youre the coolest strongest character in the world!' stuff never really does it for me. i'm way more into 'youre a very powerful person in an extremely fraught and complex political situation' and HoT really felt a lot more like that, with i think it doing a good job of setting the mood for being In An Active Warzone. i like dragons stand meta a lot in terms of things where gameplay really makes the story hit in a certain way. the challenging, large-scale metas make a better multiplayer use of a high fantasy war shining than a lot of them do. getting events that genuinely do take several dozen real human beings coordinating in real time to accomplish makes there be a sense of difficulty and scale that would be rather punishing and frustrating as instanced single player combat.

i know i kind of talked more a bout the combat than the story. oops. but to me the sort of positive feedback loop between getting more invested in playing the actual game and then getting more invested in learning about the characters to continue to future expansions.

I wish I could speak more about lws3 and PoF but i will be real with you right now. those years of my life are kind of a blur and i do not remember a lot of the story beats right now. lws4 felt pretty weak to me in a lot of ways, pretty disparate from itself. PoF though i had a hell of a fun time with. joko was a fun villain he was serving necromantic cunt.

lws4 was ok. definitely more cohesive overall and had some cool stuff. lws5 i think on the other hand really suffered from a bit of covid slump in its content which i will absolutely not blame them for. I would much rather they put out slightly subpar content during a massive health crisis than they overwork people.

CANTHA, ON THE OTHER HAND. WAS EXCELLENT. DEFINITELY THEIR BEST STORY WRITING YET. i had a blast of a time with it and i was specifically fond of what they did with mai trin, a character i was well acquainted with via getting my ass kicked in her fractal back when she was scale 100. they gave her some INSANE dyke drama. it was catnip to me. she fucked that asura they had toxic yuri i knowww they did. kelly hu did her voice for EoD, who i immediately clocked as stacy from phineas and ferb and was as such predisposed to be endeared to her. also who doesnt love an ex supervillain pirate captain. mai trin you will always be famous.

anyway. that is my extnesive opinion on the plot of guild wars 2. great game everyone play it i have over 3000 hours in guild wars 2.

[hoodlessmads]

Who wants to read a long ass review of FFXVI?

I would give this game a 6/10. Here’s why. (seriously, it's long, I'm warning you)

SPOILERS for late game (I don't spoil the ending but I do mention characters and events through basically the beach scene - if you know you know)

First, I've seen a tendency to dismiss and/or mischaracterize people’s criticisms of FFXVI as them saying “I don’t like that it’s not turn-based” or “it’s not like other Final Fantasies” when that’s not at all what I’m about to say. Those aren’t my issues with the game. At all. So just getting that out of the way. Kingdom Hearts II is one of my favorite games of all time, so I am not at all adverse to this game having action combat. Final Fantasy XII is different from other Final Fantasies too, but that’s in my top 3 FF games, so that’s not my issue either.

To be honest, I haven’t actually seen anyone criticize the game for not being turn-based except in memes, so I can’t help but feel like fans are blowing this particular criticism out of proportion, unless I’m just in the wrong places online. Who is actually saying the game isn’t Final Fantasy because it’s not turn-based? 90% of people seem to love the game.

Moving on.

This is not...professionally written, by the way. I kind of wrote it in one sitting. Also, please try not to take my extreme language too seriously - that's just how I write. praying emoji

Credit where credit is due

The presentation is great – graphics, cinematics, voice acting, cutscenes. Some of the cutscenes in this game and some of the cinematic QTEs were actually insane. Completely bonkers. The game reaches extreme high points with its story and spectacle that had me yelling. I’ve never in my life cared about graphical quality or spectacle, but this game got me, and I think part of it is the way they successfully integrated the story’s most dramatic moments with the grandest spectacle possible gameplay-wise. Virtually all of the big story moments were dope as hell. I hope this integration helps these spectacular moments stand the test of time when they eventually become graphically outdated. (Because they will. Who cares about the FFVII motorcycle chase anymore? But it blew minds back in the day.)

Things I didn’t know I needed in Final Fantasy: Ifrit hanging off a crystal going, “Fuck.”

