Important Read - Tumblr Posts
While I’ve never talk about these things at all, but from what’s going on Twitter as I’ve seen, I’m getting paranoid and outright angry that there’s those people who are racist and LGBT+ phobic are going to join the Digimon fandom after hearing about this audio drama resulting it to become toxic. This is what I’ve feared from a what-if scenario I’ve imagine if Agumon joins Smash (note the emphasis on the what-if, cause I’m sure in reality that won’t happen and I think I’m getting off-topic from here.)
This is the point where gatekeeping is a good thing, to push out those type of people, as I’ve had bad experiences in another community (wasn’t Digimon, but did involve something with it cause people targeted me for harassment for liking the series.)
I just don’t want this community to fall under from those sadistic jerks and seen as one of them for liking said series.
I don’t know how many of you may have already heard about this on Twitter, but because most of you may not have heard yet, and some may want more context for what’s going on, I’m going to make an important statement that I hope all of you read carefully.
Keep reading
Hey remember how I’m paranoid if any series I know of like Digimon succumb to NFTs? They didn’t, but a MMO that I play named Fer.al is said to be like a “testing grounds” for a blockchain game named Cinder and is developed by the same developers WildWorks.
Here, I’ll link up everything I’ve discovered about it:
Google Doc About the Controversy
Twitter posts by users who know about it:
https://twitter.com/hello_satellite/status/1466597061567016963
https://twitter.com/Senswii/status/1464738384421830662
https://twitter.com/StarlessHour/status/1465785886033911813
I didn’t expect this game to fall under as the victim of this scam my gawn... I want other people to know about this and spread it around please.
Been on a Digimon binge, and the other night I had a dream where a new baddie was invading the real world by disguising evil Digimon as NFT’s that eventually broke through the real world, and aside from some chaos and fighting, I remember Elon Musk died, so I guess it wasn’t a nightmare :>
A new NFT launched called DigiCoin, and Musk being Himself bought a shitton, and since one coin was one evil Digimon, when the villain initiated the takeover, Digimon literally burst out of servers and started attacking, and Musk was killed from collapsing debris and shrapnel
Other than that, it was a hodgepodge of running from evil Digimon in downtown Seattle/New York/LA (????? idk it was a Big City) with Henry from Tamers as we tried to fight them off. Apparently my dream Digimon partner is Armadillomon (would’ve preferred hawkmon or guilmon but w/e brain…)
The best choice is to resort to archiving everything from game code to the game’s assets, I’ve always feared the day something like that will happen.
Game preservation is greatly important, especially the fact when it comes to the MMOs in very vulnerable situations being close to shutting down.
I’ve always have to be like an “echo” of sorts to remind certain users that ripping from games like these is always important, if there’s people somewhere to create a rewritten version of such games.
I can feel the hopelessness and denial from users who felt what WildWorks did, feeling like their world is collapsing. I want to help in relieving the pain, but ripping certain things are beyond my reach such as models, as I don’t want to put too much pressure to my computer.
I can rip audio from Play Wild, but Fer.al seems to have the files “encrypted” as I tried to rip an audio file from it, it just displayed garbled text in the preview.
Reading about all this NFT stuff with WW really sucks. I'm in my 20s but I grew up playing AJC. I've been seeing a trend of virtual worlds dying over the years, and seeing how WW seems to be steadfast on this NFT bs I get the feeling that not only are the games gonna flunk, but they're probably gonna shut down everything.
My hope for them to fix anything was already at an all time low, but after the utter hellfire that was raised last night... yeah it's below zero now
Under the sardonic amusement I've been having I am actually sad for the fate of Fer.al and AJ - I spent the latter half of last decade totally immersed in AJC and its community and the game itself really meant a lot to me
We can only pray they decide to sell off their properties now, I think
To whoever the anon is, since Play Wild and Fer.al are Unity-based games, you use AssetStudio to extract from them, I'll recite to what a user said in another website if you wanna know how to keep the model’s bones intact:
"Here's a tip for AssetStudioGUI. If you want to rip models with armatures intact, filter "mesh, texture2d, animator, animation clips". Usually if the devs are professional enough, they will put them as prefabs, you can sort them by name and then highlight/select everything under that prefab. Right click and export with selected animator - animation clips or whatever it says there with animation clips. And profit! There, you have your models with proper armatures and vertex data released."
Straight up I will LEARN to rewrite AJC (not pw that seems… tough) im pretty sure all of the data is there from the launcher/installer, just need to… understand what it all means and probably get a hex decoder. This community definitely has the wits to do it.
