#the third is sort of the intro cutscene

[coern-art-very-cool-and-nice]

one wish that leads to another wish that leads to another wish that leads to another w

[inposterumcumgaudio]

Do you think the clothing the main characters wear says a lot about who they are?

Of course. I think that's true of most games. But I do think it's sort of interesting the way that clothing is used as a mechanic in We Happy Few. I will talk about the outfits in a second, but first I wanna talk about how designed the characters are compared to how much of them you actually see... which is almost none.

We Happy Few's conformity mechanic uses clothing in a way not unlike Hitman, where you must be dressed appropriately for the occasion and location or people become suspicious of and angry with you. However, in Hitman, the act of changing disguises is a large part of the game's feedback and reward loop. As such, in most installments of the game, you're able to switch between first and third person, so as to admire your new fry cook outfit, for example.

Now Agent 47 does have a default outfit. Or rather, in later installments, a wardrobe of similar outfits that all fit the general idea of him. That he can easily take the suit that he came into a level with off to put on another outfit and become a waiter or a doctor or golf instructor or or or is integral to his character.

This is not really the case in We Happy Few.

There's a lot of reasons for this. First, the game only ever allows you to play in first person. The reason for that is probably practical first and design second. If you only ever have to model a character's arms to allow him to change outfits, then that cuts down a lot of work you have to do. It also allows a lot of clever reuse of assets. Consider that Arthur, Roger, and Victoria all share the same Proper Suit suit arms, just in different textures and with different hands attached. Victoria's hands are also Sally's Garden District hands cleaned up and given red nail polish and a darker skin tone. There's a lot of clever recycling in the game that benefits from only having first-person gameplay.

In terms of design, locking you to first person view means you never get to see your player character until the end of their act (or at all in the case of Roger and with the exception of Nick who's intro is in third person). What this ends up creating is a situation in which you are swapping outfits almost constantly, but your sense of a character's identity is attached to the outfit you never actually get to see in full til you're done playing them. Funny!

Contributing to this too is that even when your character is dressed in a disguise, the arms are only ever present on the screen for more than a second when you are in combat, which is an unnatural state that you're probably trying to get out of. Outside of that condition, your hands are only ever present in cutscenes when gesticulating and for brief moments in the gameplay. Practically, this is because your hands obstruct your view (another reason to get out of combat post haste) so hands appear, do their task, and disappear. Moreover, though the game doesn't want you getting too used to the idea of your character being malleable in an Agent 47 way. You are not a council worker, a maid, a bellboy, or a even a wastrel, even if you're dressed like and behave as one. You yam what you yam.

And the thing that keeps you grounded in this knowledge - the only time you get to see your character as they are to themselves - is here, in the inventory menu.

Because you're in here a lot, right? And while that graphic element of your character does nothing and never changes, that's the anchor to their sense of self. And you get a passive reminder of that every time you open your inventory to heal up in the middle of a fight or to put things in the pneumatic stash.

So. Arthur's outfit.

Arthur wears the prototypical Proper Suit. It looks quite stylish and bold on a glance with its white piping, but it is meant to evoke the rowing blazer issued to Number Six as part of his uniform on The Prisoner, a show about a former spy trapped on a surreal island where everything seems very nice but oppressive forces operate in the background. Mercifully, being black, the suit does not require a pocket protector for the pens Arthur keeps in his breast pocket like a fuckin' dork. To take some additional slickness of the ensemble off when he wears it, Arthur is also accessorizing with blocky black glasses (although these are also common among Wellies so not unfashionable in and of themselves).

Arthur's physical character model and the specific styling of his suit (double-breasted with abbreviated lapels) are unique, but the outfit itself is not. As evidenced by the fact that many other men in the Parade wear the same outfit, it is also mass manufactured for mass approval and so involves no real sartorial risk-taking, true to Arthur's character at the beginning of his Act. In fact, when you arrive at Deirdre's birthday party, Clive Birtwhistle and another unnamed male coworker are both there also wearing the same outfit.

While the Proper Suit is worn by the randomly spawned Wellies in the Parade, other notable wearers of the Proper Suit include Dr. Verloc, Robin Goode,Ugo Sassoon, Clive Birtwhistle and... Danny Defoe.

They've done something quite interesting here.

While you'll not get back to the Parade until the end of the game, that first scene at the birthday party shows you that literally every man in your office is dressed exactly like you. Later, you'll meet Dr. Verloc and he's also wearing the same outfit, despite having a prominent position in the town, a unique face and nearly unique hair and glasses models. Then you get to the design center and the models are wearing the same suit too. Point is, this suit is accessible, trendy, and common.

Danny Defoe, however, is the only Wastrel with a torn Proper Suit... except for Arthur, but we never actually see that, do we?

Danny's suit is actually a re-textured version of the male Wastrel outfit. Even the rope in place of a belt has been colored a darker gray, perhaps to obscure that this is not actually a Proper Suit come to ruin, but a unique recolor of the torn Village Wellie outfit all male wastrels share.

At the point in the game at which you meet Danny, you have either already torn up your Proper Suit or will have to soon. In either event, the big gate that comes down to separate the two halves of the Head Boy arena allows the player the space to reflect on Danny, in his unique outfit representing his old life he can't go back to, as the ghost of Arthurs Future. Now maybe you don't become a poor Danny Defoe, forced to kill others every night for his own life and dinner. That's what the otherwise meaningless choice of whether to pick a lethal weapon or not is about. This is the point at which you decide whether that wretched visage on the other side of the gate is a mirrored reflection or a cautionary tale.

One last thing to note about Arthur's outfit is that he quite likes it and it holds sentimental value to him. He tells Beryl Markham that his uncle bought it for him (Uncle Norbert almost certainly, not Uncle Henry). If the Proper Suit is Wellington Wells's answer to America's gray flannel suit, Arthur's happy to have been given a uniform that takes all the guesswork out of not only getting dressed, but his place in the world. Being given this suit is basically being given one's marching orders; it's a metaphor for how Arthur, like most Wellies, prefers not to have to think or make choices and just be told what they need to do. Having to destroy it and indeed start changing outfits as a habit is a metaphor for being forced into accountability and having to make choices for himself.

Sally's outfit is at once a garment and a piece of concept art. It's meant to evoke the minimalist modern designs that began cropping up in the 60's, specifically Courrèges' 1964 Space-Age collection and its use of vinyl and plastic (and jockey helmets). It's also designed to bring to mind Emma Peel and her catsuits from The Avengers. That Sally's shoes appear to be connected to her pants is strange and impractical, the design of someone who does not actually live her life.

I regret to inform you that these boots/pants exist in reality.

Unlike Arthur, Sally has always been quite bold and without worry for stepping out of line and her outfit reflects this. Arthur's suit might be flashy in a vacuum, but it does blend in both for its ubiquity and for its black color. You can go unnoticed in Arthur's Proper Suit. Sally's Proper Suit, on the other hand, is shiny and high contrast with a bright clean white block of color to draw the eye (most other whites in the game are grubby or lean yellow). It says "Look at me!" It being unique also dovetails nicely with the Not Like Other Girls aspects of her character, particularly in contrast to how every other girl in Wellington Wells wears one of only two kinds of outfit.

But a thing to bear in mind is that Sally... doesn't really dress herself. Her stock outfit (and the one below) are haute couture pieces that Davy Hackney designed. Even her utility outfits are designs Mrs. Pankhurst has come up with and reflect her apparent love of harlequin print and practical allusion to sequins. While Sally's outfits do impart her character, part of her character is being a mannequin that she allows others to project onto.

I do think, though, the the jockey helmet and goggles are her own addition. That both of outfits we get to see in full feature these accessories suggest they are something she likes. The artbook also says that the goggles serve as eye protection when she's doing chemistry experiments. Since we don't get to see her other ensembles in full, we can't know if her helmet and goggles are part of those outfits too, but I would like to assume they are. Even having just the pink and the white sets would go with most of her outfits we know of. The helmet offers no additional in-game protection, but narratively, it would be a good idea.

We do get unique icons for some of her outfit versions though as well as unique arm and hand models for most of them. Most of the items themselves are shared by Arthur and they coulda been cheap and reused his icons. Kinda baffling that they did put that effort in, honestly. I can't say I wouldn't have done that too, but at the same time, it's strange given how economical they are with assets otherwise. Maybe there were grander plans for it.

Which would be quite fun since Sally actually seems to resent fashion.

This is a thing that I think shows up broadly in her character, that she has these ideas and presumptions about how things are (life, men, her place in the world as a woman), but they all blithely ignore the realities in front of her. I say she allows others to project onto her, but she permits this because that's how she relates to the world herself. She projects the idea that has the most value to her, whether it's the reality of the thing or not. Men are obsessed with her... except Verloc rejected the chance to take her back and Byng's certainly got a life outside of her. Society has hobbled her for being a woman... if you don't look at all the other women making the most of the opportunity they've been given. She's been forced to care about parties and dresses... but if she didn't care about what she wears, then why argue about the gingham?

She complains about fashion and being obligated to know about it because she's a woman. She sees it as a meaningless distraction from her chemicals. But is it actually? Like, if she didn't like being dressed to be admired and to appear special, than why not just grab the same dress every other girl is wearing and call it a day? In Wellington Wells, it is extremely easy to be fashionable without a thought. They've got it down to a uniform. For Wellie women, it's literally a Jackie/Marilyn dichotomy: are you a fun and flirty Village girl or a prim and proper Parade woman?

But it's more valuable to be the girl everyone wants and wants to be. And there's value in being the girl who can get away with Hackney's avant-garde outfits, being the one he chooses to bestow them on. There's value in having the avant-garde outfit because it necessarily marks her as different from and more special than all the other girls. But all of this has even more value to Sally if she can regard it as an imposition.

A thing they've done with Sally too that I think is very funny but also a bit of a tease is tell us that she's extremely fashionable - "outrageously" so - but not make wearing different outfits a large part of her Act. In fact, if you're not playing diligently and miss the cue for "Alterations", you may never even realize Sally has more outfits. To date, I don't think I've ever used any of Mrs. Pankhurst's outfits for her, even the rubber catsuit she gives you for free. You just don't really need different clothes as Sally; it doesn't come up that often. In fact, maybe that she is a local celebrity precludes her from the disguise element of the game in the way that being a local menace precludes Ollie from it.

As an aside, I think this is a good place to touch on one other related topic. I said that we never get to see our player character in third person until the end of their act, but that's not strictly true.

We do get to see them as other characters see them. And in Sally's Act, this serves a secondary narrative purpose.

When we meet Sally as Arthur, all of their encounters happen in the Village and so that she only ever looks impeccable and put together makes sense. It is not incongruent with the situation.

When, as Sally, we see Arthur in the alleyway conversation, this is also in the Village so him being tidy coheres with the scene. When we meet Arthur again in the Garden District though, he's still wearing his Proper Suit.

The thing about this is, while there are masked and unmasked models for our protagonists, they don't have Torn Suit models so they don't have a Garden District Arthur to use for this scene. But I do think it's also supposed to be that Sally is seeing Arthur as the idealized version of him that she's imagined since she left. She's not seeing his Torn Suit or the dirt under his fingernails; she's projecting the version of him that she left fifteen years ago and has kept in stasis in her memory. That's why the reality of him - that he exists outside of her and her priorities, her complications - hits her that much harder than having to choose to leave her behind hits Arthur.

And this projection is only really the case in Sally's Act, I think. In Arthur's act, he recognizes her as having grown up into a completely different person from the girl in the green gingham dress who left in the dead of night. Ollie also takes a moment before he recognizes Arthur, since he's also grown and changed since the last time they'd seen each other. It's only Sally who's projecting her vision of Arthur on to the real thing.

I suppose that Ollie's still wearing his No. 2 service dress fifteen years after the war ended is a bit telling. Where everyone else in town has elected to forget that time, Ollie can't move on from it and dresses accordingly. Which is to say, he has divested himself from the Army, but cannot necessarily divest the Army from himself. There's no place for him in the Memorial Camp (the past), but there's also no place for him in the Village (the present) either, thus he stays in a service uniform purgatory out in the Garden District.

Funnily enough, that he has this unique uniform of a specific rank (that apparently is no longer observed to judge by Corp. Cheeseman not having the title) marks Ollie as being himself, persona non grata, and does not conform in the military camp.

Olive(r) drab is also a good option for survivalist garb, so I can't fault him for practicality even if it's a bit of a badge of dishonor at this point and makes socializing difficult. Not like he has much need for it. Tons of pockets attached to jacket too (you can't really see them in his inventory image, but each of the main characters' menu images also show us where they're keeping all their stuff).

The pants are actually plaid, reading as a neutral brown at a distance, which is a subtle call to his being Scottish. Interestingly, at a very early stage in the game's development, pants were a separate inventory slot so you could mix and match them (there's a remnant of this in Arthur's Act, where you need both halves of the Officer's Uniform before you can wear it). Ollie's pants then are probably not the ones that came with his uniform.

Lastly, his pink ribbon tied around his wrist. Or rather, Margaret's pink ribbon. Ollie's gameplay is very combat oriented and you're meant to rely on his strength and brawn rather than Arthur's stealth and Sally's social graces to navigate the world. As such, Ollie's hands are actually on the screen quite a lot more in his Act, keeping Margaret's ribbon in view for much of the time. This helps keep her presence in the player's mind, as she would be in Ollie's, even if your individual gameplay hasn't given her much to say for a while.

Annnnd because tumblr won't let me use more than thirty images in one post, you can have the other three in a Part 2.

[gay-jesus-probably]

Okay I THINK I may have sent this in before, I apologize if I have, I can't remember if I have or if I've just complained about it a lot skdjskdndn

One thing that I haven't really seen anyone talking about, probably because the story fails to invest anyone in much of anything, is that. Sonia got fridged. Like there's no arguing it, it's almost as bad as the example that gave fridging its name. All that Sonia got to do was cheekily say "what, you didn't believe her?" or something like that, allegedly teach Zelda about time stuff, and get her spine broken so that Zelda and Rauru could be sad about it for a while and then never bring it up again. There were so many other ways they could do this if they wanted Ganondorf to steal a stone, and even that plot point already has some unfortunate consequences. She has basically no purpose in the plot, gets sidelined throughout a lot of the cutscenes, and dies in such a way that literally nobody cares less than half a cutscene later. What the fuck

Oh yeah Sonia 100% got fridged lmaooo, it was some bullshit. When they first introduced her I was actually pleasantly surprised, holy shit her name ISN'T Zelda, is that even allowed? Crazy. And I was just sort of enjoying the ride, always like it when a pretty woman is in a game, looking forwards to seeing more of her.

...Aaand then the third memory I found opened with Sonia dropping dead, and I was just like oh come ON, NINTENDO, I SAID I WANTED TO SEE MORE OF THE HOT LADY AND YOU IMMEDIATELY SHOVE HER INTO THE FRIDGE. WHY.

I mean I know why, it's to further cement how eeevil ganon is and to make sure nobody questions anything about the situation, but at the time I just threw my hands up in frustration. The second major disappointment I ran into actually; my first incident of "OH COME THE FUCK ON" came from when I was in the intro sequence, and I was joking to some friends about how Zelda's haircut and outfit are very cute, I greatly approve, and if Nintendo forces her into an impractical gown for the final battle like they did to Sheik and Tetra, I'm throwing my Switch into the fucking sun.

And I mean, I was wrong! They did not force Zelda into a floor length dress for the final battle! My expectations were really low, but I thought I could at least make it out of the FUCKING TUTORIAL before Zelda had her practical clothes stolen. I hate these goddamn sleeveless white dresses she keeps being shoved into. This one wasn't as ugly as her Sacred Bath Towel Maternity Dress from BOTW, but for the record I find it very strange that Sonia's idea of getting Zelda cleaned up was to only provide her with an outfit identical to hers, down to the jewlery choices. Why did she just have a smaller replica of her dress laying around. Was it really that hard for Nintendo to just use the fancy gown model for Sonia and keep Zelda in her own outfit? Is the world going to end if Zelda is allowed to wear pants for more than five minutes??? And boots, let her keep her damn boots! Stop making Zelda run around active battlefields in a sleeveless white dress and flimsy little sandals! SOMEONE GIVE THIS WOMAN A JACKET, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD.

At least they didn't magically grow her hair out to make her a Proper Princess, I was absolutely fucking expecting that lmaooo. So that's a little bit of progress. Literally less than the bare minimum, but I'll fucking take it anyways.

[magmaticmachine]

i'm sorry for bugging you for a third time in a row but i can't exactly give you ideas in your DMs [i tried but it says you gotta watch me]

anyways, for the sake of exploration, instead of booting the dreamer back into the dream gate, they should reappear inside the dream world they're currently in, and they would have to make their way to the next objective site with or without nights [though they would also be able to fly freely around the dreamworld, since there isn't a cage to limit dualization's range and time]

and after getting that dream world's ideya, all alarm egg/awakener spawning would be permanently disabled for that dream world [unless one replays certain missions]

the sole exceptions being twin seeds and bellbridge due to them being special cases

There is absolutely no need to be sorry!!! You are not bothering me at all, I'm absolutely delighted that fellow fans are reaching out!!! Unfortunately I keep my DMs set to private because otherwise I get spammed by bots and...sometimes there are images attached. 😔

But yeah, please feel free to keep sending me asks! I like hearing your ideas and I like that you engage with me on mine as well, especially since we don't always agree hehehe. It's good fun to mull things over again and see them in another light!

Being able to unlock a proper, timerless free fly/run mode would RULE. I could see it as its own "mission" on the menu, albeit a mission with no goals. Even as it is, like, NiD's nightopia have all sorts of hidden blue chips you can only get on foot, there are some that fall from trees or are hidden in igloos or directly in Soft Museum's terrain, and JoD's nightopia have surprisingly large areas to roam with hidden chests or these cute, specific scenes set up for dream drops, like the ring of fish in Aqua Garden or that massive staircase with the tree at the top in Lost Park. There's so much detail put into these worlds, it's really nice to slow down and appreciate them once in a while!

