#onward rpg

[hiddenwashington]

anonymous said : Hi! Do you have any faceclaim ideas for aizawa and barley lightfoot?

hey there , lovely ! for barley , some of these are on the older side , but we'd perhaps suggest : jacob batalon , john bradley west , nathan alexis , brian tyree henry , max adler , jimmy blais , makela yepez , cooper andrews , or harvey guillen ! then for aizawa , we’re actually unsure of which one you’re referring to , but if you could let us know , we’d be happy to get some suggestions together for you !

[psalacanthea]

losing my mind at this post about a guy that played bg3 by only following the main quest, blew up the absolute with Gale @ Moonrise Towers and then was like 'meh game kinda sucks'

hilarious. how can you play a game so WRONG that you don't even MAKE IT to baldur's gate and think the game is over.

[sylphwing]

the boogie man has voice-acting? 😭😭

[a-little-monotonous]

I should replay the assassins creed games at some point

[swynlake-rp]

Abundant adventures await you here in Swynlake! Tales of magic, friendship, and mystery. What stories will you weave?

Ariel Triton (Ariel, The Little Mermaid) - Be careful, Ariel. Don’t do this, Ariel. Act like this, Ariel. You get it! You know the rules already! Will you ever get a chance to just live without your father and sisters’ watchful eyes?

Rosetta Petalpot (Rosetta, Disney Fairies) - Ask any pixie in Pixie Hollow who the sweetest fairy in the whole hollow is, and Rosetta Petalpot would be a top poll answer. You’re a ray of sunshine, flitting between the hollow and the human town around it to shine. You love living in two worlds! Can you convince the shier fairies that the human town is worth exploring, and show humans that fairies are cool?

Jimmy Ling (Ling, Mulan) - Can't anybody take a JOKE anymore? Oh, brother, apparently not. Yet again, CANCEL culture rears it's ugly head. Now you have to relocate to Swynlake so you can #learnbetterdobetter. And maybe learn you were actually wrong?

Barley Lightfoot (Barley, Onward) - Magick history is your passion! No, genuinely! However...do you have additional motives behind your interest in Swynlake's magical sites and lore specifically?

Pascal Chaplin (Pascal, Tangled) - What good is a gift if you can’t share it with others is your philosophy! While you enjoy changing up your look at will, nothing makes you happier than running your little tattoo shop in town and giving a piece of your gift to others. Color changing tattoos! How wonderful! What will you create next?

Wilbur Robinson(Wilbur, Meet The Robinsons) - When your parents are Cornelius and Franny Robinson, everyone expects greatness out of you, especially yourself. Nothing is more frightening than being average– can you prove you’re anything but?

[englishotomegames]

Fields of Mistria

Release date (Steam) English (early access): August 5th, 2024

"Get ready to begin a brand-new life in a world that's brimming with possibilities!

Mistria, an idyllic village tucked between forest and sea, has offered you an overgrown but full-of-potential homestead in exchange for your assistance. Restore the town to its former glory after an earthquake wreaks havoc and strange magic begins to flow through the land.

In this spiritual successor to the Farm-Sim RPGs of the late 90s & onward, build the farm of your dreams as you discover magic, romance, and adventure!"

This is a farming sim now available in early access on Steam! You can buy it here.

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I think an interesting trick Dwarf Fortress pulls off is how, in Adventurer Mode, whenever you enter a site the game first populates it by pulling from the list of historical figures living there (note that for the purposes of Dwarf Fortress "historical figure" doesn't necessarily mean "important person", but "character that the game has chosen to keep track of as the world history progresses"), and then fills out the rest of the site population with random NPCs generated on the spot that you'll pretty much never see again because they're not saved anywhere and they'll despawn as soon as you leave and the site is offloaded.

HOWEVER, if you interact with any of those randos in a way that causes the game to generate a name for them, they'll be immediately marked as a historical figure, so the game will store them in memory and keep track of whatever happens to them from that point onward, ensuring that they can be reencountered at a later time.

That way, the game is able to keep the illusion of a consistent world while only having to keep track of the characters that the player is actually likely to remember.

