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larnax · 1 year

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tentative ochette rework with unfucked formatting

so ochette is a little different than throné in that her problem is fundamental and so basically everything but the bones of her story is Bad, for one simple reason: the implementation of the beastlings sucks ass

now that being said i am not going to sit here and explain why the beastlings are handled very poorly bc 1) ive already done that and 2) it's actually a really easy fix. just make beastling a trait you gain becoming a hunter and the rest of toto'haha are just normal fantasy pacific islanders. they did this with tropu'hapu and it was fine so they clearly can make a normal fantasy pacific islander region if they want to, so just. do that. and then because beastlings are just humans who've become hunters, treat them like humans. they speak the language they're already all native speakers of fluently and they are just people do not be weird.

but you may ask, how would becoming a hunter give you cat ears? and the answer is very simple, deus ex subjob menu. in ot1 the subclasses are literally blessings from the gods, so you can just imply that a similar thing is happening here where draefendi blesses you with the power of kemonomimi once you join her hunt. or a wizard did it who care. beastlings 100% exist primarily so the hunter class can make your characters catboys bc thats awesome so its better for everything if we're just honest with that

how does this fix everything?: well 1) as the beastlings are no longer infantilized animalistic caricatures, there is less racism in the game, 2) this makes the hunter subclass no longer technically racefaking, and 3) it means that the 20 year old woman who is the only protagonist from toto'haha no longer has to be treated like a toddler

yes i know this breaks temenos' chapter 5. i dont care. skill issue.

so anyway ochette. unfortunately ochette's entire character is noble savage/toddler so she needs an overhaul

my proposal is to make her more autistic keep her caring a lot/focusing on her interests, which are now: hunting, cooking, and languages.

these were mainly chosen based on her existing mechanics, except for languages which is tied into the fact that i want to change her night path action to be swapped with hikari's so befriend now gains you information. (yes i know this would make bribe identical to hire so you would have to change what mechanic it relies on. idk which one im not a doctor). this is mainly because ot2 already does a lot of interesting things with path actions even outside of character stories and i wanna push the thing where some NPCs can only have certain path actions just a little farther and make it so that not all NPCs can be info-gathered by all characters because some of them only speak other languages. yes ik this would require them to create some conlangs but it doesnt have to be Every character and creating one fairly simple conlang for ochette's story and maybe like 3 more for random NPCs to have 1 line in seems fully possible. they already made a couple different writing systems. actually they could literally just keep the writing systems and just write romaji/english/etc sentences in them if they dont wanna do a real language.

why ochette? Because I Said So. i told you guys i held back on throné ochette not having much of a character means i get to enter silly mode

anyway so Ochette Autism activate. she will now love cooking. she invents new recipes and likes finding ways to cook complicated stuff with only things she can gather in the moment. she has extensive knowledge of every edible plant in toto'haha. her first thought when she sees an elemental spirit with no physical body is "yeah i could make a mean fucking soup of that creatyre". she would hunt regardless as the main hunter for her village but the reason she Loves hunting is that she loves finding her own ingredients. she also really loves languages. no longer is animal language automatically translated, now she just learned how to speak the languages of animals from toto'haha and some others from juvah. she likes talking to people and is academically interested in languages. this partly comes from convenience bc shes had to get used to learning languages to speak with the village and her animal companions but its also partly because she has trouble communicating with people and its one of the ways she tries to account for that. also more on that in the story since its what ill be focusing on. she cares a lot about sustainability and is fundamentally against killing what you won't eat. her main flaws are that 1) despite her love of languages she often has difficulty communicating with people even if she can understand them, 2) she doesn't really care about anything outside her interests, and 3) due to her living her entire life in a small village of people who all knew her she's kind of unfamiliar with the concept of a stranger who doesn't immediately get her and can sometimes be overly familiar or opaque to people who don't understand her

her extensive cooking knowledge will mostly be used for jokes and in travel banter while her language skills will be the driving force of the story

