#but you also have a good point about the mechanics in general; grind!!!
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ISAT and Ludonarrative Harmony: Combat is a Storytelling Tool
Or: How Siffrin is stuck in the endgame grind, forever
Please Note: This is primarily aimed at an audience that already played In Stars and Time, because I am bad at explaining things, and it's good to already know what the fuck I'm talking about. I tend to only bring up game elements as I want to talk about them.
Spoilers for.... all of ISAT! Especially Act 5!
(image to show how i feel posting this and as an attention grabber over my wall of text)
To pull a definition of ludonarrative harmony out of a hat, game writer Lauryn Ash defines it as follows:
Ludonarrative harmony is when gameplay and story work together to create a meaningful and immersive experience.
From a design implementation perspective, it is the synchronized interactions between in-game actions (mechanics) and in-world context (story).
It is, generally speaking, how well game mechanics work hand in hand with the story. I, personally, think ISAT is an absolute masterclass of it, so I want to take a look at how ISAT specifically uses its battle system to emphasize Siffrin's character arc and create organic story moments. I want you to keep this in mind when I talk here.
So, skills, right? If you've played any turn-based RPG, you know your Fire spells, your "BACKSLASH! AIRSLASH! BACKSLASH!" and the many ways to style those.
Well, what does casting "Fire" say about your character? Not all that much, does it? Perhaps you'll have typical divisions. The smart one is the mage, the big brawny one is your tank, the petite one's the healer. And that's the barebones of ISAT's main party, but it's much more than that.
Every character's style of combat tells you something about them. Odile, the Researcher, is the most well-travelled and knowledgable of the bunch. She's the one with the expertise to keep a cool head and analyze the enemy, yet also able to use all three of the Rock-Paper-Scissors craft types.
To reflect her analytical view of things, all her skill names are just descriptive, the closest to your most bog-standard RPG. "Slow IV" or "Paper III" serve well to describe their purpose. The high number of the skills gives the impression there were three other Slow skills beforehand - fitting, considering the party starts at level 45, about to head into the final dungeon. She's also the oldest, so she's the slowest of the bunch.
Isabea, the Fighter, has all his skills in exclamation points. "YOUR TURN!!!" "SO WEAK!!!" "SMASH!!!" they're straightforward, but excited. He's a purposefully cheerfull guy, so his skills revolve around cheering on his allies. He's absolutely pumped to be here, and you see that from his skill names alone.
Mirabelle, the Housemaiden, is an interesting case. She's by all means the true protagonist of this tale - She's the one "Chosen by the Change God," the only one who survived the King's first attack, the only one immune to his ability to freeze time, the only dual-craft type of the game - just a lot of things. And her skill names reflect that facade she puts on herself - she can do this, she can win! She has to believe it, or else she starts doubting. This is how you get "Jolly Round Rondo" and "Mega Sparkle Heal" or "Adorable Moving Cure." She's styled every bit a sailor scout shojo heroine, and her moveset replicates the naming conventions of "In the name of the moon, I'll punish you!"
Even Bonnie, the Kid, who can't be controlled in combat, has named craft skills. And they very much reflect that Bonnie is, well, a kid. "Wolf Speed Technique" or "Thousand Blows Technique" are very much the phrasings of a child who learned one complicated word and now wants to use it in everything to seem cooler than they are, which is none, because they're twelve.
Siffrin's skills are all puns.
You have an IMMEDIATE feel for personality here. Between "Knife to Meet You!" and "Too Cleaver by Half," you know Siffrin's the type to always crack a joke no matter the situation, slinging witticisms around to put Sonic the Hedgehog to shame. It's just such a clever way to establish character using a game mechanic as old as the entire history of RPGs.
This is only the baseline of the way the combat system feeds into the story, though.
The timeloop, of course, feeds into it. Siffrin is the only character who retains experience upon looping, whereas all other characters are reset to their base level and skills. And it sucks (affectionate).
You're extremely likely to battle more often the earlier in the game you are - after all, you need the experience (for now.) Every party member contributes, and Siffrin isn't all that strong on their own, since they focus on raw scissor type damage with the addition of one speed buff. (Of course it's a speed buff. They're a speedy fucker. Just look at him).
At first, the difference in level between Siffrin and the rest of the group is rather negligible. Just a level or two. Just a bit more speed and attack. And then Siffrin grows further and further apart. Siffrin keeps learning new skills. He gets a healing skill that doubles as an attack boost, taking away from both Mirabelle's and Isabeau's usefullness. He gets Craft skills of every type that even give you two jackpot points instead of one - thus obliterating Odile's niche. Siffrin turns into a one-person army capable of clearing most encounters all on their own.
Siffrin's combat progression is an exact mirror of story progression - as their experience inside the loops grows, they also grow further and further away from their party. The party seems... weaker, slower, clumsier. Always back at their starting point, just as all of their character arcs are reset each loop. Never advancing, always stagnant. And you have Siffrin as the comparison post right next to them.
I also want to point out here a change from Act 2 to Act 3 - Siffrin's battle portrait. He stops smiling.
Battles keep getting easier. This is true both for the reason that Siffrin keeps growing stronger even when all enemies stay the same, but also for the reason that you, the player, learn more about the battle system and the various encounters, until you've learned perfect boss clear strategies just from repetition. Have you ever watched a speedrunner play Pokemon? They've played this game so many times, they could do it blindfolded and sleeping. Your own knowledge and Siffrin's new strength work in tandem to trivialize the game's entire combat system as the game progresses.
(Is it still fun? Playing it over, and over, and over again? Is it?)
You and Siffrin are in sync, your experience making everything trivial.
As time goes on, Siffrin grows to care less and less about performing right for their party and more and more about going fast. A huge moment in his character is marked by the end of Act 3; because of story events I won't delve too deeply into, Siffrin has grown afraid of trying something new. And his options of escape are closing in. They need an answer, and they need it fast. He doesn't have the time or patience to dumb himself down, so you unlock one new skill.
It doesn't occur with level up, or with a quest, or anything at all. At the start of Act 4, it simply appears in Siffrin's Craft skills.
(Just attack.)
No pun. No joke. Just attack. Once you notice, the effect is immediate - here you have it, a clear sign of how jaded Siffrin has become, right at every encounter. And it's a damn good attack, too! The only available attack in the game that deals "massive" damage against all enemies. Because it doesn't add any jackpot points (at least, it's not supposed to), you set up a combo with everybody else, but Siffrin simply tears away at the enemy with wild abandon. Seperated from the rest of the party by the virtue of no longer needing to contribute to team attacks (most of the time. It's still useful if they do, though).
Once again, an aspect of the battle system enhances the degree of separation between Siffrin and the static characters of his play. You're incentivized to separate him, even.
Additionally, there are two more skills to learn. They're the only skills that replace previous skills. You only get them at extremely high levels, the latter of which I didn't even reach on both of my playthroughs.
The first, somewhere in the level 70 range, Rose Printed Glasses, a paper type craft skill, is replaced by Tear You Apart. It's still a pun about paper, but remarkedly more vicious.
The second is even more on the nose. At level 80, In A While, Rockodile!, a rock type craft skill, is replaced by the more powerful Rock Bottom.
I didn't get to level 80. If you do, you pretty much have to do it on purpose. You have to keep going much longer than necessary, as Siffrin is just done. And the last skill he learns is literally called Rock Bottom.
What do I even need to say, really.
Your party doesn't stay static forever, though.
By doing their hangout quests, side quests throughout the loops that result in Siffrin and the character having a heart to heart, all of them unlock what I'd call an "ultimate" skill. You know the type - the character achieved self-fulfillment, hit rank 10 on their confidant, maxed out their skill tree, and received a reward for their trouble.
These skills are massively useful. My favorite is Odile's - it makes one enemy weak to all Craft types for several turns, which basically allows you to invalidate the first and third boss, as well as just clown on the King, especially once Siffrin starts racking up damage.
But the thing is. In Act 3, when you first get them, yeah, they're useful. But... do you need them? After all, they're such a hassle to get. You need to do the whole character quest again, you can't loop forward in the House or you'll lose them. If you want to take these skills to the King, you need to commit. Go the full nine-yards and be nice to your friends and not die and not skip forward or skip back. Which is annoying, right?
Well, I sure did think so during Act 4. After all, a base level party can still defeat the King, just with a few more tricky pieces involved. Siffrin can oneshot almost all basic enemies by the time of Act 4. It's this exact evalutation that you, the player, go through everytime you return to Dormont. Do I want this skill, still? Would it not be faster to go on without it? I'm repeating myself, but that's the thing! That's what Siffrin is thinking, too!
I also want to take a quick moment to note, here - all skills gained from hangouts have art associated with them, which no other skills do. This feature, the nifty art, hammers home these as "special" skills, besides just how they're unlocked.
Siffrin also has one skill with associated art.
Yeah, you guessed it, it's (Just attack.)
At first, helping the characters is tied to a hefty in-game reward, but that reward loses its value, and in return devalues helping Siffrin's friends every loop. It's too tedious for a skill that'll make a boss go by one turn faster. You, the player, grow jaded with the battle system. Grinding experience isn't worth it, everybody's highest levels are already recorded. Fighting bosses isn't worth it, it's much faster to loop forward.
Isn't this what all endgame in video games looks like? You already beat the final boss, and now... what challenge is left? Is there a point to keep playing? Most games will have some post-game content. A superboss to test your skills against, but ISAT doesn't have any of that. You're forever left chasing to the post-game. That's the whole point - to escape the game.