The combat is pretty good. It could be better, but it’s pretty good. Action combat-wise, it’s a huge improvement from FF15. I didn’t love it, personally, but I enjoyed my time with it sometimes, and would definitely count it among the game’s strong points. I like that you can control Torgal; it added a nice layer to the combat. I did find myself skipping most mob fights, though.

The story, like the combat, could be better, but overall I think it’s pretty solid. My issues have more to do with the execution and storytelling than the core concepts, which I think are really good. There are some really compelling and interesting ideas here. The story feels very “Final Fantasy” in a good way. I enjoyed it for the most part. I had one MAJOR issue with it that I’ll discuss in the negative section of this review but other than that the flaws in the writing, while there (especially the writing of some of the characters and the ending), aren’t huge detractors for me. I hated the moments I call “Game of Thrones bullshit” which is where I felt the GoT posturing got a little too on the nose, but otherwise, I’m a sucker for political storylines and the political machinations and such in this story were some of my favorite moments, along with the epic confrontations, of course.

Some of the characters: I like Joshua, Cid, Mid, and Dion. Joshua....what can I say. I’m obsessed with him? I’m hyperfixated on a character that is trapped in a game which I think is otherwise mediocre, and that sucks.

Overall, I'm actually really frustrated by all the things I like in this game, because similar to the last mainline entry, I feel like Square almost made one of the best games in the series, if not the best. Truly. But they kind of shat the bed instead.

Gameplay negatives

I could nitpick forever, but the main gameplay element that fully ruins this game for me, if I’m being honest, is the fact that there is no permanent party.

You have your dog, and sometimes you have Jill, but for most of the game Clive is alone. The game’s story preaches a lot about bonds with other people and togetherness and how that is humanity’s strength, but the gameplay doesn’t match up with that message at all. The gameplay sends the opposite message: that this is Clive’s sole journey. As a result, a lot of the story’s themes don’t land well. Also, because you are playing alone as Clive for most of the game, the game is pretty much made or broken on how much you like him. For me, I don’t like him. I’ll get more into why in the story negative section. But because I don’t like him, I have a hard time really enjoying my playing experience because I am forced to spend all of my time with him, and only him. This isn’t about not being able to play as other people, though that would be nice. It’s that the other people aren’t even there.

Final Fantasy XV is a broken mess of a game that I did not enjoy, with a messy story, but even that game understood this most basic principle of building a sense of camaraderie with the main character’s friends by having them all in a permanent party together all the way through until the very end of the game. When that game talked about Noctis’s bonds with others being his strength, it landed because of all the time I, as a player, had spent with the party members. I bought that. The game had earned it.

This sort of leads into my other big issue with the game, which is the virtual lack of RPG elements. Even when you do have temporary party members, they are (relatively useless) AI bots that you have no power to affect whatsoever. You can’t even change their equipment. In the menu, the only character is Clive (other than some cute sprites). It makes you feel even more alone in the journey. So there are no party members to outfit – what can you customize? The game’s customization options are limited to picking and choosing which abilities to give to Clive using earned ability points and an extremely bare bones crafting system. As for the abilities, I will admit there is potential to customize your combat based on which Eikon abilities you choose to outfit Clive with. But it pretty much stops there. The itemization and crafting system are utter dog shit. I don’t feel like I need to justify saying that...even fans of this game have to admit how tacked-on that shit is. In addition, there isn’t even something as simple as elemental weaknesses that might be affected by said tacked-on crafting system. This is a game where the story centers around eight Eikons for eight magical elements and yet there is no elemental affinity baked into the gameplay. I have to ask, what the fuck?

Some Zelda fans would probably get mad at me for saying this, but even though Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom also feature a solo journey without any party members, they legitimately feel more like RPGs than Final Fantasy XVI. Those games have elemental weaknesses and systems that force you to put some thought into your approach to combat, and they have a more worthwhile and involved gear upgrading system. It’s crystal clear that the developers of FF16 put a lot of effort into the presentation, the story and the combat and I applaud those efforts, but it really feels like they put zero effort into ANYTHING else outside of that because there is NOTHING to this game outside of the main story and combat. I would almost rather they hadn’t even bothered to try to pretend this was still an RPG instead of the linear character action thriller it wants to be.