also due to this im rewriting her relationship map lets just go in order. so as she and castti now are both knowledgeable about plants and meat(most of the human body is meat) the two of them keep finding things they have in common, and also because ochette's prepared food grants a bunch of positive effects she and castti end up talking about the benefits of healthy eating and medicinal properties of food a lot. she and throné initially have an awkward relationship because ochette is very satisfied with her life and she. isnt, but as throné goes through her story where she's worried that a killer is all she'll ever be and she's a permanent net negative for the world, ochette provides her with an example of someone who has a sustainable relationship with life and death and gives her hope that she might eventually be able to find an occupation where she can use her skills to benefit herself and other people, and also they are gay. osvald and she are initially very awkward because ochette talks a ton and osvald is completely unreceptive but as their stories progress osvald decides that ochette would probably make a pretty good scholar if being a hunter ever falls through for her and shes like yeah haha maybe in another life. partitio and her are mismatched despite being similar because despite both of them being singlemindedly determined about their interests but coming off as endearing because one of those interests is befriending people means they get along on a lot of fronts, partitio is very focused on progress and increasing in scale whereas ochette simply isn't and couldn't care less about inventions that don't have anything to do with her specialties. agnea finds out in her chapter 2 that ochette actually has a really good singing voice and spends the rest of her story trying to get ochette to contribute a verse to the song of hope but hijinks ensue as ochette only knows how to write lyrics in languages agnea can't understand and in the case of a bird language can't replicate. temenos and she spend basically all their travel banters fighting about theology because ochette could not give less of a fuck about any gods besides draefendi and temenos is like What do you mean "tell aelfric to call me back when he can give me awesome cat powers" and "if my religion was existentially threatened by the existence of other religions i would simply not lmao". she and hikari are just kind of on the same team because she's very against killing without purpose

now onto her story. the basic structure will actually be the same, i'm keeping the night of the scarlet moon and her journey to be finding and bringing back the three guardian beasts, However the how will be different

chapter 1: i'm removing the territorial dispute entirely partly bc as beastlings and humans are now the same theres no village divide and also octopath's tone and writing simply aren't equipped to handle this issue well, so we're cutting it. we are keeping the flashback of ochette choosing between the jackal and owl though, and the first scene being her hunting the king iguana its basically just that the companion is like "can we not wait until we get back to town to cook this thing" and ochette is like "no it tastes better if you cook it immediately" and then theres a little cutscene of her grilling it on the spot. she gets back to town and is sharing the jerky with everyone and then goes to speak with juvah, who tells her she's going to be the village guardian. ochette is reluctant because she enjoys her current life where she's able to only do things she finds interesting, but juvah says she's the only person strong enough to do it, and they talk about how the forest is changing. suddenly cohazeh shows up and says that a woman has wandered into the tomb of the wanderbeasts and can someone go get her, ochette says yeah of course and sets off. when she arrives the woman is acting very strangely and ochette has to provoke her. after being defeated she calms down and can be befriended to gain information about being attacked by a weird creature. after that she joins the party and they return to find juvah fighting the weird creature, with her taking over after he's injured and defeating it. after it's defeated, juvah takes her to the tombs and tells her about the prophecy and that this will be the final test of whether or not she's ready to be the guardian and then falls asleep. ochette reluctantly sets off, unsure if she'll be able to pass this trial.

chapter 2: the structure of 2 is actually mostly fine it's just ochette as a character that's changed. when she shows up she's frustrated by the way conning creek differs from the village and has an awkward confrontation with a food stall owner because she doesn't understand the concept of making food when you might be making more than you need before being stopped by her companion and reminded what she came here for. she goes to the coast and finds alpione who blocks her path and tells her that she'll be encroaching on sacred land if she goes to the island, ochette insists she needs to go and is confused by alpione not trusting her even though ochette knows she's not going to do anything bad, but fails to communicate this effectively. alpione has to be challenged and after her defeat ochette goes to find the island completely empty. at the tail end of the little spiral alpione shows up. she initially refuses to talk but can be befriended, at which point she'll share that cateracta was killed by a strange hunter and left to rot. alpione and the other guardians made use of her remains out of respect. ochette is angered by cateracta's death but is relieved that she at least wasn't left to decay, and alpione finally realizes that ochette holds the same respect for animals that she does, at which point she asks why ochette wanted to meet cateracta. ochette explains her situation more clearly and alpione is like. why did you not say that before. and mentions that there's one piece of cateracta that remains, and that it too shouldn't go to waste, giving her cateracta's egg which hatches into acta. before leaving, ochette is again conflicted and reflects on what happened. she still doesn't really get why alpione took so long to understand her motivations and wonders if she could ever be capable of being the village guardian when she feels like she'll never really understand people even if she can talk to them. she'll especially never understand people like the hunter, and doesn't know what she would do if she ever came across someone like that.

