#worst part is ive only played 2 days in game ive just been setting up the save the whole time

[sojutrait]

uni student finally gets reprieve from school, plays uni simulator for six hours 

im not joking ive really been playing for six hours 

[ddarker-dreams]

Online Love. Yan Shigaraki x Reader [Part 5]

Shigaraki has never had a full grasp on understanding others.

It’s never presented itself as an issue before, due to his unique lifestyle that doesn’t require him to rely upon others to the same extent most do. He doesn’t need to bend himself to the will of others. If anything, people need to mold themselves to his liking. 

There’s no place for coquettish remarks and hidden agendas for the people around Shigaraki. He wouldn’t care for it, and they’d be cut off without a second thought. 

So where do you fit into that? 

He doesn’t know himself. The black and white relationships that stay in neat, understandable boxes for him are all but wrecked by your presence. Where his underlings bite their tongue and present themselves to his liking, you feel no obligation to do the same.

You live as you please, speaking to him as you please. The rules he’s used to don’t apply to you, you don’t even know they exist in the first place. If anyone acted as you did towards Shigaraki, they’d undoubtedly be killed for it. 

There’s a fondness that’s reserved solely for you. 

Even so, he can’t help but feel aggravated at how you’ve been treating him lately. The past three days have been a miserable stretch, his mood taking a turn for the worst. Not due to anything you’ve said to him, no, but because of the opposite.

You haven’t messaged him in seventy-two hours. 

This has never happened before, in the entire time he has known you. In the past three days you’ve not logged onto any of your games, responded to his messages, or uploaded on social media. He’s aware of the fact that you’re physically fine -- a bit of stalking ensured that nothing had happened to you.

A part of him almost wishes that was the case, so he could make sense of it. It would be undoubtedly easier to digest the situation, and he could get you out of the situation with ease.

But the aspect of the unknown is what troubles him the most. His mind wonders pathetically, grasping at any straws to make sense of why you’ve been living your life normally; just without him. 

Staring at his monitor in the dim light of his room, Shigaraki grimaces at the blinking cursor in front of him. Coarse fingers hover over the keyboard, wanting so desperately to seek you out; but unsure of how to go about it. He wants to demand an explanation. 

Were you really able to live your life peacefully without him? Did Shigaraki delude himself of the symbiotic relationship he once believed you two shared? 

His teeth ache from the hours spent grinding together, neck raw from constant scratching. Sleep has all but evaded him, as he spent hours painfully waiting for you to come back to him. For things to go back into the routine he was used to. 

Your absence serves as a reminder of how much he needs you. 

Narrowing his bloodshot eyes, he abruptly stands from his trash covered desk and stalks over towards the door. How dare you ignore him, how dare you treat him like this! Did he mean nothing to you all along? Have you just been waiting for the chance to cut him off, having been secretly disgusted by him all along?

Fury masks over any secret feelings of hurt, Shigaraki intent on demanding Kurogiri to warp him over to you. He’d get an explanation one way or another. Even if he had to pry it from you. Staying idle any longer would surely be the death of him.

Before he opens the door, he hears the custom alert. The one that he had set for you, so he could always know when you were messaging him. 

Shigaraki’s mind goes blank as he goes back over to his computer. He wonders if it was imagined, only to be disproved by a message from you on his screen.

From: [First] 2:06 AM

hello tomo-kun

That... that’s it? Mouth slightly agape from confusion, Shigaraki’s mind races with countless responses. Ranging from cruel words directed at you for ignoring him for so long, to inquiring about what even caused it in the first place. But none of them are typed out as he delivers an equally mundane response. 

To: [First] 2:06 AM

Hey

Anyone else would’ve been facing the wrath of hell right now, but Shigaraki manages to contain himself. Knowing that you haven’t forgotten about him or discarded him was enough to momentarily distract him from his previous rage. Biting his finger nails that were already short from countless hours of similar activity, he awaits your response. 

From: [First] 2:10 AM 

i’m sorry that i haven’t been around... 

From: [First] 2:11 AM

i’ve been having kinda a bad time lately with some stuff. but if it’s okay with you can we play some comp? i kinda just wanna take my mind off it. if you’re not busy that is 

It isn’t concern that he feels, but an undying curiosity. If something major had happened to you, like a death of a loved one, he would’ve known about it by now. What could’ve happened that upset you this much that he wasn’t alerted about? 

Shigaraki silently ponders to himself. Maybe he needs better scouts. 

To: [First] 2:12 AM 

Whatever you want, idm

An immediate response. 

From: [First] 2:12 AM

thank u, i appreciate it

From: [First] 2:13 AM

aaa i feel so dumb. im sorry im sure i worried you. i just havent been in the mood to talk to anyone. its nothing like crazy or anything im fine, just some life stuff 

Shigaraki’s never been the best at comforting people, as it’s a task that he’s never been given. He can barely take care of himself, much less anyone else. But in situations like this, he feels you’re supposed to offer something. Only for you would he stretch himself in this way.

To: [First] 2:15 AM 

What happened 

It might seem like a lackluster response, but to anyone who knows Shigaraki it would come as a surprise. People’s personal affairs have never interested him in the slightest, but you’re a unique case. 

From: [First] 2:16 AM

wellllll its kinda stupid but ig it doesnt hurt to tell you lmao 

From: [First] 2:17 AM

ive... ive had a crush on this guy for a long time. we’ve known one another for a few years, stuff like that. anyways i worked up the courage to ask him out and he got upset at me. saying stuff like im ruining our friendship. it was just really bad, and ever since then ive been on auto pilot 

The word crush hits him like a ton of bricks. He’s incapable of focusing on anything else in that moment, as time all but comes to a stop. His breathing uneven, and hands shaky; he sits back from the light of his screen. Disgust isn’t the right word for it, it doesn’t begin to describe the barrage of emotions he’s experiencing. 

You liked someone. You liked someone that isn’t him. 

Even if he actually wanted to, he couldn’t fake a decent response to your message. All along he’s been under the impression that you may return his feelings. That all the little gestures meant you treasure him on the same level he does you, and that you would one day be his. 

Hours spent daydreaming of you sweetly confessing to him come to mind, as his vision goes red. 

It doesn’t matter how. He’s going to find out who this cesspool of human waste is, he’s going to savor tearing each limb from their body and take pleasure in his screams of agony. Shigaraki will take care of this individual personally, wanting them to suffer in the same way he has. 

There isn’t any way you could like someone else. This all has to be a joke, a cruel prank with an eventual punchline. There’s no other way to make sense of it. No one else could be even remotely deserving of your affections other than him, and no one will ever have them if he could do anything about it.

He will figure out what to do with you and your betrayal later. For now, only this apple of your eye has his attention. Countless cruel ideas flood his thoughts like a tidal wave, a malicious grin breaking out onto his face. 

Shigaraki will make them pay.

[cuban-feminist-that-gives-a-hoot]

Trails of Cold Steel IV

Been about a week or so since I've beaten it and I have thoughts. Lots of them. I don't expect everyone to agree or for my thoughts to be fully coherent, but here we go:

1. Gilliath Osborne is a fucking asshole. Holy shit, he is the worst father of all Zemuria, hands down. Abandons his son at 5 years old after his push into politics got his wife killed and his son nearly killed, then doesn't even tell him that he's his father until a traumatic moment happens. Then, he proceeds to use his son as a tool in his expansionist policies, followed by using him to cause the end of the fucking world. On top of that, his wife was 10 years his junior, so we can potentially add him being a creep depending on how old he was when he met his wife. 0/10, complete and total fucking asshole to the very bitter end.

2. Black Alberich's an asshole too. Second-worst father of all Zemuria, if only for being responsible for spawning Alisa Reinford rather than being an absolute, complete dick (Not to say that he isn't, he is). A shame that we only get glimpses of Franz Reinford towards the end, as it would've been a lot more interesting to learn about him directly.

3. Cedric Reise Arnor is a dick. But he's an interesting, entertaining dick. He is someone that has a very interesting story development throughout the four games that make up ToCS and I'm fascinated by where he's going to go now that he's a member of Ouroboros. Plus, it's nice to see Shirley take him under her wings in solidarity with folks that underwent trauma.

4. Rufus Albarea is the worst brother in all of Zemuria. Like, holy shit, how much of a shitbag do you have to be to basically throw all that nobility out the door to stab a teammate in the back? Glad he got arrested. Also, an excellent performance from D.C. Douglas, who shows off why he's so good at playing upper-crust assholes, on top of robots. There's a reason why Legion and Albert Wesker are his best known roles and him playing Rufus and Valimar showcase both sides easily.

5. The Black Workshop level is one of the most fun levels to play in ever. You have to switch between three different parties, manage orbment levels, and get to see Rean at his most evil & lost-looking ever so far. Him looking all hollow-like? Niiice! But more importantly, the gameplay there was so much fun. The salt pillars are a close second for fun levels to play.

6. Fighting the true final boss was equally awesome. It reminds me of the Bizarro Sephiroth fight where you're fighting with 3 parties and you're fighting different sides of the final boss. It's an awesome mechanic and I love setting up my parties to kick ass. Roselia and Vita in the same party? Absolutely dangerous and fun.

7. Machia Regnitz is the most terrifying accountant-looking inspector from the Government Accountability Inspectorate one will ever meet. Imagine being a regular person working, only for him to show up to inspect your workplace. Then, when your workplace fails the inspection, he immediately starts blasting away with multiple guns. This is a PTO day if I've ever heard of one.

8. I'm honestly glad that we got to see the normal ending first before we can see the golden ending, as it allows us to see what happens if we don't get that Earthen Prison to trap Ishmelga in it.

9. Crow Armbrust is what I'm talking about when it comes to someone that is a likable character that did some really shady shit. Yes, he was a terrorist, but you understood and got why he did what he did. It didn't exactly justify his actions, but you got where he was coming from. On top of that, he holds a lot of respect for those that he works with, from his teammates in the Imperial Liberation Front to Class VII to even his peers with Towa, George, and Angelica. He never crossed what could be considered a moral event horizon, where he could be considered irredeemable. In short, he's not Goro Akechi.

10. The voice acting for all the games is top-notch. Props to the folks that did the voice casting for each and every role because every last one of the parts played by the actors was perfect. This was a voice dub that was done so perfectly that turning on the Japanese voices seems offensive in comparison, and not just for this game, but for all four games. This is a voice dub that deserves all the love and respect it earns because it is such a flawless performance from everyone. And even the voices that do falter a bit is not enough to take away from how good it is.

11. If you haven't played any of the Trails of Cold Steel games, what are you waiting for? They are worth it. All four are available on PS4 and PC. You owe it to yourself to play these games now. If you love a turn-based JRPG that will take a decent amount of time to play, then this is the game for you.

[jawritter]

Gifted Hands

Part 2 (complete)

Request: That surgeon Jensen story was so amazing. Bless the anon who requested that & bless you for writing it😂 reading that I had idea, if you could write another Jensen story, maybe it could be the reader having a major surgery and she is scared so Jensen being her surgeon prepping her from like a month? He stays with her while anaesthesia and then takes care of her? Oh oh, you can maybe add some funny, embarrassing moments, like catheter? That sounded weird but it would make an interesting story😂

Pairing: Surgeon!Jensen x Reader

Word Count: 3460

Warnings: Smut, unprotected sex, fingering, a little anal play (very light), suggestive squirting, probably language some where. I think that’s it.

If you missed part 1 you can read it here!!

Gifted Hands Pt. 1

Want more? Check out my masterlist:

*******MASTERLIST*******

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One month. One month of doctors appointments, one month of x rays, one month of hip readjustments to find out where you needed to be. Then there was the blood work, the test, the stress of knowing you have a fairly major surgery coming, and you were not looking forward to it. In fact you had it marked as `D-Day '' on your calendar. 

One month of trying to catch up on as much work as you could, and sell as many paintings and things as you can before you were going to be down for upwards of six weeks before you could even could even function properly on your own, and six months before you were even fully back to yourself.

This had set your whole life back, every step you took forward, you felt like you just took six back. You were afraid you were going to lose your apartment. You were afraid that you were going to lose it all because you couldn’t work. You were literally agreeing to trust a complete stranger to help you through your recovery. 

Speaking of said stranger, if it wasn’t for Jensen, you probably would have gone crazy. He’d literally been your saving grace through all of this. Even though you didn’t want to admit it, you looked forward to your appointments so that you could see him. 

The third appointment in, with only two more before your surgery, he’d asked you out to dinner before you left the office that night; and you agreed to go. One because he was insanely attractive, but also because you wanted to get to know the man that was going to be your caretaker more before you were almost completely dependent on this man for at least 6 weeks. 

You were not disappointed. 

Jensen was funny, compassionate, and caring. He was everything you ever wanted in man, but had convinced yourself that it didn’t exist. He had the kindest heart that you’d ever found in another person. 

He was smart, and witty, he seemed to know just how to make you smile. Even when you didn’t think you could, he wouldn’t stop until he pulled it out of you. No matter how down you were, or what all was going wrong, he seemed to just be right there, and was more than content to be there. 

It didn’t stop with dinner. You found yourself spending a lot of time together. He’d started picking you up after he got off of work everyday. Taking you out to eat, or just coming to hang out with you.

The day before your surgery was scheduled he text you and told you to pack up enough clothes to do you for the foreseeable future, to just make sure you had everything you needed, and he’d be there to pick you up after work and get you settled and ready to come and stay at his place after your surgery so that he could take care of you. 

You felt awkward about it at first, and the fear that you were going to  lose your apartment was something you had shared with Jensen, though he swore if that happened you’d figure it out together. 

You ended up just staying there with him that night, and he drove you to the hospital this morning. The morning of your surgery. Your “D-Day”. 

To say that you were nervous was an understatement, but it did make you feel better that he was going to be the one that was performing the surgery. He stayed with you until he had to go and clock in. After you were situated in a room and hooked up to the IV’s and things. 

Now it was the waiting game. Jensen swore that it wouldn’t take long, and he’d be back to get you with and bring you back.

Sitting there in your overly exposing nightgown, your mind was wondering on just how much things had changed for you over the past month, and you were wondering just how much more they were about to keep changing. 

You hated the situation you found yourself in, but you were more than a little grateful that you had found your way to Jensen. He was quickly becoming everything to you, and he made it no secret his feelings for you. 

You’ve heard your whole life everything happened for a reason, that nothing happened by accident, even the bad things. Even though this to you looked bad, you knew that without a shadow of a doubt it led you to Jensen, so maybe it would be worth it in the end.

The sound of the door opening pulled you out of your thoughts as Jensen entered into the room. Holding a catheter that was still wrapped in it’s bag in his hand, sort of behind his back like he was hoping you wouldn’t notice it.

“What’s that?” You asked him as he sat down on the bed next to you. Taking your hand in his, playing with your fingers. 

“Catheter… Don’t worry. I’m not going to put it in until you're out, but it will have to stay in for the next five days until you can get yourself up and walking around on your own again.” He said. You must have looked as mortified as you felt, because your face said it all. He started to crack up as soon as he looked up at you.

“You gonna pass out on me sweetheart? It’s just a catheter. It’s standard medical procedure for things like this.” 

You hid your face in your hands. Trying to fight down the horrible embarrassment that was creeping it’s way beyond the total terror to the surface to override what you were feeling, and make you wish that you could jump into the floor if it would open up to swallow you.

“Well…. I uh…. I was hoping that the first time you saw that particular part of me, it wouldn’t be because you were having to insert a catheter.” 

At that he threw his head back in a perfect laugh. Shaking his whole body, making you forget momentarially about your current embarrassing situation. 

“Is that what you're worried about?” He asked you, leaning over and kissing the top of your forehead before standing up and starting to adjust and IV to so that it could travel with you to the surgical theater where they would be performing your suring. 

“I promise you pretty girl I’d much rather be inserting something that was not a catheter myself, I’ve never been more jealous of a tub.” He said winking at you, trying to make light of the situation, but you blushed deeper and pulled the covers over your head with a groan. 

Leaning down and pulling them back. His face is so close to yours that you could feel his breath fanning over you.

“Let’s just work on getting you better, then you’ve got all the time you want with me.”

Leaning down he brushed his lips over yours in a quick kiss before the door opened, revealing the anesthesiologist, and another nurse. 

In less time than you could even regester what was happening you were in the operating room, Arms being strapped to the table as they do when they are going to perform surgery on you. Jensen walked around into our line of view just as you were about to start panicking,

“Okay sweetheart, we’re going to give a little shot into your IV here, and then put that mask on you there, then you're going to take a little nap for us, before you know it this will all be over.” Jensen said. Fully scrubbed in for the surgery, a cap covering his hair and a mask over his perfect face.

“You're going to be there when I wake up right?” You asked him as you saw the anesthesiologist inject the liquid into the IV. The nurse is getting ready to move the mask over your face.

“I’m going to be right there sweetheart.”

That was the last thing you remembered before it all went black.

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The recovery was NOT a walk in the park. True to Jensen’s word he was right there holding your hand when you woke up in the hospital, and he never left your side. Not once. He’d taken vacation time during your time at the hospital and personal time to extend into that so that he could be with you through the worst part of your recovery. Which the hospital was more than willing to work with him. 

After you were finally released from the hospital, and that damn catheter was removed, thank God. Jensen brought you home to his apartment. 

He did everything for you, even took on your physical therapy yourself so that you didn’t have to go back and forth to the hospital. 