As most games get more difficult as time passes, ISAT only gets easier. The game becomes disinterested in expanding its own mechanics just as I ran out of new things to fight after 100%-ing Kingdom Hearts 3. Every encounter becomes a simple game of "press button to win."
The final boss just takes that one up a notch.
Spoilers for Act 5 ahead boys!
In Act 5, Siffrin utterly loses it. His last possible hope for escape failed him, told him there's nothing she can do, and Siffrin is trapped for eternity. So of course, they go insane and run up the entire House without their party.
This just proves what you already knew - you dont need the party to proceed. Siffrin alone is strong enough. And here, Siffrin has entirely shed the facade of the jokester they used to be. Every single skill now follows the (Just attack.) naming conventions. Your skills are: (Paper.) (Rock.) (Scissors.) (Breathe.)
To the point. Not a moment wasted, because Siffrin can't take a moment longer of any of this. Additionally, his level is set to 99 and his equipment becomes fixed. You can't even pick up items anymore! Not that you needed them at this point anyway, right? Honestly, I never used any items besides the Salty Broth since Act 2, so I stopped picking items up a long time ago. Now you just literally can't.
Something I've not talked about until now - one of the main equipment types in this game are Memories, gained for completing subquests or specific interactions and events. They all by and large have little effects - make Odile's tonics heal more, or have Mirabelle cast a shield at the start of combat. For the hangout events, you also gain an associated memory that boosts the characters' stats by 30. It lets them keep up with Siffrin again! A fresh wind! Finally, your party members feel on par with you again!
...For a time. And just like that, they're irrelevant again, just as helping them gave Siffrin a brief moment of hope that the power of friendship could fix everything.
In Act 5, your memory is set to "Memory of Emptiness." It allows you to loop back in the middle of combat. You literally can't die anymore. Not that Siffrin could've died by this point in the first place, unless you forgot about the King's instant-kill attack. This one memory takes away the false pretense that combat ever had any stakes. Siffrin's level being set to 99 means even the scant exp you get is completely wasted on them. All stakes and benefits from combat have been removed. It has become utterly pointless.
Frustrating, right? It's an artistic frustration, though. It traps you right here in Siffrin's shoes, because he hates that all these blinding Sadnesses are still walking around just as much. It all inspires just a tiny fraction of that deep rolling anger Siffrin experiences here in the player.
And listen, it was cathartic, that one time Siffrin snapped and stabbed the tutorial Sadness, wasn't it? Because who enjoys sitting through the tutorial that often? Siffrin doesn't. I don't, either.
So, since combat is an useless obstacle now meant to inspire frustration, what do you do for a boss? You can't well make it a gameplay challenge now, no. The bosses of Act 5 are an emotional challenge: a painful wait.
First, Siffrin fights the King, alone. This is already nervewracking because of one factor - in every other run, you need Mirabelle's shield skill, or else you're scripted to die. You're actually forced to fight the King multiple times in Act 3, and have to do it at least once in Act 4, though you'll likely do it more. Point is: you know how this fight works.
You know Siffrin's fight is doomed from the outset, but all you can do is keep slinging attacks. Siffrin is enough of a powerhouse to take the King's HP down, what with the healing and buff skills they have now, not to even mention you can just go all in on damage and then loop back.
(And no matter which way you play it, whether you just loop or use strategically, it reflects on Siffrin, too. Has he grown callous enough not even death will stop their mission? Or does he still avoid pain, as much as he can?)
This fight still allows you the artifice of even that much choice, not that it matters. The other shoe drops eventually - Siffrin becomes slower, and slower. Unsettling, considering this game works on an Action Gauge system. You barely get turns anymore. The screen gets darker, and darker. Until Siffrin is frozen in time, just as you knew he had to be, because you know how this encounter works, know it can't be cleared without Mirabelle.
And, then, a void.
Siffrin awakens to nothingness. The only way to tell you've hit a wall is if Siffrin has no walking animation to match your button inputs. You walk, and walk, until you're approached by.... you. The next enemy encounter of the game, and Siffrin's absolute lowest point: Mal Du Pays.
Or, "Homesickness," in english. If you know the game, you know why it's named this, but that's not the point at the moment.
Thing is, where you could damage the King and are damaged in turn, giving you at least a proper combat experience, even if its doomed to fail, Mal Du Pays has no such thing.
You can attack. You can defend. But it is immune to all attacks. And in return, it does nothing. It's common, at least, for undefeatable enemies to be a "survive" challenge, but nope. The entire fight is "press button and wait." Except, remember the previous fight against the King? The entire time, you were waiting for the big instant death attack to drop. That feeling, at least for me, carried forward. I was incredibly on edge just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And, as is a pattern, Siffrin is, too. As Siffrin's attacks fail to connect, they start talking to Mal Du Pays.
But he gets no response, as you get no attacks to strategize around. The wait for anything to happen is utterly agonizing. You and Siffrin are both waiting for something to happen. This isn't a fight. It just pretends to be. It's an utter rugpull, because Siffrin was so undefeatable for most of Act 4 and all of Act 5 so far. It's kind of terrifying!
and it does. It finally does something. Ma Du Pays speaks, in the voice of Siffrin's friends, listing out their deepest fears. I think it's honestly fantastic. You're forced to just sit here and listen to Siffrin's deepest doubts, things you know the characters could not say because it references the timeloops they're all utterly unaware of. This is all Siffrin, talking to himself. And all you, all Siffrin, can do, is keep wailing away on the enemy to no effect whatsoever.
So of course this ends with Siffrin giving up. What else can you do?
And then Siffrin's friends show up and unfreeze them and it's all very cool yay. The pure narrative scenes aren't really the main focus but I want to point out here:
A) Mirabelle is in the first party slot here, referencing how she's the de facto protagonist, and Bonnie fills in the fourth slot left empty, which shows all characters uniting to save Siffrin
B) this is the only instance of the other party members having act specific battle icons: they're all smiling brightly, further pushed by the upbeat music
C) the reflecting shield Mirabelle uses to freeze the King uses a variation of her hangout skill cut in, marking it as her true "final" skill and giving the whole fight a more climatic feeling.
It's also a short gameplay sequence with Siffrin utterly uninvolved in the battle. You can't even see them onscreen. But... it feels warm, doesn't it? Everybody coming together. Siffrin doesn't have to fight anymore.
At last, the King is defeated. Siffrin and co. make for the Head Housemaiden, to have her look at Siffrin's sudden illness. Siffrin is utterly exhausted, famished, running a fever. And this isn't unexpected - after all, their skills in Act 5 had no cooldown. For context, instead of featuring any sort of MP system, all skills work on a cooldown basis, where a character can't use it for a certain number of turns. The lowest cooldown is actually Siffrin's Knife to Meet You, which has a cooldown of 1. In universe, this is reasoned as the characters needing a break from spamming craft in order to not exhaust themselves.
Siffrin's skills in Act 5 having no cooldown/being infinitely spammable isn't a sign of their strength - it's a sign that he refuses to let himself rest in order to rush through as fast as possible.
Moving on, Siffrin panics when seeing the Head Housemaiden, because seeing her means one thing: the end. Prior to this in the game, every single time you beat the King, the loop ends when you talk to the Head Housemaiden.
Reality breaks down, the whole shebang. It's here that Siffrin realizes - they don't want the loops to end, because the end of their journey means their family will leave, and he'll be alone again. The happiest time of his life will be over.
Siffrin goes totally ballistic, to say the least.
As it turns out (and was heavily foreshadowed narratively), Siffrin has been using Wish Craft to subconciously cause the timeloop because of their abandonment issues. It's rather predictable if you paid attention to literally anything, but it's extremely notable how heavily Siffrin is paralleled to the King, the antagonist they swore to kill by themself at the start of Act 5. The King wants to freeze Vaugarde in time because it is, in his mind, "perfect," for accepting him after he lost his home - a backstory he shares with Siffrin.
Siffrin has become the exact antagonist he swore to kill, and it's shown by how the next fight utterly flips everything on its head.
Siffrin is the final boss.
In a towering form made of stars, Siffrin looks down at their friends. His face is terrified, because of his internal conflict; he can't hurt his friends, but he can't let them go, either. The combat prompt is simply changed to "END IT!"
This fight is similar to the previous, in that you just need to wait a certain number of turns until its over. However, this time, it's not dreadful suspense. It's... confusion, and hesitance.
You have two options for combat: Attack your friends, or attack yourself.
And... you don't really want to do either, I think. I certainly don't. But what else can you do? It's Siffrin's desires clashing in full force. Attack your friends, and force them to stay? Or attack yourself, and let them go safely without you?
Worth noting, here - when you attack Siffrin's friends, you can't harm them. Isabeau will shield all attacks. And when you attack yourself, Mirabelle will heal you back to full. And the friends don't... do anything, either. How could they? Occasionally, Mirabelle heals you and Isabeau shouts words of motivation, but the main thing is...
(Your friends don't know what to do.)
None of them want to harm Siffrin. Both sides simply stare at each other, resolute in their conviction but unwilling to end it with violence. It's of note that this loop, the last one, is the only loop where the King isn't killed. Just frozen. And now here is Siffrin, clamoring for the same eternity the King was. Of course everything ends in a tearfilled conversation as Siffrin sees their friends won't leave him, even after the journey ends, but I still have to appreciate this moment.
Siffrin is directly put in the position with their friends as his enemies, forced to physically reckon that keeping them in this loop is an act of violence, against both their friends, and against himself.
It's a happy ending. But... what does it mean?
