totes4totes

(!)

:flowers:

LOL I had to wait for my boss to leave and also again to not feel guilty about looking at spreadsheets that weren't my work data! I'm working on the next two now!

LOL this is really Nico's round.

you definitely did not tell me. also i only tried to make a deal with you because you were the only one i followed on twitter at the time. pm messages are way too much work.

i remember going to elliott and being like "i want to cut tiffany. u in?" and he was like "can't i have a deal with dee" then them surprising everybody but me when they revealed how they got nico and tiffany both into the top 20. and being like are you all shocked and me being like "elliott told me about 85 cuts ago"

good job rei. i like the twist of only having a top 18. will send my write-ups soon.

Ike - Left Lara Croft - Diagonal Up Link - Down Micaiah - Up Pikachu - Diagonally Down SHODAN - Right for once we can complete the spread.

That's why it's still light years away from western RPGs where the main character could probably romance every character. But again, the fact that there are at least for women multiple WLW choices is leagues beyond A LOT of JRPGs. (Men get the shaft. Though more bisexual male options exist with the DLC).

one thing fire emblem and nintendo have been doing well in comparison to other jrpgs is having explicitly gay characters. (in comparison to jrpgs because western rpgs are still light years ahead in many regards in lgbt representation)

Horizon Zero Dawn Horizon Zero Dawn is a PS4 exclusive game that came out in 2017. If you've paid attention at all in this thread, and some of you clearly haven't, you know I don't own a PS4. So I've never personally played this game but considering it was THE PS4 game of 2017 and I have friends with PS4s that I've seen a lot of gameplay of this game. When I defend and can TREAT MYSELF to a PS4 it's the first game on my "to-buy" list. For those of you who don't know, Horizon Zero Dawn is an open-world third-person action-RPG where you control Aloy who is a hunter in a postapocalyptic world ruled by robotic creatures. It's a unique landscape that makes Horizon Zero Dawn look both prehistoric and futuristic at the same time. As an action-RPG you level up your skills through a skill tree to acquire new bonuses and abilities. As Aloy, you are exploring the world and hunting machines in order to uncover your past. I am not going to summarize the rest of the game so I can avoid reading the wikipedia. As I only spoil myself to know which exact people I can romance in any given RPG and I feel like that does not exist in this game. Like I said, the game was released in 2017. Long after Open World almost became a default of many high profile western-RPGs. And we were reaching kind of a bloat of these games. To many things to do and too many rote ideas. And in 2017 both Horizon Zero Dawn and Breath of the Wild broke that. (In fact, if not for Breath of the Wild launching about a month or so later, HZD would have been probably unanimously THE game of the year). It's a game that received a lot of praise for its story and exploration. Again, had BOTW not jumped into the scene and redefined both the Zelda franchise and open world games, HZD would have been the Game of the Year for a lot of people. Instead it merely has to stand as runner-up. As gay as Lara Croft! Which is to say not canonically but for similar reasons it's easy to read both characters as gay and there's nothing to dispute that read through any sort of canonical material.

anyway, i'll get the horizon zero dawn write-up soon.

I also discussed it before in this rankdown. So IDK what to tell you. saying that Lara Croft is gay is no more or less interesting than calling Ike gay.

If you google "Rhianna Pratchett Lara Croft Lesbian" you will find a lot of angry male gamers that are celebrating that she's no longer writing the games. Which should give you the answer on why Square Enix/Crystal Dynamics won't make Lara Croft canonically explicitly gay. (Although there's nothing that makes her explicitly straight or even explicitly attracted to men in the reboot either). It's not even an interesting take. It's an incredibly easy take to make if you play the games.

Tomb Raider Or the game that made Lara Croft gay The title is mostly a joke. But also kind of not! Lara Croft is, of course, not canonically gay. As long as games are designed with a straight male as the ideal audience, there will not be a canonically gay Lara Croft (just like there won't be a canonically gay Dante). However, unlike previous iterations of Lara Croft, there is a lot more fuel to the fire this time around. Particularly because the game's writer, Rhianna Pratchett (daughter of Terry), did give an interview where she said she tried to write Lara Croft as a lesbian. And even if that was off the cuff or a joke, it's not hard to see the bones of that story in the game. On a side note, of course the Tomb Raider series comic book was handed off to Mariko Tamaki, famous for writing queer graphic novels like This One Summer and Skim and writing the novelizations of queer comic Lumberjanes. Bless that none of you can cut those comics which are truly my favorite part of the rebooted Lara Croft timeline. So like I said, it's really not hard to draw a line between Lara Croft's rebooted 2013 portrayal and queerness. And when I say the bones to a queer love story in Tomb Raider are already there, I mean it. These are actual unedited gifs. All culimating with this gif for which there is no heterosexual explanation for the imagery: But Megan, you say, these are all just gifs. Isolated moments. And don't forget, she also kisses a male on the cheek during the game! To which I respond, the story of Tomb Raider (2013) is the story of Lara Croft and the crew (both of the ship and her archeological crew) getting stranded on an island called Yamatai. Here Lara has to fight her way through cultists to save her friends and escape the island. However, the emotional core of the story is driven by her desire to save Sam. Sam who is her best friend that calls her romantic pet names. There's other side characters, some which Lara is also emotionally attached to die, other who Lara is not as emotionally attached to live. For people who don't like to be spoiled I won't name who lives and dies. Canonically, Lara does not have many friends and is a nerd who loves books and artifacts more than she loves most people. However, she has one friend who didn't raise her or mentor her and that's Sam. And the reason they are on this (unfortunately for them disastrous) trip to Yamatai is because Sam wanted to help kickstart Lara's archeology career and secured the funding. She kisses Alex on the cheek? The least sexual kiss imaginable? A full body hug is more sexual than a kiss on the cheek. Also Alex is dying and Lara knows that he has a crush on her. Might as well give him something nice as he dies. However, sad horny gamer boys are going to hold on to this so that they can masturbate to the fact that maybe in a different world Lara Croft will materialize and fall in love with them. Also Lara now dresses like a lesbian. Dee I know I wrote this one first but plz rank it higher than Horizon Zero Dawn for meaningless sentimentality. THX. The end.

