It's!

All!

Over!


Thank you all for playing, commenting, providing feedback and generally being cool.

gg

---

gg no re

Thank you Panda and Kachu!

Great game, everyone.

Now I need to figure out what to do with my ending. :p

Yes, thanks for the game everyone. I just posted my thoughts on each of the characters in my QT (not a ranking at all), so if you want feedback on your characters, go check that out. And feel free to ask me if I was unclear on anything.

I'm glad people seemed to like 5-2. It took quite a lot of time in planning, and even if we went through a lot of drafts, I hope the final product was worth it. It was also fun enough to do the art stuff. I gotta do the custom crosses for the rest of the cast now.

Also, Panda hasn't been this nice to me since I was an American idiot named Mancinitini

Last edited by Lone on Sat Mar 30, 2019 4:36 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Neat.
Okay I'll talk more
So, I liked the game. Good game. Game good. The cast was great but I don't have a full character list like all the cool kids do so here's a top five instead:
1. Marshall
2. Taylor
3. Skylar
4. Evelyn
5. Annabella
The only really notable things about this list is that comparing it to the one I made at the start of the game in my QT, Taylor and Annabella kept growing on me with every chapter while Skylar kept losing me, until the mastermind reveal where I think she really came together. Marshall and Evelyn were consistently faves though.
Anyways the game was long, but you already know that don't you?
Really all I can say is sorry I dropped at the last moment, but I also want to defend myself by saying I had to drop in order to catch up on all the work I put off so I wouldn't drop earlier.
Though if you want to know the presentation I made while you guys played went really well. Diamond-Blackfan anemia is a surprisingly deep topic.
Anyways I had fun until I wanted to die but now I don't want to die anymore, so I had fun. Althea's last post is my favorite one of her, competing with all the gift ones. I feel like these posts are the ones that let me understand why people liked her when she was such a pain to me.
Anyways, I think what I mean by all of this is

GAME GOOD

Congrats to the GMs! This was pretty fun for the most part and I think I enjoyed it enough, moreso than others did even (at least from my PoV). I have my complaints but I'll get to those in another post. For now, thanks everyone for making this fun. Favourite characters this game were Althea for sure, then Eli, Nicos, Vic and even Eve. Yeah, seriously, Eve was pretty great.

Also surprised by the large number of character rankings this time, I feel so outclassed.

---

Y'know, I was gonna put a character ranking like everyone else, but I can't come up with much to say. I liked pretty much everyone everyone. Specifically, Althea, Kyoya, Nicos, Eve, and Taylor were some of my favorites. The only character I didn't really like was Hoshiko, but that was mostly due to wasted potential and inactivity.

Now let's talk about Annabella. Hoo boy. This game made me realized that I shouldn't really do antisocial characters anymore. It got boring pretty quick, so I ended up resorting to talking about dolls and silently watching everyone else instead. If I were to go back in time and play her a little differently, I would probably do a couple of things:
- Make her less annoying during Ch3. I saw a few people complaining about that. Sorry, I didn't really realize it.
- Make her arc happen earlier. I feel as-is it was a little weird. Her sudden jump from indifferent to overly caring was a little jarring for me too, honestly. My initial plan for her arc was what ended up happening in-game, but maybe I could have used her losing the doll Ch3 to help flow into that. She interacts with some of the cast more and starts to be a bit more affected by the deaths.

But yeah, that's about it. Glad I got to participate!

...Ehh, idk

I should make it clear that the mysteries were really good this time and definitely the best part of the game. I feel like you guys got the gist of how to write these kind of mysteries in a good, easily solveable kinda way, and I always enjoyed trying to work them out. But, like, other than the occasional FTE, that's pretty much all I enjoyed.

I dunno. I was kind of waiting for this thread to say my piece, but now that it's here I don't really have anything to say. I guess I probably shouldn't have joined one of these during the last few months of senior year. But like I never really felt the same excitement I did in older games. I guess to me it's just not really the same after you've GM'd one. Or maybe it just wasn't a different enough premise to really get my creative juices flowing. I do feel like the newcomers had some of the best characters here.

