Personal Insight - Kirby's Epic Yarn

Sorry in advance for the enormous pictures in this post, high resolution is inconvenient and I can't be bothered to fix it right now.

So here's the thing. I liked Kirby's Epic Yarn. it had a LOT of problems compared to other Kirby games, though. Personally, I really wish they released an actual Kirby game that wasn't trying to be Little Big Planet. I have my reasons for it, too. Kirby games had a lot of qualities that were completely obliterated by this game, and it is absolutely necessary that they don't make another game and slap an unrelated franchise's name on it.

Kirby had a lot of defining qualities that other games didn't have, or couldn't have. It was unbelievably different from other games in the sense that nothing else could have pulled off what Kirby pulled off. So, let me list some original things that were ripped from the heart of Kirby when he entered the Yarn filled world of his Epic Yarn.

Abilities

This is the first thing that punches you in the face. Kirby is completely unable to inhale fuck all. Technically, if this was true, everyone living in the yarn world (I forget if it has a name) would suffocate to death. Obviously, Yarn doesn't have to breathe, so I SUPPOSE I can let that pass. The story implies that when Kirby tries to inhale, the air passes right through him. Physically, there would be no change in air direction regardless of what he did. Without lungs (or whatever the fuck Kirby used in the first place) there is no change in air pressure, and therefore no air rushing towards the low pressure area. Air shouldn't be passing through him at any enhanced rate at all.

Now, forgetting all that, let's stick to what he is left with. He can shoot a string of yarn and grab onto whatever to do whatever with. Depending on what he does with it, the yarn will do different things, usually pulling. Here's where shit gets weird

When you grab an enemy with your yarn, you do one of two things. If you hold the button, they turn into a ball of yarn. Simple enough. Then you hold them above your head and you can throw them at whatever. Kind of like other Kirby games right? Since you don't have copy abilities, you can just throw balls of yarn. Oh, the second thing is that if you just tab the button, you grab onto the enemy and rip them to shreds with your yarn lasso. That's what happens. Holy shit. Kirby games have never been so ruthless. Other Kirby games never let you see you digesting your enemies into stars. Yarn or no yarn, if you did something like that in real life, you're leaving a bloody mess on the floor.

Now, while we're on the topic of abilities, let's get a little more specific...

Mobility

Kirby hates you for this, Nintendo. Kirby's inhalation of air did more than just let him eat fucking everything, it let him fly. Now, he can't. He can, however, turn into a parachute. The working physics of a parachute is that it's large surface area pushes against the air on it's way down, thus slowing the fall significantly. What the fuck is going on here?

Some other things that you can do are turn into a car, a yo-yo, a top, and a tiny tank. If you get to a point in a level where you are required to turn into something more complicated that you can't transform into on a regular basis. Some of these things are a UFO, a dolphin, a snowboarding penguin or a giant tank.

I don't have a problem with many of these, but they are all very limited use. None of these things can be used wherever the hell you want with the exception of the car because it's just dashing but for lazy Kirby when he doesn't want to take the bus, and the occasional turning into a weight and apparently getting heavy as hell despite being made of the same yarn. Therefore, unless you're in a place where you are required to use it to get something/somewhere, you can't use it. It seems pretty useless most of the time. But here's something that's even more useless...

Scoring

Lots of games with stages and worlds have decided to score you on your performance, D usually being the lowest (Sometimes E) and S usually being the highest. It's a pretty familiar system by now, and it usually incorporates a variety of things. Sonic games usually base it on how fast you ran through the level, Mario games usually base it on score alone, but what can Kirby do? Kirby doesn't have anything that can support a functioning scoring system because of all the things you can do and all the different ways you can do it. Kirby games are so limitless that there is no plausible way to score the levels you play.

Oh wait.

