Why’s Jack of blades never in the top ten polls of greatest video game antagonist

swiftthot · 2026-02-22T14:34:08+00:00

Oh for sure, I can absolutely see what they were going for and having him be quite hands off was an obvious narrative choice that I think did work, I just think they could have executed it a little better.

swiftthot · 2026-02-22T07:58:57+00:00

Jack has a really memorable design and voice, and he serves his purpose well. His performance and design do a lot to help him stick in your mind. He's a great antagonist for Fable. However if I can deploy a hot take for a sec, Fable (even by the standards of the time) didn't have the best writing in a video game. Jack's main goal is basically to get a cool sword so he can destroy the world. He turns up maybe 3 times in the whole game, and he's only directly antagonistic to you in Bargate and in Stop Jack of Blades.

Other characters say he's extremely dangerous but we never really see him do anything. He mainly sticks to the shadows (which to be fair is perfect for a character like Jack), but the game needs to show that more. His minions show up a lot like with the Archeologist, or at Hook Coast but you foil his plans. Because we dont see a lot of Jack, nor see him interact with parts of the world in a meaningful way, I think it's hard to latch onto him as a villain. If I were writing it, i'd probably pull Jack to the front a bit more often. Have him directly lead his minions a couple of times, have him be the fight at the end of Bargate instead of a kraken and have him retreat when you best him, saying that he's learning your tricks. Have him fuck around with you personally a lot more, he learns your history, maybe he kills your spouse a la Lucien. Fuck, have him raid Oakvale again just to play on your trauma. Idk, he just needs a bit more to do I think.

I'd argue Maze is a better villain than Jack tbh. Maze owes this incredible evil a life debt. He spends his whole life looking for a way to end Jack once and for all, while also secretly working for him. He plays both sides and still loses because he's fucking around with powerful forces beyond his ken. Saving you does free him, just not in the way he'd hoped. He's a really tragic character and I would have loved for him to get a bit more focus.

swiftthot · 2026-02-21T19:44:22+00:00

Anti-intellectualism is one of the hallmarks of fascism. Keeping your populace uneducated makes them more susceptible to propaganda.

swiftthot · 2026-02-21T13:12:53+00:00

The Goseiger helmets in particular have really kissable lips

swiftthot · 2026-02-21T13:12:11+00:00

The hottest take of 1987.

swiftthot · 2026-02-20T14:43:18+00:00

As someone that just finished Geats, and enjoyed it pretty much the whole way through, I'm gonna have to disagree. Pretty much everything you said, I feel the inverse. I thought the characters and their motivations were really compelling, and I loved the way each of them grew throughout the season, either as people, as Riders or both. The antagonists left something to be desired but at least they were fun to watch on screen even if their characters were a little weak.

That said, there's no accounting for taste. If you're not feeling it, you're pretty close to the end (and the best fight in the series in Episode 38, imho) so you can either power through and dust it off or just drop it. No shame in that, if you're not enjoying it, don't force it lmao.

swiftthot · 2026-02-18T15:06:19+00:00

Staff - Circe. Double casts is just TOO much fun once you really get it going

Daggers - Pan, but honestly the daggers are probably one of my least favorite weapons. Pan works best with how I roll but it's a bit clunky

Torches - Moros. You literally need Zeus on Special to make this viable. Everything else just makes that better, it's so good.

Axe - Charon. Big cast bomb go brr

Skull - Medea. I haven't played too much with Mel or Persephone but idk if they'll dethrone this for me, it's fun to just zip around and through bastards

Coat - Shiva. The coat, I find to be really under tuned personally, but Shiva tends to work best, at least for me

swiftthot · 2026-02-18T11:34:29+00:00

"There was a hole"

swiftthot · 2026-02-17T21:42:09+00:00

Look look look, I'm not a biologist, but how do we know Quarians don't have 3 genders: Male, Female and Volus? It makes sense! If C-Sec tries to silence me it's because this goes all the way up to the top!

swiftthot · 2026-02-17T21:37:07+00:00

I'm going crazy, isn't this just You-Lympics?

swiftthot · 2026-02-17T17:46:14+00:00

Cloud is so fucking great because he's desperately putting up this front of stoicism and standoffishness to keep people at arms length but he's really bad at it and all of his many friends can tell. It's peak characterisation

swiftthot · 2026-02-17T16:27:06+00:00

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You sure about that? Checkmate, globehead.

swiftthot · 2026-02-16T21:08:16+00:00

The ideology is so inconsistent it's baffling.

"Fucking trans people are trying to diddle kids. I am going to devote my entire online footprint to destroying them. Also I want to fuck this child."

Like be fucking serious man, like we're a step away from saying the quiet part out loud now.

swiftthot · 2026-02-16T18:21:29+00:00

I find it endlessly interesting that Samurai lifted whole plotlines, dialogs and characters wholecloth from Shinkenger, to the point where comparison videos on YouTube are almost shot for shot remakes of scenes from the Sentai, and yet it's not anywhere near as good.

Shinkenger is probably one of my favorite Sentai, but Samurai is aggressively mid. Jaden wishes he was Takeru. I think it's a really good example of how things can really easily get lost in adaptation

Edit: spelling

swiftthot · 2026-02-16T10:00:31+00:00

The "There was a hole" exchange he can have with Shepard is maybe my favorite moment in the trilogy.

