You Will Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Orgies.
I've played a few hours of the demo for Metaphor: ReFantazio, which is basically mediaeval fantasy Persona, and unfortunately I love it. Looks like it might be time to sink a hundred hours into another Atlus game.
When the protagonist's dialogue options turned out to be voiced, I was so shocked that I paused and had to take a moment to recover. It's not what I expect from something so clearly rooted in the Persona series!
Hilariously, the background music is diegetic; your fairy companion is magically making music play in your head. Incredible. I also inexplicably find the music on the level-up screen after every battle extremely funny; it's something about the singing!
This game immediately got its claws into me by introducing a mouthy, overconfident young man with a guilt complex and a desperate need to do what's right. 'Kind of a little shit' and 'fundamentally good-hearted' is a very hard combination for me to resist. And then he was nice to our protagonist when everyone else looked at us with suspicion! I immediately loved him and wanted to be his friend.
(To be honest, I've already checked whether I can romance Strohl. The answer: no, because this game has no romance system. I'm going to pretend I'm romancing him.)
At one point an army captain asked me about my skills, and the game presented me with a list of options. 'I can take a lot of punishment,' I replied. The captain's response was 'Really now? I'd not have guessed... Sounds like an invitation to me.'
I felt the game had looked straight at me and said, 'You intentionally made the protagonist say the horniest of the options, didn't you?' and, to be honest, it was right.
The rest of this entry will be a dream roundup!
Dreamt the YouTuber Sarah Z wanted me to brainstorm discussion points for her next video essay; she gave me a marker and pointed me towards a whiteboard to get started. The topic of the video was annoyances in general, so I was supposed to list annoyances in different areas, e.g. videogames. This struck me as too broad a subject for a video essay, but I decided against saying so.
Dreamt Runic had drawn sexually explicit fanart for assorted Final Fantasy and Danganronpa pairings. The piece I remember was Kaede/Shuichi from Danganronpa V3, with Kaede on top. Not my pairing, but I could appreciate the artistry; the pieces were all beautifully drawn and coloured!
Dreamt I was out and about. I realised I needed the loo, so I walked into the nearest house and went to the master bedroom to use the ensuite, passing the house's residents on the way: a woman in maybe her sixties and a couple of young children.
It occurred to me only once I was in the bedroom that wandering into a stranger's house to use the toilet was an extremely weird thing to do. I quickly left the room and apologised to the woman. She was surprisingly understanding. She called me by my mother's name at first, causing me to realise she knew my mother and had spotted the family resemblance, so maybe it's just the sort of thing she expected of my mother.
After we'd talked, I went to actually use the loo, but I was delayed by the woman's son: a man in his twenties with long brown hair. He asked me what I had done to diversify cotton production lately. Embarrassed, I admitted I hadn't been giving much thought to the fabrics I bought. He made a disgusted, dismissive noise.
Dreamt there was a guy in the house I was staying in: a housemate's boyfriend, maybe? Someone I was acquainted with and didn't dislike but wasn't that close to, not a personal friend. He'd been in a bad mood recently, which made the atmosphere a bit uncomfortable. But then we got into a conversation about music, which it turned out was a topic he was really interested in; he had a lot of trivia to share. I remember at one point we discussed a song about doing laundry by a rapper called Dry Cent.
Eventually, I had to end the conversation because I was planning to visit my parents and needed to set off. The guy thanked me, quietly but sincerely, and I realised the conversation had really cheered him up. He seemed a little embarrassed, presumably aware that he'd been grumpy lately and that it had probably made him harder to live with.
Dreamt I had to go to the moon for a few days for work. The landing was a bit rocky, but the spacecraft was still operational, fortunately. It was a pretty bleak place to be: the black of the sky, the grey of the dust at my feet, the complete absence of life.
A couple of weeks after I'd returned to Earth, it suddenly really hit me, and I freaked out at my brother about it while we were standing in a queue together. 'Joseph! I went to the moon! I went to the fucking moon! I crashed the spacecraft, and I still made it back! What the fuck?'
