The Bog

So, the special edition or whatever of Unicorn Overlord came with a card game. I don't have it myself, but my friend bought it and we tried playing it and...it's actually really good? I had kind of assumed it would be just a vehicle for printing art, but there was obviously a lot of care put into designing a really solid game. It's a deckbuilder with some interesting twists and it even came with bespoke tokens and stuff. Just an insane amount of effort for a game that will probably never be reprinted and a lot of people will likely never even play even if they buy it.

Someone did take the enterprising step of putting it on Tabletop Sim, though, which is awesome.

Title: Salve
Fandom: Final Fantasy 4
Characters: Edward/Cecil
Rating: PGish
Length: ~4.6k words
Summary: After a resounding defeat in Fabul, Cecil learns a little about what to fend off -- and what to let past his guard.
Notes: This is actually a rewrite of a story I wrote like...probably 15 years ago at this point, if not more. Horrifying thought. I was curious to see what would happen, and the result was that it's five times as long and has a lot more blood in it, which...#WritingJourney, I guess. It's still extraordinarily sappy, to a degree that is probably embarassing, but hopefully I've proven my edgelord credentials enough that I am allowed this indulgence. Wound bandaging, a bit of extra blood on top of that (look, Darkness does HP damage, what do you want from me), angst with a mostly hopeful ending, bed sharing, indulgent amounts of headcanons about game mechanics.

( A knock on the door was the last thing Cecil wanted to hear at the moment )

Title: Amphisbaena
Fandom: Final Fantasy 4
Characters: Baigan. Appearances by Golbez, Scarmiglione, Cagnazzo, Kain
Rating: Mature
Length: ~6.6k words
Summary: Being a monster outside as well as inside has its ups and downs.
Notes: Hoo boy. Of all the fics nobody asked for, I think this is the least asked-for of all time. The story actually spun off a different fic that didn't work out (probably for the best given that it was kind of vile even for me) because I couldn't deal with Baigan's stupid snake arms. They suck so bad. In the game he's all like "Golbez has given me a great gift" and I am here to tell you: no he did not. Anyway, this has lots of extremely graphic gore and violence, body horror, non-explicitly-described rape; I hesitate to give this the guro tag given I don't think the gore in this is particularly eroticized, its mostly just gross.

The quote at the beginning is from Lucan's Pharsalia, a Latin epic poem about the conflict between Pompey and Caesar that knocked me on my ass when I read it in school and quickly became my favorite because it has some truly gnarly stuff in it. There's a lengthy sequence near the end consisting of Roman soldiers dying in graphic, horrifying detail to a variety of different deadly snakes, which in all honestly was probably the primary inspiration for this fic.

( At least a blatant seditious act would have given Baigan an excuse to break the Lord Commander's nose. )

You ever read a sex scene that's so bad it causes you actual psychological problems?

I'm exaggerating a little, but on the other hand I'm not. I won't name names or titles, but I started working on editing my first webnovel/light novel/etc that has explicit content in it (I've done explicit manga before, this is my first prose project though).

And god, is it ever bad.

I was in the middle of slogging through absolutely the worst sex scene I've ever read -- not just "worst in a published book" but I think worst I've read ever in my whole life -- and I just got like...overwhelmed? By the fact that this sucked SO BAD and multiple parties paid money to publish this in two different languages and now someone was paying ME money to try to make it as readable as possible (a tall order let me fucking tell you). And I think this must have set off some kind of chain reaction in my brain because I spent the next week or so just catastrophically depressed and stewing over my own failure to accomplish...well, much of anything, really.

With a little more perspective I can say that there are actually things I'm EXTREMELY proud of (hell, I was the editor on a manga that won an Eisner for best foreign language adaptation), but there's still... I dunno.

I guess 20 years ago...30 years ago...I thought I'd have done more by now. In particular, I thought I'd have some kind of big artistic project, a book or a comic or video game or I dunno, depends on when you asked me.

Here I was polishing up the most bottom-of-the-barrel shit I'd ever seen and I couldn't stop thinking, man...even the bottom of the barrel is still IN the barrel, you know? What am I missing that the author of this nonsense has? Is it persistence? Dedication? Work ethic? Do I just not CARE as much as he did? Clearly it's not TALENT that's the problem and that honestly makes it worse. Talent is neutral; what I've got is a failure of personality, clearly.

I've been trying to channel this into something a little more productive, maybe try writing something I can throw up on Amazon/Smashwords because if this can make its creator a bit of money then goddammit I can do better, right? But I dunno. It's hard to face up to another goal I might very well fumble yet again.

Guess we'll see how things go.

Anyway, that's the story of how I had an existential breakdown over anime boobs. Thank you, good night.

Fandom: Final Fantasy 4
Characters: Edward/Anna (though, like...just look at the notes I guess)
Rating: PG-13
Length: ~1.2k words
Notes: I really don't know how to rate this -- it's terribly graphic or anything, it's just kind of a huge downer. I mean it's primarily Edward carrying Anna's body around. Death, grief, brief thoughts of suicide, aftermath of violence.

