#clive route spoiler

[wildechild3]

Modern Maurice AU

Part 4: The Kiddos!

(Re-posted because someone decided to leave a rude comment on the first one. Please keep in mind, this is for fun. It's fanfiction. It's literally not a big deal.)

This part is background information about Maurice and Alec as parents. Like I said in part 1, none of this is spoilers for the fic I want to write. Also, feel free to share your own thoughts and opinions, these are just my headcanons!

The Kiddos:

Early on into dating, Maurice mused to Alec about being a father. But he only spoke about it in a hypothetical way. It was only the one conversation, and he didn't think Alec was really listening anyway. (Alec was. That's the biggest difference between Clive and Alec, he listens.)

After they got married, they took a short vacation to the countryside and found they liked it a lot more there than in the hustle bustle of the city. Maurice is already working from home at this point (I'm thinking this is late 2020-2021) and Alec's construction company had an opening closer to the small country town they were interested in moving to. They decided to take the chance, and found being closer to nature and out of the city was much better for their mental health (especially Maurice's, who's in therapy by this point).

They've lived in this country town for about a year when Alec gently broaches the subject. He brings up the conversation they had early in their relationship (to which Maurice replies, "You remember that!?"). He ends by saying he never saw himself as a father, but now that him and Maurice are settled and happy, he couldn't imagine doing it with anyone else.

Maurice is thrown off and doesn't give solid answer at first - which Alec is confused by but respects and gives the topic space. Maurice isn't against the idea, in fact he very excited by it. He just never thought he'd get this far - and he sits Alec down to tell him as such. He talks about how deep his depression was and his suicidal ideation - both of which convinced him that he'd never live long enough to see thirty. Yet here he was. Freshly thirty and the happiest he'd ever been. He ends by telling Alec that he'd love to be a father with him - but is scared of being too 'muddled' to be any good at it.

Alec responds by assuring him that he doesn't have to be perfect. That he wouldn't be alone. That he and Maurice would be a team. He tells Maurice that they can take their time and suggests they start small and work up to actually doing it.

So they do. First, they talk about which rooms in their little house would be a good spot for a nursery/child's room. Then they talk about how'd they fix it up. (Alec comes home to Maurice painting his once beige office a pale yellow.) Then they talk about where they would go to school (and Alec pretends to not see Maurice looking through reviews of local schools on his phone while they watch a movie.) They talk about how they would raise a child, which leads to a conversation about their own childhoods (both agree to never use spanking as a punishment.) Finally, Maurice brings up the subject on Halloween night after a little boy dressed as a cowboy comes to their door with his two fathers.

They decide to go the adoption route and after almost a year working through the process, they adopt a four year old boy - Archie - and his 6 month old sister - Winifred ("Winnie"). They agree to an open adoption, and by 2022, they become their legal guardians.

*Just a quick note about the names: I know they're older sounding names. I chose them based off of the 1913 UK census of the most popular names to help blend them into the story. I just felt like it would be weird to have classic names like Maurice and Alec paired with Brandon and Mckeighlynn.*

Both of them go on paternity leave to help the kids get settled into their home and to help Archie get ready to go to school. It's the wildest, weirdest, and best two weeks of their lives.

Alec is so sad when he has to start going back to work, but the first time he comes home and sees Maurice and Archie making dinner together- it's all worth it.

They get in the habit of taking the kids to the park after dinner. Sometimes Maurice will hang back if there's something he didn't get done for work during the day, which happens more often than Maurice would like.

On the weekends, they go to the bigger park near the center of town. It's usually a 20 minute walk and they'll pack a lunch since they're usually there all day.

Final details: Alec is insanely good at clamoring around the play-sets. Maurice jokes that it's because he's the shorter one, but Alec is a pro at running around these structures built for people far shorter than him. Maurice usually hangs out with Winnie at the swings. He's the best at giving those big dad-pushes that'll make you feel like you're flying.

And that's the world building I've sketched out for the AU! Like I said, feel free to correct me on my American-isms or add suggestions.

(Also, I'm trying to be very respectful of adoption. I don't know how different it is in the UK, but in the US it's a very complicated thing to say the least. If you're an adoptee and I said something ignorant please let me know so I can fix it.)

#maurice 1987 #maurice 1914 #maurice hall #alec scudder #maurice

[cew644]

My personal interpretation of the FF16 ending

Back on my FF16 BS again since I've been replaying NG+. I haven't changed my mind much about the ending, but I think there could be two possible routes.

Major spoilers for the ending below:

So, for the people who haven't done the late-game side quests, there are quite a few narrative elements that could point towards Clive's survival.

In Jill's quest, there is a bit where she wishes to Metia (the red star) that Clive come back to her. Since Clive is like her treasure and her dawn. In the ending credits, we see Metia fade away, and Jill begins crying. She runs away to mourn but looks up and sees the dawn rising once again, and she smiles. This, alongside the lyrics of "My Star", have people speculating that Clive lives. I can get behind the Metia symbolism, but not the lyrics. The song closes with the lyrics: "And though our night is over you shall always remain, forever, my treasure, my star." That just seems like accepting and mourning the loss of a loved one, but that's just me.

The next most clear one is in the Hypocrates quest with Dion. After reuniting the two, Hypocrates thanks Clive and gives him a quill to document his journey after the fight. The bonus after-credits scene then has a book written by Joshua Rosfield. This, along with Clive seemingly narrating the book's intro and conclusion, could mean he lives.

So this is where I start to differ in my opinion on the ending. I've seen a lot of people say that this is just Clive taking his brother's name to write the book since "the phoenix's power can't bring back the dead."

There is no ending in my mind where Joshua dies. Clive did everything he could to try and help his brother. Joshua surviving Pheonix Gate and coming back is almost like a second chance to protect his family once again. Joshua dying again would go against this sort of second chance that Clive now has. So, Joshua clearly dies from Ultima, but Clive also absorbs Ultima's power of creation. I think you can pretty safely say he can use both Ultima and the Pheonix to bring Joshua back.

So with all this preamble out of the way, here are my two possible endings:

Clive lives: So in this one, all 3 of them live. We take all the sidequests as narrative foreshadowing. Clive still succumbs to the Cystals curse but lives long enough on the beach for Jill to find him. Her wish to Metia once again, came true. His hands are no longer functional, so rather than write the novel himself, he has his brother write down his story. This is why Clive is narrating the game, and Joshua's name is on the book. And if the brothers get to live, so does Dion. I abide by the film-making rules where if you do not see a dead body, they are not dead. The man is a dragoon. He can fall from crazy heights. The medicine girl and Terence can find him or something idk. This, plus his promise to Hyprocates to go and retrieve the Wyvern's Tail, could also point to his survival. This would be the best possible ending for the trio.

Clive dies: In this one, Clive is consumed by the curse completely. Joshua lives, and Dion is probably dead. Joshua, Jill and all the people in the hideaway write down a chronicle of Clive's adventure. As discussed in the sidequests, Gav takes up Cid's name and works with all the hideaway members to try and help the people learn to live without magic. All the people that Clive helps can still work to try and live in this new magicless world that Clive died to make. A world that Clive chose how he would live and die for. It's very true to the "a world where people choose how they live and die" that Cid and he vowed to make together. And for that reason, even though it's much more sombre, I prefer this interpretation. It also makes more sense to me because it's very clear that they didn't want Jill in the final boss cause they couldn't kill her and Joshua and make the healing scene make any sense. The theme is also about brotherhood. It's just an eldest sibling thing to do lol. Edit: Grammar.

#ff16 spoilers #ffxvi spoilers #ffxvi #ffxvi ending #ff16 ending #final fantasy 16 spoilers #clive rosfield #joshua rosfield #dion lesage #jill warrick #really wish jill had more to do in the endings #she got done so dirty #ff16

[pastelpinkmomoi]

oh would you look at that I posted on ao3

heart fragment fic time hehehhe I wrote a lot more than I thought I was capable of in like 2 weeks :3

Clive route branch 2 spoilers for the fic btw but okay really simple summary: Xani accidentally kills a certain someone. BAM now they’re a ghost haunting her dreams (Inigo wasn’t enough) AND they’re still there when she’s awake. So now, as revenge, they’re going to try make Xani’s life a living hell in the most pettiest ways possible. Is it possible to fall in love with the ghost of the guy you just murdered???

find out in this self-proclaimed super cool hf fanfic (first chapter is out)

#the story’s gonna be chaotic. #hell writing the first chapter was chaotic enough 😭😭 #I’m expecting a lot of giggles for the next chapter #heart fragment #heart fragment fanfiction #heart fragment jasper #heart fragment xani #heart fragment clive

[wyvyrnygo]

So I've been doing a pokemon sleep nuzlocke... (PART 1)

I think I should probably put my progress in the run on my tumblr too

So here's the rules

normal nuzlocke rules

sleep to get your starter (not the pikachu you get at the start of the game)

the first pokemon you befriend each day in pokemon sleep is treated as an encounter for a route in the actual pokemon game (for this i'm using hgss)

Once per week you can get two encounters in 1 day by doing 2 sleep sessions in 1 day.

I'm also using FFXVI themed nicknames for this (so there will be images of FFXVI characters next to the Pokemon that's been named after them in this post, which may be spoilers?).

Anyway here's my progress for the first week

(Note: All Pokemon Sleep Encounters in this week were done on the Cyan Beach island in Pokemon Sleep)

Day 1: My starter is Rattata (named Gav), which is a pretty good Pokemon for nuzlocking HGSS early on to be honest (Guts + Dark Type Coverage). I mostly played up to the first rival battle on this day

Day 2: My first "encounter" is Spheal (named Jill), one of the most adorable ice types. Oh and Ice types will pretty much clear the first two gyms easy. I mostly just went through the first few routes to Violet City today, I wanted to wait until I had 3 Pokemon before doing the first gym, even though it's likely to be easy with just

(Edit: I remembered just after finishing slowpoke well that ice type doesn't actually do super effective damage against bug and now my entire life is a lie 😅)

Day 3: My second encounter is Eevee (named Clive), this one is going to be interesting to use due to the options it presents, however I'm currently thinking of having it become Flareon for use against the Steel and Ice gyms later on. Also Flareon is fluffy and huggable uwu. Today I started by clearing out Sprout Tower before the first gym

Anyway, Jill the Spheal sweeped the first gym easy, that's Badge 1/8 and the first stage of the nuzlocke done, I imagine the next gym will be easy. I'm not sure what my counter to Whitney will be yet honestly, it may require sleeping until I get a ghost or fighting type. For now I've just done Slowpoke well and will wait for tomorrow for another Pokemon before doing the second gym

Day 4: On this day I didn't get much sleep so I decided to add a new rule to this run - once per week I can get two encounters by having two sleep sessions in one day. So here is day 4's two encounters - Midadol the Mankey and Charon the Sudowoodo. These two are going to be really helpful. Mankey can handle Whitney's Milktank and Sudowoodo can handle Bugsy's Scyther.

