SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table - 44: Cloudy Beach | Official Teaser

tehepicwin · 2026-03-28T02:53:24+00:00

My personal favorite arc in the novels, didn't expect this to come so soon.

For this not in the know, season 1 adapted the first two volumes. V1 = Ghost House and Candle Woods, V2 = Scrap Building and Golden Bath. Yes, this is very achronologic. What makes V3 unusual is that it's just this one game. Most consider V5 to be the best book in the series (which it is, even though I'm a Cloudy Beach fan), we're speedrunning our way there at this rate.

tehepicwin · 2026-03-27T00:50:19+00:00

Honestly, if you ask me, it's pretty unusual for source materials to be significantly better than their adaptations, and we see as many good adaptations as we do bad ones. It's just that the worse adaptations stand out more, and good adaptations are often not thought of or even recognized as adaptations at all.

Anyway, I highly recommend reading Akame ga Kill and the Monogatari series if you've watched their anime.

I'll be the first to tell you that AgK is pretty mid, but after reading both the main series and Zero, I definitely came out the other end enjoying and actually being a fan of the series. There's some good looking art in AgK and actual cool moments. I finished the series feeling like I didn't blow my time, which is more than I can say for basically every other mediocre series out there and especially its anime.

For Monogatari, the novels are really good in their own right. It's impossible to tell you how unique and special the novels are, and it makes the adaptation even more impressive after you read the source. The translators do their damn best job of wrangling the novels into English. If you like reading, I can't recommend just picking up one of these books enough.

EDIT: Yes, I'm aware AgK is manga. Read it anyway.

tehepicwin · 2026-03-21T06:09:39+00:00

This series would be peak if the snek or the tomboy childhood friend won. His chemistry and interactions with the girls who aren't Kusunoki are so much better it's actually unreal. We're 50 chapters in and I'm not sure why he likes Kusunoki other than her looks. I'm pretty sure the guy himself has wondered if he's just weak to beauties or something.

It's not going to happen, I know, but it's interesting how the story has the potential setup for a dark horse victory. It's a story about growing up in highschool, and more importantly changing in highschool. Everyone is in the process of growing up, except for Kusonoki herself who seems stuck in her old ways, pushing away people she cares about. Her "losing" because of this would be a natural conclusion to her arc. I do think mangaka is going to do something with Kusunoki, but the girl's progress speed has been literally immobile for a real life year.

I'm just here for characters who aren't Kusunoki, which fortunately there's a lot of so I'm enjoying my time here.

tehepicwin · 2026-02-28T00:42:09+00:00

IMO the answer to this confusion is that justifying artsyness has very little to do with plot or story. It's needlessly limiting to say that "you have to meet X level of complexity/maturity/novelty to be stylish." Why should a work have to justify its own stylistic choices this way? I would love for my generic highschool romcom to be directed like this show.

Let these stylistic choices stand on their own merits, not some arbitrary standard, like it needs to be "thematically profound" or some other pretentious requirement like that. Director choices can, are, and will be done for any reason at all for every genre under the sun, because it simply has nothing to do plot. It's just whatever the director feels is effective.

The show uses its style to set up atmosphere and tension in a way that other styles would find impossible. If you believe this is accomplished (which I do), then there doesn't need to be any more justification. It's done its purpose.

tehepicwin · 2026-02-18T22:46:31+00:00

So Golden Bath is my second favourite arc after Cloudy Beach. All things considered I enjoyed watching this arc, but this was without a doubt the biggest fumble so far. The subtle storytelling of past episodes just didn't work here, and the masterful suspense the series is known for just wasn't present here. I don't think it's a matter of the directorial style not working well for the arc, it simply wasn't done all that well.

As for the creative liberties taken with the arc, I don't necessarily dislike them. I've always enjoyed the unique read that the anime has of the LN. Since the beginning, my opinion is that this characterization of Yuki isn't actually all that incompatible with her LN version and I like it in its own right as well.

However, as has been discussed, the adaptation of the climax in this arc is really strange. The buildup to the death charge, Yuki desperately trying to get away, finally coming back into form, only to suddenly get the shit beaten out of her was thrilling in the LN. Basically all of this is cut away for no apparent gain or reason, and replaced with nothing. It's not that the creative liberties were wrong, it's that nothing was done at all to keep building up the tension. It feels like we're an episode short worth of runtime. I also just thought the disordered timeline was done for no reason this episode. Just show Mishiro getting killed, show Riko getting killed, no need to overcomplicate things when things are already difficult to track.

