#the first pokemon game i ever played and the most recent

[kafus]

please let me introduce you to NeverHappy, my most beloved pokemon ever.

i found her as a budew on someone else’s save file after buying a used copy of pokemon platinum. the name “NeverHappy” was a pretty obvious joke about how budew evolves from happiness, and since the previous owner was going to keep her in a box forever, never use her, and never evolve her, she would never be happy. this activated some feral response in my brain and i decided no. she WOULD be happy. i was still replaying through all my old gen 4 games at the time but i traded her off to my other gen 4 files for safekeeping until i could do stuff with her.

oh trust me game. i would.

so you might have thought my plans were to simply evolve her and beat the game with her, get her to level 100, maybe even EV train her - but i had much bigger plans. i was going to ribbon master her. the ribbon master challenge, or the process of “ribbon mastering” a pokemon, is getting every single ribbon possible on a pokemon from the game it was caught in to the most recent game it can be transferred to. if you weren’t aware, that’s a LOT of ribbons. there are 40 in gen 4 alone. i had a lot to do.

(the above clean screenshot was taken by backing up my cartridge save and screenshotting a battle video in emulator. however, i did all of this on my actual DS! i don’t like playing on emulator. not as fun)

i had to beat every contest (normal-master rank in all 5 categories) and do a bunch of other random stuff but my favorite part of the process was defeating the battle tower... 6 times. the battle frontier contains the most challenging battles in gen 4 by far, as opponents have good stats and competitive movesets. there’s 6 battle tower ribbons in gen 4 - two for singles at different points in the win streak, one for doubles, one for multis /w NPCs, one for multis /w another player (i just played with myself on two dses), and one for ranking up in the wi-fi room, which is now accessible again due to fan servers restoring internet functionality for gens 4 and 5.

NeverHappy was randomly caught in the wild and did not have a competitive nature or stats, so i figured that she would just be tagging along in the back while i took out all the win streaks with 2 good pokemon, but she ended up clutching out wins in times of dire need... multiple times. she even ended up being necessary in the wi-fi room to stall out prevalent hacked pokemon like no guard sheer cold machamp, which hits 1 hit KO moves every time, with a gimmicky and convoluted leech seed + substitute strategy.

i could go into all of my team members and the excessive lengths i went to get them all (don’t even get me started on my shiny competitive latias from pokemon emerald) but that’s a story for another day.

by the end of gen 4 i was extremely emotionally attached and she was already becoming one of my favorite pokemon, now with 40 whole ribbons after days and weeks of effort.

i have ribbon mastered pokemon before, so all of my save files in gens 6, 7, and 8 were already set up to transfer neverhappy into and grab all of the ribbons. i had a lot more battling and little tasks ahead of me. it’s really cool how ribbon mastering forces you to interact with pretty much every feature of every pokemon game.

and so i transferred her! gen 5 doesn’t have any ribbons, so it was just an intermediary to transfer into gen 6. at this point, i had also acquired a shiny luxray from pokeradar chaining in platinum named Nightlight, and i was ribbon mastering them together, but once again, a story for another day.

first into gen 6... getting the super training ribbon was really annoying but the battle maison was pretty easy. i had a team in multis with terrakion and a whimsicott with beat up that could 1 hit KO all of the boss battle’s legendaries in one hit LOL

then gen 7... this one went by pretty quickly but i opted to get the best friends ribbon here instead of in XY or ORAS because it was really simple to get with rainbow pokebeans, since all you have to do is max out affection and it only takes a couple rainbow beans to do that in USUM.

and gen 8! you can see nightlight to the left in this picture. by far the hardest part of gen 8 was getting the ribbon awarded for winning a battle in master rank in online VGC against other players. i definitely had to grind that one for a while.

then, she even got an award in BDSP for being a pokemon originating from the original diamond/pearl/platinum games, which was really cool.

oh, and since i had cloned neverhappy back in gen 4 with a glitch so that i would always have a copy of her in her origin games, i was able to take this neat picture! how the times have changed LMAO

luckily she was even a part of PLA’s roster and i was able to take a picture with her there, too... which actually might end up being important since there’s an invisible flag somewhere in the game’s code that gets turned on when you take a picture with your pokemon in the photo studio, which could potentially become a ribbon in the future in another game.

so, trainer Platina from 2016, you were wrong! NeverHappy is in fact happy now and has done more than most people’s pokemon have seen in their entire lifetime. she is my most cherished pokemon and i love her more than i love myself. i think i would die for her

i abbreviated this story a lot because i didn’t want to make this post longer than it already was but i was randomly inspired to talk about this today since SV is coming out soon and there will be more ribbons to collect for any of my ribbon masters that can be transferred into SV, which got me thinking about her. my journey with ribbon mastering has taught me more about pokemon games than any normal person should ever know and if you were interested in any details i left out or how i accomplished certain ribbons (including battle frontier strategies) feel free to shoot me an ask! :D i love talking about pokemon at any time any day of the week.

#pokemon #pokemon platinum #budew #roserade #dppt #long post #kiki was here #probably no one will see this but i was in an infodumping mood ok #kiki.txt #kiki plays games

[chongoblog]

My First Pokemon Playthrough

So I've noticed in my time of talking about Pokemon, I've told a lot of various anecdotes that are all a part of my very first time playing Pokemon. I was feeling nostalgic, so I figured I would share what I remember about this playthrough for everyone to enjoy. There may be a tangent or two in there and people who have followed me a while may have heard these before, but hey.

For context, I believe I was about 8 years old at the time, and after collecting some Pokemon cards, watching a kid play Crystal at summer camp, watching some of the anime, and generally being a pretty big fan (I even have Pokemon Yahtzee burned into my memory for some reason...), I finally got myself a Game Boy Advance with Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World, some Frogger game (after looking it up, it was Temple of the Frog), Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2, and, of course, Pokemon Sapphire.

I remember that my starter was Torchic. I don't remember why I chose that one, although I remember really liking the color red at the time (which I still do), so that was probably why.

I don't remember too much about my team or the general progress I made in most of the game, but I do remember Slateport City. For those who do not recall, in Slateport City in order to advance you need to get into the museum, which is blocked off by Team Aqua Grunts until you talk to someone in the shipyard. There are also Team Aqua grunts blocking the route ahead

Now, my 8 year old brain for some reason concluded that the only way to get past the Team Aqua Grunts was to intimidate them with a high enough level Pokemon or something like that. So one night, while I was supposed to be asleep on a family beach vacation, I beat down more poor level 13 Pokemon than I could count. I learned later what I was actually SUPPOSED to do, which led to me finally fighting the Team Aqua Grunts.....with a level 42 Blaziken.

And since the Name Rater was in Slateport City and my starter had evolved, I figured it was only appropriate to give him the new moniker "MAGMA MAN"

The rest of the playthrough went about as normally as tearing through the game with mostly Blaziken normally would go. There were a couple exceptions though. First off, at the Weather Institute, after I saved the day from Team Aqua, they were kind enough to gift me a Castform, but my party was full, so I couldn't get it. My 8 year old self did not read this. (Remember this, it will come back later). But I managed to make my way through the game, catching Kyogre with my Master Ball and giving it the nickname "LEGENDARY"

Then we come to the Elite Four where I hit a brick wall. I don't remember my team at the time exactly, but I do remember it was MAGMA MAN which had reached about level 80 or so, LEGENDARY which was about level 48, a level 36 Pelipper, two level ~35 Tentacruels, and some other sixth Pokemon I don't recall. And for some reason, I just couldn't beat the Elite Four with this team for some weird reason. The best I could ever get to was Drake. I felt I was utterly defeated.

That's when we bring a new character into the story. A member of my friend group at the time who we'll call "John" to protect the innocent. Now John had a very "uncle who works at nintendo" type energy to him. The group used to play Gauntlet: Dark Legacy together all the time, and when I got the GBA port of it, he convinced me to trade my recently obtained copy of the Pokemon Trading Card Game Boy game for a Gameboy-Gamecube cables, only for me to learn too late that it didn't work like that, and from there, there were no backsies (but then I got ahold of a copy of Pac-Man VS and Four Swords Adventure then I learned to emulate, so who's laughing now).

Anyway, John saw that I was struggling and he decided that he wanted to help me out. You see, he had come across an incredibly powerful and rare Pokemon that couldn't be found in the wild. He had gotten it exclusive, and I had never seen it before. It was called a "Castform". Now John had Ruby version, so he decided that as much as it ached him to part with it, he figured it would be a reasonable trade to trade this powerful Castform for the slightly less powerful LEGENDARY. I agreed.

And then he moved to Ohio.

To this day, Castform is my least favorite Pokemon because of this betrayal. I was so distraught at 8 years old that I completely restarted my game of Pokemon Sapphire. I don't remember much about that second playthrough, but there's a reason why.

This rival battle on Route 110 is somewhat infamous for being quite the sudden difficulty spike. And since I knew how to get past Team Aqua now, I didn't have an over-leveled starter to stomp my rival with ease. After losing to her about five or so times, I got frustrated and figured that whatever team I had wasn't cutting it. So I restarted again.

In my third playthrough, I made it all the way to the rival battle on Route 110. Then she stomped me repeatedly. So I restarted again.

This cycle would go on for, like, 15 resets. I didn't count, but it felt like there was hundreds. As I would keep on resetting and playing through the early-game of Pokemon Sapphire (which I had practically memorized at this point), I would start to take things a lot less seriously, sometimes picking the girl character, making my name random gibberish, etc.

Eventually, on one of these playthroughs where I started with Treecko, I actually managed to beat the Route 110 Rival Battle! And on my first try too! And thus began the epic journey of a girl named DE.

Now, I'd figured at this point that maybe only leveling up one Pokemon wasn't the best approach, so I was trying to balance my teams a bit better (I guess my rival taught me something). I was making my way through the game, and one day I'm checking out my best friend's Pokemon in Ruby, and who do I see in his box, but a Kyogre. I take a look at his name, and I can't believe it. It was LEGENDARY. John had traded it to my friend before he moved.

My friend didn't know that it was originally mine, so he offered to trade it back, which I accepted. LEGENDARY was a disobedient little bastard since I didn't have enough badges, but he got the job done. I don't remember the team I ended up using to finally beat the Elite Four, but it included my Sceptile starter, a Sableye that somehow knew only Fighting-type moves, and two Kyogres, LEGENDARY and LEGENDARY2.

And that's my first playthrough of Pokemon Sapphire. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it.

#pokemon #now that im done typing this all out a minor addendum #the sableye was from my emerald playthrough #because his moveset was Brick Break Focus Punch Detect and Dynamicpunch #And Dynamicpunch was only teachable through a tutor in emerald #anyway yay story time

[pickles4nickles]

So I’ve been watching playthroughs of Yakuza games for a while now, but when I saw that the newest game takes place in Hawai’i, the place where I was born, raised, and have lived in for nearly 30 years now, I knew that this was something I had to have first-hand experience with and not let some guy tell me how to feel about it, to put it bluntly.

I went on a month and a half long journey to finish this game, so I sat around for a bit like

Jesus Christ I should write a review on it.

So if you’d like to read about 5k words on what I thought about The Video Game™, here you go.

Overall, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is a really really good game. However, as Hawai’i local it was kind of hard for me to turn my brain off to some of the cultural inaccuracies and as someone who tends to play smaller indie games, I clocked in about 110 hours on this and I burned out a little towards the end.

GAMEPLAY

Let’s get into Gameplay first because I think I have the most positive thoughts about it. If you haven’t heard my thoughts about Pokemon lately, it mostly boils down to “It’s the only RPG I’ve really been playing in recent years and the gameplay has been very watered down and I yearn for a decent PvE experience.” This game definitely scratched that itch in more ways than one.

Infinite Wealth’s turn-based combat system revolves around positioning. Some moves have an AoE of either a straight line or a circle. Positioning a character next to an ally will proc a combo move with them and positioning them near items will proc an item attack where you can beat a guy to death with a traffic cone or something.

The job system is robust. Every character starts off with a default class- Ichiban’s is Hero, an all-rounder that can pretty much do anything; characters like Nanba and Eric (I know the game calls him Tomi or Tomizawa, but I’m not the game and “Fuckin’ Eric” sounds way better than “Fuckin’ Tomi”) are magic-oriented, so they’re basically wizards by default. You can change their class to other jobs (Desperado is my favorite because it’s basically gun mage), which unlocks new skills as you level them up. You can also change jobs as much as you want and skills carry over between them, so there’s a bit of moveset mixing and matching that makes my brain feel good.

Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio, (the Yakuza devs, which we’re just gonna abbreviate to RGG from here on out) have always been REALLY good at asset reuse (again, I cast a dirty look to Game Freak). They’ll make a whole-ass map of a region and reuse that same map for several games down the line. Not only do you spend a significant time in Ijincho again and not only do you go to Kamurocho for little bit… AGAIN, but there are two… what I can only call “macro” games that have the best asset reuse I’ve seen in, like, maybe anything ever.