It always felt off why people assume that Fer.al was an “actual prototype” to Cinder, despite at the past during it’s development, the ideas of NFTs didn’t exist(?) back then for it to be a “prototype” for that game.
ive been seeing a lot of misinfo going around here and in the server about feral being a secret beta test for cinder or something like that and i just want to clear some things up because ive been following this closely for a while and the ama, while vague, cleared some things up for me.
ferals development started way before people cared about nfts, and certainly before anyone cared abt blockchain integrated gaming. remember: feral opened its beta to select testers during the pandemic in around april of 2020, and was in development for far, far longer. at the very very least a year seems likely, and the earliest announcement of feral i could find was in december of 2019, so itd be long before that.
the actual timeline, how i understand it, is that feral was in development and was open for new players for some time, and then late (very recently, i suspect around summer of last year) they made the decision that feral was not financially viable and looked for other options.
they then decided that taking ferals assets and shifting to an nft game instead was the best option. since they had invested so much into feral and its various assets, this makes sense because its a lot to just abandon. they had one (monetarily) failing project, but it could be used to jumpstart their new more lucrative one.
so no, feral was meant to be something to stand on its own, and the decision to shift to cinder was a recent development.
that being said, wildworks is absolutely still scummy in this situation. there was NO transparency about this shift, and they even went as far as to lie and say they were keeping development going, just to milk more money out of people. not only that, but they actively tried to guilt trip their players into thinking they needed to financially support them to keep feral afloat, which is just... insanely shitty to do, especially when you know ferals going under eventually and MADE that decision. looking at you clark >://
People who only like the game for that one specific mechanic (the player can do it to humans too within said game) are an obvious, glaring, red flag to me and it says a lot about them when their true colors show up as they shamelessly defend the game from other people criticizing the game's flaws and go as far to sling out offensive slurs to them who voice out on it from what I've seen within the replies of Twitter posts related to said game.
Man... I'ma just be real with y'all. I don't give a shit about Palworld. It's all Ive funken heard about the past week or so and I just... I just don't care! On one side of the Halo 1 ass team death match y'all are in the trenches of you have the overly zealous Pokemon fans who will needle the game to death over the slightest shortcomings and similarities. Buddy, pal, friend... GameFreak will be fine. They're gunna be ok ...
But equally bad are the ones who will take any criticism of their new personality defining game as an attack on the sanctity of their marriage or something. I'm sorry guys, the game looks painfully boring, if it didn't look like pokemon with guns you wouldn't be playing it.
But this isn't why I'm tired... If that was all I had to say about this issue I wouldn't have made a post about it on what is supposed to be a tokusatsu blog... Shit this is supposed to be a toku blog... What episode of Kingohger are we on?... We're in the 40s!?...... Man I let that one get away from me... okay!!! Not the point, not the point, we'll deal with that later. The point is! We already HAD Pokemon with guns and murder and even more obvious furry bait.
WHERE WERE YALL WHEN MY MAIN MAN AGUMON WAS FIGHTING FOR HIS LIFE HUH?
Look at em...
Y'all wanted a more mature Pokemon? Man we've had that since the 90s! We already have Palworld at home! We are not stopping and spending more money on edgy monsters when you barely play with the ones I got you last week! You want guns? You want your cute scrunkle squinkle toodle pops to have guns?
Do Gargomon and his funny little pants mean nothing to you?! Fucken ... This one is just a gun!
Gundramon is just 30 guns in a trench coat...
Death?... Ya want death and mature themes? Some real stakes and some real consequences for our sins and transgressions? Ya want to Nuzlocke and pop your way though a story where Fido can die if you forget to give him his ear medication?
Eat my ENTIRE ass.
Slavery? You want... Wait y'all want actually want that?... Like the whole putting y'all's dog on the assembly line to build Mitsubishi Outlanders thing has been in a LOT of the back and forth... I'm not sure what y'all are talking about.... Yeah...
Anyway yeah Digimon... Digital monsters. Digimon are the champions here. Play Palworld if you want, I haven't seen anything that indicates it's actually funding anything uncouth... And hate pal world if you want! I always advocate for more hate in the world. Hating things is fun!... Just... I don't care. I just don't care about monsuno for men. Bakugan for big boys. Telefang for taxpayers... Uh... Monster rancher for retirees....
...
...are we really in the 40s with Kingohger?...
As I've mentioned from my previous reblogged post, this game attracts racist trash for said mechanic and I hate it that people glance over it.
No, actually if yer out here defending Palworld in any regard you need to be mentioning the fucking human npc slavery mechanic.
Thinking about palworld & like how unashamedly it portrays slavery.
Like for sure, depictions of heinous things in fiction aren't necessarily an endorsement & don't necessarily mean ppl will go on to commit those atrocities.
