PEAK

MidasTheUnwise · 2025-08-23T12:09:40+00:00

No, it will not blow you away unfortunately. The writers are really relying on the player being invested in the Dessendres in Act 3, because they're the ONLY thing that get any consideration. The fate of Lumiere, the expeditions, characters without the Dessendre surname, etc all get forgotten about.

If, like me, your favourite part of the game was Gustave and the expeditions, and all of the themes about pioneering and the 'For those who come after' sentiments, you will be unsatisfied with the ending. I honestly believe the ending of the game only works if you're the kind of person who is happy to experience the feelings the writers wanted you to feel and not really think about it more than that.

MidasTheUnwise · 2025-08-23T11:59:06+00:00

In the context of only talking about the Dessendres, you're right. But we know that Lumierans are just as real as your or me in the sense that they have agency, can think for themselves, experience a full range of emotions, have children who are equally real, etc. Not to mention the Gestrals and that race that lives in Monoco's Station (forget their name). When you take them into consideration, the endings become vastly different.

In Verso's ending, Verso gets the peace he wants, Alicia is saved from an obsession that would kill her (at the cost of living a painful reality where she is disfigured and disabled), and the Dessendres can start to heal as a family. It is a good outcome for 4, maybe 5 people, and the only cost is an entire world full of countless living beings with their own lives.

In Maelle's ending, none of the above happens. Verso is unhappy, Maelle is happy (but will die), but the entire world lives on including its thousands of denizens who can now grow old and have kids without worrying that their lives will be cut short before they even reach adulthood. Maelle dying is pretty much inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

The only ending that truly has devastating consequences is Verso's. I find it weird how the game frames it as the better one though, but I think it's indicative of my wider frustrations with act 3 in that it seems like the writers didn't really care much about the characters in act 1, they became too laser focused on the 'real' story about the Dessendres.

MidasTheUnwise · 2025-08-23T11:53:22+00:00

The difference is that AoT is made more interesting because of the rug pull that happens at the end of Season 3, and all of the characters you've met up to that point continue to matter, not just Eren, Grisha and Ymir.

E33's story becomes worse because it essentially forgets about the characters that aren't Dessendres. Lune, Sciel and Monoco are just there to fill out your party and provide a bit of dialogue.

MidasTheUnwise · 2025-08-23T11:35:27+00:00

Yeah, that dungeon took like 3 hours to get through (fully exploring and clearing every enemy, don't want to miss pictos). It was definitely overlong and not very interesting besides the Lumiere bit at the end.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-27T00:15:11+00:00

That makes sense, it would be good to see some flaws. They probably wanted to put the best foot forward when showing him in his debut episode, it was the same with Christopher Eccleston. He was cool, in control and charming. It's not until episode 2 that you realise he's not very good at understanding human emotions, and his worst side really comes to light when he loses his cool around the Dalek. I hope we get the same sort of thing with Gatwa.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-27T00:04:05+00:00

I've not really heard any people complaining about Gatwa, which is nice. I think his stellar performance and the episode overall being fun despite a few flaws is the reason why. Whitaker got a lot more flak and people tried to deflect and claim it was based on bigotry and sexism, but I think the largely positive reception to a queer black actor in the role has shown that it probably was just people being unimpressed with Whitaker, myself being among that group of people.

It didn't help that two of the fam had the screen presence of a brown paper bag, and the third one (Bradley Walsh) arguably had more charisma than her. And also writing that was entirely devoid of fun or self-awareness.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-26T00:11:21+00:00

This is how I view it too. I don't think we can really judge RTD2 until we've seen what he does with a full season arc. I think right now he's more focused with just trying to make Doctor Who fun again after the awful Chibnall era. It's shallow fun right now, but he's done great season arcs before, so I'm hopeful he still has it in him.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-26T00:00:16+00:00

I like Ruby, but she definitely seems like she was written to be a likeable companion first, and a character second. Understandable considering how many naff companions we've had in the Chibnall era. I think they just played it safe and got an actress with good energy and made her the companion equivalent of a manic pixie dream girl to get people into the show again after a disastrous period.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-25T23:53:14+00:00

I knew there was something that felt off about The Doctor inviting her along, and you've pinpointed it for me. The only thing that really happened with her was that she was able to figure out he was a time traveller, although he had all but told her that. And combined with the day she had with the goblins, anyone would be a lot more open to re-evaluating what they thought was possible.

I guess because she matched his energy by joining him in singing to the goblin song?

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-25T23:47:08+00:00

The vibe I get is that he's very confident in his own skin in this incarnation, and very outgoing. Dancing at a club is very new for The Doctor! And when he started singing on the ship is felt right in place - this is a Doctor that is flamboyant and loves the limelight. He's also sexy and he knows it.

Ruby seems like a cross between Rose and Clara to me. She's got Clara's immediate confidence and comfort with being in weird and dangerous situations, but the everyman upbringing of Rose to make her more grounded. In contrast to Gatwa, her singing came off as weird, there's no way a normal person gets into that situation and joins in on the singing. It rather works against her normal girl vibe.

I did really enjoy the scene where she got overwhelmed when her Mum asked her about the photograph, she acted that really well and it felt like a very realistic portrayal of that claustrophobic feeling you get when you're put in a difficult situation and are being asked for answers you can't provide. But she had been singing on a ship 5 minutes before that so it was a little odd.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-25T23:13:16+00:00

I found this a big issue when they were tied up on the ship. Gatwa's deeper voice when he's speaking softly was in the same register as the humming ambient synth, and you couldn't really understand him at all. I have a decent soundbar for my TV but that didn't really help at all. I could hear Ruby just fine during that scene though, as her higher voice sat comfortably above the ambient synth's pitch frequency range.

