#sekiro i died way too much
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If you were to recommend Sekiro to someone, perhaps a Mutual even, how would you go about it?
(I'm always on the roll looking for soulsborne design content, as it is a big topic in the industry, and I am too much of a whimp to play something that openly sadomasochistic xD, but sekiro is the one I'm lest knowledgable about of them all and I'd love a first-hand opinion on it/maybe a reccomend to see if there might be something interesting to try to brave it For, and not just difficulty for difficulty's sake)
That is a GREAT ask, mutual, and I am very glad to answer it to you! (i never miss an opportunity to discuss game design xD)
Well, the game is REALLY good. It's rewarding and it just feels good to play. That's why I recommend it in very simple words, with the small warning that it is, indeed, a difficult game.
But if I was allowed to go into detail on why I love it and recommend it so much...
Sekiro is a very interesting soulsbourne. It follows many traditions of FromSoft's other games, but it also breaks enough of these rules to stand out as a game of its own.
One thing that differs in Sekiro is the very way that you tackle bossfights. Boss design is one of, if not the most important aspect of a soulslike. I have yet to play other soulsbournes, but from what I've heard, in these games there are usually multiple ways of dealing with a tough boss. You can grind and find better equipment to fight them, use cheese strategies, get help from another player (co-op), or just git gud and try to defeat the boss by learning their patterns and relying on pure skill. Each boss is always designed with that in mind, focusing on providing a fair experience to the player no matter which option they choose.
But in Sekiro, there's none of that. No co-op, very little cheese strats, a stat system that requires the defeat of a major boss to increase damage output (by very little), and a EXP system that only grants a few new skills (some of them are very useful though, such as the Mikiri counter). Oh, and you lose EXP when you die.
To beat a boss here, you must rely on pure skill. Git gud, as people say. This skill consists basically of your ability to recognize and correctly counter all the types of enemy attacks. Deflect strikes, dodge grabs, Mikiri-counter thrusts, jump over sweeps and ocassionaly redirect lightning. If you don't understand and properly use these skills, you will not get very far, because every enemy and every boss will demand varying levels of your knowledge about the game, and more importantly your ability to actually use said knowledge. Their very design is based on the player's skill.
It may sound bad, but this focus on pure player skill is exactly what makes this game so compelling and rewarding. When you fight a boss in Sekiro, you are not mastering the bossfight, you are mastering the game itself. Each boss requires the same skills to defeat, consisting of a single core gameplay loop, and extra items or tools are merely extra help and not really necessary to win (with the exception of a few gimmick optional bosses). Master these skills and the whole game becomes much easier to understand and overcome. You'll still die a lot, but you will feel your progress, understand why you died, and become even more confident after every defeat.
Once you beat Lady Butterfly and Genichiro, you have already mastered the game. From now on, you will be just sharpening your skills.
In simple words, Sekiro's definition of getting good is very different from other soulsbourne games. Beating this game is like a personal journey of improvement, in which you aim to improve because you know it's worth it.
The revival mechanic is also very interesting to me. From what I understand, it serves both as a mid-battle breathing room, and as a motivator.
Dying in a bossfight doesn't feel good, and enough deaths can motivate the player to give up, so giving them time to breath and consider their options before reviving and trying again is very nice. It's a period of time used to strategize and reflect what exactly is going wrong. Allowing the player to revive once or twice during a fight doesn't make the game easier, it makes the game fair. The player will not have to repeat a part of the fight that they have already mastered, and will have another opportunity to try and understand what's currently going on. Then, they can carry this new knowledge to the next attempts, making the whole "die and try again" experience much more fluid.
Following this logic, the revival mechanic also serves as a motivator. If the player has good enough base knowledge of a bossfight, giving them a second chance will motivate them to take risks, which leads into the discovery of potentially better strategies. Dying now will not really grant too much of a bad consequence, so why not risk something new? The whole combat system revolves about your agressiveness and lack of hesitation, so a motivator like this is very important.
Sekiro also has stealth mechanics, yipeee!!! Fitting, since you are a shinobi. Stealth here mostly serves as an second option to deal with areas filled to the brim with enemies. Attacking any enemy from behind without their notice will instantly delete an entire healthbar. This means death to most lesser foes. It also helps you deal with mini-bosses who have more than one healthbar.
Having said all of that, Sekiro is an amazing game, and I can't recommend it enough. In my opinion, you don't even have to be too much of a masochist to like this game! I found the whole experience to be pretty fair and rewarding, and not really painful at all (maybe it's just me on that xD). Patience is all that you really need, patience to slowly learn and understand, as if you where learning how to use a sword in real life. After all, that's exactly what you must do to beat this game.
#i have many thoughts about this topic#hopefully this post is good enough to convey some of these thoughts xD#dedicating yourself to something and then finally achieving greatness with it is exactly what this game feels like#can't recommend it enough#it's a very hard game that makes you feel like you can tackle anything#simply amazing#thank you very much for this ask mutual!#sekiro
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elden ring is like a ripoff of dark souls. it imitates what people like about dark souls without having the artistic intent or direction behind it. hard bosses? we can make them have basically unavoidable attacks and twice the health as any dark souls boss before it. mysterious lore? we will allude to things happening but never elaborate, etc. theres probably so much you could take that scrutiny to
yeah you're not wrong. npc design falls into that, too, when it isn't just boring and full of death and angst for no real narrative reason- lucatiel dies as the capstone of a plot about hollowing's effects on your memory, fia dies because uhhhh the player needed a way to get her armor i guess. special mention to irina\hyetta for dying twice(!) for no reason
kind of feels like they were worried about drifting too far from dark souls because the gameplay is similar. sekiro and bloodborne were mechanically different enough, but maybe with elden ring being so much more like a souls game they were worried about turning off fans with a narrative that was too different? idunno
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Sekiro Case Study: Kanji part 4 - Senpou Temple sugars
This...took a while. And effort. And cursing. A lot of cursing.
1. 阿攻の飴 (akou no ame) - Ako's sugar
The second kanji means “to attack”, same as in 攻撃力 (kougekiryoku), “attack power”. The biggest mistake one could make with the second kanji is to try to understand it literally. Meanings like “flatter”, “corner” or “Africa” are completely irrelevant here. This kanji is actually present in many Buddhist terms, including 阿修羅, asura (the same thing as “shura”), but to understand what it really means we have to learn a little about 仁王 (Niou) or 金剛力士 (kongourikishi). According to Buddhism accounts, those two warriors followed and protected the Buddha throughout his travels. The statues of these protectors are commonly placed in front of Buddhist temples as a way to ward off evil spirits. The first protector, Misshaku Kongou is always depicted with his mouth open as if pronouncing the sound “ah” (阿), which lead to him receiving a nickname 阿形 (agyou, where 形 means “shape”). Just as well, “Ah” or 阿 is the first letter of Sanskrit alphabet, symbolizing rebirth and beginning (it is also the sound of opening the mouth). Agyou himself, as the protector, is a symbol of wrath and violence. Wolf’s stance after taking the sugar and the item's icon are very similar to Agyou’s statues, so I’m pretty sure that’s where the 阿 from the name comes from.
2. 吽護の飴 (ungo no ame) - Ungo's sugar
護 means «protect». Naraen Kongou is the second kongourikishi, who is always depicted with his mouth shut. Consequently, his nickname is 吽形 (ungyou), where 吽 is the last letter of Sanskrit alphabet, symbolising “death” and “end” (and is also the sound of closing the mouth). Ungyou is the symbol of latent wrath and strength. Just as with Agyou, Ungo’s statues bear heavy resemblance to the Wolf’s stance after taking the Ungo’s sugar and this item’s icon.
3. 剛幹の飴 (goukan no ame) - Gokan's sugar
幹 comes from 体幹 (taikan), «posture». 剛 means “strong” and “sturdy”, which seems in line with the sugar itself, but we need to go deeper. I actually think it comes from 金剛夜叉明王 (Kongouyasha myouou), one of the Wisdom Kings, who are wrathful manifestations of Buddhas they swore to protect. Kongouyasha is known as “The Devourer of Demons”. This particular king is a symbol of strength and destruction of foolish human desires. At first, he was nothing but an evil spirit, who devoured humans, becoming an object of their dread. Buddha’s teachings changed his ways, and so he became a guardian deity, a guardian of wisdom Buddha Amoghasiddhi. That’s when he moved on to devouring demons and bad guys, earning his current nickname. During Sengoku era, he was revered as 「戦勝祈願の仏」(sensou kigan no hotoke) – a Buddha to pray to for the victory in battle. The reason I thought of this connection in the first place is the fact that statues of Kongouyasha are eerily similar to the Gokan’s sugar item. Still have no idea where the Wolf’s stance comes from, though.
4. 月隠の飴 (gachiin no ame) - Gachiin's sugar
From here on, things get rather uncertain, because I was unable to pin out exactly where the sugars are coming from with 100% certainty.
隠 doesn’t pose any problems, it means “to hide” or “to conceal”. As for the first kanji, 月(tsuki) means “moon”, or, more specifically “crescent”. One of the deities that have 月in their names is 月天(gatten, sanskr. Candra) also known as 月光 (gakkou, sanskr. Candraprabha). She’s often presented carrying a moon disk and accompanied by her sister 日光 (nikkou, sanskr. Sūryaprabha) who is, in turn, carrying a sun disk.
Another, a bit deeper potential connection is 水月観音 (suigetsukannon, “Gazing at the Moon in the water”), one of the 33 forms of Kannon, a god(dess) of compassion. As for her symbolism, “The imagery is akin to the symbolism of the mirror -- i.e., it represents the emptiness of all phenomena (i.e., life is illusion), for the mirror does not represent reality -- it merely provides a reflection of reality. Thus, the mirror is a metaphor for the unenlightened mind deluded by mere appearances.”
Seems rather fitting.
5. 夜叉戮の飴 (yashariku no ame) - Yashariku's sugar
戮 means 1) “to kill” 2) “to humiliate” 3) or “join together” (e.g. “join forces”). Take your pick. The rest of it is where things get really tough. By themselves, 夜叉 (yasha, sanskr. yaksha) are spirits, in Buddhism, they’re considered to be guardian deities. Now, some speculation. There’s a particular, well, let’s call it a unit of yaksha - 四夜叉 (yon’yasha, literally four yaksha) who protect one of the gates of Rinnouji Temple, 夜叉門 (yashamon).
They adhere to another deity called 青面金剛 (shoumonkongou), who over the course of history became the center of Japanese folk belief called 庚申 (koushin). A prominent symbol of this belief is Three Wise Monkeys (well, four monkeys) – “See no evil” (見ざる, mizaru), “Speak no evil” (言わざる, iwazaru), “Hear no evil” (聞かざる,kikazaru). (and “Do no evil”, しざる – shizaru) Just like the folding screen monkeys.
The connection between the Yashiraku Sugar and the monkeys/hall of illusion may explain why the sugar is forbidden in the temple in the first place. Maybe some smart person could figure it out. There isn’t all the much resemblance between any of the statues and the sugar icon, sadly. Idk where that comes from.
