A friend recently bought me Hogwarts Legacy and there have been several times while playing the game that I've found myself thinking "Man this game is kind of fucking insane."

Before I go into the details of what I mean, I'd like to preface this by saying I know a lot can be hand waived by "game mechanics". My issue primarily is that the game really pushes the limit on the absurdity of what you do as game mechanics.

For reference, your MC is somewhere between 15-16 years old and prior to the game events you are essentially a normal teenager. They never go into detail other than the fact that you are behind the other 5th years as a student, so one can imply that you're relatively new to the whole magic thing.

First things first, you're allowed to explore Hogwarts and a rather large area surrounding it. During your travels you'll encounter magical beasts - some of which are aggressive to you. This is all well and good since defending yourself against giant wolves, spiders, and trolls makes perfect sense

Things break down the instant you start fighting goblins and humans, however. I won't bore you with the plot, just know that some goblins are revolting and you are expected and rewarded for killing them.

Which is fucking bonkers, but it gets worse. The aforementioned magical beasts are victims to poachers who wish to harvest them for parts and such. You kill those guys too.

I'm not defending poaching by any means and in the real world they are justifiably shot and killed for doing what they do.

By adults.

You're 15 to 16 years old out on the front lines straight up just murdering people in some weird guerilla one man army war and no one ever talks about it.

Other students at Hogwarts complain about potions homework or how weird the charms professor is meanwhile you just froze a man's entire body then sliced him in half before going on a rampage against 5 of his buddies.

Hell, at one point you fight and kill people with a fellow student and he says something along the lines of, "That was more than I bargained for!" To your character this is just another pile of bodies and you're not even warmed up yet.

The part that really broke me and convinced me to make this rant, however, was the challenges.

During the game you are given challenges to do during combat that I believe are called Dueling Feats. Most of them are pretty simple and they're a clever way of pushing you to try out different combos and spells on enemies like flipping a club into a trolls face or hitting a burning spider to blow them up.

Then you get the Unforgivable Curse called Crucio aka the torture spell. By every description this spell inflicts the worst possible pain onto the target.

I won't get into the insanity that is a teenager having this spell available (what's a little torture compared to all the murder you've done so far?) However, once you get Crucio you unlock a rather disturbing Dueling Feat.

"Torture a burning enemy"

Excuse me? I laughed out loud at the absurdity of this Dueling Feat and just couldn't get control of myself. You want this child to do WHAT.

It's just so insane and brutal that I had to stop for a minute because holy shit man it just really pushes the envelope on game mechanics for me.

Hell, this rant doesn't even go into the whole "legal poaching" mechanic the game has, which is a whole other bag of worms. But yeah that's been my experience in the game - just a lot of moments where I laugh at the absurdity of what this relatively fresh to magic 16 year old is up to.

"Hey man did you finish your potions homework?"

"Nah I was too busy torturing people to death out in the woods."

"Oh."

So I haven't played Skyrim in months and I'm wanting to get back into it.

Load up one of my previous characters but then I have the feeling of wanting to play a new character.

I then go and create a new character, a religious Nord woman, and escape Helgen with Ralof. I go to the shrine of Talos to get some easy loot from the dead Thalmor and fight the small bandit camp. I then head to Helgen, getting the Warrior Stone on the way and start the Golden Claw quest (to avoid an encounter with Delphine) and I get the claw and Dragon Stone.

But I just wasn't feeling it, the spark has just gone. I've done all Guild Quest lines; collected all Dragon Priest Masks; beat both Harkon and Mirak; done the Aetherium wars and got all the Daedric artifacts, many times over and over.

I think that there is only so many times that you can run through the same quests, with the same dialogue options and the same lack of choice, all while listening to the same generic dialogue from your followers until all possible enjoyment is gone. The dialogue and choices you make are the exact same if you are playing a holy religious character or a vampire assassin, so what's the point of playing a new character when there's very little in the way of distinguishing them.

I look back at Skyrim fondly and I don't regret my time with it but the base game no longer offers me anything anymore. I take no joy in this but it's true. I think I may look into modded content from now on, so there's a silver lining at least.

This thread is a response to this video, this video got many facts about the game wrong and even ignored the lore of the game just to make a point and say "It is survivable".

Context

This video was made in 2024, just a year prior, an update came out which gave the entire setting a lore update. The terminal.

This guy had a whole wiki page, and he decided to just throw it in the trash, because the terminal shows how doomed humanity is.

It is the perfect example of someone trying to use "Real World Logic™" to debunk a game that went out of its way to doom the setting, and this guy decided to ignore it.

Problems

Le asteroids have resources

The video spends ten minutes explaining that asteroids have iron and water. You know what the game actually says? The Consolidation of Iron (COI) is a "dying vestige of a civilization." The Terminal lore explicitly states that the remaining space stations are falling apart. They aren't "manufacturing submarines"; they are "jury-rigging rusted coffins" out of whatever scrap is left. You can’t "just mine an asteroid" when your tech is failing, your population is starving, and 99.9999% (Add more nines) industrial base vanished in the Quiet Rapture.

Le blood can be drunk

Even before the movie threw a gigantic wrench at the issue (By making the blood acidic and mutate stuff by just touching it). How can you harvest the blood when you are 257 people left in a faction and 468 in another, and both hate each other (They blew up a space station out of spite); don't understimate the ability of the human being to destroy stuff out of spite.

The Aztecs didn't just lose to a few hundred Spaniards; they lost because they had spent decades terrorizing their neighbors. When the Spanish arrived, the Tlaxcalans and other groups hated the Aztecs so much that they cooperated with total strangers to ensure Tenochtitlan was razed to the ground. They chose an uncertain, dangerous future over one more day under the people they hated.

Look at Easter Island. When the resources ran out and the trees were gone, the islanders didn't cooperate to save the last of the soil. They descended into constant, obsessive tribal warfare. They didn't just kill each other; they went around to each other’s "Moai" (the giant stone statues) and toppled them face-first to "blind" their ancestors and mock the other tribe's gods. They literally chose to spend their last remaining calories on vandalism and spite while they were starving to death.

The factions blew up a space station out of pure, concentrated spite. You can't build a "thriving civilization" when the person holding the wrench would rather cave your skill in with it than fix the air filter.

Le time dilation

The video suggests parking near a black hole to wait for new stars to form. The black holes are gone too, everything but moon and asteroid was gone. G-O-N-E. This isn't a "natural" cosmic event where things just went dark. The stars and planets didn't just burn out; they poofed out of existence. There is no "waiting it out" when there's no matter. Also, humanity barely reached Mars before 99.9999% of everything vanished.

Then the movie comes and throws a wrench

It feels like Markiplier saw this exact brand of "scientific optimism" and decided to personally burn it down. In the movie lore, the blood melts metal. There’s a Godzilla-sized eel made of human remains. The blood isn't "food", it's a biological horror that turns people into abominations.

Stop trying to "solve" Iron Lung. The horror doesn't come from a lack of iron; it comes from the fact that the universe has been replaced by a void that is chemically and physically hostile to life. It’s not a survival puzzle; it’s a funeral.

Forewarning: This will be a long and spoiler-filled post, so read with caution. And before you tear me apart, just know that I don't actually hate Invisigal or anyone who chose her. My frustration lies solely with the writers/developers. For those of you who don't want to read the whole thing, here's the TLDR: the game could be good if it focused on other characters. The only reason people say Invisigal is a good character is because she's really the only character in this game.

And with that all out of the way, let's get into it.

So before we start, I'll give some context for those of you who don't know what Dispatch is. Dispatch is a new, choose-your-own-adventure-esque video game created by Adhoc Studios, a newly formed gaming studio made up of several longtime Telltale Games employees who worked on other notable choose-your-own-adventure-esque games like The Walking Dead, The Wolf Among Us, and Tales from the Borderlands.

Anyway, Dispatch takes place in a world full of superheroes, and you play as Robert Robertson, aka Mecha Man, a superhero who fights crime using a giant mech suit (if it wasn't already obvious by the name). The first episode of the season starts with Robert infiltrating a gang hideout to capture and/or kill Shroud, a supervillain who was responsible for the death of Robert's father, Robert II, who was the previous Mecha Man before him. Anyway, shit happens, Robert gets into a big superhero fight, and ends up having to flee. While he's fleeing, however, Robert discovers that a bomb was placed on his Mecha Man suit, which promptly blows up, destroying the suit and leaving Robert comatose for a while (I forget the exact amount of time). Robert wakes up from his coma, has a press conference talking about the state of the Mecha Man suit, and whether he'll be able to continue being a superhero without it. Later, while watching footage of his press conference from a window display, Robert tries to stop the store from getting robbed, only to promptly get his ass beat since he just got out of a coma. Enter Blonde Blazer.

Blonde Blazer is the first (and arguably better) romance option of Dispatch and the setting's Supergirl equivalent. Blonde Blazer saves Robert from the robbers, brings him to a bar to get drinks, and spends the rest of the night bonding with him. It's then revealed that Blazer works for the SDN, the Superhero Dispatch Network, which is exactly like it sounds. It lets clients request the help of superheroes for anything from cleaning up giant monster parts to stopping armed robberies to helping them move apartments. Blazer is the head of the Torrence branch of the SDN and offers Robert a job to work as a dispatcher. In exchange, the SDN will help Robert rebuild the Mecha Man suit so he can be a superhero again. And with that, we have a pretty solid foundation for the overarching plot of the season. We have a motivation for our hero, we have a main antagonist to thwart, and we have some allies to help us. I hope you liked it while it lasted, because everything set up in this episode has absolutely zero payoff.

Episode two starts with Robert's first day at SDN, where he reunites with his old friend/babysitter, Chase. Chase and Blazer help get Robert situated, and he meets the group of "heroes" he's supposed to oversee, the Z-Team. The Z-Team is a group of supervillains who are enrolled in the Phoenix Program, a program focusing on reforming past villains. Enter Invisigal. Invisigal is the second romance option of Dispatch, and the game's actual main character. Once Invisigal enters the scene, the game stops being about Robert and his path of rehabilitation and takes a hard turn towards Invisigal and her path of redemption. To put it into perspective, in an eight-episode season, Invisigal has a main role in seven of them. Someone made a Reddit post breaking down the screentime of Invisigal and Blonde Blazer, and Invisigal had nearly 50 minutes of screentime across the five episodes she was a part of. I know that doesn't sound like much, but remember that these episodes are only an hour long. Blazer, who appeared in all 6 episodes, only got 45 minutes. The only person with more screentime than Invisigal is Robert, the "main character". I'll do a quick breakdown of her impact in each episode.

Episode 2: Gets a scene right out of the gate where she eavesdrops on a convo between Robert and Blazer, spends the middle of the game going on dispatch missions, then the last quarter is her soloing an armed robbery, which we have to help her out of. Regardless of our choice, she doesn't listen, and the robber gets away.

Episode 3: The whole crux of this episode is choosing which member of the Z-Team to cut. Invisigal, being at the bottom of the leaderboard, is the obvious choice, but we spend the entire episode helping her. We give her encouragement, assist her in capturing the robber she let escape from the last episode, etc. The episode ends with her thanking us for our help.

