Wire Witch Violet

Mina the Hollower, the Castelvania flavored Link's Awakening styled game from the developers of Shovel Knight is finally out, and people are both freaking out about how hard it is, and comparing it a lot to From Soft games. The comparisons do merit making, and it is absolutely a game that's going to kick your teeth in when you first start playing, but I think the lens you really have to look at it through is that this is a game from the same developer in the same headspace as Plague of Shadows.

I'm kinda surprised that that's the case honestly. I had a chance to talk to the developers a while during a slow moment in a big anniversary marathon stream they were running, and they seemed frankly traumatized by how people reacted to the first Shovel Knight... sequel? Whatever we're calling them. It is, of course, the one where you play as Plague Knight, who like Mina here is kind of an out of touch nerd with some real weird somewhat awkward swoopy movement tech that takes a while to really get down, and you're asked to get a handle on it pretty damn forcefully right up front. And also like Plague Knight, once you get the flow of that movement the game really opens up, and you pretty quickly start to fill out a MASSIVE subscreen full of accessories and such that leave you super well-off and really open the rest of the game up. I'll come back to the movement and how to deal with it, but I have some other points to get to first.

Doing my whole stream every single game I ever got in some bundle or giveaway thing, I've developed a really short fuse when it comes to Souls-like mechanics. There's three big ones, and they're all relevant to discussing Mina here. First we've got the whole semi-consumable healing items. These I don't mind seeing. Mina has something that's a bit like Dark Souls Estus Flasks and Bloodborne's thing I've only heard vague descriptions of where you basically smack your HP back out of enemies, but... let me just talk about the actual implementation here.

We've got checkpoints. Touch one, it's where you start from when you die. Hop into it and you've got a little rest stop. The downside to these (unless you're grinding) is that entering one respawns everything out in the world, which otherwise are surprisingly good about staying dead even if you leave the area. The upside is you get a full heal, you can swap out your primary weapon (once you have more than the one you pick at the start), change which cool accessories you have equipped, pull banked cash of the ATM essentially, and recover back up to your max (3 initially) of healing vials you can use whenever. The catch with these is... they're empty.

Once you've taken damage, you've got the red part of your HP bar, representing the HP you have left, and the empty portion. If you hit enemies, or pick up certain items, this fills in with yellow. Pop a vial (which locks you in place for a moment) and all the yellow in your bar turns red. Oh and if you get hit more you lose both yellow and red HP bar juice. So there's a lot of risk/reward with it. If I'm at like 50% HP, even if I'm in the middle of fighting a boss or something, I can pretty reliably fill that, back off, heal to full... but then I'm down a vial until I hit a checkpoint or find a replacement under a rock or in a bush or whatever (they're like, Zelda fairy rare). OR I can play riskier, let myself get real low, see if I can farm up a full bar of yellow at 5% HP or whatever and get a full heal out of that same vial... OR I can realize that's not happening and just drink what I've got, bring myself back up to 50% or 75% or whatever.

It's a bit of a complex mechanic, but again it is VERY flexible, and it's honestly pretty freaking generous compared to... really anything at all that doesn't let you just buy a stack of 99 potions and use them from the pause menu or whatever. You can just fully top off your HP 3 times between all your visits to check points, maybe even more, especially if you're in a dungeon or something! Yeah you need to whack a skeleton or something to get the vial juice before you drink it, but unless you're getting wrecked by pits and spikes somewhere you can get a good bit pretty consistently (to be fair, that DOES happen, but to also be fair, it's pretty generous spreading the pick-up vial juice near those).

It IS harsh and stingy if you compare it directly to Dark Souls, specifically, where you have your per-check-point visit pile of healing at all times, all filled up for you, and well, yeah. I hate to break it to you if this is new information, but in stark contrast to the way they market themselves, the Souls games are actually super easy games for babies. They give you super generous resources to heal up with and big ol' shields and parries and dodge rolls and all the monsters have these big exaggerated like 3 second wind-ups on their attacks, and pretty much everything in them has absolutely no answer at all to it if you ever think to use ranged attacks, and if all else fails they have these systems where you can full on just invite someone from the internet to hop into your game and kill a boss you're stuck on for you. Other games don't let you heal up unless you find a healing item mid-level and you have to use it right there, or they don't let you heal at all until you beat a boss at the end of a level, or you might even just die from a single hit. All these modern systems are being super generous, really.

Anyway, the next thing I see people getting upset about in Mina here besides the healing vials starting empty is: a bunch of people a traumatized by the sort of corpse runs they make you do in the Souls games, things cribbing from the Souls games (or for the older crowd, Diablo 2) are out there screaming about how awful it is that "when you die in Mina you lose all your bones and have to make a corpse run to get them back!" Bones being a resource that acts both as money and experience points here. And I want to be very very clear about this, it's possibly the most important point I'm going to make here:

People talking about losing their bones when they die in Mina the Hollower and having to do corpse runs to get them back are lying.

It's weird! Like, I kinda get it? There is certainly A Resource you drop whenever you die, and you can get it back if you return to where you died, maybe kill the thing that took it, but you do not lose bones when you die! You DO lose all the bones you have on hand when you get a game over and have to continue. That is a very very different concept!

See, Mina kinda brings back this concept we used to have in games (and honestly still do if you play a wider selection of games) called lives. Well, OK, here they're called Sparks, and they're actually significantly more generous than lives. You start off with one spark, out of a maximum of one, which is admittedly pretty harsh, but you can eventually (pretty darn early in the game, even) raise that maximum quite a bit, and there's lots of ways to fill back up to that maximum. Every time you up your spark max, you get full sparks. Every time you level up, you get full sparks. When you game over, you of course get full sparks. And as mentioned, if you can get back to where you died (maybe with the caveat of having to avenge yourself first) you can take back the spark you lost when you died there. The avenging yourself bit is where it gets particularly generous too. Die to an environmental hazard or whatever, just get back to where you were, there's a one up right by where you died, essentially. Get killed by a boss or that one freakin' bird, OK, it's going to hold that spark hostage until you kill it... BUT, generally, only that specific one! Die to the same boss again, it's inventory is too full to take another life from you, you can get that one back before starting the fight again, you're good to go forever as long as you can consistently get back to the boss without dying, and if you can't do that... you know, maybe go somewhere else? Or grind in some fashion?

Again, when you first start, it does seem kinda really harsh. I need to grind up some bones to start upgrading. I have to go somewhere scary to do that (not actually true, you can get a LOT in the basic hub town), when I go to that scary place I keep getting killed by this big freaky knight or some jerk crow or whatever, it takes my only spare life hostage, so I have to go back for that, and NOW I lost all the bones I was grinding up. But as soon as you have a second one, you're pretty much never going to see the game over screen again.

And... OK sorry if I'm over-explaining this, but it seems to be a REAL stumbling block with people who already have the game, and misinformation about it is scaring a bunch of people away, but even if you are in a situation where you just keep losing your only spark somewhere, it's not actually a big deal? If you died to something you're not prepared to handle, just let it go. It's an extra life. It doesn't have any value beyond being a life you just lost (technically this isn't actually true- there's barriers you have to pop sparks into to pass, they're refunded when you leave, mostly it's a way to gate certain shops off until you're a bit further into the game). You can leave it. Especially if you have to grind before you're ready to head back in there... the act of grinding will give you the spark back anyway. If you were really close to a big purchase or level up, you still are. That resource is still untouched. You can get back out to town even if you're deep in a dangerous area because this game loves shortcuts like Etrian Odyssey loves shortcuts (and yeah, Souls games do too, but they're stingier about it, and it's one of the many good things in those games that people aren't constantly cribbing from for some reason).

And it's not like you ever actually need to be carrying around a copious amount of bones on you! Remember how I mentioned the checkpoint ATMs? Yeah so there's both bones (which you lose on game over) and bonestone (which you don't). Sometimes you find the latter, it goes into a bank, you can pull it out as needed, or direct spend it in shops. We've also got this oddly Zelda 2 style experience system. You've got 4 stats, sorta. Attack, Defense, Side Weapon Attack, and Big Bonestone Deposit. The second you hit enough bones to level one up, you get he delightful message Bone Up! and you can either level something up that you can afford, or wait until the next-lowest comes around. AND one of those options is just to convert everything to bonestone right then. So if you're worried about bone loss from a game over, just... spend what you have on hand (maybe dip into the bank to top off) or bank your next level up (which is already giving you a full heal and all your lives back), and tada, now you have nothing to lose and who cares if you game over? There's infinite continues and you don't lose anything else here. You just need to evict the anxiety monster in your head lying and saying it's a corpse run mechanic.

And finally, we have the one thing that's admittedly pretty hard to learn in this game, and even more so if you're Souls-like brained. That movement tech I mentioned right at the top. Mina has a pretty simple control scheme really. You've got four face buttons. One attacks, one uses sub-weapons, one pops a healing vial, and the other is a bit contextual based on how long you hold it. If you tap it, you jump. It's like identical jump physics to the feather in Link's Awakening by the way. If you hold it, you still jump, and when you land from that jump, you dive underground and can burrow around until either you let go, or... I wanna say it's 2 or 3 seconds pass (plus however long it takes you to get out from under a desk or whatever). While you're burrowing, most things can't hurt you, and you move extra fast. When you unburrow, you jump again, and if you're underground for at least a second or so, you build up a charge and you can go twice as far on that jump. It's hard to get used to, with the speedy underground part being flanked by the two jumps and all, but you get used to it. The important thing to remember with it though is that burrowing is NOT a dodge roll!

I hate corpse runs. They're just frustrating and stressful and discourage just taking a break and stepping away for a while if you're hitting a wall in a game, and I genuinely can't think of an exception where they add something to a game. If you're designing a game, I am comfortable saying to you, hey, don't put corpse runs in it. However, there is something that has infected the minds of damn near every game designer it feels like since Dark Souls was a really big hit that I hate coming across even more than I hate corpse runs. Reaction based combat.

The Souls games themselves, I need to stress, get a pass from me on this. They are inherently very slow plodding thoughtful experiences where everything kinda moves like it's underwater and you've got your head on a swivel looking for stuff that can kill you while you're focused on the thing trying to kill you, it all works very smoothly there. But generally, the way you fight anything in a souls game is, you just kinda get up in its face, you wait until it tries to attack you, you use some sort of active defense move, generally a dodge roll or a parry, you thus avoid all damage, and the enemy is now in this defenseless state where you can get in a solid hit or three before it recovers. It's kind of turn-based combat in action games really. And again, I hate it. It's a momentum killer, I get bored waiting for it to be my turn, it kinda removes all other interesting tactical stuff I might otherwise do. It's awful and puts me off most games.

But, you know, I'm kind of an outlier here. Most people, seems like, have been all to happy to have just a steady diet of like nothing but reaction based combat in everything since... holy crap, 2011!? Yeah there are kids playing games who have never known anything else. And yes I know it's 2009 if I go back to Demon's Souls, but that wasn't enough of a hit for EVERYONE to start copying them. Anyway, point is, it encourages really bad habits that make it really rough when you switch over to a game with active combat. This is also why Souls-heads had such a hard time with Silksong and rushed to switch to the Hollow Knight combat style in it.

But yeah. Mina has healing like a Souls game, and shortcuts, and things to retrieve where you died, but if you go into it expecting combat like a Souls game, it's going to be a problem. If you stand around in a boss' attack range, wait for it to attack, and hold that jump/burrow button, what is going to happen is that attack is going to hit you and do a lot of damage. The jump before the burrow is the opposite of having I-frames. You need to train yourself all the way out of that one (or I guess get the shield, I think the manual mentioned it has an active parry, I have no intention of using the thing and I'm maining the whip like a good girl).

When I say this is a game with active combat, I mean you really never want to let enemies take the lead. A generally good tactic that's just really intuitive from the start is of course to burrow between an enemy's legs, pop up behind it, smack it once or twice, and burrow again while it comes back for you. This is particularly true for these knights that show up pretty early on, what with having shields to block attacks from the front. But you don't just square up with them. Those knights in particular have sight lines, like the guards in A Link to the Past. When you first approach them (and this is true for most enemies really) they won't notice you. You can sneak around behind them, get the first hit in. Once they're aware of you, either because you just hit them or were otherwise noticed, they're going to try to run up and attack you. The time to do the burrow thing is when they're approaching, not when they're starting to attack. So, you actively start combat by hitting them, they react by trying to close and counter. Before they can do that, you get the hell out of there (jump away right after you attack, burrow to a good position). With the knights I mentioned, they WILL lose track of you if you go straight under them from front to back, so you can then rinse and repeat. With other things, just getting the hell away to the far side of the screen is often the better play, or an intercept path for the damn birds.

The end result is probably going to look very similar to that reactive combat I hate if someone's looking over your shoulder. Very strike dodge strike dodge, but you need to be the aggressor, and be on the move again before they can even try to hit back. And you know, once you have that down, it's still a pretty challenging game. It doesn't pull its punches on the tricky platforming like jumping between moving platform with spikes shooting out all over and maybe you're dodging a freaking Phanto from Super Mario Bros. 2 But yeah, learn the flow, don't try to dodge-and-counter, don't think you have to go recover sparks, and remember it's a game where you can totally grind and it pays off fast (especially if you talk to that skull headed gardener early on a couple times and get the bones-are-just-constantly-dropping trinket) and the initially super steep difficulty curve flattens out in a real satisfying way. Or you can always swallow your pride and mess with the literally 100 or so finicky little difficulty settings this game has because it's just a tad overcooked by that 6 year dev cycle.

This is one of those topics where I feel a little self-conscious even bringing it up is just going to result in a bunch of eye-rolling "whatEVER grandma!" sort of responses, but I've found myself thinking a lot lately about how when I was a kid, you could really play with a computer in a way that's hard to even describe now. So here I am, here to describe it, and ask if there's modern equivalents to this stuff I'm just unaware of.

Obviously, you can play games on a computer. That's not what I'm talking about. At least not unless you are really seriously involved in some modding scenes anyway. What I'm talking about is a variety of software... I don't know of any actual acknowledged catch-all term for it, and most of the examples that really jump out at me betray my upbringing as a bit of an Apple girl, and of a certain age, but look, I'm going to just start getting specific now.

