#without spoiling ​it gives reasoning as to why your player character has no option but to carry out a life threatening task

[tangirlisfangirl]

i feel bad that my friendly neighborhood had to release a week before the ruin dlc, its such a wonderfully and carefully crafted game with a beautiful story and character/level designs, just so much thought put into it across the board and it truly does justice to its concept, but now its gonna be lost in the onslaught of fnaf hype and not properly appreciated <:/

[theartsanityshoppe]

I like your detective stuff! Does he have a nemesis like Sherlock has Moriarty? And was he born mute or did he lose his voice? The sign language is really nice to see in a character!

Why was this in the 'bashful' gif options

Thanks Anon!! I greatly appreciate the comment~ I myself, also really like my detective stuff and I mean reeeeeeeeeeeeally like it lmao

Otherwise, I'm going to write these answers out as the parts of the story these questions delve into is being currently reworked and some of the answers are kinda up in the air / half canon as of right now. This will probably be a longish answer so I'll put a quick answer up here, and a "read more" underneath that with my ramblings. Quick answers: Was he born mute or did he lose his voice? - He was born mute. Does he have a nemesis? - Yes and no... I've cycled through a few characters but the main one now, without spoiling much, is named F.E.L.I.X.. But I've been working on a couple others who could possibly take over as his main nemesis.

For longer, more rambly answers, keep reading!

So like I said the answer to at least his nemesis part is kind of up the in air atm. I also wanted to expand a little on the mute aspect~

Flint is primarily mute because I tend to view this world in the terms of a video game, in which of course the player would play as the Det. [and as Cy actually who hasn't appeared in the comics yet] and like a lot of video games I always imagined him as being a "silent protag" despite still communicating with the other characters. Like Link in the new BOTW/TOTK games.

The second reason behind it was I just couldn't imagine him with a voice?? No matter how hard I tried, it just felt. Wrong for his character if that makes sense? So I figured "hey why not just give him sign language! How often do you see a deaf or mute main character anyway?" I've started to see more ASL used in shows - most recently in Only Murders in the Building which I LOVE [both the shows and the inclusion/importance of the deaf character in the story] and I thought it would make him a more interesting main character tbh. I also really really REALLY want to learn ASL, as my first grade teacher taught us a bunch when I was a kid but I've sadly forgotten just about all of it as she was just teaching us for fun. It had nothing to do with the class lol.

As for Flint's nemesis[es]! He currently has at least two, one of which is still so under-construction they don't even have a name yet or a design hahahaha.

Originally his nemesis was supposed to be Prof. Specter, aka this guy, whose a literal shadow man. [Cuz. Yah know. Shadow vs Light/Flames?] He was supposed to be almost the Dr. Claw to Flint's Inspector Gadget, but I just never went anywhere with him?? I couldn't really think up anything good tbh, and I felt like Flint easily overpowered him. I also couldn't think up any good reasons for him to BE so evil/want to attack the town etc. So he just became a smaller villain, who currently works under the main big bad. I am a MASSIVE sucker for "opposite" characters - the "good" version vs the "evil" version basically, and I have been actively trying to utilize that in a story of mine FOR YEARS. Think like, Darkwing Duck vs Nega Duck. This shit is my JAM.

For the first nemesis, his name is F.E.L.I.X. [Force Entity Learning Integrating and eXterminating] Flint, and he's a sort of "evil" version of Flint. [These are all cheebs of the various forms Felix currently takes in story]

The littlest dude is ACTUALLY Felix, [he starts off by possessing a flash drive and transforming it] and the rest are just later forms he takes throughout the story. Originally he was just some weird little alien computer virus that landed on earth, a la Invader Zim style, here to prepare Earth for conquer by his Mother Program, which is still more or less the case? The reasoning behind him being in Neo Oldesville and him eventually taking on Flint's appearance have changed a lot though.

The main reason I hesitate to call him a nemesis atm is because he was originally just more of a comedic, but still kinda dangerous, character and Felix Flint was originally going to be a sort of split in Felix's personality/code that took life on it's own, separate from Felix, warped by the internet, others personalities, and probably some other villain's code. He was just gonna go kinda crazy as his coding was rewritten too many times and start attacking... but that idea has been scrapped due to the rewrites.

He was also smart, but not in the same ways the Detective is, so they weren't really butting heads like Sherlock/Moriarty do wherein Felix would be besting Flint at every turn or something like that. Instead Flint actually bested Felix pretty easily originally. Felix Flint was basically my solution to fix that major leveling scale issue lol.

The other character, the unnamed one, is a Mad Scientist/Cult leader, whose become basically the 'secret' big bad of what I would call the first season of the story. Idk maybe longer than that? I haven't decided on how long I want this story to be tbh. I'm still working on the character and their storyline and how it intersects with both Flint's and Cy's, (whose the deuteragonist to this story)... but the most I do know/will reveal here is that this Mad Scientist is the leader of a cult that worshiped two aliens that used to exist on planet who promised to help the humanoids [as people are generally referred to here] "ascend to a higher life form" but were later stopped and destroyed by a group of super-hero like super spy sisters who learned that the aliens were in fact extremely hostile and their idea of "ascending to a higher plan" was just assimilating all of this worlds knowledge/tech and then selling off its inhabitants as slaves. I haven't decided if the rest of the world knows this fact, or if the alien characters are considered martyrs or something yet... or even if the rest of the world knew they WERE aliens. Just that they're eventually defeated by these legendary super-spies, and that a small cult remained behind after everyone else moved on from their teachings.

The leader of this new cult basically wants to bring those aliens back - specifically by summoning one of their kin to the world to help fully restore one of the deceased aliens back to life, but what he summons is Felix instead, as the race of aliens the cult worshiped had all been destroyed and absorbed by Felix's Mother Program years ago. Irony at its finest lol.

This new mad scientist/cult leader character is supposed to have very deep ties with Cy, who in turn has pretty deep ties to Flint, and I've been planning on possibly making him a sort of Moriarty to Flint, but I'm still ironing out details.

One reason I haven't quite finished this all yet is because while I am planning on using some religious ideology [is that the right word here? or would mimicry be better] in the cult, I don't necessarily want to make it a "RAWR RAWR RELIGION IS EVIL RAAAWR" kind of situation, since it's specifically that CULTS are evil. I myself was born and raised without religion in my life outside of just being in America, so while I don't believe in any religion at all, I also don't want to be cruel to anyone who does. I do, however, know that a lot of cults use Christianity as a guise to trick their followers into controlling them though.

Mostly I just really want the two aliens from the original cult to look semi like a devil and an angel cuz I thought it'd be hilarious if they were basically the "angel and devil on your shoulders" lmao.

If anyone wants to know more I'm happy to explain even more in detail. I don't care about spoiling things haha I'm not planning on creating a huge comic or anything anytime soon - I mean I would love to turn this series into a game or something in the future but for now I'm just having fun I LOVE talking about my characters/stories.

[spikeinthepunch]

i was recently finding out about some early access bg3 stuff, some i hadnt known before which was about Daisy which i knew was the name for the dream guardian in the files but was unaware how different it was. and it mostly got me thinking even more about the topic of sex, manipulation, and consent in the game's writing. but not from a 'oh this is well written and cool they explore this' but rather its leaned on 'was it necessary? how much of this is?'

obviously, they cut this stuff out. (going forward i will only spoil the dream guardian's dreams along with Daisy's. along with mentioning breifly the cut Baahl ending and Haarlep. and so in turn TW for topics of sexual abuse and dubcon). so if they cut it out they took whatever feedback was going on then, and i know some of that had to do with story flow.

so like. Daisy was a a character who appeared in your dreams and rather than be a voice who was trying to help you with the tadpole and destroy the Brain. They basically were always intending to not be on your side, rather they were a personification of the tadpole trying to make you give in to the transformation.

video for reference. the dream guardian/emperor from the start helps, but does have a slight betrayal, and then also a scene of sexual intimacy (which you can agree to have sex with. but regardless, the sexual suggestion is there regardless). Daisy on the other hand, isnt ever exactly "good" and again, is trying to make you lose yourself. And one method of doing so is lots of physical intimacy.

In the very first dream you have them caressing your cheek, going behind your to touch you and get close... later they slide their hand over your hips, and even later then you kiss them (depending on the outcome of hurting them or not). even if you were to give more closed off options, the character will still refer to you as "darling" and some of this intimacy still carries out anyways. in general its clear the Daisy's method of manipulation is centered around that.

so first and foremost there is the issue of Why it was removed and also Why i think it likely worked poorly for people playing, and also why i think there is an extent where this kind of writing isn't good, not even regarding thse sexual/intimate nature...

Much like with the Haarlep scene, people who didnt like it didnt like it because they felt they did not have control over a thing they were uncomfortable with. they didnt like that suddenly, their tav was having sex and had no way to escape. *yes* it is totally the point of that scene, thats what a succubus would do. and that why i think its a good scene. its a good narrative use of taking away player agency even though it is a very touchy subject... BUT reality is players dont want that to happen. even for ppl like me who liked it... a good majority of players dont want that to happen many times in an RPG. a example of a HUGE violation of players and taking away agency is the cut Baahl ending especially, but its topic were also likely a reason for its cut.

so, the dream guardian vs Daisy.. Daisy forces themself on the player hard. and while you can say things to technically deny them, fact is they still touch you inappropriately without your consent and the narrator has that issue of describing it in a way that assumes your character is enjoying it until you have an option to say something else. (they have this issue with gale's magic scene, for example imo)

on the other hand, the guardian/emperor does try to manipulate you to some extent, but not sexually in order to gain your trust. BUT when he proposes sex, it is because he has revealed himself already, and the proposition is done as a way to find your trust + most importantly it is used as a distraction from investigating further if you do just believe him. regardless of the overall writing of the emperor i do think this is a much better move of including sex with him, than being pushed into a situation with Daisy where the character is physical despite your feelings. (and story wise it was way too obvious they werent trust worthy but ya know)

alongside this topic of player agency though there is "is this necessary?" and also "is it okay that sex and physical intimacy in a negative context or forced way has come up often in this game? especially when the player lacks control?"

because actually, i think its worth thinking about. NOT if the plot or writing is good. but the writers themselves... they really pushed BG3 as being a game very open about "romances" and not shying away from sex. which is great! and i think its great they did so much of this. but the game forces sexual feelings and situations a LOT and what especially i think is the worst offender is the narrator. the narrator has been written to basically imply your character's enjoyment in multiple situations where intimacy is being offered, before you actually accept it. Again, think Gale's magic moment or Minthara's early moments in act 1.

and from a writer's position... does it need to be that way? why does it occur so often? why do so many characters thirst so openly for the player when the player often didnt push for such things? it could get to the point where the game's further relationships past friendships do just feel like they lead to sex. because i cannot think of a time where it isnt a subject to come up for romances. if youre not romancing someone in the start youll still get to hear astarion question about whether or not youll have sex at the party. and when you bundle up all this writing of sex in to the various sexual manipulation i cant help but start to feel like it is... a lot. there is a lot of sex going on here. and there are stories sometimes where having so much of that makes it feel like too much, and is not necessary.

i am a huge sex person. dont take it like im not. i love sex. i love seeing all the sex scenes. i love haarlep and i love the dream guardian and i even like the concept of the Daisy! i think its an interesting idea that just did not fit. but when is it too much? when does it start to feel inappropriate and uncomfortable? because it is almost to that extent for me when i look at the overall game. as someone who Loves Sex the way the game approached me on these things threw me off a few times, where i didnt expect it or was surprised by the narrator's implications of me.

so, thats where my brain goes with Daisy. it would not have only been inappropriate, but additionally is really hits the point of "this is way too much". to force a character onto the player who not only intends to manipulate them, but do so in the form of intimacy? its bad gameplay wise but when i see that and all the other sexual writing it starts to sour my impression of this game's writing in general. a lot of sex in video games is done for the enjoyment of the player. have good looking sex and watch it. but if you start to do that too much with it being the Bad ones-- full on proper "sex scenes" that are very much softcore porn-- i get the feeling that thats all it is about. its just about watching the sex even if its an awful scenario. but then additionally you have the Baahl scene which comes off like a shock kind of thing. a "oh god that is so fucked up and my character has been violated in a horrendous way i could not control or see coming". so now, we also had a situation where the "fucked up"-ness alongside the various uncomfortable sex scenes comes together in feeling like the writers do have more of an intent to just shock without taking all this bad stuff carefully, with additional intents being to just show sex.

we have good writing here about sex, for sure. but not all writers are working in tandem. not all writers communicate the all intentions of every scene. we got some really good writing for sex, thats completely true. but it doesnt mean there could still be issues opened up by the way it all comes together in the end like this. im not even writing this to straight up say "the writers are romanticizing manipulation and dubcon/noncon sex! there is too much sex and it means the writers only did it for the porn!"

its a rather complicated issue. trying to understand the balance and intent behind a game that does show sex as a enjoyable visual, a vessel for complex writing, but also something not always positive. still that can be shifted by the feelings that there is a point of 'too much', that the writing may control your feelings when you dont want to, and that players' feelings of being violated isnt always a good thing especially when done too much or in a way that doesnt seem necessary.

[everygame]

Lone Survivor: The Director’s Cut (PlayStation Vita)

Developed/Published by: Superflat Games Released: 24/09/2013 Completed: 28/01/2022 Completion: Saw every ending. Trophies / Achievements: 95%

Well, I got the Vita out for Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, so I might as well play something good on it–although I’m now aware that there’s a remastered version of this coming out too? Sigh.

That said. Lone Survivor is an interesting entry in the survival horror genre as a rare side-scroller and one with a heavy emphasis on actual survival with a hero that needs to eat, sleep and maintain his sanity. It is, however, all a bit obscured (all information is hidden–no status bars for you!) to join a story that is… well, let’s say here that I completed this game all five times and I still have no idea what was going on. It’s heavily influenced by David Lynch–though it never manages to ride that fine line of intrigue to be satisfying–and is probably the weakest thing about it.

It’s a bit weird, really, because the game is generally very straightforward–to be honest, it feels like layering on the hidden information and baffling story was just a way to make the game feel deeper than it is. There are some nicely designed, small maps to explore (well paced to never overwhelm the player with too many options, although the connections between 2D rooms can often be confusing) enemies are dealt with neatly (shoot them, hide from them, or blind them with flares) and the puzzles are simple (if you pick something up, there’s basically only one thing to do with it.) However, keeping your hero alive by choosing what to eat has a Yakuza-esque roleplay charm to it–it’s very rewarding when you’re finally able to make him some coffee, and heartbreaking when you realize you’re going to have to resort to eating “ground meat” to keep him going.

It’s a shame, really, that Lone Survivor layers on five endings that require you play the game with a laser focus on that aspect–everything you do affects your character’s mental health, meaning that you not only have to do things basically exactly right to get the worst/best endings, in both situations I had to grind mental health by robotically doing good/bad things for a while once you’re at the end of the game. And, as a reminder, this is to get endings that don’t really clear anything up (and have unskippable credits! Why!)

Thing is though… the game does tell you to turn off trophy pop-ups and to pretty much ignore this aspect and just play it, and you know what? I agree. I think if you play this once through and just play it the way you want to play it you’ll have a great time. There’s no reason to 100% this.

Will I ever play it again? There’s no reason to 100% this… but I’m depressingly annoyed that I didn’t because I made a choice to eat a tin of beans (as it was all I had for my hero to eat) at one point locking me out of one trophy without basically replaying the game. I shall not be doing that.

Final Thought: As annoying as decisions like unskippable credits are, I have to give props for some peerless visuals. The filter doesn’t make it feel like a retro game at all, instead something quite unique, and the limited animation is used to excellent effect. I don’t want to spoil anything, but there’s a cat in this who is just perfect and honestly the highlight of the entire thing.

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[jupitermelichios]

On a more possitive note, I’ve started watching Sword Art Online. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen (and the last film I saw in cinemas was Cats to give you context for the scale i’m working on here) and I kind of adore it in much the same way I love garbage like Smallville or Twilight. It’s so stupid on so many levels. You could challenge someone to write the worst anime, and it would almost certainly be better than SAO. It’s almost hypnotic how terrible it is.

