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Get in, folks, Ryukishi07 is back.
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Oct 31, 2019 05:23
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| # ¿ May 20, 2024 08:17 |
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Please protect these children. fakeedit: I love how much fun R07 clearly has with this introduction of the Kings. Unlike Umineko, which treats the reader like a frog placed in a cool pot of normal mystery before slowly turning up the anime until it’s boiling, Ciconia just has the anime dial set to maximum from the get go. rko fucked around with this message at 15:48 on Nov 6, 2019 |
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Nov 6, 2019 15:42
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Yurigasaki posted:These early scenes of everyone dicking around in the virtual rooms are some of my favourites. Phase 1 as a whole feels like the most polished first chapter of any of the WTC games, but if I’ve got my timeline right, didn’t R07 write Umineko as his sophomore work, more or less? Which is incredible to think about, given the heights it reaches. But since Umineko, he’s done a lot more writing, and all that work on his craft has absolutely paid off. Phase 1 even has pretty decent pacing!
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Nov 8, 2019 16:45
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I think it really shows a lot of marked improvement on Ryukishi's part over Umineko – something that always bothered me in big group scenes (particularly in the Golden Land) is that characters could sometimes sort of bleed into each other a bit and the scene could be a little hard to follow.
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We’ll see! Ciconia is certainly starting off extremely strong, but Umineko is a rich, beautiful masterpiece that has already been a huge inspiration to me as a writer even though I only read it a few years ago. Real curious to see what new readers think about this most recent scene, especially that take on geopolitics from the narrator there at the end.
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Nov 8, 2019 19:33
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PoorWeather posted:Oh, I see, "Vier" Yes, it’s “Vier Dreissig (physicist)” everybody, meet this new character.
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Nov 15, 2019 15:19
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It’s interesting how this scene plays into the overall themes of the work, too. There’s a big chunk in the middle there about cultural relativism that feels very similar to the way the kids talk about the Walls of Peace. There’s a great deal of respect, but it’s respect with hard boundaries. There’s understanding, but it’s one that not only expects, but enforces differences. Mostly though I just want to reemphasize that if anything happens to any of these incredibly important and precious children I will go apeshit.
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Nov 27, 2019 15:30
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From what I remember, “Holy Mother’s Maximum Speed” is a slight mistranslation in the original/inspired by Dalí’s “The Maximum Speed of Raphael’s Madonna.”
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Dec 2, 2019 15:56
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Alopex posted:I love how much whiplash this story has packed into it. It's so cute but also so grim and the future technology just makes the highs higher and the lows lower while still being a worryingly on point allegory. R07 has always loved mood whiplashes—the origin story I’ve always heard, after all, is that he read Key VNs and decided to do the whole slice-of-life-comedy-into-tragedy arc but with horror instead for Higurashi—and you’re absolutely right that he’s pushing it further than ever before. Also this sequence is so rich with detail and meaning and I’m still chewing over Gunhild’s turn here. It’s a lot to take in, and underlines the degree to which there’s a lot more nuance to R07’s social critique than “olds bad” or “Japanese schools are not good.” PetraCore posted:P sure Lilja is on an obscene amount of drugs. Seems like everybody is and it’s just the norm in their society. Also our society.
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Dec 5, 2019 20:18
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I really love how R07 is using the Selcom as a narrative device to have all kinds of side conversations and shifts in perspective. It plays to his strengths as a writer and it’s just cool and stylish and dynamic in a way that Umineko really wasn’t until well into the story. It’s such a relief that he wrote a new WTC that absolutely lives up to the richness and depth of the last (though we’ll see if it hits the high mark of EP7). And that’s without knowing how many of these scenes we’ll later see as insanely obvious foreshadowing! That said, while I haven’t really seen any chatter to this effect, I feel like Ciconia is begging to be animated. Umineko is beautifully voice acted and it is literally criminal that no real creative effort was made to adapt it for the anime, but I think Ciconia, thus far, feels very ready for the screen.
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Dec 13, 2019 07:54
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Quinn2win posted:Still, I hope people are enjoying the story. The Gauntlet Knights won! Nobody died! Nothing nefarious is happening anywhere, surely! If there’s one thing I know about Ryukishi07, it’s that he loves letting kids win.
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Dec 18, 2019 15:14
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Quinn2win posted:This is both a 'hell' I once experienced... and the 'future' your world is guaranteed to reach. So, this 'hell' is a prophecy. It's a promise of 'certainty', which will definitely come to pass if you do nothing. 
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Dec 21, 2019 03:04
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Quinn2win posted:Merry Christmas! There was a scene I was hoping to post today, but I was too slow by a country mile. The significantly better pacing of this WTC really hides the degree to which it’s a long one. I think R07 takes advantage of this more dynamic setting to do all his scene-setting stuff and exposition in a way that’s a bit more exciting than Keichi and Battler giggling their way through the introductions to Hinamizawa or Rokkenjima. A3W has a lot going on!
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Dec 27, 2019 19:59
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I love these dorks and I’m glad nothing bad will ever happen to them. I’m also looking forward to talking about the powerful parodic vibes of Ryukishi07’s sociopolitical commentary. I’m obviously pretty skeptical of the narrator voice throughout, here, given the other WTC games, but while I’m comfortable assuming that R07 doesn’t really think the A3W’s straight-up Starship Troopers style fascism is a good idea, it’s going to be very interesting to see where we end up in terms of Ciconia’s moral message and R07’s commentary on, you know. Living in an era of rising tension and nationalism. Anybody else miss the island of cheeky murders?
