Rewatching Fairy Tail with my sister and was reminded how much I love them

More ToH Children Headcanons:

For @dirtmanwalking :)

Simon used to make the group meditate once they started using magic. Claiming they needed 'a sound mind and body' but it was mostly just to get them all to chill out

Contrary to popular belief, Erza is closest to Shô out of the whole group

Erik would bring his snake around and introduce her to all the kids

Wally has mandatory movie nights. Jellal nearly cried the first time he was invited

Simon has two graves. One where the tower of heaven was and one in a cemetery by Kagura

The Oracion Seis used to play a secret game of house. Kids weren’t allowed to have fun so it had to done quietly.

Millianna owns several cats and volunteers at a nearby shelter in her free time

Shô and Wally send postcards to Fairy Tail and Mermaid Heel every time they visit a new place

Kagura is an honorary member of the toh family. She's in the group chat (because of course they have a gc lol)

In celebration of Jellal Day! (25.06.23)

Tale of the two Jellals with mine & @xhusu interpretations/HCs on young Jelly 🫐 💫

ms paintober (2023 edition) day 29: tower (of heaven)

i was so happy when i found the palette swaps in elechead that were references to tower of heaven and downwell

I tried out tower of heaven after my gf said some very good things about it. This spike. Fucking sucks.

Happy 10th anniversary to Pause Ahead* and happy 14 years to Tower of Heaven!!

I go on a longer ramble about this in the description of the video but. Funny precision platformer games good please play them (GRABBING AND SHAKING YOU WHILE SOBBING)

Tower of Heaven, one of the lower levels

Fairy Tail, Ch. 80

sometimes you just need a 10 minute flash game to occupy your mind

"The book of laws shatters."

Tower of Heaven fan art :)

Paused, Aheaded, Towers Too

Recently I made an account on Newgrounds, and today I beat two games which had music composed by one of my favourite composers of all time, flashygoodness: Tower of Heaven and Pause Ahead. On the Tower of Heaven side, I have played the game in the past but gave up around the end. Today I decided to beat it, and it was pretty fun! My patience has improved since, and being able to properly enjoy and master the limits given by the game was fun. The ending was very interesting, and apparently, there's another ending I missed. I'll get all the secrets later. Always been fond of the simplicity of the art style and music, near-perfectly capturing the limitations of the Game Boy (color) and in general looking/sounding beautiful. On the Pause Ahead side of things... holy shit. This game. Pause Ahead ekkjkasjsjksdajhsdojhdjsasdjsa this game so good The game is pretty simple on the surface, the main mechanic being pausing the world while you continue to move around, momentum affecting your movement as well. The first levels follow what any good game does (like Tower of Heaven hehe) and slowly introduces you into the world and the main mechanic before saying "fuck you" and instantly jumping towards kaizo bullshit in the best way possible. The levels get harder. Momentum is taken to the max. Pausing becomes your best ally. This shit was so good. It took me some time to get used to it, but eventually, I fought hard with my patience and got through the game and to the final boss, which took me some time (and a walkthrough sorry) to master, but it felt satisfying to finally beat it and witness the first ending. The first ending, because there's a secret path in one of the levels that leads to one of the best gaming experiences I've ever had. The belly of the beast. So, small (so I thought at the time of starting to write this) substory before I continue. Rivals of Aether, a game I knew about for a while before I got to play it and another game flashygoodness composed for (there is even a Tower of Heaven stage inside it! with a tiny remix of one of the original songs, Luna Ascension) eventually got a Definitive Edition, and with it came a ton of new things. The milestone system, new adjustments, un-DLCing the DLC fighters, proper workshop support, etc. It was neat. One thing stuck out to me though. It was a song called Nihil Redux that plays on one of the stages, the Frozen Gate. An intense tune with energy and fear injected into it as if you're in the depths of hell fighting for a chance to live. I fucking fell in love with it from the first few seconds. The constant, unstopping rhythm and beautiful instruments got me hooked, and eventually, the song turned into a calmer, hopeful tune. You've escaped hell. You've managed to survive. and then it loops back to the beginning but tbf it's a stage track of course it has to loop that doesn't mean you're going back to hell lollllllllllllll or does it. After listening to this track like a million times through the in-game sound test, I decided to look it up on YouTube and discovered this little game called Pause Ahead, the original source of this remix. And so it loops back to the primary discussion. Nihil Descent. The original version of this song. I reached the secret level of the game where it plays, the hardest challenge. Two fleshy and difficult paths, both taking the main mechanic to the maximum. It took time, but one by one I figured out things. Pause-cancelling at the right times, patterns, etc. All slowly mastered one by one until I got the second ending.

Also, this happened I guess. lmao. I won't discuss the endings in detail for obvious reasons (play the game ehehe) but one felt great and the other surprised me in terms of story context. Also... yes, the music outside of Nihil Descent (including some tracks by another composer, Bill Kiley!) was great, in case I didn't make it obvious sorry. The art style of the game reminds me of Cave Story, very detailed lineless tilesets and enemies with a little protagonist guy person thing character going through pain and sorrow to hopefully find a bright future. Very inspiring and pretty. Conclusion? good video games is when newgrounds, tiny little thing protagonist and pixel art . yeaaaaaaaaa tower of heaven: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/544332 pause ahead: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/628969 both need the Newgrounds Flash Player to run because flash dead boohoo :( if the writing here was ass: sorry

Tower of Heaven, the flash game about religious trauma

So! I don't talk about this much, because... well, mostly because I tend to not like talking about who I was and what I did before I realized I was trans, probably because I feel like my life and everything I did was completely empty and meaningless and everything I was and valued back then should be thrown away... but there were some things that still stuck with me. And I wanna talk about one of them!

