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veemo4 · 10 months

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2023 Media Thread (Re-do to add a Read More Link)

Spark The Electric Jester 3:

Man I was holding off on spoilers for MONTHS until the holidays when I could get this game, and I only beat it in the beginning of the year and well…HOLY SHIT I didn’t know I needed existentialism in my funny little platformer- Gameplay is INSANELY solid, like honestly some of my favorite platforming controls I have ever used! Music is top notch as well!

Nier Automata: The End of YoRHa Edition:

Holy fuck how did I manage to avoid spoilers for this game for YEARS??? That ending was beautiful~ (Yes I did do all the main endings)

Chrono Trigger: I should preface this by saying I did modify this game a tiiiiny bit to have PS4 button prompts and fixing the Classic filter. Other than that, I can see why it’s a lot of people’s favorite RPG! Short enough in case you wanna replay it, and the foundation of the NG+ system definitely helps incentivize replays! Can’t wait to play Chrono Cross!

Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII:

I binged both FFXIII and FFXIII-2 during October and November of last year, but took a short break to avoid burnout. And well, yeah this game was neat! I will admit though that since there’s no way to REWIND time like in Majora’s Mask that I got INSANELY stressed out but that didn’t take away from the sweet release of seeing these characters I love finally get their well-deserved happy ending :)

Mega Man Zero:

I put this one off and on throughout like 2 years because I just wasn’t good at it, but it taught me a VERY good lesson in perseverance! Really excited to play Zero 2!

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII Reunion: ZAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACK ;w; Story was pretty…alright for the most part, but I couldn’t feel attached to any of the original characters :/ Honestly my eyes were on Zack just…being real with what’s going on. I may not feel bad for when people he cares about dies, but I can EASILY emphasize with him because I know that HE knows them. Knows them more than we ever will know. Also the gameplay and music are fucking stellar.

Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes:

I should preface all of this by saying I don’t remember what order I beat all of these in lmao. Anyways my route was Golden Wildfire and the story for it is such an improvement over its equivalent in Three Houses!!! I love Shez so much as a protagonist even if his outfit is a tiny bit dumb.

Final Fantasy XIV: Endwalker

Man I really wanted to like this. And like, music and area wise I loved it! But the story feels…It just doesn’t feel like the finality for all we’ve done so far. I could not care at all for Meteion because they spend approximately like 20 or 30 minutes making us meet them and then throwing us IMMEDIATELY into the angst like, no. This isn’t even a case of “Well I don’t care but I can understand why others do” NO THE GAME MAKES YOUR WOL FEEL BAD AS WELL, MEANING YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO CARE! NO! I DON’T! I was able to at least pretend a little bit to roleplay as needed but man. At least Footfalls and the post-endwalker dungeon themes kick ass though. (Warrior of Light’s name for me is M’bahlon Tia)

Kirby’s Return to Dream Land Deluxe

SO CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUTE I love kirby games sm and this is no exception. REALLY loved how hard the Magolor Epilogue got at certain points though that was great.

Fire Emblem Awakening

I CAN SEE WHY THIS SAVED THE FRANCHISE WHEN IT CAME OUT!! It’s a REALLY good game! I went with the default male Robin settings since that’s what’s in Smash Bros. And man just, everything about this game is AMAZING!!! Sadly cannot see myself replaying it anytime. I could just load my endgame save and grind out support conversations with other characters or do that…new game plus thing I think it was?

Another Eden: The Cat Beyond Time and Space: Bound Wills and the Hollow Puppeteer

I did this event initially back when it came out (and in fact is the main reason why I played the game in the first place) But I got horrible units and died super often, and revived every chance I got. But losing my save data and getting a better unit HEAVILY boosted my chances of getting through the event and man, it was a lot of fun! I love seeing tiny mona :3 JUST LOOK AT HOW SMOL HE IS AAAAAAAAA

Mighty Gunvolt Burst:

I had a lot of fun with this one! I used one of the DLC characters (I think they’re the Zero character from Mighty Number 9 but) it’s a great romp!

EDIT: ALSO SHOULD MENTION IT FUCKING OWO’D ME

Final Fantasy XV

“Walk tall…my friends.” I got this game YEARS ago but haven’t truly delved into it recently. And well… That ending got to me. It really did. The gameplay took me so long to get used to (especially since I had been more used to the more refined gameplay of Final Fantasy 7 Remake 3 years prior) Music is amazing, love the characters! I just wish the other episodes were finished and weren’t just put in a novel :/

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

HOLY FUCK THIS GAME WAS SO COOL. I always heard like, right, about how good this game was but I figured it was just nostalgia talking for people. NOPE. As someone who’s first paper mario game was super (never beat it, I was a really stupid child) and then played Sticker Star (Again, very stupid child but also that game is bullshit because everything is so obtuse and it sucks) But this? This was a big breath of fresh air. I am so excited to go back and play 64 and Super!!!

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Honestly? Way better than I was expecting. You can FEEL nintendo had a strangle-hold on the movie’s production though from how Chris Pratt in the final movie actually fucking voice acts somewhat (it’s a start), there’s no bad Illumination tropes, Peach is a dragoon, Toad and Bowser easily steal the show, and just, ALL THE REFERENCES WOW. EVEN THE NEWER THINGS. I didn’t see any Paper Mario or Mario & Luigi references though which makes me sad. I hope that if there’s a sequel it’s actually better and doesn’t fall into any traps movie sequels usually do, maybe even say if the other kingdoms from Mario Odyssey are in this universe (and maybe Isle Defino) The movie definitely could have used an extra 20 minutes spread throughout to add more to the main group dynamic.

Mega Man Zero 2

OH MY GOD THIS WAS SO MUCH BETTER BALANCE-WISE HOLY SHIT Cyber-elves requirements to be leveled up were MASSIVELY lowered and the enemy AI isn’t as overly aggressive! Loved the music too, especially Departure and the ending theme which was adapted for the song Clover! Can’t wait to do Zero 3!

WARE WA MESSIAH NARI! HAHAHA!

Mega Man Zero 3 was really good, but either I am getting way too good at these games or they are getting easier haha. Loved the music and gameplay though, and how Cyber Elves were handled here is absolutely the best they have ever been! If there’s any game in this series I am gonna replay, it’s Zero 3 without a doubt! On to Mega Man Zero 4, the last of the GBA era.

Mega Man Zero 4

I finally did it. I beat the entire Mega Man Zero series. While I do not agree with how the parts and cyber elf system were handled, It was not a bad experience by any means! It felt nice following Zero’s character arc throughout these games. I’m maybe gonna take a break before I tackle Mega Man ZX, but hey, I feel like that game’s gonna be fun! It’s the only one I actually OWN on its original hardware after all! :D

Sonic and the Black Knight

This was a fun distraction for a few hours! I had a lot of fun with this! Granted the second King Arthur fight took me an hour but besides that it was a quick and good romp! Probably has one of the best final boss themes in a sonic game I’ve ever heard! :D

The Legend Of Zelda: A Link To The Past

Pretty fun game all things considered, but I didn’t like how punishing some of the design philosophies were in the end parts of the game. Music’s great though! Maybe I’ll revisit it one day, but not anytime soon. Still, can’t say I disliked my experience.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.

Where…do I even begin with this?…It was…genuinely amazing. I was waiting for a sequel to Breath of the Wild for years, and during my high school years I was wondering how they would even follow it up! Doing a sequel to an open-world game is harder than a lot of other genres. But yet….they did it. They somehow did it. Those 6 years of development time more than paid off. It felt…amazing to run around a changed Hyrule from the last game. The mechanics were amazing, and the character development was really cool! The new rune abilities are dope!!! BUT THE MUSIC MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM THE MUSIC OH THE MUSIC IS SO GOOD THE ENDING MUSIC MADE ME ACTUALLY CRY AHHHHHHHH PLAY THIS GAME PLAY IT NOW

Kirby and the Forgotten Land

And here we are! Finally got around to this! It was a really dope game! Loved the combat and music! I even did most of the bonus content and the Ultimate Cup Z, but I kept dying at the final phase of the final boss of that so I just gave up lol, it’s purely bonus content anyways lol. But honestly I loved this game! Can’t wait for the next mainline kirby game!

The Legend Of Zelda: Twilight Princess HD

FINALLY GOT AROUND TO PLAYING THIS ONE! I owned this on real hardware since its release date but never got far. I finally got around to it with the motivation of beating Tears of the Kingdom, and I gotta say, it’s pretty good! Not exactly like, absolutely top tier game that everyone MUST play but, it’s decent! Bosses are a big sour point though. Music was pretty decent, though the final dungeon theme is a bore. Only other current Zelda games I gotta beat are the 2D/Top-Down ones, so maybe I’ll do one of those next! Possibly either Phantom Hourglass or Spirit Tracks.

Pokémon Scarlet

HOLY SHIT THAT ENDING SEQUENCE WAS ACTUALLY COOL AS HELL!!! Like yeah, the game has its decent chunk of technical issues but, holy shit….those last two hours of the main story are phenomenal. TOBY FOX CONTINUES TO BE THE GOAT THE MUSIC HE COMPOSED IS AMAZING! I love how easier it is to capture pokemon compared to Sword and Shield as well. I do like Dynamax raids more as a multiplayer component, but I much prefer the Tera mechanic in terms of PVP. I stlll need to do the post game before the dlc comes out later this year, but all I really got is just the refights against the gym leaders and all that jazz. There’s also the Needle thingies I gotta pull out and the wall things I gotta investigate in order to get the other legendaries, but all I really care about is finishing the core of the main story, I got other games to get to lol. Probably thinking of either Paper Mario or Chrono Cross next haha.

Kamen Rider Heisei Generations Final: Build & Ex-Aid with Legend Riders

Okay so context: my friend @arcadiusdragoneyes is showing me and @darkspine576 Kamen Rider Build since it’s one of his favorites and he wanted to indoctrinate introduce us into Kamen Rider AND IT’S FUCKING WORKING. I only know one part of this crossover, but I think it did a good job of giving across the feel of the other Kamen Rider series very well! Kamen Rider Build is so extra I love it. Can’t wait to finish Kamen Rider Build!

#long post

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beefgnawpolis · 9 months

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I am now the proud owner of a Retroid Pocket 3 Plus (transparent blue) and after a week of playing this thing pretty much nonstop, here are my impressions.

[tl;dr: kind of a grind to set up, but works pretty great once you do!]

If you decide to get yourself one of these devices, I cannot recommend Retro Game Corps' starter guides highly enough. Here's one specific to the Retroid Pocket 2+/3/3+/Flip. Here's one that goes into more detail on RetroArch. And just for giggles, here's a general Android emulation starter guide. Oh, and you might be cool with Retroid's frontend but you'll probably like Daijisho a lot more, so here's a guide for that (sadly only in video form).

Initial setup and copying of ROMs and whatnot was a slog. Mostly because pretty much all the emulators on my PC work fine with ROMs in unzipped .zip files while (according to the wiki and I'm going to cry if I spent all that time unzipping .zips for nothing) most of the RetroArch cores other than MAME want the ROMs unzipped and hand-fed to them. Also, you'll probably need to reconfigure some controls and other settings. HOWEVER! Once you've got all your shit where it needs to go, and once you've got all your emulators set up and Daijisho in and pointed to all the right paths, that's the hard part done and over with. From there on out It Just Works. You can even set Daijisho such that you never even have to see the Android behind the curtain. Battery life is pretty decent. It feels fairly comfortable in my tiny hands, I wish there were grippy-bumps or whatnot on the back but now apparently Retroid is making a grippy case add-on? The buttons feel good, though apparently future stick drift is a possibility. One that can be fixed for about $25 with a pair of Gulikit hall sensor sticks, so I'm not too worried about that right now. The screen is nice and bright and apparently can be software-tweaked to be better but I didn't bother, this is fine. Audio is... okay but that's why God made earbuds and whatnot. Also, one caveat: playing heftier stuff on this system will make it hot. Never alarmingly "oh shit turn it off now" hot and it barely gets lukewarm on older-system stuff, but it's definitely noticeable with PS2 and graphics-heavy games like NieR: Reincarnation.

Now, as for what it can play:

The RP3+ can, in my personal experience so far, reliably play pretty much everything up to PS1/PSP/Sega Saturn tier with no or minimal tweaking, with a couple of exceptions (I had to twiddle some settings for N64 and MAME, and Duckstation and AetherSX2 have to be hand-fed a BIOS in initial setup).

My current values of "everything" are:

Atari 2600

Game Boy

GBC

GBA

Arcade (MAME)

NES

SNES

N64 (mixed results; Mario Kart runs like a champ but Pokemon Snap crashes)

Genesis

Saturn

PS1

PSP

As for systems beyond: I've had mixed results that skew "definitely playable" with PS2 and had to change some stuff in the AetherSX2 setup wizard to get that. I haven't played a lot of PS2 stuff on it yet but Final Fantasy XII seems to run pretty great so far. Fatal Frame runs pretty well (though apparently there's something I need to tweak in the per-game settings to make anomalies and whatnot show up). Magic Pengel, of all things, ran like hot garbage but that was before I RTFM and reran the setup wizard with changes so it might do better now. Sadly my PC's DVD drive has shat the bed so I can't rip anything else until the replacement comes in. There's a community spreadsheet linked in the RP3 setup guide up there that will tell you what per-game tweaks you might need to make.

I haven't tried Gamecube or Dreamcast yet, but word is it's the same deal as PS2. It can run DS/3DS/Wii emulators, but honestly I can't stomach the idea of playing DS/3DS on a single screen (and besides that is what I have a hacked 3DS for but never mind that) and the WiiWare I've tried runs okay but Wii with touchscreen-instead-of-wiimote just feels weird (and that is what I have a hacked Wii for but never mind that)

And of course, being an Android device, it can of course run Android games. NieR: Reincarnation ran like refried ass on my phone, but it runs great on the RP3+. It does have micro HDMI out, and you can pair it with an Android-compatible controller, though I haven't tried that yet. And of course you can install your streaming apps of choice on it if you want.

Anyway, it's definitely a lot of handheld for not a whole lot of money and I'm digging it!

#retro gaming #retroid pocket

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ideas-on-paper · 1 year

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Why I love Mass Effect 1's gameplay (spoiler-free review)

Very recently, I completed my first ever playthrough of Mass Effect 1 - a well renown, beloved game that has nevertheless received quite harsh criticisms for its gameplay. The somewhat rough-around the edges shooter gameplay, the confusing inventory system and frustrating Mako controls were the most common complaints, some of which BioWare addressed in the recent Legendary Edition remake of ME1.

Still, after some extensive research, I decided to buy the old trilogy version anyway (call me oldschool if you like, but I'm a bigger fan of some of the OG light effects) - and imagine my surprise when despite having signed up for a somewhat more tedious gameplay experience, I came to actually enjoy it. In fact, I think ME1 does a lot of things right that other RPGs do wrong - to this day, I might add. For analysis purposes, I will be using the game NieR: Automata (© SquareEnix/Platinum Games, 2017) as a comparison, mainly because I played these two games back to back.

