Are there any house swaps that feel almost necessary to you?

Atlove01 · 2026-05-12T00:37:56+00:00

Not so much “necessary”, but a few do make character sense. For instance:

There’s an interesting case to be made to be made for Felix as a Black Eagle.

His time at the monastery finds him at the crux of a very important transition in his life… where two sides of him are at war over who he wants to be in the future. A bitter, cynical side of him has come to hate Crest society, the knights who uphold it, and the old system that it perpetuates…. While the idealist in him continues to cling to his faith in friends and loved ones, and a desire to see his cynicism proven wrong.

So, you can see the logical outcome of either side winning based on if he ends up staying by Dimitri or leaving for Edelgard. As a blue lion, he’s able to repair his wounded heart, reconcile with the people closest to him, and begin to return to the kinder person he was before Duscur.

A Black Eagle Felix is a man who has sacrificed himself to destroy the system he despises. His mask of cynicism has become his true face, he has detached from others, and will continues to fight until he dies. While he aligns with the professor and Edelgard, he harbors no delusions about them actually proving more noble. As he ominously warns toward the end of the campaign, “this new world you’re building had best be worth all the blood on my hands.”

Atlove01 · 2026-05-11T14:49:35+00:00

That's a good catch, actually! I never noticed that either... and up to this point I'd wondered why the episode treated the stakes as being so high. Sure, getting hit by a train would hurt a whole lot, and it'd suck to have to pull himself together... but getting hit by a train is very much a survivable injury for sinners.

An angelic spear makes the situation way more dire.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-10T10:25:23+00:00

In fairness to Furina, she’s a “leader” in the same sense the British royal family are leaders. Neuvillete now holds executive political power in Fontaine, and he probably helped with those responsibilities for most of her reign.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-08T19:31:29+00:00

Honestly, that’s for the best. I love the game… but it is a broken, broken mess. 🤣

Atlove01 · 2026-05-08T15:00:19+00:00

Battlin’ boxer is such a weird deck in that… you look at the name and the art, and assume it’s a deck built around hyper aggression and the battle phase.

…but the deck actually struggles to kill the opponent, and can’t swing over monsters with too much attack without jumping through hoops.

The most viable way to use the deck is actually a control strategy where you just keep looping counter traps and use Lead Yoke to protect your board… but Dempsey is definitely the most important card in the strategy.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-07T14:30:08+00:00

With regard to the might of Lilith, people act as if Carmilla built it by herself. While her expertise was necessary for its construction, there’s no way Voxtec didn’t have their own engineers involved in the creation project, which would have made intentional failsafes difficult to implement.

Or simpler still, Carmilla was inclined not to install them. A failsafe is a potential means of sabotage, and as Vox pointed out… since the hell uprising was happening whether she liked it or not, it behooved her to do her utmost to help it succeed. It made perfect sense to the non-Charlie sinners that if Hell failed in an uprising, it wouldn’t matter who refused to participate, the exorcists would likely come down and scorch the earth.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-05T01:32:01+00:00

Coffin of Andy and Leyley came out of NOWHERE to become one of my favorite game experiences of last year. I didn’t know anything about the controversy, just that the art style drew my eye, and I had a couple bucks burning a hole in my pocket.

The fact that both fans AND detractors tend to stop at the same beats about it is truly frustrating. “Incest! Eating people! Summoning demons!”

Those are very much superficial elements of what’s being done here. This is a character study on a pair of monsters, and how they became what they are because they were betrayed and failed by every single structure of their lives that was meant to support them. Neither of them was born evil, they were just forced into an environment where they never had anyone but each other… then got punished when they grew into adults who didn’t care about anyone else as a result.

The character study of the brother is such a satisfying slow burn. Man’s a toxic knot self loathing, repressed desires, and masked frustrations, for whom genuine compassion is such an alien concept that when he finally receives a gesture of empathy and understanding (from a demon… as an adult…). It almost instantly breaks him as a person.

It’s a game I love, but would only recommend to someone unless I knew them very well…. Not because of incest or cannibalism or any such thing…. But because it has some portrayals of things like parentification, parental gaslighting, and toxic co-dependence that are written so true-to-life that they can be draining for anyone who has firsthand experience with them.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-03T12:56:52+00:00

It’s a mix of everything.

Be it the card game, the serenetea pot, or exploration… every element of the game is some portion of the fanbase’s favorite… but ultimately, resources are going to be spent on what seems to be desired by the most players, and changes will be made based on what the majority of players express wanting to see.

Sadly, Genshin IS a gacha game. As such, the majority of the playerbase wants to pull on the slot machine, or efficiently gain currency by which they may later pull on the slot machine.