Anyway, I'll gonna stop soon because I don't want to overrun the thread with my tragic, emotional musings, but I'm not sure I have much to offer to these games anymore. I don't think I'll be back for the next one, but it is supposed to be half a year from now, so maybe I'll change my mind...Kinda doubt it though, especially with the way my life is hopefully going.

---

Last edited by Planetbox on Tue Apr 16, 2019 8:09 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Ok some thoughts, and I'll try to keep it short. Obviously this is all my opinion I don't expect everyone to agree with me or my preferences of F games. I'm just speaking for myself.

Overall I enjoyed the game. The mysteries were really good to me, probably the best set we've had in a game. I didn't like the sound of preplanning so much but it's very clear that a lot of time and more importantly attention to detail went into making them. Really made me feel a bit regretful about how much I've rushed some that I've written. Nicos hiding in Hoshiko's backpack is probably my favorite twist of any F game despite being spoiled in advance on it. I also appreciated how much GM-aid there was in the trials and think that should stay. It's nice to abandon the pretense that the trials are fair to the killer while still giving the killer a puncher's chance.

More importantly the mysteries were varied and clearly wanted to try new ideas. I'm even fine with Ch3, it's a good idea and the misgivings I have with it is more about how that chapter was followed up on. My favorite was Ch4 for obvious reasons. I guess I really just liked the choices for the killers, very unexpected and pleasantly surprising. I know a lot of people thought Kyoya's death was pointless but I like Eli's role with it enough that I'm honestly fine with how it happened. I just would've done the death scene itself a little differently, but I'm not really complaining because I got what I wanted. Maybe I should be more open to letting my characters live but idk.

I wasn't a huge fan of chapter 1. I don't think there was any benefit to prolonging the idea that there's no killing game until the trial. I'm all for doing something different but I didn't really see the added benefit besides hiding the Eve twist and even that could've been worked around. Every single player knows what's gonna happen and then it goes on so long that you're just waiting for the shoe to drop. I think in general it's best to be super-duper prepared to get the trial out and keep the Ch1 DL itself short. The trial was good, but nothing special and I felt that the train setting wasn't taken advantage of. So that was probably my least favorite of the bunch but I still liked the second half enough.

I had no problems with the story of the game. I didn't love it or anything and I thought the end was a bit anticlimactic, but overall these games are more about the conflicts everyone goes through throughout. At some point the game just needs to end and I thought the framing around why the killing game existed was reasonable enough.

My biggest problems with the game are the length and cast. I'm gonna beat a dead horse talking about the length, but yeah the game was too long. Kind of unreasonably long to the point where I think it was a huge detriment in both player involvement given different schedules. I get these can take a while, but it was too long and I really hope future GMs who want to run games also keep in mind that it's best if the game is run "quickly".

Annnnnd the cast itself wasn't really the GMs' problem so yeah aside from the length I thought the GMs did a great job running this. I've talked a lot about this but I do think these games are due for a shake-up, and I think F5 was a bit too much of the same and something like the sci-fi theme isn't really a significant shakeup. But overall these games ride the most on the quality of their casts, and it just wasn't my thing this time. I guess I'll also say that any criticisms I might have on your character aren't meant to be personal or anything. Should be self-explanatory but I know it can still feel that way if you get your work criticized.

Gonna get something out as soon as I can.

I absolutely did not want this to end up having one GM work more/harder than the other, but that ended up happening where Panda had to do a lot more than me because of my circumstances. This time of the year was supposed to be really good for me, and I'd be able to easily go crazy at the game and work through it, but even after the first big delay, things just kinda kept getting worse and worse.

So pretty much every delay was because of me, for one reason or another. So I apologize for that.

I couldn't exactly work on the cases that well, either, and the only one I really had involvement in was Case 1, which I also feel insanely bad about, but I feel like Panda did a fantastic job! None of this would've happened without him, and most of it could've probably happened without me.

I'd totally be interested in doing one of these again, when I'm off school probably. Not anytime soon, though.

At the very least, I'm really happy to see everyone has enjoyed the game in some way or another!

i had good time

gg guys.

Woof...

I'm not sure how to feel, I liked F5 I guess, but it also had low ceilings and high floors for me. Which, I guess at the end of the day makes it into a less memorable experience when compared to like F4 and F5. Not to say that like the polish it had was bad, but like quirks and oddities are important and like even the Nexus was like a decently-well-polished mystery mechanic which didn't really have any surprises associated with it.

