Evonee

Drink your choccy milk please!

Eva | 31 | Ace bisexual and Two Spirit/non-binary woman | Afro-Indigenous (Black (Haitian + African American) and Nde/Chiricahua Apache) | ♎ | Weirdos and pro NFT/AI folks do not interact with me | pfp by bourbonbun



pleasantlytwstd
@pleasantlytwstd

The reason this discussion honestly sucks so fucking much isn't even because BG3, and DnD as a whole is jam-packed to the max with racism. That's the super easy convo that is on the surface that no one really needs to have because we've beaten the daylights out of it.

The convo we NEED to be having is around the white gazer's obsession with needing racism in their fantasies 'to teach an important lesson about race' coupled with the convo about PoC that are WotC adjacent (or pretty close) actively and willingly hand-waving the shit away in the quiet hopes and dreams that maybe, one day, they too can work on Critical Role. This is why I have a Cohost. So I'mma try to hit all the main 'questions' that come up in this mess from what I assume are well meaning people who want to understand 'why is the racism in BG3 such a big deal?' Let's start.

"The racism teaches an important lesson!"

No, the fuck it doesn't.

If you need a crash course on How Racism Fucks Everything, you can do so in real life, every day, by simply having more than two PoC friends and supporting/engaging/consuming PoC activist content. There is nothing in BG3 that is being 'displayed' or 'showcased' that hasn't been witnessed or pulled straight from history in real life. Tieflings being called slurs to their face? Ask a Black grandmother what going to school was like for her generation. People claiming they'll kill you in your sleep? Yea, Jewish people just entered the chat and it looks like they've clicked the convenient 'Raises Hand' button. Being called slurs for your clothing? The list goes on and on of things that happen right now, in reality land, that very much 'inspire' the racism that is in DnD and the reason this claim is a massive ass cop out is because players know that.

We know y'all know that.

But these players never do something about things like that in real life. You love to tell your Black friends about how poorly tieflings and orcs are treated (with no care about the parallels to real life so fuck us if it's triggering), and how you destroyed a goblin camp because of it, or you tried to kill that Druid lady, or that you've made it your personal goal to just piss Astarion off as hard as you can....but if we asked you to, in real life, accompany us to a BLM walk, or to challenge that RTO mandate your job is trying to push, or to maybe just keep some bottled water in your car for homeless people, it's 'eeehhhhhhhhhhhn.......'. Y'all need the racism in the game because it allows you to demonstrate how good of a person you could be with no introspection of how it reports on how good of a person in reality you're choosing not to be. You could be this hero. You could make someone's day. You could keep that kid from being hungry, or step in knowing your privilege will protect you from whatever weird ass assailant is trying to touch my hair, or grope an ass, whatever. And even if YOU didn't have the strength to walk up and do it, you could tell someone you know does. Yet you actively choose to do none of the above, just to turn around and boot up BG3 and go 'but at least here I am aware that disliking Drow because of their skin is bad and that they have every right to be angry at how they've been treated for generations!' Bonus bullshit points if you have that thought 10 minutes after commenting on a BIPOC person's thread about how 'when you call us crackers it hurts our feelings, being mean and violent isn't the way :('.

"The racism is deep seeded and part of the lore."

And?

Listen, I spent this past Sunday with my now husband sitting on the floor like a 10 year old building Legos about Sonic the Hedgehog and watching the Venture Bros. Adult Swim just had that joint on and running all day. In the first two seasons, they were throwing around the R word like it was no one's business. Race jokes were being made all over the place. It was honestly hard for the both of us to listen in fully without wincing on occasion. But then I clocked something.

Right around the time they introduced Jonas Venture, Jr, the writing made a conscious effort to course correct. Monarch said the r-word, which lead to a character flashing to Jonas and saying 'bad word, bad word!' and Jonas, mid-speech, just straight up scolding Monarch about how, and I quote, "we don't say those slurs around here!"

It's that fucking easy y'all.

The writers took all of 2 seconds, to start pushing a new narrative of 'hey we found out this is a bad thing to say so we're going to stop saying it' and baked it RIGHT IN to the next season, going 'effective immediately, we aren't saying that shit anymore.' Now there is a convo to be had about ableism and how deep rooted it is, but we won't go there. The point being conveyed here is saying it's been problematic like this for a long time doesn't mean it has to continue being so. Later seasons went even further in just calling shit straight up racist, or making it clear that a character performing bigotry was not a character you were supposed to be fond of. I'm not saying the Venture Bros. is the bastion of Great Writing-it isn't, it still has a lot of problems-but what I am saying is the ability to not write absolutely asinine and offensively wild drivel has to be something of interest. WotC has not ever been interested in such, nor has most of their purchasing fanbase, because most of their purchasing fanbase is in the segment titled The racism teaches an important lesson! up above.

