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#like I feel like these ideas were kinda cool for one game. An expanded thought experiment

gcldfanged · 1 month

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Meet the Writer

ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴍᴀᴅᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴘɪᴄᴋ ᴜᴘ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴜʀʀᴇɴᴛ ᴍᴜꜱᴇ(ꜱ) ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇ?

(CANON MUSES) -

Genesis: I actually HATED Genesis initially in the og CC game. I thought he was a lame addition and just like… idk, they wanted Gackt in the game so they made his presence plot relevant? OOOUGH, I was so mad… But then I saw how the rpc and fandom treats him, which is honestly even WORSE SOMEHOW??? So I decided to try writing him seriously and what do you know, I actually kinda like it.

Verdot: I literally have to make the content I wanna see in this rpc, such is my burden. my curse...

(OCs) - I wanted to write about the themes I have on my pinned and honestly, there were so many Tseng rpers who I am friends and mutuals with that knock it out of the fucking ballpark- I just didn't feel like I'd have ANYTHING new or good to contribute to the exploration of his character? So I made an OC :P And he's really changed so much! I remember when I was still making my own art for him and he wasn't QUITE like there the way I wanted him to be, but I didn't have anything better to employ as a faceclaim or reference to draw from. And then Cas was like "btw here's a manga about your HYPERFIXATION" and Kokonoi's general appearance and vibe was a great starting point to go off of instead.

Anyway, There's always things I had planned for Jae in the works or on the backburner, but he has really evolved over the span of years I've been writing him, so I really appreciate every person who took the time to check him out and build something with him.

ɪꜱ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ᴀɴʏᴛʜɪɴɢ ʏᴏᴜ ᴅᴏɴ'ᴛ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴡʀɪᴛᴇ?

You know, I have been becoming more lenient with allowing myself to write certain things. I always end up being afraid of how people will react to certain themes I explore because... let's be real, a lot of people are pretty intolerant to opinions that are different than theirs. So long as whatever I and/or my partner explore is handled with the care and respect it deserves, I don't really see an issue with much anymore. Hell, I was terrified to post that one drabble fleshing out Jae meeting Veld for the first time because I was afraid people would see Jae's reaction to killing someone as somehow 'excusing abuse' because he wasn't dancing on the guy's corpse and actually showed remorse for what he did. It's fears of what I write about being misconstrued like that that really makes me hesitant to even talk about certain ideas with partners. But I'm getting over that, little by little and step by step.

ɪꜱ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ ᴀɴʏᴛʜɪɴɢ ʏᴏᴜ ʀᴇᴀʟʟʏ ᴇɴᴊᴏʏ ᴡʀɪᴛɪɴɢ?

I actually love writing (as you can tell) introspective pieces. Something where you're really getting inside the character's head for a moment to see past all of their walls and facades, or sometimes you're still seeing what they tell THEMSELVES is the real undiluted truth, but isn't. I just love that kinda stream of consciousness really dig deep into the VOICE of a character exploration. Makes me feel lots of emotions.

ʜᴏᴡ ᴅᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ᴄᴏᴍᴇ ᴜᴘ ᴡɪᴛʜ ʜᴇᴀᴅᴄᴀɴᴏɴꜱ?

Usually I'll be doing something else like watching a piece of media or listening to a podcast and start to think "Ooh, my muse would love this" or "this makes me think of xyz muse wow", and it just kind of expands organically from there.

ᴅᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡʀɪᴛᴇ ɪɴ ꜱɪʟᴇɴᴄᴇ ᴏʀ ᴅᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ᴘʟᴀʏ ᴍᴜꜱɪᴄ?

Music helps get me inspired initially, especially since I make spotify playlists for all my muses (and ships :P), so generally I'm cool with music, but usually I zone in too much on my own writing to pay attention. It's like my sense of hearing turns off.

ᴅᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ᴘʟᴀɴ ʏᴏᴜʀ ʀᴇᴘʟɪᴇꜱ ᴏʀ ᴡɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇᴍ?

Both- There's always a general sort of... idea or outcome that me and my partner would LIKE to shoot for? And sometimes we just don't get there, because it really depends on what the characters do/say and how it's taken by the other muse.

For example, I was roleplaying a thread with @steeleidolon's Kunsel where he and Jae are trying to broker a deal and Kunsel ends up saying something to the effect of "your people" and he means the Turks. Jae, on the other hand, hears 'your people' and assumes Kunsel was bringing up his race and the perception of fellow people from Wutai or Hanuel being unfairly insular. So, it kinda went to shit, LOL.

It's little things like that that can color your muse's reaction to sometimes very different degrees than what you plan for!

ᴅᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ᴇɴᴊᴏʏ ꜱʜɪᴘᴘɪɴɢ?

I like complicated dynamics and no, I will never shut up about them. Ships for me don't even have to strictly be romantic or sexual in nature, so like- I have some interactions I'm still feeling out with @saishuu-heiki that are platonic but leaning in a distinctly enemy/frenemy/challenges other person kind of vibe? And I think it's great! They don't HAVE to be like "we're friends, we're lovers, or we hate each other'- Like, limiting all your interactions to one of those three options gets really boring for me...

ᴡʜᴀᴛ'ꜱ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴀʟɪᴀꜱ/ɴᴀᴍᴇ?

King_Kkeungi is my mangaka pseudonym for the Silent Manga Audition that I tried submitting to last year. People have called me just "King" (if they didn't know how to pronounce Korean) or "Kkeungi" before, so I tend to go by these handles now.

ᴀɢᴇ?

30s, I'm like Dagon: ancient and evil, spoken about in hushed whispers that the zealots who follow my dark lore worship-

ʙɪʀᴛʜᴅᴀʏ?

May 10th

ꜰᴀᴠᴏʀɪᴛᴇ ᴄᴏʟᴏʀ(ꜱ)?

Blue-greens like teal and turquoise, soft pastel mint, and pinky-purples

ꜰᴀᴠᴏʀɪᴛᴇ ꜱᴏɴɢ(ꜱ)?

Currently? PRIMADONNA by Kedarui! It's a sequel to their other song, Femme Fatale and has amazing lore and characters. It's just got fascinating kinda themes and imagery when you watch them back to back.

ʟᴀꜱᴛ ᴍᴏᴠɪᴇ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡᴀᴛᴄʜᴇᴅ?

The 2nd DUNE movie, holy crap, I was blown away!

ʟᴀꜱᴛ ꜱʜᴏᴡ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡᴀᴛᴄʜᴇᴅ?

Hell's Paradise, which I am still TRYING to finish.

ʟᴀꜱᴛ ꜱᴏɴɢ ʏᴏᴜ ʟɪꜱᴛᴇɴᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ?

Philip by millenium parade, my new go-to Jae song

ꜰᴀᴠᴏʀɪᴛᴇ ꜰᴏᴏᴅ?

Thai or Vietnamese food *drools*

ꜰᴀᴠᴏʀɪᴛᴇ ꜱᴇᴀꜱᴏɴ?

Summer... I just love the heat and the sun and the iconic imagery/sounds/themes like eating watermelon and wearing floppy plastic sandals, melting ice cream, hearing the chime of our furin while sitting outside on the porch of the house.

ᴅᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ᴀ ᴛᴜᴍʙʟʀ ʙᴇꜱᴛ ꜰʀɪᴇɴᴅ?

I talk to regularly (like near every day): @ceaselxss, @annjiru, @phoenixshards, @sadistpet, @nightiingaled. Like talking with a lot: @speedchasing, @ofdeference, @hisnewera, @cwarscars, @contemptim, @steeleidolon, @altrxisme, @hxbiris & @hxvemxnd

The people who have known me the LONGEST are mostly discord only rpers now, but Tricky, HD, Kit, and Vixen I consider to be extremely close to me since we've been friends for... like over or around 6+ years and are still ongoing buddies who have met face to face before.

Then there's my ex-fiancee, but he doesn't do tumblr rp anymore.

This list also doesn't even cover ppl I write with/ooc interacted with over a long period of time like @ivory-paragon, @poeticphoenix, @reapersxfolly, @endweapon, @chthonicsurge, or @dcviltriggcr, so- I like reaching out to people and developing bonds! We don't even have to be on discord capslocking at each other, it's really cool when you can come back to an RPC and still have that connection without any awkward small talk?

#◈ ooc #◈ dash games #◈ MUNDAY

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yandere-daze · 2 years

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Hey again! I was the one who sent that long ask about making a one shot for the self aware!enstars au—

Firstly, don’t worry I understand it takes time to write something! I’d rather prefer quantity over quality and to be frank, not a lot of people consider the fact that writing fanfics can be kinda hard lol…so don’t worry about it, take your time!

Aside from that, while reading your response, and hearing your own thoughts on the entire yandere genre, I had some of my own and to expand on my idea specifically: like you said, realistically if it were to happen, no one would rush to assume “OMG these little pixels are obsessed over me!!!” I think everyone would just assume it’s some crazy cool easter egg and start bragging about it to their friends haha

But…imagine actually thinking that. For real—I had an idea around it, mostly around the reader, but imagine MC knowing it’s bad. Really, terribly, bad.

It’d play out like, “crap…am I being stalked?” You turn around and see a figure just behind you, only to quickly vanish as soon as you turned. “No, I’m seeing things. It’s the stress. It’s getting to me. I’m making myself delusional. I’m crazy.” You keep repeating this to yourself 5x a day. But there’s this feeling in your gut, brewing inside of you, telling you it’s not you.

This IS your reality, you’re being pursed. It’s not safe. It’s dangerous. But its incredibly hard to believe that, mainly because you’re in an entirely different world. I mean, where the hell are you right now? Are you sure this is your body?

It’d be hard to have one rational thought without being bombarded with even more paranoia. And once the cogs start turning, that logical part of you, it’s a complete contradiction! You’d only berate yourself, say it was unintentional. That person you THINK you saw, you remember them being nice to you earlier. They were helping you around school and making sure you were alright. You can’t just accuse them of stalking you…yet the thought of it makes you itchy. It makes your palms sweaty and keeps you up at night.

So what do you believe? What do you do? How do you cope?

Welcome back and thank you for your understanding! There was a time back when I started out with my blog and I tried to do at least 1 request every day, many of them being scenarios, that I very much regret now. I felt that putting so much emphasis on doing something every day, even if I wasn't feeling like doing it, just for the sake of pushing out content was very much unhealthy both for myself and my creativity. So at the moment I try to only write when I actually want to because not only does it prevent me from burning out too much, but I feel like you can also see if the author had fun writing something and coming up with cool ideas or if they forced themselves to just write something

Right now, I'm probably more active than any other time before and that's because I'm just so happy about being able to talk about an au I really enjoy and to also talk to you guys and listen to your own ideas! It's the type of interaction I feel like I have been missing for some time now so it always makes me feel excited when I see a new ask in my inbox😊

gn reader

tw yandere, obsession, stalking

To move back to your ask, yes you're absolutely right! You wouldn't think that these game characters are in love with you so there would definitely be a good amount of denial on your end. Surely, this can't actually be real? Maybe you just fell asleep in a train and that's how you now found yourself in a completely foreign environment?

But deep down, you would feel that something is wrong, that there's something you're missing and you just can't help but notice that some of the surroundings suspiciously look similar to the ones you saw as backgrounds ingame.

And then there's the pairs of eyes you can sense looking at you no matter where you go. Several times you have tried to carefully glance over your shoulder, only to find no one there. Sometimes, when you walk home late at night, you could swear you could hear a separate pair of footsteps closely behind you, making you pick up your pace before you're outright sprinting home, immediately slamming the door closed once you're safely inside your house. You pull down the blinds and draw the curtains closed because there's a part of your mind that tells you that they still followed you to your doorstep, that you've been watched in your sleep many times before by them and that they won't stop no matter what.

It's terrifying because you instinctively know that there is someone stalking you, sometimes even catching glimpses of their hair when they went to hide behind a corner a little to late. It drives your crazy because you know that they look familiar, like someone you have met before. And yet, the logical part of your mind tells you that it couldn't possibly be true. How likely is it that a video game character is obsessed with you and stalks you? Are you really sure about this or are you just imagining things?

Maybe the only way to know for sure is to set up secret security cameras outside your house to catch your supposed stalker in the act. But you hesitate. Do you really want to know? Do you want the the undeniable proof that you're in danger because of someone you thought you could trust?

#anon ask #self aware au #ensemble stars self aware au #yandere self aware au #yandere self aware ensemble stars au #enstars x reader #ensemble stars x reader #yandere ensemble stars #yandere enstars #yandere ensemble stars x reader #gn reader #enstars #ensemble stars #yandere #cw yandere #cw stalking #cw obsession #yandere x reader

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hellonoblesky · 1 year

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Another hard question.

Most out of touch and popular head Canon/theory?

(don't fell obligated to answer if you find it too controversial, no issues taken)

HAHA. Like 80% of the popular ones. As a vet of the game (and someone who, at the peak of their fixation, had 90% of the entire lore memorized (that was pre-Sumeru)), a LOT of fan theories/headcanons get popular on the rule of cool alone instead of actual probability

But here's a list of the ones off the top of my head that get on my nerves:

Pierro being related to Kaeya -> Annoys me to a rabid degree, doesn't line up with their timelines, doesn't make sense, overhyped

Dainsleif having raised Kaeya as a child -> Fun concept! Doesn't make sense with my understanding of either of their timelines, Dainsleif would have interacted on-screen with Kaeya earlier if this was the case (considering in 2/3 of the Dainquests we've BEEN IN MONDSTADT FOR PART OF IT)

Diluc/the Ragnvinders are descendants of Vanessa -> the og Ragnvinder could never pull her, sorry but he was kinda a loser, he was obsessed with a different Muraten (who DIED and that's what radicalized him), if he WAS directly descended from AN EXTREMELY PROMINENT HISTORICAL FIGURE LIKE VANESSA IT WOULD BE POINT BLANK MENTIONED, Diluc's bright red hair is a feature his family line has had since the Decaabrian era

Kaeya only pretends to like alcohol as an excuse to see Diluc in the tavern -> 0 reading comprehension here, Kaeya's an alcoholic because he has deep-rooted issues that he struggles to deal with the thoughts of, he's not faking it just to see Diluc, if that was the case Wine wouldn't be his hobby, his interest, one of the first thing he mentions in the serenetea pot, etc.

Kaeya choosing Mondstadt is the objectively "Good" choice and him choosing Khaenri'ah will make him inherently "Evil" -> Stupid

Fuckboy Kaeya -> Most awful mischaracterization of him ever get it AWAY I hate it

Kaeya hiding behind Diluc as a kid and being very jumpy/shy (in the OwOUwU sad boy way, not in the Kaeya Allows Diluc To Take The Lead And Keeps His Distance A Lot Because He Doesn't Want To Make A Mistake way) -> Eugh. Rubs me the wrong way, mischaracterizes him, feels like he's being babied, I hate it

Everyone and their mothers calling Venti's backstory tragic bc he lost his bestie literally 2,600 years ago -> Someone who wasn't trained in battle and didn't have protections in a rebellion against a god?? DIED?? WHO could have seen that one coming. Like sorry you lost your buddy pal Venti but also. IT WAS TWENTY-SIX CENTURIES AGO

Khaenri'ah being a war-bent nation -> Hey guys maybe a nation literally built by people who were persecuted by GODS is going to try and make some defenses against THE GODS. Was it a bad idea for them to make things like Ruin Golems? MAYBE!! Could they also have served more uses than just battle?? YEAH!!!! IT WAS A FUCKIGN UNDERGROUND NATION GUYS MAYBE THE MISSILES AND BULLETS WERE USED FOR??? FUCKING MINES. EXPANDING THE CAVE SYSTEM. I DUNNO GUYS LETS THINK REALLLY HARD FOR A SECOND. "Oh but the fields are tilled by blood" Yeah. Construction work is deadly. Especially who knows how deep underground

Khaenri'ah and the Abyss are the same place -> No

Kaeya's the one who should apologize first -> Literally no

#SORRY. I ACTUALLY HATE THE FANDOM LOL #It's why I don't really tag most of my gensht posts #Bc I just. Get so irrationally mad #turtledove answers #also these are jsut the ones off the top of my head and mainly centered around Kaeya #I get pissed about other character's hcs I just am not thinking of them atm #ALSO HONESTLY. No hate to anyone who likes these!!! I understand that people have different interpretations of the game and characters!!#And not everyone will share my exact interpretation of the characters or even agree with mine!!!!!#HOWEVER!!!!!!!#One time back when the first part of Inazuma was released I made a casual post about Orobaxi and Durin paralels #(ofc this was before we really knew about Enkanomiya at all so everyone assumed that Orobaxi was a Khaenri'ahn dragon)#Someone tried to?? Inform me on why Durin was killed saying that they said so bc they were reading my tags #When. In the tags I mentioned him once or twice and if I remember correctly it was (at least to me) clear in the post that I understood #Durin's circumstance and lore????#Insane pet peeve with the fandom tbh but hey this is the no reading comprehension website I can't rlly get mmad

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jaythelay · 1 year

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Just a thought, Imagine a Majora’s Mask spiritual sequel where Link loses his human form, again, but this time he can transform into multiple races from the Zelda universe, in a BotW worldspace.

Start off as a meager scrub, through bad luck you lose your form to the big bad, who isn’t ganon again, explore the world via flying around with the flowers around the world that you can grow somehow. Find an avian race in the sky, zora in the deep sea, Gorons in the mountains, Phantoms in the graveyard. Even Moblins or something. You could interact with races as all different kinds and get different reactions depending on them.

Basically just take Majora’s Mask, like, really take it, take the world, the characters with down to earth personality and situations, to a degree of course, while also expanding on the mask mechanic, and, this especially, it needs to feel like a “side-plot” just like Majora’s Mask did. Imagine, after OOT, you got to play that same Link, again, in a different plot, with yes, the same character models and similar backstories and such, but everything felt as though it were it’s own world, it’s own plot, it’s own little slice of the universe. The music, the textures, the locations, these all seperate MM from OOT immediately upon first glance.

While BotW doesn’t feel entirely like previous games, where it just kinda felt like repeating the same storyline in slightly differing settings, but it does feel like one step towards a complex idea that needs far more to be fully utilized. I think it’s cool Link does so much just on his own, using a paraglider to get places, a bike to drive around, climbs on his own, etc etc, at some point that does start to run dry, and I think varying the abilities was not only the furthest the series went til BotW, but was also pretty much the last time they actually re-tried it. I mean, wolf link just...kinda sucked, and wasn’t a step up from MM at all.

Idunno, I look forward to BotW2, but I’m already pretty desperate for another big jump, utilizing this style, but doing something radically different like MM did. Just without the convolution.

#majora's mask #ocarina of time #breath of the wild #botw #oot #loz #legend of zelda

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asseater3k · 9 months

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Metal Gear Mania Day:7

Spoilers for MGS3 below the cut

I liked The bullet style from day 5 so were gonna use that this

THE SORROW this was a very cool boss fight. in my instance it was terribly mechanically complex or strictly speaking engaging but i was glued to my seat and the screen for the whole thing I wasn’t aware that there’d be a boss fight like this when i decided to try not to kill anyone, to be honest i just wanted to look cool in front of girls, but when i put two and two together that he shows you and makes you fight everyone he kills I kinda wished id killed some people It’s such a cool idea, I was a little peeved that the cobra unit ghosts showed up because I busted my ass to get all the KOs but they did also all explode after that so fair enough. I do love that even though he has a health bar its empty cause hes a ghost and the framing of this boss fight as snake almost dying is cool and helped by the fact that if you call anyone on codec they give you their game over lines

OCELOT this fucking guy every scene in this game makes you realize that the guy we see in MGS 1&2 was the “normal” well adjusted version of this guy who doesn’t go around sniffing random people and keeps his raging desire for Big Boss somewhat in check him being the final encounter was a nice relax from the actual final boss and I like the scene where they fight in the plane

THE BOSS (FIGHT) this one fuckin hurt, It’s a beautifully designed fight, A final duel in field of white flowers nothing but but stealth and CQC I made this harder on myself by using the sneaking suit cause I wanted that contrast against The Boss’ suit but man If you pay attention Snake gets a little better in each cutscene against the boss and that comes to ahead with you having to counter her moves in the fight finally surpassing your mentor add on the timer which i thought would actually come into play cause a timer didnt pop up on screen when the fight started even when The Boss started counting downs herself i was a bit 50/50 but I did actually run out of time so I learned my lesson. You have to play such a mix of patient and aggressive to get through this one

THE EVA ESCORT SECTION Ive heard a lot of flack directed at the Emma section in the last game and honestly i thought this part was worse it wasn’t anything horrible just a bit slow there was a section at the begg=inning where soldiers kept poring out and she wouldn’t go from an attack state to follow state fast enough in the down time between the soldiers showing up so we kept getting detected and entering alert I was mostly annoyed cause she kept shooting people and I thought the game would count it against me like with snake in MGS2 other than that it was just strategic snack acquisition and on to the heart break.

THE ENDING AND THE BOSS while the ending of MGS2 melted my brain this one just made me sad its a much tighter and more personal narrative than the last game and I think thats a smart call if you do something like MGS2 again you’d have to escalate it which I think would be difficult to do so soon after and without getting too convoluted. Don’t get it wrong there’s still some crossing threads in this specifically with regards to EVA, The Boss , Ocelots allegiances EVA being a Chinese spy Ocelot being a triple agent reporting to krushev over gru and The US over even them and of course The Boss remaining loyal to the US despite Kowing the expanded mission out right required her death and disgrace. I dont have a ton i feel i can say about that without straight up beaming the game into your brain its just so fucking heart breaking man her talking about how the ceaseless churn of war turns soilders into these disposable pieces where their lives a relationships are ripped up by the whims of major leaders and bids for power money etc I have players a bit of peace walker at time of writing and the fact that snake didnt fucking get it and interpreted her dream not as a world with out conflict freeing them from the need to be this group beholdent and loyal to the whims of others over themselves or each other and can live in peace but instead as world simply not beholdent to any conflict while still perpetuating it while remaking loyal to themselves just guts me man

MOVING FOWARD i had a bit of trouble deciding to go onto peace walker or MGS4 I started peace walker but got so nervous that i made the wrong choice taht i actually asked a blog I follow who is way more knowledgeable about this kind of stuff than i am about how I should go (you should follow them by the way their @ is cerastes they make good posts and have very enjoyable streams sometimes) in short he told me that while that while I was not making a mistake as both of these games feed into eachother very well meaning it was ultimately a personal choice that personally he would play 4 first sating that its depiction of war as buisness would resonate with a peace walker play through. So I was going to do that then I waffled some more then I decided that MGS4 status as a conclusion to series at lest at the time would vibe better as the final gaem in the context of this deranged two marathon I’ve done. I’m mostly writing this bit so i dont come across as/ feel like an asshole for asking for advice and kind of disregarding it, and if you read this dreamer I really did appreciate the advice and would have played the order you recommended if I was playing this in a more casual way taking my time through them all etc, any way neurosis aside its on to peace walker yippee!!

#metalgearmania #mgs3 spoilers

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applesaucesims · 2 years

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Faebuary 2022 ft. my childhood OC’s

Now these are my childhood OC’s which were also basically my imaginary friends. All but one have wings from Winx Club, not only because those were the ones I had in my game, but also because the lore around these characters is basically a Winx rip-off (to be fair I was like 10), so I thought it would be a fun way to call myself out.

Thought that the February of Fairies by @incandescentsims would be a good opportunity to post these girls. More information about them will be under the cut because, since I created them as a child, it’s a little bit too cringey not to be.

I tried to give them a more updated and grown up look here compared to my original design for them. But over the years I’ve actually refined their looks a lot, especially because I would always create them in those dress up flash games.

Their personalities are still very one- or two-dimensional, though, because I never really expanded on their story and, like I said, I was 10 lol.

Steffy (yellow) started as a self-insert, so she really had not much of a personality apart from being the leader of the group and like.... nice. Her power was like... glitter? I have no idea either.

Laylor (purple) was “the quiet one” and also the princess of some moon kingdom. Her power was moon light and harnessing the power of the moon, or something.

Zelda (blue) was kind of the fashionista of the group that is kinda mean but like, the others are still friends with her? She’s cool tho, just a little bit difficult to be around ig. She had wind powers.

Mandy (green) was like your typical “tomboy” ig, with a very laid back personality. She had water powers.

Jade (pink/red) was just “the cute one”. Like, whenever I would make them in dress up games, everyone would always be in awe of how pretty her outfit was or whatever. Her powers had to do something with feelings ig but idek nothing makes sense.

They all lived in some fairy school that is essentially the same as in Winx. They even had Charmix and Beliebix (which is what I used to think Believix was called, like the German word “beliebig” gdfsjkgfahlg).

Steffy and Laylor were best friends and so were Mandy and Jade.

Mandy and Jade were also definitely dating, I realised/decided that later lol. Harold, they are lesbians.

So yeah, just wanted to info dump about my childhood OC’s. I could tell you more about them, but let’s leave it at this for now lol.

#ts4 #sims 4 #faebuary 2022 #my edit #i had my own winx transformation song #but instead of winx they were called glitzerfeen which literally translates to glitter fairies #creativity 100 #could have made this a lookbook but just ask me if u wanna know what cc i used

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felassan · 4 years

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Dragon Age development insights from David Gaider - PART 1

This information came from DG on a recent SummerfallStudios Twitch stream where he gave developer commentary while Liam Esler played DAO, specifically the mage Origin. I transcribed it in case there’s anyone who can’t watch the stream (for example due to connection/tech limitations, data, time constraints, or personal accessibility reasons). A lot of it is centered on DAO, but there’s also insights into DA2 and DAI. Some of it is info which is known having been out there already, some of it is new, and all of it imo was really interesting! It leaps from topic to topic as it’s a transcript of a conversational format. It’s under a cut due to length.

Note on how future streams in this series are going to work: The streams are going to be every Friday night. Most likely, every week, they’re going to play DAO. Every second week it will be Liam and DG and they’ll be doing more of this developer commentary style/way of doing things, talking about how the game was made as they play through, covering quirks and quibbles etc. Every other week, it will be Liam and a guest playing a different campaign in DAO, and Liam will be talking with them about how DA changed their lives or led them into game development, to get other peoples’ thoughts on the series (as it’s now been like 10 years). Some of these guests we may know, some we won’t. When other DA devs are brought on, it’ll be in the DG sessions. They hope to have PW and Karin Weekes on at some point. Sometime they hope to have an episode where they spend the whole time going through the lore.

(Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6)

[wording and opinions DG’s, occasionally LE’s; paraphrased]

DAO’s development actually finished up around April 2009. They then put it on ice for around six months before release. Human Noble is DG’s favorite Origin. It’s one of the ones he wrote. He also wrote the Dalish Origin as well (Tamlen is his doing ;__;). DAO’s temp name during development was Chronicles. DG has never played any of the DA games after they were released. He played them pre-release loads of times, when they were half-broken or incomplete etc. This stream is his first time seeing everything played after completion.

NWN: Hordes of the Underdark was the first game where DG was a/the lead writer, in charge of other writers, as opposed to a senior writer. It was pretty well-received. In the fall of 2003, BW were just finishing up HotU when James Ohlen came to DG to talk. BW had been having issues during the development of NWN with the IP holder for D&D Wizards of the Coast, so they were interested in starting their own IPs that they would have ownership over (and also for financial reasons). JO said to DG that one of these new IPs would be fantasy and one would be sci-fi. He knew that DG was more fantasy-oriented, and so asked DG if he wanted to take this on. DG was down, and the first thing to figure out was what that fantasy IP was going to be.

JO gave DG an atlas of European history, which he still has, and said that he wanted him to make a fantasy world that is reminiscent of medieval Europe and reminiscent of D&D - “make it like D&D but not, file off the serial numbers really well”. This worked for DG because he was pretty familiar with D&D and there were also lots of things that he didn’t like about it and wanted to change. So DG went off and for the next six months worked on creating a setting, beginning with documentation and the map. This was kinda strange because they had no idea at that time what their story would be. JO was very interested in having a “genetically evil” enemy in the setting (like an equivalent to orcs). DG wasn’t a big fan of this and his initial go at the setting omitted this (i.e. darkspawn were not a thing) and was a lot more realistic. JO insisted on adding them later on.

This period of development wasn’t actually a good process. There were other people who were working on the project who were designing the combat side. Looking back, DG feels that they should have put their heads together a lot sooner. The combat designers had various ideas for various prestige classes and subclasses, and DG would be like “these are nowhere in the setting [lore]”. He tried his best to add a few of them after the fact, which is why we see things like DA’s version of the bard archetype. The combat designers and artists originally had a vision in mind of a game that was much more along the lines of the type of fantasy you’d find in the Conan the Barbarian world - bare-chested barbarians, sorceresses that show a lot of skin, a grimdark world with barbarian hordes. They were just assuming that’s what it was going to be. At this point in time DG had never thought, “Oh, maybe I’m responsible for communicating my ideas to them” - he’d never done this role before and was just told to go create the world. He created world-building documentation and would send out emails saying “I’m making this documentation, please go ahead and take a look”, not learning until later on that nobody outside of the writing team really likes reading such documentation. He learned tricks later on like making the docs more accessible, less dense and wordy, and overall easier to peruse.

There was no real ‘vision holder’ for DA. Mass Effect did a much better job of that. Casey Hudson was the project director and the vision holder for ME, and he had the power to enforce a set vision of what was and was not ME. ME therefore ended up having a bit more of a coherent vision. DG was in essence the vision holder for DA, but he didn’t really have the authority to enforce it on the artists. The DA teams ended up spending a good 3.5 - 4 years of the ~6 years of DAO dev time going in circles, not exactly sure what they were going to make, the various people working on it having different ideas of what ‘kind’ of fantasy they were going to make. The writing team were leaning towards LoTR; the artists were leaning towards Conan; at one point one of the project directors was leaning towards a point-and-click Diablo-style action adventure; and nobody was overriding anybody else.

The fans who hang out on the forums and in similar places have a very different idea about what kind of game they like and want to play versus the telemetry BW get from the public in general. As an example, fans on the forums tend towards playing non-humans and feeling that playing as a human is boring. Forum-polls reflected that, but BW’s general public-telemetry shows that around 75-80% of the playerbase played a human in DAO. Elves were at 15% and dwarves 5%. In contrast, in the core/forum-based fanbase, the human figure dropped down to 30%.

DG originally wanted Zevran to be a gay romance (he has talked about this before). He asked JO if he could do that pretty early on, thinking of Jade Empire which had same-gender romance options which were really popular. BW were surprised about that, and DG had no idea that the JE team were going to do this. For DAO, he had an idea for an assassin character. He had been reading about how the CIA and KGB would often recruit gay men to be their assassins, as they didn’t tend to have family ties. DG thought this was really interesting. JO was cool with the idea on a conceptual level, but thought that the work that would end up going into it would be better served if those characters could be romanced by both male and female PCs. Zevran and Leliana weren’t intended to be bi, they were “bi out of convenience”, but at the time these sorts of things (representation and such) didn’t enter into the equation as much as it does today. DG wrote Zevran in his head as being romanceable by men.

DG would ask the hair artists, “Why all the mullets?”, because he never understood that, and he’d get “a sort of shrug response”, and an indication that “it’s easier to model, I guess?” Having hair which is loose, in the face, in locks, coming over the shoulders etc wasn’t really supported at this point by the tech or the engine. Hence, they ended up with like five different versions of mullets. On the subject of the engine, for the first half of development they were using an upgraded version of the Aurora engine from NWN, and it was not good. Several years in they decided to switch. Trent Oster was in charge at the time of making a new proprietary BW engine. At the time it wasn’t ready yet, but the DA team decided to grab it, use it and hammer it into the DA engine. That engine had “so many little weird quirks”, like lighting on skin not working properly and looking bad, and one of the issues was hair. It was supposed to be BW’s proprietary engine but it really wasn’t optimized for RPGs and didn’t include a dialogue system. They had to custom-build the conversation system. (At the time Trent didn’t think BW should be doing RPGs anymore, which is a whole other story of its own). DG recalls programmers complaining about things in the engine that weren’t ready for ‘prime-time’. Even compared to games released concurrently, DAO’s graphics were a bit dated.

For the worldbuilding, they had an internal wiki and they kept everything on there. They ended up with a lot of legacy documentation on there very quickly. Eventually they solved this by hiring an editor whose sole job it was to wrangle the documentation. DG started work on the setting in the same manner in which he’d embark on starting a homebrew - ‘so like, first, here’s a map, oh, I like this name, vague ideas, a paragraph on each major nation, a rough timeline of the history, expanding, and it just growing from there’. After about six months, they brought on other writers, and by then he had around 50 pages of documentation. This 50 pages was a minute amount compared to the amount they had generated at the time of release. Originally, they weren’t sure where in the world specifically the story would take place, so DG made sure to seed potential and brewing conflicts throughout Thedas. They settled quite quickly on the new Blight starting in Ferelden. Once they established that, the writers went to town on taking Ferelden specifically and blowing it up detail-wise. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of the dwarves and Orzammar. Mary Kirby was on Fereldan customs and traditions.

The first version of the setting was more grounded in realism, almost like a post-fantasy. The dragons and griffons were extinct and a lot of the things that were thought to be fantastical were thought to be over with. During development, they started clawing these things back. They brought back dragons because the game was named Dragon Age (lol). DG was approached like, “Hey, we named the game DA, can you bring back dragons and weave them into the story more powerfully?” Wynne’s writer Sheryl Chee had a bit of an obsession with griffons and was often like ‘omg, griffons :D’, and this is the origin of Wynne’s dialogue with the Warden about griffons.

KotOR was the first time BW had tried to do a game that was fully voiced-over. For KotOR, BW sent the work of casting, direction and so on down to another studio in California called Technicolor. BW had little say in the process then and when they got it back, “it was what it was”. By the time they got to DA and the first ME, BW had a good system down for recording and VO had become an important thing in games at the time. BW are really one of the premieres for this, a lot of actors really like acting on BW games as they get a lot of space to act where they wouldn’t normally be able to do so otherwise. DG has learned a lot from Caroline Livingstone on how to encourage the best performance out of an actor. For DAO, DG worked together with the various lead designers and Caroline to decide on the auditions, casting etc. This was one of DG’s favorite things to do.

Gideon Emery as Fenris, GDL as Solas and Eve Myles as Merrill were times where DG had written the character and then went to Caroline and said “I have an actor in mind for them, can you check it out?” These were specific times where he was able to secure the actor he wanted. This didn’t always work out, for example there are times when actors aren’t interested or have no time due to scheduling conflicts or were too expensive etc. Eve and GDL were DG’s roommate Cori’s idea. Cori was a big fan of Torchwood/the actors from Torchwood, and worked as an editor at BW for a long time. Gideon was DG’s idea after playing FF12. For DAO, DG didn’t have any specific ideas in terms of actors. Casting Morrigan was the longest, most drawn out process.

The Circle went through a whooole process during worldbuilding. Initially, mages in the game weren’t supposed to have any “fighting magic”. The restrictions were originally such that in the lore, they didn’t teach mages that. Mages weren’t taught any magic that could kill people, only ‘indirect’ forms of magic that could support others. However, [during what sounds like] playtesting it was asked “Why can’t I cast a fireball? I just want to cast a fireball”, so the writers had to go back and rework how magic in the lore worked completely.

Flemeth was originally going to be voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, and she was totally on-board, but unfortunately because of DAO’s development delays, she was unable to attend the new recording time as she had a conflict in her schedule (she was filming House of Sand and Fog). Shoreh was quite disappointed about this and her family had been so excited that she was going to be in a video game. When the movie was finished, Shoreh came back to BW and let them know that she was still available, and this is how she ended up in ME2. For a while they were trying to find an actress with an accent that authentically mirrored Shoreh’s. Out of the blue around this time, Claudia Black’s agent sent BW an audition tape of her. At the time Claudia hadn’t done any games but wanted to get into it. The tape was of Claudia doing a beat poet rendition of Baby Got Back. DG still has this tape. DG was a big fan of Farscape and on listening to the tape, it clicked right away in his head that Claudia would be perfect for Morrigan.

The Fade ended up being a big irritation for the writers. They wanted the PC to be able to assume different forms and such while in there. A lot of this stuff proved too difficult for the combat designers to work out, and so it ended up getting changed a lot. They had a hard time coming up with gameplay that could work in the Fade. The mage Origin is DG’s least favorite of the Origin stories, as he’s really dubious about the Fade section in it. It didn’t work out like how they had pictured it in their heads. By the time they got to DAI, that’s when the Fade really looks like how the writers first described/envisioned it. By this point the artists were more keen to give it a more specific feel. DAO was made at a time when ‘brown is realistic’ was a prevailing thing in games dev.

The experience of a mage in the world isn’t represented or conveyed very well to the player when the player is a mage. The experience of the player when they’re playing a mage or have a mage in their party doesn’t really match up with how the world lore tells them how dangerous mages can be - for example, how they can lose control and so on, we never really have an example of a PC mage struggling with being taken over by a demon. This was originally supposed to be a subplot in DA2 for mage Hawkes, in one of the last cuts. In Act 2, mage Hawke was originally slowly being tricked by a demon in their head that they thought was real, only to realize at the last minute. Mouse the Pride demon in the mage Origin is the only time in the entire series that they really ever properly demonstrated how demons can fuck with [PC] mages. Also, PC templars were originally supposed to have a permanent lyrium addiction that they needed to ‘feed’, but this was scrapped as the system designers weren’t keen on it and felt that it was essentially handicapping the player.

Mages were originally also not supposed to be able to deal with pure lyrium (it would ‘overload’ them). There is a plot where mage PCs run around touching lyrium nodes to refill their mana bars. On this DG was like “Wtf is this?” The designers said that it works, and DG said “but it flies in the face of the lore”. This instance is an example of how the DA team was working where the various departments (writers, artists, designers etc) all had their own ideas about how the game and its world would work and never overrode each other (see above). DG feels that DAO is a little contradictory in that way. It’s only after the game came out that a lot of the people on the team really “bought into” what they’d put forward. This got easier as they went on, with people involved buying then into the things that make Dragon Age, Dragon Age. At one point, not everyone on the team was even aware of those things.

DG relates that originally, they would ask the artists, “Ok, can we get a village?” and said village once created would be quite generic and non-specific to DA. The writers would try to relate how things are in the DA world and list things that would be found in a village like this specific to the DA world, and the artists either didn’t read it or had their own ideas (DG isn’t sure which), and nobody was around to tell them not to do that and that they should do it differently. Everyone having their own ideas like this is why we ended up getting something that is this sort of “cobbled together half-Conan half-LotR mish-mash”, and after a while this sort of became DA’s “thing”.

Initially, BW had concepts drawn up for a lot more different creatures. After they went in circles for those years and consequently ran out of time to do all the models, they had to cut these concepts down more and more. Demons were among the ones that were the first to go (this is why we have situations like a bereskarn as the Sloth Demon in the mage Origin). The original concepts for things like spirits of Valor and Sloth demons were really good. Early on, JO made a list of D&D creatures that he liked. He picked the ones that they were thinking of doing, sent them to DG and said to make a “DA version of this”. For example, D&D succubi essentially became Desire Demons. Desire Demons were originally patterned off Sandman, neither male nor female yet really alluring, acting more like a genie and trying to ferret out mortals’ inner desires (which are not necessarily sexual in nature), without being overtly sexual. The artists’ version came back and that was basically the model seen in-game. The writers were like “What is this, this is nothing like the description?” and the artists responded that on the list from JO, it was included, in that you had to click on “succubus” to get to the Desire Demon description, so they had just read “succubus” and done their version of a succubus. The artists did loads of great work, but this was one of the instances were DG was like “???” By then, it was too late to change it. The writers were able to encourage them to make Desire Demons a little more fearsome, so that made it in at least.

The mage Origin was one of the more contentious Origin stories. It had like 4 different versions written of it over time. It was often the case that BW would hire someone, and writing an Origin story was their first test. Three different writers came in and wrote a version of the mage Origin and those versions just didn’t work. Finally they passed it to Sheryl Chee and she wrote it. The Origins were the parts of the game in general that were written/rewritten the most often. There were several others that got written that they discarded.

Duncan was slated for death from Day 1. When DG writes a story, the thing he does first is pick out the big emotional beats that he wants, such as deaths. He decides these ahead of time and the stuff in-between comes later and is more often changed. Oghren was also originally supposed to die, but this ended up getting cut. DG related a story of how Oghren came to be: At the time, there was a phase JO went through when he thought everything had a formula that it could be done by. One of these ‘creative forumulas’ was that all such IPs had a two-word name that they’re known by, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Dragonlance (being Dragon-Lance). This is how ‘DA’ and ‘ME’ came to be. One of the formulas he wanted to implement was how to distill the ‘comedy character’, like Minsc or HK-47. These characters were very popular with the fans and JO was certain that there was a way to figure this out to create one for DA. At the time, DG argued with him a lot about this. JO insisted it could be done. DG was originally supposed to write this character but ended up not doing so. JO came up with a list of comedic archetypes and had DG write a blurb about what kind of character each could be. These were then sent out to the team who voted on which was their favorite. This process eventually resulted in an archetype basically called ‘The Buffoon’ (think Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin, the kind of guy people laugh at because he’s such an oaf).

At this point ‘The Buffoon’ wasn’t named or made a dwarf yet. JO came to DG to write him, but DG said there was a problem which is that he hates this archetype. Homer and Peter are characters that he despises. DG is a professional writer, but this was comedy (outside of his areas of strength), and he felt the best he would be able to do is write a character who makes fun of this archetype and lampshade that. Comedy is something that has to come from within the writer. Oghren was given to someone else, and he ended up getting rewritten again anyway. By the time they were working on Awakening, DAO had not yet come out, and the assumption prior to the game going out was that Oghren was still going to be the most popular character from among the followers. The comedic character that ended up being the most popular along these lines was Alistair, which was interesting as he wasn’t intended as a comedic character, “so shows what we know”. DG was dubious that Oghren was going to be popular, because “he was kind of pathetic, honestly”, but that was the thinking at the time. Thinking he would be well-loved is why he was in Awakening.

On Alistair, any character DG writes is going to be sarcastic. At the time DG had made it a sort of personal challenge to recreate Joss Whedon’s dialogue patterns in his characters. Alistair was a sort of mish-mash of Xander from Buffy and maybe Mal from Firefly. DG wanted to see if he could do it, so Alistair was kind of quippy and self-deprecating. DG never really considered this to be Alistair’s main personality feature, but when other writers wrote him, they often had him doing this, as they liked the trait so much, and so this is how Alistair ended up as he did.

On dwarves, the dwarves being cut off from the Fade is very much baked into who the dwarves are as a race. There’s a specific reason why. This has been hinted at so far and it’s likely to come up in the future. DG had various ideas for some things that he wanted to include with the races or the way the world works etc. Some of them ended up never happening or some are mentioned only as part of the lore (templar lyrium addiction never coming up in gameplay is an example of this). Dwarven history and the nature of the dwarves is one of the things that survived pretty well though. DG calls Jennifer Hepler “mistress of the dwarves” and says that she did a really detailed, amazing breakdown of their history. After Jennifer left it was Mary Kirby, and DG feels that they did a good job of maintaining how dwarves were, in terms of both how they’re often presented in fantasy and yet also quite different in DA. Orzammar is one of DG’s favorite plots all together. You can really tell that Jennifer Hepler really enjoyed the dwarves and brought a lot of love to that plot.

DG draws a distinction between DA fans and the unpleasant people who harassed Jennifer Hepler.

They managed to keep the Tranquil in. There was a while there where they were going to be cut. At the same time, DG regrets that they couldn’t solve the making of the player more aware of how mages are dangerous, thing. Players could make a cogent argument like “they’re not that dangerous, look at me [mage PC]” and the writers were like “well... yeah, that is fair”. It was a case of showing one thing and the player experience of it being another. DG feels that this made the templars come off worse than they are. DG feels that they are being massively unfair and too extreme in their approach to the problem, but the problem itself is a real thing. He feels that there’s some merit/truth in the argument that mages are oppressed, but he looks at it more like an issue like gun control rather than as treatment of oppressed people, saying that we don’t have an example in real life of oppressed people who can explode into demons and cast fireballs and so on.

There are some funny pronunciations that worked their way into DA, and the reason for a lot of them is as follows: the writers had to create a pronunciation guide for VO, because otherwise you end up with a lot of inconsistencies. (Some did still slip through). The guide was online, and if you clicked on a word, an audio file for it would play. Jennifer Hepler was in charge of this and did a great job, but has a really strong NY accent, and in some cases the ‘NY-ness’ of her pronunciation endearingly worked itself into things (the way Arlathan is sometimes said is an example of where this happened sometimes).

Sometimes the writers trying to communicate the “hotness” of a character to the artists didn’t go smoothly. The writers would sometimes say things like, ok, this character is a romance, they need to be hot, and the designs would come back looking “like Burt Reynolds”, and the writers would be like “???” And then a character that wasn’t particularly intended to be hot, as in that wasn’t mentioned at all in the descriptions of them, would come back “accidentally hot”, and the writers would be like “Why couldn’t you have done this when we were asking for a character that was meant to be hot”, and the artists would be like “What?? He’s not hot”. And this became a thing (lmao - this discussion was prompted by DG being asked “Was Duncan meant to be that hot?”, for context). Some of the artists were so paranoid about their [in]ability to judge actually-hot characters that when it was time to pick an appearance, like for Alistair, they gathered up all the women at BioWare, and DG (“resident gay”) into a room to show them an array of faces and bodies like “Is this hot? Is this hot?” DG and co would sit there like, “How can you not tell? Is this a straight man thing?!” Anyways, this is why oftentimes we ended up with characters who are accidentally hot.

Over time, the writers realized that the way they communicated to artists needed to be managed better. The words they would use would have different connotations to them the writers, than what they did to the artists. For example, for Anders’ design in DA2, he was supposed to be “a little haggard”. When DG thinks of haggard, he thinks ‘a little tired, mussed hair, looking like you’ve been through some shit’. But the artists based on that produced concepts with super sunken cheeks, looking like he’d been terribly starved. The writers needed to develop a specific vocabulary for communicating with the artists, as artists think in terms of how something looks, but writers are thinking in terms of what the character “is”. Anders’ description talked about his history a lot, and the one visual-type word that jumped out was “haggard” due to its visual connotations. “A lot it came down to the writers being up their/our own asses.”

When they got to DAI, they had figured out that the way to get best results on this front was /not/ to have the writer go off and develop a long description and pre-conceived notion of what the character looked like in their head. In such scenarios artists don’t feel that they have much to contribute to the process or an ability to put their own stamp on who this character is and make them interesting to them (the best, most interesting characters are when people at all stages of the pipeline properly get to feed into it). They learned that the better solution was to bring the artists in earlier, and to give them little blurbs, and not name the character but give them an ‘archetype’-sort of ‘name’. For example, Dorian was “the rockstar mage”, “cool”, “Freddie Mercury”. The writers wouldn’t be sure that a particular concept would ‘hit’, so at this stage they would offer an array of options and sit the artist down and walk them through the concepts. The artists would then provide a bunch of sketches and it would go back and forth, with both taking part in the character creation process together. For the first two games, the writers were “really hogging” this process to themselves. They got better at not doing this and better at communicating with the artists by DAI.

There were a lot of arguments about how mages in DAO had a lot of specific lore words like “Harrowing”, “phylactery”, “Rite of Tranquility” etc. There was concern that this would be too confusing for players to understand and that it was too complicated. DG says that thankfully he put his foot down and pushed for this stuff to be kept. A lot of fans assume that as lead writer DG had all this influence, way more influence than he could possibly exert on a team. He wasn’t even a lead, he was a sub-lead, under a lead designer. He only had so much say. If the lead designer or lead artist wanted to do something differently, often there was not much he could do. Hence he had to pick his battles carefully, choose the important ones to fight. The mage vocabulary thing was one of these.

Templar Greagoir’s name is pronounced “Gregor” and it comes from a place in Alberta near where DG lived.

Codex entries are usually one of the last things that get done in a project like this, and so all of that kind of textual lore comes in super late and is super punchy as by then the writers have written so much and are exhausted. They had to find a way to make this process cute or interesting or fun for themselves, which is why a lot of entries are quite fun to read. Sometimes a writer would make a joke for banter [irl], and it would end up making it into an entry.

Only Morrigan and Duncan got unique body models in DAO. The companions all have custom-morphed heads but not custom-morphed bodies (Morrigan not included here). This is why every model has a necklace or a collar right at the point where they had to be attached to be a body. These sometimes used assets that couldn’t be used by the PC but were not unique to that character. Duncan probably got a unique model because he was in a lot of marketing/promotional material. Qunari were originally conceived as having horns.

Most people didn’t even finish DAO once (public telemetry again here), only approximately 20-25% actually did. The devs try not to read too much into this kind of thing, but the telemetry does tell them where a lot of people stop playing the game permanently (they call these “drop-off points”). One of these points in DAO is the Fade during Broken Circle. Sometimes when people interpret this data they involve self-serving biases, but it was generally accepted that the Fade there was too long, too complex, not interesting enough, etc. [source]

[Part 2]

[Part 3]

[Part 4]

[Part 5]

[Part 6]

[‘Insights into DA dev from the Gamers For Groceries stream’ transcript]

#dragon age #bioware #morrigan #solas #video games #queen of my heart #mass effect #lgbtq #jade empire #fenris #the Fenaissance #alistair theirin #lul #fav warden

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cutekittenlady · 2 years

Note

The thing you mentioned before about your villain in the AU, regarding how feelings "ruined" people's relationship with pokemon, was how easily he used Emmet and Elesa's emotions to get the Noble pokemon. Except, you mentioned how it was Elesa's "friendship for Ingo and love for Emmet". At the time, my immediate thought that made me snicker was, "It would be funny if Elesa wasn't even aware of those romantic feelings yet and immediately springs to denial because the villain is crazy, but THAT crazy to think she, Elesa, in love with one of the twins?! No, this was her helping a friend! Only to keep thinking on it later and realizing 'Acerus dammit he's right.'"

(Also "Emmet, this almost sounds like a Team Plasma knock off."

"We're not hunting Legendaries tho!")

LOl that would be halarious. Altho my idea was that Elesa was already aware of her feelings for Emmet but more or less keeps herself from acting on them. Both because she isn't sure if Emmet feels the same and because she can't help but feel that her and Emmet developing a relationship in part as a result of Ingo disappearing feels morbid.

Although her shoving it all into the backburner of her subconcious and lying to herself for the longest time only to acknowledge the truth afterwards would also be hella-fun.

And, yeah, I guess it does sorta sound like a team plasma knockoff. Then again the whole "capturing powerful pokemon to then try to remake the world in your own twisted image" is practically a staple for the series.

As I think I've said previously, it almost seems like a deliberate theme with villains in pokemon to be people who have these grandiose concepts and ideas either about themselves or the world as a whole. Only to have their ideas easily crushed due to their plans being so flimsy or poorly thought through you could drive a truck through the loopholes. But I'm on the fence if thats because its just the minimalist writing for a video game/kids media, or if its a deliberate commentary on how, for all their big talk, the villains of pokemon's ultimate downfall was how they removed themselves from the everyday world and held themselves above it to the point of being incapable of seeing what was right in front of their faces.

I mean, old school pokemon fans love to say how Team Rocket were super cool but, like, Giovanni's plans got sunk by a ten year old because he got too big for his britches and forgot "theres always a bigger fish"

Archie and Maxie, for all their hooing and hawing about their big visions of the future by expanding the ocean/land evidently failed to take even a basic meteorology class to find out why reckless ecological manipulation is a bad idea.

Don't even get me started on Cyrus and his whole 'create a new universe' thing. You know what Team Galactic is? A death cult.

And it just goes on like that.

I like to think this OC villain guy continues that tradition by exemplifying people who are obsessed with an idealized version of the past/history. Like, treating ancient Hisui and their nobles like this great ideal thing where everyone was more noble and better for having to struggle to survive kinda ignores the reality of the setting or how the people who actually live there truly feel about the whole thing.

I dunno I just thought, since the villains motivations are, at this point, honestly pretty flexible, it'd be a cool concept to explore.

#pokemon #pokemon legends arceus #e&e #e&e au #e&e in hisui #legends arceus #submas #conductorshipping

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dgcatanisiri · 2 years

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Welcome to DG’s Listing of Wish These DLC Existed, where I theorize, speculate, and just kinda generally throw ideas at the wall about DLCs for games I love that never happened and never will happen, but damn, I’d like to see them anyway.

