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phoenixrisesoncemore · 4 years

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MDZS/CQL RPG mechanics

I was inspired by this awesome post from @wangxian-patriarch with additions by @moonwaif. Go check it out! And assume all those clever details and mechanics mentioned there.

This would work SO WELL for a late 90s PS1-style RPG, where graphics were improving and storylines/character arcs were becoming crazy complex but it was still kind of the Wild West/anything goes/take all the risks you want. And the best games (IMO) are those that mix genres in an episodic fashion and MDZS/CQL totally fits the bill for that! CQL even does it, itself.

This got so long that I hated to clog up their post with a reblog. Bear with me here. Batshit crazy thoughts coming at a million miles per hour. In addition to all the above wonderful stuff: picture this structured like a 75%/25% split of MDZS/CQL (because I think the interspersed flashbacks work better for a game where you get to see your past choices affect the present in chunks) but with 75% of the character expansions from CQL. AKA, more Shijie, meet WQ and WN in Cloud Recesses, interact with them at the Wen Indoctrination. Your choices determine at what pace the relationship with LWJ proceeds (see below)? The POV is always WWX.

Intro/tutorial: Mo Manor. WWX is your main character, obv. The main present story arc is a mostly linear action/adventure RPG. Mo Manor is your tutorial/training ground where you’re introduced to the main game mechanics, learn a bit about the world via NPC interaction and MXY’s notes, and get handed the first mystery/what appears to be the main game goal: who did MXY want you to get revenge on? Melodies keeps popping into WWX’s head. Begin mini game where you are introduced to the game’s musical mechanics as WWX tries to remember melodies. Most are eerie and harsh, but there is one WWX finds “strangely soothing” even though he can’t remember where it is from. Remember these songs, especially that soothing one, because it’s going to be important soon! Introduction of basic sword-based cultivation battle mechanics via an impromptu party forming with the ducklings against the corpse arm (WWX can join in with talismans or something relatively innocuous for now). Eventually WWX goes secret solo battle using flute-less demonic cultivation battle mechanics. Can you remember how to play some of those tunes to summon fierce corpses? Then LWJ appears and it’s time for you to get the Hell out of Dodge before there are questions about what you just did. Cue short sequence of getting out of Mo Village before you’re caught. Begin Little Apple game mechanics.

Dafan Mountain Quest. First big mission. Gather info and piece together the mystery while avoiding too much attention from the Jiang sect cultivators or Game Over. Solve the mystery and begin the first boss fight alongside the ducklings! But talismans and whistling isn’t cutting it any longer. Flute-based demonic cultivation mechanics activate! Remember those songs WWX has had going through his head. You’re going to need all of them now. Game Over if Jin Ling is killed by the goddess! Also: surprise! the goddess can only be defeated by a finishing move which requires summoning a high level fierce corpse. Which song is it? Succeed and summon Wen Ning, but oh no! he’s in berserk mode. Hmmm, what about that soothing song? Better remember how to play it fast or Wen Ning will kill the other cultivators and Game Over.

FLASHBACK: Cloud Recesses. I need this to somehow incorporate and deconstruct the school dating sim genre. I don’t know how, but I need that. Sharing loquats and Emperor’s Smile and causing trouble will sure make you popular. The rooftop fight seems like a standard fighting setup. Is there a way to mix those two genres? A fighting mini game inside a dating sim? Because there needs to be! Is Biling Lake a mini action-platformer segment? Also agree: Jiang Cheng interaction and combo learning here—sneak out to explore the back hill and learn pair fighting dynamics. Use WWX’s original sword-based cultivation skills. Rabbit-catching mini game. Decide what colors you want to gift to increasingly grumpy Lan Zhan. Get to know Mianmian and she’ll be more active in helping you later. Befriend NHS and change dialog trees with him in present arc.

Present day Cloud Recesses: your home base. Sandbox. Your actions in the flashback effect the present day Cloud Recesses. Did you hide some Emperor’s smile somewhere 16 years ago? Home of rabbit-raising mini game and various troublemaking side quests. You get points for every Lan Clan rule you break (and how deeply you corrupt the ducklings). The challenge is in figuring out how to break them. Break enough rules and gain early access to the library’s restricted section where you can learn all kinds of new unorthodox cultivation techniques. Break all of them and get a super awesome power-up. Up to a certain point you can return here with LWJ on Bichen once he joins your party. Duckling night hunts are initiated here?

Lan WangJi Joins the Party. The main body of the game commences as you begin the quest to solve the Mo Manor mystery and figure out who MXY wanted you to get revenge on. Your choices/skill in the flashbacks as they occur will alter (somewhat) the events of this, the game’s main “spine.” Each town/city encountered on the road trip has its own aesthetic and NPC populace from which you have to collect clues and learn what your next moves should be. Lots of immersive qualities and learning about the current political/social situation. Fierce corpse and ghost fights along the way. Collect (offensively inaccurate) YLLZ and Sunshot memorabilia. Slowly grow your affinity with LWJ in battle and use the skills for pair fighting you learned with Jiang Cheng to build towards those awesome battle-couple combos. LWJ will remain in your party for the rest of the main game (excluding flashbacks) except for short bits like Yi City. You can play WWX’s dizi along the road for practice and to up your skill level. Depending on how often and in what circumstances you play Wangxian and how you interact with LWJ you’ll start to get different (but still evasive) answers if you ask him how he knew it was you. Remember to play Rest so NMJ’s pieces don’t get out of hand.

Because this is long: more below the cut

The Man-eating castle. Logic puzzle dungeon. Try to outclever NHS in dialog trees to get him to spill information.

Chang Manor. Mystery dungeon with final grave robber boss fight. Learn about the story of XXC, SL, and XY as you explore Chang manor, looking for clues as to what happened. Avoid traps set by XY.

Yi City. I mean: THE FOG. It’s Silent Hill. It’s Fatal Frame. It’s a survival horror dungeon. How long and involved should the Empathy section be? How does the gameplay change there?

Explore Jin Lin Tai. Stealth dungeon. Sneak around Jin Lin Tai as first “MXY” and later as Paperman WWX (AH! Sudden scale/mechanics change), gathering clues and looking for NMJ’s head. Empathy cutscenes.

Escape Jin Lin Tai. Action segment/beat em up. A place to really show off those growing battle-couple mechanics with LWJ.

FLASHBACK: Happy Times at Lotus Pier. The closest we’ve been to the light-hearted gameplay of the first Cloud Recesses flashback. WWX. JC, and JYL involved in shenanigans at Lotus Pier. Maybe we even get the Lotus Seed Pod Extra content of stealing lotuses from the old man. Get a chance to use those Jiang Cheng combos you learned in the CR flashback. Last chance to use those sword cultivation techniques. Nostalgia galore.

FLASHBACK (cont): Indoctrination/Xuanwu Cave. WWX/JC party using non-sword techniques. Eventually morphs into a WWX/LWJ party. This would be the first time chronologically that they would have fought together.

FLASHBACK (cont): Lotus Pier Attack and Escape. I totally agree with the above that this will ultimately work out to stealth escort missions as you work to get JC to safety with WN’s help.

FLASHBACK (cont): Thrown into Burial Mounds. This could be super expressionistic. Wandering through Burial Mounds trying to stay alive, but with crazy nightmare-like elements. Think of the way Eternal Darkness messed with player perceptions and even broke the 4th wall when it came to game mechanics. Maybe this even bleeds seamlessly into the supervisory office deaths and Wen Chao’s chase and death.

Return to Cloud Recesses. More areas to explore are unlocked. Dialog trees with LWJ. Feelings.

Journey to Burial Mounds. This is your chance to really grind and refine those battle couple combos. Side-quests? How far has word spread that the YLLZ is back? How will that effect the way you can or can’t interact with NPCs. I also like the idea of interspersing the flashbacks from Sunshot and up through the building of the Burial Mounds settlement in here, so as to have the player get to interact with and design the settlement in the past before the ruins of it are seen in the present.

FLASHBACK: Sunshot. mashup of beat em up/strategy tactics using demonic cultivation with chenqing and the tiger seal to clear a path for the army of cultivators. WWX is a party of one for this.

FLASHBACK (cont): Post Sunshot. More deconstructed social sim mechanics. Use chenqing to help JC bag prey on Phoenix Mountain. Social decision trees at that really uncomfortable conference scene. Qiongqi Path rescue of the Wen Refugees. The LWJ in the rain confrontation either does or does not happen (or happens somewhat differently) depending on how your relationship has progressed thus far in the past.

FLASHBACK (cont): Building Burial Mounds Settlement. Settlement/Survival Sim elements. Choose where and how to build and what to grow. Play with and protect a-Yuan. Work to revive WN. Make demonic cultivation tools. Whatever you make will still exist in future and can be gathered/used for the Second Siege battle. JC duel (ouch, there’s those moves you learned together being used against you). Play around in YiLing with LWJ and a-Yuan. Spend the day as a family. Feelings.

Arrive at Burial Mounds. Explore the ruins of the place you built. Feelings. Gather items. Release the Juniors. Fight with the Cultivators.

FLASHBACK: Death of JZX/Nightless City. Beat em up using Wen Ning at Qiongqi Path. At Nightless City this time you’re solo sending hordes towards the cultivators. Heart breaking solo battle against LWJ, as with JC, he now knows and can anticipate your moves based on your previous flashback interactions. HORRIBLE TRAGEDY AND MASSIVE DEATH.

Second Seige of Burial Mounds. Massive beat em up where you finally get to utilize the full extent of your battle-couple skills along with Wen Ning in a series of brawls to end all brawls, eventually the ducklings join your party for brawl wave 3. You know that really big battle that happens near the turning point of video games that’s inevitably the second or third biggest battle of the game (and sometimes more difficult than the actual final boss battles)? That’s this one.

Return to Lotus Pier. Here’s where you get memories of WWX’s first night at Lotus Pier and YanLi saving him from the tree are interspersed as you explore the heartbreakingly different present day Lotus Pier. As with the other locations that you experience in both past and present, some choices in the past effect the location in the present. FEELINGS.

YunPing City: Final major location. Explore and gather info. Prep for the final battle. Drunk LWJ mini game shenanigans. (Sexy time? I mean, Indigo Prophecy did it...) Stealth your way into Guanyin Temple.

Guanyin Temple Climax: Dialog trees with JGY determine how difficult he is to defeat here in battle. Final boss fight against NMJ’s fierce corpse: poignant party/combo with both JC and LWJ.

Denouement. Maybe the Sizhui revelation happens differently depending on how you interact with him throughout the game. Obv NOT getting the revelation is considered the BAD ending.

Ultimately, how the relationship between WWX and LWJ unfolds in CQL and MDZS is influenced by the plot structure (or at least is better served in each medium by how it makes use of the plot structure). The character of that relashionship journey is so different between the mediums, but each has wonderful aspects. How that plays out here is kind of up in the air without nailing more things down. Is it possible your actions could determine the timing and expression of the ship such that you end up with something more distinctly MDZS or something more distinctly CQL? (And by that I don’t mean one is overtly sexual and one isn’t, but rather whether the revelation of their feelings comes all at once near the end or rather more gradually, shifting in intensity and character as the plot goes along). That would be quite a thing to pull off without breaking the central narrative. I don’t even want to think about how complex that decision tree would be, but it could potentially be kind of amazing!

#mdzs #mo dao zu shi #grandmaster of demonic cultivation #cql #the untamed #chen qing ling #this is A LOT but i don’t care i am having a great time #i’ve only dipped my toes into game design previously but man this makes me wish I had done more #Because this is so fun #game design #rpgs #mdzs rpg?

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thetypedwriter · 4 years

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The Ruin of Kings Book Review

The Ruin of Kings Book Review by Jenn Lyons

Boy, oh, boy, was this a wild ride.

Those of you who have been following me for a while know that I occasionally delve into adult fiction here and there. I mainly stick to my vegetarian course of YA novels, but every once in a while I can’t help but pick up a slice of bacon, or in this case, an adult fiction book.

Or, even more specifically, I suppose it would be more accurate to say that it’s adult fantasy instead of fiction. High fantasy at that, which is characterized by a whole new world with fantastical elements and not just a novel in the known primary world with fantasy elements.

With that literary lesson out of the way, let me get started.

The Ruin of Kings by Jenn Lyons came recommended by one of my favorite book bloggers, Paperfury. She counted this as one of her most recent book obsessions she couldn’t stop thinking about and in general I trust her judgement (although she was way way off on The Queen of Nothing, yikes).

This massive installment is definitely not the short and sweet page length I’m used to with YA, and neither does it have the comforting and large font that makes me feel like an accomplished reader after just an hour of skimming.

No, this installment is large and beefy and could probably give someone a concussion if you threw it at them, so just keep that in mind.

The whole fantasy revolves around a boy named Khirin. Khirin is your typical fantasy hero, equipped with the luscious blonde hair and the sparkling blue eyes and most importantly, the wickedly sharp tongue reminiscent of a male character from the Cassandra Clare universe.

He’s sharp, he’s witty, he’s charming, and he also has terrible, terrible luck.

