BrokenPromise

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"A’ight, I’ma head out now.”

— Suki Oyama

Three magical girls, all with different reactions.

Bed “Roach” Shaker had the sort of reaction that Suki expected. Ever since the “incident,” she had been making an effort to get closer to Suki. Closer as in distance wise. Suki was a little fuzzy on the details, but she vaguely remembered Nyx instructing them to fight, at which point a transformed Suki took advantage of the fact that Roach hadn’t transformed yet and basically used her magic to seduce her into submission. It was an effective way to defeat her opponent without actually harming them. However, it required Suki to take away Roach’s emblem, wrap her in tentacles, and finish her off with a barrage of kisses. This detail was a little fuzzy, but Suki almost remembered stripping her bra through her sleeve during the brief exchange. It was hard to say. When Suki looked at her collection this morning it wasn’t there. But even without that detail, it was a humiliating way to lose a sparring match, especially as the club’s code enforcer, who should be strong enough to handle any individual club member. Any effects her magic might have had on Roach had long worn off. Needless to say, there was only one reason why Roach would regard her with any kindness after that. She was the type to beat the track club members into shape, and they never did anything to her.

Nyx’s reaction was more of a surprise. Yes, she worded it in a particularly unflattering way, but a flat out rejection would have been a far worse blow to Suki’s plans. Thinking back on it, her relationship with Nyx was almost the opposite of Roach. They seemed to get along fine when they first met, but then after Suki beat Roach during the “incident”, it seemed like it soured her to Suki. Or was it the food she made that day? It was so long ago she couldn’t remember. But Nyx loved blowing apart Endless Eclipse with her ray gun. Suki would have called that night a success. Yet she had regarded her poorly ever since. Had she not beaten Roach fair and square? Did she find her powers repulsive? It was hard to know. Nyx only came to the school when club activities were going on, so it wasn’t like they could talk it out between classes.

Rainbow’s reaction was also expected, but that had less to do with some far off event that shaped their relationship and more to do with her familiarity with Tsubomi. She wasn’t clear on the details, but Tsubomi had a really bad trip and lost the ability to feel her own emotions. It was even weirder when you realized her magic was empathic by nature and was bolstered by being saturated with emotion. It was as tragic as being a deaf musician or a blind painter, but there wasn’t anything she could do. Even her most powerful spells didn’t raise any desire in Tsubomi at all. It was really sad. Suki sometimes wondered if there was some way to break the curse, or restore her emotions. She didn’t even really get how Tsubomi could live like that. If Suki was like that, she wasn’t sure if she would ever do anything.

Expected or not, all of the answers made Suki uncomfortable for one reason or another. Roach’s strange optimism, Nyx’s foreshadowing, and Tsubomi’s attempts to be optimistic.

"Uh, heh, right…” Suki took one last look at her handiwork before folding it up and slipping it into her pocket. "Welp, let’s get a move on! We’ll have to look over the place and see if we notice anything strange.” Was there a reason to come up with definitive plans when you were recruiting dark magical girls? They were all going to do what they wanted anyway.

Except…

Suki took hold of Tubomi’s wrist and ran out the door with her.

---

Hibusa Town was small, and so was its flower shop. It wasn’t any bigger than the average living room. That said, there were plenty of reasons for the inhabitants to buy flowers. The end of the school season, birthdays, weddings, and visits to shrines, the hospital, funerals, and gravestones were always better if you brought flowers. Despite the shop being in a small, outdated building, it managed to do well enough to stay afloat. The interior was almost filled to the brim with flowers. An older woman was taking everything inside in preparation to close for the night. It wouldn’t be long now. The sun was already dipping below the horizon.

There were a few buildings around, many of which were taller than the flower shop. It was located at the edge of town near a three-way intersection, so there were ample places to watch from. Everyone knew that a magical girl’s favorite place to run was along rooftops, so that was where Suki decided to wait. They just had to stay out of the dragon girl’s assumed path so that she didn’t get spooked.