My list of Derek Fisher grievances stretches a mile long. #IStandwithCandaceParker

It saves me from having to do my separate “Lara Croft is gay for Samantha Nishimura” tribute

I’ll do both missing write-ups tonight

wow just imagine what would have happened had sola just not copied my direction and admitted it was because he didn't want me to nom.

Pokemon Stadium I never owned an N64 (I had a friend who did so I played a LOT of the major N64 games on his system or watched him play) so I was always more of a Pokemon Colosseum lady than a Pokemon Stadium lady. But I think that even if I did own an N64, Pokemon Stadium would not have been my go-to game. However flimsy, I enjoy playing through the story in the mainline games. I love the RPG-elements and traveling through towns and exploring the world and catching Pokemon. A battle focused game like Pokemon Stadium was not designed for me. In Pokemon Stadium, from Wikipedia, "the game challenges the player to defeat trainers at the Stadium, a tournament consisting of 4 "Cups" and 80 battles in total, as well as the Gym Leader Castle, where the player battles the 8 Kanto Gym Leaders, the Kanto Elite Four, and the Champion. When all Cups have been won and the Gym Leader Castle is completed, a battle against Mewtwo will be unlocked. Defeating Mewtwo unlocks another round of Stadium, Gym Leader Castle, and the Mewtwo battle, but with higher AI difficulty." If that's your thing then it is probably a game for you. And for everybody else, at the time it was definitely a must-own game at the time considering the thin N64 library, but I feel like it's not really a must-own game now. I would like to see a return of the Stadium/Colosseum/Battle Revolution series for the Switch but it feels like maybe Pokken Tournament has taken up the space in the 3D-Pokemon Battling games.

Donkey Kong 64 If you remember, I tried to cut DK64 way back when we were all just given 10 free cuts. That's how long I've been waiting patiently for this game to get cut. I've had a bow target on it for approximately forever just because not only did I want this game to get eliminated, I wanted to do the write-up. Donkey Kong 64 is a collect-a-thon platform game for the N64 developed by Rare, the makers of other great collect-a-thons like Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie. Unlike those two games I just listed, DK64 is not good. It's not that it's just not good it's that it essentially killed the collect-a-thon genre and basically caused Nintendo to not even compete with Microsoft when they wanted to buy Rare outright (if you are wondering why it took so long for Banjo and Kazooie to come to Smash it's because Nintendo said "Sayonara Rare" after this game). But why is DK64 not great? Well it all has to do with the amount of time you have to put in this game. In most collect-a-thon games you expect to collect different items. Banjo Kazooie has the jiggies, the musical notes, the jinjos, and empty honeycomb pieces. Collecting these is fun and manageable. In Banjo you get powers which enable you to backtrack through levels in new and exciting ways to find more secrets. In DK64 you have bananas which come in five colors (one for each Kong), Golden Bananas, and Banana Medals. That seems like a fine amount, until you realize that you have to replay each level five time to collect all the bananas. And the playthroughs don't vary enough. And you really have to replay the levels because there's no quick way to change between Kongs. Literally a quick change Kong option would help eliminate a lot of the tedious nature of this game. On top of all that, you had to buy the expanded memory pack for this game. While Majora's Mask make that pack worth it, there isn't much of an upgrade between DK64 and Banjo Kazooie (the Rare game that preceded it that didn't need the expanded memory). It doesn't look or control as great as Mario and the camera control leaves something to be desired. If DK64 had come out as a launch title (or a launch window title) I think the game would be appraised for how ambitious it was. But coming after Mario 64 and Banjo Kazooie just leaves this as a mediocre and tedious game. But, like I said, it's easy to see how this game could be so vastly improved by one small change. It's the bones of a good game, with unfortunately a body filled by bloat.

Victoria's dream come true. No write-ups.

Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn I am the lone Fire Emblem fan who is not really a fan of Tellius. Unlike everybody else, I don't like Ike that much. I'll admit from the pure strategy standpoint both Tellius games stand up as some of the best in the games but I don't really find Ike that compelling (or his band of supporting characters outside of Naesala) and therefore I've never gotten attached to these games. But while I do like Path of Radiance and do end up playing that one again occasionally I cannot stress how much I do not like Radiant Dawn. While I'm not fond of Ike, he's fine. Path of Radiance has a good enough story. But Radiant Dawn is a mess. Sothe and Micaiah are some of the least compelling Fire Emblem protagonists. The game doesn't look very good for being on the Wii (not that the Wii has great graphics but there are much better looking games on the Wii) and unlike Three Houses where the story and the characters make up for a lot of just okay graphics, the story in Radiant Dawn does not. Add in the fact that the game is both unnecessarily hard to a point where it's not very fun and getting rid of meaningful supports. In terms of the Fire Emblem games that have two parts, I prefer the Elibe duo (Lyn >>>>>> all female characters in Tellius). I understand that people really like this game. And I understand why. But it's never been my favorite. I give it props for having an ambitious story, but beyond that it doesn't really gel together for me. Going from Path of Radiance to this game was a letdown and if I had it my way, they eliminations would have been reversed.

Dreamstinger Bow on Radiant Dawn Cut Stadium

LOL I was gone at lunch and work so I didn't even see Sola's PM before this happened.