The level system

One thing I absolutely loathe about modern RPGs is how you can essentially break the game by overleveling yourself - not by conscious grinding, but by simply knowing what you're doing. While the level of some enemies in Nier Automata - especially during Route A - may seem daunting at first, all of this can be completely bypassed with the help of one little trinket: the EXP+ chip. While the effect may not be immediate, you will eventually reach the point where you surpass everything the game throws at you in terms of strength - by nothing more than understanding and making use of the game's mechanics. Nier Automata tried to remedy that by introducing a level scaling system, and while this worked out fine in Route B, it appears the developers were too lazy to properly implement it during the endgame: In Route C, all of the enemies are stuck at level 50 (60 for some bosses), so they really were no match for me at level 95. At some point, I got tired of all enemies keeling over if I so much as blew in their general direction, which was one of the reasons why Route C just felt so lackluster to me.

Because of this, I decided to play Mass Effect 1 on Veteran difficulty from the start, just so I don't accidentally make the game too easy for me again (despite having never played a shooter before, lol). However, little did I know there was no need to worry, because somewhat miraculously, Mass Effect 1 manages to avoid any kind of level exploit entirely: The reason for that is that unlike in many other RPGs (including Nier Automata), leveling up doesn't give you an inherent boost to your attack/defense - instead, you have to allot points to specific skills to improve your base values. However, while a little bonus to your stats certainly helps, it's the combat skills that you should focus on: To gain the upper hand in battle, you have to make use of abilities such as temporary damage immunity, overloading the enemies' shields or making them more vulnerable to your attacks. Although this means that you will be spamming abilities pretty much non-stop, you don't have to worry about robbing yourself of any challenge, as the game will keep you on your toes from the first battle right until the final boss. Also, since the level cap is set at 50, you can't simply max out all of your skills, which acts as a nice counterbalance and compels you to distribute your points wisely. (Imagine if the level cap in Nier Automata would've been 50 - perhaps that would've made the endgame actually challenging.)

Another thing I really appreciate is that the equipment you find is always appropriate to your current level. This is because once you start a mission, land on a planet or enter a facility, the equipment you can loot is randomly generated on the spot (you can see this if you revisit a place you went to before but didn't loot: the items will always match the level you were at during your first visit). This not only prevents you from potentially finding an OP weapon early on which you can solo the whole game with, but also the awkward situation of stumbling into "low-level" sidequest when you can no longer use the items you get from them. Also, since the enemies' strength relies just as much on equipment as your own, you always fight on pretty even ground, which means you will neither run into an overpowered squad too strong for you nor an underleveled group which goes down faster than a cardboard wall. Now, that's a way to implement proper level scaling.

The game economy

Another problem that many games suffer from is that you get tons of money, but have next to no opportunity to actually spend it on anything. In the first half of Nier Automata, the "Half-wit Inventor" quest may give a motivation to invest your money into something, but once you accumulated the 180,000 G, pretty much all you need money for is buying and upgrading your weapons, and finding the materials to do the latter is generally more of an issue. The one really cost-intensive thing you need currency for is fusing chips, but since the max chip level is 6 and your capacity is limited anyway, you will arrive at the point where you neither can nor want to upgrade your chips any further. As one might guess, this resulted in me amassing huge amounts of money (in no small part due to my extensive fishing trips), but since there was nothing that I could spend it on, the numbers didn't do much besides looking good.

Mass Effect, on the other hand, possesses a very effective game economy which gives you ample opportunities to make use of the money you earned - if you're focused on optimization, that is. Even though you will find plenty of equipment lying around, it's worth checking the shops from time to time, since they sometimes offer items slightly above your current level. Of course, the prices are accordingly high, and I often had to use almost all the money I made by mining minerals, looting chests/safes, etc.

I will say though that ME1 lacks any unique weapons - ultimately, there are 1-3 "high-end" items for each equipment category (often with marginal differences in stats), while all the other inferior products can simply be disregarded. This means that you usually want to pick the best weapons and armor possible and pimp them with mods as much as you can, while the rest of the stuff is there just for selling. However, even though this may be a bit of a chore, it actually benefits the game economy as a whole: Right before the final mission, I bought a high-end armor for Wrex and two level 10 mods at the Emporium on the Citadel, almost exhausting my entire money reserves - something which wouldn't have been possible without the few extra credits I made by selling superfluous equipment to the outfitter on the ship. The only criticism I have is that there is no "sort by" filter for the selling screen (e.g. selecting that you want to sell shotguns, assault rifles, etc. instead of the standard arrangement by item level) - that would've made things less tedious and time-consuming.

Saving

This may sound silly, but one thing I honestly perceived as such a quality of life improvement when I started playing Mass Effect is that you can not only save literally everywhere, but you will also continue exactly where you left off upon loading. In Nier Automata - and quite a few other games for that matter - you can either only save at certain checkpoints, or the game will automatically place you next to the nearest checkpoint upon loading your save (which may be a fair walking distance away from where you actually left off). However, in Mass Effect, you won't find yourself in the general vicinity of where you last saved, but at the exact same spot - a true blessing that spares you a lot of backtracking and frustration. (I know some people like to call this "save-scumming", but believe me, when one of your squadmates can't join you in battle because they got stuck behind a closed door - which happened to me with Wrex on Noveria - you will thank every god in existence that you're able to load a recent save game.)

Exploration and sidequests

If there's one aspect where Nier Automata and Mass Effect are actually tied, I'd say it's the open world exploration. All criticisms aside, the environments of Nier Automata are a true highlight, and I spent hours walking around just enjoying the scenery, atmosphere, and music. Although Mass Effect is understandably more limited in the graphical department due to its release in 2007, the extraterrestrial landscapes nevertheless manage to look truly captivating, and I had fun taking screenshots of some of my favorite views. However, while you usually explore the world of Nier Automata on foot (or with a mount of your choice), you inevitably will have to use the Mako for Mass Effect's planet-bound missions. Admittedly, the Mako has absolutely earned its reputation as a bouncy vehicle with next to no roadholding, and the physics of that thing are occasionally quite insane. Still, from my experience, it's not completely uncontrollable, and as long as you don't drive like a madman and try to avoid steep terrain, you should be fine - unless you have no other choice than to vertically drive up a cliff (P.S. I hate you Eletania).

Nevertheless, my little excursions in both Nier Automata and Mass Effect ended up having a similar, very relaxing effect on me - which is something that actually surprised even myself, since I'm usually not the biggest fan of open world games. I guess that's because a lot of them tend to have huge, overwhelming maps, and while having the biggest open world is something like a "status symbol" among game developers these days, it doesn't really do anything except making me feel lost and confused. Meanwhile, the free-roaming areas of Nier Automata and Mass Effect are quite spacious, but not so large that you lose any kind of orientation. Also, another thing many open world games do (and that really annoys me) is that they simply put a bunch of symbols on your map for you to traipse around, which is really nothing more than an employment-creation measure for the player. In contrast, Nier Automata and Mass Effect deliberately avoid putting all points of interest on the map - instead, you have to find chests, minerals, and all kinds of other treasures by yourself. While this may be perceived as "userunfriendly" by some players, I think it actually encourages you to go out there and explore, and the feeling of being rewarded for your own curiosity is immensely satisfying - a thousand times better than having everything served on a silver platter.

Last but not least, although Nier Automata is the one that always gets praised for its ambivalent, disturbing sidequests - and rightfully so (in fact, you could say I enjoyed the sidequests more than the main story) - Mass Effect is in no way inferior to it: Just like in Nier Automata, there are sidequests which really make you feel pensive and empty by the end. Personally, "Citadel: Signal Tracking" and "UNC: Geth Incursions" were the ones that unsettled me the most, but "UNC: Missing Survey Team", "UNC: Dead Scientists", and "UNC: Besieged Base" are also runners-up. In general, many of the quests ultimately leave you wondering "what did I actually do right now?" and whether your actions were justified - it truly feels like an insolvable aporia with no right or wrong solution, the only difference being your own moral perspective.

Furthermore, I think it's noteworthy how sidequests are utilized in both of these games from a storytelling perspective. If you take Witcher 3, for example, you will notice that the game tries to make its sidequests into their own independent storylines - a story in a story, so to speak. Meanwhile, the approach of Nier Automata and Mass Effect is completely different: Instead of treating its sidequests as separate entities, they act as little snippets presenting themes and topics that tie directly into the main narrative, enhancing the story as a whole. Together, all these pieces form an intricate, well-constructed web, making up the essence of the story when viewed in its entirety - a strategy which I personally find way more appealing.

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Conclusion

Despite feeling a bit dated, Mass Effect 1's gameplay still holds up surprisingly well - in fact, the game manages to avoid a lot of pitfalls that many RPGs struggle with even today. Thus, I think the first entry of BioWare's hit series truly sets the standard for what is a good RPG, being an example that all game developers should learn some valuable lessons from.

#mass effect #me1 #nier automata #gameplay analysis #game review #spoiler free #rpg #open world #bioware

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seshiiru · 3 years

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A brief analysis of Drakengard/NieR Repetition mechanic and its role in the neverending cycle of death of the Taroverse.

(This is a personal analysis so it doesn't mean that anything I say in here is true and that it is Yoko Taro's intentions )

After replaying NieR Replicant and a rewatching a Drakengard LP, something actually striked me in the "Play the game again" mechanic so unique to Yoko Taro's games. Where Drakengard is more of Hack&Slah Ace Combat hybrid devided in chapters, NieR games are a bit closer to Action RPGs. Yet, the games follow a similar narrative construction and a way of doing endings, with multiple endings you can unlock by tedious grinds or hidden secrets, with each offering a new reality.

The mechanic is clearly more accentuated in NieR Replicant's/ Gestalt because this repetition serves as a way to make you question your decisions and right to kill the shades, with run B obliterating all of your expectations and beliefs. Where few games do question the meaning behind the killing, the delusional vision of a right or wrong world, none does it as strongly as NieR. By the repetitiveness of the game, reenacting the killing, you, the players are confronted once again to every life you took throughout the game. Which end up much more impactful than knowing you've killed for wrong reasons but aren't facing truly the consequences. And NieR Automata is reusing that mechanic, in an even smarter way than its predecessor.

Then, why, even confronted to our horrendous actions do we keep going? Do we keep on doing that long and tedious farming? Simply because we want more, we want a better ending, we wish that somehow, someway, the game gives us back some companions lost on the way, we wish to see our hero finally end the cycle. And that's the powerful thing about Yoko Taro's game. The player is the one that keeps the cycle of killing ongoing. And it is a cycle that actually started at the very beginning of Yoko Taro's universe and never stopped.

It starts way back at the very beginning, Drakengard 3. Through the character of Zero, we kill countless enemies, without much an explanation than just that she wants to kill her sisters. And then we learn the truth, we understand Zero's character but Mikhail dies. Then we keep going and more people die at each endings. More people die at every grind. We are never satisfied. We hope that the game finally gives everyone a happy ending but it never does. Finally, the event of Drakengard's 3 final ending put you the player, Zero and Mikhail at rest, yet doom another world: Drakengard's.

In the same way as Zero from Drakengard 3, we kill countless enemies through the bloodlusty Caim. Despite the chaotic nature of Caim, the player understands that there's bigger threats to the world so we fight. At the end of this massacre, our sister and dragon dies. We want a better ending. We want more understanding of the world . So we keep killing, replaying to get all the weapons, upgrading them, replaying missions countless times, achieving endings after endings, until finally, this world is free of the cycle. But it's to another world that we brought the cycle : NieR's.

Unlike Zero and Caim, the protagonist of this world seems definitely more righteous. We willingly kill shades because it's necessary, it's for a good cause. But after all this adventure, we understand that he's just as ruthless and selfish as Caim or Zero. Despite saving your sister, the only reason why you slaughtered all the shades, the player keeps on going. Keeps killing shades for a new ending, for Kainé, for Emil. But then you lose Kainé and then the protagonist itself. But then the game gives you a final hope. You replay the first part of the game, back as the innocent boy, hoping that everything you've gone through could be changed. And the game rewards you, it gives you the so hoped-happy ending; not knowing that this happy ending is gained at the loss of the entire humanity.

And the cycles continues to Automata. You could have stopped at Ending A, with that lovely ending but you want more. You keep going and you keep losing. First 2B and then 9S sanity. Pascal and the twins. Adam and Eve. But you keep hoping that they'll finally have the ending desired, just like the ones you've got in every games before. And it happens, but this time, the cycle is no more. Because you, the player, who kept going, decided to sacrifice yourself so the characters you cared so much about finally got free of the cycle you've been perpetuating for so long.

You are most likely the god who was in charge of that cycle all along. You can find evidence across all of Yoko Taro's games. "Is this the land of the Gods?" from ending E of Drakengard is the first hint towards that. "You and I are the same, tools in the hands of a master" from Devola to Nier in NieR Replicant/Gestalt. Then comes the Automata introduction quote "We are perpetually trapped in an never-ending spiral of life and death. Is this a curse? Or some kind of punishment ? I often think about the God who blessed us this cryptic puzzle and wonder if we'll ever have a chance to kill him". And recently, I ended up with another hint when I pulled for the Replicant characters in Nier Reincarnation :

Yes it echoes to their games but I can't stop but seeing the 4th wall broken in each of these statements and knowing the man, there's a high possibility.

And that's through that last bit of Automata that you see how Yoko Taro's philosophy evolved throughout the games. With each game giving a more hopeful message each time. And Automata ending on your sacrifice for a good ending. You ended that cycle. Because the god of their world made the sacrifice so that they could all be free of the cycle. You lose your data, the meaning through which you kept the cycle ongoing.

The repetitiveness of Yoko Taro's games can be seen as annoying, and tedious (oh lord the grind ). But I can't stop but think it's what makes his games all the more incredible and rich in lessons and meanings.

#Drakenier #Taroverse #nier replicant ver.1.22474487139 #NieR : Automata #Drakengard #Drakengard 3 #nier reincarnation #Yoko Taro

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shuttershocky · 3 years

Note

Any advice for people new to Punishing Gray Raven?

- Get to level 50 as fast as you can to unlock all the weeklies like Pain Cage and Warzone that let you earn BC (the roll currency).

- New SSR banners have a hard pity of 60 rolls where you are GUARANTEED to get them. If you really, really want someone in the future, you know exactly how much to save.

- 5 stars are the highest tier of generic weapons. 6 star weapons are luxuries that act as "signature" weapons for specific characters, having special skills that only they can use. Only roll for the weapons your faves use, 5 star weapons are more than good enough, and you can grind them for free from co-op mode.

- Physical damage can crit but is partially blocked by shields, elemental damage cannot crit but bypasses shields entirely. This means that Phys carries can have extremely high burst damage, but can also be impeded by the most common enemy mechanic in the game. If you see enemies with a gigantic yellow bar below their HP (such as the Aife memory stage), you might want to bring elemental damage instead.

- When you enter Matrix mode from a perfectly timed dodge, the first orb you ping is counted as 3x, letting you do some skill combos with less orbs.

- Apart from their three skills and ultimate, every single construct has a "Core Passive", a secret combo that. activates a special ability unique to the character. For the starter character Lucia - Lotus for example, pinging 3 of a kind and then a red orb temporarily unlocks dual blade mode. Others use an energy system. Karenina - Ember for example, gains fire energy whenever she 3 pings. When she builds more than 50 energy, she goes into an enhanced mode that changes all her basic attacks and skills to deal bonus fire damage while rapidly draining her energy. Learning everyone's core passive is key to really getting into the combat.

