#// and to get used to the gameplay and so forth
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ok so
I started playing star/rail
but I will not confirm if I will commit or not to making an AU or anything.
#◤ ⭐ 〉 Game Comm. ◥#// pls don't bomb me with too much info I've been overwhelmed by me starting gensh/in when i was just starting i need small steps //#// and to get used to the gameplay and so forth
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What Non DnD TTRPGs Feel Like
Okay, quick thread about what playing different non DnD ttrpgs feels like.
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Pathfinder
This is DnD. It feels like DnD. It's like going to a slightly different church. Some of the words used during the service are different, but at the end of it the pulpit turns out to be a mimic and you cast Entangle and summon your direwolf.
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Fate
This is Rule Of Cool with additional rules. The GM has powers to one-up you or lead you into temptation, but you have powers to one-up the GM, and all these powers use the same kind of token that you ultimately shuffle back and forth.
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Savage Worlds
Handwave-style DnD (positive connotation.)
The GM has a lot of freedom to pick genre and setting, and the gameplay is sleeker, rule-of-cool-ier without losing meaningful combat or character building.
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Call Of Cthulhu
You may not be an old librarian, but you sure are built like one. Most acts of violence can flatten you in a couple of hits, but violence doesn't happen often. It's the punctuation mark at the end of a long sentence. Atmosphere and pacing rule over this land.
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World Of Darkness
This is a game about getting deep into your character's headspace. It's about figuring out who they are and roleplaying them passionately. Your backstory choices and powers have a huge affect on how you interact with the world around you.
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Warhammer Fantasy / Dark Heresy
You are Scrumbles McGrumbles, a walking heap of morbidity and washed-up soldiering. You are trying to find your place in a world that's having an even worse day than you are. Your best friend is a ratcatcher. Together you will be heroes.
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OSR (Mork Borg, Mausritter, Into The Odd, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, Cairn, tons more)
DnD boiled down to two components: GMing + Making A Guy. GMing is made as easy as possible and PCs are somewhat disposable, so the story is the hijinks you get into together.
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Powered By The Apocalypse (Masks, Nahual, Monsterhearts, Pasion De Las Pasiones, tons more)
The goal is to get into trouble and stir up drama. Succeeding on a roll with no consequences is rare, but when you fail you fail forward into even bigger, messier drama.
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Blades In The Dark
You go on missions and then return to your base. The missions are about choices as much as about rolls, and you build your base together to make yourselves more powerful as a squad.
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Trophy
Your goal is to lose. Specifically, it's to lose in a dramatic and harrowing fashion that sticks with everyone at the table. Think movies like Annihilation, but as oneshot games.
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Golden Sky Stories
You like everyone at the table with you. When someone does something adorable, you can award them exp. The highlight of the session is someone getting flustered and/or speaking in a squeaky voice.
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Ryuutama
You are going on a journey and helping other people along the way. Important choices include packing lunch, wearing appropriate clothing, and completely filling your canteen. Combat is a cozy, pastel color jrpg.
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The Indie
There are so, so many games that are just completely their own thing, and that I can't squeeze into a single thread. If you discover you like game mechanics and you want to Get Weird with seeing what they can do, there is an entire scene here waiting to welcome you.
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Stuff I Missed
There's lots of stuff I haven't played, or didn't remember in the moment, or absolutely love but it would take a whole thread to explain why I love it. I will do more game recommendations in the future, but you can also comment systems you like below!
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yeah no of course i cant stop trying still ...
currently trying to get out of the mindset -draw what could be popular- by designing some rough ideas for the weapons shops in the new totk rewrite (fuse isnt a thing here)
to explain; during the first part (before villain rauru reveal and change to shiekah arm) the way to repair or craft weapons is with a new type of NPCs; they are smiths that can repair your weapons, craft them, and have some avaible to buy (mostly for arrows but also small selection of weapons), it costs material and some money, or if you dont have the material/all material, it costs more money but is still doable, price depending on how valuable or hard to get the material is you dont want to spend on it
then after the switch to the sheikah arm and zelda taking on the role of your permanent companion, she can both repair and craft as well (might be limited but expandable with quests, as in that zelda learns more skills- so theres new quests after the switch and you cant just do everything before that) with the difference that you need to have the required materials but it costs no money
this would mean that while no giant change before and after the halfway point of the game, it is definitely different feeling, plus its a convenience that is good to have in the second half but shouldnt be sorely missed in the first, the difference between NPC smith and zelda gives you the option to spend material or money- so you arent forced to grind anything if you need either for something else, plus new quest rewards for the second half and new points of interest in general, similar to a stable but not too close so theres still an element of exploration; they arent super frequent but around the map of the surface enough that you can reasonably reach one in each region
(perhaps after aquiring the yiga as allies/or before that in disguise they can do the same for you but are only found in the underground)
it would also allow for more diverse gameplay, if your favorite weapon is about to break (it might not fully disappear but if you use it up it would go into a condition like the master sword when its lost its power, not usable or doing tiny amount of damage, but not gone forever if you accidentally use it too much-) you can decide to throw it away or keep it until you find the next smith, depending on if you already found one and see you are close or havent yet, or spend the material if you have it to instantly repair it
(i havent decided yet if rauru might be willing to repair your weapons, but not to craft them since he lacks the skill (would never admit to it) and he only wants to give you just enough support to enable you to do what he wants you to do- i think that might work better bc its still a difference to zelda, since she can craft too, but not too much so that you would feel like the games forcing you to use the smiths in the first half ... possibly its unlocked with one of the enigma stones, when rauru can claim he is able to do that now bc it lets him recover some of his strength)
what im wondering now, which is a bit important i think, is .. should the smiths be wandering around a set path or have a lil stationary shop? if they wander around it would make it a bit more depending on situation of you wanna use them, but bears the risk of making it annoying if you dont know here they are or happen to be too far away and a lil weird bc should have something to work on there, like an anvil, which would be a lil strange to carry around; a lil shop could potentially turn into a location you keep teleporting back and forth though
im leaning towards the shop; you could make helping them build it a quest too, or saving them from monsters? overall i think this idea is a rather nice balance
#ganondoodles talks#zelda#ganondoodles rewrites totk#the smiths are of different species too#one of them will be a hammerhead shark zora#bc i think thats funny
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Almost a year ago I decided to write a legacy challenge inspired by my favorite legacy challenge, Crybaby Whims - @draeyad, and now it's finally ready!! This challenge doesn't have the same amount of drama as crybaby whims (in my opinion! consider it the clique in comparison to mean girls yknow) but I do think it's still pretty juicy!
Cherub Fears is a 12-generation legacy challenge taking inspiration from melanie martinez songs and the stories that pop into my head when listening to them lol. It's full of love, betrayal, heartbreak, friendship, and revenge so if that sounds interesting to you keep reading to get to the excitement.
°˖✧˚ ཐི ♡ ཋྀ ˚✧˖˚ʚ♡ɞ˚˖✧˚ ཐི ♡ ཋྀ ˚✧˖˚ʚ♡ɞ˚˖✧˚ ཐི ♡ ཋྀ ˚✧˖˚ʚ♡ɞ˚˖✧˚ ཐི ♡ ཋྀ ˚✧˖°
When I play challenges I don't listen to the rules/objectives 100% so I took that into account and tried to only give a few things to do per generation. If you encounter something in your own personal gameplay that don't like change it!
Don't have a trait from a specific pack? Change it! Don’t feel like doing 12 generations? Do 10, 8, or even just 2! Don't feel like maxing a skill? Don't do it! This game is meant to be fun and an escape from the real world do what makes you happy. (just don't change something for your own personal game and demand I change the rules to reflect your revisions please.)
If I have convinced you to play my challenge please use #cherubfears so I can see your wonderful gameplay! Ok, time to go forth and bring some mayhem into your sims lives!
Love,
Eros
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
°˖✧˚ ཐི SIPPY CUP ཋྀ ˚✧˖°
Generation 1
Traits: high maintenance, self-absorbed, outgoing
Career: Work from home
Aspiration: Successful Lineage to Serial Romantic
Colors: Scarlett & White
~ Blood still stains when the sheets are washed ~
You always knew you were destined to be a revered matriarch ever since you were a toddler. Your parents were always away when you were younger, all those business trips funneling money into your little hands to ensure you were well-manicured and presentable. An only child in a gorgeous mansion with expensive furniture and silence. Pretty on the outside, hollow on the inside. You always wanted to be just like them, stunningly loved by most and hated by few, but it's hard to idolize someone invisible so you vowed when you had a family of your own they'd be perfect. On your 18th birthday, you finally leave your house of glass behind to start your life. Very quickly you fall into what feels like how love was described to you by your maids/butlers and before you know it you’re married listening to the pitter-patter of tiny feet run around your small shabby suburban home.
It all seems so perfect until you're stuck in the shadow of your bumbling partner and dreadful children making being a parent feel more like a curse, you do what was taught, run away, and start over, so that's what you do. With a newer more daring lover in arms reach will they make you the glorious matriarch you were meant to be.
You're happier than ever and just like your parents.
Max charisma & entrepreneur skills
Get married to a rich sim
Glamorous house with mediocre interiors
Have at least one kid with them
Sweet but neglectful to kids
Fall in love with a criminal
Leave your family behind for the criminal
Start an illegal business with them
How will you keep your old life secret?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
˚✧˖˚ʚ SOAP ɞ˚˖✧˚
Generation 2
Traits: erratic, good, insider
Career: your choice
Aspiration: friend of the world
Colors: White & Pink
~ Uh oh, there it goes I said too much, it overflowed ~
You were always taught to keep your mouth shut but you were never a good listener so that could have gone better. Your parents always kept everything a secret: where they grew up, their first love, even their relationship with your grandparents. Still, you'd grown a special talent for reading between the lines and deciphering whispers. When you were old enough to go to school you were all too eager to make friends just so you could tell them all the secrets you'd collected, being a gossip in your family was basically a death wish although you didn't seem to pick up on the glares and sneers thrown your way. All you wanted was someone who'd listen and actually care about what you told them, but you were always yelled at and told to be more careful “or else”.
Wanting nothing more than to get away from that suffocating family you hoped and wished a sweet sim would come and whisk you right off your feet and one day you got your wish. They were gorgeous and thoughtful and curious just like you so it felt so easy to tell them everything, they were the love of your life after all. Unfortunately for you, that same naivety and goodness were again to your detriment.
Did they ever really love you or did they just want to get closer to the skeletons in your family's closet?
Bad relationship with parents
Give terrible advice
Max research & debate skills
Fall in love with an undercover detective
Get dumped after they arrest your parents
Will you ever find someone who gets you?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
°˖✧˚ ཐི CAKE ཋྀ ˚✧˖°
Generation 3
Traits: Loner, glutton, ambitious
Career: bake sales/own bakery
Aspiration: soulmate
Colors: Pink & Yellow
~ We've got all the ingredients except you loving me ~
You didn't adore many things in life except for dessert. People always seemed to gossip far too much in your humble opinion, if you could you would get rid of every bad egg in your way. Sure you loved your family, most of the time anyway, but something about flaky croissants and decadent brownies was all you needed in life, mostly because they couldn't talk your ear off and you knew how to handle a cavity or two. Your parent despised that you kept so much of your feelings inside but they just didn't understand that sugar, butter, and flour were far more comforting than their advice. That's how you knew you were absolutely screwed after you met someone that made your heart flutter more than the scent of freshly baked pie. Sure they were so delectably beautiful but that was the extra cherry on top of meeting this wonderful sim. They were charming, witty, and so tooth rottingly sweet.
So when you found them with another sim that looked just like you in your beloved kitchen everything turned sour quickly. You were quick to leave them for bigger and better but uh oh, it looks like someone's got a bun in the oven.
Max baking
Make the highest quality of every baked good available
Partner cheats with a look-alike
Change style completely
Leave partner but someone ends up pregnant
The kid looks like mc = neutral relationship
The kid looks like ex-partner = negative relationship
How will you ever move on from this betrayal?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
˚✧˖˚ʚ FIRE DRILL ɞ˚˖✧˚
Generation 4
Traits: goofball, socially awkward, active
Career: your choice
Aspiration: academic
Colors: Yellow & Orange
~ Love is seeping out my pores, I don't hold anger anymore ~
Being so in your head as a child always seemed to get you into trouble but expressing your thoughts was worse for wear so you decided it was better not to speak at all. You assumed everyone hated you from the moment you were born which wasn't a hard conclusion to come to when your parent was indifferent to you at best. That's why when a fire started in your kitchen you didn't know what to do except run. Your parent(s) swore they weren't that upset at you for burning not only their beloved kitchen but also the house down so you chose to believe it was true since they were the only one in your life who didn't think you were completely weird. As the years went on you started to speak out little by little and decided to express yourself through your clothing.
When you reach high school you've kept the outlandish fashion and manage to find a few friends along the way too! They're not exactly the nicest but they're someone to talk to and you've learned forgiving and forgetting get you further in life. That is until you come back from your daily jog and find them stealing all your things and- wait, is that a fire?!
Maybe one day you'll find a sim who likes you for you but until then you'll keep trying to steer clear of flammable objects.
