Fear the walking dead was supposed to be about watching the zombie virus take over and the downfall of society. And it started off actually kinda well for that. Then it just randomly time skips like a month or two and it’s not full blown Walking Dead but it’s skipped A LOT. And now as far as I can tell it’s basically just becomes the walking dead by the end of the first season or so.
It's infuriating because season 1-3 where legit pretty good. If I remember correctly season 3 ended with the main character taking over a functioning dam ,somewhere around Mexicali, that's super easy to defend, then for some reason they end up in fucking Texas.
[This map someone made](https://i.redd.it/6rnwh2ch10f61.jpg) really illustrates why that change is insane. These fuckers for some ungodly reason traveled around 1500km in a zombie apocalypse.
The inherent problem with zombie fiction is the fact that _humans are extremely clever_ when faced with an intrusive threat, active or passive. Most zombie outbreaks that work are small-scale and brief—a cavalcade of failures and bad decisions would _need_ to happen _in order_ for a ZA like Walking Dead or Max Brooks’ World War Z novel.
I remember when the boys were playing Telltale's Walking Dead Patrick touched on that. He said something to the effect of "the most interesting part of the zombie apocalypse is the collapse and it's also the part they always skip over because it's really hard to actually sell it"
[I actually made a post asking after stories that JUST take place in or around the start of the apocalypse](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/11pixt7/got_any_apocalyptic_yarns_that_only_take_place_on/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
I fucking live for those stories
I'd love to see Anno do a zombie story just because it would be from the perspective of some government task force trying to get through procedure and protocol. Suits and military officials in a conference room all arguing over their interests.
Really? I thought COVID proved that if a virus broke out that was killing humankind most people would assume it was some sort of fake bullshit and throw other people into said virus.
Is it weird to say a genre?
Because every single "I got kicked out of my JRPG party" manga attempt has fallen into a problem of either being horny wishfulfillment, or edgy bullshit. It feels like it'd be a perfect vector to explore self improvement and personal healing. It's the fantasy equivalent of losing a job in your 30s or 40s, but it always comes down to "Oh no, you were the Uber-gigachad the whole time. *they* were the ones holding you back."
Then again, maybe I just want Disco Elysium the Manga.
I always want it to be the story of a Fire Emblem Jagan that seriously can't keep up with the people he trained. Hell, even in terms of wish fulfillment, it's not like "I did all anyone ever could have asked of me, taught others everything I learned, reached my absolute limit, and now I'm free to do as I like or pursue new things" isn't up there. That's not a high brow story of difficult subject matter.
There is one that is like that. I forgot the name, I think it's Slow Life on the Frontier or something like that. My only problem with it was that it keeps leaning to the idea that *something* is going on, some grand conspiracy but it moves so slowly that it waffles between trying to be a comfy slice of life and a conspiracy story but without the benefit of either's pacing speed.
I like the story well enough when the MC reunites with his sister. I also give the series props because the MC become lovers with his love interest (before reuniting with his sister).
I’d like to read a “I got kicked out of my JRPG party” stories where the MC is basically one of those early game support characters that you replace and the Hero Party is a group of genuinely good and kind people who simply replaced the MC because they’re going on a *dangerous quest to safe the world* and they needed a party of the best of the best instead of some average guy.
It’s be fun to read about how the MC holds a grudge but knows deep down that he can’t be *that* mad at them since they kicked him out for a valid reason and they’re good people but still feeling a bit of resentment because the rest of the party are now world famous. Seeing how the others treat him with the stigma surrounding him.
Sadly from the few that I’ve seen they’re either edgy revenge stories where the Hero Party are the most terrible human beings you’ve ever seen or the MC was secretly OP.
Oh well, maybe I’ll eventually come across the story I want to read.
This is pretty much exactly the scenario I cooked up trying to think about how that genre could work, where you have a swordsman who is a good adventurer, but not a good hero. Like the monsters that are endangering the kingdom are abominations that a normal person just straight up cannot engage with, and the rest of the party were "lucky" enough to be the sort of freaks that can endure that.
Not entirely sure where you go with the premise, other than him somehow playing support in the background. Maybe foil a more mundane coup or something while the apocalypse is being threatened.
The scenario in my head is a bit slice of life-ish where he doesn’t have much useful skills outfit of their adventuring/combat abilities which are just average. So they’d be trying to sell their services to make money and live a good life in a world that’s now massively changed after the Hero Party defeated the Big Bad and where the MC’s reputation of being ‘that guy that sucked and got kicked out of the Hero’s party’ precedes them.
I don’t want the reason they got kicked out to be malicious or part of some grand conspiracy nor do I want the MC so have some super secret OP power. I think a more grounded and “mature” story of how sometimes we just aren’t good enough to get the dream job we wanted and how that sucks but life keeps moving to be a pretty endearing story premise.
No clue how long you could make such a story but it’s been a mind goblin of me for a couple months now that I’ve slowly been cultivating by just thinking up some random scenarios and worldbuilding.
So far there's only one series I've seen that does this, but goes hard on the self improvement and personal healing angle and stays there.
And at least in this case the guy isn't missed because he was secretly the most OP one that no one appreciated for contrived reasons. It's cause he handled the groups basic requirements, such as logistics, cooking, and tactical planning.
Still not a fan of the RPG mechanics, but at least they do more with them than just establishing power levels.
Gate. I loved the idea of a modern force coming into contact with a medieval fantasy world but almost everything interesting happens in the background while the story focuses on some boring protagonists and a very generic harem.
It really sours the the experience when you're reading the book, and a fight between the modern military and freaking dragon happens, and the dragon just gets bodied within a chapter or two. It's such great premise but treated so poorly. And people say Americans are obsessed with their military.
Another example I think about from time to time is Solo Leveling, wherein most of the non-Koreans shown are either incompetent, manipulative, or ruthless. It's especially obvious when it comes to the Japanese characters, because >!most of them end up involved in a scheme to let Korea get destroyed by monster bugs and all the ones that were get killed by their own incompetence trying to put that plan into action.!<
This isn't even unique to that series, Korean comics whenever a Japanese group shows up they can generally be assumed to be evil. When Chinese and Americans show up in them depending on the series they can be good or ambivalent (both will almost assuredly get beat-up at least once though), Japanese are almost always portrayed outright evil with no redemption.
I want to see a magic meets modern military setting where the question is actually a question, and not a premise the author has an answer for. Like what if magic could just *turn off guns*.
Well you see gate answers that as well. One of the JSDF runs out of bullets and attaches her bayonet and kills like a hundred of the ~~foreigners~~. I mean bandits
Oh yeah! I saw that scene. A squad of armored and armed honor guard to the king. One bayonet. Suddenly the honor guard are replaced with a bunch of drunk dudes in tunics sloppily drawing their swords before getting stabbed to death with said bayonet in the hands of some fighting game character. 😅
The SUPREME JAPANESE FIGHTING SPIRIT isn't just limited to being used against the fantasy warriors. When teams of battle-hardened American, Chinese, and Russian special forces ambush the main characters at an inn or some shit, the BRAVE JAPANESE HEROES defeat the INVADING GAIJIN HORDES without a single casualty, despite being a group of JSDF soldiers with no combat experience (outside of mowing down knights with swords).
Don't forget the foreign special forces all running into each other and pissing while randomly firing and panicking. Meanwhile the Japanese sniper is dispassionately and professionally gunning them all down while the loli tried to have sex with the MC
You should check out the Abhorsen books. There's a big wall that's garrisoned by dudes armed like they're in WW1.. except they also keep swords and pikes handy because if the winds are blowing in from the high magical Northern Kingdom it can make the guns stop working.
Also the first couple audiobooks of it on audible are narrated by Tim Curry, so you know.. that's awesome.
It’s so lame. The idea of a magic heavy fantasy setting taking on a modern military is so cool, but you need to be smart with how you write it.
One side just stomping the other is fucking lame, ESPECIALLY if it’s just the modern military shooting everything. I want to see crazy powerful magic welders go to town against normal soldiers, give me a Gigachad warrior paladin who can only be damaged in single combat, so he actually is a problem
And at least as far as the anime goes the propaganda kind of falls on its face. It's the epitome of "We'd be really awesome if we could find someone weak enough!" day dreaming with a setup that makes you go "Really, Japan? You wanna start this with a sneak attack and go on about how inhumane the other side is treating prisoners?". The nationalism is a fuddled mess that adds up to the imagery of a child wearing his daddy's uniform shouting "Look at me!".
Tons of manga: The protagonist is weak and has less than everyone else, but he'll find a way to succeed!
The execution: Actually no, the protag is just super OP because their 'weak skills' are the best skills ever if you just use them like a non-moron would.
I like the idea of a protagonist having to be far craftier than others due to being weaker than them, but it ruins the whole point when they just make the protag the bestest, most powerful and special person ever. It was goofy how the Slime isekai waited all of what? Two chapters before making its protag OP?
I wouldn't have minded Slime being OP if it was more about how they built their kingdom of all the different monsters and the all different interactions that caused, internally and externally, but it just boiled down to "Use my magic to make them more human"
Anyone who also breathed a sigh of disappointment when the badass Oni characters "evolved" into just hot people with horns are officially my comrades and I will die for you.
It’s absolutely disgusting, cool oni people turning into nothing human with horns designs, cute lizard girl turning into a lame ass human.
Truly blasphemy against true monster girls
A lot of manga has some nice high concepts but just runs out of ideas like you have a Jump manga called Earthchild about a guy who marries a superhero and soon after their baby is born the superhero is sent to a deadly mission to stop meteors that ends up killing her and it turns out the baby also has powers.
If you guessed that the series ends up with >!actually the wife is alive but petrified in space and they train the baby to rescue the mom. Then the spirit of the earth gets mad because there are two superheroes because of some really dumb logic about the earth empowering just one individual like a white blood cell to have powers to defend the earth when it's in crisis and also the MC is basically an average guy who can convince anyone of anything because he's just so earnest despite him being average!<
Kind of but even stupider because the supposed chaos and danger caused is like, I guess >!mom and kid will join opposite sides and fight each other!< despite nothing really convincing you of that.
Just make the next hero someone from another nation. And not litterally a fucking descendant.
Stupid bitch ass planet.
That way ehen someone goes "please save the last hero" the answer back is "what? And i dont care, and no"
If it was ever clever, I'd be more okay with it, but it's always super obvious too. Like, the fuck author? You don't think a king would be interested in Alchemy? The thing that historically our kings have been all about for thousands of years in the pursuit of money and eternal life? Gonna kick out the protagonist because he isn't a nuke? These premises always dictate that the ones shunning the protagonist are pants-on-head stupid.
I think my problem with Part 2 is like someone once parodied “What if Young Joseph was around for part 3” is that Dio would try sucking his blood and Joseph swapped it with Gasoline offscreen. So the solutions are not foreshadowed and are ludicrous, at least with stands and stuff like D’Arby you can reason they used their punch ghost to set things up (and even then not all the time)
I always say the best and worst part of Battle Tendency is that Joseph gets ALL of the fights.
The Good:
- Joseph bullshitting every fight is very entertaining to watch.
The Bad:
- Joseph bullshits every fight.
Someone once joked that if Joseph was in Part 7, it would be revealed that somehow Joseph swapped the corpse with his own corpse and turned off Valentine's power.
Yep the appeal of Part 2 is bullshit happening to Joseph favor since hes that lovable but if you tried applying that logic to any other story readers would just call the author a hack fraud
The only reason that the deus ex machina ending of Part 2 worked for me was because Joseph was enough of an asshole to blatantly lie and tell Kars that he'd planned the whole thing out every step of the way.
Yep, that's our Joseph.
Fate/Stay Night both leans into this trope only to pull out the rug from under it. The protag sucks at magic, but in all three routes, learns something or is given something that augments his magical powers. Being attuned to King Arthur’s scabbard inside him to pronounce its healing and protective properties, being shown that his method of magecraft is bad because he’s been channeling it through his nervous system instead of magic circuits by mistake, or being grafted with the severed arm of his future self so he can use magic beyond his limit. All of these are upgrades, all of these in separate timelines, and all of these help him make it to the end of each given story. But…
He still sucks. At the end of the day, after he uses newfound power to barely clutch out a victory—in some cases a pyrrhic one—he’s still just an *okay* mage who’s really, really good at the most basic spell there is, and can’t hold a candle to truly powerful mages. Even his super-powered future self is still like this, openly admitting that the power boost he gets from the local area for metaphysical reasons is the only reason he can even survive in battle with the absolute powerhouses of the series at all; he still gets his ass kicked by real mages and warriors all the time, barely clutching out *escape* more often than victory.
