Susan

splend and I are BACK ON OUR BULLSHIT despite being in different countries! \o/ The Quarry was 75% off over xmas, we both theoretically have laptops that can run it, let's go gamers.

Gotta say, I find the multiplayer REALLY WEIRD on this one. I was expecting it to be like The Dark Pictures Anthology, where everyone picks some characters and we just switch control as the story progresses. Instead, it's one person gets to play, and everyone else only gets to vote on decisions. Which is weird. Especially as QTEs seem to be votes as well. (Sorry Laura for the whacks to the head you took before we figured that out.) Like, I'm okay with it! It means that we have time to argue discuss our decisions, which is always good. It's just feels like a weird step backwards.

Anyway, spoilers through the prologue! tl;dr shockingly the game based on summer camp horror movies has literally no characters that make good decisions, news at ten. And I'm kinda looking at the characters going "rionaleonhart ships SOME OF YOU, it's going to be the messiest disaster pair, and I'm so excited to read the fic."

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OKAY, SO, JUJUTSU KAISEN, LET'S FUCKING GO. Spoilers for everything from volume 0 to volume 23, so past the Shinjuku arc and into the Culling Game.

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So I've started playing FFXVI! So far it's very pretty, but suffering from a terrible case of "I can work out exactly how to get into all of these outfits, is this really a Final Fantasy game?"

(Listen, the fact that it's pretty makes how inanimate the expressions are even more jarring. Why do people only move their lower jaws when they talk! Talking is a full-face action!)

I can't put my finger on what's niggling at me about this game. It's not "Oh, this doesn't feel like a Final Fantasy game" because there's no one unified thing that defines a Final Fantasy game, right? The whole point is that each main game is a different aesthetic, setting, artistic direction, combat system, whatever – the commonalities are in details like summons and magic, and the broad strokes of "Let's kill god" as a plotline, but anything between those two levels is different. You can have a high tech world where everything is run by machine (XIII) or a modern-ish tech level (VII, VIII, XV), or quasi-medieval Europe (I-V) or something between the extremes (VI, IX). But something about it is pinging at me and I can't put my finger on it. ... Maybe it's the muted colour pallette. I tried to argue with jilliferium about the use of colour but the longer I play the more desaturated everything is.

The rant jilliferium and I went on while I was playing was basically that it's not WEIRD enough. Like, consider IX (jilliferium's favourite), X/X-2 (my favourite), or XII (my second favourite). Full of weird little guys! You've got hypello and bangaa and guado and seeq and moombas and whatever Quina's got going on – weird little guys! So weird! And sticking to all humans all the time isn't boring necessarily, but man, you could get so much weirder with it. I guess having multiple species would distract from the story about oppression and slavery they're trying to tell? But it's still strange to see only one species in a Final Fantasy game.

Mechanically: I love that there's a story mode, because if I wanted to play a game where I need to know how to do combat I'd go play a soulsborne. I've also equipped the rings of Helping You Dodge and Automatically Use Potions, which means that my loadout is never going to change because if I unequip those I will just die.

Anyway, spoilers through to the aftermath of Drake's Fang.

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HELLO FRIENDS I AM WATCHING THE GAY MAFIA SHOW, KINNPORSCHE. The main selling feature is queer men doing violence while wearing suits, so hello, yes, here I am. It's only like 33% fucked up mafia shit; then it gets to the 33% ridiculous nonsense and 34% people being absolutely unhinged about each other like it's a mafia AU fic instead of a mafia show! So like. Obviously I'm into it.

I can't recommend the subs I'm watching though, because Christ. Mafiosos shooting, fighting, torturing, banging, or kissing each other is fine, but them saying "Fuck" while they do it is too much? Subtitler, please explain. Or maybe don't, and I'll just keep laughing when the subtitles have someone dramatically screaming "FUDGE!"

There's just so many scenes where people are trying to have intense conversations about their feelings without actually acknowledging that they have feelings, which is the content that I'm here for. Especially because so much of it is done in the way the characters look at each other. Like. There's a great scene where Porsche challenges Kinn, and Kinn leans in towards Porsche like he's being pulled by gravity, and you can see when his eyes drop to Porsche's lips and he has to physically stop himself from kissing him. Yes. Excellent. Good work those actors.

