#figure out my main. this is an arg now and the name of the game is identity theft | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

kieuecaprie · 1 year

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So... I finished the main taskline (for now) for Toontown Corporate Clash. I won't say too much about the end but it was definitely a journey to get through, especially when the server started having issues and districts had to be reset which made making and finding groups a bit of a drag.

So, I figured it'd be nice to have a little collection of screenshots I took over the course of my journey. Of course, I won't dump all of them, just a select few I found neat.

There may be spoilers but I think most of the screenshots I'm about to post are just out of context stuff anyhow so... I'm gonna give you a fair warning anyway!

I believe I posted this a while back effectively saying that I have been playing TTCC and wanted to post this screenshot. I managed to catch the tailend of the St. Patrick's Day code event so I was able to snag some stuff, including the clover that became a mainstay on my deer.

I think this may have been the first of many buildings I would take on by myself over the course of doing the main taskline so I guess I took this screenshot to comemmorate my first building (plus it was in Toontown Central, where buildings are kind of a rarity even on private servers) and the fact I barely made it out alive.

This was before I learned the power of Prestige Throw, btw, that little prestige gag carried me pretty hard with its self-healing properties.

I just liked visual bugs and this one kind of tickled me. You can still get on the elevator, it's just bugged for some reason. No idea if this was a server thing or the behavior of the base code of the game that it ran on.

Funnily enough, BB was the first playground I got to the final kudos rank-up task for just so I could go see Rainmaker, who would otherwise be known as Misty Monsoon if you searched through some ARG stuff (or read the wiki, I guess).

Her fight was an ordeal the first time through and was frightening and was definitely a step up from the easy gameplay of the babby game that came before it.

I spared her, in case you were asking. Fortunately, my group decided to do the same.

I hated going through YOTT even though I liked the vibe of it all. The dialogue was painful to read but this one with Seymour in particular was chuckleworthy. Kind of appreciated that. Keep at it, TTCC writer's team!

I think this was taken during my runs through Sellbot Factories for the Sellbot parts. I admit, it was a little nervewracking at first to utilize the group finder because, up to this point, I was just using it to set up groups for battles I absolutely needed to do (Derrick Man, Land Acquisition Architect, Public Relations Representative). No idea why this screencap in particular, maybe I just found the name "Medieval Pheasant" on the Turkey toon to be quite amusing.

Fishing was my first activity I'd end up maxing on this server. As customary, I grade games based on how fun their fishing is. I'd give the Toontown fishing, as a whole, a decent 7/10. Fish Bingo is a nice sidegame and casting and reeling is super quick, also a good source of currency and ended up filling my bank to the brim.

A screenshot from... some attempt at mity, I don't know the number tbh. Tried the old "befriend a cog" trick during the mist phase and my heart shattered into a million pieces afterward...

Going through Mezzo Melodyland (At the time of writing, I have the rank-up task available to go from 9 to 10, gonna hold off on that for now but I'm coming for you, DAVE BRUBOT!), and I run into a taskline about a kazoo maestro who wants me to go find someone who is the kazoo kid. I already knew where this was going but I didn't think they'd actually go through with the bit.

Good one!

Shut up and leave me alone.

The only screenshot I ever took in a Cashbot Mint. Honestly thought it'd take a while to clear out the 4 Coin Mints, 4 Dollar Mints, and the 2 Bullion Mints but they were snap compared to the Lawbot and Bossbot facilities... especially in wait time, yeesh.

Come on, you had to break into Reid's van at LEAST once! I hope she didn't mind me coming in, I mean, I do pay her a ton of jellybeans, after all!

My first capped track was Throw, predictably. And I think Lure followed soon after and then it took a while before Sound, Squirt, Zap, and Toon Up would join them. Still got Trap and Drop left to go and I don't look forward to levelling Trap again.

This wizard really wanted the... ahem... minglussy. iamsosorry

Lawbot Lawfices... They were kinda fun but waiting was a bit of a drag. Although I think at one point, someone pointed out that you could play Toono on the couches. WHY COULDN'T BOSSBOT HQ HAVE SOMETHING LIKE THAT?!

Speaking of, here's a screenshot from a Bossbot Cog Golf Course. Don't tell me which one because they all felt the same to me, and it was at that point that I really felt the drag. This part was probably one of the biggest hurdles imo and I don't blame anyone for not really wanting to do anything related to Bossbots unless they ABSOLUTELY had to. (Speaking of, if any friendos wanted to do cog golf courses, I'd gladly run it because I don't want them waiting half a century for a group.)

Short detour into the High Roller stuff for MAYpril Toons event. I was sad that I couldn't fight Sads but the High Roller fight was definitely something else. And if they could pull that off for a permanent, non-canon joke of a manager, what could they do for 2.0? Gosh, imagine. The next few are also High Roller related, I had to grind for a bit to get the stuff out of him. (I still need one more item from him, barring another update that adds yet another goalpost, but it takes a while to beat him even with optimal strats.)

Holy meh, Toriel Toontown real.

This one is from one of the CEO fights. I took this one because the game was taking its sweet time waiting for everybody and found the cogs with their hands in the same position as the grief kiwi sticker to be quite funny.

While I was doing the DDL taskline, I ran into this where Featherbedder and a bunch of cogs were just... snoozing. And there was literally nobody fighting them. Guess they just wanted a slumber party, huh?

Hehehe... yeah, game show. Would be crazy if there was one in Mezzo Melodyland hosted by a robotic green duck who is a fusion of two cog managers that we've previously fought, right?

And the end of the road, for now. It feels... weird now that I have ALL FOUR task slots to fill up but it'll be a great boon when grinding out those kudos tasks! I'm not quite done yet with TTCC and I don't think I will be for a while, after all, I have drops to collect, suits to perfect, departments to experience fully, and a couple other stuff left unfinished.

I will say that I absolutely enjoyed my time in Toontown Corporate Clash and I wish the team good luck as they push onwards because this is probably the most polished Toontown experience I've ever... erm... experienced.

#kieuecaprie gaming #game screenshots #toontown corporate clash #ttcc #long post #i'm already feeling nostalgic for the sellbot factories even though i literally cleared them last month #feels like yesterday that i was afraid of everyone in the server save for a few friendly faces #now i get to be the triple digit laffer helping newbies cool surprise

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badluvki · 1 month

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my interests bc i’m bored :

-kpop (main interest) : ults - shinee , nct , loona , redvelvet , aespa , exo , fromis_9 , triples , miss a , snsd , aoa, twice , seventeen , ateez . my ult is key!!!!!!!!!!

-horror : my fav movies are saw franchise , martyrs , terrifier , incantation , texas chainsaw massacre (bc it’s funny as FUCK) , hereditary and sinister . my fav game is outlast and will never change (and final fantasy but that’s not horror) . i also rly like youtube creepy content , analog horror and args , my fav is greylock

-disturbing media : it sounds maniac but i like trying to find the most disturbing media i can not bc i like it but i’m VERY curious about things and it ends up with me going into weird stuff like this , i just research tho im not fucked up

-quentin tarantino movies : i just love them? idk . it started when i saw kill bill for the first time i needed to know more

-movies . : romcoms , comedy , horror , i don’t know the other genre i like’s name but i don’t like superhero movies and that’s basically the only type of film i won’t watch . i’m an n in mbti , i love creating theories and meaning to movies , i fully judge (i’m a j in mbti too) and analyse the movies and make huge essays in them :D

-animals : i work at a vets and i’ve always wanted to dinxe i was a child and here i am , but anyway my fav animals are fat tailed geckos , leopard geckos , corn snake , mexican milk snake , crested geckos , any tarantula but especially chilean rose and arizona blonde , rats , ferrets , possums , raccoons, cats duh i LOVE cats

-dance , producing and rap : i always danced but i had to be taken out of dance classes bc i thought i was more creative than my teachers and kept doing my own thing and i dance everyday for at least 2 hours a day and i’ve rapped since i was young when ariana grande featured rappers in her songs but i gradually got to harder rap and after my cousin passed i fully got inspired to follow my dream to rap better for him and now i practice every day until my toungue goes numb , i’m fast and good and have good flow kmaooo . i produced dubstep w my cousin when i was younger but i have a very big music taste and i am ready to do more recent genres

-art : creating my own product, only have one character based on me so far but it will get more , i’ve drawn since i was young and i use all media but my fav is traditional art and oil paint , i don’t know how to digital paint tho . i’m very good at art

-ariana grande : i was w her since i was a child in urs truly era . i went to all of her concerts in my area apart from dangerous woman luckily , i couldn’t afford that tour , but also i live in birmingham so i wouldve gone to birmingham but still rest in peace to everyone lost 🤍🤍. i have all of her albums and all of her older perfumes but i don’t have mod bc two perfumes would DENT my money . my fav songs of hers are goodnight n go , supernatural and quit (with cashmere cat) . i have sm merch too , when j was a kid in primary school i always wore a ponytail and lace cat ears