Or does he?

When you first meet Khirin he is being sold as a slave to the highest bidder. He’s cold, he’s injured, he’s starving, and he’s broken. You, as a reader at this point, are completely and irrevocably confused.

You’re thinking: Who is this boy? What is happening to him? Why are people betting so much money for him? What’s with this necklace around his neck? Where did he come from? Where are we? What world is this? Where is he going? What the hell is going on???

To say that Lyons starts out strong would be underhanded hyperbole. You are forcibly drop-kicked into the fantasy world of Qurr and its many raging empires and states, and putting them all together is frankly daunting and largely impossible until a good chunk of the book is devoured.

Frankly, I still have trouble figuring out all the locations and gods and god-kings and factions and lore and people and how they’re all related, Game of Thrones style. But that’s part of the fun.

One of my biggest complaints with YA is that the reader is generally treated like they’re pretty stupid.

Often a YA author feels the need to explain every single iteration and modicum of interaction between their characters or spend too much time describing things, and it leaves very little for interpretation or inference on the side of the reader. Lyons is almost the complete opposite, which is as refreshing as it is frustrating.

As you are introduced to Khirin and this gargantuan universe that Lyons has created, you will feel stupid. To be fair, I enjoyed it most of the time. I relished the challenge of learning to differentiate all the different families of the Court of Gems, of distinguishing the Goddess Thaena from the Goddess Tya.

I liked when I was finally able to smugly look at the map at the beginning and recognize all of the city states like Doltar or Kirpis or Manol. I liked when I understood the different races like the Thriss or the vané and the implications of what that meant.

If that was a whole load of word vomit for you, that’s okay.

Again, it’s part of the fun.

What I do want you to get out of this, however, is the knowledge that Lyons has created an expansive universe with multiple creatures, including dragons and witches, rivaling royal families, gods reminiscent of the Greek Gods and their interference with human affairs, a rivaling world split with so many seams that you’re not even sure who to root for, an emperor, magical jewelry, demons and even a dose of piracy and musical competition.

This book honestly has a little of everything — which, to be fair, it should, considering how damn long it takes to get through it’s never-ending pages.

To make this as simplified as possible, the plot goes like this:

Khirin is sold into slavery and finds himself in the hands of a group called the Black Brotherhood. Over time, Khirin learns about this group and their intentions, learns more about himself and the Stone of Shackles (the necklace he wears around his neck), divulges his past and how he got sold into slavery in the first place-his upbringing, his musical talent, his stay at the Blue Palace, his eventual betrayal at the hands of someone he loves.

You learn over the course of each chapter what brought Khirin to his current fate and more of what he is trying to do now,: which is to return home and save the world from the likes of the two main antagonists (although not all of them by any means), Gadrith and Darzin.

I’m not exaggerating when I say that is the most bare- bones summary I have ever written. But honestly, this book is about a hero named Khirin and his adventure to rid the world of evil as he learns about himself and his past.

Like many, many, other books before it, this book explores what it means to be a hero, what it means to be a god, what it means to be involved with the fight of good vs. evil. This book is not special in that sense regarding these themes.

However, there are some really cool aspects of this novel that I thoroughly enjoyed that I’ll relay now that the summary (as condensed as it is, sorry) is out of the way.

The two things I enjoyed most about this book were the writing itself and the POV. Most high fantasy novels that I’ve attempted to read have this ridiculous notion that every character must speak in some dead medieval language rife with historical inaccuracies and banal, clipped speech. Lyons does nothing of the sort.

Her characters are creative and crass and downright funny. The dialogue is immersive and natural and oftentimes, other than the backdrop of a dragon or lizard-people, it felt like two modern-day people were having a conversation, which I greatly appreciated.

Lyons is also a very big fan of building up her writing and then smacking you down at the pinnacle. For example:

“Before us lay the Mother of Trees.

I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I couldn’t comprehend. It just seemed like a humongous wall at first, one that had been built up with palaces and verandas, graceful pavilions, and stained-glass windows glittering like jewels. Only when I looked up could I perceive the sweep of branches, the distance velvet of green leaves. This was a tree to hold up the whole world, the sort of place where Galava must live, if any place were consecrated to her. It seemed ageless and immortal, a tree that had always and would always exist.

Naturally, we were setting it on fire.”

I personally found this style of writing hilarious. Lyons often built up the tension, beauty, or conflict, and then would deliver these one-liners that would leave me gasping with laughter. This creative juxtaposition was super enjoyable and one that made the book a big success for me.

Secondly, while this book is told almost entirely (keyword almost -there are some outlier chapters) from Khirin’s perspective, it technically oscillates between present Khirin and past Khirin.

The whole book switches from one timeline to another every other chapter, with the chapter starting with Khirin being sold into slavery being the “present” and told from Khirin’s first-person POV and then switching the next chapter to his “past” and being told from Khirin’s third-person POV.

I loved this. I thought this was so creative, and up to this point, I have never seen this done in another book. The subtle shift from first to third person every chapter, but still from the perspective of the same character, was so interesting and complex.

I loved that we were simultaneously getting current-day Khirin, but also Khirin from two years ago telling us the events that led up to the present. It was imaginative and intriguing, and I loved trying to fill in the holes before the book presented me with it (which even then was difficult).

In addition, throughout the whole book are also footnotes from another crucial character that offer information, clarification, and also humor. While I’ve primarily read footnotes in academic papers to cite sources or offer commentary, these footnotes were just as fictional as the rest of the story, but offered insight outside of Khirin that was often dripping in sarcasm, irony, or humor.

I thought it was another really creative way for Lyons to get across information without boring everyone half to death or releasing a 100- page guidebook to help you along.

Bottom line, people,: This book isn’t for everyone. High fantasy in general is not for everyone. That’s okay. It’s not usually my taste either, at least not the adult fictional kind, but something about this book really intrigued me.

Moreso than the actual plot, which is confusing, I enjoyed the writing, the suspense, and the act of playing detective. It’s been so long since I’ve read a book that’s made me think this hard, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. That being said, the same praise is a double-edged sword.

If you don’t want to have to think and draw out charts and make graphs on Excel, then perhaps this is not the book for you.

If you don’t like high fantasy or made-up worlds, or very interconnected family dynamics, then this is not the book for you. This book also contains elements that can be triggering to some, like rape, drugs, character death, violence, imprisonment, slavery, etc.

When I say this book has everything, I mean it has everything. And that can be good or bad depending on the person. For me, I liked it. However, I did get frustrated at certain points at the lack of clarification more than once, just for full disclosure.

Recommendation: If you’ve been bereft ever since the Game of Thrones disaster-of-a-finale, then you are not alone. The Ruin of Kings has everything you’ve ever wanted in a high fantasy book: action, kings, queens, palaces, war, dragons, magic and so much more.

This book was creative and funny and complex, and if you’re willing to sink your teeth and time into a universe that demands attention then you’ll find yourself rewarded with a brand-new world to fall in love with and characters that you can’t seem to forget.

Score: 8/10

#the ruin of kings #jenn lyons #popular fiction #books #book blog #book review #fiction #Book Recommendations #booknerd #writing #fantasy #high fantasy

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reconditarmonia · 4 years

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Dear Yuletide Writer 2020

Hi! Thank you for writing for me! I’m reconditarmonia here and on AO3. I have anon messaging off, but mods can contact me with any questions.

Fiddler on the Roof (2018 Folksbiene Production) | The Psychology of Time Travel - Kate Mascarenhas | Simoun | Where the Sky is Silver and the Earth is Brass - Sonya Taaffe

General likes:

– Relationships that aren’t built on romance or attraction. They can be romantic or sexual as well, but my favorite ships are all ones where it would still be interesting or compelling if the romantic component never materialized.

– Loyalty kink! Trust, affectionate or loving use of titles, gestures of loyalty, replacing one’s situational or ethical judgment with someone else’s, risking oneself (physically or otherwise) for someone else, not doing so on their orders. Can be commander-subordinate or comrades-in-arms.

– Heists, or other stories where there’s a lot of planning and then we see how the plan goes.

– Femslash, complicated or intense relationships between women, and female-centric gen. Women doing “male” stuff (possibly while crossdressing).

– Stories whose emotional climax or resolution isn’t the sex scene, if there is one.

– Uniforms/costumes/clothing.

– Stories, history, and performance. What gets told and how, what doesn’t get told or written down, behavior in a society where everyone’s consuming media and aware of its tropes, how people create their personas and script their own lines.

General DNW: rape/dubcon, torture, other creative gore; unrequested AUs, including “same setting, different rules” AUs such as soulmates/soulbonds; PWP; food sex; embarrassment; focus on pregnancy; Christmas/Christian themes; focus on unrequested canon or non-canon ships; unrequested trans versions of characters.

—

Fandom: Fiddler on the Roof (2018 Folksbiene Production)

Character(s): Any (The Fiddler, Hodl, Pertshik, Shprintze)

I would love to read about the Fiddler from the recent Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof, understanding him/her/them as a real person with a backstory, present and future rather than a symbol. They seem to be female (and their actor describes them as female) but wear men’s clothes and are on the men’s side at the wedding, and everyone seems cool with that? I’m 100% on board with any gender identity you decide you’d like to write them with. How did he/she/they come to be who they are, and what are their interpersonal relationships (platonic, familial, romantic, any gender) like? What might an encounter between them and the supernatural (dybbuks, demons, witches?) be or have been like? Have they always lived in Anatevka or do they wander from village to village? What happens to them after the play ends?

Or, Hodl and Pertshik! I maintain a headcanon (which you don't have to share) that Hodl reads a lot of anarchist books and pamphlets while she's in Siberia and comes around to Emma Goldman-esque views on marriage, and she and Pertshik stay together but never marry. I'd be so interested in something about their future! (Or f/f with genderswapped Pertshik??) But I'd also be happy with fic about either of them individually - Pertshik pre-play or Hodl (post-play) on her own without him on screen.

Or, Shprintze! (Or Bielke.) I love the expansion in this production of Pertshik's lessons to the younger girls, and I'd be super interested to read about one or both of them growing up in America, a very different life, having maybe absorbed some of those political beliefs as children. I also headcanon that - following the play's plot trajectory of increasingly unsuitable matches - she's got to be a lesbian, right? Bring on the Shprintze/OFC! yes, I know what happened in Sholem Aleichem's original stories

For that matter, feel free to do the supernatural plots with the non-fiddler characters too! Someone talking politics with a dybbuk? I'd also be really interested in digging into the language aspect, which I'd never really thought about before seeing this production - when do or don't they speak Yiddish, in their past or future?

Fandom-Specific DNW/Opt-In: I'm explicitly okaying antisemitism appearing in the story as part of the world the characters live in, although I do not want a character's personally facing antisemitism to be the focus of the plot. I don't really want to hear much about Khave/Fyedke.

—

Fandom: The Psychology of Time Travel - Kate Mascarenhas

Character(s): Any (none nominated)

This novel is so carefully worldbuilt, yet with such amazing potential for unusual character interactions, life stories, and relationships as shaped by time travel as well. I nominated this without characters because I would be delighted to receive fic that focused on worldbuilding, whether through the stories of OCs, or through any of the canon characters. I’m most interested in:

the Conclave and more broadly in social interactions and (romantic or friendly) relationships between multiple characters who are time travelers (rather than a time traveler and their non-time-traveling partner or family)

art that might be created with time travel (like Grace’s exhibitions or Angharad’s dance; what about novels or other fiction somehow created using time travel?)

the rules and customs of time travel (in-world documents? habits or observances that develop on a mass level beyond people’s individual compulsions or visits to significant dates within their own timeline? what fictional stories do time travelers write about time travel?)

more about the Conclave as a workplace, its social dynamics and logistics

interactive fiction?!

but really I’d love to read anything in this fandom. I'd be happy with fiction and/or in-world documents!

—

Fandom: Simoun

Character(s): Neviril

I've just completed a rewatch of this show, and it has reaffirmed for me that I love Neviril. She's a leader in both a military and a religious sense, respected by her squad and by the populace, but figuring out what that means to her is such a personal journey. I still love her scene in the hearing where she speaks aloud what no one has wanted to admit or talk about - that they're soldiers now, this is war, can they still call themselves priestessses? - but I was also struck on this rewatch by how Chor Tempest increasingly becomes a player in itself in the politicking (the bit in Episode 21 where the whole lot of them fly out against orders, because it's what they, with Neviril leading and giving voice to the group, think is what their role is about), and by the scenes of her blessing the people (when iirc she is needed elsewhere by the military governor for flight purposes) and Paraietta (after what Paraietta did to her).

I love the military aspects of this canon in general (and the associated tropes of loyalty and trust and bravery and positive/negative relationship to authority) and that definitely ties in to Neviril figuring out what her role is as the squad leader, but I'm also just here for that very process of figuring it out and defining it for herself.

So...what happens to her post-canon? What is the "new world" and her travel in it like? If she makes it back to the main world when war is brewing again, but her old cohort can't fly anymore, what does she see her role as being - a leader for peace, for war, something else? How do she and Aer interact with Paraietta, Rodoreamon, Floef, and/or Vyuraf?