Now excuse me while I recover from the PTSD this research gave me.
#sekiro#sekiro shadows die twice#sekiro case study#sekiro lore#sekiro i died way too much#日本語#日本語の勉強#漢字#漢字の勉強
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Just a side tangent on something that's bothered me tonight.
So, I completely forgot that RWBY: Grimm Eclipse was a thing because I barely hear anybody talking about it. Not even the fans seem to give a shit about it. I probably would've never heard about Grimm Eclipse if it weren't for a RWDEtuber, and even then I had never heard of the first edition from 5 years ago.
RWBY games stink, they're just cash grabs. I guess that much is obvious, I mean, the new Arrowfell looks like any other side-scroller adventure game. As if I hadn't seen 100+ of those already on the app store.
But I'm gonna focus just on Grimm Eclipse, because dear god. That game is an absolute travesty.
The Game:
The first thing that stands out to me is the awful voice acting, but I shouldn't expect too much effort in a rushed game.
The arenas you're in are all so horribly spacious. Not even the right amount of space to give your character and enemy room to fight - I mean, a ridiculous amount of empty space everywhere. What's worse is that the environments aren't even lively. The forests are just dull, nothing lavish and wonderous like the show pretends it is.
Next, the fighting is not good. It could be that I had been really into DMC, Bloodborne, and Sekiro lately, but I always enjoyed how those games are aware of weight and combat. You can make enemies stagger - the enemy can make you stagger. You can build up your stats, which means enemies will be stronger as you go on. You can feel how the character puts effort into lifting their heavy weapons and how it takes much of their strength to swing them, and this applies to enemies too. Enemies have the advantage to have superhuman strength at times - being more powerful or outsmarting you. The more you challenged the enemy, the enemy now challenges you.
As you can guess, Grimm Eclipse has nothing like that.
The characters are very floaty and weightless, even when they wield heavy weapons like Crescent Rose. They move so quickly and have no consequence, and they can wipe out a group of Grimm fast, it doesn't matter what the HP is to the enemy. You just go in, blast up the place, and leave to kill more of them. Boring.
Not to mention, every Grimm you encounter is comically tiny. Who scaled these motherfuckers?
By the way, this is all you see throughout the game. Every single Wave is just these pathetic groups of Grimm coming to fight you. And of course, since every single character you play is so perfect, you can easily wipe them out and move on.
Your professors talk to your characters through the scroll, and it's just the same, "go here, go there, Control Center there, Control Center there." I don't even care. The story is nothing, either. You wonder why I never brought it up?
Overall:
If you have 0 knowledge of RWBY, you may like this waste of time. It's a brainless beat 'em up, but even people who get sick of repetitive gameplay will get sick of this game. It's a lazy cash grab that the company was surely betting on, hoping megafans of RWBY would just eat this up. But the hype of this game was lukewarm, and when it died, it died.
I suppose the only reason why I made this post was that, once you've started to experiment with better games that are - not only hack and slash - but also flourishing with better graphics, story, and characters, you begin to look at games like Grimm Eclipse and think of how tragic it is.
And really? This garbage costs $29.99 on Switch?
And from what I saw in the comment section on the Grimm Eclipse Definitive Edition trailer, people from last year were hyped about Arrowfell because... well, they figured Grimm Eclipse was ass without playing it.
Oh, how the disappointments keep on rolling in.
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Response to the Moral Question of the MugenxFuu Romance
This is a full response to an anonymous ask I received:
“Can I ask why you ship fuugen? Isn’t Fuu a minor and Mugen is 19.”
This is a rather...complex and loaded question. There’s multiple things to address but I’ll start simple and work up from there. I will first go into my personal feelings on why I ship the pairing, evidence, and then the more complicated concept of the character’s ages both in reality, as well as in the fictional anime. Hopefully it will alleviate some distress on the issue. If it doesn’t, and you consider the age gap morally unacceptable, then it might unfortunately serve to make Mugen out to be a morally questionable character, implied romance aside.
The Simple Question: Why do I ship it?
I ship Mugen x Fuu because it’s implied canon by the creators.
I believe strongly, and have found and provided plenty of evidence in my numerous other posts that support my belief, that Mugen and Fuu were written to have romantic feelings for one another. These feelings were never addressed, acted upon, nor explicitly spelled out for viewers. But the subtle implications of their unsaid feelings added up, episode by episode. The interviews of Shinichiro Watanabe, Ayako Kawasumi and Ginpei Sato only solidify my interpretations and findings.
The actual anime aside, here are the links to my posts concerning the interviews, if you are interested.
-Shinichiro Watanabe about Mugen’s Character.
-Ayako Kawasumi and Ginpei Sato about Fuu’s Feelings for Mugen in the Roman Album.
I adore the entire cast of Samurai Champloo, as much as by themselves as I do as a trio. I love Jin just as much as Mugen and Fuu. However, I do not see any implication of Jin having romantic feelings with either of them. His romance is canonically with Shino and his role for Fuu feels more brotherly and fatherly to me.
Personally, I am not a “crack shipper”. I am not someone who typically likes two characters and pairs them off together for my own amusement. I have nothing against crack pairings, nor their shippers, but it is not my taste. I enjoy romances that have some type of evidence or backing behind it. So it is not as if I simply ship Mugen and Fuu because I like Mugen more than Jin.
If hypothetically, all the things that happened with Mugen and Fuu happened with Jin and Fuu—if Jin saved her constantly, if Jin and Fuu had strange, intimate moments like the wrist grab scene, if Fuu jumped in the way to save Jin’s life, if Fuu cried for Jin seven times, if Fuu’s voice brought Jin back from death, if Jin gave up his sword for Fuu—well, I would not be a fan of the Mugen and Fuu ship. I’d be a fan of Jin and Fuu.
But that is simply not how the anime was written.
On that same note of liking an implied romance, I am not as interested in blatant romance stories either. Implied, subtle romance is so interesting because it leaves enough clues that one has to find themselves, and then you are able to make your own interpretations and “what if” scenarios surrounding it. This is why I enjoy the story types of, say, the Souls video game series and its related titles. (Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Sekiro). The story lines have to be figured out, and while there is evidence and clues dropped all over, nothing is ever specifically stated. But even so, we can come to solid conclusions that are difficult to disprove, but also never fully confirmed.
Samurai Champloo spells out very little for viewers. Example: Never does the anime state what island Mugen is from. We only know it’s in the Ryukyus. But based on historical evidence, and also symbolism in the show (the paantu and the trees in his flashback) we can assume it’s Tarama-shima or another island in Miyako.
Never do Mugen and Fuu state they have feelings for one another, but it’s in subtle dialogue, numerous times. Most blatant however, is when Sara tells Mugen “It’s as if you’ve never been loved by anyone.” and then Fuu proves her wrong by saving his life by throwing her own in the way, only seconds later.
Their actions fascinate me. Both Mugen and Fuu demonstrate self sacrificial behavior for each other, and show how much they care with actions rather than words. Most of all, I enjoy the romantic trope of “love leads to a character’s redemption.” Mugen’s feelings for Fuu is what redeems him from the sins of his past, and saves him from a life without meaning and only pain, anger and hatred. These aspects of his dark character are highlighted both by the dialogue of Mukuro in Episode 13 and Sara in Episode 21. Fuu being his redemption is also symbolized in her saving him on three separate occasions. The last incident, when she calls him back from death and the Paantu taking him away, is the most symbolic of his “redemption”.
Samurai Champloo is a direct response to the cynicism of Watanabe’s previous work, Cowboy Bebop. Where revenge and the past consumes Spike, ruining his future and love, Mugen is redeemed by love and is able to face his past and press on.
Here is a fantastic article about the concept of Mugen’s love for Fuu being his redemption and also being a direct response to Cowboy Bebop.
All of this aside, because of the second comment, I’m assuming that this isn’t necessarily what you were asking.
“Isn’t Fuu a minor and Mugen is 19?”
I’m guessing you’re implying that either the romantic pairing is impossible due to their age gap, or it’s morally wrong.
I was conflicted how to answer this, at first. I know this can be a triggering topic. So I decided on providing several explanations. I hope at least one answers the question properly, or at least sheds some light on the issue.
Either it will justify why there is nothing morally reprehensible about the Mugen x Fuu romance, or, it will unfortunately show that Mugen is morally questionable, depending on how the evidence is taken.
First, at 15, Fuu is not a minor in her time period. Second, Mugen is either 19 or 20 depending on the source.
Samurai Champloo is not set in one specific year of history, as the anime is not only anachronistic, it historically takes place in multiple years that could not coincide. In essence, Samurai Champloo is not one year, but “a chanpuru of one whole era.” This era is the Edo/Tokugawa era, which includes the years of 1603-1868.
In the Tokugawa Era, Fuu is considered an adult. She is a young adult, yes, but in the eyes of everyone, she is an adult. This is both historically accurate, and is also demonstrated numerous times in the anime. Fuu’s sexualization and her being seen in a romantic way is never frowned upon by any of the characters in the entire series.
Brief disclaimer: Nowhere in my love of the Fuugen pairing or fan interpretations of the characters’ futures, do I see any sort of sexual relationship between Mugen and Fuu developing when she is 15. After they part ways, is where I like to make my fan conclusions on them meeting again when she’s older.
I also want to clarify here and now, that I’m not a supporter of a 15 year old entering a romantic relationship of any kind, let alone a sexual one in real life. I think that teens should work on themselves and not get swept away by romance and sexuality, especially frivolously. It’s irresponsible and dangerous. But, it’s also unrealistic to believe all young people will never fall in love, whether it’s fake or real. If there happened to be a man who was 5 years older than a girl and the two did develop feelings for each other, I believe nothing should be pursued between them until they are both of age.
Adulthood in the Tokugawa Era
I want to first talk about the concept of Fuu being a minor. In short, she is not a minor in her time period.
To begin with reality first, the life expectancy hundreds of years ago was much lower than now. In Japan now, the average life expectancy is in the 80s. But hundreds of years ago, it was estimated to be about 50. Women in particular had the complication of fatality from childbirth. Led makeup, childbirth, and also STDs were a huge threat for courtesans of the time period as well. Many women died in their twenties.
As for the concept of ”adulthood”, the adult age of 18 only started in the Meiji Restoration (late 1800s- early 1900s) when Japan contacted the west and emulated its practices. The age of 18 being an adult nowadays is largely based on the setup of the education system. Whether 18 is too young or too old is a matter up for debate and varies country to country.
Specifically, in the Tokugawa Era, the age of adulthood was considered when one entered puberty. This was generally 15 for a male and 12 for a female.
Here is a link to the full article on the topic of the shifting coming of age, if you are interested.
In the case of aristocratic children, such as boys raised as samurai, the Genpuku ceremony that transitioned children to adults varied in age. During the early Tokugawa era, it was 15-17, while later into the Tokugawa era, during less civil unrest, the age dropped to as low as 13. At this age, these young men could then marry and were likely pressured to do so. Marriages in the Tokugawa Era were very different than nowadays as well. Many nobles and royalty had their daughters married off at young ages such as 8 years old.Though, the sexual nature of these relationships did not develop until the girl was likely of child bearing age, which was in the teens.