Of course, ISAT is obviously about the fear of change. Siffrin is afraid of the journey ending, and of being alone. However, ISAT is also a game about games. Siffrin is playing the same game, over and over, because it's comforting. It's familiar. It's nice, to know exactly what happens next. These characters might just be predictable lines of dialogue, but... they feel like friends. Have you ever played a game, loved it, put countless hours into it, but you never finished it? Because you just couldn't bear to see it end? For the characters to leave your life, for there to be a void in your heart where the game used to be?
After all, maybe it became part of your routine! You play the game every day, slowly chipping away at it for weeks at a time. For me, I beat ISAT in four days. It utterly consumed me during this time. I had 36 hours of playtime by the end. Yeah, in that week, I did not do much more than play ISAT.
And once i beat it, i beat it, again. I restarted the game to see the few scenes I missed, most specifically the secret boss I won't talk about here. I... couldn't let go of the game yet. I wanted to see every scrap I could. I still do. I'm writing this, in part because I still do. It's scary to let go.
Ever heard the joke term of "Postgame Depression?" It's when you just beat a game, and you're suddenly sad. Maybe because the ending affected you emotionally and you need to process the feelings it invoked, or you search for something that can now fill your time with it gone.
The game ends, for real this time, the last time you talk to the Head Housemaiden. But Siffrin gets... scared. What if everything loops back again? And so, his family offers to hold his hand. They face the end, together.
For all loops, including the ending, you never see what happens after. After they leave the loop for good. Because the loop is the game itself. It's asking you to trust that life goes on for these characters, and it holds your hand as it asks you to let go. There's a reason for Siffrin's theater metaphors. He is the actor, and the director, asking everyone to do it over one more time. He's a character within the game, and its player.
There's a reason I talked about endgame content. This, the way it all repeats, there's nothing new, difficulty and stakes bleed away as you snap the game over your knee - it's my copy of White 2 with two hundred hours in it. It's me playing Fire Emblem Awakening in under 3 hours while skipping every cutscene. Are you playing for the sake of play, for the sake of indulging in your memories, because you're afraid of the hole it'll leave when you stop?
Of note: the narrative never condemns Siffrin for unwittingly causing their own suffering. He's a victim of circumstance. It's seen as endearing, even, that Siffrin loves their friends to the point of rather seeing the world destroyed than them gone. But Siffrin is also told: we'll stay with you for now, but we'll part ways eventually. And one day, you'll have to be okay with it.
Stop draining the things you love of every ounce of enjoyment just because you're afraid of what happens next. I'm not saying to never play your favorite games again. Playing ISAT a second time, I still had a lot of fun! I saw so many new things I didn't before, and I enjoyed myself immensely, reading the same dialogue over and over. But... it makes me look at other games I love and still play, and makes me ask... is this still fun? Do I still need to play this game to enjoy it? Even writing this is an afterimage of my enjoyment, but it's a new way to interact with the game, to analyze it through this lens. Fuck, man, I write fanfiction. Look at me.
All of this, fanart, fanfic, analysis, is a way to prolong that enjoyment without making yourself suffer for it. Without just going through the motions of enjoyment without actually experiencing any. But one day, the thing you love won't be fun to talk and write and draw about. And it's okay. You'll have new things to love. I promise.
In the end.... I'm certain I'll replay ISAT one day. Between great writing, art, puzzles and unresolved mysteries, it's my shoe-in for game of the year.
But I won't replay it for quite some time. I've had enough, for now, so I let my love take other forms.
Siffrin is never condemned, because love is no evil. Be it love for another person, or for a game. And please, if you're overempathetic - it's still a game, at the end of the day. The great thing about games is that you can always boot them up again, no matter how long its been.
A circle within a circle indeed.
To summarize:
The repetitiveness of ISAT's combat, lack of new enemies, and Siffrin's ever increasing strength eventually allows you to snap the combat over your knee, rendering it irrelevant and boring. Though this may seem counterproductive at first, it perfectly mirrors how Siffrin has also grown bored with these repeated encounters and views them only as an obstacle to get past. The reflection of Siffrin's own tiredness with the player's annoyance increases the compassion the player has for Siffrin as a character.
Additionally, the endgame state of the combat system serves as commentary on the state of a favorite game played too often, much like how Siffrin has unwittingly trapped themself in the loop. Despite the game having no more challenge or content left to over, a player might return to their favorite game anyway, solely to try and recreate the early experience of actually having fun with it. This ties into ISAT's metanarrative about the fear of change and refusal to let go of comfort even when the object (here, your favorite video game) offering that comfort has become utterly bereft of any substance to actually engage with. Playing for the sake of playing, with no actual investment to keep going besides your own memories.
Later on, stripping away even the pretense of strategy for a "press button and wait" format of final bosses highlights the lack of options at Siffrin's disposal and truly forces the player into their shoes. Truly, the only way to win is to stop playing.
#feli speaks#in stars and time#isat#isat spoilers#lays down on floor. it's done. it's done#i actually narrowed down in scope to just focus on the combat by the way. and this is like. several thousand words
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What makes this game unique from other mystery games?
Eureka has plenty that makes it stand out, from its tactical approach to combat, to its approach to the supernatural and non-restrictive character creation, but the thing that makes its investigation stand out from that of other investigation games is probably the Eureka! mechanic and its overall approach to failed investigation rolls*.
*An “investigation roll” in Eureka is any skill roll used to investigate, there is no “Investigate” skill, every investigation roll will use the skill on the character sheet that is most relevant to whatever evidence the investigator is investigating. So, in a way, every skill is the "investigation skill". For instance, you would use the Firearms skill to try and guess what calibre of bullet left these bullet holes, even though that is also the skill that is used for your accuracy when shooting guns, and how quickly you can reload.
Now, we don’t want to make a blanket statement because our dev team has not played every investigative TTRPG, but in the ones we have played, there have been a couple of consistent hang-ups. In Call of Cthulhu for example, when you miss a clue due to a bad roll, you’re just shit outta luck. This isn’t to say that Call of Cthulhu is a bad game, Eureka actually takes a lot of influence from certain parts of it, but sometimes a single bad roll at a crucial time can grind the adventure to a halt.
The Eureka! mechanic is (one of) our answers to this problem.
As the investigators fail investigation rolls*, they accumulate Investigation Points. (They actually accumulate Investigation Points even if they succeed, but you get way more of them for Failures). When a standard investigator accumulates 15 Investigation Points, they gain 1 Eureka! and their Investigation Points reset to 0. More powerful supernatural characters must accumulate more than 15 points before they get a Eureka!, but that’s a different post.
A Eureka! is a valuable resource that can be spent on a couple of different benefits, and one of those is to retroactively turn a single previous Failed investigation roll* into a Full Success, giving that investigator all the information they would have figured out if they had succeeded in the first place. This can be a significant mystery un-stumper when the party is stuck at a dead end, without the GM needed to artificially give them a hint—it’s not a free pity clue, they earned it by being thorough investigators up to this point even if they got some bad rolls.
This can act as a sort of “rubber band” mechanic, only springing the investigators forwards if they fall far enough behind to need it, so to speak, and only on their own terms, so they don’t feel like the GM just gave them the answer because they suck too much.
This doesn’t mean that Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy is an easy game for babies where the players never have to worry about failure, however. You only get 1 Eureka! for about every 5 Failures, and its combat can be pretty hardcore. Like Call of Cthulhu, the investigators are mostly just normal people with no special resistances to knives or bullets. If you shoot them once or twice, they die, and there’s no coming back. Not only does this fragility encourage a generally more investigative approach to dealing with threats, it can also be used to reward good mystery solving up to the point of the final confrontation. The Eureka! mechanic rewards investigators who have not needed to spend their Eureka!s on gaining epiphanies from previously failed rolls by the fact that they can also be spent to throw an extra die into a combat roll—or any other life-or-death roll, such as leaping to safety from a burning building or a Stealth roll when hiding from dozens of armed goons. 3D6 (dropping the lowest) can give a crucial boost to that one 2D6 roll that your character has to stake his life on.
Now, you don’t have to play a fragile normal human investigator, you have the option to play as a more robust investigator, like a vampire for instance, who can easily shrug off most forms of physical damage so long as they don’t overdo it all in one place and take some time to regenerate in between bouts of getting shot, but what those kinds of investigators gain in toughness and supernatural powers, they pay for with supernatural weaknesses. The vampire in the party may laugh in the face of small arms fire, but get knocked down a few pegs when faced with her greatest challenge yet: Figuring out how to get a direct and in-no-uncertain-terms invitation into the house without saying “I am a vampire, the owner has to invite me in.”
And no, she can’t just ask the rest of the party for help, if they find out she’s a real vampire, that’s nine-times-out-of-ten going to be much more shocking than whatever evidence they were going to find out inside, and possibly even implicate her in several other, much more gruesome murders that nobody ever managed to solve..
The Eureka! mechanic is also used in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy’s équivalent to ‘leveling up’. At the end of an adventure, investigators can spend 2 Eureka!s to add 1 skill point to a skill. Eureka!s disappear after the mystery is solved, so you might as well use them if you have any left over, but if you’re saving them up by choosing not to spend them in a moment of real danger, that’s a bit of a risk, and could cost the investigator their life.
This also works as a bit of a “rubber band”, as investigators who increase their skills will fail less rolls, and thus gain fewer Eureka!s, slowing down their level-ups each time so they don’t shoot ahead of everybody else in the party without having to have a scaling system for experience points.
(Leveling up is an optional rule, however, and it is one that we in our group actually much prefer to play without, because we prefer more episodic or one-shot adventures where we frequently swap characters each time. Because skills have limits to how high they can go, a ‘level 0’ investigator can actually be just as capable as a ‘level 10’ investigator at any given thing, the ‘level 10’ investigator will just be good at more things.)