That said, I did really like chapter 4, mostly because Eli and Nicos were great culprits and the alibis were very clever at hiding their identities.

I guess the biggest thing that affects my perception of this game is playing Marshall. To date, he's my favorite character I've ever played. I would honestly play him again and again if I could. I think during this game I was held back by my own paranoia about how obnoxious Marshall was being. It's hard to play someone so vibrant without feeling extremely self-conscious and feeling like maybe other people felt less able to respond to stuff because of Marshall's stuff. Ultimately, that's why I felt best at the time about just letting Marshall die off.

Looking back though, I wish I had gone even harder and done even more as Marshall, because he's like honestly such an interesting person in my mind, and so I'm being eaten up by like a ton of regrets about what coulda happened. I do think that in his current state he's like still pretty good and has a lot of stuff going for him, his ending works decently, and I think a lot of things he did make a lot of sense in retrospect, but like so much was left unsaid.

Okay serious criticism talk time let's go.

Pacing sucked, obviously, but I feel it's important to cover this in more detail. People are saying it's obvious and there's no real need to elaborate but I'm afraid I can't concur. I think it's important to make it clear so that it won't happen again at least. Now, previous F games have had long waits between DLs before as well, and it's not too uncommon to have week long DLs. But this game literally had every DL go on for way more than a week which was seriously overdoing it and by the end it mostly ended in people just straight up not bothering. The one pleasant counterexample to this was chapter 4, till Marshall died anyway. But the first chapter especially hit pretty hard, especially because people were so hyped about the game and having there be nothing going on felt pretty anticlimactic. I know the first trial was preplanned but it should also have been prewritten. That's how 4-1 came out so quickly, after all. I suppose the timing of the game didn't help either since people were surprisingly occupied in the holidays. I know I was pretty busy as well, though I managed to post enough and even more than most of the players by the end. Ironically though, I didn't even really feel any burnout by the end and felt just fine. Also, despite what I said about the chapter 1 DL, it still does remains my favourite out of all the bunch. Ironic, I know.

And yeah I'll say I thought the cast was kind of generic and bland this time around. Other than the few I mentioned I didn't really like anyone that much at all and I just sort of felt apathetic about a lot of them. Not that I'm washing my hands of the blame here. Evelyn was kind of bland to an almost pathetic extent and even though she pretty much carried the game at the end she still had nothing to her, at least compared to a lot of my previous characters. Honestly probably my weakest F game character, not counting non characters like Chisami or whatever. It says a lot that I went through all those character rankings and thought that she was actually ranked way higher than I was expected to. I guess normal characters aren't really my thing.

The chapter 3 twist didn't help either in terms of the above stuff. I'll agree that it was pretty ambitious and out there, and I did appreciate it for what it was at the time but it was really how it was followed up on that soured it heavily. The cast was already pretty bloated enough as it was, so letting everyone stay the same felt boring, especially since I already wasn't into the cast by then. It felt like it also didn't have any real consequences to me. Rose stopped really doing interesting and being physically handicapped didn't effect her both as a character and during trials. As a character the most I remember was her being sad she couldn't ride the mega coaster, and the wheel chair thing wasn't really used well for mysteries other than excluding her as the culprit because the killer was seen walking or something like that. Althea tried to develop too and while I appreciate the effort and I thought it turned out okay, I felt bad seeing that most of the cast really even care and just sort of forgot about it afterwards. It wasn't even really mentioned after that so it became a big waste overall. That alone was why I wasn't a big fan of chapter 3. The other chapters were...eh. At least fine, I guess. I'll probably elaborate on them later but as a whole, mysteries felt well developed and mostly well executed, so that's not that big an issue.

Story stuff also felt underwhelming to me, which was a surprise since I was expecting far more from it, especially early on. Ultimately though it just felt like nothing, I guess. A lot of stuff I was pretty interested in- i.e the twin's connections, Nick, the Scheffield case (is that how you spell it?)- turned out to be pretty much just red herrings. So with all that taken way, what was left was an extremely barebones story with little to really impress me. I didn't really care about Olivia's motives or Project Eden at the end either, so it felt very anticlimactic. It was a pity, too, because I think having some of that stuff be more tied in would have been pretty great, at least in my opinion. I do agree with the general sentiment in the ghost party it's better to have the story tied in better with the players, so that way it can have more of a general impact. In the end though it's not too big a deal since DR stories aren't usually very deep, but considering the expectations I had I was a little underwhelmed, to say the least.