Logo Writer- Back in the '80s, a lot of schools had big ol' piles of computers donated to them, and realizing that computers were a pretty important thing it was increasingly likely people would have access to over our lives, kids needed to be taught what they could do with them. But there wasn't actually all that much you could practically do with them yet. There were games of course, and we had access to some of those, particularly when they could pretend to be educational. Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, O'Dell Lake, Number Munchers, that sort of thing, but nobody really bought that that wasn't just giving kids a break to play games. Past that, we had word processors, so let's teach kids how to type properly, and do fancy formatting stuff like bold and italic text and so on. And later we had early mouse-based art stuff like Superpaint out there. Past that though, there wasn't really a lot you could show a kid. I guess there were probably spreadsheet programs, but we can't go showing kids a way to avoid writing out all their math problems by hand, and otherwise, any sort of software you'd want you kinda had to code for yourself.

Enter Logo, which is technically just a programming language, and weirdly specialized at that, but in kind of a fun way, for kids. See, it was also a text parser based art program. And yeah, that's a bit of a weird thing to make, but it's kind of a fun thing to play with.

We've got a cursor called "the turtle." It isn't necessarily visible at all times, because it's going to obscure your work when it is, but when it's visible, yeah, looks like a turtle. Bit of a body, head where it's facing, four little limbs. The turtle has a pen which is either down (and thus drawing as the turtle moves) or up (so it'll move without drawing), and you give it commands like "forward 10" to move forward 10 steps, or "left 90" to rotate 90 degrees counterclockwise. And there was a repeat command, so if you want to draw a nice little circle, you can just type something like "repeat 360 [forward 1 right 1]" and tada.

What was really cool though, to me anyway, is that in addition to these and a few other neat commands (color changes, flood fill, thicker pen lines), you could just create new commands on the fly. Just type "edit" followed by the name you want to give your custom command, write out what you want that command to do, close the editor, and tada, you can just type "circle" now to draw your little circle, or whatever. Play around a bit more, you can work out how to put parameters in there, get custom sizes or whatever.

If you just sit yourself down with it, by the way here's a free version you can play with in a browser, maybe do a quick search for some basic commands because the built in help command is a bit overwhelming, and soon enough you should be making cool little spiral patterns and such. It does lose a lot of charm with a modern processor doing it all in an eyeblink though, back in the day you'd end up watching it step through. Again though, neat little way to play with the computer. You accidentally end up learning some programming stuff, defining functions and such, maybe you pick up some geometry doing all this repeated angle change stuff. It's neat.

Hypercard- Our next stop is sort of a weird mishmash of everything you could do with a computer. Text, graphics, sound, some programming. It's called Hypercard because it's one of the earlier implementations of the whole hypertext concept that's both the H and the T in HTML, and obviously that's where the Hyper- part of the name comes from. The -card part is for index cards. The general metaphor being that when you make a new THING in Hypercard, we call it a stack (of cards), where every screen worth of stuff is a card. You can have as many as you want (actually there was probably some limit but it was pretty damn generous), and on any given card you just kinda had the same sort of toolbox you get today in something like MS Paint. Draw stuff, write stuff, whatever... but you could also toss in buttons, customize those however you liked, and set what they did with a pretty simple and easy to learn scripting language. So a simple thing you could do is what feels today like making a website. You start on this card, we've got buttons acting as links to various other cards, but instead of having to do a bunch of nasty table code and uploading image files, you could just freehand draw all over everything, move text around, play with fonts, whatever.

Anyway, if you played around with Hypercard for a bit, one of the first things you'd likely work out is it's actually a really easy environment if you want to just full on design a graphic adventure game. And people did that a LOT. Myst, quite famously, is just a hypercard stack. I'm not sure if the MacVenture games (Shadowgate, Deja Vu, The Uninvited) were too, but I sure did sit down and recreate one of them in an afternoon once using Hypercard. Super fun thing to play around with. You accidentally learn object oriented programming, it's still just a better bit of software for doing multimedia stuff than anything I can think of to this day. Sadly I don't have a handy in-browser link for this one, but hypercard.org has a demo of someone messing with it and a bunch of links for emulation/source code/clones to poke through.

ResEdit- Now this one, I feel like if my mother had any sort of computer savvy at all, I would never have been allowed anywhere near, and it wasn't exactly a stand-alone thing. Basically, one of the key differences between early Macs and other OSes was that on a Mac, a given piece of software was always a nice neat self-contained little program. Installers were kind of hilarious. You'd just pop in a disk, open it in the file browser, there's the program, there's some folders with no icons or whatever spelling out "yeah just drag this to your computer." That big directory of supporting files you'd have crowded around the .exe in a DOS installation of something would all be tucked away inside, invisibly, in a structure called the Resource Fork.

... and ResEdit let you just poke around and edit that in a nice little GUI.

Here for instance, we have a screenshot of someone using ResEdit, on ResEdit, to redraw the icon for the program itself, and also set the mask for what parts of it are clickable. You could do this with all the graphics to everything, relabel all the drop-down menus, mess with their fonts, blindly poke around in random data structure tables. You could just completely customize or generally break any piece of software on your computer. It was great. I've got a dusty old Mac Classic somewhere where all the folders have been replaced with shiny ominous orbs and the menus are all in drop-shadow outline text and I also had like 30 system extensions to do dumb little things like have a cat on your desktop chasing your mouse around and eyes on the menu bar staring at it, and there was this thing called The Talking Moose I had set to pop up a little cartoon moose in the corner of the screen every 10 seconds to tell a real dumb joke with the same voice synth Steven Hawking used. Again, playing with the computer. Learning how stuff worked under the hood by messing around with weird software.

On a more modern front, earlier this week I learned about BrokenNES. It's a weird art project of a thing that kind of works like a way more literal NES Remix. There's a list of achievements for a pretty wide selection of classic NES games, ranging from "get a flower in Super Mario Bros. to "take out Dr. Wily" in each Mega Man game. And you play these via an ever-changing hacked together emulator built from code snippets of, I think, various rather early emulation projects, just kinda frankensteined together. (Almost) every time you complete an achievement, you get a collection of new options for emulating this and that chip, along with random graphical filters and background patterns and other stupid junk, and a new enforced challenge where you're locked into say, this buggy clock speed code paired with this PPU emulation but you can do whatever you like with the sound. It's a neat thing to mess around with (and has an option to just open all the options without making a weird metagame out of it), but honestly the strategy of the intended path is neat. You wanna keep some real easy challenges uncompleted for when you get stuck with a really unusable mess to quickly clear them out, maybe save twitchier challenges for when it's running at like 1/3 normal speed. Messing with janky emulators was never part of my childhood, but I feel like it's in the same spirit as these things I'm talking up here.

But again, sadly, I feel like this whole concept is just lost now. My PC is BASICALLY a game console. My phone is so locked down I'm unclear how to really go through all the files I have saved to it. Playing through the Pixel Remaster of the first 6 Final Fantasy games, it's been driving me up the wall that I can't mess with the window background colors in the SNES games. The initial release of 6 in particular gave you a whole bunch of different complex patterns and just let you directly set the RGB value of every color in the palette for them to whatever you wanted. You could make really nice tasteful expressive marble looking backgrounds or eyesearing awfulness, and learn about additive color while you were at it. Like how if you want yellow you can just crank up red and green (look it was a fun thread to write and I realized I hadn't linked it here).

Recently I was looking at some footage for a fancy new remake of a game from the late 90s which, by random coincidence, I was at that very moment prepping a setup to stream the original two days after I'm writing this, and seeing side by side comparisons I feel like we really need to have a serious talk as game designers about draw distance fog.

For quite a long time, depicting things way off in the distance was barely a thing in games. Back before it was easy to do polygonal graphics, scaling, and resolutions were real low, almost everyone just gave every game a camera angle where it wasn't relevant. At first it was pretty much all top-down, or directly from one side with no real background going on, and most of the way into the 90s that was still broadly true. Sometimes you'd split the difference between those angles, pitched down 30 or 45 degrees from the ground plane or so, but rendering a horizon stuff had to vanish over was super rare for decades, and when people got flirtier with it in the mid-90s, everyone was using a pretty harsh cutoff of a horizon, similar to how games avoiding the issue would only load things in when they were within one screen-length of the current frame.

Eventually though, people started to really embrace the hell out of polygonal graphics, and we had a whole hardware generation where everyone was doing 3D on systems that had really severe representations on how many polygons they could render at a time. So people needed to come up with some tricks to keep the total number of models loaded in at a given time way way down, and honestly, there were a lot of great tricks people came up with for this. You had pre-rendered backgrounds of often claustrophobic spaces frequently changing to new screens...

...or 2D assets on polygonal backgrounds, with very few vertices to deal with...

... little diorama areas floating in abstract voids...

... continued use of those real severe horizons and angles cameras...

... clever level geometry where, subtley, there's always some walls obscuring the long view (and yes, this is an example from the next generation out)...

... but the one people remember, mostly because it was the favorite of games people wanted to just shove out in a hurry, was to have a limited range past which nothing is rendered, and obscure it with darkness or heavy fog.

In more recent years, we have largely reached a point where these tricks are no longer necessary on a technical level. We can push enough polygons now that if you can't actually render out as far as the eye can see, you can at least fake it with lower fidelity models for anything way the hell out there. And almost immediately after this became a viable plan, most developers jumped right in there with the crisp clear infinite draw distance... and in a whole lot of cases, it made everything look super fake and plastic-y.

Because here's the thing! Things in real life don't actually stay crisp and clear like that when viewed from afar! Air, even under the best of circumstances, isn't 100% transparent. Things that are really far away DO have their color wash out and you DO hit a point where they're just too far out to see! And yeah, there's a lot of games out there made by people who just kinda couldn't be bothered with thoughtful artistic considerations on how to deal with only being able to draw so much at once got ridiculous with impenetrable walls of fog like 2 meters out from your character, and yeah, if you want to remake one of those, you should push that back. But most games still worth talking about DID really consider what they were doing, and built any fog they were using into their aesthetic. I already used Silent Hill as THE most obvious example, but here's why this one's on my mind today:

This right here is probably the most memorable set piece level from Star Fox 64. Aside from being a big obvious Independence Day homage, the deal here is they just wanted to have an absolutely massive chaotic battle, with dozens of targets, and dozens of friendlies to watch out for, where it can get really confusing who's who. Now sure, for technical reasons, they had to bust out a lot of fog, and I think they may have also just rendered almost everything in solid black to save on texture RAM. But they also designed the whole level around it. Within the context of the game, visibility during this fight is terrible. Heavy heavy clouds at sunset. Smog. The air feels thick and choking. Characters comment on it being hard to tell friend from foe. There's a big ol' mothership casting a huge shadow making it that much worse. They built a whole aesthetic around their limitations, and it really worked.

Anyway here's how it looks in the Switch 2 remake:

They haven't completely eliminated the fog here, so it's not the WORST example I could have gone with, but they made it a hell of a lot less thick and oppressive, and it really drastically changes the entire vibe of the level, I'd say for the worse. And people keep doing this EVERY time they remake a game from this era. That and replacing any sort of dithering, making everything all eerily smooth. Embrace that fuzz people, it has character!

Let's say you're living in some sort of normal functional society, just as a thought exercise. You're in some small social circle, your coworkers, your gaming group, a family dinner, whatever. For some reason, something goes down between you and someone else. Maybe you said something to offend them, maybe they did something really messed up to you, maybe it's a misunderstanding where nobody is really at fault, but the important thing is there's some tension and animosity between you and someone else in the group.

Sometimes, you can work that out. If you're going to definitely both be existing in that space, you'll have to work something out. If there's a healthy social dynamic at play, maybe someone else in the group and play peacemaker. But let's say this is a worst-case scenario. The other party here, either formally or socially, has more power here than you do, and you are cast out of the group. Your boss fires you, your gaming group would prefer to keep the creep who's been sexually harassing you around than confront that, your family kicks you out for being queer, whatever.

This is a bad situation, obviously. Maybe you'd like to patch things up with the other person in this direct conflict, but that's not happening. Almost certainly you'd still like to spend time with other people in that group, and maybe even vice versa, but that's not happening either.

Because this is a normal functioning society, you have the ability to move on, find a new group, eventually, kinda like that old one. Lost your job? Look for a new one. Can't play with those friends? Hang around the game store, see if anyone's short a person. Abandoned by your family? That one's trickier, but manageable.

But also, you're still in this society with this whole group of people. Even if you're respectfully avoiding them, at some point, years later, you're going to bump into people again. The context is going to be different. Maybe that group kinda dissolved, you run into someone from it again and you can easily reconnect. Heck maybe you run into the person who tossed you out and now that some time's gone by you can patch things up. Could be a long rough road, but there's always some chance for healing to happen because you're still part of the same society as these people.

Unfortunately, I don't live in one of those. I, for all practical purposes, live on the internet. And on the internet, there are much worse cases for how his can go down.

On the most basic level, those inevitable moments where you bump into people again aren't guaranteed to happen. There's a pretty finite number of contexts where you can "bump into someone" on the internet. You have to both be in some shared chatroom sort of thing, or social media network, or forum, and all of these have pretty easy access to account blocking features where someone you'd prefer not to interact with just sort of disappears for all eternity for you. They can't talk to you right now, you can't enter the spaces they have power in, and this will still be true years later (unless you both sign up for some new chat platform anyway).

More importantly though, getting cast out from the group is no longer the greatest extent of what can happen when there's a power imbalance. If the person who has an issue with you runs a service, or has the ear of someone who does, you can be kicked off the entire thing. It's a bit like if you got into an argument with the GM in your home D&D game and suddenly you're dragged out of town, thrown outside the walls, and have your phone confiscated. Not only are you not talking to that person again, or that whole group of players, anything nearby is closed off to you, anyone else you knew in that general area too, no talking to anyone again unless you both visit a different town. Now, this one is a bit of an exaggeration. It's not like you're actually losing access to your home and possessions, you probably have your job still, etc. I'm building to something here though.

