Tales of Berseria's Innominat's Betrayal

Huge big grand special thanks to my buddies Ecclesiastes and Angel Adonis for stepping up to be my sounding boards and proofreaders on this rant.  Very much appreciated, guys!



Today’s gonna be 1 of those more rambling, meandering rants I sometimes do where I just don’t really know where I’m going with it and there may or may not be a point.  But hey, people seem to like Love, Death, and Robots pretty well, and something like half of its episodes are totally pointless, too, so surely it can’t be that bad when I do the same, right?

This is gonna have highest-tier spoilers for Tales of Berseria.  If you have not played the game, to completion, then back up, and walk away.  And...then walk back to your PC, tablet, or phone, and, like, go to a different site.  Look, just don’t be spoiled by this rant, is what I’m saying.  Tales of Berseria is awesome and to lessen the eventual experience of it is to do yourself wrong.

Alright, so, we’re all ToB veterans here, right?  Great, cuz I am not writing “Innominat” out 31 more times.  The title of this rant’s mostly just for the sake of avoiding spoiling anything for potential players.  We’re calling the boy by his real name, Laphicet, for the rest of today.  Admittedly not much of a difference in length, but it’s at least easier for me to keep track of its correct spelling.

And speaking of names, to avoid confusion, I use the names Arthur and Artorius to help better distinguish the man before and after his fall into despair turned him into a villain.

So!  Betrayal.  Betrayal is the great sin perpetrated against Velvet Crowe that destroys her life, and transforms her, in body and far more importantly in spirit, from a simple, caring, and optimistic young woman into a murderous, driven demon of vengeance obsessed with destroying he who betrayed her.  The betrayal of her brother-in-law Arthur is the defining tragedy that propels Velvet forward, both haunting and motivating her every act and sin as she brings chaos to an ordered world and leaves pandemonium in her wake.  Artorius betrayed her trust, murdered her brother, and destroyed her life, and nothing can heal her from the pain and fury of that transgression.

Velvet’s is a powerful story of revenge, and it works in large part because it hinges itself on a rock-solid basis: the sin of betrayal.  We as a species have a perspective on betrayal that is, perhaps, not entirely logical--we take wrongs committed against us way more personally when they’re also acts of betrayal.  For some reason, we hold much less contempt for a known enemy doing us harm than for a supposed ally doing so, even if the hurt inflicted is exactly the same.  Hell, we’ll often hold less of a grudge over a foe doing greater harm to us than we will regarding a friend’s betrayal.  It’s a universal sentiment to humanity, as far as I can tell, across any number of major cultures: traitors are the very worst kind of villain.  Violence, murder, mental abuse, rape, theft, arson, manipulation, there’s no evil we can contemplate that doesn’t become substantially worse in our minds when it is an act of betrayal.  We don’t even like people who betray others for our benefit--the infamous Benedict Arnold had great difficulties finding much love or respect from English government or society after switching sides, for example.*

And hey, in fairness, there IS some basis to this deep hatred our collective consciousness has for traitors.  Beyond countless pieces of media from every point of cultural history telling us that they suck, betrayal is, theoretically, the hardest attack to defend against.  Walls keep enemies out, not friends; it’s always harder to save ourselves from harm that comes from a source we don’t expect.  Having natural distaste for those who turn against those who trusted them, and then enhancing that distaste by drilling it further into our head with stories both fictional and historical on the matter, is a psychological safeguard that helps keep us all just a little more honest as a whole, as valuable to our advanced society today as it was to our tribal beginnings, and even perhaps to our social primate ancestors.  Maybe it’s still a little objectively silly that we would classically see an infamous traitor as a worse person than a genocidal tyrant, but there IS a cause for this deep-rooted inconsistency.

At any rate, getting back to what might generously be called my point, Velvet’s relentless hatred and thirst for vengeance has a solid basis in Artorius’s betrayal.  This isn’t like Grandia 3’s Emelius going evil-crazy because he has to share his worldly importance with his sister, or Shin Megami Tensei 3’s Isamu wanting to remake the world because he got stood up 1 time, or The Legend of Zelda’s Gannondorf falling prey to sunk cost fallacy as regards his efforts to conquer Hyrule.  Velvet is not Wild Arms 5’s Volsung, or Xenogears’s Id, or Xenosaga’s Kevin, or Final Fantasy 7’s Sephiroth, or Danganronpa’s Junko.**  Velvet very clearly has an actual reason to be what she is, and that motivating event is extreme enough that it never stops seeming to the audience a completely believable cause for her quest.  Artorius took advantage of the trust that his family had in him, and the damage that did to Velvet is a penetrating, persisting one that easily supports all that follows.

But what’s really cool, to me, is that Tales of Berseria’s writers managed to top it with the revelation that the true betrayal was Laphicet’s.

Arguably the greatest twist of Tales of Berseria is the revelation that it was not Arthur’s idea to sacrifice Laphicet to save the world--it was Laphicet’s own.  Knowing that he had at best a few years left to him thanks to his illness, Laphicet sought to make his brief existence worth something, and convinced Arthur to kill him, to use that death to call upon the power of the god Innominat to save the world.  No longer able to believe in humanity’s ability to save itself from the threat of daemonblight,*** Artorius agreed, and cast aside his humanity for the purpose, so of course he isn’t blameless, and his discipline of detached, cold logic means that he is still accountable for the atrocities that follow, including those inflicted upon Velvet herself.  But the heart of the matter, the core of Velvet’s suffering, is a betrayal by Laphicet, not Artorius.

It’s a masterful move by the writers, and arguably the only scenario that could have deepened and worsened the treachery committed against Velvet, if you look at the concept of traitors classically.  Dante’s Inferno makes the argument that the greatest of all sins, the evil act that will send you to the very bottom ring of Hell, is betrayal--but even then, there are 4 different tiers of this ultimate sin, describing which forms of it are worse than others.  As Velvet originally understood it, the treason committed against her by Artorius can be described as both Type 1 and Type 3, in Dante’s system.  

The first type is the betrayal of family, which of course Arthur has committed--he’s murdered his brother-in-law.  Hell, even considering that Laphicet actually asked him to do this, Artorius is still guilty of betraying his family, because regardless of what Laphicet’s will on the matter was, killing him still destroys Velvet’s life.  And let's be clear: it would have ruined her life even if Velvet hadn’t become a demon in the process--she’s devoted everything to keeping her little brother alive, and as healthy and happy as possible.  It doesn’t matter if Laphicet didn’t have much longer left anyway; Arthur has still brought everything for which Velvet has lived for and devoted herself to a premature end.

While any betrayal is, in Dante’s estimation, deserving of the deepest level of Hell, treachery against family is actually the least heinous version of the sin.  Worse than that is treason against one’s nation, but that’s the only kind of betrayal that Laphicet’s death does not commit.  The night Arthur destroys Velvet’s life, however, does also qualify as a betrayal of the third tier of Dante’s Inferno: the treachery of a host against a guest.  While that doesn’t seem like a literal description of Arthur’s actions, one must keep in mind that the spirit behind Dante’s description of this kind of treachery is the concept of betraying those who have, in trust and good faith, placed their well-being in your care.  A guest who enters a host’s home is a person who goes into unfamiliar territory that they have less or no control over, with the understanding that the host is now responsible for their welfare.  It’s synonymous with the trust that one places in one’s protector and/or caretaker, and to knowingly double-cross those who you have agreed to defend and provide for is the second greatest betrayal there is.  Velvet placed her faith in Arthur, with his great skills and unique powers, to protect his family: both herself and, far more importantly, their brother.  To witness the man she had held complete, unquestioning faith in as their protector violently take her brother’s life, coldly use his death as a means to an end...even beyond the harm that Artorius did directly to her that same night, such a life-shattering tragedy is easily great enough to sustain any quest for vengeance from start to finish.

And yet, there is 1 final, higher still level of treachery that can exist, if we follow the Dante’s Inferno metric.  The very worst form of the most heinous sin of all: the betrayal of one’s benefactor.  And this is why I find the twist that Laphicet’s sacrifice was his own idea and request such an impressive and clever piece of escalation from the writers of Tales of Berseria.  Because it takes the already life-destroying betrayal that Velvet thinks she has suffered, and manages to actually worsen it.  Because Laphicet is Velvet’s Brutus.  Her Judas.

I mean, think about it for a moment.  Velvet made Laphicet’s health and well-being the center of her universe, the reason for her being.  Her every effort was devoted to fighting his illness, keeping him alive and as happy as he could be.  Although Arthur kept them physically safe in the village, it was Velvet who was Laphicet’s caretaker, the one who got him medicine, cooked for him, engaged in their home’s upkeep, hunted for their food, and provided him with love, attention, and, inasmuch as she could with their limited resources, things he enjoyed.  Though Laphicet’s determination to live, whether for his own sake or hers, was surely a great factor in how well he persisted, it’s only reasonable to conclude, from what evidence the game provides us, that Laphicet Crowe’s having survived as long as he has by ToB’s opening is primarily thanks to the tireless efforts and relentless, loving devotion of his sister Velvet.

Now, arguments can be made as to what level of gratitude, if any, Laphicet is morally obligated to feel toward Velvet on this matter.  Other arguments can be made as to whether or not it was morally acceptable for him to take the life that Velvet had safeguarded for him and give it away for a greater purpose--it’s a strong point that, regardless of her contribution, it IS still HIS life, and his autonomy to devote it to a cause is inviolable, regardless of how Velvet would feel about it.  And, of course, there’s always the practical argument to be had that his time was running out, regardless of how hard Velvet worked against that fact, so even had he not sacrificed himself, she would only have had a short time longer with him.  Yes, there’s a lot you can argue about the right and wrong and practicality of Laphicet’s decision to give his limited remaining time in service of the world.  

