Everything Bounces

I’m just going to keep a running tally until I leave, I think. We’ve hit the panic stage.

Wedding: gift, makeup, jewelry

Zargabaath: helmet; gorget; ornamentation (breastplate, helmet, forearms, thighs, poleyns, shoes); pasties; fastenings; cloak; painting (all)

Drace: helmet; breastplate; breastplate ornamentation; fastenings; cloak; painting (helmet, breastplate, weathering)

Gabranth: breastplate; ornamentation (breastplate, helmet); fastenings; cloak; painting (all but helmet and elbows)

Bergan: stomach plate; hip cape; cloak; modesty panel; ornamentation (chestpiece, stomach plate); fastenings (straps); painting (helmet, headpiece, weathering)

Ghis: pauldrons, cloak

Vayne: buttcape; shirtback; shoes; thighs; fastenings; painting (ornaments, fabrics, weathering, shoes)

Tonight: Finish Gabranth’s breastplate, possibly also do the ornamentation so it’s ready to paint tomorrow; finish Drace’s breastplate (won’t take long, it just needs the top piece to go along the curve, which is the tricky part, but nothing will be as tricky as Gabranth was); Bergan’s ornamentation (which is all of three stripes of glue and a couple of rivets, done in fifteen minutes, tops), Zargabaath’s ornamentation; Zargabaath’s gorget and pasties. All hard construction on the Judges needs to be done tonight; soft construction (fabrics) can be done tomorrow, but I need- no, seriously, absolutely need to set up the sewing machine tonight. And I need to pull Vayne’s shirt off the porch so I can start tracing out the back.

We’ll probably also need to do another run to Joann’s for more craftfoam and for lacing cords tonight. Tomorrow I need to find a gift for the brother; getting jewelry and face stuff at this point is out of the question, since I have no car.

Didn’t get as much done last night as I needed/wanted to- got back at 7:30ish, and then curled up in a ball of stomach cramps until after 9. Up until 2 fitting and finishing the top piece of the breastplate and doing the glue lines on Zargabaath. Gina got my helmet done and it looks fucking awesome, and will look even more awesome once it’s got the decorations and the paint. She’ll do Drace’s helmet today, and then it’ll be crunch time until everything is done; as long as it doesn’t look like rain on Thursday, we won’t have to worry too much about painting tomorrow, since she can get much of that done on her own.

*breathing* It’s okay. We can do this. Gina will have all of Thursday and parts of Friday night to get everything painted and fitted. I can do the audio on Thursday and email it. (”People. Of. Dalmasca! I am not as evil as you think I am!” *bodies hit the floor* “Okay, maybe I’m a little bit evil.” *expires* *more bodies drop* Zargabaath shrugs and starts dragging people off.)

Glue sticks consumed: nearly 100, at this point.
Tiny bottles of super glue emptied: 3 and counting.
Spray paint inhaled: my lungs are sparkly! (5 cans and counting)
Sheets of craft foam: my math tells me it’s about 80 sheets of varying sizes and thicknesses, ranging from 2mm thick 8.5inx17in sheets to 6mm thick 8.5inx11in sheets, but that’s a high estimate, and the actual number is probably closer to 60.
Polystyrene sheeting: six 0.02mm thick and four 0.02mm thick, ~3.5ftx6ft sheets of opaque white polystyrene, minus the chunk that the cats have appropriated as their napping spot.
Super glue mishaps: my thumb feels sad and naked without that layer of skin.
Hot glue mishaps: not as many as you’d think, apart from the really bad one on my finger that oozed pus for a few days, and the one on my leg that, uh, probably wants a bandaid and some antibiotic creme.
Number of times I’ve bitched about the timing of my brother’s wedding: over 9000.
Amount of money I’ve sunk into this project: let’s not think about that, shall we?
Level of awesome that we will achieve when we roll into Otakon Saturday afternoon with a full complement of Judges Magister and Vayne Solidor and tell the cosplay judges we did all of this in a month: it goes to eleven.

Things left to be done:
Wedding: gift, makeup, jewelry

Zargabaath: helmet; gorget; ornamentation (breastplate, forearms, thighs, poleyns, shoes); pasties; fastenings; cloak; painting (all)

Drace: helmet; breastplate; breastplate ornamentation; fastenings; cloak; painting (helmet, breastplate, weathering)

Gabranth: breastplate; ornamentation (breastplate, helmet); fastenings; cloak; painting (all but helmet and elbows)

Bergan: stomach plate; hip cape; cloak; modesty panel; ornamentation (chestpiece, stomach plate); fastenings (straps); painting (helmet, headpiece, weathering)

Ghis: pauldrons, cloak

Vayne: buttcape; shirtback; shoes; thighs; fastenings; painting (ornaments, fabrics, weathering, shoes)

All to be finished by 2AM Wednesday, apart from Drace and Vayne’s fastenings. This is…not quite daunting, not yet. If tonight isn’t productive, it will be, but right now, we’re okay. Properly fitting and fastening things will take a solid hour, but it shouldn’t take longer than that, which means that as long as we don’t need to remake any pieces (Drace’s upper arm pieces worry me the most, since they’re so heavy), all of the actual fastening could be done Friday night at the hotel.

Most of the construction is done; it’s all just details now, which are mulititudinous, but at this point both Bergan and Gabranth are wearable apart from the paint job. I’d like to see Gabranth finished tonight- the sort of finishing I wanted on Bergan yesterday but didn’t quite manage- cloak, fastenings, and everything. That’s doable; if Gina gets the breastplate done, or just gets the rest of her painting done, we’ll just have to make and fit the breastplate, and then do the fastenings and drape the cloak. Bergan can get more or less finished tonight, as well; the stomach plate and modesty panel will take all of ten seconds to cut and glue, and I can get my sewing machine set up so I can hem the hip cape, which will also take all of ten seconds. We’ll do a test run of the iron on transfers and pray that we don’t run out of ink, and if the transfers don’t work well enough, we’ll trace over them by hand with acrylics.