Accidentally set the house on fire
Max fitness via running
Never use mean interactions
Go to at least one festival each season (spice festival recommended)
Only friends with mean sims
Move out as soon as you're a YA
Meet and fall in love with a sim from high school who was mean to you
They betray you, steal all your belongings, and set your house on fire
Why do these horrible things keep happening to you?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
°˖✧˚ ཐི NURSES OFFICE ཋྀ ˚✧˖°
Generation 5
Traits: genius, self-assured, clumsy
Career: scientist to astronaut to dream job (your choice)
Aspiration: never complete one
Colors: Orange & Cyan
~ I'm tired of wishing I was ditching ~
“Eureka! I haven't seen a sim this smart since well… ever!” a phrase you've grown to despise with a raging passion, luckily for you, a good poker face was next on the list of things you were gifted at. All your childhood you were paraded around like a prodigy trick pony answering equations and inquiries with ease at record speed and you hated every single second. You knew deep down it came from a sense of love and pride but there was always a voice in the back of your head that said otherwise. “They're jealous!” it shrieked “All they've achieved was light arson and a shitty relationship! You're the only thing they've ever done right in their life”. Of course, you knew those were terrible awful things to think of those who cared for you but what if it was right?
Your parent(s) wanted you to use your intelligence for “good” in the world but you were determined to live your own life and make your own mistakes without fear of their expectations… as soon as they looked the other way of course. When your childhood friend confesses their love for you your excuse to get away is right at your fingertips so you dive head first into that relationship and never look back.
Your parents can't be disappointed in your every decision now that you've moved out, right?
Max logic, handiness, and/or programming skills
Become a scientist
Have the opposite relationship with your parents
Become a scientist then switch to an astronaut (you don't like this either)
Become famous at some point
Follow your dreams once (at least) the previous heir dies
Was wasting the opportunity for a good relationship with your parents worth it?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
˚✧˖˚ʚ DRAMA CLUB ɞ˚˖✧˚
Generation 6
Traits: mean, recycle disciple, creative
Career: mixologist
Aspiration: master mixologist
Colors: Cyan & Purple
~ I’ma take a bow, so you can kiss my ass ~
Growing up your parent was the next best thing since grilled cheese, big whoop all they did was prove Sixam was real and now you've got to deal with the consequences! By proxy that makes you the world's next sim to fawn over, not because they think you're interesting, no they couldn't care less about you, it's your parents they're after and you're their golden ticket. Maybe things will be better for you once you start school, but that'd be too easy now, wouldn't it? Every sim you're interested in seems to lose all interest in you once they realize who you're the child of, or maybe their feelings were a facade the whole time. Either way, you're happy to rid frivolous romance and friendships from your life if it means one less sim getting on your nerves.
But that sentiment is easier said than done when you spend most of your nights as a teen in lounges or nightclubs. You may not have inherited your parent's huge brain but you knew sneaking out and staying out till school the next day was bad, that's why you did it!
If you had to suffer through celebrity status you were going to make it everyone else's problem.
Max mischief
Have atrocious reputation
Only negative interaction with fans
Only negative perks
Have a kid through a one-night stand (adopt/science baby if you want more kids)
Move off the grid as an adult
Never use social media again
Will your actions as a teen come back to bite you in the ass?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
°˖✧˚ ཐི DETENTION ཋྀ ˚✧˖°
Generation 7
Traits: gloomy, romantic, bookworm
Career: actor
Aspiration: Fabulously wealthy
Colors: Purple & Gold
~ I'm chewing gum to pass this time of sadness, can't you see it? ~
You were a lonely kid never having any friends except for your sibling(s)/parent and the frogs you collected, to be honest, they were lousy company. Never wanting to partake in tea time or playing dress up sure soured your mood even more. You yearned to explore and discover the wonders of the world but mostly you wanted to be like the characters to read in your books, swept away to a wonderland beyond your wildest dream, or saved from your proverbial tower. Sure you were basically a modern-day way cuter Snow White stuck in the middle of nowhere but that's not the life you wanted! You were destined for greatness! Your name spelled out in big fluorescent lights but thanks to your very own Evil Queen now you had to earn that fame organically, ugh. Next thing you know you're snapped out of a particularly amazing daydream when a kid from your class you paid no mind to before shows up on your doorstep to rescue you from your dreary life and whisk you away to their castle in the hills!
Wait what? They're here for a project, not because they were overcome with a deep unrelenting maddening love for you? Oh well, you'll find a way for them to love you, or from the looks of it put your tremendous acting skills to use and pretend you loved them; if you had to kiss one geeky frog to become royalty it's what you'll do!
Whatever it takes to get out of here and into the big castle you deserve.
Max acting skill
Complete frog collection
Have will they won't they relationship with geeky sim give them traits (geek, squeamish, bookworm)
Dump them for their sibling
Have at least three kids (name children after fairy tales)
Is that “royal” life all it's cracked up to be?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
˚✧˖˚ʚ THE CONTORTIONIST ɞ˚˖✧˚
Generation 8
Traits: overachiever, perfectionist, unflirty
Career: doctor then your choice
Aspiration: musical genius but give up
Colors: Gold & Green
~ Caught you like the cold or a flu, praying that I’ll someday be immune ~
Straight A’s, good manners, a tidy room, and no drama. The perfect formula that any parent would love, well any parent except yours. Maybe if you were on the cover of a magazine or out posing for paparazzi instead of staying up late doing homework. You do anything that's asked but no matter what you're still the odd one out. Your siblings get praised for everything even when one of them gets expelled. “Well, you know school isn't for everyone sweetheart!” How is that fair? Instead of letting that anger and frustration fester you decided to fuel it by learning how to play any and every instrument you could get your hands on and for once your parent was proud of you! Truly proud of you, until they learned you didn't want to use your talents for the greatest thing in life, fame and fortune. Soon that outlet you loved so much turned into a curse as your parent found every opportunity to exploit you.
Overworked constantly without so much of a second glance, so one day you decide enough's enough the second you've got your diploma in hand you delete all your contacts and move as far away as the simoleons in your pocket will take you. Now that you're finally rid of that burden weighing you down on you, who will you become?
Max at least one musical instrument
Get at least halfway through the doctor career
Good manners and reputation
Parents never appreciate your work but take credit
Do everything you can for them to like you
Cut all contact (except for one sibling)
Use busking money and move away
Have a kid(s) and only use positive interactions even when bad
Only have 1 kid who likes you
Will you ever achieve the greatness you were destined for?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
°˖✧˚ ཐི THE PRINCIPAL ཋྀ ˚✧˖°
Generation 9
Traits: family-oriented, loyal, jealous
Career: teacher
Aspiration: super parent
Colors: Green & Light Brown
~ I've tried to make you listen but you won't, it's your way, right? ~
You didn't have high expectations in life seeing as you were raised by a parent that was jaded from such a young age but you were determined to see the best in the world. You never faulted them for their outlook on life. I mean how terrible must have felt to be constantly belittled and used by someone who was supposed to love them? Well, you wouldn't stand for it that's for sure! All your life you wanted to make a difference that would last for generations, especially in the school system, you worked year after year to be the teacher you and your parent always wanted and deserved. You worked relentlessly to become the kind of teacher who would see when kids were hurting, bring everyone's favorite snacks, and wasn't just there for the measly paycheck. On the rare days off, you weren't going over your lesson plans, you spent them hopelessly scrolling through dating apps wishing for a match that would lead to the love of your life, or at least a lover for the night.
So when you meet a struggling single parent on a blind date you volunteer to help them with the very little time and money you have, even going out of your way to take care of their kid on the weekends. Very quickly you build a relationship with both sims, so much so that your mysterious beau's child admits their parent is swindling you of your money and not caring for them!
You have to do something about this, it's the principle!
Max parenting
Write children's books for extra cash
Helping out a partner with their kid
Giving your partner money but they use it on other things
Find out they're rich but neglecting their kid
Adopt the child and cut contact
How will you handle this responsibility?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
˚✧˖˚ʚ TAG YOURE IT ɞ˚˖✧˚
Generation 10
Traits: paranoid, proper, cheerful
Career: your choice
Aspiration: successful lineage
Colors: Light Brown & Grey
~ Your mother said to pick the very best girl, and I am ~
To say the relationships in your family were tragic would be a massive understatement, did a spellcaster curse your entire bloodline to an eternity of romantic suffering or what? You were weary of the cautionary tales thrown your way, each one weaseling its way into your head until you were scared to fall in love altogether. But the thought of ending up all alone kept you up all night long as well, so what were you to do? Ignore those feelings and pretend they don't exist of course! It would be ridiculous to live the rest of your life in fear besides you having more important things to worry about like game night with family or trying to kick that sweet tooth of yours. Every once in a while though your heart would ping at the thought of someone baking cookies with you and teaming up with you to finally beat your parent in Simbles but your paranoia kept that wish deep inside.
One night when you're walking home from an event at school a sim appears from the shadows to profess their love for you…weird. You remembered vaguely seeing them around the halls but they seemed nice enough and you were getting bored of the mononity of your life so you decided to ignore that little warning voice in your head and give them a chance.
You're happy and finally feel like you've found your person, what could possibly go wrong?
Start dating the first sim that shows interest in you (give them traits mean, jealous, paranoid)
They're nice to you in front of friends & family only
Meet an excellent sim that's love at first sight (give them traits ambitious, clumsy, art lover)
You break up with them they won't leave you alone
Start a self-defense club
Have a kid with the nice sim but your ex is convinced it's theirs
Your ex kidnaps them while you're on a date
What lengths will you go to get your child back?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
°˖✧˚ ཐི MILK & COOKIES ཋྀ ˚✧˖°
Generation 11
Traits: geek, snob, adventurous
Career: detective
Aspiration: Renaissance sim
Colors: Grey & Blue
~ Next time you're alone, think twice when you grab the phone ~
“How come you're the only family I know?” A question that always got you sent to your rundown bedroom. There was no malice behind the question, you were just a kid after all, but it was always gnawing at your mind especially because you had the faintest memories of someone raising you who wasn't them. Ever since you were young you've wondered why both parents weren't in your life. Of course, it was perfectly normal to be raised by one sim but your parent seemed flighty whenever you asked them about it. Come to think of it, they acted differently when you asked anything about them or the rest of your family. They never wanted to play games with you, your friends were never allowed over and you were constantly moving! After a while, you developed a resentment towards their secretiveness and you decided to take matters into your own.
While they were out doing who knows what you worked tirelessly to find just who this person was that called themself your parent. For years you found things out little by little but once you reached your teen years (and third home) you decided to give up your search, that is until a mysterious sim shows up on your doorstep while your parent is away. Who are they? How could they help you escape this shell of a person?
And why does that missing piece of you finally feel whole?
Max 3 skills connected to the worlds you live(d) in
Join detective career once you've settled your roots
Always have at least one pet
Donate most of your paycheck to charity at least once a week
Live in three different worlds before settling down in the world you were born in
You don't know who you are or what you want in life but you'll find out the truth
Now that you've uncovered some secrets will they make your life better, or worse?
•┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈••✦ ♡ ✦••┈•✧•┈•
˚✧˖˚ʚ MILK OF THE SIREN ɞ˚˖✧˚
Generation 12
Traits: kleptomaniac, music lover, hot-headed
Career: Part-Time job as a Teen
Aspiration: Public Enemy
Colors: Blue & Black
~ Nothing wrong with a little havoc, it's fun when shit hits the fan ~
You have lost faith in humanity, it's sad to admit but it was the truth. Your parent went through hell and back over one person's horrible decision and they now had to live with the aftermath. Sure they were a great parent and they turned out fine enough given the circumstances but you still lay awake at night listening to their muffled sobs just a couple of feet away. You were angry for them, your grandparents, and your ancestors who suffered awful fates but most of all you were angry for yourself and you wanted the world to pay. You picked up a part-time job as a teen to help out around the house but if you're being honest that sucked too so you had to find a different method. You didn't consider yourself an evil person but you were realistic and knew you weren't exactly an angel either. Sure you didn't need to steal from people but they were rich jerks that sure as hell didn't deserve their mommy and daddy's “pocket change”.
Your parent worked their ass off putting away criminals just to spend their little bit of money giving to people in need and taking care of you. There was one kid you felt kind of guilty about robbing because surprisingly they were sort of cute if you looked past the excessively expensive jewelry and weirdly pointy teeth. Too bad they weren't cute enough to stop you from breaking into their house. You left with something pretty valuable but you don't remember actually stealing it or how you got back home. And now that you think about it you feel different, not quite human anymore…
Something strange is going on!
Have a close relationship with your parent
Be enemies with the person who kidnapped your parent (if they managed to stay alive)
Resentment toward the world
Make at least 20,000 simoleons through stealing
Have a negative friendship with an occult sim (give them traits family oriented, loves outdoors, glutton)
Get turned by occult sim
How will this supernatural event change your life?
#cherub fears rules#cherub fears#ts4 legacy challenge#sims 4 challenge#sims 4 legacy#ts4 gameplay rules#ts4#ts4 legacy#ts4 gameplay#ts4 simblr#sims 4#the sims 4#simblr#sims community#sims 4 legacy challenge#legacy challenge
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Muffin! It's ASP Inc, the conglomerate made up of the companies formerly known as Apple, Sony, and Pepsi-Co. Based on your credentials with prior projects, you've been conscripted again for another big budget Twilight media project! Probably the CEO is on drugs, but congrats on your $500m dollar budget.
Your task is to design a big-budget Twilight video game. "But I don't really play that many video games," you maybe say? Idk, the CEO doesn't seem to care and is maybe using this project for tax evasion, so your instructions are "Just make us a Twilight game with gameplay stolen from a popular thing like a Minecraft, Fortnight, Among Us, whatever the kids nowadays are playing. Maybe a Mario? Are Marios still a thing?? I played Oregon Trail on my mac once. Stick some story in it. Give it the Muffin treatment, kids like Muffins!"
