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shinsengumi purchased me an entire year of paid time, which means I should actually post updates! Perhaps multiple! I have long since learned that it is fruitless to say something like "I will try to post here more often", because that is always what I say immediately before disappearing for another eighteen months. But! We shall see! What happens! This time!!!!

To that end, I have started replaying a game of my childhood that I reached the final boss of but could never actually beat: Arc the Lad: Twilight of the Spirits. It is apparently the fourth Arc the Lad game, which I sure did not know at the time! I get the impression it is a standalone game, however, perhaps akin to how most Final Fantasy games might wink at one another but are not actually directly connected. Regardless, I've never quite managed to completely forget this very silly early 2000s RPG, and now I have decided it is time to revisit and conquer it once and for all.

A quick summation! Twilight of the Spirits is a fantasy RPG set in a world torn between the humans and the Deimos. Humans look like humans. Deimos looks like just about anything you could conceive of a humanoid demon looking like. There are devilish Deimos. There are Orcish Deimos. Their are bipedal furry werewolf Deimos. There are overweight toad lady Deimos. There are reptilian Deimos who only care about money (YIKES!). There are turnip Deimos. There are lolita Deimos. But don't worry the humans are also totally cool and interesting i swear you guys no please look at our awesome human characters i'm begging you.

Reflective of that status quo, the story is split between two player characters who have their own stories. Kharg is a human of royal descent, though the monarchy was abolished when he was still a baby. He is still treated as a person of importance in the small town where he was raised by his mother, the former queen. He's a normal guy of sheltered privilege, albeit one who lives off the beaten path. Darc is a half-human half-Deimos who has spent most of his life as a slave, haunted by his dead father's lament that Darc will be the one who 'saves the Deimos'. BUT OUR HUMAN CHARACTERS ARE AWESOME I SWEAR PLEASE CARE EQUALLY ABOUT THESE COMPELLING STORIES.

Also they are 100% obviously twins who were separated at birth, like, it's not a spoiler to say this, it is extremely obvious from the outset. WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN THEIR STORIES COLLIDE? WILL THERE EVER BE PEACE BETWEEN HUMANS AND DEIMOS???

I have played the first two chapters so far, Kharg 1 and Darc 1. Thus reintroduced to both main storylines, and both main characters, here are some more initial impressions!

( Does anyone else still type lj-cut when making these or is it just me? )

I didn't even talk about the love interest situation, or the ridiculous sexual dimorphism of the Deimos races. BUT WHATEVER, I HAVE BEEN OFF AND ON TYPING THIS POST FOR A FEW HOURS NOW, imagine having the attention span to really commit to. anything! ha ha! anyway.

Been thinking about how FFVIII is really bad about letting any major character other than Squall score a win (with possibly one single exception). Will I return to make a post about that? No! I will forget! It would be cool if I did, though! Expressing my love for games through tedious complaining, the Gargant way....