Baerutt's Blog

AMUSEing Card Slinging: Why Card-en-Ciel makes for an interesting Roguelike        My journey to addiction began a little while back when I was scrolling Twitter and Twitch innocently. An acquaintance voice actor of mine retweeted this, and I fell in love with the art. https://x.com/IntiCreatesEN/status/1831739074190962943 Later that night, after I finished watching someone stream some incredible shitpost art one Thursday, I decided to hop over to a streamer acquaintance of mine’s stream. Once I was in his chat, the only explanation of the game I got was that it was “ Megaman Battle Network and a roguelike card game mixed together”. The only other thing I got from him was that, “If you like doing dumb card game things, this is the game for you.” As someone who LOVES dumb card game shenanigans I gave the 3GB demo a download and instantly fell in love with the game. As much as I gush about this game, there are some really cool mechanics and game designs that the devel...

 Why Adapting Your Game to use Modern Everyday Language Sometimes Doesn't Work: How Van messes up and why using the word "Pronouns" doesn't always work      While the script adapters at NIS America do their job really well, sometimes they make some decisions that the fandom doesn't like. In Trails into Reverie, people had a problem with the "Tower of Babel" being translated to "Retributive Tower", and there are a few smatterings here and there of people talking about other translation bits. However, when you mix translation with a bit of modern day language that people think is political, you get a lot of problems.      In Trails Through Daybreak, the character Van asks a character "I was just wondering what pronouns to use for you", and while many people were talking about a political discourse that shouldn't exist, that line didn't sit with me for a different reason. After doing some digging, I understood why the translation...

Transitioning Through Gender. How Trails through Daybreak handles its Characters' Gender and Sexuality MUCH better than past titles            Throughout the Trails series, gender and sexuality has been more or less a joke. While we all know that Kurt and Joshua can both rock a dress like their life depends on it, there’s not many good examples in the series involving gender and sexuality. While Olivier is a good representative of being bisexual within the series, Angelica and Shirley, the two main lesbians of the series, are portrayed as shallow characters and bad representations of their sexuality. However, Trails through Daybreak gives us a whole slew of characters and our biggest LGBTQ+ ally, Van. Throughout this article, I’ll be talking about how Falcom stepped up their game with gender and sexuality in Trails through Daybreak The first LGBTQ+ character I’ll be talking about is Bermotti. He is an informant, and the owner and bartender of Bernotti. In h...

Trails through Daybreaking down the Combat System. How Trails Through Daybreak cracked the Combat Formula   The Trails Series has a history of slightly different combat variation. In this article, I am going to talk about the one used in Trails through Daybreak. In my opinion, the Daybreak combat system is the best system, which combines the Trails in the Sky / Trails from Zero combat system with the new open world combat system that flows seamlessly between each other. In this article, I'm going to explain how it works and why it's so genius, so if you already know how it works, you can skip ahead a bit  Slotting up your Quartz Quartz is a running mechanic in the Trails series. By slotting in a quartz, you gain that quartz’s effect. This can range from additional health or critical hit chance, to a chance to status the enemy, or even causing certain attacks (arts) to charge for less time before going off. Included in the newest addition to the series, the Xipha has 4 differen...

How Revelations salvaged the Pair Up Mechanic This week, I managed to get COVID from somewhere, and of course in my bed ridden state, my LOGICAL course of action was to play a strategically complex JRPG. This was one of the trio of games that no one talks about, Fire Emblem Fates: Revelations. Fire Emblem Fates is a game series known for this weird in-between of Fire Emblem Awakening , the game that saved the franchise, and Fire Emblem Three Houses , the game so story rich even non-Fire Emblem fans got way too into it. The reason I like to call Fire Emblem Three Houses the game that “fixed fate’s mistakes” is for a couple of reasons. First of all, the game's main draw was that there were different paths. The main reason why multiple paths work in a game is that each path matters. However, Revelations, the game I haven't played in the series until now, breaks that rule and has a “true path” that reveals a hidden enemy has been coercing the two sides to fight. The second reason...