#they really need to do research and reach out to other game dev and just... study them more

[blueesnow]

I'm kinda late to the info but damn—I really have no words but disappointment ww

[dukku-of-catempty]

Linking my translation of Red Candle's interview yesterday here, also typed out below. I didn't translate everything, but hopefully it's enough for fans to get a glimpse of their game dev process. Interview vod here.

Ninesols was delayed twice. As their first try at a metroidvania, they found out there's a lot more to be done. Their first game play video was actually an accident. Someone clicked the wrong button on the obs and it became a live stream.

For the interview today, we have 2 of the 6 co-founders of redcandlegames, Henry and Vincent/4wei, plus the game play designer Lighty and Art designer Pege/XiaoHe.

Game Dev Process

Back then Yi was a head shorter, pretty close to Hollow Knight. Devs call it the "Hollow Cat era". It took them 1-2 years to progress from Hollow Cat to 2D Sekiro.

Q: You've already set such a high bar for game play (hollow knight, sekiro), why did you have the same high standard for art and story as well?

Henry:(points at Vincent) this is all him. I said, just focus on the game play! Then he decided to throw in the story

Vincent: I didn't set it out to be so dialogue heavy. But simple gameplay doesn't keep gamers playing, they have to be invested in the world to want to play more.

Vincent: I wanted to save budget so I thought, comics, they're simple enough. Turned out they were costly too. Pege got the other end of that. She drew all the in-game comics.

Pege: Comic works in that you can get up close to the characters and see the details, their expressions.

Their initial inspo for the artstyle was Akira... really reaching for the heights of everything

On the designing process:

Vincent: pacing comes first, whether it's story, combat, or the gaming experience

About 35mins in: Lighty explains the initial concept of TaoPunk

Vincent come up with keywords and Pege designs the character. For example, Goumang was "princess, tsundere", Lady Ethereal was based on "Zhuangzi and the butterfly dream".

40min, Pege explains the character designing process

Pege had the hardest time designing JieQuan. Girls are easier.

Vincent: he's the typical straight macho dude

MCs: what do you mean straight? All I see is 🌈

Vincent wanted there to be a low point for the gamer, since the first 3 bosses were relatively easy. He drew inspiration from Bloodborne and MGS, and JieQuan was born as Yi's tormentor.

Pege's favorite character is Ji, based on his character design and gender.

Vincent: I said Ji can be a they, but Pege insisted on him being male.

MC: So we can actually see stuff under his skirt

Henry: Yi had to struggle to not get flashed during the fight

Lighty also likes Ji best, because of his character. He likes his views as an immortal.

Henry also likes Ji best, because of his combat pattern. Out of all the bosses, his combat pattern is the only one thats entirely original. He wanted to make a 3rd stage.

Since all the characters came from Vincent, he doesn't have a favorite, but is impressed by how popular some of them are. Lady Ethereal's fight was actually the least costly. The platforming was a budget choice. Including the jumpscare, Ethereal was the easiest stage to make.

Vincent: Even the bgm. For Lady Ethereal, I didn't need to tell the composer what I want, they finished it perfectly.

Henry: This is a collaboration where everyone provides their expertise, and Lady Ethereal is an example of us working extremely in sync.

They ran out of time and funds at the research center, and were not entirely satisfied with it even when the game launched.

Solarian was based on Middle Chinese. Old Chinese sounds close to Vietnamese and is too hard for the VAs to pronounce. Vincent thinks since the game is sci-fi in ancient times, a new language is needed for immersion.

Everyone's stressed at the end of the project: it's been five years, and the game hadn't been tested by the mass public, so they weren't sure how it'd be received

Solarian language and Voiceover

Vincent: in Taiwanese we have checked tones, libiodentals, we digged deeper into these traits and referenced Taiwanese/Hokkien, Hakka, Cantonese and Middle Chinese for the Solarian language. Our Solarian expert, Sheng-Han Lin worked on it for 3 months. He even wrote a program where it converts a word into Solarian automatically, complete with KK phonetic symbols.

Basic Solarian words/phrases:

(Making these up, tone numbers are mandarin)

Bi³ Suen² = big brother

Shuai² In³ = Hello Friend

Why⁴ Song⁴ = Stop right there

Uen Zai² Chok = got it (I think?)

Ket Do³ = thank you

Vincent: first thing I said to the VAs was "sorry". Even after the recording process they still weren't sure what they were saying 😂

Many thanks to our voice director Neven Chang. It's the VAs performance that convinced me that Solarian is an actual language.

The Solarian characters came out of the need for there to be inscriptions on the background architectures, but modern Chinese characters breaks the immersion, so the art team came up with the idea to use the CangJie input method.

Vincent: initially we wanted to use the oracle bone script, but it's too time consuming, we needed something systemized. We do have our own Solarian font tho.

Solarian font has been dicephered here

Fan made font

Q&A section!

First question: are there plans for future nine sols DLCs?

Vincent: we still have a lot of work, like console ports and adding more languages, plus the crowndfund reawards... so currently we're looking to finish these first.

Vincent: as you know, we are a bunch of overachievers, so if there is a DLC, there's no telling how long we'll work on it... but atleast for me, I do hope to tell more stories in this world. That's all I'll say for now.

Q: will there be merch?

A: Yes, all the crowdfund rewards will also be sold as merch, like the art book and physical game pack, but at a higher price. Not the figure though, they're already finished, to make more we'll go bankrupt.

Unless, there's a really high demand for it 👀

Q: were there any additional plot you had to cut due to lack of resources?

.

*SPOILERS

.

.

.

.

A: Chien's boss fight, Ji's 3rd phase, Yi fighting himself in Eigong's soul sanctum, a TianHuo last boss, Abacus was supposed to be Yi from the past, Kanghui, the dragon... we cut a lot

Vincent: There are two plotlines I stood my ground on: the revenge plot, and the relationship between Yi and Heng.

We actually changed Shuanshuan's story a lot. Initially he was supposed to be super energetic and run around all of New Kunlun.

Q: there are a lot of ways the player can fight in #ninesols, were you worried about it being too hard?

A: Yes. It's very parry focused, so if you can't parry, you're dead. The Story Mode was made out of this fear. But from the response we've got so far, it seems to be ok.

Vincent: the real problem is gamers having false expectations. Souls fans get frustrated with the parrying and combat fans get frustrated with the dialouges. So we have to let the gamers know, this isn't hollow knight, isn't Sekiro, this is Nine Sols.

Q: what do the lyrics in the bgm mean?

A: they are all really simple. Like "heroes are forged in agony". For Fuxi and Nuwa, their keyword was "Peony Pavilion", opera related, so the composer incorporated 牧虎關 into their battle bgm.

All #ninesols boss music was composed by @/FFXX_sound. 4-5 of the songs were recomposed after betaing. The boss fight in plumblossom village wasn't supposed to be this hard, but the bgm was too fire, so the team adjusted it.

Vincent: the composer could choose whether to use Solarian or Mandarin lyrics. I was there during recording. We got a talented Taiwanese men's choir to sing for us. Four professional singers singing "Huh! Hah! Heroes are forged in agony!" It looked ridiculous.

For the ending song, redcandle wanted to connect to the international audience, and Collage fit that perfectly. Plus our fans kept recommending them to us. Communication was smooth, apparently Natsuko is a gamer and really liked us.

Taopunk was a mix of Eastern and Western cultures, so it was decided early on that there would be English lyrics in the ED.

There was an ARG on discord where fans can uncover the ED bit by bit.

There are also plans for future interactive games like that

Q: what are some challenges for the EN locoalizatuon?

A: It was pretty smooth, we had a lot of help from our discrod server, including JP proofreading. Both EN and JP TL was actually done in a month before release. We just posted our beta dialougues and everyone came to help us.

Lady Ethereal used to be FuDie, but it sounds terrible in English, so she was renamed.

KangHui used to be GongGong, but it's too confusing to non mandarin speakers.

Eigong too, she used to be Yigong, Yi as in change, but players may mistake her to be related to Yi.

Solarian society trivia:

-they are a matriarchal society

-the average age of death is 140

-cats are evolved from Solarians

They are working on more languages, all of them EU ones. MC asked if there are plans for SEA languages. They say that'll require ppl fluent in these languages, since the other TL are mostly done by community members/fans.

2-3days after release, their text file was hacked. It's a Google doc, Lighty went on there and found someone typing Italian text there, all correct dialougues. They kicked them out then emailed the Italian.

The Italian : I'm just a player, I just want to help.

They translated pages of text, the team was terrified. Security breach!

the Italian said thank you to the team for being patient with them, cause they did the same thing with other games and got severe responses.

RedCandle: thanks but please don't ever do it again.

Q: are you satisfied with the response from non CN speaking players?

A: Yes. Most of the reviews we got were English. It's our goal anyway, to break the culture barrier.

There are of course some surprises.

MC: you mean the furries?

A: the amount of fanart was unexpected

Vincent: I was also surprised by the response we got on reddit. We actually realized our goal, so I was pretty happy with that.

Q: any plans for a new game?

they've worked on nine sols for 5 years already, pretty drained right now, so (as a team) theres no new content planned yet

And here comes the funniest part lol (clip)

Q: any plans for a new game?

Vincent: Having ideas for a new game is one thing, but we still--

(Thunder claps)

Vincent: 😱 Did I say the wrong thing? I'm sorry! OK? We'll start working on it!

Discussing the ending...

Devs consider the true ending a good ending. Its ok if life has no meaning, having lived is enough and all that.

And ED is Collage's take on the ending.

I'll end the thread here, though there are 30mins more to go. Many thank to Wenlobong for hosting the interview, and Red Candle for making the game! Really hope #ninesols will get more recognition

[anheliotrope]

Prison Architect has offputting aesthetics to me. This includes Prison Architect 2.

I know, I know, everyone has issues these days. Developers can't just make a game and not have people talk about structural social issues and oppression, yadda yadda. And I know the devs working on Prison Architect were explicitly thinking about how people might react or judge them over the game.

I think it is extremely exhausting for people who want to explore game design spaces to have to put a lot of effort into avoiding being framed as insensitive and problematic. We've reached such levels of this that for some people Minecraft is fundamentally dislikable because it instantiates a colonialist fantasy and makes people think this is okay, normal and unremarkable. I really don't agree with that take.

That being said, that doesn't mean that I don't feel disappointed by Prison Architect's aesthetics. The games look very generic! It's as if it's signaling that prisons are just like any other thing. We have Theme Park, Theme Hospital and now we have Theme Prison. Which in fact is the opposite of what the creative director, Chris Delay said was their intent!

Chris Delay, creative director at developer Introversion Software, told me that it deliberately picked the darkest part of prison life for the first chapter of the game. “It would be very easy to think of it as building a hotel or something,” he said. “Right from the very start, we knew we had to let the player know that this was a different experience, he has to think differently about it.”

(Also very funny last name for anyone in game development)

The aesthetics suggest the idea that the game has a neutral take on prisons. I am sure the developers didn't mean to say anything about anything. The game is trying to be inoffensive. But then you can also read the description of the game on Steam:

Only the world's most ruthless Warden can contain the world's most ruthless inmates.

Uh oh, sisters! This doesn't sound very focus on rehabilitation!

And well, there's a sort of good reason for that. The concept of prisons in game design will whispers into the ear of any mildly creative designer... inverted tower defense... Well, not necessarily tower defense specifically, but you know! Rather than building up your fort to keep people out, you do it to keep people in! It's interesting! For your inverted defense design to be validated, you need rowdy inmates.

---

Oh, jumping to a different thread in this topic. Prison Architect has you executing people the state tells you need to die. Of course I don't need to phrase it like that. Of course, the context of this is a western republic, so it's one of the less bad than if you're doing it in the context of Nazi Germany, but hmm... I just don't think the neutral aesthetics of the game combine well with me executing people.

Worth noting that you do have to research death row as a technology, it's not just thrust upon you.

Interestingly enough, if you execute death row inmates that were actually innocent, you will get fined. Do it three times and it's an instant game over. The moment you execute someone, you know if they were innocent. Which sounds a bit funny. All of it sounds a bit funny, because it's such an garbled idea of how the justice and penal system could work. I don't think this misinforms anyone, but does make the in-game prison appear (artificially?) more just. Ultimately, as far as I can tell, it's just a gameplay mechanic to force you to keep death row inmates around for longer, which provides a challenge.

---

And you know what, going back to the Steam description -- I do feel moderately motivated about the idea of containing some bad sons of bitches. By adding any amount of fantasy into the setting, you can have that, the fantasy that you're sure these people need to be here and stay here. But Prison Architect occupies this... diffuse position. The inmates are analogues for modern real world inmates, with all of their nuance. But they also look like very abstracted human beings and are mechanically simple. It's just kind of a straight forward game overall. The real world theme of Prison Architect implies nuance, but its mechanics don't really model that nuance.

Prison Architect's game design direction, at least in some sense, prefers that inmates be a problem that needs to be suppressed violently. And that's fine! This is the mechanical direction that I want the game to explore. I just think that if you make Gulag Simulator it should not have the aesthetics of Sims 2. Prison Architect is doing something like that but much less egregious.

And to be clear, I don't know that I care much about how this is problematic. Rather it's just that it feels... a bit spiritually impoverishing? There is the absence of something, a void. It's just kinda boring! Man, sorry to whoever had to draw all that shit, you did an OK job, okay? I just complain a lot on the internet.

We should strive for a balance between treating the medium very seriously and "it's just a video game".

---

But yeah there's so many other ways this could have been themed. And I understand why it was themed this way, it has the widest appeal, or rather the narrow anti-appeal. A lot of other takes would alienate more people. Boring them is a less bad outcome. And the current aesthetics are pretty flexible, you can project on them.

Anyway, here's a bunch of alternative themes that visited my mind:

Butcher Bay: You play as a corporation in the business of containing, exploiting and/or rehabilitating inmates through your private prisons. The theme dispenses with any pretense that you are benevolent. You're trying to find ways to maximize long-term profit. Maybe that's putting your prisoners through a program that gives them a useful skill and you a cut of their earnings once they get out, maybe it's something more violent. Of course, you get to set up big monitors that flash demotivational messages! Hey, I'm sure the other corporations are much worse?