Over the course of those six weeks you got closer and closer to your green eyed surgeon. Who you were curtain was really your angle posing as a surgeon, to be here for you right here in this moment because without him you wouldn’t have made it, you were curtain of it.

Even after the six weeks was up he convinced you to just stay with him at his apartment. Because let’s be honest, you two were more than just friends. He said he’d gotten so used to sleeping next to you at night that he probably wouldn’t be able to sleep without his arms wrapped around you, and if you were being honest with yourself you wouldn’t be able to sleep either. 

Even after life had progressed to somewhat of a normalcy and Jensen had gone back to work you still didn't start feeling like  100% yourself until around six months. By then Jensen and yourself were openly in a relationship and had been for months, but you there was one thing you were afraid of right now. 

Sex…

You were afraid it was going to be painful, or knock something loose again, and they would have to go back in, even though your primary doctor said that you were in the clear, and you did feel better. 

Jensen was patient with you. Even though you’d been sharing a bed for ever since you came home from the hospital, he never pushed you. 

Never once did he try and convince you to have sex with him. He let you work through things in and at your own pace, and sex was no different. It’s not that you didn’t WANT to. Any woman with a pulse would want to have sex with a man that looks like him, but fear of having to go through all of what you went through again was keeping you at bay.

You were sitting on the bed in your shared bedroom, watching something on netflix on our laptop, when Jensen came through the door from work.

He looked more tired tonight than you’d ever seen him. He stripped off his scrubs and made his way to the bathroom, not saying a word as he closed the door. 

It must have been a really bad day, because he usually always greeted you before he went to take he shower. 

You waited patiently. Giving him whatever space he needed. Letting him work through whatever it was until he was ready to talk to you. He never pushed you, so you were never going to push him.

Finally he made his way out of the bathroom and flopped down on the bed next to you. Hands covering his face. It took him a long time before he finally spoke.

“I lost someone today. I couldn’t stop the bleeding, and I lost her.”

You made your way over to him and snuggled into this side. He didn’t hesitate in wrapping his thick, surprisingly muscular arms around you. Holding you close to him.

“I’m sorry, I’m sure you did everything you could.” 

You didn’t really know what you could say to make him feel better. You wished there was something you could do, but you just didn’t know what.

“Guess my hands aren’t as gifted as I thought they were….” He mumbled against your hair. Running little trails around the exposed skin of your lower back with his finger tips.

It was a gentle touch. Something he usually did at night while you were laying together, but this time it was different for you. Lighting a fire deep down inside of you. Sparking something in you that you hadn’t felt in a very, very, long time.

Shifting your bodies to the point of you laying underneath him he kissed you deeply, slowly. Enough to make your toes curl. His tongue slowly exploring your mouth. His hands lightly brushing over the exposed skin on your side where your shirt rode up when he flipped you. You couldn’t stop yourself from melting into him. 

Pulling away he smiled at you softly and went to move off of you, not wanting to push you too hard. You reached up and grabbed his shirt pulling him back down into a more demanding kiss. This time stealing his breath away from him. 

“Why don’t you show me just how gifted those hands of yours are?” You told him. Running your fingers through his still damp hair. An impish smirk crossing his face as he hovered over you, staring down at you. 

“You sure baby? I don’t want you to feel like you have to do this just to make me feel better.” Jensen said, but you could feel the outline of his impressive length pressed against your thigh. You knew he wanted this with you, and you more than anything tonight wanted it with him. It was time. You’d put it off as long as you needed to, probably too long, and you weren’t going to let fear rule you. 

“I’m sure.”

His lips were on yours again in an instance, his hands trailing up your sides. Taking with it your shirt until you had to sit up and let him throw it off of you. Your hands pulling his shirt over his head and throwing it somewhere across the room.

Your hands trailed up his thick, broad chest and shoulders as his fingertips lightly explored the skin of your breast.

“No bra sweetheart?” He asked you jokingly. You couldn’t help the giggle that exapted your lips as his finger tips tickled at your sides. When they ghosted over you. 

“They’re not very comfortable to sleep in”

“Oh I’m not complaining.” 

With that his soft lips wrapped around your exposed nipple sucking and licking at it lightly. Just enough to drive you crazy before moving on to the other breast. Your back arching into him as his hands roamed your skin. Leaving a trail of fire in their wake. All the way down to your panties. Pulling them down your leg and you kicked them off the rest of the way.

“Your so beautiful sweetheart.” 

His lips made their way up to your neck, and then to the sensitive skin behind your ear. 

His hands trailed from knee up the inside of your thigh. Grazing over your already wet folds before making their way down and up the other leg, and back again.

You were about to beg him to stop teasing you, but you never got it out. His fingers found your clit about the time you thought you couldn’t take anymore of his teasing, and a moan fell from your lips. 

He slowly worked you in slow circles. Barely touching you, then applying almost too much pressure. Sliding two of his thick fingers into your aching core. Curling them slowly as he thrust them in and out of you in an agonizingly slow rhythm. 

His thumb is still working your clit as he did. The coil building tightly in your stomach as you neared your release. Jensen kept on working you over building you hirer and hirer until you couldn't take it anymore and were thrown over the edge. Your mouth falling open in a noiseless moan, your body almost convulsing underneath him as he worked your through it. Not slowing his admisistrations. 

Even after you came down. Your body is over sensitive, and you tried to move away from him. He held you down to him. Slipping a third finger inside of you.

“Jensen I can’t” You said, your voice weak and hoarse.

“Yes you can sweetheart. Trust me, trust your body. Let me show you what these hands can really do.”

Before you could respond to him, he put the middle finger of his free hand in his mouth, and brought it down to your tight little whole. Rimming you a few times before inserting his finger slowly into your ass, building it up to the same pace as his hand that was currently still working you aching, over sensitive cunt over. Your body was shaking underneath him. A whole new sensation added to you. The pressure building in your lower half was almost painful, and were scared you were going to pee on him.

“Jensen….”

“Your right there sweetheart, let go.”

And with that you did. Your orgasm hitting you so hard you couldn’t even scream. Your vision blurring as he slowly worked your through, a gush of liquid leaving your body. Coating his hand hand forearm. 

When he pulled away from you, your body was still shaking. Coming to hover over you Jensen pushed the hair that was tuck to your sweaty forehead away from your face, and peppered you with little kisses. Waiting on you to fully come back to him.

When your vision finally came into focus again, you found his beautiful olive green eyes staring at you. Lust blown and hooded, but still piercing nonetheless.

“Hey.” You whispered to him. Still floating a little from the strongest orgasm you’d ever had in your life. 

“Hey, you okay?” He asked, and you nodded at him.

Spreading your legs with his knees he positioned himself between your thighs, his tip grazing over your entrance. While you were lost completely he must have shead the rest of his clothes…

“We can still stop if you want.” He whispered against your lips, but you placed yours to his. Kissing him to stop him from worrying over you. 

Slowly as to not hurt you, he slid himself into you inch by inch. Stealing and giving you time to adjust to him. He was massive, and he stretched you in a way that was almost painful, but was so satisfying all at the same time. 

Kissing your neck and jaw. You nodded at him. Letting him know it was okay to move. 

He pulled out of you almost all the way before sliding slowly back home. Repeating this action over and over again. Moans falling form both of your lips as he slowly picked up his pace. Driving you both towards your end with each deep thrust. 

The pain you scared of and worried over wasn’t there. Everything you were afraid of seemed so silly now. The only thing that was there was a deeper love for him than you had ever known was possible. 

It wasn’t long until that familiar burn had started in your lower abdomen the coil winding tight again as your walls started to flutter around his throbbing cock. Waves of pleasure hitting you with every drag of his manhood against your walls. His tip hitting your cervical wall as he brushed your G spot over and over again.

“Jensen.. I…”

“I know baby me too…”

Reaching between your connected bodies Jensen started making harsh circles over clit. With only two more thrust you were thrown over the edge again. His name falling from your lips like a prayer as he rode you through it. With only a few more thrust he was there with you. Stilling deep inside of you. His seed coating your walls. His body collapsing on top of yours. Barely holding his weight off of you on his forearms as he tried to regain control of his body.

Once you both had come back down from your high he pulled you close to his side. Hands trailing little patterns over your skin as you laid together. Skin against skin. Just enjoying being close to each other. 

Right there in that moment you were more sure than ever that EVERYTHING good and bad happens for a reason. It’s a journey, and it isn’t always easy, but if it weren’t for the bad. There would be no good. 

Even though your situation was scary to you, and harder than anything you’d ever gone through, you would have never found Jensen if it had never happened. 

Your life hand changed forever, all because two gifted hands were there to hold you through it, and because of that, if the outcome was the same, you’d go through it all over again. Just to get to him.

“I love you Jensen.”

“I love you too pretty girl….”

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Tag List:

@deanwanddamons​​ @imabitch4jensen​​ @rvgrsbrns​​ @bi-danvers0​​ @onethirstyunicorn​​ @i-love-superhero​​ @onethirstyunicorn​

[macgyvertape]

50 or so hours into Cyberpunk 2077

This should be roughly the correct amount of time, ive been leaving the game running as I get up to get food or do stretches. Quests are roughly in order I did them

non spoilers above cut:

 i haven't found a single hat/helmet i like, and since you can't hide them I just am not wearing any. It matters that much.

I posted the other day about bugs, every few hours I play I find new bugs. some require me to go back and reload a save others I honestly can’t tell if it’s a bug or just really poor development

there are several perks that don’t quite do what the description says, like the Anamesis perk. Based on reddit and trying it out it seems to just not do anything.

sometimes in car chase segments the passenger will say “look out” as cars spawn in my path and hit me. Can’t tell if that was deliberate or a pop in issue

Yeah I’ve just totally given up on doing pacifist things unless required by a mission. Given up on doing stealth too unless a mission objective, except for sneaking around to set up a fight.

:readmore:

the delemain car quest is fun. From the shock of the one going "beep beep motherfucker" and doing a hit and run to start it off, to the GLADOS car i see a lot of people talking about. It was fun to explore the city when i might have missed places like the landfill apparently there is follow up on T-bug's death if you go back to the quick hack shop in Kabuki. It's not much but better than nothing I made the pass with Panam of "what if the room just had one bed". I know she won't do a wlw romance, which is fine since I wouldn’t have chosen her.  I enjoy her as a character, don’t get me wrong, my V considers her as a friend, but it seems like theres always drama going on which would be tiring. I would have gone for a fling, i like her leotard-pants combo with all the straps

but also her questline was buggy as hell. Multiple cases of having to reload due to clipping into objects, including her in a driving section, or just insta-dying when collision physics with some rocks broke "your neural network can no longer function independantly of the chip" me slapping my desk: s y m b i o te!!! come on lets have some s y m b i o s i s

in the scene with hellman i really liked how Johnny moved around the room. It made him feel like he was really there. it was hard to follow the convo as I left the room, i would not have understood it without subtitles. But i guess Takemura fucking waterboarded hellman. :|

lol I hope the dialogue is different b/c i refuse to smoke for Johnny

i am level 18 and still can't beat the first opponents in the fist fighting quest. ffs

I looked up the romances options so I went to do the I fought the law quest as soon as i got it. ACAB, but like I literally just met River Ward 2 minutes ago, and I really like him. His earring and cyborg eye, his big fluffy coat. I'm definitely gonna sleep with him Ok i like how when River Ward is dealing with the tiger claws if you interject it leads to a fight. It goes better if you follow his instructions and let him deal with it. Seriously I enjoy that sometimes its good to not pick a dialogue choice.

during the red queen club part, there was no dialogue over the phone. So i reloaded a save and got myself spotted and attacked. Then River showed up to help me <3 and it was more enjoyable having him there. I honestly am not sure if him not going to the club level is bug or not.

then uuuuuugh the worst of irl police "cops are my family" from Detective Han. Again ACAB "FRATERNITY OF CITY COPS RESEMBLES A [Nomad] CLAN NOT AT ALL" ok a few minutes ago i was complaining about bugs, but the character modeling in this game is good (when they're there). You can see body posture, characters jiggle their legs when they are nervous. Like I though character A was just throwing a cigarette on the ground, but then character B flinches back; I realize Char A threw it at B as a fuck you

I'm honestly curious if "I fought the Law" quest will have any impact later on. My choices were that I thought there was more going on than Holt being the only person behind this (based on how complicated the main questline heist is, and keeping an eye on some of the in game news), and told him not to take it to internal affairs, and I loved his response of how he doesn't give a shit what we think, he's doing it anyway.

In the elevator to report in, Johnny said "this muck is deeper than you think, tell them nothing", so i just said that the case was complicated. anyway i love how much of a sarcastic asshole V is

I thought i was being nonlethal with the monk quest, but it seems i accidently killed someone. RIP, but thats kind of the problem with this game. Like when i do the non lethal cyberpychosis quests I equip my non lethal modded gun and hope for the est. I like how a go here kill things quest led to Charles the ripperdoc. He's getting all his parts from scav gang members so I felt obligated to take him out. I got a police bounty for it but w/e.

I merged the Delemain fragments with the whole. Guess he's the meta now. (Side note: some of my favorite rvb fanfic plots are Ai consiousness/memory merging with the humans, so I’m having fun with this game and look foward to introspective fanfic)

Honestly Jonny made some good points, the fragments didn't deserve to die; but also destroying the core and freeing the fragments, they couldn't really function alone.

I was able to rescue Saul fine with stealth. Using cameras and the synapse overload really made it easy.  Can't use the sniper rifle reward b/c I don't have the stats for it, and while it has a silencer the fact that it's a ricochette weapon and not a shoot through walls weapons, makes it not as good imo; and theres a legendary one that is stats free for only 100k.

Lol made a pass again at Panam, and she immediately shut me down. I then did Mitch's quest and I love every time someone tells V they area  good person.

I hacked the operation carpe noctem shard, and wow the corporations are using ai to make people have cyberpsychosis, or something like that. What a shocker /s, I've played Deus Ex HR before

lol driving through the unifinished interstate, past the fight from Panam's first quest I found a "batcave" with a very nice car, and a manifesto written by "muckman'. But here's my complaint about the loot, there is a legendary top, but it had 16 armor. My current top has 84 armor, like why would i switch?? then later i found a bunker with soviet spies in it. Wild

Doing River's second quest, love the timing of as soon as you ask, why are we breaking in, someone shows up to tell you he got kicked off the force. It's funny how Johnny comments how maybe River's into you, and V just doubts Johnny's words. Love how the first kid asks River if I'm his girlfriend. also wow like oof both the second parts of Judy and River's quest are SUPER fucked UP!! oof like i stopped doing first person mode on the braindances for those quests as soon as i could, just made me too uncomfortable seeing that in first person.

DRIVING IN THE GAME IS BAD! nowhere is it more apparent than the sinnerman quest, which took me 3 times to get the driving section done, as cars spawned out of nowhere to hit me. Then when you restart, there is a bunch of dialogue it doesn't let you fast forward through. The rest of the Sinnerman questline is interesting. My V took every option to tell the dude that he was messed up, and what he was doing was wrong. idk, I was surprised how much dialogue there was that let you buy into his whole "forgiveness thing" and how there wasn't any real dialogue to call him the fuck out, that in seeking forgiveness he continues to do harm both emotional to the mother of the man he killed, but also that he got the husband killed via cop. The later follow up quest, I told him that what he is doing is crazy, studio is just going to profit off this vid. Then I refused to join him prayer, and told him fuck no i wasn't going to hammer him to the cross, or even watch. Yes, the man is scared of dying, and the corporation is exploiting him, but he keeps creating burdens for others.  I think the discussion on this quest will be interesting to read, it's definitely my own personal experience with religion coloring my view. Anyway back to a main quest, yeah i don't trust Placide, especially in that scene where he grabs my hand, then jacks in. I ran off to do most of the sidequests here and got some criticism from him. I do love how in the cinema the western movie switches to a mission brief as the netwatch agent talks. its a fun enviromental detail.  I took the netwatch offer, i don't think he's being fully honest with me, but he didn't put a virus in my head. As I told Placide later, I didn't pick a side. I like how you can then talk with the agent, who is a fan of Western movies, b/c they show "a simpler time where all good guys carry badges" :eyeroll:, and then V recommends Unforgiven, which from the wiki summary goes against that theme.

Looks like the Voodoo boys all got killed by Netwatch, but I as revenge for them trying to set me up I'm fine with it. Honestly after speaking with ai!Alt I don’t believe their plan of trying to be on good relations with AI would work. 

doing the johnny flashback 2, and wow Johnny really is an asshole. Like I had gotten so used to him in side missions I forgot how self centered and unlikable he was.You constantly get prompts to drink or do drugs, which I ignored. But i do love the goth/punk love Rogue and others have.

lol i called it, when Hellman said that the engram would seek to override the host, put V on the engram. I really like how as the relic malfunctions, you wind up in the chair with a cigarette, which you can either smoke and say you are turning into Johnny or throw away. My dialogue "your problem is the ends justify the means", which is true!!! He and Rogue detonated a nuke downtown, does anyone know that, and like ask Rogue about it????

(Funny you can ask Rouge about Johnny silverhand, over the phone, then the game bugs out and spawns her npc where you are. She doens't say much about the nuke, but she does say no one trusts you for jobs). The line of no one trusting you for jobs is pretty funny at level 46 street cred where im at “respected” status. really loving the family atmosphere at River's 3rd quest. Also his big strong arms, and the fact he is no longer a cop. I totally let the kids win, and wow the family dinner where they GRILL YOU over the relationship and try to set the two of you up, then the water tower scene!!!!! I don't love the first person sex cutscenes but they do have personality. I'm glad afterwards you got to tell River about the biochip and that you might die. Because he's so far removed from your personal plot. So I took that option to back out of a relationship.