However, I find it deeply concerning what this depiction of slavery means in a social context. The way it joyfully tacked this on as a game mechanic & made it very explicit about how this isn't just hard labour, it is slavery & how it extremely intentionally uses terms like 'plantation' rather than crop or farm.
I was watching ppl play this game just bc I wanted to actually see what it was all about & if it was as bad as I thought. It's worse than I thought & my worries about it were confirmed by just how quickly the shock of how this game portrays slavery wore off on the player & how quickly they began to joke about it.
I really sincerely think ppl need to let go of the pokemon shit for a second & think about the social consequences of how this game portrays slavery.
I think we fucking owe it to Black people & other people who have ancestors who were enslaved to talk about how serious this is.
I don't give a fucking rats ass about pokemon or plagiarizing trillion dollar corporations, who fucking cares?
I'm much more concerned about the impact this game could have on real living people with the way it carelessly jokes about this & how this changes people's perceptions of slavery.
Changing the attitude people have towards slavery is the first step towards people thinking that it's okay to enslave people, I think we really ought to be talking about that.
If you said you haven't seen much of it at all, let me tell ya, there's an option where you can capture humans in the Pal Spheres and enslave them and there's some people who unironically love that mechanic. Whoever loves said mechanic shows what kind of person they are.
I don't understand what the big scary deal is about Palworld. Given, I don't know much about it, so I may simply not know enough to understand. But some criticisms I've heard simply confuse me.
I have seen people express upset because the pokemon-like critters have guns. But, uhm...
That's nothing new. Digimon did that twenty years ago, and nobody cared. (As a matter of fact, I think there was actually a Digimon that was literally made entirely out of guns.)
People also seem mad that the critters are basically slave labor. Which, hey, yeah, that's pretty dark, but:
1. I thought they were animals? Do we not still have oxen pulling ploughs around irl? But maybe there's an aspect of Palworld I've not seen...if so, let me know.
2. The game everyone compares this game to--Pokemon-- is literally a dogfighting game. You are pitting two animals against each other and making them beat each other up. Is THAT not slavery? Is that not abuse? How can you suspend disbelief for one game and not the other? I don't follow.
I think that people are upset that you can eat the critters in Palworld, too. If so...does no one remember this moment of Pokemon Season One?
Besides, people eat meat. Meat comes from animals. I feel like maybe being reminded that your food once was alive, that sacrifices were made for your upkeep, isn't a bad thing.
I understand criticizing the game for being unoriginal (to put it lightly) is utterly valid, but I can't fathom how it could possibly be the violent, grimdark nightmare people say it is.
That said, I haven't actually experienced the gameplay past about two hours, so perhaps there's some other horrifying aspect of the game that I'm missing. If there is, then I'd like to know. But based on my limited experience with the game, a lot of the responses I see just look like pearl-clutching.
What a scumbag, it should always, ALWAYS be a top priority to link and credit back the artists who made the fan art. It's not that hard to link and credit back.
I've reblogged this just to spread around the message if it's possible to report them for art theft?
BEWARE of the Facebook page, CyberKowloon. They've been posting art from Twitter, Pixiv, and Tumblr without credit and blocking people who call them out
even though I didn't want to talk about this game again, well.. this game's developers got hit with a patent lawsuit (I can assure this might be that pokeball-like mechanic within the game, I don't think this involves the blatant creature designs.):
this is why you shouldn't get cocky when there'll be that one moment where something will soon or later will hit you right back
don't mess with karma as they say
Gonna say this as someone who has been critical of Game Freak both as a fan and as someone with a Pokémon SPIN for a while now:
Do not support Palworld.
The CEO of Pocket Pair, the game’s studio, openly supports AI and even made a game where making AI-generated art is its main mechanic.
Palworld is not Pocket Pair’s first instance of plagiarism, either. Their previous game, Craftopia, plagiarizes Breath of the Wild, whereas as its upcoming game, Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse, plagiarizes from independent developer Team Cherry’s game, Hollow Knight.
On top of stolen character models and concepts from fakemon artists, it’s already known that you can put Pals through what is basically slave labor BUT what’s been recently discovered is that the game allows you to capture and sell humans. This has been raising some red flags for black gamers looking into these mechanics, me included, considering this factors into the established slave labor system of Palworld.
TL;DR: I completely understand being tired of Game Freak and the Pokémon Company’s lack of polish over the years, but supporting something that is just as devoid of polish and even more devoid of ingenuity is not the way to make those criticisms clearer. This will only encourage more soullessness in the industry.
I implore you to support other creature collectors with some real passion behind them; I will reblog this post with recommendations shortly!