Because I have ideas, I can’t get them made as mods, I don’t have time to make them into fic, and they’re never going to happen anyway, so why not put them up in a public place? After all, they’re tie ins to games I have no control over anyway, so it’s not like I’ll ever make money off of them anyway. And, as I’m not bound by any hardware limitations in terms of crafting ideas, or production cycles dictating when the game’s endpoint is, these can and do go on a great deal longer than the standard lifespan of a game.

A review of the format: There will be a name for the DLC, a brief synopsis, a reference to when this hypothetical DLC would become available/if and when it becomes unavailable, and then an expansion/write up of the ideas going in to them. Some ideas will have more expansion than others, because I’ve just plainly put more thought into them - in a lot of cases, I wrote them down just on the basis of ‘this idea seems pretty cool,’ and then gave them more context later on.

I try and keep these as consistent to the original games as possible, in that, like most DLC tends to be, the game is not completely upended by the playing or not playing of these stories. These are expansions on ideas or explorations of concepts and stories that I feel were not explored to their fullest in the official games. If I wanted to rewrite the whole game outright, I certainly would, but the idea here is to come up with expansions and concepts that fit within what the game is, rather than rebuild it entirely, even if the end result is that I come up with at least another full game’s worth or story and mission.

Feedback is welcome! Like an idea? Don’t like an idea? I welcome conversation and interaction on these ideas. Keep it civil, remember that these are just one person’s ideas, we can discuss them. Perhaps you’ll even help inspire a part two for these write ups! Because I do reserve the right to come up with more ideas in the future - these are the ideas that I’ve had to this point, but the whole reason this series exists is because I come up with new ideas for old stories.

Ah, back again. Here to continue with the Hypothetical DLCs of Mass Effect 2, and this is entry two of four, because there are just that many ideas I’ve had. Might as well just get used to this, since ME3 is at least as long if not longer. If you need a refresher of the prior entry in this series, here, have a handy dandy link. I’d hoped to only need three entries for this game, but it reached a point where the break would either have to be much further in or I could have a fourth part, and I reached a rather natural break for this.

That break being that all of the DLCs here would be immediately accessible for the player after Horizon is completed, while the others are either set to be accessible followign the Collector Ship or even explicitly post-game. That’s not to say that, in terms of where they fit in to game play, they play best after Horizon, just that, in the same way that Lair of the Shadow Broker and Arrival become available after Horizon, while in terms of their story and the overall portrayal (plus original release) they came after the base game and the Suicide Mission.

This arc, for lack of a better term, of ME2 DLC ideas are very heavy on the concept of developing and expanding on the various races of Citadel space. Because ultimately, I tend to feel that ME2 really is the weakest of games in the trilogy - I’ve said it elsewhere, it feels like it suffers heavily from bridge syndrome, telling an isolated story in the middle of the trilogy, the plot spinning its wheels in the name of holding back the payoff for the finale, rather than telling the natural development. So the focus in this branch of things is primarily focused on giving us an expanded look at the various peoples of Citadel space. Shepard is, by nature, meant to be as much a diplomat and representative of humanity as a soldier, and we’re here to, at least thematically, focus on that aspect.

I say “arc,” but these are still unconnected with each other. I do have ideas that are episodic or sequel-like, but when I get to those, they’ll be clearly marked. No, it was just thematic to group these all together, rather than have them tossed around in my notes.

Proud Soldiers

There’s trouble brewing on Palaven, the turian homeworld. The military forces there are beginning to show signs of tension between them and the government. With the Reaper threat imminent, the last thing the galaxy needs is the strongest military force weakened with dissent. Garrus asks Shepard to help out his people before the galaxy loses the war before it starts.

Sure would’ve been nice to actually SEE Palaven proper, wouldn’t it? Yeah, we’re fixing that.

Obviously, this is a Garrus-centric DLC. Cuz we can’t well visit the turian homeworld without taking the time to focus on our resident turian, right? While I’ve looked at the mandatory companions in pairs so far, I’m only really gonna focus on Garrus for this one.

Now the motivation here is actually building off of a comment from ME3 – when Victus is declared the next Primarch, Liara mentions his actions on Taetrus during “the uprisings.” Having not paid any attention to the Cerberus News Network (which, y’know, doesn’t even really function now anyway, so newbies probably also have this issue), I was deeply confused. So we get to have Shepard be involved. Because, really, what event can happen in the galaxy that doesn’t involve Shepard? But, seriously, it is good optics from the perspective of getting the galaxy to ally in the name of the coming war with the Reapers – humans and turians have had their relationship diplomatically described as “tense” since the First Contact War. If a human intervenes in the name of aiding the turians, that offers something to build on when the Reapers actually do show up.

Which, y’know, if the Council wasn’t saved in ME1, that might be a good thing to do.

Granted, I’m gonna take some liberties with the idea, and it’s probably not gonna tie in to the CNN thing very much because of my lack of familiarity (yes I do have the wiki articles open in the other window as I write this, but I’m not gonna be bound to this supplementary material that is functionally going to be replaced by my work here, so...).

Garrus does take point, since turians aren’t going to be all that appreciative of a human ship showing up uninvited and wanting to land on Palaven, especially a human ship flying Cerberus colors. This is where Spectre status can help smooth things a little – if Shepard has maintained their status, they can leverage that to get clearance. Otherwise, Garrus leans on the port authority – apparently someone he served with back in his military service. Because turian military service is compulsory, so there should be a great deal of people who he knew in the military before his C-Sec service.

While I’m not gonna to make her mandatory, I will say that Tali probably will get a solid position as the other companion in this – it’s a good way to create banter opportunities, both of them are already popular characters who people will enjoy having the chance to spend more time with, and it gives us some room for the building blocks of their potential hook-up in ME3 to get teased as well. Sure, there’d be the people complaining about one of them flirting with the other when they’re in a romance with Shepard, but I really don’t care about the people who are going to be assholes like that, they know it won’t go anywhere if either is romanced by Shepard, but it might be that Shepard isn’t romancing either of them and deserve to be able to find happiness if Shepard isn’t gonna date them, so the people who complain about it can shove it.

This really is our chance to get a better glimpse at the turian culture – you know how, in the Omega DLC, Nyreen brings up how her biotic abilities got her sidelined by the military? Yeah, that biotic discrimination among turians is something only really mentioned in codex entries, which might not really be something the player interacts with, doesn’t get to really see that the turians, culturally, look down on biotics among themselves (which, to be totally honest, seems a little odd to me as is, considering how pervasive biotics are, given that they’re an extension of Element Zero and all the developments around... well, the mass effect as a phenomenon), so we’re gonna give it a big deal here. These turian separatists are giving turian biotics a place of belonging so we can actually discuss this in game.

While I mentioned Victus’s actions on Taetrus being part of the inspiration, that is still going to be something happening offscreen, because, obviously, we’re on Palaven, not Taetrus. But that’s something that’s happening in like background news reports and maybe some incidental dialogue. Mostly because I’m sticking with Shepard not having met Victus prior to ME3, as their introduction there indicates – again, I am TRYING to weave these into the fabric of the existing game, rather than upending that applecart in its entirety.

And I want it to not go missed that Garrus, being from this culture, being a proud member of the turian race, being a member of a military-focused culture, is not going recognize the flaws right off. See, one of my things about Garrus in ME2... He doesn’t really get much character development. First of all, if you took the Paragon path of ME1, he’s actually REGRESSED in character when we start ME2, him having left C-Sec is saying that, once again, he got fed up with rules and regulations, even after Paragon Shepard made him realize that they all had their place in the chain. Secondly, we get no follow-up with him and Sidonis, even though there are varying results of that mission.

So the idea I’m going with here is to address that Garrus is a flawed person and needs to grow and develop over time, rather than just comfortably slot in to the role of “Shepard’s best friend.” And not just because occasionally I’d like to roll a Shepard where that isn’t the case. Plus there’s the fact that, in ME1, in the elevator conversations, he makes a lot of little micro-aggressions born of privilege in Citadel societies – turians are pretty much second only the asari in terms of popular perceptions, and he says a lot of things that are in the “you are a credit to your race” to Ashley, Kaidan, Tali, and even Wrex in the first game. Make this a genuine character trait and character flaw, you get a character who learns and grows.

So initially, no matter his stance on alien biotics, Garrus is going to be unfazed by the way that turian biotics are treated, which prompts a conversation from Shepard, one with some specific dialogue if they are a biotic, and if they’re in a romance with him – it’s like a neon sign of “CHARACTER ARC AND DEVELOPMENT” so far as this DLC is concerned y’know? Where he has to come to learn about how the turians’ way of life is actually flawed, that it’s not that he’s a bad turian but that the turians perpetuate bad ideas and ways of life. That it is, in many ways, the turians who need to learn that they’re not always right, and how to correct their behavior.

Y’know, make a point to Garrus that the turians are the problem, that it’s their cultural attitude and perceptions that need to change, not that he’s wrong – because I find a supposed military-focused society who reacts to the mission with Tarquin Victus in ME3, ready to hang him or put him in front of a firing squad, for the crime of looking at a situation, deciding that it will be certain death for his men, and trying something unconventional in the name of being able to accomplish their mission by actually getting to the battlefield... That reaction is one that has never failed to drive me up the goddamn wall. I the untrained civilian know the first axiom of battle is “no plan survives contact with the enemy.” Why don’t these soldiers from an explicitly militaristic society recognize this? We might not be able to influence the society, but we should see Garrus learn this lesson. Because I’m pretty sure that his characterization in ME3 is him doing this... but that’s not really what his ME2 character arc centers on.

Anyway, we experience some stuff with turian politics and stuff, while getting a chance to run around on Palaven itself – let’s make this part of the record, we have a long non-combat section here, because a human in a ship flying the colors of a known xenophobic alien terrorist organization running around the capitol world of a sovereign military culture who still hold grudges for the events of a conflict only thirty years prior... Letting Shepard walk around Cipirtine, the capitol city of the turian Hierarchy, with the armory that is their loadout in ME2 strapped to their back (particularly soldier class Shepard), is ASKING for them to get put in jail. So at most, they might be able to walk around with a sidearm. AT MOST – I figure that it’s not unreasonable for the turians to allow Shepard – especially a Shepard who still has their Spectre status or saved the Council in ME1 – to have their standard body armor and SOME weapons, but not the mobile armory they generally strap to their back. Through most of this, Shepard only has their pistol available, and much of their interactions are more about dialogue than combat (like there MAY be some street violence or something, some scuffles with the separatists, but not enough to justify breaking out assault rifles, sniper rifles, the tactical nuke, etc).

This is as much about immersing us in turian society and culture as anything else, so that’s where any little side quests are, again, I’m not devoting time to those, these go ON as it is already.

Back in the main plot area, we start seeing the simmering resentment among turian biotics to the turian military’s attitude towards them. That’s why we’re having Garrus be blind to the flaws of his own society – Shepard will eventually have to call him out, I like to think even sooner if they’re a biotic. Because as we call out this behavior, we’ll see some advancement and growth from him over the course, and yes, I know I’ve said this already, but dammit, it really needs to be reiterated, because Garrus really DOESN’T grow over ME2. And I am here to address and fix this problem.

The core is to acknowledge that turian society is making mistakes (just like any other) and, on a metaphorical level for “what is this saying about the world we live in?” is asking the audience to address their cultural biases – it is easy for people to look at other cultures and say something is wrong. We as humans easily do that with the turians. So having Garrus look at his culture and realize that something is wrong and that he has missed it, that he’s let his biases blind him to those problems is suggesting to the audience they do the same with their society.

Okay, back to the plot stuff. Turian politics, blah, blah, blah. This eventually turns into a more combat orientation (because this is still a shooter video game, the weapons do have to come out eventually). I know I said that Shepard is leaving a lot of their armament on the Normandy, but we can have the shuttle fly in and let them have a proper fitting of weapons when things start hitting the fan. What I’m thinking is that a group of these rebels who are uprising decide that they’re going to storm a turian government building.

I know I said that I’m not looking at a companion here other than Garrus, but, especially if Miranda, Jacob, or Jack (the human biotics) are there, but even without them, if Shepard is the only human biotic, I want to explicitly have a callback made to the side mission in ME1 that featured Chairman Burns, the guy who was taken captive by L2 biotic extremists. This is about people who don’t feel they’re being heard, lashing out against those who have ignored them.

The turian response is to lash out at them – put this down, squash the rebellion. Shepard (or Miranda, if she’s there) gets a comment on how ‘yeah, because that worked so well when you did it to humanity in the First Contact War.’ Because there’s legit a lot to question with the whole concept of ‘shoot first, ask questions after the orbital drop.’ Considering that’s turian SOP with regards to military action, it’s likely to not end well if things keep on this – some of the more reasonable members of the turian government think that this is going to just create a schism, one that Garrus, development kicking in or not, is quick to point out can only end in a weakened turian military, right as the Reapers roll in.

So Shepard offers to be the diplomat and find a way to resolve this without storming in, killing everyone, and sparking a civil war. Because, like I said, the turians fracturing like that is the kind of thing that is bad when the Reapers come along – they have one of the galaxy’s most powerful militaries, even with the awareness that conventional combat and tactics won’t win the day, a unified turian military certainly won’t hurt anything.

Being able to resolve matters peacefully will require having done the various little sidequests that were over the rest of the DLC, which offer more expansion of the turian culture and people, basically rewarding you for going out and investigating and interacting with the world. Or, if you’re Renegade, you can cut right through this, and have the big fight scene. The idea is that learning about the turian people will reward players with a peaceable alternative, something OTHER than a shooting gallery.

Because that really is one of my most frustrating things with ME2, that all the RPG elements fall in to the background in favor of the shooter stuff. Y’know, we have a game billed as an RPG, but the rails seem pretty firmly placed on who we can have Shepard be. So having a story that is relatively major (in the way that DLC tend to be, and in the way that this will have some broad impact on the future of the series, even, again, acknowledging the inherent bind of these as hypothetical DLC ideas) that can portray Shepard not as the unstoppable juggernaut of force but as the diplomat who resolves the impossible... That’s a pretty big deal for an RPG.

Garrus also offers an assist on this – he’s been recognizing the failures and problems of turian society because of the various callouts he’s gotten, the dysfunctions he’s been exposed to now that he has recognized as wrong. It’s not that he’s going to be a changed man as a result of what he’s experienced, but this is the story of someone from a privileged background and society having his eyes opened to the fact that his society is deeply flawed and full of problems and is willing to stand up and argue with the status quo.

Because you know... I’ve been pretty quiet on Garrus’s family in the midst of this. Well, this is going to lead to us to a proper introduction with Castis Vakarian. He’ll be among the turian response team who arrives once Shepard has wrapped up the hostage situation, and he’ll be the voice of how things were handled. Remember how Garrus said in ME1 that his father wouldn’t like Shepard because they’d been given the Spectre wings? Yeah, well resolving things peacefully shows him that at least SOMEONE with that authority is using it wisely – it’s easy to run in, guns blazing. Finding a better solution takes more work, shows more willingness to listen and find a good solution, rather than a quick one. He won’t be outright antagonistic if Shepard does things the non-peaceful way, but he will be chillier.

There’s also some bits of Garrus having some family time, including, for a romanced Garrus, a chance for him to introduce Shepard to his father as his partner. Because whatever you might want to say about offering a character unbalanced content in the series (and I’ve said plenty myself), once we’re in the situation, if it makes sense in character, they SHOULD get that content.

And so after some fade to black to act as the offscreen character interactions, we return to the Normandy and have a conversation with Garrus about how his views of the turian people has shifted, now that he’s really had a chance to see how flawed his people are, especially in the face of the various other races that he’s serving alongside and how they handle similar situations.

Oh, and, like Tuchanka is in the game proper, Palaven remains a small hub area afterwards, so that we get some furthering of the connection that Shepard has with the planet and the devastation happening there next game has actual emotional weight to it.

Also, while we “have” Garrus’s VA in the studio for this, I want a new conversation patched in that acts as a proper response that varies on the basis of how the Sidonis mission is handled. Because the fact that the end of Garrus’s character development in the base game has no response to the mission with a variable result, just cutting to the whole “reach and flexibility” thing... BUGS me. Especially since, if he’s not romanced, that’s the end of his “character development” in ME2. So we’re patching that while we’re here. The existing conversation can wait an extra mission while we acknowledge the growth and development of Garrus as a character, giving him reactions to whether or not Sidonis was killed and actually getting to hear what he thinks about what happened. Give that mission with a variable ending some actual fallout, emotionally speaking, considering that we’re distinctly lacking that as things are now.

Post-Game Followups:

ME3: Bonus dialogue with Garrus about his father and family, preferably with a cameo of some sort from Castus (don’t worry – Garrus’s sister is featured in the next game’s edition of these). In a peaceful resolution of events, the turian have a stronger military presence due to an increased position of biotic operatives. If violence was the solution, they’ve taken damage to morale and are weaker in war assets.

Eternity’s End

It’s said that civilization in the galaxy began on Thessia, homeworld of the asari. Now, a doomsday cult has formed there, believing that the end of the galaxy is upon them. The asari are trying to keep this quiet, but rumors still reach Commander Shepard, and they’re suspicious about how much this sounds like a cult of Reaper worshippers...

So, about a year ago, I made a big rewrite of Thessia in ME3. One of the points I hammered in during that was that Thessia, as we see it in ME3, means absolutely nothing to me, since the first time we ever set foot there, it’s already in the midst of the Reaper invasion. Y’know, showing up to Atlantis as it crumbles in to the sea does not make me feel like I’m personally responsible for said crumbling. That’s what Thessia is to me.

So priority one here is to visit Thessia at a point prior to Priority: Thessia in ME3 and make this a place that actually means something to the player. At least if we can think “I’ve been to that place, and that place that I really liked there is now being destroyed,” it offers some kind of connection to Thessia, rather than just “hey, this place being harvested should make you feel bad.”

Now, while Samara is certainly an obvious option for a companion during this, I do feel like she isn’t in the same position as Garrus was in the last write-up. Unlike Garrus, Samara has a full character arc that goes through the whole of the base game, it doesn’t just abruptly stop after the conclusion of her loyalty mission. That said, I think there’s room for a subplot that explores the Justicars in greater detail – this is a cultural facet for the asari that really doesn’t have the opportunity for play elsewhere, given that Justicars do not leave asari space. But, as a subplot, that’s not the heart of this write-up – I’ll offer it some expansion after the main plot write-up because it’s a character spotlight, but it’s not what we’re here to focus on.

As for the prospective cult, yeah, this is a concern about this being another of those machine cults like we see in the game proper and in the prior “Ghost of the Machine” entry. And this is where we talk up the importance of Thessia – the asari, having had their headstart granted by the protheans, not that we know that here, have “the seat of galactic civilization.” This is supposed to be the proverbial center of the galaxy – the Citadel is the melting pot of the galaxy, but Thessia is the origin point.

Also, going back to the earlier entry of “Underworld,” this is going to be asari-centric attitudes on display and being called out. Because there is plenty of casual arrogance in the asari cultural attitudes – they have thousand year lifespans, they can afford to take the long view of matters, the “everything will unfold as it should” approach. They might be able to survive the issues that come up, but waiting a couple of centuries for the legislation to wind its way through doesn’t work for the other races, at least, aside from the krogan. After all, the salarians and the vorcha have a shorter lifespan than humans. Humans hit about the average – the other races don’t GET centuries to consider things.

That is, ultimately, the asari’s big flaw, how much they favor “the long view” of matters, while ignoring the damage that is done in the short term. Which wraps us around to the original idea going on here – the people being drawn in by this doomsday cult are the ones who are more open to the idea that the rest of the galaxy can’t just wait out matters, that they require action more than contemplative consideration.

Unfortunately, if you have a desire for meaningful societal change, there’s going to be someone who’s going to prey on that concept. This version has managed to get the desire for change to be conflated with the idea that the asari are actively responsible for galactic civilization stagnating. That the arrival of humanity and their drive for advancement has shown that the asari may have begun “galactic civilization” as it’s known today, but it’s not the asari’s responsibility to drive it forward, that, for the good of the galaxy, the asari should step back from being the ones acting ‘at the forefront,’ that their involvement just calls for the galaxy to stagnate, taking a view of things that slows so much, no advancement will ever truly be made because the people pushing for advances end up dying off from old age before they can do anything.

Not inherently bad to start from, though still carrying that patronizing benevolence – they are CHOOSING to step back and away, they are giving the ‘younger’ races the opportunity to take the center stage. But this group has been twisted in to the idea of the asari themselves are hampering galactic development with their involvement. This is actually going to build on the idea Morinth brings up – she claims that she is “the genetic destiny” of the asari, a statement that Samara calls a sign of her delusion, because ardat-yakshi are sterile. Since BioWare never returned to this idea, I’m working it in that the ultimate idea there is that the “genetic destiny” is less “genetic” and more “destiny,” re: extinction. We’ll build more on this idea in a later story, but this is addressing it again, at least broadly, to remind people that this idea exists.

The way that this is working out is that the concept is that these asari are being suckered by a concept that they should die out in some manner – this is convenient to the (obviously Indoctrinated) leader, because the asari, for all their value as eventual Reaper juices (ew), are a powerful force to be reckoned with, and so something that depletes their strength, such as taking a chunk out of the younger generation of asari (which, given the length of a generation for the asari, is not an insignificant number), is valued by the Reapers. They may not be a full on extinction cult (at least, not at this point, but having the potential for it to get there), but they are saying that the asari are TOO present in galactic affairs, and that, if the Matriarchs aren’t going to withdraw from these matters by choice, take that choice away.

This is all part of what we piece together through investigation – the cult itself is an underground thing, and, especially because Shepard is a human and not an asari, it takes effort to uncover them and gain access to where they are keeping all of the information. This runs Shepard all over the capitol city of Armali, because we should have some connection to the place when it ends up destroyed next game.

The leader of the cult is a former member of Benezia’s commando unit who I’m gonna name Naiya P’Vari. Seriously considered making this a return for Rana Thanoptis, since I was disappointed at her offhanded email death in ME3, and, considering that the mission on Korlus has to be completed and has to be completed before Horizon, I could have made the argument for her to be responsible, but she can be outright killed in ME1, so making her an arc boss is too tricky. Plus Rana’s a scientist, not a soldier, and wouldn’t be much of a threat as an end boss. So it’s an original character. P’Vari ultimately emerges in the name of responding to Shepard’s meddling.

Now, obviously, of course, she is indoctrinated, that she was sent back from the forces that Benezia had with her when she joined with Saren and Sovereign. She’s heard the voices of the Reapers, has set out to stop the asari from getting involved in the coming fight. I’m also inclined to say that she’ll also be able to hint at how the Matriarchs are sitting on a prothean beacon at the expense of the rest of the galaxy as well, though that’s the kind of thing that will need to fly past Shepard in the first playthrough.

She was sent back, specifically, with a Reaper artifact, the thing that has indoctrinated her lieutenants, other former commandos – the idea here is for her to plant the seed of paranoia, because she could have indoctrinated others as well, made them also servants to the Reapers. There could easily still be asari commandos who are acting among their fellows, acting normal, just waiting to be unleashed when the Reapers arrive and betray their fellows.

Obviously, it eventually devolves into a fight. It’s a full on case of Shepard versus an asari commando unit. Because the game itself already calls back to Benezia asking if Shepard had ever faced such a thing. Plus I did find the biotic enemy combat in ME2 to be some of the better upgrades between the two games, so let’s take advantage of that with a full field of biotic opponents, a real combat unit of asari commandos who are ready and able to fight to the death.

After the fight’s over, the question becomes first, what to do with the remains of the cult – they’re still the asari’s disaffected youth, and they’ve got to be encouraged to try out some alternative to just letting the Matriarchs do as they’ve always done, put that passion to better use by suggesting that they give it new focus. Paragon/Renegade choice of how to motivate them, by encouraging more new forms of scientific discovery and exploration (in the vein of how Matriarch Aethyta had commented about how she’d gotten the blue laughed off her ass for suggesting they work on developing their own research into Mass Effect Relays and trying to figure out the secrets of the tech that they rely on), or to put the focus on military and combat strength.

But the second, and more pressing question is what to do about the possibility of indoctrinated infiltration of the asari military – that could undermine the eventual war effort before it gets off the ground. Here, there is no Paragon/Renegade choice – We’re not offering a strict morality dichotomy on this one, you have to guess what’s best, and who knows for sure if your guess is right? Maybe you’re acting to prevent indoctrinated troops, outing those who P’Vari had been in contact with as possible security risks, but maybe you just had some of the best military operatives in the asari ranks sidelined and questioned and put on a permanent suspicion/surveillance listing, just because you took seriously the ramblings of a madwoman. You don’t get to know (at least, not until ME3 impacts the War Assets).

And, as Palaven before it, we retain the ability to visit a small segment of Thessia afterwards in the same way that Tuchanka and Illium exist in the base game. Because after all this development of the connection with the planet, we should be able to return at least a little.

As for the matter of the Justicars (I told you we’d come back to this after the main plot), we’re going to be taking the opportunity to expand on them as a part of asari culture – because they have a Code that demands that they see only black or white in a universe full of gray, this is obviously going to be butting up against a lot of reality. To the Justicars, according to Samara, their purpose is to bring order to a universe that laughs at the notion. And by having given her oath that she will allow Shepard’s morals and actions guide her while she is working with them, Samara would, by a casual interpretation of the Code, be violating that.

We’re going to be at odds with another Justicar – I’m thinking Phora, who is mentioned on the datapads in the Ardat-Yakshi monastery in ME3 who has been terrorizing those she brings in. Because if she’s an issue there, and the Justicars aren’t supposed to be very numerous, why not connect the two. Phora’s opinion is that Shepard is a problem.

Shepard is, she believes, pushing Samara into acting against the Code and its teachings, and that makes Shepard both a problem and a threat. Because here’s the thing about black and white mindsets: Once you are in them, you are in the right, and anyone who is not in agreement with you is in the wrong. So Phora is going to be pushing and poking, trying to create a situation where Shepard will call upon Samara to break her Justicar oath in the name of following her oath to Shepard.

Phora is a zealot, who believes unquestionably in the moral rightness of the Code. So Shepard bringing Samara, one of her sisters, into their world of the moral grey, the place where these squiggy questions of subjectivity come in to play... That threatens her mindset – if one Justicar even seems to be considering how “right” the Code is, surely more questions will come. The zealots want to “defend” their faith at the expense of anyone who does not view things from their specific lens, which, for Phora, means that she can only view Shepard as a threat.

