#themes are at odds but the narrative mechanics have core similarities

[wasabi-gumdrop]

the elden ring dlc story trailer just dropped so just letting you guys know that i’m gonna find a way to integrate elden ring lore into dunmeshi somehow because i need both stories like i need air to breathe

[sendmyresignation]

You Got Blood On Your Money

Question: how do you make honest art? Is this not the eternal conflict as a creator- how to stay genuine to yourself and your art without tripping into the pitfalls that lay within fame or money or popular culture? Every creator must grapple with the fight between being seen and being sold. But very few artists struggle with this quite as visibly as My Chemical Romance has. From the inception of this band, which has always been more art project than musical endeavor, its members have tried desperately to convey a bone-deep sincerity fundamental to their work. From their very first song, the band proclaims itself as a savior to a generation that had been stripped of their will in the face of unimaginable horror. At the same time, there exists within their music a commitment to storytelling, a desire to fill the empty space in rock music with narrative and macabre and emotion that had been absent. Both of these elements manifest themselves into a band that very seriously considered it their mission to save people’s lives, as well as to create deeply meaningful art. But how do you save as many people as possible without being corrupted by the spotlight? And how do maintain genuine storytelling as you get further and further from the basement shows you got your started in?

These are questions that permeate their music at every turn, something that haunted each album and made itself known in each new project. And while there are many ways to dissect this particular struggle in their discography, nowhere is it more apparent than in the dispute between Thank You For the Venom and its reimagined successor- Tomorrow’s Money. These songs are noticeably similar in their structure as well as lyricism and imagery but instead of the latter building off of the other, they are inverses of each other. And they speak to My Chem’s long battle with becoming a legendary band in the midst of also attempting to keep their identities as artists and outsiders. And in analyzing their differences, it becomes reflective of the band’s main career-long conflict between the commodification of their art and the need to create something larger than themselves. And the question remains, were they successful?

Before we answer that, let's talk about Thank You for the Venom. To begin, it's important to note that Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge is an interesting part of My Chemical Romance’s discography because ultimately, it is unconcerned with legacy, but instead is centered on the immediacy of loss and the reactionary pursuit of revenge. In a record overwhelmed with death and grief, there is very little mention of the afterlife for either the living or the dead- characters are murdered but there is very little textual violence. Characters come back to life but there is minimal discussion of how they died or where exactly they were in death. However, that does not mean Revenge is not devoid of mythologizing- it just happens to be about immediate intention rather than a long-term commitment. It is because of this reckless drive forward almost to spite the odds that allows for Venom to exist as the band's declaration- it is their call to arms. Specifically, the track is a pronouncement of My Chemical Romance as renegades fighting against the fake, safe bands writing hits for money instead of survival or purpose: they “won’t front the scene” if you paid them, after all, but are instead running from their enemies. And not only are they an oppositional force, but they are pariahs, targets- something you can try to kill but will fail at. More specifically, in “If this is what you want the fire at will” there is an element of martyrdom, the idea that they are not just a necessary part of the very structure of society but also there is the implication that killing them is to concede to their influence and a necessary part of their lifecycle. Once you get big enough to become a target, you inevitably will be shot down- that is the final step of a great and honest band’s success. This also feeds into the album's wider ideas surrounding revenge as a concept as the greatest revenge is finding success in the aspects of yourself and, by extension, the things you create that other people thought were worthless (I don't think it's a coincidence so much of this album is steeped in comic book imagery and art and mixing punk and metal and theater when those are things the band would get shit on for enjoying). At the same time, this theme exists as the foundation necessary to create an anthem of survival- revenge is the fuel that keeps the protagonist, as well as the band, in motion. Look at the specifics of their thesis- “Just the way the doctor made me” and “You’ll never make me leave” are both reconciliations with the self in spite of the prevailing narrative against them. That connects to the way this song is a statement of a savior and a martyr twofold- “Give me all your hopeless hearts and make me ill” as a representation of the band taking on the pain of others to keep them both alive. All told, in Venom there is perseverance in the face of a large, unimaginable adversary. It is a threat directed at your enemies. It’s living as free and ugly and completely yourself as you can until they shoot you down in a hail of bullets. And then even that end is itself a victory.

Here, at its core, Venom is really the singular instance in the entire album where the band reconciles with an image. And the image the band creates for themselves is as outcasts in opposition to the "scene" and as a revenge plot, proving to their audience the value of authenticity and survival and rubbing it in the faces of those who doubted them. These themes about what My Chemical Romance is and what their goals are is something they wrestle with for the rest of their career- how do you say lives, reach an audience, and remain a fighting force against the societal norm when you exceed your mission and become part of the fabric of popular culture? But that is for later, at this moment, Revenge imagines no future. Only this desperate battlecry.

By contrast, Tomorrow’s Money is dealing with the aftermath. Functioning as a cynical reimagining of Venom, the song is structurally, thematically, and even lyrically reminiscent of Venom to an uncanny degree. First and foremost, the songs are structured the same- a slow build-up into a whispered intro, a multi-part chorus, the exact same chorus-verse layout, and a strikingly similar solo. Looking at the two Toro solos more closely, they both feature more building up as well as tremolos, triples, darker tones, and what sounds like a slide progression just ripping through both of them. Tomorrow’s Money is mimicking Venom pretty clearly here- either as a direct reference or because Venom is so reminiscent of the condensed MCR sound that they’re ripping off to make their point. And looking deeper at the themes present in Money specifically, just like Revenge, there is a clear lack of legacy- “we got no heroes ‘cause our heroes are dead” calling back to the very real disillusionment of Disenchanted that’s placed specifically in a song about becoming part of the machine, being heroes themselves, to nod to the fact that the very mission of the band is dead as well.

Simply put, Money tackles similar issues as Venom about fame and audience and creating art while using much of the same language and metaphors to completely invert the claims found in the “original”. To start with, both songs use the verbage “bleeding” to associate with a kind of suffering for your art that was an aspect of their previous band ideology. Namely, it’s the idea that the audience makes the band ill through the “hopeless hearts” as much as the “poison” does. The “what’s life like bleeding on the floor” of Venom is paired with “you’ll never make me leave” is a statement of defiance and survival against the odds while still bearing the burden of other’s pain. Money, on the other hand, explicitly says they “stopped bleeding three years ago” as a rejection of this leftover martyrdom prevalent in Revenge especially.  But it also refers to their newfound luxury of comfort, they have a way to stitch themselves together that they didn’t have before. These implications transition directly into the ideas surrounding health, vitality and living- specifically surrounding both doctors and infection. Speaking of the former, Money has an interesting lines in “If we crash this time, we’ve got machines to keep us alive” and "me and my surgeons and my street-walking friends" because they speak to both becoming a part of the “industry” by mentioning mechanization but also specifically evokes the living dead. In the MCR canon, the idea of the undead (both vampires and zombies) are antagonistic forces that represent the outside world, specifically fake people or the music industry. And zombies, in general, are already rife with allegorical connections to consumerism, like how Dawn of the Dead, a known mcr influence, is directly about materialistic culture. Vampires, subconsciously or not, are often representatives of exuberant wealth as well as beauty and desire. They’re also blood-suckers and leeches that someone in this narrative has fallen in love with, as if colluding with the enemy and allowing them to literally drain them and their life force. Thus, in describing themselves as essentially undead (when they crash, they’re revived) as well as directly collaborating with the undead, they are connecting themselves to the very forces they’ve been fighting. But perhaps the most interesting aspect of this association is how they specifically relate it to survival, the only way of staying alive is to accept them, to allow themselves to be hooked up to the machines that make them undead in the first place. Almost as if you make it far enough not to tear yourself apart, you’ll eventually assimilate into and become part of the industry. 

This idea of unavoidable assimilation is compounded with the multiple references to viruses- “You're loaded up with the fame. You’re dressed up like a virus” then being reemphasised with “We’re gonna give it for free. Hook up the veins to the antibodies, got it with the disease, we’re gonna give it to you”. Both these lines condemn fame but also implicates themselves as part of the contagion that is celebritidom at the same time it depicts this process as unavoidable. Not only that, they’re the ones spreading it at the same time they condemn it. This duality, possibly even exaggerated hypocrisy is buried deep into the foundation of Money. Even the ending line, as angry and inflammatory as it is- still names them as complicit as the "I’ll see you in hell" implies that they're going to hell too. Looking even deeper, there are multiple references to the dilution of their message:  “Choke down the words with no meaning” and “The words get lost when we all look the same'' both representing meaninglessness in the lyrics while “the microphone’s got a tapwire” is reminiscent of wiretapping or even the surveillance company Tapewire, suggesting their words are under scrutiny, they are being monitored and that could be one of the reasons for meaningless words. All of these lyrics reference, with subtly or, in the case of the last one, very obviously about the sellibility and how rigid the label of “emo” is and how they couldn't escape it - they may not have gotten paid to front the scene, but they sure did inadvertently lead a cause. And being put in that position was clearly very stifling, striping them of their artistry. Even looking at the response to Black Parade, it's clear that popular culture at large did not appreciate the record for its genuine message but for the moment in time it represented or the aesthetics it called back too. In many ways it was taken at face value- “words with no meaning” or just another dark, death obsessed emo record. What Tomorrow's money is is a rejection of the glorification of suffering and nativity of Venom in the face of becoming pop culture icons but it's also, in a way, reconciling with a perception of failure and loss of creative control that will haunt My Chem for the rest of their years.

Ultimately Tomorrow's Money is representative of the band's response to the gradual shift of My Chemical Romance, as an entity, away from martyrs to an accepted part of the music industry and culture. How do you reconcile with that? In this moment, in a post-Black Parade era, they try taking everything down with them- becoming a whistle blower to their truth. But perhaps most importantly, this conflict lays the foundation for Danger Days as both critique of industry’s commodification of art, as well as the reutilization of the obsession with legacy and death in their next project -no longer can they let the machines revive them, they have to get out of the city, yell incendiary graffiti at the top of their lungs, and explode in brilliant colors. It was time to return to calls to arms. It was time to return to the power of not just of death but of living on long after it, the album the act of becoming folk heroes for a new generation. And while the bright lights didn't last forever, by scrapping Conventional Weapons and starting over in the name of artistic integrity they truly created a legacy of material unrivaled in its sincerity, reach, and cultural significance. 

As we know, the story didn’t end there. The final chapter used to be closed, and ending with "I choose defeat I walk away and leave this place the same today" as the conclusion of their career. This was not the explosion Gerard wrote about, not the doomsday device but a quiet goodbye, a silent curtain call. It's another round of disillusionment finally fully-realized. And yet, the Reunion seems to be a direct contradiction to their farewell- in some way they did come back because they were needed, because their absence was a gaping hole in music at large which suggests they did change things, that they do have a noticeable effect on the world they inhabit. Looking at A Summoning for even a moment, the picture illustrated to the viewer is that they are an otherworldly power. That they are an entity that you plead for the return of, the hero and the savior on clear display. And regardless of how you feel about the postponement, you can never talk away that fact- some force bodily brought them back in their narrative, that it was human interference that started the resurrection. And that it was primarily through art, especially that video, that they declared their forced-to-be unfulfilled intentions. I've always liked to believe that we've cycled back around, that the cynicism of Conventional Weapons and then later Fake Your Death has had its moment but now it's time to return to that world of rebellion in this era of the desert- the reinhabiting of reckless living and creation. Again, we must ask: what does it mean to make art for the masses? I don’t think we’ll ever truly find the right answer, but I think My Chemical Romance have always tried their best to solve the equation.

[schalaasha]

Favourite Games of 2019

I don’t like making ranked lists anymore. So here’s a bunch of games old and new I played in 2019 because I was busy catching up due to not playing FFXIV as much as in previous years.

 Ciconia When They Cry Phase 1: For You, The Replaceable Ones

I think going in, and even starting to play it, I felt like maybe the game would abandon the WTC mystery game conventions. It ended up not doing that, because the game leaves you with far more questions than answers at the end. The A3W World (“after World War III”) is still trying to deal with political issues and social issues that existed prior to World War III. A global stalemate exists due to the military implementation of the Gauntlet weapon. Eventually things happen where different countries need to deal with a shortage of resources, territorial conflicts, etc which sets off a chain reaction to World War IV.  However, the children who grew up in the A3W era, settled into new ideologies and views of how society currently works are at odds with what the older generation wants and requires of them. Along the way, they need to deal with other groups and conspiracies in order to maintain the Walls of Peace.

 So in essence, R07 still crafts a mystery for readers to figure out, but it isn’t a murder mystery. It’s an international conspiracy mystery and I am more than okay with that. I think this chapter required a lot of worldbuilding to set that kind of story up and coming out of Phase 1, I understood why the first chapter wasn’t exactly like Umineko’s. I thought that it was handled well, despite some of the purple prose (but if you’ve played a R07 game before, you’re likely used to it).  I also thought he really tried to introduce and incorporate themes including gender, generational differences, societal tiers, geopolitics disguised as sports events (possibly mirroring the 2020 Olympics in Japan), etc. as well as he could throughout the story through the game’s cast. Even if the game meanders a bit (and it definitely feels that way towards the start), when it actually starts to roll, I felt compelled to keep reading.

 And truly, the game has an incredibly large cast of characters. The TIPS section handles introductions well, and while some cast members don’t have as much time in the spotlight as others, I can see them getting their time eventually in subsequent chapters. Clearly Phase 1 exists to focus more on the children from the Arctic Ocean Union (the “AOU”) as evidenced by the additional stories unlocked at the end of the game so hopefully other chapters have the same amount of character backstory for the other factions.  I also genuinely enjoyed that the big international cast of characters allowed for many different types of designs with characters with different types of hairstyles and hair texture or characters wearing hijabs and still managed to make them retain adorableness or a sense of style. I do not recall seeing it as often in Japanese media and I’m very happy to see it here.

 I think Ciconia Phase 1 is a very good start to this subseries’ planned four episodes and I hope to see more sociopolitical commentary. It feels as though R07 looked at everything happening in Japan and social media/how news is consumed and decided to write a four-part SFF series about it. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next chapter.

  Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

I backed Bloodstained when it got put on Kickstarter a few years ago.  It was shipped to me at… possibly the worst time since Shadowbringers was coming out very shortly after.  My fiancé and I played ours for a short bit, felt very positive about the game, then dropped it to play Shadowbringers.  We didn’t return to it until maybe September/October?  Both of us ended up getting our Platinum Trophies for it so we both played through everything the game had to offer.

 Bloodstained is a good experience, but not without its issues. I played on PS4 and I’ve had a few outright crashes or some glitching into walls early enough that I couldn’t come out of them again due to not having the required skill to try to get out of it.  I also felt like the game meandered or had a bit of padding in its earlier stages). Later on, you realise you have to put in the farming work to have a better and faster time not unlike its Igavania counterparts, but I did feel like the drop rates prior to actually working towards higher luck stats/drop shards were low enough almost to the point of unfair or deliberately wasting my time.  I also felt as though there were too many weapon types; with adequate shard use and shard grinding eventually you can settle into one weapon type that suits your playstyle or eventually use the gun for everything when you get the special hat quest reward).

 However, I’m speaking about this game as someone who platinumed it which requires a lot of farming and synthesis.  As a player going through the main campaign, I think the maps are adequate. The backgrounds are very lovingly crafted, and the music is absolutely one of the best of the year. Boss design is also fun and rewarding, requiring the player to learn how all the different weapon types work, adequate backstepping and closing in, and boss patterns. If you suck, the game will show you that you suck very quickly and deliberately.  Essentially towards the end, I felt as though Bloodstained tried very hard to cater to fans of the metroidvania style of game, and the classicvania style of game. I personally don’t think it completely succeeded but for a first time experience of trying to combine the two into one, it did its job with preparation for another game.  

 I also feel like some criticism was lobbed towards the game’s narrative for being told in library/book entries, and while I understand that (I actually couldn’t open all of the books for fear of my game crashing), I don’t think elaborate cutscenes and continuous dialogue would work well with this game’s flow. Bloodstained prioritizes gameplay elements and player exploration over anything else, and to be honest, I’d rather it happen that way than with long elaborate cutscenes.  I also felt as though I got more out of the game because I’d played the 8-bit prequel as well.

 Overall, Bloodstained is a passable experience. I’m glad I played it, and I’m glad I put the work in to try to make the game a better experience. I got what I wanted out of the game for as much as I backed it and I hope they try again with a similar formula because this is a very good first step.  

  The Touryst

Sometimes when I see a game with voxel graphics, I feel pretty compelled to pick it up because it looks so darn lovingly rendered and it usually ends up being fun.  The Touryst does a good job with its graphical style and visiting new islands is a complete delight because of it. It looks like a game with style, and performs super-well on the Switch. It’s also one of the freshest games I’ve played in a while.

 Basically you’re playing a blocky dude with a moustache who just wants to have a good time but when he gets to TOWA Monument, he’s told he has to find monument cores to unlock the world’s secrets. And then you can do whatever you want. The different islands have their own little personalities: there’s an island called Fijy which is volcanic, there’s Ybiza with a bunch of dudes chilling on the beach and passed out on their chairs, there’s Santoryn which is just Greece, and a few other places that are essentially recreations of real-world places.

 As you explore, there’s a lot of stuff to do. A variety of things to do.  There are puzzles and mechanics that don’t necessarily overstay their welcome, you can play footy, you can play spelunker, you can take helicopter rides, you can take pictures, get stuff for a museum, surf, play rhythm games…. It’s your vacation, do what you want. It’s a little like Vegas. Unlike Vegas, you can use your ever-increasing money and diamonds to get new moves for your moustached character to reach new objects.

 As a little game where you can do whatever you want little by little, and makes for a smooth experience, I’m glad I picked up the Touryst after asking another person what they thought of it. It has great puzzles, lots of stuff to do and explore and see, and ton of minigames for whatever mood you feel like you’re in. The game is fairly short, but I’m very glad the holiday doesn’t overstay its welcome.