Kirby's Epic Yarn introduces Beads. You need to collect lots of beads to get a good score in the level. It's completely useless to bother, but it's something you might as well do along the way, otherwise the game gets boring as hell. There are several uses for the beads, none of which are very original. You use beads outside of the levels as currency to buy more useless shit like furniture for your house that has nothing to do with anything and does nothing but look pretty while you sit around in your Yarny house not playing any levels. To bead collecting challenging, every time Kirby gets hit, you lose a shitton of beads. You can recollect them if their within reach before they disappear, and if they don't fall down into a pit. Oh, but don't fall into a pit yourself because then an angel appears and as it carries you out of the pit, you shit out all of your fucking beads and they usually all fall back into the pit, forever unreachable. Oh, and don't think that taking a hit with no beads kills you...

Challenge

Having a challenge in a video game is necessary for fun. It's not necessarily original in anyway at all, but Kirby's Epic Yarn completely erased any challenge it could have had. You can't die in this game. When you lose all your beads and take a hit, you're fine. It doesn't matter what happens, you're perfectly safe at all times. You don't have a health meter, and getting hit makes you flinch and lose your beads. Don't have any beads? Ok, let's just take out that last part until you get some beads to lose. This makes boss fights extremely easy, and boss fights that you can't figure out (if for some reason you can't figure it out) long and obnoxious. Scrambling around to collect your beads is a definite distraction, but what else is there for you to do? Nothing is out to get you for anything more than making you poor.

The final boss was disappointing. It wasn't long enough, and there was no challenge. The biggest problem you could have had was landing hits, and when you get to the last phase, it's just stupid easy. It's not necessary to make you completely invincible in a video game even if it is directed at children. Invincibility for the sake of not wanting kids to lose and have fits should be left for games like Disney Princesses and shit like that, which aren't all that legitimate. Speaking of being illegitimate...

Legitimacy

Kirby games have some noticeable patterns to them. There's always a Wispy Woods clone, even Epic Yarn stuck with that idea. There was, however, one very disappointing boss battle that I was looking forward to.

Meta Knight battles always allow Kirby to use a Sword. That's because Meta Knight is Chivalrous, and because sword fights are awesome. Of course, Kirby's Epic Yarn did not include a sword fight because there is no sword ability, and Nintendo felt it unnecessary to make a special exception for this particular part of the game. Instead, it was filled with Meta Knight throwing fireballs at Kirby from his sword, and getting them thrown back at him, never realizing that if he stopped throwing fireballs, he would be Goddamn invincible. He says later that he was sorry and that the Yarn had made him evil or something because he needed an excuse for not knitting a Yarn sword for Kirby when he made his own. What a douche.

That's really all there is to it. Now, I'm not saying that Kirby's Epic Yarn was a bad game. It was a good game. Not the best game I've ever played, and it was pretty short and didn't have a lot to it, but it was alright. You have to take into consideration what the market is for games when you think about how good/bad it is, so for a kid's game, it was decent. Compared to other Kirby games, however, it was awful. If they just went ahead and tried again on that game that was supposed to be for the Gamecube that got delayed repeatedly and then cancelled, I imagine that people would be much happier with the result. I know I would have been.

KingRanter

Blackfire Summary Pt. GTFO OF HERE

So, Jesus Christ, I'm not doing plot updates anymore. The first one should have covered way more shit, and even then, I change the rules frequently so they make more sense TO ME. Personally, I don't think about those old stories anymore, and trying to make a beginning to something that has a middle and has no planned end is confusing as hell to do. I've already changed a lot of the rules from the first summary, and I'm not going to get into what those are for obvious reasons.

So here's where we stand. Forget everything I've written plot-wise, and forget a bunch of the stuff I wrote about their powers etc. Also, while I don't plan to delete it, disregard the previous post as well, it was way too fucking general anyway. Instead, if I get th urge to write about King Ranter's adventures in my imagination, I'm going to go ahead and just do a fight or something, maybe with simple backstory. I can't be bothered to write up a fucking book if I have no inspiration to recreate old plots that are now essentially expired. A lot of it still holds water right now, but every so often I remember something I had thought up and that it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense in the current run of things. So I change it. It's not bothering anyone else, so who fucking cares? Thats's basically my mindset for it.