Also that's one of the reasons I say Dwarf Fortress in Adventurer Mode is the closest you can currently get to playing a fantasy RPG with a human GM. Many of the ways the game reacts to your actions and choices (including this one) kinda resemble the thought process a GM would follow when running a game.

[prokopetz]

I was looking at your post about ttrpgs without randomizers and was thinking about what elements could determine success and failure because I am not experienced with any.

One I thought of is players having a pool of basically success points that they use to do cool stuff. The gm gives out more success points when bad stuff happens to the players and the cycle continues but I can’t be the first person to think of a mechanic like this.

My question is, do you know on any ttrpgs that use a mechanic like this?

(With reference to this post here).

Yes, the approach you describe is a common one in randomiser-less tabletop RPGs. Examples of the type include Avery Alder's Dream Askew (later adapted as the No Dice, No Masters/Belonging Outside Belonging system and subsequently featured in many other games), Minerva McJanda et al.'s Godsend, Ryo Kamiya's Golden Sky Stories, Jason Durall's Lords of Gossamer and Shadow (and, to a lesser extent, the game that inspired it, Erick Wujcik's Amber Diceless), Dr. Jenna Moran's Nobilis (and other games by the same author), and Colin Fredericks' Sufficiently Advanced (from 2nd Edition onward).

[fiannalover]

Ok no one ever talks about Atelier Games in this Website so I'm gonna drop my unscheduled unplanned unscripted ramblings and screenshots about the Yumia trailer:

Short Version: Yumia seems to be Very different from every prior Atelier Game, going towards a more Actiony, Traditional RPG and Linear Story Driven focus than even the Iris Series and Ryza, alongside maybe doing so to gameplay elements too. However, the vibes and themes are Excellent, so although this will likely be inevitably a controversial (and potentially newbie boom inducing) title, I'm ready to love it.

Trailer Screenshot rambling under read more

YGGDRASIL, THE WORLD TREE! That's how you know it's a Traditional RPG (disclaimer: this tree has no name or given story relevancy yet, I'm joking around).

We get to see some movement and world design moments alongside the initial narration, and in this regard, Yumia fully follows in the footsteps of Ryza 3, but More. Zipline segments from there are back, and I wouldn't be surprised if Yumia was Fully open world 90% after Ryza got about 85% of the way to being an open-world game.

We get a sneak peek of the verse's Alchemy System here! We can't really say much about it: the Alchemy Core may just be an item a la the supplements of games past or a full game mechanic. If the latter, my immediate thought is that it would be again following up on Ryza 3, this time the key system, maybe on reverse, even: if they keys were an optional feature on the end of synthesis, the core could be the mandatory first step affecting Synthesis Results. We have to wait to get more info, but it's fun to think of.

Here we have the part I feel has the most potential for controversy: Battle System. Very early on, we see Yumia shoot down a fox? Cow? Foxcow hybrid? With a crossbow in real time. No UI Elements were shown in the rest of the trailer, leaving us the question: after Ryza swapped the traditional turn base for ATB, is Yumia going to change it to Real Time Action RPG?

I actually don't think we can say for sure. Again, no UI Elements means that the ambiguous identity animal could just be a non hostile mob you can kill for materials, while actual enemies are fought in turns/ATB. I don't mind which one they go with (Atelier's cousin, Tales, shows Namco does great ARPG), but one way or another, I am GREATLY looking forward to seeing the Turn Based RPG Discourse join the already lovely Bad Takes On Atelier Landscape!

With those rambles on gameplay out of the way, let's talk about the OTHER very different element: the plot.

DWAGON! Always an important Atelier Staple!

Someone get Vayne in here.

If we are to understand these screenshots as happening in chronological order, Yumia already starts the game in a commander position of a village that is preparing against something, and is promptly wiped off the face of the map. Even the most story/drama heavy Atelier games (that I played) (I'll get to you someday, Iris series) kept a generally light hearted and war crimes free atmosphere. We still don't know how it will work out in game, but it is already a very big tone shift.

