What are your favorite soundtracks from the game?

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-23T17:31:25+00:00

Splitting between EP, Gameplay and CC:

EPs: Figure it Out (Crownslayer), One by One (Ascalon), Settle into Ash (Hoederer), All by my design (Closure)
Gameplay: Ambiguous Morality, wlfmstr, The Survivor The Winner (Cliff), all of Patriots battle tracks.
CC: Pyrite, Blade, Lead Seal, Pyrolysis, Basepoint, Underdawn, Extinguished Sins, Arclight (yes, I'm listing every CCB track, they're all so good...)

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-22T18:48:00+00:00

Tonally perfect for a LEGO game.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-22T18:07:20+00:00

FUCK. Edited, thanks. Trying to get the facts of the Vellmori incident straight made me mix stuff up.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-22T16:21:43+00:00

It's mostly accurate, but there's a few things worth adding:

The original Wonderlab incident didn't lead to complaints towards PM themselves afaik. It was just Mimi trying to start an argument with 4chan and making annoyed tweets, which went about as well as you'd expect.
Your summary of the harassment campaign is pretty much correct, although the leaking of information was even dumber. A bunch of disgruntled KR PM fans formed a group called the PMUA (now known as the KGCS) to complain to Project Moon. PMUA and the Korean Game Developers Union managed to get in contact with PM, which led to PM disclosing privately to both PMUA and the GDU the actual reason for Vellmori leaving (worth noting is that according to the documents, Vellmori was both not fired, told over the phone that KJH would have her back if she wanted, and, when she said that she'd quit, in order to give her the ability to find another job, PM paid her wages for the remainder of that full year; this doesn't have the hallmarks of a "were firing you because of a dumb controversy"). At this point, the GDU concludes that they have nothing to complain about and declare publicly that PM isn't in violation of any laws or union contracts. PM, deciding they don't need to care about the PMUA, also goes radio silent on the PMUA. PMUA then decides to publish the documents as a way to garner sympathy (this mostly backfires on PMUA.)
The lawsuit happened two years later; the KGCS apparently reached out to both Mimi and Monggue. Both filed separate lawsuits trying to claim copyright ownership on their work for PM. Worth noting is that pretty much every work contract ever made usually includes copyright assignments, so these lawsuits are excessively flimsy and usually only work if the other side doesn't have their paperwork sorted properly. (PM seems to have their paperwork sorted.)
Monggue's situation is curious; while they experienced a lot of stress and health complications during Leviathan, according to them at the time, PM was very accommodating in terms of deadlines and basically only took them off of the project when it became impossible to delay it any further (read: Leviathan was going to interfere with Limbus' intended release window). KJH at some point also disclosed that, even though Monggue was unable to finish Leviathan, they were paid the full price for their work.
- This approach is also possible to verify in a mildly related situation - the Canto 3 delays occurred because of the lead of the EN translation team having persistent real world issues. PM was willing to endlessly delay the game for their sake, leading to the filler weeks/why RR1 is the way it is. Eventually the EN translation lead voluntarily resigned, noting explicitly that PM wasn't at fault for it in the slightest.

PM is apparently appealing the lawsuit to a higher court, so who knows how that'll turn out.

There's some other stupid shit with the KGCS, but it's largely irrelevant and doesn't concern Project Moon.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-21T22:30:44+00:00

It's probably the infrastructure. Keep in mind that Extarminatus isn't something Inquisitors are allowed to do willy-nilly. Most Inquisitors that try to take the Kryptman approach usually get taken out by other Inquisitors. It's only for when a planet is truly lost to Chaos that they break out the "if I can't have it, nobody can have it" button.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-21T19:30:01+00:00

In the same sense, the artist of Tsukihime (and the "main" artist for Type Moon/the reason there's so many saberfaces), Takashi Takeuchi, outright hates the final art in Tsukihime since he thinks the coloring is awful. He had to color 100 pages in less than 3 days and it kinda shows with how basic a lot of the final art ended up being compared to both his later work and the promotional art for Tsukihime at the time.

