I don’t know how I had the patience for these games in high school
Argh, sorry guys, between the three other comic projects I’m working on and the cons I’ve been flying out to every other week this past month, I have been getting really burnt out on MGDMT. It’s still getting updated, it’s just probably not going to settle down to a regular schedule until my life does. I’ll finish colouring this one later today, but I’ve got some things I need to do and for now I’m getting antsy about the lack of new content on the site.
In other news, I’ve been playing Breath of Fire 4 lately and uh…. wow. I don’t know how I ever had patience for all this grinding. I keep getting distracted and playing with tumblr every time a random battle shows up, so I’ve probably clocked twice as much playtime as I reasonably should have.
Heh, I had just checked the site less than five minutes before the update tweet.
This might not be the most original gag in the world as far as these subjects go, but the execution is an absolute delight. I can practically see the characters moving in the art.
Yeah, they really do seem unusually vibrant and animated! Wonderful job, Coela!
Haha yeah I’m with you. Played them when I was a kid, but have a much harder time getting into them now.
Too goooood!
Well, I think it’s like anything – you get older, you start to realize just how much time you spent not doing the things you really wanted to grow up to do, back in the day when “other stuff” was your main interest in life. Then you get there, and you can do those things, and you look back and realize that what you used to do is now “other stuff”.
Or maybe I’m talking out my rear and the reality is, you’d give anything to go back and do all the fun things, but without all the frustration that accompanied them.
Oh god I’m old in my mid-twenties.
I know exactly how you feel being mid tweenies myself.
I’m in my mid-twenties and I’m still playing like a boss. XD
I’m actually throughly depressed by my ineptitude at playing RPG’s now. It’s practically the only
types of games I own on console.
After college and getting to work as an actual game artist. I…. I just can’t deal with it! I used to
be a super game freak completionist that could play freaking Disgea and get to level 9999!
TWICE!
I didn’t know being in your mid-twenties would shatter your childhood livelyhood.
I love how the sound effect for the gunfire seems to be “report”. Huzzah for nonomatopoeia!
~D.
….Poor Slime. :(
I’ve also been playing BoFIV lately and while it hasn’t aged quite as well as I remember its still a fantastic example of the genre. But I too tend to get a little distracted playing it, most of the battles are truly tedious.
Breath of Fire 4?!?! >_< Aww, you poor thing you…. The storyline was great, but i swear if i hadn't used a gameshark to cheat so hardcore, i'd probably have put in way more then the week it took even with the cheating. lol I reccomend playing the 3rd one and forgetting that the rest we're ever made. Works for me. ^_^
on a more comic oriented note: begezzus! your backrounds are crazy complicated. it's sooo awesome! ^_^ like there's so much detail on the rope, and you even did the cars grill in panel 3. "ahh…*fan squee!*…so nice."
It’s really OK, Coelasquid! We’ll read it whenever you post, we love your stuff.
And we’ll be grateful she’s drawing this comic in her free time, and we won’t bitch about the irregular schedule, will we guys? RIGHT?
It’s one of the best comics on the internet, and I pay nothing to read the comic. As far as I’m concerned, if she updates at all I am happy and if not it makes no sense for me to complain about it.
Amen to that, this is my favorite webcomic. I actually check it in the morning and night on monday until it shows up
…Wondering if it would have been as messy if they just let Mr. Fish eat it instead…
To be fair, how would they untie him from the car before the Slime attacks? Who attacks first is determined by speed and since they’d have an awful lot of rope to untie…
So does that mean that the commander has the highst speed stat?
Jared seems used to going second. Perhaps he min’d speed to max something else?
Actually, it seems that’s how it always is with him, perhaps he doesn’t realize speed even does anything?
Or it’s that pokemon trainers don’t have their own personal stats, which is probably why Jared isn’t very good at anything on his own.
If I remember correctly, Gyrados isn’t particularly slow but it’s also not the fastest thing around. He might not even have to ignore speed, given that’s his only Pokemon. Of course, he might also be used to video games and who knows how many he actually finished? Also, it depends on the game too. Sometimes who goes first is based on other stuff (like ambushing.)
I’m probably thinking way too hard about this though. XD
Who needs to untie Mr. Fish? He’s a huge snake dragon, all he has to do is lean forward and he’d stretch far beyond the car.
And potentially topple the car, their only means of transport, exactly because it’s a huge snake dragon and shifting all that weight (the series notes Gyarados are prone to neckaches because of their big heads) is going to invoke the laws of physics, namely momentum.