Your project brief must include:
1) What non-story-based gameplay mechanic you're stealing ("It's like a Mario!")
2) What story set in the Twilight Universe (tm) you've decided is most game-able.
3) Where you're spending the big bucks.
Thank you and good luck! (I hope this is fun and not, you know, annoying)
That would be a very silly thing for them to do.
Caveat
Twilight already is a video game: it's a visual novel. You are Bella Swan, first person point of view, checking out hottie mchottie across the hall. You don't know it, but the wrong action you take, even if it's arriving in the parking lot late: you die.
It's up to you to find Bella's golden path to survival which is in fact the Twilight novels we know and love.
Ordinarily, I'm a big skeptic of medium jumps without much thought, especially to and from video games as they usually don't transition well. However, in this case, we're already there.
You don't even have to change that much of the narrative structure since it's all in first person and we have the visuals as we know exactly what everyone looks like down to what exact shade of red their hair is.
There's not much for me to do.
But That Will Never Fly/Isn't What You Asked For
It sounds like this merger corporation doesn't really understand Twilight or video games which is not surprising. So, I have to make a real person video game which is just like that thing the kiddos are playing.
And since I'm going to hell anyway: I'm making a Twilight game that's RDR/GTA styled and we're going wild.
You're Bella Swan going to high school but you can wander around the town of Forks/the world at large and do whatever the fuck you want. This often gets you killed horribly. You go to Mexico: you're eaten by vampires. You go to Alaska: you get fucked by vampires and have a wild time in their sauna. You go to Egypt: some guy named Amun locks you in a tomb where you hang out with Benjamin, Tia, and Amun's angry wife. You can take missions for the Volturi, which they never asked you to do, and every time you collect a bounty a Volturi member will give you a weird look and ask "what the fuck is wrong with you/why are you here?" but you'll earn in game rewards as they publicly shame you.
You can also get into affairs with your human friends and ruin Jessica's love life, go to Prom with five people, and so on and so forth.
You can also get involved in the La Push community where they stare at you for being this person who clearly doesn't belong and try to seduce Leah into a lesbian love affair with you. (This is a very difficult quest, Leah's not impressed and very confused and going through it with Sam right now). You get to hear all of people's drama that's going on in the side lines.
The actual plot is dating Edward, and somehow, he doesn't notice all your wild adventures because he can't read your mind and while he's been stalking you every time you leave the state he loses your scent.
Your missions are surprisingly difficult as you have to avoid death by Edward by saying the right things and avoid death by everything else in the universe by navigating Port Angeles correctly (shockingly hard as the rapists somehow corner you at every turn). You also get missions during the Hallucination Edward arc as you have to do increasingly difficult and dangerous things to get Hallucination Edward to appear at which point your player character gets sweet sweet endorphins.
In the online player mode, where you've probably become a vampire, you can engage in vampire warfare where the losing condition is you killed too many humans so the Volturi come to kill all of you.
And yes, of course, there is an honor system but you blow it yourself as Bella's honor plummets during New Moon when she has to endanger herself and others to see Edward.
The money's going into a) graphics b) the sheer open worldness allowed in the number of quests, the random events, and all that good points.
Conclusion
I imagine they ask me how I will market this game to Twilight's audience, who are presumably the only ones who will play this game, and I claim, "Young women love grand theft auto!"
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do you have any mod recommendations? other than romanceable nick lol
exposing my mod list is a real 'please don't tell anyone how i live' moment because it, top to bottom, is all just pretty little outfits for gloria, furniture, or very small changes to nick that i like. gameplay? story additions? those sound interesting, i wonder what those are like. my toxic video game trait, consistent across absolutely everything, is i can play a 5fps mess if it means i get to snap pretty pictures
now of those categories...
SAD WOMAN DRESSUP GAME FEATURING AN RPG OR WHATEVER:
Caliente's Beautiful Bodies: you know it you love it, and there's a nevernude option should you desire. i always forget what i have installed, so i made sure to get the nude one so i could nod appreciatively when a modded outfit failed to load. it's my present to me. got rained on? had an argument? never fear. glussy is here.
Apocalypse Attire
Commonwealth Cuts
Dave's Poses
Looksmenu
Mirrored Vanilla Scars
Eyes of Beauty
Photo Mode (even if you have absolutely no interest in the cc stuff, this thing is a godsend if you ever want to take screenshots)
Cigarette In Mouth
Handmaiden - the outfit in that picture. comes in other colours, too!
Concealed Armors
HOUSE FLIPPER: IS IT STILL MIDMOD IF IT'S THE FUTURE
Creative Family mods. you can't install these like you would the rest, so pay close attention to the instructions, but the quality on these is unmatched. creative clutter, do it yourshelf, modular kitchen, they're all really, really good if you like decorating player homes.
Building Budget Extender
Dino's Decorations
Global Stash
Just Some Rugs
MadKea (this thing adds 500+ items so if your computer has a hard time with fo4, give this one a skip unless you don't mind waiting an age for menus to load)
PlaceEverywhere
Reversed Workshop Highlight (gets rid of that annoying green glow! godsend!)
Workshop Plus (completely reworks workshop; lets you clone items, save layouts to layers, float around buildable spaces, undo/redo. it's hard to overemphasise the usefulness of this if you plan to build)
SO THERE'S THIS SENIOR CITIZEN
Companion Accuracy Boost
Companions Go Home
Alternative Synth Eyes
Nick Valentine Robot Voice (it makes nick sound as if he's talking through a speaker. it's subtle, but i really dig it)
Valentine's Revolver
Valentine Jaw Sync
Settler and Companion Dialogue Overhaul (makes npcs seem more 'aware' and much less likely to make repetitive comments)
Delay Nick's Quest (only allows Long Time Coming to trigger after you complete Gilded Grasshopper; a lot of his location-based dialogue remains open instead of him defaulting to brooding about the tapes and that long, hard quest)
I'll respect your wishes and not mentioned critically acclaimed Fallout 4 mod Romancable Nick Valentine, which can be found here. I will, instead, mention this adorable one where you can marry him, which I assume is keeping in the spirit of you specifically asking me not to mention them. Now go forth and play your wildly overambitious otome game
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Response to 4867: Funny, because I’ve seen the most fangirls hyper sexualize a male character just as much as men hyper sexualize female characters, if not do it 10 times more than the men.
Like… Resident Evil was literally trending because of a naked Leon mod at one point. I’m not kidding.
I also never venture into Baldur’s Gate stuff, but I have seen so much sexualized fanart of that one white haired vampire dude quite a lot both on here and on Twitter. Mostly on Twitter.
Do I also need to explain My Hero Academia’s most rabid fangirls when it comes to certain male characters?
But nope, it’s literally being a “gooner” a “porn addict,” a “grifter bro,” or an “incel” if a male gamer wants to see some bouncing tiddies.
I am a bisexual woman. For me, I want to see a sexualized female character AND a sexualized male character, because that is the true equality right there. And why give just the straight men the credit of wanting or making fictional hot women? We got artists like Sakimichan out there who love drawing hot women and there are female gamers that play hentai games. Why you guys excluding us ladies?
Jokes aside, while there are some weird men that throw a fit and don’t want to play a game because of the lack of titty, we can’t just generalize men in gaming like that. Just like how I and others wouldn’t lump in the reasonable fangirls of a certain male character with the toxic fangirls that attack people for shipping said male character with a female character, because that’s an unfair generalization.
Plus, most of the time when people talk about Stellar Blade’s censorship and argue back and forth, sometimes it’s about insulting men mostly whenever they get backed into a corner or their hypocrisy is called out.
There are also men who are straight but don’t fold like clean laundry as soon as they see a fictional hot woman or asexual but just do not care about how hot the girl in Stellar Blade looks and are there just for the gameplay and/or story. I’ve also seen a gay man express his interest in the game too.
Posting since this is a response to a previous problem.
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What got you to start editing out the intros on snapcube 2? I suppose it helps get to the games faster, but as a hardcore Vodhead, I kind of liked those.
I've gone back and forth about keeping pre-streams in the VODs for a couple years now. Whenever I decide to take them out I always have a couple people being like "aw I liked those", but then when I leave them in I can tell the majority of viewers will just skip to gameplay anyway and of course there's the age-old "skip to [timestamp here] for the game" comments. Not that I really mind people having the option per-se, but essentially over the years I've gotten the impression that there's always gonna be someone who feels like the experience of the VODs could be improved by either including them or cutting them and it's just gonna come down to individual preference, so I should go with my gut and how I like to produce things.
SO to actually answer your question as it stands technically, what got me to start removing the opening sections of streams RECENTLY is that I actually just completely upended the way I produce these VODs. I used to have an entire, seamless recording running from the moment I started streaming to the very last second, when I hit my "go live" button the recording would turn on automatically and I never touched it. Then when it came time to post I would put the recording in my editing software, cut out the starting soon screen and all the breaks, and then render and upload manually. At some point during or right before the Tears of the Kingdom series I changed this completely. Having to render out new versions of cut down VODs overnight became way more trouble than it was worth, literally hours of downtime where I couldn't do much on my PC while it was working on exporting them.
So I created a new method that goes something like this:
start the stream, play music
after a few songs, hop on mic and settle in with chat. talk about stuff, chill.
once i am ready to Do The Actual Content, i hit the button to start recording stream locally so the recording only ever begins when i'm ready to go.
i address vodheads and introduce them to the stream separately, then the show starts for real
if there are any stream breaks, i pause the recording as i leave and start it up again once i come back so there is literally nothing i have to edit out of the final recorded file
once the stream is over, take the recording and quickly convert it to mp4 so i can upload it to youtube as-is. every cut is already made, it's in full quality, and i don't have to render it.
now, i totally could just start recording once i hit my "bootup jingle" sound and hop on mic earlier in that process! the practical difference would not be really much to sneeze at on my end. i actually have already done this a couple times! however, what also ended up happening is that the Tears of the Kingdom series like.... REALLLY cut down on how much time i was even spending in the pre-stream to begin with. i was so pumped about that playthrough and i wanted to really maximize my time playing the game while i was live, so often there just really wasn't anything interesting in the pre-stream chat to begin with. this wasn't always the case, but it was reliable enough that i got used to just starting the recording when i started the game. then once i got used to it i kinda started to like it and like how the final VODs turned out when you could just click on it and jump right in, and i've kinda kept up a similar pacing and cadence to my streams post-TOTK.
ultimately, the TL;DR answer is that it's just how i prefer to produce the VODs right now and it makes my workflow a lot easier and makes me feel good about the final product! not saying this will never change, again it's something i go back and forth on. but it's how it is rn!
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The 3AM Stream Incident
SOOOhbkabgsjf i haven't done something like this in a while, but I just go so inspired over in the discord @majimasleftasscheek with the streamer!kiryu idea that i had to write SOMETHING and i really loved this idea we came up with so here's SOMETHING!!! username cameos are all people from the server!!
if i had to put it somewhere, something post yakuza 3 pre yakuza 4. in order to make money for the orphanage, haruka and the kids introduced him to this streaming thing. he wanted to engage in their interests, and has always enjoyed gaming deep down, the money aspect also helps out a lot. he's formed a relatively decent sized community, but has yet to go viral. the streamers are pretty laid back and the children's identities are protected, but thanks to the younger audience of streaming in general, the chat has taken to calling him 'uncle kaz' like the kids do when they call for him off screen.
this is. short and silly and i didn't go too hard on it, but i hope it's fun!! kazumaji implied cause it will be with everything i write.
Kiryu doesn't stream off schedule, not often at least. Life gets in the way sometimes, but he's never done this before. It's quiet in the orphanage, he doesn't want to disturb the kids... but he also can't sleep. Not actually worth anything, at least. It's another all nighter, one that hopefully he can recover from while the kids are at school tomorrow. Today. If there's one thing he's thinking about this isn't the various people haunting him... It's Pocket Circuit LIVE. He figures that was something more productive to be doing than just laying here.
His steps are quiet as he makes his way into the small room that had been built in the rebuilding process of Morning Glory. This room was even in the process of being sound proofed, a gift from Daigo that was hard to refuse. With the door shut, he could be a bit more comfortable with his movements.
Hopefully, not too many people in the chatroom are up either. He thinks he remembers hearing talk about finals during these months. Still, it'd be worth going live, people liked him for his ''chill vibes'' and ''comforting streams''. There was always a twinge of a pride even he knew was a bit goofy, compared to the other things he was proud of. Perhaps he could help them sleep, much like a bed time story... But to the sound of Pocket Circuit LIVE dailies.
When Kiryu hits the 'go live' button, he skips through his starting soon screen, going straight to his face cam and gameplay set up. As the game boots up, a bit slower than usual from having to do it while he's live, the first few messages start to pop up
macthedragon: ayo
cosmomemory: ???
tabbitha44: damn this game got you by the throat uncle kaz
"Good evening, chatroom." Kiryu smiles at the messages, the exhaustion painfully clear in his eyes he's sure. "I'm surprised other people are up at this hour. I can't sleep, and I can be quiet during this game to not wake the kids. So long as I don't pull." He adds the addendum before anyone in chat could mention that.
Through his months of doing this, he's learned that many of these 'stream chatrooms' have a sort of 'culture' to them. Each streamer has a different kind of audience they cater to, but many share a back and forth dynamic with their 'chatroom'. It was more work than he had ever realized, it was an interesting new world he had begun to discover.