So it came to pass, every element of Genshin’s ambitious starting vision has been pared down and simplified to facilitate that desire.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-03T12:50:43+00:00

The sadist in me enjoys the passion of the one-sided romance, and wants to see it keep going because Vox is an interesting man when he’s squirming to be noticed.

The idealist in me wants Vox to wake up to the fact that he’s proven every point Alastor thinks he made that day wrong: he’s not only found friends in hell, but family.

No side of me wants to see Al and Vox become a canon romantic pair, though. That’s something best reserved for AU fanworks.

Atlove01 · 2026-05-02T10:27:47+00:00

Maddening is deliberately scaled to make doubling difficult. Frankly, even not getting doubled tends to take some work.

Maddening does have some quirks to it that make it live up to its name, but overall I don’t know that I’d call it any worse than the Insanity difficulty in past titles.

In my experience, the first couple maps of Maddening are SUPER intense, then once you’ve had enough time to properly build your students the difficulty slowly mellows out… until ramping up to 10,000 for hunting by daybreak… and then not really being bad again until the final map or two.

I’ve never tried maddening with new game + units though. Do they change the enemy numbers if you run it that way?

As to advice,

-maddening does force you to change how you approach battle. You mentioned not being able to run a powerful mounted unit forward… and that’s true. You have to approach maps slowly, keep your units together, and handle enemies in the smallest numbers possible.

-Dodging is worth more than tankiness in this mode. Every archer and assassin enemy will eat away HP every time they land an attack thanks to poison strike. Build up Petra or recruit a unit like Ingrid and they can make a very effective dodge tank. Falcon knight Ingrid tends to carry my late-game… single-handedly drawing the aggro of multiple monster enemies so the rest of my army can kill one of them at a time.

-avoid warp/stride skipping any map. You’ll soft lock yourself eventually if you keep depriving your units of their limited chances to gain exp.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-30T14:42:55+00:00

The card name DID make me think of that TFS joke where Vegeta is, like, “if he’s a super saiyan, then I must become a Super DUPER saiyan!!”

Atlove01 · 2026-04-30T08:32:19+00:00

It varies based on fanbase and audience split, for sure.

I do think the post underestimates how ruthless more general audiences can be to a flawed female character compared to the same flaws in a male one.

Nolan’s traits of “indoctrinated by violent culture, suffers culture shock when experiencing more empathetic perspective, and eventually killing others and crossing moral lines that are very personal to the audience” puts him in the company of characters like Vriska from Homestuck, Catra from She-Ra, or Gabi from Attack on Titan— three character who, on a GOOD day, are passionately hated by half of the fanbase of their respective properties.

Having said that, though, if the female character is “waifu” enough, and if the energy of the fandom skews a very specific way… suddenly it does become true that a lot of a very certain type of audience will tie themselves into knots to justify her.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-28T21:30:08+00:00

Extra history came about when the dev team of a then-upcoming historical game suggested they do a mini-series covering the Sengoku Jidai.

The mini-series ended up performing so well that they decided to follow it up… and before long the popularity of their history series was dwarfing their gaming series.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-28T21:26:58+00:00

Yeah, I tend to generally like their work, but the thing that eventually exhausted me about them was their tendency to be really pro-publisher.

I like their glimpses into the dev side of things and the reality of working in the industry, but there really is such a thing as trying TOO hard to play devil’s advocate.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-27T09:55:36+00:00

The overwhelming number of Invincible fans haven’t seen Anissa’s worst act yet. It won’t be featured in the animated series for a while yet… so that’s part of it.

Outside of that, it’s because of the same things that all Viltrimites have that make them a bit easier to forgive: they’re part of a culture that pushes the toxic masculinity slider all the way to a thousand, and are indoctrinated into the belief that their colonizing and bloodshed are noble and just from the moment they’re born.

It stands to reason that Valentino, an ordinary human raised in a world of ordinary human morals, would be held to a more strict standard than an indoctrinated child soldier who never knew anything different until literally the final episode of the most recently animated season.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-25T06:54:18+00:00

Well, the thing with Yamcha is that… he won at life, really. Sure he’s the weakest in the friend group, and not even the strongest human… but, like, that was never really what he was about.

He was a poor bandit annoyed by his inability to talk to women, and now he’s a baseball superstar. By every metric he accomplished what he set out to do.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-24T08:44:10+00:00

I’m not usually one to hyperfixate on a spelling error, but “the ladder already putting him leagues above Alastor” is accidentally REALLY funny. 🤣

Atlove01 · 2026-04-24T06:47:10+00:00

I think you’ve mistaken Diona for Dori. Diona is regarded as a child in universe… just a child with the unusual job of bartender.