- PGR is extremely forgiving... Until it is not. There is a massive spike in difficulty in the middle of chapter 5 where it pulls off the kid gloves and starts fighting for real. Both Pain Cage and Warzone also see significant difficulty spikes at higher levels. Practice makes perfect, but you can always look up Rexlent on Youtube for boss guides if their movesets begin to confuse you.

- The guaranteed SSR in 40 rolls that they give you in the beginner banner is seperate from the SSR ticket they give to new players. That means you will have access to 2 S-rank constructs very early on. Get the beginner roll SSR first before using your ticket to avoid the chance of getting a dupe.

- Yes, I know, everyone is extremely fun to play. You still have to concentrate on raising at least one complete DPS-Tank-Healer team though, just so you have a team to farm events/weeklies with while you raise the others.

- The only limited SSRs are from the Nier collab gacha. Everyone else is spookable. Do not despair if you totally missed out on the rateup of someone you want.

- In case you're coming from FGO and are looking for a certain iconic voice, Kawasumi Ayako plays Bianca. You're welcome.

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something-very-special · 3 years

Text

Call Her Back

Probably already a post with this title from the Let’s Play but it’s appropriate.

Thoughts on Replicant up to Ending A (and change):

This game is pretty. I guess it didn’t really hit me because I’ve always thought that the original NIER was pretty, but this game can be very pretty.

This in particular just kind of struck me as I was going across the Northern Plains. It had been dominantly gray, overcast skies up to that point because Part II of the game is meant to be. You know. Bleak. But I walked out onto a bright, sunny day with an expanse of blues skies, the mountains in the backgrounds, the ivy a burst of green growing up the rusted sides of the train tracks and it just kind of hit me that the game can be very pretty.

(Then I got punched out by a Shade.)

It’s definitely not a matter of massive graphical overhaul. The models look much better (getting a good look at the Twins during the finale, they really are beautiful) and I’m sure the environmental poly count is much higher and just overall smoother, and there are little touches here and there and just the capacity for better atmospheric lighting... I mean it all helps. But NIER is a game that’s always had fantastic art direction, making the most out of its budget through atmospheric tuning. There’s something uniquely beautiful about its muted palette and the way it uses its spaces that elevates it beyond the its actual technical limitations. It doesn’t look like an end-of-generation PS4 game, but that’s not an insult; it looks very much like itself from ten years ago, with its solid art direction, but touched up where it matters.

Does the sidequest grind seem... better...? I haven’t really dug into the BEST part of the game (spending 30 hours grinding out weapon upgrades) but I mentioned before my theory about how the sidequest grind is supposed to be carried out across multiple playthroughs and that’s why it sucks. To my surprise I finished Ending A missing only one sidequest (your friend and mine, Life in the Sands), with all of the other ones being more or less... pretty natural? The only thing I really needed to go out of my way for was Memory Alloy but all the other components didn’t really give me the kind of grief I remember from my playthroughs of the original. ‘Grief’ of course being relative to getting the platinum trophy, but my first time through the game I gave up finishing a few outstanding sidequests (specifically, fixing the lighthouse broke me-- I could not find 10 Mysterious Switches!)

Maybe I just got lucky, especially with the Machine Oils. Maybe some weird muscle memory kicked in. I feel like there were a few purchasing options that weren’t open originally, too, to ameliorate some of the grind, but it might also be a case of those options being cost-prohibitive so I just didn’t really acknowledge them... whatever the case the sidequest grind felt overall pretty painless. I dunno!

I really need to know how to manipulate events. For literally seven playthroughs straight of the latter half of the game I always did the keystone quest as Junk Heap (start) - Forest of Myth - Junk Heap (end) - Facade - Aerie. It wasn’t until I did a run with my college roommates and Popola gave me the Aerie letter before the Facade in invite that I realized the Aerie wasn’t actually programmed to be the last event.

Absolutely blew my mind, and ever since I became aware of it, it feels like the game goes out of its way to make sure the Aerie always comes before Facade. When I did my Let’s Play of NIER I kept a save file from the start of the kystone collection so I could re-do the events in case they went ‘out of order’ (according to my headcanon)... which they did. I replayed the latter half of the game again in order to get things the way I wanted them to be, same order, and fortunately it cooperated the second time, but I still don’t understand what the trigger is, if there’s a way to manipulate it, or when the determination is even made.

And then they throw the Little Mermaid into the mix, which I wasn’t expecting (that is, I knew it was added, but I’ve been mostly avoiding spoilers -- and happily, the changes have largely been a delight, I’m so excited for the subsequent playthroughs -- but the way it was posted about made it seem like it would happen after and apart from the keystone quest. Not so, my friends).

The reason for this is just the emotional escalation of each factor of the quest. The Forest of Myth is weird and little else (at this juncture, of course). The Junk Heap is a personal tragedy, but the actual tragedy has already occurred and you’re just experiencing the fallout. Facade is a powerful and personal tragedy that deserves to be experienced later on. The Aerie is a terrible place and nobody misses it it’s an enormous loss and profoundly traumatic for the party, and it feels like the appropriate apex to basically force them to go to the Castle and finish the fight, having already lost far too much.

Also it’s just super weird to me that they see that devastation, they literally wipe an entire settlement off the map, and then the next day everybody’s super excited to go to a wedding.

It also becomes even weirder that you go to Popola post-Aerie and nobody mentions ‘yeah that didn’t go so well’ but coming out of Seafront they have a legitimate conversation about the loss of the ferryman and the people they’re never getting back. I guess that guy had a personality but I still think maybe somebody should mention the smoking crater where people used to be.

Then again it’s legitimately funny to me how basically everybody is just agreed the world is better off without it.

This might also just be an issue of familiarity. Maybe if I’d always ended on Facade, or actually known that they could be swapped out as they are, it wouldn’t feel so weird. I definitely got used to the pacing with the Aerie at the end and I feel like I got into a debate with somebody about how it’s more appropriate for Facade to come last so this might just be a personal thing. But it’s still a personal thing and I’m still vaguely irritated I can’t figure out how it works.

Anyway I blew up the Aerie So that’s that problem taken care of.

I feel like the ambiance surrounding Wendy was a little creepier this time. I swear I heard that good stock creepy child laughter in the background.

Then the ferryman left This was a nice bit of foreshadowing; following the Aerie events I wanted to hop over to Seafront to take care of an extant sidequest only to find the ferry dock in the Northern Plains empty. I thought that maybe this was just a weird way of railroading you to make sure you went through the Village first, even though there were no scenes that would trigger just by being in the Village.

Alas.

Not gonna lie, when the couple was first introduced I thought for SURE it was going to be the wife who wound up dead. I guess it’s because the guy had a purpose as an NPC so yeah, I was tricked. Good design decision; the ferryman is talkative and bright and definitely difficult to forget and even though he was kinda obnoxious there’s a definite void where his dialogue was. It’s clever too that you’re forced to use the ferry at least once so you can’t escape the dialogue that you’re presented with, meaning that even if you don’t really make use of the ferry you’ll always have that contrast between him at the start of Part II and the other guy (his brother, maybe?) taking over the job and just not really talking to you afterward.

Episode Mermaid First of all, to be clear, I’ve not done the Route B playthrough yet. All I know about the Little Mermaid is what’s presented on the surface, what can be gleaned from there, what I remember reading in the Grimoire NieR short story. This is very much just an impression and reaction to the first encounter and it’s pretty cool.

I like that they managed to go into yet another genre style aping a point-and-click adventure.

I like the atmosphere of the wrecked ship. It really brought me back to the ‘ghost ship’ level archetype with its little hints of spookiness.

I appreciate that it ties subtly in to the Haunted Manor (technically the Part I Seafront dungeon) with Weiss’ utterly irrational fear of ghosts.

I love every excuse they find to get Kaine and Emil (and especially Kaine) out of a situation. It’s almost a running gag that Kaine keeps getting knocked out of dungeons and boss fights. None of them are quite as great as her getting Rules Lawyer’d in the Barren Temple, but there’s something delightful about “Let’s get you some fresh air, we’ll be right outside, be careful!” and then bookending it with Kaine and Emil just chilling at the end like “Well yeah there are a lot of holes in the hull we just popped in.”

(I forgot to go backward to see what happens if you try to take them into Seafront proper, gotta remember that next time.)

Interesting thing when you find some of the dropped apples is that Nier and Weiss talk about the dinner they had with the couple. This was actually a really sweet and oddly emotional conclusion to the added sidequest between the bickering couple-- entirely missable. I would assume the dialogue just doesn’t trigger if you didn’t do the quest but it was a nice touch.

I appreciate the use of dead bodies in the hold.

(That’s a sentence.)

But for the game’s focus on violence and excess of blood it’s very selective in how it uses actual corpses. Any time you see a dead body it really emphasizes the seriousness of the situation. The corpses in the hold and the blood spatter -- especially compared to how bright and clean Seafront as a whole is -- was surprisingly effective. Again, just good atmospheric buildup.

Bit of an anticlimax as a boss, though. It is a really cool boss, between the environmental buildup to the fight and then actually unveiling her, but for how big and scary she is the fight itself went by fairly quick, and the actual finale (the postman whacking her hand telling her to go away she’s groooooss) felt a bit weird in comparison to the way the boss fights in the rest of the game usually play out. Of course, I don’t have context of her dialogue (I can take my guesses, her holding out her hand to Hans as he freaks out and attacks her is already a palpable tragedy) and by the way the scene was framed I suspect the Route B reveal is where the most important part of the scenario lies.

And the seals came back! It’s the little things.

“I wish I was Fyra.” So in the original Replicant the conversation between Emil and Nier before Sech’s wedding was apparently an implication that Emil had a crush on Nier and wanted to marry him. It was ambiguous enough that people had to ask for clarification and some players interpreted it as a weird, childish expression of looking up to and respecting Brother Nier. It was clarified in the Grimoire NieR that Emil is gay and crushing hard on Brother Nier, and this line of dialogue here seems to have been... not made explicit, but changed even between RepliCant and ver. 1.22 to make the implication a little clearer, at least insofar as he isn’t interested in girls. (It winds up missing the implication that he’s into Nier specifically, though.)

...which is funny, because it colors his introduction to the King of Facade somewhat differently. These two meeting is honestly really sweet on a few levels (Sechs recognizing him from Nier’s descriptions, which implies that Nier’s been visiting Sechs regularly and so proud of his interactions with Emil he told the king of another nation all about him, and the King is legit excited to meet him) but then a couple of minutes later Emil is all ‘I’m so jealous of Fyra’. He isn’t crushing on Nier, but he is totally crushing on Sechs.

Endgame At this point in the game the distinction between Brother and Father has become mostly lost and the final charge is pretty much the same as

wait what’s up with the music in the Lost Shrine? This is Snow in Summer.

Or an arrangement thereof. That particular track level from Snow in Summer winds up getting used in a few new places and it has this kind of weird, vague sense of dread that makes it work pretty well. Utterly threw me off in the Lost Shrine, though (I think it’s appropriate given its connection to the Shadowlord/Gestalt Nier so slowly re-introducing it in the climb is pretty cool). It also builds insanely as you climb, which is a very cool effect but, um, I’m just here to pick up some sidequest items right now this feels like a little much.

There isn’t much to say regarding any impact or differences in the large part of this area of the game. It’s a good final dungeon, it carries good momentum, it works as well as it ever did (that is to say, rather well). The emotional beats are great and translate equally well between the protagonists, although I have to give the nod to Papa Nier during a lot of this just for the imagery of such a big, powerful man becoming so broken the further he goes in (and Kaine being strong enough to toss him around like a rag doll anyway).

The final flashback with Nier and Yonah also feels better with Papa Nier. I always read it as, of course, Papa Nier having his moment with Yonah, giving her the flower, and as he lays back down Yonah does the same big sigh like she’s trying to emulate her dad and it’s really sweet. This is another one of those moments where it’s not something that feels wrong in Replicant, but just having that comparison in the back of my head is something that I just can’t help.

Is Papa Nier still Best Neir? Yes.

But there’s room in my heart for Brother. I’m glad the bizarre marketing decision happened and both of these characters can exist.

...and then we reload the save. Okay, okay, so-- so here’s the thing-- I figured that’s a good place to conclude a session, right? Get to the ending, prepare for the next run. But I also know that Route B starts with Kaine’s unskippable novel segments. I’ve read them, of course, so I figure I’ll just reload into Route B so I can make a save after the novel sections, really get into the meat of Route B when I’m fresh.

So skim through those--

Beat up the Knave--

Skim through the rest--

Educated Warrior... didn’t pop...?--

Wait what’s this camera angle--

Why am I outs--

oh my god

KAINE AND EMIL HAVING GIGGLY GIRL TALK AROUND THE CAMPFIRE OH MY GOD WHAT IS HAPPENING

THERE’S MORE.

THERE’S. MORE.

I legit short-circuited. Going in I knew they added the Little Mermaid. I knew they added Ending E. Those were things I suspected would be added and went out to specifically confirm; beyond that I’ve been keeping myself completely spoiler free.

I had no idea there was more. I had no idea this was happening.

I’m so excited.

And a goofy thought for the road

“I polished you with a special cloth, I poured warm water on you--”

“Wait, you poured water on me?”

/imagines Emil running blindfolded eight hours across the Southern Plains with an 8oz plastic water cup, getting to the library, splashing it on Kaine, waiting expectantly

/nothing happens

/walks dejectedly eight hours all the way back to the Manor

#NieR #NieR Replicant #Musings #Ramblings #OH MY GOD WHY DID NOBODY TELL ME ABOUT THIS #I AM SO GLAD NOBODY TOLD ME ABOUT THIS

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sazorak · 3 years

Text

Every Game I Played in 2020, Ranked

2020. Boy, what a garbo year huh? Didn't actually play that many games this year all-in-all. Happens! My backlog is getting pretty big, but I just find it hard to focus on games when I could be working on something. Or put off working on something, as it may happen to be at times.

My arbitrary decision from years ago to only attach a numbered ranking to same-year releases is getting increasingly silly, especially given my propensity to wait on playing games until I’m in the right mood, but whatever. That order matters than the dumb numerical numbering anyway.

2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019

Later Alligator – 2019 – Steam – ★★

The style of this game is very cute, and the jokes are funny enough. But… ok, look, I’m not one to be precious about what is or isn’t a game. But this really isn’t a game. It’s a series of disconnected, unrelated challenges clipped from Atari Free Mini Game Collection 100, wrapped in a very non-interactive adventure-game. It’s cute, it’s kind of sweet, but it’s dull. Dull dull dull. There’s a pointless, mandatory sliding block puzzle early on that infuriated me by its mere existence. Them giving the ability to skip it because “wow you’re bad at this huh”, which, while accurate, also just sold the whole point meaningless of the “““interactive experience”””.

Also: when a huge part of your game is WOW WE ANIMATED EVERYONE REALLY GOOD, text boxes that reveal word-by-word, far away from the animations that occur when said characters talk? Kind of stinks!

8. Carrion – 2020 – Steam – ★★

What Carrion does well— the whole “You’re controlling The Thing and just rippin’ people apart!” shtick— is really neat. They made that bootleg The Thing animate real-ass good.