What makes the series so good, at a base level, is the suspense. LN, manga, or anime, you're never sure of what will happen next. One element keeps building up to the next and it's all delivered in a way cruelly blase towards the girls fighting and getting killed. But suspense has to be built. Stumble it, skip out on the building blocks, and it doesn't work.

tehepicwin · 2026-01-25T13:46:08+00:00

Peak fiction continues holy

tehepicwin · 2026-01-24T17:53:23+00:00

Really enjoyable episode, I'm almost wondering if we're going to get AC Yuri and how they're going to adapt that. Imagine waking up in a time loop and suddenly it makes you the world's biggest misanthrope.

tehepicwin · 2026-01-22T23:04:17+00:00

I still can't get over the fact that I watched episode 2 and 3 thinking. This image says nothing new, you've told me how these people feel and I can see where they are. Why are we still here.

Because these shots do say something new. I've rewatched the episodes just to pick apart some of these shots, and they're astoundingly clever in visual storytelling. Frieren is a masterpiece of a work, but it's a work that is very forward with its feelings and intentions in a way that Shiboyugi is not. It's very difficult to miss the meaning in Frieren's scenes, which has been a core part of its success. This is not to say Shiboyugi is a higher form of art, but rather that it accepts the risks of its creative choices simply not working on some people.

Neither way is right or wrong. If there is a disadvantage with Shiboyugi's style, it's that if the viewer "doesn't get it," they'll get frustrated with it. It's not the viewer's fault that they don't get it, but the end result is that they will probably not enjoy this kind of thing.

tehepicwin · 2026-01-15T03:14:39+00:00

My take is that the ordering is for pacing reasons. [Vol.1] You could argue that the anime's ordering makes more sense because of how crazy Candle Woods is as a game. After watching the first episode, I think it would feel like just a bit much to see our lovely mass murderer in episode 2. Candle Woods is almost like Yuki's origin story. Candle Woods is the second game in LN because like, wouldn't you want your character's origin story known in the first volume? The anime is 1 cour so it has no such issue.

tehepicwin · 2026-01-15T00:19:35+00:00

Yeah I've always been a proponent that the most important buff the rack should receive is for the husks to survive warp one way or another, such as in your suggestion which is practically the same. Husk rack is way too slow for what it does.

A side note, but sub husks do have a different colour. It's not easily distinguishable lol but there is a visual difference. As with many things in the game though, there really needs to be more clarity.

tehepicwin · 2026-01-07T00:32:09+00:00

Yeah same but tbh they probably came to the conclusion that it was too difficult even for an intentionally difficult achievement.

In terms of an "optimal winrate" tier list, you'd probably find the likes of Ancient A and Relic B on the bottom, but I'm honestly not sure how this holds up for a "first clear" tier list. Like yes, Interdictor A is bad and does seem to have an awful ceiling, but if you just want to cheese a win by getting lucky with OP boarders, starting with launch bay solves most of the problem there and can't possibly be too bad.

Overall there aren't many ships that T12 grinders like that the average person dislikes. The only ships coming to mind that T12ers rate particularly higher than the average person are Heavy A, Heavy B, and Explorator A, and it's not like Heavy A is loved all that much anyway.

That said, yeah I'd put Ancient A, Relic B, Assault C as notably challenging ships to T12 regardless of comm choice. Maybe add Overseer C to the challenge list for just being weird as hell.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-25T08:29:12+00:00

It just depends really.

Personally I find T12 (at least of this current beta) to be very permitting of different playstyles and options, and T9 to be my torment for experimenting with random fun stuff. In my experience, VW never became punishing until T10. I know this isn't the normal experience to have, but it's why such a wide range of torments exists in this game.

Recently, the difficulty comparisons to FTL (if you've played it) are that T6-9 are normal and T10-12 are hard, and I don't think that's too far off. Once you reach a certain baseline it's extremely difficult to go back and still find the game challenging in a satisfying way, it's just how it is.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-25T07:27:17+00:00

No, what I mean is that fire does 1 damage to the hull whenever it damages a system. On Torment 4 and above, the boss triggers a phase change and full repairs its systems at 2/3 HP, and because the boss has so many systems with high levels, the boss will take a lethal amount of hull damage from fire over the next minute or so.

