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Sexy Mystic Survivors Weapon and Item Guide

Welcome to our Sexy Mystic Survivors Weapon and Item Guide. Comprehensive guide going over all the weapons, passive items and their respective evolutions and how strong or weak they are. We know that there are people who have a hard time finishing the Sexy Mystic Survivors game. If you are one of those who find it difficult to finish the game, let's take you to our Sexy Mystic Survivors guide. #SexyMysticSurvivors

Sexy Mystic Survivors Weapon and Item Guide

This is a guide to help players who are struggling with the game when it comes to what weapons, passive items, or relics to pick up. The only issue you might run in to while using this guide is not having the weapons unlocked or a good portion of upgrades taken. Sexy Mystic Survivors Weapon and Item Quickview Weapon evolutions and passives

Relics

Weapons if you dont plan on evolving

Storm Amulet gets weaker late game while Spectral Dagger becomes better late game. Fire boots become really bad late game or if you are unable to have a clear walking path, theyre super strong early game while you are kiting. Never pick up Blessed Hammer, it's by far the worst item in the game. S Tier

Weapons Holy Cross - This item is consistently highest dps by 4-5x as much as the next highest dps in my runs. The primary reason is that when it triggers it does a screen wide AOE. It is sort of weak early on but by the 20 minute mark it will be consistently triggering. Energy Shield / Inferno Shield - The reason for putting the unevolved shield in S tier is because the invulnerability it provides does not require you to upgrade it and will save you at all stages of the game but more so early on when you are still without upgrades. Inferno Shield is the same but better because when it triggers, it does massive amount of damage, typically clearing anything remotely near. Frozen Orb - This weapon is hidden top tier. It looks and feels weak upon first inspection but its honestly one of the strongest in the game because it consistently freezes enemies and gives you room to breathe which is much needed when you are completely surrounded. Frozen enemies cannot damage you but what happens in this game is that when there are a ton of enemies they push each other forward, so this also helps with preventing that as it keeps them still. Passives Cooldown - Doesn't really need much explanation, this is easily the biggest damage increase you can get in the game. Experience Gain - Again, not much explanation needed, but imo this is hands down the absolute best passive possible as you will gain so many levels you will skyrocket to a full evolved build before minute 10. I heavily prioritize this pickup and try to get it maxed out before anything else because it will make the game that much easier. Overall thoughts: You dont need all 3 weapons to beat the game on Extreme difficulty. Honestly you need just 1 of them, maybe 2 if you find yourself having an unlucky run. If you pick up all 3 its because you definitely want a win with no way of messing it up. As for the passives, I always get both cooldown and experience gain. I dont think you can beat extreme without experience gain honestly because youll just fall behind and like I mentioned I will prioritize leveling up Experience gain before anything else, the only time I wont pick it over something is if theres a legendary weapon or something that I will pick up brand new, meaning I dont already have it. So if I am picking between leveling exp gain or a weapon, i'll level exp gain. Early on I think its important to pick up all the weapon/items you can that will make up your end game build so you dont "lose" it, especially if its legendary, but if its epic tier or below, i'll let it go and try again on another level up. Cooldown is almost luxury tier, its nice to have, not necessary but keep in mind that it is still the strongest passive behind exp gain. Try and get it epic or legendary tier and then grab a heart/armor/damage passive from the ground to evolve its respective weapon. A Tier - Sexy Mystic Survivors Weapon and Item

Weapons Crescent Blade - This weapon does great damage but one of the better parts to it is that it gives your character basically a "shield" because the projectile comes out basically dead center of your character, so it provides a small pushback on top of damage before its even fired out. It also has seemingly zero cooldown, there is some but its so small its negligible. Storm Scythe - This upgrade path for the Scythe is weird because it essentially is a better version of Dark Scythe. The scythes that it has rotate around your character come out fairly quick, do great damage and again, has a short cooldown. The area that it affects is also bigger than dark scythe, There is no reason to pick Dark Scythe with this being a simply superior version to it. Another reason that this is a consistent pick up for me is that the Area passive item is part of the evolution path and you want the area passive is just really strong. Overcharged Lamp - Probably the weakest in the A tier, and might seem odd to rate it so highly but what this weapon brings to the table is that it will 100% shoot at whatever is closest to you with no cooldown and push it back. The damage isnt amazing, but it doesn't need to be. This weapon is strongest early game compared to late, but the pushback is always helpful. Flying Stars - This weapon is what the blessed hammer wishes it was. is basically forms a huge ring around you and just claps everything then flies away. Not much more needs to be said. Passives Projectile Speed - This is great because it helps everything just move around the screen quicker, slightly underrated imo. This passive is so good it makes the Crystal Bow be not such a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ weapon pick up so you can get its evolution, that says a lot. Amount - This is truly in a weird spot. I want to rate it higher but also lower at the same time. The reason for that is because this does a lot early on and is a huge damage increase but late game it makes almost 0 difference because weapon evolutions shoot out so many projectiles at such a high rate, the impact of it is not felt at all. Also the weapon that this helps evolve is not that great either. Area - This helps all your weapon projectiles become bigger and is most noticeable when you have holy pendant/cross/divine punishment as a weapon. Arguably should be S tier. Max Health - I used to underrate this but it helps you tank a ton of hits, especially late game and will help you survive a lot of times while you get to the next health pickup. Attract Area - The magnet is super good and I tend to level this up over other passives because it'll just help you grab those exp shards much easier without putting yourself in danger. Maxed out legendary magnet will have you grab like 70% of the screen, its so helpful. The weapon that this helps upgrade is also not bad. Movement Speed - Not much needs to be said, movement speed is life because you can zig-zag your way out of nasty situations early on. Revival - The cheese is either S tier if you use it or F tier if you dont. If you find yourself going through multiple revives, youre having a bad run and this doesnt really help you make it into a good run but at the same time you can get unlucky and needing to revive once or twice early on can be the difference between completing a run or not. Firm A tier. Overall thoughts: The 4 weapons are really good and they are all equally strong with the lamp being slightly less so but what it brings to the table is still great. The obvious recurring issue I bring up is that they all have some sort of pushback to them and thats what you need in this game to beat the hardest difficulty because the enemies are so strong especially late game. All 4 weapons also benefit from having good passives that help evolve them, with the exception being the sword but it's passive is only slightly weaker. As for the passives, theyre all good with amount, movement speed and revival having a slight downside to them. I already spoke about amount, but movement speed suffers from the same issue where the weapon it helps evolve is not that great and Cheese suffers from either being used or not. B Tier

Sexy Mystic Survivors Weapons Endless Tide - This is actually very strong but it has a decent cooldown on its own and the worst part about it is that it hits a very narrow area. You can make a corridor through enemies though because it does hit like a truck. Crescent blade is better but this is still fun to use every now and then. Dark Scythe - This would be better if it hit a larger area around you, its passive actually worked and it didnt have a sizeable cooldown. Or 2 out of those 3. But as it currently stands it's very bad and the Storm Scythe version is simply far superior in everything this tries to achieve. I would rate this F tier but this actually still does great damage even with all it's drawbacks. Rainy Wings - This is actually pretty good, the downside to it is that youre stuck using the crystal bow until you upgrade to it and while it hits hard it offers no pushback. Also this weapon is a little weird where putting extra levels into it late game doesnt feel like it helps it do more. It consistently stays around 2-4k dps even if you get it to level 40. A tier weapons do that dps output with only 10 levels into them. Magic Orb - I actually love this weapon. Visually, how it moves, the explosion into smaller projectiles after. The problem is that it moves too slow. Youre constantly waiting for it to hit an enemy. Also while I love the explosion, it does make it hard to see what is near you end game, no way around it. Meteor Storm - This evo is actually kind of weak until late game when the whole screen is filled with enemies trying to touch you and the ground aoe it leaves behind can actually do some damage. I think this would be a little bit stronger if it had a higher alpha strike and had its damage over time component removed. Its so much better than the Sun Orb though and still, im a huge fan of meteors as a magic attack type, so I like using it sometimes. Lightning Amulet - The upgrade to the storm amulet oddly feels weak. Not much else to say really. Looks cool though. Divine Punishment - This is really good and arguably S tier or solid A tier except for the fact that it requires the right build to pull off. You need max cooldown reduction and the right weapon combo to keep people away from you but not too far away so the spikes can hit. Its hard to pick this up when Holy Cross hits the entire screen and doesnt have all these caveats to make it work. It does hit like a truck though so dont completely dismiss it. Falling Flowers - This isnt bad but it simply does less damage than Flying Stars, only slightly but its still a slight amount and thus finds itself B instead of A. Fire Orb / Devil Boots - Just going to pack these together because they both suffer from the fact that you need to keep moving to make them work. They both do great damage but late game you will find yourself unable to make the huge strides that these weapons want you to make, especially devil boots because you need to be constantly making an enclosure around enemies when its the enemies who have you surrounded. Its tough to make them work but they do a ton of damage and are actually really good against the final boss, especially devil boots. Staff of Freezing - While it has a 100% chance to freeze, it simply has too long of a cooldown and too little damage to make this picking up over frozen orb. The aoe of it also is very very narrow as well. Lightning Shield - This feels like a meme weapon more than anything. It does decent damage but somehow not more than Inferno shield, also if you find yourself getting hit and having your shield popped you lose it and begin dealing NO damage which is terrible as you will occasionally find yourself being hit by some random enemy that runs at you at the speed of light or the guys who die and rez right at your feet. You can simply get hit by too many things and it doesnt even do more damage than inferno shield. I would rate this F but F tier is for the true dregs of society. Duplicating Daggers - This weapon is really really good, does great damage and hits everything on the screen. Would be A tier but A tier is a cut above. I would rate it A- or B+ Passives Damage - Might be odd to rate this so low but in my opinion whenever I pick this up it simply feels like it has little to no impact. I would rate it lower if it wasnt necessary to pick this up for the sword evolution. Armor - Same as damage. Doesnt feel like it does much and only really worth picking up to evolve the shield weapon. Overall Thoughts: None of these weapons are bad, they just are not as good as the A tier or suffer from some sort of drawback. I would not say never pick them up or play with them as some are fun and you can still win on Extreme Difficulty with these in your arsenal. F Tier

Weapons Barrager - This weapon is odd because it feels like it does zero damage. It hits 1/4th of your screen as well in whatever direction you are facing but the arrow spread is so high its just bizarre. It also has a high cooldown. Sun Orb - Not really sure what the intention is here. Its nice that it will suck in enemies but it will not grab elites so its not that helpful as the elites will push everyone around as they chase you. It also suffers from pitiful damage output. Protector Shield - Doesnt evolve into anything so best avoided. Does okay damage for an unevolved weapon though. Blessed Hammer / Storm Hammer / Magic Armory - Absolutely awful. Low damage, low area. Dont ever pick this up and if you do accidentally pick this up, just restart the run and save yourself the time. Dragon Tooth / Dragon Heart - Low damage, low area. The evo upgrade, which is Dragon Heart, doesnt do anything except remove the cooldown. Best to be avoided. Hellfire Butterfly - If you somehow found yourself picking up Dragon Tooth and think this evo path is the one to take you will find yourself to be wrong. The cd is decent and but the aoe explosion it has is not big enough to hit enemies behind the ones infront, so this essentially is a worse Magic Lamp. I think if the butterflies passed through enemies and dealt damage along the way it might be decent. Passives Duration - Useless. Its helpful early on but it stops being helpful as soon as you hit your first weapon evolution because all weapon evos have little to no cooldown so their duration doesnt matter. I dont know what this is for honestly. Also this item is required for the hammer weapon which you do not want in any instance. Luck - I wish I didnt have to rate this as F because it actually is very helpful. Max luck means you find Legendary weapons/passives on the regular. The issue is that it requires you to not only pick this up as a passive, taking up a slot, but also LEVEL IT for maximum effectiveness. This is only useful if you dont have luck leveled up as a powerup passive so you can find epic/legendaries from the start. Once you do, theres zero reason to grab this. Recovery - The recovery rate is simply far too low, also there for some reason is no difference from any of the rarities, so legendary recovery is the exact same as common at 0.3, so if there is a recovery leaf on the map, its much better to grab another passive item and then pick this up from the floor. Gold Gain - This item helps evolve the dragon tooth which you dont want. The extra gold you get from this is also not significant enough to warrant a pickup. Not much else needs to be said. Overall Thoughts: I would not pick up any of the items listed under F tier, they are simply far too underpowered or need some type of rework to make them worthwhile, especially the hammer which is just a travesty. The ONLY item to ever grab is the recovery leaf and thats simply to upgrade the ice staff. Everything else should be avoided at all costs. Relics

Just going to make this short because there isnt much to say. First of all, DO NOT go for relics unless you have maxed out your relic reroll upgrades so you can reroll your choices 3 times. You can get seriously screwed by being forced to pick bad relics that will end your run. Having said that, if you do have rerolls, I highly suggest going for Relic of Treasure 100% of the time. The chest drop chance is decently high and is immensely helpful especially if you get the 5 chest. Relic of Despair and Healing are the only other relics worth taking. Relic of Healing can be clutch and Despair is obvious in that it can help you kill enemies you are struggling with. All the other relics are meme sh!t or have such a huge downside they are simply not worth picking up as they will cause you to fail your run except for the gold ones but the gold ones are weird because the one that makes enemies drop gold isnt that big of an increase and the one that makes it that enemies ONLY drop gold severely hinder your level ups by dropping your exp gain to near zero Read the full article

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allisoooon · 3 years

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I absolutely love your character insights and analysis! Have you ever tried to analyse the writing on Klaus' bedroom walls? I feel like entire essays could probably be written about it...

Thank you! Annoyingly, The Making of The Umbrella Academy has two things about Klaus’ room: 1) jack, and 2) shit. Great details on Allison, Luther, and Five’s rooms, Vanya’s and Diego’s apartments, and a few good shots of the mausoleum of all places, but whoever put the guide together didn’t care very much about Klaus or Ben. So. Gotta use my own eyes and brain here.

I would love to know whether the writers did the writing on that wall, or if it was entirely a set design thing, because that would make a difference in how much stock I put in it. Most of it seems to be the same handwriting, though, if at various levels of stressed. And he does that thing kids who learned cursive do where sometimes you start writing in cursive without realizing it, and when you realize it, you switch back to print.

But since it is filmed and on the show, it is canon, so I’ll look at it like canon. Looking at this post, if I was writing all that stuff for the show, I’d be thinking of a few different things:

1. Shit Klaus wrote because he was high.

2. Shit Klaus wrote because he was an artsy, gothy teen.

3. Shit Klaus wrote because he thought it was funny.

4. Shit Klaus wrote as legitimate self-expression.

You can have some really weird thoughts when you’re high that seem deep to you at the time but make no sense to someone who isn’t high, and I think that’s a lot of what’s on his walls. My teens were definitely an experimental stage for writing supposedly avant-garde things, and I think there’s some of that, too. And then there’s stuff like “One day I aspire to illegally land a plane in Mexico. A night in jail, Mexican jail, is character-building.” I think he just thought that was funny. Then there’s gonna be a lot of crap that covers more than one category.

Regarding actual self-expression, I’m thinking that’s part of the repeated themes and statements he makes. I’ll talk about those.

Uncomfortable tactile sensations.

1. “Where the fire burns so do I feel the pain electrify me.”

2. “My skin crawls with the seething visions of the night.”

3. “Feel the pain electrify me.”

My mind went to drug withdrawal, but there’s something more sinister I’ll discuss below. 1 and 3 are written separately, and repeats can be considered significant. Some of this could also be a response to the forced tattoo, though tattooing doesn’t feel so much like burning or electricity to me as being cut into with a penknife. Look under the category of Reginald’s rule for perhaps a more significant theory.

Darkness.

4. “It makes me feel like dark + small.”

5. “Even in the darkest caves there is a light!”

6. “Well I settled on ‘lamplight’ (the first sight, in which I learned to see divinity looking out the bedroom window).”

We know the dark is/was a PTSD trigger for him (he does fall asleep in the dark in season two, and peoples’ triggers changing is very normal). I think 4 is evocative of the mausoleum. 5 is written more than once.

Connections with people, or lack thereof.

7. “To keep at hand whatever it was the mountains meant and maybe that was love and maybe it was longing.”

8. “Sorry… I tried to wake up for you but sleep took me again…”

9. “Cheats, you lose!”

10. “And why didn’t I ever actually love the others?”

11. “I am [illegible] a lone and lonely sight.”

12. “There was a time when the need for love was nothing more [than] a sigh, a long look at a red light. And now, love is locked in [cut off]…is an old acquaintance.”

Two of these are written more than once that I can see: 8 and 9. 9 is written all over the place. 8 makes me wonder if it was written about an early attempt to get sober. Overall, the impression I’m getting of Klaus’ childhood emotional state is that he was very lonely and felt unloved, but also seemed to have difficulty reaching out as well. 8 and 10 get me thinking about depersonalization and derealization, forms of dissociation that happen commonly when someone is traumatized. Like the world around him doesn’t feel real, and neither does he.

Lack of identity.

13. “Faceless and nameless.”

14. “How do I know who I am?”

15. “How do you know who I am?”

