top Obsessions rn: Voltron: Legendary Defender, The raven cycle, malevolent, Old Gods of Appalachia, TF2
It changes a lot but ummm
Media:
gravity falls, hannibal nbc, fallout prime, foundation (i haven’t fished it yet), house md, supernatural, spiderman, red white and royal blue, stranger things, malevolent, magnus archives, magnus protocol, welcome to nightvale, king falls am, camp here and there, old gods of appalachia, mil-liminal/seemingly dark, juno steel, hazbin hotel, the raven cycle, desert skies, little shop of horrors, newsies, floyd collins, bonnie and clyde, the great gatsby, the raven cycle, marauders/atyd, dont let the forest in, the witcher, watcher lore, hermitcraft, evo smp, life series, kwite, call of duty mw, compound fracture, strange æons, the spirit bears its teeth, dead boy detectives, good omens, marble hornets/slenderman, daisy brown, Hoppers (pixar)
Bands/music:
ghost, will wood and the tapeworms, lemon demon, tally hall, miracle musical, mcr, the crane wives, the amazing devil, the oh hellos, green day, autumn J, madeline mai, mcCafferty, elyotto, vera lynn, arctic monkeys, hozier, mother mother, penelope scott, cavetown, yaelokre, fish in a birdcage, the lumineers, poor mans poison
general:
spelunking, cryptids, ghost hunting, art and writing, diy, sewing, skateboarding, guitar, cello, singing, hiking, civil air patrol
side blogs
@cryptid-in-your-art - art
@cryptid-in-your-writing - writing/OCs
@the-tamagotchi-process - disability stuff 👍
@the-eyeris-collective - System Blog!!! surprise we're plural :3
@prettiest-trash-in-da-dumpster - politics and punk stuff
Ok ok ok so I’ve 100%ed it as far as I can tell so I hope you don’t mind me using this ask to do my full thought dump dfhshkd, I’ll put it under the cut bc idk how spoiler tags interact with ask format
I’ll split my thoughts up into the same categories that I do when I’m thinking about Barbie games (tho those aren’t not public anywhere rn lol): Gameplay, Story/Progression, Visuals, and Audio
There’s also a replay value section for the Barbie ones but I’m personally not really a visual novel “replayer” so it doesn’t really feel fair to be like “well I won’t likely replay it so.”
Gameplay
Dude, I LOVE escape rooms. In real life, online, physical games, video games, I can’t get enough of the stuff. If I’d known the main gameplay was straight up escape rooms (I was expecting smth more close to Ace Attorney I guess?) I’d have played it way earlier. Sorry story lovers I know the story is what hooks fans and I did care about the story too of course but I was also like “yes yes Akane collapsed again that’s very troubling when is the next escape room tho.”
The puzzles themselves were also a really satisfying difficulty level, I think. There’s been some irl escape rooms I’ve done where the difficulty was inflated in kind of bullshit ways, but I didn’t get arbitrarily stuck anywhere. And yet they were difficult enough that I was super proud that I was able to solve every part of this game with zero (haha zero) outside help!
I guess, with the exception of the final puzzle, the difficulty felt rather flat throughout? Like it doesn’t really get easier or harder at any point outside of bringing back concepts that you’d previously worked with. But I don't think that's a terrible thing. I thought it was silly (/lh) how deceptively simple said last puzzle was, while the player’s probably sitting there overthinking the whole thing (I certainly was for a bit).
As for the visual novel sections, that’s more story, but I REALLY appreciated being able to jump around and not replay the entire game at least 4 more times to get all the endings.
Story/Progression
I do still stand by my point that Junpei could have stood to be less immediately aggressive about everything, but I do think it was probably exacerbated by the English translation and English voice acting lol, and also circumstantially I can give it a bit of a pass.
I will not lie, my FIRST exposure to the series was watching my roommate’s bf play part of the middle of vlr (so I have a few spoilers going into that one) and being thrown in the middle with zero context I wrote it off as kind of a stupid series for a while until I properly tried it out myself lol. But I get it now! They really do just throw 9 of the weirdest geniuses you can find into situations, of course they all suddenly go on tangents like that.
ANYWAY. I think they do a pretty good job of having a strong setting and letting the details of it be uncovered as you play! There are plenty of games where either the situation is too mysterious to get invested, or they won’t stop throwing unnatural exposition at you, so I was relieved to have a good balance here lol.