chapter 3: ochette shows up in crackridge to find the earthquakes and goes around asking about tera but everyone refuses to talk to her about it, except for an old woman speaking a language she doesn't understand but who reacts to the name 'tera' by speaking a lot. ochette has to go around befriending people until she finds the woman's son who when befriended will share the location of a [language]-solistian dictionary which ochette can use to understand how to befriend the woman, at which point she gives ochette directions on where to find tera. ochette finds the sleeping tera and tries to wake him up but nothing works until the old woman from before shows up and shouts something in [language], at which point tera wakes up, but attacks ochette. after being captured, he calms down and recognizes that ochette is from toto'haha and figures out what's going on. he says that the old woman is a descendant of the first inhabitants of crackridge and that she's been waking him up to feed him while he tries to recover from a fight with the hunter. ochette asks why he attacked her and he says that the hunter tricked the woman's ancestor into revealing his location and he thought this was another case of that. ochette is like ohhh i see, and tera says he's healed up enough to accompany her back to the island. tera also teaches her how to thank the woman for her help, and he explains what's going on to her and that she won't need to feed him for a while. on the way back, the townspeople get angry at her for all the earthquakes but ochette says that she subdued tera and he won't be back for some time and also will be calmer when he returns. the old woman's son finds her and says he's surprised that anyone actually bothered to understand his mom, saying that although plenty of people have tried to calm down tera all of them gave up when they realized she didn't know any solistian. ochette says it's lucky she's good at learning languages, but the son says that it's probably also that she realized ochette was trying to help. he wishes her luck on her journey. ochette stops to think about things. she's still conflicted, now aware there are lots of kind of miscommunication, but found it satisfying to actually use her skills to talk with someone she otherwise wouldn't have been able to . she still doesn't want to be the guardian if it means she can't just do what she wants, but wonders if she might get to feel this satisfaction over being able to help resolve an issue using her skills if she did take up the job.