Ship-wise, Aer/Neviril grew on me a lot! I appreciated Aer more as the determined bit-of-a-loose-cannon type than as the manic pixie this time, and noted Neviril's comments about how she was drawn to Aer's determination. But I'd also be up for a poly situation where she's involved with both Aer and Paraietta, who are friends, or, I guess, one where it's a three-way relationship, although I don't personally know what the Aer/Paraietta side would be like! (I do like how they work together in battle even when they're shown as having personal issues.)

I think this is the only fandom I could be interested in explict fic for this time around, as an option - the series is, on some level, about the contrast between the reality and physicality of their bodies and the general perception of what they do (which even in its non-spiritual military capacity is removed from a connection to their bodies via the Simoun aircraft), about becoming an adult, and of course about gender.

Fandom-Specific DNW: I'm not really interested in Kaim and Alty and would prefer for them not to appear or for their backstory to come up. I would also not like to see pre-timeskip Dominuura/Limone.

—

Fandom: Where the Sky is Silver and the Earth is Brass - Sonya Taaffe

Character(s): Any (Chaye Roznatovsky, Demon)

Anything expanding on this story would make me really happy. Chaye's years with the partisans, the comrades-in-arms she had and loved then and who else's memory she holds or makes into a weapon, her journey to America, going by the surname of "no one." The demon's mirror world, its loss of that world (what exactly happened on the other side?) and its need to be where Jews are, demon Judaism? Or the future of both of them now that they've found each other!

Fandom-Specific DNW/Opt-In: DNW Chaye/demon. The premise of the story being what it is, I'm explicitly okay with antisemitism being a prominent feature of the story if you write something that covers either or both characters' backstory, but would prefer post-war antisemitism not to be a focus.

#dear author letters #fiddler on the roof #simoun #the psychology of time travel #yuletide

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silkpunk · 5 years

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Fur and flesh to metal and fire: Native woman as embodiment of cultural tradition and anti-colonial re-configurations of steampunk in “Good Hunting”

Introductory note

I’ve seen tumblr posts and opinion pieces praising and condemning the animated adaptation of Ken Liu’s “Good Hunting” in Love, Death + Robots. Whether positive or negative, most comments are brief and reactionary, with some expressing awe towards the steampunk and Chinese folklore elements, and/or disappointment towards its depictions of sexual and racial violence. I’m writing this post as an appeal for viewers and readers to consider the centrality and depth of European colonialism to the narrative, and attempt to interpret the story’s denotations on the dynamics between the European colonizer, the colonized man, and woman in the aftermath of the Opium War. This post draws heavily on Ken Liu’s original text in addition to the Netflix adaptation.

Summary:

The gendered Chinese folklore of the Huli jing and Good Hunting’s subversion

Colonial British “progression” (in the form of steam tech) displaces Chinese folklore

The Body is Political – conquest of body and land

The Empire’s Subjects Strike Back – Re-programming steampunk for decolonial resistance

Personal evaluations on adapting text to film

The gendered Chinese folklore of the Huli jing and Good Hunting’s subversion

The text introduces the huli jing as a figure of Chinese folklore: one that, like the succubus of the West, is a predatory female that seduces and preys on men. It is a folklore that reflects male anxieties of the dangers and dirtiness of female sexuality:

[1]

“You must save him,” the merchant’s wife had said, bowing like a chicken pecking at rice. “If this gets out, the matchmakers won’t touch him at all.” [2]

The huli jing is a figure heavily entrenched in the Chinese psyche as promiscuous, immoral, and sexually devious, to the extent that it even permeates the language: “huli jing” is widely used today as an insult against sexually deviant women (usually against 小三 / 3rd party / side woman, like slut / bitch). Liu’s depiction is thus very explicitly and purposefully subversive in its attempt to give the huli jing a voice, to testify to their innocence (or at the very least, blamelessness):

“She liked her freedom and didn’t want anything to do with him. But once a man has set his heart on a hulijing, she cannot help hearing him no matter how far apart they are. All that moaning and crying he did drove her to distraction, and she had to go see him every night just to keep him quiet.”

This was not what I learned from Father.

“She lures innocent scholars and draws on their life essence to feed her evil magic! Look how sick the merchant’s son is!”

“He’s sick because that useless doctor gave him poison that was supposed to make him forget about my mother. My mother is the one who’s kept him alive with her nightly visits. And stop using the word lure. A man can fall in love with a hulijing just like he can with any human woman.” [2]

Liu makes his intentions clear in the comment:

In writing this story, I wanted […] to turn the misogynistic huli jing legends upside down. In these legends, usually composed by male scholars, the huli jing is a dangerous feminine creature who uses her sexuality to deprive men of their vitality and essence. My huli jing questions that narrative. [3]

Following Yan’s appeal and the brutal death of her mother, the protagonist Liang and the viewer/reader alike become convinced of her innocence and the huli jing‘s victimhood – we become aligned with her. And indeed, the text seems to unite the native Chinese characters and folklore across gendered and human/demon fault lines against the greater threat of foreign colonizers.

Colonial British “progression” (in the form of steam tech) displaces Chinese folklore

The narrative is set in the aftermath of the Opium War, and the British occupation of Hong Kong (around 1841). Though Yan and Liang reside in a more rural area, the British presence is strongly felt, mainly through the steam trains and railways that come to penetrate the landscape:

I had heard rumors that the Manchu Emperor had lost a war and been forced to give up all kinds of concessions, one of which involved paying to help the foreigners build a road of iron. But it had all seemed so fantastical that I didn’t pay much attention. [2]

The train is widely presented as a symbol of modernity that the “progressive” British colonizers attempt to bring to their “backward” colonies in their civilizing mission [4]. The “advancement” of the steam train is clearly antagonistic to the “primitive” native religion – they cannot coexist, and with colonization, the occupier’s system of logic, truth and tech displaces native belief, practice and magic:

Thompson strode over to the buddha and looked at it appraisingly. […]

Then I heard a loud crash and a collective gasp from the men in the main hall.

“I’ve just broken the hands off of this god of yours with my cane,” Thompson said. “As you can see, I have not been struck by lightning or suffered any other calamity. Indeed, now we know that it is only an idol made of mud stuffed with straw and covered in cheap paint. This is why you people lost the war to Britain. You worship statues of mud when you should be thinking about building roads from iron and weapons from steel.”

There was no more talk about changing the path of the railroad.

After the men were gone, Yan and I stepped out from behind the statue. We gazed at the broken hands of the buddha for a while.

“The world’s changing,” Yan said. “Hong Kong, iron roads, foreigners with wires that carry speech and machines that belch smoke. More and more, storytellers in the teahouses speak of these wonders. I think that’s why the old magic is leaving. A more powerful kind of magic has come.” [2]

Note the privileging of the new and inorganic (roads of iron, weapons of steel) over the old and organic (statues of mud and straw) – the landscape (and later, Yan’s organic body) transforms in this manner. Yan details how the changes affect her: she can no longer transform at will, and barely hunts enough for survival.

Liang is likewise affected. The text explains his decision to leave for British-administered Hong Kong: colonization renders his family’s demon hunting business obsolete, and his father takes his own life:

People stopped coming to Father and me to ask for our services. They either went to the Christian missionary or the new teacher who said he’d studied in San Francisco. Young men in the village began to leave for Hong Kong or Canton, moved by rumors of bright lights and well-paying work. […] As I let his body down, my heart numb, I thought that he was not unlike those he had hunted all his life: they were all sustained by an old magic that had left and would not return, and they did not know how to survive without it. [2]

Regardless of their previous antagonism, human and demon, man and woman alike are dispossessed by colonialism. For the native woman especially, this colonial invasion is particularly intimate, as it occurs at the level of the sexual.

The Body is Political – conquest of body and land

I believe that Good Hunting illustrates how the native woman embodies the culture of the colonized, and thus her body becomes a site of political and sexual contestation. I base this belief on notions from Frantz Fanon’s essay, “Algeria Unveiled”, in which he describes the psycho-sexual antagonism arising between the white French colonizer and the veiled Muslim women of Algeria. Needless to say, real-life accounts differ from fictive re-imaginings, and the cultural configurations of French Algeria and British Hong Kong are definitely inequivalent, yet, they share common rhythms in the dynamic of sexual violence between white colonizer and the exoticized colonial subject.

Fanon explicates how the veiled Muslim woman’s body came to represent the whole culture of the colonized peoples of Algeria:

One may remain for a long time unaware of the fact that a Moslem does not eat pork or that he denies himself daily sexual relations during the month of Ramadan, but the veil worn by the women appears with such constancy that it generally suffices to characterize Arab society. We have seen that on the level of individuals the colonial strategy of destructuring Algerian society very quickly came to assign a prominent place to the Algerian woman. The colonialist’s relentlessness, his methods of struggle were bound to give rise to reactionary forms of behavior on the part of the colonized. In the face of the violence of the occupier, the colonized found himself defining a principled position with respect to a formerly inert element of the native cultural configuration. [5]

In short, the veil, a “formerly inert element” of Algerian Muslim culture, gains significance because it becomes a marker of that culture, a marker of difference, under the white colonizer’s gaze. To eliminate native culture, it is therefore imperative to eliminate the veil, and the native Algerian reacts by resisting this unveiling. In this manner, the Algerian woman’s body becomes a site for colonial conflict. This is why imperial expansion and territorial conquest is inextricably tied to rape – think of the pervasiveness of “rape and pillage”:

The history of the French conquest in Algeria, including the overrunning of villages by the troops, the confiscation of property and the raping of women, the pillaging of a country, has contributed to the birth and the crystallization of the same dynamic image. At the level of the psychological strata of the occupier, the evocation of this freedom given to the sadism of the conqueror, to his eroticism, creates faults, fertile gaps through which both dreamlike forms of behaviour and, on certain occasions, criminal acts can emerge. Thus the rape of the Algerian woman in the dream of a European is always preceded by a rending of the veil. We here witness a double deflowering. [5]

Thus, it is at this site of sexual contestation of the woman’s body that struggle and resistance takes place. To me, Fanon’s conflation of the woman’s body to the native land and culture allows us to better understand Good Hunting. Yan’s identity as a huli jing already presents her as an embodiment of Chinese “old magic”. With British industrialization and influence, Chinese magic is quelled, and Yan loses her powers, symbolizing the disempowerment of Chinese culture.

As colonial steam technology dominates the landscape, native magic weakens, as does Yan’s body. The violence exacerbates when the characters migrate to the centre of colonial administration – Victoria Peak in Hong Kong. Here, there is a gendered difference in the way Liang and Yan are brutalized. Liang’s engineering talent is discounted – the native’s labour is exploited and undervalued.

“Are you the man who came up with the idea of using a larger flywheel for the old engine?”

I nodded. I took pride in the way I could squeeze more power out of my machines than dreamed of by their designers.

“You did not steal the idea from an Englishman?” his tone was severe.

I blinked. A moment of confusion was followed by a rush of anger. “No,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. I ducked back under the machine to continue my work.

“He is clever,” my shift supervisor said, “for a Chinaman. He can be taught.”

“I suppose we might as well try,” said the other man. “It will certainly be cheaper than hiring a real engineer from England.” [2]

This is immediately followed by a scene of British clients sexually harassing Yan, now a sex worker.

The dialogue deliberately frames their subjugation as racialized. Liang adapts to colonial Hong Kong but he is not a part of it – he becomes educated in the technical language of the colonizer, replacing his inherited knowledge of magic with that of steam, but his racial difference is constantly referenced (perhaps he’s “white but not quite” [6]). He is a “Chinaman” regardless of ability and any attempt at assimilation. This discrimination occurs in the capacity as employer-employee, master-servant, at the meeting point of the train operations room, the workplace. For the native woman, due to the colonial sexual appetite – the tradition of rape and pillage – violence occurs at the intimate meeting point of her body, on which white expectations of her race are burdened – note how the stereotype of Chinese industriousness is used to pressure her into sexual labour. The colonizers feel entitled to the servitude of both native bodies – the man’s labour, and the woman’s sexual subjugation.

The text notes that this violent encounter leading to Yan and Liang’s reunion happens on a culturally significant date:

“Don’t let the Chinese ghosts get you,” a woman with bright blond hair said in the tram, and her companions laughed.

It was the night of Yulan, I realized, the Ghost Festival. I should get something for my father, maybe pick up some paper money at Mongkok. […]

“It’s the night of the Ghost Festival,” [Yan] said. “I didn’t want to work any more. I wanted to think about my mother.”

“Why don’t we go get some offerings together?” I asked. [2]

Similar to Día de Muertos – the Mexican Day of the Dead – the month of the Hungry Ghost Festival is a time to remember and honour the deceased. It is believed that the gates of the underworld open during the seventh lunar month, and the spirits of the departed return to visit the living. We follow Liang’s thoughts as he realizes it is the night of Yulan, and immediately encounter Yan, which might suggest to us that she is a ghost of sorts coming back to haunt him – she represents an old culture, dead or dying. The story connects the violent encounter, the sexual degradation of Yan’s magic-drained body, to the death of Yan and Liang’s parents, and maybe even the death of Yan herself. Colonial violence corresponds to the death of native culture.