And now we have a full team by Pokemon Sleep's standards (Note: Compared to a normal nuzlocke of this game, we're still 5 encounters behind, this new rule will hopefully even it out a bit as well as help me get enough sleep on occasions I get not enough to function)

Also Bugsy is in shambles, Sudowoodo wiped his entire team with Rock Throw. So that is 2/8 badges. The big challenge is next - Whitney's Miltank always worries me

Day 5 and 6: I couldn't continue the run during these days due to being busy preparing for a Yugioh tournament as well as other stuff. But here is my pokemon sleep encounters for those two days. Otto the Croconaw and Tarja the Ekans

Day 7: Our day 7 encounter was Morbol the Bellsprout (I went with a monster name because I couldn't think of a character that fit that evolutionary line better) This is probably going to be more helpful as a poison type than Ekans honestly

Also I put the two encounters I couldn't put in the game due to being busy into the game

And that is the end of week 1 of the Nuzlocke, Goodbye Snorlax!

For today I will just be progressing my way towards Goldenrod City, I'm still pretty busy right now so I won't be doing the gym until Day 8. Hopefully Whitney's Miltank will be easier than I think it is, I do have a strategy forming for this fight though thanks to Bellsprout and Mankey.

Anyway I'll edit this post as I go along I think (this may need a seperate post for week 2 since idk if im getting too close to the character limit for posts)

PART 2

#pokemon #nuzlocke #pokemon sleep #pokemon heartgold #pokemon soulsilver #this is a really dumb idea #ffxvi #ffxvi themed pokemon nicknames #johto #snorlax #rattata #spheal #eevee #mankey #sudowoodo #croconaw #ekans #bellsprout

[farfromdaylight]

more thoughts on ff16. spoilers follow.

it turns out ff16 is very quick when you're level 48, have every eikon, and only do one sidequest. i'm already up to the start of the Hugo Kupka Throws Hands sequence.

i think i may have been too hard on jill the first time i played through the game. i still think her writing is lacking, but i'm willing to attribute it to the writing and not the character. it's not much of a stretch to read her behavior as subtle, which is not necessarily what i think the writers intended, but it's what we got, so.

it's interesting how much more of the game makes sense when you already know what's happening. that said, there are scenes i outright didn't remember happening, so it's a nice surprise. i knew i was getting close to the titan sequences but i couldn't remember how they kicked off, for instance.

more to the point though, the ultima stuff is more interesting now that i already know ultima's Whole Deal. i still don't think ultima (and by extension barnabas) are very good villains, mostly because their motivations are... pretty simple and easy to deny, lmao. but we'll get to barnabas when we get there.

seriously, this game proceeds at such a speedy clip if you don't do sidequests. i did virtually EVERYTHING last time (which is why i'm not doing it this time) — sidequests, hunts, you name it. i do prefer more of a completionist route on the whole, but i'm actually appreciating not doing them this time, because it allows me to actually progress the story without interruption and thus enjoy it better.

this is not really liveblog commentary, but it turns out that a good chunk of fic for this game is time-travel fix-it based on new game+ giving you all the eikons, which i find FASCINATING. we love a good time-travel fix-it in this house.

i turned off baby easy mode because i'm so overlevelled, and i haven't died yet (because i'm so overlevelled), but... we'll see how things go when we get closer to the end lmao. i really don't typically go for this style of action game and i really appreciated easy mode the first time through to let me power through the story, but i do like actually playing it, so. maybe next time i'll try normal mode from the start, we'll see.

clive is so hot. jesus christ, it's unbearable. the designers were cooking with his outfit. i've been taking a lot of screenshots of his pretty face but truly the whole boy is just. goddamn.

anabella annoys me, and not in the fun way. the whole worldbuild has some got undertones (that are quickly done away with by Final Fantasy nonsense, as you do) but anabella is so clearly meant as a cersei expy without understanding what makes cersei such a good character and villain. cersei is absolutely horrendous, but we also understand that she truly loves her children, to a fault. in contrast, i don't think anabella cares for her children as anything more than tools to a greater purpose. idk, maybe i'm not seeing it, but she's not unique or compelling enough to prove interesting to me.

it is late and i must sleep. more later, probably!

#ff16 liveblog #yes i am unfortunately very proud of the double entendre in the first line i'm sorry #ffxvi

[pocketbelt]

okay here we go fuck it, FFXVI criticism/complaint/whinge post

spoilers are a given, play XVI or decide you don't care, but they will at least be in the plot section at the end. There will also be mild spoilers for FFXIV: Heavensward and light mention of later parts of XIV as well (Stormblood and Shadowbringers, no Endwalker).

this isn't about being fair or even-handed it's just knives in its back the whole way down; the game is at best okay but I grow more annoyed and angry about it the more I think about it, and I personally think it is just shit now

this post is giant, you have been warned, I could not bring myself to condense it more as I felt I would be losing relevant points

Combat

XVI's marketing made a big deal of the combat director being Ryota Suzuki, 20-year Capcom vet whose last jobs at Capcom were game designer of Devil May Cry V and programmer on Monster Hunter World. His joining the team was championed, interviews focused a lot on the action game aspect, he's said it's his "personal masterpiece" in interviews and XVI's official sites in all languages call it Final Fantasy's "first fully-fledged action RPG" to step around XV's corpse.

The game emulates DMC heavily in style and gameplay, the comparison is desired by the devs.

And this was the stupidest thing they could have done.

Clive's core moveset is extremely lacking. He has a single 1-2-3-4 Square button combo that does not change from hour 1 to hour 45, no alternate combo routes, no ways to link seamlessly into and out of other moves, not a goddamn thing. Outside of this Clive has projectiles that are extremely weak and functionally useless (its charge upgrade does not change this), a chargeable sword attack that just leads to the same 2-3-4 hit string, a DMC Stinger-esque lunge that's obsoleted frame 1 by your default Eikon and an aerial drop attack. That's it, that's his entire basic non-cooldown moveset for the entire fucking game.

The projectile is worth honing in on: ranged attacks in Devil May Cry serve to keep your Style ranking ticking over for a few seconds while you keep your distance, and even then have extra utility and damage capability besides. Dante, for instance, in V has his dual pistols, dual shotguns and dual rocket launchers which all serve obviously different purposes and behave differently. On top of this he has his Gunslinger Stance, which changes their default attacks and gives each a special move, while also providing access to stance-exclusive gun attacks like Rainstorm, a useful midair attack with a very precise form of movement that makes it useful for sticking on bosses evasively while still attacking. In Final Fantasy XVI Clive has fucking nothing but a single piss-weak shot that does almost no damage or stagger, ever, and can be charged to do tiny damage or stagger. It has no further utilities, ever, even as it changes from its default fireball to match the element of your equipped Eikon (ice, lightning, etc). It isn't useful for anything, as flying enemies are better dealt with by using Phoenix's dash to teleport to them or Garuda's grab to yank them to you.

That's XVI in a nutshell: an extremely constrained Devil May Cry whose devs missed the most crucial and critical parts of what makes Devil May Cry work: it's not just that you have lots of moves with interlocking traits and mechanics to make a complex combat system, it's that you have so many options you can do whatever the fuck you like with. DMC's core strength is player expression: if you want to use one weapon then by god you can and can still get SSS ranks, you just have to not use the same one move in succession over and over (and don't get hit), it's just easier the more of the kit you use. XVI has no interest in player expression, you are very limited in tools and by design you are locked down.

The big stuff comes in with Clive's Eikons, of which he can equip a max of 3 who have 2 slots to put moves into. You have just 6 special moves that do the big damage and special effects and also they're all on cooldowns. The idea is to use your cooldowns carefully so they pop back up when the enemy enters stagger: in practice you can just open every fight with them and then just go back to beating on the enemy until they come back up, and if stagger happens it happens, the cooldowns will largely line up anyway. The spectacle wears away as the hours pile on and the standard enemies never get engaging. Your ability to play with moves, link them up and create mad chains is harshly limited by the 6 move cap and the fact that they all just go away for 20-50 seconds. Few of the Eikon attacks can link into each other very well, either.

Eikonic Feats clearly align with Dante's Stance special moves, as they're mapped to Circle and some are clearly just Dante's own (Phoenix is Trickster's dash and Titan is Royal Guard). The problem is you only have 3 at once and some feel like they should just be core mechanics on tap, such as Phoenix's dash or Garuda's grab, which has special animations when used to floor bosses at the 50% "mini-stagger" threshold. A combination of that, the length of time between Eikons (they're plot-tied) and the order they come in means many players will be extremely hard-pressed to even consider leaving the Phoenix/Garuda/Titan combo in particular, given how instrumental, useful and powerful their moves are. Phoenix is further a problem because it also has Ifrit's attacks without needing to "master" them to let them be equipped to other Eikons, and Ifrit's attacks are batshit good. It's not even that later Eikonic feats are bad (Megaflare is cool and has uses, Shiva's works on bosses which is delightful and Odin's just makes your standard moveset cooler so it's a flat upgrade), it's that the game's pacing and the implementation of these as limited capacity hot-swappable powers and not always-on core features discourage swapping out what works to explore and experiment, even with easy free respeccing. If you weren't locked to so few Eikons and so few move slots, getting new ones would be a delight instead of going "oh, okay" and then not bothering with their moves because most of them don't stack to Titan's anyway. I myself fucking loved Odin's and was delighted Shiva's worked on bosses, as it was a rare instance of bosses reacting to something you could do outside of the pre-ordained 50% stagger Garuda grab.

The nail in the coffin is enemy design: standard enemies such as regular knights, normal orcs, wolves and things around that size are fairly passive fodder to be blasted into paste in a single Eikon move from around the 1/3rd point of the game. Small enemies that fly die in single 1-2-3-4 strings from around the same point as long as you keep up on your equipped sword. Large enemies armour through anything and everything you do, can't be launched, their only "special" state outside stagger is the Garuda grab window, they're just big sandbags to pile Eikon moves into and dodge around. They use the FFXIV boss design philosophy most of the time, where they plainly ignore what you do and just broadcast AOEs or heavily telegraphed strikes, only occasionally moving to a new spot to do a new mechanic (which is always an AOE). They are just completely un-engaging. I think often of how Kingdom Hearts' bosses often can be made to flinch, or put into a state that's vulnerable to being launched or just hitstunned into the dirt. XVI needed that kind of thing so badly.

Un-engaging is the term for the whole thing; on Action-Focused (the higher of the two default difficulties), standard enemies don't have the HP for you to try and do things like super-long aerial combos. They turn to dust if breathed on so you can't style on shit, and the focus on cooldowns means you can only style on bosses for very brief moments before going back to dodging and mashing Square. The higher difficulties unlocked after the end of the (45 hour) game would alleviate that somewhat but they wouldn't fix any of the other problems here. I want to stress it's not that it's easy (though it is easy), it's that it's dull. It doesn't engage you. It doesn't present anything to push you to explore its limited systems, and the limits it imposes seem extremely arbitrary (if not simply existing because of performance concerns, as performance hangs by a thread as is). Plenty of easy games rank among the greats of every generation, and they do so because they're still very engaging to play and interact with. XVI isn't, at all.

And this game is at minimum twice as long as a Devil May Cry. I can't fathom the logic behind massively reducing the options and tools DMC has and then going for a much longer game. None of it really works well together, at all.

RPG Mechanics

In a slide at some convention or other presentation, YoshiP included questions from users, including some slightly more aggressively worded ones for humour. One of these was something along the lines of "Why aren't there RPG mechanics? Isn't this just an action game now?", to which they said they existed and to keep an eye out.

As it turns out, the question was more on point than expected.

XVI's RPG mechanics barely exist. Stats go up in tiny uniform amounts each level-up, and the difference is not perceptible. Enemies are already made of wet paper at level parity; that they pre-emptively crumble to dust at a slight level lead doesn't mean anything. It at least takes a significant level lead for bosses or large enemies to start melting. The bulk of your stats come from equipment, then, however...