-k/c/j/tdramas : my favs are all of us are dead and alice in borderland

-rollercoasters??? : idk i love them , i have been to disneyland and universal florida w mi primo but my fav is alton towers england , my fav ride ever is nemesis . i haven’t gone on new nemesis but i can’t wait to . i talked to a man in the queue and i saw him as my father figure so i begged my ex gf who i hate to let me sit by him and i sat w him on the ride and i was terrified on the lift up but once the ride started i felt euphoric and i didn’t scream once i just smiled at the ride bc it was so fast i didn’t even know what was going on . i am terrified of loops but the queue didn’t have ANYONE in no joke and i didn’t see the track right otherwise i wouldbt have gone on if i knew it had loops and only yesterday i found out it had loops , it was too fast for me to know . i loved it tho . i went on rita (and i passed out after the straight path so i thougjt it was a second long ride and my bsf was desperately trying to wake me up) , wicker man galáctica and 13 , i have too many memories ab this i need a whole post

-random shit : quantum physics , myths and cryptids around the world as well as my own culture , tibetan sky funeral? , diseases , weird phenomenons , true crime , weird life events , anything i will watch a huge video essay about

-languages : my own languages like maltese and spanish but also i learn languages from my friends from those countries like chinese and i learnt some tagalog and my filipina friend taught me even more , i love the phillipines mythology most too i love the manananggal i have a whole book just based on filipino myth

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zahai · 8 months

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As someone who knows nothing about ai: the somnium files: what are your favorite things about ai: the somnium files? (the more you elaborate the better (<-said kicking my feet holding my head in my hands (i love hearing about people's favorire things)))

Oh my goodness me, a chance to ramble about one of my favorite games? How ever will I cope with such a situation??? I suppose... I must... Ramble!

And then I took that very literally and rambled a whole lot. I've put everything under a read more because this is just nonstop stream-of-consciousness and I'm mostly unapologetic. Enjoy!

Firstly, and really I do mean firstly, the ARG that launched with the game announcement! I've had a small interest in ARGs for the last ten or so years. Never anything relevant, weirdly enough (somehow I managed to completely dodge Gravity Falls until well after both its series AND post-series ARG had concluded), but having a new game by one of my favorite directors launch with him introducing us to his new virtual idol who he cared for deeply? Yeah I was hooked. A-Set, Uchikoshi's Virtual Star of the Internet, was a charmer. I found her annoying at first, but her weekly vlogs were a wonderful way to introduce us the players to some of the locations and cast members. There was also a twitter component where A-Set would interact with her in-world self-acclaimed Biggest Fan - Ota Matsushita - and real-world game director - Kotaro Uchikoshi - freely. I didn't and still don't have an account on that website, so I relied mostly on updates fed via discord bot for that.

This ARG was... Fascinating. I honestly highly recommend checking out, at the very least, A-Set's youtube channel. It barely scratches the surface of just how wacky things became (three additional characters eventually began participating in the ARG on twitter - Japanese A-Set, Japanese Ota Matsushita, and Japanese Kotaro Uchikoshi - only one of whom was really relevant in the end but they sure did make things confusing for a bit), but it covers more than enough to be intriguing on its own. And honestly? It made A-Set a more interesting character for me to consider on all of the routes I spent not hanging out with her.

Routes? That's right, this game has different endings! A handful of main endings, a couple of joke endings, a few bad ends scattered here and there. And it's pretty easy to figure out what route you're on because this game is.... A visual novel! Fully voice acted! Yeah I spent all that time up there rambling about an ARG that a majority of players didn't know about, didn't care about, or came too late to participate in, and only now am I actually going to tell you what kind of game Ai: The Somnium Files even is!

AITSF is a fully voice acted visual novel with multiple endings, starring not A-Set because she's too busy being a teenage internet idol, where you play as Horny Idiot Special Agent Kaname Date. The horny is important - trust me. Date's not alone out on the streets of Japan though, he's got a partner with him at all times who goes by the name of Aiba. I would say she's the brains to his foolishness, but we've all begun to realize the failings of AI and oh yeah! I should probably let you in on that little tidbit too, huh? Aiba, short for Ai-Ball, is an artificial intelligence housed inside of Date's left eye socket who has been his false eye and as his partner for the last five years. Sometimes she looks like a gelatinous hamster. I want. To hold her. So badly. So badly... ;-; I will never know the satisfaction of holding my own treasured eye in the palm of my hand, seeing myself reflected through an eye that is and is not my own, I will never feel her tiny little hamster feet trod across the palms of my hands as she lists off all the bugs she saw that day with her little cheers I will never be able to fail resisting the compulsion to put her in my mouth and swallow and thank everything for that because sometimes that gummy bear looks tasty even though she is literally the color of water and I wish I could tell you what it is but the best I can give you is a shrug and maybe a nickel.

So Date and his eye, Aiba, now that we finally have main characters for this game, are introduced to Problems almost faster than we are introduced to the characters themselves in-game. We've got a corpse on our hands (okay well actually it's in the saddle of a busted-down merry-go-round horse) and it's missing a left eye, and our Boss is looking none-too-pleased to be tromping around in the mud in her heels. From there, I'm sure you can imagine what Date's role is for the rest of this game. Find out who killed this woman, and figure out why everyone's so cagey about that case six years ago that this one is apparently so similar to.

We've got a job now, yay! How do we do it though, other than clicking on every single thing you can see on screen until every character runs out of dialogue, then panning the camera over six inches and repeating the process? There's also the generic "drive to X location" travel option, but neither dialogue decisions or travel choices impact how the story unfolds. That depends entirely on how you handle certain gameplay sections called Psyncs.

I hesitate on what to call psyncs other than what they are. It's not an interrogation, not in a traditional sense. Special Agent Kaname Date is a member of the Advanced Brain Investigation Squad of the Metropolitan Police Department. Members of ABIS use the psync machine to peer into the dreaming minds of people they're investigating in order to advance their investigations. Not great, but honestly probably one of the more ethical settings Uchikoshi has made up. I'm going to level with you - the insanely unethical bullshit that SHOULD NOT fly is most of the reason I come to Uchi games. They're fucking bizarre and there's NO way people signed off on it, and yet somehow????

During normal world investigation and interaction, Date takes the lead. He's got the bigger body of the Date-Aiba duo, and also the advantage of not being Some Annoying Blond Guy's Eye. Aiba will chime in whenever Date is too pervy, too annoying, or A BUG!!!! appears, and will also scatter in commentary to Date while he talks or looks about. During a Psync, this flips completely. Aiba's got herself a snazzy little Human Look, and everyone immediately dubbed her A Shrimp. A Shrimp Wife Who Has My Heart. I would die for her in any form. I love my hamster shrimp wife with glowing hair and a wig that I want to make some day I love her silly puns I lvoe her stupid faces I love how she teases I think it's so funny that she's decided to fuck with Date as part of her job I love how much she cares I lovve her I lvoe her so much she's everything and I would blow myself up for her no questions asked

sorry

anyways. Psyncing. Unethical, but fun! Aiba gets to explore and Date hangs back and plays the chatterbox role this time. For the most part. Aiba has six minutes to run around in whoever's brain, except not actually! Thanks to ABIS's tech guy, Pewter, time only passes normally while you're moving around. As long as you're standing still, time passes at a much, much slower rate. Psyncs are a dive into someone's dreams and psyche, so a wonderful way for a player to look at what makes a character tick. The choices you make in them decide how the story unwinds, and oh my goodness can it unwind. Before the game launched, back when all we had was the ARG's version of Ota (which actually is no different from how he is in game just so you know), I didn't like him. I didn't like him for my first several hours. I full-on sobbed at his ending because of just how HARD it went. And then I went to my next path thinking that surely this one wouldn't make me cry nearly as hard now that I'd gotten it all out early on the worst character, right?

I don't remember how many times I cried over this game and its characters. I'm tearing up now, just thinking of one of my favorite psyncs, one of my favorite somniums. and Now I'm realizing I never chained that final dot. Oops. You're Psynching into their Somnium. That's all. Sorry I forgot, I really didn't mean to. Anyways. The somniums get more and more complex the further in you get, and there were some that I replayed five or six times before I finally cracked them. They still feel good to go back and replay, actually! The complexity is just deep enough between wandering around investigating things, and figuring out how to wander around and investigate them again, but DIFFERENTLY. Because the choices you make set what path the investigation takes, with different paths revealing different clues.

Wonder what that's about.

I think I've just gone and summed up everything but the OST at this point instead of telling you what parts are my favorite. Truth be told? I love it all. Even the music. There's a lot of that, but I'm going to force myself to wrap this post up before the two hour mark even if it kills me and quite honestly there are a few tracks in there that have me tearing up just thinking about them. I'm also tireed of tearing up when I don't even have the game on.

I. I love the game's story. Not all of them, I don't really love any of the endings where Date winds up shot, but I love the big stories and the small. I love the depth and complexity to each individual ending, the way each one can hit differently once you've spent enough time turning them over, and the amount of care the charactters express through the game. They care about each other. Yes in found family no in found family say what you will but the connections between all the individual characters is just chef's kiss perfection. Every time I go back and replay aitsf I go down certain paths first because I care about their stories most. And I still cry.

