What's the equivalent of HIV or AIDS in fantasy settings?

technically, aren't all natural diseases part of the nature magic stuff in D&D settings?

But you have to choose to turn someone into a vampire, it can't be accidental.
Vampirism is like giving someone roids

Those games were fucked up.

I love them

You know those types of curses that get passed down to your descendants?

CORRUPTION

>aids is a family curse

I like this perspective

Your mom.

Look at this cool kid.
This is more homebrew but my DM had a thing for mimics. He actually made a blood virus that consisted of 'mimic goo' that infected somebody and slowly ravaged the body until the spawn were ready (and the host was dead)
Literally AIDS except when you die your body becomes a budding sack of meat for an evil creature

I seriously think that they designed 3 the way they did specifically so that reviewers would give it terrible reviews.

Everyone in that setting is so fucked. I adore it to. Mikhail a cute though.

3 felt like it was intended to piss off people intentionally.

All female singer cast
>make them murderous apocalypse-causing supersluts to piss off idolfags and purityfags

Crazy story and mediocre gamplay felt like it was meant to infuriate journalists and gameplayfags a like.

Rhythm battle
>lets make it even more obnoxious than the one in DoD 1

It adds to the charm. It doesn't approach DoD1 levels of insanity though.

Probably, but I think that it was mostly related to the creators trying to make some sort of statement. Drakengard wasn't a fun game, the plot wasn't good and the music was downright maddening, but hell, it was one of the most insane and fucked up experiences you could have in a game, which makes it extremely interesting.

>that branch E ending

They made it worse, but it was actually fun to watch.

1's Rhythm ending wasn't even interesting to listen to or watch. It was just miserable.

Drakengard isn't fun, but the story and characters aren't bad. As a summary it seems generic, but the execution bring it together. And I actually like the ost.

youtube.com/watch?v=wLFxzK25_LE&list=PLbjXFbywb2MSozU1zJNqX4FRV31Oi5sM_&index=24

As it goes on, it really captures the apocalyptic mood as you get to the later chapters.

Yeah, Final Verse is just haunting when you can sit back and watch it, and beautiful when you listen to it.

DoD1's Chapter 13 is perfect moodwise. Bleak, miserable, and soulcrushing.

I felt a lot of the writing in the latter part of Nier was kinda contrived, and a bit forced into trying to make you the bad guy, despite the fact that whole angle falls apart the moment you realize it all could've been avoid if the villains weren't complete idiots, did go full retard evil army, and if the the people who designed the Replicants weren't stupid enough to make them a bunch of sterile dolls that SOMEBLOODYHOW stop being sterile when they got a soul.

Seriously, Shadowlord is a spaz, the twins are lazy idiots, the tree is a retard, Noir is a mustache twirler, Kaine is a bitch, and the whole Aerie is full of paranoid spastic idiots, the same with all the gestalts in the Castle who never though that it might been a better idea to keep the babies somewhere else and to not attack the walking terminator who is incapable of understanding your language
They all almost deserve genocide by protag. Then said protagonist made the who villain narrative all pointless in the long run by erasing himself to save his friends and family in the ultimate altruistic act.

Do t get me wrong. I love the game and can't wait for the sequel, but the writing outside of characters is just so contrived and trite, and gets near to WH40k levels of pointless grimderp wank.

Emil is cool tho, easily best thing about Nier.

Yea, the whole setting and characters of Drakengard are just the best when you look at them.

Hell, even 2 had it's moments. All the main characters might have been the worst, but all the bad guys were great. Really, the bad guys should have been the protags in 2, they fit the series so much better.

>Emil is cool tho, easily best thing about Nier.

Yeah I'm glad he's coming back.
youtube.com/watch?v=BFXJA1tmnMc

And so is the Cult of the Watchers by the looks of it.

Everyone is fucked. But when has that ever been news in a Yoko Taro game?

I guess I haven't done it in a long time, but I remember this fucker's monologue during his fight being the best as well.

And, of course, Caim was great.

I would say that the worldbuilding, characterization and setting is pretty damn spot on, but it has that japanese storytelling thing of not revealing all the details so you don't always realize the true depth of things, so that's where things get a bit confusing until you've seen the whole scope of the plot.
Also, don't misunderstand me, the music is quite incredible but because of its own merits. There are a bunch of objectively beautiful songs, but for some music of the soundtrack it's amazing how they achieved the feel of industrial machines through cutting and pasting orchestral music, it gives me chills from just thinking about it. There's some impressive beauty to it, but it's a beauty tied to alienation, like watching an otherworldly being warping reality in front of you.