Taking the historical 12 year old age into account, Fuu being 15, is then already three years into adulthood.
Fuu’s Depiction as a Woman in the Anime
In regards to Fuu’s maturity, she has no guardian, nor caretaker, which shows she is an independent adult making her own decisions. Yes, Mugen and Jin are her bodyguards, but they are not her legal guardians, because she does not need one. It is her who commands them and leads them. After they part ways, she is fifteen years old (perhaps a year older based on the time span of the anime) traveling the country alone.
She was forced to grow up very fast. Not only is she an orphan, but Fuu’s resourcefulness allows her to survive on her own. She tricks two complete strangers to escort her across Japan. But Fuu is fully functional as an adult, arguably more than Mugen or Jin in some ways. She works, fishes, cooks, sews, tends to wounds etc. Fuu is by no means innocent to mature situations either. She’s seen Mugen and Jin kill numerous people in front of her, which is traumatizing in itself.
In regards to Fuu’s sexualization,on separate occasions, there are bath scenes in the anime, showing Fuu partially nude. There are also scenes of her undressing. Morally correct or not, it is clear she was sexualized like many young anime females.
Aside from that, here are examples of male characters viewing Fuu as an adult woman, romantically or sexually.
Episode 3 and 4: Fuu is thrown in a brothel. While the legality of her being forced against her will just for the sake of paying off a debt is somewhat in question, the fact that she is 15 in a brothel is not. Brothels were not an undercover organization. It was completely legal in Tokugawa Japan, and Fuu being 15 as a courtesan was not illegal. When an ugly rodent man buys her, it’s served as comedy.
Episode 5: Fuu becomes a ukiyo-e model, the backwards beauty, for Moronobu Hishikawa, who was a real historical figure. This grown man, probably around Jin and Mugen’s age or maybe older, also is not considered a creep for his attraction to her. In fact, it’s not even considered wrong that he paints a nude picture of a 15 year old. Again, because she’s deemed a woman in this time period.
Episode 8: Nagamitsu, who is leagues older than Mugen and Jin, asks Fuu to become the “harem of his heart”. He is attracted to her, sees her as a younger version of his wife when he first met her, and even asks her on a date, to which she accepts. This entire interaction is played off as comedy, and not that he’s some creepy grown man attracted to a minor. More like, he’s a bumbling buffoon. His two sidekicks, the beatboxer and Ogura do not intervene, nor make a comment that it’s wrong he is interested in a 15 year old when he’s in thirties or forties. Because quite simply, in this time period, it’s not wrong.
Episode 16: Okuru tells Fuu that “a woman with a healthy appetite is a good woman” when she is devouring fish.
If you stand firm that it is still morally wrong and all these characters were creeps for being interested or saying these words to a 15 year old, that is fine. If you think it is morally wrong to ship Mugen and Fuu because of the age gap, and refuse to believe that the two are an implied romance, that is fine too. I can’t convince everyone.
However, I will make the counter argument then, that liking Mugen as a character means liking a morally questionable character. Romance and feelings aside, the reason for this is simply how he treats and talks to Fuu.
Mugen’s Questionable Dialogue to Fuu
If shipping them is wrong, then what Mugen directly says and does to Fuu is just as wrong. In my opinion, it makes it weirder if he doesn’t develop feelings for her.
Episode 2: In the original Japanese dub, Mugen tells an unconscious, intoxicated Fuu that he’s going to rape her. “Okasu kureru” is the dialogue.
The English changes this to “Let’s strip her and dump her.”
Episode 11: When Fuu asks why Jin needs to go see a woman when she’s around, Mugen then responds “Because you’re flat chested”, not to be confused with “You’re a child.” When she says her kimono makes her look slender, Mugen calls her a liar and then says “Show me.” He asks Fuu to undress for him and show him her breasts...
Episode 20: Mugen stands up naked for Fuu in the hot spring even though she’s clearly flustered. Exposing oneself to a minor is an offense in the modern era. But he doesn’t stop there. He berates her, and then peeks his head out to look at her naked too.
All of these examples are meant as fluff and comedy too, no matter how offensive they can be. It also implies his attraction, interest and his consideration that she is indeed a woman. This is then furthered in his dialogue with Jin.
Episode 12: When they read Fuu’s diary, Mugen asks the odd question to Jin. “Man to man, what do you think of her?” This “man to man”, implies Mugen wants to know how Jin feels about Fuu as a woman.
As for a debatable canon example, I have the need to bring up the Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked video game on PS2. In Japanese, it is entirely voiced by the same cast as the anime: Kazuya Nakai, Ayako Kawasumi and Ginpei Sato. In English, Mugen is not Steve Blum, but Fuu and Jin are the same voice actors as the anime: Kari Whelgren and Kirk Thornton.
In it, Mugen develops an attraction to a girl who looks nearly identical to Fuu: brown hair in a ponytail, big brown eyes, pink kimono, three hairpin beads. The kicker is her name is Yuu. The even bigger kicker is that she is younger than Fuu.
Here are the links to the scenes. Japanese audio is much better, as a warning.
Link to English, Fuu catches them alone and tells Jin “I had no idea Mugen was a cradle robber!”
Link to Japanese: Fuu calls Mugen a “lolicon”.
When the girl asks “Do you like me? You can lie if you want.” he tells her:
Link to Japanese: “Suki da. Uso jane.”
Link to English: “I like you. I ain’t lyin’.”
And the two share a kiss, before she dies. Worth mentioning, Fuu also admits to being jealous about all this and a fortune teller tells Fuu that this is her “heart talking.”
While debatable canon, the video game still highlights this concept that Mugen will even like a girl younger than Fuu (anywhere from 12-14), so long as she resembles Fuu.
If we pretend for a moment that Fuu is indeed a minor in her time period, then that makes Mugen’s actions and comments out to be even worse. Not only is he a pervert, but he’s then a pervert flirting and making sexual comments about a ”minor”.
Underaged Girls and Age Gaps in Other Japanese Romances
If you still believe that there is something morally wrong, regardless of the time period it takes place in, I have more modern examples in media.
Modern Japanese shoujo manga and anime (shoujo being a genre directed at teenage girls) is rife with romance stories of older guys with younger girls. It’s not frowned upon in Japan, and even for its readers in the west.
I will give you some major examples I can think of, off the top of my head.
Inuyasha: Inuyasha and Kagome. Inuyasha is over 150 years old (not counting the other 50 years he was comatose). Yes, he ages slower as a half demon, but that is still 150 years of experience in life. Kagome meanwhile, is 15 years old and does not come from the Sengoku era. She’s from the modern era. If one wants to argue that Inuyasha doesn't count because every decade for him is one year, meaning he’s supposed to be “15 in human years”, then there is the matter of Miroku. Miroku is 18 years old, and fondles not only Kagome who is 15, but Sango who is 16. And he and Sango later become a romance.
Shugo Chara: Ikuto and Amu have an age gap of 17 and 12. While there is a love triangle element, it is debatable that Ikuto is more her true love interest in the manga. This takes place in the modern era.
Dengeki Daisy: Kurosaki and Teru have an age gap of 24 and 16. This also takes place in the modern era.
Incidentally, all of these aforementioned romances share some parallels to Mugen and Fuu in some way. Whether the guy is argumentative with the girl, a homeless wanderer, antagonist by nature, teasing about her lack of a figure, a bodyguard/protector role etc.
These are just a few of the more pure Shoujo examples directed at young girls.This does not include age gaps between characters, or underaged girls in anime meant for men or adults in general. They can get far more morally questionable, in my honest opinion. Mugen and Fuu barely scratches a surface. There is clearly a cultural gap between Asia and the West and the concept of age gaps, regardless of one’s personal moral stance on the subject.
Mugen and Fuu’s Actual Age Gap and Maturity
In the Tokugawa Era, their age gap of 4 to 5 years is incredibly small. Even nowadays, that age gap is very small, if Fuu was a legal adult in modern times.
Tsuru-himegimi, the real daughter of Shogun Tsunayoshi was 8 years old when she was married to her husband Tsunanori of Kii, who was 12 years her senior.
As for the anime’s depiction of them, there was never a sense of “Fuu is child. Mugen is a man”. It always felt like the two were in a similar age bracket.
I must ask the question, if Fuu or Mugen’s ages was never revealed, would it change the context of the story at all? If Fuu was older, would it change it? Personally, I don’t think so. In this case, because she is both physically developed and also deemed a woman in the anime and historically, it changes nothing.
Their interactions, their bickering, their attitudes, and the way Mugen yells at her, and the way Fuu reprimands him, it always felt like they were similar. They both exhibited many immature, innocent qualities, as well as adult qualities. It was Jin who had a more mature demeanor, being the calm, responsible one, who would rather not intervene with their nonsense. This is another reason why I see Jin as a father figure to Fuu: a representation of the samurai who smells of sunflowers that she did not have growing up.
These images here show their similarities in behavior quite well. And there are many more examples.
Conclusion
A good, well developed character is not a perfect one. There is no denying Mugen is flawed, morally questionable and sometimes straight out an antagonist. He steals, he kills, he was an ex-pirate who likely raided and pillaged… Realistically, he would have no qualms about being attracted or developing feelings for a woman who is 4 or 5 years his junior, let alone the other crazy stuff he’s done. Especially when, in their time period, there is nothing wrong about it at all.
Regardless if his morality is in question or not, what makes the implied romance so interesting is the fact that he didn’t act upon anything sexually with Fuu. His actions towards her were selfless, and Mugen developed greatly by the end. But because of his actions and words,and jealousy, it does not come off as simply a sibling or familial relationship that the two have. This differs from how Jin and Fuu interact.
Most importantly, Fuu serves as the catalyst for Mugen’s growth and redemption of his sins. Unlike Jin, Mugen saves Fuu time and and time again, making him her hero, despite being seemingly an ex-criminal that only works in self interest. Jin did not require this change, as he was always an honorable samurai from the start.
Both men found purpose for different reasons.
Mugen needed love.
Jin needed duty.
I think that covers everything. Well, unless your question is simply why do I ship them when the characters are young and I’m older than them.
As of the time of making this post, I am a 23 years old woman. The first time I ever set eyes on the anime, I was 8 or 9 years old. As a kid, I had my first innocent, childlike suspicion of a romance between them when Mugen first went to save Fuu from the “bad place”, being the brothel in episode 4 without any reason to, while Jin didn’t. Also, he saved her in Ep 1 and 2 and Jin didn’t.
The first time I got to watch the whole anime, I was 13 and saw the full story play out. And at that point, I was more convinced. Over the years, I rewatched, looked into a lot of the history and symbolism used in the anime, analyzed the episodes, and I became more convinced. I shipped it when I was Fuu’s age of 15. I shipped it when I was Mugen’s age of 19/20. And, I will likely continue to cherish the beautiful story of Samurai Champloo and the implied subtle romance of Mugen and Fuu for years to come.