14 is written twice. This makes it meaningful. I know I’ve read Rob Sheehan talk about how Klaus has no idea who he really is, so it’s not surprising. Also ties in with my thoughts about depersonalization above, but a very chilling possibility is that he’s writing about/to ghosts. Especially 15. I think 15 was a question he asked to the ghosts.

Deeply worrying indications of his feelings about his life under Reginald’s rule.

16. “Where the fire burns so do I feel the pain electrify me. You cannot kill the willing to die.”

17. “Feel the pain electrify me.”

18. “Obey, obey, obey, oh can you obey.”

19. “Fast as I can run.”

20. “Do not feed the animals.”

21. “Off with his head.”

22. “Feast on famine.”

You Look Like Death wasn’t out yet when this set was made, but it revealed Reginald used to electrocute Klaus without anesthesia. I don’t want to call it ECT because ECT is not and has never been “run uncontrolled electric currents through patient’s body at increasing levels to see what happens while they beg you to stop.” It is done for very stubborn cases of depression under general anesthesia with all kinds of monitoring and precautions. There was nothing therapeutic about what Hargreeves did for experimentation. So that’s what 16 and 17 make me think of, and presumably, Gerard could have told Steve Blackman some of what was in it. I know he told Robert Sheehan some of it. In context, 20 strongly makes me think Klaus felt like he was being treated like an animal. Obviously up to interpretation. 20 and 22 are both hunger-themed. Was starvation part of these kids’ punishments sometimes?

Truth.

23. “See no truth, speak no truth, hear no truth.”

24. “What is the truth of everything.”

I’m thinking about him growing old enough to question what he’s been told. 23 seems like exactly what a teen goth would write as soon as they knew about Gandhi’s monkey figurines.

Numbness or disturbed emotional state.

25. “You cannot kill the willing to die.”

26. “It makes me feel like dark + small.”

27. “What must I do to feel anything? Vacuum the void of space. Space dust all clean. Beast creatures mythical and real must be ground to dust to start anew.”

28. “Forge my soul in the fire.”

29. “The choices I’ve made could be my own self-understanding. I could balance this.”

30. “I became a frozen, forgotten frame of mind.”

31. “Time is passing quickly. There is much to enjoy and all the things I said I’d do…I can feel the guilt. How much will time will it take?”

32. “I never say he suffered!”

33. “Consume everything then consume yourself with me. Destroy everything I love. What is the essence of the forest? Why must I go?”

25 is an unsurprising thought, given what this kid is going through. Same with 27 and 30. The dissociative aspects of psychological trauma can cause some really disturbing numbness (you feel uncomfortably numb, hahaHAHAhaha…get it). 28 is written all over the place and seems almost surprisingly optimistic for Klaus. I would looooove to know what 29 means, if it might be part of his early attitude toward his addiction. 31 is crossed out, which motivated me to read it properly. I’d love to know why it’s crossed out. It’s crossed out in a different color, suggesting it was done at a later time and not part of some design. What are the things he said he’d do and why does he feel guilty about them? 32 is written twice. The last question in 33 makes me think he’s writing down something a ghost is saying. Overall, I’d kill to get a child psychologist’s opinion on this stuff, but to me a lot of it seems consistent with what I’ve read about PTSD.

Vaguely nihilistic sentiment.

34. “Wants, desires, nothing else matters.”

35. “Consume everything then consume yourself.”

36. “The day we die.”

37. “Don’t worry about the present and live in the past.”

38. “Yes years gone by without a word, but now in ink that’s soon to smudge.”

35 may be about his drug use. 36 is written more than once, including by a sticker of an eyeball. Five would have gone nuts if he’d noticed it.

Overall, I think we’re looking at a kid who had a lot of depth beneath the clownish attitude his siblings knew him for. Not all of this is dark, doom-and-gloom stuff. Some of it is humorous, some of it darkly humorous, some of it surprisingly optimistic, some of it’s just deep and the rest is inscrutable. What I love about this is that it acknowledges that abused children are still entire people. Adults like to wrap them up in pretty, innocent little packages and imagine they just shiver and hide under the bed all the time. Klaus wasn’t that kind of cliché. He was a kid who had a lot of people fooled into thinking he was shallow and carefree, but wrote cares all over his walls. Some sentences I can’t fully read keep popping up with the word “love.” I do try not to over-woobify my faves, but goddammit Klaus. He keeps insisting on breaking my heart.

You know what I realize, looking at this? I get why he and Ben were close as kids. Ben is also deep, a literature nerd, and seems like someone who could look at these walls and get what’s going on. Prior to Klaus’ drug use, they could have had some deep conversations the others may not believe happened with Klaus. I’m not saying Klaus is a great intellectual, but I can see where he and Ben could get on a similar wavelength.

A nice touch is that the stuff written in the most childish handwriting is the most faded. Quote #7 looks like it was written first years before, then rewritten when he was older.

Something right by his bed is like he woke up, took a black crayon, rubbed a black area on the wall, and scratched off a whole “message” that may just be him scribbling to let off steam. The only legible word is “NO.” Positioned directly under it on the desk is a jar of crayons. Though the more I look at it, the more I think it looks like charcoal?

There’s also “THIS IS THE DOOR” written twice in the biggest letters in the room. I’d love to know what that means.

In addition to all the writing, we get Klaus’ personal sense of style. Mostly, there’s a darkly witchy feel to it. Lots of candles, some slightly macabre imagery. A tiny electric keyboard, camera, and camcorder indicate he might have had artistic hobbies, or at least tried them out before getting bored with them. Cast iron teapot (a very good way to make tea), a sitting area by a record player with some dark boho décor. Records. CDs. Incense. Very small old television. Beaded curtains.

OF COURSE he has more than one hookah—one by his coffee table, one by his dresser.

Photos by Aidan Gallagher

Cutesy stickers. Some are of ghosts and skulls; a number are of aliens and UFOs. A hot plate with what looks like a Turkish coffee setup (you know, those tiny tiny cups of incredibly strong delicious coffee that’s almost like dark chocolate). Childhood crayon drawings. Leather-bound journal. Psychedelic imagery. Probably a Pink Floyd fan. I wonder if the fairy lights that frame his headboard come down around the desk for a reason—late night art? Coffee? Using that hot plate for something else?

Something that might be a tentacle monster made out of pipe cleaners attached to a bedpost.

It also looks to me like there’s no writing on the walls that were part of Vanya’s room. So maybe Klaus didn’t write/draw on his walls past a certain age, or wanted to leave that part of his space unscribbled-on. He would have been 17+ at this time and might have wanted that area to be a more grown-up space.

#klaus hargreeves #the umbrella academy #tua #ben hargreeves #ask answered #what a great ask #klaus has a really interesting room #and two hookahs #tua meta

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butterfrogmantis · 3 years

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I finished Vileaf this morning! I didn’t 100% it but there’s always stuff to go back to XD Bit of a review below, I’ll try not to give too much of the individual plot/surprises away but slight spoilers for a couple levels so I can talk about gameplay ^^

Poet’s Storybook: 10/10 everything in that was cute as all hell <3 Some of the rhymes were a stretch but idc I forgive him

Visuals: An honest 8/10! It looks stunning! All of the different levels had amazing unique scenery which was fairly detailed for this kind of game, and not as many invisible walls as I thought there might be, the game is very clever at hiding invisible walls with actual scenery such as crates and logs so I only ever ran into a couple :) The character lip sync animations looks a bit clunky in cutscenes but it’s video game so I get it, that’s hardly important and almost unnoticeable during walkie talkie scenes since you’re moving about

Characters: 7/10. I was somewhat sad that Clumsy didn’t appear, save for being mentioned once - I do understand the gameplay relies on precision so he would have been a bad choice to be trusted with the Smurfiser but he could have been a quest character XD I mean he’s iconic 🥺 Apart from that though, I loved the different characters! I’ve grown an entirely new outlook on Chef, he’s amazing <3

Voice Acting: 6/10 for English. It was mostly the NTOB cast, which I’m pretty used to so similar complaints to that. Farmer had a different voice that definitely wasn’t as cool lmao XD Random Smurfs will have anything from the lowest voice on the planet to sounding more feminine than Smurfette which is honestly a bit jarring to hear at times, since a lot sound like amateur actors attempting a deep voice. Main characters had some excellent dialogue with interactions that got a couple genuine chuckles tho ^^

Length: 7/10. The story was a bit short for me, but since I’m not the target audience and therefore a higher rating because I think it’s about right for kids :) you basically do sort of an intro chapter and then 4 main chapters with a decent amount of exploration and options to return with upgrades. I could have gone around collecting more upgrade parts though, so if people want to extend their gameplay or 100% it then that’s fairly easy!

Combat: 5/10. Not because it’s particularly difficult on the surface but because there’s absolutely no defence mechanism. You can dodge and jump out of the way but some enemies require standing still to spray/suck them up so if you’re doing one of the battles with a neverending vile critter spawner it can become a hassle since you can neither block nor dodge those. Overall though the basics are a good intro to these 3D platform games, and I liked how the main 4 types of enemies utilised 4 different features of the smurfiser effectively :)

Controls: 4.5/10. I was not having fun on certain parts but maybe it was just me 😭 I was using a standard controller on my pc so this is obviously going to change if you’re playing via keyboard or switch. I did get several upgrades from Handy but honestly I couldn’t see much difference? That was annoying to be honest because some of the timed puzzles are genuinely hard. Especially on levels that really require absolute precision to land on mushrooms perfectly or you fall/get caught. I had some serious difficulty with a couple of the sections on levels since the checkpoints were a bit far back and I kept dying due to being unable to perform perfection, so that I think could do with another look over but everything is possible with patience and practice. That being said, everything is super straightforward to get the hang of and the puzzles are fun to work around, and the sense of satisfaction is extra rewarding :)

Additional: I would have loved some extra shops! I think a Tailor based shop with outfits would have been super cute <3 Maybe Papa potions too for temporary bonus’ like defence or speed.

Overall: 7/10! It was a genuinely fun, exciting game! I went into Mission Vileaf with absolutely no expectations, so I have been more than pleasantly surprised! The best way I can think to describe it is an intro to games like Spyro. So if you like 3D platforming, puzzles and a bit of a challenge it’s about right! Honestly some parts are pretty adrenaline full, which was surprising but welcomed for what I thought might be a more childish game, so that makes it better for us older fans ey XD I positively recommend it ^^

#smurfs #the smurfs #mission vileaf #vileaf spoilers #vileaf review #ops thoughts #misc

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ozzdog12 · 3 years

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2020 Top 7 (and 1)

2020 am I right? We saw an insane amount of games come out and 2 brand new consoles. What a wild and weird year for gaming, and life in general. In case you are relatively new here, and to be honest that would be completely fair considering I don't post very often on Tumblr anymore, every year going on the last 4 years (on here) I have done a Top 7 (& 1) for my favorite videogames of the year. Check out 2019, 2018, & 2017. What’s wild, as I look back on my list of games that I’ve completed and played, only maybe 10 came out this year. 2020 was a huge backlog year.

Lets get on with the ‘And 1!”

Favorite Game that Didn’t Come out in 2020: Control (PS4)

Control may very well have been my 2019 Game of the Year, had I played it in 2019. I LOVED Control. I wanted to play it in 2019, but initial reports that it was a little rough on base consoles put me off until it was fixed. And Holy smokes what an insanely fun and trippy game once I finally started it. I knew within the first 20 minutes this was going to be the shit when I went down a hall, walked into a room and talked to the “janitor” left out a door behind him and the entire building had shifted. I’ve always liked Remedy games, but from a distance. Max Payne 1&2 and Alan Wake all oozed with weirdness and intrigue, but never enough for me to finish them. I missed out on Quantum Break. The story is Control is just the right amount of mind f*!$ for me and builds a universe I didn’t know I needed. It take some time to piece everything together, then everything just clicks. The game does have a weird difficulty spike when fighting bosses and the checkpoints were too far apart at times, but those were later patched. I spent an insane amount of time within the Federal Bureau of Control building and even more time after that with the Foundation and AWE DLC and it STILL wasn’t enough. I wanted more. Outside of Prey, I can’t think of another game that stuck in my brain more after I’d finished it. Control is absolutely a MUST PLAY title. In a world where everything sort’ve feels similar, Control stands out of the crowd.

Number 7: Astro’s Playroom (PS5)

I never thought in my wildest dreams that a game I had almost zero interest in playing would end up on my list of favorite games this year. Astro’s Playroom is being labeled as a ‘Tech demo’ but that feels like an insult to what it is. It’s a full fledged game and its free! I’ve paid more for less. A charming little platformer that lives and breathes the history of the Playstation. So many cool Easter eggs and references. It certainly centers its gameplay around the DualSense controller and everything it can do, but at its core, its a completely approachable and forgiving 3D platformer. I played it just to see what it was about, next thing i knew I had completed all the levels and wanted to further explore all the nooks and crannies within the game. I wanted to see everything the game had to offer and I had an absolute blast doing so. Makes me kinda wish I’d played the previous game on PSVR (I’d have to have a PSVR too)

Number 6: Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PS5)

Another quality title, albeit a spin-off, from Insomniac to add to their Spider Man universe. Gameplay felt obviously like Spider-Man, but Miles has unique abilities that made the game feel different enough, especially the cloak and stealth. I enjoyed the fact that it was short and concise. The issue with most ‘open-world’ games is that they are entirely too bloated with unnecessary filler content (I’ll get to that in a later game), something I felt the first game suffered from, but I also understand why they are there. However I could’ve use one or two more story missions to help flesh out some characters, but it wasn’t required and didn’t change my opinion one way or the other. My one BIG gripe was with Miles himself. He is an extremely smart young kid, but so incredibly naïve. Peter Parker tells him the one thing he SHOULD NOT do is tell people he is Spider-Man. I get it, that’s part of his growth, but Miles thinks he can just solve his problems by revealing his identity and it almost certainly never works out.

Number 5: The Last of Us: Part 2 (PS4)

The Last of Us Part 2 may be the most polarizing game in the history of the medium, but for the absolute wrong reasons. I’m in the minority that I very much enjoyed my experience with TLOU2, quite a bit actually. Its better in every single way over its predecessor, except the overall story. There are plenty of fair criticisms to be had about the story and various things within the game itself, but I thought the gameplay was so tight and crunchy. There were genuine moments of suspense and terror that I felt that no other game has ever given me. The entire hospital section (2nd time) was so susensful, I had to put my controller down to gther myself. Some of my favorite moments in the series I experienced with a character I wasn’t overly fond of. How many games can do that? The Last of Us Part 2 was meant to invoke emotion, not necessarily joy. I think that's what people lost along the way. Say what you will about the direction Naughty Dog has taken over the years, but you would be hard pressed to find a studio that makes games graphically better than they do. Yes, I know about their crunch culture, but this is not a place for that. I will say, the game was a tad bit too long, which is not something it typically say for a single player, narrative driven game. The pacing and the way the story was told wasn’t my favorite, but I respect what it was trying to do, even if it failed in some aspect of that, I finished the game within the week it was released. Something I RARELY ever do. I’m a father and I related with Joel a lot in TLOU, but I also recognized how wrong he was. There is a lesson to be learned. Your actions always have consequences and while he was doing what he thought was the right thing, it wasn’t his choice to make, and in doing so set up a series of events that were entirely avoidable, but again, that’s the point isn’t it?

Number 4: Grindstone (Switch)

I’m counting this as a 2020 game since it just came to the Switch this year ( less than a month ago) but its not the first time I’ve played it. Grindstone was the only reason I kept my Apple Arcade subscription and when I let it lapse, there was a void I just couldn’t fill. I bought Puzzle Quest on Switch but it just wasn't the same. Its THE perfect game for bite sized play, even though in its addictive nature, you’ll clear a few levels and an hour has passed before you know it. It has the perfect amount of depth that most ‘match’ games don't. You have different weapons, items, and outfits w/perks to use and experiment with to keep it fresh. I went months without playing my Switch and when this was announced in August, I couldn’t wait! Sadly, I had to wait 3 months, but since then I have spent so much time on the Switch. It gave me a reason to play it again. The art style and humour is great. The variety of enemies and challenge is just right. I can’t recommend it enough. Seriously, check this game out!

Number 3: Doom Eternal (Xbox One)

I will be the first to tell you, I did not like Doom (2016). I found it extremely boring and trite. I understood what Doom(2016) was doing and it succeeded, maybe too much. Nostalgia is a helluva thing. So in saying that, I was mildly interested in Doom Eternal. Doom Eternal is nothing like 2016 outside of it being a Doom game that connects to the rest of them (& also being a sequel to 2016). The mechanics are drastically different with more platforming (for better or worse). Eternal is challenging, at times very hard, especially early on. Eternal has no respect for its players, in a weirdly good way. It laughs at how you’ve played FPS before this one and WILL MAKE you play it its way, not your way. Yes, you point and shoot, but ammo is scare and you MUST use everything in your arsenal. No more using just 2 guns for the whole game. The enemies are relentless. Sometimes you have to pause and take a breath after a battle because you go a 100 mph for the whole fight. You have to continuously move or you die. There is an enticing rhythm to it. I categorize Eternal as ‘Blood Ballet’. Its a game where when your feeling it, much like a rhythm game, you get in the zone and there is no stopping demons from getting slayed. Surprisingly, unlike most games in the genre, it seemed to get easier (sans one extremely frustrating platforming section late in the game) the longer you played it. Was that a testament that I ‘learned’ the Eternal way or it truly did get easier? I don’t know, but the final Boss(es) were....easy.. I had more problems and deaths within the first 4 hours than I did the final 8-9 hours. The multiplayer was also surprisingly fun. The older I get, the less interested I am in multiplayer, but I found myself coming back for more for a good month or so.

