Posted by prismatic 1 day ago
EDIT: it does, I just had to google "Ebrietas latin" (and got https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ebrietas), otherwise it only returned references to the monster.
There is one key item in the game called “Eyes of a blood-drunk hunter”
The idea that monsters can be understood, and spared because in the end they’re exhibiting human flaws, is such a powerful storytelling device.
Sapkowski is from Poland, though. Still Slav, but still.
Must be quite the opposite of a real gamer, so I naturally like the simpler and less complex approach.
More or less the easy stuff, and I'm not completely alone.
I think first and foremost, a particular game should be fun from quite early on before you have developed much deep experience, and then any progress through different levels should be logical and straightforward.
In both respects from my simple-minded starting point I guess I enjoy it most when it's about as rewarding as finishing off an order of french fries :)
Talk about excitement rising to melancholy amounts . . .
Both "Chrono Trigger" and "Crono Cross" make you question your actions and whether or not it was worth on a monster genocide.
Pacifist is more like a puzzle game, and I didn’t find it all that challenging at all.
If you go the “kill only some people” route, I don’t think you would ever really be strong enough for this to be fun due to not levelling up enough to keep up with later stage enemies. So you’re going to be heavily incentivized to go full pacifist to bypass levelling entirely or genocide to get enough levels. Then of course you’ll hit the wall at the end…
It's clearly the intended progression, since the second playthrough then changes to reflect the fact that the game "remembers" your first one.
My guess is that Toby's intent was for you to play the game normally, get one of the many, many different Neutral endings, reset to get the Pacifist ending, and then a few years later come back to Genocide after hearing about this weird route where you get to fight the other font skeleton.
...huh? This is very much not true. The most difficult[0] encounters happen on the Genocide route, in which you powerlevel like it's a normal JRPG until the encounters run out. Pacifist is only slightly harder than a "No Mercy" neutral run[1].
For the first two thirds of this article I was screaming "BUT WHAT ABOUT UNDERTALE". Toby Fox basically wrote the book on the moral quandries of killing monsters in video games, and this article does not do his work justice. It feels like the author wanted to briefly mention it at the end as a way to cap off the essay. And, while I haven't played Shadow of the Colossus, I suspect the inspection of that is about as surface-level as the tacked-on mention of UNDERTALE at the end.
I feel like I just read a high school English essay.
[0] Mechanically and emotionally.
[1] As in, a run in which you kill everything you see, but do not exhaust the kill limit.
Regular JRPG farming is not enough to trigger this route. You need to farm out every single area with enemies, starting from the very first one and never leaving one unfarmed, otherwise you accidentally exit the route even if you keep trying. You seem to know this but somehow pretend it's the normal JRPG experience?
As for Shadow of the Colossus, this article has flaws but its analysis of that game isn't one of them. It's very much what "everyone" knows about the game.