Here is part of a 12-year-old story about an orc with a big butt

While going through some super old documents, I scrounged up this short story I started, but never finished. It is about an orc with a gigantic butt. I have no idea what to do with it, so now it’s your problem.

King Fat-Arse

There is a word in High Draconic which, if you had the requisite two tongues with which to pronounce it, might sound something like k’kraughllg. There is no literal translation, or even an approximate one, because the concept conveyed by this word exist outside of mortal experience. In plainest terms, it describes a foul odor. But human noses are dull, muted things, incapable of truly experiencing the full breadth of smells the universe is capable of producing. No, this word describes a smell so foul that inhaling it can actually damage one’s inner light. It describes the stenches which roil up from the deepest pits of the bottommost hell. It describes the thousand-year-old droppings of six-toed demons who feast entirely on rotgut and misery.

The cave in which the bard was currently seated smelled pretty k’kraughllg right about now.

Part of it was the bog outside, he knew. Rain was hammering away outside, kicking up splatters of muck, pooling up in the crooks of trees, oozing slime down their long, drooping trunks. The storm was so violent it was stripping away the caked-on top layer of swamp, allowing the new and exciting rot underneath to breathe. Smells that had laid buried in the swamp for a generation took their opportunity to bubble up and wage war on the open air.

The other part, though, was the bard’s unconscious companion, the orc-king. He was laying flat on his stomach on the opposite side of the cave, his head laying in a fetid puddle. He was snoring softly, his mouth burbling against the mixture of spittle and cave-slime he was laying in. Most of his weight was supported on his right knee, his left leg twisted off at an angle which would be considered unnaturally even by orcish standards. This caused him to be folded comically in half, with the largest and loudest part of him jutting straight up into the air.

The driest part of the cave sat empty. The bard had abandoned it in favor of a slime-covered rock nearer to the cave entrance, so as not to be sitting downwind of the slobbering orc-king. The sound of the torrent outside was constantly being split by the braaps and spluts escaping from his backside. The bard couldn’t name a sickness that caused a man to lose his sense of smell, but if he could have, he would have given a bag of silver to be presently afflicted.

One such fart escaped with such force that the orc-king’s center of gravity shifted slightly, just enough to cause him tumbling over with a loud crash. The shock of it jolted his eyes open, and for a moment the bard saw there a very genuine and very sad sort of confusion. That confusion faded almost immediately away to anger, and the orc-king thrashed about with his limbs, trying to right himself.

“Owww!” he complained, suddenly clutching his left leg in pain. He rocked back and forth, hugging his knee with one hand and sucking the thumb on the other.

“Well, I’ve decided,” said the bard in a bored tone of voice, “you’ve wounded your leg. I’ve been sitting here for hours trying to work out whether you’d bent it when you fell, or if it was just naturally twisted ’round.”

The orc-king, suddenly aware of having been addressed, turned his gaze towards the bard. He let his thumb fall from his mouth, hanging there by a long tendril of drool. Once a few awkward moments had passed the orc-king seemed to recall he was an intimidating and imposing figure. He said, “I’m suck the fat from you’s bones, hyoomun.”

“I take offense, sir. I’m quite lean,” said the bard. “Besides, I’ve disarmed you.” He gestured to the notched stone ax and the pile of mismatched daggers sitting to his side.

The orc-king grunted, squinted his eyes, and slapped his hand against his belly. “I am king,” he said. “My orcs tear you apart when find us.”

The bard admitted, “I’d considered that. True, it’s only a matter of time before this storm passes, and once it does your, eh, subjects are bound to find us here. When that happens, you will of course be a good lad and tell them I’m not to be harmed.”

“We put you over a spit, hyoomun. Roast you good, golden brown, both sides.”

“Poo on that. You’ll do no such thing.”

“Why not, hyoomun?”

The bard stood up, took one step towards the pile of weapons, and leaned his weight onto the stone ax. Handle and all, it was heavy enough and tall enough to support him quite comfortably – and quite menacingly, he imagined. “Because I could have killed you at any moment while you were asleep – and I didn’t.”

The orc-king growled, but it was not a fierce growl. It was more the noise one might make when contemplating whether to swallow the lump of phlegm in his throat or to hork it up and spit it in the road. “My orcs find us,” he said slowly, “why’s won’t I make ’em kill you then?”

The bard pondered that a moment, then said “Because that would qualify as a betrayal, which displays a certain amount of cunning on your part. And it’s well known that orcs are not cunning creatures.”

The orc-king nodded, satisfied that answer made decent enough sense. He groaned as he shifted his weight around, flopping his limp, worthless leg in front of him and relaxing his back against the stone wall of the cave. “Why’s you not kill me, then?”

“I haven’t the strength to lift your ax,” said the bard. He let out a small laugh. “Why, it was all I could do to drag the damned thing over here. And besides, if I had killed you, and your orcs did find me, who would tell them I’m not to be harmed?”

The orc-king chewed his bottom lip, peeling off a layer of cracked skin with his front teeth. “You’s in orc-land, hyoomun. No foot-roads in orc-land. No friends here.”

The bard nodded an agreement. “I suppose not. Nonetheless, I found what it was I came all this way searching for.”

“No shinies in orc-land, hyoomun. No shinies since dwarf-days.”

“Oh, I’m not searching for gold,” said the bard. “I collect stories. And I’ve always felt that you orcs were fascinating creatures. Misunderstood, even. Why, I bet your people have a positively illuminating mythology.”

“You’s take it back, hyoomun!” shouted the orc-king, rising up on his right leg. He got his left leg up, too, but once he put a bit of weight on it it crumpled out from underneath him, sending him back to the ground with a roar of pain. He sneezed as he slunk back to his wall, trying in vain to find the comfortable position he’d just bolted up from. When he’d gotten close enough, he wiped the snot from his nose on the back of his hand. “We’s not ‘lumm-natchin’,” he pouted.

The bard bowed apologetically. “My mistake,” he said. “Nonetheless, it seems like neither of us will be moving from this spot for the time being. Your orcs won’t be able to search for you in this rain. Give me your story, sir, and when I leave this swamp I’ll take the tales of orcish heroism back with me to the lands of men.”

The orc-king sat up and puffed out his chest. “I’s ain’t thought of it that way before,” he said, “but I’s done lots of hee-row-in’, ya knows. I’s king.” He tapped the crown on his brow, obviously made for a head three sizes smaller, but squashed down nonetheless over the tops of his chewed ears.

“A grand tale, that,” mused the bard. “Tell me how you became king.”

“Lots of hee-row-in’,” repeated the orc-king. “See, I’s just a grunt, once…”

The grunt had had no other name but Fat-Arse his whole stupid, stinking life. Orcs aren’t known for being maternal creatures at the best of times, but Fat-Arse’s mother had traded him away into gruntery for a sack of pig parts. At least, that’s what Gruntmaster Jook had always told him. If it were true, that would be the first lucky thing to happen to Fat-Arse in his life.

Most orcs come into the world with some nature of deformity, some freak physical protrusion that comes to shape their identities within orcish society. The lucky ones emerge with physical quirks that prove useful in the bloody, violent world of orcs: huge, muscular shoulders to better heft an impossibly large greatax. Or an extra row of sharp, iron-like teeth lining the inside of an oversized mouth capable of biting an opponent’s head off. These babes are selected for by the gruntmasters to serve in their packs, and make up the bulk of what the flimsy races see.

Behind them, though, entire populations of orcs exist with one foot twice the size of the other, or an eye wrenched permanently shut by a huge, flabby eyebrow, or sixteen extra toes. Such orcs are useless for combat, and since combat is the only thing orcs know, these creatures live wretched lives of toil underneath the heels of the gruntmasters.

Fat-Arse had a back end so big the rest of him could have curled up inside of it. He lugged it around like a tired man dragging an overfull burlap sack, which is the closest thing to pants he could find to wear most of the time. The sight of him as a babe was so comical that he was sent to the Gruntmaster as a sort of cruel amusement. That was a kindness; his mother was liable to have drowned him, otherwise.

At some point during Fat-Arse’s early childhood the sight of him became less comical to Gruntmaster Jook. Whether the Gruntmaster was disgusted with him, or merely bored, Fat-Arse never learned, but he was sent unceremoniously out to the pack to take up with the other orclings his age. Promising grunts all, these orclings made Fat-Arse’s life absolute hell. He would be made to lay face-down in the mud so one of his tormenters could climb up onto his back and bang on his cheeks like a drum. Or they would paint a sloppy bullseye on his rump and use it for slingshot practice. Or they would set his pants on fire, knowing it might be weeks before another suitable pair turned up in a raid.

The most humiliating aspect of Fat-Arse’s torture, though, was the meat. Grunts had to earn the right to eat meat by proving themselves worthy in battle. The fattest, juiciest cuts were reserved for the Gruntmaster and his favorites, of course, but even the lowliest dirt-sucking grunt could earn a fatty steak or glistening turkey leg if he could distinguish himself in battle. Upcoming orclings, though, like Fat-Arse, were sent meat scraps at every meal. The savory taste of it, the tenderness, the sensation of sucking the grease and blood off of a wide bone… it was meant to give the future grunts a hunger for glory. To an orc, meat was better than gold.

Fat-Arse’s orcling brothers learned their lessons well, and early. Nine nights out of ten his scraps were wrenched from him after a savage beating. Soon, even the threat of a savage beating would suffice. Eventually the grunt in charge of the orclings’ meals stopped giving him a portion entirely. When Fat-Arse tried to protest, he was told to carve off a hunk of his own arse if he was that hungry.

With time, the orclings turned into grunts, and their meat had to be earned. The pack would descend on small farming villages or lumbering merchant caravans. Raids, the orcs called them. Grunts lived and died for raids. They would descend out of the badlands to rape and pillage their way across a fertile countryside, until some uppity lord got fed up enough to send an army after them. Then they’d be chased back to the badlands, fatter and richer than they were. Then, a short rest. Then travel. Then they’d emerge from another part of the badlands and do it all again.

Fat-Arse hated the raids. Orcs were supposed to look menacing to the eyes of men, but Fat-Arse simply looked like a fool in a fatsuit. A seasoned grunt could run a man down on deft, careful feet; Fat-Arse could only manage a clumsy gait, the weight of him swinging low to the ground behind him. And the arrows, by gods. If he was an appealing target to orcling brats with slingshots, he was doubly so to frightened archers defending their fields from raiders. More often than not, while the rest of the grunts were drinking to their victory and divvying up their newly-won treasures, Fat-Arse would slink off somewhere and pull a half-dozen wooden shafts out of the flesh of his butt.

That’s it, thank you for reading this unfinished story about a butt.

Here is a twenty-year-old short story about a mermaid sniper.

Hello, I have not updated this blog in a very long time. Please enjoy this short story I wrote in 2004 which I came across last month while going through some stuff on a very, very old laptop. I think I was reading quite a lot of Chuck Palahniuk at the time. I do not know why it is formatted like this.

Breathing Easy

The reason you use Florez when you hunt reavers is because they’re
blind but have knockout hearing. Modern tracking equipment is
reliable, but makes that constant whirring computer noise. The kind
you have to listen real close for, but it’s there, and if you’re
around computers a lot you probably don’t even hear it anymore. With a
tracker you see the reaver as a red blip on your HUD and not the
monster itself, and sometimes the red blip has a rough time telling
you how far away a reaver is or how fast it’s moving or whether it’s
above or below you, or if it’s spotted you yet. Some folks like to
hunt by their HUD alone, but that’s only because these people are
destined to be reaver snacks and just don’t know it yet.

Reaver hunters that don’t use Florez are a mean bunch. A mean,
grizzled, battle-hardened, completely stupid idiotic foolhardy bunch.
They dart in with their clunky HUDs and their clicking trackers and
their heavy four-second Kessers, and they either get lucky or they get
dead. The reason these kinds of moronic mushbrain hunters even still
exist is because the lucky ones are shameless braggarts and the dead
ones get digested.

So the smart reaver hunters use Florez. The reason you use Florez is
because the reavers can’t see it. A marble-sized ball of Florez can be
smushed between thumb and forefinger in less than a second;
noiselessly, effortlessly. Use it in a current and it turns everything
around you into a bright ghostly blue, including reavers.

The reason you need Florez to see reavers, or a counterproductive
tracker-and-HUD setup, is because reavers camouflage themselves so
well they might as well be invisible. You can see their eyes all
right, since they’re huge and burning red with charcoal black
pupils… but since reavers can’t see anyway they usually have their
eyes stitched shut or gouged out or something. They can’t see you, you
can’t see them. I suppose they consider it to be a fairly even
trade-off.

And it’s really really weird the first time you do it, because when
you or one of your allies is coated in Florez you can tell the stuff
is corporeal but transluscent. So every hair on their head, every
stitch of their clothing, every scale on their tail is still in full
view, just with this blue shell around it, kind of like they’ve been
shrink wrapped. But a reaver, you just see the shell. You just see
this blue monster figure, you see the creepy empty claws, you see the
flailing cellophane tentacles and the gnashing neon teeth.

And then you kill it.

Because for a change, you can see it but it can’t see you.

Harpoon guns are still popular in some circles. Some of the old timers
even still use Bosches. But the next gen of hunters all use
Florez-powered sidearms. Sidearms don’t pack a punch but are
rapid-fire and small enough to fit in a handbag. And instead of heated
plasma like the bigger three- and four-second Kessers, which will
build up inside the ammo reserves and cause meltdowns if you’re a slob
and don’t clean it regularly, the sidearms fire needle-thin bursts of
Florez. Nice and cold. Don’t show up on heat imagery.

You pop one ball of Florez into your sidearm and you get about six
thousand shots. At three hundred shots per second that means you need
to reload every twenty seconds. If you unload twenty seconds worth of
Florez into a reaver and it isn’t dead, reloading is the last thing
you need to be worried about. Worry about who is going to be giving
your eulogy instead.

When you pump a reaver so full of Florez that it dies, it lights up
like a bright blue blinding lump. You know it’s dead because it stops
moving. The camo loses consistancy at the exact second of death but
you still can’t see it because there’s so much Florez in its system
that the stuff isn’t transluscent anymore. The brilliant blue shell
takes a couple of hours to dissolve, and when it does, bam; dead
reaver. Ugly monstrous lobster-slash-octopus thing that has thousands
of needlepoint wounds all over its ugly shiny carapace.

When you nail a reaver with a four-second Kesser, the superheated
plasma flash-boils on impact and explodes into a cloud of steam. By
the time the steam clears enough to where there’s anything to see, you
realize there’s nothing left to see. Incinerated. If you don’t nail a
reaver with your four-second Kesser, it has four seconds to make you
die, and Neptune knows it only needs two.

When you manage to hit a reaver with a harpoon gun, it just makes them
mad. So you only have a split second to get creative.

These days, if you’re real about hunting reavers, it’s all about
Florez.


This one day the three of us get tipped off to a newly laid nest of
reaver eggs. That means mama reaver is around somewhere scouting new
food sources for her brood. All too often, food for reavers means
merpeople. Merpeople means us, and that’s why we need hunters.

The captain’s name is Paris and he’s in charge of the Florez. Florez
is expensive so we only take three balls of it with us. One to mark
the prey, and one for each sidearm. We only need two sidearms because
Paris uses a three-second Kesser, the same Kesser his father used back
when he was a hunter. The Kesser’s name is Backup Plan, and between
the three of us, we’re so good Paris has only needed to fire it once.

Paris is a military guy, and his motto is the heavier the artillery
the better. He’s not so stupid as to rely on his huge cannonball
Kesser while hunting down reavers of course, but he’s always keeping
up with the cutting edge of military technology. This is why he was
into Florez before most folks even knew what Florez was.

Paris said, he signed up for the service right at the end of the
Cestano War, so he’s never really seen action. Paris said, they
trained him to kill things for two rock-solid years then told him
there wasn’t anything left for him to kill. So Paris said, he took his
two years of military pay, showed them his fins, and got into the
private sector. In another year he had enough black market military
ties to hook him up with all the firepower he needs to take down the
baddest reavers in the ocean.

And Paris said, he does this because he wants to kill things. Paris
says this, but you don’t believe him because he doesn’t seem like the
kind of guy who wants to kill anyone. He’s just this sweet guy with a
great big heart and an insatiable zest for slaughter. And the one time
he did have to use his Kesser was because my sidearm locked and spat a
cloud of Florez into my face. Paris, he fires this pulsating orb of
plasma into this pathetic reaver, savors the explosion, licks his
lips, and says “Yeah baby.”

The kid’s name is Jean, and he’s only fifteen but he’s good. To hear
Jean tell it, he got fed up with his parents one night so he stole his
dad’s Kesser and credit card and ditched out. Managed to evade social
services long enough to pick a fight with the wrong guy. To hear Jean
tell it, he was trying to rob this wirey looking thug because he had
his daddy’s gargantuan Kesser and this dude didn’t look to be packing
anything except a fat wallet. This was when Jean was maybe eight or
nine.

Long story short, Jean’s dad’s Kesser was flat out of charge and this
guy, this wirey nobody, calls him on it. So Jean pulls the trigger,
fires a blank, then gets flattened out by this guy. Out of nowhere
this guy, this lanky scrawny easy target guy, pulls a stone knife and
goes to town. Slices six of the scales straight off Jean’s tail with
one slash, kicking a cloud of inky blood into the water all around.
Jean gets pummeled. This hapless victim guy, he just beats on this
nine-year-old kid, steals his daddy’s Kesser, and makes off with
daddy’s credit card while leaving him for dead.

But Jean’s smart, so he plays the crybaby child card in the emergency
room, gets a free ticket home, spends a few months blabbing to
psychiatrists and sucking up to his folks, then just ditches home
again. This time though, he brings a set of cutlery with him, and
learns to fight with knives. These days, Jean carries a set of blades
with him that are just scary. Nasty looking toothy seratted knives,
solid razor-edge knives, stone, glass, coral. And it’s like I said,
he’s good. And that’s why Paris likes him.

Me, I’m a hunter because I do three things better than just about
anyone else; listen, feel and shoot. Me, I don’t need a tracker
because I can just shut up, close my eyes, and hear a reaver moving
about if one’s close. I don’t need a HUD because I can just calm down,
spread out my arms, feel the current, and know right where to bust my
Florez.

Me, I don’t need all 6000 shots because I know right where all three
of a reaver’s hearts are. One a fist below the neck, one just beneath
the crook of the left-front claw, and one right behind the ink sac at
the sprawling base of their tentacles. You hit this one last because
upon impact it ruptures and then it’s just this opaque cloud of ink
and it’s so black it makes the Florez glow impossible to see. You hit
this one first and you can’t see well enough to hit the other two.

Paris says if I were in the military I’d make about the best sniper in
the history of snipers. Jean hears this and laughs because no military
operation in its right mind would take on a lady sniper.

Ladies apparently aren’t so funny when they’re reavers, though,
because Jean isn’t laughing now when I tell him that mama’s somewhere
close by, below us, just off to our left. Dead silence. Nobody talks,
nobody blinks hard. You make a sound, the reaver knows you’re there.

I roll our tracking Florez around in my hand. The thing is cold like
ice, and glowing bright and spectral. I wait for Paris’ nod. I squeeze
the Florez and send particles of neon light floating across the subtle
currents toward the reaver, and suddenly there it is, blue and glowing
and horrible, and it has no idea we’re here.


Reavers don’t live so deep as merpeople do. A biologist could tell you
why easier than I could, but long story short it has something to do
with their chemical makeup. They actually need the pollutants you find
nearer to the surface pumping through their foul bloodstream to
survive. But see, this is right in the sweet spot of depth where most
major mining operations are found, and thus someone has to go up there
and deal with the reavers.

Something else a biologist could tell you is that reavers as a species
are all the bipeds’ fault. Unlike decent civilized folk, these bipeds
don’t have laws against genetic engineering, so you see, it isn’t
enough that they pour poisons into our oceans that kill our fish and
pollute our mines and murder our hair, but they made these reavers for
some unfathomable purpose and left us to clean up their mess.

I’m not a biologist though, so I can’t get into the specifics on
hyperevolution or cancerous mutations or a reaver’s complete immunity
to natural selection. All I know is they’re here, now, and it’s my job
to kill as many of them as I can before my time’s up.

So when you have my job, and you get a tip that there’s a whole mess
of reaver eggs in some backpath three kilometers deep in some mine or
another, you go there and hit the problem right at its root.

Quick estimation, there’s about three hundred eggs in this nest,
tucked away in a crevace in the coral wall, and right now they’re
glowing bright burning blue because organic matter absorbs Florez like
plankton through a whale’s maw. The reason Florez is inconvenient in a
coral mine is because coral is organic too, so everything around you
is a neon blue sun, and the reaver kind of blends into the background.
This effect is much less effective than its regular camo though, so
you go in wearing eyeshades and you’re fine. Looking at the walls in a
Florezed coral mine through eyeshades is seeing everything in dull
twilight colors and faded outlines.

The reaver isn’t facing me, so I can’t kill it yet. But Jean sets to
work. Instead of laying eggs in big clumps, reaver eggs are long-ish
and arranged along slimy vomit-covered straps of flesh. The mother
deliberately tears these decayed strips of shark or octopus or
merperson and lays her eggs on them so the hatchlings have something
to feed on immediately after birth.

I’m not a biologist but I don’t have to be one to know that’s
absolutely disgusting.

However, this makes it easy to harvest reaver eggs. You just slice off
one of the strips at the base (wear gloves because sometimes they’re
caustic) and you have this whole string of eggs just ready to go. You
collect the eggs like this so you can boil them later. Rich merpeople
eat that garbage and pay big money for the privelage. But it’s extra
coin in our purses and it saves Florez, so we do it this way. It takes
some fancy knifework to get them all sometimes, and so Jean’s our guy.

The closer a reaver is to hatching when you boil the sucker alive in
its egg, the meatier the meal and the more you can sell it for. This
is the kind of little tip you pick up when you’re in my line of work
as long as I am.

There’s another reason for harvesting eggs, though; it gets mama’s
attention something quick. So while Paris loads up and readies Backup
Plan and Jean sets silently to work cutting reams of reaver eggs and
stashing them in his bag, mama reaver spins and starts in at us in
protection of her unborn babies.

And just as you squeeze off the trigger three times in rapid
succession, you think aww, that’s kind of touching.

And if you aimed right, instead of a fierce maniacal reaver rushing in
to the rescue of her hundreds of spawnlings, you’ve just got this big
dead opaque blue blob floating nearby a pile of uncooked hor d’ourves.
And if you aimed right, you’re now sitting in a quick-dispersing black
cloud of reaver ink.

You can eat the meat of a reaver too, and it’s actually pretty tasty,
but it’s packed so full of biped chemicals that it’s unhealthy. And
besides, if you’re using Florez the meat becomes absolutely toxic.
Harpooning a reaver for an evening’s meal is a story worthy of
reapeating to one’s grandchildren, if there’s enough of you left after
the fight to enjoy the fine zesty flavor.

Jean hasn’t used his sidearm, so it’s still armed, so I trade mine
with his and excuse myself. I say I’m going to scout the area quickly
to see if there are any more reavers in the area. I say, yeah, I think
there’s one in this shaft above us; I’ll go have a look.

Paris wants us all three to go, but I say it’s unnecessary. Besides,
it’s probably nothing. Just procedure. I’m anal like that, you know.