I do love that you wake up with "river's tanktop" that says "fuck the police" It actually has extremely good armor stats, so thats what I'll wear now.

panam 3rd quest, when shes like why did you help me, I'm like "because it's important to you". Basically the closest you can get to "when a friend asks for help you help them", which as an ex-nomad backstory I really choose the nomad options when ever i can Paralezes quest part 2! I love the piano song but I always think of it as ocean's 11 music. It's also fun to see the computer and see Judy recommended you for the first quest. The emails talk about "forgetting" to hire a staffer, on the balocony a strange antennia was scannable, the color of the roses was remembered wrong...  lol guess i was right with those giant wall screens. Its fun environmental details that spell things out before you can notice, and it ties into some other quests where people's behavior is being altered. Actually, this quest "Dream On" I love it! For a while I've been like "wheres the illuminati conspiracy! Here it IS! I chose to follow Elisabeth's wishes and not tell her husband he was being brainwashed. In best case they program him to forget again, in worst case he ends up dead. The gaslighting Elisabeth described is CHILLING, her husband describes a vacation she can't remember and she doesn't know whose memories have been messed with. On your way to the plaza you get a call from someone/something that says the know exactly WHAT you are, any you black out!!! It's such a great feeling of helplessness that you're just one person in a world so big that you can't fight every power. As Johnny said, could be a corporation, could be a rogue ai, either way Jefferson is fucked (and so are you).

[riskeith]

hi babe, hope you slept well.. ♥️

answering on the phone is just *takes screenshots* *opens tumblr app* *switch between screenshots and answering* do you also put on my messages on the laptop and answering with your phone usually, because that’s what i do lmao sjshdks. thank god for technology.

(I LOVE BEING CALLED BRO.. i believe that i would’ve been a dudebro in another life tbh..) there is? i’m not super immersed in the fandom actually so i had no idea, do you have any examples? ofc only if you wanna talk about it i know these topics can sometimes be annoying to think about. also you’re right! ‘don’t like don’t read’ is the law. follow it. i can’t believe how some people have the nerve to talk about what other people do creatively... yikes

you should if you ever find yourself not knowing what to read! i think their fics were some of my first in the fandom and they set the bar so high hehe. dude i love how oikawa just wants to see kageyama burn it’s so funny..... he’s so cocky about it while kageyama’s just his moody self. speaking of; one of my fave fics of yours is the swapping jerseys one!

WTF 😭 BABY POOLS AND POOL FLOATIES..... razor please come back to us please. sidenote but do you also think that his powers are 5 star level? hes soo powerful it’s so odd how he’s only 4 star haha... or maybe it’s just me being biased.

YEAH! THE SAVING SCENE IS SO AHHHHH. god especially if they have dialogue while person a is hurting and person b just spills all their feelings and becomes so erratic and scared and person a is like holy shit you love me.... and after everything is okay there’s still some awkwardness and tension and aaa.... 💢💔

OOO. sadly the ps5 is always out of stock it’s crazy how fast it sold out. but i mean it makes sense it’s arguably the most popular console so.. hopefully they restock soon. last of us is such a fun game! and the second part is ~gay~ which is always a plus. i’m not sure which memes you mean? tell me 👁 HAHA that makes sense actually omg... lumine and aether reunion won’t happen until like two years if the updates keep coming the way they are (STOP THAT WOULD ACTUALLY BE SO FUNNY.... like hello if you want to unlock the rest of the story you either gacha $pin for it or you imagine it yourself love ♥️😗) talking about this makes me wonder what the other worlds might look like....

your followers are just here to witness us planning our co-op date sjsjdkdjskz. speaking of,,, hehe. i have some fantastic news. i’m at ar level 11 right now and co-op unlocks at level 16... i might just reach that tomorrow (today for you) so i’m just saying hehehehehehehehehehehe.... 😏♥️

BOWL CUT. my cutie little baby. also mullet? sounds nice omg you will probably rock that look... 😳 i’m a non mullet supporter but if cluna has a mullet then call me a yeehaw mullet lover i suppose. can’t believe my wife is a cowboy. OMG YEAH IT MUST FEEL SO NICE your head went bzz bzz. how long did it take for them to accept it? and yeah god ikr some people take hair so seriously which is fair but also i’ve never understood it... like it grows out..? wow you really went from a ballet girl to punk rock style huh. i feel like you’re the both sides of the ‘she was a punk she did ballet’ meme.

memo fic is a jealous fic? mmm smells good. I FIGURED jshdjdkhsjs slow songs are just not your forte, huh? rip. langst is the best yet worst thing ever tbh. and YEAH I DO we’re truly 🤝 ok literally mood sometimes it’s just nice to talk about how much you love a character through another character in a fic yk? so what if this 2k fic contains 1k words about how beautiful oikawa looks? it’s what iwa feels <3 (YOU’RE LEARNING!!!!!!! THATS SO EXCITING!! i guess you just have to drive me around, huh?)

oh i’m in love i’m with that fic my girl. and i knew about that spoiler it’s kind of hard to miss it since it’s everywhere skdhdkdhdk... god, that sounds so good thank you for sharing it. pining iwaizumi hajime >>>>>>>> the air i need to exist 🥺 

THE DAY IS SO SOON CLUNA, it’s literally here soooo soon holy shit i just can’t wait. i played for almost 6 hours today in a row like an idiot and now i never wanna see hilichurls again in my life but hey, one step closer to my baby. prepare yourself.. 😏

AWWW i had a feeling you’d be a tea person. but omg tea effects your sleep? how late is too late for you to drink it? what’s your favorite flavors? 👁 and i’m addicted to both shdkdhsks. i say addicted bc i literally have 6 cups of tea per day easily and like.. 1 or 2 coffee cups per day. it’s really bad but i can’t stop so.. 🙇🏽‍♀️

COLLEGE BOYFIES CLUNA. COLLEGE BOYFIES WITH DIP DYE HAIR. imagine them doing each other’s make up and nails before going to concerts together. imagine xiao in euphoria kind of make up. holy shit. here’s something for your overwhelmed heart jsdhjshska. xiaoven soulmates girl, no doubt about it. THE EDIT THE EDIT THE EDIT!!!! they just look so beautiful. we need scenes with them like Asap. the edit is based on a fic... notes down.

can’t wait to see your screenshots. super excited!!

xo, m.a. (i almost wrote my name down in a haste shshskdjdk... although you’ll find it out soon...)

hiya!! i slept alright~ ahaha

:o that’s smart! but no i don’t LOL whether i’m on my phone or my laptop i just continuously scroll up and down fhdskjfkhsdf i think that’s why i come close to missing some paragraphs some times oops. yay for the ~wonders of technology~

(AIGHT NICE AHAHHA fhsdkjfsh does that mean you’re a bit of a tomboy?) actually coincidentally i came across this thread: https://twitter.com/maxatsuomi/status/1350145589296685057 which gives you an idea lmao (also some things on there i wasn’t even aware of wtf) EXACTLY??? it’s even worse when non content creators try to come for content creators like?????????/ um you’re getting all this food for FREE and yet?????? lmfao the nerve of some people

i def will!! FKJSHFDSKJ yeah that do be their dynamic lolol. and thank you!! i too think i snapped on that one 😩😩 glad others agree ahahah

i actually haven’t really seen him in combat... and when we could trial him i was too busy trying to pass the quests to focus on how he fought fhdkfhsdkfjshf but i do think his abilities are cool!! he have wolf above head 🥺

YEAHHH BOYEEEEEEEEEEE god that reminds me of a scene from a drarry fic (What We Pretend We Can't See wink wonk)

oh damn!! hope they restock soon for your sake~ yissss ive watched a playthrough and omg lev.... my Son. i don’t think i can find the memes again but it was just about the bugs like how if you throw a grenade on the highway everyone will run out of their cars like a flashmob or something hfskfhsdjfkds. (LMAOOOOO) there’s actually a trailer with the other worlds! https://youtu.be/TAlKhARUcoY (it has spoilers tho supposedly lol. none we understand rn at least)

hdsfkhjs. omg you absolute legend!!!! but i also hope that you’re taking care of yourself and prioritising the important things too fhsfhdksdhf. but i am excited hehehehehe

AHHAAHKFHDSKJFSD pls... once i saw someone with an actual proper mullet on the bus and i was like “ew... keith would look like this irl?” FJSDHKFSAHKDASHDFSDJFKJFDSHFKJS. but what can i say i got influenced by all the kpop bois 😔 and hmmm idk? i think my dad didn’t care too much but ik my mum did/does fhsfskfsdfhkf so who knows lollllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. IT REALLY DOES GROW OUT LMAO LIKE. fhkshkfsdkj my cousin called me a rockstar when she saw it LOL so you’re prob right 🤪

yeah slow songs really just. aren’t LMAO ‘behind this mask of mine’ was based on a slow bts song and i put it in the playlist i had for it (bc obviously) but i wanted to skip it every time hfksjdhfskjdfhskfdkfhkslfhadksfjsdjhfkashkfjsdh. EXACTLY!!!!!!!!!! you are so correct. (hehehe i was gonna say that too that you don’t need to drive bc it’ll take you around 😏 LMAO)

fhkdsj thank!! legit pining iwa.......... more like pining ME mayhaps i just be self projecting 🤪🤪

lolol dw i can fight the hilichurls for you 😩 also who’s your fave enemy to fight! i used to like fighting the treasure hoarders most but the hilichurls are cute.. FHSKJDHFSDFKJSD plus i need their fucking masks my god why are their drop rates so shit hfsdhjfks

i’m not too sure actually? i’ve never been up early enough to test it but i like drinking tea like after dinner... which is the problem AHAHA. hmm well i like matcha a lot LOL but also chai? and then like black tea.... all the other ones too... i used to drink some fruity ones which were nice but we have a lot of the like basic chinese ones at home too and i enjoy those as well lol. wbu?? omg.... m.a........... dfhksdfkjhfkjshfksjd that’s a lot!!!!!!! do you even need to drink water then HKDSJFHKSDFHDKDSHFJKSDH

omg............. ive never seen euphoria LOL but ............. omg ...................... i cannot process thoughts rn.....

xoxo!! c.r. (you mean bc we’ll be playing co-op? you don’t have to if you’re uncomfy fhdskjf my genshin name was literally ‘aether’ up until yesterday FHDFHSDKFSDFJSHFKSDF)

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh Season Zero: Yuugi Gets a Tomagachi Pt 1

Hey you know what? Lets look at Zero again.

For those new here, I’m also going through Yugioh Season Zero, which is not the anime we got in the States, but the anime that came before it. It’s got all sorts of issues that 90′s anime tend to have, so, consider yourself warned.

You can read my recaps of just Season Zero by clicking on this link right here.

Anyway, it’s been kind of a while since I did one of these, and part of the reason is because I need to use a fandub in order to not have subs across the bottom. And that’s normally not a problem, but as you see in the corner of this next cap here, of the villain introduced this episode, this 3-Stooges-all-stuffed-into-one-body-suit-lookin guy, who has a realllllly weird tradition he does after beating people up,

We have an uhhhhh watermark situation in the bottom right hand corner. As an artist I have a hard time releasing anything with someone else’s watermark on it, but I have literally no other options, so forgive me, Team Millennium, you will probably never see this post because we’re a very smalltime blog. You can find their dubs on Youtube.

Anyway we’re here for pocket toys.

TAMAGACHIS. It’s been a hot minute since I’ve thought about Tamagachis.

(read more under the cap)

Mine are all gone now, I think I tossed them a year after I got them, the fad was pretty strong but short. Since most people got their Tomagachis second hand, (they were just impossible to buy because they were sold out everywhere), none of us had any freakin instructions so I had no idea at all how to use them and it died like 30 times. Usually several times a day.

Honestly Tamagachi’s are both the best and absolute worst child’s toy ever made.

And so Jounouchi’s going to go off about what a Tamagachi is (Tamagatchi? Eh doesn’t matter) but first lets just address the fact that...they’re in History class.

I mean....

...It had to happen eventually.

I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.

I’m just...

...

I’m fine.

Anyway, lets dive into Tamagachi (tomagachi?) physics. I think I spelled Tamagachi incorrectly in all of these caps and hell will freeze over before I fix them all.

These kids are WAY to old to be playing with a freakin Tamagachi, but I dunno, maybe it was different in Japan? My older brothers were playing with like Gameboys and the odd hacky sack during this time period. And then my one brother who refused to play video games that weren’t Basketball related got super into rapping into a mixer table (he is half deaf, he was v bad). That was it, that was their portable digital hobbies.

They saw my Tamagachis and were like...no thanks.

Anyway, the Yugioh Tamagachis have a little twist to them that no Tamagachi on earth has ever had the power to do. Like maybe this seems like pretty low tech to the babies out there who don’t remember these things, but listen--Tomagachis barely functioned. I don’t think they were capable of basic math. That is the only explanation to me at least of how they died so freakin often.

WOW Yugioh. I mean guaranteed, I would have been suuuuper into this when I was 10-11 but also...kind of WEIRD right?

And I mean, no worries, this is Yugioh, so not even Yuugi’s Tamagachi is going to score, but it’s not like they won’t try. TBH, Yuugi’s Tamagachi dates more than Yugi. Yuugi’s Tamagachi goes on more dates than Yugi has in 3 seasons.

Anyway, Jounouchi get’s rightfully scolded out.

And Honda is still a freakin weirdo, something I tend to forget every time I tune into Season Zero, much like this girl, who I also completely forget is a main character on this cast. Hi, Miho.

Of course, Anzu does bring up a good point...

...maybe Spanish is NEXT period?

Headcanon restored.

Miho seems entirely inept at life, to the point that she cannot both attend school and occasionally sweep up the feces of her pocket pet. She was kept up apparently all hours of the night, gazing at a little one inch screen and pressing one of three buttons.

(Anzu’s face trying to understand Miho)

Like I joke that I think Miho could easily be the super villain of this show but this episode she just pumps up the bastard like 200%.

(this is how I ended up with 2 Tamagachi’s, before I burned out and got rid of the little assholes)

So Honda, so horny he can barely think, decides to take care of this pocket pet because he’s pretty sure he can hightail it out of the country with Miho on a romantic trip to Sydney. It sort of makes me kinda miss when Yugioh was vague.

Sensing awkward romantic stuff, Yuugi gets the hell out of there, because weird stuff is happening in this bathroom with his friend, Haiyama, and while most people would leave the bathroom stuff alone, Yuugi has never been able to leave anything alone. Especially if it’s gross and riddled with collusion.

He finds out that Haiyama is giving money to the giant 3 Stooges guy who’s name is Kujiwara (Kujirada) or something like that. I’m hella bad at names and I had to look it up like four times. I’ll get the names spelled wrong like so, so many times.

All in all, the small little Haiyama is divying up money to the current class bully and Yuugi feels a very strong affinity with Haiyama because of it.

Sorry I just had to imagine for a hot minute what the Kaibas would bring to a bake sale.

Anyway, like, this is off topic but also on topic, bear with me, so you know how in Evangelion, they show up to class, and they’re like “weird that we’re in the same class with all the kids who man the robots, weird.” and it’s like “why do they all go to this class if they’re living in completely different parts of the city? Like this one kid is covered head to toe in bandages and then this other kid is the son of the head of the robot illuminati and this other kid lives in like a tent a lot of the time? Like wtf is this weird ass class?” and then, basically near the end of Evangelion you get this reveal (spoilers for a 20 year old anime, look away) that everyone in the class has been hand selected to be put inside of giant robots and that is why so many of them are just screwball beyond reason.

I feel like Yuugi might have a little bit of an Evangelion problem, because we’ve got this class of like maybe...20 students, and they all come from completely different walks of life in this city, and they’re all just a bucket of disturbing psychosis’. Like it is just so crazy that Anzu got completely possessed by Shadi, but this class is filled with so many assholes that no one noticed until she started choking Yuugi to death in the medical ward.

I’m just saying, I think Yuugi’s class was hand selected by the government for scary ulterior robot illuminati motives, and if I were to write a Yugioh spinoff, it would still be Marik’s Boat Time, but in the background of Marik’s Boat Time, these dumb asshole children would be finally forced by the government to use their inner asshole powers to mitigate WWIII against the space aliens (or WW IV, since I figured by that point Kaiba’s already pulled a III just by accident)

Anyway back to little Haiyama, who’s name I cannot spell right to save my life.

This part was real funny to me because when Yuugi went through this similar problem at the beginning of the series, he turned to a toy (or what he thought was a toy) in the Millennium Puzzle. Maybe in his mind, he’s giving Haiyama a gift to help him make friends like the Puzzle did with Yuugi. Thing is, uh.....this Tamagachi isn’t cursed with darkness or anything, so nice try Yuuge, this is a sort of pointless offering. It is nice, though.

Anyway, cute little Haiyama patiently takes the Tomagachi and walks the other way, as far as he can possibly get away, from Yuugi Muto.

DAMN, HONDA. THE BALLS ON THIS MAN.

This note is a note Honda wrote on like a permission slip, and then handed to a dude in class, to hand directly to Honda’s Spanish teacher.

