I told myself I was going to wait for the full game, but with little else to do at the moment I’m now downloading the demo of Octopath Traveler. I had some reservations about getting this game since my experience with Square/Square-Enix is incredibly sparse – I haven’t played any of their games since Super Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger – and something about the general feel of the Final Fantasy series and related games has always felt a little off-putting to me. Octopath though has some things in common with the presentation of FE, such that I’m fairly confident I’ll enjoy the experience. Commentary on the demo to follow.

Fingers crossed that Olberic and/or the other guys get some slashy subtext. 

So now that I’ve gotten to play Darkest Dungeon properly, I can say I’m glad that I got to try it out even if I recognize that the game isn’t really for me on account of its difficulty. It wouldn’t be so bad if save scumming, the traditional method of circumventing permadeath in FE, were possible, but it’s really not. I’ll still keep poking at it, if only because it’s a little over a week until Octopath Traveler comes out.

agoddamn:

The Mary Sue really just posted an article declaring Foleo “Fire Emblem’s first queer character” please send help I can’t feel my face

Leaving aside the numerous subtextual examples from earlier games – and, you know, Heather – how did they miss the same-sex paired endings from the very same game?

By a complete fluke – rescued from a trash can no less, after being tossed aside by a stubbornly conservative lover – I’ve found myself with an advance copy of a book to be released in August on the history of Southern Decadence. I’ve only skim read portions of it, but the information is as fascinating as the prose is flowery and often overwrought as if I have any room to talk. Credit is given to Catholic Creoles and our traditional Carnival celebrations on the other side of the calendar, and I believe the author is trying to make the argument that Decadence is effectively New Orleans’s unique version of Pride, built from the ground up from our love of masquerade parties (and the alcohol and sex that go with them, naturally) and staged as a much-needed distraction at the hottest time of the year. While we have Pride festivities here in June, they’ve always felt a bit out of place and don’t interest me much. I make much more of an effort to participate in Decadence, even if I’m usually dodging the suspicious questions of lovers while I do so. I’ll have to keep reading along and see if I find anything worth relating; we’re two months away from this year’s Decadence so I’ll have plenty of time to process this before I’m once again getting my drunken, mostly-naked freak on downtown on some sweltering September night.

Most self-indulgent fancies for FE16 and/or remakes

First off, this is my first post in nearly a week from my freshly restored computer, with almost all my files recovered except, oddly, all of my games and the platforms (Steam, emulators) that run them. No FE4 for me for a while, I suppose.

I’ve already explored here and elsewhere some things I’d like to see in a Genealogy remake, and aside from some mechanical lenience and I’d be totally fine with Phoenix Mode for any of them and some canon or potentially canon gayness that’s about all I’ve got for FE4-6 remakes. 

As regards FE16 based on what we know so far, I’d love for it to be another experimental branching storyline (whether that means the three houses are fighting each other or not, they can spin that idea several ways) that also ties into one or more of the previous settings so it’s not like Fates existing mostly in a very strange vacuum. I’d be interesting in seeing them attempt another storyline like FE7 that doesn’t center on a war, because it would be kind of a letdown if we eventually learn that there’s a fourth house or foreign power antagonist everyone teams up against – especially when one considers what a letdown Garon was. Hopefully the Avatar won’t take over the plot and they can be secondary to whomever the primary lord(s) is/are at any given point. Claude and Dimitri should be pairable; it’s already a foregone conclusion that they’ll be able to be paired with Edelgard, but they need to go ahead and close the lordly love triangle already. Of course I want my pseudo-Catholic classes, but if they are indeed going Teutonic it would be funny as hell if they attempted something addressing the Catholic/Protestant divide in Germany.

Basically, I want to see Three Houses as a higher concept idea that doesn’t massively disappoint like its immediate non-remake predecessor.

Thoughts on the different Links among the different Zelda games? Any favorites?

