#kotaku article

[toskarin]

4chan being heavily invested-in by good smile isn't new news (besides it being definitively confirmed), but it's also just not especially surprising if you're really.... aware of what either name in question does

nishimura is a reactionary loser who runs sites full of reactionary garbage, but he's also a reactionary loser who runs (aforementioned) incredibly popular sites full of shut-ins with disposable income who are more than willing to spend all of it on merch

even beyond that, 4chan in particular was probably the single largest word-of-mouth platform for non-japanese customers for anime merch

not saying it's a good thing, not even saying it's an acceptable thing, but it's a way more mundane and capitalistic evil than it's being made out to be in most of the threads I've seen trying to explain the situation so far

[iodrawsandtalks]

Criticism of Penacony and why i think HYV shouldve quit while they were ahead.

//vent towards the end, references to suicide while those references are quest spoilers Recently I've been doing world quests and grinding out the new region and been repeatedly finding myself walking straight into microagressions and slights to the point where it's been jarring enough for me to put my game down. As a black dude playing HYV games i know well enough not to act like the stupid billion dollar game company cares about appealing to minorities but its 2024 man.

First off, the obvious issue. Penacony has been repeatedly mentioned by the devs themselves to be based off of the Jazz Age from the U.S. a few decades ago.

The Jazz age was a period of time in American History between the 1920's and 1930s where the popularity of Jazz just boomed from being like an indie type of music to one of worldwide popularity. Obviously, Black people in that era are wholly responsible for Jazz itself.

So yeah, Penacony takes its origins from a key black history movement. Penacony, the region that released at the start of February. Black History Month. Star Rail is arguably one of the most popular games right now in terms of outreach because it's free, its new, and its colorful/futurisric etc.... And yet....

Just like with the rest of the HYV games that take real world inspirations, they fucked over black people and their stories.

In Honkai Impact 3rd, basically we had this one black girl who's like sandpaper brown and complains about how much her DARK SKIN ruins her look and how she bleaches her skin using various products to keep it lighter. She is ashamed of her DARK SKINNED mother who's a military woman. Her father is absent. Her mother is also a grown adult who is a B-rank soldier(main character white teenagers are S-rank for reference). Carole Peppers is her name if you want to go further down that rabbit hole.

In Genshin Impact, besides the fact that people with different skin tones are CLEARLY sectioned into certain regions(no seriously there's no real reason why i shouldnt see a black person in any of the existing regions.), and besides the unnecessary amount of whitewashing and besides the perpetuation of the idea of melanin NOT being natural, every single brown/black character in the game has awful playstyles and/or poor matching with weapons/artifacts, inaccessibilty, and they NEVER make it to the top of any meta tierlists. I'm not outright saying they're bad they're just harder and almost never get specialized weapons.

The only previously relevant example in Star Rail was Arlan, a lightning/destruction character. He chews through his own HP and unlike characters like blade/clara, does not have resistance or healing to handle that. Serval, the other lightning 4 star, out-dps's him veryyyyyyy easily. So yeah, the ashy black person character basically dies if you use him for too long and is never relevant TO ANY quests except where he needs to be the sidekick.

sometimes these games have dragons, animals that can understand and process english, or magic.... but then not black people...

Penacony has no black main characters. No black stories of relevance. Yesterday found an NPC whose name was detracted from chocolate and the player had the option to let commit suicide.

yeah ill get to that 💀. This large mass of at least 4 supernatural looking characters and yet no black person. NOT EVEN ANY OF THE CHARACTERS FROM penacony itself are black.

so yesterday I was grinding clockwork quests and had to help out some apathetic shopkeeper named Cocona. Her story was almost a bit sad but midway into going through her background i realized her name is one letter off of cocoa. now imagine being on a creative team coming up with a name for a melanated NPC and somebody decides on fucking CHOCOLATE with an extra letter. before anybody implies that one was something i shoehorned, think about how itd go if i had a bunch of POC characters and one white girl named crackerella.

Cocona and her once again sad backstory reach a hard tipping point as the player follows her to the edge of a building and can either grab her to stop her from jumping or simply let her end her life jumping off the building.