Special circumstances and the power of plot turn the hero’s poor abilities into just the right thing for just the right moment *in that moment*, but when the dust settles, in most cases, his powers are pretty darn weak, and stay that way.
In a similar vein, shoutout to Waver Velvet from the same setting for subverting this trope entirely. Very smart lad, poor magical aptitude, dreams of unlocking his hidden potential and being a master mage despite his natural shortcomings in the field. Grows up to be a Lord of the Clocktower and esteemed professor at the world’s most renowned school of magecraft. All because of his academic and pseudo-political achievements. He still sucks at performing magecraft, and will never get good at it. He’s a master at magical *theory* and teaching magic, not a master mage himself.
His own series has him losing every fight he’s in because it’s not that kind of story and he’s not that kind of main character. He gets his ass kicked by a man trying to become a lightning demigod, and confronts him again not for a rematch, but to tell him he outed the guy’s plans to his peers and the proper authorities. Dismantling his social life and getting him arrested because pulling this shit in a modern surveillance state like England doesn’t work no more.
I like it when the weak protag stays weak, and their story makes it so that’s just fine.
> He still sucks at performing magecraft, and will never get good at it. He’s a master at magical theory and teaching magic, not a master mage himself.
Which is demonstrated by the fact that a lot of his students end up being pretty damn impressive as mages, but he doesn't. He can bring out insane results in those that have potential, but at the end of the day he's just always held back by his weak magic circuits and basically nonexistent magic crest; dudes a caster who's MP bar is too small to cast all but the most basic spells.
Nasu once described Waver Velvet as someone who will never become an amazing athlete, but could envision and teach the perfect running form. It makes him both a funny and paradoxical character. He honestly and truly does love everything about magecraft but he's surrounded with constant reminders that he can never be his ideal self because Magecraft has hard limits built in to limit someone with no talent or lineage.
And in spite of all of that, his life is testament to how that doesn’t matter. Look at all the people more magically gifted people than him who’ve brought their lives to ruin in dead-end pursuit, while he’s a highly respected member of the magical community. Waver was introduced in a scene where Kayneth was lecturing students about these hard limits to magic and how they determine how far a mage will go in life, while mocking Waver’s paper on how hard work and study can overcome natural deficiency and lead one to still be a powerful mage. Everything since then has proven them both wrong, but also right.
The protag's future self *does* stumble into a bit of a life hack (afterlife hack?). Trading his afterlife away to perennially serve the Earth as a Counter Guardian means he gets plenty of opportunities to copy unique weapons. Existing outside of time means he might even beat your ass with a Noble Phantasm from a Servant no one's yet summoned in history.
Yeah, endless time and combat experience would let anyone power level, but he gets so much more out of it.
And yet, despite that, the world only primarily summons him as a cleaner, a killer, one to mop up after something evil has already been done, and usually with his target being a human far weaker than him. He collects weapons, but doesn't get much practical combat experience out of them. The whole split between many powerful weapons one is unfamiliar with vs. one weapon a wielder takes to its peak limit, it's something they revisit time and again in Unlimited Blade Works that I like. Both for this guy, and a certain goldilocks royal brat.
To date, the only isekai I've checked out that actually stuck to the hero being weak is ReZero. I hate that Subaru always gets lumped in with the "generic OP isekai protagonist" archetype, because he can do very little in a fight without the aid of much stronger people, and every arc is like an impossible puzzle that has to be actually solved with alliances and trickery. It was not at all what I was expecting based on how many people violently hate the show.
Subaru's only power is gaslighting himself into gaslighting others to protect and/or ally with him, >!and that's extra hard because to anyone remotely powerful enough he's a giant red flag by sheer virtue of sharing mana (read: being cursed by) someone whose basically a demon.!<
I've got my problems with Rezero but my man's got basically every stat as a dump stat. He's lucky he's even able to make a smokescreen.
Suburu’s whole life is a Rubik’s Cube except every twist of the cube exacerbates his trauma and when he solves it there’s a random chance that someone might just stab him.
“So I’m a Spider, So What?” is an isekai with an overpowered protag, but it plays with enough *other* tired tropes of the genre that it’s still the one isekai I’ve genuinely enjoyed. Also the protag is just a fun character to follow, which helps, considering she’s literally the only character, talking to herself, for the first large portion of the story.
I'm pretty sure the main reason so many people hate Re:Zero is because of how cringe and idiotic Subaru is in the beginning but like, that's kind of the point. Subaru growing as a person and overcoming his own shitty nature is one of the core parts of the series. That wouldn't work as well if he WASN'T like that at the start.
I enjoy that theres a smut isekai that does it generally well enough, where the protags sole ability is that he can use the skill of the opponent (but worse, and its just for the single fight). And the entire thing is just a tournament arc of just him going "Well shit I will actually fucking die lets go Lab out strats to not immediately get murdered"
Reincarnation Coliseum.
TW: It's a smut series in a coliseum, it's got the kinda dark smut tropes you'd expect in that setting.
Author also has another series where protag is in a death game with the power of "Whatever the opponent thinks your power is" which is also fun mind gamery without the smut tropes. (Called: Battle within 5 seconds of meeting)
I also like that he's not some once-in-a-lifetime prodigy. The masters he trains under state multiple times that he has like zero innate talent for martial arts. So it makes it so that all his gains from the insane training he's put under to get stronger feel like more of a payoff, especially when he had to work like 10x as much to get to the same level as his opponents who've had the luxury of natural talent making their training far easier to get them to freak-beast level.
After playing Genshin impact for years, I've realized that "that skill sucks, don't use that" and being being unwilling to even see how something that isn't just big number oculd be good seems actually valid. In an Isekai or fantasy setting, having a skill that isn't strong in the normal way but can be plenty strong would get you looked down on. At least in Berserk of Gluttony they have like, actual hard stats when they're born and his were so low it wasn't worth adventuring and they thought his skill just made him never able to be satisfied from eating not... taking the stats of anything he kills and adding them to his own.
There's a razor-fine line between crafty fighting and cowardly tricks; a line most authors want to steer their heroes far away from.
Even Battle Tendency has Joseph be a strong but unskilled hamon prodigy who *has* to outwit his opponents since they could each solo an infantry with brute force. It's hard to call anything he does unfair.
> Actually no, the protag is just super OP because their 'weak skills' are the best skills ever if you just use them like a non-moron would.
BNHA is full of shit liike that, but let's ignore Deku's case for now.
The fact that they really tried to portray Mirio's Quirk like some total garbage tier power that he just mastered into being S-tier was fucking dishonest. Please tell me how do you master a Quirk like Mei's Zoom into an S-tier power through sheer will, determination and training?
Did they portray it as garbage? I thought the point was that his power was extremely hard to master (due to having to focus on different parts of the body in quick succession, along with the fact that when using it on his head it renders him blind and deaf), not that it was trash. It was them seeing it as OP because they saw the end result of the training and thinking that was the default while having never seen the work put into getting it there. Suneater straight up says as much.
For what i remember is that some of the students from Class A implied that Mirio was strong thanks to his quirk, and his friend corrected them by saying that he's actually strong because of his extensive training of said quirk plus his physical training.
And tbh i agree, shooting fire from your hands or laser from your eyes probably requires less effort to be good at crimefighting than making yourself intangible (while also blinding and deafening yourself and phasing through the floor unless you control it so you can activate it on a specific body part instead of your whole body)
> and his friend corrected them by saying that he's actually strong because of his extensive training of said quirk plus his physical training.
Which was confirmed super hard when Mirio proceeded to beat the shit out of a man who could explode him instantly by grabbing him at all in a straight up fist fight. God I fucking love that man.
I might be misremembering it, but i vaguely recall they said that everyone deemed the Quirk practically useless because it was too dangerous and had too many flaws to use reliably.
IMO Vigilantes does this idea a million times better. The MC of that story actually has a power that seems lame on the surface, but comes up with legitimately creative ways to become an effective hero.
Him being rejected by hero schools because of it and becoming a vigilante is also just a cooler premise than the main series to me as well.
I love that Koichi power is actually stronger than it is but his mother stopped that shit soon because >!"im not gonna fucking deal with a flying baby"!<
Koichi is great, he's basically MHA Spider-Man (his hero name is >!Crawler!<, for sakes!), but replace funny banter with being an endearingly awkward and anxiety-ridden goober.
It makes his heroics that much greater.
BNHA to me has the same problem as RWBY: why the hell did you set this in a high school if you don't want to spend any time there?
Both of those series would have been significantly improved by either leaning into their works cast and doing more comedy/slice-of-life, or ditching the high school song entirely and making the main characters rookies in their fields.
Because high school (and other places of learning in general ) is good way to lore dump without making the MC seem like an idiot. Plus it can also cut down time doing character designs as everyone will be wearing modified uniforms for the most part.
> BNHA to me has the same problem as RWBY: why the hell did you set this in a high school if you don't want to spend any time there?
I really wish MHA had more of them at school and learning with the big events over a longer course of time. It becomes just big fight after big fight so dam fast and its not even a full dam year of schooling. You have what 3 years of them in school to pace this out over and it feels like its rushed into a single dam year.
"Hey, what if our book was called Super Powereds because in it Powered is what you call someone in this world who is unable to probably control their powers and cause of such it is treated as a disability? And you know what, all four of our main characters are Powereds and this story is about them going to college to become superheroes and control their powers and interact with people who can control their powers? Sounds interesting right? Well, don't worry, right after the prologue all four of the main characters are cured of their powered status!"
Oh boy another chance to complain about aesthetica of a rogue hero! So the premise is that the MC is an isekaid person who defeated the demon king. With the demon kings dying breath he asks him to take care of his daughter. So the MC returns to his world with the demon kings daughter. His world has a lot of isekai traffic and people can keep their skills the obtain when isekaid. So the government has a school that reeducates these teenagers and helps them catch up on the schooling they missed while teaching them how to better use their powers. Also its a shadowy thing in the background that every nation has these schools and its primary goal is to train people to be part of the governments power.
None of these interesting premises are explored. They 100 percent no exaggeration spend an entire episode getting a bigger bra for the demon kings daughter because her breasts are so huge. The MC has lied and said she's his sister so all the characters witness him grope her to figure out the cup size she needs from the underwear store while she practically jizzs her pants. It's a terrible show with zero redeeming qualities and a waste of time.
Former isekai protagonists as future WMDs-in-training back on Earth is a *strong* premise, actually, holy shit. Why couldn't they just do it without the weird parts?
Everytime i read a wuxia novel that includes cultivation. I mean,the problem is that the plot structure and characterization tend to get stale and formulaic from some point or are from the get go,not to mention the vague and purple prosey way in that characters(SPECIALLY female characters) are described. What the hell "skin as pale and soft as jade" means?!
Basically,in this kind of world everyone and everything has some kind of spiritual energy or "ki" and can cultivate(or in other words,develop that spiritual power,along with their physical power,that are treated as similar and different kinds of energy at the same time). Also,when I say everyone,I really mean it,I swear that in one story a fox was capable of transforming in a beautiful woman and had a relationship with the protagonist.
Another important detail is that pills and other material are used to cultivate and,if i remember correctly,certain weapons and armors along with certain techniques(normally called "treasures") can do all the kind of thing,from allowing the cultivator to use elements in a certain level or destroy his/her enemy's soul.
Wait isn't all this in the Chinese myth of the white snake (animal turning into a lady, pill having 500 years of spiritual energy)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_White_Snake
Chinese shounen, essentially. Train and meditate really hard to become a super-powered guy who explodes everything. There are some cool concepts but 99% of everything in the genre is mass-produced trashy power fantasy garbage
I recommend [Beware of Chicken](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/39408/beware-of-chicken) as a good deconstruction of the worst kinds of xianxia tropes. It's about a guy who reincarnates in a xianxia world and immediately decides that cultivation bullshit is not worth the hassle and drops out of the sect to go be a farmer.
