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izunias-meme-hole · 1 year

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My Top 20 Favorite Characters (Remastered)

(FYI: just because a character is low on the list doesn’t mean I don’t like them)

Number 1. Ganondorf/Ganon (The Legend of Zelda) - Honestly after so many years, Ganondorf still holds up as a villain. Ganon was the biproduct of a curse created by Demise to ensure that his hate is reincarnated just so he can destroy Link and Zelda’s descendants, and Ganondorf himself was born as the only male in a desert that belonged tribe to warrior women known as The Gerudo, eventually ending up as their king thanks to Gerudo traditions. Ganondorf had a huge presence in Ocarina of Time, manipulating you into locating the Triforce and immediately took over Hyrule during your time skip. In Hyrule Warriors, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and A Link To The Past, he adapts in some form either that be because of genuine character development, an ego increase, or a desire for revenge. However in Breath of the Wild, the end of all three timelines, he fully succumbs to Demise’s curse and uses his hate to create an entity known as Calamity Ganon. In short, Ganon started out as an intelligent and ambitious king, a man to be exact, but eventually he turned into a beast fueled by hate. Then in Tears of The Kingdom he returns, and not only so we learn that he DIDN’T succumb to Demise’s curse after all, we learn that 1,000 years ago, he reincarnated and began to EMBRACE it becoming the new Demon King in the process, and he came back to life to continue his reign. HE ALSO WAS BEHIND CALAMITY GANON! Overall Ganondorf is a surprisingly versatile and interesting take on a evil king, combining power with intellect, tragedy, anger, class, inevitability, and pure EVIL which is why he’s the greatest villain in gaming history and fiction in general.

Number 2. Palpatine/Darth Sidious (Star Wars) - In retrospective, Palpatine is easily the best villain in cinematic history. In the first two movies of the original trilogy, he never appears once, he’s only mentioned as “The Emperor,” and based off what we heard from Vader after he chopped Luke’s hand off, The Emperor sounds like a bigger and scarier dude than Vader. Then Return of The Jedi happens, and we see that he’s just a frail old man, yet he somehow manages to not only have Vader under his thumb, and based off what we see in the climax of the movie, it was primarily based off manipulation and not the force lightning he shoots out of his fingers. Then the Prequels happened, and The Clone Wars happened, which is honestly the exact moment that young me liked him more than Vader, and the moment current me rediscovered just how well written Palpatine is as a pure evil, card carrying dark lord, and as a politician. Sure he’s one of the strongest sith lords in the series, but that alone isn’t what makes him scary. It’s his careful planning, and the best part of it is that he rarely appears onscreen, yet his presence can be felt 24/7. I am not as much of a Star Wars fan as I used to be, but I will admit that I LOVE Sheev Palpatine and I’m not afraid to say it.

Number 3. Sauron (Lord Of The Rings) - A classic example of a villain who is rarely on the field, but has such an impact on the world he inhabits. Sauron has a heavy amount of lore, the right amount of impact, the perfect fear factor, and literal omnipresence to back it all up. The creator of The One Ring is not a being to be trifled with.

Number 4. Sephiroth (Final Fantasy) - Sephiroth is one of the hardest bosses in gaming and a genuine horror villain. He is a tragic monster born from science, and a loyal “son” fo his alien mother, Jenova, but he’s still scary as hell thanks to his god complex, unlimited strength, ethereal vibes, years of experience, his ability to live off of pure spite just so he can make the lives of his enemies (and Cloud) complete hell. His appearance in of itself is creepy due to how beautiful, yet unsettling it is, thanks to his silver hair, green snake-like eyes, and perfect physique which is complimented by a black coat. However the most dangerous things about him are that he’s completely delusional, and just how far he’s willing to go to distort peoples sense reality, specifically Cloud’s sense of reality. Sephiroth a good character and phenomenal villain.

Number 5. Edelgard Von Hresvelg (Fire Emblem) - I would repeat several points about why her fans like her, and also explain just how in the wrong she is, but there’s a simpler way to explain why I love Edelgard. She’s the best take on the Rudolf Archetype in the entire series. She’s calculated, arrogant, and self-righteous, yet she’s also very charming, likable, self-aware, and had a good end goal that can resonate with some people, despite the way she intended to go about it. Her character basically mixes parts of what made SoV’s Rudolf, Arvis, and Walhart good, and places them into a single character, without making her seem unoriginal. Overall, Edelgard is the most well done villain the series has ever had. Long Live The Flame Emperor!

Number 6. Bowser (Super Mario Bros) - Bowser is a genuinely great villain and fun as hell. Sure, there are a crapton of underrated villains in the Mario series, but no matter what you cannot really hate this guy. He’s a giant fire breathing turtle-dragon who’s a evil king, but he’s also a meathead, arrogant as hell, has very cool boss fights, is a surprisingly good father to his kids, an amazing protagonist and ally, as shown in games like the Paper Mario Series, and Mario & Luigi Series, not to mention he’s one of the more likable villains in gaming. So yeah, Bowser’s a cool character and fun villain.

Number 7. Venom (The Spiderverse) - This thing. THIS FRICKIN’ THING!! To sum up this abomination and his variants throughout the Spiderverse, Venom is a gooey, parasitic being known as a symbiote that basically increases aggression in a person, eats brains and stuff found in chocolate, and gives them access to some broken ass shit, and they just so happened to bond with Spider-Man, slowly turning him into a closed off jackass and influencing his every action. That was until Spidey dumped them into the trash. Then Venom meets a suitable host that is all for ending the Web Slinger, and then boom, what we get is an angry alien out to settle a score with Spider-Man. Who their host is changes depending on the universe or point in the timeline, but the most prominent host for Venom and has been Eddie Brock, a literal loser. So that’s the lore for Venom, but if you want a summary of their character; Venom is Spider-Man’s toxic, non-binary, alien ex who is fun as hell to watch. He’s also funny as shit in some of his appearances.

Number 8. Ghetsis (Pokemon Adventures) - Ah yes, the worst father in Pokemon and the greatest villain the series has ever known. Ghetsis is Team Plasma’s founder, the father of N, and the greatest embodiment of evil this series has seen, so that kinda makes him the perfect foil to N. Ghetsis is cunning, manipulative, abusive, banal, psychotic, self-righteous, and narcissistic, not to mention that his plan was actually put together pretty well. However the best part about this guy are his BREAKDOWNS, like good lord it’s satisfying to kick this rancid old man into the dirt and watch him mentally not take a loss. As for why he’s this high, I just love knocking an evil old man down a peg with maxed out pokemon, and I love watching him be shitty just to see karma hit him like a truck. And the Adventures manga adapts all of these things PERFECTLY, with the only actual change being that he constantly puts up a gentlemanly mask, even when he should be loosing it, which makes his eventual breakdown in the final chapters of the Unova Arc so SATISFYING! So yeah, Ghetsis is entertaining as all hell, and easily the best villain in the entire series.

Number 9. Miles Edgeworth (Ace Attorney) - I’ve grown to love Phoenix Wright, Mia Fey, Damon Gant, Fransika Von Karma, Godot, and like a majority of the most well done characters of the series, but Miles Edgeworth is truly the best out of all of these guys. His relationship with Pheonix is amazing, he’s very charming, and overall Miles has one of the best examples of character development a rival to a protagonist has ever had.

Number 10. Amity Blight (The Owl House) - If you had to ask me who my favorite Owl House characters were in no particular order, my top 5 are Eda, Hunter, Luz, Belos, and this girl. Amity in season 1 seemed like she was going to be a rival character, she definitely had the makings of one, primarily due to her demeanor, but after her first encounter with Luz, being humbled by her ex-BFF at the time, and a witches duel with Luz where her “mentor,” Lilith augmented her strength without her knowledge, we began to see Amity be more and more vulnerable, and Luz managed to help her through it a lot of the time. Heck it got to the point where she got a crush on Luz! Then as soon as you reach Understanding Willow and Season 2, we learn that Amity’s whole familial situation was a Harry Osborn situation, complete with a controlling parental figure that is genuinely evil to the brim and Alador, so as you see Amity’s positive growth as a character and see her relationship with Luz grow, you celebrate her happiness. In short, Amity rocks, and by extension Lumity!

Number 11. King Dedede (Kirby) - From a greedy penguin to a worthy rival and ally on some occasions. I swear, despite the amount of times Dedede gets possessed or brainwashed by some eldrich horror, I think we all forget that he is dank when he needs to be. Also he’s extremely funny as well.

Number 12. DIO/Dio Brando (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure) - After rewatching the older parts, my love for DIO resurfaced, but if I’m being honest here, it’s because of how Part 1 portrays him as a character, and how Part 3 portrays him as a villain. In Part 1, he’s still one of the greatest evils the series has ever seen, but we also saw a human element to him in a very negative way. He was bitter, envious, and straight up angry at the world for making him the bottom of the barrel, but after becoming a vampire he’s becomes sick, scary, and pitiable. In SDC, the re-emerged DIO is out to get the Joestars, not just for revenge for Jonathan constantly humiliating him, but because he KNOWS they’ll be a threat in the long run. He’s fully embraced the Novel Dracula vibes, and he’s matured by a lot, making him a lot less egocentric, angry, and erratic, and more power-hungry, paranoid, and controlled. Like DIO was not really sane, but he did a damn good job of holding himself together, until he experienced near-death yet again. As far as I can tell, DIO’s two major outtings in the series show viewers a man who can’t live with being at the bottom rung because he was born there, and as a result he’s willing to do whatever he can to ensure that he becomes untouchable.

Number 13. Xemnas (Kingdom Hearts) - This doesn’t require much explanation, but allow me to explain. After replaying KH2, I’ve come to realize after all this time Xemnas is an amazing villain. Xemnas is the nobody of Apprentice Xehanort, his husk, an entity that can feels nothing and wasn’t meant to exist, yet he’s quite the specimen. He’s a very sinister figure due to his nature, the fact that he’s a special nobody like Roxas, his inability to feel emotion, and his belief that negative emotions are what give the heart power, but at the same time you somehow manage to feel pity for him because of these things. While what he does is his own choice, you can clearly see that while he’s a different entity from his human self, he still chooses to go in that hollow shadow because it’s in his own nature, and it ended up being his downfall. That and his boss was truly a test of your skills. TL;DR: Xemnas is amazing.

Number 14. Death/The Wolf (Puss In Boots) - The best take on The Grim Reaper. Inevitable, terrifying, enigmatic, cruel to those who try and delay the inevitable, etc.

Number 15. Jin (Xenoblade Chronicles) - Shoot me dead for this take, but Jin was a great part of a decent game. If you want an easy summary of him, he’s a living weapon that was once connected to a driver, a blade, then said driver died on battlefield, he became immortal in a sense, and lost all value in life, thus why he spends a lot of the story helping out the main villain, and his former enemy, Malos. Still, Jin is genuinely interesting, mostly because of his history with the ally blades in the game, his sense of comradary with his crew, Torna, and overall how he’s written is pretty good. There’s nothing stellar about him, but he’s still effective as a tragic villain who has a firm presence in the story.

Number 16. Dark Pit (Kid Icarus Uprising) - This angel has grown on me as a character. Dark Pit is a copy of Pit from The Mirror of Truth, and a rival for a majority of the game, however there’s a small twist. Instead of being just a “evil doppelgänger,” Dark Pit is just the equivalent of a maverick who doesn’t like being held back by anyone, which is the opposite of Pit’s whole loyal good boy soldier shtick. Still, he does help out once in a while, but Pit went missing inside a ring for a couple of years, Dark Pit vanished too, which basically drilled into his head that “Oh shit if this guy gets screwed over I get screwed over.” Heck, HE ends up being the one that saves Pit after his wings got scorched! To basically sum up Dark Pit, he’s a right way on how to do an edgy rival or a dark counterpart.

Number 17. Samus Aran (Metroid) - To summarize this lovely lady, she’s basically Nintendo’s Boba Fett with a few differences. The similarities, they both have dead parents, are skilled bounty hunters, have a similar color palette, and just look plain cool. The difference, Samus is a great protagonist, while Boba is a good one ensemble darkhore antagonist that easily could work as a one scene wonder.

Number 18. Dracula/Mathias Cronqvist (Castlevania Games) - Not the most terrifying incarnation of Dracula to exist, but he’s very close because of just how insane, persistent, and downright hateful he is. However this hatred did spawn from two tragedies, one that was his motivation for becoming a vampire, and one that finally drove him mad, but both involved a woman that he loved dying. So yeah, this Dracula is a very good tragic, yet irredeemable villain.

Number 19. Dr Eggman/Dr Robotnik (Sonic The Hedgehog) - Been lookin’ at sonic stuff again and looking at the games in retrospective… Eggman is honestly the most entertaining part of each part of the series. He’s a saturday morning cartoon villain, and he knows it, but he’s also unironically one of the most charming, versatile, and egotistical fiends in gaming. Sure he gives a little bit of a crap about Metal Sonic, Sage, and his other successful machines, but they’re his crowning achievements, so of course he’s going to treat them with “care,” while his lesser mechs get sent to the scrapyard. I also really like how out of all the Sonic characters, he’s kinda the hardest to mess up personality-wise, so you can always expect him to be stealing the show. Aside from all of that, Eggman’s just a simply a twisted take on the magnificent bastard trope, with some traditional cackling supervillain elements thrown in for good measure. I may not be a huge Sonic fan, but Dr Julian Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik is AMAZING!

Number 20. Meruem (Hunter x Hunter) - The best way to summarize Meruem without spoiling his arc is this. A monster becomes a king, and the king dies like any other person.

