I still have a lot of love for how well they simplified and amplified archetypal light/dark good/evil myths into a player-centric world (I’ll always favor Demon’s Souls’ simplicity over Dark Souls’ D&D gods stable), but those have limited runway once you’ve set out your imagery.
They seem to have made consistently interesting choices in sketching out conceptual space away from the fantasy frame they started with. Certainly, it’s better than the very dire Red War and Dominus’ endless villain monologues (a habit Bungie fell into as Halo dragged on, too).
Oh, Marathon squad, @Sykel@shrug@daphaknee the megalomaniacal megacorp CEO in this new Destiny expansion wrote an intellectual dark web book called Competitive Immortality Through Primogeniture of Future-History Ontogeny/Rephylogeny (PFHOR) lol
Even better - he’s bitter decades later that his son’s more accessible recitation, Clovis Points, was more popular.
Thinkin' bout Destiny more
I love the new Fallen Kell villain, Eramis. Her M.O. contrasts with The Fanatic from Forsaken who also swears off Servitor-centric society (machines in the image of the Traveler), but is a one-note cleric leading Space ISIS. Like Space ISIS was an improvement on Space 9/11, Eramis has charisma, intelligence, and a righteousness that Destiny villains usually aren’t afforded.
They foreshadowed the Fallen diaspora fracturing and radicalizing in a lore piece a year and a half ago fashioned as a fake intelligence cable, then Eramis’s new House was introduced in the Zero Hour secret mission in a heist to steal a different dangerous technology.
The fun now is that they’ve ditched the ra-ra Light stuff and have begun to settle into the immutable fact that if you’re opposing life and death, energy vs. entropy, etc. etc. any video game player character let alone the player gestalt is unquestionably an instrument of death and destruction. It’s a beautiful complication of the fantasy mythology and centering of the actual player character. (No, my guardian doesn’t need to talk, they’re me.)
The Ghost said to me: You are a dead thing made by a dead power in the shape of the dead. All you will ever do is kill. You do not belong here. This is a place of life.
The Traveler is life, I said. You are a creature of Darkness. You seek to deceive me.
But I looked behind me, down the long slope where the blossoms tumbled in the warm wind and the great trees wept sap like blood or wine, and I felt doubt.
It appears Beyond Light is going to revisit my favorite card next.
The Fallen have always had so much potential and it’s good to see them starting to tear into it.
I think this was the motivating factor in Jason Jones’ table-flip of the Destiny narrative before launch. Now that I’ve worked with Senior Writers and Advanced Writers and Lead Writers and Former Television Writers…they don’t think prioritize meta-story any more than normal people do; they are only one sigma more likely to have watched Twin Peaks: The Return, and their main competence is in voice and narrative functionality.
Extra-textual values and the way Destiny launched with a very delicate sense of the player’s primacy, at the expense of NPCs (and in direct contrast to World of Warcraft) are not something you get unless there’s a strong voice pushing for it (and reader, while I value this more than anything,my own voice is far too thin in the crowd I find myself…)
If you’re getting it on PS4 I’m sad to say there isn’t cross-play (only cross-save) and the expansion licenses don’t get reciprocity across platforms.*
I know at least a couple of us would hop on during Japan time to do the F2P stuff (any playlist with matchmaking), but I probably won’t double-dip on the expansion for PS4. Xbox is a different story because every expansion is now on Game Pass.
If you do have a PC the requirements are modest by 2017 standards.
If you like what you’ve played solo, I highly recommend getting Forsaken on sale. Its campaign stands up without the universal salve of co-op.
(What I assume is) The first Famicom Fire Emblem is coming to Switch with English localization and quality-of-life updates. Seems to be a standalone release (with collector edition) rather than Switch Online NES game.
let me rephrase this. it feels deeply weird that fire emblem is (afaik?) the first NES game to get this kind of lavish rerelease luxury edition treatment, when almost any other NES game seems to have made a bigger impact. The replica game pak art piece sent me over the edge.
i guess the ‘rarity’ and unreleased in NA aspect of the game justifies it, but it just seems like a FE anthology collection would go over much better than this.