Number 2: Gears Tactics (Xbox One)

As 2020 comes to a close, I came to a stunning realization. I might be a bigger Gears of War fan than I had previously thought. Don’t get me wrong. I love Gears, but I seem to love Gears more than I thought. I'm way more invested into the lore than I recall. Anyways, Gears Tactics is everything XCOM 2 SHOULD’VE been. Not only does Gears Tactics utilize the Overwatch action, its makes it EXTREMELY important. The story revolves around the father of Kait Diaz, Gabe and a ragtag group of mostly random soldiers to take down Ukkon. Anyone who is remotely interested in the Gears universe will love the story and references. The gameplay is just so damn satisfying. The bosses are very challenging and different. I actually had to change my strategy to finish the final boss. I experimented with a totally different style of class and was rewarded for it. The post game stuff is also aplenty. This game scratched a VERY specific itch for me and I’m itchy to jump back in. I’m glad this came to Xbox One because I’m current computer could not run it.

Number 1: Ghost of Tsushima (PS4)

I have a very odd relationship with massive open world games. I love them, but I get very burnt out on them. They all have a relatively same-y formula and are often populated with bloat. GoT does have some of that but to its advantage, its not very populated, in a good way. One of the things that I really appreciated about GoT and its side quest is most of them felt meaningful. The thing that really stood out to me about GoT is the absolutely satisfying combat. It just feels SO GOOD. It requires timing and patience. There are different fighting styles for different enemies and even the armor you wear is more than just cosmetic. The combat is so fun and satisfying that I was immediately excited when they announced Legends, a multiplayer add on, for free. Its so much fun and is a blast to play with a group of friends. I’m sporadically still playing the Legends mode. I initially wanted to play the game in ‘Kurosawa’ mode but I am glad I didn’t because the game, even on the PS4 is stunning, and on the upgrade on PS5 is jaw-droppingly smooth. I did play the entire game in Japanese with English subtitles. I still don't know what Jin’s English voice sounds like. GoT does a good job a drip feeding you new abilities and things to keep things fresh. I love stealth and once I unlocked it, I spent the majority of every battle taking out as many enemies as I could while in stealth mode. Ghost of Tsushima does a lot of things very well, that the few things it doesn’t can be easily overlooked.

#videogames #control #grindstone #tlou #doom eternal #gears tactics #ghost of tsushima #ps4 #ps5 #xbox one #switch #nintendo switch #playstation4 #GOTY #spiderman #astro playroom

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twinvictim · 3 years

Note

your opinions on each of the post team silent games and a rating out of 10. hand 'em over

YEAHHHHHH FINALLY CATERING TO ME!!!

Uh really long post oops. for reference, my rating for the first 4 sh's are as follows

Sh1: 9/10 Sh2: 7/10 Sh3: 9/10 Sh4: 9.5/10

Silent Hill 0/Origins

overall score: 7/10

Alot of the games issues can of course be attributed to it being a psp game, and while i won't excuse everything bc of that, j have to be honest and say I think it had so much potential as a (very) late ps2 game. Not to mention, the game ON THE PSP functions as it should. (The ps2 port does fucking not tho..oops) ans you'll see that this is...a rarity post team silent.

The story has alot of potential, Travis as a character is interesting and sympathetic and j think his dynamic with alessa js super fascinating to dig into, both of them being abused children and there was alot of intrigue regarding his powers, the game feels like a smaller more watered down she, and for that I can't fault it too much. The weapons system isn't my favorite but the combat itself is reminiscent of 1 and 2 and I really like a good chunk of the monster design, there was clearly thought and care put into it, nurses and strughtjackets/lying figures be dammed. The unlockables are pretty cool though and alot of the environments look pretty cool for a psp game, hell i LOVE the theater level its super unique, I would love to see it in (actually functional) better graphics. I also think the puzzles are pretty solid, not hair pulling like sh1 even if they're not quite as clever as say sh3.

My biggest criticisms come from the reuse of sh1 characters (just alessa and Travis would've been fine, maybe dahlia and some more org characters would've been better) the bad ending being straight up bad writing. Not to mention they did the sh3 thing of "kill too many monsters and get the bad ending" which is...stupid. The foreshadowing of the butcher being? He's just kinda there, I like the lead up but it would be more interesting if the butcher represented something from those years between Travis' father dying and him being an adult. And while there's more replayability imo than sh2, it doesn't have difficulty sliders and that makes it kinda hard to come back to quite as often. Not to mention unlike sh1, 3or sh4 there's not as much horror focus and random events.

Overall, solid game its fun to play, very silent Hill and if you're willing to look past a few continuity errors and accept its a little different and slightly derrivitive at the same time, I like to say I had alot of fun with it and still do. (Maybe I just like Travis alot...idk)

Silent Hill: Homecoming

Overall score: 6/10

Once again most of the issues here are gonna be corporate fuck ups, but I'm also not gonna beat around the bush, this game isn't like...good. its bad actually. "But you gave it a 6/10?" Yeah bc its not NEARLY as bad as some other games I've.. experienced.

The negatives here are, many and vast, so let's run them down. Firstly the games performance is janky on console (ps3 at least) and abysmal/unplayable on PC, what with framerate issues that are detrimental to game play on pc and make the third boss impossible. That said on console it is completable and not even too terrible...usually. Scarletts boss fight however is terribly unbalanced and broken on all skews so :/. The combat is...functional but not anyone's favorite, it's difficult to use any actually strong weapon and you can pretty much strong arm ur ways through shit with just the knife (except scarletts first form..don't try it, it won't work) for some people this will be borening (not my opinion but w/e). Most of The puzzles...leave alot to be desired. I hate sliding block puzzles. Also no run button? At all?? No easy mode? Ok... also what is this.. wheel design for the inventory...im accidentally using my serum..what is serum also? And why is the item pickup noise like...bass boosted.

The character models look awful most of the time, and comically unfinished other times, some human models are just grotesque, (judge halloway, Adam shepherd, mayor Bartlett. .you get it) and yes...there are sexy nurses. Bc of course there are. (Whole ass out???) They did straight up have some terrible endings for this game (ph ending for one, the way you get the ufo? Hell the ufo ending is kinda boring. I like the in water ending here too but. Yeah.) the story has some, problems. To say the least.

However, while the performance is bad its not the worst I've played (on the ps3 once again..unplayable on pc) and I hardly noticed the framerate when I was just running around, I personally found the combat kinda fun, between trying to dodge accurately and still attack and not use all my health items (bc those and ammo are actually rare! Unlike some games...) it is kind of a challenge and reminds me of a much worse sh4. And hey, the health items both heal an understandable amount of health that i can easily read with a bar (unlike 1-3) and they're not a complete joke (unlike sh4...) i find the exploration really fun and sure the characters look shit but the environments are Fucking great. The church is one of my fav sections, short as jt might be and yes it stole the confessional scene but its pretty well written and acted I think. The monster design is pretty fucking rad too honestly, I like the schism, siam, I like the DESIGN of the needlers even if they make me so mad to fight, and hey the nurses and ph don't show up that much to be too aggregious. The boss monsters are also fantastic design wise, very unsettling and the boss rooms are interesting as well.

The story has problems but it also has alot of potential, the concept of people sacrificing ther children for silent Hill and being overcome by their own pain and guilt is pretty fucking cool, and alex is a good character they did a good job of giving him personality, ppl bitch about him being a soldier but a) he's not and b) soldiers are people too, and a sh game that could tackle toxic masculinity, be critical of the military, and also tackle abusive religeious parents is pretty intriguing, not to mentions themes of brotherly love that's complicated bc of how they clearly favored Josh . Sure, it misses the mark, but I like taking the potential and thinking about it bc its compelling to me. And like I said, i like alex alot.

Overall, bad game yes, but not the worst as it has enough good for me to honestly really enjoy it, besides it is pretty funny when it is bad. Don't play the pc port tho

Silent Hill Shattered Memories

Overall Score: 8/10

Unpopular opinion im sure but honestly? I find this game ALMOST on par with the team silent games. Its really that good, yes its a wii game, so this is my score taking into account the motion controls BTW.

For the good, man where do i start. Its BEAUTIFUL for a wii game and esp for a post team silent game, the graphics are nice and Constsitent, the environments are pretty and it has a pretty nice cold color pallet to contrast the warmer tones the series tends to skew towards. The acting and intrgrige are all on point and the WRITING is fantastic, its one of those games you play the first time not knowing the twist and play the second time picking up more and more clues and things that strengthen that twist so much more. Like sh2 its a simple story told in such a clever and interesting way that you'll probably be too invested to put it down, I beat it in one sitting in 6 hours bc i was so engrossed in the narrative. And the Puzzles man! The puzzles are phenomenal and fun to accomplish and there's even a little bit of variety in a few places on repeat playthroughs. The level of detail in this game is insane really, the things that change with the different psychology answers are pretty cool too and tho it all plays out relatively the same its still fun to see the different things you can get to happen. The gimmicks like the phone as an object, taking pictures, sneaking and zooming in, they're not too intrusive as to take away from the exploration or other game play but not completely useless and have some pretty fun Easter eggs too. The game plays sort of like a worse outlast with good puzzles and for that I do have to commend it. Oh and the fucking MUSIC is INCREDIBLE idk something ab this soundtrack has alot of heart put into it clearly.

Now, it's not perfect. The thing is, it is a WORSE outlast type game, in the running and hiding sense but well, the hiding is completely useless, its a run away game, which is ok, but I understand that people aren't gonna be a big fan of that when silent Hill has always balanced combat ad puzzles and exploration. The running segments are..aggravating, mostly bc its hard to figure out where to go, not to mention using motion controls that don't like to work half the time to fight the monsters off of you. Also, the monsters are not scarey in the slightest and the raw shock scream is actually enragaging if you've died one to many times, there's also...not really any penalty for dying. And once you're out for these running segments,there's no danger, no monsters, nothing to hide from despite having a hiding mechanic. Its not really a horror game more of a psycological thriller and I understand that the fact that its not horror can be disappointing. The psychology things might be a bit overhyped And yeah fine, the wii foreplay scene...well yeah its weird but it IS also funny as fuck.

That said, there's still alot thats good and alot thas unfair criticism lobbed at this game. Harry didn't have much of a personality in sh1 bc he's a ps1 character and sm really fleshed him out well, not to mention giving cybil some nice characterization, and they did some interesting things with dahlia and kaufmann. And Lisa.. well I'm gonna be honest I never found Lisa all that interesting in sh1..so it doesn't bother me that she's the way she is in this game. I know people hate the "horny" aspect of it but to be completely fair, YOU choose to make the game that way, don't answer in a sexual manner or look at boobs or anything else and you won't have an overly sexual game, its...literally that easy. Its given as an option for the play id they want to go for what is arguably another joke ending. (You cannot tell me sleeze and sirens is meant to be a real serious ending to the game. Cmon) and you can complain about the innacuuracies if you want but its a spin off, a retelling of the original game. Its not canon, and it didn't change the original game. It just took the ideas presented there and made them more human and lest fantastical, there's some supernatural elements but it takes a backseat to the human moments. And its honestly really cool.

Overall, great game, i reccomend it if you don't mind some slight jank with the motion controls and honestly? Look up directions on where to go for the running segments and you'll have a pretty good time overall.

Silent Hill Downpour

Overall score (so far): 7.5/10 *to be noted i haven't finished actually playing it yet but I know the basic plot and some of the details so I doubt it'll change

And so for the final silent Hill Game, I have to say, i don't think it deserves NEARLY the hatred it gets, there's alot about it that i find really cool and even fun and I think its a solid entry, a little better than origins in some parts and its downsides are both unfortunate and once again, mostly Konami's fault . That said, I'm also not gonna kid and say its a good game, just that I like it alot and we should be nicer to the last silent Hill game were probably ever gonna get.

Downpour has a pretty good, original story overall, there's alot to it, alot of intricacies and intrigue to it that honestly make it a pretty sold silent Hill game. Its different enough from the others to stand out but not super far removed from its themes and messages. I like that it doesn't try and lean into the cult aspect and tries to do something else with it, it doesn't try to explain silent Hill, but just use it to torment the characters, as it should be. There's tragedy ad human feelings here and some of them aren't the most...sensitive but they are pretty reasonable reactions id say. Playing as someone who's odds are stacked against him from the beginning as he's a prisoner is a cool way to open the game, someone convicted and you must discover if he is a good person or not. Themes of revenge explored more than in sh3 which is pretty cool. The environments look pretty nice, and i like the look of the otherworld, once again being unique with its cooler color pallet, but without the ice so it really feels like its own thing. The EXPLORATION is awesome with an actual open world which I think works well, there's alot to do in town (unlike sh1 and 0 on limiting hardware and 2 which just pretends you can explore to town but you cant) there's alot for cool little stories and sidequests to do, my favorite so far being the cinema (which has a section of ACTUAL fixed cameras like old Resident evils which is smth SH has never done and its super fucking cool!) And all the sidequess help strengthen murphy as a cheacter and argue for his innocence or complexites. The weapons system is pretty cool, picking up items and attacking with whatever you might find, finding cool Easter eggs with exploration and having fun noticing things. And it does honestly have the strongest side characters outside of SM. The puzzles are pretty solid and fun to figure out with some cool mechanics and the seperate difficulties is a great thing to bring back (actually done well like sh3) I also kind of like the method of triggering the night world/rain/monsters, and silent Hill really feels likes its constantly punishing Murphy, as it should. The music might not be Akira but its still pretty damn good, and fuck yall I like the Korn song, and you CAN press start and skip it yknow. (Thx tomm hewlit)

The negtitives tho, well they are there. For one it has the worst performance of any sh game outside of pc homecoming and like...the hd collection, the framerate like to shit itself alot lmao, its not usually detrimental bc I've played re2r with similar framerates but, yeah its not great. Not to mention while the models look better than hc they don't animate well or often at all, and the game has trouble loading in the models as fast as they should. The sound mixing could use...some work too, poor murph sounds like he's eating the mic. While I find the games exploration really fun, murphy also has the issue of not running very fast so it can be a little annoying to get back to a place you want to be when you can't run that fast, not to mention the loading times. The monster design is def the worst in the series, maybe on par w SM. Which is disappointing bc there's some pretty good moments here and there, but not nearly enough to make it scary and there's so much you can do with monsters with this premise. Also, the running sections in the otherworld are better than SM ad even more engaging than the brief ones in 2 and 3, but still, I'd prefer to do puzzles or fight a boss or smth. I will also say, the endings are, iffy while the main 2 endings are really good and Anne's bad ending as well as the joke ending are great, murphys bad endings are weird and ooc for the muphy you come to know in the game (even more so than Origins) plus, idk that the writers knew all that much about prison andbprison culture, nobody in a real prison would be mad ab Murphy killing a pedo (there's some racist implications here and there too which is. Unfortunate and disappointing. I like Howard and Robbie but they are a bit tropey, esp Howard) that said Anne is a compelling albeit unlikable character and thas pretty cool to see pulled off.

Overall, while it has downsides, I don't think Downpour is worthy of all the scorn it gets, this can have problems and you can point them out without disregarding the good parts and while it is unfortunate it doesn't run better and have some extras and didn't handle some things great, I still think its worth a playthrough, esp if you go out of your way to do the sidequests.

Bonus round

Book of memories is not a game I intend to play bc I don't wanna get a vita and can't imagine I'm missing much. It doesn't look bad pwr say but I'm not interested tbh

Fuck PT. :)

#entries #silent hill #long post #thank u thank you #ill try tk put a cut in here at some poitn hold on srry

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inventors-fair · 3 years

Text

Kald’ve, Would’ve, Should’ve (and Finally Did) Commentary

No no, of course I didn’t forget, you forgot. And I couldn’t blame you if you did, it’s been some time coming. Commentary may be a special action, but it obviously still uses the stack - and as it gets stacked under more and more things, it can take a while to see it resolved. While I can’t promise the next one is going to have split second timing, I’m definitely going to be adjusting my schedule to make getting things out on time more manageable.

This challenge revisited what I started with the release of Zendikar Rising, albeit with a slightly looser approach, and I definitely enjoyed the increased diversity that I saw in submissions because of it. I think it’ll take a couple more of these before I'm able to mould my prompt to hit exactly the kind of results I’m looking for, so I doubly appreciate everyone participating in my little mad science design experiments in the meantime.

That said, let’s not keep you waiting...

@bread-into-toast - Halvar, God of Battle // Sword of the Realms

Flavour: This was a direct cleanup of a card that was already in the set, so there wasn’t a lot of flavour to credit you with specifically. There is new flavour text on the front face (which wasn’t an option on the printed version thanks to the MDFC frame treatment) that I suppose gives us slightly more insight into Halvar’s personality.