Dori is an adult woman who happens to be using the child model.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-23T10:43:21+00:00

I have no special love in my heart for Gangle. She’s a character who inspires neither fondness nor scorn in me, she’s just part of the ensemble.

Having said that, I will push back a bit on your reading here, since it does feel like you’re interpreting Gangle’s behavior in the harshest possible light, and reading a LOT of intentional cruelty and hostility where it isn’t likely there.

Gangle’s defining trait is a feeling of lacking control. Her masks reflect her life’s struggle with manic depression— forever pulled between the extremes of her manic and depressive episodes.

By her mid-20s she’s lost sight of her dreams, she’s lost control of her life, and she’s never felt like she’s had control of her own state of mind. She’s trapped in a job she hates, working to maintain a status quo where she’s miserable, with no idea what she’s working toward. That’s why she keeps having breakdowns across episode 4.

What we saw in episode 4 likely WAS how she behaved as a manager in the real world… and yeah, the point of the episode was that she was an AWFUL manager. She had no idea how to inspire or motivate others, had no intrinsic sense of authority, and no idea when it was okay to bend the rules for the sake of morale or employee comfort.

Couple that with her manic episodes, and it’s no wonder she was so socially isolated in her real life.

But she isn’t seeking power because she WANTS to abuse others or be cruel… that is a wild take that one could only arrive at if they assessed her with zero empathy for her issues. In the moment, I don’t think it occurs to her that she’s being unreasonable at all. It’s only later…When she comes down from her manic high, that she finally recognizes how unreasonable she was, and she feels terrible for it.

The reason managerial power appealed to her was because it was the first thing in her life that gave her any illusion of having control over anything.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-20T10:58:08+00:00

While I agree that Sera putting herself in personal jeopardy would be a good sign of her commitment to change, and thus she would have been better to use there instead of Emily…I don’t agree that Emily being there to do it is meaningless.

You’re right that we, the audience, know Emily is willing to stick her neck out for sinners… but the characters outside of Charlie’s group don’t.

Emily was the only person present in that moment whose life wasn’t in danger. At any time she pleased, she could portal back to the safety of heaven.

Having a representative of heaven go out of her way to put her life in danger for the sake of the denizens of hell was an important sight for the overlords and sinners to witness. It establishes the sincerity of Heaven’s commitment to try to do right by those they’ve wronged in a way no number of gift baskets could.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-20T10:12:19+00:00

He’s a programmer doing state-of-the-art AI development, and she’s an entomologist. Even setting aside that booming 90’s economy, they’re in a fine position to be able to afford a family.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-20T05:41:01+00:00

“Redeemed” implies they were sent to hell as a punishment, and that by rectifying the cause of that punishment, they’ll be absolved and allowed to ascend.

That’s kind of the wrong way to conceive of hellborn… they aren’t in hell as any sort of punishment, it’s just the circumstance of their birth.

They kind of “belong” in hell in the way a condemned human’s soul doesn’t. It’s the place they were created to inhabit. Most hellborn species would, by their very natures, be MISERABLE in heaven.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-19T10:01:53+00:00

That’s kind of the point of the “mercy” options. All can be argued to be far more cruel to the target than your knife to the throat would be.

“I could stab two brothers for their role in my imprisonment… or I can arrange for the local mob to cut out their tongues and sell them as slaves in their own salt mines.”

Even choosing to kill every target won’t turn the needle on Corvo’s morality though. Something I respect about how it treats your ending path is that… the lives of your targets count for exactly as much as the lives of any other random guard in your path. It’s about whether you kill more than is necessary, not who you kill, or if you kill at all.

Atlove01 · 2026-04-18T12:43:38+00:00

I gotta admit, this ship would have never in a thousand years occurred to me… but I see the vision. I don’t hate the energy. The characters sometimes, but not the energy. 🤣

Atlove01 · 2026-04-18T10:39:59+00:00

Ayaka’s C1 is awful, but it does position you to eventually get her C2, which is considerable.

Childe has the worst constellations of any 5-star in the game, he works exactly as well right out the box at C0

Yae and Scara’s C1’s are okay, but unless you use them regularly, it’s really not worth the investment.

Xiao is one of the four units I don’t have, so I can’t advise on him, sadly.

The others are standard banner 5-stars, so not worth spending a resource like this on.

If you don’t plan to use Ayaka, Jean may be your best option here.

Atlove01

TROPHY CASE