  A Short Hike

A Short Hike places you in the shoes of a bird who is utterly determined to walk to the top of Hawk Peak to get signal for her phone.  I totally understand; sometimes you’ve gotta do what you gotta do.  

 But the game allows you to undertake that journey however you want to. You can go right away and finish up and get that darn signal. Or you can take your time and we’ll build that bridge when we get there. There are different types of terrains to explore if you opt to take the scenic route… and it’s rewarding to do so. You can find treasure, you can water a flower, you can talk to the Animal Crossing-esque characters to do some sidequests, you can do whatever you want.

 I’m sorry to say that when the game introduced fishing, I spent a lot of my time doing that. Fishing ruins me. The completionist in me wanted to fish. But the whole thing is that you don’t have to do any of this. If you want to finish the game, you can absolutely positively focus on that and the game doesn’t pressure you for it.  

 And that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s just whatever about the whole ordeal. I don’t feel like I’m completely and utterly missing out if I don’t decide to do something. Even the task of getting Golden Feathers to progress is fine since you only need eight for it, and the game easily gives you enough rewards to get four or five before sidequests or exploration is factored in.

 Sometimes you just need to take a walk and kind of think of nothing just to clear your head. And A Short Hike accomplishes that very well.

  Worldend Syndrome

In my effort to try to find other games to play in 2019 because I’d fallen a little out of love with FFXIV, I realised that taking baby steps with visual novels and bite-sized games would be the best idea to try to get back into traditional games (particularly since I was, and am, still questioning whether I like games as a hobby or not). On a whim, I decided to download a boatload of visual novel demos one night and tried a bunch of them out. Worldend Syndrome’s demo didn’t exactly grab me until perhaps halfway through the demo when I a) realised that this demo was long af, and b) nothing appeared what it had seemed as I kept going through it and the characters were enjoyable.

 So I decided to get the game and dragged my fiancé along for the ride. It’s one of those standard decision-making/pick which girl you want and go down her route VNs but it didn’t really feel skeezy or ecchi other than one particular point in each girl’s story where you get confessed to.  You go through the VN as an unnamed protagonist who is visiting his cousin over the summer, and you and your friends get dragged into a school club whose focus revolves around folklore. The town the protagonist finds himself in is haunted by the Yomibito, spirits of the undead who look exactly like regular people but are eventually driven mad enough to kill.

 One of the things that drew me to this visual novel was its assortment of animated backgrounds. They colourful and gorgeous. Every CG looks nice and coloured well, and the backgrounds for each area you visit are so beautiful and makes every single location easy to settle into.  The cast is also surprisingly decent, where I expected to hate a few people but I ended up being okay with them because they were written well and weren’t as tropey as I had expected.  I was also very pleased that the character that you were roleplaying as wasn’t skeezy when put into situations where he could have been, and that he treated the girls very well (though I won’t deny that there are some spots where behaviour was questionable but it doesn’t happen as often).  Because the characters were written adequately enough, the game’s true ending route comes together very well and very naturally to a point where I could seriously believe that every character got along with one another to make sure the emotional impact of the mystery was satisfying.

 In order to finish Worldend Syndrome, you have to do each route. A few characters’ routes don’t get unlocked until halfway through the game or even until the very end. The game also remembers everything you’ve done when it autosaves the system data on the world map, so if you need to reload a save to figure out someone’s schedule or if you mess up, it’s relatively easy to come back to something you’ve missed. I’ve played a lot of multiple route VNs before and Worldend Syndrome is easily one of the better VNs that allows the player to skip through to something they’ve missed or skip through previously-viewed text for another route.

 As it is, Worldend Syndrome doesn’t really try to do anything spectacular, nor does it try to stand out like other visual novels of 2019 have (ie: Ciconia, presumably AI but I only tried the demo and I hated parts of the script, sorry). It does its job and tells its story which has a very good payoff in the end.

  Judgement

I bought my fiancé Judgement earlier this year, as I had retired from playing Ryu ga Gotoku after Dead Souls/Ishin, and he was still playing the series religiously.  I watched him play through part of it and I felt compelled to get my own copy because the combat looked nice, and the characters were compelling enough that I felt comfortable picking it up.

 Judgement follows former lawyer Takayuki Yagami who is now a detective.  His tale is one of redemption and conspiracies, reminiscent of some Phoenix Wright games (which this game gives clever nods to when the protagonist is in the courtroom). Yagami is more serious and down-to-earth than Kiryu is so the tone of the game feels quite different than other RGG games (or at least the ones I’ve played).

 It still feels like a regular RGG game where you’re still wandering through Kamurocho, you’re still getting into fights with randos and Yakuza dudes, you date girls, you go to buy food, you play minigames, etc. But it isn’t as big as a standard RGG game; because you stay only in the one area, the cast is smaller, you get a job board to get your sidequests from, and the story itself is fairly short and sweet.  I actually prefer that as a lapsed RGG player since it’s easier to get back into the games this way.

 Judgement, however, disappointed me just a little in how little you spend in the courtroom.  You’re given opportunities to present evidence, do some suspect tailing, use your smartphone to catch a cheating husband, or use a drone to search for evidence. I felt like when you had to use the drone to search for evidence, it ruined the pacing a little. The tailing missions are also reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed, and no that isn’t a good thing! Due to this, I felt like Judgement was not necessarily a great detective game but it did a decent job of trying to mold the RGG experience to a different main character.

 Yagami can… fight… for some reason so he can beat up whatever randos come up to him on the streets. He’s actually more acrobatic than I remember Kiryu being in previous RGG games. He can kick off objects, he’s hard to back into a corner, he can do wall-flips, etc. It’s also much easier to earn XP where it’s all in one bar so you can do whatever you want to fill it up like play darts and just put stuff into his lockpicking. As a lapsed fan, the streamlining feels okay. The streamlining for combat also feels good because if you fights go on too long, the popo can come for you and you’d get fined, so emphasis is on finishing fights cleanly and quickly.

 Overall, as a lapsed RGG fan, the way Judgement looks and feels and wraps up its twists and turns was really exciting for me. It may not have as many things to do as other RGG games, but honestly I think being a leaner experience was better and thus didn’t make the game overstay its welcome.  I also am eagerly awaiting RGG7 since I enjoyed the demo a lot and I think the new protagonist can carry the series the way Yagami carried Judgement.

  Cadence of Hyrule

Sometimes, after my fiancé and I bought our Switch, I’d wake up, go brush my teeth, and return to bed just to see my fiancé awake and playing Cadence of Hyrule. I was perplexed as it’s been ages since he’d willingly played a Zelda game, and his hands are super-huge for the joycons so he doesn’t like using them much.

 You can easily say that Cadence of Hyrule is just a Crypt of the Necrodancer reskin with Zelda stuff all over it, but feels pretty clever in that it uses stuff from roguelikes and a rhythm game and makes the A Link to the Past world feel incredibly fresh. Bosses, especially, feel very fresh. Enemies move according to the rhythm and have a unique pattern that’s easily memorized so you can fall into the rhythm and take advantage of. If you’ve played Necrodancer, you’ll probably feel at home in this aspect, especially since the maps are also randomised (which leads different playthroughs feeling fresh).

 The Zelda feels comes from recreating tunes from older Zelda games in puzzles, the magnificent sprite art, the great Zelda remixes, a simple-enough story, and a standard set of things to find in each procedurally generated dungeon. You also find a variety of traditional items like the bow, the bombs, boomerang… and a spear? It’s a nice blend of Zelda and Necrodancer.

 The caveat is that it takes a little getting used to, since you’re not exactly used to not being able to freely move in a Zelda game. But when you do get used to it, it feels good. Everything is pretty expendable and if you die, you don’t feel like you necessarily lose a lot since you can accrue it all easily enough again. It’s unpredictable and that random roguelike nature is something that makes the Zelda experience feel fresh.

  Spirit Hunter: Death Mark

My fiancé and I were trying to find spooky games to play for Halloween that wouldn’t make me squeamish because despite my profession dealing with analysis of body parts and human body fluids, I can’t see that kind of stuff on TV or in games in a realistic sense. It grosses me out. At least when it’s in front of me, it’s already out and off someone’s body and in a fume hood/biosafety cabinet and I didn’t have to see how it happened. My fiancé picked up Spirit Hunter: Death Mark on a sale we went through it together.

 Death Mark is a tale about horror-themed urban legends and a curse that needs to be broken.  People get marked with a crimson bite mark in the game’s H City and they eventually develop amnesia and die. A group of people live and gather at a spirit medium’s mansion (who is dead upon arrival).  The only hint to break the curse in this mansion is a little talking doll named Mary. The protagonist eventually goes through several mysteries in an effort to break his curse and stop others from dying.

 Death Mark does some surprisingly well-crafted worldbuilding. Each spirit you deal with has a well-told backstory, sometimes especially ghoulish (particularly the bonus post-game episode, the first episode, and the one episode with the telephone booth). The game excels with psychological horror and the enemies involved in each boss battle assist in making the player feel that way as well. The backgrounds also lend well to this as while they are simplistic, the shading and colours used help to execute a sense of dread. One particular chapter harkens back to Japan’s Aokigahara, and the backgrounds used connect very well to that particular location so that it feels super-eerie.

 Regardless, Death Mark relies a lot on its text to establish its atmosphere and as someone who reads stuff like R07 VNs and other regular VNs with a lot of text, I was okay with that. The localization was well-done, albeit with some issues that would have been caught in editing but overall it carried the story very well.

 There are boss battles prior to the end of each chapter, where you must use each item you find in your exploration segments. You need to use specific items in a specific order (even with the correct party setup) in order to achieve a good ending for that particular chapter (and thus eventually the game). I thought this was an interesting mechanic and while it got a little tired depending on the spirit, it showcased how creepy some of them can be on your screen.

 Unfortunately, Death Mark does not have a variety for its soundtrack and it’s almost disappointing that the same piano tunes and boss themes played repeatedly as I felt it detracted from the experience.

 Otherwise, I felt like Death Mark was a short and sweet horror experience that played into urban legends and folklore experiences. I loved the little vignettes that eventually ramped up to a central story point. I hope the sequel is good when we get around to it.

  Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice

So my fiancé and I are doing this thing where we’ve started buying one copy of a game so we’d both own it together and go through it together. Sekiro and Man of Medan were two of those games this year.

 Sekiro isn’t really like Souls. Eventually you’ll come to learn that very quickly when the game throws a boss at you and if you try to play like Souls, you’re not going to get the job done.  It will show you that you never learned how to parry properly and you’re going to have to go back and learn it.  Or if you didn’t grab a prosthetic that will make the job easier, you’re gonna have to do that too.

 The game is interesting in that you aren’t exactly whittling down health bars all the time; you’re striking properly so you can overwhelm their posture bars, find an opening, and go in for the kill. Enemy health bars are essentially secondary to that posture bar. You have your own posture bar so you’ve got to learn how to parry properly. Sometimes you need to parry complete combos in order to deliver posture damage back to an enemy. It’s all about getting into the flow and rhythm of combat. And you must beat bosses in order for you to get a stat boost, so being able to beat a boss lies in your skill, and not necessarily your level/equipment.

 Sekiro is Souls-like in its storytelling and worldbuilding. You can run around rooftops and areas to find secrets off the beaten path. You go back and forth between areas and speak to different NPCs to find out their backstories. The plot is also told via NPC conversations with the main characters. At first it’s a little dry but the story opens up eventually. It also has some great voiced NPCs for quests (one quest in particular had voicework that made me feel so sorry for the character that I was like “we need to get the proper item for this guy please don’t make him suffer”).

 It feels rewarding to put in the work in order to beat the bosses, make it so you don’t resurrect as often to make people sick, and meet whatever standard Sekiro is throwing at you. It lets the player know that they’ve met that standard, and then throws another boss phase at them so you have to get even better.

 Owl I’m looking at you.

  Super Kirby Clash

My fiancé and I bought a Switch together this year (which, outside of dinner and movies and clothes, etc. was one of our major purchases together).  We downloaded a few demos to try the control scheme out, including Super Kirby Clash.  I am aware that this game is probably old, but hey it’s still going and it’s still being supported and I’m catching up.

 I’m probably putting it here due to bias, but I think It’s really cute and the hats are super-adorable. I love getting new hats and new weapons for my little Kirby.  It’s fairly standard as far as a “mobile experience” is concerned and playing it a little when I have the time to and hacking away at it little by little is rewarding when I get a new hat or new gear. My fiancé and I played it in multiplayer as well, which felt a lot like Kirby’s Return to Dream Land.

 It’s pretty inoffensive and I haven’t paid real-life money for anything in it, and I still feel like I’m progressing. So as a Kirby game with light RPG elements (ie: something I’ve wanted for years and years), it’s nice to finally see realised.

 Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom

An artist I commission very often from convinced me to move this game further up in queue than I originally had it when we were talking about games we were playing after finishing Shadowbringers’ main campaign.  

 Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is the spiritual successor inspired by Wonder Boy III, with the formula being modernized for a new era. It feels fast, and it looks soooooooo pretty. The tracks are bumpin’ too. It’s also a little tough but with every difficult section successfully platformed through, you feel really good about it.

 You play as a plucky boy named Jin whose uncle is an insano who turns everyone in the kingdom into animals. After you experience sweet freedom as a human boy platforming across things easily for like 15 minutes, Jin’s uncle turns him into a pig. Whoops. From there the platforming gets a little harder and you need to learn how to manipulate different forms and different spells in order to get across various sections.

 Different animal forms give you different skills. Pig form allows you to sniff out secrets literally, snake form lets you cling to walls and go through tiny passages, frog has a sticky tongue for swinging, and lion form lets you go through obstacles. You need to use these forms well to platform well enough to get through each area and finish the game. Being successful at platforming in this game feels good and fulfilling and satisfying. As you unlock more, platforming experiences get more and more complex with more obstacles put in your way, so in essence it feels like the opposite of a standard metroidvania.  Playing both Bloodstained and this in one year felt like playing polar opposites. That said, the checkpointing in Monster Boy is really good. Game Atelier knew what they were doing.

 The bosses by contrast were really easy and it’s nice to take the time to look at the art for each boss. All of the effects are also super-nice. Playing Monster Boy on a 4K TV is quite a visual treat for its boss sections, its town section, and its platforming sections. The colours are off-the-charts. Each animal sprite has its own set of unique animations: the piggy farts and looks like >_>, froggy looking at flies, etc. And the music is so good. If this game were a 2019 game I’d definitely put its soundtrack on my list, but it isn’t. It’s a nice blend of new and old stuff and it’s a delight to hear in-context as encouragement to keep going when you fail a platforming section.

 Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a faithful representation and homage of the old Wonder Boy games. It’s filled with references and secrets and awesome art, and I’m glad to have been convinced to move it up my queue for this year.

  Most Disappointing Game: Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers

I love Final Fantasy XIV. It’s brought me closer to so many people in recent years and I’ve met so many more through it. Playing this game means so much to me and I want the best for it for years to come.  It’s one of the reasons why I’m so critical about it. If I hated this game, I would stop playing and honestly, I wouldn’t care about its future.  I will say this before getting started:  I like Shadowbringers’ story so far (we aren’t going to be finished with its story until 5.3).  I don’t think It’s necessarily as consistent as Heavensward, but I think Shadowbringers’ story is the most Final Fantasy story we’ve gotten since perhaps FF10. Truly, it’s the best we’ve seen for the series this decade.  

 I had a lot of hopes and hype for Shadowbringers.  I hated Stormblood, for a myriad of reasons: social reasons, gameplay reasons, and narrative reasons.  The direction Shadowbringers was going and all the trailers made it seem like it was going to be fresh and exciting and new.  My fiancé and I (and a few others) swapped servers+data centers in advance of the expansion for a fresh start, to boot. I watched the Job Actions trailer over and over and tried to decide what I was going to eventually main and gear up because I didn’t really have a main in Stormblood due to the combat changes and how easy things became for certain things.

 During a live letter, they mentioned that they’re changing how things work in battle, and that’s when I became a little cautious. I was hoping for the best leading up to release and then I saw the scholar/healer changes and got very worried.  I changed mains in Stormblood because playing Scholar was freaking horrible at the start of Stormblood.  

 I eventually had to change mains at the start of Shadowbringers because I was not having fun playing Scholar. For people who didn’t bother to level a healer at all, the writing was on the wall for healers during Stormblood. Essentially, it introduced an age of healing where you barely ever used your GCDs to heal. You mostly used OGCDs and preplanned shields. 90% of the time if you wanted to be a good healer, you’d mostly DPS. I don’t think I’ve cast a GCD heal at all in SB and ShB content unless things were going super-wrong.

 The healing changes introduced in Shadowbringers made us think that things were going to change, that things were going to be harder to heal.  I had my doubts, however, because all fights are scripted and if they were to introduce a substantial change to incoming damage, they would have to make it so most people (casual, midcore, hardcore, less experienced newbies, experienced folks) would be used to It and could handle it.  There was no way they were going to introduce more difficulty given that subscription numbers were increasing.

 And so, healers during Shadowbringers got some damage skills taken away, but in their place, they were given more tools to heal with:

-          White Mage came away from this as a very well-rounded healer at launch. It had its damage spells, it had a damage spell with a stun, it finally had long-standing and easily useable mitigation, it has substantial MP recovery, and it has a damage spell that rewards you for using three GCD heals to make up for damage lost. White Mage still making out like a bandit in 5.1.

-          Scholar felt dramatically different and didn’t feel as solid as it used to be. It had most of its damage tools taken away, the usefulness of its fairy was decreased because let’s be honest it was super-overpowered, it got one of its fairies and its AoE esuna taken away, and it was given its PvP move to act as an AoE that doesn’t have another effect. I had to completely unlearn everything I did as scholar in the last 5-6 years in order to play current scholar. Current 5.1 scholar is overpowered as heck and I don’t feel as satisfied to play it in SB/ShB content.