"You need to chill, many are playing this and don't see the problem."

So full transparency: because I knew the game was going to be a racist ass mess, I was on the fence about getting it at all. My husband hasn't seen much of if because he rolled a Gold Dwarf barbarian so everyone talks to him like he's fucking normal. I was gifted a copy of the game from the lovely Wino Minalien and planned on installing it in September when our data cap wasn't in jeopardy from Comcast and their punk asses. Even amongst all this, I still plan on playing, because I'm plenty resilient enough that if someone wants to come sideways at my tiefling (she will be a tiefling) I will casually murder them. 'But Vanessa', you may say, 'that may disrupt quests down the road and gate you from characters' and dear reader, I am 100% confident that if someone out there has the gonads and frankly audacity to create a mod to make Wyll white that there is someone out there working tirelessly to create a mod where you can have all characters and say 'fuck your decision tree.' I'm not worried about it. We did this with Skyrim. It'll be done here too.

But also a lot of the people playing it and additionally reviewing and reporting on it are whiter than paper on snow. Of course they aren't going to report on the racism. In some cases, they likely didn't even fucking clock it. A lot of nonPoC won't clock racist bigotry unless it's the Worst Possible Form Of It-like calling a tiefling a slur to her face, or nuking a camp full of orc kids because they're orcs. Using a tiefling child for experimentation that as a player you can fuck up and she'll still get killed by a snake. They have to see the High Elf call the Drow scum, a blight on elves, a monster, a mistake, and useless clump of cells before they consider going 'hmm, that seems a bit far.'

PoC writers likely aren't writing about it because they fucking don't want to-not because they didn't notice it, but because they value their peace and don't want to be harassed. Gita wrote a piece flat out praising the game and is currently locked on Twitter to prevent the DM spam, but has shared plenty of the email death threats and harassment they've got because of their article that again, I cannot stress enough, praises the game. Instead of asking PoC who are saying 'racism *again*? UGH' to chill out, maybe ask what all these outlets that gave it 10s, a 97 on MetaCritic, and a 'masterpiece' rating everywhere meant when they said 'the writing is phenomenal.' It's easy to scream and yell (rightfully so) at the writers for writing Yet Another Racist Ass Story, but I am asking once again that we collect up OUR OWN and also start yelling at all of the gamers who are more than content to just pretend I Do Not See It.

"Doesn't this ignore the PoC that are fine with it?"

sigh. Ok. This is....complicated.

So you are going to have people like me, who are very PoC, very queer, whatever, who are going to play and enjoy the game for what it is at the core, which is a actually decently put together CRPG where I can legit make a badass looking tiefling that has Black team members is gonna keep that noseless bitch in camp. I can't stand her, she's just pissy to be pissy. I get she's an alien but she's also a LOT. Me enjoying the game does not mean I auto-default to not caring about the issues within the game-like the fact that my tiefling is going to get stares and be called slurs everywhere she goes. I have strong dislikes that I can't be my favorite alignment of actually chaotic good because you ultimately have to Do Some Bad Stuff to keep the game moving and even align with supposed good people (good people who call people slurs to their face, sacrifice children, occasionally eat people, you know your standard good people fare). I originally intended to steer clear of this convo but it didn't sit right with me that when white queers wanted to jump up and go 'hark! this is racist!' it was An Important Topic but the moment Black players got in and started saying 'yknow this feels really not great' it became a problem. A lot of y'all gotta unpack your racism there but that isn't the purpose of this post and I'm not a therapist.

There's a very quick and gross assumption that gets made that if a PoC is not talking about a PoC issue, it means we're neutral and/or we don't care. I've been on the front lines of these topics for a better part of 15 years and your bitch is *le tired*. I don't want to fight all the time. Some days I do want to just log in, grab my tiefling, my fiery tiefling, my angry horned Black dude, and my bad-decisions wizard and just go ham. My birthday celebration was this past weekend and I just wanted to assemble some Legos and go to the gym. But a big reason I am always clear that I don't rock with the TTRPG space Like That is because of topics like this and how dastardly and fucking ugly they become every. fucking. time. Which is why when we get the PoC who cosign this bullshit I get turbo pissed off and things get MORE complicated.