No one should watch this terrible terrible show so I therefore don’t feel at all bad that I’m about the spoil absolutely everything, but honestly if you do also hate-watch this please come talk to me about how terrible it is. I don’t know anyone else who watches it.

Highlights of Season 1 include:

everyone is trapped in an MMO, and if you die in the MMO you die IRL. but if you were a beta-tester you’re probably fine because they just let them keep all their levels and items from the testing, so they’re all massively OP and everyone just accepts this as a normal and non-game-breaking thing

it’s a fantasy MMO but there’s no races, no magic system, no weapons except swords and maces, and not even an option to dual wield - literally all you can do in this fucking game is stand in front of an enemy and mash the attack button. I’m pretty sure they’re trapped there because the devs realised no one would play this post launch-day otherwise because it’s boring as shit

when the villain traps everyone he also just changs all their avatars to look like they do IRL for absolutely no reason, like actually none, he doesn’t even say he thinks it would be funny, he just does it and no one questions it and it is literally never mentioned again because this is the worst TV show ever animated.

in the second episode the main character deliberately witholds information about how to defeat a boss, indirectly causing multiple deaths. there is absolutely no reason for him to withhold it, he was just being a jerk because he doesn’t like people

in the third episode they reset his entire personality and he’s now a selfless hero pretending to be a lower level than he really is so people will find him more relateable and be his friend because all he wants is to help people. this is not a consequence of episode 2, they just decided they didnt like the character as he’d previously been written.

he makes some new friends who are all objectively terrible people who have decided for no season that the twelve year old who doesn’t really know how to play and keeps having anxiety attacks about the very real possibility of death has to be the guild tank. the MC is high enough level to be functionally immortal in like half the levels, but doesn’t tell anyone this he just lets them go on bullying this child

none of his friends survive that episode, in the game or IRL. which is also a christmas epsiode. a child dies in battle because she’s a terrible tank and then a man commits suicide out of guilt, so then the main character murders santa to try and bring them back from the actual dead but it doesn’t work because again, this is a video game and they are dead IRL, so then he walks off into the snow alone. Christmas!

we meet the best character in the entire show in episode 4, Rosalia, who has gone evil and started just straight murdering people because she’s sick of being an attractive adult woman who can’t get a date because she’s surrounded by lolicons who are only interested in the preteen characters (not a joke, that comes up, the show is firmly on the side of the lolicons)

in the same episode we get an extended bra and panty sequence staring an actual fucking child, like canonically this character is maybe 13 at best. this is one of only 2 occaisions when they feel the need to undress a character and it’s the fucking 12 year old, it’s so gross it reads like a parody of itself

literally every single named female character aged over 8 who talks to the MC falls in love with him after like 5 minutes (and in season 2 this includes his actual sister). he shows absolutely no interest in any of them (including his sister, thank god) until...

the main character gets engaged to a girl he only knows from an MMO after a virtual single date (he doesn’t actually win her in a PVP match but only because he looses the match, he 100% canonically tries to win her in a match, which she is apparently fine with). he then doesn’t bother to ask for her real name until the final episode, he just calls her by her screen name

(that’s okay though becuase it turns out that this moron of a love interest used her real name, on a local server, in a game where your character looks like you do IRL, because apparently getting doxxed is her hobby)

they then get in-game married off screen. there’s not even like a still of a wedding photo. nothing. the main character proposes and then the show immediately jumps to the honeymoon, it’s fucking bizarre.

they find a creepy child dressed all in white with no memory alone in the woods a week into their honeymoon who starts calling them mommy and daddy literally seconds after they first meet her, and they don’t suspect anything suss is going on and adopt her

for hilarity bear in mind the main character may only be 15 at this point (he says he’s only just turned 16 in the last epsiode, but his actual birthday is never mentioned), and his virtual wifu is 16, but no one ever questions the marriage or the adoption, even though ‘hey marriage in a video game is as important and meaningful as marriage in real life’ is an actual conversation people have multiple times. also they think the child they adopt is an actual IRL 8 year old who thinks these randos she met in an MMO are her mum and dad and everyone just goes with that like it’s a totally normal thing

a character called ‘Thinker’ agrees to meet an enemy faction leader for peace talks. the “peace talks” take place in a high level dungeon and he is told to come alone with no weapons and no fast travel. he does this. no one ever comments that his name is ironic, and in fact they seem to think that being betrayed and trapped in a dungeon with a boss is a totally unexpected turn of events Thinker could never have planned for

they take their new baby into the dungeon to rescue thinker, because they went to the jean grey school of baby rearing, and she imediately reveals that she’s actually a magical maggufin with infinite power, murders the grim reaper, and then dies. In literally the second episode she’s in

after she dies the MC hacks the admin account of the game, converts her corpse into an in game item, and saves to the local storage on his console, with the intention of bringing her back to life as a robot once they’re saved from the game. I’m not joking, that’s an actual thing that happens.

the fact that the main character can just access the main admin account and make massive game-breaking changes isn’t used again in that game and he never thinks to try and use it to force log people out or give himself infinite life so he can just rush the game and free everyone. nope, convert a corpse into an item and then never think about it again.

there’s an entire episode where all they do is go fishing. its the only filler episode in the season, and it immediately follows the death of a small child. it’s the most tone-deaf beach episode in writing history

it turns out this game, this game where they didn’t bother coding in any difference races, weapons, or any kind of magic system, was intended to have fully sentient AI therapists, because why the fuck not at this point honestly

oh also the game has PVP and you can trick the game into thinking a sleeping player is in PVP with you in order to actually murder a real person without it flagging in-game as a murder making the crime impossible for the real life legal system to investigate even though you just murdered a person. and they expect us to believe this game had actual beta testers. at least cyberpunk wasn’t played on microwaves you connected straight to your brain (also not a joke, the VR consoles canonically work by sending microwave radiation into your brain, no wonder VR never caught on)

the set up for the show is that they have to reach level 100 of a dungeon in order to win. At level 75, the writers got bored and the show just ends.

it turns out the power of love allows you to just break the fucking game and the main villain literally has a line about how ‘love allows you to remove debuffs, huh, we didn’t think to plan for that’ because again, there’s no metaphors in this show, everything is 100% literal including the fact that falling in love with another player means you’re immune to the paralysis status effect

power of love also allows you to very briefly become a poltergeist after being killed, but only for like 2 seconds. again not a joke or a metaphor, main character is killed but then gets to hang around as a ghost for a little bit to enable him to defeat the boss. he also doesn’t die in real life despite that being the entire fucking premise of the show, again because power of love.

the bad guy literally has no plan, he’s just doing shit for the sake of having something to do. His actions directly cause the deaths of more than 4,000 people, and it’s not even in aid of anything. they ask him why he trapped 10,000 people in an MMO and allowed them to slowly die, and he’s just like ‘huh, i forgot i did that, random’ and then just fucking peaces out

the fact that he committed one of the largest mass killings outside of war never really comes up again, as far as we know he doesn’t even go to jail. i think the show actually kind of thinks he’s a good guy, which is a fucking WILD moral stance to take on the deaths of 4000 completely innocent people for absolutely no reason

If this sounds hilari-bad but you don’t want to invest the time to watch a show which is objectively garbage, it has an abridged series which is famously better than the show it’s parodying (i’m dead serious, people have character arcs, the getting married after one date thing is properly addressed, the mc has to deal with PTSD because of all his friends dying in epsidode 3, they don’t immediately follow the death of a child with an extended fishing montage, the villain has an actual plan). It’s mostly actually pretty good, but this is the internet and it’s an abridged series, so while there are a lot fewer yikes moments than most it still has enough that I’m not comfortable recommending it without the caveat. that said I still enjoyed it a lot, although possibly not at much as pointing and laughing at the garbage that is the actual show.

[ka-za-ri]

Obey Me wants to do Too Much and in an attempt to please the fans, it’s failing them instead.

Based on the post @1abbie7​ made regarding the common complaints players seem to have with OM and its choices as a game. I just wanted to put my two (very long) cents in while looking at OM as if it is the gacha game it truly wishes it was.

MAJOR DISCLAIMER: this post is based on my experiences and is not a reflection of the community as a whole. These are observations and personal thoughts and should be taken with a grain of salt. Also, please feel free to discuss or correct me if I have any of the information wrong. For reference, I’ve reached 5-3 in OM!, 9-2 in AL, and 6-17 in AK.

Now that we have that out of the way… ON TO WHAT I WANT TO SAY. Buckle in folks, I’m rambly and I have a lot to say. Obey Me! Has a lot of potential, and it’s a shame that a lot of things Solmare does are not helping it grow in a way that it could.

So this post is MOSTLY going to be comparing Obey Me!’s (OM) gacha and gaming experience with Azur Lane (AL)  and Arknights (AK) since I feel like both those games have a very good f2p model and don’t really have any PvP/Ranking system that affects the main gameplay. I will have other examples from other games that I’ve played before as well.

Ignoring any issues with storytelling and plot holes, since I feel like there are people who are much more qualified to speak upon that than I am, I’m just going to look at the more game and gacha experience.

EVENT SPACING, GAMEPLAY, STAMINA REFRESHES:

OM! As far as I know, is marketed as an Otome game with gacha and … Rhythm??? Game??? Elements? (I’m not quite sure how to even describe the ‘battle’ stages tbh) to break up the story stages. With the battle stages being the main way you can farm for materials to power up your cards, the bottlenecks that are built into the game are surprisingly super frustrating.

OM! Does not have an auto battle option, but it does make up for it by allowing you to sweep the stage once you’ve received 3 stars. This does make resource farming much quicker, but this also means that your stamina will disappear faster than ice in a desert. Coupled with the fact that the battle stages don’t really have much interaction or strategy for a good portion of the beginning of the game, there’s no real replay value in trying for older stages unless they have the resource you want to farm.

I guess I can let this pass since interaction isn’t what’s really marketed, but it IS important to keep your audience logging in and eager to play. At Level 40-ish, my current stamina cap is around 70. WIth the average stamina cost of a regular stage being 5 AP, and the hard stages being 8. This means you’ve got 14 normal stages and less than 10 hard stages in a full bar of stamina. Assuming I log in twice a day to get the bonus AP, that’s really not a lot of stamina to work with and just enough to maybe get through my dailies. 

Having that little stamina makes farming resources exceptionally difficult especially for the high requirements needed once you get about half-way through a devil tree. Add that to dealing with farming event points almost constantly, with your limited stamina pool, you’re pretty much forced to purchase extra stamina to meet the requirements to finish said events to get the rewards. Assuming you spend all of your daily Devil Point reward on Stamina, that’s only 180 stamina a day which makes for a really tight run IF you’re aiming to get everything in an event. 

ADDITIONALLY, this is also the fact that events and new lessons don’t seem to be announced prior to them dropping. Almost every gacha  game I’ve played before will give you a few days notice before an event drops whether it be via Social media or through in-game mail. This is to mainly generate excitement and allows players some time to prepare, whether it be hoarding what stamina refreshes they have or saving premium currency for gachas to hopefully get the chase card/unit that they’re looking for. Not being able to prepare makes it difficult to stay engaged considering you CONSTANTLY have to have resources/stamina to partake in all the events and you can’t plan accordingly.

AK announcing the current event two days prior to it starting in game and on twitter:

AL’s announcement on the 12th, almost a week prior to it starting. Maintenance was on the 17th when the game reset.. (In game notices update regularly and I don’t have a screenshot of what it would look like since maintenance has already passed.)

OM! basically giving people on twitter about 24 hours notice of a new event dropping followed by announcing that the new lessons are available on the day it drops:

I understand that OM! Devs may want to keep the new cards a surprise to players. If stats and skills played a more prominent role in the game, maybe there would be a better way to tease these events to build up hype. As of right now though, it feels like a surprise slap in the face to force players to purchase currency in order to maintain that stamina requirement. IF Solmare is adamant about having back-to-back events, at least provide players with a roadmap or a calendar so they can pick and choose what’s important to them.

Just… Don’t let it become like the FEH calendar…

Please, do not let it become like this.

In my opinion, it feels like OM! Has a bit of an identity crisis. It sorely wants to bank on the money making powers of a gacha game while also clinging to the claim that they’re an otome game revolving around the plot. It’s hard to really promote the plot when it’s locked behind a power requirement that a majority of players will not be able to reach.

With how difficult it is at the end game, players are most likely going to look for transcripts or screenshots of new lessons instead of playing the main storyline in order to save what little they have for the constant limited events. Either give the players time to recoup resources to prepare for your events so they can pull for all your new cards or lower the difficulty cap to give players the story you’re emphasizing so much. 

Tl;dr: back-to-back events will burn out players and not announcing them prior does not allow players to prepare resources, forcing them to drop money on the game. The amount of stamina it takes to complete an event AND level your cards does not make it f2p friendly.

GACHA RATES AND PITY SYSTEM:

Call me spoiled, but I feel like OM! ‘S banner rates are too low. Consider the following image for the current banner pool:

That’s a combined 1% to get your UR and that’s still not going to be guaranteed to get what you want. Consider the following rates from other games:

Azur Lane:

(Ultra Rare was a new rarity that was added with this new banner. Before that the highest rarity you could pull is a Super Rare)

Arknights: 

Fire Emblem Heroes: 

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: War of the Visions

For a game that’s always introducing new cards, you’d think that OM! Would maybe consider raising those rates so people won’t be so heartbroken when they don’t have enough currency for a 10 pull. (Especially if they have been spending what Devil Points they have on stamina to complete event stages) Yes, a majority of banners have bigger pools and  the chance for a specific 6*/UR/SSR is ultimately lower; but considering in OM!, you have stories and characterization locked behind devilgrams connected to these cards, the rates are pitifully low. At least in the other games listed, the units/cards/operators/ships aren’t tied to stories. 

I will say, the pity system isn’t absolutely abysmal. Keep in mind though, this is based on the assumption that you’ve saved up for 100 pulls. Considering how difficult it is to save that much currency while being f2p 100 pulls per banner is a tall order and impossible without the help of goldie or somethin. The frequency of new cards along with the difficulty obtaining gacha currency creates an extremely predatory model of currency purchase. With no guarantee of when event banners will be rerun, you’re pretty SOL if you make it half way through this pity system and you’re sitting on shards you can’t use. 

Players will get tired of this model mega fast. Especially with these kinds of rates. Assuming that your luck is the worst on earth, you need 2,700 Devil Points to reach the pity breaker. That’s more than two packs worth of Devil Points. So we’re looking at over $160.00 USD to get a guaranteed UR. Seeing as new banners come what feels like every two weeks or so, you’re looking at over $300.00 USD a month JUST for the gacha. If OM! Was purely a gacha game without such a heavy emphasis on the characters and the stories/scenarios they unlock, I might be able to overlook it. However, since the cards themselves unlock cheats for events and outfits and devilgram scenarios, that’s a steep price to pay, so I kinda just have to say… Yikes.

Tl;Dr: For a game that has so much content tied to limited cards and events, gacha rates for OM! Feel too low. Pity system is average as long as you have the currency to complete all 100 pulls. The reason to purchase premium currency is predatory and likely will not be sustainable in the long run. 

MONTHLY PACKS AND PREMIUM CURRENCY

So, we can agree that if you don’t have some cash on hand, it’s not going to be a real fun time to play OM! So, where do you spend your money? Let’s take a look at what they offer in terms of premium currency and how far that will get you. It’s also almost 3AM here and I’m losing my patience and filter, so excuse me if I sound more angry here than in the rest of the post.

So, here’s the basic Devil Point Shop for reference: 

If we equate Devil Points to stamina, you’re looking at about 100 stamina per dollar you spend. But let’s be real, Solmare makes their money off of gacha and them pretty pngs ‘cause y’all want those spicy devilgrams and sweet outfits for your secretary.

To even get a 10 pull, you’re looking at $22.00 USD worth of premium currency. (Why they didn’t make the $19.99 pack a full 10 pull is BEYOND me tbh.) Now most gacha players that I know who are willing to go all in on a specific banner will want to spend a pack, which means they’ll go for the most expensive option as it is the most bang for your buck. That’s an $80.00 pack for approximately 4 10 pulls and some change. Let’s compare that to the price of some Originite Prime from AK: 

It takes approximately 33 OP for one 10 pull in AK. 1 OP = 180 Orundum (currency used for gacha) Keeping this in mind,  if you don’t count the first time purchase bonus, at first glance, it’s overall more expensive to purchase this currency SOLELY for gacha purposes.

