12:40: Ooh, neat dialogue animations. I can see those hyperactive loops getting on my nerves if #BLUD was a visual novel and they were onscreen for long stretches of time, but it's not a visual novel, so it isn't. 15:15: Not sure I'm so happy about this loop, though. Motion is nice, I guess, but all of Becky's motion distracts from the item she just got, which I assume is supposed to be the focus of this pose, especially since the loop is just kinda…shifting back and forth. It also detracts from the "Cartoon Network" aesthetic, since Cartoon Network would absolutely _not_ pay animators to draw ten frames when one would work. 16:45: Love the background art, though. It doesn't look like it was drawn by the same artist(s) as the moving characters, just like the cel animation days! I kinda wish they'd commit to the bit and draw the park bench and other objects that are about to move/be blown up more like the characters than the background, but whatever. 25:35: It's actually derived from the French word for "grammar," "grammaire". Which I suspect is also where the English word for "grammar" comes from. 35:20: The sound effects are _very_ cartoony. 42:55: Yeah. 1:06:20: So is there a reason Becky grabbed that trophy stick and not literally any other hockey stick in the school? 2:37:30: It's remarkable how much of Alruna is just…not told to you. If you don't experimentally whip weird plants, you won't learn how to save your game. The game tells you controls, but mostly not how they interact with the environment. 2:51:05: Another case in point. 2:39:10: Hm. Subtle. …actually, is that subtle to y'all? Is this obvious, or am I Anti-Capitalist Rhetoric Georg? 3:01:18: _Grease_ is more than a few years old, Dan. The original musical is more than 50 years old. 3:03:30: I'm a big sucker for contrast. Those shots with a stark white wolf struggling against pitch-black skeleton arms? Beautiful. …the wolf probably disagrees. 3:07:25-3:08:00: Ah. This is one of those games which focuses on making your animal companion as lovably verisimilitudinous as they can. 3:09:05, 3:18:25, 3:26:00: I wonder what's gonna happen to the dog in act 3. 3:34:35: Is it just me, or does that boss look less like a giant version of the mooks than a mook that's unusually close to the camera? I'm not getting a sense of mass from its design or poses, never mind the animation. 3:57:20: Len's animation is really neat and feels full of character. Tobias and Arimbo feel dominated by their breathing loop. 3:59:05: I feel like I'd like Antar's walk animation more if it was in an adventure game. If you just needed to go left and right, then a sort of shuffling half-jog could be a neat little way to convey some character trait. But it looks wrong next to a six-foot vertical leap, and I don't think the writers want me to compare Antar to Guybrush Threepwood walking down to the Scumm Bar. (I think they want more of a Limbo feel?) 4:08:00: Most of the narrative so far has been built around the metanarrative with Narrators and Protagonists. I might have eaten it up 10-15 years ago, but I've seen it done a lot now. Will this game do anything _The Princess Bride_ or _Doki Doki Literature Club_ didn't do better? 4:13:35: The worms are now the highlight of the game, both narratively (there is a story going on) and animation-ly (look at it inch its way across the ground!) 4:17:50: If we plot the protagonist intelligence between "sex comedy" and "mystery," Antar lands somewhere below "shonen battle manga". Which is a problem, since he doesn't have the strength to solve his problems with brute force.