How many jokes have I made that Tristan is the Mom Friend? Wow.

Anyway, this version of Tristan is about as bad at life as Miho is, so he’s going to just peace out in his bedroom playing a pretttttty boring Tomagachi game.

It really takes like just nothing at all for these kids to skip school, wow.

Anyways, they come across a rival game shop storefront, so Yuugi can’t help himself but admire the competition. Surprise, it’s just a different color of Tamagachi.

Before I can contemplate on why this one podunk shop in Domino is selling the only digital pet that is the best in the whole wide world, this happens.

So...that happens. That just happens.

And then we get this weird, very spooky sort of stalker footage of Kujirada, being developed on this amazing set of old timey software, check this out. Please admire how much 1999 is in these next frames.

This episode is particularly weird, but the whole thing with the photo taking is just...it is SO weird.

And like sorry to do this to you, but we’ll go over the rest of it in the next update, cuz this episode had a lot of stuff and so I made just so many caps but...holy hell this episode went completely off the rails. Like this first half is a whole lot of weird stuff but then the next half is just...there’s absolutely no way to predict the next half from the first half of events. It just goes completely wild.

Like this episode further proves my theory that everyone in this class has no choice but to destroy all life with giant mechs. There’s no other way. All of Yuugi’s classmates are here to end the world. Him included. This mess of a class.

[roloko-karlstein]

S+: 

Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy IV: The After Years - my favorite games in the FF franchise it had a pretty damn good story and the characters were really memorable to me. Also its home to two of the few best OST that has Uematsu has composed Red Wings and The Four Fiends. On top of that I really loved how the sequel adds another layer of strategy with its lunar system. I know people hate the sequel cause of how it was spit into multiple episodes you had to buy, but as a person playing the PSP version where the all the stories were all bundled into one price it was actually pretty fun to see how and what the characters has been up to all this time and some fresh faces in forms of either children or comrades of the old IV cast.

S:

Final Fantasy VI: I love this game its my second favorite FF title. I think my favorite thing about it was at different times you controlled different party members it wasn’t just Terra the whole time. Also the fact anybody can learn magic so in a pinch you could use your offensive characters to heal. Who can forget the opera scene and the Dancing Mad song? Instant classic songs

Final Fantasy Type 0: My third favorite game in the franchise. I know that is an unpopular opinion, but I just love the setting and how you can control any character cause its their story and not like a specific character (Ace). Every character has their own weapons and way of fighting I really love using Cinque,Jack, and Trey. I know people hate using her cause she is slow, but I feel like its all about timing she is super strong honestly. I never finished it nor a new game plus where I think it ends differently than the first playthrough. I love the battle system overworld battles play more like Tales of while the missions play out like XV’s battle system, but I think better honestly.

A: 

Final Fantasy X: My fourth favorite FF title and if I remember my very first. Touching story and I love the characters. The only real flack I have is unskippable cutscenes even in the remaster. It really makes it annoying when facing two certain bosses.

Final Fantasy IX: My fifth favorite FF title. It had quite a few memorable characters and fun games on the side. I really liked its story too. The final boss really came out of no where I still think it should’ve ended at Kuja, but whatevs.

Final Fantasy VII: This one is a classic which is why it made A rank. I’m fairly certain the remake will be S or S+ tier with how they are expanding on characters and the story (I will cry over Biggs,Wedge, and Jessie I can feel it you know its coming, but I bet Square will pull out all the stops to get us to like them)

Final Fantasy Rhythm games: My other favorite genre after JRPGs which is rhythm games. I love the little chibi characters!

B:

Crisis Core: Its a nice prequel and the ending was really good I remember first playing it I cried even though I knew it was coming. I really like the song “Why” that plays during the credits

Final Fantasy V: Only reason it is below A rank is cause I never really got far in it. And both times I played it I only made it to the part where we find out about Faris and Lenna’s relationship. Job system was pretty cool and was an upgrade from III.

Final Fantasy Record Keeper: For a mobile game its pretty good and the gatcha was I think for weapons and not for characters.

Final Fantasy VIII: I actually like the junction and drawing system it was new. The final boss fight would leave me on the edge of my seat cause the final boss I think draws all of a certain type of magic from you every other turn so it was basically a battle against time. This series had more of a modern day/futuristic vibe to it. The only reason its a B cause I didn’t really care too much for the story.

Final Fantasy II: Its an easy game after hitting yourself for two hours straight. No really. After I got past the first part of the game I find that ya know it isn’t THAT bad of a game kinda tedious at the start to get your stats up there, but after that it really is smooth sailing the rest of the game.

Final Fantasy: It is only at B rank cause this is where everything began even if the game play is simple and the characters have no name and there really isn’t much of a story

C:

Final Fantasy X-2: I think its nice that we get to see a more light hearted story for the most part, but I don’t think this was really necessary. Has one of the best battle systems in the franchise though I have fun playing it and it does have some really challenging fights. 

Final Fantasy XIII: I don’t think its bad as what people make it out to be its honestly an average game and the story is alright. 

Final Fantasy Brave Exvius: I used to play this game and the event stories that would come out were really good, but if you do not have 6 Star characters with super strong equipment you would never able to finish the story. Also from what I’ve heard its not even harder to obtain lapis to draw for characters. Gatcha has been going downhill and the events harder which is why I eventually quit.

Final Fantasy III: I haven’t gotten far, but I don’t really care too much for how you can only have so many spells for each level. I think I like V and X-2 more since you can actually learn all the magics by using that class in battle.

World of Final Fantasy: Meh...thats all I gotta say I want to kill that animal thing “THE this” “THE that” if I want to hear shit like that I would go watch Teen Titans Go

D:

Final Fantasy All The Bravest: Again not as bad as the fandom says it is and I breezed through it in a week. I guess I can see why people are ticked though. $1 for a character and it might not even show up in your party. 

Final Fantasy XII: I’m thinking about giving this another chance honestly. I wasn’t a fan of the gameplay or license board.

Final Fantasy XV: Probably one of the biggest disappointments since me playing XII. I payed full price for both AND bought the strategy guides which was not cheap. While XV is better with its gameplay the story felt really rushed and had some of the worst romantic subplot I have ever seen compared to any previous Final Fantasy. Noct had more development with his fellow chocobruhs than he ever did with Luna.

The Dissidia games: I’m not a fan of fighting games I think what I liked most about these were different heroes/villains interacting with each other.

F:

Dirge of Cerberus: Terrible game play, Terrible story, I got motion sickness extremely easy, all around bad game.

Final Fantasy XV mobile game: I never played it, but I have seen ads for it and I’m like really? REALLY?

[somethingusefulfromflorida]

What if Star Wars had tanked?

May 1977, 20th Century Fox distributes a really WEIRD movie.  It’s a science fiction fantasy story about medieval knight samurais in space with laser swords and fighter pilots.  Nobody expected it to be a hit, it seemed to be such a niche movie, one that would garner a small cult following then be swept under the rug by the other summer tent poles like “Smokey and the Bandit” or “The Spy Who Loved Me.”  To everyone’s surprise, it became an instant success, rocketing no name George Lucas from a no-name bush-league indie director into the echelon of A-list Blockbusters.  His idea for a decade spanning six part saga (two sequels, three prequels) was greenlit then and there, and the budget for Star Wars 2, now called Star Wars 5, was double what he was given for the original.  Star Wars 1, nor 4, was given the subtitle “A New Hope” to let audiences know it was just the beginning of a series, and the rest is history.

But in 1977, George Lucas was not as confident in his vision as he would soon become.  He figured, as every producer did, that his film would be a flash in the pan genre piece, something that would play in theaters just long enough to make it’s budget back, then disappear into obscurity.  In 1976, he planned for the worst.

Star Wars, like many other films of the day, was being given a novelization.  Before home media became ubiquitous, the only way people could experience the film was to see it in theaters or buy the book version.  Lucas hired a ghostwriter, Alan Dean Foster, to write the novelization of Star Wars 1, AND to create a tentative Star Wars 2 that could be adapted to the screen if the original film failed to meet his high expectations.  Star Wars 2, titled “Splinter of the Minds Eye,” was written to be as low budget as possible; no big set pieces, and for that matter no big sets.  Every scene had to take place in a set that the studio already owned, and couldn’t include any major space battles because there was no guarantee that the special effects would fit into the budget.  On top of that, it meant that none of the characters played by big name actors would be included; no Harrison Ford, no Alec Guinness.  Splinter was a bare bones story set entirely on what would essentially become Dagobah, and would have taken the franchise in an entirely different direction.  None of the story elements from Lucas’ dream sequel were included, and none of the plot twists either; there is no connection between “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” and “Empire Strikes Back,” and in fact, once Empire was released, Splinter was relegated to secondary canon because the official sequel had overidden it so the story no longer made sense.

But if Star Wars 1 had flopped, Splinter of the Mind’s Eye would have been made into the official sequel, and the story would have had to pick up where it left off; Lucas didn’t plot out a low budget version of Star Wars 3, so we can only speculate as to what may have happened.

In Splinter, Luke and Leia are going on a diplomatic mission to convince some neutral star systems to join the rebellion.  Their ship crash lands on a backwater swamp planet (called Mimban, a name eventually used for the World War I trench planet in the Disney movie Solo), which is roughly analogous to the Dagobah we saw in Empire.  Stranded on the swamp planet, Luke and Leia find their way to an imperial mining colony, get into a scuffle, and escape with the help of a Jedi witch named Halla.  The titular “splinter of the mind’s eye” is a broken fragment of a magical crystal, because this was the 1970s and crystals were a big thing in fantasy (the splinter was called the kaiburr crystal; this name would later be re-purposed in canon as the crystals used for lightsaber and Death Star laser construction).  The splinter is said to focus the force, allowing the wielder to become more powerful or something; it’s a MacGuffin, the book is vague as to what it actually physically does.  After a confrontation with locals, and a duel with none other than Darth Vader (in which Leia wields a lightsaber and Luke cuts off Vader’s whole arm), Halla takes over the role of Luke’s mentor to train him in the ways of the Force.

At this point in the series, Luke and Leia were never intended to be brother and sister.  It was clearly supposed to be a chivalric romance between a knight errant and his courtly love.  He is the royal bodyguard to the Queen of Alderaan (the entire Royal Family was destroyed in Star Wars 1, so Princess Leia should by all rights have been coronated as Queen Leia).  George Lucas added the twist that they were brother and sister well into production of Empire; in fact, in Empire he shot two scenes of Leia kissing Luke (one was to make Han jealous, the other was near the end, right after she rescued Luke from cloud city; I’m glad they cut the second one, because it undermines the fact that she literally just told Han that she loves him).  Han Solo himself is mentioned in passing, not even by name, just as some pirate Luke used to know who took his reward money from the first movie and went to pay off some debts.  If this movie had been made instead of Empire, there’s no guarantee that a Star Wars 3 would even be greenlit.

But if it had been, here’s what would have happened.

Darth Vader is not Luke’s father in this version; that too was a twist Lucas invented after the series took off.  So, in this version of Star wars 3, which I will call “Revenge of the Jedi,” Luke goes on a quest to slay the evil Emperor.  It’s a fantasy movie, in any other setting the point of the franchise would be to kill the main bad guy; imagine if Lord of the Rings had ended without the heroes destroying the ring and defeating Sauron, that would have made no sense.  In this version of the story, Darth Vader is just the archetypal Black Knight; tying back into the Japanese influence on the series, he is an evil Shogun, appointed by the Emperor to be the military dictator.  There would be more emphasis on fight choreography in this version, drawing influence from the works of Akira Kurosawa.  The word Jedi comes from the word for the Japanese film genre Jidaigeki, meaning ‘period piece,’ featuring samuri and ronin (for western audiences, “Ronin” are nomadic heroes, like Clint Eastwood’s man with no name, or the Road Warrior).

Revenge of the Jedi would end with a climactic fight scene in the Emperor’s palace, with Luke battling his way through the many levels, defeating wave after wave of imperial soldiers and those red guards fans love to care about even though they do literally nothing on screen.  The prequels we got in canon were bogged down with boring politics about trade federations and unions and guilds and alliances, but politics can be interesting if done well (and written by someone who isn’t George Lucas; the original trilogy we got was good DESPITE him, not BECAUSE of him).  Revenge of the Jedi would see Leia building an army, the rebellion becoming an actual superpower in the galaxy; the New Republic wouldn’t just be restored after the Empire was defeated, it would be restored during the war with the express intent of rallying neutral systems behind an actual government body against the Emperor.

Darth Vader betrayed and murdered Luke’s father, but more importantly he committed genocide against Leia’s people, the survivors of which now live in diaspora.  Sound familiar?  “The Rebellion” isn’t a great name, but “the Alliance” is perfect because it evokes the Allies of World War II and shows that it is a galaxy-wide phenomena, not just a single splinter cell as depicted in the films in our timeline.  Luke wants to avenge his father, but if you’re insistent that the good guy isn’t allowed to kill the bad guy, you could have Vader go out the way he did in “Return of the Jedi,” turning back to the light side and sacrificing his life to kill the Emperor.  Everyone loves a redemption story, but Darth Vader really was a piece of shit and didn’t deserve to just get a free pass into Jedi Ghost Heaven because he decided to stop being evil five minutes before he died.

Maybe in this version of Star Wars 3, Harrison Ford returns for a cameo as a favor to George Lucas.  If so, he dies; Ford wanted Han to die in “Return of the Jedi,” and only agreed to do “The Force Awakens” if they finally killed him off then.  If he returns for “Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Jedi,” he will sacrifice himself for the Alliance, going out as a hero.  After the Emperor is defeated, the threat doesn’t just go away; suddenly there’s a power vacuum, with all the admirals and regional governor’s vying to replace him.  In both pre- and post-Disney Star Wars, the Emperor had a son (Triclops in Legends continuity, and Rey’s dad in Canon), so he would be heir to his father’s throne; perhaps he is propped up as a puppet for the military leaders, or maybe he surrenders to the Alliance and allows his Empire to be balkanized into dozens of independent powers, as with the fall of every great Empire; Rome (East and West), Mongolia, China, Austria-Hungary, Britain, the USSR, the list goes on.

This Star Wars trilogy would not be the enormous franchise we know today, it would still be a very niche series with a cult following.  It would be a step up from the Planet of the Apes series; sure, people have heard of it, and there have been attempts to revive it in the modern day, but it’s not even close to being a tent pole of the modern cultural zeitgeist.  Nobody looks forward to the new Planet of the Apes movie every year, it’s not a multi-billion dollar multi-media enterprise, there’s no dedicated “Planet of the Apes Celebration,” no cartoons, no streaming service shows that everyone geeks out about online, no triple-a video games, nothing.  This version of Star Wars would be just another weird artifact of the 1970s.  Maybe there would be a push to release a sequel, Star Wars 4, in like 2007, but that would be closer to Rambo IV or Superman Returns or Tron Legacy.

There are dedicated fans, but it’s not the biggest movie of the year.

Star Wars (1977)

Star Wars 2: Splinter of the Mind’s Eye (1979)

Star Wars 3: Revenge of the Jedi (1982)

Star Wars: Journal of the Whills (2011, a prequel set during the Clone Wars mentioned in the first movie)

[sonicranticoot]

About CTR, Money, and Both Together: Part 2

Continuing from part 1.

Somehow it has been brought to my attention many more things that just...don’t say any good things, any good things, about the situation of the game and possibly the entire Crash and Spyro franchises going forward. I’m known to keep a very positive image here and I want this to continue, but sometimes, life sucks and then you die. So yes, this one is a lot angrier than the one before. You got to let it all out sometimes.

First thing is how these are actually out now, and boy are they terrible. Not just the fact they exist, but you can make 2500 in about an hour each day with online play. Or just pay Activision (not Beenox) $2.49 for that. A lot of people have been talking about how ridiculously overpriced the bundle for the Probulot 2000 is, and that can take a while to grind out even for online players (I have the dearest sympathies for people who don’t have their console’s online service and are stuck with offline payrates). Or, you could just hand that nice old Activision marketer (not Beenox) $9.99 for coins that disappear as soon as you buy them. I remember years back when Capcom got major slack for selling people costumes in Street Fighter IV for $3.99 a pop. Except there, you got a costume for five characters, and each costume had ten palette swaps. And that’s not going back to before that game, where you could get those in games at the low, low price of being earned as an in-game reward like beating the game on a certain difficulty or whatever.

It just goes back to how it used to be. Crash Team Racing is a 20-year old classic game that had a wealth of content you did not have to pay a cent for past the initial purchase of the game. Some people may say, “well, nothing in the original CTR can be unlocked with microtransactions”, and although that may be correct, it is completely missing the point. Content shown heavily before launch, like all the characters from Crash Nitro Kart and the new karts taken from Tag Team Racing, the stuff that was used to show “hey, look, it’s a little more than just CTR”, that stuff is locked behind an in-game store that allows you to spend real money. That’s not even going into the people who want to put N. Tropy or his digital skin in the shop. I actually commend Beenox for putting in something that, unlike the Pit Stop, forces players to get better at the game to have in their possession. The whole thing takes some pride out of the game. It barely feels like it’s a reward for people who didn’t pay up anymore because now people can go out and buy it with real money. Maybe.