He could ya know use a ranged attack
So random JRPG elements showing up in your track is a side effect of the bishonen virus? Should have seen it coming.
It’s only a matter of time before they all have giant swords
That assault rifle will have a giant bowie knife sticking out of the barrel come lunchtime.
Are your other projects available online?
One of them will be for sale in an anthology, one of them will hopefully eventually be another webcomic. The third is a pitch I’m doing the art for, written and paid for by someone else.
Could we get some links? Once they get out that is. Big fan of your art style.
Aw, not the poor little Slime. D: Can the Goonin of Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime avenge it?
Is Commander Badass is going to bother looting the corpse?
He left a corpse?
Corpse? What’s that? Things fade into nonexistence when they die.
And when you kill enough things, music plays and you can dance!
…But you’re not insane or a mass murderer. Those kind of labels are only tossed around when in cutscenes.
(To be fair, one JRPG did have a protagonist that never really does get used to killing human enemies and the victory animation for him differed depending on if he killed one in the battle or not. Also humans were the only things to leave corpses on the battlefield. It was a nice little change of pace from the usual affair where your body count is as high as the villain’s but no one ever calls you out on it)
As I recall, “Breath of Fire IV” is actually fairly non-grindy a far as the series goes. If you want to see the grind from Hell, try “Breath of Fire II” – you have to grind for XP in the map tiles surrounding the starting town for, like, twenty minutes before you’ll stand a chance of surviving the *first dungeon*.
Breath of Fire 1&2 were for me what Final Fantasy 7 was for every other teenage girl. They’re the only RPGs I’ve replayed.
I don’t find that BoFII has aged well. I’ve tried to replay it, but I just can’t get past the fact that the plot I remember from when I played it as a kid doesn’t really exist – it’s just a bunch of unrelated events loosely connected by a string of badly translated boob jokes, and then you kill God at the end for no particular reason. The actual story I recall playing was evidently something I made up in my head.
You know, I came to the FF7 late. Like about ten years late. I do not understand why anyone likes that game. It’s long, had some serious quest/clue-linkage problems (Why did I need to talk to everyone in town twice when not one person said anything related to what I’m doing?), the art is awful, the writing is awful, blah blah blah hate blah hate blah. About the only fun thing was the music, which was exactly the same as every other FF up to that point.
I think a big part of my problem is just that that generation of games, the cusp of 3D generation, is ugly as sin. Older painted background RPGs look good still, even if the resolution is kind of bad. Newer (but still old) 3D games look … okay, I guess. At least they mostly only have the arms-not-connected-to-the-body thing as a stylistic choice and not a “we can’t figure out how to do that many pixels!!!!” thing.
To be fair I came into Final Fantasy too early for Final Fantasy 7 and I agree with you. Final Fantasy IV was my first RPG and remains my favourite. I really don’t get the fuss over Cloud and Sephiroth. Even for the time period it wasn’t very pretty. I mean if you look at IX which is made on the same system, there’s an obvious difference in asthetics.
For FF7 you really had to be part of the zeigeist to get why it affected people so intensely. The 3D and everything was so new that it kind of cast a spell over everyone, and I think people’s intense love for it is more about the nostalgia for the feelings it gave them at the time than its actual quality. FF9 was far superior to 7 in every single way, and yet it’s far less popular … because the spell had worn off by then. I replayed 9 recently and it still was great and I loved it as much as I originally did … and when I tried to replay 7 it was like, “Ugh, why did I like this?”
Oh, and 7 and 8 manage to trade on the stupid bishy sex appeal for a lot of their popularity, too. Dammit.
I adore FF9. I never understood why everyone went on and on about FF7 – the only parts I really liked was the Don Corneo bits and when I squished Jenova with a fat chocobo, that had me in hysterics.
I think the characters were a lot more likeable in FF9, and I preferred the main character being a loveable rogue, stopped it all being excessively fluffy. Even if the villain confused me “Is that a typo?? Surely that’s a girl”
Zidane was a breath of fresh air after the angstathon of 7 and 8; even when he had his low moments he wasn’t like wallowing in them. And Vivi probably affected my emotions more intensely than anyone else in the history of FF (even Terra!).
I have to agree, and surprisingly I have BoF 1 through 4. Replayed the first 3 quite often.. the fourth one.. haven’t gotten around to replaying yet.
Lets not mention Breath of fire 5 (AKA: Dragon Quarter) that put shame to the first 4 in my opinion.
I find Dragon Quarter the only one I enjoy playing anymore. I’ll respect your opinion and give you that it’s vastly different from the other BoF’s, without much focus on story.