Even in that sense, it’s not particularly outstanding. The combat’s depth is questionable...I would have preferred if you could at least use ability points to, say, modify the base combo, which never changes. Shake it up just a little bit. Instead, the modifications to Clive’s combat as the game goes on come entirely in the form of Eikon abilities that are on timers and you can cycle through them as you want. I don’t get the feeling that Clive himself is growing stronger or better, persay. Each ability has a unique utility, but that utility is limited in any given boss fight due to the lack of enemy variety, and they mostly served for me as extra damage dealers rather than relating to any sort of strategy. The lack of combo modifiers and also the lack of a dedicated block mechanic other than the one Titan ability makes the combat feel a bit clunky and outdated to me. I don’t know how to say it, I guess, because Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom also don’t have combo modifiers and that combat isn’t particularly deep but it doesn’t feel nearly as clunky to play, so I don’t know what I’m saying...but FFXVI’s combat just feels clunky to me sometimes and you’re gonna have to believe me. (I'm not trying to compare these two games, I just feel like since I compared them in the last paragraph I should at least mention I'm not trying to make a double standard about the combat here.)

Lastly, a big issue I have with the gameplay is the exploration. It’s shit. Really. You get a couple of big maps but they’re empty. The coolest locations in the game are ones you either only get to visit once or ones you only see in cutscenes. This does a lot to alienate me from the world the game is trying to build.

I've seen a counter-criticism amounting to basically, "You shouldn't bring franchise expectations to the game!" when people criticize the lack of a party or the lack of RPG elements but I have to ask...why shouldn't I? Any game that carries a series title is going to draw comparisons with other entries in the series, and why shouldn't it - otherwise, what's the point in carrying the title? Every Final Fantasy game has always been "new" in many ways, but there has also still always been a thread connecting them, even a thin one. For me, this game just frays that thread a bit too thin. Through 12, 13, 13-2, Lightning Returns, 15, you name it, I've still always felt like "This is Final Fantasy." When I'm not even playing an RPG anymore, it's gotten too far away from the core of the series. I'm sorry, but it has.

Now here's the story negative section:

Final Fantasy XVI has a slavery problem

There are other story negatives, but for me, this is the big one. I haven’t seen people talking about it much (yet) and I don’t really understand why, because for me it was glaring and cast a pall over the entire story and many of the characters.

There’s nothing wrong with featuring slavery in your fantasy story and/or world; far from it. I think it can add stakes and a dark, realist tone to the narrative (as we know, unfortunately, slavery is a disgustingly frequent part of human history and still exists even today) as well as set up some political commentary. It just has to be done right. It’s obviously a sensitive, heavy topic. FFXVI completely bungles its handling of said topic and betrays that its developers seemingly did not have the historical comprehension or tact to appropriately handle it.

In the narrative of FFXVI, there are good slaveowners and bad slaveowners. (You can see where this is going.) The bad slaveowners are people like Clive’s mom Anabella, who view Bearers (magic users) as vermin and treat them abhorrently. Like, clownishly evil and violent treatment. The good slaveowners are people like Clive’s dad Elwin, who claim to want to make life better for Bearers and treat them relatively well by comparison—see them as human beings (theoretically)—but still keep them as slaves.

During the game’s prologue, you play as a teenage Clive who was raised as a prince of Rosaria in a slave culture where Bearers are branded and are forced to work in service to his father’s duchy. We are shown that Clive is nice to the slaves and wants to make sure they are treated well; however, he doesn’t see that there is much wrong with them being enslaved and is perfectly fine with the status quo. Clive idolizes his father, who is otherwise an evenhanded, astute ruler who truly cares about his people (at least the ones that aren’t slaves). I like Clive during these first few hours. He shows a bit of personality: he is earnest and loyal to a fault, he is fiercely protective of his brother, he is focused on what he sees as his duty to his father and his country, he is secretly devastated that his mother doesn’t love him and wants to earn his place so he has poured his entire life into making himself worthwhile in his own way, i.e. becoming the best swordsman of all time. He’s kind of giving a jock but with a sensitive side.