That goes back to the fucking Fortnite store layout. Yeah I know this shop was problematic before, but didn’t go into as much as detail on why it is. Let’s say someone wants that one special skin, they want to buy Crunch that badly, that special car, or paint job. The store is set up to force players to wait, or buy things to roll again and hope what they get shows up. And with the addition of microtransactions, now, you can brute force, but even that still doesn’t help you if the Pit Stop gods don’t feel like playing nice and that special skin you wanted is the very last one in rotation. Some people aren’t that patient. This especially goes for offline players who have to spend hours trying to spend up for even one item. This type of impatience leads to kids stealing daddy’s credit card and spending $1,300 on gambling in FIFA. That’s really where this whole shit stops being “optional”, and feels like a deliberate part of the game. Because it is. It is a deliberate decision made on Activision’s part to make a predatory store. The paid solution now exists to a problem they created, and said paid solution doesn’t even fucking work.

Yes. Some people saw microtransactions coming. Some of these people like the game. Others didn’t like it, and are rubbing it into the former’s face. That doesn’t actually solve the issue here. What is the issue is that they weren’t there. People played the game for over a month without them. All the reviews were out, they were great. YouTubers praised it, both Crash-oriented and otherwise. The ESRB didn’t have to put a warning on the box. It’s all nice and cozy.

Then they do this. I’ve seen the review bombing of Metacritic. I’ve seen many Youtubers who have loved the game before either turn against it, or just express endless disgust over it. The ESRB can’t even do their fucking job of warning people that they are in the game, because there are a lot of copies out there that don’t have the “contains in-game purchases” label on them without glancing at one sentence in size 2 text on the back of the box as if Activision is playing their own twisted game of “ok, how can we tell people they’re in, but in such a way they won’t know it”, so someone, let’s say said person has a gambling problem, can buy the game, hear the good word of mouth from people who played it when it did NOT have MTX, and all of a sudden, they found a game that can prey upon them. I mentioned last time Activision did not make the message clear to consumers. Activision doesn’t want their message clear not just to consumers (and that goes for all consumers, from kids, to people with impulse buying problems, to genuine gambling addicts), but ratings boards either.

In short, all that goodwill Activision built up with this game, Spyro Reignited, Crash N. Sane, it’s gone. Not all of it is. But denying it’s done a crippling blow to things would be foolish. This game has a ton of issues. They’re all still here. MTX are though. It doesn’t give me, or anyone, a reason to trust them about what they do with these franchises, because they aren’t immune to any of the MTX bullshit that regularly plagues Call of Duty or whatever. I like the Crash and Spyro games for many reasons, but one big thing is that their newest release were free of this shit, they were old school ways of making people sold on games: by being really, really good games. You payed for a game. It’s good. Simple. Sweet. To the point.

You know what? Like Crash Bandicoot and Spyro the Dragon, Activision’s own Call of Duty sold millions and reviewed very well when it didn’t have microtransactions as well. FIFA did too. Grand Theft Auto did as well. Mortal Kombat also did. Deus Ex did. 2K sports games did. Fallout did. Elder Scrolls did. Plants vs. Zombies did. Quality games make money by being that. Quality games. Who would’ve guessed. Obviously Activision didn’t make all these games. And that’s the problem. Crash isn’t even new to this shit, it’s just one of countless classic, acclaimed franchises now subjected to the scummiest predatory practices that again, were initially made for free-to-play games that didn’t cost a dime to start playing. You didn’t see these in console games because they weren’t build for that practice. Yes, they make money, but console games could again, make money in a way a F2P mobile game can not: straight-up buying the game.

One of the worst (that’s a drinking game at this point) things is that let’s say people do get the message: everything in CTR can be earned in-game, not all the hard to do at that, the MTX coin rates are terrible, and thus, most people don’t buy the MTX. As in 99% of people don’t buy MTX. But you have whales, that 1% of people who these types of business practices specifically are psychologically engineered to pander to, spending literal thousands of dollars on coins for a cartoon kart racer and Activision can get the idea from them and only them of how to make money. And those types of practices become more accepted because of this, rinse, lather, repeat. There’s no winning scenario except for not having them in the game.

In short, Activision is the single slimiest, greediest, dirtiest, most absolutely fucking disgusting money-lusting pig of a company in the video game business and I am very, very disappointed in how corrupting classic games and franchises with pure filth meant to destroy bank accounts has consumed the industry. Activision is obviously not the only company that does this, but I can’t say many of the others are willing to do things like lie to the people who’s job is to warn people about these things. Fuck. Straight. Off.

Let it be known despite all that I am still a big Crash fan. I love the game. I’m eagerly anticipating Beenox to confirm Pasadena as a playable racer, I want to see how Brio looks in the game as well as what kind of race track the game will see when he is introduced, I want to see the Spyro stuff, I want to see what kind of crazy costumes they make or old school vehicles make a return, etc.  I payed $40 for it. That’s the only money I’m giving it because that’s the point. I’m just disappointed. And that’s severely underselling it.

[beyondmistland]

“May your heart be your guiding key” (Full thoughts on Kingdom Hearts III below!)

Graphics:

Ø  The game is bloody gorgeous, which helps mitigate the long and frequent cutscenes

Ø  The lip-syncing rarely fails

Music:

Ø  The new remixes are awesome and the brand-new tracks don't disappoint either

Ø  What does though is the actual audio mixing:

More often than not I struggled to hear the music over the sound effects during gameplay and the voiceovers during cutscenes

Ranking the Worlds:

Ø  #1: Corona: The world is huge, with varied terrain and a kick-ass final boss

Ø  #2 Olympus: The sheer scale and scope of the world took my breath away, plus we (finally!) get to fight all four titans

Ø  #3 The Caribbean: Assassin's Creed IV meets Kingdom Hearts, what's not to like

Ø  #4 Monstropolis: While not as eye-catching as some of the other worlds the way it intersects with the broader KH lore is really neat and the final cutscene was a delight in that it averts the Disney characters being useless when dealing with the original KH villains, on top of which its straightforward design is a nice change of pace, my only complaint is that there are only four types of Unversed

Ø  #5 San Fransokyo: The story is surprisingly short, which means you don't really get the chance to explore the environment, which sucks because the verticality and day/night cycle are awesome, plus there are a number of memorable boss fights

Ø  #6 Twilight Town: If it had been fully recreated based off the KH2 version the world would be much higher on my list but despite how small it is I love the liveliness, not to mention how peaceful it is in comparison to the other worlds, the same can be said for Hundred Acre Wood

Ø  #7 Keyblade Graveyard + Final World + Scala Ad Caelum: Though jaw-dropping in terms of visuals and audio they're not fully realized worlds, the same can be said for Dark World

Ø  #8 Toy Box: I loved the final boss as well as how the story tied into the larger plot of the game and I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy exploring Andy's room while "You have a friend in me" played in the background

Why then is Toy Box so far down on my list, world design

Even with endgame stats (LV40-45) the Gigas are tough to take down and as a result they come off as gimmicky in the worst sense of the word, beyond that the fact that the majority of the world is set in Galaxy Toys made me feel constrained and claustrophobic, which could have been partially alleviated if we'd been allowed to make our way through the parking lot outside, finally, the story kind of got repetitive with the backtracking whenever the characters were about to leave because "someone went missing yet again"

Ø  #9 Arrendelle: Though it has one of the best final bosses in the game along with Corona there is so much wrong with this world that I wonder if it's less Square Enix's fault and more Disney placing an insane amount of red tape on their favorite cash-cow:

1) Elsa does not become a party member even after you beat the world

2) You do not get to explore the city or the ice palace despite the latter being fully rendered on the map

3) Larxene, a lightning-based character, randomly traps you in an ice labyrinth when that would have made a lot more sense both logically and thematically if it had been Elsa

4) Speaking of Larxene, she does practically nothing the whole time you're there unlike Marluxia and Luxord, who are at least semi-active

5) You climb a mountain and get knocked off of it so many times that even Sora gets fed up

6) The bloody minigame where you have to find Olaf's body parts

7) Forcing us to watch the entire "Let it go" sequence and then having "Do you want to build a snowman" play over Anna's voice as she's explaining herself to Sora

8) So much of the story is excised that you have little clue as to what's going on to the point Hans appears for all of five minutes, doesn't say any lines, and isn't even named when it would have been cool, not to mention, just plain better, if he had started off as a guest member of your party

9) As a result of #8 Sora, Donald, and Goofy's presence feels like even more of an afterthought than usual in the sense that them not being there wouldn't have changed anything at all apart from Hans' Heartless then having no one to defeat it which can be seen by the fact that when they leave no one tells them goodbye unlike in every other world

10) The visual design was bland and tiresome after a while

11) The world's gimmick was uninspired to say the least

12) Fighting alongside a giant snowman (AKA Marshmallow) was awesome and in terms of pure gameplay the labyrinth was actually quite fun

Story Pros:

Ø  Master Xehanort's new voice actor is good but after hearing Leonard Nimoy's voice for the past couple of games the change is a bit jarring

Ø  The way previous games are referenced and tied together is a nice way of bringing new players into the fold while also setting up the finale's resolutions

Ø  The game has a better sense of humor than previous installments

Ø  Sora is more like his KH2 self than the bland caricature we saw in 3D and quite a few characters display some degree of genre-savviness

Ø  Master Yen Sid gets out of his chair to lend a hand for once

Ø  Donald Duck is the most powerful mage in Square Enix canon (and I am not making that up)

Gameplay Pros:

Ø  Being able to switch between different save points in the same world is a welcome addition

Ø  The secondary ability of all shotlocks to airstep is ingenious

Ø  You can have more than two party members finally!

Ø  The secret ending isn't too hard to unlock

Ø  You can upgrade your Keyblades, which means older ones aren't automatically relegated to redundancy

Ø  Donald and Goofy are useful again after being nerfed into uselessness in KH2

Ø  Towns and cities are actually populated by fully-voiced NPCs!

Ø  Cutscenes in Theater Mode are unlocked after completing each world rather than after beating the game

Ø  I never tried the Classic Kingdom minigames but the cooking one with Remy was a nice break from the normal gameplay (I suck at the egg-cracking one though)

Ø  The camera doesn't get in the way like it infamously did in KH1

Ø  I like the new main menu design (Feel free to disagree though)

Ø  The Gummi Ship is entirely optional outside of a few mandatory boss battles

Ø  Moogle Tickets are a nice way of giving players a second chance during difficult encounters (I do wish they didn’t activate so quickly though) 

Gameplay Cons:

Ø  The game never once tells you that you can switch between Situation Commands using L2

Ø  The game never once tells you that you keep all your lower-tier magic (Fire, Fira for example) and that your shortcuts don't automatically update to include the higher-tier version of whatever magic you have equipped

Ø  There's no real incentive to switch between Keyblades (That being said, my favorites are Wheel of Fate, Nano Arms, and Happy Gear/Ever After)

Ø  Attractions lose their charm quickly and completely ruin the flow of combat

Ø  Summons aren't too big of a deal since I only ever ended up using them once and even then it was by accident

Ø  Donald still heals you at the wrong time more often than not

Ø  Even on Proud Mode the game is way too easy for the most part (Apparently Critical Mode addresses this but I can't confirm that)

Ø  There is a lack of sidequests and post-game content that contributes to the feeling Square & Disney gave us half a game (For example, there is only one secret boss, said secret boss has a generic design, no ties to the story, and can be defeated at LV40 on your first attempt)

Ø  Hollow Bastion, Mysterious Tower, and Destiny Islands are not playable

Ø  The parkour from 3D has been nerfed too much in terms of distance to actually be useful

Story Cons:

Ø  Nomura fridged Kairi and he worfed almost everyone the first time you arrive at the Keyblade Graveyard!

Ø  The wrapping up of plot points and character arcs from prior entries was a little too nice and neat for me

Ø  The out-of-nowhere introduction of Subject X

Ø  Pete and Maleficent do literally nothing the whole damn game

Ø  The pacing is awful:

Almost all of the game's resolution is held back until after you've beaten the last Disney world

Ø  There are two important cutscenes in the Final World that you can accidentally miss because for some reason they are optional

Ø  We don't get to see what happened to Lingering Will, which also means we don't get any more insight into the third aspect of being (AKA the soul)

Ø  There are no Final Fantasy characters in the game, not even Sephiroth!

Ø  What happened to Demyx?

Ø  Master Eraqus has absolutely nothing to do with Terra’s restoration

Changes I’d make:

Ø  Require us to go through the Disney worlds a second time like in KH2

Ø  Have Aqua and Ven be saved halfway through the game instead of at the end, they could then spend the second half of the game resting or join you on one of the Disney worlds to refresh themselves

Ø  Have Lea and Kairi join you on one of the Disney worlds to get practical experience

Ø  Make the Keyblade Graveyard sequence be a series of one/two/three-on one battles so that members of Organization XIII can use their full arsenal of attacks from previous games

Ø  Let us play the second battle between Lingering Will and Terra-Xehanort

Ø  Speaking of Terra-Xehanort, we should have fought him alongside the Guardian Heartless

Ø  Have us explore Scala Ad Caelum while hunting down the individual replicas before then making us fight all of them in a boss battle

DLC

Ø  The presence of it says a lot about the game and not in a good way

Final Score

Ø  7/10-8/10

[ghostmartyr]

Pokémon FireRed Nuzlocke [Part 11]

The quest continues to beat this game using standard Nuzlocke rules and the added rule of no battling outside of Trainers. Grinding is strictly forbidden. In round I-don’t-even-know of this adventure, we head to Nugget Bridge!

Yee. haw.

-many minutes later-

Well, that’s done with. Now time to go beat up on all the Trainers hanging out near Bill’s house. Also I guess time to free Bill from the Detective Pikachu nonsense he done did to himself.

This is all going to be things we’ve done before, with me nonchalantly hoping Acorn (Pikachu) makes it up to a usable level by the end.

In the spirit of mixing it up a little, I’m going to see if Acorn can handle some of the pre-Misty trainers in her Gym. Totally not because there’s a level 17 Slowpoke up there that I want him to be able to knock flat.

First trainer beat without a fuss, Acorn grows to level 16, blah blah blah, ah. The second trainer has a Goldeen, so we’ll just come back later once we’re done with the Route 24 people. ...25?

Hell, I don’t know. I barely care at this point.

It’s 25. I do not care.

I CARE A LITTLE ACORN DON’T DIE.

Acorn does not die.

I think a piece of me does.

I’m gonna take a break from battles and catch my 24/25 stuff.

Oddish for 25 ftw!

Caught it!

Its name is Oak.

Route 24 wants us to have Weedle. As penance for missing one in Viridian Forest, I assume.

...

Acorn killed it.

Am I ever going to get both a Route 24 and a Route 25 pokemon?

[doubt]

Note how the Clefairy just disappears. Detective Pikachu’s take on this is much less dark.

Alrighty. All trainers up by Bill have been dealt with, meaning that it’s time to go forth and deal with the rest of Misty’s Gym. Acorn is level 17, Oak is level 25. Oak will take on the Goldeen the remaining trainer has. Then Acorn will have a chance against Staryu, but Oak will take on Starmie.

Acorn gets an Oran Berry, Oak gets a Persim. That Starmie’s confusion rate is the worst thing about this entire Gym.

My policy is that I have four sacrificial token pokemon in my party to spare my real team members pain. I think I’m canonically a monster.

Oki doki. The Staryu is level 18, so I think Acorn should be okay against it.

Yes! Acorn survives without a scratch.

But you are not fighting the Starmie. We do not gamble with Gym battles.

-flashbacks to Brock-

...We do not gamble with. most. Gym battles.

Oak, now level 26, against a level 21 Starmie. AKA An Abomination.

Wow.

Heeeeeeeeey, second badge get!

Time to wander down to Route 5 and catch a thing.

The thing is going to be a Meowth. Its name is Oak.

This is so much easier to do when you’re not typing down every single little thing you’re doing. I’m incredibly grateful for my past self’s logs, but I’m even more grateful that they did them so I don’t have to. Going through and not bothering with anything except the highlights is a lot more pleasant.

Not replaying Route 1 is, too.

This Butterfree Supersonicing everything in sight is less fun. The Stun Spore isn’t great either. But like everything eventually, it dies.

Step 1 of figuring out what to do about Celadon.

Step 2.

Step 3.

Wow, I’m not sure I’ve ever read this entry properly before. This is incredibly mean.

(Its name is Oak.)

And with that, we have our Vermilion City catch, and no longer have to worry about Magikarp belonging to any other route. Awesome. This is much nicer than the first time we caught a thing in this city.

Route 6 is taking too long to catch things in. We’re abandoning the attempt for now.

What we are not abandoning.

Is this insanity.

The reason I bought Repels during Left’s run, and then again during this one.

I think you can catch Diglett up to level 29 here. Oak is level 27. If I put on a Repel, things stronger than him will spawn. That should mean. I can get a ridiculously overleveled Ground pokemon for free. If true, that will help immensely.

Let’s watch as whatever happens is not that.

THERE WE GO!

The risk now is that we won’t catch it, or it will kill Oak.

Bite or Water Gun. Bite or Water Gun.

Bite for first bit.

Okay, Bite does little enough that Water Gun should be safe.

This thing knows Sand Tomb. My other fear about this arrangement is that it will have abandoned Magnitude as a move. I’m hoping I’m wrong, but even if I’m not. Level 29 Dugtrio. That’s not bad, given my options.

One more Bite, then I’ll try to catch.

It also knows Mud Slap.

-worry intensifies-

It uses Dig.

What’s the last move, Dugtrio.

FUCK YEAH.