Props to you mate! I do believe that is why I was biased, but hey I bet I would change my mind if I played it now.
4 and dragon quarter Are the ones I enjoyed the most.
I loved the team of 4 a great deal.
Whenever I want to play an older RPG i just pull out good ole chrono trigger
even if this was a turnbase event the rezults wode b the same :D
I love it!
Jared’s reaction seems rather typical of fantasy heroes–they become so accustomed to their weapon of choice that they sometimes forget the shortest distance between two points is a semi-automatic.
Must say that I’m a bit suprised that Jared knew that much about pokemon fights considering what he DOESN’T know.
No offence, I like this story.
Well, the Pokemon games weren’t the only ones that used that back and forth method. I do know that a few Final Fantasy games used the turn-based system (or some variation of it). Jared must’ve played other games with turn-based systems.
Though, I did forget how he got kicked out of the Pokemon League.
well, considering he evolved mr fish by beating random opponents with him as a bludgeoning instrument…and the fact that he got kicked out AFTER he evolved…because he was letting him EAT the opponents…
Mmhm, something about how he misinterpreted the idea behind ‘fighting a little yellow mouse with a giant dragon snake’
Technically the commander wasn’t cheating either…i know a lot of rpgs that let you use guns…
it was his turn after all…and it only took one hit…though he could have probably just ran it over, but that would wreck his paint job quite possibly…
Nawh, no bitching here. This site cracks me up
I guess technically speaking, that was one attack. Could have saved ammo just by running it over but then again, Commander’s pissed right now.
It might have been acid gloop
Can’t be acid, doesn’t have the right shape. Definitely a slime, a metal slime, or a she-slime.
I’d laugh hard if when it was colored that was a metal slime.
The worst bit of it is that when I saw the slime, the battle music immediately popped into my mind. Gobs, it’s been forever, why do I remember the music?!
As someone who is playing DQ6 right now, I’ll just… refrain from commenting on this strip.
… Wellllllllllllllll the art is nice.
I keep forgetting that Jared is technically from a JRPG , being a Pokemon trainer.
Also, if all the monsters they encounter on the way to take down THE MIGHTY GACKT have that doofy little smile, I will be fully on board.
The only Jrpg I still have the patience for are Parasite eve and FFIX, I still have my copy of BOFIV but I just got the second dragon form and I left it there
I refuse to wait for the color to answer this question for me: Was it metal?
This is important. Jared may very well have gained 4 levels and doubled in strength.
Indeed. Not to mention Commander, Mr. Fish, and… I forget the girl’s name… Jonesy.
It’s a party of four, the XP gets divided. But the lowest level gets the… wait, which version are we talking about? The one I have, the highest level steals the most XP. :C
Jared might only get 2 levels.
My answer is audiobooks. I do all that boring grinding while listening to audiobooks and I don’t have to murder anyone.
This comic makes me sad. =( Mr. Slime, noooooooooooo! I was to hug his gooey remains.
Technically a single burst of fire is a hit…
It’s not the commander’s fault he vastly outlevels the slime.
Aye, that be true, though I love Jonesy’s(?) line though; “I’m sorry, why were you kicked out of the pokemon league again?”
I don’t know what part is my favorite; Jared’s face in the first panel or the Slime’s face in the fourth. Must be that I like googly eyes. @u@
I also never was able to get into the long drawn-out menu-style fighting in RPGs. Even now I’m just like “AAAAUUUUGGGHHHHHH where’s the button that just punches the dick out of everything?!!” :flip console:
LOLs. And this is why i haet RPGs… But i’m not saying that RPG games are bad, tho.
I wouldn’t say I hate rpgs. I just hate turn-based. Who the hell would take turns to hit people in a battle??
I find myself being more and more distracted while playing Pokemon White on my emulator. IF ONLY THERE WAS A WAY TO MASH A WHILE THE GAME WAS MINIMIZEDDDDD
Many emulators have an option to keep running even minimized. You would just have to be careful about what keys you press while the screen isn’t open.
Is that Jayne’s very favorite gun from Firefly?
Vera has a different shape at the end of the barrel. Something about needing oxygen?
Which is actually pretty stupid, considering that real guns don’t. Yeah, I know that they don’t use real guns, they use spacefuture guns, but why would you replace real guns with ones that have a weakness like that when you live in freakin’ space?
Vera is a modified Saiga-12, so his gun might be a Saiga-12 with a weird barrel. It’s probably not, though.
Ah man, that just made me want to watch firefly all over again. The movie (Serenity) is pretty good too, if you haven’t watched it yet.
