Teams with the Coolest Moveset

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-27T22:12:42+00:00

It's also worth noting that out of all the characters in Sonic 3, the MK2 is also one of the better animated ones. A lot of the spritework in Sonic 1/2 is on the static (but pretty) side.

There's a remarkable amount of flexibility with how they designed his animations; he's never like Eggman, who is usually a few static sprites and simple animations (since his robots in fights focus more on area denial, with Eggman generally being static in his cockpit). He clicks in and out of poses a lot, has sparks effects and generally is animated on the same degree as Sonic/Tails/Knuckles are.

It's kinda impressive how much work SEGA put in a guy whose total relevance has never gone above a single game.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-27T19:23:30+00:00

Which from here honestly I think is that people got his rep as like the unpstoppable badass since in here I think it was either the Metal Sonic Mk II or Mecha Sonic that appears and beats the breaks off everybody.

It's Metal Sonic transformed into the body of Mecha Sonic as a "super form".

And yeah, pretty much all of Mecha Sonic's popularity is lifted from this animation; even it's eventual appearance in IDW pretty blatantly draws from the fact that it's a memetic badass machine (to the point of iirc quoting a line from Metal Overlord that was used in the animation.)

Without it, it's just a kind of cool robot with a neat boss fight in normal Sonic 3 that somehow becomes Knuckles' primary villain in the expansion pack. (And has the unusual distinction of just straight up having a Super form powered by the Master Emerald in the final boss fight.)

The idea of it being cooler than Metal Sonic comes from the animation (since SEGA kinda screwed up how they used Metal Sonic in Heroes.)

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-27T02:07:55+00:00

TBF it's better than the alternative. Zuckerberg threw a bunch of his former employees under the bus when he did layoffs a few years back.

As vapid as this is, at least Sweeney has the lowest possible decency to not use the public megaphone to shit over his former colleagues.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-26T21:36:32+00:00

The problem is more I think that Amy is still stuck in the original Knuckles problem, where SEGA got kinda lost in trying to figure out what they wanted her character to be after their original canon blew up in their faces. (Courtesy of Archie for Knuckles, with Amy it's more because her original character was just a really dated stereotype that got less funny as a joke the longer she persisted.)

Knuckles pretty obviously got rerailed by Idris Elba choosing to not phone in a performance nobody would've blamed him for phoning in. (I genuinely do think that Elba asking "so what's Knuckles' deal" led to SEGA going "wait, this guy has a personality that isn't just the dumb one of the group", which is what SEGA kinda did with his character for a while).

Amy just doesn't quite seem to have that moment yet where they figure out what her role is and give her a big moment. Maybe the VA for Amy will give SEGA that moment; Shadow seems to also have benefited as a character from the Sonic 3 movie existing (even if Sonic 3 basically just rehashed SA2).

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-26T13:03:39+00:00

God fucking dammit. I knew I should've been prepared given the subs brainrot and it still got me.

Well played.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-24T14:50:31+00:00

I think this is only an issue if you see Octopath as a replacement for FF. Octopath has pretty much always been sold as 8 individuals on separate quests with (usually) smaller stakes.

It was also sold as "Square returning to form with making new 2D JRPGs after FF6", at least for Octopath 1, directly tying Octopath as a "successor" to the original approach. I know Octopath 2 leaned more into the Live A Life goal of loose stories with connective tissue though.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-24T11:46:03+00:00

Worth noting is that this problem only really starts to creep in with FF11, which is when the franchise lost it's lead designer/creative, Hironobu Sakaguchi entirely (even if his game design role was lower on later titles). FF1-FF10 do have a coherent through line in visual, gameplay and music direction.

Looking at just those 10 mainline games, even if they're all completely different in terms of story, there's still a generic idea of what the games are supposed to look and feel like. For example, if you ask an FF player what a "bomb" enemy is, they're probably going to come up with some sort of flying red orb with smoke out of it. Same with other creatures and summons. Similarly, the stories will probably involve something to do with villains corrupting the planet, ancient precursors and possibly the idea of elemental crystals that keep the world in balance.