...equipment is clearly an afterthought by the devs. For the first few hours, you have a tiny array of options of different swords, belts and bracers to craft and reinforce, and then after some hours you get Clive's dad's gear and it outclasses everything before it by leagues, and will outclass everything for the next 10 hours or so, whereupon superior alternatives are found in the odd chest in dungeon levels, to do you for the next pile of hours. By that point, the Blacksmith's Blues quests start appearing, which by the second quest unlock the recipes for the best belt and bracer in the game, and they are readily achievable around that time. Do that, and now for the entire second half of the game you never need to change equipment, ever. Weapons are worse off; the storyline gives you Eikon-related materials after each Eikon fight, which upgrade a specific sword that starts outclassing everything by the time you get Ramuh. It is topped maybe once and only very shortly, and then the Blacksmith's Blues quests come into things; they hand you the Ragnarok for free, which is only topped by the endgame Eikon sword and the best sword in the game...whose recipe comes with the Ragnarok. Outside of these, you can just ignore the swords for basically the entire game; there are only like 7 alternatives throughout the game and they get topped by the Eikon sword most of the time because this entire thing is an afterthought.

No weapons or armour have special traits or unique attributes that make them more suitable for a given area or sequence, or for dealing with specific kinds of foe. You don't ever need anything other than the thing with the highest number, like this is an ancient NES/SNES/PC-98 RPG, and there are no factors that might outweigh pure damage.

What secures this as an afterthought and not just a super simple system is that the game is constantly, constantly shitting buckets of crafting materials at you. There's only like 6 kinds of non-unique or "elite" crafting material, which are dispensed as rewards from quests, fights, chests and items lying around. By the end of the game I had around 2000 each, because you need only small handfuls for the very rare times you do craft something that needs them, and the game is always shitting them out. They have no other purpose in a normal playthrough; I've heard you can reinforce your gear to higher levels on NG+ using the materials, but that just means they're completely fucking pointless if you aren't compelled to replay the game. And they're used as the main reward for basically everything, and have no other fucking use.

Similarly, the economy's fucked: potions and other restoratives are piss-cheap and the game buries you in money and items that are sold for big amounts of money. I never sold one of those, crafted all the best gear and still had 250,000+ gil in my pocket by the ending. There's nothing to use it on other than unlocking songs to play in the home base, which are all mega-expensive (20k-50k+) to justify it, but that's clearly a sloppy "fix" for gil numbers that weren't considered. Like the crafting material, there is no other use for it; this shit cries out for investing money into the home base and other side activities, but the game has none of those.

This may as well go in this section too: the game is packed with sidequests and very few of these are worthwhile. The ones that give meaningful upgrades are marked with +s like in XIV; outside of them, some give good AP (for moves), good gil and very, very rarely give something like orichalcum for the best equipment. The majority give you fuck all, and thus are dependent on being engaging to do or telling an engaging little tale...and the majority fail at this too. The sidequests are generally MMO-tier stuff, unsurprisingly given the devs' pedigree as, well, MMO developers; you just go from point A to B to C hitting X at things until it ends, sometimes you go to B and fight stuff, etc. I've seen people say that XVI's sidequests have compelling character moments, and this is true for a handful, mostly the ones kept to the very end of the game at the end of a variety of sidequest chains. The majority tell you things you already know, things that aren't interesting and also don't matter, all three of these or not even these. Here's the thing: world lore only matters if your world is interesting, and XVI's world is not. It's a bargain bin Ivalice (the setting of FFXII and Tactics) with none of the truly fantastical designs or truly stunning world design, filtered through the Game of Thrones TV show. I hope you like hearing that slaves have it horrifically and are treated terribly because that's what most of the sidequests will be about for the first half of the game, and it's also what the plot is about for nearly the first half of the game (and is otherwise a running theme of the game), and oh my god the XVI writers want to be sure you absolutely know this beyond a shadow of a doubt. Similarly, character moments only matter for, well, characters, and the game just isn't able to sell everyone in your home base as a fun or compelling character. The moment with Otto when you find a note from Cid is genuinely heartwrenching and well done, and it's pretty much the only one that genuinely lands...and it should've been in the main story, not an incidental sidequest. Especially with how dry the main story is most of the time you're in the home base.

Also, Final Fantasy traditionally was never big on sidequests so much as side stories, optional areas and side activities. Pretty much starting with XI is when it began really dabbling in them more and more, starting with XII having some, XIII-2 having a lot (XIII-1 had nothing because it was stripped to the bone to finish it), XIII-3 being almost completely sidequests by design, XIV being an MMO and XV having a lot. The thing is, some of these still had actual minigames and side activities; XIII-2 had its casino games and chocobo racing, same for XIV, XV had a very fun fishing minigame with attached sidequests, etc. Going further back, the PS1 FFs had card games and multiple minigames throughout, chocobo breeding and racing and treasure hunting, etc. XVI has none of this, absolutely zero, and it's a shame. Sure, XII also purely had sidequests and hunts, but XII's hunts and elite hunts were way more interesting and involved than 99% of XVI's; they often had special spawn conditions, special gimmicks and mechanics, could often be brutal and even had fucking surprise twists. There's no fun surprises in XVI's hunts, even the familiar recurring faces are at their most boring and incidental here. XVI's Carrot and Red Chocobo don't even begin to stack to XII's.

Put shortly, XVI's RPG aspect is so fucking thin it's more an action game with a very faint RPG layer strapped on. With how simplified and restrained the action side is, you'd hope it was to work with the RPG side in tandem, but no, there's basically nothing here.

Presentation

The game's really pretty and really high fidelity until it moves. Outside of combat, in Performance Mode, the world will often just swim and devolve into a blurry mess of over-aggressive motion blur and really bad temporal anti-aliasing if you or the camera move too fast or too suddenly. It struggles to hold 30FPS when just walking around environments, and I suspect performance is why Clive's auto-sprint is turned off when in towns (and your Chocobo is forbidden from entering towns) which also makes time spent running around towns for main or sidequests absolutely agonising after a little while. The game is so pretty, but I find myself wondering if it's actually worth it; is this fidelity worth the game melting and the console revving when I try to actually move in it? No, obviously.

I will go all RETVRN here but like, the fixed camera-angles and 3D models on pre-rendered backgrounds of the PS1 FFs allowed to be visual powerhouses in their day, and VIII and especially IX still hold the fuck up now. We seem to be slowly realising the strengths of these perspectives and designs again, as Nintendo rolls out a surprisingly immaculate looking Super Mario RPG remake and Square keeps rolling out incredible remasters and remakes of their older titles. Can you imagine what a big budget FFXVII could do with the strengths of that style, where you only need to render what can face the camera and nothing else? We need to go back.

In combat on Performance Mode the game mostly holds 60 pretty cleanly, sometimes staggering a little when shit gets busy, especially in the Eikon fights where the designs are complicated and particles heavy. It blatantly jumps between 30 and 60 for cutscenes and special animated sequences a lot in these fights, and I again wonder if we wouldn't be better off with lower fidelity for smoother shows.

Still, it is pretty and they at least knew to focus on making combat perform slickly, so hey.

While I'm here, the OST is a massive downer. It's mostly generic orchestral shite and very little stands out. This is especially saddening because the composer of at least most of it is Masayoshi Soken, who is a fucking eclectic powerhouse of range and skill in his work on XIV. YoshiP's drive for a grounded dark fantasy styled like Game of Thrones strangles so much of what this game could be; the Titan Eikon battle is the one time Soken's let off the leash and it's the highlight track of the game. This is also a baffling choice when you consider the gameplay is inspired by Devil May Cry, a series rife with tracks in the same flavour as shit like this! You had the perfect team for a DMC style OST and you wasted it!

Plot/Writing

okay here we fucking go

To establish, the game's core theme is that an unequal societies built upon the exploitation of some of their people will not stand, and that if we aren't united and equal we are damned to die, likely to a problem of mankind's own making such as the gradual destruction of the environment (which is what the Blight in game is, it's the world rotting from overuse of magic). This is what all the focus on slavery early on is done for, it's about how deranged these societies are for the subjugation and exploitation of others and the myriad ways both explicit and subtle they created justifications in their cultures for it (the slaves, called Bearers, are designated slaves by religious doctrine in the Sanbrequois Empire, for example). The main counterpoint to this is Cid's anarchist commune, which is your home base and eventually what Clive comes to lead...and does very little with, truthfully. Like Clive is never very concerned with the running of the place, a lot of it explicitly is handled by Otto for you (and he did the same for Cid, apparently).

The problem is this theme isn't really backed by gameplay at all, and it's here that I have to start slagging off the writers; the main scenario writer was also main scenario writer on FFXIV's Heavensward expansion, which also really, really struggled with this, but it is a failing of the gameplay end of the team as well. Namely, in this game about how united we stand and divided we fall, Clive does everything by himself successfully and unerringly. He beats every Eikon he fights 1v1 with one sole exception, and when the final boss reveals an Eikon form it wins a 3v1 matchup (where 1 of the 3 is the Eikon Ifrit couldn't beat alone!) only to lose to a solo but empowered Clive right after. From a gameplay perspective it's a fault that your party members just never matter ever, sure, even when they are present, but from the story perspective I have no idea why you'd deliberately do things like set up the 3v1 as a loss that leads to a Clive solo victory when your entire fucking theme is people working together for the betterment of all. Like, that's the moment where all the prayers of the people at the home base explicitly fly into Clive or your remaining Eikon allies descend from on high to skewer the boss for Clive to get the winning counterhit in.

The main way the game tries to show "people uniting together" is people giving up their Eikon powers willingly to Clive so he personally gets stronger, but like, that's a shit way of doing it. When Jill gives Shiva to Clive, she falls out of the plot immediately afterward; Clive has to tag-team with Joshua to defeat Bahamut, but at the final fight, Joshua surrenders Phoenix to Clive so Clive can beat the final boss alone instead of just doing the goddamn fucking tag-team again.

On that note, talking about Shiva naturally brings us to Jill. Jill is Clive's childhood friend, she's the Dominant of Shiva and the game's female lead. And she is probably the worst-handled female character in any Final Fantasy. Combined with the handling of two of the villains and the trends among women in this game in general, XVI might actually be the fucking worst about women in the series - yes, XV barely had women in it but the ones it did have weren't treated anywhere near this bad.

Alright, so, Jill starts the game being freed from Ironblood control by Clive after he realises who she is (they've been separated for years and he was sent to assassinate her). After she's back on her feet, she tags along with Clive as he journeys to Phoenix Gate, where his life went to shit, to see if he can discover who the mysterious second Fire Dominant that killed Phoenix was. In essence, Jill goes along with Clive for his revenge/self-discovery arc, and later, the opportunity to lay siege to the western Mothercrystal owned by the Ironblood Kingdom reveals itself. Jill pushes for it to be done, saying she has her own revenge to seek similar to Clive's, and her own sins to atone for like Clive's (all the people she killed as Shiva for the Ironbloods, as they threatened to kill enslaved women and children whenever she refused). Clive agrees, and has her back the way she had his.