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cobaltaris · 1 year

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Aris Media 2023 #27: The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

to be honest despite putting 100 hours into this I? don't know how to dissect this in my usual short-form reviews on this site? (this aged poorly i wrote like 10 paragraphs on it) guess we'll try because oh my god this was. an experience i wasn't ready for

so THAT was the imprisoning war...

also uh! Spoiler Warning! deep in the Read More for gameplay and story terms! i'm not gonna tell you how everything plays out but there is unrevealed stuff i need to go into, but being we're nearly a month out from release, that's mostly fine, i think

okay so breath of the wild aged kinda weirdly for me? it's a GREAT game but in retrospect it felt lacking compared tro some of my favorite Zelda games, especially in dungeons and storytelling, and i really was worried TotK wouldn't vibe with me cuz BotW looked to be a paradigm shift for the whole Zelda series

and? surprisingly, it all worked out?? i was so enthralled from beginning to end! having the same hyrule didn't end up mattering to me cuz i didnt replay BotW, and there was simply so much MORE to the world despite that. AND SO MANY KOROKS TO TORTURE AND CRUCIFY

not to mention when you can put a slab of iron together and put wheels and a stick on it and have it work as a great way to get around, the fun of traversal kinda overrode the thoughts i had about all that; the Zonai stuff is SO GOOD (that goes for both the devices and the people-okay mainly Mineru but can you blame me she is PERFECT)

SPEAKING OF CHARACTERS TO GET OFF HOT GOAT PEOPLE FOR A SEC; THIS F U C K

the memory stuff is kind of just okay in retrospect, didn't love the plot but the big key moments stuck with me, but GOD ganondorf is so good. they hit all the beats i was hoping for with him and probably made his most outright evil portrayal yet, while STILL making him so calm and in control that it's scary. the way they send him off is so good and please moots finish the game when you can cuz that ending OH MY GOD-

anyway! i just really liked vibing in this game doing shrines and whatnot, which with the new abilities are way more fun and memorable than in BotW. the jenga shrine is? amazing? Ultrahand makes every puzzle a joy to Ignore the Main Solution To, and Ascend and Recall are just outright broken and very fun to use. while I had more issues with durability this time i also love how natural and useful Fuse is; Rocket Shields are so fun and i wish I got more Rockets simply to use them more than I did

the characters are also a lot more fun this time around, and the returning ones got to shine way more! the Tarrey Town quest was SO good in this one, the Champions are a delight, the musical troupe you help out really stuck with me...and Addison. he's. he's a treasure. I'LL SUPPORT YOU

I didn't get too much out of the Sky Islands admittedly; they're still really cool but! generally repetitive after a bit and not super interesting, great atmosphere though. but it's the Depths that really caught me off guard, places in games with a lot of bounty to them but also HIGH levels of danger are some of my favorite things! but the thing i really loved about it is when i realized that it is Tears of the Kingdom's Dark World - its an exact mirror of the original world, Lightroots connecting to Shrines, water aboveground being walls in the Depths, and generally being a way harsher environment. once i realized that, it elevated it SO much, and along with a few things really made it feel like TotK was this hella cool mix of traditional and open-world Zelda

caves! finally back in this one! can i just say that between Vinny's pronunciation of them and their allure here i've gotten obsessed with finding them, every time i see one i just yell "BOOBEL GEM!!" and start firing arrows and hfgjfgjkfg

but no really the caves were such a sour missing part of BotW and their inclusion gives the world so much more needed complexity. i love exploring them, and to repeat this point again, it felt so Classic Zelda to go in one, solve an environmental puzzle, and get a Shrine out of it - and a free one almost always, which feels like the developers also bringing back how caves used to be! i need to say it again THIS GAME WAS SUCH A TREAT

that goes also somewhat for the dungeons, besides like, the Water Temple, which compared to other Water Temples felt extremely lacking, and even in this game it has...no scale? just feels like a regular place? BUT THE OTHERS. DAMN. even if i wish they were even bigger and had more to do, the fact they are real places with lore behind them to explore, different atmospheres - the Fire and Lightning ones EXCEED at this, especially in delivering great boss fights with the Sages' aid. too bad about that same cutscene repeating four times huh

there's even more i could go into it, like how the Gleeok fights are the most HYPE thing and i love them, or how i kinda still wish there was more enemy variety, and ALSO this game got me into the wonder that is house renovation, it's so good actually, but being i'm putting this all in a Tumblr post on a dashboard expected to be scrolled through at high velocity, i'll just cut it here because i loved this one too much. legit too much! it's a Top 3 Zelda, but there's almost too much to do and it can get overwhelming, and still areas left to improve on, but I am more than satisfied with what Tears turned out to be after my skepticism <3

Grade: S

#aris media 2023 #zelda #zelda totk #tears of the kingdom

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hex-flareheart · 1 year

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Hex Reviews The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

I really hope that last trailer's back's okay, because it fucking carried this game.

Genre: Open-World Sandbox/Action Adventure Platform: Nintendo Switch Price: $70 for some fucking reason Length: 4-200+ hours Do I recommend it? Yes, but not for $70.

This game had a LOT to live up to. In the pipeline for six years after the last one, and the last one basically hard carried the Switch off its success. You literally could not have asked for a better launch title for a console. Breath of the Wild is one hell of a predecessor to follow up.

Tears of the Kingdom wound up having a bit of a rocky road to release, from an initial teaser in 2019 that in retrospect was all custom footage, another in 2021 that showed actual gameplay footage, but no actual name for the game yet, and then finally an actual trailer declaring the game's name in 2022, and a pushed-back release to 2023. 2023 itself was a bit rough for the game, with an unpopular price tag increase (more on that later) and an underwhelming gameplay showcase, which together did the game little favors, especially since it was just looking like Breath of the Wild with extra stuff taped on top of it. Which, not unreasonable for a direct sequel, but with such a dev time and a price hike... yeah, there's a reason people were making jokes at the game's expense.

But the game would ultimately have a couple more trailers released, with the mid-April trailer being by a country mile the best the game received, and I strongly suspect playing a non-insignificant factor in reviving interest (hence the subtitle above- which, yes, I'm planning on doing that more in the future). And I don't think I have to tell you how it was received on launch; I'm pretty sure the entire Internet knows the answer to that question.

And to Nintendo's credit, having played the game extensively (currently in excess of 70 hours), I very much understand now why it took so long. Adding functionally two entire new layers to the world (1 1/2 if you feel like being petty) takes a lot of time, but the big thing lies in the new systems; adding a building mechanic as freeform as Tears of the Kingdom's into a game is a very involved process, and from my understanding the game was basically feature-complete a full year before release, and they spent that entire time polishing everything. Time that was clearly well-spent, because these systems are astonishingly well-integrated.

Before I really get into singing this game's praises, though, I really need to re-touch on one key point, and the single biggest caveat with this game: No game should cost $70. I hated it when Sony started doing it, I hate it here. To preempt the obvious argument, no. Nintendo does not need that extra $10. With the numbers these games pull they could easily sell it for $10 and still make all of the money. The decision wasn't made because Nintendo needed the extra money to justify continuing to make games, the decision was made because Nintendo's executives and shareholders wanted to pad their already-obscene bottom line. Also their wallets. None of that money is going to the people who actually did the work!

I am very much of the general opinion that pirating Nintendo games is morally okay; this goes for ANY supermassive video game company, but especially Nintendo, given how much of fucks they can be. And that especially goes for Tears of the Kingdom.

That point out of the way: frankly, Tears of the Kingdom makes its predecessor look like a feature-length tech demo, and that is not to disparage Breath of the Wild. That game did what it did well, Tears of the Kingdom does it better, on nearly every level. One of the most unpopular aspects, disposable weapons, becomes almost a plus in this game because of the Fuse system, as it encourages you to fuck around and find out, and boy can you really do both. Ultrahand is Magnesis if you put it on some seriously wacko steroids and handed it gorilla glue and duct tape. Cryonis kinda sucked and is accordingly gone. Stasis was overpowered and has been replaced with Recall, less powerful but with more opportunities for hilarity. Remote bombs were... also, probably a little too powerful, and are also gone, but bomb flowers are back!

Tears of the Kingdom's tone is notably less immediately dire compared to Breath of the Wild, and this is reflected in both gameplay and story. The world is even more alive than before, and it feels less like surviving in the wilderness after an apocalypse and more like exporing the wilderness with a toolbox continuously strapped to you. Accordingly, gameplay is even more prone to slapstick than Breath of the Wild was. That game already had a tendency towards slapstick, but having the ability to build shit and strap all sorts of random things onto your weapons just amplifies it. You can glue a bomb to your sword! Is it a good idea? Probably not! Can you do it? Absofuckinglutely! The shrines are also notably a bit more consistently better, and there's NO APPARATUS SHRINES, THANK FUCKING GOD.

There's also notably more... well, story to the game's story. Again, this isn't to disparage Breath of the Wild, but its story was by nature a bit barebones. Tears of the Kingdom's is a fair bit more fleshed out, though this does come with the caveat of making the timeline significantly more confusing. I'm at this point on the side of "BotW and TotK are their own continuity after SS" simply because it makes things vastly simpler.

To get more into the specifics, though, we'll need to get into spoilers, so you know the drill.

Champion abilities are no longer around, as the spirits of the champions moved on 6 years ago. (In-universe, not just a joke.) In their place are, a), ACTUAL DUNGEONS, FUCK YES, and b) sages, who both provide an ability to be used in-world, as well as providing phantoms of themselves that help you in combat. They're generally less powerful than the champions were, and their abilities can be very awkward to use (as outside of certain situations for 2 out of 5, you have to walk over to their phantom to use the ability), but having up to 5 extra characters helping you in combat is immensely useful, and makes even poor Sidon, whose ability kind of sucks, still actively very helpful.

Regarding the extra layers to the world, there's the sky islands of course, which were very heavily-advertised, but the layer less advertised is the Depths, a massive, very dark underground layer spanning the entirety of Hyrule. From corner-to-corner. It can be a bit annoying to navigate, and does have generally less to do than the surface, but it certainly has its purposes, and has a crucial role in making the dragons a bit more interesting.

There's four now, with the original three from Breath of the Wild still being around, and a fourth that now hangs out high in the sky. Unlike in Breath of the Wild, the dragons are always on the map, following a continuous loop; Farosh loops the southern part of the map, Naydra loops the eastern part of the map, Dinraal loops the northeast, and the mysterious new Light Dragon does a full loop of Hyrule high in the sky. Crucially, a) you can now land on and ride the dragons, with conditions around them corresponding to their respective element, and b) besides the Light Dragon, each of them spends roughly half their route underground, passing through one chasm on the surface, travelling through the Depths, and emerging elsewhere later. You can ride them the entire time, and getting materials is now on a 10-minute cooldown rather than being per-appearance. (I personally feel like this cooldown should be significantly shorter, but I digress.)

As for building and Fuse, there's a ton of options on both fronts, and in exploring the Depths you can unlock Autobuild, which lets you save things you've built and automatically build them on-demand, either from parts-on-hand or using Zonaite ore gathered in the Depths. Fuse, meanwhile, can be used with arrows, shields, and weapons- for arrows, it's just attaching things to the arrowhead, which can do things as simple as adding special properties like elements, to things as wacky as placing floating platforms for you to use. With weapons and shields, though, we need to go a little more in-depth.

You can attach a lot of different materials to both; with shields, they'll mostly just increase defense power and durability a bit, and often add a damage component if you feel like swatting enemies with it. With weapons, you can essentially attach a single material to make a custom weapon; depending on the material, you could end up with a thing impaled on the end, which is kind of comical, or as is the case with some of the horns in particular, replacing large parts of the weapon with the material, resulting in some VERY cool-looking hybrid weapons. The real wacky shit though, that comes with Zonai devices.

Zonai devices are, of course, devices built by the Zonai. Mostly these are meant for use with Ultrahand for building contraptions, but they can also be glued to your shield and sword. (Also arrows, but they're less notable there.) And this is no small part of why I understand why the game took so long, because there's a lot of unique attractions here, particularly with shields. Attaching a device to a weapon will typically cause it to activate briefly when swung, with generally very predictable results, but with shields, they'll behave differently between guarding with the shield and shield surfing. Three good examples of this.

One, the Zonai Cannon. Strap it to your shield and you have, well, a portable cannon. Guard with your shield, blast your enemies. Two, the Zonai Cart; a big flat platform with integrated wheels. Strap it to your shield, and it's now a fucking skateboard when you shield surf with it. No, I'm not joking. It'll even let you grind on rails! And three, the Zonai Rocket. Strap it to your shield and you have two options. Guard, and you'll rocket upward for a couple seconds, giving you a mini-Revali's Gale. Shield surf? You can fucking fly.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg here. You can do some wacky shit with Fuse! Try fusing a bomb to your shield and shield surfing sometime, you'll see what I mean.

All told, this game's combat sandbox is absolutely apeshit on a level Breath of the Wild wishes it could reach. If you've seen clips of this game, you've almost certainly seen some of the hilarity you can get up to with Ultrahand, and I just described what you can expect from Fuse. Combat is even more diverse than ever before- albeit just as likely to kill you repeatedly early on. That never went away! And compared to Breath of the Wild, the rest of Tears of the Kingdom is also just generally more refined than even its already famously-polished predecessor.

I think the price tag's bullshit, but I'm not going to pretend Tears of the Kingdom isn't a really good game.

Hex Rates This: 9/10

#hex posts things #hex reviews things #hex reviews games #this game is basically like if you took botw #and strapped some minecraft shit on top of it #and frankly that's always something I kinda thought botw needed so like #fuck it it works

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zedecksiew · 3 years

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Sentimental thoughts about the OSR

OSR -- Old School Renaissance? Revival? A style of making and playing games, where the focus is on the experience of shared imagined space, not narrative plots or arcs.

A style fostered by a community.

That community was ugly. Many alt-right-leaning white dudes. It sheltered abusers, like Zak S -- a person who, to my shame, I'd been a fan of.

That community was good. Many key figures were queer / trans. More so (to my impression) than any other RPG community (even other indie groups). Non-white folks, like me.

The popular TTRPG eye remembers the OSR for its ugliness, not its inclusivity. Probably because the assholes were loud. And because the non-white / cis / het-ness of folks was rarely advertised as a community selling-point: "Look at how diverse we are!"

The latter aspect made me feel welcomed. My work -- entirely informed by my SEA context, as it's always been -- got attention based on its merit, not its topicality.

The OSR as I joined it was based on blogs, and on G+. When G+ was shut down, the community had a diaspora.

You hear about BOSR (British OSR), or NOSR / NuSR. You used to hear about SWORDDREAM? I think FKR (the Free Kriegsspiel Revival) is an offshoot of the old community? There are a million Discord channels. Questing Beast, on Youtube.

The blogs are still going strong.

I can't keep track of all the places folks have ended up. I do feel bad about that -- that I'm less community-oriented, that I work more in isolation, now. I squat Twitter mostly. Twitter is not a good place for a creative community.

But it is what it is.

An article Ewan Wilson was writing about the OSR got spiked at Polygon. I was one of the folks he emailed questions to.

Ewan's questions prompted this bout of sentimentality, I guess?

Here are bits from email I wrote him, in reply:

The OSR scene began on blogs? That's certainly how I discovered it. I can actually remember the specific post that hooked me:

Patrick Stuart / False Machine, reading James C Scott's "The Art Of Not Being Governed" -- a history of the Zomia region of mainland Southeast Asia, a place of fluid cultures and peoples that have traditionally resisted the settled states surrounding it -- riffing on the historical information in Scott's book, spinning them into RPG campaign ideas.

A facet of the OSR scene is its willingness to use popular rulesets as a shared language.

Dungeons & Dragons (tm) not as a WOTC corporate property, but D&D as a community vernacular. (And D&D is just one example.)

Folks like Emmy Allen and Luka Rejec have talked about this quite eloquently, I think?