Tomorrow we’ll finish up Drace’s helmet and I will do all of my gods bedamned detail work on Zargabaath. I’m a fucking master with a hot glue gun; I can go to town on his forearm pieces and they will look fantastic. I just need to stop being so intimidated by them. I’ll start thinking about patterns for Vayne’s cape and back so that I can sew and paint it on Wednesday, when I’ll do all the painting on Zargabaath and start hemming cloaks. If it rains on Wednesday, I may commit ritual suicide in my grief and rage.

Wednesday I’ll go shopping for a gift of some sort; I should have gotten one of those telescope cases while at the Rennfaire, or commissioned a vase from the glassblower, but I can pick up something at The Mall that will be appropriate, I’m sure.

*cough* I keep forgetting that I am not the only person who likes to reverse stalk people via IP tracking and trackbacks. *shifty eyes*

Well, whatever. I’ll just, um. Hide under a desk in vague embarrassment or something, I dunno.

Anyway- fixed the password thing so that it actually words (though I think it depends on the computer/operating system, since it worked fine on my laptop). Now the password for any password protected entry will be the title of the entry. So, for the previous bit of nonsense that I posted, it’s “sirenity” (which is the stupidest title for anything I’ve ever come up with, I know). For the AC thing, it’s “four witnesses.” No caps, keep the spaces. If the title doesn’t work, the password is my LJ user name, but that should only apply to one post at this point.

Ahaha, I have no words for how much I love KJ Bishop’s Blog. De Nile!

“The real question is, why is Zack sticking his wang in the jam when there are so many other, better places to stick it? …like, for instance, Cloud.”

In conclusion (as ever), THE FEAST IS RUINED.

Anyway. After reading a great many rants on the subject, I’ve been making a point to cut epithets out of my writing. But damnit, sometimes you have several groups of people in a room, and the easiest way to indicate one group people is with an epithet. >_< But when I write "the other couple," it looks wrong, because I've become over-sensitive to the use of epithets. Using the characters' names would be awkward, as well.

And nevermind the pronoun juggling that happens in sex scenes, god, don't even get me started. Fortunately, it really is true that names become transparent; you're generally more interested in conceptualizing what's being done than worrying about how you indicated who is doing the what (or the whom). *cough* Also, it's really awkward trying to write a scene that is choreographed in such a way that I don't, actually, find it hot, at all. And then I have to ask myself, "Wait, why am I writing this?" and I've yet to come up with a satisfactory answer.

Some self indulgent rambling on stuff in my head that is currently on the backburner:
(more…)

Or there’s the bit at the end of “Sabra Girl” where I bring everyone- I mean everyone back to life in some sort of crossover orgy, and Silverlock flips his shit but good.

Incomplete- just a sketch, really, for my own amusement; I don’t know if this is what’s actually going to happen, or if I’m going to send Silverlock Planewalking instead in the wake of the Tower falling. The Fifth Era is mostly just a loose collection of ideas at this point. So this is sort of a “what-if”; if this situation were to occur, this is what would happen.
– — –

There was something terribly surreal- and a little terrifying- at the sight of Theron conversing with Edrana Coraline, the once-upon-a-time Avatar of the Elemental of Death. Edrana was not the only Avatar to emerge from the rubble, though- there was Joradi Deathseeker, rolling in the grass in her malestri form and twitching her tufted bobcat ears at the flight of Athren Gryphons frolicking around her. Keliran Kenichak himself lead the flight, the black and gold stripes on his wings flashing in the sun.

Surreal and terrifying. There seemed to be no limit to the number of people stumbling out of the crater into the light for the first time in the void only knew how long.

He was younger than Silverlock remembered, and unscarred again. Thinner, too, with the leanness of youth and not carelessness.

“Told you I’d see you later.” Blaine grinned, radiating a cocky self-assurance that had been mostly beaten out of him by the time Silverlock had met him the first time around.

Silverlock took a deep breath, counted to ten in Shrivish, and then punched him hard enough to send him stumbling backwards a few steps.

“What the hell?” Blood ran freely from a cut on his lip. “No- seriously, what the hell?”

“Am I supposed to be happy?” he snarled. “Happy that I get to watch you die again? Because I am fucking done with it.” He advanced, aether knives flickering at his fingertips.

“Are you insane?”

“Three times!” He lunged, aiming for Blaine’s throat. “Three fucking times, I’ve felt you die, and I swear to whatever might be left to hear me, the fourth will be the last.”

“You are insane.” Blaine stepped back, confidence replaced by anger and fear and hurt.

He remembered their sparring five hundred years ago- Blaine couldn’t fight back, but he was clever and he was damnably fast. Silverlock was faster, though, and when it came to fighting, he was cleverer by half and- he really wasn’t expecting the elbow that slammed into his solar plexus, driving the breath from his lungs and stopping him in his tracks.

A look of fierce joy spread across Blaine’s face. “Gods, that felt even better than I thought it would.”

“Good, because it won’t happen again.” He was projecting, and he didn’t care- anger spilled off of him in torrents, a feedback loop just making the fury burn hotter. He sliced a line of red across Blaine’s face, marking new lines on that now-blank canvas.

“Won’t it?” Blaine caught him across the face with another elbow, but that brought him close enough to grapple. Silverlock got a hand around Blaine’s throat but those long legs tangled with his and he hit the ground, where Blaine got in another few shots with his fists.

He ignored the crunch of his nose breaking and tightened his grip on Blaine’s windpipe. “I killed you once- you think I won’t do it again?”

“I would have died anyway that time-” Blaine gasped, twisting away.

“I snapped your neck like a fucking twig.” He followed after, scrabbling and throwing wild punches, too enraged to bother with technique, too desperate for the taste of raw, bestial violence to care for anything else. His aether knives were abandoned in favor of his fingernails and teeth.