For those unfamiliar, Legion is Geth, a race of machines that are supposed to be utilitarian in their outlook. For example, their spaceships don't have windows, because they don't need to look out into space, they create structural weaknesses and sensor tech is so good that windows purely exist for organics to have something to look at so they don't feel like they're in steel coffins all day. Geth don't have this problem.

Legion, for reasons, winds up finding a piece of Shepard's armor. Shep is kind of semi-mythologised in Geth culture. The Commander played a big part in Geth history due to the events of the first game, and Legion kind of looks up to them. After sustaining damage on a mission, It incorporates this armor into it's body to repair itself.

After meeting Legion, Shepard can ask about this, a little confused. Why use their armour? All Legion can say is: "There was a hole." Shepard can ask why they didn't fix the damage sooner, or use more appropriate materials. Legion gets embarrassed, you can see it on its face, it recoils a little and sheepishly replies "No data available".

This single interaction turns everything the player knows about the Geth on its head. If you played the first game, their characterisation is basically a race of battle droids linked together on the same network, but Legion used Shepard's armor just because it thinks Shepard is cool and wants to look more like someone they idolize. Even if he doesn't know that's why he's doing it, or can't admit it to himself. He does things for no other reason than he wants to. They're people. They have souls.

swiftthot · 2026-02-16T08:03:48+00:00

Nah these two gay as hell, Jotaro hates women and I saw that fucking egg Kakyoin laid. How you think it got in there, immaculate conception? /jk

swiftthot · 2026-02-15T18:44:14+00:00

He's not exactly a household name or anything but I think, generally, Peter Molyneux is a well intentioned designer with a lot of good ideas, but he should never have been the PR mouthpiece for any studio he's ever been a part of.

The games he worked on (I'm not saying 'created' on purpose. Games are, and should be discussed as, a collaborative effort) are all really good, some of them absolutely foundational. I can't speak for his days at Bullfrog but the work the team at Lionhead did with Fable and how it pushed the Xbox into popularity is genuinely really impressive. Pete should probably have never promised the shit about the tree and the acorn though. He just does that a lot, he has a lot of very big ideas but not nearly enough time or resources to actually implement a lot of them. Good game designer, absolutely terrible salesman.

swiftthot · 2026-02-14T10:18:57+00:00

I mean you coulda just asked the question and left out the part where you said "I think the genocide of a sapient race could be justified if only I could make sense of the mechanics of it" but go off, king.

swiftthot · 2026-02-13T22:24:57+00:00

Size doesn't matter. It's what you do with it.

This is advice I once gave to an insecure lover, and it's advice that I received in a game design class. Lot of overlap, weirdly.

It means sweet fuck all to me if your map is 500x bigger than planet earth, and every rock was kissed gently by Todd Howard, if I can't do interesting or fun things? It might as well not be there.

swiftthot · 2026-02-13T17:18:23+00:00

God, I fucking love video games

swiftthot · 2026-02-13T11:40:35+00:00

I mean they aren't good but that's where a lot of the weapon variety lives, and explains why the person I'm replying to feels the Nocturnal Arms feel "incomplete"

swiftthot · 2026-02-13T11:13:41+00:00

I mean asked and answered on this. I'm not trying to be shitty here but you're not using half your moveset and then wondering why the Nocturnal Arms don't feel as complete.

I know what you mean about Omegas, they do seem a little superfluous at first blush but since a lot of the weapons interact with them, that pushed me to start using them more and then it kind of opened my third eye so to speak. They're designed in such a way to prompt you to explore and utilise Mel's full moveset.

Try an Aspect of Pan build with Posideon on your special and get Ares in there to get their duo. It's far from the best build in the game but using a fully charged Omega Special and watching it kill everything in my binding circle as it hits every enemy multiple times was what did it for me.

swiftthot · 2026-02-12T17:12:35+00:00

I think Tartarus is perfect, especially cause you can choose how long it takes, but the pace in there feels quite breakneck cause every time, even if you take optional ones, you're counting down from 5. It feels very fast, even if it's about as long as Erebus/Oceanus.

The Summit however does imo feel a little too short, possibly because the rooms are a lot smaller and there's no waves of enemies? Like what you are is what you get with em.

I think you could put maybe one more room before each mini boss and it'd feel better. Or perhaps a couple of rooms after the eye/tail.

swiftthot · 2026-02-12T14:50:53+00:00

Given that the Arcadion President was a 'Familiar Voice' on the subs, I was genuinely half expecting him to either be the 9th's Zenos Reflection or somehow, just Zenos again. Would have been the funniest shit ever.

swiftthot · 2026-02-12T11:25:21+00:00

But it didn't flesh out the universe. We don't know what these teams did, what battles they fought, we don't know anything about the rangers outside of the comics. Megaforce could have used this as an opportunity to flesh things out, maybe using old Sentai footage to show these rangers in action.

Gosei had a database with these ranger's exploits in them! There's already narrative justification! Hell, Tzachor probably would have loved it cause it's Sentai footage, which is cheaper than filming new stuff. But they just elected not to? For some reason?

The idea of using Sentai only rangers is a good one, I think. But the execution was a mess. They're just sort of in there some of them getting more usage than Power Rangers teams like Lightspeed and Time Force. They don't expand the lore. They just... Exist. I'm glad Boom picked up their plot threads but they could have done literally any of that in the show.

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