To further cement this idea that the colonized woman’s body is conflated to the land, Yan’s body comes to receive the ultimate abuse from the figure of the governor (or the governor’s son, in the original text). Her sexual perpetrator is not an everyman, but the political representative of the British colonist; where Yan embodies native Chinese culture, her rapist embodies the British colonial administration. He ravages and consumes her body as a colonizer takes and devours territory – I think the showrunners deliberately portrayed him as obese to evoke a grotesque image of imperialist greed and over-consumption of the colonies’ resource. (Of course, this has problematic real-life implications on public perceptions of fat people.) He takes her organic body apart and reconstructs her to his own fetish fantasy of steel and chrome – just as Britain fragments, reforms, reshapes China’s trade, opium economy, and territory (e.g. Hong Kong), to its own will.

Yan’s rape and reconstruction is thus conflated to the political conquest of China and Hong Kong. (Jameson’s notion of the national allegory comes to mind. [7])

The Empire’s Subjects Strike Back – Re-programming steampunk for decolonial resistance

In Good Hunting, the mode of S/F (= speculative fiction / science fiction / science fantasy) enables imagination of how the native can re-appropriate and re-configure the colonizer’s weapons against them. Ken Liu notes:

I think there’s a paucity of good steampunk that addresses the dark stain of colonialism in a satisfactory way. Like many of my stories, this tale has an anti-colonial theme. [Yan] says, at one point, “A terrible thing had been done to me, but I could also be terrible.” It is about as succinct a summary of the experience of being a member of a colonized population as I can give. [3]

A recognizable figure of Buddhism is shown before Liang and Yan move to Hong Kong, in the form of a Buddha statue. Yan is shown in the same frame bowing to it, aligning her with the natives’ religion and again, reinforcing her as a representative of native culture. The next encounter with a religious figure comes in the form of Guan Yin, and if the friend I consulted is not mistaken, it’s possibly the incarnation with 千手千眼 / “The One With A Thousand Arms and Thousand eyes”:

The buddha Amitābha, upon seeing her plight, gave her eleven heads to help her hear the cries of those who are suffering. Upon hearing these cries and comprehending them, Avalokiteśvara attempted to reach out to all those who needed aid, but found that her two arms shattered into pieces. Once more, Amitābha came to her aid and appointed her a thousand arms to let her reach out to those in need. [8]

This statue looks on, and takes up the entire frame as the rapist-governor cries out in pain offscreen while Yan attacks him with her new mechanized strength, her body no longer victimized but newly weaponized, declaring “I could also be terrible”. The Guan Yin statue frames Yan’s act as one of divine retribution – an individual woman’s rebellion that draws strength from a wider colonized peoples and their religion. Though her organic magic had been forcefully amputated and replaced with the colonizer’s inorganic steam tech, the image of Guan Yin suggests that the old culture is not dead, but reborn in a new incarnation, to deliver comeuppance.

(Personal disclaimer: it is with bitter irony that I must admit my estrangement from these figures – so feel free to add or counter this if you’re more well-informed on the significance of Guan Yin and Buddha here.)

As I’ve mentioned before, Liang’s proficiency in the colonizer’s language of technology functions as a means of his survival, but this same distancing and Othering of him by the colonists keeps him from fully aligning himself with them, and he readily repurposes his mechanical expertise for the antagonistic cause of rebellion, thus engineering not a steam train (weapon of British imperial expansion) but a huli jing (weapon of Chinese folklore and emasculation, albeit the target of emasculation has shifted). The same technology that drove out the magic is now used to empower that folklore.

In these acts of re-configuration, I see an endeavour to visualize how a threatened culture can survive and thrive in the future. Creators like Ytasha Womack emphasize how the S/F genre of Afrofuturism (emphasis on “future”) is necessary for black persons to imagine a future with themselves in it, to provide a vision of empowerment, possibility, and survival [9]. Good Hunting’s narrative, though more of an alternate history, similarly offers a positive possibility in which Chinese culture and mythology is not smothered by colonialism and technological change, but adapted to it:

The old magic was back but changed: not fur and flesh, but metal and fire. [2]

I would also tentatively speculate that perhaps this narrative of colonized man allying himself to empower colonized woman is also driven by an impulse (maybe underlying, at the level of the subconscious) to quell male anxieties of colonial domination and complicity in female subjugation – to re-imagine a history where the figure of the Chinese male is less of a passively helpless witness to sexual abuse, to his country’s subjugation, but an active agent able to empower her. In other words, it could be a case of ‘fantasy as coping mechanism for trauma’ – re-imagining the outcomes of a traumatic past such that the victim-survivor overcomes his abuser (in this case, I see it coming from a male perspective).

Finally, I think this ‘weaponizing the colonizer’s own tools against him’ works on a metafictional level as well: the English language has long been the medium and weapon of English / white supremacy. See Macaulay’s minute on education in which he basically appeals for Indian colonial subjects to be educated in Eng to transmit British ideas, modes of thinking, systems of thought [10]. English language and literature works to naturalize anglo-imperialist modes of reasoning, to colonize the imagination. I like to think that for Chinese-American Ken Liu to tell this story in English is a re-purposing of the language to bite back at the colonizer. And if we regard the steampunk trope as a playful British fantasy of Victorian-era aesthetics, Liu’s re-fashioning and appropriation of the trope – to infuse it with a tale of colonial vengeance – is akin to Liang and Yan’s appropriation of the colonizer’s own weapons. Liu’s act of writing Good Hunting may be exemplary of how “the empire writes back with a vengeance”, to quote Salman Rushdie [11].

Personal evaluations on adapting text to film

I find that the animated adaptation has a heavier “male gaze”, a term coined by film critic Laura Mulvey: mainstream cinema is a product of patriarchal institution, and most films assume the perspective of a male, while the female is configured onscreen as erotic object [12]. To borrow Linda Williams’ words, “the bodies of women figures on the screen have functioned traditionally as the primary embodiments of pleasure, fear, and pain” [13]. The animated adaptation appears more explicit in its spectacles of female nudity and victimhood, evident in the shots panning up Yan’s legs as a harasser raises a cane to lift her dress; over her struggling, restrained, unclothed body; and over her face contorted in fear and disgust. I’ve wondered if this is necessitated because the showrunners need to show her ordeal whereas the writer only need tell it – in film, we do not get to hear her recount of suffering and survival as much as we see it. Yet, I’m fairly convinced the perspective has a focus that deliberately eyes the female form for sexual gratification – exemplified by shots of her glutes, bust, and unnecessarily bared breasts.

Science fiction, steampunk and machination has high visual appeal; they delight and enthrall as visual spectacles. It is unfortunate when narratives that indulge and play with such spectacular concepts remain coloured by patriarchal desires, and become so heavily infused with the sexual indulgence in disempowered women. This conventional fanboy approach to steampunk / SF – the entitlement to consuming fantastical tech and women – almost repeats the desires of the European colonizer-rapist that Good Hunting condemns:

In a city filled with chrome and brass and clanging and hissing, desires became confused” [2].

It is my personal conviction that the adaptation somewhat diminishes (but doesn’t erase!) the anti-colonial impact of the original text through its lapses into the impulse to consume the colonized woman’s body – the same impulse that the text works so hard to undo. So, as much as I enjoyed this and most other episode of LDR (because as a series, it’s not that much different from other mainstream depictions of women i.e. I’m sensitized and used to it), it would’ve benefited greatly from a purposeful questioning of, and distancing from, the mainstream male perspectives of science fiction.

Concluding Remarks

Even with these shortcomings, Good Hunting is undoubtedly rich in cultural meaning and purposefully, powerfully anti-colonial. It is vital to acknowledge its value in destabilizing colonial mindsets and tropes, instead of shallowly and reflexively dismissing its whole narrative for containing sexual and racial violence, and how it doesn’t comfortably fit into contemporary, widely-accepted, Western expectations of ‘girl power’.

Ken Liu’s text does not bemoan the victimization of Chinese culture in the post-Opium War period of colonization, but re-configures, upgrades, modernizes, adapts the old magic to its new technological environment, with the stubborn anti-colonial tenacity for continued cultural survival.

References:

1. “Good Hunting”, Love, Death & Robots, Netflix

2. Ken Liu, “Good Hunting”, 2012

3. Ken Liu, Story Notes: “Good Hunting” in Strange Horizons, 2012

4. Science and Technology: Transport: Railways - The British Empire

5. Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled”, A Dying Colonialism, 1965

6. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”, 1984

7. Fredric Jameson, “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism”, 1986

8. Wikipedia, “Guanyin and the Thousand Arms”

9. Steven W Thrasher, “Afrofuturism: reimagining science and the future from a black perspective”, 2015

10. Thomas Babington Macaulay, “Minute on Education”, 1835

11. Salman Rushdie, “The empire writes back with a vengeance”, 1982

12. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, 1975

13. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess, 1991

#good hunting #ken liu #love death and robots #ldr #postcolonial literature #the paper menagerie and other stories #postcolonialism #decolonization #ask to tag #我发的 #我写到废寝忘食

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azfellandco · 5 years

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Hiya! So, please feel free to ignore this, but I just listened to Good Omens for the first time with considerable enjoyment, and I was wondering whether you have/know of any good fic rec lists for the book?

hi and welcome and i’m glad you enjoyed the book!!

General

Something Ordinary by literature_and_ocean_waves (9k)

Summary: “You kidnapped the Antichrist?!”Aziraphale’s shrill screech echoed harshly throughout the dingy bookshop.

Crowley looked sheepishly at his expensive, snakeskin shoes. “Kidnap is such a strong word,” he said. “I rather like liberate.”

This is following what, if you ask me, is a plot this fandom can never write enough of: what if Crowley had kept baby Adam and he and Aziraphale had tried to raise him together?

Never Mind the Gravitation by Argyle (2k)

Summary: Sure, there’s life on Mars. But Crowley can hardly call it living.

This is not as angsty as that summary makes it sound. …okay it is a little bit, but in a bittersweet kind of way, and it’s so funny as well. This is one of those fics that has the tone of the book down really well and it takes what I feel is an inherently sad concept (humanity moving off world and the places Aziraphale and Crowley call home changing again) and makes it feel hopeful and optimistic. Also scifi is my real true love so like… of course I love this fic.

Even Without Looking by maniacalmole (18k)

Summary: Aziraphale gets requested by the heavenly court to prove that romantic love is real, and makes a valiant effort. He’s read about it so many times, in all the most romantic books. How hard could it be?

Everything maniacalmole has written is brilliant, funny, whimsical, and so in character, but this one is my favorite.

Habitual by goingsparebutwithprecision (4k)

Summary: In which Crowley wears lipstick and Aziraphale is flustered.

The mutability of angelic/demonic gender and sexual presentation is one of my favorite things about these characters and about writing for them, and this fic is one of the first I read that got me really thinking about it.

Guests On Memory Lane by Holoxam (5k)

Summary: “Whatever you go around telling yourself, angel,” Crowley said over his morning-coffee, “some of us have to work for a living. The girls and I can get into some shenanigans around the shops, you know.”Aziraphale looked up from his Telegraph, and sent Crowley a wary glance. He was torn between asking Crowley if he remembered his fruitless attempts at influencing the presumed antichrist back in the 1980’s, and sternly telling him off for even thinking about attempting to corrupt humans at such a young age.The Dynamic Duo babysit Anathema’s cousins for the weekend.

Crowley and Aziraphale being friends with Anathema? Yes, please. Crowley and Aziraphale taking care of children? Yes, please.

Teen

Five Times Crowley Wanted Aziraphale by Mitsuhachi (3k)

Summary: Wanting and wanting and wanting, in many ways over many years.

This and it’s sequel, Five Times Aziraphale Wanted Crowley (The One More Night Remix) (rated M, mind the tags) are one of my favorite fics in this fandom. I love historical stuff especially that traces Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship over vast tracks of time and this delivers on that in a huge way.

here i am, leaving you clues by Lvslie (10k)

Summary: It’s all the same burning bookshop, and I’m always inside shouting your name.

[Aziraphale is recalled to Heaven, but leaving proves more difficult than anticipated. Written for the tumblr prompt: ‘Actually….I just miss you.’]

Another one that I just adore. This fic is poetry in all the best ways and I think about the summary line, “it’s always the same burning bookshop”, pretty much every day of my life. There isn’t a plot as such (or if there is I’ve forgotten it because I am mostly just focused on how beautifully written it is) but I highly recommend it anyway.

Everything Leslie has written for this fandom is like this, actually, beautiful and poetic and sort of dream-like.

Modern Love by punkfaery (7k)

(I podficced this last year)

Summary: “The crux of it, Crowley decided, was that demons were not supposed to want.