Here are the packs offered for AL: 

If you’re using gems to purchase the cubes needed for the gacha, it takes about 600 gems for 1 10 pull. One pack will net you about 8 10 pulls. Out of all the models we’ve looked at, this is honestly the most value for your dollar specifically for gacha purposes.

Take into consideration what the premium currency is used for. As stated above, 1 DP = 10 stamina. 1 OP = 1 Full stamina refresh in AK, so that’s a pretty equivalent exchange rate. (I won’t go into the AL stamina and gacha system since it differs too much from OM! To really make a good comparison.)

But, what else can DP do? A quick glance under the “Items” tab in the shop, you’ll see that it can also purchase Keys to read your devilgram stories (integral to your gaming experience), Demon Vouchers for summoning, Glow Sticks to help you in battle (Integral to gameplay), and consumables for your Surprise Guests to raise intimacy (arguably connected to gameplay). Compare this to what you can purchase with your OP outside of summoning currency in AK: Furniture (cosmetic) and Skins (Cosmetic). That’s it. 

What I’m trying to say here is that Solmare has made DP the currency for so many things that affect the game itself. This subtly pressures the players to purchase DP in order to maintain the same quality of life that they might have experienced at the beginning of their gaming experience when the level ups came fast and when the rewards were plentiful for completing all the beginners quests.

“But wait!” you say. There’s ways to earn DP passively through dailies! You’re right! You’re given 18 DP per day for completing your dailies. That equates to 1 10 pull per 2 weeks if you’re diligent in keeping up with all your quests and log in daily. Comparatively, AK will give you 2,800 orundum per week for completing all your quests and the weekly annihilation runs, so just short of 1 full 10 pull in the game. However, AK gives you the specific currency used exclusively for gacha. This leaves your OP relatively free to be used for stamina refreshes, or you can hoard them for when new skins come out, or you can use a few to supplement your missing orundum for a banner pull.

Without knowing what could be coming up next in terms of events and banners, OM! Makes it very difficult for you to hold onto your DP due to the sheer stamina sink that events can be. Unless you’re really good at optimizing your resources, you’re likely going to be spending DP on things outside of gacha, making it difficult to save those 20 pulls in a month.

Tl:dr: DP is used for too many things that aid in gameplay which leaves less for gacha, forcing players to make a choice between moving forward in harder story stages or unlocking card specific stories.

Alright, but let’s say you don’t have enough for packs, but you still want to support a game. You don’t wanna whale ‘cause you got bills to pay, but maybe you’ve got enough to be a minnow or a very sad and small dolphin. For this, most people turn to those delicious monthly packs. Usually, the monthly packs or subscriptions are really a good bang for your buck. Usually, the bonuses that these packs provide will add up to a value that is much more than your initial investment in them. So, let’s look at what OM!, AK and AL offer, shall we? 

Let’s break down what the VIP gives you since there’s quite a bit and it’s presented in a less condensed format. So, at first glance, I have to ask… “VIP login bonus?” What does that even mean? When you look at the details the description is as follows:

I’m sorry, what? This vagueness will not help sell this pack to me. Most monthly packs will give you premium currency right away that is equivalent to the amount that you paid. You can see that both AK and AL list this and also let you know exactly what else you get for the next 30 days. There’s no vagueness in what these packs provide. 

Next thing to look at:

I’m sorry. What? I don’t understand why a max AP increase is the choice for a VIP perk here. This is banking on the fact that you’re going to be playing at max efficiency and will be under max stamina in order to take advantage of the refill timer giving you the extra AP. Why OM! Doesn’t just give you the stamina in your mail is beyond my comprehension. This is just saying “yeah, you could have more stamina if you’re playing this game and making sure you’re below your cap. I … no. Just why.

NEXT PERK: 

No. This is useless for higher level players. Perks should benefit all players, not just your new players that you’ve tricked into spending money ‘cause this pack is only $9.99 a month. I’m so angry at this I don’t want to look at this anymore. NEXT.

This is a fine perk. Paying for easier passive resources is fine. I don’t have anything to say.. Next.

Oh thank fuck. An actual good perk. Passively getting the harder to get resources which cuts down on your already limited farming? Hell yeah.  Also fine in my book. NEXT. 

“Spend money to spend more money! Because we know this monthly deal ain’t shit!” is all I’m getting out of this.

Finally, I need to talk about this: 

So… you’re telling me that for $10.00, I’m going to get $6.00 worth of DP and I won’t get the full value unless I STAY subscribed? If I cancel and then resubscribe, will that go back to 60 DP when I subscribe later? Why would you do this other than to give your players less than what they deserve? These packs are supposed to be designed to give you the value of your purchase and some extras as incentive to keep playing and coming back to pay. This just… as a first impression leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.

Also, let’s talk about the fact that you’re BILLED MONTHLY? Listen, I get that they’re trying to be ‘convenient’ so you can set this up and forget about it and reap the benefits, right? It’s about the same cost as a Netflix subscription, no big deal. But listen, that means they’re also banking on you to forget you even have this subscription if you’re a casual player and you’re going to continue to give them money Stop that Solmare. Bad.

I’m too tired to look at sales. Just as a quick glance. the discounts and deal are meh at best.

Tl:dr: Monthly pack is underwhelming and likely not worth it. Automatically being billed monthly is the worst thing I’ve seen all week and this was written in 2020. 

SOME SUGGESTIONS? IT’S NOT ALL BAD, I PROMISE.

So, how can Solmare improve? OM! Is honestly one of the most stylish otome games I’ve seen and has a lot of potential to continue growing its player base if the devs directed their energies in the right direction. Right now, OM! Suffers due to the fact that it’s trying to do too much in too little time. For a game that’s less than a year old, it’s pushed out enough content in the last three months to last six. Dialing back the gacha and collecting elements to focus on the story and a slower pace would really help, if you ask me. 

OM! Really needs to slow its roll. Events are losing their impact from being rolled out at such a quick pace on top of current pop quizzes, new lessons and banners. Every week I feel like I’m watching the more hardcore players yell at having too much to do when everything is layered on top of one another. This is not inherently a bad thing. Having a lot to do keeps the player base engaged and excited for your game.

The problem arises when you’re not giving your players any time to recover from events and just throw things at them all the time. Finding a good balance between events and downtime is difficult and it likely won’t happen overnight, but it would be nice to see them maybe give a week or two to really let the impact of events sink in and let players really find time to nurture or use the new cards/rewards they just got.

First step in the right direction would be giving more notice prior to events and lessons. Just something more than 24 hours before, or the day of. Not providing a notice makes it feel like these things are being rushed. 

If Solmare is adamant about keeping the pace it’s set up, then give us a roadmap or event calendar of when new lessons or pop quizzes are coming. They can keep the details of the lessons and quizzes limited until closer to the actual dates, but at least this will let players prioritize where they want to put their resources.

Gacha rates for URs being raised to 2% would likely make a reasonable difference. When so much story and cosmetic content is tied to a UR or SSR cards along with their frequency, it serves to likely benefit them to make it more accessible to players. Locking so much behind luck and a paywall makes it more obvious that they only care about the money that they can get from the diehard collectors in the game.

Make skins obtainable by DP. Stop locking them behind event cards. Allow players to have easier access to cosmetic features. It’s a less predatory model than what they’ve got right now. Granted, Lonely Devil has sort of helped this issue considering they’ve grouped event reruns all in one place to play at your leisure, and if I remember some of the event cards have skins tied to them. Still, just… idk sell the skin on its own. It makes more sense than to pray that you roll that UR with the one 10 pull you have. 

Make resources easier to obtain passively. I’m sure I sound like a broken record, but limited resources make this game difficult to enjoy. You’re barely through doing one thing to level up a card and you’re met with a giant wall of requirements for the next step. AL has commissions and the dorm, AK has the base. OM! Has Jobs, which gets you grimm and some items if you’re lucky, but it definitely needs expansion considering the power checkpoints late game.

Hell, just making some of those DP purchasable items actually farmable might help.

Get a publisher to work with you. I know Solmare has been around the block and this isn’t the first otome game they’ve made, but I definitely think working with a publisher who’s familiar with the ins and outs of a proper gacha helping them will benefit them. Having a publisher will help ensure that there’s adequate funding for the game to be as good as it can be. Not only that, you’re looking at a better social media presence which the player base can interact with and get more attached to.

 Literally, having a publisher could solve so many pacing and announcement issues since they would be in charge of when events come out and likely has a better eye on how players react. This way, Solmare can concentrate on making the content as quality as they can and not inundate people with a new lesson or event as soon as it’s done.

Tl:dr: Solmare, please get a proper publisher so they can help with quality control and balancing your game. Please. I’m begging you. You have so much going for you please don’t let this game die before it turns a year old.

Ok. it’s 4 AM and I spent most of the day writing this post. If you’ve made it this far, congrats and I’m sorry for being so rambly. I’m so sorry if none of this made any sense in the end.  I’m sure there are points that I’ve missed out on like stage replayability and a more engaging battle mode, and the lack of any sort of meta which makes the lower rarity cards you pull feel completely useless…  but uh… I can’t think anymore and I haven’t had time to farm in my horny ship girl game. Feel free to let me know your thoughts or discuss! 

Thanks for your time and I hope y’all have a good day. Happy romancing some demon boys!

[obeymeprompts]

Otome Game reviews? SEE HERE!

So, I’ve been away due to a heavy writer’s block + nearly no Obey Me content after finishing the whole game AGAIN and exploring new otome content, both PC and mobile. Not only that but I’m having mentorship with an artist I’ve loved for a long time now and painting B&W statues is taking a looooong time and draining me out, hhh!

I want to let you know once again I read all of your lovely inbox and I will respond everything when I feel like I’m not lacking quality! ;;;

For now, I’ll be writing a long ass post on reviewing the stuff I’ve done in the meantime. I mean, why not? Just please, take everything I say here with a grain of salt and know my opinions are not absolute.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* IKEMEN REVOLUTION (mobile) *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ✧

✧ PROS:

story doesn’t feels 100% romance driven. Like do you ever play an otome game and it feels like the characters have no other reason to exist other than being fanservice/routes? YEAH Ikerev doesnt felt like that for me at least,,,

like they legit had their own issues and problems other than fighting for the heroine and making sure everything surrounded MC,,,,

plus ghuh i love dudes in uniforms... and as far as the ikemen series go, this is the one i chose to play because the character design looked the best for me and less same dude different trope

if you know the massive friend add x greet trick you can pass through love challenges pretty easily. no premium choices too.

characters are literally so captivating and not only appearance-wise.

✧ CONS

i’m still to figure out how the destiny duels(like the miss rose challenges in BiR) work???

if you want to complete a route without spending money, you’ll have to play everyday for at least 30 days. you get 5 tickets everyday and you spend 5 tickets for each chapter. on top of that, you’ll also need some affection tests and stuff like that.

gacha is pretty expensive and depends a lot on your daily login thingy. 

maybe obey me has spoiled me as an otome player really but there is a point in which there is just plain nothing you can do other than wait more time to grind for destiny duel affection points, then 24h chapter tickets again.

✧ Gender options? No, female only. It will depict MC as female and treat it with female pronouns.

✧ CGs? Yes, though I’ve only got only one through free mode so far(chapter 18?).

✧ Voice acting? Yes, but sparsely.

✧･ﾟ: *✧･ﾟ:* BLOOD IN ROSES (mobile) *:･ﾟ✧*:･ﾟ

✧ PROS

If you want, you can f2p. Literally just add 50 people and use the mass greet button, you’ll get 1000 tokens everyday, plus whenever they’re having any launch event there are bunches of story tickets for free.

Like literally I’m in my 4th route now and I’ve only used offer coins. I’ve spent a HUGE time stuck in Gerard’s avatar checkpoint trying to grind tokens via Miss Rose Contest.

It has two WLW routes, one added recently.

Two heroine options -- witch and hunter.

✧ CONS

Fandom is basically dead from what I keep trying to grasp??? Not without reason, because recently NTTS kept giving people limited time story tickets and all,,,,

UHHH not trying to badmouth anyone but depending on where you go for the fandom, you’ll find a good bunch of people being specially mean towards the female routes and saying it’s just “not their taste to have lesbian routes”,,,,,,,,,, like not trying to say it was what pushed me out of some FB groups,,,,,,,,,,

I find it very weird that they mix old sprites with new ones, so I kind of cringe when I see a perfectly soft shaded Caelus sided with Cedric but??? Okay?

EDIT: literally a few hours after i posted this, the game ended. The team released a note saying they will no longer be launching new characters or events so yeah sad.

✧ Gender options? Nope. Female only. It will depict MC as female and treat it with female pronouns.

✧ CGs? It you play 100% free mode, you’ll get two CGs, one in the beggining and one in the ending, if I’m not mistaken(at least it was like this when I played Matilda). Plus, there are multiple endings.

✧ Voice acting? No.

Let me know if you want me to continue reviewing stuff. I still have to comment on Men of Yoshiwara, Ikesen, possibly even the old school Solmare stuff and that daddy dating stuff??? Ughhh so little time,,,,,

[moonscribe]

Dungeon Blogging #1: Warlock Necromancers

Once upon a time a friend of mine asked me for advice on how to build a warlock necromancer in 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons. My response was to send them a long string of texts that was my breakdown on the matter. For this new blog series I thought I’d start out with that. So here is my take on building a necromancer as a warlock in 5e.

So necromancers in D&D run into the same problem as animal companions and summoned creatures: action economy. One of the most powerful things that you can do in a turn based game is get more of it, that’s why Extra Attack is such a big deal for combat classes. When you have one or more zombies doing your bidding you’re getting more things that you can do in a turn which is something that Wizards of the Coast is hesitant about giving to low level characters. Because of this, most of the low level “necromancy school” spells (Toll the Dead, Cause Fear) have nothing to do with making undead and your first real necromancy spell Danse Macabre doesn’t show up until level 9.

When a player has a character concept they generally want to play that concept right away. Waiting however many months or years it takes for their character to reach level 9 is not what most players are looking for when they say they wanna be a necromancer. This is why so many campaigns start out with a party of level 3 characters. By level 3 the druids can wildshape, the monks have ki, and every class has chosen their subclass, which is where your character really comes to life.

So assuming you don’t want to wait until you have 5th level spell slots for your character to feel right, there are two things that you need to do: be on good terms with your Dungeon Master (always important) and take advantage of the freedom to reskin and reflavor abilities. The spell Find Familiar is extremely good as it provides a ton of utility and flavor. Every game I’ve played with a character that took this spell has gotten crazy use out of it, it’s hands down one of the most useful 1st level spells in the book. Whatever animal you summon with the spell has either the celestial, fey, or fiend monster type. That’s the rules as written. That said the Player’s Handbook is ultimately a book of suggestions for the DM to use to make their group have a fun experience and in the spirit of such I’d say 95% of them are going to be willing to let you choose undead as your familiar’s type (this may not work in Adventurer’s League). Now imagine your warlock, conspiring with dark forces their familiar perched atop their shoulder, perhaps it’s a zombie weasel or a skeleton crow! There is so much exciting stuff aesthetically to go from here and help flesh out the image of the character you want to play. Now technically Find Familiar is not on the warlock spell list but there are some ways around this without multiclassing to take a level in wizard (though that is an option too).

The first two options are feats so if you’re playing a human you can take these at level 1: Magic Initiate and Ritual Caster. Magic Initiate gives you two cantrips and one 1st level spell that you can cast once per day, they all have to be the same class so your cantrips would be from the wizard spell list giving you good utility options like Message and Mending as well as the necromancy attack options of Toll the Dead and Chill Touch. If you take the Ritual Caster feat then you get to cast wizard spells but only as rituals and you only learn them from scrolls, spellbooks, and the like. The spells you get from these feats will always be cast with your intelligence rather than your Charisma so be wary of that.

