Fragile Dreams - somehow not an oprainfall game

[KobaBeach]

Description:
(semi-temporary description as i research this game)
Fragile Dreams is a 2009 Action RPG/Survival Horror hybrid of sorts, developed by Namco and Tri-Crescendo. The story features a young boy, Seto, who lives in a post-Apocalyptic Tokyo and must search for survivors while fending off the ghosts prowling amongst the many ruins of present-day Japan. He will discover more about the world and what exactly happened to humanity for us to reach this point, and make friends with several survivors he encounters along the way.

Episode List:
1 - so we got Seto, Personal Frame and an unnamed girl.
2 - seto the human and his computer pal have a conversation in the girl's bathroom
3 - playing games with a ghost has certain implications about metaphysical reality.
4 - I just want to play with a dang cat how hard can it be to pierce this mystery ?
5 - weapon durability and limited inventory space: the ultimate management game 2.0
6 - with still no girls in sight, instead we attempt to befriend one bird associate
7 - local boy plays with cat, hunts down crow, hunts down crow and hunts down crow.
8 - it's like an on-rail platform riding level except without the on-rail platform.
9 - local human makes a friend, they immediately part ways and then a cartoon plays
10 - local boy seto gets incredibly distracted by absurd requests for unclear gains
11 - a rare video with many small edits because I mostly just got lost in the mall.
12 - seto dies and gets lost, then gets lost, then gets lost, then gets lost again.
13 - seto brings the ghost girl the star but she's all like nuh-huh and sai floats.
14 - the ghost girl has many things to say; the story progresses forward regardless
15 - local boy and ghost duet cross the infinite length corridor of ultimate combat
16 - a boy talks to a girl
17 - of crows and moles, pigeons and holes: local boy seto works on his golf swings
18 - dams are extremely, exhaustively, incredibly, unimaginably, ridiculously loud.
19 - suddenly we receive a lot of salient information about the extended cast :O !
20 - walking down hallways with intermittent fights and cutscenes, sometimes boxes
21 - the scope of boss encounters escalates quickly, followed by Sai saying things.
22 - memories are back! not the short little capsule ones, but the multi-page ones.
23 - I guess we're just stuck here forever now, no need to check around the corner.
24 - 10 enter a room, eradicate all the ghosts, take their stuff, leave 20 go to 10
25 - adding this to the list of video games where you cannot touch the blue things.
26 - the ongoing stories of some people living on after the world had already ended
27 - the name of the girl (which you can find in the manual) is revealed.
EX - forbidden knowledge one must usually beat the game in order to have access.

[EllenHouraisan]

Today I found out that the only way I'll be able to get through this LP is by watching the videos at 2x speed.

[raocow]

it's a... yeah, it's a pretty slow game

[Catabo]

hey there everyone this is raocow
i dug a shallow grave in the front yard of our home and buried him there

Must be Italian!

I remember this game making a lot of "look, Wii has good games on the way!" lists back in the day. I already somewhat regret not playing it myself then. It seems like it's shaping up to be one heck of an experience and it's got the exact sort of integration with Wii features that would've impressed me back in the day.

[KobaBeach]

i was partly hoping no one would post here so i could meme about it despite enjoying this game's whole vibe

[Dragon Fogel]

i was partly hoping no one would post here so i could meme about it despite enjoying this game's whole vibe

And now your fragile dream has been shattered.

[KobaBeach]

i like how i've never played this game adn yet i was screaming bloody murder as i watched episode 2 because raocow's bad at video games

[Catabo]

I'm a few episodes behind, but this conjured a funny image:

handmommy is more powerful than handbook.png (56.37 KiB) Viewed 1640 times

Jokes aside, stuffing butterflies into your pockets really does sound like a traumatic experience to have as a kid. You see the pretty butterfly friends and decide to take them home with you! Great, let's put them in your pockets... [crunch]... then when you take them out, they're dead, or worse, mangled for life.

(if there actually is a Godzilla-child, for the love of all things good do not spoil me)

[KobaBeach]

updating the op, i'm very bad at this. sorry, i kind of dropped out, the game is hauntingly beautiful but the lp just isn't my thing (^^;)

[KobaBeach]

just clocking in for the day. i see no one's using this thread still

[raocow]

the little bit of conversation has been in the comments and in spotzone, yeah, not here :(

[KobaBeach]

im just glad someone is watching the lp even if the pairing of the game's nature with the commentary isn't to my tastes. it looks like a very beautiful game and i'm gonna try to slot a playthrough of it on dolphin when i'm able to, i'm just in the middle of like 80+ rpg playthroughs rn (need to update my local non-rpg backlog spreadsheet too)

besides, talkhaus is Dead, it's mostly just me and grounder shitposting like half the time. and that's okay

[EllenHouraisan]

I've been holding off on saying much about this game until it's closer to the end, but it feels to me like one of those games that would have a lot more charm if it didn't have a budget. It gives me vibes of "small indie game with a lot of soul and a cool idea", but it suffers from that same problem that a lot of mid-budget Japanese games have of looking extremely bland and overly-anime. At least the bold character designs help it stand out, though.