I think the OSR prioritises making stuff for games rather than crafting the bestest, most elegantly-designed game possible. If you are stuck arguing about which language works best for poetry, you'll never get to the point where you actually start making and sharing verse.

I associate the OSR style with possibility, too. I'm not sure why.

Mainstream WOTC D&D is trapped in a self-referential loop, recycling its own Forgotten Realms-adjacent tropes. Then you have the vast forest of licensed RPGs: "Alien: The RPG", "Avatar: The RPG"; "[Insert Popular Nerd IP Here]: The RPG".

Many indie-RPG communities prize genre-emulation -- here's a game where you can mimic the narrative shape of a slasher film; an urban-fantasy novel; Legend of Zelda.

Not that there is anything wrong with this. But if emulation is where you start and end you doom RPGs to a secondary role -- forever in the shadow of other arts.

For sure the OSR has its pop-culture and games-media touchstones; the scene loves to riff on metal album covers and Dark Souls a lot.

But I'd argue that -- relative to other RPG subcommunities, in my experience -- OSR creators are willing to push further down the rabbit-holes of their particular obsessions more often.

So, yes: Dark Souls and metal music. But also references weirder, personal, and as-yet-untapped: Zomia, punk zines, walks in backyard forests, Birkenhead folklore, the Permian Period, Moebius, East Malaysian myth --

Composted together to the point they become game things utterly unlike anything else, and the stories / experiences you can have in those game things you can have nowhere else.

The blogs are still going strong.

Today I was reading this series of posts, a theory-based critique at D&D, the OSR, and games design in general:

"the goal of what we call "old-school play" is not to create a story but to traverse a fantastic space guided by desire, such that any story which emerges is incidental and retrospective (much like stories that emerge from 'real life'). edwards prescribes that the goal of play is to create a story, elevates this prescription into a truth about play as such, and then claims that players who do not play with this aim actually fail to meet this aim because they are mentally damaged. perhaps this can be remedied by playing the correct game, or maybe not, but regardless the implication is that by playing the correct game, one can avoid brain damage.

my take is to not let salespeople convince you that you must buy their products to be politically or mentally correct, and on the flip side do not entitle yourself to the enjoyment of other people."

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4. All four are worth reading.

Today I was also reading the very first OSR blogpost I ever read, about Zomia. It is still as good as it was, six years ago:

"The Lisu, aside from insisting that they kill assertive chiefs, have a radically abbreviated oral history. "Lisu forgetting, Jonsson claims, "is as active as Lua and Mien remembrance." he implies that the Lisu chose to have virtually no history and that the effect of this choice was to "leave no space for the active role of supra-household structures, such as villages or village clusters in ritual life, social organizations, or the mobilisation of peoples attention, labour or resources."

18 Radically forgetting tribes. How far can you push that? Ancestor free tribes, then further away, one-year tribes, then in the reaches of the deeps, the one-day, impossible even to understand as they remember only for one day.

Patrick's blog turned 10 this week.

The blogs are still going strong.

#reallife #fantasies #rpgs #blogs #patrick stuart #osr

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thisbassslaps · 3 years

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My Favorite Video Game Levels

Here are five video game levels/areas that are memorable to me. The music, creative design, unique atmosphere and intrinsic value are all decisive factors that led to my ultimate choices.

5. Great Deer Yard Hotel

Deadly Premonition: The Director's Cut - (2013)

The Great Deer Yard Hotel is filled with interesting facts about Greenvale and its historical hotel. If you enjoy game aesthetics, you will love Deadly Premonition. All of the main locations (e.g. the Hotel, A&G Diner, Sheriff's Dept, Galaxy of Terror and Muses Gallery) are carefully decorated and should be explored at a slow pace. The Great Hotel was the point in-game where I was wholeheartedly pulled into SWERY's mysterious world. The nods to Lynch and Kubrick in the hotel were pleasing, especially the picture of Snoqualmie Falls in York's hotel room. While inspecting each room, hallway, piece of art and furniture, I enjoyed reading about specific objects and finding a few easter eggs here and there. The meeting with Polly for breakfast is my favorite cutscene. The ridiculously long dining table and the nonchalant behavior/deadpan conversation is hilarious and charming. And...what better way to finish an early morning meal than with a hot, fresh cup of coffee?!

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4. Ice Cavern

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D - (2011)

Recently, I have noticed that I enjoy the colder seasons a lot more than the warmer ones. For whatever reason, winter levels intrigue and comfort me (Ando Prime in Star Wars Ep. I Racer, Mountain Village in Majora's Mask). The Ice Cavern is my favorite winter level and one of my favorite game areas of all time. The ice cold soundtrack is what really stands out for me. The shimmering keyboard bells and gusts of wind offer the sensation of arctic serenity. Besides getting the Iron Boots, there isn't much of a need to spend too much time in this mini-dungeon, but I really enjoyed the serendipitous atmosphere and the puzzles that were a part of it. I loved the sliding block puzzle and the incorporation of the Blue Fire. I was in awe of the final room, where you meet with Sheik in order to learn the "Serenade of Water". As the serenade plays, the camera angles sweep to show the stars on the ceiling and also reveal the glistening icicles that surround you. I love the sense of peace and beauty that is offered in this area.

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3. School II

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - (2000)

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 was one of the funnest games to play as a kid. Each new game release seemed to get better and better in some way (up until Project 8). I have some fond memories of Tony Hawk's 1-4. I primarily chose School II to take the number three spot due to the overwhelming sense of nostalgia that I feel for the level. Oftentimes, this was my "free skate" level of choice. Its career goals were nicely implemented/spread out and the secret areas were fun to engage with. In free skate, School II was a fun choice because I could spend a solid amount of time at a specific quadrant in the level, perform more "realistic" tricks (maybe a kickflip back-smith or kickflip back-lip), then move somewhere else and have just as good of a time (the Roll Call Rails and planter ledges were always a blast). It was also cool to skate a few famous skate spots within the level. These spots included the Leap of Faith, the Gonz Rail and the Carlsbad Gap. Watch out for that golf cart! Beep beep, "skate or die, dude"!

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2. Clock Town

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D - (2015)

If I could live in a video game world, I would choose to reside in Clock Town. It is a quaint, vibrant, entertaining and cordial place to live. During my first playthrough, I noticed that there is always some "goings-on" in Clock Town. I had fun walking through each building and engaging with the townsfolk. Everyone has their strict schedule, with certain tasks that Link can observe or investigate. I enjoyed following the Postman and Kafei during their daily routines. In addition to the incredibly personalized NPCs, the attention to color and set design are impressive. The Stock Pot Inn seems like a wonderful place to stay. Granny's (Anju's Grandmother's) room is beautifully decorated and the Mayor's Residence in East Clock Town is filled with endearing character. For me, the curved marketplace in West Clock Town is the most memorable area. I've had vivid dreams that take place in something similar to this bazaar strip. The Astral Observatory is one of my favorite locations as well (if it counts as a landmark in Clock Town). What I love about Clock Town, and Majora's Mask in general, is that it has an incredible fall carnival, harvest season atmosphere. There are many games that pull from traditional Halloween themes. In my opinion, MM has more of a unique autumn, crisp air, comfortably spooky art-style. If I were to be a Clock Town resident, I would prefer to be a pumpkin farmer...or a corn grower...and...I'd sell my crops before the moon drops!

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1. Angry Aztec

Donkey Kong 64 - (1999)

There is something special about the developer Rare's game design. Banjo Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64 and Conker's Bad Fur Day all have distinctive graphics, campy storylines and collectathon-driven gameplay. In regards to DK64's levels, all of them are quite memorable. Fungi Forest's day and night cycles offer an innovative twist, Gloomy Galleon is an entertaining 3D water level, and Jungle Japes is a great beginner level. When compared to Jungle Japes, Angry Aztec slightly increases the difficulty, offering more challenging puzzles, platforming and enemies. Angry Aztec takes the crown because I felt completely engrossed in the game environment. The copious amount of tasks had me on my toes for hours on end. There were two Kongs to unlock—Tiny Kong and Lanky Kong. There was also a giant dragonfly boss to defeat. The act of forward thinking was firing on all cylinders and the childish fear of being defeated was raised at a fairly high level. Diddy Kong was my favorite character, and I thought that his jetpack challenges were the coolest thing ever. The additional temples were also exciting and filled with creative content. The Arabian-inspired "Angry Aztec" music track, composed by Grant Kirkhope, is absolutely phenomenal and one that I think about and listen to in present times. As a kid, I would often daydream about DK64. During recess, I would talk to one or two of my friends about boss battle strategies, or go over ways in which to progress through a certain level. My friends and I loved this game, which makes it very special in retrospect. Thanks to Grant Kirkhope's spectacular soundtrack and Rare's love and care for the Donkey Kong franchise, I have become a lifelong Donkey Kong 64 fan.

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#picsandgifsarefromgoogleandyoutube #deadly premonition #great deer yard hotel #the legend of zelda #ocarina of time #ice cavern #tony hawk's pro skater 2 #school ii #zelda #majora's mask #clock town #donkey kong 64 #angry aztec #favorite levels #Youtube

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solidandsound · 3 years

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annual video game retrospective time~!!

Following the trend of the last couple of years, I bought only a small amount of new games this year and instead focused on clearing out older games from my backlog. Specifically, I decided to beat every game in my backlog that was released pre-2000. Thanks to this self-imposed challenge, I got to experience some true classics like Kirby’s Adventure and the Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the first time.

I beat a total of 38 games in 2020! This is a smaller number than previous years, but I’m satisfied with it. There were a handful of time sink games I played that sucked up time I could have used for more, shorter titles, but these long games were soothing in this year of stress. (More on that later.) I’m also proud not to have added very many new games to my list this year, not counting things I got for free or as gifts.

Here’s what I spent money on this year:

the Atelier Arland trilogy and the Atelier Dusk trilogy (finished 4/6 of these so far). These games individually have their ups and downs but as a series I can’t get enough of them. They have such a solid, addicting core gameplay loop that I am happy to fall into every time, and their lighthearted tones were great for this hell year.

Pikuniku (actually, I was able to grab this one using gold points on the Switch, the equivalent of about a dollar). A cute game about kicking capitalists into orbit. What’s not to love?

SteamWorld Dig and SteamWorld Dig 2. It was about time I played more SteamWorld games after how much I loved Heist. This series just oozes charm.

That’s it!! A couple other games I played this year were new but either received as gifts or bought by my bf for both of us, but I refrained from immediately purchasing exciting new releases like The Last of Us Part II and 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. Now, let’s talk about some more highlights from this year.

I got the Collection of Mana for Christmas 2019 and played through it in January. Final Fantasy Adventure was surprisingly solid for 1991, Secret of Mana was fun enough but by far the worst of the trilogy despite its popularity, and Trials of Mana was beautiful on every level. None of them are quite on par with Legend of Mana, but nothing is tbh, and it was a lot of fun to see more of the series finally.

Horizon Zero Dawn was great and surprisingly anti-capitalist. Prey: Mooncrash was a really inventive new take on a game I already loved. Chocobo’s Mystery Dungeon: Every Buddy was a good game to sink 100 hours into when the pandemic hit and I didn’t feel up to anything too deep. Pyre was an absolute masterpiece and my favourite of Supergiant’s games so far. Heaven Will Be Mine was a love letter to Gundam that felt made just for me.

Resident Evil. Specifically, the 2015 remaster of the 2002 remake of Resident Evil. Oh boy, this game. What a masterclass of survival horror. The first playthrough as Jill was so tense and spooky, and the second playthrough as Chris was a completely different experience, despite being mostly the same game, simply because knowing more of the layout of the mansion changes so much. I was so thrilled with this game that I jumped right into Resident Evil 0... but didn’t get very far. RE0 is superficially similar to RE but fails to understand what makes the latter so great. It’s a shame the franchise is so messy because I truly have no idea whether or not I should be trying, say, the RE2 remake, even though RE was probably the best game I played this year.

Shout out also to the games I played a lot of but didn’t beat. This of course includes the endless Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which I used as creative fuel to write over 100 poems in-game! I also played a ton of SD Gundam G Generation Cross Rays. This is a huge game that will take me a while longer to finish, but I’m not in a rush. I’ve actually been using this game to exercise, doing jumping jacks and sit-ups during the game’s long attack animations.

As an added note, the PS5 came out this year and, shock! I did not get one. Yet. More and more I find frustration with our cultural obsession with newness, and not just in video games. It is good praxis, IMO, to insist that the newest thing is not the most valuable, and that something being new is not a good enough reason to acquire it. Sure enough, some of the best stuff I played this year was from over a decade ago. Good art does not expire, and the PS5′s best games will still be good when I get around to them, eventually.

And now I will go against everything I just said and beg you to please play my new game from this year. It’s free. Thank you.

PS. My plan for next year? Play every game in my backlog that released pre-2002! This should put me clear of the PS1 era. I may catch up to the present yet!

#i ended up getting a lot of more recent games for christmas #those along with the old stuff i plan to play #should basically get me through 2021 lol #i've already started Fire Emblem Warriors which is really fun #excited for TLOUII and the Trials of Mana remake #and to finally get into Yakuza #i love video games!!!!!

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forestwater87 · 5 years

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A1 A5 A10 D10

READER MEME READER MEME READER MEME

A1: When did you start reading (and writing, because I got kinda off-track answering this question) fanfiction?

I was around 10 years old? I joined fanfiction.net in 2006 with the most awful thing ever written at around 13-14 yes the 87 in my username is a lie because I wanted to get on deviantart and had to lie about when I was born, but I’d been reading Legend of Zelda fanfic for a while before then, and writing it all down on an old Windows 95 laptop that didn’t have an internet connection, and a slightly-less-old Windows 98 laptop that didn’t have an internet connection.

I had to save my fics to one of these guys in order to upload it to a computer with actual working internet:

(Those fics still exist; I haven’t had the heart to delete anything I’ve written since 10 years old, though I have gone back and edited some things . . . which, since so much time has passed, I’d probably want to go and reedit by now. They are tragic, but they make me smile for all their flaws. I wish I’d kept the unedited versions though, because yikes. Please, save all your cringiest stuff, because it’s so much fun to look back at.)

A5: Who was the first author you subscribed to?

That was probably Rose Zemlya, who wrote this . . . well, gosh, at the time it was this mind-blowingly excellent fanfic for LoZ: Ocarina of Time. (I’ve never successfully beaten those games nor am I all that interested in them anymore, but baby Forest’s romantic awakening came from a man in a green dress and tights, and so I devoured fanfic about them. Link/Zelda was the original OTP of my dreams. Since I didn’t play the games, I alternated between scouring wikis for canon accuracy and not caring because I was a tween and just wanted to share my dumb OCs.)