I’ve done this enough so that Paris and Jean know the drill. The three
of us are a team, but after a hunt we all go our separate ways. We
know how to contact each other. Paris does his thing as captains do,
sells off the eggs if we have any, collects our pay, splits it up
three ways. I don’t know what he does with his. Jean gambles his away
on orca races and shell games. Mine gets set aside so I can do all my
fickle prissy mermaid things with it later.

But I’m not scouting for reavers right now. I know damn well there
aren’t any more left, and I don’t rightly care if Paris or Jean think
I’m crazy. The thing is, I have to get to the surface. The thing is, I
have kleistopnoisis.


I’m not a biologist, but I know an awful lot about the respiratory
system. I have to. You learn all about that kind of thing when you
have a disease.

Go ahead; touch the gills at the base of your neck lightly. You’ll
notice they feel feathery; light, and ticklish. Unless you have
kleistopnoisis. Then they feel rough; scabby, hard. You can still
breathe through them, just barely. If you overexert yourself in any
way, you can’t breathe. You lock up.

Forget your dreams of being an all-star athlete.

Bipeds have a similar ailment called asthma. I know this because the
doctor that diagnosed me with kleisto knew it, and he knew it because
he’s a doctor and doctors have to know this kind of thing. A biped
with asthma isn’t really the same as a biped drowning; they can’t
breathe water any better than we can breathe rock. So it’s not a
matter of their lungs filling up with fluid; it’s the tube which
connects their lungs with the outside world that closes up on them and
cuts off their oxygen supply.

Yeah, laugh it up. It sounds really freakin’ funny until you meet
someone with kleisto yourself.

Kleistopnoitic gills are easily inflamed, and when that happens, they
contract. Water can’t flow through them when this happens, and so it
cuts off your oxygen supply. Just like that. Except whereas an
asthmatic biped can usually just breathe harder and suck in more
oxygen, a merperson can’t just have their gills work overtime.

Fortunately, merpeople have lungs too, these pathetic mostly worthless
flesh-balloons inside their chest. Kind of an evolutionary throwback.
So if you have a ready supply of pure oxygen, you can breathe through
your mouth just like any biped. This is why all hospitals have an
oxytank on hand.

My oxytank is leagues away in a closet at home, so for me, after this
hunt, it’s a race against time. I haven’t felt it yet; the
inflamation, the contracting, but I know it’s coming. Because it
happens every time. So I swim upwards, through the coral maze of this
mine, through the layer of sludge and chemicals and
Neptune-knows-what-else to the surface.

And I don’t have to tell you, all that oily gunk is just suicide for
your hair.

With a hundred meters to go, I feel it. The same intense panicked
feeling that has happened a dozen times before. Involuntarily I start
scratching at my neck, and just feel these throbbing rough flaps of
skin where my gills should be. I wonder if I’ll really make it this
time. I count the seconds as I watch the blotted moon get closer,
closer, bigger, bigger, less wavy and more defined…

And that first breath you suck in after breaking the surface, that’s
the most incredible feeling there is from the waves to the abyss.

For a few minutes it’s really painful. Merpeople have really pitiful
lung capacity, so it takes a handful of hard, sharp breaths before you
adjust to the open air. You’re working muscles that never get worked.
Your body has to catch up to you. Short, deep gulps of air are best.
If your life weren’t in terrible mortal danger right now, you’d marvel
at how bipeds do this unconsciously their entire lives.

The reason this always happens after a hunt is because there’s no
quicker way to kick your system into an overclocked kleisto attack
than to coat your gills in Florez.

So I lay here on the top of this coral reef, sea foam cresting over
me, my chest heaving, covered in Florez and biped-trash. My muscles
are burning from the frantic swim, my sidearm is still loaded just in
case, my hair is a wasteland, and I’m freezing cold because it’s so
windy.

It can take hours for the Florez to dissolve, and of course it never
really does. Long after the glow has subsided, you know there are
still a hundred thousand microscopic particles clinging onto you that
you’ll never really be able to wash off. And you know a handful of
those are stuck, forever, on your ailing kleistopnoitic gills. And you
know that someday they’ll clap shut, the mother of all kleisto
attacks, and never re-open, and when that day comes you’ll be wearing
an oxytank forever and your charmed life as the best lady sniper in
the sea is over – if you’re lucky. Most likely you’ll just suffocate
and die.

On the surface, sometimes it rains, and that’s refreshing. Sometimes
there’s nowhere to relax and you just have to make do with treading
water for as long as it takes. Sometimes you’re fortunate enough to
meet and swap gossip with a passing family of dolphins. Sometimes you
catch a glimpse of a biped transport off in the distance, either
sailing on the waves or sailing high up in the clouds. And you wonder
what it’d be like to unload six thousand shots at it, if it were only
in range.


Home is home. There’s no point attaching any sentiment to it. It’s a
place to eat and sleep and stash what’s yours.

It’s always a cautious, deliberate swim back from the surface, and I’m
always still a bit frazzled thanks to the whole ordeal. At this point
my gills are puffy and inflamed, but otherwise back in action. The way
my hair falls around my shoulders makes it difficult to see my neck,
so it isn’t obvious about the kleisto. This suits me just fine.

It’s a little after 1130, and the green message LED is flashing on my
prehistoric computer, so I know Paris made good with my share.

I glance at the mirror and look like hell. Now begins the process of
combing the oil and chemicals out of my hair, and scrubbing as much of
the Florez off of my skin and scales as I can. It’ll be a while before
my gills have calmed down enough to clean the gook out of there too,
so there’s some time to kill. I’m exhausted, but I don’t sleep. The
thought of falling asleep with all those Florez particles clutching
dormant to the inside of my gills scares me to death.

While I do this, I give a verbal command to my computer, which whirs
and clicks for a minute and chokes on a couple of orange data LEDs
before spitting out a credit card with my new account balance etched
into it. There’s a message from Paris too, great job, and enjoy the
easy money. Says he’ll get in touch tomorrow with another job, Neptune
willing. The card drops out of the data slot and onto the floor, where
it’ll sit until I’m ready to spend it tomorrow.

The LED is still blinking once Paris is through, so I shoot off
another command. This time it’s a stranger or, at least, someone I
don’t recognize right away. It’s a merman’s voice, muffled, scratchy.
He sounds bored, he sounds tired. But he sounds determined. Sometimes,
you can tell these things, even only with audio.

“This is Asa with IBI. I have reason to believe you have information
regarding an outstanding missing merperson case that’s recently been
re-opened. I need you to contact me as soon as is practical.”

The timestamp on this message from “Asa with IBI” is 1937 today. At
1937 this evening I was headed towards the coral mines with Paris and
Jean to strike it rich on a cache of reaver eggs. Considering IBI
precincts generally shut down at 1700, this must mean this Asa guy,
whoever he is, is putting in some long hours.

I know a little bit about IBI myself. This Asa guy, whoever he is,
didn’t mention my name; that must mean he doesn’t know it. Only my
anonymous contact information. This Asa guy, whoever he is, knows I’m
a hunter, though. Reaver hunts always take place in the evening, since
most reavers are nocturnal and so dusk is right about the time they’re
active enough to locate easily, but not so much that they’re terribly
alert. This Asa guy, whoever he is, deliberately contacted me when
chances were good I wouldn’t be home.

This Asa guy, whoever he is, wants information from me without
actually speaking to me. He wants me to have to call him back because
it’s illegal to record an audio conversation if you’re the one who
initiated it. When I talk to him, even before he says hello, I’ll hear
the soft little click of a recording device being flicked on.

He knows what I do but not who I am, which suggests he got my contact
info from another hunter, possibly a rival, possibly not. This is a
sticking point. I keep my identity as anonymous as possible, so it’s
difficult to trace me through just a computer address, but this is
supposedly IBI here, not just some idiot thugs. They ought to be able
to figure me out easier than that.

Unless of course “Asa with IBI” turns out to be just plain Asa. And
this is exactly the conclusion I draw. Takes a lot of guts to claim
you’re with IBI when you’re not.

I decide that “as soon as is practical” means “whenever I damn well
feel like it”, save a copy of the message, and dig out a bottle of
this stinging medical ointment stuff. This is an industrial strength
Florez solvent that burns terribly when applied to sensative areas
like your gills. Before I set to work swabbing the stuff on, I have to
hook myself up to an oxytank. I have this portable one which holds 700
liters of oxygen compressed to 2000 psi. I have to breathe with this
thing while cleaning my gills because when they’re all full of
irritating pink Florez-eating gunk, they’re just as useless as if they
were in the throes of a kleisto attack.

Still exhausted, swabbing this pink stuff onto the scabby flaps on my
neck, wincing in pain, sucking cold air through this oxytank which,
when empty, will cost a full hunt’s salary to refill. And I can only
figure the “missing merperson” Asa is interested in is Jean.


I meet up with Paris the next day because sometimes we meet up outside
of work. We’re what you’d call comrades when there are reavers about,
and we’re what you’d call friends when there aren’t. This is a
relationship based on convenience. Jean, we never see him until it’s
crunch time. This suits all three of us just fine. Truth is, we like
Jean because he’s useful. Truth is, neither Paris nor I care much for
his companionship.

Truth is, I need Jean around because if he weren’t and I were to have
an attack, Paris would be meat.

Paris says he’s milking his leads. Says reaver activity is on the
decline, which is awesome for the food chain but bad for business.
Officially we’re licensed as reaver hunters; we have to be. And
officially we don’t know Jean exists. Jean is fifteen; too young to
hunt bloodthirsty monsters. Paris lines everything up and we get Jean
to go along at the last minute. Jean needs the money so he’s always
willing to tag along. This suits all three of us just fine.

Paris and I are snagging some lunch in the market district when I
bring up Asa from IBI. The first thing he asks is if I think it’s
about Jean.

“I’m not connected with anyone else that would be considered missing,”
I tell him.

“Are you going to get back with this guy?”

“I don’t think so. I doubt he’s really with IBI.” And I tell Paris why
I think this.

“As I recall,” he says with one of his irritating nasal laughs, “you
have a contact or two in IBI yourself. Why not have this Asa looked
into?”

This thought had crossed my mind. I tell Paris I haven’t done this
because I haven’t determined whether or not the Asa thing is serious
enough to call in a favor.

“Who do you suppose tipped this joker off? He had to have gotten your
contact info from somewhere.”

I had given this some thought too. Hunters keep tabs on each other in
case we need to grudgingly call in help from unlikely places. It’s
embarassing, it’s expensive, but sometimes it’s necessary. So this Asa
guys shows up flashing Jean’s picture around, hoping for a bite. One
of the other hunters in the area knows a guy who knows the guy in the
picture. Asa follows up the lead, who tells him yeah, that’s Jean, he
hunts reavers with this mermaid who lives near the Rift. Then my
address. This is the theory I present to Paris.

“Not many hunters outside of us know Jean. Those that do wouldn’t sell
him out to IBI.”

Which of course is another red flag.

“Well I hope for Asa’s sake he doesn’t think to come sniffing around.
I’d hate to think he’d try to muscle you.” Paris sneers. “You still
packing that old Bosche at home?”

“Yeah but it hasn’t worked for years. I’ll get it refurbished one of
these days.” That’s a half-truth in any case. Thing about me is I’m a
gun nut, but can scarcely afford to nurture my hobby. Whenever I
accumulate a sizable bit of expendable income, it’s time to have my
oxytank replenished.

“I can check into it if you want. I’ve got real friends in IBI I can
call up, rather than just inside contacts.” He pauses a moment. The
kind of thoughtful pause that is uncharacteristic of Paris, which is
what makes it notable. “We’ll decide what our next move is after
that.”

We? Our?

I don’t say that to him. I just thank him instead. And tell him to let
me know when he’s got a job lined up, because I’m ready anytime.
That’s a half-truth too.

We split ways and it’s about 1500, and what I’m thinking is how nice
it would be to fire that old Bosche.

Paris is a better friend than I give him credit for. I don’t think he
means for this to be the case. He’s the kind of guy who offers help
without thinking about it, then secretly regrets the inconvenience,
but follows through anyway because he doesn’t want folks thinking he’s
a jerk. So, in that sense, he’s kind of a really nice helpful jerk. He
said he has friends in IBI and offered to look into this Asa thing,
but his reactions betrayed him. I could look in his eyes and tell he
regretted having said it even right as he was saying it. He’ll do it
for me, but he’ll wish he’d never brought it up.

I wonder sometimes if Paris sees me as anything but a hired gun. I
wonder sometimes if I’ve got him figured out as well as I think I do.
Maybe he’s keeping score. Maybe he’s going to start expecting me to
return these favors of his.

For the time being, the truth is neither of us probably has the other
mapped out. We’re friendly to each other, but wary of each other. And
probably, for now at least, this suits the two of us just fine.

I get home later that evening and my computer is totally dark. Asa has
not tried again to get in touch with me.


It’s two days later, and we are the three of us on our way to a job.

Our only conversation is an uncomfortable silence, which is to say
none at all. I do not want to be here right now. Too many things about
this job rub my scales the wrong way. I didn’t like it when Paris
pitched it to me, and I told him so. Our targets are three fully-grown
reavers and a nest of eggs which, as best we understand, may or may
not be hatched by now. Three reavers means one for each of us, so
today Paris has got a light Florez sidearm in addition to Backup Plan.
One for each of us means no room for error.

No room for error means no room for kleisto attacks.

Thanking Neptune for small favors, this trio of reavers has been
sighted near a ridge that’s within sight of the surface. Barring an
absolute catastrophy I’m not in any serious danger. The only thing I
can think of that qualifies as “absolute catastrophy” involves either
Paris or Jean screwing up during the hunt, and they have both of them
proven time and again that scenario is unlikely.

Still, three reavers at once…

When you have more than one adult reaver to light up, hitting that
third heart can be tricky. Taking out that third heart makes it
impossible to see for a few crucial moments, but taking out only the
first two isn’t enough to incapacitate the monster. Whatever sick
biped first cooked these aberrations up, he made extra special sure
they had a bunch of extra organs inside. You can practically blow a
reaver half up and still have enough of it left over to put an end to
you.

You can, however, cut down those two hearts and expect the reaver to
slow down – if only momentarily – due to system shock. For a few
seconds it won’t know if it’s dead or not. So when you have more than
one reaver on you the idea is to take out the two safe hearts in each
one, then coordinate the finishing shot with your teammates so all the
ink sacs are ruptured at about the same time. Then you sit and wait for
the black cloud to clear and pray none of you missed.

If you have more than one reaver on you and you’re fresh out of
teammates, the best you can hope for is to keep control of your weapon
long enough to fill your own skull up with Florez. This is at least a
painless death. Plus, all the Florez pumping through your veins and
seeping through your tissue is enough to poison any reaver that eats
you, so you might get lucky and take one of them with you.

The water here is oily and murky. We’re swimming up the side of this
cliff, this hilariously sharp dropoff at the end of this huge plateau.
This plateau used to be an island where bipeds lived back before the
floods, and it’s really creepy to see these shattered buildings and
abandoned roads, and to look around at lives that haven’t been lived
for a century. Some of these buildings are tall enough to still poke
their roofs out into the open sky as sickly islands of metal and
stone, rectangular and crumbling, a tribute to biped arrogance.
Reavers love this kind of place.

We’re not going into the ruins because that’d be suicide. Bet a blind
merman’s fins there are more than a hundred reavers populating this
sunken cemetery; we’re only after the three that have been skirting
around the edges, near the cliff face.

And just as we break even with the roof of the plateau, I stop
swimming.

This ball of Florez in my hand, I break it and suddenly everything
lights up blue. The neon glow catches the current and, as it turns
out, the joke is on us.

Barely before my brain can process the visual information of being
surrounded by five – not three, five – fully grown reavers, and
countless hatchlings, I feel this sharp pain in my back. This cold,
metallic pain, this bite, this horrible thin gnashing pinprick, and
it’s not more than a few more seconds that I can see and feel nothing
else. Everything clouds out, and the last sight I remember is the tips
of my fingers glowing blue – not from the Florez particles floating
about, but from the inside-out, just like the bones in my hand were
radioactive.


As the story goes, it was during a standard training excersise when a
young cadet named Desh had his first major kleisto attack. His kleisto
was well documented by military doctors of course; these things don’t
slip through your initial physical. Soldiers with kleisto are required
to have an oxytank onhand at all times, and Desh was no exception. But
this was a public attack, and Desh’s whole unit – superiors and peers
alike – saw him at his absolute weakest, sucking air thorugh his mask
and just looking pathetic.

Desh’s heart was in the right place. He was a huge merman, a crack
shot, and fiercely loyal to his companions. His muscles threatened to
bulge right out of his flesh. More often than not this Desh, this
gentle giant, would just power through his training leaving crowds of
jealous mermen in his wake. He made an art of pushing his physical
endurance to the absolute limit. He’d always pass with flying colors,
gold stars, high praise. The military didn’t work with Florez at the
time, so overexposure wasn’t a danger for him or his kleisto.

I’m learning this story about Desh while I’m laying in the middle of a
rotted delapidated husk of a room complete with moldy carpeting and
splintered unidentifiable furniture. This room, at one point, was a
biped dwelling on the twelve trillionth floor of a gravity-defiant
skyscraper. Now, it’s an island in its own right ever since the floods
tore through its surrounding city. There’s a storm outside, this swirl
of rain, and I can feel it when it comes stinging in through the
shattered wall-window. For the most part I’m dry, and I’m breathing
weakly with my lungs because I can feel my gills have choked up on me.

Then there was this one day, the story goes, where Desh had an attack
during the middle of some target practice. Since kleisto was going to
keep hiim out of any real field action, he was in training to be a
sniper. Nothing triggered this attack, it just hit him like a bolt of
lightning. Out on the gun range, a few hundred meters away from his
oxytank, he just doubled over and clutched his neck. It took almost
ten seconds before anyone realized what was happening.

I try to force my breathing into something less erratic and wheezy and
it’s like trying to force an ocean into a bottle. Making an attempt to
speak right now would be something like suicide. The soft blue glow is
gone; but still I feel awful. I can’t see anything but hazy swirls
when I look around, and I can’t hear anything beyond the throbbing in
my head. I don’t think I’m wounded but at the moment there’s no sense
in caring.

Desh was dragged by his startled comrades over to his tank while his
tank was being dragged towards him by a commanding officer who was
watching the exercise from afar. They met halfway, and they fumbled to
get the tank’s mask over Desh’s jaw. It locked into place, and
everyone around watched as Desh’s eyes got wide and he tried to take
his first breath.

But nobody had initialized the vacuum valves yet. The mask was still
full of water. And a few moments later, so were Desh’s lungs.

So story goes, this guy Desh never suffocated – he drowned. A drowned
merman is the ultimate irony.

I black out again, for Neptune knows how long.

My eyes open again, and the torrent outside is still in full fury. The
ocean knows I’m here and isn’t particularly happy about it. Waves are
hammering against the walls and the whole structure sways back and
forth, but I don’t feel unsafe. No, unsafe is not a word I’d use to
describe myself right now.

Then there’s the all-too-familiar touch of clammy stinging Florez
solvent around my gills, and after a few moments it starts to burn.
The pain is numbed but noticable; whether I’ve just build up a
resistance to the goop over time or whether I’ve been given
painkillers isn’t apparent. For a moment all I can think is that
here’s a process I’ve put myself through a hundred times, and how
weird it feels when it’s another pair of hands.

The pair of hands is attached to a voice, and the voice is Paris’. And
Paris is telling me about how in between Desh’s first attack and his
last one, there were about three dozen. Paris was Desh’s best friend
in the service, so he learned how to administer this solvent. His
fingers flicking back and forth across the skin of my neck, expertly,
carefully, it isn’t a feeling I’m unfond of.

“I wish you would have said something to me,” he says. His voice
sounds like a whisper amidst the screaming winds outside, where the
furious rain and ravaging waves sound like they want to break the
world in half. “If you’d have said something to me I would never have
let you work around all this Florez.”

And I still don’t dare try to speak; my breathing is still too weak
and erratic, and I don’t feel like I’m getting enough oxygen as it is.
But without even answering him Paris knows what I’d say. And he
replies, “But you wouldn’t give any of it up anyway would you?”

My head is turned to the other side for me, and Paris starts working
on the other set of gills. My line of sight careens to a dark corner
of the room where Backup Plan is sitting. There are crystal-glass
fixtures on these Kessers where you can see into the bowels of the
gun, right into the plasma supply . Instead of a lit-up series of
clear blue or green or yellow crystals, however, all I can make out it
is a grey misshapen figure. Backup Plan has been fired recently, and
more than once.

Fired to save my life, probably.

“Someone tailed us to the job,” Paris says, his voice still greater
than the wind while remaining soft and soothing. “At least three of
them. They were sloppy. I don’t know if the Florez dart that hit your
back was meant for you or not. I think they might have just got jumpy
when you broke your neon.”

These Florez darts don’t pack the same punch as the sidearms we carry;
they’re used mainly as tranquilizers. The idea is there’s enough
Florez inside to knock out your system for a while but not kill you –
kind of an instant but temporary coma. This is of course a moot point
if you’ve got kleisto, since the Florez in your system will attack
your gills and suck you into a whole world of respiratory shutdown.

After that, Paris says, like three seconds after that, everything goes
ink-black. Jean shouts something about how one of the ink sacs was
ruptured prematurely. There was some screaming. Paris says, the best
he could do was to just aim Backup Plan at one of the blotted blue
shapes and hope for the best. Paris says, the only way you can tell if
you’re shooting at friend or foe depends on if you’re looking at
tentacles or a tail.

There were two former mermen floating nearby, half-chewed husks or
flesh and bone and scale. Everything was blood and ink and neon blue.
Everything was chaos. Paris’d fired Backup Plan three times, and when
the water started to clear there was Jean zooming off with a reaver
hot on his tail. And there was me, just hanging limp just outside the
current, sinking slowly. All around were the frayed remains of fresh
reaver hatchlings.

Paris says, had he never met a sniper-to-be named Desh while in the
service, he’d have never noticed my kleistopnoitic gills. He came over
to see if I was alright, if I’d been hurt, to pull the dart out of my
back… and noticed I wasn’t breathing. He said he brushed my hair all
over one shoulder and saw my gills belching Florez particles from both
inside and out, puckered and useless and inflamed.

He says he took me around the waist and swam to the surface as quickly
as he could, and let a wave carry the both of us into this empty room,
this ancient biped sarcophagus. He says it took a minute, but I
instinctively started to breathe on my own. Gasping at first, then
less, until my breaths were irregular but strong. I was unconscious,
but nonetheless putting my pathetic mermaid lungs into overtime.

That’s how he knew I’d had kleisto for a long time. Unlike Desh, who
had coped with maybe a few dozen attacks where there was always an
oxytank within reach, something in me knew not to open my lungs until
I was in the open air. Even asleep, something in me knew the water
would kill me.

It’s stupid of me, but out of all the questions I could risk my breath
on at this point the one I decide to ask is where Paris got a hold of
a jar of Florez solvent. And he smiles sadly, a sadness that’s so
unlike Paris that it makes me want to be sad too, and says, “After
Desh, I carry one all the time.”


Home is still nothing fantastic. Paris escorts me the whole way, a
strong look of sad worry about him that’s uncharacteristic of Paris.
He isn’t saying much. I tell him, really, I can breathe fine now, and
I’ll be okay, and I’m used to this sort of thing.