This part with the wolf man enemy stands ou too for Yumia's capacity as an action protagonist. I'd say this is the most unambiguous show of strength a series character has shown. like yes, Ryza is described as a capable fighter from Ryza 2 onwards, Vayne clearly knows how to fight, but most of their actions are gameplay land. Ryza 2 ALSO leaves it clear that, story wise, Lent is the group's Actual Trained Powerhouse Fighter.

In contrast, both story and gameplay parts of the trailer leave it clear Yumia is physically capable of holding her own, another evidence of how the game is set to be tonally different from predecessors, doubly so as you realize Yumia has no companions with her on this trailer. I even to get to wonder if she'll make her journey fully solo, which would be something COMPLETELY new for the series.

But what is similar?

This part of the trailer, alongside the title's focus on memories, gave me wonderful Ayesha and Ryza 2 memories, my favorite games in the series.

Both Ayesha and Ryza 2 put a big focus on ruins and the memories of yesteryear they hold. Ayesha is set in a dying world filled with buildings left behind by those who killed it. Ryza 2 has you scouring each and every inch of the ruins in search of the memories of people who lived there, their lives, their stories, how they connected to each other.

Yumia seems like it will be focused on that: holding on to the memories that others have entrusted to you, and using them to find what if your right future, your envisioned land. Truth and Ideals, in a way.

Yumia is going to do a lot of things likely radically different. But I'm sure it will keep the core parts right: the alchemy, the light, slice-of-life elements amidst the action, the somber, atmospheric ambience of Dusk and much, much of what the Ryza Trilogy constructed.

And I can't wait to see more.

[maniakmonkey]

Onward to adventure!

Fanart of @eightyuh's Untitled RPG Characters, Glendale, Harry, and Freya that I drew a while back for Art Fight. I love all the art and comic chapters she's posted so far!

[thydungeongal]

D&D is NOT an easy system to learn and I'm tired of pretending it is! I literally only play this hell game because I've never found a GM who was interested in other systems (partially my own fault, I really hate video call rpgs so I only do in person games). The immense amount of numbers and maths you have to do for every little thing are insane. Trying to make any form of homebrew species character is equally a nightmare. I play it because I enjoy rpgs and hanging out with my friends but I need hand holding through the entire game from character creation onwards. It's fine when no one is taking the rules too seriously but I resent it constantly being called the easiest system when I have to play it with a sodding calculator and ask for constant help and clarification 😑

Yeag

[elbiotipo]

I'm not asking for lack of violence in videogames though. There is much one can criticize as playing as the 'hero' in a videogame who wields violence, but the thing is, the hero stereotype is not going away as long as humanity exists. In fact, being 'heroic' in many contexts didn't even mean 'a good person', it meant someone who experienced extraordinary stuff and did great feats. Videogames allow you to replicate that. And they are art forms, so they should be analyzed and criticized, but I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with say, a videogame that allows you to rescue a town from bandits or slay a dragon. Those are things I could not do in real life, and they are fun to experience in a videogame.

What I do not find any enjoyment is in mowing down hordes of nameless enemies in an RPG. I do not mind violence in videogames, and I don't even mind playing as a bad guy. What I think is that if you're just giving me endless low-level enemies to kill and kill and kill, especially if they're people in the lore, I don't enjoy any of it. It's no longer the 80s where you get a better score by destroying enemies in a 8-bit game. I don't feel like a hero by killing Bandit 146, Raider 321 or Wolf 812. I feel like someone who did something extraordinary when I slay a dragon, or defeat an enemy army as a result of my skills.

What I want, in a roleplaying game, are roleplaying choices. If I want to play as a pacifist hero, I should be given the choice, and the choice to fail it. No, perhaps you could not negotiate with the leader of the pirates. Perhaps it's a bad idea to walk to a dragon lair equipped only with your knowledge. You were given the choice. But it also might work in many other cases. You might change things with your words. That's extraordinary too.

