fool of sound posted:Hey shrecknet, if you're cool with it we can open this up to talking about politics in tabletop stuff in general. A recent Atlantic article talked about the pro-colonialist subtext in quite a few board games, for instance. That article is a great primer, as is this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQuFSxs9VXA History and the colonial period has been a long-standing genre in designer board games, but as the Atlantic article briefly brought up that community is beginning to bring in new perspectives and respect its role as something people learn from either intentionally or inadvertently. A great example of how perspectives can change just from one edition to another is Pax Pamir, which is sets you as a player in Afghan politics in the time that Britain and Russia fought each other’s interests there. Dan Thurot is better able to write on the differences in editions than I can, but there are designers that are out there trying to still explore that space in worthy ways. Triskelli fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jul 29, 2021 |
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# ¿ Jul 29, 2021 17:26 |
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# ¿ May 11, 2024 12:43 |
I do want to follow fool of sounds’ interest in opening this thread up to other traditional gaming media, so I thought I’d write on one of boardgaming’s recent critical darlings, ROOT. Root is an asymmetric strategy game where you take control of radically different factions of woodland critters in order to rule the dozen communities that dot the forest. It’s very much Risk-meets-Redwall, but the presentation makes it look like this is a jolly romp in the Hundred Acre Wood. Adorable wooden pieces peek at you from across the table while vibrant colors and charming animals appear on all the cards. This is a filthy lie, designed to trick your family into playing a deeply political and opinionated war game. (Cole Werhle, designer, “A Defense of Kingmaking”) Root was initially inspired by an audiobook version of T.H. White’s “The Sword in the Stone”, specifically the droning speech of the Monarch of the Moat: quote:”There is nothing,” said the Monarch, “except the power which you pretend to seek: power to grind and power to digest, power to seek and power to find, power to await and power to claim, all power and pitilessness springing from the nape of the neck... Root attempts to follow on from “The Sword in the Stone” by being a political Aesop, using the medium of cute animals to express opinions of power and how it is wielded. The game’s pieces are a lowest common denominator of politics. You have: Victory Points, a measure of how legitimate your faction has been (first to 30 wins) Warriors that represent critters that are willing to fight Buildings and Tokens that represent a faction’s interests And a hand of Cards that represent locals you can use in your cause. In all, Root has a rather bleak view of politics, where legitimacy can always be gained through violence (destroying buildings and tokens gives you points), and for most factions violence is completely unavoidable. Might makes Right, after all. I’ve been tapping at this post for a bit in my downtime so I’ll limit the scope of the first entry on the Marquise De Cat, just so I can have something to spark some discussion. The Marquise is central to the “lore” of the game, though you can set up the board without her units. As a cat she is an invasive species, and she has just recently conquered the forest. As a representation of an imperial state, she starts out with weak control of every space on the board. Root argues that an Empire gains legitimacy by building infrastructure, so the Marquise gets points by building buildings. To that end the Marquise needs lumber from chopping down the forest, and has to rabidly protect that lumber from other factions since it represents a ton of points if your opponents demolish your lumber camps. If Root has anything good to say about empires it’s that they are focused on employing as many people as possible, with the caveat that you’re literally “Overworking” people by discarding their cards to create more wood, consuming them the way you do lumber. It’s all about resource extraction, and people are a resource. At least the army gets healthcare… There’s a lot more to each of the factions, and I want to go over the Woodland Alliance and their popular revolution next.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2021 18:43 |
Huh, I had always read the Underground Duchy of the moles as a more explicit parody of American intervionism, with tunnels=airports and an allergy to responsibility when things went bad with the “Price of Failure” rule.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2021 19:35 |
MonsieurChoc posted:Right I got Root on steam, but barely played it. I should play it more. The first expansion is available, with the Lizard Cult, the Riverfolk Company, and three new vagabonds.