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wait what is ur favorite gen if it’s not gen 2
OK. so this is the worlds most complicated question 4 me aside from "whats your gender and sexuality" (there are no other questions) like.. UGHHH i literally CANNOT answer this without going on a HUMONGOUS essay not kidding. though if i DO it'll be really rambly.. and. not go anywhere really... (guess what?! point of no return V)
Favourite pokemon gen is a VERY difficult question for me. its easier to say my least favourite gen. Which would be gen 8. because it feels just… boring and forgettable in a way that .. no other gen feels? And is honestly a total mess in my opinion, but.. not in the way gen 9 sorta was? Cause while i definitely have a lot of gripes with gen 9, I do think theres a decent amount of positives and stuff to work with, and stuff that WORKS, and things that really stand out. ..compared to how bland gen 8 felt 2 me. And pointing out which gen im neutral about is fairly easy, aka sinnoh. (might need to really replay it and think it over tbh)
(though theres always one thing that complicates this and its like. the remakes? because sometimes i like a main gen game or hate it, and then i have opposite feelings about the remake, so its like. is the remake…. technically the gen of the origi… ok. whatever, this is a whole complication, i think i'll just go with like. whenever i say favourite gen it just means "favourite region" and remakes can count as well (minus gen 4 sorry ur remake was Like That) to make this easier)
And sayign which gens i Like… But don't tend to feel .. TOO much about ? like kanto… gen 1 has sooo much rep and content that its like.. frlg is fun, (and so is its SECOND remake, good lird) but theres not too much 4 me to chew on .. in . a.. deeper sense? aside from blue, red and leaf, personally. It's not bad! But I don't think anybody's really rearing to say gen 1 is undoubtably the best game mechanics.. visual.. story.. or.. anythin wise. it aint BAD.. but its not really.. much more ta me……
(also i'll specify, mechanics/ gameplay are like.. yes theres type additions, ability changes, oh and the split early on and myah myah and some games have gimmicks and other stuff like mounts, and supposedly bw/bw2 is harder [base game, not hard mode]-
(which. dude did you know. like. this is fucking silly to me but.. upon beating the maingame of black you unlock hard mode. "okay well, whats the issue?" well. upon beating the main game of white. yyou um. get. easymode.) (like im sorry but why the shit would you make DIFFICULTIES VERSION EXCLUSIVES…….. WHO PLAYS THROUGH AN ENTIRE POKEMON GAME.. AND IS LIKE "ah yes wait let me delete my save and do all of that again but like. even easier" W.. WHY… WHY IS… EASY MODE… UNLOCKED… AFTER BEATING THE GAME,, WHY IS HARD MODE A VERSION EXCLUSIVE???? A GENUINELY INTERESTING FEATURE N CHALLENGE?? i know people have probably said this before but its SO baffling to me. what a design choice)
-…but generally the core is the same, and ive never particularly ran into a bump in pokemon games, so it isnt really TOO much of a gripe to me. i love meaningless grinding. i was the worlds most boring little kid, i would start up a pokemon game just to grind to level 40 immediately after getting a starter for FUN. i could watch paint dry for hours i do NOT mind. The only time gameplay comes up is just. How Much is there to do? yknow? how much content.)
but my feelins on kanto are ironic cause i like johto more. sorryyy! i think johtos just more fun 2 me, partly because silver is SOO personal to me, and what they did with kanto was just a more welcome shakeup 2 me tbh. and i like the sort of feeling parts of it give off, and like. yes theres the big hole of like. team rocket being even MORE of a wet fart in that game than b4. likr sure hgss DEFINITELY gave it an overhaul but it still wasnt .. GREAT… since it was the lowest presence an evil team kind of had (until gen 8.) and while yes, they were trying to contact giovanni, and giovanni .. was.. there .. he just got time travel assassinated.. its still kinda.. eh? and being one of the games with a HUUGE identity crisis in the way that gen 2 is forever stuck to gen 1 in a way… gen 1 isnt? but shrug. I don't really mind it. OH and i love silver in crystal. he's so so funny in crystal, whats wrong with him… and i like the legendary beast stuff! i like it, it feels pretty fucking cool.. and eusines funny. pokemon crystal is so fascinatign 2 me i want to pick it apart with my teeth, i love the aesthetic, the music, everythin. (even if the late grind is HORRIBLE) ..but idk if gen 2 is my favourite. We'll.. get back to this later .
SO WHAT IS? Um.
See .. this is kinda where i have 2 now explain a timeline. I KNOW. i know. .. (said through tears) You're just gonna have to sit down with me here because i am so insanely autistic about pokemon. pokemon has been my special interest since i was a tiny pea brained baby. i was literally known purely for pokemon when i was younger because i would NOT shut up about it. (….and here i am writing an unneccesarily long, entire essay. well.) My first game was xy. when i was . uhh .. gosh.. somethin likr… 9? i couldnt finish it because i genuinely couldnt read and got stuck on that furfrou puzzle. i know. its so insanely easy . its unreal. But i gave up. and i didnt have any internet so it stayed that way. for several years. I KNOW. OKAY. leave me alone…
but in the meantime i got oras and. this is when the autism kicked in . severely….. i fucking LOOOVE ORAS . ORAS HEADS LETS GOOO LETS RISE WOOO WOOO IM SOOOOO BIASED. UNREAL-Y BIASED. CRITICAL THINKING DIES HERE WOOOOOHOOOO . and . its a whole thing. i love the way oras looks. its so so so pretty, like. SHOCKINGLY pretty dude. I also really like the weird fusion oras and xy had of like. chibi models, the realistic (? i have no better description 4 this. models used in cutscenes and battles), AND the art. which was definitely unnecessary but i think the eeny weeny models were cute.. Also oras' music. i know its NOT original but i really like the way they remade it. yes the trumpets are almost absent, and some major changes were made to some tracks, which were devisive but honestly? i really like the original soundtrack (because the way rse's soundtrack sounds is really impressive) and the remake is just very lovingly done imo? it just feels nice 2 listen 2…
but . all my.. Current, More Developed Brain Opinions aside. at this point i could read. amazing development. so, i liked lisia. hated brendan. (we had beef.) thought wally was odd but fun, and i REALLY liked zinnia… and of course maxie and archie and their admins too.. and by the way, i liked this game SO much, that i completed the entire pokedex at age 10/11. for fun. so its safe to say i . may like oras. i liked it SO much i then pestered one of my older brothers when he was over to find a tutorial for that segment in xy.. and eventually beat that too. i like gen 6, but i understand a lot of people DONT, and thats understandable. lysandre is SUCH a mess, so are the rivals, but i generally found it charming. though i definitely understand why it was received Very Badly. but xy isnt my favourite.
A few years later, a bit older, when i was then 12.. i played gen 7…. and really liked it. but i dont have too much to SAY about it. (this could honestly be because i didnt replay gen 7 again, having one savefile for my entire playtime. and while i still have an unreal amount of time in usum, i didnt obsessively replay it like i did with oras.) but there's nothing 4 me 2 say that hasnt already been said.. i liked gen 7. completed the dex when i was 12. i liked lillie and gladion and hau, (and i think people either A) dumbed them down way too much, or where excessively critical over hau being. Nice. which….) and team skull.. which is one of my favourite evil teams below magma/aqua, and its definitely one of my favourite gens. but i think… people have said it before but sm had the better story, usum had the better gameplay. usum is JAMMED full of sooo much content its unreal….but i HATE what they did with lusamine. also the ultra recon stuff was kinda … uhh. it was REALLY hyped up in advertising like "oooohhh who are these mysterious people?!?!?" and they just kinda… didnt have a presence??? at all??? like. umm. ok . but i like gen 7. … i like halves of gen 7.
Then . ..gen 8 came out. and uhh. well. I lost a WHOLE lot of faith. cause when it came out almost.. …5 .. years ago .. stars abovr . i got really pissed. cause i HATED IT. i played through it, i wanted to give it a chance, and it was .. fine.. at first. but then i started thinking about it. and thinking about it. and you heard a LOT of things about it at the time. and then i hated it. i hated pokemon . and then i did not touch this game series for the next four years. I heard NEWS about pokemon, but i just kind of grew more spiteful over the years and stuck my head further underground.
#VOICEMAIL#good lird. i am SO sorry for the person i become whenever I talk about pokemon#i never get to ramble about it to this degree . WORDS GET AWAY FROM ME </3#I HAVE 2 REBLOG 2 ADD PART 2 . HELP ME. SORRY.......
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I have been thinking about how I am exactly the type of person who can actually really enjoy grinding in video games (at least if it's done properly).
I know that this is unusual since grinding is generally considered a negative about a game, but I have a small essay mentally prepared to explain what I like about it and what types work best for me.
To explain it in my signature horny way: I think a good grind is kind of like entering a hypnotic trance. Your thoughts and stress fade away and you focus only on the task ahead. You stop worrying and stressing and instead think only of making numbers go up.
This can be really pleasant to certain mental architectures.
But I think there's also certain factors that can make grinds better or worse, at least from my subjective point of view.
1- The most important thing is that I think a good grind should have some form of constant and tangible forward progress.
In most games, this means gaining experience and leveling up, with things like rare item drops usually being just a nice bonus. It's important for these levels to actually do something significant for you too.
For example, new abilities, new opportunities, access to new tiers of power, etc. It should not just be a barely-perceptible stat increase like a +1% to piercing damage or an extra +2 strength points added to the 60 you already have. Stuff like that doesn't feel like it changes your power level at all.