DONDOKO ISLAND

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth comes with a whole-ass Animal Crossing clone that’s also kind of The Sims called Dondoko Island. In this, you rehab an island that’s being used as a dump for some trash pirates (no, seriously, they’re actually pirates, yar har and everything) back into a five star resort. There’s a whole-ass crafting system where you go around the island, harvesting resources, to build furniture and facilities, which include whole-ass buildings which have appeared in past Yakuza games. The crafting system is GREATLY improved over Animal Crossing: New Horizon in that you can skip the goddamn animation and craft multiple of the same items at once. You don’t even have to have all the materials in your inventory, it’ll take it from your storage. Placing items in the world is also in an overhead view and the only grievance I have with the system is that placing paths is really weird and you can only place a limited number of them. But overall, Nintendo, was it really that hard to put into the video game. Why did you make AC:NH disrespect my time in that way?

Once the island has been cleaned up enough, you can start inviting guests over, which all have their own set of preferences for the vibe of your island (rustic, pop, sleazy, etc), their lodging quality, and how much of the island’s flora and fauna (and minerals, I guess??) you’ve discovered.

I really really liked Dondoko Island because who am I to say no to a management mini/macro game with decoration elements. I mostly really appreciate that it doesn’t waste your time. I wanna say I finished it in like less than 20 hours… which is not short for a game within a game (actually, that’s insane for a game within a game), but for a game of this genre, it’s pretty short.

There’s also an entire separate mini-island that further helps you with efficiently running your island by passively collecting resources over time and just being a general stockpile of bugs and fish to catch. But I can’t talk about this part without talking about…

SUJIMON

A returning character voiced by Keith Silverstein in the English dub – yes, that Keith Silverstein, who voices Masayoshi Shido of Persona 5 and Zhongli of The Genshin Impact™ is a professor who documents the behavior of weird and often hostile middle aged men, called Sujimon. When Ichiban goes to Hawai’i, he asks him to also document the native Sujimon there as there’s a prominent Sujimon scene there. Mans wasn’t kidding as there is an underground, more or less ilicit Sujimon fight club called The Sujimon League with its own Elite Four called The Discrete Four.

In the previous game, Sujimon was just your bestiary (literally called the Sujidex), but now it’s a whole-ass game, which I can mostly only describe as simplified Yokai Watch, but a glorified card game. Just so we’re not here for forever talking about middle-aged men cockfights… because I can talk about the mechanics and inner workings of middle-aged men cockfights for a hot minute, Sujimon League basically operates on a 3v3, with an additional bench of 3, rock-paper-scissors kind of system. You’ll need strong Sujimon to get through this macro game and you’ll recruit new guys through four ways- through random fights on the map, through literal Pokemon GO raids, through a gacha system, and through combining Sujimon of the same type into stronger Sujimon (don’t think too hard about that one). I had a LOT of fun with this and, again, it scratched an itch I’ve had for a while. Almost all of the Sujimon are just guys you’ll fight in-game, so, again, an excellent use of asset reuse.

Sujimon smoothly integrates into Dondoko Island in a way that makes Palworld look even more balls-less than it already is. You know that little island I was talking about a few paragraphs back? That’s Dondoko Farm. You can put your Sujimon to work on it! As you’re running around on Dondoko Island, letting it consume your life, your Sujimon will grow crops, scrounge around for resources, and earn some cash for you. The island also has some resources to help with Sujimon League by leveling them up with a small investment of some dondoko bucks and your time, but also a Pokemon-Amie type mini-mini game that helps strengthen the friendship of your current Sujimon team.

Yes.

This game lets you pet-

The sweaty, weirdo middle-aged men.

Don’t think about it too hard.

Especially don’t think about it too hard when you have a Sujimon on your team that uses Xander Mobus’ voice clips.

Anyway, there’s also another minigame called Sicko Snap, which is basically Pokemon Snap with Sujimon. It’s a good one, too.

STORY

I guess… the best way I’d explain my feelings on Infinite Wealth’s story is

Objectively, this is an okay story. Like, it’s par for the course for a Yakuza game. I have a lot of personal grievances with this plot which I’ll fully unsheathe my blade for in the next section, but for now I’ll just say… this game is basically Hawaii Five-O crammed into a Yakuza game and that was an emotional rollercoaster ride that I’m not sure I enjoyed.

Like a Dragon’s main theme is “Even if you hit rock bottom, it’s never too late to get back up again” and that’s something I hold near and dear to my heart.

They have used this theme to my benefit and to my dismay as this also apparently means it’s never too late for ~*Romance*~ which, sure, yeah, okay, true, but did it have to be Ichiban and Saeko?

I’m trying to give the game the benefit of the doubt because… to me, it’s mostly one-sided (as in, like, Saeko’s willing to give him a chance, but isn’t as crazy for Ichiban as he is for her) and, like, dude is allowed to have a crush. But from what I have seen… because I never got around to finishing her Drink Link (I was gonna but I’m like really burned out on the game), they kinda strap C4 to the Bechdel Test and raze a village to the ground with it when it comes to Saeko’s character arc because most of her dialogue and interactions are about The Incident with Ichiban, which sucks because she had more character than just a romance interest for the protagonist in the previous game. If you’re also REALLY not into this plot point like I am, the story DOES NOT let you forget that this indeed happened as it seems to be a plot thread that might continue into the next game as well.

Needless to say, I don’t ship it, and I don’t get to block tags and just walk away from this one.

The game also kinda keeps nudging at, “Hehe, Chitose’s pretty cute too, right?” to which I say

Yes I understand she’s of legal age but she’s only like 21 AT MOST and Ichiban’s like 40-something you stop with that.

It doesn’t feel like Ichiban really had a character arc in this… unless you count “proposing on the first date” to “saying I love you on a redo and then being weird about it again” as character growth. He went to Hawai’i, had some shenanigans, found mom, got backstabbed again, fought the cult (which I’ll be really salty about in the next section), went back home to help Eiji’s character arc. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just… Ichiban went on another adventure. And it was ok. I think maybe the game was sizing him up to, again, take Kiryu’s place and be The Hero, but… we already did that already? And I’m not even sure if the game was able to complete that message by the end of the game.

Kiryu probably got the most character development out of this game and talking this over with my friend Andrew, he brought up that it kinda wasn’t fair that this is supposed to be Ichiban’s game, but he had to share half of it with Kiryu. And I agree. His sections were also really hard to get into if you haven’t been a longtime fan. Again, I have a decent amount of Yakuza knowledge, but with Kiryu’s memories, a LOT of it went over my head.  It seems like RGG’s been trying to retire him as a protagonist for like three games now and MAYBE this time they’ll actually do it after this victory lap they’ve given him. But he did learn that “my friends are my power” and “never ever give up, you still have time to do better.” And you know what, that’s rad.

As far as the villains go, just, I dunno, they’re fine? Ebina and Eiji are very “okay bitch, stay mad, then,” and it’s. Fine? My only complaint is that Ebina’s arc felt like it was under-seasoned before they put it in the oven to cook and they could’ve peppered it on a little earlier in the game or something. Bryce’s entire deal I may have taken a little too personally, but that’s for later. Dwight was literally just Danny Trejo doing a villain role and I have absolutely no qualms with it. He was fun to watch.

The supporting cast was fun as always. Eric I hated at first, but he grew on me in the same way that, like, I’d bully a friend. Chitose I also kinda hated at first, was very sus of, but then she had a character arc that was pretty good. The Yokohama gang didn’t really have character arcs to them, but they were still fun to hang out with nonetheless. We got to learn a little bit more about Seonhee and she’s really fun. Both her and Zhao, who is my favorite for several reasons, are really really fun characters as they are both crime bosses (former, in Zhao’s case) who are BIG FUCKING WEIRDOS and I love them for it.

Joongi Han becomes a party member WAY too late in my opinion that, in a way, he’s technically an optional party member, or at least like getting a Dratini right before the Pokemon League in Gold/Silver/Crystal. He had some fun character moments, but felt kinda like an afterthought.

But also, ain’t no way he got his Hawai’i clothes at Hilo Hattie. There’s no way.

To wrap up my thoughts on the main story, I’d just like to say: the plot point that they sailed to Japan on a little tugboat in a handful of hours as opposed to WEEKS is peak Hawaii Five-O vibes and it infuriates me, but everyone kept telling me “it’s okay, the coast guard picked them up, like, halfway” and I will sit down and not start a fistfight over it. And just. That was the vibe of the game for me. Just… alternating between a J-Drama and Hawaii Five-O.

I don’t really have much to say about the substories except that they’re either almost Oscar-worthy material or they’re a snoozefest that I just tabbed through. I can really only think of three substories off the top of my head that were EXCELLENT, though - Nancy and Olivia, the artificial snow quest (THIS ONE IS EMOTIONAL WHIPLASH), and the traveling aquarium one. The rest I mostly just tabbed through because they were just……. Eh. But I think I’m okay with that since we have Sujimon and Dondoko to make up for it.

THE CULTURAL GRIEVANCES

So as I type this section out, I run my hands over my face to remind myself and say

This is a game that takes place in Hawai’i from a Japanese perspective, written primarily for a Japanese audience and I assume that certain things may come from a place of ignorance, but not maliciousness.

Hey Tumblr.

I want you to read that first bolded sentence again.

Because I know how you guys are with reading comprehension.

But that being said, as a Hawai’i-born Chinese person, there’s quite a lot about the Hawai’i cultural aspects of this game that I have problems with. If you wanna see me roast this game, you can stick around, but if not… Here is your chance to bail.

I’ve tried my best to write this in a way where I look at the thing that pissed me off and ask myself,  “Am I taking this too seriously or do I actually have a problem with it?” and write more or less objectively, but some of it might still come off as overly caustic. Just. I tried.

And after a deep breath,

Ho brah,

We go.

WHAT IS HAWAIIAN CULTURE, ANYWAY?

To start off, I’m not sure if RGG knows the difference between being a Hawai’i local and actually being of Hawaiian blood…? The game mentions at the very beginning that Akane is half-Japanese… and half-Hawaiian, which makes Ichiban one-fourth Hawaiian, which makes ME kinda… squint. Like, we’d need to know more about Akane’s backstory, but if you know anything about indigenous cultures, finding someone who’s half native is HARD nowadays. Akane also looks pretty light skinned for someone who’s allegedly half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian but that’s just my tiny nitpick?

I’m also… not sure what kinda research RGG did on Hawaiian last names because some of the ones I see on random enemies are kinda… 

Who is that

What is that

I have never seen anyone named that in my entire life

Sure, my worldview is a little shut in, but, no, what IS that?

Mililani is not a last name, that’s a neighborhood, why’s she Lani Mililani?

WHAT IS THAT?

The pidgin in the game is also there, but… small kine hit or miss. For those of you who don’t know, pidgin is Hawai’i’s creole, which came from a bunch of cultures who don’t speak the same language eventually falling into a kitbashed language system that works for everyone. Looking at the VA listing in the credits, they did hire some local people (they have Hawaiian names) and some of the VO performances work really well like Obispo in the restaurant side story and the cab driver dialogue that ONLY comes up in the Japanese audio version of the game for some reason. Others… are… hm (I don’t know what’s going on with Jeff the taco truck guy). I feel like the voice director got the intonation on the line reads down pretty well, but on the localization side, the syntax and grammar are a little off. Pidgin tends to come off as “broken english,” but it’s technically not since it’s its own language system with its own rules. So you have a lot of line reads that are in the right inflection, but the way it’s written is wrong for pidgin dialogue.

And it just doesn’t sound 100% right to me.

There’s also some… small pronunciation nitpicks that I have. Ukulele is pronounced the white way - it’s not Yooka-Laylee like the Chameleon and Bat, it’s ook-oo-leh-leh like Tapu Lele, the Pokemon. Some characters pronounce Hawai’i as huh-why and not ha-wuh-ee, which is more right (it’s SUPPOSED to be ha-vai-ee but I’m not native Hawaiian and this is kind of an axolotl situation so, y’know).

But shout-outs to the “Whatchu lookin’ at?” line guy.

Because that one is just, no notes, perfect.

NOTHING CAN BE NORMAL, I GUESS

Something that rubbed me the wrong way in this game is the mystification of a culture that’s foreign to you, that is, taking a culture that’s not yours and describing or representing it in such a way that it sounds so deviant and hard to comprehend compared to the one you’re used to. Think of that one tweet where someone describes hamburgers like a white person would describe asian fruit.

There's the lei substory where the girl needs to make a lei with blue plumerias (which does not exist by the way) because there’s an urban legend that if you give a blue plumeria lei to someone, it’s a way of confessing your true love. Lei are just… things you give as, like, a “congrats!” kind of a thing. Or if you wanna be touristy about it, a “welcome!” kind of gift. There’s nothing mystical about it, most grocery stores stock a few that you can just pick up, grab and go style. 

The entire game mechanic of “shaka to make friends” was so?? Like maybe after 8 hours into the Hawai’i map, I was like, okay, I’ll just… fine. I’ll accept it. But my god did I not appreciate it when Kson came up to me and was like “what’s a motherfucker gotta do around here to make some friends” and told me how FRIENDLY the Hawaiian people were and how you can just throw a shaka to make friends; while me, probably the saltiest, introverted Hawai’i local that throws stink-eye at tourists who can’t watch where they’re going, playing the video game on that day was like, “We don’t fucking do that, hello??” I don’t even know why we shaka?? Most people you ask that question will just be like “idk it’s the local thing, they do it at the end of the 5pm news on KHON2.”