I don’t actually know if I’d still think the fics were particularly good or not, because I haven’t bothered to go back and reread them -- and I fell off the wagon when she got interrupted by college or grad school and stopped updating regularly -- but she was the first author who really made me feel something.

I did just find out she’s still active on tumblr, though I don’t know if she’s still writing either for that fandom, or for fandom in general, or even at all. But I’m glad to see she’s still out there, because she was hugely formative to getting me to actually start writing. (Which means, Rose, it’s all your fault I’m like this. Apologize to the fanfic community for what you’ve done.)

A10: Who did you have your first fanfic-related conversation with? What was it about?

Oof, now we get mildly depressing. When I was a kid (as in, ages 4-16 years old), I had this . . . extremely codependent and borderline abusive relationship with the little girl who lived next door. She and I no longer speak, and there’s a lot of extremely negative feelings built up around what were in retrospect a pretty awful time in my life, but she was also the one who introduced me to fanfiction -- she actually played the Zelda games, and wrote fic for it herself and wanted a writing buddy; I kinda gave zero shits about the games beyond it being a nice convenient generic fantasy world with pretty characters. And while we were highly competitive in the not-fun way that still leaves me really fucked up over not being the Most Popular Author in Any Given Fandom because it triggers some horrible flashbacky feelings, I owe her a lot for being someone who showed me this entire culture existed, that it wasn’t weird or lame, and helped me get really excited about writing.

D10: What is one story idea you really want to read but no one has written yet?

God, I don’t know. I’m not really an “ideas” person -- eagle-eyed readers may notice that none of my fics really have plots to speak of -- but for Camp Camp at least, I do think some sort of immortal/groundhog day/time loop AU would be fun. The writers have said that the series is meant to be an endless summer that exists largely outside of time, right? So what if the entire camp, or the lake, or Sleepy Peak did as well?

I’m not sure exactly how this would work -- are the adults just random wandering immortals (vampires, what have you) who found a job somewhere where no one questions why they’re not getting older, and the campers are normal people who never stick around long enough to notice? Are we talking a Brigadoon-style situation where time stops for whoever’s in the camp but keeps going outside of it? Is there a dimensional rift?

Fuck, I dunno. I’m not an ideas person. I’d just enjoy the fuck out of an “It’s All Been Done” situation, but fanfic. (And resemblances to two particular angels who keep meeting and falling in love over the course of forever and palling around in various fun historical moments are entirely coincidental.)

#campcamp #ask forest #reader meme #sort turned into halfway a writer meme and halfway a 'listen to forest talk about her sad childhood' meme #not sure i should put this in a main tag #but i really do like this au idea and so i want people to see it and think their thinks about it #thesherlockdavenger

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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25 Underrated PS4 Games

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

After almost a decade on the market, the PlayStation 4 built up one of the most impressive gaming libraries in history. You’ve probably made your way through the big hits like The Last of Us Part II, God of War, and Bloodborne by now, but there are still plenty of lesser known games worth checking out before you finally make the jump to the PS5.

These are 25 of the best underrated PS4 games that may have fallen under your radar but are absolutely worth your time. Best of all, you can probably find most of these in bargain bins or at a discount in the PlayStation Store by now!

25. Helldivers

2015 | Arrowhead Game Studios

We’ve all played twin stick shooters to death, but Helldivers feels like the ultimate evolution of the well-tread genre, with huge, procedurally generated levels, tons of weapons, and missions that actually require some real strategy to complete. And good luck trying to get through the lengthy campaign on your own — Helldivers is much better (and much easier) as a multiplayer experience.

But probably the best part is that the game’s world and story are heavily influenced by the sci-fi classic Starship Troopers. It almost makes up for us never getting a good Starship Troopers game.

24. Shenmue III

2019 | Ys Net

Shenmue III is exactly what those of us who waited nearly 20 years for this sequel wanted. That’s both a blessing and a curse. If you played and enjoyed the first two games when they first came out, you’ll feel right at home with the clunky mechanics, awful voice acting, and monotonous yet addicting daily activities. Anyone new to the series will be baffled by what the big deal is and why anyone was clamoring for this sequel.

But kudos to director Yu Suzuki for taking his time and delivering an uncompromising vision of the game he always wanted to make. Let’s just hope we don’t have to wait another couple of decades for the next chapter.

23. Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments

2014 | Frogwares

Frogwares has been quietly toiling away at Sherlock Holmes adventure games since 2002, with mixed results. The series certainly has its fans, but Crimes & Punishments is the closest the series has come to a mainstream breakthrough. The gameplay is fairly standard for the genre: investigate crime scenes and gather clues to nab a suspect. But what sets the Sherlock Holmes titles apart is that you can always come to different conclusions, so there’s plenty of reasons to replay each mission.

Crimes & Punishments also has some of the best writing in the series. This Sherlock Holmes is grittier, amoral, and much closer to the detective envisioned by Arthur Conan Doyle than what we typically see in media adaptations.

22. Transistor

2014 | Supergiant Games

Supergiant Games put themselves on the map with 2011’s critically acclaimed Bastion, but the follow up, Transistor, didn’t quite sit as well with gamers. Maybe the futuristic setting was a little too generic compared to Bastion’s more whimsical, narrated atmosphere. Maybe the ability to pause the real-time combat and plan your moves was a turn off to more action-oriented gamers.

Regardless of why gamers didn’t seem to embrace Transistor as much as Bastion, those who took a chance on it found another masterfully told story with deep, addictive combat.

21. Cat Quest

2017 | The Gentlebros

Nobody would blame you for thinking that Cat Quest is another shovelware title based on the artwork, but if you actually take a chance on it, you’ll find a surprisingly high quality action RPG with solid combat, plenty of equipment to upgrade, and cats. Lots and lots of cats.

There are also tons of side content, and plenty of nods to other classic series like The Elder Scrolls, The Legend of Zelda, and Dragon Quest. Pretty much the only reason to avoid this one is if you really, really hate cats for some reason.

20. Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana

2017 | Nihon Falcom

Ys is virtually the poster child of underrated series at this point. Since the very first title on Japanese personal computers more than 30 years ago, each entry has been praised for its flat out fun combat and exploration. Ys VIII proudly carries on that tradition as one of the most enjoyable action RPGs on the PS4.

But more importantly, this entry in the long-running saga adds something previous games have always seemed to miss: an engaging story focusing on escaping a mysterious island. Unfortunately, this title still didn’t get a ton of attention from gamers. Give it a try!

19. Greedfall

2019 | Spiders

It’s a tough time for a new IP to break into the RPG genre, which is why you probably haven’t even heard of Greedfall. Yes, it’s a little rough around the edges and feels kind of like a mid-2000s BioWare game. But on the plus side, it feels like a mid-2000s BioWare game!

That means tons of well-written characters and moral ambiguity in a swashbuckling fantasy world. Admittedly, the combat can be clunky, and you’ll probably run into quite a few bugs, but if you can look past those issues, you’ll find a real role-playing gem.

18. The Evil Within 2

2017 | Tango Gameworks

It’s hard to understand why The Evil Within games have never clicked with more gamers. Produced by Shinji Mikami, the legendary director of the Resident Evil series, The Evil Within 2 builds on the ideas of its predecessor with more combat, bigger open world areas, and deeper weapon crafting. Plus, it’s super scary, with some of the creepiest looking enemies in any game ever.

With the Resident Evil series experimenting with first-person gameplay now, The Evil Within 2 feels more like the proper Resident Evil 4 sequel that never materialized. There’s no reason for action and survival horror fans to not check it out at this point.

17. Gravity Rush 2

2017 | SIE Japan Studio

Gravity Rush is a franchise that can’t seem to catch a break. Plenty of gamers missed out on the first title since it was initially a Vita exclusive, and then the physical release of the remaster was bafflingly only released on Amazon. Finally, Sony dumped this much-improved sequel immediately after the holiday season, ensuring it would be ignored by the masses.

That’s a real shame because Gravity Rush 2 now offers three different ways to control gravity and explore the massive world in a much lengthier, 20-hour adventure. And it looks fantastic since it didn’t start off as a portable game. Now if only Sony could figure out how to properly market the series, Gravity Rush could be its next big franchise.

16. Tearaway Unfolded

2015 | Media Molecule

Whether you consider Tearaway Unfolded to be more of a platformer or a puzzle game, it’s undeniably charming. The world, made entirely out of paper, is constantly surprising with both new locales and how to traverse them, and each character you meet on your journey as a deliveryman (or woman) is instantly likable. This is one of those games that will just always put you in a good mood.

Media Molecule also deserves a lot of credit for successfully porting the Vita controls of the original to this console remake. It’s a breeze using the touchpad to move and create objects. Few other PS4 games have even tried to emulate the innovative use of the DualShock 4.

15. Dragon Quest Heroes II

2017 | Omega Force

There’s no shortage of Musou games on the PS4, with most of them inspired by various anime series. Dragon Quest Heroes II sets itself apart though thanks to its setting. The iconic monsters of Dragon Quest have never looked better, and the new RPG mechanics, like visiting towns and being able to change classes during the lengthy story, add some welcome depth to the traditional hack and slash gameplay. It almost feels like a new action RPG take on the typical Dragon Quest offering.

But unfortunately, as with most Dragon Quest games in the west, gamers were mostly ambivalent to the release of Dragon Quest Heroes II. While the series is big in the Japan, it just doesn’t seem to have widespread global appeal, no matter what developers try.

14. The Order: 1886

2015 | Ready at Dawn

The Order:1886 is a classic case of a great game being dead on arrival due to overhyped expectations. In retrospect, it’s not clear exactly what gamers were expecting. Blame a misunderstanding about what the PS4 was capable of early on in its life, or maybe what the developers were going for. The game looked great at release (and still does), and the steampunk-inspired hunt for vampires and werewolves is unique among third-person cover-based shooters. Maybe people were expecting an open-world game.

Regardless of why so many people seemed disappointed with it, The Order: 1886 is a fun game, even if it’s super short and there’s not much replay value here. Still, it’s a fun ride while it lasts and well worth picking up on sale now.

13. Killzone: Shadow Fall

2013 | Guerilla Games

Remember when Killzone was hyped up as the “Halo killer?” Yeah, that never quite panned out. But Killzone: Shadow Fall is easily the best game in the series, building on its predecessors with more open-ended levels and new stealth abilities. It also brings in a whole new cast, so you don’t even have to be familiar with the other games. And while multiplayer is kind of dead now, it was actually a lot of fun when Shadow Fall launched alongside the PS4.

Then everyone kind of forgot about it. Even Sony seems to have abandoned what was once a flagship series. Oh well, it’s still worth checking out Shadow Fall and thinking about where the series could go next.

12. Assassin’s Creed Syndicate

2015 | Ubisoft

The last “traditional” Assassin’s Creed game before Ubisoft went full RPG easily ranks among the best in the series, with two likeable protagonists and a story that embraces the good, the bad, and the ugly of Victorian England. The rope launcher opened up all sorts of new ways to climb up and across buildings, and while driving carriages and fighting on top of them isn’t quite as cool as captaining your own pirate ship, it’s still pretty damn fun.

Ultimately, Syndicate didn’t get much attention at release because it was the ninth outing for an aging game engine. Ubisoft desperately needed to evolve the Assassin’s Creed games, but if you’ve seen everything in Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, now is the time to go back and enjoy the swan song of the old style of Assassin’s Creed games.

11. Code Vein

2019 | Bandai Namco Studios

Code Vein’s pitch is simple, yet awesome: Anime Dark Souls. If you’ve played any of the games in that legendarily difficult series, you’ll know what to expect here: slow, strategic combat; big, horrific enemies; and lots of brutal deaths. The big twist is “blood codes,” which are essentially classes. Eventually, you acquire more than two dozen of these, which you can switch on the fly to better tackle each enemy encounter.

Code Vein isn’t quite as polished as the Souls series, and at times its pacing can be a real problem, but if you can look past those flaws, it’s one of the better Souls clones out there. Here’s hoping a sequel irons out those issues.

10. The Surge 2

2017 | Deck13 Interactive

The Surge was one of the more welcome surprises of this console generation, a fun sci-fi take on Dark Souls that emphasized futuristic weapons and dismemberment. While it didn’t quite exceed FromSoftware’s classic games, it offered the best spin on the genre yet.

The sequel doesn’t fix what wasn’t broken. The basic gameplay is the same, but you can now customize your character, and there are more weapon types than ever in a bigger and more interesting world. It’s easy to get lost in the world of The Surge 2 for dozens of hours, and it’s a welcome change of pace if you’ve finally exhausted everything there is to do in Dark Souls and Bloodborne.

9. Alienation

2016 | Housemarque

While Alienation has plenty of weapon upgrades and opportunities to level up its three classes, it’s missing some of the depth found in Helldivers. Still, for what it lacks in complexity, it makes up for by being a pure joy to play, as you destroy its massive alien hordes.

The main thing holding back an otherwise fantastic game is its multiplayer options. While you can always hop online with three other players, there’s no couch co-op, which is a baffling design choice for a game like this.

8. Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth

2018 | Media Vision

The Digimon franchise may not be anywhere near as popular now as it was in the late ‘90s, but this is actually a renaissance for games featuring the biggest rival to the Pokemon juggernaut. The gameplay here is actually pretty standard JRPG fare, but damn if it isn’t fun to catch as many Digimon as possible, and the story is actually pretty enjoyable.

Between the higher production values and more engaging story, I’d wager that Cyber Sleuth may actually surpass Nintendo’s recent Pokemon games, even if there aren’t quite as many monsters to catch.

7. Knack 2

2017 | SIE Japan Studio

The original Knack was essentially a tech demo for the PS4 launch meant to showcase the more impressive graphics and the ability to make a cool looking character out of a whole bunch of constantly moving objects. It looked great, but the high difficulty and shallow gameplay turned off a lot of people.

It’s rare for a flawed launch game to get a second chance, but Knack 2 takes advantage of the opportunity with better platforming action and much more balanced gameplay. It may not be the best PS4 platformer, but it’s still worth checking out for fans of the genre.

6. Infamous First Light

2014 | Sucker Punch Studios

In 2014, Sony was making a big deal about Infamous Second Son, it’s next-gen superhero sequel featuring a new protagonist with fire-based powers. It’s a decent game, but First Light, the standalone DLC released a few months later, is actually the superior game thanks to its flawed anti-hero and her unique neon light powers.

Maybe Sucker Punch learned from the criticism of Second Son, which is why First Light feels like a better, tighter game. Unfortunately, we haven’t heard anything about another Infamous game since, so for now First Light remains the pinnacle of the series.

5. The Legend of Heroes: Trail of Cold Steel III

2019 | Nihon Falcom

Imagine if instead of being standalone titles, the Final Fantasy games all took place in the same world, with an epic winding story spanning multiple sub-series and protagonists. That’s essentially The Legend of Heroes franchise, which actually dates back to the late ‘80s, and The Trail of Cold Steel series is just the latest in a long line of deep, well-written JRPGs.

