ok i made some thoughts
Click to viewPlaying SMT: Nocturne. All along I find myself estimating improvement of overall experience if I actually recognized some of these locations as a person familiar with Tokyo. Because a sphere!!!!!! what????
Then again none of them look too legit huh
I sort of recall Shinjuku from movies and pictures about Shinjuku, but it's not the same because the background of it is drawn from a weird angle. This is almost but not quite as bad as the time I was playing DS:RK1 and wondering if having a handle on contemporary history and political climate would help me understand its deep commentaries about imperialism. DS:RK1 being a serious game for thinkers.
Anyway Nocturne is dope. My favorite character is Matador. I like the MC also, he seems super normal and all his friends ignore him. My least favorite character is Dante because I nearly ragequit every time I have to use my eyes to look at a portion of any screen that does not but should contain Raidou. Obv no hate towards people who love DMC. I understand. I figure it's ok if you exchange money for a game that explicitly reveals the extent to which it will feature Dante in a prominent and/or relentless fashion. I however did not exchange money for such a game. To stop crying I have to watch the video where Raidou runs up the stairs while doing that thing with his sword holder thing. I wish Gouto used smaller words, preferably in katakanas, since whatever he says at this point is obviously incredible and life changing. Mokoi and Moh Shuvuu are too kawaii. I am glad to see everyone being best friends. And amei's expert eye is totally on point, Raidou looks nice with fewer textures.
I am at the part where you can jump off of the building and not die and I just fought a boss that looked like a creepy wolf or fox (?) maybe? I forgot what he looked like. Basically he seemed unpopular and I beat him because I have been beasting through my levels and training the shit out of all my pokemon. Right now I am trying to catch an Oni but they're all assholes and keep using War Cry ugh fuck you Oni I am going to sacrifice you in a fusion right away.
*
Over the weekend I rewatched Kino no Tabi and tried to read some of the light novels, which are unfortunately much harder to parse than BL mangas. Fortunately an internet web site has compiled some translations, which are kind of ok<-->great, though many tend to lose their charming pragmatism in English. Still, even the least pragmatic of translations will be just as good as the version released by TokyoPop, lol, lol. Good thing this version also received a quality print job, so that you can look at it and richly imagine what is inside.
Not going into Myers-Briggs/Socionics theory for any oppressive length (joke: dnr), but I genuinely appreciate the perspective of a narrative style that is neither character nor plot driven, and in fact appears almost entirely disinterested in people. It seems more like a set of empirical theses, put into story form for optimum retention. Kino no Tabi as a whole, arguably a story told from a Sensing point of information gathering and a Thinking point of information parsing, is fun times for me because:
a) I naturally need/want to tell stories from the opposite perspective, e.g. Intuitive info gathering ---> Feeling info parsing, e.g. character-driven pieces inspired by and seeking to capture very specific moods, so when I come across the exact opposite, e.g. conceptual pieces driven by some dude's idle thoughts and couched in his own very specific, concrete interests, the effect is kind of like seeing the mirrored version of a familiar photograph. I keep stumbling upon entirely new aspects of something supposedly well-understood, e.g. social processes. It's super refreshing and disorienting, e.g. a specific mood in itself, which the whole series definitely has a lot of.
and
b) In the world of Kino no Tabi, nearly everyone is some sort of bizarro, lemming-type Sensor, and the rare Ne-dominants among the masses are literally without exception these radiant, special gifts to the world. AN SLI STORY?? Subconsciously super flattering. Conversely, I am fairly sure that, in any story I ever get the urge to tell or interpret, it's the Si/Se dominants that are the special gifts. So perhaps dual theory has some traction when it comes to ideas of what is ideologically sexy hahaha
pathetic
IN CONCLUSION tinkering with the dynamics of fiction is 99.9% of what keeps me coming back to Myers-Briggs/Socionics. Turns out it's kind of a brilliant classification tool for character archetypes/interrelations. And in fact I get much less excited when the same theory gets applied to the real world (as more likely intended by its architects and most of its proponents;;;;) because putting real people in boxes whiffs of Phrenology etc. Did I just say that lol nvm it's cool no one is still reading