"Feels like it’s been months since we did something together, heh!” Did Tsubomi even enjoy small talk? Did it make her tired? Suki had always avoided asking. "Did you want to do something later? I mean, we never played that arcade game. We should do that if you’re not busy after this.”

PC Gaming Beginner.

Try this

Gaming laptops are always expensive and never perform as well as their desktop counterparts. Expect to pay extra for the novelty of carrying around your computer. Also keep an eye out for other features you may want, like blue tooth comparability and built in wireless. Most stuff like that can be added on by buying a dongle, but it can be kind of a hassle if you use certain features daily.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@Lith Now I want to see how many hours you've logged fishing.

A World of Magic Roleplay Interest Check!

Is this still open?

Gush about your favorite characters!

@hanzo I'm not sure what's more remarkable, that you came to a month old topic to edit your favorite character, or that I chose to drop by on a whim.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

I've certainly played more card games than roguelike deck builders. But, Deep Sky Derelicts, Slay The Spire and Hand Of Fate (all have deck building elements.) And I very briefly tried Roguebook recently. Do not recommend.

@SleepingSilence

Shit, I haven't played any of those.

(But maybe the mods you played it with, make the actual deckbuilding part more substantive.)

It does, but if you don't like rougelites, you aren't going to like it. Especially on the harder difficulties. I like that you aren't always going to get an epic run, and the caveat to that is that sometimes you're not going to win when you have every challenge in the game activated at the same time.

Also, to reiterate, it's not a true mod. It's an expansion game mode that can't be played until you beat the base game.

I think Inscryption has plenty of elements that help it stand out. (That ARG puzzle sh*t that it included, certainly helped market it through FOMO.) But you can experience it's art style and music (its general aesthetics that make it unique) in a Let's Play. Least in my two cents.

I still don't get the appeal of ARGs, or watching other people play videogames. I did that as a teen and 5 minutes in I had to ask for the controller or go do something else.

How many deck builders (or meta games) have you played / how would Inscryption rank amongst them?

Aside from the card games windows ships with, virtually every digital card game I've played has been some type of deck builder. I struggle to name a lot of them because the bulk of what I played was on kongregate just when people were starting to figure out that micro-transactions were a really easy way to make money on a low effort project. Most of these games were just dumbed down versions of "magic the gathering" or "insert other popular card game here." The best ones were fun, the worst ones were whaling farms that required cash to make any real progress. Hearthstones was better than all of them, but it lacked single player options. Shadowverse was awesome, but it did what Hearthstone decided to do and has seasonal cards to keep people playing. I'm sure I've played others, but it's been too long and I can't think of them. Unless a game is absolutely amazing, I tend to forget about it after I played it a year or so ago. My steam library scares me.

But now that I have my steam library up, looks like I also played Card City Nights. I've also played a lot of triple triad in FF14 & 8, if mini games count.

This might surprise you to hear, but "meta games" don't do a whole lot for me. Yes, undertale was a fine game, but that's despite the meta stuff rather than because of it. Most of the time it comes off as an attempt to be silly, or to make a story feel more important than it really is. "Hey guys, this game you're playing is a game!" "Wow, really? I had no idea! Here I thought I was really murdering/getting murdered, but it's all a game! I should have known!" Inscryption dodges this bullet by being just a few layers deep and never truly goes full meta, even if you think it does early/mid game.

Inscryption is a difficult game to compare to other games because of the way it carries itself. It's not a true meta game, advancing through the main story requires you to step back away from the card game, it just does a lot of things very differently. How many card games even bother to have stuff like stories in them beyond some lore for window dressing? It's also not the sort of game you can really play pvp like so many others. It's very much you against a dungeon master that plays by different rules than you do. If I had to judge it based on games like it, I'd have to give it a solid 1/1.

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@SleepingSilence my condolences for your time spent in Remnant 2.

