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Kinda shocked and unsettled by just how normalized slavery is in the setting. I assume his experience being enslaved himself will be part of why Clive ends up becoming part of Cidolfus' abolitionist group, but it really doesn't say much good about even his father beforehand that a Branded was reduced to a terrified and nonvocal wreck in the household's service. That's shockingly bleak for a protagonist homeland.
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Jun 13, 2023 10:54
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MechaX posted:I guess that explains why she wasn’t *that* heartbroken about Joshua. Assuming he also doesn’t revive as a human as he did as an Eikon, she’s probably thinking she could just make another Phoenix dominant with someone else She seemed aggrieved, but also furious and hollowed out. I don't think she had her handmaidens killed because they were witnesses, I think she had them killed because they "let" Joshua die, in her mind.
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Jun 13, 2023 19:58
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RatHat posted:Ah I thought Joshua sounded familiar, his VA also played Hugo in the A Plague Tale games. He has improved a lot since then Pretty sure Jill's young VA is also Amicia's? Gave me pause.
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Jun 13, 2023 23:02
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Ytlaya posted:I won't, because I respect wildlife. With the Blight happening, all life is precious. My Clive will only kill humans and constructs. Helps that there's a lot of stuff in the game that pretty clearly indicates very early on that Rosaria are not, actually, "the good guys," they're just where Clive is from - they are, after all, a slaveowning society, and the active time lore is pretty up front that all the realms are just engaged in Machiavellian realpolitik for their perceived survival.
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Jun 14, 2023 01:15
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Is there any way to resize HUD text? My eyes aren't as good as they used to be and enemy name text in particular is kinda hard to read sometimes mid-fight.
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Jun 14, 2023 03:43
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You gotta give poor Joshua credit for bravery. Kid hears swords and smells blood and immediately quietly dresses, arms himself with a full-length arming sword, and decides he has to help the other soldiers. That's guts for someone described as frail and bookish.
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Jun 14, 2023 20:51
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Unlucky7 posted:What happens if you tried to swing the sword? I only used Joshua’s magic attack because I figured he would be good with that. And he was! He delivers a powerful, but clumsy flaming sword swing.
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Jun 14, 2023 22:02
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RatHat posted:He does like a slash of fire with his hand, he doesn’t draw his actual sword. It was too short range and slow to really be useful compared to just blasting people with magic at range Oh, really? I thought he used his sword, but I guess I couldn't see it that well.
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Jun 14, 2023 22:06
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Bongo Bill posted:Why is the text in the menu so drat tiny? Maybe I just didn't notice this until MY eyes started having issues but it's definitely a thing I've noticed in a lot of games lately and it does drive me a bit nuts. You can resize subtitles but not UI script?
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Jun 15, 2023 00:53
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CuriousSymptoms posted:Completely agree. Without getting too Paul Atreides about it, without this kind of innovation in form and function the series would stagnate. I think with FFXV they were starting to recognise that but didn't have the courage to go far enough, and it ended up being a hybrid of turn-based and active battling which they didn't really figure out until FFVII-R. I also think that the success of FFXIV has given them the deserved confidence to let the story elements be just as much of a draw as the mechanics. I personally think FF really needs parties, but I'm a purist.
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Jun 15, 2023 19:34
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SettingSun posted:That's a funny review comment considering the first few scenes right after the prologue concerning Clive's post-prologue condition. I want to give the reviewer the benefit of the doubt, but honestly, yeah, the treatment of slavery is not among the things I've currently mostly been irked about in terms of my (mostly) minor gripes so far. game fun.
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Jun 22, 2023 19:17
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I said come in! posted:The game reviews bringing up the story and characters with regards to the slavery plot, come across as concern trolling and performative to me. It’s way more nuanced than they are making it out to be. I think, to give them the absolute benefit of the doubt, it's within a common species of criticism which basically amounts to "slavery plots are always about 'how bad would this be if it happened to white people' instead of explicitly representing the most recently relevant examples of real-life slavery, which was heavily racialized?" The problem with this - among others - is that I honestly get a vibe of Valisthea as being closer to antiquity's totally normalized slave economies than either medieval Europe or American chattel slavery. Like, I get the issues, but I don't think that they're necessarily as damning as the reviewers feel?
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Jun 22, 2023 19:59
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ImpAtom posted:Yep. That is the entire system. Even the best weapon in the game is like that. To be fair - yeah, what Sun said. FFs with meaningful weapon customization in favor of just iterative stat improvements are actually kind of an outlier.