And it's not just about getting noticeably stronger either. Ideally you should also be unlocking new activities to do, new mechanics to play with, new places to visit, and so on. Even if it's a long total grind, it feels a lot better if it's broken up into smaller sections where you're even slightly changing activities as you unlock more of them.
I have more mixed feelings on stuff like grinding for rare items exclusively. That ends up feeling significantly more binary if you're not also getting some other meaningful reward in the process. It still feels satisfying when whatever you were hunting for finally drops, but until then it feels a lot more tiring without the frequent dopamine hits.
For example, grinding for rare pokemon to catch did not feel nearly as fun to me as grinding for levels in something like Wizardry 8.
2- A good framework for the grind.
Related to the above: Grinds that give you an extreme objective from the outset are harder to enjoy even if you are making constant progress towards them, and that's if you even remember them consciously.
It helps to instead have a bunch of smaller (and relatively varied!) grinds rather than a single extreme one, and then you move on to a different place to do a different set of smaller grinds.
Also on the topic of frameworks, some cool and distinctive aesthetic reward can make the grind more satisfying. I am more likely to be excited if what I'm grinding for is a cool vampiric ability or an item that looks great rather than just the mandatory next tier of advancement.
3- Some social option.
I don't necessarily mean that the game has to have multiplayer or anything, but it can be nice when it is slow and passive enough that you can talk to your friends through text as you play, just so you're still getting your interaction with them and keeping them up to date on your milestones and progress and all. Grinds that require less interaction like that are also nice in that they require less mental effort.
This is not all there is to it either... many factors go into this kind of thing.
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fuck it, why not, nct 127 as engineering students
it's midterm season and i needed smth fun to do lmao. partially inspired by dumb shit i’ve seen/done
taeil: social butterfly exchange student studying something super obscure like petroleum or mineral engineering. on his first day of school (after getting run over by a roomba), he made up some stupid lie about his home country in an effort to appear more interesting. shit escalated, the lies continued, and now four years later he’s sir moony dal tae-1-methyl-cyclohexane-il from the glorious country of kwangya on planet mars. he’s actually from korea.
johnny: biomedical engineering student who will literally never shut the fuck up about going to med school. drinks redbull for breakfast, lunch and dinner. brushes his teeth with redbull. puts redbull in his diffuser. smokes redbull. did i mention he’s drinking redbull right now so he can stay up studying for the mcat? and that he’s trying to get into med school? in all seriousness he’d be a great doctor. but he’d also prescribe redbull.
taeyong: overworked mom friend studying electrical engineering. in a perpetual state of panic, sleep deprivation and electrocution; but he always has essentials on hand for his kids. be it bandaids, tampons or condoms, all you have to do is ask. oh also he modifies roombas to chase people down hallways while singing the thomas the tank engine theme song. he’s like michael reeves but giggly and with good intentions.
yuta: part time chemical engineering student, full time drug dealer. accepted his offer to the program because he watched one episode of breaking bad while stoned out of his mind, so it's all over for you when he figures out how to cook meth in the lab. the only issue right now? yeah he failed the lab safety training like six times and thought hydrofluoric acid was edible. he's not allowed into any undergraduate lab, much less onto campus at all. yeah he got expelled.
doyoung: obnoxious industrial engineering student. won't shut up about optimization and how his very optimized schedule has allowed him to maintain a 4.20 gpa, do 50+ extracurriculars and get multiple bitches. eventually his extensive spreadsheets creep out every girl he gets with and he has a crisis over his sexuality. gets suspended for public indecency with jaehyun two days before graduation.
jaehyun: goes into civil engineering thinking he can convince everyone he's straight by working with straight members and supports in infrastructure. resident hetero fuck boy up until he learns about bending moments in his second week of school, at which point he comes out. often struggles to finish exams because he's too busy thinking about how the pipe or beam he's analyzing looks too much like a penis.
jungwoo: the nicest mechanical engineering student you'll ever meet. is so sweet and innocent that people are constantly mistaking him for a freshman. mentors younger years, has the most cracked linkedin, brings coffee and donuts to class, generally just a good guy. oh, and the guy who looks exactly like him, who gets fucking hammered at every event and once did a line off a portrait of Isaac Newton? pfft nah that's not jungwoo. no way.
mark: aerospace major and music minor, but he spends so much time in the music faculty that no one believes him when he says he's in engineering. makes a "it's not rocket science" joke at least once in every conversation. probably giggling like a fucking buffoon in the back of a class, so loud that you can hear him in lecture recordings. he also can't go anywhere without recognizing 30 people and fist bumping all of them in turn like "brooooooo."
haechan: stinky computer engineering student who only ever wears the same two hoodies in slightly different shades of grey and considers walking in the rain to be an acceptable substitute for showering. claims he's grinding league and valorant during exam week so people underestimate him. everyone's surprised when they find out he's been on the dean's list since year one AND knows how to do laundry. again his laundry is two hoodies in slightly different shades of grey.
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for newer tekken folk: i get that ranked is fun and a huge adrenaline rush, but if you are genuinely focused on getting better slow and steady always wins. i pace my sessions like so:
i try to lab a little bit every day. i think labbing is a skill in itself, but if youre genuinely just starting out it should be little bits of memorization rather than trying to cram everything about a character at once whether that be your own characters key tools, bread and butter combos, wall combos, labbing your options against a character youre having trouble against, drills, etc. just something EFFICIENT that you feel covers a gameplay deficiency you have. it can be an hour it can be ten minutes just make sure you keep it varied, makes it easier to memorize/keeps it fun for you. it helps, youre essentially studying for a test whenever you do it so try and think about the replays you have and the questions the matchups have posed to you.
if you're really focused on long term improvement, hit up quickplay to try out strats. youre still gonna get nervous salty whatever but it wont cost you points and youll be ANCHORED against people at your relative skill level. i would drill quickplay for 90 percent of my sessions in t7, it helps just getting your mechanical memorization down without any stakes (unless you count your winrate, which you shouldnt). look at your replays from these sessions during your labbing- itll give a lot more structure to your learning, theres just so much to learn that it becomes overwhelming without some kind of guideline. and replays allow you to see what you are FACTUALLY having trouble with.
also, always take breaks. i didnt know how important this was until like, september of last year when i was trying to break into gold ranks in t7 but legitimately you cant grind ranked every day unless youre a pro player/play someone really really easy. that level of mental effort generally requires a couple days off, so if youre at a point where youre not having fun just take a couple days break it saves your thumb/wrist and youll feel energized and refreshed coming back. i guarantee you that youll be playing better than you would if you kept grinding it out despite your brain not being 100 percent into it
its really a marathon not a sprint, everyone who's good took a shitton of time and a shitton of losses to get there so remember its your JOURNEY brother.
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Gotta ramble a bit about Dredge because it's got that Good Game Design.
For one thing I saw it classified as a horror game, but it also felt fundamentally at odds with my (very limited) experience of horror as a genre? Primarily, that it kept control very squarely in the player's hands, including control of pacing and encounters. I mean honestly that's rare enough in a lot of games generally, but I'd probably most categorize Dredge as a creepy-themed puzzle game more than anything else, and not just for the cargo/fishing mechanics. The entire game is very deliberately structured so the only time pressure is solving how far you can go in a single day cycle and ideally making sure you end the day on the same square as the fishmonger or merchant (or not having fish in your cargo that day). You get a heads up that the night is when the scary shit happens and your main four zones are where some big bad lives and if you observe their patterns and ask the locals, even those don't tend to jump scare you? Fundamentally the game feels surprisingly and entirely safe, which is not the vibe I would classify as horror.
The fishing/dredging mechanic is a very solid foundation and has some nice little variety to it, just a good timing test to break up the more mystery and exploration sections. Good visual interest, crunchy sound, just very good detail focus on the design.
I think I only looked up two things during the entire game (where the last stone tablet was, and how to find the catfish), which is also astonishingly rare for pretty much any game nowadays that I'm getting at least mostly completionist on. The low-hanging comparisons are pulling up an icon map to find all the damn korok seeds, but even say, Fenyx Rising - I had to look up how to catch and ride a horse because some specific input just wasn't intuitive. Dredge did a very good job at not using text heavy tutorials for game functions and still very clearly and easily getting the point across. In large part by gating progress in a way that allows the player full access to the game's entire core mechanics from very nearly the beginning, and offers clear ways to progress further that don't feel too much like grinding given the available space to explore. To look back at those examples, BOTW/TOTK and Fenyx all lock very basic movement mechanics (among lots of other skills) behind lengthy tutorial areas. It's genuinely difficult to open up the entire core gameplay from the start and not have players feel overwhelmed, and I don't think Dredge accomplished such a thing by just being simpler (I wouldn't necessarily say that it is much simpler either, just... economical about it's constituent parts?)
Good map density too, in terms of fish locations and populating the in-between islands with things to discover and revisit. BOTW (lesser extent in TOTK but still there) and AC Valhalla both suffer from having maps a little too big for their contents in places, just in terms of how far you can run across barren fields between fixed map markers with nothing else to really do except maybe collect a few low-level creature loot bits if you're lucky. Even when I'm crossing the map with purpose in Dredge, there's still nice opportunities to get distracted and find more stuff that's going to be useful, though not at such density that it's no longer interesting to find the specific things I need.
#dredge game#game design review#rambling#got jumpscared more by those fucking trees in totk than in this supposed horror game#which is more to my taste anyway
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If someone were to be deciding between either limbus company or reverse 1999, which would you recommend and why? What would you say are the pros and cons?