Also, I was thinking earlier, RE: the bosses; I actually really like the mission structure JoD has, I think it's pretty flexible, although I think having an Easy and a Hard version of the same boss feels a little strange. In a hypothetical NiGHTS 3, I think I'd want the second-levels we meet to really have more of their own personalities in their intro cutscenes too, with proper lines of their own. Instead of just fighting the boss twice the jailbreak missions could end in some sort of escape segment – perhaps the player has to outrun the second-level or successfully find some way to hide (I don't know how well stealth would work with the flying gameplay, but...the drill dash IS pretty noisy!) – and THEN have the proper Boss Fight Mission be the fifth as usual. I think it could be a good way of introducing the boss, giving them a chance to shine a little brighter, and I think it would be thematic as well – it can take time to build up the courage to face your fears, y'know?

[kid-of-chaos]

I’m not a game developer, all I know about was Tynker before it became pay to even access it, but if I were one, here’s how I’d imagine the post-story submode of Gizmo’s “game” would be (WARNING, IT’S LONG-):

I’m really interested in the Magolor Epilogue stage format but also the Heroes in Another Dimension and Milky Way Wishes formats, it’ll probably be a mix of those. Multiple areas with their own levels while you use a limited amount of copy abilities to gather all the ✨special collectibles✨ in each zone. Since the range of copy abilities is limited to 3 and are predetermined, it’ll make for a more puzzling experience since Kirby can’t copy via inhaling (although I’m not sure if that’s as big as a handicap as I think it is since copyless runs exist everywhere-)

Since we have the long name of “Heroes in Another Dimension” thanks to Kirby: Star Allies, I came up with “To Save a Fallen Star” which is the literal title, “Rouge Realm Rescue” which has a good ring to it, and “Kirby’s Reflection” which sounds odd but it’ll make sense-

The intro cutscene plays out showing Kirby sleeping at night in his bed bc why not, when all of a sudden the Star Compass starts going off like crazy, showing a strong signal leading somewhere far from the Dreamland. Kirby, being the curious one he is, heads to wherever it leads to: The Fountain of Dreams, with a dimensional portal in front of the Star Rod. The Star Compass is still going off. GIZMO IS STILL ALIVE.

Realizing that he has a chance to save him, he jumps into the portal.

The hub is composed of one area split into seven sections: Chiplet Fields, Overclock Volcano, Python Caverns, Yottabyte Mountains, Cluster Lake, Apache City, and Terminal Space, with Chiplet Fields being the sort of tutorial zone and Terminal Space being the boss zone. In each area, the Star Fragments have been shattered into even smaller Star Shards, and collecting all of them will ultimately lead to a better ending. If we’re being honest though, with all he did… is it really worth it?

I have no idea what the bosses will be but since if the official extra modes can reuse bosses THEN SO CAN THIS ONE-! So uh, wave one, wave two, wave 3, Hyness and Bandanna Dee, Dedede and Meta Knight, a freaking straight-up version of YOU (that fights based on how you played), and of course, Gizmo.

Gizmo’s boss fight is composed of three phases, the first phase being based off of how you played as HIM, the second is based off of his first boss battle but harder because you actually have to FIGHT HIM THIS TIME KIRBY, and the third phase where he goes into a timed pinch mode with the oddest black aura surrounding him. In this phase you just have to survive the time limit.

You all can probably guess what happens if you don’t collect all star shards and reform the Wishing Star, but did you know about the hidden true final boss if you do????

If you get all the star shards, then The Wishing Star will be reformed. You can then use it in the Gizmo boss fight, but only at his third phase, at which a message will appear that says, “A Copy Essence is glowing brightly..” This will unlock the Five Star Ability and trigger everyone’s favorite gimmick, The ✨Quick-time Event✨, to land a finishing blow on Gizmo.

But what’s this? After his defeat (which Kirby does not dance for), the black aura completely engulfs him and a manifestation of the hatred he had takes the form of… UMBRANIMOSITY. (If we can have a being names Sillydillo we can have this, so shush.) Yada Yada, boss goes down, but OH NO!

Gizmo’s very life is at risk since he’s not supposed to be in the Star Void without magic/a magical item! And since he’s not controlling the part of the void he had under his spell, it’s collapsing! But what’s that in the distance? A dimension portal has opened up where Kirby was dropped off! Cue one last sequence where you ride the Wishing Star to get out of here with Gizmo (with one obligatory button mash sequence to BOOST your way to the portal in time since it’s a Kirby game, we need at least one button mash in it.)

The ending plays out as Kirby escapes with Gizmo. As he hops off of the wishing star, he makes one wish for his brother to live.. but surprisingly..

“That wish does not need to be granted.”

The Wishing Star.. spoke?

“His very presence in the Star Void was an enigma. Normally, a living being’s soul would deteriorate over time without magic. But due to being an Artificial being, his lack of soul to begin with allowed him to survive the Star Void. You could say being a copy inadvertently saved his life.

However, we can do something that might benefit everyone. The wish Gizmo.. no.. the wish Circuit had was for power. The wish the king had was for the Wishing Star to be no more. Both of these wishes can be granted in one. We will live on as our fragmented state to be wielded by your brother only.

Kirby.. you wish for a happy ending... Consider your wish... granted.”

And with that said, the Wishing Star was no more, only five stars remained. Kirby snapped back to reality by the feeling of Circuit coming to, as the young Star Warrior immediately hugged the other once he was awake. Piecing everything together, he embraced the hug, as the first rays of dawn hit the two siblings.

A new day had arrived for the both of them. And with it, both of their wishes granted.

Anyways thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

[first-impressions-gaming]

Evil West

Developed by Flying Wild Hog

Published by Focus Entertainment

Release Date 2022

Tested on Xbox Series X

MSRP 49,99 USD

We find ourselves in post-Civil War United States era in an alternate history in which American Frontier is infected and riddled with vampires, human allies of them and their monstrous creatures, ranging from weak skeleton-like ones to mutated gigantic more robust ones. We’re Jesse Rentier, one of the last remaining vampire hunters, and we are given a series of missions with one objective in sight: to kill and exterminate every and each vampire and their human supporters and erase them from the face of earth. Welcome to Evil West.

First things first, when I saw Flying Wild Hog studio’s logo in the intro, I was surprised a bit, this is the same developer of Shadow Warrior 3, a game I reviewed recently. Apart from indie 2D game Trek to Yomi, Evil West is the following major game upon Shadow Warrior 3 from the studio, even though I will restrain myself from comparing two games in every way I feel the need to point out some specific aspects.

As a third-person shooter, how does it function? Well, Evil West is a strictly linear game in terms of environments and missions, each mission lasting from 20-25 minutes. Mission locations don’t feel unique, they are stereotypical in a sense that the theme is post-civil war era United States in wild west, what you do, how you interact or the combat in these locations don’t add anything extraordinary to your overall experience, locations are mostly…brown or similar dark colours. There is always a path to follow and you arrive the designated location for boss or mini-boss fights after spending around 5 minutes ‘exploring’ (and I am using this word extremely loosely) the place the mission is set in (let it be dungeons, small caves, devastated small towns, or narrow canyons). I get that the time of the day should be after sunset to fight the vampires since they cannot endure sunlight, this forces the missions to take place when it’s dark or almost dark, indirectly rendering player experience feel exactly same in throughout the game. This is a stark contrast to Shadow Warrior 3, a game that is colourful in every way, including enemy designs, environmentals, weapons, lighting. Evil West falls into repetitive gameplay after couple of early missions, and as much as I wish to keep up with the story and what’s going on and with whom we are fighting, the game gets…stale unfortunately. Player interest in game or story can be increased with plot twists or distinct characters. Evil West does not offer either of them, it keeps going on how it starts, yes, you do meet new characters along the way, but they are always accessory to cutscenes, not actual gameplay. I wish to draw upon an example from Red Dead Redemption 2, a game which is set in also wild west. In RDR2, you never say to yourself “okay, this town looks like the one before, doesn’t it?”, I can confidently say this as a player who spent 95 hours in that world, and you always approach to a new location with intrigue and wonder. In Evil West, the linear gameplay forces and pushes a closed-world, you cannot just walk to a different direction than the one game allows. Despite the fact that Shadow Warrior 3 is another linear game, it has vibrant and eye-catching environment and enemy designs, you are always stepping into a fresh location and it doesn’t get monotonous. Often the missions take place in towns and you see these houses in ruins, you get to visit and enter only one house, and you will, not surprisingly, find in-game currency, and you leave the house, and you will continue your given route. I wish I could visit at least another house, just to visit, just to see if there is anything else to discover, maybe a collectible, something personal from the people who used to dwell here. Sadly, if you have these sorts of expectations, Evil West will let you down to the core.

The combat is satisfying and responsive, and this is where the game shines and it leaves me pretty satisfied, I cannot remember the last one where I can guarantee you that you will have a fun time killing vampires in this game. The game introduces you to new gadgets, skills and guns at a great speed. You will start off with a revolver, then a rifle, shotgun and more. I kept the best of them to the last: a gauntlet. The massive gauntlet on your wrist is your primary melee combat weapon, and you learn to love it as you progress and upgrade it. You can do combos, heavy attack, sprinting attack, throw your enemy and shoot them midair and electrocute them.

The main menu:

In the menu, you have Character: this is where you find visual outfits that is earned during the game, these skins don’t have any impact on your stats or power. In Upgrades: you spend in-game currency to upgrade your gauntlet, guns, and various tools, you earn and find enough currency to upgrade yourself once or twice during a mission. Currency can be found in glowing crates in all locations. In Perks: this is where you see two skill trees for your Gauntlet and Zapper. Except for the starter perks, the rest of them all have level requirements to unlock, meaning that you cannot upgrade a certain skill over and over again, and more or less you will unlock each perk one by one in each category as you level up.

The glitch I touch on:

I’d like to talk about issues or glitches I found as well. When the character’s back is right up against a wall or a structure, the camera gets obstructed by it, or the said structure disrupts the visual partially, this isn’t a game-breaking bug, and something to be addressed. Oh boy, there is even a grammatical error in codex entry for  Vergil Olney, “they’re” is written where “their” is the intended word.

When I try to shoot at Nagal with my rifle or revolver, the enemy dodges my bullets in a weird way with perfect accuracy no matter how hard I try, I am not sure if this enemy type is meant to act this way, or this is some unexpected glitch. I checked the codex entry for Nagal, the description doesn’t mention anything like this, it is okay for different enemy types having strengths and weaknesses, but Nagal is so…frustrating, even in point-blank range you cannot shoot it, your only option is melee and when you try to attack them your attack attempt is blocked almost every time and you get overwhelmed because there is often three or four Nagals in a fight.

The discussed enemy in action:

It would be much better if the environment and NPCs were a bit alive, for example when you shoot at horses or people, there is zero reaction as if nothing happens. Perhaps the developer team didn’t mind this and didn’t create any animation for this situation, at least it would feel more grounded if the game said something like “You Killed Citizens, Try Again” upon shooting at NPCs.

You can find two instances of this:

And in a pub:

The boss fight in the fifth mission is a bit unbalanced, that was the only boss fight I failed three times and decided to decrease the difficulty from Normal to Story (the easiest difficulty). The thing is that, during fight you can deal critical damage to enemies when a yellow mark on the enemy shows up, and you need to make use of this short period but as soon as yellow mark appears the wasps, Screeching Devils, spawn and attack you all at the same time and you have to shoot them down not to get killed. In other boss fights I knew that I could defeat them by changing my strategy next time once I died, yet this specific boss fight is so one-sided due to timing of the wasps spawning and critical damage period overlapping. It is understandable the boss fight or certain level is challenging, however it stops being fun when the game works against you, not “for” you. The rationality behind a game being “challenging” is that the game provides you all the material and means to overcome your enemies, if these are not met, then the game is unbalanced and unjust. This is where the fifth mission stands, the player isn’t allowed to defeat the enemies due to irrational and misguided timing.

My final verdict is slightly muddled, Evil West will satisfy you and keep you enjoyed as long as your expectations are surface-level and combat-focused, don’t expect to come across anything deeper than that.

[wirewitchviolet]

The Entire Plot of Final Fantasy 14, with all the expansions, and some serious analysis of how good it actually is. (Part 2 - Post-ARR)

Quick heads up, there’s gonna be a bit of saucy language in a screencap of a famous quote when I get down to Shiva.

When we left off, we had just finished enduring a bunch of long-winded speeches from main villain of the thing Gaius van Baelsar, beat him up, beat his robot up, and killed some loser calle Lahabrea who at the time was possessing some loser called Thancred. And I mean I say we, but the whole point of this series of blog posts is I played this whole game to summarize it so that you, someone who theoretically values your time more than I do, can follow people’s conversations without sitting through a real freaking slog of nothing plot. You know what though? You’re going to humor me here a bit. You’re gonna get this whole damn speech.

I honestly have kind of a love-hate relationship with this speech. First off like I said the game is structured in a way that you hear it a LOT. Normally, there’s a quick little cutscene when you enter a dungeon, another as you reach the boss, and one after beating the boss. Social etiquette says you stop and wait for anyone there for the first time to watch the cutscenes, but in this final dungeon there are some extras and they are LONG. So apparently it used to be a thing where people would just go screw it, skip those, and you’d finish your big imperial general speech to see people killing the guy who gave it and doing their victory dances, and the fix was to make just these ones in the final couple areas unskippable... and also give people huge bonuses to XP and end game loot tokens if they replayed them, so, everyone who plays the game has heard this like 50 times any any other scene probably once.

Also the content of it is worth commenting on. We get a pretty good grounding of where the evil empire is coming from, philosophically (and again, it’s pretty much just fascism), their wannabe Roman thing where they build crappy sheet metal roads everywhere they go, their regard for the rest of the world as a bunch of primitive savages, and hey credit where it’s due, from there end there’s no lines drawn between the various races that count as “human” and the ones who arbitrarily don’t (because he doesn’t count any of them as human... side note “pure-blooded” imperials have “a third eye” or at least claim to, from where I sit they just have a weird habit of embedding gemstones into their foreheads). There’s also a bit in here about “your leaders” being just as bad and doing the whole god summoning thing which... really feels like a 1.0 thing.

See there’s this whole Zodiac of 12 gods, you pick one as a patron when making your character, and in that end of 1.0/intro movie cutscene, Louisoix does in fact do the standard summoning thing, and that actually really should come up as an issue. Spoiler alert though, the writers totally forget about this until the end of the 4th expansion when they have a character break the 4th wall to remind you that not-for-lack-of-trying but they haven’t resolved EVERY dangling plot thread and “the twelve” we’re still gonna get to. Also honestly, every head of state you deal with seems to be a pragmatist with no real use for religion (except Kan-E-Senna with her weird communing with elder tree monster gods thing), and while your party, AKA the Scions, do have kind of a religious bent, it’s all about Hydaelyn the Mother Crystal, the big space rock from the start of the game which also gives you some divine intervention in the final boss fight. Anyway for now we’re hand-waving the importance of any of this because one of the moons exploded, Bahamut busted out, blew up like half the world map, and sure Louisoix did some sort of summoning thing but whatever he summoned was only around for a few seconds and everyone present has a big convenient memory gap mainly to avoid the question of whether people playing in 1.0 days are still canonically that character or not, so it’s fine.

Post-A Realm Reborn

So that brings us to where we are when the very long credits finish rolling and you get slammed with like 5 interim patch teasers, most notably the one where there’s an incredibly loud roar you can hear a couple countries away to remind you that we never did address the whole world-ending-threat-that-is-Bahamut thing. On top of that though, a truckload of sidequests open more or less at once, and everyone wants to talk to you, but really the most important thing is you unlock your own Amano art style Magitek Armor and when you’re riding around in it it plays Terra’s theme, and there’s even a big snow field with a town in the distance right near where you are.

Once you’re done being a big FF6 nerd, and also over the initial novelty of having flight unlocked across the board for every base game area, allowing you to get around MUCH faster and see the jank low poly cliff tops that show these early maps absolutely weren’t designed with the assumption you could fly over them later, yeah there’s a lot of new content to check out. Just doing some quick math, before going into the endgame stuff, there are all of 7 (9 if we count the two endgame ones) mandatory dungeons and 5 optional ones, to which we are adding another 17 (only 2 of which are mandatory), and that initial count of 3 standalone boss fights against summoned gods and our final boss Ultima Weapon, we suddenly have another 22(!) boss fights added into the mix (5 of those mandatory), between stuff clearly left on the cutting room floor, lead-ins to the first expansion, and fun optional side content. And these counts are all before factoring in the randomly generated rogue-y dungeon I honestly still haven’t touched, and the “raids,” where as tradition in every one of these between-expansions periods, we have one area where there’s a string of about a dozen 5 minute bops exploring a storyline with a mix of breezy mini-dungeons and boss fights for 8-player parties (the standard size for standalone boss fights from here out), and a set of 3 sloggier dungeons you chaotically stomp through in a ridiculous 24 person mega-party. There’s also nearly no filler quests between all these new things unlocking, so the “it gets better after 50″ crowd aren’t lying or suffering from Stockholm syndrome, the game does suddenly open way the hell up the second those credits roll. BUT we’re here to talk about the plot.