There isn't enough scrutiny (and I will be real, there isn't space for the scrutiny because weaponizing activism is also a problem) around the visible PoC who will gladly shield WotC from 'The Poor Wittle Intwernet Cwiticisms' because like clockwork they either work for WotC, work alongside WotC, or aspire to work with/for WotC. I don't know who needs to tell y'all this, but if Crit Role ain't noticed you by now, they are not GOING to. Watching as PoC fall all over themselves to essentially push the narrative of 'it's always been like this, when will y'all get over it' is UGLY work-those PoC are asking their PEERS to let WotC continue to slide with their assumptions and portrayals of PoC being in the toilet and swirling. And the trade off the PoC collective gets for it is seeing the same 3-5 PoC working on books or being involved with shows that make LITTLE TO NO TANGIBLE CHANGE 'but hey I got a credit so it's progress'-is it though? Is it really progress to keep all of the racism in the book and all the weird ass racially charged traits and conflicts but slap a BW paladin (I think it was a paladin?) on page like, 40 and then put two Black people in the credits? Is it really progress to hire the Black VA who will nod and smile with all the absurdly racist ass lines they have to read without challenging them?

What's even wilder is the exact same PoC know that they will thusly be thrusted up as the Lawfully Good Paladin Shields of Discourse and still do this mess. Even wilder is that the same people will once every blue moon get on their pages and actively....complain about this exact thing. It's not a useful conversation when we can literally scroll your timeline and see that essentially your entire stance on the conversation is 'take the racism out of fantasy settings', then when people point and say 'including WotC' it becomes 'wait no not like that.' Rude as it may be to say, I'd rather this group just no say anything at all. 9/10 they aren't helping and they just muddy shit further. Which brings us to the original question posed of 'doesn't this ignore the PoC that are fine with it?' because reader, the unfortunate best answer I have for you to that is literally 'nuanced isn't a strong enough word, it is literally complicated.'

The main thing for me, personally, is this: if the racism in BG3 is a massive turn off, or you tried and you couldn't handle it, and you wanna talk about it-especially if you're PoC-you absolutely can, should, and I commend you accordingly. I, as I said, very much was lukewarm the moment I realized it was DnD based because I know WotC just does not fucking care at all about attempting to write something non-racist. It's like they're allergic to the idea. But in watching my husband play, I will not deny that it is a very, very fun game and it's given us a game that we can both FINALLY co-op on where I don't want to pop his ass in the mouth for blowing up a barrel that I explicitly said to not fucking blow up. Your thoughts on the topic are super valid and it's a lot to deal with.

If you're not bothered by any of this? Dope! Pulling up to PoC (or anyone, really) and telling them 'oh well it's fine to me?' helps literally no one! You are not a special star child because you are capable of casually ignoring the big issues in the game! Honestly at that point you are fine to just....go forth and enjoy the game! Maybe write about who your favorite crush is and why it's Karlach! Post screencaps of your character being a baddie! There are lots of other avenues in talking about BG3 that you can pursue that doesn't require you to belittle or dismiss other people's very valid concerns and gripes (especially if you aren't impacted by them).

If you're nonPoC I'mma be real, you need to sit this one out. This is decades worth of bullshit and lack of care that people are challenging (yet again) and if you agree, you need to be sharing and boosting the words of the PoC talking about it. Get in their mentions and fend off people who are making their lives hell. Send them some KoFi money. Figure out ways to support them because some people are receiving harassment and death threats (once again) over the very very low bar ask of 'can we have a story where a driving factor isn't racism'.

And really, in 2023, almost 2024, is having a story that doesn't eat sleep and breathe racism that hard of an ask?



pleasantlytwstd
@pleasantlytwstd

So Kotaku has been doing a bang up job of writing shit that absolutely no one asked for and making a lot of Claims(tm) that make little to no sense, which is very par for them if I'm being honest, but their recent piece on RPGs REALLY put me a way and so we're on Cohost. Keep in mind this is after Japanese devs said they didn't want to be referred to as JRPGs-an article that even I was like 'well that seems silly.' Oh god, do I get it now. So thanks for that, Kotaku, I guess.

It was immediately after this raging dumpster fire that YouTube recommended me deep dives on DQ as a series, and simultaneously Paul started getting ads for Let's Plays of Parasite Eve. So we skimmed some lists and played the Parasite Eve OST for Christmas. It was great!