The motions now are practiced and fluid. Daily missions were a walk in the park. Use a new wheel, win a race without a balance frame, win a race with a golem tiger. As the races began to blend, Kiryu quietly talks with his delayed chatroom, "I don't think I'll be streaming tomorrow, I'll announce on my social media platforms in the morning if I will or won't."
aquaortus: twitter. you can say twitter
looneyzune: be nice to him, he's not wrong
Kiryu knew full well he could say 'Twitter', but people seemed to like his antiquated way of saying things as much as it grated on them. It was much like with the children in the orphanage, in that way. The chat was significantly slower, but that was nice for him. He didn't directly talked to them, more so just began saying how his day was, it had been a nice day off, he just might need another.
esutonia: take all the time you need uncle kaz
cosmomemory: we all could use one i think
looneyzune: you deserve the time off, uncle kaz!
macthedragon: please don't say you're leaving to get milk-
aquaortus: going to sleep to this stream, gnight everyone
It was nice to see the messages of comfort in the corner of his eye, even as they began to talk amidst each other other than just with him. Of course, he quietly wished the viewers going to bed good night, which ended up being a few of them when an hour had passed. Less than 50 people were watching him at that point. There's a few points where he has to quiet down, hearing something shuffling outside of the room, and he has to make sure he didn't wake one of the children. Thankfully, no such incident happens, and he continues on with the quiet stream.
Quiet for a good while, but by hour two, something goes wrong. A name that he had expected to be gone from this stream popped up, marked with a green sword and bright pink text.
gorogorogorochan: Kiryu-chan what the fuck is this shit
looneyzune: uh oh
esutonia: SCATTER
brahkest: uncle majima moment! it's so over
"M-Majima-!" Kiryu jumped at seeing that familiar name, the chatroom having a similar reaction. He looked to the door, knowing he was a good while away in a hotel, yes, but like he could be there at any moment. "I just couldn't sleep, so... Why am I not surprised you're up at this hour too." He truly should have expected this. "I'll only go for another hour. You should get some rest."
He looks at his quest list. Dailies are done, but weeklies are nearing completion. He could go ahead and knock those out now if he's going to take a break soon. Kiryu gets to it, settling back into the rhythm of the game he found so addicting.
gorogorogorochan: Are ya fuckin' kiddin' me
gorogorogorochan: TEN MINUTES
mrbeefgnaw: oh rip uncle kaz
tabbitha44: h u h
cosmomemory: it's so over
looneyzune: ...has he noticed
looneyzune: uncle kaz are you with us
With chat going so slow due to so few people, now less than 20, Kiryu didn't notice it. Pocket Circuit LIVE was too temping. He keeps good on his promise to not pull, but ten minutes have gone by without him really saying a word. He was both too tired and too engrossed in the menial yet fun activities of his favorite pass time.
brahkest: TIME IS UP: UNLEASE THE HOUNDS
tabbitha44: what did he Mean by this
macthedragon: he never realized omg.....
The questions as to what he had meant didn't go unanswered for long. Kiryu looked over at the chatroom, finally seeing the sudden activity, "Chatroom, did something-" And is cut off by the door to his room swinging open. It just barely is held back from slamming by a tired, haggard, and ticked off looking Majima. He blinks in surprise at his sudden appearance, standing up and taking the same headphones the man had gifted him off his head, "Majima? What are you-"
The next moment, Majima is charging him.
Kiryu barely manages to understand whats happening in the mere second he's given before Majima's long legs get him across the room. He's still taken to the ground in the next second, but he knows not to start fighting back by then. All the camera sees in a yellow and black blur, and then Kiryu going out of frame.
brahkest: UNCLE MAJIMA MOMENT!!!!
mrbeefgnaw: oh rip lol
looneyzune: UFBKSD
cosmomemory: JHDFKSDG
macthedragon: HJDKFJDFHLD
tabbitha44: LMAOOOO
estunia: JHFKDSFKESJB
The last thing the stream sees is a gloved hand slapping around on the table to find the keyboard, and when it's found, the stream is shut off.
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Oooo you know what I haven't seen a lot of? Games meant for long term play between two players. Id love to see that!
THEME: Long-Term 2-Player
Hello friend, here's a few specific recommendations, but you'll want to take a look at the bits I recommend at the end as well!
Afterglow, by Fistful of Crits.
It started when a WIZARD cleaved apart the temple into two.
Because, in the cyclical way of things, one ideology eventually wins out over the other. The Celestial Cycles shatter and pour away, blending into the colour of their worship into tones of soft purple and creamy orange hues.
Now there is no more day or night, no rising or setting of the Godly tombs that float in carefully calculated arches through the sky: there is only the AfterGlow and the wake of a different world.
AfterGlow is a solo or co-operative play journaling TTRPG game. Become a Dawncarver Acolyte of the Light, Imefelga, or a Nightweaver Acolyte of the God of the Night, Elestrell.
Expand the world as you explore, search for offerings, fight dangerous threats and discover the mysteries of the Wizard and the AfterGlow.
AfterGlow is designed using the Firelights system, which was originally designed for solo play, and inspired by games such as Hollow Knight. As a game system, I think it’s one of the games that’s meant to last longer than just one session, and since AfterGlow uses the same bones, I’m guessing that it could work as a longer game as well. Just keep in mind that this game isn’t inspired by Hollow Knight; it’s more of a fantastical post-apocalypse.
Empanel, by Bogus Cheesecake.
The year is 1915 - you sit inside a dreary office, working as a telegraph operator for the North American rail system. The dots and dashes of the telegraph machine spell out a dreary, unfulfilling existence. Until one day, a new kind of message appears.
Empanel is a two-player narrative roleplaying game based around telegrams and queer yearning. Completely diceless, Empanel's messaging-based gameplay is designed for long-distance play between you and a partner.
Empanel provides a new spin on two-player conversational roleplaying. Step into the shoes of a middle-aged telegraph operator (or anyone, we're not your boss) and explore the feelings of reconnecting with a love long past.
I find that two-player games designed to happen over long distances naturally lend to more long-form play, although that is partially because of the time it is expected to take to send messages to each-other. That being said, even if you don’t live that far away, you’ll be expected to think carefully about the messages you send to each-other, as well as spend time encoding and decoding every letter you send. If you want a game about longing and secrecy, you might like this game.
Trading Places, by Jamie Sands.
Trading Places is a game for two people - one who has an ordinary life, and one who has an extraordinary life. They both keep journals. One day, they wake up in each other's bodies.
What happens next is entirely up to the people playing - will your story be a poignant examination of what a life of value means? Will you create a holiday-themed romantic comedy or an existential horror?
This game doesn’t look like it has a recommended play time, and since it’s a journaling game, you’ll likely need to wait for each other to submit journal entries. I think the fact that you can change the tone of this game makes it really flexible, so you can talk with the other player about what kind of story you’d like to share. I also really like the idea of exploring the life of another person, and coming up with that as you go.
One More Thing, by Nathan D. Paoletta.
Somebody has been murdered! The murderer is sure they will get away with it - but the detective is on the case, and quickly sees the truth of the matter. Both of them know that the murderer did it; the question is how to prove it.
Your story begins with the murder, and continues as a back-and-forth drama playing out in the view of an imaginary television audience. The Murderer never gets away with it, but they can control how the audience sees them in the end. Were they justified in their crime? Did they see no way out of an untenable situation? Or are they a cold-hearted monster who took a life for their own material gain?
One More Thing tells compelling stories of criminals bought to justice, in the finest tradition of TV detective dramas from the 1970s to today.
This game feels episodic, but I don’t think that would stop it from being something a bit more long-form. You could run this either with one player embodying the same detective over a series of different murders, or you could alternate between roles, perhaps following the stories of two connected detectives, or switching between different tones.
Hit the Road, Jack, by Urania Games.
Hit the Road, Jack is a solo/duet game of adrenaline rush and creeping terror. Of chasing and being chased, of being forced to face your sins or to leave them all behind. It is a game of cat and mouse between two characters that we call the Jacks.
This is a game that mentions blood, violence, drugs, crime, and death - both deaths you choose and deaths you don’t.
Jack Be Nimble is the sinner, the criminal, and the one being chased.
Jack Be Quick is the lawman, the aggrieved, and the one who chases.
This is their journey cross-country across an empty stretch of highways. By drawing tarot cards and responding to journaling prompts, you will be able to flesh out the nature of these two Jacks, their relationship, and how they deal with whatever the road throws at them.
The game page mentions that there are different lengths of play that you can use for this game, so that tells me that long-form is definitely on the table here. I don’t know how long exactly the game is, but the nice thing about having two different roles, is that you can likely play the game twice, switching roles to give each of you a chance to be each character.
Other Games To Check Out
Little Shepherd, Little Spy, by @psychhound, has a two-player mode called Little Mortal, Little Fey. It’s a game about communication between spies, so I feel like it’s meant to happen over a significant period of time.
There's a lot of GM-Less games out there that aren't specifically two-player but are duet friendly, and are designed for longer-form play.
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An Updated ‘Reasons Why I Ship Hiorin’ — Because It’s Been Ages Since I Made The First One And I’ve Had More Thoughts (and we got more moments!)
Aka: can you tell this ship makes me mentally unwell?
Hi again! It’s been a while. I did make one of these long posts a while back outlining why I choose to ship hiorin even though they’ve barely interacted and on the surface don’t look like they’d make sense at all. Since then, hiorin has gained quite a few shippers in the fandom and I keep thinking about my boys, especially with the Bastard Munchen vs PXG game FINALLY giving us some new moments. Unsurprisingly, ever since making the first post I’ve also had a lot more ideas about the dynamic, it’s potential, some more connections between them that I never touched on before, etc… and rather than editing the other post I thought it would be easier to just make a new one.
Some stuff I go over here might be familiar from the first post. I want this to be a kind of hub for any and all of my hiorin interpretations, analysis, trivia, headcanons, ‘theories’ (which I don’t think will be canon but the narrative potential for them is through the roof) and anything else I think is relevant to the ship. Feel free to jump around and read whatever is most interesting for you. Hiorin is a ship that, for me, is built on mountains of untapped potential. I just want to bring that potential to light all in one place.
Note: for this post I’ll only use information that has been written by Kaneshiro, drawn by Nomura or Sanomiya, or has otherwise been green-lit by Kaneshiro as canon. Merch collabs, voice actor QnAs, the PWC game etc… for me do not count as canon and I won’t use them. Also, the 10-image limit is biting my ass so my formatting for certain bits might be a bit all over the place. Apologies.
So without further ado. Let’s start! Enjoy the yap sesh!
Part 1 — The Manga Canon
Hiorin get their (very sparse and brief) interactions mostly from the Third Selection Arc (chapters 87-108) and the U20 arc (chapters 109-151). We recently got some new moments in the BM vs PXG match (chapters 250-present).
First off, the tryouts. It’s implied here that Hiori and Rin have never met, as Hiori notices Isagi’s response to Rin and asks if Isagi knows who Rin is. Rin also doesn’t acknowledge Hiori in any way here, so we can presume they’re strangers (although some shippers like to headcanon that they met during the first selection).
That being said during the match, after Isagi has been thoroughly shut down by Karasu, Rin turns his attention to Hiori as a teammate to help him get the ball up the field. Rin has never seen Hiori play before (as far as we know). They’ve never even talked. They’re barely getting familiar with each other’s play styles. And yet, they immediately link up to form a clean, deadly back and forth that optimises Rin’s play style. In fact, this duo helped Rin score 1 goal, and it would have helped Rin score 2 had Shidou not rudely interrupted the second.
It was so deadly that Otoya had to intervene specifically to break them up, so that they could no longer continue their one-two passes up the field and threaten to go for another goal. (Also notice in this page below how as soon as the kickoff happened, Hiori was already running into position in the background. He understands what Rin wants to do).
Not only did Hiori and Rin naturally form a link-up, but Hiori was also fully capable of keeping up with Rin, something Nanase admitted he struggled with during this match and even Isagi was struggling with as well, since later on we see Isagi fail to intercept one of Hiori’s passes due to not being able to reach it in time (which presumably Rin would have been able to were he in Isagi’s position). So, from what we see of Hiori and Rin in this match, they’re on a similar wavelength in terms of skills, field vision and gameplay, and are naturally able to link up even as strangers. I’ll note here that neither of them were playing at full power — Hiori was playing on 0 motivation, and Rin was still utilising his Puppeteer play style instead of his Destroyer. More on this later in the ‘Headcanons’ section.
After the Tryouts, we next see them interact in the U20 match. We start with a brief callback to their tryouts link up in chapter 132, where Rin passes to Hiori. Hiori is acting as a relay between Isagi and Rin, which in my opinion would be a good way to utilise him in the current manga after the NEL. Whether or not that’s how Kaneshiro chooses to use him in the future is anyone’s guess though.
The next big moment comes in chapter 140, after Shidou has kicked Rin in the face and the game has briefly paused. I think this is by far the most ‘iconic’ hiorin moment. While Isagi is analysing the previous gameplay and Karasu is arguing with the ref, it’s Hiori who is the only one to actually go and check on Rin. Even Bachira and Reo were right next to Rin and neither of them were the ones going up to him. Hiori was further down the field but he was the one who moved to help Rin first. Not only is he gentle with and worried for Rin, but by some miracle Rin actually accepts his help! It feels almost out of character given how angry Rin is for the rest of the match, but for this very brief moment he lets Hiori help him up and reassures him that he’s ‘totally fine’ (yeah sure buddy…).