So our first major concern is that no seriously, we introduced a bunch of these bad for the environment, bad for the radicalization aspect god summons we didn’t get around to killing, and need to get that done with. Oddly we start with the wildcard that is... Good King Moggle Mog XII. So moogles are a thing, this being a Final Fantasy, played here as kinda pixieish magical creatures we retcon in the first expansion most people can’t see, which is kinda weird because their main role is delivering mail for people. They also hang out in Gridania just kinda being cute and useless. Anyway they summon their god. Or, technically, they summon a recreation of a real world historical figure who they revere like a god but... yeah that still counts. So we get this weird bit where golly gee gosh we didn’t know this was bad to do, but we have to call in the designated god exterminator to fight a whimsical cartoon bunny-cat-fairy thing while listening to a delightful little song that is 100% stealing the tune of This is Halloween. It’s an entertaining change in tone from the usual stuff.

Next we have Leviathan, but being a big sea monster you need to build a custom boss battle barge to even get to, we’ve got some buildup there, which is largely spent trying and failing to make Ascians interesting, explaining how they’ve been teaching the local fish people their trick of being bodysnatching immortals in a fun show don’t tell way, where Merlwyb shows up to lend a hand, just shoots their high priest, and he immediately takes over the body of the next mook to the left, and then just ultimately gets eaten by Leviathan because, again, human sacrifices also help them with the whole aether hoarding thing. It’s entertaining, there’ll be a quiz later. Thancred also shows up during this, doing a bunch of sick ninja flips and stabbing people, because they realized, if a bit late, we really should do something to make you like the guy who got possessed and needed rescuing. It’s something.

This also ties into some future expansion foreshadowing, where this boatload of refugees arrives from Doma (wait, the Samurai city from FF6, with Cyan, that Doma? Yes) and everyone is making this big deal about how hard it is for anyone to take them in. Then eventually after a lot of hemming and hawing they get introduced to Merlwyb and she’s just like hell yes I’ll make room in my cool pirate city for the elite ninja rebels, why the hell did you think I wouldn’t? There’s also a bit where their leader hides her face out of fear of being seen as a monster, but really it’s because she’s a not-yet-introduced race, which... playing today is available for PCs right out the gate so it seems extra silly when we get the reveal.

Anyway, Ramuh’s kind of an unimportant speed bump, so is Odin, but Shiva is kind of a special case. There’s a whole cult/terrorist organization who are fighting on team dragon in that whole elves vs. dragons war going on up north, following someone who goes by Lady Iceheart and claiming to be the reincarnation of Saint Shiva, who... OK have you seen this thing that’s been floating around the internet for years?

That is actually a very specific reference to the backstory for the whole first expansion of FF14. This terrorist gal has access to secret knowledge that despite this whole war with dragons that’s been going on forever in the region, way back when it was first settled some elf lady fell in love with this big dragon and everyone lived in harmony until sometime later when some elves decided to just be huge jerks and kill one of the more important dragons. The elf pope has been covering that history up forever and insisting dragons are evil and aggressive. Terrorist gal (Ysayle) believes herself to be the reincarnation of that historical dragon-banger, and has an interesting trick where rather than externally summon a god, she personally transforms into one... and really that kinda seems to be the way to do it because if you don’t count the “I am the reincarnation of this historical figure” bit she seems pretty rational and survives boss fights against her in big ice lady form. But yeah this is all Heavensward foreshadowing. Mostly you’re just following around as her and her gang do terrorist attacks on the city off the north edge of the map (Ishgard) and slowly piece her motivations together.

But wait hold up what’s up with Bahamut? Funny story, most people who play this game don’t ever get an answer to this. What’s up with Bahamut is the subject of the first “normal raid,” The Binding Coil of Bahamut, which due to being tuned crazy hard but not showing up in the random lottery for crazy hard quests means parties for it basically never happen and you’re probably never going to see it unless you think to dip back for it later when you’re massively overleveled and turn off the normal level-adjustment thing. Which is a shame because it’s quite neat honestly, and serves as a general hub for resolving outstanding 1.0 plot threads. This also makes it weird and confusing if you’ve never played the version of the game that hasn’t existed for over a decade.

So... OK this is something I need to get into now anyway. While the retroactive overarching narrative covering this isn’t properly fleshed out until we’re a few expansions deep, the world has a very long history with a bunch of apocalypses generally called “Umbral Calamities” in it. 7 to date, specifically. Most of these really aren’t touched on, but #4 involved this ancient civilization called the Allagan Empire who were basically a bunch of ridiculously overpowers science wizards with absolutely no concept of ethics who left a bunch of rad ancient artifacts lying around. Flying continent, core modules for giant robots, cloning facilities, monster making projects, giant crystal tower, they got around. They also declared war on like whoever and were into slavery and such so they butted heads with the dragons way back when.

Dragons incidentally come from space. Their home planet got more or less destroyed by rampaging death robots, and one particular dragon called Midgardsormr (whose corpse is the most visible landmark in Mor Dhona, the area with all the imperial fortresses, thanks to a cool 1.0 cutscene) took all his personal eggs and just flew across space to find a better place to raise his kids. This mostly worked out well but Allagans gotta suck, did a lot of killing and enslaving, the dragons got desperate and did the summon thing, here’s Bahamut. He’s a real big chonky dragon god... and knowing that killing him would just lead to him getting summoned again, they did the sensible thing and built a big artificial moon as a prison for him instead. That came crashing down and busted open at the end of 1.0, and the good news is that whole bit does apparently end up with Bahamut dead after all. But, the Allagans are way into failsafes, so their pan for any eventual Bahamut summoning s to line the prison walls with torture chambers imprisoning a ton of dragons so that should Bahamut die they will of course immediately resummon him back inside the moon prison which can just restrain him again.

So... when I mentioned Alisae, one of the twins, has her own thing going on? She’s finding the main bulk of this wreck while trying to work out what happened to her grandfather, so, yeah big giant roboty moon chunk full of tortured wall dragons and a half-revived Bahamut. Also while you’re in there you find out Louisoix is less dead than advertised... but also he kinda went and turned himself into the god Phoenix and became a huge jerk, and the main imperial antagonist from 1.0, Nael van Darnus, who incidentally was kinda the one responsible for the whole “hey let’s drop the smaller moon on these primitive jerks in Eorzea” thing that lead to the whole game ending apocalypse. Nael kind of isn’t mentioned ANYWHERE in the game as is besides this raid chain, but apparently there was this whole thing with people assuming she was a guy and so it’s a big surprise to people that she isn’t here, but also she’s totally Bahamut’s slave, and has this dragon winged boss form, so it’s a bit “hey, congrats on your transition, that’s a cool new fursona you have to.” And a boss fight that’s a pain even if you are massively over-leveled. But yeah, major figures from 1.0 die, Bahamut gets a proper boss fight, you shut the whole place down. And again most people skip just ALL of this.

So... the other thing about Nael is she apparently had this very special gunhalberd (the Empire kinda loves hybridizing their weapons with guns see)  that was all powered up in the process of bring-down the moon shennanigans wand for some weird reason is called Bradamante. This tied into this late in 1.0 questline about this idiot detective named Hildibrand Helidor Maximilian Manderville (Hildy for short), and his also an idiot catgirl sidekick who likes explosives. They got up to some wacky hijinx back there which end with Hildy taking Nael’s ridiculous weapon and accidentally blasting himself up to the falling Bahamut prison moon with it. He of course survives this by virtue of being a wacky comedy character prone to slapstick stuff, and has a whole long sidequest chain in each of these pre-expansion periods having various wacky shennanigans. Also his dad is like the most supernaturally strong guy in the world, the owner of... we just straight up brought in the Gold Saucer from FF7, frequently hangs out in his underwear, and moonlights as miniskirted-FF14-Santa once a year.

The Hildy stuff is WILDLY polarizing. Either these comedy quests are the absolute greatest thing in the game, or the absolute worst thing depending who you ask. Personally I think they’re pretty great overall even if some of the running gags get old fast. This is running long again, so let me see how quick I can cover the major points of this outing.

So you’re introduced to Hildy partly by way of there being a bunch of zombies off in the desert clearly imitating his whole deal. Turns out he was presumed dead after being sent into space and frozen and crashed back down and was buried, and when he crawled out of his grave he was pretty out of it, so, honest mistake. Anyway the zombies really like him and make him their king. Once that’s all cleared up he takes a new case where someone is going around stealing various priceless antique weapons from people. Also on the case is this actually competent detective named Briardien who kinda sorta works in a Miles Edgeworth sorta way, and this big friendly guy, Gilgamesh from FF5. He suggests maybe calling him “Gil” for short, and Hildy procedes to spend the next forever introducing him as Greg.

Conveniently Gilgamesh doesn’t need an excuse to be here since just kinda randomly showing up in other Final Fantasy games looking for cool weapons has been his personal running gag/superpower forever. He’s very nice and we’re doing this real idiot plot so things stretch on for an impressively long while before anyone pieces together that the big weird looking guy stealing priceless weapons everyone’s looking for is, in fact, he big weird looking guy with like a dozen weapons strapped to his back who’s been helping look for the thief. He doesn’t make the connection himself because from his perspective he never stole anything and just won all these in duels where the other person forfeit. Also he misses his friend Enkidu from 5 and named a chicken he dyed green after him. Eventually of course you end up confronting him about this while he’s checking out the biggest bridge in the world, because that song has a name, and also at one point he’s sitting next to a big pile of crystals missing non-chicken Enkidu so, a summon happens, you fight’em as a team.

Also somewhere along the way in there... Ultros from FF6 just kinda randomly shows up, along with his pal Typhon. Here there’s less of an excuse for the cameo. We literally go with “a wizard did it.” Someone was trying a summoning ritual or something and out popped this weirdo.

There’s a bunch of other convoluted stuff in this plot line, involving a face-changing thief and the eventual reveal that Ul’dah was not in fact originally the home of the horrible little capitalist scumbags, and they in fact took it over after releasing some kind of zombie plague on the original citizens. Which is a hell of a detail to only come up in the wacky comedy side stuff. But yeah, in the end, you get fun boss fights against these wacky comedy characters from 5 and 6, a lot of shenanigans happen, and Hildy kinda gets smacked off into the sky to show up again next time.

So, hey, that bit I mentioned with the Allagans making a crystal tower, AKA Syrcus Tower? That’s the huge-party raid set. It’s also just... straight up the end game of FF3. Emperor Xande, Cloud of Darkness, Amon, Doga, Unei, gang’s all here. Full disclosure, while I have played FF3, I played the 3DS port, which kinda sucks, and got to be such a slog at the end that I didn’t quite get to the pile of reference bombs we’re dropping here. Playing all of 14 is already kind of a heavy load, OK? Other entries in the series are totally on the to-play pile. But... yeah. We’re basically just straight up saying that the Allagan empire is straight up the empire from FF3, those are historical events for this game. Or a minor variation anyway. While we’re at it we’re also dumping a bunch of FF6′s backstory with the warring triad on them, they built the Ultima Weapon... “the Allagans” is the answer to a whole lot of questions. Oh and the reason we have all these named FF3 characters around is they were into cloning. And interdimensional stuff.

Anyway, big weird tower, it’s hard to get into, this big dorky catboy nerd named G’raha really wants to do some archeology though, so, Cid is on the case.  There’s a bit of technobabble and grabbing magic rocks from all over, you mostly get in, but there’s a retinal scan/magic blood test. Fortunately, also on the case is Cid’s on-again off-again boyfriend/rival Nero who you... probably don’t recognize at all, because he doesn’t show up wearing his big ridiculous red helmet from his time as one of the 4 main imperial general types. I guess this technically makes him the first character who couldn’t be bothered to stay dead (or is that Hildy?), but honestly when you fight him there’s a big deal of him just kinda being gone right after the fight, so him making it out before the Ultima Weapon goes and casts Ultima and vaporizes the whole fortress seems reasonable. But yeah, he’s a semi-evil semi-nazi nerd who’s super jealous of Cid and it’s super super clear that they used to date. And will again. He’s here to try and turn over a new leaf somewhat and help get the weird tower open. And also around really conveniently are (clones of) Doga and Unei who pass the DNA scan so, hey, door works, in you go, go fight a bunch of FF3 bosses.

Eventually you kill the... clone of the evil emperor from 3/the Allagan Emperor, but oh no, we’ve got a portal to hell, AKA The World of Darkness, AKA the Void, AKA the 13th. Anyway yeah, we’re doing the full FF3 end game, gotta fight that Cloud of Darkness, gotta have some Nero oscillating between villainy hey I can use hell powers to be the greatest scientist and oh no gotta help get everyone out of here stuff, and by the end of it Doga and Unei end up giving G’raha a magic blood transfusion which boosts his own secret Allagan royal bloodline powers he secretly had  and once all the hell portal/giant pile of clones stuff is sorted out, he ends up locking himself inside the tower to try and work out what the whole deal is with it.

Now at this point I need to go on a little tangent because like... he’s a catboy. FF14 in general is really unclear on the matter of whether the various playable races are separate species, or if everyone’s human and just, hey, this is a world where some humans are really tall or really short or have cat ears and tails or whatnot... but the implication here seems to be the latter? Which also gets me wondering wait, when people go around using “whoresons” as an insult... is that an in-universe slur against catboys? Because NPC wise, catgirls and sex workers match up shockingly close to 1 to 1, and when the game first launched playing as a catboy wasn’t even an option (pretty sure G’raha is introduced in the same patch allowing them, also female orcs).

Also I’m just kinda using my own informal names for all these, so, real quick breakdown for clarity. Our essentially human races save those introduced in expansions and their canon names are:

Humans (Hyur)- you’d think they’d be the default but mostly they seem to come from fantasy Tibet (Ala Migo) and fantasy Japan (Doma) which have both been under imperial occupation forever so they tend to be refugees/generally down and out.

Elves (Elezen) come from the city of Ishgard in the country of Coerthas to the north, where there’s a jerk pope and a bunch of noble houses full of jerks. A lot also live in Gridania, in the Black Shroud forest.

Horrible little capitalist scumbags (Lalafell) come from Ul’dah in the country of Thanalan and no for real they are the worst. Canonically there are maybe half a dozen in the whole world who aren’t corrupt merchants basically or actually in the slave trade, colonialists, crime lords, scuzzy pimps, or just general gross creeps. I’m sorry if you play one, individuals can be cool, but culturally yeah they’re awful.

Orcs (Roegadyn) big usually easygoing folks whose names are either Welsh or ridiculous mountain puns like Curious Gorge. A couple are major NPCs (Merlwyb being one), otherwise they seem to all be either chill retired pirates or fresh-faced adventurers.

The other orc of note is this woman named Moenbryda, who is introduced in one of the most astoundingly “we want you to instantly fall in love with this new character and feel like she was part of the gang all along” ways I have ever seen. So all the scions are just super super thrilled to see this giant woman with a giant axe who’s a giant nerd and has this “I am emphatically not straight” old friend swing by, and I mean yeah I’m not going to say she isn’t pretty instantly likeable (I mean she’s basically just a spare of my character).

Unfortunately I’m pretty media savvy and it immediately struck me that the only possible reason to try and get players to instantly fall in love with a character being introduced out of the blue like this is because the writers are really jonesing to do a big tragic death and aren’t willing to sacrifice any of our existing characters for it. I’m really compressing this down for this summary, and she’s probably actually around for a chunk of this free patches span equal to everything I’ve mentioned so far, but, yeah, that’s totally what she’s here for. Shame, really. We’ve still got a bunch of not really established yet Scions around, could have killed one of them and brought her in to fill the seat, but no.

There’s a whole big run-up to this though. Short version is there’s another one of those Ascians going around causing trouble, and big splashy end of game cutscene power aside, they tend not to stay dead when killed. So Moenbryda and Urianger (the m’lady dork in the hoodie) have a science jam session and make a special Ascian-killing device that basically makes both the target and the user’s soul explode. There’s also a bit in here where forgetable Ascian villain of the day kidnaps Minfilia, just full damsel in distress style. It sucks. Again like everything involving Ascians sucks. They’re terribly written undeveloped villains and every time one shows up we need to stop dead for a ton of exposition on what we’re even trying to do with them now. But yeah, end of the day, Moenbryda shows up, is cool and likeable, heroically sacrifices herself to kill a super unimportant villain and rescue just the worst character, everyone is very sad, especially Urianger. We move on.

Or at least in this summary we move on. In game there’s like 3 or 4 plot threads all kind of advancing at once since this was all added in over multiple patches and, yeah, it skips around and opens up some. The next important thing though is Midgardsomnr, the cool dead snakey dragon up on the tower? According to the new pals from Ishgard you met dealing with the whole Lady Iceheart thing, he’s maybe less dead than advertised. This is honestly a property dragons seem to have in general, and this dragon in particular. They don’t really seem to particularly follow the rules on the whole alive vs. dead thing. You can kill’em, it’s pretty inconvenient, but they’ll hang around as a ghost, possibly powerful enough to manifest a new body, and then you can suck out all their ghost juice and they’ll just take a nap for a while. This would be a pretty annoying thing to get into if we were setting up a new antagonist or something, but... Midgardsomnr is actually a pretty solid pal. Mostly he notices that all your divine plot armor that lets you go fight bosses and not get mind controlled has lost its juice, and offers to do a weird soul pact thing with you to cover you until that gets recharged. Plus he knows you’re going to spend the whole next expansion dealing with his kids. He also manifests this tiny cutesy version of himself you can equip in your little pet slot to hang out for the next expansion or two, who still has this deep booming powerful father of all dragons voice, so, that’s great. If weird and confusing.

Anyway, one final major plot thread to get through before the next expansion starts properly. So one thing we’re trying to do here is actually establish real character for the Scions here since they’re our in it for the long haul supporting cast. Thancred gets to hang out with ninja pals and stab a fish cult, doing some snarking, Urianger gets to be said about Moenbryda being dead and also really do the big science nerd thing beyond everyone else’s exposition dumping, Minfilia is just a lost cause, the damseling was kind of the final straw. Next on the list though is Alphinaud, the twin you officially have in your little group. He’s got this big idea that after having saved the whole continent from an evil empire and several rampaging gods, you could probably get more done as an organization if instead of just being one semi-professional god exterminator and a little over half a dozen research nerds, you had maybe your own whole private military force, independent from what are technically three city-states’ private armies in a longterm alliance. Not a terrible plan on paper, none of the heads of state have an issue, so you help recruit a bunch of vollunteers from all over. And you actually snag existing NPCs from various bars and outposts and stuff, and end up with your nice little blue uniformed pals standing guard in places and doing little missions.