Anyway yeah, that's all. I'll be posting some stuff later and all but those are my major complaints for now. I'll say I'm currently interested in hosting F6 but I don't want to really discuss that in much depth currently for at least some time in order to let people get over their burnout from this game alone. It's almost definitely not going to be held for slightly less than half a year, so yeah. That's all.

---

Okay so apparently there's no place this was ever explicitly said literally anywhere, but it was underpinning a lot of the strangest Marshall interactions in F5, so I guess it should be documented somewhere:

Whoa

---

Oh that makes a lot more sense

Its finally over.

Overall I enjoyed F5 there was definitely issues with it's pacing and more done when not in trials, but there wasn't a character I can say I hated really (besides hoshiko but its not so much hate its more didnt exist to like or hate).

Skylar's/Olivias motive could definitely have used work, it didn't really stand out to me as anything special it also felt a little easy to predict it was skylar as mastermind simply due to process of elimination of which characters got developed in a gm post (I think I had skylar mostly pinned as mastermind somewhere in the chapter 3 trial) not that I think wc did a bad job with the character or anything.

I enjoyed my brief time playing vic, it was just a shame that the first half was me trying to get a grip on how I wanted to portray him, it didn't help that I only had a single chapter to do this but someones got to do it so no complaints in that regard. I wish I had put out another fte and should I get into a future game I hope to do much more with a future character.

anyways I had fun overall. :v

Last edited by Cold52 on Sat Mar 30, 2019 8:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Yeah that


that makes a lot of sense

This suddenly makes marshall make more sence. :v

Yeah the Althea fte is probably the closest it ever came to being said explicitly. The Skylar fte also had major undertones of it.

And yeah it sorta affected like his entire personality and backstory and all that so it feels weird to leave it unsaid, but also that's what Marshall would have done.

Yeah, I can kinda understand that. I do think it should have been stated outright though. Like even just putting his deadname on that Clemson letter, since in my experience schools here are really bad at using the right names. Though I guess it's future so that could have changed. I do think he's like way too convincing appearance-wise to be a high school student but whatever. I am kinda glad to hear that though, I always thought we needed a trans character in one of these but I never had the nerve to try it myself.

---

That's pretty wild

Well, it's over. Whew. Personally, while I did have a few issues with how the game was run (mainly the delays, but hey, life comes first), overall, I enjoyed it.

Allow me to just get the elephant in the room out of the way. Taylor was... ech. Personally, I'm not fond of how he turned out. Reception on him seems to be very mixed, and I can see why. I honestly feel like I was the wrong pick for the Ultimate Agent once everything is said and done. And that I should have died earlier, too.

Basically, I was getting rather burned out pretty quickly, as I had school and a ton of assignments, a vacation at the start of March which kind of screwed me over (in my defense, I thought the game would be over, or I'd at least be dead by then, but c'est la vie), and I had a TON of familial drama going around. Like, seriously. All of that combined really just led to me being extremely unmotivated, and while I did try to post, I wasn't nearly as active as I should have been, especially in trials, and for that, I apologize. Take my words as you will.

Overall, I feel like I had more fun with my character in F4. While Taylor had his moments, I really loved playing Bryan throughout the entirety of the game, while Taylor was meh to me, really. Maybe in the next F game, I'll have more fun with my character, who is personally one of my favorite characters I've made. As long as I can remain active and make them distinct, I'll be happy. But for now, yeah. Sorry for leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouth. I'll try my damnedest to do better next time, should I even get in, which I hope I do.

And as a final note, thank you to Panda and Kachu. My lack of motivation was totally my fault, and not yours, but that's kind of obvious, lol. But yes, thank you for running this game. I'm glad that just about everyone else had fun.

See y'all around.

Generally, I think the reason for burn-out was the game was too long and the cast wasn't that great. I'm not really sure if that's indicative of a format growing stale -- daily lives are as fun as characters make it, despite everything sort of boiling down to the same kind of activities. But with how many newcomers and subs there were/are I don't really think we're in need for a shake-up *just yet,* and probably some vets need to sit out if they're feeling tired of the games.

