Xenoblade X is one of my favourite playgrounds for this stuff
Wednesday, 25 December 2019 14:25The fanfic words are Not Going lately so in the meanwhile I've been doing other fandoms -- mostly older stuff, because I realised that despite it being A Bad Time, a lot of the paramilitary stuff I did for Xenoblade X probably translates really well to TF content once tweaked a bit.
I had three big projects for that fandom -- two fairly extensive battle plans and a whole field manual that never materialised despite me having a bunch of materials for it. A bunch of the field guides material does already show up in my headcanons for Wrecker field ops, and I also had a brainwave about how the battle plans could probably be repurposed for TF things, especially the Operation: Death or Glory plan with its map that I fabricated out of whole cloth.
( Elaborate paramilinonsense startegy analysis underneath )
The other battle plan is much less convoluted b/c most units involved are mixed in some way -- infantry alongside light Skells, forming a "light" company, and a mixed mechanised unit with mid and heavy Skells forming a "heavy" company -- against almost uniformly heavy armoured enemy units with their own infantry support, so the relative firepower between the combatants is much easier to work out. The siege of NLA, however, is so closely tied to the environment it was fought in that you can't just look at which troops were more "effective" in a vacuum. That makes it more interesting, definitely -- but less broadly applicable.
Case in point: Xenoblade Chronicles X was Fucking Good and I haven't ever played a game or experienced a story that did quite what it set out to do quite so well. It's a science fantasy slice of life story with an episodic character-driven plot and a world that was oozing potential and just waiting for people to dig into the production design to come up with some interesting lore.
And no I'm not just saying these things because I have an enduring crush on Frye Christoph and think he got fucking shafted by the fandom for not being as #relatable as his little brother was along the time the game came out.
(no subject)
Sunday, 27 January 2019 22:15Did you know I wrote over 70,000 thankless words of meta for that fandom? Yeah! I also talked a hell of a more stuff over with Rosy that never made it to text because I burned out on trying to create content people would pick up on and get a conversation going which never happened.
I'm quite sore about it.
Anyway I still really love XenoX so I'm now tempted to go take some of those 70k of thankless meta and rework and repost it because I am, in fact, a pretty good writer and as much as the circumstances around that game piss me off to this day, the writing itself did nothing wrong.
Other than, you know
not get an audience