( Prompt: last kiss )

Fandom: Final Fantasy 1
Characters: f!Black Mage/f!Red Mage
Rating: Teen
Length: ~500 words
Notes: Reposting some Kiss Battle 2024 stuff! First, vaguely femdom wizards. (goals amirite)

( Prompt: only you understand my power )

So there's a thing that kinda bugs me about a lot of the criticism/discourse/whatever surrounding older games. Namely, there's this tendency to chalk way too many things up to either hardware limitations or the developers simply not being "advanced" enough at game design. Not to say that hardware limitations aren't real or anything -- obviously they're still a factor even now, and maybe if big developers actually acknowledged that we wouldn't get shit like the most recent Call of Duty being over 200gb in size -- but people are extremely quick to attribute design choices they don't like, or that don't fit in with modern sensibilities, to some kind of arbitrary limitation, as though the devs didn't WANT to use random encounters or limited inventory or whatever, they were just FORCED to do so by circumstance.

The other thing, that game design is a linear progression we are steadily getting unilaterally better at, is of course bullshit.

When the Super Mario RPG remake was coming out, it was pretty faithful to the original but added a few things that people called (ugh) "quality of life" and widely regarded as just straight upgrades. One of these things was making items stack in your inventory rather than each individual item taking up a slot. The thing is -- I liked that the game did that! A lot! It made you stop and consider what you were carrying around, if you really needed all those healing mushrooms or if Mallow was going to be enough, if those old accessories were REALLY worth hoarding. It meant you had to go into a dungeon WITHOUT a completely flooded inventory prepared for every eventuality, because if you did you wouldn't have any room for cool stuff hiding in treasure chests. It also made the game feel a little more cozy, a little more like going on an adventure with your friends, because it sort of encouraged you to imagine the characters ACTUALLY stuffing these items in their backpack for the road, since 20 bottles of syrup don't condense down into a single item in real life. Earthbound also used a strictly limited per-character inventory, presumably for the exact same reason.

Maybe you disagree with me on this, maybe you do agree but think the effects aren't worth the hassle, maybe you think the new inventory does something even better, maybe you don't give a shit at all, but I really think it's uncharitable to the artists who made some of the most widely beloved games of all time to relegate certain design decisions to, essentially, the realm of "mistakes". Making the inventory something you needed to kind of grapple with does run counter to modern game design sensibilities which favor making menus as fast, frictionless, and invisible as possible. Changing it to be more in line with that might be a good move (clearly a lot of people who aren't me think so) but it's not an objectively good move, because it's a different artistic decision that doesn't sit on a binary of good to bad.

So much of the rhetoric surrounding game design revolves around hashing out what constitutes "correct" or "incorrect" design decisions rather than looking at it in terms of what it might be trying to accomplish, and as someone who loves older games and also a lot of the ASPECTS of older games that people tend to consider dated, I think it's very frustrating.

I intended to post something about Final Fantasy 5, but somehow got sidetracked talking about design philosophy and also Super Mario RPG, a game I'm not even particularly invested in, but I guess maybe it constitutes important backstory for my thoughts or something. Anyway I'll just put the FF5 stuff in a later post.

I guess the other thing that's important to establish is: Video games are art, and not just the writing or the visuals or the music or whatever, I mean like everything. Tetris is just as much a piece of art as any RPG with an intricate story. I also do not think it's possible to divorce the "narrative" of a game from its "mechanics" -- it is always a complete package.

(This is also why I dislike the current trend of calling easy modes "Story Difficulty" or whatever...first of all it sounds weirdly euphemistic, like they're trying not to offend people with the suggestion they may prefer the game be easier, and second I'm sorry but I don't think reducing the amount of friction in some areas of the game results in more focus on the nebulous "story", it just provides a slightly different way of experiencing it.)

Died on literally the last bit of the ultra-final-uber boss of Octopath Traveler (had the 2nd phase down to only the very last piece standing), though it's honestly surprising I got that far since for some reason I set up my parties completely ass-backwards from what I intended to and also forgot to unequip stuff like, the skill that decreases random encounters. I fuck up menus sometimes, I dunno why. Something really satisfying about this combat system and I probably have a gigantic analysis post about it in me somewhere.

Me enjoying the combat system is probably unsurprising, given that the main reason I started playing this game in the first place was that I periodically poke at making a game in RPGMaker MV, and periodically I would have an idea for a mechanic and go, hey I should look to see if someone's already made a plugin that does that. And practically every single time I found one it was replicating something from Octopath Traveler. So I was like, well...I guess I already think this game has some good ideas, lol.