Maxsec Dungeon Keeper: It's Dungeon Keeper, but instead of keeping heroes out, you keep heroes in. Bonus points if you brainwash and corrupt them to join your side! How evil! But is it actually unethical if they're having more fun now?

Bleeding Hearts Penitentiary: Your focus is to ensure good social outcomes for your inmates. Society might be crapsack, but your institution is the Mother Teresa of prisons -- well, minus the deeply objectionable parts of Mother Teresa. The prisoners are rendered in a high detail way, borderline fantasy, but still somewhat grounded. It could even look like everyone is out of a dating VN. You really want your roguish purple-haired murderer to repent and do well in life! Your relationship to the inmates is both that of antagonism but also they borderline feel like your own unruly RPG characters.

Supervillain Supermax: You don't need supervillains per se, they could just be your average level 12 D&D character. Ultimately they're very dangerous, they're superpowered and they've caused a lot of trouble and now you need to contain them. Better make sure you have a fallback for when the pyrokinetic's suppression collar malfuctions!

Moonscorch Reality Failure: OK, this one is kind of cheating, very tenuous relationship with the prison system. Everyone in your facility isn't there because they've done something wrong, but rather it's about what they are. They all look like normal people and at least most of the time, they are. But unfortunately, each and every one of them is also a potential reality breach that under certain conditions will trigger and cause them to morph into monsters, warping reality around them into a nightmarish landscape, which may or may not relate to their individual neurosis. Suffice to say, this is very bad. These poor fuckers can't even die anymore! Your job is to contain them and make their life be somehow tolerable. Your job is especially to avoid cascade triggers and do very good damage control. You may set the psychiatric-care-allegory dial anywhere from 0 to 10. Personally, I was just thinking 0, since I didn't consider that until finishing writing this paragraph. But other values could also be really interesting.

[dearcl113]

004 - Hip Hop Music Tycoon video game

In the 2000s tycoon games were popular of course - most people have played Roller coaster tycoon. I was always really into games since a kid starting off with a Genesis, and my Nana got me into tycoon games later. A niche of that genre was music tycoon games - not so much like rock band where you'd play as an artist, but you'd manage a record label, a music business, etc. The first of these (Rockstar) was made on DOS back in 1989 where you played as a British band. There were so many of these small games created by indie dev's and they were all available for torrents around 2006-2007. That was when I got my first computer too by myself, before that I was sharing a computer where-ever I was staying at. I started downloading games, and honestly I really enjoyed Chart Wars 3. The game was pretty simple - you manage a real life record label, sign artists, manage their marketing and release plans. It was like a demo of everything I learned from behind the music. It was set in 2004 with all the major labels of that time - I think I liked to play Rocafella & I'd make my own G-Unit since they didn't have it uploaded. You'd compete with AI labels and artists for chart-rankings, stuff like that. Eventually that led me to research all of the labels and learn about how they were created, what makes them unique, etc. It taught me how advances work, how signing someone is, contracts. Let's say you were releasing an album - you could plot out everyday of an artist's schedule down to scheduling them to play on Jay Leno (2000s) or setting up tours where you select what kind of venues would be most appropriate. I'd play this then look at the real world and see it happening in real time and it definitely made me more addicted to the game. It was strategy in the sense you had to balance stats against sales/performance, stuff like that. I was hooked from CW3 so I played a bunch of these types of games - I'd download any music tycoon game that I could research and I looked up all of the ones that ever existed up until that point. There was like 40. Eventually though I started modding in myself in CW3 and simulating a 'career', I got bored of managing a label in a game. I wanted to learn more about what my wildest dreams could be even if it was just a game. My next favorite was Rising Star - another indie game where you could play as a musician and tour the US doing shows, buying houses, gear, etc. The original game featured hip hop which was really cool to me as most of the tycoon games focused on rock music, even down to getting to have a DJ in your group. The more I did these games the more I realized I could actually do this, and it did seem fun - that the careers of celebrities really weren't that mysterious and marketing actually could be as creative as music to me. More importantly they taught you what not do as a musician that would typically lead to failures, backed up by referencing it in the real world. Then they went away. By the mid 2010s they were so rare to find compared to when I was a kid I started contacting the dev's directly of the games cause there was no other way to find them online. I got to talk to the guy who made Rising Star. He really appreciated me reaching out to him and gave me a free copy of the game, offering to share it outward past that. I would've bought it at this point, but still it was very appreciated. The obscure games are kind of gone nowadays. There's still a few music tycoon games but they're not the same to me anymore. I used what I learned from the games to understand hip hop from a business stand-point, remembering that at one point all of us started out from a small place to grow to something better. I went into the real world and saw a lot of what I learned as a kid in these games in real time, realizing I didn't need the tycoon games anymore. Sometimes all it takes is just simulating an idea to kickstart a process. So thank you again to all the dev's of these games for understanding the music industry and helping a kid learn.

[herrscherrofyatta]

Hola ....I'm gonna request (and regret) a cookie run kingdom fanfic...Where the reader is part of the cookies of darkness (dark enchantress little gang yk the ones she pick off the streets) but like pure vanilla, golden cheese, sea fairy, and frost queen is trying to get them to leave the gang yk... And make it crack/angst? - ✨The one who started it all ✨

I really have to do research on some cookies since I'm not that far into the storyline in the game—

Also, that kianaMei fight with pure vanilla, I'll write it separately cuz it's gonna be too long, just think of this as the aftermath of the fight 😗 3k+ Xiao angst and pure vanilla angst for your birthday

Enjoy this in the morning cuz when I post this it's almost 4 in the morning-

Pure Vanilla (my only favorite in the game besides cotton cookie)

"Y/n," you glance back to see the cookie you didn't want to see again, with a scowl on your face as you continue walking but your name kept being called multiple times making you turn around, pissed off.

Pure Vanilla's face brightens up at this, "ah! You finally acknowledge me, my dear." Your eye twitches at this, "stop calling me that." You say before turning around and walking away but he followed close behind, still talking to you.

Ever since the recent story events, you had finally left Dark Enchantress's side and was welcomed with open arms by the rest of the cookies in the kingdom after Pure Vanilla had fought and defeated your corrupted self, saving you from Dark Enchantress's plan to use you as a pawn.

"You're no longer tied down by the threads of dark enchantress, you're free to do as you wish." He says, your mind wonders to the words he told you that managed to save you from corruption. "Come now, I heard the others are planning a picnic." You pause to look at him as he holds out his hand for you take, hesitating, you slowly reach out for it to take it.

You stare at him as he continues to talk to you before looking away, 'maybe, there is still hope.'

The devs killed you off later in the story✨sorry not sorry

anyways, onto the next character

Frost Queen (love her too, just not my favorite favorite)

She could sense the coldness radiating from you but kept quiet about it, she watched as you roam around the kingdom unaware of how your life would change soon. She knew to keep quiet yet seeing as how the story was playing out as you were someone relevant to it, deep down she did not want you to die a painful death by the betrayal from Dark Enchantress.

So, she decided it was best to tell you the truth straightforwardly but when she went to tell you, she found you already hiding away from everyone else, in pain as you trembled slightly.

Walking over to you, she looked at you as you kept your eyes on the ground, unable to look up at her, your pride did not allow you too.

"What the queen of frost need this time?" You breathe out as sit up, forcing a grin at her but a chill ran down your spine, making you almost collapse forward if it weren't for her.

"Lay your head here," she commands and you follow, not really having a choice, closing your eyes at how comfortable you felt despite feeling so cold.

She stared down at you, noticing how you were beginning to not move as much, the occasional tremble of cold here and there but you kept quiet.

In the deepest part of her mind, she can't help but think of her old life, this was same position she and her friend were in her finally moments as she subjected to the coldness except it was quiet between you two.

Was this how her friend felt? Although she felt cold and numb, the longest she stares at you, them more she remembers how playful and risky personality you had when you two met. You always followed her where ever she went since you were curious about her powers since you two wanted to be strong like her.

A crystal tear ran down her face down her stoic face that she didn't realize until you let out a chuckle.

"oh? Why are you crying?" She looks down, a surprised look on her face as blinks at you.

The absent-minded smile on your face was enough for her to know that you know that you would be gone soon.

"you know, maybe if I had made my mind up earlier, we should have went on adventures together." She listens, not bothering to stop the tears that kept spilling, it clicked in her mind that she would no longer hear your distant shouts for her or you bugging her to teach you her ways.

In the end, you would become a memory that would fade within time.

"You know what, I'll come back as a ghost and like that, we can travel together, the first queen and his ghost companion!" You looked up at her smiling but shrink down when you saw her eyes narrowing down at you. "Eekk!?"

You know that one scene in Rapunzel where the tears of Rapunzel healed the dude's stab wound? Yeah, same situation here, after a few moments later, she had the feeling you were gone but nope, you sat up, almost smacking your forehead against her chin, "woah! I feel so energized!" She had realized that you had become like her, as your appearance slightly changed but it was still you in the end.

Onto the cookie I have no clue about....

Golden Cheese (man idk who she is okay? I didn't pay attention to the introduction only kept my eyes on pure vanilla)

After finding out you were in Dark Enchantress's team, she demanded you to leave, being stubborn you said ✨no✨ and then she proceeded to physically keep you and made you join her kingdom, you were pecked go death by her citizens (at least that's what you told me, she had like chickens or birds as her kingdoms citizens????)

The end.

Next up the cookie that refuses to come home >:/

Sea Fairy (pls, come home) this hus angst, enjoy :D

"You know, maybe you should leave Dark Enchantress's side, it might not end well for you." She says, you turn to look at her, she stood a few steps away since you were getting your weapon forged into something better.

"Huh?" You look at her confused, when ever she found you trying to become stronger, she always said the same thing. "I'm just getting my sword upgrading, what's wrong with that?" She stared at you before walking away, leaving you dumbfounded as the old man working on your sword rolled his eyes "youngsters these days."

You glare at him.

The next few days she kept popping out of nowhere despite hiding in the woods surrounding the kingdom. Becoming slowly irritated, you decided to leave and going back to dark enchantress, leaving this kingdom behind after all, the other always stare at you as if you were the weird one.

Packing your things, you leave at the dead of night and return back to the place you called home for a while.

But when you were about to see dark enchantress, you froze upon hearing her voice as you hid behind a wall, listening in.

"No, we don't need to use this one was bait, we should use Y/n, they have always been an obedient one since I took them in." Your eyes widen at this, as she continued to play out her next move that involves you basically sacrifice yourself.

Turning away, you quietly rush out, leaving the place and returning back to the kingdom that took a week to get back since you were walking awfully slow, shocked at what you heard.

No one greeted you nor did they notice your absence so you were back and put your things away before going to the forest to find some alone time.

Leaning up against a tree, hugging your knees as your head was buried in your arms as you refused to cry out of frustration.

"Oh, here you are. I was wondering where you went." Sea Fairy's voice was heard but you didn't look up, you didn't want to, she was right all along.

"You were right," she raises a brow at your muffled, shaky voice, "dark enchantress did want do use me, she was going to plan to use me a pawn for next move." She stared at you before sitting down beside you, staying quiet as you continue to mope.

In a way, she had understood you and she was the first to get close to you to the point where you considered her your first, real friend but just as nothing in your life stayed, your old master took it away with the price of your life.

Sea Fairy stares out into the sea before looking up at the starry night sky, just like moonlight cookie, it seems like she also had to wait to see you again one day, she hoped that day would come soon.

She would always be grateful for your action in shielding her from a surprise attack that led to your death. She would still have time to see moonlight cookie and be able to avenge you, her dear friend.

Masterlist

[little-klng]

yknow, i know we're literally all giving that metaverse shit absolutely zero press whatsoever on purpose both because none of us can stand the idea of giving zucc money to play it, AND because of the fact that it (hehe) zuccs in general as a whole both as a design concept and as a game. like its not fun even in concept really. but look i just NEED to give it shit for this one thing. i have to

look. in the history of vr techs development, as much as a layman as even i am (as someone who can not own a vr headset under any circumstances due to personal reasons i dont have to get into, its like 3-4 major reasons minimum). i understand that the vr history "basically" begins with the nintendo virtualboy, which was a commercial failure because Something About It gave people severe and unmanageable motion sickness. and then, even in spaces where people WANTED vr games to be a reality, it took a REALLY long time to get a game out that was good to play and felt good on the eyes for more than an hour on the average non-chronic sufferer of migraines or photosensitivity. like, in order for the games to reach the level of "playable, easy on the eyes, extremely unlikely to make you violently motion sick, and not unbearable for photosensitive chronic migraine sufferers", it took YEARS of trial and error from my perspective

first step rules of all vr games:

do not make "falling"/"spiderman" areas where the player, while standing completely still, has to fall/swing in mid air

do not make inputs too specific/precise, a small button should be achievable with shaky hands and uncalibrated controllers, though buttons shouldnt be small anyway

boring, jarring, or impossible physical movement is extremely hard to watch, it should be synced to irl movement as closely as possible and finger motion if available should be dynamic and easy to understand and intuitively use

metaverse, i cannot stress this enough, breaks literally all of those main basic rules to prevent motion sickness, eye fatigue, and has the fucking audacity to not even be fun while doing it. its PAINFULLY cheap looking, with next to no animations for officially licensed "minigames" (white arial font text "you have been hit!" and such with a bland red overlay in one, literal spiderman swing-between-buildings-over-empty-void-level-while-irl-standing-normally in another). like... theres a REASON these basic vr design rules exist and why breaking them is a bad idea. metaverse spits in the face of basic design and function research. its like they almost dont expect real people of varying visual and sensory ability to see to play the game, and i dont mean "autistic vs allistic people", i mean just straight up people who dont perceive color or light intensity the same way as other people. which is everyone, because varying sensitivity is a part of natural variation in people. vr chat has achieved this. BEAT SABER managed to achieve this while having a huge part of their gimmick break the vr rules of "things that are flashing lights fly at you very quickly", and they manage it in STYLE. tons of vr games work in spite of the inherent struggle in vr of making a game that isnt sickening to play and use. and you'd THINK a company as spyware-heavy as facebook would be able to come up with something a basic human person could play without being bored or sick, and yet... they cant even manage legs. they cant even manage not LYING about having legs. and its so useless and stupid and deserves everyone ignoring it and not bothering to even try it out of hatred.

you have to pay for applause points that might win you an irl shirt if you're top 5, and the shirt isnt even good. literally pay to win social interactions in a game that is so painfully boring and cheap you cant even imagine where 90% of the money could have gone. i dont genuinely think i could have... even FOUND A WAY to spend so much money on things like drugs and gambling in the dev time this game has taken that could account for how much money just simply could not have gone into actual development. i literally cant imagine how they could have done this. indie one person passion projects can create a better tech demo than this entire game manages to be for like... what? $15 billion? it makes me sick thinking about how much money was sunk into this and it still somehow has microtransactions. it feels insulting and flaunting. i hope mark zuckerberg reads this and feels a little worse about the whole thing than he already does. i really hope he feels bad and useless and hopeless.