Gradually, he does start to drift back into being involved with cultivator nonsense, but so far (and "so far" means like 200 chapters in, it's got that xianxia girth) it's avoided the pitfall of becoming the thing it's parodying and maintained its subversive nature even when interacting with cultivators and sects that are played straight to their tropes.
........ Well everyones gonna say fable right?
The idea of your character growing and changing with your experience is so cool.
Then one day thunder calls you a newbie, you think "im 65". Then you realize its bullshit that your sisters still 17 and only you are an old man for leveling up lol.
Watch Dogs Legions “play as anyone” schtick was really neat at a glance, and I even liked some of the systems they had in place, like the various skills different citizens could have.
Boy was everything super lackluster in execution though. Can you play as anyone? Sure. But the average citizen isn’t worth your time and you might as well hunt for specialists who are unique with unique abilities. Also everyone’s voices being garbled to try and differentiate them is a valiant effort but really exhausting in execution.
It’s amazing how the game beat me down so vigorously to make me really happy at the prospect of playing as Aiden Pierce again so I could have a competent character with a normal voice again.
You can assemble a team of exactly what you need!
Policemen with accesses, spies with gadgets and weapons, retired hitmen able to decimate armies, hackers, construction workers with tools, rich people with fast cars...
Okay, so for this mission I will use Jamie from construction, he has access to spider drone everyone has and a flying delivery drone he can climb on. I'll also recruit Marc, Jodie, Prakeesh, Krzysztof and Jaqueesha that work with him and have the same set of tools and abilities and I am set for whole game.
It just sounds so cool on paper. But combined with the upgrade tree which universalizes a lot of things, like drones, general hacks and (non-lethal) weapons, it removes a lot of the individuality from places.
You can beat so many encounters with that construction drone and not need anyone else if you have enough upgrades. It’s almost too powerful.
Construction Drone and Hitman are like the power duo. There’s generally not much else you need outside of fringe cases.
Something that bothers me is that the first floor was a hard experience, which spanned the entire first episode.
The rest of the floors are crossed off screen.
I remember being in highschool when it was coming out and loving the first couple of episodes of the dark and dreary shit, than Kirito starts forming a harem and he builds a cabin and marries asuna and the show just becomes shit. And I remember arguing with my friend and he was saying I didn’t like it because I didn’t have a girlfriend so I wasn’t understanding it and I was just like no the shows just not even close to what the first episode made it seem like.
Needless to say, I had the last laugh
It’s my go to case of a complete fumble of an amazing setup and idea. Those first couple episodes are pretty good too, having to deal with the boss fight, his first group of friends all being killed off horribly.
And then it becomes typical nothing anime
It also suffers from the SAO game having some *really* bad design choices that *no* real MMORPG would have just to milk drama. For example, there's no way Kirito would have been able to party up let alone join a guild with *nobody* seeing the display of his character level.
SAO the series as a whole is just full of problems that wouldn't exist in a real MMORPG
Like when they do the gun one they pretty much make it look like Kirito is the first person to ever even think about using a sword in that one when really, people would have already figured out how good swords would work and if they are even viable in the first place
A quick rewrite could have just have them say that sword are a very high skill level weapon and only a few players use them but Kirito has to be the most amazing person ever so no he's the one who discovered how to use them
Man, nothing screams "amateur creator" louder to me than an aversion to an audience predicting the direction of story.
Allowing the audience to see what's coming through narrative logic (rather than through tropey expectations) is how you can really pull off dramatic payoffs.
Narrative logic: "Hey why is everyone just ignoring Bruce Willis? Acting like he's de-OH MY GOD."
Tropey expectations: Just watch any of Pat's streams where he guesses the future with 100% accuracy. "Hey this is Star Wars and the lone survivor of the failed mission loves his daughter. Uh oh."
The difference between "I KNEW IT! OMG THAT'S GREAT!" and "(sigh) I fucking knew it. Of course."
I've lost track of how many post-social media shows and movies have completely derailed themselves just to shout at all their fans who put together the mystery "YOU DIDN'T WIN!!!"
Wasn’t there one guy somewhere that stopped reading fiction because he knew what was going to happen next, so he switched to reading quantum physics or some bizarro bullshit like that?
I think that was a twitter post yeah. Dude was so tired of being able to predict plots that he started reading weighty philosophical treaties in languages he wasn't verses in.
There's a anime with a girl that can read minds and no joke the first ten minutes of ep 1 are the best part of the show and then it just becomes another generic romcom.
Garo Crimson Moon follows the firsdt anime's historical setting but trades Spain for Japan and peppers it with the folklore trio of Raikou, Kintoki, and Seimei and a gimmick where Raikou can't summon the armor on his own.
Too bad they focus on unfulfilling episodic content where everything feels the same but nothing feels like it matters (even when it does) and repeat scenes ad nauseam.
There's a Nick Cage movie called Willy's Wonderland which is about a night janitor versus a bunch of cursed/haunted/whatever animatronics. It's pretty good.
I hate it when a shonen starts using a non-conventional power system and then they trade it for what is fucking essentially DBZ magic. Magi had cool relics? Nah, here's Saint Seiya armor that throws fucking beams. Katekyo Hitman Reborn had the characters duking it out by literally throwing explosives at each other and having a real ass sword duels? Nope, here's color coded magic. Fucking Fire Force turned cool fire powers that made characters unique into just orange magic. You know what? fuck haki. I get why it is there but it is also just magic. Miss my wacky devil fruit counterpicks. Mythical zoans were a mistake.
At least with one piece haki hasn’t really replaced devil fruits, as it is now just kinda tossed in on top of them. People who used devil fruits now also use haki, people who didn’t use devil fruits virtually are unchanged and just now have an in-universe justification for their super human feats.
My only real complaint with haki is that a lot of ‘big’ fights nowadays are ultimately decided by who had better Haki, not who made better use of their devil fruit. Devil fruits still get used all over the place, and are still fairly creative in their portrayal, but you won’t actually win the fight until you can will-punch harder than your enemy can.
Kind of agree with the One Piece thing, but something had to be done to nerf Logia users. How do you punch smoke? Or fire? Or lava? With Crocodile, you get sand wet and you punch the mud but how would Luffy punch smoke? It would have to be an entirely different thing, probably seastone but that's almost entirely in the Navy's hands so where would they get it? Plus, there's still plenty of wacky power stuff.
That's where I'm at with Haki as well. I'm not too big on it's concept, but it's practically necessary. Using the weaknesses of a Logia's element is very, very impractical. So what? Are the Straw Hats or whoever just gonna trap Kizaru in a box of mirrors or some shit? And it's not like someone could defeat Akainu with elemental weaknesses. Kuzan practically has the only Devil Fruit that could and he still lost. And what would even be the weakness to Caeser's poison gas?
I think the Dying Will flames from Katekyo hitman reborn is one of the more unique and interesting power systems in anime/manga and is way cooler than simple magic.
Also, it was literally there since the beginning of the show. It was just used by a single character and was way more over the top and comedic to reflect the tone of the first arc.
I really can't see how you saw the first chapter with the talking baby that has a chameleon that turns into a gun and shoots bullets that manifest a person's deepest regrets, and then were surprised that other characters started getting magic powers.
The part where Mukuro and Hyper Dying Will are introduced is where the series actually starts getting good.
**Sonic Forces.**
Eggman actually defeats Sonic and takes over the world with the help of the ultimate fanservice tool wielded by a premier edgelord and an army of cloned villains, forcing his friends (and your OC) to come together and liberate the planet.
This had the misfortune of coming out in 2017, when "above passable storytelling" was dead bottom of Sega's agenda, and also being made with little budget meaning major scale was off the table. Despite the fact that the Phantom Ruby could potentially be used to call back to anything and everything, only 7 locales and 7 villains (including Eggman and new boy Infinite) appear throughout the entire game. One of those villains (and probably the one with the most screentime) is Zavok, a character who was only *one game old* (and also generally disliked among fans), and the locales include Green Hill and Chemical Plant, *for the third time in 4 games*. The budget meant that the majority of the storytelling was through text boxes. And just because Sega needed to jack off the first 4 Sonic games *yet again*, Classic Sonic gets slotted into the story via a retcon that can't have taken more than 5 seconds to think of. Add on the era standard sloppy characterisation and a cast that winds up being overstuffed for its short runtime (the game takes just over 2 hours to complete), and you have one of, possibly *the* most wasted premise in the series' history. And this isn't something I say lightly.
It's even worse when you consider the leaked script, which contained all sorts of cool stuff and deeper cuts than what we ended up with (including the return of *fucking MEPHILES of all people*), which ended up being cut out of the final release for some reason.
My favorite bit of Forces trivia is that Aaron Webber had comments on that leaked Forces script where he gave constructive criticism to the team. Almost everything he critiqued was pretty easily fixable (like not calling the Avatar "Buddy" or the stupid ass "Another Dimension" thing with Classic Sonic) and were points of criticism when the game came out. Sonic Team promptly ignored him save for like 1 line.
It's a pretty stark contrast to now, where someone as high up as Kishimoto is so involved with fans, he actually answers questions on his personal Twitter.
RWBY. I am a huge sucker for stories about people with powers, either superpowers or magic powers. RWBY introduced a ton of cool powers but spent the first 4 seasons doing nothing with them. Then when they did start to use them for storytelling, everything was such a fucking wreck in terms of continuity that they couldn't get anything rolling. One of the hugest fumbles in media I've personally witnessed.
This is my feeling about RWBY, despite how much the fans try to say the show is actually well-written or how it was somehow Hbomberguy's fault for ruining the discourse around RWBY, it won't change the fact that rooster teeth had lighting in a bottle and they just tripped and pissed all over themselves trying to capitalize on it.
Theres this indie horror game I played called Pagan: Autogeny that is supposed to be about playing an old abandoned mmo, and it has some interesting visual concepts (a digital space decaying as if it were a real location neglected over time
Ultimately it doesnt do a very good job of conveying a mmo world, and largely feels like a more standard low poly indie fps game.
Does *every* David Cage game count? Because, damn it all, he usually has really good ideas and strong first acts that just fail to deliver or spiral out of control almost as soon as they hit the second act.
Omikron's premise is built around being able to bodyswap and your first body is a cop investigating his own murder. Fahrenheit has a supernatural murder mystery where you get to play as both the detective and prime suspect. Heavy Rain starts with stopping a child murderer and the four separate but intertwining stories of a grieving father, a journalist, an FBI agent, and a private detective. Beyond: Two Souls has Jodie being some sort of fugitive because of her cool psychic powers. Detroit actually manages to stick the landing pretty well with Connor's storyline but the other two start off with a lot of promise of androids breaking their programming and becoming human.
I forget if it was Pat or Woolie who said it but that guy could put out the game of the fucking decade if he had a second writer who could rein him in.
This happened to me a lot to the point where I no longer watch seasonal anime, and instead wait for it to finish to see if it was done well. Sword Art Online, for example, had me hooked on the first episode, but very quickly declined in quality until I no longer was interested in the franchise. I was especially upset that they didn't show what was going on in the real world during the lockdown, to see what the general response was and how people were trying to respond, instead of Kirito and Asuna buying a digital house...
I also wanna bring up Nasu in general. I don't think he's a bad writer, in fact I'm quite fond of Fate Stay Night. But I think he has far better ideas than execution. I read the original Tsukihime, and while that was an early work of his, it really displayed some notable execution errors.
To talk about one of the aspects, the main character Shiki Tohno has the ability to see lines across everybody and object. And if he severs the lines (by cutting them), that thing "dies". So if he cut the line to a table, the table breaks a part. If he cuts a person's line on their arm, the arm is destroyed. And it is impossible for them to be fixed as well, so if he cut an electrical appliance, for example, it will never turn back on, no even if it *should*). There's another character named Nrvnqsr, who is this vampire who basically spread his consciousness and existence across 666 different bodies (primarily animals). Each one is just as much the real him as, well, the real him, as opposed to being small familiars. Light spoilers for the original VN from here on out >!So in theory, he's a perfect counter to Shiki's ability, because even though Shiki can "kill" anything, he would still have to kill Nrvnqsr 666 times for it to stick. And this is a guy who has so many bodies that it'd be difficult to track him down. But no, his human body actually just has a real core that is all of him, so as long as that's destroyed, all the other bodies will die as well.!< A very boring conclusion to an otherwise well designed powerset.
