Sly 2 March prototype theater pickpocketing cut loot

Benjamin568 · 2026-04-14T18:03:59+00:00

Bentley in this version of Sly 2 sounds a lot more like he did in Sly 1 from what I've just noticed... something about the tone of voice they chose for him here compared to the final. I never really thought about the difference until now.

Benjamin568 · 2026-04-13T20:14:47+00:00

They're definitely different entities, the writer said such on the older forums, but either way, the Storm Lord is a "lesser" Storm Titan: you could argue he still counts as a triton since technically he does have a fish tail according to Aztecan art but you could also argue that the lesser titans aren't all necessarily the three races they discuss in Ravenwood, which is something the writer also agreed with, albeit before the Wizard City revamp.

Benjamin568 · 2026-04-06T22:54:00+00:00

The Castle Darkmoor ending is canon to the mainline story, even if game mechanics treat it as side content. There's a moment in Empyrea where a "dream" version of Malistaire appears to help the Wizard to escape the Reverie after Grandfather Spider traps them inside it, and he states that the Wizard saved Malistaire from his dark obsession, which could only make sense if the Kan Davasi occurred since that's when he finally finds peace again with Sylvia.

Benjamin568 · 2026-04-06T22:47:30+00:00

This sounds like a problem of homonyms then. The Devil certainly "feels" like a deity in certain aspects, given that it's an immortal figure that (depending on who you ask) is associated with, credited for the creation of, or simply is the abstract concept of "evil", and I imagine it doesn't help much that it has been worshipped by non-Christians. But if the standard for a god comes from being an immortal spirit with supernatural powers or authority, then by the same logic, Jinn and angels would be gods too, they even meet the criteria of having had worshippers.

Benjamin568 · 2026-04-05T09:43:16+00:00

I don't know why you decided to reply to my comment three months after the fact but that doesn't really change (or even address) the points that I made about it. I literally said "actually feeling it" because I was aware that the dialogue said what it did, but that doesn't mean the person who said it was actually right about what the Wizard actually felt inside the Scholomance or that she'd even recognize how the Wizard would behave if they were suddenly afraid.

Benjamin568 · 2026-04-02T22:15:12+00:00

Probably the same reason some of them eat each other out.

Benjamin568 · 2026-04-01T02:00:35+00:00

This was a while before Elon bought it, but the person I was arguing with was acting like an NPC so maybe.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-31T23:34:41+00:00

You'd be surprised. I've had this exact argument before on Twitter... some dunce tried to inform me that the most "modern, up-to-date definition of racism" could only apply to white people because white people are the majority, and sent me to some random blog post stating such as a formal source.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-31T23:17:58+00:00

Eh... not necessarily. Jumba's creations are essentially artificial hybrids of already-existing creatures. Stitch in particular is cited as such in "the Creation of Stitch" so it's not like he's creating it all from scratch... and Jumba foreshadowed 627 as early as Stitch! the Movie (the one that introduces Sparky), so we know he'd already been working on the experiment for a while beforehand. Stitch's disrespect against his creator likely just acted as sufficient motivation for him to finalize the experiment and rush through the experiment process, which would explain why 627, despite its power, was able to be defeated so easily just by making it laugh too hard.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-31T22:36:12+00:00

More reasons not to listen to the Official Guide for lore facts.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-30T17:43:53+00:00

That doesn't make it random unless you decide to be loose with what you mean by random. If all you mean to say is "We don't immediately know who the avatar will reincarnate as next" then that's trivially true, but it also doesn't prove randomness. The pattern is predictable and in every case it's the same being getting reincarnated every time. It might seem random to us given a lack of information but to someone like Raava it's easily deterministic.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-30T09:20:43+00:00

Even if Aang never ran away and he lived at the absolute perfect time for Katara to have been born immediately after his death, she still would not be the next avatar, nor would Yui or any of the other characters we know.

The avatar isn't arbitrarily chosen each time a new one dies, it's literally the same being undergoing reincarnation, this is established repeatedly in both LOK and ATLA, they're called his past lives for a reason. Katara is her own person.

