But but but! When I have an official ref, I’ll be able to do fanart, and I’ll be happy! I can’t wait now!
Ah, but Eli looks gorgeous too, though I’ll admit I’m VERY intrigued by the clothes situation.
Also, are his “tattoos” the same as MC’s? Or well, rather, are MC’s tattoos the same as Eli’s? It will help for drawing, if yes.
But… even pre-death, was it said the MC is forced to wear “wizard’ey” clothes?
While I did imagine something fantasy-like for my MC, I didn’t really have in mind anything that would scream wizard to begin with… I don’t remember it being said it has to be anything like that… Or did I just miss something / my brain erased some information?
It was said Eli won’t appear in the next update, BUT that the fact he’d be gender flippable will be implemented in it. So I’d assume a choice at the beginning will be implemented to determine that, and all flashbacks will be updated?
No plans for it as of now. After the core cast’s portrait, the next priority for the art budget is stuff like stat screen headers, cover art, and Patreon-exclusive commissions.
Feel free to headcanon this! The tattoo’s details were left intentionally vague in-game, since it’s already pretty imposing on the character customization to make MC have mandatory tattoos. High fantasy means that any deviations from Eli’s design is lore-friendly!
I do canonically describe MC as wearing robes (i.e. in alchemy combat sequences, you’d fetch potions from within the folds of your robes), but as you might imagine the term is pretty vastly interpretable. Doesn’t need to be a full Merlin getup if you don’t want it to be!
The game will ask you to define their gender in the first flashback scene (the one that starts with It burns.) And yes, their genderflip has been fully coded in, with pronouns replaced wherever they appear. May have missed one or two, but that’s what public demos are for, right?
I mean, your MC CAN have a Merlin getup, right?
That’s just not mandatory, and mine certainly doesn’t.
Though he obviously needs clothing that allow him to hide a lot of things inside considering he’s alchemy main.
Yeah, I imagined some sort of hooded coat, relatively simple, like Éclat’s clothing in Fire Emblem Heroes, but with a couple of pockets on the outside and a lot on the inside, and more sturdy “regular” clothing, with also a fair amount of pockets and pouches, under said coat.
And well, yeah, I have to talk about it cause I’ll be drawing my MC
Still would prefer it to be a satchel or something post resurrection, if we can get a style change.
But my mc is not mainly an Alchemist of course.
It’s still described as a robe, pretty big difference between a even a big trenchcoat and a robe, imho.
A coat like Ed has in Fullmetal Alchemist is something my mc might like, in fact he might like Ed’s whole getup, minus the prosthetics of course. As far as clothes go that would also bring him closer to Eli in fashion.
Would also emphasise that the mc has grown less conformist after their resurrection and/or does not “fit in” as well as they used to anymore, again for those who might want it.
Well Eli certainly doesn’t wear robes and he’s certainly a mage too, which is what made me ask about the possibility for a post resurrection mc style change for those who want it.
Eli is actually a combat healer, haha. They fight mostly on the front lines, which is why they forsake robes in favor of lighter, more mobile clothing.
Mages do have a practical reason to don robes, namely because it confers some degree of magical resistance towards them. In a functional party where there are front-line fighters drawing the brunt of the aggro, long-distance magic spells are much more of a threat to mages than swords; hence the general preference for robes.
Yes, that was our White Fang days. Post resurrection I figure the mc needs to rely more on themselves, again, more like Eli.
And ditching the robes is both non-conformist, potentially much sexier and doesn’t scream “mage” to the casual observer. All advantages for someone who is not in functional adventuring party with people they trust (well maybe excepting Eli) any longer.
Post resurrection I figure fooling the casual observer and needing to learn to fight more effectively physically ourselves would be a big priority for my mc. His magic has proven unreliable or has abandoned him too many times now and he doesn’t want something like what happened with the White fangs kids mission to happen again. Which means he needs to learn how to defend himself more effectively without magic.
Maybe but post resurrection my mc would seek to defy convention and general preference.
Mechanically you could, if you wanted to, add style variations for the mc with little additional work if you copy the mc fashion systems of either “Freak amidst the neon lights” or the more recent “Not your mother’s shire”.
But, yes, ultimately I want my mc post-resurrection to look radically different than he did before and that would ideally include a style change to something that is both sexier and allows more mobility.
Something like a trench coat would be ideal for that is it doesn’t impede mobility while still allowing for lots of pockets and storage and looking a lot better than a robe to boot.
Let me preface this by saying that that word count jump in that amount of time is fucking bananas to me; congrats for it man. Just beware of burning yourself out, maybe. Other than that, my compliments of last time remain - you’re executing an interesting premise very well and the pacing is right up my alley.
