Long-winded, but the TL;DR is that's it's pretty much the best version of Nocturne if you're willing to do your own jank version of Skill inheritance via Cheat Engine tables. It is however for the hardcore SMT'ers out there-- even on normal it is some orders harder than base Nocturne. To anyone familiar with the 'meta' behind SMT games though, it has amazing value as being an updated and more expressive version of Nocturne.

Scattered thoughts:

- Lots of kino cinematics I forgot about here. The heel-turns, Grimkhela summon, Most of Yuko's scenes, Trumpeter, Hell Biker, & Harlot's intros, Lucifer's summon, etc.

- One thing about Nocturne very few other SMTs have emulated as well is spell variety. Starting around post Hell-Biker going straight for -nga spells isn't necessarily the best idea, because the extra status chance/secondary effect on some other, less damaging spells can be a life-or-death thing. Especially true with Hardtype which adds in shit like Scald which has great utility even late-game.

- Hardtype's HP increases are kind of whack TBH. For some bosses like Mother Harlot, Dante Round 1, or the Riders it's definitely needed, but for other shit like Sahakaghi or Belezeebub it's more tedious than challenging. In most other cases it just tilts edge-case wins to the boss rather than the player, as the boss will just out-sustain you/beat you in the damage race.

- The Full-Moon miniboss encounters are a smash, they're decently hard, give good EXP as a reward, and aren't necessary to fight with the new smoke ball item. Definitely marked out for the 5th kapla full-moon miniboss, great touch.

- Didn't see too much nerfing which is incredibly for a fan-made mod, only Tornado really took a hit but there's a lot better demons and spells mid-game so it's nbd. The buffs on the other hand are great across the board, magic Demi-Fiend is very strong (esp. with the phys repel boss spam), and support demi-fiend has very usuable utility, even if prayer is more easily splashed on your demons.

- The boss scripts are greatly improved, there's some memes like Aciel still but Hardtype cements Nocturne with some of the best bosses across JRPGs. Baal Avatar, Mother Harlot, Trumpeter, Albion, and Metatron is an all-time collection of bosses.

- The System changes Hardtype does are also a smash. Most of it is no-brainer like removing the damage cap, giving Dante pierce, making skill inheritance weighted, etc. but there's some risky changes that pay off well. Making Luck a determinant in magic accuracy is pretty brazy but works surprisingly well; it gives a stronger argument for physical demons as DPS since they have to rely far less on good luck/Cadenza buffs to hit, and can even get cheeky press-turns with the higher crit rates on physical skills. It also makes investing in luck on the Demi-Fiend actually worth a shit. Demon-swapping taking half-turns is ingenious as well; swapping is no longer a momentum loss but in fact can be used to gain quite a bit of momentum if you plan your press-turns right, like getting off two buffs for the price of one. Since swapping got rid of some debuffs originally it also makes parachuting demons in and out a viable method of emergency status removal too, making it so getting status'd on your healer isn't the hax death-sentence like it was on the original. Add in the fact that all demons in your stock get 75% EXP and you'll find yourself using a greater roster of demons with more varied niches than in original. Thinking about my entire party of demons instead of a select 5-6 is a great logical progression of SMT's system.

- New skills are amazing too, I've talked about Scald, but really most of the new skills are perfectly designed for their intended purposes. The only complaint I have is that aliment secondary effects are kind of useless late-game, cuz unfortunately the hardtype creator still follows the philosophy of aliments being useless on bosses. Aliments are still super-strong on late-game dungeon crawling, especially with the HP curve meaning that late-game random battles can go for 8-12 turns instead of the 3-4 they did in the original. They become a lot more manageable however if you can get some statuses spread, and save a lot on MP and HP sustaining.

Doubt the industry will ever see something like this again. Combat sucks but outside a few tunnels it's not a big issue, thankfully the gameplay of questing, dialogue, companionship, and even puzzle-solving is genius. All of the companions' questline are thoroughly interesting and complex character studies that ultimately reflect on the TNO, and in general every named character has some meaningful story to tell that connects' back to the games' theme of regret. Even some of the seemingly innocuous items, like the language puzzles, get huge payoffs towards the conclusion of the game. Also has some of the coolest lore out of all the CRPGs; the Alphabets are personified through multidimensional beings (one of the first characters you meet is the letter 'O' inside a tavern), the locations are reflections of a variety of religious and mythical understandings of the afterlife, and without spoiling anything, the late-game stuff you encounter are very out-there as far as CRPGs go. Also goodness gracious, the prose here is super good at the really emotional moments, even if it makes some other mundane encounters unnecessarily windy and flowery. When you finally open the bronze sphere...next level stuff man.

