• Add Review
  • Subscribe
  • Nominate
  • Submit Media
  • RSS
The rope winds from the clouds like the long-dried trail of a giant's tear. It whips in the arid wind, down the birdless sky, and into the open mouth of the ravine that splits the dead land. Down and down it goes, the sky darkening to a pinpoint of light above it. This is the sky that Ivy knows.

Ivy and her sister, Mint, peer further into the ravine. It has been one day since their father stopped moving. A dandelion sprouts from the parched earth like hands clasped together in prayer. It is the only living thing they've seen in this dead world. A growl echoes off the cliff walls. Maybe not the only thing.

Sometimes Ivy dreams of a sky that covers everything. When she awakes, she hates herself for still having the dreams of a child. She's fourteen, now, her sister twelve. The rope stretches up above them, up, up, up, further than young eyes can see.

Features:
-Character-centric storyline
-50+ hours of gameplay
-Challenging boss battles
-Original music
-Different equipment sets that modify the ways characters play
-A crafting system featuring over 100 pieces of unique equipment
-LOTS of side quests
-Puzzles that spice up dungeon design
-Recruit an odd assortment of townspeople and pass legislation to develop your own village
-Raise a pig to compete in the Pig Arena and win prizes
-New game+ feature that includes multiple bonus endings--a mechanic I blatantly stole from Chrono Trigger

Latest Blog

Major Update

I've been hinting here and there about wanting to update A Very Long Rope, and I finally got off my ass and did it. I made quite a few changes, and I'll list them below, but I want to talk about the most major one in depth. When I made A Very Long Rope, my goal was to make a game with a strong story, and a lot of the other aspects got brushed aside. This was going to be my way to segue into the community and hopefully find some other people interested in working together. Since then, I've shifted my perspective and focused more on things like design and aesthetics, which this game doesn't really care much about, unfortunately.

So, the update. The chief annoyance I've been hearing about A Very Long Rope is the dungeon design--mainly, levels are way too big, and the random encounters serve to make things worse. So, this update adds an item to your inventory that toggles enemy encounters. This item was available in the game before, but the only way to get it was to beat the game (players who have done this know I'm talking about the saecelium shield). Now, this item is given to the player at the very beginning, meaning you don't have to fight a single random encounter anymore.

Of course, since bosses exist, you'll still need to gain experience. In order to incentivize getting a good amount of experience before each boss, I've made several treasure chests need a currency called "victory points" in order to open them. Basically, you get a single victory point for every enemy you defeat in a battle (other than bosses). Victory points are dependent based on the dungeon, so the ones you earn in the first dungeon will only work in that dungeon. The cost of opening chests is higher depending on what's inside the chest, so you might need to spend between 2-6 points in order to open each of these special chests.

I've also doubled the experience, gold, and item drops from monsters. The net effect here is that if you open every single locked chest, you'll end up fighting about half of the encounters that you would have if you just left random encounters on. I did a full playthrough and felt that these locked chests provided short-term goals that kept me more interested while exploring; I hope they do that for you, too!

Here's the full list of changes:

-Reduced crit damage from triple to double
-Stat cap increased to 9999 (will mainly affect buff stacking)
-Berserk no longer sucks
-One-touch Sprint
-First agricultural upgrade requires three people instead of five.
-Escape rate now a flat 60%
-Added a way to get out of the Goddess Tower if you don't have a portable transceiver
-Fixed a few typos/graphical glitches/small things I don't remember
-Rare drop rates have been increased significantly
-Gold/XP/Drop Rates doubled
-Findable equipment that could be used in recipes is now sold as recipes in your town along with the regular recipes.
-Saecelium Shield now added at the beginning of the game. Players can use their old data and find a Saeclium Shield in a number of places within a blue chest (such as the entrance to your town, on the world map, or next to the save point in Old Town); the blue chests will disappear upon opening one.
-Most chests are now "locked." Gain Victory Points from defeating random mobs in a dungeon to open locked chests. Victory Points are specific to each dungeon.
-Locked chests are weighted based on how good the item is. 2 VP is a potion, 3 VP is gold, a good potion, or monster mats, 4 VP are great potions and large sums of gold, 5 VP are stat-boosting items or rare monster mats, 6 VP are equipment.
-Chests that aren't near easy grinding spots (e.g. chests in certain puzzles, chests in towns) will never be locked. Several other random chests in dungeons will also not be locked.
-Arena fights now give experience
-Can now use saecelium shield during soul tear scenes
-Only need to find the wolf four times instead of nine (what was I thinking?!) in Marina's soul tear scene.