Then political problems start cropping up. Mainly, a couple of those horrible little capitalist scumbags are staging some kinda coup in this weird convoluted way where on paper they’re improving life for those human refugees all over but it’s kind of a front. Have I mentioned yet I kinda love these guys as villains because they all have these goofy names like Pittlety Dittlety and it’s impossible to take them seriously? There’s also an issue where it’s becoming increasingly clear that oh hey this private army you recruited off the street might have some people in it who are kinda corrupt and working against you. Whoops. And again, this is all kinda running parallel with these other plotlines, it’s not like things go horribly the INSTANT you form your army. It’s like, at least a week later.

Anyway all the political machinations come to a head with you getting invited to a big heads of state party in U’dah to talk about future plans, getting Ishgard into the alliance mainly if I recall, stuff like that. Somewhere in there, the Sultana pulls you aside to her personal chambers to split a bottle of wine and tell you how she’s planning to get onto that short list of little capitalist monsters I actually like by abdicating her throne and establishing a democracy, so this corrupt as hell merchant council can’t run things any more. At which point the poison in her glass kicks in.

So things get real serious real quick. Dead head of state, you’re the prime suspect. It’s actually a coup staged by some awful little merchant lords. Her boyfriend/bodyguard Rauban the big ex-gladiator finds out what happened, knows damn well who’s actually responsible, cuts some little piece of garbage’s head right off while everyone’s having dinner. Oh hey, one of the highest ranking people in your personal army who are here running security is also in on all this, for the... honestly pretty understandable reason that he’s one of those fantasy Tibet refugees and the little piece of garbage was pushing for more rights for them. They fight, he cuts off Rauban’s arm. The other two heads of state kinda go “you know what? We should probably go,” which, yeah, fair. Meanwhile the whole place descends into chaos, and hey not only are you being framed for the murder, you kinda... did bring in one of the actual people who did it and all his personal goons, so, it’s time for you and your pals to get the hell out of here while basically pursued by an army.

There’s a big escape sequence, lot of those “I’ll hold them off, go” moments, most of your party goes for this last ditch “this teleport spell is almost definitely probably safe” exit, you get out on foot, end up meeting up with the same caravan driver who brought you into the game to begin with from parts unknown, and the only people you can confirm made it out besides you are Alphinaud, and Tataru, who I don’t think I’ve even mentioned yet? She’s the Scion’s secretary/bookkeeper and really not relevant to anything until you’re fleeing the country with just her and Alphinaud. Super major character from here out though so have an image. Anyway, you’re bound for Ishgard, because you did make some friends with some people up there, and they’re a super militarized isolationist nation state. Good place to lay low, and credits roll on this interlude.

So... wow that was MUCH longer of a write up than I expected it would be. Things actually move fairly briskly through all this, so you’re likely to run out of plot before you run out of fresh new dungeons/bossfights/grinding those tribal quests out. Part of what all the glacial pacing in the base game does though is repeat a bunch of setting history and groups-of-guys-whole-deals at you like 20 times, so things do at least end up pretty damn firmly anchored, plot wise.

I still wouldn’t call the plot for this end of things good though. Most characters still have nothing really established, villains don’t especially exist before they’re relevant, the whole “how to kill an Ascian for real” bit is really long-winded and doesn’t actually really come up again past there. And... I guess this is a “spoiler” of sorts for a post or two from now, but you know what else doesn’t come up again? This whole exciting coup/criminal status thing. Like mechanically you can just turn around and head right back into Ul’dah like nothing happened, which... it would suck if you couldn’t because you have to for a third of the class quests and such, but even long-term plotwise? Post-Heavensward turns out the other coup orchestrator just wanted to preserve the status quo, the poison put the Sultana in a coma rather than kill her, and he just kinda... walks the whole thing back all no-hard-feelings. Terrible decision. Nothing really sticks besides your party getting scattered around and Rauban being short an arm from here out.

Anyway, if you’re digging this whole plot summary project or just, you know, want to help me remain alive, Patreon link?

We’ll be picking this up probably tomorrow with, as they say, The Award-Winning Heavensward Expansion (which if I’m honest I didn’t actually like that much).

[scithemodestmermaid]

Devtober 2021 Log #2

Well, today was busy.  

Redid the map a little.  Made the trees solid.  Added chests and put items in them.  Added an intro cutscene (these example screens are both from said intro cutscene) AND a second cutscene that plays when you approach the two chests (the third chest just exists).  Made sure those cutscenes only played once.  Changed UI to red (and decided to just keep the font, its fine).  Got music playing in-game.  So this was a lot that got done.

I'm liking RPG Maker a lot.  Its surprisingly flexible, even with just the defaults.  I haven't had to type in any sort of code, which frankly feels like cheating a bit.  I think I would like to keep making games with RPG Maker.  Although my main go-to engine is still going to be RenPy, I think.

Tomorrow is my day of rest (by which I mean I will lay down to rest my eyes and then not wake up until the evening, thereby getting nothing done except a fantastic nap), so I most likely won't be working on Cut Me Deeply any.  But my plan on Monday is to implement some combat.  Whether is mostly fixed encounters or random encounters, I don't know.  Depends on which one is easier.  Also, I want to change the main menu music.  The default doesn't really vibe with the style.

[kaialone]

Spirit Tracks Translation Comparison: Intro

This will be a comparison of the original Japanese version and the US English localized version.

Specifically, this will cover the intro cutscene of the game, detailing its backstory.

You can also watch this cutscene for yourself in English and Japanese. If you want, you can check out the EU English version, too.

For the comparison, the usual points apply:

Bolded is the original Japanese text, for the reference.

Bolded and italicized is my translation.

Italicized is the official NOA translation.

A (number) indicates that I have a specific comment to make on that part in the translation notes.

As you read this, please keep in mind that with translations like these, it’s important not to focus on the exact literal wordings, since there is no single “correct answer” when it comes to translations.

Rather than that, consider the actual information that is being conveyed, in which way, and why.

--

The Backstory:

これは遠い遠い昔… 人がこの地に生まれた頃の物語

This is a tale from long long ago... From the age when people were born in this land.

This is a tale from long ago. It's the tale of the first settlers of this land.

神の御名において治められし 大地は安寧のなかにありました

Ruled in the name of a God,  (1) the land was at peace.

In the beginning, the people followed the spirits of good, and all was peaceful.

けれどもその穏やかな時は 突如として失われたのです…

And yet, that time of tranquility suddenly came to an end...

But that era of peace soon came to an end.

闇の権化 魔王の襲来…多くの 命が奪われ 大地が焼かれました

An incarnation of darkness, the Demon King, invaded... Many lives were lost, and the land was burned.

The evil Demon King rose to power, destroying everything in his path.

全てを支配せんとする魔王は ついに神にも戦いを挑んだのです

The Demon King was close to seizing control of everything, and at last challenged the God as well.

The spirits of good had no choice but to face him in battle.

魔王と神の戦いは 永きに渡り 幾度も繰り返されました

For a long time, the battle of the Demon King and the God kept repeating over and over again.

The war that ensued seemed to last an eternity, and much blood was shed.

永遠に続くと思われた争いの果て 神は遂に魔王を討ち果たしました

At the end of their seemingly everlasting struggle, the God finally slayed the Demon King.

Finally, the spirits subdued the Demon King, though they could not destroy him.

しかしその神も かつての絶大な 御力を失ってしまったのです…

However, that God had also lost their once tremendous power...

Their powers were greatly depleted.

神は残された御力で魔王の魂を 闇の床に葬り…

With the power they had left, the God buried the Demon King's soul in a bed of darkness...  (2)

With their remaining power, they buried the Demon King's spirit in the ground.

彼の者が這い出ることが かなわぬよう塔を建てられました

To ensure that he would never crawl out again, they built a tower.

They built shackles to imprison him, and a tower that acted as a lock.

塔を要に魔を縛る封印が施され それは今も大地を覆っています

They fit the tower with a seal that binds demons. It covers the land to this day.

These shackles cover the land to this day.

全てを終え力尽きられた 神は天界に戻りになりました

After all was done, and with their power exhausted, the God returned to the heavens.

With their power drained, the spirits of good returned to the heavens.

神も魔も去ったこの大地は今 私達の手に委ねられています…

This land, left by both the divine and the demonic, has now been entrusted to us...

Suddenly bereft of both demons and spirits, this land was entrusted to us.

Translation Notes:

What I translated as “God” is 神/kami in Japanese. This can also be translated as “Gods”, but I have my reasons for going with singular instead, which I will explain in more detail below.

What I translated as “bed” is 床/toko in Japanese, which does mean “bed”, among other things, but in a loose sense that can also refer to something like the floor and the ground.

--

Comparisons & Thoughts:

Since this scene establishes the basic foundation of the entire story, which has seen some minor changes in English, there is a lot to talk about here, even if the text itself is short.

-

First of all, there are multiple points I want to go over regarding the divine entity which ruled the land in the past.

In the English version, they are called “the spirits of good”, but in many other language versions, they are called “the gods”, which is a closer translation of 神/kami, the word used in the Japanese version.

I want to point out that, depending on the context and one’s definition of what counts as a god, 神/kami could actually be translated as “spirit” or “spirits”, too.

However, in the case of the Zelda franchise, there are already creatures called “spirits” in the English adaptations of the games. These are called 精霊/seirei in Japanese, a word which more unambiguously translates to “spirits”. They include characters such as the Light Spirits in Twilight Princess, or Link’s spirit companions from Phantom Hourglass.

Because of this, translating 神/kami as “spirits” in this game here does conflate them with the previously established spirits in a misleading way.

It’s possible that they didn’t go for “gods” in English to avoid religious connotations, which is a bit of a bigger concern for a handheld title, since those are assumed to have a younger general audience.

But they actually do have at least one mention of the word “goddess” in the English version, and also feature the word “demon” a bit more prominently than most Zelda games.

So it’s not entirely clear.

For all we know, it could simply be that they came up with this idea of “Spirit” being the general theme of their localization (Spirit Tracks, Spirit Train, Spirit Flute, Zelda being a spirit), and thus went with “spirits” for branding purposes.

-

The next detail I need to address about this divine entity is the fact that I chose to translate 神/kami as the singular “God”, rather than the plural “Gods”.

You see, the Japanese language doesn’t truly have distinct singular and plural. Thus, any noun could be translated as either, and the only way to know which to go for is by knowing the context.

When it comes to the Zelda franchise, normally the obvious thing would be to translate 神/kami as plural, since this universe canonically has multiple deities, major and minor ones.

And these usually appear in groups too, like the most prominent gods in the franchise, the Three Golden Goddesses themselves.

But, as I was looking through the Japanese text of Spirit Tracks, I never came across anything that specified whether the 神/kami from its backstory was supposed to refer to multiple deities or a single one.

Once I realized that, I went back and noticed that the pictures in this intro cutscene actually seem depict a single entity fighting the Demon King:

If these were meant to be multiple deities, it feels like they would have depicted them as such here, but they didn’t.

So, while this isn’t concrete evidence that it was a single deity, I have never seen any evidence that it was multiple deities either.

For me, these pictures push the odds slightly in favor of it just being a single deity, so I have decided to go with that.

There is not much to truly go on, but given what little we have, I do believe this is the more likely option. I also think this ultimately fits slightly better with a few story details that come up later.

Going with the singular “God” does give me a few other problems, though.

Just as Japanese lacks a true plural, it also lacks things such as articles and capitalization.

Because of that, I might need to go with “God”, “a God”, “the God”, and so forth in my translation, depending on the context. And I’ll also have to make a choice when to capitalize the word or not.

Just be aware that in Japanese the word would always just be 神/kami, completely unchanged.

Additionally, the Japanese language also only rarely makes use of third-person pronouns, especially gendered ones. That’s just how the language works. As a result, the gender of this deity is never clarified either.

I decided to go with they/them pronouns for them in English, rather than to assume, but please note that this is just my translation choice.

In the Japanese version there simply aren’t any pronouns used for them, and that’s not an unusual thing.

These sorts of choices are always unavoidable when translating something from Japanese to English, so please be aware of them.

This is one of the many reasons why one should not take a translation’s wording exactly literal.

-

This next point isn’t related to this cutscene specifically, but I still wanted to mention it.

A little bit of trivia regarding this deity:

They don’t seem to have a specific given name, but in recent Japanese media I have seen them be referred to as 光の神/Hikari no Kami, which means “God(s) of Light”.

The earliest official instance of this term being used that I could find was actually in Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS. It was also later used in The Legend of Zelda: Encyclopedia.

I have seen it float around online a lot earlier than that, but I have never been able to find the original source for it.

As far as I am aware, this title does not appear in the game at all, at least I have never seen it anywhere.

If you happen to know where this title originated from, by all means, let me know!

-

With all that covered, we can move on to the more direct comparisons for this cutscene.

There is a very notable difference right at the start:

This is a tale from long long ago… From the age when people were born in this land.

This is a tale from long ago. It’s the tale of the first settlers of this land.

In the original Japanese version, it’s established that the events of this tale first began during the time when “people were born in this land”.

This makes it pretty clear that this tale involved the native population of this land.

In the English version, they instead say it’s the tale of “the first settlers of this land“.

This is quite misleading, as it gives the false impression that this tale is about the Hyrulean settlers, who arrived to this land 100 years ago.

Even if one were to argue “first settlers” could refer to previous settlers, the people described in the tale were clearly supposed to be natives of the land in Japanese.

This is no minor change, and from what I’ve seen, it led to a lot of confusion about the game’s backstory among English-speaking fans.

There are quite a few people who seem to be under the impression that Tetra and her crew would have fought the Demon King, but in reality, this conflict is supposed to have taken place many years before the Hyrulean settlers even arrived.

It’s a history that is unique to this land and its original native population.

This would also somewhat change the implication of this tale being told to Link. If you imagine it to be the story of the Hyrulean settlers, it’s Niko just telling Link about something that occurred in their recent history.

But as a tale that precedes the Hyrulean settlers, it’s Niko passing on knowledge about the history of this land prior to their own arrival.

This also happens to be one of the instances I know on top of my head where the EU English version has a more faithful translation, instead saying it’s the tale of “the first people of this land”.

-

Going forward, there are a few things to say about the battle with the Demon King as it is described here.

In Japanese, the Demon King is called 闇の権化/yami no gonge, “an incarnation of darkness”, which I feel might be interesting for people who want to speculate.

But I’m not sure if we are supposed to take this part literally, or if it’s just a poetic way to describe him.

The English version goes with a non-literal interpretation, adapting it as “The evil Demon King”.

-

A minor detail, but the Japanese version states that the Demon King went to challenge the God himself.

The English phrasing leans more towards it being the spirits of good who challenged the Demon King, but it’s a bit ambiguous.

-

Most interesting to me personally is the part where the Japanese version states that the battle between the two “kept repeating over and over again.“

The battle is stated to have been incredibly long in either version, but something about this phrasing here makes me imagine a conflict that keeps flaring up again and again across centuries.

Maybe even something slightly similar to the recurring conflict between Link and Ganondorf in the old Hyrule?

It’s a minor difference, but still one that affected my mental image of these events.

-

Finally, in Japanese it’s outright stated that the God “slayed” the Demon King, which is presumably why he was reduced to a soul.

In one sense, he died physically. It’s just that when you’re a Demon King, that doesn’t mean you’re out of the picture just yet.

The English version tones this down a notch, simply stating that the spirits “subdued” him. They even go as far as to´clarify that the spirits “could not destroy” the Demon King.

This actually will be a recurring element in this localization. For some reason, they seem to avoid this story detail.

-

Another little bit of trivia here:

This Demon King, whose actual name we learn later on, has the honor of being the first “Demon King” ...in English.

In Japanese, the titles “Demon King” and “Great Demon King” were frequently used for Ganon/Ganondorf already, but they were always translated as something else in English, like “King of Evil” or “Prince of Darkness”.

But with Spirit Tracks, they finally let this term be used.

He is still kind of special in Japanese too, since he’s the first one to be called Demon King who is not Ganon/Ganondorf, so let’s give him that.

-

And the last bit I want to compare directly is this part:

To ensure that he would never crawl out again, they built a tower.

They built shackles to imprison him, and a tower that acted as a lock.

They fit the tower with a seal that binds demons. It covers the land to this day.

These shackles cover the land to this day.

The differences here are simple.

In Japanese, the train tracks are a part of the larger “seal” that binds the Demon King, but in English they are made out to be like actual “shackles”  that directly hold him captive.

At this point in the story, this seems like a fair interpretation of what the tracks probably do, but later in the game we will get a more detailed explanation that differs from the English version.

Like I mentioned in the Introduction part, this change is most likely to elevate the importance of the tracks in the game’s lore, to fit with the English game title being “Spirit Tracks”.

Minor changes like these for the sake of branding aren’t unusual, from what I’ve seen.

-

All in all, the localization in this cutscene suffers a bit when it comes to accuracy, due to some changes they probably had no choice but making.

The story changes regarding the tracks is something that affects the whole game, naturally.

It’s an overall minor change, just a slight alteration of how this Demon King prison functions, but something the deep lore analysts among you might want to keep in mind.

Arguably, this change also causes some ever so slight plot holes later in the story, but mostly if you want to be nit-picky.

My biggest gripe in this scene is the “first settlers of this land“ line, especially since the EU English version has an easy fix for it.

It’s just a few little words, and yet they drastically change the implied context of this scene.

And I know for a fact that it has been misleading English-speaking fans for years, so I think it’s fair to say that this is a notable difference.

