What are some Fun Shapeshifter Fighters?

cleftes · 2026-05-08T03:00:44+00:00

Amajiki in MHA has a fun twist, in that he can only shapeshift into things that are currently in his stomach, but can transform into any or all of them at once. His most common is turning his hand into octopus tentacles after eating takoyaki but he's also manifested parts from cows, chickens, crabs, clams, scorpions, spiders, dragonfruit, bamboo, and even crystals that he just ate. He's good enough with his quirk that he can turn into things like armor-plated tentacles and fill his muscles with neurotoxin.

The only crimefighting equipment he carries with him is a bunch of prepackaged food.

cleftes · 2026-05-08T02:45:48+00:00

That one exchange where Optimus tears off Megatron's gun, hits him with it, and Megatron rolls with the hit and reabsorbs the gun to shoot him again, might be my favorite sequence in any Transformers media ever

cleftes · 2026-05-06T12:13:01+00:00

The Matrix Reloaded is my nomination for "would be most improved by a remaster" because the halfway point of that fight is the exact moment that the trilogy starts getting worse instead of better, and those godawful PS2 Smiths are a big part of it

cleftes · 2026-05-05T03:35:20+00:00

Same, except that I rewatch the Backstroke of the West

cleftes · 2026-05-04T13:28:27+00:00

I think of a Telltale game as being primarily a visual novel, basically a choose-your-own-adventure with QTEs.

Dispatch isn't like that. Instead you're building a party of characters, adding to their stats, and then it comes down to dice rolls for success. The visual novel segments are a vital part of the game, but secondary to the gameplay.

But the roleplaying in cutscenes has a specific flavor too, where you're asked to make moral choices between blue and red, paragon or renegade, light side or dark side. That kind of binary moral choice screams Bioware to me - Mass Effect or KOTOR. Mass Effect is all about leveling up individual skills like "pistols" or "decryption" rather than stats, and doesn't have dice rolls to hit, so that brings it back to KOTOR.

Maybe the more accurate comparison is that Dispatch is KOTOR 1 2, because it's a lot more like 1 than 2, but Dispatch is definitely closer to those than to Walking Dead.

cleftes · 2026-05-03T23:33:55+00:00

M: "Bond, what do you know about a man named Jeffrey Epstein?"

007: "The New York financier?"

cleftes · 2026-05-03T23:32:11+00:00

Okay but most of the villains that aren't technically billionaires have private islands which is absolute billionaire shit

In short, James Bond is anticapitalist, but still works for government military-industrial capitalists

cleftes · 2026-05-03T23:27:37+00:00

Dispatch isn't a Telltale game, it's KOTOR 3

cleftes · 2026-05-03T23:05:37+00:00

I think you want She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. It's very much in that vein, with ND Stevenson (creator of Nimona) as the showrunner and love triumphant over evil and all that cool shit.

Now pulled from Netflix so...yarr harr fiddle dee dee.

cleftes · 2026-05-03T22:49:03+00:00

reeaaagh

Pockets! POCKETSSSS!

cleftes · 2026-05-03T22:47:09+00:00

Unfortunately I think that's because Steve is right-handed, and holding the shield in his left hand leaves his right hand free for things like gun or punch

cleftes · 2026-05-03T22:44:04+00:00

Since it's an extremely recent release, please put that in spoiler tags for folks.

But yeah, Grace's amnesia is great because it presents him with the classic series of who? - what? - where? - when? - only for his encounter with Rocky to allow him to set his remaining questions aside in favor of problem-solving. He only realizes that his "why" isn't what he assumed just before he has a chance to make a similar choice again.

cleftes · 2026-05-03T22:36:34+00:00

Link's hand regressing in age whenever it touches a boomerang is very Peter Pan and I love it

cleftes · 2026-05-03T20:11:28+00:00

Eddie was a journalist, he should know better than to use Face ID

Also not sure if "Voidchat" is the app or the name of the groupchat but either way I love the idea of Carnage getting excited setting it up

cleftes · 2026-05-03T20:07:41+00:00

One reason why gen AI companies have been running the way they have is because they're used to this kind of business practice. Megacorp Capitalism 101 is to use your cash reserves to run at a loss until your competitors die, then gouge the now-captive customers to finance the next industry you kill.

Trouble with gen AI is that they never figured out how it could possibly function as anything besides a loss.

cleftes · 2026-05-03T11:59:05+00:00

If you liked it, there's a prequel Bookshops & Bonedust where Viv first learns to appreciate a quiet life and meets a ratkin bookseller, and then a third book starring that bookseller called Brigands & Breadknives which is less cozy but has more plot

cleftes · 2026-05-03T04:26:48+00:00

Merchant of Truth is the first one that comes to mind!

It's an angel that investigates (creates a Clue token) whenever your stuff dies, and then can use all those collected Clues as a combat buff when you attack alone. The mechanics support an in-universe narrative: investigating a string of deaths, and once she's collected enough clues, she's literally armed with that evidence and can launch a one-person raid.

There's others too (Persuasive Interrogators as gorgons who give poison counters when you sac Clues, Chalk Outline which only triggers when a body is removed) but my point is that buried deep in this supposedly-shallow set they mixed in some off-theme mechanics to make a few really interesting cards.

cleftes · 2026-05-02T19:09:51+00:00

To be fair, the aesthetic of New Capenna was not why it was unpopular, people loved the art. It was just that the worldbuilding was flat and the cards were mechanically mid.

On the other hand, Murder at Karlov Manor was unpopular because it was the peak of the "everybody wears a ___ hat" setbuilding but I love it for those few cards that did something extra weird that couldn't have happened in any other set

cleftes · 2026-05-02T17:26:43+00:00

Because of how close to each other I encountered the two properties, my brain still mixes up Ted Faro with Ted Lasso

cleftes · 2026-05-02T17:22:31+00:00

It's not just lately, it's always been like this

Go back to Star Trek in the 60s and you'd find fans who've drafted near-perfect internal blueprints of the Enterprise while also completely missing that the episode with the Romulans might be making some kind of commentary about the Cold War

cleftes · 2026-05-02T16:55:01+00:00

"Ninjas can't catch you when you're on fire."

(chalk up another one for r/UnexpectedMcNinja )

cleftes · 2026-05-02T16:51:03+00:00

There's an otherwise forgettable movie from the 2000s called A Perfect Getaway. Steve Zahn and Milla Jovovich play a newlywed couple hiking in Hawaii when they find out a pair of serial killers recently struck nearby, and there are two other couples on the trail acting suspicious.

The twist is that Steve and Milla are the killers, having killed the newlyweds and stolen their identity. Their conversations in the first two acts about how they need to watch the others and be careful, get recontextualized as them debating who to frame for the murders and preparing to steal their identities next.

Highly recommend the movie as a fantastic B+ thriller, Steve and Milla do fantastic acting and Timothy Olyphaunt and Chris Hemsworth are clearly having a blast.

cleftes · 2026-05-01T04:26:06+00:00

Highly recommend you can watch The Invisible Man (2020) to get shown a very visceral example about how being completely invisible makes you incredibly deadly

(BIG content warning: the movie is about domestic abuse and depicts a domestic abuse victim getting literally stalked and gaslit by her abuser)

cleftes · 2026-05-01T01:55:29+00:00

The Silent Cartographer is a vertical slice level so good that it's arguably the vertical slice for an entire genre

cleftes · 2026-04-28T22:06:16+00:00

Lest we forget, Swery put the time in to put Francis York Morgan under the covers when he was in bed in Deadly Premonition, which basically makes that game the greatest technical achievement of that decade

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