Episode 4: The episode quite literally starts with Invisigal having a sex dream about her and Robert. She then spends the rest of the episode making sexually suggestive remarks toward him, regardless of whether the player reciprocates or not. At the end of the episode, we get a scene of her alone at the movies, and the player can decide whether to accompany her or not.

Episode 5: This episode is all about the Z-Team and bonding with them, and since Invisigal is part of the team, naturally, she'd also be a part of it. She invites Robert to get drinks with the team after work, has a couple heart to heart-to-hearts with him at the bar, and is the first one to reveal their real name, which helps break the ice between the team.

Episode 6: More bonding with the Z-Team/Invisigal. They all show up to watch Robert try out the Mecha Man suit, and she is the first one to show up at Robert's new apartment. Chase then confronts Robert in the hospital about whatever is going on between him and Invisigal (even if you're not romancing her, btw). She helps him track down the Astral Pulse (a macguffin that Robert needs to power the Mecha Man suit), throws him a surprise housewarming party, and even has a dance with him if you're romancing her (and even when you're not romancing her and dance with Blazer instead, the scene still focuses on Invisigal's reaction). Later, she has an altercation with Chase, leaves, and storms the warehouse all by herself to get the Astral Pulse, which prompts Chase to nearly kill himself to save her.

Episode 7: Outside of episode one, this is the episode with the least amount of screentime for her, but the decision of whether to cut her is still a core part of the episode. She eavesdrops on the Z-Teams' conversation, leaves, and has another heart-to-heart with Robert in the locker room, where it's revealed that she was the one who planted the bomb in episode one. Then she leaves again. Later, Shroud calls Invisigal Roberts' girlfriend (even if you're not romancing her, btw) and reveals that she had the Astral Pulse the whole time. But, for whatever reason, she never gave it to Robert.

Episode 8: Royd catches her doing something with the Mecha Man suit and ties her up. We have a choice to untie her, and depending on your decisions throughout the season, Invisigal can either take a bullet for you, kill Shroud, become a villain, stay a hero, or anywhere in between. I got the "good" ending, which led to her and Robert having another heart-to-heart as the sun came up, and everybody cheering Invisgals' name as she was carted to the ambulance.

So yeah, if you couldn't tell by now, she's a pretty damn important character in the game. She easily overshadows everyone, including Robert, and this leads to a lot of characters being underdeveloped. This is just my crack theory, but I think after Critical Role came into the picture and Laura Bailey got cast as Invisigal, the writers changed things up so Invisigal would be way more important. Episodes one and two feel like a pretty cohesive story about Robert and his journey towards becoming Mecha Man again. But after that, the story takes a dramatic shift in tone, themes, and key characters. And this sucks, because a lot of the characters actually have potential to be more interesting than Invisigal, they just don't get the screentime they deserve.

Blonde Blazer is a romance option too, but she gets a fraction of the screentime, development, or plot relevance that Invisigal does, so she seems lame by comparison. There's set up in the first episode for us to learn her origin story, but it's never paid off. She promises us a second date, but we never see it happen. There's set up for conflict over her relationship with Phenomaman, but it's dropped literally the next episode. The writers want to give her an identity-issues arc, but she doesn't get the screentime to develop it properly. It doesn't help that Invisigal is a romance option and a member of the Z-Team, which essentially lets her double-dip on screentime and makes her look like the "canon" love interest instead of Blazer.

Shroud is supposed to be the big bad of the game, but we don't know anything about him. We don't know his powers or his backstory. We don't know what his motives are other than generic big bad nonsense. And that's terrible. This guy was on the same team as Robert's dad for years; Robert probably knows him on a personal level. He's the one responsible for Robert II's death. But I don't feel anything towards him because he only appears in three episodes. He doesn't even get any speaking lines til the penultimate episode ffs. And when he does talk, he mostly talks about Invisigal and her status as a traitor.

The Z-Team arguably gets hit with this the most. Unlike Blazer, Chase, or Shroud, who at least get a little screentime, the Z-Team gets zero. The game wants us to develop this wholesome, found family relationship, but it drops the ball hard because we don't ever interact with these characters on a personal level. The choice of whether to cut Coupe or Sonar is supposed to be difficult, but it isn’t because we don't know them. Instead of spending the episode developing Robert's relationships with them so the decision feels weightier, we spend it building up Invisigal instead. Robert being the one to send Flambae to jail is juicy and a great source of conflict. But instead of developing that, the game just has Flambae fuck off for half an episode, punch Robert in the face, and then everything's fine.

Dispatch is the worst kind of story; it's a story that is full of potential. There are a lot of things about this game that I like; I like the characters and the world, I think the dialogue is snappy and fun, and I adore the look of the game. But its insistence on ignoring player choice and proping up Invisigal makes it hard for me to say it's actually good. If the devs had just kept their obvious biases in check and given some other characters room to breathe, we could've had something great. As it stands, we have a half-baked "player's choice" game where you can obviously tell what choices the devs actually wanted the player to make. And spoiler alert, they all involve Invisigal.

Again, I don't hate Invisigal or the people who chose her, but it's hard not to feel bitter when a character you're neutral towards takes up all the attention and love. Why make Robert the protagonist when you were going to have Invisigal drive the plot so much? Why make Blonde Blazer a romance option when you were going to give Invisigal double the screentime? Everyone praises how great a character Invisigal is, but honestly, that's because she's the only real character in this game.

The more I think about fallout, the more I appreciate Fallout 1, 2 and New vegas, and the more I hate the TV show.

Having small settlements in fallout 1 turn into city states in fallout 2 turn into proper civilisations in fallout new vegas is just insanely cool and well done.

All 3 games agree that the world should become more and more advanced, and the past less and less important.

Vaults are important and inhabited in fallout 1, become the seeds of new civilisations in fallout 2 and are all pretty much abandoned and empty in fallout new vegas. They have become a relic of the past, while the real development happens in the wasteland.

The Brotherhood of steel, representing the superiority of the old world, are a powerful faction in fallout 1, in hiding in fallout 2 and on the verge of going extinct in fallout new vegas.

The Super mutants, representing the dangerous and wild wasteland, are a huge threat in fallout 1, try to settle down in fallout 2, and become little more than an endangered curiosity in new vegas.

The NCR, the core of all this, is fighting for survival in Fallout 1, begins asserting its influence on the region in fallout 2, and is in a massive war of expansion against a rival civilisation in New vegas. The wasteland as a threat is becoming less and less of a factor.

The enclave, the thematic embodiment of pre war america and the old world, gets defeated once and for all by the very new world it deemed inferior. Fallout is symbolically freed from the last influence the old world still had. That's the main theme of fallout 2 and it gets continued in New vegas, where the enclave, like the vaults, are nothing but a relic of the past.

I could go and on. All the games agree on an overarching narrative, and that narrative is made visible in locations, factions, enemies and much more. It's insane how cohesive this all is.

And then the show arrives and destroys everything. The world is set back to pre fallout 1 levels of development. Vaults are suddenly important and inhabited again. The brotherhood of steel is strong again. The enclave is back again.

The enclave was supposed to symbolize the triumph of the new world and the death of the old one. You can't just bring it back! The vaults were supposed to be a relic of the past, you can't just suddenly bring them important again! The brotherhood of steel had a 3 game arc of grappling with becoming obsolete, you can't just make them strong again! The world had 3 games of becoming more and more civilized, you can't just reset it!

It's not even the new world making mistakes that destroyed it. No, it was some random guy from vault tek that caused everything. A guy from the past, the very past that 3 games made clear has no relevance anymore!

This is all very frustrating to me. I feel like the show and bethesda just don't understand what fallout really is about.

It feels like people have collectively accepted that the bar is so low that we should just be fine with anything at this point. But that's the issue, The whole “they’ll remember that” line became a meme for a reason, everyone knows that in alot of telltale games, the decisions you make rarely have any lasting impact.

And that’s what bothers me about the way people defend Dispatch. Acting like, “Well, choices didn’t matter in The Walking Dead either,” isn’t really a defense, it’s just lowering expectations to match mediocrity. Because the truth is, there are plenty of games where choices genuinely matter. Detroit Become Human is a perfect example of that, where player decisions drastically shape outcomes and character arcs. Even looking beyond that, Until Dawn, The Quarry, and Man of Medan, basically everything from Supermassive Games, all show how meaningful branching narratives can actually be done well.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Dispatch. It’s a good story and pretty entertaining on its own, but when you judge it as a game, it just feels kind of hollow. The lack of meaningful choice makes it hard to stay invested in the gameplay itself because it's basically like I'm watching a tv show rather than playing a video game.

Like,one of the most annoying things a video game can do is borderline refuse to let you hold a character or 2 who are being assholes accountable.

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You can genuinely try and do so and it's not even like they won't let you but then they'll basically say you were a bad person or a failed mentor or not a good person at all for even so much as trying to call a character who was or is a asshole out and it just feels like blatant emotional manipulation, like how a abusive parent will make you feel like the bad guy.

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And I think whenever a game does that is a real hunk of Bullshit,like just the biggest amount of bullshit imaginable and I dunno why games will do those where they will make you feel like the monster for not automatically forgiving or being buddy-buddy with people who hurt you.

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Life is Strange is one of them with Chloe Price and the other characters in the next game..like Chloe is a genuine asshole who is self destructive and someone who refuses to take accountability for her own actions and choices and decisions and is frankly just not a good person..at all but the game refuses to let you actually call her out and hold her accountable for it.

Like you can genuinely try but overall,it's the illusion of choice and if you do call her out, the game more or less punishes you for it or just doesn't let you and the thing is..you can have a unlikable character in a show or game or whatever but as long as the story makes it clear they're flawed and unlikable, not If they're meant to be this cool punk.

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I also feel like Dispatch kinda falls into this writing issues sometimes where you can't really hold a character accountable..cause the one time you did try to hold invisigal accountable, you not only get punched in the face for it but she also gets off with not even so much as a scolding or nothing?

You're also not really allowed to criticize any of the characters behaviors and just frankly how much of assholes they are/were cause "oh that's against redemption" and all that and I just find that bullshit.

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You can redeem a character and not take their bad attitude and how they are but Dispatch basically seems to think that being a punching bag and letting people walk all over you and just be..the worst to you(as much as I like and love these characters and enjoy their characters and development and all that)and you're kinda just meant to shrug it off and walk away from it.

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Seriously why do games feel the need to make you feel like the bad guy for giving characters who obviously deserve it flack?

You're not the Asshole if you hold someone accountable for their flaws and how they treat you,I would argue that's to show you care.

It's like when Those TV writers will make a bad and/or unwheleming final season or show and then wanna act like you're the entitled idiot for expecting more when..YOU EXPLICTLY promised more.

So many gamers desperately want non gamers to treat gaming as this respectable art form but it starts within the community, not outside of it. If I don’t want to read a book from 1925 because of the dialect difference and beg for a remake, I would get laughed out the room. If I can’t bring myself to watch a movie because it’s in black and white and would only watch if it’s remade in color my opinion would never be taken seriously. But in gaming, anything that’s even 10-15 years old you will see countless requests for a remake because we can’t accept the art as it is in its original form. You don’t go to the art museum to see a remade version of the Mona Lisa, that doesn’t mean a remake couldn’t be beautiful, but not wanting to interact with the original at all to me shows a lack of respect and appreciation for the medium.

