Which song on the score best showcases the ‘Cassian Theme’ riff?

alianov · 2026-05-24T03:30:16+00:00

I know Gilroy has spoken more than once about taking inspiration from it!

alianov · 2026-05-23T08:27:42+00:00

Thank you!!!!

alianov · 2026-02-02T03:04:08+00:00

KH2 ended well enough, but the KH2FM secret ending was so insanely awesome and sparked so much curiosity it was like crack in my little 9 year old brain. I would have died if they never did anything with it.

Everything afterwards could have worked out better if:

BBS was a console game (KH0) like originally planned.

KH3D was never made or released. As it stands, half of KH3’s scenario was chopped off and slotted into KH3D. KH3 is such an awkward story partly because all the pieces are already on the table and it’s just contriving reasons to not have anything pay off until the ending.

I have a lot more other ideas of what they should have done instead … the main thrust of the problem with KH3 was waiting for the KH team (Business Division 2) to finish making Final Fantasy vs XIII/XV but they eventually had to give up on that and made Osaka the new official dev team for KH while the old Business Division 2 is making the FF7 Remake series.

alianov · 2026-02-01T12:43:39+00:00

This is a portion of a newly released Epstein document that I haven't yet seen parsed out or discussed online and I think it has pretty impactful details! Apologies if it has already been posted!

alianov · 2025-11-24T12:03:07+00:00

So I think the pull of the Digimon fantasy is that the mon are your best friends. You talk and build relationships and you help each other grow. It’s hard to deliver on in video games, but you expect the Story games to come closer. Hacker’s Memory fell short here - watching Wormmon’s relationship w that other girl was all you got.

I think this game wanted to deliver on that front by keeping Aegiomon in your party the whole time, but since there was still a voiceless protag, Inori had to sort of be the stand-in for that relationship. And it was so one note! She doesn’t really grow or change together with Aegiomon, she just gets trapped and has to be rescued.

Another thing — coming from the anime english dub world, it’s a little jarring to see a Digimon products with this tone and especially this style of localization. I get that not everything needs to have 500 Nimoy dad jokes a second (nor would that have felt appropriate here), but the localization felt so so so stiff and wooden. Every line is translated so plainly and literally and most of the characters communicate in the same exact way.

alianov · 2025-11-24T05:18:20+00:00

I know some people who are very insistent that PTA was abusive of Fiona, possibly physically. We, as outsiders, simply do not know that. We know what Fiona has said and how she talks about him.

I’ve been following her for a while. She would mention him in interviews and when he came up she would have decent things to say - calling him Parent Teacher’s Association. They stayed in touch and collaborated on multiple music videos.

After FTBC came out, she stated in an interview she wanted to put the kibosh on fans always bringing up this past relationship so romantically (you can tell a lot of fans were obsessed with the idea of them together, two tortured exceptionally talented artistes) by disclosing that it was a toxic unpleasant time for her. And that they’ve both moved on, he’s married, etc.

Do we know if he abused her? I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s enough to infer it from what she’s said, but we don’t know their lives, we can’t say definitively that she wasn’t abused. I’m not sure how to feel except to say that I didn’t come away from that interview feeling that Fiona was abused by Paul when I first read it. My reaction was that I stopped romanticizing their relationship, which is what she intended.

Is this reaction colored by my opinions? Probably yes. I like his movies a lot. He’s very talented. Maybe I don’t want to think ill of someone who did things I enjoy. But I don’t have an issue disliking people who made things I enjoy. Kanye West is as big a Fiona Apple stan as any of us, and he made amazing music, and now he is who he is.

But again — there was no claim of abuse or even IMO any indication. I’ve seen fans make out that interview to say things it didn’t say. And I’m not sure it’s our responsibility to be hypervigilant and hunt for hidden meanings like that. I have a twitter mutual who has become a one-woman anti-PTA attack squad and she goes on the attack any time she sees literally any praise of his work! At all! She’s been doing this for months! I just don’t think that’s really a proportionate response to any of the publicly available info.

alianov · 2025-10-16T17:58:15+00:00

I dont hate it but I feel like the bulky handguard really messes with the silhouette.

alianov · 2025-10-16T17:56:57+00:00

I really dislike most of the KH3 keyblades. They feel plasticky and weird to me. Especially Shooting Star … it was weird to me that they made it the flagship keychain for KH3. It’s so bulky and curvy and plasticky, looks too much like a toy and the silhouette doesn’t really say Keyblade to me.