The actual game as a whole though? Kind of garbage. Imagine a Metroidvania with zero actual exploration, where every opportunity you have to venture off the path instead results in immediate railroading with constant, utterly inexplicable one-way pipes. It’s not that it’s linear, it’s that it actively slaps you when you attempt to explore. It’s very frustrating! Add the fact that the tentacle-monster-shtick makes challenging to actually, y’know, move around and control all your bits… the only reason I finished the game was due to foreknowledge of its extreme brevity.

I think if the game were more open and less obsessed with constantly handing out upgrades, as well as having less of a focus on pure combat, I think I’d have enjoyed it more.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays – 2019 – Steam – ★★

It is well documented at this point that I am both an active Gundam fan, and as well as an on-again-off-again tactical RPG aficionado. A SD Gundam game appearing on Steam with a good English translation and localization is… exciting, to say the least. That said, I have never had much context for this game series beyond the basic facts that the combat tended to be pretty well animated CG, and that it’s vaguely similar to Super Robot Wars. Turns out… it’s really different from SRW? I dunno how the rest of the series fairs, but Cross Rays is weird as hell.

For one, there’s zero tutorialization at all. None. Almost all of what I’m going to explain here is me figuring stuff out by trial and error, or by reading junk online. Gundam is insanely popular, you’d think they’d be interested in explaining how it all works, but… nope. Even Super Robot Wars has multi-level introductory bits for new folks to show them the rope these days.

So: Cross Rays is a tactical RPG where you can playthrough the storyline of various Gundam AUs. You can play through them in any order. These playthroughs are fairly literal translations of the stories. You take control of the lead mecha from those series, fight enemy mobile suits that show up in SRW-like tactical RPG combat, until all reinforcements cease. Pretty straight forward. There are occasionally mission variants like “prevent enemies from reaching X” or “prevent enemies from destroying Y”, but even those can be just reduced to “kill everything very quickly please.”

But here’s the thing: while there is a story progression, the characters in the story itself actually have no character progression. These characters and mecha are actually considered guests, despite it being ostensibly their story. Instead, you are able to field “permanent” mecha and pilots of your own choosing, which do have progressions. There is no plot justification for this or anything like it. The game does not recognize that it’s weird that during Iron-Blooded Orphans intro where nobody knows what a Gundam even is, you can have 25 Gundams show up at once and just fire lasers at everything. That’s because this game is actually about repeatedly grinding the same set of missions over and over.

Pilots are recruited by completing certain in-mission requirements. Mecha are acquired by either by getting enough kills with the progression-less “guest” mecha, combining mecha you already have gashopon-style, completing certain quests, or by leveling up mecha and then “evolving them”. This is the actual core of the game.

SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays is basically Disgaea, it turns out? You’re grinding story missions at various difficulty levels in order to complete missions, try to recruit specific pilots, equip them with stats and levels to make them stronger, and then hitting mecha together in a sort of quasi-SMT fusion system until you get all the powerful mobile suits you desire.

The combat itself is kind of… bland? There’s a lot of systems, but they mostly seem in service of making an already easy game easier, or burning through tedium. There are four different difficulty modes, because there’s not actually that many different missions you can play through. The expectation is you’ll just work your way through every story beat while ramping the difficulty up over time to where the “guest” mecha would not be able to handle on their own. In fact, letting the story mecha act out the story beats is actually bad after a point, unless you’re still trying to get those lead mobile suits, or if you’re trying to complete some mission requirement in order to recruit Named Wing Grunt Pilot #246.

There is something to the notion of “I want to get N and N and N and N on a team, piloting weird but powerful mobile suits, and just solo every Gundam AU in a row,” but the whole premise seems kind of against purpose. Why bother recreating story beats at all, then? It’s not like the game even acknowledges any of that going on.

If the point is that I’m supposed to be, like in other grind-heavy tactical RPGs, breaking the systems to my own end in order to proceed… why not make the missions you play challenges focused towards that? The story progression literally only exists to facilitate the mission-based unlock conditions, which makes all the energy put into making them JUST LIKE THE ANIME really damn pointless.

I like tactical RPGs, I like breaking RPG systems so as to beat hard challenges (I beat all the insanely hard extra bosses in FFXII for crying out loud), I looooove Gundam. I should like this. But I don’t really have the “god, I NEED TO FILL THIS LIST” gene that some folks have… except as an excuse to continue to engage in gameplay I enjoy. The gameplay here seems in service of the collection, rather than the way around.

7. Pokemon Sword: The Isle of Armor – 2020 – ★★★

Pokemon’s first foray into actually doing DLC is… a mixed bag. As a positive, they’ve improved the Wild Area concept I liked from the main game, and even brought back buddy Pokemon walking behind you. That’s neat. On the other hand: the actual progression in it is completable in like an hour, it doesn’t scale with you, so you’re bound to be over leveled for it, and all the raid stuff, while still conceptually neat, is just as flawed as in the base game. And so, you’re just left with even more new Pokemon to RNG grind on to continue to catch-them-all. Nah, I’m good.

Astral Chain – 2019 – Switch – ★★★

Platinum knows how to make good character action games. They’ve made a bunch of them. Bayonetta, Nier: Automata, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. They also know how to make some kind of mediocre character action games. Transformers: Devastation, Wonderful 101, their various shovelware character action games like Korra. Astral Chain falls somewhere in the middle, I guess?

Astral Chain has all the production of their good games. It has some stylish, cool action. It has a neat core mechanical idea, in that it’s essentially a two-character action game where you control both characters at once. It has a lot of the old mechanics from some of their best games brought in; witch-time last second dodging from Bayonetta, Nier’s shooting-and-slashing combination, the Zandatsu mechanic from Metal Gear Rising, even Wonderful 101’s multi-unit shenanigans. The setting is different, and there’s some neat world flavor all in all.

But, of all games I’ve played over the past few years, Astral Chain made me more vividly angry than any other. It’s not that it’s too hard— far from it, really, I found its combat incredibly mashy. No, the problem is that it has so many shitty mechanics slathered on that it become a chore to get to the “good bits”.

Why would you put forced stealth sequences in your character action game, especially when your movement controls are not suited for it?

Why the HELL would you put platforming sections in your character action game, constantly, especially when your stupid ghost buddy can accidentally yank you off the edge, your auto-combos can just throw you off the edge, or literally anything can knock you off the edge and make you lose life?

Why would you put so many constant excuses into the world to force me use the digital sensor in the game, that also makes it miserable to walk around while using it?

WHO THE LIVING FUCK THINKS THESE SHITTY BOX BALANCING MINI-GAMES ARE FUN???

These games are supposed to encourage me to perfect everything, right? Why keep putting fucking fights you need to complete in order to get an S rank behind backtracking, or Legions I don’t have yet? That isn’t adding replayability, that’s just wasting my time. There are even in-level missions that have fail conditions that you never even know about. Surprise!!! A lot of them involve chasing after guys and catching them with your chain, which is really obnoxious to do!!!! SURPRISE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The story is just Bad Evangelion, straight up. Every story beat from Evangelion is here, executed worse. They also make your character have a twin just so they can have a character who can talk and feel emotions, because your boring-ass protagonist is stuck being an emotionless audience cipher. Cool!!!

Tetris Effect – 2018 – Origin – ★★★

It’s drugs Tetris. I personally don’t use, or have synesthesia for that matter. I imagine this game is better if you do. It’s an enjoyable enough experience but it feels incredibly slight for what I was expecting from it, or even compared to something like Lumines, which has tons of replayability by way of its difficulty. Tetris just isn’t that hard, unless you’re forcing yourself to do weird shit to get points. I WILL NEVER LEARN HOW TO T-SPIN. Never.

Castlevania Anniversary Collection – 2019 – Steam – ★★★

Kind of an unremarkable Castlevania collection. Neat that it has an official translation of Kid Dracula in there, but also… look, I prefer Metroidvania Castlevanias, OK?

6. Spelunky 2 – 2020 – Steam – ★★★

I’m not entirely sure why this doesn’t click for me where Spelunky 1 did. More annoying intro levels? Too many fiddly requirements for different ending-progression? Gameplay additions that just make things more annoying? Spelunky 1 was hard, but there was a kind straight-forwardness to it, even with its weird secrets, that made it much easier to grok and continue banging your head against. I’m just not having as much fun with this. Difficulty should be challenging, not a hassle.

5. Stellaris: Federations – 2020 – Steam – ★★★

This is the year that Stellaris just broke for me.

Federations itself is a good DLC; it adds some really interesting mechanics tied to various types of multi-national unions (the titular federations, as well as the Space UN), as well as the addition of unique “origins” that allow you to further specialize your gameplay. The origins in particular are a great addition that allows more specialization and roleplay.

I’m just tired of the sheer amount of busywork Stellaris forces you to do. Every DLC adds more junk you need to keep an eye on, and the fact that the AI doesn’t even bother with it (compensating with copious economy boosts in order to keep up) makes the whole thing frustrating. It’s like playing fetch with yourself; you just get tired of chasing after your own ball after a point.

I have to wonder if they’re pivoting towards a notional Stellaris 2 at this point? Might not be a bad idea for them, though it is weird with all they talked up adding more origins when Federations came out.

4. GranBlue Fantasy Versus – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★

This is probably the fighting game I got most into over the past few years. There’s just this nice, almost Street Fighter-esque ease of execution to the controls, and that Arc Systems Works 3D-as-2D style continues to just do work. I don’t give a single shit about GranBlue Fantasy (frankly, I think I’d enjoy this game more if it wasn’t attached to a property) but the characters are fun enough to play and look at.

The big problem here is two things: no crossplay, and no rollback netcode. In the span of a month, this game became a total ghost town on PC, and it doesn’t sound like PS4 faired that much better.

Ring Fit Adventure – 2019 – Switch – ★★★★

I’ve fallen on-and-off this game all year. At its heart: it works, it’s a fun exercise game. I don’t think it really feels like a “game” (in the sense that I’m not really coming to it for riveting gameplay or anything) as much as just a guided exercise experience, but… that’s fine? The in-game story is kind of flat, but funny in the fact of it existing at all. Buff Nicol Bolas and all.

XCOM 2: War of the Chosen – 2017 – Steam – ★★★★

XCOM2: War of the Chosen is a great answer to what XCOM2 struggled with. As I discussed back in 2016 (Jesus Christ), XCOM2 tried to push against player’s worst instincts by incentivizing them to keep being aggressive through a whole bunch of timers— which, kind of just weren’t fun given how much accidentally walking into an ambush could “ruin” dozens of hours of play. War of the Chosen dials that back in some intelligent ways, by instead making the encounter designs themselves, as well as much more grab-and-bail mission types, encourage players to push ahead instead. Smart!

The addition of the Chosen makes the game feel more alive, and they really do make missions harder— particularly early on. But they’ve somehow accidentally fell into the hole, where XCOM just… isn’t that hard? Early on it’s challenging, particularly with the resource restrictions and all. But they keep giving you more and more options (that aren’t especially meaningful choices) that make your team more and more powerful, without increasing the strength of the enemy as time goes on. By the five-hour mark, you basically know if you’re going to steam roll the game or not.

The amount of additional character and variety in the gameplay is great, I just wish it had a more challenging difficulty curve. Maybe make the meta-layer of when enemies show up more targeted to where players are at. If a player is doing well, ramp up the difficulty, if they’re struggling, pull it back a bit. I should always feel like I’m just barely keeping ahead with XCOM, not like I’m bored. And by the end of War of the Chosen, I was kind of getting bored, really. Oh well.

3. Animal Crossing: New Horizons – 2020 – Switch – ★★★★

This is probably the video game that I spent the most time with hours-wise this year. I’m not entirely sure why? It’s a nice evolution of New Leaf, in that the crafting, environment shaping, and general quality-of-life improvements made are quite nice. There’s clearly been some thought on how people play these games, and ways to make the experience less frustrating.

… and yet, they kept so much tedium in the game. Like yes, the schedule stretching is the point, I get it. As someone who for some reason decided not to play with the clock, I only just recently finished the fish, fossils, and insects for the museum. But there’s just so many weird, little things that just make it hard to keep coming back to it. It’s like… to what end? When I’ve unlocked everything, and basically seen the entirety of the item list at this point, and the holiday events all being the game meaningless collectathons…. Why? I’m not going to try completing the collection; the museum stuff is about my limit, really (and even the paintings I can probably pass on).

I guess even an idealized, digital representation of a quasi-domestic life has the spiritual emptiness of consumerism-for-consumerism sake. Thanks???

Hypnospace Outlaw – 2019 – Steam – ★★★★

I grew up on the internet of the early 00s. I had an AngelFire website, mostly consisting of shitty sprite webcomics and hosted Gundam pics. I remember when Google wasn’t really a thing and you would heavily rely on website compilation sites like the Anime Web Turnpike in order to find anything of value online. It was weird, it was wild. It was exciting!

The internet seemed so different back then. There was a ton of garbage online, but also, like… there was a sense of optimism to it. Folks were shitty, there was plenty of bad stuff online, but it felt so disconnected from the fabric of the physicality of real-life that it was at the same time a perfect escape.

I was young when I first got “online”, something like 12. I remember having this notion that the internet was going to be this great equalizer, that it had infinite potential to change how people behave and interact. Boy, huh.

Hypnospace Outlaw is essentially a splendid alternate universe GeoCities recreation, where you’re a volunteer moderator of a grouping of websites on HypnOS, an internet-analog you access while you are sleep. At the surface level, it’s mostly about poking around the weird alternate-historical version of the internet they created, full of kids feuding, bizarre historical divergences, and plenty of amazing bespoke weirdness. All of this is great; there’s an incredible amount of content that’s just great to poke at, listen to, and explore.

Below the surface, there’s also a rolling plotline about the ethics of this industry-owned platform, those who run it, and the way corporations handle new technology, new platforms, and emerging digital societies. There’s a late game turn that’s pretty damn affecting. And as someone who has moderator his share of internet forums in his time, trying to balance ‘do it for the community’ and what your ostensible ‘bosses’ require of you, it was kind of a weird throwback in more ways than one.

Minecraft – 2011 – PC – ★★★★★

Turns out, Minecraft is really as good still who knew??? Started playing a bunch more of it this year due to Giant Bomb deciding to do so, and yeah: still good!

2. Hades – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★★

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again— Supergiant makes damn good games. I’d been holding off on checking out Hades until its full release due to my tendency to burn out on games easily, and I’m glad I waited. Hades is a fantastic rogue-lite experience. The way it makes narrative progression part of the reiterative, randomized rogue-lite structure is just perfect.

It’s got all the usual Supergiant bullet points. Great characters, voice acting, narration, and music. In terms of gameplay, it’s probably their least ambitious game— playing something like a cousin to their original game, Bastion— but it’s also been polished to a mirror sheen. It just feels really damn good to play, over and over and over.

That being said, the second (final?) ending feels kind of…. Tacked on? It’s fine as a goal to go for while continuing to do the game’s relationship mechanics for additional story bits, but it ends up feeling kind of unfulfilling compared to the payoff of the first one.

