vivi-n

i've finished half the weapons now. i've also lost 4 runs with dualies, all of them in the mid-late sections before the last boss. i realize there may be something i don't get, but they feel frustratingly awful. even without comparing to the obviously busted charger, i would still say they're F tier. reefslider is not good and the main weapon is just blatantly inferior to other ones in terms of damage per second and range. and it has no cleave. and it's not especially good at painting. and it's not like you get great ink efficiency for all that, and one roll doesn't feel like it's that strong of a defensive option when just strafing or backwalking can also escape most of the same things. although considering that the previous problems lead to you getting surrounded a lot it's not like i think it would be any easier with tetra rolls or something

and like, there's tons of ways to cut through the hordes in the endgame, but doing it while avoiding the actual powerful enemies is incredibly overwhelming with the level of offensive power you have. the bias toward lucky chain/lucky bombs leaves you very weak on level start and respawns, and the items that actually help against dangerous enemies are the rarest drops. given all that, i kinda feel like...the build is less important than just picking easier stages where you can't get surrounded by 3 enemy sources or snipers at once. so maybe after i finish the other 4 weapons i'll remember enough of those to make it a whole run without picking a level that's impossible. or i'll buy the damage. or maybe they'll rebalance the game so that there's actually some advantage to picking this weapon cause i just don't see it

• The 23 Enigma

that's it that's the link

few things i forgot to mention:

the main bad guy has the funniest laugh. peak villain cackle shit
cynthia rothrock does two separate xiaoyu-esque "kicking from the back next to her own head" kicks in this movie
she also fights off a bunch of guys with machetes with a staff

honestly just watch this scene if you enjoy violent movies, the sequence at about 2:00 was the part where i finally just bust out laughing for almost the entire rest of the movie

couple weapons cleared in side order. been refraining from leveling up weapon damage, which seems great for winning and bad for learning. some of the stuff that gives you more options is also kind of humorously OP but there are some really mean bits so i definitely don't believe in myself to be doing naked starts anytime soon haha. if i'm even playing for that long. this game has almost everything that i've bounced off of in roguelites in the past except...that it's splatoon, so i'm going to keep playing it, probably long enough to clear with all weapons

also boss beams do too much damage for how hard they are to avoid. i need to watch someone else play splatling because i cannot figure out how to dodge stingray on the last boss with it

i don't know other charger players so i can't recommend it to the people i normally talk to but marie's setup is SO FUN if you've spent like 150 hours learning how to aim. you gotta work for it a bit early on but if you go full stats the final level of charge speed makes it instant like the grizzco charger and you can start doing absolutely disgusting cycles of instant shot spam into tristrike to reload and clear space. i only wonder if wail would be better since you can start shooting again faster...it really feels like the most powerful weapon and i like not being tied to the item system or needing to get splat drone charge, which feels make or break for weapons where you rely a lot on pearl. i did a bunch of levels i had thought were super hard in the last set and mopped almost all of them...the one that actually fucked me up is soaker blockade (it's way drone favored lol)

splatana feels...extremely average at everything. able to do anything and suit multiple playstyles, but since you have to get close to enemies to triple hit them you end up relying a lot on cycling specials to hit important targets. the charge speed in this mode also seems really slow and you can't lower it? lol :(

also, like, there's not very much randomness in the stages, they're all prefabbed and you can get versions with penalty modifiers. which i think is fine, i'm not really wowed by randomness and i think the repetitive feeling of early runs is an unavoidable part of the genre. anyway the funniest thing is that there's one in the last block of the game which is obviously the worst in the entire thing and when it's over you get to see the name and it's described as "sisyphean." games are a form of art where the creator can so easily convey malice towards the audience. that special human touch