OC

I loooooove chunky drinks :)

ohhh shit happy (belated) birthday?

Reddit has spent several days obsessed with an argument about 100 unarmed men vs a silverback gorilla, and I'm learning that a lot of people have no concept of how big a crowd that is and also think of gorillas can just crush heads forever like Omniman.

god my whole body aches. Body crumbling to dust

Maybe an eventual tailgate/parking lot cookoff if I can sneak it in. I'll play it by ear.

Volunteering at Anime Ottawa was a fun experience - met a bunch of cool folks. Haven't been into the con scene since covid, and I'm definitely past the point of partying/drinking/causing a ruckus so being there in an official capacity was neat.

There WERE no ghosts in Galley House...

Piano significance? Sound of piano trigger? Who was piano? WHO WAS PIANO? WHO WAS 12???

jesus

ガトリングベア　#機動物

I strongly encourage those that haven't played to give it a look - last I've heard it runs well on Switch (and some of the gameplay had been balanced funnily enough). Lastly - team ISOLEUCINE/Seaside Vacation represent

I remember when it first dropped our friend discord chat essentially became a redacted document with all the spoiler black bars. Such fun characters and just seeing how everything pieces together is such a treat. Gameplay is also fun and memey

God, every half a year or so #13sentinels would flash across my mind and I'd binge watch whichever creator/vtuber would have played it in the time since. It's really one of those experiences that you could never retread, so next best thing would be to see it from the eyes of a new player.

Lungfish xkcd.com/3064

The twist there is something that can only work in the novel and manga medium, but it's something that completely makes sense upon re-reading and they break that down in there

God, one thing I forgot to mention about unreliable narrator twists is that even if things seem like coming out of nowhere, at least have a more comprehensive breakdown of how everything was orchestrated - The Decagon House Murders (manga) is something I go back to a lot

All this is to say that I definitely wanted more with this game, and/or any future work from this dev. UMDC was certainly interesting, and I've grown quite fond of the crew ultimately. Also have to reiterate KIKIKAITAI is a banger

I mean, it's always cathartic to fantasize about getting back at assholes over the internet, but surely we can be offered something else beyond that no? Not saying it has to be hopeful, but something beyond yes bad guy succeeded in burning everything down kind of but not really & life goes on

I'm also generally not a fan of split personality fiction, but even putting that aside it felt a bit nihilistic that nothing Azami did mattered and the ultimate "solution" to society's ills were just to dox everyone.

I'd have to go and revisit chapters and scenes to double check, but the game also lacks a chapter/scene select. I definitely don't have the focus to go through everything again with a fine tooth comb

On first viewing I was definitely pumped. A spectacle for sure. But thinking on it some more this felt like it came out of nowhere? I mean some things in retrospect you can tie together maybe? I'd argue really that it came out of nowhere and was a twist for the sake of one.

Turns out Azami was an unreliable narrator and she was actual a split (good) personality, and the true personality was the main antagonist. All the spooky powers were her visualizing her genius hackerman mind processing information, the director was also another mind-palace split personality

But those are nitpicks in the grand scheme of things, sure. The thing that gets me is the ending/the big reveal. Major spoilers so be warned.

Wee woo wee woo once again spoilers

Sometimes I would think it autosaved after a cutscene leading into a social media search segment, but oops it didn't. I'd come back to the game and realize I'd have to see the cut scene again with no way to skip it.

There's also no real skipping either - you can fast-forward through dialogue options that you've already seen but there is never the option to completely skip a scene. Normally not an issue but the autosave can be puzzling sometimes

Good time to switch over to things I didn't like - text speed/no easy way of skipping scenes. The option menu is pretty simple so you can't adjust how quickly the text appears. Added with the slight delay between clicking and new text appearing drove me up the wall since I read slightly faster.

I know I'm boiling it down quite a bit, but in essence there are no actual puzzles to solve or any failure states. It genuinely is a matter of clicking all boxes multiple times until you've seen everything. This essentially doesn't have much added value over it just being a visual novel honestly

Now the gameplay. Definitely a weaker aspect - every case has you clicking around the room to exhaust all dialogue, use Azami's spooky sight, click some more, repeat until you need to complete some fill in the boxes, repeat some more until you get all the clues. Repeat for the social media segments

The visuals are nice - love the character designs/art style, sprites are neat. Also shoutouts to Douman Seiman for doing cute fanart of Azami/Jasmine. OST is great too, and the theme that kicks in at the end of every chapter is such a banger (KIKIKAITAI/奇々解体). Nice treat after finishing a case.

Azami becomes (slightly) more confident and proactive after every chapter - culminating in her being extremely competent by the final chapter. Jasmine also warms up to Azami and they become the tag-team do-or-die duo by the final case