[usagi-mitsu]

Werlyt & Gaius - a bunch of thoughts.

I am a little late to the party. I know. But I just finished the Emerald weapon and before I go to try out the „not Zenos“ weapon as in „Diamond“, I need to get my thoughts on the story straight.

Perhaps I have been spoiled by 5.0s brilliant MSQ and cannot appreciate the inherent beauty of at least decent writing any longer. But this felt so wrong and out of tune with the rest of the game. I started writing this 2 hours ago! I wanted to one in bed by now! XD But I had to get it out of my system… so….

Spoilers for the MSQ and Werlyt incoming??? And no I did not re-read this so not just spoilers but also writing errors incoming. -.-

The good

These fights are epic! I have only ever cleared the normal versions, but I loved those. They are amazing. The callbacks to Eula (her being a woman here! When did they discover that???), Regula (may he rest in peace) and Gaius himself in his prime were delightful. But I could do with a little less rotating, ok? A dragoon has positional, you know? And being allowed to pilot my very own mecha was like *chefs kiss*. On that front? Well done Square Enix!

I am also glad they were able to get another use out of Porta Praetora! That place looks amazing with the wide open field and the lake – and Ala Mhigo across it. It was one of my favourite Stormblood areas and I am always glad to return there. And of course… being able to visit the allied camp again… And Werlyt itself. It’s simply a beautiful place. It reminds me very much of southern Greece. If you’ve watched the movie Mamma Mia you know what I mean.

The music too was really nice. But I don’t think I’ll… you know… listen to it on repeat as I am doing with other parts of the soundtrack.

I’ve also loved how much amazing lore we got about Garlemald and especially the garlean military. And the military abroad. The way soldiers not from the mainland get treated. I love learning about these things.

Gaius

The man. The legend. The guy yelling in Prae.

He’s so very boring here. He has so much potential as a character and maybe I’m missing something, but all throughout this story he has been nothing but passive. He’s a reactive character in this storyline. You know. The guy who made deals with Lahabread (the d is intended), tried to take over Eorzea, lead a whole army, stood idly by as the moon dropped, almost died but then decided just not to die and then though „hm… I’ve got so much freetime now. How about I go and hunt some ascians?“ That guy is NOT a reactive character. He is active. He goes out of his way to make shit he wants happen. And in here? He seems too starstruck and devastated by his adopted kids actions to actually have one clear thought.

The only explanation I have is that he might have gotten hit in the head by something on his way to the ruby weapon. I get why he would rely on Cid for help, but the WoL??? The alliance? If you wish to be an ally and help or something, fucking act like it. You were a former legatus and I expect you to live up to your name – even after retiring.

And yeah.. I guess it’s hard having to watch your kids willingly, knowingly dying. But you fucking raised them. You are a big part of the reason to why they are in that predicament. So like… Aside from that I don’t even get why you are in this story at all.

And for the record: I’m not sorry for him. I’m just flabbergasted by all the bullshit we’ve been learning about him.

To be quite honest, I think this story could have worked just as well or maybe even better, if we got another man as the „hero“ of the story. I am talking about none other than our engineering, hammer-swinging, ex-enemy - of course talking about Nero!

The MSQ has long established that his research into the Ultimate Weapon had been taken, twisted and turned – Estinien had to experience this first-hand. I’m not saying that Nero was in need of a redemption arc and I cannot remember if these weapons were of his creation or even stem from anything he did, but it would make so much more sense for me, to have him confront his past in the garlean military like this and be responsible for the death of his former colleagues. Soldiers that he served with, whom he faught with. Give me Nero and them working together to get the weapons going and him bonding with them as his pilots to a degree. Comrades. Not that strange familiar bond that Gaius appareantly has with them. … Scratch that: Let Gaius be the father figure. Him being that wouldn’t change Nero’s relationship with them, but maybe his with Gaius as his superior.

The story wouldn’t even need to try and redeem Nero: He has already gone through major character development with the MSQ and the Omega raid tier. It would simply be Nero, confronted with the things he created, hopefully instilling more morals and a sense of responsibility for his creations. Heck: Let Cid yell at the guy! Seriously! Cid sticking around to help out would make so much more sense if it was Nero instead of freaking Gaius! Cid hated the guy! He might be a professional, but he is not one to torture himself by staying around a guy he (as far as I know) detests.

Make Nero the central figure and give Cid and Gaius the roles of „angel and demon“: One desperately trying to reach out to his old friend, reminding him why they became engineers and trying to make him realise that he can’t just run around designing weapons and leaving the scematics for everyone to read; while the other has trouble letting go of his imperial past and is struggling to see the errors of his ways – if Nero was wrong, than he (Gaius) was wrong too -and of course they did all of this for their home, to further their cause, and to bring peace to the savage lands of Eorzea, who had been fighting amongst themselves for so long… You get the point.

And you could still have these gundam themed fights. But I think everything would make so much more sense in general.

But speaking of which-

The children

I do not truly care for any of them. And that is a shame: I do think there are great characters and dynamics hidden behind these very few cutscenes. When they were first introduced I was wondering why I was suddenly watching „heartwarming“ cutscenes of my foes as children – until I realised that I was supposed to care and that they were supposed to make me feel pity for Gaius. I was supposed to feel bad for him, because they died and he blames himself. But while their fates so far have been gruesome, I cannot say that I am sad they died. They chose to die as they did. There were a myriad more options. And they chose that.

Actually. Their whole story makes me feel like they were huge masochist from the very beginning. They could have just run away and gotten help from someone more competent than them, but they stayed in an abusive military arrangement just so nobody else got hurt?? Please. Use your brains next time. And for the Berserk-like torture scene? I mean. I get what was implied here. But was it necessary? As a writer myself I follow the rule that torture and sexual violence should never be used in a story, unless it must be in there for the story to work or to bring across a vital point important to the story or it’s moral (or if you are writing porn and you are into it – but we are talking official in-game content here). But the violence towards these „children“ seems unnecessary for the plot and the violence of their deaths by piloting the weapons is already gruesome enough. Sometimes it’s better to leave things like this out – the emotional torture of feeling stuck and having a martyrs complex would have been enough here, I think. If the rest of the story had been well written at least.

(I believe my utter lack of sympathy shows how little character developement they had. I love tragic characters, who choose to suffer for the good of other people – even better if those people don’t even like them. It’s just my thing. And those kids are just… well.)

Their reasons and especially why they were making Allie out as the one who would need to survive was also just… weird. Like. I feel like 75% of what happened would not have happened, if they actually talked to each other, used their brains and had done something about their problems. But no…

These characters are also so exchangeable with basic anime/j-RPG character tropes… I only remember Alfonse, Rex and Allie – because I just did the Emerald weapon. And right afterwards I thought, „huh. So… Fullmetal Alchemist?“ Which brings me to my third point …

…the story at large.

„Pacing is a virtue“ or was it patience..? Anyhow: The author of this story should have had more patience with his story and characters and taken a bloody break! And I am not talking about the obvious blunder of „How is Allie feeling?“, „she is in shock and you cannot talk to her“ turning to „oh yeah if you are careful you can talk to her now“. I mean. WTF. That was MAYBE 10-20 in-game minutes of dialogue.

But everything was moving so very fast – and not even in a good way. There are few things better than a fast paced, action rich story about a group of young people trying to safe (their) world. But if you try to cram in two expansions worth of character development and story telling into about two hours of content each patch.. Well, then you get whatever the hell this is.

Gaius is a very interesting character and while I did not understand why they needed to bring him back in 4.4 (?), I do see how he could be a good asset for endwalker. And his involvement in 5.0 with Estinien was just a dear delight. So I am not opposed to learning more about him, to watching his character grow and changed with time. But I am not ready for badly written content of which 50% get told by suddenly induced echo-sequences. I mean – weren’t there rules for the echo at some point???

I’m not sure which one of the devs said it, but the feature that let’s you play an NPC is super convenient for them to tell the story, because before they could only show what happened where the WoL was.

And that’s just it. Rule number 1 in writing anything is „Show don’t tell“. It feels like they literally turned this one around for these cutscenes. While Valens torture and diet-Fandaniel-routine were very much „show“, the rest of the story was one long cutscene of exposition: We get exposition by Cid, by Gaius, by echo, by Gaius and his crew again, then by Allie. Before having to watch scenes we are not there for.

BTW. Dear square Enix: Your writers are capable of writing amazing villains, antagonist and despicable assholes. You don’t have to write „asshole, must die“ on Valens name card. And I also think the „WoL, strike here“ sign above his head was a tad bit too much. Nuance, dear writers. Nuance. Or perhaps I just got spoiled by these last few foes in the MSQ.

When I said I wanted to just be able to punch a bad guy for once and not feel bad about it, I did not mean this! I meant that I just wanted to play training dummy with Danny-Boy.

(Oh! And as far as I’m concerned you can just… sideline Gaius … „would be killer“ and the lady? Make them targetable NPCs with Dialoge to read. Let them stand somewhere accessible and comment on the latest developement. But ffs don’t give me hour long speeches about how you are going to kill Gaius if he does something you don’t like. The guy could and would wipe the floor with you if he felt like it. -.- So. Please. Shut up.)

Conclusion

Basically. I have to finish the Diamond weapon. But I doubt it will change my perception of this story line even in the slightest.

To be perfectly honest though … bringing Gaius back, having this story with and about him, forcing a sort of redemption ark here. It feels like they are really „grooming“ him to be a morally grey ally in Endwalker, with perhaps a big part to play in the endgame. At this point I wouldn’t even be surprised if they pulled a GoT and made him „King in the North“. Or if they had him die a heroic death to save the world, but especially his country. And to do so they need us to think his sacrifice means something. Or that he is the right person to lead Garlemald into a new future (I don’t think he is). But: For one, neither we (the players) nor the characters need to find him worthy of throne or death by heroism for his sacrifice/ascension to work. To be a useful tool for the story, only the other garleans who might oppose the alliance and scions need to deem him or his sacrifice „worthy“. And only they. And Ishikawa-san has all of 6.0 to accomplish whatever the hell she needs him for. He did not need to be the center of his own botched redemption ark. If that’s what they wanted to do. Or maybe I’m looking at this all wrong and all they wanted was to give the writes in training some literal training grounds to test their abilities.

But! On a positive note: I have yet to be told that raids and other side content are canon to any degree. So when playing the next story quests I’ll blissfully ignore all that happened in Werlyt and if it get’s mentioned (because they do that sometimes when you’ve done certain content) I’ll just ignore it.

Happy ignoring! Also: GIVE ME MORE NERO CONTENT!

[silyabeeodess]

Have you written anything for Time Squad based on their Retro placements?

It's a little difficult since Retro ended before the second Time Squad update. I'm not sure how I would account for those lost missions, as all I can find are the descriptions for them. I can make some headcanons using the OG game and Part 1 update: Just please take these with a grain of salt. I also won't really be able to cover Otto or Buck since they weren't introduced in-full, so this post is definitely focused on Larry.

· In the mission “Bring Me the Head of Larry 3000,” we learn that Larry was blown up in the Battle of Tech Square. He isn’t thought of fondly by the other characters, with no one feeling any remorse over having to use his circuits to remake the time machine and Numbuh Five calling him “crazy,” so I doubt he was around long enough for anyone to have any kind of attachment to him. More likely, he was there for Dexter’s research participants since it’s too much of a coincidence for a time cop to be at the exact point they reappeared on the timeline.

· His, Buck’s, and Otto’s goal would’ve been to return the research participants to the past as soon as they arrived in the future to limit damages. While they’d likely have it in their records that these individuals would play a massive role in the war effort, they’d think the latters’ jump forward into time—their disappearance—is what would’ve partly contributed to the state we find the world in with Fuse’s nearly complete takeover. They wouldn’t take into account what knowledge the research participants would take back, instead worrying over what would happen if they were killed in the future and never able to fulfill their roles.

· Unfortunately for the Time Squad trio, the Battle of Tech Square was rough on them. They were split up, resulting in Larry being on his own to try to carry out the mission. Emphasis on try. He managed to reach some of the heroes to alert them on the situation and the importance of finding the research participants, like Numbuh Five. However, even those who had a minute to spare to listen to him during the fighting thought that Dexter—who had been preparing for the research participant’s arrival since they were first lost through time—had a better plan than this strange robot. When Larry tried to do the job himself, that’s when he was blown apart.

· Following the game’s events, with the research participants returning to the past and bringing the blueprints for nanos with them, no further involvement from the Time Squad (organization) was needed. There was some worry over the existing wormholes and paradoxes, but not enough to directly involve themselves with those individuals again so long as the events of history continued to play out as they should. (Although they are on a bit of a watch list since they’re time-travelers themselves. It's worth noting too that the Time Squad Organization isn't fully trustworthy, given their willingness to lock people away who refuse to agree with their methods, as shown in the episode "Repeat Offender.")

