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If it weren't so stupidly reliant on RNG I'd probably adore this game. But I despise RNG-based gameplay so I stopped playing after the first episode. Thanks for playing the game so I don't have to, the true purpose of LP.
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May 20, 2019 23:57
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You're a trooper for all that. drat what the hell Lun. And from what I understand you got all the power-ups you could at this point?
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May 21, 2019 00:05
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SSNeoman posted:You're a trooper for all that. drat what the hell Lun. And from what I understand you got all the power-ups you could at this point? Every single one, but I haven't absorbed them all, since we didn't have many fights after the assassination mission (just the one plunge against Rosmar!) but a Lyn Rock and a Blan Rock, and the critical strength and % boosts wouldn't make it easier in the slightest. The one heart stone -might- have. That's 3 more hp.... but it's unlikely.
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May 21, 2019 00:12
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Episode 5: Part 2: The Dark Lyn.
Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Feb 20, 2020 |
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May 22, 2019 00:24
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A good deal of things like affection points and items collected seem to be tracked between episodes; how does this work? I had no idea RM2K could handle persistent data.
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May 22, 2019 02:48
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Leroy Dennui posted:A good deal of things like affection points and items collected seem to be tracked between episodes; how does this work? I had no idea RM2K could handle persistent data. Pretty sure all variables are just saved in your saved game file. So when you copy that over to the next games file, it's all in there. I've never actually checked something like that out though. Not sure how easy it'd be to open up a save file and look.
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May 22, 2019 06:21
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Funny coincidence but I just started up Zero No Kiseki after spending most of the month so far playing Trails in the Sky trilogy, and in the opening cutscene they're already talking about someone digging a mine shaft down to Gehenna, for various bad reasons.
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May 23, 2019 06:54
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Episode 5: Part 3: Please excuse me while we ditch the rails for a little bit.
Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Feb 20, 2020 |
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May 24, 2019 02:39
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How many unwinnable fights is that at this point?
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May 24, 2019 04:30
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I mean like I get it, there was little chance that we would succeed but goddamn do I not like the game jerking us around like this.
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May 24, 2019 04:37
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xrunner posted:How many unwinnable fights is that at this point? Speaking of unwinnable fights, one of my favourite jrpgs is FFIX, and The Way manages to top even that game. Though, in The Ways favor you don't get beaten like 4 times by the very same character and never get a chance after to avenge those losses. If you count plunges as unwinnable fights... there was three unwinnable plunges in Episode 1. Though two of those end before Rhue actually loses, you do actually lose the plunge against the Novice Headhunter and before that the Novice Headhunter auto-defeats you after you -technically- defeat him in a boss battle. In Episode 2, there's the plunge against Rosmar that Rhue would've lost if Rhue didn't maim him. Episode 3 has... No forced losses, I think. Episode 4 has uh... None as well I think? Episode 5 alone has had Strata absolutely destroy us, then the Dark Lyn absolutely wreck our poo poo even harder, and now Slade merely kicked our rear end badly. That's one per update. Lol. I'm also not counting the times Rhue's been KO'd in cutscenes which I think has happened like 5 times. So that's 5 -unwinnable- plunges, two boss fights you lose, and one boss fight you technically have to win, but you lose anyway.
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May 24, 2019 04:57
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Episode 5: Part 4: To Hell with this city!
Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Feb 20, 2020 |
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May 27, 2019 08:26
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In the time we've known her, she lied people, conned them out of money, murdered them and planned on leaving Kloe to die. If Rhue trusts her after that he deserves the knife that will inevitably be in his back.
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May 27, 2019 19:57
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SSNeoman posted:In the time we've known her, she lied people, conned them out of money, murdered them and planned on leaving Kloe to die. To be fair Rhue has also done almost all of those things. And he was originally planning on watching Kloe be executed back in Chapter 3 (and let's be honest probably fondling himself to it judging by how much he seemed to enjoy dressing up as one of her hunters and tormenting her). I think he has enough personal understanding of how monsters and bandit leaders think to know what's what, so I trust his judgment in this very specific instance. Hammurabi fucked around with this message at 03:42 on May 28, 2019 |
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May 28, 2019 03:39
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The thing about Rhue wanting to watch Kloe's execution so badly is handled kind of strangely. We never see his reasoning at the time and Traziun seems to think Rhue intends on rescuing her, which he denies. Later we can straight up have Rhue tell Kloe whether he intended to rescue her or not which'll net/lose us Rhue points so... I don't know. Perhaps something Lun decided to leave up to us. Rhue points do affect dialogue and things in minor ways here and there, and while I've seen conflicting statements on this, they may be one of the possible triggers for a variant of the normal ending. There's something else that also triggers that variant for sure, but Rhue points being really low might be a backup. I might have to actually download RPGMaker 2k and dig through the code personally to untangle this, before we get there. But that's way off. It's taken us two months to get this far, and Episode 5 and 6 are the two longest episodes by far.
