link

it's literally them

Happy birthday Amy!

Commission for Amy Sorel in one of her Soulcalibur 6 concept outfits

The Artist from Dead By Daylight remade in Soul Calibur 6!

Check out how to make her yourself here! LINK

Kitty Grøh 😻

found a new meme template

A Somewhat-New SoulCalibur Tumblr page

This is my SCVI creations page. It’s now open @ chaoticobject-scvi.tumblr.com. I’ll try to add more SCV creations on this Tumblr page.

...This is based on a tweet.

Kitagawa Marin - ??? (Sono Bisque Doll)

And while I'm here, one more quick post about a few games.

I decided to try playing something that isn't an RPG for a change. Normally I play lots of different kinds of things, but I kind of got stuck on playing half a dozen RPGs at once for most of the past year for some reason.

So far it hasn't been going super well.

The first thing that caught my eye in my Steam library was Killer Instinct, because I got it cheap in a bundle and remembered the older ones being kinda fun. Fighting games are pretty far from RPGs too, so that should be a good change of pace.

I don't hate it, but I don't especially like it either. It's kind of fun that most characters I tried seem to have some sort of silly gimmick because that makes them all feel different, but also it's a pain to learn them when you're just trying a bunch out to see if any of them click with you. The vast majority did not for me, and I felt like I never had a good sense of what the correct timing was for basically anything, so I decided I'd try one of the other fighting games I got in that same bundle but hadn't gotten around to yet.

Next was Soulcalibur 6. I hadn't played a SC game in any significant amount since SC2 on the GameCube, but that one was fun even if I wasn't super great at it. It told me that the story mode that has the tutorials in it was played with a character you make yourself and not one of the pre-existing ones, so I spent like half an hour screwing around with the character creator and making an edgy vampire girl with a fish for a hat. Then I went to the story mode and it informed me I had to make a new character from scratch and couldn't just import one from the character creator in the main menu. Uh oh.

I just made a generic default one so I could get on with it, and I worked my way through the tutorials. The gameplay was fine I guess, and it slowly started coming back to me from when I was younger. The story was not though. For a series with such a long history of ridiculous characters and ridiculous plots the story mode is astoundingly boring, both that one and the main story mode.

I think in 90 minutes I made it through the tutorials and maybe five actual fights, and the rest of that was just an endless series of cutscenes and VN-style dialogues across two separate story modes that I had zero interest or investment in. Ain't nobody got time for that unless it's actually good instead of just vaguely passable.

Moving on, Injustice 2 was next. I was somewhat hopeful that it would do better on the story side of things because the first one had a surprisingly fun story, and the comic series they spun off from it was actually pretty decent for at least some of its run too. It's just silly DC AU nonsense, but there are some fun alternate versions of characters and interactions between them and characters from the real main timeline too. I was only cautiously optimistic though because the trailers and promotional screenshots were pretty ugly, and somehow even though it has a larger roster of playable characters it has a substantially smaller number of female characters. They even got rid of my Zatanna, which is unforgivable.

The gameplay is probably fine? I didn't get to spend too much time with it though. It runs both really well and really badly on my computer. It's smooth and plays well and everything while also having some Age of Calamity-ass load times. Just restarting the same fight if I lost took something like 12 seconds, and that's nothing compared to having to load the whole thing fresh starting from the main menu where it's easily at least double that. I hit alt-F4 and uninstalled it after sitting on a loading screen for 20+ seconds just trying to load the tutorials after I wasn't doing great on the first few story mode fights (bounding between three different fighting games in 24 hours did not help with keeping the different systems straight).

And yeah, it really is an ugly game. On a technical level it's all fine visually, but it has severe AAA-itis when it comes to the art style and the "we have to cram every lighting/rendering feature on the checklist in whether it makes sense or not" curse that too many AAA games suffer from. It might have more polygons and more detailed textures and a bunch more fancy lighting effects than the first game, but the overall effect looks so much worse to me.

So do I just not like fighting games that aren't Smash anymore, or is it just these ones? Now I'm almost afraid to go back to Skullgirls for the new stuff in it or to try the newer BlazBlue games past the first one I played in case I just can't enjoy them anymore.

On the plus side I did get briefly distracted in the middle of there somewhere by Devil Daggers, which I also kinda forgot to play for the past several years. I'm not great at it, and I'm not sure I'll play it enough more to get particularly good at it, but I have at least had maybe an hour of fun with it already which is good enough. Also I apparently haven't entirely forgotten how to aim in a FPS even though I basically hadn't used a mouse since December.

soulcalibur characters as textposts: part 1

Soulcalibur 6 Taki

The Plague from Dead by Daylight remade in Soul Calibur 6!

Check out how to make her yourself here! LINK