Mechanics: The front face has one minor change to the timing of the combat ability that does succeed in making it objectively more powerful, but probably does not make for more interesting gameplay overall - it pushes more of the combat math onto your opponents, essentially reducing the decisions you make to “what punishes these blocks the most.” The back face has a more significant change, trading out the original’s recursion ability for an ability that I assume is supposed to better represent the Omenpaths flavourfully, since it’s certainly not a core white effect. In practice I have to imagine the recursion ability plays more nicely with the equipment theme than a ramp effect does.

Nitpicks/Templating: The front face trigger would read “At the beginning of the declare blockers step each combat,” which is admittedly confusing because “beginning” implies that it’s before blockers even though it wouldn’t be - the awkwardness of the template is probably a reason we don’t see it more often. The ability on the rear face would want to specify where you’re casting the spell from like Sram’s Expertise does, otherwise you’re leaving it up to players to guess which spells it’s allowing them to play, and they’ll often guess wrong.

Overall: Shop the art all you want, I still think he’s as handsome as ever.

Charmera - Imyir, God of Tracking // Bow of Freedom

Flavour: I feel like I might be a little sketchy on the flavour for this one, but I believe the idea is that Imyir was fated to track “the Wolf” but never catch it, and had to break free of that fate in order to finally succeed. That definitely sounds like a neat concept, and I think you could’ve been even a little more explicit in delivering on it to really drive that story home - though I suppose this does already have more space devoted to flavour text than any of the Gods that did see print.

Mechanics: The ability on the front face is very powerful, I suspect the fact that the draws are temporary is a relatively small downside compared to the ability to chain card draw by hitting creatures one after another. The back face is... Well, I’ll be honest that I don’t know what you intended it to do. Indeed, both sides are exiling cards from your library face down, meaning you have no idea what they are, but allowing you to cast them. Is it supposed to be casting one at random? Did you forget to include the part where you look at the cards? That confusion aside, the 7-mana legendary artifact that mills you for 10 every turn (but explicitly hoses any graveyard synergies) doesn’t sound particularly exciting, though I guess if the effect isn’t intended to be random the free cast would be quite powerful. But just imagine casting this in multiplayer and milling yourself for 50 cards just to get to cast one for free - the ratio doesn’t seem appealing.

Nitpicks/Templating: If you want players to know what’s under their face down exiled cards, you’ve got to include a “look at” line. If a player was able to look at it once they’ll be able to look at it as often as they like for as long as it remains exiled, but that first look has to happen explicitly. Also: 8 lines of text does not have room for flavour text.

Overall: I just hope the Wolf made it out okay.

@col-seaker-of-the-memiest-legion - Scythed Whirlwind

Flavour: Embittered with time is definitely right up Egon’s alley, though the card name and the other aspects of the flavour don’t feel like they resonate particularly strongly with me. If there’s a way the flavour is supposed to lend itself to the mechanics, I’m not immediately seeing it.

Mechanics: You mentioned in your submission that you intended this to be a “skill-testing” board wipe, but I’m struggling to imagine what skill this would be testing. This is obviously just a board wipe in the vast majority of board states, though obviously it does - somewhat - encourage you to play creatures with equipments, but in practice this is still just going into (near-)creatureless decks.

Nitpicks/Templating: Targets are chosen as part of casting a spell, so they can’t be conditional like this. You’d want the spell to be modal, as you won’t be obligated to select targets for the mode you didn’t choose.

Overall: Maybe it’s just me, but the name conjures images of kamaitachi more than anything out of Norse mythology. But I’m also not an expert.

@corporalotherbear - Explore the Realms

Flavour: You acknowledged that flavour was your focus with this one, with the flavour text here hinting at an upcoming Phyrexian corruption of the ten realms. That makes some sense in the context of Vorinclex’s unexplained appearance, and indeed may wind up being something Kaldheim has to deal with in the future.

Mechanics: An Explore variant that lets you drop two lands instead of one, albeit for one extra mana. Ramping by two is a lot more powerful than ramping by one, but the requirement of having two lands available makes this a little less consistent. Generally speaking, cards with high power level and high variance tend to lead to unsatisfying play patterns, so I’d be nervous about the games where this does succeed in ramping from 3 to 6, even if it does so unreliably.

Nitpicks/Templating: Most quotations in flavour text are credited to someone, and while it’s not strictly necessary in a case like this, I think it would go a ways to helping deliver on the flavour.

Overall: Ten realms is an upgrade over nine hells, I guess.

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@deg99 - Nith, Root Gnawer

Flavour: Your goal was to deliver on more dragons, and this kinda does that. I’ll admit that I’m lost on why it’s also a Troll, as those are completely separate species and it doesn’t appear to be an obvious crossbreed of the two. It’s not immediately obvious what the lands in graveyard clause is supposed to represent flavourfully, but if Gadrak is any indication that isn’t really necessary.

Mechanics: What stands out most here is - obviously - the repeatable land destruction. Against anything but the rampiest of decks, if you have this on the battlefield by turn six it is very unlikely for any opponent to recover from blowing up a land and creating a large token every turn. The fact that it’s unable to attack early really doesn’t feel relevant, because it’ll rarely be attacking late either - the upside of denying your opponent resources while expanding your board is almost always just much better than 5 damage.

Nitpicks/Templating: Templating favours common contractions, so it’s “can’t attack,” and (for whatever reason) only subtypes are ever capitalised: “4/4 green Troll Warrior creature token with trample.”

Overall: Repeatable land destruction is certainly a trollish thing to do, I’ll give you that.

@demimonde-semigoddess - Huatli, Guiding Hand

Flavour: Huatli on Kaldheim is a curious inclusion, feeling even more out-of-place than the existing non-native planeswalkers - of course this isn’t exactly a bad thing, as planeswalkers aren’t really supposed to blend in anyway.

Mechanics: The interplay between the three abilities here seems reasonable enough, the downtick creating tokens that trigger the first ability, and the uptick allowing them to trigger it on both attacks and blocks. It’s a little unexpected that both ways of triggering the ability are inherently aggressive (the block trigger only succeeds in tapping down blockers for the next turn), and cute that the otherwise unique tribal effect works with changelings in the set. It’s a little hard to gauge the overall power of three-mana planeswalkers as there’s often a thin line between unimpressive and broken so I won’t pretend to know how powerful this is just by looking, though I imagine the difficulty of blocking against it would give creature decks lots of trouble.

Nitpicks/Templating: You likely know the creature type in the first ability should be capitalised, and abilities with multiple targets read “each get” for the sake of clarity.

Overall: Is it the dinos that her hand is guiding, or something else?

@dimestoretajic - Calix, the Hidden

Flavour: This is an unexpected take on Calix, taking on a rather different appearance presumably as a disguise. It’s not immediately clear to me what he’d be hiding from, but the reference to Kratos is cute even if it’s ultimately confusing.

Mechanics: Always hard to evaluate planeswalkers without the benefit of iteration, but the abilities seem roughly in Calix’s wheelhouse. The first ability is a scry that upgrades to a draw if it hits an enchantment, probably reasonable enough at three mana; the downtick lets you trade him in immediately for a Stasis Snare effect; and the ultimate gives you a bunch of free Sagas. I think the idea of Calix interacting with Sagas is a little cute, though he definitely had that opportunity on Theros and didn’t so it might have been best to do it a little more subtly.

Nitpicks/Templating: The first ability feels like it has a lot of decision points for digital; I’d consider just revealing in the first place to save some clicks. The second ability is probably much wordier than it should be; I don’t think you gain much by naming the token (or by making it green), and the exile effect should probably just look closer to original Calix’s downtick. Be careful with so many wordy abilities on one planeswalker; I understand the desire to be clever, but ironically being elegant is even cleverer than being clever.

Overall: I’m down for Calix with a beard.

@driftingthruthecosmos - Immortal Triumph

Flavour: This appears to be playing into the trope space of Valhalla, letting your permanents ascend to the beyond only to return for a prophetic final battle. I think the art is an actual depiction of Valhalla, and the name generally signals toward the same concepts without actually embracing Kaldheim’s application of the same trope space, “the Worthy.”

Mechanics: This card definitely doesn’t work as written, but I prefer to judge design on the design’s merit’s, so I’ll do my best to work out how you expected it to work. The fact that this hits any nonland permanent makes it quite versatile, allowing it to return the same permanent turn after turn which can be difficult to overcome - even something as innocuous as Omen of the Sun can be pretty overbearing being recurred turn after turn with relatively little room for counterplay.

Nitpicks/Templating: The first ability leaves a few unintuitive holes where permanents can be lost despite the replacement effect. The second one appears to grant foretell (and a foretell cost) to a card it just put in your hand, which isn’t logistically feasible since your hand is a hidden zone. I’m not sure why the ability didn’t just turn the chosen card face down and make it foretold a la Ethereal Valkyrie.

Overall: I think my biggest wish for this one would be that the ‘glory’ was actually something you had to earn, rather than being totally universal.

@evscfa1 - Mistlebranche, Cosmic Prank

Flavour: The core idea of a weapon based on mistletoe deriving from the story of Baldr is really sweet, though some of the aspects of this design seem to stray a bit from that core concept. Most significantly the decision to make it a snow permanent with a snow equip cost seems rather unexpected.

Mechanics: Not to sound like a broken record, but the snow equip cost is what catches my eye the most: it makes the design very narrow, being completely useless without two snow sources plus a creature to put it on. Once it’s equipped, deathtouch and menace means that any creature this goes on will immediately be trading 2-for-1, making it really difficult to keep up with in any deck that’s able to produce tokens. Exiling planeswalkers too is a cute addition, and particularly powerful alongside making your creatures highly unprofitable to block.

Nitpicks/Templating: If you’re gonna make a weapon based explicitly on a plant, how did it end up anything but green? I imagine you designed the abilities first and chose the color to fit, but in this case I think the color was probably an important aspect of delivering on the concept and wasn’t a good place for compromise.

Overall: The name Mistlebranche sounds so elegant, though.

@fractured-infinity - Firja, First of the Valkyrie

Flavour: Reusing the Firja character with a new title. There’s enough about Firja elsewhere in the set to inform her character a bit, but that also means the title change can only do so much to change my perception of her.

Mechanics: The four life as a cost is pretty close to free here, but it does at least force you to adjust your play patterns to preserve your life total as you work up to it. In practice this is the kind of card you generally hold onto until you can guarantee some value from, and since we don’t see many Angels below three mana, this would often be waiting until eight to get played. That’s probably reasonable though, as once it does get going it tends to end games very, very quickly. This has the interesting upside of being less bad in multiples than most legendary creatures, as the second copy of this can still be cast to generate a token off the first.

Nitpicks/Templating: “First” in the name and each instance of “Angel” in the text ought to be capitalised, and life is always expressed with numerals: “4 life.”

Overall: Nice to see her growing out of that awkward Judge of Valor phase.

@hypexion - Kaya’s Gambit

Flavour: A play on the existing Divine Gambit design, with a couple minor tweaks. Interestingly, the flavour text comes very close to standing on its own - I didn’t remember the original’s, and yet it made some sense on its own (though perhaps it would’ve made less if I wasn’t aware of Divine Gambit already). The biggest miss is that the “gambit” part of the name makes virtually no sense with this design, as there’s no risk involved in using it.

Mechanics: Flexible if conditional removal. At worst it’s Disperse, at its best it’s just an exile effect. The biggest differences between this and the original are the open information and the (virtual) lack of a failure rate: with open information you’ll never be surprised by what your opponent gets back from this, and only returning the card to hand means that it’s rarely just not worth doing at all. This is clearly a more powerful version of the effect, but I’m not convinced it’s either more interesting nor a more appropriate power level.

Nitpicks/Templating: You probably want to use “with that permanent” instead of “with it”, as the text refers to multiple objects and they like to be as unambiguous as possible. I looked for examples that used “it,” but I didn’t immediately find any.

Overall: There are white cards, and then there are good cards.

@i-am-the-one-who-wololoes - Winter Travels

Flavour: The name definitely conveys both the concept and the mechanics reasonably well, and the flavour text itself is really evocative and has great imagery to it.

Mechanics: A mistake designers tend to make when designing for a known format is throwing multiple elements of that format onto the same card: when not done carefully, the result is a card that only works in a narrow intersection rather than being interesting in each archetype it makes use of. In this case, Snow archetypes make much better use of this than foretell archetypes, meaning this probably should’ve just accepted it was a Snow card and dropped foretell altogether.

Nitpicks/Templating: The template is unclear about whether the second condition - all snow mana - applies only when the spell is foretold or not, which is always going to be a problem with double-conditional cards. Also: this card had 9 lines of text before you put flavour text, it’s important to know when to make cuts.

Overall: Maybe I’ve read too much Robert Frost, but I really appreciate how poetic the concept here feels.

@ignorantturtlegaming - Elendriel, Twisted Prophet

Flavour: It’s not super clear to me who or what this is supposed to represent. The name and typing is enough to hint at a broad identity, but there’s a lot going on and not enough string to really tie it all together.

Mechanics: Like I mentioned for the submission above, throwing lots of a sets themes/mechanics onto a single card generally makes that card narrower and less exciting, rather than more exciting. In this case you’ve got a card relying heavily on foretell outside of the foretell archetype colors, unable to meaningfully contribute to its own colors’ archetype (Elves) without foretell, plus a boast ability that feels out of place both mechanically and conceptually...and also depends entirely on foretell.

Nitpicks/Templating: Flavour text was pretty important for the boast cards. While there were a couple rares that didn’t have room for it, notably the legendary ones both did because the flavour text was instrumental in selling the mechanic.

Overall: Elves > Foretell > Boast > ??? > Prophet!

@kavinika - Tjalfi, the Godly Messenger // Fjara, Doomskar Lookout

Flavour: Your submission took some time to explain the top-down basis for these two - a servant of Thor (Tjalfi) and one of the roosters of Ragnarok (Gullinkambi) - though obviously you’ve taken some slight liberties. The biggest issue with the flavour here is that it diverges from what the set establishes the Gods to look like - double-faced creatures with elements closely related to their divine duties on the reverse. With the set having only limited space to create and deliver on expectations, there probably just isn’t space to also subvert those expectations.

Mechanics: Mechanically, it’s awkward to have a red card that generates longterm card advantage, even if the condition for doing so is essentially a red thing. The two sides sort of push you in the same direction - lots of nontoken creatures - and the trigger on Fjara theoretically helps to reclaim Boast creatures that were lost trying to trigger the opposite side. The mana costs seem hard to pull off in the same deck, but I can at least see the play pattern it’s trying to encourage - though I can’t help but wish Fjara’s ability was a Boast ability, just to really help the card enable itself as most of the Gods do.

Nitpicks/Templating: Tjalfi’s triggered ability runs on a bit, it probably wants to be separated into two sentences: “ [...] of your library. You may reveal [...]” I’ll also a nitpick that if you’re going to base a character on something as unique as a rooster that crows at the end of the world, you probably want to make the connection as clear as possible - I don’t think anyone is going to make that connection here.

Overall: Maybe I’m just salty that I didn’t get the chicken version.

@kytheon4-4 - Gunnar the Breathless

Flavour: You made sure to include flavour text, which I think was really important to selling the Boast ability as it appeared on cards in the set. The specific flavour text you chose comes off as wordy, the story it tells is hard for me to parse (one can only imagine where they’d tucked the troll’s club away whilst hitching a ride), and doesn’t feel like it connects in any obvious way to the ability on the card. One of the fun aspects of Boast was how well they focused on creating stories to explain the specific ability on the card, but apart from maybe interpreting the troll’s lunch as life gain, I’m just not seeing that on this one.

Mechanics: You’re right that it would’ve been nice to have one of the Boast enablers show up at a lower rarity, though I’m suspecting that it probably didn’t for power level reasons - Boast is actually pretty powerful, and I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the rare enablers had started out at uncommon and gotten pushed to rare for being too impactful. I think it’s nice of you to try to make the ability broad enough to work outside of just Boast - there are a few things this breaks in older formats, but in Standard the scariest thing it can do is enable Kargan Intimidator or Subira, both of which are probably safe enough even with free abilities.

Nitpicks/Templating: All the templating stuff looks fine.

Overall: The irony of “the Breathless” holding a horn is not lost on me.

@masternexeon - Aggravated Berserker

Flavour: This card is a little light on flavour, which I’m normally just fine with, but in the context of Boast the flavour does a lot to bring the mechanic to life. It’s clever that the name is a throwback to Aggravated Assault, but I think a little more attention to detail could’ve helped it really pop.

Mechanics: Obviously this was really close to one of the winners, with the big difference being the Dwarf tribal element. Obviously I favoured the version that had a slightly broader appeal, but since Dwarf tribal was one of the themes of the set, there’s probably a version of this design that does both (extra combat for everyone plus a bonus for Dwarves) that I would’ve liked better than either.

Nitpicks/Templating: You’ll want to make sure to capitalise “Dwarves” in your rules text.

Overall: No spoilers, but this one almost seems designed with my next challenge in mind.

@misterstingyjack - Toralf and Valki Deceive the Giant King

Flavour: Boy howdy, that’s a name - I’m impressed that your renderer got it to fit. This is a top-down story about Thor disguising himself as his own mother in order to trick a giant that wishes to marry her into returning his hammer. The chapters of the Saga follow that pattern pretty precisely, letting you disguise one of your creatures and - over a couple turns - steal an artifact from an opponent. You might have considered swapping chapters 1 and 2, so that the destruction effect could represent the hammer going missing which prompted the whole endeavour. Indeed, then you could even move the mill effect into that ability, to represent the hammer being buried after it’s stolen.