It was certainly true that, even though he was a long way from the man he’d been in his prime, he could have killed Blaine in the space between one breath and the next. But that wasn’t the point.

He ended up on his back, pinned for a moment- and Blaine’s face looking down at him was a wreck, scratched to hell and back, one of his teeth chipped, blood smeared haphazardly from his nose and mouth, bruises discoloring the hollows of his eyes. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“You.” Silverlock paused, catching his breath; he wasn’t in much better shape. For someone who’d never had much practice throwing punches, Blaine’s right hook was vicious. “What do you think? You left- for the third time, for good, and I thought- I’d finally gotten used to you being gone, it took me eighteen fucking years, but I was fine, and then- there you were again. Only it wasn’t you, but it wasn’t like I had that much of a choice when I found him.”

“Symbiosis,” Blaine said, his chin dropping to his chest and eyes closing, anger cooling in the face of understanding. “We jumpstarted their aetheric systems and they were our vessels, carrying us until the Tower opened again. Eleth was insurance against Anna’s death; Rianna knew there was a chance she would suicide rather than wait to reopen the Tower. The rest of us went along with Aya as insurance and- as bait. But it was never meant to be permanent” He looked up, brow creased. “You thought-”

“It doesn’t matter what I thought.” He felt Blaine’s grip go lax for a moment, and that was all he needed to wrench his arms free, and they began again, throwing punches and elbows, kicking, scratching, biting, tearing the neatly manicured lawn of the Tower Field to shreds beneath them.
——-

“Enough!” Rianna DeLavrey’s parade-ground roar hit them like a bucket of cold water, and a moment later she descended upon them, pulling them apart as though they were a pair of squabbling children. Her voice was like a whiplash. “You- little kinsman. I should thank you for what you’ve done, but if you persist in this foolishness I’ll be far more inclined to kick you in the head for being an ass.”

Whatever witty retort he might have had died before it reached the tip of his tongue; he was certain that if Rianna DeLavrey wanted to kick him in the head, she’d decapitate him with her littlest toe. For all that she resembled something human (and, in fact, bore a striking similarity to Aya), there was something distinctly not human about her. She carried herself as though she were flying, even when she was simply standing still. Looking at her was vertigo-inducing.

He mumbled something that might have been an apology, and found something entirely fascinating on the ground between his feet. On the other side of Rianna, Blaine seemed to have done the same. Some distance away, Rianna’s cohorts- Empress Vrineskayala and her brother, Prince Tarashikal, and the prince’s rider, Cerrinas Morelaine- looked on with varying expressions of amusement and anticipation. Prince Tarashikal caught his eye, and winked.

Surreal and terrifying, indeed.
=============================================

What the crap, Cagnazzo almost ate me for breakfast. Back in my day, young whippersnappers, we had Tellah cast Lit3 three times and the fight was over! None of this casting Blizzaga for a measly fifteen hundred damage! And since when is Tsunami an instant death attack? (Oh god, when I get to Leviathan, he is going to squish me beneath his serpentine coils and laugh.) I managed to make it out with the whole party alive, but it was a near thing, let me tell you.

Also, I think I hate slow more than any other status effect ever. I mean seriously, what? Fine, take two turns to each of mine, sure, whatever, oh god no please don’t paralyze me in addition to the slow, and no, not the poison, the poison hurts, especially when I’m asleep too- *cries*

The awesome thing, though, is that level busting will only help so much. Yes, sure, you might kill the thing quicker- but it’s not the excessive amounts of damage that do you in, it’s the status effects that keep you from fighting effectively while the boss whittles you down to nothing. If you’re not prepared to deal with status effects and you’re not fighting as efficiently as possible, you’ll get smote. Battles- boss battles, especially- are no longer a repetetive chain of hitting A to punch something in the face. And magic users are actually useful- invaluable, even, and not just in boss battles. I could get through FFVI without casting many offensive spells until I got Ultima; same with VII and VIII. I didn’t use magic at all in XII until I got Holy and started playing with status effects and gambits. Magic just wasn’t an efficient or effective battle strategy until you got to higher levels and had the boss killing spells. However, since you have dedicated magic users in IV, you have no choice but to use their magic all the time. The random encounters will slaughter you if you aren’t making full use of all your party members- and you can’t just have your magic users hit things with their dinky weapons because you don’t feel like thinking about what spells to use.

I know, it’s weird that I’m gushing so much about the difficulty level- but the game isn’t prohibitively difficult, it’s just challenging enough to make turn-based battles interesting. And the fact that level busting isn’t really required helps a lot, too (though I imagine I will need to level bust when I get around to collecting summons). Case in point- I level busted the hell out of baby Rydia before heading to the Damcyan waterway, and still nearly got slaughtered because I wasn’t using her magic. And then Tellah joined the party, and the two magic users made short work of everything I encountered. It’s all about knowing how to play the system.

Anyway, enough gushing; I’ll shut up about how much I’m enjoying turn based battles from now on, though expect me to continue whining about nearly getting eaten by various bosses. Finished Castle Baron this morning. Airship get! Palom and Porom are looking decidedly calcified. (Okay, why couldn’t they have just left their twin magic ability as “Twin”? They changed it to “Twincast,” and I do not need to tell you what that is only one vowel away from, and every time I glance at the battle menu, it’s all I see. DO. NOT. WANT.) It was touching and all, but the only thing I was really thinking at the time was: CIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIID! We won’t see a Cid this badass again until VII.

And now I’m off to Troia and the Magnetic Cave, and Cecil occasionally lapses into stupid-speak, but the dialogue grows more palatable by the minute and I’m really quite in love with Golbez. You have no idea what his motivation is at this point, but damn he is badass and you have got to respect that. I like how I can pretty much finish a plot chapter on the bus- though it’s harder in the afternoon, because I’m more likely to get motion sick with the way the light falls in late afternoon. I’ll have to take a break from chewing through the plot soon- I’m going to need to do some serious goldbusting if I’m going into the Magnetic Cave properly equipped, and I’d like to get some sidequesting and minigames done now that I’ve got the Enterprise.