That's it! Oh, and make sure to subscribe to my new project: Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass.
  • Completed
  • Housekeeping
  • RPG Maker VX
  • RPG
  • 11/26/2013 04:56 PM
  • 05/29/2023 03:05 PM
  • 12/01/2013
  • 525463
  • 48
  • 5071

Tags

Posts

Hey, argh, I missed your old edit. The Jade Snake Ring doesn't prevent instant death, but you can buy an accessory that prevents instant death in Balfur.
Nuts. Looks like Yvette is out of luck in that department, then -- everyone else can equip saecelium armor to free up the accessory slot, but she's stuck with trust bonds? I suppose that's fair, given how powerful she is.

(And thanks for giving so many quick and helpful responses, by the way. I know I (and plenty others, looking back through the comments) bombarded you with lots of questions, and I'm grateful that you were willing to keep up with them.)


-Fair, but in that case it's weird to draw attention to it through Oliver. In my experience, if writers don't want to concern themselves with details like that they'll hand-wave it with a vague explanation and quickly move on. If it's actually going to be important, they draw attention to it to keep it in the back of the audience's mind, so I'm primed to obsess over little hints like that.

-In response to the next three points as a whole, I really think that fantasy may have been a bad choice of genre for this story. It's necessary for the gameplay, I guess (since jRPGs without magic tend to be very, very boring), but for the story it goes beyond just being extraneous and starts being an active detriment. The main point of fantasy stories -- what they uniquely bring to the table -- is the ability to completely remove the story from reality and explore a different set of cultures, social mores, and laws of physics than what we're used to. Personally, this is why I love fantasy stories so much, and so it's what I look for in them. In this regard, I can't appreciate witticisms like "I don't know if I should be scared or give him candy corn" because I'm too distracted by trying to chart the sociological implications. (Like, literally chart. I kept notes on this game full of weird theories based on every scrap of worldbuilding info that sounded relevant.) So I always think it's strange (and feel a little cheated) when fantasy authors say they're not interested in worldbuilding. If you don't want to have to deal with worldbuilding, you should have picked realistic fiction -- that would have allowed you to focus on the characters and snappy dialogue without having to deal with extra baggage. Your audience wouldn't be distracted by the baggage either, allowing them to focus on your strengths, making for a better experience in general. And honestly, I think AVLRttTotS (wow that is a freaky-looking acronym) would work perfectly well as a science fiction story -- magic and the fact the planet isn't Earth never impact the plot in the slightest, so you could do everything you wanted just relying on saecelium. (And I guess you'd have to provide some explanation for the Lydians, but science fiction has come up with stranger stuff.)

Basically, picking the genre of your story -- knowing its strengths, limitations, and just basically what kinds of stories you can and can't tell in it -- is probably the most important choice a writer can make, but it's one that a lot of writers don't seem to fully grasp for some reason. Video games are probably hit by this harder than other mediums, due to how many RPGs use stock fantasy settings, to the point that many designers just use the conventions without really understanding them. I'm sorry if this sounds condescending -- you do probably already know this stuff -- but I think it's important to reiterate here.

(The scope of the story also matters here, I think -- The Heart Pumps Clay, for instance, worked fine as a fantasy story. The audience never explored the full world, so you were free to selectively feed the audience the only information that was relevant to the characters instead of having to make up a whole world, and the magical elements actually were relevant to the plot in ways that science fiction couldn't really substitute for. (Even there, though, I got distracted by the fact that Mara couldn't see herself in the mirror but Crow could. :p) You also played with genre cliches and conventions through the antagonist characters, which wasn't worldbuilding-related but wouldn't have made sense in something other than a fantasy jRPG.)

This also ties into what I think is the game's biggest weakness, which is that it tries to do too many things at once. Why are there witches? Why is there a demon from another dimension? Why is there some ghost guy being chased by Death? What do these things add to the story? They feel like invasions from some other genre, and though they might work on their own, they just feel confusing and distracting in the context of this otherwise pretty grounded sci-fi story. This applies to the zillion sidequests, too. They're a fun idea in theory, but just end up murdering the pacing. The town, in particular, is something I'm conflicted about. It's a really neat idea in isolation, but, again, feels like something from the wrong genre, and it does really weird things to the pacing since you can spend all day running around recruiting random dudes when the story is trying to push a tense atmosphere. Overall, it makes the game less than the sum of its parts. I feel like the game could have used a lot more streamlining and cohesion, maybe breaking some of the ideas up into games of their own.

-As for the problem of making isolated protags learn mundane stuff, that's actually what I like about the archetype. It's a well-established artistic technique to reevaluate things we take for granted from a fresh perspective. It's also just interesting psychologically, since people do tend to get pretty weird in isolation. I think there's a lot of potential in that, so I take it very seriously when I'm teased with the possibility. My aforementioned obsessive notes were full of stuff like "where did Ivy learn this???", because that kind of knowledge is important to her character -- how did she react to this, how is she going to integrate it into her life, what does she consider important enough to seek out, does she stumble over things we have terms for but she doesn't, etc. etc. etc. I fully acknowledge that this could just be me being weird and/or picky and not reflective of the general populace, though.