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May 28, 2019 04:30
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Oh, I didn't realise something had happened recently, and I planned on bringing next project of Luns up at the end of the LP, but its as good a time as any now... because... In 2017, Luke Wacholtz and a team of other guys calling themselves Something Classic released a game on steam called Shadows of Adam. I don't think it got much attention and was quickly passed over. Got pretty positive reviews though. Apparently back early this month, they released a port for it on Switch where it seems like it's gotten a bit more attention than the PC release ever did. Luke Wacholtz Writer, Level Designer, Self-Appointed Voice of Reason I do remember in the years before Shadows of Adam, Lun posted on his site about it occasionally. Towards its release, he said something along the lines of "Don't expect the weird kind of writing I did in The Way." or something like that. I haven't played it yet myself, though I did buy it. Should get around to that. Oh yeah, and after 99% of his tweets were about Shadows of Adam for a great length of time, there's a few that do stand out in retrospect...    For gods' sake, I hope he makes a loving remake but DOES NOT make it a 1:1 remake or I'll kick his goddamned rear end. I don't mind if he goes with his original 7 episode plan or what we wound up getting, but both a fair amount of writing and gameplay design is in in dire need of fixing. Maybe he even has a whole new idea of how things would have ended by now. Anyway, he barely uses his twitter as it is so it's not like we'll be likely to find out more any time soon. Plus those are pretty old tweets now. Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 00:06 on May 30, 2019 |
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May 29, 2019 15:07
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Definitely agree. A remake with entirely original assets, improved writing, and less RNG-dependent gameplay would be really cool.
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May 30, 2019 02:49
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Episode 5: Part 5: A Few Farewells.
Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Feb 20, 2020 |
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Jun 2, 2019 03:52
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This goddamn better have been worth it.
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Jun 2, 2019 04:18
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Coding error here.
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Jun 2, 2019 04:21
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ultrafilter posted:Coding error here. Not even just a coding error, but the wrong image, and a double, at that. Anyway, it's fixed now, thank you.
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Jun 2, 2019 04:57
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So is it ever made clear what was wrong with Lilah's skin?
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Jun 2, 2019 12:09
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GunnerJ posted:So is it ever made clear what was wrong with Lilah's skin? Nope. The best we get is that it's some kind of incurable disease that makes it look like she's rotting away, and would have been fatal in some fashion, if not for Sacrifa, so I assume the sickness itself wasn't important. Though it is possible that perhaps the Lord Below cursed her, while knowing Sacrifa would be the type to do exactly what he did. There's no indication of that in the writing either, though. I've always found Sacrifa's comment that the Lord Below seems 'eager... too eager." a bit interesting. There's a couple different ways you could take that. Was it just unnerving that the Lord Below was extra-happy to commit to slaughtering a city? Or had he been waiting/planning for this for a long time?
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Jun 2, 2019 15:06
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I read that more as Sacrifa having prayed to the Purpose for Lilah's cure for years and been met with silence, then once he asked the Lord Below for his help and he immediately answered. Sacrifa is smart enough to realize that it is probably a bad sign if the devil is eager to help him with his problems and that he will eventually have to pay for it.
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Jun 2, 2019 15:32
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Cloacamazing! posted:I read that more as Sacrifa having prayed to the Purpose for Lilah's cure for years and been met with silence, then once he asked the Lord Below for his help and he immediately answered. Sacrifa is smart enough to realize that it is probably a bad sign if the devil is eager to help him with his problems and that he will eventually have to pay for it. Right. That's probably roughly the intended reading, but it's not like we'll ever get the chance to ask either will we? Haha.
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Jun 2, 2019 15:37
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Episode 5: Part 6: The Truth?
Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Jun 2, 2019 19:11
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 called itI'm sure this would have been very impressive if I wasn't tired of Slade and his ability to stop any progress Rhue makes in his quest.
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Jun 2, 2019 21:10
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Episode 5: Part 7: When the game goes completely off the rails and never halfway recovers... And that's a good thing.
Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2019 06:01
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So, in related news, a game I'd never heard of finally escaped it's 11 year development hell. https://rpgmaker.net/games/406/blog/21597/ I find this kind of thing heartwarming. It gives me hope for some other games long in development. A Blurred Line is one of the all-time classics of the RPGMaker community but yet it infamously ends on a cliffhanger on all things. Lysander86 used to come around promising he was still working on the sequel every couple years, but beyond making a 2.0 version of ABL with a couple hours extra content, nothing is yet to materialise. Three The Hard Way is another classic game, and it's creator iishenron is actually the same guy who started the Misao Awards. He promised a sequel to Three The Hard Way called The Queen's Court with NO combat, for years as well. Then there's the massive amounts of unfinished demos. Sites like GamingW and GamingGroundZero, among others, often had threads like 'Post what you got this month' or people would release demos of their own accord to build up hype for their game that had nice ripped and/or altered (or even completely custom) assets, unique battle systems, or to show off the atmosphere they'd cultivated in their game... and most of those would never get done. I don't know much about this game in particular though. 2008 is roughly when I stopped paying attention to the RPGMaker community except to see if Master of the Wind's next arc was out. Part of that was because sometime before then is when GamingW.net begun to shun RPGMaker and its followers to focus on wanting to be more upscale indie gaming site. Even changed its name to Salt World which was some kind of in joke. A lot of people are still bitter over that to this day, especially since GamingW.net started out as probably THE RPGMaker site. The other big place, GamingGroundZero was the place that rabidly protected its 'custom' (slightly altered mostly) assets, even threatening legal action iirc, which is odd, since this is long before people ever dared to make money off their RPGMaker games (largely). GGZ had a rep for being kind of elitist and cult-like, with the admin Wishmoo being the centre of it all, along with her righthandman QHeretic. Notoriously ban happy too, especially if they thought you were someone from GamingW.net. Also notorious for spying on other communities for just that reason. I bring this up because... because of this sort of... rival community shenanigans thing going on (and these two were just the two -probably- biggest, not the only two) specific games were usually associated with different communities. Some of the 'GamingW.net games' were The Way, A Blurred Line and... The RPGMaker 2k3 version of Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden before it was ported to Gamemaker 6. (They planned to release it in both engines but never did!) There was a third community which splintered off from GamingW.net after a heaping of drama, lead by the Iron Gaia dev I forget the name of. Ghostlight or Ghostgrave or some crap like that. Relations between all these different community was usually pretty heated. Well. Where GamingW.net was involved, anyway. Meanwhile Indinera of Aldorlea games was off on his own doing his own thing because no one wanted anything to do with him except for when he suddenly became a publisher of other peoples commercial RPGMaker games. And god bless that French bastard for that. The lessons we take from all this are: 1. People on the internet SUCK!!!!!!!!!! 2. Don't take games like Exit Fate, Last Scenario and Master of the Wind for granted. Even The Way, as unpolished and... technically unfinished compared to Lun's early plans as it may be, is still a finished story, all things considered. Anyway, I'm going to try this new game now. And maybe I'll talk more about what I -remember- and can dig up about RPGMaker community history, in the future. That's part of the reason why I decided to do this LP, and hopefully LPs of more RPGMaker games. Anyone, of course, can feel free to chime in with what they know, especially if I say something flat out wrong. It's ancient history and I was just a teen in the 00's. Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Jun 3, 2019 |
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Jun 3, 2019 10:51
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Working theory now is that Rhue isn't a real person and is instead some kind of weapon spirit. Or a vessel for one that sometimes wanders around killing as the Phantom Slasher.
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Jun 3, 2019 12:52
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I think he's some kind of gestalt personality that's made up of portions of other people's experiences. I never actually played this last chapter it wasn't out back when I played these, it's already wild holy moley.
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Jun 3, 2019 13:19
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100 HOGS AGREE posted:I think he's some kind of gestalt personality that's made up of portions of other people's experiences. Okay, that makes a ton more sense honestly, maybe he'll start acting more like Slade now?
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Jun 3, 2019 13:42
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Episode 5: Part 8: Rhue's outta control.
Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Jun 4, 2019 12:01
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Apparently Rhue never learned that it's not about the journey, but the friends you make along the way.
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Jun 4, 2019 15:30
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I am fully on board with Rhue killing Pinky here, seriously this is just exhausting now.
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Jun 4, 2019 19:31
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Episode 5: Part 9: The Fortress Beneath The Reflective Sky.