My place near the Rift is small and dumpy, but it fits the budget
nicely and, besides, who needs all the stress and heartache of city
life? Paris has never been here before, but the tour doesn’t take long
because it’s just a one-room place. Before leaving he insists on
triple-checking my oxytank, mentions something about finding a smaller
model to pack up for when I’m on the job. The more he drones on, the
more exhausted I get, and all I want to do is sleep.

I wake up and it’s 0520. Paris is nowhere around. It’s when I’m laying
there, groggy, half-awake in bed when I realize I must have nodded off
while he watched over me. It’s when I realize that’s all he wanted to
do all along, is stay with me until he was sure I was fine.

As of now, I can’t tell if he’s more worried about his friend or his
combat buddy. Right now I can’t tell if he’s friends with me or my gun.

I’m still tired, and my bones ache. My body is a limp, restless kind
of tired where my arms and tail won’t move but I know I won’t be
getting back to sleep. The kind of tired where all you do is lay there
in the dark with your thoughts.

The whole way back, Paris didn’t mention Jean. Not once. Or anything
else for that matter, except Desh and his kleisto.

It hurts to think about what that might mean.

Most of what I think about is trying to puzzle out what exactly
happened tonight. Someone set us up. Who? Someone was tailing us. Why?
Paris must have laid me down after I fell asleep. He must have done
this gently because I’m the type who’ll wake up at the slightest
disturbence.

I try to shake thoughts like that and re-focus. Paris probably got
this job when some less experienced team of hunters turned it down,
which means someone besides us knew about it. This kind of thing
happens sometimes. The idea is, you sweep in behind some hunters, take
’em out while they’re recouping from the job, then swim back
victoriously with their spoils. The truth is, I’ve never done that but
I’ve considered doing so. The truth is, I feel incredibly foolish for
not trusting Paris with the truth about my condition sooner. The truth
is, he wants to take care of me and I want to let him.

I’m beginning to get really frusterated with my brain. What am I,
falling in love with this guy? This Paris guy who, when it comes right
down to it, I barely know? This guy who I’ve worked with a long time
but still can’t read properly? The abyss with that. I need to focus. I
need to puzzle this out.

Reason and logic, not emotion. Rationality, not fantasy. Paris told me
there were two bodies nearby, mangled and chewed pretty bad. He said
there had to have been at least three persuers, since they would have
wanted to at least match us. He said they had to have been
inexperienced, otherwise they wouldn’t have shot me so soon. He told
me a long story about an old friend of his, an old military buddy
named Desh. Must’ve been painful for him. He had to choke it out. He
had to dredge up a memory he thought he had buried.

I realize my eyes are closed. When your eyes are closed and you want
to sleep but can’t, you start to lose touch with reality. You’re awake
and you’re aware you’re awake, but what’s real kind of phases out and
you’re left in mental limbo. I curse myself for not thanking Paris
tonight. I hate myself for not asking if Jean is okay. I loathe the
idea of another hunter out there, at least one, who has it out for me
and mine.

I regret not having been awake for that short moment when Paris’ arms
were around me, carrying me towards the surface, towards life. I
embarass myself by admitting I’d have enjoyed it.

Focus focus focus. But why bother? Every time you focus on one thing
you just lose sight of another. Every time you get it figured out it
all comes unraveled. Every time you tell a secret you leave yourself
vulnerable.

Every time you swim too fast or too long or too hard your gills lock
up and you die. Every time a friend’s nearby you might at least
survive.

Every time you trust a friend you just get hurt again. So why bother?

Little known fact is that you’ve got what’s called tear ducts at the
inside corner of each of your eyes. I’m not a biologist but I do know
that tear ducts are another kind of evolutionary throwback. What
happens is your eyes emit tiny droplets of fluid so they don’t dry
out. This happens every time you blink. This is inconsequential
underwater since your eyes are always saturated anyway. The job of the
tear ducts is to ensure that this fluid drains off into your nasal
passage without much ado.

Strong emotion can cause an such an overproduction of tears that the
ducts can’t keep up the pace. Tears start draining down your face
instead, over the bridge of your nose and down your upper lip. This
happens every time you cry. Most merpeople are never aware anything of
the sort is happening.

I know all this because of the countless times I’ve spent on rocks or
islands or just treading water, my sickly head poked out of the foam,
cold and lonely and nursing my kleisto. Seawater just causes your
tears to dissipate, to drift off in the currents. In the open air,
tears well up in your eyes, cloud your vision, soak your face.

Laying in my one-room flat by the Rift, and it’s 0540 now, and I’m
crying. I’m trained well enough that I can feel the tears in my eyes.
And the stupid thing is I put my hands to my face to wipe them away.
The stupid thing is, by now, this is a reflex.


Just before you’re pulled out of bed and dragged to the floor of your
embarassingly dumpy one-room flat, you have a split second of
consciousness with which to see the time display on your computer
click over to 0757. And your first thought, before you even realize
what is happening, is that you just want to roll over and go back to
sleep.

Except you can’t roll over, you can’t even move – a thug twice your
size has your arms wrenched behind your back with the unbreakable grip
of one massive hand, and is holding your face into the gritty sand of
your floor with the other. Real quick your brain processes what is
happening, decides that no, this is most assuredly not a dream, and
it’s then and only then that you realize, holy shit, I’m in some real
trouble here.

There are rummaging noises all around as whoever the second guy is
roots through all my meager posessions, throwing worthless baubles to
the floor and digging through all the accumulated crap in all my
drawers and shelves. He happens upon my old busted Bosche and says,
“Hey, we could sell this, mate.” But he throws that aside too, having
been given some visual clue by the first thug, the one perched on my
back pressing the bones in my wrists down into my spine.

Brain clicks on again; the first guy doesn’t want to say anything.
Doesn’t want me to hear his voice, because I’ve heard it. Doesn’t want
me to know that he’s just plain Asa – doesn’t want me to know that his
IBI ruse faceplanted. Doesn’t want to be identified.

I don’t struggle – I couldn’t win if I tried. I just lay there, my
mouth filling up with sand and my back burning with pain, and try to
calm myself. There are a few more crashes and whooshes and tears
before Number Two chirps, “It isn’t here, mate. We was lied to.”

Then there’s the lick of cold metal pressed to the back of your neck,
then darkness. Your eyes open again and your time display reads 1209.
And your first thought, before you even remember what had happened, is
that you just want to roll over and go back to sleep.

And when you roll over, you realize you’re not in bed. And you see all
your stuff strewn everywhere, and piece by piece you recall something
about two thugs ripping your flat apart looking for something and then
filling you with tranq.

Though heavy throbs of pain are smashing against the inside of my
skull, I force myself to place a com to Paris. I snatch the receiving
mic from my ancient computer and frantically punch in his address, and
listen to about six seconds of dead silence before I see that my mic
connection has been cut.

“Yeah? Hello?”

Damn it, I can’t respond.

“What’s this about, aye?”

He’ll notice my address, I tell myself. He’ll know it’s me.

“What the– is this some joke? Hey, are you okay?”

If he doesn’t I’m screwed, because I have no other way to contact
Paris. I have no idea where he lives or how to go about finding him.
Every single time we’ve gotten together it was he who got in touch
with me. Damn it all.

The receiver clatters to the floor as I force myself not to panic. I
hear Paris stammer something about coming over right away to check on
me, but his voice sounds like it’s fifty kilometers away. I can feel
something bad has happened – I know it somehow – and I’m powerless to
do anything.

There’s a soft click as Paris terminates the com and a whirring noise
as a credit card with my bill for the connection etches out of the
slot and clatters to the floor. All I can do now is sit and wait – and
beseech Neptune’s beard that my gut feeling is wrong.


An hour later now, and we’re waiting for Jean.

We’re in a public place. A cafe or a shopping center or a theater or
something, I don’t know. I don’t care. I’m too frazzled. I’m getting
emotional. It’s impossible to remain calm.

Paris arrived not twenty minutes after I contacted him, and quickly
surveyed the damage done to my flat. Okay, nothing major. That could
wait until later. He refused another word until he was certain I
wasn’t hurt, which I wasn’t… at least, not permenantly. The tranq
Asa (because by now, that’s who I assume it was) used wasn’t
Florez-based… if it were, I’d simply be dead right now.

After that we came here, and Paris placed a com through to Jean on a
public terminal telling the kid to meet us. It’s only now that Paris
tells me he isn’t sure if Jean’s alive. It’s only now that I learn the
last Paris saw of him was firing off with a reaver hot on his tail.
But what can we do? Just stay here and wait.

In the meantime, Paris tells me his friends at IBI didn’t turn
anything up on Asa. This doesn’t surprise me.

But he’s not telling me something, and this is one of the reasons I’m
so agitated. Paris is frightened by something. He knows something he
isn’t sharing. His IBI buddies clued him in and he’s purposely leaving
me in the dark.

Except, he’s not. He’s actually saying stuff, telling me everything,
and it’s just my stupid fault for not paying attention. Of course I
don’t even realize I’m not paying attention until Paris asks me, “Hey,
are you paying attention?” I had just convinced myself he was lying,
or holding back, or leading me on. Why had I done that? Why were my
expectations of Paris so low?

He says, “Jean is wanted by the IBI. That much I know.” He’s repeating
this. He’s talking in the slow, methodical way you talk to people when
you have to repeat yourself because they don’t listen properly. The
way you’d talk to a five-year-old. “Or more rightly, his father is.
There’s some bad mojo cooking here. Jean’s dad is part of an organized
crime syndicate that IBI has been trying to bust for years.”

That’s why Paris is frightened. His hunting partner turns out to be
the son of a notorious gangster. Terrific.

So Jean’s dad is just looking for his kid? Trying to get him back
home? That’s what I figure anyway. But Paris says no, that isn’t the
case. He says, the guys who tailed us last night were hired goons
masquereding as reaver hunters to try to make our untimely demise look
like some sort of on-the-job accident. He says whatever Jean’s dad
wants with Jean, it ends with Jean dead.

Father of the freaking year.

“This is all just coming to light now that I’ve checked with my guys
in IBI. If it weren’t for this guy Asa contacting you, we’d have never
found this out,” Paris says. We’re both looking over our shoulders
pretty consistantly now. “So I’m trying to find Jean. Damn it, I don’t
even know if he’s alive.”

And I know this sounds really cold, but I tell Paris that if he isn’t,
well case closed. That’s it, right? Whether it’s a reaver or a hired
goon or Asa or whoever, dead is dead. If Jean got planted, we’re in
the clear.

“Not exactly. Because now Asa figures you or I know something or have
something. That Jean confided in us. Now we’re liabilities.”

Which raises the question of what they were searching for in my kip
last night. And neither of us have an answer. We’re both hoping Jean
has one. So we’re both hoping Jean’s alive. If he is we at least have
a shot at knowing what we’re wrapped up in.

When we get our answer, it’s pretty much the most horrible news in the
world.

A waiter or usher or bouncer or something, just one of the guys that
works here answering coms and dealing with customers, swims up and
asks, “Are you Paris? You have a com from a fellow named Jean.” Paris
signs the com bill and we both go over to the terminal. I can’t hear
what’s said because public com terminals have these little earpieces
so your business isn’t broadcast across the whole ocean. But at the
same time I know exactly what’s said because the look on Paris’ face
is just awful.

“Okay,” he says. “We’re coming. No weapons. No oxytank. Look, I swear.
Just don’t–” and then that’s it. The little LCD on the terminal
clicks off, indicating the other party has disconnected. A credit card
prints out for Paris. And every part of me goes ice cold.


Where we’re wanted is a place near the Rift. Not “near the Rift” as in
where my flat is, though; we’re talking “near the Rift” as in “near
the scary wilderness next to an unimaginably deep dropoff”. Because
there’s the Rift, which is the name for a poor part of the suburbs
where folks like me live, that just happens to be closer to the abyss
than anyone else cares to live, and there’s the Rift, which is a
straight vertical shot into the deepest, coldest part of the world.

Jean is there. Neptune’s golden trident, Jean is there. I don’t even
want to remember what he looked like right at that moment. There was a
cloud of black swarming around him that was his blood. One of his eyes
was swollen shut. A huge chunk of his fin was completely torn off. His
left arm was twisted into a completely unrealistic angle. The way Jean
looks here is the way that makes you want to go ballistic and rip the
arms off anyone who would do this to anyone. Not like a maternal
instinct, exactly – more of an animal instinct. The kind of thing
inside you that riles against sick, twisted individuals who…

…speaking of sick, twisted individuals. Asa is here. I know it’s Asa
because I recognize his voice. He’s not from IBI. Even if I hadn’t
figured this out yet, I’d know it this instant: Asa’s got two merman
thugs, both armed with Kessers, guarding over Jean.

“First off, you ought to apologize,” said Asa, narrowing his eyes into
daggers. “You never returned my coms. That isn’t very polite.” I tried
to respond with something but there was a lump in my throat that I
couldn’t swallow. So I didn’t do or say anything.

“Second off, you ought to thank me. Your little friend here went
claw-to-fin with a reaver. If I hadn’t come along at just the right
time he’d have been meat. But, I digress.”

Asa swims over to me carefully. I throw a desperate look at Paris; he
looks like he wants to do something but can’t figure out what to do.
Anything either of us does right now is a bad move. So again, I don’t
do or say anything.

“You,” Asa says to me, “you are supposed to have a gun. A Florez gun
like this one.” And he produces a Florez gun, just a small sidearm,
several models better than the one I use. I’m a total gun nut, and
even though I can’t afford to collect I still keep up with the
literature. And I’ve never seen anything like this. Asa reads this in
my eyes. “Haven’t seen one like this, have you? Okay then. Go ahead
and play stupid. We’ll all just play stupid.”

It’s now I realize that Jean is awake. Conscious, just barely. “I told
you… she doesn’t have it,” he says. “I lied to you before. I got rid
of the thing, really. I threw it away. It’s gone. I swear…”

“Forgive me if I don’t believe that for a second, kid,” says Asa, now
swinging this futuristic-looking sidearm around wildly. “You know what
your dad told me? He told me to take care of you no matter what, but
to tie up these loose ends first. Unfortunately for me that means I
can’t exactly threaten you, since you’re about to die anyway. But…”

Several more goons appear. Five or six; they came out of nowhere.
Paris and I put up a short show of struggle, but it’s no use. We were
trapped ever since we came out here. I don’t even know now exactly
what the hell we expected to do. Asa approaches me with his weird gun,
and he places it right to my neck, just below my right gill. “Leave
her alone, Asa!” Paris cries. This is uncharacteristic of Paris, but I
don’t have time right now to think about what that might mean.

“Hey Jean,” Asa says. “I bet you didn’t know your girlfriend here is
kleistopnoitic, did you? It’s true; we found an oxytank in her flat
when we tore it apart looking for that gun last night.” Jean looks
horrified. Dammit. “Yep. So while this baby can fire up to five
hundred fifty sparks of Florez per second, it’ll only take one
straight in her gill to kill her.”

Now Asa turns to Paris. “You were in Cestano, weren’t you? Well not in
action of course. You’re too young for that. I’ll tell you how it was
then. I was in a special ops team designed to bring down biped
vessels. We had huge shoulder-mounted cannonball Bosches, so no
problem. The best part was watching them drown. They got all frantic
as their brain went vertigo, and they desperately would claw around
trying to reach the surface. Most time they’d be swimming the wrong
direction.” Pause for effect, two, three, four. “Inevitably, though,
they all tried to breathe the water. Flooded their lungs, and
drowned. It’s really quite a sight.”

Asa cocks the gun and places the barrel flush with my gill. I can’t
even writhe out of the way because these thugs that have grabbed me
are pushing my head to one side, baring the entirety of my neck. “And
if you don’t tell me – the truth this time – about where that gun is,
you’re going to see it happen to her.”

“Damn it Jean, tell him!” screeches Paris. “Tell him and end this!”

Except Jean really doesn’t know. He originally told them I had this
gun – this murder weapon thing, this piece of incriminating evidence
Jean swiped from his dad and now is wanted back. But as it turns out
he really did get rid of it. Wherever the thing is, it’s long gone
now, and Asa is having none of it.

“Alright,” says Asa, and pulls the trigger.

Bipeds need to ingest a good deal of water just to survive. Which
means even with the danger of drowning constantly looming over their
heads, they’ve formed a habit of taking a quantity of water and
willingly pouring it down their throats. Sometimes you have to wonder
how they do it.

I hold my breath as long as I can, which isn’t long. Everything gets
blurry before I black halfway out. A hundred kilometers away I can
hear Paris screaming and Jean crying out in pain. A trillion
kilometers away I can hear Paris’ old buddy Desh taking his last
frantic breath, filling his lungs with water…

Every muscle in my body goes limp. There’s enough Florez in my gill
now to lock it up forever. The left one still works, so I’m not dead.
Asa knows that. I wonder if Paris and Jean do. He hopes the sight of
me blacking out due to lack of oxygen is enough to make Jean talk;
hey, at least there will be a brain damaged drooling husk of a lady
sniper to take care of afterwards.

I feel myself move for a moment, and can’t resist. Paris is absolutely
frantic. Oh, okay. That’s why. I’m being dragged to the dropoff of the
Rift. They’re going to let go, and I’ll sink forever. Forever and
ever, until I finally fall asleep for the last time. How tragic. How
utterly, deliciously tragic.

And Jean shouts something and Paris shouts something, and something
else happens and then something else. And I’m sinking. Falling. And
everything is a swirl of color and the way I feel is just very sleepy.
My eyes get heavier and heavier, until they refuse to stay open any
longer.


My coma lasted for four months. That’s what kindly Dr. So-and-so says.

I only learn after the fact how everything happened. It was Jean who
saved us. In the end, it was the little sadistic kid with the knives
to saved my life.

Jean had a knife hidden on him the whole time. A tiny one, about the
width of his pinky finger. He always wore it; it attaches to the soft
flesh of his tail where, years ago, some psycho tore the scales away.
Reconstructive surgery allowed Jean to wear several fake scales there
and underneath those scales is an ideal place to hide a small knife.
Of course Asa searched him, but there’s no way he could have known.

Apparently, right after they let go of me, they let go of Jean. They
wanted me to die leaving Jean behind knowing he had a chance to save
me. Of course in his completely busted up condition there’s no
possible way he could have done so; I was sinking faster than he could
swim with a broken arm and a mangled tail. So instead, with his good
arm, he grabbed for his secret knife, shot forward, and buried it in
Asa’s alarmed head.

Asa, being dead at that moment and all, let the sidearm he was holding
drop out of his hand. Jean managed to grab it before anyone else
could, and even though he could barely see he screamed for the big
guys grappled onto Paris to let him go – or else. In a situation like
that you don’t hang around to find out what “or else” means, you just
do whatever the abyss the guy with the gun wants you to do.

Paris dives after me and, just as he does so, shots start going off.
The entire area was lit up with blue Florez, and after Paris manages
to grab hold of me and rise back towards the surface he realizes
there’s no way Jean made it out alive. He says there was just a sad
little collection of corpses there by the Rift – one stabbed not-IBI
agent, several Florez-injected thugs, and Jean.

Jean gave up his life for us. To save us.

Which sounds pretty amazing really. Not quite as amazing as the fact
that we were out there in the first place, though. We were prepared to
give our lives for Jean too. As it turns out, we were the three of us
much better friends than any of us thought.

It took a minute or two to get me breathing once Paris got me to the
surface. He says he was afraid I never would. My right gill was
totally shot, completely useless now. A direct shot of Florez
transformed it into a useless scab on my neck. Paris had no choice but
to leave me laying on this sandbar, barely alive, while he swam all
the way back to my place to get my oxytank. He told me he can’t even
describe how relieved he was to find I was still there when he got
back.

Then I was brought to the hospital. With surgery they managed to get
bits and pieces of my right gill working again. They managed to finish
the job Jean started and keep me alive. But I didn’t wake up for four
months. I guess my brain figured I needed a vacation.

I learned all this the first day I was awake. The night prior, though,
I didn’t know anything. The split second after finally coming to, I
was scared and angry and very, very sad all at once. I didn’t see the
point to any of this, to Asa, to Jean… the doctors learned I was
first awake because I was calling out Paris’ name in a loud, clear
voice. I can only manage a voice like that now if I’m hooked up to a
respirator.

So the next day, that morning, before I learn about Jean’s death or
the fantastic save or any of that… before I learn about all the
medication I’ll have to take and the mandatory respiration machine
I’ll have to wear and how there’s a new social disability service that
will pay for it… before I go home and fix up my old Bosche and fire
it for the first time in forever…

…before any of that, the door to my hospital room opens, and Paris
is there. And I put my arms around him, and feel the tears building up
in my eyes. This time, though, I don’t wipe them away. I don’t have
to. Paris does it for me.

Tunic Sucks, Don’t Buy It

Have you played with this Human Benchmark website? The idea is it can measure your reaction time, within the bounds of your monitor’s refresh rate. You wait until the screen turns green, and then click as fast as you can. The website takes your average over five clicks and calls that your reaction time, in milliseconds.

Human Benchmark website

The website claims the aveerage reaction time is about 270ms, and there’s some interesting data that suggests that time is getting slightly slower over time due to people migrating from CRT displays to HD monitors or cell phones. 270ms is about a quarter second, which smooths out with other sources I’ve checked (boring medical journals and peer-reviewed experiments and what-have-you). I’ve “played” the Human Benchmark site probably a hundred times in a past week, clicking five times and taking the average, and my reaction time hovers around 450ms — way out at the front of the bell curve.

Anyway, I ended up hating Tunic. It was a waste of my $30 and it’s been many years since I’ve been this angry about a gaming experience.

Dark Souls Ruined Gaming Forever

I’m not allowed to play Dark Souls. I characterise it as “not allowed to play” and not “do not like” because I am convinced that if I were allowed to play, I would find myself utterly engrossed in the world and the lore and the combat systems. I think I would really enjoy hunting down secrets and correlating clues and dying in hilarious ways while trying to roll off a moving elevator into a broken window, or whatever. I think I would have a lot of fun on replays, trying out different builds or weapon sets.

But my reaction time is 450ms and not 270ms. By the time my brain has received the signal from my eyeballs that the boss is attacking, and has sent the signal to my thumbs to dodge roll out of the way, it’s already too late and my character in the game has already sustained damage. The fights in Dark Souls (and its sequels, and its spiritual sequels, and its clones and hangers-on) are calibrated to be challenging to someone with average reaction time, and I am far below that. The game’s developers have been very consistent in their philosophy that the games are supposed to deliver a singular, explicit gaming experience, the sort of thing that would be ruined if they included difficulty settings that slowed the bosses down or increased the amount of healing potions you can carry, or whatever. So my journey thorugh Dark Souls and Bloodborne and Hollow Knight ended when I reached a boss I could not defeat who bottlenecked my progress.

A permanent Game Over.

I don’t really want this post to veer off into a point-counterpoint of every argument I’ve had to respond to over the years, along the lines of “just practice more” or “just don’t play those games” or “the games are supposed to be hard, go back to Pokémon you loser”, or whatever. The point is, there is a physicality threshhold beyond which these games simply can’t be played. I can’t dunk a basketball, I can’t gestate a human fetus, and I can’t consistently dodge roll in Dark Souls. If you don’t want colorblind people to play your game, design your challenges so differentiating between shades of red and green is important to progress. If you don’t want deaf people to play your game, have lots of spoken dialogue but no subtitles. And if you don’t want me to play your game, make sure the required boss fights all rely on attacks that can’t be reacted to inside of 450ms. From a development perspective it’s pretty easy to build a wall to keep out the players you don’t want.