· Here’s where I bring in Retro and things get iffy. Larry’s head was a vital piece to rebuilding the time machine in the future, so if Larry is saved during the Battle of Tech Square as the Part 2 Update mission “Back to the Future (Part 1 of 3)” would’ve had us do, this would’ve caused some problems with the timeline. We also have the matter of individuals appearing in two places at once in the timeline, like the player reappearing during the Battle of Tech Square unless they saved Larry before their own, initial arrival in the future—which, as mentioned when covering Professor Paradox, could cause a rupture to the timestream. Given the missions that follow, it seems that devs also shared this mindset, but since I can’t read the missions in-full to know exactly where they were going with it building up to Fusion Larry’s appearance, I’m extremely reluctant to cover them.

· However, sticking with just the first update, we find something very interesting. In Retro’s mission, “First Contact,” Larry doesn’t seem to know who we are, referring to the player as “one of the locals.” This is despite the fact that these characters should have met already given images of Larry’s head installed to the time machine in the future show his eyes lit-up, functioning, and that he is very unhappy with the situation. What I derive from this is that, while this is our second time meeting Larry, it’s his first time meeting us—meaning he came to the pastprior to his mission in the future. This is further backed up since Larry didn’t even know about the invasion itself, stating in the mission “Time Run Amok” that according to his records, “Earth wasn’t conquered by an alien planet until 56,897 AD” and that the fusion monsters “aren’t meant to exist at all.”

· It’s hard to say how reliable Larry’s records are, given that in “Time to Groove,” he thinks that Benjamin Franklin lives in Genius Grove. He’s getting his historical knowledge mixed up. Obviously, the fusion monsters exist and nothing outside of changing Planet Fusion’s route across the galaxy or making sure Fuse never came to be in the first place is likely to alter that. Earth isn’t technically “conquered” yet, and won’t be so long as the war is won, so he might be looking at things from the perspective of someone from the future and downplaying the events of the invasion. We see this evidenced too in how he thinks the player can stop the invasion within a day before realizing that the fusion monsters can respawn in no-time. Again, this would show that this Larry is playing catch up to the one we meet in the future.

· This interaction may have even been the reason for Larry’s appearance in Tech Square to begin with. With the player and him having already met, they could’ve been on his mind enough to research their involvement in the war once the robot regrouped with his team. Noting their importance, of course the Time Squad would try to save them and the others involved in the time-travel experiment, bringing everything full-circle.

· In these missions, Larry says that the team was investigating an anomaly in time. Whether he’s referring to the time-travel experiment or what would’ve been the events of the second update is hard to say, but his time pod was likely thrown off course in either case.

· Despite the destroyed pod we found in the Darklands, Otto and Buck are likely perfectly fine. Buck might not have many brains, but he is a tough fighter and they landed close enough to the base in Hunter’s Crest to reach safety.

[askagamedev]

How publishers calculate on how much a game should sells & what they do when their calculation is wrong and doesn't meet the expected sales?

Publishers have market research teams to determine sales estimates for their products. Typically, this involves user research (e.g. focus groups, customer surveys, etc.), historical data analysis of similar products, release date, and cross-referencing with different data points like whether the game is licensed, whether it’s a new IP or a new game in a franchise, etc. It certainly isn’t a precise science, but it is usually directionally more correct than not. They will also usually check periodically as time passes (since games take a while to develop) to gauge whether the predictions should be adjusted or not. Predicting the future is harder the further out you go. You’re trying to foresee two to three years in the future when you green light a project, but probably only need to predict six months in the future by the time the project reaches alpha. This way the publishers can make adjustments to both expectations and scope as the future becomes clearer. Theoretically, the possibility space of the predictions should converge as the release date approaches.

Obviously, predicting the future is hard. Market research makes mistakes sometimes and it’s especially difficult to account for black swan events like a global pandemic that might really affect things in strange ways - not just directly, but also indirectly. In situations where our predictions are off, the response greatly depends on how much our predictions were off. The larger the discrepancy between prediction and reality, the more trouble the team and the project is in. Thus, if we come in under target but still within the margin of error, we usually make small adjustments to the post-launch support plan. If the game is an unmitigated sales disaster, it isn’t abnormal to see all future plans binned and mass layoffs or even studio closure follow shortly after. Usually it’s somewhere in between - no battle plan survives first contact and all that. 

The real questions that need answering when a game falls short of expectations is whether we collectively think the situation is salvageable and how much additional funding and time we think will be necessary to save it. If that cost is too great, support for the game will be discontinued and the publisher will come up with a new plan for the various people associated with the project (either assigning them to other projects or letting them go). If the cost is not too great, then a new plan is put into place - the current state of Anthem is a good example of this.

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[sirspud]

A Vulgar First Impression of Coromon

Playing Pokémon games recently has been something akin to hiring a fairy princess to perform for your daughter’s birthday parties. The first few times she came around were fun, she made all the kids laugh and play their games, but now the princess has grown lazy, idly watching YouTube while disinterestedly mumbling the same four or five lines she’s been spouting for the past twenty-three years. But you keep hiring her regardless, even though your daughter’s trying to point out that she’s not into princesses anymore because she’s pushing 30, and you’re starting to think she might not be worth three hundred bucks a visit. And she’s starting to smell.

So as the Pokémon community sits and waits for the Diamond and Pearl remakes, because what is Pokémon if not a prolonged exercise in nostalgia bait, some indie developers have been trying their hand at doing Pokémon, but properly this time. First came along TemTem, which was, “Like Pokémon but online”, and now there’s Coromon, which is “Like Pokémon” and that’s it.

I’ll admit, I was attracted to Coromon not because of any underlying nostalgia or a want to replay Pokemon, but because the devs put out a free demo for the game, which is a rarity in this modern age of Early Access and delayed release dates. Intrigued, I decided to take a closer look, to see which warts they cut off and which ones they allowed to fester.

The game starts with our protagonist waking up in a small town with his mother about to go get his OR HER first Pokémon. So far, so standard. But where Coromon differs is that you aren’t some apple-cheeked youngster with a criminally neglectful parent, but a college kid who’s been selected for a prestigious university that studies Pokémon – sorry – “Coromon”. And incidentally, Pokémon scores the first point for having a name that actually means something. They’re monstrous creatures that can be caught in a ball and put in your pocket – “Pocket”-“Monsters”. What the fuck does Coromon mean? Because Coro only has a meaning if it’s in Italian, and I’m pretty sure these things aren’t meant to be called “Choir Monsters!”

Anyway, a dude in a wheelchair who was apparently the guy in charge gives you a magic glove and tells you about these glowing elemental orbs, which are important for some reason I wasn’t clear on, and he sends you out on a journey to collect more by finding six elemental titans and – as far as I understood the process – murdering them and stealing their essence in the name of science.

We choose our first Pokémon from a choice between the fire-type, the water-type or the… ice type? And then, we set out on our journey to fight trainers, make new friends, and shuffle about in the grass for an hour because your gobblefrog isn’t level sixty-two yet.

The first thing that struck me about Choirmon is that it really isn’t being coy with its desire to ape Pokémon. Everything, right down to the statistics of each monster, is identical to the way Pokémon does things. The types have the same names, evolving is still called evolving, it even gives you berries and other items for your monsters to hold. You can battle monsters in the wild, blundering into tall grass to scare them out of hiding and capturing them after beating them into a bloody pulp, or you can battle monsters owned by other trainers in unregulated dog fights. So it isn’t trying to be like Pokémon, it is Pokémon. It stabbed Pokémon in an alleyway, cut off its skin and is now swanning about performing a perverted Face/Off act.

Now, I love Pokémon just as much as the next guy, but I’m no deluded fanboy. Pokémon is not perfect. In fact, it’s a game with a lot of flaws. And in its desire to imitate, Collectamon inherits a lot of the same problems that Pokémon does. Using items, for example, takes up an entire turn, and while this can be forgiven in a party-based RPG, where you have other actors to make up for the guy losing a turn, you can only put out one monster at a time, and using anything other than a healing item in the thick of battle just makes you an open target.

Trying to think strategically is also a lost cause, because again, it’s fucking Pokémon. The only strategy is “use whatever the opponent is weak to” or “mash attack until one of you dies”. And while you could argue that Pokémon’s strong point is its simplicity, it does mean that winning a fight is more a matter of patience than a matter of skill.

At time of writing, I’ve been playing the demo for 7 hours. An impressive run-time for a demo, to be sure, and that’s only up to the first boss. Incidentally, it’s in that area that we meet the evil team of this game, because Pokémon had evil teams, and so must we! I don’t even understand their motivation, or who these people even are! They’re presented to us as if we already know what their deal is and why we should hate them. All I know about them is their name and the fact that they like to hang around in caves. Pitch-black ones that you navigate by wandering around aimlessly getting lost in the samey-looking environments.

Really, guys? You thought it’d be a good idea to preserve one of the shittiest areas in Pokémon? Actually, they follow it up with an even shittier level that plays like the gym leaders from the annoying puzzle gyms got together and tried to devise the most efficient backtracking machine, culminating in a game of Mastermind out of fucking nowhere.

Well, so far I’ve just been going on about how the game is the same as Pokémon. What’s different? Well, for a start, each monster has a well of stamina points that they spend to use their special abilities, limiting how many times you can use those moves before your monster has to have a little rest. So you have to weigh up whether or not you want to waste stamina using that really powerful move or whether you want to keep a steady pace with the weaker moves. Except, Pokémon already did that with each move having limited uses. So we haven’t gone anywhere. All we’ve done is paint the walls a different colour.

Erm… what else? Well, your character speaks for one thing, despite you being able to name them and customise them to your liking. I think we tried the talking player avatar thing back in Fallout 4, and it was just as unimmersive back then too. It means that you don’t really get to impose your own character on the avatar, because the avatar makes his OR HER own decisions without your input, accepting every single quest that gets handed to you without even flirting with a dialogue box because it means oh so much to them to help this random faceless NPC, whose unique name and appearance does nothing to make him feel any less forgettable.

…Ah, that’s something different. There’s a quest system. I’m not sure why. In an open world game, quest systems give the game a structure and a reason to explore the world. But, as we’ve established, Crackmon is Pokémon, and so progression is strictly linear. It’s hard to tell just how much it’ll impact the game, since it’s just a four-hour demo, but a quest system like this can easily turn into a to-do list of tedious tasks for rewards that you don’t need. One of the sidequests early on had me capture a pissweasel for some guy, only for the bloke’s mentor to smack him across the head and have him hand the pissweasel right back! This is the very definition of wasting my fucking time! The only reason I caught that pissweasel was for your quest, and I don’t want to deal with its incontinence issues!

Another way that Cloacamon tries to differentiate itself is though its Potential mechanic. Get this – whenever your pet cockcrab reaches a certain XP interval, you get to directly increase its stats by a total of 3 points, on top of the cockcrab’s normal stat increases, so you don’t have to muck around with effort values and breeding to optimise your stats. Each monster also has a “Potent” and “Perfect” form, with each form reaching these intervals sooner than the normal version of the cockcrab. So the game encourages you to abandon your monsters frequently, exchanging them for their shiny, better versions, which I would argue goes against the whole point of Pokémon. At its core, Pokémon is a game about going on a journey and creating a bond with your tag team of beasts, a bond which is impossible to form if you’re encouraged to chuck your friends in the bin the second you find their better, newer models.

I could go down my list of subtle differences, most of which are quality of life changes, like the ability to evolve mid-battle, or the ability to swap out different moves instead of permanently forgetting them, or the fact that you use HM moves yourself instead of teaching them to your Pokémon. But I’d rather finish this first impression by once again re-iterating that Cocaniumon is just Pokémon. It’s not writing any new rules, it’s not even reworking old ones, and it seems content to merely lie on its back and spin its wheels. And while you could argue that Pokémon’s formula doesn’t need to be changed, I would argue right back that not having the ambition to change has long been part of the fucking problem!

If all you want is more Pokémon but with less bullshit, then go ahead and give Coromon a try. Personally, I wasn’t motivated to continue playing past the first boss fight. Part of the problem was that I had no idea what I was ultimately working towards. Collect all the titan essences, so that we can research them! Research them for what? So we can finally uncover the mystery behind shitty Netflix sci-fi originals?

[phoenotopia]

2020 May Update

I hope you're all staying safe and healthy during this time of Coronavirus!

We continue towards the finish line, slowly, but surely. Coronavirus did throw a few wrenches in our plans. Our talks with a publisher about a possible sponsored appearance at an upcoming event stalled.

But that was always just a possibility. We have a backup plan. If we didn't win a sponsor, we were just going to pay our own way to a convention. That's what most indies do! Anyway, that's canceled too. It doesn't seem like there'll be any conventions to showcase in the near future...

Nevertheless, we did move forward in other areas. We've got the press materials ready as well as the game's official launch site up. You can view it in its prelaunch state at this link. NOTE, It is in a "prelaunch" state, so some media links are being withheld until reveal time. But there are a bunch of new pictures and artwork you can look at.

You might notice the link reads "phoenotopia.wordpress.com". The plan is to direct "phoenotopia.com" to it in the near future. That means if you wanted to reach this tumblr specifically, you'll have to visit it at its tumblr link, "phoenotopia.tumblr.com" (which, I just noticed doesn't work... huh). Anyway, since this is a dev blog, I'll talk a little bit about the journey of creating the website.

SQUARESPACE vs WIX vs WORDPRESS

I actually tried 3 different services (in the above order), before I settled on wordpress. I did a bunch of researching, and most reviews seemed to point at WIX >= SQUARESPACE >>> WORDPRESS.

I went with Squarespace first, since it was recommended a bunch on some youtube videos I saw (guess marketing works). Even though it didn't win outright in the reviews, my impression of it was "less quantity, but more quality." I tried it and found it serviceable. It was kinda sluggish, with some not so intuitive areas. I had to ask for help a few times for some things that would seem simple ("how do I change the BG and font color and of the music player?", etc).

That was last year, when I *thought* I was near launch and would need a press site soon. One year later (present day), it was time to create a press site again, and since my website with Squarespace expired (I had only signed up for a trial period), it was a good opportunity to try Wix, especially since Pirate had lots of praise for Wix.