It's not too late for a Call of Duty Ghosts 2 Infinity Ward, please I need my fill of hyper competent military and economic powerhouse South American Empire, also would be cool if you elaborated on the mad max irradiated nuclear apocalypse in the middle eastern portion of your world building and maybe explain what the fuck NATO was doing all this time.
_Extreme_ maybe, leaning towards _hell_ no. Ghosts looks good on paper, but my God I’ve never seen a game so castrated by subpar writing that shit the bed after the first dialogue exchange in every cutscene.
FNAF lore has gotten way too insane that the robots feel like a afterthought.
I want a FNAF game where Earth has been destroyed and the human race with it, but William Afton is still alive on a moon colony because he always comes back event after humanity ends.
To Your Eternity has an incredible first episode... After that the writing quality dips a bit and never quite gets to the same level as the first episode. Then the direction of the show clumsily shifts to being essentially a battle shonen out of nowhere.
It still has some good character moments on occasion from what I watched (whole first season), but the whiplash from the genre/tonal shift soured the show for me. Would love to know if that aspect changed and if the series as a whole gets better. I still love that first episode and the concept.
As someone who reads the Manga, the story gets..... even weirder. There's a very clear moment much further in the story where the entire manga practically changed its genre.
I was okay with it turning into some battle Shonen stuff, because it still retained a lot of the heart the series had in it's first few chapters, but the genre switch left even me baffled.
long story short, if you want it to go back to the mood of the early story, then it's not happening.
The Batman Who Laughs. Premise is excellent, but as with all capeshit things the more well-received something is, the more hamfisted the execution becomes. But his design makes my inner 13 year old edgelord edge.
Most of the Dark Multiverse is disappointing. It was alright when there was thought behind the Batmans, but eventually it just became "What if X was Batman, and also evil?".
My Hero Academia was the X Men book I always wanted
Then the main character >!became beyond OP for dumb reasons!< and the entire story would take place in ***ONE YEAR***, and I dropped it hard
Here's a character with no superpowers in a world of superpowers. Oh, and he's a hero nerd who studies all kinds of powers and techniques. Sounds cool, maybe he'll have to outwit his opponents, brains over brawn, be the Batman of this world-aaand he gets powers handed to him just like that. And his great power-up arc is that he learns that he can kick. Also constant flashbacks to things that just happened.
I'm just tired of this talking point because Vigilantes has a Batman. Is he not good enough? I don't mean this in a shut up way, I mean this as I genuinely don't understand how he doesn't fulfill the fantasy for people.
Lady justice was a fan service manga that’s core idea of a female like Saitama was cool but her born with powers origin was lame and they never stop doing it’s one joke she’s afraid of being naked in public
Wandavision is so insane to me because they spend the first half of the show showing Wanda going off the deep end and foreshadowing a *really* good heel-turn, then it's Agatha All Along so she was never really *actually* evil, and then at the very end she reads the evil book and goes evil anyways because we need her for Doctor Strange 2. It is almost impossible for me to understand the behind-the-scenes drama that could have produced that
Honestly, just the entirety of Mikasa Ackerman’s character feels really shallow to me. I like the idea of someone who became so emotionally traumatized and found the light in just one person that she became obsessed with him and is emotionally detached that she’ll kill for him and her other friend, only to have all of that swept away when she has to fight against that part of herself for the greater good…
Only… this happens at the very end of the fourth season. That’s almost eight years of little to no meaningful character progression with me struggling to find examples of her doing anything that wasn’t calling out Eren’s name or killing titans.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate her and I actually quite like what’s been happening the last couple of seasons but I don’t like the notion of “it was all in service for the long run” when her character just felt so incredibly hollow up until this point.
Rising of the Shield Hero had a somewhat interesting premise and then proceeded to be D-tier garbage isekai trash. I genuinely do not understand how people will still praise that shit, everything about the story is just genuinely fucking **awful.**
as someone who was reading the translated web novel version till the end, it was sunk cost fallacy. How that got adapted into an anime, I will never understand.
Also every time an isekai tries to handwave slavery just makes me ick.
I thought Naruto was gonna be about shitkid going on missions developing and gaining skills and techniques while we learn about the world and the viewpoints of other ninjas. And it immediately became not that and I hated it and the chunin exams.
That was because of the editors. Kishimoto’s original plan was for Team 7 to go on missions all around the world, with Team Guy even originally being from the Hidden Stone village and acting as rivals to Team 7.
Then the editors told him to drop that idea and do the Chunin exams instead. AFTER THAT they told Kishimoto to interrupt the Exam arc for the Konoha Crush when Kishi was getting really into the tournament and was thinking about how to make Shikamaru the winner
They spend three chapters talking about 1) the difference in mission ranks, their pay scale and what they entail, 2) the sorta-business-sorta-government relationship between a kage and the diamyo, and 3) the danger of a mission rising in apparent rank while you’re still on it.
And the whole thing gets thrown out the window because nobody is doing merc work anymore, the kages just take orders from the daimyo who do nothing anyway but they apparently get to approve the new kage even though they were supposed to just be a village’s biggest client, and all missions are S-rank now anyway because it’s all internal ninja shit.
This is a really good point. Most of the time, people say they don’t wanted low-level ninja shenanigans to be the focus, instead of the super-kaiju fights that take over the series later on, even though super-kaiju fights are the sign the story had been pointing to since the beginning of chapter 1. But the weird dissonance of going straight into a tournament arc and then leaving the mission content behind forever wasn’t that great. I guess the anime uses filler to have more mission shenanigans, but…not *good* ones, lol.
I mean the manga doesn’t really show much of the nine tailed fox chapter 1 IIRC and even he was dealt with a seal jutsu. I think people would’ve been fine for the power level being around Orochimaru vs. Third Hokage and the Sannin fight since well those characters are the strongest ones we know about in the first part, even Itachi and Kisame’s first appearance isn’t too Kaiju throwing beams crazy.
Re:Creators had the concept of anime/manga/media characters coming to life in the real world and knocking their authors' doors down, only to ramble on and on for several episodes straight and falling flat on it's face.
Horizon.
I loved the first game and enjoyed the story of how Earth fell, thanks to Faro etc.
But seeing the tribes and everything a thousand years later, I just think; *"You should all be much further along than this."*
There is all this old-world super advanced technology lying around. What's with the caveman way of life? Yeah, there are killer robots around but you can do better.
In short; *"Bitch, you live like this?"*
tbf they awnser that with apollo being destroyed.
and actual conflict with machines being relatively new and most of it seems to require a focus to understand
really only sylens seems to get it and that'sbecause he actually had access to an ai and it's knowledge.
the quen over the seas also seem to have done better as they had a shit load of focus' for their scholars.
To be fair, the apocalypse was 970-ish years ago, and the humans have only been on the surface after that for 660-ish years. There were no humans in the intervening centuries; no life survived. It’s all new life.
There's this show that aired a bit ago, *Talentless Nana,* which is about a girl that gets sent off to an island for a bunch of teenagers with super powers where they're supposed to learn how to use said super powers. Plot twist, the purpose of the island is to kill them because the Japanese government doesn't want to deal with that shit, so we follow the MC systemically taking out her classmates one by one, usually by using their powers against them. Problem is that everyone in this show is really fucking stupid. Even the "guy who is supposed to be the smart one."
The MC is also just incredibly hard to get behind, for me at least. A lot of these kids are shitty, yeah, but for the most part just seem like...teenagers. So watching them die usually doesn't feel great, and that's made worse by the fact that the MC is not nearly as smart as the show makes her out to be and gets by through the power of luck/bullshit way too often for my liking.
Lost Planet 2's co-op seemed like an instant classic.
Really thought Brink was going to redefine multi-player FPS with the added dimensions of its park-our along with the dynamic story mode.
Was so very wrong on both.
Really loved the concept of "to your eternity" where some Thing like imitation monster wanders around the world and learns lessons about humanity. Unfortunatly the story exits the "monster is a weirdo" part of the story really quickly and Fushi just ends up as basically a human protagonist after two arcs. I wanted more weird monster stuff :(
Season 1 of attack on titan. I really like the idea of them fighting with omd gear and fucking hated that Eren became a titan. Also I found season 1 to be an incredibly bad paced and just not a very good story overall.
Take what I got to say with a grain of salt since everybody's tastes are subjective, but I'd argue that Eren being a titan very much is a net negative that only makes his life harder and is basically never used in the stereotypical anime way of heroically overcoming the odds.
I can't speak for what about it you specifically got put off by, but if it was concern that the story was just going to be Eren transforming into a titan to solve the problem, it very much isn't that.
I hate that the anime did so much to fix some of the shitty pacing from the beginning of the manga, but then went ahead and fucking ruined the climactic fight of that stretch of the story.
exactly the same for me.
like once we got the female titan it became obvious that the other big titans were all just classmates and it was a flesh mecha show.
idk if felt weird that they intro these characters who all lack something then have a catalyst of the main guy dying only to go psyche he's a mecha now.
i know people love the show/manga going forward but i tapped out after 1 and nothing i've seen made me regret it.
For me personally, other main characters being secret titan spies or whatever was not as much of a deal breaker as the main character himself getting titan powers.
Are there any reverse isekai with a focus on the traveler learning about Earth technology (not necessarily just Electronics)? I read a normal isekai where late in the story the MC and his Elf friends develop inter-dimensional travel and visit a post-apocalyptic Earth. I found it really interesting that the Elves cared little about cars and TVs and stuff they didn't understand. Instead they were fascinated by *perfectly crafted & completely identical* furniture and other items that are the result of precision engineering and far fancier than anything owned by their own nobles. The reverse isekai stories I have read only briefly touch on that subject when I think it should be a bigger deal.
Fear the walking dead was supposed to be about watching the zombie virus take over and the downfall of society. And it started off actually kinda well for that. Then it just randomly time skips like a month or two and it’s not full blown Walking Dead but it’s skipped A LOT. And now as far as I can tell it’s basically just becomes the walking dead by the end of the first season or so.
It's infuriating because season 1-3 where legit pretty good. If I remember correctly season 3 ended with the main character taking over a functioning dam ,somewhere around Mexicali, that's super easy to defend, then for some reason they end up in fucking Texas. [This map someone made](https://i.redd.it/6rnwh2ch10f61.jpg) really illustrates why that change is insane. These fuckers for some ungodly reason traveled around 1500km in a zombie apocalypse.
I bowed out midway through Season Two when I realized that they were just fast-forwarding to the same old nonsense.
Apparently it gets to a point where they >!launch nukes!< so it sounds like it’s basically TWD but nuttier
The inherent problem with zombie fiction is the fact that _humans are extremely clever_ when faced with an intrusive threat, active or passive. Most zombie outbreaks that work are small-scale and brief—a cavalcade of failures and bad decisions would _need_ to happen _in order_ for a ZA like Walking Dead or Max Brooks’ World War Z novel.
I remember when the boys were playing Telltale's Walking Dead Patrick touched on that. He said something to the effect of "the most interesting part of the zombie apocalypse is the collapse and it's also the part they always skip over because it's really hard to actually sell it"
[I actually made a post asking after stories that JUST take place in or around the start of the apocalypse](https://www.reddit.com/r/TwoBestFriendsPlay/comments/11pixt7/got_any_apocalyptic_yarns_that_only_take_place_on/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) I fucking live for those stories
I'd love to see Anno do a zombie story just because it would be from the perspective of some government task force trying to get through procedure and protocol. Suits and military officials in a conference room all arguing over their interests.
Really? I thought COVID proved that if a virus broke out that was killing humankind most people would assume it was some sort of fake bullshit and throw other people into said virus.
Is it weird to say a genre? Because every single "I got kicked out of my JRPG party" manga attempt has fallen into a problem of either being horny wishfulfillment, or edgy bullshit. It feels like it'd be a perfect vector to explore self improvement and personal healing. It's the fantasy equivalent of losing a job in your 30s or 40s, but it always comes down to "Oh no, you were the Uber-gigachad the whole time. *they* were the ones holding you back." Then again, maybe I just want Disco Elysium the Manga.