Fleshwit fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Apr 12, 2020 |
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Jun 5, 2019 08:58
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THE AWARD SNUBBING Most Dramatic Game: The Way 5 Best Opening Sequence: The Way 5 Best non-cliche game: The Way 5 Best Game Pacing: The Way 5 Best Dialogue: The Way 5 Game that Best Plays with Your Emotions: The Way 5 Best Hero: Rhue, The Way 5 Random, the hero of Laxius Power, is roughly 10x more psychotic than Rhue at his worst. Actually, pretty much the entire cast of Laxius Power is completely psychotic. Most Mysterious Character: Gaius, The Way 5 Most Promising Story: The Way 5 Darkest Story: The Way 5 Most Anticipated Game of 2005: The Way Episode 6 You better loving believe it. The end of Episode 5 is a doozy. Least Favourite Antagonist: Strata The Way 5 This ones funny because he got best villain the year before. Best Story: Tie: Laxius Power 3 The Way Ep. 5 Biggest Improvement: Laxius Power 3: The Final Terror Most boring game: Laxius Power 3 Best Use of Sounds: Laxius Power 3: The Final Terror Most Non-Linear Game: Laxius Power 3 Worst Game Title: Laxius Power 3 Best Monsters: Laxius Power 3 Biggest Disappointment: Laxius Power 3 Best Medieval RPG: Laxius Power 3 Best Atmosphere: Laxius Power 3 : The Final Terror Best Rm2k Game: Laxius Power 3 Best Ending: Laxius Power 3 Best Original Music: Laxius Power 3 Best Epic Game: Laxius Power 3 Best Custom Graphics: Laxius Power 3 Best Gameplay: Laxius Power 3 Best Sidequests: Laxius Power 3 Best Character Development: Laxius Power 3 Best Backstory: Laxius Power 3 Most Replay Value: Laxius Power 3 Best Map Design: Laxius Power 3 Funniest Character: Wendala, Laxius Power 3 This is completely deserved since she's one of funniest characters in all of RPGMaker history. Most Overhyped Game: Laxius Power 3 Best use of pictures in a game: Laxius Power 3 Best use of lighting/shadows: Laxius Power 3 Best Villain: Rixian, Laxius Power 3 Best Graphics: Laxius Power 3 Most Likeable Character: Coryool and Wendala, Laxius Power 3 Ahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah Best Cast: Laxius Power 3 AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA Best Animal Character: Guanidia, Laxius Power 3 Okay, this was true then, is true now, and is true for all time. Most Realistic Dialog: Laxius Power 3 What? WHAT!?!?!?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!? HOW!?!?!? Hottest girl from an RM Game: Goddess Yveen, Laxius Power 3 The mere mention of Yveen makes me want to tear my hair out in anger. Best Complete Game: Laxius Power 3 Well... it is complete? Best Game Series: Laxius Power (series) 1-3 Game of the Year: Laxius Power 3 *wiping tears out of eyes unironically* code:A Blurred Line got 'Game most in need of a sequel' Another major RPGMaker game release was Love and War Act 1 which got a few awards too. This series is also unfinished, so... the end
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Jun 5, 2019 09:19
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Fleshwit posted:Uhm... The idea of Forerunners is like... integral to the way of life of wanderers... Like... they're the ones who make the invincible wayposts that name stretches and point out safer routes, make the bridges... do lots of things like that... to prepare the way for those who come after... They're also kinda played up as godlike/legendary entities, so maybe that's why he means. Like, there are people who do the stuff Forerunners are said to do, but they're just people?
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Jun 5, 2019 12:27
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GunnerJ posted:They're also kinda played up as godlike/legendary entities, so maybe that's why he means. Like, there are people who do the stuff Forerunners are said to do, but they're just people? Well, I meant that in the sense of... think about possible other implications of there being no such thing as Forerunners, and the closest thing to one is an eccentric old man who seems -very- knowledgeable.
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Jun 5, 2019 12:32
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Fleshwit posted:Well, I meant that in the sense of... think about possible other implications of there being no such thing as Forerunners, and the closest thing to one is an eccentric old man who seems -very- knowledgeable. Right, so then what's actually "making" the Way and all its assorted infrastructure? Honestly the weirdo setting is probably the best thing about this game, and I fully expect whatever third act off-the-rails bullshit is coming to provide a satisfactory big picture that will not leave more questions than answers!
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Jun 5, 2019 12:35
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