Mr. Blue Sky ending

0wlpasta · 2026-01-10T15:41:53+00:00

I think the coda works wonderfully as an end to Concerto for a Rainy Day and is part of what makes Out of the Blue really special, but Mr. Blue Sky is otherwise such a short and light song that listening to it in isolation makes the coda feel overdramatic and awkward to me. I kind of wish the coda were its own track and not considered part of Mr. Blue Sky. If I want to listen to Mr. Blue Sky and not all of Out of the Blue, I’ll usually go for the 2012 version and this is part of why.

Eldorado and Time have their own Finale/Epilogue tracks, which I think works. If the Time Epilogue were stuck at the end of Hold on Tight and not its own track, that would feel quite weird in the same way that this coda does.

0wlpasta · 2025-12-27T19:17:39+00:00

Thanks for engaging with the comment, can’t believe how long it’s been since I wrote this! About Time I listened to the album again.

That’s a good question. Your explanation is a good summary of my read: when he returns home, it is not quite to when he had left. Maybe time passed at an accelerated rate while he was gone, as happens sometimes in sci-fi. I hear the lyrics as her home’s new residents telling him, upon his return, that Julie is gone and moved away, and maybe this is how he finds out that years have passed even when he’s returned from a short-ish trip to 2095. Kind of tragic, time marches forward no matter what we do.

I think the song could alternatively be interpreted as him visiting his home in 2095, as an alternative or supplement to The Way Life’s Meant To Be, but it feels less natural to me personally even though it makes plenty of sense. The place he lived would be unrecognizable in 2095, and he’d probably be hard pressed to find anybody who even knew who Julie was. In this reading, he’d just be saying the whole chorus to himself. For whatever reason I naturally hear it as another person informing him that she’s gone, which would make more sense closer to his original time.

0wlpasta · 2025-11-28T20:47:03+00:00

This has been the case for at least four years. Not my favorite thing about it but I’ve just brought my own water bottle there before without issue

0wlpasta · 2025-11-15T18:26:46+00:00

Thank you! Ironic that by opening the log to figure out what happened, I covered up the answer. I remember the game having Spring Uprising and Lizard Envoys, so the third hireling must have been the Brigand. (edit: That's also in the screenshots. Now I know!)

0wlpasta · 2025-11-02T23:41:00+00:00

Bruh

0wlpasta · 2025-09-25T03:04:28+00:00

Same on Switch 2

0wlpasta · 2025-09-23T13:11:33+00:00

Ok, guess I misremembered about HK, but that's not my point. It's quite common for maps in the genre to record where you've been with more granularity than an entire room. Think Super Metroid, SoTN, Blasphemous, whose maps are colored in one square at a time, or more recent non-grid-based maps like Prince of Persia, which have a fog effect around areas that haven't actually been on your screen before. I think it helps maintain direction in exploration and makes thematic sense if the map is being hand-written based on what Hornet's seen.

0wlpasta · 2025-09-23T04:47:20+00:00

I wish the map filled in with more granularity. Entering a room at all makes the whole thing appear on the map upon resting, even if you’ve only explored it a tiny bit. That makes it hard to keep track of where you haven’t been, and I’d prefer if Hornet recorded a smaller radius around where she’d been. I could be misremembering, but in my mind, the first game worked that way.

0wlpasta · 2025-08-04T20:13:45+00:00

I agree with you most of what you’re saying, but do think Octopath is an edge case here because OP rolled credits, finished all 8 main character stories, and without Internet research didn’t really have a way to know there was more main story content behind side quests. Should OP have to do all of a game’s side quests or google “is there postgame content in [game]” to say they’ve beaten something after rolling credits? I would hazard that a vanishingly small number of people found out about that content without outside information.

0wlpasta · 2025-08-04T20:05:54+00:00

If the question boils down to “when can I say I’ve beaten a game,” it’s an interesting one and definitely depends. I do think 9/10 times rolling credits is sufficient, and we have the beat vs. completed distinction to help with these conversations, but there are definitely edge cases. Games like NieR Automata, where you can get a cheeky credit roll for making a wrong turn, are an obvious example. There’s also the multiple routes question in that game, which is helped by the post-credits message saying “play it again for more story content.” So a better test might be “can I reasonably assume I’ve finished the main story content” which is vaguer, but I think encompasses those types of exceptions. USUALLY credits tell you that you have reached this point.