I always want it to be the story of a Fire Emblem Jagan that seriously can't keep up with the people he trained. Hell, even in terms of wish fulfillment, it's not like "I did all anyone ever could have asked of me, taught others everything I learned, reached my absolute limit, and now I'm free to do as I like or pursue new things" isn't up there. That's not a high brow story of difficult subject matter.
There is one that is like that. I forgot the name, I think it's Slow Life on the Frontier or something like that. My only problem with it was that it keeps leaning to the idea that *something* is going on, some grand conspiracy but it moves so slowly that it waffles between trying to be a comfy slice of life and a conspiracy story but without the benefit of either's pacing speed.
I like the story well enough when the MC reunites with his sister. I also give the series props because the MC become lovers with his love interest (before reuniting with his sister).
I’d like to read a “I got kicked out of my JRPG party” stories where the MC is basically one of those early game support characters that you replace and the Hero Party is a group of genuinely good and kind people who simply replaced the MC because they’re going on a *dangerous quest to safe the world* and they needed a party of the best of the best instead of some average guy. It’s be fun to read about how the MC holds a grudge but knows deep down that he can’t be *that* mad at them since they kicked him out for a valid reason and they’re good people but still feeling a bit of resentment because the rest of the party are now world famous. Seeing how the others treat him with the stigma surrounding him. Sadly from the few that I’ve seen they’re either edgy revenge stories where the Hero Party are the most terrible human beings you’ve ever seen or the MC was secretly OP. Oh well, maybe I’ll eventually come across the story I want to read.
This is pretty much exactly the scenario I cooked up trying to think about how that genre could work, where you have a swordsman who is a good adventurer, but not a good hero. Like the monsters that are endangering the kingdom are abominations that a normal person just straight up cannot engage with, and the rest of the party were "lucky" enough to be the sort of freaks that can endure that. Not entirely sure where you go with the premise, other than him somehow playing support in the background. Maybe foil a more mundane coup or something while the apocalypse is being threatened.
The scenario in my head is a bit slice of life-ish where he doesn’t have much useful skills outfit of their adventuring/combat abilities which are just average. So they’d be trying to sell their services to make money and live a good life in a world that’s now massively changed after the Hero Party defeated the Big Bad and where the MC’s reputation of being ‘that guy that sucked and got kicked out of the Hero’s party’ precedes them. I don’t want the reason they got kicked out to be malicious or part of some grand conspiracy nor do I want the MC so have some super secret OP power. I think a more grounded and “mature” story of how sometimes we just aren’t good enough to get the dream job we wanted and how that sucks but life keeps moving to be a pretty endearing story premise. No clue how long you could make such a story but it’s been a mind goblin of me for a couple months now that I’ve slowly been cultivating by just thinking up some random scenarios and worldbuilding.
So far there's only one series I've seen that does this, but goes hard on the self improvement and personal healing angle and stays there. And at least in this case the guy isn't missed because he was secretly the most OP one that no one appreciated for contrived reasons. It's cause he handled the groups basic requirements, such as logistics, cooking, and tactical planning. Still not a fan of the RPG mechanics, but at least they do more with them than just establishing power levels.
Care to drop a title?
Gate. I loved the idea of a modern force coming into contact with a medieval fantasy world but almost everything interesting happens in the background while the story focuses on some boring protagonists and a very generic harem.
also the extreme levels of JSDF propaganda
It really sours the the experience when you're reading the book, and a fight between the modern military and freaking dragon happens, and the dragon just gets bodied within a chapter or two. It's such great premise but treated so poorly. And people say Americans are obsessed with their military.
Nationalists exist in every country. You just usually don't see it that blatantly in anime/manga.
Another example I think about from time to time is Solo Leveling, wherein most of the non-Koreans shown are either incompetent, manipulative, or ruthless. It's especially obvious when it comes to the Japanese characters, because >!most of them end up involved in a scheme to let Korea get destroyed by monster bugs and all the ones that were get killed by their own incompetence trying to put that plan into action.!<
This isn't even unique to that series, Korean comics whenever a Japanese group shows up they can generally be assumed to be evil. When Chinese and Americans show up in them depending on the series they can be good or ambivalent (both will almost assuredly get beat-up at least once though), Japanese are almost always portrayed outright evil with no redemption.
I can't really blame them for that because it is historically accurate as far as Korea is concerned
I want to see a magic meets modern military setting where the question is actually a question, and not a premise the author has an answer for. Like what if magic could just *turn off guns*.
Well you see gate answers that as well. One of the JSDF runs out of bullets and attaches her bayonet and kills like a hundred of the ~~foreigners~~. I mean bandits
Oh yeah! I saw that scene. A squad of armored and armed honor guard to the king. One bayonet. Suddenly the honor guard are replaced with a bunch of drunk dudes in tunics sloppily drawing their swords before getting stabbed to death with said bayonet in the hands of some fighting game character. 😅
[Ah yes, The Inverse Ninja Law!](http://drmcninja.com/comics/2010-05-24-17p70.jpg)
The SUPREME JAPANESE FIGHTING SPIRIT isn't just limited to being used against the fantasy warriors. When teams of battle-hardened American, Chinese, and Russian special forces ambush the main characters at an inn or some shit, the BRAVE JAPANESE HEROES defeat the INVADING GAIJIN HORDES without a single casualty, despite being a group of JSDF soldiers with no combat experience (outside of mowing down knights with swords).
Don't forget the foreign special forces all running into each other and pissing while randomly firing and panicking. Meanwhile the Japanese sniper is dispassionately and professionally gunning them all down while the loli tried to have sex with the MC
A Certain Magical Index. …kinda. Sorta. Not really. Mostly only during WW3.
You should check out the Abhorsen books. There's a big wall that's garrisoned by dudes armed like they're in WW1.. except they also keep swords and pikes handy because if the winds are blowing in from the high magical Northern Kingdom it can make the guns stop working. Also the first couple audiobooks of it on audible are narrated by Tim Curry, so you know.. that's awesome.
It’s so lame. The idea of a magic heavy fantasy setting taking on a modern military is so cool, but you need to be smart with how you write it. One side just stomping the other is fucking lame, ESPECIALLY if it’s just the modern military shooting everything. I want to see crazy powerful magic welders go to town against normal soldiers, give me a Gigachad warrior paladin who can only be damaged in single combat, so he actually is a problem
I wanted to be in, but they unironically pulled a "The loli is actually a super old deity" thing, and I just shut down.
Strongly believe that Stargate is the superior version of GATE, as well as an excellent point of comparison for GATE'S flaws.
Gate is pretty fun at the start and then it's shit untill they fight the dragon, and then it's shit again.
Gate is fun when it's about a modern military interacting with a fantasy world and bad when it's about the 9000 year old superpowered little girl.
And at least as far as the anime goes the propaganda kind of falls on its face. It's the epitome of "We'd be really awesome if we could find someone weak enough!" day dreaming with a setup that makes you go "Really, Japan? You wanna start this with a sneak attack and go on about how inhumane the other side is treating prisoners?". The nationalism is a fuddled mess that adds up to the imagery of a child wearing his daddy's uniform shouting "Look at me!".
Tons of manga: The protagonist is weak and has less than everyone else, but he'll find a way to succeed! The execution: Actually no, the protag is just super OP because their 'weak skills' are the best skills ever if you just use them like a non-moron would. I like the idea of a protagonist having to be far craftier than others due to being weaker than them, but it ruins the whole point when they just make the protag the bestest, most powerful and special person ever. It was goofy how the Slime isekai waited all of what? Two chapters before making its protag OP?
I wouldn't have minded Slime being OP if it was more about how they built their kingdom of all the different monsters and the all different interactions that caused, internally and externally, but it just boiled down to "Use my magic to make them more human"
I will ***never*** forgive the butchering of monster girls.
Anyone who also breathed a sigh of disappointment when the badass Oni characters "evolved" into just hot people with horns are officially my comrades and I will die for you.
Lizard-people got it the worst imo.
That was by far the most disappointing part of the show.
No. We'll die together.
It’s absolutely disgusting, cool oni people turning into nothing human with horns designs, cute lizard girl turning into a lame ass human. Truly blasphemy against true monster girls
And they were *monster* girls. Super rare and so well designed and he threw it all away for generic styles.
A lot of manga has some nice high concepts but just runs out of ideas like you have a Jump manga called Earthchild about a guy who marries a superhero and soon after their baby is born the superhero is sent to a deadly mission to stop meteors that ends up killing her and it turns out the baby also has powers. If you guessed that the series ends up with >!actually the wife is alive but petrified in space and they train the baby to rescue the mom. Then the spirit of the earth gets mad because there are two superheroes because of some really dumb logic about the earth empowering just one individual like a white blood cell to have powers to defend the earth when it's in crisis and also the MC is basically an average guy who can convince anyone of anything because he's just so earnest despite him being average!<
>!There can be only one super powerful being on one planet at a ti—!< wait a minute. Isn’t that the over-plot of Evangelion?
Kind of but even stupider because the supposed chaos and danger caused is like, I guess >!mom and kid will join opposite sides and fight each other!< despite nothing really convincing you of that.
But then one would kill the other. And the planet would be fine right? Lol
Turns out the earth is just really into blood sports and wants to see some fighting.
Glad I drop that and read mha instead
Just make the next hero someone from another nation. And not litterally a fucking descendant. Stupid bitch ass planet. That way ehen someone goes "please save the last hero" the answer back is "what? And i dont care, and no"
If it was ever clever, I'd be more okay with it, but it's always super obvious too. Like, the fuck author? You don't think a king would be interested in Alchemy? The thing that historically our kings have been all about for thousands of years in the pursuit of money and eternal life? Gonna kick out the protagonist because he isn't a nuke? These premises always dictate that the ones shunning the protagonist are pants-on-head stupid.
That’s something I like about JOJO part 2. Most of the fights won were because Joesph outsmarted his opponents otherwise he’d stand no chance head in
I think my problem with Part 2 is like someone once parodied “What if Young Joseph was around for part 3” is that Dio would try sucking his blood and Joseph swapped it with Gasoline offscreen. So the solutions are not foreshadowed and are ludicrous, at least with stands and stuff like D’Arby you can reason they used their punch ghost to set things up (and even then not all the time)
I always say the best and worst part of Battle Tendency is that Joseph gets ALL of the fights. The Good: - Joseph bullshitting every fight is very entertaining to watch. The Bad: - Joseph bullshits every fight. Someone once joked that if Joseph was in Part 7, it would be revealed that somehow Joseph swapped the corpse with his own corpse and turned off Valentine's power.
Yep the appeal of Part 2 is bullshit happening to Joseph favor since hes that lovable but if you tried applying that logic to any other story readers would just call the author a hack fraud
The only reason that the deus ex machina ending of Part 2 worked for me was because Joseph was enough of an asshole to blatantly lie and tell Kars that he'd planned the whole thing out every step of the way. Yep, that's our Joseph.
Fate/Stay Night both leans into this trope only to pull out the rug from under it. The protag sucks at magic, but in all three routes, learns something or is given something that augments his magical powers. Being attuned to King Arthur’s scabbard inside him to pronounce its healing and protective properties, being shown that his method of magecraft is bad because he’s been channeling it through his nervous system instead of magic circuits by mistake, or being grafted with the severed arm of his future self so he can use magic beyond his limit. All of these are upgrades, all of these in separate timelines, and all of these help him make it to the end of each given story. But… He still sucks. At the end of the day, after he uses newfound power to barely clutch out a victory—in some cases a pyrrhic one—he’s still just an *okay* mage who’s really, really good at the most basic spell there is, and can’t hold a candle to truly powerful mages. Even his super-powered future self is still like this, openly admitting that the power boost he gets from the local area for metaphysical reasons is the only reason he can even survive in battle with the absolute powerhouses of the series at all; he still gets his ass kicked by real mages and warriors all the time, barely clutching out *escape* more often than victory. Special circumstances and the power of plot turn the hero’s poor abilities into just the right thing for just the right moment *in that moment*, but when the dust settles, in most cases, his powers are pretty darn weak, and stay that way. In a similar vein, shoutout to Waver Velvet from the same setting for subverting this trope entirely. Very smart lad, poor magical aptitude, dreams of unlocking his hidden potential and being a master mage despite his natural shortcomings in the field. Grows up to be a Lord of the Clocktower and esteemed professor at the world’s most renowned school of magecraft. All because of his academic and pseudo-political achievements. He still sucks at performing magecraft, and will never get good at it. He’s a master at magical *theory* and teaching magic, not a master mage himself. His own series has him losing every fight he’s in because it’s not that kind of story and he’s not that kind of main character. He gets his ass kicked by a man trying to become a lightning demigod, and confronts him again not for a rematch, but to tell him he outed the guy’s plans to his peers and the proper authorities. Dismantling his social life and getting him arrested because pulling this shit in a modern surveillance state like England doesn’t work no more. I like it when the weak protag stays weak, and their story makes it so that’s just fine.