I still plan to write up some new chapters, but nothing will necessarily be in chronological order. The only thing that seems to hold true are the names of the characters and what they do, but not HOW they do it or in what way or whatever. Therefore, in any new chapters I make, remember that they are not linked together with the exception of things that I want to reuse because I think they are fucking awesome. That being said, as you read, if something doesn't make sense from something I wrote in the last post, disregard what I had written in the last post. That's srs bsns everybody, because I don't plan to fix shit up so it makes sense ever again, that's the whole reason this idea is going to hell in the first place. And that being said...

I will be taking requests. If someone has a request, I am significantly more likely to actually write a story because I will have something to write about. And I will take any request as long as I find it interesting and understand it remotely. I'm serious about that. See, I do a lot of cameos in Gyronia. Ranter's been doing a lot of running with Sonic the Hedgehog int he past year, I tell you. I highly encourage requests with or without cameos of fictional or non-fictional characters, because God only knows exactly how long I could go without making a post. Everyone who has read this blog knows that I can go a long Goddamn time. I just don't like to, so keep that in mind.

KingRanter

Blackfire Summary Pt. 2 - Zondilin Power

• I'm going to try Chrono's, Rex's, and Ranter's power evolution is somewhat chronological order as well, along with other things in other parts.

Chrono is his own life signature (a life signature being like the soul of a zondilin which I will explain later), but he himself is composed of the life signatures of Ranter and Rex. Because of that, and because the relation of Ranter and Rex is exponential rather than just putting them together, Chrono is significantly more powerful than Ranter and Rex fighting together, and in a what-if scenario, Chrono would be able to defeat both Ranter and Rex effortlessly while they both fought at full strength.

Chrono's fighting style doesn't change significantly throughout the story. Aside from becoming more brutal and ruthless while fighting, he has very little change in weapon choice and in general fighting style. He often fights hand-to-hand, sometimes using a sword, and later on using a giant axe. The only energy attacks he uses are fairly straightforward, such as launching energy from his hands in beams or spheres. For his hand-to-hand combat, he begins by often using quick punches and kicks to keep his enemy immobile, or with hard hits that send the opponent flying and quickly running, flying, or teleporting to intercept with another hit, and another and another, generally ending with one final hit into the ground. This is called a pursuit attack.

When Chrono splits into Ranter and Rex, they eventually learn how to recombine to create Chrono on command. This, however, doesn't happen for a very long time, and they have both long since become more powerful that Chrono was before the split. But when they recombine, all the power that Ranter and Rex have accumulated is given up to Chrono. This makes Chrono much more powerful than he was before, and many times more powerful that Ranter and Rex. Because of the power increase during Ranter and Rex's training, Chrono's muscle mass increases incredibly, which makes it even easier for him to move heavy objects like his opponents. After the recombine, Chrono becomes much more brutal and aggressive while fighting than before the recombine. Using a power that keeps his opponent intact while he fights them, much like the suit he wears, he can inflict as much punishment as he wishes before finishing the fight. This allows him to end fights without taking a life of someone who does not deserve death. This also allows him to torture his opponent relentlessly without accidentally killing them. Chrono, while using this power, ruthlessly attacks his opponent by using extremely hard punches and kicks without letting his opponent be sent flying. He also uses old tactics, such as the pursuit attacks, but much faster and with harder impacts. He can, now with his new muscle mass, grab opponents around both ankles with one hand, or by their tail if they have one, and swing them around as if they were weightless, smashing them into the ground or other things and throwing them as well.

Ranter and Rex fight very differently from Chrono, but very similarly to each other. Both of them fight expertly with hand-to-hand combat and sword play, gun play, and virtually any weapon imaginable from swords and axes to giant spoons. They can use an extremely wide variety of energy attacks, from the standards that Chrono uses to causing spontaneous energy explosions anywhere within a large radius, firing beams of energy from different parts on his body in many different directions, warping time so he can move faster while everyone else is slow motion, and many other abilities. Rex and Ranter can also both transform and do so often as to mix things up, an ability Chrono rarely likes to use. Transformations will be explained another time. Ranter and Rex normally fight similarly to Chrono before the first split.

