Frederic_Chopin%27s_Anime_Nightmare.pptx [Eternal Sonata VLP]

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Frederic_Chopin%27s_Anime_Nightmare.pptx [Eternal Sonata VLP]

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

God drat it, Joe

Beat me to posting in my own thread

Shut it down, Grat. I'm not having this.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2015 03:17

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 18:08

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

CHARACTERS OF ETERNAL SONATA, PART ONE: POLKA

Polka is dying of an unknown terminal disease. The disease is unknown either because we're not told what it is or I wasn't paying attention. Either way, this also means she has magical powers.

One of these powers is to use an umbrella as a weapon and get away with it. Others are glowing orange, and diving off a cliff. An amazing array of skills.

Polks is very briefly passed off as the main character before being completely subordinated by some guy with a top hat, and another guy with a shoulder pad made of feathers for some reason. It's a metaphor for our society and how it does that to women.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2015 19:22

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

CHARACTERS PART TWO: ALLEGRETTO

Allegretto is an incredibly pretty teenage boy-man who appears to run a small team of sewer-dwelling, yet remarkably well-dressed, equipped and camera-owning, orphan thieves. He's got a weird feather wing thing, presumably because he wanted to cosplay Sephiroph.

Apart from a bit where he briefly rants in detail about the systemic problems with Capitalism, he mostly has very little to say except textbook 'you're mean!' or 'wow, that was good music playing, Frederick' (spoilers, music man plays music) stuff you get with anime protagonists. He makes up for it by being written as comically dumb, so lots of his interactions with NPCs and dialogue about him is pretty funny.

Characters keep claiming there's romantic tension between Allegretto and Polka but we never see any. Presumably all those scenes got cut in favor of sewer levels.

# ¿ Aug 13, 2015 16:30

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

"The conquest of bread. The famous...collectivist...book...by...what's his face."

I am a MASTER of cultural theory

# ¿ Aug 19, 2015 02:46

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

Instant Grat posted:

In the anime Haunted Junction, Hanako is portrayed as a sultry and busty teenager in a too small (and too tight) school uniform

BECAUSE OF COURSE

# ¿ Aug 25, 2015 16:51

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

Character of Eternal Sonata Part Three: Beat

Beat is Allegretto's little brother/pseudo-brother. Either way they're both homeless kids.

Beat's got a cool gun that doubles as a hammer, and also a camera. How he owns these incredibly expensive and (from what we see of the game) potentially one-of-a-kind items is currently unknown.

His plot purpose is mostly to be a dumb foil for Allegretto to talk down to, but as far as 'annoying kid' characters go, I kinda like him. He plays off quite well with other characters who turn up later. He strikes a good balance between 'slightly brash child who doesn't take things seriously' with 'relatively innocent person coming to terms with the depths of human suffering.' So like Hope from FF13 but if he was in a game with writers or a story.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 17:11

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

Venomous posted:

Xenoblade was so good

do not post in this thread again

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 03:35

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

Accidental racism is better than the usual for me

# ¿ Sep 9, 2015 12:26

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

Did we die at the end or were we just dreaming? Things got weird.

# ¿ Sep 14, 2015 05:47

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

My art has been delayed due to Heroes of the Storm. Gonna make my millions in e-sports.

CHARACTERS OF ETERNAL SONATA: FREDERIC FRANCOIS CHOPIN

(bonus version with no lines)

Freddy Chopping is the main character, in a sense. He's dying, and the game is his dying dream. Or maybe it isn't? They sort of imply? I hope it isn't, because he's barely in it and mostly talks about how weird his dream is and plays really good piano offscreen while the real story happens.

Because his weapon is frequently referred to as a 'shaft', Freddo is fodder for numerous jokes that Grat is going to edit out.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2015 01:04

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

CODY NO

WHAT ARE YOU DOING

# ¿ Dec 1, 2015 07:28

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

Characters of Eternal Sonata, part whatever:

VIOLA

Viola herds goats. This features in her design in the form of those weird bunched-up goat ear/horn shapes in her hair. Unfortunately the rest of her design got mixed up with an unrelated character who dances in a cage in a goat-themed nightclub.

Viola is upset that goats are being taxed - or something? More importantly, a life of defending goats from whatever the natural predator of a goat is, which I can only assume is God himself, has led to her becoming a murdermaster who can carry the whole party singlehandedly. Her character development is, she briefly wonders if it's okay to be single at age 26 (a spinster in Anime years), then decides it is and continues to gank fools for ever.

I like Viola because, apart from her design, she is almost completely untainted by the Anime Madness that has infected most of the story. She doesn't have to serve the bullshit plot very much so she's completely free to just do whatever

Her pet, Arco, is not in this picture because I forgot he exists at all. But that's how rad Viola is. She has a bullshit anime companion and they don't even turn up enough to imprint on your memory.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2015 19:19

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

I thought you weren't a Souls fan? Cool to see they finally made it work for you.