Personally, I'm ready for an F6 whenever, but I know people were talking about getting tired of these games and what not. I think since these games are so character influenced, it really matters on the cast. But I don't know.

Oh, one thing that was kind of weird and totally not related to anything at all was these hidden relationships that were hidden from everyone cause of the QTs. Like it was pretty weird to see like 4 love confessions at the end, cause there wasn't much love-making going on in the thread. Previous romances definitely were more explicit, which I think is a good thing if you're going for an emotional farewell. And not just like, sexy stuff, either. I felt Annabella's affinity towards Kyoya was also pretty sudden, as another example. Just something to keep in mind. I think this happened in F2, as well.

I'm not sure if it's the format either, though I'm pretty open to almost any sort of change that people think of, likely whoever would run the next game.

Though absolutely one of the biggest reasons of the burn out was the game length, which I apologize again for, but that never really fixes anything and what people should take away from this is to definitely try and keep things on the shorter end if possible. I guess I also want to hear from everyone else if we need to change up the format of these at all, or if we're still fine keeping with what we've already got.

There are 80+ F characters at this point, I think it's just difficult to consistently pump out good ones. While the cast can certainly be an issue I think any cast can become a lot better if put through a lot of interesting scenarios. But for the most part these games just change up the settings for the DLs.

Even if people don't think things are stale yet (I do), I think it's best to change things up before they get stale. I think it'd be really cool for the next F game to experiment with a really different idea. Then after that if the next F game is normal it'll feel like a change of pace. It doesn't really matter though, if the next F game is more of the same then it'll still have enough players interested to join it. At the end of the day it's down to what the GM wants. I'm just offering my unsolicited opinion, and I personally think it'd be cool to go for something really different.

Oh, that's actually pretty neat. Yeah, pity it wasn't revealed in-game.

In regards to the game, yeah, I really couldn't get into the story for this one. The cast was also kinda eh, but it's not the first time I haven't been able to get into a cast, and Nina was designed to be able to stand on her own even without having much chemistry with others which isn't exactly the best policy I'll admit, but it's why Shirly didn't work and why Jerry somehow did.

It's mainly in that after F4, F5's story was very minimal in comparison. We had Gawain's letters in the earlier chapters, which I actually completely forgot about when it came up again in chapter 4. In the end, those didn't feel like they added a whole lot to the overall story, or even just chapter 4. After all, Adam just needed to be someone who was uploaded as an AI, him being Gawain and therefore Siri's brother didn't really add anything, sans perhaps Siri's motives in the first chapter. That, and it didn't tie into the final chapter in the end, leaving us with only the mastermind's quick motives, which as others said, was very anticlimactic.

The only real ongoing threads to the final chapters was Taylor's talent, and the mastermind being suggested to be in the class. The latter of which, we seemed to forget about until the end. On my end, mostly because we've been suspecting our classmates of being the mastermind every single F game now, so it doesn't have the same impact anymore. We also have things like chapter 3's nexus which was used for the individual case... then never brought up again. It feels like a chekov's gun here... or I guess more, the gun being taken down and shown to the guests, then put back up to never get used again. idk, it just feels weird that this huge useful-looking device never got any use outside of one mystery.

For the overall apathy, yeah, the overall delays are probably the biggest factors, but I think there's more at play here. I think things have become too streamlined and organized. No more is there the fear of RNG screwing you over and making you the next victim, or that if the class gets it wrong, and randomly a person dies. I'm not saying every GM should say any random player can become first victim but secretly make an alt-account to be first victim... but idk, I guess I just want to be able to feel more in these game, as I feel both positive and negative emotion helps get us invested.

Anyway, I'll wrap this up for now. Hopefully something to be taken into consideration for F6. I do think these game need to go on a bit of a hiatus for now, to get our motivations back up. Because if our regular trial solvers don't care and don't sign up, then that's going to cause issues in of itself (last two F5 cases kinda show this). And I take a while for creating my characters, I only really have the base idea of what I want to do next. I did enjoy F5 and the different role I had in this game than others. The delays and the chapter 1 murder being accidental did hurt Nina in the end, as I didn't want her to be the first to kill (since too obvious), but the second and only having done it when the appropriate motive was given. She was definitely a character meant to be played for two weeks and not for a month, but regardless, it seems she managed to achieve her intended effect by the end.