Talking about Link is odd to me because there’s never been a game where I’ve really identified with him, and yet I also have trouble thinking of him as a fully realized character too. That even goes for the game where he’s got more of a personality and something resembling a character arc that the player doesn’t have to completely imagine themselves. It irks me when a supposed self-insert gets railroaded in a direction I don’t care for, ex. the romantic angle of SS, but I’m so neutral on the guy that those moments bother me far less than when they come up with FE Avatars, who are both more strongly characterized and (outside of BotW Link) more customizable. Link is such a non-entity to me that I can’t even really read fic with him…although it amused me when an acquaintance of mine pointed out that he’s always been a massive bottom in fanon. Really, none of us should have been surprised that Sidlink became as popular as it did. 😛

I’m not sure if I have any favorite Links, or at least not in any way that I could separate my opinion of them from the games in which they appear. I do have to give a shoutout though to the underrated Link of A Link Between Worlds and Triforce Heroes, who strikes a nice balance between the classic (pre-OoT) style and the goofy Toon Link style.

Update on computer status:

I took my PC over to an engineer acquaintance who fixed the memory allocation problem in five minutes, but unfortunately in my efforts to restore the thing myself I inadvertently wiped my hard drive. Twelve years worth of documents and files gone, with only some of them retrievable elsewhere. I currently still have my laptop and mobile for blogging, and I may decide to start over on that CPU rather than buy a new one if it’s fully functional, but that’s still a lot to lose all at once.

On the plus side, I finally caved and bought a Switch, to compensate for all the PC gaming that I won’t be doing anytime soon. It feels nice to get back to my gaming roots and return to a system that is fully functional without the need for risky internal modifications. For now I’m mostly waiting on the release of Octopath Traveler in two weeks, which looks just FE-esque enough for me to overlook a developer I’ve never been very fond of. 

Well, my attempts at tinkering around with my computer’s graphical settings may have irreversibly crashed it. I don’t suppose anyone knows how to access and alter memory allocation via a command prompt? It’s one of the only things I can get to on the computer at this point, and so far system restores and resetting to default settings haven’t accomplished anything. This would be a Dell computer running Windows 7 and using the graphics card that came with the system, if that matters.

I’ve finished watching the second season of Versailles. I hear the third – and final? – season just recently aired on TV, but it’ll probably be months before I get to watch it. Despite my distaste for gore and female nudity (evidently whatever censorship standards this show is obligated to follow allows for the showing of vaginas but not penises – annoying double standard, that) I’ve really enjoyed it. It has the sort of complexity and moral greyness that I appreciate in stories, historical projects especially, and that its subject is one of the most…ethically complex periods in French history rather than yet another take on whatever the Anglos are doing at any given point in time is a welcome change. I don’t imagine that the third season will address France’s colonial efforts since at the time Québec was still fairly insignificant and Louisiana not even yet conceived (Louis XIV was nearly fifty years old when de La Salle named the territory in his honor), but as this court life both glamorous and noxious was the build-up to those projects – and for some of us at least a motivational factor – there’s still for me a strong connection to my own history.

Incidentally, one of my mutuals from my Downtown Abbey days, @flippyspoon, just recently expressed curiosity over a picture of the duc d’Orléans and the chevalier de Lorraine, the ship name for which on Tumblr is I believe Monchevy?. I think it’s worthwhile to contrast the two shows since on that score Versailles is unquestionably superior, with a persistent canon M/M pairing that gets a lot of screentime and a fair amount of drama (only some of which is based directly in homophobia) with historical grounding. This show also doesn’t suffer from a stifling conservative viewpoint as Downton did; indeed, there’s no way it could given what we all know happened to Louis’s great-great-great-grandson and his court. That sense of the imminent downfall of the French monarchy and the rise of the Republic looms over the series and its numerous political intrigues.

One last note: it took me a while to remember him, but Louis’s actor played Grantaire in the 2012 version of Les Misérables. Now that is a strange association.