However, those aspects aside, this cutscene is well-written in English.

It’s faithful to the Japanese version in a way that isn’t too stiff, they did a good job of localizing the text in a general sense, and handled the changes they made well enough.

I’m still somewhat astonished they were able to have mentions of demons, the heavens, and even get in the line “much blood was shed “, which was not this violent in the Japanese version.

I know technically none of these are completely new to English Zelda, but still.

Anyway, that’s all for this part, feel free to proceed to the next one!

--

 | Start | Next Part >

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Once Upon A Time Analysis- Part 2

in part one, I referred to Once Upon a Time's parts as one motif, and talked about its relation to Chara. In this post I'll actually talk about its separate parts, and focus on how they relate to the plot.

The theme Once Upon a Time actually has three parts. The first plays while showing the history of the monster human war in the opening cutscene, the second plays while showing Chara climb the mountain and enter the cave, and the third plays while showing Chara falling into the underground and ends the song. It's pretty easy to recognize the separate parts. For the sake of convenience, I'll be referring to these parts as O1, O2, and O3 respectively.

Small disclaimer, this post will be highly speculative. It was hard to get much solid evidence for this. I do believe I have a general idea of what was intended. I just hope there is a pattern and Toby didn't use the different parts where they were because they sounded good because if so then I look like a moron.

Anyways, theory time. This whole thing started with people making connections between Once Upon a Time being the first song in the Undertale OST, and Goodnight being the last song. People made jokes that Undertale was a fairy tale the whole time... but it got me thinking. The use of O3 in Beginning when Deltarune released only intrigued me more.

After some research and thinking it came to be clear to me that Once Upon a Time represents the plotline of a story, specifically the Undertale. Basically, O1 is the beginning, O2 is sort of a climax, and O3 is the ending. Though, it's not quite as simple as I first made it out to be.

Let's go back to the duality of Once Upon a Time, the beginning song, and Goodnight, the end song. Some of you may already be confused and think I'm spouting nonsense. "But if Once Upon a Time is the beginning why does it have all the motifs? And why does Goodnight use O1 if O1 represents the beginning?" I may certainly be spouting nonsense here, but I do have reasons. Once Upon a Time tells a short story in itself. O1 plays during what started it all, the story of the war, the beginning. O2 plays during once we come to 201X, where we see this "climax" of Chara climbing the mountain. Finally, O3 plays showing the aftermath of Chara having fallen into the Underground and laying on the cavern floor. This ending motif ends the intro and leads us into the main game. Now some may already point out this isn't the end of the story, as we see in Asriel's battle that Asriel actually found Chara and helped them, and there's much more that happened than us just starting the game from there. Now that's where the true nature of these motifs are shown, and things get more complicated.

You see Undertale's intro is very misleading. It makes you think that the war was simply a big war between the monsters and humans, but you find out later that it was much closer to an unprompted slaughter by the humans. Most think that Frisk wakes up and we can start the game right after seeing the human fall down in the intro, when it's later revealed to actually be Chara who fell long ago. Just like the intro is misleading, the motifs can reflect that. O3 is a repeating pattern, and in the intro it trails off. It can reflect how this is only the end of the story that we're currently being shown, and that there's really much more that will happen. The trailing off could represent an "end of the beginning" sort of thing. Meanwhile O2 more often than not emphasizes low and sad points in the story, like metaphorical "falls", rather than just the climax. If we look back at the intro, O2 plays while Chara climbs the mountain, and falls into it. While this could be considered a climax like I said before, it makes more sense to be a fall. Not to mention, Chara was probably at a pretty low point in their life right before they ran away and fell into the mountain.

Even more important is O1's use in Goodnight. I theorize, since O1 is supposed to represent the beginning, that its use here represents the irony of the pacifist ending in Undertale. You can easily just reset and play the game again, starting everything over. Undertale is a very meta game, and Flowey will even talk to you about resetting in the Pacifist ending. It's possible O1's use in Goodnight acknowledges that this is never really the end, as there's always the possibility to reset.

Now that I've wrapped up Once Upon a Time and Goodnight, the two endpoints of the plot, I'll go through the other songs that may use Once Upon a Time in this way as well.

Start Menu is hard at the very beginning of the game, which is why O1 would be used. It gradually progresses, carrying O1 with it as it adds more instruments with every monster you befriend. Finally, at the end of the Pacifist route, it adds in O3, which represents how it's the end of your journey.

Home and Home (Music Box) uses O1 as a calming motif to show how you're still at the beginning of your adventure through the underground. It also helps with Toriel's house feeling homely, as your home is where you start your day. Even so, O2 comes in to hint at the tragedy that has happened at this home. It pairs with the traces of the other children that you can find in the room Toriel gave you. It's a bittersweet feeling showing how the previous six humans all fell and had to leave Toriel, eventually dying to Asgore. However, it never uses O3. I believe this to be a subtle hint that the game is telling you it isn't the end, and that you shouldn't stay with Toriel. Like O2 suggests, you have to follow the fallen children and leave her. This is reinforced by how if you go upstairs and sleep before the Toriel fight, Chara will share a memory with you to encourage you to "stay determined" and keep going.

There's the big skip until Hotel and CYRCTHIDRMMPA, which both use O1 and O2. I think the best explanation/theory is in my previous post, in that it pokes fun at the serioussness of the tragedy of Asriel and Chara. But again, O2 is used to show that is still was a tragedy, even in elevator music form.

Later O2 is used in It's Raining Somewhere Else. This could somewhat reflects how you're nearing the climax of the story, as the CORE is the last main area. However, it more likely reflects again, the fallen humans. How horrible it must have been for Toriel to see them leave and to die. The realizing that the story Sans is telling you reveals how much she cared for them and how she cared for you so much she'd ask someone to promise her to protect you. Poor Toriel has gonna through so much and must be worried sick, O2 helps show that.

Now, the Undertale. This whole sequence is a story in itself. While the use of Once Upon a Time is to mainly refer to Chara, how all three of its parts are used are reflected in the story. I'm actually going to go much more in depth into how Once Upon a Time's parts represent the story in New Home, but I will save it for the next and last Once Upon a Time post. For a basic summary though, O1 represents the beginning of the story and then it leading into Undertale, and O2 represents the fall of Chara.

I won't talk much about O1's use in The Choice, since again The Choice is just a section of Undertale with effects layered over it, and The Choice plays in a multitude of places. Though, you could argue how O1 represents how your choice will affect things later, even if that's a bit of a stretch.

Next we move to Fallen Down (Reprise). All three parts are used here, and I believe it represents your entire journey to get here, from beginning to end. Having your friends all meet at the end of the game is a direct result of your pacifist actions to get them here, so it's sort of a little pat on the back for getting this far.

Now Hopes and Dreams. This song, while it uses O1 and O3, never actually uses O2. Odd right? All the monsters you worked so hard to befriend are now trapped in Asriel, who is now all powerful and you have no chance of beating. It's the climatic last stand final battle, where all the odds are against you, shouldn't the motif that represents that be there? Well not exactly. Let's compare this battle to one with a very similar situation, Omega Flowey. Omega Flowey's battle has a consistent theme of hopelessness. You're facing an almost-god, you have no chance! Flowey's attacks swarm you and every time you die he makes fun of you and the fact that you're all alone. Your attacks barely do any damage. Terrifying music plays and the battle is filled with so much chaos and despair. That's why, when the humans souls break free from Flowey and help you it's so impactful. In Asriel's battle, he's even more powerful, but there's not that feeling of hopelessness. Before the battle all your friends are supporting you, you don't feel as alone in the battle. When you die instead of getting a cruel joke from Flowey and your game crashing, Frisk literally refuses to die. You get hopes and dreams as healing items. Hell, the name of the song is Hopes and Dreams! You're constantly supported and encouraged to keep going. There's no sense of hopelessness, you actually feel like you can win this battle. Everyone is counting on you. Flavor text in the battle even tells you, "It's the end." which is why O3 is used so much. As for O1, why would it be used? If it's the end, why would the motif that represents the beginning be here? Well, I believe it represents that while this is the final battle, Asriel is still thinking in the past. He is still holding onto the foolish idea that you must be Chara, and he can still keep you around to stay with him.

These same things apply to SAVE the World, though it's possible that with how O1 is modified it might also represent your journey that led you to befriend everyone that is now helping you, and how it's coming full circle.

With Reunited, which uses all three, it's probably very similar to Fallen Down (Reprise), where it represents your entire journey to get here.

Bring It In, Guys! using O1 at the end really doesn't need much explanation. It's already a compilation of a bunch of the game's songs, why not end it off with the starting motif? Also from the previous post, it shows a colored version of the view of Mt. Ebott from the intro, where Once Upon a Time plays, so there's that.

Last Goodbye is pretty much a remix of SAVE the World, though it does include O2 in the beginning. This may be because it's, well the Last Goodbye, goodbyes are sad you know? You finished the game and not you can't play it for the first time again. Awesome as it is it's still a farewell song, but it doesn't spend much time on it and gets straight to partying.

We've already talked about Goodnight, so I'll move onto Deltarune songs! Before the Story was actually first used in the menu screen on PS4, and considering it's literally called *Before* the Story, it makes sense that it uses O1.

Beginning had such a nice nostalgia throwback using O3. It's possible that it's just using O3 like Undertale's into, leading to what's to come, "the end of the beginning" of sorts.

We don't get any instances of Once Upon a Time until You can Always Come Home, which is a remix of Home. The use of O1 is because it's Home, but notice how O2 is missing, replaced by Don't Forget. O3 also appears at the end with some flutes on top of Don't Forget. The reason O2 is gone is probably just because Don't Forget fit better, but may also be because this time you get to stay with Toriel, as well as the fact as far as we know there's no dead children that used to live here. And O3 would just be because it's the end of the chapter, and you finally get to come home and end the day.

Finally we have Dog Check, the song that plays on Deltarune's error screen. It usesO2 briefly, before leading into Don't Forget. In all seriousness I doubt Toby was thinking about how these parts would reflect the story, and just wanted to make a chill song using the motifs. But if you really want an explanation, O2 represents the depressed player that with a corrupt game that's giving them an error screen, and now had to figure out why Deltarune won't start. Yup that seems good.

And that's all the songs that use Once Upon a Time. Again I may be completely wrong, but I noticed some patterns and made some theories I wanted to share on this. Make of it what you will. Next post I will go more in-depth into the song Undertale, then we're done with Once Upon a Time.

[timeclonemike]

Axiom Verge: Setting and Plot Analysis

This has been bouncing around in my head for a while, so I’m going to just put it down for posterity.

Axiom Verge is a side scrolling platformer in the Metroidvania Style. Half of the game is exploring and getting new equipment, then backtracking to try that new equipment on old areas to look for secrets impossible to find earlier. The player controls Trace, a physicist who has his experiment blow up in his face, and then wakes up in an alien world fighting for his life.

I’m dropping a Keep Reading Cut here since the discussion will mention spoilers and lots of them.

There’s three main issues I want to talk about: Simulation Theory, the Alternates, and Trace’s Characterization. There may be other, smaller tangents that will get mentioned in passing.

Simulation Theory: This is a philosophical theory that posits the entire universe and everything in it is the result of a simulation being run on a computer. (I have numerous problems with it myself, but those are not germane to the analysis of this game.) In Axiom Verge, this theory is true, but the “simulation” just happens to be a sidescrolling platformer. Most of Trace’s weapons are deliberately designed to invoke classic console game glitches; a gun that causes enemy behavior to glitch out called the Address Disruptor, a lab coat that lets him noclip through walls, and the counterpart to the High Jump Boots from Metroid is literally a device that changes the local laws of physics so Trace can jump higher. There’s even a  device that functions like either a password system or the old game genie / game shark cartridge add ons that let people change the game in different ways, and it’s the only way to get to several secrets and the gear they hide.

About halfway to two thirds of the way through the plot, it’s revealed that all this equipment that Trace has been finding is equipment that Trace originally created. After the lab accident, Trace not only came up with a way to prove Simulation Theory, he managed to design hardware based on the theory. Some of the documents found in the game are from Trace, including an extract / excerpt from his original paper, with a quote that was important enough that it made it into the actual trailer.

Axiom 1(c): Any algorithm giving rise to cognitive entities will be perceived as reality by the entities described.

This, I think, is used to deliberately invoke the idea of the Simulation Theory, and all of the events of the game take that theory to it’s logical extreme; if the universe is a computer program, it can be hacked, it can glitch, and it can crash, which raises two important questions.

Question One: If the universe simulation starts to glitch out or corrupt, what would that look like to the people in that universe? A number of notes found in the game refer to something called the Breach; in game, it looks and sounds like some sort of graphical or audio corruption, and one note calls it “a forced re-linking of the lattices underlying adjacent universes.” The Breach is also responsible for the “Secret Worlds” of Axiom Verge, where assets and set pieces are randomly thrown together with very little internal logic. These Secret Worlds are almost certainly a reference to the “secret worlds” found in the original Metroid game, not just in style, but thematically as well. The Metroid secret worlds were created when the game accidentally started reading its own code as level data. With that as context, the note describing the breach suddenly makes more sense.

Question Two: If the universal simulation should be fatally corrupted or even crash, what happens next? This is only indirectly touched on in two parts of the game, one note describing the backstory of the world of Sudra that Trace is exploring, and the “pathogen” that was released on the world. In the note about old Sudra, it’s said that the people of that world had achieved untold heights of technical and scientific knowledge, but weaponized it and caused untold calamities before they got to the point that they were unwilling, or unable, to continue fighting. Given that they ended up creating at least one weapon that Trace can find, the flamethrower, and hid it in a cave using a literal password system, I think it’s plausible that the Sudrans were actually on the precipice of just such a disaster. In fact, it is entirely possible that they created the Breach itself either as an accidental result of their fighting, or as a deliberate ultimate weapon. This position is supported by the language of the notes referring to the breach and anything related to it with weather terminology; in order to capture the Rusalki, a storm-related machine was activated, and in the events of the game proper the Rusalki can’t get close to the Breach Attractor as long as it is powered on.

There’s also the matter of the “pathogen” that is unleashed on Sudra by the antagonist. If you made a list of synonyms for pathogen, you’d find “Virus” on that list. In light of the Simulation Theory, it’s not even that much of a jump to go from “pathogen” to “computer virus” and this is supported by noted left by the various bosses before they are completely transformed by it; one of them deliberately points out that the algorithm that defines them is itself twisted and corrupted.

The Alternates: One of the big plot twists halfway to two thirds of the way through the game is that the player character Trace isn’t the same Trace that got caught in the lab accident; that’s just where Trace’s memories of Earth stop. The original Trace was left blind and paraplegic by the accident, which didn’t even have anything to do with his physics experiment; a pressure valve froze and that caused an explosion. Trace ended up having a revelation while recovering and developed a revolutionary new theory; the media loved it, but the scientific community ridiculed it and him. They gave him a nickname: Athetos.

Conveniently enough, Athetos is the name of the antagonist of the game, who unleashed all the chaos on Sudra in the backstory.

Trace is actually a clone created from Athetos, as are all of the game bosses. These clones were created by the game’s version of the Save Point, called Rebirth Chambers. The original Trace was completely healed of all injuries from the accident, and there’s a hidden area with his old wheelchair and a note explaining what happened.

The main reason I’m bringing this up is because I saw an explanation video that stated that the Athetos variants created by “Prime Trace” were from alternate universes. The evidence from this was referring to a specific note talking about algorithms across universes, but the problem with this theory is that there is one part of the game where two Rebirth Chambers are actively being used to create more clone variants. So the multiversal theory didn’t even NEED to be invoked, we already have cloning.

However, that note in particular is important because I think it describes the video game phenomena of multiple lives. The relevant test goes “the instances which do not cease carry on for those that do. For most of us this happens without us being any the wiser.” If you’re playing a game and you fuck up and die, you restart at the last checkpoint / save point / level intro / what have you. Again, Axiom Verge explores what a video game reality would look like from the inside.

Trace’s Characterization: If Trace has one defining trait, it is his pacifist nature. He keeps trying to talk his way out of boss fights (which almost works once) and as soon as he realizes that he and Athetos are the same person, he wants to talk to the guy to figure out what the hell is going on and why Athetos has done all these things that Trace would never consider.

This is something that I have NEVER seen fully addressed as far as the plot goes, so I guess I have to do it.

The note next to Trace’s old wheelchair is signed Trace. By the time it was written, Trace had already been healed by the Sudran Rebirth Chambers. However, in the note, while he was impressed with the technology, he understood that it was too dangerous to even try to bring the technology back to Earth in case what happened to Sudra happened to Earth as well.

This is in complete conflict to what Athetos tells Trace at the end of the game before the final boss fight. In that same cutscene, Athetos also says “If I tell you too much, your captors will have to kill you.” (Athetos is referring to the Rusalki, who have control over both the Rebirth Chambers and the “nanogates” inside Trace that allow him to come back to life after dying.) In that context, Athetos making the claim that he just wanted to bring the technology to Earth and was willing to destroy Sudra to do it sounds like a cover story; he couldn’t tell Trace the real reason without putting Trace in danger, but he needed to tell Trace something that both Trace and the Rusalki would believe. (Given that the Rusalki have been lying to Trace since the moment he woke up from the Rebirth Chamber, the can’t really claim the moral high ground here.)

There’s one other important detail about that note found with the wheelchair: “We are going upstream - to the Filter, or whatever lies beyond - for answers.“ Now, upstream could mean several different things. It could refer to an actual stream, implying that Trace arrived at Sudra near a body of water near a Rebirth Chamber, and the stream led to civilization. The word Filter, on the other hand, could refer to a machine called the Power Filter that Trace has to activate in the game and seems to be tied into the power grid for Sudra’s technology, in which case upstream meant following the power supply for all the amazing tech to figure out how it works. Finally, there is the possibility that “upstream”  and the “Filter” refer to the Breach Elevator and what lies beyond; Athetos has his main base in the game in this space elevator kind of machine that is implied to pass through the Breach.