The other two options are a little better in my opinion but don’t come until level 3:  Pact of the Chain and Pact of the Tome. Pact of the Tome gives you 3 additional cantrips from any class and access to the Book of Ancient Secrets eldritch invocation which functions like the Ritual Caster feat but better since you get access to rituals from any class and still use your charisma. Pact of the Chain is my favorite giving you the ability to cast the Find Familiar ritual as well as access to four, much more powerful familiars: imp, pseudodragon, quasit, and sprite. Imps and quasits are CR1, which is to say a balanced challenge for a party of four level 1 adventurers! Furthermore, they along with the pseudodragon have magic resistance as well as the ability to share their magic resistance with their summoner! Finally, unlike a normal familiar, Pact of the Chain familiars can attack (at the cost of the warlock’s own attack). Now I know you edgy nerds who got this far reading a blog post about how to make a necromancer warlock are going to be at least interested in the idea of summoning a zombie pseudodragon. Its tattered leathery wings and empty eye sockets burning with the cold blue flames of undeath serving as a reminder to everyone you encounter that your totally Chaotic Good and not going to sick your pet the next NPC to draw your ire.

Okay that was a lot more about the Find Familiar spell than I expected to write so I’ll keep the next bit brief.

As I mentioned Danse Macabre (5th level) is your first real necromancy spell. It lets you quickly animate several corpses for combat but its a concentration spell with an hour long duration, after that time the undead return to being normal dead bodies. Wizards, Spore Druids, and Death Clerics all get the 3rd level spell Animate Dead but that’s them and we aren’t so spoiled. At level 11 we get Create Undead which lets us make the more elite undead: ghouls, and later ghasts, wights, and mummies.

At level 9 I’d take the Eldritch Invocation Whispers of the Grave which lets you cast Speak With Dead as many times as you want without spending a spell slot.

Finally when it comes to subclasses there are two patrons who will reward you well for your service.

The first is The Undying from the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. This patron is usually a lich on an evil god and it basically sets you up as a lich in training. You get some self healing powers, the undead have trouble attacking you, and at level 10 you don’t require food, water, or sleep (though you still need long rests) and you age at a rate of 1 year for every 10 which is even crazier if you play an elf.

The other patron to look at is The Hexblade. The Critical Role fans reading this (which is to say probably more than half of you) will recognize this as Fjord’s patron. The Hexblade is the most thematically versatile of all of the warlock patrons, the book is vague about what your patron actually is beyond “a mysterious entity from the Shadowfell- a force that manifests in sentient magic weapons carved from the stuff of shadow” so who or what your patron actually is is up to you and your DM. Mechanically the reason that we care is the 6th level class feature Accursed Specter which lets you bind the soul of someone you just killed, raising it as a specter. The Specter gets temporary hit points equal to half your warlock level and a bonus to it’s attacks equal to your charisma modifier so it’s slightly stronger than a normal specter. In addition, it sticks around until you take a long rest at which point it passes on to the afterlife. You can only do this once per long rest so don’t expect to collect a bunch of souls and see how long you can sleep deprive your character.

Although 5th edition is relatively simple, there are a lot of potential combinations to create lots of types of characters. If there was anything I missed be sure to let me know!

If you have a question or idea for a future Dungeon Blogging post be sure to send me an ask! ^^ 

Edit: I was asked to cite the art used in this post, I don’t know where the bird art was from so I replaced it. I apologize.

Art: Willian Murai, Tianhua X, (I couldn’t find the name of the artist for the last piece but it’s from page 153 of Xanathar’s Guide to Everything).

[brothermouzongaming]

Borderlands 3 review

Level 50 Zane, 15 Amara. Minor spoilers ahead World/Maps -The worlds you travel to are impressively large even though they're broken up into smaller sections; the term "smaller" is used very loosely. I may be wrong but these are by far the most areas and largest in the franchise and its kind of impressive. My favorite level is the Lectra City section of Promethea. It's both organized and maze-like where a gunfight can break out literally around every corner. All the sections are noticeably big and feel unique to the planet or area they represent with that "if it's on the map there's probably something there" design that not enough games take advantage of. -The color pallet is miles better than any previous game in the series. This game can be pretty but its even prettier when everything is blowing up and shit catching fire, particle effects are trying to fuck your eyeballs. The previous games were kind of bland color-wise, the pre-sequel did try and venture out more but this is way above that in my eyes. Gameplay/Guns/L00t

-The combat is sublime. I have heard people complain that doesn't feel much different but I think they are wrong and need to go back and play the less enthralling, less involved combat of the previous games. You didn't have many options in the first games when firefights broke out and it was dated but distinctly Borderlands. Now that the slide and mantle have been implemented (it's about time really), combat is faster and players can take advantage of high points and hit cover faster. The slide even has combat implications once you get to the later parts of the story. It's all very well worked and thought out as opposed to being just thrown in because it's what shooters do now. -The guns and gunplay are on par with Destiny, they may even be a little better when you consider how deep the loot is and how the stats visibly and tactically affect the guns they’re applied to. You get one Duke in D2 and you've pretty much got them all. Here you can get the same gun to drop and actually see and feel the difference between the stats it rolled with. The distinct differences in the manufacturers have really been leaned into as well. They reworked some of the distinct hallmarks of the makers and improved them to help ramp up the combat. This is minor but I really like how manufacturers will mail you guns the more you use theirs. -Vehicle controls are muddy as hell and will take a second to get used to. It’s definitely not the best possible setting even after messing with controls for a few minutes. The default kind of forces you to shoot where you’re looking unless you’re standing still, you may want a little more flexibility in your controls which is available. That said, the models and their functionality are varied and cool but I’m honestly surprised they haven’t perfected controls yet. Story/Writing

-The story is decent, wildly better than the actual writing and dialogue itself (which doesn't say that much) but once you get to the end there are some connection's made that are interesting and well thought out. Now that I've gotten the "good" out of the way. What the fuck is up with all the cutscenes not having our character in them. All events in cutscenes play out like our guy or girl isn't in the room and can't affect the events that play out in them. There will be so many times where you yell at the screen as to why your character is never seen/not doing anything in pivotal situations that could use a Vault Hunter. LIKE THE ONE THAT SHOULD BE STANDING RIGHT THERE. -Troy (male villain) literally says "You were like, 'My powers boo hoo'!!" which is a Handsome Jack reference. It would be nice and nostalgic if it wasn't the very first thing that comes out of his mouth when the Twins intercept you at the Dry Dock. Instead, it just seems beyond lazy and proves just how lacking in identity they both are. Tyrene is arguably worse, she just says things and then follows it with "I don't believe that," or " That's just something people say". That could show how little she cares and that would be fine if it wasn't the only thing about her that stood out. They almost do something interesting later in the story where Troy takes center stage but that lasts literally a boss fight. Both of them are just, underwhelming in almost every single way. All seldom the connection they have and how Troy is capable of being a Siren and Tyrene's seemingly completely unique and powerful abilities. Co-op, Optimization, and Performance

- Co-op will go from fluid and fantastic to laggy and rubber banding at the drop of a mag and it's as frustrating as it is thrilling as hell. It's strange what situations will slow things down and what runs smooth as hell. We had four people on one internet connection and everything ran really well. One day my friend and I tried with just us on Promethea and the session was so fucked I actually couldn't see or fire my guns at one point and I had to back out and come back to get them functioning again. There are definitely more patches coming but for a game boasting online co-op, it should be better. I will say though, level balancing is amazing and can even be quite useful if you want guns to drop at level no matter where you are in the game. People have been complaining about the UI and I totally understand, I don't mind the design, what I do mind is how obnoxious the input lag is. Oh and the weird glitch where as you scroll your inventory, the pictures of the items toward the bottom copy to rows above them. It's easy to fix in-game but...why is it even a thing? How have they not fixed that glitch where your FFYL timer just drops off despite still having time on the meter. It's happened since borderlands 1 maybe there's a certain amount of damage you can take before the timer doesn't matter anymore? I genuinely don't understand it and on boss fights, it's infuriating to lose money when you could've gotten a kill for your second wind. Misc. -Of course, the first patch they put out isn't to fix the performance issues but to kill the Loot Tink farm on at the Jakob estates. A farm you can still do offline fyi ;) A billion guns and you mad people getting a slightly higher chance at getting the guns they’re just gonna get anyway. WHY -The trinkets are cute but useless, why not put a minor stat buff on them to actually give them reason? They're so small they almost don't exist to me. -Also, that end credits song is absolutely terribly chosen. The end sequence, in general, is just strange and seemed a little forced. Not how they presented it but what exactly they showed because as perplexing as it was to see what I did, I was just more upset I didn't get the development of those scenarios to see how we reached the outcome. I'm trying not to spoil things but it's difficult so I'll just be quiet. I'm not even sure of what I saw but I do know what it looked like. I just wish there was more background given since our character gets literally none. -REALLY weird cameos. Like, really strange. tl;dr BL3 is an 8.5 for me which flys in the face of my many criticisms but I can't deny how fantastic the gameplay is on top of the absolute wealth of content delivered, all without the modern monetization bullshit. The story is meh, writing meh, but god damn if it isn't rewarding in its gameplay. IF you like BL as a whole there's no reason not to play unless you're waiting for the Steam release. An Endgame post is in the works.

[dlamp-dictator]

Three Houses Quick Thoughts

Just finished the Black Eagle’s route today and wanted to give my quick thoughts before I finally start drafting that Rambling. Mostly to get some of my thoughts together somewhere accessible so I have something to reference back to when I actually start drafting the danged thing. Don’t worry, I’m not going to spoil anything here... no story spoilers anyway.

Anyway...

The Bad

I was hesitant to say this at first, but now that I finished this game I can confirm that I hate Byleth as a character. They're honestly worse than Corrin to me due to their lack of personality and agency in their own story. The mystery surround their birth and general existence just muddies the whole plot when it tries to make them out as important when I, the player, barely know anything about my own damn character aside from being the father of a great mercenary. I didn’t like their designs either, but I wasn’t a fan of Corrin’s or Robin’s so... I guess their consistent in making player character designs I dislike/am apathetic for.

While I think the system for class advancement is good in the early and mid game, it fell a little flat as I got to the late game. Class mastery really needs to happen a bit faster, at least to a point that I don’t have to actively grind for mastery points. I pity those trying to optimize on hard mode when you don’t have endless auxiliary battles.

On that note, as of 2019 gender-locked classes are dumb and the one good thing Fates did was remove it. Why bright it back? Why deny me War Master/Punch Queen Edelgard? Why deny me a Dark Mage Lysithea? It just makes no sense to me.

Why is there no Dread Fighter class so Petra doesn’t die from a mage glaring her?

Why is there no Kishin Knight class so Bernie be more useful with a bow as a flying archer and have Amaterasu?

Why is there no Malig Knight class so Hubert can ride dragons with his waifu?

Why is Edelgard’s unique class an armored unit with 5 movement when the maps basically require two flying unique to be playable?

Oh yeah, these maps really remind of Echoes given how useless and slow the armor classes are without someone to warp them. These maps really want you to maneuver around them and can get very large. I feel like I’m playing Echoes again for the wrong reasons.

The Good

The soundtrack is great.  For all my complaints (and believe me, that’s just the tip of the iceberg), I do love this game’s music. Especially some of these battle tracks. The Edge of Dawn is probably one of my new favorite songs now.

While I didn’t like the class system in the late, the early and mid game is where it shines and I had the most fun testing things out and experimenting. As a casual player, it was fun to mix and match class and see what worked.

The supports were all done very well, some of my favorites came being Edelgard, Caspar, and Hubert. They really fleshed out all of these characters and I’m looking forward to a second playthough and seeing how all the rest are going to play out, especially when I’ll start actively recruiting now.

Speaking of, I like that recruiting classes has a real effect in the time skip, as it keeps those characters in your house after things go down and... well,  as I said, I won’t spoil things, but just know it really makes you think about what it means for some of your newer members stay on board despite what happens and it does wonders for storytelling.

While I had my hesitations about weapon durability being back it worked out for the better. It keeps the some of the strategy fresh and makes really decide between a strong yet fragile weapon versus a weak but reliable weapon that can take 20+ more swings, especially with the special relic weapons. Though weapons breaking in a story mission sucks.

The voice-acting was great, much like in Echoes. Nothing much else to say save for the fact that there’s more of it and it’s all great.

As conflicted as I feel about the Black Eagles storyline, I like the overall theme individuality, standing up for your own beliefs on your own two feet, and making a name for yourself with your own effort. The execution... well, again, not going to post spoilers, but I’ll just say the journey was more exciting than the destination. 

Again, my conflicting feelings on the story aside, I do like Edelgard as a character. I can really understand why she did the things she did in the time skip, especially after some of her later supports with certain characters. It makes me really wish the story itself was written to focus more the House heads than Byleth.

The fact that all the characters canonically have last names is a nice touch too.

Byleth aside, I did like a lot of the character designs, especially after the timeskip.

The ability to dismount is outright broken and I love it. My Pegasus Knights can look an archer in the eye and laugh at them before getting off their mount and stabbing them to death and climbing back on their flying horse.

Canto is also outright broken and I love it for similar reasons. 

General Advice

Because I feel like being nice and I wanted to just give some pointers after finish a playthrough.

According to people far better at this game than me, Master Classes are honestly optional unless you plan on being a flying class. A lot of the growths and abilities aren’t really worth it unless you’re specifically grinding for them and at least on the Black Eagle route, horse mounts can be more of a hindrance than a help with the maps of the last few chapters. I couldn’t tell you how many times I had to dismount half my army just to get a few extra movement spaces.

That said, War Master, Wyvern Lord, and Falcon Knight are generally seen as good classes overall.

Like I said, at least on the Black Eagle route, mobility is probably the best asset you can have, especially for flying units. Combining flying units, Stride, and Warp can outright break some of these maps in the right situation. You can clear a map in one or two turns if you play your cards right.

Again, coming from people far better at this game than me, don’t prioritize recruiting other students, especially on your first playthrough. Your original group is honestly all you need and I believe you can get the teachers after a certain point for free if you need some extra magic on your team.

That said, general consensus from people far better at this game that I am is that Felix, Ingrid, Bernadetta, Ferdinand, Leonie, Lysithea, and Raphael are good targets to go for. Though given my Black Eagle route I’ll say that a War Master Caspar and Dancer Dorothea are nothing to sneeze at.

Use Divine Pulse, it’s there for a reason.

And that’s it for my quick thoughts. Rambling for this will be come... eh, later this week.

[miximax-hell]

I always tell my friends that they’re capable of anything they put their mind into. But, personally, I should know my limits and act accordingly. And considering how INCREDIBLY long it took me to finish this piece for such a poor result (despite the fact that I was just trying to replicate official art, so I had all the help in the world), well, I would say this was my limit. But, hey, you’ll never know until you try, and all practice is good practice.

That aside, hello! For today’s post, I decided to revisit the concept I started this blog with and work on a bigger illustration. It’s probably my least popular kind of post, but trying to mimic KH’s artstyle is kind of a blast regardless of the result or the struggle.

With Max’s and Kageno’s out of the way, it was about time I worked on Handa’s, since, you know, he’s my favourite character and all. I can be biased here, right?

So, it might be a good time to talk about HanRoku’s reasons to be.

Well, well, well. This is coming at the beginning of April when my last post was on January, and even that was just to celebrate the fact that, somehow, over a hundred people have decided to follow this blog. I’m not even going to pretend I’m way too busy to work on stuff--it’s just been a fantastic combination of things that made me want to... stop. I hit a big wall where the ideas I had were being a tad too difficult to pull off in a satisfying way (I swear to God, Kidou, your hair is impossible to work with), and I was either not in the mood to do anything or more focused on other and, at the time, more fun endeavours. I was super passionate about my graduation thesis, for example--and that went rather well, thankfully.

But, boy, I loved Kingdom Hearts 3. No bad mood or task was going to keep me from sinking hours into that game somewhat regularly. Playing it filled me with immense joy, and seeing Roxas again after so long brought me to tears. It made me think a lot about finally finishing (or trying to finish) this big piece... and it caught me very rusty, which led to hours, hours, hours, HOURS of work for what I have already described as a disappointing result. I mean, it’s not the worst I have ever drawn, but... well. It could definitely be much better, and I’m rather tempted to rework it in the future. I hadn’t touched my tablet in ages and it shows. Nor my pencils. Just my brushes, but that was just to paint doggos and Life Is Strange-inspired landscapes.