-          AST LOL. All the cards are balance. MP regen is what. Heals are what. Everything is just what. Other fun skills were removed. That said, I really like AST just because it feels like I have to work twice as hard to achieve the same effect the other healers bring to the table.

 So eventually with all of these changes, we had assumed that healing was going to be harder.  It wasn’t. It’s the same experience and all we’re doing is pressing one single button all the time.  I barely have to heal in dungeons.  I barely have to heal in raid unless my party members step in stupid. I just can’t bring myself to play healer every single day anymore, and I love healing in this game. Or I loved it back when it was more dynamic. I just press one button over and over and over and over and over and maybe sometimes another but I just press one button a lot. It’s really sad and it makes me miss old Cleric Stance of all things.

 I like Shadowbringers’ story. I felt rewarded playing through it as someone who’s played the game for years and did everything when it was in-content. So for me, it was like a good reunion.  There were a lot of points where the story dragged or felt rocky. I felt like the start of the 5.0 campaign was utterly boring and poorly paced.  It picked up again, then slowed down again, then picked up again, then got REALLY BAD, then picked up again for a good finish. I don’t think it’s as consistent as Heavensward’s 3.0 campaign, but it was very solid and made up for the 4.0 campaign.

 However, story is only 20% of the experience for me.  The rest of the time, I need to actually play the game. I actually liked the levelling and crafting changes and new skills they brought in during 5.0 because leveling a crafter never felt easier. I felt like I still had to work hard but the payoff came quickly and my macros still worked as well as they did from during Stormblood. I also used my Stormblood melds and Stormblood equipment for the entire levelling experience and had to make concessions for some of my macros as time went on.  I still had to know what my skills did, basically. The 5.1 crafting/gathering changes kind of make me want to craft less since I don’t feel like I have to solve a puzzle anymore and to be honest, everyone crafts now so you make far less money than you previously did.  The desynth changes also made it so that most of my markets tanked since what’s the point of gathering half the materials when desynth makes those materials easily accessible.  I’m not saying to gatekeep at all, but I feel like the experience should have been a little harder (ie: like the Ixali experience where you had to learn what your skills did or desynth shouldn’t be this easy to keep the market fairly balanced). My server is a crafting server so I am more impacted in general from this. That said, I don’t have anything to spend gil on so it doesn’t matter, I guess.  I just feel far less inclined to participate in what was one of my favourite pastimes in XIV.

 I mained Ninja which got killed in 5.0. I was already dealing with the servers moving from East Coast to West Coast, so adding a bunch of stuff to squeeze into your TA window in 10 seconds in Shadowbringers utterly killed the job for me. 5.1 Ninja throws me off as someone who played this game since the time Ninja was introduced, and I can’t make myself play it. The current opener is the Doton opener (which is something I didn’t like in SB at all) and I can’t always rely on my tank to bring the thing to my Doton. That, and making it so you do different things per every other or every third TA just makes the job a little unpalatable for me at 80. I’m one of those people who wants TA to go. I don’t like that Ninja’s become the TA bot in recent years.  I can still do well with it. People still throw buffs at me, but I don’t find enjoyment in the job anymore and I hope we get a proper retool in 6.0.

 I switched back to ranged. Thankfully Bard hasn’t changed as much since SB (though I still prefer HW Bard like a weirdo), and Dancer is one of those “I worked too damn long today and I just wanna do the mindless brainless rotation” jobs.  I miss old Machinist oddly enough.  It felt really good when you played it well and pulled off a decent wildfire. Now it’s a little easier and I don’t feel as fulfilled playing it. That said, it’s probably the best incarnation of the job since it’s sad little introduction in 3.0.

 Even tanking is substantially easier and that’s a mostly good thing. It sucked going into a low level dungeon and having trouble keeping aggro due to the level syncing and your DPS’ stats. Now you can just turn your stance on and go to town without losing any damage potency like you used to. I kind of miss swapping stances after I’ve established aggro though, because you could tell the difference between a good tank and a bad/less practiced tank if they didn’t bother to swap stances in a fight. Tanks came out of this expansion very balanced, though. They might need some work here and there (warrior I’m looking at you), but overall, they came out the best out of the three roles.

 Other than that, you have monks not knowing what they should be, samurai continuously getting buffed and nerfed, black mage staying consistent, red mage being lol, summoner getting changed to the point where now it’s overpowered, among other DPS changes. DPS overall don’t have as much synergy so you can take any job you want to into raid and it’ll get the job done. That said if you want to do as much damage as possible, you’re generally going to take the same few classes into the raid if you’re less educated about them.  And I feel like the lack of synergy or utility between classes or even the loss of something like mana shift makes the whole experience a little boring.  It’s very “f you, I got mine” or the onus is on the player for their own personal burdens and no one’s really helping each other unless you’re a dancer, trick attack bot, dragoon or bard.

 I really hope the other pieces of content are substantial but what I’ve seen aren’t exactly what I had in mind. Boss refights with an alternate version is really neat but I didn’t really want that for this raid tier. I wanted something more original given what we had to deal with in Omega.  I don’t really care for the Nier Automata crossover because, again, I wanted something original to the XIV lore and the First. I think doubling down on Blue Mage is a bad idea and while some folks like its party-based content now, I can’t bring myself to keep doing the content given that it’s clear they don’t know what to do with it (or didn’t know what to do with it). With one dungeon coming per patch I have to question what’s happening internally or what they’re working on. I know SE is weird internally and I really hope that the kind of stuff I’ve read in previous postmortem articles isn’t happening.

 Either way, I’m really disappointed that I want to stop playing XIV so much when it’s the most popular among my friends and followers because it’s so dissatisfying to me and it’s the most accessible that it’s ever been. I hope things get better eventually but going by what I think they have in store and their old reliable formula, I don’t have hope. I’m tired of the formula and I feel like it needs a shakeup. Overall, I’ve been less happy playing FFXIV than I’ve ever been and it makes me feel really sad. 

[cemeterytourguide]

Theoretical Frameworks in Alien (1979)

TW: Sexual assault, sexual themes

Alien (1979) is a film rife with sexual subtext. Swiss designer ‘Hans Rudolf Giger’ known better as ‘H.R Giger’ designed each set and character with a function, a certain practicality but also an overt sexuality. Giger’s work is macabre, it’s mechanical yet deeply sensual. The sexual underpinnings of the Xenomorph design extend to ‘LV-426’, the moon that our focal characters venture onto. As a result, the sexuality of Alien’s design philosophy imbues the film with distinct references to Freudian theory; namely, the uncanny.

Freud, in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche, describes the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” (Freud, 1919) Alien subverts expectations in a way that evokes the feelings and fears associated with the uncanny. It twists the conventions of male sexuality and repurposes them as the basis of its horror. Freud himself attributes castration anxiety in men to the idea that the vagina presents an uncanny form of the penis and Giger employs vaginal imagery in specific areas of the alien spacecraft found on LV-426 to evoke this.

The doors of LV-426 resemble the labia majora whilst the opening of the facehugger’s probe is designed to resemble the vagina. The facehugger’s probe is also phallic in nature and is the introduction to the persistent source of phallic imagery throughout the film – the lifecycle of the Xenomorph.

Part of the genius of Alien’s narrative is that it requires no exposition nor supplementary explanation. The viewer is exposed to the lifecycle of the Xenomorph directly as the story progresses and the three stages of life present sexuality imagery intended to attack the male audience.

Initially, the audience is presented with the Xenomorph egg as Nostromo crew member Kane ventures out to contact the alien ship. The opening of the egg resembles the labia.

Directly following this, Kane is attacked by a facehugger. The probe of the facehugger is phallic in nature and features an opening that resembles the vagina. The function of the facehugger also evokes fear of the uncanny via its reproductive mechanisms. The probe enters Kane’s throat, symbolising the brutal assault of rape, during which he is forcibly impregnated by eggs. The action is deeply sexual but also serves to inverse the conventional concept of pregnancy by making a man its host. The process of penetration resulting in impregnation is the basis of most reproduction amongst animals and humans alike and yet its presentation in Alien is perverse, invasive and attacks the male masculinity to evoke fear.

Next, the chestburster ruptures from Kane’s chest cavity. The form of the chestburster is phallic but this process continues to use an uncanny representation of pregnancy and birth as a source of terror. The bloodied chestburster resembles the fetus, birthed by a man and symbolic of his loss of the penis. Kane has lost his penis, and thus his masculinity, as a result of being overpowered and impregnated by the facehugger.

The final stage, the famous Xenomorph, presents a much sultrier depiction of the uncanny. The previous stages repurpose the male sexuality in ways indicative of body horror but the form of the Xenomorph is aesthetic. With a phallic head and sleek body, the serpentine movement of the Xenomorph provides beauty. It’s intriguing, it’s feminine and it’s perverse. It attacks the male sexuality by inviting men to engage with the seductive nature of the Xenomorphs’ form and contrasting this with a grotesque danger. H.R Giger describes his methodology when designing the Xenomorph and how he rejected the concept of an ugly monster “(The Xenomorph) can move gracefully, it can be sinuous.” (Williams, 2016)

Every stage of the Xenomorph’s birth cycle subverts the male sexuality to create the uncanny.

Conversely, the character of Ellen Ripley works to empower the Hollywood depiction of women by employing feminist perspective.

Anneke Smelik, film researcher at Radboud University, describes feminist film theory as criticizing “classical cinema for its stereotyped representation of women.” Smelik, Anneke. (2016).

As a warrant officer, Ellen Ripley is in a place of authority. The attempted invalidation of her authority is the catalyst for the events with the Nostromo. After Kane is assaulted by the facehugger, the other crew members attempt to recover him for placement on the ship. Ripley denies this request on the basis that this action could cause contamination due to the alien lifeform latched to Kane. Ash overrides this denial and allows for Kane to be brought onboard the Nostromo and, as Ripley had asserted, these actions introduced contamination and results in the eventual destruction of the Nostromo and its crew.  This subverts the expectation of male authority and the male savior figure that is commonplace in films of its era.

This is compounded by Ripley’s direct comparison to another female character ‘Joan Lambert’. Lambert embodies the problematic female stereotype in a variety of ways throughout the film. She’s hysterical, she’s helpless and she’s callous. With the pressure mounting as the Xenomorph continues to ravage the dwindling crew, Lambert suggests escape via the ‘Narcissus’ with complete disregard for the fact that the remaining crew could not be accommodated. Lambert’s problematic traits result in the death of fellow crew member ‘Parker’ as he could not use his flamethrower on the Xenomorph in fear of killing Lambert who was paralyzed with fear. Overt femininity and dependence on a male savior are facets of a commonplace fantasy in male gaze cinema but, in this instance, it results in the death of the man. It’s a harsh critique on the nature of chauvinistic desires for female helplessness and submissiveness and Hollywood’s overdependence on the male savior complex.

Ripley embodies opposing traits; she’s independent, she’s determined and she’s in an administrative role where she has a voice. These are the traits that lead to her survival in the film as the ‘final girl’.

‘Final girl’ is a horror trope, most commonly associated with slasher films, wherein the character to overcome all odds and defeat the threat is a woman. Typically, this woman casts off femininity in favor of more male-applicable traits so as to appeal to the male audience. In her book, ‘Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film’ professor of film studies Carol J. Clover discusses male identification regarding the ‘final girl’ trope “At the moment that the Final Girl becomes her own savior, she becomes a hero; and the moment that she becomes a hero is the moment that the male viewer gives up the last pretense of male identification.” (Clover, 1993)

In addition to surviving against all odds, Ripley subverts sexual expectations also. She’s six feet tall, broad-shouldered and donning the correct uniform. Her body-type is not the curvaceous and voluptuous vessel of conventional beauty, as is often the case with male gaze cinema. She’s taller than her male counterparts and the final moments of the film subvert the voyeuristic pretenses that it originally constructs.

Ripley, having finally escaped the Nostromo, is undressing in preparation for cryosleep, a term used to describe being cryogenically frozen to allow for feasible transport across lightyears. She’s wearing a short vest top and underwear, white as a symbol of sexual purity, and the camera is distanced from her. It’s filmed in such a way to suggest that we are unseen spectators to Ripley’s undressing and the voyeuristic undertones are evident.

As we pull closer to Ripley, the moment is abruptly discontinued when the Xenomorph makes a surprise appearance aboard the Narcissus escape pod. Ripley is under threat once more, but the moment is more invasive and sexual. The Xenomorph draws closer to Ripley, unsheathing the phallic form of its inner mouth. Ripley opens the emergency hatch, allowing her to fire the harpoon gun at the Xenomorph and finally be rid of the threat. Ripley’s victory comes in the form of donning a phallic object and penetrating the Xenomorph with it. In that moment, she has taken the power and subverts male sexuality and asserts herself as an independent woman in control of her own sexuality.

The final moments of Alien also feature maternal abjection as a core theme. The brain of the Nostromo is a computer called ‘MU-TH-UR 6000’ but referred to only as ‘mother’ by the crew. The crew’s reliance on the computer called ‘mother’ establishes the theme of maternal abjection from the beginning. The computer being the core component of the ship is part of the theme of this abjection. The Xenomorph has the innate ability to become one with its environment and the presence of the threat’s symbiosis with the mother figure is literally driving the crew away; it represents the corruption of the paternal figure as it casts away those who seek its safety.

In addition to this, Ripley’s escape plan involves forcing the ship to overload via MU-TH-UR’s terminal. Upon trying to reverse these effects, once Ripley has extracted the coolant, the computer defies her and continues the self-destruct protocol regardless. Ripley’s frustration compels her to refer to MU-TH-UR as a “son of a bitch”. This represents a dichotomy of mother and daughter. They have both rejected one another and casted one another out.

Alien has always attracted academics to its subtext. It’s a classic horror film and papers cite its core themes to be Freudian or based on humanism or a depiction of otherness. Barbara Creed, professor of film studies, asserts that the chestburster scene is indicative of ‘primal scene’ and of “a common misunderstanding that many children have about birth, that is, that the mother is somehow impregnated through the mouth,” (Creed, 2019) This is featured in her book on the topic of similar theoretical frameworks ‘Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’.

This is just one of many interpretations that exist to excite the minds of viewers. Filmmaker Quentin Tarantino discusses the abstraction of intention and reception regarding the meaning of art in a 2013 interview with Terry Gross on NPR “I mean, of course "King Kong" is a metaphor for the slave trade. I'm not saying the makers of "King Kong" meant it to be that way, but that's what, that's the movie that they made - whether they meant to make it or not.” (NPR, 2019)

Viewers will interpret art subjectively and, with studious justification, is it fair to say that any given interpretation can be deemed incorrect? Through the lens of society and psychology, these theoretical frameworks provide the literary basis for filmmakers to create and for film critics to critique - whether these frameworks were ever consciously included or not.

[dungeonecologist]

WILD ARMS 2 - Golgotha Prison

The name is not subtle, but the reference itself is actually oddly superficial.  At the end of the dungeon, Ashley is separated briefly from the party and Lilka and Brad are captured and tied to crosses, evoking the characters Dismus and Gestas, the thieves crucified during the same execution as the biblical christ.  There is little reference to that actual narrative however, instead seeming to draw from the fact that the name Golgotha is taken to be an epithet to mean literally “A Place of Skulls,” which seems rather appropriate and obvious for an execution field.

Bookending the start and end of this dungeon, we fight the boss monster, Trask.  First in a scripted “loss” and then in a solo match with Ashley’s new dark henshin hero form, the “Grotesque Black Knight,” Knightblazer.

“Trask” is yet another transliteration* issue that comes from the juggling between languages.  It actually comes from the Tarrasque, another monster most readily identified from its appearance in the original Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual, itself originally taken from semi-obscure French myth of Saint Martha of Bethany and the Tarasque of Tarascon.

*(I realize I use this word a lot and it might not be as common use to others.  A “translation” lifts meaning between languages; a “transliteration” is to lift written characters between them.  Example: “Left” in English translates to 左[the direction] or 残[what remains] but transliterates to レフト.  Inversely 左 and 残 both translate back to English as “Left” but transliterate as “hidari” and “zan” respectively; and レフト transliterates back into English as “refuto.”)

Surprisingly, the Wild Arms 2 design (which would also go on to persist as the core design throughout the rest of the Wild Arms series) is based more on the original myth than the D&D representations tend to be: While the end product looks nothing like the depictions of the Tarasque of myth, it retains the spiked turtle shell, the prominent dual horns, poisonous quality, and fins on its head here account for being “half fish.”

Also of note is that the title card identifies it as a “Dragonoid” and it has various metallic and machine-like features.  These details are neat because it positions it as being not-quite a dragon, to work around a fact that will pop up much later: That dragons in Filgaia are extinct.  And also to play into the fact that Dragons in Wild Arms are semi-mechanical lifeforms.

In any case, our scripted loss to Trask the first time around ends with the team knocked out and imprisoned in what appears to be a disused execution ground and associated holding cells.  In our escape we run into monsters fitting the theme, who appear to be natural inhabitants, rather than guards put in place by the Odessa terrorist soldiers who are actually holding us here.

First up is the Wight, a classic undead warrior monster generally taken from D&D, but with a little more behind it than you might expect.  The term Wight in English lore actually traces back quite far as an archaic term with little to no real association with monsters.  The real intersection with name and subject comes from an early English translation of the Nordic Grettis Saga; In it the zombie-like creatures now better known as Draugr were referred to as apturgangr (lit.”againwalker”) but were translated as Barrow-wight. (lit.”[burial-]mound person”)

This may seem an odd choice, but the translation came at the hands of the eminent bookman William Morris.  I say “bookman” because he was not just a prolific author of prose and poetry, but a pioneer of the revival of the British textile and printing industry.  He and his wife, Jane Burden, did extensive arts, craft and design work in book and print design, book binding, and wall paper all stemming from the intricate design of modular and tiled printing blocks and stamps.  Oh and he translated various works of epic poetry and myth into English, including old Roman epics, French knightly romances, and of course Norse sagas. (all of which he wrote and published what was basically fanfiction of, btw)

His seemingly erroneous “translation” of the Barrow-wight came as an attempt to reflect a comparable agedness to the name: Rather than translating from old Norse into modern English, he chose what he thought a suitable old English equivalent; “Barrow” referring to pre-christian Anglo-Saxon burial mounds, and “Wight” meaning “thing” or “creature” but often used disparagingly to refer to a person.  The nuance there is actually quite clever, as the old Wight referred pretty exclusively to those living, even if it didn’t specify by definition, and that uncertainty or contradictory kind of implication uniquely fits a description of the undead.