4:20:35: I like some of the monster designs. They're not unique or mind-bending, but they're distinctive. 4:21:03: That's a tone-setter. It's not full "I can be your angle or yuor devil," but it feels a bit "I would have thought this was cool when I was a teenager". I don't think the pre-game exposition dump is doing this story any favors. If this was scattered through conversations and little lore-dumps, it wouldn't front-end all the most generic parts of the lore. 4:23:25: Nope. That is just Bible Canaan. It's probably subtle to someone who skipped Sunday School. (Or who didn't grow up in a society which Christianity left its mark on, but this game feels distinctly Western.) Anyways, “Akhaian” is a word Homer used for the Greeks. Like, he called the Greeks “the Akhaians” when he was talking about them as a whole and not one specific subgroup. Later, it was used to refer to Greeks from a small region Homer called Aegialus. Long after Homer, it was called Achaea or Akhaia, and that region is mentioned a few times in the New Testament. However you slice it, that’s a _much_ deeper cut than Canaan. 4:28:30: It’s always interesting to see how/if games justify their bonfire/estus flask mechanics. Also, “won’t blow the Steam back into a corpse” has some interesting lore implications. Lots of cultures use breath as a synonym for life or the soul, and it sounds like Steam has the same implications here. 4:32:30: I feel like Alethia should know better to stand on that kinda pedestal while some Tinker or Spark or whatever this universe calls ‘em is playing with it. Best case scenario, you get sent back in time 400 years and cause a temporary time paradox. 4:35:07: …I _swear_ I wrote that _Chrono Trigger_ joke before finding out that Alethia is wearing Marle’s pendant. It’s gotten some upgrades! 4:40:00: There sure are a lotta people in these ruins. No wonder Simon thought he could dash in and mess with ancient artifacts. 4:48:48: Some of them are even _deeper_ than Simon and his artifact! Gwen’s just working down here on level 2 and people are chewing Simon out for poking around on level 1? I call BS! 4:57:10: I agree with Dan. There’s a lot of words and not much reason to care about them. If there’s something that distinguishes this story from its genre counterparts, lead with the less generic stuff. 5:01:10-5:02:40: Opening cutscene, two and a half minutes. We cram all the generic scheming noble stuff here, along with some exposition about royal magic and war and so on. The 5:07:13: It’s a very different style than the Persona 5 style, or for that matter the less distinctive Persona 4 style. But it’s a style that the Persona team hasn’t used in Persona games, and it’s one they commit to. 5:09:18: Oh look, it’s Detective Prince Naoto! Or possibly just Normal Prince Naoto. 5:10:50: Prince Naoto is the youngest-looking Elder I’ve ever seen. 5:12:07: As far as fairy companions go, Gallica seems pretty top-tier. Or maybe I just like her hair. That bangs-over-one-eye look is _quite_ enigmatic! (When it’s not communicating shyness, ut Gallica doesn’t seem shy.) 5:15:48: I’d like to formally apologize to Naoto Shirogane for comparing her to this heterochromic dweeb. 5:18:10: Ooh, I’m pretty sure those are CGI models in the background and 2D animation in the foreground. But the CGI models aren’t animated on ones. I can’t say that makes them look like 2D cel animation (Atlas ≠ ArcSys), but it probably makes the difference between them less stark. 5:26:35: In some ways, Gallica is functional, as all fairy companions are. But she’s also got a personality, and it’s dysfunctional enough to be interesting. Or not boring, at least. 5:30:35-31:15: Not only do I expect M:RF to introduce me to a cast of compelling characters, I already like Gallica more than I liked the entire cast of G:SC combined. And the plot is a bit more interesting. There’s not a lot to it, but there’s not much to G:SC’s either. G:SC has ancient ruins and a bunch of evil demons and that’s about it. By comparison, M:RF’s plot is moving at lightning speed! We got to see the inciting incident right at the start, instead of…actually I’m not sure we saw G:SC’s actual inciting incident. 5:36:25: Hot take, but an RPG with voiced dialogue letting you rename _any_ character feels like a mistake. The most important lines of dialogue are always voiced, and they need to write around the name of what is usually the most central character. It’s so absurd! Honestly, I think voice acting in RPGs is overrated to begin with, but if you’re gonna do it don’t make your job harder for yourself. 5:52:34: The honest answer for most things I’m interested in. Give me a couple hours to prepare a speech and 5-10 minutes to deliver it, and I might be able to explain part of it. If you don’t mind spoilers. 5:59:20: Guys…you’re making Leeroy Jenkins look clever. You’re making the chumps in SAO Abridged look clever. At least group up before hitting it until one of you dies! 6:15:20: I’m kinda disappointed that Will doesn’t get a magical girl transformation. But whatever this is, it’s cooler than Persona 3’s Evokers. 6:24:30: If you’re gonna put someone clueless enough that he can have everything in the game explained to him, can you _please_ come up with an explanation for it? 6:35:00: The simpler the plan and the more insistent the old guy is about seeing it through, the deathier his flags. 5:42:45: The weakest part of the ReFantasio’s story so far is the fantasy-racism. Call it “tribes” all you like, the way they’re treating each other is how fantasy racists treat other races. _(Also, some of them are obviously elves and beastmen with the serial numbers filed off.)_ And so far, the story is treating fantasy-racism with all the cliché bits that get on my nerves. It’s all individual assholes being assholes because of their individual beliefs, with our pure snowflake protagonists being nice enough that they can see past it without even trying. I don’t want to say Atlus _can’t_ write a good fantasy-racism story, but ReFantasio hasn’t done much to convince me they _can._ 5:44:20: Combining it with a character looking directly at what is clearly supposed to be our modern Earth and saying “This is a place where all of those problems have been solved” is _not_ helping my impression of ReFantasio’s fantasy racism. “No soul is born into discrimination” my butt. “Less differences means less to argue over” also grinds my gears, but it’s more explicitly one character’s opinion. It’s creating caricatures of racism that no one could recognize themselves in, and saying “Isn’t that such a terrible thing?” And it also suggests that avoiding that absurd hatred is easy, that if you just choose to treat everyone equally you’re free from racism. After all, look at all of these people who simply decided not to be racist! Maybe the game could turn it around if there’s a twist where out party gets reverse-isekai’d to that fantasy world and sees what it’s actually like, and there’s a modern-Earth character who gets dragged back, but there are a lot of ways that kind of plot point could turn rancid too.

Metaphor addresses literally every gripe you mention in its story, including the idea that our world is some sort of utopia free of discrimination being nonsense and the reason the protagonist seems unaware of certain things. The title of the game is Metaphor -- don't take everything at face value.

What about gandalf?

Says someone who has never watched the anime adaptations of Atlus games. (They have a reputation for being messy. Just like most video game anime. And most attempts to directly adapt video games to more linear storytelling media, for that matter.)

I've seen it, but I don't think the cutscene animation succeeds in imitating the specific flavor of "bad" seen in the CD-i games it's inspired by, and the game's animation is otherwise fine but unremarkable.

Ow, thinking of that, my age hurts.