I have to get through Troia, and then Zot- and then I’m in the underworld, and I cannot tell you how excited I am to get Rydia back in my party, you have no idea. (I am…less excited about the prospect of fighting the Calcobrenna, because that battle has always been a bitch and a half on a cracker, even in the EasyType.) If she becomes any less awesome as an adult, I will be severely upset.

Part of me does vaguely want to write fic because I have enough confidence in my abilities to do it right now, but I don’t know that I will. My conceptions of the characters are in flux and I find myself vaguely wanting to write Edge/older-teenage!Palom, and the world really doesn’t need that, so I ought to resist the urge. The badtouch Zot fic, however, is kind of tempting- not that I need anymore badtouch stories on my plate…

Dear FFIV Fandom (tiny and incestuous as you are): how many different iterations of the Tower of Zot can you possibly excrete? None of you are doing it half as well now as Salah did it back in 1998, so please, can we move on? (Whippersnappers get offa my lawn!) There is more to Kain’s character than him molesting Rosa and being molested by Barbariccia while under Golbez’s mind control!

I never thought I’d be one to complain about too much porn- but that’s the only reason that one scene keeps getting beaten like the proverbial dead horse in fandom. It’s the perfect situation to posit an incredibly screwed up sex scene, except the ones fandom produces are all the same. Where’s the story where he willingly goes to Barbariccia’s bed, because she is, more than Baron ever could be, the thing to which he is most loyal? Where’s the story where Golbez molests Rosa and makes Kain watch? (…uh. (Somebody may have done that one already, but I’m pretty sure they did it poorly.) What. What? …shit, that would actually be really hot. Because it’s Golbez who decides to take her when he realizes how much she means to Cecil; Kain’s feelings have no bearing on the matter. Kain didn’t even want her to look at him, wanted nothing to do with her. And he wouldn’t be able to do anything to help her while Golbez tormented her, and Golbez would find the whole thing amusing in a clinical sense because he’d be doing it to hurt her because he knows that would hurt Cecil- and he wouldn’t really care how much it was also hurting Kain, who would hate himself for not being able to help and would hate himself even more for not wanting to help- because he knows he’ll never be able to touch Rosa, and this is as close as he’d be able to get. …I’m not writing that. …I need to play a little farther and see how Zot resolves in the remake first. >.>)

I did, however, find boatloads of fantastic Rydia-centric genfic, since Rydia is always awesome and fandom loves her but good. The strange tendency to pair her up with Kain distresses me, of course, but that’s largely because I see post-game Rydia as not-quite-human anymore, and I like to pair Kain up with Edge if I have to pair him up with anyone. It’s the snark, mostly. And the way I like to pretend both Kain and Edge mature post-game that makes them actually fairly healthy for each other. (Edge needs someone he doesn’t have to protect after losing Eblan, Kain needs someone who will actively challenge him after spending year challenging a mostly ambivalent/oblivious Cecil.)

I’ll be going on a fic expedition soon, and I’ll probably post links and recs and such once I’ve collected enough material. I may start writing fic (no I won’t) (okay maybe if it’s porn), not that you three will care much.

I’m also going to be continuing the running commentary of my quibbles and peeves as I play the game! Uh. Sorry? (I’m not, really.)

So, now that I’m past Ordeals…I keep reading other people’s blog posts on the game, and feeling like we’re all playing a different game entirely. Or- well, just the one person, I guess, since everyone else is too busy :D :D :D :D :D :Ding over everything in general to get specific.

On the voice acting (even though I don’t have headphones and therefore haven’t heard any of it between Damcyan and Ordeals)- you can’t just give each individual character a voice that sounds like it would suit them. You have to keep in mind how well the voices are going to interact with each other; Final Fantasy XII is one of the most brilliant examples of this, with the matching of Basch and Gabranth’s voices. FFTactics does it, too, with how well Ramza and Delita complement each other. It’s possibly just that Kain and Cecil are voiced by the same people who did Gilles and Roger in Jeanne D’Arc, and I can’t get that out of my head at the moment. Jeanne had far less voice acting in general, but the voices worked for Gilles and Roger, because Gilles was much older and more mature (even though the ending whaaaaaat ahahaha) than Roger. Kain is a year older than Cecil, and it pisses me off that he sounds so old. He isn’t old- he’s twenty-one. Honestly, I think I would love to hear his voice being used for Edge, of all characters- because even though Edge is an immature hothead, he’s also canonically older than the rest of the main party. (He’s twenty-six; that’s positively ancient in video-game main character terms.) And I know for a fact that Liam O’Brian can do sneeringly sarcastic quite well, which I feel suits Edge.

Basically, I hate that Kain’s voice sounds so inappropriate, and I need to find me a Recordingway stat so I can watch the cutscenes with Golbez with the volume up.

I was hoping for the dialogue to get an FFT treatment, and it didn’t- the kids all sound like, meh, whatever, and the NPC dialogue is lifted word for word from the older translations in places. (Mysidia! Mysidia, why you even gotta do a thing, seriously. I don’t like exclamation points, but if ever a set of NPCs needed some, it was in Mysidia.) Golbez and the fiends, however, sound fantastic. “I do not treat with worms.” Fuck yeah! Now that’s a villain. Even if the gold trim on the armor is a tad ridiculous, and it makes Cecil seem even more like a 98 pound nerd. It’s like, damn, man. Look where all the awesome genes in the family ended up. Sorry, Cecil. I’m sure your mother still loves you, even if you suck. (Or she would, if she weren’t dead! O snaps.)

