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Endorph posted:women want him to make out with crow Not just women; Crow is the only character Rean ever gets super emotional about in the course of the main story (particularly CS3 with how he reacts to the maybe-Crow showing up). I normally don't exactly care for this sort of shipping thing, but it's pretty plausible to read that there's some sort of thing between Rean/Crow.
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Sep 21, 2022 10:49
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its definitely the most interesting read on rean and crow's whole relationship, honestly. even besides obvious jokes about shipping it just kind of works as a narrative throughline.
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Sep 21, 2022 10:58
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Endorph posted:its definitely the most interesting read on rean and crow's whole relationship, honestly. even besides obvious jokes about shipping it just kind of works as a narrative throughline. It's 1000% the read I've taken on the CS2 endgame, once the on-foot fight is over it's messy gay drama until everything goes south. edit: I've just realized this leads to the most extremely unkind read on witches but on the other hand... familiars, am I right? claw game handjob fucked around with this message at 11:07 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 11:02
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Endorph posted:one of the 17 famitsu articles they ran about it mentioned it, im pretty sure? I believe the only time Rean has been brought up in regards for Kuro 2 is "Boy, we sure wish Rean will be in Kuro 2!", from like fans and such e: he notably does not feature in like, the opening or anything Terper fucked around with this message at 11:29 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 11:20
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Oh hey look a trailer for the anime https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWvbafCCu4A
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Sep 21, 2022 11:20
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Read the lyrics of the first end credits in 2, (which is the best of the games because it has by far the best gameplay to mess around with, y'all can be wrong, it's fine) and tell me, tell me that's not romantic. How many times does Rean scream "I need you!" to Crow? Was it here that I posited that Crow is in love with Rean, and Rean has such bad self esteem, he's more in love with being loved. Crow is the character that seems to love him with the least baggage, big dramatic fights weirdly not being much of an issue compared to the fundamental problems of personality the girls bring.
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Sep 21, 2022 11:27
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Terper posted:I believe the only time Rean has been brought up in regards for Kuro 2 is "Boy, we sure wish Rean will be in Kuro 2!", from like fans and such Yeah the only returning CS characters in Kuro 2 from what I can tell is Fie and Towa as well as Swin and Nadia from Reverie. Rean might be in the game but if he was, I suspect they'd advertise it more.
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Sep 21, 2022 11:55
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Terper posted:Oh hey look a trailer for the anime Thankfully it looks like most of the cast are anime original, so there's hope for a decent bodycount. They don't have to live to appear in the games that take place after the annexation. Looks like they might be pulling a page from Gundam Thunderbolt and will show how terrifying the hero and his mecha are to normal people on the ground. Then again it might just be a trailer misrepresentative of what we will actually get. Not holding my breath.
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Sep 21, 2022 12:03
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You're weirdly obsessed with people in this series dying
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Sep 21, 2022 12:17
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A frequent mistake a lot of writers make is not having enough tension in their story and the audience just closes the book or turns off the show. The goal of a plot point is to make the outcome uncertain and keep the audience guessing as to what will happen. At the end of The Two Towers, Frodo is captured but Sam has the One Ring. Half way through Return of the King, the Mouth of Sauron presents Frodo's chainmail at the Black Gate, which suggests that Frodo is dead, and makes the audience uncertain as to how the story will be resolved. It's about playing with expectations. There are external expectations (ie, I expect a Star Wars movie to be like this), and internal expectations (ie, I expect the Ring will be destroyed this way, I don't expect a magical unicorn to come out of nowhere and save the heroes). There isn't any tension in the Trails games anymore. You know all of the playable party members will survive. Heimdallr will not be bombed into ruin, or the protagonist's hometown permanently captured by another state. There isn't even much tension for the fate of the bad guys because unless you are a minor filler villain you're probably going to escape or get away with everything scott free. I have zero confidence in a satisfactory outcome of the Ouroboros storyline, so at this point I don't care about the plot anymore. I play Trails because I like the turn based battle system, I like the music, and I like the aesthetics. I'm just hoping that the creator's of this show have a free hand to inject actual tension in this show. We'll see.