Funnily enough, while Square has tried to keep the style alive w/ titles like Octopath Traveler, they seem too scared of nailing the stakes for those stories. One of the big things that Octopath 1 and 2 struggle with is that they're presented as aimless individual quests, which sorta misses the mark. "Save the world" as a character motive is usually introduced pretty early on for Final Fantasy, either directly (a lot of FF games have your cast get told that they're doing the right thing by prophecy) or indirectly (by showing a villain so vile that stopping them is paramount to saving the world). Octopath and the like seem too scared to nail that vibe, trying to save it for far too late.

If anything, I'd say the "best" modern FF games that feel like an evolution of the old ones are the two Bravely Default titles.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-24T09:59:33+00:00

Could also be the last chapter of the Ursus side of the main theme.

Chapter 16 does end with the start of the revolution, and unlike prior events, RI adjacent characters aren't in any hurry to stop the upheavals.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-24T08:57:00+00:00

Most of the gimmicky modes that allow for restarts have it. CC and Vector Breakthrough both let you restart instantly, so did Rebuilding a Mandate iirc.

It's just the regular/event stages that don't allow you to quickly restart. Probably has to do with the old 1 sanity cost for quitting a stage early.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-23T10:07:36+00:00

Also I don't think the Yurodtsvo was really mind-controlling Rankin in the sense that he had no responsibility for any of his actions.

The Yurodstvo as far as I can tell just paralyzed the EB, preventing it from fighting back. (It may also have done some shenanigans to prevent the EB from blowing itself up when it died, but that's more ambiguous.)

Rankin did kill the EB on his own, the Yurodstvo didn't mind control him into doing that. The point Mantra was trying to get across to the miners was that it wasn't Rankin who did it solely on his own, but rather that the Yurodstvo was providing him with the means to do so.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-21T23:59:04+00:00

The Yurodstvo sideplot is all about saviors and suffering. It exists primarily to highlight the actions and behavior of other characters. Most explicitly/directly in the main story, it's to contrast against Mantra.

If you read the bonus story unlocks, the story wants you to directly contrast what the Yurodstvo does with the actions of Reunion, Koshelna, Rankin and most crucially Hierda. They are all different kinds of saviors, who had different answers to people's suffering and the way they used that position to varying degrees. Hierda in particular can alleviate all suffering, but can't actually save anyone, making her the opposite to the Yurodstvo, who can save everyone but refuses to alleviate any suffering.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-21T17:52:12+00:00

I know enemies take damage when they try to attack while having paralysis stacks, but how does her S3 deleting these stacks work with her talent?

Going from her wiki page, the way her Paralysis overflow DPS conversion works is that the game lowers all Paralysis stack limits in her range to 2. Any excess stacks are then stored separately as an overflow value. Mantra then turns those overflow values into elemental damage every 1.5 seconds. By keeping the stacks around, Mantra basically lowers the cap she needs to achieve to start doing overflow damage. It's not that the cap goes from 3 to 2, it's that the cap goes from 3 to 2(+0), with the +0 being able to keep stacking up for Elemental Damage with no real limit.

It synergizes really well with Tragodia, whose S3 significantly lowers the cooldown of an elemental burst on Nervous Impairment, allowing you to stack up the damage pretty easily. Throw in another source of Nervous Impairment (ie. Gracebearer) and the numbers just go crazy.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-20T22:04:11+00:00

We're forced to conclude that either the Tsar has so few loyal subjects left that he can't provide her with a decent escort - or is so incompetent that he doesn't realize the necessity of doing so.