Each one of these scenarios is equally plausible until Thomas Happ makes a sequel or officially supports a given theory on social media or something like that. What each of these things has in common, though, is that it raises another question. Whether it was encountering an alien civilization for the first time, or discovering how the Sudran technology worked, or discovering what lies beyond the Breach...

What did Trace find that was so awful that it made a peaceful, pacifist scientist willing to commit genocide?

[saintarchie]

Astronomy Domine

Meant to go back to the castle next, but I should probably have a look at those job things first.

Upon picking them up, the game seemed to imply that the Monk job was better suited to Tiz and the White Mage to Agnès, which an examination of the stat changes for each seems to bear out. So, I guess I’ll go with that for now.

Interestingly, equipping either asteroid causes a massive reduction in most of that character’s item abilities. This, combined with the twenty-odd asteroid slots that are still unused, give an impression of just how specialised some of these jobs must be. So there should be plenty of scope for experimenting later on.

At the castle, the king informs us that the airship lately captained by Holly and Barras has been seen on the other side of that bridge that got taken out, so we can’t go and get it until the repairs are done. The king promises to launch a full assault once that happens, so at least we might have some back-up this time.

While we wait, it seems there’s some kind of feast happening back at the inn, so let’s go to that. Fade to black and another cutscene. Someone else has come for Agnès and they’ve decided that the best way to get her is by burning down the city. He’s a dark-wizard-looking motherfucker, and his name is Ominas because this game doesn’t really have much time for subtlety when it comes to character names, it seems.

Wait. Dark wizard guy using fire to chase a young woman with magical powers out of hiding. Oh god, I’ve gone full-circle and now I’m back to reviewing Eragon like the last decade never happened! Kurt Vonnegut was right!

Or not; Ominas’s actions are actually being questioned by some of his troops, which I don’t recall happening to Durjzla or whatever his name was, so maybe I haven’t been sent back to relive the 2010s just yet.

Back inside the inn, Agnès once again settles on “turn myself in” as Plan A, and wow, Star wasn’t kidding about her martyr tendencies. Meanwhile, Ominas, (whose last name is Crowe, because of course it is,) argues with his second-in-command about the merits of burning down more of the city versus giving the Caldislans time for the message to sink in. Ultimately, the un-named woman (who I think might be Edea from the intro, but it’s hard to make out) convinces Ominas to withdraw until the next night.

Once they’re gone, Owen mentions that these guys have also been encamped north of the river, should we want to go and confront them at some point. Before that conversation can go any further, however, the amnesiac appears, since it was actually his house that got burned down. Turns out he knows us, sort of, thanks to his mysterious journal that tells the future or whatever it is.

Not only does he know who Tiz and Agnès are, but also what they’re trying to do, where they intend to go next, and what’s going to happen to them when they get there. That last part is where he comes in; when they reach the Centro Ruins north of the river, they will have some kind of fated encounter with the woman that was with Ominas just now.

The amnesiac wants to go with them so that he can also have this encounter, having developed a slightly creepy fixation on her while she and her friend were burning his house down. Despite Agnès’s misgivings, Tiz and Owen convince her to let him come, and the party gains its third member.

[maximelebled]

Growing Pains - Zelda, Tony Hawk, The Sims, games and related memories from my formative years

This blog post is about my personal history with video games, how they influenced me growing up, how they sometimes helped me, and more or less an excuse to write about associated memories with them.

This is a very straightforward intro, because I’ve had this post sitting as a draft for ages, trying to glue all of it cohesively, but I’m not a very good writer, so I never really succeeded. Some of these paragraphs date back at least one year. 

And I figured I should write about a lot of this as long as I still remember clearly, or not too inaccurately. Because I know that I don’t remember my earliest ever memory. I only remember how I remember it. So I might as well help my future self here, and give myself a good memento.

Anyway, the post is a kilometer long, so it’ll be under this cut.

My family got a Windows 95 computer when I was 3 years old. While I don’t remember this personally, I’m told that one of the first things I ever did with it was mess up with the BIOS settings so badly that dad’s computer-expert friend had to be invited to repair it. (He stayed for dinner as a thank you.)

It was that off-white plastic tower, it had a turbo button, and even a 4X CD reader! Wow! And the CRT monitor must have been... I don’t remember what it was, actually. But I do once remember launching a game at a stupidly high resolution: 1280x1024! And despite being a top-down 2D strategy, it ran VERY slowly. Its video card was an ATI Rage. I had no idea what that really meant that at the time, but I do recall that detail nonetheless.

Along with legitimately purchased games, the list of which I can remember:

Tubular Worlds

Descent II

Alone in the Dark I & III

Lost Eden

Formula One (not sure which game exactly)

Heart of Darkness

(and of course the famous Adibou/Adi series of educational games)

... we also had what I realize today were cracked/pirated games, from the work-friend that had set up the family computer. I remember the following:

Age of Empires I (not sure about that one, I think it might have been from a legitimate “Microsoft Plus!” disc)

Nightmare Creatures (yep, there was a PC port of that game)

Earthworm Jim (but without any music)

The Fifth Element

Moto Racer II

There are a few other memorable games, which were memorable in most aspects, except their name. I just cannot remember their name. And believe me, I have looked. Too bad! Anyway, in this list, I can point out a couple games that made a big mark on me.

First, the Alone in the Dark trilogy. It took me a long time to beat them. I still remember the morning I beat the third game. I think it was in 2001 or 2002.

There was a specific death in it which gave me nightmares for a week. You shrink yourself to fit through a crack in a wall, but it’s possible to let a timer run out—or fall down a hole—and this terrifying thing happens (16:03). I remember sometimes struggling to run the game for no reason; something about DOS Extended Memory being too small.

I really like the low-poly flat-shaded 3D + hand-drawn 2D style of the game, and it’d be really cool to see something like that pop up again. After the 8-bit/16-bit trend, there’s now more and more games paying tribute to rough PS1-style 3D, so maybe this will happen? Maybe I’ll have to do it myself? Who knows!

Second, Lost Eden gave me a taste for adventure and good music, and outlandish fantasy universes. Here’s the intro to the game:

A lot of the game is very evocative, especially its gorgeous soundtrack, and you spend a lot of time trekking through somewhat empty renders of landscapes. Despite being very rough early pre-rendered 3D, those places were an incredible journey in my young eyes. If you have some time, I suggest either playing the game (it’s available on Steam) or watching / skimmering through this “longplay” video. Here are some of my personal highlights: 25:35, 38:05, 52:15 (love that landscape), 1:17:20, 1:20:20 (another landscape burned in my neurons), 2:12:10, 2:55:30, 3:01:18. (spoiler warning)

But let’s go a couple years back. Ever since my youngest years, I was very intrigued by creation. I filled entire pocket-sized notebooks with writing—sometimes attempts at fiction, sometimes daily logs like the weather reports from the newspaper, sometimes really bad attempts at drawing. I also filled entire audio tapes over and over and OVER with “fake shows” that my sister and I would act out. The only thing that survived is this picture of 3-year-old me with the tape player/recorder.

It also turns out that the tape recorder AND the shelf have both survived.

(I don’t know if it still works.)

On Wednesday afternoons (school was off) and on the week-ends, I often got to play on the family computer, most of the time with my older brother, who’s the one who introduced me to... well... all of it, really. (Looking back on the games he bought, I can say he had very good tastes.)

Moto Racer II came with a track editor. It was simple but pretty cool to play around with. You just had to make the track path and elevation; all the scenery was generated by the game. You could draw impossible tracks that overlapped themselves, but the editor wouldn’t let you save them. However, I found out there was a way to play/save them no matter what you did, and I got to experiment with crazy glitches. 85 degree inclines that launched the bike so high you couldn’t see the ground anymore? No problem. Tracks that overlapped themselves several times, causing very strange behaviour at the meeting points? You bet. That stuff made me really curious about how video games worked. I think a lot of my initial interest in games can be traced back to that one moment I figured out how to exploit the track editor...

There was also another game—I think it was Tubular Worlds—that came on floppy disks. I don’t remember what exactly lead me to do it, but I managed to edit the text that was displayed by the installer... I think it was the license agreement bit of it. That got me even more curious as to how computers worked.

Up until some time around my 13th or 14th birthday, during summer break (the last days of June to the first days of September for French pupils), my sister and I would always go on vacation at my grandparents’ home.

The very first console game I ever played was The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past on my cousin’s Super Nintendo, who also usually stayed with us. Unlike us, he had quite a few consoles available to him, and brought a couple along. My first time watching and playing this game was absolutely mind-blowing to me. An adventure with a huge game world to explore, so many mysterious things at every corner. “Why are you a pink rabbit now?” “I’m looking for the pearl that will help me not be that.”

Growing up and working in the games industry has taken the magic out of many things in video games... and my curiosity for the medium (and its inner workings) definitely hasn’t helped. I know more obscure technical trivia about older games than I care to admit. But I think this is what is shaping my tastes in video games nowadays... part of it is that I crave story-rich experiences that can bring me back to a, for lack of a better term, “child-like” wonderment. And I know how weird this is going to sound, but I don’t really enjoy “pure gameplay” games as much for that reason. Some of the high-concept ones are great, of course (e.g. Tetris), but I usually can’t enjoy others without a good interwoven narrative. I can’t imagine I would have completed The Talos Principle had it consisted purely of the puzzles without any narrative beats, story bits, and all that. What I’m getting at is, thinking about it, I guess I tend to value the “narrative” side of games pretty highly, because, to me, it’s one of the aspects of the medium that, even if distillable to some formulas, is inherently way more “vague” and “ungraspable”. You can do disassembly on game mechanics and figure out even the most obsure bits of weird technical trivia. You can’t do that to a plot, a universe, characters, etc. or at least nowhere near to the same extent.

You can take a good story and weave it into a number of games, but the opposite is not true. It’s easy to figure out the inner working of gameplay mechanics, and take the magic out of them, but it’s a lot harder to do that for a story, unless it’s fundamentally flawed in some way.

Video games back then seemed a lot bigger than they actually were.

I got Heart of Darkness as a gift in 1998 or 1999. We used to celebrate Christmas at my grandparents’, so I had to wait a few days to be back home, and to able to put the CD in the computer. But boy was it worth it! Those animated cutscenes! The amazing pixel art animations! The amazing and somewhat disturbing variety of ways in which you can die, most of which gruesome and mildly graphic! And of course, yet again... a strange and outlandish universe that just scratches my itch for it. Well, one of which that forged my taste for them.

I can’t remember exactly when it happened or what it was, but I do remember that at some point we visited some sort of... exposition? Exhibit? Something along those lines. And it had a board games & computer games section. The two that stick out in my mind were Abalone (of which I still have the box somewhere) and what I think was some sort of 2D isometric (MMO?) RPG. I wanna say it was Ultima Online but I recall it looking more primitive than that (it had small maps whose “void” outside them was a single blueish color). 

In my last two years of elementary school, there was one big field trip per year. They lasted two weeks, away from family. The first one was to the Alps. The second one was... not too far from where I live now, somewhere on the coast of Brittany! I have tried really hard to find out exactly where it was, as I remember the building and facilities really well, but I was never able to find it again. On a couple occasions, we went on a boat with some kind of... algae harvesters? The smell was extremely strong (burning itself into my memory) and made me sick. The reason I bring them up is because quite a few of my classmates had Game Boy consoles, most of them with, you know, all those accessories, especially the little lights. I remember being amazed at the transparent ones. Play was usually during the off-times, and I watched what my friends were up to, with, of course, a bit of jealousy mixed in. The class traveled by bus, and it took off in the middle of the night; something like 3 or 4 in the morning? It seemed like such a huge deal at the time! Now here I am, writing THESE WORDS at 03:00. Anyway, most of my classmates didn’t fall back asleep and those that had a Game Boy just started playing on them. One of my classmates, however, handed me his whole kit and I got to do pretty much what I wanted with it, with the express condition that I would not overwrite any of his save files. I remember getting reasonably far in Pokémon before I had to give it back to him and my progress was wiped.

During the trip to the Alps, I remember seeing older kids paying for computer time; there was a row of five computers in a small room... and they played Counter-Strike. I had absolutely no idea what it was, and I would forget about it until the moment I’m writing these words, but I was watching with much curiosity.

The first time I had my own access to console games was in 2001. The first Harry Potter film had just come out, and at Christmas, I was gifted a Game Boy Advance with the first official game. I just looked it up again and good god, it’s rougher than I remember. The three most memorable GBA games which I then got to play were both Golden Sun(s) and Sword of Mana... especially the latter, with its gorgeous art direction. My dad had a cellphone back then, and I remember sneakily going on there to look up a walkthrough for a tricky part of Golden Sun’s desert bit. Cellphones had access to something called “WAP” internet... very basic stuff, but of course still incredible to me back then.

I eventually got to play another Zelda game on my GBA: Link’s Awakening DX. I have very fond memories of that one because I was bed-ridden with a terrible flu. My fever ran so high that I started having some really funky dreams, delirious half-awake hallucinations/feelings, and one night, I got so hot that I stumbled out of bed and just laid down against the cold tile of the hallway. At 3 in the morning! A crazy time! (Crazy for 11-year-old me.)

(The fever hallucinations were crazy. My bedroom felt like it was three times at big, and I was convinced that a pack of elephants were charging at me from the opposite corner. The “night grain” of my vision felt sharper, amplified. Every touch, my sore body rubbing against the bed covers felt like it was happening twice as much. You know that “Heavy Rain with 300% facial animation” video? Imagine that, but as a feverish feeling. The dreams were on another level entirely. I could spend pages on them, but suffice to say that’s when I had my first dream where I dreamed of dying. There were at least two, actually. The first one was by walking down a strange, blueish metal corridor, then getting in an elevator, and then feeling that intimate convinction that it was leading me to passing over. The second one was in some Myst-like world, straight out of a Roger Dean cover, with some sort of mini-habitat pods floating on a completely undisturbed lake. We were just trapped in them. It just felt like some kind of weird afterlife.)

I also eventually got to play the GBA port of A Link To The Past. My uncle was pretty amused by seeing me play it, as he’d also played the original on SNES before I’d even been born. I asked him for help with a boss (the first Dark World one), but unfortunately, he admitted he didn’t remember much of the game.

We had a skiing holiday around this time. I don’t remember the resort’s or the town’s name, but its sights are burned in my memory. Maybe it’s because, shortly after we arrived, and we went to the ski rental place, I almost fainted and puked on myself, supposedly from the low oxygen. It also turned out that the bedroom my parents had rented unexpectedly came with a SNES in the drawer under the tiny TV. The game: Super Mario World. I got sick at one point and got to stay in and play it. This was also the holiday where I developed a fondness for iced tea, although back then the most common brand left an awful aftertaste in your mouth that just made you even more thirsty.

We got a new PC in December of 2004. Ditching the old Windows 98 SE (yep, the OS had been upgraded in... 2002, I think?). Look at how old-school this looks. The computer office room was in the basement. Even with the blur job that I applied to the monitor for privacy reasons, you can still tell that this is the XP file explorer:

A look at what the old DSLR managed to capture on the shelf reveals some more of the games that were available to me back then: a bunch of educational software, The Sims 2, and SpellForce Gold. 

I might be misremembering but I think they were our Christmas gifts for that year; we both got to pick one game. I had no idea what I wanted, really, but out of all the boxes at (what I think was) the local Fnac store, it was SpellForce that stood out to me the most. Having watched Lord of the Rings the year prior might have been a factor. I somewhat understood Age of Empires years before that, but SpellForce? Man, I loved the hell out of SpellForce. Imagine a top-down RPG that can also be played from a third-person perspective. And with the concept of... hero units... wait a second... now that reminds me of Dota.

Imagine playing a Dota hero with lots of micro-management and being able to build a whole base on new maps. And sometimes visiting very RPG-ish sections (my favorites!) with very little top-down strategy bits, towns, etc. like Siltbreaker. I guess this game was somewhat like an alternate, single-player Dota if you look at it from the right angle. (Not the third-person one.)

I do remember being very excited when I found out that it, too, came with a level editor. I never figured it out, though. I only ever got as far as making a nice landscape for my island, and that was it!

A couple weeks after, it was Christmas; my sister and I got our first modern PC game: The Sims 2. It didn’t run super well—most games didn’t, because the nVidia GeForce FX 5200 wasn’t very good. But that didn’t stop me or my sister from going absolutely nuts with the game. This video has the timestamp of 09 January 2005, and it is the first video I’ve ever made with a computer. Less than two weeks after we got the game, I was already neck-deep in creating stuff.

Not that it was particularly good, of course. This is a video that meets all of the “early YouTube Windows Movie Maker clichés”.

Speaking of YouTube, I did register an account there pretty early on, in August of 2006. I’ve been through all of it. I remember every single layout change. I also started using Sony Vegas around that time. It felt so complex and advanced back then! And I’m still using it today. Besides Windows, Vegas Pro is very likely to be the piece of software that I’ve been using for the longest time.

I don’t have a video on YouTube from before 2009, because I decided to delete all of them out of embarassment. They were mostly Super Mario 64 machinima. It’s as bad as it sounds. The reason I bring that up right now, though, is that it makes the “first” video of my account the last one I made with the Sims 2.

But before I get too far ahead with my early YouTube days, let me go backwards a bit. We got hooked up to the Internet some time in late 2005. It was RTC (dialup), 56 kbps. my first steps into the Internet led me to the Cube engine. Mostly because back then my dad would purchase computer magazines (which were genuinely helpful back then), and came with CDs of common downloadable software for those without Internet connections. One of them linked to Cube. I think it was using either this very same screenshot, or a very similar one, on the same map.