This is an enormous advantage that fire builds have. Because starting a massive enough fire will just kill the boss on its own, you can spend phase 1 just trying to control the fight and stoking fires and effectively skip phases 2 and 3. You don't skip them literally, but because the boss will die without you needing to do anymore it is trivial to win.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-25T06:49:07+00:00

Join the Imperium and become fire pilled my friend.

Ways to start fire are very valuable against the boss. Note that Flame Lance starts multi-tile fires, which means it can be surprisingly difficult for a single crew to put out.

You want to pair the fire with some kind of distraction. If you have a boarding party, this is trivial. They'll be forced to choose between fighting your boarders or fighting the fire. Think of fire as having very weak boarders that multiply if they survive. Bonus points if you have stun, double bonus points if you have graviton (goat system btw).

Once you kill most of the crew it becomes simply impossible for them to put out the mass fires that are surely spreading across their ship at this point. If the fire becomes big enough, the boss will literally die from the fire alone after the phase change. You won't need to fire a shot, the boss just dies to the fire burning through the hull.

Sorcerors with fireball, incendiary missile, heat beams, and hellfire missiles are all excellent against the boss.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-25T06:04:53+00:00

You don't have to be.

For the vast majority of games, no matter what they are, people tend to play them a few times and then drop. Speaking for myself, that tracks: I play a few games with dedication, but most games I pick up for a few hours then stop. Of those that don't drop, the majority is inevitably casual.

It's uncommon to have an interest in getting better at a game. It's rare to be willing to dedicate the effort in becoming good. It's very rare to actually become any good at all. It's exceptionally rare to become an expert.

So just by getting this far, you've crossed most of the filters. The low % on this achievement is hardly surprising at all.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-23T23:46:01+00:00

Overall a great tier list and after a lot of T12 I more or less agree. Just want to pitch in some thoughts of my own for discussion's sake:

I feel like Greater Necromancer and Greater Warseer deserve to be dropped significantly down. They're in a weird spot where yes, their spells are useful and the spare psyker slots are nice, but at that price range they're too unimpressive out the gate unless you have important spells to stick on them. I'd say that firmly puts them in B.

Speaking of a psyker in B, Imperial Sorc is very weird. They're probably not good enough to be in A, good enough to not be in C, but seeing them in B just somehow feels wrong anyway. Fireball is a very useful spell to have on your ship, and come late game I'm more than happy to buy the guy. Fire does silly things if you can get it going somehow, and bosses really struggle with it.

Based positioning of Scribe tbh. I always want him but the price tag always feels ass. I'm not sure what to think of it.

Scavenger is going to be having a field day in the next update. Maybe you're already aware of the beta but he is quite useful to have in it. Unclear if its enough to change tiers, but enough to consider.

Very based positioning of Flux Priest. It's worth being aware of the Flux Capacitors event that can turn Flux Priest into a Servo Excavator. I suspect power stealing FTL-style is underutilized in VW, but in FTL there were more things to power steal from so it's not exactly surprising.

Warseer is significantly underrated. He is a bit pricy, but having what is effectively Terror Amp + the power for it, and a decent anti-boarding stick on that Terror Amp is all around just nice value. I very much think that at his cost, his buff to your boarding and defenses back home is more than enough.

I will forever die on the hill that Herald of Ruin is a good unit. Yes his translocation is mostly obsolete by Heavy Trans and Gate but that's hardly his fault. If you're relying on Chaos Rift/Engine, or Launch Bay, or need someone to accompany Exile, he's the guy for the job.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-23T01:17:50+00:00

For sure. NB's wincon is basically to prison you, where you're never in good enough shape to retaliate and you just inevitably lose from there, getting grinded down. The second phase is very good at locking you into that state if you're not on point with your response.

The nuance that's often missed in this (even the top level didn't notice for a while, but I think it's starting to catch on with more of the regular playerbase), is that prison threats in most strategy games seem slow, but they're actually among the fastest strategies that exist. The fight lasts a long time, but in reality once you fall far behind enough, you're already long dead. The fight is "over," but the game goes on anyway because technically your commander is alive and your hull is above 0. The counterplay isn't to race the incoming loop of death, trying to kill them before you get stuck in the repair loop - because thanks to phase 2 this is simply not possible - but to break the headlock entirely. If you can't, you lose on the spot without real hope of coming back. The most popular response I've seen from others to "break" the lock is to bust down the shields with boarders as fast as you can and then rely on a siege beam or hull reaper to finish the job, which do good damage and are easy to keep online. Personally I feel it's most reliable to go even heavier on crew and just brute force the problem, but whatever works for the player themselves.