It's a little scuffed but the arc in general is nice. Clive legitimately does mostly take a back seat to Jill for it (though Jill isn't playable as that would cost money they spent elsewhere). It fucks up a little in places: Jill struggles to freeze a spout of lava in a way no other Dominant struggles to use their powers, and a fire beast summoned by the overarching villain right as they reach the Mothercrystal's heart manages to wall and fend off Shiva. The explanation, ostensibly, is that Shiva is struggling because she's ice-elemental in a volcano but to be frank, later evidence tells us that Shiva is just the weakest Eikon outside of perhaps Garuda (whose Dominant is the only other female Dominant. Good job, lads). Ramuh may also eat shit, but Cid is old when he loses to semi-prime Benedikta and he eats shit to a mysterious force none have perceived before; when he's on point he's the only Eikon to floor Ifrit and survived an encounter with Bahamut in the past.

Outside of that blemish, the arc works, Jill kills the Ironblood pope herself and takes her revenge in doing so. In breaking the Mothercrystal, they also break the back of the Ironbloods' religion and thus their entire society, fucking them all royally and thus both having revenge and atoning partially for the crimes she committed for them.

From that point on, Jill does mostly nothing in half the scenes she's in, and her trajectory in the plot goes thus: captured by Hugo and almost executed to antagonise Clive, rescued, sits out from going to fight Hugo, sits out from fighting Bahamut, gets one-shot by semi-prime Barnabas, is kidnapped, is rescued, watches Clive get wrecked, fucks Clive, surrenders Shiva to Clive, and then she falls out of the plot almost entirely. She is kept out of the party after that point, only appearing to menace enemies with her rapier while Dion does all the real fighting as they buy time for Clive and Joshua, and then sits out the final battle along with everyone who isn't Clive, Joshua or Dion.

At no point do Ifrit and Shiva tag-team another Eikon. Shiva is explicitly shown to be able to hold her own against Titan in the opening/after the prologue (she fights him to a draw!) but doesn't take part at all in fighting him for real! Whenever Shiva does show up after the prologue, it's to be ineffectual or get defeated, every single fucking time! She is all but explicitly stated to be the weakest Eikon by leagues!

Lads! What the fuck were you doing!? That was the most obvious fucking set-up and you wasted it!

To say that Jill is wasted is an understatement. But the fact that the writers largely see her as a damsel for Clive to save or a vector for people to antagonise Clive through is fucking baffling for a series that has, historically, done really well by its female casts. Funnily enough FFXIV also struggled with female characters until Shadowbringers, almost like there's a pattern here.

Fumbling the ball is debatably the game's real big theme because it's doing it constantly. None of the villains are a hit for a variety of reasons, and it becomes really obvious that the Heavensward leads and parts of the XIV team went onto this after that came out because the strides XIV made in villain quality afterward feel extremely telling (yes Stormblood fumbled Yotsuyu hard and Fordola is 100% awful no matter how you see her, but Zenos was gold; then Shadowbringers has the series' best villain after that). A lot of them can be done quickfire:

Benedikta is an insecure failwoman that had some actually good character foundations for an arc about becoming secure and succeeding! She's dead within the first five hours and nothing further is done with her as a character in any way, significant potential cast to the four winds for no good reason other than "Game of Thrones has killing so we should kill". Heavensward had a character somewhat like this in Ysayle and it wasted her in similar fashion (FUNNILY ENOUGH YSAYLE ALSO TRANSFORMS INTO SHIVA WHY IS THIS A FUCKING PATTERN). Also her last moments as a person are breaking down right as a group of bandits begins to attempt to rape her. Great work, lads.

Hugo is seduced by Benedikta early on and believes she genuinely loved him, and is driven by unyielding rage when someone makes him believe Cid killed her (when it was actually Clive, which like, same difference after that point anyway). He has a good speech in the Rosarian throne room but otherwise isn't up to much and all semblance of character vanishes going into his fight, with no moment afterward.

The Sanbrequois Emperor is a generic emperor man who initially wars for access to unBlighted lands and then for control of resources, which while bastardly is just standard operation for an empire. His sign of greater evil is feckless disregard for treaties, which is explicitly driven by his wife's ambitions, which, christ, we'll get to in a bit. By himself he isn't up to much of anything at all.

Barnabas Tharmr is king of Waloed, the eastern smaller chunk of Valisthea, and Dominant of Odin. He fights Bahamut in a very early CG cutscene, then isn't in the game for about 35 hours. When he shows up, he gets built up as a Vergil-esque impossibly strong opponent who truly could only have been matched by Dion, Dominant of Bahamut, who you needed to partner up to defeat as Ifrit. He wrecks Clive in a really unconvincing cutscene where he just kicks him out of a blind rush and then one-shots him, is implied to oneshot Shiva without needing to become Odin (which is not a feat as Shiva can't do fucking anything after the prologue), and shortly later has a more even fight that ends with Clive and Jill fleeing from him. Then you fight him for real at a tower in the middle of Waloed and he's Odin for all of 2 minutes before Ifrit ganks him and the rest of the fight is mostly just fighting him in his "semi-primed" Devil Trigger state. The entire time he's back in the plot, he's a calm, collected cold type who just repeats the real villain's very limited spiel over and over, until halfway through his real boss fight where he randomly begins cackling and goes psycho, revealing an actual character trait...and it's just bargain bin scam-brand Zenos from XIV Stormblood. It's never suggested at being a thing anywhere before this.

There are three villains I have not discussed above, who are noteworthy for being three different kinds of more elaborately bad.

First and simplest: the entire Ironblood Kingdom. The Ironblood Kingdom is a small island nation off the west coast of Valisthea, whose army are fighting Dhalmekia (Titan's nation) in the game's opening before the flashback sequence to Clive's childhood. They are an explicitly barbaric and unbelievably violent people who wield the Dominant Shiva for conquest, forcing her to fight for them by threatening to kill innocents. They are the only people in the game who speak their own foreign language, they have an evil religion based around human sacrifice to their Mothercrystal, they raid Clive's homeland Rosaria before the imperials take it and kill all the men, kidnap all the women to use as slaves and Jill's discussion of this leaves the implication of "worse" (rape) in the air but doesn't confirm it. The Ironbloods are just flavourless Vikings with unfortunate connotations (why are the evil human-sacrificing ultraviolent cultists who kill men and kidnap women the only ones who speak a foreign language?), and after Jill's revenge arc they vanish from the game completely and never matter ever again. They get one mention - that their society collapses after the loss of the Mothercrystal, the centre of their religion - and that's it. Clive and Jill, now heads of an anarchist commune looking to rescue and take in slaves wherever it can, never even mention considering going to the Ironblood home island to save the Rosarian slave women. They're just left to their fate out there in the collapsing society of ultraviolent Vikings.

The Rosarian slave women Jill grew up with, lived with, was protected by, and met with again during the incursion into the Mothercrystal.

Just never mentioned again, left to their fates.

10/10.

The second is the real villain and final boss, Ultima. Ultima has an interesting appearance: a snow-white gaunt fleshy being with dark pits for eyes. He endlessly repeats the same few lines about free will being evil and how mankind's will is super weak and how it is reinforced by consciousness and links with other people to survive and etc etc. This is genuinely over 80% of his lines, the remaining few being "You cannot win because I am God" and him descending into coping and seething as Clive beats his ass in the final fight, which is also the only time he develops an actual character.

Ultima is a boneless version of the Ascians from FFXIV, or perhaps it's more accurate to say that he is very clearly hacked together from Heavensward-era lore bible/character notes on the Ascians at that point. The Ascians in XIV: A Realm Reborn (the base game) and Heavensward are all one-note masked robe-wearing villains, largely interchangeable as they rant about making the Darkness happen again and resurrecting their fell god Zodiark to restore Balance, and so on. The only exceptions are Lahabrea (who fucking loves being evil and is cackling all the time) and Elidibius, the lone white-robed Ascian and their leader, who is just the smug "I Know What You Do Not and that means we will win" sort of preening villain who doesn't do that much. None of the rest matter or have much in the way of character in either part of the game, and the Ascians are entirely absent from Stormblood until the patches leading to Shadowbringers start.

If you still don't believe me, consider this: Ultima is a member of an unbelievably advanced and magically powerful race of god-like beings who ended up creating humanity, with the goal of exploiting humanity and laying waste to the world to remake it for their own ends and restart their own long-lost civilisation. That's the Ascians from XIV to a tee. It's the same exact shit, only Ultima doesn't have a character, he just spouts blandly mean evil shit so meaningless platitudes can be spit back at him before he gets punched in the face.

This was the worst possible road to take. It's a bad road to have taken at any point, but in a post-Shadowbringers world this was the worst possible road to take. With its shuffling in staff and promotion of Natsuko Ishikawa, previously a writer for optional side content and famously XIV's excellent Dark Knight job quests, to lead writer, Shadowbringers saw the Ascians greatly expanded. The remaining Ascians, Elidibius and technically-a-newcomer Emet-Selch, are fucking fantastic characters in Shadowbringers: Elidibius is rescued from being a boring forgettable generic smug man into a genuinely tragic figure, and Emet-Selch is Final Fantasy's single best villain. Ishikawa had the giga-brain idea to look at the Ascians' situation, of perpetuating apocalypses for millennia to try and reform their destroyed world and resurrect their dead god, and thought to ask "What kind of a person does that? What drives you to actually stick to that plan? And what does that do to you as a person? How do you hold together? How do you keep going?".

And it was beautiful.

And then XVI stumbles in with this fucking cumstain who just keeps burbling "free will bad, being my slave is based actually, please stop having the free will" and trying to climb into Clive's skin.

Ultima has no character and has fucking nothing going on. He is at least an embodiment of the game's main theme but that's all he is, he's the ultimate slave-driver and exists for a former slave to spout platitudes he himself doesn't embody at and then be punched so that a truly equal society can be made...except we don't see that truly equal society, we just see one that no longer has magic and thus no longer has Bearers, who were enslaved for their magic, and is thus saved from the Blight too. Except in the Ironblood Kingdom where women were generally enslaved to make food and be sacrificed. Those slaves we just forgot. Hm.

Fumbles the ball constantly.

Anabella gets her own section

The third and final villain to discuss isn't the main villain or even an ally of the main villain, she's just a singular black hole of fucking awful writing and concerning attitudes. Anabella Rosfield is Clive and Joshua's mother, and at the start of the game she quickly establishes a seething hatred and deep-seated bigotry for Bearers simply because they are slaves and poor, and similar contempt for everyone not born rich. Her husband, Clive's dad and duke of Rosaria, talks about making life better for the Bearers and thus possibly has intentions of abolishing slavery in Rosaria, so Anabella concocts a scheme with the Sanbrequois Empire to perform a decapitation strike that kills him and the duchy's top military unit and leaders while letting her walk away with Joshua, her favoured son because he got made the Dominant of Phoenix. The way it plays out, Anabella assumes Joshua died and walks off to marry the Emperor and have a new child.

Over the course of the game, Anabella makes it clear that her goal is to simply be the birth-mother of the ruler of the world. She desires no power for herself: she isn't concocting a scheme to make herself regent in a system that favours men and male heirs as rulers exclusively, she isn't working the system to get herself in charge. When she gets her weird child with the Emperor into the seat, she does so by talking the Emperor into letting an eight year old onto the throne in name while the Emperor stays on as regent and continues doing his work. This is her end goal. She simply wishes for her son (and it is always a son, too) to rule and for that son to be known as legitimately hers. Having and birthing a ruler is the sum total of her existence and all she strives for, except for one thing: killing slaves.