The next issue we have to deal with is the whole concept of followers, sharing, and parasocial relationships. I'm writing this as a post on tumblr. I'm in a conversational tone, because that's how I explain things, but you and I aren't actually talking right now. I'm writing all this alone, in my room, addressing some hypothetical reader. I don't know that you, specifically, are reading this, or in what context. Odds are really good I don't know you at all, and we've never had any sort of interaction outside of you reading this post, or a highlighted segment of it, maybe some others of mine. Odds are decent you're seeing this because at some point you hit the little follow button by my name on here though, and for argument's sake, let's continue on the assumption that you did, and you see a lot of things from me, and really getting out there into the hypotheticals, you're cool reading something like this instead of me explaining how computers work or how Ranma is trans or whatever more popular thing got your attention.

In this hypothetical situation, you see me writing a lot in this friendly conversational tone. It feels like you know me, like we're maybe friends, or at least I'm some cool lady on the internet you feel pretty familiar with and generally think has a good head on her shoulders. So if I were to suddenly get into how some person I have bad blood with is horrible, you're probably going to believe me. Hell, let's bring a real example into it, because I've written about this whole issue before, in a context where I named some names. If you have time, give this old piece a read, come back here after. The hypothetical avid blog reader I'm pretending you are did that too, and now probably has some real strong negative feelings about this Randi Harper woman that presumably they'd never previously heard of. I don't actually know how many people regularly read this whole blog, and I certainly don't know how many people will end up seeing a given post thanks to people hitting that reblog button, but I know that little review I did of Sudokuvania got so many eyeballs on it the game was nominated for an award, and its creator straight up told me like 90% percent of the traffic the hosting page got came from me or something. That Ranma thing I wrote might be why they did a modern remake of the anime series. Presumably I have some decent reach here, and the power to make strangers think someone's a terrible person. I shouldn't have that power.

For the next layer of the onion here though, it would be cool if you actually did read that very old post I used as an example, because the woman in question was messing with people's lives on a really wild and at the time unprecedented level. The short version is that back in 2014, the world was in a weird state where if you were a writer or an artist or an actor or a game designer or various other creative fields, you were kinda forced into using this website then known as twitter to network, get eyeballs on the creative things you did, make professional connections, get hired on for projects, just generally have an actual career. And this was made very inconvenient when the whole place became absolutely infested top to bottom with nazis trying to harass and end the lives of queer and Jewish people, especially women. Since that covers a pretty significant percentage of people in creative careers and press and such, people were really keen on having some way to filter at least a good percentage of those nazis out. And this one woman wrote a pretty good algorithm to plug into someone else's weird sociopathic software add-on where you just clicked a button on a page, and poof, you have now blocked like 400,000 nazi accounts. You will never see a thing any of them post.

Now honestly, I kinda to this day respect that one because it was pretty dispassionate and unbiased, with no real human input, and would only flag someone as a nazi if they did a pretty specific and weird list of things nobody would do unless they were a nazi, or had a reason to actively monitor nazi organizing tactics. But then she made a "better" version that was... just everyone she personally had blocked. Which was that list of 400,000 and anyone that got under her skin for any reason. And it was REALLY easy to get under this woman's skin. For instance, if you tried to flag her down about how she just silently added some trans woman to the list that makes anyone in any creative field or news room who doesn't want to look at 400,000 nazis disappear, because she didn't like seeing some post of hers making the rounds, you too would go poof.

There's other details to that story and how the whole thing really broke containment, but yeah. Develop an issue with your boss, maybe you get fired and have to find work somewhere else. Develop an issue with this random woman on Twitter, you suddenly lose your job, and the ability to even inquire about work from damn near anyone in your entire field, or various similar ones, or have a conversation with various marginalized groups or organizations or government officials. Kind of a problem! Especially when you notice that getting stuck on that list didn't even require you to personally interact with the person behind it at all. It just required that she see your name attached to something on Twitter that she didn't personally approve of. Again, a low bar.

That's just one person though, right? On a website that hopefully none of us touch again now that the nazis have formally taken the whole thing over? Well, as far as I can tell, you still can't have a career creatively without that sort of social media presence, and mostly, people have moved to bluesky... and oh damn, a foundational part of the culture of Bluesky is having lists like that one functionally replacing all moderation, run by dozens or hundreds of weird petty unaccountable tyrants. Someone who doesn't want to deal with, say, bigotry against nonbinary people might subscribe to this here list called "people who hate non-binary people" or whatever and oh, turns out that one is run by someone who decided the best way to populate it was to just term-search anyone using language relating to non-binary people. Like... non-binary people just signing up to bluesky. Or hey, maybe it'd be a good idea to sign up for this one, says it blocks "nazis, pedophiles, and zoophiles." Oh whoops, that one was just set up by a nazi, it's actually populated with leftists, trans people, and furries.

And then, finally, we've got the social murderers. A number of people, the whole Kiwi Farms scene, and a lot of apparently upstanding individuals who just get off on sick power trips as a side hobby, make an active point of exploiting all these various ways in which a person can be demonized or quietly disappeared, and will just pick out targets, and start whispering in ears or running witch hunts, to get people blacked out in as many ways as possible, and painted as monsters anywhere else.

I'm kind of immune to it here because Tumblr is just kinda to the side of a lot of these places, but I have been hit by this sort of thing A LOT. I am actually banned from Twitter, I am functionally just about banned from Bluesky. There are entire industries where I am genuinely terrified that if I sent an e-mail with a resume or pitching a story or trying to get a game published or whatever, the response would be one of those Invasion of the Body Snatchers screeches. I've been forced out of a ton of spaces, and there's no way for me to join new ones. Friends I've known for years have me blocked on like 20 different services, and I'm pretty sure they aren't even aware of it, and just thought I stopped talking completely a year or two ago. It's honestly really scary, and honestly, it is only because a bunch of people still read this blog and throw money at my patreon that I am even still alive. Even if I released a cool new game tomorrow, most people would never know, and those who did would be met with a whole propaganda deal about how the creator of this game strangles kittens and burns them in a big furnace to power GenAI or something. And I have no clue how I could ever begin to crawl out of this predicament. It just sucks.

I feel like it's been forever since I've given an update on this over here, but some time ago now, I rebranded to Wire Witch Violet around here and set these schematics as banners and profile pictures and whatnot, because my big background project I work on where I can for the past couple years, and probably for the next several as well is designing a game console, as some semi-open build it yourself as an electronics kit sorta deal, eventually. I've been starting with the controllers, which are... still facing some sticking points, but I'm at the point of actually prototyping board and case designs and stuff, so that's neat?

As you can see, a couple things are too close for comfort. That membrane is crossing into the space where a chip needs soldering on and into the well for the scroll wheel. There's also some... let's say typos on this particular PCB where holes got punched in some real bad places thanks to accidentally leaning on the spacebar in KiCAD before sending it off. But I just need to do a couple more revisions, work out just what the hell is up with the signals from the scroll wheel guts (documentation for these is... a bit lacking), get a spool of cable and crimpers and work out a way to hook this to an actual compatible console and/or an adapter so I can hook it to an emulator, and this step of things will be done.

The next step of course is... teaching myself to program in freaking machine code to make a test ROM for one of said compatible consoles and make some proof of concept demos for this, which will also probably take me some time, but after that I need to bite the bullet and finalize some design choices for the console itself. There's a lot involved in that, obviously, so let me start off with a quick overview of memory mapping. Incidentally I went way more in depth with this in my big series of posts on how a computer works. Basically though, the way a computer works is we've got a particular bundle of wires running through it that are connected to EVERYTHING, called the Data Bus, which is where all the information goes, and another bundle of wires, also connected to everything, called the Address Bus for managing where that information is actually going. Here's a really really simplified diagram. Feel free to skip sections here telling you stuff you already know.

Begin the technical explainer!

Here's a 2-bit address bus and an 8-bit data bus. Pretend there's 2 of the red lines and 8 of the green. We've got 4 addresses here. Let's say that's all actual physical switches in the top right, and we have a little 8-bit adder module with an address for each of the two numbers you want to add together, and one for the sum of those. All of these are just directly wired together. If we didn't have these address gates, if you flipped just the switch on the far right, the rightmost data line has a signal, so the whole thing goes to 00000001 + 00000001 = 00000001... except you know the adder is trying to actually add that 1 and 1 together and stick that into result (and really we'd probably have that read-only). And if we cut our little series of switches out, every time the clock let the adder do its thing, it'd be sending the total here back out onto the bus, where it goes right back and now it's 2+2 then 4+4 etc. If this is all hooked up to a string of LEDs, and the clock's real slow, that'd make a neat little light pulse zoom to the left, but we probably don't want that, so we have these little gates to say "hey, let the information out on the databus overwrite what's in you or vice versa only when the address line has the password to your specific padlock in it, and you have a whole setup to open and close those in the right order to get the stuff you want into the right places at the right times.

Usually by the way, when we talk about something being like, an 8 bit console or whatever, we're talking about how many wires we have in the data bus. In my example here, we've got 8, so any given thing you want to move around or do stuff in has to fit in that. So like in the original Zelda you can have between 0 and 255 rupies, because if we're counting in binary and have 8 digits to work with, that's all we have to work with. 1+2+4+8+16+32+64+128 we can do as 11111111 in binary, or, wires having a charge vs. not, but for 256 we'd need a 9th digit/wire.

There's no particular limit on how many wires we can use for these buses, beyond how much it gets to be a pain when you physically need to run them through a space and cross over each other and such, but in practice you end up with a lot of the same powers of 2 showing up. I'm showing an adder up there, but another very common little thing you might have in a computer is, say... open up the gate to some memory value we're storing and pop what's in it that onto the data bus next... so we need to pass the address along, as data, so OK how many addresses we have are functionally limited to whatever the biggest number our data bus can hold then isn't it (there actually are ways around this, trying to keep things simple though).

So what I'm getting at here is there's a finite number of places our computer can point to/look at/send stuff to.

Everything needs an address, and a lot of these are already going to be spoken for. The main computer part of a computer is the processor, which has a bunch of built in commands and some internal storage, and generally a lot of in-built functions like adding and subtracting and bla bla bla.

If all we have is the processor, we can slap memory chips in and point all the other addresses at those, and when we're making games, that's good, because games tend to have a whole lot of information to jot down in places and check later. But we of course don't have just the processor to worry about. We're gonna have some special sound chip in here, that's going to need a certain number of addresses pointed to it, we need to read the program in off the cart, maybe send stuff back that way, gotta handle the graphics etc. etc. etc. So consoles tend to have memory maps like these:

(Those are labeled in hexidecimal for those keeping score, where we count 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 A B C D E F, if we were going binary it'd be 4 times the digits.)

And of course I also need to account for how many controller ports are going to be on this thing, maybe need a little memory reserved for solving my scroll wheel woes, and I kinda want to throw some extra addresses back to the carts, and I'm on the fence about dedicated a big block to a rom full of default text characters/a fancy start-up animation. ALL of this is to say, I don't want to go wasting a bunch of address space if I can help it.

So the point of this whole post, storage media!

This whole thing started with me wanting to make a new 16-bit system, natively outputting to modern TVs in 16:9 resolution, with whatever nifty features I can squeeze out thanks to improvements in off the shelf chips... which apparently includes a free 32-bit upgrade because people just aren't making 16-bit processors anymore apparently. One of the big big changes since the '90s when all my jumping off point consoles were in vogue is storage. Wow dang, we've got super cheap little flash memory cards these days that'll hold terabytes. You can easily fit every game ever made up until what, 10 or 15 years ago maybe crammed onto one of these things, and it's probably a much more reasonable solution than insisting everything go onto EEPROMs inside the carts.

So one very reasonable option would be to design a little SD card slot or whatever into this thing and just assume everyone is going to have all their games stored on one of those, just popping it out, popping it into a PC or a phone or something, grabbing new games off itch.io or something, popping it back in, and then picking what you want to play through some little in-build game browser.

I am absolute not doing that.

Partly, this is because I don't want to waste my precious addressing space on a bunch of BIOS/firmware/UI stuff. Partly, this is an aesthetic thing. This is an old school console, you palm slam big solid carts into the slot on top of it. It's physically satisfying. I'm planning an official emulator for people who can't be bothered, but with the physical thing, we are using carts. And as an addendum to that, part of the reason we're using carts is a cartridge is not just a data storage medium. I actively want to encourage people throwing all sorts of weird things into these carts. Fancy custom chips, built in secondary monitors, pass-through nonsense (& Knuckles style), cram in extra accessories, sky's the limit.

Also, I honestly just kinda want to avoid onboard storage on the console itself as a matter of principle. I'm making a new-old console to encourage new-old game design. You let people know there is dedicated storage space on a console, they are going to start throwing stuff in there. Patches and DLC and installed files cluttering up the whole place, and nah, I'm not for that. Keep everything for your game in the cart for your game.

That said, it's rare for anyone to want to make a game without any long-term saving. So taking internal storage off the table, that means either A- Every individual game needs to sort that out on their own and either do some kind of internal battery-backed storage or include entirely too much flash memory. OR B- Maybe I do an official pass-through cart that has some storage and a general UI for playing with it, and maybe some other fun little bonuses. Wifi maybe? Some extra RAM? So if you want to do, say, an RPG, we plug you into the pass-through cart, you can save there like it's a memory card. Meanwhile if you're doing something more arcadey, you don't bother and have the extra addressing space to work with elsewhere in the cart.

Also to be clear, I do plan to provide standard PCB/shell designs both for having simple socketed swappable ROM chips and like an on-cart SD card or whatever, because there's obvious use cases there both for testing/prototyping and wanting some kind of Everdrive style option for games that aren't doing anything fancy.

And while it's less pressing than this long-term data storage issue, I'm not planning to support any sort of optical drive with this. The storage on a disc is kinda irrelevant next to flash memory, and there's enough of a DIY factor with this I'd rather spare people the pain of buying and connecting some pricey motor and laser assembly.

Back in 2003, there was a really amazing sci-fi TV show about a sort of motley crew of criminals that was unjustly cancelled right in its prime, and fans to this day are really bitter about it and hoping that someday somehow it manages to come back. That show was called Farscape, and I'm totally one of those fans, and seriously it was so messed up it's not even like it was slipping in the ratings it was the highest rated show on the entire network by like an order of magnitude. This is obviously a bit if you read the title already but it also kinda isn't. Seriously, amazing series, all-time favorite of mine. If we're bringing stuff back, bring that one back.

