Flawed Crystal is a Steven Universe fangame made by our very own member of the hivemind, Guest ReviewerRoarkeMini-Farla St. Elmo’s Fire. You can find it here. I finally got around to playing the game, and figured I’d share my thoughts with this blog.
Before I begin, it should be noted that this is very much a fangame in a sense that it doesn’t explain concepts or introduce characters featured in the show. If you aren’t already familiar with the cartoon, it’s impossible to engage with this game. It’s not a flaw per se, one of the greatest strengths of fanfiction is that the core elements were already established for you, so you can skip exposition and focus on things you actually want to talk about. It is, however, something to keep in mind if you think about checking out this game.
I checked out The Witcher on the basis of random gifs showing up on Tumblr and Act’s comments that the books had been surprisingly non-misogynistic after the miserable disaster that was the games.
It has a lot of women, who do a lot of talking, and it portrays the women in a really…on their own terms way, is the best way I can articulate it, and this is both what I want and deeply unsettling. I am three episodes in and intensely invested in seeing the rest of it, but there is the unshakable sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Like, you can’t have women like this and mean it that way, right? (more…)
I watched Kill la Kill, or, that anime where the magical girl costumes involve stripper gear.
Note neither character is transformed here, because their actual outfits are Not Safe For Work.
Here is what I can tell you about it:
1) I watched all of it in a few days.
2) I almost never had the slightest clue what would happen next.
3) Fight scenes.
4) Really loved the female characters.
5) Japan why must you be so rapey.
So! When I say I would recommend it, definitely consider that last bit. (more…)
“It is good to be a cynic–it is better to be a contented cat–and it is best not to exist at all. Universal suicide is the most logical thing in the world–we reject it only because of our primitive cowardice and childish fear of the dark. If we were sensible we would seek death–the same blissful blank which we enjoyed before we existed.”
I’ve been really enjoying the anime Dororo. It is very gory, and the lion’s share of that gore is the suffering of innocent people. I found it tasteful in that its focus is clearly to show sympathy/horror while samurai getting diced was just artful splatter because fuck them but it’s pretty intense misery all the same.
The pitch for Dororo is that this guy makes a deal with demons as a result his son loses most of his body parts to them an instant after being born. To regain his missing parts the son, Hyakkimaru, must go on a quest to slay each of those demons, and also he gets a small child following him around for comic relief. And this is true for the original manga and the original anime adaption.
The modern one, though, when considering the important question, “how would you tell a blind deaf quadriplegic kid this or, really, anything?” realizes the answer is “you can’t” rather than “telepathy!” And that’s how we get him wandering around running into monsters, murdering them for trying to murder him, and then being intensely distressed when sometimes, for reasons he can’t understand, that means he regains body parts and senses he didn’t know he ever had, with reactions varying from wtf??? :( to GREAT HOW DO I UNINSTALL IT. As a result, spunky kid sidekick Dororo turns out to really earn having their name be the title, as they’re the one making everything happen while Hyakkimaru is tugged along behind them.
An interesting then vs now comparison of a scene from the opening episode:
And with all that said, I’d now like to have a spoilerific chat about the character Mio and the roles (and fates) of women. (more…)
The opening episodes are generally regarded as poor, to the point of people making “How to Watch SU” Guides designed around reordering the episodes to get new people to stick around. I believe the general consensus is it takes 10+ episodes to pick up, which isn’t quite as dire as it first sounds due to them being eleven minutes long.
Over the Edge is a classic TRPG that’s getting a new edition soon. The game revolves around Al Amarja, a fictional tiny island nation that survives by virtue of basically having zero regulations on anything and being able to provide tourists with what they cannot find elsewhere in the world as easily: drugs, experimental medical treatments, exotic sex, etc., etc.
It’s also infested with various conspiracies, remnants of prehistoric human races, aliens, real mages and other things They don’t want you to know about.
Basically, think Naked Lunch (more the movie than the book since it’s actually coherent).
Recently, I’ve decided to revisit the game, maybe pick up some stuff I didn’t have. While doing that, I’ve learned about the existence of Pierced Heart, a novel set in the world of Over the Edge.
You know how long-running horror franchises would inevitably have an installment set IN SPACE in a desperate attempt to cling to life by introducing a superficial new element that doesn’t actually fit the genre? Well, Shadowrun is an old TRPG that can be accurately described as cyberpunk but WITH MAGIC. In 2012 magic came back, a large percentage of people turned into various fantasy races, many animals mutated into mythological beasts, people learned to summon and bind spirits of nature, dragons awoke from their millennia-long slumber and decided that running corporations is a good substitute for hoarding gold. Meanwhile, technology advanced in a classic cyberpunk fashion: prosthetics enhancing your abilities beyond human limits, cybernetic implants allowing full-immersion link to cyberspace inventively called the Matrix, etc.
These events resulted in a weakening and sometimes outright collapse of governments, with corporations essentially taking their place and running the world in an orgy of wild capitalism.
The game takes its name after shadowrunners, the presumed PCs, who are essentially freelance black books operatives hired by various corporations, organized crime syndicates and individual clients as deniable assets to do various shady jobs.
Honestly, my knowledge of the setting is rather limited, and I would appreciate someone chiming in on it. From what I’ve seen of it, it feels that sometimes Shadowrun strikes gold in its design (like how it has literal lizard people dragons – a classic metaphor for greed and malice – essentially running the world through corporate proxies) and other times it’s content to just throw “awesome” concepts together (Magic! Cyberware! Matrix! Samurai!) with little regard to creating a thematically-coherent whole.
But anyway, apparently there are three relatively new RPGs set in this setting, and I’ve decided to check them out. They are… pretty solid, actually.
Here’s the story of Shadow of Mordor – You are a ranger guy. Orcs kill your wife and son, then you, in a ritual designed to bind a dead elf’s spirit to your corpse. It works. You resurrect with bonus ghost powers, like ghost arrows and ghost teleporting between ghost buildings and ghost respawning after being killed so you can never really die, in a clever melding of videogame and story.
You proceed to gruesomely murder your way through your surroundings. (more…)
Tyranny is an old-school RPG made by Obsidian Entertainment as a follow-up to the reasonable success of Pillars of Eternity. It’s… solid is probably the best word for it.
Bastion is a hack-and-slash, button-mashy action RPG with very nice art and absolutely gorgeous music bogged down by mediocre gameplay and a story that ranges from boring to bizarre. And I don’t mean bizarre as in strange, I mean as in wtf were the writers thinking.
The final choice in the game is you deciding whether to wind time back a few weeks weeks to prevent the genocide of two peoples or destroying the undo machine and running away, and this is presented as some kind of extreme moral quandary.
Spoilers inside for Braid, of all things, which is an excellent game you should go play.