This culminates in a confrontation between the two, Phora and Samara. Phora is swayed to back down because of Samara calling her to the carpet – her ideas only really worked in that either/or stance that ignores the element of Samara’s choice – she chose to undertake the oath that she swore to Shepard, that bound her to their morality. The Code even allowed for this, an interpretation that Phora is resistant to accept, because it is a bending of that rigid morality.

Phora will withdraw, but I see her having room to reappear in, say an ME3 installment (see, this is what we call “foreshadowing”). Meanwhile, Samara is... not shaken, exactly, but perturbed. One of her Justicar sisters was interpreting the Code in a way that diminished it. How is it that, even among the asari, whose civilization has stood firm for millennia, there is this gap? It’s the same kind of question that is facing the main plot of this DLC – conflict among the asari is unusual, normally they just debate things out and agree on the best course of action, but this is those debates taking an actual cost in... well, okay, not quite lives, this wasn’t a life or death situation, but it is actually reshaping the ideas that the asari are following by having people come to blows on the matter, reach a point where they would draw a weapon upon one another in service of resolving their problem.

She will express some mild belief that some of this is simply the spread of new ideas from sources like the other races, and humanity in particular – like she says, if three humans are in a room, you’ll get six opinions – but that this is, ultimately, an asari issue, down to the culture of their people. That the asari haven’t just trained themselves to believe that this black and white dichotomy is good and ‘just’ (hence it being the moral code that the Justicars are all sworn to), but that they are often forgetting even one of their own tenants in diplomacy – how to compromise within those varied opinions.

This is some further cultural building for the asari – something that better justifies things like (as I mentioned in the first Mass Effect write-up) Liara being the only proponent of the cycle theory, despite the two thousand years of study. The asari are not just set in their ways, they are refusing any change, in a way standing in the way of progress – new ideas must be talked about long enough to become old ideas before they will even start to take them seriously, let alone implement any change that they might cause. That’s what Aethyta is certainly implying when she says that she got the blue laughed off her ass for suggesting that the asari build their own Mass Effect Relays. The asari don’t WANT to progress. And the point here is that we’re calling this out because it’s the kind of situation the Reapers are easy to take advantage of.

Samara is going to acknowledge that she too is set in her ways with the way that she is and the way that her society is. But for the future, the asari must foster that change, rather than attempt to stifle it. And it may call in to question even the idea of the Justicar order, because of the rigidity that they adhere to. Samara will not be able to change the world or the order. But she may attempt to apply this within the Code and how she follows it.

Because this is laying groundwork both for the response of the asari in ME3 and how Samara handles matters at the monastery.

Post Game Followups:

ME3: The asari military is weakened no matter what Shepard chose – there WERE indoctrinated agents among the military, but not as many as would be displaced by exposing P’Vari’s plants, which means that their military either has to fight among itself or has lost many of the best operatives they had. There will be asari who confront Shepard over this choice on the Citadel, either way. And, like I said, Phora will be back in a future installment.

Moon Crash

A Terminus colony world sends out a distress beacon – their planet’s moon has abruptly entered a decaying orbit, threatening to shatter their world. Because of the human population there, the Illusive Man is determined to send Cerberus to the rescue, and who better to handle this than Commander Shepard? But how and why did this happen – are the Collectors involved?

So let’s just answer that teaser question first: No. This is not the Collectors. They’re not responsible and we’re not dealing with them. This is not their MO, and we’re not going to go in the direction of that changing. But it is a legitimate concern for Shepard and company – they are acting to protect these border colonies from threats, and this is a colony world in danger, the kind that SHOULD be easily avoidable. After all, we get several planet descriptions that talk about projected lunar collisions with the planets they orbit, even a few that have anticipation for selling tickets for the event.

Which means that, when Shepard and company arrive, this is something that they really do need to do, regardless of Collector involvement or Cerberus’s stamp on the orders. The colony may have refused to be a part of the Alliance’s official register, but they’re not turning away help in their time of need – Shepard’s reputation is good for something here, with the fact that they were the one who is named as the one who saved the Citadel as reason for them being accepted as assistance right off.

I’m leaning towards saying that we’re not going to be requiring any particular squadmates this time out, just on the basis of this being a crisis that takes whoever we get in terms of who Shepard is bringing with them. Bring anyone, game mechanics say you can’t bring everyone – though, because I think that it’s kinda crazy that in a game with twelve possible companions, Shepard only ever runs around with two of them at a time, we will put the understanding that it’s explicit that the other companions are running efforts at evacuation. This is absolutely busy work, but in bringing up it’s acknowledged that this is about making it so that the people don’t panic.

The first thing that happens is a run through the colony’s main area, helping with the evacuation efforts. Yes, this is busy work, but it’s because while Shepard and company are doing this, EDI can assist the colonists in tracking mysterious signals (because there are always mysterious signals on missions like this). There’s a signal that Shepard is able to track within the main area of the colony that acts as their link – there’s an object emitting a signal that’s pulling the moon in, and it’s got a counterpart on the moon itself.

This means that Shepard and company head up to the moon, hoping they can stop it before the moon’s orbit decays too badly – it’s not clear at this point if the moon’s orbital decay can be undone, though Shepard is going to be acting on the idea that either a) if the orbit can be artificially knocked out of whack, it can also be restored OR b) at the very least, they can have enough time to properly evacuate the colony.

(For the record, I’m imagining this as a colony of a few thousand – too many to load up on the few cargo ships available to them, but not enough that it would need like a fleet the size of the quarian flotilla or something to evacuate.)

So Shepard heads up to the moon, finding the counterpart emitter, but can’t just shut it off – it’s unknown tech, just straight up shutting it off might mean it never comes back on and can’t be used to put the moon back into place.

This is when we meet the true source of the moon being knocked out of orbit. An AI, left behind from a prior cycle, even prior to the protheans. It takes some work to get it to translate in to Standard, given that it was programmed for languages dead for over a hundred thousand years, and when it does start speaking understandably, it’s not particularly interested in talking – apparently, it’s seen enough of the Reaper cycle that it’s ready to simply consider the Reaper invasion a fact of existence.

And the terrifying thing of what it is doing is that it believes that crashing the moon into the planet below is doing a kindness to these people. Because it’ll be a swift death. These people settled on a world so close to the time of this cycle’s Reaper invasion, the AI simply can’t consider it “good conscience” to allow them to survive just to be made into husks – or, if this is played post-game, orange goo for the human!Reaper.

I’m looking at this from a foreshadowing perspective – this is an AI convinced that it’s doing the right thing, despite the damage it inflicts upon the individual people. It’s thinking is that it is preventing a greater evil by doing this damaging thing that the people who are being sacrificed would certainly not agree with on their own.

The core of the AI is inaccessible – everything that Shepard can interact with is just the shell that it inhabits, it has preserved its core functions in places that are burrowed in the rock around them. What we get instead are a series of combat points that lead to dialogue that accumulates “points,” the same system we see with like Omega and Aria, trying to sway the AI towards letting the people survive, putting the moon back in orbit. This is one of those things that the goal is the same regardless of positions on the dialogue wheel, it’s just how you handle it, and you accumulate enough “points” in the dialogue that it unlocks the final persuasive dialogue once you make it through the gauntlet of combat.

So when Shepard reaches the access point that the gauntlet is leading them through, it’s a choice time. Not just does Shepard argue with the AI and sway them that there may be a chance for this cycle, and, if there is, then the AI is not sparing these people pain but killing them because of its own fear, but does Shepard even see the value in arguing – this is an AI, an artificial life form. It could be said that, afterwards, this was a program that believed itself sentient, but still bound to its programming that told it this.

Indeed, while I am not mandating a companion to join on this mission, I feel like EDI in particular (and Legion, if they were kept and activated) would have some things to say in the aftermath. Legion might be able to offer some additional dialogue points, but I feel like the focus is on EDI, and not just because there’s no way you could even start this DLC without having access to her. It also builds in to her eventual ME3 arc. EDI is going to be the one who speaks with Shepard afterwards about what they did and the why they did it.

Obviously, killing the AI is the easy, straightforward option, and how things are handled if Shepard doesn’t earn enough points through the dialogue choices. If they do convince it to back down, though, well, first of all, there is still an option to shoot it. The AI, having built itself into the interior of the moon, is not something that can be just taken from this place, and will need aid to be removed, a difficult task on its own, but also an AI is illegal in Citadel space, which means that the experts who could help download it to a more proper shell, get it out of the moon and take it somewhere else, are going to be hard to track down and be convinced they won’t get locked away for their efforts.

Resolving the issue of the AI is not going to be enough to stop the moon from colliding with the planet. But it does slow it down so that the colony can be evacuated, down that, really, they’ll get a handful of decades out of the planet itself before the collision happens. And I want to see some aftermath – some colonists are certainly getting the hell out, but some are going to stay until the crash comes. It was one thing for it to be a sudden event, but now there are people who want to catalog the planet’s uniqueness for history, an archive that says that this was once here.

Because that’s the counterpoint to these AI intelligences that say they are “preserving” life or “sparing” people. One of the things with humans (and so we extend this into our fiction to be a part of being organic) is that even when something is hopeless and doomed, we can decide that we will act to preserve it, even if it is just in the name of making sure it’s something that can be remembered. Whether or not something continues, we want to memorialize and remember things. This planet’s unique flora and fauna will be cataloged by the colonists who remain, conservation efforts made.

And, back on the Normandy, that conversation with EDI is waiting. She is asking the questions that react to Shepard’s choice – why did you kill/spare the AI? She is curious about how AI is handled in Citadel space, and how it will be impacted, both in eventual aftermath of the Reapers’ coming and in her own contributions. (I figure there are a few differences depending on if this is played pre or post Suicide Mission.)

Post-Game Followups:

ME3 – Destroying the AI provides some actual advancements in the realm of AI, which is suddenly all the rage come the invasion. The field is getting some real study now, which provides a boost in war assets. The AI being kept intact is providing historical information, details that are useful as the Citadel races are trying to map the course of the invasion, and offering some ideas on what order the Reapers will hit things, giving a defense boost in war assets. There’s also a bonus quest of trying to convince AI experts to get involved in the Crucible, and Shepard gets a bonus to convincing them to join in if they spared the AI – it says to these scientists that they won’t be clapped in irons for their work when civilization is saved (assuming they pull it all off, of course).

Dying Gasps

The drell, as a species, are in peril. Their numbers, low already because of the limited numbers the hanar were able to rescue, are nearing the tipping point between survival and extinction. With the debt the drell feel towards the hanar, they won’t leave Kahje, even as the planet’s aquatic nature threatens them. Commander Shepard and crew make the effort to intercede...

In the first part of these write-ups for ME2, I make mention of how we’re coming back to issues with Thane? Yeah, here we go.

I have been over before that I find the hanar-drell Compact to be sketchy as fuck. In the drell, you have a species native to an arid and dry world. When the hanar discover them and rescue them from their self-destructing society, the hanar take them to THEIR homeworld, a planet 90% water. The hanar, who are big stupid jellyfish, suddenly have a species who feel indebted to them who fit the general shape, body, and build of the other major species of the known galaxy. The drell are then chosen to train as assassins for the hanar from childhood, a choosing that is considered among them a great honor that they’re technically free to refuse, but how often do they?

So we have a species in existential debt to another, act as their assassins, and they feel compelled to give up their children for this duty? While living on a planet that is actively hostile to their own biology, while apparently all that is being done to try and cure Kepral’s Syndrome is to have ‘the greatest minds in the hanar Primacy’ work on it, as opposed to... y’know, giving the drell their own planet better suited to their biology? This is not right. You cannot convince me it is.

And I think that Thane is considering it at least by the course of ME2, but not quite able to admit it aloud. He will apologize to Shepard, say he’s given them the wrong idea, when Shepard calls out his use of the word “investment,” and then gets almost angry when Shepard compares the Compact to slavery. Except... How is this NOT slavery? Just dressed up to seem “nice” by providing a veneer of options – if the drell consider the selection of a child for this duty under the Compact “an honor,” then they’re compelled to give their children over for this.

It seems like this is something that IS on Thane’s mind by the time that Shepard asks about it, given how defensive he sounds about it, as if he’s busy trying to talk himself out of asking the questions that Shepard’s comments are bringing up. So instead, we’re here to tackle these questions head on.

What’s happening is that Thane hears from some contacts back in the Kahje system, that there’s some discomforting rumbles beginning to happen around Kahje, about how the drell – in particular, the youth of the species – are starting to wonder whether or not the “greatest minds in the Primacy” really are putting in the work to resolve Kepral’s Syndrome, and maybe the drell would be better off leaving Kahje entirely.

Thane’s initial response to this is to be all generationally frustrated – “this is just the anger of the youth, lashing out at the established systems, darn those kids and their rap music and their pop culture and their 23-skidoo!” Shepard gets to be the one who brings up that often, when the next generation is complaining about the way that things are, it often means that the prior generation is stuck in their ways and negatively impacting the future by clinging to the past (real world commentary, what real world commentary?). There may well be something to the complaints of the young, and it couldn’t hurt to actually listen and acknowledge them.

So, I know that the ending of Thane’s loyalty mission is variable – if Shepard loses sight of Talid during the tailing sequence, Kolyat is able to kill him and get away. But we’re just gonna assume that things went well here, again for simplifying my role as expositor, seeing as how, much as I enjoy the failure possibility of Thane, Samara, and Tali’s loyalty missions, I don’t fail those, not even intentionally – the only reason I see to do that is to get them killed on the Suicide Mission, and I prefer to find ways to do that that don’t leave me feeling shame for doing nothing to make the lives of my friends better just to follow that up with getting them killed. So we’re going from that understanding.

This means that Kolyat gets to greet us on Kahje (at what I’m going to refer to as “the drell enclave,” but assume it has something nicer and more distinct as a name) and act as the voice of the young drell who are becoming resistant to the hanar. (He’s been doing community service on the Citadel under Commander Bailey, but the idea here is that he has done enough to earn a bit of a reprieve, leading to him being called back by his own friends on Kahje – he’s not the only young drell with a family member who’s contracted Kepral’s Syndrome, and he IS feeling skeptical.

This is going to start the butting of heads – Thane reflexively takes the side of the hanar in all this, because he’s had to go along with the Compact for years, but Kolyat has the element of righteousness, since he’s JUST gotten his father back in his life, and now he wants to see if there’s anything that can be done to extend his life (Shepard – romanced and non – will have a response to that as well, though Thane will be more accepting of any comment in agreement with Kolyat from a romanced Shepard).

This is going to be another investigative focused story, because that appeals to me and these are my ideas. Mostly because the real drama is in Thane and Kolyat bouncing off each other – their story in the base game is about a father reaching out to his son, but the point here is that the grand gestures are the easiest part of making amends. It’s the little things, such as can Thane recognize Kolyat as a person who is thinking for himself and coming to his own conclusions rather than just following the crowd, or can Kolyat see his father as the flawed mortal he is, rather than the extreme of being the father who abandoned him and regrets that he prioritized that.

Our drama is in the human element, even in the fact that this is a pair of aliens interacting. The thing for me is that even in the game proper, Thane acknowledges that he and Kolyat need time to patch their relationship, and time is a resource that Thane has little of, not just because of Kepral’s but the Suicide Mission – which, let’s be clear, Kolyat is going to have a few additional words towards Shepard on the subject of. Shepard can take the lumps he throws at them, though Thane will try to intercede.

We’ll also be expanding on the drell and the hanar – the hanar themselves only have a minor cameo in ME2, as non-interactable figures in the Citadel docking bay. But the hanar are for the sidequests of this DLC, where they get to give Shepard the chance to explore their society and culture – somewhere in this, surely, is the quest about learning the soul name of a hanar, and further exploring why it is that the hanar have this distinction. Plus some further expansion into the hanar’s version of the protheans, the Enkindlers, and show some of the ideas that the hanar have of them, the kind of ideas that Javik’s existence in ME3 will either prove or disprove.

The big combat portion that we have to go in to (if we must, we must) is that there will be call to infiltrate a research facility. It’s on an isolated base, beyond any of the hanar cities or facilities that are traditionally given to house any non-aquatic life. The drell separatists (for want of a better term) believe that the hanar have been hiding additional research and information down there, things that the drell deserve to know, about the research into Kepral’s Syndrome and other things related to the drell living on Kahje, and they’re begging Shepard to go with them. Thane will accompany them in the name of finding a way around this. (Kolyat will be remaining behind – Thane insists, wanting to keep his son out of combat.)

However, as it turns out, this particular facility has mercenary guards, rather than the expected drell operatives. That’s already setting off alarm bells, and Thane’s connections only get them access so far. Once it’s clear that the information they’re looking for is not going to be given over easily, things will devolve into fighting.

Thane is not pleased at whatever is coming out of this – it’s going to be causing upset no matter what, that the hanar have trusted their safety with mercenaries loyal to a paycheck, and, by using these mercenaries, it makes it seem likely that the youth are on to something with the recognition that something doesn’t seem right among the hanar-drell relations.

In terms of design, I’m thinking this place is kinda like the Sith base on Manaan in KOTOR (updated to the engine used in Mass Effect, obviously), and uses similar puzzles (because this is still a video game). The puzzles and combat all lead to the lead scientist of the base – a drell. Who is actively dissecting his own people in his studies of disease.

Yes, the horrors are being done by a drell, who is studying the effects of Kepral’s and other similar diseases that the drell have developed. His studies began under the allowances of the hanar, and have been growing out from that point. He’s basically been given a blank check and a blind eye from the hanar, to study these things and investigate further. And it’s around this point we realize that it’s not dissection – it’s vivisection. His present subject is still alive, if only barely.

(If he’s part of the party, Mordin has some choice words for this mad science, and even Miranda, the woman who led the team to rebuild Shepard, is discomfited at the idea.)

We’re killing this bastard, let’s just be clear on that. There is a morality choice here, but it’s not in letting a guy studying still beating hearts up close live.

No, what it is in detailing what has been going on here. Because this is going to shatter the image that the hanar have for many drell. Rather than protectors and friends, this will reveal the hanar as having been unconcerned to handle this themselves, and let a madman do unspeakable things to their family. Learning about this will be devastating to the drell overall, and perhaps undermine their standing among one another. Thane has to question how this is going to impact his people. If Shepard reveals this to the drell, it’s going to make the drell question their place – and perhaps do damage to any hope of Shepard having the drell and hanar as allies, because Shepard becomes the one who blew the lid on this.

That’s the choice – tell the drell what the hanar were allowing to be done in their name because they just... didn’t bother to take this responsibility on themselves, leaving it in the hands of a complete monster, or keep this secret in the name of preserving the hanar-drell relations. Thane is willing to leave this in Shepard’s hands – he is too conflicted, and he can’t settle his emotions enough to make the decision. Much like Mordin and the genophage data, he is willing to let Shepard make this decision rather than make the choice himself.

Afterwards, he and Kolyat get to speak to one another, spends some time together, as Shepard gets the ability to go around, do the various sidequests and stuff – again, I’m not covering that here, but this is our only real chance to visit Kahje, so let’s get to explore it a little and do things. At this point, with the main plot resolved, Kahje’s a bit of a hub world for Shepard to do things and learn about the hanar people and culture, as well as the drell.

But afterwards, back on the Normandy, Thane is still rethinking the cultural mindset that the drell have towards the hanar. This has, regardless of how the other drell are reacting, shaken him, putting forth the fact that the hanar may not be the strong friends and allies that he and the drell in general have always believed them to be. This is a major blow to him, because the hanar were saviors to the drell, and that these people have been his friends, and yet... to an extent, they haven’t really CARED. Maybe individually, but on the whole...

For Thane, this is one of those moments that really makes him reconsider things – he was at peace with his death before. But now, knowing that things aren’t as assured as they were, he’s considering the world that will be left to go on without him – the world he’s basically leaving his son to at this point. It makes him care a lot more about firmly reconnecting with Kolyat, encouraging him to have knowledge and awareness of the things that consist of the drell culture, so that the old ways aren’t going to die with him (and giving more significance to Kolyat reading from the prayer book in ME3, “speaking as the priests do”).

Oh, and consider that drell enclave a remaining minor hub to visit. Bit of a running theme, I know, but it does help make these homeworlds of the races of the galaxy seem to have a little more to them, that we can visit them and subsequently want to see more of them.

Post-Game Followups:

ME3 – First off, I do want to point out that there’s going to be another drell-hanar focused DLC when I reach ME3, so there’s a lot that will likely come in to play there that probably lean on what happened here. But until I reach that point in my development, I don’t know the specifics yet, so just understand that there’s some flux happening here.

More specifically, though, I want to at least hear of, if not actually see and assist with, some efforts of drell to leave Kahje, appear on the Citadel – either they’re the growing dissident movement, now that the hanar’s failures have been exposed, or they’re part of the dissatisfied drell youth who are leaving Kahje, and their people, behind. At one point in ME2, Thane mentions that the old ways of the drell are dying, so among Shepard’s fetch quests is to do a flyby of the original drell homeworld, Rakhana, and receive a cultural codex of some kind that can be passed on to those trying to recover anything of the drell ways prior to the encroachment of the ideology of the Enkindlers. This gives a boost in war assets, and unlocks a Kolyat-centric side mission on the Citadel after the Cerberus Coup, something that effectively checks in on him and his plans following the death of his father. Because really, where was he after Thane dies, anyway? (Not anything major, just a “put feet to the fire in the research of Kepral’s Syndrome after his father dies saving the salarian councilor” kind of thing that has Shepard go to Valern/Esheel and make a point of bringing this up – this has the same kind of element of the side missions with Kasumi or Zaeed, in that it’s got a choice that having completed the DLC will have Kolyat there and it resolves things with both war assets and Kolyat.)

Succession Crisis

A renowned salarian Dalatrass abruptly dies, and with her death, Sur’Kesh is in an uproar, seeing many of the lines of salarian breeding suddenly upset. Mordin suggests to Shepard that this would make for a chance to build allies among the salarian leadership for when the Reapers arrive. He is not the only one who has this idea, however...

So some codex talk here: There’s an offshoot of the salarians only referred to as the Lystheni. That’s all the information that we really get about them, save that they’re apparently unwelcome in Council space. I see this “offshoot” as being, in effect, the same kind of “offshoot” as Star Trek’s Vulcans and Romulans, where the Lystheni have an ideological conflict with mainstream salarian society, that a schism formed between the two and the Lystheni have left Sur’Kesh to the salarians, that they began as a political group, but because of their conflict with mainstream society, they’ve taken their political label as their race name. Though, obviously, not as separated as the Romulans and Vulcans, but probably separated by a few centuries, which, given the salarian lifespan is only about roughly forty years, is still multiple generations more than it would be for humans.

Now, how does this all tie back to the above blurb? Well, this death of a Dalatrass is a big deal. Think of “Britain after the Queen dies” big deal. Not necessarily THE “Queen” of the salarians, but a really big deal, and it creates a lot of chaos. Not just the “one of our leaders has unexpectedly died” kind of chaos but the upset this is going to shake up their various breeding strategies, which we know have a high level of importance among salarian culture (see the side quest on Illium), in that her line was one that many were angling to be a part of, and, with her gone, now there’s a political gap, the kind that can only be filled by multiple people, rather than just one individual replacing her at the top of the proverbial heap, and so that’s going to impact who’s going to be in charge on Sur’Kesh.

Y’know, it’s the “now that we CAN have a better position in society, we damn well deserve it” kind of thinking, and it’s hitting with several of the various political factions and families across the planet.

Mordin’s idea that Shepard get involved stems from a handful of matters – of course, there’s the obvious fact of there being a crisis among the salarians that needs to be resolved, and, as with the above situation with the turians in crisis, it’s about preemptive coalition building. In assisting here and now, there are going to be salarians in general and families more broadly who are going to owe Shepard one, and a salarian owing you a favor is always handy on a rainy day.

Again, this allows an opportunity to explore Sur’Kesh some, since we basically just get to see a single building (or block of connected buildings) in ME3 – I have words about the smallness of the maps in ME3 in general, but for a major Citadel race planet, Sur’Kesh offers so little, it’s disappointing. So yeah. We get to play around in the salarians playground.

Same as our prior forays into Palaven and Thessia, I’m not going to get too in depth in what we get to see, but this should give us a little more grounding into Sur’Kesh in general. And, like Palaven, Thessia, and Kahje, Sur’Kesh will have a small hub accessible after the conclusion. Again: Themes, connections to the homeworlds, so on, so on. Also, obviously, Mordin is our primary companion in this mission, though, for the record, I honestly see a place for Miranda in a secondary position, during the subplots and such, which I’ll come back to closer to the end, once the main plot is out of the way.

It’s here that we get out introduction to the Lystheni. They have an emissary here on Sur’Kesh, and they’re looking to find some way back in to the mainstream of salarian society. We get some briefs on the differences between them and the salarian majority – I’ve said it’s a political divide that led to them separating enough to consider themselves almost separate species, so it’s gotta be more than the simple thing of like “we want war! We want peace!” and the like. Going back to the Vulcan/Romulan comparison, that was a divide over the philosophy of logic and the suppression of emotion – the Romulans took issue with the idea of Surak’s philosophies, they made a mass exodus of the planet. So this is something that is a divide on a deeply cultural level.

So I’m thinking that the divide has a lot to do with the hierarchy of the salarian people – we know that the leaders of the salarians are the Dalatrasses, who get described in the codex and reference materials as heads of dynasties and kingpins. Taking this to an extreme, this seems like it’d be sort of like a mafia family, only with Godmothers instead of Godfathers. Part of the Lystheni’s grievances with the mainline salarian attitudes is going to be the fact that it’s frequently the Dalatrasses, who are making decisions for the culture at large, when the male-to-female ratio is about 9:1, and basically leaving the males out of decision-making, even on matters that have direct concern of them.

Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot to discuss about Mass Effect tackling the subject of sexism, especially through a lens of “reverse the dynamic.” Let’s just put that aside for now, huh? We’re in fantasy realm, and this is where everything works the way that it should. And we also are going to involve an element of pointing out that, even in this leadership structure that favors women in power, Valern got made a Councilor over any of the qualified women. Despite the Lystheni’s claims, the salarian government may be made up of mostly their rare women, but it is not actively blocking the advancement of men.