A video came up talking about how games have lost their 'chill'-not as in they're out of control, but literally. It helped me fill several gaps at once that answered why this article frustrated me so heavy:

The RPG genre isn't dying and P5 didn't save it; the RPG genre is being choked out via a desire for more action, more gratification, and less of the slow burn.
Being denied a chance to thrive is not the same as your genre dying; the chill video helped me see that. It went in depth about how there was a time, an era some may say, where the point of creating video games was the whimsy. The nonsense. The 'fuck it, why not.' We got mountains of publicized and known RPG content because it was allowed to BE RPG content. Late 90s and early 2000s was lush with Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasies, Shadow Hearts, Breath of Fires, Dark Clouds, Wild Arms, Radiant Historias, Golden Suns, Fire Emblems; we saw no shortage of games where your job as a player was to navigate this fuckface loser of a MC into a life where they got swole, learned some shit, saved a world or two, maybe punched a god.

It was meant to be consumed gradually, the pace was intentionally slow. The reason you invested was for story and when it came to combat, that was where absurdity shined. There were no limits on magic spells and 'what could work', no one said 'you technically can't summon that, it's a Greek deity and your character is distinctly Spanish', it didn't have to be 500% accurate: your main character may have amnesia and be the most badass vigilante in the world, you could be immortal trying to figure out what the fuck the humans did this time, you could be the most beautiful agent of death, plummeting to the Earth with the dark and dreadful endgoal of delivering humans from their mortal coil, just for their souls to join you in battle against unjust and unreasonable gods. And sometimes you're just a goofy looking kid with big ass clown shoes swinging a 'keyblade'-a literal sword fashioned like a fucking key, that opens doors not by inserting the key but by pointing to it very cheekily and watching as a laser beam shoots out of your key to open the door that has a keyhole but is not being opened conventionally using a key. Also Mickey Mouse put you up to this. Maybe you were fighting in the war but it doesn't change the fact that you also fought in the war and had 9 jobs to do it, hired some random chemist woman to join you and watched as she grew from slinging bottles to touching grass and choking a bitch out with it. You didn't become a pokemon trainer overnight: you tirelessly caught mon after mon and then you reveled in beating the shit out of some gym nerd and said 'come off that badge' then as your exhausted fighting fatales rest you ran into the forest to find...another one. Maybe a shiny one this time.

It was grandeur.
It was nonsensical.
It was extravagant.
And most importantly: it was fun because of it.
The video (I will try to find it) didn't focus on just RPGs to be clear-their opening piece was about Skate 3, and how they just wanted a game like it again where we didn't need all the extra-he just wanted to do some sick jumps. That's it. he didn't care how realistic it looked. he didn't care if it was accurate to the top skaters of the year. He wanted pike and air, and that was all. SSX Tricky would be proud.

RPGs aren't and never were dying. But they are being severely overshadowed by the AAA need and desire to make every game they create into an action blockbuster, game edition, and it shows.

P5 didn't 'save' the genre-these games were and have still been getting made. They were just squandered severely by the over-abundance of hyper realistic RPGs.
In 2016 we had titles like the Odin Sphere reboot, SMT IV, DQ Builders, Fire Emblem Fates: Birthright, Tales of Beseria, I Am Setsuna, The Technomancer, Grim Dawn, Tyranny, Banner Saga 2, XCOM 2-and that's to name a FEW. But you know what else came out that year that made much more noise?

Dark Souls 3.
Fallout 4 DLC.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
Final Fantasy XV.
The only one that was a massive budget game that still appealed to that whimsy even remotely was a World of Warcraft expansion.
But the trends start making themselves. We can see the pattern of 'RPG, but make it realistic. Make it gritty. If we can see every follicle of fur on Dogmeat don't fucking ship it. I need the radiance of that plate brighter, now. The combat needs to be fast paced, because that's exciting-we're done taking our time-adapt or die.' It's not to say that these games aren't fun, don't misunderstand.

But we have to start earnestly talking about how the need to be The Next Blockbuster is clouding the landscape. Our jobs afford us the agency to be little shitty goblins that do extremely weird fucking things in the name of a design and after we're done Charlie-splaining our idea, point to the whiteboard and go 'but there is a start and a finish, so no matter how absurd it sounds, it still makes sense.' Turning a bunch of fuckfoolery and nonsense into a fantastical and loveable journey is our job.