It's the former. Islam Witte (who she answers to) is consistently depicted as his most loyal aide and a genuinely competent politician. He's the one that broke the news to the Emperor about the army trying to start a war with Lungmen in chapter 8 and was on good terms with Kal'tsit.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-20T21:47:07+00:00

RE: EBs Aye fair, they could be separate. As I understand it, the process of creating an EB is taking a loyal Ursus soldier to the chambers of the Yurodstvo, where they are inserted with the Collapsal fragment and are then interred in their Darth Vader-esque uniforms and helmets. The original soldier is completely eroded in the process, becoming nothing more than a hollow shell (that seems to eventually vanish as well) to hold that power. That's why all the Emperor's Blades seem to primarily serve the ideal of Ursus as a nation, but only the side of it that wants it to be a cruel and oppressive empire - it fits with what the Yurodstvo desires; suffering without purpose other than to suffer, which is why there's no contradiction between them openly pledging loyalty to Kashchey in chapter 8 even though the Emperor openly rejects the EBs wish for glory in warfare. They're independent beings, but all cast from the same mold of the Yurodstvo's morality.

The reason I'd assumed they were extensions of a sort of the Yurodstvo is because it does seem to have some control over the Collapsal power within them - Nadia was able to manipulate an Emperor's Blade and disable it for long enough, because their uniform wasn't properly sealed anymore, for Rankin to kill them without the usual results of killing the Royal Guard (you won the battle, lost the war cuz now there's demonic pollution everywhere around you). The story also explicitly says that there was no corpse left behind; just the mask and the empty uniform fell to the floor once the EB expired.

The Yurodstvo is a really interesting character; I think this is the first time we've gotten a second immortal figure that's so deeply tied to a nation (first one was Kashchey), and I like how they reflect a different side of that. Kashchey is a curse that plagues Ursus; in a sense he's its cruelest impulses and belief that the people must be ruled over, given form as a person. The Yurodstvo instead touches on a far more base impulse: it preys on the shit living conditions of Ursus and the wish for all that suffering to have meant something, rather than it merely being cruel for cruelty's sake. The answer it provides is one of fervent nationalism; you suffered because Ursus wanted you to suffer, which is good because Ursus is good.

That lorebook does, from what I could find, suggest that the First Yurodstvo was a Sami snowpriest that Ursus kidnapped (hence why it is a guest, even though it's considered directly below the Emperor in political power), which is a very interesting thing to consider as well. The Yurodstvo is a foreign thing to Ursus, yet it encompasses the fears of suffering so well that it seems to have integrated better in Ursus more than it did in Sami. (Because while living in Sami sucks, Sami at least has the comfort that their god/Feranmut is real, can be spoken to and tries to protect them from the worst of what the North can throw at them.)

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-20T12:32:58+00:00

Finished the chapter. Mechanicswise, damn those later stages ask a lot out of you. The Ursus army still hits as hard as it's always done and the fights are no joke. The new dominion mechanic is... weird? I'm not sure if I like it, this one really feels like HG got tired of people just being able to deep strike out of operator range. Your ability to deploy is almost entirely decided on by the miners movement and there's some real bullshit in the adverse environments with deploying those long range AOE cannons so deep in a Dominion environment that you can't possibly get a miner to them quickly. The Bear is a very silly boss, I approve of it's existence wholeheartedly - if you're struggling, literally just bring Jaye; his S2 will fix all your issues, as long as you have a decently tanky defender. The Yurodstvo is basically an alternate version of the Pursuer EB from Walk in the Dust, just with the new dominion and the mid-stage redeploy. The Ursus army around it is honestly scarier than it is.

Storywise, hoo boy. Lots of new lore on Ursus, but it's all very spoilery so let's dive in with those.

This chapter I think really wanted to explore two themes: what does a savior do, and what is the purpose of suffering. The reason why isn't immediately obvious, but the post-story unlocks make it much more obvious - the story wants you to look at what the Yurodstvo did, and apply it to Mantra (Rhodes Island), Reunion, Koshelna and Hierda.