-Okay, your explanation for Raccoon does clear some things up (and a lot of it is pretty obvious in retrospect, I guess I failed at reading comprehension), but I still don't see how it led to his final actions. If he was overcome by existential nihilism -- the knowledge that his accomplishments would ultimately amount to nothing -- why did he isolate himself in a fantasy world? If anything, I think his life would be even more meaningless there. His achievements will still be undone and he'll be unable to affect the world any further. Conflating length of life with meaning of life is a mistake plenty of people can make, but I don't see someone so obsessed with the concept making the same mistake. Even if everything goes exactly the way he wanted it, his life would still have no meaning. The only thing he would have accomplished is the mass murder at the labor camp, and even that would be forgotten in time. I guess that's supposed to be the point, but I still don't see why he would even think that immortality in a fantasy world would give his life meaning in the first place. (I also don't see what was preventing him from staying with Yvette and growing up to have a healthy life that way, especially given how fond he seemed of her.)

As for the sympathy thing, eh... Understanding someone's actions and motives in the abstract is one thing, trying to reintegrate them into society is another. Even if I can understand the ways in which a serial killer is the product of circumstance, I still think they need to be kept away from society for the safety of others. What Ivy and Yvette wanted was to drag him back from a self-imposed prison, potentially allowing him to harm others again. He even says this explicitly, when he points out that the world is full of people he's hurt and it's ridiculous to try and inflict him on them again. It ends up making the heroes look a little sociopathic, in that they seem to place the life of a mass murderer above the lives of the people he could potentially ruin. I get that they still see him as the Raccoon of their childhood and think he can be rehabilitated, but I think the body pit should have shocked them out of that naivete.

Maybe I'm just cold, though. Morality is certainly a subjective thing.

"For this game, giving Ivy closure was the most important thing for the story, and that's what I wanted to focus on."

I think that's exactly why I found the ending unsatisfying: I never liked or cared about Ivy. I'm sorry, but I have to say it: she reads like a cardboard caricature rather than anything even approaching a relatable character. She's a gender-flipped version of the cookie-cutter Grizzled White Dude With Tragic Past protagonist that so plagues modern video games. She's only ever allowed to have two emotions, anger and grizzled angst, but most of the time she settles for being an emotionless robot. I think the only time she ever felt like a real person was when she was overcome with emotion upon seeing Rose. She also commits what I consider to be a cardinal sin of protagonists, which is that she has no drives or motivations of her own. Raccoon's accusations were dead-on: she spends the entire childhood arc being dragged kicking and screaming in the direction of the plot by Mint, so when Mint dies she becomes a leaf in a river. There are stories you can tell with that kind of bland protagonist but I don't think a heroic fantasy is one. To me, good protagonists (like Mint and child!Yvette) are proactive and actively drive the story. We're spending the entire story with them, so they should have interesting motivations and get into interesting situations. The child arc is really good about this, but the adult arc suffers heavily from what TV Tropes calls "villains act, heroes react". The one time she does something proactive, it takes three filler dungeons to reach the payoff, then she fails at it utterly.

She is also a textbook sociopath, at least in the child arc (in the adult arc she's just kind of a nonperson). When she said Mint was the only thing she cared about in the entire world, my only reaction was "Wow, so she finally admits it." But the thing is, she doesn't care about Mint, only an idealized concept of her. Every single conversation she has with Mint, she does nothing but trample over and ignore Mint's hopes, dreams, and opinions. Like... I had an issue with a corrupted flash drive that made me have to repeat the opening of the game about three times, so I became intimately familiar with the cutscene where Mint says "Stop using me as an excuse!" and Ivy proceeds to completely ignore her and continue rambling about how she'll never make it so they should just stay in the ravine and starve. Almost every time they butt heads, Mint gets absolutely nowhere through reasoned argument and eventually just ignores Ivy's sometimes valid concerns right back. No wonder Mint worked herself to death when her dear sister did nothing but teach her to ignore everyone else and do everything herself! Ivy's behavior can't be described as anything other than abusive. At best she comes off as a yandere who wants to keep Mint safe forever even if it means depriving her of everything that makes life worth living for her. Even when Mint tries to hammer it in with her death speech, Ivy doesn't get it! Just...ugh! Every interaction Ivy had with Mint was incredibly painful and upsetting to watch, especially since I liked Mint so much.

So no, I didn't really care about her getting closure by doing exactly what she said she wasn't going to do. In the abstract, the idea of her getting the good childhood she was deprived of is heartwarming (and the use of the time distortion effect was clever), but with Ivy as the subject I couldn't be anything other than exasperated.

Egh. I'm sorry for all that negativity, but I really had to say it. Ivy ruined the story for me.