Love the plot on the both micro and macro scale and the fact that this lets me roleplay as the misogynistic apolitical gamer I am is a true feat, not as big on the percent skill checks or seemingly random morale losses though. I also think there's some odd pacing barriers and tedium, with the shivers mural check being one of the worst. Zipping between the fishing village and the east side is also fairly annoying, and in general the game could benefit from a quick travel option for some key-locations. Also suffers a bit from the Planescape problem where people can just drone on and on about the most trivial bullshit or superfluous exposition.

All said however I do think this game approaches politics from a novel and interesting perspective, and is even more commendable for being closer to the political zeitgeist than whatever irrelevant WRPG/JRPG narrative is being deemed 'political' at the moment (see: Trails series). The relentless satire is funny, if a little repetitive, but is just a mask for the darker critique of convenient ideology at the heart of the story. The critique goes much farther than just a simple 'don't be dogmatic because reasons' platitude, and tries to demonstrate how being an ideologue disrupts your mental health, personality, relationships, etc.

In particular, the Fascist Thought seems pretty counterintitutive from a gameplay perspective, decreasing your morale every time you choose a fascist thought, but it's reflective of how mentally taxing being a fascist is, especially in a "thing" as blatantly left-wing and degenerate as Revanchol. The alcohol benefit of the Fascist thought seems like a cheap joke, but it's equally reflective of how the only way to maintain sanity as a Fascist is through intentional reality-disruption: i.e. constantly be drunk. The satire seemed too jokey at a first play-through but upon further inspection they're carefully considered, reflecting on what it's like to hold these beliefs both in the real-world and as a member of Revanchol. Politics is as important as it is banal, and is as universal as it is personal, and Disco Elysium really captures the contradictarory nature of all it.

However, if I had to give one substantial criticism, it's that the ending is too abru

Not sure why I like this one the most of the series. Not a PvP'er so the major strength of this game (according to the fanbase) is lost on me, I think the DLC is overhyped at best and actively annoying at worst, and nothing in this game particularly stands out as being exceptional. In fact, there's about 5 areas in the game I would say are some of the dumbest stuff I've ever played. I guess I enjoy this so much since it is the most 'gamey' of the Souls series; it's not overtly ambitious like DS1 and doesn't feel like an awkward fan apology like DS3. DS2 is primarily concerned with customization and expression, and the variety of ways you can mess around and break the game with dumb and creative builds makes it weirdly inline with something like the SaGa series or FFT than anything similar to how the Souls series typically approaches RPG mechanics. When you look at the game as essentially a giant sandbox to experiment in, and are willing to use a walkthrough to find the materials to make good experiments, the stupid parts become a lot more bearable.

I could go on about the gameplay loop, but one hidden gem about this game is the meta-interaction between Rance and the player; the oft-memed picture of whether to assault the miko girl or look at her panties is typical AliceSoft dark humor but perfectly captures how the game forces you into Rance's mindset for worse. Anytime the player tries to play to their own sensibilities or morality they're severely punished for it; not having enough sex lowers Rance's battle performance, making some story battles overtly difficult, and trying to play peacefully or mercifully will have the player miss out on several strong benefits needed to beat the late-game factions. By forcing the player into roleplaying Rance, AliceSoft lets the moral dilemma of the Rance series shine through: how can this supreme asshole be the hero of the story?

Nominally, Rance is really only the hero because everyone else in the Ranceverse is a total piece of shit, including the character literally designated to be the "Hero" of the verse, but more deeply, Rance finds his success entirely by being a undefined, hedonistic shithead in a world where everyone else is simply following the pre-determined roles assigned to them. Rance does what Rance wants to get by; the Player does what they can to get by. The finale of Brutal King Rance was a revolution of the created against the creators, a final No Gods No Masters message from AliceSoft; it's only fitting that the spiritual successor to Brutal King Rance would also re-assert that the player themselves is not the master of Rance either. It's a refreshing take on a JRPG protagonist, and provides a lot of food for thought, especially in contrast to AliceSoft's Toushin Toshi II, where the player is explicitly punished for having a moral center anywhere near Rance. I'm not sure I'm fully onboard with using sexual violence as the emotional hook for a lot of the on-paper narrative here, nor the occasional homophobia, but if you can look past that there's a compelling exploration of existential freedom and amorality that's unlike anything else in the media.