This is probably the best thing I can currently do for this run. I would very much like for nothing bad to happen, but the fact that I can make this work is already really swell.

Her name is Bark.

Bark, you will replace Oak in the party. Now let’s see.

She’s Serious, and... yeah. No Magnitude. Because Mud Slap and Sand Tomb are so much better.

It’s okay, though. We’ll get through this by being superbly overleveled. Squee. We also now have something to eat Attack IVs up for breakfast, so this is just. There is nothing bad about this.

Route 11, what’ve you got for me?

Drowzee.

It’s caught. Its name is Oak.

Now to beat up the many, many trainers on this route. In hopes of getting Acorn to know Thunderbolt. That’s at level 26. He’s at level 20 right now.

Post-Route 11?

Level 22.

:(

Bike Voucher to drown my sorrows.

Followed by boat ride.

-many minutes later-

Acorn is level 25. Soon. Soon, the day will come. The day of reckoning. Thunderbolt is waiting. Somehow I’m always surprised by how difficult it can be to get an Electric pokemon with Thunderbolt. I think that, more than anything else, has single-handedly killed my general interest in raising Electric pokemon. It’s kind of sad. They were by far my favorite when I was a kid.

Side note unrelated to anything going on right now that might be scaring me.

Rattata with Hyper Fang is scary.

Those tiny things aren’t supposed to be dangerous.

Then.

Suddenly.

Danger.

And just in time for the Rival battle!

They’re going to have a real awkward wedding one day.

This fight is a lot simpler when my lowest level pokemon is level 26. Take notes, future self.

The Ivysaur is very, very annoying, though. Bark turns out to be my best choice for dealing with it. Not what I would call a comfort. ...Heero. I still miss you. So much.

Cut get.

Super happy fun boat trip over now.

We teach Cut to Oak, and go about our business entering the Gym and throwing all the Trainers to the ground. Acorn, Bark. I put my faith in you.

Pokemon fans, what is your least favorite Gym setup, and why is it Surge’s?

Let’s goooooooo.

Acorn will (hopefully) handle the Voltorb and Pikachu, and then leave the Raichu to Bark’s capable. whatevers.

Success on Acorn’s side.

Bark...?

Right.

Yeah, so Double Team?

Do Not Like.

Except when I use it. It’s like Sturdy, in that way.

This fight takes around ten turns for Dig to actually hit and knock the Raichu out in one blow.

Surge’s Gym: The Actual Worst.

We made it to needing Flash! Miracles do exist!

...Wait, what do I have that can learn Flash?

None of the Oaks present. :(

And this time!

This time!

I made it through the damn Diglett cave without needing to kill any for illicit exp.

Back at Cerulean, I’m gonna get my bike, but first I’m going to put Oak in the box so that Oak can come in and learn Cut and Flash.

Heading off to Rock Tunnel like a boss.

Huh, there’s an Aerial Ace TM around these here parts. I’m going to get rid of Sand Tomb on Bark (I hate Sand Tomb and everything remotely like Sand Tomb, so I can’t see myself using it) and teach her Aerial Ace. She is going to be violently fighting Fighting pokemon at some point, and the next Gym coming up is one I have nothing naturally super effective against.

Meanwhile, back in things happening, Route 9 option is a Spearow!

...tfw you don’t know how not to kill something and throwing a poke ball doesn’t work.

But we persevere and catch it!

Its name is Oak.

Route 10 shows us... Voltorb!

.zaft. ;-;

Oh whoops.

Um.

I was spamming the A-button equivalent.

Bye Voltorb, nice not knowing you. Uh. Sorry. +117 illicit exp to Bark and Acorn.

Oops.

Let’s go hide in a cave now and not examine all of that too closely.

Rock Tunnel gives us a Geodude to try not to kill! We are going to answer that call with utmost seriousness, and do whatever possible to not kill the Geodude.

Success!

Its name is Oak.

Now we undertake the long. long. long. journey through the tunnel. It’s exactly like that scene in Lord of the Rings. Just with less fire. And wizards.

This Clefairy near the end of the tunnel is trying my patience. Minimize is the worst. Letting pokemon become immobilized by love is the worst. All of this is the worst. I miss being able to set things on fire so much.

As romantic as it is that love as a status appears to be unending, fucking stop.

Cool. Nice. Great.

Playing this is sapping my struggling will to live, good grief.

Okaay.

So here’s how this plays. I think, if I were given the choice of having everything handed to me, I would go with catching one of the Snorlaxes, and catching a very high level Grimer in Celadon. That would put me at five pokemon. Six would be if I wanted to take the Hitmonlee or Hitmonchan.

I don’t know if I have the resources to make that work.

Truth be told, I still think it was possible for me to beat the Elite Four with my original team. I was overly paranoid about the wrong things, as it turned out, and made a few bad calls. But I don’t think that team was doomed to failure.

Leveling things up so they’re invincible works as a strategy, but I’m also undoubtedly handicapped with Typing. I could drag this current team through the game with no additions, and the leveling could make up for a lot. Maybe even enough to surpass my original team.

Or I could pick some more stuff up.

It’s a hard call. I do really think that throughout the entire game, I only have three realistic options for team additions, and I’m very close to having my hands on any of them. Everywhere else, the leveling is just too much of a negative. A level 25 Lapras was cool and all, but if you look at how much time went into leveling it, I’m not sure I would call having it my best option. Buying a Scyther has already been ruled out here, because it would be level 20. It would resist Fighting and make all Psychic things easier, but it would take too many resources to train.

Grimer, Snorlax, Fighting Gift.

Those are the things I can get that I feel could be a worthwhile investment.

What do I want my final team to look like? What things do I already know are going to cause problems, and how do I want to adjust for them?

Questions I get to ask after three badges. Hell. Why did I think this was a good idea?

I think what I’ll do. Ugh.

See, I think the problem is that the Fighting thing is closest to being gotten, but the Snorlax is what determines if I use it or not. If I can’t have Snorlax, the Fighting thing would be good. But I don’t find out if I’ll get the Snorlax until a bit later and argh.

For now, let’s keep things simple. We’ll go through the tower now, so Acorn and Oak are more experienced as we hit the other sections of the plot. I can’t remember if I get the Super Rod now or later, so we’ll also go down and mess with the fisher people briefly.

Tower and Rival-san first.

...Oh wait. I guess the first thing I want to do is dodge as many trainers as possible and run to Celadon for a Thunderstone for Acorn. Let’s do that.

But if we can get the Super Rod already, it would be best to do that now so we could nab a Grimer when we got there... Sigh.

No Super Rod just yet, sorry me.

Route.... uh. One we’re on while we head towards Celadon gives us a Growlithe to try and catch. ...Bark kills it. More sighing. +195 illicit exp.

Celadon reached, Tea gotten. And...

Yay!

Now to buy a ton of Lemonade.

Then we deal with the tower.

The nicest thing about Heero (that is a lie, all things about Heero were the nicest) was that we didn’t have to deal with this monstrosity.

Ivysaur is still difficult. I don’t have an actual answer to that, yet. It has perfect accuracy with its Sleep Powder so far, adding to the extreme difficulty. We get through it, though, and Oak handles the Kadabra.

Now for the rest of the tower to be taken by Acorn and Oak.

Right. We can’t yet see these, so no catching just yet.

So I lied. Acorn killed everything. Oak did not help. Sorry, Oak. Now I guess we go do the Celadon side of this. So we can then come back to the tower. So we can then figure out if we’re doing a Snorlax or a thingamajig. So we then can get a Grimer.

On and on it goes.

“I don’t sound remotely suspicious at all!”

Sigh. I hate how Levitate is a thing with certain Poison pokemon. Not naming names or anything. I’m just pointing out that my life would be much, much easier if Bark could Dig every single Poison thing in existence.

Look Ma, I made it.

Thanks in advance for giving Oak some exp, Giovanni.

Though Bark is taking the Kangaskhan. Love you Oak, but Dig is better than Water Gun. ...and it still manages to do nothing. That’s mildly scary. I have never missed Allenby so deeply.

Bark finishes it off while still in the green, though. Proving once again that leveling beats everything.

Silph Scope get, so now we can go and finish up the tower.

...I don’t think I actually have any moves that won’t kill this, so if throwing a Poke Ball doesn’t work, we’re running away.

Hm.

It used Curse. Fine, we’ll make an honest try of catching it.

...Why does every sleep-inducing move hit every single fucking time. Why. Why why why.

...

I don’t know how it’s still alive, and I feel like it shouldn’t be.

Whatever.

It’s caught.

Its name is Oak.

Hey, my past self screwed up and didn’t note if I could run away from the Marowak or not. If I can, I have to do that instead of winning extra exp.

Ah. Running away lets me leave the battle, but when I walk back forward the Marowak respawns. Fair. Guess you’ve gotta die, sad ghost.

That done with, time to rescue flute guy. He has a name, but that name is less important than that he has a flute and will determine what our final team will look like once we make use of it.

...I can’t believe I just realized that this is basically Kurt’s plot from gen 2.

We now begin the most difficult trial of the run.

The Snorlax wars.

If catching one looks like it will kill someone, I’m running from it. That goes for both of them. This is a mission of pure luck. Snorlax can kill whatever it wants. The mission is to avoid it killing my team. Accidentally killing it is cool, but if the choices are something dying or running to escape, we are running.

Pictured: Stress.

Let’s get this done with.

...This is not going to work. One Headbutt puts Bark in the orange. If it decides to make a concentrated attack instead of just sleeping, I’m in trouble. Plus, without an Allenby, all I have barely puts a dent in it.

THEN AS I AM TYPING THIS

What the actual fuck.

Welcome to the team, Trunk?

Uh.

Things I did not expect.

Oak, you’re going in the box to make room for Trunk.

Then I guess we’ll. Go get the Super Rod. Fetch Grimer. Then deal with the actual plot of the game. Huh.

Trunk is Quirky, and has Immunity, which as we learned last time, is great for Koga. So uh. What I guess I’m saying is. Nice. This puts us dangerously close to being in a pretty good place.

Lowest level thing that I’m using is level 30. That’s really, really good. So now we’re going to feed all the trainers we didn’t beat on Route 8 to Trunk, and giggle about it as we go.

Righty then, Trunk hits level 32, and we’re going to storm Erika’s Gym now.

...Why does everything put all of my stuff to sleep this round.

I also should find a more workable solution to fighting Grass pokemon at some point. I have an inkling that being overleveled isn’t going to last forever, and it’s my only real defense at the moment.

And I need to stop having Oak in up front. I’m trying to get some Sp. Atk from the Oddishes and things, but really it’s just meaning I forget and have to switch out on things like Bellsprout. EV training fails everywhere.

Seriously though, I’m using Acorn to deal with Grass things. That is not a solution. That is an abomination.

Lesgo.

Including blatant the blatant stupidity of having Acorn fight the Vileplume.

I just want my team to be its best self. Don’t judge.

VINDICATION.

Badge 4, get!

And now we fish for our Grimer. Which. tbh I don’t even know if it’ll make sense to use, but in any case, we will have it. Having things is nice.

According to Serebii, there’s a 1% chance of Grimer here. Mostly this pond just has Magikarp.

We’re going to be here a while. Especially since getting a pokemon on the hook at all is proving mighty difficult. Until a few seconds ago, I was averaging five tries per Magikarp.

-6. hours. later.-

.

.

.

Presenting.

The lowest level Grimer you can catch in this here pond.

Are you fucking kidding me.

-cries in the corner for six more hours-

(Sadly, only one of those descriptions of my actions is fake. Now that really wants to make me cry for six hours.)

Its name.

is.

Sap.

It joins the party. Tree goes in the box.

It is Brave.

Good for it.

Let’s call this a stopping point, shall we?

[myfriendpokey]

clearance sale

clearing out some of my backlog of opinions before the new year so i can start anew. in this post I have accumulated some writing scraps on the only three topics: 1. finance 2. mystery 3. location

FINANCE

i enjoyed these recent-ish posts against the idea of indie sustainability, although as someone who already works a day job i always feel a bit ambivalent about the advice to just work a day job to pay for this stuff - - like yes, absolutely, do it, BUT sell your shit too in the knowledge that the type of precarity we associate w/ creative work is already in the process of being implemented everywhere else as well (or has already been - zero hour contracts, sub-living wages etc). like i am fortunate to still have a day job which pays a living wage and leaves me time to work on my own things on the side - but this feels like an anachronism rather than an inevitability right now.. maybe my unsustainable games will help keep me afloat when my job gets automated and i have to go work in an amazon warehouse, unsustainable games for an unsustainable job, ha ha ha. video games are an exploitative bubble but so is the rest of "the market".

it is true that this is a political problem rather than one in the narrow remit of things that can be fixed with the right 10-point sales plan- -  nevertheless i think the issue of trying to make even small money off these things will remain kind of pressing as, in turn, regular employment comes more and more to resemble irregularly compensated hobbyist labour.

anyway one point i found really interesting, which i think all the above posts kind of grapple with - - the idea that it's not necessarily more "realistic" to aim at selling 1000 copies rather than 100,000. i think while we make fun of the aspiring millionaires a lot of people have just been banking on the idea of a fertile middle ground between the two extremes of tiny and ludicrous amounts of sales, between boom and bust. i'm sure there are still people working in that space but it seems like it's shrinking.

one question brendan keogh asks in his piece is "why should game makers be any different  [from the norm of artists, musicians etc not really making any money]?" i think this can actually be answered a little - because hobbyist game development sort of exploded in tandem with the internet itself becoming more naturalized within everyday life, because the economic basis for indie games was always centered around the internet, which means people working in indie games were always in the vicinity of the massive, startling movements of capital that the internet rendered more visible and immediate. no more were the weird vicissitudes of the market hidden behind closed doors, in boardrooms or stock quotations - now you could log onto any site and see just bewildering amounts of money suddenly funnel into the pockets of this or that individual in real time, frequently to their own surprise as well. and i think this connected to something more general - a sort of ambient awareness of financialization, the way "the financial sector" cannibalized things like industry, the greater visibility of capital not as something embedded in some specific product or set of individual practices but as a kind of weird free-floating aura arbitrarily descending or departing. enormous reservesof "general" wealth became more visible just as the benefits and stability of waged employment became yet more desolate and i think you need to see the draw of one in part as a consequence of the other. 

gacha-capitalism, permanent artificial scarcity coupled with the vague, insistent prospect of fantastic gains, as long as you keep playing. which is a rhythm already enshrined in many areas of working life - broke college students and unpaid graduates hustling for eventual employment, waged workers grinding through until  retirement. but it's one the enhanced immediacy and swiftness of capital on the internet intensified and extended. fabulous payouts can strike anyone at any time, in exchange for slowly bleeding out the prospect of any other kind of livelihood. much like the austerity following the financial crash which levelled so many basic social services for no particular purpose other than the hope that doing so for long enough would please the gods of prosperity to start tossing money around again. all dues, no pay.

i do think it's worth being cynical about the efforts to domesticate this process, building a fair and sustainable biome within capitalism, by using the tools of that same capitalism etc.  but if the format can't be seperated from the wider world then that's something which swings both ways. for me the most interesting critical work around vgames right now is in the effort to move outside of the constant, numbing boom-and-bust cycles of capital, the idiot repetition of exhilaration and depression and exhilaration and it'll all be okay as long as we can hold out one more cycle, particularly when that's a rhythm which has been central to the development of the format from the beginning. i think anyone involved with developing videogames has probably seen multiple generations of cool shit emerge, get abruptly killed off and written out of history in accordance with market diktats, and then replaced with a new wave of cool shit whenever the investors shift gears into "expansion" mode again. a mode of thinking about and preserving what people do that stands in opposition to this is something i can easily imagine being more generally useful in the culture, as ever more areas of life and culture start becoming subject to the same questions.