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2021 21:47 |
Sodomy Hussein posted:My Animal Farm gaming is limited to Armello, looks like I have another one to pick up. You’d most easily slip into the role of the Vagabond, who plays an RPG while everyone else is playing Risk. (Beat up the beaver at every opportunity, or this WILL happen). There’s not much in the way of political commentary going on with the Vagabond, whichever class you pick is going to be an individual puttering around the forest scoring a few points here and there until you’re strong enough to go on a muderhobo rampage. Your strength is determined by the number of Items you have such as boots and swords, which exist in ruins and can be created by you or the other players for a VP reward. If someone makes an item you can wander over to their territory and forcibly take the item by giving them a card. This improves your relationship with the common folk of that faction, and eventually you can get chummy enough that you can move an opponent’s soldiers with you when you move! The most incisive commentary in the vagabonds’ design is that other people can only really interact with you (an individual) with violence. Anything they do that helps you out is usually incidental (and smart players will do everything in their power to slow you down)
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2021 22:38 |
Sodomy Hussein posted:I'm not saying that I'm allergic to sociopolitical gaming, just that Armello to my reading is fairly simple as far as messaging. Oh! Oh I didn’t mean that, just that like Armarello, the Vagabond is all about questing and leveling up. Though those methods of point scoring are less efficient than murder about halfway through.
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2021 01:42 |
Hoo boy, Archipelago is an electrifying mess of a game. It’s Catan redesigned by an adderall addict. But it’s hard to hate because despite its obvious shortcomings because at the very least the designer has done some introspection into how colonization impacts the people colonized, and the game forces the players to consider the island chain’s needs or everyone can lose outright. Archipelago forms a nice counterpoint to Spirit Island, which is just as bright and colorful with a near identical setting, but instead you play an island spirit that is driving the settlers back into the ocean.
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# ¿ Aug 3, 2021 18:47 |
Sarcastr0 posted:Just make them another color..not red. Not yellow. Green, maybe? That’s not gonna work though, you still bring those brown discs in on ships, you still bid on the contents of those ships, and those discs are still sent to sugar, coffee, and indigo plantations. Puerto Rico is so good precisely because it’s mechanics and its setting are so closely linked- it’s a game about developing an island after all. But its… uncritical? bashful? it certainly whitewashes that history and the rulebook tries to swerve to say “oh no these aren’t slaves, you’re buying up citizens”
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2021 13:56 |
Reveilled posted:To maybe put this more succinctly, I don't think you can make a game that adequately critiques colonialism while simultaneously having the player be the colonialist. It may fail the definition of “Adequate” but John Company and An Infamous Traffic (by the designer of Root) make their satire/critique a little more obvious by talking a step backwards into colonialist societies. You’re not the invisible hand of Capital trying to do A Colonialism the best to get the most points: you’re a family patriarch trying to use the revenue from the colonies to throw opulent weddings & own the fanciest hats. E: John Company in particular argues that the East India Trading Company becoming a military operation lead to a death spiral for the Company, but people vigorously kept it going because looting the princes of India made for colossal individual profit. Triskelli fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Aug 6, 2021 |
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# ¿ Aug 6, 2021 16:36 |
fr0id posted:This is why the board game Oath is secretly the best historical war game. The State is overthrown, long live the State
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# ¿ Aug 7, 2021 01:37 |
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# ¿ Aug 8, 2021 21:46 |
Oath is kinda hard to discuss in this thread since it’s such a sandbox it manages to avoid any overt political statements (except maybe that history is necessarily focused on state-building & destruction, and that individuals can only be defined as being in-state or outside the state) I did want to continue the Root Chat though, by going over the politics of the Woodland Alliance. Oath is kinda hard to discuss in this thread since it’s such a sandbox it manages to avoid any overt political statements (except maybe that history is necessarily focused on state-building & destruction, and that individuals can only be defined as being in-state or outside the state) I did want to continue the Root Chat though, by going over the politics of the Woodland Alliance. The Woodland Alliance represents a popular revolution in the forest, a revolution against all the warmongers that seek to do violence against the rabbits, mice, and foxes. It executes this revolution with extreme violence. Mostly though, the WA gains “legitimacy” (victory points) through the spreading of sympathy tokens by spending a secondary hand of cards called “supporters”. Sympathetic clearings grab cards from your opponent’s hands and turn them into Supporters when they move troops into a clearing or attacking the sympathy token itself. Sympathy is important, since those are the only places you can have Revolts; where you put up the tiny guillotines and burn all enemy infrastructure to the ground and place an alliance base on the ashes. It’s only after you have a base out that you gain access to the WA’s military actions, and the more explicit assumptions about how popular revolts work are laid out. The WA has 10 warriors, compared to the 20-25 of the militant factions. A good portion of THOSE get recruited as Officers, so you often only get 7-4 on the board to protect your bases. Your sympathy tokens get very difficult to place, so you quickly have to send out warriors to Organize the uneducated. And like all revolutionaries you participate in Guerilla warfare, where you deal the bigger number rolled on defense AND attack. So ultimately Root argues that revolutions require violence to be done to people in order to start up, and require violence to maintain themselves. They fail when their army becomes top-heavy with aspiring leaders, and when their bases of support are attacked directly.
