golguin

He's not the only one who has no qualms dating a child o_o

Also, I still find it very disturbing that Alphys was performing a whole bunch of twisted secret experiments, and then when people find out, it's no biggie. Oh, Alphys, you so quirky, turning people into mutants with your silly little experiments and then imprisoning them in your lab. Ha ha, oh, that's our Alphys, all right!

Trust me as someone who was bullied regularly all through elementary and middle school that I have a pretty good idea of what would have and would not have stopped the bullying. Also as someone that works with students on the regular, please don't insult me by insinuating I am simply regurgitating text.

I felt sure going into Sakurako-san that it would end up at the top of my list. A detective procedural featuring Bishoujo Sherlock and a sanctimonious high-school Watson. Having finished the series I feel as though it concluded one arc with a cheap emotional payoff it did little to earn whilst leaving another that it spent the most time developing totally unresolved. Scarves, skulls and animal companion of the year: Hector.

Gundam IBO is proceeding well, I have to say I expected something a little different from the director-writer team that brought us Toradora. I had hoped for a similarly romantic twist on the typically grit and oil mecha formula but it's mostly routine. A fine routine still but not what I truly desired. Biscuit, cookie, cracker.

One-Punch Man was just good clean fun. Had me smiling ear-to-ear every week.

Just finished Beyond the Boundary in my ongoing quest to watch all things Kyo Ani. I think the first action series I've seen from them? Typically slick but uncharacteristically fanservicey. Enjoyed the action, comedy, and romance individually but felt the show had odd ideas about the appropriate time to mix them together. Will nonetheless seek out the movie sequel. Spectacles, spirits and swords made of blood.

Shout-out to the true and rightful anime editor @austin_walker for the Wakako-zake recommendation. This show is warm sake for the anime soul. A brief, blissful meditation on the simple pleasures of a good meal.

Sound! Euphonium: Call it K-ON! with brass instruments, a larger -but no less delightful- cast and much higher stakes. Sound! Euphonium is an emotional story of self-discovery, redemption, and the transformative power of music. Executed with trademark attention to detail, this is Kyoto Animation's best offering in years. Backpacks, bruised ankles, and brass.

Kids don't get bullied because they believe in Santa. Santa is not some sort of cultural distinguishment that will be singled out.

When kids get bullied in school, whatever the given taunts might be, always come down to something far more basic: what they look like, how they act, what they wear, etc. The nebulous nature of "what they believe", especially when it comes to pan-cultural icons, is not anywhere near the middle of the list.

So I loaded up the save and went through that new content. Flowey fight was pretty interesting, but all in all I think it's a bit of an oversight to have the game crash on you be part of the narrative. Had I not known that, I would've just stopped playing since I assumed that's the ending. Epilogue was OK too, but I didn't try to do the whole sidequest stuff that it hinted at to get the full pacifist ending, and I don't intend to go back to it.

Still just an OK game to me. Probably will watch the other endings to see what they're like, but apart from those, I've gotten my money's worth out of it.

@golguin: I guess I hadn't viewed it in that specific context - it does poke fun at a mostly unexamined trope in the RPG space - at least if I'm inferring the correct meaning from your description. In that way, it is sort of a satire of RPGs; mostly JRPGs, really. But I don't really think this kind of thing is that uncommon. You'll find that kind of satire in games like Breath of Death and Cthulu Saves the World, the Penny Arcade games, even that South Park RPG.

Other RPGs with pacifist completion methods are admittedly rare, but not unheard of. Just off the top of my head, you can complete Arcana without killing anything. You can talk your way through the old Fallout games. You can beat Nethack as a pacifist (although I guess that might be more of a technicality, because you still have to have pets to kill monsters for you).

In terms of a system that encourages alternative methods of character growth from mass murder, Undertale's is really fairly simple. There are plenty of RPGs out there (mostly in the western style) that encourage you to solve encounters not only through non-violence, but to avoid them entirely, or to arrange events in such a way that conflict is never necessary. In a maybe hilarious coincidence, a recently released game called Underrail that styles itself after older WRPGs has an experience system based entirely around recovering artifacts from around the game world. There are plenty of older games that try to recreate pen and paper roleplaying systems have alternative experience systems as well. Hell, Dungeons and Dragons Online is an MMO where you only get experience through completing quests, making fighting unnecessary if avoidable.

Undertale is certainly a unique mix of a variety of things you don't see everyday in RPGs, but it didn't have anything in it that I would say makes it historically significant to the genre.

Still a good game! I enjoyed the shit out of Mettaton, in particular.