So, from around 2006 to around 2016, I spent a lot of time playing random flash games. Which means I ended up playing a lotttt of them! And the one that stuck with me the most, and that I remember the most fondly, is a game called Tower of Heaven

Tower of Heaven is basically a 2D platformer with a simple premise: You have to climb up a tower in order to recieve... some kind of reward. However, whatever you're trying to get belongs to God, and they dictate the rules of the tower. As they see you make progress, they decide to introduce a set of rules to follow, or more accuarely, a set of acts that fucking kill you if you do any of them. And the more you go up the tower, the more "rules" get introoduced, and the more constraining, absurd and cruel they become. And... this is the kind of shit I absolutely eat up. I am extremely into stories and about gods tormenting people for daring to defy them, and how cruel and fucked-up that is. And that is exactly what Tower of Heaven is.

To be honest, I don't really know why I feel this way about religious stuff?You'd expect someone with severe religious trauma to be very drawn to stories about gods being cruel and awful, about them being assholes and fuckups, about them being just as flawed and messy as the humans they rule over, about them being dragged down and humbled. I don't have that kind of trauma at all, though. I was raised in a pretty atheist household, and never really had any interest in religion or any traditional spirituality so-to-speak.

Still, I love these kinds of stories, and I specially love how Tower of Heaven goes about it, by showing God as someone who is not just absurly cruel, but extremely petty and vindictive, protective of what they own and going to extreme lengths to keep it all to themselves.

The game starts off with God acting imposing and theratening, but still somewhat welcoming, clearly trying to convery the impression that they aren't actively opposed to the protagonist suceeding. "May heaven grant you fortune", you hear them say. But you can feel the bitterness and sarcasm in that staement from the start. The deck is clearly stacked against you from the start. This game is hard, and it needs to be! God does not want you to succeed, they want you to fail, they want you to die. And as you move forward, they start to get more visibly flustered and annoyed.. And eventually, any impression of anything but deep resentment and cruelty from God towards you collapses.

When I was playing flame sgames, I remember there being a huge trends of 2D platformers where the protagonist is tormented by whoever being put them in whatever damgerous environment they have to navigate. Imagine if in Getting Over It, Bennet Foddy just spent the emtire time talking about how much you suck. Something like that! But this game does it in a much more interesting way by turning the subtext into text, and turning the god of the world you've in into an actual, traditional god.

Now, I don't know if I'm reading too much into this, I probably am, and as I said, I don't have personal experience with this, but... if this game doesn't stem from religious trauma, it's definitely describing it. Being forced into following stringent and irrational rules by a being who pretends to want the best from you, but is antagonistic towards you at every turn, a being who refuses to let you have what you want and punishes you for the crime of wanting it... this seems like a description of what people who grew up in very religious families often have to suffer through.

And the most chilling and impactful part to me is near the middle of the game, where this rule is added:

Most rules are just ways of fucking with platforming mechaics that don't relate to the real world at all. But this rule right here, a rule explicitly put in place to force you to shed your humanity... that feels real, and it feels horrifying. You can't help but wonder to yourself: even if I make it through the tower, what next? Will this rule follow the protagonist for the rest of their life, and if so, how can they live the rest of their life? It's a genuinely powerful moment, and one that has very obvious parallels with real-world religious fundamentalism, and it's what makes the game special to me.

I've always had find memories of this game, and turns out, you can still play it! It can be downloaded at the link right here: at the link right here: https://gamejolt.com/games/tower-of-heaven/1859. I highly reccomend it, not just for the reasons I've laid out, but also because the soundtrack is fantastic and it's genuinely fun to play. It's also pretty short, only about an hour long. Check it out, it's an absolute gem of a game, it's it's also genuinely beautiful!

Erza Belserion.

I just had an insane realization-

All Fairy Tail fans, please listen to the song “Feed The Machine” by Poor Man’s Poison

AND TRY AND TELL ME THAT IT ISNT PERFECT FOR TOWER OF HEAVEN!!!!!!

Ready to wake up some memories? So am I, and so is Bracket 23… Retrogradation!

The origin of this realm remains as great a mystery as its outward appearance. Reportedly “glitching” its way into the world with a neon border, peering into this realm reveals a landscape where color palettes are reduced to select hues, curves are made an impossibility, and sounds echo machines many had long forgotten or pushed away. Its distinct alien nature has led to the neighboring realms designating it as a quarantine and research zone. Studies on its many unique denizens progressed smoothly, until a nearby square-shaped anomaly erupted without warning and incited chaos. The border between the two realms is an incomprehensible anger, and nobody has ever dared to step near it. Hypotheses have been thrown non-stop regarding the Indie Artifact’s involvement with the realm, including the possibilities of dispelling the land away, amplifying its nature and allowing the borders to spread, or even bringing the bit-crushed denizens into forms more familiar.

Creepy Castle

Tower of Heaven

The Messenger

Old School Musical

What a colorful cast... and its only set to grow larger each day. I hope to see you for the next additions to the family. :) [Contestants Revealed: 52/96] [Next Reveal: Speed Menace]