Also the design work is incredibly creative and varied, minecraft-esque characters sitting comfortably next to Masamune Date as an eyeball. It slaps.

after churning through most of the 90s-00s metal slug entries this week i was taken by two things. first: the games have a hilarious sense of Vonnegutian violence that makes all entries difficult to be mad at even if i found some of them tedious and grueling. in metal slug 1 & 2 in particular you can be killed by all sorts of 'Top 10 Worst WW2 deaths' sketches, like being crushed by a falling tank in disrepair or getting struck with an ejected shell casing from a Comically Large Cannon, as well as dishing out dark comedy of your own like pumping 20 pistol rounds into a suntanning grenadier or instagibbing a riflemen with 5 grenades as he leaves the latrine. it's hard to single out what gives a metal slug game that approachable aura that makes it a hot commodity but i imagine this aesthetic of humor, along with the plainly good slapstick like the inflation sprites and its death animation, has aided in the series' canonization and perpetual status in the zeitgeist.

second, these titles were alot slower than i remember. after perusing for a bit you can find dev interviews that state that metal slug was conceived as being branched off side-scrolling shmups like Irem's own R-TYPE instead of Contra, and its felt in the way hitboxes in the series are meant to imprison a poor position into a guaranteed death as in the shmup's philosophy rather than hitboxes being quick tests to jump or duck as in contra's philosophy. or at least, that's my perusal of the motivation--i'm nothing but a fledgling to both genres really but my main point is that I often "foresaw" my death happening in metal slug in the same way i "foresaw" my deaths in shmups, realizing too late i had put myself in an unwinnable screen position due to prior mistakes in dodging. i learned to accept this sort of difficulty for what it is as i moved on, but i wondered what a metal slug title might look like if it's challenges was more chaotic & reactive rather than guided & premeditated.

thus i have my question answered in gunforce ii, ironically the closest spiritual predecessor to metal slug, which manages to completely invert these two observations and separate itself out as a underplayed gem with its own sensibilities rather than some historical trivia for metal slug fiends. on the first observation, metal slug's wartime clownery is replaced instead with a mostly self-serious aesthetic of metal (in all forms), mecha, and masculinity: gunforce II stands next to SNK's Search and Rescue as perhaps the most attentive arcade title (to my knowledge) towards the late 80s-90s OVA & TV scene of seinen mecha and go nagai-derivated creature horror. the latter shows up only towards the ending stretch of bosses but this game is knee-deep in the bag of the former--the work of that era's staple mech designers like Katoki or Kawamori seemed like go-to references here, and shit like Bubblegum Crisis, 8th MS Team, Dragonar, L-Gaim, and Mellowlink were constantly running through my mind as i replayed this, not necessarily out of any explicit reference but just as being on the same wavelength as the game. its hard to notice this reference point of design at the game's breakneck speed but watching this HD run really honed it in--the sort of Neue Ziel-esque design of many of the common enemies, the power suited mini boss trio that appears in stage 2-1, a skeleton alien centipede demon inside a tekkaman blade-esque suit as the final boss--all of it feels crafted from a shared appreciation & study for that era's ability to engineer sleek instant classics of designs for narratives of dark melodramas and dystopian vignettes. in fact, the game cares so much for rendering these designs, for showing every healthy/damaged/destroyed state between pinion and gear, driver and driven, shear out and tear out that'll you probably spend at least 10% of your run time here in frame spikes of dropping to around 15 fps. while slowdown in metal slug becomes a crucial aid in assessment, gunforce ii never really ascends above being moderately hard for most of the time, so with slowdown often occurring in the denouement or initialization of encounters you'll just accept it for what it is. (tho I do find it really funny that the first 30 seconds of level one has the game's most noticeable slowdown). but it's rather serious passion for mecha without overt recapitulation or veneration makes it at really pretty & unique to look at it motion, and it's hard not to be charitable towards the title when you because of how singular it looks, in spite of its obvious ties to metal slug in user interface.