It’s uncomfortable that he is so comfortable with slavery, but that is exactly how a kid who grew up in a slave culture under a father he admires might think and behave. That’s why there is massive potential here to have his worldview shaken up in a big way – we know that Clive later becomes enslaved himself.  As an adult, how might he look back on his interactions with the slaves in Rosalith? How might he reevaluate the man he thought his father was, compared to the man he actually was: a benevolent father but a man who owned and sanctioned the owning of slaves?

There is one scene where, as adults, Clive and Jill are in Martha’s Rest having just witnessed some awful treatment of slaves, and they comment on how it’s crazy that they never saw anything wrong with slavery as kids. That’s it. The commentary begins and ends there. Outside of this moment, not once does Clive come to terms with his complicity in slavery as a teenager, and not once does he ever think to criticize his father for it.

On the contrary: throughout the game, Archduke Elwin is revered by everyone, and we the player are supposed to revere him too. There is one part of the game where Clive returns to a village in Rosaria and the mayor, recognizing him as the prince, offers him his father’s old Bearers back in a chillingly casual tone. Like, offers to give him his father’s old slaves back who have just been hanging out in this village ever since the country was taken over. Clive of course declines, but we don’t get any indication of how Clive feels about this reminder that his dad was, you know, a slaveowner. Clive also never confronts the mayor’s assumption that these people are things to be owned, just lets him keep on as he was. Clive then meets one of his father’s old kitchen slaves, who has become senile. The old former slave thinks he is still waiting for Elwin to return and take him back to the kitchens, where the former slave apparently enjoyed working. The old man apparently has no idea what to do with himself in the mean time and just hangs out by the well waiting for Elwin, day in and day out. The old man thinks Clive is Elwin returned to get him, and Clive plays along, but says the old dude should just chill out in the village until he’s done with his journey and eventually he’ll come back and get him.

Now...it’s not super clear what we’re supposed to get out of this scene. It’s not entirely clear if we are supposed to take the old man’s ravings about how great it was working in Elwin’s kitchens at face value. Obviously, that would be horrifying. I have to assume that we are supposed to sort of see this as a really dark and sad look at a Stockholm Syndrome-type situation. But the uncertainty that I feel is just the problem. Does this quest exist to show how great Elwin was and how much everyone loved him, including his slaves, or to show how fucked up slavery is? This shouldn’t be a question I’m asking. And the reason I’m asking it is because our viewpoint characters give us nothing to go off of.

Assuming for everyone’s sanity that it’s the latter, why doesn’t Clive have some sort of emotional reaction? This is his father we’re talking about. The great Archduke Elwin. And here is a devastating reminder of the horror Elwin wreaked on a man’s life and psyche. Nothing. We get nothing from Clive. If a normal person suddenly realized that the food they ate growing up was always prepared by slaves, you’d think they’d have some kind of reaction.

And like...is Clive serious? Is he actually planning on coming back to “get him” when he’s done with his journey? Does Clive literally just own slaves in this game? (I don't actually think so, but I'm just saying, the scene was weird.) In any case, it is clear that most of the current and former slaves in this game are completely helpless and will just keep being enslaved through inertia if someone doesn’t save them or at least come and explain to them that being enslaved is wrong, actually, and they should be free. (A portrayal of slaves that is more than patronizing...it’s revolting. Certainly many real life slaves were victims of this sort of brainwashing, but it just feels like...way too many of them are like this in the game, and there are almost no rebellious slaves to provide an alternative portrayal, so it feels very one-sided. The Hideaway folks don't count - I'm talking about current slaves that you meet in the wild.)

After the events of the following section, where a village is massacred, Clive and Jill are upset and suddenly decide they want to help Cid free all the slaves, even though up until this point they have been pretty lukewarm on the idea of joining the liberation effort. I don’t feel like the threads between events are clearly drawn to show how the characters changed their minds. Instead, it’s sudden. They see a massacre (that includes non-Bearers as well as former slaves) and decide slavery is wrong.

