games you played today 12 times the fun and the excitement!

[COINTELBRO]

VIDEOGAME LORE RECITATION

a product of divine royal incest, her allegiance was to a suppressed strain of scholarly, largely irreligious culture whose system of astral divination was driven underground when their lands were depopulated by a genocidal war and broken completely when marika and the erdtree rewrote the metaphysical system and arrested the passage of time, culminating in her brother radahn stopping the stars in their orbits.

nonetheless, aspects of their magic kept working, like the creation of “puppets” using starstuff to override people’s fates and firing blue lasers by channeling ones own will through it like a lens. the instrumental aspects kept working but the mystic ones broke, apart from the technique of developing so much crystalline intelligence that your brain literally crystalizes

instructed in these old ways by her tutor renna the snow witch, and close enough to the seat of power that the deficiencies of the erdtree’s world order were painfully obvious to her, she plotted with other malcontents rooted in the astrology-oriented culture of the eternal cities to wreck the world order by assassinating the god-prince godwyn and restore astrological fate and linear time to creation

disrupting the machinations of and ultimately slaying the fingers assigned to watch over her by the greater will means overcoming the new ersatz system of fate engineered by her mother

her ending involves taking the laws of fate and physics out of the reach of mankind, by physically moving the reconstituted elden ring off of the earth and into the heavens

[OneSecondBefore]

Damn, that is an extremely cool and well written account of that aspect of the game’s story! I picked up on like 20% of that. Thank you for putting that together!

[COINTELBRO]

don’t thank me, thank sciatica, dissociation, and the destruction of cultural life in rural america!

[Cerium]

Someone describe that new puzzle game as Blue Much Prince please.

I played that new arcade Aleste game and it is the first time I have ever enjoyed Aleste. Then saw it was arcade only and it might be the Last time Ive ever enjoyed Aleste (too lazy for teknoparrot)

[Broco]

Elden Ring lore sounds much cooler than I had assumed! I had the vague feeling it would probably disappoint, so I never paid any attention to item descriptions or tried to piece anything together.

Instead of making players piece everything together from tiny fragments, I wish From games had kept including characters like Kaathe in DkS1. He is an NPC who’s very hard to find, and who just straight-up tells you What’s Really Up In This Sick Twisted World in one big monologue.

Kaathe says all that in order to persuade you to choose the ending that’s aligned with his ideology: in other words, he could easily be lying. But because his version of the lore is the coolest, everybody assumes it must therefore be the truth.

In one way, that’s a little boring. Especially as Kaathe will be one of the last new pieces of content most DkS1 players see, it’s a bit like an old mystery novel where the villain confesses at the end. So I understand why they didn’t do it again.

But imagine if there was a game with multiple lore-dump NPCs, maybe one for each ending. All of them have very cool interpretations and they contradict each other.

[COINTELBRO]

VIDEOGAME LORE ERRATA

i remembered this in the bathtub as i chewed through the final hundred pages of an unrelated novel: marika wasn’t ranni’s mom, she (as radagon) was her dad, and rennala was her mom. only miquella, malenia, and possibly melina were the products of divine incest between marika’s male and female aspects

also it is probably a stretch to say that the greater will assigned the fingers to do anything or has any agency at all, it’s probably a concept like the dao rather than a guy from space with superpowers

[COINTELBRO]

@Broco

But imagine if there was a game with multiple lore-dump NPCs, maybe one for each ending. All of them have very cool interpretations and they contradict each other.

this would have been an improvement imo. one detail of the setting that i appreciate is that information in the setting is physical, comprised of runes, and most of the different endings feature a character that is gestating a “mending rune,” the setting’s cognate to an ideology, inside their body - a big rune made of accumulated smaller runes. it would have been fun to hear those worldviews articulated as clearly and explicitly as the serpents did in dark souls. you only really get that for the flame of frenzy in elden ring

[Kilroy]

77% complete with Armored Core 1 on the 3DS with 86% mission success. A few of these require timed route finding which is annoying and I will have to look up guides to do them, but I intend to 100% this.

[stylo]

@Broco

But imagine if there was a game with multiple lore-dump NPCs, maybe one for each ending. All of them have very cool interpretations and they contradict each other.

more or less Disco Elysium

[sleepysmiles]

Ranni fuckin owns i love her

my favorite Elden Ring lore is everything with Godwyn the Golden and the deathblight
there’s an undead god’s corpse in the well of the world and it’s slowly inexorably rotting everything

[Tulpa]

when grrm wrote the backstory, the greater will was certainly just a guy from space with superpowers

[parker]

I keep wishing for an elden ring ii to occupy my time with

[Father.Torque]

I thought it was more like a Lovecraftian elder god that sloughed off the first spores of the erdtree but didn’t consciously give two shits about what went on on planet Elden

[shnozlak]

My interpretation was…

The greater will was some divine space brain communicating through the fingers and feeding /maintaining power through the elden beast living in the erd tree. It initially shattered the great one / crucible and created humans and the life/death cycle destined death. When material time was halted ending destined death and the ring shattered it no longer had a specific vessel or vassal to keep it anchored to the lands between and so it left or dissipated. Without a greater will the elden beast is just a beast so its just eating souls non-stop, halting the fall of golden dew, helped along by the war of the shattering emptying out the land.

The hope is you will ascend to lord and thus re-establish the connection to the will and get things back on track.

[Sykel]

DUKE II

A step back from the first game. Everything is bigger, more detailed, and more explosive… the problem is that everything is so big that you can’t see what’s in front of you half the time so you’re constantly running into enemies. Also, enemies can shoot you from off-screen so that’s cool.

