ShadyPingu

@thej6m: Um, I'm failing to understand what your Christian faith has to do with the defensibility of JK Rowling's position re: the validity of trans identity and life. Her position, as she describes it, has no foundation whatsoever in religion--or "traditional" views, or whatever euphemism we want to use. It does, however, have a foundation in the same old rickety-ass fairy tales (but they'll attack your daughter in the girls bathroom, trans rights negate womens' rights, etc.) that fuels trans panic in my country, the US, as well. We've seen it all before.

JK Rowling is the reason I work in the publishing industry today. It angers me that this woman with the power to beam her thoughts directly into the minds of children chose this abhorrent position, of all possible positions, to champion. She could've cashed in all her chips to rail against climate change, or police brutality, or the rising tide of nationalist populism, or literally anything else. But no, hating on trans folks is the one. Ugh. So it goes.

Knowing that, I don't have any strong opinions on whether it's the consumer's responsibility to penalize awful people for their awfulness. She will never feel the sting of your choice to not buy a video game, but if your personal ethics drive you to dip out regardless, I respect that decision. I equally respect the people who just want to play the damn video game. Make your choice and own it.

The decision is easy for me personally since, despite the books' huge influence over my life, I've been content to leave them in the past and haven't engaged at all with anything Potter-related since watching Deathly Hallows Part 2. But I'm sure at some point I will be faced with a similar dilemma and am curious to see what I do.

@noboners: One of the smartest things that Destiny 2 did was just give you an exotic weapon and an exotic class armor piece during the vanilla campaign. Just knowing wild shit like that was waiting at the level cap was pretty cool for me, since I hadn't played the original at that point. Even while leveling, the advantage of a looter shooter over a looter brawler(?) is that guns are the literal tool you use to play the game. Getting a new one, even if it's a green SMG you'll shard in thirty minutes, materially changes the experience of playing the game because shooting now feels different. I don't know from experience if getting a new belt for Cap feels like that, but I would suspect not.

I'm very curious about what "exotic" gear looks like in Avengers, and if it has that visceral, game-changing feel like the best Destiny exotics. I feel like these games really need cool shit at the end of the loot treadmill that instantly changes the play experience, on the level of "yo, this gun shoots black holes or whatever."

Maybe an anime can get the characterization right. I got the sense of what they were trying to do with Ryo et al in Shenmue 1, but the writing and VO were so awkward and poor that none of it landed at all.

Also, did the sequels ever tell us what those mirrors do? Like, open up a portal to a hell dimension or something?

It's fine to go against the grain, but allowing other people's general positivity on a thing to reinforce and sharpen your dislike seems, I don't know, really unproductive. It's a sentiment I hear sometimes, that a thing being fawned over by others makes you dislike it even more, and I don't really understand it.

Also I watched FMA:B on Netflix earlier this year and really enjoyed it. Have no desire to watch FMA, but more power to the people who see its merits or even prefer it.

@kemuri07: That's fair. One of my favorite Beastcast bits is Vinny, Austin and Bakalar riffing on how The Division is really just a smorgasbord of modern social and political anxieties. The timely, laser-focused nature of this feels uniquely brazen to me, though.

Wow. Someone gave the thumbs-up to that pitch, that trailer and that imagery in the summer of 2020. Surprised they didn't just name the evil organization SOROS.

I am increasingly convinced that Ubisoft's catalog adhering to right-wing masturbatory fantasy is not a coincidence, it's because that's who works there.

Oh man, I forgot the beta went wide last weekend. Seems like the kind of thing I could get into with my brother across the country, but I'm not really up for another GAAS Destiny-type thing, especially if the combat isn't incredible. Only thing that would change my mind is a 50% off sale and Black Panther.

FFVII Remake really wowed me. So that's mine for now.

@humanity: OK so this is all over the place but I do get around to addressing all your thoughts.

As to your question, I didn't actually put much thought into the methods or motivations of the Rattlers. From my viewpoint, they were simply a new faction invented to facilitate the epilogue. All the stuff with Abby getting tipped off to the Fireflies and talking to them on the radio, I took it at face value and thought the Rattler ambush was a sad coincidence. Now that you mention it, their quick arrival does seem convenient, but I do think it's more video-game-economy-of-storytelling convenient.

Personally, I wouldn't mind changing that last fight into a cutscene. I did feel the gameplay artifice of that moment got in the way of my emotional experience, because I as the player absolutely wanted to stop tapping triangle but, due to my knowledge of the gameplay mechanics, kept going because it would've led to a fail state and made me do the fight over again, which would've been annoying. So I kept beating on this girl not because I was a hate-filled monster like Ellie, but because I wanted to avoid a minor inconvenience. Then I only get to throw in the towel when the cutscene says it's time to do so. It's messy, for sure.

However, I do think that interactive fight exemplifies what at least I believe ND's intentions are with parts of this game: to force you to do stuff you don't want to do, and which may in fact disgust you. I remain dubious of the artistic value of leaning so heavily on it, but there it is.

In addition, I don't agree with your statement that you get "complete agency" over your character and then have it stripped away at key moments. I don't feel you ever have anything approaching agency over Ellie/Abby's actions, which is what produces that weird tension from the end of TLOU1 and various parts of this game. All the substantive choices are made by the script. At most, you embody Ellie/Abby's... survival instincts, maybe? Their strategic and tactical acumen? I guess that's true of nearly all narrative AAA games to varying degrees, it's just that TLOU makes the distance feel especially wide because they try to treat these scenarios with more emotional verisimilitude and honesty than the typical AAA game. I agree that the end result is still a disembodying effect, but not because I had agency taken from me, but rather because I never had it but trusted Ellie to adhere to my basic worldview, and yet we slowly drifted apart.

I think our experiences varied a bit with regard to identification between player and character, is what I'm getting from all this, and so experienced that effect at different rates or times. I felt Ellie ditching Jesse to go after Abby was the moral event horizon in her section, and through the following whitewater rafting section I was 100% Team "Can we go home now, please?" By the California epilogue, no part of me wanted to be there, and I fully believe ND wanted me to not want to be there.

I totally murked all those dogs though. No hesitation. I appreciate the thought behind all ND's efforts to humanize the NPCs (and pups), but none of those anguished cries of "Oh god no JACOB!!!" changed how I approached or even thought about the combat encounters in any way, either during or after. I continued to approach the gameplay sequences like the murder pinball I truly am. Maybe I'm misinterpreting ND's design intentions here, though? Now that I think on it, the NPC stuff could just be an extension of ND's reaching for verisimilitude and building an emotionally consistent world (where of course NPCs are buddies and express horror on said friend's death), and my reaction to it wasn't really on their minds.