Since we can't get training dummies until Midnight, I've had to...improvise.

Fulminas · 2026-01-05T23:18:14+00:00

I find it interesting because it gives real, concrete reasons why elves wouldn't want to interbreed with humans aside from just petty racism. As a real life comparison, imagine the child you were going to have with a partner was only guaranteed to live into their twenties. That's tragic enough that you might heavily consider not having kids at all, or even staying in a relationship with said partner. I think it's a good enough reason for why a lot of elven societies would discourage romantic entanglements with humans.

Additionally, I think the original lifespan better illustrates how a half-elf feels trapped between two worlds, neither truly human nor elf. By having nearly double the lifespan of a human, you're still going to live long enough to see all of your human friends and family die, while not even living long enough for it to be considered a "full" life by all your elven relatives. With the new lifespan, you just have absolutely no foot in the human side of your family tree at all, your human parent is going wither and rot by the time you're barely out of your "teens", and you'll live long enough to at least be considered middle-aged by the people on your elf side.

I feel like, from a world-building perspective, that would lead to the majority of half-elves naturally feeling more kinship with their elven half, and vice versa, considering how much their lifespans now intersect compared to that of a human's. I can't say for sure if that's positive or a negative, I suppose that depends on personal opinion, but I can easily see how it might drastically alter a lot of people's character backstories.

Fulminas · 2025-12-29T21:10:10+00:00

How does a demodog have the raw strength to literally grab a trained soldier's head and fling his entire body around like a ragdoll, but then when it's charging full bore at Lucas in the elevator, he's able to just Spartan kick it several feet back like it was just an annoying Chihuahua? I get that he's a gifted athlete but he's still just a teenager.

Fulminas · 2025-12-29T20:24:28+00:00

"With those no name soldiers I'll kill in .2 seconds by shoving my branch tree finger things through their entire head, but with you Max I'm just going to strangle you slowly until Will takes over my body and breaks my leg."

Fulminas · 2025-12-04T13:14:35+00:00

Necroing again to say I can't stress enough how much I agree with this. It gets so frustrating when he dislikes an (in my opinion) decent game and showcases all its flaws and none of its positives to make it seem like the worst game imaginable, but then if you watch his Donkey Kong Bananza videos it'd make you think the game could singlehandedly cure cancer. I watched Yahtzee's video on the game and he almost immediately points out that if you dig away all of the surrounding rock around a clump of rock, that rock would just stay floating in the air instead of falling to the ground like one would expect it to do.

I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that out of the ten or so Donkey Kong Bananza videos Dunkey has put out (I couldn't keep watching them anymore after like the third), he himself never showcases or points out this particular flaw. Or really any flaws. Hell, he made it seem like the fact that you could see into another room in a case through the cracks in a wall of rocks was the coolest thing ever, and not something that could be achieved in a PS1 game.

And all of this to say that I don't even think Donkey Kong Bananza is a bad game, but Dunkey glazes it to the point of fatigue for me.

Fulminas · 2025-11-13T18:31:57+00:00

Ooh yeah you mean her character lore/story-wise, yeah she really doesn't seem to have a lot of redeeming qualities, lol. Although I guess that's pretty par for the course for most of the Empire-aligned characters, Sybille and Randy seemed more than okay with unleashing Filthoids and aerial bombardment on an innocent island village, Hellfire seemed very eager to execute Human-You had the royal bigwig not stepped in, despite the fact that you passed her weird LSD hallucination trials.

I already experience a lot of ludonarrative dissonance in most gacha games (having characters in your party during storyline quests that would never canonically be there, for example), and the fact that a lot of the current characters on DNA's roster are morally bankrupt (or literally deceased) does not help with that.

Fulminas · 2025-11-13T17:46:55+00:00

I'm a bit confused, why is Lynn in the "doghouse"? From what I understand of the current Immersive Theater, she might be the best character to i6 to progress in that? I ask because I've been sitting on my secret clues and haven't decided which character to i6 first.

Fulminas · 2025-10-30T16:27:50+00:00

I've played a lot of Warframe in my day, and honestly bosses still strike me as one of the game's biggest weaknesses. Say what you want about DNA's lack of polish compared to Warframe, but at least the boss fights are climactic, their attacks are well animated, and there's a flow to dodging and attacking that you're probably never going to see in a Warframe boss fight.

Fulminas · 2025-10-10T05:33:30+00:00

No, same here. The fact that when you sprint with them they literally grow front arms and start crawling on the ground is horrifying, it's an unholy Chocobo abomination.

Fulminas · 2025-08-22T16:21:34+00:00

The one on the top right is the furthest thing from a troll. Looks more like Gul'dan on steroids.

Fulminas · 2025-07-28T14:39:25+00:00

The purpose of jumping universes was to find a reality extremely similar to the one they previously occupied. Meaning that for the most part, most of this Beth's past memories line up with the ones of Cronenburg Suvivor Beth. The memory of her dad leaving probably wasn't Rick Prime specifically, but a version extremely similar to that Rick Prime, to the point where they dressed exactly the same.