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# ¿ Aug 9, 2021 16:52 |
Didn’t mean to so thoroughly kill this thread. Did want to share Space Biff’s latest article about “Greenwashing”, his term for replacing real historical agents with Lovecraft aliens. https://spacebiff.com/2021/08/12/greenwashing-history/#more-20510
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# ¿ Aug 16, 2021 15:21 |
90s Cringe Rock posted:I'd just assumed it was a generic zombie game. Wow. “Well you see the zombie is wearing a top hat, so obviously they’re not indigenous people”
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# ¿ Aug 17, 2021 12:24 |
And initially, the intent was to have a tilted balance of cards, with mouse>rabbit>fox>bird, but it was changed to a nearly even split through testing.
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# ¿ Aug 18, 2021 12:16 |
Comstar posted:Are all the various sides balanced in that can all win, or are some easier to win than others? Nah, there’s definitely still some unbalanced factions there: the Woodland Alliance and the Eyrie are top-tier point earners, while the Lizard Cult and the Corvid Conspiracy are quite bad at scoring points. I’ve seen most of the factions win so it’s not impossible, but it’s not a finely balanced game for sure. The other expansion races are Moles: Imperialist assholes that think invading the forest is a fun side-project Crows: Mafia-terrorists. Kinda the most garbled faction because the designers gave up on the idea of the crows being a secret police that clogs up people’s hands with useless cards. Badgers: Crusaders/Conquistadors that are trying to find holy relics Rats: Fascists. They get points for clearing out spaces of all but their own rats. There is also a giant rat who makes all of da rules. E: it’s a shame because the Lizards felt like the most opinionated but weakest faction in the game. As far as I can tell the intention was for them to win via Dominance rather than points (rule a majority of an ethnic group), but getting to the threshold where that’s an option is difficult enough on its own. Triskelli fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Aug 18, 2021 |
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# ¿ Aug 18, 2021 14:12 |
Not tabletop games, but why do so many JRPGs have you fight & dethrone God?
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# ¿ Sep 24, 2021 00:44 |
Since Root got mentioned again, I’ll go ahead and post this excellent ongoing series about the game as viewed through the lens of Foucault and bio-politics Part 1 introduces Foucault and puts forward the idea that the suited cards represent citizens within each faction Part 2 discusses Power and theorizes a new timeline of events in the background of Root Part 3 is still only on Patreon, but it finally dives into the Marquis de Cat and the Woodland Alliance: what they represent and how well they represent it. I’ll quote it without pictures here quote:Foucault in the Woodland, Part Three: Devouring Your Children
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# ¿ Dec 5, 2021 17:27 |
citybeatnik posted:Jumping multiple pages back, but in at least one setting if you didn't worship any of the gods at all you ended up turned into a brick when you died so you could be placed in a wall with your other faithless fellows. Apparently that was set up by the forgotten realms version of the Reaper, a former human turned thaumaturge and the crummy kind of Malevolent Death instead of the more modern sympathetic/overworked Death.
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# ¿ Mar 11, 2022 17:54 |
Josef bugman posted:
And apparently the Godlearner’s belief system was pretty close to totally correct, as they had a ridiculous amount of power, nearly manifested a mechanical Clanking God, and had to be destroyed by an alliance of pantheons.
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# ¿ Mar 12, 2022 13:04 |
Josef bugman posted:Not exactly. You see the God learners represent Imperialism, so they expanded too much and collapsed and were not "correct" just because they were powerful. They tried to switch too grain goddesses who possessed the same runes to "prove" there was no difference. When they did Millet wouldn't grow for one half of the swappers, and for the other marriages would not last longer than a year. It was an understanding based on flattening all culture to serve the ends of the dominant one and, as always, it failed because it did not appreciate or understand, it assigned. Right but the ability to extract and relocate the gods themselves, or summoning up long forgotten ones seems to imply they have a deeper understanding of metaphysics than anyone, and only the Lunar Empire is anywhere close to attempting similar feats.