Of course, it’s hard to follow along with what’s going on in this third installment without playing the first two games, which have also thankfully been remastered and ported to the PS4, but once you work your way through those, this third entry is easily the best in the saga thanks to its improved graphics and refined gameplay. And if you love the first three, there’s a fourth installment, too!

4. Astro Bot Rescue Mission

2018 | SIE Japan Studio

When the current slate of VR headsets were announced, most gamers envisioned massive first-person adventures that would make it feel like they were exploring another world. Those titles are starting to trickle out, but in the meantime one of the best uses of VR is the tried and true 3D platformer.

The basic gameplay of Astro Bot isn’t terribly revolutionary. You run, you jump, and you collect things. But playing from the view of a giant robot that can also interact with the world is literally a game changer. Astro Bot nails a perfect balance between the fresh and the familiar and stands out as one of the best reasons to invest in a PSVR headset.

3. Until Dawn

2015 | Supermassive Games

When discussing the best horror movies of the 2010s, a few titles always seem to pop up: The Cabin in The Woods, Get Out, or It Follows. Until Dawn deserves to be in that conversation, even if technically it’s not a movie. But gameplay is light. It’s more about your choices and trying to keep eight young adults alive during a trip to an isolated mountain lodge.

Or try to kill all eight of them as quickly as you can. That’s the beauty of Until Dawn: ultimately, you’re the director, but no matter what you choose, it’s a top tier experience for any genre fan.

2. Mad Max

2015 | Avalanche Studios

Mad Max received decent reviews upon its release, but critics didn’t quite seem to know what to make of it. Yes, the open world can be a little empty at times, but that actually fits the source material, and the story is excellent. Plus, the idea of constantly upgrading your car, the Magnum Opus, with new weapons and abilities is still something that no other games have pursued.

In many ways, the post-apocalyptic atmosphere echoes the Fallout series, even if the action-focused combat is much smoother. Maybe launching too close to Fallout 4 took away some of Mad Max’s thunder, but that’s no excuse to avoid it now, especially if you love the movies.

1. Tetris Effect

2018 | Monstars

There have been a lot of different versions of Tetris. Like, way too many. And even though you’d think it would be hard to screw up such a simple and fantastic concept, many gamers would say that a lot of these games haven’t been very good. Some say the original Game Boy version of Tetris has still never been surpassed.

Well, if anything has ever come close to topping the handheld version of Tetris so many of us fell in love with, it’s this. The classic gameplay is here, but now overlaid with tons of bright and mesmerizing graphical effects, plus thumping electronic beats in same vein as Rez and Lumines (also produced by Tetuya Mizuguchi). Add in what is quite possibly the best use of VR on the PlayStatio, and you have a must-play game that everyone needs to experience at least once.

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punishandenslavesuckers · 7 years

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She has no throne. Girls without thrones should not have knights, but hers won’t go. Princess Zelda – the girl who killed Calamity – would love to fade into legend, but Link’s bought a house, he’s fighting off monsters, and he’s selling giant horses to strangely familiar Gerudo men. She’ll never have any peace now. (ao3)

(chapter one) (chapter two) (chapter three) (chapter four) (chapter five)

They depart the Rito Village – albeit with some apologies for the structural damage to several rooms – and some notion of heading south toward Tabantha where, as Link promised, there was the possibility of dragons. They’re almost a mile along when a shadow cuts a swift but massive path across the road before them. They look up just in time to catch the sudden, high-speed intercession of a mostly recovered Mishi. He lands with a massive backdraft directly in front of Zelda’s horse, hitting the ground hard enough to kick up dust and mini cyclones. Luckily Maru is long accustomed to bizarre happenings and barely nickers even when a giant bird person appears from the sky. She just stops and snorts, offended.

“Wait!” Mishi says. He’s breathless, frazzled. “I didn’t want to miss you!”

Zelda, thrilled, dismounts to meet him in the road. “Mishi! You’re looking much better!”

The color in his plumage is brilliantly dark and glossy now, his eyes bright, feathers ruffled with emotion. Standing directly in front of her, he’s about half a head taller than her, wearing Rito archery gear, a breast-plate engraved with his clan crest, and a massive long bow clipped to his spine. Above them, the sun’s begun to track across the morning sky and – for a moment – Zelda feels herself pulled by anachronism. She’s been on this road before. Stood like this before. Facing a man like this before wearing armor like that before.

Zelda can feel Link behind her, waiting.

She roots herself in the present. Mishi, not Revali, touches her forearms lightly, cupping them in the massive curl of his wings

“I couldn’t let you leave without thanking you.”

“No thanks necessary. Just… stay away from the eastern wind temple. There’s old magic there and that’s probably what..” She swallows. “I’m very glad you’re doing better, you know. We were worried.”

“Thanks,” he says. He reaches up and un-snaps a cord from his neck – a feather and stone pendent, a white arrow-head affixed with thin blue-black plumes. He carefully places it in her palm. “Carry that with you, priestess. On my family’s behalf. If you ever need help, you’ll have it from me and all my clan. You and your allies.”

Then, quite before she can do anything except stammer, Mishi puts both wings over her shoulders – warm, dark, and heavy.

“I won’t forget it, Zelda.”

He, gently, bumps his forehead against hers. Then he steps back… and takes off, straight up, launching skyward with such force the gale he leaves in his wake kicks up a spiral of wind – tearing her hair up into a weightless whirl as Zelda stands, laughing, shielding her eyes from the sun to watch Mishi rocket through the atmosphere. He cuts a sharp arc toward the mountains, tearing away on an unstoppable trajectory beyond the foothills and into the highlands. She presses her fingers, curled around the totem, to the smile on her lips and for a moment she lives in that rising heat, like warm waters on a tide, rising within her.

Then she ties it around her neck and mounts up again.

Link signs, ‘He’s fast.’

“Just like Revali,” she agrees. Then she blinks, hard, beset suddenly by a heat of tears. She clears her throat. “Draga’s upset with us.” She nods to the shrinking silhouette in the distance, largish and moving at a fast canter. “He hasn’t done that since the mask incident. He didn’t even want to talk about looking for dragons in Tabantha and that—” she makes a face – “is probably a bad.”

Link signs, ‘You think it’s because I punched him?’

She shoots him a look. “Don’t be smart. Why did you do that, anyway?”

He shrugs.

“Do you ever think about what you do?”

He shrugs again, more deeply.

Zelda shakes her head. “I think, before, you tried much harder to hide that kind of thing from me.”

He wrinkles his nose. “Not really. I wasn’t this reckless before.”

She blinks.

Link’s still watching the road. Zelda studies his face, but his expression is neutral and unconcerned. He pats Epona fondly and fishes for something in his shoulder satchel. She waits. Oh. He’s eating a snack. That… that was it. He just said that and now he’s back to riding. Zelda tries to look less worried while her former knight escort chews on a bit of dried apricot and hums to himself, content to set a steady pace beneath the cold morning sun. He’s wearing his hood up, lazy, letting Epona pick her own path down the road while he guides mindlessly with his knees. Zelda slowly looks away so she can frown privately at the back of Maru’s ears.

Eventually, Link takes not of her silence. She hears a short whistle. When she looks up, Link’s arching a brow at her like he’s been trying to get her attention for some time now. The sun’s moved in the sky. Draga is still pacing about a quarter mile ahead of them, so he’s still mad.

Link’s face asks before his hands. ‘What’s wrong?’

“What did you mean when you say you aren’t as reckless as you were one-hundred years ago?”

He gives her a funny look.

‘I meant what I said,’ he signs.

“Yes, but…” She stops.

It’s a clear day, but the Hebra cold leaves breath visible. There’s a thin layer of snow on the foothills not far above them. Link’s still staring at her, cheeks red, brow drawn down, half a question on his lips that never quite becomes. Then, slowly, a dawning blankness moves into his face and sets fine lines of dread across the interior of Zelda’s lungs.

Then Link just faces forward again and says nothing.

Epona tosses her head a little so he leans forward to run his hand across her neck and Zelda makes a detailed study of Link’s hand as he smooths it over Epona’s downy hide. At some point, Link let a stable girl to braid her mane into a loose series of rows and knots that allowed her to thread several bouquets worth of mountain flowers into it – trapper bells, apple bloom, and violets mixed with wisteria. They’ll wither by the end of the day, Zelda knows. He’ll have to comb and pick the dead plants from Epona’s mane and she thinks of him one-hundred years ago – his old war horse, tacked for battle, meticulously groomed and saddled.

“Is that… silent princess?” she asks eventually, pointing at a flower behind Epona’s ear.

Link glances at her. He’s lowered his chin a little, so the lip of his hood shades his eyes. She has to watch his mouth to read anything from the way he nods instead of speaking. Zelda, carefully, leans from Maru’s saddle so she can lift the flower from Epona’s mane. Zelda sits back properly again. She spins the blossom between her fingers then, on a whim, she slides the stem behind her ear, arranging it into a fetching angle at her temple.

“There. How’s that look?” she demands, swiveling at the hips to face Link.

He gives her a very small smile and thumbs up.

“Useless. I’ll ask Draga.”

‘He’s still mad,’ Link signs looking a little offended. She can see his eyes now.

“I didn’t punch him. You did. And he got the best of you in that fight, by the way, I hope you don’t think I didn’t notice.”

“What? No, he didn’t.”

“Bye,” Zelda says, kicking Epona into a canter.

“Hey!”

They race to catch up with Draga and she loses the flower before they even get there.

“Link, do you want to go back to Zora’s Domain?”

He glances at her.

The fire crackles, the scent of roasting fish rising warm from the small travel-sized skillet, the oils popping softly. They’re seated in the shade by a small creek near the road. Link is halfway through the motion pinching herb into the pan and he squints at her instead of giving it the attention it needs; he’s finicky about how things are salted or flavored. Damn. She should have waited until after lunch to ask that question. Ruining a meal with personal questions. She intended to ruin the afternoon generally with personal questions, but ruining food as well… that was just unnecessary.

“Sorry. Never mind.”

Link finishes sprinkling herb and dusts his hands on his pants. Then he turns to crouch facing her. Oh no. He’s giving her his full attention. Which isn’t to suggest he doesn’t usually, but rather that she wishes he wasn’t doing that right now because her question in retrospect seems presumptuous. Link folds his hands between his knees, his elbows on his thighs. Oh, Goddess. He’s giving her his full undivided attention. Link’s full undivided attention, among other things, has brought down giants.

Presently, it’s just making her deeply anxious.

“I only ask because… we’ve only been back the one time. Now that the shrines aren’t working, it takes so long to travel and I just wonder if you wanted to make some time to go there and…” She gives a helpless shrug. “Visit?”

Link thinks about it. Then signs, ‘Do you want to go there?’

“Well, it’s comforting you know.”

Link eyes her steadily then signs, ‘I’m fine.’

“I know Bazz and Gaddison have asked you to come around. Are you afraid they’re going to group hug you to death?”

“Terrified,” he says calmly.

“But, Link, all joking aside. Do we need go back?”

Link gives her a look.

Draga, who is no longer actively avoiding their physical presence, looks up from where he’s seated nearby – back against a log, reading a book. It’s much warmer now that they’ve dropped elevation but he’s still wearing full Snowquill gear and a scarf. This does nothing to detract from the vague sense of dangerous he exudes when he eyes them over the coils of said scarf.

“Zora’s Domain is on the other side of Hyrule. You know that, right? We could not be farther away, presently.”

Zelda glares back at him. “Yes. I know. I am aware.”

“Just checking.”

“I’m sorry, but don’t pick a fight with me just because you’re grumpy.”

“I’m not. I’m saying Zora’s Domain is far away.”

“Bravo. Geography. You know I was the Princess of this land once, right? I might know where things are located.”

Link, visibly uncomfortable, laughs nervously. “Can we not?”

Draga shuts his book. “Why do we need to go to Zora’s Domain?”

“Maybe that’s personal,” Zelda says, folding her arms. She lifts her chin slightly. “Maybe it’s none of your business.”

Draga looks at Link. “Why do we need to go to Zora’s Domain?”

The Hero of Hyrule, Hylia’s chosen hand, embodiment of the Light, glances quickly toward the creek like he’s wishing it were much deeper and he could throw himself into it to avoid this conversation. But he can’t and Draga’s sitting forward now, draping one arm over his knee, his book dangling between his fingers as he narrows his eyes. Draga’s right cheekbone is still bruised. He didn’t let Zelda heal him and seems to have used just enough first aid to close the cut there, but nothing else. Link still has a split lip and scraped knuckles.

“We don’t,” Link says.

“Zelda is making a face. I don’t believe you,” Draga counters.

Link glares at Zelda who wasn’t aware she was making any face whatsoever and tries to stop having a face immediately.

“I’m fine,” Link says.

“Why,” Draga drawls, “did you assume I thought there was something wrong with you?”

Link tenses.

Draga just stares, calmly, waiting.

“I’m sorry I hit you earlier.”

“Thanks, but that is not what I’m talking about right now or why I’m asking.”

Link signs, ‘It’s no problem.’

Draga signs, carefully, ‘L-I-A-R.’

“Leave it alone,” Zelda starts to say.

Draga interrupts. “But since you brought it up – why did you attack me? You’re crazy, but that was rude. You’re not usually rude.”

“I’m not crazy,” Link says calmly.

Draga rolls his eyes. “You’re reckless but you’re not rude. So why did you do that?”

Link’s mouth thins. Then, “I don’t know. Just felt right.”

“Hitting me felt right?”

Link shrugs.

“Are you sure you’re not crazy?” Draga sighs, a little dramatically, seemingly ready to abandon this line of questioning.

Then Link repeats, quietly, “I’m not crazy.”

And then there’s a long silence.

Draga, who was clearly not trying to dig at a nerve, seems mildly unsure what to do upon realizing he’s found one. Zelda, who was not aware that was a nerve to dig at, blinks. Link, who seems to realize what he’s just done, freezes. Luckily that’s when the fish he left in the skillet starts smoking and then bursts, somewhat improbably, into flames. Small miracles. Draga points. Zelda yelps. Link, noticing the sudden flames, grabs the handle on reflex and promptly burns his hand. He hisses, then tries again with a towel whereupon he just flings the whole pan into the creek where it ricochets off a rock and disappears into the shallows on the opposite bank.

Zelda stares.

Draga, dumbfounded, says, “You lost your pan.”

“Damn it,” Link says.

He inspects his burned hand. There’s a bright red band bisecting the centre of his palm.

“Here,” Zelda says, standing up. “Let me see.”

“Don’t,” Link snaps.