This term would be picked up by J.R.R. Tolkein for use in Middle-Earth, retaining their lore and function from Norse legend to describe undead warriors.  And from there you can follow the usual chain of influence to D&D, where the shortened term Wight really solidified itself as synonymous with the undead, and eventually down to Game of Thrones, where George R.R. Martin cleverly brings the whole thing back around to old risen bodies of northern warriors, not unlike the Draugr of Norse myth.

Anyway in Wild Arms 2 we get some sorta death yeti ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Next up is the Ghoul, which I think we all know is a pretty generic term in modern parlance, but it’s specific origins date back to pre-Islamic Arabia.  It entered into English via translations of the original French translation of 1001 Arabian Nights, where it appears in one story as a monster lurking about the cemetery devouring corpses.

The Ghoul identity as a corpse eater quickly broadened into flesh eaters, and the association with lurking about graves in turn marked them as undead themselves until eventually the term became loosely applied to any variety of undead, including the thrall of vampires, supplanting the flesh of the dead with blood of the living and achieving a truly far removed meaning.  Even in modern Arabic the term now broadly applies to any number of fantasy monsters. 

And so long as we’re dabbling in pop culture transplants; the Arabaian word Ghul is in fact the same used in the name of the Batman villain, R’as al-Ghul, whose name/title has always been erroneously translated as “Head of The Demon.“

I have no idea why it’s a chicken with a mohawk but i love it

And finally the Bone Drake.  I don’t know that this one actually has any real specific lineage...

“Drake” is generally a synonym for dragon, although there is some case of fantasy semantics where different settings will try to define distinct body types of dragons each with their own name, in which case Drakes are often either dragons which simply don’t exceed a certain size (generally no bigger than a non-magical animal such as a dog or a horse) or a wingless variation of whatever the setting’s prototypical dragon might be.  I don’t know for certain, but I think this distinction in modern fantasy started with Tolkien’s wingless fire breathing dragon, Glaurung, and its offspring who were referred to as fire-drakes.

In any case, the specific term “Bone Drake” Doesn’t seem to appear with any visibility prior to Wild Arms 2, which leads me to believe it was just their name for a generic bone dragon-like creature.  It does make for an interesting companion, aesthetically, to Trask being here, although there don’t seem to be any implications that Trask lives in this dungeon at all.  Other than just being an obvious combination of cool fantasy things, it may also be pulled from Dungeon & Dragons’ Dracolich/Night Dragon; an undead (often skeletal) dragon raised from the dead, often by their own necromantic spells, hence the term “Lich.”  For whatever reason they are oddly reminiscent of shield crested dinosaurs like the Triceratops or Styracosaurus.

The attack Rhodon Breath doesn’t tell me anything either.  I think it’s just meant as “Rose Breath,” translating the “Rhodon” bit pretty literally, and references the smell of roses being present as a funeral, or else the palor of the faded pink color also called “Rose Breath.”  There is some apocryphal reference to a Rhodon but of no significance that I can tell.

Clearly the theme here is death and the undead, and with some small stretch on part of the Wight, we could even say skulls all befitting Golgotha’s “Place of Skulls” epithet.  It’s a really neat way to build this dungeon, albeit a little on the nose.  But I really like the idea that the dungeon appears to be abandoned and now haunted by all these reanimated corpses and bones before the villains arrive to use it for their plans.  Oddly there isn’t much of a martyrdom theme here, although we’ll get plenty of that a little later once we recruit our second magic user, summoner, christ figure, and perfect beautiful boy, Tim Rhymless to the team...

Anyway we get out, we fight Trask for real.  Ashley turns into a saturday morning superhero.  Trask gets solo’d.  And we all just kinda move along without asking too many questions...  Although the game dialogue describes this new form as a “grotesque black knight” the sprite work, 3D model, and even original character art don’t really convey much in the way of “grotesque” but in the context of the tokusatsu, henshin hero elements it’s not too hard to imagine that the design was meant to evoke a similar aesthetic to gruesome suit heroes like Guyver, Kamen Rider Shin, and Devilman.  I do love the gill/tendon-like organic vent structure in the pauldrons that stay.  And although it’s not visible in any of these images, but the D-Arts model has an exposed segment of vertebrae between the shoulders; that along with the teeth(?)/ribs on the open chest panels really helps bring out more of the “grotesque” quality of the design.

[less-than-hash]

Endless Night Class

If you’re interested in studying game design, Atlus has provided a rare (possibly unique) opportunity in their Persona Endless Night Collection.

Be warned: I’m about to spend a lot of words advocating that you acquire, play extensively, and critically examine their three Persona dancing games. I’m in no way associated with (and have never been associated with) Atlus. Nor am I an evangelist for any of these three games individually (though I do enjoy them). Taken together, though, I think they prove both fascinating and illuminating, and it’s rare to find a series as odd as this collected like this.

I provide some possible alternatives for similar exercises at the bottom of the post.

For the uninitiated, Atlus released a beatmatch game for the Vita a few years back based on the fourth of their teenage dating-sim slash Jungian dungeon delve Persona games: Persona 4: Dancing All Night. (I’ll be calling this P4D.)

I’m personally a big fan and played the crap out of it for months. Which is not to say that it’s without some pretty significant flaws. 

A few weeks ago, they released their follow-up(s), Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight (P3D) and Personal 5: Dancing in Starlight (P5D). 

The fact that any of these games exist at all is pretty weird. They’re beatmatch games that serve as spin-offs (and in two out of three cases, sequels) to narrative focused hundred-hour RPGs, each themed around dancing, despite the fact that dancing is in no shape, form, or fashion important to the core games. 

Stranger still, the two new releases are essentially the same game from both a systemic and narrative perspective. The characters are different, the music is different, the UI is different, but essentially everything else - the mechanics, the UX, the inciting narrative, the way story content is accessed, the loot - is exactly the same. 

Essentially Atlus made two games worth of content for the exact same “engine” and released them at the same time. It’s a little as if Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas had been released on the same day (had New Vegas not made any modifications to Fallout 3′s gameplay systems).

But here’s the kicker: for $100, you can get the “Endless Night Collection,” which contains both of the new releases and a code for the digital version of the original Dancing All Night (for PS4, if you get the PS4 bundle).

In other words, for $100 you get:

A game from mid-2015 developed for the Vita.

A follow-up to that game based on a different property developed for simultaneous release on PS4 and Vita.

A second follow-up to that game based on yet a different property developed for simultaneous release on PS4 and Vita, to be released at the same time as the above.

In addition to which, one of the two new games is a spin-off of a 12 year-old PS2 game while the other is a spin-off of a game that released last year.

That’s a whole lot of design from a whole lot of sources over a pretty long time kind of piled up on top of itself.

To an extent, that’s not wildly different from, say, being able to purchase a Witcher 1, 2, and 3 bundle. But there are a few other things that lend these particular games to study:

There’s minimal change in the basic gameplay systems, allowing you to focus on what things the devs decided to alter between games.

The games can be approached almost entirely non-linearly. You will miss nothing by not playing them in the order they were released. You certainly need not play them in their numeric order. Even within the games, the narrative and songs are released in a fairly non-linear order. (This is less true in P4: Dancing All Night, but that’s part of the point of this exercise.) 

The gameplay loop can be approached in chunks as short as five minutes.

Due to the confluence of the above, you can easily and comfortably jump back and forth between all three titles.

These games marry narrative-focused properties to a traditionally narrative-light genre.

All that said, here are a few things to keep in mind:

The games are not wildly accessible to those with difficulty hearing, seeing, or performing quick finger movements.

Having a working knowledge of Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5 will dramatically deepen your experience of the dancing games. If you haven’t played them (which is reasonable - that’s a roughly 300 hour and $120 investment for all three, and Persona 3 has not aged well at all, especially from a systems design perspective), it’s worthwhile to at least familiarize yourself with their plots, themes, characters, art styles, and UI.

Possessing a knowledge of both rhythm games and music will allow you a deeper awareness of some of the gameplay changes that occur between the games.

SO, let’s say I’ve convinced you to acquire a copy of the games. What about them should you be studying as you play them?

What changes did the devs make between 2015′s P4D and the two 2018 games? What does each change accomplish? What need, challenge, or issue do you think the change was in response to?

Some examples:

P4D includes a visual novel-style story mode while P5D and P3D do not. Yet they still contain interactive narrative scenes. What do these two different presentations accomplish? Why do you think Atlus changed their tact in the newer games? For bonus points, compare against the narrative presentation in the Persona 4 Arena fighting games.

It’s not merely the mechanical presentation of the narrative content that changed between the games - the scope, focus, and tone of the two recent games is markedly different from P4D. P4D tells a single, linear narrative, while P3D and P5D seem much more interested in their casts’ varied interpersonal relationships. In the older game, the player encounters a small cast of entirely new characters. In what I’ve played of the newer games, there are no new characters at all. Consider why that is. I'm almost positive that the answers are neither “they’re lazy” or “it was cheaper” (though “the cost didn’t justify the reward” could very well be part of the rationale).

Progression in P4D is wildly different from that in P3D and P5D. Consider how this requires the player to approach the content. Think about why the devs may have decided to change progression in such a radical way.  

Item progression, too, is handled entirely differently in P4D than in P3D/P5D. P4D included a currency system that’s entirely gone in the new games. Why do you think that is? Further, what types of items exist in the former that aren’t in the latter? Does the functionality of some of those item types exist elsewhere in the game? Why change that presentation? Some of these changes will feel like cuts, but I promise it would have been cheaper to leave some of these systems as they were. So if the reasoning wasn’t strictly financial, what was it?

There is a single addition to the core mechanics of the game between P4D and the new releases - the double beat. Why do you think it was added?  

Compare the background videos during song gameplay in P4D to that in P3D and P5D. You’ll notice that the latter two are significantly less busy from a VFX perspective. (While I haven’t closely studied it, I suspect they’re also less complex in terms of camera cuts and camera angles.) Why do you think that is, especially given that A) games within series strongly tend towards bigger, brighter, and brasher over time; and B) the original Persona 5 possesses a much flashier visual style than Persona 4? Why are the dance sequences in P5D less flashy than those in P4D?

Similarly, passing any song in P4D got you a brief cutscene in which the dancing character summoned their persona. These are absent from the newer games. Consider why that might be. (In this case, the answer “It was cheaper” may have a lot of merit, but that’s probably not the sole reason. How do those little cutscenes at the end of each song impact the way the player interacts with the game? Especially in the common use case of the player wanting to retry the song to improve their score.)

This requires a little more familiarity with music and game design, but try to observe the ways in which the authoring of the beatmatch play changes between P4D and the newer games. The mechanics are exactly the same, but the way the devs present challenges within those mechanics are different. Try to identify how, then consider why. For bonus points, examine this through the lens of questions 4, 5, and 6 in the next section.

Much of the UI art in P4D is a major departure from that of the original Persona 4. On the other hand, P3D and P5D tend to hew much more closely to their sources for their UI art. Why do you think that is? Especially consider what’s accomplished by P3D’s emulation of a 12 year-old PS2 game. (Full disclosure: I hate it.) Strangely and interestingly, though, P3D straight up steals a bit of UI from P5D, which it takes from Persona 5. (Hint: it’s when the player is prompted to speak.) Why do you think this is? (This is a spot where the financials may have played a role. Creating the art asset for P3D to use the same UI in these moments certainly cost more than not having to create that asset. However, that cost may have been significantly cheaper and safer than changing that aspect of the UI’s functionality between the two concurrent games. Is that why it was done? I can’t say. It’s worth thinking about what the decision accomplishes from a non-financial perspective, too.) 

A major change between P4D and P3D/P5D’s conversation UI is the discontinued use of character portraits during speech. Those portraits already exist for both Persona 3 and Persona 5, so why not use them?

Alright, that’s a bunch to chew on solely from the perspective of differences between the games over time.

But it’s also worthwhile to carefully consider the choices that remain consistent across the titles. These are the things the devs felt strongly enough about to hold onto when they could have changed or jettisoned them.

The controls in all three games are exactly the same (though there’s a little fuzziness between platforms where certain inputs don’t map 1 to 1 between them). What do you think the developers consider so successful about these controls that they didn’t adjust them at all in the three years between the release of P4D and the latter titles?

Similarly, consider the control inputs chosen. Identify why d-pad right and Square aren’t used during dance play. Then consider how else the developers could have tried to address that issue. Why do you think they landed on the solution that they did?

Up at the top of this post, I mentioned that despite their overt focus on the idea and act of dancing (and the narrative’s examination of dancing from perspectives social, physical, and cultural), these are not dancing games. So why do you think these games are about dancing at all? The developers could absolutely had the beatmatch play represent something like the characters calling on their personas to battle shadows - or carrying out heists in the case of P5D. Or playing music in a band. So why the focus on dance? How does that interact with the base Persona games? Consider the role that “practice” and “training” play in both the dancing games and the RPGs. How is it reflected in the narrative of the games? How is it reflected in the way the player interacts with the game?

Clearly the player isn’t actually dancing - so what experience do you think are the devs hoping to inspire in the player as they perform each song? How do you think they wanted you to feel while you’re playing?

The audio chosen for the beat match is incredibly specific. Listen to the sound the game makes when you successfully hit a single beat. To the sound the game makes when you hit a linked beat. A sustained beat. Each of these are different, and each is immediately recognizable. Unless I missed something, none of these sounds change between the original P4D and the recent releases. (Though the new games let the player edit the sounds that play for each beat type.) Why do you think the audio team chose those sounds? How do those specific sounds contribute to the player’s experience of the game?  Looking back to question 4, how do these sounds make the player feel when their actions evoke them?

Once you’ve got an answer for questions 4 and 5, consider how successful you think the devs were in evoking that experience. Which aspects of the game undermine that experience? Which support it? Are there aspects that undermine it present in P4D that no longer exist in the recent releases?

Play the game on the three basic difficulties. Are your answers to question 6 different on the different levels of difficulty?

Go play (or watch a video of) Guitar Hero, Rock Band, or one of their sequels. What sounds do those games make when the player successfully hits a beat? More interestingly, what’s the audio response to missing a beat in Guitar Hero or Rock Band? Compare that to the audio response for missing a beat in the Persona dancing games. Why do you think those teams chose those dramatically different approaches?

Carefully consider the gameplay goals and how they’re presented to the player. The player is scored numerically, but they also reside on a continuum of “approval” (presented by dancing green alien invader-looking shadows in P4D and by bar meters in the newer releases). The latter of these is given tremendous and repeated audio feedback in the form of barks from the player’s companions. Additionally, the game displays how many successful beats the player has had since they last missed one. (And look at how the game defines this - it isn’t only a Missed beat that breaks a combo, but one rated Good.) Finally, the game assigns a text rating at the end of a performance: Not Cleared Stage Cleared Brilliant King Crazy Consider how all of these forms of feedback relate to one another. Why do all of these exist? Do they need to? What problems do you think they were implemented to solve?

Really think about the numerical score. How do you think it’s calculated? (Hint: the player increases that score over the course of their playthrough - it’s not tabulated at the end based on the report card of information presented about their performance.) Note that I don’t mean the specifics of exactly how many points each beat is worth, because I have no idea what those specifics are. (I could probably Google it, but part of the point of this is to consider what the player’s experiencing is.) What purpose does it serve?

For that matter, look at the elite King Crazy rating. Consider how it’s earned (by hitting every beat in a song, including scratches, with either Perfect or Great precision). Why do you think that’s the goal the developers set for the player? And why call it “King Crazy?” (I don’t think the answer to that question is localization-related or preciousness with the original language. The two recent games are called Persona 3: Dancing Moon Night and Persona 5: Dancing Star Night in Japan. Though I suppose if preciousness preserved the term in P4D, a desire to retain the same scale might result in the persistence of the term.)

I mentioned near the top of this post that these games aren’t wildly accessible. Consider specifically what aspects of the game would make it difficult for different kinds of people to enjoy playing it. If you were the developer, how might you try to address some of these issues?

During narrative segments, P3D and P5D (and to a lesser extent P4D, given its visual novel style) make a marked departure from the RPGs they’re based on in terms of perspective. Neither Persona 3 nor Persona 5 are first-person games, and the dancing segments involving the protagonist in P3D and P5D are similarly third person. Consider the first person perspective of the narrative in P3D and P5D. What does it accomplish? Why do you think the developers chose it?

Whew, that’s a lot. You doing okay?

In the famous words of Douglas Adams’s towel, DON’T WORRY. You don’t need to know the answers to all of those questions. I certainly don’t. 

I’ve got pretty strong suspicions about some of them, interpretations or ideas about most of them, and educated guesses about the rest. For some of these questions, the only people who know the answers for sure are those who were in the room when the decision was made. And hell, maybe they’ve forgotten!

The point is that if you’re going to be successful in design, you should be willing to dig deep into what a game’s doing when you experience it. Interrogate the game. Try to suss out the developers’ intentions. Resist the urge to pass judgment on them - to say that their choices are right or wrong, good or bad - but feel free to consider how you might have tried a different approach.

And then consider what obstacles those different approaches might hit.

Personally (get it?), I think that the Endless Night Collection provides a really rare, interesting opportunity to dig into these kinds of questions across multiple related games. If you don’t want to or can’t look at these particular titles, try to find similar opportunities. Search for games that might provide rewarding insights through archaeological examination. Some possibilities:

You a WoW player? Find a vanilla server and take a long, focused look at the way the game’s changed since launch.

