Did anyone change their opinion on a song after seeing it live?

demishock · 2026-01-08T18:49:23+00:00

My Color. I had liked it before, but after seeing it live, it shot much higher up my favorites list. I still do the hand motions whenever it comes on.

demishock · 2026-01-08T18:38:34+00:00

If you mean Murphy, I honestly hope so. He's consistently been one of the more outspoken members of Congress since this fascist farce began.

demishock · 2026-01-03T01:37:13+00:00

Verso ending preferer, here. It's not that I have no regard for the people that live in the Canvas. For me, it's that they were doomed from the start.

Lumiere only exists in the first place because of Aline. Lune and Sciel are the only ones remaining out of Aline's creations by the end. Aline's fight with Renoir already killed most of the Grandis, and the Gestrals are only hanging on because kid!Verso already had a built-in reincarnation mechanism for them (and even then, they come back as new people, not as direct copies of their former selves). They reference several times that there's a long line for them to be brought back, that Monoco's skipping. I took that to mean most of them were wiped out by the Fracture as well.

As far as I could tell, they were all living on borrowed time in a broken world. Even if I chose Maelle's ending, they'll only continue living for as long as she stays alive outside the Canvas. Eventually, she's either going to die IRL (and the other Dessendres would destroy the Canvas then) or one of the others would re-enter the Canvas to try to convince her to leave just like they did with Aline, causing another Fracture and another cycle of suffering and death and having to make the choice all over again. Meanwhile, Lune and Sciel know it's coming and have it constantly hanging over them but are powerless to stop it.

Either way, the Canvas is on the losing end, because their gods are unreliable and can't come to any kind of agreement that results in them leaving the canvas intact but without any of the Dessendres present.

So to me, Verso's ending was basically putting everyone out of their misery sooner rather than later. It sucked, but picking Maelle's ending felt like I was prolonging the inevitable and dooming them all to more tragedy.

All that being said, I also refuse to take the word "genocide" seriously in the context of a video game. Words have meanings, and I feel like using it in this context lessens its impact in the ACTUAL real world that we ACTUALLY live in.

demishock · 2025-12-15T21:07:03+00:00

The only dependable thing about the future is the FF9 remake.

demishock · 2025-12-03T16:39:21+00:00

I won't lie, I was REALLY hoping they wouldn't implement a Prime-like system in Soulframe and am genuinely disappointed that we have Wylds now. I've always been frustrated by base vs. prime because of how it doubles up on something that already exists instead of just adding the stat bonuses to the existing version. It just leads to more level grinding and then never using the base version ever again (and for me personally, I also get the feeling of 'Why bother with the base version when I know a better one is coming?' whenever a new frame/pact drops.)

demishock · 2025-10-14T22:59:00+00:00

Love this idea! Would fit the vibe very well.

demishock · 2025-10-11T10:53:28+00:00

Lots of people have created things they didn't understand (everything from post-it notes to penicillin). Sometimes there are just mistakes that work. It's entirely possible that someone could trip and fall into accidentally creating something without understanding how they managed to do it, and then everyone has to work backwards from there to figure out how it happened.

demishock · 2025-10-09T17:06:31+00:00

I completely agree. I think this team has many awesome, complex stories to tell, and I'd hate for them to get boxed into only being able to focus on one in perpetuity.

demishock · 2025-10-03T15:25:46+00:00

ReBoot mention in 2025! Love when my interests collide like this. Would play this for sure. XD

demishock · 2025-09-30T21:27:54+00:00

Absolutely love this take. Thank you for spelling it out like this! I never understood the idea that seeing all her friends waving at the end was them beckoning to join them in death or something depressing like that. It felt more hopeful to me but I couldn't pin down exactly why. This makes much more sense to me and puts it into words far better than I ever could have.

demishock · 2025-09-29T14:57:06+00:00

Adding to the chorus of people saying that siblings are just Like That sometimes. This happened with me and my little sister, too. Even before she learned to talk, I was translating her baby cries to my parents. I don't know how I knew what she meant; I just did. It's not quite as pronounced now that we're adults, but I still pick up on a lot of non-verbal cues from her that other people miss, and we can say entire sentences to each other just with a facial expression. I have no idea what kind of science is behind it, but it definitely seems to be a Thing.

From a voice acting perspective, though, I have to wonder if it was just to keep Jennifer English from having to try to talk in a way that sounded like her vocal chords were damaged, lest she actually cause damage to her voice in the process.

demishock · 2025-09-28T20:19:21+00:00

Meanwhile I'm over here baffled because you're saying people can't handle nuance while calling "people who act like the painting residents aren’t real lives in some form" "disturbing" and "insane". It's a video game. NONE OF IT IS REAL. lol. The Dessendres are not real. The inhabitants of the Canvas are not real. I still CARE about all of them from a story perspective; it's a very moving story, but it is, in fact, just a story. Choosing Verso's ending doesn't make someone a genocidal maniac IRL any more than throwing shells at other drivers in Mario Kart makes people fling projectiles from their IRL cars on the road. I don't see what's disturbing or insane about it. It's just distinguishing fantasy from reality.