For many this is the main ‘ooooooh’ moment with hiorin. But what if I told you it actually happens a second time this match? After Aiku goes rogue in chapter 142 and tries to score a goal, Rin ends up slide-tackling him to prevent it. And once again, if you look in the background of the panels following the interception in chapter 143, who is it helping Rin stand? It’s Hiori. And this time they actually hold hands!
The final hiorin moment in the U20 match come soon after this in chapter 144, when Rin is about to enter his Destroyer mode. When Rin enters Destroyer mode, Hiori is in possession of the ball and so Rin steals it from him in a completely unpredictable move that had everyone stunned.
The U20 match moments, for many of us hiorin shippers, felt like the last time we’d ever see them properly interact. I at least had zero hopes for PXG. But oh boy was I wrong! Kaneshiro might not realise the dynamic he’s setting up with this duo but I’m gonna milk every interaction for what it’s worth! And so with that, I’ll bring you to the BM vs PXG match (note: currently still ongoing, so I might have to update this section soon). Since the U20 match, we’ve had some changes. The biggest one is Hiori’s personality. After going through his arc in Ubers, Hiori has become more outspoken and confident, playing into his ‘Ultra-Sadist’ style and being more than happy to speak his mind. He’s more argumentative and can whip up a good piece of trash talk (my gamer boy fr!). We see this on full display in chapter 251 when he completely shuts down Rin’s goal opportunity because Rin was too focussed on Isagi to see the bigger picture of the match. He turns around, points at Rin, and tells him “if ya want a goal… come at me with an unpredictable script!”
Notice here how he isn’t simply putting Rin down for not being able to score. Hiori may be taunting Rin, but he does still technically give Rin helpful advice. In a previous panel he explains how he was able to read Rin because Rin was too focussed on Isagi, and in combination with Hiori’s ‘unpredictable script’ line it forms some rather blunt and rude but nevertheless useful advice. Hiori is telling Rin exactly how to get past him and what Rin needs to do to improve. Notice the focus on unpredictability. This is veering into headcanon territory, but I don’t think it’s too unreasonable to think that perhaps Hiori is thinking about Rin’s unpredictable Destroyer mode. He experienced it first hand when Rin stole the ball from him in the U20 match. He knows what Rin is truly capable of. To Hiori, that version of Rin is a reasonable expectation (and I’ll get to their relationship with ‘expectations’ later) that would be the perfect key to getting through BM’s defence. But Rin isn’t showing that off because his obsession with defeating Isagi over scoring goals is hurting his performance. Hiori’s advice is reasonable and maybe Rin should listen to it.
As of right now, the final moment we have of them together is from chapter 259, where Hiori is aided by Raichi to block Rin in a 2-person press, causing Rin to lose the ball. From a purely indulgent shipping perspective, notice how Hiori and Rin’s legs are touching, their hands are on each other’s chests and they’re looking at each other. Raichi is just there lol.
This may be it for their canon interactions, however it’s far from all the canon information we have about them that’s interesting for the dynamic. A big part of the hiorin ship is about looking at their individual information and drawing together similarities and/or parallels. While on the surface they seem very different, almost opposites, digging a little deeper reveals a lot of small coincidences about them that build up to make you realise that they’re a lot more similar than you might initially think.
Part 2 — Where Hiori and Rin Align
Analytical players. Both of them have a deeply analytical play style that utilises field vision and high levels of technical skills. They don’t rely on brute strength or pure intimidation to get through the opponents’ defence, rather they analyse, play with and overcome their opponents with strategy and out-play their opponents with sheer levels of skill. This similarity is likely what led to them to be able to so easily link up when they first met.
Sadism. Both are known sadists. Rin’s Destroyer mode is particularly sadistic but in general he revels in being at the top with others under him. He’s open with his insults and destroys chaotically, looking for breaks in his opponents’ defence and completely tearing them down until there’s no hope of his opponents winning. Hiori is a self-proclaimed “ultra-sadist” (personally I think he’s more a sado-masochist but we’re sticking to canon only here). After his arc, he enjoys watching his opponents scramble to try and keep up with him only to be destroyed by his top-tier plays, especially in a ‘best play’ scenario with his chosen striker of the moment. He’s also not loyal to any one striker and will leave them behind if they’re not playing up to his standards or goal vision. Hiori’s sadism also manifests as him teasing his friends, as we see in chapter 241 when he jokingly teases Isagi for getting shipped with Kaiser by BLTV fans.
Sae connections. Rin is Sae’s younger brother and was abandoned by Sae after Sae returned home from Spain. He says he hates his brother after the U20 match, when Sae noticed Isagi over Rin, and now Rin is playing for the sake of crushing Sae (more on this later). Hiori also has connections to Sae though. He’s been compared to Sae twice in-universe, once by Sendou in chapter 129 who said his passes had the same level of skill as Sae’s, and once by Yukimiya in chapter 241 who thinks Hiori’s ultra-sadist mindset is similar to Sae’s.
They’re both gamers. Obviously we know Hiori is one. That’s been a big part of his character ever since we first met him. However, Rin also plays video games, specifically horror games. We get this info from both the Egoist Bible and his prequel light novel, where it explains that he plays horror games to de-stress at night: (chapter 2) “… even games, should be chilling and scary. Playing horror games alone at night is quite thrilling”.
Horror, gore and zombies. As well as playing horror games to de-stress, it’s explained in the Egoist Bible and Rin’s light novel that he watches horror movies for the same reason: (chapter 2) “When he’s done, he watches a horror movie and then goes to bed. This is his daily routine. For some reason, since Sae has been gone, he only watches horror movies. Movies, videos …”. The light novel slightly expands on this to specify he enjoys splatter films, as well as showing an illustration of him watching rather a gory zombie movie: (chapter 4) “Lately, he's been into splatter films. The one where a killer comes out with an electric saw and a big-ass ax, then blood splatters all over the place. The one where a killer chases you no matter how hard you try to escape, and if you get caught, you end up being dismembered. His heart is pounding, but he’s not the type to show on his face, so Rin watching the slaughter scene without any expression on his face is much more horrifying”. Likewise, Hiori is shown in chapter 206 playing a zombie shooter in which he imagines the zombies being his parents and he violently kills them. We see his inner monologue of this in his prequel light novel, showing the depths of how much he wants them to suffer: (chapter 6) “Before he knew it, in his imagination, his parents became zombies. His father and mother are coming towards him, laughing. He shoots without hesitation. Bang! Headshot. The bullet that entered the father's jaw blew off the back of his head. Bang! Bang! His mother's eyeballs pop out and there's a hole in her chest. He aims for vital spots with rapid fire, but they don't fall easily because they're zombies”.
Solitude. They’re both introverts according to their MBTIs. Rin is ranked as the most anti-social member of Blue Lock in the Egoist Bible. He says he “doesn’t have time for lukewarm conversations” (although I do think on some level he longs for approval and love from someone, given how much he craves his brother’s attention). He is also one of the only characters who genuinely has no friends in Blue Lock. He tolerated Bachira for a time and trained Nanase begrudgingly, but no one is very close with him at all. Now, at a glance Hiori might seem far more social. He has a lot of friends and seems to enjoy hanging out with them. However, in a Twitter qna (which tend to have questions compiled for the Egoist Bible but alas Hiori doesn’t have a page) it was revealed that his ideal type in a romantic partner is “someone who can leave me alone”. The wording he used — 放置し合えるん — seems to imply a reciprocal nature of this ‘leaving alone’, ie ‘you leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone’. Now tell me that arrangement wouldn’t work perfectly for Rin. Hiori is also shown in chapter 172 (pre-character arc) spending time alone in the BM dorms while others are out training. While Hiori can enjoy socialising, he also needs plenty of time to himself to the point where it becomes a deal-breaker in a relationship for him.
Ochazuke (tea on rice). Rin’s favourite food according to the Egoist Bible is ochazuke, specifically taichazuke. In the new Episode Rin extra chapter we also see him going to enjoy some taichazuke at a traditional restaurant because he was hungry for ochazuke. When Hiori was asked in another Twitter qna what his favourite accompaniment for rice is, he replied that it was the ochazuke brand Nagatanien.
Stripes. Rin’s casual outfits for both the Shibuya collab (designed by Nomura) and Episode Rin feature a striped/ribbed pattern. Likewise, Hiori’s casual pyjamas, childhood design and one of Nomura’s coaster designs all feature him wearing striped clothing.
Eyelashes. Both of them have long under lashes. That’s kinda it for this one lol.
Name kanji (yes, I’m in this deep). In Rin’s surname, the kanji 糸 means ‘thread/yarn’. In Hiori’s surname, the kanji 織 means ‘weaver’. Both of them have kanji relating to weaving, likely in relation to both Rin’s Puppeteer play style (and Sae’s insane control of the midfield), and Hiori’s way of ‘weaving’ together a best play through his skills (and his parents ‘weaving’ his life for him rather than letting him control it himself). To get poetic about it, you could say Hiori is the weaver who knows how best to utilise Rin’s threads and can guarantee their shared goal vision will be woven into place. To get even more conspiracy theorist-y, when Charles meets Hiori he calls Hiori “水色お兄さん” — literally ‘water-coloured big brother’, likely in relation to his hair colour because 水色 can also mean ‘cyan’. To keep it on the topic of water though, whose aura is made of water? That’s right. Rin’s! (yes I know this is really grasping at straws but I did say this post was for EVERYTHING hiorin soooo).
Part 3 — Family Relationships: Love, Expectations and Abandonment
Rin and Hiori both have relationships with particular members of their family that are similar and also unique among the rest of the cast. For Rin, it’s his relationship with Sae. For Hiori, it’s his relationship with his parents.
To begin with Hiori, his parents only wanted a child who could fulfil their dream of being number 1. They held this expectation of him throughout his whole life, pretending to genuinely care about and love him when in reality all they wanted was for him to be the best. If he tried to step out of line, they’d become monstrous, as seen in Hiori’s light novel: (chapter 2) “Can I take a day off from soccer tomorrow and go play with my friends?” As soon as he said this, the smiles disappeared from his parents’ faces. His mother looked very surprised, and then she made the scariest face he's ever seen. “......!” He doesn’t remember what she said. He just remembers that he was scolded terribly. After that, he was hugged tightly. “Hiori, you are born to be the best at soccer.” “You can play with other kids anytime you want.” “But if you don’t do soccer properly from now on, you will never be the best.” His mother was desperate. His father was behind her, looking sadly at Hiori. “Please, Hiori, trust us and play soccer.” Hiori felt that he had done something very wrong. … What should I do? I said something bad. I'm sorry. The air was stifling, as if he had been locked in a room full of needles. He felt like he would get hurt if he moved, so all Hiori could do was nod.” We also see the extent of this in chapter 206, when Hiori overhears his parents threatening to get a divorce if he isn’t the best. This makes him realise that if he doesn’t fulfil their expectations, he’ll be abandoned by them.
With Rin, it’s a bit more complicated. His relationship with his older brother Sae is still pretty up in the air as to what really happened from Sae’s perspective. We need to distinguish between what actually happened (which is difficult to determine as of right now) and what Rin interpreted as happening. From his perspective, Sae pretended to love him while they were growing up, only using him as a stepping stone to get to the world stage. After that had been achieved, Rin was abandoned (as seen in his inner monologue in chapter 125). While it’s difficult to discern, on a broad scale we could argue that instead of this, Sae has a particular expectation of Rin that currently Rin is failing to meet, and as a result Sae sees this abandonment as somehow ‘necessary’ to get Rin to evolve… or he really has abandoned Rin and is just an asshole, but I hope towards the former. This is where I cry on deaf ears for a Sae light novel or spin-off chapter, anything to get his side of the story. My current interpretation of canon is that Sae still loves Rin, however he knows that Rin’s desire to be the world’s best as a duo is impossible, and his way of trying to ween Rin off such a dream was to sever their relationship. No matter what really happened though, I’m more interested in what Rin interpreted and took away from being abandoned, which is an interesting mix of hatred and confusion but also still a desire for recognition.
This to me reads as very similar to what Hiori’s relationship with his parents used to be. He hated them. He wished death upon them. And yet he kept fighting for what they wanted, fulfilling their expectations because he was so afraid that if he didn’t, all the blame would be placed on him for their family falling apart and his parents abandoning him. Rin’s situation is sort of a dark mirror to Hiori’s where instead of just fearing that abandonment, Rin was abandoned, with all the blame being placed on him by Sae. And yet, deep down, he’s still fighting for Sae’s approval and love again, trying to find any way he can to fulfil Sae’s expectations. We see this in the way Rin has chosen Isagi to be his rival, not because of anything in particular that Isagi has done, but because Sae acknowledged Isagi over him. We see his desire for love in the way he travelled to Tokyo in the Episode Rin extra chapter to possibly watch Sae’s match, even though they’d already fallen out by that point. Rin and Hiori both strove for love from their families, it’s just that Hiori has now managed to break free from this mindset and fight only for himself, meanwhile Rin is still clinging to the memory of Sae no matter how much he wants to crush Sae for abandoning him.
This complicated relationship the two of them have with love, expectations and abandonment in relation to family members is what draws me to a lot of hiorin headcanon material. Rin is cold, antisocial and ruthless, and yet Hiori potentially has the capacity to understand his pain more than anyone else. This is especially true now that Hiori has broken free of his parents’ expectations. It gives him the freedom to look at these situations more objectively while retaining an understanding of their emotional core. He knows how difficult it is to both hate your family but strive for their approval, perhaps fruitlessly. And likewise, Rin might be able to actually learn something from how Hiori overcame his situation by going all-in with the egoist mindset, playing only for himself, completely discarding his family members’ expectations.