But yeah there was also this other show Firefly that was cancelled around the same time, and I don't have the actual numbers on me because sure it was on a much bigger network, Fox, but it actually WAS cancelled because the ratings were terrible, after a whopping 10 episodes... and frankly, Fox greenlighting and almost immediately cancelling sci-fi shows was EXTREMELY common around then, so at the time I was really confused why anyone was making such a big deal over this one.

So then, of course, sometime later I tracked it all down via DVD rentals and watched it and... honestly I still didn't get it. It was a really mediocre show with some really questionable decisions, like sure, space western, we all love a good space western... but wait the main guy fought for the space Confederacy? And we're going all one-to-one like that? And also we're being literal enough with the space western angle that they're robbing a train? And it was leaning uncomfortably heavy on the whole "sex sells" angle, and there's a whole thing with everyone's speech being peppered with Mandarin which would hint at some interesting future cultural crossover but then no that's just how we're getting around not being allowed to swear in English instead of the space swears every other show of this nature goes with and it's culturally just super super American and again, a bit overly literal about being a western. This isn't to say it was terrible or anything. I liked the very last episode (produced, never aired, but on the DVDs), particularly the weird quirky mercenary who mishears someone asking if he's Alliance as "are you a lion?" and starts pontificating about whether that should be his fursona. I'm just saying I didn't see anything so brimming with potential to justify such a rabid fanbase.

And then I finally got around to watching Buffy and Angel, and OH, now I get it. Oh by the way, I'm gonna spoil the hell out of all of these shows. Also Blue Velvet. There is this massive rabid cult following about this Joss Whedon guy behind these shows, and everyone's assuming if this show also got 7 or so seasons it would inevitably hit the same highs those shows did. Now, this doesn't really have any relevance to the rest of this, but I know someone's going to ask why I didn't watch any Buffy at all until like 2009 or so, and it's because I'd seen and enjoyed the original movie incarnation, which is a pretty amusing horror comedy hinged on the premise that a super girly cheerleader being a cool horror-action hero was just a hilarious juxtaposition, and while that kinda worked in 1992, it kinda felt like a regressive sexist pitch by the time the show hit and a whole lot of people had already done badass girly-girls in the interim without framing it like a joke.

Now, the thing about that little tangent there is if I were writing all this back around when Firefly was airing, here on tumblr, I would be absolutely mobbed by people going absolutely berserk that I would dare say such a thing about the amazing Joss Whedon, greatest male feminist to have ever lived. That was totally the reputation he had around then. Part of that was a few public comments he'd made on the subject, and part of it was just that his big show was about a teenage girl and generally there's cool women in his stuff and hey look lesbians. But... ultimately history totally vindicated my gut feeling, dude's creepy as hell towards women. You probably know that but I'm still going to ramble here and I'm gonna start drifting around the timeline while I'm at it.

So, after Firefly was cancelled and people started rioting, a movie, Serenity, went into production as just kind of a follow-up speedrunning to the end and resolving a bunch of plot stuff. I took a while to get to it just like the rest of this, but people were really hyping it up how there's this character River who is a super tiny twiggy little girl with crazy murder mode martial arts just killing rooms full of dudes. People were pretty into that in a frankly fetishy way, Whedon included I have to assume, and this was a big ol' discussion point at the time. But honestly, I've gotta give it a pass. It was a different time. People had absolutely zero appreciation for massive jacked women. The term MILF didn't even exist. All cool tough girls were super tiny and young. Hell, the shy little egg I was back in the late '90s/early 2000s was SUPER self-conscious about how I'm basically a broad-shouldered giant, and I'm pretty sure all my D&D characters around the time were like 4'5" and 80 lbs. That was just the thing.

That said, when I got around to watching Firefly, I was kinda shocked that River is, in know way, any sort of tiny kickass ninja. The pilot does some gross stuff with her being packed into a shipping container with no clothes, but past that her whole deal is being this extremely shy, pretty autism-coded weird quirky psychic girl and there being a whole big mystery about that and how it makes her kind of a wildcard. What happens in the movie is there's a bunch of basically rage zombies who all went insane because of some evil corporate plot and they're trying to kill everyone, and her being just kinda this psychic sponge, she absorbs all their aggro murder-minded edginess and total combined combat skills and turns into just a whirling dervisk of death, with her entire personality and plot arc just totally subsumed by this. It's basically identity death. And that is VERY MUCH a huge fetish for Whedon that keeps coming up and it's just real real creepy with how he is.

Serenity, you see, came out a year after Buffy and its spinoff Angel wrapped up, and Angel also took a teeny little pretty autism coded quirky nerd girl and replaced her with some sort of cold unfeeling badass ninja. The last couple seasons went way off the rails, honestly mostly in ways that were really good and fun and way better than the show generally was up until that point, but there was this one bit that left a horrible taste in my mouth where some kinda extradimensional ninja princess just kinda murdered the cute quirky nerdy girl, hollowed out her brain like some sort of parasitic wasp, and took over her body until the end of the show... and for some reason the rest of the cast was more or less OK with this and just kinda let her hang out as a member of the core group from there out. So again, we have this total personality rewrite/identity death thing with the mostly nice and sympathetic autistic girl becoming grimdeath skullstealer, and the showrunner clearly being pretty damn into that.

And you know, once you know to look for it, a lesser version of this is baked into the core concept of Buffy, too. Both versions. The movie had this whole thing where she's the reincarnation of this whole tragically doomed line of vampire hunters whose original lives are usurped by their new grim duty and they've got kind of a Thing with the main villain. If I recall the show was less reincarnate-y about it, but still had the sleeper activation, this is your new life and set of instincts thing going, and extended it to quite a lot of other characters by the end. Kinda creepy, frankly.

There were a lot of other weird red-flaggy things with women in these shows too. Buffy's best friend Willow has this weird arc where she has a werewolf boyfriend for a season or two who isn't going all monster-y and killing people because they have true love, but then she starts dating a girl and suddenly she is a capital L dudes suck lesbian. Not by, straight up lesbian. Which is a weird plot hole unless we want to fill it by declaring that Seth Green's werewolf character was actually a trans girl the whole time. Take your pick. Anyway, her girlfrend gets murdered, because this was the heyday of the whole Bury Your Gays thing, and then she just kinda turns into an Evil Witch and becomes the main villain for a season. Again, total personality rewrite. Meanwhile on Angel, there's a woman who had had massive amounts of complicated character growth since first getting established in Buffy, the real heart of the cast, and at some point out of the blue she's put through this whole weird baffling ringer of getting abducted by angels and disapeared from the show for a bit then returned and ending up pregnant and possessed and falling into a coma and then like a couple seasons later we're told she died off-camera like a year ago. At the time I didn't bother looking into what was going on behind the scenes, but it was real real clear Whedon just kinda decided he hated the actress playing her and was taking it out on her character. This by the way was totally the case. She got pregnant in real life and he just absolutely flipped out at the selfishness of a woman working for him daring to have a kid without his permission.

Anyway, as it happened, I finished catching up on all these shows just in time to see the newest series from Joss Whedon as it was airing, Dollhouse.

Dollhouse is absolutely repugnant. I'm pretty sure it is the single worst TV series I have ever seen just in how the whole cast are absolute moral black holes and the show does not seem to recognize this fact, at all. The premise is we have this organization of people who kind of abduct troubled girls, teenage runaways and homeless women and such, use their freaky memory erasing/rewriting machines to just completely wipe their brains, then as a a paid service, rich creeps can rent out their bodies, have custom personalities and skill sets implanted in them, and just have their personal rental assassins or sex slaves or whatever for a bit, before these new lives are again totally wiped out so their bodies can be recycled again. And the organization doing this are the good guys in this series.

There's also a real obvious self-insert character and a bunch of really thin metaphors about how the mind-wiped girls are like actresses... and basically the whole show feels like some kind of confession for the showrunner being an abusive creep towards the actresses on his shows and trying to control everything about their lives... and sure enough that started coming out around then.

A couple other things were going on around this time. Given his reputation, Whedon started getting tapped a bunch to write movies or do rewrites to punch up the dialog, and I'm while I'm not going to pretend he doesn't have a style of dialog that worked really well for those first couple shows, but people got real sick of it real quick. To this day, Whedon gets dumped on for a particular style of snarky banter even in movies he didn't actually have anything to do with.

And the other thing that happened is AdamBaldwin, the actor playing one of the characters on Firefly, stumbled onto a ridiculous conspiracy video from a 4chan nazi featuring a fully fictional story about a game developer sleeping with nearly half a dozen writers from gaming news outlets in exchange for favorable game reviews, and shared it on twitter, coining the term "Gamergate" for this imaginary scandal. I wanna say "and the rest is history" but to be clear he was also a major player in the whole mess early on, personally harassing the hell out of all sorts of people, myself included. He was super fond of sending this picture of a squirrel hanging from a birdfeeder by his scrotum in a particularly painful looking fashion. Real piece of work that creep.

Anyway, they're bringing Firefly back! Aren't you excited? More episodes or something of the mediocre show people were only into because they thought the writer was cool, who in the decade and change since has been very much exposed as a creep whose writing people cannot stand, and starring the guy who came up with the term Gamergate!

And of course, there's also the fact that Serenity, the Firefly movie, was designed to tie up ALL the loose ends. So the portions that don't involve a girl's brain being replaced with rad ninja skills rush through resolutions for any interesting world-building questions the show might have had, and also kills off like half the cast, including the most likable guy, as kind of a pure shock moment.

Metal Man- The moving floor can make it tricky, but try not to slide more than halfway down the length of it. When he tosses a big metal blade at you, wait until it's just about to hit you (see above) and hit the parry button. You'll knock the blade aside and be able to land a strong hit against him while he recovers.

Bubble Man- Wait for him to start swimming around and shooting bubbles at you. When a bubble is just about to make contact with you, hit the parry button. You'll swing off the bubble and be perfectly set up to land a strong hit against him while he recovers.

Flash Man- Flash man seems deceptively easy until halfway through the time when he stops time. Just wait for your opportunity though. After he stops time, he'll close to fire on you. When his shot is about to land, hit the parry button. You'll unfreeze and dodge the shot, and now you're perfectly set up to land a strong hit against him while he's shocked at your recovery.

Wood Man- Be careful. He likes to summon a shield of leaves around himself. Attack while it's up and you'll be hit with a punishing counter. When his invincibility phase ends though, he'll throw the shield at you. Just before impact, hit the parry button. You'll hop right through the hole in the middle and now you're perfectly set up to land a strong hit against him while he's totally defenseless.

Air Man- His ultimate attack summons half a dozen whirlwinds on trajectories that will hit you anywhere in the arena. Don't panic though. Just find the whirlwind aimed at where you're standing, wait until it's almost there, and hit the party button. You'll spin right around it, and now you're perfectly set up to land a strong hit against him while the rest of the attack resolves.

Crash Man- Your first instinct might be to get away from the powerful latching time bombs he fires, but the best strategy is to just stand your ground. Right before one of his bombs makes contact, hit the parry button. You'll deflect it back towards him, and now you're perfectly set up to land a strong hit against him while he's stunned by the explosion.

Heat Man- The flaming aura that surrounds heat man for most of the fight can make it pretty tricky to get a hit in. Just keep your cool (heh) and avoid his other attacks while waiting for him to turn into a flaming bolt and charge at you. Right before he gets there, hit the parry button. You'll slide under the flames and automatically turn around, and now you're perfectly set up to land a strong hit against him as he leaves the animation.

I have had a really weird day. Just do your best to put yourself in my shoes with this one. Oh, but first, big ol' content warnings for really just all of the worst possible things in the world I could possibly talk about. So I should also put all of this under the fold here.

The title is pretty self-explanatory, the system/game is right here on my itch page. It costs a whole $2 if you want to shove it into your own game/adventure/whatever, or if you feel like paying for it. If you don't or you want to preview it first, that's just the suggested donation.

Someone recently put an idea in my head to do another thing involving all my Ranma analysis, so I'm working on that, and since I needed a break, and have just sort of had manga on my mind from random things here and there, so why not engage in an old guilty pleasure, find some manga scanlation site, click that gender stuff category they always inevitably have, and just scan through some quick highlights of what's new and what's popular. Get a pulse on what the egg-y authors are up to, you know?

Historically, this used to work out pretty well. I've established that I'm a pretty big fan of Ranma, and the same category used to also bring up a lot of stuff from Osamu Tezuka and Go Nagai, who both go to that well suspiciously often. Then you'd get interesting sci-fi works really digging into the premise, stuff that actually took the premise seriously like Stop, Hibari-kun, stuff that just throws gender stuff in and then refuses to acknowledge it at all like Birdy the Mighty, and it used to be people through anything with queer stuff going on under the umbrella, so it was where you'd find Sailor Moon and Utena. Plus the alternatives would be like, clicking the shonen tag and just gettng DBZ knockoffs.

Later sampling sessions like this over the years, usually spread out by 5-10 years haven't really steered me wrong either. There was a stretch last time I had a poke around in like 2010 when you'd just get a lot of porn-y stuff that's not my cup of tea, but then you'd get some real Theory stuff. Once came across something where men sort of went extinct so everyone just kinda reinvented gender from first principles, sorting everyone into butches and femmes, which I figured would be a vehicle for doing some gay romance but giving everything a fig leaf of having no choice and being basically het, but then no we're doing this forbidden love thing between two butches. Doing all this convoluted world building just to go and make things some kinda high concept Double Gay, so that's cool. Plus some proper non-fiction autobiographical about an actual trans woman that was nice and upbeat, and a general trend of like Sailor Moon knockoffs where the protagonist gets turned into a magical girl and hey, jokes on you, turns out they were trans and loving the upside here.

Today though, everything sucks. There's a consistent set of problems I'm pretty sure are related. Everything is Isekai, and while I understand why that's not going away any time soon, it's still a creatively bankrupt genre. Rigid cookie cutter structure, too much emphasis on being a power fantasy over having a plot, but I've kinda made my peace. Then we've got dialog that feels like it came from someone who isn't fluent in either Japanese NOR English, just weird incoherent machine translation having hard problems with pronouns and tenses, sometimes flecked with channerisms. And then of course the third problem, as referenced in the title of this post, the protagonists in all these things are totally down with the concept of owning slaves for some reason!

