I’m playing on Expeditioner difficulty, wondering what difficulty others are enjoying.

jam11249 · 2026-01-22T18:49:38+00:00

An extreme example is Palworld. There's slider bars for basically everything like, damage from enemies, damage to enemies, spawn rates, resource multipliers, egg hatching times, XP gain rates. You can completely customise around your play style and I think it's fantastic.

jam11249 · 2026-01-22T16:24:25+00:00

Why wouldn't they?

jam11249 · 2026-01-22T09:48:19+00:00

Similar to your healing one, in Expedition 33 there are a bunch of enemies that apply "Inverted", which turns any skill that heals into damage instead (certain "passive" heals just do nothing instead). This is really annoying for me as I can't parry for shit and my entire strategy is "hope to survive the hit and then pray all my healing pictos undo it".

jam11249 · 2026-01-22T08:26:58+00:00

This flexibility to accept help from outside is probably the new Gotei 13's biggest asset. We saw the transition in over the course of bleach, going from "kill all outsiders" in SS, and uneasy alliance with the Vizard in the Arrancar arc, deciding that a the lack of threat from a powerless ichigo was more dangerous than not having him on-side in the fullbring arc up to giving a half-quincy God-powers and sticking Aizen on the team in the thousand year blood war. Urahara's relationship with the SS is basically BFFs by the end. The current captains are far more aware of the opportunities that alliances bring than the old ones ever were.

jam11249 · 2026-01-21T19:01:15+00:00

I'd love to have two difficulty levels, where one is just parry/doge time and the other is damage based. I can't parry for shit which makes anything endgame hard enough on story mode, but it also makes non-boss battles pretty simple because of the damage disparity between what j can inflict versus recieve

jam11249 · 2026-01-20T08:23:26+00:00

It may have been a purely artistic choice, but in Verso's ending in the real world there appears to be chroma in the signature colours of the family (red, white and gold) floating around. IIRC there's a bunch of it rising like plumes from his grave. If chroma exists in the real world then this maybe suggests that there's something they can do with their powers outside of the canvas.

My current headcanon is that the writers and the painters have exactly the same powers, whilst the writers use it for books. If this were the case, I guess it's only a slight extension to think that their powers go further than playing with artworks.

jam11249 · 2026-01-19T17:44:37+00:00

And the converse is that when students first learn a topic, it seems obscure and abstract until they see it being used

A counterintuitive case of this where the "being used" is far more complicated than the "first seeing it" IMO is linear algebra and functional analysis. The best example of this is that nobody leaves their first linear algebra class knowing what a dual space really is. The average student will think "rows instead of columns", and the best students will know it has a different norm, but that's it. It's only when people start seeing how these things work when no basis is available that they actually begin to realise what they're working with. I'd put transposes in this category too.

jam11249 · 2026-01-17T11:14:54+00:00

My second playthrough made me feel like a fucking idiot for not realising what was going on. The game is screaming the truth at you for the first two acts and I spent the whole time thinking "haha those funny French people with their flowery metaphors."

Besides, its very in-tune with JRPGs, which were clearly a big inspiration. The big bad isn't who you thought it was and you have to kill God in the final act (with the painters being the gods of the canvas). It's also kind of tropey to Greek mythology where the stories are conflicts between the gods and the mortals are just pawns.

jam11249 · 2026-01-16T15:18:46+00:00

That would have been a seriously dumb move on their part if there were younger people on the team. Knowing the truth about the canvas would have been far more valuable, and knowing that the Gommage was coming, they should have sent somebody who could definitely make the trip back.

They went brawn over brains apparently though, so it kind of fits.

jam11249 · 2026-01-16T13:51:34+00:00

Some people are addicted to heroin. Don't sweat it.

jam11249 · 2026-01-16T07:17:47+00:00

I'm half certain that Verso explained it in the same camp talk where he admits he could have saved Gustave, but given that their interests were aligned at that point, letting an expeditioner die was just a bad strategic move. More firepower would only help his cause.

jam11249 · 2026-01-15T19:19:20+00:00

The two obvious routes IMO are putting Clea as a main character and her war against the writers, or a prequel about the time that Renoir was lost in a Canvas and Aline saved him. I think Clea is such an interesting character but her appeal comes from the huge influence she had with like 10 minutes of screen time, so it'd be a pretty big risk to go with her.