There’s a substory in this game with a character named Nathan, but we were all calling him racist Alpharad because he kinda looks like him (ALPHARAD HIMSELF IS NOT RACIST OR IN THIS GAME I WANNA CLARIFY THAT) and he’s basically, like… a weeb. He’s recording what seems like a PBS special on Japanese tourists in Hawai’i, but he’s kind of a shitter about it. He makes Ichiban choose between local foods and cold-ass rice and becomes upset when he chooses kalua pork over the rice since it wasn’t The Japanese Option. It escalates to making Ichiban play darts with shuriken and when he loses, he tells him to “live up to his dishonor,” slides him a knife and board, and asks him if he wants to take a finger or hara-kiri. To which Ichiban goes “dude, I get you like Japanese culture, but you can’t treat people this way”

To which I look back at the game like

You clearly understand how this feels, so why are you doing this to Hawaiian culture?

Again, I understand that a lot of this game was written with maybe just ignorance, and not malice, and this isn’t really a call-out post to RGG or anything, but BOY…

Okay.

Now we get to my biggest gripe with this game.

PALEKANA CAN SUCK MY NUTS

I’m kinda disappointed in their choice to use a Hawaiian cult as a plot point. It’s not quite a native savages kind of a vibe, but… In the year of our lord 2024, I thought we would know better than to portray an indigenous religion as a bloodthirsty cult? I also don’t like how they’re conflating the Hawaiian religion with what’s more like a Christian/Catholic cult in this.

Palekana is portrayed as “cultists who worship a goddess who lives in a mystical land, forbidden only to her chosen and maybe one day we’ll be worthy of her blessings.” Hawaiian religion is… not… like that at all? They did get the part about “giving back to the community” correct as a part of Hawaiian culture is mālama ‘aina, meaning, you need to care for the land you live on, which is… reasonable? I guess the other basic idea of Hawaiian religion is that certain places, things, and times that are important, and you shouldn’t touch it unless you wanna fuck around and find out. But the game just kinda wildly overboils this.

Like, I don’t claim to be an expert, I’ve only scraped the basics from what I learned in school (a year’s worth of Hawaiiana lessons in middle school, a semester’s worth in college; went to a private Catholic school, took two world religion classes in college), but Palekana has a very Catholic European religion kind vibe instead of a Hawaiian one. And I really, really don’t like that the game conflates the two. The Palekana cultists wear hoods, which is a distinctly European thing (it’s too hot for hoods here!). The beaded necklaces also seem more like rosaries, which, again, very Catholic. The idea that a god-figure will save you is also a VERY Catholic idea. I’m also assuming the goddess Nele that they use in the game is an expy for Pele, which… okay, like, you can do that with locations. Ala Moana Shopping Center represented as Anaconda Mall in the game hurts me a lot, but… to change up the name of the most prominent deity in Hawaiian religion is like

Dude, I’m not Hawaiian, but I know better than to shit on Pele?

Maybe I’m taking this a little too seriously, but it comes off as a little(??) disrespectful.

To give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe RGG wrote this plot point in this way to be like, well, they’re the villains, so we’ll write them so hyperbolically evil and wrong so people won’t mistake that for the actual culture? But my gut reaction is that they’re only writing from what they’ve seen in the movies and they wanted to make a story like that.

This was my least favorite part of the plot because not only does the cult aspect feel like it’s in bad taste, but it’s SO MUCH of the story and you REALLY can’t get away from it.

Alright. So now that I’ve aired that out of my system, I’m finally capping off this section with the part of the game that hit the closest to me and that is

CHINESE IN HAWAI’I

Listen. Again.

This is a story about Hawai’i, written by a Japanese team, for a Japanese audience.

Yakuza is a series that often talks about the racial conflict between the Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans. And I don’t expect them to portray any of these groups in anything more than a neutral light in this game about Gang Crime.

But ohhhhh my gooooood did they get the Chinatown section so wroooooooong.

Right off the bat, the big glaring problem I have with this game is. All the guys speak Mandarin. I think they might just be reusing voice clips from Yakuza 7, which, sure, fine, I understand that video games are hard to make and expensive.

In Hawai’i, like, real-world Hawai’i, not the bizzaro Hawai’i this game takes place in, we’re definitely starting to see more Mandarin-speaking immigrants show up, but most of the town speaks Cantonese.

Most of the people here a generation or two above me come from Guangdong or Hong Kong, which are Cantonese-speaking areas. It’s an entirely different dialect that’s really only been represented in small bits in media I’m familiar with, like in Jackie Chan Adventures (the uncle’s chant is basically “no more ghosts, get out of here” in Cantonese) and Digimon Tamers (“Moumentai” is “it’s okay/don’t worry about it” in Cantonese), and it seems really hard to get VAs that speak it, so I’m not… really that mad about it.

BUT. Then there’s Wong Tou.

Wong is the Cantonese pronunciation of 黄 , Huang or Hwang in Mandarin.

So like… clearly they knew?? But?? Decided not to go all in on it??

(And then Daniel Dae Kim is his face model and I just??? Bro’s Korean, hello?????)

And then there’s the name of Wong Tou’s gang. The Ganzhe.

Which is a stupid name.

The Chinese dictionary gives me 甘蔗 which translates to sugarcane, which. I get it. The plantation times. The Chinese and the Japanese and the Filipinos and the Portuguese and whatever all used to work on the cane plantations.

…But you’re out here calling your BIG KNIFE GANG “Sugarcane??”

My guy, you could start a reggae band with that name instead.

SPEAKING OF REGGAE-

No one knows how to pronounce Ganzhe properly besides Eric’s VA apparently? All the other VAs pronounce the gan closer to “van” when it’s supposed to be more like a “gone.”

Yes. That’s right.

Ganzhe is pronounced more like ganja.

You know.

The Marajuanas™

I’m a Hawai’i-born Chinese, first-generation local on my mom’s side and third-gen local on my dad’s. I grew up in Chinatown, so this was a section of the game that was near and dear to my heart. So I THINK and HOPE you’d understand my frustration to see that work needed to be done on the representation of my culture in this game. It was definitely a little fun to see my hometown modeled in this game- they got Maunakea Marketplace and Keikaulike Mall down pretty accurately and some of the motifs on the buildings made me do a double take because they were so familiar to me. BUT, man, this cultural aspect of the game needed A LOT of work.

SO TO FINALLY CLOSE THIS OUT

Japanese people love Hawai'i a lot.

I think Japanese people love Hawai'i more than Hawai'i locals do.

But as for portraying it accurately, I understand that no one can do it as well as a local islander can. Did I personally think they did the best they could?

………………ehh

Like, if you turn your brain off, it's fine??

If you turn your brain off and not let Palekana get to you, this game is fine.

It can be a little campy.

It can be a little Hollywood.

It can be a little Disneyland.

And despite my four pages of bitching about it, at the end of the day. It is fine.

So with that, I’ve hit like ten full pages on this Google Doc. Despite half of this review being me complaining about what they got wrong about Hawai’i culture in this game, I liked it a lot! When the game didn't have me strapped down for an episode of a J-drama or Hawaii Five-O, I liked running around town, fighting guys, making other guys fight other guys, and managing a resort island. If anything, this game actually motivated me a little to make more local-themed stuff, because as I notice people getting older, there’s less and less people to correctly preserve highly specific culture stuff like this. So a lot of that responsibility falls on me, y’know?

Thank you for making it to the end of this review! I know it was a lot. I don’t know what happened. I do recommend this game, but I ask that you do NOT finish the game with the takeaway that you have learned everything there is to know about Hawai’i.

I’ll fight you with a lawn chair (in Minecraft, for the FBI agent reading this) if you do that.

Other than that, I think you’ll have a lot of fun but also take your time because this game is, like, a 100 hour commitment. Not Persona 5 Royal long, but a commitment nonetheless.

#like a dragon #like a dragon infinite wealth #pickle art #sure uhh I guess I will put this in the tag #IF YOU FOUND THIS VIA THE TAG AND YOU REALLY LIKE THIS GAME #HI HELLO I DO TOO I JUST HAVE SOME STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT THE CULTURAL ACCURACY OF MY HOMETOWN #PLEASE DON'T YELL AT ME YOU CAN STILL ENJOY IT #anyway I've had this sitting around for like... most if not all of march #and I finally got the spoons to put the finishing touches on it #and come to terms that I'm probably not opening the game back up anytime soon

[milesluna]

My Favorite Games of 2023.

Hi. Hello. Thanks ever so much for clicking on this page. Happy to have you.

First thing's first: I'm a little freak when it comes to video games. I don't feel the need to beat most games I play. From Software is one of my favorite studios in the industry and I've never finished a single one of their games. This means, fortunately, that I get to play a LOT more games than the average bear.

I've written up some blurbs about my top ten favorite games from 2023, but before that here's the list of every game I remember playing this year that left any sort of lasting impact on me (in no particular order):

Dead Space Remake Resident Evil 4 Remake F-Zero 99 Humanity Dredge Metroid Prime Remastered Anemoiaplois Alan Wake 2 Baldur’s Gate 3 LoZ Tears of the Kingdom Counter Strike 2 Hunt Showdown El Paso Elsewhere Jusant Slay the Princess| Remnant II The Finals Street FIghter 6 Lethal Company BattleBit Remastered Don’t Scream Homebody The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog Pizza Tower World of Horror Super Mario Wonder Mr. Sun’s Hatbox Fifa 23 Sea of Stars (Demo) Half-Life (25th Anniversary Update)

And the games I played that were NOT released in 2023:

Unpacking Persona 4 Golden Picross 7 The Order 1886 Shovel Knight Dig Lost Planet: Extreme Condition Spider-Man: Miles Morales Pac-Man Championship Edition DX Project Zomboid Quake LoZ The Minish Cap Drill Dozer Wario Land 4 Pokemon Pinball Resident Evil Revelations Summer of ‘58 Trackmania TwinCop We Were Here Visage Cursed Halo CE Half-Life 2 (I probably play this once per year) Witch Hunt Red Dead Redemption 2 Cyberpunk 2077 Borderlands 3 Brutal Legend Cultic Slay the Spire PUBG Rez Infinite Batman Arkham City Alan Wake Alan Wake: American Nightmare Max Payne LoZ: Majora’s Mask 3DS Metroid Prime Metroid Prime 2 Tunic Everhood Final Fantasy VII Final Fantasy VII Remake GOODBYE WORLD Yakuza: Like a Dragon Critters for Sale Dome Keeper Phasmophobia Hades Nintendo Switch Sports

Now that you understand the kind of freak you're dealing with…

Let's dive into my top ten favorite games from this objectively fucked up year.

10. El Paso Elsewhere Developed by Texas indie studio Strange Scaffold, El Paso Elsewhere is a Max Payne-clone with vampires, an opinionated narrator, and lots and lots of bullet time. As a small studio punching well above their weight class, Strange Scaffold leans into abstract, PlayStation 1 minimalism when it comes to visuals and pairs them with a soundtrack that will make your hands sweat. The vibes are here and they're ready for the end of the world. I'm personally also a big fan of everything this studio stands for.

9. Mr. Sun's Hatbox I want you to imagine Metal Gear Solid V. Now I want you to imagine that game as a 2D, level-based, slapstick platformer you can play with up to three friends. If you think that sounds stupid, you'd be right. And it's beautiful. As you build up a secret army of soldiers with various skills (and disorders), you'll start to develop *favorites*. This game constantly asks if you're willing to send those favorites on a harrowing mission and risk losing them forever… or if you'd rather send an idiot you recently captured who blinks constantly and can't kill anyone without fainting.

8. Dredge Every year I feel like I find one game that falls into the “just one more round” category, and baby… Dredge was it for 2023. As a weary fisherman in strange waters, you'll make the most out of your 12 measly hours of sunlight only for your daily voyages to inevitably pull you into the darkness of night, and night is when things get weird. Rocks emerge from the fog that you swear weren't there before, your equipment malfunctions, and you're pretty sure you just saw something in the water… something big. Despite only containing a small collection of islands, the world of Dredge manages to feel vast - perhaps vast enough to swallow you whole.

7. Resident Evil 4 Remake I was curious to see what sort of changes would be made to the timeless classic and father of modern 3rd person shooters, Resident Evil 4. I wasn't let down. RE4 Remake takes all the things that didn't age well about the original, tossed them out, and replaced them with only good things. And MORE things! It's campy, fun, and better than a game of bingo.

6. Jusant I really feel like this one didn't get the recognition it deserves. Jusant is a rock climbing game that combines the quiet contemplation of Journey with the mechanical specificity of Death Stranding. Unlike Death Standing, though, there is very little story to interrupt your flow. There are plenty of collectible bits to find for those curious to learn more about what happened before the events of the game, but the environmental storytelling does most of the heavy lifting. For me, the joy of the game comes from how it feels. Right trigger controls your right hand grip, and left trigger controls left hand grip. Plan your route, manage your stamina, and climb high above the clouds in search of answers.

5. F-Zero 99 This. Shit. Slaps. I've never been a big F-Zero guy, but this MADE me one. The “battle royale”, 99 player format is the perfect fit for the ruthless, high octane world of the game. Races last about three minutes, and friend, they are the most intense, white-knuckled three minutes of your life. The decision to make your boost meter the same as your health meter started in F-Zero 64 (I believe), and it is so much more HARROWING in this game when another player could side-swipe you mere meters from the finish line and blow you to bits. Sadly it's only playable via Switch Online, but it made me cheer, laugh, and scream enough this year to earn a spot in my top 5.