MYSTERY

there's a mystery in depth and a mystery in shallowness. with depth the habitual glance of recognition goes out and falls through - you can place roughly where something is in relation to the world, but not what it's doing, not where it goes. as a presence it seems to require a new mode of attention to be recognized, which i guess is why it sometimes makes me uneasy - that challenge, the way that challenge can be moralized. are you a bad enough dude to engage with art?? if there are 100 black obelisks in a field which one do you decide to look at? and will it really turn out to be deep, or just dense?

videogames can feel like depth-worship, like the embodiment of an essentially cthonic system of values. how deep did you go and what did you see there? did  you find the gold bars in pac-man? (www.mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/spies.cgi?action=url&type=info&page=pmgoldbar.info.txt) did you see the secret ending? how far did you get into the game mechanics, into the lore? this marks the top 10 deepest players on this game. surpass  them... if you dare. an ethos of diligent attention, hierarchial levels of  understanding and initiate-dom, a sub-culture. and at best a maguslike  dedication to altered states of consciousness that i can respect, an interest in shifting through mangled pieces of debris in search of secret mysteries. at worst the authority cults and tests of true belonging that spring up around those mysteries, whose value is in being hidden and whose guarantee is in the strenuous effort with which they must be located. paranoia about true spiritual meanings being plundered by opportunistic interlopers. stay out. get good.

the videogame has the basic opacity of the computer system and the act of engaging with this curious abyss is allegorized into dungeons, castles, mazes. trapdoors and secret corridors. one pleasure in looking up older games for me is in seeing them recognize and learn how to thematize this basic sense of mystery. in bubble bobble the obscure scoring mechanics and secret endings are cheekily perverse, arcade challenge by another means - another system to game. in king's quest there's something like a crossfertilization between the strange causal voids of the fairy tale and the adventure game: "Exit the gingerbread house and go east and east. There is a large walnut tree here. Take walnut and then open walnut to discover a gold nut. Head east and take bowl . Look bowl  to see the words “fill” at the bottom. Fill and the bowl will fill up with a delicious stew." the wizardry games took the connection between mysterious game systems and occult knowledge much further - the "true" ending of wizardry iv means finding a secret chamber and answering a series of riddles based on your knowledge of the kaballah (or at least, kaballah-derived tarot interpretations).

it's easy to moralize depth - lotus eaters, magic islands. you wander through a strange land and then return to find it's 5 hours later and you forgot to eat. there's something creepy to me about depth on an industrial scale, about building huge tunnels with massive teams on forced overtime, and then a team of professional tunnel reviewers cautiously start descending on ropes and come back every so often and say, well, 20 hours in and it all looks ok, and meanwhile everybody else is jumping en masse. maybe that's more of an issue with consumer culture in general. but sometimes it feels like a way to avoid dealing with certain inherent limitations of that culture, or even limitations of art in general, by projecting those limits out to the end of ever-deeper tunnels that fewer and fewer people will ever see, the rest of them straggling back, exhausted, getting jobs. well, i can't tell you if red dead 2 is good or not. i only got 60 hours in, and i never even found all the falcons.

if the mystery of depth is having too much space for speculation to operate coherently within, the mystery of shallowness is having not enough space for speculation to operate at all: something is too manifestly there, limited, closed-off, it's hard to push it away to get some metaphorical breathing room. 

i feel this way sometimes reading writers like tove jansson, flannery o'connor - SOMETHING happened, the stories are short and clear and describe some definite event without too much uncertainty, they even have "broader themes" raised - but somehow the themes feel embarrassingly outsize for the stories, and the stories remain too clearly defined to sink back into the murk of a generalized moral or experience. they feel like moral stories when you can't work out what the moral might be.

robbe-grillet on raymond roussel: "Now these chains of elucidations,  extraordinarily precise, ingenious, and farfetched, appear so derisory, so disappointing, that it is as if the mystery remained intact. But it  is henceforth a mystery that has been washed, emptied out, that has become  unnameable. The opacity no longer hides anything. One has the impression of  having found a locked drawer, then a key; and this key opens the drawer impeccably... and the drawer is empty."

there's a famous shallowness to videogames as well that's most often caught by people outside the culture - when you see the fake videogames in a comicbook, or on tv, and they're named something like "washing machine simulator 3000" or "municipal tax assailants". and part of this also stems from the computer, the history of the computer as it insinuated its way into everyday life, as a mysteriously elaborate and convoluted way of doing just impossibly banal things, like balancing chequebooks or printing text. the stubborn thingliness of not-quite-functional machines, the way the thingliness glosses and corrodes their own internal fantasies, mirrors of the basic weirdness that is human consciousness as a material fact within the world. 

with my friend i used to joke  about "e3" just being the dumpster behind an abandoned gamestop - all those needy longform experiences frozen into evocative trinkets. find a nonfunctional disk copy of mario odyssey and it gives you all the same delight as playing mario odyssey, only without having to. i think there's something beautiful about that flatness, that directionless object-hostility, the rejection of the grandoise hero's journey fantasies that it implies – as well as something baleful, a rejection of consciousess in general, the idea that it could take you anywhere not inside your own head.

LOCATION

why are there so many videogames about going outside? every time i've played a videogame it's been inside a room, usually a dark one, mostly while still wearing my pajamas. for me it is an internal activity. but not only do all these games take place in fields and plains, they always talk about the wonders of going on a voyage, the beauty of the great outdoors, the superiority of the wandering main characters to the slugs and layabouts who sit at home all day.... it's weird to me, i demand we move past these cloying pseudo-critiques. raymond williams once pointed out that the first pastoral was written from the perspective of a rentier daydreaming of cashing out and moving to a country home. i demand more games with the courage of their implict convictions and that if they require you to sit motionless indoors  for hours they should explicitly establish and argue for a value system in which this is the best possible thing that you can do. imagine if movies were all set in dark chambers full of people sitting down - i think i can say they would be much less insipid as an artform. "all of man's problems stem from an inability to stay in his room".

(images: Gakken No O Benkyou Soft Kazu Suuji, Legend of Legaia, a Chinese bootleg cart, and ...Iru!)

[satire-please]

Take a Sad Song and Make it Better - Part 2

Batfam Big Bang Day 2 - Sick = Batfam member being taken care of or attacked by an army of motherhens.

Jason makes soup for some ungrateful shits

Part 1

“I hate you.”

“I hate you more.”

“But I hate you little shits most,” Jay says, shouldering the guest bedroom door open roughly,  He slams the tray of soup and crackers on the bedside table between the two coughing, sniffing invalids. “Honestly, what kind of dumb fuck takes a swim in the dead of winter?”

“Screw you, Jason. I wouldn’t call being chained and thrown into the harbor a leisurely swim.” Tim says venomously. But unfortunately, he doesn’t look much of a threat when his lap is blanketed in white tissues. In fact, there might not even be a single space of the bedspread left not covered in the clumped wet balls.

It had been cold. So cold when the thugs shoved them off the boat. The water slammed against their chests like ice. Tim managed to get one breath in before the harbor creeps over his domino mask, his hair and to sucks them under. Tim has five minutes. He can hold his breath for five minutes. Has Damian been trained? How long—

Jay raises both his eyebrows, “Excuse me? This is the thanks I get? I slave all day in the kitchen for yer bony asses and instead of a single thank you, it’s screw you? Ouch, Babybird.” His hands motion grandly to the food tray.

“Must you poison us too, Hood?” Damian stares at the bowls with suspicion. “Have we not suffered enough as it is?”

The infidels had been clumsy, roughly chaining them back to back. A shoddy job. It should have provided loopholes, space from hurried mistakes, but alas they focused enough on limiting the use of their hands. The gang yelled when a new pair of black boots landed on the insufficient sailboat’s deck. The foolish men must have thrown them over as a hopeful distraction for the Bat. But as the metal links dig into Damian’s arms, quickly turning the same temperature as the bay, he knows they were wrong.

“Now why would I do that.” Jay crosses his arms over his chest, looming over first Dami and then Tim. “That’s a waste of food. If I want ya to die, I’d just shoot ya in the head. Save Alfred a grocery trip.”

“Thanks, Jay,” Tim says sarcastically.

“Aw shucks, yer welcome.”

Tim doesn’t bother kicking towards the surface yet. They tossed them in the shallows, this group doesn’t usually care about the efficiency of a kill but the fun of it. From reports, he knows the game is to cruelly toss victims in water only a few feet deeper than their prey. Giving an illusion of hope when they kick, hop, jump from the river bed. Only for them gasp and be helplessly pushed back down by oars or hands. The sadistic game can last for hours...until their playtoy finally loses strength or gives up.

He opens his eyes in the filth of the bay and peers around looking, looking...there!

Steam flows up from the bowls, the aroma quickly fills the room. Tim takes a deep breath, the smell tempting him, while a stomach gives a quiet rumble in the next bed. When neither boy makes a move towards Jason’s generous sacrifice, Jason shifts his weight to his hip and taps his foot with a scowl.

Damn it, he knows his cooking is legit, man.

“What? Wouldja like it to be Dick’s cooking instead?” Both bedridden boys look over to each other for a second, then to Jason, to the tray and back again. Then Tim and Damian frantically struggle as one to escape the sheets to get to the bowls first. “Yeah. That’s what I thought.”

The tension in Jason’s limbs, like they’d notice pffftt, finally eases as the bowls barely stay full for a minute. The moment they’re empty, he gives them a second helping and glares at Tim when he wrinkles his nose at the dish. “This is no time to eat like a bird, princess.”

“But I don’t need–”

“Don’t need nothing, ya need to give yer body the good stuff to fight. And ain’t ya lucky Dick’s off planet? He’d give ya the worst puppy eyes and be all over ya, both of ya for that shitty attitude.”

Damian and Tim shudder. Dick has always won the worst Motherhen award. Always. (Alfred is the sneakiest though.)

Damian puts his spoon down. He is...content, how odd. “I suppose that is a fair point. What I do not understand is how the two of us could be put in the same room, in a mansion such as this, forced to accept each other’s presence against our will during recovery.”

Damian conserves his energy the best he can. Watching the bubbles that escape him, minding his surroundings as his ears go numb. Their bodies jerk against the current as Drake suddenly drags them in the direction of his choosing. His slight height and longer legs give a mild advantage, but Damian does not hinder or fight Drake at a time such as this. Surely Drake has a purpose, a plan if he is as clever as Grayson has repeatedly claimed. He walks carefully backward, mindful not to trip on the debris and garbage littered on the harbor bottom. If they lose their balance, escaping to the surface will be more...difficult. His heel hits something hard and he twists to the best of his ability around Drake, a car!

“Alfred’s orders. He said it’s the perfect way to condense care and meet yer needs more efficiently. The man plays the best vindictive shtick if ya know what I mean.”

“It’s the spite. He needs it to stay alive and old.” Tim adds. He sets his bowl on the tray with a sharp clink.

Two minutes. The old beetle is brown with rust, one broken door floating on its hinges. It’s just what they need, Tim hauls them on the roof of the vehicle and stands on his tiptoes. His head breaks the surface of the water and he takes a greedy gulp of air. Smog has never tasted so sweet.

Then he feels the body lashed to his struggle and squirm violently.

“Robin? What are you–” And he notices it. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the top of Damian’s head, his wet dark spikes. But that’s it. His face is still submerged.

Fuck.

No. Tim bites his lip, tearing it and moves his arms under the chains for any wiggle room. He sucks in his ribs, not on his watch. Not another Robin dying on his watch. He pulls the boy up an itch up his body, two...and leans over. He hears a wonderful, desperate gasp before his head goes back in the water. Good. That’s fine. He can stay under.

Besides Tim’s got another five minutes.

On the bed somewhere, something buzzes and vibrates. Tim pats the covers awkwardly until he unburies a phone.

It’s 7:30.

He promptly reaches across the bedside table. His fingertips nudging a small orange bottle until it slides and topples over. It rolls closer to the preteen. Success is his. “Meds, Damian. Every four hours remember?”

The younger boy huffs but drops the bottle into his lap, “You as well, Drake. I believe Alfred has synced our medication schedules for this purpose.”

“What purpose?”

“To ensure the other does not conveniently forget.”

“I’ve never done that!”

“I disagree. In fact, shall we pull up the records to call that bluff? I am certain Oracle or Alfred have some sort of accounts on the matter.”

“...No.” Jay guffaws at the cowed expression on Tim’s face. Little do these two know that’s one of his tiny jobs to keep the suckers alive today. Stuff their pills down their throats if necessary. How lucky for them that he just gets to be an extra eye, to watch them like a hawk, to take note of how Damian pops open the bottle and swallow his meds dry. But–

“Drake,” states Damian exasperatedly.

“What?

Jay adds his two cents with a point, “So what about them meds, replacement?”

“Oh.” Tim looks to the side. There’s a long sigh, but finally, the asshat puts down his phone to finally get the good drugs in him. Okay, so it’s a bit of a setup. Replacement ain’t got some pills but the fancy stuff since he’s you know, missing an organ. The IV stand almost leans against the wall, it’s needle already burrowed in the back of Tim’s hand. Tim opens the high-end antibodies and carefully feeds it into a tubing of the hanging IV bag. The dying light reflects off the clear fluid. Jay almost considers helping, since Tim lightly curses, his arm stretched awkwardly above him.

Nah. Replacement...no Babybird got’s this. He’ll get all stiff and offended if Jay steps in.

They watch as Tim’s posture goes lax. His eyes narrow in annoyance but soon he’s going to pass out and there’s nothing he can do about it. Gods, he hopes they don’t watch him sleep again.

They do it with this vindictive glee that he could do without.

Damian sniffs, but nods with approval, “Good. It would be ridiculous if you wasted away after what we had to endure in that last venture.”

There are no stars in Gotham’s sky. Not from what he can see being propped up over Drake’s back in this manner. His chest strains as his lungs finally fill. He could do without the idiotic trembles as his body submits to the cold, yet he’s avoided one death and that shall suffice him for now.

“What took you so long, Red Robin? Did you not notice our difference in heights until the last instance. I swear, that you could become any sort of vigilante is beyond me. But be assured, soon Father will finish and rescue us from this silly predicament.”

There is no answer.

“D-Drake?”

Their bodies bob slightly, Damian thinks of how the dead float.

“DRAKE!”

He rocks, flails until under the water his wrist is squeezed tightly. Oh. Drake is not dead...at least not yet. Father, no Grayson would not be pleased over his incompetent predecessor’s possible demise.

So he focuses on the sailboat and screams one word. “BATMAN!”

Jay looks back and forth between the two and smirks. Feelings, these boys are shit at them, but he bets if he put a gun to them, it would be a fight of who leaps in front of the other first. He puts his money on the demon brat, the jumpy monkey. He remembers how Bruce stormed into the cave, one bird in the crook of his arm, the other over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. How he yelled for Jason to prepare the medi-beds and Alfred taking in the pale skin of the two boys went straight for the emergency heaters.

It had been a rush.

A chance of sepsis is not fun. Neither is dealing with hypothermia with the pint-sized preteen. You would think being closer to hell, or his genetics would keep him warm, but no, Jay had to massage the circulation back into those toes so the kid could keep them.

It had been a close shave.

But they’re Bats. Surviving is what they do.

“Well girls, it’s time for a nap,” he pulls out a book. A real one. Like get these shits some real literature, “And I gotcha the best bedtime story, so shut up and listen.”

“I do not require such frivolous–”

“I said shut yer yap before I suffocate ya with a pillow.” He thumbs open the first page, “There we are, ‘It was a pleasure to burn…’”

Tim graciously gives a wet tissue to Damian to lob at Jason. Damian takes the ammo grateful, continues to take it as Jason proceeds to dodge. And be successful at it. His voice melodious and soothing in its own rough way. Over time, it causes Damian’s throws to be more erratic, wide...slow. It causes Tim’s shoulders to sink deeper into the bedding, a different kind of drowning.

“‘We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?'”

Yeah, Jay thinks he could do that. Be the best botherer in the world.

‘Bout time he got started on it.

[teamcalamity]

Okay, newbie. Let's move!

A new competitive season has started, Opus VIII is about to launch and Team Calamity has a blog... BOOYA!!

If you want to see more variety than a dialogue with Squall, topics that hit harder than Sephiroth into the back of a flower girl and tips more useful than Vaan's point in the story, then this is the blog for you.

In this first article we thought it might be best to introduce you to some of the team who will be regular staples on here. Hopefully this brief insight will help put some of their upcoming content into perspective.

First up is our resident judge - Mitch.

How did you first get into FFTCG?

It was a dark time in my life; I had just finished one of my favourite TV series for the 15th time and worst of all I had a piece of apple skin stuck between my teeth. There was no light at the end of the tunnel.

I received a call from the UK Champion (but not world) Peter Sherratt, he spoke to me like a true champion with grace and honour “you alright dickhead?” he told me that he had just gone to a new comic book shop, the infamous Calamity Comics. Peter knew I always had a creepy girlfriend affection for Final Fantasy and our recent card game was now just an OTK shit show. So we thought let’s give it a go.

Pulled Bahamut legend, fire seems strong; I bet this card will be good for a long time, 10000 damage AND removed. Peter got Foil Light Cloud. This card is also future proof, if there’s one thing I know about card games, is that removal is key and this has it in spades…

From that day I was hooked, scratching at my arms for the next fix of spoilers, tapping the vein, breathing FFTCG and dealing with my new addiction.

What style of play do you favour?

I like to win, but more importantly I like to be a smug prick and to do this, I love my combat tricks. Nothing lifts the table up on my side more than doing something your opponent cannot see coming. I also love removal and drawing cards so if someone could explain to me how to play earth that would be great. Thank you.

Biggest hype of Opus 8?

While all the cards aren’t out yet, I am especially excited for Lunafreya, the stuff that she can enable; it means your opponent will not want to kill off some of your best forwards. That said this will all change depending on the new Garnet, if there is one.

Peter - the 2018 UK Champion (not world)

How did you first get into FFTCG?

I played yu gi oh at the time and I saw FF being sold at Calamity Comics in Hatfield.

Eric the store owner said they were doing a tournament on Friday night's (an attempt to remove the magic the gathering crowd) .

I had played FF7 and I've never liked mtg so sounded like a win win for me. All that was left was to convince mitchell to go with me to hold my hand through it all.

Didn't take long to convince him and off we went to go purchase some cardboard crack. First pack I opened....foil Cloud L!! Wooo

First deck I played was fire ice. We didn't have a clue what we were doing but got it after a couple of goes.

Mitch went home that night to learn the rulings. It became an obsession of his for a while. He would wake up in the middle of the night about illegal plays the night before.

What was even better was we convinced our mates Joseph and Azlan to join also. Fucking great game. Needs more cleavage though.

What style of play do you favour?

I really like all 3 of the main tropes. They all have a special place in my heart because of the decks ive played with.

Mono wind has generally been a control deck. Midrange ice is tempo. Discard ice is quite aggressive.

I'm gunna vote for tempo. After a short amount of set up I do love using dull freeze or discard mechanics for those cheap easy wins. It's like eating 20 mcnuggets. You know it's bad but it feels so good.