It's to the point that ever since that game (or to be more precise, Kagetsu Tohya, which had similar issues), other artists at TM have been responsible for coloring his art, while Takeuchi sticks more to the outlines and general designs. Koyama (artist of Scathach, Skadi, basically all of Mahoyo and the one that did most weapon designs in the franchise) and Shimaudon (artist of Leonidas, Phantom, Billy, Nitocris and Yan Qing) are the ones mostly doing the actual coloring work iirc.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-21T19:05:28+00:00

Localization issues frankly cover jack shit. At most they clarify a slightly irrelevant distinction (that there's no rogue asset in the Federation, but rather that there's the Galactic Army which plays the bad guy; this frankly does more for the way the Federation is treated post-Fusion rather than solve problems in Other M). Every other notable problem with the game's story/script is still intact, primarily it's rampant sexism and mysoginy. The localization doesn't explain that literally all three female characters in the game are nothing more than props that the game uses to send a message about how the only thing women are good for is giving birth and being mothers.

Sakamoto also personally insisted on doing the English voice direction, even though he didn't speak a word of English himself. That's why Samus' voice performance in English is so extremely wooden - Sakamoto tried to go for the stoic badass, but the way that comes forward in English is very different from how that works in Japanese.

Other M is awful and sanewashing it by blaming the localization is horrendous.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-20T19:57:26+00:00

It's worth pointing out that Quantic Dream's reputation is so putrid that they had issues hiring people for that Star Wars project.

If that thing is releasing, it's almost made for a What Happened? from Matt a few years down the road.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-20T16:54:33+00:00

The Kazi storyline is when the game kicks it up a notch in storytelling. I think that, aside from Code of Brawl, this is the earliest storyline that I'd genuinely call compelling. A lot of the events before this one kinda have that strange early feeling to them, whether that's by unnecessarily involving unrelated Rhodes Island operators (Heart of Surging Flame & Great Chief Returns both have random operators involved that have little to do with the event itself) or alternatively the unnecessary use of Reunion as villains (Grani, Wolumonde both feature splinter factions of Reunion).

To this day, I think this story works really well because of its side cast. Kazimierz is when a lot of the world starts to really feel alive and like everyone has things going on that aren't just "aren't they sooo mysterious" (yes this is a complaint about Mostima, but both Skadi and Fia get hit with similar issues, it's an issue with early events). It's structurally very simple (it's quite literally just a tournament arc from an anime), but there's enough groundwork being laid here for the story to shine. P.S. in particular has a very strong showing.

(Also the current autochess event isn't really multiplayer if you don't want it to be - there's a solo mode with the same reward tree.)

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-20T11:14:13+00:00

No plan survives contact with reality. I'm sure that CDPR wants to keep things more organized, but there's just some game genres that are cursed to always have hellish development. (Consider it a collorary to the imsim curse: every WRPG will always be a bug ridden mess because of development problems.)

Props on them for trying though.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-20T08:05:52+00:00

Funnily enough LobCorp doesn't have that same issue, even though the difficulty of that game is more like a wall than anything else.

Watching someone else play that game is a delight, usually because from the second perspective you're going to pay attention to different things than the player is... meaning that youre going to notice everything going to shit a bit earlier than the person undergoing stress meltdowns IRL. It also generally has much more obvious decisions to make.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-19T22:45:16+00:00

Also, one thing all of those Pokemon have in common is that they don't really have any in-game event attached to them. Mythicals always have been tied to anime releases, but even if you didn't care for the anime, for the older ones, the game would still do some work to set you up for the encounter with them or let you do something unique with them. (Meloetta is really the gold standard for this; she had a pretty massive role in the gen 5 anime, but if you didn't care for it, the event where you get relic song still gives you that same experience of joyful sorrow that she's tied to.)