(The final battle also feels weird, on a number of levels -- like, how can Raccoon even lose when he has godlike control over the simulation? Does he just give up after you inflict 350000 damage? And I get that jRPGs need to have final battles, but I found it a little distasteful that the resolution is just helping a depressed person commit suicide. After going through all that effort, the protagonists don't even try to accomplish a nonviolent resolution? They're leaves in a river to the last. They probably could have accomplished the same outcome by just not bothering in the first place -- I guess they saved Solomon, but that's about it. The whole thing feels incredibly pointless. Maybe that was the point given all the nihilism going on, but it still felt unsatisfying.)


And one last, random thought that doesn't fit in well with the others -- I think you might want to look into implementing a more narrative writing style in your games. Not full-on visual novel, but maybe something like Planescape: Torment. The summary you have for the game on this page is amazingly well-written in its imagery, but of course we can't get that kind of description in a dialogue-driven game. Could help you get around graphics limitations, too.
Whew, lots of stuff, argh.

I get your point regarding fantasy, but I think we're coming at it from two different camps. A lot of my writing prior to game writing is focused more on magical realism. I tend to use fantastical or sci-fi elements more as means of characterization rather than focusing on worldbuilding. A Very Long Rope is definitely more genre-focused than what I normally write, but I think the core idea of what I like to do in fiction is still present here--it's a world constructed around characters instead of constructing a world and creating characters for it. It already is more sci-fi than fantasy; even some pulpier sci-fi has magical elements. From a nitpicky standpoint, the only thing that's missing is the reasoning, and providing reasoning for magic isn't something I'm really interested in. The game's pretty light sci-fi/fantasy, and I'm okay with that. As an aside, I would like to (at some point) make a game that's 100% magical realism, but I need the right artistic chops first (or, like, an art department--that'd be sweet).

The idea that Raccoon is retreating into what's essentially a fictional space isn't satire per se, but it is something that I felt was reflective of a societal problem of people retreating into their fantasy lives to escape reality. It was a decision based on observation of the escapist tendencies that I see pretty frequently (and see in myself, frankly). It didn't seem so farfetched to me within the context I set up, but you're certainly entitled to think otherwise, haha.

If you hated Ivy, you hated Ivy. My feelings towards her are that she's an introvert, so a lot of the time she leaves words unspoken. Probably the best indicator is the difference in mis en scene between her house pre and post time gap. She's definitely not a sociopath with Mint, but that's kind of an interesting reading considering I wanted to make a bunch of parallels between her and Raccoon. The decisions she makes with Mint are generally to protect her, and Mint is just persuasive enough to keep pushing Ivy forward. I was actually a little afraid that Mint would be the cliche one; she doesn't have a lot of stuff that rounds her out and instead relies pretty heavily on her voice, whereas Ivy has a pretty clear arc where she comes out of her shell, retreats into it, and slowly comes back out of it. Calling her cookie-cutter is a disservice. Having a tragic life and being grizzled because of it are aspects of her character, but that doesn't make her a stereotype; if that's all she was, then yeah. She has a character arc, though, and she's tempered by moments where she's generally thoughtful. She does have selfish tendencies, but that's a core struggle, and there's reasoning for it; it's not just painted on to make her a cool loner. Again, if you hate her, you hate her, but I'm happy with the dimension I gave her.

I'm also surprised you found the childhood arc more engaging, as there wasn't a central line of tension there--just several small lines of tension. I was afraid THAT would feel too floaty. The adult arc has a central line of tension with a clear antagonist and a clear goal; that felt a lot stronger to me, though I understand how the side stuff would bog that down. I wanted there to be a lot of meat on the bone, and I like that stuff, but, yeah, this game might not have been the best conduit for it.

I'm kind of glad the final battle felt pointless; I would have liked the scenes that follow it be more impactful, though.

Also, I just wanted to point out that it's really cool to be discussing writing in videogames at this level.


Thanks; my background is in more traditional fiction. I definitely have that at my disposal, but I don't want to take my game development in that direction (unless it makes sense for the game--don't want to limit myself). I'd rather rely on the strengths of the medium, and one of those is using visuals to tell the story. I know that's weird considering this game is all rtp, but I'm moving in that direction with Jimmy.

-Ah, I'm not as familiar with magical realism so I won't comment on that. But my main point is that the magical elements felt extraneous and thus distracting. I think what bothered me the most was probably how much they didn't impact the story -- like, why does Rutger dismiss Mint as a little girl and Cyril as an old man when he should know those two groups can be dangerous spellcasters? Magic is a big part of the Circle War but in the modern story it's totally absent from military tactics. Again, it distracted me, so I feel it shouldn't have been included if it was just going to add unnecessary complications. People who aren't as detail-oriented as me might not take issue, though.

