Was thinking about Pride and Prejudice again, as I am wont to do often, and I realized: Caroline Bingley is an eighteen-year-old orphan. Like. The Bingleys' parents are fucking DEAD. That's sort of the whole underlying point.

(And we know that Caroline is basically a kid because Charles is her older brother, and he's, like, what, 21? He's one of the only men in the Austen corpus besides Mr. Collins who marries a woman his own age.)

So, like, either her parents died recently, in which case she's probably still grieving, or they died when she was a child, in which case their deaths are a foundational trauma, or they died when she was too young to remember them, in which case she was essentially raised by the Georgian equivalent to a trust fund. Jesus Christ.

RE: https://mas.to/@Judeau/115764622216122040

It really does, and what's funny is that nobody ever meaningfully talks about the enemy designs in #PhantasyStar Ⅲ at all except in the context of being angry that they're only given two or three frames of animation (which is still more animation frames than Final Fantasy enemies had, but I guess Phantasy Star, having built its reputation in part on its high-quality animation, gets held to a higher standard).

I remember that back in the nineties there was this Phantasy Star fan website (I think just called "The Phantasy Star Homepage"?) which had compiled some of the most rigorous annotation online at the time for beating the other three games, but the site owner had given up on compiling the same for PSⅢ by the first cave dungeon because they were *so disgusted* with how dumb the Grinder enemy looked and the fact that its attack animation just wiggles its ears.

But all the enemies in the game are creative, fascinatingly impressionistic, for the most part placed evocatively

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@jedimb/116572259597623977

Okay so here's the thing, if you play Phantasy Star III you should absolutely play the Retranslation patch. The original English translation gets a lot of stuff wrong, to the point of making a game that's already visibly threadbare look even more nonsensical.

(The most severe case is that the game's events take place contemporaneously to Phantasy Star IV instead of a thousand years afterward, meaning that the war that was supposed to have broken out a thousand years earlier instead occurs apparently moments after Palma explodes in Phantasy Star II).

I played the Phantasy Star III General improvement mod a few weeks ago and while I applaud most of its gameplay tweaks and story tweaks (the mod adds more NPCs to fix the "empty towns and empty houses" problem), and also adds a bit of PSIV-esque party banter, it's also a little fanfiction-y in a way that the ROMhack didn't really have to be (like, no, Alisa Landale is not the ancestor of fucking Lena).

RE: https://retro.pizza/@Nymphomachy/116571091901317999

bonzi buddy-ass brain. too many malware toolbars-ass brain. "background tile is an overoptimized gif of a Argentinian adult film star licking Hershey's strawberry syrup off the shell of a box turtle"-ass brain