Chrono, Ranter, and Rex all have very similar traits on the battlefield. All of them are able to run and fly at incredible speeds, and eventually are able to use enough energy to move faster than the speed of light while maintaining a functioning perception of oncoming obstacles. They can also teleport long distances around Gyronia, but this uses a large amount of energy as well as understanding exactly where they are going to arrive. They can teleport short distances for things like pursuit attacks or simply teleporting out of the way of attacks. They can all transform, but their transformations are often specific to their own selves, but some of them have similar transformations and some transformations often go forgotten.

Another thing they all have in common is being able to accelerate energy much faster while angry. This has something to do with the fact that they don't force their self imposed limits as much so they can do more damage while angry, but they are actually more physically able to handle punishment as well as release energy in their attacks. This is what adrenaline actually does without the clouded mind and irrational thinking to quite the same degree. This is a fairly common ability among zondilins because their fighting ability is often impacted by their mood if various ways, but not all are yet known.

That was a pretty vague summary and I left a lot of stuff out. I'm sure I left some stuff out accidentally as well, so I might have to include that elsewhere if there is anything. I'll have summaries on transformations, weapons, Zinc and his inventions, and maybe a few other things if I come up with more. I'm sure I will.

KingRanter

Blackfire Summary Pt. 1 - Unravelling Chrono

So I decided a good name for the story. Blackfire. Seems pretty appropriate to me. I won't be able to pull this summary out of my ass in one sitting, as fun as that would be, and I can guarantee that there will be a lot of changes from the original story that I actually wrote, making a lot of that shit totally null. Keep up if you like, but I don't plan to actually go and rewrite the other chapters and I probably won't be editing them. If I ever decide to write a story to be published, I'm going to focus on one plot and have a planned ending. This blogging mess, however, will have final ending, I can just about guarantee that. Now, I'm going to start again in chronological order starting with some of Chrono's own shit, and work into the Ranter segment which is one hell of a lot bigger than Chrono's.

Chrono is a warrior of a race of super-humans called "zondilins" who just happens to have an incredible gift of power compared to the others of his race. The story would be less interesting if he didn't, and would be less fun to fantasize about as well. He has a dragon named Cronco who is of the Guardian Dragon race of dragons. These dragons walk on hind legs and are also humanoid, but are several times bigger than humans and stand only slightly leaned forward. They are very bulky, have two horns on their head that point straight back with the shape of their skull, and have a tail about half the length of their own body, and large wings. They also breathe fire, etc.

Chrono lived on a planet called Gyronia, which was closer to earth than mars, but unsee-able to humans. The planet itself was protected from the humans by a spirit demon god, Barcus, who took the form of a snake-like dragon, and had created a barrier around the planet to keep it from being destroyed by the power of the super human race that inhabited it.

Chrono began his career as a travelling monster hunter. Cronco flew Chrono all over the planet in search for people being attacked by giant monsters, swarms of small flying monsters, or armies of barbaric goblins or orcs attacking cities with less than competent defense systems. Chrono could move in and kill them all single handedly, or team up with Cronco and obliterate any threat to societies that existed on his planet. Chrono was a peace keeper who solved problems that could only be solved violently, and he did them better than any other man could.

Over time, he spends much of his time with his long-time friend Zinc, a zondilin who had focused his power towards his intelligence all his life. Zinc had a partner in science, Madius, and together they were able to invent many different sorts of gadgets and machines that none could have ever dreamed possible. Zinc proved to be a helpful ally in helping Chrono find where help was needed without wandering aimlessly around the planet, and he also was able to build simulators, robots and other machines to help Chrono train. He built a high-tech watch that would sync with Chrono's thoughts and could perform many different tasks designed by Zinc, which included a power inhibitor setting so Chrono could train under strained limits which gave him new limits to push so there would always be a challege. The challenge didn't last long, though, because Chrono didn't turn off the inhibitor during day to day life, and eventually got used to the burden, and in a short time achieved a state of power under the inhibitor that was greater than that of what he had when uninhibited before. Zinc had also designed light battle uniform that kept him from getting injured or killed while in battle by keeping his body completely intact under nearly all circumstances.

