In Review: A Fool's Goddess - Chapter Sixteen

Hello and welcome to round sixteen of my Review series. Seeing as it’s another dialogue-heavy chapter and I’ve already made it all too obvious I have a crush on Nisioisin, I don’t expect I’ll have too much to say on this week’s content. It was really fun chapter to write, don’t get me wrong, but there’s only so many times I can explain my stylistic choices and their influences. With that said, I’ll go over anything that stands out to me—even if it ends up being a bit repetitive.

But first, let’s talk about Granblue Fantasy Versus!

Okay, you obviously didn’t come to my website to hear about fighting games, but seeing as I’d been looking forward to GBVS for nearly a year, please allow me to gush about how much fun I’ve been having with it. In short, it’s good, and in long, I have no idea what I’m doing when it comes to fighting games but I’m still having a blast and half.

Like a lot of scrubs, I have some trouble with FGs, mostly with the inputs. For a long time, I couldn’t even do a quarter-circle forward consistently, let alone with the speed necessary to do so in a combo. Enough practice fixed that issue, but out a desire to take advantage of my typing speed, I also invested in a Hitbox fightstick (which might seem absurd for a crap player to do, but please understand that I would like to be not-crap one day). Because of that, I’ve nearly gotten down my DP and double-quarter-circle inputs, but I seem to have also made it near impossible for me to do 360s—meaning no grapplers for me.

Now, although GBVS has a system where you can do any cardinal direction plus your Special button to do special attacks, I abstain from using it so I don’t inhibit my fledgling input skills. However, I do think it’s cool that they have a feature like that for truly new players or fans of the mobile game who just want to see their character do cool stuff without having to learn intricate movements. Hardcore FGC members might lambaste such a system, but nobody who uses the simplified inputs is going to make Top 8 at EVO so I don’t see the harm in it. Mark Brown of GMTK has some great videos about making games fun for more people, so I think having a baby FG like GBVS is a wonderful thing.

…Shit, this tangent is getting out of hand. I suppose that’s proof of how invested I am in the game, but I’ll just summarize the rest of my thoughts before I have to write a separate article. RPG mode was fun, the music and graphics are awesome, Ladiva is best girl, and I want to main Narmaya because I’ve heard people say she’s not that great and I’m a contrarian shithead.

And she’s got big boobies. That’s pretty cool too.

So, yeah, I like the game. Consider checking it out if you like the idea of FGs but want something more relaxed or less complicated. No clue how far I’ll go with the game, but it’s been real fun for me.

Alright, enough shilling. Let’s talk about chapter sixteen.

Again, it’s mostly just dialogue that does a fine job of representing itself. As I’ve stated numerous times before, I found great inspiration in the style of Nisioisin and attempted to mimic his skill for creating enjoyable conversations. The main topics in Chapter Sixteen are Lior’s misunderstanding and Hed’s future, so let’s go over each of those.

Lior believing that Tzofiya may have tricked him was really fun to work in. As my outline for A Fool’s Goddess wasn’t very detailed, the concept of a false treachery came to me on a whim, and going back to alter dialogue to fit this long-con joke made me feel more like a proper writer. The main change was adjusting how Tzofiya explained her deal with the smith—as in changing it to be more ambiguous—and doing so helped restate and cement Lior’s shortsighted tendencies. It was a nice callback to his earlier behaviors that also made for a silly scene.

Though I do wonder how many people would have realized how strange his situation appeared before this point, at least under the assumptions Lior was pushing. I hope at least one person will have stopped and thought, “wait, why didn’t they just buy pottery with that money?”, but that’s not to say it wouldn’t be cool for someone to sympathize with Lior and understand where his misunderstanding came from either. Both views are valid and would provide an interesting perception of how Lior approaches his conversation with Tzofiya, with the former preemptively realizing he was a fool and the latter taking his side and objecting to Tzofiya’s strong-worded reproach.

Regardless, if you got a smile out of watching my buddy Lior make an ass of himself, then I’m satisfied with how this bit turned out.

As for Hed’s new status as Lior’s apprentice, that was planned from the get-go as it felt like the natural progression of their relationship. Dumb kid is impressed by a dumb man—what else do you do but make them student and teacher? This scene was mostly to get Tozfiya’s take on the whole concept and force Lior to take his own next steps as a sculptor, but there are a couple nuances I’ll touch on.

There’s a rather quick bit about Hed’s father, and it doesn’t really go into detail. I brought it up to establish a better reason why Tzofiya would agree to have her debt-slave double as a teacher, but I didn’t want to make it an in-depth discussion. Originally, I had a couple of pages about Hed’s father right around here, but I removed them after seeing how much it murdered the pacing of the story. While that information could have been interesting or enjoyable, it did not feel appropriate to go into right there and I ultimately parsed it down and shoved it off camera. Unfortunately, I never found a better place to put it, so those few paragraphs are all I formally have on the subject.

After that, you get Lior fighting the idea of becoming a master. I covered this last week, but again, his reluctance is mostly him adopting the consternation of his writer. Such are the woes of being a fictional characters, I suppose. But, unlike me, he has the balls to step up to the plate and accept his own growth instead of trying to hide under the title of novice forever. In that sense, Lior is also acting as an example of what I hope to become one day.

Makes you wonder who’s really the fool in all this…

Anyways, the situation then resolves rather cleanly. Lior outlines what a diligent bastard he is before revealing his desire to kill his liver. A bit of fun, a nice little throwback to the lovely Master Malka, and then we head out for Hed’s first lessons in sculpting.

By the by, that bit about the smith’s “bonus” is one of my favorite lines in the novel. Short, dirty, and maybe a little foreshadowing—I dream of being able to put that much zing in every paragraph.

Finally, the chapter closes out on a surprisingly glum note. Despite how much forward momentum and silliness we just enjoyed, Lior’s mind is still stuck in the past. I did this to both have some contrast to the rest of the chapter and illustrate that he hasn’t forgotten what happened to him. He’s doing what he can to move on and continue his life, but the pain of losing his friends still gnaws at him. Grim, I know, but I was always pushing for more drama than comedy in A Fool’s Goddess. At least things conclude optimistically, right?

There—that’s all I can really say about Chapter Sixteen. The next chapter is very short, but as its content is profound, we’ll see if that brevity extends to its review. If it does, I’ll just write some more about Granblue Fantasy Versus and rename the series “Granblue and Review”.

…Please kick my ass if I do that.

Alright, take care of yourself. I recently went to the doctor about some abdominal pain I’ve been feeling for the past year, but thankfully my CAT scan said there’s nothing wrong with my organs. We’ll see if there’s anything that can be done after some further tests, but my point is that you shouldn’t be like me and put off healthcare for twenty years.

You deserve the best you can give yourself after all.

Have a good week, skyfarer.