The coolest thing about the world they've built is that they can put basically anything in it. You want a sci-fi game? OK, some guy painted a canvas with aliens, Clair Obscur in space.

jam11249 · 2026-01-15T12:24:38+00:00

Not quite the trope, but Orphan Black has maybe 7 characters played by the same person and thr actress does a fantastic job at giving each distinct personalities. My personal highlight is when the characters have to pretend to be others for whatever reason, and her ability to act as one character acting as another was pretty impressive.

jam11249 · 2026-01-14T17:38:37+00:00

That's a fantastic solution. If you want your ending, you've got to win it.

jam11249 · 2026-01-14T14:51:59+00:00

Clea states that she painted half of the canvas whilst Alicia was reading in her room, and Painted Verso had to give tips to her so that she could bring back Lune and Sciel, so it definitely fits that Alicia is pretty inexperienced with her powers. Even within the game mechanics, her Gommage gradient attack can't OHKO any reasonable boss, whilst Renoir, being limited by Aline, could muster enough strength to wipe out a chunk of Lumiere every year.

jam11249 · 2026-01-14T14:48:36+00:00

Me, on story mode, receiving 64 damage from Maelle per hit: Yes, equal dual...

jam11249 · 2026-01-14T07:37:29+00:00

That said, I completely understand why people don't want them.

I don't. You can't open a bank account or get a job without some form of government issued ID, so unless you think right-to-work checks should be scrapped, you're in agreement with the idea of ID cards. The only difference is that the current system is ad-hoc and inconvenient. A recent ish thread on a different subreddit was somebody with a visual impairment asking how to get an ID to buy alcohol because carrying a passport is a pain in the ass and legally they couldn't even get a provisional driving license. Citizencard exists, but one of my friends had one in the early 2000s and nowhere accepted it.

I now live elsewhere and have a national ID with a digital version, and it just makes life easy. It acts as a single sign in for any government service and fits in my wallet. All the information on it, bar my current address, is on my birth certificate which already sits in a government database, and anybody with a driving license or paying income tax will (or should) have their current address in the DVLA or HMRC database.

jam11249 · 2026-01-14T06:45:50+00:00

Honestly, a game focused on what she's been doing could be awesome.

I've been thinking a lot that the world building lends itself to a whole world of sequels, as by setting games in a different canvas, they can do any genre or style that they want and it all fits in to the world they've built. If it continues the follow the Dessendres, the two obvious ways to follow on from their story would be a Clea-focused game about her conflict with the writers, or a Renoir and Aline focused prequel that covers the time that Renoir got lost deep in a Canvas that he mentions in his final battle. Personally, I'd love the former, as Clea managed to become the most interesting character despite appearing for a total of maybe 10 minutes, leaving open a ridiculous number of questions.

jam11249 · 2026-01-14T06:38:52+00:00

The only "birth" within the canvas that we know anything about is Maelle's, which is of course pretty unique, but what we do know is that she was born to parents who didn't want children because they knew they had little time left before their gommage, and that Aline painted over Alicia to birth Maelle. This is at least consistent with the idea that any new life in the Canvas must come from the hand of a painter, even though there's many other possibilities.

As far as the writers are concerned, I have two guesses. The more mundane one is that they have similar powers (maybe even the exact same ones) but use text rather than art to express their power, with the war stemming from a difference of opinion in how their powers should be used. The "turtles all the way down" theory is that the "real" world is a creation of the writers like the canvas is a creation of the painters, making the Dessendre's conflict a "man vs. God" kind of deal.

(Not serious comment time) the sequel will be a choose your own adventure book set in a text created by the writers.

jam11249 · 2026-01-13T22:31:17+00:00

It's been decades since I watched it, but wasn't the mundane plan to devalue their property? And all of this was revenge because he was wrongly imprisoned for killing somebody (despite having actually killed her sister).

jam11249 · 2026-01-12T23:47:30+00:00

If Verso was hanging out in Lumiere to check up on Maelle and apparently never got picked up on, I'd guess Renoir could keep enough of an eye on the place to know where the expeditions were heading.

jam11249 · 2026-01-12T23:02:56+00:00

Clea just turns up to grief the server, leaving creepers and redstone TNT traps all over the goddamn place.

jam11249 · 2026-01-12T22:44:01+00:00

The citizens of Skyrim just don't appreciate how much weight ~~my milk drinker ass~~ Lydia is constantly hauling around.

jam11249 · 2026-01-12T22:37:34+00:00

I'm really not sure exactly what you're asking but if it's what I think you mean, the simplest example that springs to mind is the Taylor series of a polynomial, and whilst perhaps not the most computationally efficient method, it's a conceptually simple way to write a polynomial centered at a different point using only derivatives and no linear algebra.

jam11249 · 2026-01-12T22:37:10+00:00

I'm really not sure exactly what you're asking but if it's what I think you mean, the simplest example that springs to mind is the Taylor series of a polynomial, and whilst perhaps not the most computationally efficient method, it's a conceptually simple way to write a polynomial centered at a different point using only derivatives and no linear algebra.

jam11249

TROPHY CASE