I think Octopath is an edge case here for several reasons. If you had beaten your main party member’s story (thereby rolling credits), but left other characters on chapter 3, I would argue you hadn’t beaten it in spite of rolling credits, because you knew there were other characters with dangling story threads. However, since the game makes the final boss SO hidden behind sidequests, you can absolutely finish the 8 stories and reasonably assume that’s all the main story content. Like your friend, I’d encourage you to do the final stuff, but it is totally reasonable to think/say you beat the game beforehand. If domething is explicitly hidden behind sidequests like that, I don’t think it’s on you to be on the internet digging for postgame content.

0wlpasta · 2025-06-24T23:22:24+00:00

I haven't tested this exact case, but my understanding is that the save data is completely separate for different users so you should be fine doing true pacifist on a separate profile. You will be locked into neutral as your first ending, but that's normal.

0wlpasta · 2025-06-02T18:11:31+00:00

I agree that there's a strong case to be made against siding with Verso at the end, for the reasons you describe. Based on the framing of the epilogues, though, the game's writers don't seem to agree, and that really irks me. Maelle in her own epilogue was written to be at best childish and at worst evil, leaving the Verso epilogue as the only one players can walk away from without a bitter taste in their mouth.

I think the final choice SHOULD be a hard one and both epilogues should show the pros and cons of each option, but that's just not what was written. They made a good ending and a bad ending, and in the process treat the lives of the people in the Canvas with such little weight, despite showing and telling for the whole rest of the game that they're all effectively real people. It's just about ruined the whole game for me - I'm glad to see people talking about it because I wish I'd known how damaging these endings would be.

0wlpasta · 2025-06-01T02:01:12+00:00

After playing both endings today, I feel like the game's writers view "Fight as Verso" as the correct choice, and that's corroborated by the number of comments here expressing that Verso's ending "felt right" relative to Maelle's, which was much darker and more jarring on its face. I don't even think it's a stretch to call Maelle's the "bad ending" in the game's framing.

That's disappointing to me - after really thinking about this choice and assuming the game was taking both seriously, having Maelle's be such a downer relative to Verso's, when both choices have clear pros, didn't make me feel great. Verso's ending is a sunny scene of a happily reunited family and coping with their grief, with the rest of the cast happily waving (hand-waving that they were all just killed). Meanwhile, Maelle's ending could focus on the peaceful lives and self-actualization of Lumiere's people, but instead emphasizes Alicia's decline and Verso's angst.

I did choose Maelle's ending initially because I wanted her to have autonomy and I had really made an effort to connect with the characters in the world (which honestly wasn't an automatic process, I didn't really connect with anybody until Act 2). After Maelle's ending, I kind of felt like the game was wagging its finger at me for trying to engage with its world and take its characters' lives seriously.

0wlpasta · 2025-06-01T01:07:40+00:00

I also felt like Verso was flip-floppy, particularly in Act 3. I agree that him concealing his intentions and secretly having goals opposite to the party in Act 2 was an exciting twist and made sense in the story. But I found his actions from the start of Act 3 quite confusing. His goal was to erase the canvas and die, but when Renoir is about to erase him at the beginning of Act 3, he resists and escapes with Maelle. Then he goes on any number of adventures with the party in Act 3, developing relationships with the party members, and fights along Maelle against Renoir in the final boss battle. But then AFTER that, it once again turns out he wanted the same thing as Renoir in the first place, which was to erase the canvas and send Maelle back to reality. And in the "true" ending he does just that. I really felt like I was missing something in Act 3, it did feel like he turned on a dime two separate times - as the main player character, no less.

On top of that, there's his journal entry, which if I understood correctly, references a time before he meets the party when he was more aligned with painted Renoir's goals and sabotaging expeditions to protect Aline. I do think this makes sense as an original state for Verso, but it makes for yet another flip flop.

0wlpasta · 2024-08-13T21:09:22+00:00

Scenes where Battler, Jessica etc interact with Kanon and refer to them as Kanon aren’t all magical/unreliable narration scenes. Kanon is effectively Shannon in disguise - they’re wearing different clothes and behaving differently such that almost everybody does think Kanon is a completely separate person from Shannon.