Yes we've seen how this game lets you make choices and watch the consequences of your actions, but there have been established rule-breaking predecents. Take Ruan Mei's quest where you have no choice but to eat the cake she offers you and once again lose the ability to make a choice on saying anything related to her. or any time the trailblazer gets pushed into a fight and cannot de-escalate. ....with this in mind consider why was saving the cocoa girl from killing herself NOT a forced option.

normally id be the kind of silly person looking for lore bits and stuff and making theories, (like how clockie is from the path of elation :v)but as a black dude this whole region is disgusting. THEY ARE GENTRIFIYING JAZZ AND COVERING UP ITS BLACK ORIGINS idk who said HYV cared about their audiences they fucking dont.

wouldve posted this on reddit but whoop dee do i am NOT getting doxxed today.

[im-the-antonymph-of-your-mom]

[moxley]

kotaku really went down the drain since they turned comments off

[haellen-o]

Me too kotaku... Me too

[yusuke-of-valla]

I don't want to be too mean because there's nothing objectively wrong with this article but the vibe I got reading this was like "it sounds like these are two valid approaches to writing romances and any flaws with them aren't inherent to the design choice so much as they're limited by the devs imagination and writing skill?"

But also like it's interesting to hear people talk about it and it brings up some interesting games I want to check out now, so like? Whatever? Objectively fine article, it's just going to be bugging me for the rest of the day.

I will make fun of this quote though:

“The difference between a bisexual character versus a playersexual character really is a matter of context,” Gaider says. “By calling a character ‘playersexual,’ you’re sort of erasing the fact that they are bisexual, but, the part where having a term for that becomes useful is when you start to investigate, like, why is this character bisexual?”

I'm sorry do I need a three page essay explaining why I'm bisexual? Do I need to bring this up on my tinder date? Damn I've been doing this wrong.

[z0urcherri]

Sisi Jiang doesn't fuck around.

[videogamesincolor]

“If you’re ever lacking creativity, handcuff yourself and then figure it out, because then you’ll do something you haven’t done before. So top shots were never very cool with us, with lighting or choreography, because it gets old quick. But I had seen this video game and I’ll throw a shout-out—I think it was called “Hong Kong Massacre”—they did this top shot and we had been doing so much with the big muzzle flashes and it just kind of clicked like, ‘Well, if I’m above, we shoot like this and we shoot like this, and it draws these cool lines with the muzzle flash, and if I get the right flicker effect, it’s like Etch-A-Sketch. It looks really cool,’” Stahelski told /Film. “And it was a different way to amp up the action and keep you in that video game mode that John Wick’s kind of known for, that first-person shooter kind of thing.”

[wyndonguylikestrains]

Kotaku really though that Jet Lag’s The Race to the End of the World is named what the first episode is named.

Like what the heck

[ihaveatypeanditstrickstergods]

I've found it! I've found everything I hate about speedrun culture distilled into one article!

Namely this one

Select quotes below

"Those poor, stupid completionists, taking 200 hours to actually experience things like story and characters and dynamic combat when the actual smart people out there are breaking beating the game in 10 minutes!"

Are they, though? Is the entire video game community "in awe" of the latest way someone's figured out how to break their way to the credits of a popular game?

"The game's also getting a feature that a large chunk of the playerbase wanted, but no one gives a shit about that! Look what this one person did! Their feat clearly shows that they are more important than literally everyone else who plays the game!"

[mysticdragon3md3]

"Twink"? Maybe back in Overture! When did Sin's arms get like that????

Kotaku's incendiary divisive clickbait, strikes again.😑

[greatwesternrailway]

my villain origin story is people saying anything that amounts to “straight white men dress so badly while women and queer people always look done up and fabulous”

[james-stark-the-writer]

just found out that the co-founder of the company (Warhorse Studios) that developed one of the games I'm currently playing (Kingdom Come: Deliverance) and enjoying so much that I was willing to consider it one of my favorite games I've ever played is a Gamergater™. please don't buy Kingdom Come Deliverance. do not pay that man any money. the game is genuinely great, still one of the best things I've ever played but dear god, it feels so bad to have not done my research before buying the game. like, I really need to get into the habit of just looking shit up at this point. adore that Czech people found representation of their history in the game and there's a lot of good shit in the game that I still love and the man also wrote another one of my favorite games (Mafia 2) which has similar issues with some stuff as KCD so like just. find alternative ways to play the game. it's genuinely a phenomenal game in so many ways. I just wish I knew before I made him any money.

[yellow-yarrow]

haha nice

[rockefellerskanks]

hmmm