4. Alan Wake 2 Remedy makes weird games that also manage to exist in the AAA space and for that I will forever love them. Although Alan Wake 2 resembles a 3rd person shooter survival horror, I'd honestly say it's more of a narrative game than anything else. There's sidequests, there's puzzles, there's upgradeable skills, but at the end of the day the characters, world, and story are what kept me playing. If you haven't checked them out recently, you should definitely watch a story recap of the original games before diving into this sequel, but the wild swings for the fences this game takes are well worth that small price of admission. There's a god damn musical number, for Christ's sake.

3. The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom I've really got nothing to say about this game that most people don't already know. It's incredible. The fact that Nintendo made a game that redefined an entire genre and then made a SEQUEL to it that ups the ante is remarkable. To be honest, I've only cleared the Rito, Zora, and Goron cities. I got a bit tired of exploring the depths and guiding Koroks to their friends, but I can't deny the sheer level of complexity and polish on display here. I saw someone on TikTok build a functioning Mecha Godzilla in this game. Good God. I've heard that the ending of this game is one of the best in the franchise, and if I'd seen it this year then it may have wound up higher on my list, but for the time being I'll continue picking up this masterpiece from time to time, chipping away at it until the day comes that I can finally smack the tits off thicc Ganondorf.

2. Half-Life (25th Anniversary Update) I know I'm gonna get shit for this, but I don't care. This year was the 25th anniversary of Half-Life and Valve released an update that made playing it (and it's online Death Match) much more accessible. I threw it on my Steam Deck out of curiosity, expecting to play for 20 minutes. I could not put it down. It is unbelievable how modern this game still feels. I simply had so much fun sprinting through the corridors of Black Mesa with a dozen weapons strapped to my back, blasting aliens and military Spec-Op chumps as a 24(?!) year old theoretical physicist.

1. Baldur's Gate III This game is fucked up, man. The sheer amount of writing in this game scares me. We can all talk about how BIG this game is, it deserves it, but the thing BG3 does better than any other role playing game I have ever experienced is actually encourage roleplaying. I've played through Act I four times now, with four different groups of friends, and it has felt fresh every time. I have seen the same events play out in so many different ways that it boggles the mind, but in every one of those play sessions I see players asking themselves “What would my lil guy do here?” rather than "what is the best thing to do here?" The game rewards players constantly for just trying shit and the D&D 5e rule set means playing like the character you said you were from the start leads to frequent Points of Inspiration. Maybe one day I'll see the end of this story (probably not), but I don't have to in order to feel a connection with BG3's world, characters, and most impressively, the characters I made myself.

Honorable Mentions for 2023

5. Dave the Diver 4. Homebody 3. Sea of Stars 2. Humanity 1. Super Mario Wonder

Top 5 Favorites NOT from 2023

5. Metroid Prime 4. Final Fantasy VII Remake 3. Cursed Halo (Halo CE Mod) 2. Red Dead Redemption 2 1. Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (3DS)

Games I didn't have a chance to play from 2023 but still want to when I find more time...

Viewfinder Venba Chants of Sennaar Thirsty Suitors Hi-Fi Rush Moonring Armored Core VI Laika Aged Through Blood Bomb Rush Cyberfunk

OKAY THANKS BYE!

#video games #2023 #GOTY

[bogleech]

People who aren't familiar enough with pokemon to know why its recent decisions are terrible but wonder what the fuss is about: every individual pokemon you get is a unique digital object, even two of the same species, and customizable like a simpler version of someone's character in an MMORPG. You might have one with moves, stats and other properties that were incredibly difficult to get on it or possible in only one older game, and the ability to move individual pokemon between games is the series core gimmick, for trading them with other players, the meta competitive scene, the breeding mechanics or just playing new games with old favorites and sentimental acquisitions; I know people who still have pokemon they got 20 years prior, or from family or friends that are sometimes gone now, it can get incredibly personal!

Only with the last games did the company decide for the first time ever that only a limited number of pokemon species would be compatible with each new release, and that a few hundred moves would be retired altogether (automatically cleared if brought to a new game). Part of this is just so they can push games out faster, too, with an already overworked team.

At the same time, they made a cloud storage service for your pokemon that you have to pay for, it has no gameplay features and it doesn't let you put them back in the game you got them from. This is now almost the fourth year players using this service have had a couple hundred types of pokemon "trapped" in it, unusable in any games and by now having cost them most of the price of a full game if they don't want to lose anything.

They've confirmed that the upcoming games still have only select compatibility with certain pokemon, too, so if they don't make a point of giving all the "trapped" species a turn at being transferable those four years could turn into seven or eight before a given pokemon can leave the subscription software. 🥲

#Pokemon

[duckprintspress]

Meet the Aether Beyond the Binary Contributors: Mikki Madison

Today, we’re kicking off introducing y’all to the contributors to Aether Beyond the Binary, our currently crowdfunding awesome anthology of 17 stories set in aetherpunk settings starring genderqueer and non-binary characters, with an interview with writer Mikki Madison and excerpt from her contribution!

About Mikki Madison: Mikki Madison has been writing stories since she was seven years old.  While she is most prolific in fanfiction and has works scattered among  more than a dozen fandoms, she has been making strides into original  fiction. Her favorite genres to read are romance, fantasy, and cozy  mysteries. When she isn’t reading, writing, or falling headfirst into a  new fandom, she can be found baking, doing puzzles, walking her foster  dog, doting on her niblings, or playing Pokemon Go. She has also written  under the name M. K. Mads. Link: Tumblr

Mikki Madison has been involved with Duck Prints Press since our first project, and has contributed to two previous anthologies: And Seek (Not) to Alter Me: Queer Fanworks Inspired by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and He Bears the Cape of Stars. She’s also written two short stories with the Press, one – The Fated Prince published on our webpage (and included in the contributor short-story bundle campaign add-on!) and It Happened on Maple Street, which is Patreon-backer exclusive.

Q&A with Mikki Madison

Are you a pantser, a planner, or a planster? What’s your process look like?

I’m a planner. I virtually always have an outline for any project I’m working on, whether it’s a quick scribbled bullet list or more involved note cards. The note cards are typically for novels, while short stories  I can get away with something less involved. It helps to keep me on track and if the story veers while I’m writing, I can adjust either the  outline or the story as I need to.

Do you like having background noise when you create?  What do you listen to? Does it vary depending on the project, and if so, how?

It varies depending on project and also where I am. I have a bunch of story- or genre-specific iTunes playlists that I would listen to whenever I was at in-person write-ins, which usually contained movie and video game scores because I write most easily with instrumental music playing. So if I was writing a fantasy story, I’d have a playlist with the score from the LOTR movies or Final Fantasy games, and if it was a sci-fi story, I’d have Star Wars, and steampunk would be the movie scores from the Guy Ritchie Sherlock Holmes movies. Recently someone in the DPP server shared a link to a YouTube channel with immersive writing sessions that are about 2 hours long, with 25-minute sprints interspersed with 5-minute breaks. I’ve been putting that channel on the TV while I’m writing at home and it’s really helped me focus!

What are your favorite snacks and/or drinks to consume while creating?

As you can probably tell from a glance at my Tumblr, I love tea. I’m virtually always drinking tea, especially when it’s cold outside.

What are your favorite tropes?

Found family is one of my absolute favorite tropes. I love seeing a disparate group of people come together to care about each other. I’m also a huge fan of rivals to lovers and second-chance romances. Plus, the grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one!! I love it when the grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one.

Tell us about your pet(s).

Right now, I don’t have any full-time pets – I foster dogs for a local rescue. I’ve had 9 dogs over the course of the past year, from 80-pound coonhounds to 3-pound chihuahua puppies. It’s been extremely rewarding and I’ve had so much fun getting to know all the different dogs. It’s hard when I have to let them go, but I know that they’re not “my” dogs and I’m happy that they’re getting to go to a forever family.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

This quote from E.L. Konigsburg: “Finish. The difference between being a writer and being a person of talent is the discipline it takes to apply  the seat of your pants to the seat of your chair and finish. Don’t talk about doing it. Do it. Finish.”

Novels in particular are marathons, and finishing a story of that length is a skill you’ve got to build. It’s fine if it gets trunked, it’s fine if you never edit it, but I think especially as a younger writer, you really need to learn to at least finish that first draft. It helped me tremendously early on to focus on finishing my stories, instead of just editing the beginnings over and over and over.

What are your favorite resources and tools for your craft?

A friend of mine has gifted me a couple of writing-related card decks – one is a prompt deck called Writer’s XL Emergency Pack, another is a card game called Once Upon a Time. I’ve recently been using both to come up with short story ideas and it’s been really fun!

I draw anywhere from 3-9 cards, depending on the length of what I’m doing, and then start brainstorming how to use the different cards  within a story. If I’m not feeling one of the cards, I discard it and  draw another one. 

For example, I was recently working on a story where I knew one of the MCs didn’t want to work with the other one, but I didn’t know why. I knew that was going to be a big plot point, but none of the ideas I’d come up with seemed to fit. So I started drawing some cards out of the Once Upon a Time deck to see if that might spark something. Three of the first cards I drew were “secret,” “wolf,” and “cure.” Bam! A secret werewolf looking for a cure. That gave me my motivation and helped me  outline the back half of the story.

When you’re writing short stories for NaNoWriMo and you’re desperately trying to come up with something else for your word count, these are lifesavers. And I like the physicality of shuffling and drawing them.

Share five of your favorite books. 

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett – if you enjoy fantasy and comedy and you haven’t yet read the Discworld series, this is a fantastic place to start. The Night Watch books are probably my favorites and this one is  excellent. 

The Heiress Effect by Courtney Milan – Honestly I love all of Courtney Milan’s romance novels, but The Brothers Sinister series (of which The Heiress Effect is the second book) is really, really great. I love Jane, the heroine of this story, SO MUCH, and the secondary romance between her sister and a lawyer is so, so sweet. I’ve read it three or four  times at this point.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune – I love found families and fantasy and romance, so this book was right up my alley and I read the entire thing in one go. The kids particularly were wonderful.

The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi – Another book I read in one go, and it was SO much fun that I couldn’t put it down. Scalzi’s sci-fi is both funny and accessible, and another thing I liked about this book was that the first-person POV and the unisex name (Jamie) meant that you can read the main character as any gender you’d like.

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers – I really loved the structure of this book: essentially several episodes of this ship’s  crew becoming closer as they make their way across the galaxy on a yearlong journey to help create a new wormhole. It was both fascinating  and heart-wrenching.

And my +1 (because we do 5+1 in fandom, yeah?): A Clash of Steel by C. B. Lee – This is a queer YA retelling of Treasure Island set in 1820s China, and it’s an absolute delight. Lee’s descriptions are so vivid that it feels like you’re actually there, and the romance is so, so good.

About Mikki Madison’s Aether Beyond the Binary Contribution

Title: Mixed Dough

Tags: bakery, bed and breakfast, character injury (permanent), character injury (serious), cults, death of a sibling (past), emotional hurt/comfort, food (graphic descriptions), gender exploration, gender non-conforming character, getting together, hurt/comfort, m/nb, non-binary, past tense, plane crash, tattooed, third person limited pov

Excerpt:

“Your plane crashed,” Jules explained. “You’re badly injured. Help is on the way. I’ll—”

The pilot’s eyes grew wide, and they struggled to speak. Jules leaned in closer, putting his ear as close to the pilot’s mouth as he dared.

“Where…?”

It was the only word Jules could make out. “You’re in New Blanchard. Or, well, just outside of it.”

The pilot’s eyes closed and their whole body sagged. “Thank fuck.”

They were still breathing, albeit barely, so Jules didn’t panic. He glanced back toward the bed-and-breakfast and the road; the ambulance lights were pulling into the driveway. “The ambulance is here. I’ll…”

His eyes fell on a tattoo peeking over the collar of the pilot’s shirt. In and of itself, that wasn’t a cause for concern, but given the shape and that the pilot had been in a gas-powered plane…

Jules pulled the shirt down to reveal a tattoo of three interlocking rings, about the size of a half-dollar.

Well. Shit.

Mikki Madison is one of 17 awesome contributors to this collection. Visit our Kickstarter Campaign page to learn all about the other contributors and this project!

#aether beyond the binary #duck prints press #mikki madison #queer anthology #nonbinary #lgbtqia

[epicspheal]

hi cami! hope youre doing well! id like to ask.. have you seen that pokemon zensho is now fully available in english? i only found out recently lol. you can find it at mangadex! if you have, what are your thoughts on it?

