snarp | Entries tagged with t: chrono trigger

( Steven Universe and Chrono Trigger spoilers )

*wakes up shortly before dawn*

me: Oh hey, Dragon Age: Origins is basically grimdark Chrono Trigger, like it has the same basic narrative structure and similar plot branch points, but the alternate scenarios are fleshed out more, which unfortunately makes them less emotionally-plausible rather than more at a number of crucial points in the narrative

*goes back to sleep*

*alarm goes off a few hours later*

me: Fuck this game I hate it now

Chrono - Heir of Time. His name's Chrono and he's associated with death, so yeah, he's got to be the Time player. He's the Heir because Heirs do what girls tell them.

Lucca - Mage of Light. She talks a lot, knows things, and is the girl who bosses the passive hero around. Clearly a Light player! She's a mage because she's an offensive caster type, and because I think the outfit would look cool on her.

Marle - Seer of Life. Life players are always Princesses, so let's assume the converse is also true. She's a Seer because she's the first one to see and understand what's happening and what they need to do.

Frog - Knight of Hope. Obviously the dude is a Knight. He's Hope because Magus is Doom and that's funny. Also, he's destined to fight the Dark Lord, but it doesn't work out the way he expects.

Robo - Prince of Void. He's spent most of his existence alone and unconscious in a near-empty, dying world, and he'll choose to make said void-y world cease to exist. (You could argue for Space for him, since he's a gardener, but I think it fits better with Ayla.)

Ayla - Rogue of Space. She's associated with green things and with rebirth after terrible destruction. She steals stuff, but I think she'd look cooler in the Rogue outfit than the Thief one, and anyway she also let the Gate Key get stolen.

Magus - Bard of Doom. He helps to destroy the doom-y thing, but kind of passively and ass-backwards, and while wearing a fucking codpiece. Oh, Magus, you are my favorite sullen inept villain who fails at everything.

The other day I dreamed that Darth Vader was dating this magical forest pixie with pink hair and round pink jewels embedded in her arms, and Luke was like "Dad what" because she was his ex. (I don't know, okay.) Vader left the pixie girl, and she was sad. She died, and later on, so did he.

The pixie girl was reincarnated as a crow - you could tell it was her because she still had pink jewels on her wings - and landed on a branch looking as sad as you can when you are a bejeweled crow. (Pretty sad.) Then a crow with black plastic on its wings landed next to her. Awww.

I woke up and spent the whole day wondering what that was all about. Okay, so the pixie with her round gems is probably supposed to be one of those fairies from Gunnerkrigg Court with the round marks on them. Why is she getting together with Vader? And if Vader's getting reincarnated at all, I can see why "crow" might spring to mind, but why did these two get reincarnated? I don't think that's a thing in either Gunnerkrigg or Star Wars. I had no idea.

I just figured it out, though! It was a dream about Radical Dreamers, because I'd been playing Chrono Trigger. Vader was Magus and the pixie was Lucca. Sorry I made you into a passive sparkly pixie, Lucca. In my defense, though, the crap that game put you through was at least as bad.

Crossposts: http://snarp.livejournal.com/391032.html

Unless you count having breathed in a little ambient smoke from my fastidious designated-driver spot on the other side of the room, I've never used the illicit kind of mood-altering drugs. I've also never had major surgery before. So this steroids thing is novel for me.

I just feel like a slightly different, more difficult person on this stuff. I have a lot of sudden emotional peaks and troughs and bursts of enthusiasm and hyperbole. Small sensory things - the sight of a coffee stain on the counter, the feel of my new sweater - set off intense emotional reactions. I'm angrier than I'm comfortable with most of the time, though some of that's a function of the pain rather than the drugs.

I'm hiding in my room a lot to keep from snapping at my family over every little thing; my moods are just too friable to inflict on other people. (This is why I'm still not back at work. I do not need to be communicating with opposing counsel right now, there would be bloodshed.) My mental landscape is different, slightly dystopian and chilly. I keep doing little things to assert my control over the bedroom, to remind myself that I'm in charge. Light incense, turn on the humidifier, open and close the windows, rearrange books and clothes. I made a copy of my bedroom in Minecraft and started moving furniture around in there.

What's funny is how familiar it is. I felt this way all the time in high school. Apparently for me, puberty was just a low dose of steroids and pain. The sensation is a little like being Magus from Chrono Trigger - all megalomaniacal, resentful, and fabulous.

I have more perspective on where I am right now, because, to continue the location metaphor, I've lived in other places now. But I definitely recognize where I am. The context, and the knowledge that it's temporary, make it an easier and more pleasant place to be, but it's still a little uncomfortable.