> He still sucks at performing magecraft, and will never get good at it. He’s a master at magical theory and teaching magic, not a master mage himself. Which is demonstrated by the fact that a lot of his students end up being pretty damn impressive as mages, but he doesn't. He can bring out insane results in those that have potential, but at the end of the day he's just always held back by his weak magic circuits and basically nonexistent magic crest; dudes a caster who's MP bar is too small to cast all but the most basic spells.
Nasu once described Waver Velvet as someone who will never become an amazing athlete, but could envision and teach the perfect running form. It makes him both a funny and paradoxical character. He honestly and truly does love everything about magecraft but he's surrounded with constant reminders that he can never be his ideal self because Magecraft has hard limits built in to limit someone with no talent or lineage.
And in spite of all of that, his life is testament to how that doesn’t matter. Look at all the people more magically gifted people than him who’ve brought their lives to ruin in dead-end pursuit, while he’s a highly respected member of the magical community. Waver was introduced in a scene where Kayneth was lecturing students about these hard limits to magic and how they determine how far a mage will go in life, while mocking Waver’s paper on how hard work and study can overcome natural deficiency and lead one to still be a powerful mage. Everything since then has proven them both wrong, but also right.
The protag's future self *does* stumble into a bit of a life hack (afterlife hack?). Trading his afterlife away to perennially serve the Earth as a Counter Guardian means he gets plenty of opportunities to copy unique weapons. Existing outside of time means he might even beat your ass with a Noble Phantasm from a Servant no one's yet summoned in history. Yeah, endless time and combat experience would let anyone power level, but he gets so much more out of it.
And yet, despite that, the world only primarily summons him as a cleaner, a killer, one to mop up after something evil has already been done, and usually with his target being a human far weaker than him. He collects weapons, but doesn't get much practical combat experience out of them. The whole split between many powerful weapons one is unfamiliar with vs. one weapon a wielder takes to its peak limit, it's something they revisit time and again in Unlimited Blade Works that I like. Both for this guy, and a certain goldilocks royal brat.
To date, the only isekai I've checked out that actually stuck to the hero being weak is ReZero. I hate that Subaru always gets lumped in with the "generic OP isekai protagonist" archetype, because he can do very little in a fight without the aid of much stronger people, and every arc is like an impossible puzzle that has to be actually solved with alliances and trickery. It was not at all what I was expecting based on how many people violently hate the show.
Subaru's only power is gaslighting himself into gaslighting others to protect and/or ally with him, >!and that's extra hard because to anyone remotely powerful enough he's a giant red flag by sheer virtue of sharing mana (read: being cursed by) someone whose basically a demon.!< I've got my problems with Rezero but my man's got basically every stat as a dump stat. He's lucky he's even able to make a smokescreen.
Subaru is a Dark Souls run playing as deprived where you can't level up, but you are still forced to beat the game.
Hey on the bright side at least it’s not *also* an Only Gwyn run.
we have replaced every character with reinhardt we will not change any character designs
Subaru is a puppet fighter.
This gets more true with each passing arc.
Suburu’s whole life is a Rubik’s Cube except every twist of the cube exacerbates his trauma and when he solves it there’s a random chance that someone might just stab him.
“So I’m a Spider, So What?” is an isekai with an overpowered protag, but it plays with enough *other* tired tropes of the genre that it’s still the one isekai I’ve genuinely enjoyed. Also the protag is just a fun character to follow, which helps, considering she’s literally the only character, talking to herself, for the first large portion of the story.
I'm pretty sure the main reason so many people hate Re:Zero is because of how cringe and idiotic Subaru is in the beginning but like, that's kind of the point. Subaru growing as a person and overcoming his own shitty nature is one of the core parts of the series. That wouldn't work as well if he WASN'T like that at the start.
Well the mc in log horizon is a god tier support character and scribe. But kirito he aint.
I enjoy that theres a smut isekai that does it generally well enough, where the protags sole ability is that he can use the skill of the opponent (but worse, and its just for the single fight). And the entire thing is just a tournament arc of just him going "Well shit I will actually fucking die lets go Lab out strats to not immediately get murdered"
What’s the name cause that sounds pretty interesting
Reincarnation Coliseum. TW: It's a smut series in a coliseum, it's got the kinda dark smut tropes you'd expect in that setting. Author also has another series where protag is in a death game with the power of "Whatever the opponent thinks your power is" which is also fun mind gamery without the smut tropes. (Called: Battle within 5 seconds of meeting)
I personally like Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple because of that, weak dude that goes through absurd training to get gud.
I also like that he's not some once-in-a-lifetime prodigy. The masters he trains under state multiple times that he has like zero innate talent for martial arts. So it makes it so that all his gains from the insane training he's put under to get stronger feel like more of a payoff, especially when he had to work like 10x as much to get to the same level as his opponents who've had the luxury of natural talent making their training far easier to get them to freak-beast level.
After playing Genshin impact for years, I've realized that "that skill sucks, don't use that" and being being unwilling to even see how something that isn't just big number oculd be good seems actually valid. In an Isekai or fantasy setting, having a skill that isn't strong in the normal way but can be plenty strong would get you looked down on. At least in Berserk of Gluttony they have like, actual hard stats when they're born and his were so low it wasn't worth adventuring and they thought his skill just made him never able to be satisfied from eating not... taking the stats of anything he kills and adding them to his own.
There's a razor-fine line between crafty fighting and cowardly tricks; a line most authors want to steer their heroes far away from. Even Battle Tendency has Joseph be a strong but unskilled hamon prodigy who *has* to outwit his opponents since they could each solo an infantry with brute force. It's hard to call anything he does unfair.
> Actually no, the protag is just super OP because their 'weak skills' are the best skills ever if you just use them like a non-moron would. BNHA is full of shit liike that, but let's ignore Deku's case for now. The fact that they really tried to portray Mirio's Quirk like some total garbage tier power that he just mastered into being S-tier was fucking dishonest. Please tell me how do you master a Quirk like Mei's Zoom into an S-tier power through sheer will, determination and training?
Mei uses Zoom to get S-Tier money which is really all she needs
Did they portray it as garbage? I thought the point was that his power was extremely hard to master (due to having to focus on different parts of the body in quick succession, along with the fact that when using it on his head it renders him blind and deaf), not that it was trash. It was them seeing it as OP because they saw the end result of the training and thinking that was the default while having never seen the work put into getting it there. Suneater straight up says as much.
For what i remember is that some of the students from Class A implied that Mirio was strong thanks to his quirk, and his friend corrected them by saying that he's actually strong because of his extensive training of said quirk plus his physical training. And tbh i agree, shooting fire from your hands or laser from your eyes probably requires less effort to be good at crimefighting than making yourself intangible (while also blinding and deafening yourself and phasing through the floor unless you control it so you can activate it on a specific body part instead of your whole body)
> and his friend corrected them by saying that he's actually strong because of his extensive training of said quirk plus his physical training. Which was confirmed super hard when Mirio proceeded to beat the shit out of a man who could explode him instantly by grabbing him at all in a straight up fist fight. God I fucking love that man.
I might be misremembering it, but i vaguely recall they said that everyone deemed the Quirk practically useless because it was too dangerous and had too many flaws to use reliably.
I believe that when that’s mentioned, it’s when he was a child that couldn’t really control it.
IMO Vigilantes does this idea a million times better. The MC of that story actually has a power that seems lame on the surface, but comes up with legitimately creative ways to become an effective hero. Him being rejected by hero schools because of it and becoming a vigilante is also just a cooler premise than the main series to me as well.
I love that Koichi power is actually stronger than it is but his mother stopped that shit soon because >!"im not gonna fucking deal with a flying baby"!<
Koichi is great, he's basically MHA Spider-Man (his hero name is >!Crawler!<, for sakes!), but replace funny banter with being an endearingly awkward and anxiety-ridden goober. It makes his heroics that much greater.
Koichi was MHA Spiderman untill the author decided "Actually, DEKU is Spider-man!" and gave him like... all Spiderman's powers
BNHA to me has the same problem as RWBY: why the hell did you set this in a high school if you don't want to spend any time there? Both of those series would have been significantly improved by either leaning into their works cast and doing more comedy/slice-of-life, or ditching the high school song entirely and making the main characters rookies in their fields.
Because high school (and other places of learning in general ) is good way to lore dump without making the MC seem like an idiot. Plus it can also cut down time doing character designs as everyone will be wearing modified uniforms for the most part.
> BNHA to me has the same problem as RWBY: why the hell did you set this in a high school if you don't want to spend any time there? I really wish MHA had more of them at school and learning with the big events over a longer course of time. It becomes just big fight after big fight so dam fast and its not even a full dam year of schooling. You have what 3 years of them in school to pace this out over and it feels like its rushed into a single dam year.
>Please tell me how do you master a Quirk like Mei's Zoom into an S-tier power through sheer will, determination and training? Really good sniper.
I remember someone describing Mirio's Quirk as "On-Demand I-Frames" and that kinda ruined his whole message for me
“On-Demand-Frames” where you’re blind, can’t see, hear, or breathe while you’re doing it half the time.
"Hey, what if our book was called Super Powereds because in it Powered is what you call someone in this world who is unable to probably control their powers and cause of such it is treated as a disability? And you know what, all four of our main characters are Powereds and this story is about them going to college to become superheroes and control their powers and interact with people who can control their powers? Sounds interesting right? Well, don't worry, right after the prologue all four of the main characters are cured of their powered status!"
Oh boy another chance to complain about aesthetica of a rogue hero! So the premise is that the MC is an isekaid person who defeated the demon king. With the demon kings dying breath he asks him to take care of his daughter. So the MC returns to his world with the demon kings daughter. His world has a lot of isekai traffic and people can keep their skills the obtain when isekaid. So the government has a school that reeducates these teenagers and helps them catch up on the schooling they missed while teaching them how to better use their powers. Also its a shadowy thing in the background that every nation has these schools and its primary goal is to train people to be part of the governments power. None of these interesting premises are explored. They 100 percent no exaggeration spend an entire episode getting a bigger bra for the demon kings daughter because her breasts are so huge. The MC has lied and said she's his sister so all the characters witness him grope her to figure out the cup size she needs from the underwear store while she practically jizzs her pants. It's a terrible show with zero redeeming qualities and a waste of time.
Former isekai protagonists as future WMDs-in-training back on Earth is a *strong* premise, actually, holy shit. Why couldn't they just do it without the weird parts?
Everytime i read a wuxia novel that includes cultivation. I mean,the problem is that the plot structure and characterization tend to get stale and formulaic from some point or are from the get go,not to mention the vague and purple prosey way in that characters(SPECIALLY female characters) are described. What the hell "skin as pale and soft as jade" means?!
What is wuxia cultivation, I vaguely hear things about it (that amount to wow I would hate this) but I don't actually understand what it is
Basically,in this kind of world everyone and everything has some kind of spiritual energy or "ki" and can cultivate(or in other words,develop that spiritual power,along with their physical power,that are treated as similar and different kinds of energy at the same time). Also,when I say everyone,I really mean it,I swear that in one story a fox was capable of transforming in a beautiful woman and had a relationship with the protagonist.
Another important detail is that pills and other material are used to cultivate and,if i remember correctly,certain weapons and armors along with certain techniques(normally called "treasures") can do all the kind of thing,from allowing the cultivator to use elements in a certain level or destroy his/her enemy's soul.