There is a lot of truth that many RPGs, from D&D onwards (and let's face it, Dungeon and Dragons looms large over everything) give you violence as the main gameplay, and other things as options. RPG videogames have replicated this once and again. Videogame design assumes leveled enemies, grinding, and combat-centric design as essential for RPGs. And I again, I don't mind combat. I just wonder, why it sucks so much? What pleasure is there in mowing down hundreds of wolves or bandits? When I play an RPG, I play it to be someone extraordinary, or someone regular in an extraordinary world, and I think games would be better if they focused on making an extraordinary, well crafted world where your choices make sense, and then make the gameplay fit around it, instead of endless grinding fights.

[eerna]

If I may recommend a book series that is SO dear to my heart (if enjoyably silly) might I suggest the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness by Michelle Paver? It was my 'kicks Harry potters ass' childhood series, but the writing is so vivid and well researched that I truly think it's more than a kids thing. The serial plot takes off from the second book, but the first is good for world setting too. Plus, after finished the series at 6 books years ago, that mad lad Michelle came out with three more over lockdown. The audiobooks are read by Ian McKellen and are also a delight. AND NO ONE SEEMS TO KNOW ABOUT THEM!!!!

Brief pitch: post ice age paleolithic fantasy set in non specific Scandinavian environment. Author spends a LOT of time in various real life places and cultures to understand how people might have lived, so the detail is mwah. It has soft magic system, in a way that (apart from a few things) you're never sure if magic, or superstition/coincidence. Naturalistic magic maybe. Clans of people live and survive in their own different ways, until a lone boy from the wolf clan loses his father to a demon possessed bear and must find a way to stop it's rampage, with the help of a wolf cub he rescues.

Peak wolf girlie fiction back then, lemme tell ya, but sometimes the chapters are the wolf's pov and the way he interacts with the world is DELIGHTFUL. The second book onwards has a loose rpg structure of defeating major villains, and there is a magic ability that spices things up, but it's so grounded in the real world they live in you find it fits in easily. I could gush about this endlessly tbh AND. I have all the audiobooks on a drive if I may offer them to anyone interested.

Aaaww thank you so much for the wonderful rec!

[artbyblastweave]

Which Fallout game would you recommend to someone who's played none of them?

Depends on how you like to spend your time. Discounting a couple wild-swing-and-miss games that are only dubiously canon, Fallout games can be roughly grouped into the West Coast games- a trilogy composed of Fallout, Fallout 2, and Fallout: New Vegas- and the Bethesda-headed East Coast Games, consisting of Fallout 3, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 (the last of which is a multiplayer game-as-service that I don't own a machine powerful enough to play. I hear mixed things.)

The east coast games lean heavily into Bethesda's house style- big, lovingly-crafted open worlds, a heavy focus on exploration and environmental storytelling, satisfying dungeon-crawl-based loot loops, and so on. They aren't well written and from 4 onward they aren't terribly deep RPGs. In particular I can recommend 4 as a fun romp that's quite accessible from a gameplay perspective but a really bad showing of what the rest of the series is about thematically- a lot was lost in a push for mass market appeal. If you liked Skyrim there's a good chance you'd like Fallout 4, except I'd argue wholeheartedly that Skyrim had worldbuilding as a priority to a much greater extent than 4 even at its nadir. It's set in Boston, if that sweetens the pot at all. It did for me.

By contrast the west coast fallout games are in fact actively well-written and invite engagement from a lit-crit perspective. There are themes and shit. Of the west coast trilogy I'd recommend Fallout: New Vegas (and I'd recommend it above Fallout 4), in no small part because It's the only one of the three created in a 3d engine (the first two are top-down isometric) and it strikes a decent balance between the open-world go-anywhere philosophy of an elder scrolls game and the meaningful-choices-they-thought-of-everything RPG sensibilities. The only minor downside is that It's an indirect sequel/finale in regard to the first two games, which means there's a significant number of callbacks, returning characters, and returning factions that are rendered slightly more legible by having played the first two games. But not much more legible- you get the gist of everyone's deal just by playing and talking to everyone. There's also a decent amount of jank on numerous fronts because it was basically commissioned as a spinoff game in under 18 months but taking that mulligan into account it sort of becomes even better, pound for pound. Play this if you liked Disco Elysium and want to play a game that's significantly less heavy than that on all fronts but also lets you be a cowboy and get in shootouts with Fascist roman larpers and robots and shit. Play it even if that doesn't sound good. Play it. Play Fallout: New Vegas. Play it

