Loser’s Club as camp half blood kids hc
(These are terribly organized I’m so sorry, all under the cut)
Stan: deffo an Athena kid, look at that little logic man and tell me he’s not Athena. He would be extremely talented on the battle field but would rarely want to fight (besides, why do that when he could command his battalion in capture the flag) and he somehow befriended an owl in his third year at camp and it’ll do whatever he wants (including keeping richie in check)
Ben: also in the Athena cabin, but one of the softer of them. Always wins when they’re tasked with a building competition cause he actually reads up on what types of structures work best,,he would develop and design all of the Athena cabin weaponry and would specially design stuff for stanley. Their cabin is the coolest one because Ben is always reconstructing as needed, and it’s never too full because he has somehow developed a building that expands as needed, but only on the inside. This kid is fucking gifted.
Mike: Jesus imagine my boy mike as a Persephone kid that’s the cutest shit I’ve ever seen,,,persephone kids are almost as rare (if not more) than big three kids, so he lives in the Demeter cabin. the whole camp would adore him and the wood nymphs would love talking to this ~one~ boy because he has major respect for all parts of nature,, he would grow lil flowers to give to everyone and would make flower crowns for bev,,and although he is a little flower child he takes capture the flag VERY seriously if he’s up against his Losers. (The wood nymphs love doing favors for him such as tripping richie and taking bev’s sword right out of her hand)
Richie: holy fuck he would definitely end up head of the Hermes cabin (somehow) and he would be worse than the Stoll brothers combined,,,don’t ask how he managed to acquire a dildo tree or get a Trojan horse to camp without anyone noticing, he’s also ~conveniently~ part messenger god, which makes sending pranks to people even easier (also imagine the first time he tries to use the winged converse y i k e s there was definitely a face plant in there)
Bill: listen,,,,he would definitely be a Zeus kid if he wasn’t such an angery piece of shit,,, so you better believe he is one of the softest Hades kids to ever enter that camp,,,when he got bored he’d summon cool rocks and shit. As soon as he hears of Nico being able to summon the dead he pesters him into teaching him, learning extremely quickly how to summon spirits. Every once in a while the losers cant find bill, cause he’s sitting in a hidden cave he managed to create, talking to Georgie
Bev: listen my fiery girl would obviously be an Ares kid. She may be the nicest in the cabin, but you’re dead wrong if you think for a second she wouldn’t beat your ass if provoked. Her and Stan definitely have a friendly rivalry in capture the flag (or any battle-related activity, for that matter.) she loves her bf Ben but she can’t help but coaxing the latest Athena cabin weaponry plans out of him. Ben goes to mush as soon as Bev talks to him, and every thought he had of keeping the developments to the cabin goes out the door with one look into those eyes. Coincidentally, next week’s capture the flag battle is between Ares and Athena, and Ben is completely lost as to how the Ares cabin somehow had counter measures for all of their weaponry,, he’d been planning them for months, and had picked through all of the Ares cabin’s tactics previous to this, how did they know? Let’s just say stan was HEATED
Eddie: okay with an idiot of a boyfriend like richie (who constantly forgets where he sets up traps during capture the flag) eddie needs to be able to fix his boy. He may not seem like an Apollo boy other than the fact that he’s wicked good at being camp medic, but he’s getting pretty dialed in on his foresight (even though it only consistently reaches about an hour into the future.) still, this makes fixing up his idiots easier, as he knows exactly what to pack in his magic fanny pack (think Leo’s tool belt) before every capture the flag (even though he no longer needs it, after realizing that it wasn’t his drugs healing him but his own abilities). After LOTS of practice, Eds walks up to richie, touches his forehead, and richie fucking loses his shit because h o l y s h i t why is everything so blurry??? Before taking his glasses off and crying because everything is in focus
Also:
-bill and mike always help in developing the area for the capture the flag games and make sure it’s aesthetically pleasing, interesting, and different from the last time
-SHIT AND MIKE AND THE DEMETER CABIN MAKE CORN MAZE CAPTURE THE FLAG FOR FALL (complete with spooky scares from the grain nymphs)