The amazing thing about Cube is not only that it was open-source and moddable, but had map editing built-in the game. The mode was toggled on with a single key press. You could even edit maps cooperatively with other people. Multiplayer mapping! How cool is that?! And the idea of a game that enabled so much creation was amazing to me, so I downloaded it right away. (Over the course of several hours, 30 MiB being large for dialup.)

I made lots of bad maps that never fulfilled the definition of “good level” or “good gameplay”, not having any idea how “game design” meant, or what it even was. But I made places. Places that I could call my own. “Virtual homes”. I still distinctively remember the first map I ever made, even though no trace of it survives to this day. In the second smallest map size possible, I’d made a tower surrounded by a moat and a few smaller cozy towers, with lots of nice colored lighting. This, along with the distinctive skyboxes and intriguing music, made me feel like I’d made my home in a strange new world.

At some point later down the line, I made a kinda-decent singleplayer level. It was very linear, but one of the two lead developers of the game played it and told me he liked it a lot! Of course, half of that statement was probably “to be nice”, but it was really validating and encouraging. And I’m glad they were like that. Because I remember being annoying to some other mappers in the Sauerbraten community (the follow-up to Cube, more advanced technically), who couldn’t wrap their heads around my absolutely god awful texturing work and complete lack of level “design”. Honestly, sometimes, I actually kinda feel like trying to track a couple of them down and being like, “yeah, remember that annoying kid? That was me. Sorry you had to deal with 14-year-old me.”

At some point, I stumbled upon a mod called Cube Legends. It was a heavily Zelda-inspired “total conversion”; a term reserved for mods that are the moddiest mods and try to take away as much of the original foundation as possible. It featured lots of evocative MIDI music by the Norwegian composer Bjørn Lynne. Fun fact: the .mid files are still available officially from his website!

This was at the crossroad of many of my interests. It was yet another piece of the puzzle. As a quick side note, this is why Zelda is the first series that I name in the title of this post, even though I... never really thought of myself as a Zelda fan. It’s not that it’s one of the game series that I like the most, it’s just that, before I started writing this, I’d never realized how far-reaching its influence had been in my life, both in overt and subtle ways, especially during my formative years.

And despite how clearly unfinished, how much of a “draft” Cube Legends was, I could see what it was trying to do. I could see the author’s intent. And I’m still listening to Bjørn Lynne’s music today.

The Cube Engine and its forums were a big part of why I started speaking English so well. Compared to most French people, I mean. We’re notoriously bad with the English language, and so was I up until then. But having this much hands-on practice proved to be immensely valuable. And so, I can say that the game and its community have therefore had long-lasting impacts in my life.

I also tried out a bunch of N64 games via emulation, bringing me right back in that bedroom at my grandparents’ house, with my cousin. Though he did not have either N64 Zelda game back then.

The first online forum I ever joined was a Zelda fan site’s. There are two noteworthy things to say here:

It was managed by a woman who, during my stay in the community, graduated from her animation degree. At this stage I had absolutely no idea that this was going to be the line of work I would eventually pursue!

I recently ran into the former head moderator of the forums. (I don’t know when the community died.) One of the Dota players on my friends list invited him because I was like “hmm, I wanna go as 3, not as 2 players today”. His nickname very vaguely reminded me of something, a weird hunch I couldn’t place. Half an hour into the game, he said “hey Max... this might be a long shot, but did you ever visit [forum]?” and then I immediately yelled “OH MY GOD—IT IS YOU.” The world is a small place.

Access to the computer was sometimes tricky. I didn’t always have good grades, and of course, “punishment” (not sure the word is appropriate, hence the quotes, but you get the idea) often involved locking me out of the computer room. Of course, most times, I ended up trying to find the key instead. I needed my escape from the real world.  (You better believe it’s Tangent Time.)

I was always told I was the “smart kid”, because I “understood things faster” than my classmates. So they made me skip two grades ahead. This made me enter high school at nine years old. The consequences were awful (I was even more of the typical nerdy kid that wouldn’t fit in), and I wish it had never happened. Over the years, I finally understood: I wasn’t more intelligent. I merely had the chance to have been able to grow up with an older brother who’d instilled a sense of curiosity, critical thinking, and taste in books that were ahead of my age and reading level. This situation—and its opposite—is what I believe accounts for the difference in how well kids get to learn. It’s not innate talent, it’s not genetics (as some racists would like you to believe). It’s parenting and privilege.

And that’s why I’ll always be an outspoken proponent for any piece of media that tries to instill critical thinking and curiosity in its viewer, reader, or player.

But I digress.

Well, I’ve been digressing a lot, really, but games aren’t everything and after all, this post is about the context in which I played those games. Otherwise I reckon I would’ve just made a simple list.

I eventually got a Nintendo DS for Christmas, along with Mario Kart DS. My sister had gotten her own just around the time when it released... she had the Nintendogs bundle. We had also upgraded to proper ADSL, what I think was about a ~5 megabits download speed. The Nintendo DS supported wi-fi, which was still relatively rare compared to today. In fact, Nintendo sold a USB wireless adapter to help with that issue—our ISP-supplied modem-router did not have any wireless capabilities. I couldn’t get it the adapter work and I remember I got help from a really kind stranger who knew a lot about networking—to a point that it seemed like wizardry to me.

I remember I got a “discman” as a gift some time around that point. In fact, I still have it. Check out the stickers I put on it! I think those came from the Sims 2 DVD box and/or one of its add-ons.

I burned a lot of discs. In fact, in the stack of burned CDs/DVDs that I found (with the really bad Sims movies somewhere in there), I found at least three discs that had the Zelda album Hyrule Symphony burned in, each with different additional tracks. Some were straight-up MIDI files from vgmusic.com...! And speaking (again) of Zelda, when the Wii came out, Twilight Princess utterly blew my mind. I never got the game or the console, but damn did I yearn badly for it. I listened to the main theme of the game a lot, which didn’t help. I eventually got to play the first few hours at a friend’s place.

At some point, we’d upgraded the family computer to something with a bit more horsepower. It had a GeForce 8500 GT inside, which was eventually upgraded to a 9600 GT after the card failed for some reason. It could also dual-boot between XP and Vista. I stuck with that computer until 2011.

We moved to where I currently live in 2007. I’ve been here over a decade! And before we’d even fully finished unpacking, I was on the floor of the room that is now my office, with the computer on the ground and the monitor on a cardboard box, playing a pirated copy of... Half-Life! It was given to me by my cousin. It took me that long to find out about the series. It’s the first Valve game I played. I also later heard about the Orange Box, but mostly about Portal. Which I also pirated and played. I distinctly remember being very puzzled by the options menu: I thought it was glitched or broken, as changing settings froze the game. Turns out the Source engine had to chug for a little while, like a city car in countryside mud, as it reloaded a bunch of stuff. Patience is a virtue...

But then, something serious happened.

In the afternoon of 25 December 2007, I started having a bit of a dull stomach pain. I didn’t think much of it. Figured maybe I’d eaten too many Christmas chocolates and it’d go away. It didn’t. It progressively deteriorated into a high fever where I had trouble walking and my tummy really hurt; especially if you pressed on it. My parents tried to gently get me to eat something nice on New Year’s Eve, but it didn’t stay in very long. I could only feed myself with lemonade and painkiller. Eventually, the doctor decided I should get blood tests done as soon as possible. And I remember that day very clearly.

I was already up at 6:30 in the morning. Back then, The Daily Show aired on the French TV channel Canal+, so I was watching that, lying in the couch while waiting for my mom to get up and drive me to my appointment, at 7:00. It was just two streets away, but there was no way I could walk there. At around noon, the doctor called and told my mom: “get your son to the emergency room now.”

Long story short, part of my intestines nuked themselves into oblivion, causing acute peritonitis. To give you an idea, that’s something with a double-digit fatality rate. Had we waited maybe a day or two more, I would not be here writing this. They kind of blew up. I had an enormous abcess attached to a bunch of my organs. I had to be operated on with only weak local anaesthetics as they tried to start draining the abscess. It is, to date, by far the most painful thing that has ever happened to me. It was bad enough that the hospital doctor that was on my case told me that I was pretty much a case worthy to be in textbooks. I even had medical students come into my hospital room about it! They were very nice.

This whole affair lasted over a month. I became intimately familiar with TV schedules. And thankfully, I had my DS to keep me company. At the time, I was pretty big into the Tony Hawk DS games. They were genuinely good. They had extensive customization, really great replayability, etc. you get the idea. I think I even got pretty high on the online leaderboards at some point. I didn’t have much to do on some days besides lying down in pain while perfecting my scoring and combo strategies. I think Downhill Jam might’ve been my favorite.

My case was bad enough that they were unable to do something due to the sad state of my insides during the last surgery of my stay. I was told that I could come back in a few months for a checkup, and potentially a “cleanup” operation that would fix me up for good. I came back in late June of 2008, got the operation, and... woke up in my hospital room surrounded by, like, nine doctors, and hooked up to a morphine machine that I could trigger on command. Apparently something had gone wrong during the operation, but they never told me what. I wasn’t legally an adult, so they didn’t have to tell me. I suspect it’s somewhere in some medical files, but I never bothered to dig up through my parents’ archives, or ask the hospital. And I think I would rather not know. But anyway, that was almost three more weeks in the hospital. And it sucked even more that time because, you see, hospital beds do not “breathe” like regular beds do. The air can’t go through. Let’s say I’m intimately familiar with the smell of back sweat forever.

When I got out, my mom stopped by a supermarket on the way home. And that is when I bought The Orange Box, completely on a whim, and made my Steam account. Why? Because it was orange and stood out on the shelf.

(As a side note, that was the whole bit I started writing first, and that made me initially title this post “growing pains”. First, because I’m bad at titles. Second, because not that I didn’t have them otherwise (ow oof ouch my knees), but that was literally the most painful episode of my entire life thus far and it ended in a comically-unrelated, high-impact, life-changing decision. Just me picking up The Orange Box after two awful hospital stays... led me to where I am today.)

While I was recovering, I also started playing EarthBound! Another bit of a life-changer, that one. To a lesser extent, but still. I was immediately enamored by its unique tone. Giygas really really really creeped me out for a while afterwards though. I still get unsettled if I hear its noises sometimes.

I later bought Garry’s Mod (after convincing my mom that it was a “great creative toolbox that only cost ten bucks!”), and, well, the rest is history. By which I mean, a lot of my work and gaming activity since 2009 is still up and browsable. But there are still a few things to talk about.

In 2009, I bought my first computer with YouTube ad money: the Asus eee PC 1005HA-H. By modern standards, it’s... not very powerful. The processor in my current desktop machine is nearly 50 times as fast as its Atom N280. It had only one gigabyte of RAM, Windows 7 Basic Edition, and an integrated GPU barely worthy of the name; Intel didn’t care much for 3D in their chips back then. The GMA 945 didn’t even have hardware support for Transform & Lighting.

But I made it work, damn it. I made that machine run so much stuff. I played countless Half-Life and Half-Life 2 mods on it—though, due to the CPU overhead on geometry, some of those were trickier. I think one of the most memorable ones I played was Mistake of Pythagoras; very surreal, very rough, but I still remember it so clearly. I later played The Longest Journey on it, in the middle of winter. It was a very cozy and memorable experience. (And another one that’s an adventure wonderful outlandish alien universe. LOVE THOSE.)

I did more than playing games on it, though...

This is me sitting, sunburned on the nose, in an apartment room, on 06 August 2010. This was in the Pyrénées, at the border between France and Spain. We had a vacation with daily hiking. Some of the landscapes we visited reminded me very strongly of those from Lost Eden, way up the page...

So, you see, I had 3ds Max running on that machine. The Source SDK as well. Sony Vegas. All of it was slow; you bet I had to use some workarounds to squeeze performance out of software, and that I had to keep a close, watchful eye on RAM usage. But I worked on this thing. I really did! I animated this video’s facial animation bits (warning: this is old & bad) on the eee PC, during the evenings of the trip, when we were back at our accomodation. The Faceposer tool in the Source SDK really worked well on that machine.

I also animated an entire video solely on the machine (warning: also old and bad). It had to be rendered on the desktop computer... but every single bit of the animation was crafted on the eee PC.

I made it work.

Speaking of software that did not run well: around that time, I also played the original Crysis. The “but can it run Crysis?” joke was very much justified back then. I had to edit configuration files by hand so that I could run the game in 640x480... because I wanted to keep most of the high-end settings enabled. The motion blur was delicious, and it blew my mind that the effect made the game feel this smooth, despite wobbling around in the 20 to 30 fps range.

Alright. It’s time to finish writing this damn post and publish it at last, so I’m going to close it out by listing some more memories and games that I couldn’t work in up there.

Advance Wars. Strategy game on GBA with a top-down level editor. You better believe I was all over the editor right away.

BioShock. When we got the 2007 desktop computer, it was one of the first games I tried. Well, its demo, to be precise. Its tech and graphics blew my mind, enough that I saved up to buy the full game. This was before I had a Steam account; I got a boxed copy! I think it might have been the last boxed game I ever bought? It had a really nice metal case. The themes and political messages of the game flew way over my head, though.

Mirror’s Edge. The art direction was completely fascinating to me, and it introduced me to Solar Fields’ music; my most listened artist this decade, by a long shot.

L.A. Noire. I lost myself in its stories and investigations, and then, I did it all again, with my sister at the helm. I very rarely play games twice (directly or indirectly), which I figure is worth mentioning.

Zeno Clash. It was weird and full of soul, had cool music, and cool cutscenes. It inspired me a lot in my early animation days.

Skyward Sword. Yep, going back to Zelda on that one. The whole game was pretty good, and I’m still thinking about how amazing its art direction was. Look up screenshots of it running in HD on an emulator... it’s outstanding. But there’s a portion of the game that stands tall above the rest: the Lanayru Sand Sea. It managed to create a really striking atmosphere in many aspects, through and through. I still think about it from time to time, especially when its music comes on in shuffle mode.

Wandersong. A very recent pick, but it was absolutely a life-changing one. That game is an anti-depressant, a vaccine against cynicism, a lone bright and optimist voice.

I realize now this is basically a “flawed but interesting and impactful games” list. With “can establish its atmosphere very well” as a big criteria. (A segment of video games that is absolutely worth exploring.)

I don’t know if I’ll ever make my own video game. I have a few ideas floating around and I tried prototyping some stuff, though my limited programming abilities stood in my way. But either way, if it happens one day, I hope I’ll manage to channel all those years of games into the CULMINATION OF WHAT I LIKE. Something along those lines, I reckon.

[captainfawful]

 With the year coming to a close, that means it’s time for me to do my “Nobody Cares Awards” thing I like to do! Check under the cut for some hot takes I may or may not have!

Hello, hello! It’s me again! Third year in a row I decided to jot my thoughts down on the years various game. I decided to change things up more from last year, kind of eliminating most of the categories in favor of writing more about the games I enjoyed. I tried to write at least something about every game in the Top 10 this time, even if it’s the bare minimum. Let’s see how it goes!

BEST MUSIC

This entire thing was first created because I wanted to write about how good Death Road To Canada’s soundtrack was. So no matter what changes with my format on this, there will always be a Best Music category. I’ll be honest though, there weren’t a whole lot of games this year with amazing soundtracks. The only real contender for most of the year was Celeste, which OST is very good, and fits perfectly with the games tone and style, but it’s not... The Best music. They aren’t songs I’ll put on loop and listen to multiple times throughout the day. They’re not the hard hitting tracks I would typically put at the top of this category, despite how great the music is. That’s how I felt until about August, when The Messenger came out. Messenger is not a game that will be in my Top 10 by any means, but it’s a pretty good game nonetheless with a couple of really weird twists. But the OST is phenomenal. Easily my number 1 favorite of this year. Just about every track in the game is a total banger. But don’t take it from me, take a listen yourself! A little later in the year I played through Just Shapes & Beats. I have a personal stigma against saying a thing with licensed music should qualify for Best Music, which is why JS&B did not make it into my top 3, but rest assured that it is sitting comfortably in the 4th place spot. Almost immediately after I played JS&B, Deltarune suddenly came out. I don’t think I have to tell you why that’s on here, right? Toby Fox cannot make bad music.

SPECIAL MENTIONS

THE MISSING:J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories

It’s hard for me to talk about what makes The Missing so special without diving deep into spoilers. There’s a reason it’s in the special mentions, and not the Top 10: And that reason is because the gameplay isn’t great. The Missing is a side-scrolling puzzle game, in the same vein as Limbo or Inside. Unlike those two, however, the puzzles you have to solve are not that hard, and most of the difficulty around it revolves around how slowly and janky the movement is. However, the overall story and twist is what makes this game great. There’s not a whole lot for me to say about the themes this game presents, so if you want to play The Missing, play it. If you don’t want to play it, then maybe take a look at some writings from actual queer women who could talk about its subject matter in a way I never possibly could.