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Jun 22, 2023 20:10
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HD DAD posted:That was the article I was referencing in an earlier post. I can agree with some of the points (Benedikta) but am kinda baffled on the overall point the author is trying to make. Kinda feeling this way so far. Honestly, I think FFXVI actually has a wealth of genuinely good female characters, people who could very easily be leads for their own segments or DLC, but the nature of the game as a single player action game makes them end up being decidedly secondary in Clive's story. And some of that is just inevitable, while others is probably still annoyance at recent entries like Stranger of Paradise and FFXV. Would I prefer some playable segments or better NPC integration? Oh yes, absolutely - I'm still kinda puzzled that Torgal is the only character you can directly command or combo with. I don't think it's bad faith, so much as I think it's a somewhat subjectively weighted criteria of analysis? FFXIV has a lot of solid female characters with compelling characteristics and personalities, they just don't - because it isn't a game with a party, so it's Clive's show most of all - get to do that much onscreen. Which is genuinely unfortunate, and I think is a fair thing to go "really, Square?" at - but FFXVI is still a good game, it's just a game which reinforces an unfortunate pattern. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 19:06
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ImpAtom posted:To be honest I feel like FFXVI is getting a lot of criticism people didn't want to level at FFXV for some reason to the point where half the game's arguments make a lot more sense to me if you're discussing FFXV. XVI isn't blameless but the sheer absence of comparison to FFXV is bewildering to me because like XVI isn't perfect but it is so much better than the last game in almost every regards but it's being treated as an aberration instead of an improvement over the last game even if it could still be better. I think you're probably not wrong. There's a lot of irritation to this day about FFXV's choice to have an all-boys party as well as a lot of its narrative flaws, and it's been festering for the better part of a decade - and for some reason people don't register 7R as a "real" mainline Final Fantasy, so it doesn't "count." I know at least one of my friends who aggressively dislikes playing male leads ended up feeling like XV represented Square deciding that female audiences didn't matter. But there's also the fact that the critical environment has changed significantly in that time period. Representation is a far greater concern in the mainstream of games journalism than it was when XV came out, and a lot of topics have been far more extensively politicized about race and gender in games (see people accusing various games of "going woke" just for...having playable women do a drat thing.) Personally, I'm just a bit disappointed. XVI is still a good game! I love Clive's general depiction! I just end up looking at it and going "Well, this sure is HeavenswardIvalice, for good and ill."
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Jun 26, 2023 19:20
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Arist posted:Not to rag on your friend, but this is still an extremely silly attitude that makes no sense if you consider it for even a moment I mean I don't agree with it, I just felt it was worth mentioning. If anything I think 13 got intensely shilled, even though I also think 13 is kind of a monument to bad RPG design. Bland posted:I'm usually the last person to go off on one about representation because frankly it's not particularly my lane, but Jill is just a weak character in general even before dealing with the fact that she's supposed to be the female lead. Despite being the "party member" you spend by far the most time with, she rarely actually adds anything to scenes where she's present, and often the game seems to entirely forget she's even present at all. Honestly this is why I was a bit disappointed that Clive gets rid of his brand a little over a third into the game. The dynamics of being publicly visible as Branded and having to either find a citizen patron's mark so you could speak with their authority, or to have Jill do the talking for you, were interesting and also really helped reinforce that you were not a free citizen. It's one reason I found the claim in some articles that Bearers are passive and token annoying. They aren't! Clive is functionally a Bearer in every way that matters even if his magic originally came from a boon, as far as society is concerned.
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Jun 26, 2023 19:28
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ImpAtom posted:Wow, the group of dehumanized and enslaved people who can and will be killed for any reason up to and including 'it's really funny' tend to be passive and unlikely to speak out. Who would have fuckin' guessed? I mean, that also described a lot of historical examples of enslaved persons' situation, and they still generally engaged in uprisings and passive defiance where possible. But that happens in XVI. It's called "the player character and his entire band of outlaws slowly building a sustainable parallel society while leading a guerilla and vigilante movement." For some reason Clive doesn't register as a Bearer to some critics, but like... he's an enslaved noble. That happened a lot in Antiquity (which in my opinion is actually closer to what Valisthea is, it's just folks expect something closer to medieval Europe or New World chattel slavery)! HD DAD posted:Honestly, I think if XV had been an entirely different game with a more “traditional” cast, this pivot in XVI would have probably been given a bit more leeway. Like you, I have friends who took XV as SE’s definitive statement that women don’t matter. Which…wasn’t what happened, and is in itself a very dumb read, but I can at least understand it. Yeah I think you're right. I'm a little more sympathetic to their distaste for XV because honestly I find even the justifications for an all-male party kind of gross? But yeah, I think XVI is getting some leftover backlash from XV and, honestly, probably also from works like GoT. (This does not mean there are not valid elements to said criticism, it just doesn't drat the game in its entirety.) Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 19:34
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No Mods No Masters posted:(general game spoilers) Separate from how she's written in main story cutscenes, I think the way they structured the game in terms of party members constantly joining and leaving really hurt in this respect. Jill can be present for like almost all the side content post timeskip, but isn't guaranteed to be, so they had to write everything around her maybe not being there. She rarely gets like one or two lines commenting but it's a band aid. I feel like it would have been simpler to implement, better for the character, and not really even change that much else if she just permanently joined in the open world and could be actually written into the sidequests I will say (second mothercrystal spoilers) Jill neither being playable during the Iron Kingdoms digression or getting the starring moment to actually destroy the Mothercrystal and instead collapsing due to exhaustion after having spent all her energies protecting you... is certainly a CHOICE, and not one I'm a fan of. When Joshua gets a little playable segment as a kid, you'd think they could have given Jill her own playable mini-sequence for her to resolve her own issues. Yes, I know her nemesis ultimately is just kind of a rando dude who can't even use magic and would make a bad boss, but it felt weirdly half-baked. And as I said, I don't know why - given that she can be such a constant presence - they didn't include mechanics to direct her attacks and sync up with them like they did with Torgal. She actually does a fair bit of damage per strike or spell, you just can't plan around it or integrate it into your battle plans in any way. Not that you need to, per se, given how much of a joke the average mooks are.
