This is a question that’s been bothering me, and after looking into it I think I get it

So kobolds first appear in Germanic folklore as domestic spirits. Kobolds are also considered mine spirits, causing cave-ins and tapping on things in the dark to scare miners

Think the elves from The Elves and the Shoemaker, but bastards

This association with mines and caves and bastardy gets them into the world of tabletop RPGs when Gary Gygax adds them to his fantasy supplement of Chainmail. Kobolds are later added to Dungeons & Dragons as a subterranean race of monsters

Here’s the important thing: due to a throwaway line in the rulebooks about the kobolds having doglike voices, the first artist to depict a D&D kobold gave it a dog nose

This is the beginning point in the divergent evolution

Kobolds in western TTRPG will notoriously become more and more reptilian with each generation, leaning on the interpretation of “chihuahua dragons,” but it’s at this time, heavily inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, that the video game series Wizardry begins

They brought the dog kobolds with them

Wizardry becomes extremely popular in Japan, inspiring JRPG series like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy as well as manga series like Dungeon Meshi. And while in the west the kobold has become increasingly reptilian with each edition, the Japanese kobold has become increasingly canine

And this is why in the greater fantasy genre, kobolds represent everything from

To

To

And

Some relevant art of mine

How to unlock double barrel shotgun in DDLC? The regular Colt 1911 does shit damage to Monika, I run out of bullets before she goes to the second phase and teleports you out of the dungeon.

First, do the Sayori sidequest on Day 1.

On Day 2, you need to visit the Aoyama Pawn Shop and use the discount coupons you got from Sayori to trade with Mr. Aoyama. You need to use Talk, not Buy, since Buy just takes you to the regular shop. Exhaust his dialogue and he’ll eventually say something about really needing a new washing machine, but being short on cash. You get the option to tell him about the bundle of coupons you have, and he’ll say he’ll trade you for them. He offers a rare and expensive knife. Take it. 

Take the Exquisite Knife to Yuri before Day 4. If you do, she’ll note the Exquisite Knife and trade for it with the double barrel shotgun (she knows her dad’s safebox combination number), plus ammunition. Ammo for the double barrel is very scarce, so I recommend you stick to the 1911 and the dual Tec-9 smgs for the dungeon run itself, and to use the double barrel only when you get to the boss.

Is there a chance to unlock double barrel shotgun if I’m starting the game with PSY build, but then shifting it to PSY/Combat mix? I don’t wanna minmax yet.

Hmm yeah but it might take some reloads on Day 1, since PSY is pretty inconvenient for Sayori’s sidequest. All enemies except the miniboss (ironically) are resistant to PSY and the dialogue choices that allow for the much needed shortcuts do skill checks for Gumption, Pulchritude, and Vim, none of which are entirely necessary for early PSY builds.

If you don’t wanna reload too many times, I recommend you grind it out a little before the sidequest. Farm the Kendo-club Delinquents for a bit until you have enough money for at least 3 Hone Proses and 3 Amplify Lyricisms. Those increase party defense and attack, respectively, for a lot, especially early game, for a limited amount of time. You’ll need 2, but carry a third one just in case something goes bad (it’s really easy to get stunlocked by the Helix Gangers and thus lose on item time). That should let you do the sidequest easily.

ngl: they had me til Gumption, Pulchritude, and Vim u_u

whenever you ask your friend who’s really into JRPGs “hey which one do i start with is the newest one fine” they always go “no, what you gotta do is head on over to ebay and look up the entry that completely bombed commercially. You’ll see that it goes for $800. Close ebay. Download an emulator for a console no younger than 17 years old. Download the ROM, and also this laundry list of various tweaks, retextures, and QoL tweaks. Pull up this exact spoiler-free guide put up a decade ago from GameFAQs, and you’ll experience the best game this series has to offer.” Like???

And they’re right

Don’t forget that you specifically want the unlocalised Japanese ROM so that you can apply a fan-made English translation patch published in 1998 by a guy with a dick joke for a screen handle because the official localisation was delayed for 20 years due to licensing issues and totally butchers the script by removing all the late 1990s pop culture references.

Look, I know facile trope inversion is for weenies, but I still really want to see a JRPG-style game where the shouty teenage boy who gives long speeches about the power of friendship is the fragile healer and the girl with the gentle piano-and-strings theme song and self-sacrificing “must save everyone” attitude is the melee tank. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here.

I’m not even being ironic – I honestly think it would work better that way. Like, let’s put power-of-friendship boy in a position where he actually needs to rely on his friends to get anything done, rather than just talking about how they’ve inspired him while he solos the final boss. And as for Little Miss Messiah Complex, well, tell me you can’t perfectly picture how the standard tank protagonist move where you intercept a blow meant for a critically wounded party member, facetank a fucktillion points of damage, then get back up again with one hit point and a voice quip about how the baddies will have to do better than that would play out under her idiom. You can see it, right?

People in the notes are looking at the second one saying “that’s just She-Ra, that’s just–” no, it isn’t. Gentle piano-and-strings theme song, remember? It’s essential that each archetype’s stock personality remain intact, and only the role changes.

She’s sweet. She’s humble. She wears homespun dresses and grows pretty flowers in her free time. She has that vibe that says “I’m going to die halfway through the game to make my boyfriend sad”, except that doesn’t happen, because the baddies don’t have a big enough gun.

I want to see the obligatory scene where the bad guy’s army is burning down her Beloved Peasant Village™, and she’s standing between the evil commander and a group of soulful orphans, begging with tears in her eyes for him to see that there’s already been enough death – except when he callously rejects her entreaties and moves to backhand her out of the way, she catches his armoured fist mid-swing, without even the faintest tremor of effort, and in a tone of infinite patience informs him: “You misunderstand, sir: it’s not our lives I’m pleading for.”