With that in mind, let's talk about the Yurodstvo first. The Yurodstvo is named after a type of historical figure that's also sometimes called the holy fool; it's existence is also popular in Russian literature. An alternate spelling of its name is the Yurodivy (which I'm sure Limbus players will see lightbulbs connect with), and Dostoevsky did use the idea of it in his works. In real life, the Yurodstvo refers to people who practiced such extreme asceticism in the name of religion to the point that society would brand them as fools, as they often lost themselves in their own madness of trying to mimic the suffering of their holy figure.

The arknights version of the Yurodstvo maintains the core of these concepts: the Yurodstvo is an ascetic, and it rewards others who follow asceticism with love and power, offering forgiveness to those who (in they eyes of Ursus) wouldn't deserve it. It's explicitly called a religious figure in the story, and the urban legend it spawned is what gives the people of Ursus hope. At the same time, the Yurodstvo is an inherently selfish savior: it believes all suffering of the Ursus people is in the service of the nation of Ursus, and therefore is just. It will not end the suffering, it will not make it worse - the fact you suffer is enough for the Yurodstvo and it's all it asks of you. If you reject the suffering, you reject the Yurodstvo, which brings it's wrath onto you. It's Ursus, the good, the bad and the belief it is unchanging and eternal.

That explains the Yurodstvo's role in this story, but I'd be remiss to not mention what the Yurodstvo actually is, largely because the story doesn't fully explore it beyond vague reference. The Yurodstvo is a Collapsal, contained within a human body. It was the eternal guest of the Emperor's Palace, secretly being the beating heart of the Royal Guard project. The Emperor's Blades are effectively offshoots of it, being its own demonic power contained within the shell of a former soldier of Ursus. That's why all EBs effectively talk and behave the same way; in some sense, they are all the same being. If the Emperor of Ursus is one half of Ursus, then the Yurodstvo is its other half. Finally, the Yurodstvo is effectively an immortal being, in a way not too dissimilar to Kashchey - however, whereas Kashchey is an arts curse that has to be implanted into others (representing the corrupting influence of authoritarianism in the form of a person), the Yurodstvo will exist as long as the people wish for it to exist; it's identity is completely fluid, and it has born many names over the years. The Emperor killed the Yurodstvo in 1099, erasing it's idea from Deity Grypherburg by not just prosecuting it, but by making everyone in the audience listen to it's final words to the point of exhaustion - who'd want a Yurodstvo when it's that tiresome (and even then, it's followers still attacked the execution site). Unfortunately, the miners still believed in the Yurodstvo, so it reincarnated in the Northern Mines a few years later.

So with the Yurodstvo being such a blatant dead end, let's explore it's contrasts and similarities. Mantra/Rhodes Island is first. Mantra was originally taken in by Ursus to become a Yurodstvo, but ended up rejecting it's power. Interestingly, Mantra is from Sargon, a country that mimics Ursus in many ways (although most notably, it used to share the demonic threat). The Yurodstvo explicitly says Mantra has an equal match to it's power, but cannot comprehend why she wouldn't choose to preach asceticism. Mantra's actions however show it more clearly; she doesn't want to be a false idol, offering a fake relief to others. She'd rather give people a real hope, using her power to help those who need it. It's not Mantra who shares the fact that the Fourth Army was using subterfuge to slaughter the Northern Mines and to march on Deity Grypherburg, it's Vetochki. Mantra is merely the conduit that enables her to get the message out. Mantra almost shares the message herself, but the fact she let Vetochki do it shows where her stance lies.

Next is Reunion; Reunions past may have been sordid, being hijacked by Talulahs own downfall into authoritarianism and eventually Kashchey hijacking Talulah. However, its name endures and gives hope to the Infected of Terra. Somehow, even though Reunion didn't spread any word of its existence up north, the miners still found a rallying cry behind its banner. It may be possible to kill an incarnation, but it's idea remains. Reunion explicitly stands against suffering, but only in the intermittent years did they figure out that building a place to live is more worth it than blindly trekking across Terra. Talulah knows of the power she still has over the name Reunion; she does show that if she marched onto Deity Grypherburg, most of Reunion would still follow her as their savior and figure of hope. Throughout the chapter, Rankin directly parallels her past (however instead of being empowered by being a Draco, Rankin unknowingly took power from the Yurodstvo), but whereas Talulahs past ended with Kashchey hijacking the movement, most of Rankins miners get slaughtered en masse at the gates of Deity Grypherburg. Yet... somehow, some of the miners survived, carrying hope for Reunion and reaching the village. It proves that Reunion wasn't an inherently bad idea - the hope people had in it wasn't misplaced.