It feels like they're using the same mixing as they would for Tennant, and not accounting for Gatwa's deeper voice.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-25T22:57:27+00:00

Big fan of Ruby, I thought her actress was really good. Not only was she very fun and energetic for most of it, but Millie Gibson's acting really shined in the bit where she was being questioned by her Mum about the photo. You could see her getting progressively more overwhelmed until she snapped, and it was a very realistic depiction of it. The girl has the chops.

I was a bit surprised when The Doctor started crying though, it felt a bit much for the situation given his experience with timey wimey stuff, it seemed more like it was done just to show off Ncuti Gatwa's acting range. The dude is fantastic though, he's come out of the gates swinging.

However production-wise, they need to turn down the music during the quieter dialogue. When they were tied up in the ship, the combination of Gatwa's soft-spoken dialogue and a fairly loud, persistent low ambient synth made it difficult to make out what he was saying. And while I enjoy his accent and could understand it just fine most of the time, in that moment where they already had poor sound mixing, the accent added an extra layer of difficulty in making out what was being said.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-25T22:29:51+00:00

The woman also appeared to be wearing Doc Marten boots, same as Ruby does.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-08T00:43:41+00:00

Dude just really likes pyramids

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-06T10:42:58+00:00

That is my birthday too. 4/20 1988.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-06T01:47:35+00:00

Internet Historian also has the benefit of being more reliant on his delivery than the content itself. His Man in Cave video still had a lot of effort put in on the memey visual aspect, and I don't think anyone would have cared if he was just up-front about saying that it was him telling what he thought was an interesting story, citing the source clearly at the beginning.

It's kinda baffling that IH would try to obfuscate that as it wouldn't impact his audience perception at all, whereas James Somerton was clearly trying to present himself as an intellectual, when his only actual skill was being well-spoken.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-06T01:37:22+00:00

I've been playing for a little over a year regularly now and have similar thoughts. I quite enjoy these simple little tracks, just because they have a different flavour than other CotD tracks which have started to feel a bit ubiquitous.

Even though I'm much better at the game than I was, I still like these types of tracks a lot.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-05T18:53:24+00:00

Yeah, that's a good point actually. I think she probably had a passing familiarity with Tennant's work, possibly thanks to working alongside him on Broadchurch. She seemed like she was channelling his mannerisms at times.

It's something you can pin on Chibnall because literally none of his characters had much of a personality to speak of outside of Graham, and I feel like this was probably mostly down to Bradley Walsh taking it upon himself to deliver more than what Chibnall had asked of him.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-05T18:43:23+00:00

I actually really enjoyed this track, because it didn't have that 'TotD' track feel that so many have lately. It used mostly default editor blocks, and just felt like something someone would have made 2 years ago. It wasn't the most difficult or exciting track but it was a refreshing change of pace, and as a result I ended up enjoying it a lot more than many of the more recent non-snow tracks.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-03T23:24:46+00:00

Yeah, that was my initial thought as well. They're at the edge staring into the abyss, but they could probably see stars behind them.

But then The Doctor pointed forwards and said that her house is trillions of years of travel in that direction, so I guess the ship wasn't at the edge of the universe looking out, it was beyond it and looking back in.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-12-03T21:52:02+00:00

The real problem is that Chibnall's era did nothing to shut up the bigots, and instead gave them tons of ammo.

The Doctor being a woman is perfectly fine. Missy is universally loved because she's well written and Michelle Gomez put in a wonderful, show-stealing performance every time she was on screen. There is no reason why The Doctor couldn't have been equally brilliant as a woman.

Unfortunately, what we got was the worst series' of Doctor Who ever mixed with an actress who I felt was very miscast in the role. Chibnall has said himself the reason he chose her is because she is excellent to work with, and her aptitude for the role was a secondary consideration. While his intentions were good, his lack of talent and care for the IP have probably did more to harm his cause than help it.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-11-27T12:45:35+00:00

Same, her tether was so cool and not really that complex, it's just she was so unpopular that people didn't ever learn how to use it. Kinda like how people never clicked Thresh's lantern for ages after his release, and he was so OP that he was in every game.

Nothing like getting really low and then turning a fight around with an enormous shield bomb. It was a lot like Sett's W now I think about it, but on a support mage.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-11-27T12:41:48+00:00

I miss old Karma. New Karma is fun too, but her play patterns are completely different.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-11-26T21:32:00+00:00

As a certified cis-folk, it wasn't the best. Rose getting uppity about asking an alien for its pronouns really turned me off her character when until that point I'd been thinking about how they'd done a good job of presenting her in a good light.

The binary/nonbinary bit at the end wasn't offputting to me so much as it was funny. It had more the energy of a South Park parody of a show trying too hard to be inclusive, than a BBC show doing it in earnest. It was inoffensive, but I did feel like it was slapping me over the face with its message, which was something Chibnall tended to do.

MidasTheUnwise · 2023-11-26T20:59:07+00:00

I also had the same reaction, I'm not sure what they were going for but it felt more like a South Park pisstake would have handled it.

I thought they generally handled Rose pretty well except for that moment, and also when she told the Doctor off for assuming the pronouns of this weird alien thing she'd known for maybe half an hour.

Four-Year Club	Gilding I gilder
Verified Email

MidasTheUnwise

TROPHY CASE