Eventually you learn to play the game by itching forward rather than running in gun blazing (especially since doing that can accidentally blow up health powerups) which isn’t very exciting, but it makes the game playable at least.

The first episode is the strongest, with the most variety and fun situations… it takes the action movie thing further with duke busting out of an alien prison, destroying radars so you can’t be tracked, having a level take place during an earthquake, and so on.

The second and third episodes are almost entirely filler. There are some highlights like when you get to fly the ship around, a conveyor belt maze that was at least DIFFERENT, and a neat level in the mountains where you keep going in and out of caves…

… but for the most part it was just retreading things the first episode did but worse, with lots of levels just being a soulless collection of platforms where they put keys and doors on opposite ends of the level. It gets dull and repetitive quickly, with no sense of the design or imagination that the first Duke had even if the later levels in that got a bit sloppier.

So basically, episodes 2 and 3 could have easily been crushed down into one episode.

Episode 4 is interesting because it’s all set on an alien ship, with the first level having you stowaway on it as it launches (pretty cool!). The levels after that are okay at best… there are some fun ideas and it has a vague sense of being on a spaceship, though some of the design gets a bit tedious especially the final level which ssuccckkssss shit.

All the boss fights are a joke too, but that was the case for the first game too.

Duke has more of a personality in this one, but only in the intro and ending cutscenes.

In conclusion, this tried to be bigger and better but instead it was just bigger. I don’t see myself playing this one ever again, but I’d run through the original Duke again.

[skatebee]

Finished the Haruka part of Yakuza 5, which is an idol simulator sandwiched in the middle of a Yakuza game.

Cannot get enough of this game’s cluttered office environments with 2012 tech rendered with luscious PS3 graphics.

I didn’t mind performing the same song over and over again because it made me sympathetic to the grind of being a performing artist. I did all the side content where you do various TV appearances, framed by dressing room sequences where you are ushered around by flustered, nameless producers who comment vaguely on how the game evaluated your performance. This stuff was fascinating as a presumably somewhat authentic portrayal of the Japanese media personality beat. You have to pick tactical responses to magazine interviewers to make sure you are cultivating the right public image, and in typical Yakuza substory style, the choices are cryptic in how they test your judgement or read on a situation.

And of course, there’s the highlight of the game (possibly of the whole series): the minigame where you perform a manzai comedy routine. You have to pick appropriate responses to the story your partner is telling and press the button to interrupt them at the correct time. In the remastered version of the game they added a timing indicator, but apparently the original PS3 version of the game simply assumes the player is familiar with the rhythms of manzai, which made it basically impossible for Western players, which owns.

I enjoyed Haruka’s relationships with other idols her age, some of whom are cutthroat in their competitiveness and others who she develops camaraderie with. My only reservation about the story is that Haruka is signed to a boutique agency where she is the only idol and she lives alone in her own city apartment. Admittedly this is tied to the chapter’s b-plot which unravels the intrigue of the agency’s mysterious financing and its ties to organised crime, but none of that interested me. I would have preferred to see Haruka navigate the hierarchy of a larger agency, and live in a dorm with a cast of other teen idols who you could check in with periodically, instead of spreading them out as isolated side stories.

But I really like the structure of Yakuza 5 compared to the later games: 5 smaller narratives with tightly-themed minigames as opposed to the open-world grab bag of parody bullshit (sujimon, kart racing, whatever the fuck). Plus I’m always way more invested in the story of these games at the start because they are pretty good at getting you to care about a new protagonist in a high-concept situation as quickly as possible before the plot inevitably loses its way in the gruel of crime melodrama, so it keeps things fresh when they hit the reset button on that every 10-15 hours. Excited to see where the story goes now that I’m playing as Shinada. Absolutely loved to see Sho Aikawa show up 40 hours into the game. They really buried that treat for the persevering audience.

I’m holding out hope that RGG’s Project Century will consist predominantly of traditional stage performance minigames amid the modernisation of commercial theatrehouses and the newfangled technology of broadcast radio.

[captainlove]

@skatebee

I would have preferred to see Haruka navigate the hierarchy of a larger agency, and live in a dorm with a cast of other teen idols who you could check in with periodically, instead of spreading them out as isolated side stories.

This will be the next Yakuza spin-off game but it’s Haruka helping run the agency

[loki]

i think rgg team could make a fascinating and engrossing rpg out of pretty much any fictional genre or real world lifestyle.

[Rudie]

@skatebee

I would have preferred to see Haruka navigate the hierarchy of a larger agency, and live in a dorm with a cast of other teen idols who you could check in with periodically, instead of spreading them out as isolated side stories.

I don’t think a idol company ever arranges housing/dorm to my knowledge. Even then it is a very precarious situation because they’ll kick your ass out the day after you “graduate.”

[skatebee]

That makes sense — Haruka having her own apartment seemed like an unrealistic expense to me. My only exposure to the idol industry is from its portrayal in the tv drama Amachan, which aired around the time Yakuza 5 came out and is also about a rural protagonist moving to the city to join an agency. In that show she lives in shared housing with the few other idols who have also moved from rural areas, and the justification is that they are members of a supergroup whose gimmick is that its made up of one member from each of Japan’s prefectures.

Yakuza 5 doesn’t acknowledge that precarity much. Would have been interesting to have colleages who get dropped from the agency, to have older ex-idols as mentor figures (actually they kind of do this with Park’s character), etc. Although it’s probably easier to explore it all in a 150-episode tv drama than in a single chapter of a videogame.