One might call me very anti-Fandom. Fandom-critical. Not the concept of liking things, obviousy, and not derivative works in general. Just the entire universe of heavily consumerist attitudes surrounding those things, actively discouraging an adult way of looking at art or enjoying it on a deeper level in favor of pretending that your favorite cartoon is a real thing that really happened. It's probably fine for kids but when I see adults doing it that's just embarassing, and nowadays the big corporations like Disney know about it and lean into it in an effort to reduce all creative work into a tepid puddle of boring crap where we are expected to clap for each and every first gay character for the rest of time.
Anyway with all that said the best way to get me to ignore it is to be absolutely off your rocker and be a single person almost entirely creating the most intricate RPG Maker game I've ever seen. I feel like only RPG Maker people create this exact type of madness, lying cleanly between a normal game and like, Dwarf Fortress.
Starting with part 3, Jojo's lends itself to fandom extremely well by being about cool guys with unique special powers named after references. This is just begging people to make up their own. 7SU, being a self-indulgent self-insert fanfic game, naturally leans into this. Besides numerous original villains, 7SU has eighteen potential player stands assigned to the eneagram personality types. For the record, I was assigned Napalm Death, a calligraphy pen that writes bombs. It has practically zero special events and is only good for fighting, leading a lot of me standing around watching the manga happen and sometimes jumping in to beat up a guy. The game is almost certainly much better if you have one of the support stands such as Cardigans, a nurse that heals people, or Pixies, which can control small life forms. They let you short circuit the tension of several fights in pretty hilarious ways to make them easier.
This is NOT to say that going off-script is easy. It usually requires you to win a tough optional fight. In fact, most of the story beat fights can be bypassed by either using the special "Plan" command or running away to make things follow the original story. You won't get XP or rewards for it, but you can probably do most of the game without actually bothering to play it. There are, however, like nine trillion endings to this sucker and most of them are gated behind making the crusaders like you, which is primary accomplished by fighting the new optional villains or just interfering in the plot. This ties into the overarching plot dealing with why you, some rando, are the seventh stand user, and why so many characters who shouldn't be born yet are making cameos. It's actually... kind of elegant?
What I really love about this kind of project, though, is that absolutely nobody who makes something this ambitious in RPG Maker has any sense of the word 'enough' so you can keep cycling through NG+ runs to unlock more and more absurd content, side stories, alternate routes, secret bosses, and all sorts of other crap. You can play the whole game through as Josuke with his own story because why not fuck it. Just keep adding to this thing. I love it. No official source would ever make this game. The brand cannot achieve this level of strength when it considers things like "profit" and "a large audience" only terrifyingly dedicated fans can make this thing.
Anyway it's freeware and has a good translation so I highly reccomend checking it out for a bit or even just marvelling at the wiki walkthrough if you're familiar enough with the original story to make sense of it. In fact you probably want the wiki even if you play normally to catch even half of the more absurd secrets you can get on one playthrough. There's a whole secret room that's just the last part of the original SaGa and you can talk to all the dead characters there. And CARS is there and you can FIGHT HIM and steal his chainsaw arm and use it to instantly kill GOD because it's a SaGa reference
Anyway with all that said the best way to get me to ignore it is to be absolutely off your rocker and be a single person almost entirely creating the most intricate RPG Maker game I've ever seen. I feel like only RPG Maker people create this exact type of madness, lying cleanly between a normal game and like, Dwarf Fortress.
Starting with part 3, Jojo's lends itself to fandom extremely well by being about cool guys with unique special powers named after references. This is just begging people to make up their own. 7SU, being a self-indulgent self-insert fanfic game, naturally leans into this. Besides numerous original villains, 7SU has eighteen potential player stands assigned to the eneagram personality types. For the record, I was assigned Napalm Death, a calligraphy pen that writes bombs. It has practically zero special events and is only good for fighting, leading a lot of me standing around watching the manga happen and sometimes jumping in to beat up a guy. The game is almost certainly much better if you have one of the support stands such as Cardigans, a nurse that heals people, or Pixies, which can control small life forms. They let you short circuit the tension of several fights in pretty hilarious ways to make them easier.
This is NOT to say that going off-script is easy. It usually requires you to win a tough optional fight. In fact, most of the story beat fights can be bypassed by either using the special "Plan" command or running away to make things follow the original story. You won't get XP or rewards for it, but you can probably do most of the game without actually bothering to play it. There are, however, like nine trillion endings to this sucker and most of them are gated behind making the crusaders like you, which is primary accomplished by fighting the new optional villains or just interfering in the plot. This ties into the overarching plot dealing with why you, some rando, are the seventh stand user, and why so many characters who shouldn't be born yet are making cameos. It's actually... kind of elegant?
What I really love about this kind of project, though, is that absolutely nobody who makes something this ambitious in RPG Maker has any sense of the word 'enough' so you can keep cycling through NG+ runs to unlock more and more absurd content, side stories, alternate routes, secret bosses, and all sorts of other crap. You can play the whole game through as Josuke with his own story because why not fuck it. Just keep adding to this thing. I love it. No official source would ever make this game. The brand cannot achieve this level of strength when it considers things like "profit" and "a large audience" only terrifyingly dedicated fans can make this thing.
Anyway it's freeware and has a good translation so I highly reccomend checking it out for a bit or even just marvelling at the wiki walkthrough if you're familiar enough with the original story to make sense of it. In fact you probably want the wiki even if you play normally to catch even half of the more absurd secrets you can get on one playthrough. There's a whole secret room that's just the last part of the original SaGa and you can talk to all the dead characters there. And CARS is there and you can FIGHT HIM and steal his chainsaw arm and use it to instantly kill GOD because it's a SaGa reference
Archagent
1 year ago