Or – well, that wasn’t strictly true. Certain things, such as material wealth and the corruption of innocents and the eventual triumph of Hell over Heaven, and possibly Earth as well, were perfectly all right. The fact that he didn’t particularly care about any of these things just served to add a little extra salt to the wound.

It wasn’t a question of wanting. It was a question of wanting the wrong things.”

Crowley, Aziraphale, and a series of religious buildings.

No Pain, No…Loss? by NotASpaceAlien (7k)

Summary: Aziraphale has a horrifying realization and decides he needs to lose weight.

This is so goddamn funny. I love Aziraphale with all my heart but he is very foolish sometimes and this fic… is such a good instance of that.

There’s No Pancake Too Big For My Heavenly Father To Flip by dwarvenbeardspores (6k)

Summary: After a few exceptionally busy months, the forces of Heaven and Hell attempt to outwit each other in Aziraphale’s kitchen.

That is, Aziraphale makes pancakes and Crowley eats them.

I love cooking, and cooking headcanons, and Aziraphale and Crowley cooking for each other. This fic is delicious.

Read everything by this author, actually, everything they’ve written is wonderful.

Mature

Goodbody by copperbadge (3k)

Summary: Aziraphael’s new body is causing some problems.

Again, I love a good exploration of the relationship between angels and demons and their bodies and this fic is so much fun on that count.

Only Human by abstractconcept (9k)

Summary: Aziraphale loses his job. Humor/romance A/C

Fics exploring the fallout of Aziraphale and Crowley’s disobedience towards their bosses in trying to avert the apocalypse is definitely A Fic Type in this fandom and this one goes the route of “one of them is fired and turned into a human”. It even takes a humorous angle on this and not the obvious angst route.

Explicit

fires of the flesh, both literal and figurative by mercuryhatter (3k)

Summary: Pretty standard “there’s a sex curse and Crowley has to have way too many orgasms or be discorporated” stuff.

Genderfluidity/trans Crowley!! Discussion of feelings!! Fuck or die!! What’s not to love? I really love this fic.

No Cause for Alarm Clocks by HJ Bender (archived by the GO_Library_archivist) (2k)

Summary: A short story detailing one of Crowley’s infernal household gadgetries, and why he’ll never have sex in front of it ever again.

This is wild and funny and I have read it about thirty times.

Figurative Language by alamorn (2k)

Summary: It’s two years after the apocalypse that wasn’t and the only thing that’s changed is Aziraphale’s dick. That is to say, he has one now.

A Classic. I have read this probably thirty times, as well.

Rarefied Air by Vulgarweed (4k)

Summary: Earth is getting older, news is getting worse, and an angel has to go to extreme heights to get any peace and quiet at all. But as close as you can get to Heaven, you’re still never far from Hell. (Hell hasn’t frozen. Crowley nearly has.) Giftfic for Allthisnonsense in 2006 GO Holiday exchange.

This is another author who has written a lot of really good stuff but this one is my favorite.

And here is my ao3 as well, I’ve written a lot of GO fic in the last year. Here are some of the ones I’m most proud of.

Where a Heart Would Fit Perfectly (Teen, 2k)

Summary: Aziraphale shrugged and gestured for Crowley to sit down, “I’ve come back from the battlefield; no need for all that muscle anymore.”

“You’ve gone a bit in the other direction, though, haven’t you?” Crowley said conversationally as he took a seat and flagged someone down for a drink. “You’re a bit… pudgy.”

In 600 BCE Assyria, two man-shaped beings meet up after a long absence.

Nothing Like The Sun (Teen, 6k)

Summary: One tended to go through a number bodies in six thousand years, even if one was as cautious or sturdy as Aziraphale. Crowley, who was neither cautious nor sturdy, had gone through a large number. He’d changed appearance so many times that in Aziraphale’s memory he was often just his eyes, for no matter if Crowley was tall or short, lithe or stocky, blond or raven-haired, his eyes stayed the same.

Touch Me Gently (Explicit, 2k)

Summary: Aziraphale had started manicuring his nails.

Yours, Truly (General, 3k)

Summary: A love in selected letters.

Snapshots (General, 2k)

Summary: Five photographs on the wall of Aziraphale’s shop. An expansion of a headcanon I posted on tumblr.

And that’s about what I got! Happy reading, anon.

#fic rec #my writing #Anonymous #questions & answers

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Xbox Game Pass: New Games for April 2021 Revealed

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Xbox Game Pass is Microsoft’s subscription service for Xbox One owners. It’s designed to be like a “Netflix for games,” where you pay a simple monthly rate and get access to loads of games for download. It’s not to be confused with the Xbox Live Gold membership, which gives users a selection of free games each month.

There has been a huge surge in popularity and profile for Xbox Game Pass since its launch, mainly due to the diverse list of games and first-party exlusives on the service. In fact, Microsoft drops new releases from its own internal studios onto the service on day one! Sea of Thieves was the first example of this, followed by State of Decay 2 and Crackdown 3. Since then, the service has seen the day one launch of several other high-profile Xbox exclusives, including Gears 5, The Outer Worlds, and Halo: Reach on the Halo: The Master Chief Collection.

Membership to Xbox Game Pass will set you back $9.99 per month. You can now also get an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription for $1 for the first month and $14.99 every month after that. The subscription includes an Xbox Live Gold membership as well as all of the games offered on Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass for PC. Plus, with cloud support, you can play a selection of Xbox Game Pass titles on your Android phone. And now you even get access to titles on EA Play, the third-party publisher’s own on-demand service.

New games are added each month to Xbox Game Pass. Here are the games coming in March and April, plus all of the new Bethesda games available on the service starting on March 12 (with descriptions courtesy of the Xbox team) :

Xbox Game Pass: Games for April 2021

Outriders (Cloud and Console) – April 1

Outriders brings intense action and deep role-playing to Xbox Game Pass! Developed by People Can Fly, veterans of the shooter genre, Outriders presents a journey of survival across a savage planet, which can be tackled in both single player and 1-3 player co-op.

MLB The Show 21 (Cloud and Console) – April 20

MLB The Show 21 rockets the franchise onto the next generation of video game consoles with a huge range of improvements, enhancements, and optimizations that make The Show the ultimate Major League Baseball experience. Thousands of new animations, revolutionary innovation on gameplay, and an all-new Stadium Creator let you own The Show like never before.

NHL 21 (Console) EA Play – Coming in April

Carve your path to superstardom in an expanded Be A Pro mode and go down as one of the league’s greatest. On the ice, change up your attack with all new moves, dekes, dangles, and evasive maneuvers, inspired by the league’s most groundbreaking innovators.

Xbox Game Pass: Bethesda Games

Dishonored Definitive Edition (Console, PC, Cloud)

This complete compilation includes Dishonored, winner of over 100 Game of Year awards, as well as all of its additional content – Dunwall City Trials, The Knife of Dunwall, The Brigmore Witches and Void Walker’s Arsenal.

Dishonored 2 (Console, PC, Cloud)

Reprise your role as a supernatural assassin in Dishonored 2 – the next chapter in the award-winning saga by Arkane Studios. Play your way in a world where mysticism and industry collide. How will you combine your character’s unique set of powers, weapons and gadgets to eliminate your enemies?

DOOM (1993) (Console, PC, Cloud)

Doom introduced millions of gamers to the fast-paced, white-knuckle, demon-slaying action the franchise is known for. Relive the birth of the first-person shooter and experience the demon-blasting fun that popularized the genre. Doom includes Episode IV: Thy Flesh Consumed, with 9 additional action-packed levels and split-screen 4-player deathmatch and co-op.

DOOM II (Console, PC, Cloud)

Bring your trusty Super Shotgun and an arsenal of classic Doom weapons to bear against deadlier demons and the infamous boss, the Icon of Sin. Doom II includes The Master Levels for Doom II with 20 additional levels, as well as split-screen 4 player co-op and multiplayer.

DOOM 3 (Console, PC, Cloud)

Battle your way through a demon-infested facility before entering the abyss to battle Hell’s mightiest warrior – and put an end to the invasion. Doom 3 includes both campaign expansions – Resurrection of Evil and The Lost Mission.

DOOM 64 (Console, PC, Cloud)

Battle armies of demons in your crusade to hunt down the Mother Demon and stop Hell’s invasion. As you fight through more than 30 action-packed levels, be on the lookout for enhanced weapons and secrets to help you put an end to the demonic threat.

DOOM Eternal (Console, PC, Cloud)

Hell’s armies have invaded Earth. Become the Slayer in an epic single-player campaign to conquer demons across dimensions and stop the final destruction of humanity. Experience the ultimate combination of speed and power in Doom Eternal – the next leap in push-forward, first-person combat. The only thing they fear… is you.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (Console, PC)

An epic, open-ended single-player RPG, Morrowind allows you to play any kind of character imaginable. You can choose to follow the main storyline and find the source of the evil blight that plagues the land, or set off on your own to explore strange locations and develop your character.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Console, PC)

Step inside the most richly detailed and vibrant game-world ever created. With a powerful combination of freeform gameplay and unprecedented graphics, you can unravel the main quest at your own pace or explore the vast world and find your own challenges.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition (Console, PC, Cloud)

Winner of more than 200 Game of the Year Awards, the Skyrim Special Edition includes the game and add-ons with all-new features like remastered art and effects, volumetric god rays, dynamic depth of field, and more. Also bring the power of mods to consoles. New quests, environments, characters, dialogue, armor, weapons and more – with Mods, there are no limits to what you can experience.

The Elder Scrolls Online (Cloud, Console)

Experience the award-winning story in a persistent Elder Scrolls world. Embark on an adventure that lets you play your way, go anywhere at any level. Battle, craft, steal, siege, explore and more.

The Evil Within (Console, PC, Cloud)

Experience a disturbing reality as you try to break free from warped machinations. With limited resources at your disposal, you’ll fight for survival and experience profound fear in this perfect blend of horror and action. Defeat insurmountable terror and experience the ultimate thrill by discovering The Evil Within.

Fallout 4 (Console, PC, Cloud)

As the sole survivor of Vault 111, you enter a world destroyed by nuclear war. Every second is a fight for survival, and every choice is yours. Only you can rebuild and determine the fate of the Wasteland. Welcome home.

Fallout 76 (Console, PC, Cloud)

Steel Dawn is the first chapter in the new Brotherhood of Steel questline, free for Fallout 76 players. Visit settlements populated with new NPCs and unlock powerful weapons and armor from the Brotherhood arsenal. Join in their mission to rebuild society and aid in securing valuable technology.

Fallout: New Vegas (Console)

Welcome to New Vegas. It’s the kind of town where you dig your own grave prior to being shot in the head… and that’s before things really get ugly. It’s a town of dreamers and desperados being torn apart by warring factions vying for complete control of this desert oasis.

Prey (Console, PC, Cloud)

Good morning, Morgan. Prey joins the Xbox Game Pass library, taking you from the comfort of your home to the treacherous depths of space. As Morgan Yu, you’ll have to use your wits, weapons and strange powers to fight the alien threat that has overtaken the Talos I space station. Explore the station, upgrade your skills and abilities, and uncover the secrets of Talos I and the dangers within.

RAGE 2 (Console, PC, Cloud)

Dive headfirst into a dystopian world devoid of society, law, and order. Rage 2 brings together two studio powerhouses – Avalanche Studios, masters of open world insanity, and id Software, creators of the first-person shooter – to deliver a carnival of carnage where you can go anywhere, shoot anything, and explode everything.

Wolfenstein: The New Order (Console, PC, Cloud)

Wolfenstein sends players across Europe on a personal mission to bring down the fascist war machine. With the help of a small group of resistance fighters, infiltrate their most heavily guarded facilities, battle high-tech legions, and take control of super-weapons that have conquered the earth – and beyond.

Wolfenstein: The Old Blood (Console, PC, Cloud)

The year is 1946 and the Nazis are on the brink of winning World War II. In an effort to turn the tide in the allies’ favor, B.J. Blazkowicz must embark on an epic, two-part mission deep within Bavaria…

Wolfenstein: Youngblood (Console, PC, Cloud)

Set 19 years after the events of Wolfenstein II, BJ Blazkowicz’s twin daughters, Jess and Soph Blazkowicz — after years of training from their battle-hardened father — are forced into action. Team up with a friend to level up, explore, and complete missions to unlock abilities that compliment your playstyle.