Normally, you’d think that since Clive and Jill have, you know, been slaves themselves for the past thirteen years, that alone would be enough to give them a new perspective on slavery. But apparently not. Apparently they had to go through a journey in Rosaria to come to the conclusion that all the slaves should be freed, and even then it doesn’t feel like a perspective change that is earned or that makes sense. The scene with the mayor could have been a great opportunity to show that transition – just have Clive be like “oh, fuck...my dad did this too” – and boom, his character arc starts to make a lot more sense.

Instead, Clive proudly wears his father’s old clothes and later goes so far as to claim that he is carrying on his father’s ideals. At one point, when viewing the atrocious crimes against humanity that Anabella’s men perpetrate against former slaves, Clive mutters something along the lines of, at least in Elwin’s time Bearers weren’t “spit on as slaves.” Fam, what in the world are you talking about? We literally just talked to one of Elwin’s former kitchen slaves? We talked to a man in the Rosalith courtyard in the prologue named “Slaveowner?” It would be one thing if he was in deep denial, but the game doesn’t play it like that. The game plays it straight, like we are supposed to take what Clive is saying as truth. Later, Clive tells Byron that he won’t take back rule of Rosaria, because instead he’s fighting for the world his father believed in, where all people can live freely. Clive explicitly tells us that his father’s beliefs and the goal of ending slavery are one and the same. This does not make sense at all.

I spoke with a friend about this who argued that Elwin did believe in ending slavery, but he didn’t outright do it because he would have had revolts on his hands and so on – it would have been too sudden of a change for the free people to accept since the hatred of Bearers was so entrenched (my thoughts: oh dear, not the free people having hurt feelings, not the revolts! Better keep those people enslaved to avoid such a horror), so he was trying to change attitudes over time. According to my friend, this is what Clive meant by following his father’s ideals - moreso in spirit than in actuality. I think this is a bit of a stretch to assume this is what Clive was thinking since the game doesn't really make it super clear, if I'm being honest, and it's still a very unflattering portrayal because he's essentially excusing his father's policies of slavery. I agree with my friend that such behavior makes perfect sense for Elwin as a character, but owning slaves is still 100% wrong, Elwin was wrong, and the problem is the game’s narrative never really acknowledges this. It's obvious to us, but the game needs to acknowledge it, and it doesn't. (Also, if the reason he didn’t end slavery was truly because he was afraid of the chaos it would cause (eyeroll...it’s giving Northern liberals in 1850s United States...), then why did he himself also own slaves? Surely that wasn’t required if all he wanted was to avoid revolts. It's because he needed to use them as resources and he'd rather use free human beings in forced labor than use up the meager supply of crystals they have, right? Isn't that the real reason?) I bring this up not to discredit this friend, who is great, but because I hadn't considered this perspective before and it helped me understand Elwin's thought process a bit more, so I thought it would be helpful to mention.

What we get, as a result of all this, is a main character who comes across as extremely putzy and tepid. Sure, Clive thinks slavery is wrong, generally. He definitely thinks treating slaves badly is wrong, at least. He probably thinks having them at all is wrong...probably. (Unless you’re his dad, Archduke Elwin.) But at the same time, he doesn’t bat an eyelash when he comes across random NPCs that are in the process of abusing their slaves. And I mean including after he takes over Cid’s role as the international slave liberator and removes his brand. He doesn’t even have an emotional reaction. He just moves on like it’s to be expected. Clive is the most powerful man on earth by this point and he doesn’t lift a finger to help any Bearers he comes across in the wild. Cid the Outlaw, everybody, Clive the great liberator of slaves. What a stand-up guy. If I were a slave in Valisthea, I wouldn’t want this guy to be the one advocating for me. Personally.

It is incredibly difficult for me to emotionally connect with this character when this is how he is characterized, and when the slavery storyline is handled so tactlessly. Like it’s just tacked on to make the world more dark and fucked up, but the developers didn’t care to follow through with exploring it.