He considered this for a moment. 'How was it?' he asked.
'So depressing,' I replied, without hesitation.
Dreamt I was present in person at a recording of Make Some Noise, the improvised Dropout comedy skit show hosted by Sam Reich. Sam himself was not here on this occasion, for whatever reason, so the contestants were just doing their own thing.
It occurred to me that one skit, which involved devouring Skittles from a little bowl, seemed to be going on for a strangely long time, and then I realised it was because Sam wasn't present to hit the buzzer and end the skit.
'As Sam's not here, do you just have to eat all of the Skittles?' I asked.
'Do you think Sam can't fuck?' one of the contestants retorted, laughing. (Either Grant O'Brien or Ross Bryant? They look very similar.)
I puzzled over this for some time. Was Sam unable to host the show because he was off somewhere having sex? Or was the implication that Sam was incapable of having sex because it was instead his job to man the buzzer that told other people it was time to stop having sex? Was Sam Reich always stuck with the admin at the orgy?
Dreamt I was at a firework display. It was being held in weird conditions; it was lightly overcast but still very much daylight.
Everyone counted down, and the first firework went off, not very impressively on account of the fact that it was day. However, it drew my eye to something else in the sky. Some sort of large bird I had never seen before? As it descended, I saw its large beak silhouetted against the clouds and realised with excitement that it was a pelican.
I went to investigate where the pelican had landed and discovered a little train of five pelicans, almost beak to tail. Each had a baby pelican sitting on its back (old enough to be feathered), with the exception of the fifth and last, which had an entire pile of cheerful little baby pelicans riding it.
The pelicans ran around the plains in perfect single file, each with its passenger (or, in the case of the fifth, passengers), and we all stood and watched, the firework display forgotten.
A few nights ago, I dreamt there was a large, poisonous red and black frog on my bedroom wall, right next to the bed. I dreamt this so vividly that I had to turn on the light in real life to check whether it was really there. I don't usually get confused about whether my dreams are real; it was a very disconcerting experience!
For the benefit of anyone who's concerned: I have not been poisoned by a frog.
When the protagonist's dialogue options turned out to be voiced, I was so shocked that I paused and had to take a moment to recover. It's not what I expect from something so clearly rooted in the Persona series!
Hilariously, the background music is diegetic; your fairy companion is magically making music play in your head. Incredible. I also inexplicably find the music on the level-up screen after every battle extremely funny; it's something about the singing!
This game immediately got its claws into me by introducing a mouthy, overconfident young man with a guilt complex and a desperate need to do what's right. 'Kind of a little shit' and 'fundamentally good-hearted' is a very hard combination for me to resist. And then he was nice to our protagonist when everyone else looked at us with suspicion! I immediately loved him and wanted to be his friend.
(To be honest, I've already checked whether I can romance Strohl. The answer: no, because this game has no romance system. I'm going to pretend I'm romancing him.)
At one point an army captain asked me about my skills, and the game presented me with a list of options. 'I can take a lot of punishment,' I replied. The captain's response was 'Really now? I'd not have guessed... Sounds like an invitation to me.'
I felt the game had looked straight at me and said, 'You intentionally made the protagonist say the horniest of the options, didn't you?' and, to be honest, it was right.
The rest of this entry will be a dream roundup!
Dreamt the YouTuber Sarah Z wanted me to brainstorm discussion points for her next video essay; she gave me a marker and pointed me towards a whiteboard to get started. The topic of the video was annoyances in general, so I was supposed to list annoyances in different areas, e.g. videogames. This struck me as too broad a subject for a video essay, but I decided against saying so.
Dreamt Runic had drawn sexually explicit fanart for assorted Final Fantasy and Danganronpa pairings. The piece I remember was Kaede/Shuichi from Danganronpa V3, with Kaede on top. Not my pairing, but I could appreciate the artistry; the pieces were all beautifully drawn and coloured!