But right, wrong, some impossibly tangled quality between them, 1 thing you cannot really deny is that his voluntary sacrifice IS a betrayal.  Velvet is Laphicet’s benefactor, she has, in effect, given him his life, and he has thrown it away.  She has done everything for him that she possibly can, practically given up the idea of living her own life in order to provide for his, all to the simple, sole intent of trying to keep Laphicet alive and happy.  Maybe it was his right to and maybe it wasn’t, maybe it was morally good to attempt to better the world by using his life to safeguard all others’, but these are irrelevant concerns to Velvet.  For Velvet, Laphicet’s existence WAS hers, his life a treasure that she bought with years of her own. 

Velvet Crowe was Laphicet’s benefactor.  And she didn’t let her love for him consume her time and energy at every turn because she wanted him to make some grand gesture to the world.  What she wanted was for her brother to live, for as long as he possibly could.  And he took what she had given him, and used it to do the opposite.  Laphicet gave up, and in doing so he robbed Velvet of that for which she gave everything.  Right, wrong, practical or pointless, all irrelevant to the story of Velvet’s suffering: what matters is that Laphicet betrayed his benefactor.

As I said, it’s a stroke of brilliance from the writers, in my eyes.  I mean, it’s unexpected, it’s a shocking revelation, it makes a huge amount of sense in the plot and ties a lot of details together, it’s a tremendous turning point for the characters of both Velvet and the new Laphicet, it’s thematically excellent and ties that tragic moment all the more to the concept of despair in having Arthur’s loss of faith in humanity be manipulated by Laphicet’s own choice to give up in the face of his illness’s likely victory,*** it creates opportunity to deepen the characters of the game’s villains (and Selica’s, as well)....it’s already a fantastic plot twist.  But it’s all the greater for the fact that it manages to surpass the power of Artorius’s betrayal of Velvet and expand the tragedy of the night her life was destroyed by increasing the sheer magnitude of treachery to frankly Biblical proportions.

And it even manages to redefine the possibility and potential of the very concept of benefactor betrayal--Laphicet doesn’t stab Velvet, he doesn’t sell her out to her enemies, he doesn’t even wish her harm; he volunteered to give his life to save the world out of love for her.  And it is only the most powerful form of treason because of her love for him!  Had he not loved Velvet so dearly that he burned with the need to do something to ensure her future, Laphicet might very well not have stolen his remaining time with her away from Velvet.  Had she not loved Laphicet so dearly that she valued his own existence and happiness more than her own, Velvet would not have been so utterly destroyed by having Laphicet taken from her before his time.****  There is no malice, no greed, no disappointment, no ambition, nor anything like that--Tales of Berseria’s writers created a scenario of the greatest form of betrayal which is born and carried through solely out of love.  More than just brilliant, Laphicet’s betrayal is poetic.

This is a winding, rambling rant and I barely managed to make a point in it, let alone have any idea how to end it.  I guess I’ll just say, not for the first time, that Tales of Berseria is an inspiringly well-crafted story of a remarkable caliber, and I have nothing but respect for it because of such shining moments in its narrative as the plot twist of Laphicet’s betrayal.




















* In fairness, some of this was, as I understand it, more practical than personal (sort of), in that he was so reviled by American revolutionaries and later officials that he would be a disruptive military target in the field and a liability in the court.  Still, a lot of it was emotional bias of society against traitors; the East India company once basically told him to fuck off because no one likes a backstabber, even those who he acted in favor of.


** If Danganronpa was an RPG, there would 100% be a new queen loser at the top spot of my Lamest Villains rant.  Junko is the kind of pathetic, tiresome dipshit that makes Sephiroth look legitimate.


*** Oh, hey, by the way, Spike Chunsoft: this is how you write a character defined by despair.  Maybe take some fucking notes, hm?  Or at the very least look up what the damn word means; it’s clear you guys haven’t got the slightest idea about what despair actually is.


**** Yes, she still would, presumably, have been done the great injury of having been turned into a Therion demon.  But while she clearly, in the story’s course, resents Artorius for this personal harm and the terrible treatment she endures because of it, it’s also just as clearly not the root of her tormented quest for vengeance.

General RPGs Need a Run Button

This is not the most controversial opinion I have possessed.  As hot takes go, this one’s temperature is clocking in somewhere between Cocytus, and fans’ reception to Suikoden 4.  It’s basically common sense.  Nonetheless, it’s worth being said: RPGs should pretty much always give players the option to run.

And most of them do!  This isn’t usually a problem; the run feature was figured out and widely adopted back in the 16-bit era, and by the time the 32-bit era rolled around, it was basically standard.  And thank goodness for that; can you imagine the mundane frustration of navigating a Playstation 1 Final Fantasy from start to finish at walking speed?  Squall walks to a destination like he’s read ahead in the script and knows exactly how stupid the next thing that’s gonna happen to him is.

But there are still a few RPGs even nowadays that don’t program a feature to allow players to run, and that really just shouldn’t be the case.  And weirdly, they seem to be RPGs that are actually really good.  Like, the first ones that come to mind for me are Undertale and Rakuen.  Undertale is a cornerstone of the genre which has influenced what RPGs are and can be going forward, and Rakuen is an emotional titan whose story and message still sometimes make me cry a little just to remember.  Each is virtually flawless...except for the fact that actually playing through them is kind of annoying, because the plodding pace of the protagonist can’t be increased in any way.*

I mean, it’s not that big a deal for most of Undertale, since you’re frequently stopping to check details of your environs as you move forward, but there’s plenty of moments in the game where you’ll want to backtrack, particularly if you love the characters as much as you’re meant to (and Toby Fox is good at his job, so you will) and want to see all their dialogue changes as the game progresses.  And Rakuen really, really needs a running feature, because unlike Undertale, a large portion of progressing from beginning to end involves going through areas multiple times as new paths and possibilities open up, so the start-and-stop novelty of exploring new surroundings that Undertale benefits from isn’t something that Rakuen can likewise rely upon.

And sure, you can make a defense of Rakuen based on the fact that its protagonist is a kid who’s sick in the hospital.  It’s thus quite plot-consistent that he wouldn’t be sprinting through the halls faster than Elon Musk toward a way to embarrass himself.  Still, I gotta tell you: shortly after I started playing Rakuen, I downloaded a mod for it that added a run button, and I don’t think that saving myself a cumulative couple hours of my life on the commute from 1 plot event to another ever lessened my immersion in the game or made the main character’s situation any less meaningful to me.  I certainly don’t think my tear ducts’ output was lessened whatsoever at the appropriately moving parts of the game for the fact that I’d had a more convenient time in arriving at them.

Also, this should probably go without saying, but in addition to having a running feature, RPGs should also always be made in a way that this feature is, well, functional.  The whole point is player convenience, after all, so having this feature be in itself inconvenient doesn’t really work.  We luckily don’t have to deal much with situations like Secret of Mana or Wild Arms 1 any more, where the ability to move faster meant being forced to go in a line so narrow and forbidding of detours that it could be considered practice for playing Final Fantasy 13.  But sprint meters and their kin are still a very real and annoying thing, and then there’s the thing where mouse-based RPGs force you to double-click your destination if you want the character to run there, because just a single click will mean them slowly walking instead.  Disco Elysium is 1 of the greatest games ever created, a work of such skill and brilliance that it feels humbling just to experience its majesty, but it sure makes you fucking work for the privilege of experiencing its excellence if you’re on the PC, because EVERY SINGLE TIME you want to go somewhere, you’ve gotta double-click that spot, person, thing, whatever.  The pace at which Harry moves toward a single-click implies that he’s drunk, exhausted, depressed, out of shape, and has been shot in both his legs--and only most of that can be true at any given time.  I can’t for the life of me conceive why ZA/UM decided to use Windows 95 as their inspiration for this particular part of their gameplay design, instead of just having running be the default movement speed and walking the one that’s selected with the less natural double-click.

And don’t even get me started on the PC Shadowrun titles’ approach to the run function.  That one probably just deserves its own admittedly short, but highly vitriolic rant.

It’s not even like giving the players a functional option for running really has to impact your work’s gameplay pace.  I mean, in total frankness, a lot of a run button’s convenience is entirely mental.  Like, take the examples I gave before of the Playstation 1 Final Fantasy titles.  As I mentioned, the regular walking function in them is stupidly slow, to be the point of being outright unfeasible.  The overall size of screens in Final Fantasy 9, for example, are, I think, basically designed with the assumption that the player is going to be running through them, not walking.  I’m relatively sure that if you compared the general size of most Final Fantasy 7 environments and the speed at which you can proceed through them while running, it’d probably be, functionally-speaking, very close to that of Undertale’s unchangeable walking pace.  So in effect, the run buttons in these Final Fantasies aren’t really any faster than the walking speed of a walking-only RPG that’s been fairly well-designed.  You can still design your game to be traversed at the pace you prefer either way--but having a run button is a lot more psychologically pleasing to the player, even if the result winds up being the exact same.  And unlike just about everything else related to human psychology being employed in the gaming industry these days, this placebo of travel autonomy is harmless.

Also, in cases where the lack of a run button is felt most annoyingly during backtracking, as it is with Undertale, you can always use an alternative method like Tales of Berseria’s geoboard.  The geoboard in ToB is basically just a hoverboard that goes a little faster than the normal running pace of the protagonist, which of course makes it very convenient (as does its ability to just smash through enemies that are a level lower enough than your own, something which you all know I like a lot).  But even once you gain the geoboard during the course of ToB’s story, it’s not something that you can automatically use--each area of the game has a spot at which you can activate the feature, and only after reaching this spot can you use the geoboard in that dungeon.  In practice, this usually means that you’ll only be making use of the geoboard’s extra speed once you’re near or at the end of any given dungeon.  But while that’s an unfortunate downside in Tales of Berseria, whose regular run speed does leave something to be desired,** a similar system of awarding run functionality for backtracking purposes would’ve been a hell of a useful feature in Undertale, while still allowing for the existing controlled pace of only being able to walk through new territory.