Anabella's hatred for Bearers goes beyond even the other cartoonish examples you see throughout the early game. She straight up creates an honest-to-god Nazi death squad to go around carrying out pogroms on slaves in Rosaria specifically, not to spite Clive specifically because he escaped enslavement under the imperial military, just to kill slaves in Rosaria because she really fucking hates slaves. The Nazi death squad pillage one village, sack a church, raze a second village to the ground and raze a third to the ground before Clive finally deals with allegedly all of them as they prepared to raze another. They kill slaves in massive numbers and kill anyone who might object as well, all explicitly in the empress' name, simply because she hates slaves so much. Slaves never did anything to her, there is no hack shite like "a slave killed her dad for being a slaver" or something like Fordola in XIV Stormblood, nor does she have XIV Stormblood's justification for Yotsuyu (victim of childhood abuse and sex trafficking that the state permitted to exist openly - and still did nothing about even when new king Hien was faced with the specific sex trafficker who took her what the fuck guys); she just hates slaves because they have magic and are slaves. They are a subset of the poor and non-nobles, who she also hates blindly.

She's a deranged eugenicist-fascist birth-obsessed gender essentialist who holds these beliefs and thoughts simply because. Literally every line of hers is self-assured smug preening about screwing people over, slaves being killed or enacting her plans to get her child onto the throne so she can claim to be an emperor's mum. There is an extensive scene where she openly shit-talks, insults and smugly preens at the emperor's first son with his deceased first wife, openly gloating about screwing him out of the throne simply to gloat. She is not in league with Ultima, she does not act to serve his plans, she isn't even unknowingly corrupted by or influenced by Ultima to stir up discord to further his ends, she's just a pit of blind hatred towards everyone and everything who sexed her way to a position to give birth to someone who would take actual power, because actual power doesn't matter, birthing someone to take it does.

I have to wonder if the person who wrote her was freshly divorced. It may be uncouth to suggest it but I genuinely believe they have problems with women. I think it's deranged this got past editing and made it into the game as is.

Like, let's be clear here: Anabella is the single biggest individual source of suffering and death outside of Ultima, the literal slaver god. She:

Disowns Clive for not being a Phoenix Dominant

Orchestrates the assassination of her own husband once she has a Phoenix Dominant child and he starts suggesting they abolish slavery

Has all her husband's top men and staff killed, to a man where possible, leaving Rosaria entirely without leadership

Has her own handmaidens killed after preening to imperial soldiers in front of them, having given them the impression they would be spared to join her as she went to the Emperor

As Empress, is explicitly said to corrupt the Emperor, making him more callous and cruel. The suggestion to break the peace treaty with Twinside is from her influence

As Empress, creates a Nazi death squad themed after her dead first husband's band of loyal men, only coloured black and now called "the Black Shields". In her name openly and explicitly, they go out into Rosaria specifically alone to kill slaves, razing villages to the ground for having too many slaves and not turning over slaves, simply for the joy of killing slaves. Two villages are razed, a church sacked and a village pillaged with hundreds of people killed, and plans are made to continue doing this before the squad is allegedly completely defeated by Clive

As Empress, goes to Dhalmekia behind the Emperor's back to discuss terms with Hugo, telling him to lay siege to Rosaria's capital to set a trap for "Cid the Outlaw". This siege destroys ever more of Rosaria, continuing the trend of aggressively and viciously shitting on and destroying her prior family's legacy and history, and also sees myriad imperial soldiers and Rosarian civilians killed in swathes by Hugo's men

As Empress, having corrupted the Emperor into sieging and taking Twinside as the new imperial capital, following the destruction of Dhalmekia's crystal, she suggests the Emperor take up Dhalmekia in making a treaty to end the war (as Dhalmekia now struggles without its Mothercrystal) and then rout them as they try to leave. She suggests this so Sanbreque can take Dhalmekia and the outlying Free Cities and thus hold all of Valisthea outside Waloed.

She then intends to have the Emperor siege and take Waloed to complete the conquest of Valisthea for her 8 year old son to nominally rule over. This is a plan she has dedicated decades of her life to: making everyone bow to her child. Not her, not her family or lineage or name, just her son. Any of her sons, just needs to be one of hers.

Directly gloats about corrupting Dion's father to Dion, and directly gloats about screwing him out of the throne. Calls his "blood" "unclean", further insults, and sneers that he should just obey her weird child emperor. Thinks this will work without repercussion. This causes Dion to carry out an uprising with the intent to kill her, leading to the slaughter of the royal guard, and Ultima (who hollowed out her weird child to wear as a skinsuit a while ago) to provoke Dion into losing control and become a raging Bahamut, which then lays waste to Twinside, killing untold tens of thousands at minimum. This sequence also gets the Emperor killed.

Ultima doesn't even do anywhere near as much as she does when it comes to sowing discord. Depending on the population count of Waloed (which is more or less entirely converted to magic zombies by Barnabas choosing to serve Ultima blindly) versus the slaughtered slaves and people in Rosaria and Twinside, she may actually have caused more deaths total by her actions than Ultima does before the aetherfloods and Waloed's zombie invasion arrive. More, if we count war dead as technically hers too by her seducing the Emperor into ordering it.

I need to make it clearer: none of Anabella's actions or motivations make any actual sense. Nothing scarred her into needing to be validated or legitimised by having a child of hers placed into the highest seat of power in the world. She has no tragic backstory. She simply comes into being an unfathomably hate-filled pit directed at the weakest and most oppressed people in society, and all of her actions directly or indirectly lead to unfathomable numbers of deaths simply because she wants them dead or because she wants to be called an emperor's mum. She does not want personal power, she does not want to shape the world according to an ideology, she is not in league with the ancient slaver god or his thrall or anything like that, she just really hates slaves for no reason and is obsessed with birthing.

And they clearly aren't intended to make sense, because she's obviously meant simply to be hated. She exists to be hated, she's a completely ridiculous, embarrassingly cartoonish mess that acts as deranged as possible to make you hate her. One of her longest scenes is that one I keep referencing where she openly gloats at and insults Dion and laughs that her child is now emperor and he isn't, and she legitimately completely thought she could just do that and nothing would come of it.

Because she's shocked when Dion rocks up the next night, declares rebellion and attempts to kill her weird child. She is reduced to hysteric screaming when the Emperor takes the blow and dies, completely shaken and left a quivering wreck found by Clive later in the ruins of the imperial palace, legitimately unable to believe this could have happened or that anything could go wrong.

She's so specifically engineered to be spited and hated, to try and make you seethe at her, to be a singular symbol of all evil, and for what? This isn't the first time this team has done this sort of shit, though never to this scale; FFXIV will randomly produce minor villains and NPCs who are evil to the point of blatant stupidity, doing acts and getting minutes-long scenes of cackling and sneering and gloating about it at agonising length, and it's always dumb and bad when it happens there. At least on one occasion the gloater gets bisected gloriously, half the time they weakly eat shit or are simply rolled away.

Anabella is the worst fucking instance of it by far; as a villain type it just fucking sucks because it's not interesting to see, it has nothing interesting to say, it isn't fun or actually shocking or actually capable of disgusting you to your core, it's just weird and annoying in how much time they take up. Combining the weird birthmother angle shit to it, the fact that they're always sons and that she's the only woman in the upper ranks of these governments makes it all very pointed in a very discomforting way.

One might say it's realistic, there are genuinely people out there who are bigoted beyond belief and beyond all rationality, who will be bigoted even when it will actively work against them. Yes, that's true, they are tragically common and often shitting themselves on social media at the revelation that no-one likes them, not even their fellows. But so what? So what if they're realistic? It's not interesting, they aren't interesting, they're just shitty people. Being realistic doesn't automatically make them a good fit for a story, and often it makes them a bad fit.

Moreover, if you want to bring realism into this, let's do it: let's bring realism into Anabella's shit. That scene with Dion, realistically, is so fucking unbelievably stupid that she could not have conceivably survived to that point in the first place, she would have gotten herself killed stupidly long before it. Dion is:

First son of the Emperor

Leader of the Sanbrequois Dragoons, dragon-taming super knights and strongest and most powerful military division of a heavily militaristic society. This also makes him the highest ranked military leader in the country

Dominant of Bahamut, divine dragon in a society that worships and utilises and integrates dragons into itself. Bahamut is also undebatably the strongest of all Eikons. Sanbreque is a deeply religious society, Bahamut's Dominant is nigh-on a living god to them.

Suspecting that Anabella is an agent of, or possessed by, Ultima, who he knows is a real thing thanks to Joshua. He knows his father has become more violent and cruel lately, and has been since the marriage with Anabella. This makes Anabella a threat to all humanity, not just his family or Sanbreque, and thus she needs to be killed.

Is seeing Anabella tear his family apart before his eyes and taking away his birthright while laughing about it

Alone with her in the room at that point.

Is willing to kill her.

Is armed.

Dion has every single conceivable form of social and institutional legitimacy available in a medieval/early modern society shielding his actions. He could kill Anabella in the street and simply declare "Heathen" and walk away unfettered. He is also an extraordinarily powerful warrior himself before you even factor in "can transform into the most powerful god" - when he comes to the throne room to declare rebellion, no knight or cardinal/bishop there speaks up when the Emperor commands Dion's arrest. They don't budge. They either agree with him, or take his legitimacy over even the emperor's, or they simply refuse to fuck with him lest he kill them instantly.

When Dion orders the Dragoons to rebel and seize the palace, they do so without question. Not a man disobeys or turns away, they immediately set about slaying the royal and city guards, while evacuating and protecting civilians flawlessly. They take his assertion that Anabella is a traitor and usurper and that she and her 8-year-old son need to die without question and set about carrying it out.

Dion's word is basically divine law.

And Anabella, living in this society for over a decade if not near two, near the highest seat of power, regularly around bishops/cardinals/high priests and commanders, somehow believed that actively antagonising Dion as much as is entirely possible could not result in anything other than Dion going "okay" and just kneeling before her child. She somehow figured that Dion was not, in fact, the single most powerful man in this society (literally so, in a physical sense, too) despite living in it and seeing its workings from the inside for years.

Anabella is so stupid it's criminal. She's such a bad character it's unfathomable. The entire plot is actively warped by her presence and her list of sins is so deranged it undermines the fucking story because is this societal system that employs slavery actually this bad, or is it just this singular individual lunatic at the top ruining everything? She's the single worst character in any Final Fantasy, any one, ever. There is a weird seething, boiling disgust behind this character and I don't think it's unfair to say that someone wasn't right when writing her. Someone was freshly divorced or freshly seething about a woman for something, because I don't see how you go to these lengths and not be.

In fact, take what was said about Jill before, consider what they do with Benedikta, consider that no other female character is as prominent as these three. And then contemplate these facts:

The creative director and screenplay writer was also main scenario writer for XIV: Heavensward, where the main female character in the core cast, who also transforms into Shiva as her power-up state incidentally, steps to another primal as Shiva and gets fucking wrecked, and later sacrifices herself when there wasn't any real need to, dying as Shiva to a big airship.

One scenario writer was a scenario writer for Persona 5, which should speak for itself

One scenario writer was a game designer for Yokai Watch 3, a game so uninterested in its own female lead that not only is half her story completely irrelevant to main story, but postgame content actively denies you entry if you try to play as her for no actual reason. No plot reason, no character reason, she just can't do some things like a battle challenge tower simply because.

Another scenario writer was a story writer for Yokai Watch 3, as well.

