(no subject)
Spoilers in this post for:
Digimon World: Dusk (minor)
Star Ocean: The Second Story (minor)
Day 5 - Game character you feel you are most like (or wish you were).
I’ve been told that I’m like quite a few different characters, but the only character I think I can actually see myself being similar to is Danette, from Soul Nomad and the World Eaters.
I’m no half-cow chick, but the more I play the game (and watch others play), I can’t help but notice that she’s pretty much who I’d be if I were stuck in a video game. She’s a mega-ditz, thick-headed, and unashamedly devoted to the people closest to her.
Even though she constantly threatens people with violence, she never follows through on her threats to snap anybody’s neck. When someone’s doing something wrong, Danette is usually there to be the (admittedly misguided) voice of reason, especially when it comes to her friends doing something stupid. Of course, more often than not, she’s the one doing the stupid things, and her friends have to keep an eye on her and talk her out of it when she gets it in her head to act like a dumbass. If you piss her off, she’ll get angry in an instant. If you argue with her, she’ll probably get flustered and just call you names until you give up, and if you insult her or her friends, you better get ready for the fury.
I’d like to think that I have the same sort of energetic spirit and determination that she has, and that I can be as loyal and compassionate towards the people in my life. I mean, you can’t just run around, tumbling ass over tea kettle into all sorts of mayhem and still have a social life without having some kind of redeeming qualities. She’s got a crazy imagination, and when she clears her mind, she can actually be pretty smart. She trusts without thinking twice about it, and she can even warm up to some of the biggest jerks with time. Her taste in friends is questionable, and her taste in guys even moreso. When it comes to romance, she’s a novice, and her attempts at gaining affection are shy and clumsy at best. Still, she sees the good in people even when nobody else does, and she’ll believe whatever she wants to believe. She’s afraid of being alone, whether she admits it or not, and she’d do anything and go to any lengths for a friend.
Danette is an idiot, but she’s a kind-hearted idiot who cares for her friends and lives a life free and happy. If I’m not like her, then she’s who I want to be like.
Day 6 - Most annoying character.
I had to think really hard for this one, but I’d have to say that the final boss of Digimon World: Dusk is the most annoying character in the history of everything.
ChaosGrimmon is an asshole, plain and simple. He does what the big bad is supposed to do: Get a virus, try to destroy the Digital World, and that’s all fine and good. Do your thing, evil data guy. But as an actual boss in an actual fight, I want to murder this irritating assbat with my bare hands.
His speed is insane, and only every once in a while can I actually get my whole team of three Digimon to get their attack turns to line up. Normally, he gets one or two turns, then one of my team gets one, and he’ll get anywhere from one turn to three damn turns afterwards. Eventually, my whole team can go, and then the cycle repeats. His moves are almost all multiple target, multiple hit moves, usually with no elemental type, that deals the kind of damage that ignores your resistance levels. Most have high critical-hit rates and inflict a status effect, typically poison, paralysis, or sleep. One multiple-hit attack lets him pick a new target if his first one dies during the course of the attack so he can finish dealing damage.
If, by some slim miracle, you manage to defeat him, the cutscene afterwards seems like you’ve finally got the big bad on the ropes, and with the power of friendship or whatever, you’re going to deal some super-special-awesome final blow and beat his smug viral ass into digi-dust. Your friends are cheering you on, the whole Digital World is holding it's infected breath in anticipation...
BUT THEN HE FUCKING DIGIVOLVES INTO SOMETHING STRONGER.
And the battle starts again, and fuck this guy so hard, seriously. I know that final bosses are supposed to be strong and challenging, but ChaosGrimmon is just fucking ridiculous. They let any of your attacks that inflict damage on multiple panels count as multiple hits to his absurdly huge HP, but that just doesn’t cut it. Fighting Yiazmat in Final Fantasy XII- a battle that took me over twelve hours to complete -wasn’t this infuriating.