Like I said before, this isn’t a problem for 90% of the RPGs coming out these days.  Run functions are a standard feature built into the game for most developers at this point.  Still, there are some indie RPGs that, for whatever reason, don’t include it, and not every game that does have one utilizes it in a way that actually makes it convenient.  And while I adhere strictly to my policy that gameplay considerations do not affect an RPG’s quality and worth, even I have to admit that it’s hard not to resent a game that makes me feel like I’m wasting my time getting from Point A to Point B.  RPGs need run buttons.














* Well Rakuen also does have the flaw that it doesn’t have a non-vocal version of its main theme and I totally want one.  But that’s admittedly more a subjective thing.


** Yes Angel I heard your complaints the WHOLE time and am hereby publicly acknowledging their legitimacy; are you happy now?

The Breath of Fire Series's Dragon Transformations

Show of hands: how many readers expected me to come back after a whole month's absence with something thoughtful and significant?  Let's see, I count...0 hands in the air. Good!  I've clearly trained your expectations well.



Inconsistency to one’s series is a problem that can affect just about any form of media, and RPGs are no exception.  When, for example, Bethesda created Fallout 76, a game with effectively no story, no cast, and no point, they showed that they haven’t got the first goddamn idea of what a Fallout title is supposed to be.  Meanwhile, after over a decade of laughably inept fumbling, SquareEnix had gotten to the point that outsider Silicon Studios had to teach them what a Final Fantasy game is with Bravely Default--and as FF15 and Chocobo GP demonstrate, that lesson did not stick.  And then there was Konami's decision to break with the Suikoden series tradition of being enjoyable to even the slightest degree while they were making Suikoden 4.

Worse still, though, are the series which just as a whole don’t know how the hell to accomplish their own intent.  Wild Arms is a franchise that touts itself clearly and proudly as having a Wild West theme...and yet it took until the third title in the series for this to come to pass, and it quickly returned to its characteristic out-of-character ways immediately following WA3.  While I haven’t played the fourth or beyond, the first 2 installments of Star Ocean are embarrassing demonstrations of a Science Fiction series that can’t Science Fiction--and doesn’t really even try to.  And even SO3 only managed to have half of its narrative escape the rinky-dink backwater fantasy world setting that the series seems inescapably mired in.  Because hey, why have your story take place out in the stars with your STAR OCEAN game, right?

What I’ve only recently realized, though, is that Breath of Fire is kind of in this same embarrassing camp as Wild Arms and Star Ocean.  Because Breath of Fire is a series about dragon-people that, more often than not, doesn’t really deliver on this premise.

Things started out well enough, of course.  Breath of Fire 1 was a straightforward delivery of the goods.  You want a story about people who can transform into dragons?  You fucking got it.  There may be a lot of things that Ryu 1 doesn’t have--an intact home, or the capacity for vocal articulation, for example--but 1 thing he unequivocally does have is the totally bitchin’ power to transform into a dragon.  Magic?  Not needed.  Skills?  No thanks.  Any kind of fighting technique whatsoever beyond doggedly repeating the same rudimentary sword swing literal actual hundred of times?  Keep it.  When it’s Ass Kick O’Clock PM (Eastern Standard Time), our boy Ryu 1 raises his arm to the sky, calls forth a bolt of lightning, and becomes a scaled, fire-breathing reptilian murder machine so menacing that the day God was passing these things out, Reality hid in a corner, shivering in terror, and let Fiction grab the whole bunch of’em.  For the rest of the battle, Ryu fights as a dragon, bringing the full power of the Dragon Clan to bear on his unfortunate foes for your enjoyment.

It was, to the best of my knowledge, the first time an RPG had a transformation power-up battle mechanic, and it was a really satisfying one.  Always felt like an ace up your sleeve to pull out for the tough monsters, and with the ability to become powerful dragons like these (especially Agni; holy CRAP was that thing overpowered and awesome!), you could definitely see why the Brood was considered the most powerful clan in the world.

There you go.  There’s your kickass dragon-transforming badass for your Breath of Fire game.  The title made its promise, and it delivered.  This is a game, a series, about a bunch of guys and gals who can flip the fuck out and turn into dragons and wreck some shit any time they want, and so we get a protagonist who can do that (as well as an antagonist, and a major plot-relevant NPC).  Perhaps that’s not ALL that Breath of Fire is about, but it’s pretty safe to say it’s supposed to be the signature element of the series.  I mean, it’s basically in the goddamn name.

But having the stated theme of your game be the title itself wasn’t enough to save star-faring in Star Ocean, nor the wild west in Wild Arms, and it isn’t enough for Breath of Fire.  Because what the hell happened in Breath of Fire 2?

Ryu 2’s abilities in the second game are such a huge step down!  First and foremost, using dragon abilities isn’t a power-up transformation any more, it’s just a single damn attack!  In BoF1, if you used the thunder dragon ability, you turned into a damn thunder dragon, and then for the rest of the battle your attacks would be the dragon’s electric breath.  It was a sustained state of enhanced combat ability, as one expects of a transformation.  In BoF2, however, selecting the thunder dragon ability just means that Ryu 2 will launch a single breath attack on his foes, and that’s it--he transforms, barfs lightning, and is back to human form by the end of the turn.  Reducing a sustained empowering transformation into a dragon to just a single, momentary, fleeting attack?  LAME.

Hell, are we sure he even transforms to begin with?  I mean, in BoF2, the process for a dragon ability being used is that Ryu 2 and the rest of the party disappear for a moment, a dragon rolls on up, burps some violent mischief upon whoever’s unfortunate enough to be on the left side of the screen, makes its exit, and then the rest of the party reappears.  This process is in every single possible way indistinguishable from using a Summon in Final Fantasy 6; what assurance do we have that this dragon was even Ryu at all?  There is no evidence whatsoever that he didn’t just speed-dial his unemployed cousin to do a drive-by while Ryu steps out for a quick smoke.

What was the point of robbing the player of the fun of a sustained transformation?  Breath of Fire is a series about people who turn into dragons!*  So why give us a protagonist who can be a dragon if he’s not ever gonna be a dragon?  Why are the only members of the Dragon Clan in Breath of Fire 2 who are definitively shown to take the form of a dragon for more than 15 seconds all NPCs?  To my recollection, you don’t even get to see Ryu 2 turn into a dragon during any of the game’s scenes outside of battle, either!  Yeah, that’s what I want from my game about a guy who’s part of a clan of people that turn into dragons--I want to see him not do that.  I want to see a story in which the capability to become a titanic, fire-spewing death machine is completely and totally irrelevant.

Oh no, wait, I forgot--if you get the Sad End, Ryu turns himself into a dragon, for the first time on screen, and then goes to sleep to seal in the demons and everyone has to say goodbye to him and it’s sad.  “Don’t worry, bro,” Capcom reassures you with an evil glint in their eye.  “We know how much you were looking forward to having the hero turn into a dragon again, after we established that as a major part of this series’s lore and signature.  And we hear you.  We’ve got you, dog.  Here’s your dragon transformation, my man--super-glued to an ending that makes you feel bad.  You are so welcome.”

The greatest Brood ability in Breath of Fire 2 isn’t even dragon-related.  Anfini’s just this feel-good friendship thing that brings Ryu 2’s party back to life during the final battle.  Which, I mean, great, good, Power of Friendship and all that.  But you know how Breath of Fire 1 handles the Power of Friendship in its ultimate ability, Agni?  It fuses the entire party together and transforms them into a golden roaring raging kaiju centaur that takes up a quarter of the entire screen and automatically does an unblockable, max damage cap 999 with every strike.  Strikes that are raging lightning storms so extreme that they are immediately followed by a freakin’ earthquake!  Compared to that, the ability to miss your dog hard enough that he decides to start existing again seems...a bit less flashy, to say the least.

And as if the downgrade from Battle Transformation to Single Attack wasn’t bad enough, the dragon abilities even kind of suck in BoF2.  I mean, yeah, they hit for a good, solid chunk of damage--the G. Dragon’s lethal halitosis actually hits for an unblockable 999 damage, in fact!  But the kicker is that you’re generally only gonna use’em once per battle, and at that, only during bosses.  Because using a dragon ability uses up ALL of Ryu’s MP.  Regardless of how much he has!  Use any dragon ability, and Ryu’s gonna end that turn possessing as many Magic Points as Randy Pitchford possesses moral scruples.  And don’t think that you could just restore Ryu’s MP a little bit and use it again, because the strength of these attacks is directly proportional to how much of Ryu’s total MP has been put towards them.  So if his max MP is, say, 200, and you have him cast this spell while only having 20 MP, then it’s only gonna be 10% as powerful as it’s supposed to be, defeating the purpose.  Worsening the situation is the fact that there’s no item that restores all your MP in BoF2 (100 is the most you can do in a single go), and MP restoration items are crazily rare if you don’t specifically know how to farm them from item creation and hunting.  Bottom Line: these already disappointing 1-shot dragon “transformations” really only happen once a battle, or hell, once per period between inn stays.

Really doesn’t help make Ryu 2’s other magic, those being minor support spells Cure 1 and Cure 2, particularly viable, since you’ll naturally want to conserve his magic use as much as you can to keep his single useful ability in the next boss battle as powerful as possible.

Basically Ryu 2’s entire existence is defined by being the dragon version of a 1-pump chump.

Thankfully, after Breath of Fire 2, Capcom seemed like it’d gotten its head back in the game, and Breath of Fire 3 brought things back to the way they were supposed to be.  Not only could Ryu 3 properly, demonstrably transform into a dragon, and maintain that form over multiple combat turns, but there were now a ton of new dragon forms to take on!  BoF3 really went all out in providing different types and strengths of dragon for the player to experiment with and have fun turning into.  There were the whelps and the standard adult dragons (which looked cool and vicious and savage; BoF3 knew to make even the basic forms badass), as the previous games had established.  But all kinds of other interesting dragons could be unlocked with the right combination of Brood genes, like giant behemoth dragons that looked like what would happen if a warthog and an ankylosaurus had violent hate-sex and it somehow became your problem, cute little baby dragon-slugs that look like just the most precious things you’ll ever get eviscerated for hugging, those snake-y eastern-style dragons except that BoF3 actually somehow manages to make it look cool...there are even fusion dragons!  Like, dragon forms Ryu can take that are basically a fusion of a dragon and 1 of his companions.  The tiger dragon based on Rei and the bird dragon made from Nina 3’s influence are both insanely cool.