Haven’t heard of that one. But the youtuber sphere seems to like that game (and its sequel) a lot too.

I haven't tried the sequel. 2d games that go 3d tend to lose a lot of their speed, or rather, there's more information to take in visually and they can't be played as fast. But I can only beat the original when I play it on co-op, which is weird because friendly fire is always on and everyone says it's objectively the hardest way to play it. So uh, yea, might check it out when I can beat the original on my own.

It really, really has nothing to do with my liking of the genre. Inscryption is more specifically a "deck builder" game anyway. And not every card game is a deck builder. (And very few deck builders are anything like Inscryption.)

What are some deck builders that you've played?

Yes, a bad concept is a bad concept in every genre. I agree. (So whether or not I got to the point where that scripted loss happened. I would’ve and it wouldn’t feel fun. And I’ve seen several different let’s plays of this game. It’s not RNG. If you play Inscryption. You will get guaranteed failed runs.)

Most times when you play a game, you want to make progress. So when you play and actively lose progress instead. It can feel like a tedious experience.

Welcome to roguelite/like games, enjoy your stay.

And I can't stress how unimportant your first few runs are. what you do off the card table is a lot more important, until it's not of course.

Unless you’re mistaken, or I suffered a glitch. I did not get to keep my rewards for solving the puzzles between runs. I lost those cards when I lost my run. So that is *not* my experience playing Inscryption.

The cards you unlock in the puzzle box are largely irrelevant for progression, and are more added to the current game and can be found again in later runs. The talking cards and items for getting the talking cards that you get will always be in your hand on a fresh run and are the only thing that's essential for progression. By puzzles, I meant all of them, like the coo-coo clock. I forget exactly which ones are required for the talking cards, but none of that stuff resets between runs for the most part.

reddit

My third eye has opened.

So because I wasn’t really enjoying it. (And my reward for solving the game’s puzzles were cards that I lost forever due to unfair odds.) I chose not to stick around.

You didn't lose them forever. You can get them again in another run. You'd know that if you played more than a handful of runs. But it doesn't sound like you enjoyed it, so you probably shouldn't. I'd find a nice metroidvania to snuggle up to, or something in the vein of "Dust: An Elysian Tail."

Kurai Majokko: Tsundere Gekido

"I got the message, Tsubomi!”

— Suki Oyama

One by one, they piled in.

Typically, Suki would wait for a few people to show up before making an entrance. It was the best way to ensure that she was never alone with Bedshaker. But this was difficult to do when you were the one calling the meeting. She could hear her on the other side of the door, but the time to change her hiding spot had long passed, and she was quickly noticed. But maybe if she just ignored her, someone else would arrive before long.

And while Suki was right, it wasn’t exactly the person she was hoping to find. Nyx would probably just watch Bedshaker pound her to dust if anything happened. She was surrounded now, and it didn’t seem like being silent would be a winning strategy for much longer.

"Uh, well, actually…” Suki’s head twitched. Tsubomi had just taken a seat not too far away from the table. Salvation! She scurried out from under the table like a crab.When she stood up, her spine made an audible crack. "Oh hi Tsubomi! I guess that’s everyone for now?” Of course it was, everyone else had other things to tend to. "But to answer your question, Nyxia Torrentia: Neon Tempest of the Ultraviolet Rainbow, the answer to your question is both!”

Suki pulled a page out from between two books and slapped it down on the table. It had originally been the cover of a teen fashion magazine, but parts of other photos had been glued over it to frankenstein a portrait of some sort. "We’ve been hearing about a new magical girl for a while now, but nobody’s actually seen her. You know how Boss Baby is, they tend to leave well enough alone if they don’t directly threaten the Detention Club. But I asked around and got a few details about a ‘spirit’ running across some rooftops. She’s got wild red hair, uh, red eyes, uh, a tight dress, uh, and her uh…” Suki patted her chest. "She’s pretty top heavy. Some guys told me she was bigger than Roach. And had a bunch of dragons coming out of her back. I tried to make a picture of her by clipping out pictures from magazines, and the people who saw her said it sort of looked like her!”