But that’s where the big polarization between the two groups comes down – the Lystheni want this to be an opportunity for the salarians to put their money where their mouths are (or utilize a more appropriate cultural metaphor). With an abrupt opening in the local hierarchy, the Lystheni are saying “this would certainly be the time to have a male Dalatress, prove to us that all this business of the salarian leadership being open and free for all isn’t just words.”

While the Lystheni are going to play a part in this, thought, they are only a part of it. We’re here to get a grip on the salarian political situation – again, the dalatrasses are something of a mafia structure, and that means there’s a lot of jockeying for power and skullduggery taking place, so the Lystheni are basically going to be sharing time with the main plot – just because they feature, they’re not the stars here. It’s the salarian politics that we’re focusing on first and foremost.

Because the thing about this kind of a gap in the salarian leadership, the heads of the families, is that usually, they’re seen coming in advance and that head has an opportunity to groom their successor. Here, however, there are a few qualified candidates – let’s go with three, as a nice, simple number. Two are the dalatrass’s daughters, which, having multiple female children is part of why she’s managed to be such a voice among the salarians, the other is her son.

Yes, we’re going for a big family squabble here. Mordin explains some of the family dynamics – salarians, being born in clutches of eggs, have close ties to the mother who birthed them (well, laid... You know what I mean) and to the siblings from their clutch. This is a typical triad in personalities – the conservative, the revolutionary, the middle ground (the daughters as the conservative and middle ground, with the son being revolutionary, considering the dynamics of salarian politics). I would assume that there’s also a strong tie to those who are from the same clutch, which makes this the mother of all sibling rivalries – all three want to assume the role of leadership, all three have political beliefs that will exclude or diminish the role of the others.

The thing that they’re all coming back to is disbelief that this was a natural death – it was unexpected, how does a salarian not see a medical issue coming, etc. etc. That’s actually probably the thing that they’re all unified on – if this was a murder and one of them killed their own mother, then that individual has no business taking her place in salarian politics, which is spiking the tensions between the siblings, and it quickly falls on Shepard to act as the neutral third party to investigate the matter – even salarian law enforcement is not going to be very trusted at the moment.

So this becomes a matter of exploring the salarian attitudes (hence Mordin’s involvement, offering the perspective and being able to be clinically divorced from it – and yes, as things go on, his calm is damaged, because this is his people, his planet, and he does have an emotional reaction).

Investigate and explore, you know how this works by now. The end result is that Lystheni (who the son has been favorable towards, though keeping his connections to on the downlow because it wouldn’t reflect well on him) were NOT responsible, and it was the ‘middle ground’ daughter who set about finding a way to eliminate her mother – this is an instance of trying to set the others at their throats and make it so that she comes out seeming better in comparison.

I see this having a resolution in the same manner as the Dragon Age Inquisition Winter Palace segment – the boss battle of the DLC is one you CAN have, but if you take the right dialogue options, you can also resolve matters without having to fire a shot.

As I said in my ME1 write up, Shepard is supposed to be incredibly good at what they do, and this includes the art of diplomacy. I know this is an action-adventure sci-fi shooter RPG and all, but considering how much galactic level issues Shepard ends up resolving over the course of the trilogy (particularly ME3), they need to have their credentials of talking on display as well.

The issue with this, however, is that with her out of the picture, the salarians have only the extremes as options, and look to Shepard to help cast a vote. Do they upend everything that has guided their society and have a massive cultural shake-up on the cusp of war with the Reapers, a war that will likely bring its own upheavals, or do they stick to the status quo and leave the fostering resentment?

Once again, I’m looking at this without the Paragon/Renegade distinction – even aside from the fact that just in general, I think the Paragon/Renegade scale is a holdover from the days of KOTOR and its light side/dark side mechanic, this is a political decision, and if IRL has taught us anything about politics, it’s that, when it works (let’s not get into how well it accomplishes this), it’s a matter of picking from various lesser evils. I think there’s more of BioWare’s much touted “grey morality” when there isn’t a clear cut right or wrong.

Sure, Shepard isn’t going to be the only voice offering an opinion on the matter, but, like getting the human Councilor in ME1, they’re influential enough that it sways public opinion – the endorsement is the kind of boost that makes a difference.

Going back to the Lystheni, they are something of a barometer of the future of salarian society. The obvious reactions are obvious – there is a great deal of frustration at the absolute failure to change if the conservative daughter was chosen, and expectation of opportunity if the son was. I know they haven’t exactly been much of a player in this, but part of the point of their involvement here is in the name of expanding and exploring the salarian culture in how the cultural rebels have built themselves up – these are the counter-culture, balanced against a shift in the mainstream culture. They don’t know what’s next, and they want to make their voice heard – despite the schism between the two groups, they are still family (yes, I want to use the “house divided, family split asunder” with the Dalatrass’s children as a metaphor for the salarians and Lystheni).

Mordin is not silent in all of this, of course – he’s going to have his own thoughts on the matter. My Mordin voice is presently unrefined, but his opinion will have something of a ‘my people have much dysfunction, perhaps an outside perspective will do some good’ attitude to it. That said, he also ends up having a push-pull to deal with of his own – his family’s mating prospects are damaged in the revolutionary coming to power, and yet he sees it as a good for the greater whole, that the salarians need some kind of change – a species who stagnates doesn’t evolve. (Yes, we’re planning seeds that pay off with the salarian-krogan arc in ME3, give it some better foreshadowing. Because I can do that here.)

While I’m here, I also want there to be some exploration of Grunt as a companion. I’m not saying it’s mandatory, because bringing a krogan out on the town on Sur’Kesh could easily qualify as A Bad Idea. But if you DO take him out, I want it to be discovered that there’s a questline for him specifically – just as much as a krogan on Sur’Kesh is a bad idea, it’s an interesting encounter at the same time. Grunt is also a source of interest for the salarians, being tankbred by Doctor Okeer.

Grunt is not impressed by the salarians, of course, and has no particular interest in them, but does get perspectives on the genophage – one of the things that comes across to me, hearing about it, is that the genophage isn’t JUST a fertility disease. It’s the biowarfare equivalent of a dirty bomb inflicted on a populace, because of the stillborn factor. It’s not that they can’t reproduce. It’s that they can’t give birth to living young.

To a lot of the salarians, the krogan are a distant threat – anyone living on Sur’Kesh probably doesn’t even get the chance to meet a krogan. And so here we see a representative of what the krogan get driven to because of the genophage. It’s the kind of experience that I think would challenge the beliefs of a lot of the salarian people, actually having a krogan on Sur’Kesh, interacting with them.

Post-Game Followups:

ME3: Impact on the salarian political situation – Dalatrass Linron will have her hood in a snit either way, but there’s a new short questline on the Citadel about the Lystheni, featuring her as the obstructive diplomat as they argue for rights. The conservative leader has them on defense and basically pushing to be recognized as a separate people from the salarians, while the reformer is pushing for peace talks and questions of rejoining the populace. Either way, Linron is objecting to even hearing their proposals. Mostly, this is me thinking that Linron needs to be taken down a peg, given how she’s the one talking about “a bully has few friends when he needs them most” while being the only one at the conference engaging in bullying behavior. Here, we get the chance to professionally undermine her. Because it’s satisfying.

Frozen Blood

Red sand is illegal throughout most of Citadel space. Given the way it impacts biotic abilities, it’s incredibly dangerous. And now, it’s managed to spread through a major Citadel port. Although it’s smaller scale than most of the threats on Commander Shepard’s plate, both Miranda Lawson and Admiral Anderson suggest they do something to stop it.

Red sand gets brought up on enough occasions in the games, I kind feel like we miss out in not getting to actually have any practical experience with it in the games proper. So, yeah, we’re doing a drug bust storyline here. It’s mostly about expanding the lore in terms of the underworld of the universe – as much as BioWare claims that Omega is the seedy underbelly of the galaxy, it’s still pretty clean for the most part, all things considered. Granted, it may just be that my millennial sensibilities, knowing that I’ll never own a home, are envious of those studio apartments we ransack through in the quarantine district in Mordin’s recruitment mission, and don’t understand why those places are said to be in the slums when, while small, don’t exactly look like unpleasant living spaces. Anyway...

So this is gonna start with Anderson contacting Shepard – I feel like it’d be nice to see Anderson communicating with Shepard in the Debriefing Room instead of TIM. Miranda will be along as well, because this is “an opportunity to make in-roads with someone in the halls of power” and that such rubbish – remember, Miranda is still the Cerberus cheerleader, and she is only seeing the good of what Cerberus can accomplish, thinking of it as the Alliance’s answer to the asari commandos and the salarian STG, or even the Council’s Spectres. That’s what Cerberus is TO HER (even if it isn’t in reality, that’s just how she views it at this point in time). So she wants to take advantage of the opportunity to legitimize it.

We need to pause and define the properties of red sand, just so we’re all on the same page going forward – it’s supposed to allow non-biotics a high that allows them to feel something akin to having biotics, even being known to allow non-biotics some biotic abilities. Also, to date, humans are the only race known to be impacted by red sand, which honestly makes me think that its legality on Illium is another sign of the casual anti-human tendencies of Council space – this is going to come up as we go on.

Anderson is concerned about a new strain of red sand that’s been found in a presently-comatose Alliance marine. More potent, giving the users more of a high, more of a biotic kick, and more of a risk of a damaging crash. Miranda has also heard rumors about this – because of the effects red sand has on humans and only humans, it’s something that Cerberus monitors (I say take the opportunity and give Miranda and Anderson some chance at a back and forth – for Anderson, his disgust with Cerberus is on full display, and he’s making it clear that he’s not enamored of Shepard’s alliance of convenience, meaning that we’re disappointing Space!Dad in working with Cerberus, as a reminder to those who thought this alliance could last beyond ME2, while Miranda gets to show off her character growth, depending on the completion of her loyalty mission, that a pre-loyalty Miranda spouts the party line, while post-loyalty Miranda focuses on the fact that she – not Cerberus but Miranda – wants to help).

So with them on the same side of the argument, it’s pretty much inevitable that Shepard should go ahead and investigate. They’re gonna start on the Citadel (because, as I’ve said, the Citadel has a lot of areas to explore – you could probably set an entire trilogy of games here), doing more investigative work. And yes, I know, I lean on this a lot in the name of keeping things hazy, but (incoming soapbox) this is part of my problem with Mass Effect 2 on the whole – so much of this game is oriented towards combat. While I understand that in terms of being an action-adventure RPG, the thing for me is that Shepard needs to do more than “shoot good.” We need to see them as an intelligent person as well, giving them mysteries to unravel that involve finding and uncovering clues and putting pieces together, rather than just have answers to questions handed to them and being told their ability to shoot things makes them “the greatest EVAR!” Shepard’s abilities should be more than just the shooting.

The shooting will come, though, rest assured. Just... I want more to Shepard’s skill than their ability to fire a gun. And Mass Effect 2 is not given to these kinds of missions very often – Samara and Thane’s Loyalty Missions are about the only opportunities for this, along with a couple of non-combat missions through planet scanning, but still that’s like... five total, maybe – out of HOW many missions, exactly, in the whole game? – and I want more of that, and these are my DLC ideas, so what I say gets to go.

Back to the plot. The Citadel investigation leads us to our drug middleman. I was tempted to say that this leads us to Harkin again, but... eh, I don’t think we necessarily need to go there. I would have liked to have made this a cameo appearance from some minor ME1 character, but I can’t think of anyone who’s a real fit for it. So unless I come up with something better, we’re just going with random salarian person. They provide the next step – the drug factory itself is out in the Traverse, he just sells it on the Citadel.

The pause allows us a chance to meet with the victims of this drug – although there’s a coma and death involved in its side effects, we get to meet the people being impacted by this. I’d like to also get the chance through this to humanize the victims – y’know, we opened with concerns about a bunch of nameless, faceless others, it’s about trying to make connections, giving the audience a reason to care.

The Normandy heads out to the drug factory, and I picture this as a big set piece for the DLC. If you’re familiar with Star Wars Bounty Hunter, I’m thinking something like the deathstick factory level here. Because, sure, my critique of ME2 in general is that it’s too combat oriented, but you know something? Every now and then, you DO just want to shoot something, and my DLC ideas so far have been heavy on the investigative stuff. This is combat sequences in some inventive new areas, and it is mostly combat-centric, as opposed to a deeper and more intricate story with a great deal of choices. Nothing wrong with that every now and then.

And, on the thematic level, it’s a reminder – not every threat to the galaxy out there is something like the Reapers. There’s always a domestic threat to deal with, people with bad intentions out to hurt people in order to make a little cash. They’re a problem as much as the big level threats.

In point of fact, that’s what both the encounters with the people being impacted by the friends and family of those impacted by this red sand do AND the discussions with the crew – this isn’t an instance of having set companions, but I do expect them all to have comments during the stages, and Miranda gets a full conversation – her work with Cerberus, and even the Lazarus Project in specific, had her investigating red sand and its effects on biotics as a part of working to reanimate Shepard’s dead tissues (kinda want a comment here if Shepard has changed class between ME1 and ME2, and that the use of element zero in the process influenced that, though I’m not sure if that’s something that’s supposed to be acknowledged in universe... Whatever).

So the overall big bad is not some particular mastermind with dreams of galactic domination and such. It’s just some drug peddler who came up with a particularly potent product. But, in the end... That’s the point here. This is some lowlife who has no particular scheme beyond enriching himself. He HAS no connection to the greater story – or to the greater galaxy. All he is doing is thinking of himself. In a story about showing the importance of connection, he stands out for failing to have any, and considering it a strength – he’s claiming to be on top because of his lack of connections, his inhumanity towards others.

Shepard is proving him wrong.

And we’re also going to be addressing that, to the greater galaxy, this is a matter of “human-on-human violence,” that, because red sand only really impacts humans, it’s something that the other races don’t really pay attention to. It’s not that they’re encouraging it, but they don’t see it as a problem, because this isn’t impacting anyone but humanity.

It’s another sign of humanity being seen as the uppity attention grabbers of the galaxy, that, since humanity wants to be on this stage at a time when they’re “not ready” for the big leagues (even with being on the Council – remember, the Council is saying that all those human colony worlds Shepard is investigating the mass disappearance of isn’t worth their attention, even though humanity basically ends up taking over the primary fleet defense duties in the aftermath of the Battle of the Citadel), then humanity can solve its own problems, don’t look at us aliens.

This drug problem gets as big and as bad as it does because of the broad apathy towards human-centric issues in Citadel space, and, to build off of that connection theme, speaks to a disconnect on both sides, human and alien, where neither group is all too invested in one another – while I harp a lot about how the Citadel races have that subtle negative attitude towards humanity, it also feeds a negative attitude towards the other races in humans as well, and in this instance, it does need to be a case of both sides trying to listen. The problem both groups are having now is that humanity’s issues aren’t really being heard, and that closes humanity off to the issues of these others.

In this instance, I don’t think we really need a Paragon/Renegade conclusion – not just that this is a smaller scale story, in opposition to the bigger threats or connective stories of these other hypothetical DLCs, but the point of this whole story is in its themes and the message it is sending in talking about the importance of connection.

And it’s why we do get to have a follow-up with Miranda, since she is the character who began this DLC among our crew. Her whole façade in the beginning of the game is about being this dispassionate, rational, logical being, and she herself says that she cut most of her ties to her life before Cerberus (barring Nikket, who, I actually would like another conversation on the subject of, particularly in exploring her feelings surrounding his death and whether or not she was the one who pulled the trigger on him, so let’s patch that in as well while we hypothetically have Yvonne Strahovski and the Shepards in the studio). Miranda has been disconnected through much of her life, but, with Shepard, she’s forging new ones – while I did bring up above that there would be a pre-loyalty mission variant of Miranda’s dialogue, I do think of this as a post-loyalty mission DLC, and that should be reflected in her discussing the connection of being involved with Oriana and having built up relationships with the Normandy crew. She IS connecting, and she’s beginning to see the importance of that.

I was going have Anderson’s involvement be just an e-mail, let the character who’s here for character development and is part of the crew be the big focus, but I do figure we’ll also touch base with Space!Dad after this, hear from him about the approach that he’s going to take with regards to addressing red sand – our drug dealer was a lowlife, but his operation involved more than just humanity, which means the production of red sand is not limited to “human on human” issues (I didn’t particularly pick a species for the big drug boss here, but, to build on the whole theme of “connection” and it impacting the galactic level issues, I’d think the drug peddler with a potent product would likely be a turian – I feel like it would HAVE to be a member of a Council race for the impact I’m going for with this theme). This is becoming a much bigger deal than something that limits the spotlight in humanity and human issues. It needs to be acknowledged by the Council as an issue they need to be getting involved in – not just because human lives are impacted by this, but because LIVES are impacted.

If the theme is connection, it needs to be acknowledged that we need to connect, regardless of how different the others in question are. This isn’t a “well, we must listen and acknowledge both sides” kind of situation, it’s a “your indifference to the situation will only make it worse, and there will be those on ‘both sides’ who use your indifference to their advantage, so stop acting like you’re not involved in this at all.”

Y’know, I feel like Shepard kinda needs to say that, considering the whole “ah yes, Reapers” business...

Post-Game Followups:

ME3: The red sand facility has been seized, and, while red sand itself is still illegal drugs and such, having the files available has offered some upgrades in biotic amps for a war asset boost. Also there’s a drug recovery ward at Huerta (what, we can totally add some to the Huerta map in ME3, right?) where there are victims. I’d also say that there should be a fetch quest in that ward, something surrounding the idea of getting the patients something that helps them through their withdrawal symptoms, which can also be adapted to help with soldiers who are getting hooked on the pain meds, though this would be something I’d say would be available regardless of DLC, the same way that the batarian terrorist on life support in the Wards after the Coup is available regardless of if Shepard completed Arrival or not.

Zeroed Out

Eezo is the lifeblood of Citadel space – both what allows FTL travel and the generation of biotics. With recent concerns about dark energy and lingering resentment from human biotic extremists, a major security presence has been mandatory at many refineries. And the Illusive Man thinks Commander Shepard’s presence might be a help...

We’re going to an eezo mine! Obviously, this is Mass Effect “MacGuffin,” the thing that does what the plot needs it to – eezo is to Mass Effect as dilithium is to Star Trek, it’s the handwave that gives us faster than light travel, propelling us forward with the power of pure plot convenience. But we know enough to know that eezo can be mined out of places.

The moon Arvuna was apparently supposed to be a scannable planet in ME2 but was cut (eventually appearing in ME3 as a site we can scan for Doctor Garneau during Leviathan). Well, we’re putting it back in and having an eezo mine there being where we’re going. A Cerberus operative is given Shepard’s contact info by the Illusive Man (we really need to have a chat about how freely Shepard’s number is given out to random strangers, don’t we?). This operative, who I’m going to just go ahead and name Operative Piper for want of a name, is currently operating out near the eezo mine there and is concerned about some rumblings she’s been hearing through the proverbial grapevine. Considering the importance of securing eezo, since it’s what’s necessary for FTL travel throughout the galaxy, with or without a Mass Relay, this is something that she finds to be important to be monitoring and something that having the assistance of someone like Commander Shepard in keeping secure.

Going back to my habit of having mandatory companions on these, despite that it runs the risk of overusing them, I think Miranda and Jack will be the best fit here – both are human biotics (because eezo influences biotics), they represent opposing ends of the Cerberus spectrum... They make for a good spectrum of attitudes in the matters of things related to eezo and how it impacts people and Cerberus itself. Not sure HOW we’re arranging having them specifically locked in as companions, particularly given the loyalty conflict and how that might have locked Shepard out of one or the other’s loyalty

So Shepard arrives at the mine and meets with Piper, who is not thrilled to be calling in help, especially from an outside “contractor” like Shepard. Consider this another instance of comparing and contrasting Miranda at the start of ME2 to her development over the course of the game, going from Cerberus loyalist to “consider this my resignation.” Particularly since here, it allows Jack to be able to (grudgingly) acknowledge that Miranda, the Cerberus cheerleader, is not actually as pro-Cerberus as she could be and is actually somewhat on the level in terms of what she’s doing (Again, Jack is grudging about this and I’m basically expressing the gist of any comment she has to say about it).

Since Piper’s going to butt heads with Jack and Miranda, even if Miranda is more sympathetic to her point of view, it’s going to lead to Shepard acting as the voice of reason and compromise (because, as I’ve said before, Shepard’s diplomatic skill honestly NEEDS to be front and center in the course of this series, given what they’ll be called on to do in ME3). So I expect a lot of little moments of debate that utilize the dialogue mechanic in the same vein as the crew conflicts. I’d particularly be interested in having some kind of tracking meter of the way Shepard handles things that could potentially restore the character’s loyalty if it was lost in that conflict, though I’m not so sure about the proper implementation (and, personally, I aim to time my completion of their loyalty missions so that I have enough points to resolve their conflict peacefully, so I’m not even sure if that would be content I, the writer of these, would interact with anyway... moving on).

Piper’s concern is that the eezo mine is going to be coming under assault by biotic extremists, that plot thread we never really saw appear after the first game. Shepard will, of course, raise the obvious point – shouldn’t the appearance of Shepard disrupt any plan they’re up to? And that’s going to lead to her second concern. There’s a fluctuation within the eezo being mined. It’s ostensibly nothing to worry about, a variance within the standard deviation and blah blah blah. Piper’s superiors at the facility (the ones who don’t know about her Cerberus ties) believe it’s nothing to be concerned about and that it’s all just expected. Except she’s finding this variance consistently, and, if it keeps going, something will happen to eezo. And, of course, while the civilizations of the galaxy in this cycle have been using eezo to go faster than light for a couple thousand years, how much do they REALLY know about eezo? As we frequently see in this franchise, the galaxy’s races like to leave the unanswered questions alone, even if they probably should try to get a better grasp of the things that make civilization as they know it go round.

So to sum up: Human biotic extremists, demanding better treatment may be looking to take over the mine (reasons will be discussed shortly) and something is unusual about the eezo itself as it’s coming out of the mines.

And we are going to get some idea of just how bad it can be in these eezo mines – y’know, ME3’s Omega DLC will talk up about the mines in the station, but we don’t actually get much about the work and process of eezo mining, which is going to be our focus here. The way we’re going to see and hear about it, this particular mine is not the worst of operations in terms of safety, but it’s also not the safest, either, and it is getting worse over time – that the mining is wearing away things, and no one is particularly invested in upgrading things, that things are reaching their breaking point, but there is no one in a particular position to make the effect to increase the safety standards – this is a place willing to accept the hazards as just how it’s all done, and hey, if there’s any exposures, well, you can survive it, right? And the asari are evidence that there are species who are going to be better off for exposures, so why prevent it?

Investigation happens, you know how this part works by now. Now, as it turns out, yes, there ARE biotic extremists among the people here, but they’re not BIOTIC extremists, but the FAMILIES of biotic extremists, who are convinced that the mines across the galaxy are not safe from biotic exposure – they’re specifically using the asari as an example, since the asari, being a naturally biotic race, are “unconcerned” with the hazards (this is immediately debunked by Miranda – asari have the most stringent safety standards in the galaxy, even acknowledging that humanity could learn more from them than they have).

But... Well, I think by this point we’re all aware of that segment of the population who are determined to not be swayed by facts and reason on what they claim as a moral crusade to protect the children. And, in the Mass Effect universe, I think there’s a fair attitude to have in assuming that, due to the applications of biotic abilities, there is no particular emphasis for preventing biotic exposure – biotics are insanely powerful, but they also have extensive drawbacks – Kaidan himself says that he’s lucky to get off with just the odd migraine, and since biotic exposure is effectively inducing mutation during gestation, odds are there are additional health issues and even birth defects that take place because of it.

So legitimate medical concerns here – like, I was a little worried as I started piecing this together that this would be framed as being approving of something like “curing” autism, so trust me, I’m aware that this is stepping on eggshells here in terms of metaphors made and drawn from all of this. But in this case, considering that we’re talking about something that (as we have an example of in Jack) is explicitly manipulated by horrible people as an active weapon... I think there’s the reality of biotics in-universe that gives it a different feel to the IRL comparisons that one can draw. In the case of biotics, we DO know that there is an external cause for them, and it is something that I can easily see being misused – even Kaidan and Shepard can bring up the potential of Conatix possibly intentionally exposing people to element zero. So there ARE canonical questions surrounding the idea of “[thing] causes biotics, people are actively exposed to [thing], corporations are actively trying to expose more people to [thing].”

So while the metaphor CAN be brought up, it also is refuted by the context that the universe has applied previously – we KNOW that IF a mega-corporation (particularly one given monopoly) can do something underhanded to cut corners on the budget and do something sketchy in the name of profit, it’s done it before I even started this sentence. So it’s never confirmed but almost certain that there ARE instances of people being intentionally exposed to create biotic abilities, and it also has been known to just as likely cause brain tumors and other defects. This is a legitimate concern within the universe that something is being done without concern for the health impacts it has on fetuses in utero. It’s a legitimate question to ask “are the glowing space ninjas we get as a result of this worth the babies with brain cancer?”

Thing is, some of these people are genuine about thinking that there need to be better protections, some are just looking for the local cause to create chaos, and some are out for blood.

That last faction is where the problems are at their peak, because they’re the ones who are causing mayhem for the sake of mayhem. They want to make things worse.

The idea is to destabilize this haul of eezo, and make it cause problems – ostensibly, it’ll make the demand come for a great deal more safety regulations to be imposed upon the efforts to mine eezo, but, really, the actual effect is going to be more damaging in ways that have nothing to do with the people who are supposedly being “helped” by these efforts. Damaging eezo damages all interstellar commerce and travel. It won’t lead to better safety measures, but it will lead to the overall disruption of space travel... And it won’t actually do anything to prevent any exposures. It might even make more exposures possible, the kind of exposures that result in too much exposure and the death of the person who has been exposed to the eezo. And these people do not care – they WANT the disruption, because to them, the important part is the attention, not the results. And, I’m sure, they’re so interested with the chaos that they’re more interested in destruction with a veneer of purpose.

So we’ll have Miranda and Jack talking about what biotics are in practice – these people are honestly approaching biotics more as a theory than in the practical, because, as I said above, these aren’t biotics pushed to extremism but non-biotics who are, in degrees, there more about how biotics are impacting THEM, not the actual biotics. Where Jack is there to bring up the hardships of being biotic, to show that it’s not about how it interrupts their lives but impacts the people who have this gift and burden, Miranda can bring up the more positive elements of biotic abilities, because her issues have not been because of her biotics.