If you read all this - holy shit. Thakls. I didn't make my deadline ): that's okay though, because I had fun. I'm gonna replay my game. I can't wait

BTW it's got a free demo and is available on pc, switch, ps4, and xboxone(I think? Idk how microsoft does their. naming)~

#I am alsto high so that does not help #don't ask why my everything is so proper up top I do not know #also I would include pictures but that means wrangling my phone #actually you know what #I'vje committed to this hard enough alread I shall not shame myself #even if my spelling is going down by the moment #I’m sorry. I. Am so sleepy. And also the app won’t let me add line breaks and I do not want to get my laptop out from under the bed again #I cannot add image id the traditional way and I am not capable or confident in my ability to add them the other way that tumblr has #oh shoot and jsyk ARG stands for Altered Reality Game #I hope I’m not typing that too late

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ph1lz4-minecraft · 3 years

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sad to know you aren't real mr kinnie mineman :( i still love u tho u brought much serotonin, tho for a short time :'( <3

o7 i left for two days to do gardening and mr minecraft himself debunked me. fly high ph1lz4-minecraft, you beautiful angel <//3

on the plus side. i’m now going to subject all 223 of you to the asks i couldn’t feasibly answer as philza. strap in for the funniest motherfuckers i’ve ever seen

#now begins the Real Game.#figure out my main. this is an arg now and the name of the game is identity theft #shoutout to @157-bees for recognizing me as a fraud Instantly. mwah ily bees

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microwave-gremlin · 3 years

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Unfiction Projects You Should Watch

Complete with trigger warnings and the links you need to get started!

Will be constantly updated as I watch more webseries that I enjoy!

Almost every ARG or unfiction project never has trigger warnings, they’re expected to be scary. Why did I add them, then? Click here for my post on why!

OVERARCHING WARNING ONE: Almost every single unfiction webseries will have some form of eye strain. If you suffer from epilepsy or a similar condition, take caution.

OVERARCHING WARNING TWO: Almost every single unfiction webseries will be disturbing, creepy, or unnerving. If this bothers you, take caution.

If I missed a link or trigger warning, let me know!

And without further ado, unfiction projects you should watch!

Completed:

CatGhost

Brief Description (taken from the wiki): Cat Ghost is an animated horror webseries hosted on the YouTube account of the same name. It has now concluded, with 13 full episodes having been released, as well as 12 minigames. We already know a lot about the world of Cat Ghost, but there are still many secrets waiting for you to figure them out!

Wiki: https://catghost.fandom.com/wiki/CatGhost_Wiki

Trigger Warnings: Jumpscares (i’m pretty sure only in the games), bodyshaming (calling Gideon ‘fat’ and ‘ugly’) at the beginning in a mean tone, yelling, death, death threats, slight gore, use of sk*nw*lker uncensored

Official Links:

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/CatGhost/featured

Games are linked in the description of each episode.

Night Mind Episodes:

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RJQEIrxtrU

2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7Ac32ixV0E

3- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=by32xp_uCm4

4- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBekJpeKwV8

Daisy Brown

Brief Description (taken from the wiki): Daisy Brown is a horror web series on YouTube. Daisy Brown is an innocent, curious, and naive young girl. She is faced with the challenge of raising a monster named Alan after her father has left her alone. Alan was created by Daisy's father, a genetics and DNA scientist. At first, Alan is a sweet, helpless being who depends completely on Daisy to survive and grow. As he grows and becomes more powerful, Daisy is faced with more hardships and she must deal with her inner and outer demons.

Wiki: https://daisy-brown.fandom.com/wiki/Daisy_Brown_Wiki

Trigger Warnings: Gross monsters, abuse, yelling,

Official Links:

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDuzk8o9OnYDc8P9YE1GlUw/featured

Night Mind Episodes:

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRLUo84TRRk

2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dr-z7RxXGpI

EverymanHYBRID

Brief Description (taken from the wiki): EverymanHYBRID began as an amateur fitness group that posted videos to YouTube in March 2010. The cast consisted of three college-aged guys from Central New Jersey named Vincent (Main Host), Evan (Dietary "Specialist"), and Jeff (Camera and Editing). The videos contained health tips and advice for anybody interested in "the healthy lifestyle on a budget". A close connection to the audience was important to the cast from the very beginning, and friendly relationships were built over the internet. The cast was well-versed in internet humor, memes, creepypasta, and popular culture, particularly horror movies, video games, and similar media. In the first five entries, a familiar entity may be found as a horrific easter-egg: Slenderman, originating from the Something Awful forums. The entity seems way too inconspicuously placed and the crew was originally criticized for merely creating an awful "Slenderman rip-off series"—that is, until their sixth episode, in which their true intentions regarding the "obvious" Slenderman are revealed.

Wiki: https://everymanhybrid.fandom.com/wiki/EverymanHYBRID_Wiki

Trigger Warnings: Gore, jump scares, yelling, fighting, murder, mentions of childhood sexual assault

Official Links:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/EverymanHYBRID

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/EverymanHYBRID/featured

Night Mind Episodes:

Playlist- https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUtMdfebeaoeDq0qqomHqgTlLs4eBnvYD

hi i’m mary mary

Brief Description (taken from the wiki): In June of 2016, a young woman called Mary found herself trapped in a familiar house, with almost all of her memories gone. The windows were unbreakable, and the doors locked. Connected to the internet through a notebook, but without being able to reach out anyone, and armed with a camera, Mary started registering her new routine as she attempts to make sense of her situation and of a few strange occurrences in the house. During the day, nothing happens. But at night, things are very different.

Wiki: https://hiimmarymary.fandom.com/wiki/Hiimmarymary_Wiki

Trigger Warnings: Jumpscares, implied mental illness, implied body dysmorphia/self body shaming

Official Links:

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_b4VvmzIVwf8bCC-eoMDzg

Twitter: https://twitter.com/hithereiammary

Night Mind Episodes:

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KJu8i_Jpq8

2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMga3o8cRxE

Petscop

Brief Description (taken from the wiki): Petscop is a horror web-series published on the YouTube channel of the same name. It initially presents itself as a let's play of a fictional game called Petscop, supposedly made in 1997 for the PlayStation. Its creator or creators are unknown, but it is generally attributed as the same person who acts as the series' protagonist and narrator, who is referred to as Paul. Paul traverses each layer of the game, gradually uncovering its darker past, which is in some way related to the life of himself and his family.

Wiki: https://petscop.fandom.com/wiki/Petscop

Trigger Warnings: Graves, death, kidnapping, references to abuse and CSA

Official Links:

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZKQv0ZFHpeIUkOtNjtq4KA

Night Mind Links:

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFu-TBItXtQ

2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTrYgdF3JKA

POSTcontent

Brief Description (taken from the channel): My name is POST (not really, but who cares) and I am a professional YouTuber. I do pretty much everything you can think of. Sometimes vlogs, sometimes video blogs. Sometimes I just talk to the camera. It listens when I tell it about my day.

Wiki: https://postcontent.fandom.com/wiki/POSTcontent_Wiki

Trigger Warnings: Gore, death,

Official Links:

Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/POSTcontent

Night Mind Episode:

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fILKDvT-X5k

Ongoing:

Dad

Brief Description (taken from the wiki): Dad Lives in Town, USA which is located within The Server, where he lives with his Wife and Daughter. Dad's goals are to become the best YouTuber and Pop-star. Things that Dad likes includes: Wife, True Value, Kohl's, STORE, Dadcraft (Minecraft), Diane, FOOD and FOOD related Products. Things that Dad dislike are: Neighbor and Job. Dad has a Job at Office where his Boss has Dad do lots of paperwork, and sadly Boss overworks Dad. Luckily Dad has an E-Phone where he can work from home in the company of Cheryl, or play Dadcraft all day in the company of his Little Towels.

Wiki: https://dad.fandom.com/wiki/Dad_Wiki

Trigger Warnings: Stalking, arguing/yelling/fighting,

Official Links and Media:

Dad's Discord: discord.gg/yahhX8n

Dad Feels Music: https://dadfeels.bandcamp.com

Dad Tweets: @DadFeels

Dad Instagram: @DadFeels

Dad’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/DadFeels/featured

Night Mind Episodes:

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FM5dXBD1U_I

2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG4aIVGHr6w

I am sophie

Brief Description (taken from the wiki): "I am sophie" is an ongoing ARG/interactive web-series that focuses on the titular character, Sophie and her life as the daughter of a millionaire businessman. Follow her journey of self-discovery and let her show you the guide to being young, rich & powerful.

Wiki: https://iamsophie.fandom.com/wiki/I_am_Sophie

Trigger Warnings: Graphic gore, murder, yelling, kidnapping, just be careful with this one, ‘aight?

Official Links:

YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/iamsophie/featured

Shop YRP - i am sophie ► https://shopiamsophie.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamsophiereal

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamsophiereal

Max-treme Pranks: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChi0CSpPaoaQuHX2n8PnyUg/featured

Night Mind Episodes:

1- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRUoRp83BSI

2- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMW0QcgyheI

3- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6-jQ60Va_o

#if you can't tell i adore night mind's channel #slenderverse #slenderman #ARG #alternate reality game #unfiction #night mind #catghost #daisy brown #everymanHYBRID #hiimmarymary #petscop #dad #dad arg #i am sophie #POSTcontent

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your-fav-owos · 4 years

Note

Could you tell us what the plot of the ARG was going to be now that owo boy is deactivated?

aww owo pwetenses wiww be dwopped fow this....

