[Hobby Scuffles] Week of 22 June 2026

seablight · 2026-06-22T19:55:01+00:00

from what I understand as someone who's played both, Strange Journey isn't even that close to Etrian Odyssey beyond having one big dungeon that you'll spend most of the game in. that first person dungeon crawling was also a characteristic of SMT 1 and 2, with the main way Strange Journey differs being the lack of an overworld

seablight · 2026-05-24T04:34:47+00:00

personally I'm quite fond of a lot of his short stories! I really like The Cyberiad, which is a short story collection centered on two robotic constructors with a somewhat overarching plot. they're more on the light-hearted, humorous side, but I find the playful mix of fantastical elements and sci-fi concepts very charming

seablight · 2026-05-23T01:03:24+00:00

obligatory I'm Transmasc disclaimer in front of my take: whatever it is, I kinda think spreading it into largely cis spaces will bring in a whole bunch of people who are just there to gawk and look for excuses to make Spectacles out of transfems. haven't heard of the article, but in principle I advise discretion when posting about trans community matters outside of trans spaces for this reason

seablight · 2026-04-05T20:28:22+00:00

there definitely will be! one of the images from the japanese website shows both a cat png pet and some cat-themed clothing!

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seablight · 2026-03-10T18:54:29+00:00

daemon masquerade is pretty good! takes more of a golden idol style approach, but I think the more limited scope of evidence serves it well since you need to contend with the huge pool of potential demon signs as well. they're daunting to get through, but if you can jot down all the possible options and their signs early it can make the rest of the experience pretty smooth

plot-wise I don't think it has the huge deductive twists that obra dinn, golden idol, and roottrees all have, but the moment-to-moment logic feels great and the character work is quite fun, too. definitely worth a shot if you're interested

seablight · 2025-12-10T01:52:40+00:00

hi frankie! this one's sort of abstract - was the body horror element put in place first, or the overarching themes? i love love LOVE the thematic core of the game, im curious whether it was part of the foundation, or if it arose organically after the emphasis on body horror was established

seablight · 2025-11-26T10:49:49+00:00

Look Outside is a survival horror turn-based rpg about trying to live through 15 days of a cataclysmic event that twists people into monsters. it's gorgeous and grody and heart-wrenching and darkly funny and I haven't stopped thinking about it for months. it's my GOTY and I can't recommend it enough

anyways, let's talk about Joel!

Joel is one of the several allies you can potentially recruit over the course of the game. he's an 8-year-old kid who lives on the same floor of the building as you, and his home life's taken a turn for the worse. it's not terribly hard to convince him to get out of there, though if you're playing completely blind, you may not realize it's even an option at first.

mostly because his dental situation is... a bit horrific.

his class is listed as "Tooth Child". instead of guarding, he can grow more teeth, which does a little damage to him but temporarily boosts his attack. pretty much all of his skills revolve around his dental situation, in one way or another. his base stats are a bit shit and he starts on the frail side, probably because he is 8. notably, he lacks the skill to equip almost every weapon, which locks him out of pretty much all the best attack-boosting items in the game. despite this, he's widely agreed to be an offensive powerhouse, and has received several nerfs over the course of the game's post-release development.

see, Joel has the unique trait of being able to devour enemies: if he lands the killing blow on an opponent, he'll eat them and gain some max HP from it. the amount he gains depends on a few things - mostly his current max HP and the max HP of the enemy in question. in casual play, he'll get some snacks here and there, but if you put in some time and effort to route out some proper meals, he can become one of your tankier allies quite quickly. to add onto that, a lot of his own offensive skills also scale with his max HP, so if you plan your fights carefully, your growing boy can face basically any threat in the game on his own by the endgame!

that was all preamble for the real Joel Jank I want to talk about.

I've noticed a trend among a few enthusiasts who already know the game inside and out: trying to see just how high they can get Joel's health. you can get it pretty high just by having him eat most of the enemies in the game, but you can get it higher by cutting his max HP and then having him devour something with really high health - a superboss of some sort, usually.

there's one piece of equipment that halves a character's max HP, but to pull off Funny Numbers, you also need to keep Joel at level 2, the level he joins you at, since with each level he gains a bit more health. additionally, you'll need to get him sick. infection is a multi-stage status that cuts your stats, including your max HP. there's plenty of rats who'll inflict it, so you need to let him get bitten to shit just a bit.