Dreamt I was out and about. I realised I needed the loo, so I walked into the nearest house and went to the master bedroom to use the ensuite, passing the house's residents on the way: a woman in maybe her sixties and a couple of young children.
It occurred to me only once I was in the bedroom that wandering into a stranger's house to use the toilet was an extremely weird thing to do. I quickly left the room and apologised to the woman. She was surprisingly understanding. She called me by my mother's name at first, causing me to realise she knew my mother and had spotted the family resemblance, so maybe it's just the sort of thing she expected of my mother.
After we'd talked, I went to actually use the loo, but I was delayed by the woman's son: a man in his twenties with long brown hair. He asked me what I had done to diversify cotton production lately. Embarrassed, I admitted I hadn't been giving much thought to the fabrics I bought. He made a disgusted, dismissive noise.
Dreamt there was a guy in the house I was staying in: a housemate's boyfriend, maybe? Someone I was acquainted with and didn't dislike but wasn't that close to, not a personal friend. He'd been in a bad mood recently, which made the atmosphere a bit uncomfortable. But then we got into a conversation about music, which it turned out was a topic he was really interested in; he had a lot of trivia to share. I remember at one point we discussed a song about doing laundry by a rapper called Dry Cent.
Eventually, I had to end the conversation because I was planning to visit my parents and needed to set off. The guy thanked me, quietly but sincerely, and I realised the conversation had really cheered him up. He seemed a little embarrassed, presumably aware that he'd been grumpy lately and that it had probably made him harder to live with.
Dreamt I had to go to the moon for a few days for work. The landing was a bit rocky, but the spacecraft was still operational, fortunately. It was a pretty bleak place to be: the black of the sky, the grey of the dust at my feet, the complete absence of life.
A couple of weeks after I'd returned to Earth, it suddenly really hit me, and I freaked out at my brother about it while we were standing in a queue together. 'Joseph! I went to the moon! I went to the fucking moon! I crashed the spacecraft, and I still made it back! What the fuck?'
He considered this for a moment. 'How was it?' he asked.
'So depressing,' I replied, without hesitation.
Dreamt I was present in person at a recording of Make Some Noise, the improvised Dropout comedy skit show hosted by Sam Reich. Sam himself was not here on this occasion, for whatever reason, so the contestants were just doing their own thing.
It occurred to me that one skit, which involved devouring Skittles from a little bowl, seemed to be going on for a strangely long time, and then I realised it was because Sam wasn't present to hit the buzzer and end the skit.
'As Sam's not here, do you just have to eat all of the Skittles?' I asked.
'Do you think Sam can't fuck?' one of the contestants retorted, laughing. (Either Grant O'Brien or Ross Bryant? They look very similar.)
I puzzled over this for some time. Was Sam unable to host the show because he was off somewhere having sex? Or was the implication that Sam was incapable of having sex because it was instead his job to man the buzzer that told other people it was time to stop having sex? Was Sam Reich always stuck with the admin at the orgy?
Dreamt I was at a firework display. It was being held in weird conditions; it was lightly overcast but still very much daylight.
Everyone counted down, and the first firework went off, not very impressively on account of the fact that it was day. However, it drew my eye to something else in the sky. Some sort of large bird I had never seen before? As it descended, I saw its large beak silhouetted against the clouds and realised with excitement that it was a pelican.
I went to investigate where the pelican had landed and discovered a little train of five pelicans, almost beak to tail. Each had a baby pelican sitting on its back (old enough to be feathered), with the exception of the fifth and last, which had an entire pile of cheerful little baby pelicans riding it.
The pelicans ran around the plains in perfect single file, each with its passenger (or, in the case of the fifth, passengers), and we all stood and watched, the firework display forgotten.
A few nights ago, I dreamt there was a large, poisonous red and black frog on my bedroom wall, right next to the bed. I dreamt this so vividly that I had to turn on the light in real life to check whether it was really there. I don't usually get confused about whether my dreams are real; it was a very disconcerting experience!
For the benefit of anyone who's concerned: I have not been poisoned by a frog.