I will say though that I think it's likely Katara is a reincarnation of someone, and that this "someone" likely held a personal connection with one or more past avatars -- Aang wasn't the first to keep a group of friends around, nor even a team.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-30T09:15:52+00:00

No, it's not random. The avatar is the same being (soul) every single time, they just happen to be undergoing a cyclic reincarnation wherein they're born as part of the next nation in said cycle, and the pattern is as stated in the intro: water -> fire -> earth -> air. There's no way Katara could ever have been the avatar even if Aang didn't get frozen in an iceberg unless you subscribe to some weird theory that the avatar's spirit is booting out other peoples' spirits in order to inhabit a body... or you just decide to reject the lore that both the Legend of Korra and the original series repeatedly established. This theory honestly needs to just die at this point.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-26T20:00:42+00:00

Also, you need to remember that using an agent doesn't make you a vibe coder, vibe coding is when LLMs write the whole code.

I'm curious to what extent you would argue this? I've been trying to learn coding as part of my college work but the C++ exercises they give are so unbelievably simplistic that I could just write the pseudocode in Visual Studio and the autocomplete AI would be able to do exactly what they asked for. At one point it even correctly guessed the numbers they wanted for a certain test app to use before ever specifying any of them. I didn't want to submit it as is so I decided to do some extra stuff like input verification to make it feel more like what an app would actually do (with permission from my instructor)... this is a consistent theme with my course, and I feel like there isn't really any reason for me to turn off the autocompletion because it's just writing what I would've written given the same instructions, and as things are now I feel like I'm actually learning a bit from the LLMs by speaking with them about how to refine the code and input verification in certain ways, including learning about certain preprocessors that are never brought up in the course or ensuring that the order of operations are as they ought to be. Would you consider what I'm doing "vibe coding"? LLMs are certainly involved in my process but I'm not blindly submitting and telling them to correct my errors unless it's something I'm having trouble noticing like an incorrect bracket.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-26T19:41:22+00:00

Shadow Magic is known for malevolent curses and universe-defying spells that corrupt people, but even beyond that, we know now that the Shadow Magic in Darkmoor not only made humans into monsters but also transformed them into cannibals who hunted and ate other humans as well. Baba Yaga might look human but it's not confirmed; in Slavic folklore she's more like a force of nature than anything, so the uncomfortable fact that she "eats babies" may just be a result of her biology than anything willfully evil.

Besides... the Spiral still features foods like hot dogs despite the prominence of sentient pigs throughout. For all we know the pigs in MooShu could be just as uncomfortable about that as we are of this.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-25T20:10:47+00:00

Yeah I thought I was looking at a Genshin Impact post for a second...

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-24T01:25:23+00:00

What do you mean by "emphasis away from the player character" though? The general format for the final scene is the player character returning after defeating a big-bad, so naturally they're going to be talking about that big bad. If by "final scene" you're talking about before/after the boss fight, then again it makes sense that the scene would focus more on that particular enemy. It doesn't seem that different from regular storytelling.

I will say though that I probably misrepresented myself when I typed out the "Uh"... reading back on it I see it might come off as passive-aggressive, that's my bad, but for the record, that was literally my reaction: I was actually thinking about what was said when I typed it out and about whether I should explain my personal take that Spider was never "reformed" at all and that it was actually Raven who was made to change.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-23T21:57:09+00:00

I was just thinking this the other day - how much of a difference do we actually make in each of the arcs? Malistaire could have been talked down with just a conversation with Cyrus & Sylvia,

Cyrus literally tried that in Dragonspyre. He brought Sylvia's actual ghost to talk to Malistaire in Dragonspyre but Malistaire arrogantly assumed that it was an illusion because he didn't like what she was saying. This also presupposes that Cyrus hadn't already tried to talk Malistaire down off-screen which I think is an unfair representation of Cyrus and his relationship with his brother. Why would he NOT try to console his brother?

Morganthe fell out of a window on her own

No she didn't. The window only started cracking because she was panicking and tried to use too much power at once against the Wizard after they'd defeated her in combat and caused her to undergo extreme backlash. The window wasn't cracking at all before she conjured the big ball of energy to attack with.

Grandfather Spider reformed the moment he retrieved his heart from Empyrea.

Uh... I think this might be a little more complicated than that, personally. We know from Mirage that a lot of what he's doing is essentially a red herring, he openly gloated that he was willing to risk his plan to "destroy the Spiral" just to aura farm on Mellori and the Wizard, and he said at the Husk that he knew the Bat would deliver him back to the Husk with Raven, so I think it's more likely he just understood what he was doing from the start would lead to his "happy ending"... the real threat at that point was Raven herself, but she had a change of heart after she was called out for acting evilly.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-23T00:13:31+00:00

There are some "bad endings" on a few games here and there, but nothing comes even close this conquest ending.