FFXVI’s portrayal of the badness of slavery is mostly limited to the cheap, low-hanging fruit of showing horrific atrocities and abuse being perpetrated against slaves by awful slavemasters. But it mostly avoids the true insidiousness of slavery, which is how normal it could be, and has been. How normal, otherwise nice people, could and have been complicit in it. Slavery doesn’t need horrific treatment to be bad. Owning other people is inherently bad. And FFXVI somehow doesn’t seem to get that.

There’s a fun, interesting, comedic relief type character with a lot more personality than most of the other main characters: Clive’s uncle, Byron. He’s wonderful. I wanted to love him.

Except - nagging at the back of my mind from the second we met him was the thought that this guy probably owned Bearers as slaves back in the day, and even if he was somehow the only noble in Rosaria that didn’t, he was close with his brother and could have made an effort to convince Elwin to end slavery, but didn’t.

You can’t have the fun quirky comedic relief uncle character also be a former slaveowner (or, optimistically, a guy who used to help maintain the system of slavery). Tonally, it just doesn’t work.

It would be one thing if Byron ever addressed his past, or his failure to act, or ever somehow recanted his former beliefs and complicity in a way the player can see. But he doesn’t. The slavery in Rosaria thing goes completely unaddressed. Byron easily slides into his role as the benefactor of the Freeing the Slaves Group as if he was one of them all along. It’s confusing and distressing to see the insidiousness of “good” slavery in Rosaria go totally unaddressed.

There’s also this uncomfortable feeling when you go around as Clive after he removes his brand and suddenly no one treats you like shit anymore, and you can’t help but thinking, “Are all of these NPCs actually racist assholes and the only reason they’re not showing it is because they think I’m not a Bearer?” Steph Sterling (The Jimquisition) has a great video where she talks about how everyone in the world of Valisthea comes across as an irredeemable bigoted monster and it makes it hard to care about saving the world. I agree. Like, saving the world is obviously still the right thing to do. I know this logically – but I don’t feel it. I don’t feel any attachment to this world or the awful people in it. This makes it even harder to connect with the “role” I’m supposed to be playing in this “RPG.”

Then the slavery storyline is forgotten halfway through the game for more Final Fantasy-like and less complicated nonsense like killing gods. (Probably for the best.)

There’s also the obvious issue of there being very few people of color in the game, and many of those being white passing to boot, but I feel that has already been touched on elsewhere better than I could say it. It’s obviously stupid and it makes their bungling of the slavery storyline even worse.

There are other flaws with the story, but I can’t even pay attention to those because the slavery thing overwhelms all the comparatively small writing problems for me. I feel like one of the 2.5 people on the Internet who is actually bothered by the portrayal of slavery in this game and it’s making me a little insane. Are people really not bothered by this?

Listen. The slavery storyline had a lot of potential. Episode 2 (or 3?) of Resonant Arc’s FFXVI analysis podcast series on YouTube goes into a really great deep dive about the portrayal of slavery in Valisthea and it made me realize it was more nuanced than I had initially given it credit for. Particularly, the fact that the reason people treat Bearers with such comic book villainy and abuse is because they have to buy into the idea of Bearers being sub-human in order to justify enslaving them and slowly murdering them, and they have to buy in hard. This is extremely true to life. In order to justify treating people like objects, they dehumanize them. There is probably guilt and shame involved over taking advantage of Bearers as a resource, which they have been brainwashed into thinking they must do in order to survive, so they channel that shame into hatred and abuse. Even many slaves themselves have been brainwashed into buying into this system, and as a result they value the “good” slavemasters compared to the “bad” ones. The system has been so entrenched for generations that there is buy-in even from the lowest rung. It’s realistic and true and I definitely get what the developers were going for, I think. But there’s still a problem:

The game never does condemn the “good slavery” in Rosaria. That coming-to-terms, that realization that it seems like the game should be building up to within Clive – it never happens. Clive never has the character growth he needs in order to make the slavery storyline land properly. By the end of the game, Elwin is still a great, admired guy, Rosaria’s slavery is still good, and it is presented as fundamentally different from, say, imperial slavery. This is really just...wrong. So all of that potential for nuance that I just discussed in the previous paragraph ends up falling flat.