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# ¿ Mar 12, 2022 20:41 |
Still gotta give major respect to Eberron for not having an active pantheon and sealed off from all the other DnD cosmologies.
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# ¿ Mar 14, 2022 17:43 |
And of course writing in a group that has stolen everything it owns as a cultural habit is a little eyebrow raising without the Down syndrome connection
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2022 13:17 |
Tibalt posted:Yeah, generally it was viewed as missing the point/joke of Orks - they're an entire species of the most perfect warrior predators, Arsenal Fans. The reality of an Ork invasion would be as terrifying and miserable for the civilian population as an Eldar, Imperial, or Chaos invasion. I still wanna know what the Krorks were like, and the currently focused on Octarius War is giving us another glimpse at what large organizations of Orks are like.
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# ¿ Mar 30, 2022 20:22 |
War and Pieces posted:This is only if you ignore some of the more out there bits of the fluff like the Star Child or the Sensei (Call me a Grog if you must). It's completely reasonable for someone within the universe to make the faith claim that this was Just As Planned. Z Have the sensei appeared at all past The Lost & The Damned?
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2022 11:28 |
Archonex posted:Do they have trikes again? Because gently caress yes if so. Unknown as of yet, holding out hope for new SKREEEECH templates. Though from what we’ve seen of the squats so far (rebranded as the Leagues of Votann) they’re going to be a glimpse into what people could have been without the Imperium or the Mechanicus. Kinda want to see these guys expose the lie that “oh we HAVE to live in a theocratic fascist hell to survive this galaxy” when you can look over there and see a bunch of short guys getting along fine without it. On the other hand, the squats have secret giant computer Zardozzes they revere, so who knows how progressive they’ll actually be. E: vv It was a double-bluff vv Triskelli fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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# ¿ Apr 25, 2022 13:54 |
Apparently one of the major contributing factors to the heresy has become the fact that some of the crusading armies that conquered the galaxy submitted shoddy paperwork (or often no paperwork) which led the government on Earth to overestimate all the resources and place undue tax burdens on most planets.
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# ¿ Apr 26, 2022 10:00 |
Archonex posted:Fascists actually didn't make the trains run on time and all that jazz, y'know? The Squats can, though https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usJRU4djnrE
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# ¿ Apr 26, 2022 21:15 |
It’s been a minute since I’ve written about Root, and since fascism has been mentioned I may as well bring up the faction that best depicts the ideology, The Lord of the Hundreds. You’re the true voice of this Woodland. Dissenters will burn So the Lord of the Hundreds (LotH for short) and the other faction added in the Marauders expansion arose from a design problem. The Vagabond, the guy playing an RPG rather than an army game was overtuned; able to become quite powerful and score quite quickly while the other factions are not rewarded for fighting them. The Vagabond has received numerous nerfs over time to his ability to score points by battling and more factions in the game means more opportunities to leave the vagabond out entirely. But this creates a problem since items, ruins and forests are a core part of the game that are either not important or not interactive when the Vagabond isn’t around. Enter the LotH, a faction initially designed to have lots of warriors and interact with items and ruins. The LotH represents a pretty classical view of populist fascism, with a strongman Warlord piece (the warrior on the left with a flag) that can only be defeated by battling it who has an ever-shifting set of moods. Even then defeat isn’t permanent, as new warrior is able to take the reins on the next turn. The torch & pitchfork tokens represent Mobs, who burn down any non-Rat buildings or tokens in a clearing every morning, then spread randomly to adjacent clearings. They even remove Ruins, which presumably captures a disregard for history outside of the LotH’s genocidal project. And genocide is what’s happening here, as the Rats score Victory Points and gain legitimacy by making sure that the clearings they own are free of opponent’s pieces. Their gameplay revolves around the Warlord piece, who recruits warriors to himself, makes massive marches around the table, and grows in ability as he gains items. Gaining items though has the trade off of locking away some of his Moods. The interplay between cards and items and the LotH is an interesting one though, since it tips Cole’s hand. The LotH has incredibly poor card draw, relying on a specific Mood to ever draw more than one card. In Root’s political language this means the Warlord is actually not great at recruiting “common folk” to his cause, despite getting a constant stream of free warriors and mobs each turn. And the way he interacts with items, choosing to either take the points or the item itself, implies a greedier relationship with this mechanic than other factions. Only the Warlord keeps the wealth created by his horde, and he’s capable of looting more from the opposing factions. So we know who the Warlord is. He’s Hitler, Mussolini, Duerte, Trump. He’s every pompous tinpot dictator that makes a showy display of power, wealth, and chauvinism; and is rewarded with unwavering support by what his opponents see as a horde of mindless sycophants. But if that’s who the Warlord is… then who are the Rats? Are they an invading army seeking lebensraum? Maybe. But the mobs incited by the LotH can pop up anywhere in the forest, and the rats can be recruited from any clearing the Warlord walks through. Are they the lumpenprole? A group that’s always been in the Woodland, but one that ignores politics until called to unadulterated violence? Did the Rats silently resent their mouse and rabbit neighbors until they were given permission to slaughter them? Do such people live around us too? I don’t like to think about it.