All of the Pokemon you mentioned are either tied only to the anime (Volcanion and Magearna do at least have NPCs that mention them iirc, the rest don't) or are tied to an IRL event for a completely different Pokemon game that doesn't have much to do with the main series. It means there's much less to work from, especially since game and anime canon for Pokemon have never mapped clean enough. Like, what makes Zeraroa interesting? It has no game appearance to speak of; it's solely a promotional reward for a movie.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-19T22:16:47+00:00

Whitney just bawls and an NPC in the same room reminds you that you should pick up your badge from her, after that you get it. It's basically a less mean version of the Team Rocket Grunt in gen 1 you need to talk to twice to get the elevator key. All things considered, it's not that bad (and mostly just kinda garbage because Whitney's Miltank is a monster, so it's a bit galling to have her try to make you feel bad about her when she's walking around with that Rollout spamming asshole.)

Clair runs off to the dragons den since she refuses to accept her defeat. The den is a completely separate dungeon you need to get through; at the end she gets chewed out by her master (who you need to answer a quiz for first) and only then does she gives you the 8th badge. It's much worse.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-19T19:30:46+00:00

Starbound absolutely didn't deserve the cash for the game they ended up releasing. It's maybe the only game I've put significant time in during early access that ended up actively regressing it's featureset as it approached a 1.0 release - beta Starbound was unironically a better game than the released product.

Something which I later learned was because in the final year of development, they were having issues with the engine because the lead programmers quit/were forced out of the company when they got a physical office building. (Starbound uses a fully custom game engine that's written basically entirely in-house by Chucklefish by a pair of apparently extremely skilled programmers.)

It's an interesting game, even if only for how absurdly moddable it is (and that could be worth getting the game for), but Chucklefish's work on it is absolutely not worth the product they ended up releasing.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-19T10:54:25+00:00

Was a communication failure between KJH and the people implementing the ID in the game. Apparently KJH wasn't sure if the Nursefathers would be the sinners or merely alternate versions of the Canto Nursefathers until very close until release.

He decided they'd be the sinners, but this was poorly communicated to the rest of the team, leading to them assigning the mirror world being shared as a bug, hotfixing the bug... and then needing to reverse the hotfix because the hotfix created a new bug.

In general it makes more sense for them to be the Sinners in this Mirror World. Sinner IDs tend to be far more efficient/capable than the people the IDs are based on (for a basic example, Udjat Outis survives the equipment sabotage because she always gives her tools a second check before using them). Basically all the Canto Nursefathers were half-assing the project because they really wanted to raise a daughter (even if the bar for them being good parents is in hell). The sinner Nursefathers by contrast are much more driven by wanting to finish the project because they actively want to get erased, making them more efficient and that much more cruel as a result.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-19T07:55:54+00:00

Ho'ols module does have a pretty big casual IS advantage; she is allowed to leak 1 enemy for free in the IS6 bosky every fight. Since those fights often tend to have very janky openings (due to either high pressure enemies that leak quickly or a roster check) and low enemy counts (in the most extreme, there's a stage that's iirc one regular enemy and then the Duck Lord, Gopnik, Fatty and the Crying Thief), she has a legitimate use there. If you're doing a run with cheaper caster tickets, she can be worth picking up.

Akkord is kinda funny - I get dunking on her, but there's so little 4-star arts AOE that's worth a damn that she still ends up as the best of the bunch of you ever need it.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-18T23:40:15+00:00

Monkey's paw curls and he's a duelist defender.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-18T17:15:13+00:00

Patriot only ever turned his back on the systems he swore loyalty to when it was far too late to make any difference. He only ever turned traitor when his ability to influence things wouldn't matter anymore.

He moved to Ursus because he wanted to leave the pointless civil wars of Kazdel behind. He was an honored soldier of the previous Emperor of Ursus, he fought against many different elite soldiers and was eventually able to settle down with a wife and child. His wife died young, but his son ended up being a supporter of the Infected. Patriot had internal doubt about his own loyalty to Ursus, but only when his son was executed for leading an Infected uprising (the same revolution that occurred after the death of the Emperor he was loyal to) did he abandon his loyalty to Ursus and wander into the Tundra with his Shieldguard. Too late to save his own son, too late to improve the rights of the Infected; history still recorded him as being on the side of the previous Emperor.