The base Mass Effect trilogy was developed over a relatively short period of time (the console life cycle of the 360), but each game plays significantly differently from the one before. Despite the fact that you’re playing the same character (kind of) in each, the stats that represent that character, the way that character moves, and the UI through which you inhabit the character all change dramatically between each title. (My Shepherd in ME1 was spec’d as a healer. Remember when an ME character could be a healer?)

If you’re into Obsidian’s games, play through Baldur’s Gate 2, Pillars of Eternity, and Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire and ask questions like those above of these games. The original PoE essentially sold itself as a modern BG, so in what ways did it actually emulate those old games, and in what ways did the devs decide a different direction was better? What further did they then change for the sequel to their own game?

Find those changes, those differences large and small, give consideration to what the experience accomplishes (or fails to) on either side of the change, and imagine what the devs were trying to accomplish with their adjustments.

Anyway, I should probably sleep at some point, or so Morgana would tell me.

Good luck! <#

[prokopetz]

One of my friends wants to run a game set in the world of Seanan McGuire's Wayward Children series (in brief, the story of what happens to the kids who are sent home after travelling to Narnia-esque portal worlds, particularly when they didn't want to leave). He's planning on having us do dimension hopping, travelling between worlds. We don't necessarily need mechanical support for that, it'd be primarily narrative, but something with multiple worlds built in from the start might be nice.

Some features: relatively low-powered (teens with minor powers); low combat; a way to learn skills but no major focus on level progression; more narrative-based than number-crunchy. We’d also love a way to work in a mechanic relating to the different types of worlds/their people. In the series there’s a mapping system that describes worlds as logical/nonsense, wicked/virtuous, rhyme/reason, linear/recursive, and life/death. Reskinning is fine for us, we’re relatively experienced players!

If you’re looking for something rules light, this sort of thing is a pretty solid use case for Fate Accelerated Edition. The approach-based conflict resolution is a good fit for milieux where all player characters tend to have basically identical descriptive capabilities apart from the odd special trick, and the world theme stuff could be handled either as unusually high-level situation aspects, or by borrowing the game aspects mechanic from Fate Core. You could also have a look at Loose Threads, a Fate Core supplement that has a broadly similar premise to your source material; it’s not FAE compatible out of the box, mind, so you’d either have to use the full Fate Core package or do a bit of tinkering.

If you’re in the market for something a bit crunchier than Fate Core, or if you don’t care for Fate-based systems’ shared-narrative-authority conceit (i.e., your group would prefer to keep the responsibility for narrating the world firmly in the GM’s hands), you might instead have a look at Tales from the Loop. It’s a bit further afield from your inspirations, being informed primarily by 1980s-style suburban YA magical realism media, so it’d be more work to reskin - in particular, the rules have a baked-in assumption that all player characters have at least a little bit of familiarity with mechanical engineering and computer programming, though that could be reinterpreted as familiarity with occult wackiness without undue difficulty.

On the flip side, if you’d prefer to go even lighter than FAE and fourth-wall-breaking mechanics aren’t a turn-off for you, there’s stuff like Heroine and Whispering Road. Like Tales From the Loop, these are both a fair ways askew of what you’re actually looking for - the former is basically Labyrinth: The Roleplaying Game, while the latter is rather too Studio Ghibli if played by the book - but I think you could fruitfully mine them for ideas on how to approach the material from a super-rules-light perspective.

[mizume]

Mizme Finished Berseria (Zestiria 2.0?)

Holy hell this game is such an improvement

After Zestiria, which as we’ve mentioned really just serves as a 40 hour advertisement for Berseria and the anime adaptation, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect out of the followup title.

Well, nothing too complicated: Berseria is an incredibly vast improvement over its predecessor with just a handful of small hiccups.

Going straight into a classic breakdown and then finishing with a handful of gripes.

Combat and Gameplay

Berseria made a significant overhaul to the button layouts of the LMBS combat system but there was really just two very simple changes that returns LMBS to its proper fast paced form:

1. We’re not limited to a 4 hit maximum chain

2. The branching pathways for arte inputs are completely customizable.

What does this mean in Tales of terms. It means you can set each individual node of your arte trees to any arte you know and the revamped soul system functions much more similarly to Xillia’s base AP system then Graces or Zestirias AP/SP systems respectively.

What does this mean in laymans terms. It means you have so much more control over your combo construction and combat feels more reminiscent of Xillia, meaning face paced intensely reactive battles in which you have (near) complete control over what you’re doing.

I’d like to take a moment to explain the new LMBS and go into why its such a significant improvement.

In this new system, artes are determined by a maximum count of Souls. Starting with 3 and gaining up to 5 Souls dictate your maximum current arte chain length. Chains can be cancelled using Soul Breaks, the new LMBS battle gimmick for Berseria. With this system, each character has a unique Soul Break arte and the arte chain returns to the 0 position. Souls can be gained in the heat of combat by inflicting stun and other status ailments or by landing a finishing blow on enemies.

What this means is we now have an insane system in which you can use 5 artes, Break Soul cancel, use 4 more artes (assuming you don’t regain the expended soul withing those 4 artes) Break Soul cancel again, perform 3 artes and finish with a Mystic Arte (which restores Soul and expends Blast gauge, a carry over mechanic from Zestiria).

The sheer amount of variability is incredibly reminiscent of the free for all LMBS of Xillia and by extension its predecessors Vesperia and pre Vesperia tales games.

The only clunk in the road is the awkward remapping of attacks. All the face buttons have been rehashed to attack commands in order to allow the player character to be in a constant free run state freeing them from the 2D axis as a default. This necessitates that we maintain the 4 arte node tree from Graces/Zestiria. While the new system is incredibly gratifying, I feel that retaining the directional inputs combined with the 4 attack buttons and removing the node tree entirely would have been incredible. Absolute freedom of arte inputs is the only thing stopping Berseria’s combat system from standing with Vesperia and Xillia2 as the best and cleanest combat in the Tales series.

It’s almost as though what i’m saying is the more we emulate older LMBS systems the better the game works because we know that the system works. How strange. Bring back classic LMBS i’m begging here Bamco.

The Plot

So, this is a bit of a mixed bag for me. The first half and last fourth of Berseria’s plot are carried by solid world building, good character driven story, and Velvet being metal as fuck.

There’s a chunk in the middle where it strays just a bit. Can you guess where that is, yeah its where all of the Zestiria allusions start coming out.

Berseria interestingly has the same weird problem that Zestiria had albeit to a much lesser extent. It, in a strange roundabout way, felt like a Zestiria sequel. There are so many allusions to Zestiria in the back half of the game to the point where I guess its assumed that you’ve played and finished Zestiria. This in it of itself isn’t necessarily a bad thing but it feels odd coming from a game that isn’t meant to be treated as a proper prequel. 

For example as Scrubbing and I have discussed: Xillia2 harkens back to Xillia1 constantly, but that’s to be expected. Its in the title, Xillia2 would imply and assume that their core audience has played Xillia1. Berseria isn’t titled Zestiria2. The plot should be proper and function as in independent being without assumption that you’ve played Zestiria.

Now i’m not talking about small easter egg stuff. I love that stuff and it made me incredibly glad to find them. Small things like the town that would later become Lastonbell, Lothringen tower that would later crumble and become the City of Lohgrin. That stuff is great.

What i’m referring to are major callbacks and emotional pulls that only work if you’ve played both games. The Edna reveal, and the Maotelus reveal at the end are the two that come to mind immediately. Those moments really don’t make any sense unless you’re aware of the context from Zestiria.

It’s a very minor gripe, and ultimately it actually retroactively defines Zestiria’s world building much more clearly and makes it stronger as a result. 

I few things that deserve mentioning since I bitched about them so much in the last review: 

Berseria’s villains were standard fare. They’re an incredibly improvement on Heldalf but Artorius is a villain subtype we’ve seen much better realized in past Tales games and Innominat 100% feels like young Yggdrasil right down to “but sisterrrrrrrr”.

The retcons and explanations of how malevolence works feels like a double edged blade. On the one hand it again retroactively makes Zestiria’s world building so much stronger (which mind you is still ridiculous). But at the same time, having such a basic “good vs. evil” mechanic in the world build feels very very limiting. Its much better explained but still feels clunky. These are things that Zestiria should have simply done properly in the first place.

In the end, Berseria’s plot is solid and driven by a good narrative with the proper twists and plot building that Zestiria so desperately needed.

The Cast

OH BABY HERE WE GO. Berseria’s cast is great. That’s basically all that needs to be said. It finally feels like we’re playing a Tales game. We’ve got a great set of characters here each working under their own motivations with goals and backstories that influence their decisions and free will. 

I think I can say that Velvet has shoved Yuri off his pedestal of being the most metal Tales protagonist to date with an absolutely incredible and over the top drive for revenge.

One of the key themes in Berseria is “to choose ones own path” and it shows here. Its incorporated in different ways for every character and it manifests as something that feels organic and smooth. Its a heavy contrast to Zestiria where it always feels like the party is together simply because they have to be.

If I have any complaints at all here it would be Magilou, simply because the incorporation of her backstory feels very jarring. It kind of comes across all at once with little explanation similar to the weird and jarring plot reveals in Zestiria. Aside from that, Eizen’s Creed, Rokurou’s conviction, Eleanor’s search for her own truth, Velvet’s quest for closure, and Laphicet’s growth as a person are all recurrent themes that are incorporated into the main storyline. It feels great. It feels like we’re playing a Tales game.

Conclusion

Berseria is a game that retroactively makes Zestiria better. But is perhaps ultimately made somewhat worse by its connection to Zestiria (jury’s out on that one to be honest)

It’s good that Bamco has finally found an iteration of this combat system that feels like it actually works, and the plot and world building feel like a proper return to form for the Tales series.

Just a handful of things stop this from being within my top tier of Tales games, most of which involve the strange nature of Zestiria and Berseria’s development. They really do feel like they were intended to be a single game, like notes got lost during development and ended up with wrong development teams.

A great beginning entry to the series and a good JRPG all around.

[52inayear-blog]

Game #1- “Undertale”

Little remains to be said about “Undertale” that hasn’t been said countless times since its release in 2015. It was so impactful upon release that anyone writing about games had to share their thoughts on it. “Undertale”’s effect on the medium of games and the social platforms they’re discussed on cannot be exaggerated. Few games have ever commanded such a cult following, and even less of them have come from a single indie developer. Produced almost entirely by one creator, Toby Fox, “Undertale” was designed from the ground up to tell a story that should be played numerous times, deconstructed, dissected, and contemplated. It features an attainable three endings, that uniquely, require three distinct play styles from the player, rather than asking the player to make choices at key points in the story. Heavily inspired by the RPG series known as “Earthbound” in the west or “Mother” in Japan, “Undertale” is infamous for its’ subversive storytelling, similar to indie compeer “Five Nights at Freddies”, which was released by Scott Cawthon a year prior.

From the outset it is made immediately apparent to the player that they are not playing a run-of-the-mill videogame. Sinister undertones are sown from the beginning, warning players to tread carefully and be more conscious of their surroundings. The game repeatedly makes statements about player expectations and the relationship between game designer, the wizard behind the curtain, and the player. The core loop present in Undertale revolves around simple exploration and making choices, choices that subvert established shorthand norms in videogame design that have not changed much in some thirty-odd years. Its’ self-reflexive humour, puns, and observations have resonated with a generation that were weaned on meme humour. The core narrative is not as compelling as its cult following suggests, and is disappointingly overly simplistic as it unfolds, the game’s mysteries buried far deeper than some will be willing to dig. The narrative is not substantial enough on the surface, and relies too heavily on YouTube theory videos to expand on the hidden lore. Both the worst culprits and the biggest victims of this are the two skeletal characters the protagonist shares the stage with, Sans and Papyrus. Their importance to the plot are for the player to discover, but this will more than likely occur outside of the confines of the game. Similarly, it’s a little frustrating to walk past story content that you know is there, but is locked behind an obscure puzzle with a solution that frequently won’t be available to the player until the final sections of the game. The humour is good for a chuckle early on, but it’s incessant, and starts to grate as early as three hours in. The humour is more Douglas Adams than Terry Pratchett, a trying amalgamation of dad jokes and Christmas cracker jokes.

Even with a run-time of somewhere between four and six hours, “Undertale” might outlive its’ welcome for some. It is best experienced in occasional half hour bursts, as mainlining it may turn into a bit of a slog. Save points are mercifully frequent and always available before boss battles, and it is advised to always replenish healing items when a store comes along.

The boss battles are challenging but perfectly tuned. Toby Fox has gone on record saying that he did not want the game to require grinding to complete, and he achieved this. Some bosses are challenging and will require a handful of attempts until their attack patterns and weaknesses can be figured out, particularly towards the end, when the game gradually becomes a boss rush. The game’s turn based battles are crossed with bullet hell mechanics to invigorate this traditionally monotonous gameplay loop, and are one of the game’s most inventive features.

Despite this the story remains well paced, and the player is swiftly led from area to area, through puzzles, plot points, and phantasmagorical environments. The game’s character and environment art are not consistent with either an 8-bit or 16-bit aesthetic, a deliberate creative decision by Toby Fox and the mark of a passion project executed with confidence and creativity. Character designs are simple and mostly static, but varied, appealing and expressive, and have been a key factor to the game’s success. The plodding protagonist’s design is simple and perhaps a caricature of the target audience, slightly bulbous, with unkempt hair hanging down over narrow, sleepy eyes; his yellow skin perhaps a nod to many of the most famous stylized characters in entertainment; Spongebob Squarepants, The Simpsons, Minions, and of course Game Freak’s cash cow, Pikachu.

Toby Fox’s greatest accomplishment by far is the game’s soundtrack. Orchestras as far as Japan have paid homage to the career-defining melodies Fox penned for “Undertale”. The warbling battle theme ‘Enemy Approaching’ is a fortifying rub on the players’ shoulders while the game over theme, ‘Determination’, is a encouraging pat on the shoulder. Players will forever recall a great betrayal listening to the sweeping and melodic ‘Heartache’. ‘Dating Start!’ is pure comfort food for fans of Phoenix Wright; it’s very reminiscent of Noriyuki Iwadare’s work on the Ace Attorney series. ‘Snowy’ will become a staple on many peoples’ winter playlists, and indeed the entire soundtrack will likely be enduringly and regularly enjoyed by many of its fans.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about “Undertale”’s success is how Nintendo have failed to capitalize on it with a revival of the “Earthbound” franchise. Perhaps we’ll see something from them this year, as 2019 marks their franchise’s 30th anniversary. While gamers wait, Toby Fox does what Nintendon’t, releasing ‘Delta Rune’, a several hour long ‘demo’ set in the same universe as Undertale, in late 2018.

[angrycollectordaze-me-blog]

Indian realistic film

下面为大家整理一篇优秀的assignment代写范文- Indian realistic film，供大家参考学习，这篇论文讨论了印度现实主义电影。印度现实主义题材作品通常将人民关注的学校、宗教、女性等热点问题进行揭露，从而引起社会公众的共鸣，达到传递深刻内涵的效果。印度电影在针对教育问题进行揭露时，注重从批判印度僵化态教育模式、反思具有不公平性与商业化的教育体系、关注特殊儿童教育等方面着手。印度现实主义电影采用的也是好莱坞的经典剧作模式，从故事结构来看不会太过于巧合。

Indian realistic works usually expose the hot issues of schools, religion and women concerned by the people, so as to arouse the resonance of the public and convey the profound connotation.

When exposing education problems, Indian films focus on criticizing India's rigid education model, reflecting on the unfair and commercialized education system, and paying attention to the education of special children. Bollywood, for example, challenges the education system and tells everyone how to live their lives.

With the development of India's economy and society, the self-consciousness of Indian cultural elite women keeps improving, but the persistent problems of the whole national mechanism still exist, which further forces the superstructure to reform the social and cultural system. As a result, a large number of films have emerged that reflect women's dissatisfaction with their social status. In the process of film creation, it mainly focuses on showing women's life misfortune, women's grievance and perfection, women's passive awakening, men's voice for women's status, women's active awakening and other inspirational stories. For example, the movie toilet hero, which is adapted from a true story, focuses on the domestic toilet as the main clue and revolves around the core issue of women's status, and finally succeeds.

India is the country with the most religious sects and one of the cradles of world religions. The people of India are extremely religious. India's religion is as binding as the law. Of course, such a binding force has brought many disadvantages to the daily life of the Indian people. More and more movies criticize religion, such as little girl's uncle monkey.

The real realist is idealistic. The movie masters of the world use the character configuration of uncle and girl many times. Leon and matilda from the French film Leon and Leon; Tae-hee and mi from the Korean film "lonely agent"; Darji kawadi and rinka kawa in the Japanese movie white rabbit candy. However, the unique feature of little girl's uncle monkey lies in the allegorical narrative strategy adopted by the film, which places two ordinary characters in the cultural context of religious conflicts and delivers great love across RACES.

In what is a movie, Andre bazin said that movies should be a medium that can reproduce the realistic idea, sublimate the real beauty, educate the spirit, and make viewers noble. Think of two styles in Indian realistic movies.

Indian realistic film inherits many features of traditional drama, incorporating long segments of song and dance. In the movie "little girl's monkey god uncle", the monkey god parwan and the little girl shahida first meet, parwan led the hindus singing and dancing to celebrate the activities of hanuman god. The four-minute song and dance scenes are simple and directly Indian. That is to enhance the religious identity of the audience. It also makes audiences of other ethnic groups deeply impressed by the artistic charm of Indian characteristics based on religion, highlighting the ethnic and regional characteristics of this film.