chapter 4: ochette arrives in stormhail and after befriending a townsperson is told that glacis lives on the peak of the mountain, but the townsperson warns her that the blizzards have been so intense that trying to climb it will be extremely dangerous. ochette says that she doesn't really have a choice and sets out for the mountain anyway. she's blocked by the sanctum guard and although she tries to explain why she needs to get past the guard refuses to listen to her and she eventually resorts to knocking him out. just before she starts up the path, she's stopped by heig who Again warns her and ochette, now very annoyed, snaps at him that for the last fucking time she just needs to see glacis, heig insists she'll die just like the others, ochette says she's built different and leaves anyway. on the way up the mountain she finds several frozen corpses which she and her companion figure out must have been caused by glacis. heig shows up and is like "see? all these great hunters were felled by glacis' fury. you're fucked". ochette realizes he's trying to help her and befriends him to figure out his perspective, he explains that this is his old crew and they were trying to hunt glacis. ochette asks why, he says for glory. ochette's disgusted that they were just planning to take her head and leave, and says she doesn't have any sympathy for the dead hunters. heig admits they were acting selfishly and says that he only survived because he hesitated, and then fled while glacis was killing the rest of his party, so now he tries to atone by making sure nobody else makes it up the mountain. ochette says she has no intention of killing glacis and that he's actually preventing anything from getting better by just locking her away instead of actually trying to make it up to glacis herself. heig is like.... shes a bird, and ochette explains that all animals are sentient and can be reasoned with if you're willing to learn their language, and that he should apologize to her personally. he leaves, but ochette notices that he's going up the mountain instead of down. she thinks that just leaving the bodies here is wasteful, but eventually decides it should be up to glacis who hunted them what to do. she gets to the peak to find heig unconscious in the snow and a furious glacis who attacks her. after being subdued ochette asks glacis what happened and she says that heig started shouting at her. ochette explains that she told him to apologize for he and his comrades' selfishness. glacis is surprised, but allows ochette to get heig, and when he wakes up glacis says she'll listen to ochette if she translates for him. heig apologizes on behalf of his party for attacking glacis and says that he's spent the years since then trying to atone, but that her blizzards are wrecking stormhail and killing innocent people and it may be time for both of them to move on. glacis is suspicious that he's only apologizing because ochette made him, but reluctantly accepts that he actually never attacked her earlier and was just talking in a way she couldn't understand. she agrees to accompany ochette back to toto'haha, and says that when she returns to stormhail she will protect it instead of attacking it. she also says that if heig learns how to speak to her, she'll allow him to atone for the attack by becoming her helper, which he agrees to. ochette asks what glacis wants to do with the bodies of the fallen hunters, and glacis replies that now that the blizzard is gone they should naturally be consumed by the animals of the mountain. heig is resistant to the idea until ochette explains that it's a sign of respect to allow them to return to nature in death and should be their way to make up for their actions since they're not alive to do it themselves, which he accepts. ochette leaves the two of them and returns to stormhail to think. she's still angry on glacis' behalf at heig and the hunters, but this has shown her that there are cruel or selfish people who can be convinced to change if made to understand the problem and people who appear to be acting cruelly who just don't have the full context. she also realizes that understanding people means considering the perspectives of people she's diametrically opposed to even if she never comes to agree with them. from her experience with juvah she knows that being the guardian comes with the responsibility to protect the entirety of toto'haha, even the parts and people she doesn't particularly care about, and thinks that she would probably have to change as a person to achieve that level of understanding. could she do it? does she want to? does she have the obligation to even if she doesn't want to?

chapter 5: ochette returns to toto'haha with all the guardians. juvah is relieved, saying that the amount of weird beasts in the forest is increasing and that people were starting to get hurt. he asks her if she's ready to take on the mantle of guardian, and ochette admits that she's still not sure. suddenly, night falls and the blood moon is out. that sequence is mostly unchanged, you're fighting tons of Weird Creatures and using the guardians to bust through until she comes upon the companion she didn't choose and gets thrown into the ocean. she's rescued by the might of her current companion who channels the same force of draefendi that gives ochette her beastling power and they drag her out to the beach where she comes across the darkling. the climax is already very good so i'm leaving it unchanged except for ochette befriending the darkling and getting an info window that mentions that the darkling can now rest. the epilogue is juvah asking her the same question as before and ochette realizing that it's worth it to be the guardian and she's willing to grow to fill that role, deciding to continue on her journey until she's gained enough experience to confidently be a good guardian.

ochette's crossed paths is actually mostly good and in fact her translating the dourdour boar is one of the reasons i thought of the language thing for ochette, basically the only change is that ochette and castti have a different dynamic so no milf jokes(29 is too young to be a milf anyway. sorry) and the joke is instead that ochette is like "hmmmmmm. i wonder if i could cook the shadowy being" and castti is like "i feel like that would at least give you food poisoning"

#c.paradisi #octoposting

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icewraiths · 6 years

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Some SSO salt because this post by Rave reminded me of my own annoyances with representation

Disclaimer: I’m white af, only a little bit west asian, so I don’t count it for anything at all in ~discourse~ commentary like this (and neither should you). I’m not speaking from a personal place like Rave was, and you should of course take their word (as well as the input of any other people that aren’t white) over mine on matters such as this one.

I think this is yet another case of SSO failing hard at one of the critical aspects of good RPGs, and that is: Do Not make any assumptions about the player character.