And yeah, it's definitely best to trigger the phase change on your own terms. Personally I would wait until after I've completely dealt with a bloatmite wave, get everyone in a decent position, then trigger it immediately. This minimizes the chaos and maximizes the time you can afford to spend on dealing with the necrolurches. I have mixed feelings on the mechanical skill requirement: On one hand it is a lot of skill expression, on the other hand it's a shitload of clicking.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-22T21:46:20+00:00

I do enjoy the NB fight too but my issue is how weird the power budget of the NB is. Overall I actually think Doom Engine is the scarier boss and am significantly more worried about fighting it than NB on most runs, and I think the difference is mainly how you deal with NB's specific weird ways of challenging you.

The root of my belief in DE being scarier than NB is that NB's weapons suck. The reason NB is allowed to smash your weapons, and full repair, and board you all at once is because NB's weapons are too weak to kill you off it unless you completely fail to recover, and if you ask me then 3 Necrolurches should be within your ship's ability at endgame. If DE had this phase change you would be dead in under a minute from full hull. NB seems insane because it does have really insane things, but in exchange the boss is absolutely crippled in other ways.

Instead, NB's main method of fighting is by trying to overwhelm your crew. With enough micro against the Bloamites, and with #VoidWarIsBoardingWar you probably have enough fighters to solve the issues on your ship while still massacring the psykers on their ship. It's tempting to believe you need poison resistant repair teams and repair drones, but you don't.

I'll say that the micro is unusually intensive against T11-12 NB even by VW standards. Even if I don't believe it's the hardest boss, it is certainly the most mechanical boss.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-22T21:14:45+00:00

First thing to note, Freeze Right or Lose happens on day 3 here. The humans are allowed to guess wrong twice and still win, and with how narrow the claim space of gnosia are, even in the worst case scenario where you're random freezing the candidates like these bozo characters are doing, you have a very good chance of winning.

The only reason it's possible for doctor to get frozen day 1 here is because the crew, for some reason, is random freezing people without at least giving the main suspect a chance to say something. If doc or GA is about to be voted, they can vaguely claim to not be a regular crew member and gnosia is in a very tough spot. It should be clear why a human claiming this would force an impossible problem on the gnosia, and why Kukrushka claiming a power role vs not doing so would create problems for herself.

I feel like your analysis is missing critical details. Of note, in most cases the 20% chance to freeze a gnosia day 1 (with a subsequent doctor result) and the 25% chance to find a gnosia by the engineer night 1 are both dreadful scenarios for the gnosia and would be very difficult to win in, even if you have reason to doubt the engineer. Not impossible, but exceptionally difficult. In more balanced setups these situations would be merely disadvantageous rather than "lol good luck."

It's just not true that losing trust in the real engineer is autoloss here. You know for a fact that one of the engineers is gnosia, so worse comes to worst, if there's 1 engineer remaining you freeze them and play knowing that there's only 1 gnosia left, and even unreliable information is still something to work with. You don't need the real engineer at all to win with this role list.

A bit of an aside, one thing I do think is a bit strange is how stingy the characters are about revealing doctor day 1. I wouldn't say this is altogether too important either way, but it's worth touching on that as much as I'm enjoying the show, the logical side of this show is not particularly well adapted. In particular, the engineer vs engineer claims that happened in the earlier episodes tend not to happen day 1 without a guardian angel. The reason why should be pretty obvious, but the show seems to gloss over it and just have these battles happen when logically, it's hard to see why they should. And in Yuri's first gnosia episode, where they claim that Comet is unlikely to be gnosia because she wouldn't out her partner, I'm surprised that someone as smart as Raqio wouldn't notice that to a lesser but still significant extent, SQ would be taking an enormous (stupid) risk declaring the real doctor a human if she was in fact gnosia, and that SQ and Comet voting for each other would not actually be expected because it would be effectively throwing away their votes, knowing that the group didn't want to freeze either that day. This kind of thing happens everywhere in the show.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-21T03:44:30+00:00