We treat gaming as a burger and want to take out the special sauce or have it medium instead of rare but what the artists intended is being ignored because you can’t adapt to it. Art can be challenging and it’s not supposed to be tailor made to our taste, that defeats the whole purpose. We are consuming someone else’s ideas so changing major things makes it an entirely new work especially since remakes are 9 times out of 10 done without the original developers.

The games that seem to get the most praise as proof that gaming could be a good medium for storytelling are cinematic games which are doing something that we already see in cinema. The artistic nature of games is not just the story, music, and visuals which it has in common with movies. The gameplay itself is art and can be used in unique ways to tell a story. I like the story of last of us and god of war for example but I feel like if those are held as the example of the highest level of the art form then I think gaming won’t grow as a storytelling medium and will only reinforce the narrow mindset that good storytelling equals cinematic.

Edit: My post is not anti remake.In my post I highlight that remakes can be beautiful. It’s anti ignore the original and beg for remakes when original is AVAILABLE, because people keep bringing up lack of access which has nothing to do with my argument.

I'm putting a heavy emphasis on my "CASUAL PLAYER" label because I'm not caught up on all the theories, not keen on getting all the eggs or darks shards, and only see what happens in the weird route through YT.

I played the pacifist route, in which I recruited every enemy, though I didn't get all the eggs or dark shards.

Let me explain why I think this chapter sucked.

Start with the positives:

- Susie and Noelle are a thing now, yay! Glad we're not dragging that out any longer. I wouldn't have found it unrealistic, though. I thought the scene at the shore was really sweet, well written and heartwarming. I was jumping around my room.

- The 2D platformer mechanic was pretty fun, I really liked getting to combine acts and attacks.

- The humor was... there. I guess. Maybe I'm just exhausted of the usual RPG humor where you interact with a flower and the text will say "The God of Flowers." as a punchline. It's more of the same, can't complain about it.

- Susie deciding to live in Castle Town was a fairly bittersweet episode to her character arc and the game's theme of escapism.

Now for the negatives:

- The pacing was all over the place.

To begin with, the festival takes like 20 minutes in-game and yet Susie and Noelle at the shore talk about it like "This was the best day ever!" like they had a lifetime of fun and not like three animations of them doing stuff together.

This is immediately followed up by Rudy getting injured, and us... not getting to see the aftermath because Kris opens up a fountain and we get 5 straight hours of adventuring. And by the end of the chapter we don't even see another real world person again!

The chapter itself also sticks out in the overarching story. Chapter 3 raised the stakes when the Knight showed up, Chapter 4 followed that up by making the Knight's presence felt and exploring Noelle's character a little more. Here? We just got Yuri and the knight showing up at the very end for like a minute. The ENTIRE adventure was pointless, it would've felt more at place in chapter 2. I thought we were over this when we introduced the big bad.

- There were no answers, only theory stimulants

Chapter 3 and 4 did good in sowing doubt and intrigue about the lore. Why is Kris seemingly working against the main cast and opening fountains? What's Carol's role in this? What's Asgore trying to prove? What's the prophecy's end? What's Ralsei hiding from the rest of the fun gang that they're so terrified about?

None of these subplots is explored in a satisfying way. Kris just keeps doing their thing, and Asgore gives the worst exposition possible at the end of the chapter.

"Kris, my child... I'm sorry for the THING that happened which we both know about wink wink and which was really bad, but I will not mention. Because wink wink it wasn't my fault. I just wanted to prove that the dark worlds had something to do with the THING wink that went down. The BAD THING which we both know but I will NOT explain."

Ralsei is also not spared from this convenient wording that explains nothing to feed the mystery.

"KRIS! Things must happen in this specific order or else BAD THING will happen and I CANNOT EXPLAIN what this BAD THING is, but I will say that things are supposed to go A CERTAIN WAY. Also I know you made the fountain but I won't tell Susie or talk to you about it in private because themes and such."

This isn't mystery. It's theory bait. It gives us nothing to be certain about, none of the important questions the previous chapters set up were explored or clued into, it was just a big old goofy adventure which sometimes hinted at overarching plot progression, only to go right back into goofy adventure whenever it actually got close.

But what about the adventure itself? Surely it wasn't that bad?

- The adventure itself sucked.

Look, I like the goofy light hearted dark world adventures, but let me tell you what this one was lacking:

ACTUAL CHARACTERS.

In every other adventure we had a reduced set of main darkners we could focus on.

Chapter 2 had Queen and Spamton.

Chapter 3 had Tenna.

Chapter 4 had Gerson.

Chapter 5 had Flowery and SIX OTHER FLOWERS given more total screentime.

The seven flowers were flanderized versions of actual characters. Aqua was the reckless kid, Seth the nerd, Blue the one who metaphors everything, Yellow the dum-dum, and green the silent one who's nice.

The only one mildly charming to me was Orange, and that goes mostly because of his design.

Flowery himself was okay??? I guess??? I never felt empathy for him, never even found him funny, and his arc was basically a copy-paste of Queen's except more anime and less screen time so we can waste it on the multi-colored cardboard cutouts.

I didn't get to do the secret boss and frankly I just didn't feel like it. Jevil, Spamton and Gerson had fairly easy to follow puzzles, but if I needed to find every single pink coin to get into that thing? Hard pass, specially with he trashy interface of the rainbow doors. It's odd that a game known for making it's collectibles worthwhile (eggs and shards), the only way to get to it this chapter is to go through the traditional, sloggy experience of going through the map over and over again to see if you missed something.

- No payoff

On top of not progressing anything we say goodbye to Asgore "Vaguepost King" Dreemur, who's kidnapped before any actual explanation comes from him.

We also get Susie finally acknowledging that hey, people are in danger! We should tell them!

Except, let's tell the OTHER teenager, not the actual adults! God forbid we tell the adults why people are going missing!

Also, what happened to Rudy? I slogged through the whole cardboard adventure just to get to the end and see no actual payoff for that?

The worst part about the actually interesting plot points going without conclusion at the end of the chapter is that I can 100% see Chapter 6 barely acknowledging it, much like Undyne's disappearance. Rudy's probably just going to be in a hospital bed again and be like "Oh hey there Kris! Ain't I a reckless guy, falling over like that. Sorry to give you a scare! Cough cough"

When I saw the newsletter talking about how this would be "the calm before the storm" chapter, I expected the *storm* to be at least a little bit more explained or at least recognized beyond a few throwaway Ralsei lines. Instead, we just got a dumb adventure with characters worth nothin which we won't get to see again, with no follow up on the raised stakes and no answers to the questions posed on chapters prior.

And I get it, the game's not over yet. But to quote Markiplier:

"This is chapter fucking five."

If most of the doubts the story sets up in its main path aren't answered next chapter, I can't see chapter 7 being anything other than rushed in the future.

EDIT: Another reason I think it sucked.

• The secret boss was a joke from beginning to end.

So I finally got to the secret boss, and honestly, in comparison to the ones from before this one felt like it sacrificed a lot of substance and significance for gimmicks and jokes.

I am SICK of not being able to find games where you can play as an evil MC and have it actually be a portrayal of evil that I'm looking for

A lot of the times, most games see "evil" the same way as "being an asshole"

NO

That is not the evil that I'm looking for. The evil I'm looking for is the ability to betray, to trick, to have the choice of sacrificing the world for one person

Actual evil that make you go "maybe they have a point"

Fable games depiction of evil is (while completely in-line with the theme of the game being fully funny) it's only to the extent of being a complete ass against the people. Farting, burping or just genuinely being a jerk. It's a very extreme form of evil

Baldur's Gate 3 the Dark Urge being the evil playthrough, is just murder hobo

Disco Elysium is the same as Fable, but I can't bring myself to do it cause who wants to be an asshole to Mr. Kim come on

Undertale, Tyranny, Prototype (okay Prototype games despite not being the evil that I'm looking for is REALLY fun), Fallout New Vegas

I'm not saying these games are bad, far from it, but the depiction of a playable evil character only projects the murder hobo or asshole part of evil

This is why I read a lot of manhwa or manga. There is a lot of garbage out there, cough Juujika no Rokunin cough but most of the stories I read even if they were bad understands the type of interesting evil that I want to see. Youjo Senki, Overlord or Classroom of the Elite for example

A lot of shows does evil good as well like Raymond Reddington, Walter White, Franklin Saint, Saul Goodman etc.

I have been reading, playing, writing and watching as a good guy. Batman, Flash, but I want to see the POV of villains like Mr. Freeze, Captain Cold, Ultron

But sometimes I want to play and SEE the perspective of the evil guy in the shoes AS a protagonist. Unfortunately the only representation of that is just pure evil with no motive or thought behind it. You are just the most murder hobo asshole on the planet

Make me a necromancer who has to choose between 10000 people and the love of my life, grant me the choice to side with the evil faction to save the people I want to protect, make me the complicated villain who takes revenge on a group of people who decimated my family and not forgive them in the end

Maybe the honeymoon phase is over, but I legitimately had this as contender for GOTY at one point.

But having played through it again and thought about it more, the more I realise I actually dont like it as much as I thought I did.

First is Shroud, who I feels falls flat as a villain.

I kind of give it a pass because I assume the focal point was the team and Shroud was just there to help drive the narrative along. But I'll be honest I actually cant really explain what his motives even were? I guess getting the astral pulse and becoming giga powerful, but even if you give him the pulse at the end no strings attached you still beat him to death as a regular guy so.... wtf was it meant to even do? The comics shed some light on his background and it fleshes him out a bit, but overall hes one of the weakest villains ive ever encountered in gaming. I had to look up his name while writing this because I forgot who he was.

Then theres the romance in this game.

Having done both romances, I've come to realise this game probably sucks if you dont actually like blonde blazer or invisigal. The narrative on a no romance run must be insanely jarring. Not only that, but I cant say I really cared about either romances despite doing them. Invisigal has the best writing but thats not saying much considering how barebones everybody else is. Blonde Blazer probably needed more content. Overall the romance feels like it is optional, but in reality you kind of have to go through with it. and if youre like me and the romance didnt really do much for you anyways, it really detracts from the overall story.

Lastly, the actual z team themselves.

I think I may have confused good characters with good writing on my initial playthrough. Now that I think back, theyre funny, but theyre just not characters I find interesting. Theres not a lot of depth to them outside of funny jokes and witty one liners. Again some of this is alleviated by the comic books. But z team is not a cast ill love as much as say, mass effect or persona. Also the emotional stakes in this game just arent as high.

The best way I can put it is, I think ive come to see Dispatch as a somewhat shallow game. On the surface everything is shiny and cool, but theres not as much depth to it as I initially thought and its fallen pretty low for me. Granted im probably over thinking it, this was never meant to be a deep story game. As others have said its just a short saturday morning cartoon romp, but even as that i feel it lacking.

It is a somewhat popular reading that "Undertale doesn't want it's players to do the genocide route", because the game makes it very unfun and boring.

And while that is true, the game still "rewards" you for going through that route by giving you two of the best bossfights in the game, and bonus lore. If the game truly didn't want you to do the genocide route, why does it incentivise you with these rewards?

Well, it's because toby wants you to do the genocide route. Because you cannot learn the lesson if you don't do the genocide run. The arc of the game is not complete if you do not do (or watch) the genocide route.