1. Crusader Kings III – 2020 – Steam – ★★★★★

I never could get into Crusader Kings II. Despite my interest, the sheer mechanical heft and unintuitive interface made the game a wall that I just couldn’t get over. I’m sure if I’d dedicated myself I probably could have learned it, but… ehhhhhh.

Crusader Kings III, on the other hand, has a good tutorial, a cleaned-up UI, and a very helpful highlight and tooltip system that make it much easier to understand how to actually play the game through resources inside the game itself. And, as it turns out: I rather love this game.

I mean, conceptually it’s an easy sell, isn’t it? Historical politics is something I enjoy broadly. I liked Stellaris but wish it had more narrative, roleplaying elements. They outright say that “winning” isn’t really the point of the game. Instead, it’s more about emergent storytelling and playing with the different systems and seeing what you can do with it.

My current game has had me taking the Haesteinn dynasty from its Viking origins into England, forming a London-seated Northern Sea Empire that encompasses all of Britannia, Iceland, Holland, Norway, and Denmark. I am currently working on hegemonizing Norse religious control over enough Asatru holy sites to finally reform the religion, such that more unified feudalization can occur. To that end, my current ruler’s predecessor invaded West Francia and conquered the whole of its territory, substantially reducing the foothold of Catholicism in mainland Europe… which seems to have kicked the hornet’s nest, given the Crusade I’m going to need to contend with next time I boot up the game.

Of course, a complicating matter is that my current ruler— the Emperor of the North Sea, King of Ireland and the Danelaw, liege of the King of Denmark, was elected from the extended Haesteinn family via Thing, the Scandinavian council of his erstwhile vassals. Where the previous emperor, the one who manufactured the invasion of Francia, was quite religious and beloved for his adherence to the old ways, I discovered as I took over as his successor that he really, really is into just boning down across Europe. We’re talking constantly attempting to seduce neighboring Queens and Princesses. His vassals are not thrilled with this. They also don’t care for his propensity for torturing people to death, constantly.

I had no real say in this; attempting to stay on top of a dynasty is kind of like riding a bucking-bronco, so many things are only tenuously under your control that some weird shit can happen. This is especially true when you use the systems that make it easier to maintain the coherency of your domain. The Norse religion encouraging concubinage results in you having a lot of kids, which means there’s a lot of domain partition going on (someday, primogeniture, someday). Naturally, using Thing election reduces that, but also makes you sometimes end up having to play Emperor Stabbo-Fucko because they thought he was the best candidate at the time. Hell, I thought he was the best candidate at the time until I discovered just how many people he’d be laying with on the low. But you just have to roll with it.

The way the game forces you to play ball with character traits is great. Doing things that match with the character’s traits makes them lose stress. Doing things against their character increases stress. Too much stress can force you to make the character take up vices (which can make them suffer health or opinion maluses, as well as altering their aptitudes), or even die outright. And sometimes those vices and attitudes can be boons, given they open up opportunities for different character interactions.

Emperor Stab-and-Fuck-Kingdom is perhaps the most relaxed person alive, it turns out, because his sadism makes him really enjoy sacrificing infidels, which makes the gods happy. It also freaks the fuck out of all of his vassals, so they’re a good supplicant mix of both appreciative of my religious sentiments and also utterly terrified of my skull piles. Some especially brave vassals occasionally try to assassinate me, but my lovers keep jumping in front of the knife and saving my life mid-coitus. Iiiiiit happens! :D

The game can be incredibly fun to just watch, as it becomes emergently weird. Georgia right now is incredibly Jewish in game. I’m not sure how that happened; I guess someone made a random Jewish guy into a vassal, who somehow moved up enough in the world to make it a movement? The Byzantine princes elected a Coptic as Emperor, which over the course of the decade resulted in very accelerated balkanization as Byzantium just lost its shit. The Middle East and notional HRE haven’t really unified in a meaningful way, so I’m curious how things are going to go if/when the Mongols unify and roll-on in.

It’s one of those “Just one more thing” games that can completely devour time. I have more than a few times checked the clock mid-game to see that it’s 4AM and that I’ve totally ruined my sleep schedule in the process of play. Oooooops.

I highly recommend checking it out if you’re curious; the introductory, pre-release video series Paradox put out showing off the game does a pretty good job of showing the core gameplay loop and also how weird it can get.

#GAME OF THE YEAR #GOTY #nonfiction #thinkpiece #2020 #Crusader Kings 3 #Hades #SD Gundam #Animal Crossing

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solipsistful · 4 years

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vestriis replied to your post: various parts of our dashboard and twitter feed:...

What kind of feelings? Never heard of this before, so I am curious.

it’s an action RPG that is pretty Objectively Grindy As Fuck and would probably be no fun to return to, but the original was 11 when it came out and it was about dragons so that’s all we needed at the time

basically the part i have the most Feelings about is specifically the grind. like most games from the same guy, it has a number of endings, with each further one requiring you to have completed more sidequests, fight more bosses, and the Final Final Ending requires you get every single weapon -- which, again, repetitive and grindy as fuck game. (as much as we played it, we only got to ending 4, maybe even only 3?)

usually with that sort of thing, the endings get better the more you work at them, right? plenty of games where, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’ll first get The Bad Ending, then finishing some sidequests means now the ending is going to be Better, and 100%ing might mean either Funny Secret Ending (i think most of the Silent Hill secret endings are work-heavy ones, right?) or The Absolute Best Ending.

surprise not with Drakengard. ending 1, playing straight through the game with no sidequests or anything, gets you an ending where your Dragon BFF is painfully sealed along with the evil to save the world. how sad, doing the newly unlocked last chapter will help, right? wait no that actually just unleashes a bunch of unstoppable monsters unto the world. the next one unleashes a different bunch of unstoppable monsters and has you personally killing your Dragon BFF. ending 4 outright time-freezes most of the world (better or worse than the monsters? i dunno). ending 5 is an apocalypse for not just ONE world, but TWO (admittedly, you don’t actually know that you doomed the second world until Nier but hey)

you and i have talked about “pieces of media that made us first go “wait, you can do that?”” and Drakengard was that for video games for me in a lot of ways lmao. firstly that the progression of Bad->Better endings isn’t actually a given, and then that gameplay and story/theme actually can interweave somewhat meaningfully (especially considering that our main video game genre at the time was JRPGs, which can have a pretty strong split between “gameplay/what happens in fights” and “storytime/what happens in cutscenes”)

like... it’s a Big Deal that you have to kill hundreds and hundreds of people to get to the later endings. yeah they’re all kinda faceless masses, but it’s absolutely not treated as A Good Thing that you do this. the main character is bloodthirsty as hell, and the main party includes just some awful people like a cannibal who eats children. your solution to trying to save your Dragon BFF is to enact more violence? this is what you get, asshole.

(admittedly some of those themes sorta flew over my head at the time, and i didn’t know about the Nier connection until relatively recently, but even at the time, the whole “you’re... not playing a good person, and things are getting worse the more you try to fix things in your Not Good Way” was clear :’) )

- ace

#vestriis

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megamangx · 5 years

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drakengard nier halloween tales of scary spook

3 spooky yoko taro storys with spook enjoys.

drakengard 3 toffee ending

zero had finally kill one and freed the world form her darkness “i will make the fitst pack now” she shed and then aborbed the dragon and flowers and becomed a pact “i i feel sick and sweet” she gasp becuse she ate too much toffee and now her insides where cover in toffee as she started to vomit endless toffee “there too much toffee inside me” she cryed vomiting more toffee as she choked and her organs where clog with toffee and she kept vomiting the toffee until it drowned her sticky lungs and she die of toffee

bad end.

nier automato FLESHVAN

9s was in the city having a day off from yoha job when there was screams int he night and he went to investmatgate “i will check that out” he said and ran into the ally and it was emil who was half van “my van body NEEDS FLESH to keep driving I MUST HAVE MORE FLESH” he said running people over and goring them as they went under the FLESHVAN and there gib was used to fuel the car of evil as emil eyes glow “every day a death every death a deal” emil singed as 9s shot him but the bulets dodged off him “nothing can hurt me i am powered by satan and foresaked childran” he laughed and ran over 9s grinding him into robot flesh and consuming him to drive into the night.

next day 2b was at emil shop buying new swords “what happened to 9s?” she ask but he shooked head “who knows want tob uy one of my cool new emil burgers” he smiled and she buyed one little knowed that she was eating 9S REMAINS!!

the end

MRCLEMPS VISITS A DISTRICT

Mrclemps was a youtube channel and he was at an anime convention in the london city “this is fun and i get to meet cool and nice fans” he smile but then a brown hair man dress like a knight had come “i need your help to save lady mannha” he asked and clemps was confused wasn’t she a computer game character and not a real person but he could not ignore this so he followed him and notced he was not in london anymore but the drakengard unverse “i’m in drakgnard now cool” said clemps

but then nowe was there with eye of evil “is this a district” he askered him and got close as it was darkness like silant hill “is this a district” he asked again and clemps was scared “leave me alone” he cry and runed by nowe was in front him “is this a district” he laughed and then legna come and eated clemps.

clemps ghost was now trapped in limbo with the babys from ending e from the first game smiling “i hate this” he said.

the end?

#fanfiction #drakengard #2b #nier 9s #nier automata #mrclemps

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meetthetank · 5 years

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Peccatum Chapter 10: The Engine in the Woods

Rating: Mature Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Category: F/M Fandom: NieR: Automata (Video Game) Relationships: 2B/9S (NieR: Automata), A2/A4 (NieR: Automata), Jackass/The Commander (NieR: Automata) Characters: 2B (NieR: Automata), 9S (NieR: Automata), A2 (NieR: Automata), A4 (NieR: Automata), 6O (NieR: Automata), 21O, Jackass (NieR: Automata), The Commander (NieR: Automata) Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe, genre typical violence, long fic, Slow Burn, War

“Wow. Okay 11S, you win the bet,” 801S grumbles, fishing a handful of coins out of his pockets.

“Honestly I’m just as surprised as you are. I can barely talk to you guys for a mile straight, let alone fifteen,” he gestures to 9S and 2B who walk ahead of the group.

“They’re attached at the hip and they don’t even know.”

“They don’t have a clue.”

32S sighs, “If they end up together that’s one less scout in the group. We’d be down to the four of us.”

“Give Nines some credit,” 801S says, “It’s not like him to just leave his friends for a pretty girl.”

“Except that’s exactly what just happened.”

11S points to 9S veering off into the dense forest with 2B following close behind.

“Oh I’m gonna kill him.”

Despite being in the middle of a grueling march into uncertainty, 9S has an infectious spring in his step. He and 2B lead the scouts by nearly a mile for no other reason than they haven’t noticed.

They talk the entire time; well, 9S talks the entire time. 2B occasionally chimes in on something he says, but for the most part she walks in silence. The difference is that she looks at him with that adorable head tilt and a curious gaze . She seems actually interested in what he has to say, listening to him go on and on about the most inane of topics, such as his endless attempts to beat the Commander in gungi, and it makes his heart flutter.

It’s not the first time 9S has felt this kind of puppy love, far from it, but this is the first time that someone has reciprocated. Or at least he thinks she reciprocates. Sometimes he has trouble differentiating between what’s real and what’s imagined.

He knows he’s not imagining the subtle upward twitch of her lips when he starts rambling off about his list of strategies for the next gungi match.

“Maybe I should teach you how to play one day.” he says to her, smiling from ear to ear.

“Uh...I’m not sure I’d be much of a challenge.”

“Aw, it’s not about the challenge, it’s about having fun!”

“You were just comparing beating your commander to ‘a light genocide’.”

“Yeah but that’s different.” 9S scoffs and waves his hand dismissively, “That’s a rivalry that spans years!”

“Does White know that?”

“Not yet.”

2B covers her mouth with her hand, stifling a giggle. 9S feels his jaw go slack and his whole world slow to a crawl. He’s never heard her laugh before, let alone at something he said. Heat rises in his cheeks and his ears, and he swears his heart skips a beat or two.

“Are you trying to catch flies like that?” she teases.

“I-...uh- No just-....” 9S stammers, “Yawning.”

2B simply cocks an eyebrow up but doesn’t press him further. Shaking the stupor away, he jogs back to her side and tries to smooth over the awkward silence with whatever comes to his mind first. However, a sharp pain stabs at the base of his skull, making him hiss through his teeth.

“9S? What’s wrong?” 2B asks and places a hand on his shoulder.

“Nothing, nothing,” he lies, “Just uh...got the sun in my eyes.”

“...It’s been overcast all day.”

He looks up if only to avoid making eye contact with her, “Ah, so it is…”

They lapse into silence once again while 9S forces himself through the piercing headache. Simply walking in a straight line becomes difficult and he ends up bumping into 2B on more than one occasion. He believes he hears her tell him to stop and rest, but he just waves his hand dismissivly. It’s hard to hear anything over the sound of his own pulse.

Except for...something. The faint giggling of children and dissonant tones of some bizarre instrument. It makes his skin crawl and the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. The forest, the well trod path, even 2B all blur together as the sounds grow louder. Dread takes hold of 9S’ heart when something red flashes in the corner of his vision. His hand flies to the hilt of his spear and 2B follows suit with her own blade out of reflex, but the only thing lurking in the shadows are small forest animals.

“...9S?”

“I’m...fine.”

Just behind where 2B stands, he sees them. Those two girls in red. They flash in and out of his vision, laughing at him. Taunting him. 9S stops in his tracks and shuts his eyes. In the past, these hallucinations would pass on their own if he just sat down and thought about anything else. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. All he has to do is wait and they’ll go away on their own. Don’t listen to their laughter, don’t listen to what they tell him to do.

Don’t listen to what they say about 2B.

Their words make him sick to his stomach, not just from content alone, but they feel as if they’re being poured into his ears. He could do everything in his power to block his hearing, and the giggling of those awful girls would still pierce inside his head

You there...boy.

A deep bellowing voice cuts through his mind. The visions dissipate as the voice echoes against the forest. Even 2B stops in her tracks, the downy feathers hidden beneath her hair shifting and giving it the impression of volume.

Little spawn. Who are you?

A breeze blows through the trees from a deeper part of the forest, far off the trail, bringing with it the smell of wood and various flora. Nostalgia wells up in 2B’s chest at the scent alone and she almost finds herself wandering in the direction of the wind by instinct alone. The only reason she stops is to not abandon 9S.

Come here, little one. Leave the reptile behind.

However, 9S brushes right past her and into the forest.

“9S?” she calls after him and follows the path he creates through the brush.

2B follows close behind, deftly navigating the uneven terrain where 9S stumbles and crushes branches underfoot. She calls his name and even tries to stop him physically, but he keeps pushing his way further and further in.

Not far now, Little Spawn.

The booming voice in 9S’ head is oddly calming, like the voice of the kindly grandparents he never had, or a groaning old oak tree. It’s so much different than the girls in red that he has to know the source. He moves in a trance, barely aware of 2B following him or the twigs and thorn bushes that prick at his legs. The forest becomes so dense that it blocks out most of the sunlight and simply walking becomes difficult. Bird songs and the leaves in the wind are just as deafening as the droning voice drawing him further in.

They come to a wall of foliage, thick ivy and gnarled branches that blocks their progress, but just as 2B begins to urge him to turn back 9S takes a small hatchet out off his belt and begins hacking away at the shrubs. With a sigh, 2B begins helping by slashing a path through at a much faster pace. 9S pays her no mind, too far entranced by whatever he’s feeling to notice her, until 2B yanks him through the hole she carved into the dense foliage.