-most of the hades kids come and go, so billiam is alone a lot in his cabin, making the hades cabin basically the loser’s cabin for sleepovers
-(bill also sleeps in the Athena cabin a lot cause of the immense space and his bf)
-Eds discovers his poetic abilities when sitting with Ben and trying to think of what to say to ask rich out
-Eds definitely also helps richie write songs
-richie is a large lanky boy but somehow kicks ass when they have track events (its one of the only places he doesn’t trip)
-his biggest threat? Billiam, aka lanky boy #2
-“it’s not fair, he can literally influence the track and make my lane turn into sand!” “S-step up your p-prank game, tozier”
-richie replaces bill’s shoes with some winged ones and Jesus Christ he’s never laughed as hard as he did when bill hit the side of the big house as soon as the race started
-eddie never really pursues his artistic abilities but one time rich has a bad night and sends Eds a message to meet him at the hades cabin (bill is with Stan) and he finds richie panicking over a nightmare so he starts singing to richie and holy shit richie was crying but not cause of his nightmare
-mike always brings flowers to the medics tent and brings some of each patients’ favorites to put at their bedside
-mr d cannot stand richies existence sometimes but all of that is forgotten when richie somehow gets him some ancient bottle of wine that d hasn’t seen in millennia
-whenever eddie sees richie’s laugh or smile the camp gets a lil brighter for a second
-sometimes mike goes and sits with bill while he’s talking to Georgie. He helped him with hiding bill’s little spot, can also (to an extent) contact the dead, and bill trusts him immensely. Bill loves the losers but most of the time he just wants to talk to Georgie alone. When he does invite the losers to come talk, they don’t go to bill’s spot
-I can’t help but imagining mike making all of the losers little flower crowns made of assorted flowers and all of them match the person
-richie has so many laurel wreaths from mike due to his immense list of track records
-they think bill was conceived while the gods were battling with their second self, because he was claimed by hades but has the ability to conjure metals and jewels like Pluto (which is super uncommon when you’re Greek)
-(of course he gets his bf’s cabin some of the best metals for weapons)
-richie somehow gets all of the Good Shit from the outside world into the camp. Nintendo switch? Stan buys it off of him the first day rich has it (along with all the Mario games that comes with it.) cigarettes? Him and Bev share those. Books from libraries across the world? Ben is still amazed as to how richie gets a hold of some of the Ancient Greek texts he sells him but he’s not complaining.
-Eds sometimes misses his boyfriends stupid glasses, so richie finds some hipster glasses and wears them sometimes
-sometimes Eds wishes he had better luck with curses bc sometimes his boyfriend needs to shut the fuck up
-richie and Bev live at camp year round, while bill and Ben often return home, eddie has to go home every break (no matter how short), and mike and stan only goes home on the really long ones
-mike also helps Eddie with finding certain medicinal herbs (richie of course finds the medical marijuana eddie is keeping hidden in his fanny pack)
-instead of “your mom” jokes richie now makes jokes relating to Percy (with only the occasional jokes about mrs k) because come on he’s now the camp mom
-“wait eddie this is so gross that we’re dating cause we’re related” “fuck off richie” “gives me more of a reason to date your mom”
-eddie always makes sure Bill gets enough sunlight,,,that kids depressed enough he needs some vitamin d
-Stan’s owl friend always watches the cabins during the night, and when he sees richie setting trip wires and such on the playing ground, alerts stan
-eddie teaches richie guitar, which he picks up on quickly. It’s one of the only things his Hermes dexterity applies to, and his lankiness gives him a little bit of an advantage
-reddie is the musical power couple that everyone loves during campfires, although Eddie objects every time until richie literally pulls him to the middle of the circle with Eddie on one knee and his guitar on the other
-they have WiFi thanks to richie
-richie sets up sensors on all the cabin doors on April first and the first door to be opened (bill’s) sets off speakers in all the cabins, blasting Africa by Toto at full bass and full volume
-let’s just say eddie didn’t talk to him for four days because WHY WOULD TOU DO TJAT RICHARD
-“wait bill can you have blue fire hair like hades in Hercules??” “Richie I s-swear to god”
-eddie purposely makes it sunny all the time cause he loves the way the sun shines in Rich’s hair and gives him lil freckles :,,,,)