However:

WHAT HAVE YOU DONE

THEY ARE LITERALLY RECOMMENDING ME COMMERCIALS

# ¿ Dec 29, 2015 15:28

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

I keep clicking through the videos looking for this moment. Glad it's finally up.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2016 21:21

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

Lockmat posted:

They would all be green party voters. In keeping with Japanese RPG tradition they're all about saving the planet from mineral powder mining (bad for the environment & poisonous to users) and prefer natural remedies like floral powder. I'm not quit sure how they're marrying their ecological stance with cutting a bloody swathe through all the wildlife they encounter, but whatever, game mechanics. They're also na�ve enough to think that if they can just really sit down and talk to whoever's in charge everything can be worked out, there will be hugs, a drum circle and some herbal tea.

Like all green party voters, though, eventually they will grow up and realise that the green party is a bunch of useless hand-wringing babies that, when in a coalition government, hand right wing parties everything they want from being horrible to refugees and poor people to giving ludicrous tax breaks to wealthy polluting multinational corporations and all that in return for some token gestures or jobs that never materialise.

In conclusion glory to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought, kill the rich and send the green counter-revolutionaries to reeducation camps.

Except Chopin. He's just a Polish nationalist and has no politics other than that.

Yes, I was a green voter in my youth.

Also I saw Carpenter Brut live 2 weeks ago and it was super awesome and you should all go see him if you get the chance.

This is the winner because it's accurate, criticizes narrative/gameplay dissonance, and is written by a Carpenter Brut fan. A million points.

Alternatively, a relevant and fitting amount of points. It's up to Grat.

# ¿ Feb 25, 2016 03:44

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

Eternal Sonata 2 would have been set entirely in Claves' own dying dream.

CHARACTER BIOS: JAZZ

One morning, Jazz' best friend, a performance artist, got arrested for making weird pointless inventions and bothering people with his modern art pieces. In protest, Jazz took up their jailed friend's latest creations, the trumpet...sword (made to "highlight the performative nature of violence, or something, look, war is bad okay Jazz") and founded a revolution with two other people he knew from high school. Jazz is a tactical mastermind and a true thorn in the side of authority, despite the minor setback of literally one third of his group being spies.

Fedule posted:

At the risk of various things I am going to engage the discussion of the appeal of fan wikis and their complete lack of acknowledgement of anything diagetic.

25% serious answer: autism.

Much more serious answer; these things are, more than anything else, compilations of canon rather than works. Getting particularly deep into any examination of canon is a recipe for disaster but; we latch onto this notion that there is an aspect of the works we enjoy that persists in the universe beyond the times we are actively participating in them. That aspect is basically a bunch of "facts", or probably "assertions" is a better term, about the world, characters, plot or, at a stretch, themes. These are separate from any consideration of how the story is told. So on the one hand you have Yoda, Yoda's appearance, Yoda's personality, what Yoda does in which film (chronological order optional), the rich history of Yoda's loving lightsaber form, the reason Yoda uses a short lightsaber instead of a long one even though considerations of weight and balance shouldn't apply to lightsabers, etc. And on the other hand you have Yoda's puppet (or CG model), Yoda's voice actor, how Yoda is framed in each shot, how they got a human interacting with a puppet/CG person, the reason someone decided he should be green instead of blue, etc etc. More bluntly, you've got the things that would persist if the film was rewritten, and the things that would persist if the film was remade (although in reality a remake would be paired with a rewrite. Actually, this is a pretty good example; when Star Wars was remade, they changed a bunch of stuff that was all basically cinematic (CG detail that availed itself of the improved technology of its time), and a few frames of a single scene such that one character shoots second where previously he shot first. One of these changes has an entire pile of wiki content written about it. The rest are only really grudgingly acknowledged.)

Anyway, this is the distinction you danced around in the video; story versus storytelling. How the story is bought to something resembling life is mercurial, evolving, evocative, interpretive, often completely subjective, absolutely a product of the times, and ultimately fleeting because for the most part the method is not what sticks in your mind. That's the content, which is prescriptive, cumulative, orderable, sortable, operable; these are all things that nerds like, broadly.

The other great bastion of the categorisation of everything, TVTropes, blurs these lines somewhat in its relentless march towards every single human notion having a snappy pun-based title; it does acknowledge some of the more well-known aspects of works that are definitively filmmaking, like certain shot compositions or long takes or colour balance, but only on quite a superficial level. The site has an absolute dearth of analysis of how any of this stuff is actually leveraged in any given work, but hey, they sure can list every single cut longer than thirty seconds they've ever seen, especially if Joss Whedon was involved.