-As for Raccoon, while escapism is a worthwhile thing to comment on (especially in the context of video games), it just doesn't make sense that someone obsessed with worth and purpose would do so. I could never retreat into a fantasy world like he did, because I measure my self-worth by the impact I make on the world. Therefore, there would be no surer way to make my life feel completely worthless than by retreating into a fantasy simulation. I would becoming unable to affect reality or contribute anything positive to society, which is horrible to me. Maybe Raccoon has a different definition of "meaningful life", but using my own experiences as a baseline, his actions seem counterproductive.

-Eh, Ivy... I get that she's an introvert, but viewers need a way to see what the strong silent types are actually thinking, even if only by implication. I never got the impression there was anything under that silent exterior, just a hollow void going through the motions. Basically, she broke my suspension of disbelief; I was only ever able to see her as a stock character, not a person. I'm an introvert myself, and I just didn't see it.

"The decisions she makes with Mint are generally to protect her"

Yeah, I get that, but the problem is that she wants to protect Mint even when Mint doesn't want to be protected. That's relevant to the Raccoon discussion, I guess -- is it worth living a long life if that life is empty and meaningless? Ivy wanted to protect Mint, but at the cost of depriving her of everything she wanted in life. This on its own doesn't make her evil, but the problem is that she keeps doing this even after Mint explicitly tells her she doesn't want that. That's the problem: she claims to care so much about Mint, yet she completely ignores Mint's actual opinions and desires in favor of enforcing her own idea of what's good for Mint. That is unforgivable to me. Like I said, she doesn't care about Mint, just an idealized concept of her. She treats Mint like a pet instead of a person.

I don't really see her as having a character arc, either? Maybe it's just because I couldn't see any depth to her, but I feel she's pretty much the same at the start and end. I guess she evens out a little after the child arc, but that just makes her more boring because anger was basically her sole character trait. I could look past her coldness if she actually had drives and desires of her own, but she's just so empty, and empty doormats don't make for interesting protagonists.

(And I was pleasantly surprised by Mint! I expected her to be just as stock and generic as Ivy, but she has a lot of personality and nuance to her. She's very clever and worldly for a 12-year-old. Plus she's proactive and constantly drives the plot, and I've already established that I give tons of points for that. The fact that her ultimate role is to die tragically to motivate the protagonist is really, really cliche, though.)

-I liked the childhood arc because it was much denser than the adult arc. There were no filler dungeons; even seemingly pointless filler quests like the Fortress of the Four Winds and the tidal caverns were filled with such personality and ended up being relevant to the plot. Even when the plot didn't advance, there was constant banter and character development. There was just tons of stuff going on, and the plot maintained a pretty fast pace, especially after Yvette joins. It was a fun travelogue adventure about kids using their godly superpowers to help people, capped off by real danger and world-shattering revelations -- a fitting climax! I also liked it precisely because there was no central line of tension; that's a style of story you don't see as often, and it allowed more time to be spent on the characters.

Compare that to the adult arc: Three filler dungeons (and the corrupted region, which at least has some character development), one of which is incredibly awful (the snowfield) before we're even finished with the prologue, then a few awkward cutscenes where the protagonists just sort of gawk while the plot happens around them, then three more dungeons (only slightly less fillery) before the plot finally kicks into gear, then ALL THE SIDEQUESTS before you're strong enough to continue to Polaris, then it's just the villains doing all the heavy lifting and the heroes struggling to keep up, with the exception of Avishun and the finale. (Oh, and why does Oliver even fight you? What on Earth does he possibly hope to gain? The story basically continues as if the fight didn't even happen anyway, which is a major pet peeve of mine in video games.) The random banter and mid-dungeon conversations are completely gone. There are a few attempts to develop the characters, but I don't feel they do enough -- everyone feels incredibly static. The story feels like it lost a lot of steam all of a sudden.

The sidequests don't have nearly the personality that the "filler quests" did in the child arc, either, it's just "I have a portrait and no personality, get me a thing". The soul tears reveal there actually is story to them, but that's not apparent at the start. I think it would have worked a lot better if we were given part of the story to begin with, then saw the conclusion with the soul tears instead of the whole thing. Backloading content is generally a bad idea, writing-wise.

-So the final battle was supposed to feel pointless... Okay, but that's a really weird thing to do for the climax. I guess the idea is supposed to be that Rutger is the real climax (he was the best villain, by the way) and this is a post-climax resolution, but in that case why is the final battle so difficult and climactic-feeling? I think the theme you were going for would have been stronger if Raccoon didn't have a second form, and the final battle is just a quick, somber clash to the tune of "Rancid Wind". That would really hammer in the pain and emptiness of it all -- if you really wanted to be clever, you could take a page from UnderTale and provide a different ending if the player guards for the entire battle or something. Instead the human opponent transforms into a hideous monster accompanied by dramatic music, as mandated by jRPG law. It feels like the gameplay and story are working at cross-purposes, which is a feeling I've had throughout this entire game.
@argh:

I do get that gameplay and story fought against each other a bit; I didn't start trying to integrate mechanics and gameplay until Heart Pumps Clay, really. I was mostly trying to make a jRPG, which has been a genre that I've loved since childhood, and then give the story actual complexity and the characters development so an older audience would appreciate the writing instead of just kind of ignoring it. I will say: one thing that I didn't touch on in my last post but should have is that the game was in part structured around subverting the jRPG formula. The game starts out following the young kids from the provinces, and several of the first dungeons are riffs on RPG staples. A good example is the turnout after the Fortress of the Four Winds Bandits when Alan gives his speech and the townspeople end up punishing the children and there's nothing you can do about it. Having Raccoon be a humanized antagonist that you don't particularly want to kill is stemming from that same place. Also, the final boss theme has the same phrasing in one section that's present during the scene where Ivy says goodbye to Mint; there's still a heart there, but, yeah, probably would have been better with restraint. I like awesome rocking boss themes too much.

Also, I'm a bit surprised that you felt Rutger is a better villain; he's a pretty one-dimensional power-seeker that's just rounded out a bit by childhood feelings of uselessness because of his eye. He's definitely more fun to hate, though, and he does have a distinct voice.

Ivy isn't protecting an idealized version of Mint--she's protecting a living version of Mint. It's established early on that Mint's illness is a major issue, and Mint herself comments that she knows she's going to die before they even climb the rope. Ivy actually relents to Mint's rhetoric constantly, and that ends up being a major regret for her--you can see that in the corrupted region. If I were in a similar situation as Ivy, I would have kept my sister in a hospital bed, and any "the world is beautiful" argument she made could go fuck itself. It might be selfish to have to suppress your loved ones in order for them to actually be alive, but it's not sociopathic.

I'll let the rest of your feedback sit, as I think I pleaded my case earlier, and your pacing concerns are justified. One thought, though: using tvtropes as a guide of what to do and what not to do is probably a bad idea in writing. Not being able to have a character (regardless of gender) die and influence the other characters is removing a central component of life; of course it happens frequently. What makes it not cliche is that Mint's death has huge consequences on the characters and the plot.

I liked Rutger precisely because of his simplicity, and also because he actually did stuff. (You can probably tell that that's a pretty important metric for me, eheh.) Oliver, Darius, and Raccoon just sat around being mysterious for the most part, but Rutger was pleasantly straightforward: he knew exactly what he wanted and he took it. He provided a credible and immediate threat that spurred the heroes onward, and he was satisfying to take down. I would even say he's the only one of Raccoon's lieutenants who really earned the special boss theme. He was also one of the few villains for whom a violent confrontation made perfect sense in the context of the story, instead of feeling like an awkward jRPG obligation. He's probably not ultimate villain material, but he served his role well.

And hm, maybe sociopathic was a bit too strong of a word, but it definitely is extremely selfish of her. To me, it seems like she cares more about the emotional fulfillment Mint gives her than Mint's own emotional well-being, and I that's just something I can't forgive. The problem is, I believe you said Mint's illness was terminal no matter what in an earlier conversation? Ivy seems to understand this, which means she knows her attempts to protect Mint are futile. If she's going to die young either way, she might as well live the life she wants. I actually heard something about this in regards to cancer patients -- there's a new treatment protocol in place now where patients will be asked what things they don't want to give up (since treatment is often debilitating), even if it means they'll die. Surprisingly, these patients actually tended to live longer than patients who weren't given a dialogue with their doctors. So quality of life is actually pretty important, even for the terminally ill.

I mean, I presume the point is that she is selfish and irrational, but she never really acknowledges it or suffers any consequences for it, unless you take my interpretation that Mint worked herself to death because Ivy was so terrible at communicating with her.

"Ivy actually relents to Mint's rhetoric constantly"

I...really don't see it that way. I seem to remember that Ivy always refuses to back down until Mint literally uses physical force to coerce her (or runs off and does what she wants to anyway). She does relent through reasoned argument sometimes, but those instances are exceedingly rare in comparison. That's what bothers me; I don't see the sisters as having a meaningful back-and-forth, I see it as Ivy constantly ignoring and shouting over Mint's opinions until Mint has to force the issue. She really shouldn't be surprised that Mint learned to overexert herself and ignore Ivy's concerns.

Re: fridging, the problem isn't the loss of the loved one, it's that it's always women. There are a few gender-flipped examples (A Song of Ice and Fire is pretty big on it as I recall), and they make people act like they spotted a unicorn, because they're about as rare, at least in modern literature. (This article talks about this a bit.) But Mint actually goes beyond that and runs through a veritable checklist of other cliches associated with the trope: waifish, innocent, friend to nature, emotional support, dainty fainting illness, death by dainty fainting illness... It's not just that a woman gets fridged, it's that it's a very feminine-coded woman gets fridged. I don't agree that it has a huge effect on the plot, either, but that's probably because I don't see Ivy as getting meaningful development from it, and also because I didn't make the connection to Raccoon. The bottom line is that I felt Mint contributed way more to the story in life than she did in death, so it was a poor tradeoff to me.