This was the golden age of the dragon transformation in the Breath of Fire series.  These dragon forms looked awesome, they stayed around (while not being unlimited as they were in BoF1; they were well-balanced in that they cost MP each round to maintain), they pleasingly increased Ryu’s power appropriately, they had more than just a single signature ability to draw upon, the actual transformation process looked awesome (lightning strikes, a circular explosion of black energy envelops the party, and then clears with Ryu standing in his new form), you could use them more than just once between rests, the special abilities were no longer just set amounts of damage but rather were dependent on Ryu’s own power...BoF3 basically took every single quality of what felt awesome about the first game’s transformations, improved it, and corrected every possible flaw either of its predecessors had.

The 1 complaint I had was that the ultimate form, Kaiser, was just Ryu doing a yellow palette-swap rather than actually transforming, instead having an ability that would, for a single turn, ostensibly have him turn into the same G. Dragon that Ryu 2 could in the previous game, deliver a single attack, then fly off-screen.  So basically, it was a single instance of a return to BoF2’s lame one-and-done dragon transformation attacks that were indistinguishable from a basic summon.  It’s a far cry from BoF1’s Agni, but still, I guess going Super KaiSayan is still cooler than BoF2’s Anfini complaining about having to solo a boss loud enough that the party decides to resurrect just to shut you up.

Unfortunately, the good times were not to last.  Breath of Fire 3 is the second installment in this 5-part series to utilize real, proper dragon transformations, and it is also the last.  And worse still, as fun of a ride as it was, it was BoF3 itself which planted the seed for the disappointing direction 4 and 5 would take Brood abilities.

See, 1 of the transformations of Breath of Fire 3 was the Warrior form, which wasn’t a dragon so much as it was someone’s fursona.  Scalesona.  Whatever.  The Warrior form is basically just a dude with dragon wings, a tail, claws, and horns.  It’s not an actual dragon, it’s just a D+D half-dragon.  You want to see what the Warrior dragon form is, go to Fur Affinity, type “dragon” into the search bar, look at the first 5 results, and swear eternal vengeance on me.  It’s that simple!  Hell, most people’s dragon scalies are demonstrably more dragonlike than BoF3’s Warrior is.  The Warrior isn’t a dragon, it’s just a guy who is dragon-ish.

And unfortunately, Capcom decided that its future endeavors with Breath of Fire would be based entirely on this immigrant from Inkbunny.

In Breath of Fire 4, all dragon transformations end the same way: with Ryu 4 in a Warrior form, floating in battle awaiting your commands.  And, I mean, it’s kind of cool, for a while.  The main attack animation is him doing an elbow strike into the enemy, which is kinda badass, and as much as I’ve been razzing on it, the Warrior form does actually look pretty cool overall.  But there’s no variety!  It’s not a real dragon to begin with, and it’s the ONLY form he’ll take for any amount of time in combat.  It gets old!  In Breath of Fire 3, when I wanted Ryu to power up and start breaking skulls, I had a colorful, badass buffet to select from!  Everything from hybrid mecha-knight dragons to the tried-and-true western style with laser-beam breath was open to me.  Here, it’s just the 1 single form, throwing elbows like it’s going out of style.  Guy better hope he never feels the urge to take up tennis.

Granted, there ARE actual dragon transformations in BoF4 in a certain sense.  And that sense is...the 1-and-done variety.  Again.  Yeah, while you’re in the base Warrior form, floating above the ground like you’re afraid of getting your toes dirty, you can opt to spend your turn transforming into the actual dragon that whatever Brood variant you selected is named for, at which point Ryu 4 actually deigns to transform into a proper dragon, launches his attack, and then returns to Mr. Every Hour On The Hour ELBOWS ELBOWS ELBOWS again.

I mean, don’t get me wrong: this is a hell of a lot better than BoF2’s situation was.  You actually SEE Ryu 4 transform into the dragon for this hit-it-and-quit-it attack, for starters; this isn’t like Ryu 2 potentially just swapping out for his stunt double every time.  And it can at least be done more than 1 time per battle/inn rest thanks to it not completely draining all your MP in a single go.  Ultimately, I guess that the difference between just being the dragon in battle and what BoF4 does could be seen as pretty minimal.  Still, it feels like there’s a big difference between the back-and-forth transformation situation of Breath of Fire 4, and just being a dragon in Breath of Fire 3.  The momentary transformations of BoF4 just aren’t fun like the sustained ones of its predecessor.

And unfortunately, Breath of Fire 5 finishes us out** with more of the same.  Or should I say less of the same?  Because the only sustained transformation in BoF5 is, once again, Half Man, Half Dragon, All Deviantart, but this time, there are no 1-turn transformation attacks to go with it.  Ryu 5’s OC form is all we get!  Granted, he’s no longer courting sponsorship by G-Form and thus now uses other, more versatile parts of his anatomy to attack his enemies than just his elbows, but still!  There’s no dragons to transform into.  In a Breath of Fire game.  Not even the desperate implication of it that BoF2 had.  Nothing.

Capcom, I know BoF5’s development was a bit rushed, but you left the dragons out of your dragon game.  Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2 suffered from a rushed release schedule, too, but Obsidian still remembered to put in the damn lightsabers!

Oh, wait, THAT'S right, there IS a moment in Breath of Fire 5 when Ryu can transform into a dragon!  It slipped my mind, but faithful reader and possessor of a better memory Adam E. has gently reminded me.  Thanks, Adam!  Yeah, Ryu 5 can totally transform into a dragon.  If the D Counter hits 100%.  Which is to say, in Breath of Fire 5, turning into a dragon is a game over.  Yeah, that's...that's fucking great, Capcom.  You made AVOIDING turning into a dragon into the entire point of your Breath of Fire game.  Truly stellar stuff guys.

So let’s do the math, shall we?  In Breath of Fire, the series about humans who can turn into awesome ultra-powerful dragons, 2 out of its 5 games contain a real, legitimate ability to actually become a dragon.  Less than half.  The rest either make dragon transformation effectively (and sometimes entirely) indistinguishable from a summon ability, or forgo them altogether in favor of a single fursona.

It may not be Wild Arms only bothering to make good on the Wild West theme they sold themselves on once in a 5-game franchise.  It may not be nearly as bad as Star Ocean spending its first 2 games ignoring its science fiction premise for 95% of the game, and then only committing to it halfway through the third title.  And hell, it may not even actually matter in the slightest.  But it’s still startling, in retrospect, to look at the Breath of Fire series and realize that Capcom only ever really seemed to understand 1 of the core ideas of the series for less than half of its iterations.  It’s nothing compared to how tone-deaf SquareEnix tends to be about Final Fantasy (and really just any of its IPs, for that matter), but it’s still weird.











* Or dragons who spend most of their time futzing around as people.  I don’t think I’ve ever been 100% clear on which way it is with the Brood.


** Haven’t played BoF6 yet.  Probably never will, by both choice and circumstance.

Boyfriend Dungeon Doesn't Go Far Enough

ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm taking June off.  May is always a pretty brutal month for me at my job, but this one's put me through a tougher time than usual, and honestly, I've still been trying to rebuild a rant backlog buffer since the year-long employment crucible that was my 2021.  So...I could just really use a little break to build the reserve back up and ease myself out of customer service fight-or-flight mode.  Thus, the next rant'll be published in July, at which point we'll resume our regular schedule.  Thanks for understanding, and I'll see you then.

And now, the rant proper:



Boyfriend Dungeon is another of the Kickstarter RPGs that I’ve backed.  I don’t generally go for dungeon-crawlers, as they usually don’t have as strong a reliance on storytelling, but the premise of the game piqued my interest--it’s basically a hybrid RPG and dating sim where you’re dating (or just being good buddies with) the very weapons you’re using in the dungeon, within this peculiar world in which some people can magically transform themselves into weapons.  The idea sounds fun enough, and I can’t deny that, as a game where the majority of love interests are men (with a masculine non-binary as well) and which clearly has a very modern, progressive outlook on gender identity and sexuality and all that jazz, Boyfriend Dungeon gave me a bit of hope that I might finally find some quality gay male romances in my preferred game genre.  RPGs have always been and still are unrealistically dominated by heterosexual romances, and what few same-sex couples exist in this genre are much more often female ones.*  And frankly, regardless of what genders are involved, it’s harder-than-average to find a love story in an RPG that’s particularly noteworthy, anyway.  So yeah, I had some hopes for Boyfriend Dungeon, particularly when I realized it was being made by the same developer that did Moon Hunters, another RPG I had kickstarted and quite enjoyed.

And make no mistake, it’s a pleasant game.  The gameplay of Boyfriend Dungeon is, interestingly enough, less like Moon Hunters than it is a Supergiant Games title; there were a lot of moments as I was crawling through the dungeons that I was struck by a recollection of Bastion.  Meanwhile, the content of the dating sim stories reminded me in some ways of Shin Megami Tensei Persona 4’s Social Links--and the fact that the dungeons were meant to display and act as analogies for the protagonist’s personal fears and hang-ups increases that sense of SMTP4 similarity.  The game tells a small but recognizable and paced story with a noticeable beginning, middle stage, and conclusion, and having this clearly structured a narrative is certainly more than a lot of dungeon-focused RPGs can seem to manage.  Additionally, BD maintains a very prominently open and modern mindset and theme of respecting personal identity, pronouns, lifestyles, dietary beliefs, all that politically correct jazz--it’s very inclusive, is what I’m saying, so players caught up within or just looking for a game with a strong and positive theme of current sensibilities will probably like Boyfriend Dungeon quite a bit.  And that stuff’s not just the window-dressing to the game, either; the main story of the game is rooted within such concepts.  The protagonist and antagonist serve as mirrors for how to approach a desire for intimacy with others, with 1 doing so in a healthy manner, the other becoming mired in toxic mindsets.  It’s a decent game, Boyfriend Dungeon, is my main message here.