I know above there was the mention of comparisons to autism, but I’ve also said before that I can see some parallels with same-sex attraction with biotics (parallels that are text within the franchise, what with Cora using that line “what if someone had told me ‘that’s okay’?” in reference to her biotics, which... I’ve had words, I’m not going to go into that here and now). Here are Jack and Miranda to show the various ends of the spectrum – Jack is someone who was mistreated and is finding herself in this identity that she has learned to love about herself despite the damage others have inflicted on her for being different. Miranda is someone who has struggled, but not because of her biotics, even found her place because of her biotics (even if that place is, at this point in time, an illegal terrorist organization like Cerberus).

That’s their purpose here. I would like Shepard to, if they have a biotic class, to be able to acknowledge them as well in dialogue and interrupts (in the way that ME3’s Omega has Engineer Shepard bypass the choice of sacrificing civilians to help Aria and Nyreen), though that involves mapping this out in way more detail than I intend to here. So the idea is there and would grow if this were not hypothetical.

Of course, we do still have to come down to the bang-bang shooty stuff. Because this is a mining operation, I expect a lot of mechanic labor – the enemies here would likely mostly be reprogramed mechs, think something akin to the mining droids from the Peragus level of KOTOR 2. The big boss battle would be a reprogrammed mining mech that’s responsible for creating the variance in the eezo. Like, I’m thinking some kind of spider-like mech – I already mentioned the droids from KOTOR 2’s Peragus level, this one I’m thinking has more in common with like the crab droids from the Clone Wars material, or possibly the Terror Walker from the Force Unleashed 2. I do not know how well that translates into the game engine for Mass Effect, but dammit, it’d at least have uniqueness as a boss fight.

I sort of lost track of Cerberus operative Piper in the course of this, but she’s going to have been a part of matters all the same. Checking in a lot over the course of things, and being opposing talk in conversations between Shepard, Miranda, and Jack – not that she’s arguing in favor of the extremists, since she did call Shepard out there, but she’s looking at this as a pure results manner, to get these people out and shut them down, not listen to their issues and problems, just get them the hell off her rock.

And she’s where there’s a final choice – obviously we do shut down the mining mechs that are causing the problems, but she’s ready to kind of approach this as ‘okay, now let’s get these people off my rock, I don’t care what they have to say, they’re jackasses who tried to blow up the ability to travel through the galaxy, they’re in no position to tell me or anyone else anything at all.’ Shepard has a choice about addressing that – they DO have a legitimate point, since we’ll have seen how this mine is not entirely up to code and no one is really ready to put in the costs to put it back together.

Like, in the earlier entry of “Frozen Blood,” I brought up the idea that the greater galaxy isn’t concerned about this mostly human-centric issue. Here’s a similar perspective, that the exposure to eezo is kinda the “ultimate evolution” of civilizations, that everyone should be biotics. Like, the reason we have human biotics find their way into the Alliance is that this gives them a place to be able to contribute, so humans are seeing biotics as a place to have humanity compete on an even footing with aliens and their advantages. So it’s an idea that humanity is improved by biotics, and, as she’s a Cerberus operative, she’s content to see more exposures and more biotics among humanity, because it advances human interests.

Shepard gets to argue with her about the cost in lives because of the damage done, that eezo exposures can have benefits, but they should still be the exception, not the rule, at least until it can be controlled enough to not have the damage to those exposed to eezo, the mutations and stuff, or agree with her about the human advancement idea, that humans need the benefits too much to make an issue of things. And there are after-mission conversations with Miranda and Jack specifically, talking about their experiences and opinions of how Shepard handled things.

Post-Game Followups:

ME3: The eezo mine itself is a war asset if Shepard didn’t argue for new safety standards, because it’s putting out the eezo that the Alliance needs in the course of the war effort, despite the various complaints about the worsening safety standards – the unfortunate reality is that the war cause needs eezo, and they’re not really going to ask questions about how safe the mine is. Alternatively, if Shepard was more focused on the safety increase, while the mine is at decreased production in the name of putting in these updated standards, the Alliance has had a more positive reputation with human biotics, who are seeing the Alliance (as represented by Shepard, who presumably had Anderson pushing the agenda) as more of a place of acceptance.

We also end up with an encounter with Piper on the Citadel, prior to the coup attempt – she’s claiming to having broken ties with Cerberus and is also there to speak for the miners to the Council. If Shepard argued for the human cost of the safety standards needing to be increased, she’s there genuinely, and ends up injured during the fighting, and can be seen in Huerta afterwards. If Shepard agreed with her about the eezo was necessary regardless of the safety concerns, though, she was a Cerberus operative all the same, and gets confronted after the coup as having assisted in the Cerberus forces getting aboard the station (The idea here being that Shepard’s stark reminder of the value of human life makes her reconsider Cerberus, but, if they don’t make that remark to her, she ends up staying with Cerberus long enough that she gets the Reaper augmentation like their troops).

Security Breach

Commander Bailey of the Citadel Security forces reaches out to Shepard. He’s becoming suspicious of a problem within the C-Sec ranks. He is concerned it’s related to rising tensions between humans and Citadel races, and isn’t sure he can trust his people, human and non alike. Shepard may be his best resource to find the conspirators before chaos breaks out on the Citadel...

It’s gonna be an awkward one here, folks, considering C-Sec are cops, and... I mean, all cops are bastards. We’re all aware of this aspect, and it’s an awkwardness we just kinda have to roll with, given how the narrative is already set. C-Sec is part of the setting and treated as more or less good guys, and I can’t just excise it because I want to. And Bailey himself is not exactly the kind of character who comes off well in an ACAB-world or viewpoint, given that whole “make him scream a little” comment when we first arrive in the C-Sec station.

That all being things we’re aware of, I want it understood that the games clearly treat Bailey as a good guy and on Shepard’s side, in both ME2 and ME3, and we’re going to stand by that here. If you’re not particularly a fan of Bailey, yeah, you’ll probably want to skip this one, because I’m accepting him as a good guy for the sake of this.

We’re kicking off by having a new area on the Citadel being available, a not-quite Presidium environment, some place that would seemingly allow for a more relaxed atmosphere. “Seemingly” because when does Commander Shepard ACTUALLY get to relax?

As they’re trying to relax, they come across a protest. Remember how Thane’s Loyalty Mission centered on Kolyat being hired to kill a turian politician who was running on an openly anti-human platform? Yeah, this is more of those types. While this is still one of those that can be played anywhere after the unlock point, I see it best as after that mission, where Joram Talid has been dealt with – he can end up dead at the end of that mission or he can have had his life threatened by an assassin hired by a human criminal. Both are being held up as banner pieces of evidence of why humans are seizing power in the Citadel from those who’ve lived there for decades.

Shepard gets into an argument with the leader of this protest, another turian who I’m gonna call Gaius Crassus (because when I need to name turian characters, I basically use a grab bag of character names from Spartacus). He’s functionally replacing Talid, who may die by the end of Thane’s Loyalty Mission and I don’t want to deal with one of the major players of this DLC being potentially dead, but we are going to connect the two characters and say that Crassus has taken his position in the race (because, basically, I’m assuming that what Shepard and Thane discover about Talid in that mission functionally tanks his campaign if he survived the mission, and, if he didn’t, obviously, someone else has to run for that seat).

It’s your typical human versus alien argument in this universe (the kind that has been a running theme throughout these DLC ideas, because I think it’s an important detail of the relationships between the races in the Mass Effect universe). Crassus also brings up Shepard’s involvement in Talid’s absence from the election, whether it’s that they were spying on him (conveniently forgetting that it was in the name of preventing an assassination) or they actively killed him.

Eventually, though, C-Sec shows up to break up the protest – this isn’t the first, and the last one turned into something more than just shouting words, so the officers are taking preemptive action to break this up now. This is when Bailey shows up and speaks to Shepard and brings up the fact that this is spreading beyond the Citadel’s general population. He’s noticed it among the officers as well. When we meet him properly in ME2, he’ll bring up that the C-Sec losses during the geth attack allowed a lot of human C-Sec officers to rise through the ranks, that the upper echelons of turian, asari, and salarian officers had gotten decimated, letting the humans get the positions now vacant.

And that’s where there’s some issues in C-Sec, because Bailey believes that this tension is getting into the ranks. It’s something that he needs to address – C-Sec is supposed to be keeping the peace, if the C-Sec officers are getting wrapped up in these activities, it erodes the public confidence.

A-HEM.

Look, I said that the game portrays C-Sec and Bailey as predominantly positive forces and that I was ultimately going to maintain that attitude for the sake of internal consistency with canon, I didn’t say that I was going to approach it entirely uncritically.

Now, because we’re getting involved with C-Sec here, Garrus is an obvious companion to be brought along. To offer an alternate view of C-Sec, of the professional authority figures, I think Kasumi would be a reasonable addition. She’s a thief with a heart of gold, the Robin Hood type (as we see in Citadel, where she assembles a gang to rob the casino, since it’s overflowing with cash while refugees are struggling). While she’s not above taking a bit of a score for herself, she’s there to voice how the “proper authorities” are often no better than thugs with a badge, and that some people go outside the law to do what it fails to do with regards to helping people.

Obviously, Shepard can’t just go undercover here – they’re too well known for that much. So Kasumi is going to lead Shepard through an observation mission in the same way that Thane does in his loyalty mission, having discussions with Garrus along the way about the way C-Sec does things. This is our first bit of questioning the status quo, because Garrus, even if he counts as a “bad” turian, he’s still from a society that doesn’t question authority like C-Sec, like something with that kind of military structure. Orders, commands, discipline, that sort. That’s the environment he knows, that’s the worldview he was raised with.

And sure, Shepard is part of a military themselves, but Earthborn Shepard would know how bad cops can be, and Colonist Shepard was born outside of the military structure. Even Spacer Shepard would have learned about the ways to get around the rules, having been a kid of military parents. Because humans in general are shown to be more initiative-driven than the turians, Shepard has room to push against Garrus’s ingrained ideas of “when a bad order is given, it reflects poorly on the giver, not the one who carries it out.” That’s one of the things that we briefly touched on in the above “Proud Soldiers” entry, but it wasn’t the big focus of Garrus’s time. Here, it is.

Back into the plot stuff, the observation leads Shepard and team to discover that there are basically two types of C-Sec officers, at least among the non-humans. There are the kind who are kind of annoyed about the whole business, but they’re willing to wait until the humans screw up to swoop in and show that they’re in over their heads, and there are those who want to do something about it. Most of the officers are the former, and those “former” are excusing the latter. And that there’s a trend among the humans (because we’ve been observing C-Sec offices, so there’s mingling) to be resentful of the aliens resentment – a sense of “finally, we’re getting to do what we should have done, while the aliens have been focused on the humans as problems and not as victims.”

Like I said, I may have to approach C-Sec as ultimately part of the good guys, but we’re still being critical of the institution – the people who go into C-Sec, into cops as a career, are often people who want the ability to have authority over others, and, as a result, be the people prone to abusing that authority in various ways. Humans may have been discriminated against, but cops are, ultimately, the real bastards in this, and, by being cops, these humans are choosing to be bastards.

Now we get some interplay with Garrus and Kasumi – where Garrus is the cop, she’s been a thief, she’s worked on the margins. She knows what the cops do that make things worse, and she’s bringing up all the issues that need to be when it comes to cops – sure, ideally, they’re there to protect people, but... I mean, if we’re talking ideally, why do we even need cops? And I feel like this would be a good place to insert some backstory for them both that I am completely making up here and now, but I don’t think it’s anything that damages canon. I’ve been trying to avoid anything like this to this point, but it’s in service of the plot here, and, again, I don’t think this is knocking anything particularly of out whack.

I’m saying that Kasumi was, at one point a few years back, part of a group of thieves that C-Sec broke up. Most were arrested, some (like Kasumi) got away. This group furthered that whole “Robin Hood” thing – they stuck to hitting casinos (a la her meet in the Citadel DLC), or swiping the “priceless art” taken by collectors (small “c”) from their “primitive” societies who “can’t take care of them themselves.”

Yes, I’m here, calling out the British Museum via sci-fi metaphor.

Anyway, her group was going after mega-rich people who weren’t hurt by the crime. But C-Sec still decided that THEY were the ones to punish. And, in that C-Sec raid, was a young Garrus Vakarian. She’s never said anything because Kasumi’s just chill that way – she knows enough about Shepard coming in to the squad that she can put aside any old grudges, and I think Kasumi in general keeps loose ties to anyone else – it’s what made her relationship with Keiji so important to her, that he became someone who she would regularly partner with or care about the long term fate of. Likewise, the fact that he didn’t catch her back in the day means that he didn’t realize she was involved.

But the point of this is for her to be able to call out his attitude of “C-Sec is always the good guys, if C-Sec is after someone, they must have done something wrong.” Because, despite having been frustrated by the rules and regulations, Garrus still has that belief in his mind, that there is no real occasion where C-Sec AREN’T the good guys. And he needs to accept that. Shepard’s here to moderate the discussion, and, ultimately, this IS a case where I think that it NEEDS to be Paragon to side with Kasumi’s take over Garrus’s – Garrus is effectively saying “authority is always right by virtue of being authority,” while Kasumi is saying “systems are flawed creations enforced by flawed people, sometimes they’re making mistakes.” In this argument, Garrus is on the side of blind adherence to authority, and Kasumi is on the side of both nuance and trying to make punishments suit the crime – punishing someone who stole food to feed their family is inflicting cruelty for the sake of cruelty, meanwhile the business mogul who cut their wages just pocketed his eighty-fourth billion and demands they be punished to the fullest extent of the law.

The general idea of these discussions is one we’re in the process of having – how does the law work FOR EVERYONE. Garrus, being former C-Sec, being a turian, sees the law as a strict binary, a black and white view of “break the law, you’re a criminal and deserve to be punished.” Kasumi is able to bring in the nuance of crime is defined by people, and laws are fallible. She exposes the flaws in the system with her actions – as much as theft is about the artistry with her, that she seeks the jobs that put her skills to the most challenge, she also sees a connection between the things she steals, the people she steals from, and the laws that protect them – the people she steals from can afford to take the hit. They aren’t losing something. And Kasumi might keep enough funds for a solid nest egg when her days in the biz come to a wrap, but she’s always felt like someone who gives anything she doesn’t need to others.

Okay, that’s the character development stuff for now. We’ll be back to it come the wrap up, now back to plot. As we see, these anti-human elements are working with Gaius Crassus to try and reclaim a position for non-humans in the local political scene. It’s a small scale thing, they know they’re not going to get humanity off the Council or anything, but they’re all being very ‘put them back in their place.’

This all being said, though, in this instance I do want to be clear – there ARE C-Sec officers who are trying to build bridges. But they are not particularly open about this, BECAUSE the culture of C-Sec at this point seems VERY oriented towards resentment. And it is resentment on both sides of the divide, because the humans know that there are those who are against them having any advancement of their rights – it’s common through the series, the non-humans are quick to call humans bullies, and the humans are kinda hotheaded about these things. Both arguments are being represented here, though, because this is a messy situation – although there’s the obvious metaphors to draw, with C-Sec as cops, and talk about the IRL situation (that, admittedly, was not as forefront in our minds when ME2 was released), we do still have to recognize the elements of the fictional construct that are involved.

Okay, I swear, we’re working our way to the inevitable combat segments.

Crassus is able to uncover that Shepard and gang are there, and he’s... not happy to be overseen. He’s basically looking to have his people among C-Sec stage a revolt of some sort – ostensibly, he wants it to be peaceful, but, given how many guns are at his disposal in this facility alone, it’s obvious he’s preparing for conflict. A conflict he intends to pin on humans – if humans had just stayed in their place, this wouldn’t have happened, humans have forced their way onto the Council, shouldn’t the other races do all they can to force them off?

Garrus and Kasumi have a brief bit about the optics of gunning down a bunch of cops, considering Shepard and Kasumi are humans against a bunch of aliens. Garrus wants to make an appeal to the officers, but he might just be seen as a traitor to his kind and no one will listen, while Kasumi thinks she can set off an EMP that’ll shut down their weapons long enough to decide what to do, but she’s working on the fly with material that she questions the suitability of, and it might do more than just knock out the electronics in the place.

I’m leaning towards THIS being the big Paragon/Renegade choice of this DLC, rather than anything else. Does Shepard trust in the system that an appeal to the better nature of these officers implies, or do they make a decision that acknowledges them as a threat that needs to be stopped. Because it’s going to say what Shepard’s opinion of C-Sec is overall – is it a necessary system that can be fixed, or does it need to be rebuilt from the ground up?

I mean, the fact that I’m questioning it at all probably should say where I stand on the subject, but, see again, C-Sec is a part of ME3, it can’t be disbanded entirely.

Garrus can’t persuade everyone to lower their weapons, and Kasumi’s EMP overloads some weapons enough that they blow up in the hands of their users, so there’s drawbacks either way. And, because there are engineer officers among the C-Sec officers, while the biotic officers engage Shepard, they can get their weapons back online enough to be a threat.

This does, however, give Shepard, Spectre status or no, enough room to arrest Crassus, effectively quashing his attempts at a political career, and, by extension, making his anti-human efforts dead in the water, at least for the time being. This comes back to a conversation between Shepard, Bailey, and Executor Pallin, discussing how all this went down. Neither’s particularly happy of things, calling it subversion of C-Sec’s authority and credibility. They do acknowledge that Shepard did the best that they could under the circumstances, but it’s still made C-Sec look bad at a time when they’re needing to appear more unified, what with the whole “politicians openly campaigning on anti-human platforms” thing. Both of them doubt that this is where it all ends, even if Shepard’s done their part.

And, back on the Normandy, we get a follow-up conversation between Garrus and Kasumi, chatting in the mess hall, talking about how things went down and whether or not the other was right, as well as discussing their history. Garrus gets to bring up his whole “I don’t know what to do with grey” thing, acknowledging that, while he wouldn’t have joined up with a guy spouting the rhetoric that Crassus did, he has carried these ideas of the superiority of turians. Kasumi, meanwhile, has just seen her opinions of C-Sec reinforced, though she is willing to acknowledge that, if these organizations are going to stick around, they need people like Garrus, now that he’s asking the questions, to guide them to better places. And they need people like her to keep them on their toes.

Post-Game Followups:

ME3: C-Sec has taken a bit of a dip in their ability, given the numbers who’ve been fired and arrest for their involvement in the subversion attempt. But, if Kasumi’s EMP went off, some of the tech people at C-Sec will boost War Assets, having been working to address and patch up the holes her EMP exposed in their tech. We also get a follow-up sidequest after the Coup, a Presidium protest and counter-protest over how there are humans in C-Sec facing pushback because of pro-human Cerberus acting, while they’re countering with how the aliens would have seen them reduced in numbers anyway, allowing Cerberus less of a fight in their attempt to take over the station that leads to Shepard either siding with one or the other or convincing them to disperse/threatening to arrest them for public disturbance.

Market Crash

The volus are responsible for much of the Citadel’s economics. They have kept the Citadel running, in monetary terms. But, despite being responsible for this, the volus are still considered a “lesser” Council race, clients of the turians, who came later. Now, a group of volus on the Citadel have acted to wrest control of the markets on the Citadel, and the situation is only going to deteriorate...

The volus kinda get the short end of the stick, don’t they? Like listen to their history, they were one of the first races on the Citadel. It’s because of their efforts there even IS a galactic economy. And yet, despite that, not just are they not represented on the Council, they are a CLIENT RACE to the TURIANS, who didn’t even join the Citadel races for about a thousand years after the volus made it to the stars. Sure, the ostensible reason is that the Council doesn’t want to impose “undue burden” by making species responsible for matter beyond their ability in the event of an emergency, such as, for example, a planetary evacuation of people who have entirely different atmospheric and even pressure needs, but... It’s still saying that this species who’s been part of the galactic community for near two thousand years isn’t worth putting on the Council, on the governing body of the galactic community.

Din Korlack being pissy when we meet him in ME1 makes total sense. He’s just taking out his anger on the wrong person. Humans aren’t advancing too fast, they’re just the only ones who are willing to break with the accepted social contract among the Citadel races of accepting the status quo.

So the point here is that a group of volus are taking matters into their own hands and saying “no, we’re not putting up with this second class citizenry when you all depend on us to keep your markets open.”

This is something that’s honestly the kind of question that I’m legit surprised isn’t being asked as things stand in game. So what we’re going with here is that Shepard gets an email from Barla Von, the volus from the Presidium who works for the Shadow Broker in ME1. He’s noted several major volus investors have suddenly been making particularly odd purchases, the kind that can be indications of things like setting out to cause problems. Because the volus MO tends to be to complain without taking action, Barla Von finds this questionable (and, in the event that the player has gone through Lair of the Shadow Broker by the time that they start this mission, he’ll also mention that the Shadow Broker specifically suggested Shepard look in to this, otherwise it’s just his own initiative).

The first stop is the Presidium, which, if it wasn’t clear by now, we are DEFINITELY getting an expanded map for that – I’ve said often and repeatedly, the Citadel could absolutely be home to an entire game (or more), and we’ve just had little slivers of it in the base game. What I’m looking at here is a grander version of the financial district that the Citadel surely has. Basically, we’re going to Citadel Wall Street.

That means that weapons are meant to stay holstered, of course. Shepard is a Spectre (more or less, since the Council may not uphold that, but that’s temporary anyway, since they get the status back come ME3, so we’re just gonna handwave that away if a player hasn’t been reinstated), so they and their companions are authorized to have them, but the whole point here is to have the challenge of NOT busting out the weapons.

So it’s a variant of my general attitude here – you CAN break out the weapons to resolve things (when applicable – the standard game mechanic of ‘designated combat areas’ is in effect, where we can’t have Shepard bust out weapons in, say, the Illium market square or something). It’s just gonna lock you out of the golden ending. There’s a challenge in both finding the peaceful solution and in talking things out.

In this case, the initial work is even finding out about the volus syndicate we’re looking for. After all, given all that the volus do for the Citadel, they’re very capable of covering their tracks. This means investigative work (so this is our usual ‘not where my development focus is on, due to it being based mostly in gameplay) to even discover them, but the more Shepard uncovers, the more that they’re going to tip off the volus.

This is part of the dynamic – It benefits Shepard to be thorough, but it also means that they’ll have a harder challenge because the volus know they’re coming. Pick your poison – information or secrecy, having one means the other side has it as well. Not all the information will be necessary for the quote-unquote golden ending (for whatever value you attach to such things), but you don’t know where it is (at least on the first play – of course, as ever, knowing what is coming and where to find things will obviously streamline and assist in later replays), so you have to seek out what you’re looking for throughout the trading area and sift through what is and isn’t important.

So investigation through the financial district. I’m not mandating squadmates on this one, though I do imagine that Kasumi and Miranda would likely have some commentary to add about the commercial trade floor, a hub of galactic economies.

The information that Shepard finds is, when assembled, able to paint a picture – a pact of volus have come together (I’m gonna call them “the Clan of Righteousness,” but I want to make that clear that it’s a translation of a volus term that’s more unique. But, since the volus language hasn’t been established, and I’m inclined to think that it’s awkward for most humans to speak in whatever is volus-generic, that’s the term I’m using). Their goal is to, rather obviously, make the volus position among the Citadel races have more weight – with how quickly humanity ascended to a seat on the Council, they damn well believe that it’s time that they were as well.

And y’know, Shepard definitely should have the option to agree with that concept – call me America-centric and all, but... Well, “no taxation without representation” feels fitting to apply here. I think it’s reasonable for Shepard, and, by extension, players in general, to be kinda not-okay with the fact that the Council excludes the volus from the halls of power and thinks this is a situation that does need to change. Have some discussion with the companions on the subject – again, I expect Miranda to have some comments on this particular subject, given that it’s humanity’s advancement that sparked this behavior from the Clan, a commentary about how humanity sparked a demand within the galactic community to change.

The information also points Shepard to their next target – a volus trade world, though there’s a space station in orbit for non-volus, considering its economic functions on the galactic stage. Granted, there’s still the reasonable expectation that there are volus operating on the planet below, but the idea is to at least start in the atmosphere that Shepard and company can breathe. Start with the easy place before actively making it harder on matters.

On the station is the payoff to the information seeking – if you sought out everything, the search tipped off the Clan, and they have a whole host of mechs on hand, including some top-end experimental types (re: new mechs beyond the FENRIS, LOKI, and YMIR models, one that I’m gonna dub the BALDR, which I envision as something of a mid-point of the LOKI mech and the Rampart Mech from ME3’s Omega, and another dubbed the FRIGG model, which is basically a support unit for any mechs in the area who reinforces them with shields, sort of a prelude to the Reaper barrier engines in ME3, only supplying local mechs with shields). If you didn’t seek out anything beyond the bare minimum, the place mostly consists of the standard civilian crew – keep the weapons holstered, and Shepard has freedom of movement, at least to a point. And the “golden” zone of knowing exactly where to look and how much looking can be done will lead to some LOKI mech patrols that are not immediately hostile – the Clan suspects that there may be someone investigating them, but they aren’t certain and can’t just shut everything down on that basis.

And that allows Shepard options – they CAN go in guns blazing, but it will tip off the Clan, allowing them to dump evidence and throw up enough of a smokescreen that they can slip away, plot and scheme to return another day. They can get on board, posing as a trader and make their way into the areas of the station that are housing the heads of the Clan, but, of course, the more the Clan’s tipped off, the more they’re aware of someone coming for them. The information that Shepard found (or didn’t) allows them to know where on the station to gather the evidence they’d need to take the members of the Clan to whatever court of justice is applicable (remember – the reason Barla Von sent Shepard in was because nothing had actually been done YET, but the supplies had been taken and indicated a plot to make some kind of attempt). It’s possible that they can talk them down entirely (as I said, the challenge is in finding the peaceful solution).

So getting through the station, whether shooting everything that moves or through stealth, leads Shepard to the heads of the Clan. They are pretty straightforward – as we determined, they’re out to secure a place for volus at the table, and they want it whether or not the Council will agree, hence the threats of violence. They’re also ready to move on the Citadel – their supply of mechs are going to help with this, prove that they have the ability to back up their talk with firepower. And, like Din Korlack, they’re not very fond of “Earth clan,” given that they’ve managed to secure in years what the volus haven’t in millennia. So Shepard has a bit of an uphill climb to get them to listen.