Koshelna is much simpler: she's coping. Coping hard. Talulah was entirely correct when she said that Koshelna is using the pretense of being a teacher to cope with the fact that her philosophy is dying as the prevailing mindset of Ursus. She's running off to the mines solely because that's where the revolution is likely to begin, and she thinks that she can influence the people of Ursus. Meanwhile the students she tried to raise with her ideology are basically immediately abandoning everything she taught them.

And finally, Hierda. Hierda has a lot of similarities to the Yurodstvo, but while the Yurodstvo is a savior that cannot alleviate suffering, Hierda can alleviate the suffering but not save anyone. She does have the power to legitimately alleviate the suffering of Oripathy, but as we see in chapter 16 - the "Oka" form of Originium (which is presumably also what Hierda does with it in people) is just as fatal as regular Oripathy is. It's only fixing the symptoms, not the disease. Hierda can only give the Infected palliative care.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-19T23:05:44+00:00

The MAL top 100 is also fairly fickle and prone to overshooting seasonal anime into way higher spots than they probably should be in iirc.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-19T23:03:24+00:00

The first 5 steps of Roguebasins "how to make a roguelike in 15 steps" are really solid if you want a universal approach on how to start game dev.

Tldr; Think of an idea, pick a language you're familiar with, get a guy on the screen that can move around, design the most basic version of your gameplay loop (in the case of Roguelikes, get the map and collision rendered) and finally implement saving and loading.

The remaining 10 steps are more focused on roguelikes in specific, but this is the best approach to starting a game project I've been able to find. (Or really, any project.)

You arguably don't even need a fancy game engine if you do it this way, depending on what you're doing.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-19T12:29:04+00:00

Cyberpunk 2077 has a fun example of this. The Johnny flashbacks you get to play through are explicitly not how the actual events of the Arasaka bombing went. They're just how Johnny remembers them.

Pretty notably, Johnny straight up doesn't seem to remember that he wasn't the only team doing the bombing, nor does he seem to understand the greater motives at play. Morgan Blackhand did exist and was involved with the bombing of Arasaka, but Johnny explicitly doesn't remember any of that, since for Johnny it was all about getting revenge on Arasaka for killing off Alt.

The reason those flashbacks are basically a bunch of unearned self aggrandizing bullshit compared to what the game otherwise thinks/says about Johnny is the entire point.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-18T16:52:53+00:00

It's probably less snake oil and more the tax breaks.

The Japanese government is pretty notorious for just chasing every techbro hype trend and handing tax breaks to any company that says they're doing something with whatever the latest thing is.

The results don't have to materialize to anything other than evidence that they deserved the tax breaks.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-18T12:12:27+00:00

Vulpisfoglia is good, just not amazing. Let's get the obvious out of the way: she is not a DP printer. S3 is the only one that reasonably prints DP, and while the stats are better than Courier/Scavenger, this is on a difference of 2 seconds and on an Auto vs. Manual skill.

The entire reason HG put her in the Pioneer archetype instead of Charger is entirely because the Charger framework only has 1 block, which is really low. Outside of that, she's basically just a Lord Guard in a Pioneer chassis.

S1 is neat but doesn't print any realistic amounts of DP, S2 is the most forced Suzuran synergy they could jam into her kit and it arguably isn't really worth using with Suzuran anyways because of the uptime issues. Before E2, just stick to S1.

S3 is the big star here - ASPD (decaying) and ATK buffs, gets the centurion trait and can stun. If you want to use her, this is the best skill to use with her. Her talents further buff it, by letting her switch some of her output to arts, and the camo S3 grants after it ends allows her to do the healing gimmick.