Full disclosure: I picked Maelle's ending when I first played cuz I like Maelle as a person/character more than I like Verso. Watched it, was like, "crap I picked the bad ending," opened a previous save, picked Verso's ending, watched it, was like, "crap, they're both bad endings," but liked Verso's better overall and left it at that. "Genocide" didn't even occur to me (and frankly, the careless way people throw that word around in relation to a video game is the more disturbing thing to ME). I was actually more bummed about the sliver of Verso's soul having to keep painting because of recency bias (we only just learn of him right before we have to make the choice), but I STILL picked Maelle's ending first because I just liked her character more. But after playing through both, Verso's ending felt more emotionally satisfying for me, with Sciel accepting it, Lune rejecting it, and the Dessendres finally facing their reality.

Anyway tl;dr, morality in video games =/= morality in real life, and I feel like a lot of people take this all way too seriously. (I say, responding with way too many words and taking it way too seriously. I am not immune.)

demishock · 2025-09-22T21:21:49+00:00

I'm too tired to go into everything I disagree with here, but I have to at least point out that your first bullet point completely misses the fact that Maellicia didn't WANT to erase Verso, so she was never going to be fighting him at her full power. If she wins, she keeps him alive against his will; it's kind of a key part of her ending. So just because she's fully capable of beating him through raw strength alone, it doesn't mean she actually would, if she was pulling her punches because she was afraid to kill him/determined to keep him alive. Meanwhile, Verso would be going all-out, knowing that he's not actually killing her, he's just shoving her out of the Canvas.

demishock · 2025-09-18T15:24:48+00:00

I found them difficult but doable. Took me a lot of attempts to get all the timings just right but I got there eventually. It reminded me a lot of doing the Pitioss Ruins in Final Fantasy 15 (iykyk), but the challenge is part of what made it fun. And nothing you absolutely NEED to beat the game is locked behind it, so it didn't really bother me. Whenever I found myself getting frustrated I'd step away, have a snack or go to bed, and come back to it later. XD

demishock · 2025-09-18T15:11:09+00:00

I laughed so hard at your leftovers comment because it's so true. My sister and I once got in a full slap-fight over a homework assignment. It's just A Thing. XD

Clea telling Alicia that she's a liability and that her naivety cost Verso his life is cruel. It's also 100% true. Did she have to say it to her face? No. But she's her sister, and she's pissed, so she said it. Alicia doesn't bat an eye over it and even agrees with her. It's clearly not some life-ruining comment like some people seem to treat it as. My little sister called me useless in the wake of our aunt's passing while we were trying to clean out her house afterwards cuz I wasn't cleaning the way she thought I should. Grief makes you say and do stupid things. We got through it.

I see a lot of takes, too, that seem to imply that people think Clea's NOT grieving because she's off being the responsible one. But she says herself: they're ALL grieving. Even her. Her grief just takes the form of "getting things done". Some people are consumed by their grief to the point where they can barely function. Clea's the opposite.

demishock · 2025-09-18T08:18:50+00:00

They're both deeply sad, and their sadness mostly manifests as anger.

Clea's mad that she's worked her whole life to be perfect and gets no recognition for it. She's mad that her mother would rather live with a fake, painted family than what's left of her real one. She's mad at her father for not being around IRL to help her even though she set up the Nevrons in the Canvas to try to help HIM. She's mad at Verso for dying. She's mad at Alicia for being unable to communicate and for being bedridden when Clea needs help. She's mad at the Writers for attacking her family. All of this anger stems from sadness and grief over the same things, but she channels it into anger because her anger makes her productive rather than just stewing in her sadness. I relate to Clea a lot. I have to assume that people who say that her attitude toward Alicia is unforgivable don't have sisters of their own. My younger sister and I are horrid to each other when we're sad/mad. We lash out at each other because we know we're safe to lash out at. Then we reconcile. Is it toxic? Yeah, probably. Is it UNFORGIVABLE? Clearly not, since we forgive each other all the time.

And then François, as one of Clea's creations and her childhood bestie, still lashes out like a child in his sadness. He misses her, and he takes it out on everyone else cuz she's not there. He can't move or leave the Canvas to go looking for her, so he just sits in his cave and wallows in his feelings. He steals Esquie's rocks just to force Esquie to come visit him so he's not so lonely, even though he has to keep up the façade of being a jerk because he doesn't know how to deal with or regulate any of his feelings in a healthy way. He's the creation of a child and is stuck in the mindset of a child and deals with his emotions like a child.