Hi there @soulsilvers I'm doing well thank you for asking! Yeah, I actually didn't know that they full translated Pokemon Zensho until I got this ask, so thank you for alerting me to this I appreciate it! So of course I had to read it all last night! Link here for anyone who wants to read it! It was so cute honestly. First Pokemon Concierge, now Pokemon Zensho making me cry and I'm here for it honestly. Like you said on discord, it definitely is very rushed at only 9 chapters. I definitely would've loved to see it have a few more chapters to explore more about Red and Blue's friendship (well here called Ash and Gary) and going through the league (I always feel like the elite four part of the Kanto story always seems to get the short end of the stick). Despite it's rushed nature, it does make up for it in being the most true-to-gameverse adaptation. But what I appreciated the most was the details that were added were very grounded. Like the problems the gym leaders were facing felt real. It was cool to see how Giovanni became the way he was because it has been hinted at that he's not always been the ruthless Team Rocket boss but something made him that way. I've grown to like Lt. Surge a lot over the years and I feel like his arc was really wholesome too. Many people criticize Kanto for it not being particularly story driven (which to each their own, some people like story drive gameplay some don't, groups are valid), but to say it's completely devoid of story is false. The theme of Gen 1 besides exploration is relationships. It's why the key driver is the rivalry (and strained friendship) between Red and Blue. The orphan Cubone, Agatha and Oak, even Mewtwo's existence plays on the concept of relations in a subtle way. Zensho takes this concept and runs with it throughout as Red travels through Kanto. Much like Pokespe, Pokemon Zensho does a good job at bringing smaller but notable NPCs into the fold and it was done in a way that was not overbearing (looking at Marvin from SwSh Pokespe taking Hop's spot). It was cool to see the SS Anne captain and Game Warden get some more screentime. Also props for this manga low key making non-binary Bill canon! I know some people who read it may not like this version of Red not being "badass" in that he does earn some of his badges without actually defeating the leaders but I think the way it's handled here was okay. I think part of Red's character is supposed to be how he puts caring for others first despite being so talented at battling and I think it's okay that there are adaptations that don't just fall into him being a legendary battler who sweeps everyone. Even though this is a retelling of Red's story I would say if I'm honest this was really Blue's story. Blue got a lot of focus in this manga and outside of Pokemon Generations we don't really get to see into Blue's mindset. I appreciated as you mentioned on discord, how despite everything it did still focus on the fact that Blue was still Red's friend despite everything. It's not something that's focused on a lot in gen 1 adaptations. And of course the rest of the Oak family gets some shine too. This is probably my favorite portrayal of Oak in that it retains some of his flaws but humanizes him too (although I wish they had devoted some time to his and Agatha's rivalry). And Daisy...even with her limited screen time very much still shone especially with her calling out Professor Oak for his harsh words towards Blue. And then of course the revelation of what happened to Blue and Daisy's parents. Give those kids (and this Professor Oak) a hug. This is definitely my favorite of the four Pokemon manga I've read thus far and if we ever got a short miniseries for the Gen 1 games again I would hope it would take more of the Zensho approach and be game accurate while still expanding on little lore details.

#pokemon zensho #pokemon manga #epic spheal reviews #ask epic spheal

[weaselandfriends]

So you are going to make a fanfic about Pokemon, huh.

Are you a pokemon fan? Or you known about the franchise enough? or is a case of you, waking up one day and thinking:" I'm going to make a Pokemon Fan-Fic!" And started to consume media from it in order to make a story?

I was a child in 1998.

During that initial invasion of Pokemon into the West, when Pokemon was far more than simply the "most profitable media property in the world" that it is today, when it was a tidal wave phenomenon that swept away an entire continent, I was something of a Pokemaniac. I had Blue Version, Red Version, Yellow Version, Pokemon Pinball, Pokemon Stadium, Pokemon Puzzle League, Hey You Pikachu. I had (and still have) every single card from the first three TGC sets, included the oh-so-vaunted holographic Charizard card. I had Pokemon figurines, I had toy Poke Balls, I had Pokemon stickers, I had Pokemon stamps, I had Pokemon clothes, I had Pokemon strategy guides, I had Pokemon choose your own adventure novels. I had the then-complete runs of both Pokemon Adventures and Electric Tale of Pikachu (I vastly preferred the latter). I would wake up early every day to watch the Pokemon anime on TV. I went to Pokemon The First Movie opening day and remember walking into a theater packed to the brim only to hear a man scream—to my delight and assuredly my mother's horror—"SEATS IN THE FRONT ROW!"

Of course, it's been 25 years since 1998. I've played most of the mainline games since then (GSC, RSE, DPP, SuMo, and recently SV). I've seen a few of the endless array of movies. For some reason I watched the entire SuMo anime. So yeah, I still like Pokemon.

Is it my favorite thing ever? No. The unfortunate reality is the games are pretty formulaic and often have questionable design choices. It's not like Mario or Zelda, other nostalgic Nintendo series, where the devs put their heart and soul into each new mainline installment.

But the fundamentally fascinating elements of its world continue to interest me. I've always seen the Pokemon world as a near-future nigh-utopia, clean and neat and orderly, with large swaths of the population free to pursue their hobbies rather than slave away at some useless job. I've always wanted to delve into such a world narratively, as opposed to the endless dystopias that seem to clog contemporary fiction.

Chicago was written as a kind of critical response to To the Stars, which is a utopian story that glosses over the steps taken to reach utopia. I wanted to peer more deeply at how a world akin to that in To the Stars might actually be created, the kind of political turmoil and upheaval required to eventually integrate the panacea to mankind's ill—magic—into functional society. A Pokemon story would instead be about the utopia itself. What does it mean for society that children are not simply allowed but encouraged to leave home at 10 to pursue a vague, unstructured path to become what is basically a competitive sports athlete? What has had to happen to society for such a thing to be not simply okay, but preferred? And what does it mean for that society's future development, especially considering a world where rapid evolution of generally symbiotic non-human creatures is possible? And why, in this peaceful and low-scarcity world, are there so many insane doomsday death cults essentially seeking to usher in the apocalypse?

There are two works of literature that particularly influenced the direction of my idea for a Pokemon fanfic. The first is Eyeless in Gaza (unfortunately topical title) by Aldous Huxley of Brave New World fame. Gaza is a mostly autobiographical story touching on a variety of topics, and one chapter near its end involves the main character traveling to Central America, where he meets a strange, idealistic man named Dr. Miller. Dr. Miller espouses many ideas about anthropology, especially ones critical of or antithetical to British imperialist pseudo-scientific anthropology: "An anthropologist is a person who studies men," he says, "but you prefer to deal with bugs. I'd call you an entomologist [...] the only remedy is for the bug-hunter to throw his bayonets away and treat the bugs as though they were human beings." But the most interesting thing he talks about, the thing that has stuck with me more than anything else in the otherwise mediocre novel, is soccer.

"But [football is] the greatest English contribution to civilization," said the doctor. "Much more important than parliamentary government, or steam engines, or Newton's Principia. More important even than English poetry. Poetry can never be a substitute for war and murder. Whereas games can be. A complete and genuine substitute."

Dr. Miller envisions a world where competitive sports replace the destructive and combative elements of humanity; he teaches soccer to small Mexican tribes as a way to settle their differences instead of war. What does a utopian society look like that has replaced conflict with competitive sport at a grand, worldwide scale? In our world, the Olympics are often spoken of in similar terms, but Pokemon appears to have actually accomplished this lofty goal, to the point that becoming a trainer at 10 is more important than standard education. By setting my fanfic at a prestigious, global tournament, I become perfectly posed to explore this question...

The other point of inspiration comes from Underground, Haruki Murakami's nonfiction account of the 1995 Tokyo sarin gas attacks committed by the cult Aum Shinrikyo. The book contains numerous interviews with both survivors of the attacks themselves and former members of the cult, and ends with Murakami's essay on how the Japanese social psyche allowed this event to occur. Describing the cult members he interviewed, he says:

To all of them I posed the same question, that is, whether they regretted having joined Aum. Almost everyone answered: "No, I have no regrets. I don't think those years were wasted." Why is that? The answer is simple—because in Aum they found a purity of purpose they could not find in ordinary society.

This idea of "purity of purpose unfound in ordinary society," what does that mean in a society like Pokemon's? In a utopian society, where nearly all needs are met? Where sports replaces conflict?

Anyway, I've started to veer off topic, so I'll cut it short there. I'm incredibly excited for this project, so I hope all of you decide to give it a read when I finish!

#writing #bavitz #pokemon #eyeless in gaza #underground

[4ragon]

Can I convince you to play Octopath Traveler 2?

Hello my lovely followers! I have recently run into a problem where I have fallen in love with another video game and do not have enough people to talk about it with. I have therefore decided I’m going to do what I do best and talk WAY too much about the subject for an unreasonable amount of time. 

So! Why should you, dear followers of mine, play this hip new rpg called Octopath Traveler 2?

Well, to put it simply, this game was the most genuine fun I’ve had playing a video game in a very long time!

What is Octopath Traveler 2?

Octopath Traveler 2 is a new turn based action rpg by Square Enix, combining the charm of old school pixel art with modern graphical capabilities to create one of the most beautiful-looking 2D games out there. Like. It’s so pretty! Look at this shit!

It’s so good! Look at that presentation! Great graphics, full voice acting, orchestrated music, just. The presentation, guys!

The Gameplay

Now. Here’s the deal. I am not the most crazy about turn-based rpgs. I like them fine, but they can get very repetitive! Pokemon is a prime example. Rival sends out a Charizard? Well, better go get my Vaporeon and wreck his shit! And yes, I know there’s more strategy behind it, but like. I have never once bothered. At a certain point, the game is just “water beats fire, grind levels until you win” and that’s kind of as much as you need to bother with.

BUT

BUT BUT BUT

Here’s the deal. Octopath (both 1 and 2) is SO much fun. It is the greatest turn based rpg I have ever played. Because it’s no longer about elemental damage and sending out the right Pokemon that a lot of other turn based games use.

In each fight, the enemy has an unknown list of weaknesses, which you can discover as you fight. Each successful attack chips away at their “shield points,” until you can knock the enemy out for one round, weakening their defenses and stopping them from mercilessly beating your ass. (At least until they wake up in the next round and get to attack first.)

There are also boost points which build up each turn, just as long as you don’t use them up. Those either boost the damage on your single attack OR, and here’s the kicker, allows you do use a regular melee attack up to four times.

These two things in tandem open up a HUGE amount of strategizing! Suddenly, it’s not “will my Vaporeon be able to use hydro pump before Charizard uses fly,” it’s “do I use my turn to heal, or do I boost my attacks so I can knock this boss out before he kills me? Do I knock him out now, or do I save my boost points to do one massive attack once he’s weaker? Do I knock all of the enemies out at the same time, or should I stagger it so they don’t all Kick My Teeth In next round?”

It’s about timing! It’s about strategy! It’s like one huge puzzle combined with all of the terror of a normal action rpg! And it’s!!! So fucking fun!!!!

Just. I know most of the people following me are following me for my love of murder mystery visual novels like Ace Attorney, so this may be a bit of a harder sell than if I was trying to convince you all to play Murder By Numbers or Return of the Obra Dinn, but still! It’s not too terribly difficult to get into the game, and hey, it’s turn based! Reaction speed not required.

(Important note: Octopath Traveler OG is also just as fun to play. They added some cool mechanics in 2, and tweaked certain characters’ movesets, but overall, both are just as much fun. Try 8path 1 too! I highly recommend it.)

The Music

I have a running list of games with the greatest soundtracks of all time. We got Zelda of course, we got Kingdom Hearts, Ace Attorney, but Octopath is quickly clobbering its way into my favorites. Every single track in both games slaps so hard. Boss fights? Town music? CHARACTER MUSIC? I mean. Come on.

Come on.

Every song is gorgeous. Fully orchestrated, incredibly well done. I don't know shit about music theory, but 8-Bit Music Theory did a cool video on game one that I think holds up pretty well.

AND, because this game added a Day/Night cycle, most of the songs have multiple arrangements. Even the character themes have multiple arrangements. And I won’t spoil any of them here, but I swear, when Agnea’s final battle track started playing, I had the biggest, goofiest grin on my face. It’s just. It’s so good you guys.

The Story and Characters

Okay. Alright. Here’s where Octopath Traveler 2 goes from good to great. And here’s also where Octopath 2 edges out the first Octopath game. Now, this is not a dig at the original game. Play the original game! I love it so much! The characters are so much fun! The story is wonderful! But Octopath Traveler 2 does everything I wanted the original Octopath to do and more! More character interactions! More story! An endgame that isn’t deeply anticlimactic and actually involves the characters I care about! It’s so good.

Octopath Traveler 2, of course, stars 8 wildly different characters, each with completely different motivations and completely different skillsets, both in and out of battles. Different weapons, different spells, and different ways to interact with the NPCs around you.

And man, I love every single one of these characters so much. I feel like there’s a character for everybody, I’ve seen so much art of basically all of the main cast because every one of them is so different and interesting.

There's a favorite for everyone! We’ve got the dark, broody character, the pure-of-heart character, the character struggling with a dark curse. We’ve got revenge, chosen ones, amnesia, cowboys, one asshole detective who I am a little bit in love with. (Murder mysteries, guys! Come on! That’s my jam!) Often times, there’s usually one character that falls a little flat to me, but I just find all of them so much fun, even the ones with less going on in their backstories. They're fun! They're charming! I love it!

None of these stories are particularly complicated, of course. It’s no Tales game, where the stories twist and turn and build on each other constantly. In fact, by the very nature of this conceit, where no player character is the true main character, they can’t really build the sort of story other RPGs would usually have. Each character’s story is simple, even if they branch into different routes and do slowly start to tie into each other in subtle ways. Sure, there were surprises (and like holy shit to a few of these surprises) but overall, the stories are simple and straightforward.