Mechanics: Similarly, I think putting the destruction effect up front would’ve done this card some good. The copy effect is cute, but it’s not the most powerful effect on the card, and as written this is pretty easy to blank with a removal spell. I do really like the way the abilities intersect the colors - destroying an artifact or creature requires both colors, temporary copy effects from a graveyard feels both red and black, and recurring an artifact is something red can do that still feels pretty black.

Nitpicks/Templating: As much as I respect how ambitious the name was, I’m confident you had shorter options available.

Overall: It’s always lovely to see a top-down story that you enjoy getting represented as a card, nice choice.

@mtg-ds - Koll, Breath of the Bellows

Flavour: I definitely understand your frustration that there aren’t more smiths that do actual smithing in Magic, instead just encouraging you to build a deck that simulates their doing so. This correction for that is pretty straightforward, making axes and shields to equip to your army.

Mechanics: The low costs on this are going to lead to a lot of Equipment tokens on the battlefield at any given time - any time you have unspent mana you’re going to pour it into making tokens, especially since you can do so at instant speed. Combining that with the first ability reducing the Equip cost to zero, you’re going to have a mass of equipments shifting constantly from creature to creature, which just seems logistically difficult to keep track of.

Nitpicks/Templating: Everything looks right to me.

Overall: I have to assume stumpy Dwarven limbs are to blame for why they’re wearing shields on their shoulders rather than strapping them to their arms like the rest of us.

@naban-dean-of-irritation - Niko, the Defiant

Flavour: Niko was immediately a beloved character for a lot of us, so I can definitely understand wanting to reimagine that character more in line with your perception of them. It’s hard replacing the first iteration of a planeswalker because all the lore we have available is the card that exists and stories based on that card - so it’s just inherently difficult for me to see how these abilities relate to the character, since it’s essentially establishing a different character with the same name.

Mechanics: The most glaring issue is the fact that the first ability essentially gives haste on a WU card, which qualifies as either a very strange design choice or a pretty significant oversight. The third ability also feels like it’s skirting the color pie, presumably attempting an Omniscience impression that just feels out of place for this pair. The uptick and downtick feel like they’re designed to do pretty similar things, both primarily saving creatures from unfortunate blocks. I suspect the reason is that the ‘instant speed on your turn’ effect pushed the design into rather narrow space, where two abilities came out very similar while the third simply doesn’t really benefit from the instant speed.

Nitpicks/Templating: No obvious templating woes.

Overall: As much as I respect their defiance, defying the color pie is where I draw the line.

@nine-effing-hells - Fraenir, the Greed-Cursed

Flavour: I always enjoy top-down designs especially, and this story of a Dwarf hoarding treasures until they transform into a Dragon is such an excellent place to mine for those designs - and really, what set wouldn’t want more Dragons? The abilities themselves tell a story of murser and greed, even without needing flavour text to help it along.

Mechanics: I think my biggest issue with this design is that rather than the transformation being something you work towards or work to avoid, it is awkwardly positioned between the two - there are times the Dwarf Berserker will be larger by virtue of controlling lots of non-Treasure artifacts, making it unclear what the play pattern of the card actually is. It does have the benefit of being easy to avoid transforming when you don’t want to, but I think it would suit the design better to arrange the abilities to make the comparisons between the two states clearer (for example, giving the Dwarf non-combat abilities and saving the combat abilities for the Dragon half).

Nitpicks/Templating: Easy mistake, you missed the word “token” in the sacrifice trigger.

Overall: I’m really curious what the art for a card like this would look like.

@partlycloudy-partlyfuckoff - Pagan Chamberlain

Flavour: I have to assume the whole design was for a chance to use that flavour text, as the other aspects of the card don’t seem to align with Kaldheim as a setting - the world has no actual vampires, and the concept of a non-believer makes a lot less sense in a world where gods are as tangible as this one.

Mechanics: Similarly, this isn’t playing into any of the mechanical themes of the set; there isn’t even a strong monocolor theme to run counter to. I suspect the rationale is that each of the gods in the set are monocolor creatures, but seeing as there’s already a card in the set with protection from Gods, it seems strange to try to be subtler about it than that one.

Nitpicks/Templating: Nothing much to nitpick over.

Overall: In this set, the answer to that question is usually “an artifact.”

@real-aspen-hours - Ill Omen

Flavour: The name aligns well with the foretell mechanic, and the flavour text helps connect an important story beat to a broader narrative and to the flavour of the card itself. I’d be a little reticent about including such a significant spoiler in flavour text, but perhaps there’s a way to phrase it so that it reads like a prophecy until you find out it’s already happened.

Mechanics: This is effectively three-for-one removal, which is a lot of value for a single uncommon. Locking it to sorcery speed gives at least some incentive not to foretell it, as that delays it for a full turn - it won’t be often you cast it straight, but that I can at least imagine the situations is a plus. It’s especially powerful in that when it isn’t useful as a removal spell, it allows you redraws for something more useful.

Nitpicks/Templating: Foretell shows up after the spell effect, even for those cards that care whether they were foretold. While we’re here, good catch on including a target in the card draw effect - while it would be easy to exclude one, ensuring that the spell has two targets keeps the whole thing from fizzling if the targeted creature disappears before it resolves.

Overall: This feels like it’s only a slight push away from being constructed playable, and I’d be interested to explore what more it takes to get it there.

@snugz - Surtland Rimereader

Flavour: I rather like the flavour here, a Giant that’s able to see the future with the help of the snow allowing you a Future Sight effect specifically for snow cards is pretty satisfying. It’s not immediately obvious what the last ability represents, but the rest of the card feels like it sells it well enough anyway.

Mechanics: I’m not entirely sure that blue is still able to play lands off of this type of effect; the original obviously did, but none of the blue variations since then have, and I’m not sure ‘snow’ is a blue identity to bend for it. The triggered ability feels a little bit awkward with the overall design since you specifically don’t have much control over the first spell you cast when you’re doing so from the top of your deck.

Nitpicks/Templating: Good catch on the updated template for Future Sight, as I don’t think they’ve actually printed any cards with that wording yet. It was updated some time after Bolas’s Citadel was printed, and we’ve yet to have another card in that style see print.

Overall: Would’ve loved a rime-rhyme pun somewhere in the set, and this feels like an opportune place for it.

@stormtide-leviathan - Kvasha, God of Magic // Kvasha’s Birth

Flavour: In this setting, the connection between enchantments and Spirits and flash doesn’t feel immediately obvious. Now naturally this is trying to create a connection where one didn’t exist previously, but it does feel like it muddles the flavour slightly to do so.

Mechanics: This is large and evasive enough to serve as a finisher even without making extra tokens, though the tokens can serve as some resiliency against removal. I’m not entirely sure how the flash ability relates to the rest of the card, except to change the template of the Saga’s first ability. If that were so important I’d have looked for a first chapter ability that could take advantage of being cast at instant speed, but then more likely I would’ve just cut the flash bit entirely.

Nitpicks/Templating: I’m not sure what it was intending, but there’s no way for a chapter ability to see the object it’s on entering the battlefield - that ability won’t resolve until well after the permanent has entered, and if it somehow re-entered the battlefield it would do so as an entirely new object. The last chapter ability will want to specify whose controller the object returns under (usually its owner’s), and you’ll want to move the ‘face-up’ bit into reminder text - you don’t need rules text to make it work that way, but it’s definitely worth clarifying for players who might not realise.

Overall: My favourite god designs in this set were the ones that let you use both sides with just one copy.

@thedirtside - Ragnarock

Flavour: The setting for Kaldheim reworked the concept of Ragnarok into what they called a Doomskar, leaving the original name feeling out of place within the setting. The color combinations used for the spell also aren’t represented in the setting, making it difficult to imagine what part of the world this is supposed to be representing in practice.

Mechanics: The most obvious point here is that the foretell cost and the casting cost don’t overlap, making it almost impossible that any given deck will actually have the option of casting it both ways - since the options it provides are the only thing that makes foretell interesting, intentionally designing to hamper that doesn’t seem like a good use of the mechanic. The foretell cost is also much easier to pay than the casting cost, making the added bonus for foretelling the spell feel really counterintuitive.

Nitpicks/Templating: It’ll take a slightly wordier template to achieve the second part of this effect, something like: “For each permanent destroyed this way, CARDNAME deals damage to that permanent’s controller equal to that permanent’s mana value.”

Overall: That must be a really big rock.

@theobligatorysql - The Sagas of Worlds

Flavour: One of the fascinating things about Sagas is the way they use art to represent the stories for them - this set uses carvings, reliefs, even tattoos as a form of storytelling. So while the idea of compiling them all into a single tome is cute, it feels to me like it isn’t exactly fitting for the world itself. I could definitely see it as the work of an outsider - Tamiyo, for example - but it feels like it makes less sense as something native to the plane.

Mechanics: I’m a sucker for designs in the vein of Treasure Map and Mazemind Tome, so an artifact with a cheap scry effect is right up my alley - though admittedly, I’m not sure why this inventivises scrying to the bottom as that complicates the calculus and will cause players to make bad scrying decisions for perceived value a nonzero amount of the time. I’m never a big fan of tutoring as it tends to lead to repetitive gameplay, and the fact that it takes at least 4 full turns to set this up to draw even a second card means that it’s nearly always going to be fetching up a cheap Saga instead of a random draw.

Nitpicks/Templating: I’d probably just use “scried” in the first ability, though admittedly that templated hasn’t been used yet.

Overall: This would be a great opportunity to finally get the word “edda” on a Magic card.

@wolkemesser - Bard of the Fallen Meek

Flavour: This was actually far and away my favourite submission to this challenge in terms of flavour, as I love the way it draws attention to the difference between Istfell and Starnheim, and shows regular individuals within the setting reacting to the concept of the Worthy. The flavour text itself could probably stand to be pared down to be a little punchier about the point it’s making, but I absolutely love what it’s trying to do.

Mechanics: That said, the implementation is a little messier. The skulk mechanic was used in one block five years ago, so certainly doesn’t qualify as evergreen. I like that the creature itself has stats that make it easy to safely get its Boast ability going, though the ability itself feels rather unexciting. I’m not sure what about the card demands the double white in the mana cost, or even what makes this a rare over an uncommon.

Nitpicks/Templating: You missed capitalising “Spirit” in the Boast ability.

Overall: I would’ve loved to pick this as a winner, next time try an extra pass or two to make sure you’re hitting all the aspects of the challenge.

#inventors fair #commentary #kalda woulda shoulda #3smuth

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theirrationalzone · 3 years

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Yakkin ‘bout Games: Wolfenstein: The New Order

Yakking ‘bout Games is a series where I talk about games that I’m currently playing or have just finished. It can be new or old, console or PC, good or bad, it really doesn’t matter. If it’s a game worth talking about, you’ll see it covered here.

I think it’s fair to say that the FPS genre has enjoyed a bit of a renaissance over the last decade and a bit. The modern military shooters that dominated the late 2000s and early 2010s have become less common. We have seen the return of classic franchises like Doom and Half-Life, and we have also witnessed the influx of “boomer shooters” like Dusk and Amid Evil. A lot of cool stuff indeed.

With that being said, let’s take a trip back a few years. 2014 to be exact.

This was the first year of the (then) brand spanking new PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. The two consoles were not off to the best of starts though. Their early exclusives like Killzone Shadow Fall, InFamous Second Son, Forza Motorsport 5 and Dead Rising 3 had failed to impress. The only games picking up the slack were multi-platform releases like Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag. The only FPS games available at the time (other than Killzone on PS4) were Call of Duty Ghosts (dull as dishwater) and Battlefield 4 (I enjoyed it but it was completely broken on release.)

Not exactly the most exciting of times for an FPS fan on console.

Wolfenstein: The New Order finally came along that May. It had been announced the year prior but it didn’t have much fanfare behind it. The initial E3 showing didn’t really impress anyone and there wasn’t really a great excitement for the game’s release. Perhaps it was because the previous Wolfenstein game was largely ignored by people or maybe because people were skeptical due to the game being MachineGames’ (the developer) first effort. People needn’t have worried though. The game turned out to be a massive surprise. It ended up being one of the best of that year.

Why am I covering this now? It’s because I recently got the urge to play it again after all these years. Plus I wanted to see how it would function in a post modern Doom world. So with that in mind, let’s get psyched and see how the game holds up.

Never has a smile brought terror to my heart so fast. Well this and my last dental appointment...

The New Order is set in an alternate universe where the Nazis won World War II due to their advanced technology being too much for the Allied forces. After an operation to try and assassinate the spearhead behind this growing technological evolution goes horribly wrong, Captain William “B.J.” Blazkowicz ends up taking a piece of shrapnel to the back of the head which puts him into a vegetative state. He ends up spending fourteen years in a Polish mental asylum before finally being awoken again due to witnessing a horrible atrocity committed by the Nazis. B.J. is now in the alien world of 1960 where the Nazis rule over the world with an iron fist. It’s up to B.J. to link up with the remnants of the Resistance and take the fight back to the Nazis once and for all.

The story was and still is one of the most surprising elements of The New Order. It paints a brutal picture of a world controlled by an evil and ruthless force who will stop at nothing to assert their dominance. The cast as well are very memorable. You have the plucky and likable Resistance fighters who you get to spend quite a bit of time with. You then have some memorable encounters with the evil figureheads of the Nazi regime at certain parts of the story. Anyone who has seen the train sequence in this game knows exactly what I’m taking about. I have to give MachineGames credit as well for the characterisation of B.J. himself. They managed to turn a character who was known for being a badass Nazi killer to a very sympathetic and likable Nazi killer. B.J. in this game is weary and tired after years of fighting evil and tyranny at every corner. The man wants nothing more than for the war to be over so he can hang up his guns and finally settle down. How could you hate the man after hearing something like that?

B.J. is such an upstanding guy that he would infiltrate a Nazi controlled train just to get you some coffee. Liberation and a Cappuccino, you can’t beat it.

The real bread and butter of The New Order though is the gameplay. It has held up fantastically for the most part. Combat is a blast thanks to the very meaty arsenal at your disposal including assault rifles, shotguns, marksman rifle and a Laserkraftwerk which allows you to blast enemies to smithereens. You’ll have plenty of enemy types to cut through including rank and file soldiers, big mech suit soldiers with heavy weaponry and robots that have massive lasers. B.J. has a few abilities though to help turn the tide of battle. Leaning is one such ability and it’s implemented very well. How it works is that if you hold the L1 button, it locks B.J. in place and you can then use the left stick to lean at different angles. It’s super useful. Earning a well placed few shots at a Nazi from a very awkward angle never gets old. B.J. also has the ability to dual-wield certain weapons to deal even more hefty damage to his foes. Press up on the d-pad and prepare to bring the carnage. While this is a pretty fun feature, it does limit your movement speed and it can result in you burning through ammo quite quickly. It also is restricted to two types of the same weapon. You can also find upgrades for weapons which give them different ammo types and fire modes. The Laserkraftwerk, for example, can be used to cut through certain boxes and materials which is pretty nifty.

In terms of how health works, it’s a hybrid between classic pick-ups and regeneration. You can recover health by picking up health packs and food throughout the game. Armor can be found as well to allow you to take some extra damage. If you take health damage and managed to find cover, you’ll eventually get 10 health points back. You also have the ability to overcharge your health. How this works is that if you end up picking up a health item that takes you over your max health, you get higher health points for a brief period which is quite useful. You can increase your max health by finding hidden health upgrades throughout some of the levels.

AI is decent for the most part. They will attempt to find cover in the heat of a firefight and they do try to flank you. Some of the heavy soldiers will also attempt to rush your position. I certainly didn’t notice any unusual behaviour from them. Boss fights are a bit unremarkable for the most part. The game pretty much spells out how to take them out and they don’t really put up much of a fight. The main exception being the final boss but even then, it really isn’t that hard.

The secret painting boss fight was an interesting idea though. Definitely a canvas for them to work on in the future. (Apologies for the bad pun and joke.)

The game does have a basic stealth system and it works fine. When you enter most of the areas in the game, you will be informed that there are two commanders in the area. Take them out without being spotted and you can sneak through the area without having to worry about reinforcements if you get spotted by an enemy. You can take down enemies stealthily by using a silenced pistol, throwing knives or by sneaking up to them and performing a takedown. Stealth can feel a little overpowered during some of the early sections because the pistol is super accurate and it only takes one headshot to take some of these enemies down. The game does balance this a bit better later on as areas are populated with more elite enemies that harder to kill without being spotted.

Being a Wolfenstein game, you would expect exploration to be a big part of the gameplay and it does play a part for sure. There are hidden areas to be found with collectibles such as the Enigma codes which can unlock new difficulties and cheat codes. You can also find hidden max HP upgrades and other stuff as well. Maps can be found in each level which will indicate possible hidden secrets with a question mark. Levels are definitely more linear than some of the prior Wolfenstein games so don’t expect huge hidden areas or levels.