I was fine with the Nexus. It was very obviously a trial gimmick, and I think it could've been utilized in that particular trial a bit better but was still overall happy with it.

I guess something I will say though is that I don't really think the sci-fi theme was necessary at all in this game. It didn't affect the cast at all and not to say the GMs didn't try to integrate with things like the Nexus, androids, and AI but I don't think the game necessarily needed to be built around it. There was no sci-fi theme in F3 but it had a time machine. There was no fantasy theme in F3 either but things like the Necronomicon were meant to show that magic existed in the world to some extent. I'm not saying people should just throw whatever shit they want in their game whether it makes sense or not F1 but there is no singular universe for the F games and they're all meant to stand on their own. Mainly just saying this if any future GMs want to have a chapter with elements of magic/sci-fi but are afraid it won't fit--it'll fit as well as you want it to and most players will be happy with it as long as it's executed well. And just because I don't think the sci-fi theme wasn't necessary at all doesn't mean I think it shouldn't have been there, I just don't think it made the game distinct enough on its own.

I thought of Kyoya last minute but a character I thought of a few weeks later was an Ultimate Secret Agent (or Alabaster Tour Guide) who was also a cyborg. Given how relevant the androids/AI stuff ended up being, how little of the cast was sci-fi, and how Collin wasn't hot on the role he was given I feel like I missed an opportunity. But I wouldn't have been Ultimate ??? anyway if I didn't know what the talent was so it's probably pointless to think about.

Siri was looking for information on what happened to her brother, which was why she was in the back of the train in the storage room in the first place. I feel like that was made clear but I might be totally not be remembering right since chapter 1 ended a while back.

Also, Panda and I originally planned for the ending to be a little different, if Skylar/Olivia ended up living, she'd opt to upload herself into a computer in the same way Gawain was, and use her new abilities to completely destroy Project Eden, or something along the lines of that. And if Skylar/Olivia was voted to die, Gawain would end up doing that instead. Though we ended up with the vote being for Skylar/Olivia to live, and WC didn't want that to happen for Skylar. I don't quite remember why we didn't have Gawain do it in the end, but that ended up not happening either. I'm not too sure how much of a difference that would have ended up making though.

I also don't think the Nexus only being used in chapter 3 was all that bad of a thing, especially with how people didn't understand it at the start and didn't like it, I think it coming back would've only made things worse instead of bringing in new or different ideas.

Oh, I did like the role I was given. I just feel like after the game has ended, someone else prooobably would have been a better choice to be the mystery talent. I just feel like I could've done more with it, really.

So... yeah. Point is, I sucked hard in this game. No denying that.

Okay, maybe "sucked hard" is a bad term. Alright. redo. I was terrible. Boom.

I felt the thing that pancakes is talking about too. A lot of relationships seemed to come outta nowhere. Like I think I was told more about relationships more than I was shown any. That's kinda an old issue with these games and it definitely had a resurgence during F5. I think people were relatively uncreative with characters this time. It seems that relatively few people feel like they played their best character.

I'll also concur with a lot of what Lone just talked about with the overarching mystery. The overall thing was pretty tame and safe and there wasn't a whole lot to hang on to.

GMs have a lot of power in these games to enable the characters to do more with their story, but like I said in the ghost party, that didn't happen enough I don't think. And then, like JM is saying, the scenarios in this game can do a lot to generate excitement and just changing the background for each DL isn't enough anymore.

Also I generally enjoyed Taylor's personality but I think he was maybe a little like unambitious? I mean Bryan was a simple character and it worked well but I feel like taking on a bigger role with Taylor called for a more complex vision for your character than what you seemingly had. I dunno that's a bit of an oversimplification but it's how I feel.

Agreed on the Nexus, it did always feel like a one trial gimmick and I couldn't really see it coming back anyway.

