gekigengar gargant III!!! (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
aestivalis) wrote2026-01-16 03:57 pm
aestivalis) wrote2026-01-16 03:57 pm
SPIRITS, GIVE ME STRENGTH
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!
Sometimes I see people talk about how Tales of games do a horrible job with their race analogies, and how the games that try to deal with issues like racial prejudice and slavery are among the worst in the series for how tone-deaf they can be. I have sympathy for those perspectives! It is much much easier for me, with my background and life experience, to engage with those stories on a purely idealistic level. I can try to be attentive, and to listen, and to consider perspectives outside of my own, but at the end of the day I'm never going to have the same lived experiences as people more closely affected by the issues those games and stories are touching on. I accept that. I respect that.
But hoo boy. Do not play Twilight of the Spirits if poorly considered allegorical fantasy race stories are a sore spot for you because yeowch.
A key element introduced in the first two chapters is the idea that Spirit Stones are a finite resource that both humans and Deimos feel that they need in order to survive. Presumably our heroes will resolve this fossil fuels issue somehow, once they've stopped trying to kill each other, and thereby Stop Racism Forever. HOORAY. Meanwhile we're seeing indication that the Drakyr are really mean Deimos (nah, these ones ARE just bad actually), while there's also a human country called Dilzweld (lol) that's absolutely being controlled by a clumsy Nazi proxy led by the evil Darkham. Here is his fandom.com wiki page if you would like to judge for yourself whether I am being fair in this appraisal.
So, things are pretty subtle so far. Deimos attacked a human settlement! So Kharg and friends kill them! But then some of Kharg's allies kill some other Deimos who were intruding in the area! But that included a werewolf Deimos Wife and a werewolf Deimos Son, so now Werewolf Deimos is going to join Darc's party and become a main character in the other storyline and also an enemy of humans! But he kills one of the attacking humans in retaliation, and that was the father of Kharg's childhood friend! Oh! Oh, the cycles of violence!! When will they end...!
It's exceedingly melodramatic, exceedingly silly, and very heavy-handed. And the Deimos are kind of portrayed like they're way worse than humans! Oops! So, like, THAT doesn't help the bigger picture much either! Like, there are mean humans and there are nice humans, okay, cool, got it. But the Deimos, varied as they are, all espouse nonsense like 'the Deimos only care about power', 'Deimos don't have friends or work together', 'what's happ-i-ness?' (real quote!), on and on and on. Like, Deimos society sucks! Deimos are cruel and violent and don't even look out for each other! How do they even have civilisations, they are absurd! What is happening in this silly game!
So, like, why are you even playing it, Gargant? It doesn't sound like you're having fun at all.
ACTUALLY I'M HAVING LOTS OF FUN, WOOO!
It may be a silly and clumsy game, but it's so charming to be playing a slightly low-grade 00's PS2 RPG, you know? It definitely has warts, but since when has that been an issue for me, right? I love picking at stuff and complaining about it! And there absolutely is stuff to like about this game. The battle system is pretty slow, but it's quite fun once it gets moving along. The characters are pretty shallow, but there's good archetypal fun in there. Maru is a genuine delight! Darc is really over-the-top early 2000s edgy teen misery but I love that for him! And there's a character in this game who contributed to my little teenage gay awakening, so that's something to look forward to, haha!
For every awkward bit of clunky writing or poor delivery, there's a little something that makes me chuckle or tilt my head or even gripe in a way that's more fond than exasperated. So here I am, playing again and having a great time of it. This time I'm gonna see it through to the end. I will save the Deimos! Or maybe destroy the Deimos once and for all! I guess we'll have to wait and see!
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....
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(And then you should watch Kingsglaive. It's on YouTube!)
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'All right, let's take a look and see oh wow yeah okay.'
So, like, why are you even playing it, Gargant? It doesn't sound like you're having fun at all.
ACTUALLY I'M HAVING LOTS OF FUN, WOOO!
I smiled at this. Sometimes you pick something up and go 'this is obviously severely flawed, but it's also exactly what I want to be playing right now'!
It would be cool if I did, though!
It would be so cool if you did.
I also use 'lj-cut', I'll be honest. I've got into the habit of using 'user name' rather than 'lj user', largely because I can never remember whether 'lj user' is supposed to be hyphenated, but 'lj-cut' is baked into me; I'm not sure what the Dreamwidth equivalent even is off the top of my head.
It's always such a pleasure to see a post from you!
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Exactly, right! We are lucky enough to finally own a PS5 now and we will certainly get around to playing the much discussed Expedition 33, but I'm not in a rush because, like. Why would I hurry to play an exalted Game of the Year title when I could play a clumsy early 2000s disaster instead! (We will, in fact, play E33 at some point. I am eager to do so!)
It is always such a pleasure to post and to chat, honestly! I have been enjoying your latest descent into madness immensely, and am mortified that I predicted your favourite character so incorrectly. Utterly failed you.....