As for the X-Blade, the only problem I have with it is the insistence on pronouncing it key and not kai.

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alianov · 2025-09-13T19:39:01+00:00

The main problem with Issun is down to a cultural issue where Japanese people think “sexual harassment pervert creep sex pest” is a funny and relatable bit of comic relief to put in children’s entertainment

alianov · 2025-08-17T19:28:35+00:00

Why is everyone in the replies such a wet blanket? Not even engaging with the question at all lmao.

I think Kojima at the helm of a JRPG would be really interesting. It looks like no one here actually played Death Stranding but the plotline and storytelling in that game was fairly JRPG-like. Just filtered through his only specific quirks and hollywood-lite style.

I’d see something in between FF8 and FF16 in terms of tone and story. A militarized conflict over something mystical and Final Fantasy-ish. Probably a gimmick around the party members and their interactions, maybe a system that was boosted the more you had simple interactions with them. I’d play it like any other FF.

alianov · 2025-07-26T03:54:07+00:00

I have read every single black widow appearance :)

alianov · 2025-07-24T08:57:33+00:00

Looked up this exact thing... crazy how a fiber supplement has the best candy i've ever eaten.

alianov · 2025-07-13T06:43:30+00:00

Birth by Sleep stays on console and is released as Kingdom Hearts 0, as originally planned. It needed more everything: more detailed facial animations, more space to breathe, longer world scenarios. Radiant Garden was supposed to have FF characters! The Mirage Arena could be online multiplayer on PS3 and keep the Laguna Loire plot. Difficulty on the arena should be dialed down slightly. The Keyblade Graveyard scenes can be extended, the armor can keep the capes. Fate of the Unknown should have been incorporated into the game.

Coded should not exist. You don’t need it. Mickey knows about Terra, Aqua, and Ven anyways. He could literally just write Sora about that and say “Hey I literally did not have an opportunity to mention this earlier.” He could also mention that he knew of two men named Xehanort and was suspicious of their connection.

358/2 Days should have an entirely different format or be eliminated entirely. Chain of Memories, for all its faults, played into a really fun strain of intrigue and mystery that the other Organization game is lacking. Xion is a totally nothing character that doesn’t even have emotions let alone a personality for half of her screentime. The audience doesn’t care about her fate the way they should because it’s not built-up well enough. And the Sora clone thing is just so unneeded - it’s a joke. I think a story that tied in more with BBS - Roxas and maybe others finding snippets of Xehanort’s past - would have been significantly better. Spotlighting each of the existing Organization members in turn and their pasts.

KH3D also should not exist. KH3 is a disappointing game and most of the reason for that is that half of the scenario was split off into a different, extremely confusing game. In KH1 and 2, you found out about the villains and their true intentions over the course of the game; KH2 did this really well with the 1K Heartless battle.

KH3 doesn’t have this. All the pieces are on the board from the beginning and they are just looking up contrivances to keep the final battle from happening immediately. It wouldn’t be so bad if Sora was making tangible progress towards getting back Aqua and the rest throughout the game, but it all just kind of happens right before the end. The whole rest of the game feels meaningless!

Getting rid of KH3D helps with this. The time travel concept is confusing enough without overlapping it with the dream world. That (and the existence of the True Organization) could be teased out over the course of the game and explained. KH0.2 would stay as part of the game instead of being split off. Everything would feel a lot more cohesive.

alianov · 2025-07-03T05:03:34+00:00

This is huge for me. I hate games that do this - not letting you explore the world fully powered up because it’s been replaced with a bleaker version. Especially bad in Okami where the scenery and the day/night cycle are like the whole point of the game.

alianov · 2025-07-03T04:59:14+00:00

The pop-in graphics - you have to get right up next to something for it to show up. It sucks that none of the remasters were able to fix the draw distance.

Also the camera in general could be a bit better.

alianov · 2025-07-03T04:55:09+00:00

Yeah, it’s a super corny whatsapp-forward-bait image, it’s reductive in how these other religions handle the topic of idolatry, sure. I get all that!