And tell me that the writing staff of Final Fantasy XVI doesn't have problems with women.

There's other straggler issues I had, but nothing will top that. Now at the end of the post, actually, I remembered something and have nowhere else to put it. It's petty but I want to get it down somewhere.

After a point, you get a historian/lecturer at your home base called Vivian who tells you about the state of the world and the ongoing conflicts at different points throughout the story, and she is entirely useless every time. She gives you a very basic rundown of character backgrounds, she gives you a very basic rundown of recent history, and 95% of the time you already know what she tells you from previous scenes and the remaining 5% isn't of any use or interest, when it's even there. It's annoying in that it's pointless minutes of fluff and padding to a game that could do with better pacing and thus doesn't need it.

Like a lot of CBU3's work, it's following in the footsteps of an Ivalice game, specifically this time Final Fantasy XII (which is also a regular source of names, scenes, characters, plot elements, ideas and more for XIV as well). There are a scant few scenes in XII where you get an excerpt of the memoirs from a relatively minor NPC, the Marquis Ondore, and the first one of these comes in the game's opening, after its lengthy and gorgeous CG cutscenes. It sets the stage of the world and puts in more context for the things you saw in the cutscene, and establishes what the prologue sequence you're about to play is.

Compare the two for yourself: XVI's first Vivian scene (0:31 to 2:14, there's little bits of dialogue before and after with Clive if you want) and XII's opening excerpt with Ondore (7:04 to 9:14).

It's not just the performance, though I would argue Ondore's is miles and miles better, it's the presentation and all, really. XII's lead-in, its use of images, its fucking great music, the way it cuts it silent at the end to deliver its tantalising sting, it's not just exposition but a solid part of the opening narrative itself. Note how much faster paced Ondore's performance is, and how much easier it is to follow as a result. That sort of pacing would help a lot of XVI's dialogue and delivery, XII's English dub is very lively and theatrical and it really elevates it.

But really, I am petty about it; Ondore's opening excerpt is one of those scenes fucking embedded in my head, his delivery and cadence of his lines stuck in there. I love that scene, it's so good at establishing tone, context, flavour and leading in to the prologue it's nuts. I was excited to see XVI try the same, and was deflated when it didn't match up, and continually annoyed every time we had to go back to this random lady to be told things I already knew or even had just inferred.

And if you think I'm harping on it, just look at this bit where when asked "how do we enter Ash/Waloed", Vivian gives a 3 minute lecture only to end on "the beach you already went to literally right before this return to the home base". Tell me these scenes aren't just fucking filler.

Final Fantasy XVI should've been right up my alley. "Final Fantasy but Devil May Cry" crosses my favourite series with one of my other favourites, I should have been the target audience for this one. But holy good fuck, they fucked it in basically every area and I grow more negative on it the more I think about it.

At least now I can shit this out and get it off my mind.

#pocket-media-tag

[romance-club-daily]

Replaying SitF and I'm not sure if I should stick with Sebastian or not! What would you say are the pros and cons for every LI?

It's been a while since a replayed SIF and didn't play all of the routes, so I had a little help with the Wiki! If you don't mind some spoilers, here its is:

Unfortunately some don't have good screen time, but they have a good route anyway.

Sebastian de Aldana: It's probably the LI with the most depth in the story. And the LI who has more screen time too. He's sometime a grumpy guy (not so much?), but with a heart of gold. In the last season we get to see his backstory.

Upon first meeting Adelaide: He is very cautious and rude towards her. He is very tough but also welcoming, and seems to care about Adelaide's well being. You can tell that he has feelings for her in the beginning. He can come across as being quite pushy if you decide you don't want to romance him. He is friendly toward his crew and treats them with care.

William:

We meet him right at the beginning of the story, but the MC and him only get together and meet again some time later (long story, you'll understand). I've never taken his route, but I believe he's a good LI. We have to reject Sebastian to bring up his options.

William was born on the island of Santo Domingo. A young, adventurous boy, he wanted to to become a sailor. When Adelaide first meets him, he is being harassed by Diego de Ochoa's soldiers and she defends him. He is so smitten with her that he kisses her and confesses his love for her, however she only sees him as a child. Thanks to his bubbly and sunny personality, William always has a plan and a smile on his face.

Chris:

It looks like a good route too. There are a plot twist with this one 👀, also we have to reject Sebastian to bring up the romantic options.

While living on a wild island, Adelaide happens upon the Walrus, a pirate ship moored for repairs. There she meets a young man named Chris. The rest of the crew is rude and unfriendly, while Chris is kind and supportive.

Jackie:

We see a flashback to his past. He's a good LI, caring and kind.

He is one of the bravest and friendliest characters. His character shows that the crew likes him for who he is regardless of his skin color, which at the time was a cause of discrimination. His interactions are sweet and romantic.

Lorenza Capulet:

I don't remember her so much.

After boarding the small ship and easily disarming its merchant crew, Adelaide goes under the deck and meets Lorenza, a noble lady who is sailing from Italy to Martinique. She is frail and emaciated, as she is staying out of the sun not to spoil the whiteness of her skin. Her eyes don't hurt because she uses eye drops made from belladonna herb, that also dilate her pupils - something Lorenza thinks people find beautiful.

The amount of screen-time this character has and her plotline in this book are significantly influenced by your choices. She can have several possible endings: you can abandon her to her destiny (and in that case her presence in the story will be minimal), you can let her join the pirate crew, keep her as a friend, decide to match-make her (or not) with one of your pirate friends, or you can have her as your Love Interest and marry her at the very end of the story.

Clive Wellington

I particularly think he's annoying

Clive is a gentleman of propriety and principles, at one moment ready to shout his absolute love and admiration, at another shy and reserved. Good swimmer and attentive lover, also, reveals himself as a bit of a perfectionist, with a need to have everything noted and marked in the calendar.

They can be allies or in a relationship depending on the player's choices. ❗ If you want to romance him, Adelaide has to stay single until Season 2, Episode 10, otherwise, you won't get the romantic option! ❗

Jorge de Fantasma:

Some people played his route says it's great.

Jorge is a former Spanish nobleman and the captain of "The Penitent Thief." He first appears in Season 3, Episode 7: The Council. As Adelaide, you have the option to begin a romance with Jorge in Season 4, Episode 6: Weekdays and Holidays (if you recruit him as an ally). As a romantic partner, Jorge is a sweet, protective and attentive gentleman, offers to give Adelaide whatever her heart desires, and vows to stay with her forever.

Kai the Whaler:

This is a fun guy! His route is an interesting one!

Kai is always prepared to battle and thinks the way to solve his affairs is through dueling which he shows Adelaide during the Council of Captains. Due to his reckless nature and barbaric methods, he lost several crewmates. Kai the Whaler is a hothead who only respects power.

Manta:

His route is interesting too. You can have his romantic options and a endgame while you have a main LI, I think it doesn't affect in the main one.

Charon (Manta) is the spirit of dark magic and lord of the shadows in Sails in the Fog. He is a dark spirit and can only be pursued on the path of black magic. Manta will come to her aid no matter what the situation is and even offers her a deal to become one of his slaves (Slaugh). She has the chance to reject, which makes him happy or accept his offer. If she accepts his offer he tells her to live her life to the fullest, love as much as possible, and have adventures because eventually colors will become dull and she will lose her emotions and eventually her voice. Upon meeting he comes off as flirty and seductive towards Adelaide and she will have multiple chances to seduce him and vice versa for him since it is only a dream.

Mermaid:

Same as Manta, but with the White Magic path.

Mermaid is a light spirit, the spirit of white magic and keeper of the glade. She can only be pursued on the path of white magic. She was once a human who took a deal in exchange for immortality. She admits to not remembering her previous life or why she took it in the first place. Upon meeting she comes off as calm and seductive. Adelaide will have multiple chances to seduce her and vice versa for mermaid since it is only a dream.

Samedi and Brigitte:

They're casual love interests.

#romance club #romance club game #клуб романтики #answered ask #ask anonymous #ask anon #rc sails in the fog #rc sif

[tallulademetriou]

now that i’ve watched a complete ass playthrough of FF16, some (jumbled) thoughts under the cut, though mostly about the story:

full spoilers ahead as well!!!!!!!!!!!

i didn’t have high hopes for the story since i played through heavensward and that was... an Expansion for sure, and i expected to have the same nitpicks about FF16 as i did with HW. it still surprised me though lol

maehiro cannot write complex women to save his life. period.

but strangely enough this isn’t even maehiro at his best so i wonder what actually got cut during development.

the world-building is immaculate as always and for once i actually want a dlc to explore more of it.

also this game’s cutscenes oozes with fucking money cbu3 is insane. what was your budget yoshi-p!!!!!!!!!!!!!

the way benedikta was easily one of the most interesting eikons in this line-up and yet she was done dirty by being killed off so early in the game.

even jill felt shallow at times and while the romance was pretty cute i will not lie, she just sort of fell flat for me at the end parts. maehiro i am in your walls.

i did love her mini-arc though and i wish there were more moments like that.

there’s a point near the end of the game where the gang encounters barnabas and i kept hoping jill would be playable but no... she was not.

cid is really well done though. like i LOVE him.

joshua/jill/clive could have been my all-time trio but they didn’t have the time to marinate well.

clive grew on me as well, thanks to ben’s performance (partly) but i was not expecting how lovely he is a protag... 

something about him being raised in a lonely castle by an abusive mother then growing up into a shy, traumatized shell of a man who just wants to atone for his sins and protect what he couldn’t protect, but realizing soon that there’s more to his life than sorrow. i love you clivefinalfantasy.

the side characters are also fucking great it’s so unexpected.

i also enjoyed dion and barnabas for what they were worth. everyone expected dion to be a traitor or evil and for barnabas to be a complex and tortured king but it turned out to be the complete opposite.

barnabas you are fucking crazy. i can respect that.

political intrigue as the pretty backdrop to an evil alien overlord/creator is nothing new but it’s just so fucking funny they went that way. the most classic of all FF move.

ultima as an end boss does nothing for me personally but i always love a good punch your god in the face so it actually did end up as a +1 on the scoreboard for me.

the pacing could be jarring at times with some strange choices story-wise. really wish they’d done less awkward sex scenes that didn’t really give us anything and gave us more time to explore the eikons and their dynamic with their respective dominants.

the jill/clive naked moment can stay tho that was precious. 

though now that i think about it, i do wonder if they were going for the shb route but ultimately changed it so it wouldn’t be too similar. the fallen is just Too similar to what we get for the Ancients, with ultima trying to save his planet from the blight this time around, except he was a selfish god at the end trying to preserve legacy and not life.

and yep i fucking cried at the end LMAO. i cried so hard my eyes were fucking swollen the next day it was actually unbelievable?????

clive holding joshua’s dead body while he has flashbacks of joshua holding hands with clive as children, then the moment when his brother bestowed the phoenix’s blessing, to joshua as a baby had me fucking bawling lmao fuck this game actually.

most of my complaints err on the narrative side of the game. the gameplay looks fun and from what i’ve played in the demo i always knew i was gonna love it, but gonna add any remarks here once i’m actually done with that.

it can be as easy as not cycling through multiple eikons but once you sit down a bit with it, it’s complexity shines with how well you can string together combos and maximizing each eikon’s moveset... it’s really fun and as a previous black mage main....... big numbers go boom.

the sidequests can be abysmal design-wise but as someone who has played ff14, it didn’t really faze me so it can be a YMMV thing. 

i need a fucking dlc because we didn’t see Leviathan... my fucking queen WHERE IS SHE

#i'll probably get the game sometime next week since i'm waiting for some performance improvements #tho the demo wasn't too bad frame-drop wise it could still be pretty jarring #esp in the big eikon fights #and the motion blur makes me fucking dizzy like nothing else so until that gets fixed.... #lou text #just so i don't lose this post lol

[mintffxiv]

My thoughts on FFXVI - Full Game Spoilers

Ranking 7.5/10

As I only completed it a couple of hours ago some thoughts might change with time and if there are DLC's or other information after time has passed. My thoughts are also emotionally charged and sporadically disjointed but I will try to keep on point. Speaking of points I'm going to bullet point each thought to try and not ramble as I always do so I can get personal catharsis from writing my feelings out. So this is definitely also a release post because I need to get my feelings out.