Word of Chrono's actions got out, and people began asking him to do personal jobs for them. After all, there were people out there that needed to be assassinated, wars that needed to be won single handedly, and bullies that needed a taste of their own medicine. But Chrono wasn't interested in that sort of work, and he rarely took up any offers made. However, he did take up work to keep zondilin threats at bay. Some were more threatening than others, and one stood out greatly.

Rumors spread that the King of Gyronia himself had been summoning many of the monsters that roamed the planet causing chaos in the cities that Chrono was protecting. When Chrono found out about this, he decided to kill the King.

Kingship in Gyronia was very systematic. The original King of Gyronia was dubbed by Barcus, and any man who chose to become King had to slay the current King in battle. This way, the King would only be replaced by a more powerful warrior. The King was kept alive by the blessings of Barcus, who protected the King from disease and natural disasters and cleansed his mind of any potential thoughts of suicide. Barcus also protected the King from accidents and assassination. The death of a Gyronian King was impossible.

Chrono trained to battle the King and slay him in order to become King himself and keep the planet safe on his own. During his training, Chrono found it easiest not to try too hard while training, so he could limit himself purposefully. This way, he could teach himself self-discipline and keep improving himself. The inhibitor Zinc gave him was limited due to the fact that should too much of his energy be unused, Chrono might not have enough energy to breathe, or allow his heart to beat. He needed energy to live, so Zinc made sure that the inhibitor could not work lower than 20%. But 20% still allowed Chrono to weild an immense amount of power, so Chrono held onto self-imposed limits and chose to never go all out during training, which was a rule that ended up carrying over fighting outside of training.

Chrono and Zinc agreed that he should turn down his inhibitor to at least 50% so he can use more of his power in the battle against the King just in case Chrono didn't understand what he was getting himself into. However, going into the battle with the King, Chrono forgot to turn down his inhibitor which left him only at 20% maximum power during his fateful fight. The King did not want to fight because he did not want more people to die by his hand, but Chrono insisted his challenge be met anyway. Despite Chrono's power inhibitor, the fight was fairly short, and Chrono came out on top as the new King of Gyronia.

Nightmares

I had a screwed up nightmare last night, and it woke me up this morning. Nightmares, for me, are rare, but I enjoy them. They make me remember my sanity. I don't really feel like writing about it, but I did explain it to one of my friends on msn, so I'm just going to laze about and post what I wrote to him, minus his comments. Please note that I write pretty casually on msn, etc, so it's not going to be as grammar powerful as usual. It's probably still readable.

So there I was

a blue cartoon bear wearing a red and brown horizontal striped t-shirt, blue denim shorts, white gloves and no shoes

(yeah.)

and I was running along

in this weird, warped cartoony place

all the doorways were curved sideways, along with the doors

because it's cartoons

and it's in some sort of mostly bright colored house thing

and There are three people there

All female

only saw the face of one

that was Alice from Disney's Alice in Wonderland

for some raisin

and then the other two were some stupid brown haired girl wearing orphan clothes or some shit

and someone wearing a black and green sumbraro or whatever, with a green feather in it, and a black and green dress

the latter two were very short

They were in a rectangular room with a little jet out at the end of the wall, and none of them were facing each other

basically what happened was Alice and orphan were standing back to back, about half the room's length from each other, and sunbraroe the mexican was standing facing the wall in the jet out

after few seconds, they all ran and switched places

then they did it again after some more seconds

then, after some more seconds, they did it again but one of them left the room instead of going into the jet out