Zelda stops exactly where she is, boots rooted suddenly to the ground. Draga doesn’t say a word but Zelda can feel him… settling on her peripheral. Link flexes his hand a few times, furling and unfurling his fingers as the burn darkens, flushing with heat. She’s pretty sure it’s going to blister. She’s certain it must hurt. He looks over his shoulder at them and Zelda isn’t sure how to describe the specific notion that Link’s eyes get bluer somehow, intensify with his temper, even though that cannot be true. When he looks like that… huh, she thinks of the Wolf on the road.

“So there’s a demon in your shadow,” Link says, looking at Draga.

Draga, who was nowhere near that topic of conversation, stares then slowly allows the violent change of subject. “Yes, we established this. Are you getting that pan or…?”

“That doesn’t bother you?”

“Of course, it bothers me, but you get used to it.”

Link turns around. “Do you want us to try and get rid of it?”

Draga laughs, then seems to realize Link is serious. “That’s a notion, but no. You can’t break the tie with this demon. It’s too ancient even for you two. I admit, there is a wildness to you both that defies the laws of convention so nothing is impossible, but unless you exhibit some control over what you do I can’t imagine you breaking a curse this powerful.” Draga tilts his head. “No offense, Link, you’re strong. What power you possess, it tends to wipe out what stands before it, but you act in instinct. Do you even know how you did what you did back in the Rito Village?”

Link says nothing.

Zelda cuts in, “I could try though. The entirety of my inherited magic is fashioned for sealing malicious power.”

“And you used most of it against the Calamity,” says Draga evenly. “And what practical application has there been from your study of sorcery at the Hyrulian high court? Any at all? Or do you, like Link, draw on some unspecified knowledge at the time of necessity?”

“That may be true,” she says, ignoring the sting of that – the implication that years of prayer and study have amounted to nothing so much as book knowledge, “but how can a single dark spirit be more dangerous than the Calamity Ganon?”

“I don’t believe it is more dangerous, just more subtle. Zelda, your power is a hammer.”

“And that won’t work because…?”

“You cannot kill what you cannot reach. The demon isn’t… here. It’s on the other side of the veil. The demon tribe does not exist on this plane until they choose to do so and they needn’t present themselves in our world to do harm.” Draga gestures to his bruised cheekbone, the place where the monster laid a gash open during the fight. “Again, what you saw was a shadow on a wall. The real beast is… bigger.” He hesitates, like even talking about it sets him on edge. “But this is all beside the point: I have protections afforded me by my family. So long as I do not engage in pact magics, I am safe.”

“You’re sure?” Link says.

“After two decades of living with it? Reasonably.”

Zelda frowns, moving to take a seat on the log he’s leaning against. “Your basing this off the fact it… simply hasn’t tried anything historically?”

“No,” Draga says quietly, “I’m basing it off the fact my sisters worked very powerful magic to protect me before they died. Generations of my family have fought endlessly to break the curse and they’ve come the closest to doing it – to limiting its scope. It would dishonor their efforts to expose others needlessly to the danger now. So… I thank you, but pick a different battle. This one is mine.”

“So fight all the battles that aren’t close to us?” Link demands.

Draga looks at him. “Why are you so eager for a fight?”

“I’m not.”

“You’re being rude again. Are you going to fight me now?”

“Of course not.”

Draga narrows his eyes. “Okay, what you actually angry about? Because it’s not my curse. You’ve been in a mood since we left the Village this morning and you were fine before then so what is it? Because I think I’ve humored you long enough about something that is, actually, deeply personal so either respect my wishes not to be your next battleground or tell me what’s actually wrong.” He folds his arms. “If you can do that, maybe I’ll consider letting you help. Your choice.”

And Link, rather precisely caught, looks away.

After a while, Draga sets his book aside and moves somewhat laboriously into a crouch.

“If you’re not going to get that skillet, then I’ll do it. You’ll just be irritated about it later –”

“I don’t remember things,” Link says, cutting him off.

Draga stops. He processes that, then calmly, “I thought you said you’d recovered most of your memories.”

“Some,” Link murmurs. “Not most.”

“And that bothers you?” Draga asks.

He doesn’t quite smile. "You get used to it."

If Draga resents his words being echoed, he doesn’t give sign. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. Is it the first Zelda’s heard of it?”

And Link looks at her. She’s fighting back the knot in her throat because he looks so tired in that moment.

“I knew,” Zelda cries, hands clenching tight in her lap. “I thought it was… Link how bad is it? You never talk about it! You remember so much. We talk about the past all the time. I… I sensed that you’d remembered our time together. What do you mean you don’t remember things? What’s missing? Was I wrong?” She stops when Link folds his arms and looks away, a slight visible pain moving across his face, then sliding back into unreadable calm. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He doesn't answer.

“We can go back to Zora’s Domain,” Zelda says, desperately now. She stands up, hands clasped tight, pressed against her stomach. She feels nauseous. Dizzy. “They remember you from before I knew you. You said before that they helped you get things back. You have so many friends there. They would certainly help you. Please, you don’t have to… pretend everything is fine. We can stop. We can go back. Just talk to me.”

“I don’t think it will help.”

“Why?”

He shrugs.

“Link, no. Tell me why.”

“I always…” He tries to go on, but his next words stick and die. He says nothing for a moment, as though he’s not certain about continuing at all, but Draga is waiting and Zelda is waiting, trembling with the silence, so he signs, ‘I always assumed I’d lose my mind. So, it’s not a priority.’

Zelda says nothing.

Then, “What?”

Draga, who is probably catching only a handful of Link’s sign, looks sharply at her.

“You’re not going to lose your mind!” Zelda cries.

“What?” Draga echoes.

Link’s completely emotionless as he, wordless, lays it out in gesture and sign. ‘I already did once. It’s not unreasonable to think it’s likely.’

“Why would you say that?” Her voice is starting to crack. “What do you mean…?”

‘I don’t know. I have a feeling. My instincts tend to be good. That’s all.’

“How long have you felt this way?”

’Since the sword chose me. Draga is right: I have no control over the power inside me. It's going to eat me alive.’

Zelda covers her mouth with one hand, shaking.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I didn’t know how.’

“I don’t understand what he’s saying,” Draga says tensely.

“Link…” Zelda hesitates to see if he wants to speak for himself but he gives her a small permissive nod. “He's saying he has no control. That... the magic itself is going to drive him insane and...” She looks desperately at her once knight and partner, who calmly waits for her to translate the massiveness of his admission into plain words. “…because he lost his memories once already, it's accelerated the timeline. He thinks he will lose his mind and that it’s going to happen sooner rather than later. That's why he's pushing about the curse, because he thinks it's going to get worse.” Tears are brimming in her eyes. “Link is that right?”

He drops his gaze.

He nods.

And Zelda, barren of any other instinct in that moment, shakes her head. Slowly at first, then hard, until her hair is in her eyes and her heart in her throat and she can’t – she can’t –

She dashes across the short distance, hitting Link in the chest, palms first. She hears him grunt softly with the impact. Her hands close on his tunic. She can feel the scale mail beneath it – a token of his childhood friend, hand-crafted to fit him. His eyes are wide. She can see every organic fractal of blue in his irises and the faint scar at the top of his forehead where his hairline starts. He got it from a riding accident when he was ten. His ears are pierced because Zora give jewelry so casually as a gift.

His hands close over hers. She can pick out a myriad of pale scars on his fingers – a history of learned violence she was never witness to. She doesn’t know the stories in the callouses. She doesn’t know the topography of his lost history, mapped out in implication only and gone now in the wake of the Calamity. Her fists ball up in his shirt and she pulls at him so she can drop her forehead against her fists and breathe.

“You could have told me,” she chokes. “I wanted…. I wanted to know that.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, aloud but so softly it could be lost in the breeze. “It was easier to pretend.”

She draws back, lifting her eyes. “How could that be easier?”

He doesn’t answer for a moment, just turns from her, so her hands slide from his breastbone to his shoulder. When he continues not to answer, she moves behind him and (after a hesitation, intense, all encompassing, white hot) loops her arms around him, tucking her arms around his ribs, her hands lacing over his chest. She lies her cheek against that back of his neck. His hair tickles a little. He smells like the floral bar soap from the inn. Her heart is slamming in her chest – rabbit-quick and afraid.

“You can tell me.” She swears it to him, but still the silence stretches. “Please. Please, just tell me…”

“You didn’t know me well enough to tell the difference.”

Zelda nods, just once, then presses her face against the slope of his neck, feels his hand close over her inter-locked fingers. Squeezing tight. Like an apology or to keep her from pulling away in the aftermath. She’s not sure. She’s not sure about anything. She's not sure he could have hurt her more if he drew his blade across her arm – letting blood from her veins like venom from a bite. His hand tightens until the bones in her fingers ache and she, acting on impulse, mouths ‘it’s okay’ against the nape of neck until his hand relaxes.

“Link,” Draga says, when it's clear Zelda can't go on, “do you want my opinion?”

He waits for Link to nod.

“In Gerudo teachings, magic use of any kind always carries some measure of madness. An attitude of risk. The greatest danger to any sorcerer is the possibility of losing themselves to the powers within them – The Thousand Voices. The Sea of Lives. To lose yourself to any of these is to fall to abomination and possession. It’s what killed my family and what stands in my shadow... so when you tell me you’re afraid to lose yourself, know that I hear you, but also know that I have some notion of the signs.”

He lets that settle for a moment.

“When you say you’re going to lose your mind, do you mean you’re going to lose yourself to the Sea or that your memory loss has made you a different man?”

“Both,” Link says quietly.

“One may not have anything to do with the other, you know.”

“I dream about drowning in twilight and a moon that falls time and again, infinitely.” Link’s hand tightens on Zelda’s again, his shoulders set. “I dream about falling so far from above the clouds that I can barely see the earth. In the dream, I’m another person. When I wake up, I feel that I don’t have enough of myself left to keep them out. One has to do with the other.” He shivers. “I’m… afraid of losing my mind again. It’s like dying…”

“Look at me,” Draga says. “Link. Look at me. You embody the soul of the hero, yes, so you have many lives lined behind you. Maybe they tell you how to move. How to fight. How to employ magic you’ve never learned or a tactic you’ve never tried. Maybe, in moments of battle or fear, you see a window into a section of their lives, but I don’t believe they will consume you.”

Link's looking at the creek, not Draga.

Link says, “Why not?”

“Because those lives are yours, in some degree. They’re behind you. Like memories. You’re troubled because you’re beginning to see memories that are not your own when your own memory has been so dramatically reduced. You were wounded in battle, Link. You lost parts of yourself. I won’t say that I know whether you will ever get those pieces back, but even so the man you are now… he’s far too stubborn to fall to the men that came before him.”

“None of them lost to the Calamity,” Link murmurs.

“None of them had to come back from losing.”

“I can’t control it.”

“Such is wild magic. It’s not for you to control, but it’s intent is not your destruction. You can stand in the eye of the storm and direct its trajectory, Link, simply trust that you’re unmovable.” And when Link does not look at him, Draga moves forward and with two hands takes his head into his palms, fingers curling around the back of his neck, thumbs hooked behind the line of his jaw and when Link doesn't pull away, he guides his eyes up. “Listen to me," he says. "You are not insane. Even if every hero before you was utterly mad, you are not and you will not be."

Link exhales. "Why not?"

"You have Zelda. You have me.” He searches Link’s eyes, shakes his head. “I do not see the signs in you. So, you won't be lost."

Link doesn’t move. Doesn’t relax.

“Do you believe me, Link?”

Zelda can smell copper, taste it, like a coin on her tongue.

Link exhales, slowly. “I believe you.”

“Good. Then we should get back on the road.” Draga lets Link go and moves to pick is book up from the grass where he left it. “There are dragons at Tabantha Bridge. Or was that not true?”

Link turns in Zelda’s arms. Before she can react, he cups her face in his hands and presses his mouth to the plane of her right cheek. He says something, soundless, against her skin. ‘Thank you’ perhaps or… or something else. She freezes. Her entire face flushes, but as fast as he does it, he stops. He steps away, moving past her toward the creek where he starts to wade across the shallow water, hunting for the skillet. Zelda can’t explain why her lips, not her cheek, seems to ache from contact (or lack thereof) and the shiver that runs down her body ends somewhere in her stomach.

Draga turns around, slinging a satchel over his shoulder. “Gerudo country isn’t far from here. We have time to slow down before we head that way.”

Zelda rubs her cheek. “Yes, right. Of course.”

Link’s plucking the lost pan from the water.

Draga’s looking at her. “Are you alright?”

“Hmm? Oh. Yes. I’m okay.” She pulls her hair back. “Uh, thank you again, Draga. I… I appreciate it. I think Link needed to hear that.”

“You two need to talk more,” he says quietly. “I mean what I said – he’s safe but much of that has to do with you. Isolation is the fastest way for the Sea to take a soul beyond the shore.” He moves toward the clearing where the horses are penning beyond the trees. “I may not always be here. You need to be sentinel.”

Zelda hops the log by their rest site, chasing him down.

“Draga.” She catches his arm, pulling him around to face her. “If you leave Link and I, who will be your sentinel?”

He says nothing, just peers down at her, eyes unfathomable and green. He’s so tall he casts a shadow over her. She waits.

“I’ve been alone since I was fifteen, Zelda. I’ve had seven years to work out how to protect myself by myself. You needn’t worry about me.” He smiles a little. “But I appreciate it.”

She lets him pull away to check the tack on his horse.

“Okay,” she says to herself.

Behind her, Link is putting out the fire and packing up. Draga is patting Arbiter. She stands there, aware of them both, and silently over and over she hears Draga saying, ‘I may not always be here. I may not always be here. I may not…’

They board their horses at Tabantha Bridge Stable a full day later.

It’s a quiet and somewhat isolated outpost perched almost directly on the cliff besides its namesake – narrow arch of wood planking and rope that tenuously spans the dizzying plunge of Tanagar Canyon. So deep is the fissure in some sections of the country, the bottom vanishes into a deeper, darker layer of cloud and mist that seems it could very well be the migratory path of draconic beasts. Tabantha Bridge is the only permanent bridge linking the plains of Hyrule Ridge to the snowy region of Hebra and therefore, an essential waypoint for merchants and travelers of all variety.

They take day packs and hike out to the far edge of the canyon at the foot of Mount Rhoam, far from the bridge itself, and set up a comfortable spot for themselves on a wide jut of stone overlooking the canyon course. Zelda lays down several blankets within minute Draga has produced alcohol from a deceptively small flask that tingles when Zelda takes draft from it. She suspects, somewhat, that it’s enchanted in the way Link’s travel satchel is enchanted and carries far more than its dimensions should allow.

So, getting increasingly more drunk, they watch the color leech from the sky.

Turns out Link isn’t a talkative drunk.