*cough* Anyway! The translation drags in places (except when Golbez or a fiend is talking), and feels too abrupt in others, because the plot is still charging along at the same pace as ever (WHERE’S MY EXTRA CONTENT, BITCHES, I WANTED DRAGONS AND SHIT^1 *sob* And they didn’t bring the Lunar Ruins from the GBA version to the DS! Do you know how awesome CSI: Baron would have been on the DS? DO YOU? DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA? I-I’m gonna go sit over there and hyperventilate a little, okay *breathes*). Christ, I am going to nitpick this game to death. When Cecil defeats his dark half on Ordeals, Klu-ya’s original line was “Justice is not the only right in this world.” Which rolls a little awkwardly off the tongue, but is an incredibly awesome sentiment. The new line is “Justice and retribution are mere triflings.” Which is…not the same thing at all, really. Similar, but not the same.

On the other hand, changing the Legend Sword to the Mythgraven Sword? Hells yes. And I’m actually enjoying the jacked up difficulty levels- for the first time, turn based ATB fights actually require strategy. Scarmiglione nearly did me in because I wasn’t paying proper attention and didn’t have a decent enough stock of status ailment curatives. I’m expecting the Babil CPU to slaughter me, and that’s exciting for me.

But that menu portrait really is fugly. *sigh* But now that I’ve taken down Scarmiglione, I’ve got Caignazzo and Castle Baron to look forward to. I’m excited to see how the game handles Palom and Porom’s sacrifice, and I can’t wait to get to Troia and Zot. (I figured out how to change the lead character, so now I can get thought bubbles from everyone! Palom’s tend to be the most entertaining, unsurprisingly. Cecil’s still a bit whiny.)

What I ought to do, though, is see if I can’t hack my copy of the J2E translation file and extract the text- because some of those lines were priceless. “I’ll show you how much better I am than your boy-toy, Cecil!” and “Something stinks.” “Yeah- his acting. Come on! I’ve seen better performances out of William Shatner. If you believed that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.” *sigh* Good times, I tell you. Good times.

Of course, my overall rating of the game thusfar is still an A++, would buy again- because really. Who am I kidding? I will purchase and play every single version of this game ever released, if only for those moments when I can be six years old again, sitting on the floor of my brother’s room and falling in love all over again.
——–

1- There’s an artbook/factbook thinger that was published a million years ago when the game first came out that had things like the populations of the various countries and their major exports and all sorts of other really, really geeky worldbuilding details. And the dragoons of Baron were, in the Japanese, “Ryuukishi,” which apparently means “Dragon Knight.” Which, y’know, makes sense. But they were literally dragon knights, as in knights who rode dragons. THAT’S WHAT I WANTED TO SEE IN THE REMAKE. The little dragons fluttering about Castle Baron’s ramparts during that interlude-y bit at the beginning? Don’t count. WHERE ARE MY DRAGONS. WHERE.

Man, writing that acronym never fails to entertain me.

So, I just finished off Mt. Hobbs, and I’m on my way to Fabul; so far the only extra content I’ve run into is a slightly more in-depth ability/combat system, and all those adorable, lush graphics. Palom and Porom: Katsucon ‘09? Or Ohayocon, if we can get Hilary to come, I guess. Either way, my desire to do those costumes burns like the sun.

Back to the matter at hand, though- the graphics are delightful, although I’ve been playing Jeanne D’Arc, and the PSP is capable of so much more, in terms of graphics, that going back to the DS is a little disappointing. That’s okay- although part of me wonders what it would have been like if they’d ported the remake to the PSP instead. Whatever. The graphics are still quite good, and terribly adorable. (Unfortunately, “adorable” was never the vibe I wanted from this game. I wanted epic and heroic, not cute. *sigh*) I’m still iffy on some of the redesigns- the cutesy SD graphics aren’t kind to Cecil and Kain’s full plate armor, and they look a little ridiculous. Rosa looks pretty awesome, though- her stupid purple bikini looks more pinkish on the screen, which makes it less ridiculous.

The menu portraits upset me- I really loved the original SNES menu portraits, and the GBA ones annoyed me, but weren’t completely offensive. These new ones, though- ugh. All you can see of Rosa is her hair, and while I realize she is the original “It’s Always Fetch Quests With You” plot device character, I thought she was downright awesome in the original version. You know, when she yelled at Cecil for whining, and had a really hardcore looking menu portrait. The Rosa in my head has been eternally out of character, I know. But the Rosa in my head is so much cooler than the canon Rosa. And, supposedly, Cecil’s menu portrait is made of puke once he becomes a paladin. And that’s tragic, because SNES Cecil’s menu portrait was one of the sexiest things around.

Other things…Kain is a dick. Absolutely and utterly a dick. I knew this, in my head. I was aware of it. I mean, he’s the original Seifer/Vossler type, but depending on the translation, his dickishness has been tempered. This is, once again, a case of the character in my head being a whole lot more palatable than the character in the game. It’s just- why are he and Cecil even friends, if he’s so much of a dick and Cecil is so much of a pushover?

A lot of their dynamic is rooted in certain tropes of JRPG storytelling, but I hate certain tropes of JRPG storytelling. The honorable rivalry is one of my least favorite relationship dynamics ever, because it’s always told in the same way- Kain becomes the Sasuke to Cecil’s Naruto, the Seifer to his Squall, the Ishida to his Ichigo, and I hate it. I get that Kain is supposed to resent Cecil because Cecil is the golden child, the favored adopted son of the king, the one who gets the girl and the Red Wings, but they grew up side by side and, apart from Rosa, their goals were complimentary. I want Kain to be more than just his desire for Rosa. I want his relationship with Cecil to be more than just their rivalry over Rosa. I want them to be actual brothers, not just two people who happen to fight together. (Of course, look how well fraternity turned out for the fon Ronsenburg brothers. *sigh*)

I have hopes for the later stages of the game, though. Because my Kain- the Kain in my head, the one that has been there since I was six, even though I stopped speaking to him on a regular basis years ago- is the one who says to Edge on the deck of the Big Whale, “If I fall again, I want you to kill me. It’s no more than I deserve.” (Man. How many of my characters is Kain a template for? So many.) The angry, brash, headstrong Kain of Mist and Zot is not my Kain. (My Kain is also the Kain of the J2E translation, who was more obsessed with besting Cecil and proving himself to Cecil and being better than Cecil so Cecil would pay more attention to him- *cough* Yeah.)

