u/schulz100

This is why I loved Tracker in Chapter 4. 'I'm absolutely out to collect your bounty, but my life is worth WAY more to me than 14 million dollars. Gonna have to be a MUCH higher payout before we get into it.'

Most sensible person, arguably.

Nah, see, that's how you get the bleakest Abbot and Costello skit ever. When a corrupt NCPD MAXTAC officer ALSO has high end TT coverage and they show up guns blazing.

"Why are you guys shooting at us!?"

"You're trying to kill our client!"

"WHY DO YOU THINK WE'RE HERE?!"

Taskmaster, the man who can perfectly copy any fighting move he sees and has fought basically everyone in the 616 universe, WILL NOT FIGHT MOON KNIGHT EVER AGAIN after trying to deal with him ONCE. He got Moon Knight mildly ticked off by beating him up and kidnapping his ex, so Moon Knight FLEW HIS MOON PLANE INTO THE BUILDING TASKMASTER WAS IN, then stopped just short of CARVING OFF Taskmaster's FACE. WHICH HE'D DONE TO HIS PERSONAL WORST SUPERVILLAIN IN THEIR FINAL FIGHT. People KNOW he just DOES SHIT like that.

Someone tries to hire Taskmaster YEARS later to go after Moon Knight, and his response is "Asbolutely Fucking NOT. I'm never messing with that LUNATIC again. Anyone with any sense won't, either. The only people who will take the money you're offering are too dumb or crazy to do what you're paying them to do."

I gotta admit, after Time Breakers, I was worried. Nothing truly suggested romance beyond some intepretable cute moments in one DLC for Control, and here comes a DLC of almost equal import within the shared narrative that also seemingly declares it a Law with a Capital L of the Multiverse that Courtney Hope's characters must fall in love with Shawn Ashmore's. And I'd played Quantum Break at last by the time I'd gotten to Time Breakers so I also knew Remedy had laid the precedent for it besides.

Resonant spent the whole game getting my hopes up with how there's a 7 year gap where ANYTHING COULD'VE HAPPENED, how Emily sounded basically any time Jesse came up, the fact that Jesse asked so SPECIFICALLY about her, and a lot of cute/romantic shit people caught in screenshots (the post-its, the shared pair of earings). But I was still worried.

Then Emily had that monologue in the post-game and I was SCREAMING INTO MY FIST at HOW they DID IT. ACTUALLY. I figured if they hadn't truly confirmed it by then, it wasn't actually meant to be, and then that FUCKING MONOLOGUE. Someone get Antonia Bernath an award of some kind, cause my GOD, the LOVE she KNOWS is SHARED but didn't have the courage to voice aloud when she had the chance!

AAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

...So, yeah, pleasantly surprised they DID go through with it, and they did a great job of it, I think.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/ijs1337

Got an account on ao3, but I do still need to actually WRITE this, yet.

https://archiveofourown.org/users/ijs1337

I DO have a story about Trigger that playing the FUCK out of AC8 made me finally write down, cause I wanted to write some pilot shit, that is almpst ready to post. Trigger's first meeting with Mihaly in Two Pairs, only he talks and is OUT FOR BLOOD over the two squadmates he is now owed.

Honestly gonna write some fanfic about this, but rough summary:

Trigger technically deserts (or is at least absent without leave) from his post in Osea when news gets out Land Battleship 2 is heading for the Lighthouse.

The Endurance and the squads get in before the ship can actually reach the Lighthouse proper. They realize why it slowed to a stop when they recognize an X-02S in the AO, with very DISTINCT tail art...

Cute stunt pilot with pink tips stealing a Tonitrus guidance laser out of the Enzo Special Zone (or the ruins of Fatsia) and directing every last spear in orbit onto Sotoa and the civilian megafloat.

"All your talk about Sotoan traditions, the way of the nomad. You're a slave to history. Let me FREE you..."

Course, there's an even worse alternative that is EVEN MORE CRIMSON 1; where she AGREES with Tewy that Enso Order is the true villain of the war, and must be held fast and to account by ANY means necessary and helps her drop the last spear on Theve to ensure even more evidence is preserved beyond DD's phone.

Ok, this is a quote I've wanted to talk about all week, so thanks for posting it.

