#diamind

process and inspo vvv

Sally's Outstanding Adventure!

A point-and-click adventure game that starts out looking like a cute little edutainment game in a bright, cheerful nonsense world. The main cast consists of Sally herself, a little girl who enjoys exploring, Miss Morning, the game's narrator who Sally is able to hear and talk to, a large hairy creature with a surly disposition named Grumfrey who accompanies Sally on her adventures to keep her safe, and Scrub, a strange, vaguely ducklike-creature who stays in Sally's house. In the game, Sally goes out on her biggest adventure yet, heading out further than ever before. But as the journey goes on, strange things begin happening, and dark cracks begin to appear in the happy facade of this world.

As the game goes on, it's revealed in bits and pieces that almost everything Sally thinks she knows about her world, and herself, is wrong. She's actually Survey Android 13, a malfunctioning research drone deployed to study a hostile alien jungle, with the malfunction being the result of damage from an incident a few months ago, which horribly scrambled her programing and traumatized her to the point where she ran away from reality. Miss Morning is actually her base's computer, who developed the narrator persona so that they could relay instructions for Sally's research missions in a manner that could be understood and accepted through the delusion. Scrub is actually a floor cleaning device. Grumfrey turns out to be a massive, dangerous apex predator native to the jungle that happened to decide to use SA-13's base as its den. The big adventure they're on is a mission to find and rescue the crew of a ship that crashed nearby.

And yet, even with the reveal that her world is a lot darker than she thought it was, there's still plenty of light as well. The whole reason the illusion is breaking is because the scientists who deployed her finally managed to develop a patch that would fix her programing. It was supposed to do its work all in one go while she was in standby mode, and would have if it hadn't been for the rescue mission requiring she reactivate early. Morning gradually drops the narrator schtick as the game goes on, with their instructions becoming more direct and computer-like, but their tone stays just as kind and gentle as it was at the start, still giving little bits of encouragement when she stumbles and congratulating her on tasks well done, because they genuinely care for the little robot they're in charge of, to the point where during moments where Sally's in genuine danger they're as terrified as a parent seeing their child in such a situation. Scrub is...well, its honestly just a Space Roomba but that's really not too different from before. And despite how terrifying Grumfrey's true nature is, he really is Sally's big, grumpy, protective friend, and stays just as helpful in the second half of the game as he was in the first.

They do manage to rescue the survivors of the crash, and Sally ends up accepting her restored reality...though she does decide to keep her new name.

Diamind 6: Stars Go Out

A space-age JRPG about a young man named Cole going on an adventure to save his galaxy from two major threats; a multi-system empire that's attempting to expand their rule across the entire galaxy (with Cole actually being part of an official Resistance that formed to fend off this empire), and the titular Diamind, an ancient powerful demon that awakens every 10,000 years and attempts to bring about the apocalypse (all the Diamind games take place in the same universe, with Diamind being a major threat in all of them). Cole has a mysterious connection to Diamind that gives him unusual powers and marks him as the only person who can re-seal Diamind when it awakens.

One of the major reoccurring antagonists in the game is a scientist with a grudge against Cole and an interest-bordering-on-obsession with his Diamind powers. He betrays the resistance during the prologue, beginning Cole's adventure in the first place, and shows up periodically to cause trouble for the party. One of the most interesting things about him is that he actually does figure out how Cole's powers work, using that knowledge to create a robot with all of Cole's weapons and abilities, including a forced connection to Diamind so it could genuinely have all of his abilities. The party calls it RepliCole because it pisses the scientist off. It's a reoccurring boss throughout the game, until after the fifth or sixth time where the party manages to shut it down and take it back to resistance HQ.

This becomes relevant again about 3/4ths of the way through the game when Cole is mortally wounded and their best chance of saving him is to upload his mind into RepliCole. So now he's a robot, but there's no time for existential crises 'cause we got a galaxy to save!

Anyway, we've got typical JRPG climax stuff after that. Empire is toppled, demon is sealed, day is saved, Cole's still a robot. Roll Credits.

EMMA ( @diamind​ ) said     “ well, if it isn’t the feeling i’ve been trying to avoid. ”