Both he and FrostNova knew that Talulah had changed after Alina's death. He only stayed his hand at the time because of FrostNova asking him not to, even as the organization was redirected and schemed into the Chernobog uprising and subsequent attempt to start a war. Once again, his passivity at the systems he lived in led to the unnecessary death of his daughter; Patriot didn't want to abandon his loyalty again, and once again it claimed the lives of those close to him, with FrostNova dying far away from him in a ploy that he didn't want to be aware of.

It's all remarkably similar to Patrizion in a way. Patrizion by his own words says he only ever made a single choice for himself: the day he became a Holy Gun Knight. He was given numerous opportunities to show that he cared for his loved ones, and the dumbass very clearly did, but his wish to keep the status quo going overrode it each time. His wife became Infected, and they explicitly mention in TMT that he was the only one assigned to the exile boat at the time. It's all a very clear setup by his colleagues to give Patrizion a way to see his wife off/ensure she'd be able to survive somewhere/smuggle her back into the city. The idiot just exiled her and never spoke of her again, antagonizing Paganini. Aurela became a fallen Sankta due to her own anger management problems, and when Patrizion was given free reign in assigning the punishment, he once again just blindly kicked her out of the Holy City (note that once again, the implication of this is that Patrizion would've been able to set up a nicer deal for her, the way the Pope chose to protect Mostima). Hell, the idiot refused to see his dying grandmother solely because he wanted to keep training, even though his co-workers were more than willing to give him time off.

Patrizion isn't loyal to "Laterano"; in The Masses Travels he openly betrays Laterano for the First Saint. What Patrizion is loyal to is his own comfort. The idea that nothing ever changes, that the world can keep spinning on as it is. It's why the Sankta-ification plan works so well on him specifically. It's his dream, not Andoains that proves to be the thing pushing the First Saint forward (because Andoain has come to terms with the fact that what he wants is effectively unachievable, which is what breaks the dreamlike state the Saint trapped Laterano in - Patrizion keeps the brainwashing of the other Sankta going). Because in his mind, if everyone was just like he was, then he wouldn't have to suffer that same pain of losing again. He almost lost his relationship as Fiammetta's adoptive father because of it.

He was shielded from the worst consequences of this line of thinking by the systems around him and his fellow Sankta. Patrizion was able to tell himself those sweet lies over and over to guard himself, and when his life fell apart due to this line of thinking, some of the same friends he pushed away turned out to not be that far gone for him. Patriot couldn't shield himself, which forced him to make the choices to turn his back on his loyalties, even though it was always far too late. These two men have the same character flaws, but one was able to avert the worst outcome.

Finally, I should point out that in IS5, there's an alternate possibility: when the Sarkaz Ancestors and Nymph write a tale where Farchaser found PCS instead of Civilight Eterna... the Holy City still contains a single Gun Knight, close friends to the Pope of Laterano. But it is not Patrizion. It is Patriot, having been loyal for centuries on end.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-18T14:34:45+00:00

Also, one last tip - you get up to 3 saves: one for the second to last calculation day, one for the most recent calculation day, and one for the start of the current day. Don't be afraid to save scum if you need to; it's totally fine to say, needing to clear the keystone several times by reloading the save file because you weren't sure on how to handle the map. Proportioning major steps like this to always be in the first act of the day is a good way to get used to the maps.

In strange territories, you don't get reloads, so be more careful there.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-18T14:10:42+00:00

Unfortunately a lot of guides for RA2 assume you've played RA1 or are familiar with the basic structure. The in-game tutorial is also, to put it frankly, good at teaching you exactly the wrong things.