And yet, even with 8 relatively simple stories, the characters absolutely shine. Sure, I took one look at the character who secretly did that murder in chapter one and went, “Ah. It was absolutely you.” And sure, we had an evil king who was so cartoonishly evil to the point of becoming farcical. But still, these stories didn’t have to be these huge, sprawling, mindblowing paths. They’re about the leads growing and meeting new people and bettering themselves. Each route has its own eclectic bunch of NPCs that bring so much life and color to the world, from the put-upon knight being dragged around by the world’s shittiest cleric to the happy-go-lucky scrivener looking for her big scoop to whatever the FUCK is happening with the Blacksnakes holy shit jesus christ what the actual fu

These stories made me laugh. They’ve made me cheer. They made me sob like a baby. They made me rage so fucking hard that I had to put down the computer for several hours and lay on the ground, which to be fair was absolutely the intended effect but I’m also still so fucking mad about it I swear to god.

PLUS

PLUS PLUS PLUS

Okay, I always say a jrpg with a huge cast rides or dies on their character interaction. Love is found in the found family y’all. And, again, it’s certainly no Tales game, in part because the game isn’t quite as scripted, but there’s still so much. Each chapter has a set number of side conversations between whoever is in your party (which if you miss them you can go back to that chapter in your menu and watch them anyway thank god). Several pairs of characters get to go on fun little side quests together throughout the story. Characters talk to each other during battles, which doesn’t feel like a ton but it really does add so much charm. They feel like friends, and even if they don’t tend to interact during story cutscenes, it feels like their relationships grow and develop over the course of oh holy shit I played 90 hours? Oops. Well. Whatever. That’s fine.

Anyway. That’s my pitch. Play this game. Join me in hell. Come on. You know you want to.

#octopath #octopath traveler #octopath traveler 2 #whoops why did i spend an hour writing this

[curiouskinetic]

nine people i'd like to know better!

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐎𝐑(𝐒): I'd say blue is my all-time favorite, but purple and green are also up there

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐅𝐋𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑(𝐒): Sweet and salty things! I have such a major sweet tooth it's unreal dfkhjdf

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐂: I honestly have no idea, I'd say I listen to music from video games the most but considering how varied that kind of music is that doesn't narrow it down much does it lmao

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐌𝐎𝐕𝐈𝐄(𝐒): Probably the how to train your dragon movies! I remember seeing the first one in theaters in 3D and it was one of the most special experiences I've ever had with a movie ;w;

𝐅𝐀𝐕𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒: Hmmm I think I'd have to say pokemon. I always end up coming back to it even after taking long breaks, whether that be playing a new game that came out or replaying the old ones, or in more recent years playing through some of the amazing rom hacks people have made!

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐎𝐍𝐆: Video game music strikes again

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒: I haven't watched anything new in a long time bedsides random video essays I leave on in the background while I'm doing other things oof

𝐋𝐀𝐒𝐓 𝐌𝐎𝐕𝐈𝐄: I think the last movie I saw was the DnD movie that came out earlier this year? Or was it last year I can't remember now dfkhjkfd

𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐑𝐄𝐀𝐃𝐈𝐍𝐆: Nothing besides rp replies, but this reminds me I have been looking for some new books to read

𝐂𝐔𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐋𝐘 𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐎𝐍: Designing something for sora and also a commissions!

tagged by: @ccaptain (ty!! ;w;) tagging: @versatilejoker, @boomermania, @narvvhal, @hiisfire, and anyone else that wants to do it!

#ooc #dash games #my mind always blanks when i try to tag people in things im dfskjhfsd #always worried i'm getting people that have already done it too om g #anyways go listen to the song i linked right now thats an order #it fucking slaps

[kafus]

i did some ridiculous technical BS in pokemon again

NOTE: not only is this post a very very long infodump from yours truly, it is also specifically an infodump involving a lot of pokemon glitches and exploits. even though i don't tamper with my games and everything achieved here can be done on original hardware with no hacking or what-have-you, some people still may consider this Cheating based on their own personal standards of legitimate gameplay. i ask that you please don't try to start arguments with me about pokemon legality and just take it all as an interesting technical infodump about gen 3 pokemon okay thank you <3

SO. i decided that before pokemon bank eventually shuts down one day in the probably-not-so-distant future and makes old gen transfer impossible, i need more ribbon master pokemon (AKA a pokemon with all the ribbons it can possibly receive from its gen of origin to the most recent gen it can transfer to) from gens 3 and 4. i've been meaning to ribbon master a pokemon from gen 3 based on my favorite singer, KAF (you don't need to know anything about kaf for this story whatsoever but you should check her out LMAO) and while musing over what pokemon would suit her best, it came to me.

FARIGIRAF IS JUST KAF'S FURSONA!! the monster teeth hoodie with the eyes. even has the dangly bits. like come on it's perfect. AND girafarig is obviously available in gen 3 so i could RM a kaf girafarig and then evolve her once i got to SV. Cool! Awesome! but here's the problem. I CAN'T SETTLE FOR JUST A NORMAL GIRAFARIG. I HAVE TO GO ALL OUT!!

i started brainstorming my ideal gen 3 kaf girafarig, and came to the following conclusions:

i obviously want the girafarig to be shiny. i mean come on

i want her to be a girl for obvious reasons, and gentle nature to match her personality. just because Armor Tail is better on Farigiraf i also want it to have girafarig's second ability, Early Bird. i'm not concerned with IVs because i think random IVs add flavor and that would add more tedium than i was already dealing with

i want her to be japanese language origin since kaf is a japanese singer (i can nickname her かふ that way too!)

i want the original trainer (OT) name to be PPさん (PP-san) in reference to the person who scouted out kaf's talent in the first place - he goes by Piedpiper online and my friends and i call him PP as a joke sometimes

i want the trainer ID to be 02018 because 2018 is kaf's debut year

since girafarig only spawns in gen 3 in the ruby/sapphire/emerald safari zone, i wanted to hatch a girafarig egg in firered/leafgreen for the kanto origin, which is impossible otherwise. FRLG are also really important games to me, leafgreen being the first pokemon game i ever owned or played, so that's a bonus

now you may be looking at this entire list and being like. What the fuck. how do you intend to shiny hunt girafarig with all of these hyperspecific parameters, especially in FRLG where the everstone passing nature doesn't exist and flame body doesn't even exist to hatch eggs faster. you will be doing that long after bank shuts down. and you're intending on doing this on original hardware too??? WELL. that's where ACE and RNG manipulation comes in babey. i am GOING to attempt to make this comprehensible even if you've never touched ACE or RNG manip in your life, even tangentially, but sorry if this is a bit of a mess it's pretty technical LOL. the rest of this post is going below a cut cause it Goes Places!!

ACE and RNG manipulation explained (kinda)

first off a quick overview of ACE, ACE stands for arbitrary code execution, which is the ability to run your own (arbitrary!) code within the game. this can be set up with a series of elaborate glitches, that break open the gen 3 pokemon games into letting you run your PC box names as code, enabling you to do pretty much anything you want. to be upfront, i'm not an expert on ACE - i understand it in an overarching conceptual sense and am able to follow ACE guides just fine, but i cannot write my own ACE code, which essentially requires you to know some GBA assembly. doesn't really matter for the purpose of this story though.

you can see an example of a tiny snippet of a larger ACE code with the PC box name below. it looks like gibberish but that's because every character used in the name corresponds to a specific internal value, which when all run together, is code!

i need ACE in FRLG because resetting for, or RNG manipulating (more on that in a moment), trainer ID (and secret ID, also more on that later) is pretty much impossible. ACE will allow me to change my TID to 02018 by essentially just telling the game to do so with my PC boxes. this requires me to set up ACE in emerald first since that's the only game with a viable entrypoint, and then use emerald ACE to make glitch pokemon that can activate ACE in FRLG when traded over.

as for RNG manipulation, that's a bit more straightforward, especially if you've ever watched a speedrun of... pretty much anything with random chance in it. games with random chance are not actually fully random because computers can't really be fully random, and in the older pokemon games with unencrypted and less advanced RNG (random number generator) algorithms, this is pretty easy to exploit.

this is a heavy simplification, but whenever you encounter a wild pokemon in RSE or FRLG, the amount of frames that have passed since the game was turned on are compared to a number that was generated upon boot, called the RNG seed. if you've ever played minecraft you can compare this to world seeds - the pokemon RNG seed determines all possible wild encounters in that play session in a similar fashion as minecraft determining the infinite terrain layout. this comparison determines every aspect of an encountered pokemon; its species, nature, IVs, and so on. so, if you were able to time your wild encounter (or any other type of pokemon encounter) down to the 1/60th of a second frame, you can get the game to spit out whatever pokemon you want at you! you just need a bit of typically invisible information first - the RNG seed, and if you're RNGing a shiny, your secret ID aka SID, which is like an invisible second trainer ID generated alongside your TID that is paired up with the TID and compared against any pokemon you encounter to determine if it should be shiny or not. both of these things can be figured out without hacking or tampering with games/save files.

the most common program used for all things RNG manipulation is called pokefinder and you can see an example of it spitting out what shinies are available on hoenn's first route in the first 100000 frames of the game being on with an RNG seed of 0 and my old TID/SID combo below. it's pretty damn cool to me tbh, i love RNG manipulation and i'm way more versed on it/experienced than i am with ACE

TLDR; rng manipulation is essentially a frame perfect, speedrunning-adjacent trick to get the game to roll the RNG in your favor, including for perfect IVs or shininess. for reasons that will become clear later, this is much easier to do in emerald than any other gen 3 game, so i will be using emerald for the RNG manipulation of the girafarig egg

with ALL of that context out of the way, this was the gameplan:

play through a fresh file of japanese firered (i don't own japanese leafgreen, RIP) all the way through the postgame to unlock trading with hoenn with the name PPさん, not worrying about TID for now. the guide i was following did not have a code for changing name with ACE in japanese FRLG specifically, so i figured playing the game again real quick would be a better alternative to trying to teach myself assembly in an afternoon LOL

set up ACE in my new emerald file i completed recently

use ACE in emerald to generate the glitch pokemon needed to run ACE in FRLG and trade them over. finalize the setup process over in FRLG too

look up possible gentle, ability 2, female, and shiny egg frames, and pick one that looks good to RNG manipulate in emerald, noting its PID (an encounter-specific ID number, pretty much)

figure out what SID, when combined with a TID of 02018, will cause that egg frame to be shiny - that way when the egg is traded over and hatched in firered, it will be shiny

do the RNG in emerald, trade over the to-be-shiny egg to firered, and hatch it after changing the TID/SID with ACE appropriately!! bam female, gentle, early bird, shiny, JP origin girafarig with an OT of PPさん and a visible TID of 02018. Pog!!

to execute that gameplan would take me an entire day, though...

step 1: play through firered

ok gonna be honest this is the ONE part of this entire process that i did not play on original hardware. i wanted to get to the Cool Parts of this process so i decided to play through firered on emulator. absolutely terrible picture sorry but i do actually own japanese firered, so i could dump the game legally to my computer to use speedup in mGBA with a little device called the Joey JR which connects the cart to my computer by USB like so

after that it was pretty much a relatively normal playthrough but obviously with emulator speedup. i used solely my starter blastoise to, well, blast through the rest of the game LMAO. after just a couple of hours or so i was right before the elite four, which i completed while in the car after moving the save file back to my cartridge with the same device, since i had to leave the house to go to a doctor appointment. i tried to take pictures of me beating the game but the sun was not doing the photos any favors lol. blastoise ended up being level 76 by the end. was easy with surf and an ice beam TM from the game corner (i just bought the coins)

unfortunately beating the game isn't the only requirement for trading with the hoenn games, so i also had to complete the whole sevii islands postgame quest... which required me to have 60 registered owned entries in the pokedex, which i wasn't really doing while speeding through the game initially, so i had a lot of mons to catch. i was still out of the house at this point (and playing at normal speed lol) so i wasn't really taking pictures, but i did make a stop at the power plant to look for an electabuzz despite it being an inefficient 5% since i needed a spare anyways for my leafgreen file unrelated to this story lmao. took a pic of it since it took a while to show up. anyway soon enough the dex had 60+ entries! i've played FRLG so many times that the encounter locations are memorized in my mind... i did all of this with no googling asdfkasfd

at this point i got home and was able to do the ruby/sapphire postgame quest on emulator with speedup again, so it was pretty easy. moved the save back to cart and i was done with step 1! obviously this didn't actually take me 21 hours of playtime, that was the emulator speedup's fault loool. from here on out i didn't touch any emulators again!

step 2: set up ACE in emerald

ACE time! i've actually set up ACE in an old emerald file before but i wanted to do it again fresh. i was following a guide pretty much to a T so i'm actually going to skip over the details of some of the steps since you can read about those more in depth over at the guide i was using if you want