Key and item hunting still exists of course. You will find doors that require a key or a tool needed to progress which requires a bit of skulking around to find that key or item. You see this especially in the Resistance HQ sections which occur after most of the levels. In these sections, you will be tasked with finding a certain item for a character to progress to the next level. There are also side missions where you can do the same thing for other characters in the HQ and completing these unlocks extras such as artwork. I’m mixed on the Resistance HQ sections overall. On the one hand, they’re good from a lore perspective because you can overhear conversations from some of the characters and there are newspaper clippings and notes to find which do a good job of building up the world. On the other hand, they do feel a little bit like filler. Swings and roundabouts, I suppose...

I don’t really have many issues with the gameplay as a whole. My only real gripe is how the weapon wheel works. Weapon wheels are commonplace on console because a controller doesn’t have many buttons when compared to a keyboard. Makes perfect sense. The New Order’s one however can be such a temperamental thing to use. How it’s supposed to work is that you hit the R1 button to bring up the wheel and then you use the right stick to pick the weapon you want. Sounds simple enough. In reality what happens is that the game ends up giving you the wrong weapon time after time. I can’t even begin to count the amount of times that I tried to switch to the assault rifle and the game switched me to the dual-wield pistols instead. It can be a bloody nuisance. Part of this is down to how sensitive the stick is when using the wheel. It’s way too fast. Also why do the dual-wield options even need to be there? You can already hit up on the d-pad to dual-wield a particular weapon plus I didn’t really need to dual-wield all that much so it’s just clutter. They could have cleaned this up a lot better. I also had issues with swapping back to the previous weapon. It would sometimes default back to the Laserkraftwerk even though it wasn’t my previous weapon. Thankfully these issues didn’t get me killed but they certainly got on my nerves a little bit.

Textbook schadenfreude here from one of the villains. Shouldn’t be that shocked really...

From a graphics point of view, Wolfenstein: The New Order still holds up remarkably well. It runs on the same idTech engine that powered Rage before it and it certainly looks great. Character models are well detailed and they animate well. Cutscenes are well framed and the angles are perfectly done. Environments are beautifully crafted with amazing detail so whether you are in rainy soaked London or even the friggin’ Moon, you feel immersed in the world of the game.

I wasn’t kidding about the Moon. Look Ma, I’m in space! (In a video game...)

The game is quite aliased on the consoles. You definitely see sharp and jagged edges at times. Plus the textures look a bit low-res when viewed up close, but the game still looks great, and I imagine the PC version cleans up most of this stuff anyway so there’s that.

Tumblr’s image compression doesn’t do this environment justice. Oh well. C’est la vie, I suppose...

I can’t fault the game’s sound though. All voice performances are pitch-perfect with Brian Bloom (the voice of B.J.) being the standout. The music is incredible too with a great balance between atmospheric tracks and hard edged ones when the action really kicks off. It’s composed by a guy named Mick Gordon. Don’t think he’s done anything of note since though.

In terms of length, you’re looking at about roughly 8-10 hours for a first time playthrough. There is replay value with the collectibles and the Timeline system. To briefly explain, the Timeline system is related to a choice you make at the start of the game which changes some of the characters you encounter during the game. It doesn’t drastically change much. The events remain the same. You just get some unique dialog and a scene or two. Not much else.

So as you can see, I think that Wolfenstein: The New Order is still a bloody good time. The shooting still feels great with some really meaty weapons, the story and characters are super engaging, and the presentation and sound still kicks some ass. It has some minor issues here and there, but this game is well worth experiencing. You can pick it up pretty cheap nowadays on most of the platforms and it does go on sale quite often.

It’s nice to go back sometimes and revisit a classic, isn’t it?

Check back here soon for Part 2 of this where I take a look at The Old Blood. Until then, stay safe, folks!

#wolfenstein #ps4 #video games #yakkingboutgames

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rigelmejo · 3 years

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I don’t know if this extensive reading has helped but I FEEL like it has helped lol. When I started 小王子 how long was it taking a chapter? Just under 5 minutes per page right?

Well I know I got faster than that. Today my Internet was down so while waiting for things to restart and load and stuff I read like 5 chapters of the book. I read them out loud (just a handful of words I didn’t know how to say out loud). I was reading at slow but steady speaking speed so that’s still faster than 5 minutes a page. Ok I just timed myself to test it and I am taking 2 minutes to read a page, and I would guess 3 minutes if I slowed down to consider a bit more on the sayings/less familiar hanzi. That’s better then the 4.5-5 minutes I started at! So I must’ve picked up some words from this book. So I would say... yes a little extensive reading seems to be helping reading speed. Also! I have 16 pages to go! This story is so short. It is sweet and odd and so human though maybe that is why it’s remained loved like Alice in wonderland. (Fun fact I also read 2 chapters of Alice in wonderland in French this week and it is just as bizarre to me as when I watched the movie as a kid, But I do think in book form if I were 6-9 I would’ve related more since Alice’s POV in the story is pretty relatable... and when I was a kid and watched the movie I just did Not relate aha).

Anyway from 4.5 minutes to 2-3 is great!

What I did with graded readers/extensive reading this month, that I am hoping is why this helped:

Read graded reader (butterfly lovers, Pleco, 500 unique characters) - not hard but very satisfying to finish it and read it quickly when it used to take me 40 minutes to read a few Pleco pages of it). So that was a few thousand words comprehensible extensive reading.

Read another graded reader, chinese short stories. While I think it’s good as a study companion, a lot of very specific words which I tripped on (antique coins, being scammed). Which was fine I just think it was not the funnest reading material? It was mostly graded reader though I had to look up a couple handfuls of words.

Read a little of my 500 character Sinolingua reader (2 stories). Also read through the back of it which has all the words in the book, and the HSK 3 words included in the book - I knew all those words but it was a nice refresher. Mostly it was just nice to see how much easier these stories were to read compared to when I first got the book. (I would recommend these books as readers if you want something for adults and in short segments, the short stories are simplified prose from established authors, and the quality of storytelling can therefore be felt a bit. They feel more meaningful as short stories and therefore enjoyable if a bit basic (since they’ve been simplified). You can tell though compared to the Chinese Short Stories book above, which was probably written by a teacher/language textbook maker and not necessarily a literary writer.

Read mandarin companion journey to the center of the earth. 450 unique characters. Another easy read that felt really nice, compared to when I first read a mandarin companion book.

Started reading 小王子 on paper, so extensive reading with little word look up (I’ve looked up less than 10 words so far when reading on paper - notable words I looked up because it frustrated me I didn’t know them: 悲伤，惊奇，惊讶，匆匆，逐渐，观察，测试 a lot of these because I know I’ve seen these Hanzi before I just never remember specifically like 惊讶惊奇 what the difference is or guan pronunciation 观察 or 测 I tend to forget when it’s not in 测试). I started reading it because it’s supposed to have around 2000 unique words (so not too many), and be pretty easy reading level (so a bit easier than 活着 which is the novel Chinese learners often get recommended). Basically, this was the extensive reading book choice step up from graded readers - it’s got a bit over 1000 unique hanzi, not an overwhelming amount of unique words, but it is not a graded reader so if it goes well I could jump to other stuff of similar or slightly less “ease” while still having it feel this “easy” to read (and hopefully take days to read instead of months).

Started reading 笑猫日记之会唱歌的猫 in Pleco, so clicking words I didn’t know (though this one only had a word or two a page unknown). I saw it recommended on a Chinese learners form as easy reading material after graded readers, and I agree! It’s very easy to read! I could understand it without clicking words but it is nice to understand fully since it’s convenient, and look up the pronunciation etc. I read 8 chapters so far. I also listened to a few chapters after reading, but idk if it helped at all.

15 ish chapters into 小王子 I found it online and reread 4 chapters with a click dictionary for unknown words. It was nice just clarifying the word pronunciations and fuzzy bits, also the online translation was different so seeing the difference on how they decided to word it (mostly just seeing synonyms used instead or different sayings for certain parts). I listened to a couple chapters audio afterwards, idk if it helped.

Unrelated, but I did listen read to 5 chapters of 默读 mainly following the Chinese text so, idk if that would’ve helped my overall reading at all (I want to say no but I did notice in general much more general gist comprehension of lines in MoDu then last time I read a couple months ago - although listening to the audio and being able to glance at the English for unknown words of course also makes things much more comprehensible that’s why listen reading method is the structure it is ahh).

Listened to some audio for 小王子 during work because I happened to find it, for chapters 1-4. Just playing in the background. I looked at the text while listening to one to match pronunciation to some words, since the chapter was like 5 minutes long in listening. Again interesting to see their word choice since It was yet another translation (I think I like my print books translation best).

Back to reading print 小王子 today and I think the audio beforehand did help me with being able to pronounce more of what I’m reading. Read like 4 chapters in one short break, another 3 chapters just now. While I don’t know how well the reading speed will translate to reading harder stuff like guardian (which was oddly also taking me 5 minutes a page? Why is that my default speed?), my reading speed doing extensive reading on “stuff mostly easy” to me has increased noticeably. (Fun fact when I read English technical text like psychology and physics books and educational etc I think my reading speed is it’s like 10-20 pages an hour... I do not read non fiction very fast).

So anyway, my goal with extensive reading easy material this month was to see if I could push UP what my starting base level “easy” material is.

What I used to do is practice with an “easier text” (which was still pretty hard for me tbh) and then once it got bearable (took 30-40 minutes to read instead of an hour), I’d switch to a harder material that took me 1-1.5 hours to read. Then when I’d burn out, I’d go back to that “easier” text until it got easier at 20-30 minutes to read. Then I might pick a harder base reading text (usually what used to be the hard one that would now take 30-40 minutes to read), and find something even harder. Lately that has been 寒舍 as my “easier” text, taking 20-30 minutes a full chapter (2 mini chapters), and 天涯客 as my harder text at 30-40ish minutes a chapter. And yes, at this point I could pick something harder but they’re both hard enough I was just sticking to them. You might notice none of these were actually easy for me though, my actual base easy materials were still graded readers, and manhua. So I want to push that upward until there’s some “easier” material below 寒舍 that I can be built up to and read easily Without a dictionary aid. So I can have a solid base that’s reliable. Hanshe is an “easier” practice material but it’s not necessarily something I can read extensively with ease. But if I keep pushing up the difficulty of what I can extensively read, bit by bit, I will eventually Get it to hanshe (or a little below it realistically but still firmly in regular-webnovel-exist at the reading level). I will not get faster at reading these hard things unless my base level of reading is both higher and already a reasonable speed. (I’m guessing anyway??).

Well happy to say this plan is working. I guess the advice articles I read were right somewhat. I knew graded readers could drag you from 0 beginner to some reading ability, since It’s what I originally did with Chinese (and even French sort of). But I was very quick about it because I’m impatient and easily bored by too-easy things apparently lol. I read 1 mandarin companion graded reader (the 300 word Sherlock Holmes one), a couple chapters of 2 other graded readers, then started on a random webnovel (the bl 他们的故事 which somehow thankfully is on the easier end for novels) and looked a lot of words up to get through. But I did not think to try to “match my reading level and increase gradually” in regular novels, even tho if it works for graded readers it probably works for regular stuff!

And in school in our native languages, that’s why our elementary schools had libraries, and we read books for our age group and the chapter books we read were much easier than what we read as teens or what adults read! I remember bunnicula and cat wings those were not hard but they were chapter stories. Then I remember Dracula and hg wells and mark Twain in high school and how they felt a bit Hard despite me being one of those kids rated at college reading level in 3rd grade. Now as a kid? I had the same tendencies I do now, so I’m not surprised I always jump in the deep end and Try to read hard stuff (and it must help since it’s part of why I got good at reading my native language, and definitely has helped my chinese and french). I would be like 7 and pick up a mitchner novel of My dad’s (is that the author of stuff like Alaska etc?) and I’d read a couple pages and feel drained trying to follow it and give up. Or the huge The Witching Hour by Anne Rice, or HG Wells History of the world, or the biography of benjamin Franklin, I never finished any of these or had any idea what they were about I just got curious and opened up a couple pages every now and then. Yet somehow that must’ve been part of why my reading level so early on was considered “good”? I’m guessing.

But I wasn’t actually good at reading in the sense of doing it often or fast until my dad started reading to me at like age 8-9 I think it was Harry Potter which at the time worked out since the books got harder each time, and also my dad reads out loud slow just like he tutors slow lol so eventually I read myself so he’d stop boring me (I love him and loved the bonding time I’m sure but truly i just apparently always liked jumping in the deep end). Eventually his strategy Im guessing to get me to read slightly harder stuff each time worked, because by books 4-5 I read each in 2 days. He was so impressed because before that I couldn’t read long books and not fast, and that’s when he thought I got good at reading. Looking back lol it’s actually so funny? How much work he had to do to get me to read and how what ended up working I still sort of do now. He started me on Hop on Pop as a kid as my first book cause One Fish Two Fish bored me and I thought jumping on a dad was funny, and he did that just to do something to get me to pick up a book lol. Then he got me that digital book toy they had back then where you had a real book but it was in a digital holder and if you clicked words with the pen it read them out loud. Literally how I learn Chinese now... he really got me digital equivalent to graded readers back then ToT. And just like as a kid I still pick up stuff way beyond my level and just read a couple pages at random. It’s just. Kind of funny to me how much I didn’t really change that much after all ToT

BACK ON THE TOPIC OF APRIL PROGRESS lol ok. I listened to Guardian ep 1 today just in the background so no subs etc and I was Floored by how much I completely understood. I’ve been listening to SpoonFed chinese again (15 audios listened to this month), but I’m floored if it made a difference?! Since I was mostly listening in the background not focusing and missing some stuff. Idk if it made a difference, or listening reading method just that 1.5 hours I did this month or what. Or if my listening skills have been this decent I just don’t test them since I usually watch shows with hard Chinese subs (and read the subs), or watch shows with English subs. So like. Anyway mejo back in what was it august 2019 when I started studying? Would be so happy. Back when I started watching guardian and only knew ni hao and xie xie and zai jian.

Also I can’t even remember now if I did extensive reading guardian (after reading the English translation), this month too or just last month. But I’m sure that helped and I should test general reading sometime of a priest novel. Like.. literally what kicked off the “I should extensive read more” this month is me Desperately wanting to kick up my reading speed after the horrific 25 page guardian chapter I read that took like 1.5 hours.

#rant #april #april progress #reading progress #to be honest tho truly I’m really happy with my chinese progress so far #it has yeah sooooo much farther to go #and communication wise I’m ahhhh not not anywhere much yet #but listening and reading are already significantly further than Japanese was at 2.5 years #and honestly ‘as slow progress as Japanese’ was my assumption and goal when I started #so I figured I would not read this good for 4 years at least #so just under 2 years? I’m pretty amazed

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animebw · 3 years

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Short Reflection: Fall 2020 Anime

There is no denying that 2020 has been a bizarre year for anime. After a stacked winter season that seemed to promise a year full of excitement, the coronavirus epidemic slammed the brakes on the entire production circuit, pushing countless shows back from their expected air dates. Spring was basically stripped bare, summer was pretty barren as well, and now the fall season is an overstuffed glut bursting both with its own shows and everything that was delayed from spring and summer. And the upcoming winter 2021 season looks to be, if anything, even more ridiculously overloaded. To call this year unbalanced would be like calling a hurricane pretty nippy. Not to mention there’s no telling what impact, if any, the pandemic has had on the quality of the shows themselves. It might be years before we can do a proper autopsy on 2020 and figure out its place in the broader anime history. On the bright side, though, pushing all those shows back to fall means we’ve left with a hell of a lot exciting new anime to experience, some of which I haven’t even gotten to yet. This year might have been a clusterfuck, but at least it left us with a strong season to close us out.

Iwakakeru! Sport Climbing Girls: 3.5/10

The depressing thing about Iwakakeru is that in abstract, it seems like something I could really enjoy. An anime centering on the unique sport of rock climbing, exploring its professional and technical intricacies the same way, say, Haikyuu explores volleyball? That could’ve been a neat little cross between a sports show and a cute girls club show, even if the animation was rarely anything above functional and often even less than that. Unfortunately, it’s ruined by one very simple flaw: almost every character is unbearably obnoxious. The protagonist’s rival clubmate is an over-serious dullard, her rivals consist of mincing catgirl wannabees, blithering idiots and predatory lesbians, characters lean so hard into their quiiiirky stock archetypes they wrap back around to be caricatures of how human beings act, and everyone’s vocal performance ups the aggravation to almost unbearable levels at times. No matter how legitimately interesting the sport itself was, the sheer unpleasantness of the people playing it kept me wanting to change the channel.

Ikebukuro West Gate Park: 4/10

I wish I could offer up some deeper thoughts on Ikebukuro, but the simple fact of the matter is, I barely even fucking remember what happened in this show. I know it’s based off a classic 90s Japanese property about street gangs doing odd jobs and keeping the peace in their own rough-and-tumble corner of Tokyo. I know this update made sure to address pertinent social issues in Japan like immigration, domestic abuse and poverty, and its heart is clearly in the right place as it spins a yarn of how a community can band together to make each other’s lives better and resist the oppression of predatory societal power structures. But the overall package is just so lifeless and dull that it barely registered any emotion from me. Most episodes just have the protagonist meet up with a chain of different people who exposit the situation of the week to him, rather than active character dynamics that facilitate dramatic, meaningful, or even just exciting scenes. Maybe Doga Koba should just forget about trying to win the grungy realism market; between this show and Sing Yesterday For Me, sticking to the marshmallow fluff they know best seems like the better call.