At the same time...Boyfriend Dungeon disappoints me, because it never really seems to take any part of itself as far as it needs to.

Let’s take the dungeon-crawling aspect of it, since that’s where I first noticed this problem.  The dungeons in Boyfriend Dungeon are adequate enough, as dungeons go.  I mean, I didn’t enjoy going through them myself, but I don’t like stomping through any dungeons; the actual act of playing an RPG is boring to me.  I at least think that people who DO like the gameplay of this genre will have a decent time in Boyfriend Dungeon’s...2 dungeons.

Yeah.  2.

Now it ain’t a problem for me personally, the fewer dungeons the better I say, but even I have to admit that I find it odd that a game called Boyfriend Dungeon has only 2 examples of its namesake within its entire course.  Didn’t this game advertise itself as a dungeon-crawler on its Kickstarter?  And Steam page?  And Xbox page?  How do you make a dungeon-crawler, advertise it as such, include the word “dungeon” in its name, and then only put 2 dungeons into it?

I mean, I guess I’ve played some dungeon-crawler RPGs in which there was only, technically, a single dungeon to traverse through (such as some Etrian Odysseys, for example), but even those generally had enough significant differences between floor groups that the effect was that of multiple dungeons.  And their supposedly single dungeon had more (and larger) floors within it than Boyfriend Dungeon has in its 2.  It just feels like the dungeon element of Boyfriend Dungeon was an afterthought more than the selling point they made it out to be.  Again, not a problem from MY perspective, but I would definitely understand someone more gameplay-oriented being put out by it.

There IS a problem with this lack of dungeon-ing that I do myself take issue with, though.  The dungeons are, as I mentioned before, meant to represent personal fears of the protagonist.  I think the idea is for him/her/them to conquer these personal issues and become a more complete and actualized person, as well as a better romantic partner.  But with only 2 dungeons in the game, this storytelling mechanic is pretty damn limited, unable to explore the hero’s mind and personality any further than a mere 2 characteristics.  So even if you care as little about the gameplay elements of RPGs as I do, there is still a flaw within just how limited the dungeon count of Boyfriend Dungeon is.

Although, really, I doubt that more dungeons would actually have done much for the protagonist’s character.  While a good personal story of growth would have needed more than 2 opportunities to tell itself, the fact of the matter is that the 2 opportunities it did have were squandered.  Neither of the fears that the dungeons of the games represent are actually explored at all in their relation to the protagonist, and are barely even acknowledged by the characters in dialogue.  These 2 fears are obviously meant to describe the shy and socially hesitant state that the protagonist is in when he/she/they first arrive at Verona Beach at the game’s beginning, but that’s as far as that goes.  How did Protagonist gain these fears?  What thoughts do Protagonist’s love interests have about these fears in relation to him/her/them?  How is the protagonist confronting these personal issues and moving past them, in the emotional sense?  Why does the protagonist never have any thoughts to share on these fears when their nature is finally uncovered at the dungeon’s conclusion?  How does the protagonist feel about the process of conquering them?  What about the protagonist’s experiences thus far has allowed him/her/them to overcome it?

There’s just so little substance to this concept of the dungeons as the things holding the protagonist’s heart back.  It’s like if you were going through a Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 dungeon, but the character at the end of the dungeon never says anything the whole time, never interacts with their shadow, never expresses any perspective on the process of embracing and overcoming their weaknesses before, during, or after the whole ordeal.  You’d still be able to get something from the metaphors of the dungeon’s enemies, and from the dungeon’s own decor, but the huge majority of the message wouldn’t be there.  It’s not as bad as Princess Aerin’s complete failure in The Princess’ Heart to engage with the personal sins that the 4 demons she fights represent, but Boyfriend Dungeon’s failure to capitalize on their idea of using the dungeons to develop the protagonist is not far off from that, either.

So the dungeon aspect of Boyfriend Dungeon isn’t taken far enough, and its attempt to tell a story of growth for its protagonist isn’t, either.  What about the other major theme of the game and half of its title?  What about the Boyfriends?  And girlfriend.  And...themfriends?  Whatever the non-binary equivalent is.

Well, honestly, the game just doesn’t quite manage to do enough on that front, either, in my opinion.

First of all, the concept itself of dating weapons just...isn’t really explored well enough.  The fact that each of these characters you’re dating can turn into a sword, a scythe, a dagger, and so on, to be held and wielded by you in combat against monsters representing your fears, is a surprisingly minor detail to everyone involved.  I mean, Boyfriend Dungeon doesn’t ignore it or anything like that--Sawyer will sometimes mention the fact that they’re a glaive, Isaac will reference being a rapier often (and this fact is the initial reason for you hanging out with him, to have him train you on how to more effectively use him), and so on.  But the fact that Seven can turn himself into a goddamn laser sword** is somehow never a major, relevant point to his personal story and character development.  Apparently, being a second-banana member of a KPop band is deemed as a more interesting angle of Seven’s character to base his personal story around than the fact that he can turn into the lovechild of a taser and a lightsaber.  Isaac is a fencer who can turn into a rapier, Sunder’s ability to inflict the bleed status relates to his physical condition, and there are some aesthetic connections between the characters’ human and weapon forms, but beyond that, the fact that these boyfriends, themfriends, and girlfriend can transform themselves into weapons isn’t really important, to them or to the story as a whole.  Boyfriend Dungeon’s attention-getting gimmick is that it’s about being able to date your weapon, and yet the character stories for every single 1 of these romantic interests would be unchanged in all significant ways if they were just regular human beings! 

Correct me if I'm wrong, because I've yet to play it, but I think even Xenoblade Chronicles 2 managed to give this duality of weapon and human more relevance with its stupid waifus, yes?  Not the kind of title that it looks great to fall short of, from my initial impressions of it.

Also, I hate to say this, but not a lot of these characters’ stories are all that interesting.  I mean...Sawyer’s generally likable enough, but all that really happens in their Social Link is a bit of worrying about their future prospects in life which, though reasonable and certainly a believable concern for anyone in Sawyer’s age group nowadays, never goes anywhere or has any resolution, and some mildly amusing lessons on how to cook basic low-income meals.  It is not a compelling story of love blossoming.  It’s not a compelling story of friendship forming.  It’s kind of shaky as a tale of becoming acquaintances, really.  And while the rest of the cast at least felt a little more like they were forming a bond of interest and companionship with the protagonist, and/or had a demonstrable attraction to him/her/them, they still don’t really feel all that romantic or interesting.  I’d call Valeria’s the most romantic, but it barely breaks into the territory of average as love stories go, and I’d call Sunder’s the most interesting character study, but it ends on a weak, gimmicky note.

In fact, when I consider it, I think there’s a subconscious reason I’ve equated Boyfriend Dungeon’s romances with the Social links of SMT Persona 4 specifically--because as a general rule, they, much like all but 1 of SMTP4’s love interest Social Links, are more like friendship stories upon which an ill-matched romance was clumsily stapled.

Also, connecting the problems with the protagonist’s personal development with the current subject, I feel like Protagonist isn’t even a particularly deciding or dynamic factor in some of the character journeys of Boyfriend Dungeon’s love interests.  At least as often as I felt like the protagonist was an invested participant in these vignettes, I felt like things were just coasting along, with the protagonist along for the ride of his/her/their boo’s personal journey.  Not always, or anything, but still, I think the protagonist is too often not a strong entity within a love story that he/she/they are supposed to be half of.  And hey, don't get me wrong, this is a common problem with both RPGs and Visual Novels (the latter format is what Boyfriend Dungeon's character interactions mostly mimic), not some failing exclusive to BD.  But signature or common, it IS still a flaw.

Look, I don’t like to go off on Indie RPGs.  And I also want to reiterate that Boyfriend Dungeon is a fine enough title: I don’t regret playing it, nor do I regret backing it.  I have backed worse and I have played worse Indies in my time.  And to be sure, while I appreciate a strongly inclusive RPG and wish we had more of them, anyone who really thirsts for a game that steeps itself in modern mindsets and perspectives on love and identity will get a lot more out of this title than I could.  But at the same time, Indie RPG or not, decent game or not, Boyfriend Dungeon’s got a persistent, recurring flaw: it just doesn’t take any of its major components far enough.  It doesn’t have enough dungeon content for a dungeon crawler,*** it doesn’t take an active enough hand in telling the protagonist’s story of growth into a healthy friend and/or romantic partner, it doesn’t incorporate and explore its idea of people who are both humans and weapons far enough, it doesn’t tell strong and involving love stories,*** and the player doesn’t feel like a dynamic part of how some of these romances progress.  Each part of Boyfriend Dungeon feels enjoyable, but lacking.  There was more that this game could have been.


















* Not that I’m complaining.  As I’ve said before, I still want a lot more of these than there are.  It’d just be nice and refreshing to have an equal number of bros-before-heteros romances, too.


** For that matter, it’s weird that the rest of the cast are normal, tangible, traditional weapons like brass knuckles and talwars, and then there’s just this 1 guy who’s a lightning beam with a handle stuck on it.  What’s up with that?


*** There IS a DLC coming that's going to add a third dungeon and 2 more weapon people to romance, but if it's not a free update (which it might be?  I'd have to look back on all these backer updates I get to know for sure, but I think it'll just be easier to find out when it releases), then these can't really be counted in the main game's favor.  And even if they were, a dungeon count of 3 still seems noticeably low for a dungeon crawler.  Furthermore, even if the 2 new romances turned out to be really good--which there's not much reason to expect if we go by precedent--that's still 2 out of 8, which is not a great showing.