After quite a few long draughts from the flask, however, Link does discard all sense of personal space. So he’s presently trying to climb on Draga’s back and Zelda – eating a small bag of candied fruit – makes absolutely no move to help. Link keeps saying something about ‘higher ground’ as he clambers their giant friend the way he might climb a rock face. Draga doesn’t seem amused. He pries at the smaller man with little success, Link clinging, tenacious as a limpet. He gives it up until Link is literally sitting on his left shoulder, squinting across the plains with the attitude of a mountaineer surveying the country.

Draga sighs and loops a hand over Link’s knee to keep him from tipping. He eyes the impetuous Hero of Hyrule with a long, calculated stare that is surely counting down to the moment he flings Link into the dirt. But he makes no move to do so. His hand on Link’s thigh is so large that his fingers very nearly encircle his leg just above his knee.

“I could throw you like a shotput,” Draga reminds him.

Link says, loudly, “Don’t be a drag, Draga.”

The Gerudo gives him this look like Link’s immediate future as a human bolo is forthcoming.

“Are you certain the dragon comes this way?”

“Yes,” he says.

“When?”

“Very late at night. Or very early in the morning.”

Draga promptly torques to the left and flings Link to the ground next to Zelda. Zelda, still eating candied fruit, moves the bag out of the way so it doesn’t get crushed when Link rolls onto his back and lies there, a little red-faced, on the blanket. Draga takes a seat at the far edge of the blanket, the small campfire to the side casting relief on the three of them, the full moon laying silver highlight across the grassy slope up Mount Rhoam. Link points at the moon and signs.

‘I keep thinking it’ll turn red.’

Draga looks up, stunned. “The blood moons have stopped now that Calamity is gone.”

Zelda tilts her head. “Yes. You didn’t know that?”

Draga runs a hand through his hair, the wind ruffling some of the shorter bits. “I did, I just now realized that’s directly attributable to you two.”

Zelda does a little half bow/wave combo. Link gives a thumbs up.

“I take it back.” Draga lies back on the ground, lacing his fingers behind his head. “It’s not that impressive.”

“We probably should not be drinking if we’re trying to spot a dragon,” Zelda points out. “I’m already sleepy.”

‘They aren’t dangerous,’ Link signs.

“Wake me if dragons show up,” says Draga, closing his eyes and with a soldier’s immediacy, falls asleep.

Zelda prods the sole of his boot with her toe and gets no response. Link laughs, but silently, shoulders shaking a little. Zelda sits up so she can crawl over and peer down at Draga who, yes, appears to have completely dropped to sleep in the span of one moment and the next. She satisfies herself that it’s so by mock lunging and waving her hands inches from his face. Nothing. She sits back on her heels, examining their friend’s sleeping face. In consciousness, Draga’s neutral expressions are somewhat severe, lending him a default mien of someone vaguely irritated, just on the verge of a scowl. In sleep, the edges smooth away; you might notice his eyelashes are a little long, or that his hair curls where it get loose from the braids and clasps. Zelda has to resist a small, familiar impulse to smooth his hair flat where it’s sticking up.

She catches Link in the corner of her eye, signing.

‘I think we can break the curse.’

Zelda, glancing warily at Draga, signs back, ‘We should respect his wishes.’

Link sighs and flops back down, running his hands over his face. He signs, from his back, ‘We could fight it.’

Zelda moves to kneel beside him, leaning over her fallen knight so she can sign down at him. ‘I don’t know how to fight it.’

Link tilts his head. He’s so much smoother with his hand signals. ‘I think you did pretty well.’

She gives up on sign. “I didn’t know what I was doing. It was just… in the moment.”

Link grins. ‘You shouted down a demon.’

“I did not.”

He shrugs, makes a lazy one-handed gesture that translates, thereabouts: ‘I liked it.’

Link’s still grinning. His smiles linger longer, stick more easily when he’s tacky with liquor and slower to rein in the translation of emotions to body language, like drink gums up the gears that tell him to be stone before the eyes of others. A breeze rising from the valley ruffles Link’s bangs slightly. He’s a little more slack than usual, a warm fluidity born of drunkness and, she thinks, happiness. He’s been lighter since their talk at the creek. Quicker to smile and take to a joke. The firelight’s putting little strands of gold into his hair. He smiles up at her.

Zelda is not sure how it happens, or what part of her mind goes into automatic movement but the impulse – always there, vaguely, unformed and unexamined – comes to the forefront of her brain and asserts control. She places one hand on the blanket by Link’s head, bracing herself so he’s beneath her, looking up at her. He watches her, curiously, and begins to mouth a word. Lips parting on something, a question maybe or –

She kisses him.

Her lips find his just as his voice finds his throat. The vibrato comes across his teeth, settles in the bones of her face and it’s so unexpected she jerks back immediately, as if shocked. Link stares at her, half braced on his elbows in the attitude of rising, eyes wide in the dark, his lips still parted on whatever he was going to say before she put her tongue in his mouth and caught his voice against the back of his teeth. He can’t seem to get it back – rendered all again mute by her.

“I’m sorry!” Zelda covers her mouth with her hands. Horror possesses every fiber in her body and knots them up. “I didn’t – I’m sorry! I’m drunk! I didn’t mean that!”

Link sits up very slowly, expression… odd. His lower lip is a little swollen. She shakes her head, whispering.

“I don’t know why I did that.”

He keeps staring at her.

“That wasn’t fair. Oh. That was stupid. I don’t… I guess…. I thought it was funny what you said. Shouting at demons. Oh… that’s not very funny actually.” Panic. She’s panicking. Link’s all blue-eyed and pale and just staring at her and she’s losing her mind right in front of me so of course she rejoins, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It seemed like a good idea! Oh. Why do I keep letting Draga give me alcohol?! Just because I stole his wine that one time and suddenly it’s, like, a challenge of some variety I honestly… I don’t…”

Link is still staring. Zelda gives up entirely and covers her face with two hands, peeking between her fingers, because that will somehow make this less horrible.

Voice muffled, she whispers, “I didn’t ruin things, did I?”

Link stares. Then, “What?”

“You know… by doing that. Did I… ruin everything?”

Link again, says, “What?”

“Did I break it?”

“It?”

“Us.”

“What?”

They might both be a little too drunk for this.

“You know!” Zelda flaps a hand. “With the kiss.”

Link stares.

Then he promptly bursts into laughter.

Which, given how appalled she is, seems almost offensive – him amused in the face of her utter mortification and crisis. Link falls over on his side and lies there gasping, hair in his eyes, just lost in laughter. It occurs to Zelda that she’s never seem him laugh like that – that he’s very, very different when he’s breathless and smiling and loud even in a passing moment and in this passing moment, Zelda’s heart seems to constrict in her chest. Suddenly, she’s very glad she decided to kiss him if for no other reason than this.

Eventually, Link stops laughing.

Zelda lies down on the blanket facing him, smoothing her hair in annoyance.

Link signs, carefully, ‘You can’t break us.’

“Can’t I?” she whispers.

He looks at her. Then says, calmly, “No.”

And she doesn’t know what to say, so she says, “I might sleep this off and miss the dragon.”

Link shakes his head. He signs, ‘It’s a dragon.’

“Technically, it’s a spirit.”

‘You’d going to miss seeing a DRAGON.’

She shrugs, closing her eyes. “We have time.”

go to chapter 6...

#botw #legend of zelda #legend of zelda breath of the wild #zelda #link #ganondorf #loz fic #interim update #interim #in which the cycle starts over again immediately #and link and zelda #thought the fight was finally over #lol #no #mostly platonic destiny shit #until its not #rae writes #raewrites

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supercoolgamesstuff-blog · 4 years

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A Journey Through the Seventh Generation Video Game Consoles

New Post has been published on https://www.coolgamingzone.com/a-journey-through-the-seventh-generation-video-game-consoles-2/

A Journey Through the Seventh Generation Video Game Consoles

I’ve been playing video games my whole life. It all started with a Commodore 64 when I was just 3 years old, when my parents saw my love for games and fed my ambitions. So here we are in the new year (2014) and the Eighth Generation consoles are out: Wii U, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo 3DS, PlayStation Vita. They are exciting. They are sleek. They are impressive. But are they worth getting as soon as they come out?

I’m not going to argue with those who want to get them on Launch Day, but the recent launches of the PS4 and Xbox One made me start to believe it might be best to wait until the NEXT next gen consoles come out before purchasing THESE next gen consoles. Reasons? I’ve got a few.

The first one is obvious: the price tag. While it’s not going to cost you an arm & a leg to get one, the price isn’t exactly on the cheap side. I remember paying $500 (minus tax) for one of the first PS3’s. They were big and bulky but that meant they had super power! It was fun and cool to have one, but it didn’t feel more than a year later they were thinner and cheaper. If I could of waited a year, I could of had one for $200 cheaper. Now it’s not a big deal to some people, but upon retrospect, I could done some things with that $200. Most likely I would of lost it betting on long shots at the track but still, I missed out on adding another memory to my life! It may not sound like a big deal, but quickly these reasons start to snow ball.

Like the next reason: options for games. When you buy a next gen console on or close to launch day, you don’t have many titles to select from. And I certainly can’t think of any breakthrough games that came out specifically for that system on launch day. Take the Wii for example. When it came out, you got to play The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess right off the bat. But the difference between the game on the GameCube and the Wii? You got to swing & point your remote on the Wii and the maps were completely opposite. That’s it. The graphics were the same, the enemies were the same, Link yelling when swinging his sword was the same. The reason? The game was originally made for the GameCube. When the Wii was coming out, they just added two weak features and that was that. You could make the argument that it was still cool, but when Skyward Sword came out, you could see the capabilities of the Wii come out in full force. Twilight Princess looked like child’s play in terms of maximizing the Wii’s controls (the game itself actually kicks ass and rivals Ocarina of Time & A Link to the Past in terms of best Zelda games ever in my opinion).

Okay, back to the topic. This is just one of many examples of the types of games coming out on launch day. They mostly are games that are ports from the last generation of systems or games that haven’t maximized the new system capabilities. And you don’t have that many to choose from. And as you know, video games can sometimes be a dime a dozen and finding gems can take time. You generally have to wait months for a good selection of games to come out and wait even longer to have a good collection of top notch games to choose from.

Going back to when the Wii came out, I was excited about Metroid Prime 3, but after that, what were my choices? Not much. After awhile I just stopped looking and focused only on names I recognized (Super Mario, Donkey Kong, Final Fantasy, Metroid, Zelda, etc.) About 2 weeks ago I went through the titles just for the Wii system and couldn’t believe the bevy of games I missed out on! Now it’s my fault I didn’t pay more attention, but it goes to show how much first impressions can make.

Now let me ask you, are you better at playing games the first time through or the second time? How about the third time? I already know the answer, the more you play, the better you get. This applies to almost everything in life. So why do we expect so much flawlessness on launch day? There were lots of reports of PS4’s and Xbox One’s not working right out of the box. In terms of percentages it’s low you are going to have problems. But what if you do have a problem? Ask all the people who got PS4’s on launch day and they didn’t work. They had to call Sony, be put on hold because many others are calling on launch day with “issues” such as not being technologically savvy to sync their controller to their console. Then they had to spend an hour going through every possible way to get the PS4 to work. When it doesn’t work, they then had to wait for Sony to ship them a box to get it fixed or get a new one, which could take weeks. It was a hassle. So while the odds are you’re going to have a good system, this is still a possibility. To me, it feels like it’s better to wait it out as the console makers figure out how to perfect getting the console from the factory to your hands with as little issues as possible.

Last but not least, as technology improves, so does the console. But now you have to pay extra, rather than getting it in updated bundles. PlayStation 3 came out with Move. Xbox 360 came out with Kinect. The Wii came out with Motion Plus Controllers. The Nintendo DS came out with a larger screen, 2 cameras and an Online Store. The PSP came out with bigger storage and a microphone. Some things could be added on, some you had to buy a brand new system. The point is, if I would of waited, I wouldn’t of had to spend all that money to get all the cool features. Instead, I’ve just donated tons of money to Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony while I’m salivating and crying at all the new features I can’t have unless I want to spend more money.

The bottom line is this: to me, it’s better to wait than to buy right away. If I wait for a generation to run it’s course, I’ll have a ton of great games to play, I can get consoles with all the best features, I can get games and consoles at great prices, to me it’s win-win-win. I’m not going to argue with those who want to be on the cutting edge, but for me that time has passed. I’ve spent too much money being on the cutting edge only to see today’s technology get passed by tomorrow’s in the blink of the eye. I’m okay with letting new technology get perfected over time, at which point I can enjoy at a cheaper cost.

In the meantime, let’s enjoy the great games I, and possibly you, missed out on during the Seventh Generation of consoles! Feel free to come along for the ride!

http://seventhheavengaming.blogspot.com/

Source by Alexander D Martinez

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barbosaasouza · 5 years

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‘Monster Garden’ Developer Talks About the Healing Power of Play

Zack Wood, developer of Monster Garden, shared some of their design thoughts about their monster-befriending game, and how play and imagination can bring about personal healing and care.

What got you interested in exploring friendship with a game?

Zack Wood, developer of Monster Garden: When I played RPGs growing up, I loved getting new characters and choosing which would be in the party for different missions. I wanted them to interact with each other and for the unique combination of characters in my party to affect major story events, but in most games it didn’t seem to matter much at all.

Harvest Moon 64 was the first game I played where befriending characters was a major part of the game, so I naturally loved it and other games in the series. But in the end, friendship is just a secondary element in Harvest Moon games, and you can pretty much ignore it if you want to.

So, for a long time I wanted to make a game where meeting and making friends with characters was really the core of the game.

Why do so using monsters? What was the importance of making friends with gaming’s most maligned group?

As an artist, monsters are a chance to get imaginative and have fun with character designs, so I always appreciate it when games create some nice monsters. But for me, having to fight them clashes with the sense of delight and wonder they inspire. I want to savor that feeling of encountering something mysterious, so I often wish fighting monsters to the death wasn’t the only way most games let you interact with them. I’d rather help them, get to know them, or just let them be.

A game like Pokemon might seem different since the monsters are allies instead of enemies, but trapping monsters in balls and only releasing them to do your bidding in battle isn’t actually very nice either, when you think about it.

And I don’t think it’s by chance that monsters tend to be either a threat that must be destroyed or cute creatures to capture. It’s because monsters represent the unknown. That’s why they’re so much fun to design, but also why they’re used as a generic stand-in for scary and bad things. Anyone who’s played enough RPGs has heard it before: “There have been more monsters in the forest lately. Something must be wrong…”

It makes sense as a convention since unknown things can be scary, but they can also be met with play, curiosity, or all kinds of other approaches, which I think opens up a lot of new area in game design.