Basically we didn’t intend for it to get this far. It started when uwu and I were living in an on-campus apartment together with our rooms sharing a wall. One night, while messing around I discovered that if I pressed a plastic cup against our wall and screamed, it would travel and he would hear it relatively clearly. He immediately burst in my room demanding to know what the f*ck I had done. I showed him how I had done it, and we kept screaming back and forth to each other through the wall. This then turned into us memeing on snapchat with it. After a decent reception there, we decided to put it on tumblr. Neither of our main accounts had enough of a following or connection to each other to let it get to success, so we selected our your-fav blogs to be the platform.

I think part of the reason we did it isto reignite any excitement for the blogs. Follows had plateaued and we were both getting burnt out, so switching things up had the potential to get us back into it, and excited to make flags again. We took the series of videos on snapchat, set them up to post once an hour or so, and watched the response. Once we got a decent reception, we continued making videos and expanding the little story. Our magnum opus was the final video, where uwu says he hears something in his room. He hears a strange voice and some banging, which was me, under his bed, letting out mewled “owo”s and “uwu”s, raking my nails through the carpet, and slamming my hands on the floor to simulate steps. The video ends with him hearing something moving towards him and him walking to the end of the bed, where a hand darts out from underneath and grabs him by the leg. Somehow the video had run out at exactly the right moment for us to get that shot, along with a very strangled “owo” and give it some semblance of a cut and of him being “taken.”

From there we blacked out our blogs’ themes and changed everything into a cipher. We thought originally that we would leave it there for a day or two, give y’all some riddles, and once they were solved we would return. It got a lot more attention than we expected. Some followers left, of course, but so many more followed and tried to solve it. We got swept up in excitement and the pressure, and we sat down and attempted to come up with a riddle for you to solve.

We were really flying by the seats of our pants, often coming up with clues as they were written. If any of you thought we knew what was happening, you are sorely mistaken. We often took the discussions in the notes as inspiration and went with that and made a story as we went. I didn’t even know what an ARG was until uwu told me. From then on it had a name.

We had to come up with a villain. Obviously something had taken us, turned us into husks, and was keeping us there. After a somewhat intense googling session, uwu and I happened upon a list of semi obscure mythological creatures who stole people. It came down between our winner, The Sluagh, and a Japanese snake woman. We chose the Sluagh, a Celctic creature that stole the souls of the sick, or of any who crossed their paths. They were often accompanied by ravens and the souls they took could not be returned, but could be exchanged.

From there the story took place, we would be taken by the Sluagh, and through some sacrifice, we could be redeemed. Of course, we couldn’t figure out what the sacrifice would be, and we didn’t actually think that far ahead. We had a villain and a start up and that was pretty much it. There was no endgame. We had no goal. At some point we would be recovered…. we just had to figure out how.

There was talk of using map locations, as well as having something bartered up, or a second “villain” to defeat. It never came to be. We started the ARG a few days before the start of our junior year, with both of us having 8 am classes on alternating days, and we found ourselves with little time to do the game. In an attempt to finish it up, uwu and I decided that one of the blogs would get deactivated. He deactivated his, and regretted it. I’m not sure if he’ll start it up again or not. Unfortunately, we just got caught up in life and our poorly made ARG died. In a question on the your-favs-are-dead blog, I responded “your faves are literally dead lol” and we laughed. We just couldn’t find the energy to start it up again.

We appreciated all the support you guys gave us, and we appreciated all of your excitement and questions even more. I’m really happy that you stayed here with me, despite my complete inactivity for a while. Maybe someday, with preparation, we’ll make an actual ARG with an actual story. Until then, I’ll keep o-ing my wo’s and existing as a pastel-colored entity of chaos.

Aohur fvb hss mvy zahfpun dpao tl, aol vdv npys. P svcl hss vm fvb zv tbjo!

Love,

Svcl,

Teh owo giwl

Alo vdv npds

#so says the owo giwl

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rose---child · 4 years

Note

Hey! Im super sorry if you just got a really weird ask from me i was typing, decided to erase it all but hit enter and the 'your ask has been recieved' notif popped up akjfjdjd anyway hi! How are you! Im watching a nexpo video about the 2019 tryfg arg and recognized the icon and url for one of the yt channels he talked about... Ive actually been following you for a while so i was super shocked to see that lol so i guess my question is are you a fan of the arg or did you help create the game? 💖

Finally my time has come *girnos theme plays* uh well you see I didn’t make it I am a simple person who got caught up in trying to figure out what the hell that arg is like is it real or fake? Like my boi nexpo had a good video but he got a few things wrong. But first let me lay out a timeline

Some ordinary gamers releases a video about diamond gate in 2018 https://youtu.be/l9fq3Y9X00w

I join the discord from the diamond gate subreddit

The server slowly becomes more about pelzer,Elsa Gate, and omgle gate

The pelzer arg was the main topic since it was honestly the more juicy and I couldn’t wrap my head around what the hell is going on and also there was a lot of videos and felt the need to make a playlist

One of the channels in the arg was called super tv and we got them banned but this is why the playlist is called “pelzer super tv” but later the dude made super tv 2 which is why the playlist and the channel name don’t line up

A month before nexpo made his video on the subject a person came to my comments of a video of mine and asked me about my playlist which this scared me so I deleted the playlist but when nexpo made the video I remade the playlist

Now I might reblog with images I have saved related to this that I find to be very interesting but like this arg I don’t really like to think about since it is very depressing since I don’t know if it’s a arg or what because it’s based on a cult that in the real world has done things and still do things and this isant our of character for them and the town is just creepy and in the discord the town was what drawn me in since it’s super creepy

youtube

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xseedgames · 6 years

Text

2017 End-of-the-Year Q&A Extravaganza Blog! #2

Our second 2017 End-of-the-Year Q&A Extravaganza is here! There will be more next week, but for now, we have some answers from:

Ken Berry, Executive Vice President / Team Leader John Wheeler, Assistant Localization Manager Nick Colucci, Localization Editor Brittany Avery, Localization Producer Thomas Lipschultz, Localization Producer

Question: Have you ever considered selling the music CDs for your licenses stateside? - @LimitTimeGamer

Ken: That's not really a business we're looking to get into, with the exception being when we've already printed soundtracks as part of a limited edition release and have some leftover. Music licenses are always tricky, and even if the publisher we licensed the game from completely owns their own music rights, they can self-publish digitally on iTunes worldwide so no need for us to get involved.

Question: If possible, would you please consider researching and localizing classic Korean-made PC xRPGs? & Do you have any interest in pursuing the localization of any of the large, beautiful Chinese RPGs that have been hitting Steam? Or are you focused exclusively on Japanese titles? - @DragEnRegalia & @TheDanaAddams

Brittany: The main reason we focus on JP > EN is because we're mainly an office of Japanese to English speakers, and we can verify the quality. We haven't completely ruled out the idea of other languages in the future, but we can't do anything to guarantee these games will be accurate yet. If we hired a person to localize games into a specific language, there's no checks-and-balances system in place for us to know we're investing in a project people will be happy to play because it's the best quality we can offer. Personally, I would hesitate to expand outside of JP > EN localization regularly until we've gained more experience as a company.

We've done a few instances of EN > FIGS, but since our games usually are very text heavy, even this is difficult. I would want to experiment with smaller games first. Hopefully, there will come a time when we can expand beyond JP > EN on a regular basis, since I’ve noticed some badass-looking games outside of the EN/JP languages. I also like the Korean developer Cheritz, who did Mystic Messenger. Jaehee will always be the love of my life.

Ken: We are definitely looking to expand where we source games from in the future and not just limiting ourselves to Japan. Definitely lots of good stuff coming out of China, Korea, and other parts of Southeast Asia these days, and we're big fans of Western indie games too. You will be seeing a lot more variety of games from us in the future, but that doesn't mean that we'll be giving up on our staple of games from Japan - they will be in addition to those.

Nick: I figured I’d field these not because I have any special ability to get XSEED to license a game (we’re all free to suggest games for consideration, which is pretty cool), but because prior to working at XSEED, I actually did localization for Korean and Chinese F2P MMOs.

There’s a lot of game dev talent in places like China, Korea, and Taiwan that we in the west are only tangentially aware of due to their games market being significantly different from ours. To generalize a bit, outside of Japan, Asia doesn’t have a strong lineage of console development, as existing consoles haven’t been widely available in most of those countries. Rather, PCs are where people in Asia play their games – online games in particular, with net cafes being popular places to log in and play.

One of the first bits of localization work I ever did in my career was for the F2P MMO Dream of Mirror Online, for which I handled seasonal quests and ongoing localization (the base game had already been localized before I got there). The developer of that game, Softstar, has a cool, long-running Wuxia fantasy RPG series in China known as Xuan Yuan Jian, one installment of which is available on Steam right now. Wouldn’t it be cool to release an anime-style wuxia adventure RPG here? As a fan of drama, martial arts, and sweet swordfights, it would be pretty rad.

Personally, I’m totally up for dipping our toes into games like this as a company, but there are some extra challenges to taking on Chinese or Korean games that we haven’t had to contend with during our work on Japanese titles.

