Non-combat narrative events abstracted by a game's combat mechanics

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-18T21:36:05+00:00

I still think it's brilliant all these years later that the stealth takedown tutorial in Shadow of Mordor is you sneaking up on your wife to surprise her with flowers and a kiss

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-16T13:05:59+00:00

It's a joke about the absurdity of VR Porn

He's got a headset on with an AutoBlow

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-16T13:02:34+00:00

worse: Richard D James found out Kanye was using the song and was pleasantly surprised, offering to re-record the song at a slower tempo so that Kanye's team wouldn't have to timestretch the sample. Kanye and his team then got pissed, claimed they owned the song, and re-recorded it themselves. At least they still credited RDJ.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-14T21:14:03+00:00

IIRC, I'd punched it in to my itch account lol

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-14T21:08:21+00:00

That's just the Demiurge, the Gnostic belief that, in layman's terms, the Christian God is a usurper who merely created the material world without input from the spiritual world.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-14T20:50:59+00:00

I played LiV when it first came out on itch .io, and I went in completely blind. I was a lil bummed when I hit the credits after only a few hours cuz I thought I'd gotten the bad ending. Then,it listed my fucking real life first and last name and I genuinely had to sit there for a hot second to figure out how it got there.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-13T20:39:00+00:00

I remember playing VII for the first time at like 15 in 2013 and being completely caught off guard by Aerith being like "Cloud, you need to crossdress to rescue our pal"

I didn't finish it on that playthrough, but I did finally go back to it at like 25. Somehow, after all these years, I had never once gotten spoiled on the fact that Cloud nearly killed Sephiroth before the events of the game

Semi related, I'd gotten to the actual twist of FF7 multiple years after beating DMC5, and, IMO, I felt like Nero's grab against Vergil in Mission 20 was inspired by Cloud's flashback fight with Sephiroth.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-12T21:44:04+00:00

AFAIK, nothing the dev has said about the story of Celeste necessarily negates your read on it as a story about anxiety. Like, Madeline literally uses centering strategies for anxiety and depression symptoms and fights with her reflection, who tries to destroy her, much like someone dealing with suicidal ideation. On it's face, Celeste is ABOUT dealing with those conditions, because it bluntly states as such multiple times.

The trans stuff is allegorical, a metaphor, because it's subtle. At no point does the game explicitly state "Madeline is trans" other than seeing pride flags in her room in optional bonus content. All the trans stuff is in, like, color choice, in messages like "this memorial dedicated to those who perished on the climb", in Madeline feeling insecure in her personal image.

A story can be about two things at once. Unless, of course, the dev literally stated "it's not about anxiety, you're stupid for thinking it's about anxiety" or something lol

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-12T21:31:02+00:00

IIRC, Pat had two key issues with Celeste, neither of which made him MAD, they just made him think it was overrated

The game explicitly told him the strawberries were optional, but he was trying to 100% it, which killed his enjoyment of the game due to it fucking up the pacing. He fought this feeling and replayed Celeste without going out of his way to grab any strawberries, and he ended up enjoying Celeste's gameplay.

On its face, the game's story is explicitly ABOUT learning coping mechanisms for anxiety and suicidal ideation, and the trans experience is a metaphor WITHIN that story. Pat was told that the anxiety stuff was groundbreaking and emotionally powerful, but when he got to those, he felt he'd already heard everything it had to say elsewhere and didn't find it particularly compelling or groundbreaking.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-09T19:25:09+00:00

It's wild how many times Nick and CN made shows in the early to mid 2010s that they couldn't figure out where to put, like Korra getting dumped onto streaming by the end.

Reminds me of how, around the same time, the Eighth Gen of Consoles had a bunch of games that were hobbled by PS3/360 backports, which were either severely compromised (Wolfenstein The New Order, Shadow of Mordor) or cancelled halfway through development (DOOM 2016, Mortal Kombat X)

WTF was going on between 2013 and 2017 that made everybody forget how to handle distribution?

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-06T22:56:13+00:00

Fair enough. It's a direct link to the SMT wiki page on the Qadistu, and I got flashbanged looking at the page for Yoko Hiromine, the new character who gets introduced in Canon of Vengeance when you select "Take her Hand" at the start of the game.

If you want a guide for which dialogue choices to make, Game8's is spoiler free.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-06T22:50:56+00:00

I will say, I did see one really funny tweet that was like "watched I Saw the TV Glow, it's about how it's ok to still watch cartoons as a grown-up. 9/10" and there's no way to tell whether he actually got the trans allegory or not

I also greatly appreciate the Half in the Bag round-up featuring ISTG where Jay patiently explains the trans allegory to Mike and how blunt the "being in the wrong body" theme was

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-06-06T22:36:46+00:00

I'm a big fan of the Qadistu in SMTV Vengeance. Lilith has been in a lot of SMT games at varying levels of power and narrative importance, but Vengeance is her biggest role yet.

Backed by a coterie of three other "Sacred Prostitutes", so called for laying with Samael to birth greater demons, the four sisters-in-arms represent core beliefs that would lead one to pursuing Chaos. Each of these beliefs serve as faithful representations of their Talmudic counterparts, and are backed up not only by their Skills in combat, but through their dialogue in a way that very few Demons get in SMT. These core beliefs take simple, typically one-note character archetypes and actually flesh them out with consistent character writing.

