Death being portrayed as friendly, sympathetic, and helpful is one of my favorite tropes in all of fiction, especially when Death is acting that way towards someone who is dying or has recently died.

so true

LGBT+ human villagers, particularly ones from the Outside World, begin to worship Chimata due to her ability to let one relinquish ownership through bartering (hey nice gender you got there, want to trade yours for mine?), her status as the god of the unowned, and her rainbow color scheme. Chimata is initially confused by this and questions some of the seeming leaps in logic, but quickly accepts her new faithful.

LOL love this. Chimata proceeds to introduce Gay Pride Parades to gensokyo but then finds out that everyone in gensokyo is already gay and parading around every day

I'm excited that The Elder Scrolls VI will be set in Hammerfell. If the story of The Elder Scrolls VI focuses on the Second Great War between the Empire and the Aldmeri Dominion, then I hope it doesn't overshadow the Redguards and their fascinating culture.

I hope if it does focus on the Second Great War, it's just like the Civil War Questline with each side having no more than 12 city guards fighting for them. Redguards for the win

fitting song i guess. i still go back to their works once in a while, fact i did last time the topic came up. might've said this but they do have a couple short sets that i wish had translations.

didn't know about the youtube channel though, guess they gave up on animations. or it just hasn't come up again.

I have to ask: do Pokemon Scarlet and Violet add new fossil Pokemon? Spain has such a robust history of paleontology and fossil finds, and I'd be disappointed if Pokemon Scarlet and Violet didn't tap into that.

I don't actually know. I'm not looking a ton up, so I can't say for sure.

alright michael, lightning round

@officialhelljumper

Both are owned by microsoft now! unfortunately I doubt there are many people high enough up in microsoft that care enough to use company clout for that, so I'd say it remains about as likely as before. Maybe even less, Obsidian seems to mostly be interested in growing its own stable of IPs nowadays given that they're putting more into Outer Worlds.

I think it was one of the dev team's biggest regrets that they had to cut so much Legion content from the final product due to time crunch. I guess if you're not gonna have time to fully develop them, it's better to err on the side of narratively making it clear what's wrong with them than it is to just write them as a 'morally grey' option and leave a legacy of dudes defending them forever because the game was too subtle with its satire.

Also, I don't think any of the casinos in game are based off of real casinos; it would probably get legally sticky to have the actual Caesar's palace in the game.

NCR is interesting to me because a lot of their writing is built on inertia from the first two games. Like, at least from my perspective, there isn't a whole lot of reason to support them unless you care about them before the game itself, and that'll only be the case if you played the first two games. Otherwise (and even if you did play 1&2) they're so transparently imperialist and badly managed that it's hard to gravitate towards them naturally. Most of their early interactions are the bureaucracy getting in your way.

If you're after offbeat horror RPGs (where RPG doesn't just mean "made in RPG maker", check out World of Horror if you haven't already. Fun little game in early access and genuinely freaky at times.

It's a little disheartening to me to see Bethesda!fallout slide increasingly into a weird reified relationship with the American founding myth. Like, it kind of worked in Fallout 3 - the Capital Wasteland is genuinely unable to grow and rebuild (even if logistically the reasons for that are kind of nonsense), meaning they get stuck in the shadows of the civilization that was there before; the final conflict is between the Enclave, a remnant of that old world that promises to restore that civilization and its promises to the people of the wasteland (while mostly just inflicting its violence on them), and the Eastern Brotherhood, an organization that grew where their west coast predecessors ossified by engaging with the world around them and working to improve it. Literally a group that has steeped and concentrated its reactionary ideology for centuries vs. a group that actively chose to reject theirs to grow and change with the world around them

Like, the final battle is the Brotherhood repurposing a weapon of that old world and its violence to throw their order back in its face - it's an anticommunist weapon of ridiculous destructive potential being turned against the remnants of the U.S. Government who are trying to control a vital resource by a group of people who want that resource to be freely available to everyone. For all its specific narrative flaws, I think the broader strokes of Fallout 3 Weren't Actually That Bad. At least, until Fallout 4 comes along and reveals that actually the American prewar nostalgia actually was the only arrow in Bethesda's quiver.