I enjoy both R1999's and Limbus' story and gameplay, and both its cast of characters remain pretty intriguing enough. But I will be upfront about the fact that I will a little more biased on R199 since its currently filling up the spaces between my neurons currently, and that I've dropped Limbus months ago due to the company's actions towards its workers. All in all, if you want to play Limbus, all I ask of you is to not give the game any real-life money.
I really do want to give both games a fair chance, so I would say my verdict would be for you to try both games and see if like one or even both?
A whole ass essay under the cut:
Anyhow, when it comes to recommending it, I.. would say to a general audience, R1999's more palatable? Limbus' contents (see: its giant trigger warnings screen when you start the game for the first time) aren't quite for everyone, so if any of these aren’t for you, please take care of yourself.
Limbus gameplay is something that plays in my head even if I haven’t touched it in months. The difficulty spike is infamously vertical, but if you enjoy a good challenge, figuring out battles is really gratifying. Probably is one of the things I really miss about the game, as much as it did frustrate me to the point of insanity.
For the characters, I did really like the fact all of the playable characters take inspiration from classic literature (ie, Ishmael is inspired from Ishmael from Moby Dick, Heathcliff is from Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Faust from Goethe's Faust, Gregor as Gregor Samsa from Kafka's Metamorphosis, etc.), and the setting of the City as an ultra capitalist hell that has SCP-esque creatures wreaking havoc after the downfall of an eldritch horror energy company is a very fascinating and intriguing world.
One of the big things I can think people praise about Limbus is that almost all gacha content are actually obtainable with enough grinding; barring the pretty new Walpurgisnacht content, which I think is limited?
The game has utterly banger soundtracks including original songs from Mili is spectacularly weaved into the boss battles, sound design that is immaculately crunchy in a satisfying way (I. admit I sometimes open some character's attack audios. for fun at one point. let us ignore i am the guy obsessed with outis and I play her voicelines because she's. her.) and top-notch voice acting. While it doesn't have a english dub, but I think even if they had one I don't think they'll come quite close to the korean VA's performances.
I may not have touched the game in months but I do still carry a fondness for these gang of murderous morally gray-to-black bastards and their sad sopping wet amnesiac manager.
And let's get to R1999. It's been taking up space in my brain for a while now. The cast of characters are certainly interesting, and there is lore jam-packed into almost every bit of the story. The whole world and the ramifications and effects of the Storm pose an intriguing conflict and I'll surely be tuned in to how the main story will turn out. The events are also a joy to watch and play.
As for the gameplay, if the levels aren't kicking your ass and you're evenly matched with your enemies, I really do enjoy the process of strategizing how to defeat the enemies. Unlike Limbus flinging you out into the world and into the battle; the tutorial on how R1999's battle mechanic certainly eases you better into knowing the basics. My only complaint in here is that the end-game grind is horrific. Farming for stuff for your characters in the highest levels will have you ripping your hair out (at least, that was my experience), but at the last going through the main story content doesn't actually require you to be on a high level with your roster of characters.
I appreciate how it does look like a lot of things in R1999 take context from actual historical things that have happened, though unfortunately I'm not really that much of a history buff to fully get some references and appreciate it, which is a bit of a shame.
The game's soundtrack is simply chef's kiss. I admit I don't really have audio on when i play casually, but when I do have it on while playing through the story, the music really does deliver and drive in what the game wants you to really feel during scenes. The music in chapter 3's various chess scenes drive in Constantine's scheming and the buildup of dread as you see it all unfurl before your eyes. The solemnity of the music in the final scenes of chapter 2. A ping pong game being somehow incredibly intense. That one OST that plays whenever someone goes silly time. Green Lake's absolute bop of an OST can I just link it here man. R1999 composers giving y'all a big plate of your favorite food.
Anyways. I think this has like. gone on and on and I am not good with writing conclusions so. To say what I said at the very start, I think you should both games a fair chance, so I would say my verdict would be for you to try both games and see if like one or even both? Up to you.
Most of all have fun and don't give into the gacha addiction. That is all.
#fish asks#reverse 1999#limbus company#mostly just rambled about what i particularly enjoy about the games#i. do hope this somewhat helps you? idk.#WHY DOES THE CUT KEEP SHOWING UP IN A DIFFERENT PARAGRAPH. STAY BOY STAY
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In lieu of a week in the woods
sunday, august 27, 2023 ~ 11:30pm
just got back from 6+ days off the grid, swimming, drinking tea, porch sittin’, and generally revisiting old stomping grounds. somehow it still wasn’t long enough.
(you can add a read more on mobile now??!!)
Reading picked out some specific weird old trade paperbacks to read at the cottage, and successfully finished one: margaret atwood’s lady oracle. one of those books where I will be thinking about it forever, but not necessarily because I enjoyed it? good prose moments, good turns of phrase or moments of clear perception, but i found the main character sort of perplexing—the bits of old Toronto, vintage mid century canadian childhood and adolescence, were probably what will stick with me. That and the way that I think it was trying to get psychonanalytic but, in classic 80s feminist fiction style, it didn’t make a ton of sense. also the fatphobia? like, experimenting with the pov of someone with intense body dysmorphia / weight shaming / internalized fatphobia felt unempathetic? like i was supposed to be impressed or titillated or surprised by this choice, that the book would even consider having a main character who was fat. period typical, sure, part of the mid century setting, sure, but also like. gratuitous.
also finished italo calvino’s the baron in the trees, and a.k. larkwood’s the unspoken name, and started the audiobook for the long way to a small angry planet. Also began my harrow the ninth reread, and wow this book is good. and even more so when you can follow what’s happening.
listening only the fact that I did spend so long literally in the woods has prevented me from having in-depth thoughts and feelings about hozier’s unreal earth. more to come as I sit with it longer, but so far—strong positive feelings. some new ground, some old ground, and some things that bridge the two nicely. worth listening to with headphones or however you can pick up all the layers in the mix. I really like ‘Icarian carrion’ on this listen.
watching watched a couple of episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds this evening, since being back— ‘lost in translation,’ and the lower decks cross-over. loved seeing boimler and mariner in the flesh, and the different gags they fit into that one, despite the fact that one of the things I’ve liked most about this season has been the show gradually giving time to some of the more philosophical questions trek can explore—but lower decks does that too, sometimes better, and these two episodes back to back fit pretty well.
playing it was a very boardgame forward week at the cottage— clue, PARKS, and a new one for me, shadows over Camelot. not an uncomplicated setup, but some of the tie-ins to actual arthurian themes (the grail quest keeps pulling players in but it will grind them up and spit them out! the next generation are the ones who survive!) caught and held my enjoyment when the different mechanics threatened to lose it. I also tuned in to d&d remotely for a bit, though my connection was bad, and my rig was rated ‘haunted’ by the other players. they could hear crickets over the voice chat 😌🌲
making sewed a new patch onto my jacket and moved another two—picture to follow. didn’t do any of the mending I brought, but have had thoughts about what makes sense and what I might buy to supplement the projects. new fabric store on my commute deserves a visit, methinks.
working on truly the answer here is ‘not overthinking or delaying out of perfectionism’. which I have already done. finished all but the last eng 385 essay feedback, finished proofing for joe and responding to the department’s newsletter person for the piece she’s writing; still have to finish this letter of recommendation and these two (2!?) chapter drafts. the point is to be able to write a final sentence and just. let them go. learn how to not stop shy of finishing something. learn how to bring something (anything) to a state of some kind of completion. sure, right. sure.
if you need me, I’ll be back in the woods.
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watched the jsrf documentary recently and i am so unbelievably dissapointed
moved my rant from the tags to here. Spitted too much. Not like it matters to anyone except me cuz post is irrelevant now
Ok ik that i should not have expected something actually accurate from this video, considering how the fandom is and considering that from the very start i've seen the red flags so to say
One of these red flags is that jsrf is "literally LITERALLY just tony hawk games but roller skates". The first actually concerning thing i heard from others about it. It's my go-to way to determine that the person I'm listening to probably has no idea what they're talking about or a really missinformed. Never failed me so far
But oh man, even keeping that in mind, i did not expect whatever i got
Not only there were just no actual game analysis, which is wild, since you're like SAYING why this game is worth being played, but everything actually game related is a straight up lie
YEAH WE'RE GETTING TO LYING ABOUT GAME MECHANICS HERE
First, saying that grind combos areva rhythm game element. It could be just some weird wording, but it's just. Not true at all. Also calling this mechanic "silent". Whatever that supposed to mean. Not only it's not silent because Roboy tutorials exist and this mechanic is there, and nowhere us it said to be rhythm based, only timing based. And the tutorials ARE useful, since the controls were really expended here(using pretty much every button on the controller), but also that's not a silent mechanic purely for the fact that the character itself isn't silent during the entire thing.
Second. Saying that all characters got unique stats and that is showing off their personality. And uhh. What does that say about the love shockers and the immortals, with their stats. Or hell, clutch and jazz, who are literally right next to each other in the character select screen. It's dumb what I'm trying to say.
And not to mention the general overhyping of the game, by saying it's so so deep and thought-provoking oohhh(but then also never mention that one of jsr inspirations was movie fight club.why). And then just. Ignore that this is a game with not much dialogue. And then ignore every character aside dj k?????????
Like I'm not asking about talking about every single character, but at least like. Mention the plot relevant one's ??? Just the ones you can't possibly avoid. I know that dj k is the main man here but he alone does not move the story.
This kind of overhyping genuinely ruined my experience. Like i was under the impression that I'm gonna experience something out of this world and fun. But i came out of it disappointed. Mind you, i still have a lot to like about the game, but it's just. Not this. This is literally the the worst thing you can do when recommending the game. You will disappoint people. It's not this big grand thing because it wasn't allowed to become one. It's a sad but inspiring story about how even despite this, game is still liked. You don't need to pretty it up, lay out the truth.