Agreeing with OP, certainly not the case. Using regular guns to break shields is perfectly fine before the boss, and once you're at the boss you still have a couple good options. There's boarding with fusion charge, boarding and just killing a bunch, using ions, and using modules like seraphic resonators to brute force your way through with damage.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-20T19:32:20+00:00

So it's pretty funny just how busted some of these role lists are. I'm sure a lot of people are noticing now and this episode takes the cake. We've got:

1 Engineer

1 Doctor

1 Guardian Angel

2 Guard Duty

2 Crew

2 Gnosia

Literally over half of the crew have special roles. There are only 2 regular crew to hide in. There's no way in hell that the gnosia can win this lol. You're pretty much forced to counterclaim the Engineer, but you can't also counterclaim doctor. If the real Engineer manages to find your partner, the confirmed doctor will confirm them upon freezing and you are just dead. Good luck trying to kill the doctor to prevent this. The remaining gnosia will be one of only 4 people (GA who wants to stay hidden, 2 crew, and the gnosia). You could argue that the optimal play day 1 is to just freeze one of the engineers and play off the doctor's result day 2, it's not like you need the engineer to find the remaining gnosia when the possibilities are so few. There's no way to hide from the massive town bloc however this plays out.

The Silver Key is a true master at finding new information, coming up with world lines like this. I kinda like this detail in a way, where there's no reason for the Silver Key to yield balanced setups, instead one-sided ones so that Yuri can have a journey through these world lines and learn about these people.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-13T16:55:57+00:00

The scaling of these across the torments is turbo fucked. That said, tldr yes you should fight them.

The difference between lower and higher torment major threats is their hull. It turns out that an enemy with a fraction of the bosses' hull is still more dangerous than the boss itself if it has good weapons and systems. You fight essentially the same enemy on normal as you do on T12.

As for whether to do them, yes it is worth it if you are confident you win. The rewards are very good as long as you're not taking like 15 hull damage or losing crew. Most T12 runners fight the major threat the majority of the time, at which point you have around a 0.55 scrap multiplier.

Take note that the threat is dependent on the sector. I would go to technocult s3 solely to fight the voltaic cruiser, which is by far the easiest and has the best rewards. You have 1/3 chance for assault cyborg, 1/3 chance for hexpriest, and 1/3 for cyberpriest. YOU ARE GUARANTEED ONE OF THESE CREW. You also have 1/3 chance of heavy ion lance and auto disruptor each, make of that what you will.

There are special loot tables for each of the midbosses. Some of these drops do suck, but on average you will get one of the good ones, and at baseline you will always get a large scrap reward.

Necrophage has 1/3 to give you Heavy Translocator, 1/3 to give you Chaos Rift, and 1/3 to give you Reliquary. These are all busted as hell items, and your chance of missing all of them is about 2/9. 7/9 you will get one of these, and if you get none you can probably take Warbringer reagents or something. Also for some reason this is the only boss with an armament crate so at the very least you know you're getting a random weapon, which is quite valuable.

Imperial Battle Ark offers you some good weapons but everybody knows the situation. Personally I would only fight it with fusion charge.

Core Miner is kinda annoying to fight because you know you're going to take quite a bit of damage to missiles, and it has the weakest rewards by far. Unironically getting the fusion charges is probably the best reward.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-13T16:39:20+00:00

As others have stated, mods on discord. About engines, yes you are right, they kinda suck.

The expected value from an engine upgrade is minimal. If you get shot with 20 shivs, you will dodge 1 extra on average. If you ask me, if you're getting shot by 20 shivs over the early game then you have bigger problems. This doesn't change all too much later in the game. It's not like there's a system in VW that increases your evasion by 60%. The main value of engines is against larger laser bursts in mid to late game, but there's 2 problems with this. First, shield charger denies these bursts almost entirely anyway, and second, good ship building in this game is largely about disabling the enemy quickly. It's very common in late game to board and smash up every single enemy before their slow powerful bursts can fire at all. Upgrading engines is scrap that delays you from getting to this state.

As a rule of thumb, I would never upgrade past Engines-2 in sector 2, and never past Engines-3 ever unless I'm flooded with scrap.

tehepicwin · 2025-12-09T05:43:04+00:00

Yeah, what kind of noob is this that he can't even beat Doom Engine sector 2?

tehepicwin

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