[KobaBeach]

it suffers from that same problem that a lot of mid-budget Japanese games have of looking extremely bland and overly-anime

saying this as nicely as i can but this is a bad opinion (this is a joke post)

[EllenHouraisan]

I famously only have good opinions.

[Grounder]

It is literally too dark for me to enjoy, personally.

[Catabo]

just clocking in for the day. i see no one's using this thread still

I was gonna post once or twice (jokes, or translations for text that raocow was curious about but game didn't translate, altho YT comments probs have the latter covered now that i think about it), but since i'm several days behind on watching (Mega Man Legends is my current "if i only have enough time for one video a day, it's this" series), it wouldn't make all that much sense.

I've been enjoying watching a game that i missed out on during a time when i was just coming into "autonomous enough human to seek out new and interesting games rather than just whatever you get on birthdays/Christmas" age, but it has taken liberal use of the YouTube "ten seconds forward" hotkey. Which i've made my peace with! It's like playing an old RPG on an emulator and using emulator tools to fast-forward through the grinding.

[KobaBeach]

It is literally too dark for me to enjoy, personally.

hyper 6 moment

[Catabo]

"so yeah, these doors, like i'm not even getting 'it won't budge' or 'potato massage' or anything
it doesn't say nothing
just 'no interaction permitted'"

eat your vitamon's seto.png (345.29 KiB) Viewed 1249 times

(look, i'm almost caught up,

Non-double-post edit: "girl i just fought a massive construction vehicle" is one hell of a retort.

Non-double-post edit2: "Now that people could communicate what they felt in their hearts..."

Oh no. This smells like hard Sapir-Worf. If only we didn't have that pesky language dividing us, we'd have world peace? If only these scientists' institution had put linguistics in the college of engineering instead of liberal arts, this whole crisis could have been averted! People are still gonna have differences!

fragile map- farewell ruins of the caved-in wall.png (42.29 KiB) Viewed 1175 times

Cute that the map updates like that after you crawl through the passage tho!

Non-double-post edit3: "i should've recognised it was identical; somehow i didn't"

It wasn't, actually! しにたくない (i'm too young to die) vs ころさないで (don't kill me).

(i'm seeing what you mean now about the thread, leomon

Non-double-post edit4: "language is truly an ineffectual means of communication" NO NO NO NO NO THIS IS HARD SAPIR-WHORF WHICH IS ONLY KEPT ALIVE AS A SHAMBLING CORPSE BY POP CULTURE i hate this

Okay, guy's a maniac who wants to destroy all physical beings. I suppose there's a chance he has an outdated knowledge base to work off of (1960s might be long enough ago) and his folly is that he assumes he knows everything. And he says "how's that?!?!" when he attacks. lol. lmao. I cannot take this guy seriously as a bad guy. It would be a better maniacal villain motivation if he already knew that people will still have differences even with perfect brain-to-brain (soul-to-soul, assuming the brain is also ineffectual because it's made of meat subject to decay) communication and that's why he decided to kill everything.

You know, after typing that previous sentence, Shin's motivation doesn't seem all that logical? He's not going to "solve" language by destroying all meat-based beings. Ghosts are still going to invent ways to communicate that amount to language. If they still have the agency to have conflicts with one another, they will do so (Shin and Sai certainly do, demonstrably, right here right now!). Shin's target should be corporeality because corporeal beings, and a world ruled by them, are fragile (title drop!), not because [jazz hands] ooooo language! And where do the Crow androids and Mr. Bird fit into this? I suppose he's just waiting out their batteries.

[EllenHouraisan]

Posting to free Catabo from edit hell.

Shin is a terrible villain and I wish he didn't exist.

[KobaBeach]

please double post im begging of u

[KobaBeach]

p.s. what are you talking about in the last third of your post

[Lord Ruby]

I actually think his writing is kind of clever. They somehow managed to justify and utilize the "you wouldn't be able to understand even if I explained it" trope for once, not because it's true (and it is true in the sense that you can't properly explain something that doesn't make sense in the first place), but because he has actually convinced himself that language is so ineffective that he cannot communicate what he wants to say.

And I don't really see how this relates to Sapir-Whorf? If anything, it's its opposite - it asserts that we can think thoughts that we can't express using language, that we do so frequently and for important things, and that that's a huge issue.

You could argue that the first attempt also already partially worked, since Seto has the ability to connect with dead creatures' thoughts through memory items. Not fully, though, since he still can't communicate his motivations.

Like, is this silly? Sure, especially that the world would entrust the task of transcending language to Shin and friends. Is it dysfunctional as a premise? Not really. If anything, it even connects to the game's themes - I'm pretty sure rao argued that this is a game about bonds or connections between people a couple of times before the game started revealing the truth behind the apocalypse.

[EllenHouraisan]

I strongly disagree that Shin's nonsense is thematically appropriate, but I'll save my opinions on it for after the LP ends. Who knows, maybe the ending will bamboozle us all in some way. Maybe he's an actual alien from outer space and that's why he hates the way we communicate. That'd be pog.

[KobaBeach]

i mean i dont know why everyone's so shocked that the villain is bad (supposedly), tekken and tales' writing is absolutely, unrepentantly shit garbage trash and that's 100% the namco side of bamco