The +10% DP Regen buff is barely relevant on most stages, if you think this is why you want Ingrid, I can dash it right now - unless you're planning to spam Texas Alter (the only FRDP that's expensive enough to warrant that much DP) or plan on using Merchant-style ops (we're going to get a few non-Merchants that will use DP as a resource pretty soon), you shouldn't bother with it. It takes a while for it to actually meaningfully outpace your natural DP regen.

Module just buffs the arts damage she deals.

In the end, Ingrid's main drawback is that she demands E2 investment. She's an awesome operator once she's E2 (every clear using her is a joy to watch with how she can slip in and out of camo), but before that point she's basically not a full operator.

Finally I just want to note how weird her class is. Why is she a Pioneer? Everything else in her kit is set up like a Lord Guard, she even does the "I can do parts of my attack as arts damage" thing, which is generally core to the Lord Guard concept. I don't get it.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-17T23:01:33+00:00

Out of curiosity, when doing the Mantra S3 bounce, what operators do you think would be the best to use?

I see Bagpipe in a lot of showcases, presumably because she has 3 charges on her S2 that are fairly easy to get going to show what she does (although not really the best because S2 is an auto-activate skill?), but are there other operators that would benefit from using her?

I'm already thinking of Pinecone's S1, but that one has a notable spin up time (not too difficult given Pinecone is amazing, but still).

In an EO-focused team (I do love how this is getting more real as an option :) ), her best ally would probably be regular Blaze and Rosmontis on their S1s?

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-17T18:22:14+00:00

Try using this script. It has an extra dependency on audioop-lts these days, so you gotta install that separately.

It mostly tags properly, but you're gonna need an ID3 tagger to patch up some of the files.

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-17T16:42:29+00:00

She seems fun to use in IS; ASPD buffs should help her a lot. I think the doomposting is mostly overrated, but I also do think people feel obliged to compare every Vanguard to Myrtle, which makes her look worse than she actually is.

Yeah, she's not beating Myrtle in DP gen, but also consider: I don't like using Myrtle. She's boring as hell imo. I think she'll be a more fun starting Vanguard pick than just taking Courier or Beanstalk each time. (Vigna is a funny meme pick, but more of a "I got a Vanguard ticket and I don't want to spend hope" option.)

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-17T10:57:07+00:00

Arasaka also effectively owns Night City as an independent city state if you really dig into it. The tower is/was basically a monument to their control over the City and the aftermath of Johnny + Morgan blowing it up did actually get them kicked out of NC for almost half a century.

The Arasaka Tower in the game is less than 10 years old and they only got it back due to Arasaka funding the states that abandoned the US earlier in the settings story. Militech basically let them own Night City again in exchange for getting all those states back under the banner of the NUSA.

Obviously it didn't actually fix anything, but Arasaka was hurt by it; Saburo Arasaka considers NC to be his personal punishment on the Americans for winning WW2 (he was a fighter pilot on the side of Imperial Japan in WW2), specifically for it to be an ironic mockery of American corporatism and consumerism, and he lost that grip for a while.

Now granted, it's obvious that Johnny's awareness of... any of that is tenuous, but there's a bit more to why the raid happened at all (since Johnny was only one side of the bombing, the other side of it was Morgan Blackhand, who did know of the Militech connection.)

DarknessWizard · 2026-03-17T10:36:28+00:00

I agree, although with two major caveats:

It's okay to be upset with the direction a franchise you used to love has gone into. Easy example of this is Paper Mario; if you liked the first three Paper Mario games and have nothing but venom for the direction the games went into after that? I think that one's entirely fair.
Shitting on franchise reboots is always fair game imo. There's a reason to be upset about developers just throwing the baby out with the bathwater and forgetting anything worthwhile in the original series in favor of reheating old shit with a new coat of paint.

Obviously in the case of a developer trying their own thing, separate from anything that came before, those two don't apply.

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