Now, it is entirely possible that I am just trawling the wrong sites here. Without the guiding light of Anime Web Turnpike, and with the general awful state of search engines, maybe I am just suffering the misfortune of stumbling onto the nazi-channer-specific scanlation sites, where it's mostly just lazy creeps who can barely be bothered to learn one language seeking out the worst garbage to feed into auto-translators, and mostly channer creeps voting up the grossest stuff to the top. That's entirely possible. Another possibility is that the landscape of Japanese media in general (and formal localization for it) has gotten a bit friendlier to overt queer themes, and there's less reason for internet randos to be doing their best to translate it, so all we have is the fringe here.

All that said, there's still a definite trend going on here. And even if it's on the fringes, in just the really depraved stuff, I feel like the number of Isekai series where slave markets feature should really be zero? I mean to be clear here, I'm not talking about just some super sexist harem crap where like, the main character defeats the local goblins so this goblin girl follows them around forever now, then they took out the lizard people so here's their lizard-wife, then they take out the rampaging wild boars, etc. I'm talking straight up slavery.

Now, it occurs to me there is an outside chance not everyone knows what I mean when I'm talking about Isekai garbage, so to review (and yeah, there are broader definitions I could use), here's the formula: Some loser guy is walking somewhere, goes to cross a road, and he gets hit by a truck and dies. He then comes to in some fantasy setting, specifically based on a game, usually a video game, sometimes an MMO, sometimes a console RPG, and in addition to having access to some game UI stuff, we establish that everyone in this world has some game mechanics-y special ability, and by some amazing coincidence the one the protagonist got is ridiculously broken allowing them to basically take over the entire world and live in untold luxury by like, chapter 5 at the absolute latest. And the title of the work is just a straight up paragraph long summary of the premise. Sometimes the loser guy also ends up being a girl or some monster or inanimate object as part of this. And I guess in an incredibly small minority of stories "getting reincarnated" means they start as a baby and not just like, a 20 year old standing in a field with no questioning of this.

Now, I have played a lot of fantasy games in my day. I've played a ton of D&D and derivatives thereof, I've played damn near every console RPG there is, I've had a poke around plenty of MMOs, and I don't recall ever, even one single time, in any of these, finding a slave market. That is not a place people go with fantasy, generally speaking. In games anyway. I am aware that Gor is a thing. Maybe, MAYBE, some evil villain will conquer some village off camera and have the whole population chained up in a big non-specific mine until you beat some boss and free them, but other than that, and even that's pretty damn rare, yeah we don't have slaves in our source material. We also don't usually tend to have unique personal super power skills, but whatever I understand how that part caught on.

Also like... it's real messed up to even want to write a protagonist who has any sort of desire to own a slave, in any context, but I kinda feel like it's redundant when you're already doing some absurdly extreme power fantasy thing? Like I dunno, when you have the magical ability to gain all the cool powers of anything you spit on and you immediately run out and spit on a whole forest worth of weird monsters and you've become the unquestioned ruler of the local kingdom now that you can fly and breath fire and shapeshift and teleport and yada yada yada, like... you can just ask people to bring you food and drink to your big comfy chair and seduce whoever you want. You don't need to like... pay money to someone to give you a whole person they've tortured and beaten until they are totally servile and will do whatever out of fear of death? That's just really messed up? But yeah it's a thing, and it keeps showing up in all this random manga I'm glancing at looking for weird queer themes. And in all this other stuff I'm ignoring because I've got a brand going here.

So anyway here's a standout example from this latest poke-around. Loser guy gets Isekai'd, he has the ability to copy anyone else's special power, and for some reason people think that power sucks so he just gets immediately thrown into the kinky slave gladiator system to endlessly participate in a tournament arc where uh... here I'll let the trashy manga explain itself on this one.

Now you would THINK the reason to have this particular convoluted setup would be to have our protagonist here turned into a cute girl, get banged by another girl and then have some weird revenge arc leading long term to some lesbian harem thing, but no! What part of my description of the Isekai genre were you not paying attention to? The main character with his broken superpower does not ever lose a fight. That is not how this genre goes. He always wins and gets new slave wives to add to the pile. Right, so, clearly we must be going for some kind of force-femme fetish thing then? He beats a bunch of dudes in the arena and then oh no they suffer the humiliation of becoming hot girls for this power-copying dork to bang? Also no, somehow! I'm not exactly reading this garbage cover to cover here, because the premise is awful and the art is just kind of a sloppy mess, but skimming through, somehow Chekhov's Force-Femme Spell seems to just be mounted on the wall for the whole play and is never once brought down and fired (aside from the backstory of a girl-of-the-week or two). We've just got this messed up elaborate setting detail just to provide fake stakes for an obvious never-lose protagonist and his literal slave harem.

And this too seems to be the recent trend. "I got turned into a girl and have to deal with how society treats me differently" is out, "this girl I'm about to bang used to be a guy in theory" is in. Now, if this were happening in nice wholesome women-respecting manga, that'd be fine. Go hunt down Stop, Hibari-kun. 80s manga about some guy who ends up hanging out with a Yakusa boss' trans daughter and falling for her, that's all well and good. Or develop a crush on the singer from Mospeda, or Fushigi Yuugi, or like 30 things from around 2008 or so. But all I'm finding in this current dive is weird objectifying power-play stuff and purchasing slave girls with the money earned from killing slimes with overpowered special skills.

Well that's not entirely true. I also found something called Kanreki Hime which seems to be a real slow boil thing from the creator of Gantz where half a dozen physically quite unpleasant middle-aged guys with poor social skills decide to play Russian Roulette with some kinda sci-fi turn-into-a-hot-girl pill and then spend a while getting all paranoid if they're the one it's force-femming. That could go somewhere, potentially. No idea where, but somewhere!

Anyway I don't really have a particular point here. Honestly my approach to life in general tends to involve rolling the dice on questionable media in search of hidden treasures. I'm going through my entire library of stuff from bundles in my steam library playing stuff like that awful homunculus wrestling thing because who knows when I might find the next Contrast. I used to order the less than 1 star obscura through Netflix back when it involved the postal service (these days Tubi's good for this), saw a lot of unwatchable garbage, but it's how I find stuff like I Bought a Vampire Motorcycle and Wolfcop. And previous efforts doing this sort of trashy manga dive have turned up things like this one I forgot the title of where someone unionizes the magical girls so they can't be pulled out of classes to deal with weird monsters or whatever, and a surprisingly upbeat non-fiction thing about a trans woman first jumping through all the various medical hoops (Umareru Seibetsu wo Machigaeta!/I Was Born the Wrong Sex, it's honestly very cute/funny/educational, would recommend).

I live in a corner of the internet where people do a lot of reading into media for queer themes... and I guess I do it a good bit myself. You almost certainly found my blog because people were linking around my stuff about Ranma being trans, and I almost made this whole post here as a gigantic tangent partway into the last one I did about the 2020s anime. Anyway, regardless of any kind of authorial intent, I've noticed there is always a massive push back against any sort of head-canon (or for that matter actual canon) about fictional characters being trans, while at least comparatively speaking, people will fully agree about characters being gay with just the slightest quick glance or whatever for evidence. And like, it's not a competition, I'll happily accept basically anyone as trans and gay and generally agree with everyone's arguments, but holy crap the gulf.

Case in point, I just now finally got around to Dungeon Meshi. Watched both seasons of the anime, then dove into the manga. I didn't come at it totally blind. I knew someone when the manga was first getting started who was crazy about it, so I knew the basic premise of people being stuck in a big dungeon crawler dungeon and cooking various monsters for food, and I had some basic understanding that there is a dwarf named Senshi with dot-in-a-circle eyes and a big bushy beard. And a couple years later when it started to really pick up steam and I started seeing fan art and speculation about what where the story looked like it was going I of course also learned how the main thrust of the narrative was on the elf wizard and the human cleric being this fully canonical lesbian couple just constantly having sex.

To be clear, that last big isn't true. The gif right above this text is a fan animation just really nailing the style, not an actual scene that happens. Similarly I was genuinely surprised on finishing the manga that at no point does this panel actually appear.

Or rather, it does, just not with that text.

But yeah, super super ubiquitous fan stuff about these two is just everywhere, and people are so all-in about it that I expected there would at least be a whole lot of supporting subtext in how these two interact. So I was a bit surprised starting in on the anime how in the opening scene, the cleric gal up there gets pretty definitively killed off. At least to a point where the whole initial impetus of the plot is the rest of the cast rushing through this dungeon to find the dragon that full on ate her so they can hopefully retrieve enough of her corpse to cast revive on her before she's fully digested. I don't want to get into all the twists and turns the plot takes from there, but I will say the climax of the first season of the anime is when they finally have their big dragon confrontation, and there are complications past that point.

Now within even that span of the series, I get shippers being a thing. Our elf wizard Marcille here is noticeably driven about the whole rescue mission and there's a couple flashbacks with her looking at Falin, or dragon food, In A Way, plus a couple other scenes that feed shippers decently, and aside from a lot of little things pointing that way, there's an encounter with succubi later on (kinda, long story) taking on the form of whatever their target was into and yeah, this is some hilarious disaster lesbian content they come at her with.

But that's pretty much it for actual canonical support. Falin basically doesn't exist as a character to get any sort of read on. The whole quest to get her properly alive again and back in the party is the core plot of the entirety of the manga, not something that resolves partway through. There's another character explicitly set up as the love interest who never confessed to her, and Marcille gets a lot more shipping bait going with Falin's brother Laios, the actual central protagonist than with Falin (I'd also argue there's more in canon to support Laios being a big ol' egg than any of these three hooking up).

That isn't to say I don't ship the hell out of it. We've got meaningful looking and lots of concern after all. I also ship Laios and the prettyboy stalker thereof who shows up after a bit, and I'm pretty damn sure the author of all this is very gay for elf girls because I mean she outed herself pretty bad on that one.

But you have to read in a good bit for it is my point. Which people are more than willing to do to the point where I figured Falin was around in the party for most of the run of the whole series and I have seen multiple essays written about that plot complication I mentioned and the foreshadowing of very gay stuff there and again I don't wanna spoil anything but there were anatomical diagrams. People accept the hell out of this gay headcanon. And people including the actors who play them are all in shipping Finn and Poe in the 3rd Star Wars trilogy because hey he gave him his jacket, even very straight guys think Bill & Ted would work better if they didn't bother giving them the princesses as beards, Kirk thinking Spock was giving him a backrub is the origin of fanfiction being a thing and why Star Trek still exists, everyone who has played FF14 agrees Thancred and Urianger are a couple and that's kinda just pure vibes. We as a society love our gay gay ships.

Trans stuff though? Even getting other trans people on board with calling that out tends to be a fraught battle with tons of reservations. I've mentioned the pushback my Ranma stuff gets. I feel like nobody has my back about Swiss Army Man being a trans narrative despite it textually being about someone who is deeply depressed until just kinda spontaneously deciding to start living/dressing as a woman. People through shade on trans readings of The Matrix even after the Wachowskis have come out and said "yeah that was a trans allegory." And personally I will never forget watching Crystal Fraiser write up the official canon backstory for the 1st edition Pathfinder iconic shaman, 100% straight up write a short story about a trans girl coming out, follow it up immediately in the post comments writing up a stat block for what she used for HRT, and still having to argue with everyone commenting on it that no, no this is not the story of a cis girl with parents trying to raise her as a boy or something, she is explictly trans.

And do I even have to get into how many times the creator of the Guilty Gear series had to release a public statement that no, no, Bridget is a trans girl. Not a cis boy mistaken for being trans, not tricking people. This isn't something that is only true in some weird alternate timeline if you get some kind of bad ending, not something localizers tossed in there, honestly, just a regular ol' canonical trans girl. Always has been.

I'm not really building to some grand thesis statement here, it's just weird how people are so weird about this. Also Dungeon Meshi is a very good series, if way less textually queer than I was lead to believe. Some real Slayers vibes, all comedic-but-with-serious-stakes and real solid world-building and oh the author is SO into RPGs so very clearly. Would recommend.

I try to play a big variety of games, and I've yet to come across a dry anthology of an entire console's library I haven't started watching religiously, and I have just always been absolutely baffled by sports games. Like a lot of huge nerds, I've never cared much about most sports as played in real life, but that has no impact on how much I appreciate video games based on them. On the other hand, people who are into sports all seem to be overwhelmingly massive nerds about those particular sports. Clearly, this is how sports video games have survived as long as they have.

Pretty much every sport has at least one Big Annual Game Franchise where every single year, there's a fresh iteration, and it's not AT ALL uncommon that one of those is going to just be a rerelease of the previous game, but updated with whatever the current list of professional players is that year, maybe with updated statistics, which might even be reflected in how their in-game equivalents perform, maybe. But the thing that always blows my mind is that when there IS a change besides those roster updates, it always seems to be purely cosmetic. The actual gameplay of any given baseball game or football game or whatever is always them same, game to game, in any given series, and even between competing series, and always has been, for every sport, going back to, usually, some game in the early 80s that was probably just called "Football" or "Golf" or whatever. And that's just so weird!

The entire games industry is absurdly iterative, and all about trend chasing, so sure, two games with roughly the same concept released in the same year are likely to have all the same basic mechanics, more or less, but they're not going to play like every game in their evolutionary branch! If I play a platformer today, it's probably going to be 3D, I'm probably going to have a double jump and a dodge roll, bunch of weird power-ups. Or maybe we're 2D, it's some indie Metroidvania, there's a whole evolving set of movement techniques going on, I'm charging shots maybe. I could grab one from a few years back, pretty much guarantee there'd be some mechanic for switching between two different worlds. Few years before that I'd expect a bunch of ledge grabs and maybe time rewinding. Stuff changes. Not everything still plays fundamentally like Donkey Kong.

Or let's say I'm into shooters. That means at least two very different things now. A first person game with regenerating health as I head down corridors looking for chest high walls? A bullet hell where I'm scraping the edge of kaleidoscopes of projectiles to get a bonus and working my way through an arcane power up system? Whatever I'm playing it isn't going to look or feel like Space Invaders.