on the second observation, gunforce ii diverges from metal slug in being explicitly connected with Contra over any shmup, especially in how every platform, ledge, and wire in this game is scalable, similar to the former's platforming. this adds a much needed (for my tastes) dynamism to the greater metal slug encounter philosophy, letting you craft your own screen real-estate and angles of attack rather than following the rules as the encounter lays out for you. frankly, this scaling element is often not really necessary because again the game isn't that hard (stage 2-2 being a great example of where it's absence isn't even noticed), but there is great fun to be had in abusing the protagonists' absurdly double jointed arms to launch 360-degree assaults while hanging from the ceiling or bear hugging a ledge. it also adds a bit of strategy to the vehicular gameplay--since vehicles often aren't capable of switching vertical planes as easily as you are on foot, and because the game's equivalent of metal slug POWs can roam about both above and below your current height, there is some genuine strategy in regards to whether to abuse the hitpoints and firepower of vehicles for greater safety but miss the POWs, or to trust in your parkour skills and aim for saving all POWs even if it means a riskier section, or to mix the two and believe you can dismount & mount with the proper timings. again not every level engages with this idea to its full extent but it complicates the treatment of vehicles as a strict powerup as in metal slug, where losing a vehicle early often meant playing the rest of an encounter out at a tedious disadvantage.

where i fall off the train is unfortunate in that this is just not enough of a good thing--it's shorter than just about every metal slug title I'm sure, and the levels it really clicks on, the third and final levels, just remind me of how elite this or the planned third entry could have been if Irem didn't get the can right after gunforce ii released. but to be clear i think the rest of the levels are great, occasionally dipping into amazing on select sections and bosses, but not a consistent "damn..." like those two. in my opinion it's pretty tied with metal slug X as this dev's team best attempt at the whole idea honestly. also i'm mentioning it again but god these protagonists' arms are so fucking weird, please look at a clip or something it's like addicting-games.com tier in how you can get the arms to go out at weird angles. really endearing tho

Some periods of my life, I identify with the Undead burg portion of the game--the sense that there's always something around the corner, the constant threat of the firebombs, the ways you can diverge off the beaten path and hit Blighttown, Darkroot Basin, or touch some of the Catacombs before anything. I also enjoy how openly some of the problems are positioned--there's a dragon torching all of the bridge, how are you going to get across? Just solid video game logic.

At other points of my life, I've identified the most with the darker, openly antagonistic areas of the late-game. The spookiness of Tomb of the Giants, the literal PS3 CPU scorching lava Lost Izalith, the deception of the Duke's archives; it's a game that assumes you're capable of handling it's more ambitious, difficult ideas of not just level-design, but also of narrative through level-design--even if New Londo Ruins is frustrating, the stillness that comes through the game in this section is so palpable, it feels only natural that there's just a black abyss at the bottom of it all.

At all points of my life though, I've always enjoyed Anor Londo, Sen's Fortress, and Ash Lake. The first two are self-explanatory, those two sections have more or less defined the Soulsborne genre, but Ash Lake also slaps just cuz it's got that rockin melancholic beach vibes that are hard to come by.

At no point of my life though have I fully enjoyed Dark Souls front to back though, there's always some point of 'disconnect' between what I'm feeling and what the game wants me to feel. Sometimes the early game just bores me to tears and I give up, other times the noticeable quality drop of the 4 Lords section slowly saps my will to keep playing, and other times I think "well, I haven't gone through Blighttown legit since my first playthrough, it can't be that bad' and immediately regret that thought as the framerate hits the floor. I can't really fault Dark Souls for this, its kinda how ambitious projects go, but it's a game I think everyone should play at least once, even if I have no specific drive to experience all of this again.

another romhack W kinda unfortunately. playing this i had an epiphany about competitive pokemon but before that lemme say that doin this three innates + one selectable ability on every mon shit is crazyyyy cool and smthn that i'd like to see carried forward for romhacks, kinda like how day/night cycles are the complimentary bread you get with a romhack meal. three innates keep the core identity of most mons in tact and the selectable ability lets you splash between some gimmick, offensive, or defensive niches, meaning that you can pop out with the offensive v-create trick room solrock one gym then have him on some shiesty sand support rocker type beat the next gym. never been one to really hankerdown on one set of mons but with how quickly you can switch EVs and abilities, and thus team niches for each mon, it makes homie loyalty an actual incentive...rather a nostalgia prison of how watching venusaur clicking giga drain for 23 hours of the 40 hour experience was secretly fun because it distracted you from that overdue LabCorp bill you got last time you got burned and had to go to the clinic. similarly the minimal grinding shit this does along with level caps feels essential for the similar smogon simulator breed of romhacks that have been cropping up tryna ride radical red's high. this fares sooooo much better than radical red just on account of how quickly it is to drop and build teams back up, you can run a full new set of six after every gym if you wanted and that kinda easy team variety is something i think this genre has been missing for a long ass time now.