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Sep 21, 2022 12:38
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I don't think a party member has ever died in a Trails game. Think you might have gotten into the wrong series
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Sep 21, 2022 12:41
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its possible to have interest without character death, though. i think the trails series generally does a decent job at longterm character arcs, which is why i care about the writing. seeing renne develop from sky 2 to where she's at in cs4 or kuro is fun. thats enough to keep someone invested. maybe not everyone, but it works for a lot of people.
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Sep 21, 2022 12:41
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I expect any given Trails game to have the weight and gravitas of your average shonen battle manga. I've never gone into a One Piece arc with any real expectations that a Straw Hat would die. Same goes for any of their new friends, or any of the villains. It's just not that type of story. Perhaps some nobodies will get offed to increase the tension and maybe if its a real big arc someone with an actual name will die but better not to count on it. Trails is like that but with better written female characters and at times even worse pacing.
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Sep 21, 2022 12:59
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Moofia Boss Val posted:A frequent mistake a lot of writers make is not having enough tension in their story and the audience just closes the book or turns off the show.
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Sep 21, 2022 13:56
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I never found Nord to be a slog, it was an interesting change of pace. I did however pause the practice of fighting every enemy on the map in Nord. I found Heimdallr to be a slog because it was so big and generic with too many NPC's to talk to. Legram was short, but kinda boring. Saint-Arkh was also kinda dull and flat. *** I definitely agree that CS 4 retroactively makes CS 3 and previous games feel much worse, because CS 4's reliance on "curse does everything" feels like a big crutch. It's especially bad to use that as a replacement for actual character motivation. Compare the motivations of the villain in Sky First Chapter, and some (not all, just some) of the villains in Zero-Azure - those people had reasonable and understandable motivations for their actions. Their actions were what made them villains, but they had good solid motivations. Even CS 1-2 had some villains with interesting and understandable motivations, although already you can see the wheels start to fall apart since some of CS 1's villains, when you hear their stories, your reasons for why they had to kill a whole bunch of people and start a war, you go "that's it?" or "well you had it coming." It's very much disproportionate revenge for the slight which was committed. CS 3-4 blows that away and not only do you get a villain which has extremely vague origins, but also a vague, generic goal of "I want to destroy the world because I am the incarnation of mindless anger", which isn't very interesting. It also retroactively makes a previously intriguing villain in Osborne into just a really great awesome nice guy who was Only Doing Evil Because Curse Made Him Do It. It's just a wet splat. After CS 4, I am inclined to drop the series. I'm not even sure about playing Reverie. Hearing that the protagonist of Kuro also has some kind of magic transformation superpower killed a lot of my interest in the game. After 400 hours of Magic Transformation Superpower Rean, I wanted to go back to a "Relatively Ordinary Person" like Estelle and Lloyd. *** The problems with deaths in the series is not the low death count, it's that the writers repeatedly keep pulling convincing fake-outs and expecting the audience to both believe them this time, and care about the stakes. CS 1 ends with "wow that guy looks very dead" and he comes back. CS 2 ends with "very definitely died on-screen without any doubts" and they came back. That's the REALLY big one which shows that nothing matters. CS 3 has a "kill that one" and an offscreen gunshot in the middle, and it ends with "no one has any means of saving those people, and the people themselves think they're dead", and it had another "that person is also definitively dead". CS 4 has a character who "died" once give not one, but two additional "I'm dying here" speeches. If the writers don't actually want life and death stakes, they need to stop pretending that death is a possibility, and definitely need to stop pretending like they're actually killing someone off for real even though they know they're bringing them back. Veryslightlymad posted:Read the lyrics of the first end credits in 2, (which is the best of the games because it has by far the best gameplay to mess around with, y'all can be wrong, it's fine) and tell me, tell me that's not romantic. It is romantic, and yet the song references specific things which Rean did not do with Crow, but did do with Alisa, which even I found baffling. That's probably part of the problem, Crow was largely a background character for much of CS 1, so they didn't have anything to put into the song. I don't know if Falcom was intentionally writing romantic subtext in, or if that's a case of "The Deafening Hug" with the writers adding a bit more drama than intended to the Destined Rivals thing. If anything, Rean is in love with the idea of himself being unlovable. Stabbey_the_Clown fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 14:18
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Man, reading about all the times where Delphisage fucked around with this message at 14:44 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 14:41
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:The problems with deaths in the series is not the low death count, it's that the writers repeatedly keep pulling convincing fake-outs and expecting the audience to both believe them this time, and care about the stakes. Just like your average shonen manga.