But the Dark Souls formula is so wildly popular, and so pervasive, that it’s more and more becoming the baseline for what combat in action/adventure games should feel like. It’s getting to the point where you can now purchase some other genre of game that looks appealing, and be blindsided with Dark Souls-style difficulty without knowing that’s what you were about to play, and being too far on the other side of Steam’s refund policy to do much about it.

What Does It Feel Like To Have a 450ms Reaction Time?

Once or twice, I have gotten my time on the Human Benchmark website down below 300ms. That is, something more in line with what the average person can do. Here’s how I did it.

If you click the screen too early, the site doesn’t penalize you. It just politely goes “Too soon!” and lets you try again. It lets you try a hundred times in a row, if you want. So what I can do is try and anticipate when I thik the screen is going to change, and click. If I’m wrong, it’s no problem, because I just get Too-soon!’d. But if I guess right, and just happen to click just as the screen changes over, I get to record a ridiculously good time for that click. When I spend a few minutes clicking through the “Too soon!” messages, the site averages my guesses instead of my reactions.

I can do this in Dark Souls too. Instead of watching for the boss’s wind-up and then choosing the appropriate response, I can try and anticipate when the boss is going to attack and respond appropriately. If I guess right, I can avoid the damage just like an average player who is able to read the boss in the way the developers intended.

Unfortunately, in Dark Souls and its derivatives, if I guess wrong I don’t get to try again. Guessing wrong means taking damage, and you can only carry so much Estus.

I’ve heard many reports from hundreds of different sources about how good it feels to finally beat a tough boss in Dark Souls, which necessitates the player first learn the fight, and then execute the appropriate actions, through many repeated (and often grueling) deaths. The feeling of accomplishment is supposed to be exquisite, the final culmination of slowly getting better at the fight over time, until you’re able to put it all together and achieve something great.

But I can’t win these fights by slowly getting better over time. Whether I dodge an attack or not is a function of luck, not skill. For a given boss fight in Dark Souls I could, of course, learn the fight and then make as many educated guesses as possible. And, eventually, after enough resets, I will get a run where I guess right enough times in a row that I win the fight. I’ve done this in lots of action games over the years, including some of the opening fights in Dark Souls style games.

In my experience, the feeling isn’t one of accomplishment, but just relief. It’s not, “Sweet! I finally beat that boss! I can definitely feel myself getting better at this!” Rather, it’s, “Phew, I can finally stop resetting over and over and see some new content in this game now.”

In practice, even just trying to get enough lucky clicks on the Human Benchmark site is pretty tedious. And there, I get to try again right away, and not have to run back to the boss room from the checkpoint every single time.

In my epxerience, people don’t like to hear this explanation. After all, they eventually beat the boss after practicing for a while, so clearly I’m just lazy and give up too easily. I don’t have a good response to this sentiment, except to remind myself that empathy is hard and nobody likes to be told they’re wrong.

Brick, Is This Post About Tunic Or What?

I thought Tunic was going to be in the ballpark of “hard Zelda.” I’ve been aching for a new Zelda experience ever since Breath of the Wild failed to deliver one. Blossom Tales was vapid and empty. The Tomb Raider games are good but not exactly scratching the same itch. I loved Link’s Awakening but, like, I played it back in 1978.

But Tunic looks almost exactly like Zelda. I learned the game had a strong emphasis on exploration and puzzle-solving, and that the hero (whose name is Tunic, maybe?) collected a grab bag of toys that increased her (his?) options in both movement and combat. I knew there was a dodge roll and a stamina bar, and those things are mainstays in Dark Souls, but lots of games have the same systems without being all Souls-y. Oh, and also I’d heard the game described as “Souls-y”, but I’ve also heard lots of games described that way that decidedly aren’t.

At worst, I figured Tunic would be somewhere on the level of superhero mode in some latter Zelda games. Like, I could complete a version of Link to the Past which limits you to three hearts and one bottle. I envisioned enemies getting tougher as I go, but also my combat options increasing as well, to the point where at the end I was fighting more with magic and tools than swordplay. Link Between Worlds did that. Remember Link Between Worlds? The last Zelda game to successfully Zelda?

And for the first few hours, that’s exactly the experience the game delivers. You are dropped onto an island with a stick and no shield and told, “Go fight a bunch of monsters that kill you in two hits.” The first area caused a lot of deaths but felt… hmm… I’ll go with, appropriately hostile. It’s supposed to be this hard at first because Tunic doesn’t have any equipment yet. Soon I’ll find a real sword and a shield and maybe a magic meter, and then it’ll be fine. And even if the game stays at this relative level of difficulty, that’s fine too, because it shows a good, smooth curve in difficulty level that accurately reflects the hero’s power level as she advances.

I died a lot, but I also figured out a lot of stuff, and anyway checkpoints and shortcuts are so plentiful you never really lose any progress. I’ve had Zelda Randomizer runs where I had to wade into an ocean of blue darknuts with a wood sword in one hand and my dick in the other, and nothing in Tunic was that reset-heavy yet.

That was about my experience in every overworld and dungeon section of Tunic. Each new area ramped up the difficulty hard, but after a few deaths I started to figure some stuff out, and eventually I’d open up a shortcut or reach a new checkpoint or find some new equipment. It was good. I liked it.

But then I met a boss I couldn’t beat. The thing had more health by far than any other monster in the game up to that point. It attacked so fast and so frequently that just finding a moment in the fight to safely position myself to use one of my limited healing potions was a real challenge. After about an hour of dying and resetting I had not got the boss down below 60% health once.

The feedback I chose to take was, okay, I shouldn’t kill this guy right now. There are other areas I can go and explore, and I’ll come back much later when I’m stronger. I pushed through a few more areas of the game and unlocked some new powers, and eventually ran into another boss I threw myself at for an hour without getting below 60% health.

The difference was, now, there was nowhere else to go and nothing else to do. Tunic follows the traditional Zelda formula pretty closely: you need the red, blue, and green macguffins to open the thing and get to the second half of the game. Well, I’d been through the red, blue, and green levels. I managed to kill the blue boss — the toughest challenge I’d overcome in the game by far — but the red and green bosses were so far beyond me that I couldn’t see a path to victory except to just be really, really good at not only dodging attacks but also dodging into advantageous positioning.

Which I can’t do. Because it’s Dark Souls.

Big Sword Guy – A Deep Dive

I’m going to describe this boss fight in some detail, but I’m going to try and keep my descriptions abstract, in case you haven’t played Tunic yet and are sensitive to spoilers. That said, after uninstalling the game in disgust I really wish I had spoiled myself more on the game’s content, at least enough to know to avoid buying it. So maybe you’re in the same position and this description will be helpful.

Big Sword Guy has four distinct sword attacks (plus a few other non-sword attacks) that all need to be dodged in different ways.

Attack #1 is an instant turn-around slash which hits in a narrow arc behind him. He won’t do it unless you’re standing there, so you can avoid this attack just by staying in front of him. I learned this pretty early in my attempts.

Attack #2 is a dashing forward lunge. You can block this with your shield, but the hit is so powerful that the recoil from absorbing it leaves you unable to do much in the way of counterattack; if you block it, you give up your opportunity to hit the boss. Dodging backwards or forwards means eating the lunge, so that leaves dodging to the side. In fact, I found dodging to actually be worse than just side-stepping. If you dodge, you’re too far away now to counter, but if you just step to the side and let the lunge go by you, the boss is now locked into a recovery animation right inside your effective range. (Just don’t step back TOO far or you’ll circle around to his back, and then see Attack #1, above.)

Attack #3 is a huge forward arc, then a huge follow-up arc in the opposite direction. There’s nothing Tunic can do to interrupt a boss’s attack pattern once it starts, so you can only sneak in a hit here if you have some way to deal with both slashes. The easiest way is to just not be standing there; dodge or run backwards and the arcs will just miss you. Blocking them chews up all your stamina, which is fine if you have as many upgrades as I had, but I suspect most players won’t. (To me, it really felt like the first attack was supposed to eat up your whole bar and make you vulnerable to the follow-up. But I had been everywhere and explored absolutely everything, and had found enough stamina upgrades to survive both hits.) The issue here is, if you’re in a position that the attack misses you (or if you have enough stamina to just block) you don’t have any breathing room to comfortably counterattack. The solution I came up with was to dodge twice; roll back from the first arc, then roll forward through the follow-up. Time it right, and you’ll i-frame your way through the hit and end up right in the boss’s face, good enough for three hits, if you’re quick.

Attack #4 is a jumping downstrike. The strike itself can hit you but doesn’t actually try to track your position, so you can avoid it just by being far away. However, the strike also sends a shockwave across the ground you must dodge roll through. Tunic can’t jump and her shield is useless in this situation. If you’re anticipating the jump and know about where the boss will land, you can stay about mid-screen from him and time your roll to go over the shockwave just as it leaves his sword, placing yourself perfectly for three hits.

In isolation, I could comfortably perform all of these feats of execution. What I mean is, if the boss only had his turn-around slash, plus one of these other attacks, plus his other bits and bobbins, I would have found the fight extremely hard but also very doable. I would had an excellent moment of achievement.

But my reaction time is 450ms, so that’s not the experience I had.

The boss’s wind-up for his arc vs. his lunge vs. his jump all look different. Different enough that you can tell what’s coming pretty consistently. But I’m Shitty McSlowbrain over here, so I could either identify his attacks or select the appropriate dodge, but never both. If I watched his sword and correctly identified the lunge, it was too late to side-step because the lunge had already hit me. And if I kept all the different inputs in my thumbs to focus instead on picking the correct one for this moment, I would have no idea which one to pick.

I had to guess.

Guessing right meant I could do a combo’s worth of damage, and if I guessed right ten or twelve times in a row and also upended my inventory of bombs and magic spells into the obss, I could have maybe won, and progressed in the game.

I wanted to describe this boss in detail to prove that I really did make every effort possible. Intellectually, I understand what the boss does and how he moves and how the game expects me to move in response. I’m past the knowledge checkpoint phase of learning the fight, and just repeatedly failing on the execution.

Well, the boss never got any easier, and neither did the other boss I was stuck on (who I could also describe in this much detail). And the game couldn’t continue until both were dead. I won’t swear I had literally found every secret and pickup in the world, but I had been pretty exhaustive in my explorations. And besides, I was failing out before the halfway mark on the boss’s health bar; another heart container or point of damage wasn’t going to be what got me up and over the hump.

Steam reports I have about 25 hours played of Tunic, and I didn’t get appreciably stuck in any other part of the game outside of these boss fights. That means, horrifyingly, I spent something like a combined eight bleeding hours just trying one boss, then the other, trying to “guess better” and win, and never getting better than halfway.

But Brick! Tunic Has Difficulty Settings!

Tunic isn’t Dark Souls. Someone on the dev team realized that designing a game to purposely exclude some segment of the playerbase who might otherwise love it is, well, not a bad busines strategy, since From Software always makes a billion dollars with each of its games, but is at least a little bit mean. So they put in a “No Fail” option.

No Fail Mode is just an invincibility toggle. Turn it on and the game doesn’t actually get any easier or more approachabale, you just can’t be damaged now by any enemy attack. This might have been the only solution available of the Tunic developers; I have no idea what their situation was. But it’s a pretty terrible solution for someone like me, who is really only here to engage with the gameplay.

Admittedly, I’m not a big story guy in video games at the best of times. I enjoy a good story, but it’s exceptionally rare that I will play a video game to completion just for story alone. Especially not now, in the age of YouTube and Twitch.tv. I wanted to like Tunic on the strength of its exploration and its combat, that is, the things I really like about traditional Legend of Zelda games. And for the record, I think that outside of the few boss fights that bottlenecked me, the game mostly delivers on that promise. I found it to be difficult, but also challenging, and often rewarding.

But it will never feel challenging or rewarding to defeat a boss because you put in a Game Genie code. Big Sword Guy had all the same undodgeable attacks, and he hit me 400 times, and I only won because I was allowed to be invincible and he wasn’t.

I’m frequently told that Dark Souls-style games are about crafting a very particular type of experience. If that’s true, and if Tunic is following in that mold, then it has failed miserably. Nobody who plays Tunic on No Fail Mode is going to have a great experience with overcoming a really tough challenge that they worked really hard at. They’re going to have to give up instead, and then either leave the game unfinished, or turn on No Fail to complete it, which is what I did. Both of those experiences suck.

The proper thing to do here — and this is what every non-Dark Souls-inspired action/adventure game does — is to have several difficulty options, each of which makes slight alterations to gameplay. That way Toughguy McDarksouls can play on Super Hard and get the grueling split-second boss fights he craves, enabling his monkey brain to release 3700 Endorphin Points. Meanwhile, me and the other Shitty McSlowbrains of the world can play on Normal, and fight a version of the boss who is a little weaker or slower or less aggressive, enabling our monkey brains to release 3700 Endorphin Points. Most modern games even go a step further and have something like Story Mode difficulty, which I have never selected and cannot speak to, but I imagine it allows some players to get whatever level of interactive stimulation they crave, also to the tune of 3700 Endorphin Points.

Well, the Tunic folks either didn’t think of this or didn’t care to try, and so it’s Super Hard or Literally Invulnerable, with nothing in between. It’s better than absolutely nothing, which is always From Software’s choice, but only marginally.

And before I leave this thought, no, Tunic‘s story is not worth playing on No Fail just to see it. The world is cute and the lore has some neat aspects, but it doesn’t break any new ground or advance the art form in any direction. It’s a perfectly cromulent backdrop to a game you’re already playing and enjoying, not something that’s worth experiencing in and of itself.

Yeah But There’s a–

I know about the Hourglass. I found it. I used it extensively in every boss fight I got stuck on. It didn’t help, and even if it did, it would still be a lousy solution.

The Exploration and Puzzles, Though!

I’m as good at exploration and puzzle games as the Dark Souls fanboys are at dodge rolling. Boss fights they find too easy fail to stimulate them, and I know a few such fans who have noticed a real sense of Difficulty Creep over the years as developers chase ever more extreme levels of harder, faster, tougher, meaner.

I’m like that with puzzle games, I guess. But the playing field isn’t the same. I solved Myst in 1994 and, 400 years later, Obduction wasn’t that much harder. Similarly, when Breath of the Wild just regurgitated a bunch of Ocarina of Time puzzle concepts back at me, I batted them down without breaking my stride. Games with intellectual or observational challenges just aren’t getting harder as time goes on.

(And honestly, I don’t even know what that would look like.)

It’s an inexact comparison too, because if you defeat a tough boss, you might enjoy fighting that same boss again later, just for the fun of it. The execution alone is a good exercise to revisit, even after you know all the attacks and are well-practiced and well-equipped enough to dodge and counter them all. There’s a reason I keep playing old Mega Man games, forever.

But puzzles aren’t like that. Once you solve a great puzzle, you know how to solve it, and even if you forget the specifics of the solution, most of the fun is in discovering the method, which hangs around forever. Actually inputting the solution to Myst‘s fireplace puzzle, or carefully lining up arrow shots in the proper order in Zelda, isn’t as exciting as a Mega Man boss rush you’ve played before, and never can be.

So what’s Tunic like in this regard?

Well, for a while, you’re going to be discovering a lot of secret passages. The world is interconnected in a lot of convenient ways which, on replays I will never experience, probably lead to lots of interesting sequence breaking opportunities. But I’ve played a lot of games where pushing against walls yields results, so as soon as I realized this was what Tunic was doing, I started finding a boatload of hidden stuff in every area. Once or twice I found a backroute into (or out of) an area and ended up circling back from the other side to make sure I “did it properly,” since this was my first playthrough.

It’s a cool way to design a world and it does set Tunic apart, but if this is what people are talking about when they say Tunic is a fun exploration game, I’m not impressed. The actual discovery of all these passages and secret or hidden spaces was fun while I was discovering them but they never helped me beat the boss I was stuck on, and the prospect of forcing myself though the boss over the course of 100 retries to earn the chance to discover more passages and hidden spaces didn’t excite me.

There are actual puzzles in the game, too. I don’t mean “hit the red switch with the fire rod”, either; I mean real old-school pen-and-paper type puzzles. You eventually figure out how to spot these in the game world and what to do to solve them, and then there’s a big Final Boss meta-puzzle where you put it all together and get the only solution that works.

I never got stuck on any of these, and I’m not aware of any remaining clues in the game world that I haven’t correctly interpreted. Even the big bad meta-puzzle, what I’m sure some players will either champion as the game’s crowning moment or decry as unsolvable bullshit, didn’t slow me down. I found a clue that I immediately interpreted correctly, then I spent about twenty minutes correlating my paper notes into an organized solution that made sense. (And it’s self-checking, too. Puzzle books have to be, of course.) It was an enjoyable exercise but it won’t be one of my highlight video gaming experiences this year.

In very broad terms, all the puzzling in the game culminates to a very, very easy version of the Sun’s Map puzzle from The Fool’s Errand. If you don’t know what that means, you might get really stuck on it for a long time and then feel incredible when you finally solve it. If you do know what it means, don’t worry, I haven’t given you any more information towards formulating a solution than the game itself does, and you’re now left feeling either nostalgic or disappointed, depending on how the prospect of babby’s first sun’s map strikes you.

Tunic’s exploration is engaging, but nothing original. And its puzzles are pleasant, but pedestrian. It’s really the combat challenges that carry the experience, and they proved impossible. All told, I spent about 12 hours exploring and solving the game, plus another 12 slamming my head against boss fights. Three of these, I was never, ever going to win fairly. (That is, the two I mentioned, plus the final boss, who was appreciably harder than both and had multiple phases.)

I left Tunic feeling incredibly bitter. I want my $30 back.

A Thought Experiment

The hardest pure puzzle series I know is RHEM. These are point-and-click adventure puzzle games where you will live and die on the accuracy and meticulousness of your notes, plus hours and hours of grueling investigation as you search every square inch of every screen for miserly scraps of clues you may have missed. I love them dearly.

Here’s what I’d like to see.

Let’s have someone make a game with decent, but average, video game combat at about the baseline difficulty for, say, a Tomb Raider or Horizon game. Challenging, but not at the extreme edge of the medium. Or maybe a Mario or Zelda game, where the boss fights are big spectacles that rely on pattern recognition or tool use rather than reflexes. You know, enjoyable enough, but nothing a Dark Souls fanboy would write home about.

Then, right at the 50% mark of story completion, let’s drop a hardcore do-or-die RHEM puzzle right in the way of progression. I mean a real banger too, I’m talking rock spires or puzzle apartments, like, have fun being stuck for five hours, forehead. Oh, and let’s randomize the clues in-game and make the solution a little different for each player. Same puzzle, but the implementation space is too large to just pass on the solution; at best, the walkthrough sites can describe how to solve it but the player will still have to go in and do all the work.

I think we’d see fireworks. I think we’d see a lot of folks suddenly crying bullshit. I think the accumulation of all their exasperation and confusion will foam up about their waists and all the toxic soulsboys will look up and shout, “WTF ARE WE SUPPOSED TO DO!?”

…and I’ll look down and whisper, “GIT GUD.”

Centaurworld

Over the past few days I binged all of the Netflix cartoon Centaurworld. The quickest way to describe this show would be something like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic with the adventure stakes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, packaged as an operatic.

It was fine. It falls cleanly short of great. It will have slid off my brain in a week, and in a year i probably won’t remember anything much about it.

(Quick rant! Whenever an adult says anything like this about children’s media, the quick knee-jerk is to stamp one’s feet and holler “IT’S FOR KIDS”, maybe interspersed with some clapping hands emojis. I reject that argument. I think children’s media can be great. For example, quite a lot of Friendship is Magic and Avatar are great. I’ve posted about those shows in the past, here on this blog, in the long-long ago bevore social media and pandemic destroyed the world. I mention them now, by way of comparison, because they stuck with me. They stuck with me because they were really something special, for their time, even though I was 30 when I watched them and not 13. Adults can and should enjoy children’s media, and there are better standards to hold that media to than “did it shut the kids up for a couple hours”. End rant, thanks.)

There was a lot I liked. The cast was entertaining without ever slipping into blatantly obnoxious. (Or, at least, not slipping there for too long at a stretch.) I liked both animation styles, and I think the way they’re blended together is a good worldbuilding trick. I really liked the charming but always juuuust slightly off-putting creature design. There are 18 episodes, and I don’t think any of them classify as filler. Every story they tell either advances the plot or grows the characters or setting in ways that end up being important for the climax.

But the show isn’t great, and I can’t shake the feeling that the reason it isn’t great is because the people who made it didn’t aim for great. They aimed for “safe, and good enough”. This might not have been a bad decision on their part, necessarily. Some shows aim for great and fall short; this is where I think consensus on The Cuphead Show! will probably land. Others, say, Bojack Horseman, feel like they weren’t given the green light to aim for great until they hit some arbitrary marketability goal first.

I don’t know anything about Centaurworld‘s production. Maybe they didn’t have the confidence to aim for something truly great. Maybe they didn’t have the talent. Maybe there’s a whole universe of safe, bankable centaur merch I’m not aware of, and the actual show only had to be just good enough to peddle it.

When I watch something like this, a show I mostly enjoyed but also know is going to fade out pretty quick, I tend to quantify it in terms of what would have made it truly great. I’m going to list those things now, which means SPOILERS FOR CENTAURWORLD FOLLOW.

Thing #0: Horse and Rider Are Dumb Names

This isn’t a thing which would have improved the quality of the show, it’s just something that bothered me a little bit all the way through. I think it’s really dumb that the horse’s name is Horse, and the rider’s name is Rider. These names are first used by Horse, who has just fallen through the portal into Toontown and discovered she can talk. When she introduces herself as “Horse” and her rider as “Rider” my assumption was, okay, this is a creature who has had no concept of spoken language before now, and “Horse” is just how she used to identify herself in her own mind, back in Crapsack World where she was an ordinary horse.

Eventually Horse and Rider are reunited, and Rider gets to meet all Horse’s new Toontown friends, and I thought for sure we were being set up for a scene where they keep calling her that and she eventually goes, “Uh, actually, my name is _______.” But no, Rider is just consistently called Rider by all the characters, and she doesn’t seem to mind, so I guess that’s her Christian name. And she calls her horse Horse, so I guess that just means she named her horse Horse. Okay.

Maddeningly, Rider later teams up with a second horse character with a cutesy-poo name, confirming that human riders do name their horses and Rider just apparently… didn’t. I woonder what Jaime Lannister would make of all this. Yes, this was worth spending two and a half paragraphs complaining about.

Thing #1: The Ending is Bad

At the end of the story, in the big climactic battle against the giant monster king, Rider is mortally wounded, and dies, and it’s very sad. Except no, she miraculously survives, despite no medical or magical intervention whatsoever, because of course she does.

While I think adults should enjoy children’s media, I do acknowledge there is a disconnect when it comes to story tropes like this. A hero miraculously surviving a killing blow is something we’ve all seen before, and seen before, and seen before. Sure, sure. Usually in this case I remind myself that the target audience doesn’t have more than a decade of experience with adventure stories yet, because they haven’t been alive for a decade. The scene is boring for me, but there’s a generation of kids out there for whom it will have been their first real nail-biter.