And the best part is that the illustration ISN’T EVEN COMPLETE because the rest would actually be a spoiler for a fic of mine called Zero. If you check the official art I linked above, you’ll see that what my illustration shows as a black area is actually filled by a completely separate illustration. I know what I want there, but, as I said, it’d spoil the story, so, yeah. Talk about a work in progress. I hope I can finish it all one day...

Anyway, enough pointless ranting! Thanks for putting up with me. To reward someone who has made it this far without getting tired of me, I’m giving away a Steam copy of Batman: Arkham Origins, along with all of its DLC. If you want it, please shoot me a non-anonymous message~ There is absolutely no need to follow me nor reblog/like this post, although it’d obviously be greatly appreciated. The first to ask for it will get it. And, please, don’t follow me for future giveaways--I doubt there will be any. Now, let’s talk about HanRoku. That’s what you clicked on that "read more" button for.

The beginnings of HanRoku are ancient at this point. We’re talking 2012 or 2013, and that’s INSANE. For how long have I been struggling with this project?! Goodness gracious. Anyway, at the time, Chrono Stone was hitting all of the right notes for me. Time travel? Check. People that transform to become more powerful? Check. Fusions, because I've watched too much DBZ for me to not love that? Check. And one day, for reasons that have been lost to time, but probably have a lot to do with the aforementioned fic, I realised something. Zero was supposed to be a story about how Roxas mingles with Someoka, Handa, Aki and mostly Endou, but then it hit me: Roxas and Handa are actually... extremely similar.

To those who have never played Kingdom Hearts, PLEASE GO PLAY KINGDOM HEARTS. And to those who couldn’t care less about what I recommend them to do, KH is a story that, under a deceiving cover full of Disney characters and confusing plot points, makes a deep and rather interesting point about what the true nature of the soul is--even if they insist on calling it “heart” instead. What is a soul? What is it for? Who, or what, has a soul--and why? Is the soul linked to the mind or to the body? Is it even possible to have a body and not have a soul? Is the soul something you’re born with or something you can/must acquire over time? What makes it grow, and what is true strength of soul? You know, for a game where you hit cute Hot Topic monsters with an oversized key, that’s pretty darn cool.

I talked more about this way back when, but I’ll give you a brief summary of the main reason why Handa and Roxas are such a perfect match: they are both people looking for their place in a world that actively acts against their very existence. They have no purpose and are simply tools for other people to shine and/or achieve their goals. That is obviously not a good, fulfilling life.

But, well, after all these years of ruminating and thinking (and crying) about HanRoku, there has to be a bit more to it than just that, right?

Obviously (and even more obviously after Kingdom Hearts 3), Roxas is very strong. Very strong. What he lacks in existence, he makes up for in raw power. For someone like Handa, who is so overlooked due to being okay at everything but not great at anything, this is massive. Even if Roxas doesn’t make him stellar at everything, he doesn’t need to. He still gives Handa enough power to become an extremely invaluable asset in the field and a force to be reckoned with--especially early on, since Handa is the first original Raimon player to get a miximax and all. I’ll talk more about HanRoku’s powers in the future.

But the usefulness in the field is only the first part, and even that is debatable due to the post I linked to earlier and the fact that, well, he sure will be special and super strong when no one else can mixitrans, but he won’t be once the whole team can do so. I mean, let’s count: Endou, Gouenji, Someoka, Max, Kageno, Megane, Tamano... That’s 7 people, when there are only 11 players on the field at a time. Handa would only be at an advantage over 3 people. (And if you’re going to tell me that he’s still the only midfielder with a miximax, thus making him special on his own, that’s a perfectly valid point and you should congratulate yourself for having such a keen eye.)

What really shines about HanRoku, though, is how mutually symbiotic their relationship is. Even if their struggles are so similar at heart, the reasons why those struggles exist are not.

Handa’s problems come from not being good enough at anything to be really... indispensable. Sure, he can do pretty much any job at any given point and be adequate enough at it, but he’s never the first option. He has no place of his own in the team; not one thing only he is capable of doing. And that leads to all kinds of problems of self-worth and trying to find a purpose. He will leave Raimon and no one will remember he was even there.

Roxas is completely essential to Organization XIII, but he’s been reduced to a killing machine that they are trying to replace with a better and more obedient one, thus taking away from him the only reason to be he ever knew and making him question his very existence. Once Org XIII disposes of him, no one will miss him--and that’s made even worse by a certain plot point: Nobodies disappear from the memory of everyone who ever met them once they are defeated/killed.

Of course, Roxas would help Handa immensely, as stated earlier. That’s kind of the point of this whole ordeal. But here’s the catch: Handa would help Roxas too. By leaving a part of himself inside Handa (that sounds extremely wrong, but please bear with me), he knows he will never be truly forgotten no matter what happens to him, and his life will ultimately have a purpose: to help a friend in need find his own worth. But let’s not forget that Roxas has only been alive for less than a year, while Handa has been struggling with his demons for over a decade without ever giving up. Despite having the world against him (or, at the very least, definitely not on his side), Handa is still going at it, trying his best, fighting for what he believes in, dealing courageously with the fact that he’s just an ordinary boy in a world of amazing people in order to help them achieve their ultimate goals. At a time when Roxas felt like his existence was worthless, meeting Handa, a boy who challenges his own self to find an identity that may not even exist, is truly inspiring. His selflessness, his love towards his friends and his neverending efforts to be better give Roxas a reason to stand up to the norm and fight for what he believes is right: in this case, to save his few and treasured friends.

Handa and Roxas find in each other a mirror that, for the first time in their lives, shows them in a new light that gives them hope for the future. They learn from each other, complement each other, improve each other, inspire each other, share a deep bond of friendship and trust, feel stronger and braver when they are together, and make a fantastic team. A team of throwaways, a team of tools, a team made of convenient replacements that will one day become obsolete. But a team that, however, is much greater than the sum of its overlooked parts, and will achieve incredible things when they eventually figure out just how unique and special they both are.

Talking about HanRoku makes me very emotional and it’s difficult to convey my feelings about them when I’m choking on my own tears, but I hope you can all understand why I love these two so very much. And if you can’t... well, feel free to ask me any questions you may have! I’d love to find new ways to describe why these two are so precious to me.

[thegeneralsnotebook]

August Feature: More Custom Card Ideas!

This month’s article was originally going to be about statistics, TIA, and thoughts for the future of the system. However, for whatever reasons those topics didn’t prove particularly inspiring for me to write about, so instead, here are some more custom cards that I’ve had running through my head over the past little while. With this batch, I had two objectives. First, I’ve been watching Season 9 as the episodes have come out this time, which is rare for me. Usually I’m way behind and catch up all at once in some big viewing batch. But this time I’m actually up to date. And I’ve really loved the dynamic of this season, in particular the episodes focusing on the trio of villains: Queen Chrysalis, Lord Tirek, and Cozy Glow. (Don’t worry if you’re behind; this article isn’t going to spoil anything. Except, I guess, for the fact that these three are showing up.) So one objective here was to make some cards to capture them.

The second objective was to really explore and push the boundaries of what could be done within a Mane Character. Over the course of the first ten sets in this game, there’s already been a good amount of experimentation within the usual bounds of what Mane Characters do. We’ve had a Mane where you chose which colours it had, one that starts with three Power and flips to the side with one, and we had a pair of UR Manes in Canterlot Nights built on flipping back and forth over the course of the game. I wondered what else could be done within that structure, especially to accommodate the well-defined flavours of each of these characters.

In the end, I got three cards that were each unique in their own way. Cozy Glow ended up working much like a normal Mane, while Tirek is an interesting departure. And Chrysalis is so radical in her design that we’d need to tweak the rules just a little bit to allow her to work. But I’ll talk about that once we’ve seen her. So if you’re willing, let’s take a walk on the dark side together.

Cozy Glow, Divide & Conquer

Start: 2 Power, Home Limit 3 At the start of the game, choose a colour. This card has that colour. When you gain control of a card that you do not own, turn this card over.

Boosted: 3 Power, Home Limit 4 Main Phase: Exhaust this card to gain control of an opposing Friend. When you lose a faceoff, your opponent gains control of all cards in play that they own.

Note that we’re adopting the Changeling Pretender convention of having villainous Manes belong to no particular colour. Cozy and Tirek share that convention, while Chrysalis is a little different. Again, we’ll get to that. Now Cozy’s flavour is pretty straightforward, as she’s all about turning ponies against each other, smooth-talking them with a few words and then manipulating them into doing her bidding. So naturally I wanted a card that could easily take control of opposing Friends, and push that idea along a lot. Note by the way that her flip condition does not only apply to Friends; gaining control of a Resource or a Troublemaker would also work just as well.

Since effects that would flip her over are pretty high up the req tree, we’ve also given her two Power to start, which would be a big departure from normal design. It can make for a powerful early-game, but with the relative difficulty of that flip, it should be okay. And about the Boosted side, I wanted to emphasize that Cozy always has but a fragile hold on her pawns. Since she’s not actually using magical compulsion or anything similar, when things stop going her way, she can lose her followers quickly. From a design perspective, this hopefully alleviates the unfun possibility of locking the opponent down by stealing all of their stuff, as they always have a way to potentially turn the tables.

Lord Tirek, Powered Up

Start: 1 Power, Home Limit 4 At the start of the game, choose a colour. This card has that colour. Main Phase: Exhaust this card to banish one of your nontoken Friends to beneath this card. You may turn this card over.

Boosted: 1 Power, Home Limit 4 This card has +1 Power for each card beneath it. Immediate: Spend a card from underneath this card to give this card +2 Power. At the end of your turn, if there are no cards underneath this card, turn it over.

From a 2/3 Power line, we move to something even more different: Tirek is a 1/1! But of course, on his Boosted side he’ll rarely ever have just the one Power. In fact, he could end up having a lot of Power indeed. The flavour for Tirek was also pretty obvious: he needs to consume other cards in order to grow. And he seemed like the kind of character that would want a deck built around him exclusively as a foundation point. So I didn’t want him to be able to remove opposing Friends. Instead, the player sacrifices their own Friends to build Tirek’s power, then unleashes him at the time that feels right.

After all, we totally could flip Tirek over with just one card beneath him, then use him as a two-Power Mane for the rest of the game. Or maybe we wait for a few more turns, to take him up to the five or six-Power range. Or maybe we wait even longer, so that he can devastate the late game as a 10+ Power monster. All of these are valid options, and they all come with choices and trade-offs. Notably, waiting to flip him over is going to cost time, as he can only absorb one card per turn. Meanwhile, you’re going to have to hope that your opponent hasn’t already run away with things. And it probably bears mentioning that I don’t think this design would be a powerful Farming option. As Tirek needs Friends to grow, probably more Friends than any Farming deck would like to use.

Finally, as a third option, you could choose to treat Tirek like the CN Manes, and flip him over and back a few times over the course of the game. I think it’s good to have cards with this kind of flexibility built into them, and I’d be interested to know which style emerged as the best one.

Queen Chrysalis, Unmasked!

Okay, I’ve been hinting that Chrysalis was going to be something special this whole time, so let’s finally get to it. As I mentioned above, in order to work this card needs one small change to be made to the rules. Specifically, we need to remove the rule that says Mane Characters can’t leave play. Why? Because this Chrysalis is very different from all of the others. She does not start the game in play. Instead, you start with another Mane, like normal, and later reveal that in fact you were Chrysalis all along! So in reality this entry actually consists of two cards, starting with the Resource that sets it all in motion:

Moment of Triumph 3 Cost, 0 req, 2 flip This card enters play exhausted. Exhaust and retire this card to replace your Mane Character with Queen Chrysalis, Unmasked!

Since exhausting is part of the cost for its ability, and it enters play exhausted, your opponent is always going to have one turn to have a look and maybe find a way to stop you. There’s plenty of Resource removal out there, and I didn’t want the colours lacking in Immediate-speed Resource disruption to be at a disadvantage. As for “replacing” your Mane Character, in theory it would work exactly as you’d expect: your original Mane is removed from the game, and Chrysalis enters in its place.

Queen Chrysalis, Unmasked! Boosted (both sides are identical): 4 Power, Home Limit 4 Immediate: Retire a nontoken Friend to put a 2 Power colourless Changeling Friend token into play.

Now the flavour really does keep on coming. Not only was your Mane Chrysalis, but in fact all of your Friends were changelings this whole time! Chrysalis does have a really powerful ability, which is of course why it’s locked behind a slow Resource. Note also that she has no colours, and as I said before she doesn’t follow the convention of letting you choose one. Colour management is the card’s main weakness, as the Mane has no colours, and using her ability replaces Friends with colours with changelings that have none. Thus in theory Chrysalis isn’t just a straight upgrade for every deck. Without care, it’s easy to find yourself stranded without req, and even unable to confront your own Problems. With four base Power she has a chance maybe at Farming, but again that lack of colours is going to be an issue.

I’ve wanted to have a card that properly captured Chrysalis’ flavour for a while now, even more than we’ve got from Evil Twin and Identity Theft. Sure, rules tweaks are always a risk, so this one is probably even more of a pipe dream than the other two. But the flavour is just so on-point that I had to put it out there. In any event, just like last month, the thought of new cards has my creativity flowing again. What do you think of these three villains and my treatment of them? What would your villainous MCs look like?

[doktorpeace]

Top 5 Games Of The Year #1

[Downside Ballad - Pyre OST] 

Pyre is something really, truly, special and let me prove that to you by just describing it in the most literal sense. It is, essentially, a Basketball RPG and Visual Novel about escaping Purgatory. Not only is it wholly unlike any other game I’ve ever played or, really, even heard of before but works; it takes such a wild concept and turns it into absolutely one of the best, most unique, most touching games I’ve ever played in my life. To sum it up here right at the start, because this is going to be very long, Pyre is a game that combines a beautiful visual aesthetic and tangible, easy to parse, always expanding lore to build a cohesive, believable setting for its world and inhabitants. It then fills that world with fully fleshed out characters, so fleshed out in fact you will miss content in your first go round, because of the nature of the game it is impossible to see all of the content for every character in a single run which I’ll get into more later. It conveys itself to you in the style of a visual novel for the most part, giving a lot of time for character interactions, dialogue, and a conveyance of the world at a pace that keeps the game continuously fresh and easy to digest. It caps off each set of interactions with a gameplay segment, called a Rite, which are the ‘Basketball’ segments I mentioned before. While that’s a bit of a simplification of what all the gameplay has to offer in terms of depth and strategy it’s still a pretty apt way to describe it. Cap everything off with a unique and memorable piece of music for almost every major NPC and major part of The Downside and Pyre takes so many seemingly disparate elements and so many ostentatious ideas and turns it all into a cohesive whole basically without error and for that it deserves so much love and praise. The Downside and every location therein is so distinct and memorable it’s incredible and I think it’s helped by how colorful it is despite the narrative purgatory and harshness it has. Every location stands out from one another based solely on color palette and design. I’d like to just post a few examples:

This is helped by each Rite arena having a unique layout as well, integrating the uniqueness of the overworld and carrying it over into gameplay. The geography of The Downside has an almost dreamy, impossible to exist feeling about it from start to end which contrasts in a good way with how well realized the setting is. Part of what helps each location and every Rite feel unique is that every single place the party travels to is in and of itself a monument or major landmark of some kind. Be it the largest ship to ever crash in the sea, the remains of a titanic scorpion which once wandered the deserts near the beginning of the game, or even just where many of the Downside Imps reside every location has a tangible existence to it. This is helped by one of the smartest conveyance features I’ve ever seen in a game, and it really takes advantage of the visual novel style presentation of Pyre. Every single time a proper noun is used in conversation the text is highlighted in a bold red text and highlighting that text, be it about a person or a place or an event, the game will reveal just a snippet of information which clues the player into key information as they play in a non-obstructive way. In fact, this is used for one major character to convey the meaning of all of their dialogue, as they do not speak english.