then every time they switched places, they would proceed farther into the house

so I took a box out and pushed a button on it

remember, I'm a bear

and I pressed the button

and an anvil fell on Alice's head

And she kinda sqiushed a little, and the anvil fell off her head

and then she went back to normal as she was switching places with people

as if made of rubber

I did this for a while to the different people, with different results

a couple times I dropped a grand piano instead, which crashed onto the person but all that happened was the grand piano broke where it crashed into the person, and then disappeared

and sometimes the anvil would land on someone's head and squish them all the way to the ground, but they would still recover

so basically, they were invincible

and sometimes they would say something, like uh

"Don't you wish you know what we were feeling inside?"

as if I was hurting their feelings by dropping anvils on them

and shit like that, I forget most of it

they didn't say much

anyways, then in the dream, I woke up

I was me again

I walked outside, I was in toontown central, which is basically a big park with a pond in the middle and some stuff like shops and whatever

it's from the game Toontown Online

typical mmorpg stuff, but it's kids themed

so I was like

"Let's go to Goofy's Gag Shop!"

which is the weapon shop, btw

there was no one else in toontown central, btw

it's a huge ass place, but it was empty

then I was going to Goofy's Gag shop, and I saw a familiar username (?) and it was "Superstar" which I recognized as the orphan

but I didn't realize it right away

and then in the corner of my eye I saw a purple cartoon duck running and wearing an orange shirt and yellow shorts

but I was already going into goofy's gag shop

which, when I got inside, turned out to be my house

and I walked into the house

and I was bothered by that Superstar thing

so I was like

"Wasn't that the name of that girl?"

and then I went into the kitchen

and I saw Alice and the orphan standing back to back in my kitchen

and I woke up sort of screaming, but it was more like a "Nnngghhuuuhh..."

like, I was just making a noise, and it was pretty quiet

and I didn't even open my eyes when I woke up and I realized that I was awake for real and making a weird noise, so I stopped

I also noticed I was lying on my back, which is strange because I never sleep on my back because it's not comfortable

so I probably had a fucked up dream from lying on my back in my sleep

And thats pretty much how it went down. I hope you enjoyed reading a much more informally written blog post. Don't expect many more.

KingRanter

Twitter Time

I got Twitter. You can find my feed here, but it isn't going to be extremely eventful. I'm just using it so I can follow my friend Bleskie who is moving to Ottawa and has decided to "rediscover twitter as a tool." I figure that if he's gonna be gone, I'll be able to talk to on msn like usual, but I won't be able to see him much anymore. He was my friend since Kindergarten, and I'm gonna miss the big guy/tall and skinny guy.

I don't plan to use Twitter much myself. I barely ever use the Facebook status updates at all in the first place, and this is basically that, so I don't see myself using this, but I figure I'll post whenever I have a new blog post or something. Maybe this will increase my interest in writing or something.

Not much else to say about that. On a different note, I'm not going to stop writing King Ranter's story. At least, the story aspect. I'm still somewhat interested in writing more about it, but I'm going to post a story summary instead so I can just write about whatever is going on currently. Making a story out of it won't keep going, so the plot aspect is going to be fairly shallow. However, the plot summary is probably going to be a big post because there are a LOT of aspects, and it's probably going to be written in sections, or at least categories within the post. We'll see when we get there.

KingRanter

Hedgehogs

So yeah, hedgehogs. They're fucking adorable.

I've recently, and by recently I mean today, become somewhat infatuated with hedgehogs. And I mean the real ones, not the video game ones that I have also been a fan of for a few months now I think. I wouldn't buy one while I'm still living at home because, well, I wouldn't have room for it's cage or anything. Also, no one would want me to have it at the house because they would be like "Hedgehogs!? Do not want!" Well, not really. I talk like that, not them. Also, Hedgehogs are fairly expensive. apparently, they can range between $130-$150 in the US, but I think that might include the cage and shit. I mean, the cage, and the shit comes with the food you buy.

Look at his little feets!

Anyways, yeah. >_>

KingRanter