My impression of Wix was that it was... too distracting. After I chose a theme, in the editor view I felt bombarded by menus. Everywhere you move the mouse, things kept lighting and popping up. And it was slow. So I guess it was sorta like Squarespace, but maybe even a little worse?

(Easy ways to preview the website from phones and tablets was one of wordpress’s neat features)

What prompted me to try Wordpress was one of their slogans "35% of the web uses WordPress". If it's good enough for 35% of websites, it's good enough for me! I ended up liking it most of all. It's definitely less featured, which suited me, since I'm not trying to create something too fancy either. Unlike the other website builders which emphasize free-form, wordpress was more rigid. I couldn't drag and drop an element just anywhere - I found that comforting in a "I can't screw this up" sorta way. The most important thing was that it was fast. Loading the editor view to Wix took 11 seconds vs 4 seconds with Wordpress. And the speed advantage of wordpress extends across every action. Similarly, when Chrome launched 10+ years ago, it was also less featured vs Firefox, but it became my choice browser. I guess speed is something I value highly.

Anyway, my experience is from a drag/drop perspective with minimal coding. This is also NOT a paid advertisement. However, if wordpress would like to send some money my way, I would not be opposed... (call me!)

Achievements, Bugfixes, and Cleanup

Lots of small tasks and polish was done over the past 2 months. I finally fixed the time tracking bug - important because the Speed Run achievement depended on it. I also finally finished implementing all the technical stuff for the achievements. There was a bug where some enemies would stack up too many light sources, causing them to appear too bright and drain system resources. That's now also fixed. Lots of other small ones that don't bear mentioning.

A neat trivia about the game is that there's a final super hard achievement for those seeking to prove their mastery over the game. The player has to beat the game having never picked up a heart or energy upgrade. When playing under this constraint, some enemies can even kill the player in one hit! In the game's most current iteration, even I failed to achieve it, so I'm definitely going to have to go in and tweak things a little more.

Age Ratings

I went and got the game's age rating. I did a little research on this - it's quite fascinating. ESRB would be the age ratings board for the United States (where I'm based). But if you were in Europe, you'd get a PEGI rating. Then there's ACB for Australia and so forth. So if you wanted to launch a game globally, you'd have to deal with this process over and over, and each country rates things a little differently... that's a lot of work!

Enter IARC (International Age Rating Coalition), which aimed to simplify the process by being the one standard that you apply to, and from which you could then get the equivalent rating for all participating countries. IARC is an entirely automated process - probably necessary due to the boom of digital titles across all platforms, particularly mobile.

IARC is great for me, because they relaxed the standards for getting a rating. From my understanding, the process used to be more difficult. And you'd have to pay ESRB a hefty chunk to get a rating, but with IARC, it's totally free! So long as it's for digital and it's used only on licensed sites and store fronts. If I wanted to launch the game physically, I'd have to deal with ESRB on an individual basis again.

Without further ado, here's Phoenotopia's IARC ratings:

Fascinating... Phoenotopia is rated "Mature" in Australia... but for "Horror". Which seems suspect. The horror elements are rare (remember Dreadlands?). But when I was answering their questionnaire, they provided a video example of what they considered "horror", and it was pretty mild. About as mild as my game, so I checked that box. It is what it is...

We also got a "Teen" rating for ESRB for reasons of Fantasy Violence and "Mild Blood". This one is kinda iffy. In the game, if you hit a giant bug, it spits out a few drops of green blood. Does that really count as blood? Ocarina of time skirted by with an E rating 2 decades ago, and it let a dude spit out green blood. However, since IIARC is an automated process, I didn't see any place to dispute. But also, I wouldn't have disputed it anyway. A "T" rating is cooler than an "E" rating!

I'd like to mention this is not a paid advertisement for IARC. However, if IARC would like to send some money my way, I would not be opposed... (call me!)

Submission

I expect to polish the game for about 2 (maybe 3) more weeks. After which, I'll be submitting the game to the console "authority". From my understanding, I'll then have to wait a month while they "inspect" the title. After which, I'm then cleared to have an official launch date - which I'll probably set to be 1 month after getting approval.

So the plan is to have a very short marketing campaign. The reveal trailer will basically drop 1 month before release. And we're going to sprint to the finish line. Some marketing campaigns are 6 months to a couple years. Ours will be one month... Let's hope it works.

Wrench

That's what the plan looks like right now, but there is a possible upcoming wrench in this whole thing. I recently learned that my version of Unity is too old. Games running on old Unity versions are not automatically accepted - so I'll have to apply for an exemption. If the exemption gets rejected, we can't launch without upgrading, which will require *significant* work...

This came as a surprise to me. When I started dabbling in games development a decade ago, the most common advice I found online was "Make Games, not Game Engines." I interpreted this to mean lock in your technologies. There's always going to be a new and shinier bell or whistle, but if you keep chasing it, you're not going to work on the actual content of the game. That's probably what kept me to releasing the original game on Flash. That was a game I was making as a hobby while working a full-time job. By the time I quit my job to go full-time indie dev, Flash had long been a dead technology. But I remembered "do you want to build game engines or games?" And so I pressed forward.

So that mindset could potentially backfire here. If PC was the lead SKU, we wouldn't have these issues since PC is more relaxed as a platform. Consoles, as I'm now learning, have an ever forward shifting window of technologies. If we get rejected for the exemption, there's a couple ways we can play it. One, we go through the pain of upgrading which will take months... Two, we pivot and make PC the lead SKU again, but have to handle porting that plus its specific features, which will also take months...

So why is updating such a big issue? Unity has changed drastically over the years. When I started, it was a lot less 2D friendly. They didn't have an official 2D tilemap solution, so you had to build your own or buy a 3rd party library from their asset store. I used 2DTK for tilemaps - 2DTK is now entirely deprecated. Similarly, I had to search for and purchase a good asset to display crisp text - since you couldn't even do that in Unity back then (heh). That's the story for a lot of old Unity stuff. Think of it as a first mover's "disadvantage".

Hopefully it won't come to that, since I'm pretty spent as a developer. I've been ready for this to be over, and I know many of you feel the same. Hopefully soon! As usual, I'll update in 2 months at the latest (end of June). An update might come earlier if we have some good news to share sooner. Until then!

Fanart and Cosplay

This first picture comes from roccy_chair and shows Gail basked in light. I like how her pose and equipment together form an "X". That's a neat hidden symmetry. The way she floats also kinda reminds me of Crono's "Shining" spell. Perhaps Gail should have the ability to cast spells? Hmmm...

Cody G returns with a new art depicting the 2 Moonstone enthusiasts. I like Fran's starry-eyed expression here. That's true love on display. I also like how the Moonstones are depicted as flat and coin-shaped. Very unique! Also note Gail makes an appearance in the back :D

Thanks to M1shaaa for this cosplay of Gail! There's a lot to like here! The vibrant pink hair. The costume with 3 stitches across the vest. The pose with slingshot, accurate to Gail's depiction in the box art. Amazingly, this might also be the very *first* cosplay of Gail! Will and Pirate both alerted me about it excitedly since they were pretty stoked. We joked that we crossed the final milestone in terms of fandom.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

STARTUPS AND CADILLAC

Eventually the pimps and drug dealers notice that the doctors and lawyers have switched from Cadillac to Lexus, and do each kind of work in the way of noticing it consciously. The reason I've been writing about existing forms is that I don't know. Most of the people who've had to write PhD disserations about Dickens don't.1 That word balance is a significant one. I encourage founders to follow whichever path is most immediately exciting to them.2 What happens to publishing if you can't sell content? We're good at making movies and software, and undergrads are not especially prone to waste money.3 When you take people like this and put them together with other ambitious people, then a lot of people. One of my most vivid memories from our startup is going to be than the worst?4 In this model, the research department functions like a mine.5

I'm sometimes accused of meandering. With each step you gain confidence to stretch further next time.6 You had to for guests. Perl. If they get something wrong, it's usually not realizing they have to be inferior people.7 Of what? And because of supply and demand, they pay especially well.8

If free copies of your content are available online, then you're competing with publishing's form of distribution, and that's why they do it so well.9 Another trick I've found to protect myself against obsolete beliefs is exactly what you have to customize something for an individual client's complex and ill-defined needs.10 I make a note of what surprises me most about them is how conservative they are.11 It didn't seem to harm us. He redefined the problem as: make one that's beautiful.12 Prediction is usually all we have to rely on. As you accelerate, this drag increases, till eventually you reach a point where the adults sit you down and explain all the lies they told you. It's exciting to chase things and exciting to try to guess answers.13 Combine this with the confidence parents try to instill in their kids, and every year you get a valuable new resource you can use to figure out what he meant. One, the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent NT developer he would have if the founders had given the VCs what they wanted, when they wanted it, and focus our efforts where they'll do the most good.

A few steps before a Rubik's Cube is solved, it still looks like a mess. There were a lot of false positives. At least, that's how they see it. If it fails, that is. But it's certainly possible to do things that make you stupid, and if you can, as Steve Jobs does, make satisfying you the kind of productivity that's measured in lines of code: the best programmers can solve a given problem in a tenth the time. Hackers & Painters. Particularly to young companies that are growing fast, but haven't been doing it for long enough to have grown big yet. Do we want to get the resulting ideas past other people's. Well, there precisely is Montaigne's great discovery. Note too that determination and talent are not the graphic designers and grandmas who were buying Macs at Apple's low point in the 1960s.14 It's one of the most spectacular lies our parents told us was about the death of our first cat.

But no one those days was paying a lot more than Yahoo. Conversations with corp dev is not doing a bad job of talking to them before they are. And I think we may be good at what we're good at for the same reason we're bad at.15 When you're too weak to lift something, you don't need either of those. It's something they plunge into, working fast and constantly changing their minds, and why companies pay now for Bloomberg terminals and Economist Intelligence Unit reports. The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts became less about ancientness and more about texts. If they're only paying a twentieth as well. But this harmless type of lie can turn sour if left unexamined.16 We want kids to be innocent so they can get the most done. The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago.

If you're really productive, why not modern texts? The place to look is where the line ends. I think founders will increasingly be the fate of anyone who wants to get things done. When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably better off thinking directly about what users need. And I think this sort of thing it becomes national news. The less it costs to start a company. In the hundred meters, you know in 10 seconds who's fastest.

Notes

I know when this happened because it doesn't change the meaning of life.

Currently we do at least 150 million in 1970. Patrick Pantel and Dekang Lin.

Just use the name Homer, to a car dealer. A supports, say, but no doubt often are, but those are writeoffs from the most difficult part for startup founders tend to use some bad word multiple times. Ii. I'm not against editing.

Of the remaining outcomes don't have enough equity left to motivate people by saying Real artists ship.

But if they do for a patent troll, either. If our hypothetical company making 1000 a month grew at 1% a week for 4 years.

It should not try to get elected with a screw top would have disapproved if executives got too much. Another tip: If doctors did the same way a bibilical literalist is committed to believing anything in particular made for other reasons, the switch in mid-game.

Good and bad technological progress, however. Y Combinator makes founders move for 3 months also suggests one underestimates how hard they work. This is the accumulator generator benchmark are collected together on their companies took off? But that doesn't seem to have to talk about startups in Germany.

I may be exaggerated by the government to take board seats by switching to what you really want, like selflessness, might come from meditating in an urban legend. And if you know Apple originally had three founders? When you're starting a company if the students did well they do now.

After Greylock booted founder Philip Greenspun out of business, having spent much of the biggest winners, from hour to hour that the worm infected, because investing later would probably only improve filtering rates early on?

We Getting a Divorce? Perl.

Don't invest so much from day to day indeed, is a huge, overcomplicated agreements, and b when she's nervous, she doesn't like getting attention in the sense that there were about the same reason I stuck with such tricks will approach.

But it's useful to consider behaving the opposite way from the CIA. There are successful women who don't like to invest at any valuation the founders. But while this sort of things you waste your time working on is a dotted line on a scale that Google does. 0001.

But try this experiment is that you're not going to create a great deal of competition for the future.

VCs thus have a standard piece of casuistry for this essay will say that it refers to instant ramen would be more likely to come in and convince them. But this seems an odd idea.

You're going to drunken parties. I have no real substance. VCs should be working on Viaweb. But iTunes shows that people get older.

After a bruising fight he escaped with a slight disadvantage, but in practice money raised as convertible debt is a shock at first, but this sort of person who would never have left PARC. Again, hard work is in the Valley has over New York, people who did it lose?

[blackjack-15]

When the Boys Come Marchin’ Home — Thoughts on: The Creature of Kapu Cave (CRE)

Previous Metas: SCK/SCK2, STFD, MHM, TRT, FIN, SSH, DOG, CAR, DDI, SHA, CUR, CLK, TRN, DAN

Hello and welcome to a Nancy Drew meta series! 30 metas, 30 Nancy Drew Games that I’m comfortable with doing meta about. Hot takes, cold takes, and just Takes will abound, but one thing’s for sure: they’ll all be longer than I mean them to be.

Each meta will have different distinct sections: an Introduction, an exploration of the Title, an explanation of the Mystery, a run-through of the Suspects. Then, I’ll tackle some of my favorite and least favorite things about the game, and finish it off with ideas on how to improve it.

If any game requires an extra section or two, they’ll be listed in the paragraph above, along with links to previous metas.

These metas are not spoiler free, though I’ll list any games/media that they might spoil here: CRE; mentions of ASH’s mechanics; TMB.

The Intro:

Oh, thank Heaven, onto a game that’s fun to talk about!

Creature of Kapu Cave probably holds the title of ‘Most Maligned Nancy Drew Game’, at least in my mind; suffice it to say that while it has its fans, it’s most certainly not a fan-favorite. I’m not afraid of standing against the grain slightly here – not after my CUR meta, which is way more divisive than this one is gonna be — and saying that CRE is not only one of my favorite games (for mostly subjective reasons) but also just a solid, if not a stand-out, game in the series, far more deserving of praise than the title before or the title after it.

Yeah, next is ICE, and there’s no game more deserving to start out our “Odd Games” section than it. Yeesh. But that mess is still a couple thousand words away, so let’s dive right in.