Perhaps most important is establishing audience interest in these titles. Even if we find cool Chinese or Korean games (and I’m sure we could), if we don’t sense a market demand for those games, it doesn’t make sense to expend the effort to publish them. That’s not a statement on their quality; it’s an issue of market awareness. Japanese gaming has an advantage for us, in a sense, in that it’s been pervasive in Western culture long enough that the names, language, and even history of Japan seem less strange and foreign to Westerners now than they were 20-30 years ago. We’ve come to have a taste for Japanese games and culture, one could say. That sort of natural predilection doesn’t currently exist for games from elsewhere in Asia. I think that a good game’s quality will be self-evident enough that it can become well known, but it would take considerably more work to make people aware of and interested in a cool game from China, Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, or elsewhere than it would if that game were from Japan. And given that XSEED’s marketing and advertising resources are admittedly smaller than we wish they were, licensing and localizing a cool Asian game for a Steam release could prove difficult if we couldn’t connect the game with enough of an audience that would appreciate it. Before you nay-say me, look around at the amount of Chinese or Korean games currently available in the Western market that aren’t MMOs or mobile games. It’s...not very many, is it?

Not to say we’re not interested, of course! There’s a huge amount of potential in games from Asian developers, and an ocean of possibilities to explore. But I think, before that happens, we have to either find a game we think would be a pretty sure thing our fans would enjoy, or see that there’s a demand here for these games. If you’re interested in seeing XSEED work on Chinese or Korean games, do feel free to write us, especially if you have suggestions of titles you think are particularly worth checking out or that you think are very “on-brand” for XSEED.

Question: What inspired you all to do this kind of work in the first place? Also, what is the story behind the company name XSEED? How did you all come up with it? - @TBlock_02

Ken: The company was founded by former members of Square Enix USA, including its president at the time, Jun Iwasaki. Other smaller Japanese companies would often ask him to publish their games in the West, and even though we came extremely close to starting a separate "Square Selections" publishing brand to distinguish our own titles from third-party titles, we were always just too busy working on Square Enix titles to have the resources to work on anybody else's. Once the new company was formed and the name finalized (we wanted our new business to grow and foster from an initial small "seed"), it was only natural to reach back out to the publishers in Japan who needed a way to release their games in the West.

Question: What was everyone's favorite game(s) to work on this year? - @ArtistofLegacy

Brittany: Trails in the Sky the 3rd. I was very emotionally connected to that game, and its text is something I think I'll be proud of for years to come.

Tom: Zwei: The Arges Adventure, hands down. Most fun I've ever had translating anything.

John: I had a lot of fun with the PR-side of STORY OF SEASONS: Trio of Towns (the Capy comics and marriage candidate intros), though significantly less fun with QA for the DLC.

Question: What's everyone's favorite song from the Falcom games you've released so far? - @Crippeh

Brittany: Can’t choose a legit favorite, but it took me, like, twelve hours to beat the Finale dungeon in Trails of Cold Steel II and I still listen to Phantasmal Blaze regularly.

Tom: I'm actually not a big fan of the Trails games (blasphemy, I know!), but I absolutely adore "Cry For Me, Cry For You" from Trails 3rd. One of my favorite Falcom vocal themes of all time. As far as non-vocal themes go, I've always had a soft spot for "The Depth Napishtim" from Ys VI, "Harlech" from Xanadu Next, "Casino" from Brandish: The Dark Revenant, and basically the whole soundtrack to Zwei: The Arges Adventure.

That’s it for now! Next week, we’ll be answering questions like:

- Ever consider making a podcast/commentary for one of your games? My favorite Twitch stream from XSEED was the Trails in the Sky the 3rd stream followed by Xanadu Next. - The PC port diary thing from CS PC was fantastic. I really liked a kind of…behind the curtain look at what goes into a PC port. (I'd be similarly curious for the localization process overall.) Do you plan on doing more of those for future games? - What are the requirements/makes it likely to get hired as a translator? Would self-taught people stand a chance? - Are there any games you've worked on in the past that you wish you could go back to and do differently a second time around? - What does the first day of a new project look like? What kinds of things are done right off the bat?

See you guys next time!

#XSEED #Q&A #Localization

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may-shepard · 7 years

Text

tfp, the ring, and the art of the false climax

(ETA: This post is causing trouble on mobile...sorry!? Many of the images are cut from mobile for some reason, and apparently it’s crashing the app. I’m wondering if it’s just too long. In any case, view on a computer for a more complete experience; reblog to avoid the inevitable Mofftiss curse. If I have time in the next little while, I’ll publish it in shorter segments.)

TFP had a number of different intertexts--mainly, specific movies--which it drew upon for its motifs, themes, moment-to-moment imagery, and plot points. As approximately a million people noticed in the TFP aftermath, many of the movies referenced in this episode are horror films. Predominant among them was The Ring.

(For the purpose of this post, I’m going to focus on Gore Verbinski’s 2002 film, rather than the Japanese source film Ringu / Ring, because the former is much better known in the West, and I think it’s more likely that it’s The Ring, and not Ringu, that Moffat is talking about in this interview, where he mentions watching it. However, since the broad strokes plot outline of both The Ring and Ringu are very similar / the same wrt the idea of the false climax, the argument I’m making holds either way.)

The Ring is well known for being a really beautifully done horror film. It looks incredible, for one thing--it’s visually gorgeous and thematically dense. But mostly, it does something with the concept of hauntings, ghostly origin stories, and the standard horror plot that, at the time of its release, was incredibly stunning and exciting.

In short, The Ring fakes out its audience by presenting a false climax that appears to resolve the story, in a way that is emotionally nice, if a little unsatisfying, before pulling the rug out from under its own plot.

Because The Ring is such a standout intertext for TFP, i.e., TFP not only draws on it, but resonates with it in multiple ways, via names, repeated motifs, the framing of certain shots, as well as relying on it for nearly its entire climax, I really think the story of s4 and the series as a whole is not over. Even if you think there aren’t any further episodes coming down the pipe, I’m hoping this discussion might help people understand why the story feels incomplete. (Because it is).

If you’ve been trying to sit with the idea that the Redbeard reveal / presentation of Eurus’ backstory / resolution of Sherlock’s story is real / supposed to be taken at face value, but that reading isn’t working for you, maybe this will help.

Basic premises: the reading I’m doing here is a mind bungalow reading. The rationale for The Ring as a major intertext of TFP is that John has been shot, and TFP is the content of his hallucination as he’s bleeding out, which offers an understanding of why it’s so bizarre and tonally shifted from everything else we’ve seen in Sherlock. This reading pulls on the newly revealed information, in TST, that John is a horror movie buff--enough so that he feels the need to correct Mary on the difference between The Omen and The Exorcist. John’s proclivity for horror films offers one justification for why they not only seem to inform TFP, but practically take it over.

I’m hoping to show, for people who aren’t familiar with The Ring, exactly how wildly it dominates TFP, and to talk about how we can use this fact to make some sense of the episode, and possibly the future of the show.

Ridiculous levels of detail under the cut:

An Intro to The Ring

This is Rachel.

Oops.

This is Rachel (Naomi Watts). She’s the main character of The Ring, and an investigative journalist.

Sidebar: I might have developed a bit of a crush on Naomi Watts when this movie came out. Crush, as it turns out, still active.

Rachel’s a career-driven single mom of a son who spends his time apparently engaging in extrasensory perception normal kid things and drawing seriously disturbing totally normal pictures at all times:

(Not yet, Eurus!)

The story of The Ring starts when Rachel’s teenaged niece dies under mysterious circumstances, and Rachel’s sister, the dead girl’s mother, asks Rachel to investigate. The trail leads Rachel to what sounds like an urban legend about a cursed videotape.

She finds the tape at a creepy mountain resort, and watches it. It is, in essence, a mishmash of images set to an unsettling minimalist soundtrack:

Sorry, wrong creepy recording. This is the one from The Ring:

Yeah me too. (Note the nearly-fourth-wall-breaking gaze...remind you of anything?)

Hi, John. (Via @inevitably-johnlocked, specifically this answer.)

I’ll just say here that, in addition to seemingly casting himself as Plane Girl and Eurus throughout parts of TFP, John’s role as John in TFP overlaps with much of Rachel’s in The Ring. Rachel’s standout characteristics are her dogged attachment to the investigation and her somewhat deadbeat qualities as a mom. I’ll leave you to your deductions about why John probably identifies with her.

Immediately after Rachel watches the tape, the phone rings. When Rachel answers, a voice says, “Seven days.” We already know, from her previous investigations, that people die seven days after they watch the tape. Now she knows there’s something to the story, and we have a ticking clock motif--a handy thing that builds extra tension into any plot.

Tick tick tick, Jim!

I’m going to skip most of the investigative twists and turns in The Ring, because this movie is a treat, and half the fun is watching the evidence pile up that something supernatural is responsible for the mysterious deaths.

Long story short, Rachel’s investigations lead her to discover that the videotape is linked to a horse-loving couple whose possibly weird-scientifically conceived daughter caused a lot of trouble during her brief lifetime.

Oh, and they live on a remote island that you can only reach via boat.