So yes, I am absolutely going to be normal and not obsessive about this, I don't need to warn anyone, everything is fine.

Final Fantasy II is probably the Final Fantasy game I played the least of. I owned it – it came in the same box set I got Final Fantasy I in – but I stopped playing maybe five minutes in. I got as far as "If you raise one stat, you'll lower the opposite stat" and stopped – if you get better at magic, you get worse at hitting things; if you get better at hitting things, you get worse at magic. Oh, and earlier versions of the game had an exploit you could do to get around that, but they fixed it for the playstation release.

┻━┻︵ \(°□°)/ ︵ ┻━┻

So yeah, I got about five minutes in, realised that I would have to commit to a character build and NOPED OUT. Baby!Susan knew what she was about and it was NOT THAT. ... I can't pretend I've grown though, because the first thing I did when the pixel remasters came out was check if FFII still had that system. GOOD NEWS: THERE IS NOW NO DOWNSIDE TO LEVELLING UP YOUR CHARACTERS! So now I'm playing FFII for effectively the first time ever.

Seriously, now that the trade-off mechanic is gone, I'm really intrigued by the mechanics of FFII. You don't have an overall level! Instead, all of your individual stats and skills and spells level up as you use them, so if you want to get better at hitting people you need to hit them, if you want to get better at magic you have to cast spells, if you want to get better at not dying you have to get hit a lot. And each spell or weapon levels up on its own track, so even if you're a solid fighter, if you're a swordsman you're going to be better with a sword than you are with a bow you've never used before. It makes sense to me! Kinda reminds me of how Final Fantasy XII works, in that anyone can be good at anything and equip anything, except instead of buying licenses you're straight-up just doing the repetitive training thing.

It seems to encourage the complete opposite playstyle to FFI, at least for me. Instead of hoarding all of my spells for later in case I need them, I have to cast them or I'll never get more MP! And I can't just buy a Cura to get better healing, I have to keep casting Cure until it gets stronger! ... It does get to a weird point though where you can price yourself out of casting Cure, but still be able to cast Life no problem. And it makes sense, it's just weird!

So far the major downside to this system is that I can't gauge how far through the game I am. In regular games, you can kinda parse it out so if you're level thirty, you're probably getting close to the halfway point, right? Whereas here I'm just like "... I have no idea how to interpret these numbers." I'm like seven hours in! I feel like I'm a decent chunk into the game, but I have no way of knowing, especially considering how much time I spend Being Lost.

Behind the cut: notes on the game as far as Deist. The make take-home point is that every character who shows up, I'm like oh hey, I recognise that Yoshitaka Amano character design!

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Things that are interesting: this is the first installment with Cids and chocobos! Despite most of the rest of the gameplay not getting brought forward to future installments!

Listen, I don't yell very much about nu:carnival, because friends don't lure friends into gacha games, but I need to yell about nu:carnival for a minute.

(nu: carnival is the smutty BL gacha game of my heart. Show up for the sex-toy designer who gets isekai-ed, stay for the surprisingly thoughtful relationships and world building.)

• One of the romantic partners is Blade. He is a happy sunshine airhead who used to be a hypercompetent murderbot! One of the other romantic partners is Yakumo, who is a sweetheart and sometimes gets angry enough to forget that he has anxiety and remember that he has kaiju-level snake yokai powers! Funnily enough, the thing that makes them both go into berserk mode is Eiden, the protagonist, being endangered.


• It canonically takes at least two of the strongest party members to hold them back, but that discovery happened off-screen. D:


• Last month the game had a storyline that involved Blade going full murderbot on-screen. There's a point where he breaks his own arms to get a tactical advantage and doesn't even flinch.
  
  


• This month there is a storyline that involves Yakumo finally unleashing his True Power and I am so fucking hype. Yes, thank you, more of this please!!

... I forgot that Saiyuki was a formative influence on me, okay, I never expect characters taking their limiters off to hit me as hard as it does. And if characters take off their limiters on purpose to fight other party members? WELL.