And speaking of unpalatable, sweet christ on a cracker, Cecil is the whiniest thing ever. Whenever you go to your menu screen, you get a little thought bubble out of Cecil, and the amount of time he spends mooning over Rosa is nauseating. Yeah, okay, I get that you’re relieved your girlfriend is safe, but I’m not going to be able to use my inventory when we get to the Tower of Zot if this keeps up. Seriously. The Cecil in my head is a lot more hardcore. Naive, yeah, but hardcore. He’s not a wuss! He slaughtered half a dozen Mysidians! I may need to rewatch the opening scene, because I’m pretty sure it was the soldiers who killed the mages, and not Cecil, and that’s not how it went down in the older games. Cecil was a murderer. He cut down the Mysidians in cold blood to steal the crystal, and then he brought a bomb to Mist on his king’s orders. In the GBA version, it wasn’t just a mysterious package, it was a bomb ring. He knew what he was doing. He wasn’t a nice person at all and that’s the whole point.

Cecil’s redemption doesn’t mean anything if he’s innocent before he even climbs Ordeals. His doubts aren’t earth shaking if he didn’t have conviction before. Wielding the dark sword, being a dark knight- those may be black marks against his soul in a metaphysical sense, but wielding the power of darkness doesn’t automatically make you evil. It’s not enough- he needs blood on his hands if his redemption is to have meaning.

Rydia, at least, is still awesome. And Edward! Edward is useful! (Never thought I’d say that.) He just shows up too under-leveled to be immediately useful (level 9 to Cecil and Rydia’s levels 18 and 17, respectively), which is why that hide skill comes in handy until he’s leveled up enough to take some hits. But the ability to choose which song he sings is awesome, and the Anthem of Life and Salve are fantastically useful for healing. By the time I got Rosa in my party, she was already obsolete as a healer, and her attacks didn’t do any more damage than Edward’s. She didn’t even have the excuse of being underleveled.

One nice added feature is that arrows now come in packs of fifty, not ten. On the other hand, it doesn’t seem like the game is keeping track of how many arrows I’m using, so I don’t know if that means I’m actually using them, or if I only have to buy each kind of arrow once.

Apart from some iffy moments in the Kaipo waterway, the game isn’t any more difficult than the other versions- the waterway was geared towards a party with Tellah’s awesome magical powers in it, and things got much easier once he was able to cast thunder at everything. The boss battles are a little harder- though I remember getting beat down by the Mom Bomb in previous versions, so maybe it’s not that much different.

I imagine I’ll make it through Ordeals and maybe Caignazzo today; I’m kind of afraid of Troia and Zot at this point, because of how utterly insipid Rosa is, and how utterly insipid Cecil is around her.

And speaking of insipid, why don’t I bitch about the voice acting? Yeah, I think I’ll do that.

I hate Yuri Lowenthal. I mean it, I do. Okay, he did a decent job as Roger in Jeanne D’Arc, and Liam O’Brian did okay as Gilles (oh man, that’s another game I need to rant about a little bit more, if only because the ending made me want to ship La Hire/Gilles and that’s just wrong), but I really. Really. Really, really, really wish they’d chosen different VAs for Cecil and Kain. Yuri Lowenthal does teenagers very well. And twenty-something mercenaries with French accents, I’ll give him those. But he exacerbates Cecil’s whining, and he makes Cecil sound very young. Meanwhile, Liam O’Brian is making Kain sound like he’s ancient and fucking ridiculous, and the contrast between the two of them is terrible. Why couldn’t they have gotten Michael Rodgers and Keith Ferguson? Apart from the fact that they sound really similar- Basch and Gabranth are far, far better analogues to Cecil and Kain than Sasuke and Gaara. Just- ugh. Seriously- ugh.

Rosa is insipid, and Rydia sounds too much like an adult woman trying to sound like a child. Edward is okay. Tellah isn’t bad. Anna was painful to my ears. The generic Baron soldiers were all pretty meh.

It’s just- the voice acting isn’t bad- the VAs are all competent professionals. But the voices are all wrong for the characters, and I have too much invested in this game to find anything but the most perfect voices to be acceptable.

So far, this is not the joyride I was hoping for. I am disappointed, because FFTactics? FFTactics was everything I wanted with a cherry on top. IV is…cute. But it feels bloated, and given that I’m only three and a half hours in, that’s a bad, bad sign. I want some of that added content, damn it. I don’t want extra gameplay features (like the ability to give Kain magic- wtf do I want with that? Half his charm came from the fact that he was too thickheaded to be a mage), I want more plot, but so far the game has followed the old outline exactly.

I think I may end up posting the thing in sections if when it’s finished. The different parts are…jarringly different, thematically. But I can divide it up into three or four sections that hold together.

Anyway. This is from the very beginning, and it’s not done; I’m having a hundred thousand issues with finishing this bit, and the Districtmancy characters feel off. I dunno. Either way, I do kind of enjoy this particular bit a lot, if only because it’s silly, and very little of Never Sleep is silly- which is why this bit may not make the final cut.

So. Never Sleep Alone: Five Months Before
—-

“I can’t make any promises, but I’ll talk to Jareth and Socyl-” Finbar broke off in mid sentence, interrupted by Flax’s hissing. She was glaring at the door, back arched and tail puffed up.

“I swear, that fucking cat hates me.” Drake stood on the other side of the screen, glass in hand.