>Yoko Taro

"When I was a kid, one of my friends fell off a building and died. Seeing his body, I realized something. Anyone willing to kill another human being must be insane."

Personally, I'd like to see a game where Yoko Taro and Hidetaka Miyazaki team up to make it.
Especially since the marriage of Taro and Platinum is a match made in heaven.

It'd be interesting to see Taro and Miyazaki team up for something. Especially since Miyazaki excels at worldbuilding, and Taro does characters so well. And both have an ear for good OST.

Friendly Reminder that Two did nothing wrong.

Mummy Rot, technically cureable but way beyond the average townsperson or peasant.

Bloodrot
Maybe your veins get ashy or something idk

Corpus.

Genital Bees

I haven't got a clue who that is, but if you say so... then she's basically guaranteed to be evil through and through.

Your mom.

And her carvenous vagina.

Of black pitch darkness.

Zero is so fucked in the head, and it's great.

She's a horrible, horrible monster...and you can root for her because she's trying to fight off the end of the world.

And somehow? The fact that she makes no bones that she's all sorts of fucked up makes it, like. Ok to laugh at and enjoy.

>total disregard for life
>kills quest givers before the quests can be proposed
>unreasonably angry at the prospect of losing whatever she stole
>constantly bored/angry
>lies, pretends to be better than she is, backstabs people and laughs about It
>only person in the world that puts emphasis on getting more and more bloody
>scoffs at riddles and attacks mechanisms behind them
>blames snow for avalanches. The exact quote "Pussy ass snow, I wasn't yelling that hard!"

Actually, of the five, she is the only one who isn't really fucked up.

Of course, karma means that because she's the only nice and well intentioned character in a Drakengard game, she basically has her entire world come down around her, and ends up a miserable shell who can't even speak.

To be fair to Zero

Finding out later that anyone memerized by the song of an Intoner is doomed to insanity once the Intoner is dead. I don't know if it's ever stated, but it is implied she's doing it to put them out of their misery, and given what we see of them when they do go insane, she actually is doing them a favor.

Really, it was quite interesting how the game started off by characterizing her as an amoral monster, and then spent the whole second half of the game justifying her actions without her ever talking about it herself.

She does it for that reason....and also because she really fucking enjoys the killing.

She just has a way to make it productive and useful, is all. Bitch be craycray, and just channeling it in a good direction.

>HIV or AIDS
This makes me uncomfortably mad.
HIV causes AIDS, you twat.

I dunno, man. Ultimately nearly every action she takes is to make the world a better place.

I don't know if she's a nice person, or even a good one. But I don't think she's just mindlessly enjoying mass murder

That's Three

What's your point? You can still have HIV without AIDS.

Out of the Intoners, I'd say Two is the only legitimately good person. Zero and One have good intentions and goals, but they have to use despicable means to do it. Three and Four are pure evil, and Five is literally a selfish child (with some implication she can grow up).

Brother One is in the same boat at his sister, and Zero, even if he just makes things worse by creating the Cult of the Watchers. But hey, at least he tried to fix it. Tried being the key phrase.

And then for Nier, he realized after watching newsfeeds of the Middle East conflicts that "you don't have to be crazy to kill people, you just have to think you're right."

Yeah, I don't think Zero really enjoys killing the same way Caim would. She just seems resigned about it, which fits the tired mood her original VA affects when voicing her. I think that's the biggest failure of DoD3's english dub. DoD games and Nier had good voice direction for their dubs, so it's a shame that 3's was so mediocre. I hope Automata's turns out alright. Or at least let it have dual audio w/ subtitles.

90% of the conflict could have been avoided if Kaine was willing to serve as a translator.

She could understand them, she knew the babies were kept there, she literally said "I don't care" when a Shade begged them to stop.

Kaine had a shit childhood but that does not excuse even a fraction of the crimes she had committed in that game, she was the monster that kept NieR committing atrocities because "muh tough grandma raised me wrong."

Which she did, Grandma was a bitter idiot that solidified Kaine's path to evil.

The Shades were forced to fight because NieR and his buddies would have continued to slaughter them even if they refused to attack.