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Jan 3, 2020 15:15
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It’s probably not a great sign of the times when you find yourself thinking “I wish the people in charge in real life were half as sensible as these anime teenagers.” The grim timeliness of Ciconia is pretty uncanny, regardless.
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Jan 10, 2020 15:10
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Yeah WC, R07 really packs a ton into this phase, and it feels like he just starts going wild with plot after the first like, two scenes. It’s pretty amusing, it feels almost like a parody of Eva or Code Geass or Eureka Seven or whatever, with these big plot swerves just piled on top of one another. I love it. PetraCore posted:Yeah, I've found myself thinking of Ciconia a few times over the past week, especially in terms of the people who profit from manufactured conflict and the people who push for war while disregarding the consequences. In many ways, WTC games have always been about the idealism and hope of young people and their opposition to the olds and their toxic, conflict-ridden status quo. Olds who are always associated with the military, at that! Huh!
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Jan 11, 2020 03:47
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Jan 16, 2020 01:53
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This sequence is one of the best R07’s ever written, a distillation of all his strengths. The mood whiplashes, the colliding narrative layers, the bombastic anime action, and then that ending? Perfection. witchcore ricepunk posted:Wow. I feel so, so much empathy for this scenario, even from my relatively peaceful perch of sending private Slack DMs to coworkers during terrible meetings. This setup is so realistic and human. We do all of this already! We’ve all talked a lot about Ryukishi07 through the years now but I honestly think we’ve underrated him as a social commentary kind of guy—maybe some of that gets lost in translation, especially since his two other big works are highly Japanese, and I know some folks have said Rose Gun Days has iffy politics. In any case, he absolutely nails the present here like the best sci-fi does. Charlie Brooker should read this, learn himself how good satire works. Quinn2win posted:There's a lot of debate going on about whether or not we're going to loop in phase 2. Personally, I think we will - just because some characters were still alive at the end doesn't mean that the timeline is going to continue. Miyao killed Lingji, multiple other main characters died, the world is still completely doomed. Whoever the player is on the side of the Gauntlet Knights, they lost. My favorite theory right now is that with four phases, we could have each phase focus on another faction. I find it especially amusing to imagine that R07 will just go nuts and add more and more conspiracies and characters, each loop showing that the world is more and more complicated and busted, but then it’s hard to see how you wrap that up. But regardless, those post-credits scenes make me think you’re right, Quinn. Jestress sure makes it sound like she’s been around a whole lot longer than her appearance would suggest, Koshka’s comments about a “new world” are suggestive, etc. There’s also the weird cellar door thing that Vier talks about, and all kinds of other nonsense. But there’s also a ton of loose threads here. Knowing R07, when he ties them all together, we’ll probably be surprised.
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Feb 15, 2020 04:06
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My assumption is that following this event, all of the survivors would be heavily interrogated about the Order of the Public Bath and more or less restricted from any further action as the world ends — the olds have decisively taken control of the board, and the kids have seemingly lost all agency as they are forced to be martyrs for the horrifying Walls of Peace. Honestly, I hope we loop after this, because Phase 2 will be pretty depressing if it continues from this point. It seems like the world is in such a state that complete collapse is inevitable, and that flavor of apocalypse is always my least favorite read. Oh, one thing I completely forgot about until this re-read: why does the Ninth Prime Chivalric Order contact Miyao in the middle of this fight? What could that even be about? Is it just Toujirou’s initial ask, like, “hey son do you want to be a bad guy,” before he got impatient and apparently took total control over the situation?
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Feb 16, 2020 06:13
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Zack Ater posted:Personally, I think that "This ruthlessly sudden conversation had made Miyao's mind blank out for a while..." makes it seem likely that we skipped some time where Toujirou hasn't actually been talking to our Miyao. Meow or blue Miyao, maybe? It’s going to be a lot of fun finding out what R07 has in mind with all this, because he’s really set us up for a doozy. The man just loves a doppelgänger! And so he’s built a perfect sci-fi world in which a solid percentage of the cast is really multiple people! I have to assume he’ll do something that’ll make us all rush to read Phase 1 again with the truth in mind. Pretty neat, that he piled up so many actors and motives that sorting it all out to begin with is a chore.
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Feb 17, 2020 03:33
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cropoval posted:May be worth noting that in the game itself, things are jumping around enough that it’s ambiguous whether that message is going to Miyao at all. Upon reread I thought it may have gone to Chloe, for example. There’s a lot of this ambiguity throughout the story. R07 loves to imply that there’s a chronological/spatial relationship between events that are, in reality, happening at completely different times and places. Of course, he could also just be screwing with those of us who read Umineko, like how that game delighted in messing with the expectations they developed over the course of reading Higurashi. He’s tricky that way! I’ll hush up for awhile though, because I want to discuss all this more after folks have read the postgame content.
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Feb 18, 2020 21:59
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Chloe is already a top tier R07 character. I think she’s gonna go far. She’s also powerfully suspicious, what is her deal and why is she this way??
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Feb 26, 2020 01:11
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Carpator Diei posted:(But also an interesting continuation and modification of one of Umineko's major themes: The possibilities and limits of creating another world when the existing world is unbearable) drat this is a good point. The whole post is good, I completely forgot about wartime Christmas ceasefires and whatnot, but for some reason I never really considered that connection between Umineko and Ciconia. I haven’t read enough Higurashi to try and thread that through the whole WTC series. I suppose you could see its protagonist and antagonist as trying to create another world, but that might be stretching the theme a little too far.
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Mar 18, 2020 05:17
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Huh. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone point out this very simple thing, Cyouni? What is up with that Gauntlet?
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Apr 17, 2020 14:53
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