-Ben appreciates the sun too because bev’s hair looks like fire and she gets so many freckles
-Percy stays at camp during breaks cause he knows how lonely it can get and it always helps for richie to have one more friend while most of his are gone
-he adopts richie cause he sees a little bit of himself in that little shithead (and he may use him to long-distance pester Jason with letters rigged to spew water at him as soon as he opens the envelope before pulling out a soggy piece of blue paper that says “hope you’re not missing us too much in California”)
-Annabeth ADORES Ben and Stanley, she basically adopts them as her kids cause Ben is an intelligent little softie and stan is equally intelligent (although in battle strategy rather than crafting)
-Ben loves it when annabeth visits cause he has someone to show his architectural plans to and help him revise them
-Ben gets SUPER good at architecture, so good in fact that he’s literally hired at age sixteen to help in construction in Olympus
-Hermes learned from his mistakes of neglecting his kids, and is sure as hell to visit and talk to richie and the others as often as he can, especially Richie because of his family history
-after the Athena cabin’s plan backfire, stan gets richie’s assistance in payback (he gets the Hephaestus cabin to create weapons that look exactly like the Ares cabins’, but turn into a mini metal figurine of richie doing finger guns as soon as the capture the flag buzzers go off)
-Bev has a rage in her eyes that hasn’t been seen since they defeated IT, and sweet sweet Ben has to hold her back and (try) to calm her down until bill can come in and make her pass out
-she wakes up kicking and screaming with her entire cabin giving up at blocking her from the door and parting like the Red Sea as soon as they see a red glow surrounding her
-this is the one time bill allows a third loser into his cave hiding place, as nobody knows where it is (he made richie pass out as well before taking him into the cave to protect him from the Wrath of Beverly)
-Bev finally calms down (eddie may have put that medical marijuana to use in some special tea he’s formulated)
-mike sometimes just goes and sits in the forest if he can’t sleep. He loves how it looks at night, and how many odd creatures are roaming around
-he meets Grover one night, and they instantly become great friends
-Grover figures out that one of the wood nymphs has a crush on mike, and plays match maker
-the losers notice mike going to the forest more frequently, and while walking back into camp, little patches of flowers grow in his footprints
-when they start dating, mike likes to make his girlfriend’s tree bloom, and changes the color and type of flower each time
-they’re adorable and everyone loves them
-he protects her tree with all costs, as its life is tied to hers
-mr d has definitely found richie in his underwear and a camp Jupiter shirt passed out on the steps of the big house at 6 in the morning, with Richie holding a bottle of fireball
-richie was put on pegasus shit duty for a week, and Eddie refused to rid him of his immense hangover
-somehow richie gets a cat into the camp, its the camp pet and rich always brings it into the med tent to cheer up injured and sickly kids
-the cat mainly lives there, but it goes to bill’s cabin a lot for peace and quiet
-listen,,, the cat would totally have some horrible name that richie makes up like mr noodles and mr d would be so confused as to who mr noodles could be
-Ben my sweet boy and Stanley sometimes sit with mike in the forest during the day. Mike and stan watch the birds, and Ben reads more of the books rich has smuggled in
-richie tozier makes it his goal to get as many aphrodite kids after him as possible (eddie acts like he hates it but knows his idiot would never leave him)
-literally half the Aphrodite cabin is in love with him, and the other half isn’t interested in guys
-richie gets mike to give him assortments of flowers, and brings them to Eddie in the medics tent every morning
-it’s basically like an alarm cause every day, without fail, the sun will shine a little too brightly at 8 am
If you took the time to read all this you’re a Saint and I appreciate you
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Why Torna will always be the Golden Country
Apologies to those who have the pleasure of hearing this opinion on a daily basis, but Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is a good game. In fact, in a year that brought us Mario Odyssey and Breath of the Wild, Xenoblade stood out as my favourite game I played in 2017. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to defend this opinion shortly, but in the interim I’d like to give a brief backstory of my relationship with Xenoblade.