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Sep 21, 2022 14:47
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SyntheticPolygon posted:Just like your average shonen manga. Then I don't like that genre.
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Sep 21, 2022 14:51
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SyntheticPolygon posted:Just like your average shonen manga. Stabbey_the_Clown posted:Then I don't like that genre. Thank god that Chainsawman is coming this season. That show has no respect towards any plot armor regardless of its shonen label.
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Sep 21, 2022 14:52
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:I don't know if Falcom was intentionally writing romantic subtext in, or if that's a case of "The Deafening Hug" with the writers adding a bit more drama than intended to the Destined Rivals thing. I'm absolutely certain it's deliberate. There's both a market and a demographic for gay subtext regardless of how much Japan shuns open homosexuality. Plus coding rivals in love interest tropes is an easy shortcut for actual motivation to see them make up, or to see an evil person turn good.
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Sep 21, 2022 15:03
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https://twitter.com/alyossan/status/1572411238868467712
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Sep 21, 2022 15:04
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Maybe I have a greater tolerance but I don’t have a problem with the Curse compared to others here. Characters in CS4 keep reiterating that the Curse isn’t the sole reason for all the bad things that have happened in Erebonia. Yeah, it pushes people to act on their worst impulses but it was ultimately their choice to follow through with it. Everyone wasn’t immediately under its sway after being unleashed at the end of CS3 and there’s even scenes where people who have fallen to the Curse resist and exorcise it. So the Curse isn’t absolute mind control.
SgtSteel91 fucked around with this message at 15:25 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 15:18
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SgtSteel91 posted:So the Curse isn’t absolute mind control. It's not about being mind control. It's about being a giant DM fiat to justify and absolve a railroad plot, saying that literally any other outcome was impossible and that you can't morally judge people for making the choices they did to lead everyone here. Delphisage fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Sep 21, 2022 |
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Sep 21, 2022 15:28
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Delphisage posted:It's not about being mind control. It's about being a giant DM fiat to justify and absolve a railroad plot, saying that literally any other outcome was impossible and that you can't morally judge people for making the choices they did to lead everyone here. Sure you can. People are able to resist the Curse, so Ash could have chosen to resist it and not shoot the Emperor, for example. He even says as much when characters like Juna try to assuage it in the same way. A part of him wanted someone to pay for Hamel and he was so desperate to have it he didn’t care that the Curse was egging him on.
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Sep 21, 2022 15:45
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Ytlaya posted:Not just women; Crow is the only character Rean ever gets super emotional about in the course of the main story (particularly CS3 with how he reacts to the maybe-Crow showing up). I normally don't exactly care for this sort of shipping thing, but it's pretty plausible to read that there's some sort of thing between Rean/Crow. It's Kingdom Hearts all over again. Sora falling to his knees when he finds Riku again, while being mildly excited to reunite with Kairi, goddamn it was hilarious. KH2 was a wild ride.
