Yeah, halfway through the thing I was like “the endings are gonna suck, aren’t they?” to my girlfriend. But if you’re a fan of Black Mirror you’re used to that by now. One ending I kinda liked a lot but my girlfriend hated it. And as I said before the ending I really wanted doesn’t exist, so…
yeah there are a lot of cool little things brought up at the beginning and even kind of near the middle that I thought were going to be followed up on later in the endings but they just kind of fall off? there are some elements that could build up to really interesting narratives but it seems like the endings just kind of forget about them and decide to go for entirely different things
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Woah, I did the same thing on, like, Wednesday night. Such a fast game to go through. I was really disturbed by the colonial overtones the game had. I mean, the developers had to know how messed up it was, right?
You might be surprised how few developers consider the messages communicated by their games.
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I had no idea helping people from Satan himself counts as colonialism.
i’ve been getting back into phantasy star online, seeing as 2019 will be the year of sega
been switching off between a FOnewearl and a RAcaseal
i’m on the ephinea server, for anyone interested https://ephinea.pioneer2.net/
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god sometimes I wish I was more surprised
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I guess it’s the wording around it and the ways that you “help.” I think of colonialism as being paternalistic and destructive; in Actraiser, you carry both qualities. You destroy biomes, limit biodiversity by making everything wheat, and generally help people spread across the entire land. Civilizations “advance” due to your direction.
The end is the most discomfiting. You see how people were destined to sacrifice themselves for your vision of a perfect world. Finally, the people no longer worship you because they are self-sufficient and your helper forlornly regrets this outcome. “Should we yearn for a time when people will no longer need to ask for our help?”
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Oh wow, that’s gross.
I always read the ending as a slightly mournful “we have become obsolete and it’s better this way but dang”
But
In the game Satan is the god of every nonchristian religion and, as the Christian god, you murder all the other “false gods” holding back “progress” which is extremely gross.
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yeah actraiser is too weirdly deeply right wing for it to be merely unexamined
if anything it’s interesting that it should be as heavy handed as it is; like people have said, it’s less propagandic than it is, like, mourning its own convictions. It’s the William F Buckley of SNES games.
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This is an extremely bad-faith argument that ignores much of what you’re doing, like murdering Egyptian, Hindu, and Norse deities in the name of God. This is a clear literalization of actual things that colonists have done
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I think Actraiser knows what it’s doing and I think it’s fairly judgmental of what you do. Quintet games are all about the relationship of progress (evolution, technology, society) to religion and the destructive side effects. Actraiser is the least formed but I think that ending is supposed to be read within the real world growth of Christianity and it stamping out pagan religions.
I don’t think Actraiser is right-wing because I don’t think it endorses your actions, as the end makes clear.
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it’s something colonists have done, but you have to divorce these actions from the context of the world to call it colonialist.
to call it oddly rightwing or pro-monotheistic, i have no qualms with. monotheistic religions (or scientific thought) wiping everything else out is inevitable.
I suppose I gotta play more Quintet!
This is some Manifest Destiny shit and I don’t like it!
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Not one bit!
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play Terranigma
everyone else play Terranigma too
right now
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I didn’t do any ship battles until the endgame and then just equipped some vanilla superb armor and weapon on all of the off characters and did the same.
Overall, the ship battle system doesn’t work. I didn’t engage in any for most of the game because I didn’t have to, I couldn’t tell apart weak and strong opponents, I didn’t know what it would do to my faction reputation, and I didn’t know how many ship upgrades and crew levels were expected. And then I found out like you that the cannon minigame is meaningless and you should just board without choosing the immediate “board” option.
So it’s by far the most broken part of the game. Good music too
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Standing athwart history yelling “shoot the hinges”