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# ¿ May 19, 2022 03:09 |
The craziest part is the designers didn’t discover these hyper-aggressive strategies before the public beta testing, and had to nerf how many points they got for fighting people multiple times. It was so bad initially that even fighting a roided out Vagabond scored them points outside the vagabonds’ turn. Would have loved to see how the designers played the game in private playtesting, the other ways the Vagabond can score points such as completing quests or becoming allies with another faction are such uphill struggles in comparison.
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# ¿ Jun 15, 2022 00:54 |
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# ¿ Aug 11, 2022 21:45 |
Piell posted:When you wear it on a necklace or whatever its literally just the letter t, an axe is cooler But that's just a capital T. Same goes for hammers
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# ¿ Aug 12, 2022 15:10 |
mossyfisk posted:A biblical game should obviously be based on RuneQuest. The Last Supper would only be improved by the presence of talking ducks
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# ¿ Aug 15, 2022 17:19 |
Space Biff writing on John Company 2e. I don’t think many other games take this perspective on colonialism, about how pillage turns into tea parties. Plus, it’s fun to play in light of the Musk buyout of Twitter, with how one bad actor can wreck a massive company with terrifying speed. E: if I get time after Thanksgiving I want to do a write up on how this game used it’s art budget. There’s deliberate choices on when/where to use realistic portraiture, caricature, historical art and created pieces, and a brief story of how the game had to censor itself in order to be produced in China (Opium had to be replaced with generic Export graphics) Triskelli fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Nov 24, 2022 |
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# ¿ Nov 24, 2022 16:40 |
Tangential, but the D&D/Warmahordes/Shadowrun stuff brings it to mind, when did Dragons make the change from “big evil lizard” to “suave greed elementals, basically demigods”? The recent Fizban’s Treasury book has this HARD, with a preamble that says “oh yeah most individual dragons exist simultaneously in all multiverses fyi”
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2022 21:29 |
Fair, I’m a bit off base when you consider eastern myths. My headspace was with the Lyndwurm, Beowulf, Fafnir, Nidhogg examples of Dragons as greedy creatures that could talk but were dangerous more for their size than their political acumen
Triskelli fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Dec 14, 2022 |
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# ¿ Dec 14, 2022 21:38 |
Ragnar34 posted:And then there's that bit in the rulebook of a board game set in the cold war where you determine who goes first by who was last kidnapped by the KGB or CIA. Practical, functional game rules are overrated. Tiebreakers are always a good spot to have fun. Galaxy Trucker Arboretum Pax Pamir 2e
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# ¿ Dec 22, 2022 15:03 |
https://youtu.be/IEUqLL8J4gI I asked this question up-thread, and this is a well researched video essay about why you’re always killing god in jrpgs
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 13:57 |
Randalor posted:I can't watch the video yet because I'm at work, but how much of the reasons are "Because God is a dick and needs to be punched in the mouth"? I’m still working my way through it, but it starts out describing eastern religious tropes, the cultivation of immortality by mortals, and how Japanese religious organizations accrued political and military power, which caused later military governments to suppress those religions and claiming a divine right to do so. Triskelli fucked around with this message at 15:39 on Aug 2, 2023 |
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 15:32 |
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# ¿ May 11, 2024 12:43 |
Halloween Jack posted:Sephiroth's final form and not Kefka's? Odd. Spoiler for the video: its because the god is capitalism
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2023 17:19 |