The Gymnastics Samurai: 4/10

Man, this is a weird one. On paper, The Gymnastics Samurai is a grounded, intimate show about a single dad taking another shot at a declining gymnastics career, grappling with the difficulty of raising a daughter on his own alongside building his body back up after a near-critical injury. In practice, though... well, it’s a project by the same guy who did Zombieland Saga, so in retrospect, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised how weird things got. There’s a British weeb cosplaying as a ninja who hides out in the protagonist’s house from secret agents chasing him down, a “South American” comedy relief talking bird who looks more like a living plush toy, and a cast full of bizarrely eccentric characters who just sort of hang around being eccentric for no good reason. And all this stuff is happening alongside emotional arcs about the pressure of expectations, honing your talent, and how to accept the responsibility that life foists upon you. It’s an uncomfortable tonal clash, and by trying to have it both ways, the show ends up not really succeeding at either and just being confusing for the most part. Sorry, Mappa fans, Yuri on Ice 2 this is not.

Noblesse: 4/10

First, Tower of God overstuffed a slow-burn adventure story into too short an episode count, stripping away most worldbuilding context and leaving audiences confused as to everything was supposed to work. Next, God of High School crammed over a hundred chapters into a single cours, destroying any semblance of coherent storytelling as the plot got bludgeoned to death by nonsensical action scenes. And now, Noblesse somehow dropped without anyone on the marketing team thinking to mention that this TV anime is a sequel to a previous OVA that adapted the manhua’s first 90 chapters into an ungodly compressed thirty minutes. The logistics of this oversight utterly baffle me. Why did no one tell us that we needed to watch the OVA first? Why even bother making a sequel instead of just starting from scratch and adapting the whole thing at a reasonable pace? There is no universe in which this decision makes any lick of sense. And the sad thing is that even if you do actually get the memo and watch the OVA before moving onto the show, all you’ll be left with is the most lifeless of Crunchyroll’s trio of Webtoon adaptations yet. At least TOG and GOHS, for all their astounding faults, had enough raw style to hook audiences in before they fell apart. Noblesse might technically be the most “competently” adapted of the three, but there’s nothing about this dull semi-vampire pretty boy story that makes any sort of impact, save for the admittedly well-animated action scenes. Crunchyroll, you have officially struck out. Give up this failed experiment and leave the Webtoon adaptations to companies that actually care about doing these stories justice.

Assault Lily Bouquet: 4/10

Assault Lily Bouquet is a show that comes so close to working on so many occasions it’s maddening. It’s got all the pieces you’d want for a great yuri action series: cute characters! Fantastic design sensibilities! Legitimately jaw-dropping (at times) action sakuga! An actual thematic core centered around exploring the trauma of losing loved ones in battle and how love and friendship can help us through the grief! And yes, it is, in fact, incredibly gay. So it’s got no excuse to be anything less than passable. But my god, the script is fucking awful. A bloated, overstuffed cast that exists only to mindlessly eat up screentime, dialogue that exists only to deliver exposition and literally explain what everyone is supposedly feeling, a plot that repeats emotional beats and cul-de-sacs on multiple occasions for no reason, and a clear disinterest in achieving anything beyond advertising the action-figure line this show is based on. This isn’t an anime; it’s a cold, cynical merchandising ploy that has maybe a couple genuinely great episodes entirely on accident. And in a world where Revue Starlight and Symphogear exist, being part of a cute-girls merchandising apparatus is no longer an excuse not to try.

Burn the Witch: 4.5/10

So, I’ve never watched or read Bleach, and the only things I know about it come from Super Eyepatch Wolf’s videos on the subject. I knew going in that Burn the Witch was based on a oneshot written by Bleach’s author Tite Kubo, but I had no expectations for that piece of info to influence. And now that I’ve watched it... yeah, maybe me not watching Bleach is for the best. All this 3-episode OVA’s strengths come from its production by Studio Colorido, the slick action animation and legitimately beautiful realization of magic in a modern setting. Someone literally spray-paints an arcane glyph into the sky to firebomb a rampaging dragon, I can’t not like that on principle. The story, unfortunately, is an unfinished grab-bag of dull shonen stock characters and story beats, thrown together in a haphazard jumble with no substance to back up the posturing and attitude. Plus it decides to focus on the wimpy pervert dude and make him the center of the story, because apparently the two bickering watches with hot-and-cold personalities were far less interesting to Kubo than the umpteenth iteration of The Worst Character Archetype In All Of Anime. And sadly, this isn’t even the most frustrating witch-centric anime of the season...

Wandering Witch: 5.5/10

God, what a disappointment this turned out to be. The first two episodes of Wandering Witch were the best thing I watched all season, promising an episodic anthology adventure series to challenge Kino’s Journey itself. This, I thought, was going to be one of the most magical anime I’ve watched in a long time. And then episode 3 sent the entire damn thing into a flaming tailspin and it never recovered. This is, without question, one of the most uneven anime I’ve ever watched. A third of the time, it’s an absolute joy to behold, a magical journey full of majesty, beauty, and truly heart-wrenching emotional weight. A third of the time, it’s an asinine, aggravating, absolutely wretched disaster that mistakes edgy moral relativism for Deep, Insightful Commentary(tm). A third of the time, it’s... just okay. It flip-flops back and forth with no consistency in tone, quality, or even characterization for the titular Elaina, who’s easily one of the most incoherently written protagonists I’ve seen in a long time... a fact that the final episode actually outright addresses with a canonical explanation. Yeah, this show is fucking nuts. And after how excited those first two episodes made me, that somehow hurts worse than if this show was just completely awful. Never before have I gotten my hopes this high for an anime, only to watch them crash so spectacularly.

Warlords of Sigrdrifa: 6/10

Funny story: I actually didn’t know that Warlords of Sigrdrifa started with a double-length first episode when I started watching it. And then, I was so swept up in the action that I didn’t even bother to check how much time was left until after the twenty-minute mark, after which I went, “Holy shit, how is a double-length episode going by this fast?” And then I remembered that this was an original anime penned by the author of Re:Zero himself, a show that pretty much set the bar for fantastic double-length first episodes, and it all pretty much made sense. That’s not to say Sigrdrifa is as good as Re:Zero, because it’s very much not. It’s an awkward blend of moe cute-girls SOL on a military base, groan-inducing fanservice, bombastic action steeped in a fascinating re-imagining or Norse mythology, and some shockingly powerful emotional scenes that dig into the toll these battles take on the characters fighting them. There’s a lot in it that really doesn’t work, and it especially takes a dip in the midsection, but man, when it’s on, it’s on. The cast is all incredibly endearing, the airplane combat is uniformly fantastic, there’s a great twist in the back half that recontextualizes exactly what kind of story we’re telling, and the final episode is a straight-up knockout that brings the whole affair home. It ain’t exactly high art, but you could do a whole lot worse for dumb action these days.

Fire Force Season 2: 6/10

I still can’t believe how much I turned around on Fire Force in its second season. After some of the most incoherent direction and thunderously stupid writing I’d seen in a long time, season 2 takes everything and just makes it work. The direction is actually exciting and kinetic, the battle animation is most consistently excellent, and the overall storytelling finally learns how not to trip over its own dick. The result is still nowhere close to the heights of Soul Eater, but at long last, Fire Force has become a piece of dumb shonen schlock I was genuinely excited to been up with every week. Just one problem: it still treats its female characters like absolute shit, and sadly, this season’s second half was a miserable reminder of just how sexist and degrading it could get. I have rarely wanted to throttle a writer more than any time poor Tamaki is on screen. God, why is it so hard for some dudes to write women with even an ounce of respect?

Heaven Official’s Blessing (Tian Guan Ci Fu): 6.5/10

So, remember a couple years ago when Mo Dao Zu Shi blew everyone away and made us all realize that Chinese “anime”, or donghua, was worth paying attention to after all? Well, another one of the author’s works has been blessed with a donghua adaptation, and this time Funimation was smart enough to license it for simulcasting so it’s easy to track down. If you watched Mo Dao Zu Shi, you know what to expect from Heaven Official’s Blessing: a lavish and intricate story steeped in Chinese folkloric and mythological tradition. featuring pretty-boy gods and sorcerers of every stripe and creed unraveling slow-burn mysteries, accompanied by gorgeous action scenes and beautiful orchestrations featuring traditional instruments. Also, lots of homoerotic subtext juuuuust barely ambiguous enough to slip by the censors. Unfortunately, this one kinda stumbles in the back half with an overly draggy second arc, killing the pacing with basically three straight episodes of characters standing around and talking in a dark pit. Not anyone’s idea of a good time. But for the most part, the charming characters, beautiful artistry and effortlessly earnest gay yearning make this a fantasy adventure worth embarking upon.

Jujutsu Kaisen (1st Half): 7/10

Let’s be real, you don’t need me to tell you to watch Jujutsu Kaisen. This is far and away the biggest smash hit of the season, and for good reason. With consistently fantastic fight animation courtesy of the God of Highschool animation team and a script from veteran screenwriter Hiroshi Seko to make sure that the story doesn’t get completely lost in the sound and fury this time, Jujutsu Kaisen is the best kind of effortlessly awesome shonen popcorn. Its dark and edgy atmosphere gives the supernatural smackdowns a deliciously entertaining bite, and the story’s focus on death and its aftershocks lends some real emotional weight to Yuuji Itadori’s quest to Korone Inugami his way through the twenty cursed fingers of a sexy demon bad boy who’s possessed his body. It’s not exactly the deepest or smartest show out there; honestly, its plot is kinda stupid and unfocused at the moment, tossing a whole bunch of disconnected ideas at you and struggling to tie them into a cohesive whole. But the fights are so cool and the experience is so fun that it’s hard to care too much. Sometimes, you just want to watch a bunch of quirky high schoolers punch grotesque eldritch monstrosities in the face, and Jujutsu Kaisen delivers with enough personality and hype to keep me hungry for more every week.

The Day I Became a God: 7.5/10

There was no way The Day I Became a God wasn’t going to end up among my favorite shows this season. The sway Jun Maeda holds over my heart and soul is second to no other anime writer in the business. And it is a testament to his power that Kamisama is by far the weakest show he’s put out (at least out of those I’ve seen) and it’s still among my favorite things that aired this season. In classic Maeda fashion, what starts out as a gut-busting slapstick comedy about a precognitive little girl who turns an ordinary high school boy’s life upside-down eventually gives way to a tear-jerking drama about love, loss, abusive families, and what it truly means to care for someone through the imperfections of life. It definitely could’ve stood to pace out its back half a little more; the direction its drama goes in is insanely loaded, and you pretty much spend the entire show waiting to see if it’s actually going to stick the landing or just fall flat on its face like last time. And I can’t say it fully earns every decision it makes, with some moments needing just an ounce more nuance to make sense. This is a messy, messy show, but one still bursting with moments that made me laugh my entire ass off and cry my tear ducts dry. And make no mistake, for all its imperfections, Kamisama’s high points are still the kind of sincere, magical masterpieces that only Maeda can pull off this effortlessly. Sometimes, that’s really all you need.

Adachi and Shimamura: 7.5/10

Look, the world isn’t exactly a good place to be right now. Everyone’s miserable, we’re all locked inside and going stir-crazy, and things just aren’t looking up for anyone but the rich and evil. We all need a break to chill out with something that just makes us happy. And no show this season is better comfort food than Adachi and Shimamura, a slow-burn yuri romance about two delinquent schoolgirls skipping class together as they start to fumble through their feelings for each other. Don’t come in expecting tightly written romantic progression, because you’ll be disappointed; even by the end of this season, we haven’t made much progress on that front. This is a show to come to for the simple joy of watching two adorable dorks disaster-lesbian their way into love, complete with a beautifully written script that lends authentic weight to their very different flavors of teenage angst. It’s cozy, it’s comforting, it’s authentic to the panic and uncertainty of young love, and it’s endlessly delightful to watch. It’s got some unfortunate fanservice shots at points, but if you can stomach that, then you need to check out Adachi and Shimamura. There is no other show this season that made me laugh, squee and aaaaaw quite this much. Just don’t ask me to explain the weird alien girl side character. That, I have no answer for.

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ms-m-astrologer · 4 years

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Transiting Mercury enters Scorpio, pre-Rx Shadow

Timeline (current events in BOLD)

Wednesday, September 23, 20:55 UT - transiting Mercury enters Rx shadow, 25:54 Libra

Sunday, September 27, 07:41 UT - transiting Mercury enters Scorpio

Thursday, October 1, 15:49 UT - Mercury’s greatest eastern elongation, 4:36 Scorpio

Wednesday, October 14, 01:05 UT - transiting Mercury stations retrograde, 11:40 Scorpio

Sunday, October 25, 18:23 UT - Sun-Mercury inferior conjunction, 2:47 Scorpio

Wednesday, October 28, 01:33 UT - transiting Mercury retrogrades back into Libra

Tuesday, November 3, 17:50 UT - transiting Mercury stations direct, 25:54 Libra

Tuesday, November 10, 17:00 UT - Mercury’s greatest western elongation, 29:47 Libra

Tuesday, November 10, 21:55 UT - transiting Mercury re-enters Scorpio

Thursday, November 19, 21:04 UT - transiting Mercury exits post-retrograde shadow, 11:40 Scorpio

This is the part of the process where Mercury moves into Scorpio and begins to brood incessantly over the various resentments it has discovered - in others as well as in itself. What does it mean if all those Capricorn placements don’t want to harmonize or negotiate?

What’s intriguing (to me) is that the aspects Mercury is going to make, are bracketed by a conjunction to Juno and a sextile to Venus - both of which entities are associated with the sign Libra, which is where Mercury began this Rx Zone. It could mean that we need to try harder to get along with others. It could also mean that “getting along with others” doesn’t necessarily translate into “letting others have their own way for the sake of peace.” What do you think?

Wednesday, September 30, 06:05 UT - Juno/Scorpio conjunct Mercury/Scorpio, 3:11 (3 degrees, 11 minutes)

First of three, with #2 happening on Oct. 19 and #3 on Nov. 26 (after Mercury has exited the Rx shadow; also Thanksgiving Day in the US, hmmm).

When these two planet type thingies get together, writes Demetra George (Asteroid Goddesses), we are “learning to listen without judgement to another’s point of view.” It gives us (if we want it to) the ability to communicate with clarity to our partners, which in turn contributes to increased intimacy. Since this is the first of three conjunctions, we may become aware of a situation or of circumstances which indicate some difficulty in communicating effectively.

But I’m intrigued by Juno being the symbol for the powerless - Demetra’s list includes “women, battered wives, abused children, victims, minorities, disabled, victims of sexual violence.” And I’m also aware that Juno is associated with the atmosphere. Climate refugees, anyone?

If you aren’t in a relationship right now, you may want to channel this energy towards learning about issues related to those topics. How can you help powerless people find their voice? (Not speak for them.)

Placements affected lie between 2:11 and 4:11 of all signs, and between 17:11 and 19:11 of the mutable signs Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces.

Thursday, October 1, 15:49 UT - Mercury’s greatest eastern elongation, 4:36 Scorpio

The “greatest eastern elongation” is something that happens exclusively to Mercury and Venus - the two planets whose orbits lie between the Sun and the Earth. It means that the planet has moved as far ahead of the Sun, in the Zodiac, as it’s going to get. (That’s about 28 degrees for Mercury and 48 for Venus, but not always exactly that.)

It’s similar to the Last Quarter lunar phase, in which we turn away from old constructs that no longer work for us - mental constructs, in Mercury’s case.

Scorpio tends to hang on to things for too long - the sign has sometimes been described, in older books, as “Scorpio would rather sting itself to death, rather than give up the pleasure of stinging.” Eeek. Check out your brains for something along these lines, and turn away from it.

Placements affected lie between 3:36 and 5:36 of all signs, and between 18:36 and 20:36 of the mutable signs Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces.

Sunday, October 4, 05:55 UT - Chiron Rx/Aries inconjunct Mercury/Scorpio, 6:51

First of three, with #2 on Oct. 22 and #3 on Nov. 15. Making adjustments due to woundedness over communications, is the bare bones interpretation of this aspect. Sometimes I wonder what’s worse, getting hurt, or being the reason for someone else’s hurt. This may also play out as becoming physically ill due to those hurt feelings.

Placements affected lie between 5:51 and 7:51 of all signs, but especially Gemini and Virgo.

Tuesday, October 6, 03:21 UT - North Node/Gemini (23:27) sesquare Mercury/Scorpio (8:27); South Node/Sagittarius (23:27) semi-square Mercury/Scorpio(8:27)

Another three-peat, alas and alack; #2 on Oct. 21 and #3 on Nov. 15. Since the North Node in Gemini is the overall “vibe” we’re all supposed to be striving toward, and since Mercury is the ruler of Gemini, you just hate to see this conflict. We’re on a course to discover which of our resentments and our stubbornly cherished notions, keep us from attaining that North Node goal.

Placements affected lie between 7:27 and 9:27 of the fixed signs Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius; and between 22:27 and 24:27 of the mutable signs Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces.