And then she punches people until all the soldiers run away and feels conflicted about it afterwards.

Age is just a number...

The Golden Girls Take Manhattan DX will be releasing for Mac/PC this year!

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hi everybody. we made a new trailer. lol

jrpg final bosses will seem way too over the top but then I encounter one fruit fly irl and start to monologue when it dodges me

"no... how did you survive my attack... what is this power??"

Me chasing a mosquito at 2 in the morning: “You insignificant little pest. How dare you disturb me?! I will destroy you and all your kind!”

It's my annoyingly pedantic opinion that your JRPG plot isn't gnostic unless it involves a character achieving a union of spirit and matter in some way. Otherwise it's just killing a guy who calls themself god, and that's just Christian but you're playing for the Roman team.

Like if you can beat god to death with a tire iron that's not really gnostic. You can do that in dark souls but it's only because an Aeon fucked up the spirit/matter dichotomy so bad that he had to hook himself up to the material world like an IV drip.

elemental resistances in bio or I block

op doesn’t have the skill to scan encounters for stats

Kids these days will really be publicly posting their elemental weaknesses and what they drop when slain.

One of my favourite things is when a JRPG isn’t one of the ones where you kill God at the end, but there’s some obscure side quest that lets you fight God anyway – you know, just for fun!

Note: not every boss that could reasonably be described as a “god” is Fighting God at the End; particularly in Western RPGs, “gods” that you fight are often just generic monsters or wizards with edgy titles. In order to properly Fight God at the End, the boss in question must fulfill at least 50% of the following criteria:

Mutuals Do This

I never read the Earthsea books as a kid.  I started reading the first with my mother and when we got to the part where Ged rips open the world and lets his shadow out I got too scared to continue.  This is interesting in retrospect because I made my way through the other book that scared me that much, which was A Wind in the Door.  In both cases the thing I was afraid of was death - I was never afraid of anything but death.  In L’Engle’s books death was the adversary, the Ecthroi, creatures made of non-being and terror, manifested in the first book as fascism and in the second as cancer.   In LeGuin’s books death was not actually the enemy, but the fear of death, and the mistakes men made in their fear.  I could handle L’Engle’s Christian ideology because it externalized the evil.  LeGuin’s Jungian worldview - the idea that the evil was inside me and of my own working - was too much for me.  I hated Ged and I couldn’t watch him hurt the world in his pride.

The BBC recently made a long radio adaptation of all five Earthsea books and I just finished listening to it.   It seems pretty faithful - the dialog has that stilted straight-from-the-page quality about it - and they even try to address the whitewashing problem that has plagued adaptations of the books by giving the white-skinned Kargs south asian accents, which… would have worked better if they’d done it the other way around, but they tried.  I feel like I have the gist of the books now, in any case. 

Earthsea is instructive because the first trilogy, written from 1968 to 1972, is absolutely straight out of Joseph Campbell and at times resembles Star Wars more than anything else.  This, the hero with a thousand faces, is the ideology I was raised in.  It’s full of useful instructions about how to become a good king if you’re a boy or a good queen if you’re a girl, but it’s not very good at venturing outside those parameters, or at questioning its own politics.  Campbell says “it was ever thus” but the flipside of that is that it can never be otherwise.  So you end up with generation after generation learning and suffering and accepting the world as it is.

LeGuin saw this, came back to her world 20 years later and tore it all down.   She found the Campbellian status quo wanting and brought revolution, albeit a more textually heterosexual one than we’re used to these days.  It turns out it wasn’t just the one guy ending the world, through his fear of death - it is Guys.  It is the ideology of growth, the ideology of power, the ideology of secret-keeping.   Wizards are ending the world, so no more wizards.  The averted bad ending of the first three books - magic gone out of the world - becomes the desired outcome in the fifth, because magic was built on purgatory, enslavement, suffering, and greed, and also it’s creating dangerous concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.   In answer to “how exactly do we end the patriarchy when it is by its nature bigger and stronger and more cruel than we are”, LeGuin says “dragons” - by which I think she means that the earth eventually has its own back.  The fire comes down, always.  The important thing is to be ready to rebuild afterwards.  

Alternately the dragons represent lesbianism, as they so often do, but I’ll leave that to the reader’s discretion.

The idea that we eat the world in our greed and that our greed springs most directly from our fear of death is one that I first absorbed from Enix SNES RPGs, of all things.  It’s a Taoist worldview.   In the case of these games, it’s also a fatalistic one - in Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma you are taught over and over that you as the hero cannot fight unchecked growth, that as a hero you unwittingly become its agent.   The only thing you can do is to keep the cycle going, keeping hope alive, lest we leave death behind entirely by falling into endless stasis, ending death by ending life.  It’s a message I’m glad to hear, ready to hear, now.

What we can hope for is to be generous, not to let fear make us cruel.  Death is in us and we cannot stop it.  We must refuse to kill just to hold on to what we have, because what we have is never permanent.  We must relax our hands, let the world run through our fingers, to be gathered up again by new, strange children.

Concept: a post-apoc survival game where the premise is that the previous batch of heroes stopped one of those allegorical JRPG-style apocalypses, but the physical consequences didn’t magically undo themselves afterwards, so now everyone has to to deal with symbolic bullshit like your agricultural land being replaced with forests of stone hands, or that giant eyeball where your capital city used to be. The tone could be horror, but it’s not; rather, the emphasis is on how incredibly inconvenient it is for everybody that pieces of the world have been transformed into half-baked metaphors for hating your dad.