If the author of the Kotaku article wanted to talk about how 'man, it really sucks that RPGs as a genre really isn't getting the love it used to, and a lot of that stems from C-suite execs and western culture in general wanting high budget, flashy, realistic games that take 7+ years to make when the genre as a whole has a mountain of potential and life still pumping in it' I'd been all over it. Yup, you right, let's make smaller and more fun games again, or hell let's make a big game that doesn't have to look like a photo on my wall. They instead said P5 'saved' the genre. As though all these other games didn't exist. Which speaks significantly more to

  • the author, despite writing for a gaming culture magazine, has an extremely narrow scope on all the games within the RPG genre
  • the author, while writing for a gaming culture magazine, is noticing that the RPG genre as a whole is pushing much more towards the large scale, blockbuster-esque, realistic, and action driven approach for its games and that's super disappointing because RPG can be literally anything
  • both

We saw this in literal 4K with Final Fantasy XVI-the same devs who said JRPG is a pejorative.

Square-Enix took a franchise that for almost FOURTY YEARS held firm on an idea of what FF was: slow burn, rich story-telling, beautiful and frankly outrageous visuals, a banging OST, and the player having the agency to take their party (who also had agency) and load them up with magic, with items, summons, and spells. Characters were humans, or rodent-adjacent, or rabbits, or hell a half-espyr. Maybe your character has a gun for a hand, I don't know. Or maybe your headmaster could be related to Oga Garra. Oh there's also a small child with a horn that is 40x more powerful than you, a black mage that isn't human (we don't know what it is tbh), and.....whatever Quina Quen is. Maybe you'll play soccer UNDERWATER. Maybe you'll play cards with spirits-you get the point. It was capable of having interesting, mature (and sometimes relatable!) storytelling while also not taking itself entirely too seriously. It was colorful, it was bright, the party members grew together, figuratively and literally. It was like an advanced coloring book, with those bonus fold out pages.

And then they made FF XVI, and said on record with their chest that they were throwing this very functional and still profitable formula and flipping it on it's head in the hopes of appealing to a global audience. A lot of people wrote this off as normal: FF changes all the time, why was this different? Well:

  • mature, aka dark, gritty, oh and only humans are allowed (but not Black ones I AM NEVER GETTING OVER THIS)
  • party members aren't a thing anymore after, and I cannot stress this enough, ALMOST FOURTY YEARS of having them
  • the color palette and aesthetic is flat, which is frankly impressive after FF XII
  • lack of flexibility for the player-summons are limited to one person, spells are ?????
  • nothing in the game makes you feel like you and your crew are badasses, just...you
  • and yes we have to mention there is no turn-based combat.....but I feel this point just becomes an unfair punching bag for many

And that's not 'just A Bitter RPGer Who Didn't Get What They Wanted': those are valid complaints. Valid complaints that no one wanted to hear because 'but Devil May Fantasy fun though'-yea, Devil May Cry/Fantasy is fun, we never said otherwise. Tales of as a series does a fantastic job of blending action oriented combat while giving you, the player, agency, direct cause-and-effect leveling, a chance to see everyone in your team grow and learn, while handling heavy and mature in a fashion that doesn't make you feel like you're being beaten over the head with it. It's colorful, it's bold, everyone has an actual personality, and sometimes they even clash!

If you want introspection of why 'RPGs are dying' this is your case study, in the flesh. Square isn't the only company looking to 'appeal to more audiences'-it's why the chill video really hit home: for many, RPGs are a place of comfort, of relaxation, of reading a book but getting to be 'involved' in the progress of said book, at your own pace. We no longer get the luxury of roaming around and just fucking off without some NPC telling you 'hey you need to play the game' every two minutes. You don't get to watch your character actually grow into the super potent badass over time because fifteen minutes in you already had a super flashy swishy shooshy sword and 45 minutes in you were already doing god battles. Sure, it has that grandeur down packed. But the whimsy is...nowhere. There is no fun side quest to do that has you just chugging shitty drinks because why not. There is no levity in the story at any point: in many of the games I listed there is always SOMETHING to take that edge off. We can save the world-after I'm done fishing. Ultimecia has to die for sure, but this ghost down the hall is absolutely coming off these Triple Triad cards first. I think back to how in Dragon Quest XI you literally have to jump back in time, knowingly destroying a timeline, to save your friends and hold the knowledge that you are essentially Trunks, no one will understand that, if you try to explain it the timeline will re-fuck itself, SOOOOOOOOO I guess we're gonna hit these slots rq, maybe smack up some metal slimes. Let's fill out our monster book! The current wave of realism driven, fast-paced, constantly moving you forward action RPGs are a distinct pull from all the things that RPG as a genre has to offer. That's not killing the genre-it's making it stagnant and replicable for profit.