Sorry, wrong island.

This weird island is the one from The Ring. Totally different island. This is the one where, while the weird girl with psychic powers was still alive, she seems to have subjected the residents to her whim. (*cough cough cough*)

ANYWAY--

Rachel interviews the girl’s father and gets nowhere, but the island’s doctor is a little more talkative.

Important Backstory Alert:

Doctor: She wanted a child more than anything, poor Anna. They tried hard for years, but sometimes it’s just not meant to be. Then one winter they went away, and when they came back, it was with Samara. [I have to interject here to say you could argue that watching the tape means you have an APPOINTMENT WITH SAMARA, lol] ... Everything was fine, ’til Anna started coming to see me. Said she was suffering visions, seeing things, horrible things, like they’d been burned inside her. It only happened around Samara, that the girl put them there.

Okay. I just want to put a pin in that and go to TFP, because this is where we get some major intertextual action:

MYCROFT (firmly): I am aware of the dangers Eurus poses, and equipped to deal with them. JOHN: What dangers? MYCROFT (straightening up): Eurus doesn’t just talk to people. She ... reprograms them. (John turns back to look at the screen.) MYCROFT: Anyone who spends time with her is automatically compromised.

(all transcripts via Ariane de Vere)

Eurus is like the little girl from The Ring, putting ideas in people’s heads. As many, many people have noted, her hair and clothing in TFP are very close to Samara’s.

See what I mean?

Like Eurus, we see Samara through a television screen. Here, Samara is depicted in old footage of a psychiatric interview:

One of many iterations of televisual Eurus:

(The Ring plays very substantially with the uncanny nature of television, its habit of invading our domestic spaces, and the way that we can be manipulated and even threatened through the set. I suspect there’s something similar going on with TFP, especially in light of increasing evidence that it’s the setup to an ARG--TFP is the bait, the inciting incident, that leads us into the game.)

In any case, Eurus, as we have her in TFP, is an interesting mix of Samara from The Ring and a figure from John and Sherlock’s past. In The Ring, Samara manipulates people by “showing them things”--she puts pictures in their heads. But Eurus “talks to people,” and, somehow, makes them do things.

In TAB, on his way to his death, Sherlock read John’s blog, the story of how they met. Here, in TFP, on the verge of death, John is hallucinating a blend of motifs from horror movies and that same story--the story of how he and Sherlock met, with their first bad guy (Jeff Hope) blended together with their most recent (Eurus), and a substantial dose of Samara in the mix.

All of this evidence is plentiful enough to say there’s definitely a connection between The Ring and TFP. None of this begins to cover the sheer lunacy of the climax of TFP, and its very, very strong resemblance to the penultimate plot points of The Ring. Buckle in for a trip to bonkersland.

The Ring’s False Climax and The Non-Finality of TFP

The action of The Ring comes to its first, and fake, climax, as Rachel is running out of time. It’s the seventh day of her seven-day adventure, and she’s on Murder Moesko Island trying to figure it all out. Even as her previous ex-commander ex-boyfriend, Noah, struggles to dig up some information on the Morgans’ daughter at a nearby mental hospital, Rachel sneaks into the Morgan family farmhouse and watches a tape from the hospital’s archive:

Interviewer: So what is it that’s keeping you awake? You must sleep sometime. Do you dream about something? Samara?

Interviewer: Let’s talk about the pictures. How did you make them? Samara? How did you make these pictures?

[Sidebar: the pictures are amazing]

Samara: I don’t make them. I see them, and then, they just are.

Interviewer: Samara, I need you to start telling me the truth, okay?

Samara: Can I see my Mommy?

Interviewer: No, Samara, not until we understand what’s wrong with you.

Samara: I love my Mommy.

Interviewer: Yes you do. But you don’t want to hurt her any more, now, do you? You don’t want to hurt anyone.

Samara: But I do, and I’m sorry. It won’t stop.

Interviewer: Well that’s why you’re here. So I can help you to make it stop.

Samara: He’s going to leave me here.

Interviewer: Who?

Samara: Daddy.

Interviewer: They just want to help you.

Samara: Not Daddy.

Interviewer: Your Daddy loves you.

Samara: Daddy loves the horses. He wants me to go away.

Interviewer: No he doesn’t.

Samara: But he doesn’t know.

Interviewer: He doesn’t know what? Samara?

[The tape cuts off.]

This is lovely horror movie stuff, well done. (If anyone wants to explore the above text in terms of potential connections with John, Mary, and Rosie, or in light of Eurus’s nonsense monologues / psychiatric interviews in the background of TFP, go ahead. I’m not planning to, but I think it’s a potentially rich vein.)

We have the evidence that there was something very wrong with Samara, and the witness (Rachel) who interprets what she sees as evidence of child abuse. As The Ring builds to a series of reveals, we’re pulled in two different directions: we have the evidence that this child has powers, that she’s used them malevolently, and, on the other hand, the idea that she should have been protected, she was just a child, and therefore can’t be responsible for what’s happened to her.

Rachel, persisting in her idea that Samara just needed / needs to be understood, and that she’s uncovered some terrible story of abuse, continues to investigate.

Similarly, the narrative of TFP pulls us in two different directions. Eurus is both a little girl who somehow just needs a hug, and the demon seed who had, and has, no trouble killing wantonly.

Since Eurus can be read as a proxy for John (and this is part of where TFP takes on serious dramatic weight), we have both sides of him, as well. John needs to be rescued.

John is also full of self-blame.

He casts himself in both roles, with one resolution: his own rescue.

In The Ring, Rachel, now joined by her previous ex-commander ex-boyfriend Noah, first SEEK MY ROOM find Samara’s room, which is located in a symbolic Rapunzel’s tower hello damsel in distress at the top of the world’s tallest barn:

After approximately fifteen minutes of climbing, they find this oddly-normal-looking-for-where-it-is little girl’s room:

Compare:

Samara’s room, like Eurus’s apparently normal childhood bedroom, hides darker intentions and secrets. In this case, hidden under the wallpaper:

The burning tree image they uncover is a clue that leads them back to the inn where Rachel first watched the tape.

There, in the cabin, Noah and Rachel search desperately for the reason why they’ve been led back to this place. Rachel makes an impassioned plea for Noah to help their son (who has also watched the tape, and is under the same curse). Noah temper tantrums spectacularly--

--Noah temper tantrums spectacularly, knocking a conveniently placed vase of glass beads onto the floor. They roll and form an arrow that points to the solution:

(Did I mention that the room in The Ring is “painted red” by the setting sun shining through the red leaves of a tree? Just saying.)

Rachel and Noah figure out that there’s a hidden well underneath the floorboards on the cabin. Noah fetches an ax and smashes up the floor, an act that takes approximately a million years of screentime but is very manly:

Go, Sherlock!

Go, Noah!

What is it called when you break through the floor instead of the fourth wall? Lol.

Here’s where things get really ridiculous.

A tv, possessed by the spirit of the dead girl, knocks Rachel into the well.

No, really:

I know, totally different from being put in a well by a person who broadcasts herself through a tv and who everyone thought was dead, but you know.

The fall knocks Rachel out. She wakes up in the well:

Rachel: I’m here.

John: Yeah I’m here.

Rachel finds gruesome evidence that Samara was trapped in the well, alive, for a while.

The lid slides over the well--Rachel is trapped. She pulls up a handful of hair from the water, a hand emerges to grip her wrist, and we’re off into flashback territory:

Rachel receives a vision, presented as a flashback, about Samara’s murder. At first we see what seems to be a childhood idyll, accompanied by Samara’s singing:

Round we go The world is spinning When it stops It's just beginning Sun comes up We live and we cry Sun goes down And then we all die

[x]

But, we find out that this is actually the scene of her murder, as her mother approaches from behind her, puts a plastic bag over her head, and pushes her into the well:

Meanwhile, at the bottom of the well, Rachel pulls Samara’s body up out of the water. She comforts her:

Rachel: It’s okay now. It’s okay.

This parallels Sherlock’s puzzle solving on the surface, so he can find Eurus and save John.

SHERLOCK: I ... am ... lost ... Help ... me ... brother ... Save ... My ... Life ... Before ... my ... Doom. (He continues swiping the words away.) SHERLOCK: I ... am ... Lost ... Without ... your ... love ... Save ... My ... soul ... seek ... my ... room. [x]

The gravestone puzzle allows him to find Eurus, and comfort her.

SHERLOCK (in a whisper): You’re not lost any more.

Here we have it: a clear emotional climax for TFP--the climax that happened instead of the emotional resolution we were looking for, between John and Sherlock, but a climax nonetheless, if only in strictly structural terms.

In The Ring, this is the moment Samara’s body dissolves into bones:

Meanwhile, in John’s Well of Feels:

This moment in The Ring offers an escape from death for John Rachel. The curse doesn’t kick in: she doesn’t die, even though her seven days are up. She believes that, in discovering the true story of Redbeard Samara, she’s solved the puzzle and broken the curse. She contemplates the importance of understanding Samara, in the aftermath, as a surprising number of emergency workers and police crowd around this remote location, no doubt in response to Noah’s and Rachel’s call.