Next thing about the video is that this is not a game documentary, but some random hot takes with some lies and long history lessons.
History lessons were a good part of it, but the fact that they put the us culture stuff before talking about the japanese culture is umm. This is a game made to portray a japanese culture from the time?? Like specifically. It's confirmed. To the point that one dev did not like the inclusion of grind city levels in jsr, because, in his mind, it was watering down its identity. Not to mention that this practice specifically existed just to make overseas audiences more comfortable, which is real fucking problematic if it's about something culture related imo. Anyway, he has a point.
Absolutely not denying the influences from other cultures here, because that's just stupid and wrong, but get a clue jeez.
And related to getting clues. This video used videos of actual protest while dj k's monologue was playing in the background. YOU JUST DON'T DO THIS. It's gross. It's weird to do even IF the game gets that real. And this game sure as hell doesn't.
Also do not understand who was this vid even made for, since fans will get nothing new out of it and newcomers wont understand what's the game is about and will be thrown into a sudden history lesson
So yeah highly don't reccomend watching
(update. i spitted out most of my problems with it and my comment was removed. so much for that free speech topic present and indorsed in the vid. also i made a vid that explains my points better)
#jet set radio#jet set radio future#my stuff#moved my rant from the tags to the post#got too much stuff to say and some unfortunate updates#anyways if i see you praising it then tell it here (in a civil manner) I'm genuinely interested#what exactly good stuff do you see in it
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So the first session of Limited Life was insanely fun to watch just from a character standpoint and I love the teams that are shaping up, but what's really fascinating is the new mechanics. Setting the server on Easy Mode was obviously a mistake and it's going to get fixed, but it's clear that Limited Life is set up to be fundamentally easier than its predecessors when it comes to survival, but also to become much more challenging as the game continues.
In Grian's episode, he talked about how one of the big problems in Double Life was the scarcity of resources due to the change in ore generation from the Caves and Cliffs update. It was hard to get iron, it was almost impossible to get diamond, and the time needed to grind just wasn't there. He talked about how in Session One, people lost a lot of time just getting down to mining level and getting back again, with very little to show for it. This is obviously not ideal for a series where everybody is looking to make interesting videos!
The other big setback issue from Double Life Session One was for Team Rancher, who both lost 90 minutes or so of progress when they got killed and both lost their entire inventories. They rallied and eventually came back from it, but that loss of progress was painful and required a bunch of additional grinding at the beginning of the game.
Now we have Limited Life, and both those pain points have been solved, with Keep Inventory on and double ore generation. (Grian generated the world in 1.17 and then updated to 1.19, so there is ore generated in both the above-zero and sub-zero layers.) Not only does that minimize the time needed for basic materials grinding, but it's made the first session a lot more relaxed. In Session One, death almost doesn't matter. Everyone's got functionally 24 lives, and armor is easy to come by! Fooling around is not a big deal, dig straight down, make that MLG leap, who cares? You don't even lose your stuff!
The thing is, even the best and most careful player has lost three "lives" by the end of session one. Time is life, and nobody can stop that inexorable drain, only try and hold out as long as possible. What good is a full inventory, what good is diamond armor, when the server itself is killing you with every tick of the clock? In the end there's only one currency worth anything, and we're going to start seeing brisk trading as soon as people start turning yellow.
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After playing SRB2, do Sonic games really need physics-based ramps like loops, corkscrews and such?
I mean, did they ever? An argument could be made that loops actually give you a burst of speed (especially if you know where to jump to juice your momentum) but some of that was more about fun spectacle.
Or, like, I guess if you think about a corkscrew, that's very specifically a routing thing. You can only enter the corkscrew from the start, and it carries you to the end that would otherwise be hard to reach without it. In theory, anyway. Like a more rigid grind rail concept.
Classic Sonic physics also, generally, feel good. Maybe this is something they teach you up front in a game design course, but something I've come to observe is that feedback is like 50% of game design. You might have a really clever game mechanic but you need to convey to the player what is happening and fill in the blanks for senses they might not have due to only holding a controller.
That means sometimes things don't animate "realistically" or specific sounds might be louder than they are in real life or whatever, because you need to put emphasis on things in order to deliberately draw the player's attention to it or make them feel a certain way.
Having all of these big sloping hills and being in control of a living rollercoaster is a lot of fun, as it turns out. You get that fun from the sense of building up to a drop and the sense of speed you get from that. And you don't even need that much, because too much of that weight and speed and you start to actually feel heavy and sluggish, even out of control. To some degree it's just gotta be a taste.
There was this really old flash game called Fancy Pants Adventures and it had kind of a Sonic the Hedgehog feel to it -- but since it was drawn in flash, you could have these big, long, winding hills and it felt incredible to get going running down those.
youtube
I'm linking this because it's my own video, but it's worth mentioning Fancy Pants lives on; there's phone versions and even a game on Steam.
Racing around on hills and feeling the pace rise and fall is one of those basic core tenants of lizard brain fun. Rolling balls is also fun and many sports revolve around it.
Loops and corkscrews and such is just the gravy at some point. But then I ask you: what's wrong with a bit of gravy every now and then?
#questions#Anonymous#srb2#sonic robo-blast 2#physics#sonic the hedgehog#sega#fan game#gamedev#fancy pants adventures
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To Sleep - Expiration Date Runners-up
A deathly but still somehow congratulatory silence for our runners-up this week: @izzet-always-r-versus-u, @nine-effing-hells, and @yd12k!
Temporal Displacement - @izzet-always-r-versus-u
Gotta say that 'Old Age' is not a cause of death I expected to see this week, nor would I have expected to find it so compelling, but here we are, with some assistance from time-travel shenanigans. I will not lie, it did take me a couple reads to figure out that you could, actually, use this to flicker your own stuff, without any concerns about adverse aging, and I do very much appreciate the flexibility that grants the card. I am a little afraid that it might be a bit too above rate as a result, though, given that they've done enough flicker at 2 mana that having it also double as a removal spell feels a little aggressive, cost-wise. Absolutely adore the flavor text though. Nice and snappy, doesn't feel like it needs to explain much more what is happening, I'm a fan.
Fall Into the Gears - @nine-effing-hells
This week is gonna be a lot of me fawning over flavor text if I'm being honest. So please do not be surprised when I say Good Lord How Many People Have Fallen Into the Gears Already, Someone Call Fantasy OSHA, Please. Absolutely adore that flavor text. The name leaves no room for interpretation as to the cause of death, and you've done a delightful job of using the italics to paint in a bit of detail about the world this is set in (namely, that it is Unsafe, which I suppose is true of most Magic settings, but very few of those involve workplace hazards, so it balances I think). All that said, I do think it could use a bit more love mechanically. Tapping an artifact to grind something to death is lovely and all, but the amount of setup required to make this sorcery-speed two mana removal spell work in the first place feels a bit high to me. Certainly, mana-value-scaling cards like this can get a little crazy, but that craziness feels very much constrained already by the fact that this cannot go face, so I do think you could've maybe gotten away with making this a little cheaper, or at the very least given it a base amount of damage and have the size of the artifact be a nice lil bonus, maybe a little like Welding Sparks. Falling into gears is still gonna hurt even if they're stationary, I figure.
Erase Identity - @yd12k
I appreciate this approach of ego death as a form of actual death, because in a setting like this, where we have so many necromancers everywhere reanimating corpses like it's nothing, constraining the concept of dying to endless dirt naps does not make much sense to me. Might as well get metaphorical with it. As for the literal, I'm a very big fan of what this card is doing mechanically, stripping a creature of just about everything that makes it it, but if I must pick nits I have to say that the mana cost does concern me slightly. If the format is heavily focused on playing Creatures Of Size for Size’s Sake, then this thing at three mana rather than, like, four, is gonna be absolutely brutal, whereas in more enters-the-battlefield-value focused environments, I think you're right about where you want this to be cost-wise. Unsure, honestly. I have seen this compared to a Fiend Hunter but I don't think I need to explain to you how threatening Fiend Hunter is when it's potentially a three-mana 6/6. Compare Duplicant, which, while subject to the Generic Mana Tax, is I think a reasonable comparison point for how to price something this swingy. Regardless, this card is lovely and I adore the flavor and mechanical direction you've taken this concept. Well done.
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People are very familiar with how konami utterly fucked the Silent Hill IP and in that vein my personal franchise that "got SH'd" would be Breath of Fire.
Certain fans assigned the 5th game (Dragon Quarter) as being what killed it, but I'll defend that game for being a fairly unique RPG (and good!!) in its own right. I feel like if it came out now, people would appreciate it more.
It's relatively short (if you're fast you can legitimately beat it in <8 hours), brutal (flavor/setting + finite resources, finite enemies) and there's a simplicity to it that people seem to mistake as a problem rather than a choice.
read more of me rambling on about how one mechanic can uniquely define a game
One of the loudest fan criticisms of DQ is that it didn't have the dragon gene mixing/summons people loved and that there was !!only one dragon form!! But I'd say it was a worthy sacrifice for doing more with the dragon mechanics.
Your dragon/"I win" button was strapped to Ryu's/the MC's lifespan- sure you'd get devastating dragon powers, but it would also eventually kill him and could deadlock* your game if you abused it. Even walking around would (slowly) tick up the death counter which generates a good sense of urgency *without* condescending railroading.
As a result of this, DQ features something most of the other BoF games generally lacked, meaningfully dangerous encounters.
Other entries would be more typical random encounters that could be snuffed out or eventually grinded out of being a threat.
