2013-10-09: [CT] Ellis Used Reality

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The Comment Golem
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2013-10-09: [CT] Ellis Used Reality

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Discussion thread for [CT] Ellis Used Reality
hkmaly
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Re: 2013-10-09: [CT] Ellis Used Reality

Post by hkmaly »

Maybe they are not supposed to be snarky talking winged cats, maybe only the animators of that game are that bad at drawing :).
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Re: 2013-10-09: [CT] Ellis Used Reality

Post by lyze »

Sarine must be some sort of masochist. Or maybe she's just really bored and jaded. At this point you'd think she'd figure that these two are a loon and a drifter but she still hangs around with them on the ever so slight chance it'd help her investigation. Instead she continues to travel with them despite the aggravation. Maybe anything that provokes an emotion, even frustration and embarrassment is worth it just to spice up her centuries of life.
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Disciple of Sakura
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Re: 2013-10-09: [CT] Ellis Used Reality

Post by Disciple of Sakura »

I will love the Lunar games until the end of my life. Nall and Ruby were amazing both for the humor they brought to the games, and for being such convenient item carriers. Lunar Silver Star was definitely the better of the two, though.
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Re: 2013-10-09: [CT] Ellis Used Reality

Post by Bytemite »

Sarine said that her driving motivation at the moment is curiosity - and an unvoiced suspicion that the damn elven council has been lying to them all AGAIN and it's going to come back and bite them in the ass. Undermining her superiors who tend to be breathtakingly wrong most of the time is what Sarine does best.

She's probably not all that interested in chasing down another crazy half-elf when she's still not sure at the moment that the half-elf did anything wrong attacking the morons that tried to capture and kill him. So she's seems to be avoiding that for all she can. Sarine will do her job when directly ordered, or if it's obvious she has no choice, but it's also been made pretty clear she doesn't like that part of it.

Also, even though Jon and Meji don't have the book, she may think they're on to something. And if they are, then she figures that the other half-elf will probably turn up if she stays with them.

Plenty of logical reasons to stick around.

And besides, while Meji is genuinely annoying, Sarine has reasons why she'd be sentimental towards a young half-elf girl. And while Jon is deliberately trying to be annoying, he's also funny, and has given indications that he's a lot smarter than he acts. So despite her aggravation, they're growing on her, and on some level she's probably amused by their company and the social dynamic.

She also kinda likes Jon already. Enough that she clearly thought it was cute that he was nervous about the warp gates and teased him not-entirely-insincerely about holding her hand - a girl like Sarine wouldn't even offer if she didn't like him.
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Re: 2013-10-09: [CT] Ellis Used Reality

Post by Graybeard »

One minor criticism of the new page(s) is that it plays down Jon's "is there a problem?" probe. I was actually expecting more to be made of it in the original story, for that matter, because Sarine must be thinking at this point that there's a real chance that this cute, if obnoxious, kid who reminds her so much of her lost daughter really is an Errant. In the actual comic, we never saw Sarine showing any signs of thinking that way until her Gethsemane moment at the camp site (which remains to this day my favorite single strip in all of Errant Story). Five tsuis will get you ten that she isn't thinking charitably about Meji's behavior right here and now.
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Re: 2013-10-09: [CT] Ellis Used Reality

Post by Imp-Chan »

It's the exact same art, the only difference is that the font is a legible size and it no longer ends a page. Neither Poe nor I saw it as an important panel to emphasize.

Part of what makes Errant Story so good is that a lot of the interpersonal stuff among the characters just sortof happens, simply because they are who they are. Focusing in on those moments would make them more emphasized to the reader, but it would also make them feel ponderous and the story would lose its realism and charm. I am not going to edit with the mission of attaching added importance to the interpersonal dynamics... it's not that they're unimportant to the story, because they definitely are, but they're already solid enough as written and not the part of the story we should be looking at dead on. A lot of Errant Story happens in the peripheral vision, and I think that's a strength so I definitely want to keep it that way.

I don't object to getting a lot of feedback on the new pages, comparing and contrasting is part of the fun. Just remember that our goals in editing may be different from what you anticipate, and that we're working with limits and problems that aren't really obvious to the reader. How much text will fit on a page, how many pages are in a chapter, how much new art Poe will have to generate... all of those are factors that are invisible right now, but they make a big difference to putting the pages and chapters together and to the final coherence of the books. By the time all of you get to see the pages, they're SET except for shading, and at that point it is not possible to make changes because all of the edited pages are woven together and locking each other into place. The only exception would be if a particular panel of the new art is really out of place and screamingly wrong. Then I might ask Poe to go back and change it, but on the whole... these are finished pages. Please enjoy them as such.

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Re: 2013-10-09: [CT] Ellis Used Reality

Post by theMycon »

Disciple of Sakura wrote:I will love the Lunar games until the end of my life. Nall and Ruby were amazing both for the humor they brought to the games, and for being such convenient item carriers. Lunar Silver Star was definitely the better of the two, though.
I think I agree, but the confusing publishing history of the Lunar games makes me unsure.

Lunar: Silver Star Story/SSSComplete (The Sega Saturn/PSOne versions) are definitely better than either version of Lunar: Eternal Blue. It doesn't really work with the continuity of the series and introduces a few plot holes for the sake of drama, but as a stand-alone game it's absolutely brilliant.
Both versions of Lunar: Eternal Blue is definitely better than any other Silver Star games*, and better than any of the side-story games.
Whether Walking School: Lunar was better than the non-Working Designs versions of Silver Star is debateable.
It's best to pretend that *other* Lunar game, for the DS, doesn't exist.

*Silver Star has been released 5 times, it's getting a sixth release, and the PSOne version is about 3x as long as the original SegaCD version (Lunar: The Silver Star), which all the sequels and side-stories are based on. Lunar:TSS and Lunar:SSSC are different enough that the developers offhandedly commented that, in redoing the sequel for PSone, "It was easy because it was just a complete script re-write and redoing all the graphics". Fans are divided as to whether or not they count as the same game.
I think fans should play through the SegaCD version once, to find out the main villain's "canon" motivation, and then never touch it again, because it's not particularly fun to play.
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