Wednesday, October 7, 08:55 UT - Uranus Rx/Taurus opposite Mercury/Scorpio, 9:37

Another three-peat, with #2 on Oct. 19 and #3 on Nov. 17.

Mercury enters its “Storm” period today - i.e., it’s moving less than 40 minutes per day. According to Llewellyn, “The Storm acts like the retrograde. Not favorable for new projects - just follow through with the items that are already on your plate. Write down new ideas with date and time they occurred.” And what a way to start out, with an opposition to Uranus. Did you know that Uranus is said to be the “higher octave” of Mercury? Which I have always taken to mean “this is what Mercury wants to be when it grows up.” Here, Uranus may be slapping down little Merc from any pretensions to even approaching Uranus’ levels.

Remember, oppositions work through other people. Someone else is refusing to budge, perhaps? Someone not only won’t take back what they said, they’re doubling down?

Placements affected lie between 8:37 and 10:37 of the fixed signs Taurus, Leo, Scorpio, and Aquarius; and between 23:37 and 25:37 of the mutable signs Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius, and Pisces.

Monday, October 12, 16:39 UT - Venus/Virgo sextile Mercury/Scorpio, 11:33

Unlike most of what’s gone on before now, this is a one-and-done sextile. Some quiet words of friendly advice, maybe? Venus is in Mercury’s sign, but she isn’t comfortable there at all - Virgo is Venus’ fall. She may have a different, fresher perspective to shed on what for Mercury may be “standard operating procedure.” We’re lucky to have a flowing aspect to finish up this section of Mercury Retrograde, but Virgo is quiet and doesn’t put herself forward - and the sextile itself is a “take it or leave it” aspect. We’re going to have to pay close attention, to be able to take advantage of the situation.

Placements affected lie between 10:33 and 11:40 of the yin signs Taurus, Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn, and Pisces.

#Astrology #Transiting Mercury enters Scorpio #Ms M astrologer

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algo-rrithm · 3 years

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Best Live Chat Software

Since we live in 2021, there has been such an increase of migration to digital media. The technology boom has greatly changed our relationship with technology. Due to the phenomenal growth in the number of mobile users, it's not feasible to go back to the past.

The corona pandemic escalates our economy into the digital world. The relationship with technology has changed too much.

Due to the exponential increase in mobile users worldwide, we no longer possess the ability to keep up. But the progress of the digital age has made it almost impossible to do so.As a result, no company can offer telephonic or email services at midnight, graveyard hours, or during non-working hours, therefore the live chat software has been introduced. to combat the issue, this software has been developed. to cope with the problem, this software was developed.

I will tell you what best live chat software is - it is an online service that provides a quick response to website visitors from a company's customer service, sales representatives, or virtual assistants in real-time It is a software that provides the website visitors with fast real-time responses from the customer service department, sales representative, or virtual assistance team.The act of chatting live over the internet means being able to give your customers, your sales representatives, or virtual assistants a real-time feedback in a matter of seconds.The live chat software usually pops up at the bottom when a visitor visits the website and asks a question. It answers the query.

There are various uses for it, for example - live chat software can assist navigation and answer questions.Nowadays live chat software is used across the globe. The agents use it to assist users with navigation, to answer questions, and so on. Additionally, it is capable of generating leads. If the customer shows a certain interest in products, it is able to connect directly with the customer representative. most popular live chats software .

1. LiveChat

2. LiveAgent

3. HubSpot Live Chat

4. Olark 5. Zendesk Chat

6. ClickDesk

7. Social Intents

Why is the live chat software important for businesses? Due to the increasing importance of online presence, also the level of competition has grown. Therefore, it is part of providing services to customers. Communication gaps can result in a loss of customers, and bad service can result in less revenue.

It is surprising to learn that according to the American Marketing Association, live chat increases conversion by 20 percent. A live chat tool is more than a customer support tool. It also increases sales and customer

retention.moreover , it boosts the overall productivity of your customer support by providing satisfaction and a seamless chat system that looks after overall customer management.

Hopefully now you understand what live chat support is all about.

At this point, the greater part of you knows about the advantages of live talk programming.

Live talk doesn't simply affect deals decidedly. It doesn't simply affect backing, or administration, or fulfillment emphatically.

The advantages of live talk programming are different and expansive, and there are beyond what we could plausibly list in a straightforward blog article. In this way, here's a fast rundown of our best 25.

1. A low-hindrance alternative

Live visit is open. With talk, clients don't need to invest energy looking for contact subtleties or email addresses. They essentially land on your site and dispatch a meeting.

2. The helpful channel

For clients, one of the critical advantages of best chat live software talk programming is its accommodation. They can utilize it with negligible interruption to their day, composing messages while proceeding to perform various tasks.

3. Builds web changes

Your site is your computerized deals display area. By adding talk, you furnish it with a group of gifted deals specialists similarly you'd staff an actual display area.

4. Makes decision

A few of us disdain getting the telephone. Some abhor web-based media; for other people, actual gatherings are Satan; some disdain difficult email discussion. Adding a visit choice adds decisions for your clients.

5. Decreases site mistakes

One of the neglected advantages of live visit programming is its viability in driving down site mistakes. Guests with forgotten logins, or hitting 404 pages, might benefit from some intervention quickly and adequately.

6. Permits you to reap information

With live talk comes reams of significant information. The pre-visit overview yields key contact , talk meetings are rich with data, and post-talk reviews furnish you with helpful input.

7. Channel attentiveness

A live talk channel pipes furious online media clients who request prompt answers into a private, attentive space. You can resolve issues out of the public eye, with less harm to your standing.

8. Eliminates language hindrances

For worldwide organizations, one of the critical advantages of live talk programming is its multilingual limit. Your messages can be deciphered to and fro continuously, opening your site to the world.

9. Minimal expense

All investigations show that live visit is a minimal expense option in contrast to the phone as an assistance channel. As indicated by BT, a live talk meeting is 20-30% less expensive than a call.

10. Fast associations

Maybe rather than looking out for hold, paying attention to dreadful music, or holding up an obscure timespan for an email reaction, live visit offers a moment of association with a genuine individual.

that an organization offers live visits.

Disadvantages of live chat software

Without a doubt, as a live talk programming organization, we like to pressure the benefits of best chat live software. However, we are straightforward with our clients and teach them about live visit hindrances too. With more than 10,000 customers, we have taken in a ton about possible difficulties and how to confront them.

1Doesn't function admirably for more established socioeconomics

While messaging is natural to most socioeconomics, individuals 55+ are all the more far-fetched to contact an organization by means of visit. This is proposed by a 2015 exploration survey by Software Advice . In this way, contingent upon your objective gathering, an extra channel may be compulsory (telephone, email).

2.The should be online to offer help

Same concerning telephone, simultaneous stations expect individuals to be on the web. Having sufficient staff during top hours can be exorbitant. However there is as yet a benefit to live talk contrasted with telephone: the live talk window naturally transforms into a contact structure so guests can without much of a stretch reach you on each page of your site, even twilight.

3.First reaction time assumptions are high

Preferably, a message in live visit is replied inside 30-60 seconds. That requires the perfect measure of staffing, so the principal reaction time can be kept at an adequate level.

This impediment is diminished since talk specialists can deal with 10 clients all the while. For example, if a specialist is as of now serving two clients, he can undoubtedly send short good tidings by means of visit macros to new clients. Then again a straightforward chatbot can assume control over the primary hello and request the issue.

4.Identity check

At times like web based banking, admittance to individual information is just conceivable by secure character check. This may require phone contact.

5.Online Trolls

Since you can talk secretly, web savages are a marvel. That is the reason Userlike offers highlights like obstructing and disregarding. To secure the protection of administrators, it is feasible to utilize administrator assumed names. Since we live in 2021, there has been such an increase of migration to digital media. The technology boom has greatly changed our relationship with technology. Due to the phenomenal growth in the number of mobile users, it's not feasible to go back to the past.

The corona pandemic escalates our economy into the digital world. The relationship with technology has changed too much.

1. LiveChat

2. LiveAgent

3. HubSpot Live Chat

4. Olark 5. Zendesk Chat

6. ClickDesk

7. Social Intents

retention.moreover , it boosts the overall productivity of your customer support by providing satisfaction and a seamless chat system that looks after overall customer management.

Hopefully now you understand what live chat support is all about.

At this point, the greater part of you knows about the advantages of live talk programming.

Live talk doesn't simply affect deals decidedly. It doesn't simply affect backing, or administration, or fulfillment emphatically.

1. A low-hindrance alternative

Live visit is open. With talk, clients don't need to invest energy looking for contact subtleties or email addresses. They essentially land on your site and dispatch a meeting.

2. The helpful channel

3. Builds web changes

Your site is your computerized deals display area. By adding talk, you furnish it with a group of gifted deals specialists similarly you'd staff an actual display area.

4. Makes decision

5. Decreases site mistakes

6. Permits you to reap information

With live talk comes reams of significant information. The pre-visit overview yields key contact , talk meetings are rich with data, and post-talk reviews furnish you with helpful input.

7. Channel attentiveness

A live talk channel pipes furious online media clients who request prompt answers into a private, attentive space. You can resolve issues out of the public eye, with less harm to your standing.

8. Eliminates language hindrances

9. Minimal expense

All investigations show that live visit is a minimal expense option in contrast to the phone as an assistance channel. As indicated by BT, a live talk meeting is 20-30% less expensive than a call.

10. Fast associations

that an organization offers live visits.

Disadvantages of live chat software

1Doesn't function admirably for more established socioeconomics

2.The should be online to offer help

3.First reaction time assumptions are high

Preferably, a message in live visit is replied inside 30-60 seconds. That requires the perfect measure of staffing, so the principal reaction time can be kept at an adequate level.

4.Identity check

At times like web based banking, admittance to individual information is just conceivable by secure character check. This may require phone contact.

5.Online Trolls

000

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luna--reading · 4 years

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[PICK A CARD] HOW DO THEY SEE ME? WHAT IS THEIR IMPRESSION OF ME?

Hello lovelies~ ♡

This is a pick a card reading for “How do they see me? What is their impression of me?” This is a timeless reading and you are meant to see it right now! This can be referring to anyone on your mind and do take note that this is how they see you and not how you see yourself or your actual self~ Please do find peace if it doesn’t resonate with you~ ♡

So take a few minutes to mediate on these 3 piles:

Left to right: 1 - 3

Once you’re ready, just scroll below to find the reading that you have chosen!

You can always leave a comment or simply like the post if it resonates with you, thank you so much~ ♡♡♡

Pile 1: Pink Lotus Fairy (43) - A time for spirit.

Tarot: The Magician, The Moon, Ace of Cups, 3 of Pentacles, The Lovers, 3 of Wands, 10 of Cups, 8 of Wands, King of Swords

Oracle: THERE IS ONLY LIGHT (30) // SWAN // MOUSE // GOLDEN EGG // COFFIN (8) // MOUNTAIN (21) // LETTER (27)

To start off, I feel like this person sees you as someone who is very unique. You are someone that is very different from the people that they usually meet. You are really special in your own ways and that you bring in a different kind of feeling for them. In general, I feel like this person sees you as someone who is very hardworking, they feel comfortable working with you, being around you and that you are someone that can bring in the success that they want together with them. So, it’s almost like being around you, they feel like they can succeed at anything that they do.

I feel like this person also sees you as someone who is very creative, you aren’t afraid to do something out of the box, you are someone that is willing to dream big and willing to dream differently. You give off a very creative vibe to them and that you have great potential for success. In their eyes, you are someone who doesn’t get defeated by endings or failures, in fact, you often see these obstacles as opportunities for something new, for a fresh start and a new potential for something that you have been working for.

I also see that this person does see you as someone who is very spiritual, or maybe just someone that they can connect to on a spiritual level. It’s more of like they feel like you understand them when others couldn’t, and they feel like that brings in so much comfort for them because it’s not easy to find someone who is willing to understand us on a much deeper level without asking for anything in return. And this is something that really draws them towards you when it comes to having a deeper connection.

If this is a romantic interest that you are asking for, I feel like this person sees you as a potential. There is so much possibility when it comes to this connection and I feel like there is a possible long-term commitment when it comes to this connection. In regards to romantic-wise, this person does see you as someone who they can connect with on a deeper soul level but at the same time have fun with.

So darling, this person that is on your mind, I really do see them seeing you in a very positive light. There is a very good impression of you and that they do see you as someone who is very special and brings in joy and laughter into their lives on a whole new level. And I do see potential in this connection (regardless if it’s a family member, friend, colleague or romantic interest) whereby it will be long-lasting and that it will be a very grounded and nurturing connection for the both of you.

Pile 2: Snow Angel (4) - The signs are with you already!

Tarot: 10 of Swords, The Star, 3 of Cups, Knight of Cups, 5 of Pentacles, 8 of Cups, The Tower, 6 of Pentacles, 7 of Cups, The Chariot

Oracle: ENLIGHTENMENT (43) // REMEMBRANCE (11) // SEA SERPENT // STINGRAY // HUMMINGBIRD // KEY (33) // LILIES (30) // FOX (14)

Darling, first of all, I do see this person holding you in high regards. Whether or not you are close to this person, I feel like they do see the troubles, the obstacles, the challenges that you have gone through, and they acknowledge how strong you are in dealing with these difficulties. They see you as a teacher, as a guide, as someone who is capable of helping them to cross any difficult bridges if needed.

They see you as a fighter, I really do see that there is just so much awe for you, it’s like they are thinking “how is it possible that this person can still be that fun-loving person when they have gone through so much in their lives?” To them, they really like how positive you are. Your high vibrations really bring in so much inspiration to them that I almost feel like they are just shouting out of how they want to be like you.

You are constantly spreading so much joy and happiness to them, that it’s almost like its contagious being around you. Being around you, they just can’t feel upset, your energy really influences them so much that they just enjoy being around you. And darling, I really do see that they are inspired at how you are constantly questioning what life has for you.

Like I said, you are a fighter, in their eyes, and I feel like you are giving off that vibe of “okay, what’s next?” after going through a particular obstacle is just intriguing to them. You aren’t someone that is going to be knocked down after facing a failure, you aren’t someone that is going to be sob and just lay low after facing a defeat. In fact, you are going to be that person that is constantly challenging yourself, you are constantly challenging your own limits and boundaries. And just that, darling, they are very inspired by you.

So darling, this person that is on your mind, you are an inspiration to them. Really. It’s like your passion to constantly challenge yourself enlightens them and makes them question themselves when they are faced with a problem. They want to be like you, they want to be a fighter like you, they don’t want to be knocked down by problems, obstacles, challenges easily. They look up to you like the star when someone is lost in the woods and that will help to bring them out of their uncertainty, and bring them to more clarity in their lives. Even if this connection (regardless if it’s family, friends, colleagues or a romantic interest) doesn’t stay in your life for long-term, they will definitely remember the things that you have taught them on a spiritual and soul level because… You really are an inspiration to them!

Pile 3: Fairy of the Green World (44) - The natural world needs you

Tarot: The World, 6 of Swords, 8 of Pentacles, The Hermit, 7 of Cups, Ace of Swords, 6 of Swords, Queen of Swords, 9 of Swords, Queen of Pentacles

Oracle: INWARD REVOLUTION (42) // DEER // CAMEL // CROCODILE // DOG (18) // SNAKE (7) // STORK (17)

Okay, to start off, I feel like this person on your mind sees you as someone who is very unpredictable. They see you as someone who likes to travel, who likes to have freedom, who simply just doesn’t really have a care for this world, like you do what you want to do and you aren't going to be tied down by anything or anyone. So, this sometimes brings in a very insecure kind of feeling, like they feel like you can’t really be trusted, you won’t always be there for them.

But on the other hand, they know how hardworking you can be, they know the effort that you always strive for, and in fact, ironic as it seems, they see how grounded and nurturing you can be which brings in that sense of security that they need. So, it’s kind of like very extreme on both ends which makes them feel like you are someone that they can’t really understand clearly, even if it’s someone that you have known for a long time (it’s like they just can’t seem to predict what will be your next move, would you present yourself as someone who is free and nothing you want to care about or would you present yourself as someone who they can rely on and depend on at that point in time).

At the same time, they see you as someone who is very wise, actually. You are someone who is very logical, you often provide the right answers at the right timing for them. You give them the clarity that they need most of the time and they just see you as someone who appears at the right time when they need them (so, in a way, I’m still getting a very positive vibe, like as unpredictable as you can be, they still see you as someone who is very loyal and that they know that you would somehow appear to help them if they need that help but again, it depends on how you are going to appear to them or when).

It’s like on the surface, you present yourself as a happy-go-lucky kind of figure, you tend to brush things off easily but when it comes to something serious, when it comes to something important, you provide the best advice that anyone can give, which makes you present yourself as a reliable and dependable person.

So darling, regardless of this relationship, whether or not, it’s a family member, a friend, a colleague or a romantic interest, they do see you as someone who is very dependable but it can get a little frustrating at how carefree you seem to be at some times (maybe when things are getting a bit serious or you just appear to not care when it comes to certain troubles). But overall, they do see you as someone who is very reliable and can provide the best advice to them when they need it.

#pickacard #pick a card #how do they see me #impression of me #reading #tarot reading #tarot #love #blessings #timeless reading

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