[transgamerthoughts]

a night at poe's masquerade

Last night I made a quick tweet about how I think Persona games (particular from Persona 3 onwards) tend to be fundamentally conservative games. In worlds filled with magic powers, shadow selves, and literal gods there's an understanding that many of the most villainous people you can know are folks in positions of social/political power who weaponize their status in order to prey on those beneath them. This is a particular focus of Persona 5 but it extends even back to back to a game like Persona 2 and characters like Tatsuzou Sudou. Although these games acknowledge the social structures that lead to particularly vicious kinds of abuse, there is tendency for our protagonist to then fold themselves into those power structures. In games that focus less on real-life political allegory, there's still pattern of protagonists eventually accepting the societal roles that they're initial chafing against. It's a very common occurrence in the series. clockwork!

Persona 4 is the chief culprit here. Yukiko struggles with the idea that her presumed inheritance of the Amagi Inn is an imposition on her life but makes peace with that fact and eventually prepares herself for that role. Chie confronts Adachi, shocked that anyone who chose to be a police officer would do so for selfish reasons or betray the ideal image she holds of that job. Though confronted with the ways in which the system enabled Adachi's murders, she ultimately decided that she wants to become a police officer. Just as some examples. there's more. it's a fraught game in many ways

(I'm not gonna talk about Naoto. That's a minefield. as a trans critic people ask what I think about Naoto quite often. my answer is I like Naoto quite a bit and while I appreciate the queer read I don't need her story to be actually about transness. my tongue in cheek deep position here is that I think she's the damn coolest thing in the Dancing All Night opening movie. absolute fire!)

Persona fans are totally reasonable human beings. by which I mean that they might be the most electric and fuckin' absurd fandom I've ever encountered. While some people agreed with my read of the series, many others swarmed in. Which is fine enough. That's just what happens when you're visible on Twitter. I don't really have an interest in outlining the series in gross detail although, contrary to many accusations, I have played all the mainline games. One thing that can never be hurled my way is a suggestion that I don't play videos games. This criticism doesn't arise out of nowhere though I admit I didn't exactly expect it to become a trending topic floating in the "For You" tab. I was tweeting before bed.

Lesson learned! this fandom is wild! So it goes!

I've been thinking about people's responses and I want to venture into fraught territory to talk about a particularly bad habit I see from many fans. Which I think can be extended to things like ongoing debates about localization as much as they can apply to this little tempest in a teapot. Which is that I've grown somewhat concerned with he ways in which RPG fans (intentionally or not) exoticize Japan as a means to defend their favorite games from critique. It's kinda bad!

and I'm gonna risk a ramble exploring the topic… and I wonder how tumblr in 2024 will compare in reaction to hellscape of twitter

Something you often encounter in these discussions is an implication (sometimes a direct suggestion) that it is impossible to really engage with Japanese media as a westerner. That there's too many layers of nuance and too many centuries of ingrained tradition for anyone who has not engaged in lengthy study on the topic to penetrate. Often, this is framed as a desire to simply put things in cultural contexts. respect it and give due seriousness! Which is fine. I absolutely think if you wanna talk about something like the portrayal of the Japanese justice system in Judgement, it probably helps to… y'know… know details about the Japanese justice system. If you want to talk about how a game approaches gender, an understanding of certain social mores is important. No one debates this; it's important to understand art as arising from specific material conditions and places.

This is not really the approach people take however. Instead there is an insistence that the cultural difference between Japan and western nations is essentially insurmountable. Which has some bad implications. I think people are well meaning when they're like "hey, you gotta watch this YouTuber talk about Shintoism and JRPG boss fights for over an hour" but it comes at the cost of painting the culture as something of a puzzle to solve. and make no mistake: I'm glad anyone is doing the work but there's a bit of strangeness at play when folks are like "well you're American" and then tell me to watch criticism also made by Americans. especially since I do have a educational background that includes the study of world religions. i've studied plenty of this! and it's not impossible for me to have grasped.

the world is beautiful and nuanced and specific and full of vibrancies. but these things are not so singular that we can't connect with them or come to know them. and those nuances and specifics and vibrances don't create a protective ward around works. if anything, they're invitations to explore something new. if I walk away from Persona with a position that you don't agree with I promise that it's not something that's happened in haste. It used to be my job to think about games. and I've thought about Persona a lot! it's not inaccesible.