Perhaps it is a reminder of the purity and innocent nature of love for me. These two did more for each other, cared more for each other, and were more entertaining with each other than so many cliche, blatant romance stories.
#samurai champloo#fuugen#mugen and fuu#Mugen Samurai Champloo#fuu samurai champloo#shinichiro watanabe
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Thematically, Sekiro is the conclusion to years of From Software’s storytelling
Before its release, From Software did a really good job hiding what Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice was about. The trailers only revealed the very basics of the premise: you’re a warrior who has to rescue a young kid after he’s kidnapped and that’s about all the information you get. Of course, that’s a perfectly appropriate plot for a game about killing people with swords, so you had no reason to expect anything else. It’s only when you actually play the game that you realize there’s a lot more going on. The story is truly surprising, not only because it grows significantly crazier as it’s told, but because it serves as a conclusion to themes and ideas that were key to previous titles from the developer.
Even with how cryptic the stories of recent From Software games tend to be, some themes are crystal clear to any player. The Dark Souls series, especially the second entry, deal with the concept of immortality, with all three of them having an “undead” protagonist. In them, the idea of living forever doesn’t seem too exciting. Most undead know that, with enough time, they’ll lose all purpose and forget even their identities, becoming “hollow”. A similar idea went through the story of Bloodborne, in which a substance capable of curing any illness is discovered only for it to bring the downfall of those who use it.
And from the beginning of Sekiro you can see some of these themes come back. The character you play as, “the one-armed wolf”, has the ability to come back to life if killed. It’s a very useful tool (specially in a game this obnoxiously difficult) but, of course, it comes with a heavy price to pay. In this case, resurrecting leads to the spread of a deathly illness called “dragonrot” to those around you. Still, it’s only a lot later in the story that you really start to see the importance of these ideas. In a truly unexpected twist, you get to rescue the little kidnapped boy about halfway through the narrative. He then entrusts you with a different (and much crazier) goal: to get rid of immortality forever. You see, the kid is the source of the player’s resurrective power and after someone tried to steal him away to get those abilities, he’s convinced no one should have them.
And the kid’s got a point. The rest of the game is a fantasy-inspired quest to somehow bring an end to immortality and, throughout it, you become pretty confident about how its pursuit is not worth it. You learn of deathly experiments carried out by people trying to live forever and population-eradicating epidemics that came as a result of constant resurrection. It’s all pretty dark and depressing in that unique From Software way.
And it’s also really, really Bloodborne. In that game, people were not exactly looking for immortality but instead lost in trying to become stronger, smarter or more elevated somehow. The same rules apply though, and as a player character you could do nothing but watch the destruction and suffering that came from their misguided experiments.
But the difference between Sekiro and those games is that the themes are not in the background anymore. The story is a lot clearer this time and all of those discussions about living forever and human ambition are now in the forefront. The corruption inherent to the search for power is now the game’s definitive and unambiguous driving theme.
Seeing these ideas reoccur in different titles is pretty fascinating but not too unsurprising considering they were all developed by the same studio. What is surprising, however, is how Sekiro is such a good conclusion to the scenarios raised in Dark Souls and Bloodborne because, unlike them, it takes place before the corruption has spread completely. In Dark Souls and Bloodborne you explore worlds long dead. Yarham from Bloodborne is beyond saving and in the Dark Souls 3 your only choice is to either start the world anew or let the old one be consumed by darkness. In Sekiro, you arrive before everything goes south. You’re there before people lost their minds looking for immortality and before they forgot everything that was important for them. Before everyone died of dragonrot, someone came to his senses and realized that the craziness had to be stopped. And in that way Shadows Die Twice is very uplifting. The world, finally, can be redeemed, and I can’t think of a better ending to the series.
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The Forest Mother
A series I did inspired by “Elden Ring”, Fromsoft’s enigmatic next title, believed to carry on the Soulsborne legacy. The entire family tree from Demon’s Soul to Sekiro are easily among my favourite titles in the entire medium, and have inspired my own work intensely.
The bear and the woman are part of a 2-phase boss concept I submitted to VaatiVidya’s art contest to design a fake boss for Elden Ring. The first piece is the enemies I imagined would reside in the area the boss inhabits, but are not part of entry itself.
I was inspired by bear worship throughout European culture, descending back to Palaeolithic times. The crux of my design is focused primarily on the pagan worship of bears in ancient Finland.
The Journey:
You, a lone rider, braves the haunting wastes of a world left broken after a great war. Your only source of companionship is a horse you’ve ridden with for what feels like an eternity, though despite countless hardships, has remained a stalwart friend. The land you roam together has been claimed by beasts who hunt upon old battlegrounds, and husks of lost souls left to sleep in beds of soot and ash in forgotten ruins. Howling, frigid winds echo between creaking trees, and combined with the beat of hooves, provides a dull but eerie rhythm to the empty roads you travel. What almost looks like a dream phasing into reality is a far-off forest bathed in rays from the Sun, where the clouds allow for dappled light instead of an intense shroud above. As you approach, the trees slowly become more vibrant and lush, the flora sparkling with an emerald sheen as dew drops and a constant, light rain provide them with an ethereal lustre.
The deeper you venture, you begin to find surprising signs of life. Tents of animal hide, wooden totems, and clean cut stone altars create a makeshift village within the dells of the forest. Aside from the occasional fresh deer kill laying upon tables and animal skulls hanging from trees, there are few signs of anything insidious happening. The people who live here sing, pray, and dance together, or hold processions led by a wise-woman, who guides them around the forest. They are all dressed from head to toe in simple, white garments with a few accents of bright colour. They look nothing like the depraved wild men or the harrowed warriors you have battled with before, and they are somewhat ghostly and meek in appearance, most of them stopping what they are doing to shrink away or cower at the sight of you. Some lunge out unceremoniously with knives or spears, trying to get you to turn back, but they are easily felled, their cloth garments not meant for battle. The greatest threats here are the crowds led by the wise-women, who are emboldened by her presence and arcane words. Among the feeble worshippers are occasionally hulking guards, covered in bandages and adorned with animal hides, who wield tools like cleavers, saws, and hammers as weapons. The further you travel, the more resistant the forest folk become to your presence, and despite death after death at the hands of the frenzied mob, you persist forward, as you have before.
Finally, at the heart of the forest, there is a wide glade which has been blessed by a gentle breeze. Compared to the tight alleyways made by the forest folk’s tents and the natural overgrowth, this woodland prairie feels like a welcome place for your horse to stretch their legs and enjoy the soft wind, but it is also feels like a vulnerable place, where one may be caught in the open. As the centre of this field is reached, the ground quakes and the trees rattle as a gigantic, haggard bear emerges from the darkness of the deep woods. The ridge along her back still gleams in the sunlight, but her mane gives way to spots of mange and old scars, transitioning into what looks like hardened, scale-like calluses. She eyes you up and down sternly before she braces her legs and roars. Her bellowing cry is so loud it feels as if your chest is about to explode and the world around you will be shattered into dust. The rain stops, a ring of mist forms around the trees of the valley to halt any idea of escape, and the sun shines down upon your duel with the Forest Mother.
The Battle:
Despite her worn look and heavy frame, the Forest Mother makes it apparently clear how fast she can chase you down, charging and lunging at you with unnatural speed. Her movements will completely control how you fight if you choose to combat her on foot, but you can match her better on horseback, turning the battle into a deadly jousting match. She attacks using her entire body: swiping from either side with her claws, pouncing towards you with her full weight, rearing up to slam her column-like limbs down on you, or simply using her entire front half to ram you into submission. Some of her strikes dig into the ground, and fling dirt, grass, and rain water into the air, these attacks having more of a wind up but easily being fatal if they land against you. Any attacks behind her often result in a quick turnaround sweep of her claws, but she can also let the full weight of her massive body simply fall upon you as she disrespectfully crashes her backside atop your head.
You strike her again and again, whittling her down bit by bit. Eventually, she will slow down to stand on her back legs, only going on all fours to either crash her limbs downwards or to quickly leap and readjust her positioning. Her attacks become somewhat more predictable as she slashes at you, but are still incredibly powerful. This short phase seems like a desperate reprieve from the whirlwind you had to face moments ago, but the Forest Mother is using this time to test you, as you shockingly have managed to last as long as you have. As the battle reaches its midpoint, the Forest Mother’s proud stance begins to hunch, and she starts writhing and shifting in odd, unsettling ways. Her convulsions cease when the blade of an axe splits open her throat from the inside and tears down her gut. From the slit a giant, woman-like figure forces her way out of the bear’s hide, but keeps it sitting upon her like a cloak. She readies her axe and lets loose a passionate but monstrous battle cry, causing the breeze to pick up tremendously and the trees around you to burst into autumn colours. The fight with the Forest Mother resumes with red and gold leaves flourishing each gust of wind.
With her new form, the fight has become an entirely new affair. In a silent frenzy she charges forward, easily keeping up with you on horseback if you choose to remain mounted. Her axe sweeps across the ground and is brought down in a mighty overhead strike. Her strength is so overwhelming that some of her strikes bite into the earth, and the heaving motion of dislodging the axe deals heavy damage and creates a blinding geyser of dirt. After frenzied lashes and heavy strikes, the force of her axe moving through the air creates slicing winds that stampede towards you, able cut into you from a distance. Despite her massive frame and equally large weapon crashing against you, she will also inject quick hits with hand strikes and kicks to try and catch you off guard and throw you off balance. If she wishes to try and fell you in a single hit, she will dig her axe into the ground and charge towards you, ending with a massive upwards sweep, or in a rare moment of stillness, she will let the winds whir around her and plant her axe into the ground, resulting in a phenomenal tornado of razor winds and burning, scarlet leaves. Fighting the Forest Mother on foot or horseback is viable, and it takes an incredibly keen eye to find the right moment to parry any of her colossal attacks. Despite her connection to the forest, she is resilient to fire magics, but ice or raw arcana can pierce through her hide now and again. The Forest Mother is enduring and belligerent, with few counter measures to truly turn the tides. It is a true battle, one that requires a mastery of both ferocity and patience.
Once her frenzy is finally quelled, she falls to her knees, clinging to her axe to keep her from collapsing entirely. Despite her best efforts to stand up again, she crumbles and withers into ash. Falling into a heap, the wind dies, and the forest quickly begins shedding all of its foliage and colour. You have absorbed her essence, and gotten what brought you here in the first place.
The Aftermath:
Below the Forest Mother’s remains, a frost has spread through the ground and into the now barren trees. This place has become as desolate as the rest of the world. What forest folk remain in their village are now either huddled against the cold earth or are praying at their altars, sobbing and shaking violently, too overwhelmed to bother noticing you. The patrolling assemblages lay cut down by the larger forest folk, who now feed on their remains. They are the only ones left to challenge you, discarding their tools and fighting with bare hands in a rage. If not eating their former neighbours, they can be found on the fringes of the woods, skirmishing with wild boars and packs of dire wolves that have encroached into the forest. The empty edges of this place that once bewildered you with its idyllic glow and the gentle pitter-patter of rain on full-blooming trees has been replaced with barren twigs and stagnant air filled with the howls of hungry animals and the cries of demented brutes, joining the dismal state of everything it sought to hide from. You have found what you were looking for, and with the power of the Forest Mother seeped into your soul, you ride onwards. You are much stronger for coming here, though whether it was an essential step on your quest eludes you. There is a greater toiling in this world that you must become a part of, and whatever must be sacrificed to reach those ends will be. You persist forward, as you have before.