Whatever she was expecting it certainly wasn’t this.

In the middle of a massive clearing sits the corpse of some sort of creature. Nature covers most of its body, but 2B can make out the shape of its armored shell from which great pipe like structures jut out, and six legs as thick as the oldest tree trunks. The hundreds of jagged claws that cover its feet could be mistaken for ancient stones as well as the teeth that sit in the center of its long leathery neck. The only thing that stands out and isn’t covered in forest growth is the smooth black thing at the end of its neck.

Just the sight of this corpse ignites a deep rooted fury within 2B. She has no idea where the feeling came from, but all of the sudden she wants to destroy what remains of it. To grind it into dust and leave nothing standing. No trace of this...thing that doesn’t belong in this world.

...Doesn’t belong in this world…

She’s felt this before, this instinct.

So why doesn’t he illicit this?

9S stands in awe of the corpse, dwarfed by the sheer mass of it. He barely comes up to the tip of the glassy structure, and each of its teeth are as big as he is. Never in his life did he’d see something like this, even in an army meant to fight monsters. Is this thing even real? The only thing he can do to be sure is to reach out and…

The moment his hand touches the glassy surface a low hypnotic drone reverberates through his whole body, and causes the girls in red to vanish completely from his mind. Even their whispers and giggles fade into nothingness. 9S leaps backwards when six, glowing green eyes flicker to life just beneath his hand. They shift in position in pattern, until they arrange themselves in a V shape pointing directly at him.

Something rattles in 9S’ skull like the droning noise that this creature makes but far more articulated and potent. He recoils back only to lose his footing when 2B throws him behind her, sword drawn and a growl in her throat.

“Hmph,” the beast says, a large cloud of steam leaving its mouth, “You carry our blood, yet do not speak our tongue?”

2B lets out a snarl and raises her sword to strike, still keeping herself between 9S and this massive creature.

“Stow your fangs, reptile. I cannot harm you.” it says, “My body has been broken for a long time.”

“2B, put the sword away,” 9S says, putting his hand on her tense shoulders, “If it wanted to hurt us it would have done so already.”

She snarls at him but reluctantly sheaths her sword in her back scabbard. Her eyes never waver from their lock on the massive creature’s body. 9S tries to put himself in between it and 2B, but a low hiss from her keeps him in place next to her.

“What are you?” 9S asks.

It lets out a low sound that’s similar to a laugh, “I thought I smelled ape on you. Only they would be so ignorant. I am Engine 34287 Batch 57. I believe the apes called my kind City Breakers or Engles.”

“Engles...I’ve heard about you. Or...not specifically you, but about City Breakers. I had no idea you were...living things.”

“Feh,” Engles laughs, “Demons are as alive as apes and the creatures of this realm. Though we are manufactured and cultivated, we live just the same.”

“Manufactured?” something akin to disgust and hate rises in 9S’ gut, “You mean demons are...products?”

“We are weapons. Each of us has a purpose, a function we are designed to do. I was meant to break down the crude walls of your capitals, but as you can see I did not live to fulfill that purpose.”

“I don’t understand,” says 9S, stepping closer to it, “Did something stop you? Some weapon harmed you?”

“HA! No ape construct could pierce my hide. No, my body could not handle the strain of this world. My legs ceased functioning not long after I entered.”

“Did anyone try to fix you?”

Engles shifts its head to the right and then the left, “No. My escort legion left me to rot, as I was no longer of use. The Terminals stopped giving me instructions not long after.”

“The Terminals?” he says, “You mean the girls in red? You see them too?!”

2B shoots him a strange look at the mention of his hallucinations. He’ll have to remember to assure her he isn’t crazy. Probably.

“Saw. Of course I saw them, ape. They are our creators. Our masters. Even one with infernal blood as diluted as yours would hear their call.”

9S feels sick to his stomach. The thought of finding himself in any way similar to the demons repulses him to his very core. A portion of his back, where his tail would be if it were visible, begins to ache with the phantom pains of attempted self mutilation. With great effort he suppresses the nausea and hatred for the sole purpose of gathering more information directly from the mouth of the enemy.

“Why...why didn’t you call for help?”

“Oh I did, little ape, I did. I called for...I don’t recall how long I called for help. Eventually I accepted my fate and found peace here as the forest grew around me. I became a home for many creatures I once found vile. Your realm is...far more beautiful than I believed,” Engles laboriously turns his head to 2B, “It only took me some centuries to see why your kind defended this place so fiercely, reptile.”

2B can’t hide the shock in her expression. Never in her life would she expect a demon to...understand.

“Wait, what?” 9S interrupts, “I don’t get it. In every story I’ve read about the past Demon Wars, it was always the Angels that turned the tide.”

“In major battles, yes, but the High Enochians could care less about your realm. They only wish for us to fail, as it has been since the Alpha Terminal came into being. No, the Apes owe their continued existence in this realm to the Dragons.”

“That’s…” he stammers as memories fill his mind, “Wait, what about the red dragon? The one that burned down all those cities and townships not less than...twenty years ago?”

“Hm…” Engles rumbles, causing a flock of birds to scatter from the various pipes on its back.

“The General of our army lead a campaign to try and combat it, but it ended in failure,” 9S squares his shoulders and takes a deep breath, “If what you said is true, why would a dragon side with you and suddenly start attacking human homes?”

Engles’ eyes flicker for a moment before refocusing on 9S, “My memories are fractured, but I do recall the Terminals negotiating a contract with an ambitious reptile.”

Just one answer launches a thousand more questions in 9S’ mind and he’s about to begin interrogating the demon further, but a voice echoes through the forest that fills him with panic.

“Nines?! 9S where the hell are you?!”

There’s no mistaking 801S’ voice, laced with annoyance.

“Shit. How far did we wander?” 9S hisses to himself.

“I don’t know, I was following you to make sure you didn’t fall into a pit or something.” 2B grumbles.

“We can’t let them find Eng-...the demon. They’d kill him outright and we’d lose enemy intelligence.”

“I have thought myself too proud to ask things of a reptile and a mongrel ape but...please. Keep this place a secret. I do not have much power left. I wish to die peacefully, and forever be a home for these creatures of the forest.”

9S and 2B hesitate, hearing the last wish of something they both consider a monster makes their chests tighten.

“...Of course,” 2B says with a solemn nod.

Engles lets out a long sigh and rests its head on the ground, “Thank you, Dragon. Perhaps, if I am still alive, you could visit me? It’s...nice to talk to someone again.”

“Yeah, we’ll visit,” says 9S as he’s pulled by the arm by 2B.

“Farewell then...friends.”

“There you two are!” 801S shouts as 2B and 9S emerge from the dense underbrush, “Where the hell did you wander off to?!”

“Easy, easy!” 9S responds, holding his hands up defensively, “We went to investigate a disturbance I heard deeper in the woods.”

“Why didn’t you call for backup then?” asks 32S.

“I mean...I had 2B with me.”

“Yeah, we know,” 801S accuses.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?!”

“You know damn well what I mean!” he jabs his finger at 9S’ chest, “This is war! This isn’t a game you can just ditch to go elope in the woods with some harlot!”

2B bristles quietly but refuses to speak. Keeping her gaze forward she begins to walk away from the group, only to be followed by 9S and the rest of the scouts.

“She’s not a harlot!!-...” 9S shouts then stops himself before he lets his anger get the best of him, “I told you, there was a disturbance deeper in the woods and we went to investigate! If there was a problem I would have doubled back for help!”

“Whatever,” 801S grumbles, “Just go get on point.”

801S storms back to the other scouts, leaving 9S fuming alone. The nauseating mixture of self loathing, dread, and anger makes him tear up just a touch. He wipes his eyes with his scarf before miserably plodding back to 2B, ignoring the red flickers in the corner of his vision.

(Biiig shout out to @nierly-amazing for the sketch of lovely Engles!!)

#nier atuomata #nier automata fanfiction #fantasy au #2B #9S #Tanks fics

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nascentflash · 5 years

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never-ending survey: j’lihmu

RULES: Repost, do not reblog. Tag 10 blogs!

tagged by:@violet-warder (thank you so much!)

tagging: honestly? anyone that wants to do it! (i don’t know who actually got tagged already) you are more than welcomed to tag me :>

BASICS.

FULL NAME : J’lihmu Rhatni

NICKNAME : Crimson, Li

AGE : 25

BIRTHDAY : 19th Sun of the Third Astral Moon (5/19)

ETHNIC GROUP : Miqo’te (Seeker of the Sun)/ Elezen (Wildwood)

NATIONALITY : Ul’Dahn

LANGUAGE / S : Common, a hit of Hingan/Doman (broken)

SEXUAL ORIENTATION : Demisexual

ROMANTIC ORIENTATION : Panromantic

RELATIONSHIP STATUS : Taken (Single in some AUs)

HOME TOWN / AREA : Abalathia’s Spine/Sky Frost

CURRENT HOME : The Lavender Beds — a small home she bought herself.

PROFESSION : Hunter, mercenary, the good ol’ Warrior of Light resume being handed out.

PHYSICAL.

HAIR : Naturally red with orange highlights.

EYES : A bright green.

FACE : Resting bitch face syndrome, always /annoyed, slightly round.

LIPS :Full, tinted with the same color as her eye paint.

COMPLEXION : Slightly tanned.

BLEMISHES :None.

SCARS : Littered across her body, reminder of the victories — or losses — she always came out alive.

TATTOOS : Tattoos litter her form, it is part of her tribe back home. Her arms are covered, legs, and back.

HEIGHT : 5′2″.

WEIGHT : 143lbs.

BUILD : Athletic.

FEATURES : Large, somewhat almond shaped eyes, small, slightly refined nose, both ears pierced and longer than the normal miqo’te.

ALLERGIES : None.

USUAL HAIR STYLE : When long — messy, unkempt until told otherwise. A large braid would encompass a portion of her hair, and the other wild and free. Sometimes in a large, messy bun when she’s working, or doing anything out of battle. Short — has now a tendency to keep it up to date with oils and minerals, making sure her hair is looking better than before. She would not have it in a braid, with the exception of one on her side or most of her hair swept away from her face.

USUAL FACE LOOK : Thick painted eye-makeup, whether blue (for her tribe) or red (for herself), lips tinted red. Besides that, she has no other make up on her whatsoever. It is rare to see her without her tribal paint unless she’s at home, relaxing.

USUAL CLOTHING : Leather, furs/coats, jewelry made from bones of bears long dead from her home. However, she adapts and changes depending where she is. Example; in Kugane, she is seen wearing more of their traditional outfits in some instances, but will always opt for the good ol’ tank top and shorts if she can get away with it. Yes, even under the kimono.

PSYCHOLOGY.

FEAR / S : Failure (more so towards her WoL than anything else), falling to her Inner Beast, death— in a sense.

ASPIRATION / S : To achieve greatness and be worthy of remembrance outside the confines of her tribe. To eventually help lead a line of new, young warriors from her tribe.

POSITIVE TRAITS : Confident, resourceful, passionate, outspoken.

NEGATIVE TRAITS : Short-tempered, impatient, competitive, ruthless.

MBTI : ESTP-A/ESTP-T

ZODIAC : Azeyma (?T-Taurus?)

TEMPERAMENT : Choleric.

SOUL TYPE / S : Warrior.

ANIMALS : Bear.

VICE HABIT / S : Isolation, punching the wall a couple of times until her knuckles bleed in anger, running head on in battle and not tending to her wounds.

FAITH : Questionable, leaning on no beliefs.

GHOSTS ? : Yes.

AFTERLIFE ? : Believer.

REINCARNATION ? : Believer.

ALIENS ? : ????

POLITICAL ALIGNMENT : The only time she gave a shit is when things started going down in Ishgard, just to be spiteful to Ul’Dah later honestly. Would care for her tribes political shenanigans, but thats about it.

EDUCATION LEVEL : Home-schooled in a sense. Her father and the elders of the village taught her all she knows to a point.

FAMILY.

FATHER : Close.

MOTHERS : Estranged, trying her best tm.

SIBLINGS : ...Complicated (Half-siblings are a handful)

EXTENDED FAMILY : Many, but she does not know her mother’s side, only her father’s.

NAME MEANING / S : Her name has no meaning, but, if you asked her father—J’zahlu would say it reminded him of the sun.

HISTORICAL CONNECTION ? : No..?

FAVORITES.

BOOK : Intricate pages describing worlds she will never know.

DEITY : Azeyma.

HOLIDAY : Starlight Celebration.

MONTH : October.

SEASON : Autumn.

PLACE : Mountaintops with caves, deep within, a system of caves that lead you to the deepest part of home.

WEATHER : Sunny and cloudy days.

SOUND / S: The sound of metal clashing unto one another, the sound of rain hitting the earth.

SCENT / S : Damp caverns, burnt fur, perfumes.

TASTE / S : Sweets, orange, blood.

FEEL / S : Fur, cold floor, rough skin, broken wood.

ANIMAL / S : Bears, hunting hawks, paissa — who is now her son, don’t @ me

NUMBER : 18.

COLORS : Vermilion, black, gold, aquamarine, orange.

EXTRA.

TALENTS : Existing, hunting, beating people at bars, talking shit about powerful people because she knows she can’t be killed, headbutting is her specialty.

BAD AT : Loss, dancing, drinking — she will fall asleep or drunk fight, who knows.

TURN ONS : Men — large hands, broad build, scars, messy hair, independent. Women — someone who can kick ass, makes her laugh, independent.

TURN OFFS : Attention-seekers, arrogance, stupidity, carelessness — basically what she does what else is new.

HOBBIES :Hunting, people watching, trying to be a good blacksmith, mining — it’s therapeutic.

TROPES : Green-Eyed Redhead, Fiery Redhead, An Axe to Grind [idk a lot im baby]

QUOTES : “If one more noble attempts to be snotty with me, he’s about to get his ass ripped open by my axe.”

MUN QUESTIONS.

Q1 : If you could write your character your way in their own movie, what would it be called, what style would it be filmed in, and what would it be about?

—The Lost Crucible, it would be filmed like a documentary, so to speak, switching from third POV [narrator] to first POV [dumb catgirl] that would be finding out about her tribe, and the trial young warriors go through.

Q2 : What would their soundtrack/score sound like?

— Songs that remind you of a time when you’re one in nature; drums that give you that itch to move and dance to the beat, to appease the old and new gods, whatever you believe in. It would be of her home — where the village barely touches the heavens itself.

Q3 : Why did you start writing this character?

— I did it in a way to sort of make a new oc from an old oc, so to speak. The OG version, as you could call it, is vastly different and I kept making lots of jokes with her when I name changed and eventually she just started to slowly build up.

Q4 : What first attracted you to this character?

— It’s a mixture of self insert, so finding a way to incorporate stuff into my own character is what sort of ... made her my lovable daughter. She’s not all self-insert, her attitude, her anger, her sorrow, her accomplishments and failures and imagines on how she would deal with X and Y is just absolutely fascinating for me and having a fierce miqo’te hailing from the snowy mountain tops of Abalathia’s Spine who’s tiny with a big axe is my aesthetic okay.