Remember the small child with the robo-buddy? Him refusing to attack didn't stop NieR from stabbing him. The Wolves were a victim of the cycle of violence when the Masked Men slaughtered their pack simply to "make sure they're aren't a nuisance during the wedding." Even if they didn't retaliate, do you think they would have been left alone?

The Shades were organizing for protection.

Doesn't Kaine have to be a bitter asshole otherwise Tyrann eats her?

Quite the opposite, Kaine is a bitter asshole because it gives her pleasure, murder in particular is something Kaine gets off *hard* to.

Orcs.

Pokérus. VDs: gotta catch 'em all!

I always did feel sorry for the sisters, even if they're generally fucked up.

I mean, it's not like they got the best start in the world, it's no surprise they ended up as fucked up as they did.

I personally always felt the most sorry for Five, myself. Yea, Two basically had the world come down around her, but I think Five wanted everything because the one thing she really wanted she couldn't get.

Still, even Four and Three had some shades of that as well. All of them looked up to Zero, after all.

Corrupted Blood.

I still remember the outbreak. Me and a few of my guildies, hiding out in the mountains, listening to the death and slaughter in Orgrimmer. We could have logged out, waited for the bug to be patched, but it felt wrong, like cheating somehow. Eventually one of us would ride out to scope things out, and inevitably we'd get the message in guild chat: "Shit, someone infected me, damn it, fuck." To their credit none of them tried to return to our camp in the mountains, but neither did they log out either, they cursed and fumed as they repeatedly tried to respawn. We heard a rumour that high level Priests could cure the disease by casting a variation of resurrection, one that used a reagent. That was how Shinyguy died, wandering into the wastes to try and do as much good as he could. The rumour was false, of course. There was no stopping it.

Sometimes I still see his face in my sleep. His long blonde hair, his graceful ears, his neck... Ah, to be young, an orc, and in love. The world will never see his like again, and hopefully, will never see a plague like Corrupted Blood either.

Yeah I'm going through the novellas after having finished Utahime Five and Shi ni Itaru Aka. Zero had a pretty shitty life.

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that Drakengard isn't about a fantasy world going to shit. It's about an ugly world that is inherently shitty, it's about to end, and it won't do so gracefully.

Eat your heart out, Dito.

dying of an incurable illness that the local healer couldn't pray away.

just like cancer and every other disease we need modern medicine to diagnose.

Well, for one thing the Shades had no way of directly communicating with people and most of the ones you encounter are insane and feral.

Also, the Replicants ARE sterile. The androids like Devola and Popola keep the numbers up and a body ready for every shade by basically drugging the Replicant parents and then handing them a newly made infant while they are out of it. It has just been the way things are done that nobody thinks anything of it.

Meanwhile, think about it this way; the Shadowlord was just as, if not more, obsessively desperate to save his Yonah and the only way he could do so would basically kill Nier's Yonah. He knows himself enough to know that there is NO way to try to negotiate with his counterpart so the only remaining path is force, especially now that Weiss is active and the culmination of the system is afoot.

>Shadowlord
Knows there can be no negotiation and has been stewing for centuries
>Twins
Bound by their programming. Only at the loss of Devola did Popola realise they had developed souls and free-wills for a sort and by then it was too late.
>Tree
Basically a computer
>Noir
Read the background book. He was always a fucking maniac
>Kaine
Yeah, that's fair
>Aerie
May well be mostly possessed by rogue shades so now live in terror of everyone finding out, human or shade
>Castle
They aren't soldiers. The Castle was never meant to be attacked

>May well be mostly possessed by rogue shades so now live in terror of everyone finding out, human or shade

I'm inclined to believe they freaked out when NieR discovered the truth because Kaine, being originally from the Aerie and having nothing but disgust for the place, would have been more than happy to slaughter all of them.

syphilis

How long had the Aerie been full Gestalt/Replicant merges?

The Shades acquired sapience during the three-year timeskip, before that only a scant handful of them were actually self-aware.

>thinking that aids is the same as a dungeon

read a biology book, faggot

Fantasy aids is just aids.

Fantasy aids is dire aids

Who on earth thought that this post would spur interesting discussion?

Dire AIDS is just normal AIDSs, just more dire.

Wasn't there a whole sociological study on how certain players would try to infect newbie players on purpose? That whole situation was really fucked up

Negro fever.

yeah. certain players would intentionally get the disease on alts and run to "designated quarantine" areas Blizzard set up.

The CDC studied the hell out of the whole thing, because it ended up a simulation of what real outbreaks can be like.