Biggest hype for Opus 8?

Sherlotta, Fina, Alexander, Lasswell & Time Mage.

The one I will talk about is Time Mage though because I honestly think it's perfect for what ice needs right now.

Wind earth is an awful matchup where we can't choose Zidane, get fucked by big daddy etc etc. So we're investing 5cp for a huge tempo swing. Huge. I'm a big big fan. It's a multicard too so extra copies may be played.

Mono ice will return with a vengeance!!!

Rich - Team Calamity's synergy specialist.

How did you first get into FFTCG?

I have zero history of playing card games, so my interest in FFTCG was purely as someone who had played nearly every game released under the title, who just fancied trying it out. I bought the starter decks on release date to gauge if it was something that I was going to stick with, and pretty soon I was part of the Opus I stock disaster, hunting the shelves of every Toys'r'Us in driving distance trying to find packs (I'm not proud to admit that). Two and a half years, and many £'s later, here I am writing my first blog post after years of being a lurker on the fan page.

What style of play do you favour?

I have always run decks that I find genuinely fun to build, play and tweak. Sometimes that means I run stuff closer to the meta, and sometimes I run more obscure decks. The vast majority of decks that I run revolve around combo cards such as Yuri/Chelinka/Alhanalem or Seifer/Raijin/Fujin. Nothing turns me on more than the text "If you control card name "X"".

Biggest hype for Opus 8?

Just give me 3 Lasswell in foil. I love that the card has been made with a specific purpose in mind (Fire/Ice deck), and all 3 abilities feed into what those elements want to achieve. I'm not quite sure how best to make Lasswell work, but I'm sure someone much smarter than I am will find a way to make him a beast!

Tom - Blog editor, specialist subject the 'Tombo Combo'

How did you first get into FFTCG?

I got into the game by chance around Opus 4. I'd never played a TCG before but out browsing for a cheap PS4 game in the January sales I spotted Cloud and Squall booster packs in the bargain bin at a local game shop. A Final Fantasy card game, what even is that?! Went home, googled it, rushed back the next day, bought the lot and ordered all the starter sets. I still remember opening my first packs and getting so excited by how many shinys I was getting, like one in each pack, I must be so lucky! Next step a venture to Calamity as the only local place to play. I didn't win a game for about 2 months but was having the best time!

What style of play do you favour?

I like to do things differently so for me I'm all about the meme life and unashamedly so. I like to shy away from the meta (to my own detriment) as I get much more enjoyment from doing things myself and if someone tells me something is shit, it just makes me want to play it more. That said I still believe you can meme and be successful and hope to go someway to proving that this competitive season (here's to 0-X at every major tournament this year)

Biggest hype for Opus 8?

Not seen the full list yet but I'm buzzing for the new FF7 starter deck. I'll probably look to take the Earth parts into an Earth/Fire setup maybe utilising the new 15 characters if space. For me a big part of enjoying the game is using characters I actually know of and love so this should fit nicely. I've also got some ideas for a Fire/Water rush style deck and a new Opus launch wouldn't be complete without me trying to make FF8 work (where are you Cid Kramer!).

I hope this is the set where things really open up and we don't see the same few decklists dominating the circuit.

Team Calamity's OP runs every Friday from 7pm at Calamity Comics in Hatfield (North of London). You can also follow us on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook (teamcalamityfftcg) or contact us on email (teamcalamityfftcg@gmail.com). Alternatively just write anything on the FFTCG Fans Facebook page, Team Calamity's James Stevenson will no doubt comment on it.

[elane-in-the-shadows]

Red Queen Fan Fiction - Dark Heart Bright Lightning Chapter 4

Attention! Contains War Storm spoilers. Attention!!

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Find this on wattpad and on AO3

Bones

Maven POV

They dragged me out of my cell into some kind of locker room and let me sleep for a day. Next thing I knew, I woke and was urged to clean and shave – shaking, I insisted to do this by myself – and then was dressed up and styled and fettered. I could hardly focus on my face in the small mirror, a massive migraine combined with nausea and tiredness drowning me in place of the silent stone. Those weren’t new sensations, but more intense than before. So strange to feel worse without silent stone, and although I wasn’t sure if my face betrayed that, I looked horrible still.

Like in the cell, there was sweat on my skin, unusual for a burner. But I pulled myself together, trying my best to stop the shivering at least. I glanced over my shoulder, as haughty as possible. Ives leaned against the wall, eyeing the other jailers in a blend of threat and boredom. She cocked her head. “Done?” she asked.

I smiled, noticing how odd that looked from the corners of my eyes. I took a meaningful step away, the cue for the Arven jailer to shove me aside with a deceivingly soft insistence.

It had to be only a few minutes with the manacles and they already chafed me. They didn’t contain silent stone, only heavy metals I could melt down if I summoned enough heat. But I figured that would be futile, that I’d fail. My ability was mediocre at best, and the lingering weight of silence continued to press the power out of me. It was like a memory I could never erase. Maybe it would war with Mother’s voice in my head while I waited for the heavy, lead-like white noise to shift into the whispered words I’d grown familiar to.

It had been too much to hope for from the start, hadn’t it?

All I could wish for was for her voice to become indecipherable with time, although that was likely to only drive me closer to insanity.

On the threshold to the corridor, the Arven man pulled harshly on my manacles, making me flinch. Ives glared at him but I laughed. I just realized: the flamemaker bracelets I’d craved to get back were now replaced by fetters, and in this moment, I yearned for them even more. I almost hoped to catch a random spark – maybe by drumming the manacles against each other? – so I would feel the fire chase way the silent ache in my bones.

Cassie Ives was a traitor. I’d been aware of it, and accepted how she took insolent pride in that, for the sake of having her company instead of no one’s. But now she betrayed that paltry gift as well, when she told me goodbye on the airfield.

“I belong in the capital,” she said, her mismatched eyes adamant as she waited for me to enter the plane.

“Unlike me, you mean?” I snorted.

“Unlike you and the rest of your family,” she countered.

I almost smiled, although I didn’t feel amused at all. She was still abandoning me, like all of them, and I was still nauseous and weak, my mood dim. But I returned to what I always did and prepared myself for dealing with the new set of jailers and enemies and the brother I hadn’t seen yet. With as much posture I could muster, I spun on my heel. They couldn’t take faux pride from me.

I’d never particularly enjoyed flying and of course, this trip wasn’t improved by my current state. The hum of the plane roared as loud in my ears as the ocean beneath would, the sight of the sea not making this any less uncomfortable or scary, and thus a whole choir trio of torment was formed.

Sunk into my seat, the white noise soon became the worst of them, since every other minute, I believed to hear words among the hum, words whose meanings were impossible to grasp but dangerously tempting to guess.

The relief I’d experienced in the Bowl of Bones became short-lived. Maybe I was getting paranoid, never able to trust my own mind again, with or without whispers and silent stone. But I knew that already, didn’t I? No one could fix me, but I’d have to find a way to deal with that, as always.

The Maven from two months ago would’ve started to analyze, to scheme, to machinate already: I would’ve found out as much as possible about those around me and used it to my advantage. Mother had taught me, and I’d done my best to internalize her instructions. But it was never enough. How could it? She was a whisper, compared to her I remained a mere human, barely above a Red in ability, and she’d remind me frequently the difference between Red and Silver lied as much in attitude as ability, so I had to make the best of it and excel at the former.

I did what I was taught: I watched. Three guards surrounded me, an Arven silencer, a Newblood nymph from the Scarlet Guard, and a burner, distant Calore cousin. The flaws of this set-up were obvious – these three had been chosen for their abilities which were able to neutralize mine. But this way, my other strengths – if I might say so at the moment – were underestimated. It was too easy to figure out what to say, how to prod and tempt them.

Was the nymph truly Monfortan, or her uniform a fraud to confuse me? Did her country and the Scarlet Guard know about me, and could they accept the deceptions and sour compromises enabling my survival?

Did the silencer resent me, blaming me and not Mare or the Samos, for the deaths of his relatives?

And was my cousin Cornelia really supporting Cal’s abdication? Or would she be more than happy to conspire to reclaim the throne with me?

And why did they, whoever they who kept me alive were, even risk that – bringing in more people? They could’ve put Cal and me alone in the cabin, letting us confront each other so our flames would meet, neutralizing each other.

But on the other hand, the heat of that discussion might’ve carried too much risk, so much the Calore brothers might’ve taken this plane off the sky to drop us into the dark sea. Maybe for once, Cal had been bright enough to figure that out from the start, unlike me, or he simply procrastinated facing me as long as possible.

I would be ready for all of that options. Fearless. But not now. Now, I was too tired for any of that, and all I could do deal with myself was to rest, hoping to sleep off the week in the Bowl of Bones.

The humidity soaked everything on the island of Tuck. It dwelled in the wet ground, muddying every path, it saturated the air with heavy, cold fog, and the noise of the violent sea just topped the dread of this place. I buried my chin in my shawl and coat and hugged myself, as good as possible with manacles. I stepped into the soppy sand, although I hated the way it sullied my shoes. All of it was disgusting and I’d never planned to come here again. But despite its ugly weather, the island had a draw. Not only for the courtesy call to Mother’s grave I was to make. I stood on the despicable beach and stared at the relentless waves of the sea, mighty surges that could swallow me easily. I didn’t want that, but I liked to imagine – to tell myself how close the end might be, to play with the danger. Like a warning to myself. I often did this, yet I knew a part of me just liked staring into an abyss, as if that helped me understand the abyss I called “myself”.

The guards shuffled behind me, growing impatient. A small joy, one I gladly prolonged. Soon they started to cough, as if I was too stupid to get a hint when I only enjoyed playing petty games, one of the few joys I’d left.

Before I could give in and turn around, Cornelia came for me, luring me with a faint warm breeze I couldn’t withstand. But as I shifted my stance, the air had cleared and I saw more of the island and its airfield and hangar. It stopped my silly notion of distracting myself from the reality: I was a prisoner of the Scarlet Guard and its Monfortan allies who had claimed this island for themselves before ever I came here, and they were back at showing their flags.

Bile rose in my throat and desperation won me over. It urged me to turn this into a scene. I hissed and cursed, stepping away from the guards who only side-stepped into a new formation to surround me. Suddenly, the maw of the ocean became tempting again, the wet death preferable to the humiliation and taunts of a public trial and execution staged by Red rats. The nymph bitches of the Lakelands would be glad, although they’d never learn of it.

The guards were hesitating to touch me, but they didn’t leave me the option of fatal escape via drowning – the Newblood nymph was in her element and Arven lowered his silence over me, though hardly with an intensity I couldn’t suffer; I just gritted my teeth. Cornelia, finally, made a move at me, despite being the least effective in subduing me.

I stared at the flamemaker bracelets on her wrists, wishing to catch one of its sparks, to start a fire, even when that was hardly possible with an Arven present. I cackled, imaging he would plunge into the sea, like Mare had gotten rid of Rane Arven in the Bowl of Bones. Even with barely two months of training, she’d been a better fighter than I ever was –

I shivered, despite the new heat wave Cornelia sent my way. I heard a crack, and too late I noticed it wasn’t shiver at all, but a shock of sparks. I spun, aimlessly hoping I could use them when they’d already found their way into the ground.

Before I could look up, I was grabbed by the shoulder. The touch startled me, but its shock was gone when I recognized the man who caused it, the white-haired electricon, Tyton.

“What’s going on here?” he growled, sourly as ever. I didn’t listen to the incompetent stutter of my guards, my eyes fixed on Tyton. Not Mare, then. But if he, a Monfortan, knew about me, I was as good as dead. His eyes met mine, and he didn’t need to say more, not for my sake: The time for hesitation was over, and we’d soon start another show.

The nymph led the way. As a Scarlet guard member, she knew the place best. Arven was the rear, the electricon walked next to me. I watched him unabashedly, in a way that would make looking away more suspicious. But I also wanted to watch him, for another reason than mere caution. The wind lifted his bleached bangs, revealing his dark eyes that sparkled whenever the dim light fell on his face.

Despite the danger and gloom he exuded, he reminded me of Thomas. It wasn’t his looks, although there was a kind of resemblance. But Thomas’s skin had been a few shades darker, his features rather south than east Asian, as Tyton’s were. Tyton was athletic and lean where Thomas had been chubby. No, the resemblance was subtler, there was something about his demeanour and expression that woke foggy memories buried beneath Mother’s manipulations. I’d thought them lost, those ephemeral images of Thomas’s smile and the seconds before and after it, when his dread returned, a fear I hadn’t been able to erase nor even understand, combined with a sense for injustice. Thomas might’ve become a rebel one day, a man ready to destroy someone like me, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop him. And yet he’d seen hope – in me.

When I met Mare, she’d reminded me of him, of the same blend of resignation and dreams. And I encountered, or believed so, the same in Tyton. They weren’t brave for the sake of it but because they were unable to forget what a cesspit this world was. But unlike them, Tyton would never make the mistake of trusting me, and I liked that as well. Because it enabled me to hide one less layer of my fractured self.

Candour. Another thing I cherished in Thomas.

“Are you trying to set me on fire with those stares?” Tyton scowled.

I looked aside as if it meant nothing, catching the sight of a lone person standing in a courtyard cemetery. “That’d hardly work, don’t worry,” I said, shaking my manacles. He hmphed, his gaze gliding from the cemetery back towards our destination.

“But what about you?” asked I. “Can I be certain you won’t electrocute me before we’ve met my brother?”

He stopped, glaring at me with a dark eye. I stared back, almost waiting for another gust to reveal his other eye and his complete expression. It didn’t come. “No need,” said he, “Calore’s already arrived.”

As if I wasn’t a Calore as well, how charming. But indeed, Cal stood recognizable in the shadow of a building, wearing a simple coat like mine, having shed his regalia. The corners of my mouths went up. He might be content with a commoner’s garb, but I missed my old wardrobe. It’d done so much for my image. Now I could only straighten my posture and walk with my head held high as I devoured every twitch in my brother’s stunned face.

The mausoleum stood in the dim path between two buildings, only seeing the light – if it ever found the way to misty Tuck – on certain days, at limited times. I had a Haven calculate the dates for me, and he’d demonstrated how it’d look then. I’d nodded and I had the statue shipped and installed in this spot, chosen carefully. I avoided this place, her grave. She had it all to her own, as a queen’s due, although not as one expected.

Since I’d had the secret service clear and claim Tuck in my name a year before, I’d visited the place only once to pay my respect to Mother’s body, but today was my first time to see her grave in completion. Light marble inlaid with lapis lazuli rose from the high pedestal that stored her bones. A statue was enthroned on it, the Lady Justice with the sword and the scale. Mother had liked the allegory, always laughing at her blindfold. Of course, one would hardly impede her. Elara Merandus owned the truth and she made the law and I had to commission something for her grave while her death had filled me with a void. I’d had no idea how else to describe her life apart from a myth she’d mentioned a few times. But I did my duty, as a year before. I fell on my knees in front of her.

Cal ogled me, disbelieving. “What … ” he stuttered. “What is this … monstrosity?”

I rose and turned to him. “Have you never heard? I conquered the island, and built Mother an appropriate grave. Or,” I sneered, “do you mean me?”

He swallowed and went a step backwards. “I didn’t – “

“Didn’t want me dead?” I said. “Or alive?”

He shook his head and it was exactly like on that other island, or on his throne in Harbor Bay. He had no idea what to do with me. I waited, gave him a chance.

But he did the same. I sighed. “If you have nothing to say, Cal, then this has no point. If you excuse me, I have something better to do.” I walked past him, almost colliding into the guards, and thus implied them to lead me away. They had to have order, didn’t they? They had to know –

“Stop,” Cal commanded and although my guards formed a wall I couldn’t cross, although all of this was merely symbolic, Tyton grabbed my arm and pulled me around. He didn’t let go and I thought I could smell his electricity as Cal approached me. Heat clouded him as always, and while his temperature increased, my bravado waned. This was it, then? He’d finish what Iris, Mare, Julian – so many – had failed to do?

His bronze eyes seemed sad, if he was willing to give me that. I didn’t know what to do with his “compassion”. I wanted to see his hate when he killed me, not his fake pity that was more likely disappointment, over the brother he wished for that I wasn’t. I wouldn’t never give him that, wouldn’t care about him –

“Tyton,” he said, nothing else. Yet the electricon had to know what he meant; I saw sparks in confirmation. Not by Mare’s hand, but I’d still die like my mother, and be buried next to her if I did nothing.

“So Julian had lied,” I whispered.

Cal frowned. “One thing, Maven,” said he. “Why is there no space for you?”

I laughed. Despite the morbidity, I had to. “Finally you understand, Cal? That I’m always lying?”

He winced and waved a hand and Tyton’s sparks and current vanished back into his body before he let go of me, obviously not very willing.

Cal cleared his throat and suddenly patted my shoulder, in the most strange, intimate manner. “Then, Maven, I’ll wait for you to tell us the truth.”

I cackled again, as if I knew anything about the truth when I didn’t know myself.

A/N: Let me be honest, I don’t know whether I’ll continue this. This story is extremely hard for me to write and it eats up the time I’d like to spent with other projects. I know I said this would work in tandem with Paradise Refracted, the Evane story. but exactly this combination only slows down my writing process, since Dark and Bright, despite my interest in Maven, lacks the kind of inspiration I have for other stories. I hope you’ve enjoyed this chapter though and maybe, I’ll get back to it one day.

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