Also I think the idea of incorporating the fact that the player already knows what happened in other routes they’ve already played as an actual factor in the story is a REALLY cool idea. I’d admittedly have liked for JUNPEI’S experiences with it to somehow pop up more clearly before you’ve triggered the true ending, so I hope they play around with it more in the sequels too.
As for critique, this may have been a me thing, but my biggest thing is that there was a huge disconnect between how much Junpei cared about Akane and how much I cared about the fact that he cared. Not like I didn’t like her—I loved her character and overall role as the true main character. But like, Junpei would be like “no… with these digital roots Akane and I can never be in the same group…” and I’d think “ok I feel like you’re making a bigger deal out of that than is necessary.” Idk, maybe they didn’t do a good enough job of selling me on their bond in the very beginning? Obviously Clover and Snake also were attached to each other so maybe Junpei’s inner monologue was just annoying about it lolol
To again clarify this has nothing to do with their characters. Either way imo it made the bad endings where she dies in your arms kind of fall flat because I definitely wasn’t invested in her in the… WAY that the game wanted me to be.
For the rest of the characters, Snake is still my guy that guy’s the GOAT, but I did like everyone! I was neutral on Ace which was kind of convenient, considering. Lotus was the one who grew on me the most I think. Kind of similar to the Junpei aggression thing, she really rubbed me the wrong way at first but the more I settled into the situation that they were in the more I understood where she was coming from. I forget if I said it before but her “realistic to the point of cruelty” was a great contrast to Akane’s “idealistic to the point of hindrance.”
Uhhh who else, I’m also pretty neutral on Santa ngl, Seven was also a GOAT. Clover’s narrative path was really interesting and I really like that so much of getting the true ending is helping her avoid completely drowning in her grief.
Also I think I read that Ace kills everyone in the endings where you’re stabbed? Even in the one where you see him already dead? Someone said that he was faking but. Idk it’s not really important enough to make a deal out of but that’s why I was like “who is this mysterious person?”
This is so all over the place but I’m not really good at having organized thoughts in less than 7 business days.
Visuals
I think the art is fun! The backgrounds are nice and the characters are all modeled nicely. Obviously there was a bit of a sprite quality issue playing a DS game on a PC, but with the exception of parts of Clover’s sprite you really couldn’t tell.
I do have to say it tho bc I was thinking about it a lot while I was playing: character design-wise, I think Zero Escape respects women narratively, but doesn’t fully respect them as like… people? People detached from the male fantasy? Not like it isn’t par for the course but they do put Lotus in. That. Also the male character designs are varied in body type and features and stuff and then the female design is “three cute girls.” But again it’s par for the course.
It’s also an issue with a decent amount of jokes; maybe asexuality go brr but with the exception of the “you cool with a mother?” one they were not funny to me at all.
Anyway back to the art, with the exception of a few hand sizes and that one where boobs don’t work like that they’re also super nicely drawn. I especially like the way facial expressions get handled there! I’ve started VLR and I have to say uh… not a huge fan of those “CGs” so I know to be grateful for 999’s.
Audio
Music’s good! Don’t really remember any tracks in specific but I remember enjoying the “boom crash guitar sting bad things have happened” song a lot.
As for voice acting, I think the characters’ voices fit them very well in both English and Japanese. I started playing with JP audio because I tend to prefer it, but I was getting too impatient with how long the dialogue was so I switched to English at some point. And I do have to say… in English sometimes it felt like the tone was off? Like the characters were saying their lines as if they were in a different situation from the one they were in. Or like as if they were feeling a different way than what the narrative seemed to be pushing for. I don’t think it’s the VAs' faults tho; it kind of felt like they may have been reading their lines without the full context for the scene.
Shoutout to all the “…” lines tho, it’s always so funny to see what they try to do with it like
“My brother… might be dead.”
“Hmm…”
“Hm?”
“Grr…”
“Eughk.”