course as you can imagine here the power scaling is pushing prosperous amounts of P when niggas have four abilities--the recent 1.5v build has brought things back into the realm of sanity (weather teams were gettin the goob nut off on everything) but still keeps cool balance changes like feraligtr being a superbeast or dewong being an unkillable support god who comes up and sets up six turns of aurora veil for free for the whole gang. i think this has finally fulfilled the true promise of every mon is viable here that every romhack hitherto has claimed but never really succeeded. like, no lil baby, but if ur rlly 4PF you can build a team to have beautifly 6-0 super sweep about half of the elite four without requiring much more than some hazard support to be honest. not every change is perfect,,, (i beat this on 1.0 where weather abilities weren't as nerfed, and lets just say sharpedo with strong jaw + swift swim is first ballot hoenn HOF--conversely; parasect my friend....welcome to the guangdong tigers) but there's more than enough boosts here to justify a toe tip for even the most experienced romhackers. some personal favorites:

-- steelix getting shore up + some shiest defensive abilites lets him be an actual top tier wall, capitalizing on how good steel/ground is as a defensive typing whilst also minimizing how quickly he falls over to special attackers (still weak to them and other breakers but not in a crippling way as in before).
-- LOVE dhelmise here, some innates give you triple types and dhelmise is a grass/steel/ghost combo. AND has an ability that makes him only neutral fire and deal neutral damage back to fire types with grass STABs, AND has fucking water absorb for some reason. which means blud is like a super ferrothorn that can maintain excellent hazard control with spin but still put on that presh with a poltergeist + STAB anchor shot combo.
-- hitmonchan gets priority on all punching moves, letting him pop out with priority boltbeam coverage and a priority CC for funsies.
-- Typholsion having a priority eruption is fucking hilarious + he can splash on sand teams cause he's a ground type for some reason
-- greninja is so insanely cracked they give him wicked blow and skill link for water shuriken, like why.
-- Slaking can opt for truant or an ability that lets him act every turn but just move last, which is still p great
-- Lots of mons like sirfetch'd have this ability called Rampage which lets them avoid recharge if they get a KO, meaning you can run goofy shit like scarf giga impact tauros as a cleaner or even something more unserious like aerilate rampage giga impact dragonite as a cleaner. fun for the whole family.
-- giving tangrowth a neutrality to fire + an ability that gives him free lefties is so nice, genuinely kinda heartwarming that after decades of stall ballcrushing a romhacker is willing to toss the more patient amongst us a bone. stall players are truly feasting on the low tho between sheninja buffs + blissy regenerator + new intimidate for special attackers + more access to recovery and roost and auto-healing abilites across the board. if ur struggling early-mid game just get a quag and wall everybody, trust

now onto the epiphany: could be burn out since competitive singles dominates about 30% of my life in between youtube recommendations, me & my friends' draft league, spare showdown sessions, and occasional romhack runs like this but i think the appeal of mons to me will never be fully unlocked. about the 7th gym here i kinda got bored of all the shocking new changes and really just kinda wanted to be done with the whole endeavor lmao. as cool as the new changes are the game never feels like it can catchup to player ingenuity in a way that another player would, resulting in either some self-imposed limitations to even the scales or AI just using legendaries out the gate to even the odds. its cool that drake has a mega rayquaza, i guess? but if u got to pull out that shit just to make the game difficult i feel like there's some other considerations in terms of AI and trainer team building to be had here. likewise i look forward to when this gets some kinda movepool or ability expansion, not to undercut the sails of the aforementioned changes because they all are genuinely fun but like the shit boils down to the same archetypes for mons we've had since like gen 3: hits hard but slow, hits hard but fast, walls physical, walls special, gets up hazards, removes hazards, etc etc etc. the fact that any given mon can fulfill at least one of these roles viably is great, but without any change to the way these niches interact with each other or the kind of core teambuilding considerations to competitive pokemon as a whole its very whatever. maybe playing the whole game in doubles woulda fixed that (doubt it) but about 30 hours in it felt like i was swapping variables for the same formula rather than experiencing some transmutive. and look i get it, romhack, can only expect so much, and the scope achieved here is already crazy impressive, BUT i would be lying to u reader if i didnt walk away wanting more & more....for once i see gamefreak's vision in how they've tried to shake up battling for a decade now with z-moves, dynamax, terra, etc. z-moves were the best out of those IMO but like we need a gamefreak version of drive gauge or some shit--this is in many ways a lot of pokefiends' dream romhack, but the dream has made it clearer than ever that we've been smokin mids.