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enterinit · 5 years

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Madden NFL 20 and other games coming to Xbox One this week

Madden NFL 20 and other games coming to Xbox One this week. Madden NFL 20: Ultimate Superstar Edition (July 30, 2019) WAYS TO PLAY Face of the Franchise: QB1 - Be the Face of an NFL franchise where the decisions you make matter in your journey to become an NFL Superstar. Create your own College Quarterback to play through the College Football National Championship playoffs and the NFL Combine for your shot at the NFL Draft and to be the face of a franchise in a new and personalized career campaign centered around you. Once selected to a team, engage with Madden’s new Scenario Engine which generates personalized playable scenarios, events, and dynamic challenges that build the story of your unique NFL career. Franchise - Simulate a full NFL career and leave your legacy as a player, coach or owner with single-player and multiplayer online-connected leagues. Compete with up to 32 teams in your quest for a Super Bowl Dynasty. Complete with an annual Pro Bowl and Seasonal Awards. Ultimate Team - Compete in the ultimate NFL fantasy team-building mode featuring your favorite NFL players from the past and present. Play games, collect rewards, and upgrade your team with daily, fun and engaging challenges with live NFL content all year-long. Exhibition - Compete in head-to-head online and offline games (single and multi-player) or single player offline against the CPU. Customize your game settings including time of quarters, rules, stadiums, and uniforms. GAMEPLAY Superstar X-Factor – Feel the emotion, personality, and power of NFL Superstars with Superstar X-Factor, an all-new abilities progression system that reveals special abilities for today’s most exciting NFL Superstars when certain objectives are met in games. Combined with authentic personality & real player motion, the stars of the NFL truly come to life in Madden NFL 20. Take full control of player development with new ways to customize player abilities. Unique Playbooks – Playbooks are calibrated to be more unique from team to team providing more variety for strategic game-planning and in-game adjustments. Run/Pass Options – Run/pass option plays are now available to call, bringing even more NFL authenticity to today’s play-calling. On-Field Trainer – Learn how to improve as a Madden player with this cohesive, modernized teaching system that introduces new in-game mechanics over time as you progress through your gameplay experience. New Pump Fake mechanic – Pump-fake to a specific receiver and fake out defenders with a new double-tap ‘throw cancelling’ mechanic. NFL Pro Bowl – Play the annual Pro Bowl within Franchise mode and ‘Face of the Franchise: QB1’ featuring all-stars from the AFC and NFC. Superstar-Driven Play-Calling – Play-calling tailored to the Superstars on your team to quickly get your stars involved when you need them the most. New celebrations – Over 20 new TD and First Down celebrations added to bring more swag to the biggest plays on the gridiron. Mutant Year Zero: Seed of Evil (July 30, 2019) Seed of Evil is an expansion to the award-winning tactical adventure game Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden picking up where the original game ended and offering hours of more gameplay, new locations to visit, and a new leading character! Continue the main story and explore many hours of all new content. Expand your team with the veteran stalker Big Khan the moose and get ready to defeat a new threat to Dux, Bormin, Selma and all the others. In Seed of Evil you must solve the mystery of the powerful and ominous roots which have taken over the Ark. Discover huge new maps, battle new enemies, improve your mutations, get your hands on all new gear, defeat foes trying to take back lost ground and face off against a vicious new adversary. To play Seed of Evil it is highly recommended to have finished the main story in Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden, because of story spoilers and the level range of the new content. Continue the main story See what happens after the ending of Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. Continue into a new future for Bormin, Dux, Pripp and all the others at the Ark. How will they deal with what they have learned?New mutant: Big Khan You can now add Big Kahn the moose to your squad of mutants. He is a veteran stalker who has been exploring the Zone alone. He is not only skilled at doing critical hits but also has the unique mutations Ground Pound and Flame Puke, which make him excellent at dealing with groups of enemies.Face a new threat The Ark has suddenly become enveloped in mysterious roots and many of its inhabitants do not seem to be their normal selves. Even the Zone Ghouls appear to have been taken over by this new menace and it is up to your team of stalkers to set things right!Hours of new content Take on new enemies in places like the Hall of Electric Coffins and Mausoleum of Suburbia. The new story in Seed of Evil offers a host of new challenges and brutal fights. Get ready to rethink your tactics as you face off against brand new enemies.Improve your mutations Upgrade Bormin’s Hog Rush to Bear Smash for increased power and Corpse Eater to Corpse Feaster so that regaining lost HP no longer costs an action. Upgrade Dux’s Moth Wings to Wings of the Sniper which removes all range penalties.Retake lost territory Revisit places like the Spear of Heavens or Sea Titans as Zone Ghouls and police bots once again encroach upon places you have already cleared. This time they are stronger than ever! The Blackout Club (July 30, 2019) The Blackout Club is a first-person co-op horror game centered around a group of teenage friends investigating a monstrous secret beneath the skin of their small town. 1-4 players explore procedurally-generated missions against a fearsome enemy you can only see with your eyes closed. Features: A Modern Horror Setting To Explore: A beautiful and modern neighborhood full of houses, woods, and a very mysterious subterranean network of tunnels.Cooperative Gameplay: Drop-in/Drop-out multiplayer sessions for 1-4 players.Each Night A New Adventure: Missions are procedurally-generated and vary according to player level and progress.Richly-Simulated World Supporting Many Play Styles: Players have the freedom to go through the game at their own pace and choose the paths they take through the world.Character Growth & Customization: Players get to create their own character and customize them by unlocking new clothing, gestures, and hairstyles.An Unseen Threat: If players are not careful and draw too much attention to themselves, "The Shape" will come for them. Super Wiloo Demake (July 31, 2019) Wiloo and Agatha need to rescue their dog from the clutches of Dr.ETvaldo! Roll, fly, jump, and shoot your way across a variety of different platforming levels using unique power ups to reach the end of the level. Can you defeat all 5 bosses and rescue your buddy? With 3 different difficulties, experience the quest that you desire with easier or devilish challenges. Features: Traverse 50 levels across 5 different worlds with unique themes.Vibrant 8-bit visualsConquer 5 malicious bossesPick from 3 difficulties to suit your playstyleUse fun power ups to defeat enemies The Tower of Beatrice (July 31, 2019) The life of a thief isn’t easy: always hiding in shadows, clients cheat, traps bite… Working on a contract for a mysterious client, you'll need to infiltrate the tower of the powerful sorcerer Beatrice, steal her Book of Recipes, and get out alive. Along the way you will enter a demon's dreams to discover his most intimate desires, accept a gift from a Granny-spider, start the Clock Tower, feed a snail, make a tea for a demon, piece together a skeleton, and finally fix your own fatal failing. Features: Six floors – each with its own atmosphere and moodSurprising and charming residents – demons of Fire, Frost and Dream, Iron Maiden, Hungry Chest, and many othersAlchemy! Discover many interesting recipes!Unique puzzles ranging from simple to brain bendingAtmospheric and immersive soundtrackMany allusions to famous games, movies and books – spot them all! Pilot Sports (July 31, 2019) PILOT SPORTS, brilliant gaming fun for the whole family! Split screen mode for up to 4 players, over 50 different courses, the widest variety of aircraft and thrilling challenges provide for all sorts of gaming enjoyment! Features: 7 TYPES OF CHALLENGES! Beat the best times in the different game modes!OVER 50 COURSES! The key emphasis is on variety. Complete over 50 courses and set your sights on new records.8 CHARACTERS! Choose your favourite pilot and explore the tropical island paradise together with your favourite figure!FLYING FUN USING DIFFERENT AIRCRAFT! Soar through sensational and tricky courses with the double-decker, a jetpack, parachute or hang glider!BONUS: Beat records and unlock new courses for explorers! Solo: Islands of the Heart (July 31, 2019) Solo: Islands of the Heart is a game about love. About love as fuel, the force that drives us. Love is a universal feeling, but each of us experiences it in a different way. Solo – Islands of the Heart explores the theme of love in an introspective way, allowing players to identify and reflect on their own experiences. The world is divided into archipelagos, with each island representing a unique puzzle. Solving puzzles will award the player with a Sleeping Totem, awakening them to answer a question about love and relationships. As with love, most puzzles have no unique solution. Using boxes, each with different properties and behaviors, players can build their own paths to the Sleeping Totems on each island. Nature and contemplation are also a huge part of Solo: pull out your camera and capture the moment, play the guitar, feed the animals or just sit on a bench and think. The Church in the Darkness (August 02, 2019) No one is forced to join a cult. It welcomes you. It understands you. It envelops you until the words become more than truth—they make you whole. In the late 1970s, the charismatic Isaac and Rebecca Walker lead the Collective Justice Mission. Labeled radicals and feeling persecuted by the US government, they relocate their followers to the one place they believe they can create a socialist utopia: the jungles of South America. There they build Freedom Town. But relatives left behind in the US become worried: what exactly is going on at this compound in the jungle? You play as Vic, an ex-law enforcement officer who has snuck into Freedom Town to check on their nephew, Alex. Whether you choose stealth or violence, you must infiltrate the commune, find out what’s going on within, and locate your nephew, before it’s too late. How dangerous are the Walkers? How far will you go to uncover the truth and save Alex? Could it all have turned out differently? Features: What ending will you get? Will you get Alex out, whether he wants to go with you or not? Will you confront the cult leaders? Will you join the cult?Unlock every ending for each scenario by trying different play styles or making different choices.Multiple ways to play: Avoid detection completely, taking out guards and civilians non-lethally, or kill anyone who gets in your way. Interview characters from Freedom Town and search for clues. Documents and letters scattered around camp will clue you into the true nature of the commune.Fully voiced game, starring Ellen McLain (best known as GLaDOS in Portal) and John Patrick Lowrie (the Sniper from Team Fortress 2) as the cult leaders, Rebecca and Isaac Walker. Varenje (August 02, 2019) "All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it." ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Get yourself a little summer's day with a raspberry jam adventure! Varenje is a cute colorful adventure with a number of puzzles and mini-games made by artists for anyone that considers games to be an art. Eight unique & gorgeously hand crafted chapters await you. Hours and hours of game play will take you to a far away enchanting place. Our hero was spending summer happily at the cosy cottage until curiosity forced him to sample an unknown berry at the stream. Before he knew it, everything had become incredibly large, and he was reduced to the size of a bug! Trying to understand what happened and how to return things back to normal, we set off into the invisible to the human eye tiny world, where worms, beetles and spiders live their life, and build bizarre vehicles, in disguise so that humans do not realize. Our new friends will surely help us by discovering the secret healing potion, which will return us to our previous dimensions. All we need is to collect enough raspberries to cook grandmother's jam. And as we all know - this is a remedy for all ills! Asdivine Menance (August 02, 2019) A century after the events of Asdivine Dios, peace has finally settled in. That is, until a visitor from another world suddenly shows up proclaiming the entire universe is about to be destroyed. Hearing this, Izayoi sets off in an attempt to reverse this seemingly pronounced fate with a trio of very idiosyncratic spirits as they criss-cross four worlds in search of an answer. But what is the answer they find...? Experience immersive turn-based battles with cooperative attacks and new limit break skills! With all quests, collecting and crafting, the battle arena, and even post-game content, Asdivine Menace comes packed with enough elements to satisfy JRPG-hungry gamers. As Izayoi deepens his bonds of trust with his spirit companions, their fates together move in new and meaningful directions! Features: Travel the galaxy to bring the truth full circle in an epic fantasy RPG!Experience immersive turn-based battles with cooperative attacks and new limit break skills! Meow Motors (August 02, 2019) Meet the kitties, the main heroes of the new go-kart racing game! You will take to the track and play as one of a dozen colorful cats memorable for their different characteristics and unique personalities. Overcome various difficulties of the tracks drifting through mines and bombs, stop and slow down your competitors by blasting them with bubble gum and other astonishing weapons. And don't forget to gather power-ups along the way if you want to be the fastest driver on the track! The game will amaze you with: Dynamic gameplay that has three different modes: circle races, drifts, and 'strike' mode20 different tracks where kitties will compete10 kitties with unique abilities that will help you gain an advantage10 power-ups with unique effects to defeat your competitorsCharge your power-ups and get a more powerful effect!Overtake opponents, drift and get bonuses for it. Go grab your kitty and start your first crazy ride! Super Star Blast (August 02, 2019) Super Star Blast is a space shooter with challenging levels of increasing difficulty. All enemies must be shot down to finish a level and go to the next one. A scanner around the player tells roughly where the enemies are located. The player ship can fly forwards to attack and backwards to fight during the retreat against the opponents. After clearing a level you can purchase equipment to boost the ship, as well as extra shields and firepower or more ships. In local multiplayer mode, up to 4 players can fight together trough the levels (campaign mode) or can get each other in a battle (competition mode). Features: Massive challenging levels of increasing difficultyEnemies with unique flying and fire characteristicsUpgrade center (agility, fire power, shield, ships)Single player campaign2 – 4 player local multiplayer coop mode (split screen)Simple and clean 3D space graphics Read the full article

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superheroshome · 4 years

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Superheros home Best Anime of 2019- Top 15 Anime you can watch

Whether or not you’re searching for one thing with superhero aptitude, a horror-inspired thriller, or a romance with a bit comedy blended in, 2019 has all you want. To whittle down the seemingly countless collection of animation that the 12 months already has to supply, we’ve put collectively a listing of the very best anime exhibits of the previous couple of months.

Also check: Best Anime to Watch – Top 30 Anime of 2018

The very best upcoming 2019 anime embrace reboots of classics like Fruits Basket and Boogiepop Phantom, new seasons of fantastic exhibits like Mob Psycho 100 and Chihayafuru, and all-new variations of sizzling manga like Osamu Tezuka’s 60’s traditional Dororo, in addition to the newer sequence, The Promised Neverland. It doesn’t matter what you are in search of, there’s one thing to get hyped about on this 12 months. So, with out losing any extra time let’s begin the present!