I didn’t Play Xenoblade 1 or X. Actually, it wasn’t until Xenoblade 2 came out that I even considered buying it at all. The only reason I bought it at all was to round out the ‘Year of Nintendo’ having bought a new AAA Switch game every month. I didn’t even play other Japanese RPGs like Final Fantasy and games like Octopath Traveller didn’t interest me in the slightest after playing Xenoblade.
The basic premise of Xenoblade is that you are a Driver, basically a swordsman, who has up to three Blades at a time. Depending on which Blade you have engaged at any given time, you have different elemental attacks which have individual effects. Rex, the protagonist, accidentally encounters the most powerful Blades in existence. First is Pyra, an Aegis who becomes the main companion of Rex and is the key component to the story. Then there’s Malos and Jin, the antagonists, who want Pyra dead for reasons that only 100 hours of gameplay can really make clear.
When I played Xenoblade, it took me hours and hours and hours to finally clock the combat system, by which point they’d added various combos, gauges and other factors to start thinking about. Every time it stepped up the complexity, I was drawn further in. And, though everyone else hates it, I found the cutscenes to be fun and enjoyable. The story managed to suck me into learning everything about the universe that I knew nothing about, in a way that Skyrim never coaxed me into.
Where Xenoblade Chronicles 2 falls short is in its length, clocking in at well over 100 hours from start to finish and immeasurably longer if you’re interested in all the side quests. Also the combat system, while is engaging in isolation, can get tedious during grinding and uninteresting side-quests. Oh and the map/waypoint system leaves a lot to be desired. And there’s too many blades which bond with a given driver permanently. And Poppi is a super irritating blade to try and manage. Despite all these factors, the sheer scope, beautiful environments and complicated storyline kept me hooked to the point where a year on I’m still itching to get back on and start a new game from scratch, then start a new game plus to 100% it. If I had another 300 hours to spare, I would.
This year, the Xenoblade team made a magnificently unique choice. They released a DLC pack called ‘Torna: The Golden Country’, a prequel that explores Jin, Malos and the characters you meet only in flashbacks during the main game. Well, yes that’s been done plenty. But this DLC is also a stand alone game. You can walk to the shops and buy Torna without having touched the main game.
Torna is perfectly crafted to exist as a standalone game to those who have no idea Jin is destined to become a villain in the future as well as for those who know everything about Lora’s future but want to learn more about her past. Lora in general, actually, is an excellent protagonist compared to Rex. She is flawed and heroic in organic ways where Rex was built to be a generic, blank-slate, hot-headed but good-willed kid like we’ve seen time and time again.
If you’d not guessed it yet already, Torna: the Golden Country being a standalone game is the perfect way to release this game. Not only because it entices people into the franchise with a much more manageable £20 price tag, but because it lets me get away with calling it my Game of the Year 2018.
Lets start with the squad. Xenoblade 2 has Rex, Tora, Nia, Vandam, Zeke and Morag as the main components of the party, each of which has 1 ‘key component’ blade who has their own character traits and 2 more blades which are assigned by the player. That makes it incredibly busy and gives you lots to keep track of. This works in a 100 hour campaign, but for a 20-30 hour DLC pack it would be far too much. That’s why Torna has just 9 (playable) characters. Lora, Adam and Hugo will always be your party and each has exactly 2 blades. This compacts the experience and allows the developers and the player to focus all their attention on these characters to develop them all as much in 20 hours as Xenoblade 2 does in 100. Admittedly Hugo felt a little generic, as though he’d already had his story arc, but that’s of little consequence.
The world is compacted down too, Xenoblade 2 sees you scouring dozens of Titans (basically islands) with snow, plains, cities, forests, oceans and all kinds of different environments, each with its own distinct feel. Torna has just two Titans to worry about, the sprawling Gormott, which exists in Xenoblade 2 as a similar but distinctly changed map, and Torna itself, which is divided into several sub-sections for ease of navigation. It would have been nice to have one extra environment to explore, but these two are all you really need. Gormott is so vast that it’s easy to forget what you’re doing because you saw a chest in the distance while Torna is compact and incredibly functional, making it easy to catalogue all there is to do and work at it methodically. This also make the enemies you fight consistent and there tends to be more of a focus on animals than generic human soldiers than the full game.