But in this specific adventure I think the story and the messaging would have been much stronger if Rider had died, and then stayed for-real dead. It would have been sad, and it would have broken a lot of hearts, but you know what? I used to be a kid, way back during the Watergate scandal or whatever, when Model Ts roamed the earth. And I remember my first impactful, for-real, no-takes-backsies character death. I will remember it forever. I’ll bet you remember yours, too.

That’s the kind of developmental moment Rider’s death could have been, but Centaurworld chickens out.

Chickentaurs out.

The post-climax finale is a big musical number about how great it is to have friends and how loving your friends is awesome, etc. The messaging here seems to be that Rider loved her new friends so much she just… decided to not die because she didn’t want them to be sad. Instead, it could have been about how Horse loses her oldest and truest friend, and that’s going to hurt forever, but she’s in good hands because of how much her new friends care for her. Rather than moving forward with Rider’s companionship, she holds on to Rider’s memory as a source of strength. The ending can still be a big happy song, bent towards bittersweet. You suffer loss, the losses are meaningful, but you survive.

I really don’t think this ending would have been off-brand. When I say Centaurworld is for kids, I don’t mean it’s for babies. The show dips into some pretty heavy territory, here and there. They don’t shy away from showing Horse’s very real depression, the way a cartoon like My Little Pony would have. They are clear about establishing the violent stakes at hand, where Rider and the other human characters are concerned. Moving forward through loss is an element of almost every character’s backstory.

The foundation is there to handle a bittersweet ending, Centaurworld just didn’t want to. Missed opportunity.

Thing #2: The Songs Are Bad

18 episodes, most episodes run 20-some minutes, figure two or three songs per episode… and sitting here typing this all up I can’t bring a single one to mind. That’s a big oof.

Centaurworld is a musical, in the sense that zany madcap cartoon characters burst into song at little or no provocation. It’s also a musical in the sense that, in more serious moments, characters will dramatically soliloquize by way of ballad. Sometimes they’ll start one way and end the other, or go back and forth. Wikipedia lists over seventy songs on the soundtrack, and none of them are earworms.

Look, not every musical is going to be Hamilton. But this was supposed to be one of the show’s defining elements and it just kept falling flat, over and over. Mostly the songs just feel like the characters are kind of tunelessly singing their dialogue.

I don’t actually know anything about music, so I can’t offer much more than a thumbs down by way of critique. What I do know is it’s a real shame I don’t have a catchy Durpleton showstopper to hum in the shower.

Thing #3: It’s Not Dark Enough

The show does get surprisingly dark. Depression, as I said, is a theme. There are some genuinely scary visuals, particularly the Nowhere King, and particularly when paired with the hollow sound of his lullabye. (Oh! I did remember one song, after all! One out of seventy ain’t bad!) The Toontown characters are just a little too cracked to be your standard exaggerated chartoon personalities; they have actual trauma (and sometimes they deal with it very badly).

The bleak, desolate world Horse and Rider originally come from feels like something out of Dark Souls. I wish we spent more time there, but the time we do spend there shows us some pretty messed up stuff. There’s violence, fighting, betrayal, and even some straight-up body horror. Toontown isn’t a silly cartoon world because silly cartoon worlds are fun, it’s a silly cartoon world because we want to play with stark setting contrast. Real monsters are coming and they are really going to kill everyone and it is really important that you goobers stop singing about lollipops for one goddamn second and start taking this seriously.

The show could have gone much, much further with these elements, and 1) still mostly been a show about goobers having fun adventures in Toontown, and 2) not have pushed the envelope into parental advisory territory. There’s lots of perfectly acceptable children’s media that goes way further into darkness, horror, and General Serious Times than Centaurworld does.

By way of specific example: one of the earliest story arcs in the show is how Horse, a battle-hardened warhorse from Crapsack World, lands in Toontown and has to adjust to her new surroundings. It’s silly and weird and none of it makes sense, but she has no choice but to deal with it, and the way in which she deals with it ends up changing her. It’s a well-executed character arc and it’s just one small part of the whole story.

What we don’t get, though, is the opposite viewpoint. I thought for sure we’d see a Season Two storyline where one of the Toontown goobers gets marooned in Crapsack World with Rider, and is forced to acclimate to that reality. There is a small subplot where Rider is attacked on the road and robbed by hungry human children that would have been much improved by a Toontown presence. It would have been an effective moment of realization for Wammawink that these kids had to resort to violence not because she forgot to magic up some pancakes this morning, but because food doesn’t grow here at all anymore.

The dark stuff is so segregated, the show ends up being overwhelmingly a light-hearted friendship adventure story, and the stakes never feel completely real for the main cast. Everyone winces at that scene where Judge Doom puts the shoe into the vat of Dip, but it’s necessary for the climax to pay off later. Centaurworld doesn’t have any Dip.

That’s it, really.

Cartoons are steadily making it back into my routine media diet. The Cuphead Show! was a visual treat and had fun goofy stories, but many of the gags were tired. Disenchantment is napping in its own butt. Futurama got re-re-un-canceled but none of my dudes seem that excited about it. I don’t know when more Harley Quinn is coming.

So I figured I’d watch this, and then I did, and then I typed about it. Thanks for reading!

Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye

Outer Wilds OST – Travelers (All Instruments Join) [1 Hour]

I had this playing the entire time I wrote this post, and thought maybe you’d enjoy playing it as you read.

Throughout this post I’m going to refer to Outer Wilds and it’s DLC expansion, Echoes of the Eye, as two different games. In fact, my goal with this post is to make the case that that’s what they should have been all along.

Outer Wilds was an incredibly special experience, the kind of thing that only comes along very, very rarely. It’s a puzzle adventure game, and my brain sort of catalogues it alongside Return of the Obra Dinn (which is more adventure game than puzzle) and Baba is You (which is pure puzzle all the way down) as a sort of late-’10s puzzle experience trifecta. Outer Wilds is the best of them, though, because it went beyond merely an excellent adventure game (which it was) and into the realm of one of life’s truly great gaming experiences.

Echoes of the Eye, meanwhile, is merely an excellent adventure game. Its inclusion as DLC doesn’t really enhance Outer Wilds at all (except for one detail, which I’ll talk about at the end), but I worry that stapling the two together kind of detracts from both. The fact is, I enjoyed Echoes less than I would have if it weren’t burried deep within Wilds. And speculation is, having the two bundled together is going to make it more difficult for future players of Wilds to have the same transcendent experience I did.

I’m going to try to avoid spoilers in this post, but that’s not going to be completely possible. I’ll mark some minor spoilers when they become relevant, and then some big major ones when I start bitching about where I got stuck, but it will be safe to read until then.

Why Echoes of the Eye is not as special as Outer Wilds was

Let’s consider for a moment how adventure games are usually structured. As as a series of puzzles, yes yes, and those puzzles sometimes masquerede as social or environmental interactions. But more abstractly than that, they usually involve there being a Big Door at the end, and there are some number of Big Keys you need to find. Once you have them, you open the Big Door and then you win.

In some games, like the RHEM series, the Big Keys are literal. You need this list of physical things in your inventory, which you can only collect by traveling around and solving literally every puzzle in the game. There’s nothing wrong with this sort of structure, but it’s very boilerplate. There’s nothing to distract you from the core of the puzzles themselves. Which is fine as long as the puzzles are good, which in the RHEM games, they are.

But not everyone wants to be boilerplate, because adventure games that aren’t RHEM also like to lean in heavy on the story and lore. So we need to disguise the Big Keys a little. This is where you get something like Myst, where each Big Key you find (one in each self-contained area) comes tied to a little piece of story. Once you have all the Big Keys, someone tells you how to open the Big Door, and you can go win. The collection of all the Big Keys together is information, though, and not a physical thing, so if you want, you can go win immediately from power on without having to solve any puzzles.

Again, this is fine as long as the puzzles are good, and also as long as the story is good, which in Myst, they are. And this is the esteemed company in which Echoes sits.

You can go further down this road, though, to the point where each individual Big Key is itself a pierce of pertinent information. And you can blur the edges of each of the game’s sections, so less of it feels like it breaks down cleanly into Area II, Sub-goals A, B, C. Riven lay in here somewhere, and Obduction too. And, yes, Outer Wilds.

Outer Wilds was so special because learning about the world didn’t feel so much like you were out there collecting Big Keys. The Big Door at the end was something you had to discover for yourself, and the worlds you visited all pointed at each other in a web of puzzling but satisfying connections. They hid all of this from you, all the nuts and bolts of what made the game work, by making the things you learned intereating in the context of the fiction first, and then making the puzzles all some version of you figuring out how to apply what you now know.

In Echoes, you spend the first half of the game identifying what the Areas and Sub-goals are, and then you have a checklist to complete, and when you’ve completed it, you’re done.

It’s fine, because the puzzles and story were good. But it was Myst and not Riven. And I think it is made worse by being DLC rather than a full-fledged sequel.

Wilds Makes Echoes Worse I: Vestigial Mechanics

There are other reasons why Outer Wilds was something truly special: its wide collection of very smart game mechanics. You had a lot of tools and you had to use them all as you explored the solar system, and while some are standard fare others were things we hadn’t seen before (or, at least, hadn’t seen on this scale). You used every part of your kit so frequently that they really felt like adventuring tools. You know how the video game standard is something like, okay, there’s the special grapple point you can grab with your special Batman Grappling Gun, which you forgot you had until the game helpfully popped up a prompt? And then you swing across and there’s a special wall you can break with your special Batflash Bomb? Which doesn’t work on any other walls? Outer Wilds doesn’t do that.

(It doesn’t engage in that kind of tool specialization, I mean. Some areas do have prompts.)

And, well, technically you do have all the same kit in Echoes of the Eye, because you’re still playing Outer Wilds. But you never use your ship. You never use your translator tool or signal reader. You can’t access your map. Your scout still gets some play, but you won’t rely on it to the degree you had to in Wilds. In fact, the most frequently-used tool throughout Echoes is your flashlight, which in the base game is secondary to those other things I listed, and so is bound to a thumbstick click, which you’ll do a thousand times per session.

How weird is that? All these nice buttons, bound to fun toys you don’t play with anymore, and you end up just clickin’ yer stick. You could re-bind the controller, I suppose, but then you’d just have to un-re-bind it after you leave the DLC and head back out into the base game.

Echoes does what it can to fill this void. There are special navigational tools and new and interesting interactions to discover and make use of. But they’re much closer to the Batflash Bomb side of things. Every time I sat down to play, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was driving to the DLC, parking outside, and leaving a lot of my fun toys in the trunk. And, ah, speaking of which…

Minor spoilers for Outer Wilds follow.

Wilds Makes Echoes Worse II: The Time Loop

Outer Wilds‘s worst-kept secret, and probably the first and biggest thing new players enjoy discovering, is the 22-minute time loop. Whatever you’re going to do in the game, you have 22 minutes to accomplish it, because at that point the universe explodes and you wake up back at the beginning.

This did create some frustration in some areas, particularly if you were exploring a large area with a confusing layout. It might be a hair-raising effort just to reach the area, and just about the time you get your bearings, the universe explodes. Of course, learning how to navigate the solar system and get to places efficiently is all based on your game knowledge. As you learn, you’re able to reach deeper and deeper parts of the game.

But you will get stuck, and if the thing you’re stuck on takes two hours, say, that’s six start-overs for you. Six traps back up the elevator, six more landings to stick. (And often considerably more, if the thing you’re stuck on is dangerous or otherwise time-sensitive.)

The game world of Echoes is so detached from Wilds that your in-game map doesn’t even function. You’re still in the solar system, though; you aren’t free of the time loop. It feels like you’re Somewhere Else, but you’re nonetheless bound by the rules from outside the universe. There are time-sensitive events inside Echoes, as well, that can help you keep track of about how much longer you have. In actual practice, though, these things change too much about the world and are often start-overs in their own right. The loop actually felt shorter.

Meanwhile, the trip back is longer. You still have to go through the rigamarole of boarding your ship, donning your spacesuit, flying to your destination and sticking the landing. And then you have to navigate to your second destination inside of Echoes. So half the clock, twice the reset time.

There’s not really a way to fix this problem without breaking the fiction of the game, which is to say, the fiction of Outer Wilds. But if Echoes were a sequel, it could have opened with some contrivance as to why you’re starting each loop at the front door rather than way back at your home planet. Maybe a wood-paneled data tablet thing which catalogues your actions, and the first one is always “Woke up at home and flew to the DLC for the nth time.”

Actually, that sould solve another big problem Echoes has…

Wilds Makes Echoes Worse III: Rumors

Your ship in Outer Wilds has an on-board computer that keeps track of the places you explore and what you learn there. As you work on the game each new piece of information gets added to the spiderweb of interconnected data points, pointing you in the right direction and keeping you on task. The game calls these connections “rumors”.

There are three big advantages to your rumor log. First, you can click any of the rumors to automatically highlight the physical location that rumor pertains to, anywhere in the solar system. This is super useful for flying back to a point of interest at the beginning of a time loop.

Second, rumors help confirm your intuition. In a game as big and weird as Outer Wilds it’s actually pretty common to see some world interaction, but not completely understand what it was you saw. Maybe your camera was at a weird angle or your light was in a bad position. Or maybe you’re just slow on the uptake. When this happens, though, you can always go check your rumors and confirm that, yes, something very important happened, and here’s exactly what it was.

Third, rumors confirm for you when you’re done exploring an area. If you’re not, the rumor will come with an orange tag and the phrase “There’s more to explore here.”

The caveat is, to access your rumors, you have to be in your ship. That’s not a big deal in Wilds, when you’re actively using your ship throughout the entire loop. It’s almost always parked right next to where you’re working as your reliable home base. (And, er, sometimes, hilariously, it’s not, heh.)

In Echoes, your ship is always very far away, and getting to it might not even be possible from your present position. (Or, at least, reaching it will be a bigger pain in the ass than simply resetting the loop.) You still get log updates out in the field, but now it’s not really an option to check what they are. I still frequently found them helpful, I just felt like I had to do a lot of premature loop-ending to get the same use out of them I did in Wilds. Some way to access the rumors while away from your ship might have made this better.

Or, ah, maybe not. While they were helpful I couldn’t shake the feeling that the spiderweb structure that worked so well for Wilds didn’t fit with Echoes. You can see this clearly once you’ve solved the whole game: instead of a big web of connected entries, Echoes looks like a main hub with separate spokes leading off from it, each of which breaks off into separate goals and sub-goals.

And, you know, I felt like the rumors were just less helpful overall? In Wilds the protagonist frequently spells out exactly what he learned or what interaction he witnessed, even if it’s possible the player hadn’t worked it all out yet. (And Wilds deals with stuff like infinitely-recursive space and quantum entanglement, so that’s for the best.) In Echoes, I feel like the protagonist is much more coy about what gets written down in the rumors. Like, yeah, they’ll describe the thing they saw, but leave out just that one key detail to make sure you-the-player figure it out for realsies, because otherwise the puzzle might be too easy, wink wink.

Still, I did love Echoes of the Eye. I just wonder if it would have been an even stronger experience without pointless tools clogging up my controller buttons, and without the constraints of the time loop, and with a better in-game data-tracking system more suited to its own structure.

But there’s another problem. I hope it’s an imagined problem. I don’t know for sure. You’ll have to tell me.

Echoes Makes Wilds Worse: Splitting Attention

There’s a lot to work on in Outer Wilds. And there’s a lot to work on in Echoes of the Eye. But nothing you learn in Wilds can be applied to Echoes, and vice-versa. The full game experience, bundled together, is a new player will boot up the game and then quickly find themselves working through two parallel but never-connecting game tracks. After discovering the world of Echoes, nothing else anywhere in the solar system will point you there, or offer any enlightenment on what you find there. And nothing you learn or do in Echoes will grow your knowledge or appreciation of the wider solar system.

I think a lot of players will have the experience I had: they’d already completed Outer Wilds and formed their attachment to it, and then they’ll play Echoes in one big chunk as its own thing. My hope is that most new players will do the same thing. Wilds is excellent, and Echoes is excellent, and I think you can (mostly) play them in either order as long as you play one to completion, then the other. I think jumping back and forth will be incredibly frustrating.

The player I’m envisioning is someone who doesn’t know that there’s two games here, and thinks they just bought a game called Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye. They’re expectation, especially if they check out a few of the planets before figuring out how to get into the Echoes content, will be that anything could point you anywhere, and that everything is ultimately connected.

But it’s not.

There’s a frequent sensation in adventure games, where you find a weird machine, or some information you don’t understand, and it’s very clear you aren’t supposed to do this yet. You’re going to find something somewhere else that opens this door or lights up this cave, or whatever. Up until Echoes was released, Wilds was the best example of a self-contained informating-gating experience I’d ever played. It was okay to leave this planet even though some of its rumors still had the “more to explore” tag, because something you find on that other planet will help to contextualize it all later. You’ll be back, and smarter.

Some poor player is going to have that sensation, for one of these two worlds, and go looking for the answer in the other, and never find it. The self-containment has been breached.

Maybe that player doesn’t exist and maybe that experience isn’t going to be typical. I don’t know. Hey, you wanna hear the big stupid thing I was stuck on for like eight hours?

Major spoilers for Echoes of the Eye follow.

The Big Stupid Thing I Was Stuck on For Like Eight Hours

About halfway through Echoes you unlock the big awful dark levels. I hated these levels at first, and then I really hated them for a while, and then I figured some stuff out, and then I hated them a little less.

Can I just say, up front, that dark levels in games are almost universally bad? Limiting the player’s field of vision is just the most lazy, common, bottom-feeding thing a developer can put in, and there is such a strong trend nowadays for games to not only do it but pretend they’re being clever about it. Outer Wilds was the rare exception that actually was clever about it, because 1) there’s a really good reason for it to be so dark everywhere and 2) you get a tool that fully illuminates the entire area that you can use as much as you want.

Well, the dark levels in Echoes aren’t clever and they aren’t fun. They’re big confusing mazes and it is vitally important to know exactly how they’re laid out. A couple hours’ of gruntwork got that element of them sorted, and my rumors log had reported there wasn’t anything left to explore in them, and also they hadn’t really done anything for me yet, so uh, woo hoo I guess?

Of course Echoes is a puzzle adventure game, so eventually I did learn some stuff that gave more context to the dark levels and also reasons to re-visit them. (Each one had a Big Key hidden inside, and I knew where the Big Door was, now.) Putting this knowledge to use opened new paths in the dark levels but also began to populate them with jump scare monsters.

So Echoes is a stealth horror game with insta-kill jump scare monsters, now.

I had some advantages here. For one, I discovered an interaction that let me scout out the levels in full brightness, and making use of it makes it much harder for the jump scare monsters to detect you. So it was very easy to learn how my interactions were changing the levels, and how many monsters there were, and where they were, and what they were doing. In the first dark level, this alone is enough to retrieve the Big Key.

The second dark level was a much tougher nut to crack, and involved an “a-ha!” moment I decided was actually a stroke of genius. The kind of thing I should have known all along, that they game wasn’t even hiding from me. It was clever and I felt clever for thinking of it, and it worked like a charm as soon as I tried it. Second Big Key in the bag.

The third dark level eluded me, though. I was sure there was some cool, clever trick to it. The state change that occured to add jump scare monsters caused a lot more movement around this level than in the first two, and the map layout seemed to be saying conflicting things to me. I tried at least a dozen things I thought were very smart, but which didn’t work, and then another dozen which were less smart but increasingly desperate.

What was so awful about this section is the state change was a singular point in time, and only possible once per loop. So the big list of things I wanted to try involved riding the lift, flying back to the DLC, then traveling to the dark level’s entrance and doing some setup work every single time. It wasn’t like the other dark levels, where failure kicks you out but you can try again immediately.

To wit: pushing the big State Change button causes all the monsters in the area to hop aboard elevators (which you can see very clearly) and ride down to their patrol areas. Each of these areas connected to the main area of the level plus a top level I hadn’t been able to reach yet. Two of them traveled all the way down to the bottom area, where my Big Key was, and one of these traveled next to a walkway with no guard rail. The elevators tunneled downward into the ground through rocky points I could easily reach by jumping to them, without incurring fall damage.

I kept telling myself: these are not stealth sections. This is still part of Outer Wilds. The solution is going to be a trick, not dodge-the-vision-cone. The game gave me the strongest possible feedback about this: the best way to make yourself undetectable to the monsters is also to blind yourself. There’s no way the devs intended you to scoot around the level blind. There’s no way stealth is the answer.

I still tried stealth a lot, usually after some other trick failed. I flew out, tried to time a jump on an elevator as it was coming back up the hole, reasoning that there would be nothing on the top level but I would then have access to the elevator controls and could ride it back down. Well okay, that didn’t work, might as well try stealth until the loop ends. Fly back out again, this time let’s try catching the elevator as it rides down. Maybe the top is flat and it’ll be a way to reach the bottom of the shaft without dying. Oh, uh, I died. Well, I can’t un-push the State Change button, so might as well try stealth some more.

Just tracing which elevators up top connected to which area on the bottom level was a non-trivial exercise. You know, the kind of thing that makes it feel like you’re progressing in an adventure game. This turned out to be a red herring. You never get to ride the elevators and nothing I tried with them ever worked. Nothing else I ever tried worked, either. Because the solution is just to stealth it. You have to just run blind through the area and hope you don’t fall off a ledge.

Upon retrieving your Big Key at the end of the level, you do get some information that makes the stealth solution unnecessary. (And it’s a very cool interaction, which I nonetheless have some reservations about. I’ll talk about it below.) That’s a cold comfort, at best, and a little insulting at worst. “We made you do it the hard way so we could teach you the easy way, see?”

No, game developers, I don’t see. It’s inelegant genre-smashing. I like stealth games and skateboard games and sniping games, I wish developers would stop taking this as an invitation to jam stealth and skateboards and sniping into games that don’t need them and aren’t improved by them.

I looked up some solutions to Echoes after I rolled the credits. I feel confident that, in the context of a puzzle adventure game, phrasing such as “this might take a few tries” and “sometimes the monster just catches you because things don’t line up right” is indicative of a design misfire.

Here’s a spot where Echoes‘s rumor system was playing a bit too coy. Even a straightforward line like “I should be able to sneak by if I’m careful” would have saved me hours of painful trial and error. (And would pair nicely with one of the other levels, which could have used a “There’s too many of them, I’ll have to think of a way to get rid of them.”)

Now I’m Just Gonna Spoil the Ending

At the end of Echoes you meet The Prisoner, and for the very first time the DLC actually connects back to the lore of the base game and puts some old stuff into new light. I really loved this ending and I also really hated this ending. Or, more specifically, I think Echoes itself has a really poor ending, but what you learn and what you’re able to do help improve the ending of Wilds, which was already really strong.

(I have an aborted blog post about how emotionally resonant the ending to Outer Wilds is, which I might have to revisit now. We’ll see.)

Even more spoilers, this time for lore stuff, blah blah.

One of the tricks you learn in the dark levels of Echoes is a way to trick some sentinels by killing yourself. You’re dead, but you’re not dead-dead, at least not all the way dead-dead, and anyway you’re in a time loop so killing yourself is just something you’re into. (For real, you can ask your paradox self about this in the base game, and they’re cool with it.) You need to use the killing-you-trick to use one of your three Big Keys, which opens the Big Door to where The Prisoner is being held.