The Ring:

TFP:

Noah talks with Rachel about what happened, comforting her as she’s wrapped in a shock blanket, looking tired and worn out and damp:

Rachel: [About Samara] She just wanted to be heard. Sometimes children, they yell or cry or draw pictures.

In case you’re having trouble telling at this point, this is from TFP, not The Ring:

John: Well, you gave her what she was looking for: context.

Sherlock: Is that good?

John: It’s not good, it’s not bad. It is what it is.

[And what it is, is shit, friends, or, more hopefully, about to go to shit in the most amazing way possible. Hang on: this meta has one more loop around the track to go.]

In both The Ring and TFP, this looks like closure, doesn’t it? It looks like the show’s over. TFP certainly did its darndest to pantomime an ending after this. And yet--

WHY IT ISN’T OVER YET

Now we come to the point, the entire point and the thing that inspired this post. If John is drawing inspiration from The Ring in his hallucination--and I am certainly convinced that he is--then we ARE NOT DONE.

The above is not the climax of The Ring. It’s a nice version of a ghost story: if someone could only just learn the truth, then we could put the haunting to rest.

What a tender world that would be.

Rachel goes home, and tells her son, who has also been cursed, that she solved the puzzle.

Aidan: What happened to the girl?

Rachel: Samara?

Aidan: Is that her name?

Rachel: Mm hm.

Aidan: Is she still in the dark place?

Rachel: No. We set her free.

Aidan: You helped her?

Rachel: Yeah.

Aidan: Why did you do that?

Rachel: What’s wrong, honey?

Aidan: You weren’t supposed to help her.

[^ my approximate feelings immediately after watching TFP for the first time.]

Okay so, let me fill you in on how freaking amazing The Ring was, as a first time viewing experience, when it came out. Horror had, as horror does, gone through a particularly shitty slump at this point. The decision to import motifs from J-horror was among one of the best things that could have happened to Hollywood, however you feel about cultural appropriation / this style of collaboration. The above moment, in which the not-at-all-creepy child informs Rachel that she is wrong, that she has in fact made a terrible mistake, was, simply put, a really standout moment in the history of horror cinema. It was the thing that people talked about when they talked about The Ring.

The false climax of The Ring is the thing that distinguishes it. Borrowing that false climax to the point where, beat for beat, it informs the climax of your horror pastiche episode, as Moftiss have done in TFP, is akin to jumping up and down and screaming, THERE! IS! A! TWIST! COMING! THIS! IS! NOT! OVER!

So, what’s still to come?

In The Ring, the twist is that Rachel actually avoided the curse when she made a copy of the videotape, during her research. Like a smart virus, Samara’s curse forgives the person who propagates it.

If you don’t pass it on, you die. The curse is very much still active in the world of The Ring, which we find out when it gets Noah (poor Noah!). Here we learn the true nature of death-by-Samara. Basically, she breaks the fourth wall, climbing through your television set to come get you:

A fourth wall break so extreme, it’s lethal!

I know, Noah, this is how I feel about the ARG too.

Noah dies, leaving Rachel to figure out that the key to saving her son from the curse is to have him copy the tape:

This is Moftiss, showing you how to hit reblog on those ARG posts that you find scary, but which somehow seem increasingly important to your survival, post s4.

Bottom line, the ending of TFP, in copying the false climax of The Ring--in addition to its numerous other signs that it is not seriously offering any kind of resolution or closure for its audience--indicates that it is fake as hell. The story is not over, there is more coming for our heroes, and much more coming for us.

tagging:

@devoursjohnlock @marcespot @waitedforgarridebs @221bloodnun @jenna221b

I should probably tag others but I’m exhausted, please feel free to pass this on.

#sherlock meta #s4 speculation #the final problem #mind bungalow #john is hallucinating

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xseedgames · 7 years

Text

The Legend of Heroes: Trails Series - Localization Blog #2

Hi, kids!

This is Brittany, Localization Producer at XSEED, editor/graphic text monkey/what-have-you for Trails in the Sky the 3rd, and current head for the Trails series in general. I’m very eager to write this blog, because it’ll be full of updates for FC, SC, and the 3rd.

Let’s get the 3rd’s status out of the way: schedule-wise, we’re currently doing great! When we announced this game last year, I was dead set on getting it out by spring 2017, so I’m very proud to say that goal is being met. Trails in the Sky the 3rd is coming to PC in English on…a date you’ll find out very, very soon.

Barring typos or odd QA hiccups (which can happen when “smashing” PSP and PC code together to get the best of both worlds), the game is in pretty good shape and we’re right where we need to be. It’s cleaning up very well.

| QA is a sexy time and I won’t let you take it away from me.

I’d like to start by properly warning Trails newbies first: please play Trails in the Sky’s first and second chapters before playing the 3rd. Heck, please play them before even reading this blog! Although the 3rd is not a “third chapter” since the Estelle and Liberl’s story wrapped up with SC, this story still relies on knowledge gained by playing those two games. Internally, I’ve said before that the 3rd has only one target audience: people who’ve played both Trails FC and SC. Cold Steel fans will understand some of the lore dumping, but other details will be quite lost on lost you. Though, hey, if you want to purchase it anyway and help support my coffee fund, I ain’t gonna stop you. (Please buy it and play it later. I’m desperate, here.)

I would have loved for this blog to feature more specific details on the 3rd itself, but I tend to consider the series as a whole whenever I do my editing and am constantly referencing/perusing the text from the other games as if they were my current projects. Because of that, I’m going to be noting planned adjustments for the Sky trilogy that I decided were important enough to implement while I was working on the 3rd. We can dig into protagonist and deuteragonist Kevin Graham and Ries Argent in future blogs.

- Dead Emperor Sword > Sword of Abaddon – Loewe’s S-Craft. I meant to fix this during SC’s QA, but there were so many things I was brushing up till the last minute that it was lost in the shuffle. The original is straight-up wrong. - Pillar of Salt > Salt Pale – You’ll learn more about this in the 3rd. - Stainrose > Steinrose – This is a classy alcoholic drink briefly mentioned by Schera in Trails FC. This is clearly meant to be Steinrose and was written correctly in SC, so we’re extending that correction to FC. - Museum Descriptions – Text in the museum in Grancel will either be rewritten or greatly expanded upon in general. These descriptions were shorter due to every editor’s wariness of character limits in games, but that’s not actually a worry here, so woohoo! The Capel will also receive similar tweaks. - Master/King/Guardian of the Lake – I don’t understand how I missed this one, but boy, did I screw up when doing sweeps. You might remember the Guardian from Cold Steel; it’s a legendary fish. Well, the whole legendary fish thing actually dates back as far as the first game. Turns out, we’ve used a mix of king or master to describe it. I’d considered using the more common of the two in the current text, “master,” but I realized “master” is used in several other forms throughout FC and SC. To make its intent clear, I’m going the easy route and replacing all instances of king/King/master/Master with “Guardian” like the way it is in Cold Steel I&II.

| Mysterious boy who isn’t so mysterious if you’ve already played Cold Steel. This marks his first Trails appearance.

- Duke Dunan – I believe that even if he’s Queen Alicia II’s nephew, being a duke, he should be addressed as “Your Grace.” He’s been addressed as a number of things, including “Your Excellency” by Phillip and Kanone, so this will be corrected. - Sky Bandits – I talked about this a bit with the current series translator, and we decided that the term ‘sky bandits’ wasn’t the name of the Capua family’s group in particular. They’re simply bandits…who happen to do their bandit-ing while piloting a sweet airship. It’s not a term specific to them, but as generic as “thief” or “schoolteacher.” It shall be decapped in all instances throughout the trilogy. There are a few more words I decided to decap, and no doubt I’ll find even more in the future. They’re minor in comparison, though, so they’re not really worth listing here.

| Here’s a new feature, the “Remote Ability.”

- Airship/Orbalship/Flying Boats – Here’s one that’s bothered me for some time even though I couldn’t figure out a better solution. There’s an entry in the Capel about orbal airships stating that ships less than 20 arge in length are known as “flying boats.” We don’t actually use that term anywhere else, but no one ever brought it up so I left it as is. While reading through the games again, however, I noticed that we used both “airship” and “orbalship” as generic terms. It’s specifically thanks to orbal energy and the Orbal Revolution that modern civilization in Zemuria was able to achieve flight, so presumably all airships regardless of length use orbal energy. I don’t think it’s a stretch to scientifically classify small ships as “airships,” larger ships which require significant orbal energy as “orbalships,” and have “airships” be used as a generic term among citizens at the same time. After all, we in real life still can’t seem to decide if Pluto is classified as a damn planet or not, even if the population generally seems to refer to it as a planet no matter what its classification is. With this update, I will do away with the clunky and never-used “flying boats” in favor of the current entry.