Also in regards to what Pancakes said, were there really those many confessions at the end? Like Honda/Skylar was like a little out of nowhere as mentioned before but other than that the only thing I can remember was Taylor confessing his feelings to Althea? Which felt out of nowhere as well but like it also never ended up getting addressed anyway so it was whatever. Annabella and Kyoya being friends didn't exactly surprise me either and I'm not really sure if there were many other relationships that went unnoticed. Stuff like Nicos/Taylor, Skylar/Taylor, Nicos/Marshall, Honda/Taylor, Marshall/Althea, Althea/Evelyn, Nana/Rose (not love stuff, just relationships in general) were made extremely clear in the thread and I knew they were like good friends at the very least. So it didn't feel too bad to me. Even Skylar/Honda as far as I knew were "friends" at least, since chapter 1.

I agree that Taylor's role felt pretty dull and not out there enough. Like in terms of style, he just felt like a pretty boring version of Bryan, albeit slightly more antisocial and vulgar. His role as the Ultimate ??? just felt really bland and not enough of a standout. I know there was some mild foreshadowing towards that in earlier chapters, with chapter 3 being the big event. And then chapter 4 came and his talent was revealed! And then he... did nothing with it. Just sorta went back to being the old Taylor, like whatever. Didn't get an alibi which utilised his talent well either, but he also didn't do anything good with the reveal afterwards. I guess his chapter 5 alibi was him being slightly more proactive with the interviews, but I agree with JM that using those as a way to discover the mastermind felt a little passive though maybe it was actually in character for Taylor then and overall kind of standard. Honestly his in-thread presence felt very minimal and it left a stale taste in my mouth by the end.

Generally I agree that future F games need changing up too, but I don't have much to add to that. I'll agree though that more dynamic DLs is kind of important. Bariety in situations is pretty important for more dynamism as well.

Also while I'm here I guess I can reveal my thoughts on the DLs and the trials, let's goooo

---

I think the backpack twist was just very neat, especially because it took advantage of Hoshiko's defining trait. Would've been nicer if she were more active and the bag was used more before in gags and such, but it's still good here. And hey, maybe it's better if it's less obvious.

Also I can just really easily imagine it translating well to a DR game. I can imagine Nicos getting cornered near the end and being like "There's no way another person could've been on the ferris wheel!" Just a really cool climactic scene to imagine thought it wasn't as satisfying when it was actually revealed in the thread, but still a cool twist.

Well, yeah, that's because Nanjo figured it out in the Discord himself. Nobody else in the trial was really able to do it which also just sort of adds to my complaints about the trial activity there. I did like the twist in theory though, it just felt sudden when it came up in thread.

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Really, that high of a ranking for case 5?

I just found it kinda boring and anticlimactic tbh. Felt like the mastermind going down that easily made for an unsatisfying final act. But I understand that this was crafted this way due to the lack of active trial solvers by this point in the game. I'll admit, Nina's final rebuttal was weirdly executed too. Should have just stuck to the anatomy differences and stuff. Still, it was fun having the killer actually put up a bit of a fight for once. And I figured the Ultimate Juvenile Delinquent should pose somewhat of a challenge at least, so I was happy the only lifeline usage was on her.

I actually wasn't too bothered by the random relationships suddenly brought to light in the final chapter. It's been a thing since F1 to be fair. My issue in F1 was that there was no way for us to deduce that Sakura was lying to cover for Sayako in 1-4 without knowing that they had a relationship going on, which I know Slezak, Matt, and myself didn't know about. Matt being inactive, and not even learning about it until F3, but Slezak and I not until it was explicitly mentioned on Discord after. I don't know if Pancakes or Mecha knew about it, but they certainly didn't bring it up in that trial at least. So yeah, since none of these random relationships negatively affected the trials in any way, I didn't mind them too much. Just a bunch of things that happened really.

Well obviously that would be the case since you experienced it from a story perspective and not a mystery perspective :p In terms of story it was definitely not that good and was kinda dull, but in terms of mystery I think it felt pretty satisfying to unravel. Figuring out the killer's movements was definitely a highlight and the map helped out a lot in that regard. Alibis were pretty straightforward and easy to really keep in check too. It wasn't anything too great but I don't think it suffered from any huge issue like the Rose thing in chapter 2 or the Nexus in chapter 3.

Also I thought the anatomy thing was a bit weird as an argument? It felt a bit too semantic and silly for me to really take seriously. The argument about how she could have taken Nick by surprise, I think felt better.

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