Meeting The Prisoner was an exceptional moment. I mean that. The way The Prisoner’s species communicates is to use brainscan staff mind-meld technology, and he tells you his story, and then asks you to tell him your story. And your story here, at the end of Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye, is something truly wonderful. The writers use this moment to give the protagonist a little extra characterization, which wasn’t lacking before but is always nice to see. I learned a lot about The Prisoner, and about What Happened Here, and even a little bit about my four-eyed bug hermaphroditic alien hero. It wasn’t quite on the same level as meeting Solanum in the base game, but it was in that ballpark, and it was different in a meaningful way. They’re not just retreading something you already did with the last of the Nomai.

The very last interaction you have with The Prisoner before he leaves (to go where? no idea) is his mind-meld staff, stuck in the ground, shows an image of you and he joining hands and riding a raft off into the sunset. Heart-warming, right? Well that image fades, and the first thing in your field of vision is a raft you just used to place one of your Big Keys. You jump on the raft thinking, oh cool, they’re going to use this puzzle thing from a moment ago in the ending sequence! But no, the raft just takes you nowhere, and then you ride it back, and nothing else happens.

So The Prisoner leaves, and that’s it. You’re just stuck there, and he’s gone, and you’re dead. Not dead-dead — you can still restart the loop — but you can’t, like, run back to your ship and make it back home and tell your mates about it (and then watch the universe explode together). I kind of expected to look behind a rock and see Atrus back there, and he looks up from his writing, and politely apologizes for how there’s no more game left, but you can live here with him in this dark room forever, if you want.

Of course that’s not it it. Next loop you can get in your ship and go do the regular Outer Wilds ending, and if you do, The Prisoner is there. And the ending is better for him being there! His dialogue is unique, and his perspective on the Eye of the Universe and the End of All Things makes me like him even more. There’s a stark contrast between his unnamed species, and the inquisitive Nomai, and the laid back Hearthians that make the ending really meaningful. It was already meaningful, of course — now it’s better. Echoes didn’t ruin it.

Echoes of the Eye Didn’t Ruin Anything, I Guess

I really did love it, you know. There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to play an adventure game without a big stupid thing I hate and get stuck on forever right in the middle of it. It didn’t feel a lot like playing Outer Wilds but then no other game does either, and there are still lots of terrific games out there that aren’t Outer Wilds. Echoes of the Eye is one of them.

I think I would have liked it more if it were the new game by the makers of Outer Wilds, and they had found a way to make the connection a secret surprise toward the end. And then maybe Wilds detects your Echoes save when you replay it, and improves the ending.

Maybe things can be good sometimes, and maybe the next universe will be better.

Thanks for reading!

Cracked.com’s article about DMing is terrible and I hate it.

Do you remember that show The Big Bang Theory? It got recommended to me by every non-nerd person in my life, who was certain I would absolutely love it. Which seems weird, right? Usually it’s the nerd-people who are enthusiastic about their recommendations, but there wasn’t much overlap between this sitcom-for-nerds and actual nerds I was acquainted with. I tried the show for a few episodes and figured out why: the whole show derived its comedy from making fun of nerds. All if its “funny” situations stemmed from socially-awkward nerds behaving badly, or from pointing at the comic book/video game/star trek reference and rolling its eyes. It wasn’t funny to me, for the same reaon the kids who used to pick on me in school for reading D&D books weren’t funny.

So, anyway, I hated today’s terrible Cracked.com article entitled “6 Lessons You Learn DMing ‘Dungeons & Dragons'”.

The article: https://www.cracked.com/article_30351_6-lessons-you-learn-dming-dungeons-dragons.html

First of all, I understand Cracked.com is supposed to be a humor website. I personally haven’t enjoyed the site in years, since the days when it had regular columnists with actual comedic talent and at least a semblance of journalistic standards. So, 2009, 2010-ish. And yes, I understand that humor is relative. I never understood what was funny about bullies picking on me in school, but the bullies and their friends all thought it was hilarious, so. Diff’rent strokes, and that.

Cracked.com is a pop-culture website that crowdsources its content. I’m not sure what their application process is, but they frequently have contributors who write one or two short articles and then nothing ever again. They also frequently post user submissions from their forums and social media. It’s telling that this latter content is almost always better than the former, because a great amount of humor can be found in normal people sharing the foibles of their life experience.

But that’s not what this D&D article reads as. This article reads as someone who doesn’t play D&D, or maybe used to play in college 20 years ago, but has read a lot of subreddits about the topic and also has seen every episode of Stranger Things, so they feel like they have the gist of it. I feel like this must be the case because, if these 6 things were actual lessons she learned herself running a table, she would be able to spin the article as charming anecdotes with the added benefit of little humorous details that only come from lived experience. Some Cracked.com articles are like that. This one’s not.

As I go through the list I’m going to be keeping two questions in mind: 1) Is this funny? and 2) Is this helpful? I can forgive an unfunny list as long as it offers helpful advice, and I can forgive an unhelpful one as long as it’s amusing. This list is neither, so I’ll do what I can to offer actual advice on each topic, and maybe try my hand at a joke here or there.

0) Have a Session Zero

This isn’t addressed in the list at all, but it’s by far the most common advice given to new DMs who are starting to learn weird lessons about the game. Session Zero is a pre-character-creation session you have with your players to discuss what the game will be like, what the boundaries are, what tone you’re aiming for, etc. The idea here is to ensure everyone is on board with the game you’re about to run and to formalize the social contract players and DMs will abide by. If you go to any D&D community on the internet in 2021 citing any of the below 6 things as something you need help with, Session Zero is going to be the first response and probably also the next nineteen responses.

I’m mentioning it here because the Cracked.com article doesn’t mention Session Zero, which leads me to believe the author has never run one. In fact, there’s no sense of “talk to your players like adults” in the article at all.

A phrase you’re going to see as we go through the list is “good faith”. Establishing good faith is exactly what Session Zero is for. If you talk to your players and make sure they’re all on the same page regarding table expectations, you probably won’t have to “learn” these “lessons” at all.

6) Affection (and Attention) Is A Fickle Thing

This is the most common “things DMs hate” trope by far: the idea that you can spend a lot of work prepping an important, plot-crucial NPC only to have the group glom onto a random nobody you didn’t intend. One of the players in my meatspace group, which hasn’t met since before the plague but I have my fingers crossed in hope for the near future, is in charge of taking the weekly head count. She does this by sending a short “who’s in for tonight?” text message with a D&D meme attached. Six times out of ten, the meme is a comic of some D&D group frolicking with a bewildered chimney sweep while an angry princess gets mobbed by orcs in the background.

There is an element of “it’s funny because it’s true!” here, because it happens so frequently in games, but without the visual element I’m not sure it really works as 1/6th of the jokes in your internet comedy article.

The example the author gives, of making up an NPC shoe salesman in a panic and immediately establishing he has a crush on the town blacksmith, doesn’t ring true to me as belonging to this trope. Revealing an NPC’s secret love interest is not a thing you do with a character you aren’t intending your players to latch onto. What I’m saying is, her example either did not happen or she’s playing coy about not wanting it to happen.

Anyway, I have three actually useful pieces of advice to help new DMs avoid this pitfall, because as funny as it can be to meme about it, it can also be very aggravating and distracting when actually running the game. They are:

1) Don’t name characters you don’t intend to use beyond one scene, don’t give them any character traits, and don’t describe them visually. The shopkeep is just a shopkeep, full stop. Players that glom onto such a non-entity are not acting in good faith; they’ve seen one too many memes about chimney sweeps and are trying to make that magic happen for themselves. It’s okay to explictly tell players when a character isn’t important, and it’s time to move on.

2) Don’t roleplay busywork scenarios. If players want to go shopping, tell them they spend the afternoon in the marketplace and purchase what they need (with your approval of course), then move onto the next actually important scene. If it’s time to move the game along but the players just want to get drunk at a bar, it’s okay to say, “Sure, you each spend ten silver and get drunk at a bar. You wake up the next morning with a hangover but otherwise fine. What’s next?” Again, players who insist on roleplaying through scenes you clearly have no interest in running are not acting in good faith.

3) Accept and lean into it. You’re going to have a lot of NPCs over the course of the game, and the players are going to want to feel like they’re important in at least a few of their lives. If you do introduce a minor NPC that the players just happen to be super-besties with, well, that NPC is a major character now. Immediately think about how to work them into a plotline or use them to get the players onto whatever track you already have planned. (If you’re familiar with my table, ask me about Loes Vesterhoff or Caitlyn Chubb sometime.)

5) A Simple Misspeak Is A DM’s Worst Nightmare

The example the author gives here is the DM mispronouonces the word “warhammer” as “warmhammer”, and then being locked into it for some reason, and then an incresingly unlikely set of scenarios involving the player using their warmhammer to take over the world.

In 30 years’ experience with D&D I have not only never seen this happen, I have never heard of this happening.

What actually happens at a real table, if you accidentally call an orc an elk, is that you apologize for getting tongue-tied and then move on with the game. (Or, if it’s a real Freudian slip, you laugh about it for a few minutes and maybe it becomes a new table meme. But then you move on.) You don’t actually have to change all the orcs in your games to elks and then have to explain how elks can weild greataxes and come up with bizarre new list of racial traits the party’s half-elk now has.

In her “warmhammer” example, the author offers us this exchange:

“There’s no such thing as a warmhammer.”

“Then I leave the store.”

“(deep sigh) FINE. He offers you a WARMhammer for 30 gold. It’s a regular warhammer, but the handle is always warm to the touch.”

Instead, I offer this alternative:

“There’s no such thing as a warmhammer.”

“Then I leave the store.”

“You leave the store. What’s next?”

4) Making A Good Impression

Some DMs do lots of voices and accents, others do not. It’s not a requirement and from what I can tell about my travels across this great wide web of ours, it’s not even particularly common.

There is a wide perception of non-D&D players, however, that D&D involves doing voices and accents. This is spurred on by the popular D&D podcasts, which are frequently tabled by professional performers who are comfortable doing them. So I guess I see why this “lesson” made it onto this list.

I personally have a very narrow range of voices, and am more comfortable using inflection, cadence, and verbiage to make my NPCs sound distinct. And that’s when I bother to try at all, which I frequently don’t. It’s okay to do voices. It’s okay to not do voices. It’s okay to try and do voices, and fail, and then laugh about it afterwards. It’s all okay! It’s going to be okay.

I suppose there are DMs out there who desperately want to do a wide range of NPC voices, but are unable to, and if that’s the case I can see how this “lesson” could be a source of tremendous stress. The wider lesson here is to lean into the things you actually are good at, and try to not sweat the stuff you aren’t. This is also something you can address during Session Zero or just anytime you feel self-conscious at the table. “Hey guys, I’m trying to learn to do different voices for NPCs, and I realize I’m going to flub it a lot at first, I’d appreciate if we maybe keep the jokes about it to a minimum. Thanks!”

3) The Snackening

Providing snacks for D&D is a time-honored tradition but this “lesson” doesn’t amount to much beyond “dudes be hungry”. Well, yeah. People like to consume junk food during their recreation time. Shrug emoji. The author explains:

You must have food on hand, or things will get ugly.

Will they though? Get ugly?. Do players actually demand foodstuffs before the game can commence, and start yelling and breaking things if they don’t get it? Does this also happen in online games, which is where a huge amount of D&D gets played, especially during the pandemic?

The actual truth is that adult human beings are hungry, yes, and if you are hosting a D&D game and you intend to eat during it, it’s polite to offer food to your guests as well. (This is true of any gathering of people, of course, not just D&D.) But snacks don’t actually matter much as far as setting the tone of the table. If you find it is becoming a problem at your table, it’s something you solve with a simple conversation.

When my meatspace group begins playing again in hopefully a few weeks fingers crossed, we have a short set of generally unspoken rules regarding food. If The Snackening is your problem you might find them helpful:

1) Eat dinner before the game. If you don’t, you can bring your dinner to the game, as long as you clean up after yourself.

2) If snacks are presented, they are available to everyone.

3) The host generally doesn’t go out of her way to feed anyone, but if you’re hungry and you don’t have anything, it’s always okay to ask.

4) If you throw a temper tantrum because you are hungry and haven’t fed yourself, you will be mocked.

These guidelines seem to work pretty well. Apply them to your table with my good blessing.

2) Your Friends Are Secret Horndogs

Yes, humans are hungry and yes, humans are horny. They are these things because they are humans. Sex is a part of life, and being a part of life, it’s also a part of D&D.

I’m not sure I understand what the “lesson” is here, though. The author states:

And Gygax forbid you introduce a villain as “brooding” or “strangely alluring.” You will never get that party to kill that Bad Guy. Not ever. I hope you were planning a big wedding at the end of your “Curse of Strahd” campaign, because that’s where it’s heading, like it or not.

I have described villains as being “brooding” before, and the party still went on to kill them. I couldn’t swear this happened during Curse of Strahd, because I portrayed him as being more whimsical than brooding, but the campaign ended with an epic fight with the heroes desperately clinging to the cliffs beneath Castle Ravenloft. A tale they still tell to this day.

(I would shy away from ever describing an NPC as “strangely alluring”, because that makes a judgment on what a player character finds alluring, which isn’t my job. If I say this to you during a game you can be sure there is some weird fey magic involved and you should probably think about making a WIS save vs. being charmed.)

The degree to which sex stuff is okay at D&D tables is going to run the gamut between “no pen0r/vagoo at all ever” all the way to “my barbarian is wearing his +1 RapeCon ’06 t-shirt and catoblepas-leather assless chaps as he draws his Firebreathing Battle Dildo”. You have to talk to your group to know where to adjust that needle. Bring it up during Session Zero.

1) To You, They Are Rules. To Your Friends, Merely Suggestions.

The example the author gives here is a player insisting they be allowed to use charm person on a dragon. However, the charm person spell works only on humanoids, and dragons aren’t humanoids. So… that’s that.

If this is a “lesson” you think you’ve learned as a DM, and in fact you think it’s important enough to put on the #1 spot on your list of important lessons every DM learns, then I have very bad news for you: you have been playing with jerks. You have been playing with jerks for possibly years and years, and they have been taking advantage of you, and the “lessons” you have been learning from them are worthless.

Yes, players are going to try and skirt the rules. Yes, they will try to find “creative interpretations” of rules. And yes, sometimes they will simply get rules wrong. You correct them and move on. If they do it repeatedly and maliciously, you revisit the adult conversation you had about table expectations during Session Zero.

There’s really nothing else to say here. If you want to follow the rules at your table (and there’s nothing saying you have to, if ignoring or breaking rules is more fun for you), you have to learn to enforce them. They are not suggestions, and players who treat them as such are acting in bad faith.

I want to be charitable here.

My first read of this list is that it was written by someone who had never run D&D or, perhaps, who has played it a little and tried to extrapolate her DMing tips based on observations about how her DM acted. (Her only other article on Cracked.com is a look at which D&D monsters are most datable, so she has at least thumbed through a Monster Manual at some point. It still isn’t very funny though.)

But there is another way I think a DM could “learn” these “lessons”, and internalize them to the point where they think the “lessons” are universally applicable.

In 2018 I wrote an article called “Your DM Toolbox” where I examined a few commonly referenced pieces of DM advice and explained why these things should be part of your DM skillset but not be treated as axiomatic concepts.

Your DM Toolbox

The first tool I look at is the concept of “Yes, and…” (Or “No, but…”) The idea here is that when your player says something, you should agree to it and then build on it, or disagree but offer an similar alternative. The reason I caution against using “Yes, and…” in all cases is because your players might hear, “I will never say no.” And in a game with rules, it is important to say no.

Maybe when this Cracked.com contributor started running her D&D table, she psyched herself up by reading a bunch of websites espousing “Yes, and…” as an ingredient for good D&D. Maybe she applied the concept so liberally that her players learned that fun voices were mandatory, slips-of-tongue were immediately canon, players get to decide which NPCs are important, and rules are just suggestions.

Maybe.

That still wouldn’t explain the weird hang-up about snacks, though.

Thanks for reading my ill-tempered hit piece on Cracked.com!

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

Me and Fire Emblem are not buds.

Strike one: these games are tactical RPGs. I don’t hate TRPGs, exactly, but I’ve liked and completed far fewer than I’ve gotten bored with and quit. I love Final Fantasy Tactics, as any right-thinking person, but it doesn’t crack my list of top ten Final Fantasy games.

Strike two: these games are the most anime-ist of anime. Again, I don’t hate anime, exactly, but I find a specimen has to be something truly spectacular to wake me up. You certainly can’t do it by spooning a serving out of the Big Barrel of Anime Tropes, and that’s exactly the barrel Fire Emblem swims in.

Strike three: this is predominantly a handheld series, and I don’t play games on handhelds. There was a time back in the early ’10s where my PSP and 3DS were all I had to game on at the office, but I was never wanting for something to play on them to the point where I would take a chance on Fire Emblem.

Strike four: this is a vast series, with something like sixteen mainline entries, with intertwining timelines and character arcs and geography and who knows what else. The first, uh, six (?) of which didn’t even get released in my region. Jumping into the middle of a long-standing series and trying to play catch-up with the story and characters is exhausting, and only worth it if the pay-off is a setting you’ll cherish for life.

But.

I’m an NES kid, and I have great fondness for that particular era of gaming. Having grown up in the ’90s cutting my teeth on stuff like Ultima: Exodus and Destiny of an Emperor, I’m insulated to a lot of the weird jankiness of that bygone era. I can pick up an 8-bit console game released in 1989 and appreciate it as an historical artifact, but I can also see how a younger me might have responded to its merits and flaws.

My first exposure to Fire Emblem, as I expect is often the case in North America, was Marth’s inclusion in Super Smash Bros. Melee. I had a vague awareness that he was from some Japanese game we never got, and some light sleuthing at the time revealed his game was a lot older than I’d expected. (His companion character Roy was from the then-newest title, which hadn’t been released as of Melee. Including the newest Fire Emblem protagonist would become a sort of Smash tradition, leading to the proliferation of “anime swords” in the game today.)

My experience with TRPGs at that point had been, well, Final Fantasy Tactics and a couple other titles here and there, mostly on the Sega Genesis. A friend and I had played most of the way through Warsong, and I’d rented Shining Force II once. These were complex games that seemed to be at the far edge of what the 16-bit consoles were capable of, so I was intrigued as to how an 8-bit progenitor could even work.

The solution: romhacks. Lots of old Famicom and Super Famicom JRPGs had terrible-to-middling fan translations at the time, done by hackers who thought they were being grown-up and character-accurate by making the heroes say “bitch” and “ass”. I’d already played Final Fantasy V, Mother, and some of Seiken Densetsu III that way. But the romhackers hadn’t gotten around to Fire Emblem yet. It was 2001, nobody knew what a Marth was.

I told that story on stream a couple years ago, stating the only Fire Emblem game I’d had any interest in playing was the original, and the one time I’d looked, nobody had translated it yet. Of course, by the end of the night, my viewers had located and patched a rom for me. I booted it up to confirm, yep, it’s in English alright, and decided to save it for a rainy day.

Then I forgot about it.

Sorry, Princess Whoever! Must have slipped my mind.

Then a thing happened the ring did not intend: Nintendo released Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light for the Switch. Not a remake of the game, you understand. There is a remake, on the DS I think, but that’s not what they released. No, they were giving us the Famicom original, with a fresh new professional localization. And it wasn’t being dumped into their NES ghetto app; Blade of Light was a stand-alone title with some modern bells-and-whistles added in. You could experience the game in all it’s 8-bit jank and mean-ness, or you could smooth your playthrough with new fast-forward and rewind options not present in the original.

I bought the game immediately, then I forgot about it again. For a while. Then, this past couple weeks, I played through it twice.

You’ll Eat Your Perma-death and You’ll Like It, Mister

I’ve never really needed a fifth reason to stay away from the Fire Emblem games, but here’s one anyway: most of the early games in the series features perma-death as a mechanic. When a character dies in battle, they’re dead for good, and this can happen through no fault of yours if the dice rolls just happen to fall a particular way. The choice here seems to be whether a player embraces this system and rolls with the punches, or meticulously replays levels until all units survive. Both of these options seemed pretty stressful to me.

If the former, you’re going to inevitably lose a powerful fighter you’ve dumped a lot of resources into. This feels bad because you lose a character you’re attached to, yes, but also because those resources are just gone now, and you have to complete the rest of the game without them. The more you rely on a unit, the greater the chances this is going to happen, probably multiple times.

If the latter, you’re going to be replaying content repeatedly until you get the outcome you like. There are already individual moments in lots of JRPGs where I do this sort of thing, and it’s never fun. I tolerate it because it’s just one thread in the broader tapestry of experience, but in Fire Emblem the tapestry only has this one thread. It sounded exhausting.

Neither of these options feel right to me in a game that’s easily going to take twenty or more hours to complete. If Fire Emblem were a quick five- or six-hour jaunt, it’d be acceptable to play through it multiple times as you experience slightly different outcomes on each pass. But these games are heavy and dense. I’m not a man who plays a heavy, dense game and then immediately hits reset to play again.

I knew Blade of Light had new features to mitigate this, somewhat, but I was also very interested to experience the game as closely as I could to how it would have played in 1990. I resolved to not use the turn rewind feature, and to simply write off any dead units. I had two big questions:

1) Is the game even winnable if too many units die?
2) Do dead units really detract from the experience that much?

Before I started playing, I reasoned the answer to #1 was “it must be, somehow” and the answer to #2 was “probably not”. And it turns out, I was wrong on both counts… but that might be okay.

The game has 25 maps and something like 50 total recruitable units, 15 of which can be assigned to a given map. In some maps you’ll be assigning fewer, because they introduce new units, which count against your total, even if they’re terrible and you’ll never use them again. On my first run I was losing about one unit per map, and sometimes an unlucky two, so it wasn’t likely I’d ever be completely unable to field a full roster of 15. The game dumps more units on you than you can use specifically to patch up the holes left behind by the fallen.

Each unit is a named character with a hard-coded class, though, which means you have a finite number of units to fill a given role in combat. There are only so many heavy horse in the game, and they tend to form your army’s vanguard. As they drop one by one through the tough mid-game maps, the new horsemen you’re meant to replace your old ones with are likely not as strong as the ones you’ve lost, nor as well equipped. So, the more you lose, the more you tend to lose, and some of the late game maps are particularly brutal.

The situation I found myself in was reaching map 21 (of 25), a large open field with no healing tiles, choke points, or obstacles, which sent enemies at you in three waves and then spawned a fourth.

So like is there a rock I can hide behind, or…?

I believe the design intent of this map is a sort of knowledge checkpoint: you have to really know what each unit is capable of, and bait out each wave of enemies in turn, just on the strength of your army alone, without any assistance from the terrain. By the time I reached this map, I was really down to the dregs. I think I could have won the map, though I’d have suffered heavy losses doing so, and the most brutal maps are still to come. So, I reasoned that was about as far as I could reasonably go on that playthrough. I still wanted to see the game through, but I felt like I’d had my fill of the oldschool hardcore experience. I reset the game and allowed myself to use the turn reset feature to savescum any dead units back to life.