slaughter's I don't like shit I don't go outside, completely bleak and begging for (divine?) retribution to some unknowable crime. idk, probably the crime of being born. an apple from ribbik's tree of mixing slaughter with other gameplay elements, namely platforming, but this isn't the "oops!!!🤭 looks like you missed your jump! here's a teleport to restart ;)" nintenyearold platforming of other wads this is the "nigga fuck you" platforming of olde. maps 01 and 02 are aerial exercises of performing skates & figure eights around eroded neogothic pillars; i thought alot of NES sidescrollers and their derivatives in how benjogami will ask you to route yourself around projectiles, enemy bodies, and vertical gaps in quick succession. except, of course, the trick here being that all enemies are always moving towards you in a doom map, so the option to grind out muscle memory and timing is taken away, and now the requirement is left and right brain knowledge of which direction you need to be going at what speed and pastoral intuition on how you standing behind a wall for two seconds will herd the cyberdemon you can't see and the 12 cacodemons you can't see together to infight with each other. a notebook of Newtonian laws and velocity formulas in one hand and Joseph's shepherd crook in the other, real corpus callosum gaming.

it's claustrophobic and light on breathing room, felt like i needed a damn O2 mask by the time I hit map 03, which of course feeds into the visual work--this is by far benjogami's most striking WAD (not light praise, of the slaughter all-stars he's in the upper tier of aesthetics), undarkening Romero's brown into a low pH value bile of oranges & purples & neons. i love the Babylonian towers of toxins that serve as background to the action here too--depending on whether your philosophy says stalactite or stalagmite it's either god pissing on us or us sending our piss back to god. map 04 is otherworldly, vaguely resembling something akin to ribbik's frog & toad series but drenched in venom and supercharged with electricity. i had many (i.e. 1) drafts of words of map 04 prior to this and i could just not capture it's appeal or how it makes me feel, one of the rare things i feel that just goes beyond my aesthetic appreciation and into the sublime. realllly good shit man

sony porting their own self-produced "canon" of games that are solid but risk-less and marketing it with irrelevant "exclusive" changes and Advanced Graphics Menu technobabble: A Moment, a changing of the guard, bridge-building, empowering

koei tecmo caving to scant but fervent enthusiast demand and porting their most gluttonous and attention-seeking passion project that has gone onto to find its own niche cult and influence in the musou genre: who cares, sloppy, irrelevant, put a shirt on nigga

not a shmuphead by any means but i found the 2014 entry surprisingly entertaining and was in a car for 6 hours so I tapped in on this. manipulating bullet patterns on a crusty 2017 ASUS laptop with a suspect shift key is just only a notch below an arcade cabinet in terms of intended shmup experience, and after a bit of mangling with the different modes and ship types i was hittin that rhythmic groove that made me fall in love with PCB & Imperishable Night when I played them way back when. shmups are really good at creating this kind of paradoxical enforcement and lessening of failure anxiety--good performance lessens the feeling that you're gonna lose and builds confidence in your competency, but also said good performance moves you up the linear curve of higher stakes, to where your prior good performance might not cut it anymore, which actually just reinforces the initial anxiety, and so on and so on. new breed trapper imposter syndrome not the fake bullshit for corporate eaters they talk about in litmags. anyway i really like this one because it kind of lets you set the variables for that anxiety game--do you want to be anxious about keeping up a high standard for an indefinite period of time, do you want to be anxious about keeping pace with an ever-evolving environment, do you want to be anxious about the precarious, 'zig when you shoulda zagged' nature of timing your next big move, etc. then the internal slip n slide of affect plays out from there depending on how you've set the board up. idk just really fun stuff at the end of the day.