Eternal Sonata's Wiki would be a list of editors of Eternal Sonata's Wiki's Wiki.

This is well thought out.

My stance is, to put it bluntly, that the method is all there is. Lots of critics like to contrast style with substance, but substance is derived entirely from how the thing is made. The medium (or as we're putting it here, the method) is the message.

When two people attempt to have a conversation, they are doing so through a careful negotiation of methods of communication. I translate my ideas into words, you hear them and interpret them. Conversations are, paradoxically, ultimately an absence of conversation - our minds can never interface perfectly, instead mediated by language, expressions, or in this instance text, and our particular ways of reading and writing them. What matters is what we do with this knowledge. One solution is to understand the inherent impossibility of true communication, and act accordingly by trying to be more understanding of people who may not be very good at getting an idea across, and learning how to get ideas across better to specific audiences and so on.

~~Time~~ Art works the same way. It's a repository for ideas but in forms even more indirect than a conversation. You can for example get across the idea that war is bad by showing bombs getting dropped and then cutting to some sad kids covered in dirt starting to cry. Opening Crying War Kids Dot Wikia because it was so striking to you actually obscures meaning by pinning it down with needless 'canon' - how many tears did they cry, what are their names, what plane was dropping the bombs, etc. - it can be enjoyable to gather this information and create the sense of a concrete world and all its moving parts, but it contributes to an illiteracy in actually understanding the art itself. It's the fantasy that if you can just complete the picture, you will fully understand the piece. In the words of Edmund Burke, "Evil wins when good people do nothing but make wikis about their favourite anti war films".

I am a big time fan of George Lucas' films. I feel like a good deal of the prequels function as criticisms of this culture [the mass of books, fan works and so on even before the invention of wikis for example, and it is also not out of line to predict this behaviour as early as 1999]. The Jedi are so sure of the validity and merit of their information that they refuse to accept the existence of planets missing from their libraries. The Jedi are too busy building a giant, comprehensive in-canon star wars wiki that they stop being actual agents of peace and justice and their entire society collapses. Oops!

So on a certain level I find the idea that it's easy to make the same mistake and start cataloging the different space-fighting-styles instead of interpreting the film and deriving meaning. I'm not even saying there's a particular meaning to find. But actually trying to read a film is a nice first step.

Hbomberguy fucked around with this message at 17:23 on Jul 14, 2016

# ¿ Jul 14, 2016 16:43

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

There was one really high up editor on the Silent Hill wiki who was really angry about male circumcision and started claiming this imagery was all over the series on various pages. Even when wikis try subtext or imagery they seem to get it wrong (there are other examples but foreskin man is the best). So either it 'just keeps happening for some random reason', or maybe wikias inherently engender a mindset that's bad for understanding art.

Which is important because art is the place where we discuss how to save the world.

283 pages on the Eternal Sonata wiki and you can learn a lot about what each character does, or feels, or their stats, but the part where Eternal Sonata mounts fairly open critiques of both authoritarianism and the effects of the capitalist mode of production (with long interludes that go into detail about real actual attempts at social reform in real actual history) doesn't seem to get a look in outside of offhand references. The point of the story goes in a nice little box on the shelf next to the Forest Boar strategy guide. This stuff appears in the form of short sentences in the very short pages about the countries the world takes place in. There's like one sentence about it in the Forte page. 'oh by the way, mineral powder is popularised entirely through manipulative taxation of other forms of medicine'. By the way, the chronic illness that killed Chopin may be treatable but isn't being researched because it's not deemed profitable enough. Get hosed, people with cystic fibrosis! You aren't worth the money!

Polka keeps almost literally saying 'economic factors and their manipulation by those in power have direct effects on everyone's lives and need to be dealt with NOW, that is my entire mission here' and fans are like 'wow better add a footnote that taxes are bad'

Delete Wikia.

Hbomberguy fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jul 15, 2016

# ¿ Jul 15, 2016 00:57

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

If it's in the game it doesn't matter if they thought about putting it there or not.

If I get more thought out of a game than the creators put in, I win.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2016 22:02

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

Inco posted:

what the hell is Hbomberguy talking about

even i dont know anymore

# ¿ Sep 24, 2016 17:51

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

WE'RE STREAMING ETERNAL SONATA

# ¿ Oct 5, 2016 19:45

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 18:08

Hbomberguy: Jul 4, 2009; [culla=big red]TufFEE did nO THINg WÌ¡RAÌ¸NG[/read]

CHECK IT OUT

# ¿ Jan 9, 2017 21:04

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Let's Play! > Frederic_Chopin%27s_Anime_Nightmare.pptx [Eternal Sonata VLP]