Also has Encanto spoilers but I've pointed out where but just to add prior so it can be easily avoided.

The first thing I did after completing the game during the credits was check Google which of course took me to Reddit. This,

was the first post I saw and I've been reading and mulling over it since.

From that post and other comments I did feel some relief that Clive is alive. And for me and thankfully others that Joshua and Dion are alive.

I don't think Clive wrote the book, I think it was Joshua. Even though Tomes gave Clive his quill he also said that Joshua was also quite the historian or something like that. Now I could be misremembering but even so I don't think it's Clive who wrote it.

And speaking on that, I don't like seeing the far off future. I always feel sad when magic is gone because it's so important for this type of fantasy style. I get that it's powerful but the world looses it's spark for me. Like recently I watched Encanto with my friends. Avoid this next part of text if you don't want Encanto spoilers.

Encanto Spoilers start:

Like at the end I was so happy they all kept their magic. I mostly always dislike it when stories lose their magic because that's what made them special. That's what symbolised their strengths in a fancy and literally magical way.

Encanto Spoilers end.

I know it's Squares route to always say yadda yadda humans are magical without magic but they spend their whole damn games with magic as a core standard. I know 16 is different to an extent but it feels like overkill and almost making it too Earth-like. Like I myself am not a stable person so I need these stories to boost me up, so coming back down this way doesn't feel complete or good for me. I think it would have been better if maybe dominants wouldn't be possible anymore or just that simply the blight would stop from the aether being sucked from the land and that everyone would have the chance to use magic. Like magic wasn't the problem it was the abuse of magic so getting rid of it feels too drastic and even too easy. Like Ultima made humanity here, so they are magical beings. The flaw if any is that not all humans can use magic so ideally breaking the original crystal would restore balance to the planet. I'm sure the curse would still be present in a way of overuse but that's what happens to anything with overuse. If you exercise too much you're at risk of damaging your body from pushing too hard etc and as it's balanced now the blight would stop spreading and eventually the land would recover especially with the new survival techniques born from The Hideaway.

I get symbolism is present in all Final Fantasy games, but when it comes at a cost of clear closure it's a problem. I was finally feeling relieved that this game had clear intentions. Such as yes the people have sex lol. Yes they swear. Yes they bleed. But suddenly at the end we aren't given that? 15 really did a number on me and not just because of the ending it was a lot of issues I had so I was tentative with this but as I trust the XIV team and as I was going through the story I was starting to believe in a clear triumphant victory. But no it's just vague to be... I dunno why. Like after all the uncertainty in the game having a clear happy ending would have been so so good and appreciated. I don't feel the catharsis I needed and I expected. Even with the hope and logical thoughts that Clive and co are alive I don't feel closure and it really hurts so bad. And yes I do get heavily invested but that's just my way for many personal reasons but even so I've seen a lot of others feel the same way so that is something at least.

At least they didn't kill Torgal. However I wish he had more of a stronger role. He was our soul mate. I understand how he couldn't get on Bahamut's back but I dunno maybe he could have howled and restored Clive's health during a part of the fight, like how our friends voices cheered us on. And their first meeting was lackluster. Especially after we see how tireless Torgal was collecting Clive's things. There are a lot of jarring disconnects at times which sucks considering a lot of things are said to connect characters and events. A few lines here or there would go a long way.

Continuing on that thought, I was really expecting and then hoping for past scenes and gameplay of the brothers childhood but they had to just jam the knife in at the end. Like it just hurts, really hurts and I hate that. I was also expecting and hoping for politics but that all ends at Phoenix Gate. Like the disappointment when we get to the city of Sanbreque and the brothel only to not explore it but then move fast on rails away from it and never to step once in its city properly. Like that grand palace hello!? I was expecting some sort of masquerade stuff infiltration and seeing our mother there only she doesn't know it's us. But nope they just go off to Twinside but then we can't even explore there and then it gets flown up into the sky like? We're only stuck in the hideaway that we can't edit which would have been really cool and when we're not we're stuck in very similar landscapes outside which are pretty but it really makes the world feel small. Especially that the blight has already limited our exploration having the cities we have being taken away from us really sucks. And Barnabas! I was hoping he'd invite us for a grand dinner and during it we'd get drugged and hallucinate because he's aiding Ultima to easily take possession and then it'd switch to Joshua and we'd play as him going with Jill and Gav to infiltrate the castle and rescue Clive. Going further into my fantasy lol, imagine after recovery which would maybe take some time with Joshua reminding Clive of who he is with flashback game scenes, and maybe even after Clive comes back they end up recruiting Barnabas but I know that's definitely a stretch haha! The point is I felt we weren't given the full tour of the world and I know all Final Fantasy games are lineal but this was very on rails only stopping for side quests and with me personally running around to listen to updated voice commentary on what NPC's had to say which was cool but also distracting and long but I didn't mind especially at the time because I was enjoying figuring out the world.

Too many side characters. I really did like the lore account and information for each NPC big or small but at some point some characters really should have been one instead of two. Example Gaute and the woman next to him (I've forgotten her name and cba to look) who gives us appreciation points, should have been one person. It would also give more chances to have a stronger character we could get to know more and bond with.

Along with that was the bond and war table really necessary? I appreciated it at the time and I do still appreciate the effort but this energy could have been used for making the ending not unnecessarily vague or having all the characters voice lined and not being randomly non voiced. Like I thought my game had a bug before I realised it was doing that style for those parts but it was really confusing and not expected!

On reflection I don't think Metaia disappeared or died, I think it went to tell the moon the wish to be granted and will be back again. But if not I think it definitely went to tell the moon which also symbolises a power higher than what Ultima wanted us to believe. I think it also shows when Clive senses and partially sees his dad at his grave showing bonds and life beyond death which is extremely comforting and valid.

It would be great to learn on Leviathan properly. I know it was destroyed but perhaps there still in a defendant. Some have said it could be the baby in Edda or even Gav who is unaware. I think it's probably a whole other character we might meet in DLC however it'll be something to see how to manage that post world without magic or they do an alternative timeline or even go back in the past though that would also be sad because we know they are 'lost'.

I feel they killed off big characters too quickly which made the passing off. I knew Cid would die from his constant coughing blood and also because he's 'old'. Most characters die if they're old in these games or they are full side NPC's that half their character is being the old person. Also because he's too powerful of a character and they need Clive to take the reigns but it would have been really cool if Cid was still alive and we helped him recover, it would have been cool to have quests for him. Benedikta too, I feel like we didn't get enough of her. She drove a lot of the story well and then was cut out. I feel like they were inspired clearly by GoT but as it went on went back to final fantasy style which had a clash of styles hence the vague ending which most likely would have not been so stark if the full game was that style.

Oh and Jill. Along again with the wish that characters had more character Jill is one. I like Jill she is just above the line of being a basic boring pretty love interest. With Ice unfeeling it would have been great to have Clive melt her icy heart and in doing so she would cool his fiery anger. And I feel Clive didn't get angry enough. Like her whole story part was once again on rails, I feel like we got more emotion and character from Dory's side story because we got to read and somewhat experience this horror. We never one on one talk to Jill about our experiences and she hers to us. And on that I really thought we'd start the game from Clive being imprisoned and branded. We really missed out on a lot of lore building that really would have elevated the driving force of characters.

The bar was stupid and a waste of time. This would have been a great moment to be able to de-stress with the cast and get to know them more. Ben Starr Clive's voice said Clive was funny at least to him so I was expecting more funny and light hearted scenes but it's note like moments and it's not super funny or even cheeky just aha yeah. I wish we got the chance to learn about Clive. The whole game is about revenge to getting the choice to live and throughout that Clive is only that. What does he like to eat or not eat like Joshua and his carrots, does he like music, what does he want to do in life aside from this grand dream. We never get full bonding and comfort moments with the brothers, only a small part that ends in the space of a brief punch.

Our mother's death was disappointing. I think because the reunion was so quick and sudden. I was thinking she had more play in the story and also her bloodline thing makes no sense it's our dads bloodline not hers unless there's some unspoken fucked up GoTs shit going on lol. I was hoping when getting the eikons she'd realise that not only was we strong but far stronger than anyone and try to manipulate us to get a piece of our glory only to fall from grace from rejection just like she had rejected us all these years. Death of a character doesn't always have to be actual death but social death would be amazing. The disgraced Ana groveling to her son's would have been so so damn delicious. But naaa she just cuts her throat. As I said I was expecting and now wished for more political gameplay. Even giving us choices of how to approach a crystal would have been cool planning it, giving Vivian's map a really cool play. And having our Uncle help us with politics.

Like with Torgal I wish we got more chances of love with him and Ambrosia. They stayed loyal all this time and Clive doesn't even get the option to pet her.

I wish we got more clothes and not just us but the cast. We go to the desert in our leather clothes. The only person who ages is us and that's getting slightly more hairy lol like Jill looks the same. I thought the side quest for fabric would get her a new dress but nope.

I'm getting a bit fatigued now but I'll try to finish my thoughts. I gave this a 7.5/10 because of the ending. -2 for Clive and Joshua and 1.5 for Dion because although I want him alive I can understand if he did in fact die though the hope of him seeing with his flower and reuniting with Terrence and maybe even adopting the girl would be really comforting.

I think the only way I could fully be at peace is if DLC not only gave closure and a true happy ending but more loose ends tied up and a look to a fresh bright world not some future book with random people. After all the world isn't as important without the people in it and even more the people we know make it what it is. That's even what Clive said to Ultima that his bonds made him stronger, that because of love for others than himself he was able to beat him.

It's a shame, I was seriously contemplating getting platinum but now I don't want to even look at the screenshots I took and I want to delete them which I might later.

But yeah I do hope for clarity. Clive and Joshua and Dion deserve it. They deserve the world they fought for.

As for now I'm trying to recover, even if it was the ending I wanted and expected finishing a game is always bittersweet. I've been crying and felt shit so writing this helped a little to get it at least off my chest.

🗒️Notes: As usual there might be spelling and grammar mistakes. I might add more thoughts later. These are my thoughts and opinions which rely heavily on my strong emotions. I get extremely attached to games and things for personal reasons so my thoughts might come as even more personal because I take it too heart which is just my way I try to get past that but it's hard so I don't want to force myself. Anyway I'm nodding off now as I took meds for a headache lol so yeah. At least I don't have to worry about spoilers which was stressing me not stop whilst playing which made me anxious to complete it.

