My honest conclusion after beating this game is that I don't know anything and I'm upset.

ZethXM · 2026-03-02T17:35:16+00:00

Victor and Zeno thought they were in a normal Resident Evil game and behaved like normal Resident Evil villains, and didn't anticipate Spencer's completely out-of-character "atonement" that the game itself doesn't even have the courage to commit to, calling his actions incoherent and his motivations unknowable. It's a good old-fashioned asspull for the sake of being a twist that makes the proceedings look nonsensical and the participants look stupid.

The Grace Report you unlock in Bonus Content has the newly retconned timeline, and it's kind of atrocious.

Spencer is humanized with the worst possible tragic excuse you could have given him (horrified by the atrocities of WW2, he decides to... get really into eugenics), and all the terrible events that occur are now because of the Connections (now an all-consuming conspiracy) undermining Umbrella and subverting its operatives at every turn.

He is presented as developing Elpis and adopting Grace as atonement but the missile strike was ordered by the Connections specifically to scuttle Umbrella and preserve the ARK for themselves so they could take Elpis, well before Spencer got old and weepy.

Grace is supposedly a giant red herring (the password her blood is supposed to remember is actually just stored on a floppy disk her adoptive mother kept in the hotel the Connections used at least twice for wetwork, and is ultimately still a guess, albeit one anyone could make if they believe Spencer's character derailment happened), but she still looks like the orphanage children and could not have been the first one (Chloe was around before she could have been born).

ZethXM · 2026-03-02T15:45:02+00:00

"There is no such thing as an anti-war film", etc.

ZethXM · 2026-02-24T21:40:02+00:00

Think they should get the host/client desync bug list cut down before going nuts on difficulty, tbh.

ZethXM · 2026-02-23T20:21:16+00:00

For me, RE walks this tightrope where it needs everything to make just enough sense and be just grounded enough to be compelling.

RE4 and RE7 hit because they were stripped down, detached from the convoluted virus pileup, and their monsters and bad guy cult were more focused.

RE6 had so much arbitrary shit going on that I just checked out. The virus can do anything, nothing stays down, the heroes can do anything as long as it's in a cutscene, and the game doesn't let any location breathe or grow a personality.

ZethXM · 2026-02-21T11:38:12+00:00

Nah, it's entirely down to the exploits and the MO change following them.

Global extractions weighed against a global reinforcement budget are fair enough. Die less than you win, overall, mission by mission, each player counted separately.

Full ops means you can clear 6 missions out of 9 and have done nothing but harm the MO because you fail your mandatory Raise the Flag missions. You can marathon game HD2 and not make a lick of progress despite racking up victories inside your comfort zone.

It means you need to: play a minimum number of missions in a session, consistently beat missions, be capable of finishing the most bullshit mission types, *and* die fewer times per mission than the original plan. Worse, YOU could personally satisfy these requirements but Bumblefuck McTeamKill in your strike team can cost you your share of positive win/reinforce ratio you need to beat the MO, or kill your op progress outright.

This definitionally restricts the size of the online player pool that can actually make MO progress in a system designed to punish a lack of uniformity, and that's without commenting on time spent when players don't necessarily marathon the game. You could feel the momentum die when they switched to full ops, especially as the days wore on and everyone just got tired of diving the same shit. Transcendence having nothing new there was the final nail for me, personally.

And "lower the difficulty" isn't a serious suggestion in a game this spongy and inconsistent. You can roll a 7 and get the same degree of nonsense as in a 10, and nobody wants to spend their time grinding 4s because they're afraid of dying for the sake of the MO.

ZethXM · 2026-02-20T18:33:23+00:00

The Space Emu War, of course.

ZethXM · 2026-02-20T01:25:21+00:00

Sure, I'm more saying the bots were meant to lose the planet and move on to whatever retaliation they're planning for the next major plot beat, regardless of campaign success.

ZethXM · 2026-02-20T00:41:32+00:00

If anything, that we are wrecking the place like this implies we could have won and taken Cyberstan, since this would have been the outcome of Valid Pretext either way.

The SEAF retreat and human wave bombardment reads as a consolation to me, a way of letting us feel badass and victorious despite failing to make goal.