The story itself is engaging but curiously, fails to address a lot of the questions I was left with at the end of Xenoblade 2. Adam in particular is an elusive character in Xenoblade 2’s flashbacks but we meet him in Torna after he’s done his ‘legendary’ stuff without ever finding out what it was. It does an excellent job of going over the basics without dwelling on stuff we already heard Rex talk about every half hour in the main game but I can only hope these gaps in the story can be filled in through future games.
Some smaller changes include the campfire crafting, which replaces a majority of the NPC interaction in the main game. Shops are few and far between so you must make do with what you can make yourself. In the grand scheme of things, very little is changed with this alteration besides (as I’m sure you’re sick of me saying) condensing the gameplay down.
The only considerable drawbacks from the game, which if you’ve read any other reviews you’ll be more than aware of already, are that the voice acting is a very acquired taste and the characters will repeat the same half dozen phrases in combat for the entire adventure. More frustrating though is the wall you come against at two points in the game. There are two segments in which your only quest will become ‘do X side quests’, amounting to around 50 side quests that are unavoidable to complete the game. This didn’t affect me because the side quests were a natural part of my progression in the game, so I was only ever a couple away from my target anyway but if you were hoping to blast through the story without touching the optional quests, you will get angry. The optional quests themselves vary a lot from ‘kill x enemy’ to genuinely engaging sub-plots that span the whole game. Generally I found them to be an enjoyable extension of the game rather than a chore but I can see why others would disagree.
When Ubisoft talked about their Donkey Kong DLC for Mario Vs Rabbids, they explained how the DLC was actually quite a lot easier than the main game was in its later levels. It was an expansion, not an extension. Given that Torna is marketed for both newcomers and veterans, it’s easy to see how the complicated gameplay would be a barrier for one of these two groups. Newcomers would have to learn a 100-hour gameplay loop in 1/5 the time or veterans would be left bored that their hours of learning were wasted as Torna becomes too easy. The gameplay is by far the best part of Torna.
The very basic concepts are still in place, Lora still has her Blades and they grant her powers. You still have two other team members and all of you have various elemental attacks that can combo together. Where Torna refines the work of its predecessor is that Blades and Drivers can both be playable in combat. Rather than Pyra granting Rex a fiery sword, Jin can step forward in battle and Lora grants him bonuses. They have special attacks that trigger when they’re ‘tagged out’ which deal more damage and make encounters more interactive. You feel more like a team of 3 characters rather than a Pokemon Trainer with his Fire, Ice and Electric types. There’s also a more effective Elemental Combo system which makes it laughably easy to set up an enemy with all 8 elements and ‘break’ them for a massive chain of damage. This would probably get on my nerves but later in the game, they start to punish you for over-extending. Certain bosses deal immense damage to you if you leave elemental orbs for too long, giving you the choice between setting up and breaking as quickly as possible with the risk of it backfiring or learn new techniques to win battles without elemental attacks. In addition, there being only 9 characters to think about means the developers could build real synergies between them which are easy enough to work out without spending hours trawling through the wiki.
I wasn’t lying when I said Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was my favourite game of last year, standing tall above Mario and Zelda and Splatoon and Pokemon. It was so imperfect that it’s really easy to talk about the problems it had. And, as I hope to explain one day, it is not as good as Odyssey and Breath of the Wild were last year. But it was by far my favourite game. Torna systematically deconstructs Xenoblade 2 to find out where those faults were and how they can be addressed. Torna doesn’t take a 100 hour adventure and cut it down to 20 hours. It fits 100 hours of depth into 20. It makes me truly excited to see how Xenoblade 3 takes the same 20-hour experience and extends it back out to 100.
If the huge investment and complicated gameplay put you off buying Xenoblade Chronicles 2, or if you’re wanting an excuse to jump back onto the Titans of Alrest, Torna: The Golden Country is a must-have.
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