#elden ring#soulsborne#dark souls#bloodborne#demon's souls#fromsoft#fromsoftware#fan art#full works#cosmopoliturtle
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Wolf + Yayoi + Akiyama :)
this is seriously ill im sorry
Wolf
First Impression: well he seems neat <3
Impression Now: he's very soft and kind.. <3 and very cool very nice man i love you wolf
Favorite Moment: the whole rice thing b/t the divine child and him and kuro, this isnt a moment but i enjoy how he speaks to people he makes me (:
Idea for a Story: I'd like to see him first meeting Kuro ^__^ that would be cute.. or how he grew up w Owl bc it seems so … … … well anyway he has a lot of cool background that would be fun to explore
Unpopular Opinion: i think people draw him smiling too much in some interactions i dont want him to even remotely have a sense of humor or even emote well tbqh, not that i think hes unhappy or anything but like well … + also people are freaks w him but that's another story.. i dont think he would date grandpas
Favorite Relationship: kuro <3 it's cute how he actually engages in conversation w Kuro i like how he talks w him and how Kuro talks w him it's nice.. i think his relationship w Owl is interesting but not . good. Emma + Isshin + Sculptor & every other friend he meets i enjoy esp Kotaro ^^
Headcanon: *gives him transgenderism + autism + homosexuality*, selectively mute (:, he also just has a general issue w socializing & when he doesnt know what to say he defaults to repeating people or just ignoring people, he likes being called Wolf by like Kuro and whoever but Isshin deciding to call him Sekiro makes him feel a little something (:, he can "cook" + knows lots of misc skills like sewing and stuff, doesnt like loud noises, doesn't like being in water -_-, i think he has trouble differentiating b/t what he likes v what he dislikes bc hes used to just putting up w things and never really got to acquire preferences ever hes accustomed solely to survival, he's done kuro's hair for him before <3 but he does it very quick and messy but he tries
Yayoi
First Impression: ig this is her k1 substory idk i just kind of like . wow this lady seems cool ig goodbye
Impression Now: … hi <3 she holds a very very special place in my heart now i miss her everyday please babygirl come back to me i need you back ive written out how you can come back please
Favorite Moment: her k1 substory always makes me sad um.. everything in k2 when shes taking charge.. i love watching her interact w kiryu they have a really interesting relationship.. i like when she got on ryuji for his bullshit and i really really like her introduction in k2 i love watching her handle shitty lieutenants <3 i love you.. oh also whenever she looks sad + worries over daigo thank you for being a mom ma'am <3
Idea for a Story: um i have a lot of stuff already written for her bc im a sicko .. um ig most interesting to me is how her relationship w dojima developed & also what she was up to when dojima died and daigo went to prison right after bc i think about that period (+k1 substory) a lot.. </3 seeing what she was doing in 3 when daigo was shot would be nice iwant her to be homophobic to mine i think <3 ik a rggo event covered it but id like to see more of her when she stepped up to he acting chairman & how that went ig more in depth.. or just her general role w the dojima family back when it was relevant and uh yeah <3
Unpopular Opinion: um i personally would never call her a milf that feels so :x idek to me gross almost not even bc im a homo or anything i just never would it feels too disrespectful aieeeeeee 🙈 also i wish people didn't care for her just as daigos mom or her being more compotent than daigo or whatever idk people are weird about them in a stupid way and i </3 ik shes just a side character but whatever.. also i hate everyone who writes her like "yes i married dojima for power and i crave violence" fuck you im the only right person ever
Favorite Relationship: um daigo.. i have lots of thoughts they are so nice together ilove them very much <3 kiryu and kashiwagi are very cute w her too they respect her very much its sweet <3 i think nishiki and kiryu helping out w daigo as dojima members when daigo is little has very sweet potential b/t lady dojima and them not saying they outright would be seeking for a maternal figure but um.. also well kashiwagi uhh well i want her to move past her [k2] baggage and um.. um.. 🙈 boyfriend
Headcanon: she's so bisexual shes very very bisexual and she knows it and no part of it even concerns her shes just bi + also her first major crush was on a girl that went nowhere and it embarrasses her to death <3, her dad is who introduced her to wielding a sword it was a very unorthodox introduction and came about by kind of bittersweet means but she very much enjoys it (he didnt teach her anything more than the very very shoddy basics he really just helped introduce), she comes from a very non-traditional [japanese] family, really bad vanity issues i wont publicly elaborate on, um something about dealing w loneliness, she was like daigo and was top of her class in school, she comes off as prett7 different outside of professional settings + acts a lot colder and meaner than she actually is around work people bc that's the only way she thinks she'll be taken seriously, she was a very excited first time mommy <3 she still loves daigo more than anything, she used to sporadically grow her hair out and chop it all off and grow her hair out and chop it all off growing up mostly as a teen -_-, she doesnt socialize well but shes good at parroting and imitating proper social etiquette, she has an "older sister", she loved kiryu and then she hated him more than anything and now she likes him again, perfectionist but a lot of things come naturally to her, not very expressive but her eyes give away a lot, she used to really like kazama very fondly until she didnt, shes not much of a hand-to-hand combat fighter but she can handle self defense, cooking does not come naturally to her ):, shes kept every gift + prize daigo has gotten for her, shes not much for gifts (from people not daigo) but she likes flowers
Akiyama
First Impression: he's funny (:
Impression Now: he's still just funny <3 but also bisexual i love him he's very endearing and easy to like
Favorite Moment: hanging out w haruka in rgg5 or any time he is having fun w hana <3 his one substory in rgg5 where you get more of his background is nice or when he first gets together with shinada + tanimura is funny.. anything that's not rgg6 um
Idea for a Story: i want him to hang out w haruka more <3 or just some of his day to day life.. what he splurges on when he does ummm.. background on when he and hana first met + his ex fiance, hin hanging out w the rest of the group .. anything fun i think ^_^
Unpopular Opinion: he has annoying/questionable moments but so does everyone in the series um.. akiyama/hana is superior when he crushes on her hard vs her to him idk if that's even unpopular ummm idk idek any freak stuff w him nobody talks about akiyama much
Favorite Relationship: hana (: trans bisexuality <3 him + kiryu & haruka are sweet together, him and tanimura are fun.. i think hes a nice central point for both 4+5 protags i just enjoy him <3 hes good w people
Headcanon: hes the least athletic i think that's canon though, tried to keep a fish tank in the office but hana ended up taking over + then getting rid of it but by then he wanted an office cat or bird or something "more interesting" so that hed feel like taking care if it but by that point she put her foot down on animals, tries out lots of misc hobbies that he eventually drops (golf, tennis(very embarrassing), gardening, etc (mostly sports bc he feels like a lazy piece of shit sometimes + gets splurges of Yeah Fitness!!!)), all kinds of math teams and etc growing up he actually really likes math, has a lot of gifts he chickened out on giving hana just kind of buried in the office, bad at video games, can't cook, he buys lots of cheap things bc he doesnt really see the point of splurging on fancy unnecessary stuff, magazine hoarder bc he just picks up whatever for a mindless read when at the store and forgets if he's gotten it before
#asks#o7 thank you i love you so much#rgg txt#i literally forgot every one of my thoughys when i tried to wriye tbis i was like i dont know these people suddenly#probably missing info bc i wrote this sporadically throughout the day um <3 i love you
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So I’ve been running through the FROM Software games over the past month, here’s thoughts:
Dark Souls (Remastered)
The original Dark Souls really agitated me at first because of the one-two punch of the third and fourth bosses on the standard route, but once I broke through that wall I got really into it. I love the interconnected world and the tactically oriented combat; it really captures a great feeling of both adventure and foreignness.
Thematically I think it’s pretty interesting, even if I’m not sure the narrative is communicated in the best way possible. The player-character is essentially a sacrificial lamb for the powers-that-be (often without even realizing it as the player), and the boss encounters and world-building reveal the ultimate hollowness that stand behind thrones and crowns. Also, the bosses are great! I’ve been keeping track of which ones I’ve enjoyed most throughout the series and the vast majority of my favorites are from DS1; there are some serious low points (most of them in the Demon Ruins), but the high points are incredibly high. It makes me sad that the Remaster didn’t include anything new, like DS2′s Bonfire Ascetics, to allow me to refight Quelaag, Ornstein and Smough, or Artorias the Abysswalker.
The main things that keep me from lavishing DS1 with praise are certain tedious design choices (kindling bonfires, the inability to warp to any bonfire after unlocking warping, the incentives towards turtling up, and the incentives for finding cheap and unexciting ways to defeat bosses) and the truly disappointing last third of the game. The Duke’s Archives is a great level and I have mixed-but-positive feelings on the Tomb of Giants, but the Demon Ruins/Lost Izalith are hideous and full of boring encounters and bad bosses, and the New Londo Ruins is a slogfest from beginning to end (died to the boss? have fun on your way back to it, which requires going down an elevator, up a staircase, across a bridge, past five dragon enemies, through swaths of quick-attacking humanoid enemies that wear black in low lighting, all because there’s no bonfire in the vicinity).
Dark Souls II: Scholar of the First Sin
Dark Souls II is not as bad as it’s made out to be and I disagree with the substance of most of the traditional complaints, but it is still pretty underwhelming. The enemy placements can be frustrating but are generally a good change for people already familiar with DS1′s approach to encounter design; the Shrine of Amana is singled out for this, but it’s really not that bad, especially if you summon for it.
The narrative--a falling into darkness, the cyclical decay and disappearance of states, the direct and observable involvement of Nashandra and the Emerald Herald in the plot--is arguably more interesting than DS1′s, though it takes longer to get off the ground. New quality-of-life changes, like the revised system for weapon durability, are also good. The introduction of new healing items was also helpful, although I disliked having to farm for them sometimes (the inevitable result of a very hard game tying healing items to currency, which is also an issue in Bloodborne).
“Dudes in armor” bosses are good, and DS2 does have some great dudes in armor (specifically the Fume Knight and the Looking Glass Knight), but the problem with DS2′s bosses (irrespective of whether they’re humanoid or monstrous) is that they are not well-served by the game’s camera direction, the arenas they’re in (which are consistently and observably just big empty circles), and their visual designs (which are generally drab). Ornstein and Smough felt like forces of nature, pale shadows of themselves who nonetheless tower over you and will wreck your shit through sheer inertia; their rough equivalents, the Throne Watcher and Throne Defender, feel like beefy standard enemies. Overall I think most of the bosses are “boring but practical,” which is not really what I wanted.