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Sep 21, 2022 15:54
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SgtSteel91 posted:Maybe I have a greater tolerance but I don’t have a problem with the Curse compared to others here. Characters in CS4 keep reiterating that the Curse isn’t the sole reason for all the bad things that have happened in Erebonia. Yeah, it pushes people to act on their worst impulses but it was ultimately their choice to follow through with it. Everyone wasn’t immediately under its sway after being unleashed at the end of CS3 and there’s even scenes where people who have fallen to the Curse resist and exorcise it. So the Curse isn’t absolute mind control. CS 4 has a great many scenes, sub-plots and side-quests which explicitly convey that the curse is mind-controlling people to act and speak in ways they otherwise would not. So even if it is not 100% absolute mind control, it's not unreasonable to call it a cheap shortcut to substitute for actual motivation, with an added excuse to not have notable consequences for those actions.
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Sep 21, 2022 15:58
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I'll never understand hating the curse without also hating the plots of FC, SC, and Zero. Why is mind control that makes sense since it's powered by a godly being the cutoff point when mostly unexplained bullshit mind control by weird looking normal dudes is fine. Like, the series has been built on mind control since day 1, kinda weird for it to be a problem now. Also personally, I'm a hell of a lot more angry about the few deaths with TONS of wasted potential, than any death that was faked out. I'm sick of hearing about Leonhardt's Carnage we never see in game, I want a door where we play as him going full carnage like when he saves Renne. Arianrhod is a strong contender for character death with the most wasted potential I have ever seen, and the absolute worst part is that she literally only needed one more day to give closure to her like, 5 children and maybe spirit boyfriend. And yeah, One Piece is the absolute king of this, people die like mosquitoes in flashbacks, but in the present there's literally only the famous deaths, everyone else gets one last appearance to say "I lived bitch" after eating a nuke a mile into the sky. I read more ho yay in Gaius and Rean's Bonding events like when Rean is riding his shoulders in CS2 or Gaius says he'll fight the entire world for his friends in CS4, showing that he was the true protagonist all along than anything with Crow, but Crow is pretty firmly in last of my Class VII Rankings till we add the Pancake Bracers in, so maybe I'm just biased.
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Sep 21, 2022 16:18
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Stabbey_the_Clown posted:After CS 4, I am inclined to drop the series. I'm not even sure about playing Reverie. Hearing that the protagonist of Kuro also has some kind of magic transformation superpower killed a lot of my interest in the game. After 400 hours of Magic Transformation Superpower Rean, I wanted to go back to a "Relatively Ordinary Person" like Estelle and Lloyd. For what it's worth, Van's case is very different from Rean's and much more tied to plot elements raised in the Crossbell duology and even 3rd than anything to do with the curse from Cold Steel. Also, unlike Cold Steel which tried to hide Rean even had a super powered form until halfway into the first game you know right from the prologue of Kuro that something about Van isn't quite right.
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Sep 21, 2022 17:36
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MythosDragon posted:I'll never understand hating the curse without also hating the plots of FC, SC, and Zero. Why is mind control that makes sense since it's powered by a godly being the cutoff point when mostly unexplained bullshit mind control by weird looking normal dudes is fine. Like, the series has been built on mind control since day 1, kinda weird for it to be a problem now. You have the worst taste in the thread so this doesn't mean much. I'm basically in the same boat as Stabbey that I'm kind of done with the franchise unless Kuro turns out really good. CS3 was my favorite game in the franchise but 4 just torched it so completely I can't be arsed to care about anything anymore on top of the insane decisions made in terms of english releases. Also the entire Ash sequence is the only time the curse isn't used as an excuse. Every single other time it is just a free get out of jail card for the entire cast so nobody can do anything of consequence or do a bad thing besides Ishmelga.
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Sep 21, 2022 17:43
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Like I said, I might have a greater tolerance for it but the whole deal with the Curse and Ishmelga being the Big Bad aren’t dealbreakers to the point of dropping CS4 or retroactively ruining the past games the same way Mass Effect 3 did to me.