But if I'm playing a Golf game? I'm gonna look over a course map, maybe check a wind direction. I'm going to pick a club and probably have the best auto-recommended. I'm going to pick a direction, hit confirm. Then I'm going to have a power meter quickly fill up, I hit a button near the top. Then it comes back down and I hit it again to confirm the swing near the bottom. If I screw up in that little action step I'm probably going to curve way wide out to the side and/or get less distance. And when I'm on the green the UI is going to change a little for putting and be more zoomed in. This is literally EVERY GOLF GAME EVER MADE (or the vast vast majority anyway). Graphically they change things up, but, we have agreed as a society that this is what golf, as a video game, is.

Bowling? You line up your starting position, you adjust for how you're hooking the ball. Same deal on the PS4 or whatever as on the Intellivision. Tennis games play just like they always have, and haven't really received an update since switching from Pong to a slightly tilted view from the back of your court and letting you move towards and away from the net and add a manual swing button. Always. Exactly. The same.

And that's just so weird to me! I mean the codification of all these genres happened so long ago most are standardized for a single-button joystick! There's all kinds of very simple things you'd think people would have tried by now. Let's just take Tennis. Standard controllers these days have frankly too much on them I'd say, but we use basically none of this in a Tennis game. We generally default to doubles matches with AI partners. We could be doing twin-stick stuff to control both at once. Rather than a single swing button, we could use all these face buttons for different amounts of power and distance. Or use analog triggers to control the force. Or use the second joystick to adjust exactly how the racket's being held and get weird angles that way.

Or how about Football? Whether defined the weird way Americans do or or the sport you actually play using your feet that everyone else uses the name for, what we settled on forever ago is kinda garbage, right? You punch in your secret formation code with the former is the main distinction, but then you just have arbitrary control of one character while the rest all kinda mill about, trying to get to the ball, then hopefully angle away from everyone else, and I guess you have a pass button. Hockey games also all play like this. Again though, we have this gameplay because it was all that the platforms that were when everything got codified could really handle. You could be controlling all these players like an RTS or something. Hell, in the modern RTS revival everyone's doing this thing where you just draw an arbitrarily curved line across the screen and all your selected units will move to spread themselves along that shape. Something like that could work here right? Or at least use extra buttons to give broad commands to all these other players to spread out/tighten up/move towards one end of the field or the other? Like, have you ever played Dragon Force?

But nobody ever does any of this. Again, occasionally someone tries something just a little different. Mario Sports games give people special moves, some golf games don't use those EXACT controls, etc. But you could make a baseball game that doesn't play anything at all like Family Stadium but resembles actual baseball to the same degree, and nobody seems to have even considered trying something like that. It's weird.

Continuing this second edition-ish playthrough of Vice & Violence, or really, starting it I suppose since all I got to last time was character creation. And even then, I left out these gear packages! Milkie's got the protector kit, sword and board style. Cheeri took healer because someone should. Spookie of course has Mage's, and Kip has Burglar's. These don't all match with their class aspirations at all, but that's OK. Oh and like last time I'm trying to include some properly prose-y character notes and scenes (because I can't satisfactorily follow the V&V tradition of drawing the party, at least not while following the house art style and ducking Tumblr's oft-time prudishness), so if you don't want system analysis skip down to the italic text.

So for this first adventure, I was slightly worried it'd go a bit rougher without the birth sign perks and lucky starting stats and gear roles, but these gear packages are pretty beefy and cover us on spell-casting just fine. Fireballs for the big targets, heals for getting thrashed about, it's all good. There's some coffins early on I passed on the first time because the party was kinda nervous. Here we've got Milkie happily opening the ones with giggling and moaning, ending up with a tad more loot and a need for a shower when they hit those.

Leveling up for the first time was really surprising though. The clear best option of exertion points (spent to activate cool powers and avoid negative consequences) are off the table. Now you just get a stat point on the odds, HP on the evens, and choices of more HP or MP on the odds, MP or being able to have sex more often on the evens. However, those HP/MP boosts are significantly beefier. 1d6 (or 4 if you don't roll) points, plus the relevant stat bonus. Spookie went from 3 motes to 11 without RNG on the table. Easily enough spells to finish out a typical adventure, and after buying a couple more spells after the adventure (Magic Hand and Gust), meeting the requirement to hit Novice Wizard in the first downtime session. That's ANOTHER four motes, letting them actually cast that first Advanced Spell it comes with, and they get a cool hat. In first edition the path to being a proper wizard was such a slog it was more of an aspirational long term thing that one might ever actually access those spells, now boom, run one session and you're there.

My first thought was this was just entirely too generous (particularly when you can also just buy mote increases for VERY cheap if that somehow isn't enough, but I actually like the math here a lot. Anyone can get the basic bread and butter spells, no barrier to entry. If you just want to heal/have a big blast/some little bit of utility magic on the side of your real planned build, just spend a little money for a handful of charges, or spend one whole level up (maybe two if you aren't that smart) and you've got a plenty big enough pool to last you. And all you're giving up for the privilege is having sex more often, probably. With a lucky starting role you can still easily bottom that out. Meanwhile if you want to be a proper wizard, aside from being immediately able to do your thing, you can actually cast these advanced spells, with casting costs pushing all the way up to 25 motes for some instead of the usual 1, so if you rack up hundreds, you can still expect to spend them. Meanwhile, exertion points are now properly rare, which they should be for how powerful they are. Big thumbs up from me.

After that adventure, it's time for downtime, and unfortunately, I don't at all like how downtime currently operates. It seems to be here as a mechanical concept to serve two purposes that are somewhat at odds with each other. First, we have downtime as a conceit to keep from wasting a bunch of table time doing bookkeeping with everyone restocking on rations, water, torches, etc. between adventures, and doing any other maintenance work like gaining new abilities on characters without needing the GM to be present and breaking the flow of the game. Second, downtime is a precious precious resource, used mainly to level-up classes on a separate track from character level, remove vices (a huge push-pull part of the game), and get some extra supplies by foraging or whatever while away from town. As things stand, you get 2 downtime actions between each session of play (which is a weird structure, basically assuming every group will fully handle an adventure in one go, which is a laudable ambition but weird for the sort of group that manages to spend like 5 sessions getting through a five room dungeon).

I like the idea of handling shopping away from the table, although at least based on the first edition you do need to do some at-the-table accountancy to value all your random dungeon loot before selling it off, but you should still try, but shopping should not be lumped in with the rest of this, frankly, which is all quick and/or good roleplaying prompts. I can't really think of a way to prevent the sensible option of just handing a big shopping list and all the loot off to one member of the party while everyone else goes off to do more personally enriching things, and it just sucks to be that person. Sure you can rotate who's on shopping duty, and you might even be able to work out a schedule where there's always someone who has a bit of a dead level because classes wildly vary in how/when they advance (a good thing by the way, standardizing this makes stuff less fun) but at the end of the day, one of the options is to have a big fun party, and in character, it sucks for everyone else to be having the time of their lives while you be the adult going out to buy them morning after pills, water for the hangovers, and breakfast for the next day.

Speaking of, the partying options are kinda skewed. You can visit a brothel and pay a decent bit of cash for a flat d6 roll, with most but not all removing vices, and better rolls giving temporary buffs. OR, attend lecture for 1/3 that money and a roll with stat bonus, all but guaranteeing vice removal and maybe giving straight up stat increases or free abilities, OR the free option, multiple PCs having a good time together for free, rolls modded by your best stat giving guaranteed vice clears and way more potent temp buffs than the brothel one. It made more sense when PCs only got 1 downtime action at a time, and most would be spending it to upgrade classes, but talking another PC in is no longer a real restriction and brothels are just flatly the worst relaxation option now. Which is odd for a porn-y game.

And once we take the wildcard of shopping out of the mix, the options all boil down to "get new abilities" and "party away vices." Most people are probably going to want to do one of each. If you have a really terrible day or ran out of stuff to learn, you might need to double up on partying, and if you're an overachiever you can either multiclass (maybe?) or spar to copy spells/martial skills for free. That's all fine, but it's not quite codified neatly. I'm unclear if "train class A, train class B" is a legal downtime expenditure for multiclassed characters or if "do class training" is a unique option you can only pick once.

The majority of classes are pretty straightforward about spending a downtime session and getting a new ability, with a couple being able to get several in one go (bards have RNG based on how well their concerts go, thieves spend a downtime to open up a donation bin, but can buy as many abilities off the list as they can afford when they do). Again, I'm cool with the variable progression speed, but it gets confusing with fighters and wizards, who progress by buying abilities that are actually available to all characters. Wizards are called out as having to show their spell list off to some mentor and spend a downtime to get the real perks like advanced spells and a fancier hat. Fighters are probably meant to train with a mentor to get their specialized options, but as-presently written it just says they get them with every two martial skills.

Druid is in a similar boat, where they can spend downtime to improve their shapeshifting, but there's no formal entry level sign up ability, so you can seemingly just become a fighter or a druid (or a fighter-druid even) by just kinda deciding you want to be one, as presently written, no special action needed. And then there's clerics, whose whole deal is just gaining abilities by owning relics, without any mention of whether these can be bought alongside regular adventuring supplies or there's some sort of official merch shops or other restriction. Oh and then just to make things extra confusing, Warlock (which is arguably more a permanent status affliction not a real class) explicitly doesn't touch downtime, and doesn't count against the multiclassing limit, but instead levels up via actual character level ups. Straightforward enough but it's weird just chilling with the real classes here, and it's kinda weird that there's no contingency plans for hitting max level.

None of this needs major changes, but it needs disambiguation. I'd suggest committing to one of these:

Option 1- Make shopping trips freebies, make a properly unified "join or advance in a class" option (specifying whether multiclassers can do each), clarifying the wording on the stuff prerequisites (I already gave the dev some direct feedback on druids' weirdness), with the rest of these options left basically as is (but maybe boost brother rewards), maybe add one for doing odd jobs for people with no vices and no money in urban settings.

Option 2- Codify it all in a location-based fashion. I can spend a downtime option to visit, say, the wizard's tower. Buy any spells/motes of MP/failure-blocking staves, charms, etc. and do any wizard leveling on the same trip. Martial skills and fighter leveling get done at the arena, maybe you pick up your arms and armor on the same trip, etc. This is largely how it worked in first edition, but there's too many classes to divide everything up nicely like that, especially when we've got stuff like fae knights wandering into ponds to talk to some giant fairy.

Option 3- During downtime, you have one Acquisition Option (shopping, foraging, lectures, practice, sparring, or grabbing skills/spells/motes), one Class Advancing Option (buy your class stuff, make your roll, or advance down your list as appropriate to one of your classes), and one Relaxation Option (brothels/carousing/recreational barroom brawls, etc.). You might have to skip out on doing something because you lack the funds/access/requirements, but you wouldn't have the FOMO choice paralysis.

Option 2 feels like it'd be such a pain to balance I almost feel bad for even mentioning it. Option 1 is basically where things are, just needs a bit of cleanup and a disambiguation pass, particularly for fighter which, to be fair, I think had martial skills taken away and made independent as a very last minute change. My preference I think would be option 3 because as is I'm spending more time working out how to spend downtime than on the actual adventures. But then, I'm also learning the game and running 4 characters at once. It'd be less daunting with just one to worry about I'm sure.

Anyway, back to my session notes! Everyone came out of the dungeon with some unavoidable vices (this can be expected to happen regularly), and with this new double downtime economy, everyone can both try to get rid of those AND still grab classes. Spookie has a little trouble though, since buying the required two spells costs a total of 300 jade, and the loot split after grabbing the useful junk (some hefty shields, a patch of loose chain mail, and a one-off healing item) is only 241.5. Fortunately, an arrangement can be made.

While sorting through their rewards from clearing out all these feral zombies and trying to work out how much needs to go to food and travel costs as not everyone packed a proper lunch today, Cheeri pulls Spookie aside. "So hey, I was thinking! Turns out none of us are really all that strong, and it took a lot of stabbing to get those ferals down, so maybe we should look into that magic milk they sell that makes you stronger? And I know you're trying to learn a bunch of spells to be a proper wizard and all so if I pitched in, maybe you could learn that one that makes girls make it, and then you could find people to cast that on in exchange for like a discount or-"

Spookie, having spent enough time to know a huge obvious egg when they see one agreed with no further provocation. And wouldn't you know it, after meeting back up at the inn, Spookie just happened to be practicing the gestures for all these new spells, and accidentally went and cast it in Cheeri's direction. Oh no, what a wacky accident! And oh no! Cheeri only had one chance to resist the effects before they became PERMANENT, forever! Definitely something Cheeri didn't want to happen, and tried really hard to shrug off, definitely! But there just wasn't anything to be done, and now poor Cheeri has to deal with the horrible terrible curse of having absolutely ginormous magical boobs, and a bunch of cow features, forever! Permanently! Nothing at all to be done but make the best of it. And it'll probably just make that problem of being mistaken for an actual nice pretty girl happen even more often! Ignore the massive ear to ear grin, this is clearly a horrible tragedy! Definitely!

So yeah, elephant in the room. Part of the whole second edition push is to make things a bit friendlier to people who aren't down with certain elements (or to quote the designer, "There will be a V&V SRD for those that don't want a rulebook that's 70% art book, and an art book that's 70% cartoon genitals"), and there's some nods here and there to running it with the general levels of horniness of your typical D&D campaign, or even less than that if inclined, but some of this really is baked into the world-building. As previously mentioned, most mammals no longer exist in the setting as a result of the evil old gods trying to cause famines, but we still need to have milk or else the vampires couldn't lure in victims with delicious baked goods. And we can't have people out there milking the centaurs, that'd be highly inappropriate!

So we have a spell to transform humans and half-humans (because The Deal with humans is being particularly susceptible to this sort of things, and they're the ones wanting to bake cakes besides) to solve that issue. Look, sometimes the lore building gives you rad stuff like people realizing krakens keep attacking ships because they're hungry, so they just domesticated them and save on shipbuilding, and sometimes you get stuff like this.

I'm trying to work in all the weird setting quirks here eventually both to help calibrate expectations of what's in the book and be thorough playtesting.

Anyway, that's both of Spookie's downtime actions. Everyone else is signing up for their classes. Milkie is now a Valiant Fae Knight, getting a bonus to disposition checks, which I need to more consistently remember to roll. Cheeri the Cleric I am ASSUMING needs to spend some downtime on this relic gathering run, picking up some Semi-Genuine Dragon-gold Earrings that nicely offset that -2 smarts, reducing the odds of exploding or something when trying to cast heal in the future. And Kip is now a Druid… largely getting the whole Druid kit all at once and having little if any need for cash as a result, honestly.