Okay, now that it's not 1am (... when I started this post) and I'm not incensed by the protagonist not having the same level of genre savvy as me: I'm playing Danganronpa! I've had a little pop-up that says I'm about halfway through the game! So far it's doing a good job of going "Hey, these characters are really nice aren't they? (◡‿◡) Aren't they all good friends? (◡‿◡) Don't you enjoy dual pain of a character you like dying and another character you like being the one who did it? (ʘ‿ʘ)"

The non-spoilery things I will say: you can tell every male character in this game is a coward because they don't look at Sakura and immediately recognise that she is a queen.

... Also it gives me big Persona 4 vibes in its colour palette and general style. That could just be because Monokuma and Teddy both freak me out though.

Spoilers as far as chapter five!

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I can't remember if I've yelled on here about it before, but it's kinda doing what American Horror Story does, but better? It's an anthology horror series with common cast members across each season, but completely different stories. And it's all in a shared world setting, but the sharing aspects are really low-key so far (characters in S1 went to the summer camp that's the focus of S2, one of the characters from S3 has a cameo in S4, the protagonist in S5 has the same surname as the actor's character in S3 to suggest they're related, that sort of thing.) ... Plus there's like 80% less on-screen rape and pregnancy horror than AHS – not none, but I keep my expectations low. I'd like it if it did more with the cast it carries over between seasons, maybe? I want to say it shakes up who gets to be protagonists and antagonists between seasons, but I think the actual split is between "Who gets to be a decent person and who gets to be an unrelenting arsehole" each time around.

(AHS has one basically perfect episode where it does all of the above, which is Roanoke episode 6. Unfortunately, there are 122 other episodes.)

Anyway, ragging on American Horror Story to one side: I don't think anyone else is watching Slasher, so I have no one to send my conspiracy theories to at bollocks o'clock in the morning.

ANYWAY. Yelling my speculation about the first four episodes of Ripper ahoy!

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I have this half-formed thought about how what I actually want from horror media is a mystery being solved, but I haven't followed it to a conclusion yet. But that thought would explain why I'm more obsessed with working out whodunnit than literally any other part of the show.

I never expected that breaking myself of the habit of using "guys" as a group noun would lead to me trying to start every post with a term of endearment. Things I have nearly followed up my hellos with most recently: sweetpeas, lovelies, esteemed beings, "my babies, my honeys, my ragtime gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaals."

ANYWAY, the difficulties of tuning greetings to the correct degree of intimacy to one side: HELLO FRIEND HUMANS. Turns out that watching media and not talking about it in public feels weird. Downside of not being on twitter, I guess? Downside of whatever burnout I was having that meant my semi-regular posting schedule didn't survive lockdown? Idk, it's fine, I need to practice this stuff anyway.

• New laptop means that I can play Sims 4 again, which I am celebrating by uhhhhhhhhhhh trying to do a 100 babies challenge in a micro home. ... Honestly I kinda recommend it, just because you get SUCH a boost to relationships if the house is smaller than 32 squares that you can basically befriend anyone immediately. No I'm not doing the cheat-y thing with fake rooms, yes I am making all the children sleep in tents, yes I have a table in my diary tracking parentage, yes all of the children are named after Pokémon.


• So Juni Taisen is a series where twelve chinese zodiac themed fighters are dropped into a city to fight each other to the death for one wish/global politics reasons, and it's such bollocks. I enjoy it, but it's ridiculous. Why is the ox a matador? How is this a secret war when one of the previous fights apparently involved blowing up a space station? How many different uses can you get out of one (1) reanimated corpse? Is the man wearing a fetish bunny outfit there to complement the women in battle bikinis? Why can the hosts of this battle royale grant wishes but only if enough people die first?
  
  Like, I know battle royale/survival horror is my comfort genre, but genuinely I'm considering reading the novel to see if that makes any more sense. The manga is good for all the present day stuff, but covers everyone's backstories in maybe two pages. The anime goes into more people's backstory (except, unsurprisingly, the guy whose backstory is trafficking children), but kinda skimps on the present day stuff. ... Plus they're just cut differently. The manga goes character by character – start with one person, go through their arc until their death, switch to the next person. The anime puts it all back into chronological order, which simultaneously makes the timeline easier to follow while weakening the shorter arcs. ... Is Juni Taisen good enough to justify consuming three different versions of it in a week though?