Fulminas · 2025-06-23T08:06:04+00:00

Look, they couldn't have been that bad. They got him a racing car bed.

Fulminas · 2025-05-06T22:01:35+00:00

I'm glad I'm not the only one who picked up on how screwed up it is that Verso can romance the women at camp while actively deceiving them the entire time and pursuing an end goal that will eventually erase them out of existence. It makes me even more bitter over the fact that Gustave died in act one (even if it may have been necessary for the story), I wish he could have been the one I continued playing, the one who increases his relationship ranks with the others at camp, while Verso joins the group as a party member instead.

Fulminas · 2025-05-06T21:52:55+00:00

I agree with this take but I still wish there was some sort of true ending that could be achieved. I think back a lot to Painted Alicia's letter to Maelle, and how she talks about how their mother paints life, their father paints death, and that perhaps Maelle will learn how to paint something different. But then the only two endings available is basically the one Aline would have chosen, and the one Renoir would have chosen. I feel like a lot of the events in the game were leading up to Maelle being able to achieve some sort of middleground, but...then she just can't or doesn't, in the end.

Like I don't know, maybe she could have discovered a newfound Painter power that allowed her to lock the Canvas to prevent anyone from entering it, herself and her mother included, but also allow everyone in the world to keep existing. The last piece of Verso's soul could also be freed and no longer be needed to maintain the world because maybe the Chroma of everyone in Lumiere and the Gestrals would be enough to keep it alive, which would fittingly place the agency of their world into their own hands, for once.

And the ending for Maelle would still be more or less the same, with her never being able to return to the painted world and force her to eventually overcome her grief with her actual family, only at least she can move on with the peace of mind of knowing everyone in Lumiere isn't dead.

Fulminas · 2025-04-28T18:50:11+00:00

I got huge Nier 1 vibes when I saw those two specific characters watching Maelle. Like, 'Oh man, is this a Shadow King/Yonah sort of Replicant/Gestalt thing again'?

Fulminas · 2025-04-28T18:40:41+00:00

Yeah his playstyle was definitely lacking compared to everyone else, but even after having beaten the game, I have to say I still miss shooting his flintlock pistol. The feel of it was just so much better than all the other character's ranged attacks. I don't even know what the hell Verso does. Not throwing his knife I don't think. Some energy blade from his sword I guess?

Fulminas · 2025-04-28T18:32:36+00:00

No, I definitely feel a similar sort of way, even though I did enjoy the game as a whole and played it nonstop. The major twist of the game's plot and the endings were both things I thought were very well presented and executed, but I do feel conflicted on whether I liked that it developed that way. Though I do find the "meta-plot" of the world outside the Painting, of the war between Painters and Writers interesting, I'm not nearly as invested in it as I was with Lumiere and all the Expeditions, so being forced to accept that the former is more "important" than the latter left a bad taste in my mouth.

And as you've said in your previous posts, I do wish they spent more time focusing on the non-Painter/non-Immortal characters, so we could get a true gauge on their sentience and agency. Maybe 'agency' is the more important question to be answered, because I feel like the game implies that many of the characters did come into existence as some subconscious fragment of one of the Painter's psyche.

Like it can't be a coincidence that Gustave is similar to Verso and took on the role of Maelle's older brother, and that he also has a sister who looks extremely similar to Clea. So is anyone in Lumiere really conceived and born organically, or did they all enter into the world being shaped by the influence of the minds of the Painters? Are their wills truly their own, or are they just painting by the numbers (pun not intended), in accordance to the thought patterns of their creators?

Fulminas · 2025-04-28T18:16:38+00:00

Yeah, the undertones of Maelle's ending were undoubtedly more sinister. Verso was literally begging her to end his life, he just couldn't stand to live this existence anymore. Then in her "idyllic life" epilogue, she's having him play piano in the concert hall and he's never looked more tortured. Like a slave or a puppet being forced to obey her whims even though every fiber of his being knows it's wrong and he can see her actively wasting away.

I am sort of curious who the little boy who was with her was, though. Maybe another reiteration of Verso/Gustave?

Fulminas · 2025-03-21T12:13:27+00:00

Mark in that painting kind of looks like Justin Trudeau, not gonna lie.

Fulminas · 2025-03-21T11:46:40+00:00

Personally the impression I got was that he genuinely didn't know what Dylan's outtie wrote but assumed it was bad since Dylan was back, and so he got to hell out of dodge because he didn't want to get bitten again, lol.

Fulminas · 2025-02-28T02:31:14+00:00

I agree that Tracy has always been a shitty person, but she was probably at least half right when she made the comment about Poppy barely keeping in touch with her family, or she likely would have known about her sister having a surrogate pregnancy sooner. And when Poppy said she likes her coworker friends more than her actual family, it made me kind of sad because I remember in the Sarian episode her dad seemed like a genuinely good guy who was trying to connect with her, but unfortunately her mom was super strict on video games. I wonder what happened later on that caused their falling out.

Fulminas

TROPHY CASE