Suki gestured towards the picture she made. It was difficult to determine how accurate it was without knowing what the woman in question looked like, but there might have been other issues with it. But that would be for every girl observing the picture to decide for themselves.

Artistic rendition of the mysterious magical girl

"I took some liberties with the outfit, since everyone described it differently. B-But a lot of people see her in the same spot!” Suki shot a smile at everyone. "They usually see her jumping over the flower shop juuuuuuust as the sun sets. The Miseria don’t come out until total darkness, so we should have plenty of time to investigate this before our nightly hunt starts. Wadaya think guys? Sounds interesting, right?” Suki looked at everyone to gauge their reactions.

Symphony on High

^{No funny banner this time, fam.}

With everyone present, the briefing could begin post haste. Fritzi stood beside a projector screen that had pictures of both St Bianchi Church and Dante’s on it.

”Alright agents, we got Binky back, but GEMINI isn’t quite at full strength yet. Timekeeper is still passing out in piles of sand, and Oros the Mad has taken an interest in Cerberus. The latter wouldn’t normally be an issue, as she’s more or less treated GEMINI as a neutral party in the past and the Hand is a far more immediate danger for GEMINI operations. However, she’s recently attacked Timekeeper with the intent to kill. She can’t be left to her own devices.” She pointed at the screen beside her. ”We will be splitting up the GEMINI squad to tackle both issues in one night. Some of you will go to Dante’s, where there should be some lead as to what’s ailing Timekeeper. All of this started after he encountered a succubus there, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that Dante’s has something to do with it all.”

”Meanwhile, an esper known as Sovereign claims that she has to bring Cerberus to St Bianchi Church, where she claims Oros the Mad is waiting for her.” Binky’s eyes wandered onto Finn. ”We suspected it was a trap, but between Orion’s interrogation and reports from the water truck incident, it seems that she ‘drove off’ Oros by making a deal with her and got further details about Cerberus from one of our own agents.”

”Against my better judgment, I’m letting Timekeeper join everyone for these operations. After the deal with the Diver, I’m unsure if I’ll be able to field enough freelancers for two full operations. Tackling these issues separately is not ideal either. If Oros is expecting us, I’d just as soon not have her change her mind and meet us at Dante’s. That said, the goal of these operations should be apparent. We need to go to Dante’s to see about slaying the monster that’s cursed Timekeeper, and we need to go to St Bianchi Church to learn more about Oros’ motivation. That said, we haven’t formed much of a battle plan yet. We haven’t looked into Dante’s and Sovereign was dropped on us very recently.” Fritzi looked at Ashley. ”Speaking of, what was your read on Sovereign? Can she be trusted to keep Cerberus safe?”

“I would say she takes the stereotype of a money-obsessed mercenary to the furthest possible extreme,” Ashley replied with a small frown. “I get the feeling that she’d fully devote herself to any possible task as long as some form of reward was waiting for her at the end of it. As for her keeping Cerberus safe,” the high-tech heroine continued. “I’m not sure I would trust her to do that, or anything else, especially if we weren’t offering her some form of compensation.”

”We are going to be hiring freelancers for these operations. Are you advising against letting her tag along, even if she’s paid to be there?”

“Well, if that’s the case, then I suppose it would be fine,” Ashley replied. “I mean, she was the one Oros tasked with bringing Cerberus there in the first place, and as long as we have some form of support on hand in the event an extraction is needed, I don’t think Cerberus will be in any additional danger than would otherwise be the case. That said,” the Knight of Tomorrow added. “If freelancers are available, I’d suggest having them compose the entire support team for the St. Bianchi op. At the very least, they’re slightly less likely to be perceived as a threat by Oros, as opposed to a team including known G.E.M.I.N.I. agents. Plus, it will allow us to put all of our admittedly-limited resources into investigating Dante’s.”