OMG this is the best one yet. Love the faces on these people, esp the Commander. Thank you!
…What, no poof poof first?
Commander’s pecs are no longer big enough to poof-poof.
I’m replaying Mother 2 on emulator right now, the “speed up” button is a savior for that game… (not that the enemy encounters aren’t awesome, because they are). Auto Battle + Play at Fast Speed = ahhh… MUCH IMPROVED
I got a gigantic collection of old as all get out games on my computer with the emulator. The speed up makes traveling much much faster too.
Actually got a couple of emulators
Very useful. I hope they find one of those megaman hard-hat-dudes next.
Virus busting, away!
*speed-up*
Those faces jonesy has put on in this strip look similar to faces comander badass has put on in prvious strips
Commander, that is not very sporting! You have to play by the rules man!
Oh hey, there was an actual sound effect for the gun. I read it as “pew.” Eheheh.
turn based menu nav games: aside from pokemon, they are all terribly boring.
I always found it depended on the depth of the menus. More than two levels deep and my attention span starts to wane.
Aye, I played one once (Can’t remember the name for the life of me, came out a few years ago), It took five layers of menu hopping to use a heal item. Five Layers! How on earth is one supposed to stay interested when the enter battle is spent like this; “X, Up, Up, X, Wrong Menu, O, Up, Up, Up, X, Down, Down…. (You get the picture)”
The Commander appears to be getting incrementally more masculine-looking…
C.B didn’t fight dirty/stupid!
He just used full auto and it did 9999 every shot!
There was also one crit, it did 19888
Not every genre is for every gamer. I love RPGs and the occasional fighters and platformers, but most other types of games bore the hell out of me.
But I’m glad you’re trying BoF4 at least. I love that series. I wish Capcom would bring it back. Or at least put one of the characters in one of the Capcom vs. Whatever games. Bleu, Rei, Scias or Fou-Lu would all be good additions.
I am also wondering whether it was a metal slime.
And would Mr. Fish have found slimes tasty?
I actually enjoy RPGs with turn based systems more than real-time games (and the amount of enjoyment greater is enough that I don’t mind grinding if it isn’t too bad, can even provide a nice backdrop to watching youtube videos), but I freely admit that that’s because I have horrible, horrible reflexes and hand-eye coordination so bad I had to take occupational therapy as a kid, so games without turn-based aspects always seemed unreasonably difficult to me.
Nah it was turn based is just that Commander did a one hit kill I wonder how much exp he got. damn now I feel like playing fire emblem again to bad GBA is death and is just not the same on the emulator.
Hmm hopefully we get to see some references to books or movies.
Back then, they had a timer bar instead of pure turn-based.
The way I see it The Commander played by the rules. He’s just obscenely high level and beat it on the first turn.
The Commander should know better than to grind, makes the game trivial!
He hasn’t grinded. He’s just from the equivalent of one of those absurdly long games, like Dragon Quest VII, where playing normally without stopping to grind through the various quests and dungeons will rocket you up to ridiculous levels by the late game.
They didn’t check for loot!
Hey Coelasquid, I love you for working on Ugly Americans and keeping MGDMT updated for so long, and I follow you on twitter and I was hoping if you could do something. Can you tell all your fans to #BringBackToonami on twitter? Or bump it here? It’d be great to have more people supporting that. Thanks!
I know that it’s not the same, but there’s a website with a streaming service that shows a lot of old Toonami gold, with a lot of the CN produced bumpers. Toonami After Dark or some such like that. Have a search for it.
Actually, I remembered it later on … it was called Toonami Aftermath.
Is it just me, or is Commander’s face getting gruffer with each new strip? Perhaps his body’s beginning to cope with it the way gruff guys like Barret have?
Fear not, C-Squid – MGDMT happens to be worth waiting for. Just keep us posted like you usually do. :)
With that said, poor slime didn’t stand a chance!
I opened my ever illustrious paint program to do a small gaming cartoon for someone on Tumblr. It seemed easy. I had tutorials. I’ve painted oil portraits for the public on canvas. Oh. My. Manlymengods. It is HARDER by thousandfold than it looks. Coleasquid, I bow to the fact you do multiple panels of this. You and all the online artists who can do this. If you have to take a break, I’ll wait patiently and hope for the return of your comic. It’s beautiful to look at and hilarious to read.
awww – it was soooo cute! how can you blow away such a cute inviting blue hershey kiss thing??
By knowing that doing so causes two gold coins to spontaneously manifest in your pockets.