“She hates necromancers in general.” Blaine picked her up and tucked her into the crook of his elbow, stroking her ears until she stopped snarling at Drake and subsided into a sulky purr.

“I always just assumed that she had good taste.” Silverlock joined Drake on the other side of the door. “Takes after me, she does.”

Drake rolled his eyes. “No one could ever be that tacky. Anyway. Put the squalling catbeast down, Mister Torkehaav-“

“We’re going out!” Silverlock opened the door and stepped onto the balcony, gesturing grandly with his glass. “Some place with music and drinks with tiny foil hats and plates of overpriced finger food. And dancing. Definitely dancing.”

“Oh, gods. They can’t possibly be that drunk yet,” Finbar muttered.

“Are you kidding? Half the stuff in Rien’s liquor cabinet could take down an army. He’s got bottles of things that are banned on six planes.” Blaine reluctantly let Flax go. “But I suppose there’s no helping it. Tiny foil hats, you say?”

“Yes.” Silverlock sidled up to Blaine and gave him a kiss on the cheek. Barefoot as he was, he had to stand on his toes to do it, and Finbar felt a brief moment of vertigo-inducing incongruity. Rien D’Alestri was a thousand things, but cute wasn’t supposed to be one of them. “And foliage. I want a drink the size of a Viking goblet, and I want it garnished with a gods-bedamned jungle. My thirst is great and terrible.”

Drake looped an arm around Finbar’s waist and grinned stupidly, leaning on him with complete and utter disregard for his personal space.

Finbar rolled his eyes, but his heart wasn’t really in the gesture. “I suppose your thirst is great and terrible, too?”

“Well, it’s not exactly awe inspiring, but, you know. I haven’t had decent tequila in a while.”

In the interests of keeping my inbox from getting flooded with spam comment notifications, I’ll be password protecting anything- oh my god, Word Press’s latest release has an automatic wordcount. ^__________^

Sorry, got distracted. (Possibly previous releases had this and I just didn’t notice? I dunno, I just updated, and it’s pretty faaaabulous.) So, as I was saying, password protecting shit. Basically anything with a mature rating, or any post that starts getting excessive amounts of spam. The password will always be my livejournal username, and for those of you playing along at home, there’s the link over there in the sidebar.

In addition to spam protection, this is my general disclaimer on things with sexual content- you don’t want to read it, you don’t even have to see it.

Hopefully the update will take care of any comment issues that may occur, although technically, once you’ve been approved, you ought to be good to go for future comments. Whatever, there are only three people reading this thing, and I only expect comments from two of you.

Today didn’t suck! I mean, on the one hand, the weather is awful. But on the other, the internet is fixed. And on the one foot, my uterus is convulsing. But on the other, I’ve got FFIVDS. So, it balances out. Huzzah!

So I’m driving, listening to Muse, and then the Boffo crew says, “Hey, we would make an awesome music video to this!” Actually, first Jance and Cara claimed it, but then everybody else wanted in on the fun- and since music kind of is their thing, I couldn’t really deny them. I don’t think about Boffo nearly as much as I used to, which is a little sad. But at the same time I really have outgrown a lot of the story, since I wrote most of the story between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. I’ve moved on a lot since then, but the characters haven’t. Someday I’ll do that rewrite, since they’re still my first loves in a lot of ways (first story I ever properly finished- the whole of it was over fifty thousand words, and NaNoWriMo tells me that’s a novel).

Anyway! I could go through this line by line, but I don’t feel like describing it in that much detail, so here’s the basic run-down of what the Boffo music video to Muse’s “Time Is Running Out” would look like.

Jance gets to do vocals, because he’s the closest thing the Boffo crew has to a skinny emo boy other than Dei, and Dei’s voice is aaaaaall wrong for this.

So, it opens with Jance, who is of middling-tall height, thin, with dark skin and shock white hair, done out like a glam rocker on acid, shredded leather pants, leather jacket with studs, eyeliner. Right. Also, when I say he “does the vocals,” I pretty much mean he’s fellating the microphone. But it starts off with just the snapping, and it’s Jance in a spotlight with his head bowed, snapping, and there are hands in the darkness around him, snapping along with him. And then the rest of the music kicks in, he starts singing, and Jance-the-singer gets shoved off to the side while the rest of the action goes on.

First verse-
I think I’m drowning
asphyxiated
I wanna break this spell
that you’ve created

Jance and Cara, both in their uniforms (tuxedo suits, basically; Cara has skin the same shade as Jance’s, and hair just as white, but hers is waist length and pulled back into a perfect ponytail at the base of her neck, not a single strand of it out of place- they’re brother and sister, and the resemblance is pretty obvious), but Cara has Jance up against the wall with her hand around his throat, kissing him.

you’re something beautiful
a contradiction
I wanna play the game
I want the friction

The rest of their scene degenerates into violent sex, basically, though none of it’s explicit (this is a music video, y’know; suitable for MTV); torn clothing, Cara making judicious use of her terrifying fingernails- Jance is the one who bears the brunt of the violence- she’s his older sister, and never let him forget it.

Chorus-
you will be the death of me
you will be the death of me

bury it
I won’t let you bury it
I won’t let you smother it
I won’t let you murder it

our time is running out
our time is running out
you can’t push it underground
you can’t stop it screaming out

More of the violent sex, but with clock imagery in the background, clocks and calendars counting down to New Years. We also get images of Jance singing interspersed through the fighting, as well as images of New Years Eve, with Cara and Jance in their demon forms, and Cara standing on the edge of the ritual circle with Tyler in the center of it and Catenus standing off to the side. During the bridge (all of the wailing, the Oh’s and the Ah’s), on the last wailed “Oohhhhh, Ohhhhhhhhhhh,” Catenus decapitates her, and Jance-the-singer screams (his mascara’s probably running at this point), standing next to Jance-in-the-moment, who watches Cara bleed out with a dead expression on his face.