Still, it IS possible – obtain the golden information search result, enter stealthily, and generally stick to the idea that what Shepard is trying to do here is make peace between the frustrated factions, they will be swayed by an argument of how assembling what they have is starting that conversation already – they won’t get what they’re trying to obtain at gunpoint, because the Council will just make the appeasing motions until they can gain the upper hand, and, with both the turians and humanity to oppose them, just these resources won’t be enough. But it’s not that they need to be “model minorities” or anything, but rather they need to come to the table arguing that they should be seen as equals, not a “lesser species” (the term Avina uses when explaining why species like the volus aren’t on the Council) and not a “client race,” or an attempted invader causing a hostile takeover. All this done and it’s entirely possible to never fire a weapon once.

But, of course, there’s also the alternative, which is them sending in waves of mechs to take Shepard down, and blowing them all up – at that point, they’ve lost the most potent weapons in their arsenal. And, if the player is very determined to cause violence, there would also have been the option to plant some explosives and cause further destruction of their resources. They basically HAVE to surrender at that point.

Afterwards, Barla Von invites Shepard to their office in the financial district on the Citadel to discuss how he sees matters of galactic economics shifting, dropping some hints about the Shadow Broker having begun preparations for the Reaper invasion (stronger ones if this follows having played through Lair of the Shadow Broker). And, of course, he gives Shepard a reward for their troubles.

Post-Game Follwoups:

ME3: Depending on how Shepard resolved matters, the volus, having made in-roads with the Council, will be using the crisis of the invasion to prove their worthiness for greater galactic recognition, so their space stations are open to house refugees and their mechs and in use for the war effort. Alternatively, with the depletion of their resources and material, the volus have raised prices on any product from Irune and the volus colonies, as well as any economic service they offer, and their prices remain elevated even with the new crisis of the invasion.

#dg's hypothetical dlc #mass effect #mass effect meta #mass effect 2

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ectonurites · 3 years

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can anybody please explain the appeal of tim drake because ive been into the batfamily for a while now and tbh im really confused on why people like his character so much compared to the other robins. like they all have their own thing going on and he just... doesnt?

Have you read his Robin solo? Because if not and you want to try to like him but just don’t understand why people do, that’s what I’d recommend. That and like, Young Justice 1998.

Because Tim definitely... does have his own thing going on. Maybe not in the same way as the others, but like, there’s a reason he has a 183 issue long solo comic that ran for like 16 years: he was fun to read about!

But I will give some more specific thoughts on the subject as a Tim Drake Appreciator™ (this got long im sorry)

The appeal of Tim (especially early on Tim) is kinda the fact that he’s this more normal kid. For a while that is his ‘thing’. He was basically designed to be a self-insert (he definitely became more than that along the way, but from the start he was meant to be relatable) in a different way than how Dick and Jason had been before him.

Like the role of Robin from the start was this way to create a character young readers could identify with more, could see themselves in more. And Dick and Jason did that, but they still had this element to their lives and stories that was more... unattainable for the average reader. Dick was a circus prodigy, Jason was either also a circus prodigy if we remember pre-crisis or if we go with his post-crisis story he’s this street-wise orphaned kid who had a really tough life but still went on to be a hero anyways. Obviously those lives are relatable for some people, but those’re definitely not as broadly recognized as common upbringings especially not by DC trying to market to the ‘average’ kid/young teen.

But the creation of Tim changed the game a bit. Dick and Jason were these aspirations a kid could look to like ‘wow I want to be cool like that!’ but Tim was a Robin designed for kids to look at and go ‘wow, his problems and civilian life are just like mine AND he’s a hero, I want to be cool like that!’, ya know? Tim was... just a clever kid with an average life who managed to connect some dots and had enough drive to want to fix things he saw were a problem, he didn’t have the same kind of heightened drama backstory the others did. The Robins that came after Tim definitely didn’t have this idea of relatability in mind the same way either. Unfortunately Steph’s time as Robin was much more of a marketing ploy than an actual like... decision to make her Robin, so it’s hard to really fit her into this conversation. But Damian from the start was first of all initially created not to be Robin but just as the son of Talia and Bruce back in the 80’s, but when he was later reimagined into the character that would become Robin he had the whole ‘raised by and is the heir to the league of assassins and is the son of batman’ thing going on still. He just was not supposed to be relatable that same way, he was a character designed with different things in mind.

I really think it was more just DC’s 90′s era younger-audience comics in general that tried to push that relatability thing (like in YJ how Cissie even after quitting the team stays a major character as a civilian throughout, and the civilian aspect that’s super present in Bart’s 90s solo too, etc), but later in the 2000’s that idea was definitely pushed to the side in favor of... putting in even more dramatic superhero-y stuff.

And the other thing that’s... such a more normal thing but it actually made him unique here, was that Tim’s dad was still alive until like 2004 (so 15 years into Tim being around as a character). This gave Tim a lot more typical ‘family school girlfriends normal life etc’ problems on top of/in contrast with his superhero problems. These just manifested in very different ways than they could with the other Robins because of that unique situation with a living civilian parent who doesn’t know about hero stuff (until he did find out which lead to that whole Unmasked thing, but there was only the brief time around War Games & Identity Crisis where Jack knew Tim was actively Robin and he was... still alive) Tim also had his life at school expanded way more than most other Robins, like, he had such an extended supporting cast of civilian friends which is a really interesting thing to read about (and the fact that he hasn’t had that stuff since the New 52 I think really hurts his character)

And then related to that loss of his dad... Personally another thing about Tim that really interests me is how a lot of things were more... his choice. if that makes sense. A lot of characters in the Batfamily were struck with tragedy/extreme trauma before they became heroes and that’s what spurred them into this life of becoming heroes. Tim’s situation wasn’t like that at all! When he first got involved in everything during Lonely Place of Dying, the only tragedy he’d experienced was watching Dick’s tragedy happen. Which sure yes traumatic obviously, but that’s not the same as how pretty much all the other Bats had gone through these very personal losses or other sorts of very first-hand personal traumas that served as motivators. Tim didn’t start to experience those things until after he got involved in the hero life, and aside from his Mom’s death which was more of just an unrelated incident (that technically happened before he was officially Robin but it was during his time training to become Robin), pretty much all these other tragedies and things... would not have happened or been experienced by him had he not become Robin.

That’s not me placing blame on him or anything like that, because god no that’s not how that works, but it’s very interesting because from his point of view he definitely feels that guilt because he knows him being Robin played a role in a lot of it (Thinking specifically about in Adventure Comics #3 when Kon even says “I know what guilt does to you” to him like it’s... it’s a thing with him!). His dad was murdered because he was Robin. He only met Steph and started dating her through being Robin, and thus he would not have experienced the loss of his girlfriend dying like that had he not been Robin. Tim met both Conner and Bart through being Robin, and would not have had a personal connection to them when they died otherwise. The whole Bruce’s death thing after Final Crisis, like. I could go on honestly, that was only talking about losses not even his own experiences nearly getting killed, but yeah, all these personal tragedies were experienced by him specifically because he chose to bring himself into this life, which I think in turn plays into how throughout his comics you see him go from having this really optimistic view on things and being really hopeful to seeing him at that low point he reaches by the time of Red Robin. (thinking about that one post that points out how Tim started out in the 90′s as an optimist and Steph a cynic and by the time they were Red Robin and Batgirl in 2009 they had switched outlooks...)

I also think that him having had such a great team book with the original Young Justice can help contribute to people liking him. His friendships with the rest of the core four and that team in general are really compelling. (and that’s something like again when looking at the other Robins, while Dick had the Titans ofc, Jason never really found footing with a team outside of like one mission with the Titans and then We All Know How Damian’s Teen Titans Stuff Went. Steph also only ever really worked with a team outside the batfam on very brief occasions) and even though I’m not as big of a fan of the 2003 Teen Titans run that came after YJ, people who read Young Justice and also that could follow and be attached to those same characters over a pretty decently long period of time.

Idk man, I don’t really have an ultimate point here i’m just rambling. I can definitely understand not seeing the appeal to him right away (honestly i’ve been into Batfam since like 2013/2014 and Tim did not become one of my faves until 2020) especially if like... idk when you say ‘into the batfamily’ that can mean a lot of different things. If you’re reading more like the bigger events with the batfam sure Tim can kinda fade into the bg a bit, if you’re more talking about fanon the fanon version of him is prettyyyyy uhhhhh not really the same as how he was in pre New 52 canon, if you’re mainly reading New 52 era Batfam stuff then that Tim I also don’t understand the appeal of bc thats Not My Boy, if you’re interested in a different member primarily and only familiar with Tim when he shows up in things focused on that other character then it’s easy to not really understand the appeal right away bc he’s more there to support that character rather than shine in his own right.

I think it’s also worth mentioning he’s just not everybody’s cup of tea, and that’s totally fine. Like, these are fictional characters and sometimes you just will vibe with a character and sometimes you won’t! idk if this helped at all or even made sense. but yeah. I just think he’s neat 😌

#Anonymous

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thefatter-thebetter · 3 years

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Game Night, Gain Night

Before the story I just wanted to say I tried something different with this one. I thought something other than eating to cause the weight gain would be a cool idea. I’m also bad at naming characters so these are the two I had in mind when writing lol. I have a more normal stuffing story on the way tomorrow if this idea didn't turn out great. I hope you like it!

After some time David finally got a Nintendo Switch. Of course the first thing he is going to do is invite his best friend Krystal over to hang out to play. It's been awhile since they both had time to hang out like this, spending time with a friend is exactly what he needs right now.

The doorbell rings, she must be here. David goes and opens the door. Krystal stands there in a flannel shirt and jean shorts.

"Hey! It's been awhile! How are you?" he says.

"I'm good! Thanks for inviting me over. How about you?"

"I just got a Switch so pretty good." he says

Krystal giggles, "Good point."

"So, what do we start with?" David asks her.

"Hmm, did you get Smash? I kinda feel like beating you bad at something." Krystal says tauntingly.

"Oh, ok. Sure if you think you can." He says with confidence.

They both sat down on the couch ready to play. They go to choose their characters and quickly get into the match. They both go back and forth trading blows. Krystal quickly takes the advantage. A party ball drops down and David throws it at Krystal. It breaks into a bunch of food items and sends her flying. David grabs as much as he can to try and heal but Krystal hits back with a big hit. David goes flying off the screen. With that Krystal takes the first round. Just then David started to feel different. He felt like his clothes were tighter all of a sudden. He checks his stomach and feels some newly found pudge there.

"What?! How did this happen?"

Krystal laughs at his shock, "It looks like you focus too much on food both in game and out nowadays."

"No I'm serious, how did I get this belly out of nowhere."

"Dude it's ok if you put on a few since I last saw you, in fact it looks good on you. Let's just play the next one."

He is not going to get through to her while she's gloating about the first round. He'll just need to beat her to show her this isn't a joke. They pick new characters and the next round starts. Krystal gets an early life lead. This round has more party balls with a bunch of food in them. This time Krystal is flaunting her lead around by trying to grab as much food as she can instead of fighting. David takes advantage of that and takes her out to even up the game. Both on their last lives now they Krystal gets serious. She goes in for the kill but David counters her and win the round.

"Oh come on, you just won cause of that gold feather move. That's so..." She cuts off. Krystal looks like she's trying to processing something. Now she understands. She begins to grow just like David did. Her face stars to fill out, stomach expanding, thighs thickening.

"Maybe you shouldn't of ate so many food drops," David shoots back to Krystal.

"This isn't funny! She shouts back. "Where did you even get this Switch anyway!?"

"From an old man in a cave, where do you think?"

She sighs at that comment. "Ok jackass, what else do you want to say about this mess?" David takes a moment to think then says, "At least you’re not playing Kirby?" Her only response is a swift punch to the arm.

"Oww, listen i have an idea."

"Go on," she says.

"Ok, clearly something is going on here. How about we make this a little interesting? One more game, 5 lives, items on max, loser gains all that weight picked up. Sounds like fun? A smirk came over Krystal's face, "Your on. I know you’ve always wanted to be a fat boy deep down."

The match begins, both of them being much more careful than before. Whenever am item drops they make sure to break it open and grab all of the food inside. Krystal is the first to slip and gets knocked off. David grabs all the food he can before she's back in. Krystal then gets him right back by knocking him out. Back and forth they go trading the lead until they both are on their last life. Each one is dangerously close to getting ko'd. A lone box drops from the sky. They both dash to break it open. They both hit the box but instead of bursting into food, it blow up in both of their faces, causing them both to fly off the screen, a double ko. Stunned they stare mouth wide open and look at each other. "So...what does that mean?" Krystal says. The two both feelings their stomachs rumble David says, "I think you already know."

Slowly, they both begin to expand. David's stomach begins to bulge out. His shirt starts to ride up and the button on his pants pop off. The shirt continues to shrink around his growing body. His is arms and face begin to fill out as his stomach comfortably rests between his legs. Suddenly the fabric gives out and rips from his girth.

Krystal's belly quickly bulges out, straining the buttons on her flannel. Her breasts break through the top few buttons with ease. She then rips open the shirt to find some relief. Before she could do the same for her bra it bursts off. The button on the shorts look like it's being eaten by the top half of her fat gut. Soon her belly can't be contained as it destroys the button sending it flying. Her thighs becoming these massive pillows of flab. Arms growing into these jiggly masses. Her double chin filling out into her neck.

The creaking of the couch struggling with the two's ballooning weight can be heard. Still feeling the slow growth David exclaims, "When will this stop! The sound of more fabric tearing can be heard. His jeans begin ripping at the seams. Soon his fat legs break though escaping the pants. Krystal's shorts didn't last as long, quickly bursting off her body. Finally their bodies begin to settle, both of them easily 500 pounds now.

“Well, what could happen now? Krystal says.

The couch creaks a bit more before it snaps. Both her and David fall onto the floor causing the ground to shake.

“I guess break your couch.”

"No big deal,” David tells her. “Honestly, I kind of like this new size. I could get used to it"

"In that case you're paying for our meal then. I’m feeling really hungry all of a sudden." Krystal fires back.

#weight gain stories #fat kink #button popping #rapid weight gain #secondhand gaining #fat belly

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ajdrawshq · 2 years

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So.... What the fuck! ( Any thoughts? VLR is wild )

if i put the Junpei what the hell compilation here does that count as an answer

ok i do actually have thoughts yes. so many thoughts. might take me a sec to form words out of em bc of the sheer.. something. whatever just happened and im also lowkey sleep deprived rn i have shrimp emotions and i also cant feel anything

hmm ok one of the things i wanted to mention was that earlier i almost thought Quark couldve been some kinda abondoned Left clone but they have different eye colors so thats crossed off the list. that Does make it kinda weird that Quark mentions freeing his soul during that one scene, but i guess we're supposed to assume he just picked it up from somewhere? like he heard abt it on earth at some point? i doubt Dio wouldve said anything to him abt it in the pod, and even then i dont think hed quote him during That if he did. but how well known were the Myrmidons for him to hear that?? or was it from Junpei/what Junpei was talking abt when he said he was involved during the mars expiriment thing??? idk i just thought that was a weird connection that they didnt directly address.. i think. i couldve missed smth there

im not even gonna try to understand the entirety of the time jumping stuff when it comes to switching bodies and all that. youd think id be prepared for this kinda thing considering all the stuff ive played so far! i am not. looking at the picture they used to show how Sigma's been jumping all over the place legit gave me motivation to do my homework bc that would be easier to comprehend

on that note im like. how do i put this. i was actually super interested in where all this stuff was going for a long while bc the ideas being used were cool even if the execution was a lil wonky. like im so down for time shenanigins (with memory fuckery!! come on!!) and clones and humanlike robots and a lot of other stuff they had going on. i actually like what they were doing when they expanded the morphogenetic field stuff, although i Do wanna think of that as completely seperate from how it is in 999 bc of the retconned stuff :/ other than that what they had going on was pretty cool but. the ending just. i ,,, i dont even know the way it all came together feels so weird???? like it technically makes sense and i get what they were going for. its. ???? i wanna say what im looking for is "anticlimactic" but idk if thats right. its just..... Weird.

however i also wanna say that i am at least glad they touched on the different views of people being stuck in the "worse" timeline? Junpei being glad to have Quark despite everything while Clover and Alice have to deal with leaving behind half a century along with their friends and family. even tho they just kinda went jk lol at that part immediately afterwards???????? but whatever i guess

the characters in general were pretty fun tbh? not quite as real-feeling as 999 but still enough to be enjoyable. it was nice seeing Junpei reference a bunch of stuff from 999 and retain some pieces of himself all these years later, especially when he quoted Light ("fake, a replica, not the real thing...") its horrifying to think abt all hes been thru at this point tho ,,, Clover seemed a lot more outgoing than before but a year can change u so i cant say much abt that, it was cool to see her again regardless. Alice is an interesting one and i liked her even if she was kind of frustrating to go against in the AB games lmao. Luna has lowkey been one of my favorites thru the whole thing but i had a hard time fully trusting her for so long bc of how suspiciously innocent she was lol which wasnt entirely baseless either but yknow. Dio is admittedly funny and ridiculously good at acting like hes a normal person its actually scary. also whered he hide the bombs before planting them bc they didnt seem That small. anyway uhh Quark is a funny little guy and its nice that he straight up doesnt die (usually?? i cant remember if theres a route where he does. other than the bombs) and!!! i actually really enjoyed Kyle. no idea why. wish he didnt abandon me so many times but it fuckin be like that i guess. accidental revenge for absent fatherism. and.. Sigma. when u said u do not like him i think im with u now. not necessarily strong feelings but. yeah. but PHI.. god i wish they actually said where she came from shes just HERE and they never fuckin elaborated man who is she. she is so cool tho i love when she goes on her tangents abt stuff <3

AL OF THAT SAID u were very right when u said the puzzles in this game are fun. even tho i had to check a guide a few times bc i was genuinely clueless for some of em (u have no idea how stumped i got in the darts part of the white room puzzle. i should never do mental math this late i cant live that one down) theyre mostly really good and i did enjoy those sections especially

#OH AND I FOUND OUT PART OF WHY VLR FELT SO WEIRD AFTER PLAYING 999. its the lack of prose #anddd this is all i can come up with atm i gotta sleep like Right Now #im starting to see things xkbskcbs #man. im gonna have some weird dreams after this #might watch ztd later. just to see how much worse things can get supposedly #zero escape #ask #mortellanarts

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a-tale-of-legends · 3 years

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I'm thinking about how some of the main story lines of the main series pokemon games have, specifically the ones that fall flat to me.

For example, in FireRed/LeafGreen the story is very simple and while I don't personally find joy in playing through the games, it does it job right as an introduction of this world.

Hgss( or just the Johto games in general) the story is a continuation of what happened in FRLG. And that's fine! Great actually! But my problem is how some things could have been done better. Story wise, gameplay is a different story. In hgss , team rocket is having a revival and their end goal is to call Giovanni through the radio tower and regain power. And in my personal opinion, that just make team rocket look like a joke, cause there entire operation depends on one man. Maybe that was the point, but for the player character to try and stop something that the police should have been actively trying to stop already is very silly to me( though can you really trust the police of this world after all the shit that happens every year or so? Probably not). Not to mention the whole side plot with Suicune and the box legendary and how it's so disconnected to the main plot, when I feel it could have been connected somehow. Silvers arc is very good, but I feel like the revelation that he's Giovanni's son should come in main game ( like the mid-end), and not in a fucking event that doesn't exist anymore. Makes his hatred to Team Rocket more personal that that they're just weak. I have a few ideas on how the hgss plot could go with changes but that's a different post. Oh!

I wasn't expecting to enjoy Emerald as much as I did, but I did and it was so fun. I liked how at the end of the day, it was Rayquaza that saved the day, not the player. The characters that were important to the plot really filled their purpose. Though I will say, the evil teams reasoning could have been better, and Steven/Wallace honestly didn't do much other than a few battles( though that's still better than Cynthia). In my own timeline for my oc's, I want Oras and Emerald to be mixed a bit, which is gonna take a lot of planning and drafts from me, but that's for future me to worry about.

Dppt. Platinum specifically. The story is very straightforward, just like the past 3 games before it, and the characters are fun in their own right. I should just say it now that a good story doesn't have to be thought provoking, or a grand masterpiece. Simple stories are fun, and that's why I like Emerald and Platinum so much. The "problem" with platinum is just a few characters fall flat/ could have been expanded upon. Cyrus is a really interesting character and it would have been nice to understand him more other then the emotion thing. Cynthia *sighs* is such a disappointment as a character. I love her, I do, but she does LITERALLY NOTHING. Yes she gives some exposition, but she's, like, the champion! One of the strongest at that! Steven falls into the game category of letting the player do literally everything, but he is shown to be fighting the main evil team at. least once. Cynthia does nothing. And that's sad. She's so cool. And it's even sadder when you realize that's a trend among female characters in this franchise but that's a different topic for a different day. But other than that, the simplicity of Platinum is fine, in my personal opinion.

BW and B2W2 kinda caused a shift in the story telling of pokemon. The story was darker, the villain was more evil, the characters were just *chef kiss*. I will admit that I am biased towards these games, if that wasn't obvious enough from my ocs, so I have very little criticism. Not saying that criticism can't be made, and it should, but I can't think of anything other than the female character thing. Iris, I love you, but you too did nothing in B2W2 as Champion. I'm only excusing you cause your a literal child. Bianca is fine and deserves more love but I wish people would stop demeaning her( though I guess that was part of her growth)

XY! I used to hate it before doing a nuzlocke and now I'm just disappointed. In terms of story premise, it was good. Like really good. But in terms of execution, Arcues this was terrible. In my experience with the game, the way the game presented itself was so lack- luster, I felt like I was doing a chore than playing a game( the game was much more entertaining as a nuzlocke, but it still felt like a drag at times). The characters, I believe, where the greatest offender to this. There is very little for me, the player, to care about the rivals, let alone call them rivals, and some things feel so left-field and shoehorned in. Calem/Serena calling the player their friend near the end of the game when their was no proper build up to it? Shauna saying she's friends with Clemont and thus knows how to unlock a security door. The other two noy contributing to anything and just feeling like a waste of space. And is it just me, or was their supposed to be some sort of conflict between our "friend" group and just lead to nowhere, only to resolve itself??? Is it just me??? Diantha only appears twice before her battle, has a member of the evil team member as her elite four( who gets away just fine?????), and just does nothing. This, I feel, is the worst offender of badly written female characters in this franchise. Dear Arcues. I guess Lysander was interesting? Not really. This whole game is a mess.

SM/USUM, despite my grips with a few directional choices, are very good games. This post is getting long, so I won't go into it.

Same goes to SwSh. It's like XY, in that the plot idea was really good, but it feel flat. It's saving grace, at least to me, where the characters. And, well, the fandom just throwing out headcanons left and right, but that's a fanon thing, not a canon thing.

Okay that's all, and thank you for listening to my Ted Talk. Also female pokemon characters deserve better. And simple plot does not equal bad writing, unless the execution suck. Okay bye

#pokemon #pokemon storyline #i'm not tagging all of those games no way #its 4 in the morning #i'm not going through that

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coolgreatwebsite · 2 years

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Cool Games I Finished In 2021 (In No Real Order)

Hello again, website. Been a bit. I’m not gonna get into it too much but this year was straight up the worst year of my life. Will it remain that way with so many years left to come? Who knows, but I’m pretty sure it will at least always be in the running. Sorry to start this off on a bummer but it’s just been a bummer of a year. I have good, tangible reason to believe 2022 will at least be an improvement though. Hopeful for the future and all that. Anyway! One way that this year did not suck was in regard to those lovable Visual Games we all enjoy playing. Good year for those, which means it’s time for yet another one of these. Here’s a bunch of cool games I experienced for the first time in 2021.

Shin Megami Tensei V (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

Shin Megami Tensei V is a cool video game. It is not as cool as Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne. I know this applies to most video games created before and since, but it feels relevant to note here, this game being in the same direct series and all.

SMTV's combat and demon management is absolutely on point. There were some changes I initially didn't know if I agreed with, like lowering the amount of times buffs/debuffs stack and the introduction of the Essence system, but in the end the gameplay was basically as engaging and challenging as it ever was so all that stuff won me over. What didn't win me over as much is the move to open areas. In SMTV, the world is made up of a handful of large open areas that you're meant to platform around in and explore to find treasure, sidequests, all that JRPG stuff. It's functional and the platforming is surprisingly decent for being inserted into a turn based RPG, but looking through every nook and cranny for all the treasures and Mimans you're missing gets tiring after a while, and the map being incredibly unhelpful at describing differences in elevation exacerbates that. It also doesn't help that most of the areas just feel like the same desert wasteland with different colored lighting. There's not a ton of visual variety which, combined with the kinda underwhelming characters and plot, do a lot to make the game Not As Cool As Nocturne(tm).

All in all though SMT5 is a good time, and probably the only entry in the series so far where I'll go for 100% completion (mostly because beating the game in New Game+ takes like five hours if you just run towards the main objective markers). I'd love to see what they could do if they expand on this framework with a Maniax/Apocalypse style release in the future.

Metroid Dread (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

Metroid Dread is like, shockingly good. MercurySteam not only finally made a good game, they made a fucking great game. I replayed (at least one version of) the mainline Metroid then-quadrilogy this year in the leadup to Dread releasing and picked Samus Returns as my Metroid 2 experience since I hadn't played it, and I thought that game fuuuuuucking sucked. Slow, clunky, repetitive, annoying, I just did not have fun with that game outside of thinking the post-Queen Metroid stuff was kind of neat. Like I'd genuinely rather replay original Metroid 2 before I touch Samus Returns again, and it majorly tempered my expectations for Dread.

So how fuckin’ surprised was I when Dread comes out and it's the most fluid feeling and fun to play Metroid game yet? Samus controls like a dream in Dread, the combat is snappy and satisfying, just moving around in and interacting with the world feels great. Basically every lame idea they had in Samus Returns is either massively improved or outright gone, and there's a bunch of cool new powerups that are fun to use and feel like smart additions to the series rather than the devs going "I don't know, Samus get machine gun?". The combat is also way more engaging. The basic enemies aren't a slog to deal with like they were in Samus Returns, and the bosses are uniformly great, with the final boss being probably the most fun fight in the series.