Pillars of Eternity 1's Downloadable Content

I have to confess something.  Something terrible and degrading, a secret which has festered within me for 7 years now, like a lingering, decayed fragment of me at odds with the rest of my soul.  But I’m tired of it--tired of keeping up the facade of a discerning, cultured critic, tired of trying to maintain this farce that I’m respectable, that I’m worthy of your time and consideration.  Because the shocking, dismaying truth is...

Pillars of Eternity 1 just didn’t really do anything for me.

Woedica knows I wanted it to.  PoE1 was 1 of the first RPGs I ever helped crowdfund!  I was enamored by its theme and concepts, and by the idea of the writers behind it being able to make what they wanted without the pressures and expectations of ignorant larger publishers restricting them.  And I DID like it, and appreciate it, make no mistake.  I recognize how interesting and thoughtful its setting and lore are, I recognize that it has a good story, I recognize that much of its cast is terrifically written and unique!  There is a ton about Pillars of Eternity 1 that is great and even brilliant, and I see this and acknowledge it and respect it...objectively.

It just somehow never really managed to get past that point of appreciation from afar, for me.  A few parts of it managed to penetrate deeper, like the Grieving Mother--such a great character!--but not enough that the game ever spoke to me the way I thought it was going to, the way that I think it did most other people.  I don’t know why that is.  I’ll openly admit that Pathfinder: Kingmaker, though most certainly a great RPG, doesn’t have the same weight, intellectual power, or significance that Pillars of Eternity 1 possesses...but I love Pathfinder: Kingmaker, and I only dispassionately appreciate Pillars of Eternity 1.  I don’t know why that is, but I can’t pretend otherwise.

So basically what I’m saying is that you should probably disregard everything I’m about to say in today’s rant and just come back next time, when maybe I’ll have a subject that I actually know something about.



The White March, Part 1: This add-on’s got some definite charms.  You gotta appreciate the polish, for starters--it’s not the only game to do this, but any time a development team pays such attention to detail that characters breathe vapor in cold environments, you’ve got a work that you know the creators truly wanted to do everything in their power to get right.  That and the fact that NPCs trying to put out a burning house are pathed to run back and forth to the nearby water (to fetch it and throw it on the fire) and even exchange dialogue while filling their buckets were examples of the DLC’s high level of polish that struck me right from the get-go.

Beyond the polish, I also laud the extent that the soul-reading was incorporated into the quest to open Durgan’s Battery--it’s as interesting an experience as it was in the main game, and a lot of effort is put into some of the memory/previous life recollections, even when they aren’t relevant to the quest itself.  The mayor’s memory, for example, is not the one you’re looking for in that quest, but it’s an engaging snapshot of her history (as well as that of the town) that’s well-written and spared no effort.  There’s some decent sidequests--I rather liked the one involving the head of the foundry, and the ongoing and evolving history of the quest where you’re collecting relics and soul-reading them is nicely done--and both Zahua and the Devil of Caroc are decently written characters.

With all that said, I gotta say...The White March kinda feels like Obsidian’s team mostly was trying to recapture the glory days of Icewind Dale.*  As a result, a lot of this DLC--most of it, really--feels very Dungeons-and-Dragons-generic to me.  Like most of it could have been taken from any base pre-written adventure outline that a DM might use for a placeholder session between main campaigns.  Durgan’s Battery, for example, doesn’t really feel like it has any actual personality of its own--it just comes off to me like a timid mash-up of a Dragon Age 1 dwarven stronghold and Durlag’s Tower from Baldur’s Gate 1, while not as compelling as either.  The abandoned dwarven fortress trope that Tolkien started is wearing thin these days, and little of Durgan’s Battery stands out enough to refresh the cliche.

Also, what’s even the point of the side story with Concelhaut?  It’s pointless and dull.  If the majority of The White March, Part 1 feels like an experienced DM just buying himself time with a generic premade outline while he works on the next part of his real campaign, then the little sidequest of infiltrating Concelhaut’s pad feels like a first time DM reading lines from a tabletop starter pack.

Lastly, while Zahua’s a good character, he absolutely should have been in the main game, not an add-on character.  Zahua’s quirk of reveling in suffering and discomfort as a way of Keeping It Real Bro is the kind of personality basis that best cements itself over time and quantity of examples.  If he’d been with me for the entire PoE1 adventure, then he’d be a much more singular, stand-out personality to me, because his character would have had the time to fully impress itself upon me.  Like...imagine if instead of being a major character in the show, Ed from Cowboy Bebop was only present in its movie.  She’d still be fun and engaging, but she wouldn’t be memorable, wouldn’t be iconic, as the personality and character she is, not for any lack of skill on the writers’ part, but simply for lack of time to really capitalize on who and what she is.  That’s how Zahua feels to me--a couple DLCs just don’t cut it for a singularly quirky character.

So yeah, in the end, The White March, Part 1 is not a bad add-on, but nothing about it rises high enough that I’d call it a good one, either.  And at an unreasonable $15 (I don’t see most players getting 15 hours out of it), “neither bad nor good” does not cut it.


The White March, Part 2: I guess I’d say this is a step up from the first add-on.  The main story of Part 2 has some significance and actually goes somewhere, for starters, even though that substance only shows up toward the end of the DLC’s overall quest.  Likewise, the side bit about who legally owns Caed Nua is a hell of a lot more interesting than competing with some mercenaries for the right to indulge in some breaking and entering of Concelhaut’s stupid tower.

With that said, it still doesn’t really seem like the whole thing amounts to all that much, as an adventure.  While the choice that the new enemies wind up posing regarding the restoration of the god Abydon, and how one views the past, is compelling material, it takes a while to get there, and until that point, this whole venture just feels like some more generic RPG mush with contrived enemies.  Meanwhile, the new character, Maneha, has 1 of the most thematically appropriate personal quests in the game, in theory, but in practice, it feels rushed and impersonal...and frankly, while she’s pleasant, affable, and outgoing, Maneha herself never really quite feels like she’s engaging with her companions as 1 of the party.  Something about her personality just feels like she took a wrong turn and wound up in a different game than she’d intended.

Ultimately?  While it feels like there’s more purpose and art tying this DLC to Pillars of Eternity 1 as a whole, it still seems, to me, not really worth the trouble to play through The White March, Part 2.  Particularly not when you’re expected to pay a whopping $15 for this one, too--you’re almost definitely not getting that many hours out of it!



And the verdict on PoE1’s DLC scene is: a big, fat, dreary Meh.  Your results may vary, of course.  As I said going into this, for whatever reason, the game as a whole didn’t resonate with me the way it should have, so there’s every chance I just lack the ability to properly appreciate The White March, through no fault of the add-ons themselves.

Still...still, I do think I stand by my feeling that they’re not worth it, at least to a degree.  Maybe I never did feel Pillars of Eternity 1 the way I should have, but I’ve never had a problem seeing why it’s lauded and in recognizing the merits of its story, cast, setting, and lore.  Yet I haven’t been struck by this professional respect for the game at any point through my White March experience...hell, there’ve been more than a few occasions during the course of these DLCs when I just sort of wanted it to be done with, already.  The White March may not be outright stupid, negative, or damaging the way most RPGs’ add-on collections seem to be, and certainly it’s a step up from the last DLC I experienced (that being Final Fantasy 7 Remake’s)...but it’s still just not good, at least not to me.  If Pillars of Eternity 1 is a gourmet meal that my palette just can’t quite adapt itself to, then The White March is the microwaved TV dinner of Fantasy: serviceable, but not much more than that.  It’d be hard to recommend even at a rational price point, but the fact that it comes to a total of $30--which is as much as the game itself is being sold for at this time--I advise putting this on the ever-growing list of add-ons to steer clear of.












** Glory days which didn’t even exist to start with; Icewind Dale 1 and 2 were boring and meandering and can only thrive in an environment of pure rose-tinted nostalgia.

General RPGs' Late Add-On Characters

Add-ons are, by now, a fact of life for RPGs, and video games as a whole.  Love’em or hate’em--and I know where I’ve come to stand on the matter--there’s a good chance these days that any major RPG release, and quite a few minor ones, will eventually (or immediately) be saddled with an extra adventure that you can pay to experience.  It may be a full-on extra story, or just a minor sidequest, but either way, this additional content almost inevitably comes with various new items, equipment, abilities, and/or game features to collect and earn.  It may even come with a new character who will join your party!

Hey, here’s an idea, developers?  Maybe you could, I dunno, just stop doing this?  Like, for real.  Stop.  Doing.  This.  

Stop.

Look, sometimes this isn’t a serious detriment to the RPG.  A character like Shale in Dragon Age 1, or Zaeed in Mass Effect 2, the DLCs they’re found within were available on Day 1.  Which isn’t a GOOD thing, obviously, because if an add-on is done at the time of the game’s release, then why the hell isn’t it just a part of the damn game to begin with?  But, at the very least, if you want the full experience of Zaeed or Shale as a party member who interacts with the adventure as it unfolds, it’s there to be had from the moment you acquire the game and start playing.

But generally, DLCs come out for a game after a good chunk of time has passed from its release date.  For example, the Far Harbor add-on for Fallout 4, which introduced the party member Longfellow, was finished 6 months after the game’s release.  By that time, just about any player who had started playing Fallout 4 shortly after its release date would be long since finished with its main plot and side content, so the only content that the player could utilize Longfellow in would be that of Far Harbor itself, and the later DLC package Nuka-World (which introduced its own crappy party member Gaige, who thus got even LESS time than Longfellow).  In a game where the party members to some degree react to and engage with the happenings of the story, and the introduction of new locations, that’s really frustrating.