There's stuff I could stand to keep about this state. I like the extra energy, and the fact that food tastes better. Maybe I need to look into hacking my diet and exercise a little.

Crossposts: http://snarp.livejournal.com/348171.html

There should totally be a Chrono Trigger/Lilith's Brood crossover where Lavos is (spoilers for CT) an Oankali ship.

There should totally be a Chrono Trigger/Hundred Thousand Kingdoms crossover where Zeal is Sky and Magus is (spoilers for both) amnesiac incarnate Itempas.

Well, actually, no. There should not.

If the new cupcake shop right next to the station at Friendship Heights manages to go out of business, I don't think I'm going to feel very bad for the proprietors. It is a cupcake shop right next to the station at Friendship Heights. It has no excuse.

I bring this up only because I've noticed that, 1) there never seems to be anyone in there, 2) their selection seems to be pretty small and the cupcakes are all nearly identical, unless I just came at a bad time, and 3) it's really hard to see exactly what they're selling from outside, because they're poorly lit, the counter's way back against the back wall and partly blocked by a partition, and they have no window display.

(A place selling sweets with no window display? Japan deports people for that.)

I've also got a list of criticisms regarding the design of a sandwich place near Farragut North. I worry that my habit of thinking about these things is the mark of a degenerate character.

Which should be more alarming: seeing a copy of a book by Newt Gingrich prominently displayed in a law school library, or seeing it prominently displayed in a med school library?

It seems like the former should be worse, since lawyers are in a better position to put the book's presumed ideas into practice - but in fact, when I ran into the latter yesterday, I think I found it much more disturbing. For some reason my worldview is shaken by the idea of a doctor who doesn't want people Mirandized.

( Slight spoilers for early on. )

Part of the reason we all love Chrono Trigger so much is that the soundtrack is amazing. I've been listening to it on the way to work! I turn on Frog's theme on the bus to the metro, and Magus's theme when I get on the escalator into the station, and pretend I am infiltrating Magus's lair. I feel very adventurous about the whole thing.

Given the number of hours I've spent listening to these songs since middle school, it's kind of amazing that I can even still stand them, forget about liking them.

WELL YOU CAN’T STOP ALL OF US

I’m being serious. My reaction to that was to get even more inspired about MY BRILLIANT THING. I looked at the screenshots and thought, “you know, I should probably look around and see if people have posted example game files using Ruby, to get an idea how flexible that is,” and also had an idea about the sprite problem. I might be able to use Magus’s glide animation! I suffer from persistent self-destructive behavioral patterns!

See, the thing I don’t get is why they don’t care about normal fanfic. Okay, so there are two things I do not get, because I also don’t understand why they care at all - but given that they clearly do, I don’t see why it shouldn’t extend to all forms of derivative creative works.

Or, rather: maybe I do see why they care, in the abstract. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I’ve read that Square Enix rewrote the ending of the DS port of Chrono Trigger to make it more consistent with the sequel, Chrono Cross. This was not popular with a lot of the more old-school fans, who frequently prefer to think of the events of Chrono Cross as being non-Chrono Trigger-canonical. (Spoilers: Chrono Cross puts Lucca in a refrigerator.)

The impression this gives me is that someone on the Square Enix creative team is one of those people who identifies so strongly with the story they want to tell that they feel a literal sense of trespass when other people play around in it.* (See: Jo Walton**.) They feel that they have suffered an injury; and the present state of copyright law appears to validate them in this. So, they use it to attack the people whom they perceive as having hurt them.

( Read more... )

* Which is a FASCINATING position to take when the canon in question is 1) a video game, with 2) a plot predicated on the existence of alternate realities. Okay, guys. I'll be over here ON THE INTERNET

(my Squeenix love is so very conflicted)

** I can't link to the original comment because I've kind of, uh, blocked Making Light in my HOSTS file. So I'm sometimes capable of fighting off the self-destructive impulses, when artificial aids are available.

*** I suspect that I might even be more sympathetic to all this if I didn't have some deep-rooted, stubborn conviction of Square Enix's own creative dishonesty, because they did something with their story that seemed wrong to me.

**** I wonder to what extent the evolution of fanfic in its current form coincided with the evolution of franchise television and comics. (Were radio dramas usually written by a bunch of different people, or was there usually just one writer?) The way people relate to fanfiction seems to me something that couldn't have developed in a time when you weren't exposed to narratives that both 1) had a clear and inaccessible source and provenance (aka, the TV station or publisher), and 2) changed hands.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

I wasted it doing THIIIS

CUT BECAUSE YOU DON’T CARE

( Read the rest of this entry » )

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Listening to Frog’s theme from Chrono Trigger makes my walk home feel like an epic journey.