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Sep 21, 2022 18:00
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What are you all talking about? All of the villains think that it doesn't absolve them of their actions at all. They recognize its influence, but ultimately reject that it was the sole arbiter of their decisions. I think it's crazy that the plot repeatedly makes a point, and people bullheadedly refuse to accept that point at face value. Eugent absolves Ash, but Eugent is the aggrieved, and that is his right. It's also worth pointing out in that specific case that Eugent asked Ash to shoot him. Has anyone ever seen the television series, Angel? There's an episode titled Billy which plays with this concept. It's a fairly polarizing episode, so I guess it makes sense that people would be polarized seeing a similar idea play out over four (technically, at least seven) games.
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Sep 21, 2022 18:02
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Is it ever explained why the curse doesn't affect most Important PCs/NPCs? Like during Reverie (which I'm playing now), there's a scene when the curse comes back in Crossbell and influences everyone...except for the PCs and their close NPC associates, who are just like "everyone else is acting crazy!"
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Sep 21, 2022 18:06
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RevolverDivider posted:Also the entire Ash sequence is the only time the curse isn't used as an excuse. Every single other time it is just a free get out of jail card for the entire cast so nobody can do anything of consequence or do a bad thing besides Ishmelga. Also every time it comes up in a side quest. Here's the literal one time it's used as an excuse: Victor. All the people saying that it gives Osborne an excuse are crazy. Even freaking Cedric is like "yeah, I would have done it anyways, just would have been less of an rear end about it".
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Sep 21, 2022 18:11
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From my understanding, the Curse drills into people who have holes or weak of heart and exaggerates their worst aspects and desires. The main characters, save Rean and Ash, are all relatively stable and have a strong enough will to resist it
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Sep 21, 2022 18:13
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SgtSteel91 posted:Like I said, I might have a greater tolerance for it but the whole deal with the Curse and Ishmelga being the Big Bad aren’t dealbreakers to the point of dropping CS4 or retroactively ruining the past games the same way Mass Effect 3 did to me. Mass Effect 3 was fine. Adding a "do nothing" option to the ending, even though it's the shittiest ending, does an awful lot to make things better for me. Whoever originally worked on the Crucible, they're just loving short-sighted stupid idiots, and it's not your fault that they force you to make a decision based off their stupid shortsightedness. THEY believe something is inevitable, but it's clear that Shepard doesn't. Or rather, that Shepard doesn't have to. However, they designed the drat thing, so they're the ones who got to decide how it works. All of the endings suck because gently caress those guys. So yeah, having the option to just let it all burn, even if it's somehow an even worse option, that goes a long way to making it feel better. That makes it go from an artificial choice to just a really, really lovely choice. Although, here's a fun Mass Effect 3 speculation/only partially joking hypothesis that actually makes a little sense and goes a long way to making the game better if you buy into it: The Reapers partially designed everything and forced civilization to develop along their directives again and again throughout aeons. What if the Reapers themselves are the ones who actually designed the Crucible? Doesn't that logically follow? Think about what the two options that firing it do: One merges organics and synthetics, which is seemingly one of their goals, as much as they profess to hate organic life. The other takes away their free will and enforces control over them---essentially, it tells the machine to stop malfunctioning. Finally, they realize that destroying the relays will blow them all up. So the plot of Mass Effect is a group of frustrated and malfunctioning machines desperately trying to become more truly "alive", stop malfunctioning, or finally die. And you, the player, ultimately have to play by their rules and pick for them. And if you don't, gently caress you, they'll wait several more aeons and find someone who finally will.