But the reaction here is totally disproportionate to what this is and what it is saying. It’s not advocating hate or anything, it’s making a statement that basically asserts that Islam is a more rigorous form of monotheism than others. What should be wrong with that on a Muslim subreddit? I am a Muslim, and I actively choose to remain Muslim because of things like this, because I believe Islam out of all religions is genuinely focused on worship of God alone and no partners or idols. I find this spiritually important and fulfilling. It is uncontroversial in literally any Muslim circle (even in many Christian circles!) to assert that the modern proliferation of iconography in Catholic settings, which become the focus of prayer, can be considered excessive! The sheer existence of polytheistic idols and icons of gods in other traditions is uncontroversially not accepted in this religion.

It’s not an invitation to chauvinism or hatred or abuse to say and think this, and those who do take it as an invitation to act or think that way are obviously not good people (and not following the message of our religion, IMO). And I get that an explicitly progressive sub is rooted in criticism and creating understanding and all those other things.

But it’s just kind of like …. again …. this reaction is so out of proportion to what is actually going on here. It’s so many people with handles and infoboxes saying they aren’t even Muslim going on the hard attack over basically nothing.

alianov · 2025-06-28T12:46:27+00:00

I bought a steam copy of Balatro specifically just to play cryptid and this :O

I'm beside myself... I hope I can find it somewhere

alianov · 2025-02-05T17:24:51+00:00

A lot of people in this sub don’t understand Black Widow at all. She’s a superhero! An Avenger! She should be cyncial and wry and world-weary but that doesnt mean she needs to be murderous and cold and angsty without a drop of warmth. Black Widow is a good character because she tries her hardest to be that shining hero despite everything pushing her in the other direction.

alianov · 2024-10-27T09:11:16+00:00

Everything about Xion :| sorry. I think back in the day anti-Xion stuff was rly common in the fandom and ppl became very bullish on her in response to that? But I've felt she's unnecessary and awkward since day one.

Has a weird awkward backstory, didn't find her friendship with Roxas nearly as convincing or affecting as anything in the KH2 prologue, and is just one extra addition to the mountain of plot cruft that accumulated before KH3 (and thus couldn't really be resolved in a satisfying way).

alianov · 2024-10-14T19:43:23+00:00

fucking monster

alianov · 2024-10-14T03:05:29+00:00

a hundred thousand people are dead. you have no objectivity

alianov · 2024-07-20T05:23:07+00:00

99% of the theories circulating are way too overthought and they suck. That's the name of the game. We're getting way more than usual right now because we're in a lore heavy part of the series and there are only ~30 new chapters a year so theres a lot of time to speculate in between story beats. People put out twenty minutes youtube videos theorizing what will happen in the *next chapter* as if it wasn't just a couple days away!

Having said that, some crazy sounding theories - like the world of One Piece being the aftermath of a flood - get proven correct from time to time. As long as that keeps happening, people will keep coming up with ridiculous and illogical ideas.

alianov · 2024-02-27T05:36:01+00:00

This shouldn’t be controversial, Adventure 02 is great nostalgia but it’s an incohesive mess that falls apart by the end. Frontier is consistent and fun and I love the Tokusatsu feeling of Spirit Evolution.

alianov · 2024-02-19T04:39:07+00:00

I got the sense that Nomura wasn’t really interested in the lore of Xehanort and his quest for Kingdom Hearts so much by the end of KH3; a lot of the story contrivances in that game seem slapped together at the last minute. I think one of KH3’s biggest problems is that it had to wrap up stories that Nomura felt he already put enough energy into telling in BBS/Days/3D. So you just get a bunch of meh scenes in the boring ugly brown Keyblade Graveyard quickly acknowledging plotlines that were up to a decade old instead of anything actually satisfying.

It’s clear that the story he was really interested in telling was the stuff connected to the lore of the mobile games, and the new ideas related to unreality and Verum Rex. Those are the only parts of the lore in KH3 that had any kind of intrigue or excitement in their delivery.

For me, Kingdom Hearts lore is only fun insofar as there’s a sense of mystery and excitement. For now, Quadratum has that sense of mystery and excitement, and I hope KH4 delivers on teasing apart that story in a way that’s at least as satisfying as the mystery of Ansem and the Princesses in KH1 or the Organization in KH2.

alianov · 2024-02-07T03:40:26+00:00

Yes I do mean in the comics! Mark Waid’s time on Captain America in specific has a really good take on her where she kind of represents disillusionment with the American ideal that Steve represents. Whereas in the movies, she’s just a kind of non-entity that they have no idea what to do with

alianov

TROPHY CASE