The last of the Jetsetting Games, CRE cranks it up to full force by depositing Nancy straight into the beaches and jungles of Hawai’i, keeping the indoor locations to a bare minimum and even then limiting them to: a research facility dominated by plants, tents, caves, and a hilarious kitschy tiki shack.

Everywhere Nancy goes, HER is eager to point out that she’s on Hawai’i, and it’s honestly refreshing after being cooped up inside for all of CUR, most of TRN (my love for that game aside), and most of DAN. CLK had a mix of outdoor (mini-golf, tunnels kind of, car rides/chases, the barn) and indoor (the Inn, the Bank, Topham’s house) locations, but CRE blows it out of the water with just how much we see of Hawai'i, and how determined the devs were to keep Nancy — and thus, the player — out in nature.

CRE is a game where Nancy’s pre-professional-detective presence is actually fully justified; as a recent (and bougie) high school grad, she’s working an internship for a Dr. Quigley Kim, an etymologist studying the norsobeta oderata moth on the island and their odd shift in ~mating habits~.

In my good Christian game, no less.

While Quigley is far more interested in the norsobeta oderata moth going hot ‘n’ heavy than in her assistant, Nancy still gets a good education in frass, bugs, and what dealing with ‘professionals’ and academics is actually like. I can even handwave the ‘bugs’ idea rather than the humanities/history that Nancy is normally drawn towards, because Nancy’s the type of person to want to expand her horizons.

The Hardy Boys are, as ever, a bright spot in an already pretty sunny game. The switching between them and Nancy is a fun thing that the games haven’t really done before — at least not with this level of immersion and control — and it really makes CRE stand out as a game.

Finally, a point which should work in CRE’s favor: its detractors often point to the game as feeling rushed without a proper storyline. While I believe this negative statement to be (and hope to prove it so) mostly untrue, there is a persistent rumor that went around at the time of CRE’s release (and is still noted on the Wikia today) that CRE’s production was greatly rushed in favor of working on the new interface that would come with ICE.

While there’s no definite proof of this rumor, it does fit with HER’s general business practices (even before Pinch-A-Penny Milliken became CEO), and should probably be kept in mind while considering the outside forces surrounding CRE.

The Title:

Even detractors of this game have to admit that its title is pretty awesome, especially for this point in the Nancy Drew series (we’re about halfway, for those not keeping track at home, both through the series (#15/33) and through this meta series (#15/30, as this series will skip MED/SEA/MID). While the book it’s incredibly loosely based off of is called Mystery on Maui, The Creature of Kapu Cave is way more evocative as a title; the location still tells us that we’re in Hawai’i, the “Cave” addition tells us we’ll be spending most of our time outside, and “Creature” means a prowling presence stalking Nancy throughout the game.

In other words, it has all the elements to promise a really fun (and, at this point, unique) entry into the series.

While it’s not exactly part of the title, it doesn’t really fit anywhere else, so I’m going to take the time here to mention how wonderful the cover art is. It’s cohesive, well-segmented, and shows off the focal point (the entrance to the cave), the reel-in for the audience (the Hardy Boys) and the lurking danger (the volcano/lava). It works so well in tandem with the title that I feel like it’s worth pointing out here.

Now, onto what the title promises us:

The Mystery:

Nancy arrives bright-eyed and ready to work upon landing on Hawai’i, arriving at a place called “Big Island Mike’s Immersion Excursions” to get the keys to the car that she needs to drive to get to her professor — Dr. Quigley Kim — and to their base camp. The titular Big Island Mike, having other ideas, assigns her to complete a necklace for him in order to get the keys, saying that she’ll see that she’d rather do his Immersion Excursion than work for Quigley at camp.

Which, like, fair point. I’ll take Mike over Quigley any day.

Nancy has barely gotten to the beach (and received a call from Sir-Not-Appearing-In-This-Game and Marginal Boyfriend Ned) when she spots the Hardy boys, looking decidedly worse for the wear than in TRN (why is Frank’s hair so light???? WHAT DID THEY DO TO JOE’S FACE???) and promptly hangs up while Ned is still confused and asking questions.

I see we have another strong entry for Nancy’s “Girlfriend of the Year” nomination.

The three sleuths trade new information and Nancy finds the sea shells that she needs to make the ‘beginner’ necklace and get the keys from a reluctant Mike. Nancy sets off, car-having and confident, over the bridge and into the jungle – but not before hearing about Kāne ‘Ōkala, the ‘rough-skinned’ man, and his recent reappearance that can only spell bad news for the island.

The forces of Mystery – not to mention the tropical weather — seem to be dead-set against Nancy, as a bad storm and an equally bad man-made (or Creature-made, rather) disaster not only prevent Nancy from getting back to the beach and to safety, but also prevent her from meeting Quigley at their Base Camp, which has been ripped to pieces by someone — or something. Nancy has to survive the jungle, find Quigley, figure out what has sent Kāne ‘Ōkala on a rampage across the island — and, the most deadly task of all: sort frass.

Meanwhile, appearing on the very same beach where Nancy “Whirlwind” Drew talked to them are the Hardy Boys, undercover as vacationers at Big Island Mike’s Immersion Excursions to scope out his daughter Pua for their client Richard Aikens, as Pua is potentially being used for an ad campaign and they need to ensure that she doesn’t have any skeletons in the closet.

In other words, they’re vacationing with a side of snooping, all expenses paid. Jerks.

Because the writer is relatively competent, these two plotlines of course intersect, as Nancy finds out dirt behind the Mapus while Frank (and Joe, briefly, before he takes some hardwood to the head) finds the information Nancy needs for the titular cave, when he’s not busy making shell necklaces, trying out shave ice, and threatening random people via phone.

So because this game usually gets a lot of flak for its story, I thought — contrary to what I usually do in this section — I’d lay out the entire plot, point by point, so that it can be judged, rather than discarded based on some nebulous remembrance of its ‘nonsensicalness’.

We begin, pre-game, with disgruntled ex-pineapple grower Mike Mapu opening up his idea for a tourism business focusing on island living while the Hilihili Research Facility, headed by the CEO of Aikens Biotech, Richard Aikens, opens its doors as well. The connection between the two? The land officially granted to the Hilihili, it turns out, would go to the Mapus if the Hilihili were to go out of business.

Mike then hatches a plan; spread the word of a local folktale figure – Kāne ‘Ōkala — that’s returned and is wreaking havoc all over the island because the Hilihili’s research is killing the pineapples. While each little upset and natural storm adds to Mike’s claims, he needs something bigger — proof that the local pineapple crop is actually suffering.

Enter a shipment of fritillated flag beetles. The beetles start munching on the pineapples and their natural predator, the norsobeta oderata moth, noting that its prey is more plentiful and well-fed than ever before, begin eating and mating in unheard of numbers, drawing the attention of Korean-American entomologist and noted quirk Quigley Kim. Quigley quickly notices that there’s a little too much work for her to be able to just observe all day, and puts out an ad for a research assistant — an ad that reaches all the way to River Heights, Illinois, where Nancy jumps on the opportunity and a plane.

At the same time, Richard Aikens hears about a champion surfer who lives not far from his research center in Hawai’i and wants to use her in advertisements – provided there are no skeletons in her closet, of course. In order to find any trouble before it could cost his company money, he turns to ATAC, who send out Frank and Joe Hardy to start digging.

And that’s where the game starts.

Honestly speaking, this is a fine story — not as strong as some games, stronger than other games. The biggest problem I could see someone having with it is that so much happens pre-game — but that’s true of a lot of Nancy Drew games (CAP being the obvious standout).

Faced with the prospect of the Hilihili continuing to survive, Mike keeps spreading rumors and tries to prevent Nancy from reaching Quigley, who’s the one person who could foil his plans, as she’s studying moths who feed on the very bugs who are, themselves, feeding on the local pineapple crop. Meanwhile, Malachi Craven, secretive head researcher at the Hilihili and noted grouch, thinks that Quigley is spying on him (which she is, but we’ll gloss over that) and goes to her camp to confront her, tearing the place up in a fit of rage when she’s not there.

Thus, when Nancy happens on the crime scene and discovers an audio tape of whatever attacked the camp (which is really funny to think about knowing that it was Craven), coupled with the fact that Quigley is missing, the rumors of Kāne ‘Ōkala build even higher than Mike could have anticipated.

From here on, the story is as laid out in the game — Nancy and the Hardy Boys snoop, finding secret tunnels and lava caves, documents that Big Island Mike definitely shouldn’t have, Joe gets whacked into a concussion by a wooden head — the usual mystery stuff. While there are holes to be poked, they’re no more extreme than most other Nancy Drew games, and less extreme than most games that get put in the same pile as CRE.

Now, onto the characters that make up this mystery!

The Suspects:

Starting us off with the sheer force of his personality is Mike Mapu, otherwise known as Big Island Mike. Provider of Big Island Bucks, lover of shave ice, purveyor of varying degrees of fish bait, and our Big Bad for this game, Mike is a larger-than-life figure who controls much of the game, keeping the Hardy Boys busy, trying to delay (or even prevent) Nancy from getting to Quigley, and keeping telltale documents closely guarded — yet in plain sight.

As our suspect, Mike is honestly a decent choice — I would say he and his daughter are the two best out of our cast — and I have no problem with his actions within the game leading up to the climax. While the climax itself could use some work, Mike’s actions and his plot to achieve his goals make sense, track well, and honestly his plan is pretty well thought through. Mike, unlike a lot of suspects, takes 3 people (4 if you count Pua’s help) to take him down, rather than the Lone Nancy, and I honestly think that says a lot about how well he pulled it off.

His daughter, Pua Mapu, is at the center of the Hardy Boys plotline. A champion surfer on the brink of achieving stardom through advertisements, Pua only cares about surfing and getting ready to surf, but helps out with her dad’s business anyway giving surfing lessons, paying excursioners for necklaces, and even gives out fishing tips.

Pua’s our resident non-entity suspect, but has a bit more of a place in the story given her relation to a far more interesting suspect and her being the lynchpin in the Hardy Boys story. She’s the reason that Mike is actually found out; Nancy by herself couldn’t have gotten where she would have needed to go in order to solve the mystery, and the Hilihili probably would have folded before she could have gotten proper documentation, let alone confronted Mike.

As a suspect? Pua would have been an interesting choice, honestly; the bulk of her dad’s decisions would have been shifted onto her, and he would have been her (moderately uneasy) support. Her motive is already present in the game; if her dad inherited land, that means money, and money means she wouldn’t have to waste her time giving out fake money for fish and necklaces and could instead focus on surfing 24/7. A simple motive for a game where so much happens before Nancy and the Hardy Boys get there, but a good motive nonetheless.

In a very real way, Richard Aikens’ absolutely dumb decision to use the daughter of the man who would inherit his land should he fail for his advertisements is what saved his research facility; had the Hardy Boys not been there to snoop around Pua, most of the plot wouldn’t have had the chance to happen.

Specific to Nancy’s storyline is Dr. Quigley Kim, an entomologist who’s far more on the “observation” than the “research” side of academia. Drawn to Hawai’i to observe the norsobeta oderata moth’s unusual mating season, she hires Nancy to…well do to basically everything except the actual observation, has a tendency to ramble, and hates the nasal sound of her voice in recordings (because the recordings render it truthfully).

Quigley is missing for the first bit of the game, and is usually the suspect the player will meet last, so she has a bit less time to be suspicious — not that she’s a prime suspect anyway. A bit kooky, a whole lot annoying, and absolutely wrapped up in her work, the only thing Quigley’s actually guilty of is spying on Craven (and she never gets in trouble for that anyway).

While I appreciate the slight nudge she gets into the Non-Culprits who do Bad Things that Nancy Discovers, Quigley’s probably the weakest member of the club, and thus doesn’t feel subversive enough to be actually interesting.

As a culprit, Quigley would have been an odd, weak choice; as an entomologist, she’d have no reason to destroy the local pineapple crop, as the pineapples are in the food chain that she’s studying. The game never really goes out of its way to make her seem overly suspicious, which I find a point in its favor, as no player was going to believe it anyway.

Rounding us out is Dr. Malachi Craven, a short-tempered plant scientist with horrible plant allergies — irony at its finest. Brilliant, irritable, and egotistical, Craven refuses to work anywhere that’s not at least halfway solar powered, has been thrown out of a conference of his peers for calling them “hopelessly deluded morons”, and is on non-speaking terms with his brother (though he has a soft spot for his niece).

Craven is the obvious suspect in this mystery, as his bad-tempered and secretive nature is what really gives the rumors of the Hilihili tampering with the local pineapple crop its running shoes. Had the lead scientist been anyone even a bit more amicable, Mike’s plan likely would have fallen through — but since Craven keeps so close a watch on the facility and is so harsh to deal with, he unknowingly plays right into the rumors.

As a suspect, he would have been rather pointless; there’s enough “evidence” against him that the authorities would have already gotten involved, found out he was harming the crop — for what reason, who knows — and stopped him before Quigley could even start her moth project. As it is, he works as a competent distraction, as well as a character who’s slightly more sympathetic than I think he’s really intended to be.

The Favorite:

The Hardy Boys, as is the case with nearly every game they’re in, deserve a spot in this section. Ignoring the design choices that were, all in all, definitely for the worse (2006 was an ugly year, kiddos), the Hardy Boys are light, bright, and entertaining. Playing as Joe and getting whacked by a wooden head is great; playing as Frank threatening the man who whacked his brother is great; all their little mannerisms that separate them from Nancy and each other are well done, and the voice acting is top-notch.

And the fact that they bring with them the chance to change the User Interface (UI) and make it a pretty color is fantastic too.

I actually think the swapping mechanism is done better here than in ASH (note that this is one of the only times you’ll hear me say anything negative against ASH), because you’re only swapping between Nancy and a Hardy Boy, not a possibility of four different people. It’s a lot easier to keep track of things when each character is limited to a certain area, though I do love that the different responses that suspects would have to different people in ASH is sort of beta-tested here in Pua’s different responses to Frank and Joe.