Part 4 — Headcanons Part 1: The Hiorin Potential For A Joint Arc (which yes I know won’t happen. Let me dream)
Anything from this point on is pure headcanon, taking into account all the canon information listed in the previous sections. This is NOT ‘speculation’. I genuinely don’t think any of this will be canon or else Kaneshiro would have started calling attention to it by now in the main manga. However by the end of this I’m sure some of you will join me in wishing it could be canon, because even if Kaneshiro hasn’t consciously laid the groundwork for Rin and Hiori to have a joint arc together, he has done so by accident and all the pieces are in place.
The bulk of this section revolves around Rin’s Destroyer mode and Hiori’s ultra-sadism, as well as the ‘best-play’ scenario theorised by Isagi and Hiori in the recent PXG chapters. Basically, I think that a ‘best-play’ chemical reaction between ultra-sadist Hiori and Destroyer Rin would be both broken as fuck and would be a great way to showcase Rin’s character development as he learns to break away from wanting to crush Isagi and Sae.
In Rin’s light novel, we learn that as a child playing alongside Sae as a duo, Rin didn’t have the Puppeteer play style he’s known for in the main series. Instead, he was fully zoned in on himself and the game, moving on instinct, looking for the perfect spot to break through the enemy’s defence, trusting fully that he’d receive Sae’s pass (chapter 1): ‘“Rin, what are you thinking about when you play soccer?” Rin scored two goals in today’s match. Meanwhile, Sae scored three points with a hat trick. His Nii-chan is great after all. “Hm? Nothing. I guess it's just about goals. I just run to the bad area and then Nii-chan passes to me.” “What do you mean by bad area?” Sae asks, while playing with the stick in his mouth. “Hm. The area where the enemy panics and falls through.” The area the enemy falls through. Sae let his younger brother's words quietly seep into his mind. “You rely too much on your intuition, you know.” “But Nii-chan always passes to me, so why not? Nobody else is good enough for me.” That’s why it’s okay to move on impulse without thinking. “......What will you do when I’m not around?” “I don’t know but, I guess I’ll look for a replacement.” Rin says nonchalantly.’
This method of running ‘to the area where the enemy panics and falls through’ seems to be alluding to Rin’s Destroyer mode — the version of Rin we see in the final moments of the U20 match after he loses control and goes on a destructive rampage. Indeed, in chapter 152 we also see Rin wondering what this side of him is truly capable of and how he wants to try harnessing it more, but he still only wants to use it to destroy Isagi and Sae rather than playing for himself. His Puppeteer is not his original play style, instead it’s one he developed after Sae left in order to appease his teammates and be a able to carry his team to victory by himself (chapter 3); ‘Even in a high-level club team, no one could handle Rin’s moves’, (chapter 4): ‘Without Sae's passes, he can't play the way he wants to play’, (chapter 5): ‘Rin erases his best image and then captures the whole picture. In his head, he sees the movements of all the players, as if filmed from a drone’, (chapter 5): ‘No one understands Rin's frustration. But they can win, so that's fine. It's as if there are marionette strings attached to his teammates, controlling and moving the team…… That is Rin's new weapon. It is a play that can only be made with Rin's combination of technical, physical, and tactical skills. It has also led him to bring out the best in his teammates’. It was only in the U20 match that the Destroyer was able to come out again after it had been sealed away for so long. It was a completely different way of playing that was more primal and natural for Rin but less controlled and more clumsy due to his lack of practice using it. Still, its pure destructive power was insane enough to almost score.
In the current chapters of the manga, we know that Rin has gotten a certain better grasp of the Destroyer since the start of the NEL. In chapter 239 (immediately after Hiori says he’ll happily drop Isagi for someone else should they come along, mind you) we see Rin utilising a seemingly toned down version of the Destroyer against Nagi in the PXG vs MC match. Clearly he has been trying to improve it since first letting it loose again during the U20 match. However, so far in PXG vs BM we haven’t seen it at all. Given Hiori’s comment about focussing on Isagi and predictability, as well as Isagi and Hiori’s theory of ‘ego types’ and a ‘best play’ scenario, it appears as though Rin’s biggest problem is that he’s using a world-type ego to show off his skills to Isagi (and therefore, by extension, to Sae as well). This is the ego type suited for the Puppeteer, one that utilises teammates and was created for the sake of appeasing others. The Destroyer on the other hand seems far better suited to a ‘self-type’ ego because Rin accesses it when in a state of mind that ignores Isagi, ignores Sae and hyper-zones in on himself and his own ability to score a goal. This would mean that Rin’s ‘true’ ego is a ‘self-type’ but he is hindering himself by using a ‘world-type’ to try and prove something to Isagi and Sae.
Now, undoubtably we’ll see the Destroyer at some point in this match, and I really hope when it comes out we see it decimate Hiori. Since Hiori flat out told Rin to come at him with ‘an unpredictable script’, the Destroyer can be the ‘unpredictable script’ that blows Hiori away. And I think that would catch Hiori’s attention. Remember, his resolve in chapter 239 is to create the greatest striker, and his ultra-sadism means he’s more than happy to drop Isagi for someone he thinks is better. So, no matter what the outcome of the match is, I think Rin’s Destroyer should pique Hiori’s interest as a potential best striker candidate. This is especially so when you remember that Hiori has technically already experienced Rin’s Destroyer first hand in the U20 match, when Rin stole the ball from Hiori (interesting side note here: Hiori’s immediate thoughts before the ball was stolen from him were him struggling to figure out who he should pass to, Barou or Nagi. He thought ‘which one of you?’ but didn’t pass, in my eyes because he couldn’t envision the play working with either of them, and then immediately Rin stole the ball. Rin unknowingly answered the question Hiori was asking in those crucial seconds).
In the next arc (a U20 World Cup training mini-arc I’d presume), I’d have Hiori and Rin slowly start to come to an understanding. I think Hiori’s ultra-sadism would be incredibly useful in helping draw the Destroyer out of Rin because Hiori only passes to the best spot on the field. He doesn’t alter his level of play for the sake of his striker. So, if Rin is in a mindset where he’s too focussed on proving Sae wrong, crushing Sae and defeating Isagi, then his plays become affected and Hiori simply won’t pass to him, likely passing to Isagi instead. This creates a bottle-neck where Rin has to evolve his mindset, discarding the ‘world-type’ ego of the Puppeteer (which is still useful in some cases, but not here) and instead fully embrace the Destroyer. If he can get into that mindset, only focussing on himself and not Isagi, Sae or even the other players around him, zoning in on just the goal ahead, he is guaranteed to be rewarded by receiving Hiori’s perfect pass to the ideal spot where the enemy ‘breaks’. It mirrors how Sae used to pass to him in their childhood (remembering Hiori has been compared to Sae in terms of both skill and mindset), except now Rin isn’t thinking that he’s part of a permanent duo, rather he alone is the star and he can trust his midfielder to aid him and match goal-visions without the need for the Puppeteer.
The key word here is trust. Rin and Hiori would have to develop a level of trust. Hiori has to trust that Rin will embody the Destroyer, and Rin has to trust that Hiori will side with him. It’s why Hiori has currently been able to work so well with Isagi. Their goal visions aligned and they placed the utmost trust in each other to perform at their individual bests, thus leading to Isagi scoring successful goals. For me, if Rin could also reach this state, it would be a showcase of the culmination of his development as he breaks free of Sae and learns how to play fully for himself. It would simultaneously be a return to his childhood, where he was able to freely utilise the Destroyer without worrying about the rest of the team, while also showing his evolution because he no longer places that trust onto just Sae ‘because it’s Nii-chan’. When Rin trusts in Hiori, it wouldn’t be because ‘it’s Hiori’, rather it would be Rin fully focussing purely on himself and his own plays, forgetting about everything and everyone else, and simply allowing the ball to land in the ideal spot at his feet. It’s a completely sadistic, self-serving mindset, just like Hiori’s is from a midfielder’s perspective. Hiori’s ultra-sadism means he likely can’t be controlled by Rin’s Puppeteer style, since he plays for himself fully. Therefore in order to successfully earn Hiori’s passes, Rin would need to fully embrace the Destroyer, abandon Isagi and Sae clouding his judgement, and throw himself fully into goal-scoring. Hiori can’t be controlled but he’s reliable and can be trusted. I do think the road to building this trust should have its ups and downs. Let Rin get frustrated at Hiori not being controllable. Let Hiori want to see Rin improve while also not bending to Rin’s will. Let Hiori refuse to work with Rin sometimes. All of it would be part of a gradual, arc-spanning development for Rin that doesn’t take place in a single chapter.
In my personal opinion, having Hiori specifically be the midfielder who helps Rin most would be more narratively satisfying someone like Nanase (no hate to Nanase or nanarin tho. Love them 🫶). While Nanase works as a nice support for Rin especially at the moment in PXG, plus his sunshine personality might help to make Rin relax and open up more over time, his skill level isn’t quite up to scratch for Rin’s highest level plays. Nanase’s passes are useful with his ambidexterity but they aren’t clean. They aren’t as reliable. Rin still has to pay attention to Nanase in order to guarantee a successful play. He can’t block out literally everything else to hyper-focus on goal-scoring in this state. Hiori on the other hand provides that high level of play which means that Rin can afford to essentially forget Hiori even exists — the ball will still find its way to him. They wouldn’t even have to look at each other (much like the Isagi x Hiori best play we saw in Ubers that was recently recreated in PXG). There’s also the thematic element that Hiori has been compared to Sae before, setting him up as a Sae parallel which I think could be utilised in Rin’s evolution. Placing trust in Hiori would show that Rin is finally able to detach his reason to play from Sae and he can stop striving so strongly for Sae to notice him. Then there’s the shared relationship Hiori and Rin both have with expectations, love and abandonment, which could arguably help them get on each others wavelength to understand exactly what they want from a play and how best to execute a strategy they haven’t even discussed beforehand, as well as have Hiori be the one to help ‘create’ Rin since Hiori has already gone through the mental baggage of his arc and would understand Rin’s mental blocks.
Still, I do think canonically Rin and Nanase will be the duo that continues forwards into the next arc. Rin’s development will likely come from a combination of Nanase’s kindness, Isagi’s yap sessions and a lot of internal monologues. Meanwhile, Hiori will continue to improve alongside Isagi as a plot device who can be pulled out at convenient moments, while occasionally passing to other strikers for dramatic flair (I don’t really like this after Hiori’s resolve so strongly telegraphed that he’d very happily drop Isagi without a second thought, but oh well, what can you do?). I doubt Hiori will canonically play into Rin’s development at all.
Still, from the moment Rin and Hiori met in the third selection tryouts, they were able to flawlessly link up without the need for planning or communication. Hiori understood what Rin needed and moved to the perfect spot to work with him. If both of them were in Flow, creating a ‘best-play’ scenario with the Destroyer and the Ultra-Sadist, it would both be a show of incredible skill and high-level play while also showcasing Rin’s personal development and evolution, as well as utilising Hiori as a narrative support in a way that doesn’t impose him too strongly on the main plot but keeps him relevant and active in the story.
Part 5 — Headcanons Part 2: Some Fun Ideas
This section is all about some fun ideas I’ve had about hiorin, mostly trying to use canon as a strong basis so that they make sense. They aren’t things I think will ever be explored in canon but they’re fun to think about nonetheless. These can range from canon-adjacent to domestic AU material, it’s a whole mix really. I’ll probably come back to this bit every now and again to update it with new ideas I have, so keep an eye out for that.
A shared understanding. Since they’re both familiar with what they perceive to be feelings of false love from family members, it creates a situation where they can understand why they act the way they do better than anyone else. I hc that this would help them to more naturally form link-ups on the field, since they’d be in tune with each other’s mental states as well as general play styles, and off-field in being able to recognise when something has ticked off the other and resurfaced some unpleasant memories. I don’t think they’d really be ones to talk about their family traumas to each other openly, but they’d have an understanding of the things they do find out and wouldn’t think the other is overreacting, especially Hiori understanding Rin. While I think it’s good that Rin has friends like Nanase who he can be more chilled out with, I personally prefer the idea that his partner be someone who can actually understand the depths of his issues and sit with him in the eye of the storm rather than trying to just ‘fix’ him or drag him out of it.
Touch-starved and both slow to physical affection. Since they’re both introverted and Rin is emotionally constipated as fuck, they aren’t really a couple that would be very into PDA. Not even hand-holding. But it doesn’t really matter for them. They’re both not very used to that sort of physical comfort especially in the presence of others. However, while I think in general Rin might be a bit more reluctant to initiate intimacy than Hiori, I do think he’d still be more inclined to initiate hugs. Why Rin of all people? Because he grew up with a sibling. And he was a younger sibling at that. On some level he would have received attention from Sae while their relationship was still good, even if only a little bit. Hiori on the other hand grew up an only child in a household where hugs and doting were used as a tool to manipulate him. He’d likely not be used to the idea of hugs as a genuine show of affection. But Rin’s hugs are always genuine and often given out sparingly and bashfully, after a lot of hesitation. They’re both slow to physical affection but they’d find a way to navigate their wants and needs together, taking their time.
All-nighter horror dates. Be it playing co-op horror games or binging horror movies in the dark, I think they’d both prefer that as a date night over going out to a restaurant. It’s an activity they can both have fun with as a shared interest, just the two of them, alone at home with no need to even leave the house. They can let themselves get more passionate and competitive (and sadistic) while playing horror games too.