In fact, Kip's gonna go ahead and embrace generosity, throwing Cheeri the cash to also grab (let's be honest) her new goddess' Latest Testament: "For Fuck Sake I'm In The Shower, and Other Shoutings" to make those heals heal better too. While he's at it, he kicks in for Milkie to get a properish full set of armor, leaving her hand-me-downs for Cheeri, and those two are now maybe able to stand there getting stabbed while using their new abilities. Around here, everyone gets sick of pretending they're getting even cuts, throws the remaining 116 jade in a pile to pay for food and travel and generally agrees everyone should get Kip something real nice later.

Everyone but Spookie has an extra downtime action though, and everyone's splitting an inn room, and feeling a bit self-conscious from telling their most embarrassing stories to some jerk magic door in the dungeon. Cheeri suggests giving everyone a rubdown to relax since she used to do that sort of thing for gladiators. Milkie misinterprets that because she's slutty like that, and she was named for the stuff Cheeri produces now, and everyone's pretty grateful to Kip, so look, this averaged 3d20+everyone's best stat I'm rolling in the current rules has an alternate descriptions now for more PG-13 campaigns where you wanna say they just 'go carousing' together.

Anyway they have a fantastic time. Vices cleared, a bonus exertion for the next day, and bonus HP and stats for the same period but they're level based and kinda don't work. Plus Cheeri now exchanges like big ol' greasy burgers for brawn buffing milk and that will, in fact, help things. And hey heck with it, get in the pile Spookie, I forgot there's a shop right outside the dungeon, nobody should have to waste downtime picking up groceries… and they're broke! Time for more adventure! If anyone does need to shop for the party and miss out on the partying in the future though, it's probably going to be Spookie, always wanting new spells. That's probably part of the running gag of everyone being a happy idiot except for wizards who are all total burn-outs.

Little light investigation at first, nothing worth noting besides Milkie really buttering up Rhodkill with that gallant charm, and upon encountering a second crypt horror, Kip finally lets loose that awesome druidic transformation, his body twisting and snapping as he gains tough skin, extra legs, and the fiersome visage of a… splatcat. Adorable little things people keep as pets, like a kitten if it were technically a slug. But armed with… just little bappy paws. This is objectively even worse in combat than his usual 1d4-3 dagger setup, but he is at least non-threatening enough it doesn't bother trying to attack him. And afterwards I double check the rules for when druids turn back and… oh that's great actually. Might not be the intent but I have to follow the strict letter of the rules here.

After the battle, Kip sits there, looking a bit confused. "Well this is awkward… I'm not actually sure how I'm supposed to turn back." Cheeri giggles a bit and says, "that's OK, you're really cute like this, we can carry your stuff for you."

"Wait now I remember, apparently this lasts until I take enough of a beating to turn back to normal, so someone just maybe like give me a good smack or a kick or something? That should do it." Milkie looks a bit horrified. "I'm not gonna beat up a kitten! That's awful!" and Spookie adds, "no offense but you weren't really helping fight stuff anyway, and we have to go search up some information now, maybe you can just act pester someone for food and see if they blab about the evil plans they have to finish first or something," and then scoops him off the ground to ride on their shoulder.

Long story short, the party wants to know what's up with zombies ending up with giant piles of body parts in their closets forming into horrible clawing horrors, and the NPC they're working for is a bit concerned about how the answer is probably cultists murdering a bunch of people. Milkie volunteers to wander around town looking for potential cultists and question anyone for information, while Spookie figures it's worth it to ask other zombies in the area. Milkie's plan quickly turns into seducing sketchy guys to get info, and she kinda forgets about the info part too. The others have better luck though, running into a guy who was recently murdered and dumped down here who came back as a zombie, not particularly worse for wear besides how he used to have a totally sick tattoo of a dragon playing a saxophone, and he's pretty sure he saw some zombie woman with a real fancy dress showing it off. Might be a connection to their big mystery, either way, there's a reward. So once everyone finds a way to meet back up with Milkie, it's time to stalk some stranger.

We have another level up (Spookie takes more motes, Kip does too because hey picking up a spell or two might be useful), and a bit of a quirk in the game. You do more downtime at the end of a session. Not between adventures, not at the end of the adventuring day, end of session. This feels like a weird stopping point, but the natural path of premade adventures I have has a bit of a two-parter pending, and this blog post is getting very long. Everyone's still pretty broke, which limits options some.

Spookie is jonesing for new spells and dips into party cash again, gambling on a lecture which really pays off with 4 more motes for the pile and 2 new spells, X and Y. That's enough to dash off for a wider hat and the Invisiblity spell. Cheeri tags along for the lecture, also getting a mote pile, and the Soothe spell. She's really gaining confidence, and decides to learn to dance, too. Kip goes communing with nature and now has a shot at real natural weapons next transformation, and bumps into Milkie. He also does some foraging on the way back, finding a good bit of food and water, some weird mushrooms and some kinda bug goop. Also Milkie, who went off to the lake again, and can now kiss a friend as a tactical action to heal them. On being caught up, Milkie decides to support Cheeri with this dancing thing and buys both the Protect skill and a bass she will totally learn to play sometime.

Final thoughts on these two sessions: I know I spent a lot of time here griping, but mostly that's just because I know the developer of this is releasing this specific iteration of the book as an open playtest, and is on record wanting it to be clear and simple enough to be played by a group of people who are all quite drunk, and I actually sometimes write and edit RPG mechanics professionally, so I'm really going into proper Work Mode and looking for anything that might lead to someone asking a question the GM has to think about how to answer. If I were just running this for an actual group, I'd push through these friction points by just house-ruling downtime expenditures a little and getting a bit hand-wavey with cash (which is encouraged anyway). I'm also frankensteining this together from an early preview build of one edition's player rules and a partially-finished version of the original recipe GM rules. All things considered, it plays real smooth, and I like all the changes from the first edition.

My wish list for the second edition GM rules aside from the tweaks I've mentioned, and hopefully not too annoying edit pass notes I've been pestering the designer with all weekend as I read this over would be a bit more clarity on the expected pacing of how much gets done in a session, how much gets done in an in-game day, what sort of ratio should level-ups, downtime, and heaps of cash should roll in. I'd probably have a better sense of it with a real group. I'm mainly looking at session prep notes versions of adventures which feel like they'd breeze by, but it's easy to breeze through conversations like this, I'm not describing actions and making jokes, and it's real easy to remember my turn's coming up when it's always mine. I still feel like if I were running this it'd be two or three quick adventures in a night, one level up, one downtime, party goes to sleep.

I'm still shocked at how quickly someone with some good starting Smarts and some ambition for wizard rank ups can just pile on the motes, but it doesn't feel like a problem to be solved. Also the crypt horrors used as boss fights in both of these do feel appropriately scary for first level characters and are probably way more of a threat with allies to eat and regenerate as they drop, but I feel like if you want to have a boss fight in this against one big scary thing, either that big scary thing needs to have some real staying power and multiple attacks, or stuff before you reach it that's going to chew through exertion points. If the party can kill you in 3 rounds, even if you focus-fire on one of them, they can force a miss every round with exertion, and it's a little underwhelming. To be fair, all RPGs seem to have this sort of problem, and some later adventure seeds seem to have ideas on how to fix it.

A while back I stumbled onto a free indie fantasy RPG called Vice & Violence, which caught my eye for having quite an abundance of fun fast playing rules, an interesting and unique setting/vibe, and a lot of super useful general GMing advice. And being created by an illustrator, it's also chock full of nice full color art all over the place, which I would show off here, but most of it is straight-up porn, and while I'm not a prude about these things, last I checked tumblr really is. Have a couple crops of the cover though?

I also couldn't find enough players to properly try running it, so I rolled up 4 characters and just sorta ran it for myself for a couple sessions. I was planning to continue that, but at the time I stumbled across it, there were rapidly paced updates, and I figured I'd wait on a big class overhaul that was in progress. And... that turned into just straight up creating a new version of the game. As that new version is now CLOSE to done, has that class overhaul, and the player's guide is still free, but there's some sizable changes to how characters are put together, it's time to make a new set of weirdos and... run them through these same old demo adventures.

Standard boilerplate before I get into this- There are VERY few universal truths about game design, and it's entirely possible this subject I'm about to get into is less universal than I'm suggesting and I should really be saying "this is a thing that I like," but I've never seen anyone say they dislike the sort of structure I'm about to examine, and I've seen a whole lot of people drop a whole lot of games that lacked it, so broadly speaking, if you're doing game design of any kind, I would strongly suggest you lean heavily on this as a basic cornerstone, only deviate away from it if you have a real strong reason to, and even then, I'd suggest you maybe try to keep the structure there and just be a little more subtle with how you present it.

So what am I talking about when I say structure? Basically, I'm saying that for as long as games have existed where the total quantity of game you are going to experience is more than you can see at a glance (i.e. this doesn't apply to board games, single-screen arcade games, etc.) designers have been going out of their way to hit you with stuff like this:

It's probably the first thing you see, or it gets shoved in your face when you bring up some kind of menu, but we are framing everything with something that conveys that this game is going to be divided into some number of pieces, typically somewhere between 4 and 8, and you are going to be regularly updated on how far along you are. Either we have a big map showing your progress between levels, or we have some huge part of the screen at least occasionally taken up by a big gaudy trinket tracker of some sort, and we're almost certainly going to have some big chunk of a HUD constantly displaying the current level, and maybe that's subdivided further. Not everyone was doing this, but most people were, and people who weren't would still, typically follow strongly established conventions (I believe I've written about this before, but most people in the 8-bit area agreed, we're doing 8 levels). And generally speaking, the locations we're marking on the map or the trinkets we're collecting or whatever are going to represent a roughly equal amount of game, perhaps each topped off with a boss fight. Again, structure.

Now, I'd like you to consider what a universal practice this used to be, and I'd also like you to consider what an expensive thing it was to do. Back in the 80s, storage space was absurdly tight. I hate to keep using Super Mario Bros. as an example, particularly when it didn't really do much in terms of clear visual structure, but here is what that game had to work with for graphics. I'm not even going to say "an 8K ROM," I'm just going to show you.

I used Zelda as my initial example, and that a whole 128K disk to work with, but point is space for graphics was at a premium, resolutions were very low, and people would still take the time to pan over these bespoke little maps or jam 3 fairies down in the corner of the screen or whatever, because structure is super important. Trying to keep people feeding quarters into an arcade game? Want people to explore some vast sprawling world? Either way it's a whole lot easier to stay motivated if you know at all times how far in you are.

But also, if you have a really solid structure established, you establish a framework for yourself. You make it clear that in order to get through the game, you have to traverse these 8 levels, or travel to these four different major regions of the world, OK, we're doing some sort of episodic story telling. We have a rough shape each leg of this is going to have to have in common (walk across like 20 screens, fight a boss, generally) but to make something really compelling, we want to make each of these a very distinct experience from each other. You don't want level 2 to just be level 1 but the walls are red instead of blue. Just to look at how to do this right and do this wrong, who doesn't love Metroid?

The original Metroid is pretty lacking in structure. By design, even. We have two bosses that need to be killed to open up the final area of the game, and they both hang out in their own special areas with their own special music, with a pair of other areas before those, but the whole game, by design even, is mostly getting lost in in a series of tunnels that are largely copy-pasted versions of other tunnels. There's artistic reasons for doing this. It's a game about getting lost in a weird environment, having to map stuff out and look for secret ways to progress, but these samey tunnels are THE reason most people who play it just bounce right off the game. They don't feel like they're making progress, stuff just seems to be repeating, it's all just one big mapping expedition. In contrast, I don't even need to show you a proper bit of Super Metroid, I'm just showing the room on the map that serves as our collected trinket display. If you've played it (please tell me there aren't any people reading my blog who have never played Super Metroid) just looking at this statue pile should be conjuring memories of all the major areas of the game. Brinstar is vibrant and alive. You're seeing creatures' life cycles, lots of critters just hanging out in big open spaces. Maridia feels too big to fit in the game, vast mysterious underwater caverns with weird unknowable creatures and confusing looping paths you get lost in, spooky sort of tranquil music. The wrecked ship is a haunted house and jumps you with a front-loaded boss. Norfair is The Lava Level.

Also, Super Metroid is kinda memorable because it lies about the structure a bit. There's those four major regions, with their big bosses who give you trinkets, but there's other areas, with no trinket bearing bosses, and bosses without trinkets. These break things up a bit, and throw off that comfortable expectation, but the big structural points still work. Getting to the 4 big trinket-y statue bosses do all represent almost a quarter of the game still, there's just brief, for lack of a better term, fake little levels throwing you off, keeping it interesting.

And there's also room, I'd say, for a certain amount of major fakeouts with the structure of a game. Whole lot of 16-bit games made this their bread and butter, really. Final Fantasy 4 frames everything around trying to get to these four crystals before the villains. We've got our shitenno elemental boss set. But then bam, there's an underworld with a whole other set of dark crystals, and then head to the end. Lot of people were doing this. Link to the Past? Get the 3 trinkets, then bam, here's a dark world. FF6? Travel the world gathering friends, there's an apocalypse, get the band back together. 7th Saga? Get your runes, get sent to the past, re-explore the world without them (which is less structured, and sucks). Mega Man has Wily's Fortresses for a big final showdown, and later games all start having the fake fortress first. This sort of A-side, secret B-side, final area stucture is itself kind of a comfortable reliable thing and I think it works. I also think if anyone tried to push it further with a secret-er C side, people would riot.

And of course there's other ways to have a really well-defined structure. Most RPGs ship with a map, you can check off all the overworld locations. Dungeon crawls have floors, a specific number of floors, switching is a big deal. It's exceptionally rare to be constantly going up and down between them, once you're on a new floor, you're on that floor. And then there's Resident Evil keys.

Resident Evil gives you some big ol' maps, and it feels like that should be the main structure. But it isn't, because we play fast and loose with those maps. Mansion, caves, outbuilding, secret lab. Streets, police station, sewers, secret trains, lab again. We don't really know how many locations with a map we're gonna have, we don't really finish one completely before the next necessarily. But what we do have is a set of 4 keys. We've gotta find all those keys, and use them all up. That's the real main structural thing. Finish using that last key, you know some big moment is coming. Then we probably need 3 crests, then it's final dungeon time. It's structured, it's comforting, but geographically anything goes.