Meanwhile DQ has finite enemies (and EXP). Battles would take place on a 1:1 map, terrain, enemies, hazards, and items were retained from the normal map and vice-versa.
The game also cranked up the stakes by having limited hard saves (it required a consumable item), but still allowed you to have a soft save anywhere (the latter would be deleted upon reloading the game). Retaining your progress was always on the line and properly framed the dragon option as a temptation with consequences.
*note: the game wasn't so unfair as to leave you without any recourse, you could get a Restart+ where you carried over some items and EXP from a failed run to start the game over again, but leave it to gamers to puzzle out a way to exploit this courtesy to grind/farm, kudos on figuring it out but newspaper whap for going against the spirit of the game
This sort of decision working mechanically, playerwise, AND as a story point was a unique experience. Most games get bogged down in complexities and convulsion but DQ kept to a simple and sweet execution of "this power comes with a terrible price" and is a stronger experience for you.
As a game designer, the cohesion of story and mechanics is a solid inspiration.
Anyway did you know that there was a BoF 6? It was a mobile game and it shut down in about a year. Yes it is was soulless as it sounds. Yes the art is as bad and generic as it sounds.
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Bonus Round! BoF Game Rankings + Misc.:
BoF:DQ (in case it was not obvious) is my favorite of the series, it's an RPG I can easily revisit and enjoy, truly a lean game. My ideal remake would tidy up the graphics to be nicer and to tweak some fiddlier bits, but the best I can hope for is a lazy port just because I don't think there are many copies (and more people should play it!). The NA box art is a crime though, horrible, 1000 years dungeon.
BoF 4, I like the overall plot and what it tried to do, there's some dodgy TL but I like the weird dragons and the art. Unfortunately it suffers from being in that PS1-PS2 transitory era and from RPG trappings of the time.
BoF 2 (GBA) has a a soft nostalgia spot in my heart. The TL work was incredibly jank, but is what defined JRPGs for me with its funny little freak party and the whiplash of weird goofy shit and Horror that Just Works.
BoF 3 and 1: I never really got around to properly playing either of these and have no real motivation to fix that.
I actually own the BoF artbook (in Japanese) and if you happen to enjoy them, I rec the the purchase even if you know nothing about the series. It actually contains *art from all 5 games* and having a consolidated timeline for how the art evolved over time is fascinating.
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i can literally never go back to TTR at this point. i cannot possibly overstate the degree to which TTCC has permanently ruined rewritten for me in the ONE MONTH i have played it consistently this year so far. (i played it for a month when it first came out but i just never got into it back then.)
rewritten is just... so bad and unfun, relatively. it's fatally stuck in the past. it's for nostalgic people who want a few months of ignorant fun, not for long-term enjoyment. don't get me wrong, TTO was certifiably The Shit back in the late 2000s and all we stupid children loved it exactly how it was (which is how TTR still is), but how can it possibly be enjoyed anymore once you've seen the greener pastures? even if clash was almost an exact copy of rewritten and the only differences were the quality of life changes, those changes are so impactful on every aspect of gameplay that i'd still feel the same way.
but it's not even just QoL changes, clash also improves on every aspect of the story, characters, the game mechanics, etc. fuck, even just the clash team is infinitely better than rewritten's. they actually respond to emails, take action against bad actors, approve names within 24 hours (rewritten takes WELL over 1 month recently), and god man, it's so so SOOOO obvious just how passionate the clash team is about the game. it's not something they need to say out loud; it's something you straight up feel as you play it. they pour their hearts and souls into making clash the best it can possibly be.
i used to play rewritten thinking i was having fun, but i am honest to god questioning that now. i don't think i was ever having fun on it in the past few years, not seriously. it's all nostalgia for a game that suffers from crushing subscription-incentivizing design and 2003 capabilities. the entire game is going through the fucking Motions, wasting your life playing the most soul-suckingly repetitive ways disney could implement to keep a bunch of 9 year olds begging their parents for a monthly subscription back in 2009 so they wouldn't get locked out of their toon before they could complete their seventh Back Nine in a row to do one CEO before their math homework. there's not even any strategy involved in the gameplay because it's not meant to pose any sort of challenge, it's just a timesink for monthly subscriptions. clash feels fresh. there's actual strategy and it can be really difficult (in a fun way!!!!) even if you're experienced.
clash is the modern take on toontown, and man do they knock it out of the park on every single account. the fact that i have recently discovered one of my new favorite fictional characters ever and it comes from clash says a lot about how good it is. meanwhile in TTO/TTR, you can generally find people laughing about lil oldman or maybe saying they enjoy flippy, but not much else love for characters besides edge cases. the story of clash has genuine replayability. i feel actual excitement to replay the managers in clash and even to grind them, whereas i would always dread having to do another suit boss or field office in rewritten. playing it is almost like an abusive relationship. i never maxed a toon in TTO, so i really wanted to max a toon in TTR since it was the closest thing... it's such an extreme example of the sunk cost fallacy, blatantly so now that i've played clash.
the fact of the matter is, i grew up. TTO was, and now TTR is, fun for people under the age of 15, and/or people stuck in the early 2010s at the latest. despite being really into clash for such a short amount of time so far, i've already heard this sentiment echoed a number of times while playing it. no one who goes into clash with an open mind and gives it an honest chance goes back to rewritten in a meaningful capacity. no one hits 115 laff in rewritten and thinks "wow, almost all of the rest of my laff will come from suits, i'm so excited to do back nines!" meanwhile i'm about to hit 115 laff in clash and i'm not even remotely finished with the (compelling, well-written, and cohesive) story, much less doing anything repetitive. i'm only excited to continue where i'm at.
#this is a mess. i just wanted to rant#i still log into rewritten a couple times a week to keep up on my cattlelog (the urge to Collect despite no intentions to Play again)#but also to gift my few friends all the wearables since afking at beanfest while on clash is so easy and it makes them super happy :')#also so when friends see me online and whisper me i can continue telling them how much fun i'm having on clash (HINT HINT)#three of them have said they want to check out clash 😉😳😏 i'm working on wearing them down to bring them over ok#one of them said the same thing i kept telling myself for weeks before i started clash:#“i just want to max this toon and then i'll happily try out clash :) i've only heard really good things about it. i'm excited to play it!”#they're at 123 laff rn and i was at 126 laff when i was telling myself that last month right after maxing cashbot#trying my hardest to telepathically beam directly into their brain just how far from worthwhile that endeavor is without being pushy#just take a leap and go straight to clash... instant life improvement + very quick redpill for seeing how bad the rewritten experience is#clashpilled......#original
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let's see about 5, 11, 12, 13 for the ask meme?
5. What game would you recommend to someone new to the series?
ugh this is so HARD because i don't think there's any game that's perfect for this...
if they're new to the series but have enjoyed at least a couple older video games at some point (and thus have some tolerance for a bit of gameplay cruft and GBA-era rough edges), i'd be really tempted to throw Sacred Stones at them. absolutely gorgeous sprites, good music, probably the most solid/focused/best-executed story in the series, fun support conversations, and very good gameplay whose only flaw is "it's kinda too easy." but it's satisfying and if someone likes everything about it but "too easy," then that's an easy problem to fix with subsequent games lol
i suspect Awakening is probably the objectively-better answer, though. first "modern"-feeling FE in terms of how streamlined and nice the mechanics feel, the depth/multiplicity of strategies, the storyline is weaker but still has definite highlights (especially when the kids show up), etc
Three Houses is a solid contender but the game is kind of bloated with extras that i think can make playing it feel like a bit of a drag; i know a lot of people who just kinda flaked out or gave up b/c of all the monastery stuff, and i wouldn't want someone's first FE to end that way
i do love the Tellius games but i wouldn't recommend them as starter games. the 3d sprites are kinda ugly and it definitely shows its age a bit in terms of gameplay cruft
11. A character that deserved better?
Edelgard, tbh. she's fantastic when the game isn't trying to make her all woobie/waifu/etc. wouldn't even take many changes to fix this one!
also Renning. i love what's on the page but he gets so little and shows up so late. give the dude some damn base conversations plz
also Meg. the game is so mean to her, goddamn.
12. A game that deserved better?
oh boy. the problem here is, if i finished playing an FE game, that means i liked it well enough over all, even if there's stuff i didn't like. like, i wish Awakening's storyline was stronger, but it definitely feels like it executed on exactly what it wanted to do, so i wouldn't say the game deserves better per se
so i guess i'll say the two FE games i tried and failed to play:
fe6: i ragequit on the map with the fucking reinforcements that move the same turn that they spawn. motherfuckers. why
fe14: i was already pretty "eh" on the story and then that one fucking "defend [x] turns" map (unhappy reunion iirc) took SO much finicky effort to survive that by the time i finished it i was like. ugh. i'm so tired. and then i put it down for a while and never picked it back up oops
13. What do you like most about Fire Emblem?
...god this is going to make me sound SO uncultured but, the support conversations, especially in the older games, are just so delightful. delightful in-and-of-themselves (especially when they would happen DIRECTLY ON THE BATTLEFIELD lmao), and also, were probably weirdly influential in how i thought about game writing / writing generally. conveyed a huge amount of personality & implied huge things about the world & in a relatively small space; and also refused to let anyone be just a rando soldier in your army; you can look back at short fiction i wrote in middle school and see how much i was striving to get that huge-cast-small-space-feel in that format. simple but effective approach
also it's nice to have a big-name game series that executes so well on story and gameplay, on average. i've played a lot of Final Fantasy and i love those games but. often the gameplay is just kinda mediocre/grind-y, right, and i'm forcing my way through for the story? could NOT be fire emblem lol
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