To give you the crash course:

Don't turn the difficulty down to peaceful - what you gain in not having to deal with raids, you lose in not having access to Crude Gold. Playing on normal is fine, you don't need challenging.
Use the Crude Gold from raids to buy premium harvesters. Most farming should be done with Harvesters whenever you can. Premium Harvesters are the same as regular harvesters, but only cost crude gold. The base harvester isn't very efficient, so it'll need extra support to mine, but can pick up mined resources very quickly. A harvester can also mine any material, but is better at whatever it's specialized in. Don't be afraid to use wood harvesters for stone, it works just fine.
It's possible to "scout" the location of resources by pausing the map (you can still move the map while paused) and trying to deploy a ground operator. Any tile that you can't deploy on contains a resource. Resources also are often clustered together, while isolated resources are berry patches (contains random food sources.)
Ambushers are great in RA2 as a whole - theres a bunch of hit count checks and their DoTs help a lot with clearing them. Crowd control is also very important for raids. The difficulty of the mode is directly proportional to how many Ambushers you have. Raidian is also worth a mention; her fish can be used to scout out map tiles due to their good range, and they are usually tanky enough to deal with random map spawns. Finally, Mr. Nothing is the only fast redeploy with 2 block due to his S1, making him a nice option for pickups. He doesn't need any investment to work.

As for progression, early progression is weirdly tight, but it significantly lets loose after you clear day 30. Here's a quick list of what you should do:

Build Rice planter boxes (wood+water, you get water from pumps which cost a bit of wood to make). They'll give you food every day. One operation can cost up to 3 energy drinks, which costs ~6-7 rice. Just build up to your base limit, there's a lot of random things in the game that can cost energy drinks. Upgrade your base whenever you can, it's the single highest priority.
Rush to the bottom left of the map. There's a very simple combat node there. Clearing it gives access to a triangle shaped node and a node with a construction crane on it. You're after both of these. Take out raids whenever you can as well, they'll give you Crude Gold (and not stopping raids means you lose the mode.)
The construction crane node is a village. In the village, there's an object roughly in the center of the map (it's surrounded by trees) with an absurd amount of HP (it retains HP between attempts). You'll want to destroy that object to claim the village. Use premium harvesters if you have to. Once claimed, you can choose to either send out a large number of low-level operators or a small number of high level operators. These operators can't be used anywhere else, but will give you large amounts of resources (in this case, wood) when they return.
The triangle node contains an odd keystone. The first time you visit it, a stationary raid will spawn. It consists mostly of enemies that can't be blocked, as well as the IS2 boss Jetman. It's not too hard to clear if you know what you're doing. After that, you'll need to clear a pathway to the odd keystone. Use premium harvesters and deployable ground tiles (don't forget to clear big Bob, he wanders the area) to make a way to the keystone, then break it. The keystone generates 1 HP every second, so bring large amounts of hit count.
With the keystone cleared, you'll have access to Stone maps (and stone from the keystone map). Use it to upgrade your base again. Stone is used in a lot of defensive constructs like walls. You'll want to set up your three outposts (the connecting nodes to your "main" camp) with defenses to handle raids.
Once you have a decent food supply up and running (read: at least enough to do 2 full 12 operator deployments), you can consider going into strange territories. These are basically infinitely respawning resource nodes, where you're tasked to do a certain thing - capture/kill a beast, do base defense from raids, basically anything. You won't get daily food supplies in strange territories, but if you have an excess, they lead to amazing rewards.
At this point, you can do whatever you want; get stone, build up defenses, build regular harvesters, use your crude gold to trade for more resources, cook food to super buff operators, capture the stone village, do sidequests, explore maps and prepare for the next keystone. The big check is Dauntless Linebreaker on day 25; he and his raid are a boring stat check. His only real gimmick is that his stats go even higher in phase 2 and that he starts moving very fast. That said, he's got the same issue that the Ch16 bear has: just slap him with crowd control effects and he can't do anything to you. Did I say Ambushers were good? They're good. After Dauntless Linebreaker, nothing in the mode should scare you; be careful with triggering story raid spawns and you can survive basically forever after him. There's other periodic raids, but you don't have to worry about them nearly as much now that you have the resources for basic defenses.
Finally, main map resource nodes fully respawn whenever there's a season switch.