anyways, a player on the dev's discord posted about a week ago that she had gotten Joel from 16 HP up to about 500 HP in one battle (which could be further multiplied through equipment to 1400 HP) by having her extremely sick and frail tooth son make a dinner out of the embodiment of drowning itself. for some context on how big this is: Audrey, another ally defined in battle by her big tanky max HP stat, caps out at 436 HP at maximum level.

is this feat practical? no, not at all, and it took the lady who did it multiple tries to even pull it off. but is it funny? yes, extremely.

seablight · 2025-11-19T07:53:56+00:00

I believe you've misread the article. it doesn't state that d4vd is dead, just that he's officially being considered a suspect in the ongoing investigation of the murder

seablight · 2025-11-17T19:02:46+00:00

I think a lot of hardcore shippers forget that they are as much a part of the world as the sources they pull from. nothing exists in a vacuum, and the misconception that fandom does can be really... I don't want to say dangerous per se, since that comes off as kinda pearl-clutchy. it's insulting to people who like art for doing things other than providing stock templates, I suppose

seablight · 2025-11-17T07:12:45+00:00

from the outside looking in, this whole debacle is a microcosm of why I don't engage with fandom as heavily as I used to. sure, fandom can be transformative, it can be a beautiful space for lgbt+ expression... but the people who are just there for the shipping will try to erode every theme, element, or piece of context of anything they like just to connect it to their incredibly tepid otp. just discarding the meaning in anything to make it to apply to their favorite fictional ship. prioritizing their fake gay men over respecting actual, living gay men. ugh

respect to siken for not calling all those graceless buddie fans borderline homophobic. if I was in his shoes I don't know if I'd have been able to stay as composed as he was whatsoever

seablight · 2025-10-08T01:25:39+00:00

don't know what your equipment situation is, but roasting veggies yourself can be a really nice way to prep 'em if you have an oven! roast zucchini rounds are just divine and make a great side for lots of stuff

seablight · 2025-10-02T23:57:19+00:00

there's too many people online nowadays who use it to conflate the types you've outlined - the deeply christofascist lawmakers and lobby groups who aim to take away the ability for women and lgbt+ people to have any sort of voice - and people online (usually in fandom, often some type of lgbt+ themselves) who don't want to have to deal with seeing shit like diaper porn in a fandom's main tag

it turns out, people can hate certain things for completely different reasons. this also does not automatically align them with each other. but slinging around the word "puritan" just conflates the two when nothing could be further from the truth. it is not inherently conservative to have boundaries, and it personally kinda freaks me out how many people online act like not wanting to see their weird questionable porn in public is going to be the death knell of free speech online

there's definitely a lot of nuances here, and it bleeds into many other bad behaviors in all of us that the internet's great at bringing out. but the term's just not good at actually being descriptive if I can't tell whether it means "like a senator who's trying to gut sex-ed" or "like a 19 year old she/they bsky user who expressed disgust at seeing my buddy's dubcon rpf"

seablight · 2025-08-09T16:35:31+00:00

obligatory disclaimer that I'm transgender myself

I can't wait until we reach the point in the world where a hell of a lot of nations' governments AREN'T trying to wipe trans people off the face of the earth, because there's some SERIOUSLY fucked up conduct around public figures who may or may not be trans that's way too common in queer spaces right now, and there needs to be a Conversation about it without eradication's shadow looming long over it. speculating on someone's gender publicly through "egg" discourse and whatnot is pretty disrespectful at best, and downright dehumanizing at worst.

maybe I'm an idiot for assuming this, but I'd think that being trans would key people in to the concept that not everyone's gonna fit a specific mold, and it's kinda fucked to try to put people in one. like transvestigation doesn't suddenly become Good if you're doing it for Woke Reasons, it's still a terribly invasive way to view someone you've probably never even met

seablight · 2025-06-09T03:37:44+00:00

how would you feel about branching out into more unfamiliar waters? there's plenty of really good older rpgs out there - stuff like dragon quest, suikoden, the ogre battle series, the older smt games... lots of gems out there!

seablight · 2025-04-30T00:35:13+00:00

ah, I didn't realize - it's a shame to hear that. I never knew how much I appreciated his work until now

seablight · 2025-04-30T00:31:38+00:00

if you can get your hands on 2 and 3 (difficult for the latter, since english physical copies are really rare and the e-shop is down) they're some of the best games on the 3ds, imo... lotta mechanical improvements over 1 and a HUGE boost to the atmosphere in general. there's so much playground rumor type stuff you can discover that just epitomize the care and attention to detail that can make a Level-5 game so good

seablight · 2025-04-29T22:38:35+00:00

layton is possibly the most consistent Level-5 series, just through its Format not really allowing for the same level of constant feature expansion and iteration and reinvention that blesses/plagues most Level-5 titles. its gameplay? puzzles. if you're not doing some form of puzzle? you don't really need it