Have you ever come across any good horror Touhou fan works during your doujin delves?

nnnnot really, i have to look more into that. i talked about Wheelchair Detective Satori on the other blog, a video series by donjuan. it's more murder mystery, but has plenty of unsettling stuff. they made another based on DiPP called Murder in Pseudo Paradise, which has an ongoing translation rn. both are on youtube.

i also know 3rd eye, a point and click fangame about koishi with art by kotoinari. haven't played it yet but i heard good things, it's on steam.

FireRed and LeafGreen, HeartGold and SoulSilver, and OmegaRuby and AlphaSapphire were all remakes of the first and second versions while having at least some content from the third versions, so it’s likely that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl will have at least some content from Platinum despite the use of the word “faithful”. But how much content? Platinum had a lot of improvements and additions that Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl would suffer without.

my guess is that they’ll retain most of the quality-of-life changes (the expanded pokedex, the increased game speed, etc.) and things like the rotom/shaymin/giratina forms, but none of the story elements unique to platinum and no battle frontier

the stuff with oak’s letter/newmoon isle/that fucked up level 1 regigigas feels like prime post-release DLC material, so perhaps they could use that to incorporate the battle frontier or a side story about the distortion world

Why'd Araki give Joseph so much ass? The man is a veritable cheekzilla.

did you know the 3d models of joseph for the games have almost flat asses?  enjoy

Not sure if you’re taking suggestions and if music is on the table, but I can’t recommend House Set of Touhou, a series of doujin albums that remix many of the game’s OSTs and the music CDs, enough. A lot of the albums are on YouTube, there is a rather beefy page on the Touhou Wiki (the good one), the albums are a lot more musically diverse than just house music, the minimalist album art is some of my favorite Touhou fan art period, and House Set of Wily Beast and Weakest Creature was teased over a year ago.

(suggestions are welcome. i'd post about music if i knew what to say about it lol.)

The House Sets are pretty great, I can't say much more than you've already said. They're made by the circle Kuroneko Lounge, whose sole member is Rin, but they guest other artists as well.

There are reuploads of the albums all over youtube, but Rin also uploads a lot of them to their own accounts (niconico || Youtube)

My gamer theory is that the fourth animal gang mentioned in Wily Beast and Weakest Creature, who use poison and traps and are rumored to be based out of the underground, are the culprits of Cheating Detective Satori and will also be in Gouyoku Ibun.

it would be an act of the greatest hubris to assume that any foreshadowing will ever pay off. this is touhou and zun will continue to do whatever he wants

but on the other hand that kind of bait and switch does seem like the exact sort of shit he’d pull so who knows

I have a question about Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl if you don’t mind. Do we know whether or not they are using the Platinum Pokédex or the Diamond and Pearl Pokédex? Because Platinum let you get a lot more Pokémon before acquiring the National Pokédex, including quite a few more fire-type Pokemon.

Platinum dex is confirmed thanks to Houndoom!

Junko?

sexuality: purified gender: woman (purified) a ship: everyone knows i'm all about JunHeca lmao a BROTP: Eirin! a NOTP: sorry but it's udojun. Reisen being uncomf doesn't sit well with me, that's all it is. :( random headcanon: she frequently visits Ringo and Seiran's dango stalls in the human village. at first they were kinda terrified of her but now they compete to see whose dango can make Junko smile (Junko has no sense of taste though). she just really likes rabbits and thinks they're cute! general opinion: Junko's great! admittedly i mostly think about her as a package deal with Hecatia, but she also has a lot of interesting things about her on her own. i love how she's supposed to be like, actual pure fury, but she's outwardly calm and composed. i ascribe to the way Zounose depicted her (that eerie smile is sooo perfect).

You have big Reimu energy 😎

REALLY?!

You could do JoJo's Bizarre Adventure but Araki couldn't do JoJo ponies.

araki hire me NOW

What are your thoughts on Touhou horror now that you’ve spent a lot of time time with it? Also, have you found any good Touhou horror fan artists? Kotoinari’s Touhou fan art is awesome, but I’m not even sure if they’re still doing Touhou fan art anymore.

oh i still wanna look more into it, i have found almost nothing that plays into the potential for horror that touhou has. dark doujins aplenty though.

yeah i think kotoinari moved away from touhou. seems their work there culminated with 3rd eye.