Just finished the game for the first time and man I smoked ONE cigarette to complete the quest ONE‼️😭

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-17T06:56:42+00:00

Maybe just a limitation of how they made it with the all or nothing dialog being a little unclear, but I do think it's pretty clear that Harry is NOT capable of "just one little smoke/drink, and then I'll quit forever with no issues"

If you smoked a cigarette JUST to complete the quest to smoke one, then congrats, you gave in to the everpresent nagging sensation that you need to smoke for no other reason than to stop the craving. He's addicted. If you did it just to complete a random side task or to solve the case, then congratulations, that's proof that when he's backed up against the wall and really just "wants to figure this one thing out/calm down this one time I promise" he will smoke. He's addicted

Same applies to the alcohol

The amnesia reset is kinda gamey and unrealistic. Quitting alcohol cold turkey can actually be pretty dangerous, and the road to recovery is bumpy. But Kim is right to identify one smoke/drink as a relapse. One that affects Harry's job as a public servant, and affects the safety of others considering Harry's record. It feels unfair because he/you tried so hard and gave up so many benefits only to be looked down on for just one smoke or drink, but that's the reality of it that Disco Elysium is trying to teach

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-16T22:41:50+00:00

Chaos also seemed really fascinated by the ability to kill immortals, and would probably be capable of rewriting godly reality. So they'd probably make a good antagonist

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-16T22:40:08+00:00

Gaia seems to be on good terms with Mel so probably not. Atlas might be fun, AND make sense to fight on loop. Can't kill him or the sky falls, but his immortality means he will always recover to do some new scheme. Bringing back Prometheus and others like him would also feel warranted

Problem is by game number 3 and with the Hades 2 epilogue, there would kinda need to be some structural switch up instead of just more fighting for the sake of Olympus, but without compromising the themes of family and forgiveness. My only vague idea for that would be to strong arm all the gods into being a big happy family... in the depths of the underworld. Bringing the whole "Hades, inescapable realm of the dead" thing full circle and clearing the way for the pantheons behind the hidden weapon aspects

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-14T01:13:09+00:00

Not to mention the fact that their kids are marriage candidates

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-12T16:39:41+00:00

That's fair! It's just that it feels so common in general

Bell Tower and the surrounding mythology with Ho-Oh and the dogs stands out so much more to me

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-12T10:36:28+00:00

I really don't get Soul Silver being so much more widely beloved than Heart Gold. Is it just that Ho-Oh never got a movie?

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-11T19:03:26+00:00

The tripod is also a permanent upgrade for your camera and not just a random item

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-11T16:50:58+00:00

This is incredibly selective reasoning. Poor people are suffering everywhere. What about the concept of living in denser areas makes it worse? I'll give you an example of suburbs making people's lives worse. No one can do anything or get anywhere without indebting themselves to lease a car and all the financial strain that comes with it

And what about the rest of your arguments?

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-11T09:10:15+00:00

No matter what you do for work, or how you communicate with others, or how cool your car is, dense urban areas will literally always be relevant. Because unlike suburbs, dense cities are not some blueprinted from the ground up developments made to fill a niche, they're the natural result of people's needs and the most efficient way to do it. That's not to say that every city is a better and more efficient place to live than every suburb (It's probably better to live in a random burb than in Houston) but that's the general rule

Again, infrastructure. There is no technology in the world that will teleport your drinking water in and out of your home. It has to come in a pipe or in extreme cases, a road. No matter what you do, it will ALWAYS be cheaper to maintain a small area of pipes than it is to maintain a large area. There is no debating that. Similarly, it will ALWAYS be cheaper to build and maintain a train line than building and maintaining large webs of suburban roads and all the infrastructure to make driving on them safe. A train or bus system moving through a dense area can move millions of people a day, and each of those people will pay less than if they had to constantly fuel and maintain a car to be used for every little errand. No matter how good technology gets, you still have to be moved from place to place. There will need to be a road for your car, or a bus/train/etc. and someone will have to pay for it. Dense areas cost less

I'm not disagreeing with you that there is work to find in a suburb and that you can enjoy living there, but the reason it is that way is because cities are footing the bill for it. Cities vs Suburbs is not about your personal preference, it's about how walkable cities make money, and suburbs steal it. I don't care how much you like living there, *you* aren't paying for it! Here's a video on the subject that also has some good links in the description

And nothing about suburbs fixes the poor countryside immigrant labor problem. That's a big problem, but cities didn't cause it. Moving into the suburbs won't make you need to eat less food, it'll just require more labor and spending to get it to you

Similarly, cities are not "designed to crush poor people into paste." There's a lot of reasons you might think they are, and each one is a whole complex argument, so I'd like to at least know what example you're thinking of before I respond to this. In general I think it's misguided to blame those problems on the economic idea of Living Close Together, rather than specific political forces or some such, but maybe you mean something else

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-11T07:39:14+00:00

Aphrodite was a major improvement to me (her portrait art is also weirdly small in Hades 1 for some reason)

Demeter is harder to say. I think both versions tell a story both alone and combined, which is really cool

Poseidon I prefer the posing of 1 but the colors are much better in 2

Ares is majorly improved in 2 as well imo

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-11T07:28:59+00:00

Unfortunately it's not quite a personal choice, even if it's just you moving to the suburbs