Yoga together. While we only have canonical confirmation that Rin both regularly does yoga and is good at it, I hc that Hiori would also be quite good at it due to his parents likely drilling him with intense schedules and being helicopter parents about his health. Yoga would likely fall into it somewhere as a cool-down and a good way to exercise on rainy days. While Hiori initially wouldn’t find yoga fun to do with Rin due to his negative associations with it, I feel like over time it could be a nice bonding activity for the two of them. It requires minimal talking of they’re doing their own things, and as long as Hiori isn’t messing up the moves I think Rin would tolerate the two of them existing in the same space. At the very least, Hiori wouldn’t try to one-up Rin with moves he can’t do and topple into Rin as a result (looking at you, Isagi…). They wouldn’t do couples yoga though, just their own thing in the same space.
Sharing food. In the Twitter QnAs, it states that Hiori’s favourite food is salt-grilled saury (saury shiyoyaki) “including the bitter bits”. His least favourite food is cotton candy because “it’s just sugar”. Therefore, I hc that he tends to enjoy bitter food while disliking sweet food. In contrast, we know that Rin quite likes sweet food because he used to eat ice cream with Sae on the way home from practice, plus in the Episode Rin extra chapter he goes to buy dessert at a special desserts cafe after eating ochazuke (a traditionally salty dish). Because of this difference in tastes, I like to hc Hiori giving any sweet food Blue Lock offers in their meals to Rin. Likewise, if the main meal Rin is given is ever burnt or charred too much for his liking, he gives the charred bits to Hiori since he knows Hiori will eat them so the food won’t be wasted.
Tea and coffee. As an addendum to the previous hc, I think Hiori would be a coffee drinker and Rin would be a tea drinker. This is because coffee tends to be more bitter, especially ones without sugar like espressos, so I can see Hiori preferring it to tea. There’s also the idea that ochazuke is made with tea, which is a bonus for Rin liking tea over coffee.
Cooking. Last food-related one I promise! While Hiori likely has a ton of technical knowledge about nutrition, dieting, calorie counting etc… due to his mother’s frenzied control of his diet growing up, I headcanon that he doesn’t actually have a clue how to cook. Once again, this is because of his parents being overprotective and worrying that he’d injure himself with a kitchen knife or on the stove. So he has zero clue where to start in the kitchen. On the flip-side, while Rin isn’t the best cook in the world I reckon he’d have somewhat an idea of how to cook the basics, plus he likely also has knowledge of dieting and nutrition for the sake of his own health. So while they’d both have things to learn in the kitchen, it would be Rin doing more of the actual cooking and Hiori deciding what meals to eat to optimise their health and training.
A joint-aura that’s a blizzard — in the event that they ever were to team up on the field, I think that the aura they’d give off together should be a blizzard. It makes sense to me for them to have this because Hiori has ice associations with the kanji 氷 in his surname, which means ‘ice’, and in chapter 239 when he gives his monologue about finding a reason to play, a metaphorical key appears with a snowflake on it to symbolise his newfound resolve. Rin’s connections to snow are less positive though, since it was snowing the day that Sae abandoned him. I think making their joint aura a blizzard could symbolise both Hiori’s ultra-sadist resolve to play, and Rin finally being able to move on from Sae to associate the snow with his sadistic determination. The fact that it’s a snowstorm emphasises the pair of them having a sadistic, destructive take-down of their opponents.
Hiori has a type. His canon type is already ‘someone who will leave me alone’ as I previously discussed in section 2. However, I do like to semi-jokingly say that his type is also ‘dark-haired, analytical guys with an attitude who are really good at football’. Obviously this is meant to refer mostly to Isagi and Karasu (we’ve all seen the heart-eyes you give them, Hiori!), but it is amusing to me that the description also fits Rin perfectly.
Part 6 — Transformative Works I Recommend For New Shippers
These are just some of my favourite fanfics all linked together in one place. I’ll start with a shameless plug of my own fic:
14 Days To NOT Fall In Love (but guess who did anyway)
Summary: This annoyingly mandated break of Ego's was only fourteen days long. That would never be enough time for Rin to fall for this aggravatingly sweet, understanding, level-headed, cyan-haired gamer boy... Okay, maybe he'd need to exercise SOME restraint. Aka: how Rin and Hiori become mutually pining idiots after the U-20 match through a combination of video games, late night discord calls and learning that perhaps they're not all that different after all.
(Chapters: 10 , Word Count: 67088 , Rating: T)
And now for my personal favourites I think new shippers will enjoy, in no particular order (if any of the authors see this and have tumblrs you want me to tag, lmk!):
catch us in the morning by transrightssokka (kellallyourfriends)
Summary: Hiori looks down and brings his hand up to his mouth, hiding a faint smile. “You don’t wanna go home, do you?” “No shit, I don’t,” Rin says. He’d rather sleep on the sidewalk than spend the next two weeks with Sae. Hiori is silent for a minute. His pretty eyes flick to his feet. Up to the back of the seat in front of them. Over to Rin. “So.” “So?” Rin says. Hiori lowers his voice. “So, what if we didn’t?”
(Chapters: 3 , Word Count: 27206 , Rated: M)
Even When It’s Starless by saturnshots
Summary: Everyone’s had an imaginary friend or two — it’s not often they change the course of your life, but who says being imaginary could stop them from bringing your dreams come true?
(Chapters: 1 , Word Count: 2838 , Rating: G)
sine wave by starstruckdove
Summary: Rin discovers Bachira’s “super secret surprise” sooner than he’d thought. There’s a new boy standing next to Ego at practice, and Rin knows he’s new because each of his unfortunate teammates have made their presence (loudly and raucously) known in his life. The boy has a nice face–wide eyes and soft mouth, all rounded corners instead of sharp edges. His hair is a shocking shade of blue and Rin finds it almost familiar. “This is your new manager,” Ego says with about as much energy as a dead battery.
(Chapters: 1 , Word Count: 8990 , Rated: T)
Daydreaming by em_hiorin
Summary: Hiori can’t seem to concentrate during practice, as a certain Itoshi has been plaguing his mind.
(Chapters: 1 , Word Count: 1560 , Rating: G)
My family thinks we’re dating. by akiangelsolos
Summary: “Oh, I see.” His mother hummed, placing her silver fork down on the table. “You must be upset, Hiori hasn’t come over in a while. You have to be lonely without your boyfriend around.” “I’m not lonely-” Rin shot his eyes at his mom, “What did you just say?”
(Chapters: 2 , Word Count: 5486 , Rating: G)
Part 7 — Wow, You Made It This Far? Congratulations And Thank You!
If you’ve made it this far, then I am both immensely thankful and I applaud you. Seriously, thank you for putting up with my insane, delusional brainrot over this silly rarepair that has barely any canon backing to speak of. Hopefully if anything, you now understand why people are starting to take interest in the ship (or at least why I enjoy it). And if you’re a shipper now, welcome to the club! You will now have to watch Hiori and Rin never affect each other’s development, never interact in any meaningful capacity and you’ll be eternally bitter about it 👍. For any aspiring fic writers, I hope this can be a nice hub of info for all of you if you want to consult the hiorin ‘dynamic’ (i say in quotations because let’s face it, I made up like 95% of the dynamic based on analysis and a canon dynamic doesn’t actually exist). Also, bear in mind that in the off chance we do get some more moments, I plan to update this post. So you may end up being subject to even more brainrot in the future.
Until that day comes though, I can only thank you once again. Hiorin is my otp and no matter how much Kaneshiro doesn’t make it come to fruition, he will have to try incredibly hard to make me stop shipping them. The dynamic can change. They can become more and more ‘incompatible’. I don’t care. If hiorin has no shippers, I have passed on from this world.
#blue lock#bllk#hiorin#hiori yo#itoshi rin#blue lock hiori#blue lock rin#FINALLY this post is finished!!!#I’ve been working on it for weeks#it’s mostly for myself ngl#just a nice place to compile all my screaming into one clump#might as well share it with the world yk?#I hope it makes even a modicum of sense to any unsuspecting readers who don’t ship it#rinhio#rnho
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Any tips for making a legacy, for lack of a better term, weirder? I've worked pretty much every occult possible into the family tree but I feel like I get too focused on just maintaining needs and normal daily family life for them, especially since I prefer to keep everyone more or less happy (i.e. no tragic early deaths). The most exciting things I've really done are turn one sim into a Global Superstar and marry off another one to the Grim Reaper, and sometimes I pause aging for a bit to spend more time on certain plots. Your legacy is obviously pretty wild so I wondered how you go about coming up with ideas like Michael Bublé Christmas Getaways and Charlie's Angels Spy Squads haha
This is a great question!!
Let me see if I can dig up a good enough answer for it 😂
And I'll include pictures to break up the massive wall of text.
The reason Gens 1-3 are barely mentioned on here is because in reality there wasn't really anything interesting that happened in them. I wanted to hide away from the stress of a worldwide pandemic and watch my sims garden for a while. No real rules, just something to relax.
Gen 4 was a slight departure since I was getting a little tired of my sims doing the same thing over and over, and I decided to do the opposite and move them to a penthouse in the city as a refreshing change.
And as I started playing with more gameplay mods that added extra moodlets- the chance of hysterical death rose exponentially. My Gen 4 heir died when my Gen 5 heir, Hinoki was just a kid. So I decided to keep him around as a ghost while my Gen 3 heir worked on grinding out the ingredients for Ambrosia and Reed (Gen 4) continued to follow his political aspirations to become the first Ghost President of Simerica.
And this is where we find the nexus point of weird. And here's the biggest (not so secret) secret to it. The beginning of Gen 5 is when I started actually sharing my gameplay.
Not publicly, but with a small group of friends and simmers on a discord, like I've mentioned before here. Suddenly I wasn't just playing for myself, I was very slowly starting to play to make my friends laugh- to see how they reacted whenever I would leave little updates. And I found I really enjoyed that!
I started contriving little scenarios- what if Hinoki slept with her husband's band mate and had a secret child. And then someone would pop in and say she might have to run away for a while to Tartosa to have a baby. This independent toddler trait gives baby Val such a stink face- oh you should put him in a tiny leopard print robe to match. And it became this back and forth of - you know what would be funny?
I was started going off the rule from my friend @anotherplumbob that my first born would be the heir, so i had the fun task of figuring out how to get from point A to point B with Valerian, and what the hell point B even looked like.
We knew he was evil- he killed his dad as a toddler, and was just a full creep through his entire childhood- and so I started asking, what story do I want to tell my friends? I love romcoms, I love spy movies- what would be fun for me?
We're all influenced by our environments, the art, media, and music we consume, and that's all directly reflected into what we decide to put back out into the world.
And through exploring those characters, through playing the game, through my friends throwing the weirdest suggestions at me - what if he made a robot copy of his childhood Nanny? Okay, what mods can I use to reflect that in my gameplay? - What if he 3D printed a baby? - What if the Volcano gave them another baby? (this one is never happening shooby) - The whole thing spiraled out of control 😂
SO TDLR- How can you make your legacy weirder?
Find a community or even a couple trusted friends to bounce ideas off of. The amount of time I've spent conniving and scheming with @doctorsimcraft should honestly be studied. Write for yourself and like the 4 people you care most about. Enthusiasm is infectious.
Find some good gameplay mods to add color to your gameplay- More Personality Please is an absolute game changer. Wicked Whims and Lumpinou's RPO are also fantastic additions if that's your style. Hopefully the game throws you some fun curveballs. Adversity and conflict breed interesting story - or something like that.
Think about the types of stories that you would be excited to tell- really lean into your favorite tropes and themes. It's not a checklist, it's just like - I really love campy spies, I really love enemies to lovers - what do I do in game to make this happen. Find your story and let drive your gameplay- not the other way around. Or find a good balance and see what happens.
And to be honest I've very much lost that balance and fallen into a total rut of letting the story overtake the gameplay. So whenever I get too overwhelmed by my stupid large ambitions I just sit down and play and see where the game takes me.
I hope I can get back to not posing every single scene out for Gen 7 but I also love making poses, and breaking my game in every way to be able to tell the stories I want to!
It's why I'm so comically slow now. But I guess that just means we get to spend more time getting to know our characters, which I do genuinely enjoy.