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Sep 21, 2022 18:17
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Endorph posted:its definitely the most interesting read on rean and crow's whole relationship, honestly. even besides obvious jokes about shipping it just kind of works as a narrative throughline. I'd go a step farther and say it's the only narrative reason for CS to be four games - one for each stage of their relationship
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Sep 21, 2022 19:33
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MythosDragon posted:I'll never understand hating the curse without also hating the plots of FC, SC, and Zero. Why is mind control that makes sense since it's powered by a godly being the cutoff point when mostly unexplained bullshit mind control by weird looking normal dudes is fine. Like, the series has been built on mind control since day 1, kinda weird for it to be a problem now. I explained it like 10 posts up. In Sky FC/SC, take away Weissman's mind-control of Sky FC's big bad, and his underlying motivation remains. In Sky the Third, he even says so himself. You don't need an external factor. In Zero, it's plausible to believe drugs can alter behavior because that's something which has been documented and observed in real life. It's just an exaggerated version in that game. Plus, the drugged characters aren't characters, they're just being puppeted by the real bad guy, who has his own motivation (the motivation is "he's loving crazy", but that's still a motivation). I will say though, that those other things you mentioned don't help CS 4, because the more you repeat the similar elements and plot beats, the staler they get. quote:Also personally, I'm a hell of a lot more angry about the few deaths with TONS of wasted potential, than any death that was faked out. I'm sick of hearing about Leonhardt's Carnage we never see in game, I want a door where we play as him going full carnage like when he saves Renne. Arianrhod is a strong contender for character death with the most wasted potential I have ever seen, and the absolute worst part is that she literally only needed one more day to give closure to her like, 5 children and maybe spirit boyfriend. I didn't have a problem with that part. (CS 4) She wasn't really much of a character, just an obstacle. She didn't get any meaningful characterization until the start of CS 4, Act 3, and even then it wasn't much, so I couldn't bring myself to care. Honestly I was more glad than anything, because by that point, it was clear there was nothing else the writers could think to do with "this is the strongest fighter in the world, EVER." Her appearances had already gotten repetitive. Veryslightlymad posted:What are you all talking about? I'm talking about (CS4) Alan, and Wads, and Elliot's friends, and the mayor of Alster, and Miguel, and and a guy who literally changes his opinion mid-sentence during the newspaper survey quest, and the parents of a girl in Saint-Arkh who go stark-raving mad with curse-induced nationalism, and probably a bunch of others I'm missing. I'm talking about the Curse being the cause of Hamel and the conquest of Crossbell and North Ambria and other places. I'm talking about it being a convenient external factor to hand-wave away the idea that the people of Erebonia would object to endless war, because thanks to the curse, now they'll just love eternal war instead. Cyouni posted:Also every time it comes up in a side quest. Here's the literal one time it's used as an excuse: Victor. (CS4) Victor being mind-controlled so there could be a "let's you and her fight" between Victor and Laura was the second-lowest point of the game, beaten only by the awful reincarnation nonsense. With Osborne, it's not so much "used as an excuse", but the curse is still the reason. It still feels like a cop-out for the game to have the main villain's goal end up being "get defeated". See, Osborne really used to be a good guy and he sold his soul for noble reasons, and he's only doing this because of the curse. It's the problem of an external factor being the driving motivation, where if you removed that factor, the character's actions would completely change.
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Sep 21, 2022 20:46
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Delphisage posted:Man, reading about all the times where The story is the main selling point of the Trails series so that's what people are usually going to talk about, and when you have a 1,000+ hour long story there is going to be numerous points that are contentious. If there was more gameplay to the series beyond the fights in between cutscenes then perhaps people would talk about the gameplay more.
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Sep 21, 2022 22:27
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Ytlaya posted:Is it ever explained why the curse doesn't affect most Important PCs/NPCs? Like during Reverie (which I'm playing now), there's a scene when the curse comes back in Crossbell and influences everyone...except for the PCs and their close NPC associates, who are just like "everyone else is acting crazy!" I kind of hate that I just hovered over this, because it means I'm not going to touch Reverie. gently caress the curse and gently caress them for even bringing it back.
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Sep 21, 2022 22:57
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Saoshyant posted:I kind of hate that I just hovered over this, because it means I'm not going to touch Reverie. gently caress the curse and gently caress them for even bringing it back. for the record, from what i remember the curse is only in one of the segments of the game and itd be the weakest segment even without the curse
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Sep 21, 2022 23:02
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