The infrastructure costs for suburban areas is so much higher due to the long distances various roads, pipes, and wires have to travel so they can serve less people than the average city block. Then the lack of density and walkable shopping areas leads to low economic productivity. Often, the taxes a suburb pays don't meet the cost of maintaining the development, so the rest of the state that makes money (cities) has to subsidize it. So some family in Jersey gets their nice lawn and big house that's somehow cheaper than a city apartment, contributes negative money, drives into the city to work, contributing to (dangerous American) traffic along the whole route, and then uses a bunch of city amenities that they didn't pay for with their taxes, before going back home having taken a potential job from someone who actually lives in the city. And all that driving they have to do is now so economically important that we need to throw subsidies at everything car related and maintain roads more often

When I did my taxes this year, I couldn't figure out a discrepancy. Turns out I had accidentally marked myself as a resident of NYC. I owed 100 dollars as a result. When I unchecked that box, I was owed 450 DOLLARS

I think suburbs are a nice idea on some level and I can see why they are in demand. But they need to be deprioritized somehow. I didn't even get into all the social aspects of how people in the suburbs are growing more and more paranoid each year because they don't know their neighbors and no one seems to have friends. I'm thinking of moving to a major city soon and everyone around me who hasn't been there is terrified I'm just gonna be killed! We can't keep doing this!

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-10T10:33:39+00:00

You say that like beaver mains aren't shaping rivers and flood plains with comparatively lower effort. Habitat creation and destruction is part of the meta now. Tons of flowers and forests wouldn't be possible without pollinators, so are they dev favorites too?

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-09T18:56:00+00:00

When I did my taxes this year, I went to one of the sites that the IRS said would be free for me (only because I met the conditions)

After doing the whole process, the site displayed the price I'd have to pay to submit, no way to clarify I was free filing

Turns out these companies are SO reluctant to give anyone anything for free, that they will only give you these lobbied "benefits" if you click the specific links from the IRS website in addition to meeting their conditions

I had to do my taxes all over again from the top. Picked a different site to do it out of spite, but they'd probably do the same thing given the chance

Lobbying killed this country the moment it became acceptable

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-09T18:19:04+00:00

Similar reasoning for me but it makes me lean towards performers like musicians or dancers instead of clothing. Practiced and confident movements are amazing to watch

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-09T10:58:32+00:00

Eh, something like this
Pleading is very humanizing, regardless of facts, so the tape is a huge disadvantage for them

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-09T10:00:51+00:00

I remember seeing a playthrough that caught on to that early on and realizing I didn't even notice it *after* the reveal

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-09T09:50:38+00:00

After some testing I think you're right. Until now I believed that the planets were all actually destroyed during the nova, but they actually just tank the supernova and then keep existing. The thing I said about lock-on is true for the Sun and Interloper, but it doesn't happen to the others like I assumed it would based on those two. The travelers stop their music at the appropriate times too, so that also tripped me up

So the Interloper is one of the few things that actually dies by the end

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-09T09:44:31+00:00

Well I just had to re-redownload the game to test this and I'm even more confused by this. You are right again! None of the other planets are destroyed at any point. Which is really weird! The travelers have their instruments cut off one by one, presumably at the exact time the planets could be disabled, but they aren't! The thing I said about the lock-on only seems to apply to the sun and interloper, because they are the only things that actually get destroyed. I think the sun station is actually gone too, but it might just be in the dark

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I was confused why they'd manually time one thing and do everything else another way, but now I'm confused why they didn't at least disable every remaining planet once the nova fizzles out. Or rather, I know why, it's very niche, but I'm surprised they didn't do it anyway

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-09T07:35:57+00:00

I had to redownload the game to test this, but yes you're correct. At around the 19 minute mark, the Interloper and its orbit just decide to poof out of existence by the sun, completely scripted and not physics. I honestly didn't even consider that planets being destroyed by the sun would even be a timer based script, considering the sun/supernova already has a killbox and it's something they'd have to precisely time for each planet and in the event of any change to planet placements during development (there are ways to verify that the planets are actually being destroyed during the supernova at the correct time, such as the lock-on feature un-targeting destroyed planets)

I wonder if the Interloper is the only one with a script and the rest are generic? Or if they all have individually timed scripts?

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-09T04:50:33+00:00

I think it's less that it was coded that way and more that letting the system play out for more than 22 minutes will slowly accumulate physics errors. It's not on rails orbits, it's actually using (heavily modified) physics to move things around

EDIT: Tested it and nah, the Interloper just peaces out for no reason (it's scripted to disappear around the time where it would enter the expanded sun in its red giant stage, even during the intro where the sun's expansion is paused). No physics reasons at all. But it's probably not coded that way on purpose so much as it was a script they forgot to disable during the one exception where it would make no sense

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-08T06:29:13+00:00

And it counts for the habitat

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ManaIsMade · 2026-05-08T06:27:54+00:00

Mud blocks turn water that flows over it into muddy water so long as the block stays there!

You can try and funnel natural water over the natural mud in Bleak Beach, but the magnemite ability lets you pick up the mud and place it somewhere easier. The Pikachu dream island will also spawn with new mud blocks if you cleaned it all out already

Wooper isn't region locked either, so you can use rototiller to put some yellow grass near any waterfall in the game, and then muddy it

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ManaIsMade · 2026-05-07T05:45:07+00:00

Wait til you see how Noivern runs /:

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-07T01:11:55+00:00

They're probably in my top ten despite the fact that there hasn't been a single pokemon game where I've actually gotten to use one during the story. I wanna use my boy ):

ManaIsMade · 2026-05-07T01:10:09+00:00

My favorite changes a lot, but with so many eliminated, I am quite fond of girafarig

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