Second verse! This one is for Dei, Tyler, and Opal, and also for Leala, Aislin, and RK. This is where things start to get a lot less coherent, since I was originally thinking that the entire song could’ve been about Cara and Jance.

I wanted freedom
bound and restricted
I tried to give you up
but I’m addicted

This is basically just a montage of Tyler (late teens; six-foot-something, solidly built but not beefy, tangled blond hair, brilliant blue eyes, charismatic smile; wears jeans and a t-shirt, and battered-looking Birkenstocks) following Opal (tallish, and statuesque, though you can’t tell so much because she’s wearing a shapeless sweater; late teens but younger than Tyler by a year and a half, shoulder length brown hair, gray-green eyes, looks at the ground a lot when she walks) around, Dei (taller than Tyler, but much thinner, long black hair in a ponytail, eyes the same shade as Tyler’s; wears fitted black pants and a black button-down shirt) stalking Tyler and Opal, and RK (mid-twenties, but the RK scenes are fuzzy with flashback, so you can’t really tell that he’s got dark hair and bright blue eyes) following Aislin (dark hair, tall and willowy, super-model pretty) around and being watched by Leala (her curly blonde hair tied back in a bun, wearing a uniform). This is cut with shots of Opal in a ridiculous dominatrix outfit, backlit by flames, with both of the boys at her feet, and shots of RK with Aislin in his arms, but with Leala behind him in a short black dress (but with her hair still up), nibbling on his ear. Aislin is looking over her shoulder, not at him.

now that you know I’m trapped
in this elation
you’d never dream of
breaking this fixation

you will squeeze the life out of me

Shots of Dei-the-shade (like Dei, but yellow eyes) kissing Opal and her struggling to get away from him, shots of Aislin screaming at RK while Leala stands behind him, stroking his hair, shots of Tyler and Opal tearing each other’s clothing off. And, of course, the occasional shot of Jance-the-singer, making love to the mike.

bury it
I won’t let you bury it
I won’t let you smother it
I won’t let you murder it

our time is running out
our time is running out
you can’t push it underground
you can’t stop it screaming out

How did it come to this?

And then the chorus and bridge, which is more of the same, cut with more shots of Jance singing, and more clock-and-calendar images, and shots of New Year’s Eve- Dei lying naked in the bathtub, bleeding out from the wrists with the Shade standing over him, Opal running in the wedding dress, and shots of Tyler covered in Cara and RK’s blood. And also a shot of five-years-earlier, with RK standing over Leala’s dead body. At the wailing point in the bridge, we see RK getting decapitated the way Cara did in the previous verse- her body is off to the side.

After the bridge, there’s a brief piano interlude, which is a shot of RK playing the piano; Leala is lounging on top of it in a low cut, short black dress and her hair is down- it’s gloriously golden blonde and falls in loose ringlets down her back. She’s smiling, and her throat has been slit.

The final chorus is Catenus and Radueriel’s, with cameos by everyone else.

And you will be the death of me

bury it
I won’t let you bury it
I won’t let you smother it
I won’t let you murder it

Shots of Catenus watching Radueriel with Jubal, and then shots of him in the Garden, fondling her stone form, which weeps blood. Every time he touches the statue, he leaves behind bloody hand prints. Jance is standing on a pedestal elsewhere in the garden, singing.

our time is running out
our time is running out
you can’t push it underground
you can’t stop it screaming out

How did it come to this?

Flashes of the other couples engaged in acts of violence and/or sex, and flashes of Dei with the Shade’s tongue in his ear, Radueriel’s statue crying, Jubal bleeding from the Mark of Cain, shot through with more clock imagery, and all of the clocks counting down to midnight. And shots of Opal-the-angel, bleeding from her Mark of Cain, flashing back and forth between her and Tyler in the ritual circle, covered in blood. The final wailing bit of the bridge shows Tyler opening his eyes, with Darkness bleeding out of them.

The last few notes of the song are Jance putting the microphone back on its stand and bowing his head, and then the spotlight cuts out.

…yeah, okay, it’s a lot cooler in my head, but whatever.

*wibble* Man, that was awesome, even if it was just a glorified romance novel. But it was a glorified romance novel about two men who actually consistently acted like men the entire time. I’m in a haze of nebulous squee right now; it’s my typical reaction to well written, fluffy things. I mean, yes, there was all sorts of Murder! and Intrigue! with Dueling! and Politics! but the only thing I was really rooting for was for Ferris to get pwned and Richard and Alec to get back together, which they did. (I. I love bickering odd couples so much. So, so much. (THIS IS NOT NEWS.)) Just- when Alec leaves and Richard is going through their things, and- d’awwwwww. *wibbles* God, I’m such a girl. There were standard romance novel tropes sprinkled throughout, which were made all the more fantastic by the fact that neither Richard nor Alec stopped being rather manly men the entire time. (”O noes, my lover is kidnapped! Rather than saving him, I’m going to slaughter everyone involved. He’ll make it back on his own, or not, whichever.”) I mean, yes, Alec is a bit of a fop, but only a bit, and he’s not at all a fop in the girly sense- just a fop in the not-entirely-able-to-defend-himself sense. Not like he needs to, what with Richard being so awesome.

The short stories added to the second edition were also delightful, even if “The Death of the Duke” really was just so much romantic shmoop. But I’m a sucker for death scenes, so I didn’t really mind. (Silverlock says he’d like to have a death scene like that. Blaine just wants to state, for the record, that he doesn’t do courier service (or escort missions XD), and Silverlock can get someone else to ferry him to the afterlife. Also, the idea of Silverlock as a sickly old man makes my brain short out, so it’s not likely to happen- even if I imagine Silverlock as a sickly old man would, indeed, be just as pimp as Alec ends up. Silverlock pouts monstrously in response, and wants to know why we never let him have any fun.)