Admittedly, this isn’t often a problem for me, personally, because I usually don’t play RPGs immediately after their launch.  Hell, it’s a miracle when I get to a game within 5 years of its publication.  So it didn’t cause any irritation for me when I played Pathfinder: Kingmaker a year after its launch, and thus had the DLC characters of Kalikke and Kanerah available to me from the start of the game to engage with and be a part of the plot.  But anyone who started playing the game on the day it released in September would almost surely have finished it, or at least been in its last stages, when the Wildcards DLC dropped in December.  If that player wanted to get the most out of the content he or she had just purchased, he or she would have to play the game through all over again to have the time and opportunity to fully experience all that the tiefling sisters offered as characters.  And hell, I was already planning to play Mass Effect 2 over again when the DLC that introduced Kasumi released--but not everyone was, so suddenly acquiring a character too late to have the chance to involve her in all the plot interactions which she was capable of, having Kasumi wind up as nothing more than an afterthought unless a whole other playthrough was initiated, had to be rather irritating to some.

And hey, I don’t always avoid the brunt of this annoyance.  I don’t actually know anything about the character Oom from Torment: Tides of Numenera, because I started playing that game the hour it came out, and finished well before Oom was completed and released.  And as it turns out, great though Tides of Numenera and its 1000-page-long script is, I don’t have 50 hours I can just conjure out of nowhere to drop on the game all over again to get to know the newbie.  

I do cut TToN a little slack on this matter, though, since Oom wasn’t something that was being sold as an extra so much as it was just a late addition of content that had been intended to be a part of the game but was unfinished as of the game’s release, and they added Oom to the game for free.

I do not extend that same generosity to Fire Emblem 16.

Hey, Nintendo!  The next time you feel like tacking a DLC onto your game that adds a whopping 4 separate characters to the cast, do you think that maybe, JUST FUCKING MAYBE, you could try releasing it just a liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiittle bit earlier?  Say, perhaps, while I’m still playing the fucking game?  It ain’t like I rushed through it, either.  I only started playing 3 Houses a month after its release, and it’s not a short adventure.  Especially when you’re insane enough to go through it 4 separate times to see every path of the game, since no one warned you that you can skip the Blue Lions route and miss absolutely nothing.  Nintendo, you really couldn’t have released the damn Dickensian Sewer Rats DLC at some point before the start of my FOURTH playthrough?

No, of course not, I forgot.  You had to get the DLCs for those lounge wear cosmetics and the game mechanic of cramming rotten fish down stray cats’ throats out into the world, first.  Obviously that’s the REAL priority, here.

Thankfully, Youtube Let’s Plays exist, and I didn’t have to waste my time and money buying a frankly subpar quartet of party members I would have to play the game a fifth time to fully experience.  May the 8 Scribes have mercy on the players who began another round of FE16 in earnest solely for the sake of the Ashen Wolves characters, though.

Just...if you’re gonna add characters to the game, characters who are meant to be a legitimate part of the cast and a part of the game’s story, do it at an appropriate time.  If you HAVE to lock them behind a DLC, which you shouldn’t, because that’s fucking garbage, but if you HAVE to, release that DLC soon enough that they can be an actual part of the damn story without forcing your player to commit to a 40-hour rerun.  Because honestly, at that point, Zahua and Kasumi and the Ashen Wolves and the Devil of Caroc and Longfellow and Kalikke and Kanerah and Maneha and Mintberry Crunch and Gaige and all the rest of these tardy-to-the-party members are almost more trouble than they’re worth.

Mass Effect 2's Thermal Clips

Mass Effect 1 was an inventive, awesome experience that opened a new science fiction world to its audience, one with the best kind of unlimited potential for the imagination to take hold of and explore.  It was more than just a space opera (though it was an excellent specimen of such), it was also a game that captured the exciting beauty inherent in interstellar exploration, the real-world majesty and promise of the cosmos that we as a species are still girding ourselves to engage in.  It was inevitable that ME1 would have a sequel...and while Mass Effect 2 was a far cry lesser than its predecessor, it was certainly an excellent and worthy continuation, and great in its own right.  What separates ME2 from the first game isn’t any particular failure, simply more a case of being unable to quite recapture the same magic that Mass Effect 1 seemed to effortlessly immerse itself within.  Less a shortcoming than just a different direction and perspective.

But Mass Effect 2 does have actual, demonstrable flaws.  And 1 of its more famous ones is the addition of the thermal clip to the game.  Basically, it’s like this: in Mass Effect 1, the firearm technology is so incredibly advanced that guns don’t actually use bullets any more.  Instead, you just stick a rod of metal in the firearm, and the gun’s inner workings shave tiny pieces off the matter, and use that as ammo, because with the technology of mass effects, every weapon can be a goddamn railgun, and that means anything solid shot from its barrel is more powerful than any conventional armament, even tiny metal shavings.  What this basically means is that all guns in Mass Effect 1 have limitless ammo, since you can stick a single rod in there and have enough ammo to perforate half a city.  The guns’ll overheat if you just keep firing them nonstop, forcing you to let them cool for a bit before continuing to fire, so it’s not like you can just run around reenacting Contra, but still, the benefits of guns that have essentially limitless ammo are fairly obvious.

And then, in Mass Effect 2, firearms "advance" again, as the technology of the Geth is reverse engineered, and now guns require thermal clips to fire.  Basically, while the ammo is still technically infinite, guns now refuse to fire if you don’t have a functional thermal clip in them to deal with the heat they generate, and you have to keep replacing these clips if you want to keep firing.  So, technically different from having limited ammo, but in practice, exactly the fucking same.  I think the explanation was that the Geth attack convinced the civilized galaxy that they wanted guns that could keep shooting faster for longer before needing a break due to overheating, or something, because the Geth’s own armaments had a very fast rate of fire thanks to this thermal clip system.

Riiiight.

This is not a new subject to criticize.  As explanations for gameplay limitations go, this one rates somewhere between the absurdity of why Fox couldn’t use his blaster in Star Fox Adventures, and that time EA tried to convince us that linear games don’t sell well any more.  Fans have been complaining and pointing out the utterly irrational stupidity behind this change from the moment ME2 hit the shelves.  Bioware’s decision to prioritize a gameplay mechanic they wanted more highly than what was right or natural for their story is well-documented.  And I’m not here to repeat it--the decision to switch from guns with infinite ammo to guns that stop working until you shove a new ammo-analogue into them is so transparently, obviously idiotic that there’s no damn need to; the only way you could possibly not figure it out yourself is if you happen to be a Bioware writer yourself.

So what am I here to do today, then?  Well, I’m here to point out the absurdity of the logistics of this change.

See, when the galaxy’s decision to switch to guns with limited ammunition is lambasted, the criticism is almost always based on how stupid and nonsensical it is to believe that a community of rational, thinking beings would consciously completely abandon weapons with limitless ammunition in all their military endeavors.  But what no one seems to realize is that this isn’t just a failure in storytelling from that angle--it’s also an outright plot hole.  Beyond how dumb it is, the galaxy’s universal adoption of the thermal-clip-based firearm is a logistical impossibility.

Consider the following facts for a moment.  A: In every firefight Shepard gets into in ME2 (and ME3), he can retrieve the thermal clips from the corpses of his fallen opponents.  B: The only guns Shepard has any option to obtain in ME2, period, are the ones that depend on thermal clips.  And most importantly, C: The events of Mass Effect 2 take place 2 years after those of Mass Effect 1.  A and B mean that, by all observable evidence, essentially all armed individuals in the galaxy are using the new thermal-clip-reliant guns (since the models of ME1 did not have thermal cooling capabilities adequate for the new weaponry, or else there wouldn’t have been new weaponry, so Shepard can’t be collecting thermal clips from enemies using the guns from ME1).  This is a conclusion generally backed up by the games themselves, too; I’m using A and B to prove a point that’s already implied anyway.  And when combined with C, this means that within the span of 2 years and no more than that, the entirety of a galaxy’s civilizations completely rearmed themselves with an entirely new stock of guns.

There are more than half a dozen different space-faring civilizations in Mass Effect, and every 1 of them had their entire military completely swap out their old firearms for new ones, uniformly and universally.  And not just their military, but their police, their security guards, their bodyguards, and anyone else whose job entails the possession and potential use of a firearm.  On every official level, military to law enforcement to civilian, a complete overhaul of weapons inventory has occurred   Think about that--think about the logistics of manufacturing literal millions if not billions of handguns, assault rifles, shotguns, sniper rifles, and so on to completely rearm every Council Race’s military entirely.  Of transporting those millions of guns.  Of retraining all users of these firearms, who are used to working with weapons without a thermal clip mechanic.  Of, for that matter, manufacturing billions of spare thermal clips for those weapons, then transporting them, stocking them, and storing them, for thousands of separate gun-using groups within each species.

It’s legitimately not possible.  If the Council Races had started rearming on the day that Sovereign got wrecked in Mass Effect 1, there’s still no conceivable way that by the time Sleeping Beauty pulls his ass off the lab table, resumes saving the universe, and starts working on hitting that Quarian booty, the entire civilized galaxy has thoroughly replaced every firearm in circulation and reserve.

And that’s generously giving the entirety of the 2 years to this process, which is infeasible in and of itself.  There’s no way that reverse-engineering the Geth weaponry was done immediately, even if the Council scientists were able to get a head-start thanks to Shepard’s general exploits in ME1.  There’s no way that the process wouldn’t be delayed by debate and discussion on every level of the Council and the races within it.  There’s no way every single institution using firearms would be immediately willing or even able to foot the bill to completely change out its inventory.*  A private security firm or a police department isn’t gonna need the latest tech for every single agent and every single operation they undertake--and that’s not even accounting for the usual capitalistic reticence to ever pay for new equipment if it’s in any way possible to avoid it, even when that new equipment is needed.  There’s no way the firearms’ designs would be immediately hashed out and able to be manufactured from the very start, even if the Geth tech had been reverse-engineered on Day 1.  There’s no way the manufacturing facilities wouldn’t need some time to be set up, and the lines from production to transportation established.  Even if it were somehow rationally possible for the entirety of the civilized galaxy to rearm itself entirely in the span of 2 years, it wouldn’t actually have those full 2 years to do so!