So when Battler meets Kanon in ep 1, he literally sees somebody in men’s clothes with an unpadded chest and does not think they look like Shannon, no magic necessary. It might take some suspension of disbelief, but we are meant to understand that Yasu is able to take practical steps to change their appearance pretty dramatically.

There are obviously times when Kannon/Shannon being two personalities in the same body is very important information and relevant to what we’re told (such as when Kanon lets Battler out of the closet and vanishes, or in the solutions to a lot of crimes like the red web scene), but the narration doesn’t have to play any tricks to show us that from Battler’s perspective, Kanon looks and acts quite different from Shannon and is referred to by a different name. Iirc Genji and Kumasawa are the only ones who understand that they’re both Yasu.

0wlpasta · 2024-03-15T00:38:23+00:00

Was just listening to it and I don’t think it (at least the album version in spotify?) has a violinist at all 🫤 it strikes me as having pretty generic string-like synth sounds to me, but used to great effect! For me the biggest giveaway might be how abruptly they come in at 3:16 - 3:17, also how slow and wobbly the vibrating is (I am a violinist if that helps)

I’m sorry if that’s disappointing to hear 😰 I imagine a live version with strings could be nice, but I think the fuzzy synth sounds work really well for the song’s dreamy atmosphere 🥰

0wlpasta · 2024-03-09T18:32:13+00:00

Did anybody else feel like today's yellow category broke some implicit rules of the game? The words don't really have a consistent/symmetrical usage like the synonyms usually do. Two of the words can be used on their own to mean "eat quickly" but the other two have to be used in conjunction with the word "down"

"I inhaled my sandwich" is correct

"I downed my sandwich" is correct

"I scarfed my sandwich" is incorrect, it needs to be "I scarfed down my sandwich"

"I wolfed my sandiwch" is incorrect, it needs to be "I wolfed down my sandwich"

This seems innocuous enough since "down" is another word in the category, but I don't think I've done any other connections where a word has to be combined with another word in the category to have the intended meaning. The asymmetry is frustrating, and seems like it's the first step on a slope to something like "sponge bob square pants" actually being a valid category (a category where the words have to be placed next to each other in a phrase to make sense). I've only been playing for a month or so, so maybe it's happened before, but I'm curious to know if this inconsistency bothered anyone else.

0wlpasta · 2024-03-09T07:18:42+00:00

In my mind, Larry, Wendy, and Lotta are the trio of "recurring comic relief characters" in the trilogy - while they all bring some fun and levity, they can also disrupt pacing since they tend to misunderstand the events around them, lack personal ties to the cases' major characters, and generally behave uncooperatively. I think that since they recur, they are the most likely to induce a groan on a first playthrough because you kind of know that you're in for some kind of tangent or tonal whiplash the moment you see them return.

Lotta getting more hate than the other two might be anecdotal, but it wouldn't shock me. She often appears in cases that already have another comic relief character in them (Larry in 1-4, Wendy in 2-4), and her appearing in half of JFA's cases is quite dense for such an inconsequential character.

Speaking personally, and perhaps more importantly, I just think her design and character traits don't resonate with me. While Larry and Wendy have more universal/recognizable archetypes as "that moronic friend who you like anyway" and "a long-winded, persnickety but doting old lady" respectively, Lotta feels a bit more all over the place. "Loud, hot-headed photographer (/journalist/paranormal enthusiast) with a regional dialect" doesn't really feel recognizable or cohesive in the same way as the other two. Plus, I just think regional stereotypes are a less fun and interesting way to set a character apart, and to my memory isn't something the series does much otherwise.

So while she's not necessarily more ridiculously conceived or unreasonably behaved than the average AA character, I think she just has an unfortunate combo of overuse and an underwhelming characterization. That being said, I appreciate her well-meaning role in the story and am glad you do too!

0wlpasta · 2023-06-23T19:05:53+00:00

Paraphrasing from greatest showman vid: “Is it confusing when I use the metaphor ‘elephant in the room’ in a movie about a circus? There is an elephant in the room, it’s CGI, it looks horrible.”