Uhhh in conclusion
It was really fun! I liked the gameplay, the story was interesting, and while I can’t say I particularly care about the main relationship that I know everyone is feral over I have a feeling that playing the other games will help me understand that better.
on one hand, i think its cute that tsuzuru has given chikage hot air balloons as like, a signature of his lead play characters. on the other hand, it is Extremely funny to me that tsuzuru keeps writing chikage's lead roles crashing their hot air balloons. assigned cringefail by scriptwright
NO WAY DOES HE CRASH IT AGAIN HFDSFHSSF
That so funny Tsuzuru was like "it's my divine responsibility to nerf you so you have a pilot's license but you DIDN'T PAY ATTENTION IN BALLOON CLASS"
Looks like they’re finally catching on to people wanting individualized events! But now we get to see how well they pull it off!
((Unless they have done this explicitly before other than with the Ruri-Chan/Levi specific events and I’ve just missed it))
I wanted to hold off on answering this until I saw how it was being handled (and WOW did I miss these boys I forgot how enjoyable some of the stories can be even if they're mostly fluff, I really need to catch up) and well...
Satan is definitely the main character of this event!! I know I missed a fair amount of events, but I think you're right and they haven't done something like this since the Ruri-chan event?? A really nice change of pace to have one person be like the lead. Lucifer's also basically absent from the main topic, so they also avoided it being just about them competing.
Only thing is, I've read the entire free route (want to read the locked story all together once I've unlocked it all), and... you don't really spend any one on one time with Satan at all in the free route. Not to say that the locked route is particularly HARD to get, but if there ISN'T solo time up there once I get to it, that's something they'll have to consider improving.
I'll reblog this post with the results once I find out o7
Also, Lil Noodle has said that this event seems easier to stay up in the rankings for than previous events. I wonder if it's because people who aren't wild about Satan are opting to sit it out?
ik chikage is often portrayed as cool and smart but i like to think that for a solid good chunk of his first few days or weeks he absolutely cant make heads or tails of citron and is bewildered by how the fast harugumi is able to decipher citrons typos, both in lime and verbally. maybe kazunaris paripi speak too
Oh absolutely, Citron was giving him a rundown of how dorm life works and he was like “we often engage in chicken conservation” and Chikage was like :) ?????? until Tsuzuru or someone says “you mean kitchen conversation”. And like ok sure Chikage will give you that one but at the start he literally could crack government codes faster than he could crack this text Citron sent him
Tbh I bet he still doesn’t understand Kazu half the time but he gets the vibe of what he’s trying to say so he just. Pretends he gets the actual words too
man. man. itaru unexpectedly but willingly becoming the biggest spender of mankai because he has new avenues to fuel his hobbies. cosplay and art comms for yuki and kazu, buying multiplayer party games to host dormwide game tourneys, going to collab cafes with banri or juza, getting full collections of merch plushies or keychains to do matchies with spring. sakyo cant even lecture him about it bcs technically its his own money orz
THIS!!! Aaaa man I wanna write this now the family is too strong--I think Lil Noodle had some sort of idea related to Itaru sharing his interests I'll have to ask what it was
It's so so SO important to have people to share your passions with and Mankai is so huge for that ;w; they encourage each other!! they indulge each other sometimes!!! I just hhhhh they!!
Sakyo would be so conflicted sfhsds but I like to think that he'd let it slide when he saw how much fun everyone was having with the whole thing (tho he may have to draw the line at trying the gachapon the whole time intead of getting some merch secondhand lolol)
me, to the computer: "YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE. AND YOU WILL GIVE IT TO ME NOW! I NEED IT. I NEEEED ITTTTT" *smacks computer*
Nooooooo I hope you were able to get to the fic!!!
This ask did make me check my own fic masterlist links and I saw that the Kazu Sims 4 one was broken so thanks for that lol and sorry if that was the one that was giving you problems!!
this list is a list of 100 character Japanese women loved on 2022 basically - FOUR CHARACTERS ARE FROM OBEY ME
98. Diavolo
83. Solomon
25. Lucifer
14. Mammon
I… I don’t know what I was expecting but it certainly wasn’t seeing four whole characters from a game I’ve passively played and made fun of since college to be making it onto this list
OH WOW
To be honest I have absolutely zero grasp of how popular this game is in Japan so I’m honestly kind of surprised so many of them made it on??
Mammon and Lucifer topping the chart as far as OM is concerned isn’t surprising at all but my boy Solomon taking third best OM boy!! Look at him go!!