Might have been interesting if Ivy died, actually -- subvert our expectations -- but the older one dying is more played out. I think, anyway. I'm not an expert on literary history.
@argh

I don't really have anything else to say about the game, but that's interesting about those cancer treatments. It's not surprising since happiness/the will to live has always been important in anecdotes about people with terminal illnesses who have recovered. It IS surprising that it's just now being recognized, though.
Alternate Universe questions, if you don't mind answering...

What if Mint wasn't ill?

Also... I was thinking of shipping Raccoon & Ivy... maybe with nudging from Mint and Yvette... After reading the convos between you and argh, Housekeeping... it seems less plausible now...

What if the Anti-Somnian religion didn't exist? Possibly because the prophet guy wasn't inspired... (by that thing... Weiss) ... Pun?

Wait... was that the origin of the Mother and the Eater? How would that change the (other) Temple of the Elder Gods? Would it be more streamlined? ... Is that religion the reason for (all the problems / the whole sad story)?!
Wow, what would happen if Mint wasn't ill? That would obviously change the entire course of the game. I don't know if that's a question for me to answer; the story's out of my hands. And, that's something I should have been stressing with any of my conversations about authorial intent--I agree with "the death of the author." I'll discuss intent all day long, but what the audience gets from a game/book/movie/song/whatever is what they get from it, regardless of intent, and any soapboxing I do is going to be forgotten in the wake of the work itself. I just like talking shop, haha.

But, to kind of answer your question, removing Mint's illness would drastically change how all the characters end up, and it would also majorly change the dynamic between the sisters. So, who knows? It's not up to me to imagine!

And, yeah, if that religion didn't exist, there would be no early game source of tension, and Ivy and Mint would have lived with their mother and father normally. So, in a way, yeah, that's the root of everything, but it's one of those what ifs that isn't the direct cause of the conflict, kind of like how people obsess over things like, "If only I ate breakfast this morning, I would have left ten minutes later and not gotten into that car wreck."
Oh, one last question: what determines the sermon you get when talking to the pastors? I only ever seem to get one at a time, so I presume something must shift them.

I've been seeing more of the theater scenes too, they're quite fun. I think Miranda is probably my favorite.
The sermons are just randomized upon when you talk to the pastors; each pastor has three possible sermons.

Miranda was fun to write; Lovie's probably my personal favorite, though. There's nothing more fun than writing a pathological liar, haha.
So hm, I've started NG+. Powering through the final boss' instant death attacks with only two party members took a lot of retries, but doable. I just fought Diego, which was interesting because now I actually know some of the stuff he references.


I like that he explains what happened to Lorenzo and Ares -- good foreshadowing, and it explains why they haven't been active -- but why doesn't he mention Darius at all? I was wondering where he was during the childhood arc, especially when it probably would have been easier to kill Claire and Yvette then. I'm honestly pretty confused why he joined a gang of bandits in the first place when he has such a specific goal and doesn't seem to like working with other people.

Also, I really cannot believe the girls afterwards. A 14-year-old straight-up murders someone and her only reaction is "haha, he wasn't strong enough to beat us"? Jesus. Cyril isn't much better either -- he admonishes them for jumping into danger, but not for murder? It may have been in self-defense, but that's still a lot for a little kid to go through

And hm, can you see Marina before the timeskip?
@argh:

I wrote Darius as a bit of a drifter; he had a goal but no real way of accomplishing it until he met Raccoon. He didn't just want to kill Claire and Yvette--he wanted to topple Avishun. The idea was that he had teamed up with the Four Winds Bandits at this stage in his life and, seeing that they were falling apart, just left them. Why he joined them in the first place is a good question that I don't really have an answer to.

Yeah, it's a game, so it takes some things for granted that it probably shouldn't. Diego got treated as a bad guy rather than a human.

You can't see Marina before the timeskip--she lives in Terranoire. Richard does reference his wife and daughter, though.
Sorry to keep pestering you, but I meant it when I said the childhood arc was my favorite part. It's making me think...


It was nice to go through the Path of Gods again. Everyone seems to hate the darkness puzzles but I didn't find them too tough, and I thought it was really brilliant the way you integrated the lore with the puzzles so effectively. (I especially love the last puzzle, even if it doesn't tie in with the lore.) I'm a sucker for grand religious prose, too. And that music! I think it might actually be my favorite dungeon in the game. I'm curious, though, if the bit about the Eater losing his wings was always in the scripture, or if it was added after the addition of Weiss' apocrypha. Actually, come to think of it, I wonder if the original Lydian society had the same religion at all? The religion could easily be something unique to the isolated tribe, or even just something that ended up going in a different direction if the Lydians' religion was derived from the same source.