The film tells the story of shahida, a little girl from Pakistan, who was taken to India by her mother to wish to cure her aphasia. Parwan, a devout follower of the Hindu monkey god hanuman, eventually overcame the odds to send the girl back to Pakistan. The conflict between hindus and muslims in the movie is a legacy of history. With the progress of India's modernization, India realized the humiliation of British colonial rule. India carried out a series of non-violent and non-cooperative movements, and the British colonists intensified tensions between hindus and muslims in an attempt to undermine their independence movement. Since then, India and Pakistan have been divided into wars and conflicts, and the religious gap between hindus and muslims in the two countries has become deeper and deeper. To make serious historical themes of religion is not dull, director to join in the movie song and dance elements, while singing and dancing can be seen everywhere in the movie in India, but its expression and appeal is not a general technique can replace, interested audience with artistic technique, shows the traditional Indian movies, at the same time with special connotation of cabaret to deepen the theme.

Indian realistic films also use the classic Hollywood drama model. The structure of the story is too coincidental. In a short two hours, the main reason for the ups and downs of the character's fate is an accidental chance. The movie "little girl's uncle" is very simple, that is, the uncle takes the little girl home. Little girl with sand or uncle pavan, all may be one person, but for the ordinary one, but this is established by two little simple story model, two entirely different religious beliefs to place it in the specific social and cultural environment, but showed a deep and meaningful topic, complete the critique of religion. The allegorical narrative technique to explain the truth of "love" by means of small characters and small stories is also a strong guarantee for its good box office.

"Little girl's uncle monkey" is full of drama, plot ups and downs, emotion is real and natural, in the performance of the language of the camera is no less. It is worth mentioning the symbolism and montage of the film.

Shahida's mother kissed the flag at the start of the match, which again proved that shahida was Pakistani. The little girl likes the lamb and wishes to return home because the lamb is separated from its mother. When shahida comes home, the mother stands among the sheep, which means the process of shahida's separation to return. Shahida hand bracelet is the mother bought, shahida is very like, in shahida was sent away, is the bracelet to guide pawan found that he found to help shahida home is a human traffickers, finally prompted pawan decided to personally send shahida home, the plot to the climax. Fourth, handcuffs. Shahida loved the ring because the handcuffs were similar to the bracelet. Two attempts to remove police handcuffs, which were eventually discovered by Pakistani police, were the biggest obstacle to bringing shahida home for pawan. These four symbols, deep meaning, just right to promote the development of the plot.

Shahida came home at the same time that pavan was shot. This section USES both a cross-montage and a contrastive montage, alternating images of shahida reuniting with her family with images of pavan being beaten by police. With a warm reunion to highlight the poor pavan, a gunshot sound of the warm background music stopped, the audience's mood to the climax, good works are speaking in the language of the camera.

With the continuous development of the society, the development trend of commercialization and entertainment of domestic films in China is increasingly serious, which leads to the lack of connotation of films. In the development wave of world economic globalization and world cultural diversification, it brings many disadvantages to the development of domestic film industry in China. For this reason, China needs to actively learn from the artistic characteristics of Indian films and improve the narrative ability of localization of Chinese realistic films. To realize the reform and innovation of China's domestic films.

51due留学教育原创版权郑重声明：原创assignment代写范文源自编辑创作，未经官方许可，网站谢绝转载。对于侵权行为，未经同意的情况下，51Due有权追究法律责任。主要业务有assignment代写、essay代写、paper代写、北美作业代写服务。

51due为留学生提供最好的北美作业代写服务，亲们可以进入主页了解和获取更多代写范文 提供北美作业代写服务，详情可以咨询我们的客服QQ：800020041。

[drink-n-watch]

  Genre: Existential horror, supernatural, artsy

Length:

Studio: ufotable

  Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around just being you. What does that even mean, anyway? What exactly are you supposed to do with existing? Nothing really, that’s the rub. It’s the same old questions philosophers and emo teens have been asking since the dawn of time and we’re no closer to an answer. Or rather, the answer is different for each person and seeking it out can be a painful and violent venture. Yet this is exactly what each player in this tragedy must do, in their own way, their paths crossing and diverging again as they each must find their own truth within themselves. The only thing we can be sure about is that there will be blood.  

I’ve already watched 4 of these movies. I’ve shared my thoughts along the way. There were highs and lows but one thing I can definitely say is that for better or worse, the Garden of Sinners franchise has a very distinctive voice. And in this 5th chapter, it was screaming!

it’s a figure of speech, no one screams in this movie

I watched this movie last night and it’s still dancing around my head. Vividly! Throughout the movies, I’ve been praising production and tracking the use of non-textual (verbal) storytelling. It’s what first attracted me to the franchise, and I was sad to see this aspect pared down as the movies progressed. I can tell you, it’s back in full force and then some!

The overall quality of the art, acting and animation is fairly similar to what we saw in the last two movies, but the directing has taken quite the ambitious turn! There are tons of flair in framing and angles. Action is shot with wavering focus, almost simulating motion sickness. Of course, all of it is carefully intertwined with the story and really an integral part of the narrative. I can’t praise that framing enough, which becomes almost a central feature of the second arc (Mikiya’s) but I’ll talk about it more when I get to the story. Like I said, the way the plot is presented is as important as what’s happening in it.

And that’s just one aspect. The use of symbolic colour is liberally applied both in direct touches and in overall ambient tint throughout the movie. Perspective is constantly tweaked (forced, fisheye, panoramic) which gives eerie qualities to scenes or creates uneasy claustrophobia, which then affects how you take in the dialogue and events to ensure both a literal and emotional read of the story.

there’s no way you can really appreciate it without watching the movie

  Finally editing tricks are incorporated throughout. Frequent jump cuts, repeated scenes sometimes identical sometimes shown from different angles or points of view and odd cold cuts before what would be considered the natural endpoint of a scene both focus your attention on specific elements without the need of exposition and creates interesting reveals. We even get tiny slivers of flashbacks that clearly fit into the narrative of previous movies to give you new reveals and flesh out the general lore and world-building of the franchise.

In case I’ve not made it abundantly clear, the technical presentation of the move was a spellbinding act of artistry. So far, the best example in the series and really one of the best I’ve seen in anime in general.

I was saying something nice…and it’s “Irina”

But with a two-hour movie, you need more than just craftsmanship to hold your attention. The Garden of Sinners established its core thesis right from the start. These movies deal with existential angst in a brutal and deliberate way. They attack it from every angle. The meaning and responsibility of life. The vague notion of personal identity. The dissonance of existing in a reality entirely defined by our personal understanding and experiences while colliding with everyone else’s realities.

These are heady themes and to be honest, the franchise can be hit or miss in its attempts at expression, but it is always deliberate and single-minded which I appreciate. Whether you agree or not with the messaging or even the purpose of exploring such grandstanding philosophical questions at all, you can’t deny that the Garden of Sinners has something to say. That’s worth something in my book.

This specific movie is presented in three general arcs. In the first, we follow a young man named Enjo who meets Shiki by accident, and the mysteries he brings with him. Enjo is trying to escape a tragic past with nowhere to go but as the story progresses and dead people seem to be coming back to life, it gets difficult to pinpoint what’s real and what isn’t.

does Enjo remind you of someone?

  Together, Shiki and Enjo are trying to figure out exactly what happened in this condominium complex when Enjo thought he had lost his family. It’s a very sad story with some downright unpleasant events but it’s framed as a mystery and occasional almost like a procedural. I’ve come to realize that I can enjoy very sad events in a different way when they come with a puzzle. My mind fixates on collecting clues and solving the mystery instead of being sad for the people within it. I think this is why we can watch crime shows without crying or calling them horror.

 The second arc gives us intertwining blocks of events from Mikiya’s point of view (I learned that this was Kokuto’s name and I love it). We realize that characters we thought were absent were actually also actively taking part in the story and the two arcs eventually collide.

This is where that framing I was talking about earlier becomes so important. Shiki is part of this arc, but we never see her. She’s always just off camera. We hear her or see the effect she has on objects but that’s all. A disembodied presence, like a ghost moving through a story that’s not really hers.

who threw that book?

  The final arc brings everything together for the conclusion. I have to admit, simply seeing Shiki again had a powerful visceral impact on me that I did not expect. I like her as a character but I’m more emotionally attached to Mikiya and my beloved Touko (let’s face it, we all know she’s my type). Moreover, Shiki was front and center in the first arc. As such, I hadn’t realized how much I had missed her until she was there. This is smart direction and editing on the next level.

We find out more about Touko’s past here which I enjoyed if only for seeing Touko as a super-hot teenager and Mikiya is a very good leading man for this type of story. The only flaw I can find is with the antagonist(s). Unfortunately, it’s a big one.

The Garden of Sinners Chapter 5, Paradox Paradigm (maybe I’ll talk about this title someday), introduces Souren Araya as a powerful main antagonist and Cornelius Alba as a secondary villain. They take up quite a bit of room in the story and Araya is pivotal to the plot. You could say he is pretty much the entire driving force behind this movie. And they are both painfully dull.

arrrgh, stop monologuing…it hurts…

Honestly, they feel like they belong to a different narrative. Basic, uninteresting and not even that scary. They are unworthy of the rest of the cast. Where Enjo brought a vulnerability which created interesting conflict and interplay with both Shiki and Mikiya, Araya and Alba are just there. They advance the plot in the least engaging way possible. And their little magical diatribes are muddled and bog everything down rather than add to the story.

I thought Fujino in Chapter 3 was fairly unrealized, but she is brilliant compared to these two. It has led me to believe that the Garden of Sinners is really much better when Shiki is her own worst enemy as they have not been able to create a villain that can stand on equal footing with her.

The second arc also basically explains the events of the first (with a rather unsatisfying the wizard did it sort of solution) which effectively puts an end to the mystery. This means those unpleasant events suddenly hit you with the full brunt of just how sad the story is. That’s not a flaw in any way. It just makes it a more emotionally taxing experience and I had to turn the TV off and take a little break after.

I’m Getting Some Ice Cream!!!

The ending is fine, it’s constrained by the failing of the second arc so I wouldn’t call it amazing, but it definitely has its moments and brings some nice emotional closure. The last scene before the credits (there’s a cute after credits scenes), has soft snow starting to fall, which ties it in with the meteorological theming of the franchise.

This was a long review. You should see my notes; they are all over the place. So, what’s the takeaway. Up until the confrontation with Araya and Alba, I thought the movie was brilliant. I was gearing up to rate it close to perfect and add it to my favourites. These two guys knocked the rating down a full point. The plot is only truly captivating in the first arc but the technical artistry shines throughout and the other characters make the second and third arc worth it, even if it does start to drag a bit at the hour and a half mark.

Despite its failings, this is still a very good movie and I do recommend you watch it. I’m just a little bitter at how close it got to be an amazing movie!

almost there…

Favourite character:  Touko – is this not clear yet?

What this anime taught me: mechanical pencils are called “rocket pencils” in Japan. That information makes me inexplicably happy.

Technically, alcohol is a solution

Suggested drink: A Time Warp

Every time someone refuses to stay dead – take a sip

Every time we see Tomoe’s mom – take a sip

Every time we see a key – take a sip

Every time we see a clock – take a sip

every time we see a key AND a clock – gasp

Every time anyone stabs anything – take a sip

Every time we see a doorknob/handle  – get some water

Every time you spot a repeated scene – take a deep breath

Every time there’s a picture or painting – take a sip

Every time we see a puppet – take a sip

everything’s better with more Touko

Being such a visually stunning movie, I couldn’t resist taking an unreasonable amount of screencaps which you can see here. Be warned, although I have chosen fairly innocent ones for the post, some on my Pinterest board are both graphic and potentially spoilery.

The Garden of Sinners Chapter 5 – Paradox Paradigm or The Saddest Groundhog Day Genre: Existential horror, supernatural, artsy Length: Studio: ufotable Sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around just being you.

[swipestream]

Part-Time Gods Second Edition Review

I had a lot of early influences that led to my later interests. I can just barely remember seeing Star Wars at the drive-in when it came out. The first birthday present I can remember is a toy Batmobile. More to the point, one of the first non-Star Wars movies I can remember seeing was Clash of the Titans. While I had already started hearing stories about King Arthur and his knights, this was something else entirely — a whole different scale. My love of mythological stories was born, as was my deep abiding affection for mechanical owls.

It’s not much of a leap for me to gravitate towards roleplaying games that allow you to build your own mythology. This led me to my current review, Part-Time Gods Second Edition.

Disclaimer

While published by Third Eye Games, the Kickstarter for this project was run by Encoded Designs, which you may or may not know also has some gnomish overlap. In addition to gnomish oversight, there were a few gnomes that contributed to the contents of the book itself. While I didn’t consult with any of them in the creation of this review, I did want to state all of that up front.

Content Warning

While I’m not going to spend much time on any of it in this review, the game itself does have some instances of discussing adult professions, cannibalism, potentially compromised people put in dangerous situations, and occasional descriptions of violent acts. It isn’t constant, but each of the above pops up in a few places across the course of the text.

Manifestation

This review is based on the PDF of the game. The PDF is 318 pages, with a four-page index, 12 sample characters (in addition to the sample characters used in the text), two pages of Kickstarter backers, three pages of random tables, a blank territory grid, and a blank character sheet.

The cover has gorgeous full-color art, with similar black and white art in the interior. While the interior art is black and white, interior headers and borders are rendered in gold and purple, and the overall effect looks very sharp.

Introduction

The introduction gives the quick pitch of the game, which is that the player characters are portraying modern-day gods that must balance their responsibilities as everyday people with the responsibilities inherent in the divine spark that they possess. Complicating this is that mortals that aren’t worshippers that get too close to the gods usually don’t have a happy ending in store.

In addition to the pitch, there are brief sections on what a roleplaying game is, what is needed to play, and the core resolution mechanic. That mechanic involves assembling a dice pool of d10s, counting 7-9s as successes, counting 10s as two successes, and counting 1s with no successes in the pool as a critical failure. This section wraps up with a glossary of terms that will be introduced in the upcoming chapter.

Between chapters, there are one-page pieces of fiction illustrating how the lives of modern gods play out.

The Descending Storm

The next section delves a bit deeper into the lore of the assumed setting. The first mortal touched by the power known as The Source spent time with other mortals, and those mortals became gods. In order to keep a tighter rein on who gets to become a god, the existing gods locked up The First Mother.

This leads to some bad consequences that result in the creation of Outsiders, mythological monsters that originally just wanted to wipe out the gods (although some of them lost this drive over time).

All of this means that modern gods are a generation of people with amazing potential but burdened with the consequences of the actions of an older generation that was unwilling to fully share their power. Why does that theme feel somewhat familiar?

In addition to the broad history lesson on the gods and their origins, there are explanations of theologies, dominions, territories, pantheons, worshippers, outsiders, and why modern gods are less overt than their predecessors.

I really enjoyed the way the history weaves in and out of matching and diverting from what might be common knowledge about different mythologies. It is a history section that hits the highlights and lets you know what happened in broad terms but doesn’t assign specific fates for all of the old gods or go into details that a GM may want to provide in their own campaigns.

Spark of Divinity

This section of the book walks the reader through creating a character. This involves the following steps:

Occupations (what you do for a living)

Archetype (the type of character you are)

Dominion (what you are the god of)

Theology (an organization that has a specific philosophy on what gods should be doing)

Attachments (your ties to the mortal world)

Final Touches

Each of these steps adds different ratings to a character. By combining them, you end up with what skills a character has, how much wealth and downtime they have, what their truths are (abilities that are either always true, or can be activated, but don’t involve rolls), and the people, places, and things that are important to them.

At the end of each of the Theology sections, there is a sample character sheet for a god that belongs to that Theology. After walking players through the steps of creating a character, there is a section on XP, including how it is awarded, and what can be purchased with it.

At the end of this section is a summary of character creation. I was glad this was included, as the individual items are simple enough, but they are being accumulated across a lot of different options, and it might be easy to miss something that a character should have received from some section of character creation.

While I liked some of the items that will net a player XP for their character, I have become a much bigger fan of having tailored questions that trigger XP when answered. It’s great to award XP for characters being present, having scenes with their bonds, and highlighting their curses. I feel less excited about trying to determine spotlight awards, teamwork awards, or memorable moments. I would have rather had more specific questions tailored to the different aspects of the character as chosen through character creation, as some of the triggers feel too open-ended to me.

Divine Expressions

This section engages how to use the “big picture” aspects of the rules, such as how sparks work, legendary acts, hearing prayers, the limits of immortality, how manifestations work, rituals, and other worlds.

Legendary acts are big narrative things that gods can do to make a major change, but that drain them whenever they are done. Gods have to recover after they do these, and there are mechanical penalties assessed afterward, but the legendary act itself is a narrative thing that fits within the god’s dominion.

Whenever a god does something that isn’t a “standard” thing, such as using more mundane skills, they can use their manifestation skills to attempt to do supernatural things. The further away from their dominion the manifestation is, the more a god might take a penalty to their die pool to create the manifestation. There are example costs for things like magnitude and effect which a god must spend to create the manifestation, and if used against another creature with a spark, they must spend successes to overcome that oppositions defense before they can spend for effects.

The final section of this chapter explains how a god can create their own realm away from the mortal world, as well as detailing a few previously existing supernatural realms. There are also rules for detailing what happens when gods go exploring realms beyond the mortal world.

Blessing the Dice

The next section gets more into the rules for doing more day to day actions in the game. The group has a pantheon pool of dice that can be drawn upon when the entire group agrees and invoking a character’s curse (narratively suffering the effects of that curse), adds to the pantheon pool. Blessings often involve giving a character extra dice when they attempt certain skills or in certain circumstances.

Instead of adding a skill to an attribute, as many dice pool systems do, in Part-Time Gods 2nd Edition, you explain a primary skill related to what you want to do, and then explain how a secondary skill could supplement that skill, and the number in these two skills forms the number of dice that make up the dice pool. Higher difficulties require more successes.

Tools that are high quality or especially helpful to an action add additional dice as well. Getting three more successes than needed for a given result gives a character a boost and getting a 1 on one of the dice without getting any successes creates a critical failure. There are example boosts and critical failures given in this chapter to guide what should happen when those come up.

There are derived statistics for strength and movement. This was actually a little baffling to me, because so much of the game is abstract–the territory grid, wealth, downtime. It feels odd to quantify exactly how far characters can move, or exactly how much they can lift and carry, and it feels a little at odds with the overall feel of the game.