When we start to paint a culture as being particularly foreign we inherently exoticize it. We drape a degree of mystery over it which implies there is no universal connections found in art. Of course the concept of "police" is different in Japan to some extent as is the expectations that go into inheriting a family business. yes, the social nuances of a classroom differ. But Japan is not so alien to the western critic that we can't look at popular fiction and spot patterns. I certain don't need a 17 anime consumer to write me an essay on honne and tatemae or whatever in order to understand what's going on in the Midnight Channel. It's an easily observable truth that Persona often identifies issues within Japan society while also (particularly in Persona 5's case) concluding that these problems are not a consequence of specific power structures but rather moral failings of certain bad individuals. That's the text. Even when it wants to suggest otherwise.

Here's a little snippet from Persona 5. On face value, it seems to contradict what I'm saying. "Harper, how can you say that it only cares about individuals when it outright says that society itself needs to be addressed!?" DO YOU EVEN PLAY THESE GAMES YOU BITCH?! The answer is that the game does not have a model or idea of what it means to change society except vaguely to inspire people to more individual action. be nicer. stand up for yourself, speak your truth, do things for your own reasons. which has a radical element to it in the context to be sure but we've spent a huge portion of the game seeing how the abuse of power, particularly power placed in certain positions and social strata

a change of mindset is good but… is that sufficient? I'm not entirely convinced. not if this game want to truly deliver on everything it has explored. (side note, a lot of folks were like "why are you focusing on p5 so much here?" and the answer is that it's recent, representative of the series' values from the last decade or so, and because I'm a tired adult in their 30s who has stuff to do and isn't obligated to make a 300 tweet long thread breaking down multiple scripts. if you want me to do that labor, you better pay me for my time. otherwise I don't care to appease fan who have no plans of truly entertaining what I'd do anyway. no breakdown I do could please them)

but you fight Yaldabaoth Harper! You kill the collective gestalt representative of the status quo!. okay sure but the metaphorical battle falters as the game ultimately imagines many of our heroes (for instance Makoto, who also decides to become a cop even after her sister leaves the profession to become a defense attorney) are content to slide into the power structures as they exist. they've simply become "good apples" in the same basket that held the bad ones What does it matter if you kill the metaphor when you don't carry through elsewhere? It's not simply some vague human desire to be exploited that created the various monstrous villains we face throughout the game. There's real material circumstances, systems and long-held powers that gave them the carte blanche that enabled their abuses! Be they financial, political, or even sexual.

We might layer nuances on top of this of course. Notions of reticence to change or valuing of tradition, attitudes towards elders. But when we do so it's important be careful. When fans imply impenetrabilities in the works by virtue of cultural difference, there's a risk of veering into a kind of Orientalism. One which mystifies the culture and turns it into a kind of "other." Distant, strange. This sometimes comes paired with a kind of infantilization of creators but that's a different though similarly fraught topic that I think is particularly best left in the hands of the creators themselves. I'm not the person to talk about that!

Nevertheless, a frustrating part of the response to my tweet today has been a rush to say "This work functions that makes it necessarily elide your ability to critique it."

I'll be an ass and generalize. It's mostly people with Persona avatars making this suggest. That Persona, as a Japanese work, is imbued with an ineffable quality that magically allows it to side-step what's ultimately a pretty timid conclusion. Many of these folks are younger players, self-identified as such in profiles, who clearly have a deep connection to the series. It means something to them. But I'd rather they simply say "hey, I found this thing particularly moving at an important moment in my life" rather than conjure an impassable ocean between myself (or really anyone) and the work in the event they find flaws.

Otherwise, you just get this:

Stories are not merely about what happens on the journey. The destination does matter. It means something when the king grabs his shining sword and fights off the orc invaders or whatever. A value system is suggested Similarly, it does means something when Chie becomes a cop. (This is just a shorthand example mind you! But you hopefully get the idea!)