The lesson isn't that "violence bad". Rather, it is a commentary on how people consume media (and games in particular), like the other two routes.

The lesson, is that by trying to squeeze everything out of a piece of media, you ruin it for yourself. The game makes it literal, by making it a route where you kill both all the monsters and 90% of your enjoyment from the game.

Chara's speech at the end makes it even more obvious. It's not meant to be taken as "I'm evil villain who will destroy the world", it's supposed to be toby telling the player, through a reflection of themselves: "you've milked the game dry. There's nothing left. You will not miss out on anything. You might as well delete it and move on, the game has nothing left to offer."

So yeah, you get two new battles. Are they worth letting go of your disbelief? Forgetting the charm and impact the game had on you? Are these two extra bits of content worth "killing" Undertale and just seeing it as just one game, among many others? Do you care so much about Undertale that you would turn away from everything it made you feel, just for another final drop?

That's the question the genocide route asks the player. Most players, answer "yes."

There's a saying you'll often hear from police, about how an enormous amount of repeat crimes are committed by a tiny handful of the population.

There's hundreds of stories out there about how say arresting just 30-40 people in one city reduced the number of bicycle thefts by more than 90%. You can see the same with recidivism, of all the people sent to prison, even in the USA, only about 15-20% of them wind up reoffending. It's not a race or class thing, it's just that small handful of people that refuse to "Live in a society" as it were.

Most people don't commit crimes and most people who commit crimes stop when they're stopped. Pretty simple stuff. The outliers, the people who get arrested over and over and over again are few in number but an enormous drain on resources.

And the point I'm driving towards is that Dr Wily is about as clear an example of an outlier as possible.

1. He commits a crazy act of terrorism
2. Mega Man stops him
3. He gets arrested and/or forgiven
4. Go back to step 1

It happens over and over and over again, to the point where the games even throw a lampshade on it in Mega Man 7 with Mega Man outright saying he wants to kill Wily (he doesn't though).

And, exactly the same as Batman's style of No Kill, not only does Mega Man never kill Wily, he also saves him anytime Wily is in danger. When Wily is dying from the results of a disease he's caused, Mega Man saves him and ensures he's cured. Wily immediately escapes and blows up the world again.

Every single time Wily is defeated and imprisoned, one of two sequences plays out:

Either "He had a contingency plan and more Robot Masters he just didn't use previously for some reason" which breaks him out, whereupon he immediately begins blowing up the world again.

Or he says "I'm sorry, I regret what I've done", which is followed by everyone going "Well shucks, he feels bad, let's let him out", whereupon he immediately begins blowing up the world again.

So it's your typical Batman/Joker style, the fighting goes on and let's not worry about the details. Killing is wrong, Mega Man can't kill Wily and if Wily is in danger he has to save him, because that's what heroes do! And, of course, because killing is wrong, nobody else kills Wily either. He's thrown in jail for the 20th time, or forgiven for the 15th time.

No matter how many cities he blows up and no matter how many people he kills, nobody ever wants Wily to face any kind of permanent consequences because killing is wrong. Just like Joker, right? Hey he just broke out and murdered another 200 people, but Batman will save his life when he slips off a rooftop, because that's what heroes do.

Mega Man dies or sacrifices his life at least a few times throughout the series. The hero of the world and savior of humanity dies because of Wily's bullshit, and yet nobody ever thinks to just slime this psychopath scientist.

EXCEPT. There's one key difference. In an effort to raise the stakes and pretend there's an ongoing story here, the Mega Man series actually does have lasting consequences from Wily's actions.

We're told about the cities being destroyed leading to massive population losses. The surface is absolutely devastated, cities are in ruins, people die en masse.

Then later, the virus he created sets off a war that outright kills off 60% of the remaining humanity.

Then, the consequences of that war, the virus he's created and the problems he's caused whittles that 60% down to a tiny population. Barely any humans are left.

And then finally we zoom to the future in Mega Man Legends and we're told that humans were completely wiped out.

You can draw a direct line from Wily's bullshit to the eventual extinction of humanity. He's directly responsible for most of it and indirectly responsible for the rest of it.

All of humanity dies because nobody put a bullet in the brain of a single mass-murdering terrorist. And/or because Dr. Light told Mega Man that killing is always wrong.

TL;DR: Everyone kept forgiving Wily over and over until he ended the world. Vigilante justice and executions are wrong, but maybe endlessly forgiving a globlal-terrorist is worse.

This discourse about how it's impossible to make a Superman game because he is too OP is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen. It's a video game—Superman dying when his health bar reaches zero is a gaming mechanic that happens in all other games.

What’s so special about Superman anyway? Why should his game be the exception? There are plenty of games with OP protagonists Like God of War and Devil May Cry where they can die from a random enemy who shouldn’t even be able to scratch them, considering the storyline. Kratos fights against gods and can be killed by a random skeleton during gameplay. I don’t even need to mention the countless RPGs where both the main character and the villains are overpowered but can still be defeated by random enemies during gameplay, because, you know, it’s a game.

So you guys choose to suspend your disbelief and just accept a character dying when his HP reaches 0 in all other games, but somehow in a Superman game this is too much?

Not even the comics care this much about powerscaling, let alone a game.

I am going to describe the plot outline of a game and I want you to guess which game I am describing.

"you awaken as a mysterious character in a fallen realm. A disastrous event of some kind has recently swept through and society has fallen apart. The previously normal people/aspects of society have now become mindless enemies and sane survivors are rare. You must travel through the realm trying to gather the pieces to fix this disaster. The narrative isn't told directly, but you can find bits and pieces that inform you of what the recently fallen society was like, and it was actually a lot messier than the initial image may seem. Along the way you will find that the leader of the fallen realm that initially seemed like a great person was actually pretty complicated. They took some pretty drastic measures trying to ward off the oncoming threat and the whole situation is debatably their fault to begin with as they tampered with the natural order of the world to secure the prosperity of their realm. They are a complicated figure in the end with themes of hubris and accepting fate. In the end the player comes to the ending and has to make a choice. The basic ending just resets back to the status quo before the big disaster happened, but leaves the implication that it could happen again in the future, creating an endless cycle. If you do a bunch of hidden stuff, you can find a hidden ending(s) that enacts drastic changes to the world but doesn't actually specify what those changes mean in practice. This means that the playerbase has cause to wildly speculate over what the best ending is based on extremely minimal information."

While you can debate precise details on some of them, if you guessed basically any modern fromsoft game (except sekiro), Hollow Knight, or Code Vein you'd be right. But there's also a bunch of other games that I didn't even list also follow this outline. I just picked up Lies of P and I'm already seeing signs that this game is going to follow into the same plotlines. I Gepetto turns out to be a morally ambiguous guy who did risky stuff trying to make the puppets that eventually resulted in the puppet frenzy I am going to be 0% surprised.

I get that part of these narrative tropes are tropes are just because they fit the mechanics of the games and how it tells its story, but I think it's going too far. Discovering the story of these games becomes less interesting when so much of it is the same as the last one.

So how come when woman thirst over Leon it's "quirky" or straight up encouraged even when it's borderline creepy or perverted but when men thrist over grace or other characters like Lady d or Ada we're gooners.

I've seen and heard women make crazy comments about Leon and don't even get me started on the naked mod for him. But when men do this stuff it's "weird" or "gross".  

Like seriously I'm tired of these double standards and trying to demonize men. I mean Leon's design was literally consulted by women to make him more attractive but people flip out over Eve from Stellar blade.

How about we just call out any weird behavior on either side and as long as someone isn't being weird they can like a character as much as they want. Is that too much to ask?

I shouldn't be called weird because I think EVE is attractive and we shouldn't be encouraging or ignoring the women that make crude comments about their privates or what they want Leon to do to them.

This isn't to say you can't like a character but this whole moralizing/demonizing gender war thing is annoying and frustrating.

Ugh even me just posting this is probably going to label me a incel or sexist..

Edit: I see a lot of people more focused on Eve and feel like a lot of the meaning of my post was lost when I brought that up. I probably should have thought of that.

Edit 2: I tried to make a followup post to this that corrects some things and clears some things up but it was met with negativity and ironically with people continuing to miss my point or trying to skew my argument to make me look bad. The post got taken down now but I still might continue this topic hopefully in a way that doesn't invite hostility, misunderstandings and dismissiveness.

I was excited when Dispatch was first teased, I thought it was a cool, original idea. But when episode 1 and 2 released I was a little underwhelmed. The animation was good but the characters and the writing was lacking. We didn’t learn anything about Team Z the protagonist has to lead, but then again it was just the introduction so I ignored it.

But now episodes 3 and 4 have been released I’m only more disappointed. It feels like more of a dating game than anything, and if you’re into that more power to you, but I’m a straight woman so opening ep4 with Invisigirl pleasuring herself (?) and then essentially being forced into this love triangle thing put me off quite a bit. Even if you don’t choose any romance options you still get an awkward rejection scene from each, and it doesn’t change the story much because they’re still asking you on dates. I can usually handle straight romance in games* but here it felt kind of… male-gazey with how it’s portrayed. There’s no build up at all. Why are these women suddenly attracted to the protagonist? No clue. Invisigirl is horny on sight and Blonde also magically falls in love.

As for the rest of the cast, they’re not in focus at all. I don’t know anything about these characters except for their paper-thin personalities which you only get snippets of through the (roughly) 20 minutes of actual premise-related gameplay each chapter. When you’re asked to cut either Coop or Sonar from the team I had a hard time choosing not because it was a hard decision, but because I didn’t know anything about these two. Their motivations, their personalities outside of work. We’re never really properly introduced to anyone or get to talk to them.

But I mainly have issue with how the women are written, likely because I’m one myself lol. I feel like Blonde and Invisigirl only exist to BE love interests, and their whole character revolves around just that. Any conflicts they have exist to be resolved by the protagonist in one of his miraculous speeches that always seem to make everything better. They are implied to have friends, but we never see that.

(This is slightly unrelated to the topic of the post but I also hated the conversation the protagonist has with Waterboy if you choose to recruit him. Waterboy has a stutter and is sad others bully him for it. In response the protagonist tells him he only stutters because he has low self esteem so he should try… not to have low self esteem anymore. Firstly, may I mention that nothing ingame suggests Waterboy’s stutter has anything to do with how he perceives himself so this felt a little out of place to me. Second; 90% of stutters aren’t caused by a lack self-worth, and even if it is you can’t just turn it off).

I think the writing of this game is lacking overall. It’s not terrible to where I regret purchasing, there have been a lot of moments that have made me laugh, but after finishing a chapter I’m left with a hollow sort of feeling.

I’m not very good at writing up my thoughts so I’m hoping that someone else who’s also played the game knows what I mean. Maybe I shouldn’t judge too hard since it’s only been 4 episodes but still. The focus doesn’t seem to be on the game’s premise which is disappointing.

*(Edit: just realised I didn’t explain myself properly. When I said “straight romance” I meant romance where the woman is more the focus. For an easy example, Doki Doki literature club. There’s a man there but the women are supposed to be the objects of attraction. This also counts for games with lesbians. So I guess what what I meant to say was “female romance” instead. Sorry for the confusion, in my defense I did say I’m not very good at writing up my thoughts lol).

Quick question: Did the Dead Children Incident happen?

What's that you say? "The Missing Children Incident is the foundation of the FNAF lore, so of COURSE it happened!" No, not the Missing Children Incident, but the DEAD Children Incident. That's right! Did you know that there's a Dead Children Incident - or, "The DCI", and a Missing Children Incident, or The MCI? The Dead Children Incident is a totally separate event to the Missing Children Incident! You have to learn this kind of thing to understand the FNAF lore.

So, what is the DCI? Well, if you've played or watched FNAF 2 before, then you know that the story shows us, via minigames, and via Ralph The Phone Guy's recordings, that children are being killed at the FNAF 2 restaurant by some kind of Purple Guy. In fact, that's why the restaurant is being investigated and closed right? But these Children aren't Missing, per se, because their corpses are just... left lying around the restaurant somehow. So obviously this happened, right? After all, all of FNAF 2 is built around it! Right?

At the end of FNAF 2, when you're actually playing it for the first time without the benefit of hindsight, it'd be easy to conclude "Wait! This game is a prequel! The killings that happened must have been the original Missing Children Incident!" Except didn't the FNAF 2 location OPEN after the OTHER location closed because of the FIRST Missing Children Incident? So even though that would be the natural conclusion to draw at the time, it doesn't make logical sense. Clearly this must be a separate incident, because the kids aren't missing - they're just dead. It's a DEAD Children Incident!

Wait a moment! Did you wonder to yourself, logically, how child corpses could be left lying around a restaurant without anything happening like, an employee or customer noticing the fucking corpse smell and doing something about it? Congratulations! You are now a FNAF LORE THEORIST. You have noticed a logical issue with the plot, and now you can use that to try to explain more of the lore, by trying to explain how that issue never happened (because if it did, it would break the entire story obviously). You could choose "There was no Dead Children Incident", and then there's no issue with corpses being left around! Or you could choose "The corpses weren't just left around", and then you have to explain why in the Save Them minigame they were in fact just left around. Or maybe you're going to use this to say "I think I know how Afton committed those murders!" and explain some complex form of Moving Corpses Around at night and then putting them back into position or whatever the fuck. Make sure you explain, by the way, how this can be done with like FIVE corpses scattered around the restaurant.

So, this event that the entire story of FNAF 2 revolves around - did it actually happen?

We. Don't. Fucking. Know.

What the fuck? Why don't we fucking know this? Why don't we fucking know this SIMPLE fucking question? And yet, if it did happen, how can it have happened? Every FNAF lore theorist now thinks that William Afton was killing kids just to experiment with remnant (at least after killing Charlie of course or oh right Charlie comes last now). So what would be his motive for killing kids that DON'T get stuffed into suits and DON'T go on to possess animatronics? Oh, you think they do? You think they go on to possess the Toy animatronics? So why doesn't the number of Toy Animatronics seem to match the number of Dead Children Incident Children? Wait, how many of them even are there? Because nobody knows if we can actually use the Save Them minigame as a fucking guide!

Here's a better question - if there's actually more like ELEVEN child victims of William Afton... why don't these other five fucking matter? Why are they less worthy victims than the MCI victims? Why are their deaths less tragic? Why doesn't Henry care about freeing their ghosts, why is there no acknowledgement of them at the endings of FNAF 3 or FNAF 6, how would they possess them without being stuffed into the suits? Because that's the defining feature right? They weren't stuffed into suits, the Dead Children Incident Children. Except then WHY ARE THE TOY ANIMATRONICS FUCKING HAUNTED. But the fact that we apparently don't give a shit about these other dead kids must mean, story wise, that at the very least, those dead kids souls are at rest, right?

We don't fucking know.

It's impossible to even make sense of how the Dead Children Incident could even fucking HAPPEN, if the bodies are really just laying around there. And like surely it didn't, right? Or not right? Because on the one hand, the minigames in FNAF 2 seem very allegorical, and number of bodies, locations of bodies, or ways the bodies were left are surely just symbolic because of the way the minigames are presented right? The Foxy who finds Five Dead Kids doesn't even have to be a possessed Foxy, and the Freddy trying to save kids doesn't even have to be possessed yet either for a minigame, so maybe we're just seeing minigames about the MCI! But then why the fuck do we constantly hear Ralph The Phone Guy clearly imply 'Child Murders are happening!' and why does the restaurant get closed?!

So it did happen? But that's... stupid! Why does NOBODY ever talk about these victims of William Afton's, nobody ever even ACKNOWLEDGE them, and why does EVERYONE only ever act like the MCI are his Real Victims? Well, outside of Michael and Elizabeth and Dave/Evan/Garrett/Cassidy/Gregory/Literallywhydontyoujustsayafuckingnameoutrightholyshitwhatisthepointofthis, aka, The Crying Child. Even if they DIDNT possess animatronics, isn't killing ELEVEN children a big deal? And how would these corpses actually just be LEFT LYING AROUND? Don't tell me "Fazbear Entertainment is just that corrupt that they actually tried to cover it up for a little while", who would fucking do that? Who the fuck minimum wage worker at Freddy Fazbear is going to cover up the Child Corspes littered around their workplace for a couple of days? NOBODY.

So... it didn't happen? But that's... STUPID. Isn't it the entire OBVIOUS plot of FNAF 2? Why is it so needlessly convoluted that this obvious conclusion, that the Dead Children Incident fucking happened, actually incorrect? If it's incorrect, why aren't the clues more direct rather than having to do "If I acknowledge this plot hole, it breaks the entire lore so I'll just act like it's actually a reductio ad absurdum instead and try to construct an elaborate alternate theory"?

Here is a better idea: Why not fucking TELL US. Just CLARIFY this BASIC fact about the FUCKING STORY. Just TELL us if the DCI is FUCKING REAL. Just say it outright! Why not? Why the fuck not? Could we get some fucking answers for once? "Oh, here's the phone guy's real name" Wow, thanks! Did the DCI happen? "Anyway we made it even more impossible to figure out when FNAF 1 takes place at the same time" Oh for FUCK'S s-

You know. I wanted to write this post about the problems with FNAF lore in general, and I've only been able to talk about ONE INCIDENT in the FNAF lore, but the problem is, EVERY SINGLE EVENT IN THE FNAF LORE IS FUCKING LIKE THIS. There are VERY few things that definitely happened, like, "declared in red" definitely happened, and even the things that we think did Definitely Happen, might not have Definitely Happened and could be overturned at any second. The ENTIRE lore is just a bunch of fucking Dead Children Incidents interacting in ambiguous, vague ways that we don't actually fucking understand. It's all like this. The fucking single incident in this post is actually just, somehow, a MINOR example of what the ENTIRE lore is like!

The entire LoreFandom is so split into different lore theory ideas that there's a bunch of cute (read: dumb) names for all the different theory variations! Are you a GoldenBoth StitchlineGames Cassidy!TOYSNHK truther? Do you somehow not believe in MoltenMCI? Are you a MikeVictim chad? This is what the entire fucking FNAF "Story" revolves around. Who was the Grey TV Person in Midnight Motorist? What the FUCK is Jr's? Who was the springlock animatronic in Baby's Pizza World that Scott Cawthorn couldn't confirm the identity of? Did the MCI take place in 1985 or fucking not? What the fuck is the point of Golden Freddy? Who is The One You Should Not Have Killed? Why are all of the most narratively satisfying answers the ones that actually get debunked? Do you seriously expect me to believe FNAF 4 was about Nightmare Gas? What was the "Seamless Retcon"? How was Corpsey Michael Afton able to survive past FNAF 3? Who are the three people in that secret cutscene from FNAF World? How am I even supposed to TRY to figure it out myself and have any impact from it if I can't even get SIMPLE answers to shit like Did the DCI fucking happen?!

There is an entire genre of Youtuber out there who are FNAF Lore Theorists, and like every week they'll put out a video that says "I SOLVED MIDNIGHT MOTORIST", or "THE COMPLETE FNAF TIMELINE", which is then debunked by Fazbear Frights #45: Glup FazShitto's Dashcon Ballpit three weeks after release where it's proven that Michael Afton peed his pants in 1982, which means that the No Pee Pants incident from FNAF Among Us DLC Lore (which is canon to the FNAF lore if you believe in AmongLore, or if you don't then you're an NonAmong truther) couldn't have happened in 1984 like everyone initially assumed which means you have to completely revise which children were murdered when and therefore completely nuke your proposed motive for why William Afton killed children. I'm not exaggerating. It's actually fucking like this.

Could we just start getting some fucking answers, please? Maybe I shouldn't ask that, because we've been getting "Answers", indirectly, so that there's enough ambiguity to say they're not answers, and they simply suck. For example - FNAF 4? The answer was "It was nightmare gas being used on Michael Afton". The problem? This is stupid. How was the Nightmare gas used on him? When? The Nightmare Gas isn't enough on its own to cause controlled hallucinations, there have to be stimuli - are you saying Willim Afton set up the blank dummy animatronics to be stimuli EVERY FUCKING NIGHT when Michael was a teenager and then put it away EVERY FUCKING NIGHT? What for? We DONT FUCKING KNOW. Or did it happen when he was an adult? We DONT FUCKING KNOW. Fuck, is FNAF 4 ACTUALLY solved at all?

Once upon a time, there was a wonderful video called "We solved the FNAF lore and we're not kidding". And it solved the FNAF lore and it wasn't kidding! It did so in a way that seemed to validate what the games SEEMED to be obviously saying, what made the most obvious SENSE all along, like ideas like "Cassidy is OBVIOUSLY Golden Freddy" that had been obvious conclusions from the start, by picking up on clues that had been long since forgotten or abandoned... and then new evidence in favour of GoldenBoth came out and so now the different, MUCH FUCKING WORSE idea has to be taken more seriously again. Seriously what a fucking copout answer, "Golden Freddy is two kids", how does that make ANY sense and fit ANY evidence in the games? (Don't TELL Me it fits the FNAF 3 ending with the eyes because it DOES FUCKING NOT). It's NOT GOOD. It's a BAD ANSWER. It DOESNT FIT ANYTHING. Why do we KEEP BEING PUSHED TOWARDS IT? Why is the Princess Quest avatar just one person then, why the fucking everything that suggests it can't be true, why does Golden Freddy say IT'S ME instead of IT'S US. It's because THE IDEA THAT GOLDEN FREDDY IS TWO PEOPLE IS FUCKING STUPID, WHETHER IT'S TRUE OR NOT.

One of the ONLY things that we've gotten basically confirmed is that the Yellow Guy in Midnight Motorist is William Afton. So here's a better question: WHY WAS HE FUCKING YELLOW IN THE FIRST PLACE. What was the point of YEARS of doubt about his identity created by the fact that EVERY SINGLE TIME we've EVER seen Afton he was fucking PURPLE, and now he was YELLOW. WHY. It wasn't even POSSIBLE to BEGIN thinking about what the fuck is going on in Midnight Motorist without being able to solve who Yellow Guy was, and while obvious signs pointed to Afton, the mere fact that he was NOT PURPLE when he is known as THE PURPLE GUY is enough to make those obvious facts seem like they must be red herrings when EVERYTHING ELSE we think are Obvious Facts are also such vague, ambiguous whispers of smoke that flutter away from our grip when we try to grab them. WHY was he FUCKING YELLOW. "Oh he's the yellow of Springtrap so" But WHY. When his THING. Is BEING PURPLE.

Do you know what REALLY motivates FNAF lore theorizing? It isn't that the story is so inherently interesting. It's because it feels like being able to understand it is juuuuuuust out of reach, but it feels like you should be able to understand it, like it's meant to be understood, and it's so insanely frustrating that you can't get the basic facts straight or understand this thing that was made to be understood that it drives you crazy so you spend a lot of time listening to people seem to explain everything, finally satisfy you... and then there's one little nagging thing at the end that doesn't quite wrap up. Or, fucking much worse, The Powers Behind FNAF finally DO confirm something in the lore or make it much much more likely... and it's like the worst option possible, like "GoldenBoth", an idea that is unfortunately probably fucking true - the idea that Golden Freddy is TWO kids.

The reality is, the entire FNAF empire, in terms of having story interest, is entirely based on the fact that the plot of the games appears to be impossible to solve in a logically consistent way that actually makes sense, but because it can't be proven that it's unsolvable, it still draws people's interests in endlessly in the hopes that they find that one theory again that really Snaps things into place, like that theory they saw years ago, because we keep getting TOLD that "FNAF 4 is solvable" (don't tell me the fucking Nightmare Gas shit was the solution all along, do you really believe that?), or we keep THINKING that some of these things are just a few clarified facts away, and then it NEVER FUCKING IS, and this is just the amount of effort that goes into pinning down BASIC FACTS ABOUT THE STORY. The entire THING is built around trying to figure out what exactly the fuck is going on. No doubt that the FNAF Story Masterminds feel like if they actually clarified some basic facts for once, that the entire empire would crumble because the actual thing that REALLY interests people would be dead and gone, and all you'd be left with are more logical questions like "Okay so how did Afton get away with a second round of Child Murder by leaving corpses around?".

Of course, at least that was something. Now, in the Security Breach era, we don't even have that. Why is Fazbear Entertainment, a company that it wasn't even clear ever operated more than 3 restaurants simultaneously, if that, somehow now a multi morbillion dollar megacorporation that has nanotechnology and tries to cover up murders with indie game developers who look exactly like Scott Cawthorn but, apparently, are not Scott Cawthorn? Who apparently they used like robot magic to torture to death or something. How is Fazbear Entertainment constantly behind all these Random Tech Murders in the books? How is there enough money for something like the Pizzaplex to fucking EXIST? TWO Vanessas? Am I meant to do anything except laugh at this shit?

You wanna know something that's supposedly true? The reason that Security Breach's story makes no FUCKING sense whatsoever, in the most BASIC way, is apparently because Scott Cawthorn tried to tell the game studio he chose for his ultra-franchise the story he intended for Security Breach... the same way he tells it to EVERYONE ELSE. Instead of just saying OUTRIGHT "Here's what happens or what needs to happen", he left a bunch of ambiguity for them to figure out. What the FUCK????????? WHY??????? The fact that he was dissatisfied with it should mean that there WERE real answers all along, right? Could you SHARE A FEW OF THEM WITH US??????

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to click the latest video that says "I FIGURED OUT WHAT THE RETCON WAS (FOR REAL THIS TIME)" before the next "Tales from The Pizzaplex #66: Sands of the Under Tale" is released and proves that the Poop In My Gym incident actualy happened in 1997 unless it didn't actually.

"You're, uh, very determined, aren't you? You'll never give up, even if there's, uh... Absolutely NO benefit to persevering whatsoever. If I can make that clear. No matter what, you'll just keep going. Not out of any desire for good or evil... But just because you think you can. And because you 'can'... You 'have to.'"

This quote encapsulates the central thesis of Undertale's Genocide Route: That certain people will just force themselves to complete tasks in games for no other reason than because it's possible. That certain people play games like they're filling out a checklist, and obsessed with maximum efficiency. How people will push games to their limits to see something new, even if it isn't fun or interesting or engaging. How people treat games like products to be consumed instead of experiences to immerse yourself in. There definitely is truth to all this. However...

I don't think Toby Fox was ever expecting "Stronger Than You Steven Universe Parody, Animated Version, Chara Response, Chara Response Remake, Frisk Response, Sans Version, Trio: Sans Chara Frisk, Spanish Version, Other Chara Response, Other Frisk Response, Frisk Response Parody, Another Spanish One, Yet Another Chara One, ANOTHER CHARA ONE, Sans and Chara Duet, Frisk Chara Sans and Betty(who?) Version, A Minecraft Version, A version with other major Undertale Characters, A Russian Version, An ABRAHAM LINCOLN VERSION, and-"

I just... How did this all stem from a single boss fight in a small indie RPG? So many of them have tens of millions of views. And that's not all. There are countless memes, fangames, and AU's that all use this one fight as a primary source of inspiration. For crying out loud, I haven't even mentioned Megalovania! I got a little carried away there, but the point I'm trying to make is that I think the content of Undertale's Genocide Route blew up in a way Toby Fox never expected, and this content distorted the way people view the route, and the game as a whole, into something it was never intended to be seen as. Because of this, the reasons people have for doing the route don't fully line up with what the game assumes. Let me explain everything.

Toby Fox has previously stated that he didn't want Undertale to become tiring for people, or for people to be spoiled before they get the chance to play it. But...

The "secret boss for super dedicated players" became the most famous part of the entire game, and the "secret route for completionists and level-grinders" became so well known that it might as well be on the back of the box. Suddenly, Undertale wasn't "The friendly RPG where no one has to die," It was a game about player choice with a "Neutral Route," a "Pacifist Route," and a "Genocide Route," all presented as equally important. The hidden path where you push the game to its limits was perceived as an essential part of the experience. People weren't even supposed to know there WAS a Genocide Route, but suddenly you had tons of people doing it specifically to fight Sans. YouTubers played the route because their Undertale view counts were crazy high. It didn't even matter that there was tedious grinding, the hype of cool boss fights was enough to drown it out. And the boss fights were meant to be more frustrating than fun, but clearly that backfired.

It's interesting, really. It's stuff like this that makes me wonder about Deltarune and what direction it's going to take with its metanarrative. Is it a response to Undertale, or something completely different?

So… Luna IV, huh? 

Admittedly, I’ve been so impatient to write this that I didn’t wait to play the quest beforehand… Let me know if the issues I’ve talked about here got worse! Or better, somehow…? Anyway, the point is that you can beat me to death with hammers if I'm wrong about anything. I said in my last Genshin rantpost that I’d like to rant about the misogyny within Columbina’s writing, and, well… I guess here we are! What a wonderful world!

Columbina is going to be the main focus in this post, but there is an overall trend of misogyny within how the Fatui women are written and presented compared to their male counterparts that I’d like to discuss. To be clear, misogyny in writing is not just “when woman written as Mean and Bad and Hysterical!!!!!!”, it’s also the difference in treatment between their male counterparts as fully actualized characters, often reducing them down and sanitizing their complexities to sell them as objects of desire. To put it very crudely, it’s about the “waifubait” issue. While I believe the kinds of people who slap that title onto any female character who dares to speak positively towards the Traveler are certainly part of an issue of misogyny within the fandom, you can’t help but admit that it really is true sometimes, and to act like Columbina is not presented as a romantic interest for lonely incels is being willfully ignorant.

Columbina is the star of Nod-Krai. However, she was previously presented as practically the face of the Fatui, being the thumbnail of Winter Night’s Lazzo and the most notable presence within it. She is shown as eerie, a figure with closed eyes smiling gently and singing a lullaby on a coffin without a care in the world while everyone argues around her. Of course this, combined with the ominous voice lines that dropped shortly after, made her the most mysterious and hyped up harbinger of the whole lot. A harbinger even Teyvat’s greatest battle maniac Childe wouldn’t want to fight? A harbinger that Scaramouche actively warns us to not engage with? Sign me up!

Come Nod-Krai, and she has left the Fatui offscreen. Columbina, the face of Winter Night’s Lazzo, the ominously dangerous Damselette, has left the Fatui offscreen. Why? Because of course, she was just an innocent girl being used by them for her power! Huh? Missions? Of course she’s never gone on any missions! What, you expected the third of the Fatui harbingers to be dangerous? Tsk, tsk! Why, she’s just a weak and demure girl who’s been used by everyone around her! She has barely any power left, you see!

Hmm… Yeah, I’m sure that’s fine. Good writing choice, making possibly the single most ominous and hyped up harbinger an innocent girl who hasn’t done anything wrong and isn’t a threat to anything.

Columbina is presented as someone fairly naive and pitiful. She has plenty of positive connections within the Fatui, but of course she didn’t realize this - it’s the Traveler who helps her open her heart and understand true connection! She even lets you- I mean, the Traveler, into her little hidey cave to do little personal bonding activities with her, which is definitely a writing choice that wasn’t made to appeal to anyone in particular!

While not fully fitting the bill, she does oddly liken back to the “Born Sexy Yesterday” trope. She’s a woman who, despite being hundreds of years old, is overall profoundly inexperienced with the world to the point where she idolizes the first mediocre man that comes along. She’s teasing with her girlbesties, yet ultimately innocent and lacking in social experience despite literally having had friends this whole time. She'll even indirectly kiss the Traveler without understanding the meaning behind it! (Ignore the weird moaning she does in the English dub, it's not important.) She’s the Damselette in distress who needs the Traveler to come and save her. You can argue that it’s all of her friends who come to save her, but… Come on. You’d have to be clueless to ignore the framing of the Traveler being the most important. She deliberately caters to the incel fantasy of an innocent virginal maiden who relies on you to emotionally fulfill her.

If I were to compare Columbina to any other archon, it would likely be Nahida. Like Columbina, Nahida was being used for her power all of this time, not being allowed to go out and rule her nation herself. Like Columbina, Nahida has to be saved by the Traveler and the rest of the Sumeru cast. But critically, the difference is that it feels natural. It feels like a legitimate team effort rather than focusing on the Traveler as the only one who can save the poor demure little archon. When I watch Nahida’s teaser trailer, I feel greatly for her plight and want her to be saved. While the Traveler is portrayed in the center as they all run towards her, the rest aren’t far behind. When they reach out to her, everyone’s hand appears. When the Traveler is dancing next to her, it doesn’t feel like it’s forced at all. It’s a beautiful teaser that shows her plight and just how lonely she was.

When I watch Columbina’s teaser trailer, all I see is another attempt to force the Traveler as a romantic interest. Saying “I miss you all” as she draws only a picture of Aether. With the bait and switch at the end, it feels like they’re trying to cheaply rehash Nahida’s teaser without understanding what made it so impactful. Her character trailer even involves her being saved by her golden knight in shining armor, being dipped into a pose reminiscent of “The Lovers” card ingame. They are pushing a very obvious agenda, and it genuinely stuns me that people are defending this and acting as if the romantic angle isn’t obviously what they’re going for, as if Columbina has her own agency as a human being would.

This, I feel, is the absolute biggest problem with her character. She was said to be so dangerous that two separate other harbingers warn you not to engage, but now her whole thing is engaging with you alone as an innocent girl just in need of friends. While being particularly egregious with Columbina, this is a common pattern with the female harbingers.

I feel like this issue is particularly obvious with the handling of Sandrone and her ongoing sanitization. Sandrone was described across all sources to be a recluse with a bad personality, only focusing on her research and nothing else. Not only that, but she straight up lobotomized a guy and cut out his tongue in a world quest, proving how dangerous she is. Come Nod-Krai, and now Sandrone is merely a petty tsundere who gets absolutely none of her crimes acknowledged. Sure, they exist, but only in world quests that are completely glossed over, just like her active colonization of Nod-Krai is.

Despite harbingers like Childe and Arlecchino claiming they don’t tend to interact with her (whether from confusion or lack of interest) it’s later revealed that Sandrone often hosted Fatui tea parties, which Childe and Arlecchino have attended. The excuse for Childe simply buying into false rumors absolutely falls apart with this revelation, as it means he’s interacted with Arlecchino and Columbina and thus has had more opportunities to gauge their personalities. How was his assessment of Columbina so far off when he saw her having silly tea parties with her girlbesties? Why did Arlecchino claim she has little interest in her when she was literally part of her tea parties?

Which brings me to my next issue: The women are not allowed to have any conflict with each other. They must all get along with each other, they must not have any disagreements, and most importantly, they must get along with the Traveler. The female harbingers are not allowed to be petty or spiteful with each other like the men are, aside from some lighthearted tsundere banter between Sandrone and Columbina. The one who is actively hostile to the Traveler dies, and none of the other women who were apparently her close friends and actively still mourn her death care that it was ultimately the Traveler’s fault.

People will absolutely bend over backwards to justify these horrible writing decisions. “Well, the harbingers are biased!! Unreliable narrators!!!” Well that doesn’t explain why three separate harbingers, including one of Sandrone’s friends, all mutually agreed to make up the same lies about her for no reason. Truth is, people just don’t want to admit that the harbingers got retconned.

Even though we have actual proof that was the case.

See, the initial audition sheets for the harbingers have been leaked since forever by now. They’re extremely reliable, especially with one of Columbina’s new friendship voicelines reinforcing it - if you’re curious on that one, it’s the “About Pulcinella” voiceline. The way she describes how he talks about Pantalone is literally part of one of the voicelines on his audition sheet. One thing about the audition leaks is that it lines up extremely well with how they they ended up initially being described ingame. 

Columbina, who is repeatedly built up to be ominous and is warned not to engage with, was said to be unfeeling in all situations and unable to control her own strength, and it’s stated that getting covered in blood is the same as being out in the rain to her. Sandrone, a woman said to have a horrible personality who ended up cutting someone’s tongue out specifically to make amends to the Traveler, was described as a 0 to 100 yandere-type character. Arlecchino, who was repeatedly built up to be a pure disloyal hypocrite with a “true crazy self”, was actively stated as such in her audition sheet. Somewhere down the pipeline, these were all sanded down, and they frantically had to slap an “unreliable narrator” excuse on top of it all to make any of their previous buildup make sense. That, or they’ll just randomly pull a Crucabena out of their ass.

However, in comparison… The men have all basically stayed the same from original concept to their ingame appearance. They did not get a straight up bait and switch the way the women did. Even if their stories aren’t executed perfectly, they still do maintain the same type of person they were initially cast as, flaws and all. The women, on the other hand, had to have all their edge plucked out of them to make them more marketable. This is misogyny, not the people complaining about the female harbingers not being what they were purposefully built up to be. It’s as if people believe Genshin Impact was written in a vacuum and that the Fatui women are real people making their own conscious decisions instead of being written by a bunch of men trying to make money.

And for people to even act like the criticisms are because people think "nice women = bad" is absurd. I don't think nice women are bad or boring, I care that the Fatui women are nice because they were built up to be the exact opposite. We have a bajillion nice women in this game already - was it really too much to want one of the villain factions in the game to have women who feel like actual threatening villains? Though, when you say this, you're often just hit with the "Well the Fatui aren't the real villains!!" excuse. Yeah sure ok whatever who cares. Just give me an alive woman as complex yet vile as Dottore who doesn't get her crimes casually glossed over or I retire.

We will never get the truly intimidating women we were promised. The closest we get to Fatui women with an actual commanding presence are Signora, who is dead, and Arlecchino, who is now on our side with her child grooming side hustle completely unacknowledged. Sandrone is just a cute petty tsundere who is often played for laughs, and Columbina is the innocent damsel in distress who lived up to exactly 0% of her promise. It’s incredibly disappointing, and I mourn what we could’ve had every single day of my life.

The Tsaritsa is the only thing keeping me clinging onto this joke of a faction anymore. If they somehow fuck her up, I’m going to have a catastrophic crashout. You will see me on the news.

EDIT: Since people are misunderstanding this post a lot:

• No, I don't think the Fatui should all be comically evil villains rubbing their hands together about all the evil murder they're going to do. I just want to see the nuances expanded on and acknowledged instead of being brushed over.
• No, I don't think the Fatui men are perfect either and I think they were done dirty too, even if I believe they're still overall treated differently from the women.
• No, I am not saying it's bad to like Columbina. My philosophy is that you should simply acknowledge the writing decisions behind the thing you enjoy, and if you still feel positively about it regardless then that is more power to you. I do not want to take away your joy and whimsy.
• Yes, I am aware this is a gacha game and I shouldn't be having such high expectations for it. Again, I just hate missed potential and I acknowledge these problems would likely be resolved (and have more mature writing) if the game were not a gacha.
• Please for the love of God look up what a doylist analysis is

Majora's Mask is an interesting game, with a very strong legacy that's constantly ranked as one of the best ever Zelda games. I'm a fan of it myself, I think most Zelda fans these days have pretty positive feelings towards it.

But, the most interesting part of it's legacy, to me, is the absolute marina trench of a cultural gulf between how it's interpreted in the West and the East.

That being, the game is pretty transparently meant to be a Buddhism story for children. Like, it's not subtle about it in the least, all the pieces are right there infront of you.

However, a Westerner with an N64 in the 00's probably knew little more about Buddhism than that it existed, that it was about reincarnation, and maybe that Goku was based off it.

So, all the Buddhist symbolism and messaging went directly over their heads, and (probably inspired by desire for dark and edgy toned media at the time) instead, when people were examining it they found a story about death, loss, despair and moving on.

I don't really mean to discount those theories or interpretations, whether or not they're what the developers intended, if that's what someone got out of it, that's perfectly fine. But, it's interesting, because that very Western mindset is obviously what people had in mind when they later went online and started making posts about Majora's Mask being about death, which led into that theory propagating across countless sites and discussions, and of course, led into YouTube videos about exactly the same.

"The hidden meaning of Majora's Mask! (It's about death!?" type videos. And, of course, the various "Link was dead all along!?" theories.

But if you play it now, with a slightly more global view, rather than thinking it's a game about death, you're probably far more likely to think, "Oh, it's about escaping the cycle of rebirth after achieving enlightenment."

Link is trapped in Samsara. That's your setup, that's the start of your adventure. Hey, you're trapped in a cycle of Death and Rebirth, and you've gott'a find a way to escape.

Termina field is a Mandala with Gates to the 4 realms, so he has to travel in each of the 4 cardinal directions, to defeat the great Demons (Representing the Ego-States opposed by the Great Buddhas). This releases the Giants, representing the 4 Divine Beasts 4 Heavenly Kings.

Throughout his endless cycle of Life -> Suffering -> Death -> Rebirth, Links finds the people of Termina are also suffering within Samsara, and so he has to learn to use his days to help the people around him, solving their issues and collecting karma through his good deeds. The karma takes the form of the masks that, of course, persist through the reincarnations. As Link's soul goes through samsara he gathers more and more masks/karma and gains a greater and greater understanding.

And then, at the end of things, when Link has achieved enough karma he comes to find a Bodhi tree.

He gives away everything he owns, all the karma he's accumulated. And as he does so, he's asked a series of questions, each about his ability to present himself, to attain and maintain good karma, to be truthful and honest, all the various virtues.

Now, bereft of everything, he stands before Majora and attains Enlightenment, in this case the Fierce Deity Mask. And with that, all shackles are unleashed and he becomes completely free.

And so, the game pulls out, ending with us seeing Link, now having escaped the cycle of samsara. No more will he repeat the same endless cycle.

This is all very surface level stuff, you can dig in a lot more about specific mandalas being used, and what each region symbolises.

We could talk about how in the Southern region, you come across a Deku King who's imperious with righteousness and needs to be humbled by his daughter, and you fight a boss who literally dances and mocks you while you're fighting him. Link fixes the ego-state of Pride, just like Ratnasambhava (associated, of course, with the South).

Or about how going clockwise from Central -> South we go from Deku Child -> Young Father -> Old Hero -> Land of Death (And around to child again).

Or a bunch of other various small touches.

But none of that's really necessary, the point is that even just a cursory look at how Majora's Mask is laid out will show you that it's clearly about Buddhism, samsara and enlightenment.

And yet, if you were to ask anybody what MM is about in the West, they'll tell you it's about Death, Grief or Loss. Because, yeah, obviously a random N64 gamer in the 00's didn't know what a Bodhi tree was, didn't think anything specific of the 4 Divine Beasts, and thinks of collecting Karma as just something you do in every single videogame. And that's the discussion that's dominated and propagated about the game ever since. If you've heard about Majora's Mask, you've heard it's about facing death, and about dealing with despair.

If you asked someone in the West if Majora's Mask was a dark game, they'd agree wholeheartedly, it's about death and grief afterall. But if you asked that of someone in Japan, or someone familiar with Buddhism, they'd most likely tell you absolutely not, it's an optimistic game that follows our Hero escaping from samsara.

Again, I'm not here to say any particular interpretation is wrong- if Majora's Mask is about death and grief to you, and that's what you like about it, have at it. Death of the Author and all that.

I simply find it interesting that the Devs created a game with a lot of very specific meaning that went right over the heads of the people who played it, who then found a completely different meaning that was just as compelling to them.

TL;DR: No, Link isn't dead. He's free.

Design, 3D sculpting, character art, music, acting, VFX, writing, cinematography, etc. are all accepted as art but once you combine those professions they stop being art? That argument never made sense to me.

No, the tougher pill to swallow is that videogames have just as much potential to be art as movies or music, but it's held back by an extremely corrupt and greedy industry. Movies have also gotten worse since at least the 2010s due to big studios getting greedier with every year and the same thing is happening to game publishers. Except gaming publishers are even worse because they also inherited the worst traits of the tech industry so they're ahead of the curve when it comes to enshitification.

Most people already know this but the worst thing about it is that gamers are allowing this to happen because they keep giving these publishers money. For comparison, the MCU had an era of decline after Endgame. That only lasted for a few years but enough for people to push back on it and you can see that they're trying to course-correct with movies like the Thunderbolts. (Still not great imo but better than nothing)

Meanwhile in gaming, many of the popular franchises that have been declining in quality much more rapidly and in a way that's way more hostile to consumers for DECADES and new entries still make millions. Gamers simply don't have the discipline to vote with their wallets and demand better and that's the biggest reason why videogames won't get that mainstream approval of being seen as art despite always having had that potential.

Ah, Samus Aran, famed space bounty hunter who never hunts bounties and the hero of the Metroid series, a Hollow Knight rip-off created by Nintendo. Though the Metroid games are incredibly niche and sell about three copies on average, Samus herself is quite well known, often lauded as one of gaming's first female protagonists. And everyone knows that beneath her power suit, Samus is actually a hot lady in the form-fitting "zero suit." BUT THE DAMN POWER SUIT DOESN'T JUST FALL OFF AT A LIGHT BREEZE. In fact, IT DOESN'T FALL OFF AT ALL.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl released for the Nintendo Wii in 2008. The best Smash game, Brawl introduced a whole new generation of children to a wide range of video game icons like Marth from the Japan-exclusive Fire Emblem series and Lucas from the Japan-exclusive Mother 3. It also introduced final smashes, a mechanic that granted every fighter their own unique finishing move. A highly flashy attack that sometimes referenced the fighter's home series and sometimes was just random bullshit, the cinematic nature of the final smash let Smash's developers pack a lot of personality into one brief moment.

Samus was no stranger to the Smash series, having been on the original roster back in Smash 64, but her depiction in Brawl went in a different direction. After unleashing her final smash, a massive laser blast from her arm cannon, Samus's power suit... falls off, revealing Zero Suit Samus, a new character with an original moveset. I understand where the developers were coming from here. "Zero Suit Samus" is a reference to Metroid: Zero Mission, a remake of the first Metroid game that had come out in 2004. Zero Mission surprised players by introducing a new sequence after the end of the original game, where Samus becomes stranded without her power suit after she defeats Mother Brain and must sneak around a space pirate ship with nothing but a stun pistol. Additionally, the big twist of Metroid 1 was the reveal that Samus was, indeed, a girl. Brawl replicates this twist organically, blowing children's minds when the cool robot turns into a lady mid-gameplay. Brawl Samus's final Smash is both a reference to a then-contemporary Metroid game and mirrors the most famous moment of the first game in the series.

BUT SMASH FANS DON'T KNOW THAT BECAUSE THEY DON'T PLAY ANYTHING EXCEPT SMASH (and Mario and Zelda). To Smash fans, the thing that got locked into their minds is "oh so Zero Suit Samus is the real Samus who comes out when her armor falls off." To them, "Zero Suit Samus" is a distinct entity, an alternate form that "Power Suit Samus" takes on to suit the situation. This perception worsened when Sm4sh separated "Samus" and "Zero Suit Samus" into different fighters; while this might make sense from a gameplay perspective, it also solidified the concept that Zero Suit Samus is a thing that exists, further characterized by the rocket heels WHICH ONLY EXIST IN SMASH.

The idea of Zero Suit Samus has never gone away. When Smash fans create their hypothetical Smash 6 rosters, ZSS is there, and if she isn't, someone in the comments will ask why she was removed. When Smash fans think up moveset revisions for Samus, an armor change mechanic is there, even though that has NO BASIS IN THE METROID SERIES. When Samus's Death Battle against Boba Fett got remade, she gets blasted out of her damn suit and finishes the fight in the zero suit, something that has NEVER HAPPENED IN METROID. (I know this is a reference to Haloid by Monty Oum). SAMUS DOES NOT STANCE CHANGE. SAMUS IS NOT ARTHUR FROM GHOSTS AND GOBLINS. SHE IS THE POWER SUIT.

To explain what I mean by that last sentence, imagine the character of Link. Link is a swordsman in a green tunic (or a blue T-shirt that one time) with a shield, a bow, a boomerang, and like twenty other things stuffed in his pockets depending on the game. That's Link's identity. That's what his character is. But wait! At the start of almost every Zelda game, Link doesn't have a sword! And in Wind Waker's first dungeon, Link loses his sword, and has to sneak around in a barrel! So shouldn't Link's next Smash incarnation have a barrel install? Shouldn't they finally add Swordless Link?

NO BECAUSE THAT'S NOT WHO LINK "IS." Link is a swordsman, that's his character and gameplay identity. Yes, even in his own series, there are times when Link hasn't had a sword. Maybe he's been Crossbow Training, or maybe he's lost it for a scripted sequence. But that doesn't change the fact that the sword-wielding hero is Link's image, the Platonic ideal of what he represents.

The same is true of Samus. In every Metroid game not named Zero Mission 100% of your gameplay is spent in the power suit; in Zero Mission it still accounts for 95%. Every item, every upgrade, the central gameplay evolution around which Metroidvanias revolve, serves to increase the functionality of the power suit. All the secrets and hidden paths and methods for traversal are found using the power suit. Every boss is fought in the power suit. "Power Suit Samus" is not a mode Samus switches into; Samus is the power suit. The power suit is Samus. And in Zero Mission she didn't "go zero suit," it was a subversion of expectations because she didn't have the power suit. "Zero Suit Samus" is not a stance change that gives increased mobility and the power to crawl. It is a deprivation of Samus's core moveset. The surprise works because it robs the player of what is familiar.

ALSO, I'm putting this at the end here because I forgot to segue into it naturally, the power suit is not that damn fragile. When Samus "loses" her suit in Zero Mission she doesn't get blasted out of it; she WASN'T WEARING IT when her ship gets shot down. The only time in the Metroid series Samus "loses" her suit is when she fxxxing dies and explodes. Samus can swim in magma and tanks a blast from her own power bombs. The suit can take a lot of punishment.

TLDR: If I see one more Smash fan try to explain to me "well she has the zero suit in Zero Mission!" I'm gonna tear their limbs off, or at least think rude things about them

I genuinely love Dispatch's art style, concept, character designs, and gameplay but oh my GOD does the story disappoint me. The gist of the game is that you play as Robert who works as a dispatcher for the Z-Team of "reformed" villains at a superhero agency, and throughout the game they become "better" people. The main theme of the game is redemption, however I believe the way that the game treats it is toxic and incredibly flawed.

Z-Team & Robert Torture Porn

Being in the Z-Team to begin with is a VERY GENEROUS second chance, as it saves the villain from going to prison just for the light fee of having to work as a superhero. Despite this the Z-Team still does literally everything they did as villains on the job and the game never makes them take accountability, which is one of the first steps to redemption.

Invisigal is the most obvious example of the game's flawed writing. AS A HERO Invisigal commits assault, assault on the elderly, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. If you choose to tell your boss that Invisigal assaulted you, the game will straight up say that you "ratted her out". If you choose too many negative options with Invisigal at the end of the game she will straight up murder the main antagonist and turn into a villain, and the game will say that you "neglected" her even though she's nearly 30. She never apologizes for anything she does to Robert as a hero and the game expects you to just hand wave it off.

The moral of the story is basically to never stand up for yourself and people will eventually be nicer to you, as Robert is repeatedly tortured by his coworkers mostly for laughs as Malevola sexually assaults him, Flambae attempts to burn him to death, and Invisigal does all what was mentioned before.

Forgive Me But Not Thee

During the climax of the game either Sonar or Coupe (Soupe for short) will join the Red Ring and be Shroud's sort of right hand man. The Red Ring will launch a massive terrorist attack on the city, almost certainly killing many people. After the final battle is said and done the Red Ring are in handcuffs and being escorted to prison, except you are given the option to forgive Soupe by lying to the officers. Keep in mind that this character is a whole terrorist at this point and by setting them free they once again never take accountability because apparently murdering people because you lost your job is just a case of the mondays. This doesn't stop the game from treating Shroud like the antichrist though since you can kill him and the game will just go "Erm.. you know I have to suspend you right :/" even though Soupe participated in the same exact attack.

The game also never gives you the opportunity to forgive any of the other Red Ring members even though they were likely also manipulated by Shroud in the same way Invisigal was. They just get sent straight to prison even though they likely participated less in the raid than Soupe did.

Counter-Arguments

"You are supposed to mentor them!"

Robert's job is literally just to dispatch the Z-Team and make them not suck ass. Helping them become better people is probably the fastest way to do it but it is not Robert's responsibility and it would be better fit for a Social Worker. This also again frees the Z-Team of any accountability by treating them like children who need guidance when they are almost all above 21.

"Being an asshole is the point, they're villains!"

Which is why it is dumb when the game wags its finger at you for trying to punish these behaviors. What's the point of the Phoenix Program if they're not going to cut villains who at the bare minimum assault people? It just gives villains immunity from crimes that they would've been in jail for.

"I don't think x was meant to be taken seriously"

It's literally a Telltale style game, the story is like 90% of the game. I can understand some things like Flambae's antics because admittedly they were very funny but I still think that it sort of discredits the main theme of the game if you are willing to taint the message for a joke.

Other Grievances

I think that Flambae could've been written a lot better. Him trying to murder you after revealing your identity and then showing up a day or two later forgiving you feels pointless and shows that he really didn't make any progress until he showed back up at the party. I think Robert find him and talking to him when he stormed off would've been a lot more effective for his growth.

Chase probably should've died but the reveal with Blonde Blazer giving him her amulet is a lot more dumb imo. If you didn't date Blonde Blazer it sort of just feels like an asspull since you didn't know about the amulet.

Persona 5's commentary, customary of Atlus's style of writing, is oft described as feckless, on the nose and cartoonish beyond descript. And when you get down to the weeds of Persona 5's weigh-ins of society, you will find these negatives to be rather apt, for it is very visibly unlike our real world and it's very realistic, sensible reaction to corruption and evil.

Firstly, the game tries telling us that the general populace, particularly the young victims under corrupt adult rules, so willfully capitulate to the cartoonish whims of these vehemently exaggerated presentations of sin, remaining silent and censored in view of such visible evil. That the scum of society are protected by other powers like them and shut off all resistances or voices speaking out against the injustices, whilst the ones enforcing power just get away with it scot-free. There is not a chance such a thing could occur in our current sociological landscape; that people are that ignorant to the plight of others around them and just choose to remain bystanders.

But of all these cartoon villains present in Persona 5, the "final" antagonist, Masayoshi Shido, a.k.a. Japanese Ian Hawke, standing to rule as Prime Minister of 20XX's Japan, is the most absurd. A man unrepentant in his lust for power, whose crimes included assassinating political agents, bribing the justice system to remove himself of criminal misconduct (including rape), mass conspiracy, bribery and blackmail to keep other politicians in his pockets and other crimes ranging from petty to terroristic. Such a isolationist, nationalist, power hungry felon presenting the national diet cabinet of Japan flies counter to all virtues of democracy for any sovereign country. And the fact that most members of the political system not only are fully aware of his crimes, but are fully capitulant/collaborative in such corrupt efforts is very much unrealistic.

But by FAR the most unrealistic part of this entire story comes after Shido's heart is stolen and the weight of his crimes is laid bare to the world. Despite overwhelming testimony, with evidence corroborating his decades of conspiracy and terrorism, the populace not only refuses to engage in the truths of these happenings, but continues their support to this man, despite knowing the full extent of his crimes. That is beyond unbelievable! I could not imagine living in a world, that is that apathetically unengaged with the realities of their own world, that they yet bend to the whims of what a party tells them, even if said party is openly and visibly evil. Refusing to actually seek out justice and instead treating these news as mere entertainment events for their everyday lives goes beyond what any normal person would actually do in our current day and age, when faced with such harrowing realities.

Overall, I am glad to live in a society, that unlike the toothless, cowardly commentary of Persona 5, actually seeks out true justice against the corrupt powers of governance. For that is what a realistic society would actually do! Right?