Moving around the territory grid and entering a scene causes a character to spend downtime. Characters can go to their job to get back some wealth or downtime instead of participating in a scene, and when a character is out of downtime, they have to spend time with their bonds, or risk damaging the relationship with that bond (bonds take stress a certain number of times before being broken, and a broken bond creates new penalties for the god). Some obligations can be met by spending wealth, but not all.

Divine Battles

This section sets up how to structure a scene when player characters are in direct conflict with NPCs. There are different, but similar, rules for Battles of Fists and Battles of Wits. Characters have both health and psyche to track how much harm has been done in these conflicts.

When entering conflict, characters roll individual initiative, and they pick a major and minor action, and when they must defend against an action, they take a minor and major defense.

In addition to taking straight damage to health or psyche, characters can opt to take on conditions, which have specific consequences, but keep a character from using up all of their resources to stay viable in the scene.

Armor and weapons are a bit more granular than the overall description of the tools in the previous chapter, although most of the interactions deal with specific instances where they are more or less effective, and ways to mitigate costs for an item.

I’m a little torn, because I really like the depth that the interaction of major and minor choices adds to the narrative but coupled with the individual initiative rolled each round of combat, it feels like this could bog down quickly. It is noted that players could roll initiative once and keep the same turn order if they like, and I’m inclined to think this is what I would do, even though I like to run systems as written first, before introducing any modifications.

At least one of the defense options had me really confused, until I reread the actions sections and realized that (I think) it chains off of a character picking a certain action on their turn, which in turn allows them to then have the option to benefit from a defensive option when they are being acted against.

The Opposition

This section presents statistics for noteworthy mortals, mortals touched by the gods, other gods, and outsiders. While there is plenty of room to customize these stat blocks (and the GM is encouraged to do so when a character becomes a recurring character), there is a wide enough variety to present any number of threats on the fly. In addition to the specific examples, there is a chart giving “generic” dice pools, defenses, and resistances for different threat levels, to help GMs build and improvise anything that doesn’t appear.

The outsiders are drawn from a number of different mythologies and folklore, many of which have just a slight twist on what might be expected of them. Like the section on deific history, similar monsters from different mythologies are given more of a streamlined and common origin, such as the giants all originating from Atlas.

Creating New Myths

This section includes inspirations for the game (which draws on a wide variety of media), tips on developing stories, pacing a campaign, and utilizing story tricks. In several places it addresses specific game elements, such as getting the best use out of curses in the narrative.

There is a lot of solid advice in this section, and I particularly liked the range of inspirations for the game, citing comics, television, books, and movies, some of which may be obvious, but others that clearly have a similar theme to the game as presented.

I was a little surprised that there wasn’t a dedicated safety section in a narrative-heavy game such as this one, especially with some of the topics introduced. I do not want to give the wrong impression — the text definitely talks about paying attention to what players want and do not want in a game and building the story together, but this is interspersed, rather than concentrated in a specific discussion on safety.

I was also a little sad that there wasn’t more time spent on an idea briefly touched on in this section about starting the characters as mortal for one session, then layering on their deific powers and their association with the various theologies. While I understand what was said from a mechanical standpoint, I would love to see this as an alternate path to starting the game, with an expanded exploration of what this would look like and how it should unfold.

Divine Domain

 Part-Time Gods Second Edition manages to ignite a spark for modern urban fantasy roleplaying, creating a nice balance of game mechanics to drive the themes of the game. 

Share1

Tweet1

+11

Reddit1

Email

I enjoy the exact level of detail given, that manages to give a strong feel for the setting, while leaving plenty of room to expand the campaign. Wealth and free time provide a great ebb and flow for driving the kinds of plots that the game describes. There is a broad cross-section of different cultural influences to create a richer tapestry to draw from. 

Mortal Concerns

The more granular rules about strength and movement feel a little at odds with the more free-form aspects of the game. It feels as if there is some potential for slowed pacing with individual initiative and multiple choices for both the attacker and defender in combat. I wish there had been a little more time spent on detailing the concept of playing characters as mortals discovering their sparks, and I wish there was a little bit more of a dedicated safety section in the rules.

Recommended — If the product fits in your broad area of gaming interests, you are likely to be happy with this purchase.

Part-Time Gods Second Edition manages to ignite a spark for modern urban fantasy roleplaying, creating a nice balance of game mechanics to drive the themes of the game. If you aren’t interested in urban fantasy, this may not change your mind, but it may still be worth a look just to see how the grid, wealth, and downtime are utilized.

When you want to play god, what games to you enjoy? What are your favorite urban fantasy settings, and what is compelling about them? What kinds of mechanics do you feel support the themes of a game? We want to hear from you, so please leave a comment below! We’ll be waiting for you.

Part-Time Gods Second Edition Review published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

[techdomes]

  At its core, Insomniac Games’ new adventure strives to make you feel like Spider-Man. And, thankfully, Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS4 succeeds at nearly every swing across Manhattan’s rooftops. I was left delighted at nearly every step of its 15-hour adventure thanks to a surprisingly deep tale that mines the plights of both Spider-Man and Peter Parker to great emotional success. Underpinning that engrossing narrative is an excellent set of webswinging mechanics, which — combined with fun gadgets and plenty of puns — makes for thrilling action in both the massive setpieces and in the quiet, confined corridors of tense sequences. Insomniac’s first foray into the realm of Marvel superheroes is a continually exciting adventure whose open world and combat are only occasionally caught up in a web of overly familiar trappings. Swinging around feels, quite simply, spectacular. There’s a small learning curve, but after getting comfortable with the basics, it’s nearly effortless to make Spider-Man look graceful in every swing, leap, and lunge. And man does it feel good to find the right mix of jumping, crawling, web zipping, and wall running.

I’ve spent hours just soaring around the skyscrapers of New York City, testing the momentum of my swings to find just the right point to gain an extra boost of speed, or leaping off the Avengers Tower to test how close to the ground I could fall, just to swing out in the nick of time. Similar to how God of War’s Leviathan Axe felt so good to throw around, Insomniac has found web-spun gold with Spider-Man’s swinging mechanic, enhancing it with additional moves like a focal point webzip that allowed me to turn any ledge, beam, or satellite tower into a jumping off point to continue my non-stop movement. Open-world traversal hasn’t been this smooth since Sunset Overdrive (which, not coincidentally, Insomniac also developed).

Doing What a Spider Can

And, happily, no aspect of New York’s architecture can really stop Spider-Man. Discovering how a powerful, but nimble, Spider-Man tackles fire escapes, both vertically and horizontally, or watching him slip through the metal grating of a water tower is endlessly entertaining. His animations are so detailed that no matter the obstacle, I got the sense that I could truly do whatever a Spider-Man could.

That was surprisingly true of indoor locations, too. The main story missions often took me into large-scale interiors, sometimes for light puzzle solving, and occasionally for stealthy takedown scenarios. For anyone who’s played the Batman: Arkham franchise, the framework is largely the same: enter a room, avoid being detected, and use a mix of gadgets and (relatively) quiet web takedowns to take down the crowd.

Insomniac has found web-spun gold with Spider-Man’s wonderful webswinging.

These stealth scenarios perfectly highlight Spider-Man’s talents — especially his love for designing gadgets. There’s a methodical thrill to plotting out the order I wanted to web up enemies, whether luring an enemy out toward me for a stealth takedown or by firing off a web trap that would stick them to a wall. There’s enough enemy variety (some react differently to your webbing than others, like big brutes that can’t be taken down as easily) that I always enjoyed the light bit of strategy these sections demanded, and would happily work my way through a dozen more.

Of course, Spidey gets up close and personal with foes a lot of the time, too, making for combat that’s equally fun, if a little slow to show its true depth. At first, I found myself pretty much just punching and dodging, occasionally webbing up a foe so I could focus on a more powerful baddie. But as I unlocked more skills from Spider-Man’s skill trees and gadgets, combat became an improvisational delight. After some leveling, I could pull an enemy’s gun away and smack him in the head with it, while a previously planted web trip mine strung two other enemies together. I’d then web-zip my way to a floor above me to smack an enemy off a railing while simultaneously sending a spider drone after two more foes. That balancing act consistently delivered on the powerful and fun fantasy of being Spider-Man. To be fair, Spider-Man’s combat owes a lot to the aforementioned Arkham franchise, right down to the slow-motion crunch when you take out the last baddie in a bunch, but that template is sped up dramatically in order to take advantage of Spidey’s nimble nature.

That feeling of fluid movement only falters during boss battles. Insomniac throws in some big and exciting boss fights full of tense action. They’re sparingly involved, as many of the more fascinating setpieces of the story don’t involve one-on-one fights. But because the adventure is both front and back-loaded with boss fights, there’s an odd lull devoid of huge bouts right in the middle of the story. That’s not inherently bad, especially as a lot of great character work is done in the second act alongside those blockbuster action sequences. But because the first couple of bosses boil down to round-based pattern recognition, they felt a bit simple and rote. Unfortunately, that becomes pretty noticeable with the huge gap in major villain encounters. Still, there are some smart and fun twists in boss battles toward the end of the campaign to look forward to.

The combat and gadgets fulfill the fun and powerful fantasy of being Spider-Man.

The variation in Spider-Man’s fighting style and inventive gadget arsenal — which is hardly a surprise given Insomniac’s knack for wacky weapon wheels in series like Ratchet & Clank — is also extended to Spider-Man’s wardrobe. His portable closet of unlockable Spidey suits all come with their own powers. Each power can be used independently of the outfit once unlocked, which is a godsend. It’s a joy to swap among some of the unexpected late-game duds, though I’ve become quite fond of this Spider-Man’s new main suit. That said, I largely relied on the first couple of powers for almost the entire campaign. The singular power to fill out your focus meter for special finishers or to restore health from Peter’s white-spider costume was so consistently useful that I didn’t want to give it up, and I never felt like the world encouraged me to use the others. Swapping between mods to adapt to specific side challenges — like one that could prevent my combo counter from immediately resetting with each hit — was always more useful than swapping between different abilities.

  Concrete Jungle

Spider-Man’s New York is an absolute blast to swing around, in part thanks to how gorgeous the shiny skyscrapers of the city look. Spider-Man does have its graphical hiccups — for example, the faces of Peter and other key characters are spectacularly animated while less notable characters are flat and often out of sync with dialogue. But its New York City is undeniably gorgeous, particularly on a PS4 Pro. Swinging around at dusk as the calm oranges of the setting sun hit the reflective glass of New York’s skyscrapers at just the right angle evoked some of the most calming, zen-like gameplay sessions I’ve experienced in awhile.

Marvel’s Spider-Man doesn’t offer a a 1:1 recreation of New York City, but most of the key landmarks — including my old apartment — are recreated faithfully. Neighborhoods have distinct enough character to be discernible as I swung from one to the next. Yes, certain aspects of the city, like water towers or certain building fronts, can start to feel repetitive. But Insomniac has done a pretty great job of capturing the city’s look with the sheen I’d expect for a world full of superheroes and super science.

That feeling is only magnified by the score. Spider-Man’s main theme recalls the triumphant horns of the MCU Avengers score, rising at just the right moments as I raced to stop a crime or to save some locale from a villain’s evil plot. Outside of the main campaign, there are dozens of other side objectives scattered throughout the city, which add another 15-20 hours of exploring, though my enjoyment of them varied greatly. I was never outright bored by any task, but some were reused so often that I found myself running through the motions of scenarios I once found exciting. The fourth or fifth time you figure out how to take on a horde of enemies committing a crime or fend off waves of enemies at an outpost is still entertaining — the fortieth is much less so. It dilutes what starts as a fun, heroic act into a repetitive, going-through-the-motions activity that often had a knack for popping up just as I was making my way to a major story mission. Outside of stopping those optional crimes, Taskmaster’s tough combat, race, and stealth challenges kept me coming back for better scores. And though finding landmarks and backpacks encouraged me to hit every corner of the city, the activity itself was pretty easy. Peter outside of his suit can also engage in a couple science minigames, one of which is essentially the pipe challenge from the original BioShock. I have a soft spot for that type of puzzle activity, but their inclusion contributes to some of the campaign’s odd pacing issues. They’re introduced just after your first real taste of being Spider-Man, and then interrupt the action anytime Spider-Man needs to do something science-related within the story.

The brilliance of what the world could have been can be seen in a handful of brilliant side missions. One tied nicely into the main story, culminating in an optional boss fight. Another suite of tasks forced me to actually have a good sense of New York’s neighborhoods. These sidequests helped bring the world of Spider-Man and its open New York City to life — I just wish a few more of them cleverly gave the world and my actions more significance.

Update: A day-one patch for Spider-Man has introduced a wonderful photo mode to the experience. It feels like the next evolution of photo modes before it, being so bespoke to Spidey himself. Being able to create comic book covers or panels is a delightful twist, and effectively allows you to create your own Spider-Man comic books should you want to.

Slow-Spinning Redemption

Thankfully, the story consistently delivers that sense of weight and impact, albeit after a somewhat slow start. Insomniac’s Spider-Man is one who has a history in this world, and it feels earned thanks to smart integration of familiar villains rather than throwing them at the screen for the sake of fan service. The script allows time for the central villains (and Peter’s relationship to them) to believably develop, making for some emotionally powerful scenes toward the end that definitely had me misty eyed on a couple of occasions.

I appreciated Insomniac’s surprising amount of restraint when it came to villains, but I loved the focus it put on Peter Parker and his relationships even more. I played Spider-Man to be Spider-Man, but I’m so happy I got to be Peter, too.

I played Spider-Man to be Spider-Man, but I’m so happy I got to be Peter, too.

Peter’s story is one of mentorship, smartly showing how he can simultaneously look up to one mentor, while becoming one, too. That dichotomy offers Spider-Man voice actor Yuri Lowenthal a chance to convey Peter’s various facets, and he does so with an emotional honesty that made this version of the Spider-Man one of my favorites on screen. Peter is someone who can succeed while he makes mistakes, and that juxtaposition offers a wealth of relatable material that carried me through much of Spider-Man’s story.

I won’t spoil Miles’ part in the adventure, but I enjoyed his inclusion and, thanks to a charming performance, I was as endeared to him as I was to Peter.

Spider-Man’s story is as captivating as anything the MCU has offered

Perhaps most of all, though, I loved Peter and Mary-Jane’s relationship. It’s well-trod territory, but Insomniac injects new life into it, in part thanks to Spidey and MJ actors Lowenthal and Laura Bailey’s performances. These are two people who have a history together, and watching them try to figure out what future they have, if any — as friends, coworkers, or more — is an absolute joy to watch.

A number of Peter and MJ’s scenes feel instantly relatable, from the two having their first dinner in months together, navigating whether they’re comfortable with one another, to Peter trying not to lose his cool over a misinterpreted text. It’s one of my favorite romances in a game ever, and contributes to a story with personal stakes as captivating — and often much more — as anything the MCU (and most superhero movies) has delivered.

The Verdict

I wanted Marvel’s Spider-Man on PS4 to make me feel like Spider-Man: To sail between the highrises of New York City, to nimbly web up hordes of enemies, and tussle with familiar, animal-themed villains. Insomniac Games’ first foray into the world of Marvel handily delivers on all of that. But what I didn’t expect from Spider-Man was to come away feeling just as fulfilled to have inhabited the life of Peter Parker. Aside from a few odd pacing issues, which momentarily took me out of the experience of being a superhero, and a world of optional missions that don’t always quite live up to the heft of the main story, Insomniac has delivered a Spider-Man story that both surprised and delighted me, coupled with gameplay that made me feel like Spider-Man nearly every step of the way. The Wall Crawler’s open world doesn’t consistently deliver the thrilling moments of its main campaign, but the foundation laid here is undoubtedly a spectacular one.

                         TechDomes Score: 10

  #TechDomes2018

Marvel’s Spider-Man PS4 Review

[coolhyemihan-blog]

Mastery Journal- Doodlebug Short Film Analysis

Hyemi Han

May 11, 2018

Filmmaking Concepts and Practices

Mastery Journal- Doodlebug Short Film Analysis

         Doodlebug was released in 1997 and directed by Christopher Nolan. Christopher Nolan is an acclaimed director well known for blockbuster films such as The Dark Knight, Inception, and Dunkirk. Unlike the three films above, Doodlebug was a low-budget film with a run time of only 3 minutes. Nolan filled the role of writer, director, cinematographer, and editor. His film crew staff was less than 10 people at any given time.

        The film focuses on an anxious and paranoid man in a messy apartment. His goal in the film is to kill an insect of some kind that is moving around his room. But the bug keeps running away from the man. When the man is able to catch the bug, the viewers are shown that the bug is, in fact, a miniature human being. The miniature figure looks exactly like the man, dressed the same, and looks to be also catching a bug of his own. In the end, the man is able to kill the bug, and then in almost immediately killed by another bigger human being, who looks exactly like the man as well. Christopher Nolan externalizes his instability inner mind in various ways by using a dramatic narrative structure, costumes, props, camera movement, and music.

        While the title Doodlebug means that the larva of an ant-lion and also any of several other insects, it can be connected to represent the man himself and his self-destructive perception. This movie has a duality about character trait in that one person includes a protagonist and an antagonist at the same time. In short, his short has a psychological theme such as personal identity relating to the term, self-destructive drive and its genre is a psychological thriller.

         The suspense at first is whether or not the man will be successful in killing this bug. Then the audience is led to wonder about the identity of this bug, as it is revealed to be quite large. When the man finally uncovers the bug, the “bug” is actually a miniature version of the man himself. While the man is trying to kill this bug, the inner turmoil of this man is portrayed through the tone, the dramatic structure such as mis-en-abyme, and use of props.

         First, Nolan chooses a black-and-white film. By choosing a black and white film magnifies the man’s internal gloom. If the film had been in color, the man’s pain could have felt lessened, or rather, the tone of the film would have been lighter. The tone that Nolan chose is heavy, dark, and gloomy which is well supported by the black-and-white.