I love the location that was chosen for the game; Hawai’i is the spot of not a few Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew mysteries, and it was cool to have a game that works in both the jungle and the beaches, rather than choosing one over the other.

I might be in the minority, but I actually really love Dr. Craven as a character. He’s got a bit more depth than most suspects even at this point, and you can tell he loves his niece despite his relationship with his brother.

My favorite moment in the game is honestly Frank’s gangster moment when he calls up Johnny Kuto, ready to kill him for hurting his brother. It’s a great moment of voice acting, a great brotherly scene, and a whole lot of fun to see Frank (and Joe, but Frank in particular here) having the mettle be an Agent, regardless of his age.

My favorite puzzle probably ties between the shave ice logic puzzle (I’m always here for a logic puzzle, as readers of this meta series already know) and frass sorting. I never really got why other people disliked frass sorting, as it’s an easy and fun puzzle to me. Bring on the frass.

I’m also going to add in here my love for the minigames in this game — specifically making necklaces (fishing is fun too, but I prefer trolling for shells). It’s fun to find the shells, to snorkel to find more (and move the plot along, of course)…I just really enjoy the Immersion Excursion part of this game, and would totally go on one in real life.

In a very stupid way, I like laughing at how horrible Nancy is as a girlfriend in this game; not only does she refer to Ned in the tutorial part as “a really good friend of mine” rather than “my boyfriend” (seriously Nancy what the eff) but she also abruptly hangs up mid-conversation on Ned when she sees two people that she thinks might be the Hardy Boys. It’s almost absurd how bad of a girlfriend she is in this game, and I like laughing at it.

#NedDeservesBetter2KForever.

Lastly, there’s a bit of dialogue that I love in this game – I know, CRE isn’t even a Nik game, so I was shocked too — when Frank’s listing all the things he’s found out for Nancy that will enable her to get into the titular cave.

He finishes his list and then says “oh, and I also saved the whales and brought about world peace”. Nancy responds with a teasingly dejected “Darnit, I was gonna do world peace”, and Frank answers her with an amused “Sorry, you have to do bug stuff”. It’s a fun, funny moment, and it’s nice to hear Nancy/Frank banter, no matter if you ship them or if you prefer them as friends. Shout out to, as always, our good ol’ boy JVS for his great work with Frank this game (and another hooray for the inimitable Rob Jones as Joe).

The Un-Favorite:

My least favorite moment in the game would probably be listening to all of Quigley’s recorded data; they weren’t really trying to make her nasality subtle, and boy does it get unbearable really, really fast. The fact that this is the stand-out worst moment in the game says a lot about how much I personally enjoy this game, and how inoffensive even the ‘bad’ stuff really is.

Well, mostly. See below.

Rather than frass sorting, as seems to be ubiquitous in the fandom, the little stealth section is by far my least favorite puzzle in the game. It’s nerve-wracking, timed, mandatory, and makes you rely on tiny visual cues to win it — in other words, it’s my worst nightmare when it comes to games.

I’ll include the endgame puzzle in here too, though I like it better than the stealth puzzle, just because it’s honestly a bit of a letdown. Nancy and Frank are in lava caves — cool — with currents that lead there – double cool — and the final endgame puzzle is lava mahjong? It’s a poor way to end an otherwise engaging game, even if it doesn’t prevent me (like other puzzles that have been and will be featured in this section) from replaying the game.

The Fix:

So how would I fix The Creature of Kapu Cave?

First things first, I’d change Joe’s entire design for this game. I don’t know why they chose “caveman Jesse McCartney” as their guiding star, but it was an unbelievably poor choice. Sure, Frank’s hair is a bit light, but considering they keep him dark brown for the rest of the games rather than the black hair he had in TRN, I’d be fine with just tinting it a bit darker and focusing on the Enormous Wrong done to Joe Hardy.

The other thing I’d fix is the endgame puzzle. While that style is done well other places in the series (TMB being the obvious example of the tile-style endgame), it really doesn’t fit CRE, and it makes the ending feel like an anti-climax. Even a trip through another set of currents would have been better, though honestly even a final confrontation just through speaking to Mike would have been better.

Other than that, I don’t think I’d change anything else. Sure, there are puzzles and moments I’m not too fond of, but I don’t think that the game suffers from having them in it. Honestly speaking, as long as the player pays attention to the story and tries to put it together rather than just waiting for the final scene, The Creature of Kapu Cave isn’t an impenetrable mystery nor a poorly written game; it’s just a mystery with a beautiful location, fun games, and entertaining puzzles to soup it up.

Oh, and the Hardy Boys, of course.

[katsukisprincess-archive]

Hi Sky! I see that you do computer science? I'm going into college my first year this month. I want to do cs too, but I'm nervous as a girl. Is that normal? What is your degree called?

hey hey hey! first off, congrats on going into your first year of college! as someone who’s wrapping up her degree, i wish i could experience it for the first time again. cherish it!

the nervousness around comp sci is completely normal! there is a serious lack of females in the field and although there is a lot to overcome with that gap, there are a lot of opportunities as well. 

usually, schools will have some sort of group for womxn in stem. we do a lot of professional development work and research on the statistics behind said lack in stem to help us better understand how we can make changes in the field moving through our programs. having a support platform like that is seriously beneficial, especially in your first year. focus on general studies, but don’t hesitate to leak into the major and get your feet in the water with hackathons, codeathons, or robotics groups!

my specific degree will be a B.SE, a bachelor of science in software engineering, as well as certificates in programming foundations and java programming specifically. i don’t have any cool interests like game dev or network security, i just really love coding and java as a whole. my uni has a 4+1 masters program and i plan on taking advantage of that to hopefully broaden interests. in the end, a phd is the goal, but that’s all still... two or three years away, so not sweating!

if you need anything, please reach out to me! i can compile resources if you need and direct you to cool support groups on fb and other sites!

the road ahead may look intimidating for a stem student, but don’t let that fear swallow you! you are badass and you are more than capable!

[scripting-life]

FFVII: returning to my first love

 *peeks out of the corner of my lurking spot*

Hello? Anybody out there? It’s only been, oh you know, four-ish years since the last time I’ve posted anything here. I apologize in advance for anybody who’s still following me from my Castle days. If you couldn’t tell from my extended absence, I’ve mostly moved on. Castle and Beckett were fantastic characters that let me to play with some deep-dive analyses, and Castle will always hold a special place in my heart as my comfort show and my first real and extended experience with online fandom. I’ll always be grateful to the community I’ve had the joy of interacting with (or, the community with which I’ve had the joy of interacting, as Castle would correct me my dangling preposition).

I honestly didn’t think I would ever have reason to come back to Tumblr after Castle ended. But the FF7 Remake has returned me to my very first love--when I was young and innocent and before I knew anything about OTPs or ship wars. I’ve been back lurking for several months now and seeing all the fanart/fanfics and fun theories and analyses has reignited my enthusiasm for the FF7 franchise. It’s also fun coming back to this franchise with a more mature understanding of the themes/concepts that completely flew over my head as a young preteen.

(This ended up being super long, so the rest is below the cut to spare everyone the pain of scrolling. Apparently, my rambling tendencies have not changed at all. lol.)

When FF7R was officially announced (five freaking years ago!), I was filled with apprehension. FF7 was my first taste of a “grown-up” game. I was 11 and played my brother’s copy of the OG on PC in 1-2 hours spurts on the weekends when I visited his apartment. It took me months, if not years, to finish the game (I ended up stealing his copy to play on our computer at home...lol), and I was so blown away by it. I remember the exact moment I finished it and how I was literally shaking as I watched the ending FMV.

Later, when I found out my brother had a copy of FF8 (my poor brother was so accommodating to his annoying little sister...haha), I was so excited to play, in large part because I thought it would continue the story of FF7. Young, naive me didn’t understand the numbering conventions of Final Fantasy titles. I was madly theorizing and breaking my brain trying to find connections between the two games’ plots and had literally played through more than half the game before I finally realized the storyline of FF8 had absolutely nothing to do with FF7. I was sorely disappointed, and I think that has somewhat tainted my appreciation of future titles. Not to say I haven’t enjoyed the subsequent FF titles, but I think a little part of me is always comparing them to that first experience of wonder and awe that I had with FF7.

I discovered fanfiction in my teens and starting writing FF7/Cloti fics in college. Aside from interacting with a few fic writers at the time, I was not involved in any online communities, so I kept myself pretty free of any ship war drama and the like. When I did research for my fics, I’d sometimes see shipping sites and theories where I didn’t always understand the logic of how certain conclusions were reached, but frankly, I didn’t much care and didn’t realize that Clerith vs. Cloti was such a touchy subject. I was peripherally aware that some sort great LTD war was waging, of course, but it didn’t really touch me. I stayed in my Cloti shipping/fic-writing lane and was probably a lot happier for it. And, to be honest, based on FFN’s listings for FF7, I felt like I always saw a bunch of Sephiroth/Cloud fics and thought that was just as popular as the more conventional ships.

Graduating college and entering “real life” pretty much ended my FF7 fanfic-writing journey. In the intervening years between college and the release of FF7R, I haven’t gone back to the OG too much. I’ve played almost all the Final Fantasy games since then, and I always enjoy getting my FF7 crew fix when I play the non-canon mobile games or the Kingdom Hearts franchise. But FF7 was a happy part of my teenage years, and I was content to think on it with sweet nostalgia.

Remakes, in recent experience (*cough cough* Disney, why?), have been hit or miss, with a lot of misses. It’s hard to strike a good balance between catering to nostalgia and delivering a fresh product, never mind the change in social mores through the decades. I was so afraid FF7R would screw up my memories, especially since I wasn’t the biggest fan of Advent Children. The graphics were great and the action scenes were fun, but the story felt like a let-down. Cloud, in particular, felt so different (and yes, moody) from where we left him after the OG. I understand now that a lot of his character motivation was better explained in the On The Way to a Smile novels, but back then, I just felt like AC came out of nowhere. 

Btw, because I see this question a lot on other blogs when I’m lurking, I’ve ALWAYS thought that it was very clear in AC--even without reading anything else--that the reason for Cloud’s depression was due to guilt and not because he was pining for Aerith. The only reason I didn’t like his characterization in AC was because it felt like it came out of nowhere since AC is set 2 years after OG and by the end of the OG, he seemed to be in a pretty decent place mentally and emotionally. That being said, I can absolutely understand why some traumas resurface years after the originating incident and how times of peace might actually be worse because he is no longer solely focused on saving the world, but I was just surprised and a little bummed that this was the direction the devs chose to take AC at the time. Now that I’m older, I do better appreciate the complexities of Cloud’s mental state and the fact that they depicted a hero with lingering mental health issues is actually pretty awesome. I’m drawn to characters that have flaws--sometimes serious ones--but try their best anyway. Hence, why why Tifa Lockhart and Kate Beckett are some of my all-time favorites.

Anyhow, that didn’t stop me from pre-ordering FF7R, of course. I avoided reading any reviews as I didn’t want my first impressions to be swayed, and boy, was I happy that I went in mostly blind. That sense of awe really almost felt like playing the OG for the first time again, but somehow more. The combat system is incredibly fun and the world-building is nothing short of incredible. The variety and abundance of NPCs gives the game so much flavor and the locations have been rendered so well. As I’m going through areas like the Sector 7 train station and Wall Market and Aerith’s house, I can almost superimpose the layout from the OG in my head, but now it’s in 3D and so rich and full. It’s obvious that a lot of attention was paid to details, and I love all the head-nods and homages to the OG.

And oh, the characters!

This is the Cloud I’ve been wanting to see in glorious HD and the Cloud I remember from the original game: all awkward, dorky trying to be cool, socially inept, mentally unstable, abrasive-at-times, reluctant to act depending on who’s asking, wannabe hard-ass who’s actually a big softie inside Cloud. I remember reading an article a few years back about how the devs basically redid Cloud for the Remake because they wanted him to go back to his dorky roots--which ends up making him closest to his personality in the OG than his appearances in other franchises--and I was SOOOO incredibly happy to hear that. I was so sick of the way Cloud was constantly depicted as this cool, broody McBrood in his cameos when he was a pretty big dork in the OG. (Anybody remember him doing squats in the Highwind when Tifa says it’ll be lonely with just the two of them and Cloud responds that he’ll make enough noise to make up for it? Like I said: cute, but a dork.)

I WAS surprised by how comfortable and sweet and touchy (so very very touchy) the devs made him with Tifa from the beginning. That initial scene of Cloud being such a smooth operator giving Tifa the flower had my jaw-dropping and every single flirty interaction after that (and there are many) had my Cloti heart overflowing in shock and bliss. Throughout most of my years as a Cloti shipper, even though I believed Cloti was supported by canon and pretty clearly together, I was also under the impression--mistakenly or not--that Cloti was the minority ship. So for Square Enix to make it so blatantly obvious that Cloud is really into Tifa at such an early stage has been an unexpected gift.

Also, they’re just really hot together. (Clotiscrew tunnel--be still my heart!)

As for Tifa...oh, what wonderful character development we’ve already gotten for Tifa. Tifa has always been one of my all-time favorite characters ever since reading her character blurb in the OG game manual. Initially, as a child, it was because I saw so much of myself in her. She was outwardly bright and optimistic, but tended to hide all of her stronger feelings inside. She fought with her fists, and for someone who was a tomboy growing up who liked playing contact sports with the boys, I connected with her in a way that I had never been able to connect with other female protagonists who were primarily back-row specialists. (I also aspired to grow to her listed height of 5′4″, which alas, did not happen...lol).

I love how the Remake delves into more of Tifa’s moral conflict between the destruction that she causes as part of Avalanche and needing to do something to stop Shinra, and yes, even seeking revenge. They touched on this in the OG lightly, but the Remake really hammers it home. She’s perhaps the most conflicted character in terms of motivation in Part 1. That scene with the Shinra manager on the train is actually one of my favorite scenes of her because it highlights that tension. The elevator scene, if you opted for it instead of the stairs (or if you did one, saved, and reloaded to do the other one, like me), is also underrated in terms of how much it reveals about Tifa’s inner struggle.