Some fast notes; possibly unfiltered spoilers
Two typos: in scene five, there’s a broken italic delimiter around “holy aegis”; It’s currently “[/i” instead of “[/i]”. In scene six, Leon says “I wish I’ve been one all along” when I think the right phrasing is “I wish I’d (I had) been one all along”.
Two dumb questions: one of the suggested names for the mage is “Hel”; is it just pronounced “hell”? I had assumed it was and that there wasn’t a “hell” in-universe therefore avoiding correlations, but I was mistaken. While we’re at it, is Myreille pronounced like the french Mireille?
And now some quick notes. I was surprised by how Ilya didn’t seem very affected by the fact that the mage killed the saintess, specially compared to her last interaction with Shiraya. Being in an attempted prison break it made sense that she wouldn’t spend a lot of time with questions like “why did you kill a bunch of security plus a person I greatly admire” but I guess I just felt a lack of a passing mention of how losing the saintess the way she did made Ilya feel.
About the silence curse Myreille cast on the mage, no two ways about it: those kinds of magic curses are always finicky to write about. I bet there’s a lot of “but couldn’t they have written/mimic/charaded it?” going your way. There was only one thing that was more ambiguous to me that I’ll note just in case it wasn’t intentionally ambiguous: was Myreille more spiteful of the mage than she was avid for nuking Sienan? I ask because if that’s the case, it makes sense that Myreille told the mage what the spell was, its time frame, and cursed them to silence. Otherwise I imagine she could have just not told them or even used the opportunity she had to grab their neck to, I don’t know, pop their carotid open.
One thing I missed more was a stronger close up of the finding of the proof of innocence. For me personally, whether and how people would find out that the mage assassinated the saintess for a good reason was a big conflict in the story, but it was a little skimmed over. Specially because there’s a chance the player never learns that Myreille had a journal in the first place. I really like the fast pacing of the story overall, I just felt that this moment deserved more of a zoom.
And one nitpick: the whole ‘Hero of Sienan’ thing was lavish, but I thought of the collateral damage, Ante’s unit, and how they weren’t mentioned.
What a powerful love language, this. Thank you for your support
It’s got the vibe! I’m tossing it in my writing playlist. I had heard the original Eurovision version before, but this evokes a much more specific mood!
First of all, thank you for always leaving such detailed, actionable feedback! Forever in awe of the depth of your insight, and grateful that you’d take the time.
A good chunk (30%?) of this update was already written by the time I posted the first demo, and the rest already fully plotted out. Future updates won’t be quite as extensive, I think, but thank you all the same for the warning.
Thanks for the catch! I’ve now fixed them both in my CSIDE, to be uploaded with the next build.
Yes it is! The name is Arcadian-Salantir in origin, while hell is an exclusively Jovian concept–so what you’ve said is basically true. I’m sure it’s a name that raises eyebrows among the Parami, but not enough for them to comment on it.
Yes it is! Her name will be changed to Mireil in the next build, just because Myreille is a bit of a visual mouthful, but in my head the pronounciation is the same. Salantir naming traditions are heavily, shamelessly inspired by French phonems (as the last name options will doubtlessly demonstrate), so I googled some French names and just corrupted one I liked.
Well-noted! I’ll definitely look into rectifying these over the next couple builds, though I’m not too sure on the last one–I think it would disrupt the scene’s vibe (which admittedly is very me me me, pay attention to me!).
Yes, I’ve gotten a couple of asks to that effect in my tumblr inbox I can’t yet figure out a way to talk about it at length wiithout clobbering the reader with an infodump, so I’m relying on the gentle powers of headcanon for now. Most likely I’ll fit it into the stat screen somewhere down the line.
Her intention was to have one last ‘duel’ of sorts with the mage, even though it would be one that is carried out posthumously. Her flashback scene touches a bit on how she’s resentful of the mage’s bloodline and talents, so for her it was a chance to prove to herself that even under fair(-ish) terms she could still surpass the mage in some way.
I agree that this was underdiscussed in the current build, however. I’ll look into shedding more light on it in future builds.
Well, I like him a lot from the flashbacks, but he’s not the kind of character I tend to choose as RO - I veeeery rarely pick “childhood friends” in romance games (as I got a bit of a trauma with the trope), unless the story starts during childhood when the MC meets them, and then you have various time skips till adulthood, but that’s a different mechanic.
My own actual headcanon is that my MC wears more practical wear. Gone are the days where mages trip over themselves with baggy robes!