         Second, Nolan also employs mis-en-abyme to represent the continuity and the endlessness of the man’s turmoil. Mis-en-abyme is the French term that means a story within a story. The dramatic structure seems to be similar to the Mobius strip or Mobius band, in which there is no distinction between the inside world and the outside world, and no beginning and no end. With this structure, the main character's obsessive state was trapped by the constant yoke of self-destruction. So, the denouement of the film evokes fear in a way that is different from other film methods. Many of Nolan’s films are filled with feelings of ambiguity and unease, “which are partially transmitted through journeys of identity construction and through the films' ending” (Parks, 2011).  The fear increases exponentially at the end of the film when the audience realizes that there is, in fact, no beginning and no end to this synopsis. Nolan often uses these narrative time loops and infinitely repeating shapes. For example, Escher’s impossible staircase in Inception (mfa.org, 2018).

         Third, Christopher Nolan externalizes his character’s unstable inner mind into his costumes.  The man is wearing a very simple shirt and pants. Although it can be attributed to the lack of budget, Nolan also deliberately chooses to dress the man in a seemingly dirty shirt and shabby pants.  This is a representation of his chaotic mind. This is because a man's messy style can mean he doesn't take care of his own condition normally after all. The man’s eyes in this style jump from the bug to the clock, to the bug, back to the clock, then to the ringing phone, then to the bug.

         Then, the audiences can see props; table clock, the phone, a pitcher of water, shoes, and his underwear. The props are very mundane; they are common, everyday items one would expect to see in an apartment. In fact, it is less about the props, but the man’s reaction to the props that reveals the man’s distress and anxiety. For example, instead of replying to the ringing phone, the man has a bizarre reaction. He submerges the phone receiver into a pitcher of water. In addition, each tick of the clock seems to be causing the man further distress as evidenced by his enlarging eyes and continuous erratic behavior.

         Meanwhile, the man’s anxiety, watching the table clock, it can be connected to the man's pressure on time. And it could have been born in the social structure after the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought many changes to the notion of time. Before that, even in the West, there was not much of the concept of time, which was mechanical, objective and measurable. In other words, how time is utilized by individuals, society and the nation has become the core of competitiveness (Voth, 2012). Judging from his humble space, he could be the social weak in a competitive society created by modern time. The table clock and telephone receiver made after the Industrial Revolution can be one of the items that are threatening to men. With his odd reaction against it, this man's anxious psychology is further enhanced by the dark, heavy background sound with the camera movement like dolly zoom in and out.

         In conclusion, Christopher Nolan would have solved his real problems during the period of producing the film with his unique ways by using a literary device such as mis-en-abyme, costumes, props, camera movement, and music. If I were to make To Kill an Enemy, I would like to use simple props which are easily used in our daily lives like Christopher Nolan's Doodlebug. While considering all the elements of narrative structure, production design, photography, sound design, and editing techniques for film storytelling, I will also need to consider unique ways to incorporate these everyday prop items. To clarify, a common weapon in the thriller genre is a knife or a gun. A fork or even a ballpoint pen is a common object, but if used as a weapon, that would be peculiar and memorable to the audience. Therefore, using props like this can be not only notable in the film (if used in a different manner), it would help to alleviate the financial burden of having a low-budget.

References

Parks, E. H. (2011, June). Identity Construction and Ambiguity in Christopher Nolan’s Films. Wide Screen, 3(1). Retrieved from http://widescreenjournal.org

Cox, G. (2015, April 20). Christopher Nolan Says His Filmmaking Process a ‘Combination of Intuition and Geometry’. Variety. Retrieved from http://variety.com/2015/film/news/christopher-nolan-tribeca-film-festival-1201476250/

Voth, H. J. (2012). Time and Work in England During the Industrial Revolution. N.p.: Xlibris Corporation LLC.

Math, Mind, and Memory: The Films of Christopher Nolan. (2018, May). In Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Retrieved May 12, 2018, from https://www.mfa.org/programs/series/math-mind-and-memory-the-films-of-christopher-nolan

[kickstarter-promotion]

Another Amazing Kickstarter (Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers, an RPG by Slade Stolar —Kickstarter) has been published on http://crowdmonsters.com/new-kickstarters/dust-fog-and-glowing-embers-an-rpg-by-slade-stolar-kickstarter/

A NEW KICKSTARTER IS LAUNCHED:

What if all of the systems that were supplanted by science prevailed? That is, what if science lost? For example: What if alchemy rose to prominence instead of chemistry? What if numerology were the main branch of mathematics? What if the four humours were our explanation of human behavior, rather than psychology? What if the reading of goat entrails were the most accurate method of weather prediction?

From dark alleys to high-street shops trepanning, séances, and blood-letting would be commonplace.

In Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers, you enter a world at the cusp of its industrial age. You embody characters that have to face a world in which all kinds of strange physical laws apply. This is a science-fiction game, although from the perspective of a version of the proto-industrial past. Your characters are special because they have access to spagyric essences (plant-based alchemical substances that allow them to become as rarefied as mist, light fires by exuding sparks, or whip up dust storms to blind their enemies), which make them the perfect tool for unsavoury people to exploit.

Your pledge will help to create a book (in PDF and print-on-demand formats) that contains the rules and setting of this table-top role-playing game. Aside from pencils, dice, paper, and compatriots, the book will contain all that you need to start telling stories in the world of Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers.

The BioShock (1, 2, and Infinite) and Fallout (1, 2, 3, NV, and 4) video games are inspirations. The extant table-top RPG Into the Odd has a similar setting. Vampire: The Masquerade has similar powers. From Bioshock and Vampire, I want to take the idea of having incredible powers that feel like they are slowly corrupting you. From Fallout and Into the Odd, I want to take the idea of a setting that is gritty and oppressive and anachronistic, while still being darkly funny.

This game uses the same the core dice mechanics as our previous game The Indie Hack, in which two dice are rolled, one Light, one Dark. The Dark Die represents the character’s prowess. The Light Die represents the challenge that the character faces. The highest result is the winner, with degrees of success based on the difference between the two dice results. Of course, you will add one of your three attributes, namely, Tough, Precise, or Clever, to your Dark Die result.

The main units of narrative that you’ll be adding to the story are called details. Details are properties or conditions (e.g., the ornate pistol you found in the cellar of the judge’s manor might have the details Rusted and Engraved with occult symbols). Details are written down when they are added to a character, scene, enemy, or item, and are crossed out when they are no longer applicable. The better your dice result, the more details you get to add.

The core rules shared by The Indie Hack and Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers are available in a System Reference Document, which you can use to start making your own hacks: https://scablandspress.com/srd/

Your character is a wretch, an undesirable, an outsider, a pariah. You turn to a Patron to better your life; they exploit you to enrich theirs. They give you spagyric essences to grant you incredible powers, but these substances take a significant toll.

Fleshing out characters and additional world-building occurs at the start of the game. Once you have your group at the table, you follow these steps to create a gamut of complex outcomes:

Create your Patron; your Patron’s lusts will dictate the kinds of tasks you must complete (or risk losing their favour).

Choose your character type, from among Raven, Swan, and Phoenix. Take extreme attributes, more aptitudes, or a balance.

Answer several questions about your place in the world. Where can you never go, and why? How long has it been since you last saw your lover, and why? What causes you the most resentment about being a lackey, and why? What makes you want to destroy your Patron, and why can’t you?

Choose your spagyric powers. Exude cinders to light rooms or start fires, whip up sand to sharpen swords or blind foes, become mist to avoid attacks or slide under doors.

Choose your prime humour, among melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, and sanguine. Your personality evolves mechanically as you interact with NPCs.

The City of Stome lies at the heart of Our Commonwealth. The streets are built upon layers spanning hundreds of years of compacted waste, bodies, and ruins. The streets are filled with horses, cheroot smoke, and fog. While walking, you pass cloaked, soot-smudged, sweat-sticky people.

The main districts of Stome have their distinct flavours:

Black Hall and the Inner Courts – The Government of Our Commonwealth, including its courts and police stations

The Promenade – A pathway good for brisk walks (enjoyed by lovers and muggers alike)

The Eastern Heights – Opulent manor-houses far from the smog, but with their own (subtler, more insidious) dangers

The Circuit – Factories and slaughterhouses around a ring road

The Wold – Temples of all faiths and vast cemeteries

Beyond the city are farms, forests, and fields, but also:

The Fens – A corridor of swampy wasteland, home only to odd beasts

The Felnwol Caves – Labyrinthine sandstone passages hiding riches from ages past

The Undercity – Black markets and enigmatic characters (worthwhile if you can stand the smells)

Each district will have random tables of themed events that can be used (by the players or the GM) to drag the players into unexpected conflicts and offer unexpected rewards when they “Go looking for trouble”. A sample is shown below.

The nation simply known as Our Commonwealth, unlike Stome, is not yet well defined. We hope to expand upon it in various ways via stretch goals from talented folks in the online RPG community.

Slade Stolar – Has written the engine and setting of the game.

Dirk Leichty – Has drawn some amazing artwork, and will draw yet more. You can see a handful of excellent examples on this Kickstarter page.

Oli Jeffery – Will be doing layout to give this game polish. There’s a sampling below (note that the text and page numbers are not final).

    The music that you hear in the video is The Spirit of Russian Love (violin) by Zinaida Trokai by Kosta T. I think it’s beautiful and haunting.

We are asking for your financial support and input (as creative GMs and players) to complete this project in a way that is professional, comprehensive, and effortlessly usable. Art and layout of this high quality can get expensive, and a broad supporter base reduces per-unit costs. Additionally, in many ways, it is impossible for us to know how you would play this game; no amount of internal playtesting would be sufficient to address all the issues that might arise (even ones that are obvious to your group), that is, the powers of the game could be very unbalanced if approached differently. We want to locate and solve any such issues, and to cite you as contributors to the rules. Furthermore, we want this game to be hackable; we need to know how to make the core ruleset work for you beyond the world of Dust, Fog, and Glowing Embers.

Note that all submissions by Contributors and Patrons are subject to in-good-taste approval by Scablands Press.

The current budget is as follows:

Kickstarter Goal: $2,200 CAD

Artwork – $800 CAD, which includes the cover and over 15 illustrations in the style seen above, such as enemies, characters, items, and a map

Layout – $340 CAD, which means creating pages like those above; backgrounds, ink splats, and other embellishments

Editing – $530 CAD, which means professional editing of the document

Fees and Taxes – $530 CAD, which seems high, but includes my income taxes for the KS funds (I will declare this as income) and the KS-based fees

$4,000 CAD – [Locked] – The Burialmounds, a setting PDF by Thomas Novosel, given to all at Digital Copy level and above.

When the flesh begins to harden, the skin starts to crack, and the mind becomes scattered across the wind, it is a sign. It is a sign that your existence can no longer hold itself together after you have–time and again–weakened it. You blow away, only to materialize on the Burialmounds. This floating mass of dirt and consciousness pulls itself through the sky with tendrils of rattling chains. It is a prison for those who have abused the spagyric powers that have been discovered.

The Burialmounds is where spagyrists often find themselves when they can no longer hold their bodies together on their own. It acts as an anchor for the warped and anatomically volatile that drifts aimlessly across the lands and seas, holding The Damaged, Vultures (a new player class), and powers that only the most broken may conjure from the void beyond this world.

$6,000 CAD – [Locked] A Mystery Setting Supplement, given to all at Digital Copy level and above.

$8,000 CAD – [Locked] A Mystery Guest’s Hack, given to all at Digital Copy level and above.

$12,000 CAD – [Locked] Another Mystery Setting Supplement, given to all at Digital Copy level and above.

$16,000 CAD – [Locked] A high-quality hardcover digital offset print run. Heavy paper. Rich ink. Available to all at Digital + PoD Physical Copy level and above; just pay printing and shipping (however, at the Digital + Physical Copy Shipped to You level, don’t pay anything more).

Every $4,000 CAD thereafter – [Locked] ???

More stretch goals will be revealed as they are unlocked.

Printing and shipping are always difficult parts of planning a kickstarter that involves a book. We are working with DriveThruRPG.com to bring you high-quality physical print-on-demand products and integration with a massive online collection of existing role-playing games at the lowest possible prices.

Print-on-demand books will ship from the United States or the United Kingdom. Estimated standard shipping prices for softcover books are as follows (all prices in USD):

USA – $5 USD

UK – $6 USD

Germany – $7 USD

France – $8 USD

Canada – $7 USD

Using DriveThru, you can combine your physical print-on-demand reward with other items to reduce your per-item shipping costs.

Additionally, you’ll be able to choose your print quality:

Standard quality softcover – $4 USD

Premium quality softcover – $14 USD

Standard quality hardcover – $9 USD

Premium quality hardcover – $19 USD

Note that final printing costs will be based on final page count.

DriveThruRPG lets us at Scablands focus on making the best possible product, rather than worrying about fulfillment.

INFORMATION PROVIDED BY Kickstarter.com and Kicktraq.com VISIT PAGE SOURCE

[prokopetz]

Didn't know about the marvel hero system and I loved the concept of caracteristics depending of solo/team! Do you have other exemple of unusual stands on "how to mesure a character strength"?

Oh, there’s a whole variety of ‘em.

For example, in the Cortex Dramatic Roleplaying system (previously discussed here), instead of stats and skills, characters have Values and Relationships. Values are things like Duty, Glory, Justice, Love, etc., (every character has the same set, just with varying ratings), while relationships are tied to particular player characters or NPCs. Your basic dice pool is created by pairing the most relevant Value with the most relevant Relationship.

The upcoming Cavaliers of Mars  (discussed here) uses a similar - albeit more abstract - approach: every character has three Motivations (For Honour, For Love, and For Myself) and three Methods (With Cunning, With Force, and With Grace), with your dice pool being formed from the most relevant Motivation/Method pairing.

Going further afield, characters in Sufficiently Advanced (discussed here) are rated according to two distinct sets of stats: the levels of technology they have ready access to (e.g., Biotech, Cognitech, etc.), and narrative Themes (e.g., Intrigue, Romance, Wonder, etc.). They two sides interact so that characters with access to high tech have greater difficulty exploiting their Themes, which is how spotlight time is balanced between a character who’s literally a living city and a character who’s just some random human (both valid starting character concepts, incidentally).

Of course, we can go much further. If you want a really odd set of stats, I’ve got a real doozy for you:

Wisher, Theurgist, Fatalist (warning: direct PDF link)

This is an unreleased playtest draft of what might most accurately be described as a game about playing games. Basically, WTF provides a bare-bones framework in which nearly everything about the game - from the setting to the rules - is undefined, and proposes a set of procedures whereby the processes of playing a game and writing a game are the same thing.

Everyone has three core stats: Knowledge, Insight and Harmony. A character whose highest stat is Knowledge is called a Fatalist; a character whose highest stat is Insight is called a Theurgist; and a character whose highest stat is Harmony is called a Wisher (hence the name of the game).

Whenever a question about how to run the game comes up, everyone who has an opinion on the matter rolls the appropriate stat, as follows:

Knowledge answers questions about what things are.

Descriptively, a successful Knowledge roll lets you declare stuff about the setting of the game, whether that means filling in blanks or spinning new lore whole-cloth.

Mechanically, a successful Knowledge roll lets you attach stats to things. It doesn’t let you say anything about how to use those stats, though - that’s the province of Insight (see below).

Insight answers questions about how things work.

Descriptively, a successful Insight roll lets you declare stuff about the rules that govern the setting, including both the laws of physics and the broader metaphysics.

Mechanically, a successful Insight roll lets you declare stuff about the rules of the game, including resolving rules questions and making up new game mechanics on the spot. However, these rules need to be hung off of stats and entities declared using Knowledge (see above); Insight can’t give stats to stuff on its own.

Harmony answers questions about how things ought to be.

Descriptively, a successful Harmony roll lets you declare stuff about the what things in the setting are for, teleologically speaking - like, how they fit into the greater cosmic purpose.

Mechanically, a successful Harmony roll lets you declare stuff about when and how it’s appropriate to apply and interpret the game mechanics; i.e., what sorts of situations should be resolved with dice and rules.

To pose a simple example of this in action:

A Fatalist can say “Jane has 18 Strength!”. Jane now has a Strength score of 18 - this is an entity with mechanical weight. However, there are, as yet, no mechanics that actually engage with a Strength score.

A Theurgist can say “There exists a rule called ‘making a Strength check’, and it works like this.” Now Jane was a mechanism for using her 18 Strength - but there are still no defined situations in which it’s appropriate to invoke those mechanics.

A Wisher can say “When the group cannot agree whether Jane is able to break down a door, Jane should be allowed to make a Strength check.” Now Jane can invoke a check against her 18 Strength to resolve the question of whether she can break down any recalcitrant doors she may encounter.

(Note that this can work the other way ‘round, too. When faced with an irresolvable obstacle, the Wisher can say “make a Confidence roll!”. The fact that there’s no such animal as a Confidence roll is a problem for the Theurgists to sort out.)

There are a bunch of ancillary mechanics involved - for example, a Fatalist can declare her Knowledge “destructive”, which allows her to use her powers to retcon established facts and essentially lie to the other players about the setting - but that’s the gist of it.

The really neat part of all this is that it effectively splits the role of the GM in three. One of the potential issues with traditional tabletop RPGs is they they demand that the GM simultaneously act as an author and narrator (of the setting), an engineer and referee (of the rules), and a host and mediator (of the gaming group itself). These are three distinct skill-sets, and very few GMs are equally good at all of them. The Big Idea of WTF is to decouple those roles. The folks who love to narrate can be Fatalists and handle the GM-as-author-of-the-setting role; the gearheads can be Theurgists and assume the GM-as-engineer-and-referee role; and the folks who are drawn primarily to the social aspects of gaming can be Wishers and take responsibility for the GM-as-host-and-mediator role.

And that’s the most unusual way of statting up characters out of any game I know of.