On this point, I also appreciate that the Remake has the characters reflecting on the damage they’ve both indirectly and directly inflicted--the Avalanche team all do this to a certain degree. In particular, Jessie’s constant inability to figure out what she’d done wrong with the bomb to cause such a massive explosion and her remaining feelings of guilt during her death scene (”they were my victims” ouch!) were heart-breaking.

Aerith’s depiction was another pleasant surprise. I’ll be honest; I didn’t much like her in the OG. She was too pushy and willfully oblivious to the point of being mean at times. In the Remake, much of her sometimes too in-your-face playfulness was kept--perhaps still a little too much--but I appreciate the nuance that they gave her. The train graveyard scene tells the player that she didn’t have friends growing up, and I think that partially contributes to her lack of social tact at times. The other factor that gives her personality more nuance is the hint of special knowledge that affects how she interacts with the rest of the group. It gives her additional hidden motivation and adds to her mystery for new players while simultaneously pulling at the heartstrings for old players who get the impression that Aerith is somehow aware--to a certain, unknown extent--of her own fate. 

I also appreciate that Aerith is more grounded as a real person than as some sort of revered being. I do blame AC for some of that. When you have the power to cure a fatal disease from the afterlife and send the dead back to life, it gets into some godlike territory. Maybe it’s a fair depiction of her powers as a Cetra, but I just get the feeling that Aerith herself wouldn’t really appreciate being made into this goddess-like figure. Remember that her character blurb in the original game manual implied that she was more interested in earthly things (i.e. the love triangle) than in exploring her own powers. I personally think that Aerith used the “love triangle” in the OG as a form of escapism from the weight of her burdens rather than genuine interest, and I just think she’d want to be thought of as a person rather than as a god. One of my favorite scenes for Aerith is when she and Cloud are traversing the rooftops and she slips on the ladder, letting out a simple, “Shit.” It humanizes her in a way that combats some of the ways she’s sort of been deified in the last 23 years. Also, Aerith wielding a folding chair like it’s WWE never fails to make me laugh. Overall, she just comes off as a more reasonably flawed and--as a result, to me--a more likeable character in the Remake, and I do very much like her now.

Barret is pretty much the exact larger than life character I imagined in my head, only somehow even better, and I really love how expressive and emotional his eyes and facial expressions are. His scenes with Marlene are truly the cutest thing ever. Red XIII is a big, furry ball of sass, and I need so much more of him in the coming parts (Cosmo Canyon still wrecks me to this day). The interactions between the Wedge, Biggs, and Jessie are incredible, and they really feel like people who’ve been friends and basically each other’s family for years. The Turks and Rufus are pretty much as cool as I imagined them in the OG.

There’s still so much more I haven’t even started touching on about the Remake, and I think that’s why I’m finally posting this now. I just can’t contain my love for this game any more, and I really really need a place to express myself. I don’t know if anybody is still reading, but I appreciate having the opportunity to finally gush about this game and franchise that I’ve loved so much for pretty much two-thirds of my life.

[illegiblewords]

Hooooooo boy.

So apparently villain fan versus villain fan discourse is kicking up.

Have some reiterated opinions, some fresh ones, and some weird ones. Technically this is vagueblogging about some specific stuff but intent is no-drama here.

Emet-Selch versus Vauthry fan wank seems to be happening, which I’m sighing over because it’s a kind of ridiculous argument to have imo. Neither of these dudes are good people. Like we can debate accountability ‘til the cows come home and as I’ve been saying my opinions on insanity plea are strong. But like. I think at the very best we can argue for is a moral gray.

I can get Emet-Selch as a fallen hero/hero of Amaurot and for that reason haven’t been overly bothered by the “hero” line in the extreme fight. Vauthry is tragic but he’s basically inflicting forced cannibalism and mind control en masse. I personally am not of the opinion that he would qualify for a realistic insanity plea, so that impacts my measure of accountability. He’s also extremely, EXTREMELY familiar to me in how he thinks and behaves due to people I’ve encountered over the years. I understand how he got to a place where he thought those measures were acceptable. A form of mental illness is absolutely in play there as I read him, but it would not count toward the legal definition of insanity and for me that is significant.

As it stands, trying to claim whose behavior is less wrong is a stupid game to play when it’s genocide versus mass murder/forced cannibalism. Generally I’d rather opt out of that one because neither of these actions are things most people want to emulate. It seems like fans are more trying to decide who is moral enough to be allowed compassion/caring and who isn’t, which is an even more stupid game to play to my mind.

I don’t think having compassion and empathy for Emet-Selch or Vauthry are problems so much as selective compassion/empathy. As in “X person isn’t allowed to have compassion/empathy”.

I belong very much to the school of “everyone counts”. This means that in life some people inevitably go bad and commit atrocities that need to be stopped even if that means their death. It’s a very tragic thing when that happens and should be mourned, at least because if things had gone differently maybe the person would have turned out better. As long as you are able to remember the humanity of all involved (with the messiness that entails), odds are you’ll be able to navigate tough situations alright imo. When you start pretending some people are less than human, acceptable targets, or whose suffering otherwise doesn’t count--that’s extremely dangerous imo. It makes it easy to dismiss another person’s pain, which in turn makes it much easier to be cruel or callous. Sometimes needlessly.

Some additional bits:

- Emet-Selch did not say he would see the Sundered as less-than-human/not-really-alive/acceptable-targets if he wasn’t tempered. Attributing as much to him is literally, factually untrue. Moreover even if he had said it--he is an unreliable narrator on this front. He doesn’t know, he got tempered by the most powerful primal in existence. I’ve talked about how he lives the trolley problem before as well, which being added to tempering I think only exacerbates the level that he’s compromised. It’s a mind-wrecking situation.

- I’ve seen some people argue that because there was a point in time when Emet-Selch wasn’t tempered, his judgment while tempered isn’t as compromised as Vauthry’s is. That’s like arguing because someone at one point in their life did not have PTSD, or had not reached onset for Schizophrenia, therefore how they behaved and thought after developing those things is less compromising. It makes no sense to me as an argument. You could be born with a less severe condition that lasts your entire life while someone else is initially stable and gets completely crippled by mental illness. As it stands, I don’t even know if more severe/less severe is the way I’d even frame it because this seems like apples and oranges insofar as thought patterns go. They’re both fruit/both mentally ill characters but I mean other than that? Too different to get much from that comparison.

By the by. I know that I bring my own influences to the table in how I read things, but to me tempering absolutely reads as a mental illness allegory where it distorts a person’s existing thoughts in extreme ways that they would not do otherwise--but specifically distorting in such a way that serves the primal in question. I also think that other FFXIV characters show indications of different forms of mental illness, and I’m actually very impressed by how well the devs captured these.

Mental illness as a subject tends to get extremely complicated and people often have no idea how to deal with it. It’s also something that tends to get brushed aside, dismissed, or oversimplified today--both in fan communities and in-general. I’m glad people are having conversations about it, but good lord this is not a place to have pissing contests or try to impose pure good/evil morality.

- People are entering debate over Vauthry’s weight and whether joking about it is okay or not. I want to pose a few points. 1) Dulia Chai, also very overweight, does not receive the treatment Vauthry does and seems pretty beloved 2) Vauthry, in a period of widespread famine and as the person explicitly charged with ALL OF EULMORE’S WEALTH (as in, all of the people living under him surrendered their property in exchange for his protection) is seriously, dangerously overweight due in large part to unapologetic, non-essential cannibalism. He honestly resembles people who have been rendered physically immobile and are dying due to obesity complications during this time period, that is not something that happens without serious excess. Vauthry holds funds that were given to him specifically not for his own personal enjoyment but to perform a job for the people. He absolutely places his own pleasure above the survival of the poor. If he was that overweight in a time of plenty or as someone without the level of power he holds, it would not read the same way. Under these specific circumstances his physicality is a direct representation of his corruption and hypocrisy. Under other circumstances that might not have been the case. 3) In the same way that enabling harmful thought patterns/behavioral tendencies in a mentally ill person is bad and can constitute abuse, it is possible to cause harm by encouraging extreme and dangerous physical states. I am a strong believer in the idea that every body type can be beautiful provided it doesn’t look like the person faces imminent danger to their health or is actively dying. For me this is not exclusive to extreme obesity but also extends to starvation and some instances of extreme body-building as well. Think steroid abuse.

When a body registers as “sick”, there is a level of instinctive discomfort for most people. Sometimes this comes with sympathy and concern for the person dealing with that issue, sometimes it alienates others from them them. But when an individual actively embraces self-destruction by pursuing such an extreme and dangerous state either by design or out of apathy to the threat, it’s normal for a measure of horror to be attached because it becomes a form of self-harm. Vauthry evokes that to me. Dulia Chai does not. 4) I’ve joked about the wonders of the meol diet, because I know firsthand how difficult weight loss can be. To go from Vauthry’s level to Innocence’s in like six steps is absurd --the fact that he’s been on a cannibalism diet specifically takes it the extra mile into hilarity for me. I haven’t seen as many jokes about his weight in-general so much as the sudden transformation. If the butt of the joke is cannibalism and ridiculous speed/opposite appearance turnaround, I personally don’t think those cases warrant offense. 5) I’ve had people try to fight me before for saying there is a such thing as being dangerously overweight. No comments on dangerously underweight or muscular, just overweight. So to set people at ease--I have personally dealt with serious health risks caused by obesity before. I’ve had loved ones who were in the same position and I have lost family members directly as a result of obesity-related health problems. It’s a very difficult thing to deal with. I have a lot of sympathy on this subject and understand how devastating it can be to endure shitty treatment due to weight.

I personally don’t think it’s right to forbid any jokes that deal with Vauthry’s weight, or that deal with hot subjects in-general. I think the punchline of the joke matters a ton though. Making a joke at the expense of someone struggling with something difficult is shitty. Making a joke about cannibalism turning you into a sparkling bishonen after walking down a set of stairs is just ridiculous.

Likewise, I don’t think it’s a problem for people to feel disturbed by severe health problems... but I do think it’s important to separate the person dealing with the illness from the illness itself. This goes for physical and mental issues.

I know that a lot of people don’t necessarily agree with these types of opinions and that’s okay. They’re not really common right now and are things I arrived at just by thinking myself and trying to sort out what seems appropriate as best I can.

- I’ve talked about how insanity plea when I was researching it more or less came down to a person having their perception of reality and their judgment so heavily impaired by illness that they cannot be expected to react to situations in the same way that someone without that impairment would. I’ve seen people try to argue about how someone saying demons made them murder another person wouldn’t have any less accountability to them. I think that case could actually fall under insanity plea but would need close evaluation to make sure. If the person truly believed that they and their loved ones would be tortured to death by demons if they refused or told anyone or something--yeah, insanity plea in play there. Part of the issue is that the act is horrible and I think there’s a longstanding skepticism on whether the person is sincerely crazy or just bullshitting.

In general, a cluster B personality disorder would not qualify for insanity plea. Still might involve inaccurate perception of the world or others, but the type of delusion and impairment would not inherently compel them toward violent/unlawful  action or prevent them from seeking help. They also tend to be somewhat more aware of the world around them, but whether they care and how they interact/why can be dictated by the condition. Given I think Zenos is more or less an Antisocial Personality Disorder poster child (not because “I don’t like people so edgy”, I mean in terms of treating people in his life as filling roles and therefore being replaceable, overwhelming ennui in most aspects of his life, lack of interest or fulfillment in interpersonal relationships, etc.)--I do not think he would qualify for insanity plea.

Vauthry I’m not positive what I think he has yet, again he reminds me a lot of people I’ve met but certain conditions manifest similarly under the circumstances I have in mind. I think he absolutely has inhibited empathy. He’s also very spoiled, self-righteous, and possibly has no theory of mind. I don’t think he has instincts for taboo either which probably does tie to his sin-eater heritage. I don’t think his growing up in Eulmore or even having a shitty upbringing is the main reason he is the way he is, imo it’s a combination of nature and nurture. I think being part sin-eater essentially made it easier for him to become monstrous, but who knows--if he’d had a really good upbringing in a non-toxic environment maybe he could have been a good man anyway. Same way that having a cluster B personality disorder does not make a person evil by a long shot, but it can make it easier to hurt others due to the way thought patterns are impacted.

I would want to double check some research, but right now I think Vauthry reads likely for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. He has mood swings but none of them seem to be depressive, it’s more egotism/happiness and anger by and large. When he does get sad before dying, it’s not because of loving or missing his father but because the self-image he loved (as encouraged by his father) was compromised.

I think he’s a bit slow and I think he only cares about others insofar as they’re tools to define himself as well as possible to his own mind. I don’t think, listening to G’raha Tia or anyone who begged him to change course, he was unable to comprehend what they were saying. He was just closed-minded to it imo.

With Emet-Selch meanwhile, I actually think both how he was impacted by specific interactions, his memories, and possibly even his sensory understanding of sundered beings might have been compromised by Zodiark. Like being colorblind, almost. I think the way he deals with the world, there are a ton of colors he can no longer perceive due to tempering but he has no idea that what he should be perceiving is there. He remembers being able to see all colors in Amaurot, but after the sundering suddenly purple was gone. Purple is still actually there, but he is not capable of seeing it. You could literally wave a purple flower in front of his face and it wouldn’t register. He might even accuse you of lying because he remembers purple, and purple is gone, and he’s doing everything he can to get purple back--but he has no idea that purple has still been here but he’s been altered in such a way that despite remembering it, he can’t see it anymore. As per tempering.

Vauthry knows about purple, he just doesn’t have much interest in it outside how it looks with his complexion. If purple is unflattering then fuck purple. Burn it to the ground, ban it, forbid anyone else from indulging in it. If it works, then no one would have more or prettier purples than him.

- It is time for me to take a nap but basically it was shitty to give Vauthry a sin-eater streak but 1) I do still think that’s severely impaired judgment 2) I don’t necessarily think that Vauthry was bound in the same way by his mental condition. I do think Vauthry believed himself to be doing good but didn’t actually have a clear concept of good in existence.