crushed

I honestly feel like Disco Elysium is going to end up being a touchstone for RPG design and writing that a ton of designers are going to be talking about and influenced by for years to come, and GB is going to be just as confused as those first few years when developers would start to talk about how great and influential Dark Souls or Monster Hunter were to their projects

15 hours in I haven't run into any creepy options at all besides the first one when you're hung over (and the game makes it very plain it's a bad idea so I didn't pick it). It's also not very cynical in tone at all; it's bleak, but it's comedic and it has had quite a few moments of genuine human warmth and kindness that are really as touching as I've ever seen in a game. Seeing your character more and more very defiantly resisting any kind of corruption (if you so choose) is downright inspiring. Comparing it to the work of Garth Ennis (whose body of work I downright despise due to his distinctly odious voice) feels like a complete misread of the tone, unless you think all European satire is the same.

It's also pretty fun in the way that it makes fun of centrists possibly the most of all for being boring cowards who enable evil just as much as overtly evil people, and encourages the player to take a stand even if they might feel silly doing so.

It doesn't change the content at all, but context to remember:

DBZ wasn't a show with real multiple writers being planned out ahead of time, like multiple shows. It was a weekly black and white comic that had been running for a decade at this point, starting as a comedy series with action elements as a sort of Journey to the West satire that took off unexpectedly after initially being less popular than the writer/artist's previous purely comedic story.

Toriyama infamously had to write the story on the fly week by week while also drawing it, which is a pretty taxing experience, all things considered. Then an animation studio had to figure out how to adapt and modify that story content (usually by stretching it out with repetition), sometimes adding extra story stuff (that Toriyama barely looked at) while not knowing themselves how the story is going to ultimately pan out, while the original comic was still being written.

Then there's the weird realities of weekly print manga publishing, where you're beholden to publishers and an editor, and there's a constant reminder of popularity where readers decide which series that week is their favorite, which is constantly ranked and affects how close to the front of the magazine that series will be in future issues. There's also regular character popularity polls, which do influence publishers and writers as to which characters they need to push.

Again, none of this changes the actual content and whether you enjoy it, but it's the writer's room stuff that explains it. Why does Goten exist? Because Gohan got aged up and someone at the publisher thought that a series focused toward young boys needed a young boy hero, just like how Gohan was introduced to fill the gap left when Goku got aged up at the end of Dragon Ball (which the publisher apparently was extremely opposed to when Toriyama told them he was going to do it because he was tired of kid Goku).

The taxing schedule is also why the series got so slapstick for a while here: Toriyama sorta got roped into writing a more and more pure action series by how popular that aspect turned out to be with the audience, but by the time Buu came around he was clearly getting sick of it and wanted to write some goofier stuff - like his earlier material - just to take a short break from depressing future androids sucking dudes off and killer aliens committing genocide.

@bybeach: That was Hitman 2: Silent Assassin. Dan and Alex were confused and thought Contracts was 2, when it's actually the third game.

Alex sounded like he was seconds away from being one of the people who don't like the different art style of the SotC remake and think Bluepoint negatively changed the feel of the game, then realized that discussion would go bad especially with Dan in the room, and decided to just leave it at appreciating what the PS2 version accomplished.

A lot of what they were talking about, especially early on, had me going "Wait, what?! When did that happen?!" until I vaguely remembered it.

Like, all the stuff with the Dragon Ball hunting and the licking dragons, perv Roshi, the amusement park, the cake factory and the Dirty Harry cop, all of that stuff wasn't even in the original comic and would have been cut out of Kai if they had been following the same standards as the pre-Final Chapters episodes. It sounds like they basically kept entire filler episodes worth of stuff here.

The only filler part they brought up that I distinctly remembered was Mr. Popo finding and being attacked by Goten and Trunks, and that was only memorable because people would cite that as making it extremely confusing as to how strong these characters are.

(also yes, they did mention the limit on the time chamber before, but they sort of waive it in Super, and Videl did mention her mom as having passed away)

One small point I'll make in defense of History of Trunks, despite my not really liking it either and mostly agreeing with their take:

When it was first created and aired, the future timeline and the evil versions of 17 and 18 that Trunks had been fighting all this time hadn't actually been seen by anyone yet. Jeff and Dan ended up seeing it already because it shows up at the end of the Cell arc when Future Trunks returns to his timeline, kills the androids and Cell. But that look of the setting and the sadistic personalities of Future 17 and 18 came from this first, so in that sense, it did offer something that people didn't already know at the time.

Yes, Dragon Ball was a huge property at the time.

The end of Dragon Ball, the manga, came very suddenly and completely by surprise: Toriyama just suddenly announced it was happening a couple weeks before it ended. Toei was still adapting the Buu stuff for the anime, and scrambled to try and figure out what to do for that timeslot once they ran out of story. There were plans for a series that took place after Buu but before the epilogue (which is the route that Super took), but then they decided to set it after the main story. Toriyama contributed some of the initial character designs and some of the premise but was then completely hands-off like he was for most of the previous anime stuff.

So here's a bit of trivia about this that I think even most DBZ fans aren't aware of:

This special was adapted from a special manga chapter that was meant as a little bonus for fans as a glimpse of that timeline and Future Gohan. It was even more brief and has story differences: Trunks is already a Super Saiyan before Gohan dies, the Androids slowly blowing up stuff over the years isn't really emphasized, and Gohan losing his arm and his death are not shown on screen, you just see the androids rushing Gohan and then Trunks finds his corpse.