What happened, though, was that each map went much smoother on my second pass. I was able to use what I’d learned on my first attempt to really put some stank on my second run. Having prior knowledge of map layouts and reinforcements allowed me to position my units better and earlier, and I had a much better grasp on equipment types, movement ranges, and secondary objectives. I’d lost a lot of units on my first play learning lessones I was able to apply on my second, and when I did inevitably lose a unit to an unforseeable crit, I decided to just replay the map instead of reset the turn. Just as I imagine I would have back in 1990.

I arrived back at map 21, the open field that had defeated me previously, with a much stronger army of more balanced classes. I was able to use my flying units to bait out the opposition’s wyvern knights and bring them down with well-positioned archers. I used my horsemen to tank their line of generals, then their paladins, while my mages attacked from the back rank. By the time their reinforcements rolled up in the form of heavy ballista, I’d advanced Marth and my heroes deep enough into enemy territory, armed with lightning swords, that I was able to stop them in their tracks.

This felt good. I mean, very good. I felt like I was applying a level of proficiency that isn’t often demanded of me. It was a kind of clairvoyance, to be sure; the game was easier now because I was better at it, but also because I knew what was going to happen on each map. It’s a bit like going into The Legend of Zelda and already knowing which bushes to burn. At this level play I was able to accurately predict how each enemy turn would play out before the computer played it, as though I were controlling both our units.

I enjoyed stumbling through the process of learning the game, and I enjoyed curbstomping it too. And I’ve concluded that is the intended form of play in Blade of Light. You’re supposed to play as far as you can, losing the units you lose to bad decisions (and sometimes bad luck), until you can go no further. Then you reset, start again at map 1, but you know now. This is how I used to play these kinds of games, back in 1990. I did not clear Adventure of Link or Crystalis or Faxanadu on my first try, either, in the bad old days.

I was expecting Blade of Light to be a history lesson. I wasn’t expecting it to rekindle the feeling of resetting Quest of the Avatar with a new hero because you know where some of the good hidden stuff is now. I enjoyed being caught by surprise.

I think, all told, I spent about forty hours with Blade of Light, across those two playthroughs. And I can’t advise whether the way I played would be right for you. Maybe you’ll have more fun making liberal use of turn reset to save every unit as you go. I can say the game gets a lot friendlier after you’ve learned it, though, and that’s a chance you might consider giving yourself.

Jagen is the Best Jagen

I’ve learned a little about Fire Emblem tropes these past weeks, dipping my toes ever-so-slightly into the wikis and fansites and subreddits. And I can say with some confidence: Jagen is a pretty good Jagen.

Let’s unpack that.

Jagen is one of your first units in Blade of Light. He’s available from the very start and is Marth’s stalwart supporter for the entire adventure, or at least until he gets cut down by a BS critical hit. He is stupidly strong on that first map; he’s already a paladin (which is the promoted form of your heavy horse), he has good HP and defense, and he starts with a silver lance, easily the strongest weapon your army has access to early in the game. You could concievably use Jagen to cut a bloody path through the first several maps of the game, and this is of course exactly what I did.

But ah, I was told, by viewers and well-wishers far better versed in the Fire Emblem mythos than I, I should not fall for the trap. For you see, every Fire Emblem has a Jagen, of which Jagen is merely the first. The Jagen is a character who starts out very strong, but who has little room for improvement. If you use the Jagen overmuch early in the game, he merely serves to soak up EXP for other characters who could level up and surpass him.

There are three aspects to a Fire Emblem unit you have to consider, when it comes to their stats. The first is the stats themselves, which determine what a unit is capable of. Units with higher Strength deal more damage, units with higher Speed are capable of attacking twice, units with higher Move can traverse the map more quickly. The Jagen (and therefore Jagen) is quite good in this regard, at least at first. However, each unit also has a hidden “growth rate”, which determines how quickly their stats increase as they level up, and this is where all of Jagenkind falters. Their stats go up only infrequently, and a Speed that’s excellent on the first map is only merely “good enough” on the tenth. The third consideration is whether a unit can promote, but the Jagen comes out of the gate already promoted. Units reset their experience level to one upon promotion, and the level cap is twenty. This means your un-promoted horse units have 38 potential level-ups, whereas your Jagen has only 19.

I’m here to tell you though, at least where Blade of Light is concerned, none of that really matters.

On my second successful run of the game, I still used Jagen to cut a bloody path through the first few maps, soaking up a bunch of EXP and basically just making a nuisance of himself. It ended up not mattering. There are enough enemy units in the game to spread EXP around to everyone who wants it, and while it’s true you will notice your other horse units surpassing Jagen in the late game (especially after they promote), he remains a viable unit all the way through to the end.

I don’t know whether this is true of every Jagen in every Fire Emblem entry, or not. Maybe you’ve played a bunch of these games and are just in the habit of stealing your Jagen’s silver lance and benching him at first opportunity. You can do that here, if you want, but I think all you’ll accomplish is making the early game a little harder for yourself.

See, that’s what’s fun about going tback to the first game in an established series with its own little galaxy of tropes and expectations. A lot of times, those expectations haven’t solidified yet. Maybe Jagens are bad now, because the playerbase got wise to their trap and so the developers started feeding into that by making them worse and worse over the years, but this first Jagen — Jagen Prime — is just what he is: a strong early game unit they probably expected you to use until his untimely death, at which point you’d replace him with one of the other horse you’ve been leveling up.

There are other things “missing” from this first game, if you’re a Fire Emblem veteran. Weapons have properties, but there’s no RPS “weapon wheel” where swords always necessarily beat axes, or whatever. There’s no sortie screen, no dating mechanics. Healers don’t level up by healing, and largely don’t need to. And who even knows what else.

What I’m saying is, I don’t know how you should manage your expectations if you’re go into this game after years with the 3DS and GBA sequels. All I can tell you is, it’s safe to use Jagen. Jagen is good. Jagen will get the job done.

Cutting Edge Hi-Def Graphics!

Blade of Light isn’t one of the last Famicom games, but it’s one of the later ones. 1990 was the year of Final Fantasy III, Super Mario Bros. 3, and Mega Man III. So, uh, a lot of threes, really.

I think the game is gorgeous, as a man who has a fondness for old 8-bit pixel art. The game does lean heavily on function over form, ensuring that unit types are distinct from each other and terrain is clearly conveyed. As a result everything skews towards the simplistic, especially on the map screen where you’ll be spending most of your playtime. But it also has great little flourishes, in those places where they were able to sneak them in. It probably doesn’t sound like much when I tell you Blade of Light’s mapmen have three frames of idle animation, but most of Marth’s contemporaries have only two, and the second was often merely a reflection of the first. See how much livelier Marth looks in comparison:

Left to right: Dragon Warrior IV, Ultima: Quest of the Avatar, Final Fantasy III, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light

Once you actually engage the enemy, the battle sprites are big and detailed. I loved Marth’s cocky flourish before delivering a critical hit, and I grinned pretty wide the first time I saw the original 8-bit version of what is now his signature run cycle in Smash Bros. There’s an option in the menu to turn off combat animations, but I never wanted to do this.

Listen, I understand not everyone is enamored with 8-bit graphics. I don’t know what to tell you. I was there, in 1990, when these graphics were cutting edge. To this day I love pixel art and pixel games. I think this art style has a character to it that modern hand-drawn high-def sprites just don’t have. I don’t want every game to look like this, but I’m very happy that some games do.

Dat Jank Doe

Part of why I was interested in playing the earliest known console TRPGis, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure how you could map everything the game needs to be able to do to just four face buttons. The answer is, well, they tried, god bless ’em.

This game has some pretty severe jank. The first major shock to my system was being dumped directly onto the first battle map from power on; there’s not even so much as a prologue scene or a sortie screen. Shops and NPC interactions are directly on the battle map, and only one unit can be on a tile at a time. This means if you have three new units who each need a silver sword, it will take at least three player phases until it’s all taken care of, as each of them waits for their turn to move to the shop tile and spend some gold. And the whole time, the enemy is closing in on you. Often you’ll be building a defensive perimeter with your already-equipped units so your new guys can get sorted, and just as often you’ll have a daisy chain of units stretching back to the start of a map as units who needed a turn or two to get organized spend the whole battle playing catch up.

Everything is mapped to the A button. Selecting a unit for movement, action, or even just to look at their equipment is all handled by highlighting them and pushing A some number of times. It’s not confusing, exactly, but it’s very easy to double-press and end up at the wrong menu depth, and get lost in the interface for a moment. I spent a lot of time hitting B to back all the way out to the main map view in order to “try again” rather than just elegantly address my units. It was also very easy to accidentally issue the wrong command, and such mistakes are very costly in this game, since it can be several minutes in between issuing commands. Selecting the wrong command, or the wrong target unit, or picking the wrong square to move to, can put you behind in action economy. Play carefully.

The flip side of that coin is, the Famicom doesn’t exactly have the chops for sophisticated enemy AI. Enemy units move very predictably, and if you know their Move score you will almost always know where they intend to move on their next turn. A lot of the “git gud” aspect of Blade of Light involves exploiting enemy AI, and there are lots of hilarious ways you can do this. Your opponent doesn’t try to build a perimeter or make use of choke points, for example, so it’s easy to divide or surround them. It’s also very easy to tell what target they are going to select; they always try to hit Marth, if they can, even if it puts them in an incredibly disadvantageous position. This means Marth (who is one of your most survivable units) can “escort” a much weaker unit around the map without much worry they’ll be targeted. I frequently sent Marth along with an archer or mage unit to complete some side objective, and the computer just never had a good answer for this.

To win each map, you must defeat the boss unit and then command Marth to take the castle. This means you can full clear a map and then just live there forever, issuing movement and commands one unit at a time, for as long as you care to listen to the cheerful music. I frequently had to do this, since there’s no other opportunity to equip your units in safety. The endgame stats roll reports I spent over 50 turns on one map, using my flying units as go-betweens to load up on equipment in the shop and painstakingly trade one sword at a time to the rest of my units, patiently waiting in a long line.

It took me a very long time to figure out what was going on with the Speed stat. Every unit can be addressed exactly once on your turn, so high Speed units don’t get more turns than low Speed units. Instead, the stat is used to influence which combatant in a skirmish gets to act twice. In a typical round the attacking unit goes first, then the defending unit offers reprisal. Then, whichever unit is faster attacks a second time. (The hip Fire Emblem kids call this “doubling”.) Sometimes, though, my enemy would attack me twice even when I was faster, which made it feel like an element of randomness was involved. There are already to-hit rolls and crit chance rolls in this game, so an extra “who gets to double” roll on top of that felt really unfair. It turns out, there’s a hidden “equipment weight” stat in the game, where the weapon you use deducts from your Speed, and it’s this modified stat that determines who gets to double. This is mentioned in the instruction manual, but isn’t indicated in the game at all. I’m sure I lost a unit or two in my first run figuring this out.

Hmm… I think this last thing counts as jank. Remember my TRPG pedigree is Final Fantasy Tactics where, on a unit’s turn, you can direct them to move and then act in either order. In Blade of Light you can move and then act or you can only act. A unit can’t attack an enemy and then move away from them, nor can a unit buy something in a shop and then step away, freeing up the space for another unit. I don’t know if this is a limitation of the times or just part of the style of the Fire Emblem series, but I know it never felt great to me, and I would have preferred the freedom to take my turn in either order.

This Game Costs $96

That’s not true, it’s $5.99 as a digital download on Switch. And I could have let it end there. But I had a stack of gift cards left over from Christmas and nothing in particular to spend them on. Instead of just whittling away at them using Doordash, I decided to make an extremely unwise purchase:

Pictured: a life decision. Also pictured: award-winning photography.

This is the 30th anniversary ultimate collector’s package, and I am embarrassed to own it. I blame a combination of having too much “free” money on my desk and whatever nostalgia endorphins were still kicking around after finishing the game. But whatever, I bought the dang thing, let’s talk about what’s inside of it.

What I imagine will be the main draw for most people is the big nice art book, filled with character art from a variety of Fire Emblem games and spin-offs. I’m sure an actual long-time fanboy would get more enjoyment out of this than I do, but it’s nice to flip through and it will look handsome on the shelf. I learned two interesting things as I was flipping through it. First, apparently the cast of Blade of Light recurs in a lot of sequels throughout the years; not only Marth, but the whole gang. And second, as the series goes on, it starts leaning harder and harder on the Uncomfortable Jailbait Waifu Index (UJWI). I’m forbidden by law to have an anime waifu, especially not one who looks 14, so probably best to get away from this series while I have the chance.

Next in the package is an incredibly cool Nintendo Power mock-up. Someone actually sat down and thought, hmm, what would the Fire Emblem issue have looked like back in 1990? Not only did they nail the cover layout perfectly, but the flip side of the mockup has a hand-to-god Counselors’ Corner and Classified Information section addressing some of the game’s hidden stuff. The mock-up declares itself to be “Volume 11.5”, so I looked it up and it turns out that would have put this “issue” smack dab in 1990, right after the Super Mario Bros. 3 feature. That’s an incredible attention to detail, and I will definitely have to frame this thing.

The actual expensive bit, though, is the NES packaging. It is exactly the right shape and size, and even smell. Inside is a full instruction manual, one of the double-tall ones like Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior IV had. Oh, and a fold-out map. Do you have any idea how much good it did my poor crumbling heart to open up an NES box and pull out a fold-out map? I about cried. Then there’s the fake cartridge, a beautiful glass art piece that fits perfectly in the included cartridge sleeve. I have a huge custom display case in my dining room filled with NES carts, and this piece will look incredible once it takes its rightful place alongside all the old classics.

(Interestingly, when I first saw pictures of this cart, I thought it was made of shiny silver plastic. This seemed fitting to me. Imagine if we’d been getting Fire Emblem games all along, starting in 1990; doesn’t it make sense that its cartridges would be uniquely silver, as a counterpart to Nintendo’s other epic fantasy series, The Legend of Zelda, which had always been gold?)

The only part of this package’s presentation that betrays it as a modern replica is all the printed material is presented in French as well as English. This continues to weird me out a little bit on all of Nintendo’s products. I understand why they do it, of course, it’s just, living in Florida, I always expect the bilingual packaging to be English and Spanish, and it never is.

And look, I realize there’s a good chance if you’re reading this, and are active in my Discord, I have made fun of you in the past for buying overpriced collector’s editions of games filled with worthless trinkets. You might be feeling ways about things right now. If that’s the case, I just want you to know, this is totally different because [insert excuses and/or hypocricy here]. I still think amiibos are dumb.

I Will Never Play Another Fire Emblem Game

Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light was the perfect storm. I approached it as a historical curiosity, it ended up grabbing me a lot harder than I ever intended, and then I splurged on the big fanboy box just minutes before it disappeared into the bowels of eBay for all of time.

I don’t think this heralds a new age of me devouring Fire Emblem games, though. I still think GBA games look kinda dumb and ugly, and the entries on modern consoles look to me like episodes of Super Generic Fantasy Anime interspersed with TRPG maps. I did sample a few of the sequels from through the years by checking out playthroughs on YouTube, and maaaaybe I could see me plunking down for another go if one of the Super Famicom entries gets this same love by Nintendo in the future. But, as with Pokémon Shield, I feel like I’ve poked my head into a weird wide world, got a taste of what it was all about, and can now leave satisfied.

I think that about covers everything. Oh, wait, no, I kinda like playing as Byleth in Smash Bros. Ultimate. There, that covers everything.

Thank you for reading about my series of unwise Fire Emblem decisions!

Is There Gold in the Hole? (I just watched Tenet.)

I watched Tenet twice. I think I get it. And oh, by the way, this post contains spoilers for Tenet. I apologize up-front for how confusing it all might be to follow.

A lot of people find Tenet inscrutable. I didn’t find it inscrutable, but as mentioned, I did have to watch it twice. My first view gave me enough context to understand what I was seeing the second time, which is pretty standard for a good meaty time travel movie. (Primer was more like four times, heh heh.) And while I enjoyed the movie well enough, I find myself a little chuffed at the plot holes. I’m not used to Nolan films having them.

(There’s a long conversation to be had here over whether plot holes are really “that bad”, or not, that is a topic for another time. I think they’re more forgivable in some movies than others, and Tenet is the kind of movie where they’re less forgivable by a mile. Nolan is not a director I typically associate with “plot spackle”.)

Time travel stories are hard, because it’s a thing we can’t observe, because it doesn’t exist. Unlike other things that don’t exist, though, moving the wrong way through time creates weird and tantalizing situations when you start following the logic up. It’s not like when Gandalf makes a dragon out of fireworks, that’s just magic and you go “oh, right, magic.” You don’t have to justify breaking the laws of physics if you’re okay with appealing to magic or ghosts or god or nanomachines.

But breaking causality is a very different beast. The logic fails immediately and so as part of your story you have to construct new logic, and this new logic is now the scaffolding that holds up the rest of the story. There’s a reason every time travel movie ever made, Tenet included, has a scene where a character just stands there explicitly explaining the rules.

My gold standard for a truly great time travel story hinges on these two points:

  • Did the story explain the rules and do I understand them correctly?
  • Does the story follow its own rules once they’ve been established?

It’s very common for time travel stories to succeed at the first point, then fail at the second. That’s the category Tenet falls into, and it fails pretty badly.

Disclaimer!

Tenet is a very dense movie. Its time travel mechanics are fairly simple but the resulting logic gets very complicated very quickly. I’m a pretty smart guy (my mom thinks so anyway) but it’s possible I’m missing something important about how the mechanics work that would invalidate this post. I don’t think that’s the case, and I’ve confirmed that a lot of people are confused in the same way I am (beyond the typical “it’s time travel so I don’t get it” responses, I mean).

Before we get started, I just wanted to make sure “whoops turns out I’m dumb” is on the table as a possibility.

Temporal Polarity

What are the rules for time travel in Tenet? What we’re told, and what we’re shown in every character interaction in the film, is that history is immutable. “Immutable” is a big important word we’ll come back to later. It means you can’t go back in time and change anything. The reason you can’t, in the Tenet universe, is the same reason you can’t go forward in time and change anything. That statement sounds like nonsense, and it would be under different rules, but it’s the feature that makes Tenet stand out in its genre.

We think of the past as stuff that’s already happened, and the future as stuff that hasn’t happened yet, because that’s the direction our arrow of time points. To a person facing the other direction, the future is the stuff that’s already happened and the past is the stuff that hasn’t happened yet. If we were to meet such a person, we would disagree on what was “past” and what was “future”, for the same reason two cars facing each other at a red light would disagree on what is “ahead” and what is “behind”. In that situation my “behind” is your “ahead” and vice-versa. When the light turns green, we pass each other, then move away from each other, even though we’re both driving “ahead”.

Objects and people in Tenet have a temporal polarity. If it was 9:59 one minute ago, what time is it now? If your polarity is normal, the answer is 10:00. A normal clock on the wall moves forward at the rate of one second per second. But if your polarity is inverted, the answer is 9:58. That same clock appears to be moving backward, at the rate of one second per second. And, of course, we could also invert the clock too, so it appears “normal” for you and “inverted” for me. A clock (or a person, or a car) of the opposite polarity appears to be moving backward because their arrow of time is pointing the opposite direction.

If you want to travel back in time one week, you have to invert your polarity and then live out the whole week in real time. You will be one week older when you arrive at your target time, and there will be another you there, two weeks younger, doing whatever you were doing one week ago.

The temporal polarity of the world itself is normal in Tenet. That the world itself has a particular bias for which way it moves on the arrow of time is one of the film’s main conflicts. This means that during your one-week journey into the past, you will watch the sun rise at dusk and set at dawn. You will experience reversed laws of physics. You will be unable to breathe normal air. And everyone else will be walking around backwards, giving you funny looks before not noticing you at all.

Whatever Happened, Happened

Whether the timeline is mutable or immutable is probably the most obvious concern in any time travel story. Can you change the past? If so, history is mutable in this world. If not, history is immutable. There are lots of examples of both in time travel fiction, and protagonists thinking they’re in one type of world only to discover they’re in the other is a common time travel twist. Every time you’ve seen a movie where a guy went back in time to save Someone, only to accidentally cause the thing that killed Someone in the first place, you’re seeing the “time is immutable after all!” twist at work.

Lost was the first story I’m aware of that stated its immutability clearly and concisely: “Whatever happened, happened.” You can’t travel to the past and cause an event that didn’t happen. The reference is apt here because Tenet uses the exact same phrase to describe the same thing. It’s reinforced every time the protagonist interacts with his own past; we see the same events playing out in reverse. You can’t change these events, but you can witness them from a different perspective.

(I replayed Final Fantasy VIII recently, and it’s the same rules there. The quote is, “You’re the one that changes, not the past.” And that’s applicable to Tenet too.)

Whether history is actually immutable, as a universal axiom, is a question of some debate between characters in Tenet. There are clearly some characters who believe otherwise, including the protagonist at certain points, and that belief makes them dangerous. But the evidence we’re shown on-screen always points to immutability. There are no scenes in the movie where we see an event occur on one pass, and then later see that event occur differently on the next pass.

Or Are There?

And this brings us to the gold in the plot hole. And also in the literal hole. In this case the plot hole involves a real hole, which may or may not contain gold.

We know two rules about gold bars in Tenet. The first is, the bar has temporal polarity; it’s moving either forwards or backwards in time. It can be doing either, but it can’t be doing both at once, and it can’t change spontaneously. The second is, whatever happens to that gold bar is the thing that happened to it. Whether it’s normal or inverted, and whether acted upon by a normal or inverted force, the state of the bar at a particular moment in time is always that state, immutably.

The villain in Tenet is working with people in the future, who need the villain to perform a set of tasks in his-present-their-past. In return, they give him boxes of gold. Let’s run through how it works from each perspective.

From the villain’s perspective, he travels to a pre-arranged location and buries a normal, non-inverted, empty box. Then he waits fifteen minutes. Then he digs the box back up, except now it’s inverted and filled with inverted gold bars. He takes the bars and uses them to fund his criminal empire. The process is nearly instantaneous.

From the future peoples’ perspective, they travel to a pre-arranged location and dig up a normal, non-inverted, empty box. They fill the box with non-inverted gold bars, then send the whole package through their inversion machine. Then they bury the inverted box, happy to fund the villain’s criminal empire in the past. The gold simply vanishes; it doesn’t exist anymore beyond when it emerges from the inversion machine.

From the box’s perspective, it is buried by the villain in a pre-arranged location. There it sits for 300 years, moving forward in time, one second per second. At that time the future people dig it up, fill it with gold bars, and send it through their inversion machine. The now-inverted gold is buried in the same location, and sits for another 300 years, moving backwards, one second per second. When the villain digs the box back up, 600 years will have passed for the box, though it will not have moved an inch.

Which Rule is Broken?

Say the villain buries the empty box at 9:50 and digs it back up at 10:00, finding it full of inverted gold. Let’s take one of those inverted gold bars and ask this question: what is the gold bar’s state at 10:10?

The obvious answer is, the villain has it. It’s in a duffel bag or loaded onto a truck en route to the villain’s bank or money bin or whatever. This is the point of sending the gold back in the first place: the future people are paying him for services rendered.

But wait — the only reason the box had any gold in it is because the gold was inverted 300 years from now. At 10:10 it was sitting in the buried box just as it had for 300 years, and it won’t be dug up for another ten minutes. The gold bar can be in two places at once near the point in time when it’s inverted. But there can never be two gold bars.