• Seven Princes of the Thousand Year Labyrinth is still queer-baiting high drama nonsense, but I unironically love it. And want the 100k fic of world building and young politically people holding their elders accountable for not making the world better, but it's not on AO3. *shakes internet*


• Still being completely normal about nu:carnival! The christmas outfits involve cable-knit jumpers that are cropped to nipple length and I can't take them seriously, but once again the smutty BL gacha game has incredibly wholesome events where people make friends and support each other. ... Also I ran out of items for getting story with the event relevant characters so I doubled back to finish off some of the other ones and I am being super normal about it.
  
  • Me: I am a grown adult with a job and a mortgage, I do not go feral over things.
    Me: *unlocks more of Kuya's storyline from that visual kei looking event back in September*
    Me: I am going to EAT MY PHONE.


• Abzû on a tv screen looks SO GOOD. It's pretty! Sitting and watching the fish is really soothing! The sea mines are the opposite of soothing and I wish to unsubscribe!

I started playing Sakuna: Of Rice and Ruin! I am only like... A year and a half in, but I'm having fun! I was expecting it to be like Rune Factory; you build a farm, you make friends, you go out and gather resources. It was... Not actually that!

Sakuna, the noble daughter of a war god and a harvest goddess, is shocked – SHOCKED – to discover that actions have consequences. She gets banished to an island with a tiny group of humans, with two missions: kick all of the demons off that island, and build up enough of a farm that they don't all starve to death while she does it. Sakuna hates everything about this plan, unsurprisingly.

So yes, it's got a farm and some exploration and some fighting and some relationship building like Rune Factory does, but I didn't expect how much it was going to dig into the process of growing rice. Like, consider Harvest Moon and Rune Factory and Stardew Valley and the Sims: you plant your crops, you water them, you come back in a few days and you either have food or dead plants. In this? No. You have to monitor the nutrient level of your soil. You have to maintain the water level of your rice paddy so that your plants don't get too much or too little. The "find frogs and spiders" mini-game gives you predators to eat the pests that might ruin your crops. You have to preserve the food you find in exploration missions to keep you going until your rice actually gives enough of a yield to live on.

Like, yes Sakuna's combat stats are directly connected to how well you do at farming, but that's not the reason why I fuss at the fertiliser and level of weeds. I fuss because fussing gives you skills that make you better at fussing! Like weeding faster or actually getting a grid overlay to tell you how wonkily you've planted your rice. It feels organic and I'm into it! I just... Wasn't anticipating how much work would go into the actual mechanics of farming. I feel like that aspect might be something forestofglory would like at least a let's play of – it's got very cozy fantasy vibes, despite the monsters, and it obviously goes in on the mechanics of feeding people in this fantasy world. Although the farming difficulty and the combat difficulty are separate toggles, so maybe it's more accessible than I think!

I think my favourite thing is that everyone can sit down to eat together, and they'll actually talk. Like, I thought the human group were a family and it turns out no! Ragtag band of survivors who got busted trying to steal food in a famine/war/combination famine-war. I don't know how I feel about the characters yet; Tauemon is a samurai turned bandit turned farmer. Myrthe is a missionary, which means that she's a really smart character but I am full of side-eye towards her. Kinta hates everyone equally, Yui hates everyone who isn't Kinta equally and ( [SPOILER] )

, the baby finds dogs and thus is the second best member of this team, and the dog lets me put everyone else to work, which makes it the best member of my team. The setting seems to be Definitely Not Fantasy Japan (and Mythre is from Definitely Not The Netherlands), so I'm genuinely not sure where any of this is going to go or what my time limit is. I guess just keep flailing away at my fields until the game says that we're not starving to death anymore? That would be nice.

... Anyway so this is a game that I struggle not to play in like eight hour bursts, so I'm gonna. Go do that. Maybe not for eight hours, but I've got a field to till so MAYBE IT WILL BE. D: