Since the NEET Lab AU in Osoroku has a backstory, I'm gonna share all the info I found out so far!
(NOTE: I got this info from the in-game newsletter, app notifications, character dialogue, etc)
THE IN-GAME NEWSLETTER:
At NEET Lab, we work day and night to research for the world! We're work hard doing research and clinical trials, aiming for a richer life!
The premise of the story seems basic.
The AU takes place at NEET Lab, where scientists work everyday doing lots of "research" and "clinical trials".
Supposedly, the lab's goal is to promote people having a "richer life".
APP NOTIFICATION:
Researchers with slightly dangerous syringes... 💉✨
What kind of experiment awaits the subjects?... 💀💦
Now it says that the scientists have "slightly dangerous syringes", and that they have "subjects" that they are experimenting on.
The story took a dark turn so fast skjfhsdjk
THE CHARACTERS:
I only got Ichi and Oso in the gacha, so I can only give their special character dialogue (rip to everyone else 😔)
KARAMATSU:
Karamatsu is a scientist! And there's a blue armband on his arm.
Karamatsu's weapon is a "truly painful poison gun". The gun contains poison needles.
I wonder why he would ever need that.
ICHIMATSU:
He's also scientist! He wears a purple armband, and he carries ESP Kitty in his bag. His weapon is a "swinging flask".
And this was Ichi's dialogue:
Ah... there are so many experiments I have to do today... If you help me, I'll tell you some good things, like the secret of this lab...
Actually, there's a NEET in this lab who spits beer out of his eyes...
This confirms that Ichimatsu is another scientist working at the NEET Lab. He's busy doing research and experiments (clinical trials?) every day. He also hints that the lab has "secrets".
His dialogue also reveals that one of the test subjects is a NEET who can spit beer out of his eyes (also Ichi says "NEET" and not "experiment/test subject." He's not telling the whole story imo 💀)
JYUSHIMATSU:
Jyushimatsu is another researcher! He wears a hazmat suit instead of a lab coat, and he's holding a shower-head(?) as a weapon.
Jyushi's special attack is called "Tornado Experiment".
TODOMATSU:
Todomatsu is another researcher who wears a hazmat suit. His weapon is a syringe 💉
Totty's special attack is called "Everyone Take an Injection Shower Together".
That doesn't sound ominous at all 💀
OSOMATSU:
Osomatsu is one of the NEET test subjects inside the NEET Lab. He's shackled, covered in bandages, and his right eye is red.
Osomatsu's attack is "Desperation Beer Beam". He doesn't shoot laser beams, but instead beams made out of beer (lol).
This was Oso's dialogue:
I don't want to be a test subject!
What should I do? Its boring so maybe I should just escape... Why don't you help me escape? Nice!
This pretty much confirms that Osomatsu unwillingly became a test subject for the NEET Lab. He wants to escape, but he needs help to do so... ?
CHOROMATSU:
Choromatsu is the other NEET test subject. He is covered in bandages, holding a toy bear, and an eye-patch is hiding his right eye.
Choromatsu isn't wearing a hospital uniform like Osomatsu. And unlike Oso, Choro doesn't use any special powers in his attack.
His in-game attack is "IV Drip Reluctant Slash." He attacks enemies by swinging around his IV stand.
A lot of recent fanart also portrays Choromatsu as scared, anxious, or crying in this AU. Unlike Oso, it seems like Choro isn't handling the lab experimentation too well. Somebody please help them already omg 💀
On Trickster Path, Tricksterism, and Playing Tricks
I've been making my way through the Trickster path in WOTR after giving Azata a taste. I really like Azata, there's a lot of fun in there and Aivu is, naturally, the best girl. But I've been so curious about the Trickster path and wanted to see how Owlcat would handle such an interesting archetype. This isn't really a critique of the path so much as an exploration of what I've seen thus far (mid-act 5 on my own playthrough, though I've seen letsplays of a few path endings).
Primarily, I'm left with a desperate wish for there to be cohesive writing throughout the game. Not really something fair to want in a modern game, so instead of kvetching about that I'd like to explore how Owlcat presents the definitive difference between playing tricks and Being A Trickster. As well as just my general thoughts about Trickster path stuff. I have a lot of those, so please, enjoy this readmore. It's the only thing protecting you now.
Fellow Tricksters, please feel free to add your own thoughts and musings in replies or tags; I'd love to see how the rest of you explore this playground.
Tricksters are narrative archetypes I love to explore, and are largely categorized as agents of pure chaos... which I think is disingenuous and the sickness at the heart of America core of the fascination I have with the writing for Trickster in WotR.
More than just pranks and randomness, a true Trickster is one whose purpose it is to unveil the truth of something no matter how grim or frightening or yucky it is, expressly to inspire or force change of the status quo. That feels like more or less the thread Paizo was going for in their original writing. Owlcat doesn't have the luxury of relying on Theater of the Mind to flesh out the worldstate scenarios we interact with, so seeing how they've balanced the different types of Tricksterism is fascinating.
In Pathfinder WotR, mechanically speaking, there are many different ways to be a Trickster type. You have a sliding scale of controlled madness to complete mayhem to choose from. The easiest way I can think of to describe this is the Bugs Bunny vs Daffy Duck trickster dynamic*.
On one side you have Bugs: Passive, intellectual, friendly, open, cunning, calm, professionally effective. His antics seem random if you aren't paying attention to context clues. IE, his costume changes generally reflect the personality of his adversary, and allow him the opportunity to counter that adversary with their own strength. Favorite example: Bugs impersonating legendary conductor Leopold Stokoski♬ to humble an Opera singer. In doing so, he unveils the singer's true nature as a slave to the craft rather than a lover of music. His Tricksterism is generally externalized (tricking the other), in self-defense, or benign.
On the other you have Daffy: Aggressive, pseudointellectual, bullying, closed-off, adaptive, manic, dangerously amateur. Daffy's antics seem random if you don't know his tell - all of his costume changes are chosen specifically to make him look more heroic and powerful than his opponent, and his failure to be that ultimately leads either to his humorous downfall while also, somehow, allowing him to avoid total disaster. Favorite Example: The Scarlet Pumpernickel. Daffy once again proves true that faking your way to success will only get you so far. Daffy's Tricksterism is generally internalized (tricking the self), weaponized, and violent.
They're both Tricksters; they both harass and bother Elmer while attempting to also get one over on each other. Bugs' 'give 'em enough rope to hang themselves' ability to gracefully react to any given situation is directly opposed by Daffy's in-your-face too-crazy-not-to-work screwball energy.
In WotR, you have the mechanical flexibility to make a Bugs type (like me, call Zell Bugs Bunnicula) or a Daffy type. Or maybe you're a little more bodacious and overtly mean, like Foghorn Leghorn. Maybe you've decided to squish 'em all together and go FUCK IT, CHAOS REIGNS. Mechanically, you can do whatever!
But then there's the way your choices are reflected in-game. The way you interact with being a Trickster is so... strange. A real 'have your cake and fuck it too' scenario is what I'm sayin here. Let's start with your link to the Trickster Path, Socothbenoth.
Your Trickter patron being Socothbenoth is an interesting choice. I wouldn't call him a Trickster so much as a deceptive and manipulative creep, an archetypal demon who thinks he's more clever than he actually is. Not fully beating the Daffy allegations, but not nearly on the same level as Mister The Duck**. His goal isn't to reveal a Truth, or even to make himself look better, it's to Bully. He cares about things being surprising, revels in chaos and champions meanness, but at the end of the day his tricks are just... mean tricks. His deceptions are shallow and petty.
His manipulative schemes? WACK.
His comedic timing? WHAT comedic timing?WACK.
Yeah, sure. He's tricky.
But at the end of the day, they're just tricks. And what the Knight Commander can do to interact with him and the rest of the council are just tricks. For the player - the real Trickster in the driver's seat - there's no way to cater your tricks to your target unless we're talking about a strictly combat situation. (This is me lamenting the lack of variety in how your mythic path choices are written out, to be clear)
Socothbenoth is just mean and happens to also be cunning and evasive, but hardly seems to have any interest in truth or change... just chaos. He wants everyone to see him as charming and funny and a trickster, but he isn't one.
Barring Shyka - naturally - the rest of the council seem simply to exist as examples of alignment archetypes to bully and lie to. Not a trick in the true sense, all you're doing is manipulating them into fighting each other for reasons you yourself fully don't understand yet***
Which, I think, is fantastic. Shyka - the true Trickster here - chilling in the background and letting Socothbenoth run things until he either succeeds or gets hoisted by his own petard via Knight Commander. It's a marvelous bait and switch to set up Socothbenoth, and you only ever see it come to fruition if you play a certain way. You really have to dig for as many secrets and uncover as much truth as possible to really get one over on him, and the payoff feels good. Especially if you're playing for the Secret Ending. Yet it still comes off as pretty cheap if the conceit is you know to upset the council because you've always known to do so, because Shyka. I feel like there could have been something more to really pull it together, instead of leaning on the 'useless council' gag or Shyka's presence.
If you aren't working towards the Secret Ending and don't have any intention of betraying Socothbenoth... what's the point, other than to entertain him? It's not outright stated that I can tell, but unless you're really going for the gold all you truly end up being is this motherfucker's court jester. I suppose for those on the Evil Trickster path Socothbenoth's whole thing is more appealing, but uhhhh couldn't be me fam. It feels like Owlcat wasn't necessary pushing a preferred narrative on the player, but someone over there definitely gets the difference between Real Trickster Shit and Elevated Class Clown.
That's enough on Socothbenoth, let's talk about Thaberdine! I love him. Personally, I don't conflate drunkenness with Tricksterism the way the game narrative does, though I do feel like it was a missed opportunity to have the commander bleed moonshine rather than, say... gin. He really has the silliness about him and brings a special kind of levity to the path storyline.**** I like to imagine him played by Peter Postlethwaite and his entourage as a bunch of Muppets. Which seems to be what the game writers were going for, because Trickster Drezen truly does feel like a street scene in a Muppet movie.
Continuing on the theme of Truth in Trickery, I like that you have the option to name him King of either the Tavern, Sarkoris, or all of Golarion. King of the Tavern feels like the most true path for him by my estimation, but that reality-bending potential to re-write what's really true in the world is so neat. It's not just for the sake of the joke, but taking Thaberdine's whole-hearted and unflappable improv schtick and making it be true because he makes it feel true is the HEIGHT of comedy. That's the kind of thing that really gets me going about certain Live-Play series, particularly Dimension 20. Rewarding someone for committing to the bit is such a great detail. It also reinforces the later 'Game Master' decision you can make at the war table***** as something that a character who absolutely knows about tabletop gaming would do.
I think I'm about at the point where I can wind this up, for now. In all I think there are many aspects of the Trickster path that really get into the meat of what being a Trickster in the mythical sense really means, while being unfortunately hampered by the limits of game design. It's inspiring, definitely. My own plans for writing out a bespoke adventure for my character picking from both the game and the original adventure path are only going to be enhanced by what Owlcat gave us, IMO.
So... what about you? What do you like about being a Trickster? How far is my head stuck up my own ass? How hot or cold are my takes?
*Specifically the Chuck Jones era Bugs and Daffy. Their characterizations have shifted in some ways since Jones' day, and I feel like Chuck's rules for these two characters are a good foundation to apply what I mean here.
**this honestly feels a little unfair because writing Daffy is HARD and the fact that they really seemed to go for a Daffy/Marvel Loki/Jared Leto's Joker mashup with Socothbenoth is worth celebrating, even if it didn't quite hit the mark.
***It does not escape me that a lot of the Trickster path writing seems slanted towards making fun of people who read spoiler guides to plan out their gameplay experience. Or, y'know, make sure they hit a specific prompt so they don't play another 300 hours and get whammied by The Bad End. And I personally think the handwave that since Shyka is there and you merge in some timelines means you know exactly how to manipulate the council is CHEAP. WHERE'S THE STYLE? WHERE'S THE PANACHE? UGH.
****Owlcat I am literally begging you to let me play a chaotic drunken master moNK ALIGNMENT LOCKING MONKS IS SO GOOFY WHYYYYYYYYYY DOES JACKIE CHAN MEAN NOTHING TO YOU?!?!?!?!?
*****I KNOW it's not the war table I just miss Dragon Age
♬Leopold Stokowski was a conductor famous for not using a baton, instead directing the orchestra with full body and hand gestures, which must have been a blast for the animators on that Bugs short. His reinterpretations of classical pieces are still a hotly debated subject to this day! Fans of Disney's Fantasia will also recognize him as the conductor for that production. Personally, I'm a huge fan of his work and highly recommend listening to his interpretations of Stravinsky's Firebird and Rachmaninov's Scheherazade
So looking at Cleo's timer when Scar turned red and then again at the end of the session, Scar turned red and logged out about 27 minutes before the end of the session. During that time, Skizz also turned red, about 24 minutes after Scar did, and remained logged on until the end of the session (Grian showed the players online list in his outro, Skizz was on but not Scar). Everything we've seen suggests that the timer does not run when the players are not logged in.
It doesn't seem like Scar logging out after turning red was necessarily planned, but it would not be the first time that Scar has logged out early from a session (missing the pool party in Double Life, for instance) even if it would have game implications. Three hours is about the limit of Scar's recording stamina based on his streams, so he may have hung in there just long enough to go Red and then checked out for the evening. Understandable, but what does it mean for the state of the game?
It would seem, if nothing is done to change the timers, that when Session 6 begins Scar will be at 7:59 while everyone else will be at their 27-minutes-later time, including Skizz at 7:54. That puts Skizz at first in line to run out of time instead of Scar. It's possible that they'll just have Scar log in before everyone else next week and run his timer for the missing time, but that doesn't seem exactly fair to him since the other players had the advantage of those 27 minutes to do useful things. On the other hand, Grian lost three hours of play time to his nasty flu the other week and chose to play it out that way. It'lll be interesting to see if there's an attempt at correction there or if everyone just assumes that Scar will take himself out soon enough and that half hour just isn't going to matter that much. We shall see!
Baizhu is home!! Within the 110 ish pulls so far I have
One Baizhu
Three Candaces (who I haven’t had until now)
Four Kavehs
One Diluc (he’s now at C3!!)
And zero Ganyus which is a shame
Fully in Baizhu mode right now, and heavily messing around with artifacts and weapons, but a team that I really enjoy is Cyno & Tighnari shared DPS, with high ER Kazuha swirling electro to buff Cyno, and Baizhu providing interruption and healing and dendro. Then once Cyno’s burst ends, swapping to Tighnari, who I’ve spent a long time building and is actually a very solid DPS as well.
Out of curiosity in Cascade will Jak end up using the Dark Giant power from Jak II? I was also wondering what eco color that would fall under since the rapid growth/size changing would seem indicative of dark eco imitating green eco?
I wasn't planning to, no. For Cascade, I've decided to stick to the powers that remain consistent through J3, particularly those that have plot relevance (appearing in cutscenes and/or required to use at critical moments in gameplay, such as the invisibility & projectiles) and abilities that I feel make for interesting new developments. The ‘dark giant’ ability has more of a ‘cool unlockable extra’ vibe to me; even in II it's an optional bonus ability (never mentioned within cutscenes & not required to beat the game) and then it's not present in 3 at all.
If an extra-powered dark Jak mode does appear in Cascade, it would definitely be something that makes the current transformation effects more pronounced/‘monstrous’ rather than him just getting bigger– which would be a green eco ability! The dark Jak transformation itself falls under green eco (he instinctively altered his body to be able to absorb large quantities of dark eco, as a defence mechanism) though Jak isn't aware of that particular connection yet.
and I do have... other big plans for green eco & how it contributes to Jak's dark powers 8) it's gonna be a while before we get there but those particular developments are some of my favourites, so there's definitely a lot more to look forward to as the series goes on!
I love Obey Me, but unless I’m playing the events super wrong, I have to say I really dislike its events’ point/reward system.
There’s no way for f2p players to rank even remotely close to the top half tiers. In the latest event, to get the ranked memory SSR, which is the “easiest” non-SR you can get, you have to be one of top 1500 people out of over 167,000 players. Which sucks because that’s somewhere between 0.0075% to 0.009% of all players (my assumption is that they are about 200,000 who have played the event to get at least 1 point). And SRs are useless by Lesson 12? 10?, give or take. So it’s essentially not giving us anything.
I did the math for my specific cards this event, and if I played as much as the event allows me per day (entirely f2p without using demon points to redo battles because I need to save them for nightmares), I would still end up in the sub-6000th place, which is the 4th tier from the bottom and 10th from the top. And that’s not even accounting for the ranked memory and demon URs that are much harder to receive. (which are, respectively, about twice and three times as much points)
Other than getting the cheat cards from the Event Nightmare, I don’t see how I can get better at events without using demon points (and at that point, I think it’s no longer casual play). And the cheat cards barely help imo. In most other gacha games I’ve played, I feel like ranking improved as long as you constantly play the game, due to upgrading cards/getting better cards/actively playing the event more/learning how to optimize the game better, before it plateaus. However, insanely strong cards do not help you in the events. After you beat all the lessons, it doesn’t matter how strong your cards are since it just matters how much you can replay the levels.
Since I’ve started playing this game, I’ve been constantly ranking in the 2nd tier from the bottom, because every time I try to rank, I start out playing a lot, then slowing down exponentially when I calculate that it’s literally impossible for me to get certain cards. It’s super disheartening. I was so pumped when Satan’s birthday event came out that I tried my strategy of playing as much as I could per day. Then when I calculated that it was literally impossible for me to get his UR, I got super disappointed and stopped trying.
I also dislike how the pop quiz awards work. Once again, if I grinded as much as I could without using points (since I have a lot of AP saved up), I could get the demon SSR, but it would take multiple trips to Lonely Devil to even think about getting the memory SSR, the memory UR, and the demon UR. And it takes a while for events to show up on Lonely Devil, if they ever come back at all.
I get that Obey Me is mostly trying to make money. So they want you to shell out money so you can buy vouchers and points to get good cards for events and the main story, but I wish it was a least a little less p2w in the event so that it’s more enjoyable for casual players. I’m grateful for the UR chance boost from the anniversary, at least. That was a very nice update. Since it’s a gacha game, I didn’t expect them to be nice about that. I’ve played so many gacha games that I don’t mind low UR/SSR rates. I’m used to it. It’s mostly just the event rewards system and the difficulty curve I don’t enjoy.
If there’s something I’m missing about the meta of Obey Me!, feel free to object to my rant. Because I feel like I’m doing something wrong to be this bad at events. Or am I right about it being a p2w thing?
I have decided that I am going to be mad now until forever because there was no fucking build up for phelps doing that with elsa, the most straightlaced cop on the force? and you're not even going to foreshadow it a little?