The Quiet Man

The Quiet Man is a terrible game. When I first saw the trailer during Suare Enix's E3 presentation, I was super interested. I've always wanted a game that transitions from FMV to gameplay with as few seams as possible, and The Quiet Man promised that. Not only that, it promised a compelling story told from the perspective of its' deaf protagonist. The way I saw it, this game would either accomplish what it set out to do, or fail miserably. Either way, it was a win/win scenario for me! Little did I know just HOW miserably it would fail.... Oooooh, how miserably it failed... The gameplay is absolute trash, the graphics leave much to be desired which makes the "seamless" transitions from FMV look unconvincing and bad, the story is needlessly complicated despite how generic it is, the acting ranges from decent to awful, and it requires you to play it twice in order to actually understand what's happening. And all of those problems are the LEAST offensive parts of the game. It's racist, misogynistic, somehow ableist against more than just deaf people, semi-incestual, and also kind of pro-abuse??? I mean, it doesn't take a stance to be anti-abuse, and certainly doesn't condemn abuse, so does that make it pro? Maybe? Probably? I have a headache. I've watched this entire 2-4 hour game be played 10 or 11 times, and I still don't understand how this exists. Square-Enix published this. They dropped Hitman and IO Interactive not even one year ago, yet threw money at this horrible abomination of a video game! Oh by the way, you might be wondering why I said you have to play it twice to understand, and that's because the first playthrough doesn't give you any sound. Yup, aside from the intro cutscene and the credits song, the entire games' audio is just muffled ambiance. This includes all of it's cutscenes, of which there are MANY, and they are LONG. Entire MINUTES of dialogue happening at a time that the game just doesn't want you to hear or have subtitles for. The only way to get audio is to beat the game once and replay it. Not only that, but the New Game + with sound and subtitles didn't even get patched in until a week after it's release!!! Who does that!!!!! And the version with audio has some ATROCIOUS writing. Just about every scene has at least one line of dialogue that makes no sense, almost as if the writers were only told about how humans speak, but never actually heard one themselves. I’ve heard a lot of people saying it’s The Room of video games, and I sort of agree. Much like The Room, it’s not the absolute worst of it’s form of media, the game is playable start-to-finish, extremely straight forward so you can’t get lost, no bizarre puzzles to figure out, the FMV cutscenes are at decently produced. Hell, I wouldn’t even say The Quiet Man is the worst game to come out THIS YEAR. Crying Is Not Enough released in June, and boy oh boy is that game a trash fire. But it’s just BAFFLING that this game exists. That’s the perfect word to summarize my feelings on The Quiet Man. Every single thing about it is just, baffling. I need to stop writing about this game. This whole paragraph is probably going to be longer than anything from my Top 10, which feature a few games I ADORE, but no. All my writing energy is going to how terrible this fucking video game is. Don't play The Quiet Man. Or do, fuck if I care. Maybe watch someone else play it, I don't know. I don't know anything anymore.

Ori and the Blind Forest

Back on the topic of good games, I finally got around to playing Ori and the Blind Forest! I played it for a little while after it originally came out around 2015, but it just didn’t stick with me at the time. There wasn’t any real reason why it didn’t stick, I just got bored and stopped playing, which isn’t that uncommon for me to do. But for whatever reason I decided to go back to it super late last year. It may have been the excitement for all the cool looking Metroidvanias slated to release throughout the year, I don’t know. But I played through it, and it’s fantastic! Most Metroidvanias tend to go with around a 60-40 split between platforming and combat. Different games have different splits, sure, but most of them tend to keep those somewhat even. Ori is like an 85-15, greatly favoring tight platforming over fighting enemies. Your main attack automatically locks on to nearest enemies, and boss fights are replaced with autoscrolling or stealth segments. The traversal is also super smooth and fun, making that 85-15 split much more favorable than others in its’ genre. Great controls combined with some amazing visuals and music, Ori is definitely a game I regret not playing earlier.

2019′S COMING IN HOT

Spelunky 2, Wargroove, Indivisible, Hypnospace Outlaw, Ooblets, UFO 50, Kingdom Hearts 3, Overland, Sea of Solitude, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, and  Get in the Car, Loser!. These are all great looking games that are supposed to be coming out in 2019. I remember last December when I last did this, I couldn't think of THAT many games I was really excited for, and despite that I ended up with a pretty damn good list of games for 2018. So who knows what next year will be like?!

And now... The Top 10!

#10: Spider-Man

It’s been a great year for Spider-Man. His best buddy Venom had a pretty good movie, his new video game is good, and he has a new movie that’s fantastic! Yep, it’s been such a good year for Spider-Man in which nothing bad has happened to him or the people who created him.

#9: Megaman 11

2 > 4 > 3 > 8 > 11 > 7 > 5 > 6 > 9 > 10 > 1. Don’t @ me.

#8: Iconoclasts

Iconoclasts has been in development for a very long time. Officially, development for it began in around 2010, but there is a seemingly earlier game by Konjak that shares many similarities. Basically, Iconoclasts began development at least 8 years ago, and it shows, for better or worse. On one hand, the game is gorgeous. Grade A sprite work all around. The characters are interesting and well written with their own morales and arcs, and the story is surprisingly deep and compelling considering the type of game it is. On the other hand, the gameplay feels very outdated now. The combat is super simplistic, the puzzles aren't terribly challenging or rewarding, and the weapon/ability upgrades are very limited. The traversal can be sluggish and boring, which is a red flag for a game where you have to backtrack a decent amount. If Iconoclasts came out 4 or 5 years ago, I feel like it would've been at least a cult classic. But in 2018, it's a decent Metroidvania in a year of great Metroidvanias. Overall, I'm glad Iconoclasts finally came out. I just wish it either came out sooner, or got more updated for modern game design.

#7: Slay the Spire

For all intents and purposes, I shouldn't like Slay the Spire. I always hated card-based RPGs, and always hated RPGs with only one party member. And for the most part, the issues I have with both of those are still very much present in Spire. So why have I sunk 50 hours into it so far? Beats me! If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the similarities it shares to Darkest Dungeon, one of my favorite games, that ultimately drives me to it. Now, you might be asking why Slay the Spire, a game that came out in 2017, and won’t be in 1.0 until probably 2019, is in my top 10 for this year, but Ori & the Blind Forest isn’t? Well, I started Ori last year, and didn’t start Spire until the middle of this year! Also, they’re my awards, and I can do whatever I want!

#6: Just Shapes & Beats

Just Shapes & Beats’ concept is simple: A rhythm bullet hell. Certainly not the first of it’s kind, and not even the first one to use simplistic shapes as the obstacles/characters. But there’s a bit more to it than that. JS&B has some good personality to go with it. It has some fun characters, all of the levels are demonstrative of the areas you’re in on the world map, it even has a couple lightly emotional moments! It’s much more than you’d expect from a game about Just Shapes & Beats. When I was younger and had vague dreams to make games, I always imagined making one that was basically “What if a Windows Visualizer was trying to kill you?” and also be themed around a world and a story, and JS&B is basically that.

#5: Pipe Push Paradise

What happens when you take Pipe Dream, an iconic puzzler which has given inspiration to countless others, and mix it with Stephen's Sausage Roll, arguably one of the greatest puzzle games of all time? You get Pipe Push Paradise, of course! That’s all I really have to say, and all I NEED to say.

#4: Dead Cells

Go play Dead Cells. Really, it’s the closest thing to a perfect Rogue-like (that isn’t Spelunky) out there right now. It’s a game so good, Filip Miucin couldn’t look away from it long enough to write his own review!

#3: Subnautica

If I had the opportunity to become a Fishman and live underwater, I’d probably take it. As long as you take out the jellyfish that can kill you .0001 seconds after stinging you, I have no qualms with open water. In fact, the isolated feeling from it is really relaxing to me. That’s what initially drew me to Subnautica. Survival games are usually hit or miss for me, but the ones I like I really dive deep into (Heh heh), and Subnautica is one of those. Also, I was rewatching the Super Mario Bros. Super Show on Netflix as I played this, so now I’ll have those two permanently linked in my mind from now on.

#2: Into The Breach

I love tactics games, especially Advance Wars. While I do still love others in the genre like Fire Emblem or X-COM, there are some intricacies of the AW series that most of the others don't have. When I first heard about Into The Breach, I thought it would be exactly what I wanted, a true successor to the series I'd been waiting for. And it was not! But it's still pretty damn good. It's not so much a tactics game as it is a puzzle game, described by Waypoint's own Austin Walker as a "tactical dance". You know at the start of each turn where each enemy is going to attack, and it's your job to navigate and attack with your 3 mech units in the exact right way to minimize or even straight up prevent any damage that would befall you or the cities you're protecting. You aren't trying to advance a map during combat, or conquer any enemy bases. You are merely trying to avoid damage for a certain amount of turns and move on to the next level. And it's all super fun! I've let the game sit for 10, 20 minutes while I try and figure out every possible option I have after being backed into a corner, and coming up with the absolute perfect solution and getting through to the other side is super satisfying. The biggest gripe I have with Into The Breach is the same one I had for FTL, the developer's last game, which is I don't think the unlockable mechs/mech teams are as fun as the default ones. I played most of them once or twice and went "Yeah, that's a thing" and migrate back to the first mech team. All in all, Into The Breach is a fantastic game, it just doesn't scratch that Advance Wars itch I've been feeling. Oh well, at least there's still Wargroove!

#1: Celeste

Celeste is a game I got 100% completion in. For those of you who might not know me well enough to know how I play games, that’s something that never happens. I think the last time I purposely got 100% on a game was in Uncharted 2, and even that was only to get a skin for multiplayer. Despite that, it’s been really difficult for me to write up a whole thing about why I love Celeste so much. It’s just a compilation of everything. I love the look of it, both the sprite work and the character portraits. The music, as mentioned before, is fantastic and perfectly fitting for all of the levels themes which deal in different forms of anxiety or self-doubt. The levels are hard, but not too hard. The secrets hidden throughout the game are so satisfying to figure out and find, very reminiscent of Braid. I feel confident in saying that Celeste has cemented itself as one of my favorite games of all time.

Well, that’s all I can handle writing for this year. Thanks to the few of you who skimmed through all this, and extra thanks to the fewer of you who read all of it! I’m not 100% sure if I’ll do this whole shpeel next year or not; maybe if 2019 turns out to be an incredible year for games, and definitely not if I have to move to Twitter in the off-chance Tumblr dies out completely. Hope you all had a fun holiday season, and have a great 2019! 

[persona-play-q]

Introductions in Order

We begin our journey with quite the unusual scene.

Morgana: "...y" Morgana: "Hey! Wake up!"

Morgana. Waking Joker up, rather than telling him to go to bed.

This must be some sort of elseworld or something.

Also, WHAT IN THE UNHOLY NAME OF SATANAEL IS WRONG WITH MONA’S MODEL HERE JEZUS--

Morgana: "So you're finally up. You do know class has been over for quite a while, right?"

Ren: >"What was that cinema...?" >"What was that butterfly...?"

“W-Wait, he actually saw that butterfly? I kind of assume it was just part of the intro...”

“Those butterflies... Whenever they appear, it means something special is about to happen.”

“Yeah... Like a call for help...”

“...*cough* That is... not the inherent, intended meaning of the Butterfly...”

“...A herald of the Master above even our Master, the blue Butterfly is a symbol of human fate and its potential.”

“So, we’re watching a flick about... potential...? Huh?”

“......”

>Yosuke doesn’t even attempt to comprehend and just stuffs a hand of popcorn in his mouth. He’s seen too much to still be baffled.

Morgana: "Butterfly...? What are you talking about?"

Morgana: "Hey now, get a grip. Did you have a strange dream or something?"

Morgana: "Anyway, now that you're awake, let's go home. We still have to decide what you're going to do today." 

Ren: >Right, let's do that. >I'm still sleepy .

Jesus, Joker, what are you, Makoto Yuuki??

In any case, Morgana acts supportive of our exhaustion, given how this is before the Casino dungeon and he gets everything has been a bit much lately. He tells Ren that he’s got his back. D’aww~ 

In front of the school...

Ryuji: "Finally, class is over! That sure was hell..."

Ryuji: *yawn* 

Ryuji’s animations are adorable.

Ryuji claims he hasn’t been able to sleep lately because their Phantom Thief work has kept him so excited. He says that’s probably why he keeps falling asleep in class. However, a certain cat thinks otherwise.

Morgana: "Um, haven't you ALWAYS been napping in class, Ryuji?"

Ryuji tells him to shuddup. 

Ryuji: "We still got plenty of time till our next deadline, but how about we go gather at the hideout?"

Ren: >”Let's meet up.” >”Should we, though?” >”Let's go have Ramen first.”

I really could go for some Ramen.

Ryuji: "Whoa, you sure are taking it easy... Oh, whatever! I want some Ramen too."

Morgana: "Hey, you guys, it's still too early to think about dinner. Let's go to the hideout first."

First my nighttime slots, now my food. Will Morgana ever stop taking the things I love??

Haru: "Oh, it's you two!"

Ryuji: "Hey, nice timing! We were just talking about going to the hideout."

Haru: "Good, I happen to have some after-school time to spare today. The situation at our company has calmed considerably by now."

Ryuji sends texts for everyone to come in.Everyone replies in 2 seconds flat

Ryuji stares at his phone.

They are all going to Leblanc.

Morgana: "Alright! Then we're unanimous: Today we shall conquer another section of Mementos!"

Not if destiny has a word to put in, Mona.

Futaba: “Roger that! I will put my all into navigating.”

After best girl appears, she gets an intro screen. Everyone does.

FUTABA SAKURA. The adopted daughter of the owner of your current residence. Was a Hikikomori when you first met her. Has genius hacking skills. Her code name within the Phantom Thieves is “Oracle”.

It actually says “Navi”, but for the sake of consistency with the localization, I’ll go with “Oracle”.

“Oh, we’re all getting intros? That’s convenient.”

“Yeah, it’s really going to save time on introductions.”

HARU OKUMURA. A 3rd year at Shujin Academy and thus your Senpai. The heiress of her father’s large company, “Okumura Food”. In some ways, she is rather naive towards the world. Her Code Name is “Noir”.

ANN TAKAMAKI. A 2nd year and your classmate. A 1/4 American girl, with a bright, caring personality. Sometimes works part time as a magazine model. Her Code Name is Panther.

Ann: "Hey, Makoto. I don't mind going to Mementos today, but do you think it's okay to not tackle the Palace yet...?"

Makoto: "Don't worry. Honing our skills first is important. The next one is one battle we can't lose."

It’s nice to have it referenced how important that upcoming dungeon was to Makoto.

“...I remember that day. That was when we gathered at the Hide Out to take Akechi into Mementos for the first time.”

“Why are we seeing that though? I don’t remember anything special happening back then. We fought some Shadows and that was it.”

“...Akechi?”

> Naoto listens up.

“Goro Akechi? You knew him...?”

“Ah... Now, that’s gonna take some explaining...”

“It’s gonna be easier to just let them see. I have a feeling it is coming up anyway.”

MAKOTO NIIJIMA. A 3rd year and your Senpai. An accomplished Student Council President of high moral standards. Occasionally also shows a less restrained side.  Her Code Name is “Queen”. 

YUSUKE KITAGAWA. A second year at Kousei High, where he studies Art. Has promising potential as an artist. Rather eccentric and emotional, he seems to live in his own little world. His Code Name is “Fox”.

MORGANA. A mysterious cat you met in the Metaverse. Transforms from a normal cat into a bizarre mascot. Can also transform into a car. His Code Name is “Mona”.

“... ‘Mona’.” 

> Yosuke squints. 

“Everyone got themselves badass Code Names, and you went for... Mona.”

“J-Just so you know, I object to EVERYTHING in that description!”

“Ah, so you CAN’T transform into a kitty-car! Geez, and bear I was confused about how that would go!”

“...ALMOST everything!”

“... Come to think, you guys are pretty unfazed by the fact that Mona-chan can talk...”

“We have Teddie. We’re beyond surprising.”

“And I’d say at this point, Teddie is only the tip of the proverbial ice berg.”

“It’s actually kind of surprising that there’s something that similar to Morgana out there. I always kind of thought he was one of a kind.”

“I-I AM one of a kind, Lady Ann! You should know that!”

“Yeah! And so am I by the way, Ann-chan~!”

“...Don’t call her that...!”

> Angry cat hissing noises.

Ryuji: “Well, doesn’t matter if Palace or Mementos, we just gotta do it to it!”

 The model looks better from this angle. 

RYUJI SAKAMOTO. A 2nd year. Used to be Star of the Track Team. Passionately hot-blooded and immature. His impulsiveness sometimes gets him into trouble. His Code Name is “Skull”.  

Ryuji: "By the way, where's that guy? This would be our first time taking him to Mementos, too..."

Ryuji: "I mean, it'd be a shame if we had to just 'forget' about him..."

Akechi: Sorry to make you wait.”

Ryuji: “Ugh.”

Futaba: “Speak of the devil.”

“That’s...”

“Goro Akechi. I did hear that he had infiltrated the ranks of the Phantom Thieves for a while during the mission that lead to the temporary capture of their leader.”

“I see... I wasn’t allowed access to the files regarding the case, so I had no idea.” 

GORO AKECHI. A third year student. A high school aged private detective. His sharp sense for deduction and reasoning, as well as his looks have earned him a lot of fame. He is also called “The second coming of the Detective Prince”. His Code Name is “Crow”.

“Whoaaaaa! What a Bishie! He’s almost up there with me on the pretty-boy scale...!!”

“Yeah, that is one thing he had going for him...”

“ Mitsuru-san, if I may ask...”

“Of course. Once we’re done here, I will give you a complete copy of the case file, Shirogane.”

“Thank you. This is all very interesting...”

“Infiltration, huh...? Yeah, that’s the right word for it...”

“Not like we fell for it, of course. But we did need to play along with him for just a while. Else we wouldn’t have been able to put an end to his games.”

“His ‘games’, huh...”

> Yosuke already doesn’t like the guy. 

> Your Code Name is “Joker”. You are the Leader of the Phantom Thieves.

“I thought I felt something ‘Senpai’-ish from that guy...”

“Yeah, that guy does feel special... He may have the same power as Sensei and Ai-chan!”

“The power of the ‘Wild Card’...”

“...”

>Marie looks up, seemingly slightly disinterested. 

“I don’t know what you mean. Yu is Yu. There’s only one of him.”

“That may be. But even so, it is surprising, to see that there is such a number of Persona Users who share the same powers as...”

“...”

“In any case. It will be interesting to see how this, as they say ‘plays out’.”

After this scene, the Phantom Thieves head out for Mementos. There’s a badass cutscene which shall be shared.