15. Aggretsuko (Season 2)

Rarecho and Fanworks’ Aggretsuko was a breakout hit when it premiered on Netflix early final 12 months. A lot in order that we’re now handled to yet one more new season, this time crammed with much more pleasant surprises and twists than the primary.

After we final left Retsuko, our plucky steel karaoking crimson panda protagonist, it appeared as if she was in a reasonably great spot between her work-life and precise life. Certain, her job as an accounting clerk nonetheless sucks and her love life — or lack thereof — might depart one thing to be desired, however Retsuko got here out of the challenges of that first season a stronger, wiser, and extra assured younger girl keen to say her price, converse up for herself, and extra keen to behave on her personal wants and wishes.

Season 2 finds Retsuko tackling new, albeit acquainted challenges within the type of Anai, an aggressively hypersensitive intern below her tutelage, the intrusive helicopter parenting of her personal mom who insists on her discovering a accomplice and settling down, and a brand new love curiosity with a stunning background. An immensely satisfying continuation of the primary, Aggretsuko Season 2 is one in every of 2019’s must-watch sequence.

Launch date: June 14 Director: Rarecho Animation manufacturing: Fanworks Watch Online on: Netflix

14. Rilakkuma and Kaoru

Rilakkuma and Kaoru follows Kaoru, the present’s titular 20-something workplace employee, as she navigates the challenges of her job, residence life, the expectations of her household and friends, in addition to the imprecise however palpable expertise of melancholy and ennui that accompanies younger maturity, all whereas caring for Rilakkuma, Korilakkuma, and Kiiroitori, two anthropomorphic bears that starting dwelling with Kaoru and her pet fowl, respectively.

The present is notable for being one of the vital current and distinguished examples of stop-motion animation in anime, a method too typically marginalized to a distinct segment inside the anime trade, however no much less expressive and spectacular. A captivating slice-of-life comedy with coming-of-age components, each the sequence’ writing and animation are glorious. It is hardly stunning provided that the previous is credited to Naoko Ogigami, an award-winning Japanese comedy writer-director, and the latter to key animators comparable to Katsushi Bouda and Shigeru Okada, lauded stop-motion artists.

At its coronary heart, Rilakkuma and Kaoru is very similar to Netflix’s 2018 sequence Aggretsuko: taking the beloved mascot of a industrial model and centering them on the coronary heart of a honest and affecting exploration of the inherent loneliness of younger maturity and the worth of real, persistent friendships. For this alone, Rilakkuma and Kaoru shines as top-of-the-line anime of 2019.

Launch date: April 6 Director: Nobuyuki Takeuchi, Kunihiko Ikuhara Animation manufacturing: MAPPA, Lapin Monitor Watch Online on: Netflix

13. Sarazanmai

Let’s minimize straight to the purpose: Sarazanmai is one in every of, if not essentially the most weird, idiosyncratic, visually audacious, and thematically evocative anime to air in 2019. Describing simply precisely what the hell Saranzanmai is to somebody who has by no means seen an anime directed by Kunihiko Ikuhara (Revolutionary Lady Utena, Pengiundrum, Yurikuma Arashi) is about as tough as it will be to explain the idea of ‘water’ and what the hell it means for one thing to be ‘moist’ to an alien.

However, put merely, the present follows three middle-schoolers — Kazuki Yasaka, Kuji Toi, and Enta Jinnai — as they’re remodeled into kappa, amphibious beak-faced demons, after releasing Keppi, the guardian spirit of Asakusa, from the statue containing him and by chance insulting him. To return to human type, the three are tasked with exorcising “kappa-zombies,” malicious poltergeists, by performing elaborate dance numbers in a liminal dimension to steal the zombies’ shirikodama, magical spheres representing human want, by forcibly eradicating them from their anuses. That’s the tamest, most perfunctory description of what Sarazanmai is about, and it solely will get stranger from right here on out.

Ikuhara is understood for writing exhibits with socially-conscious premises powered by avant-garde visuals laden with labyrinthine ranges of subtextual depth, and Sarazanmai isn’t any completely different. Even realizing that, nothing can fairly put together you for the surprises this present has to supply. If nothing else, know this: It is likely one of the most daring, earnest, and empathetic sequence to air this 12 months, and save for having watched one in every of Ikuhara’s works up to now, you received’t see anything fairly prefer it.

Launch date: April 6 Director: Nobuyuki Takeuchi, Kunihiko Ikuhara Animation manufacturing: MAPPA, Lapin Monitor Watch Online on: Crunchyroll

12. Fruits Basket

Natsuki Takaya’s Fruits Basket is a perennial favourite amongst followers of shojo (i.e. ‘younger girl’) manga for its charming slice-of-life storyline, empathetically rendered characters, engrossing relational dynamics, and earnest, offbeat humor, and the sequence’ early ’00s tv adaptation much more so.

This 12 months’s reboot, produced by TMS Leisure and directed by Yoshihide Ibata (Kill La Kill, FLCL Progressive), is a meticulous and loving tackle the supply materials that champions its dedication to telling the unique manga’s story in full. Fruits Basket follows the story of Tohru Honda, a hardworking and optimistic excessive schooler who’s taken in by the Soma clan, a reclusive household whose members every carry the reincarnated spirit of an animal from the Chinese language Zodiac.

Whereas balancing the calls for of faculty and her new function as a surrogate member of the Soma clan, Tohru grows as a younger girl whereas inadvertently facilitating the expansion of every of the family members, tightening bonds that vacillate between the familial and romantic. 2019’s Fruits Basket is a disarmingly endearing romantic comedy with simply sufficient twists on the method of the style to drag in newcomers whereas satisfying longtime followers of the unique.

Launch date: April 6 Director: Yoshihide Ibata Animation manufacturing: TMS/8PAN Watch Online on: Crunchyroll, FunimationNow

11. My Roommate Is a Cat

My Roommate Is a Cat is the anime model of Rooster Soup for the Soul if there ever was one. The gist of the plot is baked into the present’s title, however this slice-of-life goes above and past in delivering heartfelt, entertaining life classes that concentrate on “the feels” with predatory accuracy – particularly for those who’re a fan of cats.

Subaru, a 23-year-old author with agoraphobic tendencies, occurs upon a stray cat whereas visiting his dad and mom’ graves. He brings her residence, drawing inspiration from her for way over only a novel. Typical hijinks ensue, however My Roommate Is a Cat seeks to elicit extra than simply the occasional snicker or smile. The present cleverly switches between the views of man and cat, shedding mild on how they interpret the world, and heartfully shows how particular person actions can so strongly have an effect on others.

Collectively, they develop and be taught, turning into extra empathetic towards one another and the individuals of their lives. Don’t be stunned if you end up laughing, crying, and soul-searching throughout a single episode.

Launch date: January 9 Director: As Futatsuya Animation manufacturing: Zero-G

Watch Online On: Crunchyroll, VRV, and Funimation

10. Boogiepop and Others

The newest anime adaptation of Kouhei Kadono’s influential early aughts mild novel sequence, Boogiepop and Others, is an anthology swirling round Boogiepop, a vigilante alter-ego of excessive schooler Touka Miyashita that possesses her physique in moments of mortal disaster within the battle towards a cadre of otherworldly creatures with ties to a shadowy entity recognized solely because the Towa group.

As a sequence, Boogiepop and Others could possibly be finest described as a slow-burn supernatural thriller thriller dotted with adrenaline-spiking sequences of horror, motion, and suspense set towards a backdrop of gorgeous metropolitan vistas. As an adaptation of not solely the primary novel in Kadono’s sequence, however a number of of the sequence’ different celebrated entries comparable toBoogiepop at Daybreak, Boogiepop Returns: VS Imaginator, and Boogiepop Overdrive: The King of Distortion, the sequence is a must-watch for longtime followers of the Boogiepop and a super level of entry for anybody new to and curious concerning the franchise.

If that is not sufficient to maneuver the needle, the sequence is being produced and animated by the identical director and workforce answerable for 2015’s satirical superhero smash-hit One Punch Man.

Launch date: January 4 Director: Shingo Natsume Animation manufacturing: Madhouse Watch Online on: Crunchyroll, FunimationNow

9. Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba

Tailored from Koyoharu Gotōge’s ongoing Shonen Bounce manga sequence, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba follows Tanjiro Kamado, a younger charcoal service provider turned demon slayer, as he units out on a journey of discovery and revenge to not solely avenge his household’s grisly homicide, however to discover a remedy for his youthful sister Nezuko, who survived their household’s assault solely to be remodeled right into a feral half-demon with an aversion to daylight. Ufotable is maybe finest recognized for his or her work on the Destiny franchise, a byzantine darkish fantasy sequence famend for its dazzling battle sequences and digital animation; happily, these qualities carry over to Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba. Whereas the present won’t be as thematically-nuanced or poignant as, say, Dororo, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is a powerful shonen journey sequence in its personal proper and is bound to attraction to any fan of Naruto or Black Clover and stands as one of the vital well-animated fantasy chanbara sequence to return out this 12 months.

Launch date: April 9 Director: Haruo Sotozaki Animation manufacturing: Ufotable Watch Online on: Crunchyroll

8. MIX: Meisei Story

Tailored from Mitsuru Adachi’s 2012 ongoing shonen baseball sequence, itself a semi-sequel to Adachi’s 1981 sequence Contact (which acquired its personal critically-acclaimed anime adaptation in 1985), MIX: Meisi Story facilities on the journey of two step-brothers, Touma “Tou” and Souichirou “Sou” Tachibana, who, following within the footsteps of Contact’s Tatsuya Uesugi, aspire to guide their middle-school baseball workforce to win the nationwide Kōshien baseball match.

Although not solely other than what one would anticipate from a run-of-the-mill shonen sports activities sequence, MIX shines amongst its contemporaries on the advantage of its charming solid, stunning animation, and creative implementation of fourth-wall breaking transitions and tongue-in-cheek narration. Tou and Sou’s dogged dedication to see their approach to victory is earnest and provoking in a means not not like that of a season of Pokémon — not stunning, given the truth that MIX’s primary author, Atsuhiro Tomioka, is understood for his previous and ongoing contributions to a number of seasons, movies, and specials of the Pokémon sequence.

When you’re searching for a wide-eyed enjoyable, inspiring, and visually spectacular sports activities anime this 12 months, and are not essentially sport to attempt to make amends for over 100 episodes of Ace of the Diamond, MIX: Meisi Story is an ideal selection.

Launch date: April 6 Director: Odahiro Watanabe Animation manufacturing: OLM Watch Online on: Crunchyroll

7. Midnight Occult Civil Servants

Miyako Arata is a younger civil servant newly transferred to a seemingly inconspicuous division within the Shinjuku Ward Workplace. Although led to consider his job might be an earthly and bureaucratic one, the unsuspecting Arata quickly realizes that the obligations of his new function are something however.

Assigned to the Nocturnal Group Relations Division, Arata and his coworkers Sakaki Kyouchi and Himezuka Search engine optimisation are tasked with appearing as liaisons between the world of people and the world of the “Anothers,” otherworldly beings imperceptible to those that lack an intuitive aptitude for the supernatural.

With a likeable solid, engrossing moment-to-moment drama, and an aura of thriller full with a handful of peculiar twists and revelations, Midnight Occult Civil Servants is an entertaining city fantasy-meets-workplace drama nicely price carving out the time to look at.

Launch date: April 7 Director: Tetsuya Watanabe Animation manufacturing: Liden Movies Watch Online on: Crunchyroll

6. That Time I Got Reincarnated as Slime

5. One Punch Man (Season 2)

The comic-heroic saga of Saitama, a self-proclaimed “hero for enjoyable” who possesses the absurd superhuman capability to defeat any adversary with one punch, was an near-instant hit amongst anime aficionados for its outlandish animation, breathtaking battle scenes, and unflappable deadpan humor.

Ever because the first season of One-Punch Man premiered and blew everybody’s face off in 2015, followers have been eagerly anticipating the following, and after a 4 years wait, it is lastly right here. Followers and critics of the primary season have been curious as to how the change between manufacturing studios and workers from Madhouse, who selected as a substitute to supply this 12 months’s Boogiepop and Others, and J.C. Workers would have an effect on the general high quality of the present’s animation. To make sure, the absence of director Shingo Natsume and the deft skills of animators as Sejoon Kim and the legendary Yutaka Nakamura are definitely missed right here, however contemplating the season’s tortured manufacturing and limitations, J.C. Workers nonetheless handle to ship a serviceable follow-up that strives for the over-the-top bombast and comedy of the primary season and misses by only a hair. Nonetheless, extra One-Punch Man continues to be extra One-Punch Man, and for those who’re a fan of the sequence, it is definitely price using out this season if solely to wash in its flashes of superior spectacle.