Also I wanted to make this short but as always it's long but yeah. I wonder if anyone read all this lol either way I got it out so I don't have to keep talking back and forth to myself as hard as I was. But if you did and even more so agree that means a lot because I'm a fragile person and I know I'm weird or I just don't manage things well so when I see people agree or I see others have my similar thoughts it helps. Anyway sleep now, I've been yapping for 2-3 hours.

New additions

I do like Clive and Jill together and how they were mostly portrayed. Same as most of the relationships but I just wanted more. I know they are busy with the plan and also have to be to defeat Ultima in time but they even said at the end Ultima would wait lol so totally could have time before then or before Clive was ready. I feel it was done well for a FF game and in general Japanese RPG games but the bar isn't very high so can't really compare. Anyway more talking moments would have been top.

#my thoughts #long text post #long post #ffxvi spoilers #ffxvi #spoilers #encanto spoilers #Encanto

[shiny-jr]

Been playing the recent Pokemon game (i got violet because Ceruledge grabbed me by the throat), how is ur experience with the new game? Whaddya think of it??

- big hat anon, actively trying to avoid Nemona

Oh god, here we go. Very long reply of my personal thoughts. Remember, these are just my personal opinions and I tend to be a heavy critic. Also, spoilers ahead if you haven't finished the game.

Where do I even begin? First off, this gen's starters were kinda trash. Not as bad as last gen, this gen was actually cute in the beginning but the designs for their last stage evolutions are kinda horrid. I picked the duck, purely so I could name him Quatrina and teach him Hurricane. I originally wanted to go with Sprigatito, but then he stood up on two legs and I was out.

Secondly, my team changed a lot but three remained on there the entire time. Quatrina, a Charcadet I named Charla, and a Fidough I named Conchas. Charla and Conchas? Carried.

Thirdly, I did the order of the story routes kinda weird.

First I did the Team Star route just because I wanted to see the "villains." And let me say, I'm glad they're actually kinda good. Like, maybe they're not as great as Team Skull, but they aren't horrible like Team Yell. The leaders of Team Star are actually interesting, and I wish we saw more of them. In my opinion, I thought they were actually more difficult than the gym leaders. Anyways, they're fun. Penny is a decent character too. I predicted she was the main boss literally before I even raided the first base. Also Clive? He's such a caring headmaster? Love that?? And how he went out of his way to try and understand the troubled students.

Second I did the Victory Road route. I wanted to do that last but it got to the point where became overpowered while playing the Star route and I had no gym badges yet, so new high level pokemon I had would not listen. Which got annoying because my main three: Quatrina, Charla, and Conchas were all higher leveled but they still listened. Anyways, I wanted to like Nemona, and I tried, I really did, but she got on my nerves so bad. She is one of the worst rivals by far. All she cared about was battles. Battles this battles that. That's literally all she ever talks about, its her whole personality, and it got so annoying. Especially because after the Star route, since I was so overleveled and the gyms don't change their levels no matter where you are, I breezed through all eight gyms within a few hours. The Elite Four was too easy, and so was the Champion, and so was Nemona. Actually, the only one that gave me trouble was Mr. Hassel, the fourth Elite Four. He was stronger than the Champion and Nemona. But I still breezed through that too. Anyways, not a fan of Nemona.

And last, I did the titan route. Arven? He is the GOAT. I love him so much, and he had such an interesting story. At first I didn't like him, I kinda thought he was a jerk, but then you learn his backstory and I fell hard. A guy with fluffy hair, Mommy/Daddy issues, cooks for you, and will fight off titans to heal his childhood pet? Sign me the fuck up. He is borderline himbo and I am so here for it. He is my favorite rival in this game by far, and probably one of my favorites of the whole Pokemon series. 10/10. Anyways, the titans were easy too. I usually one shot them most of the time, lol.

Finally, the end story, which I completed literally less than an hour ago. My theory is the crater was made by the same blast thousands of years ago mentioned in X and Y. If you know, you know. Kalos DLC, maybe??? Please?? Okay, so I have Violet meaning I got Professor Turo. When he only showed up during the last route with Arven, I knew it was super suspicious. Like he was absent almost the entire game, and now he wants us to travel to the crater? Red flag. Literally once I entered the cater and heard that beautiful but sorta eerie music, I thought to myself, "watch him be the bad guy." And guess what? I was right, he ended up being the bad guy. Although the whole AI thing and him actually being dead was not what I expected, but it was super interesting when his AI decided to destroy the time machine by going to the future that Turo obsessed over. Still, Turo really was a shit dad for spending his days on a time machine he knew could cause more harm than good and kinda just pushing his son off to the side. Arven deserved so much better. Also, Penny and Arven had a lot of good banter during this but I feel like they tried to make Nemona the peace between the two but she was just more annoying, at least to me. The way I got mad when I would say no to something and she would insist, pretty much giving you no actual choice.

That's all I can think of right now.

#big hat anon #shiny speaks #pokemon

[heartfragment]

HI! so i’m asking this totally out of sincerity and curiosity…but is clive written to be neurodivergent/autistic? bc i’m seeing a lot of things that point to it and it is all very nice to see especially since autism is rarely ever represented in media much less games :)) ahhhh i love him so much he’s so cute

He is, yes!

(Very slight Book Two spoilers) - he is confirmed as autistic during Lana's route :)

#author note

[eleiyaumei]

SPOILERS for Heart Fragment Book 1&2

Has anyone done that X-Men First Class meme yet?

Me waiting for the rest of Heart Fragment:

Some theorizing below...

I don’t know if both Inigo and Shadow-Big-Brother are the same person, just different versions/personalities/..., but they’re at least both claiming to be Clive’s real brother Inigo. It seems to be a situation similar to Shay who seems to have assumed Xani’s mother’s looks and voice.

My theory is that we are in a simulation  (as part of experiments) in the lab Xani’s mother and Inigo worked for, every person we meet in the simulation (except Kay and Jasper) Xani has known in real life and Xani either imagines them in their simulation or they are all in a simulation together, with Xani being most in control of it.

It was implied in Lana’s route that Xani’s mother slowly lost her memories/’sanity’ so I think Shay is her, just can’t remember anything bc of all the experiments. Maybe Inigo also doesn’t remember (or want to be) his true/original self but the shadow version of that still exists and appears from time to time. Both Shay and Inigo are observing and influencing Xani’s simulation but I’m not sure if they have the (technical) control in the real world, they seem to be too lost for that. I think Syringe-Lana in her one bad ending isn’t Lana, Xani’s brain just imagined it to be her. Rather, she is a nurse (or whatever) in the real world, working in the lab.

See, I’m not a fan of the real world theory that “we all live in a simulation” so for my mind to go there while theorizing seems to come from the hints the game is giving, not my brain just imagining what it wants to see. But I could be totally wrong still ^^’

Anyway, I’m not really excited for Jasper’s (too insane) and Natalia’s (too Kuudere) routes in Book 3, at least not for the purpose of befriending/romancing them, I mostly just want to see Inigo and get more clues :3

Keep up the good work and take care, @heartfragment​ !

#heart fragment #otome #visual novel #game theory #heart fragment kay #heart fragment jasper #heart fragment inigo #otome meme #meme #spoilers #spoilers for heart fragment #heart fragment spoilers

[dashythroughthesnow]

I KNOW I'M ON KAY'S ROUTE BUT EVERYTIME THEY MENTION CLIVE I JUST KSDFLGHFH 😭

(spoilers below the cut??)

i'm still in denial that he disappeared ASDFGHJKL;'

#dash plays hf

[pastelpinkmomoi]

slight spoilers for clive's route

twitter au part two >:D

#heart fragment #heart fragment jasper #heart fragment clive #heart fragment meme #heart fragment spoilers

[pinerportfolio]

Fire emblem echoes 2022

Fire emblem echoes 2022 how to#

Your first recruitment on Celica's path is in Act I, and happens right away. While Alm's Deliverance grows by the day, Celica's Pilgrimage grows as well! Here are the characters you will meet on Celica's journey and how you can bring them into the fold! Genny How to Recruit Characters for Celia's Army in Shadows of Valentia He may not be the most powerful unit in the world, but it's nice to know that he will finally join you after Rudolf is defeated. It won't be until Act IV that Mycen finally rejoins Alm's ranks. To recruit him, simply have Tatiana alive, and he will be recruitable once you meet again. He has been an enemy to the Hero King, Marth, and stands in your way in Shadows of Valentia until Tatiana is at your side. ZekeĪlthough many won't know this, Zeke is also known as Camus and Sirius depending on the game he is in. She will join your party once you save her from Nuibaba, and is essential to recruiting the next character. While her stats may be abysmal, and her growths questionable, Tatiana is oddly enough one of the strongest Saints in your potential roster. Tatiana is a Saint class character who is met in Act IV. Speak to her within the floodgates to do so. She can be recruited after dispelling the mind control cast upon her by Tattarah in Act III. She is a glass cannon mage, and so training her can be worth your while - provided you can protect her. Deltheaĭelthea is the youngest member of Alm's party, and is the younger sister of Luthier. Once free, she will speak to Clive (or Alm if Clive is dead), after which you can decide if you would like her to join or not. To recruit her, you will need to ensure her survival during the mission in which she is set to be executed. After she's been saved, you will be able to enter the castle and open her cell. Mathilda - the Female Zofian Knight - is found in Alm's route near the end of Act III. After he makes his request you will get the chance to recruit him. Speak to Luthier, and he will request your aid in saving his sister. In Act III of Alm's route you will come across a mage by the name of Luthier in a place called Forest Village. Once Clive has joined you, talk to Forsyth in the Shrine Room, and Python at the entrance to the hideout.īoth can be easy to miss if you aren't the type to talk to everyone, and neither are characters you'll want to miss out on - especially if you didn't change Tobin into an Archer. Forsyth and Pythonįorsyth and Python are both members of the Deliverance and can be found in the Deliverance Hideout when you meet Clive in Act I. Once you save her from the bandits, speak to her before leaving the Shrine Room to add her to your party. She is the one who gives him Mila's Turnwheel, and is the first character other than the villagers whose recruitment can be skipped. Silque is met very early on in Act I of Alm's journey. If you forget to recruit them before leaving, make sure to get them before reaching the end of the Act - otherwise you won't be able to recruit them afterward. You can do this by talking to them before leaving Ram Village. While Gray and Tobin will join automatically, Faye and Kliff must be recruited manually. The characters are listed in order of their recruitability: The Villager QuartetĪlm's childhood friends are all available for recruitment in Act I.

Fire emblem echoes 2022 how to#

In this guide we'll take a look at how to get the party all together in order to unite the continent of Valentia once more! Note that this guide will contain spoilers, and will not discuss characters who join you without option, so read on at your own discretion! How to Recruit Character's for Alm's Army in Shadows of ValentiaĪ total of 16 characters can join Alm's army throughout the acts in Shadows of Valentia.

#Fire emblem echoes 2022

[eye-cri]

Season 10 is so weird bc from Season 6 to then everything is supposed to be in chronological order and it follows that rule for Ted's route but then you have a split for Lars and Clive's routes, if you do Lars's route events from Clive's route don't happen and vice versa for Clive's route.

*Spoilers below*

But yeah otherwise they still keep up with the split events in season 11. If they didn't, Shu wouldn't be introduced as a new character in all 3 routes. It's a pretty weird change.

I think Clive's route is the canon chronological step in season 11, bc im pretty sure the nidhogg calms down only in his route, and that's canon in season 11.

#wizardess heart #shall we date