It's great from the standpoint of "You managed gross cultural appropriation WHILE BEING A NATIVE OF THE CULTURE. That's IMPRESSIVE assholery." Which is true, and hilarious.

But I feel like there's a deeper meaning to the point about the sheep, and Tewy and the fucked-up warrior ethos the nobility promoted/became. She was once a girl who could not STAND to see even a single animal die, even if it was for her benefit in a base objective way of 'we need it to eat.' She, perhaps, at a point abhored violence of any sort.

Yet look at her in her last two appearances. Sending literal thousands of her airmen (and women, NBs) to die, then trying to nuke herself and an entire city her nation already occupied and drove a landship through just to try and make sure the other bad guys don't get off scot free. The girl who trembled at an animal dying so she and others could eat grew up into a MONSTER willing to murder ANY amount people so long as it serves her purposes.

I honestly liked the twist they did in Gotham Knights that basically made Freeze the Walter White of supervillains. He has a VERY understandable reason to be doing what he's doing, but its ultimately revealed that understandable reason was just an excuse to go on a power trip and validate himself and his ego as a scientist, and the person he's done all this terrible stuff for wants NOTHING to do with him once they find out.

Nora Fries is in protective custody, possibly not even in America anymore, because she couldn't condone what Victor did to be able to cure her. He takes that VERY poorly, and. in continuing to be a supervillain after she explicitly left him over his supervillainy, he proves it wasn't really HER he was doing the Mr. Freeze thing for. She really just made for a convenient excuse to do all the crazy, dangerous, deadly science he could ever want to do, to be as violent as he wanted to be because he had a theoretically noble reason FOR the violence. Then once that's stripped away he's just an ASSHOLE taking out his asshole-dom on everybody else, no better in truth than any of the other asshole supervillains.

I mean, yeah. That's why D.D/Enso and the FCU do the Wings of Theve scheme in the first place. Morale and actual chances of victory are cratering, so all they can think to do is LIE that the legendary super Ace Pilot who ALWAYS eventually shows up and turns the tide of war singlehandedly HAS already shown up on THEIR side, and will turn the tide eventually. And hey, maybe whoever they pick to play the role will be able to fake it till they make it. Literally EVERY modern military conflict has had this happen; there's no easier short-term lie to tell.

The great, darkly humorous ironies are that Cope IS a good enough pilot out the gate that he probably COULD do just that; he's just too much a humanitarian to kill his countrymen and put his squad at risk by actually fighting. And Rex as his replacement literally IS the outlier Legendary Ace Wings is supposed to be, randomly plucked out of the ocean and stuck in the role cause there was no one else to put in Cope's place once he died.

'OH, thank fuck, I'm not the only one.'

<Yes>

Fuck, I KNEW that reminded me of some Good Shit from somewhere else!

I think I vaguely connected the dots in the back of my head when it was rolling around in the forest, but yeah!

Shit, now I wanna play it all again... AND I wanna play tons of Resident Evil...

Fair.

I also spent SO LONG beating Genichiro the first time I had to fight him at the midpoint of the game (it took me over a week of play sessions and realizing I'd missed several minibosses and wasn't as tough and strong as I should be), I think I could honestly beat Genichiro's phase of Sword Saint while half-alseep. Like, I almost don't register him as a threat anymore, I know him so well, have the rhythms down so pat. But that's just me, I know.

Emma also just kung-fus the FUCK out of me and her attack patterns consistently throw me off, so I still count her as a distinct, separate problem.

Honestly feel, after 5 playthroughs, that Sword Saint is easier to bait and punish, especially in what should be his hardest phase when he first busts out the spear. You can easily get him to do big, leaping strikes you can just dodge under to get some health damage in by staying vaguely at mid-range most of the time, and once you get him to his final phase, all you need to do is live long for two or three Lightning Reversals, which are almost as baitable.

Old Man is setting 80% of a very small arena EXPLOSIVELY ON FIRE and throwing out a hard-to-dodge grab move that will take half your health at minimum, and is doing both those things periodically by his final phase.

Graham McTavish made this one of the best bad guy lines I've ever heard. Cause it does NOT sound like even this very good pic implies. Most villains are annoyed, angry, occasionally scared, many times disinterested.