Anyway, I don’t like adult Clive. I think he’s a loser. For all the game’s talk of strength of will, I don’t see much strength of will in Clive. He comes across as uncommitted and wishy washy in nearly every instance, with a side dose of angst. He doesn’t compel me in the slightest; in fact, he outright disgusts me at points, and I’d have given my left arm to play as his twinky brother instead.

The women

Okay, so I’m just gonna touch on it briefly. The women in this game...could be better. Like, they’re not bad, but I came out disappointed. Especially in Anabella.

Benedikta’s storyline has already been criticized a lot for being too short and not giving her enough depth so I won’t rehash all that, but we have to talk about Anabella. Clearly, the woman’s inspiration is Cersei from Game of Thrones, unless there’s another beautiful blond traitorous kingmaker who is a total monster that I’m forgetting about. But Cersei is a great villain because in spite of all the horrible things she does, she still feels like a real person. A fucked up person, but a real person nonetheless. Her past is carefully explored so we understand the institutional misogyny, insecurity, horrible monster of a father, and toxic relationship with her brother that led her to grow up into this person. On top of that, Cersei shows a glimpse of humanity – in spite of how she may feel about everyone else, she truly loves her children. She isn’t really a monster – she’s actually just a really fucked up, evil human being.

On the other hand, Anabella is a total monster with no redeeming qualities. We get an indication at the very end that she did genuinely love Joshua and Olivier in...her own way, perhaps...but it’s just a glimmer and then she gets killed off immediately. We watch her commit horrific act after horrific act with no idea why she would do such a thing for tens of hours, and we only just manage to learn what her motivations were the whole time when she spews it out in a rush right before she dies. And the motivations are surprisingly shallow. She was just tired of people gossiping about her behind her back in Rosaria, so she had them all killed. Cool. Why is she like this? I guess we’ll never know.

I love evil women, but Anabella doesn’t even feel like a real person. Such a missed opportunity. I still kinda love when she’s being deliciously evil, though.

*tiktok autotune voice* and I’m not saying she deseeerved it – but god’s timing is aalwaaays riiiight

Oh, you want me to talk about Jill? How did they do? You mean other than her entire life revolving around her love for a man? (Just kidding...sort of.) Well, she’s fine, I guess. Personally, I find Jill to be kind of bland as a character, but that’s just me. I think we needed to get more from her backstory than what we got. As it is, she’s too Clive-focused. She’s giving Dollar Tree Tifa but not in a good way...Tifa definitely still had her own goals and motivations independent of how she felt about Cloud, and she had much more personality. (I also don’t really understand how Jill had the patience to wait for this dude for 18 years, but we don’t really get to see how she feels about that. Or was he the one waiting for her to make a move, and she was the one hesitating? Unclear, but unlikely.) Jill is just totally gung-ho to go at Clive’s pace, in all things. The Hideaway’s goals, their relationship, talking about their feelings, anything and everything is whenever he wants and no sooner or later. I don’t necessarily have a problem with that if it makes sense for the character - We’re just never in her perspective, so we don’t know why, and I find that a shame. But I do love Jill’s design, her voice acting is great, and I like that the narrative treats her like an equal to the men when it comes to combat prowess and general agency. My problem with her giving up her powers to Clive isn’t unique to just her – I hate it in every case that it happens – it just happens to sting a little bit more since Jill is the only female party member in the game.

I like the Jive ship, by the way, even though I'm not very fond of them individually. Like many people (especially fellow adults lol), I appreciate the refreshing maturity and healthiness they have. Not exactly common in Final Fantasy (as much as I love other FF ships).

So close and yet so far from greatness

For those thirsting after Clive and Cid, I raise you, Barnabas? He’s weirdly hot, right?

