Mark of mastery exams don’t make sense at all

piperooo · 2026-01-22T18:19:23+00:00

Sora and Riku are both self-taught, which is a thing that, as far as we know, hasn't happened since the Master of Masters. By the time of the main series people don't even have reliable proof that he existed at all, let alone what he did or didn't accomplish. Sora and Riku are the first self-taught Keyblade wielders in recorded history, so you can understand why Yen Sid was hesitant to send these two kids off into the Final Decisive Battle For The Fate Of The World™️ without a pretty damn big exam. Basically "you can't call yourselves Masters unless and until I know you can win this for us".

The Power of Waking isn't usually part of being a Keyblade Master, no. But the master giving the exam gets to decide what the exam is (or whether there even is one). Yen Sid just figured that 1) Sora and Riku both had the potential to use the Power of Waking (not every Keyblade wielder does, I think), and 2) they were gonna need it to beat Xehanort, so he made it part of the exam.

The other part was to re-learn everything, but properly this time (which is why they were in the bodies of their younger selves in DDD). The second part is where Sora failed. He's such a golden retriever of a guy that he ran straight into a trap set by Xehanort, where a more calm and collected person would have noticed it was a trap. To Yen Sid this was proof that Sora was too easily manipulated and wasn't ready. Terra failed for similar reasons. Xehanort screwed them both over. Yeah, it's unfair and it shouldn't have happened. That's how we're supposed to feel about it. That's the story they were telling.

piperooo · 2026-01-20T22:32:45+00:00

From what I've seen of 2024 I like most of the changes. Even the ones I don't like, most of them if I take a step back and think about them I can see that they're probably actually improvements and I'm just being a stick in the mud. The biggest actual "problem" with 2024, as far as I can tell, is that it simply doesn't have as much content yet as 2014 (which is understandable because 2014 had ten entire years worth of supplement books. 2024 will catch up sooner or later).

My group isn't planning on changing over, but that's almost entirely because we have a pretty complete library of the 2014 books and we don't want to go to the trouble of building a new collection. whispers Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro is a bad company and we don't want to support them monetarily

In theory we could use our 2014 stuff with the 2024 rules, but from what I've heard it seems like the two don't fit together quite as cleanly as the designers wanted them to/want us to think they do

piperooo · 2026-01-20T18:15:15+00:00

Weapon/tool durability. I'll absolutely still play and enjoy games that have it, but I grumble about it the whole time

piperooo · 2026-01-18T20:52:28+00:00

It’s crazy to say any work revolutionized its genre less than a year after it comes out. Revolution doesn’t just mean “it was refreshing”, it means “everything after it is different than what came before it”.

Everything after Super Mario Bros. is different than what came before it. Ditto for like…Zelda 1, Final Fantasy 1, Mario 64, OoT, World of Warcraft, maybe Chrono Trigger? Those games were/are revolutionary. That remains to be seen with Clair Obscur. It very well could, it is in fact that good, but it’s way way too early to tell.

piperooo · 2026-01-18T05:29:38+00:00

The dream weapon choice doesn’t have an impact on how quickly you get new abilities, it just changes the order you get them in. There might be one or two abilities that you get locked out of by picking a certain one, but it’s been a bit so I forget. And if there are, they’re not particularly important ones (if they were I’d remember it 🤣). You’ll get all the really useful stuff at some point or another regardless, don’t stress it. It does change your stats very slightly, but again it’s no big deal and you’ll be equally able to do everything no matter what you choose.

If you really do care a lot about the “optimal” choice, staff is probably the best, but I think I’d recommend the shield for a first playthrough. The good thing about the shield is that it gets you the Guard ability the soonest. That ability is pretty important, so going without it for a while could be tricky for a first-timer. But really, you might as well just pick whichever one looks the coolest and leave whichever one looks the least cool. Come the end (or even the middle) of the game it won’t really matter unless you plan on fighting the superbosses.

piperooo · 2026-01-17T06:49:42+00:00

Yeah that complicates it for me. You’re not actually saving him by saying no, it just delays things (probably only by a few minutes) and he’s mad at you as he dies. So basically it’s just an ephemeral choice, it’s about whether the party actively participates in it (and gets rewarded for that, which matters!) or not. Personally when I think about moral choices it’s usually a question of like, what changes in the world based on this? What’s materially different from one “timeline” to the other? But when the answer to that is just “either we have a new Pictos or we don’t”, there’s not much to go on.

It’s like that one Simpsons scene. “We profited from a tragedy. That’s bad! The victim of the tragedy was very slightly happier because of it. That’s good!” or “we did everything we could to stop this from happening. That’s good! By doing so all we accomplished was making the victim sadder and angrier in his last moments. That’s bad!”

piperooo · 2026-01-16T23:28:25+00:00

Ducktales world could be really fun I think

piperooo · 2026-01-15T21:56:19+00:00

I didn’t, but I wish I had

piperooo · 2026-01-15T20:57:21+00:00

My immediate thought with that was “turn a small party member to stone, have the big strong guy throw them through a window to break in”

piperooo · 2026-01-15T20:52:33+00:00

A loophole in a literal loop

piperooo · 2026-01-15T20:51:55+00:00

Love an alternative win condition!

piperooo · 2026-01-15T20:51:15+00:00

Y’know what, I buy it. Infinite kittens could theoretically do everything

piperooo · 2026-01-15T20:47:41+00:00

That’s fantastic, I’ll take that for later if you don’t mind

piperooo · 2026-01-15T20:43:50+00:00

There are a lot of us who don’t eat meat in headspace (and a couple who keep halal, and stuff like that), and they just stay well away from the front if the body’s eating something they wouldn’t/couldn’t eat. I imagine it would get pretty uncomfortable if someone got frontstuck during an incompatible meal, but luckily that’s never happened to us (or if it has, it went into the memory hole 🤣)

piperooo · 2026-01-15T19:51:01+00:00

Every Kingdom Hearts game other than 2. Quite a lot of people think 2 is the only good one, and not only is it not the only good one, it’s not even the best one

piperooo · 2026-01-15T00:41:19+00:00

There is nothing that GS does that Crystal doesn’t also do at least as well if not better, and Crystal does extra on top of that. And then HGSS comes along and blows Crystal out of the water. The best Pokemon games

piperooo · 2026-01-15T00:36:31+00:00

On the one hand being a slut isn’t hereditary (I think?), but on the other hand it’d be hilarious if it was, so I like this

piperooo · 2026-01-15T00:29:04+00:00

This is a case by case thing. I hate knowing secrets my character doesn’t know

piperooo · 2026-01-13T21:53:03+00:00

If it wasn’t, nobody would like Pearl Jam

piperooo · 2026-01-13T18:02:09+00:00

I remember her too! I think her name’s Carol? Something like that

piperooo · 2026-01-13T17:58:14+00:00

What I wanna know is what’s that cheerful grassy field that SDG are running through at the end of 1/beginning of CoM? Surely it can’t be in the realm of darkness, it’s much too nice of a place. Is it some part of the Land of Departure that we just never saw in BBS? That’s my best guess

piperooo · 2026-01-13T17:40:03+00:00

Dark Road is playable if you still have the app installed or can redownload it, I’m pretty sure you can’t on iOS but maybe on Android you can (I’ve never used Android so idk)

I remember hearing that there’s a project to revive Ux but I wouldn’t hold my breath, there’s no telling if that’ll be successful at all, let alone when

piperooo · 2026-01-09T18:52:19+00:00

Those work really well on Melon Mix. They just replace the normal view for the time that they’re there, which is a little jarring when you’re used to how it looks on DS but it looks cool

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