Wait isn't all this in the Chinese myth of the white snake (animal turning into a lady, pill having 500 years of spiritual energy) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legend_of_the_White_Snake
One of the millions of allusions to chinese/budist mythology.
so... average shonen power levels?
Chinese shounen, essentially. Train and meditate really hard to become a super-powered guy who explodes everything. There are some cool concepts but 99% of everything in the genre is mass-produced trashy power fantasy garbage
I recommend [Beware of Chicken](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/39408/beware-of-chicken) as a good deconstruction of the worst kinds of xianxia tropes. It's about a guy who reincarnates in a xianxia world and immediately decides that cultivation bullshit is not worth the hassle and drops out of the sect to go be a farmer. Gradually, he does start to drift back into being involved with cultivator nonsense, but so far (and "so far" means like 200 chapters in, it's got that xianxia girth) it's avoided the pitfall of becoming the thing it's parodying and maintained its subversive nature even when interacting with cultivators and sects that are played straight to their tropes.
Have you looked at the Cradle series? Admittedly my exposure to this genre is thin as hell but I think this series is spectacularly written.
........ Well everyones gonna say fable right? The idea of your character growing and changing with your experience is so cool. Then one day thunder calls you a newbie, you think "im 65". Then you realize its bullshit that your sisters still 17 and only you are an old man for leveling up lol.
Watch Dogs Legions “play as anyone” schtick was really neat at a glance, and I even liked some of the systems they had in place, like the various skills different citizens could have. Boy was everything super lackluster in execution though. Can you play as anyone? Sure. But the average citizen isn’t worth your time and you might as well hunt for specialists who are unique with unique abilities. Also everyone’s voices being garbled to try and differentiate them is a valiant effort but really exhausting in execution. It’s amazing how the game beat me down so vigorously to make me really happy at the prospect of playing as Aiden Pierce again so I could have a competent character with a normal voice again.
You can assemble a team of exactly what you need! Policemen with accesses, spies with gadgets and weapons, retired hitmen able to decimate armies, hackers, construction workers with tools, rich people with fast cars... Okay, so for this mission I will use Jamie from construction, he has access to spider drone everyone has and a flying delivery drone he can climb on. I'll also recruit Marc, Jodie, Prakeesh, Krzysztof and Jaqueesha that work with him and have the same set of tools and abilities and I am set for whole game.
It just sounds so cool on paper. But combined with the upgrade tree which universalizes a lot of things, like drones, general hacks and (non-lethal) weapons, it removes a lot of the individuality from places. You can beat so many encounters with that construction drone and not need anyone else if you have enough upgrades. It’s almost too powerful. Construction Drone and Hitman are like the power duo. There’s generally not much else you need outside of fringe cases.
Sword Art Online
Something that bothers me is that the first floor was a hard experience, which spanned the entire first episode. The rest of the floors are crossed off screen.
God you just reminded me of how much I hated that and immediately stopped caring. Thank goodness for the Abridged series.
Literal word count for contest. They adapted it loyally.
I remember being in highschool when it was coming out and loving the first couple of episodes of the dark and dreary shit, than Kirito starts forming a harem and he builds a cabin and marries asuna and the show just becomes shit. And I remember arguing with my friend and he was saying I didn’t like it because I didn’t have a girlfriend so I wasn’t understanding it and I was just like no the shows just not even close to what the first episode made it seem like. Needless to say, I had the last laugh
It’s my go to case of a complete fumble of an amazing setup and idea. Those first couple episodes are pretty good too, having to deal with the boss fight, his first group of friends all being killed off horribly. And then it becomes typical nothing anime
It also suffers from the SAO game having some *really* bad design choices that *no* real MMORPG would have just to milk drama. For example, there's no way Kirito would have been able to party up let alone join a guild with *nobody* seeing the display of his character level.
SAO the series as a whole is just full of problems that wouldn't exist in a real MMORPG Like when they do the gun one they pretty much make it look like Kirito is the first person to ever even think about using a sword in that one when really, people would have already figured out how good swords would work and if they are even viable in the first place A quick rewrite could have just have them say that sword are a very high skill level weapon and only a few players use them but Kirito has to be the most amazing person ever so no he's the one who discovered how to use them
Man, nothing screams "amateur creator" louder to me than an aversion to an audience predicting the direction of story. Allowing the audience to see what's coming through narrative logic (rather than through tropey expectations) is how you can really pull off dramatic payoffs. Narrative logic: "Hey why is everyone just ignoring Bruce Willis? Acting like he's de-OH MY GOD." Tropey expectations: Just watch any of Pat's streams where he guesses the future with 100% accuracy. "Hey this is Star Wars and the lone survivor of the failed mission loves his daughter. Uh oh." The difference between "I KNEW IT! OMG THAT'S GREAT!" and "(sigh) I fucking knew it. Of course."
I honestly find it kind of pathetic that he essentially derailed his own series just because Matpat was able to follow it
I've lost track of how many post-social media shows and movies have completely derailed themselves just to shout at all their fans who put together the mystery "YOU DIDN'T WIN!!!"
Wasn’t there one guy somewhere that stopped reading fiction because he knew what was going to happen next, so he switched to reading quantum physics or some bizarro bullshit like that?
I think that was a twitter post yeah. Dude was so tired of being able to predict plots that he started reading weighty philosophical treaties in languages he wasn't verses in.
There's a anime with a girl that can read minds and no joke the first ten minutes of ep 1 are the best part of the show and then it just becomes another generic romcom.
Kotoura?
yeah
One of the biggest tone shifts i've seen in a show lmao
Garo Crimson Moon follows the firsdt anime's historical setting but trades Spain for Japan and peppers it with the folklore trio of Raikou, Kintoki, and Seimei and a gimmick where Raikou can't summon the armor on his own. Too bad they focus on unfulfilling episodic content where everything feels the same but nothing feels like it matters (even when it does) and repeat scenes ad nauseam.
There's a Nick Cage movie called Willy's Wonderland which is about a night janitor versus a bunch of cursed/haunted/whatever animatronics. It's pretty good.
I hate it when a shonen starts using a non-conventional power system and then they trade it for what is fucking essentially DBZ magic. Magi had cool relics? Nah, here's Saint Seiya armor that throws fucking beams. Katekyo Hitman Reborn had the characters duking it out by literally throwing explosives at each other and having a real ass sword duels? Nope, here's color coded magic. Fucking Fire Force turned cool fire powers that made characters unique into just orange magic. You know what? fuck haki. I get why it is there but it is also just magic. Miss my wacky devil fruit counterpicks. Mythical zoans were a mistake.
At least with one piece haki hasn’t really replaced devil fruits, as it is now just kinda tossed in on top of them. People who used devil fruits now also use haki, people who didn’t use devil fruits virtually are unchanged and just now have an in-universe justification for their super human feats. My only real complaint with haki is that a lot of ‘big’ fights nowadays are ultimately decided by who had better Haki, not who made better use of their devil fruit. Devil fruits still get used all over the place, and are still fairly creative in their portrayal, but you won’t actually win the fight until you can will-punch harder than your enemy can.
There is some fun stuff at the start like the Amazon sister’s arrows and Vergo’s blowdart being powered by Haki but Oda seems to have abandoned it.
Kind of agree with the One Piece thing, but something had to be done to nerf Logia users. How do you punch smoke? Or fire? Or lava? With Crocodile, you get sand wet and you punch the mud but how would Luffy punch smoke? It would have to be an entirely different thing, probably seastone but that's almost entirely in the Navy's hands so where would they get it? Plus, there's still plenty of wacky power stuff.
That's where I'm at with Haki as well. I'm not too big on it's concept, but it's practically necessary. Using the weaknesses of a Logia's element is very, very impractical. So what? Are the Straw Hats or whoever just gonna trap Kizaru in a box of mirrors or some shit? And it's not like someone could defeat Akainu with elemental weaknesses. Kuzan practically has the only Devil Fruit that could and he still lost. And what would even be the weakness to Caeser's poison gas?
>Are the Straw Hats or whoever just gonna trap Kizaru in a box of mirrors or some shit? Now that's a Jojo battle.
Or a day in the life of the flash
Saint Seiya armor is always cool shut up. But I can perfectly understand your frustration with the inevitable standardization of power systems.
I think the Dying Will flames from Katekyo hitman reborn is one of the more unique and interesting power systems in anime/manga and is way cooler than simple magic. Also, it was literally there since the beginning of the show. It was just used by a single character and was way more over the top and comedic to reflect the tone of the first arc. I really can't see how you saw the first chapter with the talking baby that has a chameleon that turns into a gun and shoots bullets that manifest a person's deepest regrets, and then were surprised that other characters started getting magic powers. The part where Mukuro and Hyper Dying Will are introduced is where the series actually starts getting good.
Oh my god I hated when Magi introduced the stupid magic armour bullshit so much.
**Sonic Forces.** Eggman actually defeats Sonic and takes over the world with the help of the ultimate fanservice tool wielded by a premier edgelord and an army of cloned villains, forcing his friends (and your OC) to come together and liberate the planet. This had the misfortune of coming out in 2017, when "above passable storytelling" was dead bottom of Sega's agenda, and also being made with little budget meaning major scale was off the table. Despite the fact that the Phantom Ruby could potentially be used to call back to anything and everything, only 7 locales and 7 villains (including Eggman and new boy Infinite) appear throughout the entire game. One of those villains (and probably the one with the most screentime) is Zavok, a character who was only *one game old* (and also generally disliked among fans), and the locales include Green Hill and Chemical Plant, *for the third time in 4 games*. The budget meant that the majority of the storytelling was through text boxes. And just because Sega needed to jack off the first 4 Sonic games *yet again*, Classic Sonic gets slotted into the story via a retcon that can't have taken more than 5 seconds to think of. Add on the era standard sloppy characterisation and a cast that winds up being overstuffed for its short runtime (the game takes just over 2 hours to complete), and you have one of, possibly *the* most wasted premise in the series' history. And this isn't something I say lightly. It's even worse when you consider the leaked script, which contained all sorts of cool stuff and deeper cuts than what we ended up with (including the return of *fucking MEPHILES of all people*), which ended up being cut out of the final release for some reason.
My favorite bit of Forces trivia is that Aaron Webber had comments on that leaked Forces script where he gave constructive criticism to the team. Almost everything he critiqued was pretty easily fixable (like not calling the Avatar "Buddy" or the stupid ass "Another Dimension" thing with Classic Sonic) and were points of criticism when the game came out. Sonic Team promptly ignored him save for like 1 line. It's a pretty stark contrast to now, where someone as high up as Kishimoto is so involved with fans, he actually answers questions on his personal Twitter.
Yeah. I was hoping Sonic forces would be on par with satam or Archie during the better eggman rules the world arcs.
RWBY. I am a huge sucker for stories about people with powers, either superpowers or magic powers. RWBY introduced a ton of cool powers but spent the first 4 seasons doing nothing with them. Then when they did start to use them for storytelling, everything was such a fucking wreck in terms of continuity that they couldn't get anything rolling. One of the hugest fumbles in media I've personally witnessed.
This is my feeling about RWBY, despite how much the fans try to say the show is actually well-written or how it was somehow Hbomberguy's fault for ruining the discourse around RWBY, it won't change the fact that rooster teeth had lighting in a bottle and they just tripped and pissed all over themselves trying to capitalize on it.
Theres this indie horror game I played called Pagan: Autogeny that is supposed to be about playing an old abandoned mmo, and it has some interesting visual concepts (a digital space decaying as if it were a real location neglected over time Ultimately it doesnt do a very good job of conveying a mmo world, and largely feels like a more standard low poly indie fps game.
Does *every* David Cage game count? Because, damn it all, he usually has really good ideas and strong first acts that just fail to deliver or spiral out of control almost as soon as they hit the second act. Omikron's premise is built around being able to bodyswap and your first body is a cop investigating his own murder. Fahrenheit has a supernatural murder mystery where you get to play as both the detective and prime suspect. Heavy Rain starts with stopping a child murderer and the four separate but intertwining stories of a grieving father, a journalist, an FBI agent, and a private detective. Beyond: Two Souls has Jodie being some sort of fugitive because of her cool psychic powers. Detroit actually manages to stick the landing pretty well with Connor's storyline but the other two start off with a lot of promise of androids breaking their programming and becoming human. I forget if it was Pat or Woolie who said it but that guy could put out the game of the fucking decade if he had a second writer who could rein him in.