I feel like fixing FF16 wouldn’t be hard. Not nearly as hard as fixing FF15. It would take some redesigning the way the story plays out a little bit to give us a permanent party, but it would be worth it. The party could include Clive, Jill, Gav, and Tarja for the duration of the game. Characters like Cid could drop out when it’s their time to drop out, and characters like Dion, Josh, and Mid could jump in after crossing paths with the party, and then stay there. When the characters go off on their little quests, like when Dion sneaks off and goes back to the Crystalline Dominion, instead of having them go alone, have the whole party accompany them. This would help organically build the bonds between the characters instead of just having the game tell us that they have bonds.

There are even classic FF archetypes to work with, if they wanted to balance the party accordingly. Clive is a knight/jack of all trades, Jill is a black mage, Gav is a rogue, Tara is like a white mage or an alchemist, Cid and Mid are machinists, Dion is a dragoon, and Josh is a red mage. See? Not that they have to be called this, but I’m just making a point that balance-wise, the party is RIGHT THERE. Then allow the player to outfit them with unique gear and maybe have a couple options for how they want the AI’s playstyle to be, like offensive, defensive, attack Clive’s enemies, attack enemies other than Clive’s enemies...just simple options (if I wanted to be really greedy I’d say add a gambit system but I’m trying to keep it “easy” here--).

But if I can be a bit greedy – how about you allow us to return to the areas featured in the one-off missions and, more than that, how about you actually let us roam around in the fantastical set pieces we only get to see in cutscenes, like Oriflamme? It wouldn’t have to be a big area. Just give me like one little town square. One tiny itsy bitsy little town square per city. Nothing too graphically intensive. Something, anything to help me feel more immersed in this world, because the game desperately needs it. The world is so cool, conceptually, but I can’t really immerse myself because I can't explore most of it.

For the story, just include some deeper revelations for Clive, Jill, Josh, Byron, even Dion, where they regret their complicity in slavery in the past (well, Josh was basically a baby so I wouldn’t necessarily call him “complicit,” but you get it, his family owned slaves, that’s a lot to swallow). Instead of having the boring ass side quests that exist now, create some side quests that are like Clive and gang actually going out and freeing more Bearers on the side, even while they’re dealing with the Mothercrystal shit, so that the freeing the slaves storyline can continue even after the plot shifts to be about the crystals. Have the quests be about unique, fleshed out characters where they have agency in freeing themselves and building a better life for themselves so it’s not all about helpless slaves with Stockholm Syndrome who need to be saved (because that’s both historically inaccurate and gross).

Of course, I think the RPG elements need to be fleshed out, but I think if you just change these two major things (a permanent party and improving the slavery storyline) the game turns from being a uncomfortable and often dreary slog into an absolute banger.

Demake

Okay hear me out – a Switch demake in the pixel art style of, say, Final Fantasy VI (like the sprites we see on the menu). The party that I mentioned above exists. I don’t care if it makes sense with the story or where the characters are supposed to be located in the world. If you’re fighting, you’ve got the party. They’re just there, get over it. If you want it to make sense, you can play the original or watch a Let’s Play of the original. You can choose four of those fuckers at a time. It’s turn-based, for the hoes (I’m the hoes).

The Eikon battles though – the Eikon battles are a 2D side scrolling brawler. How fucking sick would that be? Hell, if they really wanted to keep it entirely action-oriented even in a pixel art demake, the regular combat can be a 2d side scrolling brawler too, and maybe you can control your other three party members with, like, their own assigned buttons. Kind of like TWEWY. So it would be chaotic but in a fun way. And maybe (also for the hoes) they can insert some of the epic cinematic cutscenes as FMVs.

Have I mentioned my emphasis on having a party?

Would this not be sick as hell?

Conclusion

I needed somebody to scream at about this and my only friends who are playing this game are still early in, so I turned to the Internet instead. I welcome discussion if you for some reason actually read all of this and feel so inclined. This isn’t a comprehensive review (in spite of being this long) and there’s room for debate and there are certainly more things that could be touched on.

I wrote all this about a 6/10 game because I love Final Fantasy that much – if I didn’t care, I wouldn’t have this much to say about it. Ultimately, I love all Final Fantasy games, even the ones I don’t like. If you get it you get it.