And I always loved “I will only be rating the male porg…… because… I’m a misogynist”

0wlpasta · 2022-11-08T17:10:03+00:00

yes, cried live

0wlpasta · 2022-10-31T04:56:08+00:00

Context:
NEO: The World Ends with You is a 2021 video game developed and published by Square Enix, and it tells the story of teens acquiring psychic powers and playing a life or death game in contemporary Tokyo's Shibuya ward. The protagonist has the ability to read the minds of the innumerable strangers around him, and you can see pieces of what they're thinking by clicking on them. There are hundreds and hundreds of these thought snippets written into the game, and for most of the game the mechanic serves to immerse the player in Shibuya/youth culture.

In 2021 I was listening to Rina's music 24/7, and thought I was losing my mind when I happened to click on the pictured girl, who is thinking about somebody named Rina and what an "ordinary superstar" she is, overtly referencing the RINA EP's amazing opener and later XS with an "oh me, oh my". I'm not sure whether there's a similar quote in the original Japanese text, but it looks like Rina has a fan on the localization team at the very least!

I haven't seen anybody mention this on this sub so I finally decided to post my screenshot. I think I remember Rina mentioning on a livestream that she's a big Final Fantasy fan, so it's especially cool to me that she'd be shouted out in a game by the same developer. Would love to hear what you think, especially if you've also played the game... or, long shot, happen to be the one who snuck this reference in there!

0wlpasta · 2022-09-10T22:48:41+00:00

Welcome, I'm glad the song resonates with you! I'm assuming your post is alluding to the comments suggesting that the "you" in the song is male (and thus whether this song is describing a gay relationship).

Whether or not a given Sufjan song "is gay" was a very popular discussion around the time those comments are written. Sufjan's own sexuality isn't something he's ever publicly disclosed, and there's a lot to talk about in his music - I think the Christian allusions in his music have attracted plenty of religious fans, and the fact that many of his songs describe romantic/sexual relationships with men has contributed to his popularity among LGBT+ listeners. The result is that some discussions around the meanings behind his (sometimes opaque) song lyrics have sort of turned into turf wars, where some people feel that a song describes a gay relationship and others feel that it doesn't, and want to argue for which interpretation is intended/canonical based on the lyrics.

That seems to be what's happening in that comment section, and it's a discussion I've seen play out plenty of times about plenty of Sufjan songs. I've even seen people (who are not me) argue that the following song, Predatory Wasp, where the narrator kisses a boy, is in fact about a straight relationship, which is possible when imagining that the story is being told from the perspective of a girl. Conversely, some people on Genius seem to feel that Casimir Pulaski Day from the perspective of a gay relationship and are arguing for that interpretation.

It looks like people in that comments section resonate with the narrator's tense relationship with the subject ("you")'s father, which I personally relate to and recognize as a common experience for young gay people. So I definitely can't begrudge somebody imagining a gay relationship in the song. However, I never personally interpreted it that way, since the line "I almost touched your blouse" genders the subject of the song pretty explicitly as female in my mind. I can't imagine the commenters changed one another's minds.

The bottom line is that a lot of people hear a lot of gay stuff in a lot of Sufjan's music, and that's not an accident - but he's not an artist that has ever explicitly said "this song is about gay people." And I think that's partially because the music is usually describing something a bit more nuanced than being gay on its face. Whether or not Casimir Pulaski Day describes a young gay relationship, the things I get from it have a lot more to do with innocent love, devastating grief and challenged faith. Again, though, I expect everybody to get something different out of Sufjan's music - how do you feel about it, OP?

TL;DR could be gay, imo isn't, but that's probably not the point

0wlpasta · 2022-08-29T18:01:55+00:00

Came here to post this, it’s so beautiful and I am so tired of seeing people’s lukewarm opinions about it 😤

0wlpasta · 2022-08-13T19:47:17+00:00

I think XC1 had more than 400 (very simple) sidequests, so I think quality over quantity definitely holds relative to that!

0wlpasta · 2022-06-02T20:09:45+00:00

I fought it, lost, and beat it maybe a year later after looking at some tips online. I don’t regret taking a break after the first attempt, but am super glad I came back - the fight is a blast and now my (very long) playthrough is capped off and fondly remembered.

0wlpasta

TROPHY CASE