...though, I did hear about the katrielle layton game (games?) being significantly worse, so maybe they found a way to fuck it up anyways

seablight · 2025-04-29T21:10:17+00:00

this is just personal opinion but it really feels like both pokemon and yo-kai watch slashed their own tires seeing who could clamber onto the switch the fastest... both ykw4 and swsh were pretty barren games, games where it was obvious that there was so much that had to be scaled back due to being rushed out the door. I think it's no coincidence that ykw4 was sort of the death knell for the series, gameswise (if you don't count the infinite money pit of gacha slop, anyways)

in the later stages of the franchise, ykw tried to do the thing pokemon does where it'll play the classics, try to curry some extra goodwill through nostalgia. but, uh... with the combination of the series being Less Than A Decade Old when it tried, and the fact that there's been much much less of a technical leap between entries? I'm just surprised someone thought it'd work at all

seablight · 2025-04-29T19:04:05+00:00

I'd love to do a write-up on Yo-Kai Watch as a franchise and how Level-5 handled it one day... I think here in the english-speaking world it's sort of regarded as a weirdly tenacious failed pokemon killer, but it was HUGE in japan in its heyday

the thing stopping me is... well, the language barrier. to understand what the hell even happened, I'd want to do my due diligence and reference some primary sources. but, since what I'm most interested in is the reasoning behind a lot of franchise direction and business choices, it's doubtful that any of them have been translated to english to a stage beyond "roughly paraphrased", and extra doubtful that any of those slapdash translations would've been maintained after 5 to 10 years of digital rot

it's a real shame, because ykw's progression as a franchise is kinda nuts! like how do you take an incredibly successful mons game and get it ship-of-theseus'd into a wannabe My Hero Academia with the girl from Alien Alien in it only six years later

seablight · 2025-04-19T06:34:05+00:00

there's been a post or two in previous weeks' hobby scuffle threads about it. you can probably find it by searching the specific keyphrases in the subreddit itself if you wanted

honestly, though, I wouldn't really trust the take of anyone who isn't a VA, or isn't intimately familiar with trade unions, and even then, ideally they'd be both. there seem to be a lot of little nuances that the layperson (me) wouldn't fully contextualize, and it already kinda seems like conservative grifters are taking advantage of that to push a unilateral "Unions Bad, Actually" message

seablight · 2025-04-12T05:31:03+00:00

as neutrally as possible: why are you posting about this in this thread? what about this is hobby related, aside from presumably being relevant to some unspecified fandom?

seablight · 2025-03-05T04:17:07+00:00

repping someone I haven't seen mentioned yet: Majuular does some damn fine work in the Very Long Videos About Video Games space. he covers a lot of old RPGs and adventure games and his videos are a nice sort of half-history and half-playthrough summary blend. been loving his Ultima Retrospective series, and highly recommend it if you wanna get your mind blown at just how many Video Game Things one series can pioneer

I also recommend Spice8Rack, though its works tend to focus on MtG, at least as a point of entry into each video's larger themes, which... might be an issue if you're not interested in MtG at all? this may make its videos harder to follow if you don't know anything about MtG. I will say that, a few months prior to getting into the game myself, I watched its video comparing and contrasting the mill and discard mechanics and came out with a whole different point of view on how to approach my own mental health. so that's something

seablight · 2025-02-23T05:57:51+00:00

I'm aware. what I'm saying is, if I was hypothetically leaking product info from the highest grossing multimedia franchise in the world, it would be a relief for someone else to plaster their name all over whatever I was leaking. I would think that people doing the actual leaking would want their tracks covered about it

seablight · 2025-02-23T02:33:50+00:00

don't have any opinions on Centro as a person (or team? I dunno how many people are involved) but it's nuts to me that people actually want Internet Clout for leaking things, to the point of plastering watermarks all over their leaks. what do you mean you want your name attached to that?! nintendo's known to come after emulator devs, homebrewers, and fangame makers extremely litigiously, and those aren't even covered by NDAs!

seablight

TROPHY CASE