And I feel like this really does apply to basically all games. Even tabletop. Whole lot of people's D&D campaigns are just sort of an endless meandering travelog, but then look at something like Paizo's adventure paths. Here's 6 books. Each mostly has its own story and theme, there's a big boss at the end. We know when we're halfway through, we know when a big epic fight is coming. It's nice and engaging and builds a comfortable rhythm. You can do that in your home games too. Establish a shitenno setup. Have some elemental crystals or pieces of a staff. Unite half a dozen kingdoms. It'll help everyone push through in the long run and help you flavor things differently.

I feel like I probably already have at least one post about this on this blog, but it's on my mind today and tumblr archives are a mess so we're revisiting it. As someone who absolutely loves RPGs, be they tabletop, console, PC, whatever, and always has, it's really shocking to me how often I find myself complaining that a game felt the need to include "RPG elements" (specifically referring to "number go up" gameplay here) which actively detract from the experience. And I don't even just mean in games that are not RPGs, if you can believe it.

What got me onto this today was seeing people gripe about some otherwise really fun Link's Awakening-ish game having a big Diablo 2 style skill tree and gear system bogging things down, assigning points to get +5% chance for a critical hit or +1.5% fire damage or whatever... and yeah just at a glance, it seems like there's a real fun vibrant kinetic action game there I wouldn't want to pause and start doing math to work out some kind of optimized build for instead of playing it. That specific of this problem I've been seeing a LOT while doing my whole play-everything-I-have-on-Steam project. Diablo 2 style loot drops and skill trees and tacked on crafting systems are just everywhere lately and they just seem to be there for the sake of being there, bogging things down and killing pacing to no real benefit.

Broadly speaking, if just playing your game is fun and engaging, getting you thinking about tactical positioning or deciphering attack patterns or getting into a good rhythm with attacks or whatever, great, just focus on that. Keep me going, keep building the complexity, add some cool upbeat music and ship it. Don't go looking for whatever random stuff just to add extra bullet points. Making numbers go up is a whole separate sort of gameplay, and it really only works well in the sort of game where constant min-max tweaking to get better performance is the main focus of the whole game. Offhand, I can think of exactly three types of video game where making Number Go Up feels fun and rewarding and not like a total drag I want to get away from:

1- Old school attrition heavy dungeon crawls (and I guess a particular flavor of JRPG where just getting from one town to the other on the overworld is An Ordeal but I'm hard pressed to name an example besides the original Dragon Quest). I really dig a good dungeon crawl. I like leaving town, heading into some giant sprawling maze, doing my best to explore and map out increasingly deep and scary chunks of it while my HP MP and recovery items are slowly getting whittled down, and my only means of making further progress is tweaking my characters and my tactics to get further with less resources spent, and yeah, if I'm getting better gear and just more resources to spend and I'm unlocking new ways to spend those resources like new spells and whatnot? Great, awesome, bring me another pad of graph paper, let me see if I can find a way to deal with mind flayers where I spend less than 10 MP on the fight.

2- Idle games. You know, Cookie Clicker and the like. The whole point of these is you set stuff up to generate new resources and use those new resources to set up more stuff that generates those resources on such a higher order scale that the number is now going up in 5 seconds by the same amount you'd previously gotten it to over the past week, in real time. Often they have a central multiplying they just call The Number and tease you with ways to make it go up. I'm not a fan of the genre and how badly a well designed one can hijack my brain and destroy my productivity, but yeah, it's literally all about Number Go Up.

3- Vampire Survivors and stuff of that nature. There's not a lot actually going on with Vampire Survivors, gameplay wise. Maybe you're exploring a map for some pickups on the ground, maybe you're moving a bit to collect drops or dodge enemies a little or get perfectly placed for some attack to hit, but mostly you are just waiting for that next chest or set of level up options so you can pick some number to go up and make the waves of death bursting out of your character function better and keep the run going. It's kind of a midway point between the unchecked exponential growth of an idle game and the endurance test of a dungeon crawler I suppose, but with shorter sessions. But do note that you're NOT focusing on fancy dodge rolls or combo building or whatever, just chilling out planning what to upgrade next.

I also want to point out what I'm actually not putting on that list. Most other RPGs. Old school 8-bit stuff is all about attrition, but if you look back over the history of the genre, that falls away real fast. Dungeons go from big challenges to changes of scenery leading up to boss fights where the real mechanics come into play, or just filler between cutscenes. And if you really drill down on the mechanics of the best games from this era, you'll see they actually cut way the hell back on Number-Go-Up gameplay. Just look at the Final Fantasy games. 4's whole selling point was not having to grind and just pushing ever forward. 5 is all about rewarding you with no abilities to play around with more than higher damage on your main attacks. 6 just straight up does not increase your stats at all when you level up, enabling a non-linear back half, then we start almost entirely dropping equipment, with new weapons less valuable for how hard they hit than how they unlock new abilities, before they just become action games. Other games, especially on the PC side of things, jump into level-scaling systems, where your numbers do go up out of a sense of tradition, but enemy numbers go up alongside them to effectively keep everything stable (side note, I hate this, it's a waste of effort to try to get the same result as doing nothing but with failure potential, just do nothing).

Now this I know I've talked about before, but the genre that most desperately needs to drop the whole Number Go Up thing? MMORPGs. I feel like every time anyone has ever bounced off one of these or burnt out on them, it's because of them trying to push the big number chase, and it definitely completely wrecks any sort of onboarding, and leaving huge swaths of the world empty. Let me walk you through this at the start and the end of some hypothetical MMO.

The way basically everyone seems to approach things, you start off in Newbie Town. You talk to all the NPCs, they give you maybe a dozen quests to collect 5 boar teeth or whatever in the nearby fields, and also kill 30 boars, and kill the king boar, and maybe do all that for the sheep in the slightly more eastern fields. So you spend maybe half an hour doing that, and you get rewarded with like the level 5 gear set, and sent off to the next town down the road, where you repeat that same behavior, continuing down the winding road until you eventually reach The Big City for people who hit the original level cap. And you hang out there doing endgame stuff until an expansion drops and then you follow the big road down The New Big City.

Mechanically, the way your stats keep improving, and enemies are of higher levels in different locations, you are just kinda bound into this life of the eternal hermit crab. Which is kind of dumb in general, but is just awful if anyone wants to play this game together with friends. If you all make accounts the same day and all log in together, cool, but if not, there's gonna be some point where someone plays for an hour when their friend isn't on, and now they are two towns further down the road and these two can't really play together.

Now, what if you just do not have any stat growth at all? We just have 20 or 30 towns or whatever spread around the map. Monsters surrounding them are all roughly equally difficult. Or you know, you have some canon fodder boars and some elite boars and the boss boar that's real freaky and you kinda need a party, sure, but if you can get that party together you can go fight it a minute after you create your character. You can still have a big long quest chain in each town if you really want, but just keep those totally independent of each other. So now the player who's been playing for a good bit longer than their newbie friend can just go "hey I was thinking today I'd head over to Poprocks Cove and do all the Fizzlecrab quests, wanna meet up over there?" and they do, and tada, the two towns further down the road problem is no more, at least until one person exhausts every questline everywhere, but then they have nothing better to do between endgame stuff runs but help a friend play catch-up anyway. And hey! Now you can actually like, do worldbuilding? Instead of this being the levels 5-10 town, this is just the big mining town, people come here if they wanna do mining. They go over there if they wanna sail the trade routes, or here if they wanna do the go-kart races. Let people start in any town, they can get all familiar and establish local scenes, and bouncing around to visit different places is cool because they all have their own little subcultures of players.

So OK, but what about the high end stuff? Personally my only real serious experience with high end/late game/end game stuff in an MMO is getting roped into a raid group in FF14, so stop me if this isn't the norm, but the way it works is, when you're at the end of the base game or latest expansion or whatever, we've got these optional sicko mode super bosses that get trickled out over a series of patches, so people can stay engaged and doing stuff with their friends while waiting for the next bit of new content. And consequentially when I say sicko mode I mean here is a half hour video explaining how to not die every 2 seconds in like an 8 minute fight:

So how do Numbers Going Up interact with this? Well, mostly they don't. The actual fight mechanics here mostly involve puzzling out an incredibly obtuse set of boss tells and how to get 8 people doing elaborate dance choreography to dodge everything until droning through the same set of attack inputs on pure muscle memory has the boss die right before ending the attack pattern with an unavoidable party wipe... but we're in a game with attack and defense numbers that do be Going Up, so these are all tuned with the assumption that you have the best gear possible. There's a few different things that can contribute to that, but one way or another they all sort of boil down to logging in every single day for like an hour to do one or the other incredibly tedious task to get components or some special currency to craft/buy the very top of the line stuff to participate in this one fight without dying to the timer, only to then throw that gear out and grind out the next set for the next boss. And you could just Not. It's already enough of a logistical nightmare to get 8 (or in some cases like, 50?) people together and collectively hit everyone's head on these walls until you figure out you need to get 4 people tangled in spiderwebs to bounce a superball back across the arena or match pokemon types of the summons or turn yourselves into zombies to get healed by death spells or whatever. You don't need the extra commitment of clocking in daily to meet quotas too.

Now, this system does have the side effect that if you put a particular boss fight off for months or years, Number Continue To Go Up and it gets easier, but it's a bad system? Like OK cool, I'm more survivable now so maybe if my party sucks at standing equidistant so the lasers fired at us all overlap some, I just barely live instead of dying, but I'm also doing more damage so now the boss dies before it even gets to the big finale of dealing with every BS mechanic at once. You could easily just keep all the numbers fixed, ensure I always see the whole thing play out and then just have an easy mode version of the fight (something FF14 already does, even). And not having gear with better stats drop from these fights isn't an issue because there are already all sorts of pure bragging rights trophies for these. The example above I'm super pumped to do just because it's a fun challenge, and as a bonus, winning gives me a flame-textured twisty noodle snake dragon to add to my pile of like 300 boss-reward mounts to ride around on.

Now this pivots us into the big defense or Number Go Up gameplay. Sometimes, as a game designer, you need to pad things out with a bunch of grinding. There's a whole conversation to be had over whether that's actually true, but for argument's sake, let's say it is. You need the player to hang out at this one point in the overall progression of the game for a couple hours doing the same thing over and over before they proceed, otherwise they'll just blow through the whole game too fast and either feel dissatisfied because it's too short, or have too long of a gap before a new patch/expansion/DLC/whatever drops, or the pacing is just plain going to feel off. OK. But "so you have to level up and get better stats and/or safe up to buy this gear with better stats" doesn't naturally follow from that. You can force it with story progression blocks. This guy won't open this gate until you show him 2000 nazi scalps. You can make it a goofy side thing. Run this dungeon 50 times and you get a bunny girl outfit. And I already covered how a lot of console RPGs solved this years ago. I'm not stopping and grinding to get more attack power, I'm doing it to unlock this set of new spells via this job system/materia/whatever, and they aren't just higher damage versions of what I have, they're tactically useful in different circumstances.

I mentioned that this is a problem for tabletop RPGs too though, and it is. D&D specifically is the one and only game I am aware of that actually does need Number to Go Up to work right. That one game (and some derivatives) is built around this really unique and weird power fantasy where over the course of a campaign the party goes from weak little children trembling with sticks they barely know how to swing as they face off against, I dunno, a particularly big dog? Some wacky little guys? And then they gradually become more capable and powerful and uncover some grand conspiracy that eventually leads to them practically becoming demigods dealing with world or universe imperiling supernatural threats. So yes, there you need Number Go Up and this matching giant tome of increasingly freaky enemies to deal with as it does so.

But then there's like a good thousand or so RPGs where that isn't the setup. In basically every RPG that isn't D&D, that sort of power scaling just isn't a thing. Maybe you're ordinary people dealing with freaky horror mysteries and the whole deal is that you are fragile and mortal. Maybe you're scrappy folks doing some kinda heist (and maybe you are also bears). Maybe you're half a dozen lesbian snake women having to share a small living space. Maybe you're just a bunch of demigods from the start dealing with a whole pantheon of jerks or just herding those mortal cats. I need to use some concrete example here though, so let me use Eclipse Phase, since that's the non-D&D game I've played the most longrunning campaigns of. It started life as a high concept interplanetary transhuman spinoff of Shadowrun, which is itself this cyberpunk criminal heist sorta deal but with elves and such. We've got a really open character creation system where mostly you get a whole big pile of points to dump into skills, so everyone kinda starts off as the best of the best in their own highly specialized fields, coordinating those skills together. Have some sample characters.

Honestly this is a terrible example I just wanted to break things up with art. But yeah, from the jump, at character creation, you'll have someone in the party who's got like an 80% in sneaking around with bonuses to push it all the way to 100% and someone else who's amazing at talking and someone else to be the party doctor and/or mechanic and maybe someone who's just a walking pile of super accurate guns. And we'll have an adventure needing all these skills and it should mostly go smoothly with interesting complications, and that's cool. But, because That's How RPGs Work, we have to have a progression system, so after every adventure the GM's gonna hand everyone another 10 points to throw at their skill percentages, essentially. And for one or two adventures that's cool. If I didn't quite max out my main specialty from the jump, I can top it off a couple sessions in, and maybe there's some other skill that helps my specialty I didn't have up as much as I should, but if you keep going for a real long running game? Well, I'm as good as I can get at sneaking around, I'll start bringing up my social skills so I can convince the cleaning staff to keep quiet if I bump into them. I'm the best hacker I can be, I should start training with guns in case there aren't turrets in the roof to reprogram. Eventually everyone just kinda becomes more of a generalist, everyone can do everything, nobody feels special and the cool heist coordination breaks down.

Maybe we need to tweak things so people have more skill points to work with or you hold some until you've seen your character in play and realize where the rest should go, but the constant growth just hurts the game. And hell, even D&D kinda breaks down at the higher levels. The math gets wonky, you go from some people being more accurate than others to needing 1s and 20s for a given character to either miss or hit a particular monster, damage gets all rocket-tag-y and wizards stop running out of spells.