As Rave stated, SSO assumes the player character wouldn’t understand Mandarin, despite it being a language that’s actively spoken by a sizable population of the world. It wouldn’t have been all that hard for SSO to pick a language that’s actually obscure (I’m loosely defining ‘obscure’ as 1000 native speakers worldwide or less) for that dialogue, or perhaps even make up something fictional (Jorvik is a fictional island after all, maybe there’s rare dialects only spoken in certain regions that your character hasn’t been to or something, idk) that neither the player nor character would know (because fictional).

Another example of this is that trailer they have for the game--you know, the one that’s smack dab in the middle of the front page on their site?

This trailer is aggravating to me. It’s beautifully done, it’s well animated, and it would have been all but perfect if it did not have this awful freaking shot of the Main Character setting her bag down. Why is it awful?

Because it’s straight up telling the viewer that the Main Character can only, canonically, be white. They made the assumption that the player, and therefore their character, must be white.

As I said in the disclaimer, I’m white, so I can only imagine how galling this would be to someone who isn’t white irl and who made their Main Character a self-insert of themselves. It would be like a slap in the face.

I rarely ever self-insert in video games, so when I made my very first SSO account, I gave my character the darkest skin tone option. (Even still, I headcanon her as biracial because the options we have seem to be lacking in darker skin tones overall, but that’s just my own personal opinion on it, which--as we’ve previously established--means nothing.)

I remember the first time I saw that trailer, being hyped and enjoying it, up until the clip of the girl setting her bag down. Then I sat back and was like, “well damn, I guess Drusi (my aforementioned biracial SSO character) isn’t allowed to be the game’s protagonist, cause the protagonist here is obviously white...”

(There was some sarcasm in there, for what it’s worth--Drusi is still my main and she’s absolutely still the badass protag that she is no matter what some silly promo trailer says. But it was still annoying to see.)

The assumption that the player character Must Be White bothered me, and I’m just a whiny, overreacting white person with a sentimental attachment to my main SSO oc.

I cannot imagine how this must have felt to players that do self-insert (especially younger ones), and who were essentially told that they aren’t allowed to be heroes in a video game because in this game, the hero is only allowed to have a fair complexion.

This would be another matter entirely if SSO were a game where we play as a pre-determined protagonist, such as in the SSL games. However, since they’re trying to go the RPG route, stuff like this is something they really should try to avoid.

Perhaps one of the most grating parts of this entire trailer video thing is that, all SSO would have to do to fix this (or better yet, to have avoided the problem entirely) would have just to have omitted the part with the girl setting down the bag.

That’s literally it.

Just show the gal walking up to the Moorland gates and stand there, cut. Don’t worry about showing her put the bag down at all. Keep defining features (like skin color) out of frame--that way, the viewer can easily interpret the protagonist as looking like whatever their character looks like. It’s that simple! Just don’t make restrictive assumptions about the player or the player character in situations like this; especially don’t assume that the Main Protagonist Goddess Incarnate Hero Character has to canonically be white.

Because the implications of that are... yikes.

Am I overreacting? Yeah absolutely, this is only a short clip of a trailer not everyone will see. But maybe it’s because I’ve played other RPGs where the game will often depict a character in full armor, hiding their features, or otherwise go out of their way to make the player character as vague as possible, that it’s kind of jarring to see anything otherwise.

Also, I wonder if SSO could circumvent this problem by simply making a Standard Issue Default Character to depict in promo material (such as trailers), like how in Skyrim the default player character guy is a Nord with the iconic iron helmet with horns, or how the Mass Effect trilogy has a default VanderlooShep and FemShep. SSO hasn’t done that (to my knowledge) though, so we’re kind of in an awkward place for the time being. And that still wouldn’t solve the problems of in game dialogue, like the aforementioned quest that assumes the protag doesn’t know Mandarin.

Making assumptions about the player character just isn’t a good thing to do from a perspective of inclusiveness, nor is it a good thing to do from the perspective of an RPG game with customizable protagonists. Hopefully SSO will continue to take steps forward in this regard, rather than going backwards.

#SSO #Star Stable Online #todays evening dose of sodium #and some discussion of RPGs on the side #now featuring even more run on sentences

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