One thing I consider unforgivable in this game is the ruining of the parry system; not only are the timings very weird and hard to pin down, the changing of riposte attacks from a quick, desperate counterattack to a slow, arduous process of executing a prone enemy is really annoying. I would probably have made a parry-centric character as I did in DS1 and taken the time to learn the new attack timings, if it were not for how unrewarding it feels to riposte in DS2.
Dark Souls III
DS2 also makes changes that carry into DS3, namely the ability to warp at the start of the game between any accessed bonfire, the use of a hub world, and the need to regularly return to the hub for leveling up. These are all bad choices imo. Immediate access to warping is probably a good thing, but it instills a sense of relief at being done with a chore, as opposed to the unique atmosphere of curiosity and dread that DS1 instilled. In DS1 I was always excited and fearful to see what I’d run into next; in the sequels I was often hoping to barrel through to the next bonfire. The hub world also contributes to this lack of curiosity, and having to return to it to level up means you never really feel like an adventurer in a strange and terrifying land because you can--and must--just nip back home if things are getting too rough. DS3 is a little better about this with a slightly lower number of bonfires, but not by much. At the same time, DS3 abandons good ideas from its immediate predecessor such as the ability to refight bosses, lifegems, and the “power-stance” for dual-wielding weapons.
DS3 also introduces a god-awful mechanic; in DS1, there’s pretty much no real downside to being Hollow, while in DS2, remaining Hollow after repeated deaths will steadily decrease your max HP. DS3 instead puts a hard cap on your max health. (This is framed as losing a 30% HP “bonus” from being “Embered,” rather than a 30% cap, but they achieve the same basic effect, especially since being human is supposed to be the “base” state. If DS2 did this shit, people would be mad about it.) In general I dislike when these games punish players who are having a difficult time with a section or a boss by making the game even harder (which is also why I’m really not a fan of the PvP system).
DS3 also accelerates some of the frustrating things in encounter design from DS2; not only are there many areas with insane swarms of enemies, but those enemies are all often obscenely fast and hit like a truck. The new Silver Knights (who were some of my favorite foes in DS1) are the worst offenders so far; they were slow and methodical but punishing, but now they’re used as a gank-fight.
Finally, DS3′s narrative is mired in nostalgia-bait. While DS2 asked about Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, “who’s that?”, DS3 acts like Anor Londo was the most important kingdom to ever exist, undermining both previous games’ themes. It doesn’t really feel like it’s telling its own story. So even though DS3 is more technically polished than DS2, and I think definitely has a better selection of bosses and levels, I think it’s the inferior product overall.
Bloodborne
Bloodborne is definitely the most moment-to-moment fun alongside DS1 imo, but is less visually interesting so far compared to the hideous muck of Blighttown, the splendorous ocean of Heide’s Tower of Flame and grim industry of the Iron Keep, or the terrifying, frostbitten beauty of the Boreal Valley. But I also don’t own a PS4, so I only got a third of the way done playing on my friend’s. However, the new approach to warping, the streamlining of the weapons system, the emphasis on parrying, the rallying system, and the increased speed and flow of gameplay are all great developments and I’m excited to explore the game more in future when I’m able to.
Demon’s Souls and Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Demon’s Souls is next if I can acquire a PS3 copy (or if one of my friends gets a PS5), and while Sekiro strikes me as very different in kind from the rest of these games, it’s still on my to-play list.
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Tens
I had kind of a tough 2019 and did not have the will/energy to write about most of the things that happened or the things I did. It was a Soldier Through And Hopefully Come Out The Other Side kind of year.
I can at least come up with some end of year lists though, and mention some of the things I never got around to posting here. Unless stated otherwise these lists are in order of preference but I did not sweat that order very much, so left them unnumbered.
Movies from 2019 that I recommend: (This is without a doubt my worst list, I did not see many movies this year. When I get caught up this list will be probably entirely different)
US
Little Women
Knives Out
Captain Marvel
IT Part 2
Velvet Buzzsaw
Toy Story 4
Endgame
Rocketman
Ten strongest albums from 2019
Sharon Van Etten - Remind Me Tomorrow
Ladytron - Ladytron
Carly Rae Jepsen - Dedicated
Tyler, the Creator - IGOR
Weyes Blood - Titanic Rising
Sigrid - Sucker Punch
Jamila Woods - Legacy! Legacy!
Sleater-Kinney - The Center Won’t Hold
Clairo - Immunity
Lana Del Rey - Norman Fucking Rockwell
Ten songs I loved in 2019 (that were not on the above albums)
King Princess - Prophet
Big Thief - Not / Cattails (a tie)
Billie Ellish - Bury A Friend
The National - Light Years
Aly & AJ - Church
Dua Lipa - Don’t Start Now
Ohmme - Give Me Back My Man
FKA Twigs - Cellophane
HAIM - Summer Girl
Hatchie - Stay With Me
Ten TV Shows I loved in 2019
Fleabag
Russian Doll
Watchmen (note: I am only on episode 2 but I am confidently placing it at Number 3 right now, to my UTTER SHOCK as I didnt even want this to exist)
The Expanse
The Good Place
Schitt’s Creek
Good Omens
True Detective
Los Espookys
Umbrella Academy
Also: His Dark Materials, Stranger Things, Dark, One Day at a Time
Ten bands I saw live in 2019:
Spiritualized (Wilbur Theater)
The National (Agannis Arena)
James Blake (House of Blues)
Hot Chip (Royale)
Carly Rae Jepsen (House of Blues)
Ladytron (Royale)
Mitski (Boston Calling Festival)
CHVRCHES (Boston Calling Festival)
King Princess (Boston Calling Festival)
Christine and the Queens (Boston Calling Festival)
also: Superorganism, Anderson Paak, Yaeji, Tame Impala, Hozier, Adia Victoria
Ten Amazing Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors I discovered in 2019 because I went on a rampage (not all of these books came out this year but they came out recently)
Martha Wells : The Murderbot Diaries (All Systems Red / Artificial Condition / Rogue Protocol / Exit Strategy)
Seanan McGuire : Wayward Children series (Every Heart a Doorway / Down Amongst the Sticks and Bones / Beneath the Sugar Sky / In an Absent Dream)
S. A Chakraborty : The Daevabad Triology (The City of Brass / The Kingdom of Copper)
Catherynne M. Valente: Space Opera / Radiance
Becky Chambers : A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet / A Closed and Common Orbit / Record of a Spaceborn Few
Liu Cixin : The Three-Body Problem / The Dark Forest / Death’s End
Mary Robinette Kowal : The Lady Astronaut Series (The Calculating Stars / The Fated Sky)
Ken Liu : The Grace of Kings / The Wall of Storms
(On deck for reading are Tender by Sofia Samatar, Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, and The Only Harmless Great Thing by Brooke Bolande so the rampage continues)
Comics Series I am Actually Following in 2019
The Wicked and The Divine (rip)
Die
Once and Future
Ginseng Roots
Love and Rockets
My Solo Exchange Diary
The Way of the House Husband
X-Men / House of X / Powers of X
The Immortal Hulk
Finder
Favorite Graphic Novels of 2019
Tillie Walden : Are You Listening?
Colleen AF Venable and Ellen T. Crenshaw : Kiss Number 8
Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O'Connell: Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
Maia Kobabe: Genderqueer
Jen Wang : Stargazing
Jaime Hernandez : Is This How You See Me?
Brian McDonald and Les McClaine : Old Souls
Lucy Knisley : Kid Gloves
Jim Rugg : Street Angel - Deadliest Girl Alive
Podcasts I listen to regularly in 2019 but none of them are cool or anything
How Did This Get Made
Pop Culture Happy Hour
This Is Actually Happening
Judge John Hodgeman
Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend
Sawbones
How to Be a Girl
Dear Prudence
Beautiful / Anonymous
Unspooled
Video Games I logged the most time playing in 2019 (in the order I played them. In order of preference, RDR2 is #1 followed closely by Sekiro)
Spiderman (PS4 version)
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Red Dead Redemption II
Death Stranding
The fact that there are only 4 listed here should tell you how absorbed I was by all four of these. Next on deck: the Outer Worlds
And that was my year. I also traveled to Barcelona and Rome, got a big promotion, subsequently was left holding the bag when everything fell apart at work, a family member died fairly badly, was depressed, had a lot of writers block, also wrote more than I ever have, turned 40, and a whole lot of other stuff that is kind of a blur and other stuff too personal to get into, but it was A Lot. Here’s hoping 2020 is Not As Much, or at least I handle it better.
#2019#best of 2019#2019 lists#At least when I put them all in one post you'll only have to see it once!
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Ryan’s Top 10* Video Games of 2019
I don’t write blog posts but it’s time for Video Game Top 10 Lists for 2019 and I have no where good to put it! So congrats tumblr you get it. I’ll also tweet about it but in a much smaller scale. Anyways if you don’t care that’s fine! But if you do! It’s under that read more baby!!
*there’s always more than 10
First, some honorable mentions.
Dragon Quest 1
Dragon Quest 1 is the oldest JRPG (I won’t check if this is true) and I finally got around to it this year when it come out on Switch. The nice thing about Dragon Quest 1 is that it is masterful in its simplicity: you are one person. You fight one monster at a time. You go to one town at a time (mostly). You are on one quest (again, mostly). There’s only a few handfuls of anything like weapons, items, spells, monsters. They all work really well in concert with each other, and the package as a whole is this cozy, comfy less than 20 hour JRPG experience that I really enjoyed.
Best MMO I Refused to Get Addicted to in 2019
Final Fantasy XIV
I sure did hear a lot about Final Fantasy XIV this year. From podcasts to people just talking about it on twitter it seemed to be in the cultural zeitgeist this year. I downloaded the client and put about 15 hours into the base game. If I would have had the right combination of time/money/depression at that time I know I would have gotten deep into it. I’m fine that I didn’t, I think. But the potential was there.
Okay list time here we go:
10. Baba is You
Baba is You is this a coding game? You’re manipulating verbs that are represented by blocks, and pushing them next to noun blocks, to make the objects in the world do things, so that you can get Baba to touch the win object, usually a key. It’s great fun! It got really difficult around the third world and I had to put it down but boy did I like messing around. There were several wonderful “YOOOOO” type moments, and the puzzles when you solved them were great for making you feel very cool and smart.
9. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is From Software doing From Software shit in a way I wanted to like way more but ultimately it’s Here on this list. I liked Sekiro fine but it didn’t click with me like Dark Souls 3 or Bloodborne has in the past. The best parts of Sekiro for me were nailing difficult and tight blocking windows, which gave me an absolute rush every single time. I only got to what I assume was about half way through the game, so I don’t know if this changes later, but for a From game where the bosses were for the most part A Person, the boss encounters were interesting and varied. Also the world design was stunning.
8. Dragon Quest Builders 2
Dragon Builders 2 rules, first off. I wanted to put it higher on this list but I think it fell short because it was so heavily iterative and didn’t do a whole lot to progress itself from the first game. But, there were several quality of life improvements, and there was a big cool area to build in that was permanent and part of the story. I think if they added some more cool things, and made the dialogue not be such a slog to get through, this could have been way higher up on this list.
