Personality

             Hello. I don’t really have anything going on right now, there’s this idea I’ve been sitting on (whoops, hold on, not double spaced. There we go) so I don’t know how long this will actually be but let’s just roll with it. I’ve been watching, and have watched as I’m sure most of you have, a lot of fantasy anime lately. Delicious in Dungeon, Jobless Reincarnation, I’m in Love with the Villainess, Redo of Hea- I MEAN Re:Zero, Frieren, etc and in these shows characters usually have a personality type or something they value more than anything. Some are obsessed with money, others strength, cooking food, finding rare things and I see that and then I look at video games that give you conversation choices and I think “why?”

            When we play Monster Hunter, for whatever reason, I usually decide my character really likes money and if there’s a bonus objective for the mission that rewards us with more zenny then that is what I go for. Aside from making the personal choice to do such things, this doesn’t really apply to MonHun, but it could if Capcom wanted. But with other games, KoToR for instance, where you pick light or dark side things to do in conversation it’s like “why?” The choices aren’t so gray that you don’t know what the outcome will be, it’s like “kick the puppy? Don’t kick the puppy?” Like, obviously one is a dark side choice! At the beginning of the game they should just ask “what’s your end goal? Light or dark?” and the game is different depending on which choice you grabbed. It still offers replayability without the chance of you accidentally picking the same conversation line again because you can’t keep track of all your choices. I feel like most people play KoToR with the idea of “okay, I’ll play through light this time, dark next time, and just do whatever a third time.” That’s pretty much what I did anyway.

            Some games have more conversation choices but a lot of the time they ultimately lead you to the same place. Cyberpunk 2077 felt this way. You’d have conversation choices for street rat, nomad or corpo but they didn’t really do anything, sometimes a slightly different dialog would happen but more often then not one of the generic answers would lead you to the same place. I never really got into Fallout but when I started 3 and you’re leaving the vault this goon from your childhood is all “hey man you gotta save my mom!” and I was like “bitch no I don’t! Fuck you where is she?” and proceeded to beat the crap out of his mom. You were a douche all my life, this is what happens when you’re an asshole. I had the freedom to do that, though in the long run I’m sure it mattered one way or the other. I remember in Dragon Commander there would be times where I didn’t really have good dialog options so I couldn’t explain my reasons to the NPCs. Like, this one women general was all mad that the women weren’t getting paid as much as the men. I never really thought about that, I noticed the women generals were cheaper so I would use them but I couldn’t explain to this lady that basically I’m not using the men because they are more expensive so technically who’s really making out here? But since I couldn’t do that and I didn’t want the other women general I’ve been using to be mad at me, cause she was hot, I ended up siding with her.

            As it is now-a-days I just don’t have time for your bloat, videogames. You’re lucky if I get through your game once, you want me to go through multiple times? Please. You have to be some god tier shit for me to want to do that. I think it’d be better to just of a selection at the beginning of a game of “What is your character after in life?” and have a list, like I’ve mentioned before, and the conversations your character has just reflects that choice. Like the guy in that Final Fantasy spin-off, or whatever it was, that just wanted to fight “Chaos,” he knew what he wanted, anyone tried to bring up anything he was just like “Shut up! I only care about Chaos.” My kind of guy, he’s on a mission. I think it’d be fun to have something like that in Monster Hunter, just so your character has SOMETHING to contribute other than smiling and nodding. Just small things like “the coin better be worth it” or “mm, looks tasty.” I liked the DLC voices Capcom had for Rise/Sunbreak, they gave my hunter personality.

            I’ve been getting into the Delicious in Dungeon show and now I’m hoping for some focus on cooking in Monster Hunter Wilds. It’d be cool to have like, two types of rewards from monsters. You have the normal claws, scales, fangs, rubies for weapons and armor and then a separate category that are more for food like flanks and even tails. I’ve been hearing that Wilds is supposed to be “open world” so if that’s the case it would be neat if we had to cook our own meals. You make something like “wyvern tail” and it’s literally just a roasted Rathalos or Rathian tail. The food in World/Iceborne looked so fucking good already but now the Dungeon anime is making me want more. That was one thing I liked in Wild Hearts. You had to fish, collect meat and harvest vegetables to eat but you could dry them, smoke them, pickle them to change the benefits they gave. It took a little too long for the ingredients to go through the processes for me but it was unique.

            That seems to about do it. What do you think? How do you feel about conversation choices in games? Any favorite outcomes? What would your fantasy/MonHun character trait/flaw be? If Wilds is going to be open world, how do you think that’ll work? I already shared my idea years ago but things never end up the way I think they will so I’m excited to see what it’s like. Well then, leave me some comments and I’ll be back someday! Bye-bye!

            @AztecSauce                                                        Picture by @hews__