- Hmm-Hmm!/Hm-Hm!/Etc. – Like Cold Steel I&II, this kind of chortle/laughter isn’t present at all in the 3rd. It was toned down considerably before launch in SC, but it’s still present in both FC and SC. I’ve always wanted to go through the script and alter/remove these, and I finally did! Maybe some will object to this decision, but if they’re not in the newer games, it’s just kinda weird to keep them in the older games, too. In case you wanted to know how much I suffered to do this: o "hmm-hmm" (164 hits in 96 files) o "hmmhmm" (184 hits in 85 files) o "hmhm" (89 hits in 52 files) o "hm-hm" (8 hits in 8 files) o "hmm!" (12 hits in 11 files) o "hm!" (21 hits in 20 files) o "hmm." (36 hits in 35 files) o "hm." (17 hits in 16 files) o "Hm," (62 hits in 41 files) o "hmm," (282 hits in 155 files)

- Duke/Baron Fisher – You might recall the president of the Fisherman’s Guild, Mr. Fisher. (Or maybe you do not recall, which suits me better. HEH.) Apparently, his title is mentioned once in both FC and SC—the first time was the “Duke of Angling” and second time was “Baron of Fishing.” This also comes up in the 3rd, but we thought “Fishing Baron” was a simple enough title for the guy, so this will also be fixed in FC and SC.

| From the 3rd’s opening animation.

- Social Sciences/Studies – This is the program Kloe takes at Jenis. I noticed a discrepancy here and there while doing some digging for the name, so all of these have been changed to “social studies.” It’s social sciences in Cold Steel, but since that’s a different country, I don’t consider the difference a big deal. - Faculty/Staff Office/Lounge – Also noticed this was a number of slightly difference things, so it shall be changed to “faculty lounge.” - Dorms/Dorm – Unless the person mentioning the dorms at Jenis is referencing both the boys’ and girls’ dorms, I made it singular since there’s only one dorm building each. Not really a problem, but it was bugging me. - Olivier: “In fact, I believe the Imperial Academy was to launch an investigation...but then the Hundred Days War broke out.” - *nerd glasses* Okay, this one is really cool to me!! I happened to notice the line and was confused by “Imperial Academy, so I checked the Japanese, which was more like “Imperial Science Institute.” Turns out, this is the very same “Imperial Institute of Science” that’s been brought up a few times throughout the Cold Steel arc. (Ahh, I just love how this series connects the little things.) - Dad/Daddy/Papa/Mom/Mommy/Momma – Estelle as a child calls Cassius “Daddy” in FC, but she says “Papa” in SC. SC will now match FC. Cassius still calls himself “Papa” when babying Estelle, though. I haven’t looked too deeply into this yet, but it’s also been fixed in the following instances so far: o Anya - Daddy(FC), Papa/Daddy(SC) = Daddy o Elke - Papa(FC), Papa/Dad(SC) = Dad o Mirano - Father(FC), Papa/Father(SC) = Father o Louis - Dad/Mom(FC), Papa/Mama & Dad/Mom (SC) = Dad/Mom o Helena - Dad/Mom (FC), Papa/Mama (SC) = Dad/Mom o Lucia - Mommy (FC), Mom/Mommy(SC) = Mommy

I feel ashamed to see all of this...

- Mayor/Lady/Miss/Ms. Maybelle – This one was pretty wild. When checking her address for the 3rd since Lila’s address was translated as “Lady Maybelle,” I went through FC/SC and the results were a mess. Some NPCs referred to her in three different ways, and Estelle went from “Mayor Maybelle” in FC to “Maybelle” in SC. One could argue closeness allowed her to drop the formalities, but I don’t see them as that close. Virtually everyone should be calling her “Mayor Maybelle” now, save for four exceptions: Lila, who calls her “Miss Maybelle, ” and Kloe, General Morgan, and Yahat, who affectionally call her “Maybelle.”

This biggest change affecting all these Sky games, however, will be this:

| You don’t know how happy it makes me to see this.

To refresh your memories, Zin Vathek is an A-rank bracer from the Calvard Republic, and he’s one of the main playable characters throughout the trilogy. However, due to some absurd reason I can’t even begin to understand since I wasn’t with XSEED at the time, the original translation team insisted upon changing his name to Zane.

The series has yet to truly set foot on Calvardian soil, but several characters from there appear to be of Eastern descent. This may lead some to believe that Calvard is mostly an “Asian” country, but personally, I think something very different is going on. Republican names also include stuff like Vathek, Cochrane, or Rocksmith (the Republic’s president). There’s even the Gambler Jack novel that stars a white man named…Jack…and includes characters like Chief Minister Shamrock and Enrique.

I believe Easterners are actually the minority in Calvard, and Eastern influences are reflected in a Chinatown-esque area called the “Eastern Quarter.” Even the writing in Gambler Jack mentions how immigrants tend to gather in the Eastern Quarter, and the writing goes out of its way to point out Eastern features in Halle, the heroine, as if it’s not usual for its author to see.

Throughout the localized games, there have been mentions of people from farther east immigrating into Calvard to the point where it’s become a problem. Incredibly interesting as this is, it’s only been brought up in bits and pieces throughout the series, so I can only make an educated guess on what exactly Calvard is like or what’s going on within. Also, you’ll learn more about this in 3rd and I don’t want to go into detail. These kinds of things could point to racial tension in the future or something else entirely. The more I’ve learned, the more my gut tells me that there’s a reason for these characters—Zin included—to have been given Eastern-influenced names.

While I’ve never been fond of “Zane” to begin with and believe it never should have been changed in the first place, I do understand that it’s been a part of the Trails English canon for many years. Before making the change, I tried to think of various solutions and consulted Falcom’s development team directly with my thoughts. One possible solution was based on many friends who immigrated to the West as children: they had their name from birth, and then they also had a more “white-sounding” name to further blend into Western culture. I thought this method would allow us to keep Zane, finally adopt Zin, and give Zane a few unexpected extra layers.

I’m happy that I expressed these concerns to Falcom’s team, because it gave me the confidence to do away with the more complex solutions and just skip to the overhaul. Moving forward, “Zane” will officially be “Zin” for the entire Trails in the Sky trilogy, and “Zane” will be a thing of the past. I’m excited about this. Please welcome Zin warmly.

| You’ll see cutscenes like these throughout the game.

In the Future/Other Notes

- Gambler Jack – This novel appears in both Trails in the Sky SC and Trails of Cold Steel II. The CS2 version was brushed up. This may or may not make it into this next update, but I’d like to backport this when I can. - Skippable S-Crafts – We added this patch into the PC versions of FC/SC in December 2016, but I felt it was worth noting since it’s not in any other version of the Sky trilogy but ours. You can now skip S-Crafts with the press of a button! Yay! - S-Craft Voices – Years and years ago, before my time, the Trails in the Sky trilogy was all dubbed at once just because it was battle lines and it was easier to get it all finished in one go. Some mistranslations happened here and there in those battle lines. It’s why Kloe shouts, “Radiant Plash!” instead of her actual S-Craft name, for example. The lines from one of Kevin’s S-Crafts gets mentioned as part of 3rd’s story, and you might notice it differs from the text in his actual S-Craft. I’d like to fix the voice someday, but we’ll have to work with the original for now. Just know that it was a conscious decision to not match the story text and battle lines. - NPC Names – Like Zin, a few NPC names I believe have references that were initially missed. Mirano/Trino/Modena are supposed to be Milan/Turin/Modena, I believe, Stain is supposed to be Stein, etc. These all these like relatively minor in the grand scheme of things and have no real impact on the world-building, though, so I’m still compiling a list and debating if it’s even worth touching this. I still want to…but lol. NPCs are truly trouble in this series… I have a bible I made myself for the series, but I’d love to keep filling it in!!

|I’m slowly building stuff like this in the name of obsession.

Ideally, one of the other big changes would be the basic name on Steam/GOG/Humble being displayed. We’ve always gone with Trails in the Sky and Trails in the Sky SC, but I worry names like these as an introductory header may cause confusion among newer fans. I want to someday rename these display names Trails in the Sky First Chapter and Trails in the Sky Second Chapter. We’ll see.

My hope is that outside of Zane > Zin, you guys noticed approximately none of these things and will end up reading this blog and going, “Huh. This person’s obsessed, but okay. Cool.” But how do these things happen? The same way it always happens with text-heavy games: too many cooks in the kitchen. Too many translators, too many editors. Many of these choices are perfectly valid out of world context, but when you’re given thousands of files, no unified index for characters unless you build it from scratch yourself, and some very nasty deadlines, things happen.

The series is much more unified than ever because we realized that when it comes to text-heavy projects, taking our time with a smaller team yields a much better result than throwing as many people as possible at it. CS1, CS2, and the 3rd proved it. In a perfect world, I could go over FC and SC’s text line by line and tweak things in ways fans likely wouldn’t notice just to create further consistency, but considering I do these tweaks in my free time out of pure passion for the series, that’s gonna have to be saved for another day. I’m already very blessed to be given the opportunity to comb through older files and tweak at my leisure. Or maybe I just have a very unusual hobby.

Should you come across any issues that have cropped up unexpectedly with this update (which will be before the 3rd’s launch), please feel free to contact us. Stuff happens, things break, but we’re always willing to look into it and fix it if it’s within our power. My heart belongs to the series forever, so anything I can do if time allows it, I try. Thanks for reading this update, kids, and I hope to write more about the 3rd soon!

| Yes, this actually is in the game.

#XSEED Blog #XSEED #THE LEGEND OF HEROES #TRAILS IN THE SKY #SORA NO KISEKI #POST: BRITTANY #LONG POST

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