Then, once the player has met said person or been to that place, or heard a bit more about that event in another conversation a full page or more gets added about it to the Book of Rites the player has from the beginning of the game, giving the player an optional chance at more reading to invest themselves further into the game world. Some of these pages open solely through gameplay challenges as well; Lore about the stars which you follow and the constellations in the sky and the major locations will only unlock by playing the game in ways relevant to that information. All of this information can be obtained in a single playthrough and, to me, represents what a ‘100%’ run is for this game, a great reward in my opinion. The more you want to interact with the world the more it opens up to you, 179 pages of optional text in all and as someone who read every last drop of it I promise you it’s interesting and worthwhile as a reward, it would take far too long to go into detail about here.

[Strange Voyage - Pyre OST] The inciting incident for the plot is that the player, yes you as the point of view character is intended to be literally you, has been breaking the law by knowing how to read and keeping books. The game lingers on this only in an opening cutscene, showing your collection being burnt before cutting to you exiled and sure to die in The Downside. Being as the player themselves are intended to be involved in the world and setting the game never asks for a name but instead only asks for your pronouns. He/Him, She/Her, and They/Them are all options and as a minor details I personally like that She/Her is the default, most games with features like this assume male as default. Regardless, this changes nothing mechanically about the game every character interaction with you stays the exact same, they just use the proper pronouns used to refer to you by. It’s a nice little option. Your importance to the characters who save you is immediate and thus your ability to be invested is as well and your importance comes from your crime: You can read. You, the player, are literate in a world where literacy in illegal and that allows you uniquely to read The Book of Rites, a magical book in the possession of the other protagonists (the reason they have it at all is explained later, it’s not just a Way Too Convenient happenstance though I will not reveal why here in order to avoid spoilers) which can be used to determine the next location a Rite will be held. Thus, from the very start putting the onus of deciding exactly how to get from point A to point B on the player. This immediately gives the player a reason, but a mundane and believable one, to be special and to have decision making power in this situation. You’re not some god touched, ultra special, prophesied savior. You are defined by this literacy so strongly that your special title is ‘The Reader’ which carries different connotations to different characters. Ultimately you’re just you. It’s good writing and I love it. The game then focuses on the journey you take with the other starting characters Jodariel, Rukey, and Hedwyn travelling from the furthest point south in The Downside, hitting all of the major locations along the way to conduct the Rites being held there, and travelling as far north as possible to the place where special Liberation Rites are held. These Rites are always between your team The Nightwings, and the best scoring team in that Liberation Cycle. The lore based reason for your team always competing is given in the song played during these Rites and is expanded upon through other lore, including a major plot twist at the end I won’t spoil but in short The Nightwings are the team all others are measured against. The writing surrounding this works well enough as a means of never excluding the player from the most important content in the game, while also giving good reasoning for your team to be unique. As their name implies, these rare and special Rites are used to determine the worthiness of a single individual, one selected from each team, to ascend back up into The Commonwealth with all of their crimes forgiven. As one could imagine this can result in some INTENSELY bad blood between members of The Nightwings and other team’s players. Imagine you’ve worked your ass off succeeding in these Rites, surviving a downtrodden and harsh purgatory with little in the way of food and you get ONE STEP away from finally being free, only to be rejected at the last minute. It’s gonna sting and it’s GOING to change how these characters feel about each other. Since everybody in the plot has been here longer than you have and they’ve all got relationships and opinions regarding each other. Some as simple as hating a whole team and some deeply nuanced and seeing them slowly open up to the player is another nice treat that helps the world feel oh so real. [Vagrant Song - Pyre OST] The pacing through this first half of the game is absolutely superb. You’re introduced to every playable party member you’ll receive, of which there are 9 in total, given an extended opportunity to interact with them and learn about who they are, their motivations, the crimes they committed to end up here, just a whole lot about them though not all join quite yet. While you won’t learn all of this immediately and, oftentimes, can miss major information on a character if you manage to have them Liberated that’s a purposeful part of the game’s structure. You can’t always see everything or know everything about someone, even if you really want to. It drives home the quality of the writing just a little bit more while also giving the player real, meaningful reason to play through the game again. From here on though, the game’s pacing enhances dramatically and the player is really given the reigns to decide a lot of things. I won’t go into too much detail since it spoils a big part of what makes the latter half of the plot special but basically a lot more Rites than normal begin occurring at once. Typically only a couple can happen in a night, since it is based on the glow of certain stars imbuing their respective landmarks with the magical power needed to perform Rites at all. Since so many are happening at once the player can really dictate what characters they get to see and where they get to play a lot more and that’s great from a gameplay perspective. While I felt the pacing of the game got a bit too fast compared to the first part and initially found it jarring Pyre never loses its poise and the player will quickly get into a groove with their newfound freedom. Plot events are still meaty and there’s a lot of unique little dialogues the player can miss simply by not bringing certain party members to certain locations against certain other teams. It’s all very granular and means no two playthroughs will be alike. Before I forget a little thing I love about this game is how The Blackwagon, the home you all share, starts kind of plain and bare but every character you get adds a little personal something to the interior and as you travel through the world it gets filled with all sorts of nick-nacks. It helps flesh out your party members and the world while also making the Black Wagon feel genuinely lived in, it’s nice. Also, if you highlight any given personal item of a party member it’ll tell you what they’re currently doing, so even if you can’t talk with them that day you can still get just a little bit more flavor text out of them.

The game has variable endings in both major and minor ways. I would consider there to be about four ‘major’ variations on the ending, all of which are determined by your overall success in the Liberation Rites. There are then somewhere around Two Hundred Million end state variations depending on the player’s choices, successes in Rites, what they learned, who specifically they freed, and more. While the player could get all of the main variations in just a few playthroughs this sheer dedication to detail gives every player something to feel accomplished for that’s all their own. All in all, I could gush about Pyre’s writing for hours but I think that will suffice for now. I think it goes without saying as well that Pyre is a visually stunning game. The  almost paint-like models and dreamy appearance of everything is beautiful to see in motion. Every animation is clear, every particle effect stunning, every location beautiful, and every character expressive. Pyre is a beautiful, gorgeous game and I wish I could give it the description it deserves but frankly I don’t have the words to. Hopefully just the pictures I provide throughout this review will help sway you but trust me, if you like playing games for their visuals, their character designs, their environments, just how pretty everything is Pyre won’t disappoint you. [The Eight Scribes - Pyre OST] About the gameplay itself Pyre manages to build a Sports RPG that, at least to me, didn’t feel like a ‘Sports’ game in the colloquial sense. It felt involved, tactical, and had enough of a fantasy element to it to make it stand head and shoulders above its contemporaries. Pyre’s gameplay is deep, balanced, and most importantly fun. All 9 of your playable party members feel different from one another, in part thanks to the amazing variety of body types at play lending themselves to intrinsic gameplay differences, and they each add something valuable to the three man team composition that each Rite is conducted with. This combined with each map in the game being just a bit different also means the player is constantly incentivized to try new team compositions and to not fall into just a comfortable rhythm. 

Rites are contests with no time limit. The only goal at hand for each team is to extinguish the Flame of their opponents, which is essentially their basket. To do so each team must try and carry an orb that spawns in a neutral position to their opponent’s flame with any member of their team, leaping with force into it. The Flame of each team has a standard worth of 100 and most of the time your goal is to earn 100 Points or inflict 100 damage depending on how you look at it, though there are variables which can make this number higher or lower for both the player and their AI controlled opponents. Each character lowers the flame’s value by a different amount, usually inversely proportional to their speed and size. Your largest, slowest, hardest to navigate party member, Jodariel, can snuff an entire flame in just two or three scores meanwhile your faster, easier to score with units such as Sir Gilman and Ti’Zo typically lower a flame by 15 or 20 points.

[Talon Sheath - Pyre OST] Importantly, however, is to note that scoring with a character removes them from the field until another goal is made. This means the team that scored last must now play 2 against 3 and, if they continue scoring, will continue to play at that disadvantage for the entire game after the first score. This system, like so many others in the game, ensures the player never gets too comfortable relying on ‘old reliable’ strategies and must constantly think and play to their fullest. Alternatively, characters can both pass and throw the orb to facilitate team based play and allow for advanced strategies and unique abilities to be made use of. Throwing the orb into the Flame of an opponent takes a bit longer and is harder to do than jumping into the Flame and also nets less points BUT keeps the scoring player in the game, since they were not banished by the Flame. This opens up a lot of playstyle variety and strategy on its own and is a very smart feature in my opinion.  While playing a match each team can only move any one character of the three at a time, and while it’s nigh instantaneous to change who you’re controlling it does make for an interesting, almost chess-like approach to gameplay. To make this more clear there is no AI to control the teammates you’re not actively playing as, they simply stand there until you choose to move them around again. Some characters are only really good in movement where others can easily be useful just standing still it creates a unique gameplay feeling which keeps the tension high and thus player involvement up. It’s hard to describe exactly how it works, but trust me, it works quite well. [Path to Glory - Pyre OST]

Banishment is another major part of how matches are played in Pyre. Each character has a different attack or set of attacks that, if they connect with an opponent, Banishes them from the field for a time and it is possible to have an entire team wiped out at once, leading to free goals. In addition to their dedicated attacks characters also have a stat called Presence, generally tied to how large they are and their demeanor, which causes them to cast a flaming shadow in a circle around them. If any opponent so much as touches the ground in this area they are instantly banished, allowing large characters to function as ‘goalkeepers’ in a sense. Note that I said touches the ground, however, some characters can leap a VERY long distance to undermine all but the absolute largest of Presences given good spacing and timing. This mechanic functions well, but can sometimes be frustrating since the AI can be VERY good at making called shots or long distance snipes to take out characters. Just flinging the orb into opponents can banish them as some characters, that’s fun. Interestingly as well a character’s Presence Aura disappears while they perform an active attack which in and of itself is a good balance for characters with exceptionally large Auras.

Each character has a few major stats: Glory, which determines the damage they deal to the Flame anytime they extinguish it. This is generally inversely proportional to a character’s speed, but some characters who are particularly righteous still score very well even while being fast such as Pamitha. Presence, which as mentioned before determines essentially their defensive capabilities. This is generally tied to the character’s size, though Ti’Zo the imp has an extremely large Aura regardless of being so small. Quickness, which determines their speed. Generally the smaller the better, but the fastest character of all, The Vagabond Girl (Who for the purposes of this review will be called ‘Fae’ from here on because LITERALLY everyone I know chose that name for her) is of an average size. and last but not least Hope, which determines their respawn timer after being Banished by an opponent. This is entirely informed by the character’s personality and thus has nothing to do with their other statistics. It is also the most fickle stat, being the one most prone to both temporary and permanent changes. These stats can be adjusted by Charms, each character can hold one and every character has at least one completely unique to them that no one else can use. Charms generally just raise stats to give an edge to a character, but they also can give access to unique options such as a farther leap, augmenting a character’s special abilities, the ability to cause earthquakes by jumping, the opportunity to instantly respawn after being banished once per play in each match, and more. Characters can also be adjusted as they gain experience, known as Enlightenment in this game. As you play through characters will slowly gain access to four permanent and major adjustments to their playstyle. There are 8 options with many being mutually exclusive. These are permanent changes with I believe only a single opportunity to respec a single character on any playthrough so the decision is tough especially since often all the options presented are fun and interesting. For some characters these upgrades push them to one role or another but for others, like Hedwyn, it can take a relatively mediocre and unspecialized character and make them into an absolute powerhouse. Other things that can adjust the character’s stats include your dialogue options with them and about them to other people, plot events, and who is Liberated at the current time. Most of these are temporary but sometimes you can have permanent effects on your teammates, for good or ill.

[Never to Return -  Pyre OST]

Now to get to perhaps the defining trait of the gameplay side of things, the event around which the plot revolves: Liberation Rites. As I touched on before these Rites are used to determine if a character is worthy to go free from The Downside and return to society at large with their crimes forgiven. This does have gameplay ramifications which are permanent in each playthrough, whoever goes free is removed from the game. Be they your teammate or your opponent they are gone for good. For you this means no more talking with them anymore, no more finding out about them except by secondhand accounts which are generally less detailed than the source, and no more using them in future Rites. Only your three most experienced party members are options for Anointment on any given Liberation, too, so don’t think you can just send your least favorite party member who you’ve been neglecting; You must give up someone of great value to you every single time. It’s a tough decision which, again, drives replay value AND the narrative along letting every last element of the game coalesce in a meaningful way. One might decide to keep their very favorite character around a little longer so they can help in more Rites and so they can talk with them more, since every character has unique dialogue all the way up through the very end of the game, but then you may risk them never going free as there are not enough Liberations to go around. It’s a tough decision every time and there are no right answers. It’s a great, amazingly considered concept from a narrative and gameplay perspective and it was well worth building a game around. I would like to talk briefly on each party member, but not too much since I want to keep them special. I will only talk about eight of the party members here since two of them are spoilers in and of themselves. Hedwyn is the closest thing to an ordinary person you get in your party. He’s a kind, level headed man who’s always there when you need advice. While initially he might seem boring compared to the other options Hedwyn ultimately surprised me with how much I liked him though in terms of gameplay he’s definitely the most plain party member. Not the worst, far from it, but definitely the most plain. His role in gameplay initially starts as an ‘all rounder’ kind of character but eventually he blossoms into a supportive role, acting essentially as a cheerleader for your other party members, giving them AMAZING boons just for taking the field with them and honestly that fits his personality so well. Jodariel is a Demon, she has managed to survive in The Downside for a very, very long time compared to most. She’s gruff, very slow to open up, and generally quite harsh and realistic. All that said she’s still quite personable if you have the drive to get to know her. As a result of being down here so long she’s also got a lot of ties to the other teams you’ll be facing giving her some of the most interesting relationships in the game. She’s kind of a team mom, too, and very self sacrificing over the course of the game. In terms of gameplay I think Sandra puts it best:

She is arguably the weakest party member you receive on the whole but she is far from useless. She’s a great auxiliary party member and slots well into just about any team of three characters. Defensively she’s a monster as well, her Presence stat can reach ludicrous levels, making it impossible for opponents to score in any way other than by throwing the orb or banishing her first. She’s quite fun to use on the whole. Rukey Greentail is a Cur (yes that is his species name) and is quite the rogue. He’s got that kind of disposition where you just know this jokester is hiding something from you but he’s very good at deflecting attempts to pry so he’s slow to open up. He, like Hedwyn, is actually quite kind from the get go though his snarkier more eccentric personality can make him harder to read and get along with at times. Ultimately though he’s a good guy, he’s just also kind of greedy. Early on in terms of gameplay he will absolutely be your offensive star. He’s fast, he’s got a long jump, and he can dart right through enemy defenses and only gets better at it as you go. I tend to find he has kind of a reverse bell curve of effectiveness. He’s incredibly good early on, then in the middle of the game most other characters overtake them as they can fill multiple roles on a team compared to his specialized speedy offense, and then he unlocks the ability to double jump and shit absolutely hits the fan. Rukey is a great long term investment and is the character most able to just ignore enemy defenses and terrain difficulties in order to seal the game for you. Fae is another human, like you and Hedwyn, though she’s a bit more in line with the world you find yourselves in in terms of personality. She’s very out there, having visions and a very deep interest in and almost idolization of The Eight Scribes and their lore, giving her almost a religious aspect other characters lack. She’s difficult to parse and doesn’t develop as much as the other characters but her relationships are developing at the same time yours are, since nobody knows her before she joins you. Seeing how the party members get along with her over time is a treat. She’s an endearing character, just a bit of an oddball. In terms of gameplay she has ridiculous mobility and overall really good stats. Though she doesn’t gain as much from her personal upgrades as most other characters she’s still consistently useful since she has can run VERY fast and leap VERY far. Like Rukey she’s almost entirely offense oriented, but she can be used for other roles more easily thanks to her superior size. Also you get to choose her name when you meet her and all of the options rhyme with ‘Gray’. Everyone I know chose ‘Fae’ and I gotta say it’s a very fitting name for her personality.

Ti’Zo is a Wagon Imp and a natural resident of the Downside. Having never been to the Commonwealth and also not of a typically ‘intelligent’ species he cannot speak in human language. Thankfully he is very expressive, so you can always understand him anyway.

