I was fully corrupted for many years before I ever heard of or played Vikings of Midgard, but that's actually a remarkably apt description.Spoonweaver wrote:Vikings of Midgar isn't really a furry game. It's more like a furry gateway drug.
While I don't agree with your criticisms of Vikings, I can absolutely understand that feeling. I kind of have a love-hate relationship with the Elder Scrolls series for the same reason. I love all the lore of that series, the way it's conveyed through books that really seem to be written by different authors, ranging from spiritual allegory (the 36 Lessons of Vivec) to practical advice (The Art of War Magic) to goofy picture books (ABCs for Barbarians,) the way it presents its gods as beings with truly alien natures and thought processes, and the way it handles authors with different perspectives and agendas (the competing biographies of Queen Barenziah,) which is something that's rare in any form of fiction and pretty much unheard of in video games. At the same time, though, I find it a distinctly unpleasant setting to actually be in, and a large part of that is because of the way the beast races are almost invariably treated either as criminals and drug addicts or as pathetic buffoons (or as slaves, in Morrowind.)BennyJackdaw wrote:But I think what really offends me the most about the games is that there was supposedly a big war between furries and humans where, again, humans and only humans were the good guys, while furries get shafted and have to be banished to this particular place. This does not make me feel good.
I always felt, growing up, that you never seemed to see media with feline characters that weren't just about them getting beaten up all the time, and I spent an excessive amount of time searching for movies and video games with characters that looked the way I felt, and feel, on the inside, and obsessing over media that, by any objective standard, were pretty mediocre, like Captain Claw. (I even had the original Bubsy game as a kid, and was actually willing to argue for its merit, but even then, it was like there was some spectral force whispering in my ear "nah, you don't really want to play this, you want to play Super Metroid again".)
When I started getting deeply into the internet and found out that being furry was officially A Thing (by kind of a strange route, since I was first introduced to the concept of furries through MST3K fans making fun of original characters in Sonic fanfiction by calling them furries,) it really made a lot of things about my life fall into place, like the amount of time I used to spend basically roleplaying as Lion King characters with other kids in the neighborhood, until I scared them all off by being way too into the idea of being a big cat. For years, I thought I must have just been dropped on my head when I was small. I mean, I was, it's just that I was elated to discover there was actually a name for my particular kind of being dropped on one's head.
There is actually a reason for this, and it's because they're characters from other OHRRPGCE games with widely varying settings and tones. (This is justified in-world using the idea of the Einherjar, who in Norse mythology, are warriors who fall in combat in their respective worlds, and are chosen by the Valkyries to join the gods in Asgard and fight alongside them in the battle of Ragnarok, which I think is pretty awesome.) Daguerro is really Dogero from Sword of Jade, Kyle was in various earlier games that Fenrir made, Triangle Man is Particle Man's archnemesis.... uh, I mean he's from Mr. Triangle's Adventure, and Master H is Housemaster from ARFENHOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (sic.)BennyJackdaw wrote:Then we have the antihero team. Instead of being completely limited to just humans and MAYBE two furries, it's made up of four completely different creatures.
While you don't need to have played any of those earlier games to understand those characters' roles in Vikings' plot, I feel like they are improved if you have. If you've played Sword of Jade, for instance, you'll recognize Daguerro's sad-sack personality as a humorous exaggeration of his personality in that game, and one particular monster he summons to fight the heroes will seem familiar.
(With that said, I could certainly live a long and happy life without ever again seeing the kind of "ironic" caricature of bad writing that ARFENHOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! is built on. So I suppose that's the reason why today, that exact same style of writing has become orders of magnitude more prevalent than ever, only instead of being used to mock "newbies" in game-making communities, it's now called "copypasta", it's the only form of political argument that's used in the world anymore, and we're actually expected to engage with it as though it's some sort of meaningful commentary on serious issues: are there any problems that geeky, neurodivergent men face in today's society? Obviously there can't be, because they think Rick and Morty is good! But that is a rant for another forum.)
Honestly, from the perspective of Vikings being a showcase to demonstrate the OHRRPGCE's capabilities to people new to the community, I kind of wonder whether all the community references in it are a bad thing, because they'll just seem like completely random nonsense to anyone who isn't familiar with the people and games they refer to, or a good thing, because they'll introduce newcomers to characters and running gags that they'll see in numerous other OHR games, including future games. Granted, the fact that most of the references are in the form of one-time battles with characters from other games actually makes them quite appropriate as an homage to classic-era JRPGs, because in those games, you were always running into completely ridiculous and unexplained things as enemies in random battles, like floating eggs that open up and smaller eggs come out to attack you, or artichokes that open up their leaves and reveal a fish head that bites you, or evil dice with top hats that summon eyeballs with lightning bolts for eyebrows.