Dracula as played by McTavish?

Oh, the FUNNEST THING IN YEARS just punched him in the face. He thought he wouldn't get the chance to kill one of these idiots ever again, and HERE'S A BELMONT! Maybe the LAST Belmont. He needs to SAVOR this, cause who ELSE would just punch him, as if that would WORK? He's gonna have SUCH a good time killing this absolute buffoon of a vampire hunter! It's so good to see one really carrying on the family tradition. Cause it means he gets to fucking kill him, and that's gonna be the best thing he's had to do in a WHILE.

"Fine. There. Now we're all STANDING. Buncha JACKASSES, standing in a circle."

OR

Thor strides purposefully into a small town pet store. "I require a horse!"

The culture clash of Thor 1 was definitely not unexpected, but actually really well done, looking back.

It's interesting as a Millennial to consider I effectively lived in real time through the Silver Age equivalent of comic book movies with the dawn of the MCU and the attempts at the DCCU.

It's also funny to think that in-universe, the MCU is convinced they already had the BEST superheroes they'll ever get.

Platforming that is both inaccurate yet incredibly demanding in terms of precision, with SERIOUS input delay that is ALSO couched in randomized animations. You can ONLY make jumps if you do it PERFECTLY. There are TINY windows where you won't completely under or overshoot wherever you're jumping to, and if you can't hit that, perfectly, every time, while not being sure how long you actually need to push the button because you don't know which jumping animation will play THIS time. This will also or course be compounded at points where you have to run away from something that will kill you instantly while dealing with all this.

It will ALSO include a completely broken ledge-grab system, that will only properly work maybe a sixth of the time. Half the time you just won't grab the ledge; the rest of the time you'll still fall off despite climbing up, or phsyics-blast off into a wall and fall to your death.

I must also shot-out the best bad mechanic I've ever seen; tying the lethality of a chase sequence in a co-op game to where BOTH players are, and one can be a computer who enemies along the path ignore and will ALWAYS outpace you. So unless you know exactly what do to and can play the run with literal MACHINE PRECISION, you'll instantly die at the same point EVERY TIME because the computer partner will always get way ahead of you and push the lethality of the chase past general human ability.

Any guesses as to what that is specifically? It IS from something...

I think Karen Travis' work in thr Republic Commando books portraying the Jedi and Republic as organizations and peoe who barely cared about the obvious humanity and individuality of the clones outside of a few outliers, making the clones honestly kinda happy to get ordered to kill supposedly traitorous Jedi and to overturn the democracy that treated them as disposable property, was fucking GREAT.

But I also came to really appreciate the evil of the chips after finally watching Clone Wars all the way through. The way these very individualized factory-made men WERE forcibly reduced to a state mindless obedience (Rex especially hti hard because it INSTANTLY reverted all his growth from Umbara; THIS is the exact thing he would stand up against, and that he wouldn't be the only one is WHY the chips are in place ij the first place)... Watching many who'd wholeheartedly fought for democracy and a peaceful uni erse be twisted into gleeful agents of oppression and authoritarianism in Bad Batch, even as their government plots to exterminate and replace them...

The chips works just as well as any earlier interpretations, imo, especially for their distinct purpose in their story. Equally as tragic for different reasons.

Moe explaining what to do when someone is dissing your fly girl; busts out a double barrel and fires FOUR SHOTS into the ceiling.

Heck, them being USED to help with things he doesn't like is over the line these days. Punisher stole a set and used them to help with a particularly gnarly kill scene, after which Spider-Man tracked him down and BEAT his ass. Only reason Frank got away was because he set off a flashbang DIRECTLY in Peter's face.

Wile reconstructing an entire wall that a train out of a sealed repainted painting crashed through (it's actually clever and kinda beautiful, and will make sense when you see it), only for the actual whole-ass wall to then topple backwards onto him and remain perfectly intact AFTER impact, because he did such a good job in the brickwork anyways.

I'd honestly forgotten how actually HILARIOUS Loony Tunes is. And to think this movie was almost locked away forever for tax write-offs.

So, there's a VERY nice car parked up the cliffside, and while it TECHNICALLY isn't mine to sell...

You observe that the figure was so short because IT WAS A CHILD!

It's always a kid.