I don't think games or any work of art need us to defend them. The trap of fandom is that you often turn to any possible means to justify what you love. For Persona, a series which does have the decency to explore cultural issues, that same cultural specificity is often weaponize by fans (largely western fans even!) to deflect certain problems. This process inadvertently portrays that culture as a mystery, a shrouded thing that we cannot ever criticize. It's one thing to dig into some of those contextual specifics but it's another all-together to imply these specifics provide a mean to abrogate certain analyses. and I think navigating the line between due deference and something deeper and stranger seems to be something many of the fans reacting to me... have not managed. I had a peer talk to me about this situation and their feeling was that the animated members of the fandom that were coming at me, many of whom are self-identified as young and western, were kinda treating Japan like it was a land of elves. which it's not! it is a place on Earth and yes we need to take strides to understand and respect certain specificities... but we can't mystify an entire people. especially if the purpose is to turn those people and their culture into a shield. a means to justify and validate the specialness you see in a franchise.

I call Persona conservative because it cannot imagine a world in any other shape that what we have right now. God dies but nothing actually changes. I don't think it's enough to say "well, they defeated the god! and they needed the collective strength of society to do it! people did change because without that change of heart, the heroes wouldn't have the magical juice to fight the Kabbalah monster!" to toss Makoto's words back at the series: victory against a single god is meaningless if the true enemy is society.

If you can't show me what that grand spiritual change means for society, then I think you've kinda failed. you've certainly failed if the conclusion is that the world after that change is functionally the same and it doesn't really matter to me if "they talk about this in Strikers or whatever" because you can't offload your thematic snarls to side games. if the main stories you tell can't resolve this tension, that's a problem. these are often very beautiful games. they certainly have amazing structure and systems. but I don't think it's controversial to say they often hedge their bets at the end. and there's no impenetrable cultural wall surrounding the games that leaves the criticism off the table.

that's just What Happens. and it's fine for us to acknowledge flaws in even in things that contain beauty or meant something to us

really. it's fine.

[patchwork-crow-writes]

Deltarune is about many things - about growing up, about fantasy and reality, about games and how we as players interact with them... but it's also about legacy.

Yes, in the big meta sense, it's about how this game is following up from Undertale, one of the most beloved and successful indie RPGs of all time. But also you have Kris learning to live outside of Asriel's shadow, you have Noelle struggling to cope with her sister's disappearance and her father's illness, Susie flailing around for a foothold in a new town with peers who don't like her very much, Berdly doing his utmost to live up to his "smart genius" label so he can actually be known for something.

You have Ralsei who finds himself at a crossroads between fulfilling a predetermined prophecy to save the world, and forging his own identity separate from his willingness to serve any "higher" authority. You have King, a ruler who became a tyrant so that his people could be free.

You also have Alphys, struggling to fill the rather large boots of her predecessor, Gerson Boom, who had a career in smithing, wrote a series of hit fantasy novels, and was an excellent teacher according to his son Alvin. (I wanna talk more about this, but it's going in its own post because of reasons)

A character's legacy, the thing that they will be known for, the thing they struggle to actualise so that people will like and accept them, can be a powerful driving-force, giving them agency to fulfill their ambitions. But that same legacy can also be a millstone, forcing them onto a narrowly-defined path through life, burdening them with the crushing weight of others' expectations, and trapping them into a version of themselves they may not wish to be.

Legacy can be difficult to escape from, perhaps even impossible in some cases. It can feel like there's no other choice but to press onward, to be what others want or expect from you, to do what you are told, to try and live up to a golden predecessor who could do no wrong in the eyes of their admirers. It can feel like what you want, what you choose for yourself, doesn't actually matter, because in many ways that choice has already been made for you. And to rebel against that choice risks disappointing the people closest to you, risks losing your reputation, risks the comfort of a predictable path forward, and in extreme cases risks losing your own sense of identity.

I think this theme is going to continue to develop throughout Deltarune, and I very much look forward to seeing how it all plays out!