7. Kingdom Hearts 3
God, Kingdom Hearts 3. I was convinced for about 7 years that KH3 would not only never come out, but it would keep getting bad handheld games until I died. But they finally did it, they made the thing. It felt like a PS3 game which is the wildest thing. (It probably was a PS3 game for a while). It was very fun to play mechanically; the part of KH that was always pretty good was the action RPG stuff. The story is bad tho! The reasons you go to the different world’s is the thinnest it’s ever been, and there’s almost no real lore until the last two hours where you get all of it at once. KH3 was clunky, but I still liked swinging the keyblade and shooting fireballs.
6. Judgment
Shout outs to Judgment: I own it. I never played it. It is number 6 on my list. This probably says more about how I felt overall about games this year than it does about Judgment. Judgment comes from the Yakuza studio, and by all accounts it was so close to that vein, that I am confident and comfortable putting it at this number 6 spot without having ever launching the game. I have second hand accounts that it slaps, and will do for me everything Yakuza does for me, which is fine. I just ran out of time.
5. MiSTer FPGA
I love MiSTer. Wow do I love MiSTer. It’s got everything: old games, tinkering, assembling parts. If you are unaware of the MiSTer device, it’s a custom FPGA board with add-on boards, that developers have written Cores for classic consoles that all run in this FPGA environment. As opposed to emulators, an FPGA as I understand it is mimicking real hardware and then running games ontop of it. It’s a great device, and plays the things it plays (NES, SNES, Master System, Genesis, Game Gear, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, NeoGeo, loads of Arcade games,and more) really well. I have really enjoyed playing games on it, and tinkering with it this year. I spent a lot of my time this year with it.
4. Slay the Spire
This is where the list starts to get Real. Wow does Slay the Spire rule! Holy shit. Rogue like, deck building, choice making, hard as fuck, big time strategy, unique characters. It’s really got everything. And it’s dense. This was absolutely my “just one more X” game this year. I put hundreds of hours into it. The way all of the cards interact with each other, the way you can really craft so many kinds of specific decks in each character, in each run, really worked for me. The ever-growing engines you could make, and the way that, even if you have a not great deck, it never feels bad. It’s one of the few rogue likes where you feel like when you’ve lost it’s your fault in a good way. It’s tuned to feel good no matter what. It’s tuned to feel tense. God Slay the Spire rules. And there’s a new character on the way? fuck.
3. Monster Hunter World: Iceborne
I loved coming back to Monster Hunter so bad y’all don’t even know. They added a ton, so many good monsters that I love to fight. Tigrex? yes. Zinogre? Yes. Velkhana? YES. The variant monsters are great, too. I just love Monster Hunter World so much. The clutch claw rips ass. This game is so good, and chunky, and feels good to play. I really mastered the bow this time around, but I started off with Hammer again because I will always have a torrent love affair with Hammer. Clutch Claw Grab with the Hammer is the best feeling you can get from video games.
2. Pokemon Sword/Sheild
Good Pokemon games! They’re good! It was nice to go through all the motions of a new pokemon game this year: rumors, leaks, having a reaction to all the starters and their evolutions, getting my hands on it, catching them all. It’s just a good Pokemon game. It’s not the best one (Black and White still got that crown) but it’s good. And I like a majority of the new designs. I like how they culled the dex to a nice, satisfying but manageable number. Anyone who’s mad please fuck off.
1. Fire Emblem: Three Houses
WE ALL KNEW THIS WAS COMING. Anyone who follows me on twitter, you know. God where do I start. So, I played all the way through Three Houses six times. I did two runs of Golden Deer, two of Black Eagles, one Blue Lions, and one Church of Seiros. I love all of my students. This game hit hard for me for a few reasons: they did Fire Emblem again, but its bigger and there’s more moving parts. More need for spreadsheets, which is stuff that I eat up. Yum yum good. Adding an overworld even in the scope that was as small as, the Monastery School, to this Fire Emblem was a BIG risk because they have been down this road before, and have not really nailed it. But I think with Three Houses they struck a really good balance, and it never overwhelmed me. They took a big page out of Persona’s book here which did wonders for me. You have this big map and it LOOKS scary, but in reality with fast travel and the limited number of actual activities/quests, you can do everything you want very quickly.
The thing that shined that brightest was the characters. I love them all, even the ones that aren’t cool, and even the ones that are Bad. I love all my kids. I have a lot I could say about how having all of these story routes, with their inconsistencies and their only slightly subtle variations bummed me out, but I did think if you take a macro look at the plot, this is one of the only well-written Fire Emblems ever. There was like, magic and dragons and things like this, but the thing that worked for me was their commitment to keeping the story grounded in the people that were in it? It was a story about three lands, vying for power in their own ways, and the actions/consequences that would follow. They really leaned in to the human part of it. It was not as much Kingdoms doing Politics, it was people doing things, and I think that worked for me.
Honestly the weakest parts of FE:3H was the Fire Emblem parts. The classes are just okay, and they took out a lot of the limitations of weapons/magic and so it was really a class change system about skills mastery, which I think they didn’t hit a home run here, but it was fine. And I liked doing it, clearly. The maps were a little samey in, especially in the first Part of the game.
All of this said, FE:3H slaps so much fat juicy ass and it is absolutely my game of the year for 2019.
#video games#top 10#top 10 video games 2019#dragon quest#final fantasy xiv#baba is you#sekiro#dragon quest builders 2#kingdom hearts#kingdom hearts 3#judgment#mister fpga#slay the spire#monster hunter world#monster hunter world iceborne#pokemon sword#pokemon shield#fire emblem three houses
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Difficulty vs. Accessibility: Sekiro and Dragon Age
[cross-posting to several media platforms, so I explain the terminology more than would be called for on the subreddit. unmarked spoilers below the cut]
Since From Software’s Sekiro was released a few weeks ago, there has been a great deal of online hullabaloo about its lack of difficulty settings – well, they actually are there, but only in the sense that there are in-game options to make things harder rather than easier. The centerpiece of the debate has been this article:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2019/03/28/sekiro-shadows-dies-twice-needs-to-respect-its-players-and-add-an-easy-mode/#362a8dc91639
Here’s the thing: in the past, I’ve said games should absolutely offer an easy mode, or ways to speed up progression, for those without the time/ability/inclination to play “as intended” – that is, to play the game the way the developers intended for it to be played. But I’ve mainly had this conversation as regards games like Dragon Age and the newer Deus Exes, which have in fact included these difficulty options.
The crux of the argument about Dragon Age was a developer’s assertion that she would like to see a mode included where combat is either removed or automatically resolved. She was, of course, sent the usual array of death threats and other excreta from the Twitter Brigade, mostly for the crime of being a woman on the Internet with an opinion, but those with an actual bone to pick said basically: “If you take the combat out of the game, there is no game left. There is only a visual novel.”
The reason why I think difficulty settings, and indeed even a way to remove combat altogether, work/would work in Dragon Age is simple. Visual novels are great! Choose-your-own-adventure stories are fun! The heart of the Dragon Age experience is interacting with your companions, exploring the world, learning the lore, making decisions that shape the way the story plays out, and so forth. Do you drink from the Well of Knowledge yourself, or let your morally-ambiguous and rather-too-eager mage advisor do it? Do you stand by while your friend’s mercenary company dies in pursuit of a larger political goal, or do you sacrifice the possibility of an alliance with a foreign power in deference to your friend’s well-being and feelings? Absent the combat, these choices have weight. They have consequences.
The combat, frankly, is the tax you pay to get to experience these things. I like Dragon Age combat just fine, particularly Inquisition’s, to the point where I’ve finished the game on Nightmare. But to my wife, it’s precisely what I said it is: a tax you pay to get to the good bits. On our joint playthroughs, she handles exploration and dialogue, I kill things. She’s 100% capable of killing things just as efficiently as I am, but she doesn’t get the same joy from it. If there were an option to remove the combat and just explore and hang out with your friends, she might be happy at the option to use it.
Here is why, in my estimation, the same argument doesn’t apply to Sekiro.
In Dragon Age, there are two kinds of entities: players, and enemies. Players have a ton of abilities, specializations, equipment, weapons, they have skill combos they can do with their allies, etc. Enemies are big walking chunks of hit points with the ability to make you die unless you use your abilities. Most of the rules you need to follow, like stamina/mana management, cooldowns, positioning AoEs, trying to make your potion supply last from point A to point B, don’t apply to them. They are there to get in your way and make you consume x% of your resources. The combat gameplay does not inform the world, the lore, or the characters, beyond each party member being assigned a specialization that supposedly relates to their character (like Cassandra being given the Templar spec, which is… not accurate). Your mages never have to worry about demonic possession, one of the main story elements driving class warfare in the setting, because that’s not the gameplay experience the devs are trying to sell you.
In Sekiro, you and your enemies are, by and large, the same. You both have health and a Posture meter that gets closer to a guard break as you block more attacks. You can both Deflect enemy attacks to inflict extra Posture damage and avoid taking it yourself. While you have a wide array of skills and techniques, enemies do too. Common enemies do not wander around with the goal of making you consume x% of your resources; they patrol specific routes, on the lookout, with the intent and capability of killing you stone dead if you screw up more than once or twice.
Combat gameplay absolutely informs the world, the lore, and the characters. Sekiro can learn a multitude of special combat techniques, but unlike in Dragon Age, where the different abilities are just buttons you press to do different things for different kinds of damage or effects, these techniques have a presence in the world. The Ashina-style Ichimonji, a powerful downward swing that restores your Posture, and the Ashina Cross, a sword-drawing technique, are both available to you and your enemies who practice Ashina swordsmanship. You can counter enemy thrust attacks with a shinobi technique called the Mikiri Counter, where you step on an enemy blade as it’s thrust at you. So when you fight your shinobi father Owl, who taught you everything you know, and you try a thrust attack on him… well, he hits you with his own Mikiri Counter. He also knows your Chasing Slice follow-up attack to a shuriken throw, the Shadowfall thrust technique you can learn… the list goes on.
If the game wasn’t difficult, wasn’t punishing, if you could just tap R1 through every fight and occasionally dodge the really dangerous attacks, you wouldn’t recognize these things. The difficulty of the game also encourages you to use stealth attacks, throw dirt in people’s eyes, kill from a distance with shuriken, use firecrackers to interrupt enemy attacks… In other words, you are forced by the exigency of your situation to really adopt a shinobi mindset. Once you really know the game, your moveset, and your tools, you can run into a crowd of three or four guys and come out on top, and it feels awesome, but not at first. And even at the very end of the game, normal enemies are still totally capable of murdering you, to say nothing of the bosses, so you can never let your guard down.
So much of the story, the lore, of Sekiro, is communicated in this way, through your learned experiences and your struggles to master the systems of the world. Watching someone play through the game is thrilling when they demonstrate skill, but it’s not the same as doing it yourself. So the question is: how do you make such a difficult, tailored experience accessible?