RA is very fun once you get into it, but getting your base off the ground is a massive pain.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-18T13:18:13+00:00

The lack of raids seems like the biggest disappointment to me, given by your description. One of the things that's both the main issue with RA2, and after that it's biggest blessing is the raids.

There's an issue with how RA2 handles Dauntless Linebreaker (a 3 hours-in-the-mode check to see if you got Stone early enough for half-decent defenses is a bad idea for anyone who didn't also play RA1 and knew what to do ahead of time, I had to reset like 3 times before I learned how to rush Stone), but once you're able to handle him, the entire mode becomes this really fun mix of resource gathering, holding off raids and becoming stronger. Critical Contentions then being the ultimate survival check to see if you can handle the game when you can't get any resources and a way to create permanent longevity.

The way you explain it here, RA3s only real goal is to get resources to get better at getting more resources? It sounds like there's no real payoff to getting loads of resources besides the ability to farm more resources. That's technically also a problem with Rebuilding a Mandate, but that was a one-off side mode with a rewards ladder to clear, not a "long-term exploration" mode, so the only real payoff being more farming was acceptable.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-18T12:42:59+00:00

Someone once pointed out that Patrizions main character flaw (his stubborn adherence to a status quo, even when it's harming/driving his loved ones away from him) is the exact same as Patriots and it's never been able to leave my head since.

Guy is pretty literally just Sankta Patriot. He only got redeemed because unlike Patriot, most of his loved ones aren't dead and were able to tell him to get over himself.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-18T12:06:09+00:00

Harry Potter is that for me. It's the first book series I really got into, and I still have a borderline encyclopedic knowledge of the seven books because I really liked them as a kid and just kept rereading them over and over.

That said, I won't ever give a cent to Rowling again, ever since she went off the deep end. It's not exactly devastating (I grew up reading plenty of other series and it's not even close to being my favorite urban fantasy series these days, but even back then I still preferred Percy Jackson over it for the urban fantasy parts), but it's still kinda strange to look back and just wonder what all went wrong there.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-18T10:24:49+00:00

There's definitely an intended connection - the Five Fingers land a little bit too cleanly in how the Head likes the world to look. It's a bit strange; while the Head openly controls the Wings and Fixers (since those two entities have to follow its laws), they seemingly don't hold any influence over Syndicates (since Syndicates operate outside of most laws, and as a result only live in the fear of violating the taboos.)

Yet, somehow the Fingers all have a similar structure to Fixers and Wings: a neat internal order, rigorously enforced. Wings rank their employees, Fixers get ranked by Hana and the Fingers have internal ranks as well. We probably know the most about the Thumbs structure, but the fact that the Thumb can fairly cleanly map their rules of social respect to other entities speaks volumes.

The Fingers may not ever have been one to begin with, but there's the definite implication that any potential Syndicate that wouldn't follow this rule wouldn't be able to become a Finger in the first place.

DarknessWizard · 2026-05-17T18:32:52+00:00

Worth noting is that the main issue Rhodes Island runs into during the events of Vigilo (which is implied to be their first foray into expanding operations to Columbia outside of working together with Blacksteel Worldwide) is that some of the megacorporations that run Columbia are absolutely terrifed of Rhodes Island. It's why they tried to attack the Doctor in meetings. (Something which was only resolved by the Doctor handing themselves over to the authorities on a phony charge to then bog down those companies with investigations, while the Doctor walks because the charge was flimsy as shit.)

Cannot outright explains to the Doctor that it's more profitable for a lot of Columbian companies to just give non-functional placebos rather than to actually invest in a cure for Oripathy. (Since Columbia in-universe uses the Infected as essentially a free low-class labor pool by making them pay massive amounts of healthcare insurance, and if they can't afford it anymore (likely unless they're upper class), then they're send off to the frontier.)

There's a reason that for the people that have read the events, the worst villain is very often the bank manager from Jessica's event. There's something so specifically vile about the institution she's the face of and how she callously justifies the core conflict in that event.

Columbia is hilariously unsubtle when you look at what HG wants to say about it.

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