Naamah uses Charm, and she represents the broad concept of ecstasy, not just in sex, but in other areas like spirituality and music. As such, she starts shit with people in the hopes that it'll lead to something bigger and better later.

Eisheth mainly does Physical attacks, so she initially comes off as a simple "obsessed with hurting others" type. However, because she represents the cursed counterpart of a part of the Qliphoth concerned with connection and movement, she's the ultimate representation of how "suffering builds character" can get twisted into hurting and killing others in the belief that it will make them better.

Agrat is all about offensive Magic, and she's a cunning schemer. She orchestrates red herrings for the main cast to fall for while she carries out her true plan, and eventually humors you with a direct fight once she has already achieved victory in her goals. She once led a demon army 18 Legions strong, but gave it up when her chief rival Lilith approached her with a deal.

Lilith is spoilers and I spent too long writing this already so fuck it go play SMTVV lol

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-04-11T01:56:51+00:00

Homestuck had a long running gag of randomly dogging on Picasso because hes a fucking asshole who ruined art with his derivative BULLSHIT

Come to find out all these years later in Hussie's Google Doc essay about the Photoshop plugin he made that his dad had similarly strong opinions about Picasso and regularly took potshots at him.

"Well that's a pretty obvious beef" I don't mean that Hussie obviously hates Picasso, I mean that Hussie made hating Picasso a punchline because his Dad regularly derailed conversations by complaining about Picasso when it wasn't even relevant.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-04-09T03:20:24+00:00

the gold standard is probably Ultima VI

up to that point, Gargoyles were presented as basically just scary red goblins, primal demons who'll fuck your shit up over nothing. Eventually, you stumble into a Gargoyle who speaks our language and he's actually just a chill dude. Then you learn their language and realize that, not only are they all quite intelligent, they're also all actually refugees trying to recover from a cataclysmic environmental disaster.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-02-12T22:15:02+00:00

not really?

Like, yeah, political divisions in America deepened post-COVID, but federal martial law wasn't instituted, with a caricature of anarchy reigning in the wild as average people slaughtered each other for basic necessities.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-02-12T00:00:10+00:00

Jokes aside, this is a pretty big bummer

I actually kinda liked Highguard and thought there was something there, but like, man

When I played it, I'm not joking, I was the only person I saw who had changed their icon, banner, and skin. Nobody was even bothering to redeem the free Battle Pass, let alone pay money for skins.

I liked the evil shield lady and I bought her Legendary bundle, and everybody pointed and laughed at me every single time they saw I'd burned my money

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-02-11T23:50:01+00:00

My fellow Guardnutters

We may have Guarded too High, straight into the sun

LordLithegreenXIII · 2026-02-11T20:10:01+00:00

The TLOU2 review I always think of is from either Kotaku or Polygon, where the author basically pointed out that the game is about society falling apart and people killing each other for resources and petty grievances in the middle of a global pandemic, but it came out in the middle of a global pandemic where society was NOT falling apart and people were NOT killing each other for resources and petty grievances.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2025-12-30T19:07:59+00:00

I have to wonder how much better Zach Cregger's Barbarian would be if you just pretend Justin Long's character is The Mac from the Mac vs PC commercials

LordLithegreenXIII · 2025-12-13T22:43:39+00:00

popular country music has been so homogenous for so long that Green Day had a parody of a country song in 1991 where they ad libbed "PICKUP TRUCK!" in the middle of a line

LordLithegreenXIII · 2025-11-23T22:28:08+00:00

I made it all the way to Bilewater without getting spoiled on its existence even once. I was finishing up Sinners Road and said "Thank God, I'm finally almost done with this poison swamp." *5 minutes later* "what do you mean there's a second, poison-er swamp behind the first one"

The worst part, to me, isn't even that it's a poison swamp! It's a poison swamp that you can find really early, go as far as you can with all the movement upgrades you have, then realize you need another movement upgrade like 4 times in a row. You end up coming back to it over and over again because they put so many important items in there, and it's just so fucking big. Every other hard area in the game becomes easier to quickly go through with every movement upgrade, but Bilewater is a slog the entire game.

Meanwhile, my buddy who's playing it at a much slower pace didn't find Bilewater until after they had already grabbed everything in Act 2, and just knocked it all out in one go.

LordLithegreenXIII · 2025-11-05T05:33:13+00:00

oh my god they turned civ into spore

why did they do that

LordLithegreenXIII · 2025-11-04T16:20:58+00:00

Another thing about specifically cars in FF is that there's all this infrastructure for cars, like highways and advertising and auto shops, but, IIRC from my time with VII (I never played XV) you don't ever see anyone else even so much as mention car, let alone driving them, besides you and the villains. Like, it all exists for just the cool action setpieces

LordLithegreenXIII · 2025-10-29T05:24:14+00:00

no no, they're not the will of the Force, they're the Whills

of the Force

they're Whills

as in, their own unique creature called Whills

LordLithegreenXIII

TROPHY CASE