I did have one big complaint on my first playthrough (and keep in mind this is a complaint that disappeared in subsequent playthroughs), and that was that progression felt super railroaded to me. Not as in your face "You Will Go Here And Only Here, The Objective Marker On Your Map" as Fusion and Other M were, but it still felt like there was really only one obvious, correct way to go from whatever room the powerup you just acquired was in to the next room a powerup is in, and if you tried any other way you got hit with a door you couldn't open. It felt very hard to get lost or miss anything important (but boy howdy did some people still manage to pull off both of those spectacularly, the discourse around this game for the months after it came out was fucking insufferable), very hard to go anywhere the devs didn't intend for you to go, very limited.

Then I replayed it with the express purpose of looking for sequence breaks and holy shit sequence breaking this game is so fucking fun. Maybe BECAUSE that first playthrough felt so restrictive, finding ways to skip around and avoid shit, both in ways intended by the devs and ways unintended by them, really made me appreciate the world design way more. It's not like Zero Mission levels of masterfully designed to allow you to do whatever if you're smart enough to know how, but they let you get away with some duuuuumb shit if you're trying to. Like, I beat the game without any sort of extra jump ability just to see if I could. I got myself in so many dumb situations that I had to improvise my way out of, got myself locked into boss fights that I was just barely equipped to handle, and it all felt great! You can get so dumb with this game! I beat it like 5 times within the month it came out. It fucking rules. Play Metroid Dread, it's a good game.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Nintendo Switch & eventually PlayStation 4, 2019)

And on the other end of the search action spectrum, I finally got around to playing Bloodstained and man if this isn't the best search action Castlevania game without "castle" or "vania" in the title. Right up there with Symphony of the Night and Aria of Sorrow.

It's not too much of a looker, but it makes up for it basically everywhere else. There's soooooo much weird shit to discover and so many weird systems on top of systems on top of systems. It's just a weird game in the best way possible. The power curve is great too, by the end of the game you're zipping around at 100 miles per hour, warping through walls, stopping time, near-instantly decimating everyone with chain lightning and 8-bit fireballs, all sorts of wild shit. If you like the exploration-focused Castlevania games you owe it to yourself to play this.

Just don't play the Switch version. It's indefensibly bad, like it should be illegal to sell that version. Buggy, crashy, framey, hard to look at, just a total fucking mess. Really wish the full scope of how terrible this version of the game would be was more readily apparent before I ended up choosing the physical Switch version on my backer survey!!

Lost Judgment (PlayStation 5, 2021)

Lost Judgment was another big surprise for me. I enjoyed the first Judgment's story, but kind of hated almost everything about actually playing it, and only hated playing it even more when I picked it up again this year to refresh myself before the sequel came out. Lost Judgment, on the other hand, is the most fun a Yakuza game has been to play since Yakuza 0 with a story that's just the dictionary definition of acceptable.

But yeah holy shit they did it, they finally paid off the Dragon Engine debt and made a Yakuza game that's got fun action combat and a ton of weird optional side activities. Like, really fun combat. Best in the series combat. The new Snake style is super fun, having three styles makes a lot more sense than having two, they all flow into each other way more naturally, you can do funny air juggles, it's genuinely the best it's ever been. The breadth of side stuff reminds me of Noted Best Game In The Series Yakuza 5, there's wayyyy more than you think there would and reasonably should be. Like even more than Yakuza 7, and that already felt like it was mostly back on the right track in that regard. And sure it's all pretty hit or miss, but that's the way things should be with these games, dammit. They should get wild with it and they super did and I'm so happy it finally happened again.

It's a shame the story just isn't super engaging! Not awful, just not that compelling. I really hope the weird business with Kimura's agency not knowing what a computer is doesn't stop a third Judgment game from happening, because an iteration on the gameplay from this one with a story that's more in the caliber of the best this series is capable of could be fucking killer.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

This is kind of a weird game to talk about. There's a lot of weird aspects to unpack about how it was released.

The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is a collection of two games, "The Great Ace Attorney Adventures" and "The Great Ace Attorney 2: Resolve", neither of which were released outside of Japan until this year. The first game originally came out in 2015 and was met with, from my outsider view, a pretty negative reception. So much so that I really didn't hear anything about the sequel when it released two years later in 2017. It seemed like a flop that was destined to sit in the no localization corner with Ace Attorney Investigations 2 (Capcom! You dumbasses!! Give AAI2 an official release!!! It's one of the best games in the franchise!!!) until suddenly in 2021 it didn't. Capcom was just bringing them both over here in a compilation, suddenly as that.

After playing through this collection I can say two things: I 10000% percent understand the initial reception in Japan, and I think The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is pretty damn good. Releasing it like this was absolutely the only correct call on Capcom USA's part. If US fans got it piecemeal like Japan did there would've been riots. The fact that it was initially split into two games with a two year gap between each is insane. This is just one bigger than usual Ace Attorney game.

GAA1 is, when taken on its own, SO fucking weirdly paced. The first case is genuinely bad in my opinion. It's your average Ace Attorney tutorial case except expanded out to three and a half hours. Then you get to case two expecting things to pick up and, while not bad, it's entirely an investigation segment. The third case is trial-only (but again, not bad!). The fourth case finally has you do both one investigation segment and one trial segment, and then the fifth and final case is the first and only one that dares to take place over more than one day. And then it's over! And it's over with an almost Halo 2 level "see ya next game suckers" ending! I wouldn't go so far as to say GAA1 is bad, but it is a game that's mostly setup and, when taken as a standalone product, has bizarre pacing that's only acceptable in the context of it being the first half of a larger thing you can immediately continue.

With all that out of the way though, when taken as the one large product it was released worldwide as, Great Ace Attorney Chronicles is the best game the series has had since Ace Attorney Investigations 2. The first half being basically nothing but setup is, coincidentally enough, good at setting up overarching mysteries and characters for the second half to very successfully make good on. Especially the characters. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles has the most eminently likeable core cast of characters since the original Ace Attorney trilogy. It was extremely bittersweet leaving them at the end of it all. Herlock Sholmes is the best character of 2021. He is a huge dip shit and he is my huge dip shit. The ultimate lovable dumbass. And then it has all the charming writing, music and animations you'd expect from a good Ace Attorney on top of that. If you're in the mood for an XL AA and you go in knowing that it's gonna be big and take its time, I can't recommend it enough.

Bravely Default II (Nintendo Switch, 2021)

Ok look, I know every single year I have one game where I go "this was objectively good but still disappointed me" and in recent years I've even made a disclaimer similar to this one right here. Bravely Default II is this year's game. But before I get into it I feel the need to stress, emphatically stress even, that this game is objectively good. I played it, I beat it, and overall I enjoyed it. It would not be on this list if I didn't. Please please please do your best to keep this in mind as you read the following rambly wall of text.

Bravely Default II might be one of the biggest disappointments of my life. I love the first Bravely Default. It's one of my favorite JRPGs of all time. Final Fantasy V is my favorite Final Fantasy and they made a shiny new FFV just for me with an insanely good soundtrack. Just that would have been enough for me, but they also went and did one other thing: they made it weird. Bravely Default gets fucking WEIRD.

What starts out as a purposefully traditional "warriors of light please you must save the crystals" story suddenly turns into what appears to be a time travel story after you "save" the last crystal, which then turns out to actually be a multiple dimensions story when you find out your cutesy fairy companion Airy is secretly a major villain, which is signified by the game's subtitle on the title screen changing from "WHERE THE FAIRY FLIES" to a big goofy red "AIRY LIES". You run through multiple dimensions, each one becoming more and more warped and distorted from the original one you knew, until you eventually face the final boss on the edge of all realities, banding together with every alternate universe version of your heroes as represented by your actual friends on your 3DS online friends list. And that's just an extremely surface level synopsis of how the back half of that game just fuckin’, goes for it. Just does a bunch of extremely weird, over the top, unexpected things that make it stick in your mind forever.

I don't like the direct sequel, Bravely Second, as much as the first game but it also Just Fuckin’ Goes For It. Maybe even harder in some respects! Like, the game opens immediately on a scripted unwinnable fight with the final boss and halfway through the game you fail in stopping his plan, and the solution is to use the newly unlocked New Game+ button on the main menu to go back to that unwinnable fight and break the scripting so you can win. The true final boss attempts to defeat you by sending you back to the main menu and literally forcing your cursor to pick the delete save option. The Bravely Series Fucking Goes For It! It rules!! I love it!!!

Anyway, the scene is late 2019. I'm on the last leg of my commute home from work, walking to my apartment from the bus stop, begrudgingly watching The Game Awards on my phone. Suddenly, the announcement I never expected to see on Geoff's dreadful obligation of a show magically appears: fucking Bravely Default II. I honest to god started jumping up and down and yelling on the sidewalk. I cannot remember the last time a game announcement surprised and delighted me that much, let alone one at the fucking Game Awards. It was all I could think about for the next couple of weeks. My mind raced with all the wild directions they could possibly go from the end of Bravely Second. Hell, they were already calling the third game in the series Bravely Default II, what title screen nuttiness would they get up to this time? I was so fucking pumped. They were doing it! They even got the original composer back after scheduling conflicts stopped him from working on Bravely Second! This was gonna rule!

Bravely Default II is a good game. It still has the rock solid core job system gameplay the rest of the series has. Bravely Default II is also the worst game in the series. Bravely Default II Does Not Fuckin’ Go For It, in any respect aside from the music. Revo did his job there. Nobody else did.

For starters, Bravely Default II wasn't developed by the studio that developed Bravely Default and Bravely Second, Silicon Studio. It was instead handled by Claytechworks, the developers of the mobile game Bravely Default: Fairy's Effect. I'm assuming this is the reason a lot of Bravely Default II's gameplay and mechanics feel like varying degrees of a regression from Bravely Second. Bravely Second (and technically Bravely Default: For The Sequel, which is the upgraded version of the original that was the only version released internationally) introduced a lot of interesting new job mechanics, skill interactions, and overall gameplay systems that are either severely pared down or completely absent in Bravely Default II.

It's also just kinda fucking ugly? The first two games were pretty damn good looking for the 3DS, with well-stylized characters and very pretty painted backgrounds. The backgrounds here in Bravely Default II are still nice, but the models look rough and on a technical level everything just looks grainy and blurry and there's a lot of framerate hitching.

The whole thing very much feels like a separate studio that wasn't several iterations deep in a series had to scramble to hammer a game into a shape mostly resembling the shape of those old games while missing a lot of the details. I don't know why this change of studios was made. I hope either Claytechworks gets it together or Silicon Studio comes back for a hypothetical sequel.

But beyond the gameplay shortcomings, my biggest misgiving with Bravely Default II is that it does not have that Bravely series juice, and I was DESPERATELY craving the juice. It makes some meager attempts to provide the juice, but it's just water with food coloring. The story and presentation just does not have it together, and the "wild stuff" they do try to pull mostly falls flat. The final boss genuinely snuck up on me. They do a few fakeouts with the final boss near the end of the game and I honest to God thought the actual last fight was another fakeout until it was over, with only the degree to which how hard the music was going (extremely hard, hard enough for me to look back on the fight as being cooler than it actually was) giving me any sort of suspicion that this was truly supposed to be the climactic final battle.

Even worse than the stuff they fumble is the stuff they just don't do, which is most of it. One of those later game fakeout bosses starts to play a key theme from the original Bravely Default, hinting at some sort of deeper meaning/connection/plot, but there isn't any. Nothing comes of it. That character just disappears after that fight, leaving you to maybe potentially go out of your way to find a hidden lore page to get any info on what her deal was, just like so much of the rest of the game's plot details. I also didn't think the final dungeon was the final dungeon! It's just kind of a lightly altered version of the world map!! Hell, they don't even do anything weird with the title screen!!! They named the third Bravely game Bravely Default II and they don't even do anything weird with the title like the first two games did!!!! Fuck!!!!!

Bravely Default II is a good game. I played it, I beat it, and overall I enjoyed it. It's a shiny new Final Fantasy V just for me with a good soundtrack and, as previously stated, that's enough for me.

Psychonauts 2 (Xbox Series X, 2021)

In a list already full of big shocks, this was the biggest shock. I genuinely kinda can't believe how well they pulled Psychonauts 2 off.

If you asked me what my favorite games were in 2005, as one of the handful of people who played Psychonauts, I would have put Psychonauts pretty damn high up on my list. I spent at least a decade after it came out lamenting the lack of a sequel and cursing the world for ignoring such an incredible game, so much so that eventually all the energy I had behind those feelings was just depleted. When Double Fine finally did announce Psychonauts 2 as a crowdfunding campaign, my reaction was along the lines of "sure, fine, I'll believe it when it's out". The release of Psychonauts 2 ended up sneaking up on me.

I only ended up realizing it was imminent like a week or so before its release date, and in an "oh fuck wait shit I actually am excited about this" frenzy I decided to replay the original to refresh myself, and I'm glad I did because it just made it that much more clear how much they fucking NAILED Psychonauts 2 when I ended up playing it right after. It's like the original game came out 16 days ago, not 16 years ago. They didn't skip a beat, didn't age a day. It's uncanny, like everyone involved with the first game immediately time traveled to 2021 after production finished. The entire voice cast is back and firing on all cylinders (except maybe Cruller, whose voice got much more southern and much less grandpa in the interim), the writing and environments are as wild and inventive and charming as ever, and the gameplay is monstrously refined from the first game. Just wildly better, it's full of smart improvements and plays great (Jeff if you're reading this you're insanely, impossibly wrong (also hi)). I could go on and on about what they got right but I'd have to list nearly everything.

I genuinely think the only criticism I have is that by focusing the story so hard on having a big central mystery, it feels more like you learn how characters relate to that mystery rather than learning about the characters themselves, and I liked naturally learning what made each character who they were over the course of a level in the first game. For instance, I had zero idea why Compton's level was game show themed until I looked at his room in photo mode at some point and saw that he was watching game shows on TV and kind of inferred from there that he's just cooped up watching them 24/7, whereas I feel a detail like this would have more effortlessly revealed itself over the course of the level in the first game.

But I'm nitpicking. Psychonauts 2 is an incredible, almost impossible seeming follow-up to one of my favorite games ever. Just stunning considering the gap between releases and what Double Fine has done/been through in that gap. I'm so happy it happened, and I'm so happy I got to play it. Psychonauts 2 is game of the 2021, just edging out Metroid Dread. Thank you.

These games were also cool, I just had less to say about them:

Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania (Nintendo Switch, 2021): This is a good game, but mostly on the merits of being built off two great games. They made a lot of weird decisions with it, and it's an aesthetic downgrade on every level, but for the most part it's still those Super Monkey Ball 1 & 2 levels, and those are still good. 100% the best Monkey Ball product released in the last decade and a half. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia (Nintendo DS, 2008): And in search action Castlevania games that DO have "castle" and "vania" in the title, this is probably the most fascinating of them all. Absolutely the best one mechanically. The glyphs are a cool mix of standard weapons and Soma's soul system, and turning the MP bar into a Souls series-style stamina meter is a cool shakeup. If they managed to make a sequel to this before Konami decided to be Konami, it probably would have been the best in the series. Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade (PlayStation 5, 2021): This is a better version of a fantastic game and the added Yuffie side mode is very good. Yuffie might just straight up be my favorite character to play as? Super versatile and fast with a real fun ability set. Really looking forward to using her more in the sequel. The story for her campaign is decent too, I just wish they left the Deepground dipshits in the basement where they belong. New Pokémon Snap (Nintendo Switch, 2021): New Pokémon Snap is exactly that. It is a New Pokémon Snap, but bigger and fancier. I was never one of the ones clamoring that there's GOTTA be another Pokémon Snap RIGHT NOW like a lot of people were, but I would have gladly accepted one at any time, and here I am now to accept it. It's extremely similar to the first game, but that 20-something year gap does a lot to mitigate that being a negative. Looking forward to Newer Pokémon Snap in 2041! Monster Hunter Rise (Nintendo Switch, 2021): Monster Hunter Rise whips. Literally, you have a grappling hook you can whip around with. But yeah, it's solid as hell Monster Hunter with very little of what got in the way in MH World. They completely revamped the Hunting Horn, and while I think it's still fun I do miss the old one. Also a little light on content, but nothing a G rank expansion won't fix. Good stuff! Hitman 2 & Hitman 3 (PlayStation 4 & PlayStation 5, 2018 & 2021): Grouping this in as one game since it essentially is and I played it all at once. A bucket load of great new levels and mechanical additions to the formula established in the previous game. Not much more to say than that, it all just kinda rules. Hitman just kinda rules. Except Sniper Assassin mode, that sucks. Mario Party Superstars (Nintendo Switch, 2021): I feel a lot of the same ways about this as I feel about Super Monkey Ball Banana Mania. A good game carried on the backs of great games with a lot of weird decisions around the edges, but still the best product released in the franchise since the mid 2000s. Some of the items are just too busted, and a lot of the rules changes drain the typical Mario Party tension and stakes out of the whole thing. Great online play though, hope it eventually gets more boards as DLC. Resident Evil Village (PlayStation 5, 2021): I had fun with Resident Evil Village. It's good. When I was done with it I never wanted to play it again. It's going for something more action-y than Resident Evil 7, and what it ends up being is weirdly reverent towards Resident Evil 4 but with none of the mechanical chops to back it up (masterfully demonstrated by its absolutely terrible take on The Mercenaries mode). Entertaining in the moment but instantly forgettable. A popcorn video game, and there's nothing wrong with that. Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown (PlayStation 4, 2021): Virtua Fighter 5 rules and it's nice that they ported it to something other than 360 and PS3. I would have rather had a Virtua Fighter 6. They also should have given it rollback netcode. And put it on the PC. The apparent success of this release has given me high hopes that I will eventually get all of those.

And that’s a wrap on 2021, gamers. What does the new year hold for this neglected website? I dunno man. I’d like to at least get that article about the ToeJam & Earl 3 racism final boss up so that story is somewhere other than a Twitter thread, but beyond that you’ll just have to wait and see. As always, thank you so much for reading to the end of this. See ya next year.

#article #year wrapup

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opinions-of-loki · 3 years

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Loki - Episode One, Summary bullet points in form of an unnecessarily detailed opinion

- What I found sort of funny was Loki, who immediately hit the dessert and immediately hurried to the next higher stone, as if this were the pedestal that was his equal, only to be able to explain / present himself to the Mongolian inhabitants, only that they did not understand him and asked again who he is. It kinda gave me Hela vibes. Black haired Odin children have a tough time getting heard.

ALSO! THE SASS! Yet staying polite despite him being confused of what is going to happen to him - Trying to be all intimidating, but nobody takes him serious, as always! You can’t scare the time space cops my boy :/ Finding out how the company works and being all confused was honestly a very sweet and funny moment

- What’s up with the soundtracks??? Someone give this dude a raise who composed these Blade Runner-que music for the TVA followed with those cool bagpipes traditionally used for Scandinavian folk music? FUCK YES! Also the end credits music, it’s just excellent!

- Loki questioning if he’s a robot or not! I mean, he was told to believe he was an Aesir but in the end wasn’t. So who knew if Odin adopted a robot son? Better check on this one - I kinda got cute vibes from Mobius and Renslayer, they seem to perhaps have a closer connection towards another, especially after he greeted her with a formal Hi and talking to her on a somehow personal level - Mobius at first seemed like a very kind man and being patient with Loki, even supportive, but he is an experienced cop and knows how to handle complicated people, especially Loki variants. Mobius gives off a vibe of an older Blade Runner who takes his job very serious. But in the middle I kind of started to hate him a little

- The story of why Loki is an American crime legend D.B. Cooper just because he lost a bet to Thor when they were younger! Hilarious! Most of the most legendary pranks ever! I would have been more happy about the details of why Thor demanded this, or if it went like ” Loki! Cause some chaos on Midgard. Humans are easy to impress.” ” Say no more, Brother!” - Though Mobius seemed like the only person ever who had the ability to call out Loki to his actions: That he isn’t a God of mischief, because he confronted Loki about if killing innocent people is part of his fun, if it brings enjoyment to him to torture people who had nothing to do about Loki’s past. Loki denying that it’s not true, Mobius harshly confronts him about his earlier maniac like expression when removing someone’s eyeballs, if this is still harmless mischief-making. - BUT! Where is it mentioned he was controlled by the mind stone and the thriving fear of Thanos to get killed??? Loki was under pressure, to get killed by the Mad Titan, and he wasn’t thinking rationally when he invaded New York? For someone who studied Loki’s life so well, Mobius sucks to get a point to this one, or it will be mentioned in the future, I better hope so - Loki doesn’t trust easily, because “Trust is for children and dogs.” Gave me Natasha vibes. Because she and him were sharing a quite similar conversation a few hours earlier.

- SEEING FRIGGA’S DEATH! Loki giving great speeches about wanting to free everyone, being a ruler of the Nine Realms to hide away what he truly desired and that nobody would understand his thoughts and emotions, but seeing 2012 Loki seeing that HE gave the coordinates to the Dark Elves, unknowing Frigga would be on this very wing, you can see how hurt he was and panicked! He completely lost all trails of thoughts, asking where she is, if the TVA also kept her, if she is okay! He wanted to save her so badly, he doesn’t want to become the version who will kill her once again. - Mobius saying that there is nothing he can change and that Frigga HAS to die to get back in the flow of time, OUCH! - I get more TTDW vibes when everything that has been explained to Loki, that he will only bring death and chaos no matter what he does, that not only Frigga is destined to die, but Loki is about to die at some point, it made me think of Odin’s words:

Mobius said the same things, Loki’s destiny is to bring death or to ultimately die himself, no matter if he goes the bad or good path. It left me with weird vibes about Mobius being like Odin, just less of an abusive father mentor thing. He was made to cause pain, death and suffering. It hurt. Knowing those weren’t Loki’s goals, he came to the realization that Mobius is right, but doesn’t want to admit it, or at least denies it, but agreed in the end in a very subtle way - MOBIUS AND LOKI FIGHTING!! ” Do you enjoy killing?” “I will kill you!” “Like you did to your mother?” MOBIUS! FUCK YOU! At this point, he lost any sympathy from me towards him. He was guilt-tripping Loki, perhaps even gaslighting him. But this is also part of his job. He isn’t supposed to be Loki’s friend, he is a cop after all. Loki is an emotional and vulnerable being, so hitting him at the worst spot to get out more of him probably wasn’t the kindest thing to do, but probably the most effective for Mobius. Loki likes to pressure other people, but doesn’t like to be the pressured one. - Loki’s purpose is to bring those together he ultimately tried to remove according to Mobius, Loki brought together a team of legendary superheroes together that barely knew each other, and they grew strong together thanks to Loki’s wrongdoings. It somehow hurt a lot, but in the end, Mobius was speaking the harsh truth - "I will gut you out like a fish!” “What's a fish?!” BLESS CASEY!

- Endless Infinity Stones! I am in love with this idea! I don’t know why I saw people getting confused by it because even though the Stones are what hold the universe together, the TVA doesn’t live in that very universe, they are beyond that very space and time we don’t know and can’t grasp, they visit timelines after timelines, so of course it happens they find stones and keep them, either knowing or not knowing what they are, or they simply don’t care, because they have no purpose in the TVA. Perhaps these stones are variants too and don’t belong to a certain timeline and needed to be removed, such as Loki’s Tesseract

- What got me the most, and we all know what I mean, Loki crying privately when he once again viewed the life of his alternative self, viewing the loss of his family, the loss of his own life. I don’t really know if he mourned over Odin too, but in this series, Odin never threatened to kill or imprison Loki which perhaps didn’t cause any damage towards his anger. Though he was aware that Odin took the other Loki in a cell, but it was a destiny he could avoid now that he knew how things will turn out when he returns to Asgard. He will never get arrested, Frigga probably wouldn’t die because of him, though I get a feeling the Dark Elves will come nevertheless, but this time, it shall be Thor’s problem not to screw it up. Though it was a relief to see him smile soon after when he realized Thor was the only one believing in him, even though their relationships always has been kinda weird, as Loki always was jealous of him being everyone’s first choice, but in the end, Thor was alive, everything that was left, and Thor didn’t hate him - End of File - I don’t know why, but reading this, Loki himself reading this, the very end of his life, it made me shiver. He saw his memories of what could be, what MUST happen to him, and that there are more happy memories. But in the end, there are no memories anymore - end of file. That’s it. That was his life. - I can’t imagine how many thoughts must have been go through his head to see Thanos again, Loki’s try to kill him, just to see his neck and wind pipe getting cracked. He currently recovers from the effects of a full year of torture, both mentally and physically, just the same he would treat his ‘Children’. I can imagine Thanos promised him the world, something small to rule over to expand over more realms. Thanos triggered Loki’s fear and anger, who had to deal with the information he never belonged to Asgard in the first place. Whenever Loki would try to flee or play games with Thanos, I can imagine Loki got punished for it, he never even spoke sassy with Thanos during Infinity War. Loki is terrified of him for good reasons. I imagine this young man, feared, terrified, trapped on a rock with daily mental manipulation and pain. Loki became obedient and would have done anything for Thanos, whatever he ordered, including an exchange of power. Even if Thanos never fully was on his side and used Loki as a puppet with power and sorcery, being useful, I get a feeling Loki clung to his words and promises to rule over Earth as a savior and liberator, which completely went wrong - His laughter following after could have many reasons, relief, stress or disbelief. He was still crying between those laughs, which could be taken as desperation about no matter what he does, his actions will lead to harsh consequences. Disbelief of what he just saw, as if it felt so unreal to even believe what he had just witnessed, that it was all real, a destiny that was meant to him. But what else did Loki do during serious situations? He avoids them, he doesn’t want to acknowledge problems and shoving them away with a sassy comment or a smile to cope with it - which could mean this laughter could be part of his coping mechanism

- Him opening up, addressing why Loki hurts people, was honestly the best scene to me. He spoke about his inferior complex, his fear of not being strong enough to survive, building up a facade, a fake personality to survive also with the help of his magic. He thought he can be superior to anyone if he could scare everyone, gaining respect and love in form of war and destruction, as he perhaps thought of Odin being a former warlord, he would prefer a son who is able to conquer, being merciless. He doesn’t want to get hurt, he doesn’t trust anyone easily, that’s why he has to hurt people, to avoid of getting hurt or betrayed in the end. He became a double-edged sword I’m open for opinions and private chatting if you guys want to add something ! :DD

#Loki #loki spoilers #tom hiddleston #mcu #marvel #disney plus #owen wilson #agent of asgard #hiddlestoner #avengers #black widow #thor

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