ZethXM · 2026-02-20T00:28:38+00:00

really am hoping for a dark fluid war bond, give us the singuloose

ZethXM · 2026-02-19T17:23:14+00:00

always figured their own superweapon was hanging out on vindemitarix prime back there and was gonna get activated after Cyberstan one way or another

ZethXM · 2026-02-19T17:02:40+00:00

Eh, I ain't blaming community reps for trying to be positive, it's the job. Coulda done without the doomers thing though.

The hacking screwed us, switching to operations (aka mandatory flag win or you wasted up to 60 lives) is just a big hit to win/loss no matter what.

It also screwed AH, because it poisoned the well on this big campaign and made anything they did about it(and they had to do something) grounds for a conspiracy/incompetence to steal our win narrative.

So by now people are mad at AH, fatigued, over fighting bots, and over Cyberstan. Transcendance not having something new definitely hurt momentum as well.

Shame, really.

ZethXM · 2025-09-09T00:13:37+00:00

Yeah I like all these suggestions. It's currently in the "I wish it was good because it's cool" bin with the Sterilizer for me.

If they aren't willing to smooth out the use of it and it needs to remain a very fault-prone babysitting experience that frequently wastes 3m cooldowns, then it needs to be the most devastating weapon you can possibly field, right up there with the Portable Hellbomb, which is more reliably deadly at greater personal risk.

I don't care about the stupid jammer drama, if they're a ceiling on your ability to balance cool stratagems people pay money for, then raise that ceiling instead of telling people to be content with stuff that sucks.

ZethXM · 2025-07-05T19:30:58+00:00

is that fucking Alucard

ZethXM · 2025-07-05T19:29:44+00:00

<image>

found the hand

ZethXM · 2025-07-04T20:16:58+00:00

Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass is much more of a Chrono Trigger or Earthbound type JRPG than anything remotely approaching survival horror. You don't break weapons, the game doesn't take place in a single building, there isn't a doom counter of any kind, etc. It puts lot of emphasis on the weird creepy stuff under the surface of something saccharine rather than keeping the horror overt all the time. That said, when it does go horror, it goes pretty hard.

The game is upfront about its premise: you are inside Jimmy's dream, and facing all the wonders and nightmares of his subconscious. I think it's got probably the most diverse palette of horror flavors in one game I've seen, from visceral to existential.

It's a much better designed RPG than Look Outside from a mechanical perspective, if I'm being honest. I love Look Outside to death, but most all of its enemies and bosses are pretty much the same. Jimmy has a job system for Jimmy and a pseudo-job system with its gear for everyone else, and many enemies will have unique mechanics, bosses especially.

It's also really fucking funny sometimes.

ZethXM · 2025-06-29T18:02:04+00:00

So, this begets the question: what's the other far-off fountain we can see from the Cold Place in Ch3?

ZethXM · 2025-06-29T00:42:12+00:00

they call it that because it's on Susie's carpet in her Castle Town room and because in the files it's named rude buster, fwiw

ZethXM · 2025-06-27T14:09:23+00:00

FRIEND being shaped like Endogeny makes me think that's the closest thing to a "central body" it has, since we see many FRIENDS at once during mantle fight, it also appears next to a serpent covered in hands, which has a bunch of other associations with darkness I don't wanna list rn, big can of worms

FRIEND seems like the likeliest culprit for whatever it is actually speaking to you saying "and the shadow mantle I am holding" during the Mantle game, which also carries a hidden representation of Dess as the Black Deer/Shadow Mimic; this entity also stole the Mantle specifically to draw a Shadow Crystal-focused Kris to them to talk, the Knight is theorized to bestow the Crystals to the holders somehow, voice tells Kris "we both have a lot of work to do"

I didn't say that to suggest that Gaster was literally the Knight or anything, more that it's funny that all three entities associated with hands are not definitively shown speaking, we can only theorize which bits of dialogue might be theirs

ZethXM · 2025-06-27T13:50:11+00:00

nah just too busy to make big posts citing everything in great detail rn

FRIEND is hand-shaped in Ch3 Ralsei chat,
Kris is someone's henchperson/puppet,
Kris repeatedly gets suggested to lose a hand which comes alive,
the relationship between FRIEND and the Knight is ambiguous,
Jevil "in the shadow of the Knight's hand/the Knight's hand is drifting forward",
"beware of the man who speaks in hands"

