Maybe the Guardians just need a hug

My “asking about one piece is illegal” policy is my rule so I get to choose when to allow it and decline to execute ppl for their crimes. I don’t think I’ve ever actually said anything about the Wano arc. Like I’ve gone this entire arc without saying a word about it. And that would mostly be because I haven’t been very impressed by it. Not gonna dive super deep into it, but it feels too sprawling. Massive cast, way too much time spent on side characters that I never got attached to. It’s had a handful of well loved fellow Supernovas there but barely made any use of them. It’s 50 chapters long already and we’re only just now getting to a flashback with a character who we’ve heard a lot about but that I feel 0 actual interest in. Wano’s been a place of interest for over 450 chapters. That’s a LOT of build up, and I’ve never felt that Momo or Kin’emon or Kanjuro or Raizo did a good job of interesting me or investing me in Wano in the preceding arcs. Ryuma’s zombie was awesome 450 chapters ago, and I feel like that connection has been underutilized. O-Kiku? Amazing and also underutilized. There are still good parts about it and I have no doubts that most fans are enjoying it plenty, but the arc hasn’t done anything to reignite any of the passion I used to have for OP. 

One last pro: I felt vindicated when Luffy got fuckng one-shotted by Kaido b/c I still remember when one anon tried to argue with me that Luffy could totally beat the Yonko after the time skip One last con: I felt super robbed that Oda just went and skipped over the Revere. I wanted to see politics in motion, and Vivi, and political intrigue and the secret Straw Hats fanclub meeting each other and all that good stuff! We were robbed. 

Not a huge fan. There are elements that are, by themselves, good, like Endeavor’s multiple acknowledgements that he fucked up and can only “try” to atone for it, but numerous other parts of how it’s been handled fucked it up bad IMO. What you said about his wife/daughter in particular is my biggest sticking point. Wrote all about this exact topic a ways back (here), and I think that all holds true still. 

Two things to say here. One, I was concerned when I remembered that Zoe Quinns has already been a target of an intense online harassment campaign before. I’m not planning on diving into that. I’m an advocate of people both believing victims and people doing their own research before jumping to conclusions, but the one article I’ve looked at claiming to ~unravel~ the initial statements made by Zoe regarding Alec was a mile long and seemed like the webpage equivalent of a red string conspiracy theory board. 

Second, even if you aren’t invested in NITW or its creators, it’s kinda crappy to treat a situation like this as a form of entertainment. 

Yes, I’ve read about the situation. I’m not going to try to summarize it here, so I’ll just provide this link. People who don’t know but want to can read more there and it’s highly recommended to read the posts by Scott Bensen, the lead writer and director of the game. 

Getting to it, “drama” doesn’t really do much to describe the situation. At least how I feel about it, “drama” is beauty vlougers on youtube making back to back callout videos that ultimately seem to be more about fighting for subscriber counts than anything else. The recent events involving Alec and his role in the NITW game and the lives of the people around him is something very far away from drama. It’s a situation of widespread abuse going back years that “ended” tragically, with the people involved making single statements they feel they owe to others and then stepping away from the public spotlight to continue processing both Alec’s death and the realization that what they personally went through had happened to so many other people without their realizing it. That’s not drama, that’s the reality of the life in the 21st century where creative types and their audiences feel connected to each other, which inherently involves the individual creatives becoming partially public figures who are expected to talk to their audience. Additionally, separate from that expectation, it’s also Scott and company’s right to be able to use their platforms to say, “I’ve heard something awful about my former team member, and this is how I feel about it and what I’ve been through myself.” 

As far as recommending the game goes, there are two basic perspectives that come to my mind. The first is cynical. It’s, “Sure Alec was minimally involved in the creative processes (aside from the music), but regardless of that and the work of the other team members, the success of NITW enabled an abusive person to gain more influence and hurt more people.” A simpler version of that take is as direct as, “A person who I would never want to support was involved in making NITW, so I do not want to support NITW.” However, the flip side of that is equally true. Even though NITW wouldn’t exist without Alec, Scott Benson went through veritable hell to create NITW because of Alec, and to decide to condemn the game is also to condemn all the hard work and passion of one of Alec’s victims. 

Scott himself has said that it’s up to every person to decide how they should feel about this, and that’s true. But Alec is gone, while Scott and Bethany are still here. I’ll let that statement speak for itself. Plus, NITW speaks for itself. Regardless of the abusive actions of its lead programmer and composer, the game is a heartfelt and masterful exploration of fighting for hope and life in dark places while your town slowly dies and every year people seem to struggle a bit more than they did before. I would feel differently about that if every person on the NITW team was someone who I would feel bad about supporting, but that’s not the case with NITW. The only thing the recent developments have changed for me is to make me feel even more acutely invested in the heart-wrenching tale of personal and collective struggle that Scott and Bethany worked so hard to bring into the world while fighting their way through their own struggles to make it through each day. 

I have not played! I know it has rave reviews, and I am genuinely curious/tempted. My main issue is that I still don’t know how much I actually like Fire Emblem games. Do I like the characters? Absolutely. But do I like the gameplay itself? Uhhh not necessarily. I played Awakening and enjoyed it, but I tried playing Fates Conquest, got like 1/3rd? 1/2? of the way through the game and just dropped it and never finished it. That’s what I worry about with Three Houses. Strategy games that have huge, oversized maps stress me out because I’m a perfectionist and I get paralyzed by the prospect of messing up on something where it’s tricky to undo your mistakes. But at the same time doing something on too easy of a mode takes that challenge and fun out of it for me.

Another major problem for me with games like FE is that I have a hard time with games that have branching stories, time limited things to do, and where making some choices blocks off other parts of the game. I want to experience everything! Which is why games like BoTW are so essentially perfect for me--the game is set up to enable to you have the chance to do everything the game has to offer, and you can do it at your own pace in any order. It takes a massive amount of stress off my shoulders that I get burdened by when I play game that give you consequence based freedom where everything you do has the potential to bar you from doing/experience something else. 

So that’s what’s holding me back! I’m still very much tempted and intrigued by it and how positively it has been reviewed, but I just don’t know if it is fundamentally the kind of game I’d fully be able to enjoy. Frankly, I’m more like to list it as a birthday or Christmas gift option than I am to decide to buy the game myself. There’s just so much other stuff that is going to be comming out soon that I am embracing wholeheartedly, so Fire Emblem, pros and cons combined, is a bit lower down on my priorities list