this annoys me a lot
30 March 2026
recently i tried to play Dawn of Mana, the 8th game in a series that's explicitly about the sanctity of nature.
fig.1: the protagonists remembering a time a decade ago when they carved their initials into a tree, and cringing at how terrible it was to pointlessly harm nature like that.
fig.2: a combat tutorial. you get damage bonuses and extra items proportional to how stressed-out you make each enemy before you kill them.
how come everyone is blind to this? it feels like every video game has you kill animals for no reason, but this one is probably the most obvious contradiction i've ever seen. at least the animals just poof into a cartoon dust cloud, instead of exploding into a fountain of bones like the first few Mana games.