Q5 : Describe the biggest thing you dislike about your muse.

— Her desire to keep things quiet until the last second—mostly when it’s about her. Anything related to her life, her health, her problems, she’d rather deal with them alone. Even if there’s been major character improvement, there are some things she does not feel comfortable sharing, or letting people in. Her desire for more power so she can finally be at peace.

Q6 : What do you have in common with your muse?

— We are both stubborn bitches. However, she deals with things far better than I ever could, as I am baby. Similar in arrogance, and in anger — to a point.

Q7 : How does your muse feel about you?

— She’d fucking kick my ass. I think she would appreciate me, and not be as bully as with others — not because I am her mun, but more so as I think we’d clash a lot but get along quite well, too.

Q8 : What characters does your muse have interesting interactions with ?

— I, unfortunately haven’t had a lot of interactions with Li trying to be nice, or fight somebody but— people like her, who are broken yet continue on. Who carry a mantle too big to carry and they do it anyways. Fighters that only know how to fight, when she eventually wants peace, but that will never leave her soul. People so nice that it makes her want to protect them; to view the world the way they see it. Warriors, even if they are not from the same village, are all brethren to one another and the desire to meet and see how they live out their lives — just a handful of stuff in my head I’d like to see.

That and a bar fight, she really is the one who would start a bar fight drunk or angry okay. Also nobles. She sort of hates them cause of her mom but then eventually doesn’t and it’s awkward asf.

Q9 : What gives you inspiration to write your muse ?

—Vikings, Game of Thrones aesthetics of the Dothraki tribe, anything tribal honestly. The existential dread that is Nier: Automata, some Fire Emblem aesthetics, a lot of stuff honestly.

Q10 : How long did this take you to complete ?

— I STARTED YESTERDAY. I finished late today cause my last two braincells hate everything

#long post #thanks for the tag!#that took way longer than it should've but i am dumb #c; J'Lihmu Rhatni #answered prompt;

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nameless-articles · 5 years

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The Regional Differences of Nier (And Why the Western Version is Better)

Nier (2010) is one of countless games to change based on the region its released in. While the localization process is nothing interesting in the realm of video games, the extent to which Nier changes is quite immense. The significant difference between Nier Replicant, the Japanese Playstation 3 version, and Nier Gestalt, the Japanese Xbox and worldwide version, is the age of the main character (canonically and for the sake of this essay titular) and his relationship to Yonah. In the former, Nier is Yonah’s older brother, while in the latter he is Yonah’s father. There appears to be a twenty or so year difference between the two Niers, and in general this does little to affect the gameplay. Yoko Taro is on record as saying Replicant was the original premise, while Gestalt was an attempt to appeal to a wider audience, as they feared the younger protagonist would not mesh well with western players. While their fears weren’t misguided, this change has wider thematic implications that overall service the narrative better than if Nier had remained a brother.

While Gestalt is available in Japan, it’s important to note that it is the Xbox version. Japanese support was weak for the console, hence any user being hard-pressed to name several noteworthy Japanese made games that did not cater to the west in some fashion (at least overseas, because there were a surprising number of japanese only shoot-em-ups and rpgs exclusive to the Xbox). All to say, that even if this version was available in Japan, the developers didn’t make it with Japanese players in mind.

Yoko Taro is no stranger to challenging tropes in video games, and this is one of the surface reasons Nier’s age difference works between versions. Tropes vary depending on regional culture, so it is not too far-fetched to suggest a game challenging conventional game design and its tropes would change important/visible aspects of its game to challenge them. While a caring big brother is a common trope in the West, there are more instances of it in Japanese media (particularly games and other contemporary media). On the other hand, the caring father figure is a trope that, though it would not be amazingly popular in video games for another two years after Nier (thank you The Last of Us), is familiar to the average consumer. On a basic level, the big brother and father roles are functioning the same outside of a few script changes and different voice acting. Gameplay wise, brother Nier has a better excuse for not having the ability to wield greatswords and spears than father Nier, but this doesn’t amount to much beyond a jarring absence of those weapons in the first half of the western version. As the game goes on, there is a different importance placed on the character depending on their age and relationship, and the implications for the story are greater for father than they are brother.

Our expectations for these characters’ knowledge varies depending on how old they are; we would expect father Nier to be wiser, to know more about this world than we would for brother Nier. What we would chalk up to naivety for brother Nier is then considered willful ignorance if not outright manipulation for the older one. Brother Nier is a simpler character in this regard, because he’s young, and we can only despise what he does so much before realizing he didn’t know any better. Father Nier, on the other hand, is old enough that his lack of empathy provides stronger commentary for his character.

At the root of Nier (game) is the matter of perspective: what looks good for one character is disastrous and hostile for another. The game reveals this information towards the end of the first playthrough and all throughout the second. This information then informs the player’s perspective on both Nier’s behavior and what we presumed to be hostile acts. Let’s take a look at the cutscene after Emil destroys the Aerie.

Emil is overcome with grief and sorrow because of the destruction his actions have caused. He seems genuinely concerned and remorseful after having destroyed the town, realizing all the innocent people that were surely killed in the process. Despite actions having consequences throughout the whole game, none of them up until that point have had that great of a change. From this point on, this area becomes more or less useless (and for those interested in grinding out upgrade materials, a sour sight as you wait until the next play through to grind for eggs). People to talk to, quests to complete, whatever you needed in that place is completely locked away for the rest of the play through. All that remains is a huge and empty pit.

How does Nier respond to Emil? He tells Emil, “But you saved our lives,” and goes on to explain how it was a case of them or the shades, that there was no other choice to take, and ends, almost like an order, by telling Emil, “Don’t look back.” Nier does not want Emil to think about the negative consequences of his actions, a running theme present throughout the story, usually used with regards to killing shades, where no matter how innocuous their behavior might seem, Nier will posit that there is no other choice but to exterminate each and every shade they encounter. Nier tells Emil this to keep him on his side, to influence the way Emil should see his monstrous actions. Nier needs him to believe in his cause, and there’s no room to question who’ve you hurt, or whether you are wrong.

Nier’s stubbornness persists throughout the whole game, culminating in the end where, despite knowing that the Shadowlord has just a noble a cause - in fact, probably a nobler cause considering he is the original Nier and his daughter is the original Yonah - Nier refuses to sympathize or stop himself from taking what he deserves. This isn’t to say that the Nier we play as the whole game is necessarily “the bad guy,” but that our entire notion of what it means to play “the bad guy” is entirely dependent on the perspective and player agency of that character.

It is much easier to view these enemies in simple terms as we are forced to do in the first play through, before we understand Kaine’s backstory and see how shades behave when they aren’t being murdered by the replicants. These are enemies, plain and simple. Though there are side quests and moments where this comes into question, for the majority of the main plot, up until the very end, we are meant to believe that our fight is the right thing to do. However, the second playthrough complicates this situation, and it starts to become less clear whether we should keep on going. However, Nier’s own persistent despite our own knowledge is what differentiates him from most other playable protagonists. While the player is able to make choices throughout the game, it is never during the most critical scenes (despite arguably the ending (though even then the Shadowlord must always be defeated)). Nier is stubborn and committed to the purpose he has set for himself until the very end.

Again, as a brother these actions come across just as stubborn, however this stubbornness is different from father Nier. We can look at Nier’s actions more critically when we accept that he’s consciously exerting himself and manipulating others to get the result he wants.

This becomes most clear during the battle with Devola and Popola. The sisters make the game’s point clear: Everyone has their own motives and desires driving them, and conflict happens when different characters with opposing purposes meet. It really is that simple. However, after Nier kills Devola, he tells Popola to stop. Popola responds with what might be the most powerful statement in the entire game. Her line, “Do you think I have the luxury to stop?” is particularly poignant because it invites the player to consider how important her role is and whether she could call it quits even if she wanted to. But most importantly, it makes the player question why we ourselves haven’t stopped. Why have we continued to play this game and kill these characters? Even if we separate ourselves from the characters and believe we only play to get to the end, what does this say about our behaviors and why we continue to play games at all. Why don’t we just stop? Before her phase in the battle begins, she exclaims, “No one ever stops!” She’s just as assured in what she’s about to do as Nier. While this article focuses on how Nier (the character) is changed between regions, it would be foolish not to include that this line, as it’s expressed in the English dub, does not exist in the original Japanese. In Japanese, Popola just exclaims that she’s going to kill you… Besides removing many of the implications that her English exclamation has, it really limits how deeply we can think about Devola and Popola. The English version gives a better sense of thematic ideas that have been present throughout.

The credit song for ending A works to this goal as well. Though the song is interesting for the way it explains how the world of Nier (the game) relates to Drakengard by giving the events shortly following that game’s ending, there are several lines that speak to the thematic points that I argue are made clearer in the English version. The chorus of the song goes, “Hidden so deep in veils of deceit, / Imprisoned in twisting spells - / Are we the plaything of fiends, or merely the dreams / That we're telling ourselves, telling ourselves?” While Devola acknowledges the reality of everyone having motives, she neglects to note how difficult it is to discover those motives; even Nier doesn’t find out until they tell him explicitly, and up until then everyone is certain the sisters are on the side of the replicants. These lines also acknowledge the unfounded nature of everyone’s motives and purpose. Do our duties come from a manipulative figure (as we see Nier doing to Emil) or do they come from something we hope is achievable (as we see in the side quest where the boy wants to escape his family of thieves). Are either of these better than the other?

The lines directly following the first chorus, “Strive till the phantoms are broken, / Fight till the battle is done,” refer to the end goal of these motives, which is to say, not necessarily to achieve those motives at all. If phantoms are taken to be haunting visages of the past, then we continue on until we forget about them. If we set out for war, all we can do is fight until there is nothing left to fight. Fighting until the battle is done is not the same as fighting until its won. The one referenced in the lyrics only wants the fight to be done, regardless of the results. Neither of these existences are spoken of with much reverence, more so with an acceptance that this is one framework through which we view actions in our lives. Further playthroughs build our understanding of everyone’s actions, but the game’s final ending being locked behind deleting the player’s save data asks us to question what these goals are worth (or they would, if consoles didn’t have cloud-saving and backup features).

While the song lyrics and final-ending mechanic are present in the Japanese version as well, that version of the game, primarily by having Nier portrayed as a younger character, doesn’t reinforce these larger thematic ideas as well as the English version, despite arguably having better voice acting. The English version feels like it has a more concentrated focus on these interactions because of the little things changed to appeal to a western audience. While most games don’t/wouldn’t benefit from a western localization, it’s interesting to encounter a game where such a release feels like a more tightly constructed work of art.

#nier #video games #translations #regional differences #gestalt #replicant #ps3

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miloscat · 3 years

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[Review] Nier Reincarnation (iOS)

My first Nier game, and I’m hooked!

My friend Gibbon got me to try this new mobile RPG as it launched, and I played it daily until now! It’s got all the usual trappings of these kind of free to play games, with an energy system, premium currency, tons of crafting materials, events, crossovers. Gameplay is simplistic and more about keeping your numbers up. But it’s wrapped up in an appealing package with some pretty engaging story and very stylish, clean, and consistent visual design.

It’s a Yoko Taro game like the other Nier and Drakengard titles. From what I know of them (not having played them yet myself), this seems to share many traits: desaturated colour schemes, themes of transhumanism, most of the characters being waifish, white-haired cyborg asassins with embarrassingly revealing outfits.

In this case, there’s a framing story about a young girl/insectoid monster being led around a vast stone ruin by a mysterious and deceptive but cute ghost-like creature. In trying to recover her memories/consume the dreams of humans, they enter other stories from across the ages, and observe the absurdly tragic lives of a series of characters, recruiting them for your team. These range from touching tales of lives ruined by war (90% of the cast), to infuriating debacles of a guy selfishly neglecting his family (Argo, he sucks).

My main team consisted of Gayle, the provincial provider forcibly converted into a part-mechanical killing machine; Akeha, matriarch of a house of assassins in feudal Japan; and Fio, the main character(?), who was forced into a social subclass and whose family fell apart, her only solace found in the world of dreams with an unlikely friend. Most of the settings of these tales are post-apocalyptic dystopias of one kind or another, and share themes of cruelty, war, the search for meaning, and having ridiculously terrible things happen constantly to the characters and seeing how they react. You can dig as deep as you want for the story content, with alternate skins, weapons, and events fleshing out backstories and sidestories of the cast, their contexts, and their intersections.

I don’t know how much I can say about the gameplay. There is a fair bit of depth to setting up and customising your team and navigating all the upgrade menus. The RPG battles set in their restricted 3D arenas look flashy but basically play themselves, although you have a little bit of interactivity with them. Like many of these games you can spend stamina to grind a bunch of quests automatically, but in this one you actually have to let them play out in real time even then, which requires a not insignificant time investment on the player’s part. I got used to setting this up then putting my phone down while I did something else; keep in mind this can be a big drain on the battery.

As far as free to play games go, this one was very generous. They throw premium currency and materials at you often, and the international launch had events coming thick and fast, to catch up to the six-month-old Japanese release. As of today we’ve reached parity on main story content, and had crossovers with Nier Replicant and Automata, as well as Drakengard 3. With a roadmap of more improvements and content to come, the game is still living and evolving, but it’s in a robust shape and worth checking out.

#nier #nier reincarnation #applibot #review #ios

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Was Final Fantasy Really the First JRPG?

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

1987’s Final Fantasy deserves all the credit it can get for helping popularize the JRPG genre (especially in the West), expanding the scope of NES titles, and kicking off an all-time great franchise, but was it really the first JRPG ever made?

To help answer that question, we first have to define what a JRPG is and what separates that subgenre from tabletop RPGs, CRPGs, ARPGs, strategy RPGs, and every other type of role-playing game out there.

The problem is that defining a JRPG has always been an especially contentious topic. It seems easy to say that a JRPG is an RPG made in Japan, but even that definition doesn’t satisfy everyone. For instance, Dark Souls is an RPG made in Japan, but you rarely hear fans describe it as a JRPG.

You could use common JRPG gameplay/design elements to help define the genre, but even that gets tricky. For instance, I could say that a JRPG has random encounters, turn-based combat, level grinding, and parties of customizable characters, but where does that leave games like Earthbound, Nier, and even later entries into the Dragon Quest and Persona franchises that don’t include all of those elements?

The simpler solution in this instance may be to look at the original Final Fantasy and focus on the elements of the game that later became “tropes” of the JRPG genre and help define the image we form in our head when we think of JRPGs from that era.

What we’re basically looking for, then, is a role-playing game made in Japan that features turn-based combat, random enemy encounters, character leveling, and an overworld you explore between dungeons and quests. If we accept that there was a time when JRPGs were at least partially defined by such qualities (and that deviating from those qualities represented a deviation from subgenre norms) then was Final Fantasy the first JRPG?

Well, the pretty obvious answer to that question is “no.” At the very least, 1986’s Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior certainly beat Final Fantasy to the JRPG punch. Final Fantasy director Hironobu Sakaguchi has stated many times in the past that his game probably would have never been made if it wasn’t for Dragon Quest‘s surprising success. There’s a complicated conversation we’re about to have regarding the “true” origins of the JRPG genre, but few will deny that Dragon Quest is an earlier example of a JRPG game.