In my game Monster Garden, I wanted to add a sense of mystery and surprise to dialogue by letting the player choose which of their monsters will talk without knowing exactly what they’ll say. I think this makes the monsters feel more autonomous and the dialogue feel more surprising than if the player just chose from a list of pre-written responses.

So, to answer your question, I wanted to show monsters some love and respect for a change, and also to savor the element of the unknown that makes monsters so much fun in the first place. If you’re interested, I wrote about why games need more “monster love” in this post on Gamasutra as well.

Of course there are also games like Undertale where players can choose between killing monsters or being pacifist, and I think that’s a positive change from many games. But in Monster Garden, I wanted to embrace monsters with a more thoroughly loving approach. Instead of just choosing whether or not to kill monsters, I wanted to let players choose different ways of peacefully interacting with them and getting to know them better.

You seem to have a great interest in ‘healing games.’ What would you define as a healing game, and can you tell us some examples you’ve found?

One way I think games can be healing is by inviting the player to explore, play, and experiment with its world without having to worry about being caught in a proving ground and punished. It’s hard to feel anything like healing when you’re busy just trying not to make a mistake and lose.

Kirby’s Epic Yarn comes to mind as a game that manages, despite being an action platformer, to be thoroughly forgiving and never really put you on the spot. I don’t know if I’d call it deeply healing, but it’s definitely going in that direction.

These days there are also lots of walking sims and similar games with no way to lose, and although I think that can definitely be relaxing, I also think that a special type of healing is possible when there are challenges in a game, but when you aren’t punished for approaching them in the wrong way.

Of course, that’s next to impossible in large games with multiple overlapping systems where there’s no way to account for all the things that the player might do. So it helped that Monster Garden is only 30-45 minutes long and very simple. That enabled me to account for every way the player could possibly interact with the game’s three levels and to make something fun and different happen in each case (usually introducing a different monster).

Another way games can be healing is by explicitly focusing on personal healing experiences (which I think can be just as healing for the developer to create as for the player to play).

Two games come to mind as examples (although I haven’t played either one, unfortunately): Papo y Yo, a game about a boy dealing with an abusive alcoholic father based on creator Vander Caballero’s own experiences, and That Dragon, Cancer, a game about struggling with a child’s cancer diagnosis.

I’d personally love to see more games that combine playful, non-punishing gameplay with content that draws on personal healing experiences.

What unique power do you feel that games have to ‘heal’? How can games capture a kind of soothing interaction?

Once I asked for examples of “healing games” on Twitter, and people mentioned many games that I wasn’t expecting (Way more people responded than I expected, too, which reflects how much people appreciate the healing side of games).

Some of the games people mentioned involved winning and losing based on player skill like Celeste and many Legend of Zelda games, while others simply had a relaxing atmosphere like Viridi. Others were games people had played during a tough time in their lives that gave them a much needed break or connection with other players.

The variety of responses made me realize that all kinds of games can be healing, and that it naturally depends a lot on the individual player.

But in all cases, I think the key to games’ unique healing power is the that they let us play. When you’re at play, you feel more relaxed and open to change and seeing things in a new way. It might sound contradictory, but I think fun and play can be the key to serious healing.

What draws you to explore healing power in games with your own work?

I didn’t set out to make a “healing game” when I started working on Monster Garden. Initially, I just wanted to learn how to use RPG Maker and to design and animate a bunch of pixelated monsters. What I was consciously trying to do was make a more “playful” game in terms of being less punishing and more gentle, with a focus on characters and friendship.

Also, around the time I started working on Monster Garden, I had been learning a lot about play and playfulness at indie game events where physical games were presented alongside digital ones. I had been realizing that I just like playing around and having fun with people more so than competing and winning or any of the things normally considered core to games (like mechanics, narrative, etc.).

I had also discovered the work of Bernie De Koven, a proponent of fun and play whose work in the 1970’s is one of the reasons Physical Education programs in schools in the US use more games and playful activities (Stuff like that big rainbow parachute thing that everyone wooshes up in the air and then runs and sits under. I remember that being so much fun in elementary school, but in retrospect it was so simple, not even a game at all…which I think was one of Bernie’s main points, actually).

He had a background in theater and worked to spread theater warm-up games, childrens’ games, and “folk games” throughout his life. I had also done some improv theater and loved the warm-up games more than actual “scenes” or acting, so I appreciated his approach and writing a lot.

It turned out that he was a proponent not only of playing physical games with other people, but also of playing with yourself in your imagination. He wrote about exploring the “inner playground” of your imagination, and I love imagining things, so I was naturally intrigued. But it turns out getting in touch with your imagination and learning to let it guide you is actually kinda tough and takes a lot of practice. You have to learn how to trust yourself and get past obstacles you encounter along the way that stop you from letting yourself play – in other words, it can be a deeply healing experience.

Through that process I imagined a lot of fun, silly, and sometimes scary things. So, when it came time to work on Monster Garden and I needed content beyond the basic idea of a playful RPG about monsters, I used these experiences as the foundation for the game’s structure and story.

In a sense, you could say Monster Garden is about the healing process of learning to see scary, unknown things as fun friends instead of frightening foes.

Why do you feel it’s important to explore this sort of play and interaction in games?

Lately I’ve been seeing myself as a “playful artist” more than a game designer because I realized I just want to make things that invite people to play, whether its through a game with other people or a silly moment they enjoy all by themselves.

For me, play, playfulness and the healing and fun that come with them are the real treasures that games have to offer. I wish we had more playful games, which I think would also mean more healing games. Games that are thoroughly warm and welcoming instead of cold and confrontational, where you don’t have to worry about the fun suddenly ending because you messed up.

I think this is still new territory in game design, but trends like “wholesome games” and “care wave” in indie games show that people want more of these types of experiences. It’s an exciting time to make and play games, and I’m personally looking forward to seeing what new ways people come up with to have deeply healing fun!

The post ‘Monster Garden’ Developer Talks About the Healing Power of Play appeared first on Indie Games Plus.

‘Monster Garden’ Developer Talks About the Healing Power of Play published first on https://superworldrom.tumblr.com/

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ghostsonabiketonowhere · 6 years

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Ghostman: The council calamity retrospective

Well christ, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? I know literally nobody follows this blog, but as of this writing, i’m waiting on the steam direct fee i paid to be fully processed (Basically, in a week i’ll be able to publish the game)

I’d like to take a second and stroll down memory lane for a little bit, and why it took so fucking long to make this game, this is basically going to be a list of every time i tried and failed to make a game, so strap in, these aren’t in chronological order either, and i’ve kinda forgotten the proper order.

Bill’s excellent adventure:

There’s incredibly little to say on this one, after reading a 4chan thread on games development i downloaded GM:S, tried making a platformer, saw my art, didn’t see any progress after trying a little bit, and gave up.

Mugman:

Mugman was the first time i tried making an adventure game, other than the main character, i had no ideas for the game and dropped it like a rock.

Radiation Seat:

Radiation Seat, for the more dedicated gamers in the audience, is just a synonym for nuclear throne, i tried messing around with random generation in GM:S, realised i’m not very good at coding and gave up, the game actually kinda works though, so theoretically if i’m a moron/psychopath i could try working on it again.

Asterodis:

First real game i ever made, it’s an asteroids clone, but with a bunch of the stuff i saw in Vlambeer’s game feel talks crammed in, it’s essentially idenitcal to a tutorial on youtube except shooting takes away points and there’s a limit to the number of bullets on screen.

Poltergeist (Aka: Ghostman when he was a person)

I posted a lot about Poltergeist (the version of ghostman with good art and a completely different setting), the secret to this was having a good artist, Robert Thomas helping me out, we never finished it, and Bobby got caught up in school work, but that’s almost over so if he’s willing to pick up the pen again, i’m willing to do the coding and fix the reall weird bugs (randomly the game would massively lag for a reason i never figured out, i assume it had something to do with the way AGS handles characters over non walkable areas)

Grall and Foegart goto whitecastle:

I’d had the idea of wanting to make a high fantasy adventure game after reading a couple of discworld novels, these games didn’t get far, but it did have an interesting character switching mechnic similar to DOTT, this also appeared in a couple of other half finished games i’d made, why i thought it’d be funny to make a game based on it when i’d never seen Harold and Kumar go to whitecastle? Iunno.

H.E.L.L:

H.E.L.L (Hyper Energetive Love Lab) was a shot at making a VN, i’m probably going to still do this, so i don’t know if putting here’s sensible but eh, fuck it, i’d had the idea of a reality show crossed with a death game for ages, and tried writing a short story about it, which went nowhere.

Gender Girl:

Gender Girl was the first video game i ever made, it was a scratch program with the cat repainted to be pink, moving left killed you by a spike, moving right displayed a message that gender girl had liberated herself (Hohoho, very ludonarratively insync, 12 year old me), i uploaded it to the scratch website, and it, containing swear words(such a rebel was i) it was deleted 5 seconds after publication, truly, a light gone from the world, what did it have to do with gender? If i remember literally nothing, or you were supposed to cut your dick off with the spikes.

Yeah.

PAGAN:

Pagan was a pokemon rip off i was making, i didn’t get far beyond changing sprites and types, world design is hard, as of writing it’s still on my site, i ought to take it down buti just don’t have the heart, poor Pagan.

BORB (Ghostman 1)

Borb, as it’s affectionatly called in the files, is ghostman 1, it’s the source of the Alien King sprite, and the Ghostman sprite used in Ghostman: The council calamity, and was distributed amongst my friends for like, 5 seconds, it’s 4 screens and one “Puzzle”, which doesn’t actually work because the last time i did work on it, it’s fun to see how my humour changed, in GM1 we’ve got the classic line “It’s locked up tighter than a jewish bank” and a character named Snil, whose ribbing snarky asshole persona was basically every persona i used to write until i started playing dnd with my friends, and had to make more than 1 character, i don’t really like anything about GM1, but i find it oddly charming, it’s terrible perspective and total lack of story or theme (You’re kidnapped by bandits and the game ends in leaving on a spaceship having never seen a single bandit.) just makes it like lenny from of mice and men, it probably should die, but i can’t help shooting a game that thought the way to add taste was to remove the words “Fuck off” from a wall.

Rebet:

Rebet’s the first time we see the actual character “Rebut” appear, in some weird tron like backround, i remember wanting to make something that looked like tron, and failing, other than that Rebet remains a total mystery, even to me, andi made the fucking thing, looking at the code, i remember a little bit more about the game, the main gimmick was having a variety of ray guns that could effect peoples emotion, the example in the tutorial was a “calming ray” to prevent a drill seargeant from screaming at you, this didn’t go anywhere.

Wing Wang:

This is literally an empty ags game, there’s nothing in it, i don’t know why i haven’t deleted it.

Ye Men of Valour:

Ye Men of Valour was a weird idea, i’d read a book called “The decline and fall of the British Empire” (Based upon the work, the decline and fall of the roman empire) and decided to make a game based upon a variety of British figures from across time entering into a house they must escape, only to be killed by Aliens, the goal of the game was to get players to reload the game with the knowledge that following the puzzles as they were laid out would kill them, and use a different method to escape, Ye Men of Valour really ended up going nowhere because i was in a pretty dark place and wasn’t motivated, like at all, i’m gonna put this in the “Might come back to it” pile.

Ghostman 2:

Ghostman 2, like Grall and Foegart, had a character switching thing, this ended up breaking the game, so i scrapped it, Ghostman 2 was when the idea of Ghostman being a space adventure comes from, following from Ghostman 1, where you leave on a ufo with an alien, it’s what i thought would happen next, if i remember there was literally no story, just the characters, and switching gimmick.

I.A.C.M

I.A.C.M was a project i worked on with Bobby very breifly, the idea was to make an adventure game set inside a mentally disturbed girls mind, this basically didn’t pan out due to AGS engine limitations, the sprites sent in were too big and ended up looking kind of lame squashed down.

You cannot name this file, insect.:

This wasn’t a game, this was shit poetry at a time in my life where i knew my poetry was godawful, there was no story here, just a Shodan like figure who’d insult me, like personally, i’d write insults about myself into a script and then play it.

Robot Initation:

Adventure game, starring “some random guy named mike”, drew the first character sprites, hated them, didn’t want to improve them, gave up.

Assault and Battery/BatteryMan:

This was a go at 3d platformers made in unity, fell apart because the models i’d made in blender weren’t done properly at all, breaking practically everything.

PirateTextAdventure(ActualTitle):

Sounds exactly like what it is, never got a single line down for this.

Shield Slide:

A rip off of free ski based on the idea of riding a shield i think i saw i a lotr movie? Never got to prototype.

AAAH!

AAAH (Aimless aeronautical adveture, huzzah!) was an experiment i wanted to make, an adventure game that was procedudrely generated, every game would involve a one minute timer, which upon reaching zero, would result in the player dying, the story was the player had just survived a plane colliding with another plane in midair, and had to find a way to live without a parachute just using debris, lessons learned: Random generation is hard, i also ripped off the title from AAAAAAAAAAAAh for the awesome.

Sweet Goodnight:

Sweet goodnight was an rpg i planned to make about dying alone in a spaceship, it never got far beyond idle doodles and some game design docs that i’ve since lost, may go back to this in future.

Spaceman and Woodboy:

A mario and luigi superstar saga ripoff, never got to properly playable state, GM:S is hard.

Quest of Halden:

Shit rpg.

Ghostman: CNC :

Ghostman: CNC (Caverns and creatures) was a weird idea, i wanted to make an Rpg based on my dnd campaign, but for some reason i felt the need to justify it with a weird ghostman shell, may go back to this one.

Legend of Negro:

I don’t know why the fuck this is on my computer, i tried pissing around with a legend of zelda game maker thing.

Generic Units:

Supposed to be an xcom like, fell apart.

Airman/Pacifist run:

Something i still want to do, an fps with non violent weapons and stage hazards that you have to use to defeat enemies, got as far as modeling a single gun.

Sepsis man:

A 3d platformer starring a drinks machine, modeled main character, gave up.

Slime Game (actual title, again.)

Slime game (Or Slime Quest) was going to be an incredibly clever subversive take on the Rpg genre by having the grand villain actually be a low level mook, think cave rats and dungeon bosses, that kind of thing, stopped making it because i thought “Woah, that’s dumb, and lame, and i really don’t like making art for ideas that are dumb and lame!”

Zug’s Glorious road trip for the glory of the party and wealth of the nation:

ZGRTFTGOTPAWOTN for short, this was a text adventure based on wormhole shenanigans and Soviet propaganda films, never really got that far, fun little fact, Zug’s the name of the alien in my twitter profile pic.

Ghostman: The council calamity:

I didn’t quit, i made the game.

THANK GOD FOR THAT.

#gamedev reflection didireallyjustypereflection? iamawanker