TLDR; you have to trade for the NPC trade pokemon, DOTS the seedot and PLUSES the plusle, then EV train DOTS a specific way. these EV values cause DOTS to turn into a glitch pokemon egg 0x0611 when corrupted with the pomeg glitch (more on that in a bit), which, when hatched, runs the PC box names as code, aka ACE! why does it work? if you really want to know, there's plenty of stuff online about it, i'm not the best person to ask haha

it's worth noting that volbeat is really annoying to capture in emerald as it's literally only available as a 1% in one patch of grass, so i caught an illumise instead and bred them until a volbeat hatched lol. was much more efficient

also lol "Take good care of DOTS!" sorry i will be corrupting your son into demonspawn that lets me wield godlike control over your universe

after getting the necessary NPC trade pokemon all ready and moving them into a specific pattern in box 2 (i cloned them with the emerald tower cloning glitch) i had to perform the pomeg glitch. this involves using a pomeg berry to decrease a pokemon's health to 0 without causing a whiteout. this is achieved by getting a pokemon with at least 8 HP EVs to 1 HP and then using the pomeg berry on it, decreasing the EVs and taking off a point of health in the process (it's slightly more steps than this but whatever). i decided to use the camerupt i had during my playthrough of the game for this purpose. just took him to fiery path to get poisoned and walked until he was on 1 HP and healed him with an antidote lol

by doing the pomeg glitch and entering a wild battle, the game gets a bit confused since all the pokemon in your party are fainted and just sends out some sort of glitch decamark pokemon. in this situation, after viewing my camerupt's summary in battle and exiting back out of the summary screen, i was able to corrupt the DOTS and PLUSES sitting in my PC by scrolling up above the usual limit of the party menu, which reaches into data used by the first two PC boxes and fucks them up, ending up with, assuming that i EV trained correctly, a glitched egg that is about to hatch in a nest ball named DOTS with pokerus. this will run ACE when hatched! (if you want more info on this corruption pomeg stuff, check out the bulbapedia article for glitzer popping. yes that's what they named it)

step 3: use emerald ACE to set up firered ACE

so once again you can find a lot more detail on this process over at the guide i was using, but the TLDR of the matter was, i needed to put a bunch of codes into my PC box names to generate a few different glitch mons. specifically, i needed a egg that would hatch into a crobat (yes, fully evolved lol) with a singular glitched out move, that when used in battle in firered, would cause ACE to happen similar to how hatching the corrupted DOTS egg causes ACE to happen in emerald. i also needed a specific buggy shiny umbreon and a very strange glitchy egg.

even though this step was mostly a lot of tedious typing on the gen 3 keyboard (+ i had to redo things once because i made a typo at one point in the process LOL) it was so much fun! the game breaks in so many ways that you would just... never see during normal gameplay and it makes for some really good pictures and whatnot

first of all, when you hatch the 0x0611 egg, it hatches into a decamark of varying colors, in the case of the picture below it's almost imperceptible because the whole sprite is just a black circle, blending in with the background (sorry for the quality on this one, it's a screencap of a video clip i took).

additionally, trying to scroll over the hatched decamark in the PC or viewing its summary screen will crash the game, so to get rid of it, it has to be moved to the front of your party in the party menu, and then you go to the PC to release it through the deposit menu. since the cursor just defaults to the first position of the party and you don't have to scroll over to it, it's possible to release it from here.

oh yes and the umbreon/other glitch egg? similarly screwy - actually after generating them, their sprites are glitched out until you reset the game, so they look like this. behold their nonsense summaries:

after i had all i needed to trade to FRLG, i cloned an extra set of them with the emerald tower glitch again just in case i messed something up and got to trading! here's me receiving them on the firered side:

and last but not least, i'm a little obsessed with the way the glitch move looks in FRLG on the hatched crobat, absolute nonsense:

i finalized setting up the FRLG ACE (check out the guide i linked earlier for more info) and put everything into their proper positions, but before i could actually execute any code... i needed to know what SID i was going for!

step 4 + 5: look up potential egg frames in emerald and find an SID

soo now for looking at potential girafarig eggs. instead of using the program pokefinder which i mentioned earlier, i used a program called pokenav egg rng tool, which is exactly what it sounds like, a tool specialized for rng manipulating eggs with the pokenav in emerald. using it, i was quickly able to generate a whole list of gentle, female, ability 2 (early bird) eggs, and i picked one that was around 1300 frames in since that made for quick resetting attempts, but not so quick that i could barely make my inputs in time. the one i picked was frame 1381. with a TID of 02018, the PID D2C5EF55 would be shiny with an SID of 14962, so i noted that for later in firered. (i figured this out using an old program called RNG Reporter which is what i'm familiar with but i don't recommend using lmao. it's the "Pandora's Box" feature of that software though if you happen to look it up)

i won't make an entire guide on how to do emerald egg RNG here because it's a lot of steps, but i might at some point because the most up to date method isn't super well documented. anyways, here's a very paraphrased version of the process (this is also assuming that you aren't dealing with "redraws", which i wasn't... like i said very paraphrased):

get a pokemon with the ability lightningrod in the front of your party (i used electrike) to make pokenav calls happen more frequently, and a pokemon with flame body or magma armor (i used slugma) to make eggs hatch faster

get a male and a female of the pokemon you want to hatch, in my case girafarig. if you were RNGing IVs, the parent's IVs would be relevant, but i am not RNGing IVs so i didn't care and just caught the first girafarig i could in the safari zone

an egg is attempted to be generated every 255 steps after the parents are deposited in the daycare together, so by timing the usage of a max repel in such a way, it's easy to save the game exactly 10 steps before an egg is generated. do this

using a timer such as eontimer, soft reset and try to take that last 10th step on your target frame. this will also trigger a pokenav call (or lack thereof) and by looking for the phone call you got in the call column of the egg rng tool and whether or not an egg generated at the daycare, you can tell what frame you hit. didn't hit your target? just soft reset and try again, calibrating the timer for your own human error. this can take a while since the timing is precise to 1/60th of a second

once you hit your target frame, woohoo you did it just take the egg and hatch it! if you're RNGing IVs you would actually save before taking the egg and then RNG the IVs separately but that's a whole different thing i'm not explaining here since i wasn't RNGing IVs

i've avoided mentioning it this entire time till now, but emerald is particularly easy to do rng manipulation in because due to a programming error, the rng seed is always 0 - all encounters are predictable and you don't have to dedicate a frame perfect input to getting the right seed, making emerald rng a matter of one frame perfect input instead of two (there ARE ways to get emerald to generate a proper rng seed but that's unrelated here). additionally, its pokenav system means you can see if you got the right egg BEFORE taking it and hatching it... doing egg RNG in any other gen 3 game is basically a death sentence due to multiple untelegraphed frame perfect inputs that have to be executed in a row, plus really long wait times due to hatching eggs on a slower bike without flame body. there's a reason i was not doing this on four island in frlg.

but yeah now i knew what egg frame i was going for and was all prepared to do the RNG, so now it was onto actually executing it all:

step 6: getting kaf girafarig babey!!

before doing the RNG manipulation in emerald, i needed to change my SID and TID in firered finally! this required me to run two different codes, one for SID and one for TID. it was actually pretty painless since the code is nearly identical for both, you just swap out the values of each ID and one character changes in one box name to decide whether you're changing TID or SID. you can find the list of codes i was referencing here.

i was saving my one allotted video clip in this post for changing the TID with the glitched crobat move though because LMAO

^ shoutout to my qpp @/spikyearr for this one i fucking chokedSKFDDSFK

anyway, after doing that i went through the process of the egg rng in emerald (unfortunately no pictures because it's kind of hard to take pics mid-rng) and actually saved before taking the egg so that i'd be able to soft reset after hatching it - i just needed to check to make sure it was gentle and everything, and then i could soft reset, take the egg again, bike around to decrease the egg cycles in emerald since hatching in firered is super slow, and then trade it off before hatching it to go be hatched in firered. i knew it wouldn't be shiny in emerald, so i wasn't concerned with that. it only took 40 or so minutes of attempts before i got her!

and then AT LAST after spending my ENTIRE DAY ON THIS SHIT (like 10x the amount of time on the ACE stuff for the TID instead of the actual RNG itself LOOOL) i just had to trade the egg to firered and hatch it and i was golden!!!!! AAAGH here she is next to my kaf plushies!!!

also a picture of her summary screen after being traded to my english leafgreen!! i am assuming this will be easier to read for most of the people reading this post LOL

THAT'S IT. POST OVER THIS WAS SO LONG. IF YOU MADE IT THROUGH MY RAMBLING GOOD JOB. I HIT THE PHOTO LIMIT HELP ME

anyways yeah i'm gonna be ribbon mastering her and idk i might post about the process as i go. not immediately though i have a platinum playthrough to finish teehee. also if any of this was interesting to you i highly recommend trying out RNG manipulation, it's a really fun way to play pokemon games! gen 5, BW specifically and not their sequels, is REALLY beginner friendly for RNG manipulation as the timing is a lot less precise. check it out, there's plenty of guides online!!

#pokemon #pokemon rse #rse #pokemon frlg #frlg #rng manipulation #arbitrary code execution #girafarig #ribbon mastering #kiki was here #kiki.txt #long post #kiki plays games

[flimsy-roost]

I'd like to talk about the latest Pokemon Center plush line!

I tend to avoid official nintendo merch, because I give that company enough of my money already. But White was the first Pokemon game I ever played (after saving my allowance for months for it and a used DS lite), so I have a very special place in my heart for gen5/Unova pokemon. When I heard they were releasing a line of Unova "Sitting Cutie" plushes, I wanted to at least check it out.

And I did! And I mildly disappointed my wallet! There are some bangers in here! But there are a lot of... decidedly un-bangers. Tippy-tappers at best. So I wanted to take the time to walk you through some of the ways this line fell short of its central claims: namely, Sits and Cuteness.

"Sitting"

I'd first like to address the distinguishing claim of the line; that each of these plush can sit up unsupported (or, more generously, could be propped up stably).

It would be easy to only give examples of pokemon that shouldn't have been considered for this line at all, of which there are many:

fig. 1) in what universe, praytell

But there were many more that were so, so close to plausibility in the face of physics, that really only needed a modified design direction.

Let's compare Eelektrik (left) to Serperior (right). Eelektrik is extremely top-heavy and prone to tipping, problems which could perhaps have been mitigated by a coiled design (like Serperior), or even as a flat. It could be argued that the current form stays true to the original art, which should always take precedent. I see you, and I hear you, and I disagree

A skosh below the "no way in hell" category of sittability, lay a group of lesser design sins broadly defined as "questionable in the face of a stiff breeze." For many plush in this category, the product designers could learn a thing or two from Toxel:

fig. 2) a well-balanced bean

Put another way, the popular rule-of-thumb "four on the floor," most commonly begged for in the context of starter evolution lines, may be applied to great effect:

Top-heavy Golurk? Four on the floor!

Tall, spindly, misguidedly "source-accurate" Genesect? Four on the floor!

Think of his poor Tepiggy spine! FOUR ON THE FREAKING FLOOR

Purrloin, look! Your big sibling has it down! Get at that generational knowledge, girl!

"Cuties"

I'm not aware of a single official merch line in existence that lacks at least one cursed artifact. Plush are particularly susceptible, and this line is no different.

While I have to give the designers props for a perfectly lovely Mienshao, they canonized my bestie as having a cringe childhood:

All this Mienfoo wants are uppies. How's she gonna kick ass when her feet go straight into her torso? Her glowup will never come if she can't even land a pound.

Entire evolution lines fell prey to design decisions here. Please compare gen5 Elgyem and Beheeyem to their inbred and deformed purebred domesticates:

fig. 3) has IV breeding gone too far?

Let us also more closely examine the full Sandile evolution line compared to wild type examples, as I consider these among the least forgivable offences:

Why is the plush Sandile so sad? Perhaps he knows what is to come.

Where sass? Why snoot so droop????

NO MY CREATCHURE?????? NO NONONO NOT THE SNOOT!!!!!!!

figs. 4-6) look how they slaughtered my boy

Finally, I would like to highlight a subset of the line that has Witnessed The Horrors. These are more subjective in their cuteness. You know the saying; one man's uncanny gremlin is another man's terrified blorbo.

Meet Drilbur, who has recently Seen Some Shit!

fig. 7) the boy who inspired this post, with WT reference

The bug-eyed-ness is what tips this into horror movie prop for me personally. I should not be able to see both his eyes from a diagonal. I could understand how some people could find him endearingly goofy, but my litmus tends to be: would I be amused to open my eyes to see him in the dark at 3am, or would I shit my pants? Drilbur here leans towards the latter.

Here is an example of a shell-shocked friend I find cute:

Crustle, normally hiding safely under their rocky shell, is leaned back to fulfill the barely-followed criteria of "sits," and so turns their eyes to god to ask why he has forsaken them. I love it.

BONUS CONTENT: KERMIT DEINO!!!!

:D

#pokemon #plush #plushies #nintendo #unova #pokemon gen five #sitting cuties plush #eelektrik #golurk #genesect #tepig #mienfoo #purrloin #elgyem #beheeyem #sandile #krokorok #krookodile #drilbur #crustle #deino #cursed plush #cursed merch #pokemon center #long post

[stingraywipe]

What’s your top three beloved Pokemon? And if you have them— your top three most hated Pokemon?

omg hi Sofie!! :0 Get ready because I have a whole lot to say about this.

Most Beloved:

Number 1: Squirtle

My absolute favorite is squirtle. What's funny about this is I can't really pinpoint a specific reason why I like him so much. My first pokemon game was alpha sapphire, and I didn't play gen 1 until Let's Go Eevee, so it's not a nostalgia factor. I think my brain just subconsciously selected him back when I was watching the Indigo League anime in middle school. The squirtle squad showed up and my brain was like "Yeah. This guy. He's awesome. This is the one." And he has been my number 1 favorite fella ever since then, and as a consequence he is the pokemon I have the most merch of and it isn't really close.