He’s been a member of The Nightwings for longer than almost anyone else and thus actually gives some good insight to the Rites themselves and the history of The Downside. He also has complex relationships with some other party members and enemy teams. He’s just a great wellspring of character and completely avoids the annoying ‘Mascot Character’ bullet. In terms of gameplay he’s the most different party member you get. His attack hits a MASSIVE area but also banishes himself, he has a huge presence, high hope, his Glory can be raised through his personal upgrades to great levels, and he’s fast! So what’s his downside? His movement is in set bursts. As you move around with him he jumps from place to place and you cannot adjust his jump mid arc. He takes a lot of commitment to play but I would argue he’s one of the strongest party members overall since he’s just so good at everything. Honestly it makes sense given how long he’s been conducting Rites, but still! [Knights of the Sea - Pyre OST]

Sir Gilman is a Wyrm Knight and he’s about everything you would expect. He’s honorable, a good and true person, and loyal to a fault. He’s also maybe a bit too forthcoming which can get him in trouble sometimes. Nonetheless he’s great to have around and is a funny guy, too. Despite his seemingly carefree nature he does a lot of introspection and worries about the choices he’s made in his life giving him a hidden bit of sadness that’s interesting to tap into. Gameplay wise Sir Gilman is a great, well rounded character. Though his presence is small he is great defensively, with perhaps the safest attack in the game, a teleport that damages everywhere between where he starts and ends. He can easily defend your Flame and wipe out whole teams. He’s also amazing offensively as he’s quite fast and has a good leap, but his orb throw is very slow and easy to intercept making his offense a bit one dimensional. Overall Gilman is a great party member who slots comfortably onto any team. Pamitha is a Harp with a troubled history and a great desire to make good out of the mess that is her life situation. She’s had a rough lot in life, growing up in a society that demands everything of you, something she still struggles with growing past. Despite that she’s got a fun loving personality and is pretty personable, she just has a hard time gaining the trust of your other party members, especially given the conditions she joins under. She’s an interesting nut to crack open and she’s got a lot of depth but I feel that goes without saying. In terms of gameplay she’s unquestionably the best party member in my opinion. Like Ti’zo she’s not really bad at anything but unlike Ti’zo she can fly. Flight is exactly as overpowered as you might anticipate in a basketball game. Once she has the orb she’s basically already scored. Pamitha is absolutely incredible and can do anything the player needs. She can win whole matches entirely on her own without breaking a sweat. There are two other playable party members, but I’ll refrain talking from them here. I’ll just say they were both among my favorites, one in particular holds a lot of context to the game as a whole, so getting to meet them will be a special moment for anyone who decides to play the game after reading this! All in all your party members are diverse, well balanced, and interesting. They truly are the draw for this game and though I didn’t anticipate liking them all so much truly they all, each and every one, surprised me with their depth and just how well realized they were. I love the cast of Pyre, well and truly. Additionally there is one quasi-party member, the above mentioned Sandra. Though never playable she does offer you help and advice through the game. She’s snarky and has a very negative personality though even from her you can eke out a friendship if you’re consistent in talking with her. She has an extremely unique perspective I won’t spoil, but she has character specific challenges, one per party member, which require you to beat her 1 vs 3 in a challenge built just for that party member. Succeeding unlocks a unique Charm for that character and they’re great moments of progress and inspiration for each and every one. Sandra’s a tough opponent though, so don’t take her lightly. While all of her content is optional, it’s good bonus content and I’d absolutely recommend talking with her anytime possible and taking her on with all of your party members as the chances arise.

[In The Flame - Pyre OST]

The last one I want to talk about is you, The Reader. While you aren’t playable in Rites directly you do control the Rites, and this game controls really well. Regardless of if you prefer a controller or a keyboard and mouse the game feels good. I played with a Keyboard+Mouse setup and was able to unlock every singleplayer achievement on my first run, though some did take multiple attempts. You have the option to restart Rites at no penalty at anytime as they’re being played, keeping the stakes from getting too high, but savescumming is obviously not within the intent of the game. Still, it’s an option if you wish to use it. Overall Pyre is not too hard of a game at default, but there are 12 Constellations which unlock over time, all of which make the game harder should you choose to make use of them. In exchange your characters get 3% or more bonus experience per each one in use. These range in effect from ‘Make the AI faster/better’ to ‘Damage your own Flame at the start of a match’ to giving opponents basically hacks, such as allowing them to keep their Presence Aura while holding The Orb, which normally is not allowed. These can add a severe challenge to any match in the game and are worth exploring, since winning a match with any given one active unlocks more lore in your book! Still, the customizable difficulty means no player should get bored or find the game too tough or too easy. As you may have noticed I’ve been linking to some of the game’s absolutely stellar OST throughout this review and, frankly, it’s one of the best OSTs I’ve ever heard in a game. It’s about 2 hours long despite the game itself being relatively short in length. The sound design of the gameplay itself is really great too, but again I’m not really skilled at being able to say why. Still, everything from moving around to scoring, to banishment sounds impactful and distinct. Even different body types cause different sounds while moving which is a great touch. The game also has a multiplayer mode in which you can play any combination of ANY named character from the main game including some who never showed up in a Rite! It’s good fun with a friend and a nice bit of extra content once the main game is finished. Really, there’s a lot more I could talk about. I haven’t even talked about the many, many NPCs but they’re quite lovely and distinct too, each readily coming back to my mind as I think about the game. Pyre is a game with so much depth, so much to it despite being only about a 15 hour game in total. Please just, play this game, it’s a complete package in every sense of the word: Great gameplay, stellar soundtrack, gorgeous art design, AMAZING writing, and an awesome concept all rolled together, it’s not often such a thoroughly and completely amazing game comes along just to blow you out of the water. It is such a special game with so much to give! It’s $8 dollars on Steam right now and its soundtrack is just an additional $3. Supergiant Games truly knocked the ball out of the park with this one, I truly feel Pyre is something special and stands head and shoulders not just above Supergiant’s other products, Bastion and Transistor, not just above other Sports games like Golf Story, not even just above other Visual Novels. No, Pyre stands above every single game I played in 2018. I love this game and you owe it to yourself to experience all of the great, unique, and amazing things it has to offer.

[shielddrake]

FFXV and KH3: The Challenge of Setup and Payoff

So, having recently finished Kingdom Hearts III and taking a few days to digest it, I have concluded something: the current writers on staff at SquareEnix have problems with setup and payoff in regards to storytelling.  This is something I think warrants discussing because it is one of the most common techniques in creative writing (including video games), but it appears to be what the developers of both Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III seem to have the biggest problem accomplishing.

 This is not meant to be a review of either game. Plenty of other people are doing or have done that, and I feel I don’t really need to add to that discussion.  I also don’t mean to be preachy when I talk about setup and payoff in terms of writing.  This is merely my interpretation of what I experienced while playing these games.

 Finally, I don’t mean to say that using Chekov’s Gun is the end-all, be-all of story telling. Setup and payoff are not absolutely necessary to tell a good story, but as they seem to only try to use this technique about halfway, this seems to be the biggest, rather glaring flaw of both of these games, although in different ways.

 WARNING: Spoilers under the cut for both Final Fantasy XV and Kingdom Hearts III, more so for the latter because it just came out and the former has been out for a while.  You all have been warned.

In play writing and screenwriting, it is said that if there is a gun hanging on the wall in the first act, then it better go off by the third. If it doesn’t, it shouldn’t be hanging on the wall.  This is well-known as Chekhov’s Gun, basically saying that if something is mentioned, it better be mentioned because it furthers the plot in some way.  This technique has been discussed by far more educated people than me, so if you want to know more about this, you can do your own research.  For the purposes of this discussion, let’s just say that if something is brought up, it needs to payoff in the end somehow, or else it’s not important enough to mention.

 Let’s look at a few Final Fantasy moments that do setup and payoff well, and there are quite a few. The Hymn of the Fayth in FFX is mentioned, and sung, several times over the game, and it is revealed that when Sin/Jecht listens to it, he calms down.  It ends up being a key part of making Sin docile enough to be attacked, infiltrated, and then destroyed from the inside, thus ending its thousand-year destruction of Spira.  Final Fantasy VIII has the mention of Squall’s ring named Griever, which later ends up being the Guardian Force summoned by Ultimecia in the final boss battle of the game.  (The significance of this is left up to the player.)  And, very famously, there is Final Fantasy VII’s Aerith and her white materia, which she claims does nothing but is actually what saves the world from Meteor by casting Holy magic at the end of the game.  There are many others, but those are a few examples.

 That being said, both FFXV and KH3 suffer from issues of setup and payoff, but in sort of opposite ways.  Let’s start with FFXV.

 First, this is not to say that FFXV completely fails at setting ideas up and then paying them off in the end.  The entire situation with the Ring of the Lucii is set up and pays off by the game’s end, and the story of Shiva and Ifrit’s love story sets up the end of the battle with Ifrit when Shiva is summoned to finish him off (at least, the set up is there better in the Royal Edition).  Episode Ignis also has the alternative ending where Ravus ends up coming to terms with his sister’s death and gives Noctis his father’s sword willingly, rather than dying and Noct finding it after the fact.  The setup of Ravus having issues with Noctis finally has a proper payoff when he accepts that Noctis is the Chosen King and supports him, and Ravus finally gets the character development he so desperately needed and was cheated out on in the original version of the game.  This concept of setup and payoff is not completely lost on SquareEnix.

 There are times, however, when the setup is there but the payoff is little to nothing.  The Royal Arms are brought up by Cor roughly at the start of the game, but then they become nothing really more than a tidbit of information at best and an optional sidequest at worst.  During my first playthrough, I actually forgot all about them between meeting Titan and obtaining the Katana of the Warrior.  I was like, “Oh, right.  Those things.”  They are brought up again at the end of the game where the Kings of Lucis all kill Noctis to purge the Starscourge and defeat Ardyn, so I guess that’s some payoff, but it seems so minor compared to the other plot points that I find this debatable.

 I also have big problems with the use of Luna.  Her character is absolutely fine, don’t get me wrong there, but there is an almost complete lack of use of her character as she relates to Noctis.  If they are supposed to be close, possibly in love or at least in like, then the flashback sequences from their childhood don’t really do it justice.  They show interactions that don’t advance their relationship at all.  As such, when the “payoff” of Luna’s death and Noctis’ despair from it happens, it doesn’t really mean anything to the player.  We’re sad for Noctis, but not necessarily sad that Luna had died.  There was no setup for her relationship with him, so her loss isn’t all that poignant.  This could have been fixed if the journal the two share could have been read by the player, even with just small snippets of their written conversations with each other, but this wasn’t an option.

 Next, I want to talk about the DLC.  Ignoring the fact that I’m one of those people who think the events of Episodes Gladiolus, Ignis and Prompto should have been included the game proper from the start, the absence of them also hurts the setup and payoff techniques of the story.  The setup is in the DLC, but the payoff exists in the original game.  So, in a way, we’re getting the payoff before the setup even happens, chronologically speaking.

 For starters, let’s look at Episode Ignis.  This episode is arguably the best of the three DLC, so it is no surprise that it has the strongest story.  There is actually an example of really good setup and payoff within the episode itself, and it starts where Ignis and Ravus are hiding while they wait for the Niflheim soldiers to leave the area.  Ravus mentions that he tried to use the Ring of the Lucii for himself and lost his left arm in the process.  So, anyone who isn’t of Lucis Caelum blood pays a price for using the ring.  Okay, plot point established.  With this knowledge, when we see Ignis put on the ring, we know that there will be some kind of price he has to pay to use it, and this is confirmed when he loses his eyesight.  And there’s the payoff.

 The problem is that Episode Ignis wasn’t released until December 13, 2017, just over a year after FFXV was originally released.  So, we already knew about Ignis’ blindness and saw the consequences of it, but we just didn’t see the event that caused it. Heck, we didn’t even really know the reason why he became blind, just that it happened during the events in Altissia. So, when Gladio goes off on Noct about how “Ignis took one for you too,” instead of thinking that Gladio has a point and Noct needs to step up, we just think that Gladio’s being a jerk.  Ignis could have been shot by a Niflheim soldier or fell off a building and his eyes were injured for all we know.  The context of how Ignis lost his sight is lost on not only the player but Noctis as well, so the payoff feels empty.  We see the consequences of him being blind in that he can’t fight as effectively and can’t cook for the team, but again this is all after the fact.  The payoff is there, but it seems like it came out of nowhere because there was no setup for it.  Seems like they set of Chekhov’s Gun without ever showing us it was there to begin with.

 And then there’s Prompto…

 Oh Prompto.  I feel he really got the short end of the stick when it came to his background. His story is actually a really good one and could have been a really turning point for his friendship with Noctis, but it is so rushed at the end of the game that it feels a little forced.  The slower pace of Episode Prompto fixes this, but just like with Episode Ignis, the payoff that happened in the main game had already been seen by the players.  

 The whole conflict for Prompto during his DLC is that he worries his origins will mean that Noctis and the others will no longer want to be friends with him, and as a child that grew up very much alone (where the heck are his parents?!), friendship is vital to this poor kid.  The sequence where Prompto dreams he is an MT that is being pursued by Noct adds so much suspense and is an excellent visual to the anxiety he is feeling…or it would be if we didn’t already know that Noct accepts him with practically no convincing at all.  We already know that their friendship survives this revelation, so there is really no suspense for the players as they watch Prompto go through the motions of coming to terms with his origins.

 All of this could have been avoided if the darn DLC had been included in the main game in the first pla—No! Not getting on that soapbox!  I could go on about how much that bugs me, but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

 Now, if FFXV suffers from lots of payoff with very little setup, then KH3 has a lot of setup but very little payoff.

 For those of you who have read this far and didn’t see the spoiler warning at the top, this is your final notice:  There are major spoilers for the events of the recently released Kingdom Hearts III.  Turn back while you still can if you don’t want to be spoiled!

 With that out of the way…

 There are a lot of cutscenes in KH3, and I mean a lot.  It’s one of the controversial points I’ve read in a lot of reviews, but the presence of a lot of cutscenes doesn’t bother me too much when the game is trying to tie up loose ends and explain things in what is perceived as the final installment in a series.  Metal Gear Solid 4 had the same problem, but again, they were trying to tie up loose ends. The fact that the series has continued from there and thus only added more loose ends is also a topic for another day.  My point is that several long cutscenes are not necessarily a bad thing if they are used well.

 The problem with KH3 is that many of them are not used well. There are numerous cutscenes with Ansem the Wise, Ienzo, Dilan and the others that don’t really seem to have any point to the plot.  Sure, Ienzo talks about trying to find a way to help bring Roxas back, but they never end up doing that anyway.  They bring back Namine, certainly, but what were they trying to accomplish with all their talk about atoning?  I get what they want to atone for, but what are they doing to actually do that?  It’s a bunch of talk that doesn’t really go anywhere.

 Along the same lines is the scene with Even and Demyx. They talk about atoning and being benched and betraying the Organization, but the only thing that comes of it is Demyx brings Ansem and a vessel for Namine to Ienzo.  And then the conversation between Even and Demyx is never mentioned again.  What was the point?  Is Namine being brought back supposed to be the payoff?  But then we never interact with her at all.  She’s only seen during the ending cutscenes and has no dialogue with anyone.  Not very satisfying at all.  Where did her heart for the replica even come from anyway?  Her heart was in Kairi, who by that point is dead...sort of.  I actually think she was sent to the heavenly place Sora went when he had to gather up pieces of himself, but I have nothing to support that theory.

 Speaking of Kairi, her scenes with Axel during their keyblade training are great.  They are cute and provide good setup for both Axel’s vague memories of Xion and their abilities in wielding keyblades…which end up being pointless since Kairi ends up kidnapped (again) and Xemnas destroys Axel’s very cool fire keyblade, although it does come back later, so there is really no reason for Xemnas to taunt Axel about not being a guardian of light anymore.