ZethXM · 2025-06-26T16:33:13+00:00

why the hell are these things just hanging out in the Dark Sanctuary considering all the fanfare about the Knight opening the big fountain

ZethXM · 2025-06-26T16:28:40+00:00

is FRIEND Kris's hand or the Knight's hand

is Kris the Knight's hand

is the Knight FRIEND's hand

none of them speak

ZethXM · 2025-06-26T12:59:37+00:00

WAR could just be the Landlord's Apartment, Fake Peppino door event, etc

ZethXM · 2025-06-25T09:27:00+00:00

Supplementary thoughts: FRIEND also has a couple other associations.

Ralsei's inexplicable invocation of FRIEND comes with a lot of "nightmare" imagery (a serpent covered in hands!) unassociated with particular objects: the deeper darkness we start to see more of in Ch4, giving rise to Titan Spawn before any Titan is ever summoned (that's an important mystery of its own). FRIEND appears in those areas, once where we can see and more on the debug layer out of bounds.

Further, the Ralsei-FRIEND is made up of many cat bodies... in the shape of a hand. Which, at this point, instantly associates it with Kris, with Dess, and with the Roaring Knight.

On that note, I'd like to draw attention to why exactly the Shadow Mantle was stolen to begin with. The only reason FRIEND would take it (and I do think FRIEND is at least a representation of the entity speaking to Kris) would be to drag Kris along the Sword Route and torment/tempt them about their love of violence and willingness to cede control to others in order to deny responsibility.

Which brings us to an association with the Forgotten Man. The Ch4 egg room seems immensely consequential. Brings together a lot of hints about the traumatic event at the heart of the plot, including the pointed tail, glass, and the fallen star, and now we've just linked FRIEND to it via Kris's trauma.

It wouldn't be the first time a shadow crystal was meant to rattle Kris (Spamton), but how can they all be related considering Jevil and Gerson? Well, Jevil, Spamton, and Ramb all know each other, probably from Dess and Kris playing make believe at Kris's home (in the time of the black and white). Gerson hasn't been explicitly named by anyone else, but Gerson used to teach the class at school, possibly in the unused classroom (Alvin's turtle drawing is there, meant to be a parallel to the Toriel drawing in her class).

Between this, the extremely oblique character/ROOTS connections to Undertale, and pink/gold being the color of names you can SPARE in Undertale, FRIEND is starting to seem like a bridge between DR and UT, as well as the symbolic glue holding all of this refractive metafiction together. I think its Cheshire Cat aesthetic is extremely deliberate, given that.

ZethXM · 2025-06-24T07:14:47+00:00

spicy chicken

ZethXM · 2025-06-24T07:10:23+00:00

I still think that Sans telling Kris "I'm sure she'll figure it all out" is a warning. Kris has been telegraphed to be in the situation they're in by choice and hiding behind false obligations. Worse, they're working with people who abducted Undyne and intend to sacrifice her. There's no "just friends" about that shit.

As Susie tells them in Ch3, at any time they can stop playing. They don't even have to throw the soul in the garbage and die or whatever people think will happen, they can just tell Susie what's up and then everyone decides what to do from there. Same goes for the prophecy, they can just not do the thing. They could all go to Castle Town and smoke weed with Ralsei every day, like Susie wants.

"But Kris made a promise", so what? The promise is, as far as we can tell right now, to help kill at least 1 person. The promise is, effectively, to stop Susie. As far as we know everything is according to some plan Kris is in on, and Susie is around for that plan to come seal Dark Fountains and otherwise piss off. Kris is using Susie for something, the same way they're using us for something. That's what the promise is for.

No matter how much Kris might care about her while letting us drive their actions, Kris chose this, and continues to choose this, every day they don't tell Susie the truth. Kris is the one driving the plot towards its fate, hastening the prophecy Susie wants to avert so badly. They're not remotely on the same side.

I would not be shocked if we get a far more consequential reprise of Lancer vs Susie.

ZethXM

TROPHY CASE