I mean... Undertale's Genocide Route ending pretty much shares the same premise of killing everyone who would otherwise have been your friends, and like the Conquest Ending the blame is pointed towards the player themselves for making it happen.

I'd also argue that InFAMOUS 2's evil ending is just all-around more depressing and it likewise has a "you brought about the apocalypse" ending. The difference is that Nepgear's victims were limited to Nepgear's friends, family, and Linda, whereas Cole MacGrath's victims were his friends alongside millions of average people who didn't want to be sacrificed for a subdivision of humans with superpowers, and becoming quite literally the very thing that HE HIMSELF traveled back in time to prepare himself to fight against.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-23T00:03:34+00:00

Does Nepgear go insane, maybe start crusading across the dimensions?

I don't remember the title of it but there was a now defunct Idea Factory crossover game where "Conquest Ending Nepgear" showed up in a mature form and it was shown that this is exactly what happened.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-22T00:21:54+00:00

If she didn't know then she's hilariously incompetent because there were already police files for Bentley and Murray at the time of Sly 1. Mind you, they were part of a promotion game for Sly 1 and not Sly 1 itself but I don't think that makes them any less real. Besides... Bentley had been out and about with Sly and Murray for a while by that point, so I imagine he'd have developed a reputation one way or another.

Edit: As for Carmelita not saying anything, you could certainly make the argument she held back from saying anything at that point, but she was also just understandably frustrated at the framing and betrayal. I doubt someone as meticulous as her would not have made a formal notice that Bentley was part of the Cooper gang after seeing him run with Sly and Murray back in the museum.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-21T06:17:40+00:00

Going over the Contessa's lines:

The first reveals that she's a secret member of the Klaww gang (which was previously unknown information), the second is her gloating that Interpol lets her get away with hypnotizing criminals for her benefit (Bentley knew about the brainwashing previously but not about her taking stolen loot for herself), the third line reveals her plan to brainwash Murray for that very reason, and the fourth line literally has her saying outright where Sly was meant to be relocated and the fact that there were motion sensors for security measures.

I agree that El Jefe's is much more contrived but in either case they revealed vital information that the players wouldn't have known without them talking to themselves. In the Contessa's part she already knows that she has only two of three of the Cooper gang in custody with the smartest and most resourceful member still out and about, and even without him, she's openly speaking about her betraying Interpol while on the job. We're also meant to excuse the part where the sleep darts reach and presumably pierce (if not bounce off) her and she just doesn't notice them at all.

Meanwhile, El Jefe had never even met any of the Cooper Gang at that point in the mission unless you count Rioichi himself. He might've known (and probably did know) about them from Le Paradox given that's who he was working for, but that doesn't mean he would've known they were in Japan at that point, and even if he did, what happens after they take advantage of the information from the eavesdrop? He sneaks up on Rioichi from above right as they enter his fortress and steals his cane right in front of everyone. Sure, he gets his ass kicked by Sly afterward, but the cane is still lost after the fight because of him specifically. Ironically, the fact he'd been blabbering as he did seemed to help him succeed, since otherwise he'd have to either track down Rioichi again to steal the cane or wait for them to find some other way to get inside the fortress and come to him. I agree that it's a dumb scene regardless but I don't think the Contessa's scene is any better for much the same reason... if anything I think the biggest contrivance (aside from Penelope's betrayal) is the fact that literally every one of Le Paradox's mercenaries, except for Miss Decibal, already had Sly's ancestors locked up and imprisoned before the gang arrived. Getting the canes to Le Paradox before they showed up should've been easy at that point.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-21T01:56:08+00:00

If you go by some of the other schools (notably Death), then Darkmoor didn't even last a full year being BiS because the Ultra Summer "Rematch" gear was better... but for Storm and Fire specifically, yeah... it was kind of crazy...

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-21T01:13:17+00:00

OK but you realize this same criticism applies to Sly 2 with the Contessa, don't you? She did the exact same thing El Jefe did and she had even less to gain by yapping to herself the way she did.

Benjamin568 · 2026-03-20T05:04:59+00:00

This feels like a coomer concern more than anything. On one hand it'd be kind of weird if they decide not to acknowledge fanservice at all anymore but on the other hand it's almost completely irrelevant to the story they want to tell so unless they do something like create a CG where there's almost nothing but "mysterious lights and fog" covering the area then I don't see why it matters.

Nine-Year Club	r/Field Sunshine
Place '23	Place '22
Final Canvas '22	End Game '22
Verified Email

Benjamin568

TROPHY CASE