Launch date: April 9 Director: Chikara Sakurai Animation manufacturing: J.C. Workers Watch Online on: VIZ, Hulu

4. The Promised Neverland

The Promised Neverland follows 11-year-old Emma and her finest buddies, Norman and Ray, three of 37 orphaned kids who reside on a mysterious walled property known as the Grace Area Home. Below the watchful eye of their caretaker recognized merely as Mother, the kids are afforded the very best that life can supply.

Gourmand meals, plush beds, immaculate white outfits, and ample play time whereas they wait to someday be adopted by a loving household. Nevertheless, the quiet idyllicism of Grace Area is swiftly shattered when Emma and Co. bump into a darkish secret which underlies the Home’s very existence. Horrified by their discovery, the three conspire to flee with the remainder of kids into the surface world, because the machinations of each their caretaker and Grace Area’s mysterious benefactors transfer steadily to completion.

With a premise that feels like a cross between From The New World and Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel By no means Let Me Go, The Promised Neverland is an engrossing fantasy thriller with deft animation, savvy modifying, and a taut environment of mortal horror juxtaposed towards a disquietingly cheerful exterior.

Launch date: January 11 Director: Mamoru Kanbe Animation manufacturing: CloverWorks Watch Online on: Crunchyroll, Hulu

3. Kaguya-sama: Love is Struggle

Within the “contest” of romance, the one that falls in love first — or “catches emotions” as the children say these days — is the loser. Or at the least, that is the premise of A-1 Photos’ Kaguya-Sama: Love Is Struggle. Tailored from the favored ongoing manga of the identical identify,

Love Is Struggle follows the story of Miyuki Shirogane and Kaguya Shinomiya, two genius-level college students attending the illustrious Shuch’in Academy, who quietly harbor emotions for each other. To this point, so boring. However there’s a twist: As a result of an ill-fated mixture of entrenched class consciousness, emotional immaturity, and poisonous adolescent satisfaction, neither Shirogane or Shinomiya will acknowledge their emotions for the opposite.

Fairly than healthily course of these feelings and discuss issues out like, y’know, adults, Shirogane and Shinomiya as a substitute elect to orchestrate an elaborate sequence of public conditions to drive the opposite to admit their emotions first in a bid to save lots of face. The result’s a romantic comedy infused with the depth of a psychological thriller that’s equal elements hilarious and infuriating for all the proper causes.

Launch date: January 12 Director: Mamoru Hatakeyama Animation manufacturing: A-1 Photos Watch Online on: Crunchyroll, Hulu, Funimation

2. Mob Psycho 100 II

Coming sizzling on the tail of the sequence’ breakout debut in 2016, Mob Psycho 100 II carries the torch of its predecessor’s pedigree as one of the vital hilarious, kinetic, and aesthetically eclectic anime to air in current reminiscence, pushing that envelope even additional in its second season.

With most, if not all, of the unique workers from the primary season returning for this outing, together with animator Miya Sato, whose masterful “oil on glass” animation has distinguished so lots of the earlier season’s stand-out sequences, the adventures of layabout con artist Reigen Arataka, his formidably highly effective protege, Shigeo “Mob” Kageyama, and their poltergeist sidekick, Dimple, proceed to ramp up as Mob journeys via adolescence within the face of ever-more perilous stakes.

Other than its adventurous animation, whip-sharp comedic timing, and spectacular motion sequences, Mob Psycho 100 II is a touching coming-of-age story of the connection between a mentor and his pupil, and the way the 2 assist every to develop into extra mature, earnest, and better-adjusted people. Come from the pyrotechnics, keep for the waterworks.

Launch date: January 7 Director: Yuzuru Tachikawa Animation manufacturing: Bones Watch Online on: Crunchyroll

1. Dororo

Within the midst of a horrible plague on the top of Japan’s Warring States interval, Lord Daigo Kagemitsu of the Ishikawa province enacts a pact with 12 demons so as save his area and safe a path to a way forward for wealth and energy. In alternate, every of the demons gather on Kagemitsu’s debt by taking physique elements from his newly born son — his limbs, his eyes, his tongue, his pores and skin — till the child is rendered right into a horrifying testomony to his father’s sins.

Years later, the boy, having survived his father’s try and get rid of him out of disgrace, grows as much as develop into an itinerant swordsman named Hyakkimaru with a prosthetic physique, swords for arms, and the extrasensory capability to “see” demons.

Tailored from Ozamu Tezuka’s authentic manga and anime from the late ‘60s, Dororo tells the story of Hyakkimaru’s quest to slay demons, regain his humanity, and be taught to like and divulge heart’s contents to different individuals in a time of immense cruelty with the assistance of his companion, an orphaned thief by the identify of Dororo.

Produced by Studio Mappa (Youngsters on the Slope, Yuri on Ice, Banana Fish) and directed by Kazuhiro Furuhashi (Rurouni Kenshin, Hunter × Hunter ’99, and Cellular Go well with Gundam Unicorn), Dororo is an anime as viscerally violent as it’s heartbreaking, and a sequence that shouldn’t be missed.

Launch date: January 7 Director: Kazuhiro Furuhashi Animation manufacturing: MAPPA, Tezuka Productions Watch Online on: Amazon Prime

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Square Announces PAX Plans

Square Enix has revealed it’s current lineup for PAX West:

LOS ANGELES (August 28, 2017) – SQUARE ENIX® returns to PAX West at the Washington State Convention Center from Sept. 1-4, with a diverse lineup of hands-on game demos, panels and giveaways.

At the SQUARE ENIX booth (#2141), fans can be the first to get hands-on with Secret of Mana® andFINAL FANTASY® XV POCKET EDITION. Other demos include DISSIDIA® FINAL FANTASY NT, FINAL FANTASY XIV: Stormblood™, FINAL FANTASY XV MULTIPLAYER EXPANSION: COMRADES, LIFE IS STRANGE™: BEFORE THE STORM and LOST SPHEAR™.

The SQUARE ENIX Products booth (#SKY3) will have exclusive FINAL FANTASY 30th Anniversary items for sale, as well as FINAL FANTASY Trading Card Game events and demonstrations throughout the weekend.

FINAL FANTASY XV WINDOWS EDITION is also playable at the Razer booth (#2343).

Development team members from various SQUARE ENIX titles will speak on several panels and attend events during the show, including:

LIFE IS STRANGE: BEFORE THE STORM- A New Series Has Begun Friday, September 1 from 1:00 PM – Hydra Theater Join the key developers from Deck Nine Games to celebrate the recent release of the first episode in a brand new series in the award winning videogame franchise LIFE IS STRANGE. The discussion will be kept spoiler free, but will consist of multiple, never heard before details of the game, including insight into what players can expect from the new series. The panel will include a lengthy Q&A session to gain further insight direct from the development team.

MOBIUS FINAL FANTASY 1-Year Anniversary Panel Friday, September 1 from 5:00pm – 6:00pm – Hippogriff Theatre Renowned FINAL FANTASY Producer Yoshinori Kitase will discuss future updates, as well as how the team developed the first FINAL FANTASY RPG experience custom-tailored for mobile.

LIFE IS STRANGE: BEFORE THE STORM LAUNCH PARTY with What’s Good Games Friday, September 1 from 6:00 – 9:00 p.m. at Unicorn (1118 E Pike St, Seattle) Join the crew from What’s Good Games and developers from Deck Nine Games to celebrate the launch of the first episode of LIFE IS STRANGE: BEFORE THE STORM. Rock out with your favorite moments from the series, enjoy refreshments and a chance to win games, SQUARE ENIX prizes and custom What’s Good Games items. For additional information about the event visit:https://www.facebook.com/WhatsGoodGames/.

FINAL FANTASY XIV: Stormblood – Tales of Localization & Lore Saturday, September 2 from 1:00pm – 2:00pm – Hydra Theater English Localization Lead Michael-Christopher Koji Fox will discuss various topics on the lore and localization behind FINAL FANTASY XIV: Stormblood. He will also be answering various lore-related questions gathered from the official forum.

The PAX West 2017 lineup of titles includes:

DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY NT Platform: PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system Developer: Square Enix/Team Ninja (Koei Tecmo) ESRB: Not yet rated Release: January 30, 2018 Developed in partnership with Team NINJA from KOEI TECMO, DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY NT includes a roster of more than 20 beloved FINAL FANTASY characters and ten iconic battle arenas for players to join in 3 vs. 3 battle. There will also be two DISSIDIA FINAL FANTASY NT tournaments throughout the weekend, where the victors will win an exclusive Battle Tours Champion T-Shirt. Find out more details at:http://bit.ly/sechallonge. Winners of each free play round will also receive an exclusive Warrior of Light Gil Coin while supplies last.

FINAL FANTASY XIV: Stormblood Platform: PlayStation®4 system, Windows PC, Mac® Developer: SQUARE ENIX Release: Available Now Stormblood is the second expansion pack for FINAL FANTASY XIV Online, featuring a new level cap, new jobs (red mage and samurai), exploration of underwater environments, battle system updates, new dungeons and much more. Fans can also stop by the booth to receive a FINAL FANTASY XIV:Stormblood-themed red mage hat, or team up in an attempt to defeat the powerful primal, Susano, for a chance to win an “I Beat Susano” T-Shirt.

FINAL FANTASY XV MULTIPLAYER EXPANSION: COMRADES Platform: Xbox One®, PlayStation®4 system Developer: SQUARE ENIX Release: Autumn 2017 The FINAL FANTASY XV UNIVERSE continues to grow with the release of FINAL FANTASY XV MULTIPLAYER EXPANSION: COMRADES. Players can create their own avatars and play with their friends to bring the Light back to the Kingdom of Lucis.

LIFE IS STRANGE : BEFORE THE STORM Platform: Xbox One®, the all-in-one games and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation®4 computer entertainment system, Windows PC Developer: Deck Nine ESRB: M for Mature Available: August 31, 2017 for Episode 1 LIFE IS STRANGE: BEFORE THE STORM features Chloe Price, a 16-year-old rebel who forms an unlikely friendship with Rachel Amber, a beautiful and popular girl destined for success. When Rachel’s world is turned upside down by a family secret, their newfound alliance gives them the strength to overcome their demons.

LOST SPHEAR Platform: Nintendo Switch™, PlayStation®4 system and Windows PC (STEAM®) Developer: Tokyo RPG Factory ESRB: Not yet rated Available: January 23, 2018 The LOST SPHEAR adventure presents the journey of Kanata and his comrades, who set out to stop the world from being Lost forever by using the power of Memory. PAX attendees who have pre-ordered the game from the Square Enix Online Store can receive an exclusive LOST SPHEAR T-Shirt.

Secret of Mana Platform: PlayStation®4 system, PlayStation®Vita handheld entertainment system and Windows PC (STEAM) Developer: Square Enix / Q Studios Release: February 15, 2018 Secret of Mana is a faithful remake of one of the greatest RPGs of all time, reborn for the first time with modern 3D graphics, voice over and updated gameplay. New and old fans alike will be able to experience the same magic and fantasy found in the original classic.

MOBILE:

FINAL FANTASY XV POCKET EDITION Platform: iOS, Android and Windows 10 Developer: SQUARE ENIX Available: Autumn 2017 FINAL FANTASY XV POCKET EDITION features the main characters and story of the console version in an episodic format, with a completely redesigned art style and casual touch controls optimized for mobile gameplay. All ten episodes will be available when the game launches, with the first episode available to download for free.

FLAME vs BLAZE Platform: iOS and Android Developer: SQUARE ENIX Available: 2017 FLAME vs BLAZE™ is an original and competitive MOBA (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game) for mobile devices that allows players to engage in fast-paced and exciting single or multiplayer matches on the go. All fans who play the game will receive an exclusive FLAME vs BLAZE shoulder bag.

KING’S KNIGHT -Wrath of the Dark Dragon- Platform: iOS, Android Developer: SQUARE ENIX Available: 2017 KING’S KNIGHT -Wrath of the Dark Dragon- is a nod to one of SQUARE ENIX’s earliest scrolling shooting games, King’s Knight. It features a completely new story and world, with multiplayer support for up to four players.

MOBIUS FINAL FANTASY Platform: iOS, Android and Windows PC (STEAM) Developer: SQUARE ENIX Available: Now Available The first ever console-quality FINAL FANTASY game specifically designed for mobile devices, MOBIUS FINAL FANTASY™ takes players on an RPG adventure filled with deep character customization, ongoing live events and HD graphics that push the boundaries of the mobile platform.

About Square Enix, Inc. Square Enix, Inc. develops, publishes, distributes and licenses SQUARE ENIX®, EIDOS® and TAITO® branded entertainment content throughout the Americas as part of the Square Enix group of companies. Square Enix, Inc. is affiliated with a global network of leading development studios such as Crystal Dynamics® and Eidos Montréal. The Square Enix group of companies boasts a valuable portfolio of intellectual property including: FINAL FANTASY®, which has sold over 135 million units worldwide; DRAGON QUEST®, which has sold over 71 million units worldwide; TOMB RAIDER®, which has sold over 60 million units worldwide; and the legendary SPACE INVADERS®. Square Enix, Inc. is a U.S.-based, wholly-owned subsidiary of Square Enix Holdings Co., Ltd.

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