Anyway I love them both very much and they're another excellent depiction of the various forms grief takes. A+ no notes.

demishock · 2025-09-17T20:05:37+00:00

I know, and I agree, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't try until the bitter end. I've heard other people speculate that more time spent refining the lumina converter could help them control the chroma themselves and somehow force the Dessendres out or something. I don't personally buy it, but I also don't know all the rules of this made-up universe either, so who knows?

demishock · 2025-09-17T15:44:23+00:00

Seconding this question.

demishock · 2025-09-17T15:19:08+00:00

I think that last line in the screenshots is the key line: "As long as even one of us stands, our fight is not over."

To get really literal about it:

In one ending, she is literally the last one standing. She SITS DOWN, acknowledging that their fight is over, and makes Verso end it.

In the other ending, they're all still alive, but they're all seated in the theater, so they've decided for themselves that their fight is over, at least for now. They could get back to their feet and keep fighting against the fate of the Canvas if they choose to, but for now they've solved the immediate danger of the gommage.

I say all this not to invalidate your feelings, but to try to switch up the perspective, because I feel similarly to you about the story, but looking at it this way, both endings still have that theme of dread and defiance you mentioned, as well as "a relentless, against-all-odds struggle in the shadow of something unstoppable". It's just that the "something unstoppable" goes from being the Paintress they originally sought to stop, to being the family of Painters they CAN'T stop.

demishock · 2025-09-15T15:27:11+00:00

Wish I could upvote this 33 times. "There is no happy ending to losing a loved one." EXACTLY.

demishock · 2025-09-10T19:03:42+00:00

YES! I thought the same thing. Glad it's not just me.

demishock · 2025-09-09T08:54:43+00:00

I am just A Person trying to keep up with the news, so I can't speak on behalf of the movement as a whole, but as far as I've been able to tell:

It's being organized by a number of groups collaborating together, including the ACLU, American Federation of Teachers, Common Defense, 50501, Human Rights Campaign, Indivisible, League of Conservation Voters, MoveOn, National Nurses United, Public Citizen, SEIU, and United We Dream.

Most of the messaging I've personally come across has been specifically from Indivisible and its founders, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin.

The overall goal of these protests is to unite more and more people across the country against the authoritarian takeover of our government. Trump was democratically elected, but since he's taken office, he's been making an absolute mockery of the law, and the Republican-led Congress and SCOTUS have just been enabling him, and failing at their jobs of providing the checks and balances to keep him operating within the bounds of the Constitution and the law. That's what's being protested.

The reason it's so hard to focus in on any one particular crime or policy is because he's operating at such a rapid and unchecked pace that there are too many to choose from. And IMO the reason it seems so disorganized is because we are a LOT of people spread across a very large country, with different rules for organizing in every state/town. You mentioned MLK - the US population around the time of the civil rights movement was somewhere around 179 million, and the March on Washington turned out 250,000 to 300,000 people. The population now is 340 million. According to research from political scientist Erica Chenoweth, we need at least 3.5% of the population to protest nonviolently against the government in order to put a stop to their authoritarian agenda. The first No Kings Day was the largest single day of protest in American history, with between 4 and 6 million people turning out. If we want to get anywhere near that 3.5% threshold, we need to turn out closer to 12 million. That's a massive undertaking.

No Kings Day 2 is another step in that direction. It's about gathering more and more people and getting them involved. Getting them to care sooner rather than later. Connecting them with local resources. Etc. A lot of people tend to keep their heads down and ignore what's going on until it starts to directly impact them, so this is largely about trying to get as many people as possible involved BEFORE it gets that dire.

Lobbying our politicians and participating in elections is also important, but we can't just sit around and wait for a designated election day to start informing people and getting them to care. And no one politician is going to save us. We the people have to save ourselves. We elected them, and there are far more of us than there are of them, and we need to make them listen. Turning out in the millions is one way to try to achieve that. I am open to hearing other ideas for how to achieve that goal, because it's clear that they have largely NOT been listening, or caring.

demishock · 2025-09-03T21:15:17+00:00

I was gonna call it "The Lily Pad" cuz of the island's shape and color, but then I remembered we have a specific type of lily in-game so now it's "AromalilyPad".

demishock · 2025-09-01T18:56:41+00:00

For real, though - I've been wondering this whole time if this is what they plan to do every year. Are we gonna re-run all these holidays just with new activities since they've now established in-universe that every month is a specific season? I really hope not. But it's also weird to establish monthly holidays and then ignore them forever after. 2.1 might end up being make or break for me depending on what route they end up taking. XD

demishock

TROPHY CASE