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Jun 26, 2023 19:42
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Ibblebibble posted:Were people complaining about female representation in SoP? Because Neon and Sophia both kick rear end and are important to the plot. I recall a fair bit of irritation about how bro-y the game presented itself as. Of course, it's also SoP, which is just a wild and weird game in general, so I expect at least some of it is literally just having to play Jack. EDIT: anyways, basically, yeah, I think a good chunk of the annoyance around XV, XVI and representation re: gender I've seen can be summed up by opinions like this: https://twitter.com/headfallsoff/status/1673340484993835022?s=20 Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 19:49 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 19:45
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Caidin posted:I dunno, one of the more challenging opponents in the game for my money is just one of those big empire dudes with a cannon. One of the harder hunts was 3 Ironblood axes at once. The Ironbloods had this weird heavy presence in the early game where they were these rough burly bastards dive tackling guys off their birds and beating to death barehanded, they were the original threat to Roseria and in the modern day hold dozens of women as prisoners of war, they have designs on brutal conquest on the entire continent, the poo poo they did to Jill is most of her character. You sneak through the back half of the fire dungeon and fight a hallways worth of them and then that's basically it. They are done then, Jill is out of cool. Yeah I'd agree with all of that, to be honest, the Ironblood are bizarrely token. I'd honestly much rather have less tromping around Sanbreque and Rosaria and more interaction with them - they're strangely underdeveloped for such a presence, and feel mostly like something invoked to give Jill trauma. SyntheticPolygon posted:I'm glad we've all come around on Lightning. Heh. I mean I'm still kinda eh on Lightning, but mostly just disappointed. But that belongs back in the other thread.
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Jun 26, 2023 22:25
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BrianWilly posted:So I'm still not finished with the game yet despite being at the literal doorstep of the final mission (Baldur's Gate sucked up 90% of my free time) but I just got to the part where Mid decided not to build the airship for which she had me scrounging for parts all game because it would If it helps, Clive pretty obviously also wants to do that! Her arguments are stupid - there will literally never be a better time politically given that all the nation-states are collapsing into desperate survival mode and they've just, if you've finished other side quests, concluded a treaty of mutual aid, and people will desperately need it. The degree to which every member of the Hideaway is sick of Mid's poo poo relatively early on and basically just has to put up with her because she makes their water purification system is kind of funny. What an unintentionally unlikable character. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Sep 28, 2023 |
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Sep 28, 2023 20:09
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cause wars 
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ImpAtom posted:Literally everyone in the Hideaway has nothing but positive comments about the character. She's literally referred to being 'the best of us.' Every time she demands they do something for one of her pet projects everyone she ropes into it is some variation of "gently caress, can we get this over with and get back to important things?" It's also funny because her projects are only relevant for like one event, the creation of her ship, which it turns out they probably didn't even actually need because Barnabas' entire endgame is getting killed by Clive so he just needed to keep Jill alive as bait either way. Her gadgets are almost wholly irrelevant beyond the water purification - though of course Clive wouldn't know that. EDIT: And of course the game knows Mid is a flake; it's an explicit part of her characterization that she's flighty, mercurial and avoidant. Which is afterwards you get a note where she goes "oh you probably thought I was just being a flake about destroying my engines but I really mean it this time." BrianWilly posted:The thing that annoyed me about Mid's finale is that I'm at the part of the game where everyone is saying magic is really bad actually and will get everyone killed, and now they're also saying technology is also really bad and will also get everyone killed, so I'm just like...Okay?? The gently caress you want everyone to do then, Final Fantasy XVI? Live in caves and poo poo in rivers? Yup, basically! FF16 ended up really weirdly anprim "back to subsistence" and I don't think it meant to do it at all. Jetrauben fucked around with this message at 20:20 on Sep 28, 2023 |
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Sep 28, 2023 20:15
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