I came out of the Yiazmat fight feeling hardcore and badass, like I’d really done something awesome. (And let’s face it, I kinda did. 50 million HP, 12+ hours of confined-to-my-chair combat, not saving for over half the battle; I kicked some ass that day.) But defeating ChaosGrimmon’s first form only left me with a feeling of, ‘Oh thank Cthulu I don’t have to keep level grinding; I can see the fucking ending now’, and being slapped with a second boss fight on top of that was so hilariously unfair, I laughed until I cried the whole few rounds of the fight I survived. The only real saving grace is that he tends to spam a one-hit, one-target attack that’s not that bad, but before I can really get my feet under me, the big guns come out and my whole team is history.
No, really. Fuck ChaosGrimmon. I’m going to call everyone in my address book and just laugh like a damn lunatic when I beat him, and so help me if the game crashes before I can save, because I just might lose my mind.
Day 7 - Favorite game couple.
I don’t care if they’re not canon, Ashton Anchors and Noel Chandler from Star Ocean 2 are my favorite game couple.
In Star Ocean 2, you can pair up any two people in your party and if you get their romantic points with each other to a certain level, they’ll have an ending together after the final boss is beaten. For the most part, only guy/girl couples have romantic endings and any same-sex pairs have a sort of best-friend thing going on, but I’m not the only person who agrees that they dropped the ball a little with these two.
Oddly enough, Ashton is probably the only person that Noel gets an ending with that can even be considered romantic. For two of the four girls you can pair him with, he ignores them to hang out in the woods playing with animals. The third girl ignores him to take a nap, and the fourth grudgingly lets him use her house as a home for stray dogs he finds. His endings with the other guys are pretty benign, too, with most of them being funny at Noel’s expense, such as when he is attacked by a wild dog he wants to take in, causing Claude to panic, or when he oversleeps and forces Dias to literally kick him out of bed.
Ashton’s endings are in the same vein, with a number of them involving a joke at his expense or some commentary on his legendary misfortune. Most are very sweet, though, such as his special ending with the sickly girl, Eleanor, where he encourages her to work hard and always believe in herself, or his ending with Precis where he worries over her hurting herself and almost gets a kiss, if not for his dragons interrupting the moment. Precis is really the only girl he has a romantic ending with, especially since they’re a canon couple, but a fair number of his endings with some of the male party members are sweet, if not borderline romantic.
Their ending with each other is short, with the two of them living together in a cabin somewhere in a forest. Although they don’t make that much money and have to worry about their living expenses each month, they have a carefree, relaxed life together, opting to sleep outside in the sunlight one afternoon instead of worrying about something they know will turn out alright in the end anyway. It’s not a lot, but it comes across sweetly, despite the same flatness that plagues almost every scene and ending in the game. A borderline bishounen swordsman and one of the two surviving members of an alien race shacking up in a secluded cabin deep in the woods? I know I tend to see what I want to see, but if that’s not hiding some subtext, then I don’t know what does.
Although they don’t really get to interact much in the story (mostly due to how little screen time the minor characters get in comparison to Claude, Rena, or even Dias and Celine), they have a lot of potential to have been better friends, if the story allowed for more in-depth relationship building between party members.
Both have a sort of physical deformity that makes them stand out (the dragons on Ashton's back; Noel’s ears), they both have a natural love for animals, and they’re both extremely dense when it comes to obvious social cues. Neither of them ever mention their past or their families, and are the only two party members who don’t. Their personalities mesh well together, both of them being similar enough in nature to get along and have things in common without being too identical. They’re gentle people, with kind hearts and a distaste for fighting, but will do what they have to in the name of justice. Even in battle they can almost balance out, with dual-sword-wielding Ashton being one of the most powerful warriors you can get on your team, and weak, battle mage Noel holding things down in the background when the other healer or the other mage gets cut down.
If the game had been set up to allow more interaction between the minor party members and not just the two main characters, it wouldn’t be all that hard to imagine the two having at least a friendship, if not relationship potential.