I look forward to getting to Octopath Traveler 2 (even though ALAS Cyrus is not in it) sometime in the next century, but my next big RPG is pretty much going to have to be Final Fantasy 2, Live a Live, or Unicorn Overlord. FF2 because it's the one I've never played and features my favorite RPG character type, a coward; Live a Live because as someone old enough to remember RPG fandom in the 90s it is completely insane to me that I can just go purchase a copy of Live a Live in English literally right now whenever I want; or Unicorn Overlord because I'm very excited that Vanillaware of all studios decided to make a spiritual successor to one of my favorite games of all time. Ogre Battle: March of the Black Queen on the SNES is IMO an incredible game that got completely overshadowed by its big sister Tactics Ogre, which I've always been sad about because it's very fun and there really aren't any other games that play similarly that I'm aware of. Vanillaware I just love, their stuff always looks like I thought video games would look in the future when graphics Got Better in some nebulous way -- like a moving painting. I'm also pretty fond of lavishly illustrated food and necromancer ladies with enormous boobs, two things that seem to be Vanillaware specialties.

Anyway, I thought it was funny that when I beat the first half of Galdera, Cyrus was like "You should have studied harder!", like. Imagine saying that to Satan himself. Iconic honestly. No wonder a bizarrely large portion of his storyline revolves around how everybody wants to fuck him, which also incidentally has to be one of the funniest RPG writing decisions of all time despite not actually being a joke per se, probably up there with including a scene in FF4: TAY where Edward sets Kain on fire.

Getting to be a month on in FF Kiss Battle and I still have stuff I wanna post, and I already posted three things, which is like 300% more things than I posted all last year that weren't for Nonconathon. So, that's good, I guess. Also started writing a thing for my own prompt and then 2000 words in realized I'd never actually posted the prompt. Oops.

Went around putting some subscription money into things I actually use and like, which includes this site. Because I've been thinking a lot about, idk. The old internet and wanting to make better stuff.

There was a Twitter post by another manga editor that was like, "I wonder what percentage of my job is typing stuff like "ball sack" or "blow job" into merriam-webster.com" and I think about that like, literally every time I look up anything there now, so I had to make this icon. For work posts, I guess. It was between this or a screenshot of a chart showing JPN to US bra size conversions, an invaluable resource in my line of work.

There is no Merriam-Webster accepted spelling of "ball sack" by the way so feel free to run wild. The playing field is wide open.

I've spent all day trying to fill out a series bible retroactively for something I'm working on, since there's a multivolume gap that predates me starting the project that I can no longer handwave, and also the whole thing has gotten so complicated it needs to be completely reorganized. Honestly, its a nightmare and I don't know how anybody with a series bigger than this keeps everything straight.

Currently it's a regular old Excel spreadsheet and I am honestly considering taking up maintaining the fan wiki, since I genuinely think it would be easier to reference in a pinch. Also this series is actually popular enough to have a fan wiki, which despite having been doing this for some years now I'm still astounded that I'm in charge of something popular enough to have a fan wiki.

I like video essays about games, other people like video essays about games, so here's another one I liked!

Amelie Doree is a channel that does outrageously in-depth analysis of obscure, older visual novels and eroge.

(My weeb confession I need to make right now is that despite the Saya no Uta icon and recent Hatoful Boyfriend posting, I actually don't like visual novels all that much as a genre, despite the enormous presence they have in Japanese gaming history, hobby gamedev spaces, and erotic games specifically. It's notable that Saya no Uta and Hatoful Boyfriend are both fairly short, and Saya no Uta has only two choice points. Maybe I'm just too smoothbrained for it but VNs with a ton of story-impacting choices tend to just make me stressed, and novel-length text on a computer screen is hard for me to focus on. Extremely detailed discussions of cool VNs are thus super good for me specifically, since I probably wouldn't have the same positive experience actually playing them as a genre enthusiast would.)

Anyway, she's extremely knowledgeable about Japanese retro computing in general, but what really stood out to me is that I don't think I've ever seen someone quite so passionate about eroge who is also willing to take the genre seriously, even at its silliest. She did an extremely long video on Dasaku, a guro yuri VN I'd never heard of before despite being a big guro fan, from a trans perspective that was honestly fantastic (though like...WARNING even I was surprised by how gruesome the story got).

The video that brought me to her channel, though, was one about the hilariously-named PC-98 eroge Sex 2. It's really only partially about Sex 2, using the game as a springboard to talk about her own history with creating things, how we communicate with each other as people, and how there's meaning and beauty to be found in all art, no matter how tacky or maligned or silly or seemingly shallow -- and often the niche, weird, and cringey stuff can be the most affecting.

I dunno, it just kinda resonated (also it was interesting to learn the true story of Sex 2...the sequel to Sex [for the PC-98]).

Side note, the fact that you could release a porn game that was just called "Sex" in the early 90s is really funny to me, and kind of reminds me of the old Atari and Intellivision cars we'd get in at the game store I used to work at, featuring games just called "Combat" or "Golf". The days when there were few enough video games that these qualified as distinguishing features lol