Please keep in mind this is just what I have in my apartment where I live for college, and that I have even more stuff in my bedroom back at home. Now that I think about it, Koopa Troopa is my favorite mario character, so maybe I have an affinity for characters that are just little turtles. Either way, water is also my favorite type, which means even more bonus points for squirtle.

Number 2: Riolu

Riolu's high ranking has been somewhat of a recent development for me. I've always liked lucario, but I didn't see the light that was riolu until after I watched Pokemon Journeys. Ash's riolu was so silly and adorable, and I always felt so bubbly inside when he was on screen. This shift in my preference is probably due to me developing a major soft spot for cute characters/creatures over the past few years. Most of my favorite pokemon at this point are just little guys because of it. Anyways, the reason I like him so much is because of the aura control him and lucario are capable of. I've always loved aura as a power system; the idea of being able to harness one's own life energy and see it in others is just so cool to me. I especially like how it's established as its own concept outside of moves in pokemon, making it something super unique that only riolu's evolutionary line can take advantage of. I have a lot of lore/worldbuilding ideas for PMD that would utilize aura. For example, Milo, the protagonist of the PMD verse I've been brainstorming, on is a riolu with much stronger aura than normal due to him being a pokemon with a human soul. I have a lot of ideas for how I could use this concept to drive plot points or character arcs, and I might share more in the future if I ever get time to start solidifying a story.

By the way, Milo's partner, Lilly, is a squirtle. No way I don't give both of my two favorites the spotlight.

Number 3: Sprigatito

My love of sprigatito is really quite simple. I love cats. So much. They are easily my number one favorite animal of all time. My Instagram feed is covered in them. So imagine my excitement when I saw that one of the new generation 9 starters was a kitty. My violet team is my favorite team I've ever used in a pokemon game, and the sprigatito line is a massive part of why I love it so much. Sprigatito is adorable, and my meowscarada was so much fun to use after he evolved. On top of that, sprigatito's depiction in Pokemon Horizons makes me love it even more. It's literally just a cat. It loafs. It makes biscuits.. It gets annoyed at the mildest inconvenience. Liko squishes its beans. Plus it releases a super sweet scent when you cuddle it as a bonus. It's so perfect. It's like Game Freak was like "Yeah this is the perfect pokemon for Ray, put it in the game." I have a sprigatito character in my PMD verse named Mayple, but I can't share much about her because it would mean dropping pretty big spoilers for a plot point I have planned.

Honorable Mentions: Greninja and Ceruledge

I love ninjas. I love frogs. Greninja is both. And ceruledge is just objectively one of the coolest pokemon designs ever.

In terms of behated pokemon, I don't have many that I personally despise. It's more so that I feel indifferent about them, and I would simply prefer not to use them on my teams. Usually I don't have any real reason to dislike the ones I do hate; I think it just stems from a gut feeling. The biggest one off the top of my head is the tepig line. I don't know what it is, something just feels off about them. I also dislike incineroar. I like litten and torracat a lot, but they really dropped the ball with the final evolution for me.

That's about all I have. This was really fun to do! Thank you so much for submitting this ask. I look up to you and your work a lot, and it made my night when I got the notification. I'm still pretty new to Tumblr, so I don't know exactly how I'm supposed to do things around here. I want to try to meet more people here, but my social anxiety and tendency to overthink online interactions usually shuts down anything before it can happen. Because of that, being able to answer something simple like this means a lot!! Thank you!! :D

#pokemon #pokemon mystery dungeon #squirtle #riolu #sprigatito

[zgvlt]

frequently asked questions while i don't mind answering the same asks, i take a long time to answer since i'm not online too often 😅 so here's a post for people to refer to in case i'm M.I.A.

WRITING RELATED QUESTIONS

Do you accept requests?

Sorry, no! Don't have the time for it, so I only really write when I feel particularly inspired by a plot/concept.

Will you write for the NRC faculty or the side characters?

One of these days! Though it will be platonic or age-appropriate for the staff. I'm trying to figure out just how to characterize them the best I could first!

Will you ever write a part two for (insert one-shot)? Will you write these headcanons but for (insert characters)?

One-shots: If I feel like it! Especially if it's a fic I'm particularly fond of and I feel could still be explored dynamics wise.

HCs: I usually state when something is going to be a series, so just look out for that!

Are translations of your work allowed?

With permission from me, so please send a DM first! Or leave a comment under one of my fics on AO3. Either way!

Would you ever consider writing for another fandom?

Of course, but not on this blog! And no guarantees I'd ever make a blog in the first place, I'd probably just post on AO3 heehee

GRAPHIC DESIGN/HEADER/THEME RELATED QUESTIONS

How do you make your headers/Do you have any advice on how to make my fic headers/theme look nicer?

See this post I made!

What do you use to make your headers?

Photoshop usually, Illustrator and Canva on occasion.

Where do you get your fonts?

See this post I made!

Can you recommend any apps for editing?

See this post I made!

What are your favorite fonts?

I answered an ask about this recently!

GENERAL QUESTIONS ABOUT ME

What do you do when you're not writing?

Three S's: Studying, Sleeping, Socializing... Mostly the sleeping part, I like getting at least 8 hours, 10 if I'm lucky! I write slowly because when I get free time to write, I decide to just sleep. Oops!

What other games do you play?

I don't really have the time these days (which is why I like games like TWST, easy to play and let run), but I'm into off the top of my head:

Pokemon, Fire Emblem, Harvest Moon/Story of Seasons/Rune Factory/Anything Farming tbh, Persona (especially Persona 3!!! FEMC my most beloved), Animal Crossing, Minecraft, Terraria, Style Savvy, Sims, and a bunch of casual and tycoon games

For Gachas, I don't play much anymore aside from TWST, but I still enjoy content from: Love Live!, Project Sekai, Fate Grand Order, Ensemble Stars, Obey Me (though mostly Mammon), Genshin (but mostly Lumine + Aether + Dainsleif + Paimon), D4DJ

Do you play TWST JP?

Have not touched my account in months because for the life of me I hate having to log into my JP apple ID to update the app

YOU'RE FILIPINO????

Kaloka kayo OO FILIPINO AKO ano ba yan... Bat ba kayo nagugulat WAHAHAHAHA /lighthearted lang di ako galit mwah!

#🏡: nathya housekeeping

[theinstagrahame]

It's time for the Monthly-ish Mail Call Hype Post!

Another set of awesome games I've gotten in the mail, and why I'm hype about them. Because people out there making rad stuff and I'm super into it!

It was a pretty big month. A lot of stuff arriving coincidentally at the same time, not all from crowdfunds, but still a really exciting collection. Let's dive in!

Beam Saber: I've played this one, and just started a campaign. Plus listening to Friends at the Table play it in Partizan (Which I legitimately cannot recommend highly enough). Mech Anime Forged in the Dark! It's genuinely a fantastic game.

Coriolis: A friend in a Discord server was clearing some room on their shelves before moving, and offered a few titles up. I wound up with three of them, this and the next two. Initially, they told me the box would only fit two, so I debated between Coriolis and DCC, and ultimately picked Coriolis because the sci-fi universe it takes place in seemed unique compared to what I've really experienced. An exploration-driven, Middle Eastern-inspired universe sounded really fascinating.

Dungeon Crawl Classics: I first became aware of DCC early in my TTRPG career, and was honestly mostly intrigued by DCC because of its use of Weird Dice; D3s and D5s and whatnot. I've heard mostly good things about it, and haven't done nearly enough Dungeon Crawling in my day, so I was quite pleased when it turned out this would also fit in the Discord Friend's "get it out of my house" box!

Last Fleet: This was the game I'd wanted from the pile. I'd recently backed Wreck this Deck, also by Black Armada, and have played Flotsam. I was intrigued by the pitch for this one, so it was the definite from the Discord friend.

Hull Breach: Mothership took the indie RPG scene by storm, and this book looked fantastic. I still haven't played Mothership, but honestly having this makes it feel like I could just about pick it up and throw anyone in. It's packed with scenarios and extra content, in a really great package.

Animon Story: I've been searching for the right Pokemon-themed RPG for a while. Too many of the ones I have seen spend a lot of time on the combat system, which I honestly find the least exciting part of the franchise. I want to explore and meet cool little guys. I confess I haven't read this one, but what I've heard of it sounds way more inspiring than most of the ones I've looked into.

The Hexcrawl Toolbox: I have The Bottled Sea and the Undying Sands from Games Omnivorous (Plus Vaults of Vaarn and Isle of Ixx). This box looks like an incredibly expansion of those ideas, and it's such a great package.

Enoch's Wake: Big fan of R. Rook games, ever since I had Richard on my (defunct) podcast to play a session of Moonlight over Roseville Beach. Enoch's Wake is a fresh take on a science-fantasy setting, and I really wanted to dig in and check it out more.

Sanctuary and Sentinel: I've followed Meghan Cross' work in the scene for a while, and it's all great. I love stories about lone sentinels guarding something long beyond the point of its relevance, and listening to how the two games intersect on Party of One really sold me that the Kickstarter had been a good investment.

The Book of Gaub: I will admit, I fall straight into peer pressure. I've heard about the Book of Gaub, heard all good things, and was really intrigued by the premise. It's honestly not even a game supplement per se, as much as it could function as an in-world text and concept, with annotations to make it usable in a game. The writing is fantastic, the art is great, and I really can't wait to find an excuse to bust it out. (I may or may not be trying to squeeze it into that Beam Saber campaign...)

Aberrant Reflections: Another that I'd heard really good things about, but also I had heard the words "puzzle dungeon" used pretty close to it, so I absolutely could not pass it up. It's been a great year for adventure content, so I am intrigued to get stuck into this one.

A Butterfly Dies and Cocoxoca: Primal Quest grabbed my attention because I don't feel like we see a ton of work in the stone age setting. A Butterfly Dies seemed like a really interesting premise, drawing on Mexican myths and murals to give a perspective on that world that I hadn't seen before. Cocoxoca was a pamphlet adventure that I thought would make a fantastic add-on.

Viva la Queer Bar: As someone starting to explore their queer identity, this was honestly a no-brainer. I'm honestly hoping this could be my first Descended from the Queen game played (I've got For the Queen, and have flipped through the cards, but still haven't brought it to the table). Again, heard incredible things about this game, so can't wait to check it out.

Guild: I did say earlier that I've not gotten enough dungeon crawlers in my background. I've been kicking around some Discords with Disaster Tourism in them, and have been watching this grow with interest. It came with so much stuff I really had to, packed a lot into two zines, a bookmark, and a tearaway pad.

#indie ttrpg #ttrpg #scifi rpg #indie ttrpgs #fantasy ttrpg #ttrpg hype post

[e-adlirez]

Just wondering but aside from geronimo/thea sisters, what other fandoms you have been into? I seen that you are into pokemon and demon slayer

Not a lot honestly, haha ^ ^

Geronimo and Thea Stilton is really my homebase, but for other things that interest me hmmmm

As you saw I'm into Pokemon and Demon Slayer, demonslayedher is feeding quality Demon Slayer content on Tumblr for me rn

I'm into Pokemon, but I'm not really a gaming fanatic about it. I'm more of a fandom osmosis type of person because of financial reasons. The only Pokemon games I've played are Ruby, Emerald, and Platinum, and Platinum wasn't a legit copy (it was a computer ROM), and I played it recently so uh yeah. My first Platinum run was a Nuzlocke so that's fun :D Maybe I can talk about that sometime :D

Lil' extra part of the Pokemon thing, the Nuzlocke and VGC corners of the fandom are the ones I currently visit frequently

I've been keeping up with the BNHA manga's recent chapters lately, not because I'm a crazy BNHA fan, but because I'm kinda curious about how that's going down. I could care less about the flaws in the manga at this point, I jus wanna see how all that's gonna go down :3

I used to be in the FNaF fandom during its prime, but I kinda stopped keeping track of it as a whole since UCN and FNaF VR. Recently took a peek at some Security Breach stuff and all I gotta say is Glamrock Freddy is best dad

I was also in the BATIM fandom back in the day, but if I remember correctly I fell out of it gradually after the chapter with uh good Alice and mech hand Boris, I forgor their names haha

Minecraft I guess is my most consistent fandom because I'd been in it since the old Minecraft parody days. Really loved the Cops and Robbers stuff from that time, the Minecraft parodies, DanTDM's Minecraft era, Hermitcraft 6, and now Cobblemon (the new Minecraft Pokemon mod). I'm jus vibin, hanging around in the community

I got into the Technoblade fandom either in the aftermath of SAD-ist's Hog Hunt or the aftermath of the Dream vs Technoblade battle (memory's not great in that regard), and I stayed ever since. Kept up with some of his DSMP stuff and regularly watched his videos. Still do. Rest in power, my king.

The QSMP is something I'm passively keeping tabs on, mainly because my girl Jaiden Animations is there doing stuff. I myself am not watching the streams because my attention span just can't keep up with that, but I assure you, I do go into the q!jaiden tag on Tumblr every now and then to peep what's going on. QSMP people please I need help what happened to Jaiden please I miss her /j

Anyway those are all the fandoms I can remember being in, hope I sufficiently answered your question ^^

#questions with e #pokemon #fnaf #bnha #minecraft #technoblade #qsmp #q!jaiden