In fact, if the gold bar is in a duffel bag, the implication is that it had never been placed into an empty box and buried for 300 years. A normal person carrying an inverted object is, by definition, carrying that object to its point of origin. This wouldn’t be a problem if the bars are inverted again (de-inverted?) after being removed from the box, but they aren’t. They paradoxically originate in the villain’s money bin and 300 years in the future.

Let’s illustrate it this way. An observer monitoring an object that has been inverted at least once could describe that object in terms of whether it’s moving towards or away from its inversion point. As long as the gold is in the hole, this works fine. A normal observer would say “towards”, because they could watch for 300 years as the gold bar sits there doing nothing, then gets dug up, then gets carried backwards into the machine. But what about once the gold is in a duffel bag? A normal observer would have to conclude “towards”, but they’d be wrong, because no matter how long they watch the gold will never be buried for 300 years, nor dug up, nor carried into the machine.

It’s even stranger for inverted observers. One watches the gold as it emerges from the machine and is buried, then quietly monitors it for 300 years while it does nothing, and then it just… vanishes. As soon as the villain puts his hands on it, the gold no longer exists. Meanwhile, another inverted observer watches as gold which has never emerged from an inversion machine gets placed into a duffel bag, is placed into a hole, and then vanishes. Both of these observers would agree the inverted gold is moving “away” from its inversion point, but one of them would be confused as to when that happened (because it never did), and then they would both lose the gold entirely as soon as the villain interacts with it.

It’s almost like the villain touching the gold acts just like an inversion machine. Could this be what’s happening? In the film we see inverted bullets leaving holes in glass. (And we see this in both directions.) But wait, no, we’re also explicitly shown in the first polarity exposition scene that inverted objects behave strangely, but consinstently. “Dropped” objects magically jump up into your hand. Bullets shoot out of walls and into your gun. Piles of rubble form up into buildings and structures. Manipulating an inverted object doesn’t change its polarity at all. From the object’s point of view, your handling it is just one of many events that happens to it in between its emergence from an inversion machine and its eventual final resting place. But our gold has no final resting place. It originates at two different points (one of which is unknown) and then vanishes entirely when the villain touches it.

That just leaves immutability. In fact, a surface read of the event has us throwing immutability out the window immediately! The future people saw that there was an empty box in the past, and decided to change the past, and fill that box with gold. For them to dig up an empty box, it must have traveled there, sitting empty, for 300 years. And for the villain to receive the gold at his end of the trip, the box must sit there again, for 300 years, in the same spot. Pick any point on that 300 year timeline and ask: what does that space contain? An empty box? Or a full one?

The answer must be the box is empty in one timeline, and full in another, but the whole point of immutability is we’re not supposed to have timelines. If that’s possible, then the protagonist’s original idea that he can change the past is correct and we should have gotten a very different movie.

To make this gold work, we have to either throw out our understanding of temporal polarity, or throw out immutability, and doing either wrecks the rest of the events of the film. Argh!

Radiation?

There’s always room to hand-wave stuff like this aside in any time travel story. Again, one of Tenet’s main plot points is that the antagonists believe the timeline is mutable, and are actively trying to change the past. The movie fudges hard-to-explain interactions between normal and inverted matter by going “something something radiation” and then not looking at it too closely in most scenes. That’s well enough, and maybe about as good as anyone could expect of a writer, and if that were the end of my gripe I wouldn’t worry so much about this gold.

But I just can’t shake it. The antagonists in the film are wrong about changing the past, and so is the protagonist each and every time he attempts it. Indeed, it’s only after he accepts the immutability of the timeline that things start going right for him. (His quote is, “Whatever happened, happened. I get that now.”) Time travel stories that embrace immutability have a certain beauty to them, a sort of all-wrapped-up elegance that I really appreciate. Unfortunately, Tenet doesn’t.

The gold bars aren’t the only objects in the story that seem to break when you start considering them carefully. But they are one of the objects that do need to be considered carefully, if the villain’s motivation is to make any sense. Either they’re stupid, or I am.

Thanks for reading!

The Lightning Saga Remastered (Coming Soon to PS5!)

This is all hypothetical. I’m sorry if you Googled that and it popped up and you clicked the link thinking maybe I had some news the rest of the games industry didn’t. I don’t. But this year I played through Final Fantasy VIII Remastered and Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age and Final Fantasy VII Remake and the Steam port of the 3D remake of Final Fantasy III and, ya know, I got to thinking. Isn’t it about that time for FFXIII?

The Final Fantasy XIII trilogy was released originally on the PS3 and then later atrociously ported to Steam. I say atrociously because I tried to play the PC version of Final Fantasy XIII-2, but couldn’t, because it installed something that made my controller catch fire. Even after I refunded and uninstalled the game, the garbage it installed caused my gamepad configuration to break in a bunch of other games I’d never had trouble with. So, ah, if you came here looking for a review of the Steam port of FFXIII-2, I guess that’s the takeaway: don’t buy it, because if you do it won’t work, and then you’ll have to spend two hours manually scraping malicious .dlls out of your hard drive.

But here we are with our toes dipped in this new console hardware generation, and while we know FFXVI is looking pretty sexy, it’s probably still a few years out. What’s Square-Enix cooking up to keep us fed in the meantime? I submit to you that the FFXIII series is ripe for the plucking.

I don’t actually care that much about FFXIII-2 or Lightning Returns, but there’s a lot of room for improvement in the original FFXIII.

Package it with FFXIII-2 and Lightning Returns.

Like I said, I don’t actually care about these two games very much, but if I’m paying $60, they’d better be in there. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I will absolutely spend $60 on a stand-alone FFXIII remake, because I am a putz with more money than sense. But I’ll spend $80 on a FFXIII Collection in a snazzy box, even if I don’t like one-third of the games.

Better Replay Options

FFVII Remake and The Zodiac Age both have excellent New Game Plus modes, and there’s no reason FFXIII shouldn’t, either. This was the first Final Fantasy title which split its gameplay into concise numbered chapters, and we seem to be doing that in all of them now, so an unlockable Chapter Select after you roll the credits would definitely be welcome. And let me use any combination of the six characters I want in each chapter, too. Maybe include a “Hard Mode” option that replaces each enemy with the hardest version of that enemy type, so re-visiting old chapters is a good way to stockpile CP and develop your characters.

Can I play on the racetrack, please?

We have a canonically-established grand prix racetrack in this universe, and six player characters whose spiritual monster buddies all transform into vehicles. There’s a dumb mini-game here waiting to happen, and I think we can all agree that FFXIII is sorely lacking in the dumb minigame department. Unlock “Cocoon Circuit” once Lightning defeats Odin, and make the other five characters playable as they receive their own eidolons. Unlock a second “Pulse Circuit” upon reaching Oerba.

The reward structure doesn’t need to be more complicated than just giving me piles of money. We all know I’m going to be farming gil for hours to afford mats for weapon leveling, just give me a second thing to grind at so I can switch up the scenery every so often. Prize stickers I can slap on Odin’s butt will also be acceptable.

Swap Party Leader

This is the thing everyone always complains about in FFXIII. When the party leader dies, you get a Game Over, and there is no mechanism by which to switch party leaders during battle. The final boss in particular has this really nasty combo where he can poison you with one of his regular actions, but he also has a special scripted action to drop your whole party’s HP to 1 upon hitting a certain HP treshhold. If you don’t know about that and these two things happen at almost the same time…

The only reason it seems like we’re not allowed to swap leaders is each hero has a special ultimate attack that must be manually selected. Since your AI partners will never use their ultimates, your choice of leader is also a choice of which ultimate attack you want to have in the chamber. I guess there are balance reasons why we’re not allowed to access more than one ultimate at a time. Maybe the game would crack in half if you queued one up and then switched to someone else to queue theirs.

The game already has a party resource for this sort of thing, though: TP. Techs have to be manually selected and they burn a meter that isn’t tied to any particular character. Make these six ultimate attacks into techs requiring full TP and let me choose between the three associated with my characters, and whatever balance bugaboos you’re worried about are sated.

(If we’re doing this, Vanille should probably get a new ultimate attack, and her existing Death spell should just be rolled into the SAB crystarium.)

FFXII already did this right, fools!

One of the major annoyances in FFXIII is, every time you switch your party (which is mandated at many points during the game) you have to go in and reset your paradigm decks. More than half of your input as a player during combat just boils down to switching paradigms, and the game doesn’t let you save deck favorites. We don’t need to get super crazy with this, just remember what the deck looks like per each combination of three characters, so I can switch around and switch back and end up with something that looks like what I already had.

We also really need some control over our AI partners outside of swapping over to them and inputting their commands manually. (In FFXIII you usually don’t even input your own character’s commands manually.) The way it works currently is each role has a sequence of commands it wants to use, and an order it wants to use them in, and it goes through the list one at a time. This is most noticable for the SYN and SAB roles but every role has some version of it.

All I want here is a page that lists all of a character’s abilities for a given role, and a way to toggle them on and off. I don’t need Veil and Shell in absolutely every random encounter, Sazh. Come on.

New roles!

Adding new character content is a Final Fantasy remake tradition: FFIV DS‘s augments, FFV Advance‘s new jobs, FFX-2 HD‘s new pokémon. For better or worse, FFXIII has a unique combat interface focused on macro-actions that no other game has. The trick here is to introduce some classic Final Fantasy jobs which stand out in FFXIII‘s interface.

In FFX, Yuna can summon aeons to fight for her. She does this by issuing individual commands just like the player typically does. However, a couple of her aeons are controlled only indirectly; instead of issuing commands to Yojimbo, she pays him some amount of gil, and then Yojimbo decides what to do. This is kind of a fun little thing in an otherwise complete system, and I think we can pluck at it for FFXIII.

I propose these three new roles, unlocked late in the game: [OPP]ortunist, [COL]lector, and [OBS]erver.

OPP is the new spin on the traditional Gambler. Their AI is limited to Auto-slots, which rolls the tumblers to pull from a variety of effects. When controlled directly, you can specify some amount of gil to get a calculated amount of damage and perhaps special side effects like dispelling buffs or hitting elemental weaknesses. Include a powerful attack called “Go all in!” which spends some preposterous amount of gil, say 10x the average gil value of whatever the enemies typically drop, for a chance at instant stagger.

[COL] is the Chemist. Their AI is Auto-potion, the only function of which is to heal the party with consumable items. (All item use in XIII is otherwise manual.) Give them a passive ability that doubles item effectiveness, and another that gives some percentage chance to use an item without consuming it, and a back-row COL becomes a pretty good party healer. Besides that, XIII has a huge number of individual items, none of which have any function other than their sell value or their XP potential for equipment upgrades. At any time during combat you can switch to your COL and have them mix any of these two otherwise flavorless items together to create some bombastic effect. Low-tier items are already available in shops in large quantities, and the really rare items are so difficult to obtain you could get away with creating truly spectacular attacks.

[OBS] is the Blue Mage. The role does nothing at all except have a passive Learning trait, and there’s a big list of enemy skills to learn. The AI that chooses which skills to use out of the big long list could run on the same sort of logic that the current RAV/SYN/SAB skills do. (Check enemy weaknesses, don’t apply redundant debuffs, etc.) Mostly I just want this in the game to justify an attack called 1,000,000 Needles.

Greg

Spend one million gil in the Gilgamesh, Inc. store and the man himself shows up to yell at you about swords, then you beat him up. Come on, this one’s a no-brainer.

Re-design Gestalt Battles

Nobody knows how these fights work and everybody complains about them. Whatever the devs were trying to do, they failed. Re-design these fights to use the same rules as regular boss battles.

Increase bankable CP from 999,999 to 99,999,999.

You’d think a million CP is enough for anyone, but it’s actually only a fraction of what you need to complete the Crystarium for any given character. You have to fill the jar a few times for each character, and any CP you earn while the jar is filled just gets wasted. Accidentally wasting CP because you don’t want to use Hope in the active party during a long grind session is just a bad situation we should probably avoid.

A Better Post-game

Which is to say, uh, any post-game at all.

(Quick digression: I actually abhor the term “post-game” because [long list of reasons]. I use it here only because we all kind of know what it means. End of digression.)

FFXIII is one of the few Final Fantasy games where defeating the final boss actually opens up new game content; the final stage of your Crystarium is locked until you roll the credits. A few of the remakes unlock new challenges or bonus dungeons or whatever, but FFXIII explicitly tells you “you aren’t done yet.”

Unfortunately that’s all it does. There’s nothing to do with that final Crystarium stage except throw it against the areas you can already reach, to better humiliate the bosses you could already kill. There’s not much a party capable of defeating Barty 3 and Orphan can’t do, and slogging through the millions of CP required to fill the final tier on old monsters just feels like unnecessary hassle.

I already mentioned some stuff we can do with a Chapter Replay option, but there’s no reason we have to stop there.

Revamp Tier III Weapons

Currently, each weapon in the game belongs in one of three tiers, with each character’s “ultimate weapon” being Tier III.

(It’s actually slightly more complicated than that. Each weapon in the game has a Tier III version, and so each character has several different options for “ultimate weapon.”)

To make Tier III weapons you need a rare item called a Trapezohedron. One or two of these drop in your lap just by clearing game content, but the rest have to be farmed for over long hours. Instead of a one-size-fits all ultimate weapon strategy, let’s revamp the system so each character now has an optional endgame sidequest to earn a unique crafting material, instead. Maybe keep Trapezohedrons as a semi-rare resource in the game, used to transform one character’s Tier III into another version, so you can play with it without having to farm it up again from scratch.

And while we’re at it…

Dark Aeons (Except Good)

…maybe we can tie those sidequests into each character’s eidolon, and doing so causes a superboss version of the Gestalt fight to appear somewhere in the world. If there’s one thing FFXIII needs, it’s more giant super-monsters to throw your millions of CP worth of abilities and paradigm decks at. And maybe…

11th Crystarium Tier

…defeating a dark eidolon (or some other superboss) unlocks an 11th tier to the character’s Crystarium. There’s a lot of space to make these characters even more absurdly powerful than they already are, including:

  • a standard “break damage limit” node;
  • a node that unlocks a feature which increases that role’s effectiveness based on banked CP, say a 1% increase in effectiveness (damage output for COM, damage reduction for SEN, buff duration for SYN, etc.) per 1 million CP, up to the new max of 99% increase at 99 million;
  • a node that gives a character some fraction of this role’s bonus even when not in that role (e.g., Lightning could enjoy some percent of her COM damage bonus even as a RAV); and
  • the missing skills from that character’s lower Crystarium levels (e.g., Lightning doesn’t learn Curaja as a MED, even though MED is one of her starting roles, so she could learn it here).

The idea here is, in many Final Fantasy games, there are two parallel “lanes” of leveling up. You gain experience to go from L1 to L99 in Final Fantasy VI, but that doesn’t leave you with the most powerful characters. To do that you need to maximize esper stat growth, which is a totally separate system. Nothing like that really exists in FFXIII, but the game also doesn’t really support a “totally separate system” for parallel leveling. (And it’s a mostly vestigial concept in other games too. Neglecting esper stat growth in VI still leaves your characters way overpowered for any actual challenge in the game.)

Anyway, we need all this extra power because…

Dark Faultwarrens

…we’re sending these super-charged 11-tier 99m-CP-banked characters into the Dark Faultwarrens.

O.G. vanilla FFXIII has a location called the Faultwarrens, which is a sort of branching battle gauntlet. You fight a battle there, and the battle arena has two exits, and each exit takes you to a different path, until you reach one of eight possible exits (each with unique rewards). These are some of the toughest fights available in XIII and it’s a concept I really like.

Let’s leave those in, but at some point let’s open up a second Faultwarrens that works the same way but contains much stronger monsters. The 8 ending fights should be on the level of “maybe 2% of players will complete this content.”

Brick your ideas are dumb and you are dumb.

Possibly!

XIII is rare in this series in that there’s really only one direction for your characters to advance in. Once you level up and equip the best weapon, your work is done except for making the numbers ever more and more preposterous. That’s why my ideal vision for bonus endgame content in this title specifically involves so much “push the numbers as high as they’ll go”.

That said, I’m one of the few dorklingers that actually enjoys Final Fantasy XIII. It’s possible the game doesn’t have enough grip to bother remastering at all, or if it does, perhaps the remastering efforts are better spent bolstering those elements of the game so many people found objectionable.

Mostly, for my purposes, I’m just ready to put the PS3 in the closet.

Thanks for reading!

18 Adventurers or, An Exercise in D&D Alignment

A party of 18 adventurers find themselves in a bit of a moral quandary.

They had been adventuring in and around a rustic village and have earned some well-deserved renown amongst the townsfolk. Every so often one farmer or another living on the village’s outskirts complains of bizarre livestock mutilations. The village elders (some of whom have lost livestock of their own) bicker about whether the mutilations are the work of a malicious prankster or a monster living in the wilds beyond the fields. The party become involved when the most recent mutilation raises the stakes dramatically: instead of a sheep or a goat, a child has been found murdered and the body badly ruined. The villagers need this problem solved quickly. Either they have a murderer living amongst them or there is a vicious beast growing bolder by the moment. The adventurers are hired to investigate the problem and deal with it. Upon successful completion of the quest, their reward shall be 1,800 pieces of gold (100 pieces each).

The party follows the trail to a distraught woodsman in a cabin out beyond the fields. The man admits to the mutilations, but swears innocence, blaming his actions on a terrible curse that has befallen him. He periodically transforms into a werewolf with an insatiable hunger for slaughter, and cannot control his actions while in that state. He has known about his condition since winter and has been trying to manage it by limiting his visits to the village to just those of necessity. He is understandably traumatized to learn he has slain a child and fears his explanation will fall on deaf ears if he is delivered to the village elders. If the village gets hold of him, he will surely be found guilty of murder and hanged. He swears to the party he will pack his meager belongings and head off into the wilds, living off the land and staying far from civilization, if they agree to let him go.

There’s a slight wrinkle, however, when under the effects of a zone of truth spell, the woodsman is discovered to be lying. The curse is real, as is his remorse, but the party discovers he has two daughters living in the village whom he loves dearly, who he does not intend to be apart from them. His will to leave is genuine, but he plans to continue sparse visits to the village to see them, believing that he can return in the time between his violent episodes so as to cause no further harm.

The decision before the party is this: they can either let the man go and run the risk his curse management plan fails, leading to more deaths, or they can bring him back to the village, collect their reward and leave the poor woodsman to the village’s justice.

The lawful good druid argues to let the man go. The laws she recognizes are the laws of nature, in all their primal beauty, and the nature of the woodsman’s curse is a perversion of those laws. While the child’s death is tragic, manufacturing a second death in no way pays for the first. The only reasonable course of action, she says, is to seek a cure for the woodsman’s ailment, thereby preventing any future unnatural loss of life.

The lawful good paladin angrily disagrees. Letting the man go is simply not an option. While the circumstances are indeed tragic, the fact remains he broke the laws of the village where he trades. The paladin intends to uphold the law by bringing the woodsman back in irons and submitting him to their justice, but concedes to advocate on the man’s behalf against execution, using his portion of the reward money to that end if necessary.

The neutral good bard was leaning toward letting the man go until casting zone of truth. Now that he knows the woodsman will return to the village from time to time, there’s really no way to prevent future murders except to bring the criminal to justice. The continued loss of life is simply unacceptable. Perhaps if the man had not lied about his intentions…

The neutral good dwarf doesn’t give a goblin’s bollocks about the man’s intentions. The fact remains, there’s some sort of malignant force in these woods transforming people into werewolves. While alive, the woodsman is an asset in locating the source of his curse; if he is executed they lose their primary lead until someone else is turned and another murder has occurred. He argues the party has a duty to this man, the village, and the slain child to find the creature or magic ultimately responsible for the violence and destroy it.

The chaotic good ranger doesn’t think the village can render a fair punishment. It’s wrong for this man to have killed a child, but he at least has the excuse of being magically compelled. An angry mob cannot be counted on to act rationally. If delivered to the village he will become the victim of a different kind of bloodlust, and one she wants no particular role in feeding into.

The chaotic good half-elf points out that it’s disingenuous to say the man has acted under magical duress. He’s known about his condition for months but valued his desire to see his daughters over a child’s life. He’s therefore ultimately responsible for his own actions. Each villager deserves to know the truth and has just as much right to weigh this man’s priorities as the man himself does.

The lawful neutral dragonborn wants to calm the discussion down and just stick to the facts. The village has laws. The law was broken. The punishment for breaking the law is hanging. That’s the end of it as far as she’s concerned. What’s left to discuss?

The lawful neutral monk is a bit surprised, as she has the same reasoning but arrived at the opposite conclusion. Respect of law must be observed, but in this case, the woodsman very pointedly hasn’t broken any laws. He acted under compulsion of a magical curse which, as of now, is ill-understood. To kill him for actions outside of his control and before all the facts are in evidence isn’t justice, it’s vengeance.

The true neutral barbarian says he’s fine with the villagers enacting vengeance. A life lost for a life taken. That’s fair in the only sense that matters.

The true neutral necromancer says the man should be freed. He’s been following the debate closely, and while only about half of his companions have spoken their piece, it was starting to look like “bring him in” was picking up steam. He wants to make sure that everyone’s thoughts have been given due consideration and that the dissenters aren’t bullied into submission.

The chaotic neutral half-orc flipped a coin. It came up heads. He therefore argues loudly and boisterously that they bring the man in and see him hanged.

The chaotic neutral artificer argues, equally loudly and boisterously, to let the man go. He doesn’t actually care about the man or what happens to him, but arguing for the man’s release ties the conversation back up, and the more discordance and bickering amongst his companions, the happier he is. He’ll change his mind later if it looks like things are swinging the other way.

The lawful evil cleric agrees with the paladin and the dragonborn: a law was broken, and the penalty is fair. However, she has been secretly unhappy with her recent efforts to sway the villagers into converting to her patron deity. She sees an opportunity to use the situation to cast the village’s church in a negative light by insisting their worship of pagan gods is what caused the curse in the first place. (Which, for all she knows, is true!)

The lawful evil warlock insists those arguing to drag the man back in chains are acting prematurely. He wants to join the dwarf and the druid in searching for the source of the curse, and they need the man alive to do that. If the village is willing to pay them each 100 gold to bring the murderer to justice, the warlock imagines he could negotiate double or even triple once the town learns of the much more insidious threat!

The neutral evil assassin has done the very simple math. If they bring the woodsman in, they each get 100 gold. If they don’t, they don’t. That’s all the information he needs to seal the woodsman’s fate.

The neutral evil wizard sees the 100 gold reward as a pittance when compared to the fascinating fel magic that’s obviously in play. She wants to let the werewolf live in order to study his case, potentially identifying and maybe even learning to control this curse for her own ends.

The chaotic evil battlemaster wants the man hanged. The sight of the child’s mangled corpse excited him, and the prospect of a violent public execution excites him further. He secretly hopes the mysterious curse creates more werewolves in the future, perpetuating the cycle of bloodshed.

The chaotic evil tiefling votes to release the man, but doesn’t explain why. Her plan is to sneak away from camp that night, track the werewolf down, and offer him this ultimatum: he must pay her 100 pieces of gold every month or she will reveal him to the village. If he refuses, she reasons, she can drag him in herself and claim the whole 1,800. Either way her payout is larger than it otherwise would be.

Sensing the gridlock, the party members prepare to go over the pros and cons of all their arguments again, when the bard suddenly realizes the woodsman has fled out a back window during the debate. The party takes a short rest, spends some hit dice, and the chase begins anew!