I’ve thought a lot about it, and the answer I keep coming to is that you don’t. You do everything you can to make it actually accessible – Sekiro already has completely remappable controls, multiple spoken language tracks for people who don’t want to or can’t deal with subtitles, adjustable gore levels – but at the end of the day, you can’t compromise the core of the experience. I’ve read accounts from multiple people with disabilities on the Sekiro subreddit who, in point of fact, decry the call for “accessibility” and the use of the disabled community as a talking point. They don’t want to be pandered to; they want to play the game as it was intended, same as everyone else, regardless of any additional complications. Speaking as a person on the spectrum, if someone handed me a visual novel that had been tweaked to be more “accessible” to me, and they had tweaked it by taking out characters’ emotional ambiguity because we Aspies sure are bad with those Feelings, I would feel… well. Not great, not at all! I would rather play the actual visual novel and take the risk of not 100% grokking what was happening on the first run.
Another argument: at this point, we can all agree that Games Can Be Art. Yes? Good. The purpose of art is to create emotion. So we have to ask: what is the vehicle the art uses to deliver that emotion? In Dragon Age, the vehicle is your interactions with the other characters, the choices you make, and the ways in which the story changes depending on those choices. These elements are present in Sekiro, but a fundamental part of its vehicle is the experience of being in the world.
Confronting Genichiro, the man who cut off your arm, in the middle of a lightning storm on top of a castle which you have spent the past hour scaling, fighting off enemy shinobi the entire way, and barely scraping out a victory by redirecting his own lightning attacks back at him – there is a raw edge of desperation that feeds back in to a tremendously powerful feeling of victory and satisfaction. The analogous situation in Dragon Age, the big battle against Corypheus, does not create the same feelings because the situation is manufactured. He supplies the battlefield, drops you into it, and then you have a little fight. Your emotions about him and the situation come from the events leading up to it and their impact on you and your allies. The cathartic element present in Sekiro is absent here, and the difference in the execution of gameplay-as-story is at the center of this contrast.
To sum up, the difficulty of Sekiro is directly tied to the player’s experiences in and understanding of the world, and thus it is an essential component of the game qua art. Changing any element of it to make it less demanding and punishing would change the essence of the art form. This is in contrast to Dragon Age, whose gameplay does not directly inform story and as a result can change the nature of that gameplay without compromising its essential player experience.
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what's your favorite part about Bloodborne? and what are you looking forward to in Sekiro? :0
On top of the aesthetic and the lore and the music? The ammount of possibilities you get that still lead you to the outcome you want to reach, probably. I am still not over the fact that I died almost 1k times to Gascoigne but not once I felt like giving up or quitting the game. I came coming back because even when I lost a thousand times I found rewards and learned something new, and in between I could explore the rest of Central Yharnam and I never got bored.
I don’t like a lot games where you’re given too many possibilities because like, most of the time that means my ADHD ass who is EXTREMELY goal driven and crumbles if there isn’t a linear structure, will quit. I just get overwhelmed and I can’t prioritize and just leave it.
Bloodborne DOES have a ton of ways you can go to but it always nudges you towards the goal you set, and I am very thankful for that. It keeps me focused and gives me very tangible rewards for overcoming obstacles and motivates me to try again so I can stay on track.
Now about Sekiro!!! for starters I am A WHORE, an absolute fucking WHORE for anything that is related to the feudal era in Japan. It’s weeby as shit and I know it but it’s a period of such intense political unrest and with so much history and a specific aesthetic (something like, domesticity that is kept despite the world burning around you?) that has always hit deep for me. Also samurais yeehaw
I think what most excited me abt Sekiro when I first saw the trailers was the concept of a horror fantasy game set in that period. Most horror and fantasy nowadays are eurocentric by default with maybe a katana for flavor and as much as I do love horror, I’m exhausted of seeing the same white people things again and again. I’m looking forward to the rich new array of folkloral concepts that can be implemented for horror. I stg the crazy corrupted monk dude? first time I saw it I nearly pissed myself in excitement bc the entire fight was aesthetic as fuck
also cool arm. swoosh swoosh
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dev.log Magenta
This past week has been interesting in terms of my work as a game designer. I wrote a basic game narrative, although I still don’t know what kind of game I would apply it to. I never really realized how hard it is to come up with something truly original, if you get really critical everything starts to seem derivative. I guess the only way to create something truly unique is to combine a bunch of elements from a bunch of different things. What if you made x game in y genre, that kind of thing works to a certain extent.
For my game I’ve never played I’m choosing Sekrio: Shadows die Twice, for a multitude of reasons; I’m taking Japanese and the game is in Japanese, it’s a From Software and I like their games, and a friend of mine has urged me to try it out. Coming fresh off of From’s previous titles, I was prepared to die in Sekrio. This game is much faster paced than the games of the Souls series, which I was not ready for. From also manage to implement something I never thought I’d see in one of their games, the y-axis. You can use Sekiro’s crazy wooden arm to grapple on terrain, obviously this adds entirely new ways to die into the game. It also allowed From to make some pretty crazy and interesting terrain for the fantasy/feudal-Japanese world the game takes place in. This game looks like a every other From game
Being a ninja, stealth plays a big part in this game, if you sneak around sometimes you can take out most of the enemies in an area without too much commotion, you could also just run right past them straight into the boss arena. Boss fights in Sekiro aren’t the striking once and rolling away that I’m familiar, It’s more like a dance of blades, like a sword rhythm game where losing means you die (twice). Most of the boss battles consist of learning the opponents move-set and finding an opportunity do damage, the real challenge comes when you have have to parry incoming attacks. If you mess up you’ll get hit, you might even die, if you succeed you get the chance to riposte. Most bosses have to be riposted and executed, if you don’t finish them in this way they’ll regain 25% of their health back and continue to fight until one of you dies.
Speaking of dying, in this game you get to do it twice; that is when you die, you can resurrect and continue fighting, dying again means you lose half your money and progress toward your next skill. There are more consequences to dying a true death, when you die a little too much there is a chance that an NPC in your world will be infected with ‘Dragonrot‘ which means you may lose valuable quest lines.
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I haven't see if you answered this yet but does fujimi have any relation to that big ass snake boss that one shots you in sekiro?
I’ve only briefly mentioned it, but yes - or, kind of? Earlier drafts of her had the relation more prominent; the way she is now, her relation is more circumstantial?
As she is now, Fujimi and her twin, Kikyo, are albino because they’re said to bear the mark of Benzaiten who is associated with shirohebi (and her Hindu counterpart, Sarasvati, is associated with the color white). Her village’s legends link these albino twins to snakes...... I’ll go into those legends at another time because it is kinda long, but yeah (it’s basically the story of why so much ritual practice happens around the twins and why they have their roles as “Vessel” and “Gatekeeper” so Important that I don’t just jet through them)
The surface level connection is that the twin that plays the role of “Vessel” is sacrificed as the Great Serpent’s bride as a kind of partnership/the single link of good faith between Ayame village and Ashina after their split centuries ago. Of course, it isn’t as if these albino girls from Ayame village are the only ones sacrificed, but are seen as the “best” offerings, to be offered up in times where good fortune is most needed (since the “Vessel” trains to be the perfect bride from the time they have cognitive understanding). There’s a whole story about that too which I’ll detail in the legends post since all of that is linked.
On a not-so-surface level, I think the snakes are sort of cosmically linked to the twins? In-game, one roams the valley and is the only one to die should the player decide to go with the Homecoming Ending. The other curls itself as a guardian to the shrine in the Sunken Valley, defending what appears at least to me as a depiction of Benzaiten (it looks as though the deity depicted has a feminine form and Benzaiten is oft depicted with a snake curled around her).
In a twist, it’s the snake that roams the valley that represents Kikyo, even though Kikyo is the one locked inside. If we’re going for the magical realism bent, I can see Kikyo “living” through that snake in her subconscious mind as a “getaway”. One twin is meant to die and the other live, and even though it was supposed to be Fujimi who dies, it ends up being Kikyo, mirroring the snakes.
As to why Fujimi is the snake that dwells within the Sunken Valley..... Like Fujimi it is ever attentive to its charge - the snake at the shrine, and Fujimi with regards to Ashina. I’m sure, if she could, she would coil her body around the country in order to protect it.......... But that same snake is distracted by something frivolous. Yes, something that it thinks it needs (in this case, sustenance), but that distraction is what allows Okami to steal inside the shrine and obtain the dried viscera. Likewise, Fujimi is wholly committed to saving Ashina, but her faith lies in supporting Genichiro because she believes he can save it. This leads her to abandon the country in its time of need while she supports Genichiro in his quest to find the Black Mortal Blade (that, in her canon, is wrapped up in the lore of her village). And so, just as the snake, she is distracted from her role as a guardian and loses sight of what must be protected, in the end.
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Choi’s Choice - zero deaffs playthru
Game: Sekiro, Shadows die twice
9.102 watching | 20.012.109 total views
“Wassup everyone! This is Yuzu and you’re watching Choi’s Choice!”
Her first order of business is of course to inform her fans. So the female sets up a stream with the intention to entertain but also inform in this case. It's after she has yet again died in Sekiro during her "zero deaffs playthru" that she exhales a breath and checks the comments. To her surprise there are some people that actually have heard of the announcement. Seems like her culture exchange program was working out great.
"Ah yeah... I saw the announcement that they were accepting applications... would you guys support me if I signed up?" A smile widens over her lips as she shifts to hug onto her knees, resting her chin on the knee caps while watching supportive comments stream in. "You guys do realize that means doe I won't be able to stream for probably a month, ye? I'd try to make time for quick streams maybe once a week but I doubt I'd got much time to do anythin' big and set schedule...," she murmurs with a pout on her lips.
Yet again the opinions are mostly positive even if some people say that they'll miss her. It's the constant support she receives and the heartfelt messages of "you can do it!" and "follow your dreams! don't let us hold you back, we'll be always with you!" that actually make her tear up a little. Soon enough all of the stream chants a chorus of "don't cry" to her which makes the tears leak stubbornly even more so as she buries her face into her knees. "Ahhh you guys! What would I do without ya. So much lovely support- Listen I dunno what'll wait for me on this venture but suddenly I feel real invincible knowin' I'll have y'all support! Now listen- I'm sure there's ways to watch the season subbed somehow but dun ask me how- I haven't checked it too thoroughly- as always feel free to get somethin' set up in the discord server, I'm sure there's ways! If I do happen to like make it miraculously and become a trainee I'mma try to like at least stream once a week still, ye? I just can't be away from y'all for too long, I'll be lonely~ and I love gamin' too much-"
Now all of them are calling her out for being too cheesy again and Yuzu can't help but chuckle. She wipes the remnants of her tears and ends up grinning widely. "Okay then! Let's get back to some further game play in this zero deaffs playthru- BITSIES?!"
Let's hope you at least power through the MGAs with zero deaffs :blobthumbsup:
"... Thanks." Ah yeah she loved her viewers even if they roast her.
#twitch: choi's choice;#rkmga5#since it's relevant uwu#she basically tells her fans she's signing up
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