I don't know if that was helpful or incredibly unhelpful- but it's what I got. Good luck! And above all have fun- in whatever shape that may take. (Hopefully it's a weird one)
xo, Anne
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you know, i talked about it before but i still, for a much more rare totk gameplay complaint-
i still cannot wrap my head around how it went all the way to the finished product to have 5 ghosts that love to glitch around and threaten your frame rate (espeically bad in combat) help in combat, 4 of which are MELEE fighters, AND have their abilities tied to their model forcing you to chase after them constantly if you want to use any of it AND ALSO give them collision so they can get knocked over cancelling their ability if it needs charging (RIJU!!), the one needing a long time to charge being not jsut one of the most useful and fun to use but then making that one also be one of tHE MELEE fighters meaning anytime you manage to catch her and activate it she instantly charges into battle and due to her being rather small and using short swords she basically sticks to the enemy like glue and keeps gettign knocked over, i swear yelling riju was my most spoken word in any type of combat in all my playtime
also how they teleport back and forth in and out of your arm the second you dare to look at a climable surface or are in one thats too small for them (even when you need them the most like yuno in one of those caves stuffed to the brim with destroyable rocks thatd take out all your swords if you did it by hand) or just .. randomly teleporting around but then can still get stuck on environmental collision until you cant even see them anymore
(stares at sidon giving me a heart attack in the underground when he got caught on a light root until i was so far away he was barely visible and instead of teleporting he started to sprint at me with inhumane speed when i turned around making me frozen in shokc bc he turned dark in the distance for some reason making me think one of the creepy ghost soldiers was out to murder me, granted that was one of the best moments in the game for me, but also, imagine if they actually did that with one of the creepy ghost soldiers instead of it being a glitch??? another missed opportunity tbh)
how did that never come up during playtesting?? if they really were done somewhere in 2022 and spent the rest of the time with polish like they said how did that never come up?? i loved having the champ- sages around in their dungeons but the ghost version thingy wasnt really that optimal and id rather have their abilities be either integrated into your controls like in botw (tbh i find that really thoguhtful, to have your dead friends abilities they granted you inegrated into your basic controls as dynamically as they did) or in another ability wheel (like i did in my rewrite) with maybe mineru beign the only one you actually need around via summon since you can ride ... her
idk about anyone else but i only had them around bc i liked them walking around with me and was too lazy to constantly de and reactivate them but tbh i think it caused more annoyance to me than it brought anything interesting to it
#ganondoodles talks#zelda#tloz#totk#ganondoodles rants#idk why that came up again#but that needed to be said#i think it could have been integrated way better with even less work#thinking of a pure gameplay-mechanic perspective that is like my biggest problem#it feels so unfinished?#not good to me at least bc i wanted to use their abilities in combat but then spent more time on chasing them instead of the enemy lol
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Dev Diary 12 - Destructive Testing
Breaking from the usual format for this one, and it’s going to be a bit shorter, but this is important.
At the beginning of November was Metatopia, a convention dedicated to playtesting roleplaying games. It’s an excellent place to go to break games in order to fix them stronger than ever, and in that respect Torchship did not disappoint. While its parts all worked beautifully, there were some issues with the connective tissue tying it; the game needed a stronger mechanical framework to put these pieces into.
With that in mind, we’ve started a new draft of Torchship designed to be rapidly playtested and iterated, into which all the other stuff we’ve built up can be plugged back. This new draft focuses particularly hard on making sure the game’s fundamental tablefeel is strong, that you always know what to do and where to go next.
Which is to say, fans of my games having big circles in them somewhere? There’s a big circle in this one now too. Torchship now has two distinct modes; an Action mode where you go out and gather information, and a Reflection portion where that information is managed, damage gets fixed, and plans are made. Action takes the form of ongoing narrative play, dropping into turn-based combat when needed, where Reflection takes place in a series of special scenes called Vignettes to represent timeskips, with more impactful ‘Resupply’ Vignettes acting in some ways as bridges between episodes or story arcs.
While it may sound similar to some of our previous games, this isn’t like in Flying Circus where each part of the Routine is a commitment to a certain kind of gameplay before you can go back. You’re able to switch between the two pretty readily; so long as there’s nothing bearing down on you this minute, you can go into Reflection and play out Vignettes, with the number available before you need to go back into Action depending on the in-universe time until the next important thing.
This structure imitates the back and forth you see in many episodes of Star Trek. To use Devil in the Dark as an example, the Action scenes are things like arriving at the planet to meet with the staff, or going out into the cave to track down what’s killing the miners. When they go back to talk about their findings, prep security crews, or bring in new resources, that’s Reflection. It covers your beloved TNG meeting room scenes, the cut to sickbay as we find out what happened to the redshirt, and the montages of inventing or building the tools that’ll solve this week’s problems.
As part of these rewrites, some parts of the game have been modified from previous dev diaries. We’ve simplified the way Harm works; you now have two Harm tracks, Injury and Panic, and a new accumulating penalty called Strain which builds up quickly as you make checks or use medicine to manage the other tracks or boost your abilities. Strain is easy to clear so long as you have supplies available, so it acts to pace out scenes and give less-skilled characters a reason to roll; if you know there’s a lot of a certain kind of work ahead, you might want to save your expert for the rolls which really matter!
(Radiation no longer uses a whole track, but instead consists of a small card the GM can hand you entitled “Congratulations, you’ve been irradiated!” with a list of dosage effects.)
A variety of changes large and small have emerged from these changes. Relationships act as an excellent starting point for Vignettes, while access to meetings have let us place restrictions on the number of checklists out on the field at a time, as you can always call meetings to retire checklists, propose others, and figure out what your next Big Question is about the mission. We’ve created a new XP system where you train skills directly by using them, with the pace of advancement limited on a per-episode basis to encourage you to play wide and learn new things.
Finally, we’ve come up with a neat solution to one of the longstanding problems that original sci-fi games often run into, where players are unsure what their technology can do, resulting in decision paralysis. We’ve added a very distinct CAN & CAN’T field on the info cards which lists exactly what everything does and what their limitations are so you can jump straight in without slowing the game to ask the GM where the boundaries are.
Things are bound to change more over time as the game is refined and tested, but that’s a good thing. Good games take time, revision, and a willingness to recognize and rewrite when things aren’t working as well as they could.
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On Minfilia
When you take Minfilia at face value, she’s honestly a good character. And her writing is consistent enough that I can’t completely say that the way the community reacted to her was due to it but at the same time... it kinda is, in my opinion, and most of the arguments given to “hate on her” by people are mis-attributed griefs with the storytelling itself or the gameplay.
(The way some choose to mis-attribute it speak more of those people than of the story or devs, though.)
To me, Minfilia is a just and kind woman, if a bit politically naive, who tries her hardest to fill in the shoes of Louisoix when it’s very much not what she signed up for in creating the Path of the Twelve. It’s a hell of a role to take on at 22 (time of the Calamity, since she’s 27 in ARR) and she did an admirable job with it. You can understand why those who’ve known her for a long time feel like she’s incredible, given the facts.
But if you’re not a Legacy player, you don’t know those stakes, you don’t know her, and she doesn’t know your character either (she recognizes Legacy WoLs from what I've gathered).
So your actual introduction to Minfilia goes like this: you get told by Momodi that a secret organization is interested in hiring you and to go to Vesper Bay. You go there and speak to Tataru.
A summary in two screenshots:
The named Scion depends on where you started: Thancred for Ul'dah, Y'shtola for Limsa, Yda and Papalymo for Gridania. It's not Minfilia who recruits you, it's them. She just gets to make it official because she's the boss and got the last word.
And not only that but you've traveled to the town, then get to pass three doors (and two loading screens) in total before meeting her: to enter the building, to go to the basement and, finally, to enter her office where she's talking to the main Scions.
Which seems entirely trivial but I feel like it create a pre-existing distance before you even get to meet Minfilia.
In the Solar, she introduces herself, then immediately puts some distance between you and her by walking behind her desk—ironically while telling you that you're amongst friends—and starts her speech about the Scions, the Echo, the Primals and the fact that your Echo is especially strong. A speech she ends with this (notice the crossed arms—distance, again):
The next cutscene is about the perks of the job, settling once and for all that your relationship with her, even though she calls you friend, is transactional and hierarchical.
Which is fine, I'm not complaining. But she's our boss, which sets her apart from every other character in the story, Scions included.
The next hours are literally spent executing her orders, going back and forth between Vesper Bay and wherever she sends you (and we didn't have the aetheryte tickets until patch 5.3) until she gets abducted.
We meet quite a lot of NPCs who tell us that she's a great diplomat (something we didn't get to see so far since she doesn't accompany us on our diplomatic mission to talk to the Sylphs about Ramuh) and talented to bring people together (which is probably true but always happens off screen). We don't get to see it until well after they made her go from our boss to a damsel in distress we need to save.
To quote Erenville: first impressions last.
Especially when the story doesn't give you opportunities to change it for hours of gaming time.
She's not as passive as people tend to remember, but they botched her introduction to non-legacy players, in my opinion.
So I can't say it's entirely fair to pretend there's no reason to dislike her, or at least to not care much about her. There are other characters who play a similar role to her up to a point: the Exarch for example. But the Exarch goes, literally, outside to meet with us. We get to see him deal with Ranjit and the threat of Eulmore. By the time he needs saving, we've seen what he can do, even discounting his help in the first dungeon. I don't think he would have received such a warm reception if he'd just been waiting for us passively in the Ocular for the first half of Shadowbringers.
It's worth mentioning that the writers were working on the 1.X patches at the same time they were writing ARR, though. And to me, it feels like they either forgot or didn't care that new players wouldn't have a pre-existing rapport with Minfilia.
After all, Louisoix tells her in one of the short stories to wait for "one who bears the light". When we meet her in the Solar, we doom her: her role was to serve as a bridge between 1.0 and 2.0. To wait for us.
And we're here now.
(I don't think they meant to keep her around, even without the general disliking of her that players had—and that's probably why the twins were here from the start.)
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iirc you said in another post that the time between ALTTP and OOT was either 80 or 400 years. i haven’t played ALTTP yet but love timelines - are those numbers in the game somewhere?
I think I came up with those specific figures myself, BUT I do have some in-game and official text basis for them! The reason for the 80 year vs 400 years (or even longer) options is that there is actually some pretty big inconsistency between a) various parts of the game itself, b) the official game booklet, and c) Nintendo's big ole retcon of the Imprisoning War. Or possibly retCONS if we count TotK.
(Idk if you wanted an info dump, but you're getting one lol. THANKS FOR THE ASK!! 💜)
SO. The intro cutscene.
We start by hearing of legends from long ago, about a Golden Power that resides in a hidden land. Many people tried to find it; none ever returned. One day, evil power began to flow forth (we later learn this was due to Ganondorf finding the Triforce), so the King told the sages (originally translated as "Wise Men") to seal the Golden Land away for good. The narrator then describes those events as occurring so long ago that they became legend. Sounds like a while, right?
But then within about an hour or two of gameplay, you meet Sahrasrahla. Sahasrala? Saharasala? YOU MEET MR SALSA. And he ends up telling you a story about the knights that fought to protect the sages and who were almost all killed at the time, leaving YOU, the protagonist, as the last known member of that bloodline. According to Mr Salsa, those events took place only three or four generations ago.
That's not long at all! I mean, the exact numbers may vary depending on whether it's 3-4 generations from Salsa-san's point of view or Link's, as well as whether we give that person a human lifespan or an elf one (ALTTP has some Western fantasy elements, but the later games suggest that Hylians are basically just humans with pointy ears), but that would be where my ~80 years figure came from.
One of the later bits of dialogue then mentions Ganondorf rediscovering the Golden Land after the knowledge of it was lost - which may explain the discrepancy between the intro cutscene and Sahasralah(?)'s own dialogue. (I'm taking screenshots from Youtube FYI - see cutscene compilation here.)
All good so far?
WELP. THEN WE HAVE THE GAME BOOKLET.
By "game booklet" I mean the little brochure thing that used to come with physical games up until someone decided they weren't necessary. Boo and bah humbug. But I digress.
The original booklet for ALTTP, which you can find online, says that the Imprisoning War took place centuries ago. It also adds a bunch of other new lore details, including Ganondorf's last name, Dragmire - which never actually appears in-game. Both of those things are however missing from the truncated lore dump you get in the Gameboy Advance release's booklet:
And then there's Nintendo's Fallen Hero retcon. Lol.
See, the original "Imprisoning War" from ALTTP went something like this:
Ganondorf found an entrance to the Sacred Realm (formerly "Golden Land") and went in. Much like the others before him, he was then stuck there forever. UNLIKE the others before him however, he then randomly stumbled across the Triforce, which offered him the power to make a wish.
He made some unspecified wish along the lines of "I want to take over the world". As a result, the Sacred Realm became the Dark World and started to leak evil magic and demons into the Light World (aka "Overworld").
The knights fought against the demons, allowing the sages to seal the entrances ro the Sacred Realm. Note it's unclear if they even knew about Ganondorf's existence at this point.
Sometime later, Ganondorf manages to partially break free, and sends his alter ego Agahnim out to break the seal on the Sacred Realm and merge the two worlds into one.
And then we have Nintendo's retcon, which introduces the whole idea of the Fallen Hero - as a means of clumsily tying ALTTP to Ocarina of Time. So instead of the above:
Ganondorf publicly swears allegiance to the King of Hyrule, only to later backstab him and take over the castle. He then follows Link into the Temple of Time and grabs hold of the Triforce while the latter goes to take a nice long nap. He only manages to claim part of the Triforce (Power), so his wish remains incomplete. The other parts go to Link (Courage) and Zelda (Wisdom).
Seven years later, Link challenges Ganondorf to an epic showdown and loses. Ganondorf claims the remaining parts of the Triforce and uses them to transform into the Demon King. The seven sages, Zelda included, then seal both Ganon and the Triforce away in the Sacred Realm.
The names of the seven sages (per OoT) eventually become the names of the towns in Zelda II. Any remaining discrepancies are handwaved away as unreliable narrators.
Interestingly, TotK's Imprisoning War is much closer to ALTTP's version than Hyrule Historia's - which makes me wonder if that whole retcon is doomed to be retconned once again. Of course, the Triforce isn't present at all within TotK, but it's also a pretty compelling reason for why seven sages with secret stones couldn't win against the one guy with a secret stone. So there’s that.
But yeah, going back to that initial question: no, there's no specific figure provided for the time between the Imprisoning War and events of ALttP. Just depends on which piece of conflicting lore you feel like using lol.
#asks#zelda lore#zelda infodumping let's be real#PLEASE ASK ME LORE QUESTIONS I LOVE THEM#legend of zelda#Imprisoning War#zelda timeline
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