You have been able to save the world, while being in high school, or hanging with your frog friend, or arguing with a druid, or asking an oversized lizard to pickpocket something for you. Saying you (the Kotaku author) opted to not engage any of those things because you waited for P5 after you beat P4 Golden isn't the vibe. XCOM is a RPG that delivers fun tactical combat, interesting characters, interesting ways to DEVELOP and CREATE characters (insofar that people will literally stop playing if certain people wipe), kicks it with weird aliens, upgrades weird tech shit that will never exist in our lives, adhere to a style that doesn't look like I can count the pores on someone's face, all while still addressing a plot point of 'so the world is kinda at war and we losing-ish kinda and we need to maybe not do that.' It gives you that mature tone, respects you as a player intellectually, respects your time as a real person, is great to look at over time, and still provides you levity via barks, remarks, and team commentary. In FFXVI, it always felt very GO GO GO GO, STORY DUMP YOU CATCH ALL THAT TOO BAD GO GO GO, ok here is your overly detailed boss fight where you press a few buttons to make a movie proc, ok GO GO GO GO-which works really well for a Bayonetta or a DmC. But in a RPG, where I am playing a ROLE, I want to feel like I'm actually playing said role, fleshing out that story and journey, and not like I'm in that scene of The Bear where I just found out I'm firing 76 beefs or that I'm no longer expo because I did not react fast enough.

Look: if you made it this far, thanks. It's a lot of thoughts.
But this just didn't sit right on my spirit.
Claiming P5 saved a genre is....look, I have my platinum in P5, P5R, am working on my platinum in P5 Tactica. I say this as someone who loves the game(s).
P5 did not save anything or anyone.
It just helped remind us that 'RPG' is not 'realistic people game', it's 'role playing game.'
We can literally do whatever we want to with it, and it seems like a weird choice to say 'let's only focus on realism with a linear quest, no variability in party or a lot of the execution, and as flashy combat as we can muster. We'll add a story at some point but it's not the driver.'

It also just unfortunately exposed loudly why Japanese devs don't want the label.
Westerners have done a great job demonstrating on what they meant by 'the term feels derogatory'-because there is also a conversation to be had in how this author penned a piece that has an undertone of JRPGs saved the RPG genre, which disrespects the entire genre as it is, and Western devs getting Very Upset about that because they don't want to hear how maybe devs that aren't from the US are cookin'.

There is a reason DQ continues to be one of the best selling RPGs in the market, and they've never once leaned into action hybrids, making characters look like real people, or shoe-horning you into doing the story as fast and as much as possible. Hell, the soundtracks are almost the same each time minus a few variations. Toriyama's namesake carries because we COULD talk about the outdated tropes and styles he's still using. And yet they still opt to release on Saturdays to allow people time to enjoy the game rather than call off of work, call out sick, or run home from school. DQ AND Persona are showing at a AAA level what indies have been telling us: RPGs are for the stories and the journeys first and foremost. P5 did that magnificently. DQ stays being SHE. Sea of Stars, Chained Echoes, and In Stars and Time are right there demonstrating this entire piece, and to insinuate that they wouldn't have performed nearly as well without P5 existing is honestly: an insult.

Baldur's Gate 3 took the world by storm because they weren't afraid to say 'bring in the aliens, bring in the absolute zanny spells, let people get thrown off cliffs as a strategy, romance a woman with horns coming out of her head. Let the teammates fight. Let the teammates make out. The shopkeep is a smartass because of course she is. Have some mini games! Is it a quest? Is it a time waster? Who knows and who cares, because you want to do it anyway; but also watch as your characters grow, and you understand their journeys, as much as you understand your own. Also there is a space squid trying to kill you.'

P5 didn't shine because 'oh it's a JRPG' (and no the author never FORMALLY said that but...they are saying that)-it's because they understood the assignment.

An assignment that many Western devs are desperate to insist was drastically different, somehow, than the assignment we've been given, as we all look around at each other's homework and see About The Same Picture, reckoning with the idea that while yes our parents have more than enough money to put us in this school that maybe we copied the wrong person's work.


@Evonee shared with:


I forgot to do an introduction post but here is one now. Hello Eva I am Eva and I'm a Black Native, 2S and nby person/woman, and pet mom of Mimi: my 17 year old dorkie and Kiki: my 6/7 year old black cat who recently passed from the aftermath of an unexpected seizure. For those who already know me from Twitter, Tumblr, Discord, etc. here's another place where you can find me!



staff
@staff

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