Shit man in this day and age gold will buy quite a bit more than what they do in rpgs
Vulpe’s right, it’d probably manifest as 2 dollars
So he killed the mentally disabled blob for 2 bucks
The system works!
Random question here…. how do those glasses stay on the commander’s head? I’m starting to wonder if it’s an insanely overstated headband.
Speaking as someone who has actually looked into Kamina cosplay, the answer is spirit gum.
Yah, that’s why I said “looked into”, rather than “actually did”.
Finally.
Hey man,
I don’t make a habit of commenting, but I gotta say: stay in the game on this comic, man! It’s A) hilarious and B) the only comic (or indeed any popular media of any kind) that engages with the topic of masculinity. I sped my way through the whole archive yesterday and, the comic genuinely made me laugh out loud. Its quite something to make a dude chuckle in the total solemn silence of his study. I have been sending it to all of my other gender/videogame interested friends (there are more people of that kind than you’d think). Anyway, this comic is one of a kind! Keep it up!
I used to hate turn based games but now I love them specially strategy ones. Front Mission for the Snes was the first one I tried and it was really fun.
Thanks so much for the work you’ve done so far, and take care of yourself. We don’t want any smart person burn-out.
That way leads to you moving to a remote cabin in Montana and only communicating with the outside world through mailed explosive devices.
We really don’t want to get to know more about you through America’s Most Wanted.
Wait, so does this mean that the trio are travelling to RPG-territory? As in possibly Jared’s home town in Kanto (I think that’s where he’s from)? Interesting.
That’s it. Commander must catch a Pokemon. And just to be ironic, something girly. I recommend a Jigglypuff.
No he’s probably gonna catch like a steelix or somethin’ by beating it in hand to hand combat
In his current state?
Good point the whole bishi thing keeps slipping my mind
I’ve never considered Jigglypuffs to be “girly.” Cute, sure, but not girly. Bellossom or Eevee would be “girlier” choices IMHO.
I remember playing FF9 and BF4 when I was younger, both of which were pretty fun. However the latter had some horrible moments of fridge horror when I replayed it, the gaint organs and the creepy frog guy being two of them. This is probably part of the reason I don’t often replay games played by my younger self. You never know what you’ll figure out…
Fortune smiles upon thee, Commander Badass! Thou hast gained a level!
You know, when the comic was first posted uncolored, I thought the white line was actually the road, with the asphalt being the sides, and the slime was larger than the entire road.
There needs be be a plot point where the slime multiply when killed. Then they can throw one slime into a building, do some mass killing and then let them loose…
No matter what he may look like, Commander BA is still the same.
the only good turn based game was legend of dragoon. I should REALLY beat that game someday
You’re not the only one. I didn’t have the time to deal with stupid stuff like that XD Though those creatures are adorable
Shouldn’t the fine line be between fighting fair and fighting stupid?
Sorta, depending on what you’re talking about. In this case, Jonesy was calling Jared a dirty fighter because he let Gyarados OM NOM NOM his opponents, which was against the rules. However, Jared was just stupid and didn’t realise it was. Thus was fighting stupid, not dirty.
I lose it every time I look at that thing’s face.
The Commander’s face in the 5th panel reminds me very much of my father’s face during any traffic hold-up, ever. Only more pretty, obviously, because my Dad doesn’t have the bishi virus.
Looking back on most of my grinding in rpgs I realized that I spent half of the time playing and the other half reading a book and waiting for the animations to end.
After all that has happened i now wonder if Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star will make an appearence
So, I’ve recently started reading this… I can’t remember how I came about it…
You’ll probably be incredibly sad to hear that I’m a fan of your bishie-fied character art style =P lmao. And this last strip was why I went back to the beginning to read. But I like the regular style, too. The comic in general makes me giggle, even though it bashes like…everything I like in video games generally xD that’s alright.
Looking at your art does make me want to doodle…
Just like to point out something small and not really big, but on the bottom right of this you’ve written thepunchlineismaCIsmo.com, you missed the H
On another note, f5 till Tuesday (damn time zones)
At first, I thought to myself, this is kind of a pointless distraction that interrupts the flow of the comic, but then I realized “so are random battles.”
Geez people are so quick to bash jRPGs, rather needlessly so these days, but excessive random battles are something we could do without.
Most jRPGs of note are moving away from turn based stuff into more active time stuff.
I’m starting to like the expressions of Commander BishiAss.
I have seen few things funnier than that slime’s face, sitting there in the midde of the road, all dumb and happy.
It’s a OHKO!
And that’s why i prefer Action RPGs