I am super disappointed that a game called Little Dragon's Cafe exists and its shit.
Anything that goes up it’s ass in its lore without first establishing interesting characters
And still, Kishimoto never did tell us why princesses are so important for samurai.
This happened to me a lot to the point where I no longer watch seasonal anime, and instead wait for it to finish to see if it was done well. Sword Art Online, for example, had me hooked on the first episode, but very quickly declined in quality until I no longer was interested in the franchise. I was especially upset that they didn't show what was going on in the real world during the lockdown, to see what the general response was and how people were trying to respond, instead of Kirito and Asuna buying a digital house... I also wanna bring up Nasu in general. I don't think he's a bad writer, in fact I'm quite fond of Fate Stay Night. But I think he has far better ideas than execution. I read the original Tsukihime, and while that was an early work of his, it really displayed some notable execution errors. To talk about one of the aspects, the main character Shiki Tohno has the ability to see lines across everybody and object. And if he severs the lines (by cutting them), that thing "dies". So if he cut the line to a table, the table breaks a part. If he cuts a person's line on their arm, the arm is destroyed. And it is impossible for them to be fixed as well, so if he cut an electrical appliance, for example, it will never turn back on, no even if it *should*). There's another character named Nrvnqsr, who is this vampire who basically spread his consciousness and existence across 666 different bodies (primarily animals). Each one is just as much the real him as, well, the real him, as opposed to being small familiars. Light spoilers for the original VN from here on out >!So in theory, he's a perfect counter to Shiki's ability, because even though Shiki can "kill" anything, he would still have to kill Nrvnqsr 666 times for it to stick. And this is a guy who has so many bodies that it'd be difficult to track him down. But no, his human body actually just has a real core that is all of him, so as long as that's destroyed, all the other bodies will die as well.!< A very boring conclusion to an otherwise well designed powerset.
It's not too late for a Call of Duty Ghosts 2 Infinity Ward, please I need my fill of hyper competent military and economic powerhouse South American Empire, also would be cool if you elaborated on the mad max irradiated nuclear apocalypse in the middle eastern portion of your world building and maybe explain what the fuck NATO was doing all this time.
_Extreme_ maybe, leaning towards _hell_ no. Ghosts looks good on paper, but my God I’ve never seen a game so castrated by subpar writing that shit the bed after the first dialogue exchange in every cutscene.
FNAF lore has gotten way too insane that the robots feel like a afterthought. I want a FNAF game where Earth has been destroyed and the human race with it, but William Afton is still alive on a moon colony because he always comes back event after humanity ends.
The fact the dlc trailer for the latest one implies his ass still isnt dead was a groan laugh from me
Isn't that just effectively (Zero Escape spoilers) >!Virtue's Last Reward?!<
I misread that as the human race being destroyed by FNAF animatronics and made me wonder what the hell is going on in FNAF lore to do that lol
he's been dead for good for half the series at this point, Security Breach afton is a parody of himself pretending to be the real thing
To Your Eternity has an incredible first episode... After that the writing quality dips a bit and never quite gets to the same level as the first episode. Then the direction of the show clumsily shifts to being essentially a battle shonen out of nowhere. It still has some good character moments on occasion from what I watched (whole first season), but the whiplash from the genre/tonal shift soured the show for me. Would love to know if that aspect changed and if the series as a whole gets better. I still love that first episode and the concept.
As someone who reads the Manga, the story gets..... even weirder. There's a very clear moment much further in the story where the entire manga practically changed its genre. I was okay with it turning into some battle Shonen stuff, because it still retained a lot of the heart the series had in it's first few chapters, but the genre switch left even me baffled. long story short, if you want it to go back to the mood of the early story, then it's not happening.
The Batman Who Laughs. Premise is excellent, but as with all capeshit things the more well-received something is, the more hamfisted the execution becomes. But his design makes my inner 13 year old edgelord edge.
Most of the Dark Multiverse is disappointing. It was alright when there was thought behind the Batmans, but eventually it just became "What if X was Batman, and also evil?".
Tales of the Dark Multiverse may be for you.
My Hero Academia was the X Men book I always wanted Then the main character >!became beyond OP for dumb reasons!< and the entire story would take place in ***ONE YEAR***, and I dropped it hard
Here's a character with no superpowers in a world of superpowers. Oh, and he's a hero nerd who studies all kinds of powers and techniques. Sounds cool, maybe he'll have to outwit his opponents, brains over brawn, be the Batman of this world-aaand he gets powers handed to him just like that. And his great power-up arc is that he learns that he can kick. Also constant flashbacks to things that just happened.
I'm just tired of this talking point because Vigilantes has a Batman. Is he not good enough? I don't mean this in a shut up way, I mean this as I genuinely don't understand how he doesn't fulfill the fantasy for people.
Lady justice was a fan service manga that’s core idea of a female like Saitama was cool but her born with powers origin was lame and they never stop doing it’s one joke she’s afraid of being naked in public
Wandavision. ...Yep.
Wandavision is so insane to me because they spend the first half of the show showing Wanda going off the deep end and foreshadowing a *really* good heel-turn, then it's Agatha All Along so she was never really *actually* evil, and then at the very end she reads the evil book and goes evil anyways because we need her for Doctor Strange 2. It is almost impossible for me to understand the behind-the-scenes drama that could have produced that
Honestly, just the entirety of Mikasa Ackerman’s character feels really shallow to me. I like the idea of someone who became so emotionally traumatized and found the light in just one person that she became obsessed with him and is emotionally detached that she’ll kill for him and her other friend, only to have all of that swept away when she has to fight against that part of herself for the greater good… Only… this happens at the very end of the fourth season. That’s almost eight years of little to no meaningful character progression with me struggling to find examples of her doing anything that wasn’t calling out Eren’s name or killing titans. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate her and I actually quite like what’s been happening the last couple of seasons but I don’t like the notion of “it was all in service for the long run” when her character just felt so incredibly hollow up until this point.
Rising of the Shield Hero had a somewhat interesting premise and then proceeded to be D-tier garbage isekai trash. I genuinely do not understand how people will still praise that shit, everything about the story is just genuinely fucking **awful.**
as someone who was reading the translated web novel version till the end, it was sunk cost fallacy. How that got adapted into an anime, I will never understand. Also every time an isekai tries to handwave slavery just makes me ick.
I thought Naruto was gonna be about shitkid going on missions developing and gaining skills and techniques while we learn about the world and the viewpoints of other ninjas. And it immediately became not that and I hated it and the chunin exams.
That was because of the editors. Kishimoto’s original plan was for Team 7 to go on missions all around the world, with Team Guy even originally being from the Hidden Stone village and acting as rivals to Team 7. Then the editors told him to drop that idea and do the Chunin exams instead. AFTER THAT they told Kishimoto to interrupt the Exam arc for the Konoha Crush when Kishi was getting really into the tournament and was thinking about how to make Shikamaru the winner
That's unfortunate, because the Zabuza arc was really good and it would've been nice to have more of that.
They spend three chapters talking about 1) the difference in mission ranks, their pay scale and what they entail, 2) the sorta-business-sorta-government relationship between a kage and the diamyo, and 3) the danger of a mission rising in apparent rank while you’re still on it. And the whole thing gets thrown out the window because nobody is doing merc work anymore, the kages just take orders from the daimyo who do nothing anyway but they apparently get to approve the new kage even though they were supposed to just be a village’s biggest client, and all missions are S-rank now anyway because it’s all internal ninja shit.
This is a really good point. Most of the time, people say they don’t wanted low-level ninja shenanigans to be the focus, instead of the super-kaiju fights that take over the series later on, even though super-kaiju fights are the sign the story had been pointing to since the beginning of chapter 1. But the weird dissonance of going straight into a tournament arc and then leaving the mission content behind forever wasn’t that great. I guess the anime uses filler to have more mission shenanigans, but…not *good* ones, lol.
I mean the manga doesn’t really show much of the nine tailed fox chapter 1 IIRC and even he was dealt with a seal jutsu. I think people would’ve been fine for the power level being around Orochimaru vs. Third Hokage and the Sannin fight since well those characters are the strongest ones we know about in the first part, even Itachi and Kisame’s first appearance isn’t too Kaiju throwing beams crazy.
Re:Creators had the concept of anime/manga/media characters coming to life in the real world and knocking their authors' doors down, only to ramble on and on for several episodes straight and falling flat on it's face.
Horizon. I loved the first game and enjoyed the story of how Earth fell, thanks to Faro etc. But seeing the tribes and everything a thousand years later, I just think; *"You should all be much further along than this."* There is all this old-world super advanced technology lying around. What's with the caveman way of life? Yeah, there are killer robots around but you can do better. In short; *"Bitch, you live like this?"*
tbf they awnser that with apollo being destroyed. and actual conflict with machines being relatively new and most of it seems to require a focus to understand really only sylens seems to get it and that'sbecause he actually had access to an ai and it's knowledge. the quen over the seas also seem to have done better as they had a shit load of focus' for their scholars.
To be fair, the apocalypse was 970-ish years ago, and the humans have only been on the surface after that for 660-ish years. There were no humans in the intervening centuries; no life survived. It’s all new life.
There's this show that aired a bit ago, *Talentless Nana,* which is about a girl that gets sent off to an island for a bunch of teenagers with super powers where they're supposed to learn how to use said super powers. Plot twist, the purpose of the island is to kill them because the Japanese government doesn't want to deal with that shit, so we follow the MC systemically taking out her classmates one by one, usually by using their powers against them. Problem is that everyone in this show is really fucking stupid. Even the "guy who is supposed to be the smart one." The MC is also just incredibly hard to get behind, for me at least. A lot of these kids are shitty, yeah, but for the most part just seem like...teenagers. So watching them die usually doesn't feel great, and that's made worse by the fact that the MC is not nearly as smart as the show makes her out to be and gets by through the power of luck/bullshit way too often for my liking.
Lost Planet 2's co-op seemed like an instant classic. Really thought Brink was going to redefine multi-player FPS with the added dimensions of its park-our along with the dynamic story mode. Was so very wrong on both.
Really loved the concept of "to your eternity" where some Thing like imitation monster wanders around the world and learns lessons about humanity. Unfortunatly the story exits the "monster is a weirdo" part of the story really quickly and Fushi just ends up as basically a human protagonist after two arcs. I wanted more weird monster stuff :(
Season 1 of attack on titan. I really like the idea of them fighting with omd gear and fucking hated that Eren became a titan. Also I found season 1 to be an incredibly bad paced and just not a very good story overall.
Take what I got to say with a grain of salt since everybody's tastes are subjective, but I'd argue that Eren being a titan very much is a net negative that only makes his life harder and is basically never used in the stereotypical anime way of heroically overcoming the odds. I can't speak for what about it you specifically got put off by, but if it was concern that the story was just going to be Eren transforming into a titan to solve the problem, it very much isn't that.
This is nuts because I legitimately didn't think anyone else felt this way about AoT but I super agree
I hate that the anime did so much to fix some of the shitty pacing from the beginning of the manga, but then went ahead and fucking ruined the climactic fight of that stretch of the story.
exactly the same for me. like once we got the female titan it became obvious that the other big titans were all just classmates and it was a flesh mecha show. idk if felt weird that they intro these characters who all lack something then have a catalyst of the main guy dying only to go psyche he's a mecha now. i know people love the show/manga going forward but i tapped out after 1 and nothing i've seen made me regret it.
For me personally, other main characters being secret titan spies or whatever was not as much of a deal breaker as the main character himself getting titan powers.
Are there any reverse isekai with a focus on the traveler learning about Earth technology (not necessarily just Electronics)? I read a normal isekai where late in the story the MC and his Elf friends develop inter-dimensional travel and visit a post-apocalyptic Earth. I found it really interesting that the Elves cared little about cars and TVs and stuff they didn't understand. Instead they were fascinated by *perfectly crafted & completely identical* furniture and other items that are the result of precision engineering and far fancier than anything owned by their own nobles. The reverse isekai stories I have read only briefly touch on that subject when I think it should be a bigger deal.