(And huh, I didn't know you could fight Lorenzo. I never thought to interact with the door, I thought it would come up in the dialogue or something.)

Anyway. In the third ending (the Cosmic Knight one), does Raccoon survive, or does he still commit suicide when Yvette 'kills' him? I honestly think this is my favorite ending so far, despite being the 'joke' ending. I actually misted up a bit seeing Raccoon play along, presumably because Yvette's enthusiasm made him remember the happiness and friendship she gave him when they were kids. I'm pretty sure that's the only time old Raccoon has a smiling portrait in the entire game; that's really powerful, especially when adult Yvette couldn't reach him at all. I'm a little disappointed that young Raccoon didn't have much of a reaction, but eh, you had to maintain the flow of the scene.

And a lore question: In Beriall Brymme, Yvette says the royal family evacuated Avishun before the city was destroyed, but of course Darius and the soul tears show that's not true. I presume this was either propaganda introduced by the new royal family, or simply the facts being obscured by time?

Also, I always thought it was a little weird that Rose said she couldn't come with them because the authorities would hunt her to the ends of the earth, then immediately tells them to take another heretic. Did she assume they would split ways, or was she a particularly high-profile prisoner, and they wouldn't pursue Raccoon in the same way?
Hey, argh; I've been on vacation (brother got married), so sorry this is coming a bit later than normal!

-Yeah, the idea was that the religion was created just in that isolated tribe; Weiss had a big influence on that.

-I love using portraits for moments like that.

-Yeah, that was propaganda.

-And, yeah, Rose is higher profile. Raccoon was just a kid who vandalized a church; it was a serious enough crime to get him locked up, but no one would really look for him. That was sort of a recurring theme with Raccoon's childhood; he doesn't stand out.
Woo, finally beat everything. I think all the grinding I did to get crafting materials made me a little overleveled, haha. (My party's level 81.) My play time is a little over 100 hours (yikes).

I thought the ultimate superboss was pretty unfair, though. It's fitting to throw everything in the book at the player, but I think the love spell was overdoing it. Everything else can be blocked or prepared for in some way, but not only is there no way to block the love spell, there's no way to mitigate it reactively either; your party is just crippled for a few rounds and there's nothing you can do about it. It's especially bad that there doesn't seem to be a cooldown, so he can spam it -- there was one point for me where all four party members were charmed, which is just ridiculous. There's also not much you can do about his buffs, since his debuff resistance is so high. There isn't really any strategy that works against him; you just have to equip as much status resistance gear as you can and hope he wastes his turns on Eerie Whistle and redundant buffs. The battle can go south at any point based solely on bad luck and there's nothing you can really do about it. While it's important to keep players on their toes, I think that's still a bit much.


Also, when encountering the Mother and the Eater initially, Ivy expresses confusion about why they're exploring the temple in the first place, and feels like there's some external force drawing them onward...but this plot thread is never followed up on. Is it just supposed to be some meta thing about the player's influence?


I was also a little underwhelmed by the final arena boss.
I expected something really shocking like Ivy or Raccoon, or maybe even Mint from a timeline where she didn't die. But, in retrospect, that would break the theme of refighting previous enemies, and it's unreasonable to expect you to make unique battlers for a single fight that most people wouldn't even see. Rutger's still pretty neat, anyway.
Dang, argh; you definitely put in the time! I need to get around to testing/uploading the latest version--the Everything's Okay Bell is set to block that charm status effect now, and the other major changes should drop the playtime without sacrificing gameplay. I've just been working on Jimmy this past week or so.

Regarding the secret dungeon:

Yeah, it's just a meta thing with the player.
By the way, if you're polishing stuff in the next update, you might want to change the God's Eye to only have 8 crystals. When I watched the Flying Mountain scene on NG+ I realized it actually had 9 (counting the center crystal), which doesn't match up with the later event where

Raccoon takes 1 and leaves Rutger with 7. If the God's Eye has 9 crystals, Rutger should still have enough left over to create a stable four configuration for his boss battle. Wouldn't 8 crystals also make more sense for an official Lydian technology, since 8 is supposed to be more stable? It seemed like that was what the research database was referring to when it talked about the stable eight configuration...


...Unless I missed something obvious, which is also possible.
Yyyyeah, that was an oversight. Good eye!
Hello, again... sorry if this was already in the game, but... What happens if you activate a teleporter, and there's someone on the other side?
I think I at least touched on this in Switch's soul tear scene, but I probably didn't go into specifics other than calling it dangerous, so as far as "canon" is concerned, that's about as far as it goes. If I were to write the specifics into it, whatever you teleported into would explode into messy bits.