Fritzi smiled. ”Now there’s an idea! It also lets us keep Timekeeper’s situation on the down low. Meanwhile, the freelancers will jump at the chance to brag about having a close scuff with our mad esper.”

Mika scoffed. ”Really? You’re sending me out there by myself?” She looked between Fritzi and Ashley. ”Her file claims that she can see the future. I doubt she’s going to be fooled by a bunch of freelance espers. Not to mention she’s already attacked us once. It would be more suspicious not to send me in with some backup.”

Fritzi chuckled. ”You’re so animated today. I don’t see how Oros’s abilities invalidate Orion’s strategy. It does allow us to pool our resources into one operation, and if Oros is less inclined to ‘look’, we’re less likely to be discovered.” She placed a finger on her chin. ”Though if we’re trying to prevent her from looking, maybe it would be good to give you a little bit of help. Any volunteers?”

”Oh! Me!” Angelie threw an arm around Mika’s neck and gave a thumbs up. ”I’ll be Claudia’s backup! If Sovereign or Oros try anything, I’ll make sure they regret it!”

Mika sighed. ”I don’t like it, but she’ll work.” Angelie cheered before hugging Mika.

And here I thought she didn’t need any help… Ashley mused, doing her best to suppress an annoyed scowl. While she was glad Ellie would be looking after the feisty feline, the angelic agent was as distressingly far from subtle as one could get, and Ashley only hoped that her addition to such a delicate situation wouldn’t backfire catastrophically…

”I don’t anticipate Dante’s having any hired espers, so this arrangement should be fine.” She turned to the rest of the GEMINI espers. ”We have a floor plan of Dante’s, but have little information on what else you should expect. To our knowledge, they do not appear to be affiliated with the weretiger mafia. It should just be temptation and dream monsters like the succubus Timekeeper encountered. Did you have any more questions?”

“None at the present time, ma’am,” Ashley replied.

Finn shook his head. ”Nothing else I need to know at the moment.”

Estelle blinked, then shook her head. Nope, she definitely didn’t zone out for a moment there.

”In that case, we’ll prepare for deployment immediately. It shouldn’t take more than a few days to get the freelancers we need.” Fritzi shot a smile at everyone. ”You’re dismissed until then.”

Video Games: The General Discussion & Community Thread Number Two

@SleepingSilence Unless your game "glitched out" and a wall of grizzly cards appeared, you didn't encounter a scripted loss. Even so, complaining about scripted losses is a carry over from RPGS where you'd jump into a long, tedious battle and waste resources trying to beat a boss that you absolutely can't. You aren't making progress, and you're dragging out a fight when you could be experiencing the rest of the story. The thing with Inscryption is, you progress against non-game objectives carries over between deaths, and you need to be really good or "lucky" to encounter the grisly wall anyway. I'm quite confident you didn't encounter it.

The game also has an overwhelmingly positive rating on steam, with about a thousand people not recommending it to one hundred thousand that do. So if we're going to listen to the court of popular opinion (not something I typically do) then the game is absolutely worth playing.

But you don't like the game for one reason or another, and I'm fine with that. Card games aren't for everyone and they do require you to ignore certain video game conventions, like the idea that you cal always win with a good strategy. Come to think of it, rouge-lite/like games have a lot of the same quirks as traditional card games, like constantly starting from scratch and luck being a huge factor in your game.

What are you currently playing (or were until you stopped)?

@SleepingSilence

I'm not sure if you're talking about Inscryption, card games, or games in general here, so I'll answer for all three.

I've 100% inscryption, along with all of the Kacee's mod stuff. I can't remember the last other card game I've played because it's been years. Though the standouts were Hearthstone and anime Hearthstone (Shadowverse). Sadly, F2P mechanics do be F2P mechanics, and you need to play those games a lot if you don't want to spend money to be competitive. I don't play them anymore. SYNTHETIK has been the game I boot when I want a gaming fix.