And it only gets worse when you consider that most of Mass Effect 2 takes place in the uncivilized frontiers of the galaxy, outside of Council space.  Are you trying to tell me that in addition to all the legitimate, official institutions of the galaxy fully restocking themselves with the latest weaponry, every single mercenary outfit, crime organization, and terrorist cell also went out of its way to acquire enough brand new guns for their every single member?  The thugs operating in the back alleys of Omega, they’re outfitted with weapon technology that’s on the exact same level as the highest military special forces operatives?  The Batarian Hegemony exists as a hostile faction proudly separated from the rest of the galaxy’s races, which has no reason to care about the threat of the Geth to the races of Council space,** but they’re 100% on board with following the Council’s decision to completely change the way all personal firearms work?  And then they somehow acquire and voluntarily adopt this outside technology, and even stick to the same schedule for this overhaul?

The fact is that when the chips are down, when all is said and done, the writers of an RPG or other work have a bunker they can crawl into when it comes to a character making illogical or uncharacteristic decisions.  George Lucas, the fucktards in charge of Star Trek: Picard, whoever was writing Shion in Xenosaga 3, every creative mind on the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise past the first movie, and definitely Bioware, they’re all very fond of this little impenetrable defense: they’re the writers, and what they say goes.  No matter how out of character, no matter how outright stupid, there is nothing technically impossible about most badly-written character decisions.  So the irrationality of the galaxy as a collective whole abandoning infinite-ammo weaponry entirely in favor of the heat sink system we see in Mass Effect 2 may be truly staggering, and every critique made against it may be completely legitimate, but Bioware’s writers can still dive into their little panic room, the same one they keep on hand for when someone so much as glances inquisitively at Dragon Age 2’s Anders, and insist that thermal clips are just what all the military experts across the galaxy unanimously agreed on, and in the end, that can’t be disproven.  Bioware even used this fact to mock its detractors on this point through the banter of Conrad and Shepard later in ME3, with Conrad pointing out how illogical the decision was and Shepard just coming back with “well that’s what the smart people wanted so I guess you must be wrong, buddy.”

But the logistics of basic possibility?  That’s a different matter.  It doesn’t matter how many battle experts Bioware tells us agreed on changing the system when the scope of that change simply could not be accomplished.  And that’s why I’ve always been surprised that on the many, many occasions when the thermal clip thing is criticized, the arguments almost always seem to be purely based on the irrationality of it, and never mention the fact that, beyond its stupidity, it’s also outright and obviously impossible.  Because it’s the latter point of debate that Bioware can’t just wave away: there is not even the faintest possibility that every corner of the civilized and uncivilized galaxy could have changed their armaments as thoroughly as they’re shown and said to have in the 2 years between Mass Effect 1 and 2.  The thermal clip system isn’t just stupid, it’s impossible, and it represents a failure on Bioware’s part.















* There’re thermal clips to be found during a mission in Mass Effect 2 in which Shepard has to put down some Geth that have reactivated and taken control of a Quarian vessel.  So apparently, we’re supposed to believe either that Tali didn’t happen to notice that every Geth arm she shipped home to be analyzed was holding a gun, or that the Quarians, famous scavengers who as a species can barely afford the duct tape that’s holding half their ships together, splurged on outfitting themselves with brand new guns.  Or maybe the Quarians just purchased a bunch of thermal clips, for guns they can’t afford.  It’s all equally ludicrous.

And that’s not even getting into the outright plothole that is Jacob’s Loyalty mission.


** For that matter, why would the merc groups and criminals care about their weapons being designed to better fight Geth, either?  Everything they intend to use their guns for is going to involve non-Geth targets.

General RPGs' Poison Status Ailment

The most common status ailment in RPGs, besides KO/Unconscious/Dead (which sort of doesn’t count anyway), is probably Poison.  Silence, Petrify, Paralyze, Bleed, Confuse, Sleep, they’re all popular and common enough, but when all is said and done, if your RPG has status ailments, the only 1 that you’re pretty much guaranteed to see within their ranks every time, is Poison.  Hell, the Poison status ailment will even show up to RPGs where it’s completely redundant--Mass Effect 3, for example, already has a Burning status ailment which gradually lowers HP, but it still has Poison, too, to do the same thing.  Poison is as much a bedrock of the RPG formula as swords, menus, and lazily using "The Legend of" as a way of getting out of creating a real title for the game.

Too bad it doesn’t really make much sense most of the time.

See, here’s the thing.  99% of the time, the Poison status effect causes a character’s HP to deplete by a set amount each turn.  Sometimes it can kill a character, but more often, it’ll bring them to 1 HP but never take them below it.*  Either way, though, Poison’s main thing, and almost always its only thing, is a gradual lowering of HP.  Which...really doesn’t have much to do with real, actual poison.

I mean, yeah, you can look at a process of gradually lowering HP as a case of having a poison gradually killing you.  And to be sure, gradually worsening your physical condition is definitely what poisons generally do.  But you could more effectively simulate that through a condition like Final Fantasy’s Countdown status ailment, wherein your character just straight up dies after a set number of turns.  Because, honestly, the symptoms that poisons generally induce really just don’t connect to the idea of constant HP loss.

Here are the most common effects of poisoning upon the human body in real life, according to familydoctor.org: Nausea and/or Vomiting, Diarrhea, Rash, Redness or Sores around the Mouth, Dry Mouth, Drooling or Foaming at the Mouth, Trouble Breathing, Dilated Pupils or Constricted Pupils, Confusion, Fainting, and Shaking or Seizures.  Quite a nasty little list, isn’t it?  And I think it’s only fair to add Paralysis to that list, because I believe that list is more about ingested poisons, and not toxins that have been introduced into your system by venomous creatures, which is actually the more common cause of Poison status in games.**  And from what I understand, paralysis is a common and very dangerous part of a LOT of venom.

But really, when you look at that list, not a lot of it really seems like it lines up with constant HP loss.  I mean, when you get right down to it, HP loss is pretty easy to define, in terms of its representation in RPG combat: it represents standard, traditional harm upon one’s person.  When an enemy punches, stabs, slices, burns, freezes, melts, electrocutes, crushes, or does some other form of basic, wounding damage to a character, HP is lost to show that damage.  So a status ailment like Bleeding, or Burn, those make a lot of sense as ones defined by a continuous loss of HP, because bleeding represents an ongoing harm that continues to lessen the body’s ability to function and stay alive, and when you’re burning, well, the fire causing the pain and damage is ongoing until it’s put out.

But Poison’s symptoms?  They don’t really seem to add up to the same sort of basic harm that HP loss implies.  Even if it’s a debilitating internal matter, that sort of thing still seems more akin to other status ailments that affect characters’ abilities to act, rather than outright ongoing damage.  I guess nausea and vomiting work for HP loss in a couple of special cases like the Loathing and South Park games, where Disgust is an actual elemental force as much as Fire and Ice, but that’s as far as it goes, really.

What they ought to do is fully commit to the relative newcomer, Bleed, to be the constant HP-draining status ailment for RPGs, going forward,*** and rework Poison into an entirely new thing.  Like, they could make Poison into something really cool as status ailments go, transform it from the mild annoyance it’s been into 1 of the nastier, more powerful inflictions to suffer from.  What they could do is, each turn a character has Poison, they suffer a varying status effect associated with real-world poisons and venoms.  They might be paralyzed this round, or be silenced to simulate their throat closing up, or have a 40% penalty on physical attack damage as they suffer from seizures making it impossible to swing a sword correctly, and so on.  And then the next round, a new symptom of poisoning hits the character...but there’s only a 30% chance that the previous round’s symptom disappears, so as time goes on, these ailment symptoms continue to stack and make the character more and more incapable of fighting.  And you could even have the element of a descent in condition toward death, the way the original HP loss was presumably intended to imply, by having a rule that once a character’s accumulated 4 or 5 symptoms, they die.

That’d be kind of interesting, right?  And it’d certainly give Poison a bit more bite as an ailment, which seems more realistic to me.  Ingested or injected toxins ain’t generally something you can solve or temporarily delay by gritting your teeth and slapping a bandage on yourself.  Poison should be a status ailment with enough gravity that you want to make a priority of curing it.  I say leave the inconvenience of HP drain to Bleed, and make Poison the serious threat that it realistically should be.



















* Which is itself something that makes no sense.  Why in the world does Poison in RPGs so frequently refuse to be the factor that kills you?  If someone in real life is brought to the brink of death by poison, and that poison isn’t done running through their system, then it sure as hell isn’t gonna just sit back and wait for them to recover a bit before continuing about its business; it’ll just keep going and finish you off.  But apparently whoever designs the poisons in RPG Land is a downright gentleman about their debilitating toxins.  Of all methods of attack, you wouldn’t think that poison would be the one that insists on giving you a fighting chance.


** And since we’re on the subject, this makes Poison unrealistic in yet another way, since most enemies induce the effect in ways that make it venom, not poison.  I mean, mushroom enemies that release spores in the air that you breathe, sure, poison.  Mages that cast a spell that inflicts the status ailment, alright, poison.  But bites from snakes, spiders, and demons?  Stings from bees, scorpions, and jellyfish?  Wounds from assassins’ daggers, darts, and arrows?  That should called Venom, not Poison, if we want to be technically accurate.

I guess there ARE a few games that distinguish the 2 (Aldorlea Games titles, with their insatiable lust for collecting and inventing status ailments, frequently have both Poison and Venom).  But even they usually just seem to use the distinction as a way of making a more powerful version of the Poison status ailment, rather than distinguishing Venom by its origins and delivery.


*** And if they really want multiple HP-loss status ailments, they can always take a page out of South Park: The Fractured but Whole’s book and have Bleed and Hemorrhage be separate status ailments to accomplish this.  Not to mention that Burn still does the trick, too.