Brank's Art

Hi! This blog is about my science-fantasy setting called Song of Vakoth. It's been an ongoing project for about two years off and on now, and has been through a lot of reworks. It started as a small-scale, hard-sci-fi setting focused on humanity's internal divisions and interactions with aliens; but has now evolved into a galactic-scale, space fantasy setting focusing on authoritarianism and it's horrors, and more specifically follows a character's path towards open rebellion.

//What is Vakoth? Vakoth is the setting's name for the Milky Way. Humans are not the dominant species in the galaxy, nor the most numerous; and this is reflected in both the names of the galaxy and the places within it; the galactic basic being unrelated to earth-originated languages (although english is used as an out-of-character placeholder), and a variety of other things.

//What is it about? Fascism, Totalitarianism, and other political evils. Centralized regimes dictating the fates of billions in pointless, multi-generation wars; fantastical discoveries being used to further military-industrial complexes; and how the 'good guys' often become the 'bad guys' with enough time.

//Aside from worldbuilding, what is the story? The actual story follows Ayna Whitlocke, a soldier in the Coalition of Local Stars; one of two major human factions in the galaxy, centralized in the Sol system, and the remnants of a once-democratic alliance of nations turned cultlike regime. Without going too deep into future plot I may write, it follows the path of her and those close to her breaking from the government's propaganda and joining an ever-growing resistance movement sponsored by the Coalition's mortal enemy, and also how rebellion isn't always so clean-cut and pretty.

//How will it be formatted? I'm not quite sure yet. After this post, I'm considering making all lore-posts from the in-character perspective of an extradimensional documentation organization with dubious canonicity to the actual setting; aptly named the Archives (with sub-groups named after the region they are monitoring, e.g. Vakoth Archive). Not 100% sure yet.

another slime girl comm!

Oh. My god. Why did Seasun do this?

Okay. For context, I was one of the players from the last OBT. Back then, the tutorial was a little clunky, but mostly fine. You had the space elevator section, the enormous bossfight, and one NPC tutorial match to get the player started. Overall, it worked well. It was a little jank, especially lacking in narrative tissue, but that's not strictly necessary for a tutorial, and it did its job well.

Seasun took a look at this, thought about it, and then jammed one extra mandatory single player mission and two mandatory multiplayer missions in there with maybe *one* opportunity to pause the game. I don't understand who wanted this or why, because it's terrible. I genuinely had my girlfriends quit on this game mid-tutorial because it was that bad (and because of the sexism, but believe me, we'll get there later too). Even previously-functional sections have random add-ons with no clear rhyme or reason. Why is there a pointless, clunky on-rails shooting section during the space elevator sequence now? Who thought it was a good idea to force the player to repeat the ConPoint (not using that other abbreviation) multiplayer ♥♥♥♥ twice? Genuinely. This is so long and so padded for no good reason, and it is at most giving you a rudimentary understanding of the game mechanics with no real depth. Add region-locked save files to this, and you have a recipe for just absolute ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ garbage."

Okay, okay; let's back up a little. It's a Korean game; of course it's going to be a little sexist. Misogyny is so bad over on that peninsula that there's an ongoing culture war between the incel freaks and most of the women in the country. At the same time, this is absurd. This game is missing a genuinely baffling number of character creator QoL features for seemingly no reason.

For example:

- Why can't you select skintone from a gradient map instead of being locked to like seven options and their sliders? - Why are the body sliders so limited in such frustrating ways? - Why is the fashion so completely different for the masc and femme character bases? Like, I get that Seasun treats the gender binary like they're two different species, which is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ strange on its own, but why is there such a gap in fanservice? - You're telling me they could give the boys a chestplate and not the girls? - Why am I wearing heels in a hundred-ton death machine while they're just in a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ bodyglove? - In what world is it okay to wear piercings under a military issue helmet? - How do I get rid of this stupid scoliosis back and get my camera out of my character's crotch? Who came up with this? - Why did they add *nothing* to this since the OBT?