 I’m not going to talk about how Kairi being kidnapped robs her of the agency she should have gained during her training (again, plenty of people have already talked about that), but it does make the scenes regarding her training seem like a cop out.  What was the point of showing all that if she was just going to be a kidnapped damsel again?  She doesn’t really do anything with the keyblade that we see, so it doesn’t add much to see that she was even training to begin with.

 Axel has the same problem since he loses his keyblade. He was training to use it, but then Xemnas destroys it at the first possible opportunity.  There was no scene where he saves the day with it or manages to defeat Isa or something along those lines with it, so watching those scenes again feels empty.  The setup was there, but there was no payoff.  What use is it to show the player that these two characters are training hard with keyblades if they end up not ever really using them?  The gun was shown, but not shot.

 Conversely, and very briefly, it was good that there was setup of the Riku Replica earlier on in the game so it didn’t seem like he completely came out of nowhere when he came to help Riku against the Organization’s Riku (man, there are a lot of Rikus here).

 Then again, there was supposed to be some reason that Marluxia, Larxene, Luxord and Demyx were brought back?  Some “important purpose”?  The “ancient keyblade legacy”?  Which is…what?  It’s not explained and it’s never mentioned again.  And what about all the scenes with Maleficent and Pete searching for the box? The game kept cutting back to them but never went anywhere with them.  What was the point?  Wouldn’t it have built more suspense if we hadn’t seen what they were doing? Otherwise it added nothing to the plot other than the fact that the black box was missing, which the player already knows…or at least most of us do, who know about the Master and Masters and all that.  Hey, look, there are a bunch of guns hanging on the wall, but they remain unfired!

 But...And it’s a big but…There is one way that Kingdom Hearts III really does setup and payoff well, and that’s when you look at the story of the game as a whole.

 Near the end of the game, Young Xehanort warns Sora that using the power of waking too much will cause him to “condemn your heart to that same abyss,” meaning that Sora will fall into darkness, something that almost came to pass at the end of Dream Drop Distance.  Mickey also warns him that he might not come home from his journey to find Kairi.  The final cutscene (not the secret ending) of the game shows Sora disappearing from Destiny Islands while everyone else is partying and having fun.  It is presumed that he died after finding Kairi again, though personally I’m not sure if death is really what happened or if it was more of falling into darkness.  I think that’s left up to the interpretation of the player.

 Whatever the case, Sora is separated from the group, having given himself up to darkness in one form or another to bring Kairi back. Believe it or not, this is actually foreshadowed during the events of the various Disney worlds Sora visits over the course of the game.  What is the common theme seen through each of the Disney worlds?  The loss of a loved one.  

 The Toy Story world has all the toys worried about whether they’ll ever see Andy again.  The Caribbean shows Will and Elizabeth separated, just like at the end of the movie that world is based on.  The Kingdom of Corona shows Rapunzel being willing to sacrifice her freedom for Eugene’s life, and Eugene ends up giving his own life to cut Rapunzel’s hair to defeat Mother Gothel.  Arendelle…do I need to explain?  Elsa is terrified of hurting Anna, which she unintentionally ends up doing.  The 100 Acre Wood has Pooh worried that Sora will go away, leading to Sora worrying that their bond has grown weaker. Monstropolis has less to do with the loss of a loved one and is more about Sully and Mike needing to protect Boo, whom they care about very much.  And San Fransokyo has Hiro dealing with needing to destroy the first version of Baymax, his good friend.  Only Olympus doesn’t fit this pattern in terms of its plot, but that’s probably because that was already done in Kingdom Hearts II…but Sora and Hercules do have a conversation about Herc wanting to save Meg with all his heart.  Sort of parallels Sora’s desire to rescue Kairi, doesn’t it?

 And what ends up happening?  Sora does exactly the same.  He ends up sacrificing himself to bring Kairi back from…wherever it is she is. It’s Kairi that ends up losing her loved one in the end.  That’s the ultimate payoff for the pretty strong setup that was building throughout the game.

 SquareEnix has the ability to tell really good stories in their games.  The aspects of the storytelling process they get right, they really get right.  The problem is that they are inconsistent.  There are many ways to tell a story, and as I mentioned in the beginning, you don’t have to use the technique of Chekov’s Gun to do so and do it well.  But when only half of a creative writing technique is used, it can take away from the story rather than add to it.

[knight-otu]

After Action Report - House, by Karona

On Sunday, May 6th, ClubFloyd played House, a parser-based interactive fiction by Karona.

Wait, what?

If the above sentence doesn't mean anything to you, the short of it is that Clubfloyd is a weekly event on a text-only MUD, the IFMUD, (usually) using a bot to play interactive fiction games, usually parser games in the tradition of Zork.

The game

The thought of losing you is my greatest fear.

House is a single room game in which the focus is the interaction with a single non-player character - Leah, the protagonist's wife. The game, released as part of the Spring Thing 2018 Festival, is set in a modern-day environment. The marriage of Ayumu and Leah is having troubles, and Leah seems to suffer from abandonment anxiety of some sort. The drive is then to figure out what is wrong, and how we can help her.

From here on, there will be spoilers. If you wish to play the game, you should avoid reading on.

The play

(Here, I would link to a transcript of the playing session. However, at the time I post his, the most recent batch of transcripts has not yet been posted. I will edit this post when that happens.)

House is heavily conversation-based. You won't get anywhere without asking or telling Leah about topics that come up, and remembering memories that surface as you talk to her. One of the first thing we noticed was that Leah wasn't wearing shoes and socks, because of her father's no footwear policy, and learned that he had custody of her after *he* had an affair. Something already seemed quite wrong here.

And the memories is where things get depressing - Leah does not share your memories, and this is one more thing we needed to figure out. At points, I feared that Leah was in a sanatorium, and we were simply visiting her there, indulging her. She talks about paintings and collages that are not there, doesn't remember the club we met in...

"I did not see the point of trying to convince Leah that we had been inside a club.  She was certain that we had not--and for good reason."

"Where is the collage?" I asked. Leah looked distressed and responded, "You really don't know?"

And as we talked to Leah further, more trouble surfaced.

"Leah interrupted and asked, "Are we still an 'us'"?"

"Could I give you a hug?" I requested. Leah said, "Yes," and wholeheartedly received my hug.  When I embraced her, I trembled.  I had not anticipated that hugging her would be different after our last encounter.

In our quest to find out what the problem was, we were greeted by other oddities and an accusation.

> X UNIFORM My uniform looked remarkably clean. [clubfloyd] DavidW says, "I wonder how we went to a construction job and returned with a clean uniform and spotless white socks."

"How could your dad have been untrue?" I asked. "Perhaps I should ask you that question," Leah said.  She then turned a raised eyebrow towards me and responded, "You already know all about being untrue, don't you?"

"Tell me about the woman who wrote the letter."

At which point we got stuck. It took a wording suggestion from Karona to push us back on the right track. And that track? It changed everything.

"Why did you choose metamorphosis as a theme?" I asked. "I was thinking of you," she said, "and from there it was simple to start thinking about seclusion in a cocoon and the emergence of a colorful new creature."

"On the wall I saw three paintings--one of two people dancing in a club, one of two people sitting on a blanket in a backyard, and one of two people standing near a Hanukkah menorah."

The problem was with us. Leah was not playing (or at least I assume so). This last sentence won't make much sense for anyone who hasn't played House to the end, but that's deliberate. I don't want to spoil the endings or the ending twist here.

In conclusion

Personally, I found House to be captivating. Leah's plight grabbed me, and I wanted to find a way to help her. Doing something else seemed wrong (though as it turns out, it also lead to giving hints), and did my best to ignore the option to go south and flee all over again.

Naturally, the game had its faults. It is an ambitious conversation-based game that requires not just asking/telling about topics, but combining them as well, and we stumbled around with that combining topics that apparently didn't go together. We did receive the in-game hint from Leah which topics to combine though, I believe. However, we also stumbled on the phrasing of the important question, and there we needed the author's help. A simple synonym in a subsequent should resolve this problem, though.

One review I read faulted the protagonist's "voice" as unemotional. While I can't call this false, exactly, I found that my own mindset was far more important to the feeling of the story than the voice of Ayumu.

The ending twist at first seemed to come very abruptly. With the benefit of a little hindsight, I believe it to be hinted quite well, without it being telegraphed.

[adaliacom105]

Blog 5

Hello classmates, professor, and anyone else that has stumbled upon this blog of mine! So you have probably noticed the trend by now that all the other blogs have something to do with movies. Well, this blog is no different! This week it was superhero movies, and they were fantastic! It was an interesting experience for me since they were live-action, and I usually prefer animated hero movies instead. The Marvel movies really impressed me and confused me since there were some characters I didn’t know because I have only seen their animated counterparts. So I might be watching more Marvel movies soon because of how good they were.

So now that you know what I have been watching, let’s get on with the topic for this blog. In this one, I will be creating my own superhero, and I am both hyped and scared for it. There is so much detail when it comes to creating your own character I learned that the hard way in my Sequential Arts class. Well, let’s get down to business then.

First things first let us start with their name and superhero name.

I have chosen the name Aelita Stones. I chose this name for two reasons. The first reason being that in my family by complete coincidence all the first-born female’s names end with the letter A. So I decided to do the same here. The second reason being it’s the name of a character from one of my favorite cartoons, Code Lyoko. Code Lyoko is a show about five teens who travel to a virtual world in order to fight Xana, an evil program trying to take over the world. Any character outside the group thinks it sounds like a game, and it does. In Code Lyoko, Aelita starts off as a being that lives in the virtual world called Lyoko. Since it's kind of like my character's power, I decided to use the name. This then brings me to the hero name, and that would be Player 1.

What does Aelita look like?

Well, she has dark brown hair with some pink highlights and chocolate brown eyes to match. She has a roundish face, and her eyes can be seen sporting some eye bags from all nighters and her mom refusing her to skip classes. Aelita prefers comfort over fashion, so she can be seen wearing baggy clothes. She is never seen without a sweater, whether it be tied around her waist or properly worn. She is also short...why? Well, because I refuse to make someone taller than me!

Now let's move on to her powers and how she got them.

Aelita’s powers are that when she uses this special handheld console, she can take classes and traits like from videogames and apply them to herself and others. For example she can use the handheld console and become a mage, an assassin, or a fighter class. Whenever she chooses a class she gets a new change of clothes that match the type she is currently using. The same mechanics of videogames apply to Aelita as well, which means levels, exp, traits, stats, special abilities, health, and extra lives. At first, she only has access to three classes, which are Mage, Warrior, and Thief, which all begin at level 1. All new class levels start at level 1. In order to unlock more classes, there are conditions that need to be met, but most are through leveling up. To do this, Aelita needs exp, which she can get in three ways. The first way would be going inside the special handheld console that gave her powers. Inside it has training and levels to help her master her powers. The second way would be real-life battles like you see in the games. The third and final way would be to do real-life tasks or ‘quests’ such as going to the store because mom asked, they don’t give much, but it’s still nice. In addition to training, her console can be used to store things like how bags in games are able to store many things. It doesn’t matter the size; it can all go into the console….., even humans. Another power she possesses is to give a class to another person, and they become player 2. With this power, she doesn’t need to be close to the person she is bestowing the power upon; she just needs to see them at least once, and they become an option on her list. She then gains control of the person like a playable character, and the area becomes the stage with boundaries within a limit. The downside to this is that they start off as level one unless she has taken over you before. In good news, they start off with three lives. After you die the second time, she has it set to be stored in the console in order not to risk it. Aelita can let them control themselves and join in the battle if she doesn’t or can’t stay on the sidelines anymore. She can make Players 2 and 3, and they can’t be the same class, or it causes some strain on her body. With enough training, this can be improved upon. She can also max out her traits or push up her level temporarily, but it leaves her drained and shouldn’t be done that often.

How did she get this awesome handheld console, you ask?

Well, she actually wasn’t supposed to get it at all. Aelita is a pretty known gamer, so when she opened her mail one day and saw a video game console, she thought it was some company who wanted to use her to promote their products, so she didn’t think anything of it. So Aelita was pretty surprised when she went to test drive the new console and all of a sudden she was in new clothes and broke her door. There are plenty of people trying to take this new power from her, but she has decided she likes it and won’t give it up!

The next thing would be Aelita’s history.

She was born on September 16, 2002, in Fortniles. Why that date? It's the date from one of the first games I ever played, Animal Crossing on the Gamecube (The very first would be Sonic on the Gameboy….I feel old). I choose Fortniles because I made it up, and it sounds cool in my head.

Who are her parents? Well, they are Flint Stones and Alexandra Stones. Flint is a doctor, and his wife is a zoologist. I one hundred percent picked Flint’s name because of Flintstones. Now there is a family tradition of naming the firstborn in his family after a stone. The two have been together for 20 years now. Next is the siblings.

Aelita has an older brother by two years named Jasper and was the one who actually got her into video games. They have a typical brother-sister relationship of bugging each other and always having each other's back. Aelita also has a younger sister named Yasmin, who is six years old. Aelita is usually the one to babysit her, teach her things, and spoil her a bit.

The next bit would be her childhood and adolescence.

Aelita is an indoor child, which means she prefers to be inside rather than outside. This would lead her brother to teach her about videogames and how to play them. They would then play with each other and rely on one another for a part the other wasn’t so good at. As the years went by, she started playing more and more games and became better at them as well. This then leads us into her adolescence. She has now become an awkward teen and has trouble making friends outside of her video games. She goes to school and is pretty smart, and has been caught for playing games during class multiple times. Her favorite class is English because the teacher is not picky about the subjects of the essays, so Aelita likes the freedom. She hates the gym as she has poor physical health and bad eating habits. This then gets in the way of her hero work as she has to get in shape, which eventually lessens her hatred of gym (curse them making you use effort). 

The next question is if Aelita is a hero, anti-hero, or villain?

The answer is Aelita is a hero, but since she is a teen and not fully mature, there are incidents where she abuses her new found powers. For example, temporarily maxing out her charm attribute inorder to convince her teacher to give back everything he had confiscated from her or using it to get a new friend.

The next question is to talk about her psyche, level of intelligence, and emotional attributes.

Aelita isn’t the fittest; as said before, she hates the gym, is an indoor child, and doesn’t have the best eating habits. She is a little chubby. This leads to a rocky start for her superhero career, but as time moves forward, she does get better and lose some weight. As for intelligence, she is very smart and usually receives 90s on her test, for she knows her parents would kill her and take away her technology otherwise. All the strategy games and puzzles have helped her think outside the box and in battle. For emotional attributes, well, she can be shy and awkward at first and then becomes loud and awkward as you get to know her. She is also excitable when in front of something she believes to be awesome. What does she advocate for? Aelita’s motto is you do you as long as it's nothing terrible. Her current goal is to win a gaming tournament and to live up to the heroes in her games and in life. Is she successful at it? She is trying hard. There have been successes and failures, but she is learning.

In terms of who they are, likened from the DC Universe and Marvel Cinematic, I would say Firestorm and Blue Beetle from DC and Spiderman from the Marvel Cinematic. Firestorm was the first one that came to mind when answering this question, and that is because of his personality. He can be smart at times, but at others, he is the goofy voice in a severe situation, but when it comes down to it, you can rely on him. Blue Beetle was because the stories are kind of similar. Aelita gets a strange package that gives her powers, and Jaime Reyes gets a blue beetle from space stuck to his back one day that gives him armor; both of these events changed them both. I say Spiderman because I imagine Aelita to act in a similar manner.

The final thing to talk about would be Aelita’s future.

How and when she dies? 

I honestly don’t know that quite yet. Aelita would prefer not to die at all, but if she had to, she would like to die knowing she did everything she could rather than be sloppy. Like she imagines it from the movies where they sacrifice their lives for others to go on but understands that it’s not how it works. It could be from anything really, and it doesn't have to be super related otherwise. Until then, she continues to live until that day comes.

What legacy does she leave behind? That would be the new Player 1. She ends up passing the torch to someone new to take over her position as a hero. She actually helps mentor the new hero through her handy dandy console, where she has collected her memories and preserved her in a way so she could help the next generation as best she can.

Well, we're finally done with introducing my very own superhero, Aelita Stones or better known as Player 1, or at least to those in that fictional world where she lives in. Thank you for reading this long blog, and I hope you enjoyed my character.