But what if we broaden our definition a bit in an effort to find the first role-playing game released in Japan with natively written Japanese dialog/text that featured at least some of the notable JRPG mechanics that we outlined above? Well, we’d then have to highlight 1984’s The Black Onyx. That game is often credited with helping to popularize turn-based RPG games in Japan, and it was certainly one of the most successful Japanese-language RPGs released exclusively in that country until that point. It’s also hard to look at that game and not see how it clearly influenced Dragon Quest and future JRPGs.

However, because Black Onyx was made by a Western developer (Dutch video game designer Henk Rogers), it’s debatable whether or not it really fits the definition we outlined above. That being the case, let’s throw as much ambiguity out of the window as possible and just try to answer the question “What was the first RPG video game developed by a Japanese studio and released exclusively (or originally) for Japanese gamers?”

Believe it or not, that’s still a surprisingly complicated question. For instance, there were actually quite a few “ARPGs” developed and released in Japan before, or around the same time as, Black Onyx. Titles like Dragon Slayer, Hydlide, and The Tower of Druaga are all some kind of RPG even if they’re not typically what most people think of when they think of JRPGs. While each of those games is worthy of a separate conversation, they’re ultimately little more than a footnote in this particular discussion. After all, we know for a fact that there were RPGs developed/released in Japan before those titles started to help the genre gain mainstream momentum.

Even still, things get a lot trickier when you start to look at Japanese RPGs released before 1984, though. See, in 1981, a Japanese translation of Wizardry became a surprise hit in that country and inspired more Japanese developers to make RPGs and pseudo-RPGs of their own. While you’d think that finding the first JRPG is really just a matter of finding the studio who capitalized on that trend first, the fact of the matter is that a lot of the Japanese-developed RPGs released in the wake of Wizardry were…weird.

For instance, Pony Canyon’s 1982 title Spy Daisakusen (which was strangely based on the Mission Impossible franchise) visually resembles a dungeon crawler of that era, but it’s hard to call it an RPG given that it lacks so many of the key gameplay elements of that genre. There’s also Koei’s Underground Exploration, which was released a few months before Spy Daisakusen and actually features a lot of traditional dungeon crawling/RPG gameplay elements. However, because that game also lacks some of the features that often even vaguely define the RPG genre (such as stats and character-building), it’s hard to cleanly classify it as an RPG without making a pretty compelling outside-the-box argument.

This is the point where I’d also love to tell you more about Koei’s erotic adventure title Seduction of Condominium Wives, but to keep things moving along, let’s just say that it also doesn’t check most of the major RPG boxes. It’s actually closer to a text-based adventure game that so happens to see you battle Yakuza members and ancient spirits while trying to seduce local housewives and sell condoms. Suffice to say, it deserves a remake.

The thing you have to understand about these early “JRPGs” is that Japanese developers and gamers were also still trying to figure out what RPGs meant to them. That’s how we ended up with these wild and experimental blends of adventure games, dungeon crawlers, and the kind of JRPGs we associate with games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. If you want to read a little more about this time period, I highly recommend these excellent articles from PC Gamer and Gamasutra.

More importantly, we actually don’t know a lot about many of the games that were released during that time. So many games of that era have been lost to history or only exist as references in magazines or adverts. That means that there’s a small chance someone actually made a more “traditional” JRPG in the early ’80s and we simply don’t know about it or don’t know enough about it to give it more of the credit it may deserve.

However, there is one more game we have to talk about when talking about the earliest JRPGs ever: Koei’s The Dragon and Princess.

Released in December 1982, The Dragon and Princess features a classic medieval setting, a party of characters, stats, experience points, and, perhaps most importantly, random encounters that force the player to enter a “battle screen” where they participate in tactical RPG combat. While its combat system is a far cry from what we eventually saw in Black Onyx and Dragon Quest (and much the game plays out like a text-based adventure), it’s pretty remarkable how many “core” JRPG elements this game features. It’s arguably become the most accepted answer to the question “What was the first JRPG ever made?” even if people still rightfully debate the nuances of that discussion.

Of course, all of this information just makes Final Fantasy’s obviously inaccurate reputation as the first JRPG that much more confusing. If there were so many Japanese RPGs released before Final Fantasy (including some of the games Final Fantasy was obviously inspired by), then how has Final Fantasy become so closely associated with the earliest days of the genre in the minds of many?

Well, there’s obviously a degree to which the game’s popularity has impacted its historical status. Simply put, Final Fantasy was significantly more popular than so many of the early JRPG experiments that came before. More importantly, Final Fantasy was the first JRPG many Western gamers ever played (though I and others certainly grew up with Dragon Warrior). If Final Fantasy was the first JRPG you played, you’re more likely to remember it as the first JRPG. The fact that the series has remained the most globally popular JRPG franchise has only enhanced its status as a globally recognized JRPG innovator.

That’s not to say that Final Fantasy doesn’t deserve that honor. The way that the game combined the innovations of its predecessors and introduced a few new ideas of its own (including elemental weaknesses, the “party-view” combat screen, and the way it handled classes and party compositions) means that it really does feel like the first “modern” JRPG in a lot of ways. At the very least, it’s the JRPG of that era that would have the biggest impact on the evolution of the genre moving forward.

See, the evolution of the JRPG is similar to the evolution of slasher films. Games like Dragon Slayer, Black Onyx, and The Dragon and Princess are like Psycho, Peeping Tom, and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. They all helped set the stage for the genre, but they were really only adopted into it after the fact as spiritual predecessors. In the case of The Dragon and Princess, you could argue that one of the biggest reasons it wasn’t immediately referred to as a JRPG is that the term really wasn’t a thing at the time of that game’s release.

Dragon Quest, meanwhile, is like Halloween. They’re the earliest and clearest examples of what we now think of when we think of their subgenres. Both were clearly inspired by previous works, and their subgenres would grow to incorporate more ideas soon after their releases, but they showed everybody a clear blueprint to follow and proved that blueprint could be commercially successful. They set the stage for so much of what would come next.

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Sticking to this analogy, I’d say that Final Fantasy is closest to Friday the 13th. Both were obviously inspired by something that came before (and they are arguably derivative of their inspirations in some ways), but the way that they refined and altered elements of their genres made them massive hits, helped kick off a boom period for their respective genres, and helped start franchises that became incredibly successful and innovative in their own right.

Of course, Final Fantasy continues to innovate to this day whereas Friday the 13th arguably peaked when Crispin Glover wildly danced to copyright-friendly music in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.

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rigelmejo · 3 years

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April Study Plan Updates

noticing myself falling into that rabbit hole of ‘studying too many languages, gonna neglect progress in all!’

or the similar ‘using too many resources, gonna neglect making progress in any!’

ToT

suddenly felt like refreshing my french (which future me, that study plan would be: french comprhensible input youtube videos and shadowing, reading Le Francais Par Le Method Nature and finishing it, then optionally finishing some french books). but realistically i do NOT have time right now. improving that would be a “do i need it” and then do all that for a few months straight.

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Chinese is mostly on track but I’m really whittling down what I’m doing because it’s become sort of chaotic:

Chinese study plan:

1. Read anything (priority is ONLY hanshe on Pleco app, or Guardian print novel - I do not have time for anything else. My goal right now is to be at hanshe chapter 80 by the end of the month, and to get to the end of the Sundial arc in guardian because that’s how much I’ve read of the english translation so far) 2. Listen to Chinese Spoonfed Audio, shadowing when I can (I am over 1/3 through I CAN finish it, I’m putting Listening Reading off until later because that is so time intensive I need to finish at LEAST one thing I’m reading before I can carve out time. This is ultimately lower priority, but I do NOT want to see myself start from scratch again on this, and do not want to L-R method or listen to other audio until I’ve went through this).

Anything else is OPTIONAL rn I do not have time. The 2 optional activities I’m prioritizing:

a. Watching Two Souls in One, shadowing when desired (although any show would be fine but it would be nice to Not abandon a show lol) b. go through my hanzi characters book, SPECIFICALLY practice writing and make mnemonics to remember the TONES. saying the hanzi pronunciation out loud when i write. (While this is optional I would like to do it for several hundred freaking common hanzi because like... firstly, I’m studying japanese again and Definitively knowing the hanzi pronunciation and tone and comparing it would allow me to review/test that better as i see the japanese readings - and help me keep them firmly separate as HANZI WITH SOLIDLY AUDIBLE TONE versus japanese readings. Because right now a LOT of hanzi i ‘partly’ know i know the initial-final-meaning of and can recognize in reading and tend to just sub-vocalize when i read with no-tone or a tentative guess, and all those ‘partly known’ i really do not want to get mixed up with japanese. Thankfully it is pretty hard to confuse shou3 and te 手, or zu2 and ashi 足, because the japanese words sound pretty firmly japanese pronunciations and those hanzi are pretty hard imprinted in my head with their pronunciation in chinese already. But that may not always be the case! And my writing in chinese is like 0% skills and I think writing would help them them stick in my head when it comes to a lot of the ‘partly’ learned once I have more vague recognition of. Also again just... I know mnemonics have worked for me to remember tones but then I just stopped doing it when I went reading heavy. And knowing hanzi but not their tone is a huge weak spot, so sitting down and forcing myself to write it out will help it stick. I imagine this will be a longer term project of a few months, but it only takes like 5-10 free minutes in a day to do several so I should try when I feel like it.

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Japanese goals:

1. continue through nukemarine’s memrise courses. No excuses mejo if you feel you need to ‘prepare’ then just continue the vocab courses instead of the grammar. 2. continue reading Tae Kim’s grammar guide (when you can focus - I would ideally like to see myself finish the first 2 sections since I’m almost done with section 1).

Optional:

a. listen to some lets plays (I just looked up a bunch of persona lps -3-)/

*I really do not need to do optional anything rn. I want to read - I need more freaking vocabulary! (Parasite Eve, the Galaxy Train, those are down the road when reading is something less intensive). I already KNOW at the end of the month when Nier Replicant comes my ass will be playing that game in english and japanese. I already know right after that my psp’s coming and my ass will be playing crisis core. I will get some ‘immersion’/practice in soon. But I’d really like to just... grind through the nukemarine courses as MUCH as possible while I still have the very rare ability to do flashcards fast. (I go through periods where I can do 100-300 flashcards a day, and then suddenly it takes me 1 hour to do 5-10 cards and i give up again). Last time I studied japanese (for 2.5 years ;-;) I did NOT make it this far through the nukemarine courses. Poor past mejo really dove in fucking blind into japanese games with like 500 words maybe from genki and maybe 200 from nukemarine’s courses and just TRIED. Wild. I’m not doing anything that hard again lol. Present mejo would like to get at MINIMUM 1000 words in before I try that again this time around. I’m about 300 through the 1000 first words (and 300 through the grammar deck which has some extra words, and through 500 kanji but tbh kanji meanings are much less horrific now that i know some chinese to help me remember and associate). So I’ve got like... until the end of April to study 700 more! If I keep doing 40-200 a day that should be doable.

I just know myself and the instant this ability to flashcard focus leaves I will not go back to it for months, and also the instant I get back into playing video games a Lot in japanese I will abandon any other structured study... at least for a while. Last time I did it for like 4 months, it was pretty hard, and then I just kinda just stopped studying. Phenomenal. I’m hoping if i know a BIT more words I’ll be less likely to just abandon things. We’ll see.

LATER (end of month?)

b. play some games ovo)/

**Longer term, I’ve been desperately getting the urge to read through my Japanese Sentence Patterns book, my Japanese in 30 Hours book. Also to go through the Japanese Audio Lessons. HOWEVER. I think a few things need to happen first. First, I need to finish at least maybe 7-8 of nukemarine’s courses - I do not want to be doing them AND a textbook/another course, I would like to do them one at a time. Second, I need to finish reading Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide - that is why I want to get done all the nukemarine courses that coincide with it, and read through it that far, at least. I cannot read 2 textbooks at once, I WILL abandon one and probably finish neither. Third, I need to finish Chinese Spoonfed Audio - I know myself and I absolutely can’t focus on multiple audio prioritized activities in a study plan. I can’t listen to the DeFrancis audio and get Through it, I can’t do the Japanese Audio Lessons. In fact Japanese Audio Lessons I might ‘only’ do because it would slip in as a nice replacement activity when I finish Chinese Spoonfed Audio. An audio I can listen to while walking/working out/chilling.

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KEY overall goals:

Chinese: I want to finish a novel (Guardian hi baby), which has been the goal since day 1.

After that: I want to work on audio comprehension (so Listening-Reading), shadowing (can do it in l-r or with any audio), and SOLIDLY knowing the hanzi I partially know (so probably continue through my hanzi books - I should consider using my Alan Hoenig book again tbh).

Japanese: I want to finish 7-8 nukemarine courses, and try playing video games again.

After that: playing video games, looking up words, having fun! (And MUCH later, when there’s time - read the textbooks I have. Then even Later... try diving into reading whenever I feel ready to do that...or whenever the mood randomly strikes).

**The bolded goals I plan to actually do this April-May (guardian I may only finish section 1 but hey its a solid portion). “After that” goals are my next concrete things I want to do.

just personal goal notes below

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Personal goals:

1. Workout everyday (actually 5-6 days a week cause I think breaks can be good, but I’m aiming for every so when I inevitably skip one that’s the break day lol). 50 crunches, 70 pushups, at least 15 minutes cardio. I’ve been sticking to it pretty well! Hardest part is just... I hate being sweaty a lot -.- Also I’m fairly sure eventually I am going to need to add more specific time for bodyweight workouts (probably 20 minutes minimum) if I want to get any results similar at all to back when I went to the gym (which was like 12 minutes HIIT then 8 minutes cool down cardio like walking, 10 minutes warm up with pushups/crunches and stretches, 30ish minutes just weight machines, some cooldown stretches and/or walking). I want to do a few specific muscle workouts but like god baby steps, i need to consistently just work out at the MINIMUM before i add stuff because i will absolutely quit if it gets complicated or time consuming. ‘any cardio’ is very flexible so i will actually do it. (also hopefully that means when i switch To a specific thing like ‘do this for a week or 2′ because i’m consistent with working out so i can move into consistent in ONE specific workout, i will be able to stick to it).

2. Eat low carb, low sodium (apparently -.- ). Try to get my bloating to stop getting so bad constantly, try to make my stomach stop hurting for a consistent amount of time. I would like to get it feeling good for a week or 2 straight before I eat something that hurts it again (and next time I hurt it I have got to do a one-off thing then be nice to it again :c ). I got too cocky last time. I know I hate how boring it all tastes i know but i need to just do it long enough for it to help.

#april #april progress #april study plan #study plan #basically while i WANT to use a lot of my resources. i really need to limit myself and keep to a strict plan #as usual i need to PROGRESS THROUGH AND FINISH A MATERIAL #BEFORE GOING TO THE NEXT #i can only jump around with shows/reading!#and tbh even my reading i specifically want to FINISH the books so no more skipping around ;-;#and even tho my french got !!! again #realistically i have no reason to work on it rn #a friend informed me... my ass should apply for CERN and UN when covid is over #and god it reminded me how ive DREAMED of that for years and YES i sure would need french for that #but even IF thats true im not gonna need to fix the issues w my french until like fall/winter #until at LEAST july.

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