The story is unbelievably mediocre, the eight characters’ stories happen completely independent of each other with zero interaction despite them traveling together, and the four per structure of each character’s story just means the momentum is killed every time by having to spend 10 hours doing other stories. The dialogue rarely ascends above trite, and gets very, very bad at times.

The gameplay mechanics are innovative, intricate, and amazingly well-designed, the graphics are interesting, and the music is really good. Not a game to play for plot, but solid everywhere else.

I love how I could tell this was mochi just by the name of the story.

@PureShipper I mean that’s kind of the goal when you’re going down on a woman, so sounds to me like the analogy still works.

Delet this nephew

@Throbelisk she’s talking about eating pussy for 20 minutes straight without stopping to breathe.

cries in trans

The classmate is like 10000% an egg too.

I’m really just here for Effie’s sculpted back & arms.

It really do be like that sometimes

Oh hell yeah, more Octopath. FEED ME MY TRASH SHIPS

Ah yes, Kodama Naoko, queen of unhealthy, disturbing, yet compelling dynamics.

^^^^MDQ since discover, reporting for duty

Creator, pls make my lesbians real in the canon, I humbly beg of you. They’re too good.

I never knew this would see the light of day, I thought is was just a weird crack ship I found while playing. But fuuuck, can you imagine Ophelia’s empathy and kindness helping Primrose recover from her deep emotional trauma as she receives tenderness for the first time since she was a child while Primrose teaches a starry-eyed Ophelia how to be confident and worldly, and to value her self as she deserves to? And they slowly fall in love and develop a kind, nurturing, and super-healthy relationship with each other? Because I have definitely imagined this myself, if you can’t tell.

Oh lord I really hope this doesn’t go like in the oneshot, they’re so cute and the sense of melancholy distance would fuck me up, can we get some realistic lesbians with a happy ending in this world? Is that too much to ask? I almost feel a sense of dread getting attached to these characters.

The thing is, yeah, I’m canon I guess it’s suggested that she would come back, but the thing about the end of any piece of media—and especially games, because of their ability to create semi-real fictional spaces—is that, when you reach the ending, it stops being a living world. You know there won’t be any more development in the game, and so the state of the world remains “Lillie has left Alola” forever. The world of the game doesn’t continue; it ends with Lillie leaving, and you know she is never coming back—whatever the game might say, it doesn’t bring her back, so in an important sense she has left you forever right at the end of your journey.

It’s a really powerful—and probably the best—move from a design perspective, because if she stayed she would become an NPC with one line, like Hau and Gladion, and she would cease to be a living character. Lillie is such an interesting and lovable character, and by having her leave at the end they avoid the sort of quasi-death other characters undergo, leaving behind the corpse of a one-line NPC that will never continue to grow as the characters have done throughout the story. I think this—Lillie remaining in our memory only as a living character, the end of the story making her departure permanent—drives that powerful feeling of melancholy that everyone is hit with on finishing the game; our good friend and almost-lover is still out there, but we’ll never see her again. Add in the difficult-to-process circumstance of her leaving suddenly and without warning you, and it becomes clear how this ending has generated so many fan works trying to explain, deny, or understand her departure.